A United States panel on religious freedom on Wednesday urged the Donald Trump administration to revoke the visa issued to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat and “make him ineligible” to enter the country in the future.

Bhagwat arrived in the US on Tuesday to participate in the RSS’ centenary-year global outreach programme. He is scheduled to address around 5,000 Hindu Americans and Hindu non-resident Indians at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

The RSS is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said that it was “deeply concerned” about Bhagwat’s visit and alleged that groups associated with the RSS “have perpetrated violent attacks against religious minorities, including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs” in recent years.

“Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has enforced policies that closely align with the RSS’ Hindutva ideology, inherently discriminating against religious minority communities,” it added.

The commission again urged the US government to impose sanctions on the RSS.

It had made the demand on August 19 as well, saying that members of the RSS should not be given high-level meetings or diplomatic courtesies in the US.

Dismissing the remarks, India’s Ministry of External Affairs had said on August 21 that the commission was “biased” and lacked credibility.

Randhir Jaiswal, the ministry’s spokesperson, said that the US panel had been making “misleading and provocative statements” about India for years.

“We should stay away from such organisations because they have their own agenda and at the same time have no credibility,” he added.

The commission is an independent American government agency that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion and makes policy suggestions to the White House. These suggestions are not binding.

On Wednesday, Cece Heil, the commission’s vice-chair, said that the US government has an opportunity to hold India accountable “and signal that the United States stands for religious freedom for the people of India”.

“Without this accountability, religious freedom will only deteriorate further, as vigilante mobs continue to attack religious minorities and their houses of worship under the guise of enforcing anti-conversion laws and other harmful policies,” Heil added.

In March, the commission recommended in its annual report that the US government designate India as a “country of particular concern” over alleged systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom.

This was the seventh time that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had made this recommendation.

Objections have also been raised in Canada about Bhagwat’s upcoming visit from August 31 to September 1.

On August 7, two Canadian MPs urged Ottawa to ban the RSS and prevent Bhagwat from entering the country, citing his “history of hate speech” and advocacy of violence against religious minorities.

They said his visit could “lead to social disorder”.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Delhi Police has told the High Court that the bail petitions filed by activist Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in the 2020 riots conspiracy case were “illegal” and an “attempt to mislead the court”, reported Bar and Bench on Wednesday.

The police also repeated its allegations that Khalid and Imam were the “masterminds” of the riots, reported Live Law.

Khalid, Imam and several other activists were arrested between January 2020 and September 2020 in connection with the communal violence that broke out in North East Delhi in February 2020 between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it. The violence had left 53 dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.

Those accused in the matter have been charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, the Arms Act and sections of the Indian Penal Code.

The police have claimed that the violence was part of a larger conspiracy to defame the Narendra Modi government and was planned by those who organised the protests against the amended Citizenship Act.

The trial against Khalid and Imam is yet to begin.

This is the third round of bail pleas the activists have filed. On the first two occasions when they petitioned to get bail, their pleas were rejected right up to the Supreme Court.

Referring to the Supreme Court’s January order denying them bail, the police have told the High Court that according to the order, the “risk profiles” of all accused are “markedly dissimilar”, which justifies the continued detention of the activists, reported Live Law.

On January 5, a bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria granted bail to Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan in the Delhi riots case.

The bench had said that Khalid and Imam could file fresh petitions after all protected witnesses are examined or after one year. It also said that in cases under the anti-terror law, delay in trials cannot act as a “trump card” overriding statutory safeguards.

The police have argued before the High Court that the threshold then set by the Supreme Court has not yet been met, reported Bar and Bench.

Noting that the two activists’ petition relies on an order delivered in May by the Supreme Court, the police said that the judgment of a co-ordinate bench in a different case cannot override the directions issued in January.

On May 18, a Supreme Court bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan criticised the January verdict, saying that “bail is the rule and jail is an exception” even in prosecutions under the anti-terror law.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• Umar Khalid’s five years of incarceration: ‘Do I even know the world any more?’

• ‘Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar’: A JNU teacher’s message for her jailed students

Sonya Gill, women’s rights activist and co-founder of the digital news outlet People’s Archive of Rural India, died after a prolonged illness on Tuesday. She was 70.

Gill was a former secretary of the Maharashtra unit of the All India Democratic Women’s Association. She had founded PARI with her husband, journalist P Sainath, in December 2014 and continued to serve as its trustee.

With deep regret, we share the sudden passing of Sonya Gill, PARI Co-Founder and Trustee, on August 25, 2026.. Sonya worked for decades on women's rights issues and had been Secretary of AIDWA, Maharashtra. She was the wife of PARI Founder, Journalist P. Sainath. pic.twitter.com/ZMHSXsM0Xx

— People's Archive of Rural India (@PARInetwork) August 26, 2026

The All India Democratic Women’s Association described Gill’s death as an “immense and irreparable loss” to the women’s movement.

“She was a dedicated organiser, a committed fighter for women’s rights and a comrade whose warmth, grace and determination touched all those who worked with her,” stated the association.

It added that Gill had built the association from the grassroots. Her efforts at it had started with the work she did to support women living in Mumbai’s chawls.

“Comrade Sonya was a courageous fighter,” added the association. “Even while battling a prolonged illness, she continued to participate in AIDWA activities until the very end. She faced her illness with extraordinary courage and dignity, never allowing her personal difficulties to come in the way of her commitment to the movement.”

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In her tribute to Gill, human rights activist Teesta Setalvad wrote that she was a mentor to hundreds of activists from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

“Sonya Gill’s own quiet revolutionary journey will and must be treasured, by comrade husband Sainath, family, women saathees and party as it undoubtedly will,” wrote Setalvad in The Wire.

CPI(M) General Secretary MA Baby said that Gill’s death was “a huge loss for the progressive women’s movement in the country”.

“She will always be remembered as a committed communist, fierce feminist and tireless organiser who worked wholeheartedly to advance the working-class movement in the country, especially in Maharashtra,” he added.

Baby also expressed condolences to Sainath and all of Gill’s family members.

Comrade Sonya Gill’s untimely demise is a huge loss for the progressive women’s movement in the country. She will always be remembered as a committed communist, fierce feminist and tireless organiser who worked wholeheartedly to advance the working-class movement in the country,… pic.twitter.com/4kAcvvmSWE

— M A Baby (@MABABYCPIM) August 27, 2026

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

In the vast mangrove delta of the Sundarbans, where the Bengal coast dissolves into tidal rivers and dense forest, survival depends on more than a boat and a net. Before entering the forest to collect honey or cut wood, fishermen and wood-gatherers stop at small shrines along the treeline to invoke Bonbibi, a figure one 19th traveller called a “strange goddess”, believed to be the keeper of the forest.

Bonbibi is, by origin, a Muslim figure. Her legend, interwoven with the tiger god Dakshin Ray and the mediating saint Ghazi Miyan, forms the cosmological grammar of an entire ecosystem: a shared sacred world in which tigers, humans, forest spirits, and Muslim saints negotiate the boundary between the wild and the habitable.

What, exactly, makes this a Muslim ecology? Not the presence of Muslims as such. Hindu, animist, and tribal communities too invoke Bonbibi. What makes it Muslim is that an Islamic idiom – a saint, a sacred genealogy, a moral vocabulary of protection and transgression drawn from Islamic devotional practice – has become one of the registers through which an entire regional community, across religious lines, understands and regulates its relationship with a dangerous and necessary landscape.

This essay is about Muslim ecologies: not environmental knowledge that happens to be held by Muslims, but ecological practice and ethical reasoning in which an Islamic vocabulary does identifiable work: dividing the forest, sanctifying a pond, regulating a water channel, restricting a tree.

The claim here is not that Muslims have a special relationship with nature. It is that, across several regions of India, the vernacular life of Islam – its saints, its legal concepts, its devotional geography – has shaped how land, water and animals are managed. This history has gone almost entirely unrecognised in how India thinks about its environmental past and present.

The Bengal Delta

The story of Bonbibi is best understood not as folklore decoration but as a working cosmology for an unworkable landscape. The Sundarbans are a tidal forest where the line between land and water shifts with every monsoon, where the Bengal tiger is a constant and lethal presence, and where any human entry into the forest interior is, in a quite literal sense, a negotiation with death.

According to the “Bonbibi Johuranama”, a narrative poem that has circulated among fishing and forest-dwelling communities for generations, Bonbibi is sent by God to protect the poor of the forest. She defeats Dakshin Ray, the tiger god and lord of the wild, but does not destroy him: she negotiates. The forest is divided – the deep interior remains the tiger’s domain, while humans may use the margins, provided they enter with humility and seek her blessing first. Ghazi Miyan, the Muslim warrior-saint, witnesses and seals this compact.

This is, in effect, a zoning law expressed as theology. It tells honey-collectors and woodcutters where they may go, on what terms, and what ritual obligations attach to entry – and it does so by fusing an Islamic figure of sainthood with a pre-existing, non-Islamic tiger-deity and forest-spirit complex that long predates the arrival of Islam in Bengal.

The historian Richard Eaton’s account of how Islam became local in Bengal helps explain why this fusion occurred where and how it did. Eaton describes the eastward expansion of Bengali agriculture into forested, sparsely settled tracts of the delta from the 16th century, often led by pirs, Sufi pioneers, who arrived not as conquerors but as forest-clearers. They were granted land by Mughal authorities precisely because they could mobilise local labour and command local legitimacy. These pirs became, in local memory, figures who could ride tigers, command crocodiles, and negotiate with the spirits already understood to inhabit the forest. Sufi shrines functioned, in Eaton’s phrase, as nodes of a “moral ecology” – a cognitive map in which the authority to clear land, the authority to mediate with dangerous animals, and the authority to bless or curse were all held by the same sacred figure.

This is the specific historical mechanism by which an Islamic idiom became a vernacular ecological expression: not through doctrine imposed from above, but through the practical role Sufi pioneers played in the agrarian and ecological frontier of premodern Bengal. The legendary Zindah Ghazi, said to ride tigers, and Khan Jahan, credited with clearing the forests of what is now southwestern Bangladesh by mediating between settlers and the animals and spirits of the land, belong to this same genealogy. Bonbibi is its most enduring popular form – still invoked today by Hindu and Muslim forest-goers alike, in a region where the practical business of staying alive in the mangrove has outlasted, and absorbed, the religious categories that produced it.

The shrine pond

A second, more widely distributed pattern concerns the role of Sufi shrines as informal sanctuaries for endangered wildlife. Here the mechanism is different again, and worth spelling out carefully.

At the shrine of Bayazid Bistami in Chittagong, the sacred pond harbours the black soft-shell turtle, among the rarest turtles in the world. Across present-day Bangladesh and Pakistan, researchers have documented similar shrine ponds inhabited by protected fish and crocodiles, which devotees feed and will not harm. The animals are understood to be in some sense the shrine’s own, connected to the saint’s baraka, his spiritual charge, in ways that vary from place to place but that consistently mark the pond and its inhabitants as off-limits to ordinary use.

The mechanism here is not an abstract Islamic teaching about animals in general. It is the specific, local logic of shrine sanctity: a saint’s tomb radiates a kind of protection outward into its immediate environment, and the pond, being physically continuous with the shrine, falls within that radius. Catching the fish or harming the turtle would be to violate the sanctity of the place itself; a transgression against the shrine, which only secondarily, and almost incidentally, has the effect of protecting the species.

The result, in ecological terms, is nonetheless real. Centuries before the language of conservation biology existed, a religious geography of sanctity was functioning as a de facto protected-area network, scattered across the subcontinent wherever Sufi shrines stood near water. The turtle in the shrine pond is not a religious symbol pressed into ecological service. Its survival has depended on the specific local belief that this pond belongs to this saint: a belief that is simultaneously about Islam, and about this place.

Islamic law as resource law

A third pattern, in the high-altitude cold desert of Kargil in Ladakh, shows the same Islamic idiom doing different ecological work: not zoning a forest or sanctifying a pond, but regulating water and timber in a landscape where both are catastrophically scarce.

Field studies of Muslim communities in Kargil describe how the cutting of juniper – a slow-growing tree that is ecologically critical for soil stability and fuel in this fragile environment – is restricted through community norms. Participants explicitly describe these norms in the vocabulary of Islamic stewardship: the idea that resources are held in trust and that wasteful or excessive use is a kind of wrongdoing for which one is accountable.

Water in Kargil is distributed through collective irrigation arrangements that draw on a specific principle of Islamic law , that flowing water (as distinct from water that has been collected or stored) cannot be privately owned and access to it is a shared right that no individual can foreclose. This is not a vague spiritual orientation toward nature. This legal concept, drawn from the fiqh tradition, performs a distributive function in the irrigation system: determining who may take water, in what order, and on what basis a dispute over a channel is resolved.

What is striking about Kargil is how precisely the Islamic vocabulary maps onto the ecological problem. A cold desert’s two scarcest resources – wood and water – are governed by, respectively, an ethic of accountable stewardship and a legal doctrine about the non-ownability of flowing water. Neither of these is a generic “Islam is green” claim.

Both are specific doctrinal resources, selected and emphasised because they happen to fit the ecological problem at hand. This is exactly what one would expect when religious vocabulary is used as a regulation by people living with scarcity, rather than being read into their practices after the fact by an outside observer.

Vernacular architecture

A fourth, more diffuse pattern is visible in the way mosques across India took on entirely different built forms depending on region. The multi-pitched terracotta roofs of rural Bengal echo the thatched bamboo-and-mud houses of the delta and shed the region’s heavy monsoon rain.

The sloping tiled roofs of the Malabar coast in Kerala, which use locally available materials, are suited to its different but equally intense rainfall. The tiered wooden forms of Kashmir are built for snow load and for a climate where wood, not stone, was the available building material.

These adaptations are sometimes described simply as evidence of Islam’s capacity to absorb local aesthetic traditions. This is true but understates the point. A roof pitched to shed monsoon rain or built from the timber a forested hill region produces, is a building in working relationship with its climate and its materials.

It is, in a modest but real sense, an ecological adaptation arrived at by communities who needed their houses of worship to survive the same weather as their houses of living. That this adaptation happened differently in Bengal, Kerala and Kashmir – producing three quite different built vocabularies, all recognisably Islamic and local – is itself evidence against any singular “Muslim” relationship to the environment.

What is Muslim about this?

What is Muslim here is a set of practices that took shape differently in each place, in dialogue with each place’s ecology. In each of the four cases described – a forest cosmology in Bengal, shrine ponds across the subcontinent, water and timber law in Kargil, and mosque architecture in three regions –what makes the practice “Muslim” is different and specific.

In the Sundarbans, it is a saint-figure and a sacred narrative, of Islamic provenance, that organises a cosmology shared across religious communities. It is Muslim in origin and idiom, but not Muslim in exclusive ownership or practice. In the shrine-ponds, it is the specific logic of Sufi sanctity – the baraka of a tomb extending into its surroundings – that produces a conservation effect as a side-consequence of devotional geography. In Kargil, it is Islamic legal doctrine that supplies the rules of a resource-management system. In mosque architecture, it is the way Islamic religious building, as a category, take on the specific ecological grammar of each region it arrived in.

What unites these cases is not a shared “Islamic environmental ethic” that exists prior to and independent of local context, waiting to be applied. It is rather that Islam in India has also been local and environmental. It arrived in, and took shape within, specific ecological and social landscapes, via specific historical agents: Sufi pioneers in Bengal’s forest frontier, jurists and irrigation communities in Ladakh’s cold desert, builders working with regional materials and climates.

In becoming local, it became, in these instances, ecological. Islamic vocabulary did not arrive as an abstract doctrine and get “applied” to nature in general; it arrived embedded in specific practices of settlement, sanctity, law and building, each of which had to come to terms with a specific landscape.

This also clarifies what this essay is not claiming. It is not claiming that anything done by a person who happens to be Muslim – a Muslim farmer, a Muslim scientist, a Muslim novelist – constitutes “Muslim ecology” simply by virtue of the practitioner’s identity. That would make the category so broad as to be analytically empty and would risk exactly the kind of forced or essentialising move that this framing wants to avoid. The cases above are different in kind. In each, an identifiably Islamic vocabulary, narrative, legal concept or institutional form is doing identifiable work in how land, water, trees, or animals are actually treated.

Faith as vocabulary

None of these amounts to a singular claim that Islam determines ecological outcomes, or that Muslim communities are inherently more conservation-minded than others. Region, caste, livelihood and local political economy all matter – often more, in any given instance, than religious identity. The Kargil irrigation system would not function on doctrine alone; it depends on local enforcement, kinship obligation, and the practical fact that everyone in a watershed needs the system to work. The Bonbibi cosmology did not, in itself, prevent the colonial-era and postcolonial destruction of large parts of the Sundarbans mangrove. A cosmology is not a conservation policy, and treating it as a substitute for one would be its own kind of error.

What religious identity does provide, in each of these cases, is a vocabulary: a set of terms – stewardship, sanctity, the non-ownability of flowing water, the moral geography of a saint’s protection – through which ecological relationships can be named, argued about, and handed down.

Concepts like khalifah (often glossed as stewardship), hima (a pre-Islamic and early Islamic institution of protected land, adapted in various local forms), and fasaad (corruption or disorder on the earth, a Quranic term) are available, across the Muslim world, as a moral vocabulary for ecological argument. Whether, and how, that vocabulary gets taken up in any given place depends also on local circumstance. The vocabulary is portable; its ecological uptake is complex and also local.

Seen this way, what is distinctive about this material is not that it represents a separate or parallel ‘Muslim environmentalism’, set apart from other Indian environmental traditions. It is that it is irreducibly syncretic and transregional in a way that other, better-recognised strands of Indian environmental thought – indigenous forest-rights traditions rooted in specific territorial claims, or Dalit ecological politics rooted in the specific experience of caste and pollution – are not, or not in the same way.

The Bonbibi cosmology is simultaneously Islamic, animist, and Hindu, crossing all three registers in a single narrative shared by communities who do not share a single religious identity. The shrine-pond pattern recurs, with local variation, from Chittagong to the Sindh – the same logic of saintly sanctity producing parallel conservation effects across very different ecologies and political boundaries.

Kargil’s water law draws on a legal tradition that is simultaneously rooted in this specific Ladakhi watershed and connected to a body of jurisprudence shared across the Muslim world. This trans-regional portability, combined with deep local specificity, is most distinguished feature. It is also, not incidentally, a direct rebuttal to the idea, current in some political discourse, that Muslim presence in a landscape is inherently foreign to it, or stands outside its ecological history. The opposite is closer to the truth: in these cases, an originally extra-regional religious vocabulary became one of the idioms through which intensely local ecological relationships were – and in places still are – organised.

Recovering the Frame

Indian environmental scholarship has, over several decades, expanded its sense of who counts as an environmental subject. Indigenous communities are recognised as ecological stewards with territorial claims. Women are recognised as primary managers of household and agrarian resources. Dalit communities are recognised as disproportionate bearers of environmental risk and as holders of a distinct ecological politics rooted in the experience of pollution and exclusion. Each of these recognitions involved identifying a specific relationship – a specific vocabulary, a specific structural position – through which a community’s environmental experience could be named and analysed.

Muslim communities, by contrast, remain largely outside this frame, not because the relevant material does not exist, but because it has not been organised around a comparably specific analytical question. This essay has tried to pose that question narrowly: not “what have Muslims done for the environment”; but where has an Islamic vocabulary done identifiable work in how a landscape is managed, and what does that tell us about how Islam became, in these places, local and ecological.

The answer, in the cases surveyed here, is that this has happened more often, and more substantively, than India’s environmental discourse currently recognises. Recovering this history does not add a footnote to existing accounts of Indian environmentalism so much as it complicates the map: showing forest cosmologies, shrine ecologies and resource law that are at once Islamic, regional, and shared across religious lines, in landscapes from the Bengal delta to the Ladakhi highlands.

