“This is not a survey marker for me – it is like a dagger driven into my heart,” lamented Hafizullah Ganie, an apple farmer in Pulwama district’s Babhara village pointing to a bright yellow concrete pillar indicating the route a planned railway line will take through South Kashmir.

When the 27.6-km Awantipora-Shopian railway line is built, the project will consume Ganie’s half-acre orchard.

Similar survey pillars were installed in December in orchards in Babhara, Tikken, Keegam, Kunso and other villages in Pulwama and Shopian districts.

In December 2023, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw told Parliament that the final location survey has been sanctioned for this project.

The construction, villagers claim, will swallow hundreds of acres of orchard land and between half a million and 700,000 trees. The district authorities say they have not yet begun to estimate how much land will be required for the project and how many trees will be cut.

But since the markers were installed, apple farmers in several affected villages have held peaceful protests. They say that the railway line imperils the prosperous lives they have built since they shifted from paddy cultivation to apple farming around 25 years ago.

Since the 1970s, apple farming has lifted incomes in Kashmir, reshaping aspirations and making horticulture the backbone of the Valley’s economy. The industry directly or indirectly provides a living for 3.3 million people.

The decision to change what was grown on their land was born not just of the desire to produce a more lucrative commodity – it was the result of growing water scarcity.

Traditionally, paddy cultivation in this area would be irrigated by water from snow-fed streams, said 58-year-old Abdul Hamid, a farmer in Babhara village. But now, he said, “snow has almost vanished… and so has the water”.

Ganie still remembers how he and other farmers from Babhara were beaten up by farmers of a nearby village in 2001 when they attempted to divert a stream there to provide water to their farms.

“That day many of us decided to convert our paddy land into orchards as apple trees and other fruit trees are not reliant on irrigation,” Ganie said. It took him a year to move from paddy to growing apples. Many of his neighbours followed suit.

Not only did this solve their water problem, it also turned around their fortunes because the earnings from apple farming are far higher than paddy farming, he said.

Ganie said it is hard to believe how the snow and glaciers that fed Kashmir’s streams have diminished over the past few decades. “When I was a young boy, Pir Ki Gali [a mountain pass] had snow even in July and August,” he said. “Today, there is none even in April.”

Over the past 60 years, glaciers in the Kashmir and Ladakh Himalayan regions have reduced by 25% to 30%, said Irfan Rashid, an assistant professor at the earth sciences department of University of Kashmir who has studied the phenomenon.

Farhat Shaheen, an agricultural economist at Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology who has done extensive research on the impacts of climate change on agriculture, said that the decisions of farmers in recent years in some water-stressed villages of Kashmir have turned out not just to be economically advantageous for farmers – they were climate-smart too.

“The water footprint of apple is very low compared to paddy,” Shaheen said. While paddy needs irrigation, apple orchards are largely rain-fed. He added that horticulture also has a significantly smaller carbon footprint. Apple trees, he noted, help sequester carbon. Paddy fields, on the other hand, are a source of methane emissions.

From a climate lens, Shaheen observed that apples are well suited to Kashmir’s conditions, requiring only a few showers during the growing season and minimal irrigation in dry spells.

The effects of climate change have been especially intense in the region. After analysing the recession patterns of nine glaciers in the Kashmir Himalaya over 28 years from 1992 and 2020 with the help of satellite images and field measurements, Rashid of the University of Kashmir and his co-researchers found that glaciers here are melting faster than in other regions across the Himalayan arc.

Farmers have sensed such changes way earlier. Farmers in Babhara, Drubgam and other villages in Pulwama said that shifting from paddy cultivation to apple cultivation wasn’t just a way to seek better returns – in the face of water shortages, it was a survival strategy.

Adjusting to climate change will not be cheap. A new regional analysis report by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development has found a $12.05 trillion gap in amount of money the Hindu Kush Himalaya will require to address the region’s adaptation and mitigation needs between 2020 to 2050

The report notes that global climate finance flows, which reached approximately $1.3 trillion annually in 2021-’22, are predominantly directed toward mitigation in developed and larger emerging economies. The Hindu Kush Himayala region received significantly lower shares.

Despite this, resilient farmers in various Himalayan villages have already found their own solutions to climate-driven problems – such as switching crops.

Paddy cultivation, said the agricultural economist Shaheen, is increasingly unviable from a farmer’s perspective though it is crucial for food security in a region where rice is a staple. “It does not even recover the costs farmers incur every season,” he said.

In contrast, horticulture offers quicker and higher returns. High-density apple plantations, for instance, begin bearing fruit from the second year, with production peaking by the sixth year.

Still, apple production isn't without problems. From an environmental perspective, Shaheen acknowledged that pesticide use in horticulture remains a concern. “But it can be taken care of by bio-pesticides in due course,” he said.

He said that horticulture has been a critical economic lifeline in Kashmir, particularly during years of conflict and economic uncertainty.

The prosperity apple farming has brought is written into the landscape. In most villages in South Kashmir, beautiful houses, most of them built in recent years, stand amidst rolling orchards.

In this region, homes and orchards stand in close proximity. They are sometimes separated only by a narrow street because apple farmers do not want orchard land eaten into by broader roads.

Ganie has not yet told his 78-year-old father how much of the family’s land will be lost to the rail project. “That would simply crush him,” he said. “Land is all he has known in his life.”

In Babhara, farmer Altaf Ahmad pointed to the stylish houses around the village surrounded by orchards, noting that these signs of prosperity would have been unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago.

“Thanks to our incomes from our orchards, every household is now prosperous enough to construct a house and afford whatever it takes to live a good life,” said Ahmad.

But with the rail project, “all this hard-earned success is at stake now”, he complained.

Ahmad hastened to add that the residents do not oppose the idea of development. Many years ago, he said, the people of South Kashmir gave land for the railway project that connected the region to the rest of the country.

But they could not see the reason for the Awantipura-Shopian line, he said. “We are already connected through a network of roads,” Ahmad said. “For god’s sake, a small distance of around 20 km doesn’t need a railway connection.”

Another villager said that the line “would achieve nothing except slicing our land and our future”.

Farmer groups in Pulwama and some Kashmiri political leaders have emphasised that such projects require a Social Impact Assessment and formal consultations with affected families. The farmers claimed that the surveyors installed the project's boundary markers without informing residents, “breaching procedures” meant to safeguard landowners’ rights.

Shahbaz Ahmad Bodha, Pulwama district’s Assistant Commissioner Revenue, said that his office has not yet received communication to carry out a complete estimation of land and trees involved.

“We will carry out the assessment as and when we get specific directions ... and the compensation will be provided to those whose land gets involved as per the Fair Compensation Act,” Bodha said. He added that protesting farmers had not approached their office directly.

Himanshu Shekhar Upadhyay, Chief Public Relations Officer of Northern Indian Railway, said that he had not heard about “any such protests” against the project.

“I will get the information regarding your questions and get back to you,” he said. “But, as of now, I will only say that Railways is for people. People are not for the railways...so whatever is in the interest of people, Railways will do that after taking the people in confidence.”

When contacted several times later for further information, he did not pick up the phone nor answer the email sent to him. This story will be updated if he responds.

Athar Parvaiz is a resident fellow at the Climate Change Media Hub, Asian College of Journalism.

Many upper-caste protestors opposing the University Grants Commission’s new guidelines against discrimination have demanded that the rules be made caste-neutral.

But lawyer Disha Wadekar said there is no point to the regulations if they are made caste-neutral. “Then they will have to be gender neutral, they will have to be disabilities neutral, so everyone can file complaints against everyone,” Wadekar told Scroll in an interview on Friday.

Wadekar is representing petitioners seeking institutional safeguards against caste-based discrimination in higher education institutions in India.

She pointed out that the UGC’s Redressal of Grievances of Students Regulations, 2023, which has also been mentioned in the 2026 guidelines, allow any student to file a complaint of victimisation. “So what is this uproar that ‘we don’t have a redressal’?”

Regarding claims that the new rules could be misused, Wadekar said that misuse is a symptom of systemic failures in our criminal justice system.

“This whole ‘misuse’ narrative about the atrocities act was also based on the fact that there are so many acquittals,” she said, pointing that similarly, in rape cases, only 25% cases reach conviction. “Does that mean that 75% of rape cases are false and are a misuse of the rape law?”

Excerpts from the interview:

How do you respond to what happened in the Supreme Court on January 29? The petition opposing the UGC regulations and the court’s order to stay the petition.

The staying of the UGC regulations is an interim order, so in the interim, the older regulations will be in force. And the final matter on the merits of the case will be heard on March 13. The petitioners are challenging the definition of caste-based discrimination, which says that caste-based discrimination is discrimination only against SCs, STs and OBCs. Their claim is that that is not a caste-neutral provision, and so that provision needs to be made caste-neutral.

We, of course, do not agree with that. We believe that SC, STs and OBCs are the only people who need to be protected against discrimination based on caste. However, we will make our detailed submissions on March 13, and I would not like to comment directly on what the court said.

But I would like to point out that the 2012 regulations that are now going to be in operation, at least until the next hearing date, also protect Scheduled Castes and Schedule Tribes exclusively against caste-based discrimination. That to me is interesting because the whole rationale for staying the regulations was that the definition of caste discrimination is not caste neutral, and both the older regulations and the newer regulations are not caste neutral when it comes to defining discrimination based on caste.

In the realm of the law and regulations, have you even seen anything like caste neutrality when it comes to the question of caste discrimination?

Not at all. Caste is a group identity, and it is based on this group identity that an individual is discriminated against.

Are they denying any form of group identity in this country, which is an ascribed status shaped by historical disadvantages, untouchability and patriarchy? There are these identities that are inflexible, therefore we call these associations as group associations or group identity.

So is this an attempt to say that in this country we will not recognise any of us? And is that non-recognition therefore only caste specific? Or is it also going to apply to gender, because gender is also an ascriptive identity. To some extent it could be fluid but it is still an ascriptive identity.

The stay on the new regulations has led the Supreme Court to revert back to the 2012 UGC regulations which were in operation when Rohith Vemula and Payal Tadvi died by suicide, allegedly after being subjected to caste discrimination on campus. They have also been operational in the last five years, during which UGC data says that caste-based discrimination has risen by 118%. Why do you think the 2012 regulations failed to address caste-based discrimination in higher education institutions?

There is enough evidence to show that the 2012 regulations were completely ineffective. I remember Payal’s mother Abeda Tadvi, who is a petitioner in the Supreme Court, kept saying that they did not have any records, that they kept approaching college authorities who would send them back with all the representations and letters that they would take to them. And finally, because they didn't have any recourse, Payal took this step.

That got us thinking whether there was an equal opportunity cell and whether these equity regulations were being implemented by Payal’s college or her university. And of course, they were not. And that was not specific to Payal’s college, 90% of the colleges and universities in the country did not have something like an operational equal opportunity cell or an equity committee.

When institutional heads and VCs were asked are you even aware of something like this, they were not aware.

Then we started looking for answers as to how we can make these regulations enforceable. We didn't have to look too far, we just had to look at other UGC regulations. There was a regulation on ragging and sexual harassment of UGC that operates within the university sphere. We realised that the enforcement mechanism of the UGC regulations on ragging were extremely stringent, which is why ragging and prevention of ragging in this country has been a success story, to a great extent. Today, you will not find a single college or university without an anti-ragging cell. But that same college or university, if you ask them do you have an equity cell? They will say: what is that?

So we looked at the enforcement mechanisms of other UGC regulations, whether it’s sexual harassment, disabilities or anti-ragging regulations. We saw that there was a non-compliance action clause, which meant that the UGC as a statutory body has powers under the UGC Act to take action against universities that do not comply with its regulations. UGC can withdraw grants if a university doesn't comply. They can withdraw affiliations, because they are responsible for giving affiliations to universities. They can derecognise courses. We noticed that this was completely absent in the equity regulations.

Then we also realised one more thing. Both these regulations had an independent monitoring committee, which is like an oversight mechanism, which means that you don't leave it to the college that they will set up this committee or this equal opportunity cell.

So, what is this oversight mechanism? It should be an independent committee that asks the college for reports. It should ask them how many complaints have you received, how have you dealt with those complaints, what have the consequences been? To effectively ensure the implementation of these equity committees, it has to be an external body.

When we filed RTIs, we realised that most colleges didn’t even care to have an equal opportunity cell or an equity committee. The colleges that did say that we have these equal opportunity cells or committees, for year after year the same college has been saying that we have zero complaints. There were a few colleges that said that we have just one complaint.

When we asked them what was the resolution of that complaint, they said that we sent the complainant to mental health counselling. So even if the non-compliance clause is there and they end up having a committee on paper, the question remains, are they really going to function?

Why is it that only in 2026 people are outraged about the regulations, when the regulations have been there since 2012?

This is because both these enforcement mechanisms, the monitoring committee and the non-compliance clause, have now been added to the equity regulations, which means that colleges and universities will have to implement it. That is the reason for the outrage.

All this while you knew that nobody is implementing those regulations. The state doesn’t care, and nothing was going to happen. They were mere on paper regulations.

When the mother of Rohith Vemula, Radhika Vemula, and Abeda Tadvi approached you all as lawyers, seeking reform in anti-discrimination policy in higher education institutions, what was their main vision and how was that translated into the petition?

It actually started with me being Abeda Tadvi’s lawyer in Payal Tadvi’s case. In the conversations that we had, the mother kept showing me all these representations that she was writing to the authorities, for almost an entire year. It’s not that Payal decided to take her life suddenly. It was because of harassment that had been happening for over a year.

The response of the authorities would be to send the Tadvis back and not take any action. She thought, what is my recourse? I will approach the authorities. But then they shut their door. And then they didn’t have an equal opportunity cell or an equity committee. So you have doors shut from everywhere. There is a reason why Payal committed suicide.

So we thought, what if there was an equal opportunity cell? Maybe there could have been some action taken, even if it was a whitewashed committee. There could have been something, at least those girls who were harassing her everyday would have been called and given a warning.

When we looked at all the available legal safeguards, we found these equity regulations. There was something that already existed on paper but not in practice. So, our work was about translating that from a formal paper law to something that can actually be implemented and can actually work in institutions. I am not going to say that they are going to be perfect. But at least we have something to work with.

That’s also the problem with Internal Complaint Committees (for sexual harassment complaints). But at least there is that fear that there is going to be an ICC for a man who is a sexual harasser and perpetrator. That mechanism doesn’t exist for SCs, STs, religious minority students and those with disabilities at the moment in Indian universities.

Critics are saying the regulations are vague and there is widespread room for misuse. How likely do you think that actually might happen?

The critics on both sides have certain issues with the definition. There is one section that is saying that the older regulations had a better definition of the forms of discrimination.

Firstly, the forms of discrimination in the older regulations were restricted to caste-based discrimination. They were not manifestations or illustrations of discrimination on the basis of gender, or disabilities or any other form of discrimination – or even religion for that matter. They were restricted to caste, but they were there. Those forms and illustrations have been deleted from the new legislation.

The other section is also criticising the regulation for being vague because it does not include upper-caste or general category. That non-inclusion, according to them, is the vagueness.

We were very clear that the definition of discrimination is different from manifestation of forms of discrimination. They are illustrative, not all inclusive. So some things will always be left out. For instance, in the atrocities Act, all the definitions of atrocities are basically illustrations.

The way we understand the drafting of a law, definition is the most important part. There are two aspects of it.

One, is a definition, which describes or which includes or gives meaning to what you are trying to curb. We were clear that definition, the larger definition, should be based on the UN conventions, whether it is race or UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

The language used in these two conventions is very important because of how it defines gender-based discrimination and race-based discrimination. It says that any kind of distinction, any kind of exclusion, any kind of preferential treatment that degrades human dignity, that violates fundamental rights and freedoms. It is all-encompassing. And a definition should be like that.

But we also felt that there was a need for illustration. Are we saying that the illustrations are the only forms of discrimination? No. The illustrations might be able to cover some forms of discrimination, some others it might not.

But the larger definition should be enough to guide the committee to say that though it is not an illustration or a form of discrimination that is there in the regulation, it still amounts to a form of discrimination under the larger definition.

We were insistent on illustrations, especially with respect to caste-based discrimination. Because discrimination in institutional cases is never over, it’s always covert.

All of us stop at “there was this slur and this was a casteist slur and therefore this is different”.

But that is really not how discrimination operates institutional spaces. It is systemic. It is endemic to a point where it is so normalised that it is difficult for someone facing the discrimination and harassment to even pinpoint and say that this is what I am facing and this is discrimination.

The purpose of illustration is that it will guide both the person who is at the receiving end of the discrimination to even be able to articulate that this is what is happening.

Secondly, it is also for the equity committees and cells who are going to decide on these cases and these complaints. Otherwise, in most cases, whatever complaints they would get they would just say “but this doesn't look like discrimination to us”. That's always subjective. There needs to be that guiding principle.

So this would be a civil regulation, not criminal, right? Social media posts are making claims that upper-caste faculty and students will land up in jail. There are some posts claiming that if a Dalit man proposes to an upper-caste woman and she says no, he can just lodge a false case against her and she will end up in jail.

Under the same regulation, she can file a complaint against the same Dalit man for gender-based discrimination – of stalking, of harassment. What are they even talking about?

An upper-caste, disabled person will not be able to file a complaint against a Dalit man for caste discrimination. And that is how it should be. But that upper-caste, disabled person can file a complaint against an able-bodied Dalit man for disabilities-based discrimination under the same regulation.

Why is there this whole narrative accusing only Dalits of misuse when even upper-castes are going to be able to misuse the regulation? If misuse is a narrative, why are Dalits being centered? This is just some narrative, discourse and propaganda-building. That’s not the reality.

Another much-cited example on social media was that if an upper-caste professor marks a Dalit, Adivasi or OBC student poorly in an exam, that student can file a revenge complaint of harassment.

If the student files a revenge complaint, is that going to put the professor behind bars or would that even land him in trouble? That’s not the case. You will have to prove that it is caste-based.

Look at the definition of caste discrimination. It says discrimination on the basis of caste and tribe. So the basis of discrimination will have to be proved. If the Dalit student was deserving of getting more marks and he still got low marks compared to, say, an upper-caste student who wrote the same thing and still got higher marks. Then that shows it is caste-based. The burden is much higher.

Even in this upper-caste women and Dalit man case, the Dalit man will have to prove that the woman rejecting him is caste-based. And the committee is there to do that.

It’s not like everything will be decided based on one complaint. A complaint is filed. Notice is issued to the respondent. The respondent has to file their say, put their submissions on record. They can bring their own evidence and witnesses before the committee to support their claim that they did not do this.

The burden of proving a complaint is so much higher. And the burden is higher on the other side, on the complainant. The basis of caste will have to still be proved in both these examples. That is how the Atrocities Act is as well.

Hasn’t it been argued that there has been a systemic failure in the implementation of the Atrocities Act too?

Because the courts, over the years, have diluted its provisions in so many ways. Even if an atrocities complaint is filed, it doesn’t always lead to a good investigation by the police. It’s the state that fights atrocities cases. And if the police investigation is horrible, it doesn't stand the test in court during trial. In so many atrocities cases, there are acquittals only because the investigation was lopsided, there weren’t enough witnesses. Or if the witnesses were brought, they turned hostile.

This whole “misuse” narrative about the atrocities act was also based on the fact that there are so many acquittals. The proportion is equivalent to rape cases: in rape cases only 25% of the cases actually reach conviction.

Does that mean that 75% of rape cases are false and are a misuse of the rape law? It can be due to so many reasons: lack of evidence, lack of good investigation by the police, not having good representation by the public prosecutor representing you, the court being biased. It is not always that there is some mala fide intention and therefore that is a misuse of the provision.

Misuse is a symptom of all of these systemic failures in our criminal justice system. And this is going to happen with equity regulations also. There is a line of thinking that if you file a complaint, there will be 100% success. That's not how it is going to be.

Do you think these regulations could work if they were made caste-neutral?

Then there is no point to these regulations. They will have to be gender neutral, they will have to be disabilities neutral, so everyone can file complaints against everyone.

And there is already a UGC regulation for that: the student grievance redressal regulation of 2023. That regulation has also been mentioned in the 2026 regulation. For all sorts of individual complaints that are not based on group identity, or group-based discrimination, there is already a redressal mechanism. So what is this uproar that “we don’t have a redressal”?

The 2023 student grievance regulations are caste-neutral, gender-neutral, disabilities-neutral. Any student can file a grievance of victimisation. The definition in the grievance redressal regulation says it includes harassment and victimisation.

We are not saying that upper-caste students don’t face victimisation and harassment. But that is individual-based harassment and victimisation and not group-based.

Because of this ascriptive, group-based status of being a Scheduled Tribe, of being a woman, of being a disabled person – that discrimination and harassment is very different from the discrimination, harassment and victimisation that an individual, upper-caste student faces.

The “mother of all deals”: that’s how European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the new free trade agreement between the European Union and India, announced on Tuesday after about two decades of negotiations.

The deal will affect a combined population of 2 billion people across economies representing about a quarter of global GDP.

Speaking in New Delhi, von der Leyen characterised the agreement as a “tale of two giants” who “choose partnership, in a true win-win fashion”.

So, what have both sides agreed to – and why does it matter so much for global trade?

What has been agreed?

Under this agreement, tariffs on 96.6% of EU goods exported to India will be eliminated or reduced. This will reportedly mean savings of approximately €4 billion annually in customs duties on European products.

The automotive sector is the big winner. European carmakers – including Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Renault – will see tariffs on their vehicles gradually reduced from the current punitive rate of 110% to as little as 10%.

The reduced tariffs will apply to an annual quota of 250,000 vehicles, which is six times larger than the quota the UK received in its deal with India.

To protect India’s domestic manufacturers, European cars priced below €15,000 will face higher tariffs, while electric vehicles get a five-year grace period.

