The Delhi Police has registered a first information report against Aam Aadmi Party leaders Saurabh Bharadwaj, Sanjeev Jha and Adil Ahmed Khan for allegedly hurting religious sentiments by posting on social media a video skit, which showed men dressed as Santa Claus fainting due to high levels of pollution in the national capital, reported ANI on Thursday.

The video was posted by Aam Aadmi Party leaders on December 17 and December 18, ahead of Christmas celebrations. It was shot in Delhi’s Connaught Place area and titled: “Santa Claus fainted in Delhi pollution”.

It showed Bharadwaj, the party’s Delhi unit chief, trying to revive the men through cardiopulmonary resuscitation after they fell down upon seeing that the Air Quality Index in the national capital was in the “very poor” category.

Bharadwaj was also heard criticising Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta for her inaction in curbing air pollution in the city.

According to the FIR, the “political skit” showed “individuals dressed as Santa Claus – a revered religious and cultural icon for Christians worldwide – in a derogatory and mocking manner”, reported ANI.

“The videos depict these religious icons ‘fainting’ and ‘collapsing’ on the street to be used as mere props for political messaging,” it added.

The FIR was registered on the complaint of an advocate, Khushboo George, who alleged that AAP leaders maliciously committed acts intended to outrage religious feelings, reported The Tribune.

Responding to the case, Bharadwaj said that photos of the complainant “are all over social media with Bharatiya Janata Party leaders”. He shared photos of George with the Delhi chief minister and BJP MP Manoj Tiwari.

“We shouldn’t give these folks free publicity,” he added.

AQI in Delhi

Delhi’s air quality on Thursday remained in the “poor” category, according to data from the Sameer application at 7.05 pm.

The national capital’s average AQI stood at 241, showed the application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

An index value between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air. Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

As the AQI further improved on Wednesday, the Commission for Air Quality Management revoked Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region.

Stage 4 restrictions had come into force on December 13.

The commission, however, said on Wednesday that air quality forecasts provided by the India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras suggest that in the coming days, the air quality index may increase because of slower winds.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region. The commission is a statutory body formed in 2020 to address pollution in the NCR and adjoining areas.

When leaders of “the Quad” last met in September 2024, host and then-President Joe Biden declared the partnership between the United States, India, Australia and Japan to be “more strategically aligned than ever before”.

“The Quad is here to stay,” trumpeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Fast-forward a little over a year, however, and the tune has changed.

Leaders of the Quad were due to hold their latest summit in November 2025, with India hosting. But the month came and went, and no event was held. A future date has yet to be announced.

Why the silence? As experts of international institutions and the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the Indo-Pacific, we believe the answers can be found in the calculus of the two largest members involved: India and the US.

For the Trump administration, the domestic dividends of the Quad are not immediately obvious. Meanwhile, New Delhi is more concerned about how to position itself amid the great power competition between China and the US.

The result is paralysis for the Quad, for now.

On the sidelines of Operation Christmas Drop, Quad partners carried out the first Indo-Pacific Logistics Network Field Training Exercise (8-12 Dec 2025) to enhance shared logistics capacity for swift and effective responses to regional humanitarian needs. pic.twitter.com/DzDLCLiYGr

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) December 19, 2025

Evolution of Quad

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, to give the Quad its full name, began life in 2004.

The Quad 1.0 focused on humanitarian disaster assistance and cooperation after the Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2007, under the vision of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Quad was recast as a platform to promote a free and prosperous Indo-Pacific, with an eye toward maritime security and economic cooperation.

Since then, the Quad has seen many fits and starts. Australia withdrew from the partnership in 2008 when it prioritised trade relations with China. India, too, has at times been tepid about the Quad’s continuation, partly due to its legacy of nonalignment and concerns over managing relations with Beijing.

The Quad 2.0 came to life in 2017 as the four core members coalesced around a shared sentiment of countering China’s rising power.

Despite its name, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue has increasingly gravitated toward nonsecurity agendas, from global health to maritime domain awareness and critical technologies.

Yet even as this emerging Quad 3.0 has foregrounded cooperation around the slogan “development, stability and prosperity”, it is over trade and tariffs that the two largest members of the Quad are not seeing eye to eye.

Tariff tussle

On August 1, 2025, Washington imposed a 25% reciprocal tariff on Indian goods over long-standing trade frictions, notably over access to India’s agricultural market. It was followed by an additional 25% punitive duty for New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil.

The combined 50% US tariff was accompanied by another move that upset New Delhi: new US restrictions on H-1B visas. Some 70% of all holders of the US visas, designed for temporary skilled workers, are Indian nationals.

The rift between New Delhi and Washington widened with India’s decision to attend a meeting in Rio de Janeiro in September of the so-called BRICS nations. That was interpreted as an “anti-US” summit by Washington given its composition of largely Global South nations and other countryies antagonistic to the West, including Russia and China.

As a key member of the BRICS grouping, India’s attendance should have come as no real surprise. Even so, and despite Modi’s decision not to attend personally, the US took umbrage, with US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick criticising India’s BRICS membership and accusing New Delhi of having “rubbed the United States the wrong way”.

Lutnick’s comments are indicative of the cooling ties between New Delhi and Washington. Since the end of the Cold War, India has been seen by Washington as a democratic ally and a vital US partner in the Indo-Pacific. The two countries have shared strategic and defence partnerships – a foundational aspect of the Quad.

And despite recent tensions, the factors underpinning US-India relations remain constant. The US is India’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade reaching US$131.84 billion in the 2024-’25 fiscal year.

This gives New Delhi not only economic leverage over the US but also a strategic rationale to continue its cooperation with Washington.

Just finished a very productive meeting of Quad Foreign Ministers in Washington DC.

Discussed how to make Quad more focused and impactful on contemporary opportunities and challenges.

Today’s gathering will strengthen strategic stability in the Indo - Pacific and keep it free… pic.twitter.com/M9Vg5NaxMR

— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) July 1, 2025

Dragon-elephant tango

Yet at the same time, India appears to be increasingly tilting toward China, both economically and in geopolitics.

Modi visited China during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit meeting in August and framed the two countries as development partners, not rivals. This has been interpreted as a rapprochement between China and India after decades of border skirmishes and maritime friction.

Earlier this year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping used the term “Dragon-Elephant Tango” to promote a vision of India-China ties based on “mutual achievement.”

Despite the US surpassing China as India’s biggest trading partner in 2021-’22, investment ties between New Delhi and Beijing have grown steadily between 2005 and 2025, with only some intermittent friction.

However, what can appear as a tilt toward Beijing is better understood through structural roots in India’s economic realities as well as the country’s long-standing commitment to nonalignment.

The relationship between India and China is marked by significant economic interdependence rather than political convergence. India’s imports are largely coming from China, especially in the areas of machinery, electronics and other intermediate goods.

Yet for all of the convergence, areas of bilateral tensions remain. India’s growing trade deficit with China and Beijing’s ironclad relationship with Pakistan – along with unresolved border issues – limit how far New Delhi is willing to align with Beijing strategically.

Nevertheless, India-China relations are no doubt warming, especially in the wake of Trump’s tariffs. Indicative of that shift were India’s exports to China, which surged by 90% in November to $2.2 billion.

India-US tension

It isn’t just the warming China-India relationship that has thrown a wrench into the Quad’s works. The Trump administration’s growing embrace of India’s archrival Pakistan has also soured US-India ties.

Trump’s claim to have mediated an end to the brief Pakistan-India war in May and his subsequent invitation of Pakistan’s army chief to the White House were met with anger in India.

That dispute was mirrored by the one over Russian oil, which had precipitated some of Trump’s tariffs on India. Modi’s government has walked a tightrope between the US and Russia, wanting to keep open the possibility of good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, while managing tensions with the US. That’s why Putin’s visit to India in December held such symbolic value.

The Modi government stopped short of explicit long-term commitments to new Russian oil purchases and did not chart any new defence deals. In that, as with the issue over Washington’s embrace of Pakistan, India has sought to balance competing camps, creating space to maintain an open door with the US without abandoning India’s strategic autonomy on what nations it does business with.

Optimism amid paralysis

So, how does all this diplomatic tangoing affect the Quad?

The result, it appears, is paralysis at this juncture. But it is important to point out that neither country wants to pronounce the Quad dead. The latest National Security Strategy of the United States explicitly mentions the Quad as part of efforts to “win the economic future” in Asia.

And both nations continue to reaffirm their commitment to the partnership – betting that political conditions will stabilize and that global trends may turn in their favor.

So there are still reasons for guarded optimism. Recent progress in trade negotiations and gradual reductions in Russian oil imports could ease Washington’s scepticism over India.

And for their part, Japan and Australia are trying to keep the momentum going – Japan with its naval and coast guard capabilities and Australia with infrastructure and health initiatives.

If a mutually acceptable trade deal with the US can emerge, and New Delhi can craft an agenda for the Quad framework that is acceptable to the current US administration, a leaders summit could still materialize in 2026.

But the louder the tariff wars between India and the US become, the slimmer the chance for a stronger Quad in the near term.

Hyeran Jo is Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University.

Yoon Jung Choi is Visiting scholar, Texas A&M University; Sejong Institute.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

A migrant labourer from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district was lynched in Odisha’s Sambalpur on Wednesday. Six persons have been arrested for the murder.

The co-workers and family members of the man, Jewel Sheikh, alleged that he was attacked on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant from Bangladesh. However, the Odisha Police denied this and claimed that the victim and the persons accused in his lynching knew each other.

The assault took place in the Shantinagar area late Wednesday evening when Jewel Sheikh and other construction workers were returning from work. Two other workers, Akir Sheikh and Palash Sheikh, were also injured in the attack and were hospitalised in Sambalpur.

Samirul Islam, the head of the West Bengal Labour Welfare Board, said that Bengali-speaking migrant workers were once again being targeted in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Read more.

A Hindutva mob vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur. This was among several attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations over the past week.

Videos of the incident in Raipur showed a mob armed with sticks barging into the Magneto Mall and destroying decorations a day ahead of Christmas. Hindutva groups had called for a state-wide strike on Wednesday to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in Chhattisgarh.

In Uttar Pradesh, members of Hindutva groups on Wednesday sat outside a church in Bareilly’s Cantonment area, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

In Assam, members of the Bajrang Dal barged into a school in the Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations and smashing posters on the premises. Read more.

Tarique Rahman, the acting chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, returned to the country after 17 years in exile. He is a key contender to be the country’s next prime minister after the general elections in February.

Speaking at a rally after landing in Dhaka, he outlined his vision for the country and invoked the words of American civil rights activist Martin Luther King.

Referring to the killing of Sharif Osman Bin Hadi on December 12, Rahman said that the student leader wanted the citizens of the country to regain their economic rights.

He also claimed that “agents of various dominant powers are still engaged in conspiracies” in the country.

While in exile in London, Rahman had been convicted on charges of money laundering and faced around 100 lawsuits. The convictions were overturned after the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024. Read on.

A key Maoist leader who carried a reward of Rs 1.1 crore on his head, Ganesh Uike, was killed in a gunfight with security forces in Odisha’s Kandhamal district. Three other suspected Maoists were also killed in the gunfight, which took place in a forest in the Chakapad police station area.

Uike was the chief of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Odisha. The identities of the three others who were killed are yet to be ascertained.

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

In the course of the Centre’s anti-Maoist offensive this year, key Maoist leaders like Uike and Madvi Hidma have been killed, while others like Vikas Nagpure alias Anant and Mallojula Venugopal Rao, alias Bhupathi have surrendered. Read more.

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A 30-year-old migrant labourer from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district was lynched in Odisha’s Sambalpur on Wednesday, The Indian Express reported. Six persons have been arrested for the killing.

The victim, Jewel Sheikh, hailed from Murshidabad’s Chakbahadurpur village, and was working as a labourer in Odisha’s Sambalpur.

While his co-workers and family members alleged that he was attacked on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant from Bangladesh, the Odisha Police denied this and claimed that the victim and the persons accused in his lynching knew each other.

The assault took place in the Shantinagar area late Wednesday evening when Jewel Sheikh and other construction workers were returning from work, The Indian Express reported.

Paltu Sheikh, who was also with Jewel Sheikh and is from Murshidabad, said that the group was at a tea stall.

He added that another group of men asked for a beedi from Jewel Sheikh.

“Then they started asking for Aadhaar cards and wanted to know where we were from,” The Indian Express quoted Paltu Sheikh as saying. “We showed our Aadhaar cards. Suddenly, the group, armed with bamboo sticks, started beating us. Jewel was hit on the head. Some others were injured.”

Paltu Sheikh said that Jewel Sheikh was taken to a hospital but doctors declared him dead. Two other workers, Akir Sheikh and Palash Sheikh, were also injured in the attack and were at a hospital in Sambalpur.

Paltu Sheikh said that he had been working in Odisha for 12 years. “This is the first time we faced such an incident,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying.

Sambalpur Additional Superintendent of Police Srimanta Barik told the newspaper that the labourers from West Bengal had been living in the area for several years and had become familiar with the residents there.

He claimed that the assault occured over a demand for a beedi.

“A group suddenly attacked the Bengali migrant workers after they refused,” the newspaper quoted Barik as saying. “We have arrested six people and are identifying whether more were involved.”

Northern Range Inspector General of Police Himansu Lal also claimed on Thursday that the murder was a result of a sudden provocation and not a targeted attack, The New Indian Express reported.

He added that all the persons accused had been apprehended.

After the incident, local Trinamool Congress leaders and Emani Biswas, MLA from West Bengal’s Suti, visited Jewel Sheikh’s home and promised assistance, The Indian Express reported.

Samirul Islam, Trinamool Congress MP and chairperson of the West Bengal Migrant Labour Welfare Board, said that Bengali-speaking migrant workers were once again being targeted in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“How many lives of innocent Bengali speaking people the BJP wants?” he asked. “This is nothing but another example on how BJP treats Bengalis.”

Since May, thousands of Bengali-speaking migrant workers have been rounded up in states ruled by the BJP and asked to prove that they were Indian citizens – and not undocumented immigrants.

In several cases, workers have been declared foreigners within days and forced into Bangladesh, despite being Indian citizens.

The Uttar Pradesh Police has arrested a Bajrang Dal member and is searching for eight others who are accused of demolishing a two-century-old shrine in Fatehpur’s Mawai village on Tuesday, the Hindustan Times reported.

The arrested man, identified as Narendra Hindu, has been produced before a court. Narendra is the Bhitoora block coordinator of the Bajrang Dal.

The shrine of Wali Shah Baba, located in a predominantly Hindu area, had been partially damaged during previous road work and repaired by residents. Villagers alleged that a group of about 24 men demolished the structure on Tuesday with hammers, spades and sticks, while making references to Bangladesh.

Alok Pandey, the station house officer at the Husainaganj police station, said that the incident came to light after a video of the demolition was widely circulated on social media.

A first information report was subsequently filed against five named persons and four others who remain unidentified, based on a complaint by a sub-inspector, the Hindustan Times reported.

The men were accused of damaging the shrine, delivering communally provocative speeches, disturbing social harmony and hurting religious sentiments, according to the newspaper.

The FIR was registered under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to rioting, injuring or defiling a place of worship, trespassing on burial places, promoting enmity, hatred, or ill-will between different religious, linguistic or caste groups, and mischief.

“One person has been arrested and sent to jail,” the Hindustan Times quoted Pandey as saying. “Action against others named in the FIR is in progress.”

According to local revenue records, the structure, which measures about 10-12 square metres, is not officially recognised as a shrine, the newspaper reported.

Amresh Kumar Singh, the tehsildar of Sadar, said that the “so-called shrine had been constructed several years ago on land recorded as part of the village settlement”. He added that the surrounding area was inhabited by Hindu families.

Members of the Bajrang Dal claimed that the shrine was linked to a land dispute, the Hindustan Times reported.

