A passport remains the state’s strongest and most authoritative official evidence that its holder has been recognised as an Indian citizen for international purposes.
Illustration: The Wire, with Canva.
A recent public controversy has raised an important constitutional question: is an Indian passport merely a travel document, or does it signify something more? The issue arose from an unsolicited official statement that a passport is “only a travel document” and not proof of citizenship.
Former Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao rightly reminded us that citizenship is governed by the Citizenship Act, 1955, not the Passports Act. That proposition is legally unexceptionable. Yet it does not answer the real question: what is the legal and constitutional significance of a passport in a country that issues no universal certificate of citizenship?
The starting point must be the Passports Act, 1967. Curiously, much of the present discussion has overlooked the very language chosen by parliament. The Preamble of the Act states that it is “an Act to provide for the issue of passports and (emphasis added) travel documents, to regulate the departure from India of citizens of India and other persons…”. The deliberate use of two distinct expressions, in several sections of the Passports Act, cannot be dismissed as careless drafting.
A passport is undoubtedly a travel document, but a travel document need not be a passport. Refugees, stateless persons and certain foreign nationals may instead be issued documents such as ‘identity certificates’. Similarly, an Indian who is being extradited and whose passport is cancelled may be issued a travel document to enter India.
Parliament created two legal categories of documents, not one. To reduce a passport to “just another travel document” is to blur a distinction the statute itself deliberately draws.
There is a further reason the passport occupies a unique place in Indian law. Unlike many countries, India does not issue a universal certificate of citizenship. There is no single document handed to every Indian certifying nationality; certificates of citizenship are issued only in limited cases, such as registration or naturalisation. The overwhelming majority of Indians possess no such certificate.
Citizenship is therefore ordinarily inferred from a range of official records – birth certificates, electoral rolls, passports and school records – each serving its own purpose, none universally conclusive.
The passport nevertheless stands apart because of what precedes its issuance. Before issuing one, the passport authority must satisfy itself, through documentary scrutiny and police verification where required, that the applicant is entitled to receive it under the law. No other document commonly held by Indian citizens undergoes comparable scrutiny before issuance.
Electoral photo identity cards, too, are issued only to citizens, but that process rests primarily on declarations made within the electoral roll framework. A passport follows a separate and significantly more rigorous process because it is intended to establish the holder’s nationality before foreign governments.
That international function makes the passport unique. It is the instrument through which the Republic presents one of its citizens to the international community. When an Indian passport is presented to an immigration officer abroad, it embodies the government of India’s representation that the bearer is entitled to travel as an Indian national and to seek the protection of the Indian State.
Foreign governments do not independently investigate every traveller’s citizenship; they rely upon the issuing state’s certification contained in the passport. This reflects a long-established principle of international practice: passports are accepted because they embody the issuing state’s assertion that the bearer is one of its nationals.
None of this means that a passport creates citizenship. It does not. Citizenship is determined by the Constitution and the Citizenship Act, 1955, and a passport neither confers it nor overrides those laws.
If a passport is obtained by fraud or issued in error, it can be cancelled, and the underlying legal status determined afresh under the Citizenship Act. But invoking the possibility of fraud as an argument against the passport’s evidentiary value is erroneous. Birth certificates have been fabricated, electoral rolls have contained ineligible names and even citizenship certificates could eventually be procured by deception. No one suggests these documents are therefore without evidentiary value. Fraud is the exception; the law proceeds on the ordinary case, not the exceptional one.
Among the documents ordinarily available to Indian citizens, the passport reflects the highest level of official verification by the state. That is why the familiar words printed in every passport – requesting foreign states to allow the bearer to pass freely and extend assistance and protection – are not ornamental. They express the constitutional relationship between the Republic and its citizen beyond India’s borders.