India will almost entirely eliminate tariffs on machinery (which previously faced rates up to 44%), chemicals (22%) and pharmaceuticals (11%).

Wine is particularly notable – tariffs are being slashed from 150% to between 20%-30% for medium and premium varieties. Spirits face cuts from 150% to 40%.

In return, the EU is also opening up its market. It will reduce tariffs on 99.5% of goods imported from India. EU tariffs on Indian marine products (such as shrimp), leather goods, textiles, handicrafts, gems and jewellery, plastics and toys will be eliminated.

These are labour-intensive sectors where India has genuine competitive advantage. Indian exporters in marine products, textiles and gems have faced tough conditions in recent years, partly due to US tariff pressures. That makes this EU access particularly valuable.

What’s been left out?

This deal, while ambitious by India standards, has limits. It explicitly excludes deeper policy harmonisation on several fronts. Perhaps most significantly, the deal doesn’t include comprehensive provisions on labour rights, environmental standards or climate commitments.

While there are references to carbon border adjustment mechanisms (by which the EU imposes its domestic carbon price on imports into their common market), these likely fall short of enforceable environmental standards increasingly common in EU deals.

And the deal keeps protections for sensitive sectors in Europe: the EU maintains tariffs on beef, chicken, dairy, rice and sugar. Consumers in Delhi might enjoy cheaper European cars, while Europe’s farmers are protected from competition.

Why not?

Three forces converged to make this deal happen. First, a growing need to diversify from traditional partners amid economic uncertainty.

Second, the Donald Trump factor. Both the EU and India currently face significant US tariffs: India faces a 50% tariff on goods, while the EU faces headline tariffs of 15% (and recently avoided more in Trump’s threats over Greenland). This deal provides an alternative market for both sides.

And third, there’s what economists call “trade diversion” – notably, when Chinese products are diverted to other markets after the US closes its doors to them.

Both the EU and India want to avoid becoming dumping grounds for products that would normally go to the American market.

A deal-making spree

The EU has been on something of a dealmaking spree recently. Earlier this month, it signed an agreement with Mercosur, a South American trade bloc.

That deal, however, has hit complications. On January 21, the European Parliament voted to refer it to the EU Court of Justice for legal review, which could delay ratification.

This creates a cautionary tale for the India deal. The legal uncertainty around Mercosur shows how well-intentioned trade deals can face obstacles.

The EU also finalised negotiations with Indonesia in September; EU-Indonesia trade was valued at €27 billion in 2024.

For India, this deal with the EU is considerably bigger than recent agreements with New Zealand, Oman and the UK. It positions India as a diversified trading nation pursuing multiple partnerships.

However, the EU–India trade deal should be understood not as a purely commercial breakthrough, but also as a strategic signal – aimed primarily at the US.

In effect, it communicates that even close allies will actively seek alternative economic partners when faced with the threat of economic coercion or politicised trade pressure.

This interpretation is reinforced by both the deal’s timing and how it was announced. The announcement came even though key details still need to be negotiated and there remains some distance to go before final ratification.

That suggests the immediate objective was to deliver a message: the EU has options, and it will use them.

India and Australia

For Australians, this deal matters more than you might think. Australia already has the Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement, which came into force in late 2022.

Australia has eliminated tariffs on all Indian exports, while India has removed duties on 90% of Australian goods by value, rising from an original commitment of 85%.

This EU-India deal should provide impetus for Australia and India to finalise their more comprehensive Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement, under negotiation since 2023.

The 11th round of negotiations took place in August, covering goods, services, digital trade, rules of origin, and – importantly – labour and environmental standards.

The EU deal suggests India is willing to engage seriously on tariff liberalisation. However, it remains to be seen whether that appetite will transfer to the newer issues increasingly central to global trade, notably those Australia is now trying to secure with Indian negotiators.

Chasing an Australia-EU deal

Australia should take heart from the EU’s success in building alternative trading relationships.

This should encourage negotiators still pursuing an EU-Australia free trade agreement, negotiations for which were renewed last June after collapsing in 2023.

These deals signal something important about the global trading system: countries are adapting to American protectionism not by becoming protectionist themselves, but by deepening partnerships with each other.

The world’s democracies are saying they want to trade, invest, and cooperate on rules-based terms.

Peter Draper is Professor, and Executive Director: Institute for International Trade, and Director of the Jean Monnet Centre of Trade and Environment, Adelaide University.

Mandar Oak is Associate Professor, School of Economics, Adelaide University.

Nathan Howard Gray is Senior Research Fellow, Institute for International Trade, Adelaide University.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

The Odisha Police on Friday formally informed the family of Muntaz Khan that he and his two elderly siblings had been deported to Bangladesh on December 24. This came more than a month after they were reported missing, following their detention by the police in Kendrapara district.

In a written intimation issued to the family, the police stated that 63-year-old Muntaz Khan, his 59-year-old brother Insaan Khan and their 70-year-old sister Ameena Bibi had been identified as Bangladeshis after “due verification”.

The document, seen by Scroll, added that the three persons had been handed over to the Border Security Force at Seemanagar in West Bengal’s Nadia district and were transferred to the Bangladesh Police on December 24.

It stated that the three siblings had been deported “as per practice in vogue”, in the presence of the police and officials from the intelligence bureau.

The intimation was issued weeks after the family said they had been kept in the dark about the whereabouts of the three elderly relatives.

Scroll had reported on Wednesday that the three persons were forced out of India and into Bangladesh, as confirmed by the Kendrapara superintendent of police on January 14.

The three had “confessed” to being Bangladeshis, the police officer had claimed.

He also said that the Odisha Police had contacted the authorities in West Bengal to verify the family’s claims that the three persons were Indian citizens. The authorities in Bengal had failed to verify the claims, the Odisha Police officer had told Scroll.

The procedure laid down by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in May requires the authorities to give a suspected undocumented immigrant 30 days to prove his or her citizenship, and ask the person’s home state to verify the claim.

However, Mitun Kumar Dey, the superintendent of police of West Bengal’s Purba Medinipur district, had denied receiving such a verification request, saying that neither the district intelligence nor the local police had been contacted by the Odisha Police.

“I completely rule out the claim of Odisha Police,” Dey had told Scroll.

On November 27, the Odisha Police picked up 12 members of the family from Garapur village on suspicion of being Bangladeshi citizens. Nine of them, including Muntaz Khan’s son Mukhtar Khan, were released after being detained for nine days.

However, the three elderly siblings were not released and were later found to be missing from a college hostel where they had been held.

Mukhtar Khan, who was born in India in 1979, was released after the police said he was an Indian citizen by birth. According to Indian citizenship rules, a person born in India after 1950 but before July 1, 1987, becomes a citizen by birth.

However, Muntaz Khan, the Odisha Police claimed, was a Bangladeshi because his father, Yasin Khan, had allegedly arrived in India from Bangladesh in the 1970s.

The family disputes this and showed Scroll land records from 1956 showing Yasin Khan as a cultivator in Purba Medinipur district, as well as voter lists from 2002, Aadhaar cards and land documents in the names of the expelled siblings.

This is at least the second Bengali Muslim family that the Odisha government has expelled to Bangladesh. As Scroll reported earlier in January, 14 members of a family, including a 90-year-old woman, were picked up from Jagatsinghpur district and forced out of India in December.

Since April, 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.

Also read: Son declared Indian, but father, uncle and aunt pushed into Bangladesh

The Supreme Court ruled that the right to menstrual health is a part of the fundamental right to life. It directed all states to ensure adolescent students in private and government schools are provided bio-degradable sanitary pads for free.

The bench, which ruled on a plea seeking nationwide implementation of the Union government’s menstrual hygiene policy for schoolgirls, also ordered states to ensure separate toilets for female and male students in all schools. Read on.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation said that no airline has been exempted from the weekly rest rules for pilots. The aviation regulator told the Delhi High Court that the mandate continues to operate and has not been withdrawn.

It was responding to a petition challenging its decision to suspend the new flight duty-time norms after large-scale disruptions to airline services in December.

The regulator said that only a limited and time-bound relaxation had been granted to IndiGo for night operations, which will remain in force till February 10. Read on.

No beef tallow or lard was used in the ghee supplied to Tirupati’s Sri Venkateswara temple between 2019 and 2024 to prepare prasadam, the Central Bureau of Investigation said in its final chargesheet. The agency is probing the alleged adulteration of ghee with animal fat during the period.

The ghee used for preparing the offering was adulterated with vegetable oils and esters, the central agency alleged.

In September 2024, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu claimed that substandard ingredients and animal fat had been used to make the prasadam during the YSR Congress Party government. Read on.

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The Allahabad High Court on Wednesday strongly criticised the Uttar Pradesh Police for its alleged practice of shooting accused persons in the legs and portraying such incidents as gunfights, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench of Justice Arun Kumar Singh Deshwal sought explanations from the state’s Director General of Police Rajiv Krishna and Additional Chief Secretary (Home) Sanjay Prasad.

The officers were directed to appear before the court through video conference on Friday. They were asked to state whether any verbal or written directions had been issued to police personnel to shoot accused persons in the legs or otherwise, and claim the incidents to be gunfights.

In its Wednesday order, the court observed that gunfights with security forces, particularly incidents that involve firing at the legs of accused persons, appeared to have become a routine, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench said that the action were ostensibly carried out to please superior officers or to teach the accused persons a so-called lesson. “Such conduct is wholly impermissible, as the power to punish lies exclusively within the domain of the courts and not with the police,” the order was quoted as having stated.

Deshwal said that India, as a democratic country, is governed by the rule of law with clearly defined roles for the executive, legislature and judiciary, and that any encroachment by the police into the judicial domain cannot be accepted.

He further observed that some police personnel may be misusing their authority to attract attention from senior officers or to create public sympathy by projecting incidents as gunfights.

The bench made the observations while hearing bail petitions filed by three persons who had been injured in separate alleged incidents of gunfight with the police.

The court noted that no police officer had suffered injuries in the incidents, leading to questions about the necessity and proportionality of the use of firearms.

In one case, the court had earlier sought details on whether a first information report had been registered and whether the injured person’s statement had been recorded before a magistrate or medical officer.

The state informed the court that while an FIR had been registered, no statement had been recorded, and that the investigation had initially been handled by a sub-inspector before being reassigned to an inspector.

Taking note of this, the court held that the Supreme Court’s guidelines on gunfights had not been followed.

The court directed the director general of police and additional chief secretary (home) to clarify whether any instructions had been issued to ensure compliance with the Supreme Court’s guidelines on the registration of FIRs, recording of statements and investigation procedures in cases of death or grievous injury during gunfights with the police.

During the hearing on Friday, Deshwal also raised concerns about police officers pressuring judicial officers, particularly chief judicial magistrates, to pass specific orders, Bar and Bench reported.

He said the court could not allow Uttar Pradesh to become a police state.

The judge stressed that there must be mutual respect between the police and the judiciary, and that a police officer should not consider himself superior to a judicial officer, Bar and Bench reported.

“Power to punish is in the domain of judiciary and not with the police,” the court underscored.

Krishna assured the court that instructions would be issued to ensure protocol and adherence to the law. “Majesty of law is supreme, there is no doubt about that,” he was quoted as saying.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Thursday cited a 2005 Supreme Court order to defend his recent remarks targeting Miya Muslims in the state, saying that acknowledging the “reality” is neither hatred nor communalism but a recognition of a “grave and long-standing” problem.

The BJP leader has been repeatedly claiming over the past few days that Miya Muslims will be deleted as voters during the special revision of the electoral rolls in the state, and that it was his job to “make them suffer”.

In Assam, “Miya” is a derogatory word used to refer to undocumented immigrants and is exclusively directed at Muslims of Bengali origin. They are often accused of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.

Once a pejorative in Assam, from the common use of the honorific “Miya” among South Asian Muslims, the term has now been reappropriated by the community as a self-descriptor to refer to Muslims who migrated to Assam from Bengal during the colonial era.

In a post on social media on Thursday, Sarma said that those who were questioning him about his remarks about the community should “pause and read” what the court had said about Assam while striking down the 1983 Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals Act in 2005.

Those who are attacking me for my remarks on “Miyan”—a word used in Assam in the context of Bangladeshi Muslim illegal migration—should pause and read what the Supreme Court of India itself has said about Assam. This is not my language, not my imagination, and not political…

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) January 29, 2026

The Act was enacted in 1983 to identify and deport undocumented immigrants, primarily from Bangladesh, residing in Assam. It established special tribunals to determine the status of “illegal” immigrants who arrived on or after March 25, 1971.

The legislation was meant to expedite the detection and deportation of “illegal” immigrants. The provisions of the Act, however, placed the burden of proof on the state and not the accused.

In 2005, the court struck down the law after hearing a petition filed by former Chief Minister and BJP leader Sarbananda Sonowal. The petition had contended that the provisions of the 1983 law for identifying foreigners were so stringent that few persons had been declared as such and deported.

Sarma on Thursday referred to the court’s warning about what it described as a “silent and invidious demographic invasion of Assam”, which it said may lead to the loss of the “geostrategically vital” districts of lower Assam.

The court had observed that the “influx of illegal migrants is turning these districts into a Muslim majority region”, adding: “It will then only be a matter of time when a demand for their merger with Bangladesh may be made…”

It went on to caution that such a development could sever the northeastern region from the rest of India and threaten national unity and natural resources.

The chief minister said that when the highest constitutional court of the country used “words like “demographic invasion” and warned of the possible loss of territory and national unity, acknowledging that “reality” was neither hatred nor communalism or an attack on any community.

He added: “It is a recognition of a grave and long-standing problem that Assam has lived with for decades.”

Reacting to Sarma’s statement, Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi said that the chief minister is “misusing the name of the Supreme Court”.

“The language he quotes is not the Supreme Court’s,” Gogoi said on social media. “The…court neither authored the said words nor adopted it. To pass off an executive report as judicial pronouncement is a deliberate contempt.”

A chief minister, a constitutional office, to “falsely attribute words to the…Supreme Court is not just contemptuous, it is an assault on constitutional propriety and institutional integrity”, the Assam Congress chief added.

Dishonesty and shamelessness define Himanta Biswa Sarma’s politics.

He has stooped so low that he is misusing the name of the Hon’ble Supreme Court.

He claims to rely on the Hon’ble Court’s “own words” from the case of Sarbananda Sonowal. This is a blatant lie.

The language…

— Gaurav Gogoi (@GauravGogoiAsm) January 30, 2026

Congress spokesperson Aman Wadud also noted that the Supreme Court judgement was based on a report by former Assam Governor SK Sinha. “Based on which empirical data did SK Sinha came to the conclusion of large scale illegal migration?” he asked.

Enough with one-sided propaganda, Sir.

How about a DEBATE – On your preferred channel , at a place of your choice ?

You are quoting Sonowal-I judgement, the SC made this observation based on a report by Assam Governor SK Sinha.

Would you care to answer ?

1. Based on… https://t.co/nG1zq8Jf32

— Aman Wadud (@AmanWadud) January 29, 2026

Wadud also asked how many “demands for merger” with Bangladesh have been made since Sinha warned of such a possibility 28 years ago.

“The people you are calling Miyan are Indian citizens , migrated way before partition,” the Congress spokesperson said. “Half a million migrated a few years before 1930 – according to census commissioner CS Mullan.”

State’s actions not against any religion, claims CM

Nevertheless, Sarma on Thursday claimed that the state government’s actions were not against any religion or any Indian citizen.

“Our effort is to protect Assam’s identity, security, and future, exactly as the Supreme Court cautioned the nation to do,” he added. “Ignoring that warning would be the real injustice – to Assam and to India.”

Sarma’s remarks on Thursday came a day after he said that BJP workers had filed more than five lakh complaints against suspected foreigners during the special revision of the electoral rolls in the state.

The Election Commission is separately conducting a “special revision” of the voter list in the state, which is similar to the usual updates to the electoral roll. Assam is not among the 12 states and Union Territories where the poll panel is conducting the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls.

The state is expected to hold Assembly elections in three to four months.

Several Opposition parties have accused the BJP of conspiring to delete the names of a large number of genuine voters from the state’s electoral rolls amid the special revision and filed police complaints.

On Wednesday, Sarma claimed that four lakh to five lakh Miya voters would be deleted when the special intensive revision of the voter rolls takes place in the state, and acknowledged that the BJP was attempting to prevent them from voting.

“What does ‘vote chori’ [vote theft] mean to us?” the chief minister had asked reporters. “Yes, we are trying to steal some Miya votes. Ideally, they should not be allowed to vote in Assam. They should be able to vote in Bangladesh.”

Reacting to Sarma’s comments, Congress leader Aman Wadud had said that Sarma had “made the Constitution absolutely ineffective” in Assam.

On January 24, the chief minister said that only Miya Muslims were being served notices under the special revision in the state.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation told the Delhi High Court on Friday that weekly rest for pilots is non-negotiable and that no airline has been granted any exemption from this requirement, Bar and Bench reported.

Appearing before a division bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia, counsel for the aviation regulator said that the mandate on weekly rest continues to operate and has not been withdrawn.

The aviation regulator was responding to a petition challenging its decision to suspend the new flight duty-time norms after large-scale disruptions to airline services in December.

In January 2024, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation issued revised Flight Duty Time Limit norms after concerns were raised about pilot fatigue. The norms were meant to take effect on June 1.

However, airlines asked for delayed implementation because of staffing shortages and operational challenges, and the key changes were eventually introduced on November 1.

The new rules required longer weekly rest, restricted night landings, extended the definition of night hours and limited consecutive night duties.

As the revised norms came into force, air travel was severely affected in December when a shortage of pilots and crew forced IndiGo to cancel or delay hundreds of flights. The disruption also pushed fares to unusually high rates on several routes.

To reduce air travel disruptions, the aviation regulator temporarily placed the new flight duty-time norms in abeyance. It also granted exemptions to airlines until early February 2026 while they make sufficient adjustments to their roster to accommodate new government regulations.

On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court sought the stand of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on a petition challenging the suspension of the norms.

In its response on Friday, the regulator stated that no exemption had been given to any airline on weekly rest and that the rule could not be tampered with, Bar and Bench reported.

The regulator’s counsel clarified that a limited and time-bound relaxation had been granted to IndiGo airlines for night operations. The exemption will remain in force until February 10.

The counsel added that even after certain provisions of the Flight Duty Time Limitation norms were placed in abeyance on December 5, weekly rest for pilots continued to be mandatory under existing Civil Aviation Requirements, The Telegraph reported.

The court then issued notice to the Union government, the aviation regulator and Indigo and sought their responses on the matter.

The case was posted for further hearing in April, The Telegraph reported.

Also read:

• IndiGo disruption reflects the crisis in India’s aviation sector

• Flyers can seek damages from IndiGo. But most will skip that route\

The Central Bureau of Investigation, in its final chargesheet in the alleged adulteration of ghee used in the laddus offered as prasadam at Tirupati’s Sri Venkateswara temple, has said that no beef tallow or lard was used in the ghee supplied between 2019 and 2024, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

The chargesheet was filed on January 23 before the Anti-Corruption Bureau court in Nellore.

It stated that the ghee used for preparing laddus was adulterated with vegetable oils and esters, used to chemically mimic dairy parameters, the newspaper reported. It did not find that animal fat was used in the ghee.

In September 2024, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu had claimed that substandard ingredients and animal fat had been used to make the prasadam when the YSR Congress Party was in power in the state. The YS Jagan Mohan Reddy-led YSR Congress Party lost the Assembly elections in June 2024.

In October 2024, the Supreme Court ordered the formation of a Special Investigation Team to probe the allegations by the Andhra Pradesh government.

The chargesheet filed this month alleged that the primary supplier, Bhole Baba Organic Dairy, based in Bhagwanpur, Uttarakhand, operated a “virtual” manufacturing unit, The Indian Express reported.

Between 2019 and 2024, the firm allegedly procured no milk or butter at its facility, but supplied at least 68 kg of ghee to Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams trust, which manages the temple. The ghee was synthetically manufactured without milk and was valued at approximately Rs 250 crore, the newspaper quoted the probe agency as having alleged in the chargesheet.

To make the product resemble authentic ghee, chemical esters, including acetic acid esters, were used to manipulate key test values, it alleged. They also added beta carotene for colour and artificial flavouring to imitate the smell of traditional ghee, The New Indian Express quoted the chargesheet as having alleged.

The final chargesheet accuses 36 persons in the matter, including procurement officials of the temple trust, representatives of the Uttarakhand-based supplier and intermediaries.

Several former officials have also been accused of accepting bribes and gifts in return for ignoring evidence of adulteration and signing off on flawed quality certificates, The New Indian Express quoted the chargesheet as having alleged.

After the Central Bureau of Investigation’s chargesheet became public, the YSR Congress Party said that Naidu and Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan should apologise to former Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy for “false propaganda”, The Indian Express reported.

Addressing a press conference, YSR Congress Party’s Rajya Sabha MP YV Subba Reddy said that Tirumala, the town where the temple is located, is not a political platform but a spiritual centre for crores of devotees. He added that Naidu and Kalyan should apologise for bringing politics into the matter, the newspaper reported.

Ruling that the right to menstrual health is a part of the fundamental right to life, the Supreme Court on Friday directed all states and Union Territories to ensure adolescent students in private and government schools are provided bio-degradable sanitary pads for free, PTI reported.

A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan instructed the states to ensure separate toilets for male and female students in all schools, including facilities that are accessible to students with disabilities.

The court directed states to make sure that all schools set up menstrual hygiene management corners, which will have spare innerwear, uniforms and other necessary materials to address menstrual urgency, Live Law reported.

The ruling came on a public interest litigation seeking the nationwide implementation of the Union government’s menstrual hygiene policy for schoolgirls in government and government-aided institutes.

