Why your passport isn't definitive proof of citizenship and what this means for rights in India
Originally published on Global Voices
This post is also part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.
“A passport is not proof of citizenship.”
With this short statement, the spokesperson for India’s Ministry for External Affairs (MEA) turned what was otherwise a humdrum, eminently forgettable “Passport Services Day” on June 24, 2026, into a national news headline and the source of raging controversy. Indian passport holders were bewildered — if this dark blue government document, which gives them access to the rest of the world, does not acknowledge them as Indian citizens, then what does?
The MEA spokesperson was absolutely right. Retired Supreme Court judge Madan Lokur contradicted this statement at a recent seminar, but his opinion that a passport is “proof” of citizenship is not supported by the law. The Supreme Court of India has consistently held that a passport is not proof of citizenship, whether of India or any other country.
Not just in India, but around the world, a passport is only a travel document, not “proof” of citizenship. The source of confusion is thinking that nationality and citizenship are the same thing. Your passport only records your nationality, i.e., where you are from, and says nothing about your citizenship.
So what is citizenship then? And why has it suddenly become such a hot topic for discussion in India?
Unlike nationality, which is a fact, citizenship is what lawyers call a “legal fiction” — a pure creation of law. For the purposes of international law, nationality is simply an acknowledgment that you are a resident of this country and the government of that country is responsible for you. Passports, which became widespread after the First World War, were required for international travel, and there was no requirement that only citizens could be given passports. Colonial subjects, such as Indians living under British rule, obtained passports from colonial authorities for international travel without ever claiming or being granted citizenship.
Citizenship, on the other hand, is granted only by law, and most countries follow one of two approaches. In some countries, birth on the soil of the country is enough to make you a citizen (jus soli), and in others, you get citizenship only if you are born to citizens of that country (jus sanguinis). Some countries also allow you to become a citizen by living there long enough, and in some, you can just buy it outright. Citizenship is nothing more than the right to certain rights and services. While basic human rights are available to all, the ability to hold public office, move freely and settle within the territory, and the right to vote are usually granted only to citizens.
When India became a republic in 1950, one of the questions to be decided in the Constitution was citizenship. It was one of the most passionately debated and fraught topics, and the Chairman of the Drafting Committee, B.R. Ambedkar, admitted that the Constitution’s provisions on citizenship were, at best, a temporary compromise and that a final settlement would have to wait for a law enacted by a future Indian parliament.
The reason for contention was the Partition of India — millions of Hindu and Sikh refugees fled to north Indian cities from what had become Pakistan, while millions of Muslims fled the other way, from India into Pakistan. This left their nationality ambiguous, and no one knew whether they would stay in India forever or return to their homes and fields. (Spoiler: they stayed.) The thorny question before the Constituent Assembly was: Should refugees who are here for now be given Indian citizenship, and should those who return to India from what is now Pakistan also be given citizenship? The compromise granted citizenship to everyone who was living in or had been born in India, and to those born in India before 1950 who migrated to Pakistan but returned to India thereafter.
Eventually, India passed a citizenship law in 1955 that said that everyone born in India after 1950 would be a citizen of India. This changed in 1987 to say that only those born in India with at least one parent who was an Indian citizen would be Indian citizens. In 2003, this requirement to obtain citizenship at birth was changed, requiring neither parent to be an “illegal migrant” in India when the child was born.
Acquiring citizenship was long considered such a bureaucratic and legal niche that it was not even seriously taught in law schools, not even in constitutional law courses. But citizenship became a contentious issue when, after the birth of neighboring Bangladesh, the free movement of people between India and Bangladesh was used to raise fears in the eastern Indian state of Assam. The specter of the Bengali-speaking migrant “swamping” the Assamese-speaking natives was used to inflame a violent local insurgency that raged for several years and ended partially with the Assam Accords, which, among other things, ended birthright citizenship in India in 1987.
This regional discourse over the Bengali migrant has been “nationalized” as India’s police in cities far from the India-Bangladesh border round up poor, Muslim Bengali speakers (whether they are citizens of India or not) and attempt to force them to go to Bangladesh, even in 2026. The rhetoric that India is being “invaded” and its religious demographics are being forcibly changed by a tide of Bengali Muslims has been ratcheted up and turned into official policy.
The recent exercise to revise electoral rolls has become a communal flashpoint, as the Supreme Court of India allowed the Election Commission of India to remove anyone it “suspected” of being a non-citizen from the electoral rolls with little or no proof. This resulted in large-scale deletions of Bengali Muslims in West Bengal — something that commentators have said allowed the ruling BJP party to win the State Assembly elections in the state earlier this year.
Proving citizenship was assumed to be a problem of just Bengali Muslims in Assam. The law and institutions have worked to make it virtually impossible for someone suspected of being a “foreigner” in Assam to prove their Indian citizenship. The Gauhati High Court recently rejected no fewer than 15 government-issued documents in order to claim that one Assam resident was a “foreigner.” The court even refused to believe the testimony of the “foreigner’s” own father, who gave oral testimony and documents to prove that he was born in India. This was not a one-off and is a pattern where Bengali-speaking Muslims are constantly disenfranchised by institutions working in tandem to strip people of their rights.
Strictly speaking, no one document “proves” that you are a citizen of India. A birth certificate is a starting point for most people, since it lists the date and place of birth and is usually enough if you were born before 1987. Those born between 1987 and 2003 need to show that at least one of their parents was also a citizen of India, and those born after 2003 need to show that both parents were citizens or at least legally in India. However, even as recently as 2019, nearly 40 percent of children under the age of five did not have a birth certificate. The Indian government says that any proof of date and place of birth is sufficient, but it does not have an authoritative list of which documents suffice.
So when the MEA said that a passport is not proof of citizenship, it brought home to most Indians that they have no definitive way of proving that they are, in fact, citizens of India. In a country where there has only recently been consistent recording of births and deaths, a vast majority of people have no way of “proving” their citizenship. Many realized that their cherished rights, and not just those of marginalized communities, are at the mercy of bureaucratic malice or negligence.