In exile, I lost India but gained a home

ON NOV. 7, 2019, THE GOVERNMENT OF PRIME MINISTER Narendra Modi revoked my Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), effectively banning me from the country I grew up in. India was where my mother and grandmother lived. Where four out of my five books of fiction and nonfiction were set. Where I had returned after college in the U.S. with the aim of being “an Indian writer.”

- BY AATISH TASEER

The government alleged I had concealed that my father was Pakistani. It was a surprising accusation. My first book—Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, which was published in 2009—dealt extensively with my relationship to my absent father and my rediscovery of him. I had written countless articles on the subject, not to mention that my father was a public figure. In 2011, as governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, he was assassinated by his own bodyguard for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. His killing was on the front page of the New York Times.

None of this affected my position in India, where I lived for over 30 years. I became “Pakistani” the day I wrote a story for the cover of TIME titled INDIA’S DIVIDER IN CHIEF, which appeared in 2019, in the run-up to Modi’s reelection. Modi’s army of internet trolls came after me with threats, abuse, and digital vandalism. Then Modi himself spoke: “TIME Magazine is foreign. The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.”

After that, I was on borrowed time.

THERE IS SOMETHING DEBILITATING about losing one’s country. It is so intimately tied up with our sense of self that we don’t know how fundamental it is till it’s gone. “I do not ‘love’ Germany,” wrote Sebastian Haffner in 1939 in Defying Hitler soon after leaving Nazi Germany for Britain, “just as I do not ‘love’ myself.” But “one’s country,” he continued, “plays a different and far more indispensable role than that of a mistress; it is just one’s country. If one loses it, one almost loses the right to love any other country.”