The Delhi Police on Saturday detained Congress leader Mumtaz Patel and several other protesters who were staging a sit-in near the Parliament complex to oppose a Delhi High Court order suspending the life sentence of former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case involving a minor, PTI reported.

The protesters reached the area around 4 pm, sat on the road, chanted slogans and demanded the cancellation of the bail granted to Sengar by the Delhi High Court on December 23, the news agency reported.

आज उन्नाव पीड़िता और उनकी माताजी के साथ मुलाकात की । जब इनके और भारत की बेटियों के हक में आवाज़ उठाई तो मौजूदा भाजपा शासन में अपने हितों की रक्षा के लिये धरना करने को भी अपराध ठहराया जा रहा है — संसद के बाहर 6 महिलाओं का शांतिपूर्ण विरोध भी सत्ता को अखर गया, और उन्हें हिरासत में… pic.twitter.com/FiRUZhTeNy

— Mumtaz Patel (@mumtazpatels) December 27, 2025

Police officials announced through loudspeakers that the area near Parliament was not a designated site for protests and asked the demonstrators to disperse. When they refused to vacate the spot, they were removed and detained, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

रेप आरोपी को घूमने की आज़ादी क्यों?

और न्याय की आवाज़ उठाने वालों को सज़ा क्यों?

यह व्यवस्था किसके लिए काम कर रही है?#JusticeForUnnaoVictim pic.twitter.com/5W3ZrPuQBs

— Yogita Bhayana योगिता भयाना (@yogitabhayana) December 27, 2025

The detentions came a day after the complainant’s mother, along with others, staged a protest outside the Delhi High Court against the order.

On December 23, the Delhi High Court granted Sengar bail while the former MLA’s appeal against conviction is being heard. However, the former MLA from Uttar Pradesh was directed not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

Sengar will, however, remain in jail as he is also serving a 10-year sentence in connection with the custodial death of the complainant’s father and has not been granted bail in the case.

Complaint against investigating officer

The complainant has approached the Central Bureau of Investigation, seeking that a first information report be registered against the then investigating officer, alleging that the officer was working in collusion with Sengar, PTI reported on Saturday.

She alleged that the officer conducted the investigation dishonestly and in such a manner that the former MLA and other persons accused in the case may get the benefits of “deliberate lapses and manipulation of fact introduced, and secure a favourable outcome”.

She also claimed that several statements were falsely attributed to her in the chargesheet, the news agency reported.

On Friday, the Central Bureau of Investigation moved the Supreme Court challenging the Delhi High Court order.

When Wazir Khanam married Mirza Fakhru, the third heir apparent to the Mughal throne, on the cold evening of January 24, 1845, she probably thought this was the pinnacle of her success – and the last stop in her tumultuous journey.

The 31-year-old Khanam was already the mother of four children from various liaisons. But undaunted by her circumstances and confident of her beauty, Wazir bargained hard to secure the most advantageous terms for the marriage contract. It involved a dower of one lakh Shah Alami rupees, to be paid to her later.

Wazir, who composed ghazals under the pen name Zuhra or Venus, was welcomed into the Red Fort by Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. She was elevated to the title of “Shaukat Mahal”, the splendour of the palace.

The match gave a boost to the rising poetic career of her teenage son, Nawab Mirza Dagh Dehlvi, who accompanied her to her new residence and was to be brought up and educated as the son of Mirza Fakhru.

By the time of Wazir’s death in 1879, three of her sons and one daughter had become well-regarded poets. She had moved between households and kingdoms. But despite her adventurous life and position in the household of the Mughal emperor, she has earned a mention in the footnotes of history only because of the eminence of the men she loved and the children to whom she gave birth.

Yusuf’s daughters

Born in 1811, Wazir Khanam was the youngest of three daughters of Muhammad Yusuf, a Kashmiri ornament craftsman, and Asghari Begum, the daughter of a famous courtesan of Delhi’s Chowri Bazar.

In Bazm e Dagh, Dagh’s biographer, Rafiq Marehrvi, refers to Yusuf as a “dereydar”, implying that he was also the proprietor of a kotha. In the bazaars of Chandni Chowk, the three girls were famous for their beauty but known somewhat demeaningly as “Yusuf waliyan”, Yusuf’s girls.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in his rigorously researched novel about Wazir’s life, The Mirror of Beauty, describes Yusuf’s despair in trying to keep his daughters away from the glittering kotha of their grandmother and his anger at Wazir’s later choices.

However, the younger two girls, Wazir and Umdah, were immersed in the world of Akbar Bai’s kotha: they attended musical and poetic soirees and met with the grandees who graced the salon. The tawaifs of the time were learned in Persian poetry and the works of great philosophers – a privilege their purdah-observing sisters were denied. Both Umdah and Wazir were mentored by renowned scholars of Delhi.

As evidence of their education, Faruqi includes corrections and comments Wazir’s mentor, Mian Shah Nasir, made on her ghazals. However, most of her writings are now lost to us.

It was in the kotha that Umdah met Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan, scion of the royal family of Rampur. She became his concubine. The elder sister had already been married into a respectable Mirza family of Delhi. The teenage Wazir had a choice of both worlds.

The decision she made would shape her life.

A Bibi

It is not clear when Wazir met the handsome young British officer, Captain Edward Marston Blake, but she decided to accompany him as his bibi or concubine to Jaipur, where he was posted as the assistant political agent.

According to Faruqi, Edward came to an agreement with Wazir’s father. British officers at that time used to have Indian concubines in their “bibi khanas”. Wazir and Marston had two children, Sophia (also known as Maseeh Jan) and Martin Blake (also known as Amir Mirza).

When Edward was killed in a riot in Jaipur in 1830, Wazir was forced to give up her children to be brought up in the Christian faith by Blake’s cousins. She returned to Delhi.

She had no claims to Edward’s estate or their children, and no resources to support herself. Sophia, or Miss Blake, would go on to become a famous Urdu poet under the pen name “Khafi”.

A Begum

Umdah, who still lived in Delhi with Nawab Yusuf, became Wazir’s support and introduced her to William Fraser, the British Resident of Delhi. It is likely that Wazir took up the profession of a tawaif. From the accounts of the time, we know that she met Fraser’s interest in her was sparked by her beauty and intellect as she attended the grand mehfils.

Soon after, she met Nawab Shamsuddin of the Jhirka and Loharu states, possibly through the offices of Nawab Yusuf, and became his mistress. Nawab Shamsuddin brought her a three-storeyed house in Chandni Chowk’s Khanam Bazar, with shops on the ground floor. The rental income was hers for perpetuity. She was also given a regular allowance.

It was in this house that her son, Nawab Mirza, was born. He would become a renowned poet under the name Dagh Dehlvi. Nawab Shamsuddin was overjoyed. Nawab Mirza was his first male heir.

But happiness and security were always ephemeral in Wazir’s life as the fortunes of the men in her life cast her adrift. On October 8, 1835, Nawab Shamsuddin and his servant, Karim Khan, were hanged for the murder of William Fraser.

Fraser had been instrumental in dispossessing the Nawab of his Loharu estate and conferring it on Nawab Shamsuddin’s stepbrother. Some suggest that Fraser coveted Wazir. Though the enmity between the Nawab and the British Resident was common knowledge, some have written that there was no substantial proof of the Nawab’s involvement in the murder.

Dagh’s account of the events recorded in the roznamcha, or daily diary written by his pupil Marehrvi, says that Karim Khan executed the murder on the behest of Nawab Shamsuddin and, in a hurry, disposed of the weapon in a well. It bore the Nawab’s initials, and was recovered during the investigations.

Rampur years

Though the British seized all the Nawab’s property, they could not confiscate the Khanam Bazar house as it was in the name of Wazir. However, Wazir, fearing for her four-year-old son Dagh’s life, sent him to live with Umdah in Rampur. Nawab Yusuf’s father, Nawab Saeed Ali Khan, had ascended the throne of Rampur. He ruled from 1840 to 1855.

Wazir herself spent some years in hiding from the British. Finally, Umdah managed to effect an alliance for her with a Rampur nobleman Agha Turab. Wazir settled in Rampur and was united with her beloved son. Wazir had a son with Turab, Mirza Shagil. He too would become a noted poet.

But these few years of respite in Rampur were shattered by the death of Agha Turab at the hands of thugs in 1842. Wazir returned to Delhi with her two sons to live in her house in Khanam Bazar. Nawab Saeed possibly provided her with some financial support, but her circumstances were greatly reduced.

Shaukat Mahal

Faruqi quotes Muhammad Husain Azad’s Collected Works of Zauq to narrate an incident when the poet and scholar saw the painting of Wazir with Mirza Fakhru. Zauq reportedly described her as a “whore” and a “harlot” out to ensnare the young prince. Regardless, it’s clear that Mirza Fakhru was enamoured of Wazir and she became Shaukat Mahal, the respectable begum of a Mughal prince.

The mushairas of Delhi – held at the royal court, the courtyards of Delhi College and noblemen’s houses – resounded with the words of Ghalib, Momin, Zauq, Azad, Azurda and others, says writer Farhatullah Baig in Dilli ki Akhri Shama. Emperor Bahadur Shah, a pensioner of the British, was a prolific poet too.

There was one disappointment for Wazir, however. She had to reluctantly leave behind her toddler son, Shah Muhammad Agha with a caregiver until he grew up. Mirza Fakhru probably didn’t want her to be distracted by the demands of a child.

But in these twilight years of Mughal Delhi, another of her sons, the teenaged Dagh, was gaining repute for his youthful, extempore poetry. He had been educated at the Rampur court with the crown prince, Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan. Living at the Mughal fort, Dagh was tutored by Zauq in poetry, and his talent was lauded by the emperor himself.

It is possible that Wazir agreed to the match with the Mughal prince Mirza Fakhru to encourage Dagh’s career and to forge ahead toward the chimaera of stability.

But the 1840s, Mughal court was a slippery, inconstant world. The equilibrium between the British and the Mughals was lost with the death of the first heir apparent in 1849. Mirza Fakhru made himself the heir apparent with the support of the British lieutenant general – which led to the alleged poisoning of three British officials. It is said that Zinat Mahal, the chief queen, was responsible for their deaths because they were instrumental in Mirza Fakhru’s elevation.

Then on July 10, 1856, Mirza Fakhru died too. It was said that he died from cholera, though that seemed suspicious to some.

For Wazir, life had assumed a familiar rhythm where every crescendo was followed by a descending note. She was unceremoniously evicted from the fort by the chief queen, who was happy that her son, Jawan Bakht, had finally become the crown prince.

Wazir moved back to her Delhi house with Dagh and Khurshid, her son with Mirza Fakhru. She was 43.

Dagh soon received an appointment at the court of Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan, and the family moved to Rampur, where the poet lived till 1887. The historical record falls silent once Wazir’s life moved beyond the orbit of illustrious men.

Marehrvi writes that she might have found employment with a gentleman from the Deccan. But it is possible that she lived with Dagh in Rampur till her death in 1879. That is what is mentioned in a condolence letter written by Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan of Rampur to Dagh.

Her learning and artistic sensibilities had shaped the lives of three of her four sons – Dagh, Shagil and Khursheed, who had all become poets. But only one fragment of Wazir’s own work survives.

It is quoted by Faruqi in his novel.

It is from her early years and echoes her desire to forge her own way in the constrained world of women:

Sun lein naseh ke chup rahein behtar
Hum na deingey jawab jahil ko

Better to listen to the words of the counsellor quietly,
I shall not respond to an ignorant person.

Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and culinary revivalist based in Rampur. Her latest novel is The Courtesan, Her Lover and I. Her website is here.

It had been 20 minutes since Vaishnavi Rathore and I had begun our little trek in a dense forest in Dzongu in North Sikkim. We were lucky the rain had stopped just before we began, but the wet mud was a challenge we city folks were not ready for. I was worried about slipping, not just because of the risk of injury, but also of damaging the expensive camera in my bag.

We were being led by Mayalmit Lepcha, an environmental activist and local resident, whom we had met earlier in the day. We had been reporting on the impact of a glacial lake outburst flood that devastated parts of Sikkim in 2023 and on the broader consequences of hydropower projects in the ecologically sensitive region. As we spoke about what the construction of dams in the Himalayas meant for indigenous communities, Mayalmit said she wanted to show us a Lepcha ritual.

As we continued our trek, the sun had begun to set, and by the time we saw a small house emerging amidst the wild ferns, the sky had turned a purple-blue. It was the house of a shaman, a spiritual leader of the Lepcha community.