Virendra Pandey, a provincial coordinator of the Hindutva group, claimed that the structure was being used to assert ownership of the land. “Some bricks were removed, but there was no shrine,” the newspaper quoted Virendra Pandey as saying. “Residents cleared the site themselves.”

Key Maoist leader Ganesh Uike was killed in a gunfight with security forces in Odisha’s Kandhamal district on Thursday, PTI quoted police officials as saying.

Apart from Uike, who carried a reward of Rs 1.1 crore on his head, three suspected Maoists were also killed in the gunfight, which took place in a forest in the Chakapad police station area.

Uike was the chief of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Odisha.

The identities of the three others who were killed are yet to be ascertained.

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

On December 16, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Lok Sabha that 942 Left-wing extremists had been arrested this year.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read: In Andhra village closest to where Maoist commander Hidma was killed, no one heard gunfire

Uttar Pradesh minister Om Prakash Rajbhar on Wednesday mocked the complainant in the Unnao rape case and laughed at her for staging a protest in Delhi, asking why she was at India Gate when her home is in Unnao, The Indian Express reported.

The complainant and her mother on Tuesday protested at India Gate against the High Court having suspended the life sentence of former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the rape case and having granted him bail. However, they were dragged and forcefully removed from the protest site by security personnel.

Rajbhar, commenting on the developments on Wednesday, laughed loudly and asked: “India Gate? Ghar to unka Unnao hai [Why India gate? She is from Unnao].”

The Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party leader was responding to reporters seeking his response to the woman being removed from India Gate by security personnel.

Reporter: Police took away Unnao rape survivor from India gate.

BJP allay OP Rajbhar: But her house is in Unnao. Hehehehehe. pic.twitter.com/HXFjj6qBcw

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) December 24, 2025

The state minister was further quoted as saying by The Indian Express: “The court has issued directions that Sengar would stay away from the family, maintaining a 5-km distance. Why a dharna in Delhi when the court has given directions ensuring security. Where is the question of lack of security?”

Sengar was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2019 for raping the woman in Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time.

In March 2020, Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother Jaideep Singh Sengar, among others, were also sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for the killing of the woman’s father in judicial custody.

On account of the conviction in the second case, Sengar remains in jail despite getting bail from the Delhi High Court.

Nevertheless, the complainant told PTI on Wednesday that the court’s decision was “no less than death” for her.

“If the convict gets bail in cases like this, how will the country’s daughters remain safe?” she asked. She also said that she would challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court.

A video of the complainant and her mother being removed from the protest site led Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to ask in a social media post if “such treatment of a gangrape survivor” was appropriate.

Gandhi said that Sengar being granted bail was “extremely disappointing and shameful – especially when the survivor is being repeatedly harassed, and is living under the shadow of fear”.

“Bail for rapists, and treating survivors like criminals – what kind of justice is this?” he asked.

Also read:

Explained: Why Delhi HC released a former BJP MLA convicted of raping a minor

A Hindutva mob on Wednesday vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, The Indian Express reported.

The videos of the incident posted on social media show the mob, armed with sticks, barging into the mall and destroying decorations a day ahead of Christmas.

The incident occurred on the day a Hindutva group called for a state-wide strike to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in Chhattisgarh, NDTV Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh reported.

रायपुर में बंद का समर्थन नहीं करने पर तोड़फोड़, मैग्नेटो मॉल में जमकर की गई तोड़फोड़#chhattisgarh #raipur #magnetomall#christmas #christmaspreparations pic.twitter.com/waK8KYhLgh

— ShubhCg (@ShubhCg) December 24, 2025

An unidentified employee of the mall told The Indian Express that about 80 to 90 persons barged in, “threatened us…shouted at us” and “indulged in violence”.

“For the last 16 years, since we began operations here, we have always supported bandh calls,” the employee was quoted as having said. “But I have never seen such behaviour.”

The call for the bandh followed communal clashes over the Christian burial of a person in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh.

The tensions began on December 16 in Bade Teoda village after the sarpanch Rajman Salam buried his 70-year-old father a day after his death. In a video released the same day, Salam said that he had converted to Christianity, while his father had not.

Salam claimed that he sought permission from village elders to bury his father according to tribal customs, but was told that the burial could not take place in his presence because he is a Christian.

He then went ahead with a Christian burial on his private land, after which the clashes were reported, The Wire reported.

Clashes broke out on December 16 and December 17, after which the police cordoned off the area. On December 18, tensions escalated when a mob armed with sticks breached the police barricades and entered Bade Teoda village, triggering fresh violence.

Several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations have been reported in the past week.

In Uttar Pradesh, members of Hindutva groups on Wednesday sat outside a church in Bareilly’s Cantonment area, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and shouting slogans of “Jai Shri Ram”, The Hindu reported.

Bareilly, UP: Bajrang Dal and Vishav Hindu Parishad members sat outside a prominent church (Bishop Conrad school) in the Cantonment area of Bareilly and recited Hanuman Chalisa amid police presence. They raised slogans of Jai Shree Ram as well. pic.twitter.com/uBBMNdYGC9

— Krishna Chaudhary (@KrishnaTOI) December 24, 2025

In Assam, members of the Bajrang Dal on Wednesday barged into a school in Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations and smashing posters on the premises, the police said.

The alleged members of the Hindutva group carried out the vandalism at St Mary’s School in Nalbari’s Panigaon village. A video by India Today NE showed them setting fire to Christmas decorations and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

In Kerala, a worker of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was arrested after a Christmas carol group of children was attacked while visiting homes in Pudussery village in Palakkad district on Monday.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP at the Centre.

Last week, some schools in Kerala run by Hindutva organisations and a privately-managed Hindu institution had allegedly halted Christmas celebrations. The managements of the schools, however, denied the allegations.

In Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, a hotel run by the state tourism department cancelled a Christmas celebration on the banks of the river Ganga after protests called by the Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat.

On Monday, Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bharadwaj shared a video purportedly recorded in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar showing men threatening women and children wearing Santa Claus caps.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Tuesday raised concern about the “alarming rise in attacks” on Christians in several states ahead of Christmas and said that the incidents undermine India’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the right to worship without fear.

No Christmas holiday for UP schools

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh announced that schools in the state will not be closed for Christmas on Thursday, but will remain open to commemorate the birth centenary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

An order issued by the state Basic Education Department stated that attendance for students would be mandatory. It also directed schools to organise speeches, cultural programmes and remembrance activities to honour Vajpayee.

The order applies to government primary and upper primary schools and coincides with the conclusion of the official birth centenary year celebrations of the BJP leader.

In Rajasthan’s Sriganganagar district, the education department on December 22 issued an order stating that private schools should not force students to dress as Santa Claus during Christmas celebrations.

Additional District Education Officer Ashok Wadhwa said in the order that action would be taken if any complaint was received, PTI reported. “Action will be taken under the rules if any school is found forcing students,” the news agency quoted Wadhwa as saying.

India on Wednesday expressed concern over reports about the demolition of a Hindu deity’s statue near the Cambodia-Thailand border amid the conflict between the two countries, saying that such “disrespectful acts hurt the sentiments of followers around the world”.

Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said in a statement that such acts should not take place, notwithstanding territorial claims.

The conflict between Cambodia and Thailand stems from a territorial dispute over the colonial-era demarcation of their 800-km border. Several ancient temple ruins are located in the region.

The long-standing border reignited this month, leading to more than 40 deaths and over a million persons getting displaced, AFP reported. Both sides have blamed the other for instigating the fresh fighting and attacking civilians.

Amid the dispute, Cambodia accused Thailand of destroying the statue of the Hindu deity Vishnu in the disputed area, the news agency reported. Videos of an excavator demolishing the statue were widely shared on social media.

Kim Chanpanha, a Cambodian government spokesperson in the border province Preah Vihear, said that the statue, built in 2014, “was inside our territory in the An Ses area”, AFP reported.

The demolition occurred on Monday about 100 metres from the border with Thailand, he added.

“We condemn the destruction of ancient temples and statues that are worshipped by Buddhist and Hindu followers,” the news agency quoted Chanpanha as saying.

On Wednesday, Jaiswal said that “Hindu and Buddhist deities are deeply revered and worshipped by people across the region, as part of our shared civilisational heritage”.

He added: “We once again urge the two sides to return to dialogue and diplomacy, to resume peace and avoid any further loss of lives, and damage to property and heritage.”

The border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia had erupted in July. However, both countries agreed on a ceasefire that month, which was brokered by United States President Donald Trump.

But the fighting resumed in December.

The police in Haryana’s Palwal have filed a case against 10 members of a family for allegedly torturing and wrongfully confining a 12-year-old Dalit boy for several hours after accusing him of theft, the Hindustan Times reported.

The incident took place on the night of December 10.

While one person accused in the matter has been arrested so far, three prime accused are absconding, the newspaper reported.

The members of the family have been charged with voluntarily causing hurt and wrongful confinement. They were also booked under provisions of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Prevention of Atrocities Act and the Juvenile Justice Care and Protection of Children Act.

The police was quoted as saying that the family allegedly tied the boy’s limbs and repeatedly gave him electric shocks. The minor told the investigators that he had also been sexually abused by the family. He is being treated in hospital for burn injuries.

The boy carries lights during wedding processions to financially support his family.

On December 10, he was returning to Banchari village from Hodal town near Palwal with two other children when a car with persons who were allegedly drunk began chasing them at around 11.30 pm.

The boy told the police that while trying to escape he jumped into the premises of a house and the other children ran towards the village.

The family living in the house caught the minor, suspecting he was a thief, and assaulted him, the newspaper quoted the police as saying. They called the police hours later.

The three prime suspects who are absconding filed anticipatory bail petitions on Monday. A hearing in the sessions court on Wednesday was adjourned after a medical report on the injuries sustained by the minor was presented, the Hindustan Times reported.

The matter will be heard next on January 8.

At least nine persons were killed as a bus caught fire after colliding with a lorry in Chitradurga, Karnataka on Thursday, IANS reported.

Eight passengers of the bus and the lorry driver died in the accident, which occurred on a highway near Gorlathu village at about 3 am. The bus was travelling from Bengaluru to Gokarna.

There were 32 passengers in the bus, PTI reported. The persons injured in the accident were taken to hospitals in Hiriyur town and Tumkur.

The news agency quoted Inspector-General of Police Ravikanthe Gowda as saying that the “lorry driver, coming from the opposite direction, drove recklessly and veered into the other lane, causing the collision”.

The lorry also collided with a school bus but the passengers in the school bus were not injured.

#WATCH | Karnataka | An accident took place between a lorry and a private bus near Gorlathu village in Chitradurga district on National Highway 48. Multiple dead bodies seen at the spot. Rescue operations underway. More details awaited

(Visuals from the spot) pic.twitter.com/1pcOboCYGq

— ANI (@ANI) December 25, 2025

The police in Assam have arrested three persons for social media posts allegedly supporting the killing of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, The Assam Tribune reported on Wednesday.

On December 18, the Hindu man, Dipu Chandra Das, was beaten to death in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district by a mob that accused him of blasphemy. His body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Seven persons had been arrested in the case.

In Assam’s Sribhumi district, the police arrested 19-year-old Izazur Rahman Laskar of Gamoria village for creating and sharing a video on social media platform Instagram that allegedly sought to justify Das’ killing, The Times of India reported.

He was booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to promoting enmity between groups, imputations assertions prejudicial to national integration, deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class, and statements conducing to public mischief, among others, the newspaper reported.

The police said that the mobile phone allegedly used to create and share the video has been seized, The Times of India reported.

In Kamrup district, Mohammad Shaif Akhtar Ali of Rangia town was arrested for social media posts allegedly supporting Das’ killing, The Times of India reported.

Babul Hussain was arrested in Dhubri district for sharing content that allegedly supported extremist elements in Bangladesh, The Assam Tribune reported.

The Hindu man’s killing in Bangladesh led to protests in several parts of India, including Assam.

Das was killed amid widespread unrest in the neighbouring country following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi, who succumbed to gunshot injuries at a hospital in Singapore on December 18.

Hadi was a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina government.

The Union environment ministry on Wednesday directed states not to grant new mining leases in the Aravalli Hills amid criticism about redefining the mountain range.

The ban on new mining leases is to preserve the integrity of the landscape and applies to the entire Aravalli range, the ministry said.

The 700-km Aravalli mountain range stretches diagonally from southwest Gujarat, through Rajasthan to Delhi and Haryana. Its highest point is Guru Shikhar in Mount Abu, which rises to an elevation of 1,722 metres.

Under the government’s new definition that has been accepted by the Supreme Court, an Aravalli hill is any landform that rises at least 100 metres above the surrounding terrain. An Aravalli range is formed by two or more such hills located within 500 metres of each other, including the land between them.

However, environmentalists have warned that defining the Aravallis solely by their height could leave many lower, scrub-covered but ecologically important hills vulnerable to mining and construction. Experts say these smaller hills are crucial for preventing desertification, recharging groundwater and supporting local livelihoods.

Amid criticism, the ministry said on Wednesday that it has directed the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education to identify additional zones in the Aravallis based on ecological, geological and landscape-level considerations where mining should not be allowed. These zones would be over and above the areas where mining has already been prohibited.

The ministry said that the state governments must ensure that existing mining operations comply with environmental safeguards and conform to the Supreme Court’s order.

The Congress described the government’s directives to state governments on Wednesday as a “bogus attempt at damage control that will not fool anybody”. The “dangerous 100m+ redefinition” had remained unchanged, party leader Jairam Ramesh said on social media.

On Monday, the Union government denied that the redefinition weakens environmental safeguards, stating that over 90% of the Aravalli region remains protected.

On Wednesday, the Congress asked the Union government why it was “pushing through a fatally flawed” redefinition of the Aravallis, despite opposition from key expert bodies and advisers to the Supreme Court.

Ramesh shared on social media a report by The Indian Express saying that the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the government’s new definition of the Aravalli hills contradicts the recommendations of its own Central Empowered Committee.

Also read: The slow destruction of Delhi’s forgotten spine

For the past 43 Christmases, a tapestry has hung in my mother’s home. Lately, it has come to represent a contradiction.

A gift from Ethiopia by dear friends of my grandparents, the tapestry depicts Mary cradling baby Jesus, both encircled by golden halos: it is renaissance-style imagery with both figures pale-skinned while Christ has bouncing, golden curls and bright, blue eyes.

Ethiopia was among the earliest regions to adopt Christianity, around the fourth century, according to historians. I am not an art scholar, but unlike our tapestry, religious illustrations and artwork from Ethiopia between the 14th century to the late 18th century are distinct, featuring figures with brown skin, black hair and eyes and beards.

Startlingly, they look Middle Eastern.

With Israel’s assault on Gaza stretching into its third Christmas, the idea that Christ was a Palestinian has resurfaced at protests and rallies as Christians in Gaza and the Palestinian territories in the West Bank mark the festival.

Historians and scholars of religious studies say there is not enough evidence to state precisely where Christ was born and that Palestine, despite its long history, had undefined and shifting boundaries. However, it is agreed that Christ was born in West Asia and was certainly not white.

Non-white representations of Christ and Christianity are widespread even though churches, certainly in India, abide by idealised European-style imagery. There is a wealth of art and iconography, fromMughal art and Ethiopian manuscripts to “Black Jesus” and the work of Indian artists, of varying depictions of Christianity.

The Ethiopian tapestry, with its marble-skinned iconography, instead reinforces what faith and divinity must look like.

Tradition maintains that Christianity arrived in the Indian subcontinent as early as 52 CE, but it is also intertwined with the European colonisation of India. For Indian Christians, this can be a double bind: Hindutva supporters claim that they are not sufficiently Indian while some in the West believe that they are not appropriately Christian. But this ambivalence is also a flexible space of being, unique to one’s life and location.

Indeed, the book Indian Christmas is a heartfelt archive of how India’s many Christians have made the festival their own through food, ritual and faith. Last December, Scroll’s Nolina Minj wrote about how Adivasi Christians celebrate Christmas in Jharkhand with Kurukh carols, traditional food and Adivasi figures in the nativity scene.

