R. Rajagopal edited a well-known Kolkata based newspaper for many years. This year, he discovered that the Republic was no longer sure he existed. In March, his name vanished from the electoral roll of his constituency. The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) could not trace him in the voters’ list of 2003. It could not trace his late father either. His father was a Gandhian, a retired professor, once the state secretary of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi in Kerala. He died in 2016. A man who gave his life to the Republic’s founding creed had become a gap in a register.Rajagopal was one of nearly 27 lakh people struck off the rolls in West Bengal. The reason offered was a phrase: “Logical discrepancy”. He sent his matriculation certificate. It was found insufficient. His appeal sits before a tribunal. He could not vote in the recent election.Then the second blow fell. He had applied to renew his passport. He gave his biometrics on March 19. The police would not clear his verification because his name no longer appeared on the voters’ list. The very deletion that took his vote reached across and took his passport. By the end of June, he had waited a hundred days. Kolkata Police had sent an adverse report. He was told to appear before the passport office at once. The earliest appointment they would give him was weeks away.In April, his daughter married in San Francisco. He holds a valid ten-year American visa. He could not go. He had no passport. A father missed his daughter’s wedding because a clerk could not find a line on a list.Now consider what the government has chosen to do. On Passport Seva Divas, the Union Ministry of External Affairs told the country that a passport is a travel document and not a document of citizenship. As a matter of strict law, the ministry was right. The passport is issued under the Passports Act, 1967. Citizenship is governed by the Citizenship Act of 1955. One law regulates a document. The other regulates a status. But the law and the street do not always speak the same language.Also read: EGI Condemns Deletion of Veteran Journalist R. Rajagopal’s Name From Electoral Rolls, Non-Renewal of His PassportWhat is technically legal is not the common understanding of how things work. For most Indians, the passport is the most authoritative thing the Republic has ever given them. It bears the name of the country. It carries their face. It is honoured at every border in the world because foreign governments trust that India checked before it issued anyone a passport.The state does not hand out passports to all and sundry. It issues one only after it has satisfied itself that the holder belongs. So when a citizen is told that this document proves nothing about belonging, the natural question follows: If the passport is not proof of citizenship, then what is?The word itself carries the older meaning. “Passport” comes from passing through a port or a gate. It began as a letter from a sovereign, a safe conduct, the state’s blessing on a traveller who wished to leave and to return. The sovereign vouched for the bearer because the bearer was the sovereign’s own. A passport was an authority to leave a country with that country’s blessing. A state does not bless a stranger going out into the world – it blesses one of its own.So the timing was cruel. Passport Seva Divas marks the day the Passports Act came into force in 1967. It is meant to be a day of quiet pride. Instead, the ministry spokesperson made more people anxious than proud. He spoke a legal truth and left a public bruise. People who had never doubted their passports began to wonder what they were worth.Call it the demonetisation effect, applied to passports. In November of 2016, the citizen awoke to find that notes legal until that morning were now no longer so. The currency was still the Republic’s. The promise was still printed on it. Yet people stood in queues, unsure whether what they held was good. The statement about passports did the same thing to belonging. It took a document nobody questioned and taught a nation to question it.Rajagopal’s passport story also shows that the real mischief lies elsewhere. It lies in the electoral roll and its ability to hold the ruler to account. Strike a name from the voters’ list, and you do not merely remove a vote, you take away a citizen’s ability to hold the ruler to account. You not only remove the foundation that police verification stands on but also stall the renewal of the passport. You strip away the proof that the state itself once accepted. The deletion is the kill switch of citizenship. One administrative stroke, and a citizen is dimmed at every counter of the state at once.Also read: Chronology Samajhiye: Method Behind Modi Government’s Passport MadnessThis is the part of the story that should trouble us most, because the Supreme Court was asked to stop it, and did not. In Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India, decided this year, the court upheld the Special Intensive Revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls. Nearly 47 lakh names had been struck off. The court found the exercise proportionate, lawful and procedurally sound. It held that a place on the roll raises only a rebuttable presumption, and that asking a citizen to prove himself afresh does not offend the Constitution.In so holding, the court has tacitly drawn a line through the population. On one side stand the voter-citizens, secure in their papers. On the other stand the non-voter doubtful inhabitants, people like Rajagopal, upon whom administrative vengeance may now be wreaked at leisure. Article 14 promises equal protection of the laws. A court that allows the state to quietly raise two classes of inhabitants, and to protect only one, has not kept that promise. It has failed in its first duty.History offers a grim rhyme. In ADM Jabalpur, half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that even the right to life could be suspended during Emergency. The country never forgave that judgment. This year’s Bihar judgment is its quieter cousin. It has taken away, in normal times and with no Emergency declared, the right to vote, and with it much of the ordinary furniture of civic life. The passport, subsidised rations, access to government health care, education of children…. ADM Jabalpur at least had the excuse of a darkened hour. This judgment has none.Rajagopal has said he does not wish to be seen as a victim. His point is larger. If a known editor can be erased by a clerical phrase, what chance has the labourer, the migrant, the widow with no school in 1959 to write to? He spends his days writing to colleges and to old campaigners, gathering paper to prove that his parents once lived. The Republic has asked him to disprove his own disappearance.The law need not have been diluted to spare him. The ministry might have said simply that a passport is issued only after the government has verified that the holder is a citizen, and that it remains the clearest everyday evidence of being Indian. The court might have held that a citizen long on the rolls cannot be struck off on proof demanded from him, but only on proof brought against him. Neither did so.Thus the Republic may fairly ask a question. Do we have an occasionally fallible Supreme Court? Or do we have a court that repeatedly fails its citizens?Sanjay Hegde is a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India.