‘I am an Indian citizen’

“I am an Indian citizen… have always been an Indian citizen. I hold an Indian passport and I have always held an Indian passport,” reiterated Raghuram Rajan here on Tuesday.

The RBI Governor drove home this point at a press meet when a reporter asked him to comment on the controversy surrounding his citizenship. Senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi brought up this issue in Parliament a couple of months ago, asking how a foreigner could be appointed RBI Governor.

“It would be a joke if some people wouldn’t have been serious about it….And I will answer this question once and only once and am not going to answer it again,” a distinctly annoyed Rajan said. “I am proud of being an Indian citizen and have always been,” he added for good measure.

What is bizarre is that the RBI Governor actually gets an email everyday on this subject. “I have never applied for a citizenship of another country, have never been a citizenship of another country and I have never taken pledge of allegiance to another country… On occasions I have held an Indian diplomatic passport because my father was in the foreign services and when I have travelled on behalf of the Ministry of Finance.”

Rajan holds a green card which is simply a work permit in the US “and does not require you to take a pledge of allegiance anywhere”. Incidentally, the green card is close to expiry which means the RBI Governor needs to “go through a whole process of reapplying just to keep it going”.

Clearly, Rajan has had enough of this subject. As he put it, “In some sense it is (to me) shameful that we spend so much time on such issues. There was a time when India was open, when people didn’t really care where a person came from. We sort of incorporated them in what we were doing.”

>beena.parmar@thehindu.co.in

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