Passport Not a Citizenship Document? A Fundamental Question Arises
The Ministry of External Affairs' assertion that a passport is a travel document, not a citizenship document, has triggered a fundamental question: if a passport does not prove citizenship, what does? This statement undermines the common understanding held by millions of Indian passport holders.
The Indian state dispenses benefits through various documents such as ration cards, health insurance enrollments, and Kisan credit cards. However, none of these instruments serve as proof of citizenship. The Aadhaar Act, 2016, explicitly states in Section 9 that the Aadhaar number or card neither confers nor is evidence of citizenship. Similarly, a driving licence, issued under the Motor Vehicles Act, merely authorises a person to drive a motor vehicle and carries no citizenship status.
Electoral Photo Identity Card and Citizenship
The Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) is also not a proof of citizenship. Voting is a constitutional right, not a fundamental right, and is not available to every citizen by mere fact of citizenship. Moreover, the voter ID is issued by the Election Commission, not the central government. The Supreme Court, in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) case — Association for Democratic Reforms v. ECI (2026) — confirmed that the Election Commission's plenary powers under Article 324 do not extend to determining citizenship.
The Passport Paradox: Government's Own Contradictions
The government's reliance on Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967, which allows issuance of a passport even to a non-citizen in public interest, suffers from a fallacy of composition. However, the Passport Manual (Chapter 2, Paragraph 6.1) states that a passport provides evidence of the holder's nationality, placing it in the same category as any other evidence of citizenship status. This creates two distinct considerations.
First, for Indian nationals holding a passport issued under Section 5(2), not under Section 20, the passport is an assertion of citizenship. Section 6 mandates the passport-issuing authority to reject an application if the applicant is a non-citizen. The entire verification apparatus is predicated on the applicant being a citizen.
Second, the government's own consular machinery uses the passport as the operational certificate of citizenship. The Indian Community Welfare Fund (ICWF), which assists overseas Indian nationals in distress, is explicitly reserved for Indian citizens, not Persons of Indian Origin or Overseas Citizens of India (OCI). Accessing the fund requires an Indian passport and an endorsement on that passport.
OCI and Citizenship by Descent
The architecture of the OCI under Section 7A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, also rests on the passport. An OCI cardholder must prove lineage of citizenship extending up to four generations, and the primary document establishing this former citizenship is a passport. Children born abroad to Indian citizens acquire citizenship by descent, and the parent's citizenship is proved by their Indian passport.
At border trade posts like Tamu-Moreh in Manipur along the Myanmar border, interdependent communities of both nationalities traverse daily, depositing their IDs at check-posts. Nationality is determined by these documents. Even Section 15 of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, states that when a foreigner in India with a valid passport is recognised as a national by more than one foreign country, the civil authority may treat that foreigner as the national of the country on whose passport he entered India.
Nationality vs. Citizenship: Legal Distinctions
Although the Supreme Court in State Trading Corporation of India Ltd. v. Commercial Tax Officer (1963) held that citizenship and nationality are not interchangeable, that judgment was made in the context of juristic persons. For natural persons, the conceptual distinction between nationality and citizenship, rooted in Roman law, has collapsed in the modern constitutional scheme. Roman law distinguished nationals into civis (citizen with full rights), latinus (intermediate status), peregrinus (foreigner), servus (slave), and hostis (enemy). Today, all free subjects are cives, leaving only foreigners and those stripped of citizenship outside the civic pale. An Indian national holding a passport issued under Section 5 is a citizen because no other category exists.
What Document Serves as Proof of Citizenship?
The Passport Manual mentions any other evidence of citizenship status. Three questions provide the answer: First, is the issue of the document preceded by a rigorous process requiring evidence of citizenship? The passport application requires a declaration of citizenship, verification of birth details, and parentage. Second, are citizens fundamentally entitled to apply for that document? The right to travel abroad, a fundamental right under Article 21 as laid down in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), is operationalised by a passport. A non-citizen may obtain a passport under Section 20, but the Section 5 route is a citizen's gateway. Third, is the issuing authority the central government? As things stand, the standalone document that serves as practical proof of citizenship for a citizen by birth is a passport issued under Section 5.
The Need for a National Register of Citizens
The ideal is a meticulously maintained National Register of Citizens (NRC) complemented by the National Population Register (NPR). However, the experience of Foreigners Tribunals and Illegal Migrants Determination Tribunals serves as a cautionary tale. Any sincere citizenship determination exercise must be anchored in one unshakeable maxim: the burden to prove citizenship does not rest on the citizen; the burden to rebut the presumption of citizenship rests on the State. It must not become a Kafkaesque gauntlet where the poor, the disaster-borne, the landless, and the illiterate are presumed aliens until they prove their citizenship, without the means or knowledge of what document would suffice.
