Journalist Angad Singh, who criticized Modi’s policies, deported from Delhi airport, claim family members

US citizen and journalist Angad Singh, who works for American website ‘Vice News,’ was deported from Delhi airport, his mother claimed in a Facebook post on Wednesday evening while expressing dismay over the development.

Singh had landed in Delhi at 8.30 pm and was deported back to the US within three hours. Delhi airport authorities have not issued a statement on the matter yet, according to an Indian Express report.

On Twitter, Singh has shared several video news reports produced by Vice which exposed flaws in the “mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic” by the Narendra Modi government. The news outlet covered topics such as overwhelmed crematoriums, the oxygen shortage during the deadly second wave of COVID-19 infections, reporting lacunae in COVID-death reporting from rural India, and more, according to The Wire.

Singh had been denied a visa recently to make a documentary film about Dalits in the country, however, this time around, he was visiting for personal, not professional, reasons, reported the portal, quoting family members.

According to an Indian Express report, Singh’s family expressed apprehensions that the American journalist was, perhaps, not allowed to remain in India because of his journalistic work. “Angad Singh covers South Asia. He had made a documentary on the Shaheen Bagh protest. The Government must be upset due to that documentary,” a family member was quoted as saying in the Express report.

“He had made a documentary on the Shaheen Bagh protest…The government must be upset due to that documentary,” the family member told The Indian Express. “His request for a visa as a journalist to make a documentary on Dalits in India was rejected recently.”

 “They didn’t give a reason. But we know it is his award winning journalism that scares them. It is the stories he did and the stories he is capable of. It is the love for his Motherland that they can’t stand. It is the cutting edge reporting of #ViceNews that gets to them,” Kaur wrote in the post.

“It’s not easy to be a Sikh, a Gursikh on top, a journalist, a warrior of truth and justice. Speaking truth has a price. We must pay it,” she wrote further, adding the post-script, “So which story do you think pissed them off?”

-INDIA NEWS STREAM