Days before the 75th anniversary of Pakistan’s and India’s Independence Day, Ganpat Singh received a call he has long been waiting for, that granted him freedom to see his family in India after six long and tragic years — the Indian High Commission in Islamabad said his visa to India was approved on Saturday.
Mr. Ganpat Singh is a Pakistani citizen born in the Hindu Rajput Sodha community, based in the Umarkot (earlier Amarkot) principality of the Sindh Province. Traditionally, the Sodhas don’t intermarry within their own clan, and have always intermarried with other Rajput clans in India, with a special visa mandate to travel back and forth agreed to for them some decades ago. Mr. Ganpat Singh’s father was from Pakistan, his mother belongs to India, and his brother and sister, born in Pakistan, now live in Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. Mr. Ganpat Singh married his wife Magan in Jodhpur in 1996 and she moved to Pakistan, but died of hepatitis in 2012, leaving three children — son Chander Veer Singh, 22, and daughters, Meena and Disha, now 21 and 13. He remarried in 2013 to Magan’s cousin Dimple Kanwar, who had two children — Kuleep, 8 and Priya, 4, and chose to bring up all the five children together in India. As India and Pakistan’s relations collapsed after the Uri attack in September 2016, however, so did Mr. Ganpat Singh’s world, as he learned he had been “blacklisted”.
“When my visa was first rejected, I thought it must be a mistake. They said I had been ‘blacklisted’ for overstaying in India, even though I had applied for extensions online. I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Ganpat Singh on the phone to The Hindu.
