Mumbai: On September 10, 73-year-old Australian documentary filmmaker David Bradbury landed at the Chennai airport along with his two young children. He was on a two-week trip to India and had plans to visit five different tourist destinations across the country.
The family had booked hotels and made other arrangements for their domestic travel. However, when they arrived in India, only the children – Nakeita Bradbury (21) and Omar Bradbury (14) – were allowed to pass through immigration. Bradbury was detained.
What followed was an ordeal in which Bradbury was allegedly held for over 24 hours, denied access to the Australian embassy, deprived of medication, refused access to a toilet, and ultimately forced out of the country while his children remained in India.
The Wire has accessed a copy of his e-visa, as well as stamps on his passport showing his exit from Bangkok (from where the family was traveling to Chennai) on September 10, and his re-entry into Bangkok on September 12.
Bradbury’s e-visa. Personal details have been redacted.
This was not Bradbury’s first visit to India.
In 2012, he had visited the country as a member of the jury for the Mumbai International Film Festival. After the event, Bradbury, along with his wife Treena Lenthall (who passed away a few months ago) and Omar (who was three years old at the time), visited Idinthakarai, a coastal village in the Tirunelveli District of Tamil Nadu, located just a few kilometres from the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. Bradbury stayed in the village for over two weeks and documented the ongoing protests against the nuclear plant. The villagers, who were leading the protests, had faced both police violence and multiple charges for their agitation. Upon returning to Australia, Bradbury also published an article in a local news outlet on this.
At that time, the Kudankulam nuclear power plant protest was gaining momentum, with villagers opposing what would become the highest-capacity nuclear plant in the country. During that trip, Bradbury says his family “lived in the village and filmed the villagers’ everyday lives, including their fishing activities, which their livelihood depended upon.”
Bradbury believes his detention and subsequent deportation were directly related to his past visit to India and the work that followed.
Mistreatment at airport
At the airport, he says, he was taken to a “small room with high ceilings.” He describes it as a “pretty disgusting room with papers and rubbish on the floor under a bed with a filthy mattress and no sheets.” There, Bradbury was asked to explain the purpose of his current visit, the reason for his 2012 visit to India, and his contacts in the country. He says the officers insisted that he unlock his phone and share the contact numbers of his associates in India. “I refused,” he says.
Throughout his detention, Bradbury requested to be put in touch with the Australian Embassy in New Delhi, but his requests were ignored, he alleges. Bradbury, who has health concerns, claims he was denied his medication, even after multiple requests. When he asked for warmer clothes and access to a toilet, the officers refused. “Eventually, the pressure on my bladder forced me to urinate into a paper cup I found,” he recounts.
The Wire has reached out to the spokesperson of the Ministry of Home Affairs, seeking a response to the allegations made by the filmmaker, but has not yet received a reply. This report will be updated as and when the ministry responds.
A farewell trip
Bradbury’s wife, Treena, an activist and filmmaker, passed away five months ago from cancer. During this trip, Bradbury had planned to visit Varanasi with his children. “I wanted to show my son Omar how Hindus deal with death and say farewell to their loved ones in the next life,” Bradbury says.
Bradbury says when the Tamil Nadu and Union government made a decision to build six nuclear reactors on a major earthquake fault line, “it acted not only irresponsibly towards their own people but also to the world – to the people of Sri Lanka and other surrounding countries, home to many billions of people”.
“If one of those reactors has a meltdown like Fukushima or Chernobyl or the Three Mile Island in the US, the consequences and triggering of cancer from the radiation leakage would prove catastrophic,” he says.
With David’s detention, both Nakeita and Omar had to decide whether to embark on their two-week journey on their own or stay at the airport and head to Bangkok, where he was being deported. “My father told us not to change our plans or else we would regret having missed a chance to explore a new country,” Nakeita says.
On the night of their arrival at Chennai airport, Nakeita recalls being overwhelmed by shock at how things unfolded. “It was just very sad and unfair. The Indian authorities had issued my father a visa after all, and he had been very honest in mentioning all details in his visa application. There was no reason to trouble him and us this way,” she says.
The children claim that during the few hours they were at the airport and able to see and interact with David across a barricade, the police tried to influence them. “They kept asking us to convince our father to return to Bangkok. We just refused,” they claim.
Omar, who was only a toddler during his last visit to India in 2012, adds, “I didn’t have much memory of that trip. I had only seen the pictures from our past visit.” Despite the situation, the siblings continued their travels as planned. They are next headed to Milan, Italy, for the next leg of their trip.