This matters, too, against the political backdrop of the present moment, in which Muslim presence in a landscape – a herd on a riverbank, a settlement on a floodplain, a community near a forest – is increasingly read through the vocabulary of encroachment and threat: “land jihad”, “flood jihad”, the figure of the Muslim as ecological transgressor. The material recovered here does not, by itself, answer that politics. But it does establish that the relationship between Islam and the Indian landscape has a much longer and more intimate history than either side of that argument usually allows, a history in which an Islamic vocabulary became, in particular places and for particular reasons, part of how the land itself was understood.

Mukul Sharma is a professor of environmental studies at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. His research focuses on caste, Dalits, Hindu nationalism, environmental justice, and ecological politics in India and South Asia.

This article was first published on The India Forum.

The list of questions for the 2027 census has stoked fears that census data might be used to prepare a National Register of Citizens.

The questionnaire for the 2027 census includes 12 questions that were not asked in the previous census. Ten of these were part of the contentious National Population Register that the Modi government had attempted to conduct in 2020.

With these inclusions, the census has subsumed the National Population Register, which is the first step towards drawing up a National Register of Citizens.

Scroll spoke to lawyers, activists and politicians to understand what the collapse of the distinction between the census and the National Population Register means. Most were of the view that this move could trigger anxieties about citizenship similar to those that had sparked the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.

The main purpose of the census is to collect statistical data about India’s population and their housing and social conditions. But the 2027 census will go beyond questions that allow administrators to construct a statistical picture of how Indians live.

It will, for instance, ask respondents where and when their parents were born and which religion they practiced. Activists worry that this could set off a cycle of investigations and inquiries into the citizenship of those who have been living in India for generations, especially if they are Muslims.

Subsuming the NPR

The population enumeration phase of the census, during which enumerators go door-to-door with a questionnaire, will begin in snowbound parts of North India in September. At least 12 of the 40 questions to be asked as part of this process have never been asked in a census before. These include details about a respondent’s spouse, parentage, nationality and identification documents, such as passport, Aadhaar and voter card number.

This information was meant to be collected in 2020 as part of the National Population Register but the exercise had to be shelved back then on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, even before the pandemic, the National Population Register had been met with fierce opposition from civil society groups because of its design.

Specifically, questions about where and when a respondent’s parents were born caused concern as these could, in theory, help determine whether they were Indian citizens. A 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act made the citizenship of those born in India after June 30, 1987, contingent on the citizenship of their parents.

Those controversial questions have now been included in the census as “father’s particulars” and “mother’s particulars”. Scroll accessed the training manual meant for government officials involved in conducting the exercise to find out what these “particulars” entail. They include name, date of birth, place of birth and religion.

Census enumerators were already expected to ask respondents for their name, date of birth, place of birth and religion. Now, they will have to obtain these details for every respondent’s parents too, raising fears that the data could be used to create a National Register of Citizens.

“NPR combined with NRC and CAA was what we were really fearing in 2019,” said human rights activist Harsh Mander. “The whole agitation at that time was against this. One hoped that the government would have learned lessons from it and set aside this project. But just the first glance at the census seems to suggest that they are going the whole way.”

The National Population Register flows from the sweeping changes that the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government made in India’s citizenship law in 2003. This included defining, for the first time, who an “illegal migrant” was. It then introduced the Citizenship Rules to implement these changes on the ground through, among other things, the National Population Register.

The first National Population Register was consequently drawn up in 2010 and then updated in 2015. The database reportedly contains information about 119 crore residents of the country. All of this data was collected by the same body that conducts the census: the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.

However, in 2020, the National Population Register became mired in controversy for two reasons. First, the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam caused chaos by excluding over 19 lakh people from the final list. The majority of them were Hindus.

And second, the Bharatiya Janata Party promised to create a nationwide National Register of Citizens – that it linked to religion through the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. Now, by subsuming the National Population Register into the census, the Modi government risks reviving the controversy.

“There is a grave danger that the census is becoming an instrument not of collecting information but of finding grounds to exclude and expel targeted communities, especially Muslims, from citizenship,” Mander said.

Is it legal?

Legally, the process of storing and using data collected for the National Population Register is very different from the census. The latter has strong protections in place. “No person shall have a right to inspect any book, register or record made by a census officer in the discharge of his duty,” reads section 15 of the Census Act, 1948.

In contrast, the National Population Register database can be shared with other departments of the Union government as well as state governments. In fact, the 2003 rules say that the National Register of Citizens has to be prepared after verifying entries in the National Population Register.

The Census Act, on the contrary, categorically states that its findings cannot be used as grounds for initiating government action of any kind, which would include probing someone’s citizenship status. “No entry in any such book, register, record or schedule shall be admissible as evidence in any civil proceeding whatsoever or in any criminal proceeding,” it says.

This means that at least on paper, the National Population Register getting subsumed into the census would actually lead to greater data security. But Talha Abdul Rahman, an advocate-on-record at the Supreme Court who takes up cases on data privacy and citizenship, was not convinced that these protections were enough.

He worried that once the government had such granular data, it could amend the Census Act to add an exception for citizenship inquiries. Worse still, even in the absence of a legal exception, authorities could use census data to investigate someone without disclosing the source, he added.

“This is what our experience with citizenship cases in Assam shows,” Rahman said. “Officials often falsely claim that they received inputs from the neighbours of a suspect or other local informants when the actual basis for their actions is profiling.”

Rahman was referring to officials allegedly using the religious or linguistic identity of people as a pretext to investigate their citizenship. He gave the example of Bengali Muslims, who regularly face such profiling in Assam and, of late, other Indian states.

For the lawyer, the main problem was that India did not have a data protection law. “Unless you have a law, what can you do about violations?” he asked. “How will you deal with the problems that might arise? You are getting into a domain that is very private and personal.”

Facing blowback

Journalists, researchers and politicians share this concern. The Hindu’s Deputy Editor Vijaita Singh, who is covering the census for her newspaper, complained that the government had not once explained why it was seeking so much information.

“The census has never been this document-heavy,” she noted, underlining the sheer length of the questionnaire. “Enumerators might face problems because people are very sceptical of sharing information these days. If somebody lands at your doorstep with so many questions, you might get irritated or scared.”

This has happened in the past. The first census, which was conducted by the colonial administration in 1872, drew the ire of Adivasis in what is now Jharkhand. More recently, in 2020, vaccinators in Uttar Pradesh and surveyors in West Bengal faced violence because of widespread panic about the National Register of Citizens.

Bengal, in particular, has only seen contestations over citizenship intensify since then. The BJP has vowed to address the problem of what it calls “large-scale infiltration” in the border state. On the other hand, the Trinamool Congress, which ruled Bengal till May 2026, has vehemently opposed the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register.

This clash peaked earlier this year during the special intensive revision of the electoral roll in Bengal. At the time, the BJP had repeatedly claimed that over one crore undocumented Muslim migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar had their names on the state’s voter lists.

Eventually, over 27 lakh people, most of them Muslims, were denied the right to vote in Assembly elections this year even after they had submitted documents and attended hearings.

Sabir Ahamed, a Kolkata-based researcher, suggested that the new census questionnaire was not yet making headlines in Bengal because people were busy managing the fallout of the voter roll revision.

“So far, there is no awareness about the census because people are still facing difficulties owing to the SIR,” he said, referring to the state’s new BJP government excluding deleted voters from welfare schemes.

But Jawhar Sircar, a retired bureaucrat and a former Rajya Sabha MP from Bengal, was certain that there would be opposition once more Bengalis found out about how the census data could be used for citizenship.

“People will scream once it dawns on them or the Left, the Trinamool Congress or somebody else decides to take issue with the census,” he said.

While the census is slated to begin in Bengal only next year, Opposition parties in the state have already sounded the bugle. The Left will oppose the census “politically”, Mohammed Salim, state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), told Scroll.

“They have started the census,” Trinamool Congress Chairperson Mamata Banerjee said in a statement on Monday. “But this census is a form of NRC.”

Several BJP spokespersons declined interview requests for this story.

With inputs from Safwat Zargar.

Former Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain has moved the Delhi High Court against his conviction for the murder of Intelligence Bureau staffer Ankit Sharma during the 2020 riots in the national capital, Bar and Bench reported on Wednesday.

On July 31, Hussain was sentenced to life imprisonment in the case.

Sharma was killed by a mob during the violence, and his body had been dumped in a drain.

In his appeal before the High Court, Hussain alleged that the investigation against him had been tainted from the start and was aimed at implicating him to satisfy public anger.

“Witnesses have been planted, statements of genuine eyewitnesses manipulated and the actual perpetrators have not been brought to book,” Bar and Bench quoted Hussain as saying in his appeal.

On July 13, a sessions court had convicted Hussain for murder, rioting, disobedience to an order promulgated by a public servant, promoting enmity between groups, rioting armed with a deadly weapon, unlawful assembly, and kidnapping or abducting with intent to secretly and wrongfully confine a person.

However, it cleared him of a criminal conspiracy charge.

In February 2020, violence broke out in northeast Delhi between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it. The violence left 53 people dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: What exactly happened in Delhi locality where AAP councillor stands accused of IB staffer’s murder?

At least 95 persons died in a flash flood and mudslide in Nepal, the police said. Several more are feared dead, with a search and rescue operation underway. More than 100 Indian tourists have been reported missing, amidst a total of 291 foreign citizens who have not yet been traced.

The incident occurred in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s border with China. The mountainous district is located about 120 km north of Kathmandu.

The flash flood swept away several villages along the Bhotekoshi river, and damaged roads and bridges. The cause of the flood has not yet been established. Read on.

The Donald Trump administration in the United States paused immigrant visa appointments globally as consular officials undergo training to identify applicants who may become dependent on public benefits. Applicants scheduled for interviews have been told their appointments would be rescheduled.

The US State Department said that the training was intended to ensure visa applications are assessed “comprehensively and consistently”.

The pause comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration seeking to tighten the rules for entry into the US. Read on.

A Supreme Court judge has accused Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma of misusing his administrative powers ahead of his retirement next month. In letters to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Sandeep Mehta has sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”.

Mehta has alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts. He also claimed that Sharma had “frequently” threatened fellow judges with “retributive action”, including transfer while “claiming his closeness” with the chief justice of India. Read on.

An Indian jewellery firm withdrew an advertisement about Raksha Bandhan featuring actor Kriti Sanon after it received backlash for the outfit she had worn in it. The company, Giva, had released the advertisement for the upcoming Hindu festival during which women tie threads, known as rakhis, around their brothers’ wrists.

Sanon’s outfit was criticised by some social media users, who called it inappropriate for the Hindu religious event and said that it showed a lack of sensitivity towards the festival.

Giva said that it had “highest regard and deep respect” for Indian culture, traditions and festivals. “If our recent advertisement has inadvertently hurt the sentiments of some segments of society, that was not our intent at all,” it said. Read on.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that he does not support an event on Saturday at which Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to speak. However, he said the city may not have “jurisdiction to cancel a private event”.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Mamdani said he was “deeply” opposed to the RSS, describing it as a “movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country”.

Bhagwat arrived in the US on Tuesday for the RSS’ centenary-year global outreach programme. He is expected to address around 5,000 Hindu-Americans and Hindu non-resident Indians in Madison Square Garden. Read on.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our Daily Brief newsletter.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday said he does not support an upcoming event in which Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to speak. However, the city may not have any “jurisdiction to cancel a private event”, he added.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Bhagwat arrived in the United States on Tuesday to participate in the RSS’s centenary-year global outreach programme. He is scheduled to address around 5,000 Hindu-Americans and Hindu NRIs at the Madison Square Garden on Saturday, PTI reported.

Responding to questions about the event and the RSS, Mamdani said it was “incredibly troubling to see the rise of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country”.

Mamdani said he was “deeply” opposed to the RSS, both as an Indian-American and as mayor of New York.

He said that the vision of India he had grown up with was that of “a pluralistic society, of a secular republic that believed in the belonging of each and every person who was from India”.

His statement came against the backdrop of activists and political figures asking him to cancel Bhagwat’s event.

Objections have also been raised in Canada about Bhagwat’s upcoming visit from August 31 to September 1.

On August 7, two Canadian MPs urged Ottawa to ban the RSS and prevent Bhagwat from entering the country, citing his “history of hate speech” and advocacy of violence against religious minorities.

They said his visit could “lead to social disorder”.

On August 19, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom called for sanctions against members of the RSS, describing the organisation as “biased” and lacking credibility.

The commission had said that RSS leaders should not be given high-level meetings or diplomatic courtesies.

Dismissing this, New Delhi on August 21 described the organisation as “biased” and lacking credibility.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

An Indian jewellery firm withdrew a Raksha Bandhan-themed advertisement featuring actor Kriti Sanon after it received backlash for the outfit she had worn in it.

The company, Giva, had released the advertisement for the upcoming Hindu festival during which women tie threads, known as rakhis, around their brothers’ wrists. The outfit worn by Sanon was criticised by some social media users, who claimed that it was inappropriate for a religious occasion and said that it showed a lack of sensitivity towards the festival.

View this post on Instagram

Bharatiya Janata Party MP and actor Kangana Ranaut also criticised the advertisement, saying that it looked “intentionally creepy”.

“Why would you tie your brother a rakhi in your bikini/under garments? Where are all your styling options?” she said.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Giva said that it had “highest regard and deep respect” for Indian culture, traditions and festivals. “If our recent advertisement has inadvertently hurt the sentiments of some segments of society, that was not our intent at all,” the brand said.

The brand said it had withdrawn the advertisement from all media platforms “out of respect”.

Before the advertisement was withdrawn, Sanon had said on Tuesday that culture and traditions are in a woman’s heart, and not in her neckline.

“The essence of festivals is not in the clothes you wear, it is in the emotions and meaning you hold for the traditions,” she wrote on Instagram.

Sanon also questioned why women continue to be told what to wear, saying that ethnic fashion had evolved over the years but women’s respect for their culture was still judged by their clothing.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi shared Sanon’s comments and said that what a woman wears, what she does and where she goes is her choice. “Stop trolling women for exercising their freedom. #SmashThePatriarchy”, he wrote on social media.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Decades ago, in the Banni grasslands of Kachchh, an invasive tree was planted to solve one environmental crisis. Today, big companies are paying to convert the same trees into a charcoal-like substance to solve another problem.

In January 2025, Google announced one of the largest biochar carbon removal deals to date, agreeing to purchase 1,00,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal credits from Varaha ClimateAg Private Limited, a Gurugram-based climate tech startup. Biochar is a carbon-rich charcoal produced by heating organic matter in low-oxygen conditions, which can store carbon in soil for hundreds of years.

By January 2026, Varaha had added Microsoft to its roster of corporate buyers, with Lufthansa, Swiss Re, and Capgemini also signing offtake agreements.

Among Varaha’s initiatives is a project in Kachchh, Gujarat, combining carbon sequestration with ecosystem restoration.

An invasive species

Prosopis juliflora was introduced to Kachchh around the 1960s to arrest desertification. The Banni grassland now has around 50% of its area dominated by this single invasive species, according to Khyati Thacker, a botanist who has spent over five years working on community-led ecosystem restoration in Kachchh and Saurashtra.

Research shows the grassland produced up to 4,000 kg of fodder per hectare in the 1960s; by 1999, that had fallen to around 620 kg. “This Prosopis juliflora has destroyed the jungle, the native trees (such as Vachellia nilotica, Prosopis cineraria, Senegalia senegal) and the grazing grass,” said Kaiyan Rabari, a herdsman from Sangnara village, Kachchh.

Around late 2022, a private project developer approached Sahjeevan, an NGO working in Kachchh, with a proposal to link the restoration work to the carbon market.

A pilot was launched in Dedhiya village, Kachchh, using low-cost Kon-Tiki kilns, cone-shaped metal structures in which Prosopis wood is burned under low-oxygen conditions and then doused with water to produce biochar. “All this was speculation,” said Kavita Mehta, Executive Director of Sahjeevan. “They weren’t sure either, and we weren’t sure either, so it was a pilot for both of us.”

Based on Sahjeevan’s 2023-24 annual report, the Kachchh pilot processed around 800 tonnes of Prosopis, generating approximately 2,000 carbon credits sold on the European voluntary market at roughly $120 per credit.

A credit built on a promise about soil

The climate logic of a biochar carbon credit rests on one central premise: that the biochar produced ends up durably buried in soil, storing carbon for centuries. But on the ground in Kachchh, soil application is not being tracked with the same rigour as production itself.

In Sangnara village, farmer Umra Pala Jepar, 48, described a stockpile left behind after production. “The biochar has been lying in the open at the outskirts of the village since it was all made. Two years have passed, and it is lying just like that.”

In a written response to questions submitted by Mongabay-India on May 28, Varaha said, “In none of our projects does biochar leave the production site before it is mixed with cow dung or manure. Furthermore, Varaha’s systems are designed so that unmixed biochar cannot be submitted to the registry for credits.”

Sahjeevan, in its 2024-25 annual report, noted that in the same Sangnara village, the local Biodiversity Management Committees cleared Prosopis from 30 hectares, converted it into 100 tonnes of biochar, and generated 220 carbon credits.

Gafur Mutva, a contractor in Gorewali village, Kachchh, who produced biochar in Banni, explained the structural difficulty of soil application in the grassland context. “We produce biochar, but there is no agriculture here in this specific area to apply it to. If we transport it outside Banni, the logistics cost increases. That is why we dig a pit there and apply it directly into the soil.” He flagged an unintended consequence, “The biochar retains soil moisture, but we noticed that instead of helping native grasses, that moisture appeared to be benefiting the invasive Prosopis juliflora. Double the baval grows instead of native grass,” he said.

Shailesh Vyas, an agriculture expert who conducted biochar soil trials across multiple locations in Kachchh as an assessment for Sahjeevan, found the results troubling. “We experimented in the arid and semi-arid landscapes of Kachchh. The results were entirely negative. The crop production actually dropped across all biochar plots compared to the control plots.”

His explanation is rooted in soil chemistry, “Whenever you burn wood, the resulting product is largely alkaline. The soil in Kachchh is already naturally alkaline. When you introduce an alkaline additive to an already alkaline environment, it does not reduce the pH (a scale that tells us how acidic or alkaline soil is); it increases it,” Vyas said.

In response to Mongabay-India’s queries, Varaha said biochar is mixed with cow dung in a 1:1 ratio, saving farmers the cost of inputs such as urea and DAP. Vyas raised a fundamental methodological point, “Cow dung is globally recognised as one of the best soil inputs. If you apply one tonne of biochar with one tonne of cow dung, any benefit you see is highly likely coming from the cow dung itself, not the biochar.”

The ecological cost of restoration

Producing biochar in a Kon-Tiki kiln requires water to quench the burning biomass. Thacker’s field data put the requirement at 500 to 600 litres per kiln. “Kachchh is an arid landscape facing severe water scarcity, where people struggle for drinking water. You are providing funding to do something good, but in the process of doing that good deed, no one has considered how many other vital resources are being wasted,” she said.

Mutva, who ran up to 20 kilns simultaneously, said around 12,000 litres were needed each day, trucked from Khavda or Bhuj since saline water corrodes kilns. “The entire Banni population, along with thousands of pastoralist livestock per village, relies primarily on one Narmada pipeline. The water crisis here is severe.”

Varaha said approximately 500 litres are required per kiln cycle and that it recycles quench water by digging a trench beside each kiln. Mutva found this unworkable. “These theoretical solutions simply do not work on the ground. We made a genuine attempt to recover and save the water. However, at best, we might recover a very small portion from certain batches, which we can then reuse for the next cycle. Beyond that, the overall water consumption in this process is high.” He added, “The kilns are constantly relocated to wherever the raw wood supply is. The labourers handling the heavy wood simply will not take on the additional headache of managing water pipelines.”