These contradict the accusations that arise every Christmas of the faith being an obscene Western import.

The Nativity, an 18th-century Ethiopian depiction from the Nagara Maryam. the history and miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, portrays the Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus in a manger, with Joseph by their side. #MerryChristmas #Ethiopia pic.twitter.com/zmVBLKuqnu

— Abyssinia Archive (@Abyssinia_Vault) December 25, 2024

Christianity’s violent colonial legacy is a historical reality, but Christianity has also been rooted in and transformed by the lives and cultures of those who went on to follow it. Faith, after all, is given meaning by those who practise it and perhaps find in it whatever it is they seek.

The blogIndigenous Jesus collects iconography and artwork showing how the faith has been reimagined across the world, by Indigenous Americans and Australians, Nigerians and several Indian artists.

Scroll has extensively covered the work of some of these artists, such as FN Souza and especially Angelo da Fonseca, whose art inhabits the contradictions of Christian identity. They were both born in Portuguese-ruled Goa, which was later integrated into India.

Fonseca’s evocative Christian iconography is a bridge between these two worlds. In one nativity painting, Fonseca’s Mary, wearing a saree and mangalsutra, holds an infant, faintly emitting rays of light while Joseph stands behind her, his hands folded in prayer.

Nativity paintings (1954) by the Indian artist Angelo Da Fonseca (1902-1967). His work has many famous examples of modern Indian Christian Iconography. pic.twitter.com/APG6mrmxHm

— Iqtibas اقتباس (@iqtibaas88) December 25, 2024

Like Fonseca, Indian artist Alfred Thomas’s Life of Christ, a collection of his paintings first published in 1948, depicts a Buddha-like Christ. The introduction to the book says that Thomas “places our Lord and His followers in Indian settings. He employs Indian symbolism, interpreting it in the light of Christian faith”.

Yet, the writer of the introduction, presumably George, the Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan, is perhaps unsettled. He writes that Thomas’s depiction of transfiguration, the moment when Christ undergoes divine transformation on a mountaintop, “is the most difficult picture”.

Contrary to the depictions of Christ exuding radiant power, Thomas’s Christ closely resembles Buddha and is also clearly dark-skinned. “The joy of perfect colouring and design is marred at first sight for us by the blue of Christ’s glorified Body,” writes the bishop. “But that which to us is so strange is immediately understandable to Indian eyes.”

But it was Fonseca’s iconography that sparked the most outrage, drawing the censure and criticism of the church as well as Indian Christians, forcing the artist to leave Goa. Jesuit priest Delio Mendonca writes in Fonseca that the artist’s difficulties “started with his own family, then extended to his entire community including church authorities of his day as well as the art world of India”.

Mendonca quotes FN Souza as saying that the clergy continued to impress upon Christians “the art to be admired was the Christ with the golden hair and blue eyes and flaxen-haired Madonnas, the Italy-made holiness”.

As Mendonca powerfully notes, Fonseca “was to remain paradoxically too Hindu for Catholics and too Catholic for the Hindus, too Indian for the West and too Western for the Indians”.

Over the years, Mendonca writes, the church in the 20th century began reconsidering its position on indigenised iconography, keen to disassociate itself from the cruelties of colonial conquest as independence movements gathered steam across the colonies.

The acceptance of iconography, like Fonseca’s, was recast as part of the church’s advocacy of Christian universalism.

Today, when December feels lost beneath a heap of tinsel and terrible Christmas movies – almost always set against snowfall and flowing coats – the priest’s annual lament that “Christmas is not about Santa, gifts and cake” rings true.

But cotton snow, wreaths and candy canes jostle for room alongside Indian influences such as the exuberant, skinny Santa Clauses who dance to drumbeats as they accompany carolers in Kerala, Christmas “faral” and the like.

Snow is hardly a prerequisite for the festival and like in balmy Kerala or Mumbai, not everyone is dreaming of a White Christmas.

Beyond the dominant aesthetic sensibilities of a European-American Christmas is a world of varying, unique celebrations. The widespread festive embrace of this time of year, though Christ wasn’t even born in December – and what we are all celebrating is actually the Winter Solstice – is a brief but heartening moment.

Perhaps, in another time, my grandparents’ tapestry could have told a different story. But for now it is a reminder to seek out the more varying threads of faith that make for a more colourful tapestry.

Members of the Bajrang Dal on Wednesday barged into a school in Assam’s Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations and smashing posters on the premises, the police said.

The alleged members of the Hindutva group carried out the vandalism at St Mary’s School in Nalbari’s Panigaon village. A video by India Today NE showed them setting fire to Christmas decorations and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

On the eve of Christmas, members of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal entered St. Mary’s School in Panigaon, Nalbari, chanting slogans like “Jai Shri Ram” and “Jai Hindu Rashtra.” They destroyed and set fire to all Christmas decorations prepared at the school,… pic.twitter.com/cLkMiubOyX

— India Today NE (@IndiaTodayNE) December 24, 2025

In another incident in Nalbari, about 15-20 members of the Bajrang Dal also burned Christmas decorations at a shop and forced the establishment to close, Asom Live reported.

“I didn’t know that I can’t sell Christmas decoration goods,'“ the channel quoted the shopkeeper as saying. “The members of the Bajrang Dal came, threw the items in the drain and torched some of them.”

This comes amid several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations being reported in the past week.

In Kerala, a worker of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was arrested after a Christmas carol group of children was attacked while visiting homes in Pudussery village in Palakkad district on Monday.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP at the Centre.

In Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, a hotel run by the state tourism department cancelled a Christmas celebration on the banks of the river Ganga after protests called by the Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat.

On Monday, Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bharadwaj shared a video purportedly recorded in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar showing men threatening women and children wearing Santa Claus caps. However, the police claimed that the incident was a “minor and momentary verbal disagreement" between some individuals which did not escalate into a confrontation or law and order situation, PTI reported.

On Tuesday, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India raised concerns about the “alarming rise in attacks” on Christians in several states ahead of Christmas and said that the incidents undermine India’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the right to worship without fear.

The bishops’ association said that it was “particularly shocked” by an incident in Jabalpur, where a visually impaired woman attending a Christmas programme was assaulted by a BJP leader.

The assault took place on Saturday at a church, where the BJP’s Jabalpur Vice President Anju Bhargava accused the woman of carrying out religious conversions. The incident took place in the presence of a police officer.

The Commission for Air Quality Management on Wednesday revoked Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region after the air quality improved.

Stage 4 restrictions had came into force on December 13 after the air quality slipped into the “severe plus” category.

The commission said on Wednesday that the Air Quality Index in Delhi has shown significant improvement since Tuesday night due to high winds and favourable meteorological conditions.

It added that average AQI in the national capital stood at 271 on Wednesday, which is in the “poor category”.

However, the commission added that air quality forecasts provided by the India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute Of Technology-Madras suggest that in the coming days, the air quality index may increase because of slower winds.

Noting that restrictions Stage 4 restrictions under the GRAP has been revoked with immediate effect, the statement added that actions under Stage 1, 2 and 3 will continue to be implemented.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region. The commission is a statutory body formed in 2020 to address pollution in the NCR and adjoining areas.

The air quality in the national capital had worsened to the “severe plus” category between December 13 and December 15, but had improved marginally to the “very poor” category till Monday.

However, the average AQI in Delhi worsened to 412 on Tuesday before improving on Wednesday.

What the GRAP measures entail

Stage 4 restrictions under GRAP include a ban on trucks entering the region and halting construction activities for public and private projects. All schools, except for classes 10 and 12, also shift to hybrid mode.

Stage 3 measures include a ban on non-essential construction work and the closure of stone crushers and mining activities, in addition to the measures already imposed under Stage 1 and Stage 2.

They also include the shifting of primary school up to Class 5 to hybrid mode. Parents and students have the option to choose between offline and online classes wherever available.

Additionally, the use of BS-III petrol and BS-IV diesel cars is restricted in Delhi and the NCR.

BS norms, or Bharat Stage Emission Standards, are regulations set by the Indian government to control air pollutants from motor vehicles. The higher the BS norm, the stricter the standard and the lower the permissible emissions.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

In recent months, there has been frenzied debate about whether the US government’s unfavorable outlook toward immigration would curtail foreign student enrollments in US universities and scale back overseas talent in American tech companies. Many predicted that these measures would hit candidates of Indian origin the hardest.

India is the source of the largest cohort of international students in the US. The world’s most populous country is also by far the largest beneficiary of the H-1B system. Seven out of 10 of all new H-1Bs are granted to applicants born in India. Initial reports seemed to confirm the suspicion that Indians would take the biggest hit.

In October, The New York Times reported that the number of international students arriving in the US in 2025 fell by 19% compared to last year – the largest decline on record outside of the Covid-19 pandemic. But subsequent reporting in The Economist noted that this figure may be misleading. New arrivals were fewer than before because many returning students from the previous term did not leave the US in the first place, concerned that if they left for the summer break, they might not be allowed back in the fall. Indian student enrollments, far from declining, were up 10% over the previous year.

But as is often the case with a purely numerical assessment of facts, these headline numbers may obscure more than they reveal. Many of the people interviewed by Rest of World suggested that when it comes to Indian talent’s access to the US market, there are two contrary trends at play. On the one hand, a fast-growing economy at home has placed an overseas education within the reach of a broader segment of India’s rapidly expanding middle class. At the same time, some of the country’s best graduates are diversifying away from the US.

The aggregate numbers mask a bifurcation: While for the average Indian graduate, the allure of America’s universities and companies is still strong, the country’s best minds are more attuned to similar or better options in other countries and, increasingly, in India as well.

“We are getting fewer top drivers who want to do advanced graduate studies,” Karthik Ramani, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University and a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Rest of World. “Partly because I think in India you have more consulting jobs, you can do really well after doing an MBA for instance, so the general attractiveness of the US has come down.”

Ramani graduated from the elite Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1985. After picking up a doctorate at Stanford University, he spent the better part of the past 35 years in academia in the US. While a generation ago, up to a half of his undergraduate class at IIT moved to the US, the figure has now dropped to 10%-20%, Ramani told me.

Take Nishant Vasan, who received his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering in IIT Madras in 2025 – 40 years after Ramani graduated with the same degree from the same school. While Vasan initially thought about following the well-worn path of moving to the US like so many alums before him, his prospective graduate adviser in the US nudged him to look for alternatives elsewhere given, as he put it, the “current situation”.

Vasan ended up taking an offer from automaker Honda Motor Co in Tokyo, where he works on artificial intelligence and robotics. His decision had next to nothing to do with topical concerns like student visas and H-1Bs, given that Vasan was born in the US and is an American citizen. He decided to move to Japan because he thought the work he did there would be more consequential, he told Rest of World.

“I feel like more avenues have opened up,” he said. “I know seniors in Dubai, I know seniors in Japan, in Singapore. IIT graduates are not just going to the US – there are other alternatives now.”

Vasan said he wouldn’t rule out going back to the US some day. Right now, he is much more preoccupied with the prospect of returning to India.

“I would really like to go back to India and either start something new or contribute to that space in a meaningful way,” he said. It’s a way of thinking that he says is becoming more common among fresh graduates like himself.

For Vasan and others, it is no longer unthinkable that a globally relevant tech company can be incubated in India. The country has the fifth highest concentration of billion-dollar companies and is the fourth largest recipient of venture dollars globally, according to data from Dealroom, which provides intelligence on startups.

In some respects, building outside the US could be an advantage. At a time when important pockets of the tech industry in the US are being monopolised by a handful of big tech companies, overseas destinations offer upstarts breathing room to work on their ideas outside the kill zones that surround these behemoths.

The AI boom has proven to be different from the internet era in one important respect: We haven’t seen nearly the same degree of cannibalization of old companies by new ones. Many of the biggest names in AI – Nvidia, Google, Meta, Microsoft – are holdovers from previous platform shifts, and have managed to extend their relevance, given the sheer scale of investments needed to train and run AI models, which can make it very hard for new entrants to compete.

Local companies can also work on local problems which foreign firms might find hard to fully comprehend. Vasan cites the example of Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based company which is creating an LLM with all the Indian languages and their various dialects – a big challenge, given the lack of data.

This openness to exploring India as an option extends to second-generation Indian Americans, too.

“I worked in India for a year, and if not for wanting to do graduate school, I would’ve stayed longer and I could totally see myself going back in the future,” Arjun Ramani told Rest of World. Ramani was born and raised in the US and holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in economics and computer science from Stanford University. He is currently enrolled in a PhD program in economics at MIT.

“At Stanford there were 10 to 15, or maybe even more students from India every year. And in the past, the aspiration was if you came to the US for undergrad you would want to stay,” he said. “But now it seems like more than half the people in my year have gone back to India, and many are starting companies in India.”

The India AI Mission, launched last year with $1.25 billion in funding, aims to catalyse the transformation by providing compute infrastructure and supporting AI innovation hubs across the country. By facilitating access to GPU resources and fostering public-private partnerships, the initiative seeks to create the ecosystem conditions that could turn India’s talent pool into the next generation of AI companies.

The enduring challenge of the Indian tech industry is that it has struggled to turn a vast talent base into successive waves of tech companies. The industry is still dominated by the old guard of Wipro, Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services, which are all more than half a century old and continue to retain a narrow focus on software services.

Many of the newer startup ecosystems globally got their start with that one breakout success story that proves to the diaspora their startup dreams can be built at home. South Korea’s Coupang, the e-commerce giant founded by Harvard dropout and Korean-American returnee Bom Kim, is one example that comes to mind. A success of that scale might be just what it takes for a country like India to turn a trickle of returning professionals into a broader movement of talent repatriation.

Mehran Gul is the author of The New Geography of Innovation.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

Schools in Uttar Pradesh will not observe a holiday for Christmas on December 25 but will stay open to commemorate the birth centenary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. An order issued by the state’s Basic Education Department said that attendance for students would be mandatory on Thursday.

The department directed schools to organise speeches, cultural programmes and remembrance activities to honour Vajpayee. The order applies to government primary and upper primary schools in the state.

The decision reportedly came amid demands made by the Hindutva group Bajrang Dal in Saharanpur district to celebrate December 25 as “Bal Gaurav [child pride] and Good Governance Day” instead of Christmas. Read on.

Meta restricted access for Indian users to two artificial intelligence-generated videos posted by the Congress showing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Adani Group chairperson Gautam Adani. The social media conglomerate took the action after it received takedown notices from the Delhi Police, it disclosed to the Lumen Database, a Harvard University project.

The company said that the videos did not violate its community standards, but it would risk losing safe harbour protections and would put its local personnel at risk of criminal penalties if it failed to comply with the notices.

Losing safe harbour protections would mean that the platforms would be legally responsible for the content in question.

The police said that the videos contravenes provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act pertaining to forgery, fraudulent use of forged documents and identity theft. Read more.

Security personnel stopped the complainant in the Unnao rape case and her family members from protesting in Delhi against the High Court granting bail to the convicted former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar. They were reportedly dragged and forcefully removed from India Gate on Tuesday.

The High Court on Tuesday also suspended the life sentence of Sengar, while directing him not to travel within a five-kilometre radius of the complainant’s home.

Hours after the judgement, the complainant, accompanied by her mother and activist Yogita Bhayana, staged a protest at India Gate against the bail. However, they were dragged and forcefully removed from the protest site, showed videos circulating on social media.

On Wednesday morning, the complainant’s mother alleged that the Central Reserve Police Force stopped her and her daughter from protesting at Mandi House. Read more.

India reported 14,875 instances of free speech violations in 2025, including the killings of eight journalists and one social media influencer, a report by a civil society group said. The report by the Free Speech Collective recorded instances of censorship, court gag orders, restrictions affecting academic autonomy in the past year.

