By Faiza Moatasim
One of the positive issues taken up by the Aman ki Asha initiative is the aggressive campaign to force revisions in the ridiculous visa regimes for citizens of India and Pakistan to visit each other’s country. Citizens from both sides have been voicing their resentment recently in this paper over the unfriendly and unreasonable visa process — a nuisance for scores of visa-seekers on both sides of the border.
It is not uncommon for citizens of neighbouring countries to move easily across borders as seen in the North American and European continents. However, in the case of India and Pakistan, the situation could not be more different. A look at the history of the visa policy in these two countries reveals that the visa document was more than just permission for movement across borders.
Vazira F-Y Zamindar’s book entitled, The Long Partition, is an interesting source to learn about the circumstances in which the current visa policies are rooted. In her book, Zamindar uses official, written record as a means of determining the role of the state in defining citizenship in the period immediately following the 1947 Partition of India.
The year 1948 saw a surge in reverse migration of Muslims, returning to India due to poor living and working conditions across the border. There was also a section of Muslims who had moved their families to Pakistan but continued to work in India due to better employment opportunities and so were constantly moving back and forth between the two states.
In order to control and discourage the returning Muslim migrants to India, which was already facing great difficulties in accommodating its own large Hindu and Sikh refugee population from Pakistan, the Indian government introduced a permit system in 1948. This was later replaced by a passport system introduced by the Pakistani government in 1952 to control influx of Muslims migrating from UP. Even though these systems were initially developed to control and restrict movement across the India-Pakistan border, they eventually became means of defining citizenship of Muslim Indians.
The case of Delhi’s administration in the regulation of citizenship of its Muslim government servants is especially noteworthy. The official records from the chief commissioner’s office in Delhi delineates a process of establishing loyalty of Muslim employees based on the presence of their family members in Pakistan, among other arbitrary means.
The Muslim employees with families across the border were given notices to either bring them back to India or face termination from their employment. The starkness of this ‘loyal citizen’ selection process can be read in the explanations from the government employees regarding the whereabouts of their dependent family members and the subsequent remarks from the in charge official, mostly stating the disloyalty of the person in question in a single word, ‘doubtful.’ In an attempt not to appear ‘doubtful’ in front of their employers, the Muslim employees often had to reveal personal, sometimes tragic details of their lives.
An official document thus became a powerful instrument of gauging the loyalty of Muslims towards the state by categorising Muslims, who had lived in India for generations (including those who chose not to migrate to Pakistan), as ‘doubtful’ or ‘satisfactory,’ based on arbitrary markers of loyalty.
The purpose to reiterate sections from Vazira F-Y Zamindar’s larger book project of tracing the marginalisation of minorities and refugees in the newly emergent nation-states of India and Pakistan after Partition, is not to criticise any one country for initiating restrictions over movement across borders but to identify the shared mindset behind the visa regime that was entangled with the politics of dislocation, distrust and nationalism. The question of movement became entwined with the question of loyalty, which was especially problematic for common people with affiliations on both sides of the border.
The bureaucracy completed the transition of two different nations by restricting their movement to the other side. Since Partition, successive visa policies have only added to the woes of the citizens on both sides by imposing restrictions and creating categories of people, which were once a nation. Over the years, our governments in fact seem to have perfected the system of physical alienation of both nations. One can only hope that the two bureaucracies can abandon the policies adopted sixty-three years ago and can ‘let people meet.’
Source: “The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries and Histories”
by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar
The writer is an architect by profession. Email: [email protected]
