Chennai: Single mom fights passport norm

Chennai: The fight of a single mother and her daughter to get her father’s name removed from the latter’s passport as he deserted them, is gaining momentum after the woman’s appeal on  change.org, the web’s leading platform for social change. Union minister Maneka Gandhi has now supported her cause. Unhappy over a girl child, the father had abandoned the family soon after the child’s birth. 

Priyanka Gupta, a 45 year old resident of Janakpuri in Delhi told Deccan Chronicle that she applied for a passport at Bhikaji Kama Place regional passport office, for her now 20-year-old daughter, an architecture student, to go abroad on an educational trip.“

“Our request to avoid his name (daughter’s father) who left us when she was born and never looked back, and did not even care whether we are dead or alive, was denied”, says Gupta. When writing letters to the passport officer, talking to senior officials and submitting the required documents which carried only the mother’s name did not help, they were forced to include his name.

Gupta, employed in a private firm got married in 1994 and her husband abandoned her in 1995, soon after the birth of her daughter. “Since her childhood, my daughter revolted at the very name of her father. Now, every time she looks at her passport, she sees the name of a person who deeply hurt her, who abandoned her”, says Gupta.

Unable to go through the mental agony and torture, she sent to the passport officer a recent Delhi High Court verdict that a biological father’s name was not mandatory in the passport, while pleading for a new passport for the daughter. The response from the Ministry of Home Affairs was: “The decision is taken on a case to case basis and can’t be applied universally”.

“Since my financial situation does not allow me to get into a long drawn legal battle, we decided to send a petition via change.org to Prime minister, Minister of Home Affairs and Minister of External Affairs to look into this matter and help single parents - fathers and mothers, so that they don’t have to go through this agony”, said  Gupta.

Thanks to the online petition, which quickly got huge public response from across the country, Maneka Gandhi, minister for women & child development, has now asked the minister for external affairs Sushma Swaraj to get necessary modifications done in the rules for issuance of passports in such cases as Gupta’s.

Comments by the people who have signed the petition empathize with the duo and the plight of all single parents in the country. “We are still a patriarchal society demonstrating every now and then how cruel and mean we could get towards our female counterparts. When a brave little girl rebels against this disgusting male dictated system, we must support”, reads one such comment.