On November 7, 2019, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked my Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), effectively banning me from the country I grew up in. India was where my mother and grandmother lived. Where four out of my five books of fiction and nonfiction were set. Where I had moved back after college in the United States with the aim of being “an Indian writer.”

The government alleged I had concealed that my father was Pakistani. It was a surprising accusation. My first book—Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey through Islamic Lands, which was published in 2009—dealt extensively with my relationship to my absent father and my rediscovery of him. I had written countless articles on the subject, not to mention that my father was a public figure. In 2011, as governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, he was assassinated by his own bodyguard for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy. His killing was on the front page of the New York Times.

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None of this affected my position in India, where I lived for over 30 years. I became “Pakistani” the day I wrote a story for the cover of TIME Magazine entitled “India’s Divider in Chief,” which appeared in 2019, in the run-up to Modi’s re-election. TIME (where I began my career as a reporter in 2003) has powerful name recognition in India. The sight of its famous red masthead enclosing a scowling image of India’s leader produced a visceral reaction within the country. Modi’s army of internet trolls came after me with threats, abuse and digital vandalism. If in the past authoritarian regimes sought to destroy your person, they now first destroy your reputation. Then Modi himself spoke, “TIME Magazine is foreign. The writer has also said he comes from a Pakistani political family. That is enough for his credibility.”

After that, I was on borrowed time—though, of course, none of this is new. The weaponization of citizenship documents against critics is something we see now in the U.S. too, most notably in the case of student activist Mahmoud Khalil, who was detained by ICE for more than three months in the beginning of the year and released in June.

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In India, I was an early test case. There have been over 100 such

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