The study said that the arrests of 117 persons, including eight journalists, were linked to free speech violations this year. Thirty-three of the 40 attacks related to free speech targeted journalists, the Free Speech Collective said.

Eight journalists were killed during the year: two in Uttar Pradesh and one each in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha and Uttarakhand. A social media influencer was killed in Punjab. Read more.

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

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh has announced that schools in the state will not be closed for Christmas on Thursday, but will remain open to commemorate the birth centenary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Maktoob Media reported on Wednesday.

An order issued by the state Basic Education Department stated that attendance for students would be mandatory on Thursday. It also directed schools to organise speeches, cultural programmes and remembrance activities to honour Vajpayee.

The order applies to government primary and upper primary schools in the state and coincides with the conclusion of the official birth centenary year celebrations of the BJP leader.

The decision reportedly came amid demands made by the Hindutva group Bajrang Dal in Saharanpur district to celebrate December 25 as “Bal Gaurav [child pride] and Good Governance Day” instead of Christmas, Maktoob Media reported.

Good Governance Day, started in 2014 by the then newly elected Union government led by Narendra Modi, is observed on December 25 every year to commemorate Vajpayee’s birth anniversary.

In a memorandum, the Hindutva group called for action against schools that observed Christmas and urged the state Basic Education Department to issue directives preventing celebrations for the festival, according to Maktoob Media.

It claimed that students should be taught about “Indian values” and that schools must organise poetry recitations featuring Vajpayee’s poems, speeches and essay competitions instead of Christmas activities.

December 25 should honour the birth anniversaries of educationist Madan Mohan Malaviya and Vajpayee rather than mark the birth of Jesus Christ, it added.

The decision not to observe a holiday for Christmas has drawn criticism, with Christian organisations and activists saying that the cancellation marginalises the community and undermines the secular fabric of public education, according to Maktoob Media.

John Dayal, secretary general of the All India Christian Council and a member of the National Integration Council, told the news portal that the directive to replace the traditional holiday with commemorative programmes was a “deliberate targeting of the most sacred day in the Christian calendar”.

“The decision reflects a sustained and intensifying pattern of marginalisation of the Christian community under the current regime,” Maktoob Media quoted Dayal as saying. He added that the normalisation of such rhetoric had created an atmosphere of fear.

Nihal Nazim, a teacher at a government school in Uttar Pradesh’s Moradabad district, said that “official calendars in schools must balance national commemorations with respect for diverse cultural and religious traditions”.

The direction on the cancellation of the holiday in Uttar Pradesh comes days after the Kerala government flagged reports of schools in the state halting Christmas celebrations due to alleged pressure from Hindutva organisations linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP at the Centre.

On Sunday, the Kerala government warned that schools would not be allowed to be turned into “communal laboratories”. It also added that an “urgent inquiry” had been ordered.

Education Minister V Sivankutty said that the state government will resist pressure to create division along religious lines. The minister accused the RSS and its affiliates of seeking to expel the religious practices and celebrations of Christian and Muslim minorities from the state’s cultural life.

Security personnel forcefully stopped the complainant in the Unnao rape case and her family members from protesting in Delhi on Tuesday and Wednesday against the High Court granting bail to the convicted former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar, reported NDTV.

The High Court on Tuesday suspended the life sentence of Sengar and directed him not to travel within a five-kilometre radius of the complainant’s home.

Hours after the judgement, the complainant, accompanied by her mother and activist Yogita Bhayana, staged a protest at India Gate against the bail. However, they were dragged and forcefully removed from the protest site, showed videos circulating on social media.

They were detained at the Kartavya Path police station for around an hour, reported the Hindustan Times.

On Wednesday morning, the complainant’s mother alleged that the Central Reserve Police Force stopped her and her daughter from protesting at the Mandi House.

She also allegedly jumped from a moving CRPF-escorted bus while the complainant was inside, reported NDTV.

“We did not get justice,” the mother was quoted as saying. “My daughter has been held captive. It seems they want to kill us. CRPF men took the girl and dropped me on the road.”

She further alleged: “We were going to protest, but the CRPF men forcibly took her away. We were going to Mandi House to protest.”

In December 2019, Sengar was convicted and sentenced to life for raping a woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time.

In March 2020, Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother Jaideep Singh Sengar, among others, were sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for the killing of the woman’s father in judicial custody.

Sharing a video of the police dragging the complainant away from the India Gate, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday asked in a social media post if “such treatment of a gangrape survivor” was appropriate.

He said that Kuldeep Singh Sengar being granted bail was “extremely disappointing and shameful – especially when the survivor is being repeatedly harassed, and is living under the shadow of fear”.

“Bail for rapists, and treating survivors like criminals – what kind of justice is this,” he said.

Meanwhile, the complainant told PTI that the High Court’s decision was “no less than death” for her.

“If the convict gets bail in cases like this, how will the country’s daughters remain safe?” she asked.

She also said that she would challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court.

As part of his bail conditions, the High Court told Sengar to furnish a personal bond of Rs 15 lakh with three sureties of the same amount, and to report to the police every Monday at 10 am.

Despite the order, he remains in prison for the killing of the complainant’s father.

While sentencing Sengar to life imprisonment in 2019, the trial court had directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to take adequate steps to ensure that the life and liberty of the complainant are protected.

The woman and her family had been placed under the protection of the Central Reserve Police Force after an order from the Supreme Court in 2019. The court had noted at the time that there was a threat to the lives of the complainant, her mother and her lawyer, among other persons.

This came after the woman and her lawyer were severely injured in a car crash. Her family had alleged that Sengar was behind the accident. Two of the woman’s relatives, one of whom was a witness in the rape case, were killed.

A court in Goa on Tuesday granted bail to two nightclub managers who had been arrested in connection with a fire that claimed 25 lives there earlier this month, The Times of India. The court, however, rejected a similar petition filed by the general manager of the establishment.

The fire had erupted around midnight on December 7 in a club named Birch by Romeo Lane, located near Baga beach, one of the most popular tourist spots in Goa. Twenty staff members and five tourists were killed.

A preliminary inquiry said that “electric firecrackers” set off inside the premises triggered the fire.

On Tuesday, District Judge DV Patkar allowed the bail application filed by the bar manager, Rajveer Singhania, and the gate manager, Priyanshu Thakur. However, the judge denied relief to the general manager, Vivek Singh.

All three of them had been arrested on December 7.

The lawyer representing Singhania and Thakur said that the court granted them bail with strict conditions, including directions that they must not influence or threaten anyone connected with the case, The Times of India reported.

The two men cannot leave India without prior permission, the lawyer said.

They have also been asked to remain available for questioning and to report to the investigating officer or the Anjuna police station once a month until the chargesheet or final report in the case is filed, the newspaper reported.

Meanwhile, a Goa court on Monday extended the police custody of the owners of the club, brothers Saurabh and Gaurav Luthra, by five days, the Hindustan Times reported.

The brothers, who were in Delhi when the fire broke out, were also booked after the incident but they had gone to Thailand. While the police accused them of having fled the country, they claimed that they had travelled to the southeast Asian country for business reasons.

On December 16, the two of them were deported from Thailand and taken into custody as soon as they landed in Delhi.

Also read: The expensive fantasy of Goa displaces Goans and runs on cheap migrant labour

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday directed the Goods and Services Tax Council to convene an urgent meeting and consider lowering the levies on air purifiers in view of the high levels of pollution in the national capital and surrounding areas, reported Bar and Bench.

The council should consider slashing the tax on the machines from the current figure of 18% to 5%, a division bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said.

The court was hearing a petition filed by advocate Kapil Madan seeking directions to categorise air purifiers as a “medical device” and lower the GST levy on them.

Madan told the bench that air purifiers cannot be treated as a luxury and should instead be looked at as a necessity to face extreme air pollution, Live Law reported.

Air purifiers qualify as medical devices under Section 3(b)(iv) of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act because they perform a preventive function by mechanically filtering and removing hazardous particulate matter, he added.

Madan said that continuing to impose 18% GST on air purifiers, despite their medically recognised role in a crisis and their functional equivalence to devices taxed at 5%, constitutes an “arbitrary and unreasonable fiscal classification”.

Earlier in the day, the High Court on Wednesday criticised the Union government for its failure to tackle air pollution in the national capital, saying that the least it could do was to reduce the GST on air purifiers during such an “emergency”, Bar and Bench reported.

“How many times do you breathe in a day?” the bench was quoted as saying. “21,000 times. Just calculate the harm you are doing to yourself.”

As the bench reconvened after lunch, it noted that the parliamentary standing committee in December recommended that the government should either lower or abolish taxes on air purifiers and filters used in them, reported Bar and Bench.

“We are informed that GST council is a pan-India body and convening a meeting may take some time,” said the court. “However, considering the air quality situation in Delhi and nearby areas, we find it appropriate for the GST council to meet at the earliest.”

The court listed the matter for December 26.

AQI in Delhi

Delhi’s air quality on Wednesday marginally improved to the “poor” category, according to data from the Sameer application at 3.05 pm.

The national capital’s average AQI stood at 283, showed the application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board. Twenty of the city’s 39 active monitoring stations recording Air Quality Index readings above 300.

An index value between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air. Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

An AQI in the “severe” and “severe plus” category signifies hazardous pollution levels that can pose serious risks even to healthy individuals.

The air quality in the national capital had worsened to the “severe plus” category between December 13 and December 15, but had improved marginally to the “very poor” category till Monday.

However, the average AQI in Delhi worsened to 412 on Tuesday.

Delhi and the National Capital Region are under Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan to curb pollution. The restrictions came into force on December 13 after the air quality slipped into the “severe plus” category.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region.

Also read: How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

Meta has restricted access in India to two videos posted by the Congress showing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Adani Group chief Gautam Adani after receiving takedown notices from the Delhi Police, the Hindustan Times reported.

The social media conglomerate disclosed to the Lumen Database, a Harvard University project, that it restricted access to the artificial intelligence-generated videos on Instagram and Facebook.

In its disclosure, Meta stated that it received the takedown notices on December 18.

The company said that the videos did not violate its community standards, but it would risk losing safe harbour protections and would put its local personnel at risk of criminal penalties if it failed to comply with the notices.

Losing safe harbour protections would mean that the platforms would be legally responsible for the content in question.

The police had invoked Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act. This provision states that online intermediaries, such as social media platforms, can lose their safe harbour status if they fail to remove or disable access to content that is used to commit an “unlawful act” despite being told to do so by government authorities.

The notices also mentioned rule 3(1)(d) of IT Rules, which requires social media platforms to remove content within 36 hours of receiving a court order or a government notification.

They said that the videos violated Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita Sections 336(4) and 340(2), and section 66C of the IT Act.

While BNS section 336(4) deals with punishment for forgery, section 340(2) pertains to the fraudulent use of forged documents or electronic records. Section 66C of the IT Act deals with identity theft.

On October 22, the Union government amended the IT Rules to define the authorities that can seek the removal of content posted online.

The earlier version of the rules said that any “appropriate government or its agency” can direct social media platforms to take down content.

The amended rules say that social media platforms can be directed to remove content or block its access through an order of a court of competent jurisdiction or through an intimation by a government official not below the rank of joint secretary or director.

If the take-down notice is from the police, it must be issued by an officer not below the rank of deputy inspector general.

Jamia Millia Islamia university on Tuesday suspended a professor from the Department of Social Work after receiving complaints about a question on “atrocities against Muslim minorities in India” in an undergraduate examination paper, reported The Indian Express.

The institute said that it would ask the police to register a first information report against Virendra Balaji Shahare, who had set the question paper, according to the newspaper.

The question, which appeared in a paper titled Social Problems in India, read: “Discuss the atrocities against Muslim minorities in India giving suitable example.”

The question was asked to students in their first semester of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Social Work programme in an exam held on Sunday.

In an order on Tuesday, the office of the registrar stated that it had received complaints regarding the contents of the end-semester paper and described the question as “lapses on the part of” Shahare.

“The Competent Authority, JMI, has taken a serious view on the negligence and carelessness on the part of Prof Virendra Balaji Shahare, Department of Social Work,” the order was quoted as having said.

It added that an inquiry committee would examine the contents of the question paper. The professor would be required to remain in Delhi during his suspension.

The Delhi University Teachers’ Association alleged that the question promoted a “one-sided” narrative and described it as a matter of “serious concern”, reported The Times of India.

It also asked the University Grants Commission and the Ministry of Education to take note of the matter.

However, a student group in the university, The Fraternity Movement, has demanded that Shahare’s suspension be revoked, saying that he had only “raised critical questions on the atrocities faced by the Muslim minority in India”, reported The Indian Express.

It added that through the order, the university had chosen “punishment over academic freedom”.

“If a university historically known for its Muslim identity and tradition of intellectual resistance cannot allow honest engagement with social realities, then who will?” asked the group.

The Indian Express said it had asked Shahare for a comment but had not received a response.

On November 22, members of a little-known nativist group arrived at one of the oldest mosques in Arunachal Pradesh, a modest two-storied structure in Itanagar.

The men, belonging to the Arunachal Pradesh Indigenous Youth Organization, demanded to see documentary proof that the Itanagar Jama Masjid, built in 1979 on land donated by a tribal resident, was a legal construction. They were led by their president Taro Sonam Liyak.

A mosque official, who is from Assam, told Scroll that he did not give in to their demands. “I did not show them any documents despite the threats and intimidation,” he said. “Why should I? Who are they?”

But the refusal led to violence. “They called me Bangladeshi and kicked the caretaker of the masjid.” The mosque officials have filed written complaints with the police, asking for the registration of a first information report.

The Itanagar Jama Masjid was not the sole target.

A member of the staff of another Naharlagun mosque, Capital Jama Masjid, told Scroll that the group turned up at their premises on November 15. “They intimidated us for over an hour,” he told Scroll, asking that he not be identified. “The police were there but they didn’t stop them,” he said.

A senior official of the masjid committee told Scroll that the mob damaged and vandalised the wazookhana, where ablutions are carried out before prayers, and broke taps. The mosque was built in 2009 at the initiative of Bengali Muslims, but is administered by a group of tribal Muslims.

Prayers are held in a makeshift tin shed, while the main mosque building is under construction. But APIYO vigilantes accused the mosque officials of building the structure without permission.

Five days later, Naharlagun authorities sealed the mosque, arguing that it was built without a legal permit from Itanagar Planning Authority or the town planning department.

Since October, the Arunachal Pradesh Indigenous Youth Organization has carried out a series of raids on mosques in the Itanagar Capital Region, comprising the two cities of Naharlagun and Itanagar.

Led by the outfit’s head Liyak, they have visited mosques, demanded to see documents, called the mosque officials Bangladeshis, demanded that they say “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and threatened to shut down the places of worship. All of this has been streamed on social media. On December 9, a bandh called by APIYO against “illegal mosques” led to Itanagar and Naharlagun shutting down.

Since the organisation began its raids, two of the eight mosques in the Itanagar Capital Region have been sealed.

The Masjid Welfare Committee of the region has written to the Bharatiya Janata Party led-state government, asking for action against the group and objecting to their harassment.

A senior member of the committee, who is a tribal Muslim, refuted that the mosques were illegal. “In some cases, documents like the construction permit might be missing,” he said. “But the land on which the mosques were built was given by the local people and they have given the permission.”

He added: “There are numerous unauthorised temples and churches in the state built without permission. But mosques are being specifically targeted.”

Police officials and mosque leaders Scroll spoke to said the anti-Muslim campaign was triggered by eviction drives against Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam, and the growing fear that the displaced “illegal immigrants” were taking over economic activity in the state.

‘We do not want mosques’

Arunachal Pradesh has a minuscule Muslim population. According to the 2011 Census, only 27,045 residents or 1.95 % of the state’s population follow Islam.

Several mosques in Arunachal Pradesh were built on the initiative of Bengali Muslims from Assam, who work here as businessmen or labourers.

