A foreigner who is studying in Delhi shares the experience of dealing with the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO). For obvious reasons, the student prefers to
remain anonymous.

All of us foreigners have to go through with it at one point, eliciting dread in all of us in equal measure. We are talking about registration with the Indian FRRO. Some of us are so turned off by the prospect that we wait until the last possible moment to show up and wait in the queue near the Hyatt hotel in South Delhi, my partner Christine being one of those people. Her story is a bit more disturbing than most, revealing the ugly side to the Indian bureaucratic system.

In order to leave India, each long-term visa-holding foreigner needs to have ‘checked-in’ with the FRRO, and Christine had neglected completing this duty far past her assigned deadline. As a busy student at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, she had simply forgotten about it after having put it off for so long, but with her looming date to return to France, she knew she would have to get it done sooner than later.

Having collected all of the necessary papers from her university’s faculty, she set off early one morning to face the music. Having waited for a couple of hours in the FRRO’s ever-present queue she finally reached the first of the many desks. The rather unhelpful man at the first desk shuffled through her papers, looked up at her and asked why she was so late with her registration. Christine, being of a rather calm and cool disposition, responded with a shrug, smiled, and said, “I simply forgot”. Scoffing at her, he said that the papers she presented were “not good enough”, and sent her off to retrieve a letter from the home ministry.

Frustrated but compliant, she set off the next morning to complete her new assignment. The home ministry’s office is open to foreigners only between 9 am and 12 noon, with queues that often take up to an hour to get through. If you just so happen to arrive at 11.30 am, you better hope that the clerks behind the desk are not in a hurry to leave for their lunch breaks. Fortunately, Christine arrived early and was passed through without much more than the typical hassle. However, to her surprise, the stamped letter that she needed to continue with her delayed registration would take five hours to complete, forcing her to return to the office at 5 pm that day.

The next day she returned to the FRRO with her letter and stamp, waited through another two hours in the queue, and saw the same man at the first desk. He once again rudely grabbed her papers, shuffled through them, and then sent her off to wait for her number to be called.

If you have had the luck to never have been to the FRRO office in Delhi, this is what it looks like: it is very hot, overcrowded with people and their babies of all nationalities screaming in various languages while the older siblings of the latter run to and fro adding to the mayhem. People are always trying to pass you as you wait in line, thinking themselves either of a higher disposition and worthy of preferential treatment, or simply testing their luck. The sad part is that sometimes, their efforts work, leaving you shaking your head at the lack of discernible order within the office. You are sent back and forth between desks and their officers who either hate their jobs or take pleasure in complicating your life for no apparent reason. When you have finally finished the process you feel as though you have accomplished something significant, akin to having ascended a very tall mountain or completing a doctoral thesis.

Finally, her number was showed on the overhead display, and she walked up to the assigned counter. She stood at the counter for a few minutes while the clerk carried on a casual conversation with her neighbour, until Christine spoke up to ‘rudely’ break in. The clerk unceremoniously looked at her papers, checked the letter, and declared that she would have to go to the second floor. Without explaining why or whom she would have to see, she was dismissed.

On the second floor of the office she met with a moustached man of about 50 years of age who, after giving her a once-over look, declared that the police would be coming by her flat to make sure that she was indeed living there. Only then would she receive her registration stamp. A date was tentatively offered as “sometime this weekend”, the man at the desk kept her papers and sent her away.

This is where things get interesting. On the Sunday of that week, Christine received a phone call from the same man she had met on the second floor. We will call him Mr Moustache. Mr Moustache was waiting outside our flat, waiting for Christine to greet him. The previous night a few friends had come over for a small get-together and were still fast asleep in our living room when Mr Moustache walked in. I welcomed Mr Moustache and sat with him and Christine at our table to oversee the process. Mr Moustache was more docile than I had expected, going over Christine’s file with the both of us and making random chitchat about our being of Indian descent despite being foreign... I had the guy pegged for a decent human being, that is, until he redirected his attention to our still sleeping friends.

He looked to the living room floor where my friends were fast asleep, noticing in particular our African friend. Pointing to him, Mr Moustache asked: “Is he Nigerian?” No, I replied, explaining that he was from Congo. “Oh,” said the moustached man, “you have to be careful about the Nigerians, they are cheats and liars, you can’t trust them.”

Christine and I nodded silently, diverting our eyes from his gaze in order to retain an air of agreement at what we both knew was a derogatory and preposterous statement on his behalf. As much as I would have wanted to protest, Christine’s ‘stamp’ was at stake, and accusing the man of racism was not worth risking losing his cooperation.

