| Patriot Games By Salil Tripathi
Dual
citizenship is the clarion call of the ambivalent.
At
long last, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee
appears to have decided to accept one of the longest-running,
unacknowledged demands of overseas Indians — the right
to dual citizenship. If the pronouncement becomes the
law, it would mean citizens of Indian origin in the
United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Australia,
Canada, and a few other select countries will now be
able to carry two passports, their acquired one, and
an Indian passport.
This policy is going to be a bureaucratic nightmare.
Would an Indian who had a Kenyan passport, then acquired
British citizenship, qualify? What about someone whose
father is Pakistani and mother an Indian, and now has
Canadian citizenship? What about someone else, whose
grandmother was Indian, but the other three grandparents
were not Indians? What if the case was reversed, with
the grandfather being an Indian, the rest not? What
of children of divorced, or separated parents with different
nationalities, only one of which is Indian?
What will determine the—Indianness of the Indian abroad?
The color of the skin? The ability to recite the Indian
national anthem? Name the Indian cabinet? Do a geography
quiz or a history test? Nobody knows, and the current
policy of determining Non-Resident Indians is itself
so flawed it cannot help. The NRI policy is sexist,
in that the non-Indian spouse of an Indian man is deemed
NRI, but the non-Indian spouse of an Indian woman is
not. And it is a security nightmare for those hawkish
Indians who want to plant a barbed wire between India
and Pakistan. For it defines as an NRI anybody who can
trace grandparents to pre-Partition India, which would
include almost everybody of India, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi
origin currently alive.
Mr. Vajpayee’s government hasn’t spelt out the details
yet, so it doesn’t yet know what it is going to be in
for. Good luck to the officials, who now have the unenviable
task of defining nationality in presumably ethnic terms
in a multi-ethnic country which has no clear definition
on what makes an Indian.
What will complicate the task is that you can become
an Indian citizen — Sonia Gandhi is the most obvious
example, but I know of other former British, Japanese
and Burmese nationals who have become Indian citizens.
That openness is a sign of India’s greatness, not weakness.
You don’t have to be born an Indian to be an Indian;
you are Indian because you’ve chosen to remain one or
become one. There is broadmindedness in it, which will
now have to be disassembled by bureaucrats who’d have
the task of providing second passports to the well heeled
and well travelled.
Let us accept the unstated: that the policy is aimed
at overseas Indians from the wealthier countries; like
airlines’ frequent flier programs, it rewards those
who need the reward less, when compared to other Indians
abroad, including citizens of India, who could do with
more help from their government. I think of the construction
workers in the Middle East, the maids in Southeast Asia,
who are left rudderless and are often helpless when
their employers mistreat them or sexually harass them,
or when their passports are lost or stolen. They are
Mr. Vajpayee’s primary responsibility, but they don’t
send donations to build a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, so
their needs are clearly less relevant than those of
the Overseas Friends of the BJP.
Not only is this policy going to be discriminatory and
bad law, it is also bad in intent. Its sole purpose
is cynical; to reward wealthy foreigners of Indian origin
by giving them the right to acquire property in India
without going through too many hassles, and without
having to queue up at Indian embassies and high commissions
to get visas. I thought the Person of Indian Origin
(PIO) card solved that.
This has been a long-standing problem with the Indian
elite abroad — of wanting to have their biryani and
eating it. They want invitations to soirees hosted by
the Indian ambassadors, but do not want to queue up
for visas. They want to be invited to dinners with Indian
politicians and bask in the reflected glory of citizenship,
but don’t want to live in India and pay Indian taxes.
They would consider investing in India, so long as India
offers two- or three-percentage point interest rates
above prevailing international interest rates for some
currencies. And in Southeast Asia, in the early 1990s,
we saw a weird spectacle, when Malaysia imposed onerous
requirements on Indians to get visas to travel to Malaysia.
A group of overseas Indians started a spirited email
list to think of ideas to plead with the Malaysian governments
to think of them — software engineers, bankers, professionals
— as somehow different, more equal, “upper caste,” I
presume, than the menial workers who overstayed their
visas.
We’ve been vetted by the Singapore
government, we are not like ordinary Indians, one of
them wrote. We won’t overstay, we work for good companies,
another said. I suggested, in jest, that Malaysia could
perhaps consider the fact that all of us had gold American
Express cards. I was shocked when someone took that
idea seriously. Such was their squeamishness over having
an Indian passport, such was their desire to distance
themselves from the riff-raff. At the first opportunity,
they swapped their Indian passport for a Singaporean
one. Good luck to them.
Little wonder then, that in India, NRI stands for Not-Required
Indians, not Non-Resident Indians.
In fact, the Indian government has gone out of its way
to offer benefits to NRIs without getting much in return.
Yes, there are privileged rates on fixed deposits, but
that’s expensive borrowing for the Indian taxpayer,
something India cannot afford and should not offer.
And the PIO (Person of Indian Origin) card, which is
another expensive perk offered to foreigners who don’t
pay Indian taxes.
But like Indians at a wedding buffet, their overseas
brethren want more and have returned for another helping,
of spring rolls and samosas with barbecue sauce: they
want to be American and Indian, Singaporean and Indian.
But not, apparently, German and Indian, Malaysian and
Indian, or Fijian and Indian yet.
And it is people of Indian origin in those countries
that need the support of their mother country. Last
year in Germany, an opposition politician launched a
campaign, Kinder Statt Indien (Children, not Indians),
as a one-party jihad against the Schroeder government’s
decision to lure Indian professionals. We should produce
more children and make them engineers rather than let
the Indians in, was his’mantra.