Many Muslims from Bihar and Assam’s Lakhimpur district, which shares a border with Arunachal Pradesh, have been trading in the state for decades. “Muslims have been doing business here since Independence,” said a 53-year-old Muslim shopkeeper, who set up business in Itanagar in 2004.

Many construction workers for Arunachal’s infrastructure projects come from Lakhimpur as well. “Over the years, the number of migrants have increased with the construction of roads, dams and buildings increasing,” the shopkeeper said.

Observers said the nativist group has been successful in feeding the anxiety about the growing presence of Muslim migrants in the state.

The outfit’s president Liyak told Scroll: “The migrants dominate in every sector, from construction to market and business. And then we see the mushrooming of mosques in the capital. So, we were alarmed.”

He said the organisation decided to raid the mosques to see if they had permissions. “We found that they were violating the government norms,” he said. “The mosques give shelter to both legal and illegal migrants.”

Senior police officials put the number of migrant Bengali Muslims, mostly workers and businessmen, at around 13,000 – an estimate that the APIYO agrees on.

Tapor Maying, the general secretary of APIYO, said they “do not want” any mosques in the Itanagar Capital Region. “At the most, we are okay if the authorities give permission to two mosques only,” he said.

Both Maying and Liyak claimed that the Muslim community was involved in the narcotics trade. “Because of them, the crime rate is increasing,” Liyak alleged.

Assam eviction fallout?

The APIYO has also been successful in drumming up fears by linking the presence of Bengali Muslims to evictions in Assam, police officials and observers said.

Since June, Assam has demolished homes of over 60,000 Bengali Muslim families, who were living on government land. “The local Arunachali people have genuine fears that those being chased away by evictions and demolitions in Assam may enter the state,” said T Amo, Itanagar deputy inspector general of police.

A leading Muslim representative from Itanagar, who does not want to be named because of fear of repercussions, told Scroll, “There has been no clarification from the Assam government that those who are being evicted during demolition drives are genuine Indians, not Bangladeshis.”

A large number of tribal people, he said, believe that the evicted “illegal immigrants” are moving to Arunachal.

Tapor Maying, the general secretary of APIYO, told Scroll: “Himanta Biswa Sarma is chasing illegal immigrants while our chief minister (Pema Khandu) is letting them come here.”

However, Amo, the senior police official, no illegal migrants or Bangladeshis have been detected in the state this year.

Arunachal Pradesh regulates the entry of “outsiders” to the state through the colonial-era Inner Line Permit system. An inner line permit is an official document issued by the government without which Indian citizens cannot visit or travel the state.

“Some ILP violators were caught and sent back,” Amo said.

Chukhu Apa, Inspector-General of Police, told reporters recently that since January, 8,936 ILP violators have been detected, “out of which 7,351 have been externed”.

The inner line permit is meant to protect the state from extensive migration, which could endanger the identity and heritage of the state’s 26 major tribes and over 100 sub-tribes. It denies voting and land rights to migrants, whether Muslims or Hindus.

Observers pointed out that the group has been able to tap into the widespread anxiety about the growing presence of migrants. “People rely on migrants but when workers or businessmen move in with their families even if they have individual permits, it triggers a deep resentment,” said journalist Tongam Rina of Arunachal Times.

An Itanagar-based political scientist, who teaches at Rajiv Gandhi University, said the APIYO is taking “advantage of the sentiment of the indigenous people”, who believe “that there are too many illegal migrants in the state but the government is not doing anything”.

The RSS’s old project

Others blamed the surge in anti-Muslim rhetoric and sentiment to an old Hindutva project in Arunachal Pradesh. Ebo Mili, a human rights lawyer based in Itanagar, said the people of state are being “influenced by the anti-Muslim hate orchestrated by the RSS-BJP”.

The APIYO’s drive has the support of the Indigenous Faiths and Cultural Society of Arunachal Pradesh or IFCSAP, an influential group backed by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Pai Dawe, vice president of the society, told Scroll that the “threat” posed by Muslim migrants is the “most pertinent” issue of the state. He alleged that Muslim workers, by agreeing to low wages, now dominate construction jobs and corner all economic opportunities. He accused them of “capturing” markets by opening shops and businesses.

“It threatens the very existence of the indigenous people,” Dawe said.

Bengia Ajum, a senior journalist in Itanagar, explained that the “RSS has been active in the state for a very long time, and has made deep inroads into the everyday lives of tribal people”.

The “targeting of Muslims and mosques” is a fallout of the spread of their ideology and shows that “their project has now moved to the next stage.”

Two persons were killed in Assam’s West Karbi Anglong district on Tuesday after clashes broke out between Karbis and non-Karbis, a senior police official told Scroll.

One of those killed, 40-year-old Linus Timung, belongs to the Karbi community, while another, Suraj Dey, is a Hindu Bengali.

The violence took place amid protests demanding that Hindi-speaking persons be evicted from grazing reserves around the town of Kheroni.

Police resorted to tear gas and rubber bullets to control the protesters.

Director General of Police Harmit Singh told reporters that 38 police personnel were injured in the violence. Singh added that he too had been hit by a stone thrown during the clashes.

Mobile internet has been suspended indefinitely in Karbi Anglong and West Karbi Anglong.

The number of protesters injured in the violence remained unclear.

However, PTI reported earlier in the day that at least eight persons had been injured.

Members of the Karbi community were on a hunger strike for the past two weeks, demanding that Hindi-speaking persons with origins in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh be evicted from Kheroni.

The protesters have been demanding that Hindi speakers be evicted from village grazing reserves and professional grazing reserves.

On Monday, a mob in the West Karbi Anglong district set fire to the ancestral home of Tuliram Ronghang, a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and the chief of Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council.

The council is a self-governing body set up to administer the Karbi Anglong and West Karbi Anglong districts under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. It is currently headed by the BJP.

Protesters also vandalised the shops and vehicles of non-tribals in Kheroni market. About 15 shops were torched the area.

Following the violence, the authorities in the Karbi Anglong and West Karbi Anglong districts prohibited public gatherings under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita until further orders.

On Tuesday, a crowd came out to protest against the violence a day earlier despite the prohibitory orders. Demonstrators demanding the eviction of Hindi-speaking persons from the tribal belt also gathered in the Kheroni market area, PTI reported.

Stones were thrown from both sides, injuring protesters, police personnel and reporters, a police officer told the news agency. The police personnel had to baton-charge the protestors and fire tear gas to disperse both groups, he added.

Additional forces have been deployed at the site.

Inspector General of Police (Law and Order) Akhilesh Kumar Singh told Scroll that protesters again set fire to several shops and establishments belonging to non-tribal residents near Zero Point.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that the situation in Karbi Anglong was “very sensitive”, PTI reported. He added Ranoj Pegu, state education and plain tribe and backward classes minister, was present in the district.

The chief minister expressed confidence that the matter would be resolved soon.

Pegu had arrived in the district on Monday night. He said on Tuesday that after his appeal, the agitators agreed to call off their hunger strike, and agreed to a discussion with the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council and the Assam government.

Sarma will head the discussion on December 26, Pegu said.

On Tuesday, Raijor Dal MLA Akhil Gogoi said that he was “shocked and disappointed” to see visuals of the violence in Kheroni and the setting on fire of Ronghang’s home. In a letter, Gogoi urged the chief minister to control the situation immediately so that no more harm is done to the residents of the district.

The Karbi community is Assam’s third largest tribe, constituting 11.1% of the state’s 38.8 lakh tribal population, after Bodo and Mising.

In February 2024, the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council ordered officials to evict more than 2,000 families from grazing land in the hills of Assam, alleging that they were unauthorised occupants of the land.

Most of those affected were Hindi-speaking residents with origins in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The action had come in the backdrop of protests and demonstrations by Karbi civil society groups against the Hindi-speaking population in the region. One such protest was followed by violence in Kheroni on February 15, 2024, when members of a Karbi students’ group came under attack allegedly from Hindi speakers.

Also read:

Why tribal groups in Assam’s Karbi hills are demanding the eviction of Hindi speakers

The Congress on Wednesday asked the Union government why it was “pushing through a fatally flawed” redefinition of the Aravalli hills, despite opposition from key expert bodies and advisers to the Supreme Court.

Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh shared on social media a report by The Indian Express stating that the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the government’s new definition of the Aravalli hills contradicts the recommendations of its own Central Empowered Committee.

The report noted that the Forest Survey of India’s definition, which says the Aravallis include areas with a minimum elevation of three degrees, would better protect the ecology of the range.

The 700-km Aravalli mountain range stretches diagonally from southwest Gujarat, through Rajasthan to Delhi and Haryana. Its highest point is Guru Shikhar in Mount Abu, which rises to an elevation of 1,722 metres.

Under the new definition that has been accepted by the Supreme Court, an Aravalli hill is any landform that rises at least 100 metres above the surrounding terrain. An Aravalli range is formed by two or more such hills located within 500 metres of each other, including the land between them.

However, environmentalists have warned that defining the Aravallis solely by their height could leave many lower, scrub-covered but ecologically important hills vulnerable to mining and construction. Experts say these smaller hills are crucial for preventing desertification, recharging groundwater and supporting local livelihoods.

It is by now abundantly clear that the Union Minister of Environment, Forests, and Climate Climate is being economical with the truth on the Aravallis issue and is misleading the public.

The redefinition of the Aravallis that the Modi Govt is adopting has been clearly and… pic.twitter.com/lzUpKTmrEZ

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) December 24, 2025

The Centre has denied that the redefinition weakens environmental safeguards, stating that over 90% of the Aravalli region remains protected.

On Wednesday, Ramesh accused the environment ministry of “being economical with the truth” and “misleading the public” by persisting with a redefinition that had been “clearly and compellingly opposed” by expert institutions.

The party had earlier said the Aravallis are a national natural heritage and warned that the new definition could undermine their ecological protection, PTI reported.

Also read: The slow destruction of Delhi’s forgotten spine

The United States Department of War on Tuesday said that China was probably seeking to capitalise on the decreased military tensions along the Line of Actual Control to prevent the deepening of New Delhi-Washington ties.

Beijing was also seeking to use the thaw to stabilise its bilateral relations with New Delhi, the Pentagon said in an annual report submitted to the US Congress about the military and security developments relating to China.

India “probably remains sceptical of China’s actions and motives”, the report said. “Continued mutual distrust and other irritants almost certainly limit the [India-China] bilateral relationship,” it added.

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

Initial rounds of disengagement occurred at several points of tension, including Galwan Valley, Hot Springs and Pangong Tso, but Demchok and Depsang had remained points of contention.

The report reiterates Pentagon's view that the Chinese leadership has extended the term “core interest” to cover Beijing’s sovereignty claims “amid territorial disputes” including Arunachal Pradesh.

Beijing refers to Arunachal Pradesh as Zangnan. It lays territorial claims over a large portion of the state, claiming that it is “South Tibet”. India has rejected China’s claims.

In a chapter detailing the Pentagon’s view of Chinese strategy and the US-China relations, the report noted that New Delhi and Beijing had in October 2024 announced a patrolling arrangement along the Line of Actual Control, “leading to the disengagement” of the two militaries in eastern Ladakh.

The agreement had come two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia. This was their first formal meeting since the 2020 skirmishes.

The Pentagon said that the leaders’ meeting “marked the onset of monthly high-level engagements between the two countries” where border management was discussed, along with steps to improve bilateral relationship such as resumption of flights between Indian and Chinese cities and reopening of visa services.

The US has in recent decades viewed India as a counterweight to China’s growing influence in the Indo-Pacific. The improving defence partnership with Washington has also been viewed favourably by New Delhi. Improving ties with India has found bipartisan support in both countries over the past 25 years.

However, US President Donald Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs, additional levies for purchase of Russian oil amid the Ukraine war and repeated claims that he mediated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan following their four-day conflict in May have strained ties.

New Delhi has denied Trump’s claims of having mediated an end to the conflict.

Also read: Modi in China: New détente or a progressive trajectory?

India reported 14,875 instances of free speech violations in 2025, including the killing of eight journalists and one social media influencer, said a report released on Tuesday by the Free Speech Collective.

The organisation that monitors violations of free speech in India, recorded instances of censorship, court gag orders, restrictions affecting academic autonomy, film censorship, regulatory policies and corporate interventions to regulate free speech during this year.

Hundred and seventeen arrests linked to free speech violations were reported during the year, including the arrests of eight journalists, the report said.

The Free Speech Collective also said that 33 of the 40 attacks related to free speech targeted journalists. Of the 19 instances of harassment, 14 involved journalists. Twelve cases of journalists receiving threats in the course of their work were also recorded, the report added.

Eight journalists were killed during the year: two in Uttar Pradesh and one each in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Karnataka, Odisha and Uttarakhand. A social media influencer was killed in Punjab.

The report added that two journalists, Irfan Mehraj from Kashmir and Rupesh Kumar from Jharkhand, remained in custody this year under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

Mehraj has been jailed since March 2023 and Kumar since July 2022.

Gujarat recorded the highest number of free speech violations at 108, followed by Uttar Pradesh at 83 and Kerala at 78.

The report also said that there had been 11,385 instances of censorship and 208 cases of “lawfare”, referring to the use of legal action to cause problems for an opponent.

The censorship figures include mass takedown requests issued by the Union government to social media platform X.

In May, the government sought to withhold access to more than 8,000 accounts on the social media platform in India, the highest number recorded in any month.

The report also recorded 3,070 instances of internet control in 2025, such as internet shutdowns and blocking of mobile applications.

The Free Speech Collective said that there had been at least 16 “serious instances” of censorship in academia.

The report also highlighted the “untrammelled use of [film] certification as a tool of censorship”.

It cited the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting this month denying the International Film Festival of Kerala permission to screen 19 films.

The report also raised concern about the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act, the rules for which were notified in November, noting that they could endanger journalism and weaken India’s transparency regime by diluting the Right to Information Act.

Also Read:

• The Palestine-sized hole in the Kerala film festival programme

• Why the draft personal data protection rules are contentious

Names of 95 lakh persons were removed from the draft voter lists in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala, which were published on Tuesday as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands recorded the highest percentage of deletions, with about 20.6% of voters removed from the draft rolls. A total of 64,000 names were struck off from a voter list of 3.1 lakh.

The second-highest percentage of deletions was recorded in Chhattisgarh, where 27.3 lakh voters were deleted from an electorate of 2.1 crore, translating to 12.9%.

In Kerala, 24 lakh names were excluded from an electorate of 2.7 crore or approximately 8.7%.

Madhya Pradesh recorded the highest absolute number of deletions, with 42.7 lakh voters removed from a total electorate of 5.7 crore. Percentage-wise, this amounted to about 7.4%, the lowest among the four.

The deletions from the draft rolls are provisional and citizens can object to their names being removed. Voters whose names have been excluded will be able to file claims and objections until January 22.

The electoral officers will take a final decision on the applications, after which the final electoral rolls will be issued on February 14.

In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 9,191 electors were marked as dead, 51,906 as shifted or absent and 2,917 were found to be enrolled at multiple locations.

In Chhattisgarh, among the 27.3 lakh names removed, 19.1 lakh voters were found to have shifted from their registered addresses, 6.4 lakh were recorded as dead and 1.7 lakh were identified as being registered in more than one place.

In Kerala, about 6.4 lakh voters were removed after being marked as untraceable or absent, while around 8.1 lakh were deleted as they had permanently shifted. The list also included 6.49 lakh voters recorded as dead and 1.36 lakh duplicate entries. In addition, about 1.6 lakh names fell under the “others” category, which includes people who refused to accept or return the enumeration forms.

In Madhya Pradesh, around 8.4 lakh of those deleted were recorded as dead, 31.5 lakh were marked as absent from their registered addresses or had shifted to other places and 2.7 lakh were identified as being registered as voters in more than one location.

In addition to Kerala, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in eight states and Union Territories.

Overall, around 3.6 crore electors in the 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far in the revision of electoral rolls.

The draft electoral roll for Uttar Pradesh is scheduled to be published on December 31.

