PAKISTAN’S KAFKAESQUE IDENTITY PROBLEM

Khadija Hafiz was looking to buy a black cloth for her lawyer’s gown at Lahore’s Liberty Market when a man approached her. “Are you a lawyer?” he asked, looking at the black coat she had on, before adding, “I need your help, please.”
A daily wage labourer, Ahmed* told Khadija about the seven years he had spent unsuccessfully struggling to get a computerised national identity card (CNIC) made for himself and the continuous back-and-forth at the offices of the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra). He was looking for advice about what to do, but his story moved and angered Khadija so much that she took up his case for free and decided to “unleash hell” on Nadra.
Ahmed was from Sheikhupura. His mother had died before he turned 18 and his father was in prison. When Ahmed turned 18, he took his father’s documents to Nadra to get a CNIC made for himself. But Nadra wanted documents that proved that his father was incarcerated. Ahmed did so, but then he was asked to bring a biometric thumb verification of his father. “This is your problem,” they told Ahmed, who did not know how he, a civilian, could go to prison with a biometric machine and get the biometric verification.
Ahmed begged them to advise him about any alternatives, especially since the documents of his other close male relatives were not considered acceptable substitutes, “since the father was alive.” His case was sent to Nadra’s monthly board meetings, for which Ahmed had to travel back and forth from Sheikhupura and Lahore, where the provincial headquarters had information about the meeting.
A daily wage labourer, Ahmed would worry about “what he would eat, and how he would make up the wages for the two days he had taken off,” says Khadija. This went on for six years. He could not obtain higher education, and he was regularly stopped and harassed by the police who would demand to see his ID card.
After Khadija took up his case, she sent a legal notice to Nadra and filed a writ petition the very day after she had met Ahmed. There was no delay from Nadra this time. The headquarters asked Khadija and Ahmed to meet with Nadra representatives the very next day, and assured them of help, saying there was no need to take the legal route.
Nadra checked Ahmed’s documents, opened his family tree on their computer, and told him that they will link him to his paternal uncle. It took five minutes. Before Khadija could congratulate Ahmed, the employee, with a smirk on his face, said that this “was a small issue, so why were you making such a fuss?”
Khadija could not believe his audacity and responded, “How dare you tell us that we are making a fuss when it has taken this man seven years to get his CNIC!” The employee’s response was to exchange blame between the Nadra branches and the headquarters.
When Ahmed finally got his CNIC, he was “over the moon” and brought mithai for the entire legal team and thanked them profusely.
DIGITALLY UNDOCUMENTED
On its website, Nadra says it is “an autonomous body [formed] to operate independently with the mandate to replace the old directorate general of Registration with a computerised system of registering citizens…” The programme replaced the paper-based Personal Identity System of Pakistan that had been in use since 1973.
The 2000s saw the adoption of digital services and the digitisation of governance around the world. Technology was hailed as revolutionary, thought of as a solution to human errors and their limitations with regards to managing large amounts of data. But, in the past decade, there has been increasing scrutiny and concern around digital IDs all over the world, for exacerbating inequalities, if not creating them.
Countries such as Pakistan, India and many African nations started down the digitisation path without accommodating the ground realities: several sections of society had been without an ID card for generations. According to the 2022 report ‘Digital IDs Rooted in Justice’ by the Engine Room, a global non-profit organisation, “Digital ID systems can act as gatekeepers for marginalised communities’ ability to access and realise their rights — and most of the time, such systems are developed and implemented without any participation or input from civil society or the communities most significantly affected by such schemes.”
In Sindh, there are various communities who are “khanabadosh”— constantly travelling from one place to another, without a fixed residence. As Basam Ali Dahri, the litigation manager at the Legal Aid Society, Karachi, puts it, “People from these communities do not have a fixed residence or a house, they travel from here to there, and so they do not have any documents.” Entire families can sometimes not have CNICs or a living blood relative with complete documents.
In Punjab, as reported in a Human Rights Commission of Pakistan study in November 2021 on seasonal workers based in and around Lahore, “a significant proportion of the pakhiwas [nomadic] community were unaware of the benefits of CNICs, including the fact that citizenship documents could make them eligible for public healthcare and social safety nets such as the Benazir Income Support Programme.”