The plea had sought directions to the Centre and the state governments to provide free sanitary pads to female students between Class 6 and Class 12, and separate toilets in all government, government-aided and residential schools for girls.

“The inaccessibility of menstrual hygiene management measures undermines the dignity of a girl child, as dignity finds expression in conditions that enable individuals to live without humiliation, exclusion or avoidable suffering,” Bar and Bench quoted the bench as having said.

This critique of the guru-shishya system it seems to confuse the profound, time-tested tradition with its modern distortions and misinterpretations (“How the traditional guru-shishya system undermined critical thinking in India”). The foundational principle of the authentic guru-shishya relationship is trust, openness and dialogue, not blind submission.

The scripture which is the cornerstone of the philosophy, the Bhagavad Gita, is structured as a disciple’s sincere questioning and the guru’s compassionate clarification. Krishna never silences Arjuna; instead, he encourages dialogue, saying, “Now listen, O Arjuna, how with the mind absorbed in Me... you will know Me completely, free from doubt.” The system is built on removing doubt, or samsaya, not instilling fear.

The example of Karna from the Mahabharata is profoundly misunderstood. Parashurama’s curse was not about “caste supremacy”, but the fundamental breach of truthfulness, or satya, which is the bedrock of the relationship. Karna, by lying about his identity, broke that trust. The curse that knowledge would fail him at a critical moment symbolises a deep spiritual principle: knowledge acquired through deceit is unstable. To reduce this to “guru dominance” is to miss its ethical and narrative depth.

You are correct that the abuses witnessed in recent decades – where gurus, perhaps due to misplaced authority, institutional power, or social hierarchy, suppress questioning – are deviations from the tradition. They are symptoms of ego and institutional decay, not features of the system itself.

The article’s selective reading and forced framing seem less like a sincere analysis and more like an attempt to discredit a core civilisational educational and spiritual methodology by conflating its essence with its occasional corruptions. I request the editor to give enough attention in detail before publishing such articles henceforth. – Jayachandran Elumalai

***

I appreciate the concerns you raise about power imbalance, exclusion and abuse within certain historical and contemporary manifestations of the tradition.

At the same time, I would like to offer a nuance that may complicate the central claim that the guru – shishya system, as a whole, did not permit questioning or critical thought.

Classical Indian intellectual traditions – particularly in philosophy, grammar, logic and theology – were deeply rooted in structured debate (vāda), counter-argument (prativāda), and rigorous reasoning (tarka). Systems such as Nyāya, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta evolved precisely through sustained teacher – student disputation, where questioning the guru’s position was not only permitted but methodologically necessary. Texts were taught through pūrvapakṣa-siddhānta frameworks, training students to first argue against a position before establishing one.

It is undeniable that social hierarchies, caste exclusion, and authoritarian misuse distorted educational spaces – and these distortions deserve critique – the ideal paedagogic model embedded in many traditional systems was not passive obedience but intellectual sharpening through dialogue, memorisation followed by interpretation, and debate conducted within ethical bounds.

In this sense, the problem may lie less with the epistemological foundations of the guru-shishya model and more with its social capture and institutional degeneration over time. Acknowledging this distinction, I believe, allows for a more historically balanced understanding – one that critiques injustice without dismissing indigenous traditions of reasoning that contributed to India’s long scholarly legacy. Thank you for provoking an important discussion. I hope this perspective adds another layer to the conversation. – Yeshaswini Pavankumar

‘Hindupohobic’, ‘bias’

This is unfortunately a biased, anti-Hindu outlook. The Dronacharya Award is named for the relationship between Dronacharya and Arjuna. Complete obedience is expected during the time of tutelage under the guru. Once guru dakshina has been paid, the disciple is independent and is supposed to follow his dharma.

The reason for imposing trials by guru before imparting knowledge is to test the worthiness, the mental strength and acumen. The casteist remarks are unfair, especially towards Dronacharya, who taught Arjuna the multiple usage of Bramhastra and taught only dispersal to his own son to prevent misuse.

Sanatana Dharma itself has a long history of philosophical debates conducted and encouraged by kings. I realise that Scroll is highly biased against Hindus and their philosophy, but I am sending this in the hope that there may be at least one person who may look at the philosophy with an unbiased view. – Vijaya Swati G

***

The disciple should have the shraddha to listen to the teacher. The right of questioning has never been denied. In reality, there were raging debates between the teacher and disciples on each issue! This type of writing only serves to catch the interest of the neoliberals. This is why people try to denigrate their own traditional knowledge systems. – Bratati Mukherjee

***

I challenge you to a public debate on this topic where all of India can see. – Arjun

***

This article is inspired by Hinduphobic intentions. I am not aware of any ancient text in which any shishya was punished or frowned upon for questioning his guru. Hindu philosophy is full of stories where established beliefs were questioned even challenged. Social reformer Basavanna protested against the established ritualistic Hindu culture.

Hindus have been inculcated by centuries of liberal thoughts and are open to reformation. How else was the Hindu Code Bill by BR Ambedkar be passed in Hindu-majority India? Scroll is an agent of the western deep-state and intolerant of the rising Hindu nationalist spirit which has been making Bharat strong and a force to reckon with. Your sabotage will not work. – Virupaksh Reddy Patel

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act achieved significant gains in participation, digitisation and transparency over time, but “persistent structural weaknesses” limited its effectiveness, the Union government’s annual Economic Survey stated on Thursday.

The document said that the 2025 Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act represented a decisive shift in India’s rural employment policy.

It added that the new Act was a “comprehensive legislative reset that aims to modernise rural employment guarantees, strengthen accountability, and align employment creation with long-term infrastructure and climate resilience goals”.

The Economic Survey, tabled by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament three days ahead of the Union Budget for the financial year 2026-’27, details the state of the country’s economy and suggests measures to boost growth.

The 2025 VB-G RAM G Bill was given assent by the president on December 21, two days after it was passed by Parliament amid protests by Opposition parties. The new rural employment law will replace the MGNREGA.

The MGNREGA was introduced in 2005 by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and aimed at enhancing the livelihood security of households in rural areas. The scheme guaranteed 100 days of unskilled work annually for every rural household that wants it, covering all districts in the country.

Under the new law, the number of guaranteed workdays will increase to 125, while states’ share of costs will rise to 40%. The Union government will continue to bear the wage component, with states sharing material and administrative expenses.

The legislation has drawn criticism from economists and labour rights experts.

On Thursday, the Economic Survey said that monitoring in several states showed gaps under MGNREGA, including work not being done on the ground, expenditure not matching physical progress, the use of machines in labour-intensive work and frequent bypassing of digital attendance systems.

It added that misappropriation accumulated over time and only a small proportion of households completed the full 100 days of employment after the Covid-19 pandemic, indicating that while delivery systems improved, the overall architecture of MGNREGA had reached its limits.

The new Act represented a “significant upgrade over MGNREGA, fixing structural weaknesses while enhancing employment, transparency, planning and accountability”, the Economic Survey said.

It added that the VB-G RAM G Act “builds on past improvements while addressing their shortcomings through a modern, accountable and infrastructure-focused framework”.

Economy Survey calls for re-examination of RTI Act

The Economic Survey also called for a re-examination of the 2005 Right to Information Act. It said that this was not to dilute the law’s spirit, but to align it with global best practices, incorporate evolving lessons and keep it firmly anchored to its original intent.

The document noted that the legislation was powerful democratic reform that served as a tool for accountability and against corruption.

However, it added that the Act carried risks of becoming an “end in itself”, where disclosures were celebrated regardless of contribution to better governance.

The Economic Survey suggested exploring “adjustments” to exempt disclosures related to the deliberative process of policymaking. It also proposed considering a ministerial veto with parliamentary oversight, to prevent disclosures that could “unduly constrain governance”, among others.

The document added that the Act was never intended “as a tool for idle curiosity”, nor as a mechanism to micromanage government from the outside.

At least two suspected Maoists were killed in a gunfight with security personnel in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district on Thursday, PTI reported.

The exchange of fire broke out around 7 am in a forested area in the southern part of the district, when a team of the District Reserve Guard was conducting an anti-Maoist operation following intelligence inputs about the presence of a small group of armed Maoists, The Indian Express reported.

Bijapur Additional Superintendent of Police Chandrakant Governa told PTI that the bodies of two Maoists were recovered during a search operation after the gunfight.

With the latest deaths, at least 22 suspected Maoists have been killed in separate gunfights in Chhattisgarh so far this year, PTI reported.

On January 3, 14 suspected Maoists were killed in two separate gunfights with security forces in the state’s Sukma and Bijapur districts.

Between January 16 and January 17, six suspected Maoists were killed in a gunfight with security forces in Bijapur.

The Union government told Parliament that 335 “Left-wing extremists” had been killed, while 2,167 others had surrendered in 2025.

Overall, 1,841 such persons had been killed, over 16,000 had been arrested, while 9,588 others had surrendered since 2014.

The Union government has vowed to end Maoism by March 31, 2026.

In October, the Union home ministry said that the number of districts across states affected by “Left-wing extremism” has come down to 11 from 18 in March.

In 2025, the number of “most affected” districts came down from six to three, it added. These are Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh.

In the course of the Union government’s anti-Maoist offensive in 2025, key Maoist leaders like Ganesh Uike and Madvi Hidma have been killed, while others like Vikas Nagpure, alias Anant, and Mallojula Venugopal Rao, alias Bhupathi, have surrendered.

A report by Malini Subramaniam for Scroll on Hidma’s killing noted that in the Andhra Pradesh village closest to where he was killed, no one heard gunfire.

She had earlier reported that while many of those killed in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region in 2024 were declared by the police to be reward-carrying Maoists, several families dispute the claim. The families claim that the persons killed were civilians.

Civil liberties groups and Opposition parties have also questioned some of these killings, alleging that they constitute “fake encounters”.

A Delhi court on Thursday acquitted Delhi Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena in a two-decade-old defamation case filed by activist Medha Patkar, Bar and Bench reported.

Judicial Magistrate First Class Raghav Sharma of the Saket courts held that the complainant had failed to prove the charges against the accused, PTI reported.

The case dates back to November 2000, when an advertisement titled “True face of Ms Medha Patkar and her Narmada Bachao Andolan” was published in The Indian Express, according to Bar and Bench. The advertisement was issued by the National Council for Civil Liberties, an organisation that Saxena headed at the time.

The organisation supported the Sardar Sarovar Dam project in Gujarat, which Patkar’s Narmada Bachao Andolan opposed.

Following the publication, Patkar issued a press note responding to the advertisement and subsequently filed a criminal defamation case against Saxena, alleging that the contents of the advertisement were defamatory.

Saxena, in turn, initiated defamation proceedings against Patkar in 2001, accusing her of making derogatory remarks against him through the same press note.

In that case, Patkar was convicted by the trial court, and the conviction was later upheld by the Supreme Court, Bar and Bench reported.

However, on January 24, a Delhi court acquitted Patkar in a separate defamation case filed by Saxena. Judge Raghav Sharma of Saket courts had held at the time Saxena had failed to prove that Patkar made defamatory statements about him during a television program in April 2006.

Following Thursday’s verdict, the Delhi lieutenant governor’s office described the acquittal as a “major judicial victory” in the case that had been pending since 2000, PTI reported.

Several Opposition leaders on Thursday welcomed the Supreme Court’s stay on the 2026 University Grants Commission’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, saying that the rules were “arbitrary and an attempt to create further discrimination on campuses”.

The rules, notified on January 13, had led to protests by upper-caste students who argued that it could lead to discrimination against them. The protesters contended that the rules were biased against students from the general category as they did not provide for measures against “false complaints”.

The court, while issued a stay on the regulations on Thursday, observed that its provisions were “prima facie vague and capable of misuse”. It asked the Union government to redraft the regulations and added that until then, their operation will remain in abeyance.

After the court order, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati said that the new rules implemented by the UGC to prevent caste-based incidents in universities had created an atmosphere of social tension.

“In light of these current circumstances, the Honourable Supreme Court's decision today to ban the new UGC rules is appropriate,” Mayawati said in a statement on social media.

She added that such an atmosphere would not have arisen in the matter if the UGC had taken all parties into confidence before implementing the regulations and had “given proper representation to the upper-caste society in the investigation committee etc. under natural justice”.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Thursday said that “true justice does not do injustice to anyone”, adding that this was what the court had ensured with its order.

“The language of the law should be clear and so should its substance,” the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister said on social media. “It is not just a matter of rules, it is also a matter of intention. No one should be oppressed, no one should be treated unjustly.”

Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi said that she was glad that the court stepped in and stayed the UGC guidelines, which she described as “vague, arbitrary and an attempt to create further discrimination on campuses”.

Chaturvedi said that the Union government’s “absolute abdication” of its responsibility to intervene and withdraw the UGC regulations showed “that they give no respect or consideration to peoples protests..”

Congress MP Pramod Tiwari also welcomed the decision of the court to stay the rules, PTI reported.

“The BJP [ruling Bharatiya Janata Party] government creates conflicts in the name of religion, caste and category to divert people's attention from real issues,” the news agency quoted him as saying.

CPI(ML), Bhim Army chief oppose order

On the other hand, the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation said that the observations made by the court on Thursday were deeply appalling, adding that it reflected a “myopic attitude”.

The party said that caste and racial discrimination were not abstract concepts or historical relics but “brutal, everyday realities in our educational institutions and across society”.

Data compiled by the UGC showed that complaints of caste-based discrimination in universities and colleges had increased by 118% between 2019 and 2024, the statement said. “These incidents of caste based violence are a consequence of a casteist system sustained by institutional and state complicity,” it added.

The party said that the stay issued by the court was a “capitulation before Brahminical pressure”.

The CPI(ML) Liberation urged “all rational sections of society to stand for the measures and reject any attempt to whip up caste hysteria in a bid to stall the long overdue measure”.

Earlier in the day, Azad Samaj Party chief and MP Chandrashekhar Azad said that he had written to Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan seeking the implementation of the UGC regulations as a binding provision for eliminating discrimination prevalent in central institutions, including Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and All India Institutes Of Medical Sciences.

Azad added that the opposition to the regulations were “misleading” and were an organised effort against social justice, especially pertaining to the rights of students from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.

The Bhim Army chief also told News18 India that the stay was issued as the Centre could not adequately defend the rules before the court.

Also read: UGC did not defend its equity guidelines in court. But activists explain why they must be defended

What the rules mandate

The UGC’s new equity rules require institutes to set up special committees, helplines and monitoring teams to address complaints, particularly from members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.

The UGC had in 2012 first released equity rules for higher education institutes, which required them to set up Equal Opportunity Cells and Anti-Discrimination Officers. However, those rules did not provide for action against institutions that did not comply with them.

In contrast, the 2026 rules require the UGC to set up a monitoring committee to oversee their implementation.

Institutes that do not comply with the regulations can be barred from participating in the commission’s schemes, offering degree programmes and online courses, and can be removed from the list of institutes eligible to receive central grants.

The University Grants Commission’s updated rules to address caste discrimination in higher education institutes have sparked outrage among Savarna commentators and students. They claim that they will become victims of false complaints and that the provisions will be weaponised against them.

But this reflects a continuing refusal to listen to experiences of caste discrimination on campuses, something I have witnessed closely since 2022 when I became the first elected student representative of the Equal Opportunity Cell at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

As part of student committees and through my research on caste injustice, I have seen how the claim that Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students misuse guidelines against general category students is invoked when a caste discrimination complaint is filed. This negative framing favours the student or professor accused of casteism and rarely accounts for the humiliation or insensitive behaviour faced by the student making the complaint.

Over the past few days, Savarna students have framed themselves as potential victims of the UGC rules, issued on January 13, recentering the issue of casteist discrimination around their anxieties. On January 29, the Supreme Court stayed the new rules after hearing a public interest litigation which claimed that the guidelines were vague and could be misused.

Akhil Kang, a queer Dalit scholar who has extensively written about “upper-caste victimhood”, argues that claims of upper-caste victimhood are not about actual harm. Instead, they are about preserving moral innocence in the face of caste accountability.

Illustrating Kang’s observation, upper-caste students are floating hypothetical situations in which they could be victimised by the UGC guidelines. For example, one Instagram post claims that a general category female student is now afraid of being accused of caste discrimination if she rejects the advances of a male student from the Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe category.

Such claims displace attention from the everyday experiences of discrimination of Dalit and Adivasi students, who remain unacknowledged in classrooms and are rendered invisible on campuses where merit is routinely read through caste.

Now I’ve seen absolutely everything: the petitions challenging the UGC regulations have compared the upper castes to the criminal/denotified tribes. pic.twitter.com/72WhALHT1l

— Gautam Bhatia (@gautambhatia88) January 29, 2026

Caste on campus

As part of a meeting called by the National Task Force set up by the Supreme Court on January 12, I highlighted three crucial observations based on my experience of observing casteism on campus. The meeting was attended by anti-caste intellectuals, academics, activists and student representatives from universities in Delhi.

First, caste is seemingly invisible and so it is difficult to prove that it exists. But the discriminatory effects of caste are primarily experienced by Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students.

For example, a professor may make a student wait outside their office hours every day just to address one concern or speak to them. The student could wait for days on end, often feeling humiliated. But this will not be recognised as “casteism”.

This same professor could ask about the student’s rank in the entrance exam – using the phrase “hawa kya hai?”, or what’s the AIR, or all India rank. Ambedkarite student collectives across the IITs have stressed that asking a student’s rank should be counted as caste discrimination. Rank indicates whether a student was admitted in the general or Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students.

The student might then be labelled incompetent and underperforming, and the professor could suggest that they be expelled from IIT Delhi for not being meritorious.

The student could find their admission and place at the institute being attacked and so end up writing to the administration and Equal Opportunity Cell, or SC/ST cell, seeking legal recourse. The Equal Opportunity Cell registers the student’s complaint, and thereafter, a committee is set up to inquire into caste discrimination. This illustrates how faculty and resource persons in an institution refuse to listen to a student who feels neglected or socially excluded.

Second, caste reveals itself through networks and support systems.

A general category student might instantly feel a sense of belonging in the classroom while a Dalit, Adivasi or OBC student may continuously invest energy in proving or defending their merit.

As a student representative, I have observed that the network of Savarna scholars does not easily offer support to Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students and often has preconceived notions about who is meritorious or deserving.

Savarna students travel easily through these networks, receiving guidance on scholarships abroad, building academic connections, seeking funding and finding opportunities to get published. But Dalit students have to hustle merely to get signatures on recommendation letters.

Even if students have got admission on merit, they are always made to feel inadequate. “No matter how I perform, I feel invisible in the classroom,” a Dalit BTech student told me off the record on campus. “The Savarna professor never acknowledges my greeting.”

Such an environment attacks the confidence of Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students. The demoralisation shows itself in lesser grades, poor progress reports and lonely or isolated students in campus spaces.

It is a challenge to define this experience of being made to feel invisible, but what can be defined are broader actions – the implicit or explicit bias on the campus.

Many Dalit and Adivasi scholars report feeling depressed, which I believe is a result of an uncaring institutional structure that does not provide motivation, appreciation nor respond to their efforts properly.

In 2022, I emailed the IIT-Delhi mental health team asking why caste-based trauma was missing from the counselling options of gender, LGBTQ+, violence, relationship problems and campus problems. It was aimed at making the institute recognise the reality of the trauma of caste. IIT-Delhi positively implemented this, by adding “caste-based trauma” as an option on its YourDost website, which provides counselling to enrolled students.

The third observation was the challenge Dalit Adivasi students face to “prove” casteist discrimination. Students resort to methods such as recording verbal encounters with the perpetrators. Committees view this suspiciously, furthering the narrative that the complainant has “misused” their freedom as a student. I highlighted this concern to convey the need for camera surveillance inside hostel lobbies, as deaths often occur in hostel rooms.

Jaising: There's attempt to overreach orders in that matter. Concern court had was of all-inclusive society...

CJI: Prima facie language of the regulations...there is complete vagueness...capable of misuse...some expert may advise remodulation

Jaising: I will convince you…

— Live Law (@LiveLawIndia) January 29, 2026

The unheard testimony

The refusal to acknowledge casteism is a structural response to Dalit assertion, an indignation sparked by outspoken Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students. Students who file caste discrimination complaints are seen as “troublemakers” rather than lonely, isolated individuals who had no other recourse.

Listening demands acknowledging the testimony of the narrator. But the benefit of the doubt is largely given to the accused student in these instances since it is assumed that the perpetrator was “unaware that their behavior was casteist”.

Despite the complainant narrating that they were made to feel socially excluded or discriminated against through certain actions, words, or behaviour, the perpetrator is likely to dismiss such claims.

The events that follow the filing of such a complaint are rarely discussed.

Social redressal largely depends on the equity committee and how it is formed. The UGC had told the Supreme Court that 90% of caste complaints were “resolved”, but it does not state what the resolution entails. Committees often bargain to ensure that the accused apologises to the survivor, recognising discrimination. There are many instances when the complainant never receives an apology and the case is closed.

Finally, caste consciousness may differ among students as well: based on friendships or other ties, Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students can also disagree about whether an incident counts as caste discrimination.

Together, it shows how ending caste discrimination on campus is an enormous social challenge.

But until individuals and institutions embedded in caste privilege are willing to listen and extend care through listening, caste will continue to reproduce itself through denial and deepening divisions in universities.

Any equity policy, including the UGC’s latest guidelines, will do little to eradicate casteism unless there is an institutional commitment to listen to testimonies of discrimination without suspicion or dismissal.

Shainal Verma is a sociologist trained at IIT-Delhi, researching gender, labour, and caste, and was a former student representative of the SC/ST Cell.

The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the Election Commission to publish the names of about 1.6 crore persons against whom the poll panel had raised “logical discrepancy” objections during the special intensive revision exercise in Tamil Nadu, The Hindu reported.

A bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi directed that the list be posted in taluk offices across the state. The court added that those whose names are on the list will have 10 days from the date of its display to submit their documents for verification.

The bench added that the list should also briefly mention against each name the “logical discrepancy” that the poll panel had found in their forms.

“Logical discrepancies” that the Election Commission has flagged during the special intensive revision process include mismatches in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six.

The draft electoral rolls for Tamil Nadu under the special intensive revision exercise were published on December 19. The names of 97.3 lakh persons were removed from the draft voter lists in the state.

The court on Thursday was hearing a petition filed by a group of Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leaders, The Hindu reported. The petition had noted that the period to file claims and objections during the revision exercise in the state was ending on January 30.

It added that Electoral Registration Officers had submitted that there was a “staggering gap of 88%, that is, 1,21,05,441 voters” who had not yet received hearing notices, the newspaper reported.

The petition urged the court to extend the directions issued in a January 19 order on an application filed by the West Bengal government to Tamil Nadu as well.

On January 19, the court had told the Election Commission to publish the names of about 1.2 crore persons in West Bengal against whom logical discrepancy objections had been raised.

Besides Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 10 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

On January 29, the Supreme Court stayed the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, which had been notified around two weeks earlier.

The regulations were aimed at ensuring that educational institutions across the country had inclusive environments, free of discrimination. But their notification by the UGC had been met with protests, largely centred in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

Four petitions were also filed in the Supreme Court, challenging the regulations, and asking that the court strike them down or revise them.

The chief objection that the petitions raised was that some of the regulations were specifically aimed at protecting students who belonged to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes from discrimination, and did not mention students from other groups, such as upper castes and others in the general category.

The petitioners argued that this was, in fact, discriminatory towards those other groups of students.

In the January 29 hearing, the UGC did not put forth any defence of the regulations. In its order staying them, the Supreme Court described them as “prima facie vague and capable of misuse”. If implemented, the court said, they would “divide the country”.

The court issued notice to the Centre and the UGC in the matter, and reinstated earlier regulations that the UGC had issued in 2012. It scheduled the next hearing for March 13.

Activists and lawyers criticised the court’s decision, and argued that the protests and petitions were unfounded.

N Sukumar, a professor at Delhi University who has written extensively about caste discrimination on campuses, described one of the protesting general category students’ key demands, that they be included within the ambit of the current regulations on caste discrimination, as “meaningless”.

“It doesn’t make any sense, what they are asking,” he said. He noted that apart from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, the regulations also had provisions pertaining to women, disabled people and members of economically weaker sections. “So, technically, whoever is at a disadvantage from these communities have other regulations that have provisions for them,” he said.

Student leaders also spoke up against the court’s decision. “The court is saying that these regulations will divide the country,” Kiran Gowd, the president of the All India OBC Students Association said. “This country is already divided, and these regulations would have unified the divided sections on campuses.”

He added, “I hope the court will also listen to the grievances of students from SC, ST and OBC communities. We have enough data to show that suicides occur among these communities, and that there is severe discrimination on our campuses.”

The regulations

The UGC first issued regulations aimed at promoting equity on university campuses in 2012.

Among the measures those regulations mandated were that institutions establish equal opportunity cells on their campuses. They also forbade teachers from discriminating against students through means such as grading them unfairly, or allocating hostels on the basis of caste.

But the suicides of Rohith Vemula in 2016 and Payal Tadvi in 2019 led many students and activists to ask whether the regulations were sufficient, and whether they were being properly implemented.

In the aftermath of Tadvi’s death, a group of lawyers and a journalist filed a series of right-to-information requests, and determined that most universities had not implemented most of these measures, such as setting up equal opportunity cells whose responsibilities included overseeing complaints of discrimination.

“We filed RTIs in 2019 after Payal Tadvi’s death because in her case, she had complained and the issue had not been addressed,” said Disha Wadekar, one of the lawyers who filed the requests. “We found that nobody is implementing these regulations. At least 99% of colleges did not have an equal opportunity cell.”

In 2019, Radhika Vemula and Abeda Tadvi, Rohith and Payal’s mothers, filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking that the regulations be strengthened, and that the UGC take effective steps to implement them.

The 2025 draft regulations

The petition moved slowly through the courts. It was filed in August 2019, a few months after Payal Tadvi’s death. The Supreme Court held the first hearing in the matter shortly after, and issued notice to the UGC.

But it was only five years after the petition was filed, in December 2024, that the Supreme Court asked the UGC to respond to the petitions.

In February 2025, the UGC released a draft of the updated regulations. Activists and academics criticised it fiercely, noting that the 2012 regulations had been diluted, and that the new guidelines were vague and inadequate.

Among their key criticisms were that the regulations did not include clear definitions of what constituted discrimination, and that they did not contain provisions to protect students from other backward class groups. They also argued that provisions to deter false complaints were unduly harsh, and could effectively discourage students who had legitimate grievances. Further, they argued that the equal opportunity cells that would oversee complaints would not be sufficiently representative, and that universities should face penalties if they failed to comply with the regulations.

It was only in January this year that the UGC notified the updated regulations, which incorporated some of the changes that activists had demanded. For instance, they included OBC students within their ambit, and did away with provisions pertaining to false complaints.

The protests

Students on campuses across the country, particularly those from marginalised groups, were alarmed by the intense backlash that the new regulations saw from upper caste communities.

The response began with murmurs of discontent on social media. Some users criticised the regulations for lacking provisions that safeguarded the interests of general category students, while others claimed that they would be misused by students from marginalised communities.

The objections quickly gained in intensity and spread to the political domain – as a mark of solidarity with the protestors, at least 11 Bharatiya Janata Party leaders quit from their official party posts in Uttar Pradesh.

Then, over the last two days, protests erupted onto the streets. Students gathered at the UGC office in New Delhi, shouting slogans such as “UGC roll back” and “Batenge toh katenge”. In Uttar Pradesh, upper caste students carried out marches, tonsured their heads and tied black bands on their hands.

Online too, they spewed their anger at the original petition that led the new regulations, as well as the ruling party for supposedly favouring students from marginalised communities over those from the general category.

This aggressive response has left students from marginalised communities deeply fearful of the future of Indian campuses, particularly given that the regulations, they say, only sought to provide basic protections for them. Such protections were crucial, they added, given that UGC data showed that there had been a 118% rise in complaints of caste-based discrimination since 2019.

The protests seemed “to endorse caste-based discrimination on campuses”, said Kiran Gowd. “I don’t know how else to see this, because why would people protest against a set of regulations to merely prevent caste discrimination on campuses?”

Dayanidhi, the president of the Ambedkar Students Association in the University of Hyderabad, which Rohith Vemula was also a part of, echoed this argument. “If the upper caste students are not participating in caste discrimination, why are they scared of the regulations?” he said.

The opposition to the regulations

Among the key concerns of the protesting students and petitioners was that the regulations only referred to marginalised communities.

“By design and operation, this definition accords legal recognition of victimhood exclusively to certain reserved categories and categorically excludes persons belonging to general or upper castes from its protective ambit, regardless of the nature, gravity, or context of discrimination suffered by them,” one petition said.

Now I’ve seen absolutely everything: the petitions challenging the UGC regulations have compared the upper castes to the criminal/denotified tribes. pic.twitter.com/72WhALHT1l

— Gautam Bhatia (@gautambhatia88) January 29, 2026

Anti-caste activists described this as a strange argument, given that the regulations were specifically aimed at groups that might be targeted for discrimination.

“The demand is quite ridiculous, and is not consistent with how affirmative planning and inclusive justice works,” Ravikant Kisana, a professor at a private university, said.

Wadekar noted that it would be akin to men seeking “protection in women’s protective legislation, able-bodied person saying they are facing discrimination based on disabilities”. She added, “Caste and gender are social disabilities and it’s quite absurd to say they are facing discrimination on the basis of caste.”

Further, Kisana noted, “To be included, upper caste students must be able to prove that they are vulnerable, specifically that they suffer caste discrimination from SC,ST students.” But, he said, their “demands are not evidence based and not in the spirit of social justice. It seems like they just don’t want to be held accountable for their actions and thus making such demands.”

Further, Sukumar noted that an earlier set of UGC regulations, issued in 2023, contained provisions that allowed all students across the country to seek redressal for a wide range of grievances.

The petitions also objected to the inclusion of OBC communities in the regulations. One argued that doing so “mischaracterises them as castes alone, ignoring the constitutional distinction and restricting protection to a predetermined set of classes while excluding others who may suffer caste-based hostility irrespective of their class status”.

Such a position ignored the ground reality that there were vast numbers of castes within the OBC umbrella, many of which faced discrimination even today, Kisana noted. “People think OBC is just these 50-55 castes, but the problem is that OBC has thousands of communities, and many of these communities have never entered colleges,” Kisana said. “So rolling back the regulations or removing OBCs from the regulations is going to push these communities into an even more precarious position.”

Sukumar argued, “When the OBC communities are being given reservations and are recognised as backward communities, why would they not be included in these regulations?”

Kisana worries that in response to the protests, the UGC will most readily tone down provisions pertaining to these groups. “It is easiest to remove the OBC clause and tone down the policy further,” he said. “With issues regarding reservation or regulations like these, we take one step forward and two steps back.”

The intense opposition to the regulations had its roots in a general dissatisfaction that had been building up for some time among upper-caste communities against the ruling government, he reasoned. He said he had observed an increasing tendency among these groups to raise fears about problems such as “Brahmin-phobia”.

“I think there was already a lot of frustration among people, and now with the regulations it is suddenly exploding,” he said.

The recent debates around conducting a caste census may also have left upper-castes worried that they would lose some privileges or power. “It could also be the caste census issue, or that the opposition party is taking up caste issues more these days,” he said. “I think this anger has been building up for a while, and it is being unleashed on the UGC regulations.”

Sukumar noted that he was surprised at how quickly the court listed the recent petitions, particularly given how many years it took to hear Vemula and Tadvi’s petition, and given that the protests were restricted to only a few states. “There were no protests in any other part of the country, yet with such a hurry the court has stayed orders,” Sukumar said. “No states in the south, west or east had any such protests.”

Meanwhile, students say caste discrimination is still common on campuses. On the day of Rohith Vemula’s 10th death anniversary, for instance, Dayanidhi said, “People tore his posters.” He added, People will also say, ‘Don’t get us a teacher from reserved category, we want one from general category.’ All these are things people say so casually.”

An 18-year-old Kashmiri man selling shawls with his family was assaulted by a group of persons in Uttarakhand on Wednesday, the Jammu and Kashmir Students Association said. His cousin was also allegedly assaulted, and suffered minor injuries.

The man, Tabish Ahmed, was stopped in the Vikas Nagar area near Dehradun and questioned about his identity, The New Indian Express quoted the student association as saying. The assault allegedly began after he told the group that he was a Muslim and from Kashmir.

Ahmed’s left arm has been fractured and he has suffered serious head injuries, the student body said. He was first taken to a local hospital and later referred to Dehradun’s Doon Hospital for further treatment.

Nasir Khuehami, the national convenor of the Jammu and Kashmir Students Association, said that the police have filed a case under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to voluntarily causing grievous hurt and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace. He said that he spoke to Director General of Police Deepam Seth, who assured him that the strongest possible action would be taken.

“This is a welcome first step, but accountability must be time-bound, transparent, and exemplary,” Khuehami said.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said such attacks were unacceptable, and had to stop. “It can’t be claimed that J&K is an inalienable part of India while people from Kashmir, in other parts of the country, live in fear for their lives,” he said. “My Government will step in where ever necessary & will do whatever is needed to ensure these incidents are not repeated.”

Abdullah said he spoke to Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and urged him to take strict action against the perpetrators.

Commenting on the attack, Congress leader Pawan Khera said that while Kashmiri artistry is celebrated, the people behind it are denied dignity, safety and respect.

“What message does that send?” he asked. “That Kashmiri beauty is valuable. Kashmiri labour is useful. But Kashmiri lives are expendable.”

Anyone who owns a Kashmiri shawl wears it with pride.

And yet, too often, the very men who bring these shawls to us are met with suspicion, harassment, intimidation - even violence.

The irony is stark. These are the same shawls that drape the shoulders of the Prime Minister and… https://t.co/QhQ8s5C7o4

— Pawan Khera 🇮🇳 (@Pawankhera) January 29, 2026

In December as well, a Kashmiri shawl seller named Bilal Ahmed Ganie was attacked in Uttarakhand’s Udham Singh Nagar when he was going from door to door to sell shawls. He said he was assaulted by men who demanded that he shout “Bharat mata ki jai”.

The toll in the fire that broke out at two warehouses in Kolkata on Monday has risen to 21, PTI quoted the police as saying on Thursday.

Twenty-eight persons remain missing, the news agency reported.

The warehouses, one operated by quick-service restaurant chain Wow! Momo and the other by a decorator, are located in East Kolkata’s Anandapur area. The fire reportedly began at about 3 am on Monday in one of the warehouses and spread to the other.

DNA profiling of the recovered bodies, to establish their identities, was likely to begin on Thursday, the news agency quoted an unidentified police officer as saying.

“DNA profiling is essential in this case as many of the bodies are severely charred and identification through conventional means is not possible,” the officer said.

Search and recovery operations continued in the area on Thursday where several structures were gutted or partially collapsed, PTI reported.

Fire department and forensic teams are investigating what caused the fire.

The authorities imposed prohibitory orders on Thursday, restricting public movement in Anandapur ahead of a visit by Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Suvendu Adhikari and other Bharatiya Janata Party leaders.

Adhikari visited the area on Thursday evening but was stopped by the police from entering the actual site, PTI reported.

“I follow the law,” PTI quoted him as telling reporters. “I will observe the situation from 100 metres away.”

Adhikari criticised the state’s Trinamool Congress government for alleged laxity and claimed that “fire services were late in reaching the spot”.

“The TMC government’s chronic apathy, corruption and failure to enforce basic regulations have caused this,” Adhikari added on social media. “Mamata Banerjee is yet to visit the site days after the tragedy.”

Adhikari also announced a protest rally at Narendrapur on Friday, which the Calcutta High Court has permitted, The Indian Express reported.

India’s real gross domestic product is expected to grow between 6.8% and 7.2% in the financial year 2026-’27, the government’s annual Economic Survey projected. The cumulative impact of policy reforms in recent years appeared to have lifted the economy’s medium-term growth potential closer to 7%, the Department of Economic Affairs said.

The document, tabled in Parliament ahead of the Union Budget on Sunday, details the state of the country’s economy and suggests measures to boost growth.

“With domestic drivers playing a dominant role and macroeconomic stability well anchored, the balance of risks around growth remains broadly even,” it said. “The outlook, therefore, is one of steady growth amid global uncertainty, requiring caution, but not pessimism.” Read on.

The Supreme Court stayed the 2026 University Grants Commission’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations. The provisions were “prima facie vague and capable of misuse”, the court observed, asking the Union government to redraft the regulations. Until then, the operation of the rules will be in abeyance.

The bench verbally raised questions about why “caste-based discrimination” had been separately defined when the definition of “discrimination” already covered all forms of discriminatory treatment.

The regulations, notified on January 13, led to protests by upper-caste students, who have argued that the framework could lead to discrimination against them. The protesters have contended that the rules are biased against students from the general category as they do not provide for measures against “false complaints”. Read on.

The Supreme Court refused to entertain a public interest litigation seeking a declaration that domestic workers have a fundamental right to be paid minimum wages. The plea, filed by domestic workers’ unions, sought to bring domestic workers under the minimum wages notification.

A bench held that the reliefs sought were legislative in nature and that the court could not issue a writ asking the Union government and the states to consider amending the laws.

The court expressed concerns that fixing a mandatory minimum wage could lead to fears that trade unions may drag “every household” into litigation. This could backfire and result in a reluctance to hire domestic workers, the bench added. Read on.

The Indian rupee fell to a record low of nearly 92 against the United States dollar. The currency sank to 91.98 per US dollar, before marginally improving to 91.95 at the close of the trading session.

A widened balance of payments deficit, along with uncertainty about the trade deal with the US, has exerted pressure on the rupee, causing it to weaken, said the Economic Survey tabled in Parliament on Thursday.

The Indian currency has plummeted more than 2% this month after falling about 5% in 2025. Read on.

Activist Sonam Wangchuk told the Supreme Court that he has the democratic right to criticise the government and that it did not amount to a threat to national security. His counsel told the court that no act of violence was attributed to the activist and that the grounds of detention relied only on verbal statements, a protest march and a hunger strike, which were not violent acts.

The lawyer said that several statements cited by the authorities were either misattributed or misconstrued, including allegations that Wangchuk had threatened to overthrow the government or suggested that Ladakhis would not help the Army.

The authorities had ignored speeches in which Wangchuk had praised the government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and relied selectively on material to justify the detention, the counsel added.

Wangchuk was detained under the National Security Act on September 26 following protests in Leh demanding statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The bench was hearing a plea by his wife challenging the detention. Read on.

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Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk on Thursday told the Supreme Court that he has a democratic right to criticise the government and that such statements do not threaten national security, Bar and Bench reported.

Lawyer Kapil Sibal, representing Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo, made the argument while challenging the activist’s detention under the National Security Act.

Wangchuk was detained on September 26 after protests in Leh demanding statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. During the protests, demonstrators clashed with and threw stones at security personnel, injuring several of them. Four persons were killed in police firing.

On Thursday, Sibal said there was nothing wrong with protesting against the destruction of the environment in Ladakh. “If Ladakh is to remain pristine, we don’t want any kind of activity that destroys the environment,” Bar and Bench quoted him as telling a bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and PB Varale.

The lawyer told the court that there was no case of violence against Wangchuk, and that only acts of violence attributed to him would constitute grounds of detention.

“All the statements relied upon are verbal statements,” Sibal was quoted as saying by Bar and Bench. “Other than that, there’s the padyatra [march] and anshan [hunger strike]. These are not violent acts.”

The lawyer said that many statements cited to justify Wangchuk’s detention were either misattributed or misconstrued. He said it had been wrongly alleged that the activist said he would overthrow the government if Ladakh was not given statehood.

Sibal quoted Wangchuk as having said that a government that did not have affection for citizens and did not care for the environment was “an obstacle in the progress of the nation”, the legal news outlet reported.

The court then asked him about an alleged statement by Wangchuk saying that Ladakhis would not help the Army. Sibal maintained that Wangchuk had not said so, adding that the speech in question was from over three months before the detention order.

The lawyer further said that the authorities had ignored videos in which Wangchuk had praised the government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Bar and Bench reported.

“They don’t show all this,” Sibal said. “And put selective things in the grounds of detention. They show as if I am advocating a plebiscite. I never made such statements.”

Citizens are allowed to criticise the authorities, and anti-government sentiments do not affect the security of the state, the lawyer was quoted as saying by Bar and Bench.

“The Sixth Schedule was a promise given by a political party,” Sibal noted. “It was given in 2020. If in 2025 he says fulfil it before elections, what’s wrong with it?”

Including Ladakh in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution would allow for the creation of autonomous development councils to govern land, public health and agriculture.

On August 5, 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government abrogated the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution and bifurcated the state into the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh.

The lack of a legislature in Ladakh has led to increasing insecurities among the residents of the Union Territory about their land, nature, resources and livelihoods, and stoked fears that the region’s cultural identity and fragile ecosystem may be in jeopardy.

Following Wangchuk’s detention, key regional groups Apex Body Leh and Kargil Democratic Alliance withdrew from the talks with the government, stating that “talks cannot be held at gunpoint”.

Also read: Nine false claims about Sonam Wangchuk – and why they fall flat

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to entertain a public interest litigation seeking a declaration that domestic workers have a fundamental right to be paid minimum wages, Bar and Bench reported.

The plea, filed by domestic workers’ unions, sought to bring domestic workers under the minimum wages notification, Live Law reported.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi held that the reliefs sought were legislative in nature and that the court could not issue a writ asking the Centre and states to consider amending existing laws, PTI reported.

“No enforceable decree or order can be passed unless the legislature is asked to enact a suitable law” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “Such a direction…ought not to be issued by this court.”

The bench was also quoted as having expressed concerns that fixing a mandatory minimum wage could backfire as trade unions may drag “every household” into litigation, leading to a reluctance in hiring domestic workers.

“Once minimum wages are fixed, people will refuse to hire,” Bar and Bench quoted Kant as saying. “Tell me how many industries have been able to hire successfully using the trade unions. See all sugarcane unions closed.”

The chief justice also remarked that trade unions had, in his view, played a role in slowing industrial growth in the country, Live Law reported.

“How many industrial units in the country have been closed thanks to trade unions,” Kant was quoted as saying. “All traditional industries in the country, all because of these…unions have been closed, all throughout the country. They don’t want to work.”

“Of course exploitation is there, but there are means to address exploitation,” PTI quoted Kant as saying. “People should have been made more aware of their individual rights, people should have been made more skilled, there were several other reforms which should have been done.”

While acknowledging the plight of millions of domestic workers across the country, the bench maintained that the judiciary cannot encroach upon the legislative domain to mandate the enactment of laws, PTI reported.

Responding to the submission that collective bargaining could address these concerns, Bagchi noted that domestic workers are already covered under existing welfare frameworks, the news agency reported.

“It is not as if there is no safety net,” PTI quoted Bagchi as saying. “The Unorganised Workers’ Social Security Act does take care of several aspects.”

Advocate Raju Ramachandran, appearing for one of the petitioner organisations, Penn Thozhilalargal Sangam, argued that non-payment of minimum wages violated several constitutional rights pertaining to equality, prohibition against discrimination, equality of opportunity in public employment, among others, Live Law reported.

He submitted that domestic workers were deliberately excluded from the minimum wage framework despite the uniform nature of domestic work across states.

