Rupa Subramanya is a researcher and commentator. She is a distinguished fellow of the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada and the co-author of " Indianomix: Making Sense of Modern India."
While addressing party workers of the governing Bharatiya Janata Party on Oct. 16, India's Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-hand man, claimed that Modi had "increased the value of Indian passports" since coming to power in 2014, merely by the fact that Indian voters had bestowed a majority on his government.
One hallmark of a country's hard economic power is that other countries do not fear that their citizens will try to settle down illegally after entering visa-free.
Citizens of advanced Western countries, plus a few rich Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore and South Korea, enjoy this privilege. But holders of poor country passports like India invariably face hurdles when trying to travel, as just about every country, especially those in advanced economies, employ onerous visa requirements typically involving large fees and lots of paperwork.
Perhaps the enormous privilege that visa-free travel carries is one reason why Indian politicians seem to react to small but irrelevant changes in the number of countries that Indians can visit without having to obtain a visa.
According to the widely recognized Henley Passport Index, as of October 2021, Indian citizens can travel to a grand total of 58 countries without a visa. By contrast, citizens of Japan and Singapore, which top the list, have visa free access to 192 countries, with other Western countries not far behind.
This is not just a numbers game. Countries that Indians can visit visa-free are, for the most part, other developing countries. Notably, Indians require a visa to visit the EU, the U.S., Canada and other rich countries.
By contrast, citizens of rich countries can, without exception, visit other rich countries without a visa. Even citizens of China, a rising power that is aspiring to unseat the U.S. as a global hegemon, and which possesses way more hard economic power than India or any other developing country, only has visa free access to 72 countries.
This stark inequity in the ability to travel is a key distinguishing feature between citizens of rich countries, who are a minority of the global population, and everyone else. It is not just visas, but there is the added complication that many countries now require proof of vaccination, popularly called a vaccine passport, to be allowed entry without quarantine.
By this point, just about anyone in the rich world who wishes to be vaccinated has had ample opportunity to do so. By contrast, and not by choice, many in the global south remain unvaccinated. Even India, which boasts about being the "pharmacy of the world," has only fully vaccinated 21% of its population.
A Canadian, for example, can throw their passport, plus vaccine proof, and a toothbrush into a travel bag and head overseas without the need to plan. An Indian has to plan weeks in advance because to get a visa to travel to, for example, a European country requires not only a confirmed air ticket and proof of medical insurance, but proof of funds and proof of where you are going to stay every night that you are in that country. And, of course, proof of vaccination. This makes such travel infeasible except for the most privileged in the developing world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has considerably sharpened access inequities. Take the fact that India's homegrown vaccine, Covaxin, which millions of Indians have taken in good faith, is not yet recognized by the World Health Organization nor by many other countries. This means that for those who took the domestic Indian vaccine, travel to countries that require proof of vaccination is all but impossible.
A health worker administers a dose of Covaxin to a man in New Delhi on Sept. 15: the homegrown vaccine is not yet recognized by the WHO nor by many other countries. © Sipa/AP Contrast this with Canada, which used its leverage as a strong partner and ally of the U.S. to wrangle access for three million Canadians who received a mixed vaccine regimen, typically one dose of AstraZeneca followed by a second dose of Pfizer or Moderna. The U.S. does not officially recognize this vaccine mix, yet Canadians so vaccinated will be treated as fully vaccinated when the border reopens in a few weeks' time.
There are legitimate concerns in the developing world that ostensibly temporary vaccine passports and additional COVID-19 related travel restrictions may end up becoming permanent, or at any rate long lasting, thereby further impeding the already low level of mobility from the global south to the global north.
The Indian government explicitly articulated this view at the Group of Seven health ministers meeting in June, noting that vaccine passport requirements unfairly discriminate against the developing world, where vaccination rates remain low despite the best efforts of many poor countries to increase the pace of vaccinations.
In a sense, the debate over how many countries you can visit on a given country's passport and to what extent this reflects the "power" of that passport is a distraction from the real debate: not how many countries you can visit but which ones.
Whether tourists, business travelers, or students, a high level of demand from the global south for access to the global north is met with resistance from protectionist groups in the north who want to protect high-wage jobs from competition from new immigrants willing to work for lower wages.
Barriers to mobility, originating in a legitimate desire to promote public health, may end up as a further barrier to labor mobility from south to north and may usher in a further unraveling of a globalization project already in peril.