The ritual was to take place inside a small hut near the main house. The family was preparing for the upcoming ritual, and the house was bustling. As soon as we said “Khamree” to the family, a Lepcha greeting, I took out my camera and began shooting – I did not want to miss a single moment of the evening.

Almost immediately, there was a power cut and the lights went out – this, we learnt, was a regular occurrence.

The Lepchas are an indigenous community of North Sikkim, whose culture is deeply rooted in nature worship. Those we met told us that for them, mountains, forests and rivers are divine entities. The ritual we were invited to witness is performed every year to welcome the spring season. During it, the shaman interacts with the “spirit world” to bring prosperity to the community. The ritual this year was particularly special because it was being performed by a young shaman.

As preparations for the ritual were underway, a wisp of smoke rose from a nearby outdoor kitchen. Men and women were cutting vegetables and preparing for a special dinner. We also helped with the cooking. Families had come from around the village, and some from as far as Gangtok, to participate in the ceremony. Their shy smiles and curious eyes followed me around as I photographed them.

The hut where the ritual was to take place was made from natural material, such as mud and bamboo. Mayalmit explained that this was a requirement for the ritual. Inside, I saw the young shaman helping his family with the arrangements. He was around my age and seemed very calm – yet I sensed a hint of nervousness as the time for the ritual drew closer.

As we waited, we met a diverse group of people, including a senior shaman, an environmental activist, a Buddhist monk and a farmer. They were united by a strong resistance to dams. The Lepcha shaman told us that the community believes that the Teesta river is sacred, and that it is the path towards salvation for departed souls in the afterlife. Building dams, he said, would block this passage. So far, ten large hydropower projects have been built on the river.

When it was time for the ritual, everyone headed towards the hut. It had started raining again, and the smell of wet earth filled the air. The hut was dark inside, lit only by oil lamps. There was an altar in the middle, in front of which the older shaman and the young shaman sat. The younger shaman was playing a traditional instrument while the older shaman was chanting and praying.

I sat on the left side of the altar in the front row, wanting to capture the ritual. I had also placed my zoom recorder in front of me. After about 10 minutes, the young shaman suddenly stood up. Mayalmit told us that an older ancestor had entered him.

The young shaman's demeanor changed completely. He crouched and walked with the support of a stick. I raised my camera to film this, but it was not recording. The display showed it had overheated, which surprised me, since this usually happens when I record long takes or shoot in high temperatures.

Neither was the case here.

The young shaman slowly walked around the altar, swinging his stick in the air to ward off evil spirits. As he approached us, he looked up and stared at Vaishnavi and me for a few seconds. I met his gaze and felt he knew we were outsiders.

Mayalmit gestured for us to lower our eyes.

The shaman lifted his stick. For a moment, we thought he would strike us. Instead, he brought it down on my Zoom recorder. I immediately switched it off. My heart raced. He then turned away and continued circling the altar.

Vaishnavi and I looked at each other, shaken, but awed by what we had witnessed. Through the hut’s single window, a flash of lightning lit up the sky.

I realised how deeply the community's identity was intertwined with nature, an identity now under threat from the growing number of hydropower projects built in the name of development.

For them development is not what is added, but what must not be lost.

For the two days we stayed in Dzongu, the electricity did not return. When night fell, the village would return to darkness, lit only by night lamps.

On December 5, six months after being forced across the border into Bangladesh by Indian authorities, 25-year-old Sunali Khatun was allowed to return to her home state of West Bengal. She is eight months pregnant.

Indian officials had detained Khatun, her husband and eight-year-old son in Delhi’s Rohini area on June 20, claiming that the family were “illegal migrants of Bangladesh”.

But when Scroll’s Anant Gupta travelled to Khatun’s village in Birbhum district in August, her family showed him land records going back five generations. Gupta even interviewed the midwife who had delivered Khatun.

Though Khatun is relieved that her baby, due in January, will be born in India, she is worried about her husband. She and her son were let back in after India’s Supreme Court urged the government to allow them to return on “humanitarian grounds”. But her husband remains stranded in Bangladesh.

Khatun is just one of the many victims of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s cynical strategy of weaponising anxieties about belonging and citizenship to brutalise India’s most vulnerable citizens – especially Muslims.

The horrific cost paid by the scapegoats of this campaign has been the focus of Scroll’s journalism for much of 2025.

The BJP declared its intention to show Indian Muslims exactly where they stood in 2016, when it moved the Citizenship Amendment Bill. This discriminatory law, which was eventually passed in 2019, offered undocumented immigrants belonging to religious minorities from three neighbouring countries a fast track to Indian citizenship – except if they were Muslim.

The programme to underscore who belongs (but more expressly, who does not) is playing out especially savagely in Assam, where those pronounced non-citizens by the state’s notorious foreigners’ tribunals are “pushed” across the border into Bangladesh in the dead of the night.

Our colleague Rokibuz Zaman reported on the drive to detain Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers across the country, demand that they prove that they are Indian – and sometimes expel them. Anant Gupta investigated instances in which the police had bypassed the rules that regulate deportations.

From Kashmir, Safwat Zargar wrote about 80-year-old Abdul Waheed Bhat, paralysed and incapable of speaking, who died in a bus at the Attari-Wagah border post on April 30, waiting to be deported to Pakistan.

He had little with him: a blanket, a few medicines, doctor’s prescriptions, a water bottle and some diapers.

Bhat had lived a life fractured by the vagaries and malign intransigence of bureaucracy. He had been born in India and had mostly lived in Kashmir – save for 15 years, when he was stuck in Pakistan after taking a trip with an aunt at a time when crossing the international boundary did not require a passport or visa.

But the sudden outbreak of war in 1965 left Bhat stranded. Returning home required elaborate documentation that he did not possess. Only after he had acquired a Pakistani passport was he allowed to be reunited with his family.

At the end of April, in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, Bhat was served notice to leave India. The authorities ignored the pleas of his relatives that Bhat was bed-ridden and unable to take care of himself – a fact to which doctors had attested.

Had Bhat not been Muslim, he would perhaps have been spared this Mantoesque tragedy.

The programme to reify Indian identity was not conducted only on the borders. It spread to the heartland in earnest in July, when the Election Commission began a “special intensive revision” to “purify” the electoral rolls in Bihar. Three months later, the commission decided to expand the exercise to 12 states and Union Territories.

This is ostensibly being done to excise duplicate entries and remove the names of voters who may have died. It also aims to stop undocumented migrants from casting their ballots. Critics fear that the names of Muslims and voters from other communities that oppose the policies of the BJP will be deleted, claiming that they – like Sunali Khatun – are “illegal migrants”.

The process reverses the principles of natural justice: rather than the state providing evidence for why it believes names should be deleted, voters are expected to prove that they belong.

It is not a coincidence that the crusade to identify undesirables has been accelerated in a year that marks the centenary of the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the BJP’s ideological parent.

Since 1925, the Sangh has been relentless in its pursuit of a Hindu rashtra, a theocratic state that would afford supremacy to Hindus. It isn’t surprising that the Sangh’s supporters, now that they occupy the pinnacle of power, have deployed grey areas in the law to turbocharge their effort to paint India saffron.

If it weren’t so tragic, it would be amusing to remind them of the warning issued by MS Golwalkar, the second head of the RSS, in We or Our Nationhood Defined, a foundational text for the Hindutva movement.

“We have learnt to call a class of people patriots, saviours of the nation,” Golwalkar noted in 1939. “We have also learnt to dub all the rest as unnational. Really, have we thought over it well? Do we, in fact, understand what it is to be a national? Or do we merely echo a well-worn slogan without appreciating the essence thereof?”

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

Hindutva vs Christmas. Several attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations were reported in the past week.

On Wednesday, a Hindutva mob vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Videos of the incident showed a mob armed with sticks barging into the mall and destroying decorations on Christmas eve. Hindutva groups had called for a state-wide strike on Wednesday to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in the state.

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 Hindutva organisations barged into a school in the Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations.

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.

A balmy Christmas: Indians have made the festival and Christian faith their own, writes Divya Aslesha

The Akhlaq lynching case. 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.

Crimes against women. 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.

Earlier in the day, the High Court had also suspended the life sentence of Sengar, while directing him not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

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

Ratna Singh explains why the Delhi High Court released the former BJP MLA convicted of raping a minor.

Also on Scroll last week

• Backstory 2025, where Scroll journalists share their reporting experience
• Why a nativist group is targeting Muslims in Arunachal Pradesh
• BJP cornered 85% of political donations last year, up from 56%
• ‘The police watched as my home was burnt’: Why Assam’s Karbi Anglong went up in flames
• Why West rushed to mourn the killing of an anti-India youth leader in Bangladesh
• After Bihar, is the INDIA bloc dead? Yes and no, say Opposition parties
• Why caste is central to India’s ‘civic sense’ problem
• Bollywood’s mantra in 2025: If it bleeds, it leads
• The best Indian films of 2025: Sabar Bonda, Dhadak 2, Agra and more
• Review: ‘Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri’ is as long-winded and exhausting as its title

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

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The Supreme Court of India has taken suo motu cognisance of concerns arising from a change in the definition of the Aravalli Hills, following apprehensions that the move could lead to unregulated mining and severe environmental degradation, Live Law reported.

A vacation bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justices J K Maheshwari and A G Masih will hear the matter on Monday.

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.

On Wednesday, amid the criticism, the Union environment ministry directed states not to grant new mining leases in the Aravalli Hills. The ban on new mining leases is to preserve the integrity of the landscape and applies to the entire Aravalli range, the ministry had said.

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

On December 28, 1885, Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit Pathshala in Bombay hosted the inaugural meeting of the Indian National Congress – a modest assembly of 72 delegates that ignited the subcontinent’s quest for self-rule.

Held from for four days in the hall near Gowalia Tank, the meeting drew delegates who were mostly lawyers, educators and professionals. They came primarily from Bombay, Madras, Bengal and the North-Western Provinces.

Allan Octavian Hume, the retired British civil servant pivotal in organising the gathering, envisioned the Congress as a “safety valve” to peacefully channel the grievances of educated Indians in order to prevent unrest of the kind experienced during the 1857 Revolt.

Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s seminal History of the Indian National Congress describes how Hume circulated invitations in mid-1885, recruiting luminary even as fears of an outbreak of the plague prompted the venue to be shifted from Poona to Bombay.

Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi economic thinker and political leader, later called the “Grand Old Man of India,” proposed the name Indian National Congress, supplanting the bland National Indian Association.

Prominent delegates included Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, Surendranath Banerjee, and S Subramania Iyer, whose diverse regional backgrounds symbolised nascent unity. No avowed radicals like Bal Gangadhar Tilak participated, underscoring the moderate character of the enterprise. Neither did any women.

Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister and the first president, delivered a concise opening address on 28 December, setting a tone of constitutional loyalty. He urged delegates to deliberate on India’s administrative woes – being excluded from the civil service, the drain of India’s fiscal resources and arms import bans – while pledging allegiance to the British Crown.

Bonnerjee emphasised not confrontation but “loyal and constitutional agitation” to secure reforms.

The speech, brief and indirect per archival records, highlighted nine resolutions: expanding the Imperial Legislative Council, simultaneous exams for the Indian Civil Service in India and England, reducing military spending, and fostering famine relief. These pragmatic demands were rooted in Hume’s gradualist blueprint.

Delegates like Tyabji, who became president in 1887, echoed calls for the Indianisation of the services, while Mehta pushed for Bombay’s commercial interests. Rafiq Zakaria’s edited volumes on Congress history portray this as a forum for deliberation, not protest, where views coalesced around petitions to Viceroy Lord Dufferin.

Hume’s role, as Sitaramayya and Zakaria describe it, blended altruism with imperial strategy: he claimed divine inspiration from a theosophical “storm warning”, though critics later decried it as viceregal sanction to monitor nationalists. Zakaria, in 100 Glorious Years (1885-1985), credits Hume for the logistical arrangements – drafting the rules for the meeting, funding it via his wife’s dowry. But Naoroji and Banerjee, he said, shaped the organisation’s ideology.

The interventions of the delegates reflected optimism tempered by realism. Banerjee advocated press freedoms; Iyer demanded judicial reforms. Discussions spanned three days, culminating in a 1,200-word address to Dufferin. Sitaramayya notes the session’s success in fostering elite consensus, with no major rifts.The Congress would galvanise millions en route to Independence. The Moderate era (1885-1905), led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Naoroji, pursued petitions and swaraj. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, extremists such as Tilak, Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal surged, demanding swadeshi and boycotts.

