The Delhi government on Monday said that it had withheld the decision to give Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat the duty charge of additional deputy commissioner while an inquiry into sexual harassment allegations against him is pending.

A woman journalist had alleged that Bhagat groped her while she was making a video of student leader Neha Bora being detained during protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at Jantar Mantar.

She said that she had gone to the Parliament Street police station to file a complaint, but no action was taken.

An unidentified police official was quoted as saying by The Hindu that registering cases against police personnel for actions taken while performing law and order duties could “deter them from working”.

Another unidentified police official told the newspaper on Sunday that there was no evidence to substantiate the journalist’s allegation.

On Monday, Bhagat, along with 11 others, was assigned the current duty charge of additional deputy commissioner of police.

A current duty charge is a temporary administrative arrangement where a government employee performs the routine daily tasks of a higher vacant post without getting a formal promotion or extra pay.

The Delhi government said that the decision to give Bhagat additional responsibilities was initiated on August 25, “much before the present set of events”.

“The orders were issued after due approval on October 5,” stated the government.

It also claimed that Bhagat had requested not to take up the additional duty “of his own volition, till a full enquiry has been conducted in the matter of alleged harassment of women journalists and such enquiry has been satisfactorily concluded”.

Government of NCT of Delhi order dated October 5, 2026, wherein current duty charge of the post of Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police has been assigned to 12 officers of DANIPS is being modified in respect of Shri Vivek Bhagat, ACP.
The proposal to confer additional duty…

— Delhi Government (@DelhiGovDigital) October 5, 2026

The journalist who accused Bhagat of sexual harassment was among the three women journalists who alleged that they were sexually harassed by police officers while covering the protests at Jantar Mantar.

On Sunday, the Delhi Police said that the allegations of sexual harassment had been received “in context of the emergent law and order situation” a day earlier.

The New Delhi district police has received the complaints and transferred them to the Crime Branch at Kamla Market for a “fair and impartial enquiry” against the police officers, it said.

It was unclear whether the Delhi Police was referring to the allegations against Bhagat or to separate complaints of sexual assault.

The police also arrested a person for allegedly creating and circulating an artificial intelligence-generated poster depicting Bhagat sexually assaulting a woman, ANI reported on Monday.

Separately, the police claimed on Monday that allegations of women protesters being physically assaulted are “baseless and misleading”.

“Female protesters are handled by female staff and are treated with dignity and due regard,” it said. “Detentions and releases are carried out in accordance with the applicable law and prescribed procedures.”

It added: “Any claim suggesting otherwise is factually incorrect and does not reflect the actual sequence of events.”

OFFICIAL CLARIFICATION

Some social media handles are claiming that female protesters were subjected to physical assault.

These allegations are baseless and misleading. Female protesters are handled by female staff and are treated with dignity and due regard.

Detentions and…

— DCP New Delhi (@DCPNewDelhi) October 5, 2026

Written by Sneha. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s much-discussed special address at Davos in January called for a world of “values-based realism.” First proposed by Finland’s President, Alexander Stubb, values-based realism describes not a strategy, but an “instrument – temporary, adaptive, and situational…that espouses values while engaging respectfully with those who do not share them.”

Put more colloquially, this macro-geopolitical landscape operates exactly like a Gen Z “situationship” – relationships that are not beholden to labels, exclusivity, and can be non-committal.

India, with its cautious diplomatic language and history of moral rhetoric on the global stage, may not seem like a player suited to this new world of “situationships.” Yet New Delhi’s record navigating problematic regimes in its own neighborhoods suggests that India may actually enter this new order with more experience than most.

Situationships and values-based realism

Where once the rules-based international order was the organising principle for global affairs, the broader strategic framework increasingly gaining traction is values-based realism, which underscores the rising salience of variable, issue-by-issue geometries that form when states choose immediate interests over long-term normative alignment.

This approach does not mean a complete rubbishing of values, but their discerning application, while also challenging the idea that a principle must be applied universally to count. Instead, it recognises that, in a fractured world, what holds true as a core belief for one state may not be shared by another and that enforcing moral universalism is neither feasible nor harmless.

As a strategic framework, values-based realism recognises that cooperation and compromise work in tandem, such that to cooperate, states must make difficult compromises from time to time. A pragmatic reaction to a fracturing world, values-based realism seeks to approach the emerging geopolitical configurations not without values, but besides them, such that national interests – like border security, maritime lanes, and counter-terrorism – can be separated from normative metrics (eg freedom, rights, etc) during issue-specific engagements.

In other words, values-based realism suggests that to be realistic is to value that all states are not alike and may not even want to be. Accordingly, to limit cooperation because of lack of convergence around identified norms – which is what a liberal, rules-based international order promoted –actually risks further fragmentation, especially when states in general can no longer feasibly or viably enforce norms.

India’s historical footprint might suggest it will not be well-positioned to navigate such a world. For decades, New Delhi leaned heavily on the moral rhetoric of Non-Alignment and Third World solidarity, later embracing the rules-based international order through normative frameworks like vishwaguru (teacher to the world) and vasudhaiva kutumbakam (the world is one family).

Yet, this global posturing has always coexisted with a parallel, pragmatic reality. When observed through its immediate neighborhood practice rather than its global rhetoric, India has acted less as an idealistic bystander and more as a seasoned practitioner of what may be understood as issue-centric realism.

Neighbourhood dilemmas

One of the most enduring challenges for Indian foreign policy has been how to approach its relations with “problematic” regimes. These are regimes that are not merely ideologically opposed to India in terms of their governance structures (eg military dictatorships or ultra-conservative movements that see New Delhi as an adversary), but also because they are seen as posing systemic challenges to the traditional global norms. To add to these, they tend to create even more dilemmas when they happen to exist next door.

Whether it has been the military takeover of Myanmar in 1962, or the dominance of an ideologically dissimilar government in Bangladesh through the 1980s, or having a fundamentalist Taliban in charge of Afghanistan in the 1990s, India has frequently found itself having to choose between its idealist mottos and realist interests.

The consensus view of such historical struggles suggests a tactic of total disengagement is not necessarily effective for New Delhi, since it allows regional rivals to fill the strategic vacuum. For India, this lesson was painfully underscored in Kabul, where diplomatic absence ceded vital ground to regional competitors from the 1990s up until the departure of the US in 2021.

In the past, India’s moral compunctions frequently dominated its rhetorical output, especially in a world seen as being governed by rules and ideals. Yet outside of its total isolation of the Taliban in the 1990s, India’s actual practice has long leaned toward pragmatism, comfortably engaging with the Myanmar junta or increasingly autocratic regimes in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka when national security dictated it.

In a similar spirit, the current technical engagement with Afghanistan signals a shift from moral insularity to strategic presence. The most visible manifestation of this approach has been India’s decision to prioritise counter-terrorism and regional influence, taking a more nuanced approach that balances Indian national interests with sustainable benefits for the people of Afghanistan. This is not an endorsement of the Taliban’s internal policies, but a pragmatic recognition that a diplomatic vacuum only cedes ground to regional rivals like Pakistan and China.

By maintaining a technical footprint, New Delhi, hence, seeks to ensure that it remains a stakeholder in the Afghan narrative, choosing a seat at the table instead of being a principled but passive observer in the wings. What is genuinely new here is not the transactional impulse itself, but its open endorsement by Indian thinkers and policymakers as a legitimate, open tool for securing national interests over ideological norms.

A similar recalibration can be seen unfolding in Dhaka. For over a decade, India’s Bangladesh policy was tethered almost exclusively to the Awami League, creating a binary outreach that was severely tested in a momentous people-led political upheaval in 2024. This single-party tether was not exclusively moral – as India’s support for Hasina, despite her tight-fisted control over Bangladesh, showed – but a hyper-securitised, interest-based association.

The overthrow of the long-allied Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government has forced a rethink of this “Awami-versus-the-rest” strategy. By untethering its approach from the Awami League, India is making efforts to protect its hard-earned connectivity and security goals from the volatility of internal political shifts, acknowledging that neighborhood first must mean engaging with the neighborhood as it is, not as India wishes it to be.

This nuanced approach is not a new intervention but a refinement of India’s long-standing practice of what may be described as an engagement-at-a-distance template, one most consistently applied vis-à-vis Myanmar. Underscoring a specific strategic posture where a state maintains functional, high-level diplomatic and security ties with a regime without offering it moral or ideological endorsement, this template has allowed India to maintain a robust, if uneasy, relationship with the Myanmar junta, driven by the imperatives of a neighborhood-first policy and the need to secure its restive northeast borders.

Whether through the strategic bind of being tolerant of the successive military-scripted polls or ignoring Western sanctions to maintain a diplomatic tightrope, New Delhi has long demonstrated that strategic necessity can coexist with moral distance. This Myanmar model of the past (and the present) may well be serving as the silent blueprint for India’s current maneuvers in Kabul and Dhaka.

‘It’s complicated’

The core novelty of this moment is not that India has suddenly discovered realism, but that the global spread of this practice has accelerated international acceptance. Values-based realism represents the systematisation of an assertive, layered doctrine.

The emphasis on such sectioning and parsing neither signals fragmentation in the Indian foreign policy nor does it come with a complete abandoning of overarching moral norms and ideals. Instead, it indicates a sophisticated conduct that transcends values-versus-interests dualisms to interact with other geopolitical actors in a multipolar, plural world where cooperation is increasingly becoming transactional and timed, without committing to exclusivity.

This logic extends well beyond South Asia: India’s simultaneous engagement with Washington and Moscow – which has long been criticised as opportunistic fence-sitting – operates on this exact template. As the wider world adopts values-based realism, New Delhi’s refusal to choose between vital defense and energy ties and Western strategic partnerships now has an acceptable name, precisely because such issue-based balancing is becoming the global norm.

The international order itself has become a collection of structural “it’s complicated” dynamics. As the global rules-based order fragments and ideologies are no longer the primary glue of alliances, India enjoys a distinct experiential advantage. Having spent decades managing non-normative neighbors, New Delhi’s legacy experience with situationships is finally being acknowledged as a standard playbook for a multipolar world.

Yet, following a transaction-centric approach can have its own strategic costs. While issue-centric engagement shields India from regional vacuums and preserves tactical flexibility, operating without an overarching umbrella of normative guardrails can affect accountability and transparency in nation-to-nation relations in the long run.

Also, as situationships do not require institutional permanence, they can end up demanding constant diplomatic upkeep, which can pressure India to expend significant energy continuously renegotiating bilateral terms on an issue-by-issue basis to prevent ties from slipping.

That said, following the template of values-based realism remains an essential bargain in today’s time. The diplomatic friction of managing fluid ties is far less damaging than the structural cost of absence, which historically ceded vital regional ground to India’s rivals. In a fragmented order where multilateral guarantees are increasingly unreliable, this approach ensures India retains the strategic agility to secure its core security and connectivity priorities on its own terms.

Chayanika Saxena is an independent researcher, working on the intersection of geopolitics and risk management. Her email ID is chayanika.saxena11@gmail.com.

This article was first published on India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.

Jeffrey Archer, the British novelist and former ​politician, died at the age of ‌86 on Monday, AFP quoted his publisher HarperCollins as saying.

Archer died “suddenly and peacefully at his home between writing sessions”, said the publisher.

Author of 31 novels, he had sold more than 30 crore copies of his books worldwide. His final book, Adam and Eve, was scheduled to be published on Tuesday.

He had also been a member of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party, often referred to as the Tories. Archer joined the party while he was a student at Oxford University, reported AFP. In 1969, he won a bye-election to become an MP at the age of 29.

Archer was brought to the brink of bankruptcy in 1974 after a Canadian industrial cleaning company in which he had invested collapsed. He published his first book, Not A Penny More, Not A Penny Less, a year after that.

Under then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, he was appointed the Tory deputy chairman in 1985.

However, he was forced to resign in October 1986, after the News of the World published a photo of Archer’s friend, Michael Stackpole, paying £2,000 to a sex worker.

The tabloid did not make claims about what the payments were for. However, the Daily Star alleged that the author had paid the woman for sex, after which he sued the publication and won £500,000 in damages.

After he was selected ​as the Conservative candidate to become London’s first elected mayor in 1999, a former friend of his accused ​him of lying in the case. Archer was charged with perjury, convicted and sentenced to ‌four ⁠years’ imprisonment.

He served two years, during which time he wrote A Prison Diary.

Archer remained a member of Britain’s Upper House of Parliament until he retired in 2024.

Kate Elton, HarperCollins UK’s chief executive and Archer’s editor, said that it had been “one of the great privileges” of her publishing career to have been Archer’s editor, reported The Guardian.

“He was the master storyteller and an editor’s dream – phenomenally hard-working, utterly committed to completing draft after draft to get every word as perfect as possible, and a true champion of the team nature of great publishing,” Elton added.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Supreme Court on Monday refused to pass an interim order on petitions seeking the suspension of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for allegedly taking unilateral decisions regarding the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, reported Live Law.

The court said it would first seek responses from the Election Commission and other respondents.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana issued notices to Kumar, the poll panel, the Union government, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi and Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg.

Kant also verbally observed that the Supreme Court had not approved any changes to the Election Commission’s Form 6, which is used to register new voters.

The Election Commission had claimed in a statement on September 26 that a declaration attached to Form 6 for the voter roll revision had been upheld by the Supreme Court. It had also announced that the old version of Form 6 would be used in periods when SIR is not underway.

Petitions were filed before the court after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were reportedly related to the changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll body had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

The Election Commission has rejected reports of a rift, saying differences in views and observations are a normal part of its deliberations.

One of the petitions in the Supreme Court sought that all decisions taken by the poll panel not in concurrence with the election commissioners should be declared illegal, reported Bar and Bench.

It also sought that there should be an investigation into the deletion of 13.8 crore voters from the electoral rolls of 31 states and Union Territories during the special intensive revision.

“We are dealing with a grave situation which can undermine the very basis of our democracy,” the petitioner told the court.

Also read: SIR explained: Why the voter role revision has become so controversial

The petitions were heard as protests are being held in several parts of the country calling for Kumar to resign over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Edited by Sara Varghese, Nachiket Deuskar and Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court
• Process of deleting citizens as voters ‘intrinsically arbitrary’, says SC judge amid SIR concerns

The Telangana chief electoral officer on Monday directed officials to take action against persons misusing Form 7 to seek the deletion of eligible voters from electoral rolls during the special intensive revision in the Congress-ruled state, The Indian Express reported.

Form 7 is used to object to the inclusion of a name or seek the deletion of an existing name from the electoral roll.

The order came after the Telangana Congress’ electoral office registered a complaint with the Hyderabad Police alleging that certain booth-level agents were filing bulk Form 7 applications to seek the deletion of eligible voters.

Similar allegations have been made in other states where the voter roll revision is underway.

In his order on Monday, Chief Electoral Officer C Sudharshan Reddy said that it had come to his notice that “there have been instances of filing bulk applications in Form 7 before the [electoral registration officers] and it is also alleged that such forms are not genuine”.

He also asked officials to take action against applicants who knowingly make false statements or declarations in Forms 6, 6A, 7 and 8.

Form 6 is used by new voters to apply for inclusion in the electoral roll, while Form 6A is used by overseas Indian voters for the same. Form 8 is used to request corrections, change of residence or replacement of an elector’s photo identity card.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

The Opposition and civil society groups have been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over revelations in a September 23 report by The Indian Express.

The newspaper reported that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were related to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

“Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,” the poll panel stated. “They are a part of the decision-making process before a final decision is taken.”

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Chief Justice Surya Kant verbally observed that the Supreme Court had not approved any changes to the Election Commission’s Form 6, which is used to register new voters. The poll panel had in a statement on September 26 claimed that a declaration attached to the form for the special intensive revision of electoral rolls had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

“Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us,” Kant said. “Let’s be clear. When the record is produced, we would like to see who modified [it].” Kant was hearing petitions seeking that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar be suspended for allegedly taking unilateral decisions about the voter roll revision.

The court refused to pass an interim order on the pleas, saying that it would first seek responses from the Election Commission and other respondents. The bench issued notices to Kumar, the poll panel, the Union government, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, and Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg. Read on.

The Supreme Court asked the police to create “fear and fright” among men who threaten safety of women in Delhi. It said that offenders should know that they could “die” if they commit such offences.

“There should be fear…in the mind of the man who is prone to commit such offences,” the bench verbally observed. “Unless that fear and fright is created ki ‘ab kuch kiya toh mar jayenge’ [if we do anything now, we will die], you will not be able to prevent such crimes.”

The court told the police not to hesitate to be “a little more harsh”.

“There will be people who will raise a hue and cry about Article 21, but you have to do your duty,” it added. Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty. Read on.

A woman journalist who alleged that she had been sexually harassed by Delhi Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat was detained for the second time. The detention came as protests continued outside the Parliament Street police station demanding that a first information report be registered against Bhagat.

The journalist had also been detained during a protest on Sunday.

She was among the three women journalists who alleged that they were sexually harassed by police officers while covering the protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at Jantar Mantar. Read on.

Former Trinamool Congress MP Koel Mallick joined the Bharatiya Janata Party, a day after the Hindutva party nominated her for the Rajya Sabha elections. The actor-politician had quit Mamata Banerjee’s faction of the TMC and resigned as a legislator in the Upper House of Parliament in July.

Based on the composition of the Assembly, she is expected to be re-elected unopposed. The polls became necessary after Mallick resigned amid alleged coercion by the BJP after the TMC lost the Assembly elections in May. Read on.

Three scientists were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their research on brain activity.

Peter Hegemann of Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel of the University of Würzburg in Germany discovered a protein in a single-celled alga. Karl Deisseroth of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Stanford University in the United States turned the protein into a light-controlled switch for nerve cells.

Their research has led to the discovery of a method that makes it possible to show how nerve cells shape memories, feelings and behaviours in the brain, the Nobel Assembly said. Researchers are using the method to try and restore eye sight in people. Read on.

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

Chief Justice Surya Kant on Monday verbally observed that the Supreme Court had not approved any changes to the Election Commission’s Form 6, which is used to register new voters, Live Law reported.

Kant was hearing petitions seeking the suspension of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for allegedly taking unilateral decisions regarding the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The Election Commission had claimed in a statement on September 26 that a declaration attached to Form 6 for the voter roll revision exercise had been upheld by the Supreme Court. It had also announced that the old version of Form 6 would be used in periods when SIR is not underway.

“Any modified Form 6 has not been approved by us,” Kant was quoted as having said. “Let’s be clear. When the record is produced, we would like to see who modified [it].”

During the hearing on Monday, the bench of Kant, and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana refused to issue an interim order on the pleas to suspend Kumar for allegedly failing to consider objections of the two other election commissioners.

But it issued notices to Kumar, the poll panel, the Union government, Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi and Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg.

Reacting to Kant’s remarks, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that it was now “established beyond doubt” that Kumar had changed Form 6 “illegally and unilaterally”.

In a social media post, Gandhi attached a screenshot of the poll panel’s September 26 statement and accused the chief election commissioner of abusing his position to help the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“He and everyone else involved in this criminal assault on our democracy will be held accountable,” he wrote.

It is now established beyond doubt that Gyanesh Kumar changed Form 6 illegally and unilaterally.

This is just one more proof of him abusing his position to help the BJP.

He and everyone else involved in this criminal assault on our democracy will be held accountable. https://t.co/oPwOw12uXd pic.twitter.com/a33eJdPetu

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) October 5, 2026

Petitions were filed before the court after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were reportedly related to the changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll body had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

Contentious changes to Form 6

One of Joshi and Sandhu’s objections pertained to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6.

The new form asked applicants to state whether they or their parents or grandparents were part of the last special intensive revision of electoral rolls. Although the new declaration is not marked as mandatory, applicants cannot submit the online form without filling it.

Joshi and Sandhu had objected to the change, saying that it could not be made without amending the rules. Section 28 of the 1950 Representation of the People Act says that only the Union government can amend the rules governing electoral forms, including Form 6.

Also read: SIR explained: Why the voter role revision has become so controversial

The Election Commission has rejected reports of a rift, saying differences in views and observations are a normal part of its deliberations.

One of the petitions in the Supreme Court sought that all decisions taken by the poll panel not in concurrence with the election commissioners should be declared illegal, reported Bar and Bench.

