Foreigners seeking visa must reveal criminal records now

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, October 22

Foreigners applying for Indian visa will now have to declare their criminal records as part of the new visa format to check child sexual abuse and a range of other crimes by travellers.

The move follows a specific request Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi made to Sushma Swaraj, her counterpart in the MEA, last June to ensure mechanisms to prevent travelling child sex offenders from entering India.

There have been several instances where foreigners convicted for child abuse at home have travelled to India to run child sex rackets due to lenient visa rules.

Australian Paul Dean was recently convicted for abusing differently abled poor children from Vishakapatnam and Puri during his three-decade stay in India in which he wore different hats from a priest’s to a charity worker’s. US citizen John Jones was recently arrested by the Hyderabad police for circulating child sex abuse literature online.

Past cases have seen worse forms of child abuse being perpetrated by travelling foreigners who were hitherto not required to tell the Indian visa and passport authorities whether they had any criminal records whatsoever back home.

For instance, Raymond Varley, convicted in Britain for child sexual abuse in the 1970s hopped from country to country after his release ultimately making India his home. Here he ran a child sex abuse racket dating back to 1989 at a Goa orphanage. Varley fled India and continues to escape the domestic law.

“It has now been decided that an appropriate questionnaire and a declaration will be incorporated in the visa application form which will have to be filled up by visa applicants and foreign nationals,”, Maneka Gandhi said today.

New rules require

Foreigners applying for Indian visa to declare all criminal records, including for child sex abuse and crimes against women, involvement in drug or human trafficking, espionage, political killings, genocide, cyber crimes, terrorist acts, etc