The other concern is regrowth. “Babul (P juliflora) grows back to its original state in just two years,” said Babubhai Ravabhai Lalwani, a contractor in Khanpar village, Kachchh. Mutva was more direct, “We destroyed the baval, clearing everything with a JCB. But it still comes back, and it comes back denser. Within a month, this Prosopis juliflora can grow nearly a metre.”

Thackar warned of a structural drift in the model’s purpose. “Rather than restoration, this may become a business model where, once removal is done, you wait three to four years for the Prosopis juliflora to grow back, and then you utilise the biomass again from the same landscape. This would benefit neither the native ecosystem nor the local community,” she said.

In Banni, Prosopis removed from degraded grazing lands when the first Kon-Tiki pilot began in 2022 had, by 2025, reinvaded the same areas, with growth nearly doubling, according to Thacker. “A similar pattern played out in Sangnara, where Prosopis was cleared from around 11 hectares in 2024. Within a year, the number of new recruits had nearly doubled. Villagers said that while funds are being allocated for biochar production and the removal of mature trees, there is no financial support for clearing the new recruits that rapidly regenerate,” Thacker said. “Without that, biochar production alone cannot restore the grasslands. For this reason, many of them were not in favour of biochar production.”

Varaha acknowledged that “significant restoration following Prosopis juliflora removal at a particular site would take at least three to five years of continuous effort.” Mutva said the economics of thorough removal were unworkable. “The compensation rate from the company is also low, so it is difficult to justify the expense of uprooting it every single time,” he said. He received Rs 7 to Rs 8 per kg of biochar; processing one metric tonne of raw biomass yielded only around 200 kg. Mehta confirmed that community institutions were paid Rs 7.2 per kg.

Communities may not know the price at which their credits are sold. “Are we transparently sharing with them at what price their carbon credit will be sold? All these are matters of transparency. With the community, it is necessary because it is their right,” Mehta said.

Varaha said it discloses credit sale prices and revenue breakdowns to communities, signs Free, Prior and Informed Consent agreements with participating communities and village panchayats before production begins, and makes all payments to communities in advance, before credits are issued. Asked for specific figures on how revenue is divided, including its own margin, the company did not provide them.

Mehta flagged issues related to auditing. “The auditor is paid by the same company whose project is being verified, creating a built-in conflict of interest,” Mehta argued. A July 2025 paper by the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the voluntary carbon market’s auditing process is inherently flawed, pointing to the financial relationship between project developers and verifying bodies as compromising genuine independence.

Varaha said its projects are validated annually by a Validation and Verification Body independently appointed by the registry, with unannounced site visits as part of the process. “The audit covers the entire chain, from biomass sourcing through to biochar application,” the company said.

The emissions question

Google has backed biochar as a carbon removal solution because of what it describes as its “ability to scale worldwide.” Even as it invests in such carbon removal projects, however, the company’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 81% between 2019 and 2025. Mongabay-India contacted Google for comment and will update this story if a response is received.

Carbon Market Watch, a non-profit watchdog, argues that this reflects a broader problem with carbon offsetting. “Offsetting is a highly problematic practice because it diverts the focus away from the real emissions reductions that must be urgently achieved, provides ample opportunity for greenwashing and usually does not represent the claimed climate impact,” it said.

“The systems being normalised today will shape how carbon markets function in India,” Mehta said. In Banni, where the monsoon is underway, gando baval is already sending up fresh shoots through land cleared just two years ago.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

A Delhi man on Monday sent a legal notice to Meta and an Instagram creator who allegedly covertly recorded him using camera-equipped smart glasses manufactured by the technology conglomerate.

The creator had posted the video, recorded using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, as a reel on Instagram on July 26. The social media platform is also owned by Meta.

When the man tried to report the video to Instagram, he was told that the content does not violate its community standards.

Digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation, which has provided pro bono legal assistance to the man, contended that the conglomerate is liable for the design and marketing of the device that is “deliberately styled to be indistinguishable” from regular spectacles.

This may be among the first legal actions in India that seek to fix liability on a manufacturer of smart glasses for the harm that the product design may cause.

A man was covertly recorded at a café in Khan Market through camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses while being harassed by a stranger. The footage was uploaded to Instagram, where it crossed 4.19 lakh views and attracted hundreds of mocking comments. IFF has provided pro…

— Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (@internetfreedom) August 25, 2026

In the legal notice, the man said he was covertly recorded at a café in Delhi’s Khan Market. He said that the video posted on Instagram was viewed more than 4.19 lakh times over 10 days and got several comments ridiculing him.

The Internet Freedom Foundation said that the man tried to report the video to Instagram, but the application offered no specific privacy-violation category. He also approached Meta’s grievance officer for India, but received no acknowledgement or decision.

Instagram eventually contacted him on July 28 and July 30, maintaining that the material did not violate its community standards.

In the legal notice, the man has demanded that the video be taken down and that the Instagram creator publish an apology for posting it. He has also demanded Rs 2.05 crore in damages.

The notice asserted that Meta “owed and breached a duty of care to [the man] as a victim, and is liable in negligence for its contribution to the intrusion upon his privacy”.

Meta smart glasses have a small indicator light near the right temple that turns on when a video is being recorded and flashes when a photo is being taken. However, the legal notice asserted that the “recording indicator on the said devices is inadequate and easily overlooked”.

Responding to a query from Scroll about the legal notice, Meta said that its smart glasses are designed with in-built privacy and safety features such as the light.

Meta also said that it removes accounts and content from its platforms that violate its policies, including content that encourages or facilitates harassment, regardless of the device used to capture it. It further said it had taken down accounts that systematically shared content filmed without people’s awareness or consent.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Sneha.

A Supreme Court judge has accused Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma of misusing his administrative powers ahead of his retirement next month, Bar and Bench quoted letters sent to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as saying.

Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts.

Mehta has sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”, the legal news outlet reported.

Sharma was appointed as a Rajasthan High Court judge in November 2016 and transferred to the Patna High Court in 2022.

After Sharma sought to return to Rajasthan on health grounds, the collegium headed by DY Chandrachud, the chief justice at the time, declined his request in March 2023. Sharma was transferred to the Punjab and Haryana High Court instead.

In May 2025, a fresh collegium recommended his return to Rajasthan.

He later became the acting chief justice of the Rajasthan High Court. Mehta wrote in his letters that Sharma has held the position for “more than 10 months”, Bar and Bench reported.

Mehta has also claimed in his letters that several judges of the Rajasthan High Court had approached him during his visits to the state and expressed concerns about Sharma’s conduct.

He alleged that Sharma had “frequently” threatened fellow judges with “retributive action”, including transfer while “claiming his closeness” with the chief justice of India.

Among the allegations, the Supreme Court judge also highlighted a complaint by an advocate addressed to Justice Vikram Nath and copied to him and 15 others, which alleged that Sharma had used his position as acting chief justice to secure permanent appointments to Lok Adalats in Jaipur and Ajmer for persons close to him. These included a childhood friend and the spouses of two district judges, Bar and Bench reported.

In letters dated August 2, August 10 and August 17, Mehta repeatedly urged Kant to appoint a chief justice from another High Court, warning that the continued failure to act was “wholly against the interest of the institution”, Live Law reported. Mehta was elevated to the Supreme Court from the Rajasthan High Court.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

New Delhi on Wednesday rejected as “politically motivated” and “highly malicious” the United Nations’ racial discrimination watchdog’s observations about the alleged targeting of Rohingya refugees and Bengali-speaking Muslims by Indian law enforcement agencies.

On Tuesday, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that there had been an “increase in law enforcement operations targeting Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers”, particularly following an order by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in 2017 and the 2025 Pahalgam terror attack.

The 2017 order was an apparent reference to a directive issued by New Delhi that year detailing instructions for the deportation of undocumented migrants, including Rohingyas.

Weeks after the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025, the Union home ministry had directed the states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Following the May 2025 directive, the police in several states, most of them ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asking them to prove that they are Indian citizens.

Several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after the state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

On Wednesday, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said the UN committee’s review was a routine treaty-body process and that India had participated in it in a “spirit of constructive engagement”.

He added that India had highlighted its constitutional safeguards, legal framework, pluralism and efforts to protect disadvantaged communities during the review.

“While we will respond to the committee’s observations through the established procedure, the inter-ministerial delegation, which was led by the Solicitor General…Tushar Mehta, had already rejected the sweeping generalisations, unsubstantiated allegations, or tendency to exceed the convention’s mandate during the review meeting,” Jaiswal said.

The UN panel had also said that it was concerned about violations allegedly perpetrated by the law enforcement authorities against the Scheduled Tribes, the Scheduled Castes and other groups, and urged New Delhi to act in the matter.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: How India allegedly deported 40 Rohingya refugees by forcing them into Andaman Sea

The Allahabad High Court has observed that wearing a headscarf could not be established as an “essential religious practice” in Islam.

A student had approached the court seeking permission to wear a hijab with her school uniform after Tagore Public School in Prayagraj allegedly denied her admission to Class 11 because she wore a headscarf.

The High Court held that there was no material placed on record to establish that a Muslim woman or girl would be considered to have left the faith if she chose not to wear one.

The petitioner had argued that wearing a hijab was an essential religious practice protected under her fundamental rights to equality before the law and freedom of speech and expression.

She also said that she had been allowed to wear the headscarf at the same school from Class 6 onwards without objection.

In an order on August 21, the court said that the school might not have raised any objection in the past due to “lethargy, inaction, lack of will, non-enforcement of the uniform policy, even courtesy or hesitation”. But, this would not prevent the school from implementing its uniform policy or enforcing its dress code now, the court held.

The Allahabad High Court also referred to previous rulings of the Bombay and Karnataka High Courts. The Bombay High Court had held that choosing not to cover one’s head in an all-girls section did not amount to a violation of an essential Islamic practice. The Karnataka High Court, too, had ruled that wearing the hijab was not an essential religious practice.

In October 2022, the Supreme Court delivered a split verdict on a batch of petitions challenging the Karnataka High Court’s order upholding the state government’s ban on wearing the hijab in educational institutions.

Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia had quashed the state government’s order, while Justice Hemant Gupta had dismissed the appeals. As the two judges gave different rulings, Gupta said the matter would be placed before the chief justice for further directions.

The matter is yet to be decided by a larger bench of the Supreme Court.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court was on Tuesday told that only 7 lakh out of 38 lakh appeals before special intensive revision tribunals in West Bengal were against deletions from the electoral rolls, while 31 lakh applications were challenging inclusion in the list, The Telegraph reported.

The appeals against inclusion were filed by the Election Commission and individual objectors, lawyer Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for the petitioner West Bengal Congress leader Prasenjit Bose, told the court.

Sankaranarayanan demanded before a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant that the tribunals should be directed to prioritise the appeals of those deleted from the rolls, The Telegraph reported.

The lawyer pointed out that out of nearly 83,000 appeals that were disposed of, tribunals allowed voters to be included in the electoral rolls in more than 75,000 cases, which meant that over 90% of the decided appeals had been ruled in favour of the voters.

In this backdrop, Sankaranarayanan demanded that tribunals should prioritise appeals of those who had been excluded from voters, noting that there was a “track record” of voters being directed to be included eventually, Live Law reported.

The advocate further suggested that appeals from Kolkata and Howrah in particular be given priority, as municipal elections in the two cities are expected to take place in December.

Sankaranarayanan told the court that the information was part of a Right to Information response provided by the state chief electoral officer to Congress MP Isha Khan Choudhury.

The advocate contended that there was no need to set up additional tribunals if the appeals against deletions are prioritised, Live Law reported. He argued that those appealing against inclusions had other remedies under the Representation of the People Act, which they could use instead of burdening the tribunals.

The Supreme Court then directed the Election Commission to file an affidavit stating the number of appeals pending before tribunals, a break-up of appeals filed by excluded persons and those against inclusions, and actions taken in response to the applications.

The special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal was carried out before the Assembly elections in April.

Final rolls published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.

By April 6, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of West Bengal’s electorate before the revision process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls.

Since the nationwide exercise began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to scrap the current caste census questionnaire and prepare a new one based on a verified list of castes.

Gandhi and Kharge said that the government had chosen an open-ended question to record caste details, which they argued could result in the same caste being recorded under different names, sub-castes and with regional variations.

They proposed creating a drop-down list of castes, similar to the method used for enumerating Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Read on.

The Supreme Court sought responses from 20 rebel Trinamool Congress MPs on a plea by party leader Abhishek Banerjee challenging the delay by the Lok Sabha speaker in deciding the disqualification petitions he has filed against the legislators. The bench did not issue notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, who is the main respondent in the case.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament in July, Birla accepted the request of the rebel MPs to sit separately in the Lok Sabha. However, the speaker has not yet recognised the group’s merger with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. Read on.

The Calcutta High Court directed that no coercive action be taken against Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee in three first information reports registered against him. There was no need for Banerjee to be interrogated in custody, a judge said.

The TMC leader was granted protection till November 30, or until further orders.

The court stipulated that Banerjee be given at least 48 hours’ notice before being called for interrogation and asked the TMC leader to cooperate with the police. Read on.

The United Nations’ watchdog on racial discrimination expressed concern about Indian law enforcement officers allegedly targeting Rohingya refugees and Bengali-speaking Muslims. The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that there had also been an increase in the authorities allegedly targeting migrants and asylum-seekers, particularly in the past year.

The panel said it was concerned about deportations and “forcible returns of people in need of international protection, in violation of the principle of non-refoulement”.

The committee also said that it was concerned about violations allegedly perpetrated by the law enforcement authorities against ethnic and ethno-religious groups, the Scheduled Tribes, the Scheduled Castes, particularly Dalits. It called on India to “urgently address” discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes. Read on.

The Supreme Court directed rape convict journalist Tarun Tejpal to surrender to the authorities within two weeks. Tejpal, the former editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine, had moved the Supreme Court on Thursday challenging the Bombay High Court’s decision to convict him of raping and sexually harassing a junior colleague in 2013. He was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

The bench agreed to list Tejpal’s appeal, provided he submits his surrender certificate by September 22.

The Goa government has also moved the Supreme Court seeking life imprisonment for Tejpal instead of the 10-year sentence. Read on.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our Daily Brief newsletter.

The United Nations’ watchdog on racial discrimination on Tuesday expressed “grave concern” about Indian law enforcement officers allegedly targeting Rohingya refugees and Bengali-speaking Muslims.

The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that there had been an “increase in law enforcement operations targeting Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers”, particularly following an order by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in 2017 and the 2025 Pahalgam terror attack.

The panel also said that it was concerned about violations allegedly perpetrated by the law enforcement authorities against the Scheduled Tribes, the Scheduled Castes and other groups.

The comments were made as part of the committee’s findings on India, Finland, Honduras and Kuwait after reviewing the four countries at a recent session of the panel.

The committee of 18 independent rights experts monitors adherence to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by signatory countries. This was the first time since 2007 that India appeared for review before the panel, AFP reported.

The 2017 order was an apparent reference to a directive issued by New Delhi that year detailing instructions for the deportation of undocumented migrants, including Rohingyas.

Weeks after the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025, the Union home ministry had directed the states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Following the May 2025 directive, the police in several states, most of them ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asking them to prove that they are Indian citizens.

Several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after the state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

In May 2025, Scroll had reported how the Indian authorities had allegedly deported 40 Rohingya refugees by forcing them into the Andaman Sea.

On Tuesday, the United Nations committee noted that the “police stops and identity checks involving racial profiling had reportedly resulted in arbitrary arrest and detention without due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment”.

The panel said that it was also concerned about deportations and “forcible returns of people in need of international protection, in violation of the principle of non-refoulement”.

The committee called on India to “urgently address” discrimination, hate speech and hate crimes against Rohingya, Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers. It also asked New Delhi to protect the groups’ rights, “refrain from collective expulsions” and ensure access to international protection in line with the principle of non-refoulement.

Refoulement is the unlawful act of forcing asylum seekers or refugees to return to a country where they were persecuted or face threats to their lives.

The committee said that it was also concerned about reports of alleged large-scale violations “perpetrated by law enforcement officials” against ethnic and ethno-religious groups, the Scheduled Tribes, the Scheduled Castes, particularly Dalits.

“These included racially motivated violence, excessive use of force, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary and prolonged detention without due process, torture, ill-treatment and sexual violence,” the committee said in a statement.

The panel called on India to conduct prompt, thorough and impartial investigations into all such allegations and hold those responsible accountable.

The Ministry of External Affairs has not yet commented on the committee’s findings.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: How India allegedly deported 40 Rohingya refugees by forcing them into Andaman Sea

Pakistan’s Kirana Hills, which is reported to have a nuclear installation, may have been struck by a loitering munition fired by India during Operation Sindoor in May 2025, said former Chief of Defence Staff General Anil Chauhan on Tuesday.

Chauhan was the chief of defence staff during the military operation carried out against what India claimed were terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

The strikes were in response to the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which killed 26 persons on April 22, 2025.

Speaking at an event in Delhi on Tuesday, Chauhan said that the Indian military did not launch munitions to deliberately target a nuclear site.

India had sent several munitions towards Sargodha to search for radars around the area, he said. “Kirana Hills is about 10 kilometres north of Sargodha,” added Chauhan.

He said that the munitions had an endurance of around two hours and if they failed to find a target within that time, would eventually descend and strike elsewhere.

During Operation Sindoor, the Indian armed forces had confirmed that they had hit the Pakistani air base in Sargodha, among others. However, Air Marshal AK Bharti, the director general of air operations at the time, had rejected claims that Indian forces had targeted Kirana Hills.

“Thank you for telling us that Kirana Hills houses some nuclear installation,” said Bharti on May 12, 2025. “We did not know about it. We have not hit Kirana Hills, whatever is there.”

Referring to Bharti’s statement, Chauhan said on Tuesday that he had “rightly clarified” that Kirana Hills was not an intended target.

India and Pakistan had reached an “understanding” to halt firing on May 10, 2025.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

India and China on Tuesday discussed making progress on boundary delimitation and maintaining peace along the disputed border, as National Security Adviser Ajit Doval and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi held their 25th round of talks in Beijing.

The Indian Embassy in Beijing said the two sides “positively reviewed the ongoing momentum in bilateral relations”.

“They discussed ways to further expand bilateral cooperation, maintain stability and ensure peace and tranquility in the border areas, and make progress on boundary delimitation, while sustaining the ongoing work on transboundary cooperation,” the embassy said.

NSA Shri Ajit Doval co-chaired the 25th Meeting of SRs on India-China Boundary Question with his counterpart H. E. Wang Yi, Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPC and China’s Foreign Minister on 25 August 2026 in Beijing. The two sides positively reviewed the… pic.twitter.com/op50eDrU8i

— India in China (@EOIBeijing) August 25, 2026

The two sides reviewed progress in implementing the “important consensus” reached by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Kazan in October 2024 and Tianjin in August 2025, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

They also expressed satisfaction at the “steady resumption of people-to-people and cross-border exchanges”, including the ongoing Kailash Manasarovar Yatra and border trade through the three designated border trading passes.

China’s Foreign Ministry said the two sides “held in-depth discussions on advancing border delimitation negotiations, strengthening border management and control, improving mechanisms and promoting cross-border cooperation”, The Hindu reported

However, neither side specified which parts of the Line of Actual Control were being considered for possible delimitation. Boundary delimitation refers to the process of deciding and formally agreeing on where the international boundary between the two countries should run.

The two sides agreed to use the Special Representatives’ mechanism to pursue “a fair, reasonable and mutually acceptable package solution to the boundary question”, the Chinese statement said.

Wang said China and India should draw lessons from history, place the boundary question appropriately within bilateral relations and continue moving forward without stagnating or backtracking.

