Rahul Bedi
India’s bureaucracy has long been a global leader in administrative innovation, as nowhere else can a government issue a passport, ask the world to accept it as proof of nationality and citizenship, and then maintain that it is merely a travel document.
The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) did just that on Wednesday.
One of its senior officials maintained that an Indian passport is not proof of citizenship – a proposition that raises an obvious question: if India itself does not fully trust its passport as evidence of nationality, why should anyone else?
Consider this for an incredulous moment.
The Government of India issues a document, embosses it with the national emblem, subjects applicants to police verification, and then prints the passport in one of the country’s most secure facilities, presenting it to the world as an official document identifying Indian citizens.
Thus, when Indians invoke their passports as evidence of citizenship, they are informed that they cannot be regarded as such. The irony is difficult to miss.
The passport is also considered sufficiently reliable to obtain visas, satisfy immigration authorities, board international flights and secure diplomatic protection abroad. Airlines accept it without hesitation. Border-control agencies rely upon it. Foreign governments recognise it as evidence that its holder is an Indian national.
Only in India does the document appear to lose some of its authority. The state that issues the passport is seemingly less willing to rely upon it than the states overseas to which it is presented. This is no small bureaucratic accomplishment.
One is therefore entitled to wonder what exactly the government believes it has been verifying all along. If citizenship is not the central consideration, then what is? A fondness for international travel? An enthusiasm for collecting immigration stamps? Or, the ability to queue patiently at passport offices and police stations?
Perhaps the answer lies in some quality perceptible only to sharp MEA officials, whose remarkable talent is to produce documents that require additional documents to clarify what the original documents were supposedly issued to certify.
The preamble to the Passport Act, 1967 reads: “An Act to provide for the issue of passports and travel documents, to regulate the departure from India of citizens of India and for other persons and for matters incidental or ancillary thereto.” Section 1(2) of the Act extends to the whole of India and applies also to citizens of India who are outside India. The MEA statement is, therefore, contrary to law.
The current official position on passports, as declared by the MEA, is also likely to put foreign governments in a rather awkward position.
Every Indian passport carries the familiar request, on its inner flap, that the bearer be permitted to pass freely and be afforded all necessary assistance and protection. Implicit in that request is a straightforward assurance: that the Government of India is vouching for the nationality of the individual carrying the document.
After all, sovereign states do not ordinarily ask other countries to extend diplomatic courtesies and consular protection to people whose status they themselves are unwilling to certify. The entire passport system depends upon precisely such assurances. Without them, passports would become little more than elaborately- and expensively- produced travel accessories.
Yet, as of Wednesday, India now appears to be advancing a curious proposition.
Foreign governments are expected to trust the nationality certified by an Indian passport for purposes of entry, visas and consular dealings, while the issuing authority holds that the same document does not suffice to establish citizenship locally.
It is, indeed, a remarkable arrangement.
An immigration officer in London, Paris or Washington is expected to place complete faith in the document, while the country that issued it reserves the right to treat it with extreme caution and suspicion and ultimately to disregard it entirely.
The outcome, therefore, is a passport that enjoys greater credibility abroad than it does at home-a uniquely Indian jalebi, and one that would be amusing were it not so utterly absurd.
The entire international passport system rests on a simple and time-tested understanding: all sovereign states verify the identity and nationality of an individual based on their respective passports. They mutually accept that certification and permit passport holders to travel across borders; sovereign states do not generally extend diplomatic protection to random travellers.
They do so because those travellers are citizens of a particular country.
But remove nationality from the equation, and the passport ceases to have much purpose beyond serving as a high-value notebook. And, if a passport does not constitute proof of citizenship, one is entitled to wonder what exactly the Indian government believes it has been verifying all along.
This is indeed an extraordinary achievement for a government that prides itself on digital governance, administrative reform and ease of doing business. An Indian citizen may traverse continents, clear immigration controls in multiple jurisdictions and be recognised everywhere as Indian, only to discover that the one institution still harbouring doubts over his nationality is the very government that issued his passport in the first place.
Most countries spend considerable effort ensuring that their passports are regarded as definitive proof of nationality. India, by contrast, has managed to produce a passport that is issued on the basis of confirmed citizenship, but does not accept the conclusion that scrutiny determined. It is to be admired that few bureaucracies have thus managed to create a document that becomes less useful the moment it is employed for the purpose for which it exists.
It is near impossible to think of another official document subjected to such evaluation.
A death certificate that merely suggested the possibility of death, a birth certificate that did not confirm birth, a driving licence that did not prove the holder could drive, a university degree that did not establish graduation, or a marriage certificate that did not affirm marriage would be laughed out of existence. Such documents would be ridiculed as administrative absurdities, as their value lay precisely in the fact that they certified the very fact they were created to record.
Yet the passport somehow escapes a similar fate, largely because it exists within a bureaucracy that appears incapable of accepting it at face value until it has been additionally endorsed by yet another document, attested by a third, verified by a fourth and supported by sufficient paperwork to confirm what it established in the first place- that its holder was an Indian citizen.
That is by no means a contradiction; it’s simply administrative elegance of a particularly Indian kind. It should also not be mistaken for bureaucratic dysfunction, but bureaucratic achievement carried to its logical conclusion.
Also Read: India’s Global Mobility Improves As Passport Ranking Rises To 75 https://www.vibesofindia.com/indias-global-mobility-improves-as-passport-ranking-rises-to-75/
