Every Indian passport carries, on the very first page, a message from the Indian President requesting the foreign authorities to allow the passport holder to 'pass freely'. This is essentially the Republic’s letter of introduction to the world, which is only issued after thorough verification from the law enforcement agencies and biometric tests confirming that the individual is lawfully recognised as part of the Indian national community. However, the same individual may find themselves standing before an Indian court where the Indian government will maintain that the passport ‘is only a travel document’ and does not conclusively prove citizenship. The state, as it seems, speaks with two voices: one for the world, one for its own people.  

This contradiction deserves scrutiny, not deference.

Nationality versus Citizenship: A distinction India rarely uses

The root of the above contradiction may be due to the conceptual difference between nationality and citizenship. Conceptually, nationality and citizenship have different meanings, and although the words have the same root, they emerged separately. The term "nationality" first appeared in English in the 17th century. It was derived from the French (Old French nacion) word "national," meaning a person having a common origin with others. The term eventually evolved and acquired a more political meaning by the 1830s. The word "citizen" is older than "national" and has a different origin as it came to English from the Old French word "citesein" and from Latin "civitas," meaning "city" and "civis," meaning "a citizen of a city." This term originated as "a resident of a town," which again gained the modern meaning of being a member of a nation only by the end of the fourteenth century, when "citoyen" came to signify equality among people of different social ranks and became widely popular during the French Revolution as the words citoyen/ citoyenne started replacing traditional binaries terms such as monsieur and madame.

That etymological split still tracks the modern legal one. Nationality is defined by birth and blood, and remains essentially the socio-cultural bond between a person and a state, the fact that lets one state tell others, “This person is ours”. Citizenship is based on composition in a particular community, and thus signifies domestic rights granted to its members. In contrast to India, the U.S. and the E.U., when it comes to nationality versus citizenship, treat this as a live operative distinction rather than an academic one.

The EU serves as a prime example where citizenship is based on several points of entry different than a single template. The total number of citizenships granted across the bloc grew 54% over a decade, from 762,000 in 2014 to 1.2 million in 2024, reflecting the different pathways to citizenship adopted my member states.¹ For instance, Germany, which issued the largest number of citizenships, imposed a new five-year residency period plus a language test, a citizenship exam and proof of financial self-sufficiency, having scrapped its fast track scheme for skilled workers.² Spain uses a dual approach: a ten-year residency for foreign applicants and a much shorter period of just two years for applicants from countries with a long history of close relations with Spain.³ Sweden has an equivalent system for Nordic countries, even as its standard residency requirement has risen to eight years.⁴ Malta, until recently, gave citizenship for a €600,000 financial investment and additionally requiring three years of residency (or €750,000  for just one year), compressing what could otherwise take much longer.⁵ However, the EU Court of Justice ruled in April 2025 that this scheme violated EU law, and Malta has since closed it to new applicants.⁶ However, Poland requires only a three-year residency and a stable income.⁷ In sum, the EU views residence, language, money, ancestry, and investment as different pathways to citizenship acquisition, and this is precisely because for the EU the aspects of nationality and citizenship cannot be hammered out on the same anvil.

The United States goes further still, writing the distinction directly into federal law. In the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is stated that all citizens are also nationals, but the reverse is not true in all cases.⁸ This means individuals from American Samoa and Swains Island are classified as nationals and hold US passports but do not automatically gain political privileges such as voting. Rather than formalizing a new status for nationals of the US Department of State, the latter simply issued these individuals passports clearly stating "United States National and not United States Citizen."⁹ The state department does not create a new status for these people but provides them with a regular USA passport proving the intermediate status instead. This ensures the primacy of the passport and attributes to it a lot of clarity and authority. It does not undermine the passport to a sub-par status.

India formally recognises the same conceptual distinction between nationality and citizenship on paper, but almost never operates it. In contrast to the EU, which sets up gates pertaining to residence, language, ancestry, and investment, and the US, which has a separate legal status that it incorporates into its documents, India does not have such requirements or procedures in place. In practice, an Indian passport is issued only after the applicant’s Indian citizenship has been established.¹⁰ In this respect, India's situation differs from that in other countries, where there is a structured mechanism of differentiation in place. Hence, the whole discussion about nationality versus citizenship is meaningless.

