The government announced that citizens whose passports carry the stamp ‘Emigration Check Required’ (ECR) will hold orange passports, while those who don’t require emigration checks will carry dark blue passports. It also introduced another change. Over the past few years, certain sections of women, and children with single parents, have made a strong case against the name of the spouse/father being mentioned in the passport. In response, the Ministry of External Affairs has decided that it will no longer be printing the name of the spouse/father/legal guardian on the last page of passports. In fact, the last page will be left blank. While the government’s decision addresses the concerns raised by these women and children, it will have devastating consequences for others.
ECR passport-holders are those who, among other things, have not passed their matriculation examination or are not income tax payees. Data from the Protectorate General of Emigrants shows that a majority are likely to belong to a minority or marginalised community from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. To prevent the exploitation of such unskilled workers when they are employed in certain parts of the world, an ECR stamp is made on their passports. Now that the last page is going to be left blank, the government, in an apparent attempt to improve efficiency at airports, has decided that it will issue an orange passport for them.
By failing to use technology-led solutions to identify ECR passport-holders quickly, and issuing orange passports only to poor and marginalised migrant workers, the administration is creating a situation where some citizens will proudly carry the dark blue document while others will carry one that is an evidence of the failure of the state to provide education and income opportunities to all. While it is no one’s case that the government intended to create a citizenship document that will visibly identify some as members of economically and socially marginalised or minority communities, unfortunately that’s how it will play out. For, every time the orange passport will be used at airports around the world, it will not only shout out that Indians have reneged on a core promise laid out in the Preamble of the Constitution — “to secure to all its citizens equality of status and of opportunity” — but will also separate and stigmatise a set of citizens for their poverty.
History is replete with odious instances of countries that have differentiated between citizens in the past — be it the Judenstempel or the big red “J” that was stamped on passports held by German Jews in the 1940s, or the Dompas, a pass book that had to be carried by some South Africans to declare their qualifications to seek work in specific areas. Each of these serves as a reminder for everything that a democracy like ours cannot have any space for. Can the world’s largest democracy allow a document, issued in the name of its President, to divide it on the basis of economic or social capital?
