Citizenship is a funny thing. It is an artificially created membership in an artificially created community, and yet inflected with deep emotion. One’s passport is just a piece of paper, and yet it is a symbol of privileged membership in an imagined community – a symbol of belonging.
There are two aspects to citizenship that I want to discuss here, both in terms of the non-resident citizen. The first is legal and the second, emotional.
By legal, I am referring to the laws of the nation that control whether or not non-resident citizens can participate fully in their national life. The biggest issue at hand is the right to vote. Non-resident citizens retain the right to vote, but not the means. You cannot go to your nearest consulate and vote, India has no provisions for absentee ballots, and the reason offered, when shaved of doublespeak, is that it’s too much of a bother. Being resident outside India means that your name cannot be on the electoral roll, except through accident or oversight. If your name is not on the rolls, you don’t vote – even if you have a permanent address in India.
Why deny Indian citizens their right to vote? It can’t possibly be legal, and it’s not all that inconvenient. Other countries do it. When the US elections took place, my husband, who is a US citizen, was in India with me. He wrote to the county where he was registered, gave them his India address, and got an absentee ballot. How hard is that? We’re supposed to be a growing technological superpower. We supply some of the best tech brains to the rest of the world! This should be a simple thing.
Of course, our money is good enough for everyone. The Hindu writes that remittances by NRIs amount to almost $25 billion. That’s just remittances – I don’t know if it includes other investments. That doesn’t include the money brought in person, or sent through someone else. NRI investments in the country are encouraged. I’ve never heard a single person say it was too much bother to set up systems for NRIs to send their money home, or to invest it in the Indian economy.
The emotional issue is harder to resolve. Indians in India often talk about NRIs as though they were stupid, or second-class citizens, or both, and say things like “You don’t know anything. You don’t know what it’s like in India”, which is sort of a stupid thing to say if the person is a recent, adult NRI. Unless the NRI in question is famous, in which case they will be proudly claimed even if they are about as Indian as John Travolta, and their ancestors left India two hundred years ago.
NRIs – especially those of us who are recent migrants – are emotionally committed to India in a way that people who have not lived outside India will never understand. Ask your family NRI why they left. Your answers will vary – better life, better education, more opportunity, so they can help their families at home. Ask them if it was an easy decision. I’m pretty sure that they will say no. Ask them if their move entailed major sacrifices. Most likely, they will all say yes. Ask them if there is even one day when they do not think of home, if they ever have moments when homesickness hits them like a punch in the stomach, when the guilt of leaving home overwhelms them until they have to focus to breathe. They will all say yes.
Life is hard outside India. Very hard. We have to work very hard, because we have everything to lose. We remember home with a desperate fondness that is in no way reduced because we chose to leave. If anything, it is heightened by our knowledge that it was our choice – a guilt that increases everytime a parent is sick, a friend gets married, a cousin has a baby, and we can’t go home.
We live with our choices because we have to, because we made them, and because we built our lives around them. This doesn’t mean we don’t take joy in our lives. But it also doesn’t mean that we lose our legal statuses as Indians, that we cannot vote, that we can be told that we are no longer Indians and have no say in the family or nation because we left the country. It does not mean that we have lost the right to be Indian, because being Indian is not a matter of where you live or what color the piece of paper you hold is. It’s a matter of being Indian in your heart.
