The Allahabad High Court quashed the detention under the National Security Act of a 25-year-old Delhi University graduate who has been in jail for nearly five months in connection with the workers’ protest in Noida in April, reported Bar and Bench on Wednesday.

The Act allows for long periods of detention without trial up to a year.

On Tuesday, a bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev held that Aakriti Chaudhary was detained based on a “concocted story” by the Uttar Pradesh government, reported Live Law.

The bench also directed the Noida authorities to pay a compensation of Rs 5 lakh to Chaudhary, Bar and Bench quoted advocate Charlie Prakash as saying.

Chaudhary will remain in jail as she is yet to secure bail in other cases registered in connection with the protests, reported the legal news outlet.

On April 13, about 40,000 to 45,000 workers from several industrial units had gathered in parts of the city to press long-standing demands that their salaries be increased. The protests came amid increasing gas prices because of the supply disruption caused by the war in West Asia.

The demonstration had turned violent, with videos widely shared on social media showing some protesters throwing stones and vandalising property.

On April 14, more than 350 persons had been arrested in connection with the violence.

A month later, the Uttar Pradesh police booked Chaudhary and 60-year-old Satya Verma under the National Security Act.

Verma is a former journalist from Lucknow and Chaudhary, a history graduate, is from Durgapur in West Bengal. The two are members of the Mazdoor Bigul Dasta, a workers’ organisation.

The police had alleged that the role played by the two was “significant in instigating violence, arson and creating chaos” during the protest. It also claimed that Verma and Chaudhary “provoked” persons in different areas to “disturb public order”.

Chaudhary’s family had claimed that she had been picked up by the police from a metro station in Noida on April 11. Her father, Arun Chaudhary, had asked how a person who had been picked up on April 11 could be charged with violence that took place on April 13.

Violence during protests

Witnesses had alleged that the police personnel deployed to contain the violence on April 13 had beaten up the protesters.

On April 16, a video surfaced online showing police personnel assaulting women. The video was shared on social media platforms by several users, including the Uttar Pradesh Congress, who alleged that it showed police personnel in Noida lathi-charging and manhandling women workers on the day of wage hike protests.

The police commissionerate in Gautam Buddha Nagar district denied this. It said that “prima facie, the video appears to be morphed or AI-generated and does not seem to be from Noida, but rather from some other location.”

However, eyewitnesses, who did not want to be identified because of the fear of facing backlash from the authorities, told Scroll that the video accurately captured the scene they had witnessed.

Scroll also used geolocation analysis and matched the video against a press photo to establish that the location was indeed Block A and Block B of Noida’s Sector 6. Scroll visited the spot and spoke to several people who had seen the police assault. Questions sent to Commissioner of Police Laxmi Singh at the time did not receive a response.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Noida and beyond: India’s workers are being shortchanged. They deserve a fair deal

• Fact check: Despite official denial, viral video showing police beating women workers is from Noida

The Calcutta High Court on Wednesday declined urgent relief to Anandabazar Patrika journalists against whom a first information report has been filed after the newspaper used the phrase “saffron hooliganism” in a headline, Live Law reported.

The headline was about clashes between members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and Left-affiliated student groups at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University on August 20. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

An FIR was registered against the editorial team of Anandabazar Patrika, including editor Ishani Dutta Roy and chief reporter Soma Mukherjee, PTI reported.

On Wednesday, the High Court indicated that the appropriate course of action for the journalists would be to file a petition seeking the quashing of the FIR, Live Law reported.

Lawyer SN Mookherjee, appearing for the journalists, told the court that such a petition had already been filed. He sought urgent relief, arguing that the case warranted immediate intervention.

The bench, however, said the matter should be filed in the regular course and would be heard according to the applicable procedure.

The clash on August 20 took place during a general meeting of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students’ Union. The ABVP and Left-affiliated groups blamed each other for the violence and accused the other of bringing people from outside the university onto the campus.

Several students were injured and taken to a hospital.

In its report, Anandabazar Patrika had described the clashes as “gerua gundami”, or saffron hooliganism.

The High Court hearing came a day after a group of men purportedly associated with Hindutva outfits staged a protest outside the newspaper’s office and smeared saffron paint on its building.

Videos of the incident, widely shared on social media, showed several police personnel standing nearby as a group of men wearing saffron clothing painted the walls and shouted slogans, such as “Hindustan will not tolerate the insult of saffron”.

The newspaper’s authorities repainted the walls to their original colour a few hours later.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Hindutva ideologue Vinayak Damodar Savarkar “never hated Muslims”, rather “showed the way for their progress”, his grandnephew Satyaki Savarkar told a Pune court on Tuesday, reported Bar and Bench.

Satyaki Savarkar made the statement during his cross-examination before a special MP/MLA court in a criminal defamation trial against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. He has accused Gandhi of making false and malicious remarks about his uncle during an event in London in March 2023.

Gandhi’s lawyer Milind Pawar had asked Satyaki Savarkar what about the Congress leader’s speech had he found defamatory.

Satyaki Savarkar alleged that Gandhi claimed in the speech that VD Savarkar had written a book, in which he described him and his friends beating a Muslim man. He alleged that Gandhi claimed VD Savarkar found the act enjoyable.

“By these words, Savarkar was portrayed as an extreme hater of Muslims and as a mob lyncher,” Live Law quoted Satyaki Savarkar as saying. “Savarkar never hated Muslims. Rather, in his writings, he showed the ways and means for their progress.”

He further said that he does not know if the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh follows Savarkar’s ideology.

The RSS is the ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat and Union Home Minister Amit Shah had inaugurated a statue of VD Savarkar in the Andaman Islands on December 12, 2025.

“We had no information about that programme,” said Satyaki Savarkar. “Further, no permission of our family was obtained while unveiling the said statue. I do not know whether the RSS follows the ideology of Savarkar.”

The cross-examination will continue on September 3.

During the previous hearing on August 17, Satyaki Savarkar told the Pune court that his maternal grandfather Gopal Godse and MK Gandhi’s assassin Nathuram Godse were active members of the RSS.

He also acknowledged before the Pune court that Gopal Godse and VD Savarkar were among those accused of conspiring to kill Gandhi.

Gopal Godse was the younger brother of Nathuram Godse, who shot Gandhi dead in 1948. He was found guilty of taking part in the assassination conspiracy and spent 18 years in prison. VD Savarkar was acquitted due to the lack of evidence.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the death of Disha Salian, the former manager of late actor Sushant Singh Rajput, Bar and Bench reported.

Disha Salian had allegedly died by suicide on June 8, 2020, in Mumbai. Six days later, Rajput was found dead at his residence. The police had closed the case in 2021 and said that no evidence of foul play had been found in her death.

A division bench of Justices Sarang V Kotwal and Ranjitsinha R Bhonsale directed the CBI to register a first information report based on a statement by Disha Salian’s father, Satish Salian, who had filed the petition.

The court said that no one should be treated as a suspect in the case unless the investigating officer finds enough material to reasonably suspect their involvement, the legal news outlet reported.

The celebrity manager’s father had moved the High Court in March 2025 seeking a CBI probe into her death and the filing of an FIR against several persons, including Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Aaditya Thackeray.

Satish Salian claimed that his daughter had died under suspicious circumstances. In his petition, he alleged that she was gangraped and murdered. He also claimed that there had also been a politically-driven cover-up to shield “influential persons”.

Satish Salian said that he initially believed that the investigation was “genuine, but later found it to be a cover-up”.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

While the youth protests were underway at the Jantar Mantar in the first week of July, the Central government published two crucial reports on higher education enrollment: the All India Survey on Higher Education for 2022-’23 and 2023-’24.

The findings were alarming. For the first time since 2011, there has been a decline in the number of Indian students pursuing undergraduate degrees. In 2023-’24, undergraduate enrolment decreased by 93,321 students compared with the previous academic year, representing a decline of 0.29%. This decline at national level might look small. But for a developing country like India enrollments for higher education are supposed to grow fast.

Maharashtra was among the states with the sharpest declines: 5% of Class 12 students here did not enroll in the undergraduate enrollment. This means that nearly 200,000 fewer young people in the state opted for degree programmes compared to the previous year. The number dropped from 35,04,046 in 2023-’24 from 36,88,956 in 2022-’23.

The case of Maharashtra is striking, as it is one of the most industrially advanced states in the country. It is home to cities such as Mumbai, Pune, Nashik and Aurangabad which provide jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors. The declining importance of degrees among young people in such a state is telling because a graduate degree is a prerequisite for good jobs in the organised sector.

Is it possible that these youth simply pivoted to short-term, skill-based certificate or diploma courses? Unfortunately, this is not the case. The same government report shows only an insignificant increase in enrollment in diploma and certificate courses.

Why would the vast majority of Maharashtra’s youths turn their backs on higher education and why has this number suddenly swelled?

The answer lies either in a waning enthusiasm for education or a decline in the financial capacity of their parents – two factors that are inextricably linked.

Most parents evaluate further education as an investment of time and money. If this investment does not yield better employment opportunities and stable jobs, they inevitably question its necessity. When household incomes stagnate or fall, the probability of abandoning higher education rises sharply.

In the United States, for instance, approximately 64% of high school graduates enroll in degree-granting institutions (which formally encompass both two-year associate degrees and four-year bachelor’s programmes). This is nearly double India’s rate of gross enrollment ratio for higher education. Across most developed nations, participation in formal post-secondary education is more than twice that of India – and the quality of education delivered is significantly superior.

Ironically, the AISHE data was released against the backdrop of reports about the Central government reducing education expenditure as a percentage of the gross domestic product.

The decline also makes it clear that graduate degrees have lost their “signaling value”. Theoretically, a degree serves as a signal to the job market, guaranteeing that the holder possesses the knowledge and skills necessary for employment. However, due to the plummeting standards of Indian colleges, degrees have been reduced to a mere minimum formal requirement rather than vouching for a student’s actual competence.

Under the present regulatory system, establishing innovative educational institutions that impart the modern skills and knowledge demanded by the market is nearly impossible. Established institutions are shielded from genuine competition. They face no pressure to raise their teaching standards, to update their curricula or to offer innovative teaching methods. As a consequence, passionate educational entrepreneurs are systematically demoralised.

Instead, this regulatory framework has been exploited by politicians, who have emerged as the largest suppliers of new educational institutes in the country. This is a dominant cause of the collapsing quality of higher education.

Indians often complain about the “commercialisation of education” but this is true only in a limited sense. In a truly free market, poor quality is punished. But in India’s distorted system, institutions can easily survive – and even receive encouragement to expand – without ever providing high-quality education.

When the signaling value of a degree diminishes relative to the money and time invested, turning away from higher education becomes a highly rational economic decision for parents and students. They simply choose to exit a broken system. Against this incredibly bleak backdrop, the Cockroach Janata Party effectively placed the quality of education on the political agenda. It is imperative that it stays there for the long haul.

Milind Murugkar writes on economic and social issues.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Union government to submit its views on introducing a totaliser system to count votes recorded in a cluster of electronic voting machines, reported Live Law.

At present, votes cast in elections are counted booth-wise. A totaliser would allow votes recorded in multiple machines to be counted together. This can make it difficult to determine how any particular booth voted.

The petitioners in the case have argued that introducing a totaliser system can prevent a candidate or a political party from knowing how much support they received at a particular booth, thereby reducing the chances of post-poll violence, reported Live Law.

They have sought that election results be declared at the parliamentary constituency level, instead of disclosing booth-wise figures separately.

On Tuesday, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana asked the Union government to state if there were hurdles in introducing the system and whether it could have any adverse effects, reported Live Law.

The bench also asked the Election Commission to submit its proposal on the matter to the government.

During the hearing, Kant asked if there was a need for the totaliser system, saying that the booth-wise counting process allows discrepancies or tampering to be detected.

One of the petitioners told the court that the system would ensure that the privacy of voters is maintained.

The court asked the Union government and the Election Commission if a provision similar to Rule 59A of the 1961 Conduct of Elections Rules, which allows the use of a totaliser in ballot paper counting, could be introduced for electronic voting machines.

The proposal had been examined earlier but did not receive support from the government-appointed expert committee, the counsel appearing for the Election Commission told the court. The counsel added that most political parties were against the proposal.

“Fifty percent of national parties opposed, 68% state-level parties opposed,” The Indian Express quoted the counsel as saying.

The petitioner said that the poll body had supported introducing a totaliser for years and had recently changed its stance, Bar and Bench reported.

Referring to a January 2018 order by the Supreme Court, the petitioner said the Election Commission had stated that “a time has come for introduction of totaliser for counting of the votes”.

Edited by Sneha.

The Delhi government on Tuesday directed bus operators to ensure that panic buttons are operational at all times on their vehicles and that there are no curtains or films blocking the windows, reported PTI.

They were also told that vehicle tracking devices on buses should be functional at all times.

The directions came days after a driver and a conductor raped a 17-year-old girl inside a moving sleeper bus.

The crime took place on August 4, while the bus travelled nearly 47 km from Greater Noida to Old Delhi’s Kashmere Gate. The persons accused in the matter, 39-year-old bus driver Kuldeep and 26-year-old conductor Sandeep, have been arrested.

The bus had curtains around its berth, which prevented persons who were outside from seeing what was happening inside the vehicle, The Hindu quoted unidentified police officers as saying.

In the order on Tuesday, the Delhi government told bus operators that stopping at unsafe or unauthorised locations, particularly in the middle of the road or at intersections, was strictly prohibited, reported PTI.

It also said that all bus drivers must have a valid driving licence and should be wearing a uniform while driving.

The bus operators have also been told that if an incident of harassment of any woman is reported to them, they should inform the police and take the vehicle to the nearest police station or post.

Buses must be parked only during night and idle hours in authorised, secure and adequately lit locations, PTI quoted the order as saying.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

A group of men purportedly associated with Hindutva outfits staged a protest outside the office of newspaper Anandabazar Patrika and painted parts of its white building saffron, The Hindu reported.

The protest came days after the newspaper used the phrase “saffron hooliganism” in a headline about the August 20 clash between student groups at Jadavpur University.

Videos of the incident, widely shared on social media, showed several police personnel standing nearby as a group of men wearing saffron clothing painted the walls and shouted slogans, such as “Hindustan will not tolerate the insult of saffron”.

The newspaper’s authorities repainted the walls to their original colour a few hours later.

The men who painted parts of the building have not yet been identified, and no complaint has been filed yet, The Hindu reported.

Kolkata: Saffron-clad Hindutva men paint the walls of the iconic Anandabazar Patrika (ABP) office saffron, sloganeering "Bhagwa ka apman nehi sahega Hindustan" in the presence of Kolkata Police. 1:45 PM, 01.09.2026. pic.twitter.com/qckQgPWBrw

— Ankita Mahalanobish (@onkeyta_) September 1, 2026

On August 20, a clash broke out between members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and Left-affiliated student groups at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University during a general meeting of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology Students’ Union.

The clash continued into the early hours of Thursday. The two sides blamed each other for the violence and accused the other of bringing people from outside the university onto the campus.

Several students were injured and taken to a hospital.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the BJP.

In its report, Anandabazar Patrika had described the clashes as “gerua gundami”, or saffron hooliganism.

A first information report was filed against the editorial team of the newspaper, including two journalists. On Tuesday, the Indian Women’s Press Corps and the Press Association criticised the filing of the case.

“The increasing incidence of registration of FIRs against journalists is disturbing,” a joint statement by the two bodies had said, according to PTI. “It criminalises the journalist and shows disrespect for the role of a free press.”

Commenting on parts of the newspaper building being painted saffron, Trinamool Congress Kunal Ghosh said that protests cannot descend into brute force. “Ongoing attacks all around, with governmental support, and such a display of muscle power by uncultured brutes have dealt an ugly blow to Bengal’s image,” he said on social media.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant on Tuesday said that more than 90% of the crimes in the state were committed by migrants, The Indian Express reported.

Replying to questions raised by Opposition MLAs in the Assembly about the law and order, Sawant said that a large number of migrants come to Goa for work and become involved in cases of robbery, rape and dacoity.

The Bharatiya Janata Party leader had made similar remarks in 2023 and alleged that migrant workers from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were responsible for 90% of the crimes in Goa. He later said that his words were “twisted by some political leaders”.

Speaking about law and order in the state, Sawant said that the verification of tenants and labourers was important to curb crime and improve security, The Indian Express reported. “First and among the foremost things that the police department has done is verification of labourers and tenants,” he added.

He further said that no one should rent out their homes to unknown persons, without having their backgrounds verified by the police.

Opposition MLA Viresh Borkar said that that number of rape cases in Goa had increased by 43% to 103 in 2025 from 72 in 2021, The Times of India reported.

The chief minister claimed that the data recorded in 2023 may “seem” high but most of the cases involved live-in relationships that did not work out or failed love affairs, the newspaper reported.

Minors eloping with known persons, underage marriages among migrant workers that came to light during pregnancy and extramarital affairs that later resulted in cases being registered were among the other reasons for the rise in rape cases, Sawant stated.

He also said that increasing security camera coverage cannot prevent thefts as criminals “know how to switch off CCTVs now”.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

About a century ago, long before environmental degradation became the crisis of our times, Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore had sounded early warning bells about the destruction of forests.

Though Tagore was born in the city of Kolkata, he had a deep and abiding contact with nature from childhood, and it shaped his many-sided genius in diverse ways. As an adolescent, he accompanied his father Debendranath to the foothills of the Himalayas, an experience he wrote about in his autobiographical notes.

Later, he was a frequent visitor to a zamindari estate in Shilaidaha, now in Bangladesh, where many of his short stories and songs were written while on a boat on the mighty river Padma. He had experienced the vast expanse of nature – in the sky, in the mountains, in the rivers and the flat, verdant lands of the Bengal delta.

