Tuesday , January 7 2025

Indian visa curbs amid Bangladesh tensions hurt patients

05-01-2025

DHAKA: Khadiza Khatun’s life took a devastating turn in September when doctors at Dhaka Medical College Hospital informed her that her 37-year-old husband, Mohammad Nuri Alam, urgently needed a liver transplant, a procedure unavailable in Bangladesh.

After careful research, they decided to go to India’s Asian Institute of Gastroenterology in Hyderabad, a trusted destination for many Bangladeshi patients but three months later, they are yet to secure visas for the trip. Amid escalating tensions between India and Bangladesh since the August ouster of Sheikh Hasina, an ally of New Delhi’s, from Dhaka, Indian authorities have significantly scaled back visa operations in Bangladesh.

The result: Khadiza and her husband have already missed two hospital appointments, on November 20 and December 20, and are unsure about whether they’ll be able to get to India in time for January 10, the next date the medical facility in Hyderabad has given them.

“We’ve tried everything since October, approaching travel agencies, seeking help from friends in government,” she told media. “India remains our only hope.”

Faced with unaffordable treatment options in Thailand and other countries, Khadiza is left watching her husband’s health deteriorate while relying on daily symptomatic treatment in Dhaka hospitals, hoping that the New Year will bring her the visas her husband and she desperately need. “I feel helpless, running between hospitals without a solution,” said the mother of two.

Khadiza’s struggle reflects a larger crisis affecting thousands of Bangladeshi patients, who rely on India’s affordable healthcare, because of the visa restrictions introduced by the Indian authorities. The Indian visa centre, on its website, says that it is only “offering limited appointment slots for Bangladesh nationals requiring urgent medical and student visas” and is “currently processing only a limited number of visas of emergency and humanitarian nature”.

According to an Indian visa centre official in Bangladesh, daily online visa slots across five Indian visa centres in Bangladesh, including Dhaka, have “plummeted to around 500” from over 7,000 since the onset of the protests in July that led to Hasina’s removal from office.

For many Bangladeshis, like Khadiza, the real likelihood of getting visas feels even slimmer.

The slide in ties

India-Bangladesh relations have deteriorated since Hasina fled the country for New Delhi on August 5 after a weeks-long student-led protest against her increasingly authoritarian rule.

India has since sheltered Hasina, straining ties, the interim Bangladesh government of Nobel laureate, Muhammad Yunus, last week sent New Delhi a diplomatic note seeking her extradition.

Meanwhile, the Indian government has told Bangladesh it is concerned about a spate of attacks against Bangladeshi Hindus. Dhaka, on its part, insists that most attacks have been political in nature against perceived supporters of Sheikh Hasina rather than religious in their character. Bangladesh has also accused Indian media channels of exaggerating the scale of violence against Hindus.

These tensions between the two governments have also impacted visa issuances. On August 26, a protest broke out at the Indian visa centre in Dhaka over processing delays, after the authority resumed “limited operations” in protest-hit Bangladesh on August 13. Across the border, a Bangladeshi diplomatic mission in the northeast Indian city of Agartala was attacked by a mob in early December, prompting a strong protest from Dhaka. (Int’l News Desk)

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