At least 18 workers were killed in a blast at an illegal coal mine in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills district on Thursday, the superintendent of police said.

One person with burn injuries had been taken to hospital, East Jaintia Hills Superintendent of Police Vikash Kumar said.

“We are unable to tell the exact number of workers trapped inside because of [smoke] and fire,” Vikash Kumar had told Scroll on Thursday evening.

The National Disaster Response Force and the State Disaster Response Force “are trying to rescue them”, he had said, adding that the workers are “locals and non-locals”.

The incident occurred on Thursday morning at Mynsyngat, Thangsko. The site is located about 40 km from the district headquarters.

Manish Kumar, the deputy commissioner of East Jaintia Hills, told Scroll that the unauthorised mine is located in a “very remote area”.

The incident is being investigated, Manish Kumar added.

A first information report has been registered in the matter.

Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said that an inquiry had been ordered into the incident and promised legal action.

The Prime Minister’s Office announced an ex-gratia of Rs 2 lakh for the families of those who died. The injured would be given Rs 50,000.

In 2014, the National Green Tribunal imposed a ban on rat-hole mining of coal in Meghalaya on the grounds that it was unsafe and unscientific. The rathole technique entails digging small vertical pits to reach the mineral, often making it dangerous for miners.

The tribunal, however, allowed for transportation of already-mined coal till 2017. The Supreme Court has since given more concessions to the state’s coal miners, allowing for periodic extensions of the transportation deadline.

However, critics believe that the concessions left the mining ban incomplete, allowing miners to illegally extract and ferry freshly mined coal under the guise of transporting old coal.

A 2022 report prepared by a court-appointed panel confirmed the concerns after it found that the state had overstated the quantity of coal extracted before the ban by 13 lakh metric tonnes.

Also read: A new report calls the bluff on Meghalaya’s coal mining ban – with data

The Union government, Nagaland and the Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation on Thursday signed a tripartite agreement to form the Frontier Nagaland Territorial Authority.

The agreement signed by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio and the Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation in New Delhi on Thursday creates an autonomous region within Nagaland.

The Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation, a pressure group that represents the state’s backward hilly regions, has long been demanding a separate state, arguing that the eastern Nagaland region was significantly more backward than the rest of the state.

The group has been calling for the creation of the Frontier Nagaland Territorial Authority comprising six districts: Kiphire, Longleng, Mon, Noklak, Shamator and Tuensang.

In 2022, members of the Eastern Nagaland People’s Organisation met the Union home minister, following which work began on an agreement to form the authority.

A momentous day for the people of Nagaland. Speaking on the signing of a historic agreement between GoI, Govt of Nagaland and representatives of Eastern Nagaland People's Organisation (ENPO). https://t.co/OFQiNQ6mjV

— Amit Shah (@AmitShah) February 5, 2026

During the signing of the agreement on Thursday, Shah said that the Union Ministry of Home Affairs will also provide funds for and assist the territorial authority.

“After Nagaland was created, the people of eastern Nagaland had a feeling that they were not getting justice,” Shah said, adding that the negotiations had reached a positive outcome.

“Home ministry officials had for a long time worked as a bridge between the ENPO and Government of Nagaland,” the Union home minister said. The “conflict is now nearing its end”, he added.

The signing of the pact was important because the “ENPO and the Nagaland government had taken the agreement to its logical end”, Shah added, thanking the chief minister and his colleagues.

The pressure group had called on voters in the six districts to boycott voting in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections after a similar call in the Assembly polls a year earlier.

The Union home minister, in a social media post, also said that it was a “momentous day” for the residents of Nagaland.

Nagaland’s public relations department quoted Rio as having thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Shah for their support during the negotiations. He also thanked officials in the Union home ministry and the state government, and the ENPO for their cooperation.

I am happy to announce that today, 5th Feb 2026, the Govt. of Nagaland signed the Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with the Govt. of India and the Eastern Nagaland Peoples’ Organisation for the formation of the ‘Frontier Nagaland Territorial Authority’ within the State of Nagaland.” pic.twitter.com/xbfVbluj31

— Neiphiu Rio (@Neiphiu_Rio) February 5, 2026

Also read: Why some Nagas want to partition their state to create a ‘Frontier Nagaland’

The Lok Sabha passed the Motion of Thanks on the president’s address without Prime Minister Narendra Modi giving his customary reply as the Opposition continued its protest. This was the first time since 2004 that the prime minister has been unable to reply to the motion in the Lok Sabha.

The Opposition has been protesting against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi not being allowed to quote an excerpt of an unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief MM Naravane about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

In 2004, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in Opposition at the time, had prevented Manmohan Singh from responding to the motion.

Modi was expected to speak in the Lower House at 5 pm on Wednesday. However, amid protests by Opposition MPs, the proceedings in the Lower House were adjourned till Thursday. But the prime minister’s speech did not take place. Read on.

The Mumbai Police claimed that British doctor Sangram Patil’s visit to India on a tourist visa and his social media activities were part of a “larger, organised effort” to post material about Prime Minister Narendra Modi that it alleged was defamatory and inflammatory material. The police described this as a matter of serious concern in an affidavit responding to a criminal writ petition filed by Patil in the Bombay High Court.

The police added that they were trying to ascertain the “true purpose” of Patil’s visit to India.

The case against Patil is based on a complaint by a BJP leader who in December accused the doctor of deliberately making allegedly defamatory and misleading posts about the Hindutva party and its leaders. On January 10, Patil was detained at the Mumbai airport and was later allowed to leave after being given a notice to join the investigation.

In his petition, Patil said that he was being targeted for political reasons and that the case was a misuse of criminal law to suppress dissenting political views. Read on.

At least 16 workers were killed in a suspected dynamite blast at an allegedly unauthorised coal mine in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills district. Operations were underway to rescue more workers feared trapped. Read on.

Former poll strategist Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj party moved the Supreme Court challenging the conduct of the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections over the alleged misuse of a cash transfer scheme by the state government ahead of polling, to allegedly influence voters. The petition sought fresh elections.

While the National Democratic Alliance had won 202 seats in the 243-member Assembly, the Opposition Mahagathbandhan won 35. The Jan Suraaj had failed to win a seat despite fielding candidates in 238 constituencies.

Ahead of the polls, the state government had transferred Rs 10,000 each to the bank accounts of women under a scheme meant to support one woman in every family to start a small business.

The payment in October, among a series of welfare measures announced by Chief Minister Nitish Kumar ahead of the polls, was made despite the Model Code of Conduct being in force, Jan Suraaj alleged. Read on.

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Two umbrella organisations of Kuki-Zo groups on Wednesday said that MLAs from the community “cannot and should not” participate in the formation of a government in Manipur, adding that the elected administration would neither restore normalcy nor heal social divisions.

They made the statement on a day when Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yumnam Khemchand Singh took oath as the chief minister of Manipur, ending the President’s Rule that had been in place for nearly a year.

The BJP’s Nemcha Kipgen, who belongs to the Kuki community, and Naga People’s Front MLA Losii Dikho, from the Naga community, were sworn in as deputy chief ministers.

The Kuki-Zo Council said on Wednesday that the community has been “forcibly and physically separated by the Meiteis” and has demanded a separate administration from the “Meitei government” in the form of a Union Territory with a legislature.

The council added that in a meeting on December 30, it had resolved that in view of the “unspeakable atrocities committed against the Kuki-Zo people and the enforced physical separation imposed by the Meiteis, the Kuki-Zo people cannot and shall not participate in the formation of the government of Manipur”.

The council said that any Kuki-Zo MLA who “chooses to disregard the collective decision” would be doing so in their individual capacity.

In a statement on Thursday, the council said that it “strongly and unequivocally” condemns the participation of the Kuki-Zo MLAs in the formation of the state government, which it said constituted a “gross violation” of the Lungthu Resolution on January 13.

During a meeting held on January 13, Kuki militant groups and MLAs from the community unanimously resolved to participate in the formation of a new government in Manipur only after getting a political commitment for a Union Territory in the Kuki-Zo-majority areas of the state.

While the Meiteis dominate the valley region, the Kukis are in the majority in the state’s hill districts.

The statement on Thursday added: “By joining the formation of a Meitei-dominated government, these MLAs have effectively aligned themselves with our enemy, thereby betraying their own people and disregarding the immense pain and sacrifices endured by the Kuku-Zo community.”

The council also declared a “social boycott” of these Kuki-Zo MLAs, urging people from the community to not “cooperate or associate with them in any social, customary, or public matters”.

It added that the boycott would remain in force until the legislators refrain from participation in the state government and “realign themselves with the collective position” of the community.

The Kuki Inpi Manipur had said on Wednesday that a new government in the state would be “nothing more than a Meitei-centric political arrangement” and would be incapable of delivering peace, justice or reconciliation.

The organisation said that the formation of a popular government at this juncture would be ill-advised and deeply provocative.

“It will neither restore normalcy nor heal the deep fractures created by the ongoing conflict,” it said. “Instead, it threatens to inflame further tensions and push the state towards greater instability.”

The Kuki Inpi Manipur said that any Kuki-Zo MLA who takes part in the government “must come clean before the public and explain why they have decided to join despite being bound by the Guwahati Conclave resolution adopted earlier [on January 13]”.

The organisation added that “in the event of the formation of such a government”, the Kuki Inpi Manipur “will be compelled to curtail all political activities of any political party in Kuki-Zo areas”.

Kipgen takes oath virtually

Kipgen, who on Wednesday became the first deputy chief minister from the Kuki-Zo community in the state, took oath virtually from the Manipur Bhavan in New Delhi, the Hindustan Times reported.

This came after Kuki groups objected to her joining the government led by Khemchand Singh, a Meitei leader.

In the Churachandpur district, security forces fortified the homes of two Kuki-Zo MLAs, LM Khaute and Ngursanglur Sanate, the Hindustan Times reported. The two did not take oath as ministers, but accompanied Khemchand Singh to Imphal to stake claim to form the government.

Manipur had been under President’s Rule since February 2025, when BJP leader N Biren Singh resigned as the chief minister. The six-month extension to the President’s Rule, approved by Parliament in August, was to end this month.

At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since ethnic clashes broke out between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities in May 2023. There were periodic upticks in violence in 2024 and 2025.

Biren Singh had stepped down amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the violence had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

Former political strategist Prashant Kishor’s Jan Suraaj party has approached the Supreme Court challenging the conduct of the 2025 Bihar Assembly elections over what it describes as the misuse of a cash transfer scheme by the state government ahead of voting to allegedly influence voters, Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.

The petition, which sought fresh elections in the state, is likely to be heard on Friday by a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi, PTI reported.

The National Democratic Alliance had bagged 202 of the state’s 243 Assembly seats on November 14, while the Opposition Mahagathbandhan won 35 seats. The Jan Suraaj had failed to win any seat despite fielding candidates in 238 constituencies.

Ahead of the polls, the state government had on October 3 transferred Rs 10,000 each to the bank accounts of women residents under the Mukhyamantri Mahila Rojgar Yojana. The scheme aims to support one woman in each family to start a small business.

At the time, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had said that financial assistance to the remaining women would be transferred on October 8.

The payment was among a series of welfare measures announced by Kumar in the run-up to the elections.

This came despite the Election Commission announcing the schedule for the Assembly elections in the state on October 6, when the Model Code of Conduct came into force.

The code is a set of guidelines issued by the poll panel that political parties, candidates and governments must follow during an election. It sets guardrails for speeches, campaigning, meetings, processions, election manifestos and other aspects of the polls.

In its petition in the court, the Jan Suraaj said that the cash transfer scheme was linked to the membership of JEEVIKA, a network of women’s self-help groups in the state, Bar and Bench reported.

It claimed that while about one crore women had been associated with the JEEVIKA network ahead of the Mode Code of Conduct coming into force, around 1.5 crore women eventually received the payments as per media reports.

These new beneficiaries were added and received the cash transfer when the poll code was in force, the petition claimed, adding that this amounted to “corrupt practices” that were meant to influence voters.

The Jan Suraaj sought directions to the Election Commission to take action under Article 324 of Constitution and Section 123 of the Representation of People Act against the direct transfer of money to women voters.

Article 324 vests the superintendence, direction and control of elections in India in the Election Commission, while Section 123 of the Representation of the People Act defines and enumerates “corrupt practices” in elections, including bribery, undue influence and misuse of official machinery.

The party alleged that the scheme was approved by a Cabinet decision without legislative sanction and that the funds for the scheme came from the state government’s contingency fund, which violated Article 267 of the Constitution, PTI reported.

Article 267 specifies that contingency funds at the state and Central level are meant for urgent and unforeseen expenses such as natural calamities.

The petition also urged the court to pass directions to the Election Commission to fix a minimum time, preferably six months, to implement schemes that have an impact on free and fair elections, Live Law reported.

Also read: Why Nitish Kumar’s Rs 10,000 scheme is not swaying women voters in Bihar

The Mumbai Police has claimed that the visit of British doctor Sangram Patil to India on a tourist visa and his activities on social media were part of a “larger, organised effort” to post defamatory and inflammatory material about Prime Minister Narendra Modi while living outside the country, Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Detection) Raj Tilak Roushan, in an affidavit filed in the Bombay High Court, described this as a matter of serious concern, Live Law reported.

The affidavit was in response to a criminal writ petition filed by Patil, who is also a content creator, seeking the quashing of a first information report and a lookout circular filed against him over “objectionable” posts about Bharatiya Janata Party leaders.

The lookout circular is used by law enforcement authorities to check whether a person entering or leaving the country is wanted by the police.

The FIR against the Indian-origin doctor was based on a complaint by BJP leader Nikhil Bhamre, who in December, alleged Patil had deliberately made allegedly defamatory and misleading posts about the Hindutva party and its leaders. The online posts could create feelings of enmity and hatred between groups, Bhamre claimed.

Patil’s YouTube channel has over four lakh subscribers and 5.6 crore views, and his Facebook page has more than one lakh followers. His posts on the video platform and social media cover several topics, including political commentary. Some posts were critical of the Modi government.

On January 10, Patil was detained at the Mumbai airport in connection with the allegedly derogatory online posts about the BJP. He was later allowed to leave after being given a notice to join the investigation.

The doctor, in his petition in the court challenging the FIR and the lookout circular, has said that he was being targeted for political reasons and that the case was a misuse of criminal law to suppress dissenting political views, Bar and Bench reported.

Describing the FIR and the circular as illegal, Patil has sought their quashing, a stay on further investigation, protection from coercive action and permission to return to the United Kingdom.

The police, in their affidavit, defended the investigation, alleging that Patil had not fully cooperated and also avoided submitting devices and credentials for forensic analysis, according to the legal news portal.

The deputy commissioner of police (detection) said that the matter warranted an investigation to look into why a foreign citizen, despite being a qualified medical professional in India on a tourist visa, was engaged in posting allegedly scandalous and obscene content online about Modi from abroad.

“At this stage, the possibility that such acts form part of a larger, organised effort in order to malign constitutional authority and disturb the public order, cannot be ruled out,” Bar and Bench quoted the affidavit as having said.

The authorities were trying to ascertain the “true purpose” of Patil’s visit to India, the document said, adding that the investigation was also looking at whether he violated the conditions of his tourist visa, Live Law reported.

The affidavit added: “It is necessary to investigate whether the accused, while being a foreign national, had any local assistance, collaborators, or handlers in India who facilitated or amplified the dissemination of such content on social media, particularly content that directly attacks the character and dignity of the prime minister”.

The police required Patil’s presence within the country as it would be difficult to track him once he goes back to the United Kingdom, it said.

The deputy commissioner of police (detection) also claimed that the doctor continued to post derogatory and inflammatory content from his account even after coming to India.

The Lok Sabha on Thursday passed the Motion of Thanks on the president’s address without Prime Minister Narendra Modi giving his customary reply, as Opposition MPs continued their protest, PTI reported.

This was the first time since 2004 that the prime minister has been unable to reply to the Motion of Thanks in the Lok Sabha, the Hindustan Times reported. In 2004, the Bharatiya Janata Party, in Opposition at the time, had prevented Manmohan Singh from responding to the motion, the Congress said on Thursday.

The Opposition has for the past three days been protesting against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi not being allowed to quote an excerpt of an unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief MM Naravane about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

On Thursday, amid sloganeering, Speaker Om Birla put the Opposition’s amendments to the Motion of Thanks to vote and the proposed changes were rejected, PTI reported.

Birla then read out the Motion of Thanks to the President Droupadi Murmu for her customary address to the joint session of Parliament on January 28. It was approved by a voice vote.

After this, the proceedings of the Lower House were adjourned till 2 pm.

On Wednesday, Gandhi said that he had predicted that the prime minister would not come to Parliament because “he is scared” and “does not want to face the truth” about Naravane’s unpublished memoir.

Earlier in the day, the Congress leader had said that did not think that Modi “will have the guts to come to the Lok Sabha today [Wednesday]”, adding that he would give the prime minister a copy of Naravane’s memoir if he came to Parliament.

Gandhi’s comment that the prime minister was scared came after the Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day before Modi could address the House during the debate on the Motion of Thanks.

Modi was expected to speak in the Lower House at 5 pm on Wednesday. However, the proceedings were adjourned until 11 am on Thursday because of protests by the Opposition.

On Thursday, Birla said that he had urged the prime minister not to come to the Lok Sabha on Wednesday to avoid a “mishap”.

“Everyone saw how the [Opposition] MPs approached the prime minister’s chair in the House...” Birla said in Parliament. “I got information that any mishap could have happened. To ensure that such a situation does not arise, I conveyed to PM Modi not to come to the House.”

The protests by the Opposition on Wednesday had intensified after BJP leader Nishikant Dubey said he brought a series of books allegedly critical of the Gandhi family.

In the excerpts from the book We, the People of India: Decoding a Nation’s Symbols published in Scroll (“‘Every execution chips away at the nation’s moral fibre’: TM Krishna on the death penalty”, TM Krishna addressed the death penalty in his characteristic manner – with eloquence and emotion. But erudition does not always inform or provide insights into complex matters, such as the role of presidents in mercy plea petitions.

He characterises presidential decisions on capital punishment as “inclinations”, starting from my father, President R Venkataraman’s decision in the case of Indira Gandhi’s assassin Kehar Singh, to subsequent presidents – KR Narayanan, Abdul Kalam, Pratibha Patil, Pranab Mukherjee and Ramnath Kovind.

Contrary to Krishna’s assertion, Venkataraman, who was widely known as a “copybook President”, strongly believed that a Head of State should not be guided by mere inclinations but must strictly adhere to the rule of law. Lest one concludes that he was propagating a formulaic approach, Venkataraman in his memoirs, My Presidential Years, writes in depth about his thoughts while tackling the difficult case of Kehar’s Singh mercy plea:

“First, should not the President have the discretion to examine any extenuating circumstance and alter the death sentence without the advice of the Government? Absence of such a power unnecessarily brings blame to the President. In the public mind, there was an impression that the President in person decides mercy petitions and whether the accused lives or dies is in one man’s hands…

However, I stuck to my view that in law and in fact, the President has to accept the advice of the council of ministers”, Venkataraman opined.

