By Southern India Correspondent
Morning Star News
Emergency medicine doctor Christo Thomas Philip was returning with his family to his native India from a medical conference in Greece when immigration officials at Delhi’s Indira Ghandi International Airport took him into custody.
His deportation from India on that day, April 26, 2016, came after working for three years treating destitute people on the verge of death from snakebites, HIV, diphtheria, tuberculosis and heart failure, among other conditions, in Raxaul, a remote area of eastern India’s Bihar state. He was planning to return to his work there at the emergency care unit of Duncan Hospital.
“My wife and children were allowed entry back into the country,” Philip, 36, told Morning Star News. “But as soon as my passport was scanned, I was surrounded by multiple Indian immigration officials, taken into custody and was informed that I had an hour to leave the country.”At age 10 Philip had migrated with his family to the United States, where he was educated. He had a life-time visa to India and an Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) card, but the immigration officials confiscated the card and his passport, telling him only that he was no longer welcome on orders of the Consulate General of India in Houston, Texas.
“It broke my heart to see my family from behind the cordoned-off section of the immigration detention centre. It was hard to watch my three young children crying, not knowing when they would see me again,” the Christian doctor told Morning Star News.His children were 11, 9 and 7 at the time. He recalled sitting in his seat on the flight back to Istanbul, Turkey, the transit point from which he’d arrived, tears filling his eyes as he watched India disappear from view through the window, he said.
“Being deported from India and being separated from my wife and three young children was one of the most difficult days of my life,” he said. “It was hard to see my wife knowing that there was nothing she could do – realizing that I had never been this far away from her since we were married.”In Istanbul, officials locked him in a detention cell with 25 others for 24 hours, until he could board a flight to Spain, a prior transit point, the next day.
“It was one of the darkest moments in my life to have my freedom taken away even though I had done nothing wrong except sacrifice a comfortable and lucrative life in the U.S. to serve those that were marginalized in India,” he said.
“It was devastating to me and my family when I was ordered to leave this country and the people I love so much, with no explanation other than that the government no longer considered me welcome.”From court records of the battle he fought for the next three years to regain his right to return to India, Philip could not detect who directed the consulate in Houston to order his deportation, he said. But he has not been the only Christian deported since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party assumed power in 2014.
His deportation was not an isolated case, as he became aware of numerous other individuals and families working with engineering organizations, hospitals or small businesses that were deported from India around the same time, he said.
“The only common thread among the deportations was that the individuals involved were Christians or working with Christian organizations in India,” he said. “We are also aware that it was the policy of the government to place individuals on a blacklist without informing them of such an action being taken, and the only time someone would find out about the blacklist was when they were trying to enter India.”The failure to issue notices to the blacklisted Christians appears to have been intentional to prevent any type of judicial review since, once deported, they have limited legal ability to make legal challenges, he said.
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