The real value of India's passport - The Morning Context

3 min read

source

14 highlights

  • Getting a visa is so difficult, there are special temples and holy men in India that offer divine intervention.

  • If you have an Indian passport, it won’t help even if you’re Shah Rukh Khan.

  • Between 2014 and 2019, India’s ranking fell from 76 to 82 on Henley’s Passport Index. The COVID-19 pandemic only made it worse, and today India is ranked 90th—tied with Burkina Faso and Tajikistan.

  • The passport regime rests on the Westphalian system—a premise that each state is sovereign, that they can make their own laws and set practices. It’s all a game of perception and hard power.

  • In recent years, some West Asian countries have been looking to move away from the oil economy and boost tourism. That explains the relatively liberal visa regime of the UAE, on the back of which it dramatically improved its passport rank to 16th in the world, with visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to 174 countries.

  • India was among the losers; between 1969 to 2010, the country lost visa-free travel to 19 countries.

  • There have been more events since that marred India’s stability: the 1992 Mumbai serial blasts, the 2001 Parliament attacks, the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008, and the decades-long militancy in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh and parts of the country’s north-east.

  • India’s decline started around the time of the Khalistani separatist movement in 1984, says Anil Trigunayat, a retired Indian diplomat

  • Income is a crucial metric in determining the value of a country’s passport. If its citizens are well-off, there’s less incentive for them to migrate.

  • India is the fifth-largest economy in the world, but in terms of per capita income, it falls far lower down the order and lags the other BRICS countries

  • When Modi was elected in 2014, 19.8% of Indian visa applications were rejected by the US. By the time Trump was voted out in 2020, this had increased to 27.26%.

  • Indians looking to travel to the Schengen zone in Europe didn’t fare any better either: between 2014 and 2019, the number of applications rose from 5.5 lakh to more than 11 lakh, but the rejection rate shot up from 8% to 14%.

  • The United States and United Kingdom are the most difficult: they require you to provide your travel history, an end-to-end itinerary, proof of funds for the duration of travel and biometric details before issuing you a visa. The process can take weeks.

  • At the same time, there is a worrying trend of Indians going abroad claiming persecution and applying for asylum. The abuse of the asylum system by Indians is well-documented but with majoritarian Hindutva politics finding currency under the Modi government, the claims of persecution, even if exaggerated, can’t be dismissed.

Graph View