So, “how must a president, who is a constitutional head of state, express his approvals and disapprovals?”, asks the legal luminary Fali S Nariman in an essay in the book R Venkataraman, a Centenary Tribute. Referring to the Constitution of India, Nariman says, “If the President is inclined to disagree with the initial advice of the Council of Ministers, the President may require the Council of Ministers to reconsider such advice, either generally or otherwise and the President shall act in accordance with the advice tendered after such reconsideration”.

Venkataraman, did exactly that in the case of Kehar Singh. “I referred the whole matter again to the Home Ministry for a thorough examination of all the facts”, Venkataraman wrote in his memoir. He further goes on to give his considered opinion on what the role of the judiciary and the executive could be to better address such complex issues in the future.

In his prescient manner, President Venkataraman documented his views in 1993 so that there may be some enlightened discussion on them. While we can and should continue debating the true principles that underlie our democracy and seek to change the way we are governed, we must also acknowledge that the president of a parliamentary democracy, as a constitutional head, “cannot desecrate the rule of law”, in President Venkataraman’s words. – The daughters of President Venkataraman, Padma, Vijaya, Lakshmi

The legislatures in Karnataka and Kerala have passed resolutions opposing the Union government’s decision to replace the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act with the VB-G RAM G Act, The Hindu reported.

The 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 replaces the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which was introduced in 2005 by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance. The scheme aimed to enhance the livelihood security of households in rural areas and guaranteed 100 days of unskilled work annually for every rural household that wants it, covering all districts in the country.

The resolution in Karnataka was passed on Wednesday even as members of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Janata Dal (Secular) staged a walkout from the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council, The Hindu reported.

On Tuesday, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah tabled the resolution opposing the VB-G RAM G. However, BJP and JD(S) MLAs staged an overnight protest demanding the resignation of state Excise Minister RB Timmapur amid allegations of corruption. The protests continued on Wednesday.

The Legislative Council unanimously passed the resolution late on Wednesday, with no Opposition members present.

After the resolution was passed, Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar said that although the Opposition had several opportunities to discuss the VB-G RAM G Act and defend it, it failed to do so, The Hindu reported.

Earlier in the day, state Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Minister Priyank Kharge had contended that the new law was “anti-federal” as it increased the expenditure of the state governments without consulting them. He was quoted as saying by the newspaper that this amounted to “economic terrorism”.

Under the new law, the states’ share of costs has risen to 40%, while the number of guaranteed workdays has been increased to 125. The Union government continues to bear the wage component, with states sharing material and administrative expenses.

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

On Wednesday, Kharge said that even the BJP’s allies such as Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu have voiced concerns about state governments’ share being increased to 40% from 10%.

The Congress leader said that the funds allocated for the scheme in the Union Budget on Sunday was not in line with the government’s claims.

“To give 125 days of work to all those registered at a minimum wage of Rs 375, we need Rs 3.83 lakh crore, of which 60% was Rs 2.3 lakh crore,” Kharge said, according to The Hindu. “But the Union Budget had only earmarked Rs 95,000 crore this year.”

State Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister HK Patil said that the new job types listed did not encompass several job types essential for rural infrastructure that had been listed under the MGNREGA, The New Indian Express reported.

However, MLA Basanagouda Patil Yatnal, who had been expelled by the BJP in March, said that the VB-G RAM G Act had been enacted due to the “misuse of job cards” under MGNREGA. He urged the Centre to change the funding ratio from 60:40 to 75:25 to implement the scheme effectively.

Yatnal urged Siddaramaiah not to enter into a conflict with the Union government as it would harm the state’s development, The New Indian Express reported. He asked the chief minister to withdraw the resolution against the VB-G RAM G Act.

The resolution passed by the Kerala Assembly on Thursday also said that the new act “entails severe financial burden on the states”.

“With its introduction, the rights-based approach that was the essence of the existing scheme has vanished,” said the resolution.

It said that the new financial structure would mean an additional burden of Rs 3,500 crore on the Kerala government.

The resolution was passed despite protests by the Opposition over the Sabarimala gold irregularities case, The Hindu reported.

The Competition Commission of India on Wednesday ordered an investigation into whether IndiGo abused its “dominant position” as the country’s largest carrier when it cancelled and delayed several flights in December, citing a shortage of pilots and crew.

IndiGo, which has about 65% of the domestic aviation market, “effectively withheld its service from the market, creating an artificial scarcity, limiting consumer access to air travel during peak demand,” the competition watchdog said in its order.

Such conduct by a “dominant enterprise” may be viewed as restricting the provision of services under the Competition Act, its 16-page order added.

The Competition Commission of India is a statutory body set up under the Competition Act, 2002, to eliminate practices having adverse effects on competition, promote and sustain competition, protect the interests of consumers and ensure freedom of trade in the markets of India.

The case before the antitrust body was based on a complaint from a passenger who claimed his flight was cancelled hours before departure, forcing him to book an alternative. He added that the seats being offered by IndiGo and other airlines were priced much higher than the usual fares.

Between December 3 and December 5, IndiGo cancelled 2,507 flights and delayed 1,852 others, affecting more than three lakh passengers. The disruption also pushed fares to unusually high rates on several routes.

The disruptions in December came amid the rollout of stricter work hour norms introduced in November. The revised rostering norms, issued by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation in January 2024 after concerns about pilot fatigue, were meant to take effect on June 1.

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

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

On Wednesday, the Competition Commission of India directed IndiGo’s director general to submit an inquiry report within 90 days.

“It is observed that passengers who had booked tickets were left with no real choice but to accept last-minute cancellations,” the order stated. “Further, passengers were left to seek alternatives, on their own, at significantly higher prices.”

The probe is expected to examine how IndiGo’s conduct constrained consumers’ access to domestic flights, creating a “system-wide capacity shock”.

IndiGo shares dropped by over 2.5%, falling to Rs 4,827 per share on Thursday after the probe was ordered, Moneycontrol reported.

On January 17, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation imposed a penalty of Rs 22.2 crore on the airline over the widespread disruptions.

The aviation regulator said its four-member inquiry committee found that there was “an overriding focus on maximising utilisation of crew, aircraft and network resources, which significantly reduced roster buffer margins”.

Also read:

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

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

A poetry and story reading session featuring actor Naseeruddin Shah, co-organised by the Mumbai University’s Urdu Department and scheduled to be held on February 1, was cancelled with the actor alleging that he was “disinvited at the last moment”.

The head of the Urdu Department had initially claimed that Shah had opted out of the event himself and later said that the co-organisers, the Bazm-e-Ahbab Foundation, may have cancelled it, the Mumbai Mirror reported.

A representative of the Bazm-e-Ahbab Foundation, speaking to Scroll, declined to comment on the event featuring Shah.

The poetry and story reading session, titled Preet Nagar, was to be held on February 1 as part of a celebration of the Urdu language at the university campus in Mumbai’s Kalina. The event was to feature the works of poets such as Sahir Ludhianvi and Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Shah claimed that he was told late at night on January 31 that the event was cancelled, the Mumbai Mirror reported. The actor said he received an email from a person named Ghazal Sheikh, who had been coordinating with him.

In an article for The Indian Express on Thursday, Shah alleged that the university neither provided a reason nor an apology for the cancellation. The actor claimed that a university official said that he openly made statements “against the country”, but maintained that he had never done so.

“This is not the country I grew up in and was taught to love,” Shah wrote in the article. “The ‘thought police’ and ‘doublespeak’ have been deployed in full force, as has surveillance.”

Abdullah Imtiaz, the head of Mumbai University’s Urdu Department, initially told the Mumbai Mirror that Shah cancelled the event, not the university. “There is a rumour and misinformation being spread on social media by a Malegaon-based reporter, who did not get placed here and barely attended the event for 10 minutes,” the Mumbai Mirror quoted him as claiming.

However, after Shah reportedly confronted him over a phone call, Imtiaz later told the Mumbai Mirror that it was the co-organisers who had been coordinating with the actor and that they may have cancelled the session.

A representative of the Bazm-e-Ahbab Foundation, when contacted by Scroll, declined to state the reason for the cancellation of the session featuring Shah. “About 20 other events took place at the festival,” the official said. “I would prefer to focus on the events that took place, rather than the one that did not.”

The Jharkhand High Court on Wednesday directed the state government to register a first information report in connection with five children suffering from thalassemia who were allegedly transfused with blood infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, The New Indian Express reported.

A bench of Justice Gautam Kumar Chaudhary passed the order while hearing a petition about the incident which was reported in October at Chaibasa in Jharkhand’s West Singhbhum district, The Indian Express reported.

The cases were detected in October during an investigation by a five-member medical team from Ranchi. The team was sent after the family of a seven-year-old thalassemia patient alleged that the Sadar Hospital blood bank in Chaibasa had supplied HIV-infected blood for a transfusion.

Following the complaint, the Jharkhand Health Department had constituted a medical team to ascertain how the infected blood had been administered. During the inquiry, four more children were found to have tested positive for HIV.

Taking suo moto cognisance of the case, the High Court ordered a probe and sought a detailed report from the state health department, The New Indian Express reported.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the court observed that lapses in blood screening and transfusion protocols could not be treated casually. It directed the state government to provide copies of the registered FIR to the complainants and to the court through a counter-affidavit.

The bench also ordered the authorities to identify those responsible through a fair and time-bound investigation.

After the incident was reported in October, Chief Minister Hemant Soren ordered the suspension of the civil surgeon of West Singhbhum and other officials concerned. He also announced financial assistance of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of the affected children and said that the state would bear the full cost of their medical treatment.

The petition before the High Court had noted that the complainants belong to marginalised Adivasi communities and that their families are facing “extreme social stigma, economic hardship and a complete disruption of their lives”, Live Law reported.

“The compensation of Rs 2 lakh announced by the state is grossly inadequate for lifelong treatment and rehabilitation,” the legal news outlet quoted the petition as having said.

Blood transfusion guidelines

Blood banks are supposed to follow guidelines issued by the National AIDS Control Organisation, which state that each unit of blood donated from a person must undergo a screening test to detect HIV and hepatitis. Elisa is the most commonly used test for this purpose.

However, if donors have been freshly infected with either HIV or hepatitis, their bodies may not have generated enough antibodies against the virus for them to be detected in screening tests.

The Elisa test can only detect antibodies against these viruses 45 days after the patient is infected. A more sensitive method – the nucleic acid amplification test – reduces the window period to 10-15 days. However, this too cannot totally eliminate the chances of missing out on identifying an infection.

Experts say most cases of blood transfusion-related infections are caused when such tests miss detecting infections, or tests are not carried altogether.

Comedian Kunal Kamra has been asked to depose in person before the privileges committee of the Maharashtra Legislative Council on February 17 in connection with a breach of privilege motion against him for his alleged disparaging remarks about Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

Bharatiya Janata Party MLC Prasad Lad, the head of the panel, told PTI that notices were issued to Kamra and Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Sushma Andhare 15 days ago for a hearing over the alleged remarks. The two had been asked to appear before the committee on Thursday.

On Wednesday, Lad said that Kamra had informed the panel that he would not be able to travel to Mumbai for the hearing. He was then asked to appear on February 17, The Indian Express reported.

The committee also rescheduled Andhare’s hearing after she told the panel that she was occupied with Zilla Parishad election campaigning. She has also been asked to appear on February 17, the newspaper reported.

In March, BJP MLC, Pravin Darekar had moved a breach of privilege notice against Kamra and Andhare. While Kamra was accused of having mocked Shinde and insulted the Maharashtra legislature, Andhare was accused of having expressed support for him.

On March 23, Kamra posted a video on his YouTube channel in which he ostensibly criticised Shinde while performing a satirical version of a song from a Hindi film.

The comedian alluded to Shinde as a “traitor” while referring to his 2022 rebellion against former Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray and the ensuing political crisis in Maharashtra. He, however, did not mention Shinde by name.

After clips of the performance were widely shared on social media, members of the Shinde-led faction of the Shiv Sena on the night of March 23 vandalised The Habitat studio in Mumbai’s Khar area, where it was recorded.

The next day, the Mumbai Police filed a case against Kamra under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to defamation and public mischief.

On April 25, the Bombay High Court protected the comedian from arrest, but allowed the investigation against him to continue.

Early in December, Amit Malviya, the head of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s propaganda wing, claimed in a post on X that Jawaharlal Nehru had wanted to rebuild the Babri Masjid using public funds. To support this, he cited the English translation of the diary of Maniben Patel, daughter of Sardar Patel, and shared a page from the introduction of the book.

The English edition, Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel, 1936-’50, was published in 2001, while the original Gujarati diaries had remained unpublished until 2025. Just last month, selections from the original Gujarati text were finally released by the Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Memorial Society in Ahmedabad.

Compiled by RS Patel, the society’s secretary, these newly published excerpts Samarpit Padchhayo Sardarno have raised serious questions about the way the English volume was compiled and translated – an edition that had long been treated as a key source by researchers.

Inside Story of Sardar Patel: The Diary of Maniben Patel, 1936-’50 was published as part of the Collected Works of Sardar Patel, with PN Chopra as chief editor and Prabha Chopra as editor. The translation from the original Gujarati diaries was carried out by UM Choksi, former deputy chief editor of the Gazetteers of Gujarat, though his contribution was acknowledged only in a single line in the introduction.

The diary offered an intimate glimpse into Sardar Patel’s work and views, as seen through the eyes of his daughter, who was his constant companion. The translation claimed to illuminate and flesh out “some of India’s most epochal years and those of one of the tallest leaders”.

1946 :: Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel With Daughter Maniben Patel pic.twitter.com/fVURFMAKqN

— indianhistorypics (@IndiaHistorypic) October 31, 2017

Since the Gujarati diaries were not available, the English edition became the sole source for information. Readers naturally assumed that the English volume was a complete and faithful rendering of Maniben’s writings.

Now that portions of the original Gujarati diary have been published, comparisons between the two texts reveal some serious discrepancies.

It should be noted that there appears to be no political agenda behind these selections or omissions, and the same applies to the Gujarati edition. It carries a tagline stating that it is “inspired” by the daily diary of Maniben Patel. The editor of the Gujarati selections has clarified – unlike the English volume – that he chose material from 25 diaries as he deemed appropriate.

Among the discrepancies, the editor of the English translation wrote in the book’s introduction: “Nehru also raised the question of Babri Masjid but Sardar made it clear that the government could not spend any money for building a mosque.” (Inside Story of Sardar Patel, p. 24).

The entry dated 20.9.1950 in the same volume reads: “When reference about Babri Masjid erupted…Bapu [Sardar] said government cannot give money for building a mosque?” (p. 415).

Yet the original Gujarati diary records the opposite: “When the conversation turned to Babri Masjid…Bapu [as Maniben referred to her father] said Masjid bandhane ke liye to Sarkar paisa de sakati hai…” (The government could give money to build a mosque, Page 212)

Another instance of erroneous and misleading translation concerns the 1946 episode when Nehru became Congress president instead of Patel. The English version in the volume reads:

“At this juncture I could recall the whole episode which Bapuji told me. None of the province had recommended his (Jawaharlalji’s) name yet Bapu maintained silence. Bapuji categorically told him (Bapu) that even if not a single province desired him, I don’t want to make you my prop – yet he did not say anything.

“Kripalani also withdraws his candidature, and Kripalani himself proposed Bapu’s name and asked Bapu to authenticate it (sign). But he got his name withdrawn. How Jawaharlalji’s name was suggested by WC members in Delhi. Everything appeared before my eyes (like a film).” (The Diary of Maniben Patel, Page 211-212)

Maniben referred to her father as “Bapu” and to Gandhi as “Bapuji”. The passage remains confusing even after that clarification. It blurs the roles of Sardar and Nehru. It wrongly suggests that Kripalani proposed Sardar’s name, asked him to authenticate it.

Reading the original Gujarati entry brings at least some clarity. A more accurate translation would read:

“…This reminded me of the whole incident that Bapuji [Gandhiji] told me after calling me in Simla – that no province has sent his [Jawaharlalji’s] name. The name has come only from the WC [Working Committee] yet he [Nehru] said nothing. Bapuji [Gandhiji] also said that if the provinces do not wish, ‘I don’t want to make you [Nehru] my prop’ [noted originally in English]. Still, he [Nehru] did not say anything.

“Kripalani withdrew his name and Kripalani brought a draft [of withdrawal] written by him and got the signature of Bapu [Sardar] on it. Got his [Sardar’s] name withdrawn. How [Kripalani] got Jawaharlalji’s name proposed by the WC people in Delhi – All these flashed before my eyes…” (Page 79).

Several more discrepancies have come to light through random comparisons of the Gujarati text and its English translation.

An equally serious issue with the English edition is the silent omission of material from the original diary. The editors did not indicate or acknowledge these cuts. Random sampling shows a striking mismatch between the two versions.

For example, the English translation contains no entry for 21.6.1949, while the Gujarati selection has an almost two‑page account of the Rs 55 crore issue, which was the amount given to Pakistan after Partition, and Sardar’s views on it on the same date.

The Gujarati entry dated 23.6.1949 has two paragraphs that are missing from the English version. The English translation for 29.6.1949 is reduced to a single paragraph, whereas the Gujarati diary runs to more than two pages. Likewise, the Gujarati diary has a lengthy entry on 6.9.1949, but the English edition offers only three lines.

In the entry dated 13.9.1949, the sections dealing with freedom fighter Dadasaheb Mavalankar, the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi and Sastu Sahitya publication trust are omitted. Even where the original text is broken, the English translation presents it as continuous and complete, without using three dots to indicate a break.

Both the Gujarati and English diaries, as important publications, demand far greater clarity, transparency, and editorial procedure in the process of selection. The absence of explanatory footnotes, proper identification of individuals and correction of obvious proofing errors undermines the reliability of a primary source now coming to light for the first time.

Finally, it must be noted that Maniben’s diary is not written in a truly Gandhian spirit. It suffers from several limitations – a lack of precision in expression, a tendency to flatten complex narratives, and at times the use of rash language with insulting references.

Her account of the Nehru-Sardar presidentship episode of 1946 is particularly misleading in style, as it gives the impression that most of the events unfolded in a single meeting, when in fact they stretched over two to three weeks.

Taken together, these shortcomings diminish the historical weight and credibility of a primary source that otherwise holds immense potential value.

Urvish Kothari is a Gujarat-based writer, satirist, editor of A Plain, Blunt Man: The Essential Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (2023).

