Indian citizenship – solving for a riddle with no answers

Indian citizenship – solving for a riddle with no answers

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On June 24, the Ministry of External Affairs made a statement at a press briefing marking Passport Seva Divas that, had it not been almost immediately drowned in the noise of the Iran war, would have generated the political firestorm it deserved. “A passport is a travel document and not a document of citizenship,” a ministry official said.

The reaction from the Opposition was immediate. Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal posted on X: “Which document then is proof of citizenship? BLO can doubt my citizenship. Deprive me of my vote. Result: BJP wins the election.” The government responded that the Ministry of External Affairs had not introduced any new rule but had merely restated a long-settled legal position. Both sides were, in their own fashion, correct and that is what makes the situation so alarming.

India does not have a document that conclusively proves citizenship. Not a passport. Not Aadhaar, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled establishes only identity and residence. Not a voter ID card, which courts have held is an administrative tool for electoral participation. Not a ration card nor a PAN card.

In March 2020, Nityanand Rai, who was then minister of state for home affairs, in response to a question in Rajya Sabha that specifically asked which document proves citizenship, declined to identify any as definitive proof.

The only formal citizenship certificate India issues is upon naturalisation or registration of a person who was previously a foreign national. For the vast majority of Indians, who are citizens by birth or descent, there is, in the strict legal sense, no document.

This extraordinary void has been visible for decades in legal scholarship. The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls by the Election Commission has now made this void visible to 140 crore people.

Revision of electoral rolls

The Election Commission launched the Special Intensive Revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls in June 2025, ahead of the state’s elections later in November that year. It was described by the Election Commission as the first intensive revision since 2003.

The exercise was extended nationally: Phase II began on November 4 across nine states and three Union Territories covering approximately 51 crore electors while Phase three was announced in May covering 16 more states. Approximately 91 lakh voters were removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls and 2.04 crore in Uttar Pradesh. In Bihar alone, approximately 47 lakh electors were removed from the rolls, around 5%-6% of the total electorate. Across nine states and three Union Territories, the cumulative deletions approached 6.5 crore names.

Three critical features of the SIR transformed it from a routine electoral housekeeping exercise into a constitutional crisis:

First, the Election Commission excluded the most commonly held documents – Aadhaar card, voter ID card and ration card – from the list of 11 valid documents for the initial enumeration phase. Those whose names were not in the 2003 voter lists were required to provide additional documents, including proof of date and place of birth of not just themselves but also their parents.

Second, the burden of proof was placed entirely on citizens. The state did not have to demonstrate ineligibility, but individuals had to affirmatively prove their citizenship.

Third, the timeline was compressed to one month. In Bihar, July 25, 2025 was the deadline in a state where at least 75 lakh residents migrate to other parts of India for work or study and where significant portions of the population lack any of the 11 specified documents.

The political rhetoric and the fear of being erased from voter lists – linked by many to the threat of the proposed National Register of Citizens – allegedly led to multiple unnatural deaths and suicides among people who had migrated from Bangladesh.

Booth Level Officers, mostly government schoolteachers conscripted for the work, reported being “completely overburdened” and unable to eat or rest. In Tamil Nadu, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai captured the political substance: “When SIR was held earlier, it was not an exercise to prove citizenship but an electoral revision. That is not the case currently.”

The Supreme Court on May 27 upheld the constitutional validity of the SIR. But it inserted a critical limitation: the Election Commission’s role is confined to determining eligibility for electoral rolls, not citizenship. That distinction, between electoral eligibility and citizenship, is where the constitutional problem lies. The Court’s validation of the SIR notwithstanding, the distinction matters enormously.

Citizenship, Constitution and the law

The Election Commission justifies the SIR under Article 324 of the Constitution, which vests in it the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls, and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The Constitution specifies that only citizens are entitled to vote. The Election Commission argues, therefore, that verifying citizenship is implicit in its mandate to maintain accurate electoral rolls.

This argument contains a syllogism whose major premise it has no authority to establish. That only citizens may vote is correct. That the Election Commission may therefore adjudicate who is a citizen does not follow.

Citizenship determination is a legislative function vested by the Constitution in Parliament. Articles 5 through 11 of the Constitution set out the original citizenship provisions and, critically, Article 11 explicitly reserves to Parliament the power to make any provision with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship and all other matters relating to citizenship.

The Citizenship Act, 1955 – Parliament’s exercise of this power – vests the determination of citizenship in the Ministry of Home Affairs, not in the Election Commission.

The SIR, by requiring citizens to prove their citizenship to Block Level Officers who are schoolteachers, not trained adjudicators of citizenship, effectively delegates a parliamentary function to an electoral body through an administrative exercise. This is not merely a procedural irregularity. It is a constitutional category error.

The Election Commission is not the authority under law to establish the citizenship of any person; this lies with the home ministry. Yet the SIR, in practice, operates as a citizenship determination exercise by removing voters from rolls on the basis of their inability to produce documents that the law itself does not designate as proof of citizenship. The circle is vicious: citizenship cannot be proven by any document the state itself has issued, and the absence of that unattainable proof is used to deny electoral rights that citizenship confers.