It also sought that there should be an investigation into the deletion of 13.8 crore voters from the electoral rolls of 31 states and Union Territories during the special intensive revision. “We are dealing with a grave situation which can undermine the very basis of our democracy,” the petitioner told the court.

The petitions were heard as protests are being held in several parts of the country calling for Kumar to resign over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision exercise.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court
• Process of deleting citizens as voters ‘intrinsically arbitrary’, says SC judge amid SIR concerns

A woman journalist, who alleged that she had been sexually harassed by Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat on Saturday, was detained again on Monday, reported The Hindu.

She was detained as protests continued outside the Parliament Street police station demanding that a first information report be registered against Bhagat. The journalist had also been detained during a protest on Sunday.

She was among the three women journalists who alleged that they were sexually harassed by police officers while covering the protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at Jantar Mantar.

The journalist who was detained had alleged that Bhagat groped her while she was making a video of the student leader Neha Bora being detained. She said that she had gone to the Parliament Street police station to file a complaint, but no action was taken.

An unidentified police official was quoted as saying by The Hindu that registering cases against police personnel for actions taken while performing law and order duties could “deter them from working”.

Another unidentified police official told the newspaper on Sunday that there was no evidence to substantiate the journalist’s allegation.

On Sunday, the Delhi Police said that the allegations of sexual harassment had been received “in context of the emergent law and order situation” a day earlier.

The New Delhi district police has received their complaints and transferred them to the Crime Branch at Kamla Market for a “fair and impartial enquiry” against the police officers, it said.

It was unclear whether the Delhi Police was referring to the allegations against Bhagat or to separate complaints of sexual assault.

#WATCH | Delhi | Police detain protestors protesting outside Parliament Street Police Station against an alleged incident of misconduct by a police personnel with a woman. https://t.co/OPX23jq577 pic.twitter.com/NLA2dWsSzB

— ANI (@ANI) October 5, 2026

On Sunday, the Cockroach Janta Party said its team went to the police station with the journalist and asked the police to register an FIR against Bhagat for molestation. It alleged that police refused, citing the ongoing Crime Branch investigation.

Meanwhile, Ratna Singh, the legal affairs head of the Cockroach Janta Party, said that along with the journalist, 17 others were detained during Monday’s protest demanding action against Bhagat.

She alleged that the police assaulted the detainees. “To protect their own, the police are now allegedly beating up the victim and those demanding action against the accused,” said Singh.

Separately, Digipub News India Foundation, an association of independent digital news organisations and journalists of which Scroll is a member, demanded that FIRs be registered against accused officers.

The association said that the incidents of women journalists being sexually harassed were “extremely shameful and completely unacceptable”.

“The responsible officers and authorities of the Delhi Police, who are meant to maintain law and order, and protect the constitutional rights of citizens, are themselves engaging in criminal activities,” said Digipub. “Whom should ordinary citizens and journalists now look to for protection?”

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Supreme Court on Monday asked the police to create “fear and fright” among persons found to be threatening the safety of women in Delhi, saying that offenders should know that they could “die” if they committed such offences, Bar and Bench reported.

“There should be fear…in the mind of the man who is prone to commit such offences,” the legal news outlet quoted the bench as verbally observing. “Unless that fear and fright is created ki ‘ab kuch kiya toh mar jayenge’ (if we do anything now, we will die), you will not be able to prevent such crimes.”

The court added: “Apprehending them, putting them behind bars is not the solution.”

The court told the police not to hesitate to be “a little more harsh” against persons committing crimes against women.

“If you have to be a little more strict, a little more harsh, do not hesitate,” the bench said. “There will be people who will raise a hue and cry about Article 21, but you have to do your duty.”

Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life and personal liberty.

A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran was hearing a suo moto case initiated after several cases of rape and sexual assault were reported in Delhi.

At least 13 cases of sexual assault were reported in Delhi in September, including the gang rape of a 17-year-old by three men who allegedly posed as police personnel in a park near Lady Shri Ram College on September 21.

The court also directed the Delhi Police to intensify surveillance across the city to identify and arrest those involved in such offences, with a particular focus on public places such as bus stops, metro stations, railway stations, schools and colleges, The New Indian Express reported.

During the hearing on September 28, the court had said that the rise in crimes against women in Delhi underlined a “systematic failure” of the law enforcement authorities and the administration to guarantee basic public safety.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: The bid to improve safety in public parks cannot involve keeping the public out

A Bharatiya Janata Party booth-level agent allegedly sought the deletion of more than 75,000 voters from the electoral roll of Ballari City Assembly constituency in Karnataka using Form 7 during the special intensive revision exercise, The Hindu reported.

On Tuesday, The Hindu reported that of the 4,000 applications filed to delete voters from Karnataka’s electoral rolls, the majority targeted Muslims. The newspaper report is based on data from Form 10, which consolidates details of Form 7 applications.

Form 7 is used to object to the inclusion of a name or seek the deletion of an existing name from the electoral roll. A first information report has been registered against the booth-level agent, T Srinivas Mothkur, for allegedly misusing the form.

Political parties appoint booth level agents for specific polling station areas to complement the Election Commission’s booth level officers during the preparation and revision of electoral rolls.

This is the sixth FIR registered in Karnataka in connection with the alleged misuse of Form 7. Three of the five other cases have named BJP members as the accused, The Hindu reported.

On September 21, Mothkur wrote to the Ballari City Corporation saying several booth-level officers had refused to accept his Form 7 applications. He then submitted the remaining applications directly to the electoral registration officer.

The same day, the election authorities of the Ballari City Corporation responded that Mothkur’s claims that the voters were registered elsewhere, absent or had permanently shifted were not supported by documents or other information, The Hindu reported.

The electoral registration officer also said that booth-level agents could not submit more than 10 applications to a booth-level officer in a day. If an agent submitted more than 30 applications during the claims and objections period, the electoral registration officer or assistant electoral registration officer had to cross-verify them.

The agents were also required to submit a declaration stating that they had verified the details in the applications and found them to be correct, the newspaper quoted the election officer’s response as saying.

On September 22, Mothkur wrote to the election authorities saying that he was ready to submit objections against 7,561 voters and enclosed the list of names.

The election authorities rejected his request again, saying that the registration of voters cannot be verified on the basis of his complaint.

Following this, Congress booth-level agent Goutham S filed a complaint against Mothkur. He also alleged that a majority of the voters whose names Mothkur sought to remove belonged to a minority community.

Mothkur has been booked under section of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to public mischief.

He told The Hindu that he and another booth-level agent had identified voters who had shifted or were absent and shared their details with the electoral registration officer for verification. He denied seeking that they be deleted.

On Thursday, Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer V Anbu Kumar said legal action would be taken against anyone found filing bulk Form 7 applications. In a circular sent to district election officers and electoral registration officers across the state, Kumar said that his office had received reports of bulk applications, some of which were allegedly not genuine, and directed officials to investigate the claims.

Kumar’s statement came after Chief Minister DK Shivakumar and Congress legislators protested outside the election officer’s office. Shivakumar withdrew the protest after the announcement.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

The Opposition and civil society groups have been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over revelations in a September 23 report by The Indian Express.

The newspaper reported that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were related to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

“Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,” the poll panel stated. “They are a part of the decision-making process before a final decision is taken.”

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

At a busy roundabout in Nandigram town, Milan Pradhan was shouting into a mic connected to a loudspeaker mounted on an e-rickshaw.

With a few days left to go before the October 6 bye-election in Nandigram, the Congress candidate was trying hard to campaign. But it was a futile effort. Drowning out his e-rickshaw were much more powerful loudspeakers sitting atop a white Scorpio parked just a few metres away. This was the Bharatiya Janata Party’s campaign car announcing on loop that Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari would tour the constituency the following day.

Some Congress workers demanded that the sports utility vehicle be moved from the spot – but to no avail. Personnel from the Central Armed Police Forces watched the kerfuffle unfold silently from a coconut water stall nearby.

Pradhan’s e-rickshaw was clearly no match for the Scorpio – a stark symbol of the one-sided nature of the political contest in Nandigram, five months after the BJP formed the government in West Bengal.

Since 2021, the high-profile seat has been represented by Adhikari himself. This time, the BJP has fielded the mother of his murdered political aide Chandranath Rath.

However, the bye-poll has been mired in controversy from the start. First, the candidate from the Mamata Banerjee-led faction of the Trinamool Congress met the chief minister and decided to withdraw. Banerjee then announced that she would back the Congress nominee in Nandigram. But soon after that, Pradhan was arrested by the police in cases that were filed decades ago.

Even after Pradhan was granted interim bail to campaign in the final week of the bye-election, Scroll found that the BJP faced no real competition from him or anybody else. Opposition leaders complained that the police and the local administration were doing little to ensure fairness. Voters also seemed to have reconciled to the one-sided nature of the contest – for now.

‘Managing’ elections

The e-rickshaw-Scorpio joust was just the tip of the iceberg. Opposition politicians alleged that the chief minister is using the law and order machinery of the state to intimidate them in Nandigram.

“Even civil defence volunteers are threatening Congress workers with jail for up to six years,” grumbled Ranajit Mukherjee, a state-level leader whom the party has stationed in the constituency as its observer. “They don’t even have the power to arrest.”

Mukherjee pointed out that on September 30, the police detained writer and activist Manik Fakir in an old case while he was campaigning for the Congress party. “He was drawing big crowds wherever he went,” he added. “I don’t know why the BJP is doing these things. It’s not like we are going to win.”

The Congress candidate, who is an old associate of Adhikari’s, is not as surprised by what is happening. The two had worked closely together two decades ago during the 2007 movement against land acquisition in Nandigram.

“The chief minister is a vengeful person,” Pradhan claimed. “He did similar things when he was a minister in Mamata Banerjee’s government.”

Adhikari’s opponents had not taken well to a comment that he made on September 15. “I know how to manage elections,” he said on the day his party announced its nominee for the bye-poll in Nandigram. The Opposition saw this as damning proof that the bye-election would not be fair.

“He is using the police to create such an environment that people will not be able to vote freely,” contended Santi Gopal Giri, the Communist Party of India’s candidate in Nandigram. “Our workers are being intimidated with false cases so they don’t become our polling agents.”

In addition to the purported misuse of the police, Giri complained that political violence in Bengal had also escalated under the BJP. He had contested from the seat six months ago as well, but did not need security at the time. Now, a paramilitary official tails him everywhere because on September 28, he was physically assaulted — allegedly by the saffron party’s workers.

“The BJP has turned out to be twice as bad as the Trinamool,” Giri reckoned.

A one-party show?

Hasirani Rath, the BJP’s nominee, rubbished these accusations. “Those in the Opposition have to say such things,” she stated.

But Rath was clear that there was no real Opposition for the BJP to contest against here. “These days, you need binoculars to find the Opposition,” she said.

Rath’s boast was not off the mark. Driving into Nandigram, signs of Opposition parties were hard to see. The streets were instead full of Jai Shri Ram and angry Hanuman flags, put up by the BJP. Besides posters displaying the picture of its nominee, cut outs of the chief minister and Prime Minister Narendra Modi lined the road.

Rath claimed that her target was to win the bye-poll by over 1.5 lakh votes. The number seems incredible, given the constituency’s electoral history. Five months ago, when the Hindutva party swept the rest of the state in a historic victory, it managed to win this seat by less than 10,000 votes.

But its main challenger, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress, is nowhere to be seen on the ground. Locals say that its rank and file have joined the BJP, while top leaders are absconding.

“All old Trinamool workers are now in the BJP,” said Kabir Khan, who drives an e-rickshaw in Nandigram. “We saw them in the Trinamool for 15 years when it was in power. As soon as the BJP won, they switched sides.”

The Congress, which is vying to become the principal Opposition outfit in Bengal, shares this view. In fact, the grand old party even blames Trinamool converts for taking down its flags and banners hours after its workers put them up.

“Many of them have shifted in a short span of time and they are trying to prove to the BJP that they can do anything,” alleged Subhashish Bhattacharya, another Congress politician who was picked up by the police along with Pradhan last month.

Voters weigh in

Voters whom Scroll met in Nandigram seemed to have reconciled to the one-sidedness of the contest. Part of the reason for this is how the BJP has framed the bye-election.

At a rally in Gokul Nagar village on October 1, Scroll heard Samik Bhattacharya, state president of the BJP, make a thinly veiled threat to minority voters. “Our government is not going anywhere for at least 20 years,” he boasted. “You have to decide if you are with us or against us.”

This approach might be working. Several Muslims who attended the rally told this reporter that they would vote for the BJP.

“It’s best to vote for the party in power,” reasoned Sheikh Ainul Hoque, a resident of Jadu Bari Chak village in Nandigram. “If the BJP loses this seat, then also it will continue to run the government. We voters have to follow whoever is wielding the stick.”

He did lament the collapse of the Trinamool Congress, though.

“For us poor people, nobody can do what Mamata Banerjee did,” Hoque added. “Unfortunately, she and her party have been ruined by lower-rung workers.”

Sheikh Abdul Soban, a veteran Trinamool leader from Jadu Bari Chak, bluntly stated that many Muslims would vote for the BJP this time because they want to continue receiving welfare benefits from the state government.

“But they will vote differently in the next Panchayat elections,” he claimed. “And if the national movement against Gyanesh Kumar succeeds and the BJP loses power at the centre in 2029, Suvendu will not remain chief minister for long. Opposition parties just have to come together.”

Most Hindus, for their part, did not seem bothered by the BJP’s communal rhetoric or the concerns about the space for Opposition politics shrinking just yet. Jashoda Bhuiyan, 60, said that she had voted for the saffron party because she was fed up with the Trinamool’s “Muslim goons”.

“Let’s give the new government two years and see what they will do,” she suggested. “If they become like the Trinamool, we will vote them out as well. We should keep changing the government from time to time.”

Food products manufacturer Everest has been directed to immediately recall a batch of its packaged cumin powder from the market after a food analysis report found that a sample collected from a resort in Goa was found to have unsafe levels of pesticide residues, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India said on Sunday.

The sample taken from Riverside Resorts and Holiday Homes was found containing Azoxystrobin and Thiamethoxam at “levels exceeding the prescribed limits”, stated the food regulator.

Azoxystrobin and thiamethoxam are agricultural chemicals used to protect crops from fungal diseases and insect pests, respectively. While both are widely used in farming, exposure to residues above prescribed regulatory limits in food can pose risks to human health.

The regulator said that its food analyst had concluded that the sample did not comply with the 2006 Food Safety and Standards Act. A food laboratory that the sample was sent to also confirmed that the sample was unsafe.

“The FBO [food business operator] was provided an opportunity to appeal against the food analyst’s report, following which the sample was referred to the referred food laboratory” it added.

The regulator also directed Everest to undertake corrective measures to prevent such incidents from occurring again and submit a report upon completing the recall.

In a separate instance, the licence of Kolkata-based Creative Bakers and Confectioners was suspended with immediate effect on Sunday after a report found severe lapses in hygiene and sanitation standards.

On Saturday, FSSAI found a sample of Nestlé’s low-fat dairy whitener collected from The LaLiT hotel in Delhi’s Connaught Place to be “unsafe and substandard”.

This comes weeks after the food regulator on September 18 said that it had initiated legal action against Nestlé India after a sample of one of the company’s baby food products was found to be substandard during testing.

The cases come amid a crackdown by the food regulators in the country on food adulteration and misleading advertisements of products in recent months.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• Food regulator took credit for a ‘crackdown’ on Bournvita. But it gave the drink a clean chit

• India’s food regulator flagged over 160 misleading claims. Years later, 120 are still around

• How India’s ambitious plan to curb unhealthy food failed

Members of a Hindutva group, Bangiyo Hindu Jagaran Manch, on Sunday marched to the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata, broke police barricades put up in the aftermath of last week’s violence on the campus, and threw stones inside, reported The Telegraph.

The mob also scuffled with the police while trying to enter the campus, reported The Indian Express.

Rohit Shaw, a spokesperson for the Hindutva group, was quoted as saying by The Telegraph that the Bangiyo Hindu Jagaran Manch carried out the march because students of the institute had “disrespected the image of Swami Vivekananda and Bharat Mata” on September 27.

On that day, at least six students were injured after being attacked for objecting to an event organised by members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated consumer group Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat.

At least one of those injured was hit on the head and another was allegedly attacked with a knife, a student told Scroll.

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

Poorvi Bondre, a member of the union, had told Deutsche Welle that students confronted participants of the event after learning that the organisers were affiliated with the RSS and using the event to “promote its agenda” on campus.

“They called us anti-nationals and Naxals and attacked us with knives,” Bondre had said.

#WATCH | Kolkata, West Bengal: Members of the Hindu Jagran Manch hold a protest against students of SRFTI (Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute) in Mukundapur.

Members of the Hindu Jagran Manch attempted to break down the gate and enter the SRFTI premises. Heavy police… pic.twitter.com/FZ42JDlVIU

— ANI (@ANI) October 4, 2026

On Sunday, Shaw said that the Bangiyo Hindu Jagaran Manch said that “dimagi Naxals at the SRFTI will be taught a lesson the same way as Jadavpur University recently”, reported The Telegraph.

“Dimagi Naxal” is a term popularised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his address to the nation from the Red Fort on the 80th Independence Day. Modi had said that “dimagi Naxals” are a threat to Indian society and called for them to be “found and isolated”.

On August 20, clashes broke out between members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and Left-affiliated student groups at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is the student wing of the RSS.

On Sunday, students at the Film and Television Institute alleged that the Hindutva group tore down the pictures of BR Ambedkar and MK Gandhi on the gate, reported The Indian Express.

The students also said that they had written to the Kolkata Police and the West Bengal government on Saturday, asking them not to allow Bangiyo Hindu Jagaran Manch to hold the march. They had urged the administration to deploy adequate police personnel for their safety and security.

Additionally, students of the Film and Television Institute in Pune and Itanagar, as well as those at intitute in Kolkata wrote to Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting Ashwini Vaishnaw, expressing concerns about the proposed rally, reported The Indian Express.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Amid concerns that the special intensive revision of electoral rolls could deny genuine electors their right to vote, Supreme Court Justice Ujjal Bhuyan on Sunday said that any process that disenfranchises Indians is “intrinsically arbitrary”, reported Bar and Bench.

“No amount of whataboutery can justify it,” Bhuyan said while speaking at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research in Hyderabad.

He said that such a process “strikes at the very heart of the Constitution and I would go to the extent of saying that it is a negation of the constitutional order”.

Former Supreme Court judge Rohinton Fali Nariman also expressed concerns about 13.8 crore voters having been removed from the electoral rolls of 31 states and Union Territories, saying that the “Election Commission cannot malfunction like this”, reported Live Law.

The statements came as protests are being held in several parts of the country calling for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision exercise.

Read Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision exercise here.

Right to vote intertwined with freedom struggle: Bhuyan

Speaking at the law school in Hyderabad, Bhuyan said that unless a voter has died, no one else’s name can be deleted from the electoral roll “without notice and hearing”, reported Bar and Bench.

“From the persona of an Indian citizen, the right to vote or right to be included in the voters list cannot be detached,” added the Supreme Court judge. “It will be like taking out the soul from the body.”

He said that any process that “leads to wholesale disenfranchisement of Indian citizens, making them citizens without voting rights”, violates Article 326 and Article 14 of the Constitution.

Article 326 provides every Indian citizen the right to vote once they reach the age of 18. Article 14 provides for equality before the law.

Bhuyan said that no authority can violate these provisions. “No one is above the Constitution,” he added.

He also said that the right to vote is “intertwined with India’s long years of struggle against foreign rule”.

“It is a manifestation of our freedom achieved after so much of struggle and sacrifice,” Bar and Bench quoted him as saying.

SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

Nariman on appointment of election commissioners

Nariman, a former solicitor general of India, said that leaving the appointment of election commissioners in the hand of the government was a “red flag”, reported Live Law.

He added that the Supreme Court must decide the validity of the 2023 Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Appointment, Conditions of Service and Term of Office Act at the earliest.

The Act states that the head of the poll panel and the two other top members are to be appointed based on the recommendations of a selection committee comprising the prime minister, a Union Cabinet minister and the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.

The composition of the panel means that the government enjoys a 2:1 majority over the leader of the Opposition, if there is a difference of opinion.