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said he had predicted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would not come to Parliament because “he is scared” and “does not want to face the truth” about the unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief MM Naravane.

Earlier in the day, he had said that did not think that Modi “will have the guts to come to the Lok Sabha today”, adding that he would give the prime minister a copy of Naravane’s memoir if he came to Parliament.

Gandhi’s comment that the prime minister was scared came after the Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day before Modi could address the House during the debate on the Motion of Thanks for the president’s address.

The prime minister was expected to speak in the Lower House at 5 pm, ANI reported. However, the proceedings were adjourned until 11 am on Thursday because of protests by the Opposition.

जैसा मैंने कहा, पीएम मोदी संसद में नहीं आएंगे क्योंकि वो डरे हुए हैं और सच्चाई का सामना नहीं करना चाहते। pic.twitter.com/1d2UmvR9mz

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) February 4, 2026

On Wednesday, the Opposition’s protest intensified when Bharatiya Janata Party leader Nishikant Dubey said he brought a series of books allegedly critical of the Gandhi family, NDTV reported.

Krishna Prasad Tenneti, a member of the Lok Sabha chairpersons’ panel overseeing the proceedings in the House at the time, said he could not allow this, citing Rule 349, which bars members from reading from a book, newspaper or letter except in connection with the business of the House.

Dubey’s alleged refusal to stop prompted the Opposition to protest, NDTV reported.

Later on Wednesday, the BJP alleged that the Opposition had staged protests to not allow the ruling party to speak in Parliament, ANI reported.

BJP MP Manoj Tiwari told ANI that the Opposition was “doing all this to prevent Prime Minister Modi from speaking” about the India-United States trade deal announced on Monday.

“The country is watching everything, and the country will demand an answer from the Congress,” he was quoted as saying.

Since Monday, Gandhi has been stopped from discussing an excerpt from the former Army chief’s memoir about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China. The excerpts from the book had been reported in December 2023 and were quoted by The Caravan magazine on Saturday.

BJP MPs have been objecting to Gandhi speaking on the matter, arguing that he was quoting from a book that has not yet been released.

On Tuesday, eight Congress MPs were suspended for the remainder of the Budget Session for throwing papers at the chair as they protested against Tenneti for calling on other members to speak before Gandhi had completed his speech.

On Monday, when Gandhi first quoted the excerpt, he was interrupted by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, who accused the Congress leader of misleading the House.

The Lok Sabha had been adjourned for the day amid the ruckus that followed.

In his memoir Four Stars of Destiny, Naravane wrote that on August 31, 2020, he had sought “clear direction” from India’s political and military leadership for the Army to respond to Chinese tanks moving towards Rechin La in eastern Ladakh.

Naravane said that hours after first seeking orders, he had been told by Singh that he had spoken with Modi, and that the military was to do whatever it deemed appropriate.

This implied that the Indian response was to be “purely a military decision” and that “the onus was now totally on [him]”, the former Army chief wrote.

The incident Naravane referred to had taken place amid the border tensions between India and China in eastern Ladakh.

The book was to be published in April 2024, but has not been released yet. In October, Naravane said that the publisher was waiting for the Union government’s approval.

The Union government has not commented on the contents of Naravane’s memoir.

However, on Monday, the defence minister said in Parliament that the book would have been published if its contents were accurate, adding that Naravane could challenge it in court if he thinks that his memoir has been unjustly barred from being released.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday verbally asked the Union government to rethink the continued detention of activist Sonam Wangchuk, who has been detained since September, considering that “his health is not that good”, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and PB Varale was hearing a petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo challenging the activist’s detention under the National Security Act.

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

Varale told Additional Solicitor General KM Nataraj that it had been nearly five months since Wangchuk was detained and highlighted the activist’s worsening health condition.

“Considering more particularly his health and condition of the detenue, which is certainly not very good,” Live Law quoted Varale as saying. “Even the report which we saw on the earlier occasion, it shows that his health is not that good, and there are certainly [other factors] age-related. Is there any possibility for the government to rethink?”

Nataraj responded that he will place the suggestion before the authorities, Bar and Bench reported.

During the hearing on Wednesday, Nataraj alleged that Wangchuk had been responsible for the violence in Leh.

“The person need not actively participate, the propensity of person to influence a group of persons...that is more than sufficient [for preventive detention],” he said.

Nataraj also argued that Wangchuk had not challenged the subsequent orders of the state government and the advisory board upholding the detention order passed by the Leh district magistrate, Live Law reported.

He highlighted that there are several layers of screenings under the National Security Act to ensure the person who has been detained is treated fairly, the legal news outlet reported.

In response, the court observed that the petitioner’s arguments were on the very foundation of the detention order, Bar and Bench reported.

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

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

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

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

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

Appearing before the Supreme Court, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee alleged that her state was being targeted through the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls. She questioned why the process was not being carried out in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Assam.

This was the first time a chief minister has appeared before the court to make a verbal submission.

In her petition, Banerjee has said that the voter list revision exercise poses an immediate, irreversible risk of mass disenfranchisement ahead of the Assembly elections, expected to be held in April or May. She has sought the court’s direction that the polls be conducted on the basis of the electoral rolls prepared last year. Read on.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yumnam Khemchand Singh took oath as the chief minister of Manipur, forming a new government and ending a year of President’s Rule in the state. The Hindutva party’s Nemcha Kipgen, who belongs to the Kuki community, and ally Naga People’s Front MLA Losii Dikho, from the Naga community, were sworn in as the deputy chief ministers.

The President’s Rule was imposed in February 2025 after N Biren Singh stepped down as the chief minister amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the ethnic violence in Manipur had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

Khemchand Singh was the Assembly speaker between 2017 and 2022 and a state minister in the Biren Singh government.

Kuki-Zo groups have maintained that the creation of a separate administrative arrangement in the form of a Union Territory, in the areas of the state dominated by the community, is the way forward to end the conflict. Read on.

The Union govenrment told Parliament that sensitive sectors such as agriculture and dairy will be protected under the trade deal between India and the United States. Washington has also protected sectors that it considers sensitive, Union minister Piyush Goyal said.

He reiterated that negotiators are completing the technical processes of the deal and more details will be announced soon.

Goyal’s statement came hours after White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had committed to $500 billion worth of purchases from the US, including agricultural products. US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that New Delhi has agreed to reduce tariffs on several US agricultural products and manufactured goods.

The Opposition has claimed that Modi “sold out” the “sweat and blood” of the country’s farmers by buckling under pressure from the US to finalise a deal. Read on.

Sessions courts in India handed death penalties to 1,279 persons between 2016 and 2025, according to a study. Only a “staggeringly low” number of 70 sentences were confirmed by High Courts.

By the end of the last year, 574 persons were on death row in India, the highest since 2016, showed the study by criminal reforms advocacy group The Square Circle Clinic.

For the third consecutive year in 2025, the Supreme Court did not confirm any death sentences, the study said. “Wrongful or erroneous or unjustified convictions” could not be dismissed as “random or freak incidents,” it added. Read on.

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Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yumnam Khemchand Singh on Wednesday took oath as the chief minister of Manipur, ending the President’s Rule.

BJP’s Nemcha Kipgen, who belongs to the Kuki community, and Naga People’s Front MLA Losii Dikho, from the Naga community, were sworn in as the deputy chief ministers.

Kipgen became the first woman deputy chief minister of the state.

Earlier in the day, Khemchand Singh met Governor Ajay Kumar Bhalla and staked a claim to form a new government in the state. This came a day after the Singjamei MLA was elected as the leader of BJP’s legislative party.

Manipur had been under President’s Rule since February 2025, when BJP leader N Biren Singh resigned as the chief minister.

The six-month extension to the President’s Rule, approved by Parliament in August, was to end this month.

Khemchand Singh was the Assembly speaker between 2017 and 2022 and a state minister in the Biren Singh government.

He was elected as the legislative party leader a day after MLAs of the BJP and its allies were called to Delhi for a meeting about government formation in the state. MLAs from the Meitei and the Kuki communities had been called, The Hindu had quoted unidentified legislators as saying.

At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since ethnic clashes broke out between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities in May 2023. There were periodic upticks in violence in 2024 and 2025.

Biren Singh had stepped down amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the violence had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

The tenure of the Assembly ends in March 2027.

Kuki-Zo groups have maintained that the creation of a separate administrative arrangement in the form of a Union Territory, in the areas of the state dominated by the community, is the way forward to end the conflict.

While the Meiteis dominate the valley region, the Kukis are in the majority in the state’s hill districts.

On January 6, the Kuki-Zo Council said that members of the community “cannot and shall not” participate in the formation of a new state government, reiterating the demand for a Union Territory.

On January 13, Kuki militant groups and MLAs from the community unanimously resolved to participate in the formation of a new government only after getting a political commitment for a Union Territory.

On Wednesday, the Kuki-Zo Council said in a statement that the MLAs from the community who choose to “disregard the collective decision” will be “doing so in their individual capacity, and KZC shall not be held accountable for the consequences arising from such unilateral decisions”.

Sessions courts in India handed death penalties to 1,279 persons between 2016 and 2025, a study by criminal reforms advocacy group The Square Circle Clinic showed on Wednesday.

The persons were given 1,310 death penalties, which meant that multiple death sentences may have been imposed on the same person over the years.

In only 70 cases the sentence was confirmed by High Courts, a number that the advocacy group described as “staggeringly low”.

The study added that by the end of the last year, 574 persons were on death row in India, the highest since 2016 when the number stood at 400.

In 2025 alone, sessions courts sentenced 128 persons to death in 94 cases. In the same year, while High Courts overturned death sentences into acquittals in more than 25% of the matters they decided, the Supreme Court acquitted the accused in more than half of the cases it heard.

It added that for the third consecutive year, the Supreme Court did not confirm any death sentences.

“The low rates of confirmation over the past 10 years reflects the appellate judiciary’s concerns with the system’s failure to adhere to due process guarantees and coincides with the Supreme Court’s increased scrutiny of due process safeguards at the sentencing stage,” the study said.

It added that “wrongful or erroneous or unjustified convictions” could not be dismissed as “random or freak incidents”.

The president rejected 19 mercy petitions and accepted 5 between 2016 and 2025.

The study added that 312 cases involving 478 persons were pending before the High Courts as of December 31. The average duration of pendency between a person being sentenced to death by a sessions court and heard by a High Court was 2.99 years, or nearly 36 months.

The Jammu and Kashmir High Court, on an average, had the longest pendency duration of 11.53 years, or more than 138 months.

The Allahabad High Court had the highest number of death penalty cases (91) pending at the end of 2025, the study said.

The study also highlighted the growing use of life imprisonment without remission as a “worryingly unregulated area of law that is in need of a framework to save it from the arbitrariness that currently plagues it”.

It warned that while there had been a decline in the use of the death penalty by higher courts, this emerging alternative should not be viewed as a safer or lenient alternative.

It noted that such a sentence takes “away from a person an important essence of life – hope”.

A 2015 Law Commission report had recommended abolition of the death penalty, except in terrorism-related offences and waging war, and it had hoped that India would move towards absolute abolition of the death penalty.

But India continues to be one of the 55 countries that retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes, according to Amnesty International’s 2023 data.

Also read:

• Why SC thinks courts humanely evaluating the accused could reduce rush to award death penalty
• Arbitrary death sentencing is the rule not the exception in Indian courts

India is entering a consequential political-administrative cycle. After six years of delay, the government is set to begin the house-listing phase of the next census in 2026. This process bears significance well beyond the vital data about India’s population that it will generate.

It also has a direct bearing on women’s representation in Indian politics since it is the first step toward implementing the constitutional amendment, passed in September 2023, reserving one-third of seats for women in national and state legislatures. That key piece of legislation was designed to take effect only after a delimitation exercise, referring to the redrawing of legislative constituencies based on official Census data. This makes the coming Census cycle the hinge moment when the reform becomes electorally actionable.

It is a good moment to revisit the considerable literature on the gap between descriptive representation (more women in seats, which is what the quota sets out to achieve) and substantive representation (women exercising real influence). Research shows that quotas can change the formal rules of entry, but they do not automatically transform the terms of authority under which women govern.

As the reservation pipeline moves from constitutional promise toward implementation, the key bottlenecks will lie in who enters and under what conditions – often shaped by kinship networks (the bibi-beti-bahu pipeline of wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law) and the gatekeeping instincts of political parties.

Family pipelines, proxy candidates

One persistent pattern in Indian politics is that women who reach elected office often come from established political families. In the current Lok Sabha (the lower house of Parliament), over half of the women MPs reportedly have political family links, and many are dynasts whose close relative – usually a father, husband, or father-in-law – has preceded them in politics.

Research suggests this isn’t a marginal difference; in the parliaments elected in 2004, 2009, and 2014, about two-thirds of women MPs were dynastic, compared to about one-fourth of male MPs. This points to a “family pipeline” that has, for decades, partially compensated for the absence of formal gender quotas at higher levels of government.

But this pipeline cuts both ways. While family networks can facilitate entry, they can also constrain autonomy and narrow the social diversity of women’s representation. At the same time, dynastic entry does not automatically mean dynastic control. Some women who entered through political families have gone on to build independent mass bases, consolidate authority within parties, and become major political actors in their own right.

The bibi-beti-bahu model can reinforce the perception of women as political stand-ins for male kin rather than independent leaders. This is especially visible in by-elections, where women candidates have sometimes stepped in for deceased male relatives, inheriting their electoral base even as the real locus of control remains embedded in family networks.

The pattern is even more pronounced at the panchayat level, where women’s quotas have been in place for decades. Despite the scale of formal inclusion, many elected women remain informally sidelined by male relatives who manage everyday governance, a phenomenon that gave rise to the term sarpanch pati (the sarpanch’s husband). However, proxyism is not a settled story. Substantial literature debates how pervasive it is, how it varies across contexts, and whether the more decisive constraints come from household substitution or from the wider political-bureaucratic ecosystem that can sideline women even without a visible sarpanch pati.

At the same time, recent scholarship also cautions against treating sarpanch pati as a uniform or exhaustive diagnosis. Evidence suggests the phenomenon is not systematic everywhere, and that women’s authority can be constrained not only inside the household but also by institutional practices and local elite ecosystems (bureaucrats and influential panchayat actors) that can sideline women even when husbands are absent from formal meetings. In such cases, the promise of the quota risks shrinking into symbolism – women occupy positions but do not always command the authority those offices are meant to confer.

Recognising this gap, the government launched the Asli Pradhan Kaun? (“Who is the real chief?”) campaign in 2025 to publicly challenge the culture of proxy leadership and encourage women to assert their authority. Some states and local administrations have also reportedly taken smaller corrective steps, including discouraging or restricting husbands’ participation in official meetings so that women office-holders gain confidence by speaking and governing for themselves. The broader lesson is straightforward: genuine empowerment requires not only entry into office, but the institutional and social space to lead.

Party gatekeeping, elite control

Family pipelines loom large partly because party gatekeeping remains the decisive filter for women’s entry into competitive politics. In India’s electoral system, parties control tickets and have historically nominated relatively few women for winnable seats.

The numbers from recent national elections illustrate the scale of this bottleneck. In 2024, women accounted for about 9.5% of total Lok Sabha candidates, and the two largest national parties fielded only a small fraction of women contestants relative to the total number of candidates. This pattern helps explain why women’s representation in higher legislatures has struggled to rise organically.

While “winnable” is rarely tracked as a single official metric, election research does test it using proxies like past victory margins and incumbency. For instance, a constituency-level study of the 2009 election finds that the Indian National Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party not only place women in unwinnable seats, but their nomination patterns still reflected strong risk aversion and reliance on “known” candidates.

Parties often justify this imbalance in terms of “winnability”. This is usually invoked as an internal ticket-allocation heuristic, often relayed through off-the-record briefings and interviews by party figures, but it also surfaces explicitly in public-facing party discourse and elite commentary.

For instance, Congress leaders have long described women’s nominations being filtered through winnability, and party documents have even framed candidate selection as balancing loyalty and winnability. Yet in practice, winnability tends to privilege established networks, name recognition, and access to resources – forms of political capital that remain disproportionately male and deeply embedded in patronage structures. This is where the logic of the women’s reservation amendment intersects with the family pipeline.

Once one-third of seats are reserved, parties will have to nominate more women, but the easiest pathway may be to select women who already carry an inherited political brand. Hence, quotas may expand the supply of women candidates, while gatekeeping may still shape which women are considered “safe” bets.

This concern also relates to the “creamy layer” problem: when politically privileged families and social elites disproportionately capture the benefits of institutional reform. If party leadership remains centralised and male-dominated, quota implementation could be absorbed into existing hierarchies rather than disrupting them.

The broader finding from scholarship is that women’s entry is frequently routed through existing social pipelines such as family ties, party patronage, and caste/class networks, so a woman office-holder is often read as representing not only gender but also the social bloc that enabled her rise. This structure can dilute the political meaning of expanded representation even as numbers improve. The implication is not that quotas will fail, but that the political sociology of nomination will determine how far they can travel beyond symbolism.

Beyond tokenism

While the earlier sections show how kinship and party control shape women’s entry, the next question is what happens after entry. Quotas can rebalance the headcount, but the conversion of descriptive representation into substantive influence depends on whether women can exercise authority independent of family and party patrons. This is why the twin bottlenecks of family pipelines and party gatekeeping remain central to interpreting the reservation moment.

A large body of work by scholars, including Raghabendra Chattopadhyay and Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, Rikhil R. Bhavnani, and Irma Clots-Figueras, among others, has used India’s local reservations to test when descriptive representation translates into substantive influence, and when it does not.

Evidence from local government offers cautious grounds for optimism. India’s panchayat reservations show that women heads can shift policy toward public goods more closely aligned with women’s stated priorities (for example, drinking water and roads), and that repeated exposure to women leaders can weaken gender stereotypes and improve girls’ aspirations and educational outcomes over time. But this disruption is neither automatic nor evenly spread.

Where women’s authority is contested, informal obstruction can blunt the promise of formal inclusion, sometimes through household “proxy” dynamics, but also through discrimination and interference by the wider male-dominated local ecosystem (council members and bureaucrats) that can sideline elected women’s voices and centrality in decision-making even after they enter office.

Rachel Brulé’s (2021) broader work on gender-equalising reforms similarly highlights that institutional openings can provoke backlash when they threaten entrenched hierarchies without parallel shifts in bargaining power, reinforcing the core lesson: the same quota design can produce empowerment in one context and proxy capture (or backlash) in another.

At the party-strategy level, there are already signals of variation. Some regional parties field markedly higher shares of women candidates, suggesting that candidate supply is not the only constraint; organisational incentives and leadership choices matter too.

The 2023 passage of the Bill itself also reveals growing political pressure: after decades of stasis, a mix of reputational costs (no party wanting to be seen as opposing women’s representation) and sustained mobilisation, including litigation pressing for action, helped create a moment where near-unanimous support became the path of least resistance.

