By Vickram Kilpady
While one was imagining the Indian bureaucracy’s python of red tape having exhausted itself on swallowing the voting rights of millions of disenfranchised citizens, up pops the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). Hold my beer!
A day before the June 25 anniversary of the 1975 proclamation of Emergency, an MEA official put out a bland statement on Passport Seva Diwas, stating that the passport is just a travel document and not a proof of citizenship. That innocuous statement reminded one of the ways red tape has been deployed to frustrate citizens some 51 years after Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s moment in India’s infamy.
That proclamation was constitutional in letter, but not in spirit, just like declaring the passport to be no proof of citizenship, when the entire country is embroiled in the convulsive Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, so ably and expertly handled by the Election Commission of India. Tip-top!
The spectre of the passport as the ultimate proof of citizenship had gained ground during the first SIR, held in Bihar last year ahead of the assembly elections, when random peasants in remote locations were asked to prove their citizenship with their passport. They had their Aadhaar IDs, a must-have document post-2012, but which, by 2025, would no longer do, given how the stormtroopers of the ECI didn’t trust the UIDAI’s verification machinery. Therefore, the passport.
Unlike in Kerala and Tamil Nadu where the passport is applied for in hopes of its bearer’s finding employment in the petro-dollar Mecca of the Gulf, the document is not a must-have in Bihar and West Bengal, where a large majority find employment through internal migration and Aadhaar-mandated reference checks. Before the UIDAI card, a lower wage demand was enough to guarantee employment, checks be damned. But, you see, such la-di-da procedures ended up being infiltrated by so-called termites and parasites and whatever else people from Bangladesh and the Rohingya of Myanmar are called by the ruling dispensation. Thus, many voters in Bihar and West Bengal couldn’t prove their citizenship and so were bundled with the dreaded “infiltrators”.
The benefits meant for the poor had to go specifically to our poor, and not to migrant foreigners, also deemed “sleeper cells” of patently sub-standard espionage and sabotage plots of allegedly extremist Islamist groups. National security demanded that they be identified, separated and denied voting rights, even if they had previously voted for the party in power. That was the aim and the process, not security vetting, but ensuring what could be termed voter-mandering to suit a particular party. The losses borne by the opposition Rashtriya Janata Dal in Bihar and the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal seemed to have materialised from the voters’ sudden love for the ruling party. This is not to say that all was milk and honey in either of these states. Bihar’s was a caste party fed by closed clan votebanks; in Bengal, the Trinamool emerged as a system of percentages for the party’s every paara dada, all now in tatters, both in the assembly and in Parliament.
Before the anonymity of the 12-digit Aadhaar number, which, again, is not a proof of citizenship, but only of identity, you see, the passport was the one Big Kahuna among the government’s array of certificatory documents. The Permanent Account Number of the Income Tax department was perhaps too mundanely materialistic, one may say, for the land of navel-gazing lotus eaters and was dismissed as proof of citizenship without contest. The passport, on the other hand, requires police verification, a visit which though dreaded, is entirely harmless, wrapped as it is in a regulation rolled-up note palmed to the head constable. Aside: This is probably the first time that young persons face the everyday nature of corruption, its part in process. Formerly, the document arrived by registered post, and one threw a party for close friends. Nowadays, the process is, of course, ultra digital, what else could it be?
The social media outrage that followed the MEA statement was largely one of incredulity. In the melee involving Orwell, Kafka and every other author of dystopian fiction, there were some voices explaining what was said by the MEA officials and attempting to make sense of the discrepancy: Indian citizen has passport, but passport no proof of citizenship. To be or not to be?
One of the calmer voices on X, Nirupama Menon Rao, the former foreign secretary, said the MEA position is legally correct since the passport is issued under the Passports Act and citizenship is governed by the Citizenship Act, 1955.
Then she noted the cause for the outrage: “But law and public understanding are not always the same.”
Calling for some nuance, she noted that a passport does not create citizenship. “Nor is it the legal instrument that finally determines citizenship if that status is challenged before a court. Like many democracies, India distinguishes between citizenship law and passport law. In rare cases involving fraud, disputed parentage or illegal acquisition, citizenship may have to be established through the provisions of the Citizenship Act and supporting evidence. That is why a passport is not regarded in law as conclusive proof in every conceivable circumstance.”
She added a passport is issued only after the government has verified that the applicant is an Indian citizen, but, in a legal dispute over citizenship itself, the governing law remains the Citizenship Act, and a passport is not conclusive proof to override all other evidence. “In everyday life, and in international travel, it is the strongest evidence of Indian nationality that most citizens will ever possess. Nothing said by the MEA changes that. No immigration officer abroad will suddenly regard an Indian passport with suspicion because of a legal clarification made in New Delhi.”
The exhaustive X post calmed some nerves. It is thus very simple: a passport is given to a citizen, but in a legal dispute, it sits below the Citizenship Act requirements. Like a celebrated former chief justice of India said, what is legal may not necessarily be justice.
For the many who haven’t had the opportunity to look up Rao’s explanation, the whorls and layers of the bureaucracy are mind-boggling tests of understanding of the given and the law. Just as this controversy faded, The Economist did a telling story of how difficult it is to apply for an Indian visa. This was possibly the reporter’s first date with the outdated system of captchas and OTPs. But, as experts at captcha and OTP, we have every reason to say: Hold my beer!
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