Colour has always signified more than it denotes. Its emotional impact on the human psyche occurs at a primal level, the reason why it has had such a tenacious connection with everything, including politics. Even before we mention race, there is our own homegrown varna system, where the literal meaning is merely category, but everyone knows what else it means. It is inevitable therefore that the idea of using colour for categorisation will always connote more than that: it would imply a segregation of populations.
The triad of colours on our national flag apart, the only other colour that completely unifies India, as a modern democratic republic with egalitarian goals, is that blue-coloured passport. It’s a document that, no matter who you are, whatever your background, you have to carry as final proof of your Indian nationality.
The idea of introducing colour-coding in passports, however well-meaning as an administrative move, is therefore highly undesirable. A passport doubles up as a citizen document, and there cannot be kinds of citizens. Rather than segregating citizens into two types—the original blue-holders and the new orange for the ECR category, with its class connotations—the External Affairs Ministry would do well to evolve other mechanisms to help address the problems of the unskilled, unschooled Indian labour force working abroad.
After all, this segment of our population, employed in large numbers in West Asia, accounts for a lion’s share of remittances to India, $62.7 billion last year—that’s 4 per cent of GDP. In trying to secure their basic human rights, which often get trampled in the abysmal, even inhumane, working conditions in the Gulf, the government must not make them more vulnerable. With a differently coloured passport, they would be easily exposed to harassment—from labour contractors, travel agents, airlines. In the long term, it may strongly imply—even subtly create—the idea of a secondary citizen. It would be advisable, therefore, if the MEA puts the colour-coding proposal back into its crayon box.