At the same time, the way it was enacted, by tying commencement to a future Census and delimitation, postpones the immediate disruption of incumbent ticket structures, which may shape how seriously parties prepare to diversify their nomination pipelines before the reform actually bites. The real test, therefore, is whether parties use the runway to cultivate non-dynastic women leaders or simply default to “pre-authorised” names once reservation becomes operational.

Finally, the women’s reservation amendment is best seen as a structural opening rather than a guaranteed redistribution of power. It will change the arithmetic of entry, but party gatekeeping, kinship networks, and political ecosystems will still shape the sociology of authority – and “proxy power” will not look identical across tiers.

At the panchayat level, proxy leadership can be overt and administrative, with male relatives informally substituting for elected women in day-to-day governance; at the MP/MLA level, outright substitution is rarer, but dependence can be reproduced through control over ticketing, campaign finance, staff/advisers, and patronage networks that narrow autonomy.

The coming election cycles will therefore test not only how many women enter legislatures, but which women enter – and whether reservation broadens leadership beyond inherited authority and delegable legitimacy, or simply re-labels the bibi-beti-bahu pipeline under a constitutional umbrella.

Soumya Bhowmick is an economist whose work engages with questions of development and institutional design in India’s governance landscape. He holds a PhD and double master’s degrees in economics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and the University of Antwerp, with specialisation in globalisation economics and European integration. He has published in peer-reviewed journals and contributes regularly to platforms including Economic & Political Weekly, The Hindu Business Line, The Diplomat, CFR, The Telegraph, Firstpost, Dhaka Tribune, East Asia Forum, Fortune India, The Quint, and India Today.

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

The Election Commission is conducting a special revision of the voter list in Assam, which is similar to the usual updates to the electoral roll.

On Wednesday, the Trinamool Congress chief appeared in person before the court to argue her petition challenging the special intensive revision being conducted by the Election Commission.

This is the first time a chief minister has personally appeared before the Supreme Court to make verbal submissions, according to Live Law.

Banerjee had moved an interlocutory application seeking permission to appear and argue the case herself, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi was hearing a petition filed by the chief minister raising concerns that the voter list revision exercise poses an immediate and irreversible risk of mass disenfranchisement of eligible voters in the Assembly elections, Bar and Bench reported.

She has sought the court’s direction that the polls be conducted on the basis of the existing electoral rolls prepared last year.

The state polls are expected to be held by April or May.

On Wednesday, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submitted that there was an “atmosphere of hostility” in the state against the officials of the Election Commission, Live Law reported.

The bench issued a notice to the poll panel on Banerjee’s plea and sought a response by Monday.

Banerjee has also asked the court to direct the election authorities not to summon voters for hearings in cases involving name mismatches or spelling variations categorised as “logical discrepancies” during the revision exercise.

She asked for such corrections to be carried out suo moto on the basis of available records.

Logical discrepancies include a mismatch in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen was among those who got such a notice, with the Election Commission citing a gap of less than 15 years between him and his parents.

The draft electoral rolls for West Bengal under the special intensive revision exercise were published on December 16. The names of over 58 lakh voters were removed from voter lists in the state as they had either died, migrated outside the state or did not submit their enumeration forms.

In her interlocutory application, Banerjee submitted that she is “aware of the ground realities faced by residents of West Bengal due to the SIR process”, Bar and Bench reported.

“Her appearance in person would assist the court in the effective adjudication of the case,” the legal news outlet quoted her as submitting before the court.

A book discussion at Mumbai’s prestigious Kala Ghoda Arts Festival featuring activist Anand Teltumbde scheduled for Thursday has been cancelled on the orders of the Mumbai Police, organisers told participants.

Participants were also asked to delete social media posts about the event.

Also scheduled to speak at the discussion, titled “Incarcerated: Tales from Behind Bars”, was Neeta Kolhatkar, author of The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners. It was to be moderated by Scroll editor Naresh Fernandes.

Teltumbde had been arrested on allegations that he was among the 16 who conspired to trigger caste riots in the village of Bhima Koregaon near Pune in 2018. He is currently out on bail. He is the author of several books, including The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir.

This year’s edition of the annual Kala Ghoda Arts Festival started on January 31 and will end on February 8. Among the collaborators for the event are the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the Maharashtra Tourism Department and Unesco. Listed among the supporters of the festival are the Maharashtra Police and the Mumbai Traffic Police.

The programme contains a wide-range of events relating to dance, stand-up comedy, theatre, music and heritage walks.

Brinda Miller, festival director of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, declined comment on the matter.

The Allahabad High Court on Tuesday observed that demolitions continue to be used as punishment in Uttar Pradesh despite a Supreme Court ruling in November 2024 against the practice, ANI reported.

There are no provisions in Indian law that allow for the demolition of property as a punitive measure. However, the practice has become commonplace in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states.

In November 2024, the Supreme Court held as illegal the practice of demolishing properties of persons accused of crimes as a punitive measure. It said that processes must be followed before removing allegedly illegal encroachments.

On Tuesday, a bench of Justices Atul Sridharan and Siddharthanandan questioned whether the Supreme Court’s directions are being followed in the state.

It also asked whether the state has the authority to demolish the home of an accused or whether its duty lies in protecting the rights of citizens, ANI reported.

The bench observed that demolitions carried out soon after the registration of an offence may constitute a distorted exercise of executive discretion. It noted that it had seen several instances where demolition notices had been issued in such circumstances, the news agency reported.

It reiterated that the Supreme Court has held that demolition cannot be used as a form of punishment. The power to impose punishment lies with the judiciary and not the executive, the bench added.

The High Court said that even a “reasonable apprehension” of demolition is enough for citizens to approach the court, ANI reported.

A Muslim headmaster at a government school in Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura was suspended after a Bharatiya Janata Party leader filed a complaint accusing him of making students offer namaz and of not having them recite the national anthem, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

The headmaster, 52-year-old Jaan Mohammed, had been posted at the primary school in Naujheel since 2007.

Mohammed denied the allegations against him and said that no one had made such claims about him before, the newspaper reported.

He said that he was informed about his suspension on January 31, even though no verification or inquiry was carried out.

The complaint against Mohammed was filed by a man named Durgesh, the head of the BJP unit in the Bajna town and a former village chief.

The BJP member claimed that villagers informed him about the activities of the headmaster, after which he wrote to the block education officer, The New Indian Express reported.

The complainant claimed that in the presence of the headmaster, preachers from the Islamic organisation Tablighi Jamaat were called, who pressured children at the school to adopt Islam.

“I have no personal dispute with the headmaster, nor have I ever met him,” The Indian Express quoted Durgesh as saying. “I filed the complaint with the BSA [Basic Shiksha Adhikari] solely on the basis of complaints received from local residents. I only raised the issue in the interest of the children and the school.”

The headmaster was suspended within 24 hours of Durgesh’s complaint.

Mathura Basic Shiksha Adhikari Ratan Kirti said that a two-member committee has been set up to look into the matter.

The primary school at Naujheel has 235 children, of whom 89 are Muslims and the rest are Hindus, The New Indian Express reported. The school has eight staffers, of whom seven are Hindus.

Journalist Vinod K Jose, the former editor of The Caravan magazine, said on Tuesday that he was disinvited from a college event in Kerala’s Pala town.

Jose was scheduled to speak on the “State of Indian Democracy” at St Thomas College on Thursday, as part of the institute’s annual TC Thomas Endowment Lecture.

He said that he was told on Tuesday morning that the management and the principal did not want him on campus, as he was a “controversial figure”.

The journalist said this was the first time he had been disinvited from an event.

Noting that the institution is a Catholic diocese-managed college, Jose said in a social media post: “These are interesting times we live in. If not all, at least a section of the Christian society in Kerala are tiptoeing the RSS-BJP [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party] line of blocking relevant, transparent conversations at the least, and at its maximum, working to help the Hindu right get a foothold in Kerala.”

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP.

Jose said that through his disinvitation, “the lecture has already been delivered, without me uttering a word”.

“The state of Indian democracy stands explained,” he remarked.

The journalist said that Christian educational institutions often complain about declining student quality. “But the question is also about the quality these colleges offer their students,” he said. “When a management decides to censor ideas and experiences that students should be exposed to – an integral part of social science education – why then complain about quality?”

Jose was the editor of The Caravan from 2009 to 2023. He is now the director of the annual Wayanad Literature Festival.

Scroll has requested the principal of the St Thomas College for comments. This story will be updated if comments are received.

The police in Rajasthan have issued notices to two British tourists, directing them to leave India for allegedly pasting posters carrying the slogan “Free Palestine, Boycott Israel” in parts of the tourist destination of Pushkar in Ajmer district, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

Officials at the Foreigners Registration Office in Ajmer said the notice was issued on Monday and that the two tourists have been asked to leave the country “at the earliest”, the newspaper reported.

A Leave India Notice is a formal directive issued by Indian authorities requiring a foreign national to exit the country within a specified time period. Failure to comply could lead to detention, deportation or blacklisting.

The incident came to light on January 21. The action against them was taken under the Immigration and Foreigners Act, following which the visas of the two nationals of the United Kingdom were revoked.

Additional Superintendent of Police (Crime Investigation Department, Ajmer Zone) Rajesh Meena told The Times of India that two persons, Lewis Gabriel D and Anushi Emma Christine, had come to India on a tourist visa in January and were staying in Pushkar.

“Engaging in activities that disrespect other nations while on Indian soil is a clear violation of visa rules,” Meena was quoted as saying.

The posters were later removed with the assistance of the district police.

Israel’s military offensive in Gaza began in October 2023 after Hamas killed 1,200 persons during its incursion into southern Israel and took hostages. Israel has been carrying out unprecedented air and ground strikes on besieged Gaza since then, leaving more than 70,000 persons dead.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed on Tuesday that New Delhi has agreed to “stop purchasing Russian oil” and to buy more American oil as part of the trade deal between India and the United States, Fox News reported.

Leavitt added that Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed to $500 billion worth of purchases of US energy, transportation and agricultural products.

India has not commented on the claims so far. The US has been repeatedly alleging that India’s purchases of Russian oil have helped fuel the war in Ukraine, while New Delhi has maintained that its oil purchases are aimed at ensuring its own energy security.

India also agreed to potentially buy more oil from Venezuela, the White House press secretary told Fox News. “As you know, the president [Donald Trump] and his national security team are now dictating the commerce of Venezuela and those oil sales and so, this directly benefits the American people as well,” she said.

.@PressSec on @POTUS' deal with India: "Prime Minister Modi committed to $500B of purchases of U.S. energy, transportation, agricultural products... This is a great deal, and a huge win for American workers, businesses, and consumers alike." pic.twitter.com/XM71yUG6cq

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 3, 2026

Last week, the US reportedly told India that it could soon resume purchasing Venezuelan oil to help replace oil imports from Russia.

As per the deal, which was announced on Monday, the US would cut tariffs imposed on India to 18% with immediate effect. India will reduce its tariffs and non-tariff barriers against the US to zero, Trump said.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Tuesday told CNBC that Washington will “continue to maintain some level of tariffs against India – 18% – because we have this giant trade deficit with them”. However, India has agreed to reduce tariffs on a variety of agricultural products, manufactured goods, chemicals and medical devices, Greer said.

India will lower tariffs on a wide array of U.S. industrial and agricultural goods to 0%.

President Trump’s historic deal with India delivers unprecedented market access for American farmers and producers.pic.twitter.com/qsTTOwKlIt

— United States Trade Representative (@USTradeRep) February 3, 2026

Indian goods had been facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%, including a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August for buying Russian oil. After the deal was announced, Modi said on social media that he was “delighted” that India-made products will now face reduced tariffs.

On Tuesday, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal said that the interests of Indian farmers were safeguarded and their protection was key during the course of negotiations for the deal, The Indian Express reported.

“The Prime Minister is constantly concerned about our farmers, those associated with animal husbandry, and the dairy sector,” Goyal was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “He has never allowed their interests to be compromised… In this US trade deal, the sensitive sectors of agriculture and dairy have been protected.”

Opposition parties in India have expressed concerns that the interests of farmers have been jeopardised in the deal. Congress MP Jairam Ramesh said it was clear that Modi had “completely surrendered” by agreeing to the deal, according to The Indian Express.

“He has most definitely appeased President Trump,” Ramesh said. “India stands diminished by this unfortunate sequence of events.”

The Trinamool Congress will consult other parties to consider bringing a motion to impeach Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, over the allegedly flawed manner in which the special intensive revision exercise was being conducted in West Bengal, NDTV reported.

Party MP Kalyan Banerjee was quoted as telling reporters in Delhi on Tuesday: “We are considering impeaching the Chief Election Commissioner because of the way he is conducting the SIR, which is incorrect and affects the voting rights of every citizen in the country.”

This came a day after Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee walked out of a meeting with Kumar, alleging that the Election Commission chief “insulted and humiliated” the delegation that she led.

After walking out, Banerjee had alleged that West Bengal was being “deliberately targeted” and claimed that 58 lakh voters had been removed from the rolls without being given a chance to defend themselves.

Banerjee had claimed that the Election Commission was using the special intensive revision to delete voters from Assembly seats held by TMC legislators, NDTV reported.

“In assembly constituencies of BJP MLAs, the names of a maximum of 3,000 to 4,000 voters are deleted,” Banerjee was quoted as claiming at the time. “But in constituencies held by Trinamool Congress MLAs, the number of voters deleted ranges between 40,000 and 1 lakh.”

The chief minister had also alleged that in her own constituency of Bhabanipur in Kolkata, the poll panel had a “final target” to delete 1 lakh voters from the rolls.

Banerjee had questioned why the revision exercise was not being conducted in BJP-ruled states and said it had been limited to Opposition-ruled West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The voter roll revision exercise is underway in 12 states and Union Territories. Of these, assembly elections are due in 2026 in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

‘EC plotting to delete 1 crore votes in UP’: Akhilesh Yadav

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Tuesday echoed Banerjee’s allegations and accused the Election Commission of conspiring with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to delete the names of nearly 1 crore voters from marginalised communities during the special intensive revision exercise, The Indian Express reported.

Yadav said that his party will approach court on the matter.

“Voting is the biggest right in a democracy, and there should not be any fraud with it,” the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “But the EC along with the BJP has made a plan to delete the names of the PDA voters from the electoral roll through Form-7 [filled to delete names from the existing electoral roll] in the state.”

The Samajwadi Party uses the acronym PDA to refer to a social coalition of Pichda (backward classes), Dalit and Alpasankhyak (minorities).

Yadav claimed that the BJP was doing this in constituencies where it was defeated during the 2022 Assembly election. He alleged that nearly 1,200 Muslim votes were deleted from just one polling station in his Lok Sabha constituency Kannauj, The Indian Express reported.

However, state BJP chief Pankaj Chaudhary said that the exercise was being conducted by the Election Commission and not the ruling party, the newspaper reported.

He added that Yadav should complain to the poll panel if he has any misgivings.

State Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa said that some reports alleged that Form 7 was, in some cases, not submitted by the person whose name was on the document, the newspaper reported.

“Therefore, all district election officers and electoral registration officers have been instructed to ensure that whenever a Form 7 is received, they must verify it was submitted by the person whose signature it bears,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying.

Last week, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha declared that his government would not agree to the Kokborok language, spoken by Tripura’s tribal groups, being written in the Roman script.

These groups account for a little over 30% of the state’s total population.

The decision puts the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party on a path of conflict with its ally, the Tipra Motha, which has in the last few weeks stepped up its demand for a change of script for Kokborok.

Kokborok is currently written in Bengali but demand for it to be written in Roman dates back several decades.

Chief Minister Saha shot down the demand for the “foreign script”, calling it part of an “international conspiracy”. He asked tribal groups to either develop a script for the Kokborok language or to adopt the Devanagari script instead of Bengali.

“We will never allow Roman script for Kokborok language because it poses a threat to the indigenous traditional and culture,” Saha said at a party programme in South Tripura. “The young generation will completely forget their culture if Roman script is adopted for their language.”

Saha’s stand is in line with the Centre’s suggestion and Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s backing for the Devanagari script for indigenous languages in the North East. Both Bengali and Devanagari evolved from the Brahmi script.

Tipra Motha leaders reacted sharply. “It is our language, our right, our choice,” said Anthony Debbarma, a Tipra Motha spokesperson. “Who are they to object?”

Debbarma admitted that the relationship between the allies is on rocky ground, especially over the issue of the script. “Our indigenous people are suppressed in so many ways by the state government,” he said. “Whenever we raise the issues, they have no response.”

The Tipra Motha joined hands with the BJP in 2024, even though it had fought the 2023 elections on its own. It agreed to join the Manik Saha government after the Centre signed a “historic” tripartite pact with the Tripura government and the Tipra Motha, which aimed to “amicably resolve all issues of indigenous people” of the state.

But ahead of elections to the autonomous district council in Tripura’s tribal areas, a rift appears to have emerged in the alliance.

Debbarma alleged that the Centre has not fulfilled a single issue under the tripartite pact even after two years.

On Monday, Saha launched a sharp attack on the Tipra Motha-led district council, accusing it of failing to deliver on promises despite having the money to do so, and misleading indigenous communities.

‘RSS hand’

Thirteen tribal legislators from Tripura and Tipra Motha’s chief Pradyot Debbarma wrote to Saha on January 15 asking for the Roman script to be adopted for the Kokborok language

The letter was written ahead of elections to the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council, where most of the tribal population is concentrated and which accounts for 20 of the state’s 60 Assembly seats. The elections are supposed to be held in a month or two.

Looks like we will have to look at Meghalaya ,Mizoram, Nagaland Model where despite the local languages not being included in the 8th schedule, the boys and girls can write and read their language and sit in examinations in Roman script . Why ?
because it's a 'State' Subject and…

— Pradyot_Tripura (@PradyotManikya) March 21, 2025

Chief Minister Saha, however, refused to concede to the demand. “Why are you demanding a foreign script?” he said at a rally. “Our central leadership and central government has repeatedly told us to opt for the Devanagari script. We speak Hindi but we don’t opt for Devanagari script. This is strange. This is an international conspiracy.”

Opposition leaders have alleged that the BJP government was following the doctrine of its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, in refusing the old demand. “RSS’s slogan is Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan,” said Jitendra Chaudhury, senior Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader.

He alleged that the RSS worldview does not permit the flourishing of “any language or culture of any indigenous in our country”.

“Opposing the Roman script, opposing the culture of indigenous people is part of that same doctrine only,” he said.

Animesh Debbarma, Tipra Motha leader and a Cabinet colleague of Saha, said the script for Kokborok will be decided by the speakers of the language. “A language does not develop because of government order or because of government restriction,” the state forest minister said. “A language is developed by poets, writers, students, artists, not politicians.”