Gandhi’s entry in 1915 transformed the Congress into a mass-based organisation. The Non-Cooperation movement (1920-’22), Civil Disobedience mvement (1930) and Quit India movement (1942) mobilised peasants, workers and women.

By 1947, the moderate seeds sown in Bombay in 1885 had burst into a rich harvest.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai.

Names of more than 10 lakh voters were identified to be deleted in Assam after a house-to-house verification process as part of the special revision of electoral rolls, the Election Commission stated on Saturday.

Of the total, nearly 4.79 lakh names were to be deleted due to deaths and over 5.23 lakh voters were identified to have shifted from their registered locations.

Assam is set to go to the polls next year.

The Election Commission is not conducting a special intensive revision exercise in Assam, unlike in 12 other states and Union Territories. Instead, on November 17, it had directed the state chief electoral officer to conduct a “special revision” of the electoral rolls, saying that January 1, 2026, would be the qualifying date for Assam to carry out the exercise.

This had come less than a month after Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, on October 27, announced a special intensive revision exercise of the electoral rolls in West Bengal, Kerala, Rajasthan, Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep, and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

At the time, Kumar had said that another order would be issued later for Assam as the Citizenship Act had separate provisions for the state.

Assembly polls are also expected to take place in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala and Puducherry in the first half of 2026.

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

On Saturday, the poll panel stated that there are 2,52,02,775 electors in Assam.

The number stands at 2,51,09,754 exclusive “D” voters, or doubtful voters whose cases are pending before Foreigners’ Tribunals. They are not allowed to vote until their citizenship is upheld by a court.

Additionally, 53,619 duplicate entries were identified, stated the poll panel, adding that booth-level officers visited 61,03,103 households to verify voters.

After the draft rolls were published, the period of filing claims and objections began. It will continue till January 22, and the final list will be published on February 10.

In November, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma welcomed the decision to undertake the special revision exercise.

“This will help ensure clean, updated and accurate electoral rolls for all eligible citizens,” the Bharatiya Janata Party leader had said. “Assam will extend full cooperation to the Election Commission to complete the revision in a transparent and time-bound manner.”

Meanwhile, around 3.6 crore electors in 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

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

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union Territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

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 published on September 30.

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

For years, many farmers across Kashmir had gradually stopped growing Mushq Budji, the region’s prized aromatic rice, after frequent outbreaks of blast disease made the crop too risky and expensive to maintain. But in the fields today, the tide is slowly beginning to turn.

Mushq Budji is a premium traditional rice variety native to the Kashmir Himalayas. It grows at an altitude of 1,600-1,800 metres above sea level and has a short, bold, translucent, and highly aromatic grain. It is especially prized as the preferred rice for Wazwan, the valley’s famed traditional feast. In 2023, the rice variety also received a Geographical Indication tag, protecting its authenticity and regional heritage.

However, Mushq Budji faced a major challenge. It was highly susceptible to blast disease, a fungal infection that can infect all above-ground parts of the plant, causing lesions on leaves, stems, and panicles and leading to total crop failure. Moreover, changing weather patterns worsened disease outbreaks. This disease had become so serious that the variety was almost on the verge of extinction.

The rice blast disease outbreak in Mushq Budji rice began in the early 1960s. Its cultivation began to decline from 1980 onwards, reaching its lowest level in 2000. “We worked specifically on addressing this issue. The SKUAST-Kashmir launched a revival programme in 2007. It is considered a rare case where a traditional farmers’ variety was genetically improved and saved from extinction,” says Asif Bashir Shikari, Professor, Genetics and Plant Breeding at Sher e Kashmir University Of Agricultural Sciences & Technology.

Disease-resistance rice

The researchers used marker-assisted selection to develop the improved, disease-resistant Mushq Budji variety. In this procedure, it is possible to select useful traits, such as disease resistance or improved nutrition, within the same crop species and combine them through conventional breeding without altering the original genetic background. This way, the crop maintains its identity and taste while becoming healthier and more resilient.

In India, marker-assisted selection for disease resistance began in the early 2000s, with the first improved crop variety released in 2007. It was done in crops like rice, wheat, and maize. The results included the release of rice varieties resistant to diseases like bacterial blight (eg, Improved PB-1 and Improved Pusa Basmati-1), a maize hybrid (Vivek QPM9) with improved nutritional content, and a pearl millet hybrid (HHB-67-2) resistant to downy mildew. These efforts aimed to develop climate-resilient and higher-quality crops more quickly than traditional methods.

According to Shikari, the researchers at SKUAST-Kashmir took 10 years to develop two versions of Mushq Budji: SKUA-485, which has three genes that protect the plant against blast disease, and SKUA-528, which has two such genes.

Although these new rice varieties were not explicitly designed for weather-related tolerance, they still retain essential traits of the traditional Mushq Budji, such as cold tolerance. “They are also shorter and stronger, which means they do not fall over easily during strong winds or heavy late-season rains. The presence of genes responsible for cold tolerance, early maturity, and other adaptive traits was confirmed through genome sequencing,” Zahoor Ahmad Dar, Professor of Genetics and Plant Breeding at SKUAST-Kashmir, says. Genome sequencing involves reading a plant’s complete DNA code to identify the genes responsible for specific traits.

To evaluate the success rate of the improved Mushq Budji variety, it has been tested in farmers’ fields across many districts, including Anantnag, Shumnag, Kupwara, and Beerwah (Budgam). “During unusually warm and humid periods – the conditions that make blast disease worse in the old variety – the improved version performed much better because of its disease resistance. We visited farmers in several districts, and they gave very positive feedback. The research team is hopeful that the area under the new variety will continue to grow,” Dar says.

That said, there are several challenges towards developing this variety as it is a highly technical and demanding job. “At one time, our team had to manage lakhs of cross-bred plants, conduct many field trials, perform DNA-based laboratory tests, and check cooking quality. In the beginning, we struggled with poor laboratory facilities, but later we improved our labs using funding from the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, and through the Holistic Agriculture Development Program, Government of J&K,” Shikari say.

When asked whether the improved seeds of this variety are readily available and what is needed to increase their use among small farmers, the research team explained that this season they have produced two quintals of breeder seed of the improved Mushq Budji. “We have further multiplied the foundation seed at Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Khudwani, a research and development centre under the SKUAST-K.

Breeder seed is the first and most genetically pure seed produced by scientists who develop a variety. It is used to produce foundation seed, which is then multiplied further to generate certified seed for farmers.

Meanwhile, in a study published in 2024, scientists at SKUAST-Kashmir have also shown that Mushq Budji’s prized aroma is closely linked to altitude and temperature. In a study analysing rice samples from eight locations across the valley, ranging from about 1,500 to 2,000 metres, researchers identified nearly 35 aromatic compounds that together shape its distinctive fragrance.

“We found that rice grown at higher altitudes had a richer and more complex aroma profile, with key fragrance compounds more abundant in cooler locations. Notably, 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (2-AP), a compound commonly associated with aromatic rice, was detected mainly in samples from higher-altitude areas such as Budgam and Kupwara, suggesting that Mushq Budji’s aroma is shaped as much by its environment as by its genetics,” Syed Zameer Hussain, Professor at Division of Food Science and Technology, SKUAST, Kashmir and corresponding author of the study, said.

Farmers reclaim a lost grain

Zafar Ahmad Bhat, a farmer from Sagam village in Anantnag district, owns 19 kanals (0.96 ha) of land under rice cultivation. Of this, he grows the improved variety of Mushq Budji on 11 kanals (0.56 ha), while the rest of the land is used for other rice varieties such as SR-4 (Shalimar Rice-4) and K39.

“My family has been growing rice for many generations. We last cultivated the traditional Mushq Budji in 1980, but frequent disease outbreaks reduced the yield, so we stopped growing it,” he says.

In 2012, Bhat first heard about the improved variety of Mushq Budji. Scientists from SKUAST-Kashmir visited his village and held an awareness programme, during which they explained the importance of the crop and new cultivation methods. Farmers were given one kg of improved Mushq Budji seeds for field trials. “That is how my journey with Mushq Budji started again,” Bhat recalls.

The results were encouraging. The crop matured on time, and no fungicides were used. From one kanal (0.05 ha) of land, Bhat harvested 2.5 quintals of Mushq Budji, while common rice varieties yield about five quintals per kanal. However, Mushq Budji sells at a much higher price – Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 per quintal compared to Rs 3,200 for regular rice.

A similar story comes from Kulgam district, where Ghulam Rasool, a farmer, grows the improved Mushq Budji on one kanal (0.05 ha) of land. He now plans to expand the area under the crop. “At first, I was worried that rice blast disease would damage the new variety too. But after attending awareness programmes and learning the new farming techniques, I felt confident,” he says.

He explains that traditional rice varieties are planted with a gap of only three to four centimetres between seedlings, which reduces sunlight as the plants shade each other. For the improved Mushq Budji, farmers leave a gap of about one square foot between seedlings. This allows more sunlight to reach the plants and helps the soil retain heat, improving crop health and preventing rice blast.

Pleased with the results, Ghulam Rasool now plans to grow Mushq Budji on five kanals (0.25 ha) of land. “This new variety has given me confidence to expand cultivation and grow it for commercial sale,” he says.

According to official documents accessed by Mongabay-India, seed production has expanded steadily over the past three years. The area under cultivation increased from about 250 ha in 2022-’23 to an estimated 1,000 ha by 2025, while production is projected to rise from around 600 tonnes to about 2,500 tonnes over the same period.

Despite these successes, farmers face challenges. Marketing remains weak, with demand mostly limited to local consumers. National and international demand is still low. “Last year, the Department of Agriculture distributed Mushq Budji seeds in almost every district under the HADP programme, which increased production manifold. But due to fewer consumers, around 20% of farmers still have unsold stock,” Bhat claims.

Another significant issue is rice milling. “Local mills often produce broken grains, with nearly 20% of the rice breaking during processing. In contrast, basmati rice brought from outside the region is usually full grain. These are some of the challenges that we are facing,” he says.

To address these problems, SKAUST-K and the Jammu & Kashmir Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, have started exploring export opportunities for Mushq Budji rice to Japan and Southeast Asian countries.

“The rice was showcased at the International Trade Fair 2025 in New Delhi, where international chefs praised its quality and suitability for global cuisines. The initiative aims to create new markets beyond Kashmir and ensure better and more stable incomes for farmers,” Asif Shikari says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Congress will launch a nationwide protest from January 5 to demand the repeal of the 2025 Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, said party chief Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting of the Congress Working Committee in New Delhi, Kharge stated that an oath had been taken to protect the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act under all circumstances.

“MGNREGA is not a scheme, it is the right to work granted by the Constitution of India,” the Congress chief said. “We will unite and struggle for the dignity of rural labourers, employment, wages, and the right to timely payment, and protect the right to demand-based employment and gram sabha.”

He added that the party will also democratically oppose every “conspiracy to erase” Mahatma Gandhi’s name from MGNREGA.

The 2025 Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill was given assent by the president on December 21, two days after it was passed by Parliament amid protests by Opposition parties. The new rural employment law will replace the MGNREGA.

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

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

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

On Saturday, Congress MP and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi also noted that MGNREGA was not just a work programme but a conceptual development framework that has been appreciated across the world.

“This has been destroyed single-handedly by the Prime Minister [Narendra Modi] without asking his Cabinet, without studying the matter,” Gandhi said. “This is an attack on the states of India because they are simply taking away money that belongs to the state, decision-making power that belongs to the state.”

He added that the party was going to fight the replacement of the Act, adding that he was confident that the entire Opposition was going to be aligned with them.

Kharge flags voter deletions, attacks on churches

Kharge also flagged the deletion of voters during the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls being conducted by the Election Commission, claiming that it was a “well-planned conspiracy” to limit democratic rights, ANI reported.

Noting that it was a matter of serious concern, the Congress chief claimed that the “collusion” between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre and the Election Commission was “well known to all”.

He said that Rahul Gandhi had also previously presented evidence of “vote theft” in the country with facts and examples.

Gandhi and the Congress have repeatedly accused the Election Commission of large-scale vote rigging, including in the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly polls held in 2024, alleging what they called “industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of national institutions.” The Election Commission has rejected those allegations.