In Malaysia, the Indians, like the Chinese, face discrimination
in jobs and education, because the system prefers bumiputras
(sons-of-soils), or Malays, in an institutionalized
apartheid that simply hasn’t captured the imagination
of protesters the way South Africa’s apartheid did.
Many Malaysians of Indian origin have no choice but
to spend thousands of dollars to study in Britain, Australia
or India, a burden they bear disproportionately, like
the Chinese. And Fijian Indians have twice been overthrown
from office in Suva, and even after centuries, the local
Melanesians continue to question their commitment to
Fiji. Historically, ethnicity has played no role in
being a citizen of India. That had the wonderful virtue
of being consistent and simple. When Idi Amin decided
to banish Indians from Uganda, some tens of thousands
of them, India was legally right in saying that they
were Britain’s responsibility, since they held British
passports.
Now that obstinacy may well rank high as one of India’s
many economic follies, for it would have made huge economic
sense to get those Patels and Madhvanis to move to India
and set up factories and unleash an entrepreneurial
revolution. But this was 1970s, the time of Garibi Hatao,
of planned economics, of bank nationalization, and state
control of industry; private capital was to be suspected
and taxed.
Those Indians, the Gujarati shopkeepers and Sikh farmers,
were better off abroad, there were too many of us at
home anyway. So the unwanted East African Indians came
here to Britain, and transformed the retail trade, bringing
about new vibrancy and fresh sparkle to British corner
shops that used to close at 5 pm daily, turning High
Streets into ghost towns before people returned home
from work. Britain, apparently, had ceased to be a nation
of shopkeepers since Napoleon reminded them of it. East
African Indians once again made it a nation of shopkeepers,
but one in which the consumer’s needs mattered more
than the retailer’s.
Today, their sons and daughters go to elite public schools,
on their way to professional lives as doctors and lawyers.
A former colleague, now an editor at the Economist magazine,
predicts there would be an Asian prime minister in Britain
within three decades, and he — or she — would be a descendant
of the East African Indians. I wouldn’t be surprised.
Economically, India’s decision not to accept the East
African Indians in 1971 may have been a flawed one,
but legally, the Indira Gandhi administration was right
in reminding Britain of its responsibility towards British
Asians in Africa. In the 1950s, while visiting the West,
the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reminded overseas
Indians they must become loyal citizens of their adapted
homes first. And that is as it should be.
Whether we came overseas for better professional or
economic prospects, whether our parents came here to
study, work, do business, or were brought against their
will (as in the plantations of Caribbean and Southeast
Asia), we have chosen to live our lives abroad, not
in India. Unless we hold on to Indian passports (like
I do), we have decided to become part of a new country,
our new homes, and by acquiring the new citizenship,
we have decided to belong elsewhere. That elsewhere
has been good to us. It has allowed us to prosper, provide
opportunities to our children, which we would not have
been able to provide back home in most cases.
And the system has picked out the brightest, and not
hindered their access to the highest positions in the
fields we have chosen: in America, I think of Zubin
Mehta, Rajat Gupta, Victor Menezes, Fareed Zakaria,
and Jhumpa Lahiri. (The fact that there are more such
examples in the United States than in other countries
also says much about how genuinely meritocratic the
United States is, unlike other countries; but that’s
a separate issue).
As Bharati Mukherjee pointed out in a moving, poignant
essay in the New York Times nearly a decade ago during
an amnesty period when non-citizens were encouraged
to acquire U.S. citizenship, there comes a time to take
the decision, to belong. She reached her decision early,
in an America three decades ago, coming here from Canada
where she faced discrimination, and astounded by this
new land welcoming her with open arms (and, over time,
the National Book Award for her marvellous collection,
The Middleman and Other Stories). Since then, the situation
has only improved for new immigrants. In return, Ms.
Mukherjee offered America her loyalty.
Mr. Vajpayee doesn’t seem to have grasped that idea
of loyalty well’— in his speech in early January, he
told overseas Indians they can be dual citizens, but
they can’t have dual loyalty. That’s impossible. Citizenship
implies loyalty to the ideals that make up the country;
not a tax dodge, not a document-of-convenience to travel
and buy property. Believing in those ideals does not
mean a mindless,’“my country, right or wrong” approach,
for there is always room for dissent in pluralistic,
mature democracies. And one person’s loyalty is another
person’s treason. To me, those who destroyed the Babri
Masjid in 1992 betrayed the ideals of India; but many
Overseas Friends of the BJP would parrot the Naipaulian
line of “inevitable retribution,” and claim that by
criticizing the Indian government while abroad I was
being disloyal. To each his own. India’s strength is
that it can accommodate all views. (That some would
like to change that is the real danger facing India,
but that’s another issue too). When Ms. Mukherjee wrote
her innermost thoughts about acquiring U.S. citizenship
and what it means, some overseas Indians saw that as
a sell-out — not the fact that she took American citizenship——
many of them did too. But the fact that she celebrated
it. In public! Too many Indians abroad remain reluctant
citizens overseas, and don’t appear to want to accept
the challenge of plunging headlong in the culture of
the new land.
Then it hits them, 15 years later, when their son wants
to pierce his ears or bring home a black or Vietnamese
girlfriend, or when the daughter wants to wear that
short skirt, not bigger than a handkerchief, and become
a cheerleader, rooting for that handsome Hispanic boy.
The Indian passport then becomes a security blanket,
a desire to return to the womb, a nostalgic yearning
to return, hankering to the perceived loyalty to one’s
roots.
But nostalgia is nothing but remembrance of the past
without remembering the pain, which forced us to leave
that past behind. We are in a new land. It is time to
belong, time to own it.
..-
End Of Article.....
|