A longstanding demand

Tripura is the only state in the North East, where the tribal population is not in a majority. The arrival of Bengali refugees in the years after Partition altered the demography of the state and led to a sense of tribals being disempowered

Kokborok is spoken by 19 tribes in the state, approximately 14 lakh people. The 2011 census put the state’s population at 36.7 lakh.

Since 1967, tribal groups have been demanding that the language be written in the Roman script and not Bengali – a demand that over the years has become associated with the politics of ethnic identity. Kokborok was recognised as one of the state’s two official languages in 1979.

While early Left governments promoted the Kokborok language through the Bengali script, tribal intellectuals believe that is an imposition.

“The Bengali script can do nothing for the development of the [Kokborok] since it, or any Indic script derived from the Brahmi script, has got some limitations,” Kokborok author, poet and composer Bikash Rai Debbarma told Scroll.

The main feature of the language, which belongs to a family of Tibeto-Burman languages, is that of tonal variations. “The same word can express five or six meanings, depending on the tone,” Bikash Rai Debbarma said. “We need a script that can express these variations.”

Despite the state’s reluctance, the use of the Roman script is on the rise – on social media and in books.

“In 2023, more than 20 books were published in Kokborok language – 16 were printed in Roman script,” said Rai Debbarma. “Young writers increasingly use Roman script because it is easy to write.”

Across the state, college students are given the option of writing examinations in either of the two scripts, though school students have to write the Kokborok test in Bengali script.

“According to the higher education department’s responses to our right to information requests, of more than 10,000 students who took the undergraduate exams, no one wrote in the Bengali script,” Rai Debbarma said. “Our point is why should one script be imposed upon students and speakers.”

Reaction to CM’s charge

Chief Minister Saha’s strident position and insinuations that the demand for Roman script is linked to the spread of Christianity has led to several protests across the state.

“It's an imposition and against the collective rights of the indigenous people,” John Debbarma, the vice president of Twipra Students’ Federation, the apex tribal students’ body of the state, said.

He pointed out that several tribes in the region – Khasi, Garo, Dimasa, Mizo Kuki, and others – have already adopted the Roman script.

“Most importantly, each of these languages has reformed and adapted the script according to its own needs,” John Debbarma said. “Then why does the state administration continue to pressure national boards to print Kokborok examination papers in Bengali script instead of respecting the linguistic autonomy of Kokborok speakers?”

টি.টি.এ.ডি.সি. নির্বাচনে ২৮টির মধ্যে ২৮টি আসনে জয়ের লক্ষ্য নিয়ে আজ বুরাখা বাজারে আয়োজিত যোগদান সভায় জনজাতি ভাইবোনদের সম্বোধন করি।

আজ জনজাতি সমাজ উপলব্ধি করেছে- প্রকৃত ও সর্বাঙ্গীণ উন্নয়ন নিশ্চিত করতে হলে ভারতীয় জনতা পার্টিকেই বিপুল ভোটে জয়যুক্ত করতে হবে। pic.twitter.com/UWPW3IyrL1

— Prof.(Dr.) Manik Saha (@DrManikSaha2) February 1, 2026

John Debbarma also criticised the chief minister’s claim of a“foreign conspiracy” behind their demand and accused him of spreading “conspiracy theories” to divert the issue.

The writer, Bikash Rai Debbarma, agreed. “The chief minister of a state cannot unilaterally decide over the script issue of a particular language,” he said. “It's totally unconstitutional and against democracy. They don't want Kokborok to develop.”

He also criticised attempts to link the Roman script with attempts to spread Christianity. “To consume the language of a numerically smaller community, the majority community continuously creates such narratives with great care and implants them into the public mind,” Bikash Rai Debbarma said.

‘Only a spectacle’

Critics of the Tipra Motha were sceptical about the party’s commitment to the cause of Kokborok.

“All parties are doing politics over the script,” Rebati Tripura, a former MP and a prominent BJP leader from tribal communities, told Scroll.

He alleged that Motha’s chief Pradyot Debbarma does not even speak the language. “Only the villagers have kept Kokborok alive.”

Tripura admitted that cracks had developed in the alliance. “The alliance is only for name's sake and on paper,” he said. “It is only limited to the state government as the Motha wanted two ministers. But we are not fighting the district council elections together. Rather, they say they will not allow the BJP to enter the council. How can an alliance partner say such things about a national party?”

The CPI(M)’s Chaudhury, who is the leader of Opposition in the Tripura Assembly, dismissed the apparent hostility between the parties.

He called the face-off a “drama”, and was sceptical of any substantive fallout between the alliance partners. “They need a spectacle for the next council elections and so they are organising this thing,” he said.

Anthony Debbarma, the Tipra Motha spokesperson, told Scroll that the party has no plans of exiting the government and will continue to raise their demands while staying with the BJP.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee walked out of the Election Commission’s office on Monday, alleging that the delegation she led was “insulted and humiliated” by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar during the meeting.

Banerjee accused the poll body of operating as an extension of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s political machinery.

Banerjee, accompanied by MPs of the Trinamool Congress, met the commission to raise concerns about the special intensive revision of voter rolls. The members of the delegation had worn black shawls as a mark of protest.

Accusing the poll body of attempting to “choose the government before the election”, the chief minister said that she had “never seen an election commissioner so arrogant and such a liar” in her political career.

“You [EC] have the power of the BJP,” Banerjee said. “We have the power of the people. So we boycotted the meeting.”

Twelve voters had also accompanied the chief minister. Five of them had been declared dead and removed from the rolls, she claimed.

The draft electoral rolls for West Bengal under the special intensive revision exercise were published on December 16. The names of over 58 lakh voters were removed from voter lists in the state as they had either died, migrated outside the state or did not submit their enumeration forms.

What unfolded today at the @ECISVEEP’s office is a grave indictment of India’s democratic institutions. Mr. Vanish Kumar’s conduct stripped the Election Commission of even the pretence of neutrality, confirming how the Commission is now operating as an extension of @BJP4India’s… pic.twitter.com/Tr2jPYrfmz

— All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) February 2, 2026

On Monday, the chief minister alleged that the state was being “deliberately targeted” and claimed that the 58 lakh voters had been removed from the rolls without being given a chance to defend themselves.

She questioned why the revision exercise was not being conducted in BJP-ruled states and said it had been limited to Opposition-ruled West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The voter roll revision exercise is underway in 12 states and Union Territories. Of these, assembly elections are due in 2026 in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

“If you had to do SIR [special intensive revision], you should have left the election-bound States out of it and undertaken it with proper planning,” The Hindu quoted Banerjee as saying. “You have a BJP government in Assam. You didn’t do SIR in Assam, but you did it in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu.”

In Assam, the poll panel is conducting a special revision of the voter list in the state, which is similar to the usual updates to the electoral roll.

Banerjee also said that her party did not oppose the special intensive revision exercise in principle but added that it should not have been carried out in a “hurried manner”.

She also said that in a “document-poor” country like India, the Election Commission was seeking parental documents from those whose citizenship is beyond dispute, voters who exist in the 2002 electoral rolls.

“Can the prime minister, the home minister, or the chief election commissioner themselves produce their parents’ documents,” the CM’s party said. “Or is this humiliation reserved only for the poor, the vulnerable, and the voiceless?”

In a document-poor country like ours, the @ECISVEEP is now demanding parental documents from those whose citizenship is beyond dispute, voters who exist in the 2002 electoral rolls, yet are suddenly being treated as suspects, their democratic rights hanging by a thread.

Who… pic.twitter.com/l1QJLrtgig

— All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) February 2, 2026

She also alleged that the chief election commissioner had not responded to five letters sent by her party.

An unidentified Election Commission official was quoted as saying by PTI that when Kumar started to respond, the TMC leaders interjected on multiple occasions.

“She was agitated and left the meeting in a huff,” the official said.

Banerjee flags ‘mass disenfranchisement’ risk

Banerjee has filed a public interest litigation before the Supreme Court challenging thevoter roll revision exercise in the state.

In her petition, Banerjee has raised concerns that the exercise poses an immediate and irreversible risk of mass disenfranchisement of eligible voters in the Assembly elections, Bar and Bench reported.

She has sought the court’s direction that the elections be conducted on the basis of the existing electoral rolls prepared last year.

Banerjee has also asked the court to direct election authorities not to summon voters for hearings in cases involving name mismatches or spelling variations categorised as “logical discrepancies” during the revision exercise.

She said such corrections should instead be carried out suo motu on the basis of available records.

Logical discrepancies include a mismatch in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six. Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen was among those who got such a notice, with the Election Commission citing a gap of less than 15 years between him and his parents.

The draft electoral rolls for West Bengal under the special intensive revision exercise were published on December 16. The names of over 58 lakh voters were removed from voter lists in the state as they had either died, migrated outside the state or did not submit their enumeration forms.

When the Supreme Court of India stayed the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, on Thursday, it did more than pause a regulatory framework. It inadvertently put on trial the very idea that campuses in India require a modern, enforceable equity architecture responsive to the lived realities of caste, gender, religion, disability and region.

By restoring the older 2012 framework pending review, the court signalled caution about definitional clarity, procedural safeguards and possible misuse. Yet, the stay also risks sidelining a crucial constitutional commitment: that higher education spaces must actively dismantle discrimination rather than merely advise against it.

While the objections raised by petitioners deserve careful judicial scrutiny, the decision to suspend the 2026 Regulations in their entirety may have been disproportionate. A more balanced course – allowing the rules to operate with clarifications – would have preserved protections for vulnerable students while the court examined contested clauses.

Selective judicial urgency?

The irony at the heart of the controversy is easy to miss. The UGC (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026, did not arise in a vacuum. They were framed in response to concerns repeatedly flagged before the Supreme Court in a 2019 public interest litigation which drew attention to persistent caste discrimination, student suicides and the ineffectiveness of purely advisory mechanisms on campuses.

The Court had then emphasised the need for stronger institutional frameworks to prevent discrimination and ensure accountability. The UGC’s 2026 effort can be read as an attempt to comply with that judicial nudge: to move from moral exhortation to enforceable structure.

What followed, however, revealed an uncomfortable social reality. Opposition to the regulations quickly coalesced around a shared anxiety that the rules singled out caste discrimination as a structural reality affecting historically marginalised students.

Groups identifying themselves as representing the “general category” mobilised explicitly on caste lines to challenge the rules. In doing so, they made visible the very caste consciousness the regulations sought to address. The litigation that reached the court was not framed in the language of universal campus harmony but in the language of perceived injury to upper-caste identity.

The speed with which the matter moved was striking. The petitions were listed urgently, heard almost immediately, and the regulations stayed at the threshold stage. Interim stays are a routine judicial tool, but the swiftness here stood in contrast to the long delays that typically characterise cases brought by marginalised litigants seeking relief from discrimination or by political prisoners incarcerated for years begging for bail.

This contrast raises an uneasy question about whose anxieties trigger institutional urgency.

Consider, for example, the protracted journeys in cases involving caste atrocity survivors under the Schedule Castes/Schedule Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, or the families of students who have died by suicide after alleging caste humiliation on campuses. In many such matters, hearings stretch over months and years, with interim relief hard to secure.

By comparison, the immediate judicial attention to the upper-caste petitions claiming discomfort with equity regulation suggests a hierarchy of responsiveness that mirrors social hierarchy and pervasive caste-based discrimination even in institutional conduct.

This is not to question the court’s power to stay the regulations, pending review. It is to note how the episode itself illustrates the persistence of caste as an organising principle of public action – even among those who deny its relevance. The very mobilisation against anti-discrimination norms on explicitly caste-identified lines and the rapid institutional response to that mobilisation underline the argument that caste discrimination is a living force shaping access to power, voice and urgency.

In that sense, the background to this case does more than explain the legal dispute. It exposes the social conditions that made such regulations necessary in the first place.

Core objections

Petitioners challenged several aspects of the regulations.

1. The definition of caste-based discrimination focused on Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe/Other Backward Classes students, allegedly excluding the “general category”.

2. The absence of explicit penalties for false complaints.

3. Vagueness in language and scope.

4. The risk of misuse by equity committees designed to promote fairness within institutions and foster inclusive environments

5. The administrative burden the regulations would place on institutions.

6. Possible violation of Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution due to asymmetrical protection. Article 14 guarantees equality before law, while Article 15 prohibits discrimination against citizens on grounds only of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth.

The court, noting these concerns at a preliminary stage, stayed the regulations.

Yet, each objection admits of a compelling counterpoint grounded in constitutional doctrine and campus realities.

1. Objection: Exclusion of General Category from definition of caste discrimination

Petitioners’ claim: Regulation 3(c) defines caste-based discrimination only as discrimination against students of the Schedule Castes, Schedule Tribes and Other Backward Classes, excluding general/unreserved category students, which is arbitrary and unconstitutional.

Counterargument: Discrimination law often has asymmetric coverage because discrimination itself is asymmetric in Indian society. Indian constitutional jurisprudence accepts that certain groups face systemic exclusion and harassment specific to their structural position, and therefore protective frameworks can be tailored to their realities.

For example, affirmative action under Article 15(4) is a constitutional exception to formal equality precisely to address historical disadvantages – meaning unequal treatment in law is not of itself unconstitutional but often necessary to achieve substantive equality.

The Supreme Court’s NM Thomas judgement in 1976 even held that reservations were not thought of as an exception to the rule of equality but as an integral part of it as it addressed systematic and structural barriers which operate asymmetrically.

Moreover, the regulations still define “discrimination” broadly on grounds of caste, religion, gender and disability. Excluding the general category from a caste-focused protective definition does not mean general category students cannot complain under the larger umbrella.

Rather, it reflects the factual reality that caste harassment disproportionately targets historically marginalised groups – just as the Prevention of Atrocities Act extends only to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes because atrocity data show structurally patterned violence against them.

2. Objection: No safeguards for false complaints

Petitioners’ claim: Because the 2026 regulations do not include penalties for false or malicious complaints, they can be misused, harming innocent parties.

Counterargument: Anti-discrimination frameworks globally separate procedural safeguards (such as confidentiality, appeal procedures, and fact-based inquiry standards) from punitive measures against complainants. Not having punitive provisions against false complaints does not automatically make a law unconstitutional; it simply reflects a common legislative choice to focus on redress and relief for victims rather than punitive litigation against complainants.

Many civil rights statutes (including workplace anti-discrimination codes in other jurisdictions) provide for remedies and fact-finding without a parallel “punish complainant” regime.

What matters is that institutions adopt due process – such as the right to hear both sides, evidentiary standards, and transparent inquiry timelines – and most draft frameworks intend to incorporate these procedural protections at the institutional level.

3. Objection: Vagueness and possibility of misuse

Petitioners’ Claim: The bench observed the language was vague and could be misused.

Counterargument: Vagueness is a real concern in any regulation, but every statutory regime requires some degree of normative judgment by institutions – that is the essence of administrative law. What matters is whether the statute provides principled standards that guide enforcement rather than subjective whim.

The 2026 regulations set out institutional structures (equity committees, equal opportunity centres, grievance channels) precisely to build procedural clarity.

Too many judicial stays in regulatory contexts have relied on preliminary notions of “vagueness” before meaningful interpretation is possible. A more balanced approach would have been to allow the regulations to operate while clarifying the schemes or issuing guidelines rather than imposing a blanket stay.

Indeed, the bench itself acknowledged the court was only at the “threshold of constitutionality and legality”, indicating that detailed analysis was premature.

4. Objection: Social divisiveness

Petitioners’ claim: The Supreme Court suggested the rules might divide society and campuses.

Counterargument: Promoting equity and addressing discrimination inevitably requires categorisation. If addressing bias were easy without targeted measures, the very persistence of caste and identity exclusion would not have necessitated new regulations.

A fallacy in the stay is to equate proactive institutional responsibility with community division. Discrimination does not cease to exist simply because a law criminalising or addressing it goes unenforced or is set aside. In fact, vacating a framework designed to protect equity risks preserving the status quo of exclusion, which itself produces division.

Empowering institutions to respond to the lived realities of caste exclusion is not social division but a constitutional imperative under Articles 14 and 15.

5. Objection: Exclusion of General Category raises constitutional questions

Petitioners’ Claim: The exclusion violates Articles 14 and 15.

Counterargument: It is as such the corollary of the first objection on account of asymmetry. The Constitution does not require formal identical treatment in all contexts. Protective discrimination and progressive measures under the Constitution explicitly contemplate differential treatment to rectify structural inequality.

The courts have upheld asymmetric protections (for example, in reservations and in the Prevention of Atrocities Act) because the object and purpose is amelioration of entrenched disadvantage – not uniform entitlements irrespective of social reality.

The stay appears to treat the asymmetric coverage itself as inherently suspect, but in substantive equality jurisprudence, asymmetry is valid if it aligns with the empirical patterns of discrimination it seeks to address.

6. Objection: Institutions burdened

Petitioners’ claim: Implementing equity cells and committees is an undue burden on institutions.

Counterargument: Higher education institutions already have myriad statutory responsibilities (anti-Ragging, sexual harassment redressal, mental health protocols). Creating mechanisms to prevent discrimination is consistent with other statutory duties. This is neither novel nor unduly onerous.

Equity cells are internally constituted, and many institutions already maintain grievance cells that could be re-designated, making implementation an administrative evolution rather than overreach.

Judicial restraint and interim stays

In interim jurisprudence worldwide, stays are typically granted only in cases where (a) a petitioner can demonstrate a prima facie case, (b) when a petitioner can show irreparable harm if the stay is not granted and (c) the balance of convenience weighs in favour of petitioner. In this instance the bench acknowledged the regulations were at the “threshold of constitutionality” and not yet fully examined before imposing a stay.

There is strong evidence the regulations respond to gaps in the 2012 framework and global best practices on campus equity. The balance of convenience does not favour petitioners.

Analysed this way, the rules did not deserve to be stayed. If the Court still had reservations, a more measured alternative would have been conditional operation with guidelines or expert input, rather than suspension.

The Supreme Court’s stay reflects legitimate procedural concerns but arguably misreads the structural and constitutional logic behind equity regulations. Rather than suspending the entire framework, a more proportionate judicial response would be to clarify definitions, integrate procedural safeguards, and allow the regime to operate while under review, preserving the substantive protection against discrimination without compromising constitutional balance.

It is particularly necessary in the context of the delays in India’s judicial system where stays have a character of permanence or a final judgement.

Writer and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO, Petronet India Limited and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management. His most recent book is The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday claimed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been “compromised”, adding that he has “sold out” the “sweat and blood” of the country’s farmers by buckling under pressure from the United States to finalise a trade deal.

Gandhi made the comments while speaking with reporters outside Parliament after he was prevented from quoting excerpts in the Lok Sabha of an unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

He had been mentioning the excerpt during the debate on the Motion of Thanks to the president’s address.

