The Karnataka High Court has granted bail to a 25-year-old woman from West Bengal who had been arrested in January for shouting “Jai Bangla” during a demolition drive in Bengaluru.

On March 11, Justice S Rachaiah noted that Sarbanu Khatun was “instigated” to shout “Jai Bharath Mata Ki Jai”. Khatun shouted “Jai Bharath Mata Ki Jai” thrice after saying “Jai Bangla” once, he added.

The court also took into account that the woman had two minor children to take care of.

“…it is appropriate to grant her bail by imposing suitable conditions that would take care of the apprehension of the prosecution,” the judge said in his order.

Advocate Rashif Nayarmoole, appearing for Khatun, said that the incident had taken place during a demolition drive to remove unauthorised houses on a plot of land in Anekal Taluk.

Khatun is a resident of West Bengal’s Nandigram and works as a domestic worker in Bengaluru.

A video of her, along with others, shouting slogans during the drive was circulated widely on social media. Subsequently, a complaint was filed against the woman and a first information report was registered at the Hebbagodi police station on January 11.

The case was filed under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, residence, etc, and making false statements with the intent to commit mischief.

Section 152 pertaining to acts that endanger the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India was also invoked. Critics have described this section as a “reincarnation” of the repealed sedition law under the erstwhile Indian Penal Code.

Khatun was arrested in the matter on January 12.

An additional sessions and district judge at Anekal had earlier rejected Khatun’s application for bail, after which she moved the High Court.

In the High Court, the counsel for the state government submitted that an Indian national should not have shouted “Jai Bangla”, which hurt the sentiments of Indians.

However, Nayarmoole submitted that the woman had no intention to hurt the sentiments of Indians. “When she was provoked to say ‘Jai Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, in order to avoid further conflict, she might have uttered such slogan,” the High Court order quoted the advocate as submitting.

The advocate also argued that no action was taken against those who provoked her to shout the slogans. Nayarmoole added that the police registered a suo motu case based only on a social media video without conducting a preliminary inquiry.

Granting the woman bail, the judge directed Khatun to execute a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh, along with a local surety to the same amount.

India’s environment ministry notified the new solid waste management rules of 2026 on January 27, superseding the 2016 rules. The new rules signal a shift towards a more systematic compliance architecture, with a clearer outline of duties for waste generators, a revised definition of Bulk Waste Generators, and higher landfill user fees for mixed waste to encourage segregation.

Well-intentioned as the new rules are, experts caution against gaps in implementation that have dogged solid waste management in India for decades.

Illustrating this are the towering landfills in New Delhi – Bhalaswa, Ghazipur and Okhla – symbols of the city’s historical failure to segregate waste at source. Delhi leads all Indian cities, generating approximately 600 grams of waste per person per day.

Nearly 64% of the collected waste is processed, according to the Central Pollution Control Bureau, while the remaining 36% or 4,241 tonnes, find its way to unsanitary landfills, or dumpsites everyday.

These landfills and dumpsites are silent contributors to air pollution through the year as well as to greenhouse gas emissions and heat stress during the summers. Biomass and waste burning are the second largest contributors to particulate matter emissions in Delhi, contributing 23% to PM10 and 24% to PM2.5, according to one source apportionment study.

When biodegradable waste accumulates and is left to rot, it produces methane, which has a warming potential 80 times greater than that of carbon dioxide, over a 20-year-period, and is the second-largest contributor to global warming. According to another study, higher temperature zones within the Ghazipur landfill are widening and reaching the surface, which is unsuitable.

“There are not many provisions in the new rules that directly address air pollution or heat stress, despite the clear link between waste burning, emissions and air quality,” says Shrotik Bose, Research Associate, Solid Waste Management and Circular Economy, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).

What the new rules say

The new rules, which come into effect on April 1, mandate four-way segregation of waste, marking a shift away from the three-way segregation system, which divided waste into dry, wet, and domestic hazardous waste. Now, waste must be segregated into dry, wet, sanitary and special care waste, which includes medicines, paint cans, bulbs, and mercury thermometers, among others.

Extended Bulk Waste Generator Responsibility is also introduced, to put a stricter focus on generators who produce more than 100 kg of waste or occupy more than 20,000 square meters of area, or consume more than 40,000 litres of water per day. Bulk waste generators make up 30% of total solid waste generation and must either treat wet waste on-site, or send it to an appropriate facility and obtain an Extended Bulk Waste Generator Responsibility certificate as proof instead.

Restrictions on landfills are strengthened, with only non-recyclable, non-energy recoverable waste and inert material being allowed and higher landfill fees prescribed for local bodies sending unsegregated waste to sanitary landfills.

Further, the rules mandate mapping and assessment of all legacy waste dumpsites and provide for time-bound biomining and bioremediation. These are microorganism-based technologies – the former extracts metals from the waste and the latter helps break down toxic contaminants.

“I think the 2026 rules have addressed several gaps from the 2016 framework. The move to four-way segregation is a step up – it shows higher ambition, and that’s always good to have. Overall, there is greater clarity now about who is responsible for what. The document has absorbed many lessons from the past decade. But ultimately, the real test will be implementation.” says Lakshmi P, Head of Impact, Cleanhub, an environmental technology company focused on plastic waste collection.

A centralised online portal is being developed to track all stages of solid waste management, including waste generation, collection, transportation, processing at Material Recovery Facilities, and disposal. Urban local bodies are central to these operations.

According to Bose, whether the new framework and portal will improve the functioning of ULBs is unclear. “The real challenge lies in rewriting old agreements with waste processing facilities, registering them on the portal, and managing compliance at that scale,” he says.

Waste-to-energy plants

The new rules encourage circularity by restricting landfill dumping, but they still reinforce waste-to-energy plants as a permissible processing pathway for waste, despite longstanding concerns of their contribution to air pollution. An inspection by the Central Pollution Control Board in response to the National Green Tribunal found the Okhla waste-to-energy incinerator releasing dioxins and furans, highly toxic carcinogens at levels almost 900% above permissible limits.

“In India, waste really has calorific value only after proper segregation. But once you segregate, the recycling industry is strong enough to absorb most of that material. The truly non-recyclable fraction is actually very small – maybe 5% to 10% by weight. At the same time, Extended Producer Responsibility and better product design are supposed to reduce non-recyclable plastics. So waste-to-energy, EPR, and recycling all end up attacking the same waste.” says Lakshmi.

She adds, “WtE plants need to run for many years to become economically viable, which creates pressure to keep feeding them waste – often mixed waste. These plants operate at relatively low temperatures, meaning toxins such as dioxins and heavy metals are not effectively broken down. When located within or near cities, this can pose significant environmental and public health risks.”

“It’s a common misconception that technology can fix this,” says Dr Ruby Makhija, an opthamologist and founder of the Why Waste Wednesdays Foundation that has been working to scale a zero waste to landfills model across Delhi-NCR. “No matter how advanced or expensive the machinery, it will fail if waste is not segregated at source. Nearly 70% of effective waste management depends on segregation, but this is not treated as an investment priority.”

The new rules require waste-to-energy and cement plants to increase their Refuse Derived Fuel sources from 5% to 15% over a period of six years. RDF has been defined in the new rules as “Fuel produced by shredding and dehydrating municipal solid waste with high calorific value, primarily consisting of non-recyclable plastic, paper and textiles.”

Health and waste management

Despite mandates on paper, thousands of tonnes of mixed waste continue to reach landfills in Delhi due to weak enforcement, waiver of fines, and limited Resident Welfare Association budgets.

“In cities like Indore which have succeeded in mainstreaming segregation, it’s because the state itself was involved in going door to door and creating awareness. Non profits are treated like partners. With the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, NGOs are not seen as partners but as dispensable actors.” said Bharati Chaturvedi, founder and director of the Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group, a Delhi-based advocacy group working on circularity and waste.

According to Makhija, closing the environmental and health gap in waste management requires less reliance on technological fixes and more on restoring accountability in the system. “If a person is being asked to segregate waste at home and they do it properly, there must be assurance that the system beyond them is already in place. What happens too often is that if residents segregate, when the collector arrives and mixes everything again, all that effort goes to waste. That completely erodes trust. At the same time, Urban Local Bodies collect user fees for waste management – but how many residents actually pay them?”

The consequences of mounting mixed waste is tangible. An accidental fire in Bhalaswa landfill in 2022 led concentrations of PM2.5 to increase by 45%-55%, while PM 10 rose by 40%-50% in the vicinity. Toxic nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, and sulphur dioxide levels rose between 25 and 100% too, illustrating how waste burning can trigger abrupt localised air pollution that rivals some of the city’s worst smog events.

Until segregation and decentralised processing are backed by both institutional enforcement and individual responsibility, the fight against toxic air and rising heat will remain incomplete, says Makhija. “Waste does not disappear once it leaves the doorstep; it returns through the air people breathe, the water they drink, and the food grown in contaminated soil,” she says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Union government directed airlines to allocate a minimum of 60% of the seats on every flight without selection charges to ensure fair access. Airlines are also required to seat passengers travelling on the same Passenger Name Record together “preferably in adjacent seats”, according to the orders issued by the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

Additionally, airlines have been instructed to make the process of transporting sports equipment and musical instruments more transparent and passenger-friendly. They were further told to publish clear policies on the carriage of pets. Read on.

A day after quitting the Congress in the run-up to Assam Assembly elections, Pradyut Bordoloi joined the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Bordoloi is one of the Congress’ three Lok Sabha MPs from Assam.

He stated that he made the decision as he had felt humiliated on certain matters. The Congress described his resignation as “very unfortunate”.

Before he resigned, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had invited Bordoloi to join the BJP, though he claimed that there had been no direct communication between them. Read on.

Israel claimed that it killed Iran’s Intelligence Minister Esmaeil Khatib in an airstrike in Tehran. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz also said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has authorised the country’s military to “[eliminate] any senior Iranian figure…without the need for additional approval”.

Oil prices fell by more than $2 per barrel after the Iraqi government and the Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq reached an agreement to resume oil exports through Turkey’s Ceyhan port.

Later in the day, Iranian officials said that a part of the refineries in Asaluyeh, linked to the South Pars gas field, was “hit by a projectile” fired by the Israeli-United States forces.

Earlier, the US said that it dropped several 5,000-pound, or 2,250 kg, bombs on Iranian missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz. Read on.

The Iran war is starting to hit India’s small manufacturers, write Vaishnavi Rathore and Johanna Deeksha.

The Allahabad High Court said the state must ensure that security is provided to persons facing threats for congregating to hold prayers at private properties in Uttar Pradesh. The bench added that Article 25 of the Constitution protects the right to congregate for worship for every religious group.

However, the provision does not accord protection to the incitement of one faith by another in the garb of prayer, it added. The court also said that congregating for prayer is a facet of the Abrahamic faiths. Read on.

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Uttarakhand resident Deepak Kumar has moved the High Court challenging the case against him and requesting a departmental inquiry against police officers who allegedly failed to act against hate crimes, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

Kumar and another person booked in the matter, Vijay Rawat, contended that the first information report filed against them is partisan.

The case against Kumar and Rawat was filed in late January. The two Hindu men had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in the Pauri Garhwal district.

A mob had on January 26 arrived at the shop of Vakeel Ahmed, objecting to him using the word “Baba” in the name of his shop. Kumar, a gym owner, and Rawat objected to the mob’s actions, after which they were asked not to intervene.

The FIR had been registered based on a complaint by two persons who are members of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The outfits are a group of Hindutva organisations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

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

Kumar had filed a complaint against the persons who had gathered in front of his gym, allegedly making hate speech, The Indian Express reported. However, the police had filed the case based on the complaint of an officer against unidentified persons in connection with the protests.

In the petition filed on March 13, Kumar stated that the police had failed to take action in the matter despite evidence that included videos of the incident and details of the persons, the newspaper reported.

The plea urged the court to direct the police to take immediate and effective action against the perpetrators of hate crimes and hate speech.

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

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

“I intended to convey that I was an Indian and that everyone is equal before the law,” Kumar told the newspaper.

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

He added that no one, whether a Hindu or a Muslim, should be targeted for their religion.

The filing of the FIR against Kumar and Rawat sparked criticism from several social media users, who said that Kumar was being targeted merely for speaking up for humanity and opposing the intimidation of a Muslim citizen.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said that Kumar was fighting for the Constitution and humanity.

The Allahabad High Court on Monday said that the state must ensure that security is provided to persons facing threats for congregating to hold prayers at private properties in Uttar Pradesh, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Siddharth Nandan added that Article 25 of the Constitution, which guarantees the fundamental right to freedom of religion, protects the right to congregate for worship for every religious group, Live Law reported.

However, the provision does not accord protection to the incitement of one faith by another in the garb of prayer, it added.

The bench added that there can be no impediment or embargo on prayers or religious functions being conducted within the private premises of a person, irrespective of their faith.

The court made the observations in a case pertaining to the decision of the administration in Uttar Pradesh to restrict the number of persons offering namaz during the Islamic holy month of Ramzan at a mosque in Sambhal district.

A petition had been filed in the court by a person alleging that he was being prevented from conducting prayers during Ramzan at a plot where he claimed the mosque existed.

On February 27, the bench rejected the administration’s decision to restrict the number of persons praying at the site. It had added that the officials should either resign or seek a transfer if they are unable to enforce the rule of law.

While disposing of the petition on Monday, the bench said: “Any objection taken by any person (individual or group) against prayers being conducted in a private space, should be taken cognisance of by the state and if need be, protection be accorded to the place of worship and the worshipers”.

The court also said that the explanation of Article 25 by the court “is not to be construed as giving any special status to the adherents of the Islamic faith in India”, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench noted that it had only laid down that Article 25 ensured every religion in India an “equal and immutable right” to profess, practice and propagate their faith equally across the board without any “ifs and buts”. This is subject only to public order, morality and health, the bench added.

However, the law prohibits actions and speech having the propensity to vitiate public order by pitting one religious denomination against the other, the court said, adding that this would be beyond the scope of protection under Article 25 and will expose the person to the full rigours of the criminal law.

The court also said that congregating for prayer is a facet of the Abrahamic faiths, the legal news portal reported.

Article 25 is religion and faith neutral, adding that the freedom of conscience protects and enables equally an atheist to profess, practice and propagate that there is no God on the anvil of logic, reason and science, Bar and Bench reported the court as having said.

The court directed that its order be sent to the Uttar Pradesh police chief and additional chief secretary (home) for it to be circulated to the authorities in the state, the legal news portal reported.

Also read: Allahabad HC orders protection for Muslim man stopped from offering namaz on private property

Congress MP Mohammad Jawaid on Wednesday said that he has written to Union Home Minister Amit Shah, alleging that Muslims in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar have been facing open threats and hateful slogans ahead of Eid amid tensions in the area.

Jawaid also claimed that there had been a perception of a selective police response, which he said was emboldening those “seeking to disturb communal harmony”.

The letter comes days after a man named Tarun Bhutolia died after being severely injured in a clash during Holi celebrations on March 4 that began when a water balloon accidentally thrown by an 11-year-old girl from the third floor of a building fell on a Muslim woman standing below.

The incident had led to an argument between the two neighbouring families from different religious communities.

The 26-year-old’s killing had sparked tensions in the area. Several vehicles were damaged and some were set on fire during protests by residents, following which police and paramilitary personnel were deployed.

Muslim residents of the area have also flagged calls for violence during Eid on Saturday.

In his letter to the home minister on Wednesday, Jawaid said that members of the Muslim community in Uttam Nagar were facing “open threats, intimidation and a systematic attempt to create fear in their daily lives”.

A call for slaughter of Muslims on Eid in Uttam Nagar, Delhi and inaction by @DelhiPolice is highly alarming.

Have written and handed over the letter to Union Home Minister @AmitShah ji to take action and direct @DelhiPolice to take action in this urgent matter.

The letter has… pic.twitter.com/5J9NjxmrJ1

— Dr Md Jawaid (@DrMdJawaid1) March 18, 2026

The MP from Bihar’s Kishanganj Lok Sabha seat said that “what is unfolding is not an isolated law-and-order issue, but a pattern of targeted hostility that raises serious questions about the state’s ability and willingness to protect all citizens equally”.

He added: “Public threats, inflammatory slogans and the circulation of hate-filled content have created an atmosphere where a section of Indian citizens feel unsafe in the national capital itself.”

The Congress MP urged Shah to take cognisance of the situation and ensure accountability for any lapse in maintaining law and order. He also sought directions to the Delhi Police to “act firmly and impartially against those spreading hate, issuing threats or attempting to communalise the situation”.

Jawaid further sought “visible and effective” protection for vulnerable residents to restore confidence on the ground. “Initiate an independent review of police action to address concerns of bias or inaction,” he added.

The letter noted that silence or delay of the state in such moments sends a dangerous message that intimidation can replace law, and fear can override rights. “This must not be allowed in a constitutional democracy,” Jawaid added.

Sharing the letter on social media, the Congress MP added that the letter had been signed by several legislators from Opposition parties, including from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Samajwadi Party.

Adjournment motion

Earlier on Wednesday, Jawaid also said that he had moved an adjournment motion in the Lok Sabha to discuss the “alarming situation in Uttam Nagar and the recent arrests linked to an iftar gathering on the banks of the Ganga”.

The Congress MP was referring to the arrest of 14 Muslims in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi for allegedly hurting religious sentiments of Hindus after they organised an iftar party on a boat in the river Ganga and ate chicken biryani.

They were arrested after a video showing them holding the party on the boat on Monday was widely shared on social media.

A police complaint was filed by Rajat Jaiswal, the chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing in the city, who alleged that the incident had hurt religious sentiments of the Hindus. In his complaint, Jaiswal alleged that the persons had thrown meat leftovers into the Ganga, which holds religious significance for Hindus.

Noting that Iftar is a peaceful and integral religious practice during Ramzan, Jawaid in his letter to the secretary general of the Lok Sabha said that criminalising such a gathering reflects a “clear misuse of law and indicates a pattern of targeting minorities under the guise of enforcement”.

The Himachal Pradesh government on Wednesday issued an advisory directing government employees not to make statements on social media about official policies, and not to disseminate official information without authorisation, The Indian Express reported.

The state government also told employees to wear formal attire, saying that a dignified dress code helps maintain a positive image of public service.

A communication by Sanjay Gupta, the officiating chief secretary of the state Department of Personnel, was quoted by The Indian Express as saying that government employees should be advised “not to express opinion on government policies/schemes etc through personal social media accounts or to make political or religious statements in any public forum, vlogs and other social media platforms etc”.

