Born in Sri Lanka, brought up in India, residing in the US: IT employee faces threat of being declared ‘stateless’

On the heels of the debate over whether an Indian passport is proof of citizenship or merely a travel document, the Madras High Court came up with a case by 44-year-old Vivek Saravanamuthu, who was born in Sri Lanka, grew up in India and has been residing in the United States since 2014, using an Indian passport but now facing the threat of being declared ‘stateless’.

Justice Mohammed Shaffiq took cognizance of a writ petition filed by him and directed the Indian Embassy in Washington DC to postpone a notice till July 22, 2026, directing the petitioner to surrender his passport within 10 days. He also directed the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) to file a detailed counter-affidavit to the writ petition challenging the notification by then.

Senior advocate PR Raman, assisted by S. Sandesh Saravanan, told the court that the petitioner was born on April 26, 1982, in a cooperative hospital in Colombo. In August 1983, his family had migrated to Pudukottai in Tamil Nadu after fleeing intense civil and ethnic unrest in the island nation. He later continued his school and university education in Tamil Nadu.

After completing an engineering degree from a private college in Tiruchi in April 2003, he had applied for an Indian passport in March 2004. “At that time, I did not have an official Sri Lankan birth certificate nor did I have any alternative documentary record showing my birth details,” the petitioner said in his affidavit, claiming that he had applied for an Indian passport in pure good faith using other identity documents.

He further said: “As a young 22-year-old engineering graduate just starting out in my career, I had no idea about the complex international citizenship laws, historical treaties or the grave legal ramifications of my birthplace… Had I known at the time that my ancestral past required a special legal process to rectify, I would have immediately sought guidance from the passport authorities rather than citing an accidental mistake.”

The petitioner worked as an engineering professional in Chennai and Puducherry for 10 years before moving to the United States in 2014 on an H1-B work visa sponsored by an Indian information technology consulting company. He moved to an American technology conglomerate in North Carolina in 2019 and claimed to have resided in the United States for the past 12 years without filing any complaints.

In 2024, he formally petitioned the Colombo Additional District Registrar and obtained his birth certificate. It was also officially verified and attested by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Sri Lanka. “I emphasize that this expensive, complex and voluntary work was carried out with a will that was transparent, factually accurate and completely free of any deceptive intent,” he said.

The writ petitioner also alleged that he disclosed this to immigration authorities and voluntarily submitted his genuine Colombo birth certificate to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, resulting in him being issued a U.S. Permanent Resident Card (Green Card) in October 2025, which accurately reflects his country of birth as Sri Lanka.

Meanwhile, as his Indian passport was about to expire on November 18, 2025, he applied to the Indian Embassy in Washington DC for renewal. “I voluntarily attached my genuine Sri Lankan birth certificate along with my renewal application and expressly requested the Embassy to correct my place of birth from Pudukkottai to Colombo in its database,” the petitioner added.

The Indian Embassy has renewed the passport to be valid from 22 February 2026 to 22 February 2036. Subsequently, on 18 June 2026, the Embassy issued a notice instructing the applicant to surrender his passport within 10 days and also provided an explanation as to why the passport should not be seized and criminal prosecution against the applicant under the Passport Act 1967.

In his current plea before the Madras High Court, the petitioner has requested the court to quash the notification and give him nine months to acquire Sri Lankan citizenship in the meantime so that he is not forced into “international statelessness”. The petitioner assured the court that he would surrender his Indian passport after receiving valid travel documents from the Sri Lankan authorities.