The price of citizenship for Indians like Goa’s Joseph Pereira—uncertainty, red tape, tears

I met the genial Joseph and Martha Pereira at their quiet home in a placid part of Goa, untouched by tourists. Joseph was the only applicant from the state under CAA.

Joseph Francis Pereira, 78, became the first Goan to be granted citizenship status under the CAA | Photo: ANI

In 2019, Indian civil society went into a pitched battle against the Indian government with country-wide protests against the proposed Citizenship Amendment Act. But in a small, quiet corner of Goa, an elderly couple watched the agitations unfold on television, in the grip of anxiety. For Joseph Francis Pereira, the bill’s fate was inextricably linked to his own status as a legal citizen in the country he had always called home.

Earlier this week, Pereira, 78, became the first Goan to be granted citizenship status under the CAA. The resident of Cansaulim in South Goa was born here but held a Pakistani passport and lived most of his life in Bahrain, where he worked as a refrigeration and air conditioning expert. Since his retirement in 2013, Pereira has been living in the state with his wife Martha on a long-term visa. At a very well-publicised ceremony that blended personal triumph with political theatre, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant presented Pereira’s citizenship certificate to him.

There is much to celebrate in the decision – for the elderly couple, as well as the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government. Over the last 11 years, Pereira applied twice for citizenship: One application was cancelled due to “missing documents”, while the second one was still pending when his CAA application came through within two months. But the headlines around Pereira’s case conceal so much more than they reveal. Peeling back the layers of a carefully edited story reveals a life lived out amid several pauses.

A complex pursuit of opportunity

I met the genial Joseph and Martha at their quiet home in a placid part of Goa, untouched by tourists. They are a little overwhelmed at having become the focus of sudden media attention, but they are understandably relieved that Joseph has finally been certified as an Indian. Pereira was the only applicant from Goa under CAA, in this category. But he already met all the criteria of Indian citizenship – of birth, descent, registration, and naturalisation. He had Indian parents, an Indian birth certificate, and was married to an Indian national, yet his attempts to be recognised as a citizen of this country have taken more than four decades.

It all hinges on a small technicality dating back to Pereira’s youth. In 1960, when Pereira was 14, an uncle suggested that he go to Karachi for higher education and training. There were few job prospects in pre-Liberation Goa, and Pereira would be better off studying at an English-medium school. Pereira applied for a Portuguese passport and set off on the week-long trip to Karachi by the steamboat Sabarmati, unaware of the decades-long journey he was embarking upon.

Once there, he stayed with his uncle’s family and studied first at a missionary school, and later took up a technical course in refrigeration and air conditioning. In 1964, Pereira returned to Goa alongside a group of pilgrims who were visiting India for the Eucharistic Congress and the exposition of St Francis Xavier’s remains for public venerations. Pereira’s agenda, however, was different – he was terribly homesick and desperate to meet his family. “At 14 years old, you don’t realise these things. I thought going to Karachi was like just taking a bus or something,” he said. After spending two months here, he returned to Karachi.

Pereira said that his years in Karachi were mostly uneventful. He went to church, had “no problem” buying liquor, and there were no restrictions on practising his religion. That changed once the dictatorships began in 1965, followed by the 1971 war. During the war, Pereira could barely communicate with his family because postal service between India and Pakistan was suspended. He was forced to write letters to a friend in Bahrain, who would send them to his family, and vice versa. However, it was the lack of job opportunities that led Pereira out of Karachi.

As political tensions in the region escalated, Pereira’s simple pursuit of opportunity became increasingly complex.

Within a few years, Pereira got a job in Bahrain, but in order to go to the West Asian country, he had to surrender his Portuguese passport and get a Pakistani one. This innocuous exchange of documents – combined with the caprice of political events in the subcontinent – would have an outsize impact on Pereira’s life.

Between 1975 and 2013, Pereira worked in Bahrain, first as a technician and later as a supervisor. In the intervening years, he met Martha, got married in 1978, and had two daughters. While Martha and her children remained in Goa, Joseph continued to work in Bahrain, leading a life parcelled out in instalments of two months every two years, dictated by the cold logic of visa regulations and leave policies. “I missed my family so much, I used to cry,” Pereira said. “I just wanted to come back to Goa, my birthplace, my motherland.”

A life put on hold

Joseph and Martha paint a picture of a life put on hold. Since the time they got married, the couple were together only for a year in Bahrain in 1979. Martha then returned to her full-time job as the office superintendent at Carmel College for Arts and Science, and held the fort in Goa. She built the house they currently reside in, and raised and educated her children. “It was very difficult to manage so many things without a man around,” she told me. “I used to be very scared at night. But I had a lot of help from family and friends.”

In the post-1971-war era, as Pakistan came to acquire the status of enemy territory, anyone associated with the country would be treated with the same suspicion. And so it was with Pereira. Returning to India meant furnishing supporting letters from his wife, reporting to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office within 24 hours of being in the country, and every once in a while, being subject to police verification at home. Thanks to these policies, Joseph ended up missing a part of his daughter’s wedding celebrations.

Since 2013, when Joseph moved back to Goa after his retirement, paperwork became an unwelcome member of the family. Joseph could only apply for two-year visas on the condition that Martha sign a bond stating that she was responsible for him. It meant several letters to the FRRO and constant compilation of documentation, some of which warranted visits to the state archives. It meant multiple applications for citizenship and dealing with confusion from officers who couldn’t wrap their heads around a maze of overlapping rules. It meant having their applications suspended thanks to a global pandemic and later cancelled over technicalities like the time of birth of his parents.

If navigating Indian bureaucracy were an Olympic sport, the Pereiras would be gold medallists – ordinary citizens who’ve managed to outlast red tape, even if their weathered faces bear the marks of those battles. “It’s not like it happened overnight,” Martha said, referring to the CAA application. “We had been preparing and collecting documents for years.”

Tale of bureaucratic endurance

The Pereiras – understandably – had different feelings about the proposed CAA, which ignited a firestorm across India in 2019. Civil society and expert groups together decried it as a damning blow to the country’s secular foundations. The bill’s glaring omission of Muslims was seen as a calculated move to further marginalise an already vulnerable community. In those heady days, the very idea of what it means to be Indian was on trial.

Yet, in the margins of these sweeping narratives lie stories like the Pereiras’. Their decades-long tale is a masterclass in bureaucratic endurance – a reminder that legislation often hits hardest at the individual level. It’s a story that doesn’t fit neatly into any one side, but it does lay bare the human cost of political manoeuvring.

I asked Pereira how he now feels. “I think you can see it on my face, I am so happy. I am free!” he said. He recalled that if he had permission to go to Delhi, he couldn’t even stay with his daughter who lives in Gurugram, because it is a different district. Even though he has always felt like a Goan, the official stamp was missing. “Now I can just show them my citizenship certificate, and say, ‘Please don’t bother me.’ God’s blessing is upon me. I am very thankful to Narendra Modiji and Amit Shahji. I can now stay with my family peacefully until my death.”

In the end, the Pereiras’ saga is both a validation of the CAA’s intent and a damning indictment of the prevailing system it aims to replace. It forces us to confront uncomfortable questions: While the Pereira’s are distinguished by their success, how many others like them are caught in this twilight zone of identity? And what is the cost of this “success”? Decades of uncertainty and a life of fragmented belonging – this is the price tag of citizenship for some of us Indians.

This article is part of the Goa Life series, which explores the new and the old of Goan culture.

Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)