By R Rajagopal
Rejection was spelt out in 21 letters: “Excluded in deleted list.”
Earlier, a senior journalist had virtually admonished me for complaining about my name being deleted from the voters’ list in the Ballygunge constituency in Calcutta, where I have been living for over 30 years, and about the delay in the police verification for the renewal of my 20-year-old passport, which was originally issued from the same address, renewed once and is now up for renewal again from the same address.
“Rejection is a way of life in India for the poor and marginalised. You are discovering it only now?” the senior journalist had asked me at a pre-election gathering of journalists in Calcutta in which I had taken part as a spectator.
I was taken aback but realised that whatever manner I spoke of my plight, it would be viewed, not entirely unfairly, as an attempt by me to step off the ivory tower and play the victim card. This was the reason I hesitated initially to write about my experience.
Back to “excluded in deleted list.” The four words were scrawled on a piece of paper I had torn from my file and handed over to an official at an office variously referred to as Security Control Organisation (SCO) or Security Control Passport Verification on AJC Bose Road in Calcutta. One of the responsibilities of the AJC Bose Road SCO, which is part of the Kolkata Police, is to verify the antecedents of passport-related applicants who reside within the jurisdiction of the Kolkata Police.
I was unable to vote in the West Bengal election
I was asked to report to the AJC Bose Road SCO by an official of the Ballygunge Police Station. I have lived in Calcutta for over 30 years, more than 25 of them spent at the same address in Ballygunge, where I was a voter at least since 2010. I was editor of The Telegraph, a newspaper headquartered in the city, for seven years until my stint ended abruptly in September 2023. I now split my time between Calcutta, where my permanent address is, and Thiruvananthapuram, where I was born and raised.
I had submitted the passport renewal application on February 27 and got an appointment for March 19. On March 27, my name was deleted from the electoral roll of the Ballygunge constituency in Kolkata. Like nearly 27 lakh other residents of West Bengal, I was excluded on account of what were described as “logical discrepancies”.
Apparently, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process could trace neither my name nor that of my late father in the 2002 voters’ list. My father, a retired professor of economics and a former secretary of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi in Kerala, passed away in 2016.
This story was originally published in thewire.in. Read the full story here.