Simultaneously he witnessed the urbanisation of the sleepy villages around Kolkata and Kolkata itself, and lamented the oppressive bounds of concrete and the lessening of contact between human beings and nature. When he founded his school, now a part of the Central University, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, a Unesco World Heritage Site – he ensured that classes took place under canopies of trees rather than within the confines of four walls.

Tagore is widely known as a romantic poet but he was also a social thinker, deeply interested in advances in science and their application for the betterment of human societies. He formed village cooperatives, sent his son Rathindranath to study science-based agricultural studies in the United States, and began to explore modern methods and their viability in local conditions at Sriniketan, a few kilometres from Santiniketan.

His concern for the environment blended with an awareness of the needs of an urbanising population. This conflict between the demands of an urbanising, industrialising world and the imperative to preserve our bond with nature is a recurrent theme in his work – most powerfully, perhaps, in the play Raktakarabi (Red Oleanders), where the life-force of nature, embodied in the character of Nandini, confronts the dehumanising machinery of an underground mining kingdom.

With these concerns in mind, Tagore had initiated the Vriksharopana Utsav – the annual festival of tree planting – at Sriniketan, alongside the Halakarshana, the ceremonial ploughing of the fields. On September 2, 1938, he gave a lecture at the annual celebration of this tree planting festival. That lecture, translated here for the first time into English, is strikingly relevant – the prescience of a sensitive and great mind.

‘Lord of The Forest’

In the first phase of creation, the earth was rocky and barren. There was no hint of her compassion to any form of life around her. In all directions the volcanoes were erupting; the frequent earthquakes made the ground unquiet. While this was going on, in an unforeseen, auspicious moment, the goddess of the forest sent her messengers to this theatre of the earth. The green grass began to cover what was naked; slowly, shrubs and trees appeared as harbingers of life. Animals were still not upon the scene. In order to welcome and nurture the incipient and precious life, the trees made their own food and provided shade upon the ground. Their greatest gift was to harness the fiery rays of the sun and to store them for future consumption by mankind when, much later, human beings would make their appearance. Even now our civilisation continues to advance drawing from the same source of life and energy.

Human beings are prone to being wasteful. As long as they roamed in the forests, they maintained a rich, meaningful, balanced interaction with nature. As they began to form settlements, they started to lose their sense of belonging with the forests. The human beings forgot their very first set of friends who brought to the earth the original and the divine gift of life; instead, they began to attack the forests in the most cruel and thoughtless manner so that they could make their own homes built with wood, bricks and mortar. By ignoring the blessing brought by the primordial green trees, human beings invited upon themselves a curse to spread.

Today, parts of northern India are becoming arid and suffering from extreme heat during the summer months. But anyone familiar with the old texts would know that these areas were once covered with forests where the hermits would stay in their simple but beautiful dwellings in the cool shade of tall trees. Human beings dealt with the gift of nature like a vulture; unhappy with the bounty offered to them, they destroyed the forests without any care in the world. Deforestation is leading to gradual desertification. If we are to avoid a calamitous end for ourselves, we have to recall the divine spirit which gave us the boon of the forests and pray that the life force that once sustained us, may the same life force protect our land; may it give us shade for comfort and fruits for sustenance.

The problem has not cropped up specifically for us or just today. Everywhere it is a great challenge to save the treasures of forests from the devouring greed of mankind. In the United States too, the timber industry has destroyed forests resulting in sand blown storms destroying fertile fields. The creator of the universe had sent the messenger of life and made arrangement for its nourishment, to which the human beings added the ingredient of death borne out of greed.

Human society has been subjected to so much curse because of its superseding the divine intention to nurture life. Wanton self-indulgence and consequent loss of forests have brought about gaping, self-inflicted wounds. Those trees which provided the canopy of leaves that would purify the air, the great mass of fallen leaves which would make the ground fecund, they have been uprooted. Whatever was gifted as life to the good earth, mankind oblivious to its own good has destroyed these very things.

It is now time to repent. Though our resources are limited, we will employ them to build an altar to welcome back in our midst the divine forest spirit of life. Our meagre beginning today has two parts. First is tilling the fields; tilling the fields to meet our needs; our needs for food grains. Tilling the land is our unavoidable duty to ourselves. But we must give something back in return so that we lessen the damage caused to the earth. To redress her wounds, to replenish what we take, we have organised the festival of planting trees. It is our earnest hope that the seeds we sow today, the saplings that we plant today will grow into green fields and beautiful shady trees which will make this little corner of our world with fruit laden forests and verdant fields serene and beautiful.

Utpal Chattopadhyay, a mathematician and teacher from Kolkata, translates and writes essays illuminating different precious stones strewn around in Bengali literature. He can be reached via email at utpal.ch@gmail.com.

September 2 is the 87th anniversary of Tagore’s ‘Lord of the Forest’ address.

Vaishnavi Patil, 26, was supposed to share the stage with Rahul Gandhi at a Congress party event for women in Pune last month. She could not address the crowd because of time constraints but was far from disappointed.

“This was the first event where a political party head was talking about women-centric issues,” the researcher told Scroll after the event.

More than a thousand kilometres away in Delhi, the significance of what happened in Pune was not lost on Kritika Jain either. The 22-year-old psychology graduate said that she was “shocked” to see a male politician talk about the patriarchal nature of Indian society.

“Oh my god! Wow! Is this for real?” she remembered thinking when she came across snippets from Gandhi’s speech on Instagram. “When I thought about it more, I was actually impressed.”

Scroll spoke to young women from several Indian cities and found much the same sentiment. Clearly, Gandhi had struck a chord with a constituency that is otherwise neglected in Indian politics: young, urban women.

However, most interviewees were quick to add that statements alone would not make them vote for the Congress party in future elections. They wanted to see Gandhi and his party do more for women before they decided to get behind him.

Beyond welfare

In Pune, Gandhi took a stridently feminist tone in his hour-long address to the crowd of mostly young women. Some attendees also joined him on stage and voiced their concerns.

“You do not belong to anybody except yourself,” he declared, drawing loud cheers. “You have a relationship with your father, husband, brother, son. But you do not belong to them.”

The public meeting in Pune was the fourth in a series of concert-style rallies through which Gandhi has been trying to appeal to young Indians. His party is calling the campaign Chhatron Ki Goonj, or echoing students’ voices. This was the first time that his presentation focused on women and the pitch was largely successful: his message resonated with many of the women at the venue.

Diya, an 18-year-old law student at Pune’s Bharati Vidyapeeth College, was convinced that the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha knew what women wanted. “If he comes to power, we are going to get more solutions for our problems instead of them being dismissed,” she said.

The Congress already fares better among urban women as compared to rural women, according to data put out by Lokniti, an election studies programme of the Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, for example, 21% rural women voted for the party, while 35% of them preferred the Bharatiya Janata Party. But the gap between the two parties narrowed for urban women, 25% of whom voted for the Congress, whereas 36% went with the BJP.

It is no surprise then that the grand old party is trying to close this gap further.

Journalist Ruhi Tewari, author of a book titled What Women Want: Understanding the Female Voter in Modern India, calls Gandhi’s outreach a new sort of politics that tries to move beyond welfare.

Till now, Indian politicians have pursued women-oriented schemes such as incentives for girls’ education, free cooking gas connections and cash transfers. But Tewari suggested that those benefits had now become the baseline for many young women who were looking for more. Gandhi’s call to “smash the patriarchy” was meant to appeal to them.

“This younger woman is looking for not just welfare delivery,” Tewari said. “She is more interested in looking at questions of representation, questions of equality.”

This was evident at the event in Pune, where some of the middle-class women in attendance expressed dissatisfaction with the Maharashtra government’s Ladki Bahin Yojana. The scheme provides Rs 1,500 every month for women between the ages of 21 and 65, if their families make less than Rs 2.5 lakh a year.

“How is Rs 1,500 going to help when I earn Rs 25,000?” asked Patil, the researcher quoted earlier in this piece. “What are you doing for me – for working women?”

From Hindutva to thirst traps

The BJP has largely avoided responding to Gandhi’s main point and has so far focused on the references he made to the Manusmriti, an ancient Hindu legal text, during his address in Pune. The chief ministers of Assam and Uttar Pradesh have criticised the Congress leader for singling out Hinduism while talking about patriarchy.

Political scientist Suhas Palshikar was not surprised by this, considering the importance that “cultural pride” holds in the Hindutva imagination.

“This attack on Manusmriti or any attack on any part of our present existence, which requires an introspection into the past, is unacceptable to them [the BJP],” he explained.

However, the young women from different Indian cities, whom Scroll spoke to, did not seem to buy the BJP’s argument.

Aishwarya Dwivedi, 30, agreed with Gandhi that gender discrimination might be enshrined in some Hindu scriptures. She had herself experienced how Hindu families expect women to perform religious rituals, but their husbands are often exempt.

“He [Gandhi] is hitting the right notes,” said the software consultant who lives in Bhopal. “All the women around me know that they are victims of patriarchy. So, what he has brought up is very close to a lot of women’s hearts because they see it on a daily basis.”

Gandhi’s popularity among younger women may also be driven, in part, by the way he carries himself. Jain, the 22-year-old psychology graduate from Delhi, admitted to finding him “hot and sexy”.

“I get a few reels of his thirst traps on my Instagram and I don’t mind that,” she added laughingly. “There is a sense of personality and charisma. You can make edits on him using catchy songs. It is kind of difficult to do that with Modi.”

The Congress leader, too, appears to be playing to this gallery of late. On Instagram, he recently opened up about his fitness routine, for example. Since June, when the Chhatron Ki Goonj campaign began, he has ditched his usual white shirt on several occasions and opted for colourful ones instead.

View this post on Instagram

What women want

While all of this may be getting Gandhi more attention from young women, it alone will not win him their votes. Jain, the woman from Delhi who called him “sexy”, said that she wanted to see him do more to empower women before voting for him.

Dwivedi, the software consultant from Bhopal, was more direct. “I don’t care about his pookieness,” she stated, referring to the internet slang of endearment that some use for Gandhi online.

She had also come across his Pune speech on Instagram. She then went looking for his full presentation and was disappointed to find no “actionable items” in it. The Congress could work on including gender sensitisation in school curriculum, she suggested, giving the party a year’s time to convince her to vote for it.

Srinidhi Vardhan, a 21-year-old marketing professional from Chennai, was just as unconvinced about voting for the party even though she admitted that the event in Pune had roused her curiosity.

“This will not be the turning point after which I will want him [Gandhi] to win,” she said. “But it will make me look more into what he is doing and follow what he will be up to in the coming days.”

Tewari, the journalist, was of the view that Gandhi should increase women’s representation in the Congress party if he wanted to earn credibility among women. She reasoned that it was not enough for the grand old party to blame the Modi government for intertwining the law mandating 33% reservation for women in legislatures with the controversial delimitation process.

“The act should be implemented, but why must any political party, including the BJP, wait for it?” Tewari asked. “What is stopping him [Gandhi] from saying that the next election onwards, he will ensure that women get as many tickets as men do, or at least 33% tickets? It would help his cause greatly.”

Easier said than done

Political analysts contend that the Congress leader will likely struggle to rally support from his party when it comes to taking any concrete steps towards gender equality.

Veteran journalist Neerja Chowdhury, who has covered Gandhi’s political career as well as that of his mother, father and grandmother, appreciated him for delivering a “strong message” in Pune, but then also pointed to the ramshackle state of the Congress party.

“I have always felt that Rahul Gandhi is enamoured of social change,” Chowdhury noted. “He has got that NGO element in him. The problem is that while he is creating a buzz, the Congress’ organisation is virtually non-existent in many states. Winning elections is not only about creating a narrative.”

Palshikar, the political scientist, agreed. The Congress, he said, comes up with ideas that attract media attention and get intellectuals and activists “keyed up”, but does not have the machinery to sustain the momentum on the ground.

According to him, even in states where the Congress does have its organisational structure in place, Gandhi confronts a recurring problem: his party does not share its leader’s enthusiasm for progressive ideas such as gender equality.

“The real hurdle is the mindset of the so-called party stalwarts,” Palshikar argued. “Everywhere, the Congress is controlled by them rather than Rahul Gandhi. If you look at the BJP, once they get the cue from the top, everyone starts believing the same thing right down to the bottom.”

With inputs from Tanya Shrivastava and Johanna Deeksha.

The list of questions for the 2027 census has stoked fears that census data might be used to prepare a National Register of Citizens.

The questionnaire for the 2027 census includes 12 questions that were not asked in the previous census. Ten of these were part of the contentious National Population Register that the Modi government had attempted to conduct in 2020.

With these inclusions, the census has subsumed the National Population Register, which is the first step towards drawing up a National Register of Citizens.

Scroll spoke to lawyers, activists and politicians to understand what the collapse of the distinction between the census and the National Population Register means. Most were of the view that this move could trigger anxieties about citizenship similar to those that had sparked the nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.

The main purpose of the census is to collect statistical data about India’s population and their housing and social conditions. But the 2027 census will go beyond questions that allow administrators to construct a statistical picture of how Indians live.

It will, for instance, ask respondents where and when their parents were born and which religion they practiced. Activists worry that this could set off a cycle of investigations and inquiries into the citizenship of those who have been living in India for generations, especially if they are Muslims.

Subsuming the NPR

The population enumeration phase of the census, during which enumerators go door-to-door with a questionnaire, will begin in snowbound parts of North India in September. At least 12 of the 40 questions to be asked as part of this process have never been asked in a census before. These include details about a respondent’s spouse, parentage, nationality and identification documents, such as passport, Aadhaar and voter card number.

This information was meant to be collected in 2020 as part of the National Population Register but the exercise had to be shelved back then on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, even before the pandemic, the National Population Register had been met with fierce opposition from civil society groups because of its design.

Specifically, questions about where and when a respondent’s parents were born caused concern as these could, in theory, help determine whether they were Indian citizens. A 1986 amendment to the Citizenship Act made the citizenship of those born in India after June 30, 1987, contingent on the citizenship of their parents.

Those controversial questions have now been included in the census as “father’s particulars” and “mother’s particulars”. Scroll accessed the training manual meant for government officials involved in conducting the exercise to find out what these “particulars” entail. They include name, date of birth, place of birth and religion.

Census enumerators were already expected to ask respondents for their name, date of birth, place of birth and religion. Now, they will have to obtain these details for every respondent’s parents too, raising fears that the data could be used to create a National Register of Citizens.

“NPR combined with NRC and CAA was what we were really fearing in 2019,” said human rights activist Harsh Mander. “The whole agitation at that time was against this. One hoped that the government would have learned lessons from it and set aside this project. But just the first glance at the census seems to suggest that they are going the whole way.”

The National Population Register flows from the sweeping changes that the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led National Democratic Alliance government made in India’s citizenship law in 2003. This included defining, for the first time, who an “illegal migrant” was. It then introduced the Citizenship Rules to implement these changes on the ground through, among other things, the National Population Register.

The first National Population Register was consequently drawn up in 2010 and then updated in 2015. The database reportedly contains information about 119 crore residents of the country. All of this data was collected by the same body that conducts the census: the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India.

However, in 2020, the National Population Register became mired in controversy for two reasons. First, the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam caused chaos by excluding over 19 lakh people from the final list. The majority of them were Hindus.

And second, the Bharatiya Janata Party promised to create a nationwide National Register of Citizens – that it linked to religion through the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019. Now, by subsuming the National Population Register into the census, the Modi government risks reviving the controversy.

“There is a grave danger that the census is becoming an instrument not of collecting information but of finding grounds to exclude and expel targeted communities, especially Muslims, from citizenship,” Mander said.

Is it legal?

Legally, the process of storing and using data collected for the National Population Register is very different from the census. The latter has strong protections in place. “No person shall have a right to inspect any book, register or record made by a census officer in the discharge of his duty,” reads section 15 of the Census Act, 1948.

In contrast, the National Population Register database can be shared with other departments of the Union government as well as state governments. In fact, the 2003 rules say that the National Register of Citizens has to be prepared after verifying entries in the National Population Register.

The Census Act, on the contrary, categorically states that its findings cannot be used as grounds for initiating government action of any kind, which would include probing someone’s citizenship status. “No entry in any such book, register, record or schedule shall be admissible as evidence in any civil proceeding whatsoever or in any criminal proceeding,” it says.

This means that at least on paper, the National Population Register getting subsumed into the census would actually lead to greater data security. But Talha Abdul Rahman, an advocate-on-record at the Supreme Court who takes up cases on data privacy and citizenship, was not convinced that these protections were enough.

He worried that once the government had such granular data, it could amend the Census Act to add an exception for citizenship inquiries. Worse still, even in the absence of a legal exception, authorities could use census data to investigate someone without disclosing the source, he added.

“This is what our experience with citizenship cases in Assam shows,” Rahman said. “Officials often falsely claim that they received inputs from the neighbours of a suspect or other local informants when the actual basis for their actions is profiling.”

Rahman was referring to officials allegedly using the religious or linguistic identity of people as a pretext to investigate their citizenship. He gave the example of Bengali Muslims, who regularly face such profiling in Assam and, of late, other Indian states.

For the lawyer, the main problem was that India did not have a data protection law. “Unless you have a law, what can you do about violations?” he asked. “How will you deal with the problems that might arise? You are getting into a domain that is very private and personal.”

Facing blowback

Journalists, researchers and politicians share this concern. The Hindu’s Deputy Editor Vijaita Singh, who is covering the census for her newspaper, complained that the government had not once explained why it was seeking so much information.

“The census has never been this document-heavy,” she noted, underlining the sheer length of the questionnaire. “Enumerators might face problems because people are very sceptical of sharing information these days. If somebody lands at your doorstep with so many questions, you might get irritated or scared.”

This has happened in the past. The first census, which was conducted by the colonial administration in 1872, drew the ire of Adivasis in what is now Jharkhand. More recently, in 2020, vaccinators in Uttar Pradesh and surveyors in West Bengal faced violence because of widespread panic about the National Register of Citizens.