The government's three objections — and why they don't hold

The Centre's reluctance to treat passports as a much stronger proof of citizenship rests on three claims. Each is weaker than it first appears.

First, it is statutorily established and has also been upheld by courts that under the Passports Act, 1967 (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Act’), a passport is nowhere said to be conclusive evidence of citizenship and has recently been referred to as a ‘travel document’. This slightly understates the statute’s own logic. Section 6(2)(a) of the Act requires the passport authority to refuse a passport precisely because the applicant is not a citizen of India; citizenship is written into the Act as the threshold gate, not an afterthought.¹¹ The law requires a passport officer to refuse a passport to a person who is not a citizen so that to ensure that the evidentiary burden of citizenship claims are taken seriously at the time of issuing a passport.  This does not support the idea of a "merely a travel document". If not, being a citizen were a mandatory ground for refusal, citizenship is doing real evidentiary work at the point of issuance. Statutory silence when it comes to the passport evidentiary status does not mean that the passport is worthless as evidence. Courts have never claimed that the passport proves nothing; rather, it has been stated that it does not provide conclusive evidence.¹² There is a very wide space between "conclusive proof" and "travel document," and it is, therefore, reasonable to assume that there exist enough grounds to think that a decent assumption of citizenship lies somewhere in the middle.

Second, the government can give passports to certain non-citizens "in the public interest," under Section 20 of the Act.¹³ This is real, but it is also exceptional by design. Section 20 is an exclusive Central Government power and has been delegated formally only three times in the last six decades since the passing of the Act :  the first was in 1971, to the Indian Embassy in Bangkok for persons of Indian origin whose nationality was not confirmed; then in 1976, to the Indian Embassy in Yangon (for persons of Indian origin in Myanmar holding foreign resignation certificates); and lastly in 1977, to the Passport Officer of Ahmedabad for people of Indian origin coming back from Kenya and Uganda. This is not an outdated count since it is backed up by an official document on Passport India website based on an RTI response and last updated in May 2020 since those remain only three delegations made up to now. Each of which concerns a specific category and not the general public.¹⁴ The argument that an extraordinary power which has been used only thrice in almost sixty years cannot form the basis for the rule that governs or disregards the evidentiary burden undertaken of an ordinary applicant/ passport-holder.

It is noteworthy that even the way the government practices things do not follow the approved standards. For instance, in 2018 the Ministry of External Affairs released a memorandum on Tibetan refugees born in India.¹⁵ Following High Court decisions that said that some refugees and their children were Indian citizens by birth according to Section 3(1)(b) and 3(1)(c) of the Citizenship Act (CA), the Ministry instructed passport officials to issue passports on that basis,  and instructed them to treat even an “adverse” police verification report, one that wrongly flagged the applicant as a non-citizen, as “clear” once the citizenship funding was established. Citizenship, once determined, was made to “override” a contrary administrative finding, not the other way round.¹⁶ That is precisely the sequencing this piece argues for: citizenship first, passport as its confirmation, not a passport which just assigns nationality or travel permits and then treats it as an ancillary document that might support the meaning of citizenship and then dissolves its vitality the moment it is inconvenient.

Third, that issuing passports is subject to fraud or that mere 8% of Indians are passport-holders. However, just like birth certificates, deed sales, marriage certificates, higher education certificates, their involvement in crime does not diminish their reliability for the authorities. Thus, the answer to the problem of fraud in this case is investigation, not blanket dilution of the evidentiary value of all passports. For instance, if ten fraudulent passports were issued, investigations on those ten should be carried out in order to invalidate them rather than invalidate other one hundred million passports. Besides, the government also has other means at its disposal besides invalidating passports. This piece does not make the claim that the 92% people in this country are non-citizens because they do not have a passport, instead the argument is that if 8% of the people have gone through a superior labyrinth of evidentiary burden to prove something, then that should not be undermined on account of administrative incapacity or lackadaisical enforcement. According to sections 8, 9, and 10 of the CA, the government has the power to accept renunciation, termination, or deprive a person of citizenship.¹⁷ Moreover, Section 13 of the CA allows the government to issue a certificate resolving doubts concerning his or her citizenship.¹⁸ In other words, Parliament created an effective tool for dealing with doubts, without general devaluation of the passport.