“We must ensure that the names of our voters are not deleted,” Kharge said. He also directed party workers to ensure that the votes of marginalised communities were not removed or transferred to other booths.

The poll panel is conducting the revision in 12 states and Union Territories. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4. Overall, around 3.6 crore electors in 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far in the exercise.

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

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union Territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

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 published on September 30.

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

The Congress chief on Friday also condemned the attacks on the Christian community during Christmas celebrations by organisations that he claimed were linked to the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, adding that this had disturbed communal harmony and tainted India’s image globally.

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

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

The Congress Working Committee meeting on Friday comes ahead of Assembly elections in Assam, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry next year.

Also read:

• BJP chief ministers wanted MGNREGA to include farm work. Modi government’s bill goes another way

• ‘A bill to destroy MGNREGA’: Why experts fear the worst from new job guarantee bill

The Delhi Police on Friday arrested 285 persons for offences under the Excise Act, the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances and the Public Gambling Act in a crackdown ahead of New Year celebrations, ANI reported.

Additionally, 504 persons were apprehended under preventive measures. A total of 116 persons identified as having a “bad character” were also arrested, the news agency quoted Deputy Commissioner of Police (South East) Hemant Tiwari as saying.

The arrests were part of an operation named Aaghat 3.0, aimed at preventing crimes during the festive period. Coordinated searches were held in several areas within 24 hours, NDTV reported. The joint operation was carried out by the South and South East District Police.

Twenty-one country-made pistols, 20 live cartridges, 27 knives, 12,258 quarters of illicit liquor, 6 kg of ganja, Rs 2,30,990 in cash, 310 mobile phones, 231 two-wheelers and one four-wheeler were also recovered as part of the operation.

Tiwari said that the operation was a significant step in maintaining law and order, ANI reported.

In September, 70 persons were arrested and firearms, narcotics, illicit liquor and stolen property seized, during Aaghat 1.0, the Hindustan Times reported. In the second edition of the operation in October, 500 persons were apprehended.

The district administration in Bihar’s Patna has ordered an inquiry after a video widely shared on social media showed students alleging caste-based discrimination at a government school in Alawalpur village, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

In the video, students claimed that they had been made to sit separately and were prevented from mingling with upper-caste students. They also alleged that they were denied food at times.

“They ask the other students, ‘Why do you sit with them?’,” the newspaper quoted one of the students as having alleged in the video. “They seat us separately.”

The student added that upper-caste students were moved if found seated next to lower-caste students.

The alleged administrative irregularities such as poor teacher attendance, irregular classes and low-quality food were also raised in the video, The Indian Express reported. Claims were also made about students being forced to do manual labour.

Ranjan Kumar, the principal of the government school, told The Hindu that the allegations were baseless. “We only ask the girls and boys students to sit separately,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

This video is from a school in Alawalpur village of the Patna Sahib Lok Sabha constituency in Bihar, The students claim that the teachers are adopting a caste-discriminatory attitude towards students, isolating them and keeping them separate from other students. Interestingly,… pic.twitter.com/5lHfiXbLml

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) December 23, 2025

Nitan Devi, the panchayat head of Alawalpur, said that she has asked the principal not to spoil the education system in the area. Any teacher violating the guidelines deserves punishment, The Hindu quoted Devi as saying.

Patna District Magistrate Thiyagarajan SM told The Indian Express that the district education officer has been directed to inquire into the matter and submit a report.

Alawalpur is located about 20 kms south of Patna.

The village had been adopted by Lok Sabha MP Ravi Shankar Prasad under the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana in 2014. Under the scheme, MPs are required to adopt a village to develop it into a model village.

India on Friday stated that it has conveyed its concerns to the United States about the cancellation of pre-scheduled interviews of Indian applicants for H-1B visas, adding that both sides were discussing the matter.

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

Some of the applicants, whose visa appointments were scheduled a week after the announcement on the vetting, received emails from the US immigration authorities informing them that their interviews had been pushed to as late as May.

The rescheduling hurt applicants who were previously given appointments after December 15.

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

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

On Friday, Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that it had received several representations from Indian citizens who were facing delays or problems with the rescheduling of their US visa appointments.

Jaiswal noted that visa-related problems pertain to the sovereign domain of a country. However, he said that the problems and concerns of Indians had been flagged to the US, in New Delhi and in Washington. “We hope that these delays and disruptions will be addressed,” he added.

The spokesperson said that there were several persons who had been stranded for an extended period of time because of the scheduling or rescheduling of consular appointments.

“And these have also caused a lot of hardships to their families, to the family life that they have, as also to the education of their children, as you would understand,” Jaiswal said.

He added: “The Government of India remains actively engaged with the US side to address and minimise the disruptions that have been caused to our nationals.”

On December 3, Washington directed all foreign workers applying for H-1B visas and their dependents, who are issued H-4 visas, to keep their social media profiles public for them to be reviewed.

In June, the Donald Trump administration issued similar directions for student visa applicants, stating that the government would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting”, including of their online presence.

These directions came amid Trump’s intensified crackdown on immigration.

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

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

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

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

The Central Bureau of Investigation on Friday approached the Supreme Court challenging the Delhi High Court order suspending the life sentence of former Uttar Pradesh MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case involving a minor, Live Law reported.

The petition was filed against the High Court’s decision to suspend the sentence and grant Sengar bail while the former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA’s appeal against conviction is being heard. However, Sengar was directed not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

On Tuesday, the High Court observed that, on the face of it, the facts of the case did not fulfil the conditions required to apply the stricter offence of “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” under Section 5 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. This was because Sengar did not fall within the definition of a “public servant”, it said.

Section 5 of the Pocso Act sets out conditions in which a “penetrative sexual assault” against a child is treated as a more “aggravated” offence. An aggravated offence is treated as serious because it is committed under special or severe circumstances that make the crime graver than usual.

Under the Act, an offence becomes “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” when it is committed by persons holding positions of authority, such as a public servant or a police officer within their jurisdiction, members of security forces, or staff of hospitals or prisons.

Under the Pocso Act, an aggravated offence carries a minimum sentence of 20 years, which can be extended up to life imprisonment.

In 2019, the trial court convicted Sengar, noting that, since he was an MLA at the time of the incident, he qualified as a “public servant” under Pocso. This made the offence a serious one and attracted a harsher punishment.

Thereafter, Sengar was sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeal against conviction and sentence had been pending before the High Court since 2020.

On Tuesday, the High Court rejected the trial court’s reasoning. It held that Sengar, as an elected MLA at the time of the incident, could not be treated as a “public servant” under the Pocso Act.

Security personnel had on Tuesday and Wednesday forcefully stopped the complainant in the rape case and her family members from protesting in Delhi against the High Court order.

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

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.

A Tripura student from the Chakma community on Friday succumbed to his injuries from an attack on him in Uttarakhand’s Dehradun that took place two weeks ago, India Today NE reported.

Angel Chakma, an MBA student, and his brother had been attacked allegedly by a group of assailants on December 9.

The 24-year-old’s brother Michael Chakma was quoted as saying that the attackers, who were drunk, harassed them because of their appearance and shouted racial slurs.

The assailants allegedly stabbed Angel Chakma several times with knives. He was critically injured and taken to a hospital in Dehradun, where he was in the intensive care unit for the past two weeks. His condition deteriorated and he died on Friday morning.

The brothers were on their way to buy groceries in the Selaqui area of Dehradun, East Mojo reported.

The police have arrested five persons in the matter. The suspects have been identified as Avinash Negi, Shaurya Rajput, Suraj Khawas, Ayush Badoni and Sumit, India Today NE reported.

One of those arrested is from Manipur and the others from Uttarakhand.

Legal action is being taken against one more suspect who is a Nepali citizen, The Hindu quoted Senior Superintendent of Police Dehradun Ajay Singh as saying.

A murder charge was added to the initial first information report about the assault, the officer was quoted as saying.

Angel Chakma was a resident of Debram Para near Agartala. He was from Pecharthal in North Tripura district.

The student’s family has demanded strict punishment for those involved in the killing.

TIPRA Motha chief Pradyot Debbarma condemned the killing. “We have lost Angel Chakma but his murderers are yet to be convicted – we demand justice for the departed soul,” Debbarma said on social media.

“We will ensure that the murderers of Angel Chakma get due punishment,” Debbarma added in another post.

The junta in Myanmar, which snatched power through a coup in 2021 and now calls itself the State Security and Peace Commission, is about to conduct a heavily stage-managed, geographically restricted and politically stunted “election”. The first phase will take place on Sunday, the second phase on January 11 and potentially a third phase on a yet unannounced date.

According to data collated by the Asian Network for Free Elections, only 99 out of the country’s 330 townships – the country’s basic administrative unit – are slated to vote in full. Ninety three others will likely post a partial ballot. Ten townships are expected to vote only the areas that are controlled by the military and not in the tracts controlled by the resistance. The military regime has entirely cancelled voting in 56 townships.

Geographically, most of the polling is slated to take place in the central part of the Bamar heartland, the Irrawaddy deltaic region, Yangon region, parts of the eastern ethnic states bordering Thailand, parts of northern Kachin State bordering China and India, and a few patches across the southeasternmost coastal regions.

Large parts of the country remain under resistance control, negating the possibility of any campaigning or polling.

What ‘election’?

By no standard can such a territorially constricted election be considered a genuine democratic exercise. Besides, some of Myanmar’s largest civilian parties, including Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the influential Shan National League for Democracy and more than four dozen others, are not participating in the junta’s electoral exercise.

While the junta-appointed election commission dissolved these parties under a newly-enacted election registration law 2023, most of them would have anyway likely boycotted the polls as a mark of protest against the coup regime, not unlike in 2010 when the National League for Democracy boycotted a similar junta-held “election” that put in place a quasi-civilian government led by President Thein Sein.

While both elections must be placed squarely within inverted quotes, there is a crucial difference.

In Issue No. 25 of #DataDive, @Anfrel maps four key dimensions of the #Myanmar junta's #election project focused on how the Election Protection Law criminalizes dissent and why there is no real choice for voters. #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar pic.twitter.com/fiWeO19usj

— ANFREL (@Anfrel) December 19, 2025

The 2010 moment paved the way for Myanmar’s first free and fair election five years later, partly due to Sein’s consultative leadership style and a difficult but long-due peace process between the government in the national capital of Naypyidaw and ethnic armed organisations that helped repair some of the trust deficit between the centre and ethnic peripheries.

This time, the “election” is being held under the stewardship of junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, an obstinate political figure who is disinterested in federal democracy-building, lacks a grand political vision and fancies a firm grip on power.

In refusing to cede power back to a civilian government and instead, waging a war against his own people, Hlaing has not only bulldozed the delicate relationship between Naypyidaw and the ethnic minorities, but also alienated and provoked the very same Bamar majority from which the military draws legitimacy.

In a conspicuous show of his pathological insecurity and awareness that most of his own people reject the sham polls, Hlaing has been using a draconian election law to order the arrest of hundreds for criticising the election plan. Thus, the uncertain yet genuine sense of cautious optimism that seemed to shadow the 2010 election is completely missing in the upcoming “election”, which rests on half a decade of bloodshed, distrust and despondency.

Optimism or self-interest?

Despite the grave cynicism among the people of Myanmar, governments in the immediate neighbourhood, flustered by nearly five years of armed conflict, economic decay and political instability, have quietly wagered on the upcoming “elections” as a pathway towards stability and predictability, if not peace.

In this, they are guided by a culture of foreign policy pragmatism drilled deep into modern Asian statecraft, which seeks a strong central government, stable provincial centres, a flexible economy and manageable frontiers. It has little time for disruptive social or political movements next door, let alone a revolution. In fact, the word “revolution” is anathema for government officials and their policy allies in most of Myanmar’s neighbourhood, not least because it generates a sense of anxiety about the political status quo in their own countries.

This is true even for the Communist Party of China, which was born out of the crucible of a historic revolution but has moderated itself over the decades for the sake of statecraft and geopolitics. In fact, the Xi Jinping government has emerged as the Myanmar junta’s leading backer today.

It has thrown all its weight behind the “elections”, and helped the coup regime stabilise large parts of northern Myanmar by forcing warring ethnic groups to cease fire. India and Thailand have followed in lockstep, extending notional support to the junta’s “elections”, although without the accompanying strategic groundwork that China has done in Myanmar.

