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Chandigarh: 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.

Also read: Passport ‘Not a Document of Citizenship’, Says MEA

In one fell swoop, the MEA has effectively transformed the passport into a document........

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