Indian Consulate looking into ‘Vedic pandits’ disappearance

Consul General Ausaf Sayeed said none of the pandits had sought any assistance from the Consulate for their repatriation to India.

The Indian Consul General in Chicago has said that no complaints or information has been received from either the Iowa-based Maharishi Vedic City, or from any one of the 130 “Vedic pandits,” or religious scholars brought here from India for studies and training, who have said to have gone “missing” in the last seven months.

In an email to The Hindu Consul General Ausaf Sayeed said none of the pandits had sought any assistance from the Consulate for their repatriation to India, and “The Consulate has no information on the current whereabouts of the missing pandits and whether they are working elsewhere.”

Dr. Sayeed further clarified, “The Maharishi University has also not deposited any passport of their missing employees with the Consulate.”

Earlier, a Maharishi University official said that the missing pandits were “in violation of U.S. immigration law and it is therefore a federal matter, beyond the legal jurisdiction of local officials in Iowa or the Indian Consul General in Chicago,” however adding that, “The prior Consul General has visited the pandit campus in Iowa and expressed great pleasure at the program and facilities.”

Although Dr. Sayeed said that the Consulate General was in the process of ascertaining full facts of the case, what is evident is that unprecedented numbers of R-1 visa holders have been vanishing from the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi institutions since they began coming here for their training since 2006.

In messages sent to The Hindu earlier, William Goldstein, Dean of Global Development and General Counsel to the Maharishi University of Management, based in Fairfield, Iowa, said that the Global Country of World Peace (GCWP), the U.S. organisation sponsoring the pandits’ R-1 visas and their stay in this country, had not received any prior communication from the scholars before they went “AWOL” (Absence Without Leave).

Mr. Goldstein said that while they did not know for sure what they pandits were doing after their departure from the Vedic city, but suspected that many of them were “working simple jobs in restaurants as the ones who have returned or the few we have information on seem to have followed that pattern”.

He added that it could be that, “Someone is misinforming them about the financial opportunities and the legal implications, and their prime motive appears to be to generate more money for their families,” and there could be an “organised racket brokering the operation”.

Further, Mr. Goldstein said that few, if any, of the pandits spoke English at all, and allegations made by the Chicago-based Hi India newspaper that the pandits’ initial contract signed with the Maharishi institutions for travel to the U.S. had not been translated from English to Hindi were “untrue”.

Mr. Goldstein also said, “I am the attorney who spent many hours before and after the project launched working with the U.S. State Department and Indian passport officials setting up the visas for the project.”

The Hindu contacted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) regarding this matter, but their office in Minneapolis, which is dealing with the case, was closed owing to extreme weather conditions.

An ICE official however noted that missing person reports were generally not filed with ICE, rather they had to be submitted to local law enforcement authorities and in the case of foreign nationals with the government concerned.

source:thehindu.com