As Myanmar’s military prepares for the first phase of voting on December 28, even as a civil war rages across large parts of the nation, an analyst explains why the election will not produce anything new in the Southeast Asian country https://t.co/btkccLYBqU pic.twitter.com/uKXiRdnIgL

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 26, 2025

All three know well that polling will be far from free and fair, but are willing to bet some of their cards on the process, hoping that it yields a set of outcomes that is favourable to their own strategic interests. In doing so, they are willing to either overlook or undermine the aspirations of the majority of the people of Myanmar who see the junta as their sworn enemy and will not accept any election that is held under the military-drafted 2008 constitution.

It is precisely this self-serving realpolitik optimism about an impending positive transition in Myanmar that the junta seeks to exploit through an illusory electoral exercise.

Faux franchise

There is also a general view in government (or pro-government) circles in some of Myanmar’s neighbours that the election would force Hlaing to be accountable to his own people. They believe an exercise in franchise will ultimately humble him. This is a view that is naïve at best, and foolish at worst. It ignores two things about the “election”.

One, the junta has closely curated the electoral landscape and polling architecture in a way that makes a loss virtually impossible. By dissolving Myanmar’s most popular political parties, allowing pro-military parties, such as the Union Solidarity and Development Party, to seek a mandate, and switching from a first-past-the-post to a proportional representation system, it has ensured that political power remains firmly in the military’s own stead even before polling begins.

The Asian Network for Free Elections has also shown that the Electronic Voting Machines that the junta has deployed for the polls were introduced without any consultation, consensus or trials, which opens up serious possibilities of large-scale fraud. In such a structurally rigged and thoroughly opaque electoral system, the win-loss binary becomes utterly meaningless.

Two, despite the spokesperson for the junta stating otherwise, the key target audience of “election” is not the people of Myanmar, but rather, regional governments and entities like ASEAN who have preconditioned their support for the regime on a notional transition to democracy. Therefore, the question of domestic accountability does not arise.

For Hlaing, holding the election, no matter how staged it might seem, is a path back to regional diplomatic circles.

In fact, it is China that Hlaing wishes to primarily placate through the elections. Beijing, frustrated by a lack of progress on Belt and Road Initiative projects in post-coup Myanmar and Hlaing’s abject failure to restore peace, believes that an election might calm the waters. It is also aware that any government that emerges out of the junta would be beholden to Chinese interests, not least because of the critical support that Beijing has extended to the military rulers in taming a set of powerful of ethnic rebels in the north.

Backing the “election”, therefore, is China’s way to consolidate its influence in Myanmar’s Bamar heartland at a time when the US seems to have retracted from the country. The costs of its realpolitik geopolitics are, of course, severe – it stands to become even more unpopular in a country where large parts of the population already see their northern neighbour as a disruptive and extractive force.

But, this is a cost that Beijing is willing to pay to ensure that its high-speed road and rail corridors cutting across Myanmar are completed on time.

🇲🇲🇨🇳Beijing’s vote of confidence for Myanmar polls.

Myanmar's military-run elections are being pilloried abroad and shunned at home, but neighbouring China has emerged as an enthusiastic backer of the pariah poll.https://t.co/XfEIjTI3XF pic.twitter.com/fEZoM7mQsF

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 24, 2025

The Indian play

The lesson here is for the others around Myanmar, including India. Any support for the junta’s election, even if in notional terms, could be seen as an attempt to legitimise the coup regime. In fact, it could disturb the relationship that India has quietly built with ethnic armed organisations in western Myanmar, most prominently the powerful Arakan Army and Chin groups that now control territory through which the New Delhi-funded Kaladan project passes. The multi-crore project aims to connect Kolkata with Northeast India via the Sittwe port in Myanmar’s Rakhine state by sea, river and land.

Yet, it is clear that New Delhi is not cutting itself loose from the junta yet. In fact, in the upcoming “election”, the Narendra Modi government sees an avenue to rationalise its relationship with the junta and, as a recent meeting between the two sides indicated, find “better opportunities” to work together. For India, a strong central government in Naypyidaw, regardless of its political provenance and popular legitimacy, is an ideal partner to work with.

This emanates from a longstanding Indian diplomatic posture to engage with whoever is in power in the Burmese capital. But, seen from another angle, it is a reflection of the Modi government’s own preference of a centralised democracy over a federal one at home. The home and the world collapse into each other in foreign policy decision-making more often than we might believe.

It is unlikely that the resistance groups with which India has built a rapport over the last year will abruptly sever their ties with New Delhi if the Modi government endorses the “election” result. But, India’s choice to do so may certainly leave a bitter taste among Myanmar’s pro-democracy forces who see in their western neighbour an exemplar model of federal democracy that is worth emulating in the Burmese context, unlike the Chinese model of a one-party authoritarian state that is ill-fitted to Myanmar’s rich multi-ethnic sociopolitical landscape.

India must capitalise on this critical distinction. To do so, it must slowly but surely expand its relations with the pro-democracy groups next door. Simultaneously, it must scale down its ties with the grossly unpopular military regime and any subsequent quasi-civilian government that Hlaing might install, while quietly building strategic clout in western Myanmar’s ethnic pockets where almost every group remains keen on working with India for mutual benefit.

The key here is to keep the ear to the ground and listen to the aspirations and suffering of the people, rather than the self-serving fantasies of a rogue military clique that has never been serious about protecting Indian security interests. It is only by adopting a truly people-centric foreign policy that India can kill two birds with a stone: outsmart China in its own backyard, and build political-strategic depth in a rapidly transforming Myanmar.

Angshuman Choudhury is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies jointly at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London.

Australia has issued an advisory warning that counterfeit batches of a rabies vaccine have been circulating in India since November 1, 2023.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation issued the alert about counterfeit batches of the vaccine Abhayrab on December 22. It stated that while the vaccine is not available in Australia, those who received it while in India may still be affected.

Rabies is a viral zoonotic disease that affects the central nervous system. Infected dogs are responsible for transmitting the virus in the vast majority of rabies cases among humans.

According to the World Health Organization, the disease is fatal in 100% cases once it infects the central nervous system and clinical symptoms appear.

Abhayrub is manufactured by the Human Biologicals Institute, a division of Hyderabad-based Indian Immunologicals Limited.

Indian Immunologicals Limited told Scroll that in January, it “proactively identified an issue related to a specific batch of Abhayrab (Batch # KA 24014) in the market place with a packaging that was different”.

It added that it immediately notified Indian regulators. “We are working closely with regulatory authorities and law-enforcement agencies to swiftly curb this batch specific issue, and a formal complaint has been lodged to facilitate investigation,” stated the company.

In its advisory, the Australian advisory body said that those “who have received the counterfeit vaccine may not be fully protected against rabies and are recommended to receive replacement doses with a rabies vaccine registered in Australia”.

As it would be difficult to confirm whether an individual received a genuine or fake vaccine, anyone who received a dose of Abhayrab in India from November 1, 2023, onwards should be considered to have potentially been administered the counterfeit vaccine, it added.

The advisory body said that such persons should be offered replacement doses of a vaccine in Australia.

The World Health Organization says that as per available information, rabies causes 18,000 to 20,000 deaths every year in India. The country accounts for 36% of the total deaths due to rabies in the world.

In recent years, there have been several concerns about medical products manufactured in India being found to be substandard in foreign countries. Deaths allegedly linked to India-made cough syrups have been reported from the Gambia and Uzbekistan, while Indian-made eye drops were suspected to have been linked to infections in Sri Lanka.

‘Supplies made through authorised distributors safe’

The company told Scroll that every batch of vaccine made at Indian Immunologicals Limited is tested and released by the Central Drugs Laboratory under the Government of India prior to release for public use.

Abhayrab has been manufactured by Indian Immunologicals Limited since 2000, with over 210 million doses supplied in India and across 40 countries, the vaccine-maker said, adding that the vaccine holds about 40% of the market share.

“We would like to reiterate and provide adequate confidence to health care professionals and the general public that all supplies of Abhayrab made by IIL to the various government institutions and all supplies made through our authorised distributors are safe and of standard quality,” it added.

Indian Immunologicals Limited is committed to the highest standards of quality, safety, and transparency in the interest of public health, the statement added.

A booth-level officer has allegedly died by suicide in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district, PTI reported on Friday. His family has alleged that he took the step due to work pressure related to the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in the state.

The booth-level officer, identified as 30-year-old Umesh, lived in Ataria town and was employed as an instructor at Dariyapur pre-secondary school, said Rakesh Kumar Gupta, an inspector in charge of the Ataria police station.

Umesh was a resident of the Rampur Kala police station area, he added.

Gupta said that Umesh was alone in his room when he allegedly killed himself.

“After the door remained unopened for a long time, police were informed,” PTI quoted the inspector as saying. “As the iron door was locked from inside, it was cut open, following which Umesh was found hanging from a noose.”

Umesh’s family members told the news agency that he had been assigned duties as a booth-level officer during the revision exercise and was under pressure due to the increased workload.

The police said that the matter was being investigated and that a case would be registered after a preliminary probe.

The Election Commission is conducting the revision of the electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories, including Uttar Pradesh. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

Overall, around 3.6 crore electors in the 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far in the exercise.

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

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

The task of preparing voter lists before elections is typically assigned to primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are required to go door-to-door and check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

In the Election Commission’s parlance, they are called booth-level officers. Each booth-level officer is responsible for maintaining the voter list for one polling booth, which can sometimes have as many as 1,500 registered voters.

At least nine suicides and two deaths due to stroke have been reported due to alleged work pressure in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan amid the revision of electoral rolls.

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 published on September 30.

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

Also read: I struggled to fill SIR forms. BLOs have it much worse

Jhalo Devi and her husband, Basu Oraon, tried cultivating hybrid paddy for five years. The result? Higher costs, more pesticides, and less nutrition. The couple are third-generation Oraon tribal farmers from Jahupkokotoli village in Gumla district of Jharkhand. Like many farmers in the state, they eventually made a choice – to abandon modern hybrids and return to the Indigenous rice their ancestors cultivated for generations.

“Look how healthy these grains are,” says 64-year-old Jhalo Devi, standing in a field that defies the usual image of a lush green paddy crop. Under the winter sun, the grains glow like black diamonds. “This is our dehati dhan (native paddy), Kala Jeera.”

The reasons are both practical and profound. “Hybrids get a lot of diseases; they don’t grow without pesticides,” says Basu, 60. In contrast, their Kala Jeera yields well, fetches a premium price, and needs no fertilisers.

This shift is not merely about tradition; it is a strategic response to climate change and rising costs. Native varieties have evolved to withstand local adversities. “They have built-in resistance and possess diverse genes. In case of drought, flood, or pest attack, they perform better than hybrids,” explains Brijesh Pandey, scientist at Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Gumla. Agroecologist Debal Deb notes that these folk varieties have an “amazing capacity for adaptation”, honed over generations to suit local soil, climate, and pests.

More resilient

The couple recall the days when they grew several varieties of red and black rice. “We once grew a variety called Namri, which was red, then Kalamdani, also red, and Karhani, a black rice rich in vitamins (nutrition),” says Jhalo.

They also cultivated Mehia, a small, white-grained variety; a red grain, Ramdi; and a sweet, black-grained rice, Gopal Bhog. “Earlier, our harvest was so good that three chatka (traditional bamboo grain storage) would fill up with grain,” she recalls. But over time, the younger generation distanced itself from farming. Today, the couple cultivate seven acres – six acres with native varieties, Kala Jeera and Mehia, and one acre with hybrid paddy, a compromise Jhalo jokingly attributes to her husband.

“The black rice tasted so good. There’s a world of difference between today’s hybrid rice and the old varieties. Even when eaten as leftover or as fermented water rice, it was delicious,” she says. Hybrids, she explains, spoil quickly. “If you cook hybrid rice in the morning, it will spoil by evening. But if you cook black rice and keep it in water, it won’t spoil even after three days.”

Jhalo has even preserved seeds of Karhani, a black variety she says has medicinal value. “We eat it only when someone falls sick. It’s beneficial for people with diabetes and even for ailments like jaundice,” she adds.

What Jhalo knows from her experience is supported by scientific data. Rice and wheat – which meet over 50% of India’s daily energy requirements – have lost up to 45% of their nutritional value in the past 50 years. Zinc content in rice has fallen by 33%, iron by 27%, and most troublingly, arsenic levels have surged by 1,493%. At this rate, researchers estimate that grains could become nutritionally impoverished for human consumption by 2040.