The communication stated that participating in official debates and posting content that could be construed as critical of official policies is strictly prohibited. The letter warned of disciplinary action for violations.

The Department of Personnel also said that male employees have been advised to wear formal clothing such as shirts and trousers, along with appropriate footwear, The Indian Express reported. It added that casual clothing, such as jeans and sandals, was discouraged, especially during official duties and court appearances.

Female employees have been asked to wear sarees, suits or other formal clothing that reflects professionalism and modesty, The Indian Express quoted the communication as saying.

India on Tuesday denied holding negotiations with Iran about releasing three vessels New Delhi had seized in February in return for the safe passage of ​Indian ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

The denial by the Ministry of External Affairs came during an inter-ministerial press briefing on the conflict in West Asia.

Quoting unidentified officials, Reuters reported on Monday that Iran had asked India to release three fuel tankers that had been seized. India had in February seized the United States-sanctioned ships linked to Iran near Indian waters.

The Indian authorities had reportedly alleged that the vessels were involved in illegal mid-sea ship-to-ship transfer of fuel and had concealed their identity.

The news agency had also reported on Monday that Iran has sought a supply of medical equipment and some medicines.

Ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal described the report as ​baseless.

“There has been no discussion of this nature,” he told reporters, adding that the three seized ships are not Iranian-owned and that the vessels were not tankers.

The three ships are currently docked off the coast of Mumbai, Reuters reported.

Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of the global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

On Monday and Tuesday, two Indian-flagged vessels carrying liquefied petroleum gas reached India after crossing the Strait of Hormuz on Friday night and Saturday morning.

They were among the 24 Indian-flagged vessels stranded in the Gulf after the conflict broke out in the region on February 28.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told the Financial Times on Sunday that India’s talks with Iran have “yielded some results” in allowing Indian ships to pass through the strategic waterway. However, he added that there is no “blanket arrangement” with Tehran on the matter.

The movement of each Indian ship through the strait is being handled individually, Jaishankar had said.

The Union government on Wednesday directed airlines to allocate a minimum of 60% seats on every flight without seat selection charges to ensure fair access.

The orders issued by the Ministry of Civil Aviation through the Directorate General of Civil Aviation also require that passengers travelling on the same Passenger Name Record be seated together “preferably in adjacent seats”.

Additionally, airlines have been instructed to make the process of transporting sports equipment and musical instruments more transparent and passenger-friendly, while adhering to safety and operational requirements, and to publish clear policies on the carriage of pets.

The ministry also mandated strict adherence to the passenger rights framework, particularly in cases of delays, cancellations and denied boarding.

It further ordered the “prominent display of passenger rights across airline websites, mobile applications, booking platforms, and airport counters” and to communicate the same in regional languages to widen awareness and accessibility.

The Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh High Court has quashed another preventive detention under the Public Safety Act, ruling that there was “no application of mind” by the Bandipora senior superintendent of police and the district magistrate in detaining the petitioner, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

It said that there was instead “a unity of mind that the petitioner needs to be detained on one false pretext or another”.

The Public Safety Act is a preventive detention law that allows persons to be taken into custody to prevent them from acting against “the security of the state or the maintenance of the public order” in the Union Territory.

Justice Rahul Bharti directed that Ehtsham ul Haq Dar be released from custody if he is not required in any other case, the newspaper reported. Dar had been detained under the Public Safety Act on May 6, following an order by the Bandipora district magistrate, and was held in Kishtwar jail.

The Public Safety Act Advisory Board, in an order dated June 2, found sufficient cause for his detention. The government had extended his detention until November 5.

Bharti noted that there was no record of any further extension of the petitioner’s detention. He added that the grounds for preventive detention were based on “vague and conjectured assumptions without any…factual content”, except a criminal case relating to a first information report, the newspaper reported.

The judge observed that the authorities had acted “unmindful of the constitutional obligation of resorting to preventive detention with due caution and circumspection”, The Indian Express reported.

Bharti added that according to the dossier Dar was allegedly involved in “anti-national activities” as an overground worker of a banned terrorist organisation.

He also noted that the police dossier and the grounds of detention were “exact replicas” of each other.

Bharti said that by “literally lifting the print and text of the dossier, the district magistrate, Bandipora, purportedly formulated the so-called grounds of detention more as a mouthpiece of the senior superintendent of police, Bandipora, and passed the detention order”.

“A fundamental right under Article 21 of the Constitution of India is not so fragile and weak-footed that by purported reference to any casual exercise at the end of the authorities under the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, 1978, the said fundamental right of the petitioner can be uprooted,” The Indian Express quoted the judge as observing.

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

Last week, Bharti had also ordered the release of another detainee, Mudasir Ahmad Bhat, from Udhampur district jail, holding that his preventive detention was inconsistent with constitutional safeguards governing such powers.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari are set to contest against each other again in the 2026 state Assembly elections, this time from the Bhabanipur constituency.

The Trinamool Congress on Tuesday announced its candidates for 291 of the state’s 294 seats, fielding Banerjee from the south Kolkata constituency, which she has represented since 2011, except for a short interval in 2021.

Banerjee, after losing Nandigram to the BJP leader in a close contest in 2021, had returned to the Assembly by winning a bypoll from Bhabanipur. Adhikari, once a close associate of Banerjee, had quit the TMC in 2020 and joined the BJP. He is the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly.

The BJP leader will also contest elections from Nandigram. The TMC has filed Pabitra Kar, a former aide of Adhikari, from the seat, PTI reported. He was a former BJP leader who rejoined the TMC ahead of the polls.

In the list released on Tuesday, the ruling party also dropped around one-third of its sitting legislators, denying tickets to about 74 MLAs. It has retained around 135 MLAs and shifted 15 to different constituencies. The changes are aimed at countering anti-incumbency after three consecutive terms in power, The New Indian Express reported.

The TMC has left three seats in the Darjeeling hills to its ally, the Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha, The Hindu reported.

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Monday released its first list of 152 candidates.

The West Bengal election will be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29 in the state. The results will be announced on May 4.

In West Bengal, the Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has been in power since 2011. The main Opposition in the state over the years has shifted from the Left parties to the BJP.

In the 2021 Assembly elections, the BJP won 77 seats in the 294-member House, while the Trinamool secured 215. The Left-Congress alliance and its partners, despite a vote share of about 10%, won just one seat.

SIR process underway

The elections were announced even as a special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in West Bengal, with several voters “under adjudication”.

On February 28, the Election Commission published the final electoral roll for West Bengal, indicating the exclusion of more than 61 lakh voters.

About 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases remain “under adjudication” based on their objections to their exclusions from the draft rolls published in December.

The names of those approved by judicial officers will be added to the rolls through a supplementary list.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ordered that judicial officers of the rank of district judge or additional district judge be appointed to help complete the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in the state amid a tussle between the Trinamool Congress government and the Election Commission.

Four days later, the court allowed judges from Odisha and Jharkhand to also be deployed to decide on the claims and objections raised during the process.

Also read: As polls knock, why is Bengal’s SIR in a state of chaos with no end in sight?

Zubeen Nath was supposed to come home in February for Bihu, to celebrate his wife’s birthday.

Instead, the phone rang at his neighbour’s home in Assam’s Chirang district on the afternoon of February 13.

When his mother answered, she was told that the 26-year-old had died in an accident at the tile construction factory in Bengaluru that employed him. “Someone told her that our son fell into a machine and died immediately,” his father Ananta Nath told Scroll.

Incredulous, his father called his son’s number and an Assamese contractor picked up. “He told me that my son was lying under a machine, applying grease on it, but nobody had noticed him,” Ananta said. “Someone turned on the machine and he got trapped. His body was split into two.”

The next day, Nath’s body was brought home with the help of a contractor.

Zubeen Nath had been working at the company for about five years. He is survived by his parents, his 20-year-old wife and a one-year-old son.

Nath’s father said the owner of the Bangalore company gave the family Rs 50,000 to perform his last rites. “But we have not got any help from the state government,” he added. “The local MLA and government officials visited and only gave us assurances.”

Unlike the death of singer Zubeen Garg in September, which plunged Assam into deep grief, Zubeen Nath’s demise went unnoticed.

He is not alone. Altogether 162 workers from Assam, who migrated outside for work, died between September and February 2, according to a statement by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who admitted the situation was “concerning”.

He said that the mortal remains of the 162 workers were brought back to the state under the Assam government’s Shraddhanjali scheme. No other state government in India has introduced such a scheme, Sarma said.

In the last six months, migrant workers from Assam have lost their lives in accidents across the country – three of them died in a fire in a Goa nightclub, eight died in Meghalaya’s illegal rat-hole mines, nine workers were killed in an accident at a construction site in Chennai, and four were found dead in a rented room in Bengaluru.

Scroll spoke to families of eight migrant workers who died in this period. All of them said they had no other options but to migrate as jobs had dried up in the rural economy. Several belonged to tribal communities or were tea garden workers, some of the most marginalised groups in the state.

Scroll emailed the chief minister’s office, asking for details of the 162 dead workers, the reasons behind their deaths and their age profiles. The story will be updated if there is a response.

In the Assembly, Opposition MLA Akhil Gogoi said the deaths of workers was an indictment of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government.

“People of the state are being forced to go outside to work as security guards or daily wagers in Chennai or Bangalore because there is no work in Assam,” Gogoi said. “They don’t have any job security. There should be a right to work in the state.”

But Gogoi’s intervention was a rare one. The deaths of migrant workers has got little attention from Assam’s political parties, even while the state is headed for an Assembly election.

Manoranjan Pegu, a trade union activist and political commentator from the Mising community, one of Assam’s largest tribal groups, said the identity of the dead explains the lack of any political backlash. “Who are these migrants? Mostly tribals, working-class Hindus or Miya Muslims from rural villages,” Pegu said. “This cannot be spun into an identity issue or an Assamese versus non-Assamese problem. So, it is not favorable for electoral benefits.”

‘Almost every family has a boy working outside’

In Bengaluru, Zubeen Nath earned Rs 30,000-Rs 35,000 a month, breaking stones at the tiles factory. “The salary was regular even though the work was tiring and hard,” his father said.

A college dropout, he had returned to Assam from Bengaluru during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. But had to go back because there was no work in Barpather, a village near the Manas National Park, close to the border with Bhutan.

Like him, about 150 youths from the village went back to the cities in search of work. “In our village, almost every family has a boy who works outside,” Anant Nath said.

The reasons for the exodus are many. While farming is the main occupation, crops are increasingly under stress from elephant attacks, Anant Nath said.

“My home is close to the Manas forest. So, there has been an increase in elephant raids,” Anant said. “Almost every day, the elephants break homes, kill people and destroy standing crops.”

Erratic monsoons and depleting groundwater reserves have also increased the challenges for farmers. “The 80-feet deep well does not have water now,” Nath said. “We are buying water or bringing it from others. The fields are dry. The farm yield is not enough and not self-sustaining. That’s why people are leaving.”

‘Breakdown of agriculture’

Experts Scroll spoke to said that the outmigration of youth is driven by the absence of opportunity at home. Sociologist Chandan Kumar Sharma pointed out that most migrant workers from Assam are being absorbed into the informal workforce in metropolises, where jobs have no security.

“This indeed speaks of the breakdown of agriculture and meaningful rural livelihoods for the youths in the state,” Sharma, who teaches at Tezpur University, told Scroll.

The government’s own figures speak of the scale of the migration. According to a 2020 report prepared in the backdrop of Covid pandemic by the Assam government’s think-tank, State Innovation and Transformation Aayog or SITA, 25 lakh workers from the state work outside the state in low-end jobs.

“For the last many years we have seen outmigration from Assam since agriculture could not provide financial gains except subsistence,” the report by the think tank on the state’s agriculture and allied sectors said.

The absence of opportunity has led Assam’s workers to take on unimaginable risks.

“My relatives are not alone to sign up for life-threatening jobs,” Iqbal Ahmed, a resident of Katigorah area of Cachar district, told Scroll.

Ahmed’s three cousins died in a blast in a set of illegal rat-hole coal mines in Meghalaya’s East Jaintia Hills district on February 5. “If you work the whole day in Katogorah, you may get Rs 200 or Rs 300, while working in the mines fetches you Rs 1,000-Rs 1,200 a day,” he said.

About 25-30 migrant workers from Katigorah had died in Meghalaya’s illegal mines in recent years, he claimed.

Ahmed added: “If you want to survive, you can’t think of death.”

9 migrant workers from Assam have reportedly succumbed to death after falling down at a construction site at Minjur, Thiruvallur district, today while carrying out construction works for extension of North Chennai Thermal Power Station.

4 of the victims are from Karbi Anglong…

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) September 30, 2025

‘It is destiny’

Several of those forced to do hazardous work outside the state come from tribal communities.

Take Paban Sorong. The 34-year-old man from the Dimasa tribe worked in Delhi as a security guard before moving to Chennai as a construction worker.

Last September, he was among nine tribal migrant workers from Assam’s Karbi Anglong and Hojai districts, who died at a construction site in a special economic zone near Chennai.

The men were at a height of more than 20 feet when the iron scaffolding installed for the construction of an arch collapsed.

Sorong’s father Nabin Sorong said his son earned Rs 20,000 at the construction site. He explained that his son had to take risks because they can no longer depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

Sorong’s family was luckier than others. They received Rs 17 lakh as compensation – Rs 10 lakh from the Tamil Nadu government, Rs 2 lakh from Centre, and Rs 5 lakh from Assam government. The family received compensation as they died while working on a power plant being built by Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, a public sector undertaking.

Sorong was resigned to his son’s fate. “It was destiny. We can’t blame anyone,” he said.

The exodus of tea garden workers

Among those forced to take desperate measures are Assam’s tea garden workers. Last year, the Assam Chah Mazdoor Sangha, the largest and most influential trade union of the plantation sector, raised an alarm, flagging a sharp rise in outmigration of workers.

A clear reason is the abysmal wages that they earn – tea workers in the Brahmaputra Valley earn Rs 250 per day, while those in the Barak Valley are paid Rs 228 per day.

“It was hard to survive with this little money,” said Bidya Chatriya, whose brother Dhiren worked in the Gelapukhuri tea estate in Tinsukia district.

A few months ago, Dhiren and other tea garden workers moved to Arunachal Pradesh to work on construction sites. “They were promised a daily wage between Rs 500 and Rs 700, depending on the working hours,” Bidya said.

In December, Dhiren was among 21 tea labourers killed after a truck they were being transported in met with an accident in Anjaw district in the eastern part of Arunachal Pradesh on the night of December 8. Senior superintendent of police, Tinsukia, Mayank Kumar Jha, said the labourers were being transported illegally without proper documentation or safety measures. Two people were arrested on charges of human trafficking.

Questions on Assam development

The large exodus of migrant workers puts a question mark on the BJP’s development claims, observers and ordinary residents said.

In the Assembly, Raijor Dal MLA Gogoi too questioned the BJP’s record of development. “It has only made flyovers in the name of development,” he said.

Tapan Sarma, the general secretary of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions, criticised the Assam chief minister for launching a scheme to bring bodies home. “Has the government figured out why they needed to go so far in the first place? What has it done for the safety and economic security of the workers at home?” Sarma said.

Bishnu Jyoti, a tribal resident of Lakhimpur, agreed. “The BJP government talks day and night about development,” he said. “But this development exists only in speeches and advertisements. Otherwise young boys from tribal villages would not have to travel thousands of kilometers to work as security guards, delivery boys, construction workers, and restaurant workers,” he said.

Jyoti added: “Many of them live in unsafe conditions. Some of them never return home alive.” He was referring to four Mising young men from Lakhimpur, who were found dead in a rented room on the outskirts of Bengaluru in January.

Sarma, the senior trade union leader, admitted that Opposition parties too have failed to speak up for the working class. “Assam has 91 lakh workers – both from organised and unorganised sectors – which is more than 30% of the state’s total population,” Sarma said. “But we have failed to highlight their issues.”

Jyoti said the government’s welfare and cash-transfer schemes have not changed the lives of people in rural Assam. “People cannot live on small benefits and temporary schemes,” he said. “They need permanent jobs and stable incomes. But instead of jobs, the government spreads hate and fear.”

I don’t write about myself. Not in public, and rarely, if ever, in private. The proposed amendment to the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, presented by Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment, Virendra Kumar in Lok Sabha on March 13 forces my hand, and yet, I find a thrilling freedom in finally coming out and staking a claim to who I am.

I hope that talking about it will throw more light on why self-determination is a long process that requires patience, not more erasure, and also light the way for others who find their way to transgender identities as adults.

The bill solidifies an argument that was made in the run-up to the passing of the Act in 2019 that transgender people could only belong to traditional transgender groups: hijras, kinnars, jogtas, aravanis and others. While the Act as it was passed aligned itself with the Supreme Court’s NALSA judgement of 2014 and allowed for trans people to identify themselves, the definition proposed by Bill No 79 of 2026 would have trans women outside those traditional groups, trans men, non-binary people, and people of other gender identities not be included in the protections of the act.

The bill explicitly aims to delete the separate category for intersex people in the 2019 Act, and to list them under the trans umbrella. This erases the separate and unique struggle intersex people have had for decades for their own concerns – including, for instance, the fight against forced gender realignment surgeries done at young ages to attempt to fit them into the binary.

Collapsing the two identities perpetuates stereotypes about both trans and intersex communities. The basic demand of trans groups for horizontal reservation seems more distant, though it will be ever more urgent as oppressed caste trans individuals lead the fight for simply being represented fairly. The bill drives a wedge into cross-community solidarity and divides us so that we do not organise and assert ourselves or live our lives to their fullest potentials.

𝐓𝐎𝐃𝐀𝐘 𝐈𝐍 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐀𝐌𝐄𝐍𝐓: Social and Justice Minister Dr Virendra Kumar today introduced the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026 in the Lok Sabha today. The Bill aims to amend the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019.… pic.twitter.com/4F9tFXVNP8

— All India Radio News (@airnewsalerts) March 13, 2026

I have known since I was a child that I was different, that I was not quite a girl, yet nowhere like a boy, either. My puberty was different – too much, too skewed towards an indefinite, in-between gendered appearance. It did not soften me and at times, it stole my childhood. For years, I balanced anger at myself and fear of the world, always aware that I was not enough of any gender and that I would never fit in. Even amid that rage and confusion, I made choices that affirmed my existence outside the binary of gender. The way I dressed, talked, and moved in the world spoke to how neither gender had a hold on me.

