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.

The Supreme Court has recognised this constitutional dimension directly. In Satwant Singh Sawhney v. D. Ramarathnam (1967), decided even before the Passports Act was enacted, the court held that the right to travel abroad forms part of the personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21. Parliament responded the same year by replacing executive discretion with a statutory framework.

A decade later, in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), the Court reaffirmed that any restriction on a citizen’s passport must satisfy fairness, reasonableness and due process under Article 21. These decisions did not determine the legal status of citizenship. They established something equally significant: a passport is not an ordinary administrative document but one intimately connected with the exercise of a fundamental freedom.

One provision deserves particular attention. Section 20 of the Passports Act provides:

“Notwithstanding anything contained in the foregoing provisions relating to issue of a passport or travel document, the Central Government may issue, or cause to be issued, a passport or travel document to a person who is not a citizen of India if that Government is of the opinion that it is necessary so to do in the public interest.”

Some might read this as weakening the proposition that passports are intended for citizens. We think it does precisely the opposite. The very fact that parliament found it necessary to enact an express exception confirms the general rule. Ordinarily, passports are issued to citizens. Only in exceptional cases, and only where the Union government considers it necessary in the public interest, may that rule be departed from.

The present controversy appears to conflate two distinct questions. The first is whether a passport is conclusive proof of citizenship in every legal proceeding. Plainly it is not; courts must remain free to examine evidence wherever citizenship is genuinely disputed. The second is whether a passport is merely another travel document carrying no special evidentiary weight.

That is an altogether different question, on which the statutory scheme, administrative practice and constitutional jurisprudence all point in the same direction. A passport therefore occupies a different legal plane from other official documents.

It is therefore inaccurate to describe a passport as a certificate of citizenship, for the law employs no such expression. It is equally inaccurate to dismiss it as “just a travel document”. The truth lies between those two extremes. 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.

A contrary view would reduce diplomatic passports issued to ministers, senior government officials, ambassadors and the Chief Justice of India to mere travel documents bearing a different colour.

Parliament chose its words carefully. Those entrusted with administering the law should do likewise. For when the Republic places its seal upon a passport, it is doing far more than permitting international travel. It is formally vouching for one of its own citizens before the world.

Madan B. Lokur is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India. S.Y. Quraishi is former Chief Election Commissioner of India and a member of the Board of Advisers, International Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Stockholm.