He also drew comparisons with countries such as Singapore, where statutory safeguards, mandatory leave and service conditions applied to domestic workers.

The court, however, said that a declaration recognising a fundamental right to minimum wages would amount to “lip service if not implemented”, Bar and Bench reported.

It reiterated that courts must be cautious in matters of economic policy and declined to interfere, suggesting that the petitioners approach the concerned state governments or, where appropriate, the High Courts.

The Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the operation of the 2026 University Grants Commission’s Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations, observing that their provisions were “prima facie vague and capable of misuse”, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi asked the Union government to redraft the regulations. Until then, their operation will remain in abeyance, the legal news outlet reported.

The bench verbally raised concern about the regulations, questioning why “caste-based discrimination” had been separately defined when the definition of “discrimination” already covered all forms of discriminatory treatment. It also asked why incidents of ragging had been excluded from the ambit of the new rules, Live Law reported.

The 2026 University Grants Commission Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations were notified on January 13. The regulations have led to protests by upper-caste students, who have argued that the framework could lead to discrimination against them.

The protesters have contended that the rules are biased against students from the general category as they do not provide for measures against “false complaints”.

Three writ petitions had been filed in the Supreme Court challenging Section 3(c) of the regulations, which defines caste-based discrimination as discrimination against members of the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes, Live Law reported.

One of the petitioners, advocate Vineet Jindal, had contended that the provision renders protection against caste discrimination non-inclusionary. He had argued that the provision, in its current “exclusionary form”, denies grievance redressal mechanisms and institutional protection to individuals who do not belong to the three categories.

What the rules mandate

The University Grants Commission’s new equity rules require institutes to set up special committees, helplines and monitoring teams to address complaints, particularly from members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.

The UGC had in 2012 first released equity rules for higher education institutes, which required them to set up Equal Opportunity Cells and Anti-Discrimination Officers. However, those rules did not provide for action against institutions that did not comply with them.

In contrast, the 2026 rules require the UGC to set up a monitoring committee to oversee their implementation.

Institutes that do not comply with the regulations can be barred from participating in the commission’s schemes, offering degree programmes and online courses, and can be removed from the list of institutes eligible to receive central grants.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Wednesday said that the workers of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have filed more than five lakh complaints against suspected foreigners during the special revision of the electoral rolls in the state.

Speaking to reporters on the sidelines of an event at Demow in Sivasagar district on Wednesday, the BJP leader said that filing complaints during the exercise was a “national duty”.

“Everyone in Assam knows that Bangladeshi Miya immigrants have entered the state,” Sarma said. “If no one receives a notice under SR [special revision], what does that imply? That there are no foreign nationals in Assam.”

He added: “That is why our workers have filed over five lakh complaints. Otherwise, everyone would have been legitimised.”

SR में शिकायत दर्ज कराना एक राष्ट्रीय जिम्मेदारी है। यह केवल भाजपा तक सीमित नहीं, बल्कि असम के सभी दलों और संगठनों का समान दायित्व है। pic.twitter.com/Uj4Qz5ADrr

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) January 28, 2026

In Assam, “Miya” is a derogatory word used to refer to undocumented immigrants and is exclusively directed at Muslims of Bengali origin. They are often accused of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.

Once a pejorative in Assam, from the common use of the honorific “Miya” among South Asian Muslims, the term has now been reappropriated by the community as a self-descriptor to refer to Muslims who migrated to Assam from Bengal during the colonial era.

The poll panel is separately conducting a “special revision” of the voter list in the state, which is similar to the usual updates to the electoral roll. Assam is not among the 12 states and Union Territories where the Election Commission is conducting the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls.

The door-to-door verification took place in the state between November 22 and December 20. The process did not involve document verification, unlike the special intensive revision.

On December 27, the Election Commission said that the names of more than 10 lakh voters were identified to be deleted in Assam after a house-to-house verification process.

Claims and objections to inclusions and deletions in the draft electoral rolls had to be filed between December 27 and January 22. These are to be disposed of by February 2 and the final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on February 10.

The state is expected to hold Assembly elections in three to four months.

On Wednesday, the chief minister said that if no complaints were filed now, what answer could be given if somebody later claimed that there were foreigners in Assam.

“If foreigners existed, why did no complaint reach the SR process?” the BJP leader asked. “Therefore filing complaints under the SR is a national responsibility.”

He added that this responsibility did not lie with the BJP alone but also with other parties and organisations.

However, they had not filed any complaints, he added.

This came a day after Sarma claimed that four lakh to five lakh Miya voters would be deleted when the special intensive revision of the voter rolls takes place in the state, adding that his job was to “make them suffer”.

“What does ‘vote chori’ [vote theft] mean to us?” the chief minister had asked reporters. “Yes, we are trying to steal some Miya votes. Ideally, they should not be allowed to vote in Assam. They should be able to vote in Bangladesh.”

Reacting to Sarma’s comments, Congress leader Aman Wadud had said that Sarma had “made the Constitution absolutely ineffective” in Assam.

On January 24, the chief minister said that only Miya Muslims were being served notices under the special revision in the state.

Sarma had said at the time that there was “nothing to hide”.

“We are giving them trouble,” the chief minister had said, referring to his earlier statements that “Miyas” would face problems in his regime. He added that serving them notices as part of the special revision exercise was a way to “keep them under pressure”.

Several Opposition parties have accused the BJP of conspiring to delete the names of a large number of genuine voters from the state’s electoral rolls amid the exercise and filed police complaints.

On January 25, the chief minister said that the eviction drives in the state were only targeting Miya Muslims and not Assamese people.

Since the BJP came to power in Assam in 2016, several demolition drives have been conducted in the state, mostly targeting areas populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Sarma claimed earlier this month that the government has “reclaimed” close to 1.5 lakh bighas of land in the course of the eviction drives.

Also Read:

• In Assam, ‘forged’ forms aimed at deleting thousands of Muslim voters ring alarm bells

• BJP workers in Assam say their names used to seek mass voter deletion – without their knowledge

When I returned to my village of Hemisshukpachan in Ladakh in November after a hiatus of three months, I noticed a new architectural trend: steel roofing.

The next day, at a meeting in the community hall called by an NGO to distribute solar lamps, some villagers were in a rush to leave because there were workers at their homes installing steel roofs. This sparked a discussion about this new trend. There was a general agreement that all the residents should install steel roofs.

The impetus to build these roofs had come from the unprecedented rainfall we received in August. Leh recorded 80 mm of rain – roughly 930%. The flat mud roofs of the region’s traditional houses could easily withstand the historical average annual precipitation (both rain and snow) of around 100 mm. But my neighbours thought that steel roofing was necessary to face the changing weather patterns.

As a result, Ladakhis were spending their early winter getting ready for the summer instead of the phenomenon we have historically spent our time preparing for – the cold.

As I see it, the loosening ties of Ladakhis with the cold is responsible for the region’s new obsession with heritage preservation – and even our political anxiety.

Till the early 2000s, Ladakh’s winters (October-March) were harsh. Agricultural activities came to a halt. Everything froze: the rivers, streams, water canals, grassland and land with moisture in it. Precipitation mostly came in the form of snowfall. “In the past, winters were very cold and snowfall was abundant,” an octogenarian fellow villager told me.

In the shaded parts of the village, the early winter snow was transformed into sheets of ice. As residents shovelled the snow off their roofs, towers of sleet grew in the alleyways. In the winter, some parts of the village used to be covered permanently with ice.

These tough conditions entailed that there was always the looming danger of food and fuel scarcity. As a result, Ladakhis spent their summers preparing for the winter.

The summer months were used to cultivate barley and wheat (the main foodgrains), collect apricots and vegetables (both wild and cultivated) for dry preservation, and to secure essentials not found locally, such as salt, from distant outposts.

Talking to my Buddhist neighbours about the time before Ladakh joined the Republic and a couple of decades after it became part of India, they told me many stories about the cruel, cold months. The most prominent theme was food scarcity.

By mid- to late winter, pantries became empty, and people went to seek loans of grain from relatively wealthy neighbours. Stories of people venturing to the nearby monastery to steal from the granary are also remembered. Young men went on expeditions to hunt wild sheep, goats and birds for subsistence. People slept early so they would be under the covers during the freezing nights.

The local architecture reflected the necessity of tackling the frosty conditions. The older houses have thick walls that act as thermal insulation. Homes had a special winter chamber, called yokhang, on the ground floor. This floor also had rooms for the livestock. Moving nearer to the animals provided the much-needed warmth.

The preparations made for the dreary winter months underscore the intimate relationship Ladakhis had with the cold. Living in Ladakh meant getting ready, tackling and facing the icy circumstances head-on.

Ladakh’s social institutions reflect this. Elaborate systems of community cooperation in villages – norms related to water sharing, social groups that assist in ploughing, funerals and weddings – were the safety nets. A powerful village-level decision-making institution headed by the goba (chief) and representing all the households had authority on important aspects like water sharing.

Social practices were designed to negotiate the frigid landscape. For instance, polyandrous marriage, in which a woman had several husbands, controlled the population. In many families, younger siblings became monks and nuns, which secured their survival in monasteries with generous endowments.

One bit of small talk in Ladakh is “Thogs babs se rag, ta” (the warm has descended). Essentially, Ladakhis, at both the individual and collective level, had a fundamental purpose in this world – to survive the cold environment.

But geopolitics-related increase in military deployment, development programmes and tourism slowly began to upend this purpose. Food and fuel also became available from the civil administration and the military, which provided employment to Ladakhis.

Life became easier. But it made a social world designed to negotiate coldness inconsequential. Practices like agro-pastoralism, settlement patterns, mud buildings, mud stoves, livestock and much more became anachronistic.

The upending of Ladakh’s social world produced a sense of crisis. This became evident in the rush to preserve traditional architecture, pottery, metal works, dress, languages, festivals, monasteries, stupas, water-mills, heirloom seeds, animals, agricultural practices, water distribution systems, the institution of goba and even villages (which were being depopulated by outmigration).

The region now has an abundance of heritage-preserving individuals and organisations.

The looming planetary ecological crisis that has widespread public acknowledgement in the region adds another dimension to the threats. For example, the majority of families in Kulum abandoned their village due to water scarcity. After the 2010 floods, the village spring, the main source of water, dried up.

Due to rising temperatures, glacier-lake outburst floods (GLOF) have become frequent. A prominent example is the 2014 Gya village GLOF. Studies have shown a significant increase in temperature in Ladakh and neighbouring regions of around 1.6 degrees celsius in the last century, with winters heating at an increased rate.

All of these processes portray Ladakhi people as endangered. This atmosphere of risk underpins the recent political movement in Ladakh.

The sense of crisis in contemporary Ladakh is fundamentally an altered relationship with coldness, which provided a purpose to live. This relationship with the coldness is deeply ingrained in the social psyche of Ladakhis. These broken ties with frigidity finds articulation with the help of common discourses of heritage protection, tribal rights, and local governance.

If all the important heritage items and sites are protected, if all the tribal rights are recognised, if the region is empowered through extension of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution and even statehood, the question is how do we live with our changed relationship with coldness on a dangerously warming planet even while enjoying modern amenities.

Steel roofs are only a temporary answer.

Padma Rigzin is a social anthropologist from Ladakh.

This is the first of a two-part series on Ladakh. Read the second part here.

India’s real gross domestic product is expected to grow between 6.8% and 7.2% in the financial year 2026-’27, the government’s annual Economic Survey projected on Thursday.

The document said that the cumulative impact of policy reforms in recent years appeared to have lifted the economy’s medium-term growth potential closer to 7%.

“With domestic drivers playing a dominant role and macroeconomic stability well anchored, the balance of risks around growth remains broadly even,” the Economic Survey said. “…The outlook, therefore, is one of steady growth amid global uncertainty, requiring caution, but not pessimism.”

The Economic Survey, tabled by Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in Parliament three days ahead of the Union Budget for the forthcoming financial year, details the state of the country’s economy and suggests measures to boost growth.

In the financial year 2025-’26, India’s gross domestic product is projected to grow at 7.4% as compared to 6.5% in 2024-’25, according to the first advance estimates released by the National Statistics Office on January 7. The projection released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation is slightly higher than the Reserve Bank of India’s forecast of a growth rate of 7.3%.

The advance estimates give a broad picture of how the country’s economy may perform in the upcoming year, and help the finance ministry decide on budgetary allocations.

The Budget Session of Parliament began on Wednesday. Both Houses were adjourned after President Droupadi Murmu addressed a joint session of Parliament.

On Thursday, the Department of Economic Affairs stated in the Economic Survey that the global economy has been subjected to “multiple upheavals”, with the most disruptive among them being tariffs imposed by the United States on several countries.

Indian goods are facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%, including a punitive levy imposed in August.

The punitive tariffs of 25% were introduced as part of US President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against countries purchasing discounted oil from Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

After the punitive levies were announced, New Delhi had said it was “extremely unfortunate” that the US had chosen to impose additional tariffs on India “for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest”.

Six rounds of negotiations have been held so far on a proposed India-US trade agreement, Moneycontrol reported on January 9.

Rupee decline

The Economic Survey said that a widened balance of payments deficit, along with uncertainty about the trade deal with the US, has exerted pressure on the Indian rupee, causing it to weaken.

At 2.30 pm Indian time on Thursday, the rupee was valued at 91.95 against the US dollar.

The document noted that from April 1 to January 22, the Indian currency depreciated by about 6.5% against the US dollar. However, the movement of the rupee has been “orderly”, the Economic Survey said.

“Over the medium to long term, exchange rate dynamics are expected to be guided by structural fundamentals, such as productivity gains, export diversification towards higher-value goods and services, deeper integration into GVCs [global value chains] and a stable policy environment rather than short-term fluctuations,” the document said.

Growth remains strong, says CEA

In the Economic Survey, Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran said that “even as the global economy navigates uncertainty, India continues to chart a strong growth path”.

Speaking about the first advance estimates on GDP, the survey noted that it surpasses projections of the last Economic Survey.

In the previous survey, the Union government had estimated that India’s real GDP will grow between 6.3% and 6.8% in the financial year 2025-’26.

Also watch: Scroll Adda: Why India's GDP data can't be believed

The Kerala High Court stated that the first information reports registered against expelled Congress leader and Palakkad MLA Rahul Mamkootathil in two other sexual assault cases against him cannot be treated as criminal antecedents in the rape and forced miscarriage case it was hearing on Wednesday, reported Live Law.

Justice Kauser Edappagath also reserved the verdict on Mamkootathil’s petition for anticipatory bail.

The prosecution contended that two other FIRs have been registered against the MLA, which constitute criminal antecedents.

However, the judge noted that all three cases were in the FIR stage, adding that no final report had been filed in any of them.

“All are under investigation,” Live Law quoted Edappagath as saying. “Law of antecedents is that mere registration of complaint is not sufficient. At least final report should be there...Is there a single FIR which is registered prior to this?...Not a technicality…We will take this case alone.”

The prosecution also argued that the cases against Mamkootathil showed a pattern of intimidation and similar offences against multiple women, Bar and Bench reported. This was not just a case where a consensual relationship turned sour, the judge was told.

In response, the judge said: “Even consensual relationship with a married spouse is permitted under law then what is wrong in an unmarried man having consensual sexual relationship with so many persons. What is wrong and because of that how can this bail be rejected.”

The MLA faces three cases of rape. He has been granted bail in the other two cases.

While a sessions court in Thiruvananthapuram allowed the anticipatory bail petition of the expelled Congress leader in one of the cases on December 10, he was granted relief by another sessions court in Pathanamthitta district earlier on Wednesday in the third case against him.

Mamkootathil was arrested on January 11 in Palakkad after the complaint was filed in the third case.

The matter before the High Court on Wednesday pertained to a complaint submitted directly to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan on November 27 by a woman and her family, accusing the Palakkad MLA of rape, pregnancy through sexual assault and forced abortion, Bar and Bench reported.

She claimed that Mamkootathil recorded their intimate videos without her consent, adding that he also threatened to circulate them if she did not comply with his demands.

A Thiruvananthapuram sessions court had denied him bail in the matter in December. The expelled Congress leader subsequently moved the High Court and got a stay on his arrest on December 6.

In his petition for anticipatory bail, Mamkootathil admitted to having a physical relationship with the complainant but claimed that it was entirely consensual, Bar and Bench reported.

However, the woman claimed that the Palakkad MLA repeatedly attempted to mislead the High Court by presenting distorted versions of the event.

She alleged that the abuse she suffered was not a one-time incident but part of a systematic pattern of violence and coercion, adding that Mamkootathil repeatedly subjected her to sexual violence, physical abuse and psychological intimidation.

In August, the Congress suspended Mamkootathil from its primary membership following multiple allegations from women of misconduct. Following this, he resigned from his post as the Kerala Youth Congress chief.

He was later expelled from the party but continues to serve as the MLA from Palakkad.

The attorney general of Texas in the United States on Wednesday announced an investigation into instances of abuse of the H-1B visa programme in the state.

As part of the investigation, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued Civil Investigative Demands to three north Texan companies suspected of engaging in fraudulent activity.

H-1B visas allow companies in the US to temporarily employ foreign workers for special occupations.

Over the past few years, Indians have constituted the majority of H-1B visa holders. Indians comprised 72.3% of all H-1B visas issued by the US in the financial year 2022-’23.

The Texas governor said on Wednesday that, according to reports, the businesses under investigation likely engaged in illegal activities by setting up sham companies and advertising non-existent products or services in order to fraudulently sponsor H-1B visas.

“Any criminal who attempts to scam the H-1B visa program and use ‘ghost offices’ or other fraudulent ploys should be prepared to face the full force of the law,” Paxton said in a press release.

🚨BREAKING: I'm announcing a sweeping investigation into H-1B visa abuse, starting with three North Texas businesses.

Any criminal who attempts to scam the H-1B visa program and use "ghost offices" or other fraudulent ploys should be prepared to face the full force of the law. pic.twitter.com/FHuHCJh3iH

— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) January 29, 2026

A day earlier, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had ordered an investigation into the H-1B visa programme in the state, and directed state agencies and universities to suspend new visa petitions under the programme, Reuters reported.

“In light of recent reports of abuse in the federal H-1B visa programme, and amid the federal government’s ongoing review of that programme to ensure American jobs are going to American workers, I am directing all state agencies to immediately freeze new H-1B visa petitions,” the news agency quoted Abbott as saying in a letter to state agencies.

The freeze will last until May 31, 2027, the Republican governor said, adding that exceptions will be allowed for cases where written permission is given by the Texas Workforce Commission.

State agencies were also given until March 27 to compile a report stating the number of new and renewal H-1B petitions had been submitted in 2025, the number of visa-holders sponsored, and their countries of origin and job classifications, Reuters reported.

The directions on Tuesday came amid US President Donald Trump’s intensified crackdown on immigration.

On September 19, Trump had signed an order requiring companies to pay $100,000 for each H-1B worker visa. However, two days after the rule came into effect, his administration clarified that the fee applies only to new applicants and does not affect current holders.

In December, Washington had said that it would expand the vetting of social media profiles to applicants for H-1B visas and their dependents from December 15. As a result, interviews of thousands of H-1B visa applicants in India were abruptly postponed by several months.

Later in the month, India stated that it had conveyed its concerns to the US about the cancellation of pre-scheduled interviews of Indian applicants for H-1B visas, adding that both sides were discussing the matter.

On December 23, the US Department of Homeland Security also said it had finalised amendments to regulations governing the H-1B visa selection process to favour workers who are higher-skilled and better-paid.

The new rules would take effect on February 27 and will be applicable for the financial year 2026-’27 registration period. The number of H-1B visas issued annually is limited to 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for US advanced degree holders.

The Trump administration said that replacing the lottery system of granting the visa with a process that gives greater weight to persons with higher skills will “better protect the wages, working conditions and job opportunities for American workers”.

A special court in Bengaluru on Wednesday accepted a closure report filed by the Karnataka Lokayukta police in a case against Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and three others in an alleged land scam involving the Mysuru Urban Development Authority, The Indian Express reported.

The Lokayukta police had filed the closure report in February, claiming that there was not enough evidence to establish corruption charges against Siddaramaiah, his wife BM Parvathi, brother-in-law Mallikarjun Swamy and former landowner J Devaraj.

However, the report had been kept in abeyance to allow the Lokayukta police to complete investigations into the larger allegations of corruption, according to the newspaper.

On Wednesday, Special Judge Santosh Gajanan Bhat accepted the closure report against Siddaramaiah, Parvathi, Swamy and Devaraj, but clarified that the investigation against other accused persons can continue, Bar and Bench reported.

The judge also rejected an application by the complainant demanding that contempt of court proceedings be initiated against the investigating officer.

The court held that the Enforcement Directorate, which is looking into money-laundering allegations linked to the case, can intervene in the matter only to a “limited extent” as an aggrieved person, The Indian Express reported.

The alleged scam pertains to the allotment of 14 high-value housing sites in Mysuru’s Vijaynagar area to Parvathi in 2021 by the Mysore Urban Development Authority under a state government scheme.

This was allegedly done in exchange for 3.1 acres of land that Parvathi owned in another part of the city. The land was alleged to have been illegally acquired from Dalit families.

The Karnataka governor had approved prosecution against Siddaramaiah in September 2024. A special court had subsequently directed the Lokayukta police to file a first information report against Siddaramaiah, Parvathi, Swamy and Devaraj.

Two midday meal cooks who were part of an ongoing protest demanding an increase in wages in Chhattisgarh’s Atal Nagar-Nava Raipur have died after their health deteriorated, PTI quoted their family members as saying on Wednesday.

Rukmani Sinha, in her 50s and a resident of Balod district, died at a hospital in the adjoining Rajnandgaon district on Monday. Dulari Yadav, in her early 60s and from Bemetara, died a day later at a hospital in Durg district’s Bhilai, The Indian Express reported.