When I became a reporter, I learned to lean into my assigned gender. I played the “young woman who doesn’t know anything” when lulling sources, often cis men, into lowering their guard. I learned to smile and give assurances that I was one of them when speaking to cis women, who in turn embraced me because of my perceived likeness. I was aware, all the time, that I was playing a part. I could have even tried to deceive myself had I not repeatedly asserted in private my confusion at what being a woman even meant, the irritation at being called “sister” by feminist colleagues, the knowledge that the dresses I had begun to wear made me feel awkward and out of place.

In 2015, I wrote to a friend about how I did not feel like a man or a woman, but that I did not know what that made me. That year, when Facebook allowed users to choose their own pronouns, I chose “they/them” hardly knowing what it meant, only knowing that there was a relief in not showing my assigned gender to people. In 2018, I told my therapist jokingly that I had never received the gender memo.

I was electrified when I heard the term non-binary. I had flirted with genderqueer and gender non-conforming, but neither encapsulated my alienation from gender. Finally, here was a term that was political. It saw the gendered binary that I had so long regarded as inevitable, and promised an existence beyond it. It took me years after that to embrace it. I used “they/them” pronouns on anonymous online forums for a year before I started to tell people that I was non-binary, only because I wanted to be certain that I was not taking up space, that I was not falling into a yearning for being seen as queer, without actually being it. I stopped myself from expressing myself in public for years.

The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026 must be referred to the Standing Committee on Social Justice & Empowerment so that legal experts and, most importantly, members of the trans community can be heard before Parliament proceeds further.#NoGoingBack pic.twitter.com/GB6O42LWPE

— Pink List India (@PinkListIndia) March 15, 2026

It has been four years since I came out and many of the changes that I have made have been low-key. I cut my hair, started to wear shirts, started to surround myself with people like myself. I began to assert that my pronouns are indeed “they/them”. In a moment of anger, I updated them on my website, as this essay too, written in anger, appears on my website, marking a coming out of several stages. I also made myself smaller. I withdrew from people who knew me, afraid that they would judge me. Being in public became that much harder when, as an experiment in finding freedom, I began to grow a beard. It was matched by the euphoria of being seen as someone different – neither woman nor man – someone who could pass seamlessly through security queues meant for men and for women.

The proposed amendments disparagingly state that the Act is not meant for the protection of people who identify their own gender. The bill says that it “shall not include, nor shall ever have been so included, persons with different sexual orientations and self-perceived sexual identities”.

Disturbingly, it aims to criminalise people who support and affirm trans people, threatening them with imprisonment and fines. I have the privilege of caste and class to return to my small life in the closet. There are so many people for whom this is not the case. But silence has corroded me. Speaking up is not a choice. It is necessary if I am to survive.

I am a journalist. I am non-binary. I am transgender. The years of suppression have led me to a deep alienation from my body. I do not know if any intervention, medical or otherwise, will surmount this. It has taken me decades to get to this acceptance. I had hoped that I might yet have more time.

The Transgender Persons Amendment Act introduced in the Lok Sabha today is absolutely unconstitutional. GoI is excluding from protection persons with self-identified gender and entrenching the authority of "medical experts" in direct violation of NALSA. This Bill must not pass. pic.twitter.com/AYOYy1crNk

— muski 🌈 (@muskanmt13) March 13, 2026

Now, the government might insert itself as an intermediary for any step that I might want to take, adding itself to the double takes and rejection that I already experience in plenty in the world around me. I have been dismissed by relatives and former friends. Colleagues in the profession scoff at and dismiss gender identities that are not binary. I see the changes in how people I speak to for work respond to me, their suspicion and distrust, where, as someone who once presented as a cis woman, I had once found openness. I know that I have to learn how to report again, while being true to myself.

These concerns pale in front of the reality that even basic self-identification might no longer be recognised if this bill is passed. The scope of prosecution for violence against the community will be shrunk. Layers upon layers of bureaucracy will be added to very personal journeys of medical and legal transition. The violent anti-trans rhetoric of the United Kingdom and the United States will be replicated in India.

My heart breaks for the people further along in their journeys who face the crumbling of their painstakingly built lives. My heart breaks for those who are considering joining in but must now weigh the innate drive to live authentically against the fear of the state.

But trans people are nothing if not stubborn and resilient. How much courage does it take to take on a world that tells you that you are wrong, that your entire conception of your self is immoral and not even worthy of being thought of? In or out of the closet, trans people are more vulnerable to self-harm and suicide, and yet, so many of us fight to survive, wherever we are. We have survived before and we will survive now.

No more lies, no more hiding. I am here and I will not go back. I stand in solidarity and in protest with my transgender, non-binary, and intersex siblings. I demand that this short-sighted, and dehumanising bill be withdrawn in its entirety.

Mridula Chari is an award-winning, independent, non-binary reporter based in Mumbai. This article was first published on their website.

Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk on Tuesday called for a “win-win” dialogue with the Centre after his detention under the National Security Act was revoked.

He said that the Centre has extended its hand to build trust for meaningful dialogue with the residents of the Union Territory.

Addressing a press conference after his release from jail, Wangchuk referred to his release as the first “win”. He added: “The government extending hands to build trust and facilitate meaningful dialogue is a great thing. That way Ladakh and our cause will also win.”

Wangchuk said that a “third win” is that the Union government will “come out looking better, and our image in the world will be a little better”.

These were the activist’s first public remarks after he was released from detention on March 4 after five-and-a-half months.

Wangchuk had been detained on September 26, two days after protesters demanding statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution clashed with security personnel, injuring several of them. Four persons were killed in police firing.

The Sixth Schedule guarantees certain protections for land and a nominal autonomy for citizens in designated tribal areas.

The revocation of Wangchuk’s detention came in the backdrop of the Supreme Court hearing a petition filed by his wife, Gitanjali Angmo, challenging the government’s action.

On Tuesday, Wangchuk said that he hoped the court will record and publish a judgement in the matter, so that his case can be used as a precedent in other cases under the National Security Act.

On participating in future protests, he said: “I have always maintained that I did not want to go on hunger strikes. I did it out of compulsion.”

“Now the government has offered constructive dialogue,” Wangchuk said, adding that he is hoping for “meaningful and effective talks with the government that will lead to something good”.

The activist said that the demand for Ladakh to have safeguards under the Sixth Schedule will remain. He said that he will remain flexible during the talks, but not at the cost of it being a “lose-lose” for Ladakhis.

Angmo, who was also present at the press conference, added that the negotiations ahead must be done in such a way that “everyone feels that they have a bigger piece of the cake”.

Speaking about his next step, Wangchuk said that he would travel to Ladakh and consult with leaders of the Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance, civil society coalitions that have been leading the movement seeking constitutional safeguards for Ladakh, PTI reported.

The National Investigation Agency has arrested seven foreign citizens on charges of conspiring to carry out terrorist activities against India, ThePrint reported on Monday.

While six of them are Ukrainians, one is from the United States, The Indian Express reported. They were arrested last week under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

They were reportedly arrested in Delhi, Kolkata and Lucknow while trying to leave India.

The persons accused in the matter had entered India on valid visas, but had travelled to Mizoram without the mandatory restricted area permit, The Indian Express quoted an unidentified official as saying. They allegedly crossed into Myanmar and “reportedly met ethnic groups hostile to India”.

In Mizoram, the persons had received deliveries of drones from Europe, ThePrint quoted unidentified officials as having alleged.

The accused persons were produced before a magistrate on Saturday, who remanded them to three days’ custody. The custody period was on Monday extended by 11 days till March 27, according to The Indian Express.

Ukraine has lodged an official protest with India against the arrests of its citizens, and has demanded that they be released immediately, the newspaper reported.

The Press Service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine described the allegations as unfounded and said: “…As of now, there are no established facts proving the involvement of the said Ukrainian citizens in unlawful activities on the territory of India or Myanmar.”

Grasslands around the world are quietly changing under pressure from overgrazing, cropland expansion, climate change and biological invasions. In India’s Thar Desert, these pressures are reshaping which species survive and how they share space.

A new ecological study finds that two invasive forces, fast-spreading mesquite trees and free-ranging dogs linked to human settlements, are changing how native mesocarnivores (medium-sized carnivores) move, hunt and coexist in this landscape.

“Wildlife communities of the Thar Desert remain relatively understudied even as the landscape undergoes rapid ecological change,” says Chetan Misher, a wildlife ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Trust and the study’s corresponding author.

“Mesquite has become the dominant woody plant, altering habitat structure, while free-ranging dogs function as apex or dominant predators in many areas. Together, these invasives are reshaping native communities through habitat modification, changes in predation, competition and interference, with cascading effects across the ecosystem,”

Changing landscape

The Thar spans about 446,000 square kilometres across western India and southern Pakistan, covering over 200,000 sq km across parts of western Rajasthan and the Kachchh region of Gujarat.

To capture ecological variation across this landscape, researchers focused on two contrasting sites for the study: the mesquite-dominated Banni grasslands of Gujarat and the more fragmented, agriculture-influenced grasslands around Bikaner in Rajasthan.

Both regions support similar wildlife, including desert and jungle cats, desert and Indian foxes, golden jackals, along with a wider range of desert-adapted small mammals, birds and reptiles. The researchers conducted field surveys using motion-triggered infrared camera traps to record wildlife presence and activity.

The study also used high-resolution satellite imagery to map land cover, including open vegetation, invasive woodland, agriculture, water bodies and built-up areas. These habitat layers were linked to each camera location across multiple spatial scales. Using occupancy modelling, the study estimated where carnivores were likely to occur while accounting for missed detections and environmental influences. The study also use temporal activity analysis to examine when species were active and how much their daily routines overlapped.

Winners and losers in an invaded desert

The study results showed that Indian foxes avoided areas used by desert foxes or dogs. But they were often found where golden jackals were present, in contrast to a study from Maharashtra where Indian foxes avoid jackals.

Jungle cats also frequently appeared alongside jackals. Desert foxes and dogs were recorded more often in Bikaner, whereas jackals and jungle cats were more common in mesquite-dominated Banni. Indian foxes were not detected in Bikaner, while desert cat detections were similar in both regions.

Desert foxes strongly preferred open native vegetation and avoided mesquite woodland and farmland. They were also frequently found close to human settlements, likely because villages in Bikaner lie near the remaining grassland patches they depend on.

Golden jackals, as habitat generalists that can thrive in diverse environmental conditions, used a wide range of environments and persisted even where the mesquite expanded. Indian foxes, the smallest canid in the study, avoided desert foxes and dogs and disappeared from Bikaner altogether, suggesting possible competitive exclusion where predator and dog pressures are high. The overlap with jackal territory was surprising, with one explanation being size-structured competition.

“In the Thar, the desert fox, being intermediate in size, may experience more direct competition with jackals, while the smaller Indian fox could overlap spatially with jackals to avoid stronger competitive pressure from desert foxes,” says Misher.

The study did not detect the Indian fox in Bikaner. This absence, despite earlier reports of it being present, raises concern. Misher states that this may suggest local decline or displacement, potentially linked to high dog abundance and activity in the region, but cautioned that the evidence is not yet conclusive and requires further investigation.

Among wild cats, jungle cats appeared to benefit from invasive woodland, showing higher occupancy in mesquite-dominated areas, while the elusive desert cat showed weak habitat associations, likely reflecting low detection rates. Overall, spreading mesquite seems to favour adaptable species while placing grassland specialists at risk.

These vegetation changes are likely to ripple through the prey base that sustains desert carnivores. “Invasive species can alter both herbivore and carnivore communities,” says Abi T Vanak, director of the Centre for Policy Design and senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), who was also involved in the study.

“For example, mesquite can alter grasslands and convert them into woody-dominated states, and thus favour generalist species. Species (of rodents) such as Rattus are more commonly found in mesquite thickets compared to open grassland specialists such as Millardia. Habitat structure driven by invasive species, and the associated differences in predation risk, microclimate and food availability, can alter the community of herbivores and carnivores at a site.”

Dogs reshape behaviour

If mesquite alters habitat, dogs alter behaviour. Supported by human food and shelter, free-ranging dogs are dominant predators. Native carnivores respond by avoiding them spatially or by shifting activity patterns.

Desert foxes, for example, remained largely nocturnal, but in dog-dominated areas, the study found, their activity shifted further away from peak dog movement, reducing the likelihood of encounters. Yet the relationship is not purely one of avoidance. Occupancy models revealed an unexpected positive spatial association but a strong temporal avoidance between desert fox presence and dog occurrence. Simply put, they tend to use the same areas, but at different times of day.

The findings point to a clear conservation message: landscape structure determines survival. Managing the spread of mesquite in key grassland refuges, alongside targeted control of free-ranging dogs in ecologically sensitive areas, will be critical to reducing predation pressure, disease risk and habitat loss for specialist predators. Maintaining mosaics of open grassland with low woody cover may allow both specialists and generalists to coexist.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Israel claimed that it killed Iranian security chief Ali Larijani in an airstrike. Tel Aviv also claimed that the commander of Iran’s Basij paramilitary force was killed in a separate strike.

Iran has not yet commented on the claim.

The Israeli defence ministry’s statement came more than two weeks after the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran on February 28. Tehran has retaliated by striking Israel and US military bases in the region, and targeting major cities in Gulf countries and some ships.

Meanwhile, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said it was speaking with Iran and other countries to safely bring back Indian ships from the Strait of Hormuz. Read on.

Janata Dal (United) leader and former Rajya Sabha MP KC Tyagi announced that he was quitting the party. This came a day after JD(U) chief and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was elected to the Rajya Sabha from the state.

Kumar is expected to step down after his election to the Upper House.

Tyagi said that his membership with the JD(U) had ended and that he would not be renewing it. “Our relation with Nitish ji is forever,” he said. “It is just that I am searching for new political ground in Uttar Pradesh under the banner of another political party.”

The former MP had been serving as a political adviser in the JD(U) after he was removed as its national spokesperson in September 2024. The JD(U) has previously distanced itself from several statements made by Tyagi, including his recent demand for a Bharat Ratna for Kumar. Read on.

Fourteen Muslims were arrested in Varanasi for allegedly hurting religious sentiments of Hindus after they organised an iftar party on a boat in the river Ganga and ate chicken biryani.

The complainant, a Bharatiya Janata Party leader named Rajat Jaiswal, alleged that they threw meat leftovers in the river, which holds religious significance for Hindus.

The men were arrested after a video showing them holding the party on the boat on Monday was widely shared on social media. They were booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to defiling a place of worship, deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings and promoting enmity between groups. Read on.

The Lok Sabha revoked the suspension of eight Opposition MPs through a voice vote. They had been suspended in February for the remainder of the Budget Session after they allegedly tore up papers and threw them at the speaker’s chair.

The MPs are Congress’ Hibi Eden, Amarinder Singh Raja Warring, Manickam Tagore, Gurjeet Singh Aujla, Chamala Kiran Kumar Reddy, Prashant Padole and Dean Kuriakose, and S Venkatesan from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

They had been suspended against the backdrop of multiple adjournments in the House amid protests by the Opposition after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was prevented from quoting an excerpt of an unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief MM Naravane. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a section of the 2020 Social Security Code that allowed maternity leaves for adoptive mothers to only those adopting children under three months old, PTI reported.

The court observed that adoption is part of the right to reproductive autonomy.

A bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan said that an adoptive mother should be entitled to maternity leave for a 12-week period despite the age of the adopted child.

The court said that a restriction of maternity leave under Section 60(4) of the Code for adoptive mothers who adopt children over three months old violated their right to equality as their role is similar to that of mothers who adopt children below three months, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench added that the section also violates Article 21 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to protection of life and personal liberty, PTI reported.

The order came on a 2021 petition by advocate Hamsaanandini Nanduri originally challenging Section 5(4) of the 1961 Maternity Benefit Act, Live Law reported. The provision, which was introduced through a 2017 amendment, granted 12 weeks of maternity benefit to adoptive mothers only when the adopted child is below three months of age.

The petitioner argued that the age-based restriction was arbitrary and violated Article 14, Article 19(1)(g) and Article 21, Bar and Bench reported. Article 14 guarantees the right to equality and Article 19(1)(g) provides the right to practice any profession, occupation, trade or business.

The provision in the Maternity Benefit Act created an artificial classification between adoptive children based solely on age, the petitioner said, adding that it also failed to account for the realities of India’s adoption framework under the Juvenile Justice Act and Adoption Regulations.

The matter was initially reserved for judgement on December 12, Bar and Bench reported.

However, as the Social Security Code, which repealed the Maternity Benefit Act, had come into effect in November, the court permitted the petitioner to challenge Section 60(4) of the code. Section 60(4) is the corresponding provision to Section 5(4) of the Maternity Benefit Act.

In its order on Tuesday, the court said that the distinction drawn under Section 60(4) did not “have a rational nexus” with the object of the Social Security Code, Bar and Bench reported.

The order said that the object of maternity benefit is not associated with the “process of childbirth but with the process of motherhood”. The purpose of maternity protection does not vary with the manner in which the child is brought into the life of the beneficiary mother, it added.

“Insofar as the roles, responsibilities, and caregiving obligations are concerned, women who adopt a child aged three months or above are similarly situated to women who adopt a child below the age of three months,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying in its order.

The court also noted that the needs of an adoptive child is no different from a child born to the mother.

While striking down the section, the court urged the Union government to come out with a provision recognising paternity leave as a social security benefit, PTI reported.

Fourteen Muslims were arrested in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi for allegedly hurting religious sentiments of Hindus after they organised an iftar party on a boat in the river Ganga and ate chicken biryani, the Deccan Herald reported.

They were arrested after a video showing them holding the party on the boat on Monday was widely shared on social media.

A police complaint was filed by Rajat Jaiswal, the chief of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing in the city, who alleged that the incident had hurt religious sentiments of the Hindus, the newspaper reported.

In his complaint, Jaiswal alleged that the persons had thrown meat leftovers into the Ganga river, which holds religious significance for Hindus, The Indian Express reported.

The persons were booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to defiling a place of worship with intent to insult the religion of a class, deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of a class by insulting its religious beliefs and promoting enmity between groups.

They were also booked under sections pertaining to public nuisance and using evidence known to be false, The Indian Express reported.

The police also invoked the Water Prevention and Control of Pollution Act.

All the 14 Muslim men seen on boat Iftar in Varanasi have been arrested. The FIR was registered based on the complaint of Bhartiya Janata Yuva morcha office bearer who accused the arrested men of hurting the religious sentiments. https://t.co/1Z6KnUgu59 pic.twitter.com/HNk2ng9ohN

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) March 17, 2026

Janata Dal (United) leader and former Rajya Sabha MP KC Tyagi on Tuesday announced his decision to quit the party, ANI reported.