An institution investigating itself into irrelevance

Passport issuance is preceded by various phases of verification such as identity confirmation, police inquiries, biometric data collection, and the application of the CA. None other documents in India require a similar verification process or any meaningful verification. For example, an Aadhaar card verifies identity and place of residence. A PAN card verifies tax identification.

According to common reason, the amount of evidence available in any matter should correspond to the quality of the processes used to create the evidence. However, it seems the logic is inverted in this case. The document on which a maximum amount of effort was spent is being declared of a lower evidentiary value than should be accorded to it. A state that takes months to establish the citizenship of a certain individual cannot deny the significance of its own conclusion.

Ideally, an Indian passport should be situated at the top of the evidentiary hierarchy when it comes to stating citizenship. Its issuance is subject to stringent statutory scrutiny, has profound constitutional and international consequences and is backed by extensive statutory powers of revocation and deprivation where fraud or ineligibility is found. No document can be regarded as absolutely immune from challenge but to reduce the passport to a mere travel document takes away from the citizen the legal certainty and shifts the burden of the error of the government on the individual and undermines the State's own solemn representation to both, the international and domestic community, as to the status of its nationals.

The current position of the Center tells citizens: we’ve done an investigation; we believe you are Indian; you have received an identity document from us but in case we doubt our findings later, the burden is on you. This is what is incorrect in terms of administrative justice. If a citizen has already passed a verification conducted by the state, there is no point in repeating it again. When the government believes that a passport is wrongly issued it has enough means available to deal with the matter:  take the passport away, cancel it, revoke it following the Passports Act and make use of Sections 8, 9, and 10 of the CA¹⁹ for accepting renunciation, canceling citizenship, or interpreting unclear cases of citizenship according to Section 13.²⁰ The government is totally armed with the legislative means here. What is missing is the minimum guarantee for the legitimate and bonafide passport owners.

Two voices, one state

Another imperative concern, already highlighted briefly above, to be taken into cognisance is the international aspect of representation and how this consistency plays out at a global level. A passport, unlike a ration card, is not an internal document; rather it is a declaration made to other countries, asking them to trust India’s assurance that a particular individual is indeed a citizen of India. If the Indian government makes this claim to other countries, one cannot justify telling the Indian court that such a document has no meaning. A country that gives a guarantee to its citizens abroad but refuses to do so in India creates uncertainty related to a very important legal status which gives a person the right to vote, protection from deportation and a right to stay in the country.

None of this requires treating passports as something unquestionable; no legal system treats any document as such. What this involves is the shift from the current, almost default position of irrelevance of passports to an extremely strong, rebuttable assumption of citizenship:  the passport stands until the state proves its falseness, misrepresentation, or presence of other relevant legal aspects that give it grounds to withdraw it. This isn't a radical demand; it simply requires the state to value its own documents and take responsibility for what it issued.

The Way Forward 

In the Indian context, the passport currently finds itself in a witless circumstance: it is rigorously subjected to heavy scrutiny before it is issued but post-issue, it is treated as having negligible evidentiary value when it comes to proving its most basic tenant: citizenship. This piece argues that neither legal doctrine compels such treatment, nor does any operational necessity warrant it, as the authorities already possess the necessary means to rectify any unwarranted situation that they are afraid will arise.

The Indian government cannot hide its accountability behind a veil of technicality and shield itself using and maltreating the classical distinction between the definitions of nationality and citizenship. This may be relevant in jurisdictions like the EU and the USA where there are different pathways and multiple intermediary positions between citizenship and nationality. However, this distinction does not apply in India where it culminates into one act, ratified by the passport authorities in one go, under the Citizenship Act and the Passports Act. In practicality, there is no other residual category for a passport to signify because in addition to acting as a ‘travel document’, it is either certifying citizenship or it certifies nothing. The statute, authorities and jurisprudence all point toward it treating itself as the former. 

It is imperative for the government to understand this reality, take a step back and proceed in the following manner which can be achieved by utilizing the existing powers of the state in a coherent manner:

First, the state ought to establish, through administrative guidance exclusively, a strong rebuttable presumption of validity for a passport, and the only way for the government to disprove someone’s status is by demonstrating that the passport was obtained through fraud or similar grounds.