NADRA’S WOMEN PROBLEM
Shehzeen, a content-writer based in Karachi, went to Nadra three years ago to renew her CNIC, which had expired some time after her marriage. She took her documents, B-Form and nikahnama [marriage certificate], but she wanted to retain her father’s name.
Nadra officers told her that she needed to declare on her CNIC that she is married, or bring her brother, mother or father if she wants to retain her father’s name. “It felt like they were refusing to acknowledge me as a person, an adult standing in front of them,” she says. She asked her husband, and he renewed it online for her using his CNIC.
In many cases, Nadra is known to renew CNICs if the father or husband are in the system and if the woman has brought at least one document that has the male relative’s CNIC, such as the marriage certificate.
Despite the CNIC being an important document that you will be asked to produce for employment, by hotels, for opening a bank account, or to apply for other government documents, Nadra does not have codified rules for cases and situations that might slightly differ from a straightforward situation. For a securitised country that routinely expresses concern about and orders action against fake CNICs issued to refugees or ‘aliens’, it does little to improve fixable administrative issues or legislative gaps. It seems the authority leaves it to its employees to figure out solutions, leading to confusion among the wider population about how processes about the most important document work.
If married women want to have changes made to their CNICs, they have to provide their documents to Nadra, as well as the nikahnama and marriage verification certificate, says Dahri. In 2021, Nadra allowed women to choose whether they wanted their husband’s name as their surname after marriage.
Nadra has carried out campaigns to increase CNIC registration. In December last year, the authority said that it had designated every Friday of the week for women to receive help with any documents-related issues. The Sindh government recently launched a campaign in Hyderabad to register labourers, transgender people and religious minorities.
But the issues go beyond surnames and lack of awareness in the general public, and point to a system replete with colonial, patriarchal practices, not to mention “bureaucratic red tape”, says Noman, a lawyer who works for a Karachi-based non-profit. It is a system that aims to digitise populations in a country that have long been undocumented, without targeted, consistent and evidence-based campaigns.
The unnecessary complications in documentation are not limited to the poor or marginalised. According to Khadija, “A case has to be very simple for [Nadra’s] employees to resolve it. If there is even a little complication or something different, they just let it be. Unless you have a contact in the government, your case could go on for years.”
COMPLICATING THE UNCOMPLICATED
Miranda Hussain is a journalist and was born to a Pakistani father and a British mother. For the registration of her CNIC and its renewal, Nadra would tell her different requirements every time, resulting in her visiting their offices multiple times.
Miranda was born in Pakistan and, after her father applied for citizenship, she became a citizen at the age of 20, in addition to already being a naturalised British citizen. In 2002, when she moved back to Pakistan, she went to Nadra to get her CNIC made. By then, her parents had died, but she took her father’s CNIC with her and her ID was made.
But around 2010, when she went back to renew it, NADRA told her that she needed to bring a living male relative as the next of kin. So she asked her uncle to accompany her, and her CNIC was renewed. Almost three years ago, she again went to get it renewed and faced incompetence that made her develop “a pathological fear of the bureaucracy here.”
Three years ago, officials told her that it should be her father, not her uncle, that should be the next of kin. “I told them this is what I had thought when renewing the CNIC in 2010,” Miranda says, “but they put my uncle as the next of kin.” But because her father was not in the Nadra system — he had died before Nadra was computerised — Miranda faced months of government incompetence.
Officials told her she could get a National Identity Card for Overseas Pakistanis (NICOP). According to Nadra’s Deputy Director Media Umar Saeed, the NICOP is issued to a foreign national who marries a Pakistani and wants to enter the country without a visa. A child born to a Pakistani and a foreign parent gets an overseas Pakistanis card which, according to Umar, is “equally good as a CNIC.” If a person is a dual national, they get a NICOP.
But Miranda did not understand why she needed to apply for a NICOP when she already had a CNIC that simply needed to be renewed and was a Pakistani citizen by birth. She had already used her CNIC for opening bank accounts and other services. After she had an argument at the Nadra office in Lahore, an employee suggested she get married. “This is not Shaadi.com,” she retorted, shocked at his response.
“I faced all this,” Miranda says, “despite the fact that I had my father’s death certificate, and was privileged to have contacts in the government. If someone like me faced this, what does a common person go through?” She tried to register herself as an independent family unit upon her uncle’s suggestion, who was working with a government department at the time. But she was not prepared for Nadra’s absurd verification process.