The development comes a day after JD(U) chief and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar was elected to the Rajya Sabha from the state. Kumar, who became chief minister for the 10th time in November, is expected to step down after his election to the Upper House.

In a statement on Tuesday, Tyagi said that his membership of the JD(U) had ended, but he would not renew it.

“My commitment to the broader ideological points concerning the interests of the downtrodden, peasants and agriculturalists, including the deprived sections of society, remains as firm as ever,” he said.

The former MP also told The Indian Express that he has immense respect for Kumar, with “whom I have shared socialist space for over 50 years”.

He added: “Our relation with Nitishji is forever. It is just that I am searching for new political ground in Uttar Pradesh under the banner of another political party.”

"...The membership campaign of the JD(U) party has ended. This time, I have not renewed the membership in the party. Though my commitment to the larger and wider ideological points concerning the interests of downtrodden, peasants and agriculturalists, including the deprived… pic.twitter.com/VoCLmdbjcG

— ANI (@ANI) March 17, 2026

The former MP, in his statement, noted that the JD(U) had come into existence on October 30, 2003, with the merger of the Samata Party and the Janata Dal, ANI reported.

“George Fernandes was the president, and I, as the secretary general of the party, worked with him,” he said. “I worked with Sharad Yadav and Nitish Kumar as my party president, serving as chief general secretary, chief spokesman and political advisor of the party.”

Tyagi added that he would convene a meeting on March 22 in New Delhi to “discuss the political situation” of the country, the news agency reported. “My further course of action will be decided soon in consultation with all required people,” he said.

Tyagi had previously served as the chief national spokesperson and national secretary general of the JD(U). He had been serving as a political adviser to the party after he was removed as its national spokesperson in September 2024.

The JD(U) has previously distanced itself from several statements made by the former MP, including on the Uniform Civil Code and Israel’s war on Gaza. The party had also recently taken serious exception to his demand for a Bharat Ratna for Kumar, The Indian Express reported.

The JD(U) is among the key allies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre and is part of the National Democratic Alliance government.

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 and Dean Kuriakose, and S Venkatesan from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

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

The Congress in Odisha suspended three MLAs on Tuesday for cross-voting in the Rajya Sabha elections held a day earlier, The Hindu reported.

Four Rajya Sabha seats from the state were due to fall vacant on April 2 and elections were held on Monday to fill them. Bharatiya Janata Party candidates Manmohan Samal and Sujeet Kumar won two seats, while Dilip Ray, an independent nominee backed by the Hindutva party, secured one.

Santrupta Mishra, a candidate from the Opposition Biju Janata Dal, won the fourth seat.

Amid polling, Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee chief Bhakta Charan Das had told reporters that three of its MLAs – Ramesh Jena, Dasarathi Gomango and Sofia Firdous – had voted in favour of the ruling BJP in the state.

“The party will certainly take action against the erring members who jumped party discipline,” Das had said.

Jena, Gomango and Firdous were suspended from the party on Tuesday, according to The Hindu.

Earlier, BJD deputy chief whip Pratap Keshari Deb had also said that eight party MLAs cross-voted in favour of Ray.

BJD chief Naveen Patnaik had accused the BJP of “horse-trading”.

“They [BJP] have collected a number of persons who voted for them,” the former chief minister said. “Most of them have criminal past, I am ashamed to say. You can check yourself as to how many of their parents went to jail and how they were with them.”

However, Ray had said that everybody knew his relationship with leaders across party lines.

“I pay my gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Chief Minister Mohan Majhi and state BJP president Manmohan Samal for their total support,” he had said. “I have got success because of support of many in BJD and Congress.”

Elections for 37 Rajya Sabha seats in 10 states had been scheduled for Monday. Of these, 26 candidates secured their wins unopposed. Voting had taken place for the remaining 11 seats – five in Bihar, four in Odisha and two from Haryana.

Apart from the three in Odisha, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance won all five Rajya Sabha seats in Bihar and one in Haryana. The Congress secured one seat in Haryana.

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday issued summons to Republic TV Editor Arnab Goswami in a defamation case filed by the Congress over his claim that the Indian Opposition party had an office in Turkey, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench of Justice Mini Pushkarna refused to pass any interim order in the matter, observing that the comment had been made during a broadcast in May.

The matter will be next heard on May 19.

During a news segment on the TV channel on May 15, Goswami had falsely claimed that the Istanbul Congress Center is an office of the Indian National Congress. The building shown during the show is a convention centre owned by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Alt News reported.

The Bengaluru Police had at the time booked Goswami and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s publicity chief Amit Malviya on a separate complaint by an Indian Youth Congress leader. The first information report had been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace.

The Karnataka High Court had at the time stayed the case.

The complainant had alleged that the claim was made “with clear and undeniable criminal intent to deceive the Indian public”, defame the party, manipulate nationalist sentiments and undermine national security and democratic integrity”.

The complainant had also alleged that the claims were made in the context of tense relations between India and Turkey because of Ankara’s support for Pakistan during Operation Sindoor.

Republic TV said in May that the image had been mistakenly used by a video editor on the digital desk due to a “technical error”.

However, the Congress said that an apology was not sufficient as redressal for the error.

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday ordered the removal of allegedly defamatory online content linking Himayani Puri, the daughter of Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, to convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Live Law reported.

Justice Mini Pushkarna directed that the takedown order would apply only within India for now because the matter pertaining to the scope of global takedowns is pending before another bench of the High Court.

The judge said that while content uploaded from within India must be removed, that uploaded from outside should be blocked from being accessed in the country.

The court added that if the uploaders fail to remove the videos and links within 24 hours, the posts must be blocked by the social media platforms, Bar and Bench reported.

Pushkarna was hearing a defamation suit filed by Himayani Puri, who has sought damages of Rs 10 crore and the removal of the allegedly defamatory content posted on several online platforms.

The court observed that a prima facie case had been made out and that the failure to grant relief could cause “irreparable injury” to her reputation, Bar and Bench reported.

During the hearing, the counsel for internet intermediaries, including Google and Meta, argued against a global takedown order, stating that the question of whether Indian courts can order worldwide content blocking is pending before a division bench of the High Court.

They urged the court to first consider their detailed responses before passing an order.

Himayani Puri’s counsel argued that the allegations made in the posts were false and part of a coordinated campaign to damage her reputation, stating that she was being targeted because she is the daughter of a Union minister, Live Law reported.

The court declined to issue a global blocking order at this stage and said it would consider the request after hearing all parties.

The matter has been listed for further hearing on August 7.

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

The documents released on January 30 contained email exchanges between Hardeep Singh Puri and Epstein that began in June 2014.

The minister has said that his conversations with Epstein had nothing to do with the crimes for which the American financier had been convicted.

The National Democratic Alliance won all five Rajya Sabha seats in Bihar, three in Odisha and one in Haryana in the elections held on Monday, reported The Hindu.

While the Biju Janata Dal won one seat in Odisha, the Congress secured one in Haryana.

The polls were held for 37 Rajya Sabha seats in 10 states.

Voting was required for only 11 seats. Twenty-six candidates from seven states – Maharashtra, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Chhattisgarh, Assam and Himachal Pradesh – were elected unopposed.

Among the five NDA candidates elected from Bihar were Bharatiya Janata Party chief Nitin Nabin and Janata Dal (United) president and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

BJP leader Shivesh Kumar, the JD(U)’s Ramnath Thakur and Rashtriya Lok Morcha president and former Union minister Upendra Kushwaha were also elected to the Rajya Sabha from Bihar.

Nitish Kumar, who became chief minister for the 10th time in November, is expected to step down after his election to the Rajya Sabha. He is currently a member of the legislative council and has previously served terms as an MLA and Lok Sabha MP.

In Odisha, the BJP’s state chief Manmohan Samal and party leader Sujeet Kumar were among those elected. The party also secured the victory of Independent candidate Dilip Ray, whom it supported, reported The Hindu.

Opposition Biju Janata Dal’s Santrupt Misra won one seat from the state.

This came amid reports that at least eight BJD MLAs voted in favour of Ray.

Odisha Congress chief Bhakta Charan Das told reporters that three of the party’s MLAs – Ramesh Jena, Dasarathi Gomango and Sofia Firdous – had voted in favour of the BJP.

Earlier in the day, BJD chief Naveen Patnaik accused the BJP of “horse-trading”.

Complaints delayed counting in Haryana

The BJP’s Sanjay Bhatia and the Congress’ Karamvir Boudh were declared winners in Haryana, where counting continued past midnight amid complaints.

The counting was delayed by more than five hours after Haryana minister Krishan Kumar Bedi said that the BJP had complained to the Election Commission that two Congress MLAs had violated the secrecy of their votes, reported India Today.

Referring to legislators Bharat Singh Beniwal and Paramvir Singh, Bedi alleged: “Two Congress MLAs did not fold their ballots as required.”

The Congress also registered a complaint about a breach of secrecy in the vote of Cabinet minister Anil Vij, reported The Hindu.

Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge wrote to the Election Commission, alleging that there was “a clear attempt to interfere with the integrity of the election”, reported PTI.

“It must be stopped/redressed by the ECI immediately,” read Kharge’s letter. “Furthermore, no disqualification of our legitimate voters/votes cast can be allowed in what is clearly a transparent attempt to taint/derail the process.”

In the 90-member Haryana Assembly, 88 MLAs cast their votes. Two MLAs of the Indian National Lok Dal – Arjun Chautala and Aditya Devilal – did not vote.

The composition of the Rajya Sabha has shifted further in the favour of the ruling NDA following the 2026 elections. Following these polls, another 34 vacancies are expected to arise in the Upper House over the remainder of the year.

India has not held bilateral discussions with the United States about deploying naval forces to ensure the safe passage of merchant vessels through the Strait of Hormuz amid the West Asia conflict, the Union government said on Monday.

Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal made the statement during a media briefing.

The statement came in response to a question about a call by United States President Donald Trump for countries such as China, France, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom to send warships to keep the strategically important waterway “open and safe”.

“We are aware of this particular matter being discussed by several countries,” Jaiswal said. “We have not yet discussed it in a bilateral setting.”

On Sunday, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told the Financial Times that India’s direct talks with Iran had “yielded some results” in allowing Indian ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz, though there was no blanket arrangement with Tehran for their passage.

He added: “From India’s perspective, it is better that we reason and we co-ordinate and we get a solution than we don’t…So if that sort of allows other people to engage, I think the world is better off for it.”

Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz for most international commercial vessels amid the conflict in West Asia began on February 28. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

The International Energy Agency on Thursday said that the fighting has caused the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”.

Global oil prices have surged since the conflict began. The benchmark Brent crude oil price has crossed the $100 per barrel-mark. The price was about $72.8 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict began.

Also read: Can propaganda on Iran allowing Indian ships hide Modi government’s failure to secure gas supply?

The mild phrasing in the Indian Meteorological Department’s forecast that this summer will be “hotter-than-normal” with an “above-normal number of heatwave days” belies the grave consequences of the coming summer heat.

The forecast predicts heatwaves lasting 10-14 days longer in many parts of the country than the usual eight to 15 days per summer season.

With Assembly elections scheduled in several states next month, the forecast signals a profound risk to India’s democratic life besides the obvious tangible threats to food, water, power and public health.

To see why, it is worth revisiting India’s 2024 general election – which was also held during summer in which India endured brutal heat. During the sixth phase on May 25, 2024, daytime temperatures in several poll-bound regions breached 45 degrees celsius.

Candidates, election officials, campaign managers, and field reporters fainted or fell sick. The substantial 1.6% drop in voter turnout in 2024 from the 2019 polls has been attributed, in part, to the intense summer heat.

This was not entirely unforeseen since the Meteorological Department had already forecast double the number of heatwave days that summer. In fact, the heat had an impact on the elections despite some mitigative measures being undertaken such as political parties shifting their campaign efforts to early mornings or late evenings, and provisions made for water and shade at polling stations.

As extreme temperatures become more common, India must consider not just how the changing climate may affect tangibles such as health, but even intangibles such as democratic participation.

A peer-reviewed climate change assessment for India that my colleagues and I published recently in PLOS Climate offers critical insights.

The report shows that the hottest days of the year across large swathes of the country are now about 1.5 degrees celsius-2 degrees celsius warmer than in the 1950s. Looking ahead, we project an additional 1.2 degrees celsius-1.3 degrees celsius warming in just the next two or three decades.

Yet, this projection carries a troubling caveat. These projections assume a continued high aerosol burden over India – in other words, persistent air pollution. Ironically, air pollution has exerted a substantial cooling effect on Earth’s surface, masking about 25% of the warming that would otherwise have occurred from rising greenhouse gases.

This “aerosol-masking” is one of the reasons for India’s muted warming compared to warming over land in other parts of the world.

It makes for a dilemma. As India pursues strategies to ensure cleaner air, a fundamental requirement for improved public health and quality of life, warming may inadvertently be accelerated.

When China reduced its aerosol emissions through pollution controls, scientistsobserved faster warming rates in response. If India successfully cleans its air, this could mean even greater warming over the country than current projections.

What is worse is that the impact of rising heat is not felt evenly. Those unable to afford air-conditioned comfort – often residents of informal settlements, people with medical vulnerabilities and the elderly – bear the heaviest burden of rising temperatures.

In the context of elections, the problem in 2024 was not merely the decline in the turnout but that the groups most vulnerable to extreme heat would have been disproportionately affected.

This amounts to a form of inequitable climate disenfranchisement.

The implications for democratic participation are profound. If heat already suppressed voter turnout in 2024, what happens when such extreme conditions become the norm – when the heatwave season expands to two months in summer as our projections suggest?

If extreme climate conditions systematically edge out specific groups from the democratic process, India risks a pernicious feedback loop: those least represented are also those most vulnerable to climate impacts, and their diminished political voice makes it harder to demand the very climate action they need most.

Measuring development only in economic terms rings hollow if environmental conditions undermine the foundations of democratic participation. As India charts its path forward, climate adaptation must be central to how infrastructure, electoral processes and social protections are imagined.

After the 2024 election, the chief election commissioner admitted that India should have completed the elections at least a month earlier. His successors would do well to heed that message as India heads into the Assembly elections this year.

Chirag Dhara is a climate and sustainability scientist at Krea University.

At least eight MLAs of the Opposition Biju Janata Dal on Monday reportedly voted in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party-supported independent nominee Dilip Ray in the Rajya Sabha elections in Odisha, The Hindu reported.

Four Rajya Sabha seats from Odisha were due to fall vacant on April 2 and elections had been held on Monday to fill them. Voting ended at 6 pm in the state.

Amid polling on Monday, BJD deputy chief whip Pratap Keshari Deb said that eight party MLAs cross-voted in favour of Ray, who won the seat.

Additionally, Odisha Pradesh Congress Committee chief Bhakta Charan Das also told reporters that three of its MLAs – Ramesh Jena, Dasarathi Gomango and Sofia Firdous – had voted in favour of the ruling BJP in the state.

“The party will certainly take action against the erring members who jumped party discipline,” Das said.

However, Ray said that everybody knew his relationship with leaders across party lines, The Hindu reported.

“I pay my gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Chief Minister Mohan Majhi and state BJP president Manmohan Samal for their total support,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “I have got success because of support of many in BJD and Congress.”

Earlier in the day, BJD chief Naveen Patnaik accused the BJP of “horse-trading”, The Hindu reported.

“They [BJP] have collected a number of persons who voted for them,” the newspaper quoted the former chief minister as saying. “Most of them have criminal past, I am ashamed to say. You can check yourself as to how many of their parents went to jail and how they were with them.”

In total, elections for 37 Rajya Sabha seats in 10 states had been scheduled for Monday. Of these, 26 candidates had already secured their wins unopposed. Voting had taken place on Monday for the remaining 11 seats, which included five from Bihar, four from Odisha and two from Haryana.

Apart from Ray, two other BJP-backed candidates – Manmohan Samal and Sujeet Kumar – won in Odisha, The Hindu reported. BJD candidate Santrupta Mishra won the fourth seat.

Bribery allegations

On Sunday, two men had been arrested in Karnataka for allegedly attempting to bribe MLAs from the Odisha unit of the Congress ahead of the elections.

Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar accused the BJP of trying to influence the legislators as part of “Operation Lotus” by offering them Rs 5 crore to cross-vote in favour of a candidate backed by the party.

“Operation Lotus” refers to the alleged attempts by the BJP to orchestrate defections and poach legislators from Opposition parties by offering them bribes and other incentives.

The development came after eight Congress MLAs from Odisha were moved to a resort near Bengaluru on Thursday amid concerns about possible cross-voting in the election for the four Rajya Sabha seats from the state.

Shivakumar added that two of the four persons allegedly involved in Sunday’s incident were apprehended at the resort.

Meanwhile, the BJD and the Congress had also issued showcause notices to three MLAs on Sunday for allegedly violating party whips ahead of the elections.

A sessions court in Gujarat’s Gir Somnath district on Monday convicted five persons and acquitted 35 others in connection with a 2016 case in which seven Dalits were assaulted in the town of Una, The Indian Express reported.

Additional Sessions Judge Jignesh Pandya of the court in Veraval convicted Ramesh Jadav, Rakesh Joshi, Nagjibhai Vaniya, Pramodgiri Gausvami and Balvantgiri Gausvami. The court will pronounce the punishment on Tuesday.

On July 11, 2016, more than 40 men from the upper caste Darbar community had assaulted seven members of the Sarvaiya family for skinning a dead cow in Una town in the district. The Sarvaiyas were leather tanners and skinning dead cattle was part of their traditional occupation.

However, the assailants accused them of cow slaughter.

During the attack, four of the Sarvaiya brothers were stripped, tied to the back of a car and beaten with sticks and iron rods, while some of the attackers filmed the assault.

The Criminal Investigation Department, which investigated the case, had filed charges against 41 persons, The Indian Express reported.

The charges included attempted murder, criminal conspiracy, attempting to cause grievous hurt, dacoity, kidnapping, assault or criminal force against a woman with intent to outrage her modesty, wrongful confinement, rioting, unlawful assembly, among other offences.

Provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act and the Information Technology Act were also invoked.

Among the 41 accused facing trial were four police officers from the Una police station. One of these officers, former police inspector Nirmalsinh Zala, died during trial. The other three have been acquitted.

VC Mavadhiya, one of the defence lawyers in the case, told The Indian Express on Monday that the five men accused in the case have been convicted under sections of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to voluntarily causing hurt, intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace, voluntarily causing hurt using dangerous weapons or means and criminal intimidation.