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state has denied a direct connection between the deaths and the protest by the midday meal cooks, which entered its 31st day on Wednesday.

The midday meal programme under the Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman is a centrally-sponsored scheme that is aimed at providing nutritious meals to students enrolled in government and aided schools.

Since December 29, thousands of midday meal cooks, mostly women, under the banner of the Chhattisgarh School Madhyanh Bhojan Rasoiya Sanyukta Sangh, have been staging a sit-in protest at Tuta Dharna Sthala in Atal Nagar-Nava Raipur, demanding an increase in their daily honorarium to over Rs 400 from Rs 66.

On Wednesday, PTI quoted Rukmani Sinha’s son-in-law Mukesh Kumar Sinha as saying that the midday meal cook, who was a resident of Balod’s Kusumkasa village, had taken part in the protest between January 20 and January 23, and returned home on January 24 after complaining of health-related complications.

Mukesh Kumar Sinha said that Rukmani Sinha was admitted to the district hospital in Balod on Sunday and was later referred to Rajnandgaon Medical College and Hospital. She died on Monday afternoon, he added.

He said that she suffered from blood pressure-related issues.

Dulari Yadav’s grandson Gaukaran Yadav told The Indian Express that his grandmother had gone to the protest on January 23. Three days later, the family received a call from the Chhattisgarh School Madhyanh Bhojan Rasoiya Sanyukta Sangh saying that her health had worsened.

“They said she has been referred to the Shri Shankaracharya Institute of Medical Sciences in Bhilai,” the newspaper quoted Gaukaran Yadav as saying. “On January 27, before we could speak with her, she died.”

Gaukaran Yadav said that his grandmother had no health issues, but she had complained of being unable to breathe.

Meanwhile, the state Directorate of Public Instruction said that representatives of the protesters had held discussions with officials, including the director and secretary of the School Education Department, reported PTI.

The state government had informed them during these talks of the decision to raise the honorarium by 25% and called for an end to the protest, according to the statement. The 25% hike amounted to Rs 500, or an increase of about Rs 17 per day.

The Directorate of Public Instruction added that Rukmani Sinha had attended the protest on January 20 and January 21 but later returned home, where she fell ill and was admitted to a government hospital.

It added that Dulari Yadav was already suffering from a serious illness and was admitted to a hospital in Bhilai, where she died.

The deaths in both cases had no direct connection with the ongoing protest, claimed the authorities.

The state government remains sensitive to the health, safety and welfare of all midday meal cooks and continues to take necessary steps in their interest, PTI quoted the statement as saying.

Lobsang Tsering, my octogenarian fellow villager, was a voracious reader and traditional knowledge keeper. Before he died in 2024, he made it his mission to give me a clear sense of the social, political and economic histories of our village – the site of my fieldwork for my PhD thesis on snow leopard conservation and tourism – and Ladakh in general.

He would spend hours telling me who married whom and how those alliances had been effected, offering me a sense of the kinship networks in Ladakh. Moreover, he would tell me about the histories of the Namgyal dynasty, which ruled from 1460 to 1834, and of Tibetan Buddhism, the faith followed by half the population of Ladakh.

He would educate me about the succession of Namgyal kings, which Namgyal king had been afflicted by leprosy and how these medical tribulations had affected our village.

After some time, I realised that his stories did not have to say much about the century or so of Dogra dynasty rule in Ladakh. More often than not, Tsering’s social and historical vignettes dealt with the period before Dogra rule began in the 1830s.

Lobsang Tsering was not an anomaly. It would seem that contemporary Ladakh has blanked out from its collective memory the period of Dogra domination in the region. This erasure partly helps us understand the roots of the political movement for self-governance in Ladakh.

Ladakh was an independent kingdom till the 1830s. But from the 1830s to 1947, Ladakh was a colonised territory. Its colonisation began in 1834, when Gulab Singh of Jammu, a commander of the Sikh empire, dispatched Zorawar Singh Khaluria to invade Ladakh. Zorawar’s forces defeated the haphazardly organised defence of the region by the Ladakhi king.

A decade later, the East India Company defeated the Sikh empire in the first Anglo-Sikh war, during which Gulab Singh sided with the British East India Company. As a reward, the Company signed the Treaty of Amritsar with Gulab Singh in 1846. For Rs 75 lakh, Gulab Singh got the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, including the Ladakh region.

Gulab Singh became the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. With the treaty, Ladakh formally lost its independence and became a province in the Dogra-ruled territory. It was called the Ladakh Wazarat.

The takeover of Ladakh by Gulab Singh’s Dogra dynasty was a bloody affair. Around 15,000 Ladakhis died during the conquest between 1834 and 1841. Several monasteries were plundered and destroyed, and monastic estates were confiscated. An estimated 9,000 monks fled to Tibet. Others sought refuge in Baltistan.

To strengthen the Dogra position, Zorawar constructed a fort, now called Zorawar Fort, after the defeat of the Ladakhi king, who did not have a standing army.

As a result of the conquest, elite Ladakhis lost their power while the commoners got buried in high taxes. In the mid-19th century, the annual land revenue collection in Ladakh was around Rs 28,000, By 1912-’13, it had increased five times to Rs 152,621. It has to be kept in mind that Ladakh is a cold desert at high altitude, where only one crop per year could grow in small terraced farms.

Despite high extraction of revenue, the maharaja spent a minuscule amount on the local people’s welfare. For instance, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that a small amount was spent on establishing the first primary school in Leh, with only one teacher. When it was upgraded to a middle school in 1908, a second teacher was appointed.

Elders told me about the humiliations of the period. I heard accounts of officials slapping the goba or village head to assert dominance. Similarly, residents had to provide begar or forced labour to transport the official across Ladakh. Begar often involved carrying the officers, their families and even their pets in a palki.

“The Dogra administration introduced the res system by which a village or group of villages was bound to supply transport for certain stages on certain roads for any passing official,” writes Ladakhi scholar Abdul Ghani Sheikh. “At Leh and Kargil, fifty horses and twenty coolies had to be kept ready in summer, and twenty horses and thirty coolies in winter. Each house had to supply a man and animal to fulfil the begar carriage obligation.”

The Dogra regime was such a blow on the social psyche that Ladakhis judged a year as bad or good based on the number of visits by officials to their hamlets.

Ladakhi historian Rinchen Dolma writes: “A century of Dogra rule is considered as the darkest chapter in the history of Ladakh.”

Those 100 years were a psychological and emotional wound that was passed down the generations. But instead of acknowledging it, there seems to be an unconscious attempt to erase this traumatic past.

I think that it is important not only to acknowledge the scars of the past, but to recognise how this distressing legacy continues to mould our contemporary politics. This period of Dogra rule unconsciously manifests itself as never-ending anxiety about people from the “mainland” taking over Ladakh’s land, jobs and resources.

In addition, the region’s demand for autonomy under the sixth schedule of the Constitution and even statehood could be seen as an urge to regain power that Ladakhis lost in the 1830s.

As a first baby step to acknowledge this past, Ladakhis could ask the army to hand over the fort that Zorawar Singh built to station his troops in Leh. The fort could be given to the combined authority of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils of both Leh and Kargil.

The councils should convert the fort into a museum, so that we can prepare the next generation of knowledge keepers to break the cycle of erasing a substantial chunk of history and validate our ancestors and, by extension, our suffering.

Padma Rigzin is a social anthropologist from Ladakh.

This is the second part of a two-part series on Ladakh. Read the first part here.

The toll in the fire at two warehouses in Kolkata on Monday increased to 19, ETV Bharat quoted the police as saying on Wednesday.

The warehouses, one operated by quick-service restaurant chain Wow! Momo and the other by a decorator, are located in East Kolkata’s Anandapur area.

The fire reportedly began at about 3 am on Monday in one of the warehouses and spread to the other, The Times of India reported.

Throughout Monday, firefighters tried to bring the blaze under control, The Hindu reported.

The rescue operations had continued on Tuesday amid fears that more workers may be trapped under the debris. At least 13 workers from East Medinipur district are unaccounted for, ETV Bharat quoted the police as saying.

Residents told The Times of India that only three of about 37 workers in the two warehouses had managed to get out. Several workers were believed to be sleeping inside at the time of the fire, according to ETV Bharat.

The police have not yet identified the bodies that were recovered and said that they will seek court permission to conduct DNA tests to identify the persons who had died, according to The Indian Express.

The Narendrapur Police registered a case of death due to negligence based on a complaint filed by the fire department.

The police arrested warehouse owner Gangadhar Das, ETV Bharat reported. He has been remanded to eight days of police custody.

Ranvir Kumar, the director general of the West Bengal Department of Fire and Emergency Services, told The Hindu that the warehouse did not have the mandatory fire safety clearance.

Kolkata Mayor Firhad Hakim said that action would be taken against those responsible and announced financial assistance of Rs 10 lakh for the families of those killed, ETV Bharat reported.

The compensation will be released after those killed in the incident are identified, he said.

Wow! Momo said in a statement on Wednesday that three of its employees had died in the incident.

The restaurant chain claimed that the fire had originated in the neighbouring warehouse and had “reportedly started due to unauthorised cooking”, adding that it was cooperating with the investigation.

A Muslim domestic worker struggling to find employment in Delhi laments forlornly, “I am uneducated and it is very difficult for me to get a job. The only one I can get is of a domestic help, and even that is not happening because of my religion. I want to be known by my real name. I am not a criminal. I don’t see any reason to hide my identity.”

I hear anecdotally from Muslim taxi drivers and delivery agents whose services I hire of clients not uncommonly refusing their services due to their religious identity. Only sometimes does this come to public notice. One instance is when a man named Abhishek Mishra, who identified as a “Hindutva thinker” and was followed by several Indian ministers on X, announced on social media that he canceled an Ola cab ride because the driver was Muslim. The reason he gave was that he did not want to give his money to “Jihadi people”.

In the climate of frank and even defiant anti-Muslim prejudice among the Indian middle classes today, Muslim workers feel barred or pushed out from employment in both the public and private sector through the experience of everyday discrimination and prejudice in the workplace.

Muslim women in multiple cleaning, cooking and caregiving jobs frequently use Hindu-sounding names at their workplaces in order to retain their jobs. One of them said to Al Jazeera that her grandmother even wore a sari and bindi to appear Hindu, and her sister worked even on Eid to avoid suspicion.

Other studies also confirm that many Muslim domestic workers reported using Hindu names to hide their Muslim identity. This was because they had struggled initially to find work using their Muslim names, but found that if they changed their names to Hindu ones this got them quicker and better employment opportunities. They also adopted Hindu customs in the workplace such as applying vermillion on their foreheads, wearing saris and speaking only in Hindi.

The New Indian Express reports in a similar vein that Muslim domestic workers from Tamil Nadu in Delhi face job discrimination due to their names. To secure employment, many adopt Hindu names, despite a sense of personal discomfort and humiliation. Employers openly express distrust and reluctance to hire Muslims. They justify their prejudice citing “security concerns” – as though Muslims by definition are untrustworthy.

Their predicament is compounded by the inclusion of religious identifiers of people seeking employment on online job portals for domestic help. Some residents are candid about their prejudice. A homemaker said, “It is my personal choice who I will employ and who I won’t. I do not feel secure about a Muslim woman working in my house. I do not trust them,” adding that most women in her locality would not employ Muslim domestics.

Studies confirm that working conditions are dismal not just for Muslim but also Hindu casual workers. They are often subjected to extremely inhumane conditions of work which include no water, no food, and delayed and reduced payment. But they find that the Muslims are more vulnerable. They report feeling unwelcome. Their Hindu employer and fellow-workers do not socialise with them. They also say they felt excluded because of preconceptions about their eating habits.

Open discrimination is also the fate of Muslim gig workers. For instance, a man of Hindu identity ordered chicken from a food delivery app, and instructed that he would prefer a Hindu delivery agent. When a Muslim agent appeared instead, he refused to accept the package and slammed the company. When they re-sent the package with a Hindu agent, he still refused to accept it. This was repeated in Hyderabad, with a customer again refusing to accept food delivered by a Muslim delivery agent.

In Lucknow, the customer first questioned a Zomato delivery agent named Mohammad Aslam about his identity. Upon learning of his background, the customer assaulted him, holding him captive for about one and a half hours before the police intervened. Bharata Rakshana Vedike, a Hindutva group in Karnataka, actually campaigns for a boycott of cab services operated by Muslims. Its members visit homes to persuade people not to use cabs driven by Muslim drivers, arguing that it is a matter of cultural and religious purity.

In UP's Lucknow, a Muslim Zomato delivery personnel was allegedly held captive and tortured over his religious identity. As per FIR, victim claims the assailants threw glass of alcohol on him, attacked with helmet and threatened him with life while he was held captive for 1.5… pic.twitter.com/Fqf8eg7idR

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) August 22, 2024

Online aggregators do nothing to protect Muslim gig workers who face discrimination – affecting their already meagre earnings – and even sometimes violence. Bigotry is enacted on the apps, but – as journalist Rohitha Naraharishetty documents – the company just looks away, except occasionally when it stirs social media outrage. But even then, there is little that is either preventive or remedial that the companies offer to their at-risk delivery agents. She points to what is possible with the example of the United States, where Uber banned white supremacists who made black Uber drivers uncomfortable and vulnerable.

However, the same company Uber in India does nothing when their Muslim drivers feel unsafe or even when they face violence. For instance Syed Lateefuddin, on his third ride as Uber driver in Hyderabad, was accosted by six men who began following him on a motorbike and a scooter. They forced him to stop his car and coerced him to chant “Jai Shri Ram”. They also threw stones at his car, shattering the windows. Lateefuddin was terrified, abandoned his car and ran away. He suspects the attack was triggered by the Islamic prayer beads hanging in his car, a visible sign of his faith.

He called Uber’s emergency helpline multiple times but they provided him no assistance. Fortunately, he had escaped without serious injury, but his car was badly damaged. It cost him over Rs 1.5 lakh to repair. “Uber’s representatives should have come with me to the police station. Instead, I’ve not heard a single word of support from them until now,” he told Naraharishetty (who quotes him using a pseudonym). He had to face a hostile police system alone.

Through their inaction and indifference, Naraharishetty observes that apps wantonly compromise the workers’ right to life, their right to livelihood and to dignity. The reason, she avers, is that Swiggy, Uber, and other platform apps are fundamentally antithetical to workers’ labour rights. The apps present themselves as value-neutral entities. But by failing to recognise the vulnerability of stigmatised sections of gig workers, they wilfully deny them their rights in their bid to swell further the company’s profits.

“It’s not rocket science”, Kaveri Medappa, a researcher on gig and platform workers explains. “You can filter out specific words… they can make sure that words like Hindu, Muslim, Dalit are flagged. There’s no will to do any of this,” she says. “Even if you don’t have these filters – as soon as the delivery person receives the delivery notes and is able to see them, why can’t [the platform] enable a function to report the notes and cancel the order? These are simple tools to have embedded in the app interface.”

This discrimination is grievous for working class Muslims but not confined to them. In 2015, an Economic Times Intelligence Group highlighted the disparity in representation of Muslims in senior management within India’s corporate sector. Despite making up 14.2% of the population, Muslims only account for 2.67% of directors and senior executives in Bombay Stock Exchange 500 companies. These executives received 3.14% of the total remuneration for this group. In BSE 100 companies, the representation increases slightly to 4.60%, but the remuneration percentage drops to 2.56%.

Many studies have confirmed entry-level anti-Muslim prejudices that significantly block the entry of qualified professionals into private sector jobs. In 2005, scholars Paul Attewell and Sukhadeo Thorat undertook a study in which applications with similar qualifications but different names were sent out. They found that discrimination operated even at the application state and even more severely at the interview stage against applicants with Muslim names, as compared with those with upper-caste Hindu names.

This was confirmed by another similar study by LedBy Foundation. It created two identical résumés for a fictitious Muslim woman, Habiba Ali, and a Hindu woman, Priyanka Sharma, and sent them for 1,000 job applications each. Priyanka received 208 positive responses, while Habiba received 103. Priyanka got more callbacks and proactive contacts from recruiters. This, despite the fact that they had equal qualifications. This once again revealed unsaid norms that the private sector employers maintain of not recruiting Muslim employees, and a possible underlying prejudice that Muslim women are less capable for jobs that they are fully qualified for.

This is in line also with the experience reported by many young qualified Muslim women. Madina Ashfaq, a postgraduate in clinical psychology said, “I have been a straight ‘A’ student since middle school. While others in my batch have gotten placed in reputed hospitals, I struggle to even get a call for an interview.” Likewise Wajiha Noor is a hijab-wearing fashion designer. She did get some interview calls, but feels her hijab was a dealbreaker.

Some may argue about the necessity of admitting a caveat here. “[T]he low share of Muslims among the better jobs in India need not necessarily be a result of discrimination in the hiring process,” argue journalists Abhishek Jha and Roshan Kishore in a data analysis published in Hindustan Times in 2023 “Rather, it could be the result of Muslim job-seekers lagging in terms of educational qualifications, which is bound to have a big role in employability.”

Data does confirm that Muslims in India have the lowest rate of enrollment in higher education. Worse still, the enrollment numbers of Muslim students decreased by 8% between 2019 and 2020, according to a report that stated: “(The) Muslim community is the only category to experience an absolute decline, while other communities have witnessed an overall increase in enrolment.”. There can be many reasons for these – such as inadequate educational infrastructure in Muslim-majority areas resulting in a shortage of schools including separate schools for girls that may be culturally more acceptable, and a lack of trained teachers, besides poverty but also the experience of discrimination that discourage Muslim educational access.

But I underline that this caveat does not apply to the instances of discrimination that we describe here, because the prejudice that blocks their job chances is experienced by Muslims who are educated and qualified, no less than their Hindu counterparts.

Ghazala Jamil, teacher and author of Muslim Women Speak, feels that this is partly because “Muslim women are stereotyped as being imprisoned in their homes by purdah, therefore professionally incapacitated. This image plays in the mind of employers who often subject Muslim women candidates to hostile questions in the interview and selection process.”

She adds that it is also true that “Often, the employers might simply have decided not to employ Muslims because of bigotry and Islamophobia. Even when they are selected, co-workers might subject them to subtle discrimination or microaggressions which makes the workplace hostile. Lack of dignity and low salaries keep much lower class and lower-middle class Muslim women from wage work because it is not considered worth their time,” said Jamil.

Three Indian Muslim women spoke to Article 14 of workplace “micro-aggressions”, which Jamil refers to, about their experiences of prejudice in Delhi-based private firms. They say they were chastised, humiliated, pressured to disown their religious identity, harassed over wearing the hijab, and subjected to taunts referring to Pakistan.

One said, “The CEO occasionally commented on how Muslims are intolerant and how he hoped I was different.” She was advised “not to wear her religion on her sleeve”. The CEO asked her in a meeting that if someone offered her a glass of wine, would she accept it – because it would be impolite to decline. When she was delayed in submitting an output, she was asked by her seniors in jest if she had gone to Pakistan.

Another young woman described her experience when she was called by a global company for a final interview for her selection. The question centred around the hijab she wore, and they offered her the job if she agreed to take it off. She refused.

A Muslim intern in a Delhi-based global ed-tech company talked about how casual Islamophobia was a normal part of office conversation. She explained once to her colleagues that in the Muslim nikah, or marriage, the woman is required to affirm qubool hai (I accept) three times before the marriage is solemnised. One of them laughingly remarked how Muslims also say talaq three times to end their marriages.

Another female colleague asked her how to get a gharara made; she would know because it is popular in Pakistan. “I asked her how I would know what people in Pakistan wear.” When the film The Kerala Files was released, another colleague kept speaking to her how traumatised she was by the experience of the women in the film.

Not just Muslim women. BBC reports that when Mumbai-based Zeeshan Khan applied after completing a business management course for a job at the jewellery firm, Hari Krishna Exports, the company did not call him for an interview. Instead, an email popped into his mailbox from them, saying, “We regret to inform you that we only hire non-Muslim candidates”. The company later formally retracted with a less than convincing denial after some social media outrage. Khan ruefully said he would take a break before he applies for a job again.

I am grateful for the research support from Syed Rubeel Haider Zaidi.

Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, teacher who leads the Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to fight hate with radical love and solidarity. He teaches part-time at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and has authored many books, including Partitions of the Heart, Fatal Accidents of Birth and Looking Away.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday expressed dissatisfaction with the measures taken by several states to control the stray dog population, warning of strict action if compliance does not improve, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and NV Anjaria said that several states had failed to adequately implement measures to sterilise, vaccinate and shelter stray dogs, and had not removed them from sensitive areas such as educational institutions and hospitals.

The court highlighted data from Assam, noting that while 1.6 lakh cases of dog bites had been reported in 2024, the state had only one functional dog centre.

“It is astonishing,” the court was quoted as saying. “In 2024, there were 1.66 lakh bites. And in 2025 only in January, there were 20,900. This is shocking.”

The court also flagged deficiencies in affidavits filed by several states, observing that many lacked basic data on dog bite incidents, sterilisation capacity, dog pounds and manpower.

“All the states who have put these vague averments in their affidavits, will get a proper dressing down,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “Total eye wash.”

Specifically, the bench expressed concern about data submitted by Jharkhand, Gujarat, Bihar and Haryana, and noted that Karnataka was the only state to provide data on stray dogs in institutional premises, though no dogs had been removed.

The case in the Supreme Court about stray dogs began in July, when a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan took suo moto cognisance of concerns about stray dogs in public places based on a media report.

On August 11, it directed authorities in the National Capital Territory of Delhi to immediately begin relocating street dogs and build shelters for 5,000 to 6,000 animals within six weeks.

However, the directions were challenged by animal rights groups and the case was shifted to a three-judge bench headed by Nath.

