Indian? Prove it

Yes, passports alone don’t prove citizenship. But govt must understand why there’s general anxiety

An MEA official’s response that an Indian passport is not proof of citizenship, to a question on a passport-holder’s exclusion from SIR, has created both uncertainty and anxiety.

Understandably so – there’s been a lot of chatter about the citizenship issue. What the official said is correct – the passport is the primary document for international travel.

And, yes, there are various categories of passports, one of which may be issued to non-Indians in select cases. Also true: Bombay HC’s 2013 judgment was clear that a passport by itself is not proof of citizenship.

The fact is India has no single document for citizenship. And attempts at building a National Register of Citizens have, unsurprisingly , faltered. Proving citizenship through documents is a complicated affair.

This is not only because India is a document-scarce country, but also because how citizenship should be determined was mostly allowed to be a flexible process.

This was by design, given the range of peoples that call India home.

The original idea of citizenship presumed most people residing in this country are citizens, unless there was clear and present evidence to suggest otherwise. But, for some time now, this view hasn’t found favour with the official approach.

There’s a problem with that. In the accelerated push for document-based determination of citizenship, and with the relevant law going through multiple amendments, in 2003, 2015, 2019, and 2025, citizenship has become a status that depends not only on possessing documents but on possessing the right documents that fit changing legal criteria.

One of these is legacy documents. For example, can proof of birth in India be considered evidence of citizenship, without proof that one of our parents was also born in India?

If the answer is no, then the sarkari solution will be: get proof that your mum and dad were India-born. But even many well-to-do people may not possess these documents, far less hundreds of millions of poorer residents of this country.

And woe betide anyone who’s lost their birth certificate – getting it out of the relevant municipal authority is a Kafkaesque ordeal. And, as some have pointed out, what’s to prevent an official from asking where your grandad and grannie were born?

None of this is happening now. Neither was MEA wrong. But govt must ask itself why many people who call themselves Indians in utterly good faith, are getting increasingly apprehensive about the citizenship question.

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