The Invictus

The Union Cabinet on Thursday gave its approval for amending the Citizenship Act 1955 to enable all persons of Indian origin who migrated to other countries after January 26, 1950 to acquire overseas citizenship of India.

The cabinet meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, also gave its approval to amend the Allocation of Business Rules and to allow Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs to issue notifications under Section 7B (1) of the Citizenship Act and issue smart cards to registered Overseas Citizens of India.

However, the amendment would not be applicable to all persons of Indian origin, their children and grand children, who migrated to Pakistan and Bangladesh after January 26, 1950.

It will benefit people who were eligible to become citizens on this date or belonged to the territories, which became part of India after August 15, 1947 to acquire overseas citizenship "as long as their home countries allow dual citizenship in some form or the other".

These were among the various proposals approved by the cabinet, Information and Broadcasting Minister Jaipal Reddy told reporters after the meeting.

AC: So do we expect the next Prime Minister / President who is a foreigner, yet not foreigner?? The news article does not specify if there will be any distinction in the rights that get conferred on such "dual" citizens..For example, will such people be allowed to vote? Will they be able to contest elections?? More importantly, if the answers to the first two are "yes", then can we - who are not "dual" citizens - expect them to bring about the right kind of understanding about India and her ground realities to be able to truly represent the people? Or would this amount to - now am treading exaggerated ground here - outsourcing of governance to across the border?

Questions and more questions! But, to my mind - not that i claim to know a great deal about this matter - it appears to be an exercise that is aimed at gratifying (red carpet to rashtrapati bhavan?) the NRI / PIO populace, with no real need or rationale for doing so.

I think a better alternative of integrating the Indian diaspora - the real objective i think - would be to strengthen the concept of PIO (apart from simply labelling it as so and issuing PIO cards), giving them certain privileges while at the same time making a clear distinction between PIOs and normal citizens of this great country. You see, there's also a matter of paying tax, which I as a normal "Single" citizen do!
What do you think?