Snake Dance

A Performance by Citizens of the Queue

For citizens accustomed to proving themselves to their own governments, foreign borders feel strangely familiar. Because the border is made of paper. And every nation’s foreign policy resembles the domestic policy of countries where citizens are treated as subjects.

The same logic operates on both sides of every border: stand in line, produce documents, await verification and hope for approval. For much of the world, especially if you have darker skin, foreign policy appears as complicated paperwork.

The border is not a wall of concrete, sea, desert, mountain, river, steel or razor wire, but a Himalayan wall made of birth certificates, caste certificates, bank statements, passports, police verification reports, notarised identities, Nandan Nilakeni cards, biometric scans, sponsorship letters and approved life histories.

Can you navigate a wall made of paper? Do you have all the above documents and more? Can you easily fill the complicated forms in local legalese and foreign languages, waiting to be accepted, rejected after hefty fees, or kept pending endlessly?

The modern border is made of paper, and it resembles a queue.

VFS. Seen as an enabler of paper terror for old colonial powers. https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/the-visa-empire-borders-as-a-business/

The vetted queue outside VFS. A queue before immigration counters. The queues leading to alternative portals, like university admissions.

Remember how, with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the advent of the World Wide Web, we celebrated a newly interconnected world? Ads proclaimed that geography had become history and the world was now flat. That illusion ends when one stands in a queue that snakes before the paper wall.

PEOPLE WAITING OUT THE FORTIFIED CONSULATE OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - MUMBAI.

For citizens of countries like India, this queue is hardly unfamiliar. Queues can be seen as a snake dance that governments of every persuasion have made their subjects perform with elan. For ration, fuel, exchange of banned notes, Aadhaar renewal, registration as beneficiaries rather than rights-bearing citizens, verification drives and a spectrum of backdoor citizenship checks while renewing passports, voters’ cards or applying for any scheme.

Demonetisation Days - When people queued to deposit banned currency notes.

The queue at the government Shatabdi Hospital in Mumbai every morning to get a OPD appointment.

Overnight queue reservation for railway tickets.

Queue outside KEM hospital for free dal kichadi.

Public Transport

Queue outside a Fair Price Shop/Public Distribution or Ration Shop in Mumbai.

Water queue.

We are mere subjects, treated as criminals and required to prove our innocence, using paper, throughout our lives.

No surprises when much of the world sees the same people as applicants to be verified and processed too. They will always be immigrants, never expats.

Throughout this snake-like queue are checkpoints that have become a booming economy. Recruitment agents, college admission consultants, visa consultants, migration brokers, attestation offices, biometric contractors, language tests, verification systems and portals that feed off the desperation to move.

It is only goods and capital that cross borders with dignity. Not common people. Not even labour, one of India's greatest exports. Millions leave in search of opportunities denied to them at home by hierarchies of caste, class and privilege, only to encounter more paper wall abroad. Escape sounds good in dreams, not paper.

The paper wall may be written in different languages, but it asks the same question everywhere: prove who you are, produce the documents, and wait your turn.

That’s all for now folks!