India's Passport Controversy Highlights Citizenship Documentation Gap

For decades, Indian citizenship was rarely questioned. Most people voted, obtained passports, enrolled in welfare schemes and went about their lives without having to demonstrate that they belonged in the country in which they were born. That assumption is steadily changing.

Last week, a senior official of India's Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said the Indian passport is primarily a travel document and should not be treated as a conclusive proof of citizenship, according to Indian media reports. Legally, that distinction is not new.

Former diplomat Veena Sikri notes that the Ministry of Home Affairs — not the MEA — has the sole authority to grant and determine citizenship.

"A passport is an attribute of citizenship, but does not itself confer it," Sikri told DW.

The MEA official's reported statement comes at a time when citizenship itself has become one of India's most politically contested subjects.

It also coincides with the election commission's ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in several states and territories, including Bihar — one of India's largest states by population — and West Bengal, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi's party recently won state elections.

The Election Commission of India (ECI) said the "intensive revision" was needed to remove ineligible voters, but critics say it is skewed against marginalized and minority communities.

Members of Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have long claimed that large numbers of undocumented Muslim migrants from neighboring Bangladesh have fraudulently entered India's electoral rolls.

No single proof of citizenship

India's citizenship law does not provide most people with a single document that conclusively proves their status.

Instead, different documents serve different purposes. The Aadhaar biometric card establishes identity for welfare and public services. A voter identity card enables electoral participation. A passport certifies nationality for international travel. Birth certificates, school records and land documents may all become relevant in different circumstances.

Rebecca Mammen John, a senior lawyer who has studied the issue closely, says the real problem is that India has no universal document that conclusively establishes citizenship.

"A passport is issued only to an Indian citizen under the Passports Act, yet the government does not issue any separate citizenship certificate to people who acquire citizenship by birth or descent," she told DW.

While acknowledging that a passport may not always be conclusive proof in exceptional circumstances, she said the timing of the clarification had unnecessarily fueled public anxiety.

"At a time when citizens are already grappling with the SIR and recurring debates over a National Register of Citizens, the government has raised doubts about the one document most Indians regard as the ultimate proof of belonging without offering any alternative," she said.

Taken together, the various identity documents most Indians possess usually leave little room for doubt. Individually, however, none is recognized in law as conclusive proof of citizenship.

That legal distinction has acquired new significance as official scrutiny of documents has intensified.

For many Indians, assembling documentary records is not always straightforward. Millions were born before birth registration became widespread. Families have migrated repeatedly for work. Land records are incomplete in many parts of the country, while school certificates may have been lost decades ago.

The politics of documentation

Faizan Mustafa, vice-chancellor of Chanakya National Law University in Patna, the capital of India's Bihar state, says the larger concern is that citizenship is increasingly being determined through documentation exercises.

"I feel that anyone born in India and having Aadhaar should be presumed a citizen as the Aadhaar is issued after capturing biometric data," Mustafa told DW.

"The absence of a universally accepted proof of citizenship creates uncertainty for ordinary Indians and leaves room for arbitrary challenges to their status," added Mustafa. "Low-level executive officials must not be given the power to determine anyone's citizenship."

Mustafa argues that the burden of proof should work the other way.

"If the state has issued someone a passport or enrolled them as a voter after official verification, these documents should be treated as conclusive proof of citizenship," he said. "The burden should shift to the government to prove otherwise, except in cases of fraud."

Passport row highlights documentation gap

The current passport controversy also recalls the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), part of the Modi government's effort to identify and weed out people it claims came to India illegally.

It has already been implemented in the northeastern state of Assam, resulting in nearly two million people, including both Hindus and Muslims, being excluded from Indian citizenship.

The NRC debate quickly became intertwined with the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), enacted by Parliament in 2019.

The CAA fast-tracks Indian citizenship applications from Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian immigrants who escaped to India from religious persecution in Muslim-majority Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

The Supreme Court has drawn an important legal boundary.

While upholding the Election Commission's authority to revise electoral rolls, it has made clear that determining citizenship lies beyond the Commission's powers. Deletion from a voter list, it said, does not by itself extinguish citizenship.

The passport controversy has nevertheless brought a largely legal debate into the public domain.

It has highlighted a fundamental gap in India's citizenship framework. While millions possess passports, voter ID cards and Aadhaar, there is still no single document that conclusively establishes citizenship for most Indians.

Edited by: Keith Walker