Justice For All Expresses Grave Concern at Indian Officials Declaring an Indian Passport is Not Proof of Indian Citizenship

Justice For All is gravely concerned about recent Indian government statements, judicial opinions and practices that claim that documents many Indians rely on, including Indian passports and Aadhaar (foundation) cards, will not be treated as conclusive proof of citizenship. This ambiguity is especially dangerous for India’s Muslim population.

India is facing a manufactured citizenship crisis. This shift could create another pathway to disenfranchise Indian Muslims and other marginalized communities. The new statements must be understood in the broader context of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the BJP-RSS regime’s ongoing push for citizenship-verification systems such as the National Register of Citizens (NRC). The NRC is troubling because the onus to prove citizenship is passed onto the targeted citizens rather than the prosecutor proving their case.

The passport, issued to Indian citizens under the Passports Act, is issued by the Ministry of External Affairs (India’s Foreign Ministry) while citizenship itself is apparently determined by the Ministry of Home Affairs (the Internal Ministry). This distinction has a dangerous potential of being weaponized against India’s minority religious populations, of which the primary targets have been Muslims.

India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has seen a shift towards majoritarian and fascist ideas born out of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS). A long standing goal of the RSS has been to declare India as a Hindu-nation, with a return to caste differences and stratification. The goal also relegates Muslims and Christians as followers of “foreign” religions. The message of the RSS and its constituent groups is to Hinduize or be targeted. Hiding behind laws, the perpetrators of violence enjoy immunity from police action and often victims are themselves held responsible for initiating the violence.

If a passport cannot protect a person from being challenged as a citizen, then targeted Indian Muslims could be pushed into a dangerous legal limbo, even after years of holding official identity documents. The threat of being declared a non-citizen has so far been borne by the lowest economic class of India’s Muslims. They often do not have documents and live in areas such as Assam, which are prone to frequent flooding and subsequent displacements of families. In that environment, holding on to documents is secondary to survival itself. This threat of loss of citizenship can now be easily extended to middle-class Indian Muslims, who are more likely to hold passports and may have believed that those documents offered some protection.

For many families, birth certificates are missing, damaged, difficult to replace or nearly impossible to trace across generations. New documentation rules and restrictions around birth records only deepen the risk. Together, these developments could allow the Indian state to strip citizenship protections from targeted communities, while presenting the process as a neutral bureaucratic exercise.