On September 23, the Supreme Court referred the petitions challenging the constitutionality of the 2023 law to a larger bench.

Nariman on Sunday said the move had only allowed the government to continue making appointments to the poll panel.

“Now, we saw the danger of this happening very recently,” Live Law quoted him as saying. “All of you have seen that in the West Bengal elections, 90 lakh voters were disenfranchised; that is an astounding figure.”

He pointed out that out of those excluded, 22.2 lakh persons had appealed to be added back to the electoral rolls.

“And of these 22 lakh voters, some 1 lakh voter appeals were decided 93% in favour of the voters,” said Nariman. “So, you can imagine this was completely illegal, knocking out of the common man, the citizen of India in order that a government obtains what it wants.”

The former Supreme Court judge also referred to The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation that revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision.

He asked why Sandhu and Joshi had not pressed their rights under Section 18 of the 2023 Act, which allowed the decision of the two-thirds majority to prevail within the Election Commission.

“They didn’t do that [because] they were also appointees of the present government,” Nariman was quoted as saying by Live Law.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: In half the seats BJP won in Bengal, total SIR deletions outnumber victory margin

Periyar EV Ramasamy, one of the leading figures of the Dravidian movement, argued that “To insist that chastity is only for women and should not be insisted upon for men, is a philosophy based on biased individual ownership.” As part of the argument, published in his Collected Works, he noted further that “If our literatures have all been written for the sake of justice and disciplined conduct, then, should not all the conditions imposed on women be applied to men too.”

To many academics, these arguments remain relevant and vital even today, and students stand to gain significantly from reading and engaging with them. To their shock, however, the book was among the publications that the Prime Minister’s Office took note of after an anonymous X user included it in a list of material that the user termed “poison”.

“Periyar in his writing discusses the idea of chastity, love, marriage, motherhood and inheritance and how these ideas need to be negotiated in the everyday context of cultural and patriarchal hegemony,” said N Sukumar, professor of political science at Delhi University. “Why would anyone be threatened to debate these ideas in the classroom?”

Sukumar heard about the Prime Minister’s Office’s move on September 27, after he received an anxious call from a colleague from another university. He then saw the X post: the material under the scanner was predominantly anti-caste writing, by a long list of scholars, including BR Ambedkar, Gail Omvedt, Sharmila Rege, and Savitribai and Jotirao Phule.

The anonymous X user stated that “From patriarchy to Caste Annihilation to Debrahmanising the history to Curse of Manu we are feeding young minds with a poison”. The “leftist cabal”, it said, used these writings as “apprenticeship for grooming their future rank and file”.

In conversations with peers, Sukumar learnt that an email had gone out from an education ministry official to universities across the country – the email cited “a communication received from the Prime Minister’s Office” about the X post.

The email asked departments to “furnish comments” and also “enrollment in the courses mentioned in the tweet”, and added that the request should be treated as “urgent”.

Sukumar and other professors that Scroll spoke to expressed surprise that the country’s highest office had taken cognisance of an anonymous post. “Such tweets are posted almost every single day,” Sukumar said. “Certainly the PMO must have better things to do than to be issuing such directives. The account has no name, no number, no authenticity and yet it got the attention of the PMO.”

The post seemed to serve as an excuse to exercise control over the academic sphere, he argued. “Instead of directly intervening in the issue, it looks like the government is using the tweet as an opportunity to indirectly do so,” he said.

R Mahalakshmi, a professor from the history department at Jawaharlal Nehru University, observed that the responsibility of compiling syllabi and reading material lay solely with academic institutions. “The PMO doesn’t have the expertise to determine syllabus,” she said. “This is active political interference and policing.”

Student groups have also pushed back. The Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association in Jawaharlal Nehru University released a statement, arguing that “If a particular text is academically contested, the appropriate response is to engage with it intellectually, not to initiate administrative scrutiny merely because an anonymous social-media account objects to it.” It decried the move to shape syllabi “through political pressure generated by social-media outrage”.

Writing under the scanner

Most of the works cited in the post contain arguments critical of the caste system and, in some instances, Hindutva.

“Many of the texts in the list, including Ambedkar’s, dismantle the majoritarian narrative of the existence of a unified national past and identity, that is then projected as essentially Hindu identity or Hindu past,” said an assistant professor from a college affiliated to Delhi University, who asked not to be identified by name. “There is no wonder why Ambedkar’s work figured several times in the list, because Ambedkar’s critique of caste and caste majoritarianism calls not just for the eradication of untouchability, but for the annihilation of caste itself.”

He added, “Works by Ambedkar, Phule, Gail Omvedt and others question India’s past by compelling students to ask questions such as who was allowed to learn, read, own land, enter temples, exercise freedom, define and produce knowledge.”

Sukumar observed that the texts he taught in his classes, “which includes Dalit Bahujan pedagogy, just talk about everyday negotiation of equality, justice, freedom”.

The writings “challenge Brahminical patriarchy, caste system, the idea of exploitation, the idea of duty and the idea of rights”, he added.

The move to raise concerns about these writings was likely part of an effort “to sanitise and present a monolithic and conveniently Brahmanical understanding of Indian intellectual traditions”, argued N Sachin, an associate professor from a college affiliated to the Delhi University. He also argued that the government was resorting to such measures because “they are unable to defend Hindutva intellectually” and that they are failing “to put up a facade against the rigours of Western and other critical Indian intellectual traditions in the academic on many counts”.

Sukumar argued that the move was an attack on Dalit writers and writing. “The X account called these writings as ‘poison’. Is teaching Ambedkar, Periyar and Phule poison? Is the PMO saying institutions cannot teach these books?” he said.

He added, “Is caste only supposed to be brought up when talking about votes and not in classrooms?”

Importance of the work

Sukumar argued that the directive presented a threat to the work of first-generation Dalit-Bahujan academics. “It is the first generation of Dalit-Bahujan graduates who went back to academia and introduced so many of these writers and reading,” he said. “So this seems to be challenging their intellect.” He recounted, for instance, that he had introduced the writing of Kancha Illaiah Shepherd in his department, including his popular book Why I Am Not a Hindu.

The Delhi University professor recalled that it had not been easy to even introduce these subjects and readings in the first place. “I teach a subject called Dalit writings. It was introduced a few years ago and it took a lot of efforts for these courses to actually be added to the curriculum,” he said.

For instance, he noted that earlier, his university offered a paper titled “Literature and Caste” but that it was an elective course. “Departments were not mandated to offer it,” he said. “So if someone in the department didn’t want to offer it, they didn’t have to. Later, we fought for this to become an essential course in the English department at the undergraduate level. It wasn’t easy.”

The ministry’s move was particularly alarming, Sukumar noted, because in recent years an increasing number of students had been interested in these courses. “I have over a 100 students in my class,” he said. “The demand for such courses has gone up, which is why maybe the government wants to know how many students are enrolled in these courses.”

Sukumar said that after news broke of the prime minister’s office’s intervention, he asked his students what they thought about the kinds of writings and ideas that had been flagged. “We were discussing Periyar’s Why Were Women Enslaved and I asked them if they thought these ideas of patriarchy and caste are topics to be discussed and debated,” he said. “And they all agreed that they were.”

Similarly, Mahalakshmi argued that Ambedkar’s work on caste and untouchability needed to be studied even today because caste remains prevalent in Indian society.

But right-wing forces saw such material as an impediment to their dominance, she noted. She recounted one incident where a student of hers was questioned about her refusal to join the right-wing student party on campus. “They asked her if she was refusing to join because she had enrolled in so many of my classes,” she said.

She argued that the government’s move was intended “to create fear among teachers and students”.

An unprecedented move

Ajay Gudavarthy, an associate professor in the political science department in Jawaharlal Nehru University, said that the actions of the prime minister’s office and the education ministry were unprecedented. Referring to authorities’ reliance on the post on X, he said, “We talk of manufactured consent, but today we also have manufactured dissent.”

He noted that the courses named in the list were taught across disciplines at Jawaharlal Nehru University. “If one or two courses offered these readings and they wanted to disband it, maybe it would have been possible,” he said. “But this is critical reading across several disciplines.”

He argued that through the directive, the government was seeking to make the study of these courses a national security issue. “The account referred to this literature as ‘poison’, so now it will become a security concern for the government – who is teaching this? Who are the ones taking it?” he said.

Gudavarthy also said that in his view, the government was seeking through these moves to pacify the dominant population in the country. “The government’s electoral vote banks are not stable anymore. The dominant castes are also unhappy with the UGC regulations,” he said, referring to regulations against discrimination that the commission sought to introduce earlier this year. “So this was a way to appease them,” he said.

The assistant professor from the Delhi University affiliated college said that he feared that this new directive would give classrooms “hyper visibility”.

“The government and the public already know in some sense what we teach because syllabuses are public, but this is different,” he said. “This initiative makes us traceable as teachers – who we are, what we teach and which students enrolled in the course.”

The professor said that he had been discussing the government’s intervention with other colleagues and had also brought it up in class. “Another colleague was telling me that his superiors were asking teachers to submit details of the books that they are teaching,” he said. “While my department has not yet asked for any details, I think the queries have already started.”

The professor is worried that this kind of scrutiny and interference will potentially discourage students from taking up these courses. “I fear this is an attempt to dissuade students from enrolling in these courses and I think eventually, that is what will happen, our student strength will decrease.”

He added, “Students join these classes out of curiosity. But these kinds of interferences will replace curiosity with caution and disagreements and debates with compliance.”

All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora was detained by the Delhi Police on Sunday as protests to demand Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation entered the third day.

AISA later said Bora had been released at Narela Industrial Area Police Station in north Delhi, but alleged that their phone and bag were not returned.

Neha is safe and health. We are with Neha and bringing her back safely.

Thank you everyone for your solidarity. No amount of detention and threat will stop our movement demanding removal of Gyanesh Kumar.

Gyanu your time is UP! https://t.co/yzxz0mLKDC pic.twitter.com/C8xTDubthd

— N Sai Balaji | ఎన్ సాయి బాలాజీ (@nsaibalaji) October 4, 2026

Earlier, the student association alleged that Bora was taken in an “unauthorised vehicle” without a female constable.

Where is Delhi Police taking Neha on their own?

This is not detention it is kidnapping! pic.twitter.com/dFBBh1EaLa

— Neha (@neha_aisa) October 4, 2026

A protest was scheduled to begin from Andhra Bhawan Circle on Ashoka Road and proceed towards Jantar Mantar. Police had not granted permission for the march and deployed around 5,000 personnel, including Rapid Action Force along with drones and barricades, Hindustan Times reported.

As protesters attempted to move towards Jantar Mantar, police stopped them at the barricades. Several demonstrators were detained and forced into buses. Protesters tried to stop the vehicles from leaving and and smashed the window of a police bus a window of a police bus, The Wire reported.

View this post on Instagram

Women protesters were seen climbing on top of the car in which Bora was being detained in an attempt to stop it from leaving.

Fellow female protesters climbed atop a car in which AISA President Neha Bora was detained to stop it from driving away. However, police personnel tried to forcibly remove them.@priyali_dhingra reports pic.twitter.com/40fsT80iQV

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 4, 2026

Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bharadwaj was also detained after party workers marched towards India Gate to protest against Kumar. After being detained, Bharadwaj alleged that the police were “picking me up and throwing me around like I am a football”, ANI reported.

Protests are being held in several parts of the country seeking Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision exercise.

On Saturday, Bora, activist Yogendra Yadav, lawyer Prashant Bhushan and Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal were among those detained while marching towards Jantar Mantar.

In Mumbai, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) chief Uddhav Thackeray and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray jointly led a protest march against Kumar on Sunday.

Two days earlier, the Cockroach Janta Party had held a demonstration against Kumar at Shivaji Park. The Mumbai Police later registered a first information report against the campaign’s founder Abhijeet Dipke, convenors Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, and more than 400 unidentified persons over the demonstration, for which permission had been denied.

Demand for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Inputs from Priyali Dhingra. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Three women journalists have alleged that they were sexually harassed by police officers while covering the protests at Jantar Mantar on Saturday, the Delhi Police stated.

In a video shared by Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, a journalist alleged that Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat groped her while she was making a video of the detention of student leader Neha Bora in Delhi during the protest demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

The journalist said that she went to the Parliament Street police station to file a complaint, but no action was taken.

Following this, several journalists and other protesters gathered outside the police station demanding that a first information report be registered against the officer.

The Delhi Police said on Sunday that three journalists had made allegations of sexual harassment “in context of the emergent law and order situation” a day earlier.

The New Delhi district police has received their complaints and transferred them to the Crime Branch at Kamla Market for a “fair and impartial enquiry” against the police officers, it said.

It was unclear whether the Delhi Police was referring to the allegations against Bhagat or to separate complaints of sexual assault.

Meanwhile, Cockroach Janta Party leader Saurav Das said that the political campaign would hold a protest at the police station at 11 am on Sunday seeking action against the assistant commissioner of police.

Later in the day, the political campaign alleged that the journalist who had complained was detained by police. It was unclear whether she was detained near the Parliament Street police station or during the third day of protests seeking Kumar’s resignation.

The Cockroach Janta Party said its team went to the police station with the journalist and asked police to register an FIR against Bhagat for molestation. It alleged that police refused, citing the ongoing Crime Branch investigation.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi also asked why there had been a delay in registering an FIR in the case.

“Women across Delhi, students, are gripped by fear for their safety, staging satyagraha,” he said in a social media post. “But the very police responsible for protecting women are raising hands against them.”

He added: “Delhi Police comes under the Ministry of Home Affairs. Amit Shah ji, where are you? You have to answer for this.”

The Press Club of India said that Delhi Police should immediately act on the woman journalist’s complaint.

The press body added that it was “shocked and dismayed” by the police action against journalists and their treatment during the protests.

It said that journalists from various independent news organisations and portals reported that police behaved “violently and aggressively” despite them carrying press cards and repeatedly identifying themselves as media personnel, with some being detained along with protesters.

“Journalists must be allowed to work freely, without fear, and document those who gather to raise various issues,” the press body added. “That this is not being allowed even at the heart of the national capital does not bode well for the trajectory of media freedom in India.”

It also condemned the Union government’s decision to suspend internet services in the area during the protest.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava and Sara Varghese.

Two Muslim persons were lynched by a mob that accused them of stealing cattle near Bagdogra in West Bengal’s Darjeeling district on Saturday, the Hindustan Times reported. Three others were injured after the mob set their pickup van on fire.

The two persons who were killed have been identified as Shahid Akhtar, a resident of Chopra in West Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur, and Sajjad Mohammad, a resident of Haryana, the newspaper quoted Additional Commissioner of Police of Siliguri Anirban Majumdar as saying.

The three injured were identified as Amir Sattar, Akram Khan and Arif Khan, all residents of Haryana.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Keralam government on Sunday ordered a preliminary investigation into corruption allegations against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar dating back 20 years, when he was the secretary of the state’s Public Works Department, The Hindu reported.

The development comes amid allegations against Kumar about irregularities in the conduct of the special intensive revision of voters rolls and calls from Opposition parties seeking his removal from office.

The Congress-led United Democratic Front government has directed the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau to probe allegations of bribery involving an Indo-Malaysian construction company that was awarded a contract to upgrade the Main Central Road under the Kerala State Transport Project. The project was delayed and saw cost escalations during Kumar’s tenure while the Left Democratic Front government was in power.

The firm had been awarded the contract by the previous UDF government.

The allegations also include financial losses to the exchequer and the suspected death by suicide of Lee See Been, chief engineer of the PATI-BEL consortium, in Kuala Lumpur in November 2006.

Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala on Sunday said that the government received a formal complaint alleging irregularities during Kumar’s tenure as the public works department secretary.

“I have forwarded the petition to the Vigilance Director for a detailed examination and further action in accordance with law,” he wrote in a post on social media.

Congress leader Malayinkeezhu Venugopal had filed the complaint, The Hindu quoted Chennithala’s office as saying.

In his petition, Venugopal alleged that the 2006 inquiries against Kumar did not follow due process and ignored the “incriminatory accusations” in Lee’s purported suicide note, the newspaper reported.

Venugopal claimed that Lee had mentioned Kumar in his suicide note, ANI reported.

He also alleged that the then Left Democratic Front government quietly closed the investigation against Kumar, allowing him to seek Central deputation, The Hindu reported.

Chennithala said the allegation that “external influence” derailed the earlier investigation was “serious” and will be inquired into.

“Public accountability does not expire with time,” he added.

Demand for Kumar’s resignation

Kumar is facing protests after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray on Sunday demanded that the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Maharashtra be cancelled and that elections be conducted using ballot papers instead of electronic voting machines, citing alleged irregularities in the electoral process.

Speaking at a rally in Mumbai, Raj Thackeray questioned the deletion of voters through the SIR process, saying that two crore people had so far been removed and asking who those voters were.

“Who are these 2 crore people,” the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief asked. “When this matter is discussed in Delhi, I request all political parties to demand that SIR be canceled.”

The rally was jointly led by Raj Thackeray and his cousin, Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) chief Uddhav Thackeray. The march was held against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in the SIR process, and was also attended by leaders of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) and Congress.

Raj Thackeray quit the undivided Shiv Sena in 2005 and formed the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena a year later. The parties had been political rivals for the past two decades, but have in recent months come together.

On Sunday, Raj Thackeray also questioned the increase in the number of voters between the 2024 Lok Sabha and Maharashtra Assembly elections. According to him, 40 lakh to 60 lakh voters were added in the state between the two elections.

He also questioned the difference in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s vote totals, saying it received 2.44 crore votes in the Lok Sabha election and 3.16 crore in the Assembly election six months later.

“⁠I just want to tell the ruling party this much: We’re not angry that you came to power,” he said. “We’re angry about how you’re wielding that power.”

He said it should be the people, rather than the Election Commission who decide which party forms the government and which remains in Opposition.

The march began near Metro Cinema and ended near the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation headquarters in south Mumbai.

#WATCH | Mumbai: Supporters of MNS chief Raj Thackeray and Shiv Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray gather in large numbers near Metro Cinema.

Both are leading a joint protest march toward the BMC headquarters against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. pic.twitter.com/BZnmhmSkgK

— ANI (@ANI) October 4, 2026

Uddhav Thackeray described the protest as a fight to protect democracy and the Constitution and accused the Election Commission of acting in favour of the BJP.

“If the SIR was conducted to weed out Bangladeshis from the voters’ list, then how many Bangladeshis residing illegally in the country did the government find?” he asked.

He also accused the chief election commissioner of being “a weapon of the BJP”.

“The BJP should realise that people are quiet today,” Uddhav Thackeray added. “If they become agitated, they will burn down its throne.”

The protest comes amid demonstrations in several parts of the country seeking Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the SIR exercise.

In Delhi, lawyer Prashant Bhushan, activist Yogendra Yadav and All India Students’ Association president Neha Bora were among those detained at Jantar Mantar on Saturday during the second consecutive day of protests.

In Mumbai, the Cockroach Janta Party also held a protest against Kumar at Shivaji Park on Friday. The Mumbai Police later registered an FIR against the campaign’s founder Abhijeet Dipke, convenors Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das and more than 400 unidentified people over the demonstration, for which permission was denied.

Questions over the SIR process

The protests followed a The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign, on September 25 called on Opposition parties to boycott polls if they do not trust the Election Commission to hold free and fair polls.

Dipke contended that this was a logical inconsistency: why are they participating in exercises they contend are rigged? It is merely for their “political survival”, he claimed.

By participating in elections, Opposition parties help “maintain the illusion that they are free and fair”. But a boycott would deny Indian elections the legitimacy they now have, Dipke argued.

Dipke’s approach found support on social media. Among those who called for polls to be boycotted was former minister in the Narendra Modi Cabinet, RK Singh, who had resigned from the Bharatiya Janata party last year.

But even after several years of alleging irregularities in the electoral process, no Opposition party has so far given a serious thought to the idea of boycotting elections.

Some on social media defended Dipke’s approach, suggesting that boycotting elections would not mean merely sitting at home and doing nothing more. A boycott could result in new political movements being built, protests and mass mobilisation against the alleged irregularities in elections, they argued.

These objectives, however, are not contingent on elections being boycotted. In fact, mass mobilisation could, in theory, yield better results for the Opposition at the ballots.

