Story Behind a Stapled Chinese Visa
Manmohan Singh, left, prime minister of India, with Xi Jinping, president of China, in Beijing, China, on Oct. 23. Kyodo News-Pool/Getty Images
NEW DELHI — On Oct. 23, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India and Prime Minister Li Keqiang of China oversaw the signing of nine agreements on issues like river-sharing and cooperation against terrorism. The most notable among these was the Border Defense Cooperation Agreement, meant to calm down tensions along the disputed 3,380-kilometer (2,100-mile) Himalayan border between the two countries.
The agreement came as a major relief to Indian defense strategists after the Chinese Army’s repeated incursions into Ladakh in the north earlier this year and into Arunachal Pradesh in the east. But despite some signs of improvement in India-China relations, Chinese officials have maintained that their policy of issuing stapled visas, instead of stamped visas, to the residents of Arunachal Pradesh, the northeastern Indian state over which China for long has made territorial claims will continue to remain in place. In 2009, China also started giving stapled visas to the residents of Jammu and Kashmir.
Indian immigration officials have responded by refusing to let Indian holders of stapled visas board their flights to China. In the past, those who have been turned back from the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi include students, athletes and businessmen. I happen to be one among them.
Historically, immigration controls, passports, visas and other such mechanisms were developed to first institutionalize the idea of the nation-state and then preserve its sovereignty. For nations to be sovereign nation-states, not only was it necessary for the state to monopolize the means of violence but also to have complete control over who could leave or enter its territorial borders. This was the essence of the explanation given to me by the immigration officials at the New Delhi airport when they stopped me from boarding a flight to Beijing on the night of Sept. 2, 2009….