When the Ministry of External Affairs on Wednesday (June 24) said that an Indian passport is not a document proving citizenship, it may have been right in law. But what it failed to answer, and what citizens now are left wondering, is what does prove Indian citizenship? The ongoing contentious special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls which has become a citizenship test, lakhs of people being denied welfare benefits and even ‘pushed back’ across international borders, and continuous political propaganda around ‘illegal’ immigration, including the government’s “detect, delete, deport” policy, have made this question both urgent and, seemingly, unanswerable.

In its SIR order, on June 24 last year, the Election Commission included the passport as one of the listed 11 documents that can be produced as proof for the purpose of inclusion in the revised voter lists. Following stiff resistance from the poll body, the Aadhaar card was subsequently added as a 12th document that can be produced as proof of identity on the Supreme Court’s insistence, a full 77 days after the SIR started.

Exactly a year later, now, the MEA has said that the passport is only a “travel document”. How, then, is it being used to verify citizenship for those seeking inclusion in the voter rolls as only citizens can vote, and no non-citizen can hold an Indian passport?

In its judgement last month upholding the SIR exercise, the Supreme Court held that the Election Commission cannot determine citizenship. The choice of documents for the verification of electoral rolls, the court said, falls within the discretionary domain of the Election Commission.

Of the 11 documents that were listed by the Election Commission in its June 24, 2025, order, five do not indicate the applicant’s place or date of birth, which is a prerequisite for inclusion of name in the voter roll. The poll body also left out its own voter cards, ration cards and PAN cards, though it included Aadhaar as identity proof later.

According to Faizan Mustafa, vice chancellor, Chanakya National Law University, Patna, and constitutional law expert, no document included by the Election Commission in the SIR is conclusive proof of........

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