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You will never get rid of your ex if the director-general of immigration and passports, Mustafa Jamal Kazi, gets his way. He told Geo News in a recent interview that he believed divorced women should have their former spouse’s name on their passport to prove the parentage of their children. Someone stop this man!

The issue was highlighted through the case of a woman named Khadija Bukhari, who was told by the passport issuing authority to get a new ID card bearing the name of her husband in order to obtain a new passport even though her information was up to date in the Nadra system. As if the same ministry isn’t overseeing both departments. Her matter is currently in court as she had the sensible idea to overturn the entire system — a true girlboss.

A committee has been formed by Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi to deliberate on the issue of women being required to have their husband’s names on their passports, which is in contradiction to the Nadra option to retain your father’s name on your ID card after marriage.

Kazi was invited on a Geo TV morning show to discuss Bukhari’s case but the conversation ended up devolving to how to verify parentage via passports — only the mother’s, of course. To be clear — it is not being stated that Kazi’s comments are to be taken as policy. He said he believed that this should be the case and that amendments should be brought in to the existing passport policy to include an ex-husband’s name on a woman’s passport. But he’s the head of the immigration and passports department, so his musings have more weight than the average person’s and therefore must be considered with due caution. You never know which middle-aged man’s musings the government will adopt into policy.

His logic is astounding and deeply flawed. It seems to bank on the fact that one woman will only have ever married and divorced one man. If a woman has two children from two different husbands, does she put both husband’s names on her passport? Will her passport bear a laundry list of names if she marries a third time? If she divorces all three husbands, her passport would bear the names of all three men and her father. We wonder if there’d be enough room for her own name in the booklet if that were the case.

If the question, as he claimed, is of a child’s parentage, then a child’s passport should bear the names of both parents. By that logic should the wife’s name not be on the husband’s passport as well?

He also claimed that there is no database abroad allowing border control authorities in foreign countries access to information on Pakistani citizens, which is why your child’s parentage must be reflected in your passport. This is the 21st century, does Pakistan really not have a system through which this basic information can be shared with foreign countries? And whatever happened to our FRC, which is being asked for by multiple countries in their visa processes.

This is actually quite believable — a colleague recently travelled abroad and at immigration, when she asked if there was no system through which the border control authorities could cross-check her visa status in another country, she was met with a chuckle and an admonition for thinking Pakistan’s system was this “Hi-Fi”.

Currently, the law requires that a woman have her husband’s name on her passport. We believe there’s no mention of requiring your ex-husband’s name on your passport but we can’t be too sure — at the time of writing this piece, the website for the Directorate General of Immigration and Passports was down. We should have expected this.

As the Geo anchors pointed out, many men abandon their families and their (ex) wives and children are left high and dry. The burden of deadbeat fathers and husbands often falls on women. Must they then be dependent on the whims of the man in order to get a passport or any other form of ID? The answer to that is yes.

In 2018, a woman named Tatheer Fatima petitioned the Supreme Court to allow her to use the last name Bint-e-Pakistan and remove her father’s name from her documents so that she could get an ID card — the father in question hadn’t registered the young woman and so she wasn’t able to apply for one. The court dismissed her petition.

Even when a woman is rid of said man, the idea that she would forever be required to have his name on her identification documents is ridiculous. You can’t choose your parents, but you can choose your spouse and when a woman has chosen to leave said spouse, why must she be reminded forever that she was married to him?

And what about all those documents that the government requires for everything? By Kazi’s own admission, divorces are often acrimonious endeavours, so why then would he make women go through an added layer of irritation for their passport?

The world has moved on and so has Pakistan, in some ways, but it seems a Pakistani woman will never really be rid of her ex.