“The Indigenous paddy tastes better than hybrid varieties,” says Lambodar Behera, Principal Scientist at the ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack. “Black and red rice often have antioxidant and medicinal properties. They can be useful for people with diabetes, have anti-inflammatory compounds and may help with joint pain. The deeper the red or black colour, the richer the nutrition; some have a good aroma, even better than Basmati.”

A 2021 study found that traditional black rice is nutritionally richer, with more vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and medicinal properties than commonly consumed white rice varieties. “I tell him to plant only Indigenous varieties, but this old man doesn’t listen,” says Jhalo, teasing Basu. “But when I serve him hybrid rice, he won’t eat it. He says it has no taste.”

It is not just about taste and health; Kala Dhan also fetches a fair price. “This rice sells easily for Rs 80-Rs 120 a kilo in the market,” says Basu. The couple sell their produce in the local markets of Lohardagga and Banari. “Everyone loves our rice and often asks for it during festivals and special occasions.”

Greater resilience

This year, Jharkhand received almost 1,200 mm of monsoon rainfall (June-September) – 17% above normal and the third-highest since 2001, causing damage to Kharif crops, especially paddy and maize, across the state.

Dinbharan Nageshiya, 32, a farmer from Chorkakhar village in Latehar district who cultivates Indigenous paddy on his 5.5 acres, explains that traditional varieties such as the red rice Sanpiya and black rice varieties Karhani, Baghpanjara, Jeera Phool, and Rani Kajra were once common in their diet.

Over the past decade, many villagers switched to hybrids. But Dinbharan and a few neighbours who held on to Indigenous varieties were proved right during this year’s rain. “All farmers who grew hybrid paddy lost their crops, while those with Indigenous varieties had good harvests,” he says.

“We bought hybrid seed and planted it on three acres. They failed this year,” says Dasi Kisan, 42, from the same village, who spent over Rs 30,000 on this season’s paddy. Standing between two fields, Dinbharan points out, “This traditional paddy is thriving without fertiliser. That hybrid field? Dead.”

For Jharkhand, the resilience of Indigenous varieties matters. The state is prone to climate extremes and has suffered 10 droughts in the last 25 years. As climate variabilities intensify, farmers like Dinbharan are showing that older seeds may offer better survival odds than newer ones.

Yet many Indigenous varieties have already been lost. RH Richharia, one of India’s leading rice experts, documented and collected around 19,000 varieties during his career, estimating that India was once home to 200,000 rice varieties.

Lifeline in mining areas

Indigenous varieties not only have greater climate resistance but also remarkable adaptability. One such black rice variety is Gauda Dhan of the Pat region. Gauda Dhan thrives in southern Gumla district, part of the Chhotanagpur plateau scarred by open-cast bauxite mines. “We have grown Gauda Dhan for at least five generations,” says Sukhani Asur, 56, of Kujam village. She belongs to the Asur tribe, classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group.

Villagers grow only kharif crops; rabi cultivation is impossible. “There is no water source here,” she says. For locals, Gauda Dhan means survival.

“We must conserve Gauda genotypes,” says Somnath Roy, Scientist at ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Hazaribag. “They tolerate drought and phosphorus starvation, which are common in acidic mining soils. Their longer roots extract phosphorus from deeper layers.”

A study of the Sundarban’s traditional rice varieties found that farmers grow many local types suited to salty soil. But these yield less than modern high-yielding varieties, so most farmers switched to newer types for bigger harvests.

Yet older varieties persist. They resist salt well, protecting crops during floods and storms. Farmers also value their taste, reminiscent of childhood. Seeds cost nothing – farmers save them after harvest. These varieties need little fertiliser or pesticide, keeping costs low.

About 50 km from the Pat region, in Latehar district, lies Vijaipur. The village grows only Indigenous dehati dhan. As in the Pat region, no crops are grown in the Rabi season due to lack of water. But the village has its own way to endure the dry spell. Some grow Sathi (a 60-day, drought-escaping rice) and Fakthi (a 70-90 day, late-sown option). “Even in upland fields or dry years, Sathi yields if planted,” says farmer Joseph Kujur, 37.

“Sathi completes its life cycle before water stress hits,” explains Somnath Roy. “If rain doesn’t come until mid-August, farmers sow Sathi or Fakthi later. It still survives.” Some varieties thrive under excessive rain. “Karhani grows well in low-lying fields with heavy rainfall,” says Joseph. “It matures quickly and yields well.”

Indigenous paddy is hardier and less disease-prone. “Even after storms, grains don’t fall,” Joseph says. “You can delay harvest a week and still get a full crop. Hybrids lack that toughness. Their seeds sprout if they fall.”

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Criticising the lynching of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, India said that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning. Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson also said that New Delhi “expects the perpetrators of the crime to be brought to justice”.

He was referring to the killing of Dipu Chandra Das, a factory worker, on December 18. Das was beaten to death by a mob in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district after being accused of blasphemy. His body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Eighteen persons have been taken into custody for the lynching.

Jaiswal also claimed that independent sources had documented more than 2,900 incidents of violence against minorities in Bangladesh during the four-month tenure of the interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus. Read on.

Why West rushed to mourn the killing of an anti-India youth leader in Bangladesh

Amid strained diplomatic ties between New Delhi and Dhaka, a group of hoteliers in West Bengal’s Siliguri decided to stop providing accommodation to Bangladeshi citizens. A notice issued by the Greater Siliguri Hoteliers Welfare Association said that the decision was linked to provocative statements allegedly made by some Bangladeshi citizens and alleged disrespect towards the Indian national flag.

Siliguri, located close to the border with Bangladesh, is an important entry point for Bangladeshi citizens who travel to India on tourist, medical and student visas.

Ujjwal Ghosh, the joint secretary of the association, said that the decision was an extension of a ban that was first imposed in December 2024. He said that the association has 180 hotels in and around Siliguri, all of which are strictly following the ban. Read on.

The Union government told the Delhi High Court that reducing the Goods and Services Tax on air purifiers to 5% from 18% without following due process will open up a “Pandora’s box”. Seeking more time to offer a measured response, the Union government said that it will inform in its counter-affidavit when a GST Council meeting can be scheduled.

“It is a federal levy,” said the Centre’s counsel. “All states and Union ministry has to argue...If anything has to be voted, it can only be done physically.” The Union government also asked whether a public interest litigation could be filed in the matter, stating that the petitioner could instead make a representation before it.

On its part, the court maintained that something should be done to bring down the cost of air purifiers in light of the air pollution crisis in the national capital. This came as the Air Quality Index in the national capital plunged again to the “very poor” category. Read on.

How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

The internet was suspended for 24 hours in the town of Chomu near Jaipur after four police personnel were injured due to stones being thrown at them during a protest. The protesters were objecting to the police removing iron railings erected along the road outside a mosque.

The dispute was linked to stones placed along the road outside the mosque. Representatives of the Muslim community held talks with the district administration on Thursday and agreed to remove the stones.

However, some persons allegedly began installing iron railings outside the mosque to create a boundary after the stones were removed, leading to the unrest. Read on.

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Internet has been suspended for 24 hours in the town of Chomu near Jaipur after four police personnel were injured due to stones being thrown at them during a protest, the Hindustan Times reported.

The protesters were objecting to the police removing iron railings erected along the road outside a mosque on Friday.

The incident took place at about 3 am near the bus stand area in the Chomu town, which is 40 km from the Rajasthan capital, PTI reported.

Director General of Police (Law and Order) Sanjay Agarwal told the Hindustan Times that the situation was completely under control, adding that strict action would be taken against those who took the law into their own hands.

The dispute was linked to stones placed along the road outside the mosque, unidentified police officers told the newspaper. Representatives of the Muslim community held talks with the district administration on Thursday and agreed to remove the stones.

However, some persons allegedly began installing iron railings outside the mosque to create a boundary after the stones were removed, PTI reported. This led to fresh objections and unrest as the railings encroached on the road.

Early on Friday, the police attempted to remove the railings using a JCB machine. However, a few persons allegedly started throwing stones, injuring four police officers who were later admitted to a hospital.

The police had to resort to tear gas shells and used mild force to force the crowd to disperse, officers said.

Police officers have been conducting flag marches in the town, PTI reported. Teams have been formed to identify and arrest those involved in the violence.

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.

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 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.

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.

India on Friday condemned the lynching of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, saying that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning.

Dipu Chandra Das, a factory worker, was beaten to death by a mob in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district on December 18, after which his body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Eighteen persons have been taken into custody for the lynching.

On Friday, Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that continuing hostilities against minorities in Bangladesh, including Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, at the hands of extremists was a matter of great concern.

#WATCH | Delhi | On Bangladesh, MEA Spox Randhir Jaiswal says," The unremitting hostility against minorities in Bangladesh is a matter of great concern. We condemn the recent killing of a Hindu youth in Bangladesh and expect that the perpetrators of the crime will be brought to… pic.twitter.com/UbacgqSskh

— ANI (@ANI) December 26, 2025

“We condemn the recent gruesome killing of a Hindu youth in Mymensingh and expect the perpetrators of the crime to be brought to justice,” Jaiswal said.

The spokesperson also claimed that independent sources had documented more than 2,900 incidents of violence against minorities in Bangladesh during the tenure of the interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus.

Such incidents cannot be brushed aside as media exaggeration or dismissed as political violence, he added.

Das 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 earlier that day.

Hadi was a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the earlier government headed by Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina.

On Friday, Jaiswal also reacted cautiously to the return of Tarique Rahman, the acting chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, to Bangladesh on Thursday after 17 years in exile, reported PTI.

He said that Rahman’s return should be seen in the context of ensuring inclusive polls in the country.

Rahman, who is a key contender to be the next prime minister of the country after the general elections in February, had been living in London since he fled Bangladesh in 2008.

He was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly masterminding a grenade attack on a rally in 2004 that killed 24 leaders and activists of Hasina’s Awami League.

While in exile, he was also convicted on charges of money laundering and faced around 100 lawsuits. The convictions were overturned after Hasina was ousted from power in August 2024, following large-scale student-led protests against her government.

Rahman’s return to Bangladesh ahead of the 13th national election, to be held on February 12, is being seen as a defining moment for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. This will be the first election in the country since the ouster of Hasina.

Yunus, a Nobel laureate economist, had taken over as chief adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government three days after Hasina resigned as the prime minister and fled to India on August 5, 2024.

Hasina was ousted from power after being the prime minister of Bangladesh for 16 years.

A group of hotel owners in West Bengal’s Siliguri has decided to stop providing accommodation to Bangladeshi citizens in view of the unrest in the country, PTI reported on Friday.

A notice issued by the Greater Siliguri Hoteliers Welfare Association said that the decision was linked to provocative statements allegedly made by a section of Bangladeshi citizens and alleged disrespect towards the Indian national flag.

The decision was aimed at ensuring the safety and well-being of guests and hotel staff members, the association was quoted as saying by the news agency.

Ujjwal Ghosh, the joint secretary of the association, said that the decision was an extension of a ban that was first imposed in December 2024, The Telegraph reported.

“In December 2024, our members had stopped providing accommodation to Bangladeshi citizens,” Ghosh said. “However, on humanitarian grounds, exceptions were made for students and patients visiting India on student and medical visas, respectively.”

Ghosh told The Telegraph that the association has now decided to ban all Bangladeshis from its hotels because of the violence in the country and the “anti-India rhetoric” being spread there. He said that the association has 180 hotels in and around Siliguri, all of which are strictly following the ban.

The association said that the ban will be reviewed from time to time, with the "possibility of reinstating accommodation facilities once conditions are deemed safe and respectful”, PTI reported.

Siliguri, located close to the border with Bangladesh, is an important entry point for Bangladeshi citizens who travel to India on tourist, medical and student visas.

Since December 18, Bangladesh has been rocked by unrest that was sparked by the death of activist Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina-led government.

Hadi was shot on December 12 in Dhaka and died on December 18 at a mosque in Singapore.

His death triggered protests, vandalism and attacks across Bangladesh, including stone-throwing at the residence of the Assistant Indian High Commissioner in Chittagong on December 18.

Further, the killing of a Hindu man named Dipu Chandra Das in Bangladesh after a mob accused him of blasphemy sparked protests in India.

These developments have led to a strain in India-Bangladesh ties, which had already been tense since Muhammad Yunus took over as the country’s interim leader on August 8, 2024 – three days after Hasina was ousted from power.

Bangladesh has been demanding that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal in that country sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government.

