Why the OCI card for NRIs is a hogwash

The Overseas Citizen of India (OCI) is not really any kind of citizenship. Now it turns out the “Lifelong” visa (clearly marked as that on the passport) it comes with is not lifelong either. New rules require the OCI registration certificate and visa to be re-issued every time a new passport is acquired, up to the completion of 20 years of age and once after 50. When it was introduced in 2005, the OCI card was supposed to be proof of how serious the government was about wooing the diaspora. It pushed people to give up the PIO (Person of Indian Origin) card, promising that the OCI was a sort of PIO-plus. It encouraged community camps to help people apply. It was a lifelong card. [caption id=“attachment_709258” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  NRIs in UK watch a cricket match. Agencies.[/caption] There was no need to register with the police when you came to India. You did not have to deal with the hassle of changes in tourist visa rules. Other than owning agricultural property and the vote, it put OCIs on par with other Indian citizens, at least certainly with NRIs. Sounds great, except this “lifelong” visa just lulls the cardholder into a false sense of complacency. Soon there will be some hapless desi family going frantic at the airport in Mumbai, where an immigration official is obdurately denying their ten-year-old daughter entry into the country. “But she has an OCI card. Look. It says Lifelong visa.” “Sorry, madam. You need to apply for a new OCI card for her new passport. That is the rule.” “Well how can we do that now? It’s 2 am. All the documents are sitting in some folder in a desk in New Jersey.” Shrug. It’s clear the Indian government wants the diaspora’s money, investment and help during nuclear deals. It’s equally clear it has no interest in them as people. It pats the diaspora on the head and fobs its off with meaningless symbols – like an OCI card that looks like a faux passport but cannot be used as ID to even get a cell phone connection in India. The ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs should just be called the Ministry of Song and Dance since that seems to be its forte – producing the annual jamboree known as the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas. When it comes to actually streamlining regulations for people of Indian origin, the ministry is missing in action. It will say that these regulations come from the home ministry. The home ministry will point fingers at the external affairs. Someone there will say go talk to overseas affairs. The consular officials will promise to simplify the rules at India Day celebrations and then the government will tie them up in more knots. The government, as usual, has announced a rule without planning for its consequences or thinking through its ramifications. “Announced” is a charitable word. No one has bothered to inform OCI card holders about the change. This is a rule that affects children, for goodness sake. And seniors. Yes, it’s up on the website of Travisa, the outsourcing firm that deals with Indian visas. But why should anyone with a lifelong OCI card even bother going to the website before traveling to India? The whole point of an OCI card was to eliminate that headache. “What is India gaining by such rules?” asked Thomas T. Oommen of the Indian Pravasi Action Council in New York in the weekly India Abroad. No one knows. “If the reason is terror-related then it is the 21-49 years group that would likely require re-issuance, not those under the age of 20 or above the age of 50 since the later two groups are less known to produce terrorists,” writes a memorandum submitted by the Indian National Overseas Congress (INOC). This is INOC, the overseas wing of the ruling party. So the left hand really does not know what the right hand is up to. “The rub is that (OCI) applications have to be sent to India, and the processing time would be ninety days for Washington and sixty days for all other centers. Add about 15 days for other handling.” V. S. Raghavan, a former World Bank director told India America Today. “In other words, a OCI cardholder is without an Indian Visa for three to four months.” There are obvious ways to deal with this. Alex Vilanilam of the World Malayalee Council told India Abroad, “Why can’t (the OCI card) be a standalone document without any need for another visa stamp in the passport?” The OCI card should always have been what it claimed to be in the first place – a standalone, lifelong, multiple entry visa card. But because the government had been pretending it was creating “dual citizenship” when it was really dressing up a glorified visa, it’s caught in its own hall of illusions, churning out documents that mean nothing except create confusion and the need for more documents. In 2010, the government suddenly woke up to the need to require all Indian nationals who had acquired another citizenship to surrender passports, even if that naturalization had happened decades ago. It caused utter panic and chaos since many immigrants had long lost or misplaced the old passports. When John Abraham, the first desi mayor in the US, applied for a visa to come to India, he was rejected because he didn’t have a passport surrender certificate or a police report that said he had lost it. “I became a US citizen decades ago,” he told India Abroad. “The Indian passport was kept somewhere and I could not locate it now. How can I ask the police to give a certificate to that effect, or tell a lie that I had lost it?” The Indian diaspora, especially from places like the US often come with a huge sense of entitlement. Yes, the stereotypical desi immigrant can be a royal pain, complaining incessantly about heat, service, hygiene and demanding special privileges. But that does not mean they deserve to be stranded at airports, or even worse, have their children and grandparents stranded at airports. The government unabashedly used that misleading word “citizen” in the OCI card’s name to encourage people into applying for one. This latest mess just proves it was classic bait-and-switch.