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

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

Vinod Kumar Shukla, renowned Hindi writer, poet and novelist, died in Chhattisgarh’s Raipur on Tuesday. He was 88.

Shukla died at 4.58 pm at the All India Institute Of Medical Sciences in Raipur due to multiple organ infection and organ failure, The Indian Express quoted the hospital’s Public Relations Officer Laxmikant Choudhary as saying.

The writer was admitted to the hospital on December 2.

Shukla is survived by his wife, son and a daughter.

The writer, born in Rajnandgaon district in 1937, published his first poetry collection, Lagbhag Jaihind, in 1971. He subsequently wrote several novels, including Naukar Ki Kameez, Khilega To Dekhenge, Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi and Ek Chuppi Jagah.

Naukar ki Kameez was later made into a film of the same title by director Mani Kaul, while Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rehti Thi won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1999. Shukla also received the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature in 2023.

Earlier this year, Shukla was conferred the 59th Jnanpith Award, the highest literary honour in the country, for his contributions to Hindi literature. Shukla became the first person from Chhattisgarh to receive the award.

“His writings are known for their simplicity, sensitivity and unique writing style,” the Bharatiya Jnanpith, which gives out the award, had said at the time. “…His poems and stories present the nuances of a common life in simple language.”

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that he was deeply saddened by Shukla’s death and added that his invaluable contribution to the world of Hindi literature would always be remembered.

Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Vishnu Deo Sai said that Shukla’s passing was an “irreparable loss” to the state. “The Chhattisgarh government, in recognition of his unparalleled contributions, has decided to accord him a final farewell with full state honours,” he said on social media.

Also read:

Vinod Kumar Shukla: An artist forever seeking to be one with his conscientious creation

For a few weeks this February, I would set out early in the morning to visit government hospitals in Bengaluru.

I was reporting on India’s amputation rates, which are among the worst in the world. Not surprisingly, my assignment led me to stories of immense suffering and trauma.

Patients would arrive early in the morning from across Karnataka and other states. Some had open wounds and others were in severe pain.

I sat in rooms as patients were told, to their horror, that they would have to have their legs or toes amputated. In many instances, delay in treatment, as my investigation found, was one of the main reasons for often avoidable amputations.

Every day’s reporting left me drained of hope – until I met a young woman.

Her name was Harshita B. She lived in Bellary.

When Harshita walked into a room at the Bhagwan Mahaveer Jain Hospital, I assumed she was accompanying another patient.

Murali, who was in charge of the hospital’s prosthetic limb centre, looked at me and said, “You should talk to Harshita. She has been coming here for years, since she was a little girl.”

The 23-year-old smiled broadly at Murali and then walked towards me.

At first glance, it did not seem as if she was walking with a prosthetic limb. But she had been doing so almost her whole life.

“When I was about two years old, my family and I were travelling in an autorickshaw,” Harshita said. “A vehicle hit the auto, instantly killing my mother.” In the accident, Harshita lost her leg.

She did not quite remember her life before the accident, nor did she hold any anger in her heart about losing her leg.

Instead, Harshita listed the many ways that life had been good to her. “I went to a very good school. My teachers were always kind and considerate,” she said. “I had a very nice group of friends too. If somebody did make fun of my disability, it was my friends who defended and protected me.”

Through school and engineering college, Harshita said she managed to find people who always helped her out.

When I met her, Harshita was excited about starting on her first job.

“I’m starting tomorrow,” she said, smiling brightly.

She had come to the limb centre to check on her prosthetic and make sure it was in good shape. “The job is in Bengaluru, so I’m excited to move.”

But if there was one concern that the 24-year-old had, it was travelling on buses and trains. “That’s the time that I face the most trouble,” she said.

Harshita said that fellow passengers would often refuse to offer her a seat or make offensive comments.

As her handicap is not immediately apparent, Harshita is often chided if she takes up the seat reserved for the disabled on buses and trains. “Once, I was on the way to write an exam and I sat on a reserved seat in the bus. The whole time, the other passengers, and one man in particular, kept scolding me and passing comments,” she said.

Harshita said the experience made her nervous and caused her to carry that discomfort into the exam rooms as well. “People don’t seem to care for the disabled when it comes to public spaces,” she said. “But I try not to pay attention to those who are mean.”

It struck me that the struggle of the disabled in buses and trains and public spaces still does not get the attention it deserves.

It also made me realise that disabilities can sometimes be invisible. So, it’s important to check if there’s somebody around you who needs that seat on the bus more than you do.

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme scrapped by the Narendra Modi government last week was never just an employment scheme.

Introduced in 2005 when rural India was reeling from agrarian distress and shrinking employment opportunities, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme helped shift everyday power relations by weakening hierarchies of dependence and coercion that have historically structured rural social life – particularly for workers from oppressed caste groups.

The scheme was implemented when neoliberal programmes were reshaping India’s economy at the expense of the working poor. At a time of jobless growth, the promise of 100 days of guaranteed employment per year to each rural household that asked for it did more than provide income: it strengthened the voice of workers in everyday economic and social life.

For many rural households, particularly those dependent on casual labour, the scheme became a critical source of stability in a time of otherwise uncertain livelihoods. It offered breathing space to the Indian working class, especially women and marginalised caste groups.

The economic effects of MGNREGS have been well documented. It increased incomes and savings among landless labourers and improved their bargaining power vis a vis landowning cultivators. By setting a floor to wages, the programme increased daily earnings for men and women in several states.

It also set off profound social changes.

Unlike China or several East Asian countries, India failed to carry out meaningful land reforms after Independence. As a result, traditional power structures rooted in caste and land ownership remained largely intact in rural areas. For a working-class person from a marginalised caste, and even more so for a woman, everyday life continued to be shaped by several layers of oppression and domination.

Yet rural society has not been static. Across India, working class and oppressed caste groups have resisted and negotiated for greater rights and dignity. The expansion of non-farm employment in urban areas also opened up new avenues, weakening older forms of dependence on dominant-caste landlords.

MGNREGS was introduced precisely at this moment, when social change was already underway and waiting to be consolidated.

By offering an alternative source of employment, the scheme enhanced the bargaining power of landless labourers. In many villages, traditional labour arrangements such as the jajmani system, a caste based and hierarchical patron-client relationship involving year-round service obligations, began to weaken.

Cowherds and other attached labourers, who were bound to specific employers through long term obligations, refused to return to customary work and chose instead to work on MGNREGS sites. Farmers complained of labour shortages as workers preferred government employment to poorly paid and often humiliating agrarian work.

Customary labour relations marked by dominance and extra-economic coercion began to erode further. These relations were sustained through caste hierarchy, social dependence, and the threat of withdrawal of work, credit, or everyday support, leaving labourers with little real choice over wages or conditions.

The social consequences of MGNREGS were far reaching. Lower-caste workers gained greater ability to make choices, negotiate wages and challenge long-standing social subordination. Women, in particular, emerged as major beneficiaries. Paid work under MGNREGS gave many women an income of their own. Having cash in hand expanded their everyday choices, reduced economic dependence on male bread winners, and made their contribution to household income more visible.

In several regions, MGNREGS worked in tandem with other welfare programmes such as the public distribution system for foodgrains and self help group-based credit facilities. Together, these interventions improved living standards and enhanced women’s economic security.

For many agricultural labourers, income from farm work had been used for daily consumption, while MGNREGS earnings allowed them to save and repay debts. It created space for planning, autonomy and a degree of financial resilience.

MGNREGS thus unleashed a quiet social revolution in the countryside. It did not abolish hierarchy or inequality but it disrupted them. It created room for dignity, negotiation and refusal in places where these were long denied.

The costs of dismantling the MGNREGS will not be evenly borne. They will fall disproportionately on women, landless workers and marginalised caste groups. What is being presented as efficiency or reform risks restoring monopoly control over labour and livelihoods to landlords and dominant castes. Any vision of a developed India that is built on such exclusions is a vision that deepens inequality rather than resolves it.

Yadu CR is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Water, Environment, Land and Livelihoods (WELL) Labs in Bengaluru.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Tuesday raised concern about the “alarming rise in attacks” on Christians in several states ahead of Christmas and said that the incidents undermine India’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the right to worship without fear.

In a statement, the bishops’ association said that it was “particularly shocked” by an incident in Jabalpur, where a visually impaired woman attending a Christmas programme was assaulted by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader.

The assault took place on Saturday at a church, where the BJP’s Jabalpur Vice President Anju Bhargava accused the woman of carrying out religious conversions. The incident took place in the presence of a police officer.

Bhargava had entered the church with members of several Hindutva organisations, alleging that visually impaired children were being coerced into religious conversion. The gathering had been organised by Christian organisations as part of Christmas celebrations.

The students denied that religious conversions had taken place during the gathering. An unidentified police officer was also quoted as saying by The Indian Express that there was “no evidence of forced conversion”.

On Tuesday, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India called for the dismissal of Bhargava from the BJP.

The association also criticised the circulation of “hate-filled digital posters in Chhattisgarh”, reportedly calling for a bandh against Christians on Wednesday, saying that such messages could “inflame tensions and incite further violence”.

Condemning the incidents, the Catholic body urged state governments and the Centre to take “urgent and visible action” against persons and organisations spreading hate and violence.

It also urged Union Home Minister Amit Shah to ensure strict enforcement of the law and protection for Christian communities so that Christmas can be celebrated “in an atmosphere of security and harmony”.

Several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations have been reported in the past week.

In Kerala, a worker of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was arrested after a Christmas carol group of children was attacked while visiting homes in Pudussery village in Palakkad district on Monday.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP at the Centre.

Last week, some schools in Kerala run by Hindutva organisations and a privately-managed Hindu institution had allegedly halted Christmas celebrations. The managements of the schools, however, denied the allegations.

In Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, a hotel run by the state tourism department cancelled a Christmas celebration on the banks of the river Ganga after protests called by the Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat.

On Monday, Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bharadwaj shared a video purportedly recorded in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar showing men threatening women and children wearing Santa Claus caps.

A trial court rejected a petition filed by the Uttar Pradesh government to withdraw all charges against 10 persons accused in the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015. It directed that the matter be categorised as “most important” and heard on a daily basis.

The court also told the authorities to write to the police to ensure that the evidence is protected.

On September 28, 2015, 50-year-old Akhlaq was lynched following rumours that he and his family had killed a calf and eaten beef during Eid festivities.

A forensic report in May 2016 said the meat found in Akhlaq’s home was that of a cow or its progeny. The police had said that the report “does not diminish the case as murder is an offence”.

All the accused persons have been out on bail since 2017. Read on.

The Delhi High Court suspended the life sentence of expelled Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case. Granting him bail, the bench directed Sengar to remain in Delhi during the pendency of his appeal against his conviction.

He was also told not to go within 5 km radius of the complainant’s home and report to the police every Monday at 10 am. The bench also directed him to furnish a personal bond of Rs 15 lakh with three sureties of the same amount.

In December 2019, Sengar was convicted and sentenced to life for raping a woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time. Read on.

Hundreds of persons associated with Hindutva groups protested outside the Bangladesh High Commission on Tuesday against communal violence in that country, including the recent lynching of a Hindu man. Some of the protestors were associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal.

Earlier in the day, Bangladesh’s foreign ministry summoned the Indian envoy in the country to express concerns about the security of its missions in India after protests in front of them on December 20 and December 22.

After the disruption in the high-security zone on Tuesday, the Delhi Police detained several persons.

A Hindu man, Dipu Chandra Das, was beaten to death in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district on December 18 by a mob that accused him of blasphemy. Seven persons have been arrested in the case. Read more.

The Union government has issued 91 takedown notices to social media platform X since March 2024 for over 1,100 URLs allegedly violating legal provisions. Over half of these URLs, or 566 of them, were flagged for “disturbing public order”, The Indian Express reported.

There was reportedly an increase in notices around the Lok Sabha elections in 2024 and Operation Sindoor in May.

These notices were issued to X under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act via the ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre.

This provision states that online intermediaries, such as social media platforms, can lose their safe harbour status if they fail to remove or disable access to content that is used to commit an “unlawful act” despite being told to do so by government authorities. Removing this status would mean that the platforms would be liable for the content in question. Read more.

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Once found in the alpine, temperate, tropical, and subtropical forests across Asia, the dhole, or Asiatic wild dog, has now disappeared from much of its former range. Known for its high-pitched whistles, coordinated pack hunts, and remarkable endurance, this wide-ranging carnivore now survives in only small, fragmented populations due to habitat loss, prey decline and increasing human pressures.

A recent large-scale study has now mapped suitable habitats where these elusive wild dogs could persist. It spanned 12 countries within the dhole’s known range, grouped into three regions: Mainland China, the Indian subcontinent (India, Nepal, Bhutan and Bangladesh), and Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia).

Researchers assessed which landscapes still provide the ecological conditions necessary for dholes. They then used MaxEnt (Maximum Entropy) modelling, a computational method, to predict habitat suitability using 24 environmental variables (such as climate, ecology, geophysical characteristics, and human impact), which are known to influence the distribution of large, wide-ranging carnivores.

“MaxEnt finds the probability of distribution across the landscape that matches only such environmental conditions, thus predicting habitat suitability only where supported by provided environmental variables,” explains Monsoon Pokharel Khatiwada, corresponding author of the study and member of the IUCN Dhole Working Group.

The team compiled a dataset of 1,604 verified dhole observations recorded between 1996 and 2018. The data was provided by participants of a 2019 workshop co-organised by the IUCN Dhole Working Group, the IUCN Conservation Planning Specialist Group, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Kasetsart University, and Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park. Because dholes are more often spotted in protected forests, the data was filtered using spatial software to ensure records were evenly spaced, reducing sampling bias.

Two models were then run: a coarse-scale model to identify broad regions of suitability, and a fine-scale model to zoom in on likely areas of dhole presence. Both were validated with independent datasets and statistical tests, showing strong predictive accuracy.

Fractured forests

The models highlighted three primary regions of suitable dhole habitat: western India, central India, and across the Himalayan foothills through Southeast Asia.

Southeast Asia as a region was found to have the largest share of potential dhole habitat (56%). Among individual countries, India held the largest proportion of potential range. Meanwhile, Bhutan, Thailand, Cambodia, and Malaysia showed the highest relative probability of dhole presence within their habitats.

Khatiwada points out that some of this concentration may reflect better research effort rather than actual distribution. “Our observation data were more biased in these regions, and the provided environmental variables match the probability of distribution of dholes across these regions. The bias of observations could have been caused by field efforts being prioritised in areas where the species is most likely to be observed,” she says.

The study also found that legally protected forests were the strongest predictor of whether dholes can survive in an area, which means conservation efforts cannot rely only on isolated reserves. Corridors and surrounding landscapes need protection too if populations are to remain connected and viable.

“Simply knowing where the suitable habitat is for dholes alone is not sufficient for their conservation. Functional corridors and connectivity play a crucial role in their long-term survival,” says Khatiwada.

This broader landscape perspective is crucial, as the study found that remaining dhole habitats are poorly connected, limiting dispersal and genetic exchange. Maintaining connectivity is especially important for wide-ranging species like dholes. Without corridors linking forest patches, small populations become isolated, leading to inbreeding and increased vulnerability to disease or local extinction. Conservation strategies that only focus on protected areas may fail if surrounding landscapes cannot support movement and hunting.

“We suggest focusing conservation actions within each of these three regions, and on improving connectivity among dhole populations,” says Khatiwada.

A call for regional cooperation

The global adult dhole population is estimated at just 4,500-10,500 individuals across South and Southeast Asia and parts of China, of which 1,000-2,000 are adult, mature individuals capable of reproducing.

Even in areas where suitable habitat remains, dholes face ongoing pressures. Forests continue to be cleared or altered for agriculture, roads, and urban expansion. “Increasing human population and the need of urbanisation are the main factors causing habitat loss, not only for dholes but for other wide-ranging species as well,” says Khatiwada.