The Union government told the Delhi High Court on Friday that reducing the Goods and Services Tax on air purifiers to 5% from 18% without following due process will open up a “Pandora’s box”, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices Vikas Mahajan and Vinod Kumar was hearing a public interest litigation filed by advocate Kapil Madan, seeking directions to categorise air purifiers as a “medical device” and lower the tax levied on them.

On Wednesday, the court directed the GST Council to convene an urgent meeting and consider lowering the levies on air purifiers in view of the high levels of pollution in Delhi and the surrounding areas.

During the hearing on Friday, Additional Solicitor General N Venkataraman, representing the Union government, said that the matter was being examined at the highest level, Bar and Bench reported.

Seeking more time to give a measured response, he said that the Union government will inform in its counter-affidavit when a GST Council meeting can be scheduled.

Venkataraman also said that there was a legislative process to deal with recommendations made in parliamentary standing committee reports, as well as how GST Council meetings deliberate on proposals, The Indian Express reported.

“How can this process be scuttled through a court process?” the newspaper quoted the additional solicitor general as asking.

He said that the GST Council was a constitutional body. “It is a federal levy,” Bar and Bench quoted Venkataraman as saying. “All states and Union ministry has to argue... If anything has to be voted, it can only be done physically...”

However, Madan said that the residents of the national capital will continue to suffer if a decision is not taken promptly, adding that it was a simple process. “Not only is the clean air taxed, it is being taxed wrongly,” the legal news portal quoted him as saying.

In response, the court also noted that these decisions may have to wait until the GST Council meets.

During the proceedings, the additional solicitor general also asked whether a public interest litigation could be filed in the matter, stating that the petitioner could instead make a representation before the Union government.

“We want to know who is behind this writ petition,” Bar and Bench quoted Venkataraman as saying. “It is not a PIL at all.”

Madan, however, opposed the argument, stating that his petition was not “adversarial”.

“Maybe the learned counsel for UOI [Union of India] has not seen the notification by which these slabs have been imposed,” Bar and Bench quoted the advocate as saying. “On a bare reading of this notification itself, I will be able to demonstrate that they are taxing air purifiers under the wrong category.”

The court, on its part, maintained that something should be done to bring down the cost of air purifiers in Delhi in light of the air pollution crisis in the national capital.

“Why can’t it be done?” the bench asked. “Do whatever you have to do. Right now, an air purifier costs Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000. Why not bring down the GST to a reasonable level where even a common man can afford an air purifier?”

The court directed the Union government to file its counter-affidavit within ten days and listed the matter for further hearing on January 9. The petitioner has also been allowed to file his rejoinder by then.

During the last hearing on Wednesday, the court 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”.

“How many times do you breathe in a day?” the bench had said at the time. “21,000 times. Just calculate the harm you are doing to yourself.”

AQI in Delhi

The hearing came as the Air Quality Index in the national capital plunged again to the “very poor” category, after improving earlier this week.

Delhi’s average AQI stood at 336 at 5.05 pm, according to data from the Sameer 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”.

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.

The commission, however, said 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.

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital. Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, along with the lighting of firecrackers during Diwali, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

The man, Kupwara resident Bilal Ahmed Ganie, was attacked when he was going from door to door to sell shawls. The assault came to light on Thursday when a video of it was widely shared on social media platform Instagram.

In the video, Ganie was seen being beaten up by men who demanded that he shout “Bharat mata ki jai”.

Ganie told The Times of India that the assailants asked him his name and where he was from.

“When I said Kashmir, they started beating me with kicks and punches,” he said. “One of them hit my legs with a cane, and I fell to the ground.”

The shawl seller was further quoted as saying: “They asked me to say ‘Bharat mata ki jai’. I said I would proudly say ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ as this is our country.”

Ganie said that bystanders goaded the mob and verbally abused him, The Indian Express reported.

Bilal Ahmad a shawl seller was brutally assaulted by right wing goons in Kashipur Uttarakhand. Despite approaching the Pratappur Goshala Police Station no FIR has reportedly been registered so far.
Urge the DGP Uttarakhand to kindly intervene & ensure that an FIR is registered so… pic.twitter.com/LCWeAiNFvU

— Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) December 25, 2025

Ganie said he had lodged a complaint, but added that he did not want to pursue the case as he feared facing reprisal from the group.

“As much as I want justice and condemnation for the act, I am scared of the consequences,” he was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “I have to travel back to Kashmir in two months, and the case would tie me to Uttarakhand.”

The police in Udham Singh Nagar said that as the video of the assault was of a sensitive nature, they had it removed from the social media platform.

A case has been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to rioting, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, snatching of property and public nuisance, The Indian Express quoted a statement from the office of the senior superintendent of police as saying.

“The police have identified the men seen in the viral video and taken them into custody,” the police said. “A fair and thorough investigation is being conducted and strict legal action against the guilty will be ensured.”

Peoples Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti urged the Uttarakhand police chief to intervene and ensure “that the perpetrators are held accountable and such incidents are not repeated in future”.

Jammu and Kashmir Students Association National Convenor Nasir Khuehami said that Ganie had been selling shawls in Udham Singh Nagar for the past nine to ten years. “Despite this, he was threatened, asked to vacate the area and leave the state immediately, his stock was looted, and he was even threatened with death,” he said.

Khuehami urged Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami to “immediately intervene, put an end to this reign of terror, and ensure the prompt arrest of the culprits”.

The Assam Police has arrested four persons associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal for allegedly vandalising Christmas decorations at a school in Nalbari district, the administration said on Thursday.

The persons were identified as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s district Secretary Bhaskar Deka, its district Vice President Manash Jyoti Patgiri, its Assistant Secretary Biju Dutta and the Bajrang Dal’s district Convenor Nayan Talukdar.

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

The persons allegedly carried out the vandalism at St Mary’s School in Panigaon village on Wednesday. A video by India Today NE showed them setting fire to Christmas decorations and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

A case was registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to criminal trespass, unlawful assembly, criminal intimidation and criminal conspiracy. The persons have also been booked for mischief by injury, inundation, fire or explosive substances.

In another incident in Nalbari, about 15 to 20 alleged members of the Hindutva organisations burnt Christmas decorations at a shop and forced the establishment to close, Asom Live had reported.

Kerala minister says Lok Bhavan employees denied Christmas holiday

Kerala Labour Minister V Sivankutty on Thursday criticised the decision of the Lok Bhavan, formerly the Raj Bhavan, to organise programmes on Christmas day, alleging that it effectively denied employees a holiday, Onmanorama reported.

The governor’s official residence observed the Good Governance Day on Thursday to mark the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The minister said that the clarification by the authorities that participation was optional was misleading. “As long as instructions come from senior officials, ‘optional’ remains only in name,” he was quoted as saying.

Sivankutty cited orders issued by the Uttar Pradesh government to say that the Lok Bhavan’s decision appeared to follow a broader pattern.

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh had on Wednesday announced that schools in the state will not be closed on Christmas day, but will remain open to commemorate Vajpayee’s birth anniversary.

Attacks on Christians, disruptions to Christmas celebrations

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

In Chhattisgarh’s Raipur, a Hindutva mob on Wednesday vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall. The videos of the incident posted on social media showed the men, armed with sticks, barging into the mall and destroying decorations a day ahead of Christmas.

The incident occurred on the day a Hindutva group had called for a state-wide strike 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 the shouting slogan “Jai Shri Ram”, The Hindu reported.

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

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.

On the morning of December 24, Kalpana Dey stood outside the burnt remains of her shop and home at the Kheroni daily market in Assam.

A day earlier, a mob of more than 200 people had descended on the 58-year-old’s home on the bank of the Kopili river in West Karbi Anglong.

“I hid behind the bushes and trees to save my life,” Dey, who has been living in Kheroni for the last 40 years, said. “I saw others jumping into the river to escape.” By the time they left, nothing much had remained of her home.

Violence erupted in the area on December 22 after the police broke up a protest by the Karbi tribes against the alleged encroachment of grazing reserves by non-tribal settlers.

Over the next two days, angry tribal residents burnt down the ancestral home of a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader, looted shops and then finally burnt homes and establishments in the Kheroni market.

Dey’s home and shop are only about 600 metres from the police station, reached by crossing the bridge over the Kopili river. But she alleged that they did nothing to stop the crowd.

“For the last two days, hundreds of police personnel have been stationed at the station,” she said. “But they did not do anything to stop the fire.”

Several Bihari residents of the area told Scroll that the angry men dragged out tables and other belongings of non-tribals and set them on fire right in front of the Kheroni police station.

“The police simply watched,” said a Bihari resident, who lives near the police station.

Dey’s neighbour Suraj Dey, a 32-year-old disabled man, was inside his home when the mob set it on fire. He could not get out in time. “By the time someone tried to rescue him, the fire had already spread,” she said.

When Scroll visited the Kheroni market on Wednesday, we found that all the non-tribal shops were either charred or looted. Over a dozen non-tribal houses had been burnt down.

“Not a single Karbi shop was burnt,” said 48-year-old Pannalal Das, whose hotel and homes were set on fire. “The police could have done a lathi charge or fired blanks to scatter the crowd but they only watched.”

Scroll contacted the Assam director-general of police and the inspector-general of police for a response to the allegations of the residents. The story will be updated if they respond.

Suraj Dey was among two people killed in the violence. The other person, a Karbi man, was killed in police firing, said a doctor at Kheroni Model Hospital.

The Karbi residents, too, blamed the police for triggering the violence by forcibly “dragging away” protestors at Phelangpi, about 3 km from Kheroni, on December 22.

Holiram Terang, a veteran Karbi politician and former minister, told Scroll: “The civil and police administration behaved almost indifferently, as if the situation were allowed to escalate.”

Leaders of the Karbi community said the violence was a response to the growth in non-tribal settlers in a Sixth Schedule area, which risks turning the Karbis into a minority. Terang alleged that the “open presence” of “Hindutva forces aggravated the situation.”

The fault line

A dispute has been brewing in the Karbi hills between the tribals and non-tribals over land for a while now. The hills are governed under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which gives tribal communities exclusive rights over land, political rights and businesses.

Last February, a group claiming to represent the interests of Hindi-speaking communities of Karbi Anglong, met President Droupadi Murmu in Shillong to demand “protection of land rights of settlers” over village grazing reserves.

The move set off ripples of alarm in the tribal community.

In response, the Karbi Students Association held protests and demonstrations, demanding the eviction of non-tribals from the area. They also asserted that attempts to grant them land rights were against the provisions of the Sixth Schedule.

In February 2024, the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council ordered officials to evict over 2,000 families, mostly Biharis, from grazing land in the hills of Assam, describing them “unauthorized occupants” of the land.

The order was then challenged in the Gauhati High Court by 300-odd families. The court granted the petitioners interim relief.

However, Karbi residents said not all 2,000 families benefited from the court order and the state government could evict the others.

Litsong Rongphar, who has been leading the protest against the settlers since 2024, accused the BJP government of prioritising “vote bank” politics over the rights of tribal people. “If Muslims or Miyas were living in Kheroni today, they would have been evicted long back,” he said, referring to Bengal-origin Muslims in the state, thousands of whom have been evicted from government land by the Himanta Biswa Sarma government.

Rongphar added: “The BJP came to power with a promise to protect the natives’ land but here the illegal encroachers are Hindu communities. So, they don’t want to upset their vote bank.”

A hunger strike, and a riot

On December 6, a group of nine tribal residents, led by Rongphar, sat on an indefinite hunger strike at Phelangpi village, about 3 km from Kheroni daily market, demanding the immediate eviction of alleged illegal settlers from grazing land.

About 10 days later, the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council announced a meeting between Tulimar Ronghang, the chief executive member of the council, and the protestors on December 22.

But at 3 am on December 22, the police allegedly removed the protesters, including women, from the site. “The video showing how police commandos held guns to our necks and dragged us from the site triggered the common Karbi people,” said Rongphar. “It all started from there. Whatever happened was the fault of the government.”

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma later said the protestors had been taken to Guwahati for medical examination. “Why did they come in the dark and take us to Guwahati and not any hospital nearby?” Rongphar asked.

Said Holiram Terang, the former minister, “Even an ordinary man knows this is an unjust way to force the struggle to stop.”

He added: “The people's shock and anger are quite justified. With no organisation to lead the people and elected representatives nowhere to be seen, mob violence is expected.”