Second, once citizenship is determined, it should be deemed as final and the issuance of a passport must be recognised as proof of that. The issuing of the passports, for example in the 2018 case of the Tibetan refugees, happens post declaring someone has a citizen. The outcome, which is the issuance of a passport, is the certification of inquiry and happens after citizenship has been bestowed and the same has been meticulously perused. If its own inquiry was palatable enough to issue such a document then it should be sufficient enough to bind the state to it. If such a document or proclamation has to be revisited, then that has to be statutorily done using the powers of the state. Instead, deteriorating the evidentiary value of such a document is a bigger waste of the state’s machinery and resources, especially when the administrative burden and the taxpayer’s burden is so high when it comes to issuing a passport.

Third, when a passport is doubted, it should be cancelled rather than its evidentiary value being denied. The provisions of the Citizenship Act in sections 8, 9, 10 and section 13 along with the impounding and revoking provisions of the Passports Act provide all the necessary means to the state to challenge a wrongly issued passport. The logistical and enforcement burden is on the state and it needs to hold itself accountable for it henceforth.

Fourth, suspicion of fraud should be confined only to those passports which are specifically implicated. Just like in the case of a fraudulent deed or diploma, isolated cases of violations give grounds for investigating the specific documents issued in those cases, and it is not to be used as a premise for denying the evidentiary value of the approximately 93 million (9.3 crores) passports issued by the government.

None of the above requires treating passports as infallible. It only requires the government to honour and adhere to what it has already affirmed. If there is a problem with the passport, it is merely a question of going through the process established by the law. But until then, it is to be considered a highly valid and sound proof of citizenship. The government cannot at one point testify to a person's citizenship, certify the same, announce it to the world and at the same time require the same administration to disregard it when it comes to proving the same aspect domestically. The process of giving different messages to citizens at home and to the world outside is hardly a sign of institutional integrity, it is simply the act of a state pushing off the cost of its administrative error onto the very individual/ citizen it has already clear

¹Eurostat, ‘Citizenship granted to almost 1.2 million people in 2024’ (27 March 2026) https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260327-1 accessed 16 July 2026.

²Federal Foreign Office. ‘Law on Nationality (12 November 2025) https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/229970-229970 accessed 16 July 2026.

³Código Civil (Spain), art 22.

⁴Swedish Migration Agency, ‘Apply for Swedish Citizenship’ https://www.migrationsverket.se/en/you-want-to-apply/swedish-citizenship/citizenship-for-adults/citizenship-for-adults.html accessed 16 July 2026.

⁵Community Malta Agency, The Maltese Citizenship by Naturalisation for Exceptional Services by Direct Investment Handbook (2020) 15.

⁶European Commission v Republic of Malta (Citizenship by Investment) (Case C-181/23) EU:C: 2025:283.

⁷Ministry of the Interior and Administration (Poland), 'Apply to Be Recognised as a Polish Citizen' https://www.gov.pl/web/mswia-en/apply-to-be-recognised-as-a-polish-citizen? accessed 16 July 2026.

⁸Immigration and Nationality Act 1952, s 101(a)(22).

⁹8 USC § 1408.

¹⁰Passports Act 1967, s.6 (2)(a).

¹¹ibid.

¹²Anwar Hussain Abdul Kadar Shaikh and Ors v State of Maharashtra (Bombay High Court, Criminal Revision Application No 212 of 2013 with Criminal Application No 208 of 2013, 26 July 2013) (Chandiwal J).

¹³ Passports Act 1967, s. 20.

¹⁴Ministry of External Affairs, ‘Compendium of Instructions/Guidelines Relating to Issue of Passports in India/Abroad' (updated up to 31 May 2020) shttps://www.passportindia.gov.in/AppOnlineProject/pdf/Latest_Passport_Manual_for_disclosure_under_RTI_Act.pdf accessed 16 July 2026.

¹⁵Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, Office Memorandum No VI/441/01/16 Vol VI: Grant of Passport Facilities to Tibetan Refugees (TRs) Born in India between 26.01.1950 and 1/7/1987 and Their Children Who Have Been Declared as Indian Citizens by Birth under the Citizenship Act, 1955 (17 September 2018).

¹⁶ibid.

¹⁷Citizenship Act 1955, ss 8-10.

¹⁸Ibid, s. 13.

¹⁹Citizenship Act 1955, ss 8-10.

²⁰ibid, s. 13.