New Delhi: It has been 101 days since the former editor of The Telegraph, R Rajagopal, completed his biometrics at the Kolkata passport office.. But there is still no sign of his passport. He says he now feels “voteless, passportless, kicked around like a football, like millions of Indians.”
Rajagopal has been living in Kolkata for over three decades, and has worked with The Economic Times, India Today Magazine, and Business Standard.
He is now asking for clarity on why his passport is not being renewed.
“‘If your name is not in the SIR, don’t come to us for the passport’ — the authorities should tell us,” he told ThePrint over the phone.
‘Pathie diechi’
Rajagopal’s name was deleted from West Bengal’s electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), along with those of over 90 lakh other voters in the state. In his viral letter to the jury of Prem Bhatia Awards, the 57-year-old journalist penned how, despite having his Kolkata address as the permanent address in his official documents, his name was deleted from the electoral rolls.
“In March this year, my name was deleted from the Ballygunge constituency electoral roll in Kolkata, apparently because the Special Intensive Revision process could not trace either my name or that of my late father in the 2002 voters’ list,” he wrote.
At that time, he did not realise that the deletion of his name would trigger a battle for his passport renewal.
Rajagopal’s passport expired in October 2025, and he applied for a renewal on 27 February this year. He completed his biometric formalities at the passport office on 19 March in just half an hour.
“I finished the process pretty fast. If there was any problem with my documents they would have not allowed me,” he said. Soon after, he received a message alert saying “file has been dispatched to Ballygunge Police Station”.
Rajagopal stays in Dover Road in Ballygunge. He was expecting the police to make a visit for verification, the way they did when his daughter’s passport was getting renewed last year.
“My daughter got the renewed passport very fast. I was expecting the same but there was no query and I assumed the police were busy with the Assembly election responsibilities,” he said.
A few days later, he got a call from the police asking him to submit a few more documents since his name was not on the voters’ list. Rajagopal submitted a matriculation certificate and a few more documents, but did not hear from them for many weeks.
He made a call to the police station, where he was told “pathie diche (sent)”. “I assumed that the file has been sent to the passport office”.
However, from then on, the status of his passport did not change.
Rajagopal tried reaching out to the police station where he was told that his file was sent to the “Security Control Organisation (SCO)”.
Since then, Rajagopal has struggled to get any word on his passport. He also wrote an email to the police commissioner of Kolkata, but to no avail.
On 17 June, he received an official communication from the passport regional office in Kolkata of “an adverse report, citing the deletion of my name from the voters’ list”.
“Discreet, discreet decisions taken by authority,” he said.
Rajagopal has now been asked to appear before the Regional Passport Office in Calcutta “immediately”, but he could only get an appointment for 17 July 2026.
Government sources indicated that a passport cannot be issued without police verification.
Rajagopal is currently fighting for his voting rights along with 91 lakh other people in West Bengal. In his letter, he wrote, “I was excluded on account of what were described as ‘logical discrepancies’. No reason was furnished even after I submitted my matriculation certificate, and my appeal is now pending before one of the tribunals constituted pursuant to the Supreme Court’s directions. As a consequence, I was unable to vote in the recent election”.
As a journalist, Rajagopal was of the opinion that journalists should not vote. However, over the years after the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014, his perspective changed.
“But after 2014 obviously people changed, I also changed. I thought that what I did was wrong,” he said.
‘Kolkata is home for me, my kids’
Rajagopal came to Bengal from Delhi for the first time in 1991, and started working with The Economic Times. He then joined The Telegraph in 1996 and continued to work till February 2025. His colleague from The Telegraph, Nefertiti Biswas, described him as “meticulous.”
“His fingers did not move away from the keyboard, he was an innovator,” she said of Rajagopal, who is widely known as a Modi-critic.
Originally from Kerala, Rajagopal said he has spent the best years of his life in Kolkata. “My most productive years are probably going to be the ones that I spent in Calcutta,” he said.
His kids, who were brought up in the City of Joy, have fond memories.
“They consider Kolkata home more than Kerala,” he said.
Many people advised Rajagopal to shift to Kerala and reapply for a passport. But the journalist did not want to, since the Dover Road home is his permanent address in all documents and “Calcutta is very much my home”.
“If I abandon my claim here and apply from Kerala, people will assume that I am running away from Bengal and there is something wrong with my status in Bengal. Bengal has given my family and me everything in life. Why should I leave Bengal,” he said.
“I am an Indian citizen, why should I leave Calcutta. Even after leaving my job I was switching between Kerala and Calcutta”.
Rajagopal has not told his daughter about it, who got married in San Francisco in April.
“I had no plans to attend the wedding, but even if I wanted I could not because I did not have any passport” he said, adding that she wanted him to be there.
“I hope my daughter does not read the articles, because they love Calcutta, and it is unpleasant”.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)