No English? Don’t fly to London

Calcutta: As India celebrates the 60th anniversary of Independence, a citizen smarts under the insult meted out to her at Calcutta airport for not speaking English.
Saleha Iqbal, 55, was “harassed and detained” by immigration officials for over half an hour on July 7 as she could not reply to their queries in English. The central Calcutta resident, travelling alone, was on her way to London to join her sister, who had lost her husband two weeks before.
“Strangely, her inability to speak English did not land her in trouble at Heathrow airport, in London,” said Saleha’s son Mohammed Asif Iqbal.
Asif has written to chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee and the airport authorities, seeking action against the “guilty” officials.
“The immigration officials asked her whether she could speak English, as she was conversing with them in Hindi. When she said she could not, one of them yelled at her, saying she had no business travelling to London if she could not speak the language,” said Asif, an executive in a software company.
The official asked her to wait and took away her passport and ticket. “Others then started interrogating her...... They had suddenly become suspicious of an innocent woman simply because she was not speaking English,” said Asif.
Nervous and humiliated, Saleha called her husband from her cellphone. “My father wanted to talk to the immigration officials, but they refused to speak to him,” Asif recalled. When Asif was informed about the situation by his father, he called Air-India officials, who “sorted out the matter”.
15/08/07 Sanjay Mandal/The Telegraph

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Categories: Air India Aug 2007, Airports Aug 2007, Foreign Aug 2007