Doval said the India-China relationship had been “steadily returning to normalcy” over the past year and linked this to both sides maintaining peace and tranquillity along the border.

He said the talks were particularly important ahead of the BRICS summit in New Delhi in September, which the Chinese president is expected to attend.

Doval and Wang held small-group discussions lasting more than 90 minutes before wider delegation-level talks later on Tuesday.

Border tensions between India and China escalated in June 2020 when a violent face-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers took place in Ladakh’s Galwan Valley along the Line of Actual Control. It led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers. Beijing said that the clash left four of its soldiers dead.

Following the military face-off, both countries deployed thousands of soldiers along with heavy artillery in the region. China and India held several rounds of military and diplomatic talks to resolve their border standoff.

In October 2024, the two countries announced that they had reached a patrolling arrangement along the Line of Actual Control, “leading to the disengagement” of the two militaries in eastern Ladakh.

The bilateral relations have seen a thaw since 2024.

In July 2025, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that relations between India and China were “steadily improving” and called for the continued normalisation of bilateral ties.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• India’s knotty China problem
• Interview: From Trump to West Asia, India’s diplomatic troubles go back to post-Galwan failure

Twenty-three-year-old Ayesha* fought hard to study a master’s degree in social sciences and finally land a corporate job in Delhi in 2024. But within a year, she was struggling to stay afloat with her starting salary of Rs 40,000.

She was paying Rs 18,000 a month for a gated, paying guest accommodation, a metro-adjacent location and a neighbourhood she could come home to at night without planning ahead. After food, travel, groceries and sending money home, she was saving Rs 1,000 at best.

The latest annual Periodic Labour Force Survey data says that women’s workforce participation stood at 40% from January to December 2025. It means the number of Indian women working has nearly doubled from 23.3% in 2017-’18.

However, the rise in women’s workforce is largely among rural workers, and a significant part of it appears to be driven by a change in the definition that reclassified women performing subsistence and domestic tasks as “self-employed”.

These numbers also conceal the high costs paid by first-generation Dalit or Muslim women to attain a private sector job and remain employed in an Indian city. These are the women who are most likely to have broken through family resistance and constrained networks to land a job that offers upward mobility.

This “intersectional tax”, as I call it, falls hardest on the women who have the least capacity to absorb it, becoming a drain on income and savings.

The price of safety

The first might be called the safety premium.

A woman migrating alone to Bengaluru, Mumbai, or Delhi for her first salaried job is likely to pay more for safe accommodation unlike male colleagues. For first-generation working women, this can be a high added cost on trainee-level salaries.

Entry-level salaries range between Rs 30,000-Rs 40,000 a month, according to two estimates.

A 2023 Foundit report on the white-collar jobs market puts entry-level salaries at Rs 3.45- Rs 6.75 lakh per annum in IT and Rs 3.28-Rs 5.40 lakh in Banking, Finance Services and Insurance. Similarly, GetWork’s fresher salary data for the financial year 2025 shows an average of Rs 4.29 lakh per annum in Mumbai and Rs 4.05 lakh in Delhi.

A gated paying guest facility with a security guard, a building within walking distance of a metro station, a neighbourhood where coming home at 10 pm does not require a prior risk assessment, all command a premium. Zaira (name changed), a 25-year-old Muslim woman in Delhi, paid Rs 16,000 a month for safe accommodation, leaving her with savings of Rs 2,000 at best, she told me.

These costs add up. For instance, an app-based cab during late hours instead of a shared auto became another expense. My conversations during 2023-’25 with 10 women employed in entry-level roles in Delhi suggested these differential costs can account for 10%-15% per cent of a fresher’s take-home pay.

Housing discrimination

Religious and casteist discrimination can compound these costs.

In a 2012 research paper, scholars including SK Thorat documented discrimination against Dalits and Muslims in the housing markets of Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon and Noida. Another study found that the probability of a landlord responding to an upper-caste applicant is 0.35, but it is only 0.22 for a Muslim applicant, and Muslim applicants are especially disadvantaged when applying for one-bedroom houses.

Brokers have been documented advising Muslim clients to conceal their religious identity and to remove visible markers of faith. Dalits and people of other marginalised identities face a similar version of discrimination: scrutiny of surnames, steering them towards particular neighbourhoods, terms and conditions that would not be offered to others.

A young Muslim woman arriving in Mumbai is unlikely to choose her neighbourhood so much as being assigned one by a housing market. The cost of housing bias is longer commutes, higher transport costs and more brokerage payments as she cycles through unwilling landlords. Alongside these is psychological fatigue: of the cumulative weight of concealment, rejection and second-class treatment could affect her performance at work.

Among the 12 Muslim women I met at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 2023-25, several chose not to pursue jobs in Mumbai because of the city’s hostile rental market.

Almost none of them work in Mumbai or Delhi now, except one woman who is a member of a political organisation and has a support system. They repeatedly talked about how difficult it is to navigate the housing market as a visibly Muslim woman. Finding accommodation was described as one of the biggest barriers to living and working independently in these cities.

Then there is the cost of menstruation.

India currently has no national menstrual leave policy. One study from 2015 of about 1,000 women found that at least 70% of the participants suffered from dysmenorrhea, or painful menstruation cramps. Most Indian companies offer between 18 and 21 days of combined earned, sick and casual leave annually.

A 23-year-old, first-generation Muslim woman employed at a five-day, work-from-office company told me that she needs a sick leave every month. Her organisation offers 18 days of combined leave annually and has a no-sandwich-leave policy, which means if she takes a Friday and Monday off, four days are deducted. She told me that managing her menstruation through the year left her with barely any days off to travel home.

How it adds up

Consider two women graduates entering Delhi’s formal economy at starting salaries of Rs 40,000 a month. The woman from a socially-privileged background is much better placed to afford these added costs.

For the first-generation Dalit or Muslim woman, the higher rent for safe housing, additional transport costs and the cost of living in a city adds up.

The cumulative savings divergence between two workers on identical incomes will compound. The financial cushion that makes risk-taking in careers possible, investing in further education, surviving a period of unemployment or leaving a bad job gets built at a slower rate, or not at all.

This is the mechanism through which caste and religious disadvantage reproduces itself in the formal labour market.

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation should consider publishing labour force participation data disaggregated by social group and urban-rural residence.

As long as policymakers cannot see urban Dalit women and urban Muslim women as distinct analytical categories, they will continue designing interventions for an average that corresponds to nobody’s actual experience.

India’s efforts to improve women’s economic participation has focused on what keeps women out of the labour market: skill deficits, household norms, patriarchal gatekeeping. Apart from job creation, equity in India’s urban labour markets will require a reckoning with costs paid by some women to stay in the workforce.

Fathima Althaf is a development sector professional with experience in public policy and government advisory. Her research interests are in gender, labour and urban employment.

On the overcast afternoon of August 18, a football match of the Mumbai Football Association’s Second Division League was underway at the Neville D’Souza Football Ground in Mumbai’s Bandra West neighbourhood. Players attacked the ball aggressively, rushing to score before the approaching half-time break.

As the game played out, in his office cabin, located on the ground, Sudhakar Rane, the association’s general secretary, struck a more placid note. “This is currently the only full-size functional football turf in the suburbs where professional football can be played in the city,” Rane said. “It is in a central location, so it’s easily accessible to players from across the city.”

Rane was responding to a proposal that the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation put forward to its general body in late May, to change the “reservation” of the ground, or the specific function for which it was earmarked. The corporation proposed to turn the plot into a convention and exhibition centre.

The city’s football community has reacted with alarm at the proposal, and noted that there is already excess demand for the ground. Ajit Sawant, the assistant secretary of the association, explained that the season that began in May 2025 and was to end in May 2026 is still unfinished. “This season should have been over by now,” Sawant said. “We are running three months late due to the non-availability of the ground.”

The 2.47-acre ground was named after Neville D’Souza, who in the 1956 summer Olympics became the first Asian to score a hattrick in Olympic football. It was inaugurated in 2018, and allotted by the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority to the Mumbai Football Association to “beautify and maintain the ground and use it for football games”. Today the ground sees around 16 tournaments a year, and serves over 15,000 people.

The association’s board members explained that demand for the ground was particularly high because other grounds in the city had become difficult to use over the years. For instance, they said, the popular Cooperage Ground in Nariman Point was leased to a private agency a few years ago, and has since become expensive and difficult to book. Meanwhile, the St Xavier’s football ground in Parel, also a major ground for the city, has been unused since 2022, when it was used by the municipal corporation to construct a rainwater harvesting tank.

Since July, football players and locals from Bandra have been assembling at the ground on Sundays to protest against its closure. The Mumbai Football Association has also filed a petition in the Bombay High Court, seeking to quash the proposal. On August 10, the court instructed the corporation not to take any further decisions in the matter – despite this, on August 18the BMC’s general body cleared the proposal to change the reservation of the ground.

Two days later, on August 20, the court stayed this plan until the next hearing, scheduled for September 18.

Ryan Menezes, a lawyer and vice president of the football association, argued that there was no pressing need for a convention centre in the area, given that there were at least three convention centres between 5 km and 7 km away – the St Andrew’s auditorium, the Jio World Convention Centre and the MMRDA grounds.

Tapan Ghosh, a football referee, travels regularly from Thane district to referee at matches on the ground, echoed this argument. “Why is a convention centre, which can be built anywhere else, more important than one of the few remaining open spaces where professional football can be played in the city?” Ghosh said. “It is all just for earning money.” Besides professional football, Ghosh explained that the ground was also used by local senior citizens for walks, and that working-class youth from the nearby informal settlements had also formed a football team, and used the ground for practice.

Rane, the association’s general secretary, sounded a warning: “If this ground goes, Mumbai might as well stop playing football.”

Scarce open spaces

PK Das, an architect and activist based in Mumbai, said that the proposed takeover of the football ground was part of a larger pattern playing out across India, which he described as “the depletion of public assets for private interests”.

In Mumbai, he noted, apart from recreational open spaces, ecologically important ones, such as the Dharavi salt pans, had also been taken over or destroyed, without much protest. “All land which comes under the umbrella of public land, whether or not it’s managed by an agency, is a common property resource,” he said. “Under our constitution and commitments to the nation, these lands have to be utilised for larger public groups. The government is merely a custodian to promote and protect the public interest.”

But, he added, “they behave as if they are the owners of the land”.

Mumbai has earlier had dedicated policies for the governance of open spaces, but they have lapsed over the years. At present, the city has no such specific policy.

In 1991, for instance, the state government had introduced the Adoption and Caretaker Policy, which allowed for public-private partnerships to manage the city’s open spaces. Under the policy’s adoption mechanism, the government could hand public spaces over to private entities for five-year periods to restore and maintain them. Meanwhile, under the caretaker mechanism, the government could “reserve” an open space for a private entity for a minimum of 33 years – the mechanism also allowed for this period to be extended indefinitely. A year-long study on open spaces in Mumbai by the Urban Design Research Institute, or UDRI, and the NGO Alliance for Governance and Renewal, or NAGAR, noted that over the years, while many adopted plots were returned to the government, several plots leased under the caretaker mechanism remained under private control.

The current conflict over the ground is playing out amidst a larger push towards the commercialisation and privatisation of already scarce open spaces.

Earlier in the year, the BMC proposed converting the Colaba Back Garden into an astroturf, which would have made it unaffordable for lower income communities to use. The proposal was rescinded after locals protested against it. In July, the Gulmohar Area Societies Welfare Group wrote to chief minister Devendra Fadnavis about the allotment of three open spaces in Juhu and Andheri to the Shri Vile Parle Kelvani Mandal, a charitable trust. Similarly, locals in Bandra’s Pali village have also criticised the allotment of a ground to the NGO I Love Mumbai Foundation for conversion into a multi-sport turf and pickleball court. While it is owned by the government, residents said it had been open to the public for decades.

The UDRI-NAGAR study found that greater Mumbai only has 1.28 square metres of public open space per capita. This is dramatically lower than the national standard of the ministry of housing and urban affairs, which recommends 10-12 square metres of open space per capita in cities, including recreational space and natural spaces like forest cover and flood plains.

The study stated that the “city today faces a twofold challenge; a severe deficit in per capita open space, falling significantly short of national standards; and inadequate protection, development and maintenance of the limited open spaces that remain”. It further notes that the Mumbai Municipal Corporation Act of 1888 “classifies the maintenance of open spaces as a discretionary duty” and not a “mandatory” obligation.

Of particular note is the study’s observation that according to the municipal corporation’s development plans, several spaces to which the public enjoys limited or no access, such as clubs, swimming pools and traffic islands are also counted as open spaces. Ashwini Deshpande, one of the study’s authors, explained that an open space should be “permeable, recreational and accessible to everybody”. She noted, “Clubs and gymkhanas are heavily built exclusive structures and they serve a very specific section of the public. If an open space is not following those norms then it’s really pointless to call it a public open space.”

The Andheri sports complex

On the evening of August 20, I visited the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Sports Complex in Andheri West, which is to be given to the Shri Vile Parle Kelvani Mandal for development. The 12-acre complex houses a cricket ground, a pickleball court, a jogging track, a basketball court and an outdoor gym. In late August, the Gulmohar Area Societies Welfare Group, and the activist and filmmaker Ashoke Pandit, filed a public interest litigation in the Bombay High Court objecting to this allotment.

“Hundreds of people visit this space in a day, from slum dwellers to high-rise residents. There’s no other open space like this in the neighbourhood,” said local Yogesh Mehta. “I live in a residential tower nearby, but it has no space to take long walks. It will be sad if this space goes or becomes expensive to enter.”

Youth from Shyam Nagar, the neighbouring informal settlement, said the complex was the only open space to which they had access. “This ground was developed some six-seven years ago, before that we used to play on a small mud patch,” said Suraj Kumar. “It’s free for all to use. If they start charging us for entry then we will have to stop playing here.”

A few women from Shyam Nagar also stressed the importance of the space for them. “We live in the neighbouring chawl, where we have just one large room for a house,” said Manju Devi. “So we come here in the evenings to get away and get some space. It will be sad if this ground closes or becomes costly to access.”

She added, “But these decisions are in the hands of the authorities. What can we do?”

The UDRI-NAGAR study noted that besides the municipal corporation, citizen groups and NGOs could play a “significant role in maintaining and managing” open spaces. It suggests that “advanced locality management” groups should be formally institutionalised, to ensure that citizens can participate in these processes.

“Open spaces don’t protect themselves, you need to fight for them because there are lots of forces against them,” said Samarth Das, an architect and member of the Gulmohar group. He observed that over the years, active citizen groups in Juhu had played a vital role in upgrading and maintaining gardens in their area.

But he observed that such efforts could not be replicated everywhere. “The average Mumbaikar is struggling to make a living and cannot be bothered about all of this,” he said. “There is no time on their hands. Meanwhile there is a constant wave of attack after attack, testing the tenacity of people involved in such issues. But we need to start asking, where is this kind of development really taking us?”

Meanwhile, the current fight over the city’s open spaces has entered the political arena. On August 20, Congress leader and municipal councillor Ashraf Azmi in a speech in the BMC House raised concerns about the rampant use of public-private partnerships for developing Mumbai’s open spaces. Drawing on civic records he acquired, Azmi noted that in the last four years, the corporation had changed the land reservations of 17 plots in the city, eight of which were initially reserved for natural open spaces or gardens. Meanwhile, Shiv Sena UBT leader Aaditya Thackeray has announced that he will lead a “tiranga andolan” against the takeover of the over the Neville D’Souza ground, and against the broader takeover of public open spaces.

The UDRI-NAGAR study’s researchers observed that once an open space is taken over and changed, restoring them to their original state is nearly impossible. “In Mumbai, it's very difficult to even acquire new spaces,” said Prerna Yadav, one of the authors. “So, there's only one way to ensure that we have enough open spaces, and that is by protecting what we already have.”

Former Indian diplomat Ramesh Chander has been asked by the authorities conducting the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Punjab to submit documents proving his citizenship, The Tribune reported on Tuesday.

The 75-year-old told the newspaper that he has been “summoned to appear with proof of residence” at a government office on Thursday despite sharing his Aadhaar and voter identity cards with a booth level officer in Jalandhar.

Chander told The Tribune that he has voted from Jalandhar in several elections, including the last Assembly elections in 2022 and the Lok Sabha polls in 2024.

Chander served as India’s ambassador to Belarus and the consul general in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He also held positions including India’s counsellor in Japan and a minister at the embassy in Prague, Czech Republic.

He retired from the foreign service in December 2010.

A notice issued to Chander by the additional electoral registration officer of Jalandhar West on Saturday said that the documents he submitted were insufficient to establish his eligibility as a voter, the newspaper reported. It also said that his voter details did not match those in the electoral roll used before SIR.

Jalandhar Deputy Commissioner Varjeet Walia described the notice as part of the routine verification process, The Tribune reported. “Two categories of voters have so far been left out, those who are unmapped or those with logical discrepancies,” the newspaper quoted Walia as saying.

He added that, under general instructions issued to booth level officers to make the process easier, Chander’s required documents would be collected from his home and he would not have to visit any office.

On Sunday, retired diplomat Navdeep Suri also raised concerns about the verification process under the special intensive revision in Punjab. In a social media post, Suri said that he had to submit his Aadhaar and voter identity cards to a booth level officer and “was assured that everything is in order”.

Suri said that he was later informed that some of his details did not match the electoral rolls from 2003, which are being used to verify voters during the exercise.

Punjab is among the 16 states where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of SIR.

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026. Since it began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision, but said that the exercise does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Also read: Scroll’s SIR experience is a microcosm of what urban India is facing

Four India-based companies were among several entities sanctioned by the United States on Monday for importing petroleum and petrochemical products from Iran.

A statement released by the US Department of State said that Washington has implemented “Operation Economic Outcast”, imposing additional sanctions targeting Iran’s military activities and procurement networks, as well as traders involved in petroleum and petrochemical products.

The four India-based companies include Portease Partners LLP, which is a customs broker that allegedly facilitated the import of shipments of Iranian petrochemical products to India, the statement said.

Sadashiva Overseas Limited, PP Softtech Private Limited and Prakrutees Infra Impex Private Limited are the other India-based entities facing the fresh US sanctions.

Indian citizens Indrismiya Ashrafmiya Sheikh and Harish Ramachandra Rangi, partners of Portease Partners LLP, and Prashant Garg, the director of PP Softtech Private Limited, have also been sanctioned, the statement added.

The US state department said that Sadashiva Overseas allegedly imported petroleum products originating in Iran worth about $69 million from several companies. PP Softtech and Prakrutees Infra each allegedly imported Iranian petroleum products valued at about $25 million.

Washington said that the companies were sanctioned for “knowingly engaging in a significant transaction for the purchase, acquisition, sale, transport, or marketing of petroleum or petroleum products” from Iran.

Nearly 60 individuals, entities and vessels were concurrently sanctioned by the US Treasury Department on Monday.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant said that the objective of the fresh measures was “to sever every economic lifeline” that sustains Iran.

“Iran’s enablers purchase and transport its petroleum,” Bessant said.

He added that those who support the US would “reap the rewards” of its partnership, while those who align themselves with Tehran should expect to share in the isolation of what he described as a “withering regime”.

Iranian Economy Minister Ali Madanizadeh told state television that Tehran was “fully prepared” for the sanctions, Reuters reported.

On August 2, US President Donald Trump said that his country’s military and Israeli forces will halt attacks on Iran as “the perimeters of a deal” had been agreed upon.

The new deal “would include the immediate, complete and total” opening of the Strait of Hormuz and an end to “Iran’s nuclear threat”, Trump had said on social media.

This comes more than five months after the war in West Asia began on February 28. Since then, two peace talks held between Washington and Tehran have collapsed.

The first round of talks that were held in Pakistan’s Islamabad collapsed on April 12, but the ceasefire in the region had largely held for nearly two months.