They were also convicted under Section 3(1)(10) of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act. This section is related to the intentional insult, intimidation or caste-based abuse against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes members.

Noting that several persons had been accused in the case, Mavadhiya also told the newspaper that the prosecution could not establish who did what either in its complaint or in its testimony before the court.

“Therefore, the court has not found the offence against the rest of the accused proved,” The Indian Express quoted the lawyer as saying.

Vashram Sarvaiya described the ruling as “sad” and said that it will be challenged in the Gujarat High Court.

Also read: How the Una protests reflect Ambedkar’s great wisdom in the Constituent Assembly

Trinamool Congress MPs walked out of the Rajya Sabha to protest against the Election Commission’s decision to replace several top officials in West Bengal shortly after the schedule for the Assembly election was announced.

Among those removed from their posts by the poll panel were Director General of Police Peeyush Pandey, Kolkata Commissioner of Police Supratim Sarkar and Chief Secretary Nandini Chakraborty.

The Election Commission directed that those transferred out of their positions should not be posted in any election-related assignment till the polls are completed.

The election will be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29. The result will be announced on May 4. Read on.

The Haryana government told the Supreme Court that it will not grant sanction to prosecute Ashoka University Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad in a case related to his comments about the press briefings on Operation Sindoor. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi then quashed the criminal proceedings against Mahmudabad, but cautioned him to act “prudently” in the future.

The state’s decision, described as “one-time magnanimity”, was communicated to the court by Additional Solicitor General SV Raju.

Mahmudabad had been booked in May for a social media post highlighting the apparent irony of Hindutva commentators praising Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who had represented the Indian Army during the press briefings. He was arrested on May 18, but was granted bail by the Supreme Court three days later.

Of two cases filed against him, one was filed based on a complaint by Yogesh Jatheri, general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s state Yuva Morcha, while the second was based on a complaint by Haryana Women’s Commission Chairperson Renu Bhatia. Read on.

Flights at Dubai airport in the United Arab Emirates were temporarily suspended when a drone struck one of the fuel tanks in its vicinity amid the conflict in West Asia. Later in the day, the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority announced the “gradual resumption of some flights” to selected destinations.

Some flights were diverted from the Dubai International Airport to Al Maktoum International Airport on the outskirts of the city.

Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates ordered the arrest of 25 persons, including 17 Indians, for posting allegedly misleading or fabricated videos on social media amid the conflict. This is in addition to 10 persons, including two Indians, who were arrested on Saturday for similar offences. Read on.

Ten patients died and several were injured after a fire broke out in the trauma care intensive care unit of the Srirama Chandra Bhanja Medical College and Hospital in Odisha’s Cuttack. The fire was reported at about 3 am.

While the exact cause of the fire has not been confirmed, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi said it may have been triggered by a short circuit.

Around 23 patients were admitted in the unit and an adjacent intensive care unit at the time of the incident, Majhi said. Many of them were on ventilator and oxygen support, making it difficult for the authorities to shift them quickly after the blaze erupted.

SCB Medical College and Hospital is the largest government healthcare facility in Odisha. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Monday refused to intervene in a petition filed by journalist Ravi Nair against a notice issued to him by the Gujarat Crime Branch in connection with an article that he co-authored about Adani Ports and SEZ Limited, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta asked Nair to move the Gujarat High Court instead, The Hindu reported. It then allowed him to withdraw the petition

The journalist had moved the Supreme Court against a Gujarat Crime Branch notice issued on February 12 in connection with an article published in October 2025 in The Washington Post titled “India’s $3.9 billion plan to help Modi’s mogul ally after US charges”, Live Law reported.

The article had been authored by Nair and Pranshu Verma, former New Delhi bureau chief for The Washington Post.

The notice issued to Nair on February 12 summoned him to the office of the Gujarat Crime Branch on February 19 for a preliminary enquiry in connection with the article and one of his posts on social media.

In his petition against the notice, Nair said that the The Washington Post article “revealed how Indian officials drafted and pushed through a proposal in May 2025 to steer roughly $3.9 billion in investments to Adani Group businesses from the Life Insurance Corporation of India, a state-owned entity primarily responsible for providing life insurance to poor and rural families”, The Hindu reported.

It claimed that the Gujarat Crime Branch notice sought to “criminalise journalistic work carried out in good faith, after due diligence, and in the public interest”. Nair contended that the crime branch’s actions threatened his constitutional rights to equality, freedom of expression, and protection of life and liberty, the newspaper reported.

The state government authorities were “illegally indulging in a roving and fishing inquiry against the petitioner without jurisdiction”, the petition claimed.

During the proceedings in the Supreme Court, Nair’s counsel argued that industrialist Gautam Adani’s Adani Group had initiated three cases against the journalist and added that he was repeatedly being harassed, Live Law reported.

Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited is a part of the Adani Group.

However, the bench asked why a petition was filed under Article 32 instead of moving the jurisdictional High Court. In response, Grover said that it is “a fundamental right”.

Article 32 guarantees the right to directly approach the Supreme Court for the enforcement of fundamental rights.

Earlier case

On February 13, Nair was granted bail in another criminal defamation case filed by Adani Enterprises Limited in connection with a series of posts on the social media platform X.

A magisterial court in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar also suspended for a month the one-year prison sentence awarded to him.

The court had convicted Nair on February 10 and sentenced him to one year of imprisonment, along with a fine of Rs 5,000.

The case pertained to a series of social media posts by Nair from October 2020 to July 2021 about the Adani Group, including allegations by United States short seller Hindenburg Research and a strike against the proposed privatisation of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust.

The case was based on a complaint filed by Adani Enterprises, the flagship company of Adani Group, alleging that Nair published and disseminated a series of posts on X containing false and defamatory statements intended to damage its reputation.

The Central Bureau of Investigation on Monday told the Delhi High Court that an order discharging all 23 accused persons, including Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, from the liquor policy case should not remain on record “even for a second more than what is necessary”, Live Law reported.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta made the statement after N Hariharan, the lawyer for Kejriwal, said that the AAP chief has approached the Supreme Court against a High Court order staying the trial court’s adverse observations about the CBI.

Mehta said that while it was Kejriwal’s right to challenge the High Court order, if the plea in the top court was being cited as a reason for adjournment, then he must ensure that the petition is listed this week, according to Live Law.

The solicitor general contended that seeking a reply from the AAP leaders was not necessary as the entire record of the trial court was available, PTI reported. He demanded that Kejriwal and the other respondents should not be given more than a week to file their responses.

“We seriously object to the order,” Mehta told the High Court, according to Live Law. “It cannot remain on record even for a second more than what is necessary.”

Mehta contended that the order discharging all the accused persons was “perverse” and its existence constituted a prejudice to the system.

However, the High Court granted the respondents two weeks to file their replies.

The trial court had passed the order discharging all the accused persons on February 27. The court had criticised the CBI for implicating Kejriwal and AAP leader Manish Sisodia without any cogent material and said the chargesheet contained several gaps not supported by witnesses or statements.

The trial court had also said it would recommend a departmental inquiry against CBI officials who made a public servant the accused number one in the case. It had said that there was no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent behind the excise policy.

The CBI has filed an appeal against the order.

Kejriwal had urged the High Court to transfer the case from Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma to another bench. However, the High Court’s Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyay rejected the request, according to Live Law.

Also read: Why a court held CBI’s corruption case against Kejriwal was so flimsy it could not even go to trial

A day after the schedule for the Assembly elections in West Bengal was released, the Election Commission on Monday removed the state director general of police and the Kolkata police commissioner, PTI reported.

The poll panel appointed Indian Police Service officer Siddh Nath Gupta as the new director general of police, the news agency quoted an unidentified official as saying. Gupta will replace Peeyush Pandey in the post.

The official added that Kolkata Police Commissioner Supratim Sarkar has been removed and Ajay Kumar Nand has been appointed in his position.

Additionally, Natarajan Ramesh Babu has been named director general of correctional services, while Ajay Mukund Ranade has been appointed additional director general (law and order), the Hindustan Times reported.

In an earlier notice, the poll panel had removed Nandini Chakraborty from the post of chief secretary, appointing Dushyant Nariala in her place, The Indian Express reported. Home Secretary Jagdish Prasad Meena was replaced by Sanghamitra Ghosh.

The official also told PTI that the Election Commission has directed that all the orders be implemented immediately and that the state government submit a compliance report by 3 pm on Monday.

Those transferred out of their positions should not be posted in any election-related assignment till the completion of the polls, the poll panel added.

The West Bengal election will be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29 in the state. The results will be announced on May 4.

Trinamool Congress walks out of Rajya Sabha

In the Rajya Sabha on Monday, Trinamool Congress MPs walked out in protest against the Election Commission’s decision to remove top officials in the state, hours after announcing the schedule for the Assembly elections.

Raising the issue ahead of the Zero Hour in the Upper House, Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien said that “in the dead of night, the chief secretary, the principal secretary, the home secretary have been removed by the Election Commission”.

O’Brien added that the poll panel had all the power to do this. “They can also say that I am wearing a blue shirt and not a white shirt,” he said.

“In protest against what the chief election commissioner is doing, the Trinamool Congress is walking out for the day,” the Rajya Sabha member said.

Trinamool intervenes, registers protest in Rajya Sabha, walks out

VIDEO

"In the dead of night, the Chief Secretary, Principal Secretary, Home Secretary of Bengal were removed by the Election Commission

EC have all the power to do it. They can (misuse their power). I am wearing… pic.twitter.com/uDLYegkOSY

— Derek O'Brien | ডেরেক ও'ব্রায়েন (@derekobrienmp) March 16, 2026

The Haryana government on Monday told the Supreme Court that it will not grant sanction to prosecute Ashoka University Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad in the case pertaining to his comments about the press briefings on Operation Sindoor, Live Law reported.

The decision, described as a “one-time magnanimity” was communicated to the court by Additional Solicitor General SV Raju, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi then quashed the criminal proceedings against Mahmudabad.

The court, however, cautioned the professor to act “prudently” in the future.

“Sometimes writing in between the lines creates more problems,” Bar and Bench quoted Kant as saying. “Sometimes the situation is so sensitive that we all have to be careful. Petitioner being a highly learned person shall act in a prudent manner in the future.”

Mahmudabad, who heads the political science department at Ashoka University, had been booked in May for a social media post highlighting the apparent irony of Hindutva commentators praising Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who had represented the Indian Army during the press briefings.

He had said that the optics of the press briefings by Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh were important, “but optics must translate to reality on the ground otherwise it’s just hypocrisy”.

“Perhaps they [commentators] could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hate mongering be protected as Indian citizens,” he had said.

Mahmudabad was arrested on May 18 but was granted bail by the Supreme Court three days later.

However, the court had at the time declined to halt the investigation against him. It had also instructed the Haryana Police chief to form a special investigation team to look into the meaning of the words used by Mahmudabad.

The first case in the matter was filed based on a complaint by Yogesh Jatheri, general secretary of the BJP’s state Yuva Morcha, invoking provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita related to promoting enmity, prejudicial assertions affecting national integration and acts endangering India’s sovereignty, unity and integrity.

The second FIR, lodged by Haryana Women’s Commission Chairperson Renu Bhatia, invoked provisions pertaining to public mischief, deliberate actions aimed at insulting the modesty of a woman, and endangering India’s sovereignty, unity and integrity.

On August 25, the Supreme Court restrained a magistrate from taking cognisance of the chargesheet filed by the Haryana Police’s Special Investigation Team in the first case. It had also quashed all proceedings in the second first information report against Mahmudabad based on a police closure report.

On January 6, the Supreme Court had urged the state to reconsider the matter and decline prosecution.

The professor has maintained that his remarks had been “completely misunderstood” by the women’s commission and that its notice failed to explain how his posts were “contrary to the right of or laws for women”.

Also read:

• Why Ashoka University professor’s arrest has no legal basis

• Harsh Mander: The message from the persecution of Ali Khan Mahmudabad

Nineteen Indians were among 35 persons whose arrest has been ordered in the United Arab Emirates for posting allegedly misleading and fabricated videos on social media amid regional tensions due to the West Asia conflict, PTI reported on Sunday.

Ten persons, including two Indians, were ordered to be arrested on Saturday, while the arrest of the remaining 25, including 17 Indians, was ordered on Sunday.

The accused persons have been referred for an expedited trial.

UAE Attorney General Dr Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said in a statement that the action followed rigorous monitoring of digital platforms to curb the spread of fabricated information and artificial content intended to incite public disorder and undermine stability.

He added that “publishing such clips, whether real or fabricated,” could “affect public security and create confusion,” and also provide “hostile media with material that could be used to distort facts, undermine confidence in the competent authorities and potentially reveal aspects of the country’s defensive capabilities”.

The conflict in West Asia began on February 28 after Israel and the US launched a joint operation to “degrade the capabilities” of the Iranian government.

Tehran retaliated by striking Israel and US military bases in the region, and targeting major cities in other Gulf countries and some ships.

Iran has fired more than 1,800 missiles and drones at the UAE, more than any other country targeted by Tehran in the conflict, upending travel plans in the financial hub despite its air defence intercepting a vast majority of the projectiles, Reuters reported.

Ten patients died and several others were injured after a fire broke out in the trauma care intensive care unit of the Srirama Chandra Bhanja Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack on Monday, ANI quoted Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi as saying.

The fire was reported at about 3 am, The Indian Express reported. While the exact cause of the fire has not been confirmed, the chief minister said it may have been triggered by a short circuit.

Around 23 patients were admitted in the trauma intensive care unit and an adjacent intensive care unit at the time of the incident, Majhi told ANI. Many of them were on ventilator and oxygen support, making it difficult to shift them quickly after the blaze began, The New Indian Express reported.

Majhi said that seven patients died while being shifted during the rescue operation, while three others later died during treatment, ANI reported.

Eleven hospital employees, including private security guards involved in the rescue, were also injured by fire and smoke and are receiving treatment, The Hindu reported.

Firefighters, including the college’s unit and personnel from the Cuttack Fire Station, responded with three tenders and more than 30 personnel to control the blaze and assist in rescues, the newspaper reported.

SCB Medical College and Hospital is the largest government healthcare facility in Odisha.

Majhi announced an ex gratia payment of Rs 25 lakh from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund to the next of kin of each of those who died and ordered a judicial probe into the incident.

#WATCH | Cuttack: 10 people died in the fire in the Trauma Care ICU of SCB Medical College and Hospital, Cuttack.

Odisha CM Mohan Charan Majhi says, "...The fire broke out probably due to a short circuit. 23 patients were under treatment at the trauma ICU, the ICU adjacent to… https://t.co/0l3TrFlra5 pic.twitter.com/WpAunajOok

— ANI (@ANI) March 16, 2026

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh should face targeted sanctions for its responsibility for and tolerance of violations of religious freedom in India, a US panel has recommended to the Donald Trump administration. The sanctions could include freezing the organisation’s assets and barring entry to the US.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the Narendra-Modi led Bharatiya Janata Party government in India.

The recommendation was made in the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2026 annual report, released earlier this month.

The commission is an independent American government agency that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion and makes policy suggestions to the White House. These suggestions are not binding.

In an India-specific issue update released in November, the commission had noted that the “interconnected relationship between the RSS and BJP allows for the creation and enforcement of several discriminatory pieces of legislation, including citizenship, anti-conversion and cow slaughter laws”.

In the 2026 annual report, the commission also recommended that India’s Research and Analysis Wing be among the individuals and entities facing sanctions for their tolerance of religious freedom violations. The Research and Analysis Wing is the country’s foreign intelligence agency.

In 2025 as well, the commission had recommended sanctions against the agency over its alleged involvement in assassination plots against Sikh separatists, Reuters reported.

Among the commission’s other recommendations was that the Trump administration designate India as a “country of particular concern” for engaging in and tolerating systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom. This is the seventh time the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has made this recommendation.

India has not responded to the latest report. However, in March 2025, the Ministry of External Affairs had said that the commission has a “pattern of issuing biased and politically motivated assessments”.

India is among the 18 countries that the commission recommended for designation as “countries of particular concern”, along with Afghanistan, Myanmar, China, Cuba, Eritrea, Iran, Libya, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Vietnam.

‘Religious freedom continues to deteriorate’

In the latest annual report, the commission noted that in 2025 “religious freedom conditions in India continued to deteriorate as the government introduced and enforced new legislation targeting religious minority communities and their houses of worship”.

“Indian authorities also facilitated widespread detention and illegal expulsion of citizens and religious refugees and tolerated vigilante attacks against religious minority communities,” the report said.

The Union government continued to use anti-terrorism laws to imprison religious minorities and those advocating on their behalf, it added.

The report noted that activists “Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and several others involved in the 2020 [Citizenship Amendment Act] protests remained in prison for the fifth year without trials”.

“Throughout the year, Hindu nationalist mobs across several states harassed, incited, and instigated violence against Muslims and Christians with impunity,” the report said. “Throughout 2025, violent mobs attacked Muslims under the guise of protecting state-level cow slaughter laws.”

It also noted that 12 of India’s states have anti-conversion laws, and that several state governments strengthened or introduced new legislation in 2025 with broader definitions of “religious conversion” and harsher penalties.

Two men were arrested in Karnataka on Sunday for allegedly attempting to bribe MLAs from the Odisha unit of the Congress a day ahead of the Rajya Sabha elections, the Hindustan Times reported.

Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of trying to influence the legislators as part of “Operation Lotus” by offering them Rs 5 crore to cross-vote in favour of a candidate backed by the party, PTI reported.

“Operation Lotus” refers to the alleged attempts by the BJP to orchestrate defections and poach legislators from Opposition parties by offering them bribes and other incentives.

On Thursday, eight Congress MLAs from Odisha were moved to a resort near Bengaluru amid concerns about possible cross-voting in the election for four Rajya Sabha seats from the state.

Shivakumar added that two of the four persons allegedly involved in Sunday’s incident were apprehended at the resort, PTI reported.

Odisha Congress leader Ashok Kumar Das filed a complaint with the Bidadi police station in Karnataka naming the four persons as Birendra Prasad, Suresh, Ajit Kumar Sahu and Simachal Mohakud, the Hindustan Times reported.

Das also alleged that when the legislators rejected the alleged offer of Rs 5 crore each to cross-vote in the Rajya Sabha election, the individuals threatened to kill them if they returned to Odisha, India Today reported.

The BJP rejected the allegations.

Anil Biswal, a spokesperson for the party in Odisha, described the claims as “baseless” and said they had been made after the Congress realised it was facing defeat in the Rajya Sabha elections, the Hindustan Times reported.

