The closest filmmaker Mahera Omar has come to Delhi was when a friend sent her the picture of a packed hall on WhatsApp. Omar won the award for the best documentary for The Rebel Optimist at the 7th Delhi International Film Festival 2018, but was denied a visa to come to India to collect it.
The festival authorities too have tried to help me, but it is very difficult for a Pakistani to get a visa, she said over the phone.
The Rebel Optimist captures the life and work of Perween Rahman, an urban planner and social activist who headed the Orangi Pilot Project—a scheme that helped the poor people, mainly in low-income settlements, to solve their sanitation problems. Rahman was gunned down on March 13, 2013, in Karachi.
Apart from festival, Omar always wanted to visit India as her grandparents hail from the country.
“I feel a sense of belonging. My ancestry is from there,’’ she says. Her great-grandfather, Zafar Omar, who used to write detective fiction, was from Aligarh. Their home, Nili Chatri, still exists, but is now taken over by the Aligarh Muslim University.
The Omars, like many others who crossed over during Partition, believed that they would be back. “My aunt went to Aligarh a few years ago and found the house,’’ she says. “The old family retainer was there. My great-grandfather’s picture was still up in his room. He looked at her and said to her ‘you are back.’ It is heartbreaking’’.
The caretaker has since died, taking with him memories and the only tangible link she had with her past. She wants to come back some day and hear more stories and capture the stories and scenes she had grown up hearing. “But how do I go there,’’ she asks.
Omar, however, is not the only Pakistani to have denied a visa. In the last, the Indian government has clamped down on issuing visas to Pakistanis. Except the odd medical visa, thanks to the Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, visas to India for Pakistanis have been severely restricted. In July, Pakistani scholars were barred from attending a meeting of the Association for Asian Studies and Ashoka University, attracting strong reactions from academics. In May, Moneeza Hashmi, daughter of noted Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, was invited to speak at the 15th Asia Media Summit, but was dropped from the list of speakers. Her booking at the hotel was cancelled as no Pakistani had been invited to the conference. Former ISI chief Asad Durrani was also denied a visa to come to India to promote his book. He, however, used video conferencing for the purpose.
Pakistan has claimed that India denied visas to over 500 pilgrims who wanted to take part in the Urs at Ajmer.
Despite visa restrictions, Omar still managed to get a second-by-second update from the festival venue, thanks to technology and Indian friends she made in Nepal. “There is people-to-people contact there,’’ she laughs. And it is the friendships that she had made in a third country that gave her a virtual taste of the experience of winning the award.