On August 22, the court stayed the directions given by the two-judge bench and said that stray dogs that are picked up should be released back into the same area after being sterilised, dewormed and immunised.

The court, however, had said that dogs displaying aggressive behaviour, or those infected with rabies, should not be released.

On November 3, the court took serious note of government employees feeding stray dogs within office premises, observing that such conduct violated its directions mandating the creation of designated feeding zones for canines.

On November 7, it ordered that all government premises, such as hospitals, schools and railway stations, must be properly fenced to prevent stray dogs from entering. The court said that the local authorities would be responsible for removing stray dogs from such areas, and placing them in designated shelters after vaccinating and sterilising them.

It also directed that stray dogs picked up from these premises must not be released in the areas from which they are taken away.

Several animal rights groups had later sought changes to the order, objecting to the ban on releasing the dogs in the same areas.

During the last hearing on January 13, the court said that the civic authorities and individuals who feed stray dogs could be held responsible for injuries or deaths caused by animal attacks.

The hearing will continue on Thursday, Live Law reported.

Also read:

• Do animals have rights? The SC ruling on stray dogs shows why this needs to change

• Why the argument that dog lovers are ‘elite’ is flawed

• Mumbai had a street dog issue. Then it didn’t

Much of India – including parts of south India – has been experiencing unusually cold weather in the new year, more notable compared to the typical January pattern. Experts attribute these conditions to local, regional and remote – from the Arctic to the Pacific – influences and climate change patterns.

The India Meteorological Department and media reports show a cold condition affecting northern and central India, with unusually low temperatures and dense fog disrupting daily life. Delhi recorded one of its coldest January mornings in recent years, with temperatures dipping to 3.2 degrees celsius on January 13.

Cities across Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan recorded near-freezing temperatures, while Gurugram, in the National Capital Region, registered a chilling 0.6 degrees celsius, among its lowest readings in close to 50 years. Parts of northern India remained colder than several Himalayan hill towns.

Gujarat, where winters are usually mild, has been experiencing a rare cold spell, with night temperatures in Saurashtra and the central and southern regions dropping into the single digits. Minimum temperature below normal by 2-3 degrees celsius was recorded at many places in Karnataka too.

Several factors are at play

Multiple factors influence the cold weather experienced in the Indian region during these days, atmospheric scientists explained. “One of the primary contributors is a high-pressure system over north-central India, typically characterised by cloud-free skies and cold, dry air,” said Vijaykumar P, an assistant professor at the Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Kerala. “In many parts of central India, negative anomalies are observed in both daily maximum and minimum temperatures, indicating unusually cold conditions during both day and night. This cold air flows southward, bringing chilliness to the southern states of India too.”

Regarding the cold conditions in south India, Vijaykumar explained that at present, winds over both the Arabian sea and the Bay of Bengal are predominantly northwesterly. These winds can carry cold, dry air from central Asia and the Indo-Gangetic plains deep into the subcontinent, suppressing the warmer influence of the oceans and cooling the atmosphere.

“Most regions over the Indian mainland and even adjacent oceanic areas remain largely cloud-free, except when low-pressure systems bring clouds. These clear-sky conditions facilitate rapid heat loss from the Earth’s surface after sunset, resulting in colder mornings. In addition, humidity levels are low, especially over inland regions, which further enhances heat loss, as water vapour acts as a greenhouse gas that traps heat.”

Other weather and geographic factors also contribute to the cold conditions in northern India. “The present cold wave conditions in northern India mark the approach of the western disturbances that bring cold air from northern latitudes to the Indian subcontinent,” explained Abhilash S, Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the Cochin University of Science and Technology.

Western disturbances are large weather systems that travel from west to east with the subtropical westerly jet. The jet stream is a fast-moving band of winds that flows about 30,000 feet (nine km) above Earth, near the boundaries between the tropics and mid-latitudes. In winter, it shifts southward over India, steering western disturbances across the region. The system carries cold, dry air deep into the subcontinent, shaping north India’s winter weather and cold waves.

Western disturbances often pair with low-pressure systems near the surface over western and northern India. Most frequent from December to March, they deliver the bulk of rain and snow to the western Himalayas and shape winter weather across northern India, Pakistan, and the Tibetan Plateau. They can also lead to heavy snowfall, hail, dense fog, cloudbursts, avalanches, frost, and the cold waves that periodically grip the plains.

Warming influences

While acknowledging below-normal temperatures, IMD scientists, however, noted that western disturbances are changing. “Though five to seven WDs are formed every month, either they are weak or pass over India quickly without impacting the weather much. The WD-induced rain and snowfall activities are decreasing,” said IMD director general Mrutyunjay Mohapatra in a press conference. This is causing a trend of declining winter rains in northern India, even when foggy conditions prevail.

Scientists say the changes could be due to global warming. “Basically, climate change and global warming are also adding to this [trend of cold weather]; east-west circulation like jet streams that are blowing from west to east can meander to the lower latitudes and intrude into the tropical region,” Abhilash said.

Cold conditions are also linked to teleconnections – changing conditions in one part of the world affecting remote regions – that are as far away as the Arctic and the Pacific, as scientists note. “Arctic Warming Amplification – the abnormal warming of the Arctic region, reducing the temperature gradient between the tropics and polar regions – is one such influence. As the temperature gradient reduces, the jet stream may weaken, and sometimes it can flow in unstable wavy patterns that can meander and intrude into its lower latitudes,” Abhilash said.

Arctic amplification refers to the Arctic region warming significantly faster than the global average – often two or more times faster – due to climate change, primarily driven by the loss of sea ice and snow cover that reduces the region’s reflectivity (albedo) and accelerates local warming.

However, the Arctic is not the only distant influence shaping India’s winter weather, scientists note.

“La Niña is favouring the cold wave conditions, so that is also an important factor,” Abhilash said, referring to the Pacific influence over the current weather in India. El Niño and La Niña are the warm and cool phases of a natural climate cycle across the tropical Pacific called theEl Niño-Southern Oscillation.

This cycle fluctuates irregularly every two to seven years, altering ocean temperatures and disrupting wind and rainfall patterns across the tropics. Currently, La Niña is expected to persist through the Northern Hemisphere winter, with a likely shift to El Niño-Southern Oscillation-neutral conditions between January and March 2026.

“La Niña conditions – characterised by anomalously cool sea surface temperatures – persist in the Pacific ocean and also play a role in influencing temperature patterns over the Indian region,” Vijaykumar explained. “In the Arabian sea, particularly near its eastern boundary, neutral to cold sea surface temperature anomalies are present. This reduces the ocean’s ability to moderate air temperatures along the west coast of India.”

He noted that there could also be the indirect influence of the weakening of the polar vortex in the Arctic region. When the polar vortex weakens, extremely cold air from the polar regions can spill into mid-latitudes, contributing to cold conditions over Europe, North America, and parts of central Asia. This occurs through large meanders in the jet stream, known as Rossby waves, which allow cold air to plunge equatorward.

​The latest forecasts point to a fresh disruption of the polar vortex, triggered by a stratospheric warming event confirmed in mid-January. High-resolution models now depict a faltering polar circulation allowing Arctic air to spill south across North America and Europe. But when it weakens or fractures, that cold is no longer contained. It pours outward, reshaping the weather far from the pole and ushering in a spell of cold spells across the mid-latitudes.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Political leaders arrived in Maharashtra’s Baramati to pay their respects to Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar, who was among the five persons killed in a plane crash. The small aircraft crashed near an airstrip in Baramati town on Wednesday morning during its second attempt to land. Two pilots, an attendant and a security officer were the others who died.

The cause of the crash was unclear. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau is probing the incident.

The Nationalist Congress Party leader, in his sixth term as the deputy chief minister, was flying in from Mumbai for a political rally ahead of civic elections.

The state government announced a three-day mourning. Read on.

Opposition leaders demanded an independent investigation into the plane crash that killed Pawar and four others.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that a few days ago she had come across a claim by an unidentified leader of another party on social media that Pawar was “willing to leave” the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance

“And now what happened today…I need proper investigation under the supervision of the Supreme Court,” she told reporters. “We only trust the Supreme Court, no other agency.”

Her demand was supported by Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, who said that “such an incident should not happen with a VIP”.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge also said that his party will demand an investigation into the incident. Read on.

The Supreme Court raised concerns about the claims made by two candidates from an upper-caste community seeking admission under the religious minority quota after converting to Buddhism. This was a “new type of fraud”, the court verbally observed.

A bench was hearing a writ petition filed by the candidates from Haryana seeking admission to postgraduate medical courses under the Buddhist minority quota at a college in Uttar Pradesh.

The petitioners claimed that they had converted to Buddhism and had presented minority certificates issued by a sub-divisional officer. The court, however, noted that they belonged to the Punia caste.

When told that they were from the Jat Punia community, which is in the general category, Chief Justice Surya Kant questioned their claim to minority status. The petitioners’ counsel said that conversion was a right.

Kant remarked: “This is another way of fraud…You want to snatch the rights of some genuine bona fide minority.” Read on.

The Delhi High Court sought a response from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on a petition challenging the aviation regulator’s decision to suspend new flight duty-time norms. The instructions were withdrawn on December 5 after a shortage of pilots and crew disrupted flights operated by IndiGo.

The regulator had issued revised Flight Duty Time Limit norms in January 2024 after concerns were raised about pilot fatigue. The norms were scheduled to take effect on June 1 but the airlines had asked for delayed implementation of the new rules because of staffing shortages and operational challenges.

The key changes were eventually introduced on November 1. The new rules required longer weekly rest, restricted night landings, extended the definition of night hours and limited consecutive night duties.

On Wednesday, the High Court noted that the flight duty-time norms must be implemented as they were directly linked to passenger safety. Read on.

A sessions court in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district granted bail to expelled Congress leader and Palakkad MLA Rahul Mamkootathil in the third rape case registered against him. The court allowed his appeal against the dismissal of his bail application by a magistrate court on January 17.

The alleged incident took place in 2024 at a hotel in Thiruvalla. The complainant, a non-resident Indian woman, alleged that Mamkootathil befriended her on social media, forced her to book a hotel room and sexually assaulted her, resulting in pregnancy and a subsequent miscarriage

Mamkootathil was arrested on January 11 in Palakkad following a complaint filed on January 8. He has been booked for rape and criminal intimidation. Read on.

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Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar and four others died in a plane crash in Baramati on Wednesday, ANI reported.

The small aircraft, a Learjet 45XR, crashed at about 8.45 am. Besides the Nationalist Congress Party leader and the two pilots, an attendant and a security officer were onboard.

The plane crashed while landing at an airstrip in Baramati town. It was flying from Mumbai.

Videos from the crash site posted on social media showed plane debris scattered and the fuselage engulfed in fire.

Ajit Pawar, the leader of the Nationalist Congress Party faction that is part of the state’s ruling alliance, was heading to Baramati to attend a political rally for the Zilla Parishad elections.

#WATCH | Crash landing in Baramati | Five people onboard the Mumbai-Baramati charter plane, including Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar, died as per initial information by the DGCA.

Visuals from the spot. pic.twitter.com/6MHqTi6gna

— ANI (@ANI) January 28, 2026

Following his death, Ajit Pawar’s wife Sunetra Pawar and cousin Supriya Sule, an MP from the rival NCP faction, travelled to Baramati.

Maharashtra Governor Acharya Devvrat, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde also travelled to Baramati.

His funeral will take place in Baramati on Thursday.

The Maharashtra government announced a three-day mourning for Ajit Pawar.

Shinde said that the crash will be investigated so that such incidents do not happen again.

Ajit Pawar was serving his sixth term as the deputy chief minister. He was also the MLA from the Baramati for seven consecutive terms.

The 66-year-old had been the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly and an MP from the Baramati Lok Sabha constituency.

In 2023, Ajit Pawar, along with several party MLAs, joined Maharashtra’s Mahayuti coalition government comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena faction led by Shinde. The move had led to a split in the Nationalist Congress Party, with one faction supporting him and the other backing his uncle and party founder Sharad Pawar.

The incident

The Ministry of Civil Aviation on Wednesday said that the pilots had initiated a go-around during their first landing attempt as the runway was not in their sight. A go-around is the flight path taken by an aircraft after aborting a landing attempt.

At 8.43 am, the aircraft was cleared to land by the air traffic controller during the second attempt but the plane “did not give a readback of the landing clearance”, the ministry said.

The controllers “saw the flames around the threshold of [the] runway” at 08.44 am and emergency services were sent to the crash site.

The pilot in command had more than 15,000 hours of flying experience. The co-pilot had 1,500 hours of experience, the ministry said.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, a unit of the civil aviation ministry, is investigating the crash.

Shock across political lines

Political leaders from across party lines on Wednesday expressed shock and grief at Ajit Pawar’s sudden death.

Fadnavis said that losing a leader like Ajit Pawar was an “unprecedented loss” and added that there was an atmosphere of sadness in the state, ANI reported.

“In personal life, he was a good friend,” the BJP leader said. “We faced many challenges together. At a time when he was contributing to Maharashtra’s development, his untimely demise is a loss.”

#WATCH | Mumbai | Maharashtra CM Devendra Fadnavis says, "Maharahstra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar has lost his life in a plane accident. There is an atmosphere of sadness in the state. Losing a leader like him is an unprecedented loss. In personal life, he was a good friend. We faced… pic.twitter.com/F3bXxN9BlB

— ANI (@ANI) January 28, 2026

Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences to the NCP leader’s family and said that his untimely death was “very shocking and saddening”.

Modi described Pawar as a “leader of the people, having a strong grassroots level connect”.

“He was widely respected as a hardworking personality at the forefront of serving the people of Maharashtra,” the prime minister said on social media. “His understanding of administrative matters and passion for empowering the poor and downtrodden were also noteworthy.”

President Droupadi Murmu said that the news of Pawar’s death was extremely tragic.

“He will always be remembered for his special contribution to the development of Maharashtra, especially in the cooperative sector,” she said on social media. “I express my deep condolences to his family, supporters, and admirers.”

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge said that Ajit Pawar’s death was deeply shocking and profoundly distressing. “It is an untimely loss of a leader who had a long and promising political career ahead,” Kharge said.

He added that Pawar will be remembered “as a seasoned politician who discharged his responsibilities towards his people with sincerity and astuteness”.

Also read: Opposition demands independent probe into plane crash that killed Ajit Pawar

The Supreme Court on Wednesday raised concerns about the claims made by two candidates from upper-caste backgrounds seeking admission under the religious minority quota after converting to Buddhism, Live Law reported.

The court verbally observed that it was a “new type of fraud”, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was hearing a writ petition filed by the candidates from Haryana seeking admission to postgraduate medical courses under the Buddhist minority quota at Subharti Medical College in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut, Live Law reported.

The petitioners claimed that they had converted to Buddhism and had presented minority certificates issued by a sub divisional officer.

The college was granted minority status by the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions in 2018.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the court noted that the petitioners belonged to the Punia caste.

When told they were from the Jat Punia community, which is in the general category, Kant questioned the candidates’ claim to minority status.

The petitioners’ counsel submitted that they had converted to Buddhism and that conversion was a right.

Kant was quoted as having then remarked: “This is another way of fraud…You want to snatch the rights of some genuine bona fide minority.”

“You are one of the richest, best located, upper caste communities...holding agricultural lands and having facilities,” Live Law quoted Kant as saying. “You should be proud of your merit....instead of taking the rights of who are actually deprived.”

The court also noted that the petitioners had earlier applied for the postgraduate National Eligibility-Cum-Entrance Test as general category candidates and had declared that they did not belong to the Economically Weaker Sections, Live Law reported.

The bench observed that the issuance of minority certificates in such circumstances required deeper scrutiny and sought an explanation from the Haryana government.

It directed the state’s chief secretary to submit a report within two weeks clarifying the guidelines for issuing minority certificates.

The report will examine whether upper-caste candidates from the general category, who had earlier declared themselves as general and not from the Economically Weaker Sections, could later claim minority status based on conversion, Live Law reported.

The court also dismissed the petitioners’ plea seeking admission as minority candidates but kept the matter pending for further consideration after the state submits its report, PTI reported.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Tuesday made another series of remarks targeting “Miyas”, or Muslims of Bengali origin, amid the “special revision” of electoral rolls underway in the state.

Addressing reporters in Guwahati, the chief minister said that he has directed Bharatiya Janata Party members to file complaints against “Miya” voters during the voter list revision exercise underway in the state, The Indian Express reported.

“There is nothing to hide about this,” he was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “I have held meetings, I have done video conferences, and I have told people that, wherever possible, they should fill Form 7s. So that they have to run around a little, are troubled, so that they understand that the Assamese people are still living.”

#WATCH | Guwahati: On the SIR, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma says, "I am very happy that some people are getting disturbed in SIR. I have advised my BJP workers to give more and more complaints so that some people realise that there is still some kind of resistance in Assam..." pic.twitter.com/I61SYL4OBB

— ANI (@ANI) January 27, 2026

The Election Commission’s Form 7 is a document seeking the deletion of a voter from a state’s electoral rolls. Making a false objection about a voter on the electoral ballot is an offence that is punishable by imprisonment for up to a year, or a fine.

Sarma also said that in the next 30 years, it would be necessary to “practice politics of polarisation if we want to live”. However, he claimed that polarisation in the state is not between Hindus and Muslims, but “between Assamese and Bangladeshis”.

For the next 30 years Assam has to practice politics of polarisation - and this polarisation is a fight to save our identity. It is between indigenous people of Assam and illegal Bangladeshis. pic.twitter.com/kVizKc5PDh

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) January 27, 2026

The BJP leader said that he himself was encouraging people to “keep giving troubles” to Miyas. “In a rickshaw, if the fare is Rs 5, give them Rs 4,” he said, according to The Indian Express. “Only if they face troubles will they leave Assam.”

Sarma was further quoted as saying: “If you don’t trouble them, yesterday I found that they have even reached Duliajan (a town in Eastern Assam). So you all should also trouble, and you should not do news that sympathise with them. There will be love jihad in your own house.”

In Assam, “Miya” is a derogatory word used to refer to undocumented immigrants and is exclusively directed at Muslims of Bengali origin. They are often accused of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.

Once a pejorative in Assam, from the common use of the honorific “Miya” among South Asian Muslims, the term has now been reappropriated by the community as a self-descriptor to refer to Muslims who migrated to Assam from Bengal during the colonial era.

In recent days, Sarma has made a slew of statements targeting “Miyas”, including threats of disenfranchisement and evictions.

Earlier on Tuesday, the chief minister also claimed that four lakh to five lakh “Miya” voters will be deleted when the special intensive revision of electoral rolls takes place in the state and said that his job is to “make them suffer”.

On January 24, Sarma said that only Miya Muslims were being served notices under the “special revision” of electoral rolls in the state. On the following day, he went on to say that the eviction drives in the state were only targeting Miya Muslims and not Assamese people.

Since the BJP came to power in Assam in 2016, several demolition drives have been conducted in the state, mostly targeting areas populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Also Read:

• BJP workers in Assam say their names used to seek mass voter deletion – without their knowledge

• In Assam, ‘forged’ forms aimed at deleting thousands of Muslim voters ring alarm bells

A sessions court in Kerala’s Pathanamthitta district on Wednesday granted bail to expelled Congress leader and Palakkad MLA Rahul Mamkootathil in the third rape case registered against him, Bar and Bench reported.

Principal District and Sessions Judge N Harikumar granted bail, allowing Mamkootathil’s appeal against the dismissal of his bail application by a magistrate court on January 17.

The sessions court had reserved its verdict in the matter on Saturday and posted the matter for orders on Wednesday, Live Law reported.

On January 17, the magistrate court held that a prima facie case of rape was made out against Mamkootathil, citing the seriousness of the allegations and similar antecedents, Live Law reported.

“This is also every chance of witnesses being threatened or influenced, evidence being tampered and investigation being hampered,” the magistrate court had held.

The alleged incident took place in 2024 at a hotel in Thiruvalla. The complainant, a non-resident Indian woman, alleged that Mamkootathil befriended her on social media, compelled her to book a hotel room and sexually assaulted her, resulting in pregnancy and a subsequent miscarriage, Live Law reported.

Mamkootathil was arrested on January 11 in Palakkad following a complaint filed on January 8. He has been booked for rape and criminal intimidation, PTI reported.

After his arrest, Mamkootathil was produced before a trial court, which granted the police three days of custody for interrogation. He was subsequently remanded to judicial custody. His bail application was heard in-camera by the magistrate court and dismissed on January 17, prompting him to approach the sessions court.

Mamkootathil has denied the allegations, maintaining that the relationship was consensual. He stated that he was unaware that the complainant was married and that he ended the relationship upon learning of her marital status, Bar and Bench reported.

He has also claimed that the case was intended to damage his public image.

The MLA faces three cases of rape. In the first case, the Kerala High Court, on December 6, temporarily stayed his arrest. The bail plea in that matter is scheduled to be heard later on Wednesday, Bar and Bench reported.

In the second case, a sessions court in Thiruvananthapuram had granted him anticipatory bail on December 10.

In August, the Congress suspended Mamkootathil from its primary membership following multiple allegations from women of misconduct. Following this, he resigned from his post as the Kerala Youth Congress chief.

He was later expelled from the party but continues to serve as the MLA from Palakkad.

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought the stand of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation on a petition challenging its decision to suspend the new flight duty-time norms after massive disruptions to airline services last month, Bar and Bench reported.

A division bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia asked the counsel for the aviation regulator to obtain instructions in the matter by Thursday.

In January 2024, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation issued revised Flight Duty Time Limit norms after concerns were raised about pilot fatigue. The norms were meant to take effect on June 1.

However, airlines asked for delayed implementation because of staffing shortages and operational challenges, and the key changes were eventually introduced on November 1.