“The Congress has a habit of cross-voting,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Four Rajya Sabha seats from Odisha are due to fall vacant on April 2 and elections are being held on Monday to fill them. In total, polls for 37 Rajya Sabha seats in 10 states are scheduled for the same day.

In the 147-member Odisha Assembly, the BJP has 79 MLAs and the support of three Independents, giving it 82 votes. The Biju Janata Dal has 50 MLAs, though two are currently under suspension, leaving it with 48 effective votes. The Congress has 14 MLAs and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) has one.

Under the voting formula for Rajya Sabha elections, a candidate requires at least 30 first-preference votes to win.

BJD, Congress issue showcause notice to 3 MLAs

The Opposition BJD and the Congress on Sunday issued showcause notices to three MLAs for allegedly violating party whips ahead of the Rajya Sabha elections, PTI reported.

The BJD issued showcause notices to two MLAs: Chakramani Kanhar, who represents the Baliguda constituency, and Naba Kishor Mallick, the legislator from Jayadev.

In a statement on Sunday, BJD chief whip Pramila Mallik said that the two MLAs had been absent from meetings convened by the party leadership for the past three days, the news agency reported.

The Congress also asked its MLA from Mohana, Dasarathi Gomango, to present himself before the party.

In the showcause notice, the Congress Disciplinary Committee said that Gomango had remained incommunicado and accused him of “deliberately going into hiding at a critical juncture, raising suspicions of potential cross-voting or defection that could undermine the party’s strategic alliance”, PTI reported.

The Supreme Court’s “unease” with the 2023 Handbook on Combating Gender Stereotypes is reportedly driving its push to frame new guidelines, but this risks undoing decades of progressive jurisprudence on gender justice and reflects an institutional discomfort with confronting gendered and caste-based power structures in judicial reasoning.

The handbook, intended as a tool to help judges identify and avoid stereotypes that frequently appear in judicial reasoning, was released in August 2023 during the tenure of Chief Justice DY Chandrachud.

On February 10, the Supreme Court issued an order to form a committee of experts and frame new guidelines. During the hearing, Chief Justice Surya Kant described the handbook as “too Harvard-oriented”. This criticism is misplaced.

A month on, a report in The Indian Express, published on March 9, indicates that the handbook’s description of the use of sexual violence to maintain caste dominance appears to be among the factors that sparked a push to reexamine the guidelines.

The report, citing sources within the court, points to two main areas of concern among some judges. These are: first, the handbook’s discussion of gender stereotypes includes an illustrative list of assumptions often applied to men and women in cases involving sex and sexual violence, along with explanations of why such assumptions are flawed.

Second, the handbook references stereotypes surrounding caste-based sexual violence, including that “dominant caste men do not want to engage in sexual relations with women from oppressed castes”.

The handbook notes that rape and sexual violence have historically been used as tools of social control and domination, particularly to reinforce caste hierarchies. According to the Indian Express, some judges were concerned that such sweeping generalisations risk “painting targets on entire communities”.

But, as the handbook explains, these stereotypes are drawn directly from the language and reasoning found in the judgments of the Supreme Court, High Courts and District Courts.

By compiling and analysing these examples, the handbook simply holds up a mirror to the legal system. It demonstrates how assumptions about the behaviour of a “respectable” woman, the credibility of survivors of sexual violence or the supposed improbability of certain forms of violence have found their way into judicial discourse and led to unjust outcomes.

Highlighting the patterns

Critiquing stereotypes in judicial decisions is a necessary step toward ensuring that courts do not reproduce the social prejudices that can shape legal reasoning. Indeed, identifying and questioning such stereotypes has long been recognised as a marker of progress in gender-sensitive jurisprudence. The handbook merely highlights these patterns so that judges can consciously avoid repeating them.

Similarly, the example relating to caste-based sexual violence reflects reasoning that has appeared in a real judicial decision. As the handbook notes, this was highlighted from the trial court’s judgment in the Bhanwari Devi gang rape case, where the accused were acquitted in 1995.

Among the reasons cited by the court was the assumption that oppressor-caste men would not rape a lower-caste woman. This reasoning starkly illustrated how caste prejudice could shape judicial decision-making.

Bhanwari Devi, a grassroots worker with the Rajasthan government’s Women’s Development Programme, was gang-raped in 1992 after she attempted to stop a child marriage in her village. The trial court’s acquittal of the accused and the reasoning it employed generated outrage and ultimately led to the landmark Vishaka ruling in which the Supreme Court laid down the first binding guidelines on workplace sexual harassment.

Thus, the handbook’s discussion on caste stereotypes in sexual violence cases does not “paint targets” on communities. Moreover, sociological and feminist scholarship has consistently demonstrated how sexual violence is often used as a tool of social control against marginalised communities.

In Castes in India, BR Ambedkar had theorised how control over a woman’s sexuality helps maintain the caste system by regulating marriage. The patterns that emerge in caste-based gender violence cases prove this. Recognising this structural reality is an attempt to understand how power operates in society, and does not vilify any community.

The discomfort with this analysis also shows the judiciary’s misplaced priorities. The appeal in the Bhanwari Devi case that prompted this discussion has been pending before the Rajasthan High Court for nearly three decades. The case has been unheard for several years. Yet, the judiciary found time to express “unease” about institutional critiques of judicial reasoning, instead of the delay in resolving such appeals, raising deeper questions about institutional priorities. If anything should cause institutional discomfort, it ought to be the continued denial of timely justice in cases of gender and caste violence.

This “unease” is also difficult to reconcile with the structure of the Indian Constitution. The Constitution is built on the recognition that Indian society is marked by deeply entrenched structures of power, particularly those rooted in caste and gender, and that the law must actively work to dismantle them.

Invisible hierarchies

When scholarship, handbooks, or judicial training materials identify patterns within these systems, they are attempting to illuminate the structural dynamics through which power operates in society. Ignoring these patterns merely allows entrenched hierarchies to remain invisible within legal reasoning.

Educational tools that encourage judges to reflect critically on social realities are not ideological or partisan exercises. They are essential to prevent the law from unconsciously reproducing prejudice.

Without conscious reflection, stereotypes and assumptions embedded in society can easily find their way into legal judgments. A justice system that is unwilling to confront the social structures within which crimes occur risks retreating into an ivory-tower, detached from the society it claims to serve.

Anurag Bhaskar is a faculty at OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and a visiting professor of law at NALSAR, Hyderabad. He was a part of the team that prepared the Supreme Court’s Gender Handbook in 2023.

India’s direct talks with Iran have “yielded some results” in allowing Indian ships to pass through the Strait of Hormuz amid the conflict in West Asia, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar told the Financial Times on Sunday. He, however, added that there is no “blanket arrangement” with Tehran for Indian vessels to move through the strait.

In an interview to the newspaper, Jaishankar said that each movement of Indian ships through the strait is being handled individually.

“I am at the moment engaged in talking to them [Iran] and my talking has yielded some results,” Jaishankar told the Financial Times. “This is ongoing. If it is yielding results for me, I would naturally continue to look at it.”

The Union government on Saturday confirmed that two Indian-flagged vessels carrying liquefied petroleum gas – Shivalik and Nanda Devi – had crossed the Strait of Hormuz.

Jaishankar said that the passage of the ships showed what diplomatic negotiations could achieve.

He added: “From India’s perspective, it is better that we reason and we co-ordinate and we get a solution than we don’t…So if that sort of allows other people to engage, I think the world is better off for it.”

The remarks came after United States President Donald Trump on Saturday urged other countries to send warships to help secure the Strait of Hormuz.

In the interview, Jaishankar also said that the discussions with Tehran were continuing as several Indian vessels were still waiting to pass through the strait.

“These are still early days,” he said. “We have many more ships there. So while this is a welcome development, there is continuing conversation because there is continued work on that.”

He added: “India and Iran have a relationship. And this is a conflict that we regard as something very unfortunate.”

The conflict in West Asia began on February 28. Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

The International Energy Agency on Thursday said that the fighting has caused the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”.

Global oil prices have surged since the conflict began. The benchmark Brent crude oil price has crossed the $100 per barrel-mark. The price was about $72.8 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict began.

The disruption has also affected LPG supplies in India. The country imports about 60% of its LPG demand, most of it from Gulf countries. The disruption has led to several eateries being temporarily shut, and long queues outside LPG godowns and agencies.

Months before United States President Donald Trump announced Reliance Group’s investment in a Texas oil refinery, the group spent $1.49 million (Rs 13 crore) on lobbying the White House and other US government departments on energy and trade policies, “sanctions” and “tariffs affecting oil”, records filed with the US Senate show.

More than half the amount – $760,000 – was spent between October 1 and December 31, 2025.

On March 11, Trump announced that Reliance Group would back a new oil refinery at the Port of Brownsville, Texas, to be built by America First Refining. Trump called it the first American refinery in 50 years and pegged the deal at a staggering $300 billion (Rs 27.7 lakh crore).

Reliance is yet to comment on the deal.

In a statement, America First Refining said that in February, it had received a “9-figure investment from a global supermajor at a 10-figure valuation”. Without identifying the global firm, it added that it had signed a binding “offtake term sheet” with the firm to purchase, process, and distribute energy from American shale oil.

Scroll sent questions to the Reliance Group about the deal and its spend on lobbying in the US. No response has been received by the time of publication.

In 2025, the Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate had found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration over Russian oil imports. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had said that some of India’s richest families were profiteering from New Delhi buying and reselling cheap Russian oil.

In August, the Trump administration hiked tariffs on Indian goods from 25% to 50% over the oil imports. By December, the Reliance group had to cut down its purchase of Russian oil. In February 2026, Trump waived the additional 25% tariff.

Four lobbying firms

Lobbying to influence government policy is a legal activity in the US. It is done through specialised firms.

In addition to three lobbying firms already representing it, in 2025, Reliance hired a new firm, Checkmate Government Relations. The North Carolina-based firm has old ties with the Trump administration. One of its lobbyists, Fritz Vaughan, was a treasury official in the first Trump administration.

For $330,000, Checkmate Government Relations was tasked with discussing “issues regarding international energy policy” with the US State Department and the intelligence-focused National Security Agency.

Reliance spent another $480,000 through Ballard Partners for lobbying the Department of Commerce and the State Department – which manages American foreign policy – on the same issues.

The group gave $80,000 to AND Partners to lobby on its behalf with the US Senate on diesel swaps, an arrangement where a company trades with a sanctioned country without exchanging money.

The highest spending – $600,000 – however, was directed towards discussions on “US trade policies, sanctions, and tariffs affecting oil” with the White House, US Senate, House of Representatives, Department of Commerce, Treasury Department and the Department of Energy. This was done via a lobbying firm called Eversheds Sutherland.

In addition to Reliance, records show that Element Fuels Holdings LLC, the firm that operates America First Refining, spent $450,000 (Rs 4 crore) in 2025 to lobby with Trump’s office over the “production of hydrogen technology”. For this, it engaged Washington-based Continental Strategy LLC, which is run by Carlos Trujillo, an official who served in the first Trump administration. This was its highest-ever spending on lobbying.

A new record

Reliance has lobbied US governments in the past, but never on this scale. In 2009 and 2010, it spent Rs $760,000 (Rs 3.7 crore) each year on “strategic counsel on issues related to trade”.

In 2020 and 2021, it spent $1.2 million (Rs 9 crore) each year to lobby the State Department and the US Senate over sanctions. According to Bloomberg, the group was trying to get the US to loosen its sanctions on oil from Venezuela.

Chevron, an American multinational pushing the same issue, had spent $6.8 million in lobbying in 2021, records show.

Apart from Reliance, 2025 saw the Adani Group spend $160,000 to lobby the US State department, Department of Homeland Security, and the House of Representatives over “US-India trade relationship”, “green energy” and “related criminal and civil matters”. In 2024, a US court had indicted the group for bribing Indian officials to convince them into buying electricity from its units.

The same year, records show that the Tata Group spent $920,000 on lobbying the US Senate and the House of Representatives over “education, innovation, and research programs and federal funding for STEM education”. In 2025, Tata Consultancy Services was among the Indian information technology firms that faced headwinds in the US as the Trump administration threatened to charge businesses a steep fee for H1-B visas, three-fourths of which are secured by Indians.

The West Bengal Police’s Special Task Force on Saturday arrested a third Bangladeshi citizen in connection with the killing of Bangladeshi activist Sharif Osman Hadi, The Hindu reported.

On March 7, the police had arrested two Bangladeshis, Rahul alias Faisal Karim Masud and Alamgir Hossain, near the Bongaon border area, on charges of illegally entering and staying in India.

The third man arrested on Saturday, Philip Sangma, had allegedly helped the two persons enter India illegally through the Haluaghat-Dalupara border area in exchange for money, according to the police.

Investigators said that Sangma later entered India to evade arrest in Bangladesh and travelled to several locations in the country, PTI reported.

He remained in contact with the other two men and was attempting to return to Bangladesh when he was apprehended, the news agency quoted an unidentified officer as saying.

“During initial interrogation, Philip Sangma admitted that he operates as a border tout and facilitates illegal migrants to cross the border,” The Hindu quoted the police as saying.

The police statement added that Sangma allegedly admitted to facilitating Masud and Hossain’s entry into India.

Sangma was produced before a court on Saturday and remanded to police custody for further investigation.

Hadi was a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina-led Awami League government at the time.

He was shot on December 12 while he was leaving a mosque in Dhaka. He died on December 18 at a hospital in Singapore, where he had been flown for treatment.

Hadi’s death had led to unrest in parts of Bangladesh, during which the offices of newspapers The Daily Star and Prothom Alo were attacked.

The Bangladesh Police had at the time alleged that Masud and Hossain had crossed into Meghalaya with the help of Indian residents and had taken refuge there. India’s Border Security Force had, however, denied the claim.

The Bangladesh Police have claimed that Hadi was killed on the instructions of leaders linked to the Awami League and its student wing, the Chhatra League. It alleged that the killing was the result of “political vendetta”.

Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal will head for Assembly elections in phases starting on April 9, the Election Commission announced on Sunday. The results in all states will be announced on May 4.

The polling in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry will take place in a single phase on April 9.

In Tamil Nadu, the voting will take place in a single phase on April 23.

In West Bengal, the polling will take place in two phases on April 23 and April 29.

The Model Code of Conduct came into force with the poll schedule being announced.

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

More than 17.4 crore electors will be eligible to vote in the polls.

Bye-elections

The poll panel also announced bye-elections to eight Assembly seats in Goa (Ponda), Gujarat (Umreth), Karnataka (Bagalkot and Davanagere South), Maharashtra (Rahuri and Baramati), Nagaland (Koridang) and Tripura (Dharmanagar).

The voting in Goa, Karnataka Nagaland and Tripura will be held on April 9, and in Gujarat and Maharashtra on April 23. The counting of votes will take place on May 4.

The bye-polls were necessitated by the death of the legislators.

Revised voter lists

The final voter lists in the four states and the Union Territory have been published following the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The process is still underway in West Bengal with several voters “under adjudication”.

On February 28, the Election Commission published the final electoral roll for West Bengal, indicating the exclusion of more than 61 lakh voters.

About 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases remain “under adjudication” based on their objections to their exclusions from the draft rolls published in December.

The names of those approved by judicial officers will be added to the rolls through a supplementary list.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ordered that judicial officers of the rank of district judge or additional district judge be appointed to help complete the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in the state amid a tussle between the Trinamool Congress government and the Election Commission.

Four days later, the court allowed judges from Odisha and Jharkhand to also be deployed to decide on the claims and objections raised during the process.

The 2021 results

In West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has been in power since 2011. The main Opposition in the state over the years has shifted from the Left parties to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In 2021, the BJP managed to win 77 seats in the 294-member Assembly. The Trinamool had won 215. The other alliance comprising the Left, the Congress and some smaller parties, despite securing a 10% vote share, had won just one seat.

In Assam, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance had won a clear majority. It won 75 seats of the 126-member Assembly. The Opposition Mahajot alliance comprising the Congress, the Left and the All India United Democratic Front had won 50 seats.

After the polls, BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma had become the chief minister, replacing Sarbananda Sonowal.

In Tamil Nadu, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam-led alliance, which includes the Congress and the Left, won 159 seats in the 234-member Assembly. The NDA, comprising the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the BJP, had won 75. DMK leader MK Stalin had become the chief minister.

In Kerala, the Left Democratic Front had broken a 44-year trend of incumbents losing power. The alliance picked up 99 seats in the 140-member Assembly. The Congress-led United Democratic Front had won 41.

In Puducherry, the NDA, comprising the All India NR Congress and the BJP, had defeated the United Progressive Alliance of the Congress and the DMK. N Rangaswamy of the NR Congress became the chief minister.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi on Saturday sealed and demolished portions of 70 shops in a drive against alleged encroachments in Uttam Nagar, days after a man died following a clash in the area during Holi celebrations.

Tarun Bhutolia was severely injured in a clash on March 4 that began after a water balloon accidentally thrown by an 11-year-old girl from the third floor of a building fell on a Muslim woman standing below. The incident had led to an argument between the two neighbouring families from different religious communities.

The 26-year-old man had succumbed to his injuries the next day.

Bhutolia’s killing had sparked tensions in the area. Several vehicles were damaged and some were set on fire during protests by residents, following which police and paramilitary personnel were deployed.

On Saturday, the municipal authority said that the demolition drive had been undertaken to remove what it stated were unauthorised platforms, stairs and temporary sheds in front of the shops to “ensure smoother pedestrian movement and better traffic flow”.

Team MCD in West Zone carried out an encroachment removal drive at B-Block, JJ Colony, Hastsal, reclaiming public space and restoring order in the area.

Unauthorized thadas, stairs and temporary sheds in front of 70 shops were removed, clearing about 380 metres of road… pic.twitter.com/Gd14ONll5P

— Municipal Corporation of Delhi (@MCD_Delhi) March 14, 2026

The drive targeted a row of eateries next to the Uttam Nagar police station, a few hundred metres from Bhutolia’s house, The Hindu reported. The lane serves as the entry point to the Hastsal locality of Uttam Nagar.

Deputy Commissioner Colonel Vinod Atri told the newspaper that no permanent structures were demolished.

The action came days after the municipal corporation on March 8 demolished allegedly illegal portions of a property linked to a person accused in Bhutolia’s death.

On Wednesday, the Delhi High Court restrained the municipal body from demolitions for a week of houses belonging to persons allegedly involved in the clash, The Hindu 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 states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In November 2024, the Supreme Court held as illegal the practice of demolishing properties of persons accused of crimes as a punitive measure.