One day, a Nadra official arrived at her flat and said that the authority needed to get photographs of her in her flat for proof of residence, if she wanted to apply as an independent family unit. “You are not entering my apartment,” Miranda told him. Shocked and angry, she had the person call the Nadra head office manager in Lahore to confirm he was an employee. They confirmed it.
She finally got her CNIC after pulling some strings, and because the manager of the Lahore DHA branch, where she had applied now, was a woman. “If it were a man, I don’t think I’d get my CNIC,” Miranda says. Her CNIC now has her father’s name, who is now in the system too.
“My experience was radically different when I went recently for some services,” Miranda concludes. “The process was simple and there were no unnecessary questions.”
AND IF YOU’RE A NON-MUSLIM WOMAN
The CNIC being the most important national ID means that women face issues with other documentation too, such as passports, children’s documents and divorces. Dahri says, “Christian women can only file for divorce if they can prove adultery or cruelty on part of the man.” The courts also cannot grant divorce, only judicial separation, unless the above conditions are met. Most couples end up getting judicial separation. The “separation” is not divorce, so the women won’t be able to change their names or marry someone else, adds Dahri.
The “no-fault divorce” was previously possible under The Christian Divorce Act 1869’s Section 7, which said that the law would be governed by whatever legislation was being practised in the United Kingdom at the given time, says Dahri. But Gen Ziaul Haq, notorious for bringing anti-women laws, removed the sections and, in the new law, divorce could only happen under Section 10, where the wife has to prove adultery or cruelty.
But in a 2017 judgement of the Lahore High Court, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah revived Section 7, allowing Christian women the right to a no-fault divorce in Punjab. The Legal Aid Society, along with renowned rights activist Peter Jacob, filed a petition in the Sindh High Court last year, seeking a similar judgement in Sindh, adds Dahri.
Alice* was born in Pakistan to Sri Lankan parents who moved here in the 1980s. When she was four, her mother died, and she spent the next decade living with an abusive father and stepmother. At 18, she finally decided to take a stand against the abuse, after which her father kicked her out of the house.
“I was on the streets of Karachi,” she says, “calling friends to let me crash at their place.” A friend came through and, after some months, Alice married a Pakistani Christian she had been dating for some months, and had two children. A young survivor of abuse and struggling financially, getting an ID or children’s documents made was the last thing on her mind. But she would soon realise what a hassle this would prove to be.
After she discovered her husband had cheated on her several times, she took a separation through the church. Then she struggled to find employment without a university degree to support her children. And this is when she realised that ID and documents dictated what you do, where you work and whether your children get admitted to a school.
Alice had a Pakistan Origin Card (POC) for an ID, which had to be renewed every few years. The POC, according to Nadra’s website, is given to a foreign national who is married to a Pakistani, and in other such foreign nationality cases. Alice needed her ex-husband’s documents to renew her POC. Her ex-husband was not only uncooperative, he also gave a fake ID one time.
“Nadra got mad at me,” Alice says, “and they asked me if I was trying to fool them.” She had to get the ex-husband’s parents involved, and requested them to have him give his true ID. “It is all just a big joke to him,” she adds.
In many cases, the husband divorces the wife and leaves the children with her, and is uncooperative or simply untraceable. In such cases, the mother will have to file a case in court to obtain a guardianship certificate, which can be used for obtaining the CNIC, travel documents and school admissions for the child, says Dahri. But even when the certificate is produced, Nadra creates issues in many cases, he adds.
Alice’s ex-husband also failed to get their children’s birth certificates made, so she used a hospital certificate to get them into schools. She also wants to visit or move to Sri Lanka where her brother, who was born in Pakistan too, now lives. But her ex-husband refuses to provide his documents for the passports of their children. “Whenever I go to Nadra for anything,” she says, “they tell me I need this man’s consent or documents.”
The government and documentation authorities have made several statements to the media and in courts justifying these practices. In their limited imagination, there can be no system other than an inflexible, patriarchal system that makes the lives of thousands of women difficult and leaves children without important documents.
But in America, the UK, and the European Union (EU), “the requirements of putting down a father’s name on a birth certificate are flexible,” says Nighat Dad, lawyer and founder of Digital Rights Foundation, Lahore.