Gandhi told reporters that this was the first time that the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha had not been allowed to speak about the president’s address.

However, the matter related to Naravane was “a side show”, the Congress leader said, adding that the main issue was that “our prime minister has been compromised”.

“I want to say three things,” Gandhi said. “But I cannot speak even the first thing [in the House]. Modi ji is scared.”

PM Modi is Compromised.

PM is too afraid to let me speak in Parliament about Naravane, Epstein Files and how he has surrendered on Tariffs. pic.twitter.com/V1J6yxZDM2

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) February 3, 2026

The Opposition leader said that the trade deal that had been suspended for four months, “for some reason that Prime Minister Modi and I know”, was signed a day earlier.

Indian goods had been facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%, including a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August for buying Russian oil.

On Monday, President Donald Trump said that India and the US had agreed to a trade deal and that he was cutting tariffs imposed on New Delhi to 18% with immediate effect.

On Tuesday, Gandhi claimed that Modi was under “enormous pressure”, adding that the prime minister’s image that had been “inflated with thousands of crores could burst”.

The Opposition leader said that Indian farmers should understand that there had been a “sell-out” of their hard work, and their blood and sweat, by the prime minister through this deal.

“He has not just sold you off, but the whole country,” the Rae Bareli MP said. “That is why they are not allowing me to speak [inside the House].”

Gandhi also referred to an alleged $265 million bribery and fraud case against Adani Group chairperson Gautam Adani in the US, adding that this was not targeting the industrialist but Modi’s “financial structure”.

In November 2024, the US Attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York indicted Gautam Adani in the case.

The US Department of Justice alleged that executives of the conglomerate participated in a scheme to bribe officials in India for solar energy contracts, then misrepresented the company’s anti-bribery practices to investors in the US. The details of the alleged bribes were concealed to secure financing, the justice department claimed.

While the indictment document outlines conspiracy to obstruct justice and violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Adani and his executives were not charged with these counts.

However, the indictment document names Gautam Adani, among others, in what it describes as a “massive bribery scheme”.

The Adani Group has denied the allegations and vowed legal action. In November 2024, the Adani Group said in a stock exchange filing that Gautam Adani had been charged in the US for securities fraud, not bribery.

On Tuesday, Gandhi further said that the “Epstein files had more matter”.

The “Epstein files” refer to millions of documents, emails, photos and videos released by the US Department of Justice detailing the activities of Jeffery Epstein, an American financier and convicted child sex offender, and his social circle that included politicians, celebrities and several public figures.

A purported email from Epstein to a person named Jabor Y that was part of a fresh set of files made public on Friday had a reference to one of Modi’s visits to Israel.

On Saturday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that “allusions” made about Modi in an email message that is part of the Epstein files “deserve to be dismissed with the utmost contempt”.

The Congress leader told reporters on Tuesday that the Epstein files and the case against Adani in the US were two “pressure points” for the Union government.

Later in the day, Gandhi on social media reiterated that Modi was “compromised”, adding that he was “too afraid to let me speak in Parliament about Naravane, Epstein Files and how he has surrendered on tariffs”.

The paramount barrier in the right to healthcare for all, regardless of their capacity to pay and the gravity of their ailment, is the tension between the pursuit of profits and ensuring healthcare.

Nowhere is this more dramatically manifest than in the powerful global pharmaceutical industry, which, with its close links with governments, especially in high-income countries, charges sky-high – and some would say extortionist – prices for medicines critical to saving lives.

These high prices make medicines unaffordable for the impoverished unless governments subsidise them. People get sicker and die not because treatment does not exist, but because big pharma has pushed these outside their reach.

A third of global health spending is out of the shallow and often torn pockets of patients. Studies reveal that the single item on which people spend the most money is medicines. This makes the high monopoly prices of essential medicines, levied by big pharmaceutical companies, a leading cause of driving people into poverty and destitution, besides of preventable illness and deaths often in millions.

Frequently, the argument in favour of patents in the pharmaceutical sector is that without this there would be no profit incentive for research and development.

To understand the desperate need for affordable medicines to save millions of lives, and pathways to make this possible, I share two extraordinary stories.

Zackie’s heroic civil disobedience

It was the 1990s. The South African people had begun rebuilding their ravaged nation from the ruins of apartheid. A looming early challenge was HIV – the human immunodeficiency virus which causes AIDS – which raged like a malign forest fire across the country, infecting millions and extinguishing tens of thousands of lives.

The first hope stirred in a world overwhelmed by this pandemic was when antiretroviral drugs were invented. By postponing the advent of AIDS, these could keep alive people with HIV infections for many years. This drug began saving lives in countries of the Global North.

But impoverished people in the African continent infected with the HIV virus continued to needlessly die. Pharmaceutical companies refused to forego their super-profits and reduce their astronomical prices to stem this humanitarian catastrophe. The South African government refused to invest the massive public funds required to import the medicines and supply these free in its public hospitals.

As the preventable deaths of literally millions continued in South Africa, public anger exploded and fuelled massive countrywide protests. A popular civilian formation, the Treatment Action Group, emerged. It demanded that multinational pharmaceutical corporations steeply cut prices to save millions of lives. From governments in industrialised countries, it demanded that they do not sanction poorer countries if they purchase inexpensive generic versions of patented AIDS drugs from India, Brazil and Thailand.

At the forefront of the protests was a charismatic activist and film-maker Abdurrazack Achmat, popularly known as Zackie. Born to Muslim Malay parents, as a teenager between 1977 and 1981, he had moonlighted as a gay sex worker. He joined the struggle against apartheid and was frequently jailed for his political activism. He developed a colourful activist resume, including setting fire to his school in 1976 during the student agitations.

In post-apartheid South Africa, he made films about the lives of queer people in his country. But late in the 1990s, he was diagnosed HIV-positive, like millions of his compatriots. He co-founded the Treatment Action Group, which organised “sit-ins and marches … to demand treatment through a public health system that was sending AIDS patients home to die”. Zackie led many struggles, on the streets and in the courts, for free medicines to save the lives of his people.

In a compelling symbolic act of civil disobedience, he travelled to Thailand and returned to his country with his suitcase packed with Biozole. This was a locally manufactured generic copy of Fluconazole, a patented and expensive drug used to treat opportunistic infections in AIDS patients. He bought this at a price 98% cheaper than the price charged in South Africa.

But his civil disobedience did not end there. He stunned the world with his announcement that although he could afford to buy the drugs that would save his life, he would refuse to take them unless and until these were made available free to all his countrymen and women who need the medicine to be able to continue to live. The towering moral power of his civil disobedience, risking his own life in solidarity and resistance, stirred the global public conscience in ways that little else could have done.

Even this was not enough for big pharma to bend. The protests prolonged. Millions continued to die untreated in the AIDS epidemic in Africa. Protesters like Zackie publicly shamed governments and pharmaceutical companies that prioritised private super-profits over human lives. Their challenges began at last to wound.

The first success of the South African civic protests – supported also on the streets of America – was when the US government withdrew its threat of sanctions against South Africa for importing cheaper generic AIDS drugs. Pharmaceutical companies followed with agreements to supply drugs at discounts of up to 95%, and in some cases even to waive their patents and allow poor countries to import generic drugs. Thirty-nine pharmaceutical companies withdrew a lawsuit to block South Africa from importing cheaper generic copies of patented AIDS drugs.

By placing his own life on the anvil in order to secure treatment for millions who could not afford this in his country, Zackie became a hero for the right to health care. Not just in South Africa but around the world.

“People were dying across the country and doctors were saying they could not afford to prescribe the right medicines,” he explained later. “We wanted to set a moral example and put the right to health and life before profit.” Finally, then, the South African government stocked all public hospitals to freely supply these life-saving medicines.

It was a luminous victory of the value of human life over private profit. Its impact resonated far beyond South Africa, inspiring movements for affordable drugs and equitable health care across the globe.

Historic resistance of India’s pharma giant

Zackie’s was not the only story. Resistance to this cynical profiteering by pharmaceutical companies that cost the lives of millions of people in countries of the Global South came from sometimes unlikely sources.

One of these was from the founder-chairperson of one of India’s leading pharmaceutical companies, Cipla, the scientist billionaire Yusuf Khwaja Hamied. In 2021, Forbes estimated his wealth to be 3.3 billion US dollars. Without his humanism and extraordinary solidarity with people dying needlessly of AIDS in a distant corner of the globe, the outcomes of the epic South African resistance by Zackie and his comrades would have been incomplete.

Recalled The New York Times in a tribute in September 2011: “Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied, chairman of the Indian drug giant Cipla Ltd., electrified the global health community a decade ago when he said he could produce cocktails of AIDS medicines for $1 per day – a fraction of the price charged by branded pharmaceutical companies. That price has since fallen to 20 cents per day, and more than six million people in the developing world now receive treatment, up from little more than 2,000 in 2001.”

Katherine Eban tells his fascinating story in her book Bottle of Lies. In 1986, when a colleague first told him about azidothymidine or AZT, the only drug available at that time that could postpone the onset of AIDS, Hamied asked “What is AIDS?”

At that time, as the HIV/AIDS pandemic spread, poorer countries were baulked by the prohibitive costs of ARVs that did not cure the virus, but suppressed it and prevented its advance. AZT, the first ARV medication to be developed globally, had demonstrated its power to significantly reduce deaths from AIDS and related diseases and both prolong and improve the quality of patient lives.

Provided, of course, that the infected persons could afford the medicines. In 1991, the only company that manufactured AZT was Burroughs Wellcome in the United States. It sold it at roughly $8,000 per patient a year.

For Hamied, this was intolerable. He launched a version of the drug in 1993 for about $2 a day. This was less than one-tenth of what Burroughs Wellcome charged at that time. But even this was too high for Indians, and the government refused to purchase and distribute the medicine. His stocks were unsold and wasted, and preventable suffering and death from AIDS continued.

Some years later, multinational drug companies developed a cocktail of three drugs called HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy). This was found to be even more effective in controlling AIDS. The three drugs in question – stavudine, lamivudine and nevirapine – were made by three different multinational drug companies. Their combined price for a single patient was $12,000 a year. Hamied immediately set out to make the drugs in the cocktail at a much cheaper price.

Meanwhile, in 1997, the government of Nelson Mandela in South Africa amended its law to enable the import of low-cost medicine, ignoring pharmaceutical patents. Thirty-nine drug companies sued the South African government, charging South Africa with violating the international trade agreement TRIPS (Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights).

In September 2000, Hamied addressed a sceptical audience in the European Commission’s conference in Brussels on HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and poverty reduction with these words: “Friends, I represent the needs and aspirations of the third world.” He announced that he would sell the AIDS cocktail for $800 a year ($600 to governments buying in bulk). To make sure that this life-saving drug would reach all who needed it, he would share the technology to make the drugs free to any African government willing to produce its own drugs. And he would supply nevirapine, the drug that limited transmission of the disease from mother to child, for free.

He ended with a moral appeal: “We call upon the participants of this conference to do what their conscience dictates.” Still, no one came forward to accept his proposal.

Unwilling to accept defeat, just months later, he further upped the ante when he announced his plans to an incredulous world that he would sell the cocktail at just one dollar a day. This made it to the front page of the Times, which compared Cipla’s costing of the AIDS cocktail for $350 a year per patient, or roughly $1 a day, to Western prices of between $10,000 -$15,000 a year.

The Times wrote graphically of the ways that Cipla, on this life-saving mission, was being blocked by multinational drug makers that held the patents and how these were backed by the Bush administration. This ignited international outrage and street protests in many cities across continents. Even dishonorable accusations of genocide were assembled.

Charges against Hamied also flew, questioning his motivation. He replied calmly, “I am accused of having an ulterior motive. Of course, I have an ulterior motive. Before I die, I want to do some good.”

The extraordinary cross-continental alliance of Indian drug giant Hamied on one side of the globe and the health rights activists in the United States and South Africa on the other, finally stood tall, victorious. The multinational drug manufacturers on bended knee withdrew their lawsuit against South Africa and waived off their patents.

The outcome of this was that Hamied’s generic AIDS cocktail could be sold cheaply in Africa. Ramani and Mukherjee recall the seismic impact of Cipla’s offer. Multinational corporations (MNCs) dropped the price of their drugs by up to 90%. According to Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), India played a “major role in scaling up treatment to 17 million people” across the world by reducing the price of ARVs from $10,000 per patient per year in 2001 to less than $300.46. By 2016, the lowest price had fallen to $100.47.

Hamied continued to stand up to powerful giant pharma corporations by manufacturing and selling generic life-saving drugs for AIDS, TB, cancer, diabetes, asthma and other non-communicable diseases at prices that were a tiny fraction of what Western pharmaceutical companies were charging.

Holding firm to his robust moral compass, Hamied declared, “I don’t want to make money off these diseases which cause the whole fabric of society to crumble”. His is an example that very few giant pharmaceutical companies have heeded. If they did, the world would be a different place, a place more kind and just.

I am grateful for the research support of Rishiraj Bhagawat.

Eight Congress MPs were suspended from the Lok Sabha for the remainder of the Budget session after they allegedly tore papers and threw them at the speaker’s chair. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju moved the resolution, which was adopted by the House.

The suspended MPs are Hibi Eden, Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, Manickam Tagore, Gurjeet Singh Aujla, Chamala Kiran Kumar Reddy, Prashant Padole, S Venkataraman and Dean Kuriakose. The Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day amid a ruckus.

The protest by the Opposition followed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi being prevented from quoting an excerpt from former Army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane’s unpublished memoir about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China, during the debate in the House.

Congress MPs protested after the chair called on other members to speak before Gandhi had completed his speech. Read on.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi asked in the Lok Sabha why he was being stopped from discussing the excerpt from Naravane’s unpublished book. Gandhi said that he was willing to not quote a magazine article about the excerpts, but added that he should be allowed to speak about its contents that are related to national security.

Accusing Gandhi of misleading the Lok Sabha, Rijiju said that Gandhi cannot again quote the excerpts that Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla had on Monday refused to allow.

Since Monday, MPs from the Bharatiya Janata Party have been objecting to the Congress leader speaking on the matter, arguing that he was quoting from a book that has not yet been released. Read on.

The Supreme Court criticised WhatsApp and its parent company Meta for what it described as the messaging platform’s “take it or leave it” privacy policy. The policy appeared to enable data theft and WhatsApp cannot expect to get away with violating the right to privacy of Indian users, the court observed verbally.

The court was hearing appeals filed by WhatsApp against a National Company Law Appellate Tribunal order upholding a Rs 213 crore penalty imposed by the Competition Commission of India on the platform for its 2021 privacy policy.

WhatsApp had informed users in January 2021 that they needed to accept the updated terms and conditions to continue using the platform. While the previous policy allowed users to opt out of sharing data with the platform’s parent company, the update had made it mandatory.

The bench flagged the unavailability of a clear option for a user to opt out of such a policy. Read on.

The number of districts affected by “Left-wing extremism” has reduced to eight from eleven in October, the Union home ministry said. The districts affected by Maoist violence in 2018 were 126.

Bijapur, Dantewada, Gariyaband, Kanker, Narayanpur and Sukma in Chhattisgarh, West Singhbhum in Jharkhand, and Kandhamal in Odisha are the districts that are still affected.

Three districts – Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur – remain in the “most affected” category, the ministry said.

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

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The Union Ministry of Home Affairs on Tuesday said that the number of districts affected by “Left-wing extremism” has come down to eight from 11 in October.

The number of districts affected by such violence in 2018 was 126, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Lok Sabha in response to a question from Bharatiya Janata Party MP Sambit Patra.

The districts still affected by “Left-wing extremism” include Bijapur, Dantewada, Gariyaband, Kanker, Narayanpur and Sukma in Chhattisgarh, West Singhbhum in Jharkhand, and Kandhamal in Odisha, Rai said.

Three districts remained in the “most affected” category, the minister added.

The Union government had said in October that these districts were Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh.

The minister also told the Lok Sabha on Tuesday that incidents of violence relating to Maoists fell by 88% from 1,936 cases in 2010 to 234 cases in 2025. Deaths of civilians and security personnel dropped by 90% from 1,005 in 2010 to 100 in 2025, Rai added.

He said that in 2025, security forces killed 364 Maoists, arrested 1,022 and facilitated the surrender of 2,337 others.

The number of police stations reporting violence related to “Left-wing extremism” also reduced from 465 in 2010 to 119 in 2025, he added.

“The government of India is committed for [the] complete eradication of Left-wing extremism from our country as well as holistic development of areas freed from Left-wing extremism,” Rai said.

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

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

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

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

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

Also read: As Maoists retreat, why many fear security forces in Chhattisgarh villages

Eight Opposition MPs were suspended from the Lok Sabha for the remainder of the Budget Session on Tuesday after they allegedly tore up papers and threw them at the speaker’s chair.

In Speaker Om Birla’s absence, Krishna Prasad Tenneti, a member of the panel of chairpersons, was presiding over the proceedings in the Lower House at the time.

Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju moved a resolution seeking their suspension, which was adopted by the House.

The members who have been suspended are Congress leaders Hibi Eden, Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, Manickam Tagore, Gurjeet Singh Aujla, Chamala Kiran Kumar Reddy, Prashant Padole, S Venkataraman and Dean Kuriakose.

After the resolution was adopted, the Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day amid a ruckus.

The proceedings on Tuesday were marked by multiple adjournments amid protests by the Opposition after Congress leader Gandhi was again prevented from quoting an excerpt of an unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

Gandhi has been mentioning the excerpt during the debate on the Motion of Thanks to the President’s address.

Congress MPs began protesting in the well of the House after Tenneti called on other members to speak before Gandhi had completed his speech.

Earlier, Tenneti had asked Gandhi to restrict his speech to the President’s address.

In response, Gandhi said that the conflict between China and the United States was a major global issue reflected in the Union Budget and the President’s address, and added that India also faced a conflict with China.

The chair then moved on to other speakers.

LoP Shri @RahulGandhi, Congress General Secretary & MP Smt. @priyankagandhi ji along with other MPs staged a strong protest at Makar Dwar, Parliament against the unjust suspension of eight Congress MPs and the India-US trade agreement.

👉This is an attack on parliamentary… pic.twitter.com/aEybMKmI8g

— Congress (@INCIndia) February 3, 2026

Following the suspension of its MPs on Tuesday, Congress leaders and other MPs staged a protest in the Parliament complex.

“This is an attack on parliamentary democracy,” the party said on social media. “Congress will not be silenced. We will continue to speak for the nation.”

In a social media post, Gandhi said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “too afraid to let me speak in Parliament about Naravane”.

PM Modi is Compromised.

