The Indian Community Welfare Fund (ICWF), designed to assist overseas Indian nationals in times of distress and emergency on a means-tested basis, is explicitly reserved for “Indian citizens,” not for Persons of Indian Origin or Overseas Citizens of India (OCI).
The government’s own consular machinery requires the production of an Indian passport to establish the beneficiary’s citizenship, and an endorsement on that passport is mandatory for accessing the fund.
An OCI cardholder, a former Indian citizen, must prove one’s own lineage of citizenship extending up to four generations to qualify.
In the same vein, children born abroad to Indian citizens are registered with Indian diplomatic missions to acquire citizenship by descent, and the parent’s citizenship is proved by their Indian passport.
Any sincere citizenship determination exercise must be anchored in one unshakeable maxim: the burden to prove citizenship does not rest on the citizen; but the burden to rebut the presumption of citizenship rests on the State.
THE Ministry of External Affairs’ assertion that the passport is not a “citizenship document” but a “travel document” has birthed a fundamental, unsettling question: if the passport is not proof of citizenship, what is?
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The vast apparatus of the Indian State dispenses benefits through myriad documents: ration card, health insurance enrolment, Kisan credit card and a host of similar instruments. These documents are, lock, stock and barrel, no proof of citizenship whatsoever.
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Then comes Aadhaar. Section 9 of the Aadhaar Act, 2016, states unequivocally that the Aadhaar number/card neither confers nor is evidence of citizenship.
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The driving licence fares no better. It is a permit issued under the Motor Vehicles Act to a person who is not otherwise disqualified, authorising them to drive a motor vehicle.
The Electoral Photo Identity Card (EPIC) sails in the same boat. Voting, a constitutional right, and not a fundamental right, is not an inalienable right available to every citizen by the mere fact of citizenship.
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Furthermore, voter ID is issued not by the Central Government but by the Election Commission, whose plenary powers, broad as they may be under Article 324, do not extend to the determination of citizenship. This has been confirmed by the Supreme Court (SC) in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) case — Association for Democratic Reforms v. ECI (2026).
Having ruled out these tokens of identity, we return to the passport. The government’s reliance on Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967, which enables the issuance of a passport even to a non-citizen in public interest, suffers from the fallacy of composition.
Besides, it draws strength from the Passport Manual (Chapter 2, Paragraph 6.1), which states that “a passport provides evidence of the holder’s nationality, but this is placed in the same category as any other evidence of the citizenship status of an individual.” This gives birth to two distinct and necessary lines of consideration.
First, for all Indian nationals who hold a passport issued not under Section 20 but under the general rule of Section 5(2), the passport is an assertion of citizenship. Section 6 mandates the passport-issuing authority to reject an application for a passport inter alia on the ground that the applicant is a non-citizen.
The entire inquiry and verification apparatus is predicated on the applicant being a citizen.
The machinery of citizenship across borders is also anchored to the passport as the operational certificate of citizenship. The Indian Community Welfare Fund (ICWF), designed to assist overseas Indian nationals in times of distress and emergency on a means-tested basis, is explicitly reserved for “Indian citizens,” not for Persons of Indian Origin or Overseas Citizens of India (OCI).
The government’s own consular machinery requires the production of an Indian passport to establish the beneficiary’s citizenship, and an endorsement on that passport is mandatory for accessing the fund.
Furthermore, the architecture of the OCI, under Section 7A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, rests on this very edifice. An OCI cardholder, a former Indian citizen, must prove one’s own lineage of citizenship extending up to four generations to qualify. The primary, and often the only, document that establishes this former citizenship is a passport.
In the same vein, children born abroad to Indian citizens are registered with Indian diplomatic missions to acquire citizenship by descent, and the parent’s citizenship is proved by their Indian passport.
At border trade posts like Tamu-Moreh in Manipur along the Myanmar border, interdependent communities of both nationalities traverse daily, depositing their IDs at the check-post in the morning and retrieving them upon return by sunset. Nationality is determined by these documents.
Even Section 15 of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, states that when a foreigner in India with a valid passport is recognised as a national by the law of more than one foreign country, the civil authority may treat that foreigner as the national of the country on whose passport he entered India. Thus, a passport is the determinant of nationality.
Although the SC, in State Trading Corporation of India Ltd. v. Commercial Tax Officer (1963), held that ‘citizenship’ and ‘nationality’ are not interchangeable, the judgment was made in the context that while juristic persons may be nationals for the purposes of international law, they cannot be citizens for the purposes of municipal law or the Constitution, which contemplates citizens as natural persons.
For natural persons, the conceptual distinction between nationality and citizenship, rooted in Roman law, has collapsed in the modern constitutional scheme. Roman law distinguished the nationals into civis (citizen with full political-civic rights), latinus (intermediate status), peregrinus (foreigner), servus (slave), and hostis (enemy) until all free subjects evolved into cives, leaving only foreigners and those stripped of citizenship outside the civic pale.
An Indian national holding a passport issued under Section 5 (neither a slave, nor an enemy alien, nor a person deprived of citizenship) is a citizen simply because no other category exists to accommodate him.
The second consideration flows from the Passport Manual: “any other evidence of the citizenship status”. What document is such evidence?
Three successive questions provide the answer. First, is the issue of the document preceded by such rigorous process that it effectively requires adducing all evidence of citizenship? The passport application requires a declaration of citizenship, verification of place and date of birth, and parentage. Second, are citizens fundamentally entitled, and prospective citizens eligible, to apply for that document? The right to travel abroad, a fundamental right under Article 21, as laid down in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), is operationalised by the issuance of a passport.
A non-citizen, having no such fundamental right, may obtain a passport under Section 20, but the Section 5 route is a citizen’s gateway. Third, is the issuing authority for a passport the Central Government and not any state government or any other instrumentality?
As things stand today, the standalone document that serves as practical proof of citizenship for a citizen by birth is a passport issued under Section 5. Certainly, it is not the only mode of proof but that is all a citizen has.
The ideal, of course, is a meticulously maintained National Register of Citizens (NRC), complemented by the National Population Register (NPR). Yet, the experience of Foreigners Tribunals and Illegal Migrants Determination Tribunals serves as a grim cautionary tale.
Any sincere citizenship determination exercise must be anchored in one unshakeable maxim: the burden to prove citizenship does not rest on the citizen; but the burden to rebut the presumption of citizenship rests on the State.
It must not become a Kafkaesque gauntlet in which the poor, the disaster-borne, the landless and the illiterate are presumed aliens until they prove their citizenship, without the means — or even knowledge of what document would suffice — to do so.
