December 6, 2017
India’s High Commissioner to South Africa
Ruchira Kamboj
YOUR Excellency
I have not had the pleasure of meeting you personally. I know of you from the media.
I recently attended a function in Durban where you were one of the chief guests.
I was most impressed by the gracious and decorous manner in which you carried yourself.
I am aware you are the former chief of protocol of India, the first and only woman to have been appointed to the post.
You also served as India’s ambassador and permanent representative to Unesco.
A career diplomat, you were top of the 1987 batch of the Indian Civil Service and also held eminent positions at the High Commission of India in Mauritius and at the Indian Embassy in Paris.
Now just what is the purpose of this regurgitation of your curriculum vitae, you must be wondering.
Actually, it is just to remind me that you are extremely well-qualified and well-positioned to consider the merits or otherwise of an appeal I will be making to you.
In recent times, especially coinciding with the political turmoil in South Africa, rising levels of crime, rampant corruption within government corridors and shrinking employment opportunities, more and more South Africans of Indian origin have been applying for the Overseas Citizenship of India card (OCI card).
When the Persons of Indian Origin card (PIO card) was initially offered to Indians throughout the world who were not born in India but who the government of India recognised should have some rights based on their ancestry, a trickling of South Africans of Indian origin applied for it.
The PIO card cost less than R1 000 in 2004.
Then the OCI card was introduced in 2005 to show how serious the Indian government was about wooing the diaspora.
The PIO card was merged with the OCI card, which presently costs R4 400.
The Indian government benefits greatly from its provision of status to the estimated 25 million Indians settled in various parts of the world.
By allowing OCI cardholders to deposit money in Indian banks, the mass of foreign exchange and investment potential is increased.
In your position, you must know the benefits of the OCI card, but there is no harm in repeating for the sake of providing some context.
The OCI card gives a lifetime of multiple entry visas to India.
An OCI cardholder can open special bank accounts in India and make investments.
OCI cardholders can also buy non-farm property and exercise property ownership rights.
They will pay the same tariffs as Indian citizens for domestic flights.
They will also be charged the same entry fee as domestic Indian visitors to visit national parks, game wildlife sanctuaries, national monuments and museums in India.
An OCI cardholder cannot vote, hold a government job or run for public office.
OCI cardholders can apply for Indian citizenship five years after registration.
However, the cardholder has to first live in India for a year before applying for Indian citizenship.
But the cardholder will have to surrender current citizenship to become an Indian citizen.
Your Excellency, some South Africans of Indian origin who have been fortunate enough to have attained a fairly large amount of wealth opt for the OCI card to have a safe haven in India for their money because of the high political and economic instability in South Africa.
Then there are those who do not mind forking out R4400 for an OCI card, if only to avoid the hassle of having to apply for a visa (free for South Africans of Indian origin) each time they want to visit India.
Few South Africans of Indian origin have an affinity to watch game in wildlife sanctuaries in India.
In fact, “game” for many is a large discount store where they stock up on cooking oil, 20-litre plastic buckets and rice on Black Friday.
For some, “game” means Thunee - a card game that was invented in Durban by indentured labourers.
The majority of Indians in South Africa are apathetic when it comes to voting, so it will not bother them that an OCI card will not grant them franchise.
They also show little ambition nowadays to hold public office. Little wonder then that the Indian community in South Africa is seriously lacking in any meaningful leadership.
However, the majority of Indians who apply for the OCI Card do so - in their own words - “in case things get too bad in South Africa”.
It is their belief that the OCI card will give them unrestricted passage to India in the event that minority groups become targets if continued political, social and economic distress culminates in civil warfare.
This is a reckless and ill-advised reason to get an OCI card.
They fail to reflect on the fact that the constitution of South Africa is one of the finest in the world.
The Bill of Rights contained therein is a cornerstone of democracy and is premised on the Rule of Law.
protects minorities by enshrining the rights of all people and affirms the democratic values of human dignity, equality and freedom.
If some Indians are of the view that the future is bleak for them in South Africa, heaven forbid them thinking life will be any easier in India.
They must compete against a population of 1.3 billion for jobs. India, too, has its own challenges in terms of inadequate health care, unreliable water supply, improper sanitation, political instability and civil service corruption.
But never mind the reason South Africans of Indian origin desire an OCI card.
What irks me is the bureaucratic ritualism associated with the application for an OCI card and I thus humbly beseech you to make it easier for South Africans of Indian origin to acquire same.
The demands to prove Indian ancestry are too onerous. Applicants must furnish evidence of parents, grandparents or great grandparents being a citizen of India.
This evidence must be in the form of unabridged birth certificates tracing the lineage from South Africa back to India through a common file number.
It may be easier to find a lost child in a Kumbh Mela when as many as 100 million Hindu pilgrims may gather to bathe in the waters of a sacred river.
Down through the almost 16 decades that Indians have been in South Africa, the working class had more pressing issues than having to worry about preserving old documents.
Also, frequent uprooting of families from settled communities under the notorious Group Areas Act resulted in documents being mislaid.
Thus many families will be hard-pressed to find documents to correlate with the ships’ lists which recorded just over 152000 migrants between 1860 and 1911 in the colony of Natal.
I am aware that some people have been fortunate enough to acquire an OCI card after great slog, yet their siblings are subjected to a whole rigmarole.
Surely the same set of ancestry documents should suffice.
But no, too much officialdom, rules and regulations from New Delhi demand that fresh documents must be sourced from Pretoria, where proper record-keeping is not a forte.
Until the late 1980s, the second last of the 13-digit number in the green identity document indicated a person’s race.
This was eliminated and old ID numbers were reissued to remove this bigotry.
There must be a way of linking new ID numbers with the old, racially-classified ID numbers.
To help make it easier to obtain an OCI card, it should be made permissible to only trace back to the number on the old ID.
If this confirms one is an Indian, surely there should be no need to go back several generations.
In the final analysis, all Indians have their roots in India. And didn’t Gandhiji say: “For the non-violent person, the whole world is one family.”
Your Excellency, I leave this problem in your capable hands to resolve.
Yours sincerely
Yogin Devan
* Yogin Devan is a media consultant and social commentator. Share your comments with him on: [email protected]
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