He sat and asked us about our Indian ancestry, and as he did I noticed in his files papers of two other JNU students that Christine and I both knew. He was going to give them a visit next, as he did us, and as such left soon thereafter ordering Christine to come to his office a week later for the final stamp.

Thinking the worst was over, she returned to him the following week. All of the paper work being done, all the necessary forms being filled out and handed in, and even with a home visit. Mr Moustache looked at Christine and told her that all of this was still not enough. She would have to bring him another form from her faculty, the very same form that he had an original copy of right on his desk before him. He said that this form, a Proof of Enrollment form filled out and signed by the head of her department, was no longer valid for whatever reason, and she needed to come back with a new one. No matter how much Christine tried to reason with him, he would not give in.

For obvious reasons, Christine was exasperated. When would it all end? When would life just go back to normal, where she would no longer have to run around like a headless chicken all for the sake of a stamp?

On her final visit to the FRRO, Christine went back up to the second floor to meet Mr Moustache with the redundant PoE form he had requested for the second time. After having done everything the department required of her, the stamp would come, but at a price. Mr Moustache reviewed all the documents and, through his dark glasses looked up at Christine from his desk, saying “The other French students that I visited that Sunday told me you were a very good dancer,” he said.

“Yes, I dance professionally,” Christine acknowledged, not seeing the relevance of the comment.

Looking at her with a very serious expression, he said, “Well, you’re not going to get this stamp unless you do a dance for us.”
Hoping that he was joking, she looked at him incredulously. “Funny joke,” she said flatly.

“I’m not kidding, dance and you’ll get your stamp.”

Christine looked around the office, seeing a room full of men she turned back to the moustached man behind the desk.

“Well, I’m not going to dance for an office full of men, I’m the only girl in this room. Plus, this is not something you would ask to anyone else,” she reasoned.

“No dance, no stamp,” the man insisted.

Thinking quickly, she responded, “Well, clearly that’s not part of the deal for the stamp, if you asked everyone to do a dance for their stamp this office would look like a Bollywood party all the time and people would actually want to come to have fun.”

The man behind the desk half-smiled, “Okay, here you go,” he said as he handed her stamp.

Nearly two weeks after the process began, Christine finally had her stamp. Not only was she exhausted by the process, had her friend insulted in her own home, but was degraded as a woman by the hapless scum who sat ogling at her from behind his impenetrable desk.

Mr Moustache’s final request goes to show just how much power these bureaucratic types find themselves with. Using their position as the body that stands between the client and their goal, they often try and weasel whatever they can away from the people who just so happen to find themselves in need of their often meaningless service. In Christine’s case, it was not about whatever paper, signature, or letter she needed to present, it was her very dignity that was asked for.

What Indians must take away from this story is a sense of responsibility that they share with their bureaucratic establishment. The people who work at these offices are often the first exposure foreigners have to India, and like it or not, it leaves an impression of the country as a whole. Is this the way Indians want their country to be seen by the rest of the world?
Christine will most likely be spared from having to deal with the FRRO again now that she is back in France, but what of the countless others who will be demeaned and degraded by the very people who are supposed to represent India at the bureaucratic level?

Without an effective complaint system, without any accountability, how will this ever change?

Had this event happened anywhere else in the world you can be sure that this man would have lost his job for his unprofessional and utterly disgusting behaviour, a fact that Indians will have to consider closely as they continue to evolve as a nation. n

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What other foreigners have to say about the FRRO

“I waited in the queue for three hours. They have kept my documents and said they would try to resolve it by today evening. If they do not, I have to stay in Delhi for one night which I cannot afford. People in this office are not cooperative. I am sure there must be better ways to do things. They are testing me. I am tired of being tested.”
--Jennifer
A British national teaching English in Jaipur

“It just does not work. The immigration office at the airport told me no such thing. I have wasted three hours of my time here. And now they ask me to f** off. This is just not done man.”
Aliester
--An Estonian. He spent three hours in the queue and when his turn came the FRRO receptionist asked him to go its Gurgaon office as he was staying in a hotel in Gurgaon.

“I do not face any problem. Not because their system has improved. But because this is my third visit to India.”
--Arshil Qazi
An Afghan national

“I am standing here since 8 in the morning. You should come at 6 if you want things to be done in lesser time.”
--A foreigner who did not want to be identified

“These b*****s want me to produce the electricity bill of the house of the person with whom I am staying.”
--Another foreigner who too did not want to be identified