Livestock grazing can also influence dhole movement and sometimes spark conflict with humans. Diseases from domestic dogs may spill over into wild packs, causing local declines. Even forests that appear intact may be functionally unsuitable if prey populations have been depleted.

Additionally, because dholes cross national borders, international collaboration is essential for long-term conservation.

Khatiwada outlines practical priorities, “Initiate coordinated transboundary meetings, strengthen cross-border conservation initiatives, improve monitoring in the northern part of their historic range, focus conservation beyond protected areas, and work to improve functional corridors, connectivity, and bottlenecks among suitable habitats,” she says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

A court in Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday rejected a petition filed by the state’s Bharatiya Janata Party government to withdraw all charges against persons accused in the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015, The Indian Express reported.

Additional District Judge Saurabh Dwivedi ordered that the case be classified as “most important” and be heard on a daily basis. The judge also directed the government to write to the police to ensure that the evidence is safeguarded, according to The Indian Express.

The case has been listed for further hearing on January 6.

On September 28, 2015, 50-year-old Akhlaq was lynched following rumours that he and his family had killed a calf and eaten beef during Eid festivities.

A forensic report in May 2016 said the meat found in Akhlaq’s home was that of a cow or its progeny. The police had then said the report “does not diminish the case as murder is an offence”.

On October 15, the Uttar Pradesh government filed an application before the Upper Sessions Court in Gautam Buddha Nagar under the Criminal Procedure Code to withdraw all charges against the 10 persons accused in the case.

All the accused persons have been out on bail since 2017. They face charges of murder, attempt to murder, voluntarily causing hurt, intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace and criminal intimidation.

The application before the trial court said that the state government has the written approval of the governor and reiterated that the meat found was identified to be beef.

Before Adityanath became the state’s chief minister, he had said Akhlaq’s family should face charges for cow slaughter and be stripped of the benefits they were given after his killing.

The September 2015 incident had sparked nationwide outrage and fuelled a debate on religious intolerance in the country.

Samajwadi Party leader Akhilesh Yadav, who was the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh at the time, had offered Akhlaq’s family Rs 20 lakh as compensation. The family moved to Delhi soon after the lynching, fearing for their safety.

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday suspended the life sentence of expelled Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar during the pendency of his appeal against his conviction in the Unnao rape case, reported Live Law.

A bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar also granted bail to Sengar. The court directed him not to travel within a five-kilometre radius of the complainant’s home and to remain in Delhi while on bail, Bar and Bench reported.

The court told him to furnish a personal bond of Rs 15 lakh with three sureties of the same amount, and to report to the police every Monday at 10 am.

In December 2019, Sengar was convicted and sentenced to life for raping a woman in Uttar Pradesh’s Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time.

In March 2020, Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother Jaideep Singh Sengar, among others, were sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for the killing of the woman’s father in judicial custody.

While sentencing Sengar to life imprisonment in 2019, the trial court had directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to take adequate steps to ensure that the life and liberty of the complainant are protected.

The woman and her family had been placed under the protection of the Central Reserve Police Force after an order from the Supreme Court in 2019. The court had noted at the time that there was a threat to the lives of the complainant, her mother and her lawyer, among other persons.

This came after the woman and her lawyer were severely injured in a car crash. Her family had alleged that Sengar was behind the accident. Two of the woman’s relatives, one of whom was a witness in the rape case, were killed.

In 2024, the Centre had moved a plea against the CRPF security cover provided to the complainant and her family, claiming that they no longer needed the security detail.

In March, the Supreme Court refused to revoke the security cover provided to the complainant, citing continued concerns of threats to her safety.

The top court, however, directed that the security cover for the woman’s family members and other witnesses in the case be revoked.

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has issued 91 takedown notices to social media platform X since March 2024 for over 1,100 URLs allegedly violating legal provisions, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

More than half of these URLs, or 566, were flagged for “disturbing public order”, notices reviewed by the newspaper showed. This was followed by 124 for targeting political and public figures.

The newspaper reviewed a compilation of these notices issued between March 20, 2024 and November 7, 2025, which was filed in an affidavit by the Ministry of Home Affairs before the Delhi High Court in December.

These notices were issued to X under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act via the ministry’s Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre.

This provision states that online intermediaries, such as social media platforms, can lose their safe harbour status if they fail to remove or disable access to content that is used to commit an “unlawful act” despite being told to do so by government authorities.

Removing this status would mean that the platforms would be liable for the content in question.

As per the notices examined by The Indian Express across the 20-month span, 58 takedown notices were issued to X in 2024, including 24 for provisions related to violating public tranquillity and promoting enmity.

Three other notice flagged content deemed to threaten national integrity and sovereignty, the newspaper reported.

Fourteen notices were issued during the period for alleged criminal activity, including promoting betting apps, impersonating official handles with potential to cause financial fraud and circulating child sexual abuse material.

As per the newspaper, there was also an increase in notices around the Lok Sabha elections in 2024, and Operation Sindoor in May.

At least 761 URLs were flagged in takedown notices to X during the elections in April and May 2024. Of these, nine notices flagging 198 URLs referred to violations of the Representation of the People Act.

Operation Sindoor were strikes carried out by the Indian military on what it claimed were terrorist camps in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad escalated on May 7.

The strikes were in response to the Pahalgam terror attack, which killed 26 persons on April 22.

Several notices were issued for posts on X amid the tensions, including five seeking the takedown or removal of 56 URLs for content that posed a threat to India’s “integrity, sovereignty and security”, The Indian Express reported.

After Operation Sindoor in May, two notices were also issued seeking the removal of three URLs for posting content allegedly “critical of the Indian Army”.

This comes as X is challenging the legitimacy of Sahyog, a portal set up by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre to “streamline” orders to take down content, in court. This portal also uses Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology to issue takedown notices.

X has described this portal as a “censorship portal”, and claimed that the Information Technology Act does not contain any provision to create such a portal, or to require social platforms to appoint a nodal officer for it.

Also read:

• How India is using its Information Technology Act to arbitrarily take down online content

• ‘Excessive power to state’: Why experts are worried about Karnataka High Court Twitter verdict

A trial court in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district on Monday convicted 13 persons for murdering a father and son during a violent protest against the Waqf Amendment Act in April, The Indian Express reported.

Harogobind Das, 72, and his 40-year-old son Chandan Das were killed by a mob on April 11 in the district’s Samserganj area.

According to the police, the violence that led to the killings broke out after rumours that security personnel had fired near a mosque, following which arson and attacks were reported in the area, The Times of India reported.

Jangipur Sub-Divisional Court judge Amitabh Mukhopadhyay convicted the persons accused in the case under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to murder, robbery, trespassing, rioting with deadly weapon, causing hurt and wrongful restraint, the newspaper quoted special public prosecutor Bivas Chatterjee as saying.

Violence had broken out in Murshidabad on April 11 and 12 during protests against the Waqf Amendment Act passed by Parliament on April 4. Three persons, including Chandan Das and Hargobind Das, were killed in the violence.

The third fatality was that of a man named Ijaz Momin, who was allegedly shot dead by the police in the Suti town in Murshidabad.

The widow of Harogobindo Das alleged in a first information report that a mob had dragged her husband and son out of their home and murdered them. “Though there were many people, the murder was committed by few people,” she alleged.

A 25-member Special Investigation Team had filed a 983-page chargesheet after six months of the killings.

The SIT conducted raids in West Bengal, Odisha and Jharkhand to arrest the accused.

The victims’ family had sought the maximum punishment and had also approached the Calcutta High Court seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation probe, which is still under consideration.

The rioting in Murshidabad led hundreds of Hindus, who are a minority in the district, to flee to neighbouring Malda.

The Waqf Amendment Act curbs the authority of waqf boards and allows greater government control over them. Critics allege that the amended law violates the right to equality and the freedom to manage religious affairs.

A waqf is an endowment under Islamic law dedicated to a religious, educational or charitable cause. Each state has a waqf board led by a legal entity vested with the power to acquire, hold and transfer property.

A Bharatiya Janata Party councillor in Delhi has triggered a row after posting a video on social media in which she is seen threatening to bar a man from teaching football at a public park if he does not learn Hindi within a month.

Reports said that the man was African, but it was unclear which country he is a citizen of. He provides football coaching at a municipal park in the Mayur Vihar area.

The video shows Renu Chaudhary telling the man: “You have not learnt Hindi. Why have you not learnt it? If you do not learn Hindi within a month…then take the park away from him”.

The councillor, who represents the Patparganj ward, also said: “If you make your living here, you must learn the local language as well.”

The man has lived in the area for nearly 15 years, NDTV reported.

Chaudhary told The Hindu that she had visited the park to address unrelated complaints about the park made by residents.

Defending her remarks, Chaudhary was quoted as saying: “Anyone living and working in the country for years should make an effort to understand and speak the local language, just as we respect rules and language of the land when we go abroad.”

National News Channels will not cover this because this isn't from Maharashtra, Karnataka or Tamil Nadu. This is BJP councillor Renu Chaudhary from Delhi confronting an African football coach in a public park, threatening him to learn Hindi within one month. The coach has been… pic.twitter.com/iqMkt9b8gH

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) December 22, 2025

She said that as most people in India speak in Hindi, there is nothing wrong if foreigners learn the language, NDTV reported. The councillor said that it was not her intention to threaten anyone but to ease communication between the coach and the authorities.

Most employees of the municipal corporation do not understand English, Chaudhary added.

“I had asked him eight months ago to pay revenue, as that was an [Municipal Corporation of Delhi] park and he was using it for commercial activities,” NDTV quoted Chaudhary as saying. “Since he was charging children for football lessons, I asked him to pay revenue to the MCD. He told me that he does not understand Hindi.”

“The MCD official had also said that since he did not know Hindi, they were finding it difficult to communicate with him,” she added.

Stating that the Bhagavad Gita is “not a religious book, rather a moral science”, the Madras High Court has set aside the Union government’s decision to deny registration under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act to a trust, reported Live Law on Monday.

Registration under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act is mandatory for a non-profit organisation to receive foreign funds.

Justice GR Swaminathan was hearing a petition filed by a trust named Arsha Vidya Parampara, which was set up in 2017 and conducts online classes as well as residential courses to teach Hindu religious texts, yoga and Sanskrit.

The trust had applied for an FCRA license in 2021, but the request remained pending for years, reported Bar and Bench. In 2024 and 2025, the Union home ministry sought clarifications on it.

In January, Arsha Vidya Parampara filed a fresh application, which was rejected in September. The main reason cited by the home ministry was that the trust “appears to be religious”.

The trust moved the High Court challenging this decision.

In his order delivered on December 19, Swaminathan held that the “Bhagavad Gita cannot be confined within a given religion”, reported Live Law.

“It is a part of Bharatiya civilisation,” he was quoted as saying.

The court also said that the Centre’s reasoning that the trust is a religious organisation falls short of the requirements under FCRA Section 11, which pertains to the registration of organisations under the Act.

To deny FCRA registration to such organisations, the government is required to provide a “definite” and well-reasoned explanation, said the court, according to Bar and Bench.

Swaminathan held that in the present case, the authorities had concluded that the trust’s activities “appeared to be religious”, and not definitely religious.

“The authority could have rejected the application by forming a definite conclusion which should of course be based on materials,” he was quoted as saying by Live Law. “It cannot be a tentative one.”

The Centre had told the court that another reason for rejecting the trust’s application was that it had allegedly received foreign funds before obtaining the FCRA registration.

The trust had acknowledged this and chose to “compound” the offence under section 41 of the Act, which allows certain violations to be settled by paying a fee, reported Bar and Bench.

The court held that, as the offence was compounded, it could not be used to reject the application.

Swaminathan directed the Centre to issue a fresh notice in the application and pass its order within three months.

Swaminathan was at the centre of controversy earlier this month, when Opposition MPs submitted an impeachment notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla against him. The legislators contended that the judge’s recent orders and actions have been viewed as “disruptive to social harmony and detrimental to integrity of the judiciary”.

This had come against the backdrop of Swaminathan’s order directing the authorities of the Subramaniya Swamy Temple at Thirupparankundram in Madurai to ensure that the Karthigai Deepam was lit at the deepathoon, a stone pillar, near a dargah on the top of a hill.

Also read: ‘RSS agenda, favours Brahmins’: The controversial career of a Madras HC judge under impeachment fire

A video showing a Bharatiya Janata Party leader from Madhya Pradesh’s Jabalpur assaulting a visually impaired woman inside a church, accusing her of carrying out religious conversion, triggered a row in the state on Monday.

The assault took place on Saturday at a church in the Hawa Bagh area under the Gorakhpur police station, reported The New Indian Express.

In the video, the BJP’s Jabalpur city unit Vice President Anju Bhargava is seen shouting at the woman in the presence of a police officer.

Bhargava is seen abusing the woman, twisting her arm and grabbing her face. The woman is heard asking Bhargava to speak to her instead of assaulting her.

The BJP leader is also heard telling the woman that she “will be blind in her next birth too”.

Bhargava had entered the church with members of several Hindutva organisations, alleging that visually impaired children were being coerced into religious conversion, reported The Indian Express on Tuesday.

Police officials told the newspaper that the gathering had been organised by Christian organisations as part of Christmas celebrations.

Visually impaired students were invited from a government-run hostel for lunch and a prayer meet.

The students denied that any religious conversions had taken place during the gathering. An unidentified police officer was also quoted as saying by The Indian Express that there was “no evidence of forced conversion”.

Despite this, Hindutva organisations registered a complaint with the police, questioning how students from a government hostel were taken to a religious site without informing the authorities, reported The Indian Express.

They also claimed that prayers conducted during the gathering were “exclusively Christian in nature and that non-vegetarian food was served”.

Speaking to the newspaper, Bhargava defended her actions and said that she had arrived at the church after receiving information that “visually impaired women” were being “held against their will” near the church.

She also claimed that she was “assaulted during the confrontation, but no complaint was filed by her side because the woman involved was blind”.

Sharing a video of the assault on social media, the Congress leader Supriya Shrinate said that “cruelty is the easiest way to advance in the BJP”.

“These people are stains on society,” said Shrinate, referring to Bhargava.

यह औरत जो एक दृष्टिहीन लड़की के साथ मारपीट कर रही है वो जबलपुर में BJP की उप जिलाध्यक्ष अंजू भार्गव हैं

यह जाहिलियत और क्रूरता करना BJP में आगे बढ़ने का सबसे आसान तरीका है

धब्बे हैं यह लोग समाज पर
pic.twitter.com/tgsxjzhaLA

— Supriya Shrinate (@SupriyaShrinate) December 22, 2025

Hundreds of persons associated with Hindutva groups staged a demonstration outside the Bangladesh High Commission in New Delhi on Tuesday against communal violence in that country, including the recent lynching of a Hindu man, PTI reported.

Some of the protestors were associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal.

Several persons were detained by the Delhi Police after the disruption in the high-security diplomatic zone, ANI reported.

The authorities had deployed additional police and paramilitary personnel and erected three layers of barricades around the mission in anticipation of the protest, PTI reported. Despite this, the police still reportedly struggled to contain the crowd.

#WATCH | Delhi | Members of Vishva Hindu Parishad and other Hindu organisations protest near the Bangladesh High Commission over the atrocities against Hindus and the mob lynching of Dipu Chandra Das in Bangladesh pic.twitter.com/PTsCWrKCrO

— ANI (@ANI) December 23, 2025

A Hindu man, Dipu Chandra Das, was beaten to death in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district on Thursday night by a mob that accused him of blasphemy. His body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Seven persons have been arrested in the case so far.

He was killed amid widespread unrest in Bangladesh following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi, who succumbed to gunshot injuries at a hospital in Singapore on Thursday.

Hadi was a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina government.

