OBTAINING an Indian visa is getting more and more difficult with the passage of each day.

Recently, I attended a wedding in which the bridegroom and his family had come from the United States for celebrating the marriage as the bride is from Karachi.

A number of very close relatives of the bridegroom live in India and they were invited to attend the marriage and they had applied for visa well over two months prior to the date of marriage.

All that they were told by the Pakistan High Commission was that their applications had beenforwarded to Pakistan for verification.

Well, they were still awaiting the grant of visa on the day of marriage. I understand that similar difficulties are faced by Pakistanis when applying for an Indian visa.

Most of those who wish to come from India are members of divided families some of whose members had migrated to Pakistan at the time of partition. Putting hurdles in their way and thus preventing them from meeting their relatives in Pakistan is indeed very deplorable.

There was a time before 1965when those who applied for Indian visa at the Karachi consulate/ deputy high commission before llam were granted visas the same afternoon at 3pm and those applying after llam were granted visas the next morning.

I believe the same schedule of granting visas was also followed by the Pakistan high commission/deputy high commission in India in those days.

Why can we not revert to the same time schedule in granting visas? All over the world visas are country specific but our misfortune is that India-Pakistan visas are city specific. They aregranted for specific cities.

There was a time when visas were granted for up to eight cities but now in most of the cases they are granted only for one or two places.

We just do not know what delays the opening of deputy high commissions in Karachi and Bombay. As for Karachi, India has all the infrastructure ready but on the principle of reciprocity it cannot open its deputy high commission in Karachi until Pakistanis ready to do soin Bombay.

But what delays Pakistan in doing so when the Maharashtragovernment had long ago offered it a plot in Bombay for building its deputy high commission?

SALAHUDDIN MIRZA Karachi