PM is too afraid to let me speak in Parliament about Naravane, Epstein Files and how he has surrendered on Tariffs. pic.twitter.com/V1J6yxZDM2

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) February 3, 2026

A mob vandalised and set fire to six houses belonging to Muslims in Dutkaiya village of Chhattisgarh’s Gariaband district on Sunday, leaving at least seven security personnel injured as they tried to protect the residents, The Hindu quoted the police as saying.

The violence followed a series of incidents earlier in the day in which three men – one of whom had been released on bail in a 2024 temple desecration case – allegedly assaulted four persons and robbed two mobile phones, The Indian Express reported.

One of the persons who was assaulted was reportedly a witness in the earlier case about the alleged vandalism of the Chaveshwar Shiva temple in the village, The Hindu reported.

One of the three persons accused of vandalising the temple had been sent to a juvenile correctional centre and later released on bail, the police said. He had reportedly not returned to the village until the early hours of Sunday, when the alleged assaults took place.

The three men were arrested by about 6 pm, The Indian Express reported.

However, tensions escalated when a small group vandalised the home of one of the men allegedly involved in the desecration of the temple, prompting a police team to urge the residents against further provocation, The Hindu reported.

But a larger mob from Dutkaiya and neighbouring villages gathered later in the evening. Armed with sticks, stones, bricks and inflammable material, the crowd allegedly tried to enter the homes of about 10 Muslim families who had locked themselves inside, the newspaper reported.

“The crowd set the vehicles ablaze and demanded that they be allowed to enter the homes of Muslims,” an unidentified police officer told The Hindu. “Not only were we outnumbered but there was a manpower crunch due to the Rajim Kumbh [a religious congregation].”

An unidentified officer told The Indian Express that the mob had hit the police with sticks and “struck our hands, back and head”.

“They broke our helmets and threw stones at our vehicles as well as those of the fire brigade,” the officer added.

The police said that attempts had been made to enter the homes of the Muslim families from adjacent buildings, but the officers held the mob off until reinforcements arrived by 9 pm, after which force was used to disperse the crowd, The Hindu reported.

While about 20 persons were rescued and taken to safety in a bus, a group of six or seven children trapped in a madrasa were later evacuated in a police vehicle.

At least seven police personnel were injured in the operation. One of them suffered a head injury after being hit by a brick allegedly thrown by a woman from the crowd after the situation had largely been brought under control, The Indian Express reported.

Two persons from the Muslim community were also injured, PTI reported.

Two first information reports have been registered in connection with the rioting, according to The Hindu.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday criticised WhatsApp and its United States-based parent company Meta for what the bench described as the messaging platform’s “take it or leave it” privacy policy, saying that it appears to enable data theft, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi also said that WhatsApp cannot expect to get away with violating the right to privacy of Indian users.

“You [WhatsApp and Meta] can’t play with the right of privacy of this country, in the name of data sharing,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “You are making a mockery of the constitutionalism of this country.”

The consumer had no choice because the technology company had created a monopoly, it added.

The court was hearing appeals filed by WhatsApp against a National Company Law Appellate Tribunal order upholding a Rs 213 crore penalty imposed by the Competition Commission of India on the messaging platform for its 2021 privacy policy.

WhatsApp had informed users in January 2021 about changes to its terms of service and privacy policy, which were effective from February 2021, the legal news portal reported. It also said that users had to accept the new terms and conditions to continue using the messaging platform.

The previous privacy policy from 2016 had allowed users to opt out of sharing data with the parent company. The updated policy made sharing data mandatory.

At the hearing on Tuesday, the bench flagged the unavailability of a clear option for a WhatsApp user to opt out of such a policy.

“Where is the question of opt out?” Bar and Bench quoted the court as asking the counsel for WhatsApp and Meta. “…This is a decent way of committing theft of private information! You know your commercial interest and you also know how you have made consumers addicted to the app.”

It added: “If the users have a right to opt-out, how will the users know this right exists? Let us see the option and the situation with the user. When it comes to opting out, the information is in a newspaper. How will a person know?”

Kant also asked the counsel for WhatsApp about whether its privacy policy was as transparent as it claimed.

The chief justice further asked how a street vendor would understand such terms and conditions.

“Can you imagine the kind of language you use!” the legal news portal quoted Kant as saying. “Every such condition must be examined!...How does the substantial part of the country going to understand your terms and conditions?”

However, the counsel representing WhatsApp and Meta said that only some data is shared, adding that the Indian government also had a data protection law in place. The counsel was referring to the Digital Personal Data Protection Act passed in 2023.

The Union government notified the rules in November, bringing the Act into effect.

But the court on Tuesday noted that the new legislation was yet to be enforced.

The chief justice also said that WhatsApp’s stated purpose was to provide messaging services, and not to collect and sell data.

Bagchi noted that the concern was also about the larger behavioural patterns that WhatsApp and Meta had been showing.

He added that the Digital Personal Data Protection Rules spoke about privacy.

“We are concerned [with] behavioural tendencies,” Bar and Bench quoted the judge as saying. “You are using the data for purpose of online advertising.”

But the counsel for WhatsApp and Meta said that the messaging platform was encrypted, adding that what was sent between two persons cannot be read by it.

During the proceedings, the bench suggested that WhatsApp file an affidavit explaining its privacy policy and how data sharing activities under it would work, Bar and Bench reported.

The court listed the matter for further hearing on February 9 after adding the Union government as a party to the case.

After WhatsApp changed its terms of service and privacy policy in 2021, the Competition Commission of India launched an investigation. In November 2024, the regulatory body held that the messaging platform’s new policy amounted to abuse of dominance under the 2002 Competition Act, Bar and Bench reported.

WhatsApp was directed not to share data collected on its platforms with Meta or its products for five years.

However, WhatsApp and Meta moved the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal against the order.

In November, the tribunal partly ruled in favour of WhatsApp by setting aside the Competition Commission of India’s finding that Meta had leveraged a dominant position in the over-the-top media messaging market to protect its position in online display advertising, Bar and Bench reported.

But it also upheld the Rs 213 crore penalty imposed by the regulatory body.

WhatsApp and Meta moved the court against the penalty imposed on them.

On the morning of January 21, a group of around 70 people stood in front of the Tanot Mata temple in Rajasthan’s Jaisalmer district, roughly 30 km away from the India-Pakistan border.

After praying at the temple, the group began to beat drums and set off on a long march along the roads of the Thar desert.

As they marched, they raised the slogan, “Oran bachao, gochar bacho!” – save orans and gochars, referring to community groves and grazing lands that they see as sacred.

The same day, the Rajasthan government allocated 745 hectares of land to solar power companies in Jaisalmer’s Ramgarh tehsil. While locals do not yet know the exact piece of land that has been allocated, they fear that such a large tract will likely be land that has been classified in government records as wasteland, but that in fact is part of an oran, and is used by villages around it.

The marchers were walking in protest of exactly such practices. Over the last few years, they said, the Rajasthan government had allocated thousands of acres of orans land in the state to renewable energy plants. These allocated lands also included ponds and other water bodies managed and protected by local communities, they noted.

This is particularly significant given that Rajasthan is India’s leading state in solar power, with an installed capacity of more than 22,000 MW. At least seven more projects that will use around 41,000 hectares of land are currently under construction in the state.

Conflicts and legal cases over these allocations are not new. The village Nedan, for instance, filed a case in 2018 to block a 600-MW hybrid solar-wind project that was being set up in its vicinity by the Adani group, arguing that it restricted access to orans that they used. In 2021, the Rajasthan High Court cancelled the allotment of land to the group.

The current padayatra is an effort to draw wider attention to the need to protect these lands. Residents of villages in Jaisalmer are marching 700 km through the district and Jodhpur to reach the state capital of Jaipur with one demand – that the government register all sacred groves in the state as such in land revenue records. According to Sumer Singh Bhati, a participant of the padayatra who is a camel herder and a conservationist from Jaisalmer, around 5.8 lakh hectares of orans in just that district need to be recorded as such. At present, only a few orans are formally registered – many, instead are recorded as “gair mumkin”, or uncultivable land, and “banjar”, or wasteland.

This is despite the fact that “on ground these lands have forests and wildlife, and we use them as grazing lands”, Bhati told Scroll over the phone as he took a short break from the yatra. “But the government has no intention to protect these. They are handing over these lands to power companies overnight.”

The marchers have walked through several villages surrounded by fields of solar panels that sprawl over thousands of hectares. Among the companies that operate in this region are ReNew, which has a 300-MW plant in Sanwata, Adani Green, which has a 360-MW project in Nedan, and MW Hild Energy a 334-MW Hild Energy plant in Bhopa.

The protestors have been stopping at various villages along its route, holding meetings at which their concerns are discussed – videos of the march on social media show the team being welcomed by local residents with garlands and food.

The eighth day of the yatra saw a positive development for the protestors: Jaisalmer’s district collector notified more than 2,000 hectares of “banjar” and “gair mumkin” lands in Jaisalmer’s Fatehgrah and Ramgarh tehsils as orans in the revenue record.

Meanwhile, the marchers are pressing on. As of February 1, they had covered more than 200 km and reached Pokhran. The padyatra is expected to conclude in Jaipur by late February, just before the panchayat elections of the state, which are expected to be held sometime after February 25.

“We are ready to boycott the elections if our demands are not met,” said Kundan Singh, a resident of Mokla village and a participant in the walk. One of the marchers’ slogans voices this demand: “No oran, no vote.”

Confusion in land records

The yatris’ demands are in keeping with past directives of the Supreme Court, including one issued in 2024.

In fact, the court’s orders went further than the measure that the marchers are demanding. In 2005, a court-empowered committee had recommended formally classifying orans, not just as orans, but as “deemed forests” – the court directed Rajasthan to implement this recommendation in 2018.

“Deemed forest means that on paper so far, the forest department does not have it recorded as forest, but since it seems like a forest on ground, it will be recorded as one,” said Sumit Dookia, associate professor in the University School of Environment Management, at GGS Indraprastha University in Delhi, and an honorary scientific advisor at the ERDS Foundation, which works with local communities to conserve the great Indian bustard, a critically endangered bird found in Rajasthan.

Dookia explained that once a patch of land was converted to a deemed forest, it would enjoy a significantly higher degree of protection. If the government wanted to use it for any activity unconnected to forestry, it would first have to clear a proposal through a regional empowered committee at the state level, and then through the environment ministry.

In contrast, diversion of grazing land or wasteland for any activity not connected with forests only needs to be approved at the district and state level, Dookia said.

More than five years after the Supreme Court’s 2018 order, in 2024, Aman Singh, founder of the Alwar-based Krishi Avam Paristhitiki Vikas Sansthan, filed a petition that in the court, arguing that the order was not being complied with. According to the petition, only 5,000 orans of an estimated 25,000 in the state had been converted to deemed forests.

In December that year, the court directed the Rajasthan forest department to carry out “detailed on-ground mapping of the identified groves” and classify them as deemed forests.

But the marchers, and other activists, argued that there is likely lacuna in the court’s order, and in its implementation.

They noted that in February 2018, after the Supreme Court issued directions in the matter, Rajasthan’s forest department had published a district-wise list of orans that were from then on classified as deemed forests. But the list was incomplete, they pointed out, because the government only converted those orans that were already registered as such to forests in revenue records. Several others, which were registered as “gair mumkin” or “banjar” and which were used as orans, were not converted to forests.

Protecting species

The protection of orans also has ecological ramifications, the marchers say. The court echoed this observation in its 2024 order.

It directed that “given the ecological and cultural importance of sacred groves”, the lands should be declared as “community reserves” under the Wildlife Protection Act. Under the act, such a status would mandate that the area be legally protected as a forest, but also that community members be involved in managing it.

This is particularly important for orans in Jaisalmer district, which are home to the great Indian bustard. The bird, locally known as godavan, is one of the world’s heaviest flying birds. At present, only about 150 individuals are left in the wild in India, most of them in Rajasthan.

“There are eight to nine orans where the great Indian bustard is found, but these orans are either partially recorded in revenue records or not recorded at all,” said Dookia. “As of now, these habitats are completely open. Recording them as forests will ensure they come under the purview of a protected law.”

The installation of transmission lines for solar and wind projects on orans has proved to be a grave threat to the species – the bird has poor frontal vision and cannot see the wires clearly while flying. Thus, several have died after colliding with them, as well as with windmills of wind projects. In this regard, the Supreme Court in 2021 directed a ban on putting up overhead transmission lines in new projects in Rajasthan, and ordered the installation on existing ones of bird diverters, disc- or spiral-shaped devices that hang on the lines and can be easily seen by birds.

Another rare species that the region is home to is the caracal, a rare wild cat considered “locally endangered”.

“The government is giving away these lands to where the godavan lives and where the caracal lives,” said Singh. “Where will these species go?”

Community involvement

Some experts worry that categorising orans as deemed forests could, in effect, restrict communities’ access to those lands.

“Most community reserves are controlled by the forest department, thereby taking away communities’ rights to manage these forests”, said Mrinali K, climate research lead at Land Conflict Watch, who has closely followed conflicts around renewable energy projects across the country.

Marchers, too, echoed this fear. “We are supporting the government in recording these lands as deemed forest,” said Singh. “But it is essential that the rules of management and protection should be akin to how we communities manage the orans.”

Singh explained that many such rules have been in force for many generations and are deeply linked to the communities’ beliefs – in fact, he explained, many orans are recorded in revenue records as lands that belong to community shrines located in the orans. Since orans are considered sacred, he noted, communities ban hunting in them, as well as the cutting of tree branches. In contrast, he added, officials and staff of the forest department are “unfamiliar with the rules of oran management”.

The Allahabad High Court has held that no permission is needed for holding a religious prayer meeting on private property in Uttar Pradesh as long as the activity remains within private premises.

The court, however, said that if such a meeting has to “spill over the public road or public property”, the petitioners must inform the police and, if needed, secure permissions.

A two-judge bench was responding to petitions by Christian bodies Maranatha Full Gospel Ministries and Emmanuel Grace Charitable Trust. The organisations said in their petitions that they submitted several representations seeking to organise religious congregations in their private premises, but received no response from the authorities.

A division bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Siddharth Nandan took note of the Uttar Pradesh government’s submission that there is no legal requirement for permission to be sought for such gatherings.

Religious gatherings form part of the fundamental right guaranteed under Article 25 of the Constitution, which deals with the freedom of religion, the court said.

The judges further said that the state may decide whether any protection needs to be provided, and the manner in which it would do so.

"However, it is a concomitant duty on the State to ensure that property, rights and life of the petitioner are protected at all cost,” the bench said while disposing of the petitions. “How this is done is entirely discretion of the police.”

The Supreme Court on Monday sought responses from the Centre and 12 state governments on a petition contending that anti-conversion laws in these states criminalise voluntary and conscience-based change of faith, The Times of India reported.

The petition has also argued that requiring government approval for conversion violates citizens’ right to privacy.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant issued notice to the Union law ministry, and to the governments of Himachal Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Haryana, Arunachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.

The petition was filed by the National Council of Churches in India, which submitted that the anti-conversion laws “incentivise” vigilante groups to commit acts of violence against religious minorities, The Hindu reported.

“So, even if there is no case at all against a person, someone would make a complaint and that person would be arrested,” the lawyer for the petitioner, Meenakshi Arora, argued.

Arora urged the court to stay the operation of the states’ anti-religious conversion laws.

Appearing for the Centre, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said that the Union government had its responses ready and contended that the petitioner’s submissions were “not factually correct”, the newspaper reported.

Mehta contended that state governments had enough basis to introduce these laws, and that a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court had already approved the validity of such legislations, The Times of India reported.

The Supreme Court on Monday said that it agreed “in principle” with concerns that relying solely on self-declaration of caste in the proposed 2027 census could compromise data accuracy, The Indian Express reported.

However, it held that the manner of caste enumeration was a matter for census authorities and domain experts to decide.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi declined to intervene in the technical aspects of the exercise, but asked the Centre and census authorities to consider the concerns that have been raised, Live Law reported.

The court was hearing a public interest litigation filed by Delhi resident Aakash Goel, The Indian Express reported.

The petitioner said that he was not opposed to the caste census but questioned the absence of any publicly disclosed criteria or standardised methodology for recording, classifying or verifying caste identity during the upcoming census.

The petitioner’s lawyer submitted that the caste data would have long-term consequences for welfare policies, reservations in government employment and educational institutions, and the delimitation of parliamentary and assembly constituencies. The lawyer argued that such data needed to be based on verifiable material, The Times of India reported.

Kant agreed that the concern was valid, observing that nothing should be included or excluded on the basis of “a certificate, the genuineness of which might be either doubtful or unverified”, The Indian Express reported.

In its order disposing of the petition, the Supreme Court said that it had no reason to doubt that the respondent authorities would evolve a “robust mechanism” to rule out the mistakes flagged by the petitioner.

It then directed the Union government, the registrar general and census commissioner of India, and the directorate of census operations to consider the petitioner’s suggestions and concerns, The Indian Express reported.

India will conduct its population census, including caste enumeration, in two phases in 2027.

The last decennial census exercise was held in 2011. In 2020, India was set to begin the first phase of the exercise – in which housing data is collected – but it had to be delayed as the coronavirus pandemic hit.

On April 30, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs approved the enumeration of caste in the next census.

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

Also read: ‘The Caste Con Census’: Anand Teltumbde argues that a nationwide caste census cannot annihilate it

A 28-year-old man from Maharashtra’s Nanded district was arrested on Monday for allegedly killing one of his six-year-old twin daughters to qualify for contesting panchayat elections, The Times of India reported.

Under the Maharashtra Panchayat Raj Act, persons with more than two children cannot contest rural local body elections. Pandurang Kondamangale had three children: a three-year-old son and twin daughters aged six.

The panchayat elections are expected to be held in June.

Police said that Kondamangale allegedly acted on the advice of the current sarpanch of his village, Ganesh Shinde, who has been booked as a co-accused in the case, The Indian Express reported.

Sau Chaitanya, the commissioner of police of Telangana’s Nizamabad district, told the newspaper that Kondamangale allegedly took one of his twin daughters, Prachi, to the district’s Nizamsagar Canal, which is surrounded by agricultural fields. “He allegedly pushed the girl into the water and fled the scene,” the police officer was quoted as saying.

However, villagers working nearby heard a splash and reached the canal, where they found the child floating in the water. The local police were alerted and the body was recovered.

The pictures of the girl were shared widely on social media. Someone from the village in Maharashtra identified Prachi and alerted the Telangana Police, Chaitanya told The Indian Express.

One of the police teams later reached the village in Maharashtra and questioned the father.

Kondamangale initially claimed that his daughter was undergoing treatment at a distant health centre but later confessed to the crime, the police officer was quoted as saying.

Kondamangale has been booked on charges of murder and criminal conspiracy.

