Passport complaints
10
IT seems like such a great idea, a muted ray of hope in the corruption-addled depths of the ordinary person’s dealings with government bureaucracy. A few weeks ago, a blog on the website of the World Bank reported the initiation of a programme that contacts Pakistani passport applicants who had visited or submitted applications to any of the country’s 95 Passport Office locations. Via a text to their mobile phone number, an inquiry is made as to whether they faced any problems or had been asked for money during the application process. In this way, the programme promises an avenue to register and address the complaints of those who had faced harassment, corrupt officials or inept offices in their efforts to get a passport.
The text-complaint technology is touted as groundbreaking because it does not require the hapless citizen to take the initiative of making a complaint. In the words of a civil servant who is now at the World Bank and who was involved in developing the programme, “This is not your usual helpline, hotline because most countries already have it. People have been writing letters to emperors and kings for (hundreds of) years. There’s nothing new in that. But the emperor reaching out to the citizen, that’s new.”
It’s a hopeful characterisation, especially if one ignores the mistaken equivalence of Pakistan’s democratic government (whose job, at least theoretically, is to serve the people) with an ‘emperor’. Pakistan has some 120 million mobile phone subscribers; connecting their passport applications to their mobile phone numbers and then asking applicants about their experiences makes so much sense if we see it in the light of the promise of digital data collection against the scourge of ineptitude and graft.
The problem is one of implementation. Citizens may find it difficult to obtain a passport easily, but there is little political will to take action.
But Pakistan, despite its wide mobile phone network and usage, is not a simple country that is sated with simple solutions to its thorny problems. A report published in Dawn recently reveals how and why. According to the report, Punjab passport’s central zone director Ikhlaq Qureshi had written to the Directorate of Immigration and Passports in Islamabad regarding the transfer of five officials at the Garden Town Passport Office in Lahore. They had been suspected of indulging in malpractice and colluding with the agent mafia — these are precisely the sort of ills that the complaint programme was designed to avoid.
The Passport Office officials seemed reluctant to take action against the named individuals. Furthermore, according to Qureshi, 20 agents, working outside the passport offices and asking people for bribes so that they could skip the long queues, had been booked in cases in Lahore. All those who had contacts with officials had been able to secure their release within a few days. He also acknowledged that serious action was not usually taken against employees of the Passport Office because there was a shortage of staff.
There are some crucial truths to the revelation. First, the problem obviously is not one of reporting but of implementation. The complaints may come in (perhaps via text now as they did via letters before) but there is little or no political will to actually take action against the culprits. There are many excuses: lack of action by central offices, local favouritism at regional offices, understaffing and so on; corruption exists because it is able to co-opt all in its web of immorality — all are guilty and so no one is convicted. Since actual officials are alleged to receive payoffs from the agents who work outside, the latter are insulated in that the scheme rests on their cumulative collusion. Digital accountability seems like a lovely idea in theory but is a complete farce in reality.
The fool, then, is the citizen, the idiot who receives a text from the government asking about a bribe or malpractice and actually goes through the process of reporting his or her experience. The reporting act is a measure of faith, an act that belies the individual’s belief that the question is not simply an inquiry for the sake of inquiry (or to prove the ‘groundbreaking’ nature of a programme), rather, it is actually intended to produce results — an end to corruption and holding those officials to account who flout ethics and honesty. As the reality from Garden Town, Lahore testifies, this is not true. Complaints may pour in, but they will go nowhere, their collection simply another step in a bureaucratic process that exists to serve itself rather than the citizen.
There is an even darker, more Kafkaesque aspect to this grim joke that the Passport Office has chosen to inflict on the citizens of Pakistan, tempting them to engage in the rituals of complaint, even when there is no point to them. If mobile phone numbers attached to applications are available so easily, what mechanisms exist to prevent accused passport officials from seeking retribution against complainants whose applications are pending in their offices? It is unclear how and who collects the complaints and whether any insulation is available to the citizen against the petty vengeance of one or another official irked at having been called out.
The collection of more data from citizens and attaching mobile phone information to passport applications may permit another objective: the collating and collection of personal information (mobile phones to passports) can better permit the tracking of Pakistani citizens who intend to travel abroad. The programme’s use, then, may not be the provision of a smoother passport process locally but an easier way to tag and track internationally.
To date, no public information exists on whether the mobile phone data relating to Pakistani citizens is being shared with foreign governments interested in monitoring a given Pakistani. The corrupt official at the Passport Office, solidly entrenched within a bureaucracy that runs on clout and favour, seems untouched by endeavours to end corruption; the fate of the individual Pakistani standing in line, harassed for bribes, tempted to complain, is far less secure.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, January 20th, 2016
