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Mahesh

23/12/23 06:57 AM IST

‘Dunki’ and immigration

In News
  • The recently released Shahrukh Khan-Rajkumar Hirani film ‘Dunki’ focuses on the issue of immigration.
  • Its title is taken from the term “donkey journey”, which refers to the long-winding, often dangerous routes that people across the world take to reach the places they want to immigrate to.
Passports of the past
  • Passports function as permits and proofs of identity, allowing the residents of one country to travel to another, and documents similar to it have existed for centuries.
  • In the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Nehemiah says that the ancient Persian king Artaxerxes, in around 450 BC, sent a prophet to Jerusalem but also sent letters with him that requested other governors to grant him safe passage through his journey.
  • Similar documents were in place in countries such as France and the United Kingdom.
  • In his book The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document, Martin Lloyd writes, “In France, the ‘Passport System’ had been well established before the French Revolution of 1789. Internal passports for travel from town to town were required as well as overseas passports for foreign excursions.”
  • The French State also used this system to “prevent skilled workers and capital from leaving and deterring troublemakers from arriving.
Modern passports
  • There was no practice of issuing Indian passports before the First World War.”
  • This changed with the First World War (1914 to 1918) when the British government of India enacted the Defence of India Act.
  • Under it, possessing a passport for leaving and entering India was compulsory.
  • It then continued seeing how the practice was in place in other parts of the British Empire.
  • In 1914, the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act was enacted (where ‘alien’ referred to a “non-British subject”) to “consolidate and amend the Enactments relating to British Nationality and the Status of Aliens”.
  • It spoke about the naturalisation of aliens and other laws related to citizenship.
  • The first modern passport was a product of this Act.
  • Before this, international travel did not require such documents. It carried distinguishing features of its holder – “a photograph and signature”, their complexion, etc.
  • A body seen as a predecessor to the United Nations, the League of Nations, also held a conference on the matter of regulating travel through passports in 1920.
  • The Conference on Passports and Customs Formalities sought to have a standard system.
  • The British system then became a common one from here onwards.
Source- Indian Express

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