Bengal, in particular, has only seen contestations over citizenship intensify since then. The BJP has vowed to address the problem of what it calls “large-scale infiltration” in the border state. On the other hand, the Trinamool Congress, which ruled Bengal till May 2026, has vehemently opposed the National Register of Citizens and the National Population Register.

This clash peaked earlier this year during the special intensive revision of the electoral roll in Bengal. At the time, the BJP had repeatedly claimed that over one crore undocumented Muslim migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar had their names on the state’s voter lists.

Eventually, over 27 lakh people, most of them Muslims, were denied the right to vote in Assembly elections this year even after they had submitted documents and attended hearings.

Sabir Ahamed, a Kolkata-based researcher, suggested that the new census questionnaire was not yet making headlines in Bengal because people were busy managing the fallout of the voter roll revision.

“So far, there is no awareness about the census because people are still facing difficulties owing to the SIR,” he said, referring to the state’s new BJP government excluding deleted voters from welfare schemes.

But Jawhar Sircar, a retired bureaucrat and a former Rajya Sabha MP from Bengal, was certain that there would be opposition once more Bengalis found out about how the census data could be used for citizenship.

“People will scream once it dawns on them or the Left, the Trinamool Congress or somebody else decides to take issue with the census,” he said.

While the census is slated to begin in Bengal only next year, Opposition parties in the state have already sounded the bugle. The Left will oppose the census “politically”, Mohammed Salim, state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), told Scroll.

“They have started the census,” Trinamool Congress Chairperson Mamata Banerjee said in a statement on Monday. “But this census is a form of NRC.”

Several BJP spokespersons declined interview requests for this story.

With inputs from Safwat Zargar.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the Union government had amended the Citizenship Act in 2003 to make the citizenship of those born in India after June 30, 1987, contingent on the citizenship of their parents. That amendment was made in 1986.

The error is regretted.

The number of voters removed from Hyderabad’s draft electoral rolls during the special intensive revision – 19.4 lakh – was equivalent to 89% of the votes polled in the city in the 2023 Assembly elections, according to analysis done by a Kolkata-based research organisation.

There were 42 lakh voters on the list in January 2023, The News Minute reported.

In two Assembly constituencies – Malakpet and Yakutpura – the number of electors deleted was higher than the number of votes polled in the seats in 2023, Sabar Institute said in its report.

The deletions were equivalent to 112% of the votes polled in Malakpet and 110% in Yakutpura. Both constituencies are represented by the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and recorded the lowest voter turnout in Hyderabad district in the 2023 elections, The News Minute reported.

In all 15 Assembly constituencies in Hyderabad, the number of electors deleted was higher than the winning margin in the 2023 Assembly elections, the Sabar Institute said.

Muslims account for 40% of all deletions

Muslims accounted for 40.7% of all deletions, the institute said. However, the report could not determine whether Muslim voters were deleted at a higher rate than other voters because religion-wise elector data at the constituency level is not available, it said.

According to the 2011 Census, Muslims comprise 30.1% of the population of Hyderabad city.

The report said 69.3% of the names were removed because the electors were found to have “permanently shifted” from their addresses. Another 17.5% were marked as untraceable, 8.1% as deceased and 5.1% as already enrolled elsewhere.

Among Muslim electors, 19.8% were marked as untraceable, compared with 16% among non-Muslims. Meanwhile, 63.8% of Muslim electors were marked as having permanently shifted, compared with 73% of non-Muslims.

🚨 Hyderabad ASDD Deletion Report is out

🗳️ Total deletions equal 89% of the 2023 turnout. In Malakpet (112%) and Yakutpura (110%), deletions exceed the total votes cast.

🧍92% of the deleted voters are *living* ie. non-dead voters. Only 8.1% of deletions were recorded as… pic.twitter.com/rdE3N5zUZi

— SABAR Institute (@SabarInstitute_) September 1, 2026

The draft electoral rolls for Telangana were published on August 17. It was among 19 states and Union territories where the exercise is being carried out in the third phase of the SIR.

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories, including West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

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

In July, the Sabar Institute also published a report on West Bengal, which found that Muslims accounted for about 70% of the more than 27 lakh voters placed under adjudication during the special intensive revision exercise.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

For much of the 20th century, the most admired wife in Marathi-speaking India was not a woman at all.

Bal Gandharva (1888–1967), a celebrated impersonator of Marathi sangeet natak (musical theatre), played devoted heroines with such conviction that film actresses well into the 1970s were trained to reproduce his mannerisms.

How did a man come to define middle-class femininity with such authority?

My recently published research traces Gandharva’s enactment of womanhood from the stage to the marketplace.

It reveals how his star persona became a site where respectable Hindu femininity was produced and commodified – a project that the theatre industry, emerging consumer culture and Hindu nationalist politics each exploited for their own ends.

Staging respectability

India’s pervasive caste system divides Hindus into distinct groups based on which caste they are born into, with certain castes regarded as “higher” than others.

Some of these “lower” castes are made up of hereditary performers: families with a lineage of performing arts. Historically, women from these communities were allowed – and sometimes expected – to perform and entertain.

But Marathi sangeet natak, which emerged in the mid-19th century, was a predominantly upper-caste and middle-class practice.

Its proponents viewed women from hereditary performing castes as unfit to appear before upper-caste audiences, and refused to engage them – or any women – on stage, even while relying on their uncredited labour behind the scenes. Instead, female stage roles were performed exclusively by upper-caste men.

Hindu nationalists condemned any trace of effeminacy in men as a sign of a weakened spirit. However, they made concessions for sangeet natak as the sector developed close ties with the influential nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920).

Sangeet natak was a vehicle for Hindu nationalist politics, and Tilak was the leader of this political ideology – so they fulfilled each other’s agendas.

Tilak’s newspaper, Kesari, ran favourable reviews of performances and lent a respectable air to the enterprise, helping to quieten suspicion about men dressing up in saris to play women’s roles.

Across his career, Gandharva played 27 female roles drawn from Hindu mythology, reformist writing and classical drama. His heroines were bound by unwavering adherence to stridharma: a concept in Hindu scriptures that positions wifely devotion as a woman’s sole destiny.

Stridharma was also heavily pushed at the turn of the 20th century, during the nationalist movement, by upper-caste men and women reformers writing in novels, women’s journals and newspaper columns. These writers gave advice on hygiene, housework and raising children, to help shape the reader into the perfect housewife, or sugrahini.

Playing the perfect wife

Stridharma found its most immersive expression on stage, where Gandharva turned it into a visually and emotionally legible experience.

His heroines such as Shakuntala, Sindhu and Rukmini became emblems of reticence, forbearance and self-effacement. Yet these pathos-ridden performances were always delivered in exquisite saris and jewellery, turning the stage into something close to a fashion runway.

Women left the theatre and went directly to sari shops to replicate “Gandharva fashion”. Although women who longed for material things had long been seen as morally dangerous, Gandharva fashion made feminine objects both desirable and respectable.

In one 1917 play called Ekach Pyala, Gandharva played Sindhu, a devoted wife who is brutalised and killed by her alcoholic husband. The audience hail Sindhu as Sati, the Hindu goddess of self-sacrifice.

A promotional portrait (pictured in the header image of this article) shows Sindhu/Gandharva in fine jewellery and a golden-border sari. It’s as though her suffering earned her the right to such finery. The underlying message? Only through stridharma can a woman earn redemption and recognition.

The same image was later used in the product packaging for “Gandharva toilet powder” (face powder).

Sugrahini in the consumer market

Gandharva’s dutiful wife image fit naturally into ads for family products. He endorsed Zenith Drakshasava, an Ayurvedic tonic made from raisins and barley and sold as a cure for tiredness and weakness.

Such tonics were once prepared locally by Ayurvedic physicians. Slowly, pharmaceutical companies began manufacturing and selling these “homemade” cures commercially.

Gandharva’s sugrahini image lent these products a sense of homely authenticity. They reinforced the idea that protecting family wellbeing was a devoted wife’s central duty – a duty that could now be conveniently purchased.

The domestic life of the sugrahini became a way to assert Hindu identity and push back against Western influence brought by colonial rule. She offered a controlled alternative to the seductive “modern girl” figure that arose globally in popular media between the first and second world wars.

In Indian context, the “modern girl” was embodied onscreen by stars such as Sulochana. She could be seen speeding along in motorcars, in a split-sleeve blouse, with a flapper hairstyle. But by the end of the narrative, she was either “tamed” or punished.

Gandharva’s sugrahini needed no taming.

Govindrao Tembe, a contemporary of Gandharva, once observed that upper-caste families “saw a reflection of their own daughters in him”, and even sought a daughter-in-law like him. Thus the sugrahini archetype outlived the stage and entered the marriage market.

From sugrahini to tradwives

In post-independence India, the sugrahini archetype appeared in all manner of ads, from pressure cookers, to laundry powder and kitchen appliances. She was economically savvy and efficient. And even as she shopped, she remained fundamentally tied to the domestic realm.

Today, we see echoes of sugrahini in the broader global tradwife culture, where women perform traditional forms of domesticity online. They cook, clean and care for children. In many cases they monetise this performance.

Gandharva’s career reminds us that domesticated and commodified femininity is not new. It is deliberately constructed and marketed – ironically, in many cases, by men.

Radhika Raghav is Teaching Fellow, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Otago; Swinburne University of Technology.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

The Cockroach Janta Party withdrew its call for a march in Delhi on September 5. This came after the Supreme Court ordered that all first information reports registered in the country in connection with student protests held in July be withdrawn.

The plea to quash the cases was filed by the Union government on Monday. Bihar, Assam, Maharashtra and West Bengal followed suit.

The Union government had also sought permission for the Delhi Police to register a fresh FIR against 2,873 persons with serious criminal records who were present at the protest site. The Supreme Court has allowed this. Read on.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again appealed to Indians not to travel abroad and refrain from buying gold. “Avoid organising destination weddings in foreign countries,” said Modi in a video posted from Kyrgyzstan.

Modi had previously called for austerity in May, saying that such measures were needed to withstand the economic challenges created by the war in West Asia. He had urged the public to avoid non-essential foreign travel, adding that conserving foreign exchange reserves was “an act of patriotism”.

He repeated the appeal while congratulating the public on India’s gross domestic product in the April-June quarter growing at 7.8%. However, the Congress said that the numbers present a “greatly distorted picture” of the Indian economy. Read on.

China, the United States and India, which are the top industrial emitters of carbon dioxide, have a “historical responsibility to compensate” Nepal as it deals with the consequences of climate change, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Shisir Khanal said. The statement came five days after a flash flood in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s northern border with China, which has killed 1,003 persons.

Of these, 987 deaths were reported in Nepal. The remaining 16 deaths were on the Chinese side of the border. More than 3,900 persons were missing in Nepal and more than 500 in China. Read on.

Jet fuel prices for domestic airlines were increased by Rs 6.2 per litre, a hike of more than 5%. Additionally, the prices of 19-kg commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders were increased by Rs 9.5 in the country.

The increase applies to commercial cylinders used by businesses and industrial consumers. Prices of domestic cooking gas cylinders are unchanged.

The price of aviation turbine fuel now stands at Rs 121.2 per litre. The latest increase will add to the financial burden on airlines, as the fuel accounts for about 40% of their operating expenses. Read on.

A five-member bench of the National Company Law Tribunal stayed the approval of a repayment plan under which media baron Subhash Chandra was allowed to pay Rs 6.2 crore to creditors against admitted claims of about Rs 22,006 crore in his personal insolvency resolution process. Chandra was also restrained from dealing with or transferring his properties.

The tribunal has decided to hear the matter afresh and issued notices to all the respondents. Read on.

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China, the United States and India, the top industrial emitters of carbon dioxide, have a “historical responsibility to compensate” Nepal as it deals with the consequences of climate change, the country’s Foreign Affairs Minister Shisir Khanal was quoted as saying by The Kathmandu Post on Tuesday.

The statement came five days after a flash flood in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s northern border with China, which has killed 1,003 persons. Of these, 987 deaths were reported in Nepal. The remaining 16 deaths were on the Chinese side of the border. Nearly 4,500 persons are missing, reported AFP.

The United States Geological Survey has said that the floods were caused by a glacial collapse that sent a wall of water and debris downstream. As there was no rainfall in the area, residents did not have a warning about the deluge.

In an interview to Kantipur TV, Khanal described the disaster as a “catastrophic mountain tsunami”, which he said was a direct consequence of global climate change, reported The Kathmandu Post.

“Nepal’s greenhouse gas emissions are virtually negligible,” the minister was quoted as saying. “Yet, we are paying the ultimate price for a global crisis we did not create.”

In 2024, China accounted for 33.1% of the global carbon emissions, according to data from the Worldometer tracker. The US was in second spot, accounting for 11.7% of the emissions. India’s global share of emissions was 8%.

Nepal accounted for only 0.04% of global emissions.

In view of this, Kathmandu was shifting its “diplomatic framework from ‘aid’ to ‘justice and compensation’, said Khanal.

“This is not a matter of charity; it is a matter of legal and moral liability,” he added.

The minister said that Kathmandu had dispatched a climate compensation claim to its international partners, without specifying the countries.

“We will be raising this issue with absolute firmness and clarity at every upcoming international forum,” he was quoted as saying by The Kathmandu Post. “This is a matter of civilisational survival.”

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• Nepal: Warming may have induced glacial floods, but the damage downstream is manmade

• The day after catastrophic flash flood, Nepal contemplates enormous cost of climate change

A journalist who reported on the alleged embezzlement of donations at the Ram temple in Ayodhya told the Supreme Court on Tuesday that the Ghaziabad Police was seeking information about his digital activities, Bar and Bench reported.

In a petition, challenging the police’s move, Abhishek Upadhyay told the Supreme Court that X had informed him that the police were seeking his “digital footprint” from June 1, Bar and Bench reported.

Upadhyay has a road-rage case registered against him, which he has claimed was filed to harass him for his reports on the alleged corruption in Uttar Pradesh. He was among the first to report on the alleged embezzlement of donations at the Ram temple.

His lawyer has argued before the court that the road-rage case was registered on August 18, much later than the period for which the police had sought Upadhyay’s data.

Awasthi said that the digital footprint sought appeared to relate to the period when Upadhyay was collecting material for his reports about the alleged theft of donations from the Ram temple, the legal news website reported.

He contended that disclosing such information could expose Upadhyay’s journalistic sources to the state machinery. “All my journalistic sources would be at the mercy of the state machinery and subject to harassment,” the lawyer was quoted as saying by The Hindu.

The court said it would examine these concerns.

Road-rage case

The first information report against Upadhyay, based on a complaint by a two-wheeler rider, alleged that the journalist hit his vehicle from behind and then threatened and abused him. The FIR invoked provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

On August 25, the Supreme Court granted Upadhyay protection from arrest in the case.

During the hearing, the journalist had claimed that the road-rage allegations were baseless and that the closed-circuit television footage from the site would prove this. He also sought preservation of the footage from the area.

Chief Justice Surya Kant, while granting Upadhyay protection from arrest, verbally remarked that while the court did not know the truth of the matter, it could understand the journalist’s apprehension.

The chief justice told the journalist to approach the High Court to seek that the case be quashed.

The Supreme Court also directed the police to supply Upadhyay with a copy of the first information report. The case will be heard further on September 7.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

A five-member bench of the National Company Law Tribunal on Tuesday stayed the approval of a repayment plan under which media baron Subhash Chandra was allowed to pay Rs 6.2 crore to creditors against admitted claims of about Rs 22,006 crore in his personal insolvency resolution process, reported Bar and Bench.

On August 25, National Company Law Tribunal Member (Judicial) Nilesh Sharma approved the repayment plan that would have translated into a haircut of approximately 99.9%.

The tribunal is a quasi-judicial body that deals with corporate insolvency and company-law disputes.

In finance, when a creditor is owed a certain amount of money but the debtor only repays a portion of it, the percentage of the write-off is known as a “haircut”.

Since 2022, Chandra has been the subject of insolvency proceedings filed by Indiabulls Housing Finance Limited, now known as Sammaan Capital.

Chandra had stood as a personal guarantor for a Rs 170 crore loan given to a firm, Vivek Infracon. After the loan turned bad, Indiabulls moved the National Company Law Tribunal in 2022 under Section 95 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code for insolvency proceedings against Chandra. The plea was admitted in 2024.

Chandra was a Rajya Sabha MP between 2016 and 2022. He was elected to the Upper House as an Independent candidate backed by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

On Tuesday, Chandra was also restrained from dealing with or transferring his properties, reported Live Law.

The order was passed by the newly constituted five-member bench, headed by the tribunal’s president Justice Anupinder Singh.

The five-member bench also held that no clear majority exists regarding the previous verdict, reported Bar and Bench.

Staying the order, it decided to hear the matter afresh and issued notices to all the respondents.

The original two-member bench of the tribunal hearing the matter had delivered a split verdict on the repayment plan, after which Sharma was appointed as the third member to resolve the difference of opinion.

After his August 25 verdict, the two-member bench noted that he had passed an independent order rather than resolving the specific points of disagreement, reported Live Law.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Cockroach Janta Party has withdrawn its call for a march on September 5 after the Union government moved to quash cases against protesters, Live Law quoted the political campaign’s co-convener Saurav Das as telling the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

This came after the Supreme Court ordered that all first information reports registered across the country in connection with student protests held between July 20 and July 25 should not be pursued or investigated and must be treated as closed, reported Live Law.

On Monday, the Union government moved the Supreme Court seeking to withdraw all FIRs filed in connection with the youth protests in Delhi.

The application urged the court to quash the 13 FIRs registered in Delhi for offences including rioting, attempt to murder, robbery and damage to public property, using its special powers under Article 142 of the Constitution.

Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court to pass orders necessary to ensure “complete justice” in any matter before it.

The governments in Bihar, Assam, West Bengal and Maharashtra had also moved the Supreme Court seeking to quash 116 FIRs registered in connection with the youth protests, reported Live Law.