United States President Donald Trump on Monday said that India and the US had agreed to a trade deal and that he was cutting tariffs imposed on New Delhi to 18% from 25% with immediate effect.

The announcement came after Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke on Monday.

The decision to cut the tariffs and the agreement on the trade deal was “out of friendship and respect for Prime Minister Modi” and “as per his request”, Trump said on social media.

US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor told NDTV that the total tariff on New Delhi will be 18%.

“That will be finalised over the next few days,” Gor told NDTV. “There are some items that need to be signed but the total tariff will be at 18%.”

Modi said on social media that he is “delighted that Made in India products will now have a reduced tariff of 18%”.

“When two large economies and the world’s largest democracies work together, it benefits our people and unlocks immense opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation,” Modi said, adding that Trump’s “leadership is vital for global peace, stability and prosperity”.

Modi said that India “fully supports his efforts for peace”.

Wonderful to speak with my dear friend President Trump today. Delighted that Made in India products will now have a reduced tariff of 18%. Big thanks to President Trump on behalf of the 1.4 billion people of India for this wonderful announcement.

When two large economies and the…

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 2, 2026

Indian goods had been facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%, including a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August for buying Russian oil.

On Monday, Trump said that India will “move forward to reduce” its tariffs and non-tariff barriers against the US to zero.

“The prime minister also committed to ‘buy American’, at a much higher level, in addition to over $500 billion dollars of US energy, technology, agricultural, coal and many other products,” Trump said. “Our amazing relationship with India will be even stronger going forward.”

US Secretary for Agriculture Brooke Rollins said the new trade deal with lead to more American farm products being exported to Indian markets.

“In 2024, America’s agricultural trade deficit with India was $1.3 billion,” Rollins said. “India’s growing population is an important market for American agricultural products and today’s deal will go a long way to reducing this deficit.”

Trump said that he and Modi had spoken about several matters, including trade and ending Russia’s war on Ukraine.

He said that Modi had agreed to “stop buying Russian oil, and to buy much more from the United States and, potentially, Venezuela”.

“This will help end the war in Ukraine, which is taking place right now, with thousands of people dying each and every week!” Trump said on social media.

Two days earlier, Trump had told reporters that India will buy oil from Venezuela instead of Iran. This was after the US reportedly told India that it could soon resume purchasing Venezuelan oil to help replace oil imports from Russia.

The punitive tariffs of 25% on India were introduced as part of Trump’s pressure campaign against countries purchasing discounted oil from Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine. The US has claimed that India stopped buying Russian oil after the punitive tariffs were imposed.

However, India had said that the US tariffs are unjustified and has maintained that its oil purchases are guided by the country’s energy security needs.

The Supreme Court on Monday granted bail to three persons accused of tampering with blood samples in connection with an investigation into a car crash in Pune in May 2024 that killed two, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan granted bail to Aditya Avinash Sood, Ashish Satish Mittal and Santosh Gaikwad, saying that all three of them had been in custody for 18 months.

“..their continued incarceration will greatly prejudice...[the matter],” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying.

The case pertains to the death of two persons after a 17-year-old boy allegedly crashed into their motorbike with his Porsche car in Pune on May 19, 2024. The minor, reportedly from the family of a prominent city realtor, was allegedly driving under the influence of alcohol.

He was booked for culpable homicide not amounting to murder.

The prosecution had also alleged that the father of the juvenile driver, his wife and his associates conspired with doctors at Sassoon General Hospital to manipulate test reports of the blood samples collected after the accident to check for alcohol content.

The legal news portal quoted the prosecution as claiming that Rs 3 lakh was also paid to the hospital staff through intermediaries to ensure that the tests showed no traces of alcohol.

Gaikwad was accused of having facilitated the monetary transaction. He was arrested on June 4, 2024.

Sood and Mittal were arrested after their blood samples were alleged to be used for tests linked to two minors who were in the car with the 17-year-old driver at the time of the accident, PTI reported.

During the proceedings on Monday, the bench allowed the petitions for bail filed by the three men on the condition that they comply with the requirements of the trial court, Bar and Bench reported.

The Supreme Court also observed that the parents had failed to control their children.

“The main one responsible is the parents who give money to children to have gala time,” the legal news portal quoted the court as saying. “Parents have no time to spend with children and that is why what is the best thing to give – the ATM card!”

The Bombay High Court in December had rejected the bail petitions of eight persons accused in the case, including Gaikwad, Sood and Mittal.

The case had sparked widespread outrage after the Juvenile Justice Board had, on the day of the crash, granted bail to the minor who was driving the car. The board had directed him to write an essay and work with the traffic police for 15 days.

Following the outrage, the Juvenile Justice Board cancelled the minor’s bail order on May 22, 2024, and remanded him to an observation home.

On June 25, 2024, the High Court granted him bail and ordered that he should be placed under the care of his aunt.

In July, the Juvenile Justice Board ruled that the 17-year-old will be tried as a minor.

In the early hours of July 30 2024, a landslide in the Wayanad district of Kerala state, India, killed 400 people. The Punjirimattom, Mundakkai, Vellarimala and Chooralmala villages in the Western Ghats mountain range turned into a dystopian rubble of uprooted trees and debris.

A coalition of scientists that quantifies the links between climate change and extreme weather, known as World Weather Attribution, highlighted that human-induced climate change caused 10% more rainfall than usual in this area, contributing to the landslide.

Known for its welfare achievements such as universal literacy, public health and education, Kerala’s disaster management involved a swift relief response and the announcement of rehabilitation measures. But our research into the consequences of long-term environmental change reveals the crevices in this state-citizen relationship.

The Kerala government’s response to the landslide has focused on two townships – one in Kalpetta and the other in Nedumbala – that are promised to be of high-quality construction, with facilities characteristic of upmarket, private housing projects. Of the total 430 beneficiary families, each will be given a 93m² concrete house in a seven-cent plot (a cent is a hundredth of an acre). There will be marketplaces, playgrounds and community centres at both sites.

An AI-generated video of the Kalpetta township promised a glittering new life for its residents. Construction of the two sites was entrusted to the Uralungal Labour Contract Cooperative Society, a labour union known for building quality infrastructure, to raise credibility.

A man we spoke to as part of our ongoing research in Vellarimala was happy about the money he will make from rising property prices once his household receives a new home. “It is a great deal,” he told us. “We get seven cents of land and a new house. We estimate the property [will] hit a value of 10 million rupees (£85,600) in a few years. Also, since the government provided the house, we just have to protest if there is a complaint.”

We also spoke to two citizen groups that mobilised victims after the landslide, enabling settlers – who came to the area as plantation labourers during colonial rule in the 20th century – to voice their grief, loss and trauma. This highlighted their history of migration from the plains of Kerala. Although they sought optional cash compensation initially, they have largely accepted being given a new home in the township, drawn by its future value.

But while township development seems to be an apt response, Kerala will struggle to cope with recurring cycles of disasters and disaster management without addressing the factors that trigger or amplify these calamities.

The townships are being built on 115 hectares of two tea plantations that have been bought by the Kerala government. With roots in British colonial rule, plantations represent a significant alteration of Wayanad’s ecology. The landslide’s route was full of tea plantations and most affected families were non-Indigenous plantation workers.

Tourism is also booming here, with hundreds of resorts, homestays and hotels, and a glass bridge that welcomes tourists to visit the forests and plantations of Vellarimala.

Less than three miles away, a landslide in 2019 in Puthumala killed 17 people. Although it was a warning, construction of buildings has continued unchecked. A tunnel that connects Wayanad with the plains of Kerala has been proposed, despite a state government committee report highlighting it would pass through areas that are at a moderate-to-high risk of landslides.

Differing values

Resettlement plans that focus on glitzy townships can fail to consider the most marginalised people, especially in societies like India that are marked by social hierarchies. A couple of Indigenous families, referred to as Adivasis in India, were initially offered space in the township. They refused it, citing their separation from the means of livelihood and cultural resources that the nearby forests provide.

For a long time, they have resisted efforts to relocate them from the forests – first in the name of animal conservation, and now because of the threat of climate disasters. This is despite the efforts of the government’s forest department to portray the shifting of these families as a heroic rescue effort.

Two versions of the value attached to land are clashing here. Settlers see land as a commodity, so prize the two townships announced in Wayanad for their increasing land value. But Indigenous families hold deep cultural ties with the lands they are being asked to leave behind.

This is not just a romanticised connection with nature. Indigenous families will have to forgo hard-won forest rights. Leaving means losing access to honey, resins and medicinal plants that they trade for cash when food from the forests is insufficient.

Disasters like the Wayanad landslide expose the faultlines in both crisis management and state-citizen relationships. How a disaster is handled shows the state believes people can be easily moved from one site to another, while extraction and capitalist accumulation must continue.

Disasters also reveal whose loss is valued by the state and whose is not. While settlers’ losses were compensated through townships that hold the possibility of rising property value, Indigenous citizens’ loss of deeper ties with the land and forests remains unaddressed.

We believe this calls for an urgent rethink. Disaster responses demand more than relocation of people from one vulnerable site to another, perpetuating an endless series of calamities and reconstruction. It demands a fundamental change in the model of development.

Ipshita Basu is Associate professor (Reader) in Global Development and Politics, University of Westminster.

Sudheesh RC is Assistant Professor of Social Sciences, National Law School of India University.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

A political row broke out after Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi in Parliament quoted an excerpt from the unpublished memoir of former Army chief MM Naravane. The excerpt was about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

Union ministers Rajnath Singh and Amit Shah objected to Gandhi’s remarks, saying that the book had not been published and accused the Congress leader of misleading the Lok Sabha.

In his memoir, Naravane wrote that he had in August 2020 sought orders from the political leadership to respond to Chinese tanks moving towards Rechin La in eastern Ladakh. He said he was told by Defence Minister Singh that the military was to do whatever it deems appropriate.

This implied that the Indian response was to be “purely a military decision” and that “the onus was now totally on [him]”, the former Army chief wrote. The incident Naravane referred to had taken place amid the border tensions between India and China in eastern Ladakh.

During the ruckus on Monday, Speaker Om Birla ruled that no book or newspaper clipping could be quoted on a matter unrelated to the proceedings and adjourned the House for the day.

Gandhi told reporters that a country’s leader “is supposed to give direction” and not “run away from decisions” by leaving them to others. Read on.

The Union government claimed before the Supreme Court that activist Sonam Wangchuk wanted Ladakh to have a violent agitation similar to the ones that took place in Bangladesh and Nepal. The submissions were made as the bench heard a plea by Wangchuk’s wife challenging the activist’s detention under the National Security Act.

The government said that Wangchuk had referred to the Centre as “them”, alleging that it showed secessionist tendencies. “This ‘us’ and ‘them’ is enough for NSA detention,” the government argued. “There is no us and them. We are all Indians.”

The solicitor general added: “He wants Ladakh to become Nepal or Bangladesh? This is what clearly he wants to say. We all know what happened in Bangladesh. He is targeting the impressionable youth.” Read on.

The Supreme Court directed the Union government to constitute a tribunal to adjudicate the dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu about the sharing of water from the Pennaiyar river. The bench ordered the tribunal to be set up within a month and Tamil Nadu’s complaint be placed before it.

Tamil Nadu had approached the Supreme Court in 2018 challenging Karnataka constructing check dams and diversion structures on the river. The state argued that Karnataka cannot use the river water in a manner detrimental to Tamil Nadu’s interests.

The state contended that the water of an inter-state river was a national asset and that an 1892 agreement was valid and binding on both sides.

The court was informed that the negotiations between the states had failed and adjudication by a tribunal cannot be avoided. Read on.

A court in Bangladesh sentenced deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to 10 years imprisonment in two corruption cases relating to alleged irregularities in the allocation of land in a government housing project.

The cases had been filed by the anti-corruption commission for the alleged irregularities linked to the allocation of two 10-katha plots under the Rajuk New Town Project near Dhaka. The prosecution claimed that the persons accused in the matter had manipulated the allocation process.

The verdict came ahead of the general elections on February 12, the first since she was ousted. Read more.

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The Union government on Monday claimed that activist Sonam Wangchuk wanted Ladakh to face a violent agitation similar to the ones that took place in Bangladesh and Nepal, Bar and Bench reported.

The submissions were made before a Supreme Court bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and PB Varale by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta in a petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo challenging the activist’s detention under the National Security Act.

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

On Monday, the government said that Wangchuk had referred to the Centre as “them”, alleging that it showed secessionist tendencies, Bar and Bench reported.

“This ‘us’ and ‘them’ is enough for NSA detention,” the government was quoted as having argued. “There is no us and them. We are all Indians.”

The activist had instigated “Gen Z” to indulge in a civil war, the legal news portal quoted the government as having alleged. Gen Z generally refers to persons born between the late 1990s and 2010.

“He [Wangchuk] wants Ladakh to become Nepal or Bangladesh?” Mehta asked. “This is what clearly he wants to say. We all know what happened in Bangladesh. He is targeting the impressionable youth.”

He added: “The moment you say ours and theirs in this country, you are doing something against the country. There is no ‘they’. It is ‘our’ government.”

In August 2024, Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina had been forced to flee to India after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

In Nepal, the political crisis began following protests sparked by the government’s ban on 26 social media platforms on September 4. Although the KP Sharma Oli government lifted the ban four days later, the agitation evolved into a broader protest against alleged corruption and misgovernance.

The deadly protests forced Oli to resign as the prime minister. The demonstrations were described as a protest mainly by Gen Z.

Citing a speech by Wangchuk, Mehta alleged on Monday that the activist had hoped for a riot-like situation similar to Nepal.

“He is misleading the young generation to do what Nepal did,” Bar and Bench quoted him as alleging. “The illustration of Mahatma Gandhi is only a facade to hide an inflammatory speech.”

On Thursday, Wangchuk had told the court that criticising the government is a democratic right and that such statements do not threaten national security.

His lawyer Kapil Sibal had said that there was no case of violence against Wangchuk, and that only acts of violence attributed to him would constitute grounds of detention.

Sibal said that several statements cited to justify Wangchuk’s detention were either misattributed or misconstrued. He added that it had been wrongly alleged that the activist said he would overthrow the government if Ladakh was not given statehood. There was nothing wrong with protesting against the destruction of the environment in Ladakh, he added.

Wangchuk was quoted by his counsel as having said that a government that did not have affection for citizens and did not care for the environment was “an obstacle in the progress of the nation”.

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

A political row erupted on Monday after Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi quoted in Parliament an excerpt from the unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief Manoj Mukund Naravane about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

Gandhi’s remarks during a discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President’s Address were interrupted by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Union Home Minister Amit Shah, leading to ruckus in the Lok Sabha.

In his memoir Four Stars of Destiny, which is yet to be released, Naravane wrote that on August 31, 2020, he had sought orders from India’s political and military leadership for the Army to respond to Chinese tanks moving towards Rechin La in eastern Ladakh.

Naravane wrote that he had, in line with the protocol, sought “clear direction” from Singh, National Security Adviser Ajit Doval, General Bipin Rawat, who was the chief of defence staff at the time, and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar.

Naravane said that hours after first seeking orders, he had been told by Singh that he had spoken with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and that the military was to do whatever its deem appropriate.

The former Army chief wrote in his memoir that this implied that the Indian response was to be “purely a military decision” and that “the onus was now totally on [him]”.

The excerpts from the memoir had been reported in December 2023 and were quoted by The Caravan magazine on Saturday.

The incident Naravane referred to had taken place amid the border tensions between India and China in eastern Ladakh. Two months before the incident, in June 2020, a violent face-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers in Galwan valley along the Line of Actual Control had led to the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers. Beijing said that the clash left four of its soldiers dead.

On Monday, the proceedings of the Lok Sabha were disrupted as Gandhi began quoting from the book.

The defence minister asked the leader of the Opposition to clarify whether the book had been published, PTI reported.

In response, Gandhi said that the source he was quoting from was authentic, insisting that he can read from it.

Gandhi said that he had not intended to speak on the particular matter, but decided to do so after Bharatiya Janata Party MP Tejasvi Surya questioned the Congress’ patriotism, the news agency reported.

Shah said that Surya had not questioned the Opposition’s patriotism.

Singh reiterated that the book had not been published and accused Gandhi of “misleading the House”.

Shah asked how Gandhi could quote from the book when it had not been released, India Today reported.

Gandhi said that he was quoting from the magazine article to express his views.

Speaker Om Birla, citing rules, said that no book or newspaper clipping could be quoted on a matter not related to the proceedings of the House, PTI reported.

Amid the uproar, Birla adjourned the proceedings in the Lok Sabha for some time. When the ruckus continued as the House convened, it was adjourned for the day.

Gandhi told reporters outside Parliament that “the leader of the country is supposed to give direction”.

“The leader of the country is not supposed to run away from decisions and leave decisions to other people’s shoulders,” ANI quoted Gandhi as saying. “That is what the prime minister has done.”

The book was to be published in April 2024, but has not been released yet. In October, Naravane had said that the publisher was waiting for the Union government’s approval.

The Union government has not commented on the contents of Naravane’s memoir.

However, on Monday, the defence minister said in Parliament that if the book would have been published if its contents were accurate and if Naravane thinks that his memoir has been unjustly barred from being released, he could challenge it in court.

The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Union government to constitute a dispute tribunal to adjudicate the dispute between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu over the sharing of water from the Pennaiyar river, The Hindu reported.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and NV Anjaria directed the Union government to constitute the tribunal within a month. Tamil Nadu’s complaint in the matter can be placed before the tribunal, it said.

Tamil Nadu had moved the Supreme Court in 2018 through an original suit against Karnataka challenging the construction of check dams and diversion structures on the Pennaiyar river, The Hindu reported.

The state argued that Karnataka had no right to use the river water in a manner detrimental to its interests.

Tamil Nadu contended that the water of an inter-state river is a national asset and that no single state can claim exclusive ownership of it. It said that an 1892 agreement governing the usage of the river water was “valid and binding” on all party states, The Hindu reported.

The state further argued that a river included its streams, tributaries and other watercourses that contribute directly or indirectly to its flow. On that basis, it said the Markandeyanadhi, a major tributary with a catchment area in both states, could not be kept outside the scope of the 1892 agreement.

Any new construction obstructing the flow of the Markandeya river, it argued, was governed by the agreement.

Tamil Nadu had also challenged Karnataka’s position that it was free to construct diversion structures or large dams across the Markandeya river.

During the proceedings in November 2024, the Union government had informed the court that negotiations between the two states had failed to resolve the dispute.

Previously, the Supreme Court had said that under the 1956 Inter-State River Water Disputes Act, a tribunal could be constituted only once the Union government concludes that the dispute cannot be settled through negotiations.

The court had reserved its decision in the matter in December.

In its order on Monday, the bench said that it found no reason to refrain from directing the Union government to constitute the tribunal, PTI reported.