On June 15, the US and Iran arrived at an interim agreement to stop the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterbody connecting the Gulf and the Arabian Sea, for commercial vessels. They also held talks in Switzerland aimed at reaching a final peace deal within two months.

However, on July 8, Trump said that the ceasefire was “over”.

As a consequence, the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively blocked for most international commercial vessels, triggering a global energy crisis. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

About 3,000 influenza cases have been reported in Delhi this year, including more than 2,300 H1N1, or swine flu, infections, PTI quoted the national capital’s Health Minister Pankaj Kumar Singh as saying on Tuesday.

Officials of the health department, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the New Delhi Municipal Council and the Delhi Cantonment Board held a review meeting to assess arrangements and preparedness for seasonal influenza and vector-borne diseases in the national capital.

Vector-borne diseases are illnesses caused by parasites, viruses or bacteria that are transmitted to humans through living organisms known as vectors.

At a press conference held after the meeting, Singh said that Chief Minister Rekha Gupta has also called an emergency review meeting, the news agency reported.

Singh said that there is no shortage of doctors, staff or medicines, and “everything is under control”.

H1N1 typically causes symptoms such as fever, cough, sore throat, headache, body aches and tiredness. People experiencing a prolonged high fever, difficulty breathing, chest pain, confusion or a deterioration in their condition are advised to seek medical care.

🔹𝗜𝗻𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝘇𝗮 𝗔 (𝗛𝟭𝗡𝟭) is a seasonal respiratory infection and is mostly 𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳-𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 in healthy adults.

🔹𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘆𝗺𝗽𝘁𝗼𝗺𝘀 include fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, headache, body/muscle aches, fatigue, and sometimes nausea, vomiting… pic.twitter.com/nFUjh3Jr3A

— Ministry of Health (@MoHFW_INDIA) August 25, 2026

Indian Council of Medical Research Director General Dr Rajiv Bahl said that respiratory surveillance data showed that H1N1 was circulating widely in Delhi, ANI reported. He added that H1N1 was the predominant strain among Influenza A infections, accounting for about 97% to 98% of the cases.

Different strains are genetically distinct variants of the same virus that can vary in their characteristics, including transmissibility and severity.

Some cases of Influenza B have also been detected, he said.

Bahl said that SARS-CoV-2 infections, which cause Covid-19, had previously been reported in higher numbers but were now declining.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Calcutta High Court on Tuesday directed that no coercive action be taken against Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee in three first information reports registered against him, Live Law reported.

There was no need for Banerjee to be interrogated in custody, held Justice Saugata Bhattacharya. The TMC national general secretary was granted protection till November 30, or until further orders.

Bhattacharya also stipulated that Banerjee be given at least 48 hours’ notice before being called for interrogation, Live Law reported. However, the judge told the TMC leader to cooperate with the police and remain available for interrogation.

Cases were registered against Banerjee at Bhabanipur police station on May 27, Kalitala police station on June 1, and Bishnupur police station on June 16. He contended before the court that “unreasonable complaints” had been filed against him since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in West Bengal after defeating the TMC in the Assembly election in May.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the state, had objected to Banerjee filing a single petition seeking relief against multiple FIRs. He had argued that such a petition was not maintainable.

However, the court held on Tuesday that there was no need to file a separate petition for each case, as it would “only lead to multiplicity of litigation”, Bar and Bench reported.

While Banerjee had sought relief in 16 FIRs, the High Court said it would confine itself to the three cases about which the TMC leader had provided details in his petition.

The judge said that in the absence of specific details, it would not be appropriate to examine the other FIRs, Bar and Bench reported.

The court also clarified that the order would not come in the way of Banerjee going abroad for medical treatment, as it had been allowed by the Supreme Court in an order on August 10.

Edited by Sneha.

Opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge on Tuesday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to scrap the current caste census questionnaire and prepare a new one based on a verified list of castes.

In the letter, Kharge, the leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, and Gandhi, the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said the government had chosen an open-ended question to record caste details, which they described as misleading. “We do not accept the caste census being conducted in this manner,” they said.

They argued that the open-ended question could result in the same caste being recorded under different names, sub-castes and with regional variations.

“A correct assessment of the numbers and socio-economic status of various castes is possible only if the caste enumeration is conducted properly,” they said.

They said that the current methodology could fragment the data and make it difficult to accurately determine the population and socio-economic status of communities.

The Congress leaders further highlighted that this would particularly disadvantage “backward, extremely backward, and other deprived communities”, and would also impact decisions related to education, employment, welfare schemes and social justice.

Further, the leaders pointed out that the questionnaire did not include the term “backward class”, which would make it impossible to determine the size of the Other Backward Classes population through the exercise.

They proposed creating a drop-down list of castes, similar to the method used for enumerating Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

The leaders said that such a list could be prepared using existing government lists, including those of socially and educationally backward classes, as well as material from the Anthropological Survey of India.

Kharge and Gandhi cited the caste surveys conducted in Telangana and Bihar as examples of the use of prepared caste lists.

लोक सभा में नेता प्रतिपक्ष श्री @RahulGandhi और मैंने प्रधानमंत्री नरेंद्र मोदी जी को संयुक्त पत्र लिखकर जाति जनगणना की मौजूदा प्रक्रिया पर गंभीर चिंता जताई है।

Open-ended सवालों के जरिए जातियों की सही गिनती संभव नहीं है। एक ही जाति अलग-अलग नामों और उपजातियों में दर्ज हुई तो… pic.twitter.com/9bmRQrNiaT

— Mallikarjun Kharge (@kharge) August 25, 2026

On August 18, the Congress alleged that the Narendra Modi government intends to “sabotage” the caste census.

In the Census 2027, surveyors will ask respondents if they belong to a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe, and will also include an open-ended question for other communities about the caste that they belong to.

This will be the first time in independent India that caste will be enumerated across communities. Until now, the Census only recorded the population of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

India had last conducted an exercise to count the population of all caste groups in 1931.

The Opposition had in recent years been demanding a nationwide caste census. The proponents of such an exercise argue that it will help identify the true population of the country’s Other Backward Classes and other castes, in turn paving the way for policies such as expanded reservations in jobs and education.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: ‘Planned failure’: Is the Modi government sabotaging its own caste census?

The Supreme Court on Tuesday directed rape convict journalist Tarun Tejpal to surrender to the authorities within two weeks, Live Law reported.

Tejpal, the former editor-in-chief of Tehelka magazine, had moved the Supreme Court on Thursday challenging the Bombay High Court’s decision to convict him of raping and sexually harassing a junior colleague in 2013. He was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment.

A bench of Justice Alok Aradhe agreed to list Tejpal’s appeal, provided he submits his surrender certificate by September 22, the legal news outlet reported.

Representing Tejpal, advocate Kapil Sibal argued that the journalist was not required to surrender for his appeal to be heard, given that the High Court had granted him four weeks’ time to surrender during the hearing on August 6.

However, the court rejected the petition.

Separately, the Goa government has also moved the Supreme Court seeking life imprisonment for Tejpal instead of the 10-year sentence.

During the hearing on Monday, the government told the Supreme Court that Tejpal should have surrendered before filing the appeal, Bar and Bench reported.

On August 6, the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court overturned a 2021 sessions court verdict acquitting Tejpal.

The High Court convicted the journalist under provisions of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to rape by a person holding trust or authority, rape by a person who is in a position of control or dominance over a woman, sexual harassment and criminal force against a woman with an intent to disrobe her.

Tejpal was accused of raping a junior colleague in an elevator in 2013. He had been arrested in November 2013 and was in jail for seven months before being granted bail by the Supreme Court in July 2014.

A sessions court in Goa’s Mapusa had acquitted him in May 2021.

Additional Sessions Judge Kshama Joshi had said at the time that Tejpal was granted “benefit of doubt” in the absence of corroborative evidence to support the allegations made by the complainant. The judge had also remarked that the complainant did not show the “kind of normative behaviour” expected from her.

During the hearing in the High Court, the state alleged that the trial court’s verdict was prejudiced, and contended that it had wrongly focused on the complainant’s character and post-incident behaviour instead of the conduct of the accused.

The counsel representing Tejpal had argued that the complainant’s account was inconsistent with evidence such as the security camera footage and how the elevator worked.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: After Tejpal: A letter to progressive men from a feminist

The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought responses from 20 rebel Trinamool Congress MPs on a plea by party leader Abhishek Banerjee challenging the delay by the Lok Sabha speaker in deciding the disqualification petitions he has filed against the legislators, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana did not issue notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, who is the main respondent in the case, Bar and Bench reported.

On June 14, TMC leader Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar announced that 20 of the party’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs would merge with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens Party of India and support the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance in the Lower House of Parliament.

The MPs rebelled against the TMC leadership of Mamata Banerjee and Abhishek Banerjee following the party’s defeat in the West Bengal Assembly elections.

In response, TMC’s leader in the Lok Sabha, Abhishek Banerjee, had on June 19 submitted petitions to Birla demanding that the 20 rebel MPs be disqualified on the grounds of leaving the party. He had argued that the 10th Schedule of the Constitution was clear that if a member voluntarily gives up the party’s membership, they are to be disqualified as MPs.

Citing the 10th Schedule, Abhishek Banerjee had also contended that the merger can be considered valid only if two-thirds of a political party, not the legislature party, merges into another party.

The Nationalist Citizens Party of India did not have any MPs before the merger.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament in July, Birla accepted the request of the rebel MPs to sit separately in the Lok Sabha chamber. However, the speaker has not yet recognised the group as the Nationalist Citizens Party of India in the House.

The bench had initially issued notice to Birla. However, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the speaker, argued that there was no need to issue notice to him as he is a constitutional authority, The Hindu reported.

In response, Bagchi stated that the speaker acts as a tribunal while deciding disqualification petitions under the 10th Schedule.

Mehta said he was personally present in court to represent the speaker and urged the court not to issue formal notice. The court accepted his submission.

The solicitor general also told the court that Birla had issued notices to the 20 MPs on the disqualification petitions filed by TMC under the anti-defection law, Live Law reported.

In response, Bagchi said: “It is not a question of issuing notices, it is a question of concluding the proceedings within a time frame.”

When Abhishek Banerjee questioned why notice had not been issued to the speaker, the court asked whether he was interested in adjudication of the matter or in the issuance of notice, Bar and Bench reported.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted protection from arrest to journalist Abhishek Upadhyay, who was among the first to report about the alleged theft of donations at the Ram temple in Ayodhya, in a case filed against him by the Uttar Pradesh Police, reported Bar and Bench.

On August 18, a first information report was registered against Upadhyay in connection with an alleged road rage incident in Ghaziabad. The journalist has claimed that the case, which invokes provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act, was filed to harass him for his reports on alleged corruption in Uttar Pradesh.

Upadhyay moved the Supreme Court challenging the case against him and demanding that a copy of the FIR be supplied to him.

His lawyer, Pradeep Rai, told the court on Tuesday that Upadhyay’s “unpardonable sin” was that he had reported on the alleged embezzlement of donations at the Ram temple, Live Law reported. He said that his client had reported about corruption in other cases as well.

Rai demanded that an independent agency should investigate the case against Upadhyay.

The advocate claimed that the allegation of road rage was baseless and that closed-circuit television footage from the site would prove this, Live Law reported. He demanded that the footage from the area be preserved.

Chief Justice Surya Kant verbally remarked that while the court did not know the truth of the matter, it could understand Upadhyay’s apprehension. The chief justice told the journalist to approach the High Court to seek that the case be quashed, and granted him interim protection, the legal news outlet reported.

The Supreme Court also directed the police to supply Upadhyay with a copy of the first information report. The case will be heard further on September 7.

Upadhyay described the order as a “big victory from the Supreme Court” and asserted that his work would continue. “The pen will neither bend nor stop,” he asserted on social media.

सुप्रीम कोर्ट से बड़ी जीत।

गिरफ़्तारी पर लगाई रोक।

प्रोटेक्शन दिया।

ग़ाज़ियाबाद पुलिस कमिश्नर को FIR कॉपी देने और compliance report दाखिल करने को कहा।

बाकी की होने वाली एफआईआर पर भी रोक लगाई।

अगली तारीख़ 7 सितंबर।

मेरी और से argue करने वाले Supreme Court Bar Association के… pic.twitter.com/26fJAFUzHh

— abhishek upadhyay (@upadhyayabhii) August 25, 2026

A Special Investigation Team set up by the Uttar Pradesh government is looking into the alleged embezzlement of donations made to the Ram temple in Ayodhya.

In its preliminary report, submitted to the Uttar Pradesh home department on June 23, the SIT found 70 instances of counting staff hiding bundles of notes and loose cash in their clothes, pockets and shoes. Scroll has seen a copy of the report.

The report alleged that offerings were stolen during the counting process, with staff routinely hiding cash on their bodies and walking out with it, as systems meant to stop this were not enforced. It also flagged serious lapses by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust and the State Bank of India, the banker to the trust.

Edited by Sneha.

In April 2025, the Modi government made a dramatic U-turn and announced that it would count caste in India’s next census. At the time, it made sure to take potshots at its predecessor, the Manmohan Singh-led United Progressive Alliance government, for not including caste in the 2011 census.

“Most political parties recommended conducting a caste census,” the Cabinet had snidely noted in a press release then. “Despite this, the previous government opted for a survey instead of a caste census, known as the Socio-Economic and Caste Census.”

A year later, however, the Modi government has disclosed that it will follow the same method for counting caste that was used by Manmohan Singh’s administration. This has triggered allegations of sabotage, given that the data collected in 2011 was seen to be so faulty that it was never released.

Scroll spoke to analysts, activists and politicians who advocate for a caste census to understand why these charges have surfaced. Most of them described the chosen methodology for counting caste as a flawed one. They questioned the Modi government’s call to stick to the 2011 model when states such as Bihar and Telangana have, in recent years, carried out caste surveys which they consider to be more robust.

Some critics have even argued that the caste data collected in this census will be useless. But others were hopeful that researchers will still be able to clean it up and work with it.

On September 21, 2021, the Modi Govt had filed an affidavit in the Supreme Court categorically rejecting the plea for a caste census.

However, Para 12 (d) in the affidavit says the following: “There was no registry of caste prepared prior to the conduct of 2011 Census. It would… pic.twitter.com/gHdPZSMiQw

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) August 18, 2026

‘Designed to fail’

The population enumeration phase of the census, during which enumerators go door-to-door collecting data from individuals, will begin in snowbound parts of north India next month. This will be the first time since 1931 that caste will be counted as part of the exercise.

To do so, enumerators will first ask respondents whether or not they belong to a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe and then ask them to state their caste. People will also have the option to say that they have no caste or that they do not wish to declare their caste, The Hindu has reported.

Critics argue that having an open-ended question on caste leads to an enormous range of responses that make any meaningful analysis nearly impossible. The 2011 survey, which too had an open-ended question on caste, reportedly threw up an astounding 46 lakh entries.

Sociologist Satish Deshpande, who has written extensively on caste and has been advocating for counting it since the 2001 census, called this a “planned failure”.

“Variations of spellings alone will account for tens of thousands of entries,” he said. “It is quite tragic that a deliberate attempt is being made to prevent usable data from coming out.”

In addition to spelling errors, an open-ended question about caste is also likely to lead to members of the same community identifying themselves using different caste names. In a news conference on August 17, Anil Jaihind, chairperson of the Congress party’s Other Backward Classes department, illustrated this using the example of carpenters from his home state of Haryana.

“Some from this caste identify themselves as Badhais, while others prefer Jangid,” he said. “Yet others in the same caste group go by Jangda, Khati, Dhiman, Suthar, Tarkhan, Ramgarhia and Vishwakarma.”

The alternative to an open-ended question, Deshpande suggested, was to have a drop-down list of caste names which were already available with the state. Respondents could chose their caste from it. For those who do not find their caste on this list, an “Other” option could be included, the sociologist added. Those choosing “Other” could state their caste in response to a follow-up question.

“This data can then be rationalised at the regional level by forming expert committees, as is done for the language, religion and occupation data collected in the census,” he recommended.

In the absence of a drop-down list, though, this analysis will have to be done for all responses. Activist-politician Yogendra Yadav contended that the design of the census was a clear sign that the Modi government lacked the “political will” to count caste.

“When they don’t even have the political will for putting together a drop-down list, how will they find the political will to analyse the findings?” he asked. “The whole point is to make the data useless. It is designed to fail.”

Quota wars

For many activists, this is not just a problem of shoddy data collection, but a question of social justice for the Other Backward Classes.

They worry that this census will not reflect the group’s actual share in the population because it does not recognise them as a distinct category. As mentioned earlier, enumerators will only ask respondents whether they belong to the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes, and not the Other Backward Classes.

In 1980, the Mandal Commission had estimated that the Other Backward Classes made up 52% of India’s population. That is why some Opposition parties have long held that the current 27% quota for them in government jobs and educational institutions is inadequate.

The Congress, too, has come around to this view in recent years with its leader, Rahul Gandhi, promising to remove the Supreme Court’s 50% cap on reservations if voted to power. But doing so will require irrefutable data to get past judicial scrutiny, activists say.

“The Supreme Court keeps asking for data,” complained Sushil Gautam, an Ambedkarite activist from Meerut in Uttar Pradesh. “The data does not exist because a proper caste census has never been done. And so laws favouring the OBCs are not enacted even though they vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party in big numbers.”

Gautam went so far as to allege that the BJP was never sincere about conducting a caste census. It had made a U-turn on the issue, he claimed, only because it had its eyes set on Bihar, where Assembly elections were held in November.

The state had already carried out a caste survey, which established that the Other Backward Classes accounted for over 63% of its population. To win the favour of such a substantial segment of the electorate in Bihar, the saffron party felt compelled to say that it would hold a nationwide caste census, Gautam suggested. Several spokespersons from the BJP declined to answer Scroll’s questions for this story.

Could the supposedly faulty design of the census lead to political backlash from the Other Backward Classes? Jaihind of the Congress party was certain that it would. The Opposition outfit plans to launch “a programme” to take this issue to voters soon, he told Scroll.

Activists from the community, however, were less optimistic. “If the Other Backward Classes were like the Dalits, they would have hit the streets and forced the government’s hand,” said Dharmendra Kushwah, a Gwalior-based lawyer and a core committee member of the OBC Mahasabha. “This community is fast asleep, or rather intoxicated. It does not care about rights.”

In his view, the Modi government had “betrayed” the Other Backward Classes by not treating them at par with the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes in the census. The open-ended caste question will “make it hard” for people to draw conclusions from the census, he alleged.

Enter AI

Hard is not the same as impossible, though, if Praveen Chakravarty, a Rajya Sabha MP from the Congress, were to be believed. The former investment banker heads the grand old party’s data analytics department and served as convenor of an 11-member committee of experts that studied the Telangana caste survey data.

While Chakravarty, too, agreed that drop-down lists of castes helped produce “structured” data, he contended that their absence would not completely foreclose the possibility of analysis.

“For example, if you declared your caste as ‘Rajput’ and another person said ‘Rejput’, artificial intelligence today would say that these two are the same,” he explained. “But back in 2011, they would have been counted as two different castes. So yes, it’s a bad idea to leave it open, but not as bad as it was in 2011.”

Deshpande, the sociologist, also stated that cleaning up the data was possible, but would need a lot of work. A completely open-ended caste question with no drop-down list “multiplies the work that we have to do”, he complained. For him, however, the caste census had less to do with data and more to do with the political will for social justice in India, or the lack thereof.

“You could say that this is a repeat of 2011,” he rued. “Clearly, this is a deliberate undermining by the government of the government’s own programme. These are features, not bugs. They tell you the caste-marked character of governance.”

The Calcutta High Court on Monday stayed an arrest warrant issued against Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra for failing to appear before a Krishnanagar court in a case about purportedly provocative remarks she made in June, Live Law reported.

