‘Providing passport without…’: Javed Akhtar reacts to MEA's citizenship remark, calls it ‘absurd’

WRiter and lyrist Javed Akhtar on wed criticised the ministry of extraneous affairs financial statement that said a passport was “ non a proof of citizenship” but a travel document, calling it “absurd”.The poet shared his thoughts in a post on the social media platform X, asking whether the authorities were issuing passports without being convinced that the person was an Indian citizen.“The ministry of external affairs says that a passport is a document travel not the proof of citizenship. Really??? So are they providing this travel document to some people without being totally convinced that this person is an Indian citizen ?? It is absurd,” Akhtar wrote. This comes after the ministry of external affairs (MEA) officials said on Wednesday that the passport is a travel document, not a document of citizenship, while highlighting measures incorporated into new chip-based e-passports, such as biometric data, to boost global acceptance and reduce the risk of fraud.What the MEA saidThe passport remains a travel document, and not a document of citizenship, as it attests the nationality of Indians when they are abroad, the ministry of external affairs officials said.“A passport is issued after a lot of due diligence, and it is based on documents from several government agencies,” an official said.A total of 14.7 million e-passports have been issued since the chip-based documents were rolled out last year as part of a revamp of the Passport Seva Programme, the officials said.The e-passports, which have an embedded antenna and a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip containing personal particulars and biometric data, account for about 10% of the total passports. All new passports are currently chip-based passports.The e-passports offer heightened security and significantly reduce the scope for unauthorised access or tampering of the data, as well as the possibility of obtaining the document through fraudulent means, the officials said. “It is more difficult to generate fake passports, and the e-passports offer greater reassurance to immigration authorities abroad and make clearances faster,” an official said.The chips used in e-passports are sourced from the India Security Press in Nashik, which in turn sources them from abroad, the officials said. Best practices from other countries were studied to make the Indian e-passports as robust as possible, and efforts are underway to further enhance the security of the documents, they said.