Passport office has no right asking unwed mothers if they were raped

What goes of your father? Perhaps that's what someone should ask the ministry of external affairs (MEA). What can possibly be the rationale behind Clause 3.2 (a) of the instructions of the Regional Passport Office (RPO) - which requires a single mother to disclose how her child was conceived - out of wedlock, or because of rape, and if she has been deserted by the child's biological father, and, if divorced, does she intend to remarry?

Ask the woman litigant in the Bombay High Court who challenged the RPO's refusal to include her stepfather's name in the passport unless she got a court order certifying him as her natural guardian. She was also asked to get her mother to testify, by way of a sworn affidavit, as to how she came into this world, and why the biological father's name shall not be included.

This is absurd. Only in criminal law, that too, under very specific circumstances, can the mandatory disclosure of such information be called for, that too, only by a competent court, not by any government authority.

The passport authority's action is also in violation of settled principles of law. Two previous cases come to my mind.

In 1999, the Supreme Court had ruled in the case of Githa Hariharan, a mother has an equal right as a natural guardian and this should apply even if the biological father is alive.

In 2011, the Delhi High Court's order in Ishman v RPO: Justice Muralidhar restrained the authority from enforcing the very same clause which is now being agitated in the Bombay High Court.

Clause 3.2 (a) exemplifies the State's determination to render the mother invisible, and the deeply entrenched stigma against single-mothers.

It is not known if the constitutionality of this clause has been assailed in the petition, but there is no doubt that such a repugnant rule needs to be quashed at the earliest. For, not only does it militate against the law, but it is an affront to a woman's privacy and dignity. If nothing else, the very fact of a rule being unconscionable is sufficient for the judiciary to strike it down.