On 3 May, Tarun Vijay, a Bharatiya Janata Party member of parliament from Uttarakhand, delivered a fiery speech on the floor of the Rajya Sabha. It is time to shun “a legacy of British colonialism,” he proclaimed. “India cannot be a viceroy’s territory anymore.” Vijay was not calling for monetary reparations for colonialism, or demanding the return of the Kohinoor diamond. His target was the pair of letters etched onto the sides of every civilian aircraft in India.
According to international aviation norms, each civilian aircraft must bear an alpha-numeric code known as a call sign. A call sign uses a one- or two-character prefix, or “nationality mark,” to convey the aircraft’s country of registration, followed by a “registration mark”—a series of characters that indicates the aircraft’s type and airline name. According to Vijay, India’s nationality mark, VT, was assigned by the British to signify “viceroy’s territory.” Because of this colonial history, he said, the code must be changed.
Vijay is not the first politician to say this. In 2004, the civil-aviation ministry, under the National Democratic Alliance government, tried to change the code, citing the same reasoning. In his speech, Vijay mentioned that the issue had been raised in 2006 and 2009. At no point, however, have any politicians or bureaucrats publicly cited proof that VT once stood for “viceroy’s territory.” Still, the Indian media has often parroted that contention as fact; a 2008 article in the Indian Express, for example, claims that VT “stands for Victorian or Viceroy’s Territory.” A few outlets repeated this after Vijay’s speech, with one headline reading: “Ever Wondered What ‘VT’ On Indian Aircrafts Stands For? We Bet You Won’t Like The Answer.”
A careful look at the history behind VT, however, calls into question the claim that it ever meant “viceroy’s territory.”
In order to change its nationality mark, India must secure approval from the International Civil Aviation Organisation, or ICAO: an agency of the United Nations that governs international air transport. Last month, I emailed Anthony Philbin, a senior communications officer at the ICAO, to ask him about the origins of VT. He told me that “the nationality mark VT has been in Annex 7”—a portion of the organisation’s official code—“since its first publication in July 1949.” Philbin added that the code could also be found in the recommendations made by the provisional ICAO, in 1946, a year before the body’s official formation.
But the origins of VT trace back further than that. According to a detailed history posted on the ICAO website, nationality marks were modelled after a radio-call system set up in 1912 by the International Telecommunications Union, which governed global use of the radio spectrum. Under the ITU’s system, individual countries, colonies and regions were allotted specific ranges of letters that they could employ to label radio users in their territories. The spectrum of codes allotted to British India spanned VTA to VWZ. Most overseas British territories were given ranges beginning with V. Australia, for example, could use codes between VHA and VKZ.
Philbin said that states were asked to choose the nationality marks for their aircraft “from the series of nationality symbols included in the radio call signs” allocated to them. While it is difficult to pin down a firm date for the first usage of VT, it was most likely decided upon around 1929, when most nationality marks were codified. The fact that VT was selected from a range of letters predetermined by an international body, not plucked from thin air by British officials, casts serious doubt on whether it ever stood for “viceroy’s territory.”
Because of the way the radio-call ranges are divided, Indian politicians seeking a new nationality mark have been unable to obtain one that they consider suitable. When the civil-aviation ministry approached the ICAO in 2004, to request codes such as IN, for India, or BH, for Bharat, they were told that China already had the B-series, and Italy the I-series. After four years of negotiation, India chose to stick with its existing prefix. “While we would very much like to replace VT, we cannot just give it up till we have a reasonable alternative,” an official from the civil-aviation ministry told the Indian Express in 2008.
In parliament, Vijay invoked the examples of several other countries. “Fiji is a small country that was also colonised by the British, but they changed their code, as did Nepal and Pakistan,” he said. “Why is India, then, choosing to remain with ‘viceroy’s territory?’” He was right about Fiji: when the country gained independence, it changed its code from VQ to DQ. But Vijay’s other two examples do not pass muster. Pakistan changed its nationality mark in 1947 to differentiate itself from India, not to distance itself from its former colonisers. The country’s new code, AP, reflected the new radio-call range that the ITU allocated for it. Nepal was never colonised, and has never changed its nationality mark, 9N.
When I spoke to Prashant Sukul, who was the joint secretary of the civil-aviation ministry under the previous government, he expressed practical qualms over a switch from VT. The issue, he said, would “take a long time to resolve, because these changes require the approval of the ICAO and ITU.” With some trepidation, he described the drawn-out process that would ensue if a new nationality mark had to be inscribed on all of India’s civilian aircraft, and in airport manifestos across the world.
Sukul told me that, to the best of his knowledge, the current civil-aviation ministry has approached the ICAO again, to attempt to change the nationality mark. However, when I spoke to S Dutta, the director of airworthiness at the directorate general of civil aviation—the regulatory body that handles the registration of civilian aircraft under the ministry—he said he was unaware of the matter.
I hoped to ask Vijay about the many questions I had encountered through my research, but after several unanswered phone calls, the only response I received from him was a succinct statement, via email. “The VT code is an insult to the Indian freedom struggle and our sovereignty,” he wrote. “Smaller nations have shown courage and commitment to change their colonial civil aviation code, why did we ignore it for so long? Get anything that is closer to our identity, but get rid of this trash on our air-territory.”