No coercive action be taken against Moitra, said a division bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Aryak Dutt, and posted the matter for hearing on August 27.

The complaint against Moitra was filed by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader in June for remarks she had made on social media.

The purportedly provocative remarks were made in two posts after women BJP supporters allegedly gathered outside the Krishnanagar court carrying eggs and tomatoes, to be thrown at her when she arrived there in connection with an old case.

In one post, Moitra had said that she would file a police complaint against the women. In a video, she said that those wanting to throw eggs at her “should wear a burqa” if they wish to stay hidden.

The complainant alleged that the remarks were capable of hurting religious sentiments and disturbing communal harmony.

On August 19, the third judicial magistrate at Krishnanagar ordered that an arrest warrant be issued against Moitra for failing to appear before the court despite repeated summonses.

The judge said that the “series of disobedience” of the repeated summonses showed the “lackadaisical approach” of Moitra to comply with the court order.

The court also directed the authorities to submit a report on the execution of the warrant by August 28.

Moitra subsequently approached the Calcutta High Court challenging the warrant.

Her lawyer argued that since the alleged remarks and the complaints against her concerned actions taken while she was an MP, the case should be heard by the designated MP/MLA court in Salt Lake, PTI reported.

He also argued that the allegations were baseless and that the complaint did not constitute a criminal offence.

Edited by Sneha.

A Central Reserve Police Force sub-inspector was shot and at least two homes were torched in Manipur after clashes broke out between two groups on Monday, The Hindu reported.

Sub-inspector Pradeep Singh of the 36th Battalion of the CRPF sustained a bullet injury to his left leg when he was caught in crossfire along the border of the Kuki-dominated Kangpokpi district and the Naga-dominated Senapati district, The Indian Express reported. He is being treated at the District Hospital, Senapati.

The violence began in the early hours of Monday when unknown miscreants burned down a home in the Taphou Kuki village in the Kangpokpi district. Soon afterwards, another home was torched in the Taphou Naga village in the Senapati district.

The two groups exchanged fire after 9 am, in which the CRPF member was injured, The Hindu reported.

Residents of Senapati district blocked the National Highway-2, also known as the Imphal-Dimapur (Nagaland) Road, for several hours. Transport services on the highway had resumed just last Friday, three years after the ethnic violence that broke out in the state in May 2023.

The Taphou Kuki village authority said it condemned the “highly deplorable, inhuman, and unacceptable” arson attack, and called for an end to violence, The Hindu reported.

“We urge the district administration, police, and other competent authorities to take immediate and appropriate action to investigate the incident, identify those responsible, and ensure that justice is delivered in accordance with the law,” the village authority was quoted as saying.

Tensions between Kukis and Nagas escalated in Manipur on February 7 after an alleged assault involving members of the Tangkhul Naga and the Kuki-Zo communities in the Ukhrul district. At least 25 persons from the two communities have been killed since tensions erupted.

Ethnic clashes had first broken out in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities. At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since then in the conflict.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Biren Singh had stepped down as the chief minister in February 2025 amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the violence had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

Edited by Sneha.

Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh walked out of jail on Tuesday after being granted a 21-day furlough, reported Hindustan Times. This is the 17th time he has been released from prison since he was convicted in a rape case in August 2017.

Singh is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Sunaria jail in Haryana’s Rohtak for raping two of his women disciples. During the furlough, he will stay at the headquarters of his organisation in Sirsa district.

This is his third consecutive temporary release during which he has been allowed to stay at the Sirsa headquarters, NDTV reported. At other times, he stayed at his organisation’s ashram in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat.

With the latest 21-day furlough, Singh has exhausted his annual entitlement of 10 weeks of parole and three weeks of furlough under the 2022 Haryana Good Conduct Prisoners Temporary Release Act.

The law allows prisoners a total of 10 weeks of parole in a calendar year, which can be taken in two parts, along with up to three weeks of furlough that must be availed in a single stretch.

In February 2024, the Punjab and Haryana High Court told the Haryana government that Singh could not be granted parole without its permission. This came a month after Singh was released for 50 days, which was his seventh parole in 24 months and ninth in four years.

In August 2024, the High Court said that the application for temporary release filed by Singh will be decided by competent authorities as per the provisions of the 2022 Haryana Good Conduct Prisoners Temporary Release Act without “favouritism or arbitrariness”.

The bench left the decision on Singh’s application for furlough to the Haryana Prisons Department.

In May, Singh was granted a 30-day parole and he returned to Sunaria jail on June 26. In January, he was released on a 40-day parole.

In 2025, he was granted 40 days’ parole in August to celebrate his birthday, which followed by a 21-day furlough in April 2025 and 30-day parole in January 2025, ahead of the Delhi Assembly elections.

While a furlough can be given without any specific reason after a prisoner has served a stipulated period of time in prison, parole is based on an urgent demand or need.

Singh was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment in 2017 for raping two of his women disciples at the Dera’s Sirsa headquarters.

In 2021, he and four others were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in the murder case of a former manager of his sect. However, the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted him in the murder case in May 2024.

Edited by Sneha.

The Delhi Police has filed a case against YouTuber Ajeet Bharti for making allegedly derogatory remarks about Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) MP Chandra Shekhar Aazad, The Indian Express reported.

Aazad is the president of the party and the chief of the Dalit rights organisation Bhim Army.

Bharti made the alleged remarks in a video where he spoke about the anti-reservation protests held at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar last week.

The Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) filed a complaint against Bharti on Sunday, alleging that he had uploaded content in which he made “caste-based, abusive, humiliating, sexually degrading and potentially inflammatory statements” about the Nagina MP and about BR Ambedkar.

Bharti repeatedly invoked caste identity in a derogatory and humiliating manner, The Indian Express quoted the complaint as having said.

The YouTuber has been booked under sections of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act, the Information Technology Act and provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to promoting enmity between groups, criminal intimidation.

Bharti claimed that he had made the comments in response to abusive social media posts targeting his mother and sister. He denied using casteist slurs about Chandra Shekhar Aazad, and claimed that the first information report was filed due to pressure from the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram).

On August 21, thousands joined a protest at Jantar Mantar to demand that quotas in educational institutions and government jobs should be based on economic criteria rather than caste. Several persons were detained and removed from the site by the police.

Though the police had given permission for the event to be held at Ramlila Maidan, protesters gathered at Jantar Mantar in the heart of the capital.

Edited by Sneha.

Census 2027 is crucial to the Nomadic and Denotified Tribes whose existence, culture, livelihood and identities are deeply connected to the fundamental right of being counted.

Community activists and leaders have repeatedly demanded that Nomadic and Denotified Tribes be counted separately in the Census. But these demands have been ignored even though the Census is much more than just counting people – it is fundamental to constitutional justice, policy-making and the equitable distribution of resources.

As someone from the Ghisadi Gadiya Lohar Nomadic and Denotified Tribe community, I have closely seen the effects of relentless migration, prejudice from settled populations, homelessness, the utter lack of safety and social security, little schooling and healthcare access and negligible democratic participation.

In almost all states, these communities are at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, below the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. There is no standard identity across the country: our caste identity keeps changing from state to state because there is no uniform counting of our people at the national level.

The last time the population of the Nomadic and Denotified Tribes was counted separately was in the caste-based Census conducted by the British administration in 1931. As India nears 80 years of independence, one must ask why there has never been an independent enumeration of Nomadic and Denotified Tribes.

Generational deprivation

India’s nomadic and denotified tribe population were among the earliest and fiercest freedom fighters. But the colonial administration branded them “born criminals” under the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871. This criminalisation violently disrupted their mobility, livelihoods, ownership of assets, education, employability and cultural preservation.

After the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in August 1952, the communities categorised and listed as “criminal” were denotified.

A key demand from the nomadic, denotified and semi-nomadic tribes is that they be recognised at the national level. They may have recognition in some states, but lack their own national identity because they have never been adequately recognised in national frameworks.

As a result, the violence, exclusion and isolation these communities experience is largely invisible. They live beyond the threshold of public institutions, government schemes, budgets, resources, land rights and basic civic amenities such as drinking water, electricity, sanitation and housing.

The Renke Commission was constituted by the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment in 2005 to examine the socio-economic status of Denotified, Nomadic, and Semi-Nomadic Tribes, which it estimated was 10% of India’s population, according to the Renke Commission.

The commission’s 2008 report noted that these communities do not possess below poverty line or other ration cards, which excludes them from social welfare schemes and access to crucial food rations. This especially affected women, with the report stating that 31% of the denotified tribes and 42% percent of the nomadic tribes have 20 destitute women or more in their communities, most of whom were widows and eligible for widow pension.

The report also found that 42% for children from de-notified tribes and only 28% from nomadic tribes were enrolled in schools.

A 2008 study similarly found that the enrollment of denotified and nomadic tribes in higher education was the lowest at 0.24% compared to others such as Schedule Caste (7.48%), Scheduled Tribes (4.19%), Other Backward Classes (11.00%), Muslim (11.04%), upper class Hindus (24.89%) and upper class Christians.

My organisation’s work of 20 years has also observed that our communities live in distressingly harmful conditions lacking basics like toilets and housing, electricity, water, disaster support while struggling to access schooling and healthcare.

Legacy of criminalisation

The Criminal Tribes Act has long been repealed, but its attitudes are entrenched. Legal and administrative systems continue to silently and violently criminalise denotified and nomadic communities. Yet there is no constitutional or legal framework to protect these communities from such discrimination.

Unlike the registries maintained for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, the National Crime Records Bureau does not have track crimes, lynching, sexual or other forms of violence against nomadic and denotified tribes. This is mainly because there is no national framework that recognises these communities as a distinct category requiring separate data collection.

There is also no dedicated law comparable to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act for Nomadic and Denotified Tribes. This is urgently needed to protect our communities from regular and extreme violence, including mob lynching, police brutality and sexual violence.

In my experience alone there have been scores of such instances, but the actual scale of the violence is unknown because there is no data. Media coverage of such incidents is poor and the police respond insensitively in registering cases.

Police manuals still view these communities with suspicion and their language, mobility, cultural traditions, clothing and occupations are treated as markers of suspicion rather than diversity. Their distinctiveness is misunderstood, leading policy and decision-makers to justify discrimination.

They face existential concerns as they grapple with overlapping challenges of homelessness, displacement, repeated disasters, the impacts of climate change and constant migration.

Last week we secured bail for a 15 year old Pardhi boy who was incarcerated for a week during the lockdown. Everyday there are numerous children from marginalised communities who are detained and tortured by the police.
Police brutality is a part of their everyday reality.

— Nikita Sonavane (@glorious_gluten) June 1, 2020

How being counted will help

The Census can help with crucial supporting data for planning and implementing policies for this vulnerable population. In India, budgets, policies, political will and action for welfare are framed in the context of vulnerable groups such as women, the elderly, children, and the disaster-affected. Nomadic and denotified communities are among the most precarious groups but there is hardly any data about them. This knowledge gap translates to an absence of budgetary, policy or other kinds of provisions.

Yet, the Supreme Court was critical of a petition filed in March asking for denotified tribes to be counted in the 2027 Census. A two-judge bench presided over by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant refused to entertain the writ petition saying it was a “deep-rooted move to divide society” even though a senior advocate told the court that the Ministry of Social Justice was in favour of enumerating the denotified tribes.

This dismissal of the demands of nomad and denotified tribes questions the commitment to social justice among the highest decision-makers of India. Ahead of the 2027 Census, the government must create an independent category for nomadic, denotified and semi-nomadic tribes so that they are recognised and counted separately.

At present, many of the Census questions appear to be designed for settled communities with stable housing, fixed occupations and permanent addresses. This does not reflect the lived realities of nomadic, denotified and semi-nomadic communities.

The Census process and its questionnaires should be redesigned to recognise diverse patterns of mobility, livelihoods and habitation so that these communities can be accurately counted and meaningfully included in national planning.

The Census is an instrument of social justice, constitutional equality and a means of responding to historical injustice. It provides a clear picture of society, enabling governments to prepare action plans through budgets, policies, government resolutions, circulars and other administrative measures.

It can strengthen leadership, increase participation, identify existing gaps and address historical exclusions and systemic errors. Good quality data serves as a guide for future planning and helps direct resources where they are most needed.

The absence of data creates uncertainty and perpetuates exclusion. Those who are not counted gradually disappear from the active participation in the building and narrative of the nation.

The Constitution places a responsibility upon governments and policymakers to prioritise those at the bottom rungs of society, like the nomadic and denotified tribes, and also guarantees that a person born in India has a right to education, healthcare, rehabilitation, housing, employment and livelihood opportunities.

Without recognising and counting the denotified and nomadic tribes, it is impossible to fulfil this constitutional obligation.

Deepa Pawar is an activist from the nomadic and denotified tribe community, researcher, writer, counselor, an Ashoka Fellow, and founder director of the anti-caste feminist organisation Anubhuti. Her email address is deepa@anubhutitrust.org.

Former Indian diplomat Navdeep Suri has raised concerns about the verification process under the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.

Suri, a retired Indian Foreign Services officer, went through the process in Punjab. It is among the 16 states where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of SIR.

In a social media post, Suri said that he had to submit his voter ID and Aadhaar card to a booth level officer and “was assured that everything is in order”.

He said that he was later informed that some of his details did not match the electoral rolls from 2003, which are being used to verify voters during the exercise.

“Spoke with booth level officer, was told that I should come and collect the notice,” he said in the post. “And then come again with unspecified documents that show I am an Indian citizen.”

He added: “Replied that I was not in India in 2003, so they have asked for passport as proof.”

.@ECISVEEP
I happen to have documents other than voter ID and Aadhaar card. But can’t help asking:
If I have trouble establishing my citizenship after representing India in three countries, what’s the fate of the common citizen?
Ease of Living, I presume!

— Navdeep Suri (@navdeepsuri) August 23, 2026

Suri said that he was able to provide other forms of identification in addition to his voter ID and Aadhaar card.

“But can’t help asking: If I have trouble establishing my citizenship after representing India in three countries, what’s the fate of the common citizen?”

Suri has served as India’s high commissioner to Australia and ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

Voter roll revision

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Since it began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision, but said that the exercise does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: Scroll’s SIR experience is a microcosm of what urban India is facing

From the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine border, Manoj Singh Shekhawat sent a 21-second audio message to his family in Rajasthan on October 15.

“If you don’t hear from me for three days, consider that I am no more,” the 33-year-old cab driver from Jaipur told his family.

Ten months later, however, his family has not given up hope that he is alive.

“We hope that maybe they are making him work at some place where there is no internet connectivity,” said Ajay Singh Rathore, a cousin.

Shekhawat’s family is among 26 Indian families who moved the Supreme Court in March to direct the Union government to trace and repatriate their loved ones from the active conflict zone on the Russia-Ukraine border.

Since the outbreak of war between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, hundreds of Indians have found themselves fighting along the Russian Armed Forces. Many claimed to have been lured there by recruitment agents. It is illegal for Indian citizens to fight for another country.

Shekhawat was recruited by a local agent in Jaipur early last year on the promise of a high-paying job, his family said.

On July 31, the Supreme Court directed the Centre to “continue its efforts” to trace the missing Indian nationals. The court also directed the Ministry of External Affairs to appoint a nodal officer in Delhi who will serve as a single point of contact for the family members of Indian nationals trapped in Russia. It also directed the ministry to arrange DNA tests of family members so that they could be matched with bodies of soldiers lying in Russian morgues.

For 14 of the families, the interventions came too late. Their sons had already been killed in the conflict, some of them in 2025. Six of the bodies were handed over to their families after the petition was filed, according to a status report filed by the Centre in the court in May. The evacuation of some of the bodies “was not possible from an active combat zone”, the Indian government said.

There is no information on 11 of the men, while one of them is in a Russian prison serving a sentence.

“Authorities keep assuring us but the fact is that we haven’t heard from my brother since October last year,” said Dheeraj Kumar, whose brother is also among those still missing in Russia. “We just want my brother to be brought back to us safely. Everything else comes later.”

But with almost no information from the frontline, the families of Indian men lured or tricked into fighting Russia’s war are caught in a limbo, they told Scroll. Seeking justice or punishment for unscrupulous agents for entrapping their kin has also been a lonely, hard struggle.

‘Go to war or get killed’

Before he went to Russia, Shekhawat earned a living as a cab driver, taking groups of tourists to different parts of North India.

Every year, he also tried to find work in foreign countries to supplement his income. “He had travelled to Poland and Thailand as well in search of work and a chance to settle down there,” said Rathore, his cousin. “Each time he had come back home after working for some time.”

But his attempt to settle down abroad failed and drained him financially as well as emotionally.

When he was offered a job in an egg factory in Russia, Shekhawat kept his decision a secret from everyone except his immediate family. “Had I known he was planning to, I would have never let him go because I knew what was happening with Indians in Russia,” said Rathore, a mechanical engineer with a United States-based company.

But after working for a few months in the egg factory, Shekhawat was not paid any wages.

The travel agents in India had sent Shekhawat to Russia on an e-visa, according to a first information report filed by the family. An e-visa allows a visitor to enter the Russian Federation for business visits or as a tourist for a maximum period of 16 days. It does not allow him or her to earn a living.

Shekhawat’s second job was at a tomato plucking factory. “Again, he was not paid any salary after working there for 15 days,” said Rathore.

It was in this dire situation that Shekhawat and several other Indians with him came in touch with an Indian agent in Russia who recruited them into Russian Armed Forces.

This agent, Rathore alleged, was part of the network of travel agents who had lured Shekhawat to Russia in the first place.

“They told Shekhawat and others that since relations between India and Russia are good, they won’t be sent to frontlines to do the actual fighting and would be engaged in other duties like digging bunkers, taking supplies and other non-combative activities,” said Rathore, recalling his conversations with Shekhawat.

Family members of missing Indian nationals in Russia and their lawyers blamed a web of travel agents in India and Russia for drawing them with the promise of better pay.

Subsequently, most of these men found themselves in difficult situations from which the only escape was serving with Russian Armed Forces under a contract.

“Many of them were first told that the Russian Army will hire them on a temporary basis for non-combative roles like constructing some tents or laying bricks or labourers who help in carrying goods,” said Supreme Court lawyer Ritwik Bhanot, who serves as the legal counsel for the families.

Once they were in the custody of the Russian Army, however, their passports were confiscated. “They were told to sign such and such agreements. After that, they were told to go to war or get killed,” Bhanot added.

In September 2025, Shekhawat eventually joined the Army by undergoing a 15-day formal training. By mid-October, he was on the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine border near Kupyansk, sending panic messages home to save him. “Since October 15, we haven’t heard from him,” said Rathore.

A labour market

In recent years, Russia has looked to South Asian countries like India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as it struggles with a labour crisis.

According to the Russian labour ministry, the country will need nearly 11 million new workers by 2030.

Aleksei Zakharov, a fellow at Observer Research Foundation, said Indian workers have filled positions in various sectors like construction, warehousing, packaging, textile, and agriculture. “There are currently around 70,000-80,000 Indian nationals working in Russia,” he said. The footprint of Indian labour is expected to grow further in the coming years. “Last year, India and Russia signed a labour mobility agreement.”

The number of those lured into the battlefield with Ukraine is relatively small, Zakharov said. “As media reports and official investigations have shown, it is largely the result of fraudulent schemes by unscrupulous visa consultancy firms and agents,” he added.

However, Russia’s use of civilians in military operations have been criticised by several countries.

Russian armed forces are known to have recruited men from more than two dozen countries to fight its war with Ukraine.

In March, the European Parliament passed a resolution addressing the grave human rights violations linked to the recruitment of non-Russian nationals in the Russia-Ukraine war. It also convened a public hearing that looked at evidence of civilians from other countries being coerced, deceived, and trafficked into fighting in Russia’s war against Ukraine.

