There was an unusual moment of clarity in the Senate this week. A proposal to give official blue passports to dependent children below the age of 28 of government officials (grades 21 and 22), or former parliamentarians was withdrawn after treasury members opposed it. Law Minister Azam Nazeer Tarar reportedly put the matter rather simply: let children make their own careers; respect does not come from blue passports.
It was a welcome retreat from an idea that should never have travelled this far. The government then went a step further. Minister of State for Interior Talal Chaudhry told the Senate that separate legislation would be brought to withdraw the lifetime blue-passport facility presently available to the children and families of retired Grade-21 and Grade-22 officers. Tarar supported that position too, maintaining that children of retired senior bureaucrats should not continue enjoying an official passport merely because of their parents’ former status. That is an important shift.
For years, one privilege has been used to justify another. If senior bureaucrats and their families have blue passports, the argument went, why should former parliamentarians and their families not have them too? Now the government itself appears to be questioning the original premise.
In the very same sitting, however, the Senate passed another bill expanding the entitlement of former parliamentarians themselves. Under the proposed new Section 3-A of the Passports Act, 1974, a parliamentarian who has merely taken oath as a member of the National Assembly or Senate would be entitled, subject to prescribed conditions, to retain and use a gratis official passport after leaving office — even if he or she served only the unexpired portion of somebody else’s term.
The bill is yet to be passed by the National Assembly. The two decisions, taken together, reveal something more interesting than an ordinary parliamentary compromise. Pakistan has apparently begun to recognise that official passports should not become hereditary possessions. It has not, however, accepted the more elementary proposition that an official passport should follow an official function. That distinction goes to the heart of the matter.
How did an official document become a status symbol?
The Directorate General of Immigration and Passports describes an official passport as one issued under prescribed rules to specified public functionaries and officials proceeding abroad on official assignments. That formulation contains the logic of the document.
A serving diplomat sent abroad represents the state. So does an official travelling on an authorised government assignment. There is an identifiable public purpose, a duration and an institutional responsibility.
Once that assignment ends, what exactly remains “official” about the passport? Pakistan has spent years answering that question not through function, but through rank. The expansion did not begin this week.
In 2018, Parliament amended the Members of Parliament (Salaries and Allowances) Act, 1974, to provide gratis official passports to former members and their spouses. Interestingly, that entitlement was inserted through the Finance Act, 2018 — itself raising the question why a non-fiscal privilege concerning passports needed to travel through financial legislation.
Passport Rules, 2021 subsequently consolidated an extensive range of eligible categories. The political argument that followed was almost inevitable. If retired senior bureaucrats and their families have the privilege, why should former parliamentarians and their families not receive the same treatment? This is called “parity”.
Constitutionally, it is a peculiar understanding of equality. If one privileged category enjoys an advantage unrelated to a continuing public function, Article 25 of the Constitution does not require the state to reproduce that advantage across every other powerful category.
Equality can also be achieved by ending an arbitrary privilege. The government’s latest announcement concerning families of retired Grade-21 and Grade-22 officers is more significant than it may first appear. It amounts to an implicit recognition that parity among privileged groups is not the same thing as equality among citizens.
The strange logic of parity
The statement of objects and reasons accompanying the bill passed by the Senate says it seeks parity with privileges available to other high-ranking officials and “uniform treatment of persons who have served the state at the highest level” but this formulation quietly changes the nature of an official passport.
The relevant question should not be whether someone once served the state at a high level. It should be whether the person is presently performing a state function requiring an official travel document.
A former senator may have rendered distinguished public service. A retired federal secretary may have served for decades. A former judge, military officer or minister may deserve respect. Respect, however, is not a travel document. Public service cannot become a transferable title of nobility in a constitutional republic.
Once rank rather than function becomes the organising principle, categories necessarily multiply. Legislators compare themselves with bureaucrats who invoke their service. Families demand treatment equivalent to other families. Former officeholders compare themselves with serving officeholders.
Every extension becomes the precedent for the next. That is how administrative necessity evolves into social hierarchy. The present debate demonstrates the cycle perfectly. The Senate rejected an attempt to extend the privilege to children of former parliamentarians. The government announced its intention to remove the analogous privilege from the families of retired senior bureaucrats. And in the same breath, the Senate widened the privilege for former parliamentarians themselves.
The contradiction is difficult to miss. If the passport is meant for official work, why should it survive the office?
Taxpayers who became ambassadors
The story took an even more curious turn in 2024. The Federal Board of Revenue introduced Pakistan Honour Card scheme for recipients of the Tax Excellence Awards. The idea of publicly recognising exemplary taxpayers is not objectionable in itself. Tax compliance matters. Export performance matters. Public recognition can encourage both. The difficulty arose when recognition became governmental privilege.
In May this year, the director general of Immigration and Passports disclosed that 42 top taxpayers, designated “ambassadors-at-large” on the prime minister’s directions, had been approved for blue passports and that most of these passports had already been issued. Their names, as a distinct list of the 42 recipients, were not publicly disclosed.
This raises a different but related question. Since when does payment of tax convert a citizen into an official representative of the state?
Tax is not a subscription fee for superior citizenship. It is a legal obligation arising from law and taxable capacity. If the largest taxpayers deserve different passports because they contribute more revenue, where does the principle end?
Should they receive preferential treatment in courts because they finance more of the justice system? Faster policing because they pay more towards the police budget? Priority access to public services because their fiscal contribution is larger?
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The absurdity becomes apparent when the principle is extended beyond the passport counter.
