Want passport? Go abroad

I continue the practice of arranging my travel so my passports are renewed abroad.

It sounds grand, those sonorous words calling on the world in the name of the President of the Republic of India to allow one to pass freely without let or hindrance, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, as Anna's King of Siam would have said. The sad reality for Filipinos and Indians is that a passport is often little more than a third class ticket to the crumbs from someone else's table in Jeddah or Kuala Lumpur. Hence, I cannot but be apprehensive about the consequences of present plans to liberalise the system.

This is not to suggest that the authorities should continue to make it difficult for ordinary citizens to get a passport. Maneka Gandhi's landmark victory in 1978 made little difference on the ground especially in state capitals even though the Supreme Court recognised that everyone has a fundamental right to travel. I continued the practice begun in the late sixties of so arranging my foreign travel that my passports could always be renewed or replaced abroad.

That way I was almost certain of being spared the humiliation of having to beg and plead, fill in cumbersome forms, stand in interminable queues, be pushed, shoved and asked insulting questions by crudely venal petty officials. I say "almost certain" because in the sixties some of our bigger missions abroad were quite as bad as suffocatingly crowded passport offices here.

I remember one occasion in London when a room full of patient applicants sat watching the hands of the clock above the empty desk at the end moving inexorably towards four-thirty when work would cease for the day. A female official in a silk saree floated in at ten past four clutching a pen, took one look at the packed room, exclaimed "Oh ma!" in Bengali with a hand to her cheek, and fled back through the door she had come. She re-emerged five minutes later and, needless to say, my turn didn't come that day.

I spoke to the India House press attaché and my expired passport was promptly replaced. That's the Indian way. It was also the Indian way when I needed a renewal back home and the passport officer blandly announced that a document issued abroad without due process was an act of compassion and that the full rigmarole of police and other inquiries would have to be initiated unless … No, he didn't want money, he sought a feature article favourably highlighting the exemplary way in which he discharged his duties. We could discuss it over a meal, he said, at any restaurant I wished to take him.

I stormed indignantly out of his office and was not at all surprised to see the article of his dreams in the city's other English-language daily a week or two later. Obviously, some poor journalist there badly needed a passport.

Did all that end with Maneka Gandhi's case? I don't know for I kept getting my own fresh passports abroad. But I do recall that the proprietors of a local Chinese restaurant could not sell out and migrate to Hong Kong as they had long planned because, under guise of carrying out the mandatory check, dozens of policemen gorged themselves on hakka chow mein and chilly chicken, naturally free of cost, every week.

Online police checks might eradicate that abuse but how long will it be before human cunning discovers another loophole? That also applies to plans to abolish the need for emigration clearance. One hears in the Persian Gulf as well as southeast Asia of illiterate labourers who are deliberately given passports without the magic clearance — criminal collusion between labour recruiting agents and certain passport issuing centres — so that they become hostage to unscrupulous employers and unsympathetic host governments.

Apparently, there are something like 25 million passports in the country, in addition to those of about five million semi-skilled and unskilled Indian workers in the Gulf, southeast Asia and elsewhere. They are the ones whose plight should cause the most concern -- their money comes straight to India and they have no chance of ever acquiring foreign citizenship, yet they are victims of rackets and official callousness. They don't get the full protection they deserve because of snobbish reasons of status.

Professionals among NRIs can look after themselves. But our leaders should hang their heads in shame remembering the trauma of the late eighties when about 2,000 panic-stricken Indian workers, most without valid papers, took refuge in the Indian high commission in Singapore because they were mortally afraid of being rounded up, charged and lashed with the dreaded rotan -- a long flexible rod that does unspeakable injury to the human body.

No one should be exposed to such pain and indignity. But life being what it is, I am sadly afraid that instead of protecting them, easier passports will only tempt more poverty-stricken young Indian males to risk all in a desperate bid to earn and save some money. That is the real challenge before the government. Not just to acquire nuclear power or naval might but to create a society at home that makes the export of manpower unnecessary.