Non-Regarded Indians

Assuming that a million PIOs opt for this scheme, they would form the most exclusive club within the ‘Indian Diaspora’. It is not known how many of these would find a second passport of any use.

Strangely, no one really knows why these PIOs are being conferred with this extraordinary privilege.

No doubt, some of them have excelled in business, in education, in professions abroad. Some of them have achieved political success; a few have amassed great fortunes. But what exactly does India owe them? Is it because some of them sign ‘‘fat cheques’’ for causes dear to the present political dispensation?

This brings us to the one billion Indians who’ve been endlessly waiting for a meaningful ‘single citizenship’. They consist of the 250-300 million people living below the poverty line — officially — and an estimated one million children who have no home to call their own. Between 400 and 500 million ‘single citizens’ are without access to safe drinking water and sanitation.

Three hundred million have no electricity in their homes. Fifty million of them live in the most degrading and abysmal conditions on the pavements and in the slums of our cities. In violation of all human rights, two million of these ‘single citizens’ languish in the prisons of India, many of them without knowing why they are there.

As for the ‘single citizens’ living in fear and indignity in the lawless areas of the country their numbers are beyond fathom.

If any national or international honour must be conferred, it must go to the ‘‘bent, dry stick of a man’’ in the towns, villages, deserts and mountains of India, struggling to survive in an environment — natural, economic, social, administrative, legal and political — which grows more intimidating and more oppressive with each passing day.

If not pravasi, at least a ‘‘deshvasi’’ honour should be conferred on all these Indians who brave intimidation, even bullets, to exercise their ballot; who day after day fight through a maze of obstacles that threaten their livelihood; who somehow beat the system which is for ever trying to hold them in bondage.

Let us salute this ‘single citizen’ who, in the words of the late jurist Nani Palkhivala, ‘‘suffer and endure in patience without the perception of their potential’’.

But all is not lost — there’s hope for the deshvasi, held out by none other than the redoubtable Deputy Prime Minister cum Home Minister of India. In all sincerity, L K Advani has announced that every ‘single citizen’ will have a National Identity Card, which he or she can flaunt around. This precious document issued to the ‘single citizen’ will have the seal of the awesome Union Home Ministry.

One can imagine the army of officials that will fan out into the nooks and corners of the country, cameras and notebooks in hand, to come face to face with the ‘single citizen’. They will ride up the luxury skyscrapers; they will wade through the grime and the garbage to visit slums. Single citizens will be confronted on the pavements, on the platforms and pipes of our metropolitan areas.

The army of babus will walk, cycle, hitchhike and ride camels to reach the villages and hamlets of the Deccan plateau and Gangetic delta, the deserts of Rajasthan and the mountains of the Himalayas. They will seek the ‘single citizen’ out in the densest of forests and trek through remote jungles of the North East to establish his national identity on the borders of Myanmar, Bangladesh and China. Even fishing boats in the waters between India and Sri Lanka will not be spared.

Having sought out and handed over the magic plastic, the agents of the State will tell the ‘single citizen’ in their usual imperious tone that whatever else he may lose — sleep, home, livelihood, sustenance, income, liberty, even his life — he should never, never lose his National Identity Card.

All these will be done in a jiffy, never mind the fact that the mighty Election Commission of India has not even partly succeeded in issuing Voter Identity Cards after a decade of hectic efforts! But then, there is nothing wrong in dreaming, and this, at least, the ‘single citizen’ can afford to do.