“In the UK,” she continues, “any parent can apply for their child’s birth certificate, which does not require the father’s details. Similarly, in the US, in Washington State, a mother can refuse to put down the father’s name on the child’s birth certificate, if they are not married at the time of birth.”

‘M FOR CHRISTIAN’
Some of the most egregious cases of Nadra inefficiency have to do with the documentation of Christians. Pastor Ghazala, a rights activist in Karachi, says that uneducated Christians are often labelled as Muslim on their CNICs because the Nadra employees, in a 97 percent Muslim country, are used to typing “M” on CNICs. “We have several cases where this has happened,” Pastor Ghazala says, “either intentionally by the Nadra employees or by mistake, we do not know.”
By the time the person realises, sometimes after years, Nadra does not cooperate and asks why they signed a document that declared them to be Muslim in the first case. Given that the people who end up in this predicament are mostly uneducated and illiterate, the onus lies with the Nadra officials to ensure that they prevent this error from happening in the first place.
“Recently,” Pastor Ghazala relays, “a female church official was at the Nadra office for 18 hours, trying to get this clerical error fixed. A young girl, studying at a private university, was labelled Muslim by Nadra. But they do not cooperate and, in almost every case, we have to move the high court.” According to her, it should be mandatory for Nadra to read out all final form details to the applicants before entering them in the system, so that uneducated people don’t face such issues.
In interfaith marriages, Christian women face similar issues. Many Muslim men do not give them identity documents, marriage certificates, and documents for their children, says Pastor Ghazala. The religious and cultural differences, including additional marriages by the Muslim husbands, makes many women move back to their parents’ home, but then they face issues in documentation, due to uncooperative husbands.
In several cases of forced marriage after conversion to Islam in Sindh, young women and underage girls do not have their birth certificates or CNICs. The Sindh Commission on the Status of Women (SCSW) said in a statement in 2019, “As it stands right now, many children in Sindh are not registered and, in cases of underage marriages, false birth certificates are produced that falsely state the age of the child-bride to be above 18. In the case of Raveena and Reena [victims of alleged forced conversions], both do not have birth certificates, and neither do their other three sisters.”
As stated in the 2018 paper ‘Knowledge, Access, and Decision-Making: Women’s Financial Inclusion In Pakistan’, “In Pakistani villages, it is common practice to ask a village guard who has basic literacy to record the date-of-births (DOBs) of newborns. People refer to this DOB when requesting a CNIC. However, such bookkeeping is prone to errors, as the guards often forget or mix-up names and dates, or are relocated.”
Marriage within Hindus has a documentation problem too. Marriages are conducted by Hindu pandits, and many of the pandits and marriages are not registered with a government department, says Dahri. The Sindh government is working on a law that will introduce a set process, and the minorities’ affairs department will look after these issues. As of now, a pandit can provide the marriage certificate to Nadra for a couple’s registration, but there are no codified rules or set standard operating procedures.
BASIC ISSUES
A lack of set rules means women can have issues with changing their name to their husband’s or back to their father’s, and face issues in child custody cases and when travelling abroad. However, in some recent welcome news, 16 marriage registrars have been appointed to register the marriages of Hindu and Sikh communities under the Hindus Marriage Act 2018.
According to legal experts, the most scrutiny when applying for an ID in Sindh is faced by the ethnic Bihari, Bengali and Burmese, also dubbed as “stateless communities.” Noman, a lawyer who works with a non-profit in Karachi, says that people belonging to these communities face tremendous issues with getting citizenship or ID documents, are harassed by law enforcement, and miss out on educational and employment opportunities.
Men, women and children, all face similar discrimination. Eos asked the interior ministry for comments on citizenship verification and documentation processes in different cases, but was directed to Nadra, which did not respond.
There are three ways a claim to citizenship or residence is verified: through the board meetings of Nadra’s zonal offices, an Intelligence Bureau inquiry — where they ascertain national status — and/or by a district-level committee, which is formed by the interior ministry, says Noman. The process takes months, and rarely produces a positive outcome.
Noman adds, “The thing is, when Nadra wants to delay something, they can be very creative about it.”
** Names have been changed to protect confidentiality*
The writer is a freelance journalist and researcher.
A former computer engineer, she reports on cybercrime, disinformation and human rights
Published in Dawn, EOS, October 6th, 2024