While Bihar moved to quash 69 FIRs, Maharashtra placed before the court 34 cases to be quashed. West Bengal sought to cancel eight FIRs and Assam listed five cases.

The Bharatiya Janata Party is in power in all four states.

On Tuesday, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the court that the Union government was also committed to providing compensation to the families of those who died by suicide after the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for admission to undergraduate medical courses was cancelled, reported Live Law.

He added that the government needed three months “to work out the modalities”.

Das said that the campaign “deems it appropriate to withdraw the call for the march” in view of the assurances and the order passed by the Supreme Court.

The political campaign had announced the march on August 24, alleging that the Union government had failed to “honour its July 25 commitments” that led the campaign to call off its protest at Jantar Mantar.

One of the demands was that “no punitive action would be taken against any protester, either now or in the future” in any state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party or its National Democratic Alliance. The campaign had also demanded compensation for the families of aspirants who died by suicide.

Despite accepting the demands, the government had “played delay games, hidden behind technicalities and avoided giving clear commitments even before the Supreme Court”, instead of implementing what was promised to the protesters, the campaign had said.

On Monday, the government told the court that no fresh FIRs will be filed in connection with the incidents mentioned in the application. It also said that if any similar FIR is filed later, the authorities will not oppose its quashing.

However, it sought permission for the Delhi Police to register a fresh FIR against 2,873 persons with serious criminal records who were present at the protest site.

Youth protests

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party held a demonstration at Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time.

On July 20, thousands joined the protest. This came two days after the police forcibly took activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike for three weeks, to hospital.

The protesters’ march to Parliament was met with a crackdown by police. Dozens were injured as the police used lathis and fired tear gas shells and pellet guns at the demonstrators. The police action turbocharged the agitation, which spread to other parts of the country. Pradhan resigned as the education minister on July 25.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The jet fuel prices for domestic airlines were increased by Rs 6.2 per litre on Tuesday, a hike of more than 5%, NDTV Profit quoted unidentified sources at Indian Oil Corporation Limited as saying.

This is the second consecutive monthly increase in the price of aviation turbine fuel, which now stands at Rs 121.2 per litre.

On August 1, the rate was raised to Rs 115 per litre from Rs 110. In July, it had been reduced by Rs 5 per litre.

The latest increase will add to the financial burden on airlines, as aviation turbine fuel accounts for about 40% of their operating expenses.

The war in West Asia has pushed up global oil prices and led to airspace restrictions that have increased operating costs.

On April 26, Air India, IndiGo and SpiceJet told the Union government that the country’s aviation sector was on the verge of “stopping operations” and had sought its intervention “for immediate and meaningful financial support to tide over the current situation”.

Air India said on May 13 that it would temporarily suspend its services on certain international routes from June to August due to airspace restrictions over some regions and record-high prices of jet fuel.

Commercial LPG price hiked

The prices of 19-kg commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders were also increased by approximately Rs 10 in the country, The Hindu reported.

The increase applies to commercial cylinders used by businesses and industrial consumers. Prices of domestic cooking gas cylinders are unchanged.

With this, a 19-kg LPG cylinder costs Rs 2,745.5 in Delhi, and Rs 2,701 in Mumbai.

The hike was steeper in Kolkata, where the price of commercial cylinders was increased by Rs 11.50 to Rs 2,844, the newspaper reported. In Chennai, the prices were increased by Rs 10.5 to Rs 2,916.5 per cylinder.

The rates of free trade 5-kg cylinders were increased by Rs 2, The Hindu reported.

Free trade 5 kg LPG cylinders are designed for easy purchase without mandatory address proof and are primarily used by migrant populations in urban and semi-urban areas.

India imports half of its natural gas requirements and 88% of its crude oil needs. This mostly comes through the Strait of Hormuz, which had been effectively blocked since the conflict in West Asia began on February 28.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Tuesday once again appealed to Indians not to travel abroad and refrain from buying gold.

“Avoid organising destination weddings in foreign countries,” said Modi in a video posted from Kyrgyzstan. The prime minister is in the country for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit.

The multilateral forum comprises India, China, Russia, Pakistan and Iran, and five nations from the Eurasian region.

Modi had called for austerity in May as well, to withstand the economic headwinds created by the war in West Asia.

He had urged the public to avoid non-essential foreign travel and destination weddings abroad for a year, saying that conserving foreign exchange reserves was “an act of patriotism”.

The prime minister had also advised Indians to avoid non-essential gold purchases to reduce pressure on foreign exchange outflows.

He repeated the appeal on Tuesday while congratulating the public on India’s gross domestic product in the April-June quarter growing at 7.8%. This surpassed the 7% forecast by the Reserve Bank of India for the quarter.

Modi said that India was “progressing rapidly” despite global uncertainty, wars and disruptions in supply chains.

7.8% growth.

Strong numbers.

Even stronger confidence. pic.twitter.com/ZVPpnAXrVU

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 1, 2026

“On the other hand, within India too, people drowned in an atmosphere of despair are engaged in spreading lies,” he stated. “Overcoming all these challenges, the country has achieved 7.8% growth.”

He added: “We have to maintain this pace.”

His remarks came after the Congress claimed that the GDP growth rate presents a “greatly distorted picture” of India’s economy.

Party leader Jairam Ramesh said that the numbers do not convey the “decidedly depressed private investment sentiment in the economy – both domestic and foreign”.

The prime minister’s celebration was “premature”, Ramesh added, while referring to Modi describing the country’s growth as a “herculean feat”.

Congress MP Pawan Khera had said that GDP measures only the national output, and not jobs, wages or the opportunities available to the citizens.

He asked whether India had truly “bloomed” if “rampant unemployment, leaked exam papers, and a crumbling education system define the ground reality”.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Excesses in the time of austerity

• Modi’s austerity appeals are a misplaced solution for India’s economic woes

Last month was the hottest August since 1901, the India Meteorological Department said on Monday. It also forecast that the rainfall in September will be below normal.

The average temperature across the country was 28.01 degrees Celsius, warmer than the normal of 27.34 degrees Celsius during the month.

The average maximum temperature during the month was 31.66 degrees Celsius instead of the normal of 31.01 degrees Celsius, the weather department said. The average minimum temperature was 24.36 degrees Celsius, higher than the normal of 23.6 degrees Celsius.

In eastern, northeastern and southern India, the average maximum temperature was more than 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than the normal.

September forecast

The weather department also said that the southwest monsoon rainfall in most part of the country will be below normal and less than 91% of the long period average.

The long period average is the measure of the mean rainfall during the four-month monsoon season over the last 50 years.

However, some areas in the northwest, northeast, east, east-central and southeast peninsular India, are likely to receive normal to above-normal rainfall, it said.

The average maximum temperatures are likely to be above-normal in most parts of the country, the India Meteorological Department said.

Monthly average minimum temperatures are also expected to be above-normal in most parts of the country except some parts of northwestern, west-central and northeastern India, where it is likely to be normal to below-normal.

The department said that strong El Niño conditions are prevailing over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with sea surface temperature remaining above-normal in central and eastern equatorial Pacific.

The El Niño weather phenomenon involves the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific. It typically occurs every few years and has been linked to reduced monsoon rainfall in India.

The conditions are expected to strengthen further in the coming months, it added.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Anamika Pathak.

The Supreme Court collegium on Monday recommended the appointment of Justice Sanjay K Agrawal as the chief justice of the Rajasthan High Court, the Hindustan Times reported.

Agrawal is currently a judge in the Chhattisgarh High Court. The collegium consisted of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Vikram Nath and BV Nagarathna.

The recommendation came amid allegations of misuse of administrative power against Rajasthan High Court Acting Chief Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma who is due to retire on September 26.

Sharma on Monday decided to opt out of hearing cases following protests by lawyers against him, Bar and Bench reported.

In letters sent to Kant in August, Supreme Court Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts. Mehta had sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”.

As per the new roster prepared by Sharma, no bench has been constituted with him as a member, and no regular judicial sittings have been assigned to him between Tuesday and Saturday, Bar and Bench reported. The new roster also assigns cases previously handled by him to other benches.

Earlier on Monday, the Rajasthan High Court Lawyers Association announced a strike until September 6, seeking Sharma’s removal as the acting chief justice and the appointment of a permanent chief justice.

Sharma was appointed as a Rajasthan High Court judge in November 2016 and transferred to the Patna High Court in 2022.

After Sharma sought to return to Rajasthan on health grounds, the collegium headed by DY Chandrachud, the chief justice at the time, declined his request in March 2023. Sharma was transferred to the Punjab and Haryana High Court instead.

In May 2025, a fresh collegium recommended his return to Rajasthan.

He later became the acting chief justice of the Rajasthan High Court. Mehta wrote in his letters that Sharma has held the position for “more than 10 months”.

Mehta has also claimed in his letters that several judges of the Rajasthan High Court had approached him during his visits to the state and expressed concerns about Sharma’s conduct.

After the allegations came to light, lawyers at the Jaipur and Jodhpur benches of the High Court held protests against Sharma.

On August 26, Kant had said that the allegations against Sharma were being examined at the “appropriate level”. Taking note of Mehta’s complaint, Kant had said that Sharma had to be given an opportunity to respond.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The 7.8% growth rate of India’s gross domestic product in the April-June quarter presents a “greatly distorted picture” of the economy, claimed the Congress on Monday.

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation had published the GDP numbers earlier in the day, saying that the manufacturing sector grew 9.2% during the first quarter of the financial year 2026-’27. This was up from 8.3% in the same period last year. The services sector grew 10%, compared with 8% a year ago, it added.

The overall GDP numbers published by the ministry surpassed the 7% forecast by the Reserve Bank of India for the quarter.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi described the country’s growth as a “herculean feat” achieved despite “oil price shocks and supply chain issues” amid the war in West Asia. “Doomsayers were doomed and India bloomed…yet again,” he wrote on social media.

India’s exemplary GDP growth of 7.8% during Q1 of FY 2026-27 is a herculean feat.

The collective strength of our people ensured India delivered such growth despite oil price shocks and supply chain issues in the midst of global uncertainties.

Doomsayers were doomed and India…

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 31, 2026

However, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that the GDP numbers do not convey the “decidedly depressed private investment sentiment in the economy – both domestic and foreign”.

The prime minister’s celebration was “premature”, he added.

The MP claimed that “consumer confidence was weak and had fallen to its lowest level since the Covid-19 pandemic, continuing a downward trend since November 2025”.

“Further, prices of essential household goods were rising sharply, while unemployment among educated youth remained high,” he pointed out.

The quarterly GDP numbers, such as they are reported, present a GDP - Greatly Distorted Picture - of the economy.

They do not convey the decidedly depressed private investment sentiment in the economy — both domestic and foreign.

Consumer confidence is very sluggish, hitting…

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) August 31, 2026

Ramesh also accused the prime minister of encouraging a few large business groups to dominate key sectors. “The wealth of India’s five richest families has grown by 400% while the real wages of salaried workers have fallen,” he wrote.

His comment was in reference to the 2026 Wealth Tracker India study published by non-profit organisation Centre for Financial Accountability and Tax The Top campaign on April 1.

The study said that five of the richest families in India saw their wealth increase by 400% between 2019 and 2025. On the other hand, the share of the bottom 50% in the country’s wealth stagnated at 6.4% by 2024, it had pointed out.

Ramesh’s party colleague Pawan Khera said that GDP measures only the national output, and not jobs, wages or the opportunities available to the citizens.

He asked whether India had truly “bloomed” if “rampant unemployment, leaked exam papers, and a crumbling education system define the ground reality”.

“Why is the republic’s prosperity not translating into the prosperity of its public?” he asked on social media.

One quarter of 7.8% growth is not an economic spring.

If India has truly "bloomed," why do rampant unemployment, leaked exam papers, and a crumbling education system define the ground reality?

Why is the republic's prosperity not translating into the prosperity of its public?… pic.twitter.com/czpnK4JsaC

— Pawan Khera 🇮🇳 ಪವನ್ ಖೇರಾ (@Pawankhera) August 31, 2026

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sneha.

The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal and China, which occurred on August 26, rose to 1,003 on Tuesday. Of these, 987 deaths were reported in Nepal.

The remaining 16 deaths were on the Chinese side of the border, AFP reported.

More than 3,900 persons were missing in Nepal and more than 500 in China. Those missing in Nepal included 275 Indians, New Delhi had said on Saturday night. It was unclear if the number had changed in the two days after that.

More than 11,300 persons have been rescued in Nepal as of 6 pm on Monday, the country’s disaster management authority said. This included 158 Indians, the Ministry of External Affairs said on Monday.

Our technical team for tunnel rescue worked in both Chilime and Langtang sites today in coordination with the Nepali Army. Despite inclement weather and difficult access conditions at Chilime, the team successfully established foothold at the tunnel and set up safety ropes inside… pic.twitter.com/eLQa0amdAM

— Naveen Srivastava, Ambassador of India in Nepal (@navsri6619) August 31, 2026

The floods occurred in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s northern border with China on Wednesday. The mountainous district is located about 120 km north of Kathmandu. As there was no rainfall in the area, residents did not have a warning about the deluge.

The United States Geological Survey has said that the floods were caused by a glacial collapse that sent a wall of water and debris downstream, reported AFP.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Also read: Warming may have induced glacial floods in Nepal, but the damage downstream is manmade

US President Donald Trump’s tenure has vindicated many in the Indian foreign policy establishment prone to reflexive anti-Americanism. However, the recent history of intensified engagement between India and the US, the ongoing bureaucratic collaboration, and the Indian ruling establishment’s cautious reaction to Trump suggest New Delhi’s receptivity to a turnaround in the relationship.

India’s continued insistence on better ties with the US provides an opportune segue to analyse the historical roots of the pro-American, liberal ideational strand of Indian internationalist thought.

Against the backdrop of the Cold War geopolitics, this particular vision offered an alternative to former Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s non-aligned, zone of peace approach to the Asian regional security order. Nobody represented the Indian liberal internationalist vision as forcefully as Minoo Masani, the founding leader of the Swatantra party (1959-74).

Based on previously unused archival sources, this inquiry into Masani’s vision for India’s place in the Asian security order highlights a crucial strand of Indian internationalism during the early Cold War years, motivated by a strong sense of both geopolitical and ideological assault by the communist movement.

His consistent advocacy of closer ties with the US reveals the diversity of Indian strategic culture beyond the Nehruvian non-alignment. The Masani case also points to the pitfalls of ideological excesses, demonstrating how entrenched dogmas lead to miscalculations and sub-optimal foreign policy choices.

Despite cutting his teeth in public life as an anti-colonial Congress Socialist, Masani turned toward liberalism, infused with Gandhian ethics, in reaction to the post-World War II superpower contest, communist China’s control over Tibet and a homegrown communist insurgency.

At first, he focused his attention on contesting the appeal of communism in the Indian public sphere, albeit with little durable impact. As the founding father and leading foreign policy expert of the Swatantra Party, his opinion on India’s place in its extended Asian neighborhood stood a better chance at positive public reception.

This was even more true in the first half of the 1960s, as deteriorating relations with communist China led to a brief border war and security cooperation with the US. Here, we focus on three peculiar aspects of Masani’s conception of the regional security order as emblematic of one strain of Indian foreign policy thinking from the 1950s to early 1970s.

‘Communist Threat’

By 1950, the nascent Indian republic was faced with two potential security threats along its continental border – Pakistan and communist China, which had invaded and annexed Tibet. Nehru was attentive to the potential for expansionist designs, driven in China by the twin forces of nationalism and communism.

But his preferred approach to handling bilateral ties and the wider Asian security order lay in a combination of building the industrial sinews of Indian power in the long run and promoting a zone of peace in Asia to dampen the zero-sum superpower conflict. In addition, Nehru also undertook a range of measures in the early 1950s to reassure China of New Delhi’s benign intentions.

Masani and his anti-communist and right-wing compatriots, however, were less sanguine about the nature of the Chinese threat. In his later recollections, Masani would sometimes admit his initial agreement with Nehru’s enunciation of the non-alignment doctrine in 1946-’47. The communist Chinese movement into Tibet in 1950 and the erosion of Tibetan autonomy, however, alarmed Masani enough to argue for a change in the Indian approach.

But Masani’s concern did not remain limited to frontier dynamics. Rather, he interpreted the Chinese communist regime’s motives in terms of an authoritarian threat to democratic freedom. In this reading, the Korean war, the Taiwan Strait crisis, tensions in Berlin, and the Indochina conflict were all connected in a grand communist design to systematically erode liberalism. The China challenge, thus, went well beyond the border. Rather, it penetrated the jungles of Telangana, factories in Bombay and Calcutta, university campuses across India, and legislative buildings in the provincial and federal capitals.

Such a hardened ideological approach translated into an acute sense of threat perception that invariably led to miscalculations. To Masani’s credit, it bears mentioning that the Chinese attack on India in 1962 vindicated the anti-communist foreign policy elites who sounded an alarm in the wilderness in the 1950s.

The poor status of military preparedness and infrastructure buildup in the border region necessitated external balancing to defend Indian national interest. As Masani would correctly surmise at the time, the strategic cultural fixation with bloc neutrality hardly made strategic sense in this context. But the pitfalls of ideological threat inflation were reflected in his take on Sino-Soviet alliance dynamics.

Since Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and advocacy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist bloc in the mid-1950s, the strain in Moscow’s ties with a more radical and unrelenting Mao opened up a potentially exploitable opportunity. In fact, the 1959 military clash between India and China itself contributed to the deterioration of Sino-Soviet dynamics. Chinese behaviour in the Second Taiwan Strait crisis and the Soviet withdrawal of technical assistance portended the growing schism in the communist bloc. Masani, however, remained impervious to the potential for a Sino-Soviet split and its implications for India throughout the 1960s.