“The way to counter selective rigging, if it is happening, is by having a big movement of votes that makes it difficult” for electoral processes to be manipulated, Congress leader Amitabh Dubey had said on the Scroll Adda show in September 2025.

Dubey said that in his personal view, a boycott by the Opposition would be a mistake.

“Whether you look at Bangladesh or any other country, it boomerangs because the ruling party gets like 90% of the seats and then they can do whatever they want, and tomorrow they could change the Constitution if they want,” he explained.

Bangladesh’s Opposition parties, including the main Bangladesh Nationalist Party, boycotted the general elections in 2014 and 2024, claiming that the Sheikh Hasina government at the time was rigging the polls.

However, the boycott further diminished the Opposition’s voice in the legislature.

Moreover, Hasina’s grip over the police and the media meant that the Opposition was constricted further until her government was ousted in August 2024 following violent protests.

In the view of Opposition parties in India, a boycott would amount to yielding space to the political forces they want to defeat.

Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien explained the concern more bluntly in a response to Dipke: “Opposition boycotting elections = BJP wins all seats.” Once that happens, he said, the BJP will amend the Constitution to “legalise all their crimes”.

O’Brien also said that not contesting polls would mean “betraying” the party workers “fighting with their lives”.

Another practical problem, political observers note, is that a party apparatus at the local level depends on contesting elections: poll campaigns are when money flows to a party. Boycotting elections would cut off the funds required to sustain the party.

Some have expressed concerns that, in the event of a boycott, some Opposition supporters may still seek alternatives, prompting the ruling party to prop up proxy organisations.

The solution, as O’Brien suggested, would be for Opposition parties to contest elections to protect democratic rights “while also fighting for free and fair elections”.

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

An escalating agitation. Several protesters and political leaders, including Aam Aadmi Party’s Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj, were detained by the police near the Jantar Mantar protest site in Delhi ahead of a demonstration demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha and All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora were also detained.

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded.

In Mumbai, the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign also began a protest demanding Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the poll panel and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes, write Divya Aslesha and Ayush Tiwari.

A disaster averted. A Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. This came after an altercation in the cockpit, during an apparent attempt by the co-pilot to crash the aircraft and kill its passengers. Out of the 174 passengers onboard, 150 were Israeli. There were no fatalities in the incident.

The co-pilot, who stabbed the pilot during the altercation, was overwhelmed by passengers and the crew. Other Flydubai pilots on board the aircraft landed the plane.

The pilot who was stabbed, Smit Machchhar, is an Indian. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu and United States President Donald Trump said that Machchhar is a hero.

Amid the altercation, the aircraft had plummeted about 17,000 feet in altitude in a minute. The airline stated that “the underlying reasons behind this event are unknown” at this stage. The incident is being investigated.

Also read: Israel election weeks away, Netanyahu seizes on Flydubai incident to bolster his image

A tough time ahead. The southwest monsoon ended with a 12.6% deficit in rainfall, said the India Meteorological Department. This makes the season the driest in 11 years and the fourth driest this century.

The rainfall in eastern and northeastern states was the lowest since 1901.

The four-month rainy season began in the country on June 4, three days later than its usual onset date. It covered the entire country on July 9, a day later than the normal date.

The country had received 759.4 mm of rainfall against the long-period average of 868.6 mm, the weather agency said. The long-period average is the measure of the mean rainfall during the monsoon season over the last 50 years.

Freedom of speech. After Meta restricted the work of political cartoonists Satish Acharya and Manjul about the Election Commission in India, their colleagues responded with cartoons of their own, saying that “satire must remain free”.

Acharya’s Instagram account has been restricted in India after the Meta-owned platform received a legal request from the government. Manjul, also said that Instagram had restricted one of his works about the Election Commission to users in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India/Law Enforcement”.

Also on Scroll last week

• Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court
• ‘No one to protect us’: In Manipur, civilians easy targets as armed groups step up violence
• As a Bengal seat goes to bye-polls, SIR deleted voters are stuck in limbo
• Bastar village looks for truth and reconciliation as Maoist-police strife ends
• Why India does not have enough caregivers for people with disabilities
• Watch: The reason for Indian democracy’s downslide is collapse of judiciary: Indira Jaising
• Indian women are on the streets again. Everything has changed but nothing has changed
• Harsh Mander: How cow slaughter bans have annihilated farm, meat and leather livelihoods
• ‘Drishyam The Conclusion’ review: Vijay Salgaonkar faces a new adversary – but barely
• Review: The heart beats extra hard and fast in ‘Dupahiya’ season 2

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

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

A sample of Nestlé’s low-fat dairy whitener collected from The LaLiT hotel in Delhi’s Connaught Place was found to be “unsafe and substandard”, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India said on Saturday.

In a social media post, the food regulator said that it had directed that the sale of the product be immediately prohibited.

It added that a food analyst’s laboratory report found that the product did not comply with the 2006 Food Safety and Standards Act.

The regulator said that a copy of the laboratory analysis report was provided to Bharat Hotels Limited, the food business operator, for reference and necessary action. It also issued a notice to the company over the non-compliant product.

“The FBO [food business operator] was provided an opportunity to appeal against the food analyst’s report under Section of the FSS Act, 2006, within the prescribed period,” it said.

Responding to the development, The LaLiT said the product had been procured from Nestlé India and was collected by FSSAI from the hotel around three months ago. It said that, upon receiving communication from the regulator, it immediately discontinued the product’s use and removed all packets

The hotel said that Nestlé had assured it that the company would respond directly to the regulator.

“The matter concerning the product’s compliance is between FSSAI and Nestlé India and not with The LaLiT,” the hotel said.

Nestlé India said the product is “safe to consume” and complies with applicable regulations, ANI reported.

An unidentified spokesperson said that the regulator’s report does not account for phosphorus naturally present in milk-based ingredients and maintained that the product complies with prescribed limits for added phosphorus.

“We have been in continuous engagement with the authorities as per due process established under law and have shared data across other same/similar milk-based products in the category to reflect presence of naturally occurring phosphorous,” ANI quoted the spokesperson as saying.

This comes weeks after the food regulator on September 18 said that it had initiated legal action against Nestlé India after a sample of one of the company’s baby food products was found to be substandard during testing. It also flagged allegedly misleading claims on two other baby food products.

The regulator had said that a sample of a “follow-up formula”, a milk product for infants, was found to be “sub-standard with respect to biotin”.

It also flagged two other products, NAN Excella Pro Stage 1 and Lactogen Pro 1, for making allegedly misleading ​claims violating the 2020 Foods for Infant Nutrition Regulations and the 1992 Infant Milk Substitutes Act.

The company had responded by saying that their products were “fully compliant with all the applicable regulations”, after the FSSAI sought clarifications from it.

The cases against Nestlé India come amid a crackdown by the food regulators in the country on food adulteration and misleading advertisements of products in recent months.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Food regulator took credit for a ‘crackdown’ on Bournvita. But it gave the drink a clean chit
• India’s food regulator flagged over 160 misleading claims. Years later, 120 are still around
• How India’s ambitious plan to curb unhealthy food failed

The names of around 9 lakh persons were deleted from Uttarakhand’s final voter list published on Saturday following the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, The Hindu quoted the state Election Commission as saying.

The number of voters in the state reduced to 71.5 lakh from 79.6 lakh before the exercise began, a decrease of about 10.1%.

Uttarakhand is among the 19 states and Union Territories where the voter roll revision is being carried out in the third phase of SIR.

On Saturday, Uttarakhand Chief Electoral Officer BVRC Purushottam said the final roll included 1.2 lakh newly enrolled voters, The Hindu reported.

“Compared with the draft roll published in July, the number of electors has risen by about 25,000, as 1,04,708 names were deleted following claims and objections, while more than 1.29 lakh names were added,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The state accepted claims and objections until August 13, while hearings and disposal of cases continued until September 28, ahead of the publication of the final roll on October 3.

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

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

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

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Apple has removed the offline messaging application Bitchat from its India App Store after a demand from the Ministry of Information Technology, developer Jack Dorsey said on Saturday.

The removal came months after reports that youth demonstrators at Jantar Mantar, who were protesting against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations, had been using such applications amid temporary internet restrictions that had been imposed at the protest site.

From Friday, protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls were held in Delhi and Mumbai.

Bitchat is an open-source, decentralised messaging application that allows nearby users to communicate without mobile data, Wi-Fi, phone numbers or centralised servers. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect nearby phones, with each device capable of relaying messages to others and thereby extending the network’s reach. Private messages are end-to-end encrypted, and the application does not require users to create accounts or provide persistent identifiers.

While removal from the App Store does not delete Bitchat from phones, it stops new downloads and security updates.

In July, the Union Home Ministry asked software platform GitHub to remove the repositories for Bitchat citing security concerns, according to a notice shared by Dorsey.

On Saturday, Dorsey shared in a social media post what appeared to be a notice from Apple’s App Review team. Dorsey is a tech entrepreneur and the co-founder of Twitter, now known as X.

government of India officially removes bitchat from the App Store pic.twitter.com/9oHHiwquec

— jack (@jack) October 3, 2026

The notice said that “your application…will be removed from India App Store because it includes content that is illegal in India”.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued the takedown demand under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. It allows the government to order the blocking of public access to information on grounds such as national security, public order and preventing incitement to cognisable offences.

The Apple notice said that the developer of the app can contact the ministry directly for more information about the removal or about Indian laws and requirements.

‘Unconstitutional’

Digital rights organisation, the Internet Freedom Foundation, said that the removal of Bitchat from the India App Store is unconstitutional. Section 69A permits the blocking of unlawful information, not of a messenger for working during internet shutdowns, it said in a social media post.

Statement : The removal of BitChat from the India App Store is unconstitutional. Section 69A permits the blocking of unlawful information, not of a messenger for working during internet shutdowns.

New Delhi, 3 October 2026

An Apple App Review notice published today by Jack…

— Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (@internetfreedom) October 3, 2026

“The ability of a citizen to speak to another citizen while the state has switched the internet off is not a ground for restriction under Section 69A or Article 19(2) of the Constitution”, it added. Article 19 guarantees freedom of speech and expression to the citizens.

The organisation said that the notice does not identify the content said to be illegal or the grounds under Section 69A that was invoked.

It also added that the Indian government has not published the blocking order.

The Internet Freedom Foundation demanded that the IT ministry must publish the blocking order, the reason invoked and the record of the committee’s proceedings, and serve the developers with a copy and an opportunity for a hearing. It also demanded that the direction must be withdrawn. “Any specific unlawful use must be met with targeted proceedings under due process, not the removal of a communications tool for everyone,” it added.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Lawyer Prashant Bhushan, activist Yogendra Yadav and All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora were among those detained at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on Saturday during a protest to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

This is the second consecutive day that demonstrations were held at Jantar Mantar demanding action against Kumar.

The protesters have raised concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

On Friday, Bora, Aam Aadmi Party’s Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj, and Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha were among the nearly 700 protesters whom the Delhi Police had detained from Jantar Mantar. All persons detained were reportedly released later in the day.

On Saturday, along with Bora, Yadav and Bhushan, Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal marched to Jantar Mantar.

The police have said that permission has not been granted for any demonstration and that orders prohibiting a gathering of five or more persons under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita remain in force in the New Delhi district.

The authorities had on Friday also suspended internet services in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded.

Further, they closed the entry and exit at 12 Delhi Metro stations, including Lok Kalyan Marg near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk in Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the protest site. Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, INA, Chawri Bazaar, New Delhi and Barakhamba Road were also affected.

The police have also registered three first information reports in connection with Friday’s demonstration, reported PTI. However, no one has been named as accused.

Demand for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: ‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes

Classes at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute in Kolkata were suspended for the sixth day on Saturday as students continued their “academic boycott” over an alleged attack by members of a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-affiliated organisation on the campus, reported PTI.

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

On September 27, at least six students were injured after being attacked for objecting to an event organised by members of the RSS-affiliated consumer group Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat.

The students’ union had stated that it was not informed about the event before the institute gave permission.

Poorvi Bondre, a member of the union, told Deutsche Welle that students confronted participants of the event after learning that the organisers were affiliated with the RSS and using the event to “promote its agenda” on campus.

“They called us anti-nationals and Naxals and attacked us with knives,” Bondre said.

Some students were also chased while others had their clothes torn and phones forcibly taken, the union had stated

Students have since been boycotting classes, demanding heightened security on campus and that those responsible for the violence be arrested, reported PTI.

The Kolkata Police is reportedly deployed outside the main gate of the campus.

“Authorities want us to shoot outside the campus in a bid to resume academic activities,” PTI quoted SRFTI students’ union general secretary Nachiket as saying. “But we need the assurance of [the] safety of students.”

On the other hand, the Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat has disputed the union’s account, alleging that some of its members were attacked, which led to the violence. It also claimed that students tore its posters and disrupted the programme.

Edited by Sneha.

The Mumbai Police on Saturday registered a first information report against Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, convenors Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, and more than 400 unidentified persons for a protest they held a day earlier to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, reported Hindustan Times.

The protest in Mumbai was called by the political campaign. Dipke had sought permission to demonstrate at Shivaji Park, but the police had denied it on September 27. Following this, he had said that the Cockroach Janta Party would launch a “jail bharo andolan”, or mass voluntary arrest movement.

No one was detained during the protest in Mumbai on Friday. The demonstration coincided with protests held at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, where the police detained more than 700 persons.

The protesters have raised concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

On Saturday, the Mumbai Police said that organisers of the protest in the city had been booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Maharashtra Police Act pertaining to unlawful assembly and wilful disobedience of lawful order issued by public servant, reported PTI.

“No one has been arrested in the case,” an unidentified police officer was quoted as saying by the news agency. “Further probe is underway.”

The officer added that the case was registered based on a complaint of a resident of the Shivaji Park area.

Apart from Dipke, Ranka and Das, the police have named Cockroach Janta Party members Pranav Ahire, Ajinkya Shinde, Afreen Nawaz, Saumya Korde, Ankit Bharadwaj, Vijay Malangi and Yogesh Ingle in the FIR, reported Hindustan Times.

Permission denied for protest

In its order denying permission to hold the protest on Friday, the police had said that Shivaji Park can only be used for sports, as per a 2013 Bombay High Court order.

The police also said that the protest could cause “noise pollution” in the residential locality. “Furthermore, as there are several major hospitals in the vicinity, the resulting traffic congestion could affect the movement of patients,” it added.

In response, Dipke shared a video of Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde addressing a gathering at the venue in January and asked how he had been granted permission for his event.

CJP protest call in Delhi

On Friday, the Cockroach Janta Party said that it will launch a march to Delhi and hold a protest at Jantar Mantar on October 10 if Kumar does not resign.

“If Delhi Police tries to stop us, wherever they stop us will become our Jantar Mantar,” said Dipke. “Ours will be a peaceful andolan.”

The campaign added that “it is up to the government and the Delhi Police whether they respect our right to peaceful protest or repeat the brutality we witnessed on July 20”.

On July 20, during the youth protests against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations, several demonstrators were injured after the security personnel in Delhi used lathis, fired tear gas and pellet guns to disperse the crowd.

Demand for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: ‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes

An Uttarakhand court on Friday granted bail to Dehradun gym owner Deepak Kumar, a day after he was arrested for allegedly assaulting a trader, reported PTI.

Kumar had in January opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members. When the group questioned him, he had told them his name was “Mohammad Deepak”. He later explained that he intended to convey that he was an Indian and that everyone is equal before the law.

On Thursday, Sanjeev Tonk, a businessman, alleged that Kumar had abused and assaulted him for a comment he had made on one of the social media posts by the gym owner.

Kumar had purportedly uploaded a social media post about the Ujjain municipal authority demolishing a portion of a mosque as part of a road-widening project ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela.

The court on Friday granted bail to Kumar after asking him to furnish three bonds of Rs 50,000 each, assuring that he would not cause any breach of peace over the next six months, reported The Indian Express.

The first information report against Kumar was initially registered under provisions pertaining to criminal intimidation and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

The police said that they later added sections pertaining to promoting enmity between different groups and voluntarily causing hurt to the FIR.

“Considering the available evidence, the activities of the accused and the possibility of disturbance to peace and law and order in the area, Kotdwar Police took prompt and effective action and arrested Deepak under Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita,” the newspaper quoted the police as saying.

Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita allows preventive arrest of a person to stop a serious, cognizable crime.

Demolition in Ujjain

A road near the Shahi Masjid is being widened ahead of the Simhastha Kumbh Mela to be held in March 2028. The event is held every 12 years on the banks of the Kshipra River.

The administration’s plans to demolish portions of the mosque had led to violence near the structure on Monday, with the police firing tear gas at Muslim residents protesting against the notice. The demonstrators threw stones at police personnel during the clashes.

As of Wednesday, police had filed eight first information reports about the violence on Monday against 35 persons, 20 of whom had been arrested.

‘Mohammed’ Deepak incident

On January 26, alleged Bajrang Dal members had gone to the shop of an elderly Muslim man, Vakeel Ahmed, in Pauri Garhwal district and objected to him using the word “Baba” in the name of his establishment.

Kumar and another person, Vijay Rawat, had objected to the mob’s actions.

In a video of the incident that was later widely shared on social media, Kumar is seen asking the group why other shops were allowed to use the word “Baba”, but Ahmed’s shop was not. He said the shop is more than 30 years old and questioned why its name should be changed.

When asked his name, Kumar replied: “My name is Mohammad Deepak.”

Soon after their argument with the mob, an FIR was filed against Kumar and Rawat in late January based on a complaint by two persons who are members of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad. The FIR invoked charges of rioting, causing hurt and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace.

The Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad are part of a group of Hindutva outfits led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The members of the Hindutva groups, in their complaint, claimed that Kumar and Rawat stole their watches and money, and shouted casteist abuses at them.

Subsequently, a group of about 40 persons gathered near Kumar’s gym and shouted slogans against him. The protesters also blocked a national highway.

Kumar had filed a complaint against the persons who had gathered in front of his gym. However, the police had registered the case based on the complaint of an officer against unidentified persons in connection with the protests.

Edited by Sneha.

The Election Commission has directed poll panels in states where the special intensive revision of electoral rolls has been completed to conduct an exercise for reinstating through Form 6 eligible voters who may have been wrongly removed from the voter lists.

The directive on Thursday came amid political parties, activist and civil society groups raising concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the SIR. They have also been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the alleged irregularities in the conduct of elections.

However, after the drive was announced, former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi said that Form 6 cannot be filled by deleted voters as it is only for new voters.

“All those who have been forced to fill it have committed a criminal offence carrying one year prison,” he said on social media. “EC officials who forced them are abetters to crime. This press note shows ECI’s abetment!”

The poll panel announced that booth-level officers will compare the electoral roll prepared after the revision of voter lists to those before the exercise and identify persons whose names “were there in the pre-SIR roll but who are not included” in the new rolls.

The Election Commission also directed the booth-level officers to undertake house-to-house survey of voters identified during the process, ascertain their current status and facilitate their enrolment through Form 6 wherever the person is found to be eligible.

The booth-level officers may cover at least 20 to 25 voters in a week “so as to complete this exercise within a period of about one month”, the poll panel said.

The officers will share the list of new enrolments with the booth-level agents of political parties, the Election Commission said.

The electoral registration officer will act “as deemed fit” in these cases.

At the end of the exercise, booth-wise lists would be shared by the electoral registration officer with the representatives of political parties, giving them a further opportunity for enrolment of any voters who have been left out.

The poll panel said that booth-level camps would also be organised to facilitate the submission of applications for such enrolments.

The Opposition has said that 13.8 crore voters had been removed from the voter lists of 31 states and Union Territories so far. This accounts for 14.6% of India’s 94.7 crore voters before the exercise began in 2025.

Not applicable to cases in Bengal tribunals

The Election Commission’s drive to reinstate eligible voters wrongly deleted from the voters lists will not be applicable to lakhs of persons in West Bengal whose appeals are pending in appellate tribunals as the cases are under adjudication, The Hindu quoted an unidentified poll panel official as saying.

The exercise to reinstate them would otherwise create parallel re-enrolment routes, one through the tribunals and the other by filing Form 6, the newspaper reported.

However, the booth-level officers in the state will check for eligible voters who may have been wrongly removed after the enumeration phase for being absent during the process, marked as dead or duplicate voters, or having shifted.