As news of the police removing protestors on December 22 spread, agitated Karbi residents protested in front of the Kheroni police station, clashed with the police and set fire to the ancestral home of Ronghang.

Later in the evening, they turned their fury on the non-tribal shops in the Kheroni daily market.

By Monday evening, however, the situation appeared to improve with the state government agreeing to talks with the protestors.

Rongphar returned from Guwahati and called off the hunger strike.

Senior minister Ranoj Pegu along with the officials visited the place on Tuesday morning and held talks with both the groups.

But the situation took a turn for the worse when two communities began to gather on both sides of the river near Kheroni.

Hours before, the tribal community had been inflamed by a video of Bihari protesters allegedly shouting “Karbi go back” and calling the tribal residents derogatory names. They also carried saffron flags and shouted “Jai Shri Ram”.

While Karbis came on vehicles from villages 20 km away, Biharis arrived from nearby towns of Hojai and Lanka to protest the police inaction.

The police personnel took their positions on the bridge while both sides pelted stones at them. As the situation threatened to go out of hand, the police opened fire.

Linus Phangcho, a 40-year-old evangelist who works at a church, was among the hundreds of villagers who came to Kheroni from his native village, which is 20 km away. He was killed in police action.

“He sacrificed his life for our land and protection of Karbis,” his brother-in-law Wilson Keap told Scroll. Phangcho is survived by four children and his wife.

A doctor at Kheroni Model Hospital, where he was admitted, told Scroll that he was killed by “suspected bullet injuries”.

Inspector-general of police Akhilesh Kumar, however, said they had only fired tear gas shells and rubber bullets.

‘Sixth Schedule protections have collapsed’

The Karbis are Assam’s third-largest tribe, constituting 11.1% of the tribal population, after the Bodos and the Mising.

For decades, politics in the Karbi hills has revolved around the need to protect Karbis’ political, cultural and linguistic identity from outsiders. The anxiety stems from many waves of past migration.

The current violence is tied up with that fear.

Rongphar alleged that Sixth Schedule protections for the Karbis have “collapsed”.

“Non-tribals are not allowed to get land pattas and trading licences in a Sixth Schedule area, but they are still getting it,” he said. “The Bihari population has grown as they start many businesses and settle on land.” He alleged that Karbis have become a minority in several constituencies of Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council.

Another reason for the disquiet is that since 2017, a Bihari BJP leader Pawan Kumar has been the elected member of the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council from the local Kopili constituency.

“How can he contest the elections if he doesn't have land in Karbi hills?” Rongphar said. “The Biharis have already outnumbered us in Kopili constituency.”

Of the 42,000 voters in Kopili constituency, 18,000 are Hindi speakers, 10,000 Karbis, and 3,500 Gorkhas, Rongphar said.

However, Kumar told Scroll that his family had come to Kheroni before 1951, when the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council was created. He agreed that there were more Hindi speakers in Kopili. “But it is a false narrative that the Biharis are still coming to Karbi Anglong,” he said.

Terang, the Karbi politician, argued that the Karbis are “more vulnerable as a community now” than before, as the Assam government signs agreements to set up solar plants and palm oil plantations.

“As the government openly facilitates large corporations to establish large palm oil plantations, solar projects, and mine limestone and other minerals, including rare earth, in the hill areas, the common indigenous people will be pushed to further impoverishment,” he said.

All photographs by Rokibuz Zaman.

In August, a strange story from Mumbai appeared in the news.

The city’s municipal corporation began to shut down 51 kabutarkhanas in response to a silent health crisis – the bird droppings were causing respiratory troubles for residents. It was not the decision that was strange but the response to it. Rallies and marches were held across the city to demand that the pigeon feeding sites be reopened.

Most of the protestors were Jains, members of a community that believes that feeding pigeons is “punya ka kaam” or a work of charity. They feared that the birds would starve if they were not fed. Even monks from the community went on fasts to press for their demand.

A side note is relevant here. Increasing urbanisation may have wiped out large numbers of birds, such as sparrows, but pigeons have learnt to live around humans, nesting comfortably near air conditioners, on parapets and sheltered ledges. That is why most Indian cities have seen a spike in pigeon populations. It is only in recent years that authorities have begun to identify pigeons as pests whose droppings can cause serious, sometimes fatal, lung infections in humans.

And so I set off to cover the story, chasing pigeons to where they had shifted – to buildings around the kabutarkhanas, now covered in tarpaulin.

Hundreds of pigeons were flying around, perching on tree branches and building ledges, leaving their droppings on balconies and tin roofs as they tried to adjust to the new situation.

When I returned to my scooter, it was covered in bird poop.

While covering the story, I noticed an odd world of human behaviour. Near these kabutarkhanas in Dadar and Matunga squatted many beggars, some in desperate need of food and clothes. But they were ignored by the benevolent pigeon feeders, who chased after the birds to offer them grain.

The bird feeders were also diverting resources from critical tasks. Municipal staffers had been pulled away from cleaning the storm water drains, filling up potholes and pruning trees to patrol the area. In accordance with directions of the Bombay High Court, they were expected to fine people feeding pigeons.

It didn’t take long for the bird feeders to figure out the patterns of the civic staff. When I visited the Matunga kabutarkhana, a shop owner told me proudly that he would secretly throw a bag of grain on the road when municipal workers were not around. In the middle of traffic, I saw several birds pecking enthusiastically at grain.

One resident of a nearby building, who was more than 70, said she had been unable to eat for two days because she was not allowed to feed pigeons any longer. She said that she had cried the day the kabutarkhana was shut. I did not doubt her.

Her 60-year-old neighbour told me she had created a new place for feeding on their building terrace. The woman grew emotional when she recounted how her grandmother had fed pigeons described how this charitable practice had been passed on to her generation.

“We never saw anyone die of pigeon shit,” she said. “This is something new. It's a conspiracy by those who hate pigeons.”

Two floors above, I met a family of five, all of them had respiratory troubles. Pigeons nest right outside their balcony; I could see hundreds of birds right by their window. But the family was scared to complain. “It’s like being branded anti-national,” the father joked. “People come to fight if we say that pigeons are a nuisance for our building.”

In the same building, I found that pigeons had driven away a family from the in which their daughter was born and had grown up. Some years before, the mother had been diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis. A doctor advised the family to shift to ensure her survival.

Pigeons had led to people falling sick, had driven away families, had left many too scared to walk without covering their heads – yet they had a prominent lobby.

In September, a state minister inaugurated a kabutarkhana near a temple in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, on land provided by the Jain community. Eventually, the municipal body allotted four more areas for feeding pigeons in various parts of the city.

Pigeon feeding has been restricted in several cities across the world, including New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Paris, Venice, Tokyo, Melbourne and Singapore. Even Chandigarh and Ahmedabad have also put restrictions in place. Though animal support groups did protest in some of these places, the municipal corporations did not budge.

Mumbai, it seems, is determined to be unique.

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

When Amrith Shenava began experimenting with large language models shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, he quickly realized that Tulu – the language he and some 2 million people spoke in the southern Indian state of Karnataka – had virtually no digital data set. He decided to build one.

Shenava, who has a degree in computer science from Kent State University in Ohio, had earlier launched a translation app, and a language learning app for Tulu. To build the data set for the LLM, he had to collect voice and text data from native speakers including teachers, professionals, homemakers, and members of the Tulu diaspora.

“Most AI systems are built in the US. They don’t understand Indian languages or contexts,” Shenava, the 27-year-old founder of TuluAI, told Rest of World. “We need our own models that represent us.”

India has more than 1,600 languages and dialects, but most artificial intelligence systems cater to those that are widely spoken. OpenAI’s ChatGPT supports more than a dozen Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada, the dominant language in Karnataka. Google’s Gemini can chat with users in nine Indian languages.

Spurred by their success, and keen to be a part of the rapid global transition to AI, a handful of Indian startups are building AI tools for so-called low-resource languages such as Tulu, Bodo, and Kashmiri, which have a limited online presence and few written records. The startups are having to build data sets nearly from scratch.

TuluAI holds storytelling sessions and workshops in rural areas, in which local residents – particularly women and elders – narrate their stories, or are asked to read texts and simulate everyday conversations. Participants are taught to record and label the data. Each workshop of one to two days produces over 150 hours of labeled voice and text data, Shenava said.

The startup also collects WhatsApp voice notes from anyone who wishes to send one, with annotators checking transcripts and labels for accuracy.

“Major translation tools miss the context that gives meaning to words. The only way to fix that is to use authentic, human-recorded data that reflects real-life language use,” Shenava said. “The goal is for the model to talk like a native speaker. We want it to understand humor, idioms, and cultural context. So we’re building slowly, verifying every sample.”

Across the country, in the northeastern state of Assam, Kabyanil Talukdar, the 25-year-old co-founder of Aakhor AI, follows a similar process to build data sets in Bodo and Assamese. Talukdar’s team conducts community workshops and classes, and holds voice-note drives via WhatsApp groups, with simple daily prompts like “Talk about your morning tea.”

Each submission is tagged with metadata such as dialect, region, and speaker demographics to ensure diversity. The clips, 20-60 seconds long, are processed, transcribed, and anonymised. Each three-month campaign produces over 5,000 voice samples, Talukdar told Rest of World.

“When people see that their voices help preserve their language, they feel ownership,” he said. “They are driven by the shared goal of creating AI that understands and speaks their native language.”

Big tech LLMs such as GPT and Meta’s Llama are trained on a wide range of data, including in languages other than English. Yet their performance in low-resource languages can be unpredictable, particularly in dialects and local idioms. Countries keen to support their languages and become self-sufficient in AI are building their own multilingual LLMs, which can support translation, speech recognition, and tools for customer service, education, health care, and other applications.

These include the Chile-led LatamGPT project, Southeast Asia’s Sealion, and efforts by Masakhane – a grassroots organisation that aims to build AI data sets and tools in African languages. India’s BharatGPT and Sarvam support many major Indian languages, and the government is building open-source models for several languages under the Bhashini project.

It is not easy.

Tulu’s ancient script lacks a Unicode standard that would allow computational processing of text. Shenava’s team is digitising literature written in the script, and training the model to identify patterns. While more complicated, the process helps capture the cultural nuance that is often lost in translation, he said.

The team avoids AI-generated or machine-translated data, which is often riddled with grammatical errors, made-up words and phrases, and other inaccuracies, he said.

“Even open-source models produce text that doesn’t make sense. That’s why we decided to build it from scratch,” Shenava said. This also ensures ethical data use, he said. “We don’t use any personal data without explicit permission.”

Aakhor AI’s models are voice-first, targeting areas with low literacy and weak internet access. The company recruits speakers from underrepresented areas to prevent dominant dialects from overshadowing smaller ones, and ensure “balanced sampling,” Talukdar said.

For Saqlain Yousef, it was the fear that Kashmiri – a language spoken by about 7 million people in India – might disappear that drove him to build the KashmiriGPT app using OpenAI’s application programming interface.

The platform accepts input in English as well as Kashmiri written in the Roman script, and generates responses in the Kashmiri script, Roman Kashmiri script, and English.

“Our language is vulnerable and at risk of disappearing. So I took matters into my own hands,” the 25-year-old told Rest of World. “This will help preserve Kashmiri in the AI age.”

Yousef is right to be concerned, C Vanlalawmpuia, an independent researcher in language and AI, told Rest of World.

“These languages are already marginalised, and without proper digital representation, they risk disappearing from online spaces entirely,” he said.

AI makes it easier to preserve a language through translation tools, transcription systems, and data sets that can make a language more visible and accessible, according to Vanlalawmpuia. But the lack of digital resources and funding are a challenge, and community-led efforts are one way to sustain the platforms, he said.

AI platforms from deep-pocketed big tech firms including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are also targeting India. The country is already the biggest market for ChatGPT outside the US, and OpenAI this month offered its ChatGPT Go service free for a year to users in India.

Aakhor AI is aware of its challenge. “We don’t compete with GPT on scale,” Talukdar said. “We compete on relevance.”

By sourcing data from the ground, the community is involved in preserving linguistic diversity and advancing linguistic inclusion, Shenava said.

“Anyone can contribute. That’s how language preservation will happen,” he said. “If AI can help keep it alive, that’s worth all the effort.”

For Rita D’Souza, a 32-year-old primary schoolteacher in coastal Karnataka, TuluAI is already making a difference, helping students improve their pronunciation and spelling, she told Rest of World.

Tauseef Ahmad is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

Sajid Raina is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

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

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.

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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