According to the Indian government’s status report filed before the Supreme Court, several Indians were drawn to working in Russia after being promised “attractive salary packages”, hefty signing bonuses and Russian citizenship. Some of them “voluntarily” signed contracts to join the Russian Armed Forces.

The recruits to the Army were promised a monthly salary of US $2,500 or Rs 2.38 lakh, with a signing bonus of $5,000 or Rs 4.76 lakh.

In case they died, they were promised compensation amounting to $1,68,000 dollars or Rs 1.60 crore.

Official figures suggest at least 217 Indian nationals had joined the Russian military, of which 139 were already discharged from their contracts following diplomatic engagement between the Indian government and the Russian Federation.

Agreeing to joining Russian military service comes with a number of incentives for both the locals as well as foreign nationals.

"For foreigners, beyond financial compensation, salaries and other bonuses, these include Russian residence permits for the family members of those who join the armed forces,” Zakharov told Scroll.

Bait: Permanent resident status

The promise of a permanent residency convinced Himachal Pradesh’s Dinesh Kumar to sign up as a Russian fighter.

He had been working in Russia for several years, running a chain of Indian cuisine restaurants in partnership with some fellow Indians. “My brother always wanted a permanent residency,” said Dheeraj Kumar, Dinesh’s younger brother.

It was this hope that Dinesh Kumar had agreed to join the Russian forces last year, said Kumar. “One of his colleagues had guided him to join the Army as a cook,” recalled Kumar. “He was promised a good salary and permanent resident status if he completed a one-year-long contract.”

Last August, Dinesh Kumar signed a contract with the Russian Armed Forces. After a month-long training, he was sent to the frontline. “During training, he would speak to us twice or thrice a week, saying that he won’t be fighting as a soldier but work as a cook in the Army,” Kumar added.

All of that turned out to be fake. On September 14, 2025, Dinesh Kumar made a last video call to his brother. “He said he had been misguided and that they are taking him to the frontline,” said Kumar. “He was in a truck.”

Since then, there has been no contact from his side even though the family received multiple calls from unknown individuals in Russia claiming that Dinesh Kumar had been found.

Kumar’s family is one of the 26 families who have moved the Supreme Court for intervention.

In desperation to find their son, the Kumar family even fell into a trap. “My brother had shared contact details of a Pakistani man, Ahmad Bhatti, in Russia who was known to him,” recalled Dheeraj Kumar. “He had asked me to get in touch with him in case we needed anything.”

When Kumar contacted Bhatti, he asked him to come to Russia to seek compensation for his brother, claiming that his brother had been declared “missing dead”. “I transferred Rs 1.6 lakh to him to book tickets and arrange my stay in Russia but after that he stopped answering my messages and calls,” said Dheeraj Kumar, who works as a movie director.

The difficulty of finding justice

The petition by families also seeks action against agents in India who are part of the international networks that lure young men to Russia. But the path to justice or any accountability has been an uphill one.

In November last year, Shekhawat’s family filed a first information report against three travel agents in Rajasthan who allegedly lured him to Russia.

But nearly ten months later, they have not been arrested. “We even visited the Chief Minister’s office to seek a strong action against them,” said Rathore.

Instead, the agents have been urging the family to drop the case and promised to return their money. “But what about Manoj?” he asked.

Scroll contacted the station house officer of Kardhani police station in Jaipur where the case has been lodged, asking about the progress in the case. However, there was no response to the calls and messages. We also wrote to the Jaipur police commissioner. The story will be updated if they respond.

“It has been brought to the notice of the Supreme Court that so and so travel agents are behind this,” said Bhanot, the advocate. “I have made a verbal submission before the Chief Justice of India along with the names of those who are involved. But, till now, there have been no directions with regard to these agents.”

A peculiar feature of Indian law stands in the way of prosecuting recruitment agents.

Under the provisions of the Emigration Act, prior sanction of the central government is mandatory to prosecute a recruitment agent accused of illegal migration unless the complaint against that individual is filed directly by the affected emigrant or their close family members.

“Let’s say an FIR is filed against an illegal agent in Rajasthan under the Emigration Act,” said Vasanth Adithya, an advocate at the High Court of Karnataka. “Once they start the investigation, they have to seek permission from the Ministry of External Affairs because the state police cannot launch a probe in a foreign country. Once the investigation is completed, a sanction from the MEA is mandatory to prosecute the accused."

The process takes a lot of time. “The procedure is lengthy and by the time the sanctions come through, either it is too late or the person has returned home,” said Adhitya.

Moreover, the punishment for cheating under the Emigration Act is imprisonment up to two years and a paltry fine of Rs 2,000.

According to official figures tabled in Parliament in February, a total of 3,925 complaints regarding unauthorised or illegal recruiting agents were received between 2023 and 2025. Of these, only one-fourth or 955 complaints translated into FIRs in different states.

Once investigations were completed, only 39 cases qualified for seeking of sanction for prosecution from the Centre.

Adhitya called for the government to overhaul and update the Emigration Act and educate people about emigration frauds. “The ones who fall into these traps are mostly people who want to somehow succeed in life,” he added. “They are often very gullible.”

The Cockroach Janta Party on Monday called for a peaceful march from India Gate to the Delhi Police headquarters on September 5, saying the Union government had failed to “honour its July 25 commitments” that led the political campaign to call off its protest at Jantar Mantar.

The protests against alleged mismanagement of several competitive examinations began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party held a demonstration at Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time.

On July 20, thousands joined the protest. This came two days after the police forcibly took activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike for three weeks, to hospital.

The protesters’ march to Parliament was met with a crackdown by police. Dozens were injured as the police used lathis and fired tear gas shells and pellet guns at the demonstrators. The police action turbocharged the agitation, which spread to other parts of the country. Pradhan resigned as the education minister on July 25.

After his resignation, the political campaign called off the protests, saying that the government had accepted all its demands, including an assurance that “no punitive action would be taken against any protester, either now or in the future” in any state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party or its National Democratic Alliance.

The campaign had also demanded compensation of Rs 1 crore for the family of each aspirant of National Eligibility cum Entrance Test who died by suicide.

🚨#BIGANNOUNCEMENT🚨

The Cockroach Janta Party calls for a peaceful protest march at India Gate, New Delhi on September 5.

The National Working Committee expressed serious doubts over whether the Government of India intends to honour its commitments made to the young generation… pic.twitter.com/XXNIognlmO

— Saurav Das (@SauravDassss) August 24, 2026

On Monday, the Cockroach Janta Party’s national working committee met to review whether the government and the states ruled by the BJP and the NDA had complied with the “solemn commitments made to the youth people of this country”, it said in a statement.

“Members of the committee expressed serious doubts over whether the government intends to honour its word at all,” the political campaign said.

It added that instead of implementing what was promised to the protesters, the government had “played delay games, hidden behind technicalities and avoided giving clear commitments even before the Supreme Court”.

The political campaign said that the Supreme Court had asked the Union government to provide a list of first information reports registered across the country “so that the court could consider quashing them together…making the commitment easier to fulfil”.

But the government “refused to give a clear commitment to do so”, the campaign said.

On August 18, the Supreme Court said it would use its powers under Article 142 of the Constitution to quash FIRs in which only students had been named, The Hindu reported. Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court to pass orders necessary to ensure “complete justice” in any matter before it.

The court had also asked the Union government to provide a list of FIRs registered against students across the country. The bench said that cases involving persons with serious criminal antecedents would be considered separately.

On Monday, the Cockroach Janta Party said that it had been “forced to return to the streets” because of the government’s “vishwasghat”, or betrayal, of the younger generation and the families who had lost their children.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

One of the world’s top 100 worst invasive species was brought to India in the 19th century as an ornamental garden plant. But Lantana camara, which now occupies 40% of India’s tiger habitats, was not the only one.

The ornamental horticulture industry is recognised as a key global pathway for introducing invasive alien species. A new study examining India’s online ornamental plant trade has found that a majority of these plants sold online are alien species, many of which are known to be invasive or naturalised in other countries.

The study, published in Environmental Conservation, also revealed that 57 species already declared invasive in India were available for purchase online, including Lantana camara and the highly-invasive Parthenium hysterophorus.

Invasive alien species are recognised as one of five major drivers of global biodiversity decline. “They outcompete our native species and the cost is enormous,” said Kesang Bhutia, the study’s lead author and a graduate student at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru.

“Not all alien plants are a threat. There is a continuum,” explained Bhutia. A newly-introduced plant cannot survive without human care. Some escape cultivation, enter native ecosystems and naturalise, reproducing independently. Others can go further to become invasive.

As part of her research, Bhutia compiled an inventory of 1,856 ornamental species sold online using data from three of India’s largest online plant retailers that ship nationwide. Of these, 1,371 species (over 70%) were alien species, outnumbering the 480 native species on the list. Cross-checking against global databases showed that 327 species were invasive elsewhere, while 639 had naturalised outside their native ranges.

“What was particularly alarming is that species already known to cause ecological harm in India are still easily purchasable and deliverable to homes; there’s practically no barrier between ‘known invasive’ species and adding them to your cart,” said Aravind NA, Senior Fellow at ATREE and the study’s supervising author.

Among the invasive species researchers found listed for sale online were the common water hyacinth (Pontederia crassipes), bitter vine (Mikania micrantha) and mesquite (Neltuma juliflora). Since many invasive weeds first appeared as ornamentals, “online retail presents an important but underexamined pathway for potential invasions”, Aravind added.

Ornamental plant trade and the Internet

While less than 10% of introduced ornamental species escape cultivation, the volume of the ornamental plant trade contributes significantly to the spread of potentially invasive species, the study notes.

“A lot of ornamental plants are coming in through high-tech nurseries and overseas imports,” said Mam Singh, Principal Scientist (greenhouse floriculture) at ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, who was not a part of the study. India has many native ornamental species. But imported plants are often aesthetically-appealing and profitable for nurseries, he pointed out, adding that “customers always want something new, which may not be suitable for the local environment.”

With the rise of e-commerce, online platforms now ship seeds, bulbs and live plants directly to people’s homes across India, expanding the trade’s reach, volume and frequency. This increases the geographic spread of what researchers call “propagule pressure” (the number and frequency of introductions into a new environment) as well as the number of “escape attempts” a species makes, explained Aravind. E-commerce, he added, often bypasses biosecurity checkpoints as no quarantine inspections exist for plants shipped domestically by courier. As this gap between identifying a species as invasive and allowing it to be sold nationwide persists, the propagule pressure and geographic spread continue to grow, making post-establishment control costlier than prevention.

Globally, nearly three-fifths of the world’s seed-plant species, including over 500 invasive species, are traded daily through platforms like eBay. Studies in Australia and the US have also documented regulated and invasive species being sold despite biosecurity policies.

“In India, where plant trade regulations are less strict, the situation is arguably more vulnerable to this issue than in countries with more rigorous controls,” observed Aravind. The prevalence of alien species in online trade indicates a “systemic issue”, he said, as the market centres around exotic, fast-growing, and easily propagated plants that tend to have invasion-prone traits.

Traits like high seed output and resistance to herbivory that make ornamental plants easy to cultivate often help them naturalise and spread as invasive as well, according to Anzar Khuroo, professor of Botany at the University of Kashmir who has compiled alien flora inventories of India and the Himalayan region.

Khuroo, who was not associated with this research, called the study a “valuable contribution” and noted, “Although alien plant inventories in India have been assembled over the last decade, a list specifically focusing on those alien plants traded online for ornamental use was lacking for the country.”

A preliminary screening tool

The study found that herbs were the dominant life form among the inventory’s native, alien and invasive taxa. Most alien species originated from Southern and Northern America, possibly due to climatic similarities with India allowing them to establish easily.

Apart from similar climatic conditions between a species’ native and introduced range, another key indicator of a species’ invasiveness is its history of being “invasive elsewhere” – a common metric used as part of Weed Risk Assessments globally. “The rationale behind it is that a species problematic in one area can be problematic in another area which has similar climatic conditions,” explained Bhutia.

The authors determined each species’ native range using Plants of the World Online database. They then cross-checked the inventory against three databases of alien and invasive species – Indian Alien Flora Information (ILORA), Global Register of Introduced and Invasive Species (GRIIS), and Global Naturalised Alien Flora (GLONAF) – further categorising them based on invasion risk.

Thirty-nine species naturalised in India and invasive in other regions comprised the high-risk group, highlighting their potential to become invasive in India as well. A total of 239 species recorded as invasive in other countries but not yet naturalised or invasive in India were identified as moderate-risk species, while only two species naturalised in India and elsewhere but not invasive globally were identified as low-risk.

“[T]his tool functions as a screening method, not a prediction,” clarified Aravind, adding that it has a “solid precedent” as “invasive elsewhere” questions have demonstrated strong predictive accuracy in Australian and Hawaiian Weed Risk Assessments. The authors suggest the lists be used to prioritise species for thorough risk assessments.

These lists can also help raise awareness among consumers and the industry, said Khuroo. Given the relatively weak online trade regulation in the country, he noted, the study calls for the development of an “early warning mechanism” to minimise invasion risks. But he cautioned that alien species posing high invasion risk in India’s warmer tropical areas may not pose the same risk in temperate colder regions. Since “the data has been collected at national scale, but India has diverse agroclimatic zones at regional scale,” Khuroo recommended that future studies assess regional applicability as well.

Bridging regulatory gaps

More than half of the alien species recorded globally since 1950 had never been documented as established anywhere until they first appeared. This means the databases this study relies upon possibly underestimate the threat, Bhutia pointed out.

“While we have tried to take three of India’s largest online retailers, they are only part of the picture,” she added, highlighting the need to examine social media and smaller informal sellers as well. Another limitation, according to Aravind, is that the study only assesses what is available for sale, which leaves the causal link between online sale and new invasions in India still to be traced.

The authors say no country-specific WRA framework currently exists in India. While researchers have developed Weed Risk Assessment tools, these have not yet been implemented as regulation. The Plant Quarantine (Regulation of Import into India) Order, 2003 also lists 57 quarantine weed species, of which only one (Anthemis cotula) is recognised as invasive by ILORA – “a striking mismatch between the regulatory list and the species actually known to be problematic domestically,” observed Aravind.

Building on previous recommendations, the study suggests a blacklist-based ban on species confirmed invasive in India – a cost-effective measure, he said, since they are already listed on the ILORA database. Other measures include opt-in risk labelling, promoting native alternatives and implementing a certification model like California’s PlantRight programme, which reduced invasive plants carried by participating retailers. From an industry perspective, “these are all very feasible,” noted Singh.

As per existing regulations, he explained, any planting material imported into India must be contained and monitored in post entry quarantine facilities for some months to ensure it is not harmful to public or environmental health. Singh added this on-ground monitoring needs to be more strictly enforced.

“The knowledge is there,” said Bhutia. “How to merge that knowledge with regulations would be the next step.”

This article was first published on Mongabay.

In recent weeks, the authorities in several Indian cities have taken action against protesters who have reportedly displayed support for jailed activist Umar Khalid.

On August 7, the police in Mumbai arrested Abhirup Paul, a former student of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, for allegedly chanting slogans in support of Khalid at a campus event – an accusation that the student has denied.

Two days later, in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University officials withdrew permission for a discussion on Khalid’s book, Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power.

Last month, while youth protesters were demanding the resignation of the education minister, a first information report was filed against a demonstrator in Bengaluru for carrying a poster that said “Umar Khalid zindabad”. Long live Umar Khalid.

Around the same time, Instagram complied with a demand made by the Modi government and restricted access to a profile named “Free Umar Khalid” in India.

Shortly after, two protesters in Goa were detained for expressing their support for Khalid at an event to celebrate the education minister’s resignation.

Legally, there is no basis for these actions, asserted Arvind Narrain, a Bengaluru-based lawyer, academic and president of the Karnataka unit of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties. “At worst, he [Khalid] is an accused,” he explained. “Article 19 of the Constitution includes the right to advocate for the release of those accused under any law, including the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.”

Article 19 guarantees the right to freedom of speech and expression. Khalid is accused under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

It is the Hindutva framing of Khalid as an “anti-national” that has rendered those supporting him vulnerable to such state action, Narrain added.

This framing dates back to February 2016, when Khalid and two other Jawaharlal Nehru University students were embroiled in a controversial sedition case. Since then, he has come under fire, quite literally, for his persistent opposition to Hindutva politics.

Khalid’s admirers say that despite these attacks, his popularity has only grown, making him a sore point for Hindu nationalists. The support for him, they argue, is driven by his refusal to be boxed into any single identity, be it Muslim or communist.

But the “anti-national” label is no longer effective in stigmatising the activist, given that he has spent nearly six years in prison without trial, Narrain said.

“Umar Khalid’s name was taken every day at the protest in Bengaluru,” Narrain pointed out. “It’s not like the FIR killed the discourse. People were still talking about him.”

In April, when the People’s Union for Civil Liberties organised a discussion in Bengaluru on a book about Khalid, the venue was “jam-packed”, Narrain said. It is precisely this burgeoning support for Khalid that had triggered the clampdown, contended the activist’s partner, Banojyotsna Lahiri, a researcher based in Delhi.

Soon after Khalid was arrested for his purported role in organising the 2020 Delhi riots, some of his friends had begun campaigning for his release on social media and offline. Though the campaign had few supporters in the beginning, the police did not try to stop them, Lahiri recalled.

“Why now, after all these years?” she asked. “It is because the support and acceptance for Umar is becoming mainstream. People are becoming fearless and speaking out. That is why the state is flexing its muscles.”

The recent youth protests showed that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party views anybody opposed to the policies of the Modi government as “anti-national”, Lahiri said. She urged those who sympathise with Khalid to become more vocal instead of getting intimidated.

But this is easier said than done. At the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest in Delhi, for example, the prolonged incarceration of activists such as Khalid was a taboo topic. Throughout the 36-day sit-in, the movement’s spokespersons ducked questions about Khalid, arguing that this threatened unity on the demand for the education minister’s resignation.

It is not as if the tactic went unnoticed or unopposed. Nabiya Khan, one of Khalid’s friends, sharply criticised the Cockroach Janta Party for its position.

“With this logic, Umar is a distraction,” she wrote in The Quint. “And a movement against the corporatisation and degradation of higher education must not mention a political prisoner who emerged from a university campus and student movements.”

An activist from the All India Students’ Association, a left-wing student outfit that was closely involved in organising the protests, had discussed the issue with this reporter in Jantar Mantar.

“If Sonam Wangchuk can bring up Ladakh, why can’t we talk about Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam?” this person asked. The dispute was eventually settled with both sides agreeing to stick to education alone.

Clifton D’Rozario, a central committee member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, said that Khalid is an “ideological threat” to Hindutva. He explained: “He does not respond only as a Muslim, but also raises the questions of caste and class. He is scary to them because he is an intellectual.”

D’Rozario summed it up elegantly. “Every authoritarian era produces its own defining political prisoner who faces persecution, but also embodies hope,” he said. “Umar Khalid epitomises that idea for this era.”

Here is a summary of last week’s top stories.

FCRA bill under review. The Lok Sabha on Wednesday referred the 2026 Foreign Contribution Regulation Amendment Bill to a joint parliamentary committee for detailed examination. Registration under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act is mandatory for a non-profit organisation to receive foreign funds.

Among the key provisions under the amendment bill is one that allows the Union government to take control of an organisation’s foreign funds and assets if its FCRA registration lapses or is cancelled. The bill was introduced in Parliament in March during the Budget Session.

The proposed legislation was sent for wider consultation in the wake of protests by Opposition parties, who said that the bill grants “sweeping and disproportionate powers” to the executive without adequate constitutional safeguards.⁠

Phase two of Census 2027. The Census 2027 will ask respondents if they belong to a Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe, and will also include an open-ended question for other communities about the caste that they belong to. This will be the first time in independent India that caste will be enumerated across communities. Until now, Census exercises only recorded the population of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.