Form 6 changes

On September 26, the Election Commission had said that the old version of Form 6 will be used in periods when the SIR is not underway. It said that the declaration attached to Form 6 for the voter roll revision exercise had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

This came three days after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that two of the Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

One of their objections pertained to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6.

The new form asked applicants to state whether they or their parents or grandparents were part of the last special intensive revision of electoral rolls. Although the new declaration is not marked as mandatory, applicants cannot submit the online form without filling it.

Joshi and Sandhu had objected to the change, saying that it could not be made without amending the rules. Section 28 of the 1950 Representation of the People Act says that only the Union government can amend the rules governing electoral forms, including Form 6.

On Friday, the Cockroach Janta Party, political parties, activists and civil society groups held protests in Delhi and Mumbai demanding action against Kumar, and raised concerns about the functioning of the poll panel. More than 700 protesters and political leaders were reportedly detained by the Delhi Police.

Also read: ‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes

Musicians stage a unique protest at Mumbai's Shivaji Park demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar's resignation.

Credit: Naresh Fernandes (@tajmahalfoxtrot) pic.twitter.com/QKAxxtfeWL

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial
• Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court

The Cockroach Janta Party political campaign on Friday said it will launch a march to Delhi and hold a protest at Jantar Mantar on October 10 if Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar does not resign.

The announcement came after protests by several groups in Delhi and Mumbai earlier in the day. The demonstrators were demanding action against Kumar, and raised concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

“If Delhi Police tries to stop us, wherever they stop us will become our Jantar Mantar,” Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the political campaign, said on social media. “Ours will be a peaceful andolan.”

The Cockroach Janta Party said that “it is up to the government and the Delhi Police whether they respect our right to peaceful protest or repeat the brutality we witnessed on July 20”.

The campaign said that its protest is a fight to save democracy, and called on “every citizen who wants free and fair elections” to join.

On July 20, during the youth protests against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations, several demonstrators were injured after the security personnel in Delhi used lathis, fired tear gas and pellet guns to disperse the crowd.

The Left parties and their affiliated groups, including the All India Students’ Association, said that they will continue their protest at Jantar Mantar on Saturday.

The protests on Friday

On Friday, more than 700 protesters and political leaders were detained by the police in Delhi.

Those detained near Jantar Mantar included Aam Aadmi Party’s Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj, and Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha. All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora was also detained. All persons detained were reportedly released later in the day.

Delhi Police detained several protesters on their way to Jantar Mantar, where they planned to protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and demand his resignation. Deputy Commissioner of Police Sachin Sharma said that “permission has not been granted for any type”… pic.twitter.com/Nk8fAEhRkP

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded, The Hindu reported.

The authorities on Friday also closed the entry and exit at 12 Delhi Metro stations, including Lok Kalyan Marg near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk in Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the protest site. Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, INA, Chawri Bazaar, New Delhi and Barakhamba Road were also affected.

The Cockroach Janta Party also held a protest in Mumbai against Kumar. The campaign had sought permission to demonstrate at Shivaji Park, but the Mumbai Police denied it. Dipke had said on Monday that the campaign would launch a “jail bharo andolan”, or mass voluntary arrest movement.

As hundreds hit the street to demand resignation of CEC #GyaneshKumar, @sighyush reports on how the Delhi Police is detaining protesters from the street that leads to #JantarMantar. pic.twitter.com/qj4ddPP9MK

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Demands for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

“We are living in Mumbai for decades, so why is our right to vote being questioned?” asks a woman whose family members' names were deleted from the voter roll during the recently concluded Spcial Intensive Revision in Maharashtra.@knowleena reports from #Shivajipark in #Mumbai pic.twitter.com/mZ9024nJwX

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: ‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes

On 4 August 1924, Sitaram Keshav Bole moved a resolution in the Bombay Legislative Council granting untouchables access to public water bodies, wells, dharmashalas, schools, courts and hospitals. Three years later, it was this resolution that was invoked by BR Ambedkar, a lawyer who would go on to lead India’s Dalit rights movement, as he led thousands of so-called untouchables to Mahad to drink water from a public water tank that had been barred to them.

The Mahad satyagraha was a critical moment in the anti-caste movement – a movement whose young leader, Ambedkar, had been mentored by Bole since 1907.

Just over a decade later, in 1938, Bole – a man who had worked for decades on behalf of underprivileged castes and classes – became president of the Bombay Provincial Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist organisation. This contradiction at the heart of Bole’s life has gone almost entirely unexamined.

Since branches were established in Maharashtra from 1923, the Hindu Mahasabha there had been dominated by Brahmins. Its politics centred on the challenges its leaders perceived from other religions, particularly Islam. Caste reform, the abolition of untouchability and the concerns of farmers and labourers were never part of its core agenda.

If anything, these issues became a point of contestation and conflict between the Hindu mahasabha on the one hand and the non-Brahmin movement and Ambedkar’s Dalit politics on the other. Bole’s later positions, it would seem, transformed him into a living paradox.

Caste and its early wounds

Bole was born into the Bhandari caste on June 29, 1869, in Palshet, in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district. Today, the Bhandaris in the Konkan region are classified among the Other Backward Classes. Caste discrimination entered Bole’s life early and stayed with him, sometimes through what he witnessed himself, sometimes through the ill-treatment meted out to people close to him.

Dhananjay Keer, in his biography of Bole, records some incidents. Brahmin children routinely addressed Bole’s elderly grandfather by his first name. Once, a Brahmin talathi (village accountant) invited Bole and his uncle home for a meal, then made them eat in the outer veranda and clean their own plates.

Though the Satyashodhak Samaj, started by Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, and other reform movements had already taken root in the region in the last few decades of the 19th century, their reach was uneven. Social hierarchies in villages in the Konkan had barely changed even in the 1930s, Keer says.

Bole’s early brush with caste discrimination and a more considered awareness of inequality that grew through his education in Mumbai prompted him to turn to social work. While still a student, he and some associates founded the Dnyanvardhak Mandali (Society for the Advancement of Knowledge), which organised lectures by eminent people. For a time, it even ran a night school for children from underprivileged backgrounds.

Broad reform vision

By the 1880s, the challenge to Brahmin dominance in politics, economy and culture was making non-Brahmin communities increasingly aware of their own condition and their rights.

The Brahman Sabha, established in Bombay in 1888 to safeguard Brahmin caste interests, deepened the sense of exclusion among members of other castes. Partly in response to this, the Maratha Aikyechhu Sabha was founded around the same time to spread education among Hindu castes that had lagged behind.

From 1891, Bole became associated with the work of the Sabha, serving as its secretary for nine years. He later became its president. In the same period, in 1890, at the age of 21, he founded the Kitte Bhandari Aikyavardhak Mandal, chiefly to resolve internal disputes within his own Bhandari community and help members advance through education.

Even so, Bole’s reformist outlook was not narrow or parochial. He expected educated individuals within each caste to reform their own communities but held that castes where education and reform had already spread bore a duty not to stop there – they had also to work for other, educationally backward castes. Only through this, he wrote in the Mandal’s manifesto, could Hindu society as a whole be reformed.

Contemporaries corroborate this broader vision: essays gathered for a volume to commemorate Bole’s birth-centenary in 1969 recall that he used caste-linked scholarships to put children from Koli, Bhandari, Maratha and other backward castes through school, so that they would be capable of reforming their own communities. His idea of Hindu society, these accounts insist, ran “from Brahmin to untouchable”.

Mill workers, political career

Bole’s energies soon spread well beyond caste-reform circles, though not beyond the logic driving them. For Bole, labour and caste were two parts of the same hierarchy. At the First Conference of Workers in December 1919, he argued that educating labourers was essential to their battle against capitalists and Brahmin priests alike, the two forces he held responsible for their condition.

In 1909, a wave of mill closures in Bombay left thousands of textile workers unpaid. Bole, with Harishchandra Anandrao Talcherkar and Bhiwaji Ramji Nare, responded by founding the Kamgar Hitvardhak Sabha, one of the city’s earliest organised labour bodies, which mediated strikes.

It also published a pamphlet arguing for European-style unions with strike funds and legislative representation for workers. Labour historian VB Karnik later credited the three men for stepping in at a time when Bombay’s mill workers had, in effect, no guardians.

Alongside this, Bole’s political career was growing. Through the Deccan Rayat Association (1916) and the Lok Sangh (1918), founded with the backing of Shahu Maharaj, the Kolhapur ruler and patron of the non-Brahmin movement, Bole pushed for non-Brahmin and depressed-class representation in the legislature and local boards.

He also resisted Maratha dominance within the non-Brahmin movement itself, a position that was among the factors for the party’s later splits.

Elected to the Bombay Legislative Council in 1920 and serving until 1936, he took up causes ranging from free primary education to the abolition of begging. He was sceptical of Gandhi’s non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements on the grounds that an unorganised, illiterate working class had more to lose than gain from confrontations it could not sustain.

Land, priests and legislative battles

Two of Bole’s toughest legislative fights show the same instinct at work against entrenched rural power. One was the khoti-kul dispute in Ratnagiri and Kulaba (now called Raigad), which ran through the 1920s. Hereditary landlords, or khots, extracted revenue from tenant-cultivators, or kul, under terms the tenants had little power to contest.

Many of these khots were upper-caste and many were aligned with the Congress and the Swaraj Party. Bole, together with his colleague AN Surve, repeatedly raised the plight of these tenants in the legislative council.

Around the same time, he backed the joshi-watan Bill, which sought to curtail the hereditary privileges enjoyed by village priests or joshis and other village functionaries.

Both bills attracted fierce resistance from the Swaraj Party and the Hindu Mahasabha, many of whose leaders were themselves landlords or hereditary priests with a direct financial and social stake in the status quo. However, both eventually passed.

Taken together with the 1924 resolution on access for the depressed classes to water and dharmashalas, these battles mark Bole as a legislator willing to take on landlords and priests alike, well before such positions became common currency in Bombay politics.

Turn towards the Hindu Mahasabha

But by the late 1930s, the ground beneath him had shifted: the non-Brahmin party had splintered, the Congress was dominating provincial politics, and communal lines were hardening across the country – a process that would accelerate with the Muslim League’s 1940 demand for a separate Muslim state.

What hadn’t changed was Bole’s own belief in a casteless, unified Hindu society, the same idea that had driven his reform work for four decades. Contesting as an independent candidate for the reserved Maratha and Other seat, Bole lost the 1937 election to the Congress candidate. He turned to the Hindu Mahasabha soon after, becoming the president of Bombay Provincial Hindu Mahasabha in 1938.

Through the 1940s, he aligned closely with VD Savarkar, the Hindutva ideologue who was leading the organisation.

During World War II, Bole backed the idea of a Hindu Sarakshak Dal to “militarise” Hindus. After the communal riots of the early 1940s, he denounced Gandhian non-violence. He also opposed Partition to the last.

Bole presented this as being compatible with his old commitment to a casteless, unified Hindu order, which Savarkar’s Hindutva rhetoric seemed to promise. In practice, though, that rhetoric functioned less as a commitment to caste equality than as a means of mobilising Hindus electorally against Muslims.

His position on caste inequality itself did not visibly soften. But that cannot fully absorb what his alignment meant in practice – active participation, in his final years, in a communal politics that deepened Hindu-Muslim polarisation on the eve of Partition.

There is a more personal thread worth noting. Bole’s father had died from injuries he received during a Hindu-Muslim riot in 1893, decades before Bole’s public life took this turn. It is a loss Bole never wrote about directly but it would be too neat to treat this as the explanation for his Hindu Mahasabha years.

A scattered legacy

Bole’s near-absence from standard and popular histories of Maharashtra’s reform movements is telling. Unlike Phule or Ambedkar, he built no enduring institutions that later movements could claim as inheritance. His work was scattered across the Kamgar Hitvardhak Sabha, the Maratha Aikyechhu Sabha, the non-Brahmin party and, finally, the Hindu Mahasabha, an organisation that anti-caste movements have rightly treated as an object of critique.

The first four decades of his life enabled some of the most consequential moments of Dalit assertion in colonial India. His final decades until he died in 1961 leave him unclaimable by any single political tradition.

Bole belonged to a generation of non-Brahmin reformers, shaped by the Satyashodhak Samaj but working before Ambedkar had built an independent Dalit political idiom.

He saw caste reform, labour rights and Hindu consolidation as compatible projects. That such a combination now reads as contradictory says as much about how far India’s categories of caste and religion have changed since his time as it does about Bole himself. But those categories were not entirely fluid even in his Bole’s lifetime, and his later choices were his own to make. Tellingly, his personal bond with Ambedkar survived even this final turn.

Whatever else changed in his politics after 1938, the two men’s regard for each other did not. Bole’s resolution helped make possible one of the century’s defining anti-caste movements. Yet the same man later became a leading figure in a politics that worked against that very movement.

Aniket Lakhpati is an Academic Associate for History, Philosophy and Political Science at Nayanta University, Pune.

Six allegedly undocumented Bangladeshi migrants were arrested in Mumbai, ANI quoted the police as saying on Friday.

The six persons have been accused of providing forged Aadhaar and other identity documents to Bangladeshi citizens to help them enter India, ANI reported.

Forty forged Aadhaar cards, Permanent Account Number cards, railway tickets with QR codes and other Indian identity documents were recovered from them, the news agency quoted the Mumbai Police as saying.

Since the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025, the police in several states, most of them ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asking them to prove that they are Indian citizens.

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

Scroll has also reported on several cases of persons who were forced into Bangladesh being brought back to India, as the authorities had failed to follow the process laid down by the Union home ministry for such deportations.

In May 2025, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs directed the states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Another Muslim man from Bengal pushed into Bangladesh despite voter ID and passport, says family
• Bengal again: Muslim man and three sons picked up from home. Police say they have been ‘deported’

The Punjab Police on Friday arrested two persons for allegedly provoking students of Chitkara University to protest by spreading rumours on social media that two women students had gone missing from the institute’s hostel, The Indian Express reported.

The unrest at the private university began on the night of September 25 after rumours circulated on social media that two students had gone missing from their hostel.

The students allegedly damaged two police vehicles and assaulted a police officer during the protest. They also alleged that the officer was under the influence of alcohol when he reached the campus to control the situation.

On Friday, Patiala Senior Superintendent of Police Harmandeep Singh Hans said the arrested persons, Himanshu and Aryan, were former students of the university, The Indian Express reported. They allegedly incited students by spreading misleading messages in multiple social media groups.

They have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita pertaining to attempt to murder, wrongful confinement, obstructing a public servant, assault on a public servant, criminal intimidation, wrongful restraint, disturbing public peace, rioting, unlawful assembly and criminal conspiracy, the newspaper reported.

The first information report was registered on September 29, and police are trying to apprehend 10 other persons named in the FIR, the officer said.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Several protesters and political leaders, including Aam Aadmi Party’s Saurabh Bharadwaj and Atishi, were detained near Jantar Mantar in Delhi ahead of a proposed demonstration to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Manoj Kumar Jha and All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora were also detained by the Delhi Police.

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded.

In Mumbai, the Cockroach Janta Party also began a protest demanding Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The exercise has resulted in crores of Indians being deleted from the rolls.Read on.

Dehradun gym owner Deepak Kumar, who had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in January, was arrested for allegedly assaulting a trader. Kumar had purportedly uploaded a social media post about the Ujjain municipal authority demolishing a portion of a mosque as part a road-widening project ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela.

The complainant, Sanjeev Tonk, said in his complaint that he had commented on Kumar’s post.

Kumar then went to Tonk’s shop and assaulted him, said Sarvesh Panwar, the senior superintendent of police at Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal. Read on.

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that India and the US were nearing the end of negotiations for a trade deal, but added that an agreement was not imminent. The official said that the two sides had identified a “universe of items that are sticking points”.

Greer also said US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could speak again “very soon” to assess progress of the trade deal. Read on.

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

Few people know more about India’s courts than Indira Jaising. In a career spanning more than half a century, Jaising has practised both at the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court.

On this episode of ‘Scroll Adda’, she speaks to Shoaib Daniyal on the ills plaguing the judiciary. Dynasty has taken over the courts, she says, leading to a lack of intellectual development. Bright young lawyers without family contacts are forced to leave litigation.

The judiciary is not doing its job of being a check on the executive. Jaising argues that this government is simply ignoring the Constitution and the courts are unable to stop it. ‘The reason for Indian democracy’s downslide is the collapse of the judiciary,’ she says.

Meanwhile, public movements like the Jantar Mantar protests, sparked by the Chief Justice’s “cockroach” comment, show that anger against the judiciary is boiling over into the streets.

Producer: Raghav Kakkar

Host: Shoaib Daniyal

Editor: Hyder Habib

Several protesters and political leaders, including Aam Aadmi Party’s Saurabh Bharadwaj and Atishi, and Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Manoj Kumar Jha, were detained near Jantar Mantar in Delhi ahead of a proposed demonstration demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora was also detained by the Delhi Police, The Hindu reported.

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded, The Hindu reported.

The protesters are demanding action against Kumar and have raised concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

In Mumbai, the Cockroach Janta Party also began its protest against the chief election commissioner.

Delhi Police detained several protesters on their way to Jantar Mantar, where they planned to protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and demand his resignation. Deputy Commissioner of Police Sachin Sharma said that “permission has not been granted for any type”… pic.twitter.com/Nk8fAEhRkP

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Here’s more on this and other updates:

Protesters detained in Delhi

• Around 100 to 150 protesters were stopped by the police before they could reach Jantar Mantar, Newslaundry reported. 

शांतिपूर्ण प्रदर्शन के बावजूद दिल्ली पुलिस ने मुझे और विधायक संजीव झा जी को गिरफ्तार किया।

लेकिन आंदोलन रुकेगा नहीं! सभी साथी जंतर-मंतर पहुँचें और शांतिपूर्ण प्रदर्शन करें। pic.twitter.com/sRiQTdpOD9

— Saurabh Bharadwaj (@Saurabh_MLAgk) October 2, 2026

• The police said that orders prohibiting a gathering of five or more persons under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita remain in force in the New Delhi district. 
• On Friday, Deputy Commissioner of Police Sachin Sharma said that “permission has not been granted for any type of protest”, PTI reported.

#WATCH | Delhi | Heavy Security heightened at Janpath in view of a call for protest by activists, political leaders and civil society representatives against the Election Commissioner

Entry and exit gates of the nearby metro stations of Janpath, Patel Chowk, Central… pic.twitter.com/TUXF2ScIs5

— ANI (@ANI) October 2, 2026

Metro stations shut

• Entry and exit at 12 stations, including Lok Kalyan Marg near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk in Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the protest site, were closed. Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, INA, Chawri Bazaar, New Delhi and Barakhamba Road were also affected.

• Interchange facilities remained available at Rajiv Chowk, Mandi House, New Delhi and Central Secretariat.

• The Cockroach Janta Party, led by founder Abhijeet Dipke, started the protest Kumar in Mumbai at 4 pm. The campaign had sought permission to demonstrate at Shivaji Park, but Mumbai Police denied it. Dipke had said the party would launch a “jail bharo andolan”, or mass voluntary arrest movement.

Scenes from the scheduled protest at Mumbai's Shivaji Park, as hundreds have already gathered to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

📷Scroll Staff pic.twitter.com/LScK3BiN6T

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Demands for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha and Tanya Shrivastava.

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Thursday said that India and the US were nearing the end of negotiations for a trade deal, but added that an agreement was not imminent as the two sides had identified a “universe of items that are sticking points”, ANI reported.

“We are continually trying to finish the trade deal with India…,” he said.

Greer’s remarks came a day after he met Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal during the G20 Trade Ministers’ Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The US is hosting the G20 this year.

Greer described his conversation with Goyal as “very constructive”.

“At the same time, I do not think there is something imminent, but we truly have identified the universe of items that are sticking points,” ANI quoted him as saying. “We are working diligently towards them.”

Greer also said US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could speak again “very soon” to assess progress of the trade deal.

On Wednesday, Modi and Trump reviewed progress in bilateral cooperation, including trade, defence, energy and critical technologies, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

Greer’s statements came weeks after Trump gave his assent to a legislation that allows him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on India and other countries that purchase Russian oil and gas.

India has increased its purchases of Russian oil this year, while New Delhi and Washington negotiate a preliminary trade deal. India’s import of Russian oil rose to an 11-month high in April, following the US and Israel’s war on Iran.