In 1962, Masani acknowledged the existence of tensions within the socialist camp but argued that centripetal forces were exerting an even greater pull. Ignoring the signs of a continued schism, he contended that Nikita Khrushchev’s removal from power could potentially heal the intra-bloc rift, since the rivalry was partly driven by a personality clash. As the split became evident in the second half of the 1960s, Indian policymakers began to envisage an alignment with the USSR to counter China. Ever combative, Masani still argued in 1966 that the Soviets’ interest lay in a détente with China.

A year earlier, the ideological need for a cohesive and powerful adversary was reflected in his interview with political scientist Michael Brecher, whereby he explicitly hoped for Sino-Soviet rapprochement to negate the prospect of a New Delhi-Moscow alignment. As we see later, the rapprochement actually occurred between Washington and Beijing, which made Masani shift his views on India’s involvement with the Asian security order.

The regional alliance of democracies

The admixture of geopolitical and ideological threats led Masani to advocate for an anti-communist regional alliance of democracies in Asia. This counterbalancing coalition against communist China was to involve all the democracies between India and Japan, alongside Australia and New Zealand.

Even though Japan and India were expected to take the lead, any viable regional security alliance required the US backing to be effective against the communist power. Masani’s account of the exact contours of the anti-communist alliance remains frustratingly short on details. We can still reasonably surmise that the Asian coalition would have coordinated diplomatic signaling to deter Chinese threats and provided material aid in the case of aggression. Finally, Masani would also have been comfortable with the framing of the coalition as a coordination device to counter the communist infiltration of domestic politics across the region.

The border conflict with China in 1962 provided a propitious moment for Masani to push his agenda within the Indian foreign policy establishment. With the approval of Masani, the Swatantra leader PK Singh Deo brought up the idea of a collective Asian security venture at an all-party meeting in August 1962. Nehru, however, rejected the suggestion on the grounds of the inadequate material capability of such an anti-China coalition.

While archival sources in Australia and New Zealand vindicate Nehru’s pessimism, the real value of the initiative lay in sending a strong signal of a concerted diplomatic front against China to deter military adventurism. Any meaningful shift in the Sino-Indian military balance had to be contingent on the external intervention of the US, though. India’s military modernisation efforts after the winter 1962 debacle again brought the issue to the fore.

As the Indian government largely preferred internal balancing, Masani complained about the creaking economic burden of military modernisation efforts with deleterious implications for national morale. He preferred New Delhi to accept the military aid offer from the US and other democracies to bolster national security without breaking the budget.

In Masani’s anti-communist collective security plan, both the Republic of China in Taiwan, run by an authoritarian Chiang Kai-shek, and illiberal Pakistan under the dictatorship of Ayub Khan were misfits. But Masani overlooked such discrepancies in the name of the necessity of a joint anti-communist front. He regularly criticised Nehru’s rejection of the offer of joint defense from Ayub Khan in 1959. Much like American and British strategic elites, Masani understood well that any plausible anti-Chinese strategic initiative in South Asia remained contingent upon solving the Kashmir issue. Thus, both Masani and fellow Swatantra leader C Rajagopalachari argued for a conciliatory policy approach toward Pakistan.

As Pakistan grew closer to China and the Vietnam war intensified in the late 1960s, however, the falling dominoes assumption led Masani to fear a potential encirclement of Indian frontiers by communist satellites from Karachi to Singapore. A potential reliance on a US-led coalition remained the only plausible solution, as reflected in Masani’s support for the US offensive in Vietnam.

The Sino-US Rapprochement

Unlike Masani’s dogmatic insistence on the continued endurance of the monolithic communist bloc, US President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger recognised and sought to exploit the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1970s. Masani’s initial reading of Nixon’s China visit recognised the balancing imperative behind the rapprochement, but took Nixon to task for betraying Taiwan’s cause in the joint communique. Reflective of the fluid geopolitical dynamics spurred by Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy, he even speculated that Washington’s abandonment of Taiwan might lead the latter to join Brezhnev’s Asian collective security initiative directed against China.

On the other hand, Masani relentlessly critiqued India’s growing affinity with the USSR. The 1971 Indo-Soviet treaty, in his understanding, turned India into a handmaiden of Brezhnev’s plan for collective security in Asia. Ironically enough, his criticism of the growing Soviet influence in the Indian Ocean was approvingly cited by the Chinese News Agency Hsinhua. Masani’s immediate reaction to the Chinese media report in September 1973 underscored the need to avoid engagement with both communist powers.

In the years following the Nixon-in-China moment, however, Masani significantly shifted his thinking on New Delhi’s dynamics with the competing communist states. The immediate spur for Masani’s reconsideration might have been Brezhnev’s November 1973 visit to India. But the trendline of a seemingly durable Sino-US détente and the growing Indian dependency on the USSR more plausibly explains the shift.

By the early 1970s, Masani did not evince a strong and immediate threat perception vis-à-vis China. Consequently, in his understanding, New Delhi should have recalibrated its approach in response to the evolving “multipolar” world. More clearly, he wanted India to normalise ties with China at this juncture instead of acting as a pawn in the Soviet collective security arrangement for Asia. The Indira Gandhi government, however, perceived a greater degree of threat from the Washington-Beijing-Islamabad nexus. Accordingly, New Delhi’s policy response in the 1970s ignored Masani’s protests at inching closer to the USSR and testing its own nuclear device.

The veteran liberal ideologue might not have had many takers in his time. But, as India seeks closer cooperation with the US and Asian partners to balance against China, Masani’s international thought could serve as the historical anchor for New Delhi’s strategic posturing. Masani’s forgotten vision of an Asian alliance and US ties points to a particular strand of Indian foreign policy that now holds wider purchase in New Delhi’s strategic circles.

China’s geopolitical assertion, the proliferation of Asian regional minilaterals, the uptick in India-Taiwan relations, and a strong alignment with the US render relevant Masani’s vision. At the same time, any applied history exercise requires due caution in drawing analogies across different contexts. New Delhi’s strong disapproval of an Asian NATO architecture, steadfast adherence to strategic autonomy, and continued rivalry with Pakistan show the limits of drawing from Masani’s preferred strategy.

Sanjeet Kashyap is a doctoral candidate in international politics at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This article is the second in a two-part series focusing on research that sheds light on key personalities in India’s diplomatic history, based on work that was first presented at the Ashoka-LSE Diplomatic Studies Workshop.

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

The Union government on Monday moved the Supreme Court seeking to quash all first information reports filed in connection with the youth protests in Delhi in July, Bar and Bench reported.

The application urged the court to quash the 13 FIRs registered for offences including rioting, attempt to murder, robbery and damage to public property, using its special powers under Article 142 of the Constitution. Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court to pass orders necessary to ensure “complete justice” in any matter before it.

It also sought permission for the Delhi Police to register a fresh FIR against 2,873 persons with serious criminal records who were present at the protest site, the legal news outlet reported.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta mentioned the matter before Chief Justice Surya Kant and sought an urgent listing for Tuesday, Live Law reported.

The government assured the court that no fresh FIR will be filed in connection with the incidents mentioned in the application. It also said that if any similar FIR is filed later, the authorities will not oppose its quashing.

This comes ahead of the Cockroach Janta Party’s call for a peaceful march from India Gate to the Delhi Police headquarters on Saturday. The political campaign had spearheaded the protests against alleged mismanagement of several competitive examinations.

The Cockroach Janta Party said that the Union government had failed to “honour its July 25 commitments” that led the campaign to call off its protest at Jantar Mantar. One of the demands was that “no punitive action would be taken against any protester, either now or in the future” in any state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party or its National Democratic Alliance.

The protests began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party held a demonstration at Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time.

On July 20, thousands joined the protest. This came two days after the police forcibly took activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike for three weeks, to hospital.

The protesters’ march to Parliament was met with a crackdown by police. Dozens were injured as the police used lathis and fired tear gas shells and pellet guns at the demonstrators. The police action turbocharged the agitation, which spread to other parts of the country. Pradhan resigned as the education minister on July 25.

After his resignation, the political campaign called off the protests.

On August 24, the political campaign said that instead of implementing what was promised to the protesters, the government had “played delay games, hidden behind technicalities and avoided giving clear commitments even before the Supreme Court”.

It said that the Supreme Court had asked the Union government to provide a list of first information reports registered across the country “so that the court could consider quashing them together…making the commitment easier to fulfil”.

But the government “refused to give a clear commitment to do so”, the campaign said.

On August 18, the Supreme Court said it would use its powers under Article 142 to quash FIRs in which only students had been named.

The court had also asked the Union government to provide a list of FIRs registered against students across the country. The bench said that cases involving persons with serious criminal antecedents would be considered separately.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The names of more than two crore persons were removed from Maharashtra’s draft voter list on Monday as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The electors excluded from the draft account for 21.1% of the state’s previous voter base.

In Delhi, 47.7 lakh names were deleted from the draft voter list. The names account for 33% of the Union Territory’s electorate.

Deletions in Maharashtra, Delhi

Those removed from the voter list were marked as either permanently shifted, deceased, absent, duplicate entries or placed under the “other” category, which includes those who refused to fill the enumeration form.

In Maharashtra, Pune district had the highest number of deletions at 28.6 lakh, followed by Thane with 28.5 lakh and Mumbai Suburban with 26.5 lakh.

In the national capital, Tughlakabad had the highest deletions at 52.1%.

In both states, voters can file claims and objections against their exclusion from the draft list between August 31 and September 30. The appeals will be heard by October 29. The final electoral roll will be published on November 4.

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

In 2025, the first phase of the exercise was conducted in Bihar. It was extended to 12 states and Union Territories, including West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, in the second phase in late 2025 and the first half of 2026.

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

Crores of names removed

During the third phase, more than six crore names have been deleted from draft lists.

In Karnataka, more than one crore names, or 19% of the electorate, were removed. In Haryana, 16% of the voters, or more than 24 lakh persons, were deleted. In Andhra Pradesh, 10.8% of the electorate, or more than 22 lakh names, were excluded.

Earlier in July, more than 22 lakh names were removed from the voter lists of four states Odisha, Manipur, Mizoram and Sikkim. The names accounted for 6.1% of the voters in the states’ earlier electoral rolls.

In West Bengal, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of the electorate before the process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls. Ahead of the Assembly elections in April, about 38 lakh appeals were reportedly pending before the tribunals.

On August 25, the Supreme Court was told that only seven lakh out of 38 lakh appeals before the tribunals in West Bengal were against deletions from the electoral rolls. The remaining 31 lakh applications were challenging inclusion in the list.

In nearly 83,000 appeals that were disposed of in West Bengal, tribunals allowed voters to be included in the electoral rolls in more than 75,000 cases. This meant that more than 90% of the decided appeals had been ruled in favour of the voters, the court was informed.

In Bihar, the exercise took place between July 2025 and September 2025 ahead of the Assembly elections in November 2025. Forty-seven lakh voters in the state were excluded from the final electoral roll.

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

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Also read:

• Scroll’s SIR experience is a microcosm of what urban India is facing
• Bihar to Bengal, the great Indian disenfranchisement now has the Supreme Court’s approval

More than two crore voters have been removed from the draft voter list for Maharashtra as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The draft roll has 7.7 crore voters.

Electors whose names do not figure in the draft account for 21.1% of Maharashtra’s previous voter base.

Those removed from the voter list were marked as either permanently shifted, deceased, absent, duplicate entries or placed under the “other” category, which includes those who refused to fill the enumeration form.

Pune district had the highest number of uncollected enumeration forms at 28.6 lakh, followed by Thane with 28.5 lakh, Mumbai Suburban with 26.5 lakh.

Those whose names are missing from the draft rolls can file claims and objections till September 30. Claims, objections and notices will be processed till October 29, while the final electoral roll is scheduled to be published on November 4.

Maharashtra's SIR 2026 - Key Findings of Enumeration Form (1/2) pic.twitter.com/OWX7R9exDU

— ChiefElectoralOffice (@CEO_Maharashtra) August 31, 2026

Earlier in the day, the draft voter list for Delhi was also published. The names of 47.7 lakh voters in Delhi were removed from the draft electoral rolls in the national capital.

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

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

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

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

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

In August last year, Rafikul Biswas was picked up from his home in Bengaluru, and accused of being an undocumented migrant from Bangladesh.

Biswas, who is originally from Nadia district in Bengal, spent four months in a detention centre in the city, as his family members and lawyers scrambled to get him out.

Since May last year, several Bengali Muslims have been picked up in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, falsely accused of being Bangladeshis and, in several cases, forcibly expelled from Indian territory.

In Biswas’s case, it was the Congress-ruled government in Karnataka that had acted in a similar fashion.

It took a year-long legal battle for Biswas to be set free, despite the fact that he owned a passport. In the time he spent in the detention centre, he suffered two cardiac episodes, Biswas told Scroll.

On August 4, the Karnataka High Court declared the 32-year-old an Indian and said that his family had been residing in India for “generations”.

But his ordeal was not yet over.

Four days later, on August 8, the police landed up at Biswas’s home again at 6 in the morning and rounded him up along with his wife.

They were among about 3,000 Bengali workers picked up by the Bengaluru City Police as part of a special drive, called ‘Operation Mukta’, to identify suspected undocumented immigrants living in the city.

The police raided 90 locations, many of which are home to Bengali speakers who pick up and segregate the tonnes of garbage and waste that Bengaluru produces every day.

“Everyone was picked up and accused of being Bangladeshi,” Biswas said. “In my locality, about 230 people were taken to the police station despite being Indian citizens.” Biswas said the police refused to even see the High Court order declaring him an Indian.

Sheikh Kader, a 56-year-old of Nadia district of Bengal, who has been living in Bengaluru for the last 21 years, said he was picked up from a road near his home by a group of policemen on the morning of August 8.

“I have a long beard and I wear a lungi,” he told Scroll. “They looked at me and said, ‘Aap pura Bangladeshi hai.’” You are definitely a Bangladeshi.

Kader added: “The police did not check any documents before detaining me.”

Hundreds of workers were held for 12-14 hours in detention centres, marriage halls and hotels and then finally let go. Of the 3,000 picked up, only 105 were found to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, The Times of India reported.

The mass detention has been criticised by activists as unprecedented for Karnataka.

Hundreds of Indian citizens were harassed in the drive, Avisikta (June), a Bengaluru-based human rights activist who works with displaced and migrant populations, told Scroll.

“There is anyway widespread ethno-racial hate speech in Karnataka against Bengali workers,” Avisikta said. “Every Bengali-speaking informal worker is suspected of being Bangladeshi. This right-wing rhetoric appears to have pushed the Congress to crack down instead of following constitutional provisions.”

Biswas, who has been living in Bengaluru for over 12 years, too, said he was disappointed.

“Sarkar Congress er, kintu byabohaar BJPir,” Biswas said. It is a Congress government here, but it behaves like the BJP.

Scroll emailed and called the Bengaluru police commissioner and the Karnataka home minister Priyank Kharge, asking about the rationale behind the drive and allegations of harassment of Indian citizens. The story will be updated if they reply.

The first detention

Biswas lives in a shanty in Somasundarpalya with his 30-year-old wife Anguri Khatun Biswas and their 11- year-old daughter. Before he was picked up last year, he was employed as a driver at a private school. He also ran a scrap business.

On the evening of August 28, 2025, personnel from the Bandepalya police station knocked at his door and took him away.

A day later, the Foreigners Regional Registration Office passed an order directing that Biswas be put in a detention centre.

“I was not given any notice nor was I initially told the reason for my confinement,” Biswas told Scroll.

Later, the police showed him purported Bangladeshi identity documents that proved he was a citizen of that country, Biswas said.

His family and friends went to the police with a folder of documents – Biswas’s passport, his school certificate, a voter identity card and an electoral roll featuring his name, his Aadhar card, and a gram panchayat certificate.

Biswas and his wife Anguri Khatun Biswas said they refused to check the papers. “We were told these are fake documents,” Anguri Khatun said.

Two days later, the police in Biswas’s native district, Nadia, carried out an enquiry and submitted a report to the FRRO, confirming that Biswas is an Indian citizen and a permanent resident of Dhananjoypur village. However, he was not released.

The FRRO maintained that he was detained on the basis of information from intelligence agencies as well as documentary evidence – a national ID card from Bangladesh as well as a birth certificate issued by the country.

Biswas’s advocate Clifton D Rozario argued that the two alleged Bangladeshi documents were fake and that the FRRO had issued an order without following due process. “The authorities made no efforts to verify the veracity of these documents,” he said. “A person's citizenship cannot be challenged in such a cavalier fashion.”

Eventually, Biswas’s wife challenged the detention order by FRRO in the Karnataka High Court.

On August 4, the High Court of Karnataka declared him Indian, saying that the voter card issued to him after the recent Special Intensive Revision in West Bengal was “genuine” and that his family had been residing in India for “generations”.

“The Karnataka High court declared me Indian,” Biswas said. “But where is the justice? Where did the police get these two fake Bangladeshi documents to frame me? I need an answer.”

‘Beaten up, harassed’

Several Bengali workers, who were raided and detained in this year’s drive, also questioned the police action against them.

Abul Kalam Azad, a 42-year-old resident of Murshidabad who came to the city three months ago for his niece’s treatment, said he was detained for close to a day.

“There was no FIR against me or any complaint. But I had to go to the FRRO the next day and give my biometrics because they suspected I am Bangladeshi,” he said.

Azad said that he never expected a Congress government would doubt his citizenship. “This is not done,” he said.

Aijual Sheikh, a 47-year-old scrap dealer in Electronic City, said several of his workers, who segregate garbage, were accosted and beaten up in a raid on August 8.

“The police can check our documents,” Sheikh said. “But they can’t treat us like thieves and criminals. We are Indians, not Bangladeshis.”

‘Collateral damage’

Activists in Bengaluru pointed out that the situation is complicated by the presence of undocumented Bangladeshi migrants in the city, many of whom also work in the waste segregation sector.

“They are often employed at lesser wages than workers from West Bengal and Assam and exploited,” said R Kaleem Ullah, a member of the All India Shramik Swaraj Kendra who has been working with Bengali Muslims in the city for decades.

