NRIs face ‘obstacle course’ in travelling to India

Thousands of non-resident Indians (NRIs) are beginning to feel like ‘Not Required Indians’ as they endure a bureaucratic ordeal with their old Indian passports. They say New Delhi’s hard-as-nails visa rules are forcing them to navigate an “obstacle course” in travelling home to India.

The two million Indian-Americans who put a human face — not to mention a voter’s face and a campaign contributor’s face — on the lobbying push for the India-US civilian nuclear deal on Capitol Hill say they are “anguished” by the new travel rules. They feel they are paying for the sins of Lashkar-e-Taiba operative David Coleman Headley as India launches a series of visa reforms.

Worldwide, hundreds of thousands of ex-Indian nationals have signed a petition to protest New Delhi’s move to force Indians to renounce their old passports for a stiff fee. Indians who have become naturalised US citizens have to surrender their old Indian passports and obtain a ‘surrender certificate’ for up to $425 before receiving a new visa to travel to India. Failure to provide the ‘surrender certificate’ would mean the denial of an Indian travel visa. 

“I lost my Indian passport 15 to 16 years ago and have been travelling to India all these years on my multiple-entry visa. My mother is now dying of cancer and I have to see her. What am I to do?” said businessman GP Shah, 58, who stood in a labyrinthine queue outside the Indian consulate in New York on Saturday. Shah was planning to use the long May 29 Memorial Day weekend holiday in America to travel out to see his mother in Ahmedabad.

Instead, he has spent it running around the consulate furnishing a notarised affidavit saying he has lost his passport. In some cases, Indians are being asked for police reports if they have misplaced their old passports. 

The forms for the surrender certificates have changed three times in a span of days. Confusion over the new rule has morphed into outrage at the Byzantine requirements: five copies of the original passport, a copy of the renouncer’s naturalisation certificate and US passport, and outrageous fees that must be paid by money order.

The Indian embassy in Washington says the policy isn’t really new at all but rather “tougher enforcement” of a rule that has been on the books since 1955, but rarely implemented.

“Why are they asking us now for our old Indian passports?” asked Indrani Mukherjee, a librarian from Manhattan who said she lost her Indian passport decades ago. “If this is the law, then it should have been enforced right from the start. It is the Government of India which didn’t follow its own rules for the last four decades. Now they are whipping us!”

Indian consulates across the US have irate hordes descending on them as millions of Indians have obtained foreign citizenship in the past 50 years and obtained Indian visas without having surrendered their Indian passports. “It is a bureaucratic nightmare,” said an Indian embassy official who did not want to be named. “Delhi makes the rules and here we are stuck working weekends trying to sort out the bloody mess and paperwork.”

The Indian government also requires foreign nationals who travel to India on multiple-entry tourist visas to have a gap of at least 60 days between each visit to India. This rule is cruel for Indians with ailing parents as they typically snatch short, frequent tips to India. 

“As dual nationality is not allowed by India, an Indian passport should automatically be considered void once an Indian citizen accepts a foreign passport. To require such persons to visit the issue retrospectively after several years is both futile and insensitive,” said Sanjay Puri, chairman of the US India Political Action Committee (USINPAC).