Before this, India had reduced its purchases of Russian oil, which fell to a 38-month low in December.

Over the past year, there have been diplomatic tensions between Washington and New Delhi over India’s continued purchases of Russian crude.

In July, the US imposed a 10% tariff on goods purchased from India and 16 other countries, citing inadequate measures to prevent the use of forced labour in production. India has denied the allegations.

The Trump administration had in August 2025 imposed a 25% punitive levy on India for buying oil from Russia amid the Ukraine war. This had taken the combined US tariff rate to 50%.

In January, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that India had stopped buying Russian oil after Trump imposed the punitive tariff.

In February, after New Delhi and Washington agreed to an interim trade deal, Trump removed the additional 25% punitive levy linked to the purchase of Russian oil.

The US Treasury had later paused global sanctions on Russian oil shipments that were already in transit before March 11, amid supply disruptions caused by war in West Asia.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer V Anbu Kumar on Thursday said that legal action would be initiated against anyone found to be filing bulk Form 7 applications to remove voters during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The directive was issued after Chief Minister DK Shivakumar and Congress legislators protested outside the election officer’s office.

On Tuesday, The Hindu reported that of the 4,000 applications filed to delete voters from Karnataka’s electoral rolls, a majority targeted Muslims. The newspaper report is based on data from Form 10, which consolidates details of Form 7 applications.

In a circular sent to district election officers and electoral registration officers in the state, Kumar said his office had received reports of bulk Form 7 applications being filed. The reports alleged that some applications were not genuine, said Kumar, directing officials to investigate the claims.

Shivakumar withdrew the protest after the announcement.

The chief minister stated electoral officials had been told to approve Form-7 applications only for deaths or duplicate entries.

Death claims must include a death certificate, while duplicate cases must include the second voter ID number in the remarks, the chief minister quoted Kumar as directing electoral officials.

The alleged irregularities

In two cases, The Hindu found already filled and printed Form 7s with names of voters whose deletion was being sought. Only the objectors’ names were handwritten.

In Vijayapura district’s Babaleshwar Assembly constituency, 1,373 Form 7 applications were received on September 22. Of these, 99.2%, or 1,363, were filed by just 10 persons, largely against Muslim voters in polling stations where the objectors themselves were not registered.

Similar patterns were reported in Bhalki in Bidar district, where more than 1,700 deletions were sought by 30 persons on September 23. Several of those who filed multiple objections on that day had also filed applications the previous day.

Shivakumar has alleged that large numbers of Form 7 applications were filed to remove eligible voters and has accused the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Janata Dal (Secular) workers of being involved, The Hindu reported.

“This process was carried out by targeting voters from minority communities, backward classes, Dalits, and economically weaker sections,” Shivakumar said on social media.

The BJP has rejected the allegations. The party’s Karnataka unit chief BY Vijayendra said there was nothing wrong with asking the Election Commission to verify voters suspected of being ineligible, adding that names found to be valid would remain on the rolls, The Hindu reported.

“In the beginning, Muslim voters were pooled together in masjids and kalyana mantaps, officers also called to the spot, and voters were added to the list,” he claimed. “There is a suspicion that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants have made it to the voter list in some constituencies. We have flagged them.”

On Thursday, the police registered five first information reports over the alleged irregularities.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

The Opposition and civil society groups have been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over revelations in a September 23 report by The Indian Express.

The newspaper reported that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were related to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

“Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,” the poll panel stated. “They are a part of the decision-making process before a final decision is taken.”

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

Dehradun gym owner Deepak Kumar, who had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in January, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly assaulting a trader, reported The Indian Express.

Kumar had purportedly uploaded a social media post about the Ujjain municipal authority demolishing a portion of a mosque as part a road-widening project ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela, reported The Times of India.

The complainant, Sanjeev Tonk, said in his complaint that he had commented on Kumar’s post.

Kumar then went to Tonk’s shop and assaulted him on Thursday, Sarvesh Panwar, the senior superintendent of police at Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal, told The Times of India.

The first information report against Kumar was initially registered under provisions pertaining to criminal intimidation and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, reported The Indian Express.

The police said that they later added sections pertaining to promoting enmity between different groups and voluntarily causing hurt to the FIR.

“Considering the available evidence, the activities of the accused and the possibility of disturbance to peace and law and order in the area, Kotdwar Police took prompt and effective action and arrested Deepak under Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita,” the newspaper quoted the police as stating.

Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita allows preventive arrest of a person to stop a serious, cognizable crime.

Demolition in Ujjain

A road near the Shahi Masjid is being widened ahead of the Simhastha Kumbh Mela to be held in March 2028. The event is held every 12 years on the banks of the Kshipra River.

The administration’s plans to demolish portions of the mosque had led to violence near the structure on Monday, with the police firing tear gas at Muslim residents protesting against the notice. The demonstrators threw stones at police personnel during the clashes.

As of Wednesday, police had filed eight first information reports about the violence on Monday against 35 persons, 20 of whom had been arrested.

‘Mohammed’ Deepak incident

On January 26, alleged Bajrang Dal members had gone to the shop of an elderly Muslim man, Vakeel Ahmed, in Pauri Garhwal district and objected to him using the word “Baba” in the name of his establishment.

Kumar and another person, Vijay Rawat, had objected to the mob’s actions.

In a video of the incident that was later widely shared on social media, Kumar is seen asking the group why other shops were allowed to use the word “Baba”, but Ahmed’s shop was not. He said the shop is more than 30 years old and questioned why its name should be changed.

When asked his name, Kumar replied: “My name is Mohammad Deepak.” He later explained that he intended to convey that he was an Indian and that everyone is equal before the law.

Kumar subsequently posted a video on social media, in which he said: “I am neither a Hindu, neither a Muslim, nor a Sikh, nor a Christian. First and foremost, I am a human being. Because after I die, I have to answer to God and to humanity, not to any religion.”

Soon after their argument with the mob, an FIR was filed against Kumar and Rawat in late January based on a complaint by two persons who are members of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad. The FIR invoked charges of rioting, causing hurt and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace.

The Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad are part of a group of Hindutva outfits led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The members of the Hindutva groups, in their complaint, claimed that Kumar and Rawat stole their watches and money, and shouted casteist abuses at them.

Subsequently, a group of about 40 persons gathered near Kumar’s gym and shouted slogans against him. The protesters also blocked a national highway.

Kumar had filed a complaint against the persons who had gathered in front of his gym. However, the police had registered the case based on the complaint of an officer against unidentified persons in connection with the protests.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

In 1936, the African American scholar and activist WEB Du Bois wrote an article for The Aryan Path, a magazine published out of Mumbai that advocated Theosophical views but also carried articles on contemporary political events and philosophical ideas. The magazine was edited by BP Wadia, a Theosophist and a trade unionist.

The editors had asked Du Bois to write an article about the special features of African American culture. Du Bois asked if he could instead write about “The Methods of Increasing the Interest and Knowledge between Indians and American Negroes”. He titled the article “The Clash of Colour”.

Nearly a century later, his observations sound very contemporary. The difficulty in establishing any relationship between Indians and African Americans, he argued, lay “in the almost utter lack of knowledge which these two groups of people have of each other”. American schools taught very little of Indian history, and educated Indians tended to believe American and English propaganda about African Americans.

That is why, Du Bois said, it was important for Indians and African Americans to meet and know each other. He knew that Howard Thurman, a theologian, philosopher and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr, was undertaking his tour to India at that time.

Du Bois also observed that Indians who visit the United States often find themselves separated from the black world. When traveling in the American South, an Indian traveller could avoid Jim Crow discrimination by wearing traditional dress. Du Bois was writing at a time when Hitler had come to power in Germany and his ideas of a superior “Aryan race” had become internationally known.

Perhaps with the name of the magazine in mind, Du Bois wrote that Indians might be tempted to regard themselves as “Aryan” rather than “coloured”, and closer to Germany and England than to Africa and China. However, this was wishful thinking and European exploitation assigned the same place to “the black slave, the Chinese coolie and the Indian labourer”.

Du Bois made another argument that he had previously made, allegorically, in his novel Dark Princess. The problems of African Americans and Indians should be understood as part of a “world-wide clash of colour” and the “union of the darker races” could “bring a new and beautiful world” – but only if these movements and their leadership understood the importance of their own labouring masses.

The Aryan Path may not have had a large readership, but it had a considerable intellectual influence. Ram Manohar Lohia, who was then secretary of the foreign department of the All India Congress Committee, read Du Bois’ article and wrote to him, assuring him that the freedom struggle in India attached “the highest significance to the Negro front of anti-Imperialism”.

A different response came from NS Subbarao, who had been adviser to the Indian Princes’ Delegation during the Round Table Conferences. Subbarao wrote a rejoinder to Du Bois, taking exception to his statement that Indians may see themselves as “Aryans” and distinguished race from language. He claimed that “the strangeness” that Indians feel when coming into contact with Africans did not represent racial superiority but “non-parity of culture”.

Subbarao further argued that the hope of mankind lay in the darker races accepting humiliation and suffering while seeking cooperation of the white world for the sake of the “larger good”.

Du Bois and Subbarao subsequently wrote another response in the magazine. Their disagreement was fundamental. “I believe in man; in men of all colours and races,” Du Bois wrote, but he refused to give up his personhood “and acquiesce spinelessly in continued suppression”.

Du Bois gave a counterexample to show the kind of contact between Indians and African Americans that he felt was necessary: Lala Lajpat Rai. Lajpat Rai had gone to America in 1914. This was his second visit to the US and it was partly motivated by his wish to study the African American condition in the US. He devoted a significant part of his book on America to a study of the African American situation.

Lajpat Rai met Du Bois while in the US and the two became friends. They met on several occasions. Later, Lajpat Rai asked Du Bois for assistance when replying to Katherine Mayo’s Mother India with his Unhappy India. In turn, Du Bois sought Lajpat Rai’s comments on his manuscript Dark Princess.

After Lajpat Rai was killed in 1928 following a brutal assault by the British, Du Bois wrote, “I especially admired his restraint and sweet temper. If a man of his sort can be called a Revolutionist and beaten to death by a great civilized government, then indeed revolution becomes a duty to all right thinking men.”

While Lajpat Rai shaped Du Bois’ understanding of the Indian freedom struggle, Du Bois may have influenced Lala Lajpat Rai’s evolving views on labour and imperialism.

His friendship with Lajpat Rai was part of a long engagement that Du Bois had with India. He wrote to Gandhi and Tagore, and both sent him messages for The Crisis, the journal he edited. By the 1930s, he had met Tagore and established a wide range of contacts in Indian society.

These interactions contributed to Du Bois’ worldview, as revealed in a striking section of his unpublished manuscript, Russia and America. Du Bois imagined a new ideal for the world, “Marxian in its division of income according to need” but “distinctly Asiatic”.

“It would take a new way of thinking on Asiatic lines to work this out.” wrote Du Bois. This could happen “through the philosophy of Gandhi and Tagore, of Japan and China”, to “create a vast democracy into which the ruling dictatorship of the proletariat would fuse and deliquesce”. If this were done, “socialism”, instead of “becoming a stark negation of the freedom of thought”, “would expand to a great democracy of the spirit”.

This remarkable formulation, in which Du Bois brought together the philosophy of Gandhi, Tagore and Asian civilisations with the lessons of the Russian Revolution, was consistent with Du Bois’ understanding of 20th-century history. He repeatedly described the Russian Revolution and the freeing of India as the greatest events of the 20th century. In one article, he went further to describe the freedom of India as the singularly great event of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Du Bois personally knew the leadership of the freedom struggle but had very wide contact with sections of Indian society including the cultural and peace movements in the country. His admiration for this struggle related to his unique approach to world history and social analysis. His writing and influence became part of the worldview that shaped the relationship between African and Asian anti-colonial movements. Unfortunately, though he considered it one of his life’s ambitions to visit India, he could never visit the country.

Much has changed since Du Bois wrote in The Aryan Path. Most significantly, the US civil rights movement transformed the relationship between the Indian and the Black freedom struggles. The use of Gandhian methods of nonviolent social change in the American South greatly increased the interest and understanding of the black freedom movement in India. Martin Luther King Jr visited India in 1959 for a month-long trip and met Nehru and Vinoba Bhave, among others.

The expansion of citizenship rights won during the struggle opened a path for Indians, among others, to immigrate to the United States. Indians now constitute a very significant minority in the United States, and are very visible in the top echelons of American intellectual, political and economic life.

Nevertheless, Du Bois’ argument in The Aryan Path remains worth revisiting. The black world, he wrote, is “a world largely apart and organized; in its churches, industry and amusement, largely separate from the white world. It is not easily penetrated by strangers, except in lines of commercialized entertainment”.

Understanding the United States through the African American struggle for freedom substantially changes the way American society is understood. It helps us understand how the colour line in the United States is related to its global empire. WEB. Du Bois remains the central thinker for such an understanding. His call for Indians and African Americans to know each other was part of his reimagining of a different world.

The Intercivilizational Dialogue Project along with other organisations is undertaking a King-Du Bois Peace Pilgrimage to renew ties between India and Afro-America. More information here.

A portion of the Shahi Masjid in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain was damaged on Thursday when the municipal corporation was demolishing a minaret for a road-widening project, The Indian Express reported.

The minaret, which is a tower traditionally used to give the daily call to prayer, fell on the dome and first floor of the mosque, reported Maktoob Media. No one was injured.

The administration’s plans to demolish portions of the mosque had led to violence near the structure on Monday, with the police firing tear gas at Muslim residents protesting against the notice. The demonstrators threw stones at police personnel during the clashes.

The road near the mosque is being widened ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela to be held in March 2028. The event is held every 12 years on the banks of the Kshipra River.

Video shows the moment the minaret of India’s 600-year-old Ujjain mosque collapsed during demolition work for a road-widening project for a Hindu pilgrimage, triggering despair among Muslims onlookers.

Officials described it as an accident caused by faulty machinery. pic.twitter.com/2HmS4WpLdm

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 1, 2026

The Ujjain administration said that the damage to the mosque on Thursday was accidental, Maktoob Media reported.

Khaleeq ur Rahman, a Muslim religious leader in Ujjain, said the minaret fell after a strap on a crane being used to remove it broke, The Times of India reported.

He also pointed out that members of the Muslim community were demolishing portions of the mosque themselves after Monday’s violence.

An unidentified member of the Shahi Masjid committee asked why the administration had shown urgency in demolishing the minaret when “our people were removing” it, reported The Indian Express.

“Why did you have to intervene when the minarets were being removed?” asked the member.

Rahman appealed to the Muslim community to maintain peace.

“Make sure you don’t gather anywhere and say or write anything,” he was quoted as saying by Maktoob Media. It will only and only harm us. It is better to maintain calm and peace for now.”

Ujjain Collector Roshan Kumar Singh said that discussions were being held with members of the Muslim community.

After the incident, movement around the site was restricted and the area was barricaded, PTI reported. The police also said that photography and videography were prohibited within a 500-metre radius as a precaution while the work continued.

On Sunday night, police and municipal teams brought heavy machinery to the area, while several companies of police were also deployed.

As of Wednesday, police had filed eight first information reports about the violence on Monday against 35 persons, 20 of whom had been arrested, The Indian Express reported.

Edited by Sneha.

“These are only bye-elections, that’s all.”

Jharna Khatun, 22, frowned when she heard what Chief Justice Surya Kant had said in the Supreme Court on Monday. The judge’s dismissive response was in reaction to petitioners asking for cases related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal to be taken up urgently in light of the upcoming bye-polls.

Khatun had good reason to be displeased with the chief justice. She is one of the thousands who will not be able to vote in the bye-elections because her name was deleted from the voter list.

“Whenever elections come around, the mood is festive and we hope for change in our lives,” Khatun explained. “All our neighbours will experience this again, but not us. That is giving me a lot of grief.”

Her elder brother, Ibrahim Sheikh, whose name was also deleted along with hers, opposed the chief justice even more strongly. “Every vote holds value,” he stated. “You can never tell which vote could swing the result. People have even won elections by just one vote.”

For the second time in under six months, the siblings will watch the rest of Maradighi, a quiet hamlet dotted with ponds, queue up to vote at the village school – but not do so themselves. Their village falls in Murshidabad’s Rejinagar, one of the two Assembly seats in Bengal where bye-polls are scheduled on October 6.

Scroll spoke to several such deleted voters in Rejinagar who have for months been waiting for the Supreme Court-appointed tribunals to hear their appeals and restore their names to the electoral roll.

They now live in a state of legal limbo, fearful that their rights and status as citizens could be taken away. Most of them brought up the new state government’s late-night detention and deportation drive that has targeted deleted voters on the suspicion that they are undocumented migrants from Bangladesh. Others worried that they could stop receiving state welfare any moment, as Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has repeatedly threatened.

Living in fear

Abdul Alim Sheikh, a 64-year-old farmer from Maradighi whose name was deleted from the rolls, was so scared that he would be sent to Bangladesh that he did not eat or sleep for several days when the detentions began.

He used to work in Bihar when he was young, but vows to have never been east of Murshidabad in his life. “I may have to spend my old age in Bangladesh, if the government so wishes,” he joked wryly.

Even those from his family whose names made it to the voter list found it distressing to talk about the upcoming bye-elections. “I don’t feel like voting anymore,” his wife, Beli Bibi, complained.

“Not voting is out of the question,” Sheikh retorted. “We are citizens and we must vote.”

When asked what he made of the chief justice’s comment about bye-polls, he reiterated: “Those in power can do as they wish. But we cannot afford to waste our votes.”

About 12 km away in Begunbari village, Belifa Bibi, who rolls bidis for Rs 100 a day, was also worried that the police would take away her husband, Golam Nur Reja, and push him into Bangladesh. He was removed from the electoral roll because his surname did not match that of his father’s.

“I fear that they will come and take him away any moment,” the 42-year-old said. “I will vote for anyone who can get his name back into the voter list.”

In limbo

All the voters whom Scroll met had filed appeals challenging their exclusion from the electoral roll. However, it is unclear when their appeals will come up for hearing.

Only 3% of the 38 lakh appeals filed across Bengal have been decided so far, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court earlier this month. Of these, the voters in question were found to be genuine in 93% cases. In all of Rejinagar, only four appeals were decided in six months – all in favour of inclusion.

These numbers raise serious doubts about the manner in which the Election Commission carried out the special intensive revision of voter lists in Bengal.

In Rejinagar alone, the names of 3,923 voters were removed from the rolls for minor errors in their documents, according to an analysis conducted by the Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research organisation. It found almost all of them – 96% – to be Muslims.

A dangling sword

The aftermath of the deletions has left many feeling bitter in Rejinagar. Kulsom Bibi, 36, is the only member of her family who lost her right to vote because the person she paid to fill out her form made one tiny mistake: he put her details in the fields where her father’s details were supposed to be.

“I get so angry when I see politicians asking us to come to their public meetings before the vote,” she fumed as she cooked chicken at her home in Begunbari village. “I cannot forget how I had to keep running to Berhampore in that heat.”

Kulsom Bibi was referring to the district headquarters where she had to go repeatedly during and after the special intensive revision: first, to file an appeal against her exclusion, and then to make sure that she continues to receive government rations.

Under fire since its internal divisions became public knowledge, the Election Commission recently announced that officials will visit the homes of people who got notices for hearings. But it had extended no such relief to Bengalis, nearly 1.5 crore of whom received these notices earlier this year.

What upset Kulsom Bibi the most, though, was that she had stopped receiving a monthly cash transfer of Rs 1,500, which she used to get when Mamata Banerjee was the chief minister. “I bought medicines with that money,” she remembered, adding that she was diabetic.

Legally, deleted voters whose appeals are pending before tribunals are eligible to receive cash transfers from the government. In fact, the Bharatiya Janata Party has doubled the amount to Rs 3,000 after coming to power.

But in practice, many women whose names were deleted from the voter list have run into a wall while trying to enroll themselves for this scheme. Even those of them who have been getting the money are ill at ease.

“It could stop coming any time,” said Jaharbanu Bibi, a resident of Maradighi. “That is why I want my name to be included in the voter list. Already, I could not vote once. I was hoping that they would decide my appeal by now.”

Politicians apathetic?

