“Why did you let the rest go free?
I am NOT the one!”
From Tapaas — a Detective Drama by Bachchoo

Cardinals from all over the world, the story goes, were gathered in the upper storey of St. Peter’s in the Vatican about to be joined by the Pope who was in his study. One of the cardinals looked out of the window across the deserted cobbles of St. Peter’s Square, closed that day to tourists and worshippers alike, and lo and behold! What does he see? He sees Jesus Christ crossing the Square with determined strides.

Is he seeing things? — the Madeira from last night’s revels? He blinks, looks again and yes! Our Lord is approaching in his simple garments befitting a prophet and the Son of God. The Cardinal in torment cries out.
“Help! Are my eyes deceiving me?”
The others gather at the window and immediately confirm that yes, it is Himself who comes!
The cardinals are in a panic and rush to the door of the Pope’s chamber and knock frantically.
“Vere Papa, Jesus Christ himself is coming up the stairs of the Cathedral. What shall we do?”
Without hesitation comes the answer.
“Look busy!”
I am reminded of this story (or is it a parable?) each time I negotiate the international terminal of an Indian airport. India is one of the countries that subject you to severe surveillance when you leave it. I have tried to fathom the purpose of this procedure. Alas!
Every country subjects you to checks on your passport, visa and true identity as you enter. They want to know if you are really Osama bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Muhammed trying to enter the country using some ridiculous and unlikely Parsi name such as “Farrukh Dhondy”.
The police official on immigration duty in his wooden enclosure, a yellow line keeping back the pressing hordes, passes your passport through a machine he conceals below the sight line and then performs some mysterious puja to ascertain if you are indeed as you claim Mr Tony Blair. These ceremonies tell him that you have never been involved in the wanton death by bombing of civilians in any part of the globe and he stamps your passport and lets you through. His is not to reason why.
None of this baffles the intrepid traveller. The queues are as long as they are at Heathrow or Los Angeles and the procedure as tedious but common sense tells us that all this is necessary.
But why on the way out? My troubled reasoning tells me that there has to be a purpose to this surveillance of passports and people as one leaves a country. Perhaps one is a minister taking a suitcase full of bribes to Switzerland. Perhaps another in the exit queue is the politician’s son who murdered 20 pavement-dwellers in a drunken driving fit and is now on the way to Dubai to celebrate. It’s obvious that this sort of person ought to be stopped at the pearly gates of Indian immigration, not allowed to pass go and taken straight to jail.
There ought to be other ways of stopping the minister with the loot going to Switzerland or the politician’s murdering son on the way to Dubai to boast about drinking Vodka costing $1,000 a bottle, because the other millions who pass through the Passage From India (Okay, sorry!) are critically bored and inconvenienced by the procedure.
The UK takes the attitude of “good riddance to bad rubbish” as one leaves the country. One passes through the departure gates, is checked for guns, bombs and after-shave lotion and released into the consumer paradise/trap of duty free. No policewallahs checking passports on exit.
The story of the cardinals comes back and I feel that perhaps this exit-check enterprise at Indian airports is just a way to employ a lot of people in inessential jobs, going through the motions, implementing the details of the procedure, earning a living at the end of the week and keeping a family in food, accommodation and education. Bravo!
They are “looking busy”.
India, my India, — rumbles on, but this week I read in the British newspapers that an Israeli diplomat’s wife was grievously injured in a terrorist attack in Delhi. The Indian newspapers attribute it to an attack by Iranian activists in retaliation for the murder of Iranian scientists by Israel. So Israel and Iran are with impunity playing cowboys and Indians — but why on Indian soil?
Is it because our security measures, despite all the bluster of politicians after the Mumbai terror, are pretty much non-existent? We all know that the “security guards” who pass you through those surveillance-doors-to-nowhere at the entrances of malls or hotels don’t have a clue to what they are doing. They may as well be selling the people who pass them salted, boiled-in-the-shell peanuts.
The British surveillance with intelligence agencies have, since the terrorist assaults on the London Underground in 2005, caught and brought to trial 28 cases of planned terrorism. The police say they have done it by proper intelligence, infiltration and piercing analysis of electronically obtained data. Way to go. The plotters and perpetrators are now cooling their upturned, prayer-matted heels in British jails.
No CCTV camera could have prevented a motorcyclist fixing a bomb to the car in which the Israeli diplomat’s wife was fetching her child from school. Only an efficient intelligence operation could have monitored and apprehended the Iranian or sympathiser who did this awful thing.
I am sure the police officers at the departures immigration check, in the most boring job in the entire service (and much less lucrative than stopping rich, drunken drivers on their mobile phones at night in Mumbai and charging them a backhander of `200) would welcome the chance to become intelligence heroes and do some live surveillance work.
Stop this farce at exit! Put the officers to use gathering intelligence and nipping terrorism in the bud as Scotland Yard seems to have done. Let the unwanted go.