The Editors Guild of India on Sunday condemned the treatment of R Rajagopal, a former editor of The Telegraph in Kolkata, after his name was deleted from West Bengal’s electoral rolls and his passport renewal was blocked for more than 100 days. The Guild said the case showed how ordinary citizens are being treated by the bureaucracy that decides who counts as an Indian citizen. Rajagopal’s name was removed from the Ballygunge constituency roll in Kolkata in March during the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, of electoral rolls.
The Guild’s statement, issued by president Sanjay Kapoor, general secretary Raghavan Srinivasan and treasurer Teresa Rehman, said Rajagopal had spent decades working in the public domain as a journalist and editor before finding himself stripped of his vote and unable to renew his travel document. “Mr Rajagopal, despite decades of work in the public domain as a journalist and editor, today finds himself not only disenfranchised as a voter due to the deletion of his name from the electoral rolls, but also unable to renew his passport since more than 100 days, allegedly due to an ‘adverse report’ from the Kolkata Police, who must have been very familiar with Mr Rajagopal as the Editor of one of the city’s leading dailies,” the statement said, according to The Wire.
Rajagopal’s name and that of his late father could not be traced in the 2002 voters’ list, which the Election Commission cited as a “logical discrepancy,” one of the categories used during the West Bengal revision to flag entries for removal. Other categories under the same label include mismatches between a person’s age and their parents’ ages, or a parent recorded as having more than six children. Rajagopal said no explanation was given even after he submitted his matriculation certificate. His appeal is now pending before one of the appellate tribunals that the Supreme Court ordered the government to set up to hear challenges to the deletions.
The passport complication followed directly from the voter roll deletion. Rajagopal completed his biometric formalities for passport renewal on March 19, eight days before his name was struck from the rolls. On June 17, the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata informed him in writing that Kolkata Police had filed an “adverse” verification report, citing the deletion of his name from the SIR rolls as the reason. He was told to report to the passport office “immediately,” but the earliest appointment available was July 17, a full month later.
The Editors Guild said Rajagopal’s case was not an isolated bureaucratic error but a warning about the scale of the problem facing far less prominent citizens. “If it could happen to someone like Mr Rajagopal, a known public figure, the fate of others who have similarly been disenfranchised by a bureaucratic stroke of the pen, and lacking the voice to seek redressal can only be imagined,” the Guild said in its statement.
Opposition politicians seized on the case within days of Rajagopal publishing his account. Trinamool Congress MP Sagarika Ghose wrote on X that Rajagopal had been deleted from the electoral roll, denied the right to vote, and had his passport renewal stalled for 100 days because of a police report tied to that deletion, adding that he was forced to miss his own daughter’s wedding abroad as a result. CPI(M) leader P Sandosh Kumar called the case an “eye-opener,” and Congress MP Vivek Tankha questioned the practicality of the documentation requirements being demanded of applicants caught up in the revision.
Rajagopal told The Print he did not intend his account as a complaint for sympathy but as an illustration of a wider failure. “My intention has never been to project myself as a victim,” he said. “If someone who spent his professional life in journalism and edited a relatively known newspaper can encounter such difficulties, one can only imagine what the truly marginalised must endure.”
Regional and national impact
The Editors Guild said Rajagopal’s case reflects the broader consequences of the SIR exercise, which it said is responsible for what it called the misery faced by millions of Indians. According to The Federal, the revision has led to the deletion of nearly six crore, or 60 million, voters from electoral rolls nationally since it began in Bihar in June of last year, with around 27 lakh, or 2.7 million, names referred to tribunals in West Bengal alone for verification and adjudication. Legal experts and affected citizens cited by The Quint said the process has created new categories of citizenship status that affect not only voting rights but also access to documentation and welfare services.
Background
The Special Intensive Revision is an Election Commission of India exercise aimed at verifying and updating electoral rolls, and it began in Bihar in June 2025 before expanding to other states, including West Bengal ahead of that state’s assembly elections. The Supreme Court declined to halt the exercise but ordered the creation of appellate tribunals, headed by retired high court judges, to hear challenges to deletions. The court also ruled that the Election Commission’s inquiries for electoral purposes cannot determine a person’s citizenship status, and that any deletions made on citizenship grounds must be referred to the central government for adjudication. The Ministry of External Affairs has said separately that a passport is a travel document and reiterated that voter roll status is not proof of citizenship.
What happens next
Rajagopal’s appeal against his deletion from the electoral roll remains pending before one of the tribunals created under the Supreme Court’s directions, with no fixed timeline for a ruling. He has an appointment to appear before the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata on July 17. The Editors Guild has called on the Election Commission to restore Rajagopal’s voter status and to extend the same consideration to others affected by similar deletions. Government sources cited by The Print have said a passport cannot be issued without completed police verification, leaving the outcome of Rajagopal’s renewal tied to the resolution of his voter roll appeal.