Deleted voters are now left out of the election campaign. Politicians, who go door-to-door seeking votes, have stopped visiting their homes.

“The last time my MLA came by was during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections,” said Jharna Khatun, the woman quoted at the start of this piece. “If we could vote, all politicians would come here.”

When asked about this, Jamil Chowdhury, son of the former MLA Rabiul Alam Chowdhury, pleaded guilty. His father, he pointed out, had been too caught up with the crises confronting the Trinamool Congress to do anything for deleted voters.

“We are contesting this election only out of respect for Mamata Banerjee,” he stated, adding that the party had even lost its symbol. “We will look into the issues of deleted voters once we get our act together.”

Mohammed Sayeed, the candidate from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Rejinagar, promised that he would take up the cause of deleted voters if he wins the bye-election.

“Being a lawyer myself, I have helped many people file appeals,” he claimed. “If I win, I will voice their concerns in the Assembly as well.”

The High Court on Thursday directed the police to provide protection to the mother of the main accused in the killing of a 26-year-old man in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar area during Holi, Live Law reported.

The court was hearing a petition filed by the mother of the accused, Ismail. She had submitted that for the past two days, some residents of the area, including the family members of the erson who died, had been throwing stones and bricks at her home. Her counsel also showed the court CCTV footage to support the claim.

The court noted that it was a “serious situation”, Live Law reported.

On March 4, Tarun Bhutolia died after being severely injured in a clash during Holi celebrations. The clash began when a water balloon accidentally thrown by an 11-year-old girl from the third floor of a building fell on a Muslim woman standing below.

The incident had led to an argument between the two neighbouring families from different religious communities. Ismail has been in Tihar Jail since March 5.

On Thursday, Justice Girish Kathpalia said the accused’s mother could not be left vulnerable to violence regardless of the legal proceedings against her son.

“At least till the situation becomes normal, local police in Uttam Nagar shall ensure continuous round the clock deployment of sufficient police personnel in that area, especially in the lane where the house of the petitioner exists,” Live Law quoted the court as saying.

The Delhi Police assured the court that adequate police deployment would be made to prevent any untoward incidents in the area.

The court also asked the police to file a status report within a week. The matter will be next heard on October 16.

The 26-year-old’s killing had sparked tensions in the area. Several vehicles were damaged and some were set on fire during protests by residents, following which police and paramilitary personnel were deployed.

On March 14, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi sealed and demolished portions of 70 shops in a drive against alleged encroachments in the area. The drive targeted a row of eateries next to the Uttam Nagar police station, a few hundred metres from Bhutolia’s house.

Allegedly illegal portions of properties linked to persons accused in Bhutolia’s death were also demolished in subsequent days, before a Delhi High Court order temporarily halted further action.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Chhinari is a medium-sized village of about 80 households nestled in Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur district. Most of its residents are Adivasis from the Muria Gond community, while around 13 families belong to the Yadav community.

For two decades, the conflict between Maoist insurgents and the police violently disrupted their lives, bitterly dividing both Adivasi and Yadav families. Now, with the state announcing a victory over the Maoists, the residents of Chhinari are attempting to repair the ruptures in their social fabric and return to an older rhythm of life.

But this was proving to be difficult – or so I heard from local contacts in the area.

One Saturday in June, I decided to find out more by travelling to Chinnari to attend the weekly village meeting where residents gather to discuss matters of common concern.

Around 7 am, when I reached the village, I found both the young and the old were walking down to the meeting point – an open space that once held two Maoist memorials, but is now ringed by a newly built panchayat bhavan, a primary school and a community centre.

The two memorials, now razed to the ground, had been erected in the memory of Mangtu Vinod and Karuna Somari, Maoist cadres from Andhra Pradesh with adopted Adivasi names, who had been killed by the security forces in 2005, I was told. Six years later, the security forces had returned to the area and used explosives to blast away the memorials, the villagers said, as some of them sat down on the brick rubble that still lay scattered around.

The year 2011 also saw an exodus of many Yadav families from the village. This left an indelible mark on Chhinari and its residents, as I would eventually discover – a social wound left to fester for 15 years, its pain and scars still woven into the lives and memories of those who live here.

“Those who left the village, abandoned us to our circumstances,” said Manket Salaam, among those perched on the brick rubble and on narrow wooden planks fixed on tree stumps. “Can they simply return now as if nothing ever happened?”

Based on fragments of information shared by several villagers at the meeting and in subsequent conversations which often brimmed with anger and indignation, I gradually came to understand what had happened in Chhinari, and how deeply the events of all these years had shaped the lives of those who remained as well as those who left the village.

This is a story that is not unique to Chinnari – it echoes across the wider Bastar region, of which Narayanpur is a part. Until recently, the region was a stronghold of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), which waged an insurgency against the Indian state for over four decades. Over the past two years, however, the majority of its top leaders have either surrendered to the police or been killed.

As conflict abates in the villages, a painful search for truth and reconciliation has begun. Our series documents this process. This is the first part.

The first killing

In their quest to establish a parallel government in the forests of central India, the Maoists created an elaborate hierarchy. At the top was the regional committee called the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, which was divided into three bureaus, nine divisions and more than 20 area committees.

Chhinari came under the jurisdiction of the Bayanar area committee, one of four such committees under the Purvi Uttar Division, covering around 75 villages.

As the Maoists began making inroads into the Bayanar area in 2000, the same year that Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh, they identified Sukkanand Yadav as their contact person in Chinnari.

Even though the village had less than 15 Yadav families, the Adivasi-dominated village endorsed their choice. Sukkanand Yadav was “extremely helpful, vocal and a good leader,” recalled Jaggaram Salaam, a resident of Chinnari.

Sukkanand Yadav rose to become the president of the local unit of the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangh, or DAKMS, a mass organisation of the Maoist party. He came to be known by a pseudonym, Vijay.

Eleven years later, in October 2011, the police killed him in an alleged gunfight or “encounter”, identifying him as Negi Rawat, a Maoist cadre carrying a reward of Rs 5,000.

“There was no encounter,” said Sanjay Kumar, Sukkanand Yadav’s eldest son. “Security forces entered our house and shot him dead.”

Sanjay sat alongside his younger brother and other villagers as he recounted the events from 2011.

Then 16 years old, he recalled, he was enrolled in a government school in Daudhai, about 12 km from Chinnari, and had come home for a break when security personnel stormed their house and killed his father.

Did the family report the killing to the police? “There was no possibility in those years of going to the police to file a case against the forces,” he said.

While acknowledging that his father had been an active member of the DAKMS, Sanjay insisted he was not an armed Maoist and did not possess any weapons. “The police could have easily arrested him instead of killing him so brutally,” he said, as the others around him nodded in agreement.

An exodus

Sukkanand Yadav’s killing sparked a chain of reactions that opened up a social chasm in Chinnari.

The Maoists conducted an investigation and concluded that Palli Yadav, Sukkanand’s cousin, had leaked information about him to the police. Within a month of Sukkanand’s death, the party held a jan adalat – a public trial – and pronounced Palli guilty, after which he was taken away and killed.

Fear gripped the rest of the Yadav community, and many families began considering leaving the village en masse.

When other villagers heard of their plans to leave, they tried to stop them. The Maoist leaders of the area also sent a message saying no one in Chhinari needed to fear any further retaliation.

And yet, two months later, one early morning, the village woke up to find that nine of the 13 Yadav families had left overnight with all their belongings.

The Yadav families even took away the village deity, provoking intense hurt, said Manglu Gawde, the wadde or healer of the village. “Taking away the devi means they want to settle elsewhere,” said Gawde. “They don’t care about what happens to the village.”

In Bastar, every village is believed to have a foundational deity around whom community life revolves. In the absence of the deity, the ghotul or community centre in Chinnari lost its spirit, said Gawde.The Yadav families that left Chinnari, while denying they had taken the deity, said they had no other choice but to leave. “The villagers did not convince us that they would stand by us,” said Mahesh Kumar Yadav, Sukkanand’s younger brother, who now lives in the Narayanpur district headquarters. “Otherwise, we would never have left our land and homes in a village that the Yadav community had founded.”

Not all Yadav families left, though. A few, including Sukkanand’s children, chose to stay back, only to find themselves confronting another kind of fear.

A few months after the Maoists killed Palli Yadav, the security forces descended on the village and took away Sukkanand’s son Sanjay, who had turned 17 by then, along with Jagaram Salaam, then 16.

The two were taken to the Narayanpur police station, where Sanjay alleged they were beaten in custody. After nine days in custody, they were produced before a magistrate, with the police levelling serious charges against them and claiming they were in their twenties. But Sanjay mustered the courage to tell the magistrate that they were both under 18. The magistrate, Sanjay recalled, reprimanded the police and ordered that the two boys be sent instead to the juvenile home in Jagdalpur. They were released six months later.

Police make inroads

In Narayanpur town, the headquarters of the district, the Yadav families from Chinnari came under the police radar. One of Sukkanand’s brothers and a cousin were recruited as gopniya sainiks or secret police personnel. Their job was to accompany the security forces on search operations in the Bayanar area, and help identify suspected Naxal supporters and jan militia members.

I managed to trace the phone number of Sukkanand’s brother, Sukhchand. When I called him, he was in Tamil Nadu, looking for wage work. He told me that he had worked with the police for five years, but had been fired from the job in 2017 after he skipped duty for 21 days to care for his wife after she had given birth to their child. His cousin, Manturam Yadav, who had been recruited with him, also quit in solidarity, Sukhchand said. In five years, their salary had risen from Rs 5,100 to 12,000, he said.

As for the work he did as a gopniya sainik, Sukhchand said he did what the police asked of him: “Naxaliyon ko pakadwao ya marwao” – get the Naxals arrested or killed. He said he and his cousin were posted in Chhote Pharasgaon, a village close to Chinnari, and they helped the police track down a couple of Naxal cadres and were rewarded for it.

Sukhchand did not put a number to the arrests. But, back in Chinnari, his nephew, Sanjay alleged that his uncles were instrumental in getting nearly 40 people arrested from the Bayanar area.

“Although only one person from Chhinari is currently lodged in Bilaspur jail, between 2010 and 2026, around 20 persons, both Adivasi and non-Adivasi, from the village were arrested and jailed,” Sanjay said.

He added that those arrested spent anywhere between six months and five years behind bars. Some were released on bail, but their trials dragged on for years. Meanwhile, the threat of rearrest continued to hang over them, with police repeatedly warning families that they could be taken back into custody.

For some, the harassment proved unbearable. Dholu Gawde, from Dobinpara of Chinnari village, died by suicide in 2020, unable to withstand what his family described as repeated beatings and harassment by the police, including demands that he provide information about Maoists and threats of being arrested again.

The financial burden on families with members in prison was equally heavy. They had to sell their cattle to raise money for lawyers, send weekly provisions to relatives in jail, and pay for repeated journeys from the village to the prison, a village resident said. Expenses could range from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh. Families who borrowed money to meet these costs were still struggling to repay their debts.

Cycle of violence

The villagers said the area also witnessed many killings from 2011 onwards – by both the police and the Maoists.

Between 2011 and 2026, the police killed 17 people from four villages of Chhinari gram panchayat, said Jagaram Salaam, in the group conversation that took place on the sidelines of the weekly meeting in June.

While some of those killed were Maoist cadres who perished in gunfights with security forces, others were unarmed villagers killed in cold blood by the police and subsequently labelled “khunkhar Naxali” or dangerous Maoists, he said.

One such victim, Salaam recalled, was a 14-year-old boy named Rajnu Salaam, who was killed in 2011. Others in the group then began listing down more names of those killed. While they had difficulty remembering the exact dates of the killings, they vividly recalled the years, the seasons, and the circumstances of each of the killings.

Jeetru, who was part of the group, interjected to say that retaliation by Maoist cadres was no less painful. Five people were killed by the insurgents after they were accused of being mukhbir or police informers, he said.

One of them was Sukhlal Gawde. His 35-year-old son Saithram Gawde, whom I later met in Chhinari, told me that the Maoists killed his father in 2020. The irony, he pointed out, was that his father had worked with the Maoists for a while, and had even spent a year in jail in a Maoist-related case.

But after he returned from jail, the party began suspecting him of being a police informer. He was hauled up in a jan adalat twice – the first time, he was allowed to go, but after the second one, he was taken away and killed. The Maoists left a parcha or note beside his body detailing the charges against him.

Saithram Gawde defended his father: “I don’t think he was a mukhbir”. He filed a police case against unnamed Maoists and received Rs 5 lakh in compensation from the state government. The police, warning him against Maoist retaliation, advised him to leave Chhinari and move to Narayanpur, but he refused.

“If there was any mistake, it was my father’s, not mine. Why should I leave my village and my land?” he said. He continues to live in Chhinari.

Another exit

Birsa Pottai, however, chose to leave Chinnari.

Pottai had spent five years with the Maoists before returning to the village to lead a farmer’s life. “I wanted to live a normal life,” he said.

But the two gopniya sainiks recruited from the Yadav family identified him during a security patrol in the area. Pottai said he somehow managed to evade the police – but it proved harder to escape the suspicions of the Maoists, who saw his purchase of a tractor as a sign that he was on the payroll of the police.

In 2015, the Maoists called him in for questioning, along with two other men from the village. A jan adalat was held where the villagers vouched for Pottai’s innocence and secured his release. The other two men, Manter Salaam from Bailapur and Ramlal Sori from Etpal, however, were killed by the Maoists.

Caught between the suspicions of both sides, Pottai eventually left the village in 2015, leaving his family behind. He surrendered to the police but did not join them, he was quick to add, when I met him at his temporary home in Gudri Para, Narayanpur, a government settlement of more than 1,000 families identified by the state as “naxal peedit” or victims of Naxals. Joining the police force, he was well aware, would effectively shut the door to his village.

In 2016, Pottai’s teenage brother, Rassu, died under mysterious circumstances. While villagers claimed Rassu had died of a snakebite when he went out looking for his cattle late in the evening, Pottai’s wife alleged that suspicious men had entered their house late in the evening and killed him.

Rassu had already been buried by the time Pottai reached the village. Pottai, however, obtained a magisterial order to exhume the body for a post-mortem, bringing along a large security contingent to the village.

“Who does this? Who exhumes a body after it has been buried with all the customary rituals and that too by bringing the police force?” Laluram Gawde, the village pujari or priest, had said in a conversation back in the village. “If he has lost even this much faith in the villagers, what is left?”

Although Pottai did not show me the post-mortem report, he insisted that it confirmed that Rassu’s death occurred because his neck had been twisted and not because of a snakebite as claimed by the villagers.

Feeling unsafe in the village, Pottai’s wife and children subsequently moved out and joined him in Narayanpur.

Conditional return

In Narayanpur, although the Yadav families and Birsa Pottai’s family have built a new life, they still yearn to return to Chinnari.

“How can we live here all our lives?” said Pottai, turning around to point to the uneven knot of concrete houses in Gudripara, none of which had the open courtyard typical of village homes.

Mahesh Kumar Yadav, Sukkchand’s brother, echoed the same sentiment. “Our forefathers had identified that village. Our gods and goddesses reside there. We have to return.”

The end of Maoist presence in Bayanar area initially raised hopes that a return was possible – but then complex negotiations began.

Four meetings were held this year between village representatives from Chinnari and those who had left the village, said sarpanch Manita Salaam. At the first meeting, which was held in the police station in Benur, the village representatives said they needed to convene a gram sabha meeting to discuss the matter.

The gram sabha meeting, which involved village elders and traditional functionaries like the wadde (traditional healer), pujari (priest), gaita (guardian) and others, did not result in a favourable decision – most people were unwilling to allow those who had left to return, the sarpanch said.

Subsequently, on June 18, another meeting was held, which was attended by political representatives from Narayanpur block and local officials including the tehsildar and the sub-divisional police officer.

The Narayanpur police superintendent told me that such meetings, called maitreyi chaupal, are part of a larger initiative by the local administration and the police to broker peace and resettlement in strife-torn villages. “Where there is more tension [in a village], higher officials also join the chaupal to settle matters,” Sandeep Patel, the superintendent, said.

The June 18 meeting culminated in a written agreement or panchnama, which laid down certain conditions for the return of those who had left Chinnari: that they withdraw cases filed against other villagers, promise not to abandon the village in times of trouble, give up their homes in Narayanpur and return to Chhinari permanently.

Although the written panchnama makes no mention of it, Mahesh Kumar Yadav claimed the villagers had demanded Rs 50 lakh as compensation from them. The compensation was partly for the legal expenses that the villagers had incurred on fighting police cases that had resulted from the Yadavs’ snitching on them, and partly to make up for their failure to contribute to village festivals over the past 15 years.

“How can we pay such a huge amount?” the Yadav women sitting around us exclaimed. “We work as daily-wage labourers here to make two ends meet.”

But money was not the only obstacle in their return. Although they would like to go back to their life as farmers – the Yadav families own registered agricultural land in Chhinari – their younger generation is now enrolled in schools and colleges in Narayanpur. Abandoning their homes in Narayanpur to abide by the stipulated conditions was not possible, they said.

Experts say the end of an insurgency, however laudable, cannot by itself ensure lasting peace, particularly when it has been brought to a close through violence. It requires a carefully laid-out peace plan to enable long-term peaceful coexistence in areas scarred by conflict.

“Years of violence and collateral hurt leaves people in insurgency regions traumatised, displaced, immiserated and alienated,” Anuradha Chenoy, adjunct professor at Jindal School of International Affairs, wrote in a response to Scroll on email.

As an academic who has extensively written on conflict resolution, and even served on a United Nations special group for South Asia on peace and security, Chenoy underscored the importance of providing support to people to return to “dignified daily existence” once a conflict is over. This could take the form of peace and development committees, involving the local panchayat with women representation.

While eventually it was for the local people to find the way, she said it was the government’s responsibility to ensure the necessary resources and infrastructure support for that.

Asked about Chinnari village, the Narayanpur police superintendent said: “It is quite normal for people to take time to adjust to new situations, but perhaps after two or three or even six months, things will settle down”.

Back in Chhinari, Sanjay Yadav rued: “If only the police had arrested my father and not killed him, our families would not have been scattered. After all, those who left the village are our own uncles.”

All photos by Malini Subramaniam

The Sunday church service had just ended in the hill-top village of Longpi in Manipur’s Noney district on the afternoon of September 13.

Longpi is home to about 320 Kuki residents, village officials said.

A group of five women and two men were on their way to gather some rice and wash some clothes when a group of 45-50 militants attacked the village.

“They were walking from one part of the village to another when they came under attack,” David Gangte, the son of Longpi village chief and a primary school government teacher at the village, told Scroll.

Gangte said the group found themselves cornered in a narrow lane when the militants opened fire with “automatic weapons”.

Two people – Thangvel Roel Gangte, 43, and Julie Singson 22 – were killed on the spot. Singson was two months pregnant at the time. Another 22-year-old woman, Ester Gangte, sustained severe bullet injuries and died later in a hospital in Churachandpur, about 250 km away.

They were not the only civilians to have lost their lives in a deadly surge of violence in Manipur.

In a span of a month – between August 27 and September 27 – 23 civilians, including at least seven women, were killed in the hill districts of Manipur, where Nagas and Kukis have been locked in conflict since February.

The dead include a 17-year-old walking to a nearby town to attend a birthday, two women working in their fields, a group of men travelling to a neighbouring district.

All were shot down by armed militants while going about their daily life in the remote villages of Manipur. Twelve of the dead are Nagas, 11 belong to the Kuki community.

At least 51 people have been killed in Manipur since the Naga-Kuki conflict began in February. Scroll analysis shows the majority of them were unarmed civilians.

“Nobody is there to protect us,” Gangte, the primary teacher at Longpi village, told Scroll. “No Army, no one from the government. How can we defend ourselves as civilians?”

A spate of attacks

On the same day that Longpi residents were ambushed, militants walked into a Kuki home in
L. Tollen village in Tamenglong district around 4 in the morning and fired indiscriminately. Lhingzangai Singsit, a mother of five children, was shot dead. Her husband, injured in the attack, later succumbed to his injuries.

Two days later, on September 15, 76-year-old Phalneichong Sitlhou had gone into her jhum fields at Leisangphai village in Tamenglong district with another younger woman.

