Kaul was reportedly invited by the Karnataka government to participate as a speaker in the two-day ‘Constitution and National Unity Convention -2024’ organised on February 24 and 25 but at the Bengaluru airport, she was sent back to London.According to her, the entry was denied because of her opinions on “democratic and constitutional values”.
Defending herself, the professor took her X account and said, “Re all the lies, I am not married to a Pakistani, not Muslim convert, not a pawn of China, not a puppet of West, not a commie, not a jihadi, not Pak sympathiser, not terrorist supporter, not anti-India, not part of a gang. I am what authoritarians fear- a thinking woman.”
“I urge you to think beyond walls of hate against those different from you. And to read and understand what I say and think, before rushing to condemn. It’s hard but it’s possible,” she added.
Who is Nitasha Kaul?
Nitasha Kaul is a Professor of Politics, International Relations, and Critical Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Westminster in London, UK. She is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Westminster in London.
She has written her first book titled ‘Imagining Economics Otherwise: encounters with identity/difference’ in 2007.
Born in Uttar Pradesh’s Gorakhpur, Kaul’s origin is from a downtown mohalla in Srinagar, Kashmir, according to her post on X.
Kaul has received funding and honours for her research; two of the most recent are the “Small Seed Funding” from the Westminster-Smithsonian Partnership Development Fund (2023–2024) and the “Research and Knowledge Exchange Award” given by the University of Westminster’s School of Social Sciences in January 2022.
What Nitasha have to say about this?
After a 12-hour travel from London to Bengaluru, Kaul took to X to share her experience of spending several hours at immigration, where she was shuttled and given little information about the procedure.
“I spent 12 hours in a flight from London to Bangalore, several hours at immigration where they shuttled me here & there, provided no info on process, then 24 hours in a holding cell (no BA flight back until next day) under direct cctv w restricted movement, a narrow area to lie down and no easy access to food and water, made dozens of calls to airport for basic things as a pillow and blanket, which they refused to provide, then 12 hours on the flight back to London,” she said on the X.
“The govt at centre in India refused me entry to a conference where I was invited by the state govt. Unless this is fixed, I join the ranks of the Tibetan exiles and Ukrainian exiles, and others throughout history who have faced the arbitrary exercise of brute unreasoning power,” she added.