Two developments only days apart have shed light on how the controversy over citizenship has become an integral part of the already dubious SIR process.
The first was a seemingly casual remark by a senior official of the Minister of External Affairs that the Indian passport is not a proof of citizenship, but only a travel document. In purely technical terms, the official was right. Passports and citizenship are governed by different Acts. It is legitimate to argue that the two should not be conflated.
Nor is this a new debate. Way back in the 1980s, a corporate war led the government to issue a deportation notice to a businessman who held a British passport. The businessman challenged the order, arguing that his British passport was merely a travel document and that he continued to be an Indian citizen.
The courts appeared to accept the argument. The deportation did not go ahead. But, just to avoid any further attacks from politicians who favoured his rivals, the businessman said he would apply for an Indian passport as well.
And yet the confusion continues. For instance, every time the law requires a person to be an Indian citizen, the government does not take the line that anyone with a foreign passport could still be an Indian citizen because the two concepts — passports and citizenship — are different. Newspaper editors were required to be Indian citizens and the official way to ascertain that was by checking their passports. Nobody said, ‘so what if he has a Brazilian passport. He might still be an Indian citizen.’
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The intention behind the remark
As far as officialdom is concerned, you are not an Indian citizen unless you have an Indian passport. That position has now been modified to suit the government: even if you do have an Indian passport, you may still be regarded as not being an Indian citizen.
Yes, there is a technical issue here: the two separate Acts. But there is also a reality. Nobody who goes to a passport office and demands a passport will be issued one unless the authorities are convinced that he or she is an Indian citizen. If you say, ‘I am a Brazilian but want an Indian passport,’ they will
throw you out of the passport office.
So, why does the government think that the distinction is worth emphasising? At first, I thought the MEA official was making a casual remark about the technical position, but given that the government has not rushed to reassure citizens or clarify the matter, I am no longer sure what its motives are.
Is it, as some have suggested, preparing the ground for giving Indian passports to American citizens of Indian origin? Many have been demanding something like this for years. Certainly, such a move would appeal to the BJP’s PIO support base: people who sit in, say New Jersey, and tell us how India should be run but when it comes to the crunch, when we expect them to lobby American legislators on India’s behalf (as we did during Operation Sindoor), they say “Sorry pal, I am an American citizen; it’s not my problem.”
I am sure many of them would gladly accept Indian passports while hanging on to their US citizenship. Once you say that passports and citizenship are unrelated, this becomes possible to implement.
Or is the intention more negative?
Over the past few years, there has been a conscious attempt to redefine who an Indian is. Is this casual remark part of that exercise? Now that the technical distinction between passport holders and citizens has been re-emphasised, it will become more difficult for lakhs of people to prove that they are Indians. It is no secret whose Indianness is under suspicion: Muslims, mainly.
Whatever you think of the motives behind this move, no reasonable person can deny that the SIR process has disenfranchised members of the Muslim minority. It is true that the BJP would have won West Bengal anyway, but the voting figures clearly demonstrate that in many constituencies the BJP’s majority swelled because Muslim voters had been struck off the rolls.
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Passport and the SIR process
Which brings us to the second worrying development of the last week. A well known anti-BJP former editor has said that his passport was not renewed and he was unable to go abroad for his daughter’s wedding. As far as we can tell, the problem was that the police verification was denied. And why was it denied?
Well, because he was not on the post-SIR electoral rolls. As he used to edit one of Kolkata’s most famous newspapers, The Telegraph, and is not what the BJP would call a termite or an infiltrator (and while it should not matter but may be worth mentioning that he is a Hindu), it seems strange to remove him from the electoral rolls. It is even stranger that getting a passport renewal now depends on how a citizen fared in the notoriously dodgy and controversial SIR exercise.
It is entirely possible that the two phenomena — the citizenship controversy and the use of SIR-fiddled rolls to renew a passport — are not connected and that the timing is co-incidental.
Either way, it shows us how fragile the concept of citizenship is becoming in our country.
The Supreme Court has taken a largely passive attitude to the SIR issue. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake. It’s no longer just the possibility of rigging an election that the judiciary has to consider. Now that this flawed and probably malign SIR exercise is being used to deny our very Indianness and our rights as citizens, it may be time for the Supreme Court to take a less passive role and clarify what it means to be an Indian.
It owes that much to posterity. What binds us is our Indianness. Take that away and you signal the beginning of a national collapse.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)