According to a statement by the village authorities, Naga armed militants allegedly waylaid the women as they gathered firewood and shot them.

The spate of attacks by armed groups has left villagers in dread.

A Naga resident of a village along the Imphal-Tamenglong road told Scroll that people have stopped going out. “The militants from both sides do not spare civilians,” he said. “They will waylay people going to the paddy fields or going out for any work. So, people are spending all their time and energy guarding the village.”

Shokin Chauhan, former director general of the Assam Rifles, said the armed groups were picking “soft targets” in isolated villages to keep “the cycle of violence” going.

Several Manipur residents questioned the failure of the Narendra Modi government and Manipur’s Bharatiya Janata Party government to control the violence.

“We have been reminding both governments to intervene sincerely in this ongoing violence,” said Anteshang Charanga, leader of the All Naga Students’ Association, Manipur. “But they only come up with statements of condemnation like other civil society organisations. So, if they also are simply going to condemn, who is going to deliver justice?”

The conflict

In May 2023, fierce ethnic clashes broke out in Manipur between Meiteis and Kukis, leading to thousands displaced and at least 300 dead.

The violence culminated in an ethnic partition of Manipur, with Meiteis not allowed in the hill districts and Kukis purged out of the Imphal valley.

Nagas, who account for about 20 per cent of Manipur’s total population, remained neutral through the conflict. The Kukis constitute the third-largest demographic group in the state.

The two tribes live close to each other in the hills and have a history of conflict over competing claims over territory. In 1993, clashes between Nagas and Kukis led to a five-year spell of violence. Hundreds were killed and several villages burned down.

In February this year, as Scroll reported, a petty fight in Ukhrul district lit a fire between Nagas and Kukis.

Underneath the dispute was Naga hostility to the Kuki demand for a “separate administration” that would span most of the hill districts and cut off administrative links with the Meitei-inhabited Imphal Valley. The Nagas allege that the territory claimed by the Kukis encroach on Naga-dominated areas. Like the Meiteis, the Nagas dispute Kuki claim on land, accusing them of being “outsiders” and “illegal immigrants”.

Since February, the two communities have been engaged in a cycle of retaliatory abductions and killings across Tamenglong, Noney, Kangpopki and Kamjong districts, with armed groups from both communities involved in the conflict. Also at stake is control over a lucrative trade route along the Indo-Myanmar border, observers say.

Moving targets

The most recent cycle of violence began with an attack on the Imphal Tamenglong (IT) road, which passes through Kangpokpi district.

As Scroll had reported in July, roads and highways had been drawn into the conflict as both sides claimed control on territory. Residents of Naga and Kuki villages along the Imphal Tamenglong road had told us they were fearful of stepping out of their villages because of armed gunmen prowling the area.

Those fears came true again on August 27. A group of Naga men were on their way to Senapati town to attend a meeting when they were attacked, said Timothy Wijunamai, who heads the Liangmai Naga Council, the apex body of the tribe.

“We had been using this isolated hilly uneven road because it is not safe to take the highway,” Wijunamai said.

But that day suspected Kuki armed groups sprung a surprise, killing four Naga civilians and injuring one, a senior police official told Scroll.

Wijunamai blamed members of a militant group, Kuki National Front (Presidential), for the ambush.

The dead include leaders of Naga councils and schools in the area. The killings set off a series of revenge killings and attacks.

Over a dozen “innocent people have been brutally killed” on the road, the Naga Women’s Union said in a statement on September 22.

In many cases, civilians have been killed upon venturing out from their remote villages. Even minors have not been spared.

On September 21, a 17-year-old Naga boy, NK Wiphenbou, was walking from his village in Tamenglong district to Tamei town, where he studied, when he was attacked on a lonely stretch of the road.

“On normal days, he could have taken a jeep but because of the violence, there were no vehicles,” said Ch Sajulakbou, the chairman of Upper Takou village, where Wiphenbou lived. “So, he was walking. He had come to meet his parents and he was going back. We had heard that he also had plans to attend a friend’s birthday.”

Wiphenbou was allegedly ambushed by Kuki militants about 7 km from the village, Sajulakbou said.

Around 21 villages lie along the Tamei–Kuilong road, a vital 52-km interior hill route in Tamenglong district, where the teenager was killed. “Everyone is afraid now,” Sajulakbou said. “No one is stepping out. Even the police personnel are afraid.”

More attacks

The killing of the Naga teen was followed by an attack on a Kuki village in Tamenglong district on September 23, in which a 36-year-old Kuki electrician was shot dead.

According to the police complaint filed by the Kuki village chief, the attack was allegedly carried out by armed cadres of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah), one of the oldest insurgent groups in the North East.

On the same day, armed Kukis set 41 Naga homes and churches on fire in the remote Makui region of Kangpokpi district. Several Naga residents had to be shifted to the neighbouring Senapati district headquarters.

Leaders from both communities alleged that they have no protection from security forces. “The security forces were not able to reach Makui even two days after the arson,” Wijunamai said. “The villagers have been left alone there. The response of security forces is very slow. That is why houses are being burnt down repeatedly.”

Wijunamai said efforts to move those whose homes had been burnt down have been thwarted in the absence of security cover.

“There are thousands of security personnel in the headquarters, be it in Kangpokpi, Senapati, or Tamenglong,” Wijunamai, the Naga leader, said. “Why are they not being deployed in vulnerable areas?”

Kukis have also urged deployment of central security forces to safeguard vulnerable Kuki-Zo villages across Tamenglong and adjoining districts.

“To date, 29 Kuki villages have been systematically attacked, looted, or reduced to ashes,” Janghaolun Haokip of Kuki Inpi, the apex body of the community. “This ongoing violence has caused the forced displacement of over 2,000 Kuki civilians across multiple districts.”

Scroll sent questionnaires to the Manipur director general of police, chief secretary and the official spokesperson of the defence ministry. The story will be updated if they respond.

Control over territory

Security officials underlined that the presence of armed groups on both sides has made it difficult to control the violence. “The rivalry between NSCN-IM-linked formations and Kuki armed groups is increasingly intersecting with the wider Naga–Kuki confrontation,” said Shokin Chauhan, the former director general of the Assam Rifles, a key central security force dealing with the crisis.

A Senapati-based armed Naga volunteer told Scroll that it would be impossible for village residents alone to defend their territory.

“We would have already lost Makui to Kuki militants if we were fighting with the single-barreled guns most villagers have,” the 34-year-old Naga volunteer said. “A section of Naga guards are trained militants with sophisticated weapons. The Kuki side, too, has sophisticated guns."

Chauhan pointed out that the recent pattern of violence shows that the armed groups are picking up “soft targets”.

“They are operating in areas where civilian settlements are exposed, making ordinary villagers particularly vulnerable,” he said. “An attack [on isolated villages] can provoke retaliation and a cycle of violence between communities. That is precisely what the security forces have to prevent.”

Empty villages

Several villages have sent away women and children in fear of more violence.

Only five men had been left to guard Pilong, a remote village in Kamjong district along the Myanmar border.

“The people of the village had vacated their homes due to the conflict,” an NSCN-IM member told Scroll.

On September 24 afternoon, armed Kuki cadres entered the village and opened fire. Four of the men were killed. One of them, Akhan Kaping of Ukhrul, managed to escape.“I want to say don’t hurt and kill the civilians. Their time will also come,” he warned.

But despite civilians from both communities being killed in the violence, neither side appears to be open to dialogue.

Wijunamai, the Naga leader, said “now there is no question of talking to one another”.

“We are [going] heads-on,” he said. “I don't think there is any initiative to have a talk or dialogue between the communities. Everything is on a war footing.”

In Longpi village, where a 22-year-old pregnant woman was shot dead, most residents have left. Gangte, the government school teacher, said the school had been shut down. “We all had to leave. All the students are scattered in different places. We don’t know when we can resume classes.”

India’s exotic pet trade has grown from a niche pursuit into a significant industry. Over 40,000 people across 30 states and union territories declared their exotic pets in the government’s 2020 Voluntary Disclosure Scheme, making the scale of ownership hard to ignore, according to a Humane World for Animals report published this year. Even that, the report cautions, could represent only a fraction of actual ownership.

So, what draws people to animals that are often unfamiliar, expensive and difficult to keep?

Conservation researcher working on illegal wildlife hunting and trade Uttara Mendiratta identifies several motives: the desire to own something others do not, the appeal of animals perceived as unusual or “cool”, and the belief that some exotic species are easy to maintain.

Research into exotic pet buyers in Japan points to another dimension. A consumer study found that people were drawn to the “mental healing” (Iyashi in Japanese) they associated with animals, as well as their cuteness (Kawaii).

Social media can amplify these attractions, creating a ready marketplace where people can see what is trending, find sellers and learn how to care for unfamiliar species.

But the impulse to own an unusual animal can be very different from the reality of living with one.

“People buy a small, cute animal that eventually becomes bigger,” says Mendiratta. A teenager may lose interest in a reptile as they both grow older. A turtle may outgrow its enclosure. A parrot may live for decades. A snake may become difficult to house, a primate harder to manage as it reaches sexual maturity, or an iguana, increasingly aggressive. An owner may move cities, face rising veterinary costs or simply find that caring for the animal is far more demanding than expected.

The exotic pet that once seemed unusual, fascinating or adorable can suddenly become a problem. And that is when abandonment begins.

Possession and abandonment

A January 2026 Kerala study of red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) offers more insight into why people buy exotic pets. The study interviewed people involved in the pet trade and found that the most common motivation was personal interest in exotic pets (54.8%). Other reasons included the species’ friendly nature and ease of care (16.1%), religious beliefs (12.9%) and its long lifespan (9.7%). Overall, 55% of the turtles were purchased for children, 13% by adults and 32% by both.

The same study also points to what can happen when the appeal wears off. Sixteen per cent of respondents said some owners released turtles into natural or open areas when they grew larger.

Abandonment, however, is not only a welfare concern. The possession, release or abandonment of exotic species can have long-term ecological consequences, both in their native habitats and in the places where they are introduced.

Removing animals from their native ecosystems can also mean removing the ecological functions they perform. This is particularly relevant for species such as gibbons and orangutans, as well as some birds and reptiles, that play important roles in their ecosystems.

A 2024 analysis of the global primate trade, for instance, notes that primates can be important seed dispersers and, in some cases, pollinators. Their removal from forests can therefore affect plant recruitment, forest composition and, potentially, carbon storage. Primates are also culturally important to many Indigenous communities, meaning their loss can have consequences beyond the ecosystem. The analysis also points to the potential for wildlife trade and the removal of primates to alter disease dynamics by changing wildlife pathogen reservoirs.

Ecological damage

Conversely, introducing a species into a new environment can alter the ecology of the place where it is released. Exotic animals with invasive potential can compete with native species for food and other resources, prey on native wildlife, introduce pathogens, hybridise with related species and alter food webs.

Red-eared sliders are a classic example, says Sumanth Bindumadhav, India director of Humane World for Animals and co-author of the 2026 report. Native to the Mississippi River basin in North America, these freshwater turtles have become popular pets in India within a relatively short period.

“They can become extremely dominant in water bodies, eating other organisms and establishing themselves as a dominant species,” says Bindumadhav.

Multiple studies point to the species’ invasive potential. A 2023 paper describes the red-eared slider as one of the world’s worst invasive species and notes records from India suggesting that it may be expanding into natural habitats. Climate change could further increase the areas of India suitable for the species, including regions with high native chelonian diversity, the study says. A Herpetology Notes paper similarly describes a free-living slider recorded in Kerala as an “Invasive Alien Species” capable of causing severe harm to native ecosystems.

Part of the problem may stem from how the turtles are sold. Red-eared sliders are commonly bought as tiny hatchlings but grow considerably larger as adults, making them increasingly difficult to keep as pets. This can encourage owners to release them into local waterways, according to a study published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa.

Their ecological impact can also increase as they mature. Their diet shifts from predominantly carnivorous to omnivorous, and they can compete with native turtles for food, basking and nesting sites, while also preying on native aquatic animals.

The species has now been recorded in water bodies across several parts of India, including Gujarat, Karnataka, West Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, Goa and Telangana. In Gujarat alone, the study documented them in 35 water bodies that are also home to native turtle species.

“There are videos on social media of people releasing them (red-eared sliders) into lakes and ponds and presenting it as a good deed. It is not a good deed; they are releasing a highly invasive alien species,” says Mendiratta.

The red-eared slider is classified by the IUCN’s Invasive Species Specialist Group as one of the 100 “World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species”. The Zoological Survey of India’s reptile checklist, however, notes that no reptile has currently been formally designated as an invasive alien species under India’s biodiversity legislation.

Red-eared sliders are not the only exotic reptiles raising concerns. Green iguanas (Iguana iguana), native to Central and South America, are also popular among pet keepers in India. Their ability to thrive in tropical environments raises concerns about what could happen if they become established outside captivity.

“We are seeing green iguanas in large numbers, along with species such as ball pythons and others, during seizures and on social media,” says Mendiratta. She adds that they could damage crops and create problems for native species.

A 2025 study modelled the invasion potential of green iguanas in India. It found substantial areas with climatic conditions suitable for the species to establish and reproduce, and concluded that the species poses a serious potential ecological threat.

The scale of import and release

The scale of the trade in these reptiles is striking. Reptiles, both native and non-native, form a majority of pets: The latest Directorate of Revenue Intelligence data points to reptiles constituting the highest number of wildlife seizures.

In July 2024, Chennai Customs seized 402 baby iguanas arriving from Bangkok: 229 green, 113 orange and seven yellow iguanas, along with 53 blue iguanas (Cyclura lewisi). Blue iguanas are listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which provides the species with the highest level of protection from international commercial trade. Sixty-seven of the animals were already dead when they were seized.

The scale of red-eared slider imports is equally concerning. Customs authorities seized 12,385 red-eared sliders at Chennai and Tiruchirappalli international airports between 2018 and 2020, according to a study covering the period. Their small size, relatively high survival rate and low price in exporting countries make them particularly suited to being transported in large numbers, the study says.

The difficulty of keeping some of these animals as they grow can create another problem. An Indian veterinary review notes the popularity of juvenile green iguanas as pets, but says they are often donated to zoos or other agencies once they grow and become more difficult to manage.

Snakes are also increasingly turning up in rescues, including both venomous and non-venomous species. A Burmese python hanging from an apartment balcony in Mumbai went viral a few years ago. “These are often animals that people have kept as pets and which have either escaped or been deliberately released,” says Bindumadhav.

Pawan Sharma, an advocate and wildlife conservationist with RAWW, says he has encountered anacondas, both juveniles and large individuals. “There have been cases where large snakes have broken out of their enclosures and disappeared. In some cases, we simply don’t know where they have gone.”

The presence of venomous exotic snakes raises an additional concern: India does not have antivenoms for many of these species. “People are bringing animals such as black mambas and Gaboon vipers into the country. These pose an even greater health risk because they are venomous,” says Bindumadhav. “If they escape or are released, they could potentially establish populations because they can adapt to tropical conditions.” He adds that venomous tarantulas are also increasingly being kept as pets, raising similar concerns.

Sharma concurs that escape is a potential pathway for exotic animals to enter the wild. During rescues, he has encountered abandoned or escaped African grey parrots and macaws, as well as marmosets and sugar gliders, in addition to snakes, iguanas and turtles.

Parrots, among the more popular exotic pets, can also enter the rescue system when owners no longer want or are unable to care for them. In Visakhapatnam, a rescue organisation reported taking in exotic parrots and other birds abandoned by owners who had lost interest or moved away. More recently, a media report described a rescue network caring for African greys, eclectus parrots, conures, African lovebirds and cockatiels, among other exotic animals. In that case, however, abandonment was not established.

There is little systematic data on the scale of exotic bird abandonment in India, making it difficult to assess how widespread the problem is.

Dealing with invasive species

The growing number of exotic animals entering the country raises an important question: what happens when owners no longer want or are able to keep them?

Mendiratta points to gaps in law, infrastructure and awareness in dealing with invasive fauna. “We have relatively clear approaches for some invasive plants, such as Lantana camara. But what do you do with thousands of red-eared sliders? If we remove them from these waterbodies, where do they go? Can they be euthanised humanely? Do you keep them in captivity indefinitely? There is very little clarity around those questions.”

The Central Zoo Authority recognises non-native animals abandoned by owners or rescued from unsuitable environments, including animals originating from the exotic-pet trade, as rescued animals that may be placed in recognised zoos or rescue centres. While its guidelines provide a management framework for zoos receiving rescued or abandoned exotic animals, it doesn’t create a general right for an exotic-pet owner to surrender an animal to a zoo. Acceptance depends on the zoo’s facilities, the animal’s circumstances and applicable legal requirements.

Sharma says CZA guidelines are largely applicable for species listed under CITES. Other species such as red-eared sliders face a challenge. His organisation, RAWW takes them in and in many cases, puts them up for adoption so they go to a home. “We do not have the capacity to take a large number of abandoned animals, so we do this at a smaller scale,” he explains.

Mendiratta says the system for surrendering unwanted exotic animals to the government or rescue centres needs to be better developed. “There are only so many rescue centres, and many are understaffed. Once you hand an animal over, you may also have very little control over what ultimately happens to it,” she says.

Bindumadhav believes India needs a national surrender policy. “It needs to come after we have the infrastructure to take these animals that people don’t want to keep anymore. In the absence of it, people often end up releasing animals where they see fit,” he says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The southwest monsoon ended with a 12.6% deficit in rainfall, said the India Meteorological Department. This makes the season the driest in 11 years and the fourth driest this century.

The four-month rainy season began in the country on June 4, three days later than its usual onset date. It covered the entire country on July 9, a day later than the normal date.

The country had received 759.4 mm of rainfall against the long-period average of 868.6 mm, the weather agency said. The long-period average is the measure of the mean rainfall during the monsoon season over the last 50 years. Read on.

Jet fuel prices for domestic airlines has been hiked by about 13% or Rs 15.8 per litre. This is the third consecutive monthly increase in jet fuel prices. It will now cost to Rs 137 per litre.

The latest increase will add to the financial burden on airlines, as aviation turbine fuel accounts for about 40% of their operating expenses.

The prices of 19-kg commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders were also increased by around Rs 62.5 per cylinder. With the latest hike, a 19-kg commercial LPG cylinder costs Rs 2,810 in Delhi and Rs 2,764 in Mumbai. Read on.

The Supreme Court has stayed the death sentence awarded to one of the 38 persons convicted in the 2008 Ahmedabad serial bomb blasts case. Ahmed Bawa Abbu Abubakar Barelvi’s counsel submitted that the conviction was based entirely on “conspiracy”.

The court was hearing a challenge to the Gujarat High Court’s July 7 judgement upholding the death sentences handed to 38 of the 49 persons convicted in case.

Twenty-two explosions had ripped through the city on July 26, 2008, leaving 56 dead and more than 200 injured. In February 2022, a special court convicted the 49 persons, of whom 38 were sentenced to death, and the others were given life imprisonment. Read on.

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

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the West Bengal government, seeking its response to Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra’s petition seeking protection during her visits to her parliamentary constituency, Krishnanagar, PTI reported.

A bench of Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana also directed the West Bengal and Union governments to file their responses to Moitra’s allegation that works funded under the Members of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme were being obstructed in Krishnanagar, Live Law reported. The scheme enables MPs to recommend local development work.

Appearing for the state and Union governments, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta questioned the maintainability of the petition, saying there are more than 500 MPs in the country and it would create difficulties if all of them approached the court.

The bench said it would hear the matter after the respondents file their replies within a week, followed by a rejoinder from Moitra, PTI reported.

In her petition, Moitra alleged that the Nadia district administration directed her to vacate the circuit house in Krishnanagar late at night on August 14, despite her having been allotted a room at the state government-owned property.

Moitra had posted on social media at the time that she had arrived at the circuit house around 6.30 pm and was given the same room she usually stayed in. However, at 9.47 pm, she was asked to vacate the room while a large crowd outside the gates shouted “Jai Shri Ram” slogans, she said.

She alleged that, as an MP, she was entitled to stay at the circuit house but was pressured by district authorities to leave in the middle of the night in an attempt to harass her.

Following the incident, Moitra wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking his intervention, PTI reported. She said no one had objected when she made the booking or informed her of any alleged embargo on bookings when she checked in.