Also watch: How a clash between two families on Holi in Delhi became a larger flashpoint

We were in Bihar on our way from Narendrapur to Patna. Narendrapur is a village near Jiradei, the birthplace of India’s first president, Rajendra Prasad. I was returning after taking part in a reflective workshop on Mahatma Gandhi at the campus of an organisation called Parivartan. Our car had entered the road through Siwan.

As we drove along, I tried to look for familiar landmarks because this was the very road on which, from childhood through adolescence, I had spent countless hours every day. The road was narrow and crowded with people. Our car crawled forward slowly. On both sides of the road, there were women wearing hijabs and burqas.

“So many Muslims in Siwan!” the driver said.

A faint air of tension entered the vehicle, although the driver was merely describing what he saw. He had not expressed an opinion. But it surprised me that the sight of Muslims in Bihar should elicit a comment like this. The community forms nearly 17% of the population, and there is hardly any part of Bihar that Muslims do not live.

“Yes, there is quite a sizeable Muslim population here,” I replied. “I used to live here. I spent my childhood in a Muslim locality, Sheikh Mohalla.” I added, almost defensively, “Everyone used to live together.”

“Living together is a good thing,” the driver agreed.

I felt my back relax a little against the seat.

But the conversation had not ended.

“But sometimes Muslims do mischief,” he said.

Living together was a good thing, yes. But perhaps the driver wanted to explain why, in India, such togetherness often breaks down – or why it could not last. I straightened my back again in my seat.

He offered an example in support of his point: “Just look at what happened in Delhi. A girl merely threw a colour-filled balloon. It hit a Muslim woman. Then her family came with swords and sticks and beat one of the men from the girl’s family so badly that he died. Killing someone over such a small matter cannot be right.”

There was no anger in the driver’s voice. Yet the conclusion he wanted to lead me toward through with this example was clear.

He was referring to the horrific incident in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar on Holi relating to the murder of a young man named Tarun Kumar. The information the driver was giving me was precisely the information most of us had until a day after the incident.

Everyone had been shocked by the news. How could a man be killed merely because a coloured balloon had struck someone?

An argument on Holi spiralled into a clash and eventually led to the death of a man in Delhi's Uttam Nagar. Soon, Hindutva groups alleged that it was a communal hate crime. https://t.co/l7VV3YNWbX@sighyush & @raghavKakkar30 visit the locality to find out what really happened. pic.twitter.com/vhBAoRjkDF

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) March 13, 2026

I began to think about all the clips I had seen on social media of how Holi has come to be celebrated. Many scenes were joyous and festive, involving the sprinkling of bright colours and throwing of coloured water.

No one thinks that throwing a balloon filled with colour at someone might injure them. But when a balloon is hurled at a person, the intention is rarely to give the target any pleasure. In fact, the shock experienced by the target gives the person throwing the balloon a certain thrill. The real objective is not to invite someone to join the festival of colours.

In recent years, another element has been added to this practice: choosing Muslims as the target – forcing Holi on them.

After Tarun Khatik’s murder, I watched a video of a Hindu boy repeatedly throwing colour-filled balloons at a Muslim woman. The woman staggered. Her bag fell to the ground. Other people were walking beside her. Yet the boy continued to aim only at the Muslim woman.

Where did he learn that the real fun of Holi lies in hurting Muslims?

Similar incidents may perhaps have taken place across the country on Holi. In most cases, the targets quietly ignored the action. After all, this is part of Holi revelry.

Before Holi, we did not see the police issuing instructions that the festival should not become an excuse for inflicting violence on others. On the contrary, one police officer was heard, with a smile, warning that those who did not wish to celebrate Holi should remain indoors that day.

Friday prayers take place 52 times while Holi is celebrated once a year. If anyone in the Muslim community feels use of Holi colour on them is profanity, it's better they don't step out of the homes: UP Police DSP Anuj Chaudhary in Sambhal. pic.twitter.com/COUtt8knSh

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) March 6, 2025

But I also watched a video in which a police officer asks Muslims to celebrate their festivals within the confines of their homes. Even there, they cannot pray. They can be arrested if they are praying on their own property.

The implication is unmistakable: during Holi, mischief – even a degree of aggression – enjoys a certain licence. It is assumed to be part of the festival.

That is why old rivalries are often settled under the cover of Holi. This year alone, for instance, five people were reportedly killed in Odisha on Holi. There were dozens of other violent incidents in which people were injured. Last year, six killings were reported from the same state during the restival.

In those cases, both the perpetrators and the victims were Hindus.

Similar reports of killings and violence came from other states as well.

On Holi, bhang, alcohol, and other intoxicating substances are consumed with abandon. Violence is sometimes committed under the cover of intoxication. When a deliberate killing is described as an act committed in drunkenness, the gravity of the crime – and the punishment it attracts – becomes lighter.

In most such cases, both parties are Hindu. Yet we rarely see community organisations or crowds taking to the streets to protest these incidents.

In addition, under the cover of the festival, sexual harassment is not uncommon, Yet society rarely condemns this strongly. Most of the women who suffer such violence are Hindus. The perpetrators, too, are Hindus.

Gang Rape on Holi in Chhattisgarh's Kondagaon

Five men, including 03 minors, gang-raped a 19 y/o woman in Kondagaon on Holi, after entering her home under the pretext of applying colours and sending her mother away to buy a liquor bottle. All five accused have been arrested. pic.twitter.com/TcQtW2F6G9

— زماں (@Delhiite_) March 7, 2026

Tarun Khatik’s brutal murder became a national story, as it should have. Many reports emphasised that he was Dalit. However, the same day, another Dalit man was also killed because of Holi. In a village called Begariya near Lucknow, a 22-year-old Dalit youth named Suraj Gautam was killed by Brahmins from his village, seemingly because he had dared to wish them “Happy Holi”.

According to reports, a woman from a Brahmin family stabbed him in anger. Yet the news of Suraj Gautam’s murder had not reached our driver. That act of violence did not evoke popular anger.

No one is demanding justice for Suraj Gautam. But across social media, there have been frenzied demands that the killers of Tarun Khatik be punished. The chief minister of Delhi visited Tarun Khatik’s family to express her condolences.

Soon after the killing, as has become something of a custom in India over the last ten years, the home of the accused man was demolished. Before that, Bajrang Dal goons are alleged to have looted the home and burnt a motorcycle, as the police stood by silently. It has now become customary to justify Hindutva violence as an expression of hurt Hindu sentiments.

Gradually, more details emerged. It turned out that the families of Tarun Khatik and the accused Muslim men had an old dispute. The balloon had not been thrown by a little girl but by a man. There had been an exchange of abuse afterwards, but the matter had apparently calmed down.

Later, Khatik returned from the gym with several others and a fight broke out. During that fight, he was struck on the head, leading to his death. People from the Muslim side were also injured in the clash. According to their lawyer, a boy named Rizwan is badly injured and missing. The police have not provided any information about him.

Many members of the Muslim family are in jail. The Hindus who the Muslim family claim attacked them are free.

Demolition begins at the residence of accused in the Delhi murder where young man identified as Tarun was killed following altercation between families of two different communities over throwing of colour balloon on Holi. pic.twitter.com/V3tyJkvJ0E

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) March 8, 2026

Our driver in Bihar did not know these facts. Millions of Hindus like him do not know them either. When I shared these details with him, he admitted that his information had come only from television and the mobile phone. He agreed that in light of the new facts, it would be difficult to hold only one side entirely responsible.

For Hindutva organisations, spreading hate propaganda is necessary for their anti-Muslim politics. But why is the media uninterested in the truth? Why is it manufacturing “facts” designed to produce hatred against Muslims?

How will Muslims defend themselves against such relentless propaganda?

After the incident, speaking to Hindus in that neighbourhood gives the impression that many of them do not harbour personal hatred toward Muslims. But the Muslim family’s home been looted without their participation – or at least their silent consent?

Since Tarun Khatik’s death, incidents of violence against Muslims have increased in Delhi and elsewhere. Neither the government nor the police has issued clear warnings that such violence will not be tolerated. No action has been taken against those spreading false news and propaganda.

We can see that the media and the government want hatred against Muslims among Hindus to grow deeper, to reduce, and eventually eliminate the spaces where the two communities still share life.

But what do we want?

Especially those of us Hindus who like to see ourselves as conscientious and vigilant – what do we want?

Apoorvanand teaches Hindi in Delhi University.

Exactly 80 years ago, a trial began that starkly brought out the brutality of war.

Captain Nirpal Chand of the 2/17 Dogras was one of 62,000 soldiers of the colonial Indian Army defending Singapore from the Japanese who became prisoners of war in February 1942 when the island surrendered.

Forty thousand of these soldiers volunteered for the Indian National Army. which had been formed a few weeks before by General Mohan Singh with Japan’s support. But Singh soon became sceptial about Japan’s commitment to arming the force to liberate India. He was arrested on December 29, 1942. The Indian National Army was disbanded.

A little while later, it was resurrected by Rash Bahari Bose and handed over to Subhash Chandra Bose when he reached Singapore in July 1943.

Chand had joined Mohan Singh’s Indian National Army but refused to participate in the reconstituted force.

A few months after Mohan Singh was arrested, the first of 17,000 Indians were shipped by Japan to forced labour camps in Papua New Guinea. At least 10,500 men died, most from starvation, sickness or overwork. Dozens were shot escaping. But the officers that protected them as long as they could.

Chand’s men were among the 3,000 sent to the island of New Guinea. They arrived there in May 1943. Later that year, he angered the Japanese by leading a hunger strike to demand better conditions. In early 1944, American troops invaded parts of the island, and in April the Japanese decided to move to a new camp 300 km away. With the men already emaciated, it was a death sentence for most.

At a halt midway, on April 22, 1944, Chand refused to allow his men to move as they were getting further away from the Americans and the possibility of being rescued. After tense negotiation and many threats, he refused to budge, so the Japanese commandant, Captain Mitsuba Hisaneo, decided to execute him.

Mitsuba and three other Japanese soldiers took Chand away from the other prisoners of war. While one of them kept watch to ensure the Indians could not see their actions, the second sat on his stomach, while Mitsuba held his hands down. Then the fourth, using Mitsuba’s samurai sword, thrust it into Chand’s throat.

Chand died a few minutes later. They buried him there.

After the war, Australian troops rescued the Indians. On the island of New Guinea they found only 11 survivors of the 3,000 who had been sent there. They nursed the men back to life and investigated the atrocities. Two survivors had been part of Chand’s group and identified the Japanese involved – these former guards were now themselves prisoners of war.

The trial began on March 15, 1946, in Rabaul, Papua New Guinea. There were four army officers as court members, a prosecutor and a defence officer both with legal qualifications, and a civilian Japanese interpreter.

As the members of the court did not have legal experience, a judge advocate explained the nuances of the law. In a way, he acted as the judge, while the court was in effect the jury. Unlike most other trials where the Japanese disputed the evidence, here they agreed to the facts – they had killed Chand.

Their defense was that the Indians were not prisoners of war but their allies, as they had been in the Indian National Army. They had applied Japanese military law, under which the execution had been legal, they contended.

Captain Mistuba Hisaneo was in command when Chand was beheaded. Describing what had happened, Mitsuba said that on the way to the new camp, Chand refused to move further and instigated his men, armed with sticks, stones and machetes, to threaten the Japanese.

Mitsuba tried to reason with Chand but he retorted, “If you want to kill me, you can kill me.” As Mitsuba had been ordered to take disciplinary action if there was trouble, he decided to behead Chand. “I carried out the execution of Nirpal Chand myself,” he told the court.

According to the Japanese military code, when there was violence by a mob in the face of the enemy, mutineers could be executed without trial. “I firmly believed my actions were lawful in this instance,” Mitsuba said. “There was no other way out”

The evidence from the three other Japanese present – two officers and a lance-corporal – was similar.

There was one statement that was not commented upon then but later used by the prosecution to devastating effect. Asked what they had done when the Indian prisoners of war instigated by Chand had armed themselves with machettes, Lance-Corporal Hibino Kazuo said they had been confiscated.

For the closing, Lieutenant DGE Hill put up the best defense possible. Besides emphasising key aspects of Mitsuba’s statements, he added that it was irrelevant whether the Indians were in the Indian National Army.

Even as prisoners of war, their treatment should be judged by Japanese law as Japan had not ratified the Geneva Convention. Under their law, Chand’s mutiny meant death. Of the three officers, they were platoon commanders in the field who had been told Japanese law applied to the Indians.

“Their belief was a reasonable one considering the circumstances and their knowledge as junior officers,” Hill said.

The prosecution, Captain JD Steed, was equally passionate. He said what had been done was illegal even under Japanese law. Execution without a trial was permissible in “the face of the enemy”, but he said the American troops were nowhere near. He also latched onto Hibino’s statement that the machetes had been taken away from the Indians and the mutineers disarmed. There was also no imminent possibility of insurrection, he said.

The Judge Advocate, Captain JH Watson, said that the onus was on the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The court had to decide if the beheading of Chand was murder. The killing should have been unlawful, voluntary, deliberate and with malice. If there was any doubt about this, the accused must be acquitted.

If the Indians were considered prisoners of war, international law applied. On the question of whether the Japanese were following orders, the advice was that only legal orders could be followed.

Taking all this into account, the court must disregard their own opinions, Watson said, and judge the evidence as per rules outlined.

The court took 28 minutes to decide. Their verdict was – the three officers were guilty but not Lance-Corporal Hibino. In a further 23 minutes they announced the sentences – 20 years for Misuba and the second officer who had done the beheading and five years for the third who had assisted.

Mitsuba was also charged with killing or ordering the deaths of other Indian prisoners of war. He did so, he said, as some had stolen rice, others had quarrelled and disturbed work. He also shot some who were too sick to march. On March 21, 1946, he was sentenced to be hanged. He received the same sentence in another case on March 22, and a third time on April 4.

On April 13, 1946, Mitsuba committed suicide. He was brought to trial on a fifth case but was already dead by then.

Throughout the trial, the memory of Captain Nirpal Chand shone through. He had given his life protecting his men.

Gautam Hazarika is a Singapore-based researcher and the author of The Forgotten Indian Prisoners of World War II (Penguin Random House India & Pen & Sword UK). His email address is ghazarika70@yahoo.com.sg.

The Union government on Saturday said that it has barred consumers with piped natural gas connections from retaining, obtaining or refilling domestic liquefied petroleum gas cylinders under an amended supply order.

The amendment also prohibits government oil companies from providing LPG connections or refills to consumers who already have PNG connections, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas said in a notification.

This came amid disruptions to LPG supplies in India due to the West Asia conflict.

Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

India imports about 60% of its LPG demand, most of it from Gulf countries. The disruption has led to several eateries being temporarily shut, and long queues outside LPG godowns and agencies.

On Friday, the Union government acknowledged that the supply of LPG in the country was a “matter of concern”, but added that no distributor had run out of stocks.

“LPG is a matter of concern for us as most of our imports travel through the Strait of Hormuz,” Sujata Sharma, joint secretary (marketing and oil refinery) in the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, had said. “But despite this, no dry out has been reported at any of our 25,000 distributors.”

The official urged citizens not to believe in rumours and to refrain from panic buying. However, she urged consumers who can shift from LPG to piped natural gas to do so immediately.

Sharma said that there are currently 60 lakh households who can make the shift.

Also read:

• The Iran war is starting to hit India’s small manufacturers

• From weddings to funerals, Iran war has hit life in India

In the 2024 general elections, Indians voted to elect a National Democratic Alliance government. But despite a democratic mandate for a Narendra Modi-led administration, it seems the government that actually took power was controlled by a rather mysterious entity – sources.

When a gas crisis hit India as a result of the joint United States and Israeli attack on Iran, it was not Modi or one of his ministers who kept Indians informed about the situation. Instead, ANI, a news wire seen to be close to the administration, ran updates on gas and petroleum stocks quoting unidentified sources in the government.

On March 3, three days after the war began, ANI quoted “government sources” to say that India was “scouting for alternative sources for importing crude oil, LPG and LNG”. Three days later, “government sources” told ANI that India was “in a comfortable position in crude oil, oil products and LPG”.

Ten days later, it’s now clear that the “government sources” were not telling the entire truth. Liquified petroleum gas shortages are widespread across India right now.

It was nearly a fortnight after the war began and panic started to spread throughout the country that India’s elected ministers at last started to speak on the record. On Thursday, Prime Minister Modi and Petroleum and Natural Gas Minister Hardeep Singh Puri attacked the “panic” around the gas shortages and appealed to Indians not to spread “rumours”.

This was, of course, darkly ironic because this panic had been caused directly by the fact that senior government ministers did not have the courage to face the press and reassure Indians right at the start of the war.

Part of the blame should also lie with media outlets eager to employ anonymous sources to carry the view of the government. Of course, the use of anonymous sources does have a part in journalism – in exceptional circumstances. It allows journalists to publish information from people who could be persecuted or punished for their views and would otherwise not speak to the press.

But the idea of using anonymous sources to communicate a government’s official view makes little sense. The only thing this achieves is that it allows powerful ministers to evade accountability – the very opposite of what journalism is meant to achieve.

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

Judicial decision. The Supreme Court directed the Centre, the state governments and universities to not assign three experts, who were involved in drafting a chapter about “corruption in the judiciary” in a now-withdrawn textbook, responsibilities involving public funds. This includes other curriculum projects.

An affidavit by the National Council of Educational Research and Training said that visiting professor Michel Danino had supervised the drafting of the chapter, and educator Suparna Diwakar and legal researcher Alok Prasanna Kumar were also involved in the process.

The court said that either the three did not have “reasonable knowledge about the Indian judiciary”, or they knowingly misrepresented facts.

Manipur tensions. Two Kuki men who had been missing since Wednesday were found dead in Manipur’s Kamjong district. The bodies were found in a forested area of Thawai Kuki village.

The Kuki-dominated authority of Shangkai village alleged that the two men had been abducted by persons belonging to the Tangkhul Naga community. The village authority said that the public had stopped vehicles plying along the Ukhrul road “out of deep concern for the safety of the detained and missing villagers”.

Amid the tensions, several Tangkhul Naga persons travelling along the Ukhrul-Imphal route had been abducted allegedly by Kuki persons on Wednesday. They were released on Thursday morning.

Meghalaya violence. The April 10 elections to the Garo Hills Autonomous District Council in Meghalaya were postponed after two persons were killed in suspected police firing in the West Garo Hills district amid clashes between tribal and non-tribal groups.

