To Lose One’s Country Is to Know an Intimate Shame, Writes Aatish Taseer in His New Book

On November 7, 2019 the Indian government revoked Aatish Taseer’s Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI). The news was first conveyed to him by a Union home ministry spokesperson’s tweet. The official letter came later. The pretext the government used was that he had concealed the Pakistani origins of his father. But was that the full truth?

aThe introduction of Taseer’s latest book A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile convincingly argues that it was not. “It was an odd accusation”, he writes. “I had written a book, Stranger to History (2009), and published many articles about my father, despite being estranged from him for most of my life.” In fact, it was no secret that Tavleen Singh’s son was Salman Taseer’s love child. There’s absolutely no way the government did not know.

However, there’s another point that’s worth recalling. In 1999, when Tavleen applied on Aatish’s behalf for a Person of Indian Origin card, which in 2005 became Overseas Citizenship of India, the rules of that time did not make him ineligible on the grounds that one of his parents was Pakistani. That only happened in 2016, long after Aatish had become an overseas citizen.

Actually, there’s one other fact that’s worth noting. Aatish’s father, Salman Taseer, was a dual Pakistani and British citizen. His mother was British. This, presumably, is how Aatish, at birth, became a British citizen.

Aatish has no doubt his overseas citizenship was revoked for a very different reason. Not because of any concealment but because he criticised Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “I became ‘Pakistani’ in the eyes of Modi’s government – and, more importantly, ‘Muslim’ because religious identity in India is mostly patrilineal and more a matter of blood than faith – only after I wrote a cover story about Narendra Modi for Time titled ‘India’s Divider In Chief’. The article enraged the Prime Minister … after that, my days in India were numbered. It did not matter that my mother was Indian. I had been recast as an outsider, an alien, a Pakistani. It was a judgement from which there was no reprieve.”

Some of the issues raised with Aatish were outlandish, if not also offensive. Why had he taken the surname Taseer, he was asked. His response that he had not named himself didn’t seem to count. He was told if he was Aatish Singh, he would have been a Hindu. But a Taseer could only be Muslim and Pakistani.

After losing his citizenship, the government refused to even grant him a visa. Thus, when his grandmother, who had brought him up, died, Atish couldn’t attend her funeral.

Aatish’s introduction reflects on what it’s like to lose one’s citizenship. “To lose one’s country is to know an intimate shame, like being disowned by a parent, turned out of one’s home … it is one of the few things we are allowed to take for granted … without a country we are adrift.” In a sense, he had been stripped of the only identity he had till then known and cherished.

The truth is after returning to India from university in America, Aatish was very conscious that he belonged to an elite minority cut-off, if not divorced, from the majority. He made an enormous effort to learn Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit and travelled widely to immerse himself in the country. It was a heartfelt attempt to belong, to be part of India. “I killed off aspects of myself … in order to better fit back into Indian life”, he writes.

So, not surprisingly, when the door was shut on him, he writes: “I felt strangely free … I felt relieved. The burden of trying to fit into India, of forever apologising for its shortcomings, apologising for my own westernisation, was suddenly lifted from me.”

Today he writes of the country in the past tense: “India was my country”. He says it’s unbearably painful to do this. But it’s been forced upon him. At 44, he has a future to build. The Modi government has made India his past.

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