e-Paper
The controversy over the cancellation of the Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) status of more than 100 people involves several legal and political issues. These deserve to be aired in the public interest.
What is disturbing is that the debate has indirectly invoked the idea that the OCI scheme is a form of dual citizenship. It is not. Had it been so, holding an OCI card would have been illegal in many countries, including Singapore, which disallows dual (or multiple) citizenship.
Indeed, it would have been astonishing for India to operate the OCI scheme since it, too, prohibits dual citizenship, according to its Constitution.
These realities are in danger of being obscured in the coverage of the controversy. In one report, an OCI housewife in her 50s, who lives with her family in Bengaluru, said that, when the OCI scheme was introduced, she had understood it as “dual citizenship without voting rights”. But she now believes that “I am simply a foreigner with a long-term visa”.
Yes. That is exactly what she is. Whether an OCI lives abroad or resides in India, he or she is a foreigner for whom the OCI card is a life-long visa.
The fact that it is a visa proves it is not a form of dual citizenship. No citizen of India needs a visa to visit or remain in India (any more than a Singaporean needs a visa to visit or remain here).
Matters are complicated somewhat by a 2021 petition filed in India’s Supreme Court which, according to a report, “argues that the government has long said that OCI status is effectively dual citizenship without political rights”.
Yet, the website of India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) states: “OCI is not to be misconstrued as ‘dual citizenship’. It does not confer political rights. The registered overseas citizens of India shall not be entitled to the rights conferred on a citizen of India under article 16 of the Constitution with regard to equality of opportunity in matters of public employment.”
The OCI scheme came into effect in 2005, expanding the benefits under the earlier Persons of Indian Origin (PIO) scheme, including the important provision that OCI cardholders could stay in India indefinitely.
The PIO scheme itself had strived to give its beneficiaries a degree of parity within India with the rights enjoyed by Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). An NRI is a citizen of India who lives abroad.
The evolution of official thinking about those of Indian origin living outside India – from NRIs to PIOs to OCIs – demonstrates that India cares about Indians abroad. However, this does not change the fact that there are Indian citizens and non-Indian citizens.
The term “overseas citizen of India” itself is a misnomer. Overseas, underwater, sky-borne or earth-thrown, living in palatial bungalows or building them for others, thriving in peace or distraught in war, there are only two kinds of Indians in this world: citizens and non-citizens. An OCI card does not make a non-Indian citizen a vicarious Indian citizen.
These lines of national demarcation are important in an age when ancestry and ethnicity are impinging on national loyalties. I am not insinuating of course that India wishes to create a reserve army of ethnic supporters outside its borders, or that Indians settled abroad would join that imaginary force through the “dual citizenship” fiction attributed to the OCI scheme.
In countries like Singapore, citizenship means unalloyed loyalty to Singapore and only Singapore. Ethnicity and ancestry are facts of life, but there are higher facts of life, and no reality is higher for a citizen than ultimate loyalty to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the person’s country.
I hope that the controversy over the withdrawal of OCI cards passes without impugning the loyalty of Indians who have chosen to make some other country in the world home.
Asad Latif is an editorial writer for The Straits Times.