Activists alleged that the presence of Bangladeshis is not hidden from the police or political parties.

“The police are fully aware of which is a Bangladeshi settlement and which is inhabited by Indian Bengali workers,” said Kaleem Ullah.

The Congress government, he said, was forced to launch the drive against illegal migrants because of pressure from right-wing activists in Bengaluru. In the run-up to the police action, several Hindutva activists had gone around confronting and interrogating migrant workers, accusing them of being undocumented Bangladeshi immigrants, and posted videos.

“The Congress came under pressure and now poor migrant workers are getting harassed,” Kaleem Ullah said.

Indian Bengali Muslims, Avisikta said, have ended up becoming “collateral damage”.

‘Solitary confinement’

The citizenship trial has set back Rafikul Biswas by many years, he said.

He lost his job as a school driver. His scrap godown and the shanty he was living in were attacked and set on fire in April. He had to take a loan from a moneylender in Bengal to pay his daughter’s school fees.

He alleged that he was kept in solitary confinement at the detention centre, which affected his health. “I did not see the sun for months. Each hour felt like a year.”

Biswas said he was perturbed that his nationality was questioned by the Congress government because he is a Bengali Muslim. “If I get an opportunity, I will question Rahul Gandhi. What is the difference between you and the BJP?”

India on Monday rejected a court of arbitration’s order setting aside New Delhi’s decision to suspend the Indus Waters Treaty with Pakistan, saying that it never recognised the existence of the “illegally constituted” court.

Earlier in the day, the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague had held that the Indus Waters Treaty remained in force, and that India must comply with its obligations under it. In an interim order, the court also prohibited India from building certain structures of the Ratle hydroelectric project in Jammu and Kashmir.

However, the Ministry of External Affairs maintained that India’s decision to hold the treaty in abeyance remained in effect.

India had placed the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty in abeyance a day after the April 22 terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam, which left 26 persons dead. India said that the treaty would be suspended until Pakistan “credibly and irrevocably” stopped its support for cross-border terrorism.

Since it suspended the treaty, the Indian side has stepped up work on several hydropower projects in Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan opposed under the provisions of the 1960 pact, the Hindustan Times reported. Among these are the Ratle and Kishenganga hydropower projects, over which Pakistan had sought the formation of a court of arbitration.

On Monday, the ministry said that the court of arbitration had no jurisdiction over India’s sovereign decisions and that its pronouncements “will have no effect on India’s actions in connection with the projects being undertaken by India”.

“This so called court was constituted by the World Bank in patent breach of the terms of the treaty and India categorically rejects its so-called award, just as it has firmly rejected all prior pronouncements by this illegally constituted body,” the foreign ministry said.

The treaty

India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 with the World Bank as an additional signatory. The pact sought to divide the water of the Indus river and its tributaries equitably among the two countries.

Under the treaty, water from three eastern rivers, Beas, Ravi and Sutlej, were allocated to India and that from the three western rivers – Indus, Chenab and Jhelum – to Pakistan.

The treaty also allowed both countries to use the other’s rivers for certain purposes, such as small hydroelectric projects that require little or no water storage.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

At least three persons from the Kuki community were killed in Manipur after an armed group allegedly from the Naga community attacked a Kuki village along the Imphal-Tamenglong road in Kangpokpi district, a senior police official in the district told Scroll.

The three persons who died were identified as 40-year-old Tingneichin Lhouvum, 36-year-old Lamtinthang Lhoujem and 21-year-old Hoineineng Lhoujem. Four persons were also injured in the attack.

This is the second violent attack reported along the Imphal-Tamenglong road within a week. On Thursday, unidentified gunmen ambushed and killed four Naga civilians.

Tensions between the Kukis and the Nagas escalated in Manipur in February after an alleged assault involving members of the Tangkhul Naga and the Kuki-Zo communities in the Ukhrul district.

This followed the ethnic clashes that broke out in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities. At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since then in the conflict.

The latest killings take the toll in the Kuki-Naga conflict to at least 34 since the conflict began in February this year.

The Imphal-Tamenglong road is a crucial route in the area, with Kuki and Naga communities living in close proximity in villages along it.

On Monday, nine Naga MLAs, including Deputy Chief Minister Losii Dikho, wrote to Union Home Minister Amit Shah seeking his “immediate intervention” to restore normalcy in Manipur. They demanded the immediate arrest of Kuki-Zo leaders who have “publicly claimed responsibility” for killing Naga civilians.

Census deferred

In the backdrop of these attacks, the Union government has deferred the Census 2027 exercise in Manipur, the state government said on Monday.

The decision was taken at a meeting chaired by Union Home Minister Amit Shah, it added. The Ministry of Home Affairs is yet to issue a statement.

The first phase of Census 2027, involving house listing, was scheduled to begin in Manipur on Tuesday and continue till September 30. The preparations for the exercise had faced disruptions amid protests in the state.

The protests were linked to a demand from sections of civil society in Manipur that the National Register of Citizens be updated before the Census is conducted. The groups, largely representing Meitei, Naga and Meitei Pangal communities, have argued that an NRC based on 1951 records is necessary to identify those they allege are undocumented migrants from Myanmar, the Hindustan Times reported.

Fourteen civil society organisations representing these communities have approached senior political leaders, including Bharatiya Janata Party chief Nitin Nabin and Union ministers, seeking that the NRC be implemented before the Census, the newspaper reported. The organisations do not represent the Kuki-Zo communities.

The groups have alleged that migrants from Myanmar have settled in parts of Manipur and could be counted as residents in the Census.

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Species primarily found in Africa and the Amazon have been listed in a recent environment impact assessment study claiming that they live on Great Nicobar Island.

The report released in April was prepared by WAPCOS Limited, a Gurgaon-based public sector undertaking as part of a proposal to repair the lighthouse and construct tourist facilities at Indira Point, the southern-most point of the island – and of India.

Tables in the environment impact assessment report list tiger fish (Hydrocynus vittatus), a native of African freshwater rivers, and the flagtail (Semaprochilodus insignis), an Amazonian freshwater fish.

Also listed are sambar (Cervus unicolor) and barking deer (Muntiacus muntjak), two species of mammals found primarily on India’s mainland.

More than 90% of the species listed in the tables in the study have never been reported from Great Nicobar. In many cases the closest sites are thousands of kilometres away.

Ecologists and marine biologists who have spent decades studying Great Nicobar said the report was “shocking” and alleged that it was “completely fabricated”.

The study includes the Eurasian woodcock (Scolopax rusticola), a bird of temperate and subarctic Eurasia that is found in Sri Lanka and along India’s western coast only in the non-breeding season, and the Mayabandar rice frog (Microhyla chakrapanii), which has only ever been reported from the Andaman Islands but not the Nicobar.

At the same time, the report omits creatures such as the sea turtle, which is prominently found around Indira Point.

Email messages seeking clarifications about this have been sent to Dharamveer Shrivastava, Director, Lighthouses and Lightships, Port Blair, and Aman Chopra, the co-ordinator and a key author of the environmental impact assessment report prepared by WAPCOS.

This article will be updated if they respond.

Indira Point project

The report was prepared in the context of the Rs 250 crore Indira Point project proposed by the Directorate of Lighthouses and Lightships, Port Blair, to repair and reinforce the island’s lighthouse.

The project will also include constructing eco-tourism facilities, a convention centre, cafeteria, viewing tower, cycle tracks, a museum as well as a memorial.

Indira Point is located about 5 km south of Galathea Bay, the site of a proposed Rs 50,000-crore transshipment port on the ecologically sensitive Great Nicobar island.

The port is the centrepiece of a Rs 90,000 crore-mega infrastructure project that has been in the eye of a storm. Experts have noted that it will cause enormous environmental destruction and will displace members of the vulnerable Shompen indigenous group. They have also pointed to flaws in the scientific reports that were presented to win approvals.

In June, the lighthouse project proposal was sent to the Andaman and Nicobar Coastal Zone Management Authority seeking coastal regulation zone clearance. The application had a host of supporting documents. They included a detailed project report from May 2025 prepared by the Department of Ocean Engineering of the Indian Institute of Madras, Chennai, and a coastal regulation zone map prepared by Anna University.

Among the documents was the April 2026 rapid environmental impact assessment report by WAPCOS.

Five tables

The environment impact assessment report has five tables of species reportedly found at the project site – one each for mammals (12 species listed) , birds (29 species), reptiles (11 species), amphibians (seven species) and ichthyofauna (fishes;19 species).

The list of birds is illustrative. Great Nicobar is an internationally acknowledged Important Bird Area with more than 100 species of birds, according to a comprehensive study on the island published by the Zoological Survey of India in 2022. Many of the species found are endemic, suggesting they are not found anywhere else on the planet.

“It is shocking that this bird list has only 29 names,” said Asad Rahmani, former director of Bombay Natural History Society, and one of India’s foremost ornithologists. However, it includes species such as the Hume’s hawk-owl, the Eurasian woodcock and the mangrove whistler “that have never been reported from Great Nicobar”, he said.

The same is true of the tables with mammal and reptile species.

Of the 12 mammals in the table, only three are found on Great Nicobar. How the sambar got listed is a complete mystery.

The case of reptiles is equally intriguing. The 2022 study by the Zoological Survey of India lists more than 30 reptile species from Great Nicobar. But the environmental impact assessment report lists none of these, including prominent large creatures such as sea turtles that are regularly reported around Indira Point.

Of the 11 reptiles in the table, only one – the sunbeam snake – has ever been found in Great Nicobar.

“All this data is highly erroneous,” said an ecologist who has worked in Great Nicobar for many years but did not want to be identified. “Many sections of this report and these tables in particular are highly objectionable or outright shocking.”

Vardhan Patankar, a senior marine biologist with intimate knowledge of the coastal and marine systems of the Nicobars, contended that the environmental impact assessment report “is full of copy-paste material, and that too is not from an authentic source”.

Said Patankar: “The fish list here reads more like an aquarium shop catalogue. Many are simply not found here. To claim these are part of the coastal or marine environment surrounding Indira Point is completely fabricated.”

String of problematic reports

The Indira Point environmental impact assessment report is only the latest in a string of problematic reports and interventions by leading scientific and research institutions that support the projects proposed on Great Nicobar Island.

Among the earliest was the Wildlife Institute of India, which played a key role in the environmental and wildlife clearances granted to the mega project on the island. The institute was eventually granted projects worth nearly Rs 400 crore to study the biodiversity of Great Nicobar, raising concerns about a conflict of interest.

Then there was the disappearance of coral reefs on the official maps of Great Nicobar Island, as reported by Scroll in October 2025.

The Chennai-based National Centre for Sustainable Coastal Management, an agency under the environment ministry, produced maps in 2023 with no coral reefs in Galathea Bay.

This was in stark contrast to the centre’s own maps of 2021 and other scientific studies that reported at least 20,000 vibrant coral colonies. Experts suggested that the maps had been manipulated to facilitate port construction there.

In December 2019, a WAPCOS tender document titled “Traffic Study For Creating Transshipment Port At South Bay, Great Nicobar Island Of A&N Islands” had sought to justify constructing the port in Galathea Bay, another name for South Bay.

The reasoning offered in the report was that “the topography of the island [Great Nicobar] is the best suited [for the port], which has not been damaged much even by Tsunami on 26.11.2004”.

This too flies in the face of evidence. The coastline of Great Nicobar and the entire Nicobar group of islands experienced a subsidence of nearly 15 feet in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake of December 2004 that also caused one of the biggest tsunamis in recorded history.

In fact, the Indira Point lighthouse needs repairs and strengthening because of this subsidence. Before December 26, 2004, it was surrounded by coastal forests, way above the high-tide line. It now stands in the sea.

The irony of this reality appears completely lost on WAPCOS that has prepared the EIA report with “incorrect data”, noted the researcher who did not want to be identified.

Pankaj Sekhsaria was jointly awarded the Prem Bhatia Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism 2026 for his research and reporting on the Great Nicobar infrastructure project. He has written and edited seven books on the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, including two edited volumes on the Great Nicobar project.

Trinamool Congress spokesperson Saket Gokhale said on Monday that the Central Reserve Police Force declined to share information about its ammunition log and details about the use of pellet guns allegedly by its Rapid Action Force during the youth protests in Delhi on July 20.

Gokhale had sought the details under the Right to Information Act.

The CRPF, which includes the Rapid Action Force, is among the security and intelligence organisations exempted from the Right to Information Act under Section 24. However, the exemption does not apply to information pertaining to allegations of corruption or human rights violations.

Gokhale contended in his application that the details he sought on the use of pellet guns fell under this exception as they pertained to alleged human rights violations.

He had sought a certified copy of the ammunition log and the muster of the RAF contingents deployed in central Delhi on July 20, showing the ammunition drawn, ammunition expended and quantity of each type of munition fired, including pellet, plastic-pellet cartridges and tear smoke shells on the date.

The RTI response from the CRPF that Gokhale shared on social media said that the “allegations made in the application do not attract the exemption relating to violation of human rights”.

The force added in its reply: “The information sought by you pertains to operational and security-related matters of the force.”

Commenting on the response, Gokhale said: “CRPF claims use of pellet guns on protestors in Delhi is NOT a human rights violation…In any civilised democracy, this is a shocking argument to make.”

SHOCKING:

CRPF claims use of pellet guns on protestors in Delhi is NOT a human rights violation

I’d filed an RTI with Rapid Action Force (which is a part of CRPF) asking for information related to the use of pellet guns on unarmed protestors on 20th July during the Jantar… pic.twitter.com/0Xv0laN4tA

— Saket Gokhale (@SaketGokhale) August 31, 2026

The July 20 march to Parliament had been organised over alleged irregularities in competitive examinations. Thousands of protesters participated in the march. Several demonstrators were injured after security personnel used lathis and fired tear gas and pellet guns to disperse the crowd.

The police had denied firing pellet guns at protesters during the agitation. However, a Right to Information response showed that 10 persons had been treated for pellet injuries at government hospitals.

The CRPF had set up an inquiry into whether pellet guns had been used by its Rapid Action Force personnel on July 20.

On July 27, The Indian Express quoted unidentified officials as saying that a person from the force deployed in Connaught Place fired at least seven rounds from his pellet gun. While five rounds hit protesters, two struck the ground, the newspaper reported.

On August 21, the Delhi Police filed a first information report based on a complaint by a student named Sahil Lochav, who was injured by pellet gun fire during the youth protest. The case was filed hours after a sit-in protest by Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.

The Congress said that Lochav had submitted a written complaint on August 14, but alleged that the police had refused to register an FIR.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The names of 47.7 lakh voters in Delhi have been removed from the draft voter list as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. If the list is finalised, it would lead to the electorate in the national capital shrinking by about 33%, to 97.5 lakh from 1.45 crore.

Those removed from the voter list were marked as either permanently shifted, deceased, absent, duplicate entries or placed under the “other” category. It was unclear what the “other” category referred to.

Voters can file claims and objections against their removal from the draft list between August 31 and September 30. Read on.

Scroll’s SIR experience is a microcosm of what urban India is facing

The Supreme Court stayed a case against a Dehradun gym owner who had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in January. It also stayed the Uttarakhand High Court’s March order restraining Deepak Kumar from commenting on social media about the case against him.

On January 26, alleged Bajrang Dal members had come to the shop of an elderly Muslim man in Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal district, objecting to him using the word “Baba” in the name of his establishment. Kumar and another person objected to the mob’s actions.

Following this, an FIR was registered against Kumar based on a complaint by two persons who are members of the Bajrang Dal and the Vishva Hindu Parishad. Read on.

Trinamool Congress spokesperson Saket Gokhale said that the Central Reserve Police Force declined to share information about its ammunition log and details about the use of pellet guns allegedly by its Rapid Action Force during the July 20 protest in Delhi. Gokhale had sought the details under the Right to Information Act.

The CRPF, which includes the Rapid Action Force, is among the security and intelligence organisations exempted from the Right to Information Act under Section 24. However, the exemption does not apply to information pertaining to allegations of corruption or human rights violations.

Gokhale contended in his application that the details he sought on the use of pellet guns fell under this exception as they pertained to alleged human rights violations. The RTI response from the CRPF that Gokhale shared on social media said that the “allegations made in the application do not attract the exemption relating to violation of human rights”.

Commenting on the response, Gokhale said: “CRPF claims use of pellet guns on protestors in Delhi is NOT a human rights violation…In any civilised democracy, this is a shocking argument to make.” Read on.

The Supreme Court dismissed a petition seeking that the percentage of ethanol blended in petrol be mandatorily disclosed at fuel pumps. The petitioner can approach the “competent authority” in the matter, held the bench.

Advocate Narendra Kumar Goswami had moved the court, saying that consumers have a right to know about the contents of the petrol they were buying. He had sought that invoices given to consumers should also mention the percentage of ethanol in the petrol sold. Read on.

The Supreme Court declined to pass an urgent order restricting the march that the Cockroach Janta Party has planned in Delhi on September 5. It could not be presumed that a law and order problem would arise because of the march, said the bench.

The political campaign had called for a peaceful march from India Gate to the Delhi Police headquarters, saying the Union government had failed to “honour its July 25 commitments” that led the political campaign to call off its protest at Jantar Mantar. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Monday declined to pass an urgent order restricting the march that the Cockroach Janta Party has planned in Delhi on September 5, Live Law reported.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant said it could not presume that a law and order problem will arise because of the march. “We will, at least as of now, presume everybody will behave in a peaceful manner,” Kant was quoted as saying by Live Law.

The Cockroach Janta Party had called for a peaceful march from India Gate to the Delhi Police headquarters on September 5, saying the Union government had failed to “honour its July 25 commitments” that led the political campaign to call off its protest at Jantar Mantar.

The protests against alleged mismanagement of several competitive examinations began on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party held a demonstration at Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time.

