Mid-January, an immigration officer at Kempegowda International Airport (KIA) caught Lakshman Bhattarai, 32, an aspiring football coach who wanted to work in Europe. Immigration officials discovered from his travel records that he was a Nepali citizen who created fake identity documents in India to get an Indian passport in 2017.
Over the past few months, immigration officials at KIA have been getting a number of cases of foreign nationals with valid Indian identity documents. Most cases involved residents of Bangladesh and Nepal.
According to sources, since September 2018, there have been eight cases involving Bangladeshi nationals, and two involving Nepali nationals. In the most recent case, a Nepali national was caught with a valid voter ID card from India.
“There has been an increase in the number of such cases in the last three months at KIA. When we detect such a case, we inform the agencies concerned and hand it over to the police,” said an immigration official.
Officials of the Bengaluru Regional Passport Office (RPO) have come across around 20 cases so far of immigrants having acquired Indian passports using valid Indian documents, and have filed around 15 complaints with the police.
“In case of suspect applications, we call them for an explanation. Generally, in such cases, there is no response,” officials said.
But it is tricky, they say. “They all have original documents. The catch is how not to issue a passport to someone who has all the required documents. The police will have to verify the criminality, citizenship, etc,” said an RPO official.
Police sources, on the other hand, said their role is limited to verifying if the applicant has criminal antecedents and if s/he lives in the address specified in case of passport applicants. “There is no verification of nationality. In the case of Aadhaar, the police is not involved. The agencies concerned will have to identify and fix the loophole,” said an official.
A senior police officer also pointed out that in the case of issuing passports, the process of police verification is becoming less of a requirement in some cases. “It is a complex legal issue,” he said.