Opinion Reverse Swing- Dear India: I’m Indian too!
I’m Rafi over Kishore Kumar, Dravid over Tendulkar. But I’m not Indian. Or, put another way: I’m not an Indian citizen.
I am fiercely proud of India’s achievements, fiercely critical of its failings, and never neutral about anything of import that has to do with the land of my birth
What am I? I was born in Delhi, in a hospital in the military cantonment, my maternal grandfather having been a stiff-backed officer of the Indian Army. Every member of my immediate biological family resides in Delhi. I cheer for India at cricket, at hockey, and at every other sport worth shouting for, and follow Indian politics more closely than the politics of any other land — including that of the US, the country in which I live (and whose domestic politics I abhor). I am fiercely proud of India’s achievements, fiercely critical of its failings, and never neutral about anything of import that has to do with the land of my birth. I’m Rafi over Kishore Kumar, Vilayat over Ravi Shankar, Dravid over Tendulkar, langda over alphonso, and idli over dosa (as long as there’s good gunpowder).
But I’m not Indian. Or, put another way: I’m not an Indian citizen.
Every life has its trajectory and mine took me to Britain as a teenager. I chose to settle there after I finished my studies and lived there for two happy decades, retaining my Indian citizenship all the while. I became a journalist, and in due course my newspaper, The Times, sent me to Madrid as bureau chief. Getting a work permit for Spain was a chore, but the newspaper’s name carried some heft and the Spanish authorities fast-tracked my Indian passport through the bureaucratic labyrinth.
One fateful day, a breaking story of significance required me to hop on the next flight out of Madrid to Casablanca, in Morocco. But I couldn’t: With my Indian citizenship, the Moroccan Embassy in Madrid said it would take two weeks for a visa. I watched as my competitors — Brits to the last man — hopped on that flight out of town and filed their stories. The Times carried wire copy instead, and my editor was pissed off. “Get a UK passport,” he said. “You can tell me you’re Indian all you like. But don’t tell me you couldn’t do the job.”
So I got a UK passport. There was a breaking story out of Morocco two months later — and I was on a plane to Rabat in a flash.
I had to surrender my Indian passport, a fat, wedge-like thing, three books gummed together, with an insane (and dazzling) array of immigration stamps and visas. Only Nepal, I recall — and perhaps Mauritius, though I can’t be sure — let Indians in without a visa in those days. It was a serious professional liability to be a working journalist in Europe with one of the world’s leading newspapers and to have an Indian passport. My decision to surrender my Indian passport was wholly pragmatic. Did I love India less after I became British? Hardly.
There are hundreds of thousands of people like me outside India who have had to surrender their Indian passports for foreign ones for purely professional and practical reasons. These are people who would gladly have retained their Indian citizenship, even as they took on the citizenship of another land, if India’s laws had permitted dual nationality.
Sixty-eight years after Independence, India is an economic and political powerhouse. One of the keenest weapons in its arsenal is the Indian diaspora, which includes Indian citizens residing abroad as well as many millions of people of Indian origin who are the nationals of other countries. Why not extend the option of Indian nationality to those among this group of people who had once been Indian citizens? They would embrace it with gratitude and gusto.
At so many levels this would be the right thing for India to do. In a world where numerous countries offer dual citizenship, India is depriving itself, limiting the free flow of people and ideas for no advantage that I can see. The notion that it would be a security hazard is bogus. Dangerous infiltration isn’t deterred by passports and nationality. (Remember David Headley?) It would also show confidence and maturity, and a pride in people who may have left the Motherland, but for whom the Motherland is always a source of inspiration and love.
Tunku Varadarajan is the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
@tunkuv
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