The Passport Seva Divas (24 June) tends to commemorate the enactment of the Passports Act 1967 and recognise the efforts of passport issuing authorities, highlights digital advancements in e-governance and reaffirms the government’s commitment to delivering transparent and citizen-centric services. Besides, the founding of the legal framework to issue passports, it empowers the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to announce the expansion of the Passport Seva Kendra (PSK) network, roll out advanced features like chip-enabled e-passports and celebrate surges in annual passport issuance and reward the best-performing Passport Offices and officials for maintaining high standards in e-governance and public service.
Despite these achievements, over 200,000 Indians have voluntarily renounced their citizenship to become foreign nationals and over 900,000 Indians have given up their passports in the last five years. The year 2022 saw a record 225,620 Indian passports being surrendered in favour of another country, with the US taking the lead. While this may be attributable to a multitude of factors, the recent MEA statement does tend to add that little bit to the byzantine maze of regulations that every Indian resident faces in this country.
This statement (totally unwarranted in my opinion) on Passport Seva Divas made by MEA generated more bedlam than bliss. It stated that ‘a passport is a travel document, not a document of citizenship’. Though legally sound, it is as banal as stating that the age of majority is 18. About 92.6 million Indians (constituting 7-8 per cent of the population) hold valid passports and they couldn’t care less one way or another. The remaining 92 per cent of the population, who either travel to the next village or the next town or the next city or the next state, would have perhaps yawned, depending on whether they read it or heard of it. A passport bears the name of the Republic of India, describes the holder’s identity and is accepted around the world as proof of the holder’s nationality.
But the few curious ones who are not lawyers, naively and legitimately asked: if a passport is not proof of citizenship, then what is? I guffawed when I asked the query to myself but seriously answered the few young law graduates whom I had taken out for lunch. The youth would be wasted on the young, if the wisdom to guide them was wasted on the old ones like me! You see, friends: a passport does not create citizenship, and, hence, is not the final determinant of my citizenship, if that is in question before the court. Akin to many democracies, India distinguishes between citizenship law and passport law and we have both as aforesaid. Under the Citizenship Act, what determines citizenship is birth, descent, registration, naturalisation and incorporation of territory.
In a few cases involving fraud, questionable parentage or illegal acquisition, supporting evidence like the issuance of a passport could be necessitated. A passport is issued only after the government has satisfied itself that the applicant is entitled to one. In international travel, it is the strongest evidence of Indian nationality, rendering MEA’s statement a non sequitur. A friend of mine, who was travelling on 26 June, was worried whether an immigration officer abroad would suddenly regard his passport with suspicion because of this MEA statement. I allayed his fears, stating that the statement is just a clarification.
India needs a robust civil registration, universal birth registration and dependable untattered archives, so that citizenship can never become subservient to haphazard paperwork
Antiquated registers: There is a larger challenge – India’s record logs are as old and inefficient as our sewage systems. They developed in a slipshod way over many decades, when several older Indians were born, when birth registration was incomplete, including school certificates, land records and electoral rolls. The recent Supreme Court judgement on Special Intensive Revision was an archetype of the painful experience showing how documentary inconsistencies can create profound absurdities, when citizenship itself becomes the subject of legal scrutiny. The Supreme Court drew an important distinction. While upholding the Election Commission’s constitutional authority to revise electoral rolls, it clarified that determining citizenship lies beyond the Commission’s powers and is subject to a determination under the Citizenship Act. Deletion from a voter list cannot extinguish citizenship. Hence, India needs a robust civil registration, universal birth registration and dependable untattered archives, so that citizenship can never become subservient to haphazard paperwork.
NRC debate: The current citizenship conundrum reminds us of the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), which claimed to weed out illegal residents. Implemented in Assam, it resulted in nearly two million people, including Hindus and Muslims, being excluded from Indian citizenship. The NRC debate quickly became intertwined with the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), enacted by Parliament in 2019, which fast-tracks Indian citizenship applications from Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian immigrants, who escaped to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
The MEA statement has snowballed into a riddle wrapped inside an enigma interwoven in a mystery. A person possessing a passport, a voter ID card, a PAN Card and Aadhaar cannot say that he/she is a citizen, as none of the above legal instruments is a definitive single proof of citizenship. Instead, these different documents serve different purposes. The Aadhaar establishes identity primarily inclined towards welfare and public services. A voter identity card enables right to vote and a passport allows one to travel internationally. My recommendation to the Parliament is: ‘Amend the Constitution to include a sub-Article to the effect that this legal instrument issued to a person definitively determines his/her citizenship’.
Territorial challenges: With increasing passport services, every parliamentary constituency can avail of them, with about 30 districts yet to receive a dedicated centre. Special mobile passport teams are being sent to remote and difficult-to-access regions, while dedicated outreach camps helped issue passports to nearly 300,000 people in underserved areas last year. However, only about 10 per cent possess a passport.
A better statement would have been that the government does its verification checks before issuing one and that, while the passport is the strongest evidence of one’s nationality, it is primarily a travel document. Perhaps this would have reduced newspaper reports and, also, not incited me to write this piece. My friend (who was worried about the immigration officer), like Mr. Bumble, a Dickensian character, quoted to me, ‘The law is an ass – an idiot’, whereas one of the law graduates as a GEN Z said: ‘The law seems to be crass’. Being a firm believer in the Rule of Law as the centre-point of any successful democracy, I shook my head both lamentably and loathsomely at both statements. I am still deciding whether the statement made by the MEA was out of turn or the ones made by my friend and the law graduate. But I did quote the enlightened French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville to them both: “Society is endangered not by the great profligacy of a few, but by the laxity of morals amongst all.”