On July 20, thousands joined the protest. This came two days after the police forcibly took activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike for three weeks, to hospital.

The protesters’ march to Parliament was met with a crackdown by police. Dozens were injured as the police used lathis and fired tear gas shells and pellet guns at the demonstrators. The police action turbocharged the agitation, which spread to other parts of the country. Pradhan resigned as the education minister on July 25.

After his resignation, the political campaign called off the protests, saying that the government had accepted all its demands, including an assurance that “no punitive action would be taken against any protester, either now or in the future” in any state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party or its National Democratic Alliance.

On July 28, the Supreme Court directed that minors who had been detained should be released and that no coercive action should be taken against protesting students as long as they did not have any “criminal antecedents”.

On August 3, the court said that the states could withdraw first information reports filed against youth protesters wherever permissible. It also clarified that the term “criminal antecedents” in its earlier order referred only to “grave and heinous offences”.

The Supreme Court’s order had come on a batch of petitions alleging that the police used excessive force against protesters marching to Parliament in Delhi on July 20.

On Monday, retired police officer Rajender Singh filed a petition seeking directions against the proposed march. The court, however, said that the matter would have to be decided by the police, Live Law reported.

The case will be heard next on September 10.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has “turned my life into hell”, a 15-year-old girl has purportedly alleged in a video being widely shared on social media.

Scroll was unable to independently verify when or where the video was recorded. However, the girl’s lawyer confirmed to The Tribune that the video was not generated using artificial intelligence.

The girl in the video had been booked on July 30 for making purportedly objectionable remarks about the prime minister during the youth protests at Jantar Mantar.

A day later, she apologised for her purportedly objectionable remarks. But her mother told The Telegraph that the family was forced to move out of their rented home in Noida “after being hounded by police and mediapersons”.

Scroll had reported that several supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party had also shared a phone number and names of her family members on social media. These posts had abusive and sexually-coloured comments about the 15-year-old.

In the recent video shared by the Congress on Monday, the girl alleged that the prime minister had had her “tortured” to the extent that she had “lost everything”, including her freedom.

“I am unable to leave my home and have had to hide my face wherever I go,” she can be heard saying.

The Congress said that the prime minister should be “ashamed” for allegedly getting a “15-year-old trolled by BJP goons”.

'मोदी जी, आपने मेरी ज़िन्दगी नरक बना दी है'

- ये बात 15 साल की रुचिका ने कही है, जिसे मोदी ने गुंडों से डरा-धमकाकर माफी मंगवाई थी

रुचिका का कहना है 👇

"नरेंद्र मोदी ने मुझे इतना टॉर्चर करवाया है कि मेरा सबकुछ छिन गया है। अब मेरे पास खोने के लिए कुछ नहीं बचा।"

Gen Z के आगे… pic.twitter.com/DKawGvhsFr

— Congress (@INCIndia) August 30, 2026

The FIR against the girl had been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to intentional insult to provoke breach of peace, statements conducing to public mischief and defamation.

A day after she apologised, Modi posted a video on social media, in which he said that he wanted to forgive the students who had allegedly made objectionable remarks about him.

Soon after, the complaint against the 15-year-old was withdrawn, reported PTI. However, it remained unclear if the FIR had been withdrawn.

The youth protests against alleged mismanagement of several competitive examinations had begun on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign staged a demonstration at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time.

On July 20, thousands joined the protest. This came two days after the police forcibly took activist Sonam Wangchuk, who had been on a hunger strike for three weeks, to hospital.

The protesters’ march to Parliament was met with a crackdown by the police. Dozens were injured as the police used lathis, fired tear gas shells and pellet guns against the demonstrators.

The police action turbocharged the agitation, which spread to other parts of the country. Pradhan resigned as the education minister on July 25.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• ‘We will kill, rape you’: Online mobs are targeting women protesters for ‘abusing’ Modi

• Modi is one of India’s most powerful prime ministers – so why is he so bothered by Gen Z profanity?

The names of 47.7 lakh voters in Delhi were removed from the draft voter list as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, The Indian Express reported.

If the list is finalised, it would lead to the electorate in the national capital being reduced to about 97.5 lakh as compared to the 1.45 crore before the exercise began in June, The New Indian Express reported. The names not included in the draft roll account for 33% of the Union Territory’s electorate.

Those removed from the voter list were marked as either permanently shifted, deceased, absent, duplicate entries or placed under the “other” category. It was unclear what the “other” category referred to.

Voters can file claims and objections against their removal from the draft list between August 31 and September 30. The appeals will be heard by October 29. The final electoral roll will be published on November 4.

While Rohini recorded the highest rate of digitisation of the enumeration forms at 83.4%, Tughlakabad had the lowest at 52.1%, PTI reported.

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

More than 19% of the voters in Karnataka, 16% in Haryana and 10.8% in Andhra Pradesh were removed from the draft lists as part of the exercise.

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

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

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

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read: Scroll’s SIR experience is a microcosm of what urban India is facing

The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a petition seeking that the percentage of ethanol blended in petrol be mandatorily disclosed at fuel pumps, Bar and Bench reported.

The petitioner can approach the “competent authority” in the matter, held a bench of Justices MM Sundresh and PB Varale.

The government’s Ethanol Blended Petrol programme mandates that all petrol sold in the country be blended with 20% ethanol – a substance produced from sugarcane and food grain. The policy is aimed at reducing India’s dependency on fossil fuels, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and boosting income for sugarcane farmers.

However, consumers have complained that the new fuel mix damages engines and reduces their mileage.

Advocate Narendra Kumar Goswami had moved the Supreme Court, seeking that the Union government direct petrol pumps to mandatorily display the exact percentage of ethanol on every petrol dispensing nozzle, reported Live Law.

Goswami said that invoices given to consumers should also mention the percentage of ethanol in the petrol sold.

“I have right to be informed,” he contended. “If I buy petrol there is no mention of E20.”

Appearing for the Union government, Attorney General R Venkataramani said that the court had already dismissed pleas challenging the policy.

The petitioner said that he was not challenging the policy. “Even when we buy a packet of biscuits we know the ingredients,” he told the court.

This came in the wake of an opinion poll by survey platform LocalCircles published on July 5, which showed that 53% of respondents who owned petrol vehicles believed that the government’s handling of the E20 rollout was “disastrous” or “ineffective”.

Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Monday stayed a case against Dehradun gym owner Deepak Kumar, who had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in January, Live Law reported.

The bench also stayed the Uttarakhand High Court’s March order restraining Kumar from commenting on social media about the case against him.

It issued notice on Kumar’s petition challenging the High Court’s refusal to quash the first information report against him.

The incident took place on January 26 when alleged Bajrang Dal members had come to the shop of an elderly Muslim man, Vakeel Ahmed, in Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal district, objecting to him using the word “Baba” in the name of his establishment.

Kumar and another person, Vijay Rawat, objected to the mob’s actions, after which the two Hindu men were asked not to intervene.

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

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

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

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

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

On Monday, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing Kumar, asked how a good Samaritan could be “subjected to this kind of a complaint”, Live Law reported.

The incident

In a video of the January 26 incident that was later widely shared on social media, Kumar is seen asking the group 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 why its name should be changed.

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

Kumar subsequently posted a video on social media, in which he said: “I am neither a Hindu, neither a Muslim, 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.

Edited by Sneha.

Four suspected members of an armed group were killed in a gunfight with the Meghalaya Police in the East Garo Hills district on Sunday.

Two pistols, along with live and used rounds of ammunition, were recovered from them, said the East Garo Hills Police.

It alleged that the men were going towards Songsak town to abduct officials of the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited for ransom.

A team comprising personnel from the anti-terror squad, the East Garo Hills District Police and Songsak Police Station was deployed to intercept them.

At a checkpoint, when the vehicle carrying the four men was signalled to stop, they opened fire on the team, alleged the police. This prompted the security personnel to retaliate, it added.

The police said that the four men were taken to hospital, where they were declared brought dead.

They were identified as Allason Marak, a resident of Mendima in North Garo Hills, and Sustom Rabha, Kalam Ali and Bobidul Islam, all residents of Goalpara in Assam.

Marak was allegedly involved in a firing incident in Damra, in which a businessperson was killed, the police said. Rabha and Ali were allegedly accused in robbery, abduction and extortion cases.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sneha.

A first information report was registered against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for allegedly promoting enmity between groups and deliberately outraging religious feelings, PTI reported on Sunday.

This came a day after Gandhi demanded that an FIR be registered against those who carried out a “purification” ritual at a ground in Uttarakhand where Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge had held a rally earlier this month.

The police in Uttarakhand’s Haldwani said that the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act was also invoked against Gandhi.

The complaint was filed by a member of the Shri Ram Sena Dharmarth Seva Nyas, the organisation that had performed the ritual at Ramlila Ground in Haldwani.

The complainant said that he is a member of the Valmiki community and was present during the “ritual and cleanliness drive” held on August 11, along with other members of the Scheduled Caste community, PTI reported.

He said that Gandhi, in his press conference on Saturday, portrayed those involved in the ritual as practising “untouchability” and being “anti-Dalit”, claiming that the Congress leader’s remarks had hurt the sentiments of the community.

He also claimed that the event had “no connection” with Kharge’s caste, the news agency reported.

On Monday, the Congress said that the case against Gandhi was nothing but the pot calling the kettle black.

“What is worse, the BJP has actually jumped in to defend this abhorrently casteist behaviour – showing to the entire world that they are the biggest perpetrators of social injustice today,” Congress leader KC Venugopal said. “They are willing to put the entire might of the state to attack those who speak against Dalit atrocities.”

On Saturday, Gandhi said that the incident in Haldwani was “an act of untouchability” against Kharge, disguised as “purification”. Untouchability is a punishable offence under the Constitution, he said.

Kharge had raised the matter in the Rajya Sabha on August 13 and demanded that those who performed the ritual be arrested. Union minister JP Nadda had said that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party “does not subscribe to such activities” and that the party would investigate the matter.

The Congress’ Uttarakhand unit has alleged that the Shri Ram Sena Dharmarth Seva Nyas is associated with the BJP.

However, the Hindutva party has denied links to the group and claimed that slogans shouted at Kharge’s rally had offended those who believed in Sanatana Dharma.

Sanatana Dharma is a term some people use as a synonym for Hinduism.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal and China, which occurred on Wednesday, rose to 919 on Monday. Of these, 903 deaths were reported in Nepal and 16 on the Chinese side of the border.

More than 4,200 persons were missing in Nepal. This included 275 Indians, New Delhi had said on Saturday night. The number was nearly 550 on the Chinese side.

More than 10,000 persons, including 252 foreigners, had been rescued in Nepal as of 9 am on Monday, the country’s disaster management authority said.

Nearly 150 Indians were rescued from flash flood-hit Nepal as of 5.30 pm on Sunday, the Ministry of External Affairs said. While 403 Indian citizens had safely crossed into Nepal from China, 500 were reported safe on the Chinese side of the border, it added.

#WATCH | Nuwakot, Nepal: Scores of volunteers from Likhu Rural Municipality head to Devighat to launch extensive rescue and cleanup operations following the recent flash floods in Nepal. pic.twitter.com/0wGNNJhQ56

— ANI (@ANI) August 31, 2026

The technical team from India for tunnel rescue retrieved the mortal remains of one person from a tunnel near the Langtang hydroelectric project amid harsh weather conditions, the external affairs ministry said on Sunday.

Nepal’s disaster management authority said that seven Indian and 15 Chinese citizens were rescued from a hydropower tunnel on Sunday.

More than 100 workers are believed to be trapped inside multiple hydropower tunnels in Nepal.

“The tunnel rescue operations team continued its work today and supplemented the search and rescue efforts of Nepali Army at hydropower sites in Chilime and Langtang,” the ministry said.

A 19-member forensics team sent from India to assist in analysing the DNA samples to identify the mortal remains of those who died in the floods began functioning on Sunday. Indian Ambassador to Nepal Naveen Srivastava briefed the team.

The floods occurred in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s northern border with China on Wednesday. The mountainous district is located about 120 km north of Kathmandu. As there was no rainfall in the area, residents did not have a warning about the deluge.

The United States Geological Survey has said that the floods were caused by a glacial collapse that sent a wall of water and debris downstream, reported AFP.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, which works on climate and glacial conditions in Nepal, had earlier stated that according to its preliminary investigation, a large volume of ice and rock debris had entered the Lende Khola, a tributary of the Bhotekoshi river, which generated a sudden surge that carried water, sediment and large boulders downstream.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: Warming may have induced glacial floods in Nepal, but the damage downstream is manmade

At around 10.40 am on June 21, the female migrant workers’ quarters at a seafood processing plant in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruvallur district, was almost full. Many of the women were still sleeping because it was a Sunday, their day off.

The quarters were situated on the first floor of the plant, operated by St Peter and Paul’s Sea Food and Exports. The floor was also crammed with equipment, including refrigeration machinery, pipeline systems and an ice flakes generator machine.

Suddenly, the occupants began to feel breathless. Ammonia, a poisonous gas, was leaking up from faulty infrastructure in the plant below, and quietly filling up the room.

When news of the gas leak broke out, Kiran Kumar immediately rushed to the hospital where victims were being taken. Kumar is a social worker with Jesuits Migrant Services, which aids and advocates for the rights of migrant workers.

He was keen to help the workers and their families in any way he could. But at the hospital, authorities denied him permission to meet the workers. Kumar was unsurprised – this was an obstacle he often faced in his work.

Over the next few days, Packiaraj SJ, a Jesuit priest and the head of the organisation, and Kumar, called government officials, and police and hospital administrators, seeking permission to enter the hospitals where victims were admitted. They did not acquiesce. Kumar tried visiting the hospitals directly, but police stationed outside turned him away, saying that his services were not needed.

Kumar pleaded with authorities, explaining that he could be useful to them. In his decade of work with migrants, Kumar had gained fluency in Hindi. He had also become familiar with villages, districts and cities in states like Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, Assam and Uttar Pradesh, from where most workers to the state migrated. He had even picked up other local languages and educated himself about communities that lived in these regions.

It was only a full week after the incident that Kumar was allowed to meet the women – by then, 18 had died. According to the bail order of one of the company’s directors, which Scroll accessed, most of the deceased women had been brought to the company by the same contractor named Suresh. Four were minors. Nearly 70 workers had been hospitalised, many of whom remained in a coma for several days.

Authorities contacted Kumar because they had been unable to trace the family of a deceased worker for three days. The information on the worker’s Aadhaar card was inaccurate, leaving them with no way to find the name of her village or members of her family.

Over the next two days, Kumar tracked down the woman’s family. It was another three before her body was handed over to them. “By the time the body reached them, it had decayed quite a bit, despite the embalming,” Kumar said.

In the days and weeks that followed, Kumar helped coordinate the tracking and return of many other injured workers.

Most of the deceased were Adivasis. Fourteen were from Odisha’s Keonjhar district, and belonged to the Juang community, categorised as a particularly vulnerable tribal group. There were also others from Adivasi communities in Assam and Jharkhand. The high number of Adivasi victims led the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes to take note of the incident, and write to the district collector, seeking details about it.

Even a month or so after the incident, Kumar recounted, when he went to see a patient who was in a coma, police stopped him. “Sometimes, I lose my temper when things like this happen,” he said. “But I’ve also become accustomed to this attitude from officials.”

Kumar and other activists told Scroll that the June incident was only the most recent evidence of the immense vulnerability of migrant workers in Tamil Nadu, which is among India’s most industrialised states. Migrant workers are crucial for this industrialisation – while the state government is currently conducting a survey to determine the number of such workers in the state, according to the 2011 census, 34.87 lakh people had migrated to the state for employment.

In most such incidents involving deaths and injuries of these workers, a crucial factor is that companies typically house the workers within factory sites – often in dehumanising conditions that expose them to major health risks. Even when factories and plants provide housing to workers outside worksites, the accommodations usually violate building codes, are overcrowded and pose safety risks.

Further, their freedoms are typically restricted. A 2024 report of the Corporate Accountability Lab, which examined seafood processing plants in Andhra Pradesh, underlined this concern, noting that migrant workers were at high risk of forced labour. This was particularly so among “those whose housing is tied to their employment, a common practice across the supply chain”, it stated.

This type of living arrangement is not limited to seafood processing plants, or Andhra Pradesh. Scroll’s investigation across industrial areas in Chennai and Tiruvallur revealed that workers in a wide range of sectors, including automobile, general engineering and chemical manufacturing, as well as in smaller enterprises like restaurants, textile stores and petrol bunks, live in the premises of their workplaces, or adjacent to them.

Activists regularly deal with cases in which workers are injured or killed, or go missing. In June, for instance, a worker at a Larsen & Toubro site in Chennai died, and 48 were injured, after a corroded staircase collapsed in the workers’ labour camp in Nandambakkam. In September 2025, another worker, from another Larsen & Toubro site in Kattupalli died after tripping on a staircase in a makeshift shelter near the site. Around 100 employees were lathi-charged by police when they protested after the incident, demanding that the worker’s family be paid compensation for the death.

Scroll contacted all the companies named in this story, as well as the Tamil Nadu government, seeking responses to arguments that they had not adequately protected migrant workers. This story will be updated if they respond.

“Most incidents don’t come to light because the employers quietly take care of it, pay for treatment and send them home with a small amount,” Kumar said. He added that employers have nearly complete control over migrant workers’ lives. “What we are seeing with migrant labour today is a new urbanised form of bonded labour and enslavement,” he said.

This story is part of Common Ground, our in-depth and investigative reporting project. Sign up here to get the stories in your inbox soon after they are published.

The isolation of workers at the Tiruvallur seafood unit was evident when Scroll visited it in early July – even villagers who lived next to the plant said they did not know that so many women were living within the premises. “We would see some of the women sometimes, many of them looked 15-16 years old,” said Selva, a neighbour. “They would walk to the small shop down the road.”

On the day of the leak, when locals rushed to help, and carried the women outside one by one, they were surprised.

