PremiumFergus MacLeod, head of investor relations at Saudi Aramco, one of the world’s most valuable companies, was held in an Indian jail for nearly a week in July for carrying an unauthorized satellite phone with him, while on holiday in Uttarakhand’s Valley of Flowers in Chamoli district. This is an unfortunate development and India needs to put in place systems and procedures to avoid repetition of such avoidable hardship to visitors to the country.
If satellite phones require special permission, this should be made clear to visitors right at the immigration counter they have to cross to enter the country, if not before travelling to the country. It should mandatorily figure as an item of essential communication a visitor to the country receives from the immigration official, who checks the visitor’s passport.
Chamoli is close to the Line of Actual Control, the quasi-border with China. It is a sensitive region, and India has valid reasons to be chary of foreign visitors communicating via satellite phone at such a site. That the Indian authorities were able to detect and track down MacLeod, a British national, is commendable. What is not commendable is that it took nearly a week to ascertain the executive’s bona fides.
He was let off with a fine of ₹1,000. If the violation that he is guilty of is only severe enough to warrant a ₹1,000 fine, should he have been kept in jail for a week? What is the sanctity of authorized satellite phones? Suppose authorized phones are purloined by miscreants, or those who received the authorization acted under a false identity?
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Once India permits satellite broadband, whether from Bharti’s OneWeb or from Elon Musk’s Starlink, or from both, what would be the validity of satellite phone bans? Should we fill the airwaves in sensitive areas with noise that would jam satellite communications on wavelengths other than those used by military satellites? We need answers to such questions.
What cannot be delayed, however, is a procedure to identify a foreign visitor and verify his bona fides at the earliest. Saudi Arabia is a friendly power, a major supplier of oil to India, a fellow G20 member and invested with extraordinary geopolitical clout, thanks to the world’s persistent reliance on hydrocarbons. A senior functionary of a Saudi state-owned enterprise should not have languished in jail for a week for want of clarity as to his identity and intentions.
It should have taken not more than a few hours to verify his identity and his credentials with the Saudi oil giant, the Saudi government and with the government of the country of which he is a national, via its consular office in India, the British High Commission, in the present case. An increasing number of countries tag visas with biometrics, and modern communication facilities make taking and transmitting biometric information for verification pretty straightforward. If there is no established procedure that is expeditious enough, it must be identified and laid down.
Satellite phones become necessary for communication in areas where mobile phone signals do not reach. Perhaps, India can avoid creating such dead zones. This should not be all that difficult, especially in areas such as the Valley of Flowers, with regular tourist routes. The outlay for Bharat Net, the countrywide optical fibre network that is supposed to reach far-flung villages, could be utilized for the purpose.
Tourism is a valuable industry, for both its revenue and employment possibilities and for the human connections and civilizational understanding it engenders. At the same time, national security is vital. It should be possible to cater to the requirements of both, with some forward thinking and established protocols.
It has taken MacLeod’s week-long incarceration for the lacuna in satellite-phone-carrying protocols to come to light. Let’s not allow his suffering to go to waste.
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