The ethnic faultline widened after the council issued a notification barring non-tribal persons from contesting the polls. Protests erupted on Monday, when the nomination process began, against non-tribal persons being allowed to contest the elections.

On Wednesday, the Meghalaya High Court set aside the notification that made a Scheduled Tribe certificate mandatory to contest the polls.

Passive euthanasia. The Supreme Court allowed life support to be withdrawn for a 31-year-old man who has been in a permanent vegetative state since 2013. This was the first instance in which the court’s directions on passive euthanasia, laid down in a 2018 judgement, have been applied.

The bench passed the order on a plea filed by the family of Harish Rana, who suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in August 2013 after falling from the fourth floor of a building in Chandigarh. Rana’s family had approached the court seeking permission to withdraw life-sustaining treatment.

The court also recommended that the Union government bring in comprehensive legislation on passive euthanasia.

Also on Scroll last week

• From weddings to funerals, Iran war has hit life in India
• ‘Tired and frightened’: How Iranians are facing the war
• Despatch from Dubai: Don’t believe Indian TV news – we are safe and secure
• The farmers preparing for the day Punjab runs out of water
• Why Punjab stands in solidarity with Iran
• Why domestic gig workers in India are unhappy despite the better pay
• Why Bengal’s new governor is sparking talk of president’s rule
• No lights for Eid, closed universities: Bangladesh moves to save fuel amidst West Asia conflict
• Geeta Gandbhir interview: We don’t make art to please everyone, we make art to make a statement’
• Hariharan interview: ‘Independent music is becoming stronger than film music’

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A few days after fresh instances of censorship (an actor’s claim of being disinvited from a university event for his anti-establishment views and the cancellation of a scheduled discussion on political prisoners by a prominent Mumbai cultural festival), India hosted a flamboyant visit by French President Emmanuel Macron amidst the fanfare of the Artificial Intelligence Impact Summit 2026 which was held in New Delhi. Most people would say there is no connection between the suppression of dissent and India’s staging of these high-profile events.

For many years now, it has been widely held that the relentless erosion of civil liberties in the country (seen in recurring attacks on minorities, the arrest of civil rights activists, tax raids on media houses and threats to cartoonists and stand-up comics) is attributable to the authoritarian personality of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his powerful appeal as a fundamentalist Hindu leader. Conventional wisdom within the liberal intelligentsia, articulated in numerous books, documentary films and media columns has it that the Hindutva rhetoric of historical injustice and hurt pride has turned millions of Indians into adulators of Modi and the promise he holds out for majoritarian rule.

I have long argued that this explanation, axiomatic for many, is erroneous. The diminution of democratic freedom and of secular rights in present-day India is undeniable. But their cause is far more complex than is commonly suggested.

My perspective, as a writer who combines journalistic research with deep scholarship, is based on a close observation of the socio-political trajectory of post-liberalisation India and a focused study of the western state of Gujarat which has often been described as a laboratory for Hindutva. I visited the state frequently between 2005-2010 to look into its recent socio-political history for causes of the brutal mass communal violence of 2002. I was distracted from my purpose by something peculiar taking place in the commercial capital, Ahmedabad. Every few weeks when I went there it seemed something new had come up: a giant convention centre, a luxury hotel, a flyover, a mall, a highway. A modest, provincial city was transmogrifying before my very eyes.

To call what I was witnessing “development” would have been a misleading way of communicating the complex set of strategies that were at play there, of which the physical structures were only manifestations. It was a new kind of politics being practiced by the state’s then controversial chief minister that I sensed would catapult him to national prominence and find replication at the Central level. I decided to continue looking at Gujarat’s recent past but to change my focus and study this phenomenon.

This was not as simple as it seemed. The backdrop to this unconventional politics was the mandate for development signalled by the 1991 structural reforms programme, a key component of which was the International Monetary Fund-World Bank-propelled push towards urbanisation (cities are the “engines of growth”).

Programmes like the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission provided the basis for the hyper development of a city like Ahmedabad. To make sense of the emerging politics of this developmental model I realised that I had to step outside familiar political frameworks and look instead at the substantial global scholarship on the evolution of the urban form in the neoliberal era at the turn of the 21st century.

Keeping this in mind, I studied the unusually fast-paced construction underway in Ahmedabad and found that what had struck me so vividly on my visits to the city was not a coincidental coming together of random projects but a planned operation. After the ebbing of violence in 2002, Narendra Modi had presented the adverse coverage of the riots in the national and international media to Gujaratis as a calamity, a blow to the state’s asmita, or pride, that needed to be redressed. He asked the state’s people, particularly its business community, to join him in an exercise aimed at changing the negative perception of the state.

In Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein describes how leaders often exploit a crisis to introduce potentially unpopular free market policies counting on the fact that populations may be too traumatised to participate in or resist the change. Sometimes this is done in tandem with developers keen to profit from the mandate for reconstruction.

India’s 1991 shift to a capitalist economy was propelled by a fiscal crisis which required an emergency loan of $2.2 billion from the International Monetary Fund. In 2001, development and government agencies flocked to build a new modern city of Bhuj from the rubble of an earthquake. A couple of years later, Modi embarked on an ambitious exercise to package Gujarat as an attractive business destination. The exercise involved measures such as a biannual “Vibrant Gujarat Global Summit” for potential investors, the refurbishment of ports and highways in the state and, most conspicuously, the makeover of Ahmedabad.

Hansalpur, Gujarat: PM Narendra Modi says, "The major initiative to realize the industrial potential of the India-Japan partnership began right here in Gujarat. I remember, when we started the Vibrant Gujarat Summit 20 years ago, Japan was a key partner. Just think, a small state… pic.twitter.com/JfnnyJyg1y

— IANS (@ians_india) August 26, 2025

The atmosphere of fear and grim uncertainty following the protracted mob violence of 2002 and the mythology it built around Modi enabled the packaging exercise to be pushed through with minimal oversight and resistance and with a speed that would have been unimaginable in other circumstances. In 2014, glowing claims about this exercise paved the way to his prime-ministership.

These claims were made most visibly by national television anchors in the lead-up to the 2014 parliamentary elections where they referred repeatedly and with breathless awe to the “Gujarat Model”, painting it as a picture of a high-growth, hyper-capitalist model – albeit with poor indices on conventional measures, such as health and nutrition. Had the media done a more in-depth study or looked at available scholarship on the subject, it would have found that the Gujarat Model was not only about “roads, highways and GDP”, as it vaguely claimed, but a much more elaborate global process.

Place marketing is a process evolved in the neoliberal era of making spaces, particularly cities, attractive to people and companies with money to spend, mainly transnational corporations, business travellers and tourists. Scholars have identified a number of strategies that are associated with the process, the most common of which is gentrification. Airports are made over, select neighbourhoods are beautified, and special business enclaves and recreational areas with nightclubs and cafes are created. There are several other strategies that cities use to market themselves, including staging large cultural events, sprucing up historical sites or monuments to attract tourists and fostering a service or industrial specialisation.

By 2005, Ahmedabad had acquired the status of a megacity. The state government increased the area of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation from 198 square kilometres to 500 square kilometres by merging seven municipalities and expanded the total area of the urban agglomeration to 1,300 square kilometres. Eleven-kilometre-long concrete banks with plans for highways and residential blocks came up alongside the river that snaked through the city.

A Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (“double the size of Paris’s La Défense and eight times more built up than the London Docklands”) was conceived. Ahmedabad’s pharma industry and its hospitals, some established as charitable institutions by local philanthropists, were reoriented to brand Ahmedabad as a destination for medical tourism and its old walled city was refurbished to successfully bid for Unesco World Heritage certification in 2017. Some of the projects were already discussed or underway when Modi became chief minister but by bringing them under his ambit and clubbing them with new projects he created an impression of a wide-ranging developmental plan under his leadership.

The Ahmedabad makeover borrowed every rule from the place marketing playbook. But there was a twist in that every element in the Ahmedabad makeover was infused with a Hindutva ideal. For instance, a high street emerging as the new centre of the expanding city acquired a distinctly Hindu ethos while Muslim ghettos on the city margins swelled with refugees escaping mixed neighbourhoods from the city after the 2002 violence. Public space was commodified with a distinct bias towards the Hindu middle class. A new Heritage Walk focusing on violence in the freedom struggle subtly questioned Gandhi’s legacy. Even the city’s name was differently spelt to rid it of its Islamic associations.

The remaking of Ahmedabad suggested that the key to explaining Narendra Modi was through his ideological commitments. He is committed to the Hindutva ideology of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. And he is committed to neoliberalism. And he is committed to both at the same time.

Conventional thinking in the mainstream media projects India’s economic liberalisation programme and Hindutva as two opposing tendencies. The former is perceived as being outward- and forward-looking, cloaked in the accoutrements of modernisation and promises of economic growth and world connectivity, while the latter is seen as being insular and primitive in outlook, peopled by saffron-robed acolytes reliving a mythical past. This construct of economic liberalisation/liberalisation-led development and Hindutva as opposites in the popular media is a false binary.

Hindu nationalism made its presence felt in the early decades of the 20th century but made little headway politically for several decades. It was only in 1989 that the Bharatiya Janata Party won 86 seats in Parliament, marking an upward trend which continued in subsequent years enabling it to form governments in various states and at the Centre.

The congruence between the timeline of the political ascendancy of the BJP and the onset of structural reforms is not a coincidence. That is when the middle class, the BJP’s traditional support base, grew in size from 2.5 million households in 1990 to nearly 50 million in 201. Television freed from government ownership emerged as the trumpeter of this new consuming class which also came to be culturally defined in upper-caste Hindu terms. The communitarian underpinnings of socialism, which provided a logic to secularism by implying that the weak (minority) were entitled to the protection of the strong (majority), were overturned by a vigorously rapacious individualism.

Economic liberalisation provided a favourable climate for Hindutva to grow. And in turn, I suggest, the rise of Hindutva and the climate of religious conflict have played a critical role in realising the project of economic liberalisation.

Three of the country’s most pro-capitalist leaders (Rajiv Gandhi, Bal Thackeray and Narendra Modi) consolidated power on the back of citywide riots. The shaping of Mumbai into a world-class city beginning in the late 1990s saw mill workers forced out of the city, fishing communities displaced, the poor pushed into informal work and large stretches of coastal mangroves destroyed.

Workers of the Shiv Sena and other Hindutva affiliates maintained an atmosphere of intimidation through those years by attacking vehicles and television studios and whipping up a fury with their angry rhetoric over a perceived threat to Indian culture and national security from sources such as a Michael Jackson concert, Pakistani cricketers and Valentine’s Day celebrations.

As Zoya Hasan claims, resistance to the new economic policies of liberalisation was displaced by Hindutva adherents “from the realm of concrete economic policy to a confrontation with the cultural politics of globalization”.

Violence in a restructuring society then is a far more complicated business than it appears to be. The celebrated makeover of New York in the early 1990s, for instance, was preceded by a war against homeless people, panhandlers, prostitutes and unruly youth by then mayor Rudy Guliani. Urban geographer Neil Smith called Guiliani’s politics “revanchist”, recalling nationalist reactionaries in 19th-century Paris fighting to reinstate the bourgeois order and to wreak revenge on the working class which had “stolen” their vision of French society from them. Revanchism creates a hierarchy of claims on citizenship.

Justus Uitermark and Jan Willem Duyvendak write in their article “Civilising the City: Populism and Revanchist Urbanism in Rotterdam” that “Revanchism ... is predicated on a belief system that naturalises as universal the interests and cultural codes of the White middle class while at the same time it essentialises marginalised individuals into subjects who cannot be reformed.”

The dehumanising of those whose fortunes are destined to decline in the new economy is a common feature of restructuring. And it explains why Modi emerges stronger rather than weaker from allegations of extreme insensitivity, beginning with his harshness towards victims of the 2002 violence to his apparent unconcern for migrants forced to trudge miles after his sudden declaration of a lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Every display of callousness magnifies his aura as a capitalist moderniser and empowers him to act without blowback. He feeds off bellicosity and usefully extends it to a growing list of targets: protesting farmers, students, civil rights activists and political opponents.

As Ajay Gudavarthy wrote for Scroll: ‘The BJP views the defeated Opposition as prisoners of war. They are deliberately ignored, they are insulted, they are sermonised to, and they are dealt with unfairly. This is an essential feature of the script. … Behaving unfairly towards minorities is an essential strategy for majoritarian consolidation.’

Much of the commentary on India under Narendra Modi is either about the violence against members of religious minorities and Dalits by Hindutva activists or about the administration’s intolerance of dissent and the use of state agencies to punish political opponents and other critics. These align with perceptions of Modi himself.

Astute political analysts are thrown by his arbitrary diktats and his obduracy towards petitioners. Modi’s effusiveness in greeting foreign leaders, his love for the media glare and his penchant for buying bullet trains and building gigantic statues provoke ridicule. The Central Vista project which revamped the historic colonial era Central administrative area in Delhi had one commentator comparing him to a mid-20th century African autocrat with a vanity project; another compared him to Mungerilal, a 1980s Indian television soap opera character based on the chronic daydreamer Walter Mitty. A picture emerges of a fanatical, capricious and megalomaniacal leader, a self-aggrandizing man who is so consumed by bigotry that it is impossible to know what he will do next.

It is a compelling image but it is a myth.

Modi is not a conventional Indian politician. He belongs to the league of capitalist-modernisers like China’s Xi Jinping, Turkey’s Recep Erdogan and Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro. His motivations are systemic not opportunistic (for the most part) and cannot be understood through the familiar matrix of short-term economic gains and losses and electoral politics that is routinely applied by political analysts.

If we apply the paradigm of the remaking of Ahmedabad, which I would suggest constitutes the Gujarat model to Modi’s leadership of India, we can perceive phenomena such as Modi’s frequent foreign visits, his “Make in India” and similar campaigns to encourage manufacturing activity and his passion for the bullet train (a shiny symbol of speed) as elements of a place marketing exercise to sell India to the world.

Prime Minister Modi took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Sendai alongside Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru.

Gujarat to welcome its first Japanese bullet train around 2027. pic.twitter.com/k9iuRbSRy4

— Riccha Dwivedi (@RicchaDwivedi) August 30, 2025

All of Modi’s political moves and programmes, including demonetisation, schemes like the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana to expand the reach of banking and even huge political leaps, such as revoking Jammu and Kashmir’s special status within the Indian Constitution, become steps (ordering, enumerating, expanding opportunity, extending the formal economy) in a project of neoliberal transformation.

Some borrow directly from Gujarat: the 2014 Swachh Bharat or Clean India mission extended the logic of a 1997-1998 USAID programme in Ahmedabad to improve hygiene and create green spaces to aid the circulation of capital and healthy labour. The hasty beautification of Delhi before the G20 Summit is another instance of the neoliberal preoccupation with appearances. And Modi’s partiality to industrial giants such as the Ambanis and Adani corresponds to the heroic, entrepreneurial role marked out for the ultra-rich by Friedrich Hayek, the grandfather of neoliberalism.

The recurring violence and violent rhetoric against minorities serve to consolidate the hegemony of the majority even as Hindutva ideals find expression in the architecture of an emerging India. And Modi’s reliance on media advertising is of a piece with the surging role of marketing in the public space. One can say that if analysed through the correct framework, Modi’s thinking, far from being arbitrary and erratic, is formulaic and predictable.

India’s democratic backslide too is hardly unique in today’s world. Over the past four decades as country after country has fallen into the embrace of neoliberalism, a new mindset has taken over the world. An economic ideology which projects the market as the answer to mankind’s diverse needs and holds profit maximisation as its motto subsumes all other priorities. The state as the medium facilitating the neoliberal dream has demanded a strengthening of its powers and large enough numbers have lustily cheered it on.

Across the world environmental protections and human rights are being weakened or withdrawn. Reports of violence against racial minorities and refugees and the brazen killings of journalists from various places and an unravelling of civil rights in Donald Trump’s America confirm the fact that citizens’ rights once thought to be intrinsic to democracy are being eroded everywhere, even in the world’s leading democracy.

In India, the line of causation for these phenomena is routinely and unthinkingly drawn to majoritarianism. The widely talked about sociopolitical consequences of neoliberalism, which even filtered into an influential journal of the International Monetary Fund, the bulwark of the free market in 2016, rarely enter into the reckoning. For instance, inequality, which is raging in the world and is currently as high in India as it was in the days of the Raj, according to a recent study by Thomas Piketty and others for the World Inequality Lab.

Indeed, outside of a limited circle of academics and developmental activists, neoliberalism finds hardly any mention. The media and ordinary Indians talk blandly of “development” and “privatisation” as if they are standalone activities, not part of a powerful, multidimensional ideology favouring unfettered marketisation and a top-down approach currently dominating the world.

Most Indians, particularly the country’s fast-expanding middle class – expected to rise to 715 million in 2030-’31 – are in love with Western modernity, a feature they share with other post-colonial societies. It is a powerful dream: of unmitigated prosperity through capitalism, an infrastructure equal to the West, the efficiency of the private sector in the public realm and glossy cities resembling Asian favourites Shanghai and Singapore.

A “new” India, kickstarted by the Congress and grown with intensified zeal by Narendra Modi is coming into being. Ports, bridges, transportation facilities and buildings being constructed or upgraded at a rapid pace. Cities are exploding with towers made up of astronomically priced apartments. India’s road network is now second only to the US and seven bullet train projects are in the planning. And crores of rupees are being spent on extravagant beautification projects.

The widespread fanatical faith in the benefits of “development” means that no discussion is possible on priorities for public spending. And scant attention has been paid to consequences and the steep costs, both financial (the scale of borrowings), environmental and human, of infrastructural development is possible.

Nor has there been much said about aspects of form and aesthetics despite the powerful cultural and symbolic possibilities of place marketing and branding. The absence of public engagement has left a vacuum that Hindutva has stepped into, as one can see from initiatives such as India’s successful lobbying for the United Nations to designate an International Yoga Day and from the birth of a new tourist circuit connecting the temple towns of Ayodhya and Varanasi to Kevadia in Gujarat, the site of the Statue of Unity, a 182-metre-high state of Sardar Patel, an iconic national leader appropriated by the BJP.

Ahmedabad continues to be strategically significant as the stream of world leaders (Xi Jinping, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump) and plans for staging the 2030 Commonwealth Games in the giant stadium bearing the prime minister’s name shows. But the city and its remaking in the early 2000s also provides a key to understanding the political thinking shaping the country’s present.

This piece draws the author’s introductory essay to the December 2025 paperback edition of Ahmedabad: A City in the World (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Amrita Shah is a writer, journalist and scholar based in Mumbai.