Among the 40 questions notified on Friday are also those seeking information on the place where respondents received their Covid-19 vaccination, the total number of bank accounts they hold and digital literacy. The form also seeks information on Aadhaar numbers, mobile numbers, passport numbers and voter IDs.

Row over invite to CJI. After students of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research opposed Chief Justice Surya Kant’s participation as a chief guest at their convocation, the Bar Council of India on Thursday issued an order directing state bar councils to defer the enrolment of any student from the university graduating in 2026. Hours later, it withdrew the order following a backlash.

Last month, a group of students had urged the university authorities to reconsider Kant’s invitation after his response to a petition alleging police excesses against protesters in Delhi on July 20. On Friday, Kant criticised the council’s decision as “uncalled for”. “It’s a dialogue between students and me. Who are they to raise an issue?” he said.

Also on Scroll last week

• Why disability support still evades those with blood disorders
• NHPC knew of risks at Sikkim tunnel before deadly July blast, documents show
• ‘She had stepped out to buy food’: Another Bengali woman forcibly pushed to Bangladesh from Mumbai
• True Story: Food companies are lying to you. The regulator failed to stop them
• What happened to Modi’s $5 trillion economy promise?
• Does ‘Vande Mataram’ need the threat of criminal law to be honoured?
• Kanwar Yatra’s deafening noise goes unheard by the state
• Should India apologise for caste injustice, like Nepal did?
• In Pakistan, Prisoner No 804 seems to be everywhere
• How Moscow tried to make Soviet cinema popular in Cold War India

Follow the Scroll channel on WhatsApp for a curated selection of the news that matters throughout the day, and a round-up of major developments in India and around the world every evening. What you won’t get: spam.

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More than one crore names were removed from the draft voter list of Karnataka published as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The state has 4.4 crore voters in the draft roll as compared to the 5.5 crore before the exercise began in June. The names not included in the draft roll account for 19.4% of the state’s electorate.

Notices will be sent to 43 lakh persons whose enumeration forms either had anomalies or those who had not been mapped, Chief Electoral Officer V Anbukumar said. The claims and objections by voters against their removal from the draft list can be filed between August 24 and September 23. The appeals will be heard by October 22, before the final electoral roll is published on October 27.

Karnataka is among the 16 states where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of SIR. Read on.

The Delhi High Court summoned political commentator Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, media portals The Pamphlet, Law Beat and The Sunday Guardian, and social media account The Jaipur Dialogues in a privacy suit filed by Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson Saurav Das against his home address and other personal information being revealed online. The defendants have been asked to file their replies within 10 days.

Das alleged that people from The Pamphlet entered his shared home in Delhi without permission on August 5, and recorded and posted a video showing parts of the property on social media. The video was reposted by Iyer-Mitra, he alleged.

Das also alleged that Iyer-Mitra disclosed his address during a Law Beat programme by identifying his neighbour. The commentator also incorrectly stated that his rent was about Rs 7 lakh per month, he alleged.

He has sought damages of more than Rs 2 crore for alleged violations of his privacy. Read on.

The Bombay High Court’s verdict upholding the acquittal of 22 accused in the allegedly staged “encounter” killings of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati, and the alleged murder of his wife Kausar Bi in Gujarat, has been challenged in the Supreme Court. The order was challenged by Sheikh’s brother.

In December 2018, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court acquitted all persons, including 21 police officers, accused in the matter. It held that the prosecution had failed to prove a conspiracy beyond reasonable doubt. Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah, who is now the Union home minister, was among the persons acquitted earlier in the case. Out of 210 witnesses examined during the trial, 92 were declared hostile.

While upholding the acquittals in May, the High Court said that the prosecution’s case was based on circumstantial evidence with “several broken links in the chain of circumstances”. Read on.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our Daily Brief newsletter.

The names of more than one crore persons were removed from the draft voter list of Karnataka published on Monday as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, Moneycontrol reported.

The state had 4.4 crore voters in the draft roll as compared to the 5.5 crore before the exercise began in June. The names not included in the draft roll account for 19.4% of the state’s electorate.

While 65.4 lakh voters have been marked as permanently shifted, 12.3 lakh had died, 15.1 lakh were absent and 7 lakh names were duplicate entries. More than 3.8 lakh were placed under the “other” category. It was unclear what the other category was.

The highest deletions were recorded in Bengaluru’s urban districts.

Notices will be sent to 43 lakh persons whose enumeration forms either had anomalies or those who had not been mapped, Moneycontrol quoted the Chief Electoral Officer V Anbukumar as saying.

The claims and objections by voters against their removal from the draft list can be filed between August 24 and September 23. The appeals will be heard by October 22, before the final electoral roll is published on October 27.

Karnataka is among the 16 states where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of SIR.

More than 16% of the voters in Haryana and 10.8% in Andhra Pradesh were removed from the draft lists published on July 31 as part of the exercise.

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

Since it began, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision, but said that the exercise does not mean that the Election Commission can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: Scroll’s SIR experience is a microcosm of what urban India is facing

The government spent Rs 92.3 crore on renovation, repair and furnishing of the official homes of Union ministers in Delhi’s Lutyens bungalow zone in 2025-’26, PTI quoted a Right to Information Act response as saying on Sunday. The annual spending was the highest since 2014.

The expenditure on the renovation of homes of Union ministers was Rs 27.4 crore in 2014-’15. Adjusted for inflation, this would be around Rs 46.6 crore in 2026.

The Lutyens bungalow zone, developed between 1912 and 1930 as part of the development of Delhi as the British capital, has homes of Union ministers, MPs and senior judges and top military officers. Some of the bungalows are 80 to 100 years old.

Between 2014-’15 and 2025-’26, the government spent Rs 547.6 crore on renovating the ministers’ homes through the Central Public Works Department, which is responsible for their maintenance, PTI reported.

The Central Public Works Department did not provide data on expenditure during the period on the residences of Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha MPs who are not ministers, or on the offices of Union ministers and ministers of state.

The Cockroach Janta Party political campaign criticised the expenditure, saying “Rs 92 crore = 10 new world class government schools”.

“Stop fixing your lavish homes, and fix the schools!,” it said on social media. “The money is available, the intent to use it for government schools is missing.”

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Nayabuddin Sheikh, the brother of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, has moved the Supreme Court against the Bombay High Court’s decision to uphold the acquittal of 22 accused, including 21 police officers, in the 2005 case involving the alleged staged “encounter” killings of his brother and his aide Tulsiram Prajapati, and the alleged murder of his sister-in-law Kausar Bi in Gujarat, Live Law reported.

The plea was filed on August 13 and challenges the High Court’s May 7 judgement dismissing the appeals against the acquittals.

Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was a wanted criminal, was killed by the Gujarat Police in November 2005 in an “encounter”, which is alleged to have been staged. He and his wife were travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra when they were stopped by the Gujarat and Rajasthan police, allegedly abducted and shot dead near Gandhinagar.

A sub-inspector also allegedly raped Kauser Bi before murdering her. Prajapati was the sole witness to the murders. He was in police custody after the incident but was shot dead in another “encounter” in December 2006, when the police claimed he was trying to escape.

In December 2018, a special Central Bureau of Investigation court acquitted all persons accused in the matter. In its judgement the court had held that the prosecution had failed to prove a conspiracy beyond reasonable doubt.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Shah, who is now the Union home minister, was among the persons acquitted earlier in the case. Out of 210 witnesses examined during the trial, 92 were declared hostile.

In April 2019, Nayabuddin Sheikh and another brother of Sohrabuddin Sheikh, Rubabuddin Sheikh, challenged the acquittal before the High Court, alleging that the trial was flawed and that several witness statements had not been recorded accurately.

While upholding the acquittals, the High Court said the prosecution’s case was based on circumstantial evidence with “several broken links in the chain of circumstances”, Live Law reported.

It also found that the prosecution had failed to show that Sohrabuddin Sheikh and Kausar Bi were abducted by the police or establish a motive for staging an allegedly fake “encounter”.

The court said that the large number of hostile witnesses did not by itself show that the trial had not been properly conducted. It also said that it found no evidence of a politician-police nexus behind the alleged encounters.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Delhi High Court on Monday summoned political commentator Abhijit Iyer-Mitra, media portals The Pamphlet, Law Beat and The Sunday Guardian, and social media account The Jaipur Dialogues in a privacy suit filed by Cockroach Janta Party Spokesperson Saurav Das against his residential address and other personal information being revealed online, Bar and Bench reported.

The defendants have been asked to file their replies within 10 days.

The counsel for Das alleged that persons from The Pamphlet entered his client’s shared home in Delhi without permission on August 5, and recorded and posted a video showing parts of the property on social media platform X. The video was reposted by Iyer-Mitra, the lawyer alleged.

Das has sought damages of more than Rs 2 crore for alleged violations of his privacy, dignity and security, Live Law reported.

The posts on X that showed Das’ address had been removed, Live Law reported. However, the lawyer urged that the posts, removed by X under the platform’s policy, should not be restored.

The suit also asks the court to stop the defendants from publishing, sharing or disclosing his residential address, and to remove videos and posts containing the information from public access.

Further, Das has sought directions to platforms X and Google to take down such content, and prevent the information from disseminating further.

The suit states that the video posted by The Pamphlet showing his residential address received more than 2.1 million views and was reposted on August 10, Bar and Bench reported.

Das has further alleged that Iyer-Mitra disclosed his address during a Law Beat programme by identifying his neighbour. The commentator also incorrectly stated that the rent was about Rs 7 lakh per month, he alleged.

The Cockroach Janta Party spokesperson said that he filed a police complaint on August 5 and told the defendants about the security risks posed by their disclosure, but said the information continued to be shared.

He said that the repeated sharing of his residential details, along with previous violent threats against him, increased the risk of hostile persons finding his home and put him, his family and other residents at risk of “intimidation, harassment and physical violence”, Bar and Bench reported.

The matter will be heard next on September 14.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Sunday criticised the Maharashtra government’s rule making Marathi mandatory for auto-rickshaw and cab drivers in the state, saying that no language should be “politicised” as it creates “distance and discord in the country’s linguistic and emotional unity”.

The Bharatiya Janata Party government on April 14 made basic knowledge of Marathi mandatory for all licensed taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers from May 1. The requirement also applies to drivers working with cab aggregators such as Ola, Uber and Rapido.

However, on April 29, it deferred the implementation of the decision until August 15.

A statewide inspection campaign to enforce the rule began on Thursday. As of Saturday, the Maharashtra Transport Department had issued notices to more than 770 drivers for lacking basic knowledge of Marathi.

The Regional Transport Office has deployed marshals to conduct language tests on roads, at rickshaw stands and at junctions.

Among the questions asked by the marshals in Marathi are “Where do you want to go?”, “Please start the meter” and “Do you have change?”

In a social media post, Yadav asked whether the language requirement for auto-rickshaw drivers not violate their constitutional right to carry out business in any part of the country.

He also asked why the same requirement was not being imposed on foreign companies operating in Mumbai.

हर राज्य की मातृभाषा का सम्मान और उत्थान होना चाहिए लेकिन किसी भी भाषा का राजनीतिकरण नहीं होना चाहिए। इससे देश की भाषिक-भाविक एकता में दूरी और दुराव पैदा होता है।

मुंबई में भाजपा के उत्तर भारतीय नेता हैं या भ्रष्टाचार में लीन होकर ठंडे पड़े हैं।

क्या इस तरह की भाषा-ज्ञान की… pic.twitter.com/ZSZtlLYoqu

— Akhilesh Yadav (@yadavakhilesh) August 23, 2026

“The money-hungry BJP is always ready to roll out the red carpet for the wealthy,” Yadav said. “The BJP’s entire pressure is exerted only on the poor, the exploited, the deprived and the neglected.”

The former Uttar Pradesh chief minister shared a video that purportedly shows two auto-rickshaw drivers talking about the Marathi requirement.

One driver said he had been told that his licence would be cancelled and that he would face a fine of Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 if he could not speak Marathi.

He said that auto-rickshaw drivers like him come from states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and that it would be difficult for persons who cannot even read Hindi properly to learn Marathi within one and a half months.

Another driver claimed that he had been fined Rs 25,000 and that his licence had been suspended. He said he had been given three months to learn the language and return to work.

Yadav said that if auto-rickshaw drivers were made to work under mental stress, it could endanger not only the drivers but also their passengers and other vehicles.

He said that if the BJP in Mumbai and Maharashtra wanted to make language a condition for work, it should also declare that it would not seek votes from speakers of languages such as Hindi, Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Punjabi.

In 2025, several attacks were reported in Maharashtra against persons for not speaking Marathi or allegedly insulting the language.

Drivers protest at Mumbai’s Kandivali

The auto and taxi drivers in Mumbai’s Kandivali area blocked a road for more than an hour on Monday to protest against the statewide inspection campaign to check Marathi proficiency, The Indian Express reported.

They alleged that they are being harassed by some Marathi-speaking members of the drivers’ community since the language requirement was introduced.

The protest began at about 9 am on the Kandivali Link Road near Laljipada, disrupting traffic during peak hours. The police had to be deployed to clear the site.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Delhi High Court has stayed proceedings in a criminal defamation case filed against Sudarshan TV and its editor Suresh Chavhanke in connection with allegations that his channel had claimed that a madrasa was involved in “anti-national” activities.

The case against Chavhanke was filed by Mohammed Tufail Khan, who runs Jamia Arabia Nizami Welfare Educational Society, which is a non-governmental organisation and a madrasa that provides shelter, food and clothing to about 70 orphans, Bar and Bench reported. Khan had also named Islamic scholar Mufti Wajahat Qasmi, Sudarshan TV and the channel’s director Maya Chavhanke, the wife of Suresh Chavhanke, in his petition.

He alleged that Qasmi falsely accused his educational society of engaging in anti-national activities, receiving illicit funding and “brainwashing” children in August and September 2022, Bar and Bench reported.

Khan said that some residents, along with media personnel, entered his home in September 2022, called him a “Bangladeshi” and made his number public, which led to him getting death threats.

He alleged that Sudarshan TV broadcast defamatory programmes against his organisations and hosted another show in which derogatory accusations were made.

In its order on August 21, the High Court quoted the petitioner’s counsel as having submitted that Chavhanke is only an anchor of a TV show and there was no criminal intention on his part.

The court ordered a stay on the proceedings in the trial court till the next date of hearing.

On October 19, a city court found that the allegations made by Sudarshan TV in its broadcasts and social media posts were, on a preliminary reading, defamatory, Bar and Bench reported.

The judge had issued bailable warrants against Chavhanke and Sudarshan TV on April 6 after they failed to appear before court. The warrants were cancelled on May 30 when they recorded their appearance.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Sneha.

India had asked the United States not to allow reporters to ask questions during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s meeting with President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in France in June, US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said on Saturday.

Speaking at the Economic Times World Leaders Forum, Gor said the Ministry of External Affairs had made the request shortly before the June 17 meeting between Trump and Modi in Evian-les-Bains.

According to Gor, Trump was told that India preferred “no questions” and agreed to the arrangement.

Gor said: “We were behind the scenes…And he [Trump] said, do they have any asks? And the MEA [Ministry of External Affairs] had one ask. He said, and it was, let's bring in the media, but let's not do a full press conference.”

“I told the president, I said, the Indians prefer no questions,” the US envoy added. “He said, sure, no problem.”

However, Gor said the meeting then began with journalists and around 50 cameras in the room. Modi and Trump made opening remarks, after which Trump turned towards the cameras and asked, “any questions?”

According to Gor, Trump’s invitation turned the meeting into a 45-minute press interaction, with Modi seated beside him as reporters directed their questions primarily to the US president.

“MEA had one ask… let’s do a press conference and let’s not do any questions…”, says US Ambassador Sergio Gor. And then President Trump took questions, indirectly embarrassing @narendramodi.

Why is the Prime Minister afraid of taking questions? The MEA, instead of working for… pic.twitter.com/rmxhXQwkJF

— Dr. Shama Mohamed (@drshamamohd) August 23, 2026

The Indian government and the Ministry of External Affairs have not officially responded to Gor’s account.

Modi’s meeting with Trump came days after three Indian mariners were killed in a US Navy attack on a commercial vessel in the Strait of Hormuz. During the interaction, Modi had raised concerns over the safety of Indian seafarers operating in the conflict zone.

A month earlier, Modi’s reluctance to hold press conferences, along with growing concerns over India’s deteriorating press freedom, had come under renewed scrutiny during his visit to Europe.

Journalists in Amsterdam and Oslo questioned foreign ministry officials about the prime minister’s approach to the media.

Among them was Norwegian journalist Helle Lyng, who directly asked Modi whether he would take questions “from the freest press in the world”. The prime minister did not respond. Lyng later attended a press conference by Indian diplomats in Oslo, where she had a tense exchange with Sibi George, the Ministry of External Affairs’ secretary (West).

US envoy flags ‘fake news problem’ in India

During his address at the event, Gor highlighted what he described as a “fake news” problem in India.

“I used to think we have a fake news problem back home,” he said. “Some of the things that get reported here are just nowhere close to the ballpark.”

The envoy specifically referred to a conversation with Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal over one such report. “I told him, I said I’m going to put something out publicly,” Gor said, adding that Goyal did the same.

“Rarely has a minister here in India put out something calling out fake news,” Gor added.

On July 13, Goyal rejected a Reuters report that India declined a quick trade agreement with the US during talks in June and is holding out for a better deal.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

An Indian national was killed in a shooting incident in New York on Friday night, said the Indian consulate general in the city.

The man, Gurdeep Singh, was killed on Crescent Street in the city’s Brooklyn area, in what police believe may have been a road rage incident, CBS News reported.

No arrests have been made yet and the investigation is ongoing.

Surveillance camera footage obtained by CBS News showed what appeared to be two persons fighting on a street, followed by a flash of light from apparent gunfire. One person was seen falling to the ground, while the attacker entered a car and drove away.

The consulate general of India in New York said it was in touch with Singh’s family and was extending all possible assistance. “Our thoughts and heartfelt condolences are with his family during this difficult time,” it said.

We are deeply saddened to learn about the untimely demise of Mr. Gurdeep Singh, an Indian national, who tragically lost his life in a shooting incident in Brooklyn, New York.

Our thoughts and heartfelt condolences are with his family during this difficult time. The Consulate is…

— India in New York (@IndiainNewYork) August 24, 2026

Edited by Sneha.

Three newborns died after a fire that broke out in the neonatal intensive care unit of a government hospital in Maharashtra’s Amravati district in the early hours of Monday, PTI reported.

The fire broke out at the Amravati District Women’s Hospital around 3.15 am when a ventilator in the unit sparked, the news agency quoted an unidentified official as saying.

Nine infants were in the room when the blaze began, The Indian Express reported. Hospital staffers evacuated all nine babies, but three of them died.

The remaining six babies have been admitted to a super speciality hospital.

Amravati Deputy Commissioner of Police Shyam Ghuge said that the fire was confined to one room in the neonatal intensive care unit and was doused within about 30 minutes, The Indian Express reported.

“There was a technical fault in the thermal unit, following which the fire broke out,” the official was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “The attendants immediately took out the nine babies from the room, of whom three died.”

STORY | Three newborns die in fire at govt hospital's NICU in Maharashtra's Amravati

Three newborns were killed when a fire broke out in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) of a government hospital in Maharashtra’s Amravati district early on Monday, officials said.

READ:… pic.twitter.com/0fbXlL0nr1

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) August 24, 2026

The authorities will investigate the reasons for the blaze and whether the hospital followed fire safety norms, Ghuge said. “The technical equipment involved in the incident, as well as the fire-safety arrangements at the hospital, are likely to be examined as part of the probe,” he was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

Edited by Sneha.