In 2009, I wrote “The Green Passport”, a musing based on my travels plights standing in hotel lobbies in Northeast India, clutching my Bangladeshi passport – a green booklet that felt less like a key to the world and more like a shackle.
Back then, it symbolised bureaucratic absurdity: a document that demanded police verification to prove I was not a threat to myself.
Fifteen years later, Bangladesh has abolished that colonial-era requirement, a reform hailed as progress. Yet the Home Ministry’s resistance – invoking Rohingya infiltration fears – hints at deeper anxieties.
The world, too, has shifted. The unipolar order has crumbled; the US wages financial wars via sanctions, China builds railways in Africa, and Western dissidents flee to Moscow. Amid this turbulence, the humble passport has become a prism refracting power, privilege, and peril.
Passport as a mirror of power
The Bangladeshi passport’s 2024 reforms are a study in contradictions. Diplomatic red passports, once doled out to MPs as status symbols, have been revoked – a nod to austerity.
E-passports now feature biometric chips, yet their forest-green covers remain unchanged, a design frozen since 1973. This duality reflects a nation torn between modernity and patronage.
Ranked 108th globally, the green passport grants visa-free access to just 40 countries, many of them “remote islands” like Dominica and Micronesia. For Bangladeshis, mobility is a calculus of exclusion: Each visa application a humiliating ritual of bank statements, invitation letters, and interviews probing intent.
Meanwhile, Nomad Capitalist – a consultancy catering to wealthy Westerners – advertises citizenship as a commodity. “Go where you’re treated best,” their mantra goes, offering Maltese or Grenadian passports in exchange for investments or low tax rates. For them, citizenship is transactional; for us, it’s existential.
This disparity is no accident. The passport hierarchy mirrors colonial fault lines. Former imperial powers – the United States, United Kingdom, European Union – retain visa-free access to 180+ nations, their passports talismans of inherited privilege. The Bangladeshi passport, by contrast, is a relic of post-colonial limbo, its green hue evoking both hope and stagnation.
Dhaka’s delicate dance
Bangladesh’s 2025 foreign policy walks a tightrope. To the west, it courts the EU, which absorbs 60% of its garment exports. To the east, it embraces China’s Belt and Road Initiative, accepting loans for mega-projects. Bangladesh’s foreign policy mantra – “friendship to all, malice to none” – suits a multipolar era, yet neutrality has its limits.
The Rohingya crisis lays bare these tensions. Since 2017, over a million refugees have crowded into Cox’s Bazar, a crisis the UN calls “the world’s largest refugee settlement.” Donor funding has dwindled; Western nations prioritise Ukraine, while China shields Myanmar from accountability. Dhaka’s soft power – its climate resilience, decades of consistent economic growth, and achievement in meeting SDG targets – cannot offset its geopolitical fragility.
Meanwhile, a curious inversion unfolds: Western dissidents, stripped of passports, seek asylum in Russia. Journalist Johnny Miller, labeled a “foreign agent” by Australia, now broadcasts from Moscow. Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine and UN Wesson’s inspector turned geopolitical analyst and peace activist, had his home raided by FBI and passport seized, co-incidentallybefore travelling to St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (2024). These “defections” echo Cold War dramas, yet the script has flipped. The passport, once a shield of liberal democracy, is now a weapon in an ideological war.
Two tales of exodus
In 2020, during Covid-19 lockdown, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt chose Mediterranean paradise Cyprus for a second citizenship to hedge his investment. Cyprus harbours a favourable tax regime and travel access to EU countries with ease. Those who become citizens through the investment program can avoid hefty income taxes burdening them in America. Meanwhile, in Tripoli, Libya, a Bangladeshi migrant boards a rubber dinghy, praying to reach Italy. Both seek freedom; only one is guaranteed survival.
In 2024, over 1,200 Bangladeshis drowned in the Mediterranean, their bodies washing ashore with green passports tucked in plastic bags. These deaths barely make headlines – just another statistic in the “migrant crisis.” Meanwhile, the EU allocates 3.5 billion Euros to fortify borders while pleading for migrant labourers to fill ageing workforces. The hypocrisy is stark: Walls for the poor,welcome mats for the rich.
Philosopher Walter Benjamin, who fled Nazis with a stateless person’s passport, wrote: “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Today’s passports are no different. They encode histories of empire, violence, and inequality – tools of liberation for some, instruments of exclusion for others.
Borders within borders
In 2025, North East India is a region transformed. Assam’s National Register of Citizens has rendered two million people stateless, mostly Bengali-speaking Muslims. Manipur burns with ethnic strife, its valleys scarred by armed checkpoints. India’s Citizenship Act, fast-tracking naturalisation for non-Muslim migrants, has polarised the subcontinent.
At a Nagaland checkpoint, a traveller draws suspicion. An officer flips through its pages, scrutinising stamps from Turkey and Tanzania. “Why do you travel so much?” he asks, as if curiosity were a crime. The moment crystallises South Asia’s paradox: A region bound by shared history, yet fractured by invented borders. The passport, intended as a bridge, now deepens divides.
Epilogue: The calculus of power
Walter Benjamin’s grave in Portbou, Spain, overlooks the Mediterranean – a sea that has claimed countless migrants. In 1940, fleeing the Gestapo, he carried a stateless person’s passport; despairing of escape, he overdosed on morphine.
Today, his epitaph – “There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism” – haunts our era.
The green passport, like Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project, is a palimpsest. Its pages hold dreams of workers in Dubai, students in Toronto, and those lost at sea. “Going where you’re treated best” is not a choice but a reflection of power – a global caste system where mobility is currency and passports are its unequal distributors.
As the West clings to sanctions and the East builds alliances, the marginalised are left to navigate a fractured world. The Bangladeshi passport, once a metaphor for bureaucratic absurdity, now embodies a darker truth: in the 21st century, citizenship is not a right, but a privilege – one that the Global South is still denied.
In revisiting the green passport, we confront not just a document, but a world order – one where the right to move is the ultimate measure of freedom, and its denial, the starkest proof of inequality.
Zakir Kibria is a writer and nicotine fugitive (once successfully smuggled a lighter through 3 continents). Entrepreneur | Chronicler of Entropy | Cognitive Dissident. Chasing next caffeine fix, immersive auditory haze, free falls. Collector of glances. “Some desires defy gravity.” His email ID is zk@krishikaaj.com.
This article was first published on Dhaka Tribune.
