The Union Cabinet on May 6, 2003 decided to grant dual citizenship to NRIs living in the USA, UK, Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands and Italy.

While the first four states on the list are easy to understand, being the countries where many lakhs of NRIs reside permanently, the choice of the other European countries is hard to understand.

The number of NRIs who will be able to benefit from this is tiny. At the same time, other European countries with significant communities of Indian origin like France, Germany and Portugal have been excluded, even though they permit their citizens to hold dual citizenship.

Equally strangely, Belgium, which is home to a financially important community of Gujarati diamond merchants has been excluded.

These days, the 15-member European Union acts more and more like a single country. As Indians who have visited recently will have noticed, all border controls between them have been removed, (with the exception of UK and Ireland) and a single Visa (known as a Schenghen visa, named after the city where the Treaty covering this was signed) permits non-EU citizens to travel from one EU state to another without restriction.

The Cabinet’s decision is illogical and hard to follow. What special links does India have with Finland or Italy? Why have other more important EU countries been ignored? The correct decision would have been to include all the EU states that allow dual citizenship in the new policy.

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