The Union home ministry has done the impossible: make the country so attractive to Americans of Indian origin almost overnight that they are queuing up here in hordes for Indian citizenship.
Requests for Overseas Citizenship of India, commonly known as dual citizenship, has shot up in recent days by as much as 1,600 per cent in one consular post in the US.
Other posts in the US are also reporting a similar avalanche in requests for dual citizenship, which Indian missions, with their limited consular staff, are finding nearly impossible to cope with.
The unprecedented rush is the result of New Delhi’s bone-headed decision to demand copies of birth certificates and other documents that are difficult to procure from those applying for Indian visas here.
The demand for birth certificates to be appended to visa applications with immediate effect is the latest in a long series of knee-jerk reactions on Raisina Hill, the seat of power in New Delhi, to the David Headley visa controversy, which prompted the minister of state for external affairs, Shashi Tharoor, to question the wisdom of these draconian measures.
Last weekend, India’s ambassador to the US, his second in command, all Indian consuls-general in the US and several other officials involved in the visa process put their heads together in San Francisco to deal with what is becoming a crisis for the process of issuing Indian visas in the US.
Although this meeting was planned earlier as part of a regular exercise by the Indian embassy and consulates in the US, considerable time was taken up at the San Francisco conclave over the visa issue, according to consular officials who attended, but are under a gag order for fear of offending the increasingly powerful Union home ministry.
With the latest fiat from New Delhi requiring birth certificates, the visa issuing process at Indian diplomatic posts here has virtually broken down.
Adding to the complications, last week the telephone system at the New York location of the company, to which the Indian embassy outsourced the visa collection and delivery process in 2007, collapsed, according to an announcement on the website of Travisa Outsourcing.
Panic-stricken applicants for Indian visas, especially those who had to travel to India on emergencies, did not know whom to turn to for complaints or redress.
The latest order from New Delhi demands that Indian consular officials in the US should issue Indian visas to US-born Americans only after they produce their birth certificates.
US-born Americans normally possess birth certificates, but many of those applying for Indian visas have been unable to readily locate the document that is rarely demanded in everyday life.
New Delhi has allowed consular officials here to issue visas to Indian Americans who produce their matriculation certificates or old Indian passports in lieu of their birth certificates.
But many such applicants have been unable to locate these in a hurry: some of them have, in fact, left them in lockers or other safe places back in India and will now be unable to travel to India, in an emergency or otherwise.
India began issuing birth certificates routinely to its newborn only from 1967, according to officials here dealing with the issue.
Many of those born in India prior to 1967, who migrated to America in the 1950s and ’60s do not have birth certificates and have lost or misplaced their Indian passports which were cancelled upto half a century ago.
Many of them can readily produce their graduate degree certificates or even proof of PhD degrees, but are unable to locate secondary school leaving certificates issued in the 1950s or earlier.
With the requirements for Indian visas changing almost on a daily basis at North Block’s whim, thousands of Indian Americans have now decided that it is safer for them to apply for dual citizenship instead of seeking visas. Hence the surge in demand for dual citizenship.
Many of the two million-plus Indian Americans now fear that New Delhi’s increasingly draconian demands may make it impossible for them one day to visit the country which some of them still consider home by emotional and psychological yardsticks.
But obtaining dual citizenship is a long and complicated process, in which the Union home ministry has the key role. It is expected to strain the resources of Indian consular posts here further.
One consular official who is under gag order said: New Delhi’s problem is that the Union home ministry is unable to live down the ease with which Headley, a Washington-born half Pakistani, now in jail in Chicago for association with anti-Indian terrorists, managed to fool Indian consular officials here and get a multiple-entry visa for India.
The official said Indian Americans and other US citizens who have genuine reasons for travelling to India are being made to pay a heavy price for the bureaucracy’s failure to deal with normal consular issues such as Headley’s.
The latest order from New Delhi says non-US born Americans and non-Indian Americans applying for visas “should submit a birth certificate or any government document from the(ir) country of origin that has parents’ name, date of birth and nationality.”
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For more information on Dual Citizenship Inida and OCI please visit this page.
http://www.immigration.com/citizenship-and-naturalization
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