In 1967, the Supreme Court of India ruled that having a passport and traveling abroad is a basic right of every citizen in the country.

It was a historic decision because until then this document was considered a privilege only granted to those who were well off “dear” one of “worthy” to represent the country and “maintain its honor abroad”.

For a long time, passports were considered as “civic credentials” aimed only at Indians with “finance, education and position,” explains Radhika Singha, a historian at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

This interpretation explains why those who worked in the colonies of British Malaya, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (now Myanmar) did not have passports, as did the so-called “coolies”, who were part of the more than one million Indians who emigrated. throughout the British Empire at that time for forced labor.

not suitable for anyone

The criteria for granting passports make the holder desirable, state-backed representatives of India, as opposed to “unwanted coolies, the narrative that continued to shape India’s passport regime after 1947,” said Kalathmika Natarajan, historian from the University of Exeter.

Natarajan searches the archives to find out more about India’s discriminatory passport system.

Liberation from British rule did not change much: the new postcolonial state continued to treat “certain categories of its own citizens as ‘undesirable’ in a very similar way to the colonial state, hierarchicala and discriminatorya“.

This separation, experts say, is deeply rooted in the mentality that traveling abroad implies India’s “respect and ‘izzat’ (honor) and can only be practiced by those who have ‘small part of India’ adequate, one might say.”

So the government asked officials to identify citizens who would not “embarrass” the country abroad.

The fact that the state government was responsible for issuing passports until 1954 helped drive this policy, as they denied passports to most applicants. The aim of the Indian authorities is to establish a diaspora “desired”.

Approved by the ancient metropolis

Scholars such as Natarajan have found that this discriminatory policy was carried out in collusion with British officials, who wanted to prevent the mobility of lower caste and class citizens who wished to emigrate to Britain after 1947, the year India gained its independence. from India.London.

The British Nationality Act of 1948 allowed Indian emigrants to enter Britain freely after the separation of the country. The reason? Under the law, residents of India inside and outside India are British citizens.

Officials in both countries listed categories of Indians deemed – to varying degrees by both sides – as “unwanted” to emigrate to the British Isles.

Both countries benefit from politics. For the Indian government, this means hampering the mobility of low-caste and “unfit” poor people who tend to “embarrass India in the West”.

For its part, for Great Britain this will help stem the tide of “immigrants of color” and India’s “hawker class” in particular, according to Natarajan.

In a report dated 1958, British authorities warned of the “problems” arising from the influx of immigrants of color and exposed how they differed from immigrants from the West Indies.

“They are mostly good-natured and quite easily fit into British society.” This is how the report refers to immigrants from the English-speaking Caribbean, while it says of Indians and Pakistanis that “they are deeply affected by their inability to speak English and lack of any skills.”

The origin of the immigrant class which is “mostly simple unskilled peasants who don’t know English” seems to be “claim” for England, said Natarajan.

A British official from the Office of Commonwealth Relations in the early 1950s stated in a letter that Indian officials had “expressed undisguised pleasure” that the British Home Office “deems it possible to reject certain emigrants.

The poorest, the most affected

The most marginalized communities – such as the “scheduled” caste or Dalits, who make up more than 230 million of India’s 1.4 billion people today – are not granted passports along with “undesirable” politicians such as members of the Communist Party. , according to scholars. .

In the 1960s, guidelines for granting passports to deputies and council members regardless of wealth or ideology were violated, the denial of passports to members of a number of regional parties that had previously split, such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

There are many ways to restrict passports. Applicants must undergo literacy test -and English-, Have enough money and meet public health standards.

Indian-born British writer Dilip Hiro relates that in 1957 it took him six months to obtain a passport in India “despite having good academic qualifications and financial references”.

This oppressive control had unforeseen consequences: many Indians obtained fake passports.

As a result of this scandal, “illiterate or semi-illiterate Indians” who did not know English were briefly disqualified from obtaining passports between 1959 and 1960.

For nearly two decades, India’s passport system has remained exclusive.

In 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s current government attempted to dig into the policy by announcing a new category of “orange” passports – as opposed to the current dark blue ones – for unskilled Indians with limited education. “with a view to assisting and assisting them as a priority”.

The protests caused the government to drop the proposal. According to Natarajan, this plan simply reflects “the old international vision as a space for India’s castes and upper classes.”

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