Here is more on this and other top updates:

• Protests similar to the ones in Delhi were also held outside the Bangladesh Visa Application Centre in West Bengal’s Siliguri on Monday, The Statesman reported. Bangladesh has since suspended all consular services at its missions in Delhi and Agartala.
• Bangladesh’s foreign ministry on Tuesday summoned the Indian envoy in the country to express concerns about the security of its missions in India, Hindustan Times reported. The foreign ministry said it condemned “such acts of premeditated violence or intimidation against diplomatic establishments, which not only endanger the safety of diplomatic personnel but also undermine the principles of mutual respect and values of peace and tolerance”. 
• Hindu leaders in Bangladesh on Monday held a human chain-protest in Dhaka, seeking justice for Das and alleging that the government had failed to protect minorities, The Daily Star reported. Manindra Kumar Nath, the joint coordinator of the Minority Unity Front, said that while Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus claimed that he was building a humane country, he was in reality “an inhumane chief adviser”. 
• The Secretary-General of the United Nations also expressed concern on Monday about the violence in Bangladesh. “We’re very concerned about the violence that we’ve seen in Bangladesh,”  Stéphane Dujarric, the UN chief’s spokesperson said. “Whether it’s in Bangladesh or any other countries…people who don’t belong to the ‘majority’ need to feel safe and all Bangladeshis need to feel safe.”

Also Read: Opinion: What India must do to help restore stability in Bangladesh

The Economic Offences Wing and Anti-Corruption Bureau of the Chhattisgarh Police on Monday alleged that former Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel’s son, Chaitanya Baghel, personally gained Rs 200 crore to Rs 250 crore in an alleged liquor scam in the state between 2019 and 2022, The Indian Express reported.

Bhupesh Baghel was the chief minister of Chhattisgarh between December 2018 and December 2023.

In its seventh supplementary chargesheet filed on Monday, the Economic Offences Wing alleged that a syndicate of senior bureaucrats, politicians and excise department officials operated a parallel excise system, selling illegal liquor and causing a loss of Rs 3,074 crore to the state exchequer, The Indian Express reported.

Chaitanya Baghel, who was arrested in July in connection with the alleged liquor scam, has been accused of acting as a bridge between government officials and the alleged liquor syndicate.

The Economic Offences Wing has alleged that Chaitanya Baghel helped transfer proceeds collected by the network allegedly run by Anwar Dhebar, another accused in the case, up the chain within the liquor syndicate, The Indian Express reported.

Anwar Dhebar is the brother of former Raipur Mayor and Congress leader Aijaz Dhebar.

In return, Chaitanya Baghel allegedly received a share of the money through firms linked to another suspect in the case, Trilok Singh Dhillon. The funds were then allegedly funnelled into family-owned firms and real estate projects.

“The scale of the scam evidence indicates that besides managing funds at a high level, Chaitanya personally received approximately Rs 200-Rs 250 crore,” The Indian Express quoted a press release by the agency as saying.

An unidentified official told The Indian Express that as of now the liquor scam was valued at Rs 3,074 crore, but further investigation suggested that the amount could exceed Rs 3,500 crore.

With this a total of eight chargesheets have been filed in the case so far, The Times of India reported.

In response to the Economic Offences Wing’s allegations, Chaitanya Baghel’s lawyer told The Indian Express that the investigating agency has “no evidence”.

“They are making a case based on statements of absconding accused in the case,” he was quoted as saying.

In September, the Enforcement Directorate had alleged that Chaitanya Baghel was the “controller and ultimate authority” of the “organised liquor syndicate” in the state.

The Enforcement Directorate had also claimed that it had established that the former chief minister’s son personally handled about Rs 1,000 crore generated from the alleged scam.

The liquor scam case

The Chhattisgarh Anti-Corruption Bureau registered a first information report in the alleged liquor scam in January 2024 based on the Enforcement Directorate’s complaints.

The bureau had alleged that during Bhupesh Baghel’s tenure a syndicate of bureaucrats and politicians ran a parallel excise department, under which liquor was sold without any revenue going to the state exchequer.

The FIR accused 70 persons of involvement in the alleged scam, including former state Excise Minister Kawasi Lakhma, Special Secretary Arun Pati Tripathi and Indian Administrative Service officer Anil Tuteja.

They have been charged with corruption, cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy under the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption Act.

The authorities in Kerala have confirmed an outbreak of bird flu among poultry in the Alappuzha and Kottayam districts, PTI reported on Tuesday.

State Animal Husbandry Minister J Chinchu Rani told the news agency that samples sent to a central laboratory in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal confirmed the outbreak in the two districts.

“Cases of avian flu came to our notice about a week ago,” PTI quoted Rani as saying.

Bird flu or avian influenza is a highly contagious disease caused by Influenza Type A viruses. The disease affects poultry and does not spread easily among humans. Those who come in contact with infected birds can contract the flu.

In the latest outbreak, cases have been reported from Alappuzha’s Nedumudi, Cheruthana, Karuvatta, Karthikappally, Ambalappuzha South, Punnapra South, Thakazhi and Purakkad panchayats, The Hindu reported.

While chickens were found to be infected in Nedumudi, ducks were affected in the remaining areas.

In Kottayam, the disease has been recorded in the Kuruppanthara, Manjoor, Kallupurakkal and Velur villages, the newspaper reported. Quails and chickens were found to be infected in these villages.

Rani told PTI that the State Animal Husbandry Department was currently assessing the intensity of the outbreak, adding that no restrictions had been imposed on the consumption of poultry products so far.

“However, after further analysis, if required, steps such as culling and restrictions on the consumption of poultry meat will be announced,” she added.

Poultry farmers could be affected due to the outbreak as sales usually rise during the Christmas and New Year season, she added.

Compensation is generally provided to farmers, the minister said. “However, on some occasions, there are issues related to fund allocation from the Centre, and the state has to depend on its own funds,” the news agency quoted Rani as saying.

Expert teams were working on the ground in light of the outbreak, she said.

“Our assessment is that avian flu spreads through migratory birds,” the minister said, adding that a similar outbreak had been reported in Alappuzha, Kottayam and Pathanamthitta last year too.

Also read: Avian flu isn’t ‘one mutation away’ from becoming the next pandemic – yet

Three persons, one from Gujarat and two from Uttar Pradesh, were arrested by the Karnataka Police for allegedly sharing sensitive information about the Indian Navy with handlers in Pakistan, The Indian Express reported on Sunday.

The Gujarat resident, 34-year-old Hirendra Kumar, was arrested on Saturday, The Indian Express reported. The two others, 29-year-old Rohit and 37-year-old Santri, both from Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur district, were arrested in November.

They have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita relating to acts endangering the sovereignty and integrity of India, as well as Section 3 and Section 5 of the Official Secrets Act, which deal with spying and the wrongful communication of official information, the newspaper reported.

Rohit and Santri were employed as insulators at Shushma Marine Private Limited, a subcontractor for the Udupi Cochin Shipyard.

The police alleged that Rohit collected confidential details about naval ships, including identification numbers, repair schedules and sensitive infrastructure information, and messaged them to Pakistani handlers, NDTV reported.

He continued to do so with Santri’s assistance even after being transferred from the site, The Indian Express quoted the police as saying.

Kumar allegedly provided Rohit with a SIM card registered in his name in exchange for money, the police alleged.

“The Gujarat-based accused was supplying SIM cards and OTPs that were used to activate WhatsApp accounts for communication with Pakistani handlers,” NDTV quoted Assistant Superintendent of Police of Karkala sub-division Harsha Priyamvada as saying.

The case came to light in November when the chief executive officer of Cochin Shipyard filed a complaint at Malpe police station about a security breach.

Meanwhile, in a separate case, five residents of Kashmir were arrested on Thursday by the Arunachal Pradesh Police on charges of spying, Inspector General of Police, Law and Order, Chukhu Apa told Scroll.

They have been booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and are accused of collecting “sensitive information from different parts of Arunachal Pradesh and sharing it with their Pakistani handlers”.

Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Monday claimed that the redefining of the Aravalli Hills is only meant to prevent illegal mining in the area and added that the Narendra Modi government remains committed to protecting and restoring the mountain range, PTI reported.

Yadav said that mining remains prohibited in the National Capital Region.

The 700-km Aravalli mountain range stretches diagonally from southwest Gujarat, through Rajasthan to Delhi and Haryana. Its highest point is Guru Shikhar in Mount Abu, which rises to an elevation of 1,722 metres.

Under the new definition that has been accepted by the Supreme Court, an Aravalli hill is any landform that rises at least 100 metres above the surrounding terrain. An Aravalli range is formed by two or more such hills located within 500 metres of each other, including the land between them.

However, environmentalists have warned that defining the Aravallis solely by their height could leave many lower, scrub-covered but ecologically important hills vulnerable to mining and construction. Experts say these smaller hills are crucial for preventing desertification, recharging groundwater and supporting local livelihoods.

On Monday, Yadav said that the new definition was designed to allow “sustainable mining legally”. He said that no new mining leases will be granted until a comprehensive Management Plan for Sustainable Mining is finalised.

Only 0.19% of the entire Aravalli area can potentially be mined, Yadav added.

He said that the Congress was spreading misinformation and lies on the matter.

“The Congress, which allowed rampant illegal mining in Rajasthan during its tenure, is spreading confusion, misinformation and lies about the issue,” PTI quoted the minister as having alleged.

The Congress has criticised the new definition, saying that the changes could have devastating ecological consequences for the region, ANI reported.

Congress leader Pawan Khera accused the government of jeopardising the ecological balance of the National Capital Region and other nearby areas.

“If the new order on the Aravallis is implemented, the ecological balance of this entire region, several states, or half of Hindustan will be destroyed,” he said.

Congress leader Sachin Pilot also expressed concerns and asked “what will we leave behind for our future generations” if we allow illegal mining to continue, ANI reported.

Also read: The slow destruction of Delhi’s forgotten spine

In December 2024, government data submitted in Parliament reiterated how caste is central to sanitation work in India.

In response to a minister’s question in Lok Sabha, the Ministry of Social Justice said “sewer and Septic Tank Cleaning is an occupation based activity rather than caste based” though the data provided contradicted this assertion.

Of the 57,758 sewer and septic tank workers profiled across India’s urban local bodies, a majority of 68%, or 37,060, are from Scheduled Castes. About 8.05% of the sanitation workers were categorised as “general”. The data was gathered as part of the Centre’s National Action for Mechanized Sanitation Ecosystem Mission, or Namaste scheme, to be implemented in urban bodies.

These figures hold up a mirror to frequent debates on cleanliness, sanitation and “civic sense” in Indian cities. The politics of who cleans and who does not is fundamental to civic behaviour.

Cleanliness is usually described as a matter of civic sense: people, it is said, must behave better, litter less and keep public spaces clean. But civic behaviour is shaped by the society they live in.

Inside homes in India, hygiene is maintained through constant labour, most of it done by women family members or women domestic workers. Outside the home, sanitation work is similarly carried out primarily by lower castes. These differences shape who learns to see cleanliness as hard work and who learns to see it as something provided for them.

At the same time, those who undertake hazardous sanitation work largely reside in informal settlements or poorer parts of the cities with inadequate garbage management and overflowing drains. Those who benefit from their work live and move in cleaner spaces where the labour behind cleanliness stays invisible.

Caste, class and labour

Under the caste system, the “untouchable” castes have historically been assigned the “polluting” labour of tasks such as cleaning, or handling bodies and dead animals. The colonial British administration relied on the same caste system for organised waste removal and drain cleaning in Indian towns and cities: “sweeper” became “sanitary worker,” and “caste-bound duty” became “municipal service”.

This continues to structure sanitation work and even the geography of India’s modern cities.

Much of sanitation and cleaning work happens before cities wake up, keeping the labour out of sight. In wealthy neighbourhoods and gated societies, cleaning workers wait outside the gate because they are not allowed to enter buildings.

Sanitation workers enter airports and shiny malls only as cleaners, rarely users. Earlier this year, an Air India advisory asked passengers to flush properly and leave airplane washrooms usable, reported The Times of India. According to the airline, passengers had flushed clothes, plastic bags and rags. Those who have never performed cleaned, treat public facilities as if maintenance is automatic.

In September, a sanitation worker, with no safety gear, was filmed cleaning a clogged drain outside the Supreme Court, which has repeatedly declared manual scavenging – cleaning sewers by hand – illegal.

In cities and towns across India, cleaning contractors send sanitation workers into sewers and septic tanks with little more than a rope and a bucket. A deadly job becomes regular maintenance work. Everyone involved knows the work is illegal, but they also know who takes the risk.

Data submitted in Parliament year after year shows whose lives pay the price or cleanliness: between 2019 and 2023, at least 377 people died cleaning sewer and septic tanks.

For the bodies that labour and clean, cleanliness is elusive: the areas they return to look nothing like the ones they clean. Several homes depend on a single tap and public toilets are dirty or not functioning for weeks.

A study by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, reported by Article 14 in 2023, found that Dalit neighbourhoods across several Indian cities receive weaker water supply, slower repairs and fewer municipal visits.

Civic sense

When the work of cleanliness is unequal, the habits formed through them will also be unequal.

A 2014 investigation by Human Rights Watch found that municipal bodies often recruit from the same neighbourhoods, assuming the work will continue within the same communities. “I am a cleaner. I am born to do this,” Deepak Valmiki told The Guardian in 2018.

Children learn the same lesson by watching whom officials call when a drain overflows, who is sent when a septic tank collapses and who returns home soaked in sewage after the job. Unless these conditions change, the disregard for the labour of cleanliness and hygiene will remain the same.

India’s failure to inculcate civic sense is the result of a society conditioned to outsourcing the labour of cleaning: where children grow up in homes where women clean, and in cities where specific caste groups clean everything else.

Unless cleanliness is collective, it will never become a collective habit.

Mohit Nirmender studies how labour, public infrastructure and state systems shape everyday life and social inequality across contemporary societies.

The administration in Assam’s Biswanath district has ordered two declared foreigners to leave the state within 24 hours, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

The orders were issued by the district administration under the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

The Act grants power to district commissioners and senior superintendents of police to expel “illegal migrants” from the state by bypassing the foreigners tribunals.

The order, dated December 20, named Asmul Khatun and Afuja Begum, stating that they were declared foreigners by the Foreigners Tribunal in 2005, The Indian Express reported.

It added that being a declared foreigner, Khatun and Begum’s “presence in India/state of Assam” was “detrimental to the interest of general public” and “internal security of the state”, the newspaper reported.

The order directed them to leave the state through the Dhubri, Sribhumi or South Salmara-Mankachar routes. This effectively requires the two to leave the country.

Biswanath Superintendent of Police Ajagwran Basumatary told The Indian Express that the women are being detained at the Matia Transit Camp in Goalpara district.

“Their deportation is under process and will be undertaken in due time after receiving the green signal from the Border Security Force,” Basumatary was quoted as saying.

Similar orders were issued against 15 persons in Nagaon district on December 17, and against five persons in Sonitpur district on November 18.

In September, the Assam Cabinet approved the framing of a standard operating procedure under the Act. Earlier, cases pertaining to undocumented migrants were handled by foreigners tribunals.

Sarma had said that the standard operating procedure to use the 1950 Act had been approved, which would, to a large extent, “nullify” the role of the foreigners tribunals.

Foreigners tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. However, the tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and of declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

As per the standard operating procedure, if a district commissioner receives information from the police or other sources that a person is suspected to be an “illegal immigrant”, the official will direct the person to produce evidence of his citizenship within 10 days, Sarma had at the time.

If the district commissioner finds that the evidence submitted is not satisfactory, he can pass an expulsion order by invoking the 1950 Act, ordering the removal of the undocumented immigrant from Assam “by giving 24 hours’ time and by the route so specified”.

In June, Sarma informed the Assembly that the state government was planning to invoke the 1950 law to “push back” more suspected foreigners.

The chief minister had claimed that the expulsion of declared foreigners was justified in the legal framework provided by the Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

Also read: Why experts contest Assam CM’s use of 1950 law to justify forcing out people into Bangladesh