Delhi: Anant Mittal, an Indian vlogger, has claimed he was detained at an airport in China for 15 hours over a video he made about a month earlier in response to the harassment faced by a woman from Arunachal Pradesh at Shanghai airport in November.
In the video, posted Tuesday using his YouTube handle ‘On Road Indian’, Mittal landed in Guangzhou on 16 November. He was going through routine procedure at the immigration when suddenly, the officer behind the counter received some notification on his computer screen, following which another officer was called in to escort Mittal to another room.
He was made to wait for two hours before two Chinese officials came in to question him.
By his own admission, the questioning was done in a very polite, casual manner without any hostility. But then all his devices were confiscated by Chinese authorities, except for his iPad which they happened to overlook. Mittal alleges he was not given food or water, or allowed to visit the washroom. Sitting in the room waiting to be released, he was not even allowed to contact the Indian embassy. He was given no reason for the detainment.
It was when he was asked about his work as a YouTuber, he said, that he connected the dots, realising that the questioning might be linked to the video he posted earlier.
“Now I am realising that I should not have raised the issue. My job is to travel around and come back to my country. A land dispute is going on between China and India. But I had no right to stand on their soil and criticise them,” Mittal said. He also expressed relief at eventually being let go by Chinese authorities after they had questioned him.
Mittal has 3.98 lakh followers on YouTube.
In a post on Instagram, he wrote that he had studied in the Northeast for three years and was very attached to the region, which is why he uploaded a video supporting the woman from Arunachal Pradesh. He clarified that he does not have any political agenda.
Some of Mittal’s previous videos focus on the aspect of harassment foreign tourists face in other countries, including one where he got into problems with a Chinese airline in June.
Niyati Kothiyal is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism currently interning with ThePrint
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
Also read: Why China targets Arunachal citizens — and how Nehru, Patel and Khathing saw it coming