A constitutional state may honour a taxpayer. It should not confuse honour with official status. There is also a transparency issue that has still not disappeared. Tax returns, wealth statements, CNIC numbers and passport particulars are legitimately confidential.
The identity of people formally bestowed with a public title and given a state privilege is a different matter. If 42 private citizens have been designated ambassadors-at-large, what is the legal instrument appointing them? What country or subject do they represent? What is their mandate? For how long? What duties accompany the title?
Article 19A was not inserted into the Constitution so the citizen could merely obtain information about ordinary administrative trivia. It exists because the exercise of public power must be open to scrutiny.
The government now admits there is a problem
The most revealing part of this week’s Senate debate came from the government itself. Tallal Chaudhry told the House that the number of official blue passports had already been reduced from around 75,000 to 45,000, with approximately 30,000 unnecessary or inactive passports cancelled.
He said excessive issuance had drawn reservations from European countries and Canada and had also complicated Pakistan’s efforts to secure easier visa access. That admission changes the nature of the debate. What may appear to be a minor elite privilege can impose a wider public cost.
An official passport derives its value from foreign governments believing that its holder has a genuine official relationship with the issuing state. If a country distributes such passports among former officials, relatives, adult children and favoured private citizens, the document inevitably loses signalling value.
The cost is then not confined to those holding blue passports. Pakistan’s passport credibility affects millions carrying ordinary green passports. In other words, privilege at the top can produce inconvenience below. And this is precisely why the government’s announcement concerning retired Grade-21 and Grade-22 officers’ families deserves attention. If their lifetime entitlement is now considered excessive, the same principle must logically be applied elsewhere.
Why should the child of a retired federal secretary lose a blue passport because the state now recognises that the privilege has no continuing official purpose, while a former parliamentarian may retain one for life despite no longer holding office?
The government cannot coherently dismantle hereditary privilege in one category while perpetuating status-based privilege in another.
A pocket-sized version of a larger state
For decades, Pakistan has operated through systems in which public office generates benefits extending far beyond reasonable compensation. Plots at concessional prices. Official residences. Vehicles. Clubs. Rest houses. Protocol. Special counters. Preferential access. Post-retirement appointments. Medical facilities extending to families. Subsidised services unavailable to ordinary citizens.
Each privilege may appear small when examined separately. Together they reveal the architecture of an unequal state. The problem is not simply financial. Some privileges cost the exchequer relatively little. Their larger cost is institutional. They tell the citizen that public office is not merely an opportunity to serve. It is entry into a different relationship with the state.
The ordinary Pakistani encounters government through queues, forms, taxes, electricity bills, police stations, overburdened hospitals and litigation that can last years. The privileged encounter the same state through exemptions, dedicated counters, protocols and entitlements. The blue passport is unusually revealing because the distinction is literally carried in the pocket.
What Article 25 actually requires
Article 25 guarantees equality before law and equal protection of law. It does not prohibit every classification. Governments classify all the time. The Constitution permits reasonable distinctions where they are founded upon an intelligible basis and bear a rational relationship to a legitimate objective.
An official passport issued to a serving functionary travelling on government business satisfies that test easily. The function explains classification. It becomes much harder to locate that relationship when the holder has retired, ceased holding public office, is travelling privately, is related to somebody who once held office, or receives the document because of tax performance.
Past status is not present function. Kinship is not public duty. Wealth is not official responsibility. Tax payment is not diplomatic appointment. This is why the Senate’s withdrawal of the proposal concerning former parliamentarians’ children should be welcomed — but should not be mistaken for resolution of the underlying problem. Nor should the proposed withdrawal of the privilege from families of retired Grade-21 and Grade-22 officers be treated merely as administrative housekeeping.
Both developments point toward the same constitutional principle. The question is whether Parliament is prepared to follow that principle consistently.
Start again from first principles
The government has already conceded, through cancellation of tens of thousands of passports, that the system had become excessive. It should now complete the exercise logically.
Schedule III should be comprehensively reviewed. The governing principle could be stated in one sentence: An official passport should be issued because of an official function, for the duration of that function. Serving officials proceeding abroad on documented government assignments should receive one. Officers posted overseas should receive one for the duration of the posting.
A spouse or dependent accompanying a long-term official posting may reasonably require appropriate documentation. The passport should ordinarily expire, or become unusable as an official document, when the function ends.
Former parliamentarians should travel as former parliamentarians—distinguished citizens perhaps, but citizens nevertheless. Retired bureaucrats should travel as retired bureaucrats. Their adult children should travel on their own passports. Taxpayers should be honoured for tax compliance without being converted into nominal diplomats. None of this diminishes public service. It restores meaning to it.
The colour of citizenship
There was something encouraging in the Senate debate. For once, the argument that privilege should pass automatically from parent to child did not prevail.
The government’s announcement that similar privileges available to the families of retired senior bureaucrats will also be withdrawn suggests that an old assumption may finally be under examination but Pakistan should resist celebrating too early. The republic will not become egalitarian merely because one hereditary privilege has been withdrawn while numerous status-based ones survive. Nor is “parity” among elites the same thing as equality among citizens. The better question is not: If they have it, why should we not?
It is: Why does anyone who is no longer performing an official function need it?
A state confident in the dignity of public service should have no difficulty answering that question. And a republic confident in the equality of its citizens should not need different colours of passport to remind former officeholders that they once mattered.
Public office should leave behind a record of service. Not an inherited queue at immigration.