The new rules required longer weekly rest, restricted night landings, extended the definition of night hours and limited consecutive night duties.

As the revised norms came into force, air travel was severely affected in December when a shortage of pilots and crew forced IndiGo to cancel or delay hundreds of flights. The disruption also pushed fares to unusually high rates on several routes.

To reduce air travel disruptions, the aviation regulator temporarily placed the new flight duty-time norms in abeyance, Bar and Bench reported. It also granted exemptions to airlines until early February 2026 while they make sufficient adjustments to their roster to accommodate new government regulations.

On Wednesday, the bench said that the new flight duty-time rules must be implemented as they are directly linked to the safety of the passengers.

“The regulator has provided some regulations,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “Unless it is challenged or there is some flaw, they need to enforce it. They have not been practically followed... They must be implemented.”

The observations were made during the hearing of a public interest litigation by a person named Sabari Roy Lenka and other litigants that challenged the aviation regulator’s decision to keep the norms in abeyance.

Also read:

• IndiGo disruption reflects the crisis in India’s aviation sector

• Flyers can seek damages from IndiGo. But most will skip that route\

A row has erupted in Madhya Pradesh after a video circulating on social media showed students of a school in Maihar district being served their special Republic Day midday meal on scraps of paper, including torn notebook pages, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

The district administration took cognisance of the matter after the video triggered outrage. A proposal has been forwarded to the Rewa divisional commissioner to suspend the principal, according to The New Indian Express.

The midday meal programme under the Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman is a centrally-sponsored scheme that is aimed at providing nutritious meals to students enrolled in government and aided schools.

The incident in Maihar had taken place on Monday at the Government High School in Bhatigwan village. Students sitting on the floor were served puri and halwa on ink-stained pages torn from old books, The Indian Express reported.

Maihar District Collector Rani Batad said that the district administration had taken cognisance of the matter and initiated action against those responsible.

Rajesh Singh, public relations officer for Satna and Maihar, said that the district administration acted after receiving an inquiry report from District Project Coordinator Vishnu Tripathi.

Vishnu Tripathi told the newspaper that the arrangement violated basic norms and added that the responsibility lay with the school administration.

He said that the preliminary inquiry established that the principal was responsible for ensuring proper arrangements for the midday meal.

“Such negligence on a national occasion like Republic Day is unacceptable,” the newspaper quoted Vishnu Tripathi as saying. He added that a report had been submitted to the district administration recommending strict action.

Singh also said that a “proposal to suspend the in-charge principal of Government High School Bhatigwan, Sunil Kumar Tripathi, has been forwarded to the Commissioner, Rewa division”, The Indian Express reported.

The public relations officer added that the salary of Pradeep Singh, a contract employee and the block resource coordinator, had been deducted for one month.

The incident on Monday came nearly two months after another video from a school in Hullpur village in the state’s Sheopur district showed students in a school eating their midday meals on a newspaper.

At the time, Sheopur District Collector Arpit Verma had ordered an inquiry by the sub-divisional magistrate into the matter. After the inquiry confirmed the incident, the self-help group responsible for serving the meals was terminated and a show-cause notice was issued to the principal of the school.

Sharing the video on social media, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Mohan Yadav should feel ashamed for nurturing “India’s future” in such a “pitiable state”.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Tuesday announced that all gram panchayats in the state will be named after Mahatma Gandhi, The Indian Express reported.

An announcement to this effect will be made during the Budget Session of the Assembly, he said.

Siddaramaiah made the statement at a rally organised by the Congress’ state unit to protest the Union government’s decisions to repeal the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and replace it with the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin). The Congress, along with several other Opposition parties, has objected to removing Gandhi’s name from the scheme.

On Tuesday, Siddaramaiah reiterated this criticism at the “MNREGA Bachao Sangram” rally held at Bengaluru’s Freedom Park.

“The BJP government cannot tolerate Mahatma Gandhi’s name,” he was quoted as saying by Deccan Herald. “They intentionally named the new scheme with the word ‘Ram’ to play on people’s mind. But it is neither ‘Dasharatha Ram’, ‘Kaushalya Ram’ nor ‘Sita Ram’. There is no Ram in this Act.”

Siddaramaiah alleged that the BJP scrapped welfare measures for the underprivileged because of its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. “[The RSS] wants the poor to remain poor,” he was quoted as saying by the Deccan Herald. “Only Congress thinks of the poor.”

A delegation of Congress leaders, including Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar, met Karnataka Governor Thaawarchand Gehlot after the rally, and submitted a memorandum to him, according to The Indian Express.

The memorandum alleged that VB-G Ram G amounted to “broad daylight murder” of the MGNREGA, and an assault on the poor.

Under the new law, the number of guaranteed workdays will increase to 125, while states’ share of costs will rise to 40%. The Centre will continue to bear the wage component, with states sharing material and administrative expenses.

Congress general secretary in charge of Karnataka Randeep Singh Surjewala on Tuesday referred to these provisions, and said that state governments “have no money as Centre takes away Rs 5 lakh crore under GST and cesses through Finance Commission”, the Deccan Herald reported.

“It [Centre] owes Rs 70,000 crore to Karnataka alone,” Surjewala said. “The employment guarantee will end on its own due to funds crunch.”

The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Tuesday appointed a one-member commission of inquiry to investigate water contamination in Indore’s Bhagirathpura area, where several deaths were reported in recent weeks, Bar and Bench reported. Former judge Justice Sushil Kumar Gupta will head the commission.

The court also directed that water quality be tested daily and medical camps be held in the affected localities.

The order came more than a month after more than 1,400 persons fell ill in Bhagirathpura area due to water contamination, with symptoms including vomiting, diarrhoea and dehydration. The cases were first reported on December 24.

While the state government told the court that 23 deaths had been reported from Bhagirathpura, it claimed that only 16 were on account of the water contamination, Bar and Bench reported. The petitioners and media reports claim that the toll was closer to 30.

The Madhya Pradesh government made the claims based on a report prepared by a five-member committee from the government-run Mahatma Gandhi Memorial Medical College, which examined 23 deaths from the area, PTI reported. The report stated that the deaths of four persons were unrelated to the outbreak, while no conclusion could be reached regarding the cause of death of three other persons in the area.

The authorities in Indore had earlier said that residents of the Bhagirathpura area had complained that the water supplied to them had an unusual smell.

On Tuesday, a bench of Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Alok Awasthi took note of allegations that sewage mixing, pipeline leakages and the failure of civic authorities to maintain potable water standards had led to the outbreak of water-borne diseases, Bar and Bench reported.

Photographs, medical reports and complaints indicated a matter requiring urgent judicial scrutiny, the bench said.

"Considering the gravity of the allegation and affecting the right to life under Article 21 [right to life] of the Constitution of India and the need for an independent fact-finding exercise, the court is of the opinion that the matter requires investigation by an independent, credible authority," Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying.

The court directed the commission to submit a report on the cause of contamination and the actual number of deaths reported in the area.

The court also asked the state government what the scientific basis was for its conclusion that 16 of the 23 deaths in Bhagirathpura were confirmed to be due to water contamination and the others were not, The Indian Express reported.

The commission has also been tasked with identifying officials who were prima facie responsible for the incident, and recommending guidelines for compensation to affected residents, particularly those from vulnerable sections, Bar and Bench reported.

The matter has been listed for hearing on March 5.

The temple committee that manages the Badrinath and Kedarnath shrines in Uttarakhand said on Tuesday that a proposal to ban the entry of non-Hindus into the sites will not apply to Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists, ANI reported.

Hemant Dwiwedi, the chairperson of the Shri Badrinath Kedarnath Temple Committee, said that under Article 25 of the Constitution, the definition of Hindus includes Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists. “Those spreading anarchy and seeking to divide Hindus should first study the Constitution…and then say such things in the public domain,” he said.

#WATCH | Dehradun: On the ban on the entry of non-Hindus in the Shri Badrinath and Kedarnath Dhams, Hemant Dwivedi, Chairman of the Shri Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee, says, "... Administrators and priests of all major temples in the state believed that to maintain the… pic.twitter.com/UCkXP6ejmm

— ANI (@ANI) January 27, 2026

Dwiwedi claimed that “anti-social elements” were harming the atmosphere of Uttarakhand through “thook jihad” and “land jihad” – referring to Hindutva conspiracy theories targeting Muslims.

While “thook jihad” refers to a Hindutva disinformation campaign claiming that Muslims spit in food to spread disease, “land jihad” is a conspiracy theory that alleges that Muslims plot to usurp public land by illegally building structures on it.

“Due to this, administrators and priests of temples had been demanding that non-Hindus be barred from these sites,” Dwiwedi was quoted as saying by ANI.

The temple committees of the shrines along the Chardham route in Uttarakhand – Bardinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri – have proposed a ban on the entry of non-Hindus into the sites.

The development came days after the Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat in Haridwar, on January 16 installed hoardings and banners prohibiting the entry of non-Hindus at the religious site.

Dwiwedi was quoted by The Hindu as saying on Tuesday: “The Chardham shrines are not tourist spots and those who have no faith in Sanatan Dharma must not enter our sacred places.” Sanatan Dharma is a term some use as a synonym for Hinduism.

In response to the demands, Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said that the priests and members of the temple committees handle the affairs of the Chardham shrines and, therefore, their wishes must be taken into account.

On the other hand, former chief minister and Congress leader Harish Rawat said that the BJP was resorting to communal polarisation, adding that these prohibitions had nothing to do with Hindu pilgrimages.

“Those who would earlier gatekeep their religious places have started opening them to all, while Hinduism, which is known for being open to all, is closing its doors,” Rawat said.

Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju on Tuesday said that the process to impeach Allahabad High Court judge Yashwant Varma in the unaccounted cash row is underway, PTI reported.

Rijiju added that the Union government was awaiting the report of a three-member committee set up under the 1968 Judges Inquiry Act by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to investigate the charges against him on August 12.

The minister’s remarks come days after the Supreme Court on January 16 rejected Varma’s petition challenging the legality of the inquiry committee constituted by Birla to look into corruption charges against him.

Unaccounted cash was allegedly recovered at Varma’s official residence in Delhi when emergency services responded to a fire there on March 14. He was a judge at the Delhi High Court at that time. The judge said he was in Bhopal when the cash was discovered and claimed that it did not belong to him or his family.

Amid the row, he was transferred to the Allahabad High Court.

A report of the in-house inquiry committee into the matter, released on May 3, concluded that there was “sufficient substance” in the charges against Varma. It held that the judge’s misconduct was “serious enough to call for initiation of proceedings for removal”.

To impeach a judge in Parliament, a removal motion is required to be signed by 100 Lok Sabha MPs or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. If the motion is admitted in both Houses, a three-member judicial committee investigates the matter. A vote is conducted in Parliament on the impeachment if the committee finds misconduct. If the motion gets two-thirds of the votes, the president is advised to remove the judge.

On July 25, Rijiju said that the decision to impeach Varma was unanimous and that 152 MPs from the ruling coalition and the Opposition parties had signed the motion.

There is consensus that the removal of Varma should be a joint effort, he had said, adding that the Lok Sabha will take up the proceedings before they move to the Rajya Sabha in line with the Judges Inquiry Act.

On August 12, the Lok Sabha speaker formed a three-member committee, comprising Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar, Madras High Court Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and advocate B Vasudeva Acharya, to look into the matter.

In November, the committee sought a written statement from Varma on the charges against him. In response, the judge sought authenticated copies of the motions before both the Houses in July and any orders passed in connection with them.

Earlier, Varma had also challenged the in-house committee report that indicted him in the matter, as well as the recommendation made by Sanjiv Khanna, who was the chief justice of India when the report was submitted to the president and the prime minister, to initiate impeachment proceedings against him.

In August, the Supreme Court dismissed both the petitions.

Days after the municipal elections in Maharashtra, the Uddhav Thackeray-led faction of the Shiv Sena has filed a police complaint and put up “missing” posters as four of its newly elected Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation members were untraceable, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

Uddhav Sena leaders have alleged that the four corporators – Madhur Mhatre, Kirti Dhone, Swapnali Kene and Rahul Kot – were in contact with the Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena faction, which has moved them to an undisclosed location.

The Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies on January 16 won most of the 29 municipal corporation elections in Maharashtra. In some cities, the civic body elections took place after a four-year delay.

The six major political parties in the state – the BJP, the Congress, and the two factions each of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party – had entered into several combinations of tie-ups in the 29 cities.

The 122-member Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation saw no clear majority for any party, leading to a tussle for control, including the mayor’s post.

The Shinde Sena is the single-largest party in the corporation with 53 members, while the BJP has 50.

The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena won five wards and the Uddhav Sena clinched 11, of which only seven have formally registered as a group with the Konkan divisional commissioner, as the corporators of four wards were “missing”.

While the Shinde Sena already has the support of the five corporators from Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, four more from Uddhav Sena would take its tally to the majority mark of 62 in the 122-member House.

In addition, the BJP has been ruled out of the mayor’s race, as the post is reserved for the Scheduled Tribe category this term and the party does not have an eligible corporator.

Amid the tussle, Sharad Patil, who is the Uddhav Sena’s Kalyan East district chief, on Saturday filed a complaint at the Kolsewadi Police Station about the four “missing” corporators, the Hindustan Times reported.

The complaint urged the police to trace them using CCTV footage, call data records and mobile tower locations.

The Indian Express quoted an unidentified police officer as saying that the matter was being looked into.

Mhatre and Dhone were earlier linked to the Shinde Sena. However, they contested the Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation on a Uddhav Sena ticket after failing to secure nominations from Shinde Sena.

While Mhatre defeated former Deputy Mayor Vicky Tare in Ward 21 of Kalyan East, Dhone secured a seat from Ward 13A in Kalyan East.

Kot secured a seat from Ward 4 in Dombivli and Kene from Ward 6 in Kalyan West

Patil told The Indian Express that “inducements” were being offered to corporators.

He added that Mhatre, Dhone, Kot and Kene had received “tickets from us, contested on our symbol, and won because people voted for the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray)”.

“Now they have suddenly gone untraceable,” Patil added. “This is a betrayal of the people of Kalyan.”

The Uddhav Sena leader added that the Shinde Sena was trying to wean away more corporators from the party.

“I myself received calls,” The Indian Express quoted Patil as alleging. “They are saying they will ensure we are not disqualified even if the anti-defection law is applied.”

He said that the Uddhav Sena will initiate disqualification proceedings against anyone crossing over.

Earlier, the Hindustan Times had also quoted Uddhav Sena MP Sanjay Raut as saying that a complaint had been filed with the police about the missing corporators.

“We will put up posters in the KDMC [Kalyan-Dombivli Municipal Corporation],” the newspaper had quoted him as saying. “They were elected on our symbol. They are traitors and chose a different path 24 hours after their victory.”

Also read: ‘Money and muscle’: Why Opposition workers are crying foul in Maharashtra civic polls

A filmmaker whose work has won international and national accolades, Pradip Krishen is not your textbook environmentalist. Krishen stepped into the world of ecological restoration in unusual fashion in 1994 when he visited Pachmarhi in Madhya Pradesh to shoot his film Electric Moon. Krishen would go on “Latin walks” with his neighbour, a forester with an encyclopedic knowledge of trees and a fondness for scientific names.

That was the start of Krishen’s journey with trees, giving India one of its best ecological restoration experts. Krishen went on to shape the Rao Jodha Desert Rock Park in Jodhpur and the Kishan Bagh Sand dune park in Jaipur, both considered pioneering projects in the field of ecological restoration.

When starting out at Rao Jodha Park, Krishen said the best bet would be to restore the natural ecology of the rocky desert area of pure rock, with hardly any soil. “I knew, unless we can grow things that can grow here alone, there is no point,” said Krishen. “This is 70 hectares. We can’t go around watering it.”

The first three years were slow: “learning by mistakes and learning by taking very, very careful notes”. Krishen and his team experimented with potting mixes, plants and sites to uncover patterns and thus increase the survival rates of what they had planted.

“There is the whole question of people thinking of restoration as planting trees,” said Krishen. “Unfortunately, that’s the way it has been perceived, because that’s what governments do. And that is such a narrow perception of what restoration is.” Jaya Peter spoke to him at his home in Delhi. Excerpts:

There is a host of restoration work happening in India and there are different schools of thought on the philosophy and practice of restoration. What does restoration mean to you?

There are lots of healthy debates about what is restoration. But at a basic level, you are trying to restore a landscape to what it might have been like before it was disturbed. And you are characterising the disturbance as something that ought not to have happened. Then, there is the whole question of people thinking of restoration as planting trees. Unfortunately that’s the way it has been perceived, because that’s what governments do. And that is such a narrow perception of what restoration is.

How do we look at an ecosystem and decide that it needs to be restored? Are there any metrics by which we can tell that a land is degraded?

If you find reference sites that are much richer and diverse, where you have many systems that are operating, and a much larger cohort of birds and biodiversity, it becomes one way of judging whether it is degraded.

Like the Ridge, for example, here in Delhi. There are no distinct references that I found for the Ridge from the past, but the Ridge was overgrazed and in very poor condition.

The British wanted to plant up the Ridge for a reason that did not have anything to do with restoration. They wanted to plant trees and make it look like some French retreat. They designated the Ridge as being what they called an ameliorative forest.

Restoration might have been implied but it’s certainly not a term that they were using. And because they planted non-native species, the minute they withdrew irrigation they all collapsed. They ended up growing Prosopis juliflora [a kind of a shrub] on the ridge. That is the opposite of amelioration because Prosopis is an invasive species.

So, what is your method of going about a restoration project?

The issue was, what are you leaning on? You are leaning on floras. When I first began, there was no ecological information whatsoever. So if you wanted to understand where to grow a plant and what it needs, books gave you nothing but phylogenetic information. The scheme the book follows only arranges plants according to how they have evolved, what family they belong to. So we have to do all this work ourselves, based on notetaking and observations, learning and making mistakes and finding it out the hard way.

When you are actually planting it, you are faced with the questions, what does that plant need? Does it grow along grading lines? Does it like gravel, does it like clay, does it like sand? What is the kind of site quality that the plant needs? There is none that is actually available to us for restoration.

Taking you back to when you had started, was Rao Jodha your first experiment in restoration?

When I was writing the tree book in 1998, I had a friendly couple who had a lodge in Garhwal. They asked for my help to plant up their property. I don’t remember why using native plants had occurred to me, but it had. It’s common sense, I guess. And we had the most incredible results there in the first year, partly because it is a place with very high rainfall. As a matter of fact, as I think back, I had never had results like that ever again.

That was the first place where I did any kind of native plant gardening. It was an ornamental setting, where things are supposed to look a particular way. It was not about restoration. I was not trying to restore a natural ecosystem or ecology. I was basically planting up a lodge. And then I went back to writing my book.

How did The Trees of Delhi happen?

I moved back to Delhi from Pachmarhi in 1998, with basically nothing to show for the four years of having given up cinema and trying something else. And I remember standing in front of my front gate and looking across and there was a tree there I didn’t recognise. I said, my god, I have lived here for a good 27-28 years and I realised we don’t even know the trees in our own backyard. So I thought, why don’t I use my tree-spotting hobby as a way of writing a short account on the common trees of Delhi.

Luckily at that stage, I was married to Arundhati [Roy] and she’d just written a book. So I didn’t need to look over my shoulder at how I needed to earn a living. So I had this great luxury of being able to spend five-six years immersing myself and the more I read and the more I got into exploring trees and understanding them, the more ambitious I became of my book writing.

So how did the Rao Jodha restoration project come about ?

By 2004, my book still wasn’t out. I was called into a meeting at INTACH Delhi and there were some gentlemen from Jodhpur in the meetings. They approached me to green one of their properties in Nagaur. There they had made a grid, like the forest department does, with every pit equally spaced apart. We changed that up and started planting native species. And again, we had very good results in the year and half. We had two rains.

That’s when I got to know the CEO of the trust in Jodhpur, who took me to the edge of what later became Rao Jodha Park and asked me if I could green it. I said the option they have is to try and restore the natural ecology of a rocky desert. Because it’s pure rock, there is hardly any soil. I explained to them how this is not the kind of land that supports a forest.

I knew, unless we can grow things that can grow here alone, there is no point. This is 70 hectares. We can’t go around watering it. Again, we didn’t know enough about each kind of plant. So we were putting in things, getting typically 60%-65% survival rates.

There is a difference between identifying trees and shrubs and the actual field work that you did in Rao Jodha. In my mind, it’s a huge challenge to be out in the field deciding where to plant what, how long it would take to grow etc because I don’t think that knowledge is available to us. So how did you do that?

I’d say the first three years were learning; learning by mistakes and learning by taking very, very careful notes. We remembered every single place. We decided only to plant in pits vacated by bawlias (Prosopis), which turned out to be a very good decision. So we measured every single pit. We were experimenting with two or three kinds of potting mixes. We’d record that and the plant we planted there as well as the site quality.

We went around after six months to see how the plants were doing and documenting again. If you do this on an excel sheet, and you rearrange your columns in such a way that you only look at one plant species, patterns emerge. So, once these patterns started emerging in color, we got a much better understanding and our survival rates went up.

What does the future look like for you?

I am now at a stage where I have very deliberately given up all fieldwork, partly because I am 75 now. I want to write. Writing doesn’t come easily to me. But it’s hugely enjoyable. I love the difficulty of writing. For example, while writing the introduction to my second book The Jungle Trees, I had enough material to write two books. But I knew I had to condense it into 50 pages, without making it so dense that no light emerges from it.

That became one of the most exciting things I have ever written. I guess it is like cooking with something and then finding it one way, make it loose again, make it dry. It’s just so exciting.

Meera M, a doctoral student at ATREE, helped transcribe the interview.

Jaya Peter is the Communication Head at Ashoka Trust For Research in Ecology and Environment.