A Passport is No Proof of Citizenship, Declares MEA; Iran Invites PM to Ayatollah Khamenei’s State Funeral; Modi, Three Cabinet Ministers and 150 Bureaucrats Visited America on US Govt-Funded Trips
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Snapshot of the day
June 24, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
Even as millions of people travel the world on Indian passports, the Ministry of External Affairs has now clarified that a passport is a travel document and not, in itself, proof of Indian citizenship.
Yet the constitutional promise of Universal Adult Franchise has come under sustained assault in the space of just 365 days. Exactly a year ago today, the Election Commission had released its Bihar SIR notification, in which it listed the passport as among 11 indicative documents that would go towards proving eligibility (indirectly citizenship, as it can affirm that one is an adult citizen of India). While the Modi government now insists that a passport is merely a travel document and not proof of citizenship, the state has shown no hesitation in invoking the same document when it suits in identifying who belongs and who does not. The contradiction is glaring.
At any rate, a passport is hardly something that the hundreds of people who are voluntarily gathering at the Hakimpur border village in West Bengal will possess. These people – including the elderly and young mothers carrying infants, all of them living in penury – have come to Hakimpur driven by fear of being picked up by police and consternated by uncertainty over what happens next. They do know that their fate will likely involve being ‘pushed back’ into Bangladesh, though their lack of documentation means that the authorities across the border will shun them as well. Madhu Sudan Chatterjee reports from Hakimpur on who these people are and what impact the current establishment’s ‘detect, delete and deport’ policy is having.
Despite the Modi government refraining from officially condemning the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in February by the unprovoked US-Israel strikes, Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has nevertheless extended a personal invitation to Indian PM Modi to attend the state funeral – which was postponed several times due to the war in West Asia – of the late Supreme Leader scheduled to be held in Tehran and Qom on July 5, 6, and 7. The final ceremony will take place in the city of Mashhad on July 9. India had issued vague appeals for “dialogue and diplomacy”, with Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri the sole senior official to sign the condolence book at the Iranian embassy and Minister of State for External Affairs Kirti Vardhan Singh later attending Ayatollah Khamenei’s chehlum (40th-day ceremony) in April.
Even as New Delhi has yet to confirm whether PM Modi will attend the ceremonies, Pakistan has confirmed its attendance at the Tehran funeral, with Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif announcing that a Pakistani delegation will travel to Iran for the event before the National Assembly. Sharif said he spoke with President Masoud Pezeshkian by telephone and received a direct appeal from the Iranian president. “I said Pakistan’s delegation will be present there, so we can tell the world how much respect we have for him in our hearts,” Sharif told lawmakers.
A senior US official, Bethany Morrison, stated that PM Modi