A definitional abyss

The Constitution’s definition of citizenship is deliberately provisional. Articles 5 to 9 establish who was a citizen at the commencement – those born in India, those with parents or grandparents born in India, those who had been ordinarily resident in India for five years – and Article 11 then hands the entire architecture to Parliament.

The Citizenship Act of 1955 has been amended repeatedly: in 1986 to introduce the requirement that at least one parent be a citizen by birth, abandoning pure jus soli – the principle of citizenship by birthplace; in 2003 making it a condition that neither parent be an illegal migrant, introducing jus sanguinis – citizenship by descent – more rigorously; and in 2019 when the Citizenship Amendment Act created a religion-based fast-track to naturalise non-Muslim refugees from three specified neighbours.

The practical effect of these amendments is the creation of three distinct populations. Those born before January 26, 1950 were citizens under the original constitutional provisions. Those born between January 26, 1950, and July 1, 1987 are citizens by birth regardless of parents’ nationality – a robust jus soli period. Those born between July 1, 1987 and December 3, 2004 require at least one parent to have been an Indian citizen. Those born after December 3, 2004 require one parent to be a citizen and the other not to be an illegal migrant.

The practical consequence of this framework is devastating in the SIR context. For the approximately three crore voters enrolled on Bihar’s rolls after 2003, the task of verifying documents to establish citizenship by establishing parental nationality is of gigantic proportions. This is because the documentary infrastructure that would be needed to prove parentage and parental citizenship simply does not exist for a population that has historically navigated daily life without formal documentation, that migrates extensively for work, and that has often been born in circumstances – home births, villages without municipal records, floods, famines – that left no administrative trace.

The passport declaration by the Ministry of External Affairs makes this concrete with uncomfortable precision. A passport is issued only after police verification, background checks and the affirmation of Indian nationality. Yet even this — the most internationally recognised proof of national identity – does not legally prove Indian citizenship, because Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967 permits the government to issue a passport to a non-citizen in the public interest. The document that the rest of the world accepts as the definitive proof of who you are is, in the strict domestic legal sense, not proof of citizenship.

The politics of the void politics

None of this is accidental. Opposition parties – the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, CPI(M), Samajwadi Party, DMK and RJD – have alleged that the Election Commission was favouring the BJP ahead of assembly elections.

In May, the BJP won the election in West Bengal, a state it had been trying to make inroads into for years. Weeks before polling began, BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari confirmed, with unusual candour, the political calculation: “Once a clean voter list is prepared through the SIR, removing fake voters, the BJP will achieve a similar sweep in Bengal as in Bihar.” Earlier, Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress had described the SIR as implementing the National Register of Citizens “through the backdoor.”

The SIR, by requiring documentary proof of citizenship that a disproportionate number of Muslim, minority, migrant and economically marginal voters are structurally unable to produce, functions as a selective disenfranchisement mechanism.

The Citizenship Amendment Act offers fast-track citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from specified countries while some communities face enhanced scrutiny though others are given expedited inclusion. The National Register of Citizens – whose implementation has been suspended but never formally abandoned – looms large as the logical terminus of the process: a national register in which those unable to prove citizenship through documents they were never given would be designated foreigners.

The Supreme Court’s validation of the SIR, however carefully hedged, has provided constitutional cover for the next phase of this exercise. The Court ruled that the SIR is within the mandate of the Election Commission. It did not rule – because it cannot rule – that the underlying citizenship framework is adequate to the task it is being asked to perform.

So, what proves Indian citizenship?

Congress leader Kapil Sibal’s question deserves to be the central question of Indian politics: what document proves Indian citizenship? The honest answer, currently, is: none. The government’s response – that this is a settled legal position that has existed for decades – is technically accurate and politically evasive.

It has existed for decades without consequence precisely because no government had previously attempted to operationalise it at scale, in a context where inability to prove citizenship translates into loss of electoral rights, and where the SIR’s document requirements and compressed timelines are calibrated to produce exactly the kind of mass deletions from electoral rolls that have been documented.

The citizenship framework India has built – through seven decades of constitutional amendment, parliamentary legislation, judicial interpretation and administrative practice – has arrived at a position where the state can demand proof of what it has never provided the means to prove, where the electoral body is delegated a function Parliament reserved to itself, and where the consequence falls overwhelmingly on the poorest, the most mobile, the least documented: who are, not coincidentally, the least likely to vote for the incumbent.

A democracy that cannot tell its citizens what proves they are citizens, that removes millions from voter rolls on the basis of documentary standards no ordinary person can meet, and that calls this a routine electoral housekeeping exercise, is a democracy that is being systematically hollowed from within.

The apparatus of democracy – the Election Commission, the passport office, the Citizenship Act, the courts – are all in place. The substance of democracy – the equal, unconditional right of every citizen to vote without having to produce impossible proof of what they already are – is being quietly removed.

That is no legal technicality. It is the oldest and most fundamental form of political exclusion, conducted with modern instruments and constitutional camouflage.

Writer and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO, Petronet India Limited and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management. His most recent book is The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir.



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