New Delhi: A passport is a travel document and not a citizenship document, officials at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) said on Wednesday (June 24), stepping into a legal grey zone that has long surrounded the question of what documents can conclusively establish Indian citizenship.The remarks came on Passport Seva Divas, when the ministry highlighted the scale of its passport operations, saying it delivered around 1.5 crore passports and related services in 2025, including 1.39 crore passports. Officials also said about 1.47 crore chip-enabled passports have been issued since their rollout last year, while average processing times have been reduced to five to six working days, excluding police verification.The issue surfaced following queries on whether a person excluded from the Election Commission’s special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls could rely on their possession of an Indian passport to establish citizenship.An MEA official responded, on condition of anonymity, that while passports attest nationality when Indians travel abroad, they are fundamentally travel documents and “not a document of citizenship”. It was stressed that passports are issued only after “a lot of due diligence” and after authorities satisfy themselves that the applicant is entitled to receive one.The remarks have drawn attention because Indian law does not provide a simple answer to the relationship between passports and citizenship.Under section 6(2)(a) of the Passports Act, 1967, passport authorities are required to refuse issuance of a passport if the applicant is not a citizen of India.At the same time, the government’s Passport Manual describes a passport as an identity and travel document that “provides evidence of the holder’s nationality” while also noting that the Union government may issue passports or travel documents to non-nationals in specified circumstances under Section 20 of the Act.The manual cites delegations of this power to Indian missions in Bangkok and Yangon for specified categories of persons of Indian origin and to the passport officer in Ahmedabad for issuing Certificates of Identity to certain categories of persons of Indian origin who had returned from East Africa.The issue has acquired added significance because passports are among the documents the Election Commission accepted for the SIR exercise in Bihar and elsewhere.During hearings before the Supreme Court in petitions challenging the Bihar SIR, the Election Commission argued that Aadhaar establishes identity but not citizenship because it can be issued to residents who are not Indian citizens.While upholding the SIR exercise, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to accept Aadhaar as an additional document for identity verification, but did not treat it as proof of citizenship. The judgment underscored the distinction between documents used to establish identity and those relied upon in citizenship-related inquiries.However, the broader question of what documents can establish citizenship has remained unsettled. Last year, the Union home ministry declined in parliament to specify categories of documents that could be treated as proof of citizenship, instead pointing to the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the various routes through which citizenship may be acquired, including birth, descent, registration, naturalisation and incorporation of territory.There has been no clear order from the judiciary on this matter, as courts have approached the issue differently depending on the context. In a 2018 passport-related case, the Delhi high court treated the grant of Indian passports as a significant factor while examining a citizenship dispute, describing a passport as a document evidencing nationality.More recently, the Bombay high court observed in a separate case that questions of citizenship must ultimately be examined under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and cannot be resolved solely by reference to identity documents such as Aadhaar, PAN or voter ID cards.