Citizenship in India is a matter of constitutional status, yet Indian law has never settled the anterior question of how that status is to be proved once it is disputed. This paper examines the doctrinal architecture of Indian citizenship law under Part II of the Constitution, the Citizenship Act, 1955, and its amendments alongside two developments of 2025–26 that have exposed the fragility of that architecture: the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (“SIR”) of electoral rolls in Bihar and West Bengal, and the Ministry of External Affairs' public clarification that an Indian passport is not, in law, proof of citizenship. Building on the Supreme Court's jurisprudence in Sarbananda Sonowal and the 2024 Constitution Bench verdict on Section 6A, the paper argues that India operates a citizenship regime with an inverted evidentiary structure: the burden of proving citizenship is cast upon the individual, while no single document has been designated as conclusive proof of the status the individual is asked to establish. The paper concludes with proposals for a coherent, rights respecting evidentiary framework.
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Mir et al. (2026) studied this question.
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