India’s travel ban was seen as retaliation against critics.

“Dismissed without prejudice.” A big red stamp on Sana Irshad Mato’s travel documents put a stop to the photojournalist’s plan to crush him.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was due to travel to Paris earlier this month for a book launch in France and the Arles Rencontres photography festival.

She had a travel visa and a plane ticket, but when Matteo tried to board a flight to Delhi, immigration officials said the journalist had been denied travel and briefly detained her.

No one, Mato said, has explained why it was suspended.

“Not being able to attend the Arles Rencontres photo festival is sad and worrying,” Matou told VOA.

The festival has a special meaning for Mati. She was one of 10 recipients of the 2020 Serendipity Arles Grant.

Her work has received international acclaim and she was part of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning Reuters team on the pandemic in India.

Legal and media analysts say the travel ban imposed on Mato violates the constitutional right to travel and is part of a wider trend of harassment of critics.

At least four journalists from Indian-administered Kashmir have been banned from traveling abroad since Delhi revoked the region’s special status in August 2019. Journalists and activists elsewhere in India, including investigative reporter Rana Ayub and Akar Patel, chairman of Amnesty International. India, is also banned or delayed from travel.

In Ayub’s case, immigration officials at the Mumbai airport arrested an investigative journalist known for religious violence and extrajudicial killings in 2015. She was denied entry to a flight to Britain on March 29, saying she was under investigation for money laundering.

Ayub told the committee at the time to protect the journalists, an hour before she was scheduled to leave. Later she was able to travel.

While officials typically do not give a reason for the ban, a Kashmiri journalist said the authorities cited unrest in the Indian-controlled region as a stopgap.

Gouhar Gelani, a freelancer who contributes to Germany’s Deutsche Welle He was arrested at the New Delhi airport in 2019 while on his way to Bonn for media training.

At the time, Geelani said in a statement that immigration officials told him “there is a lot of violence in Kashmir” and that they were just following orders.

There is an appeals process for those denied travel.

Neither India’s immigration office nor its embassy in Washington responded to VOA’s request for comment.

‘systemic harassment’

In a statement on Mato’s case, the International Federation of Journalists described the travel ban as “systematic harassment and a severe pressure on press freedom.”

For Matthew, the suspension was a frustrating problem.

“Immigration officers at the Delhi airport made me wait for over two hours,” said Mato. Then “the authorities told me that I could not get on the flight.”

But when the reporter asked why she was late, she said, “The officials said they are not sure why.”

Umair N. Ronga, a lawyer at the Jammu and Kashmir High Court in Srinagar, told VOA that travel is a fundamental right in India.

“Prohibiting a person from traveling abroad and preventing a person from doing his professional work is a violation of fundamental rights,” Ronga said, adding that such restrictions can be lifted under Article 226 of the Constitution.

Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch, believes Indian authorities use the travel ban to hide poor human rights record.

The best approach, she says, is for the government to focus on stopping violations, including violence against minorities and Muslims, and to protect its reputation abroad.

International bodies, including the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, have called on the Indian government to take action to stop retaliatory attacks against Ayub and other human rights abusers.

HRW in 2011 In 2021, authorities will use “surveillance, politically motivated prosecutions, harassment, online trafficking and tax raids” to attack critics, he said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called the country the “mother of democracy” at the G-7 summit in Germany last month in response to India’s apparent backsliding on rights.

Manoj Joshi, a fellow at the New Delhi-based Observer Research Foundation, told VOA that government policies are systematically stifling independent reporting on events in Kashmir. Journalists have been arrested, charged with violence and banned from doing their jobs.

India has failed in the World Press Freedom Index. It is currently ranked 1 out of 150 out of 180 countries with a good media climate, according to Reporters Without Borders.

The media watchdog said the findings “press freedom is in crisis” across India and that the situation of journalists in Kashmir is “dire”.

For now, Matu is back in Srinagar, waiting to see if the ban will be lifted.

“I hope the authorities will look into the matter soon so that I can travel freely,” she said.