No Voter Card, No Passport, No Citizenship?
11/07/2026
New Delhi, July 11 (KIP)-The Delhi Union of Journalists(DUJ) welcomes the return of the passport of senior journalist and author Samrat Choudhury by the Kolkata passport department on July 10, 2026. Choudhury had been sent a notice requiring him to return his passport on the grounds that there was an adverse police report against him.
This was extremely strange as Choudhury is a well known journalist who belongs to West Bengal and has lived here for several years. He is certainly not a criminal. He duly surrendered the passport but appealed against the arbitrary ruling. It is only after the issue became public, with Choudhury reluctantly giving interviews to the media, particularly the social media, and after media organisations protested, that the authorities reviewed the matter and have now returned the passport to him.
The incident comes on the heels of a similar adverse police report against another veteran journalist and former editor of The Telegraph, one of Kolkata’s leading newspapers, R. Rajagopal. His name was, strangely enough, removed from the electoral roll. That was made a ground for withholding his passport for several months and he was unable to attend his daughter’s wedding in USA. Again, after an uproar when he finally chose to go public, the matter was reviewed and the passport given to him. The DUJ does not view these as isolated events.
Both problems arose after the inordinately hasty SIR exercise in West Bengal and the denial of voting rights to lakhs of people. Now, it seems, if a name does not appear on the electoral role, the individual ceases to exist in the national record and can be denied many rights including the right to a passport and other documents. A controversy has arisen over whether a passport is proof of citizenship, with a Ministry of External Affairs official stating that it is merely a ‘travel document’. The government and the courts have earlier stated that other documents like an Aadhar card or PAN card or voter card are also mere paper and prove nothing.
There is no clarity on what document proves citizenship, leaving lakhs of people insecure and afraid, scurrying about to find decades old documents to prove who they are and where they belong as the SIR sweeps across the country. It is common knowledge that government issued documents and lists are often contradictory, with mistakes ranging from wrong photographs to misspelt names and other anomalies. Given low literacy levels and apathy, these are seldom noticed or corrected in time. As women’s organisations have pointed out, married women are especially vulnerable because their surnames and addresses usually change and they may no longer have ready access to maternal homes and parental documents.
Since the SIR began in November 2025 about 60 million names have been deleted from the electoral rolls in just 12 states and Union Territories. The SIR is now being conducted in another 19 states and territories. The DUJ fears that the SIR will be an exclusionary instrument leaving millions outside its purview, not just journalists whose prominence enables them to challenge their own exclusion.