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NRI - Non Reliable Indians

Dual citizenship is irrelevant if the reason is sentimental, as with the pioneering Congressman Dalip Singh Saund of California, who visited India for the first time in 38 years in 1957. Saund sought no favours.

If it's a business link today's NRIs want, why can't they trade or invest like other foreigners? Why should an Indian Singaporean, for instance, enjoy privileges that are not available to a Chinese or Malay Singaporean?

Ethnic discrimination jars on what we are told is a seamless global society. But if it is to be officially condoned, the government must produce sound justification that makes more than party political sense.

I would understand special treatment of Kerala Muslims who go to the Gulf or of Gujaratis in East Africa because their remittances have made a vital physical difference to their native villages.

But the government has not honoured any Gulf state or East African country with a special ambassador for NRI affairs. Nor is it courting Indians in these regions with extraordinary privileges.

New Delhi's favoured section of the Diaspora turned out to be very different from the overseas Chinese during the first Gulf War when India faced bankruptcy with enough foreign exchange to pay for only two weeks' imports.

Expatriates (mainly from the US) who had invested in India when the going was good scrambled out in haste when things became rough.

Of the $2 billion that NRIs withdrew, a sum of $1 billion was moved out between April and June 1991 alone. No wonder the Not-Reliable Indian tag dies hard.

Even if they are more generous to the party of their choice than to the country, a list of 16 selected countries whose Indian settlers are eligible for dual citizenship is as obnoxious as the US list of countries whose citizens are exempt from finger printing.

Brazil's complaint that the US favours only white Anglo-Saxon nations plus Japan, the traditional honorary white, could be replicated here as well, except that India does not have to add Japan. There are no (or hardly any) Indians there.

As for pampering the others, the government would do well to rise above party and repeat to them John Fitzgerald Kennedy's ringing words, "Ask not what your country can do for you: Ask what you can do for your country."

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