“We had no idea so many women lived within those walls,” Selva said. The villagers struggled because of the gas. “We could not even stand there for a few minutes, because we were also struggling to breathe,” Selva said.

There was a similar lack of transparency at other industrial sites Scroll visited. Conversations with workers in the area around another seafood processing unit in Chintadripet, in Chennai, revealed that the unit housed migrant workers. But the security guard at the gate dodged questions about them – it was only when another local overheard our conversation and emphasised that workers lived inside that the security guard hesitantly agreed.

But a senior staffer I met, who was walking into the premises, paused for a few seconds when I asked about migrant workers, then denied outright that any were employed at the unit, let alone that they lived inside.

Owners of seafood processing units, many of which process shrimp, often housed workers on site, explained Siddharth Chakravarty, a researcher with the National Federation of Small Scale Fishworkers. Workers, including those from Adivasi communities, “are usually made to stay inside the compounds, similar to the plant in Tamil Nadu, often in premises adjacent to processing facilities”, he said. “As a result, when ammonia leaks occur, which is common, they cause severe impacts on health and at times deaths of workers.”

Sara Abraham, a former lawyer and sociologist, explained that in fact, according to section 16 of the Interstate Migrant Workmen Act, 1979, employers are required to “provide and maintain suitable residential accommodation to such workmen during the period of their employment”.

But, she noted, “There is no clarity about the type of accommodation, where it should be. The company can claim that its barracks are temporary accommodation, though workers live there for years on end”. Further, the law “doesn’t make it mandatory for the accommodation to conform to standard building codes”, she added.

The lack of clear guidelines ends up disadvantaging workers, Abraham said.

“When employers provide workers with substandard housing, which is furthermore confined to being within a compound with security at the gate, workers have little leeway to demand better accommodation, or rental expenses,” she said.

Indeed, a 2026 study on workers in Chengalpattu in Tamil Nadu found that 59.6% had makeshift housing, and that 32.77% felt their living space was unsafe. The study also found that 61.2% of the workers suffered from poor mental health.

The practice of housing workers on site was also common in an area of Tiruvallur called Kosapur, which Scroll visited, and which has a high concentration of industries, including wood and engineering industries. “Nobody lives outside, they all live within the factory,” said a shopkeeper.

Most workers hesitate to speak to outsiders, especially those from civil society organisations or the media. One worker, from Uttar Pradesh, said in a brief conversation that the facilities for them were not good, but that he did not have any objections. From the outside, the accommodation building that was visible looked dilapidated – several men were waiting their turn for a shower in an open-air bathroom.

Conversations with workers were easier at an event for migrant workers held in Chennai in late July, organised by the Jesuits Migrant Services. Here too, some of the workers appeared to have accepted the difficulties they lived with.

Among them were four young men, aged between 19 and 21, from Assam. They worked and lived within the compound of a factory in Chennai that manufactured vehicle parts. The men said that they did not mind staying at the factory and that they only wished that there were more toilets and bathrooms. “We are about 13 people in a room, so it would help to have extra toilets,” he said.

But when asked more questions about safety on the site, workers tended to remember adverse incidents.

The worker from Uttar Pradesh recalled an incident where a colleague lost a finger in an accident. On another occasion, “a snake bit a worker while he was sleeping”, he said. “The employers gave the family some money and sent back the body.”

Similarly, after some thought, the young men from Assam recounted that a colleague had lost a toe while operating a machine. “The employers paid his hospital bill and gave the family Rs 2 lakh and sent him back,” one said.

Two other young men from Odisha at the Chennai event had worked for two years in a factory in the city that manufactured tractor components, and where workers stayed on the first floor. “If we stay outside, a lot of time goes in travelling, so staying inside is fine with us,” one said. He noted that the rooms were large, and that the sleeping arrangements were not crowded because workers alternated between day and night shifts.

The manufacturing processes at the unit required high temperatures, which workers said affected the living quarters as well. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that workers also had to use the rooms to cook their meals. “Yes, it does get very hot in the rooms,” the worker said.

After the June incident, both the directors of the seafood export company were accused of offences that included culpable homicide and using child labour.

In their bail application, the directors of the company said that the company had an annual turnover of Rs 300 crore and that they were “willing” to pay Rs 10 lakh per victim. They also claimed that the incident was an “accident” and not a case of negligence.

The accused were released on conditional bail after paying a bond of Rs 25,000 and were asked to compensate the families of the deceased workers, and those who were injured.

But Kumar and other activists said that securing compensation was often an uphill task because companies did not usually formally register workers. Activists explained that avoiding registering their workers also gave companies the freedom to pay lower wages and demand longer working hours.

The Tamil Nadu government has an online portal that allows workers to self-register. But Kumar said it was unrealistic to expect workers to learn about this process and see it through.

“How are workers going to be able to register themselves?” he said. “The employers must be mandated to make the government aware of the number of workers they are bringing in and how they are being brought here.”

The consequences of the lack of transparency are grave. Kumar and other activists said if the seafood plant workers had been registered properly, authorities would have been more quickly able to determine how many people had died or been injured, and trace their families.

But instead of following a systematic process, Abraham said, after the incident, workers were immediately shifted into a wedding hall, where they stayed for the next few days, and where media and social welfare groups were not allowed to meet them. She argued that such an approach, which the government often resorted to in such situations, “creates a bizarre situation of workers moving into a deeper situation of confinement after a major tragedy which has already completely upended their lives”.

In mid July, Scroll met the families of two of the ammonia leak victims who were still undergoing treatment at the Rajiv Gandhi Government Hospital in Chennai. One of them had emerged from a coma just a few days earlier, almost a month after the incident.

The father of one of the victims, from Odisha, said that nobody from the company had called him to inform him about his daughter’s condition. “When I heard about the ammonia leak, I had a feeling my daughter may have been working in the same plant,” he said. He learnt it was her when he received a call from his son-in-law, who worked in the same plant.

The husband of the other victim said he was furious that the company had not reached out to them. “An agent from the neighbouring village told my wife about the job, I told her not to join but she insisted,” he said. Since then, the agent had not called “to find out about my wife”, he said.

This was a common situation, Kumar noted. “Many agents bring the workers to the factories and then become incommunicado to family members,” he said. “If they want any help after that, they have no one to call.”

Activists said that companies usually stonewalled their efforts to gather information to help workers and their families.

Kumar is currently working on a case of a death of a worker from Jharkhand. “When we went to enquire at the police station, the representative of the company he worked in refused to disclose the name of the company,” he said. “And when we tried to speak to his colleagues, they blocked our access.”

Construction workers, who were often housed in makeshift accommodations close to their worksites, were particularly vulnerable, he observed. “If something falls on them, or if they fall off a height, nobody is going to know,” he said. “Nobody is held accountable.”

Kumar said many migrant workers in the state were from very remote regions with little exposure to the outside world. This made it imperative, he said, for the government to pay greater attention to how they are brought into the state and placed in the care of the employers.

But, he argued, “Both here and in the source states, labour departments are ill equipped. It’s such a struggle for us to contact them, or to get any response or help from them, when we are trying to trace a worker or send someone home.”

Packiaraj echoed Kumar’s observations. “It is very difficult to coordinate with the labour department when it comes to migrant worker issues,” he said.

Despite their hardships, many workers Scroll spoke to said that they were glad to have work. “If we were home, we would not be earning so much,” said Asha, a worker from Jharkhand at a copper recycling unit in the industrial town of Gummidipoondi, in Tiruvallur. “This land is feeding us, so we must not complain.”

The town, which is home to many industries, as well as a State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu industrial park, has seen so many migrant workers arrive that a tiny village of sorts inside it is occupied entirely by migrant workers and their families. Though some of the plants in the industrial park provide free accommodation to workers in rooms adjacent to their compounds, many choose to live in the settlement because they have families.

Elderly men in traditional North Indian style dhotis and turbans sat under a tree – fathers of those working in the estate. Even the clinic nearby had its name and other details written in Hindi.

The day before I visited the settlement, a boiler explosion had killed one worker and injured five others at a copper recycling unit at the estate. “We don’t know how many died or how many were injured,” one worker said. “The news we get is never accurate.”

Asha, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym because she was fearful of retaliation from her employers, worked at the same factory. The day I met her, Asha along with two of her colleagues, Anandi and Priya, also identified by pseudonyms, had gone to work in the morning at 8 am, as they usually did. But they were sent back because the plant was shut down after the explosion. “Now that means we don’t get paid for the day,” Asha said.

I asked if they felt that was unfair. “Yes, there are things that happen that are unfair, but how can we complain? We are not in our homes,” she said. “We are in pardes,” a foreign land.

The women then went on to list other problems they faced. They explained that due to the hazardous nature of their work, they are required to wear protective shoes, gloves, glasses and masks. The costs of the shoes and gloves are cut from the workers’ salaries, they said. “They give us the masks for free, but we have to pay for the other things,” Anandi said.

Anandi took out a small bar of soap from her pocket. “Our whole bodies get covered in soot, especially our hands. So we carry soap to wash our hands before lunch,” she said.

Anandi frequently falls ill. “The doctor told me that my chest is filled with soot,” she said. When the workers fall sick the supervisors give them a tablet called Embulide, a painkiller. “When I complained, they told me, laughing, to eat banana and jaggery, and said I would be fine,” Anandi said. When workers are injured or fall ill, they are taken to the hospital, but the bills are left for them to pay, she observed.

If the workers arrive a few minutes late, the security guard slams the gates shut, Asha said. “We have to walk 30 minutes to the factory and we have to walk past isolated wild areas with snakes, and where often drunk men stand and harass us,” she said. “So sometimes we get late, but they refuse to let us in, forcing us to lose the day’s wages.”

Anandi explained that they were paid around Rs 400 for eight hours of work – Tamil Nadu’s minimum daily wage is around Rs 550. “Some money is also deducted,” she said. “Each time, we get a different amount.” The workers from Odisha at the tractor manufacturing company had also complained that they were only being paid between Rs 12,000 and Rs 14,000 a month, or under Rs 500 a day.

Perhaps what upsets the workers the most is that they feel they are treated poorly compared to their Tamil counterparts.

“When there is some really strenuous or dehumanising work to do, they ask the North Indian workers to do it,” Anandi said. “The Tamil workers will outright say they won’t do certain jobs. Those are reserved for us.”

She added, “The Tamil workers can take breaks also, but we can’t.”

Kumar reiterated this observation, noting that migrant workers were also often paid lower wages. “They make migrant workers work overtime also but don’t compensate them,” he said.

“It is much easier to exploit migrant workers than Tamil workers,” he added. “The local workers are aware of their rights and demand fair salary, and also appropriate working conditions.”

At the seafood plant in Tiruvallur, too, villagers living in the area said that locals would only take up general cleaning jobs in the factory. “Some people sweep and clean the outside, but inside, only migrants work,” one villager said. “Our people will not work in such hazardous conditions.”

The seafood plant was shut down after the June incident – villagers said they were relieved, and that they had been demanding its closure for years. But some argued that the move came too late, partly because there was an overall lack of empathy for migrant workers. If locals had died, Selva argued, many “would have gone to the streets and raised a hue and cry. But because they were migrant workers, nobody did anything.”

The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal and China rose to 768 on Sunday, reported AFP. Nearly 3,000 persons were missing.

On the Nepal side, 2,426 persons were out of contact as of Saturday, the country’s disaster management authority was quoted as saying. The number was 546 in Tibet, with 16 persons confirmed dead.

A total of 517 foreigners were among those out of contact. This includes tourists as well as foreign workers, reported AFP. New Delhi said on Saturday that 287 Indians were missing in Nepal. As of Sunday evening, 149 Indians had been rescued, the Ministry of External Affairs said. It was unclear how many remained missing.

Update on Indian Nationals rescued in Nepal as of 1730 hrs on 30 August, 2026

Indians rescued : 149

Please see names below ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/f5olP2chxa

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) August 30, 2026

The floods occurred in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s northern border with China on Wednesday. The mountainous district is located about 120 km north of Kathmandu. As there was no rainfall in the area, residents did not have a warning about the deluge.

The United States Geological Survey has said that the floods were caused by a glacial collapse that sent a wall of water and debris downstream, reported AFP.

The International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, which works on climate and glacial conditions in Nepal, had earlier stated that according to its preliminary investigation, a large volume of ice and rock debris had entered the Lende Khola, a tributary of the Bhotekoshi river, which generated a sudden surge that carried water, sediment and large boulders downstream.

Warning to rescuers

On Sunday, as the rescue efforts entered the fifth day, Nepal warned the teams involved in the operations about rising floodwaters in the Bhotekoshi river in Rasuwa.

“Therefore, all personnel engaged in search, rescue, and relief operations, those in riverside areas, and everyone else in affected areas including Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, and Chitwan are requested to exercise caution,” stated the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.

India sends tunnel rescue team

A technical team from India for tunnel rescue has arrived in Nepal to assist with the operations, said the Ministry of External Affairs on Saturday.

This came as more than 100 workers are believed to be trapped inside multiple hydropower tunnels, reported AFP.

Apart from India, China has also sent a nine-person team to help with the tunnel rescue operations.

Additionally, New Delhi stated that it was sending to Nepal a 19-member contingent of six forensic teams to assist in the analysis of DNA samples for identification of mortal remains of those killed in the floods.

“Further targeted assistance, as per the requirements of Nepal, is being mobilised,” stated the external affairs ministry. “This includes Bailey bridges and associated technical teams for restoring connectivity and helping in relief efforts.”

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: Warming may have induced glacial floods in Nepal, but the damage downstream is manmade

The Bombay High Court on Saturday pulled up the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration for passing a “mechanical” order refusing to revoke the suspension of licences of five eateries operating on the premises of the Mumbai Cricket Association, despite the court’s earlier direction to reconsider the matter, Live Law reported.

The licences had been suspended on Monday amid a statewide drive by the administration against eateries and other establishments for alleged violations of food safety norms.

The High Court had subsequently directed the Food and Drug Administration to re-inspect the premises and take a fresh decision on the suspension of licences of the five eateries: Permit Room, Oriental Swing, Clubway & Pastry Counter, Mediterranean and Pavilion. The establishments operate from the Sharad Pawar Indoor Cricket Academy and Recreational Centre in Mumbai’s Bandra-Kurla Complex.

On Saturday, a division bench of Acting Chief Justice Ravindra Ghuge and Justice Gautam Ankhad expressed displeasure after being informed that an assistant commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration had passed an order retaining the suspension of the licences.

The bench said the official had failed to “apply his mind” and had passed the order in a “pedantic” manner.

The judge also questioned why the administration had not complied with the court’s directions and warned that contempt proceedings could be initiated against the assistant commissioner.

The bench also criticised the haste with which the Food and Drug Administration had been passing orders in similar matters.

“Why this haste?” the legal news outlet quoted the court as saying. “ We told earlier also, don't kill a mosquito with a sword... We wanted you to measure your actions."

Additional Government Pleader Priyabhushan Kakade, appearing for the administration, urged the bench not to initiate contempt proceedings and sought time to consult the concerned officials.

When the matter was taken up again later, Kakade informed the bench that the Food and Drug Administration had decided to restore the suspended licences of the five eateries.

The bench accepted the statement and disposed of the plea.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: How a bureaucrat has forced Maharashtra’s eateries and other food businesses to clean up their act

On the morning of August 29, more than 5,000 people of Indian-origin trickled into New York’s Madison Square Garden to see one man take the stage: Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The event was titled the “Universal Oneness Celebration”. But outside the arena, there were two starkly different worlds.

On one side of the entrance sidewalk, attendees in festive clothes, saffron caps and rakhis took photographs in front of the Madison Square Garden logo. In one corner, a man played the dhol and sang a rap-like version of Jana Gana Mana. “Being woke is a joke,” he shouted. “We love Modi ji,” he continued, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as some others joined in to shout “Vande Mataram”.

On the other side stood coalitions protesting Bhagwat’s appearance on grounds that the RSS and BJP fostered a climate of hate and violence against religious minorities in India. On Wednesday, echoing the same concerns, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had urged the Trump administration to revoke Bhagwat’s visa.

But the demonstrations on Saturday, organised by groups including Hindus for Human Rights and the Indian American Muslim Council, seldom bothered the attendees, many of whom had travelled from far and beyond to see Bhagwat speak.

“I saw Modi when he was here. It was wow. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I got it,” said Neelima Kallaru, who posed in front of the stadium with her husband and friends, referring to Modi’s public address in Long Island in September 2024. “And now I got the second one. There was no way I would miss it,” she said.

Her husband, Murali Kallaru, who immigrated from Andhra Pradesh to the US in 2000, felt similarly. The cacophony of protest slogans did not bother him either, he said.

“This is about India, not just about Hindutva,” said Kallaru. “It’s one family. And families can have different opinions,” he continued, referring to the demonstrations that had grown in numbers as the event got closer.

‘Oneness in diversity’

As the crowds began entering the arena, chants echoed: from “Vande Mataram” to “Jai Shri Ram”. The attendees were ushered in by volunteers with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS’s offshoot in the United States. The hall was packed to the brim.

The event, ostensibly centred on celebrating “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” or “the world is one family”, began with a call to action from the organisers, the American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue. The world is one, they said, calling around 48 faith leaders to the stage.

Then entered the guest of honour, Bhagwat. He was welcomed with a standing ovation.

He sat next to three people: a rabbi, an imam and a reverend. Each of them spoke one after the other. The common theme was “oneness”.

“It is one world, one humanity,” said Talib M Shareef, president and imam of Washington DC’s Masjid Muhammad and a retired US Air Force member. “Not one religion. Not one culture. Not one language. Not one ethnicity. Not one nationality. But one humanity.”

Finally, at the end of the nearly three-hour-long event, the RSS chief spoke.

For nearly 45 minutes, Bhagwat expounded on the “unity of existence” and “dharma”, which he said stood for balance, not religion.

“I come from a country where there is oneness in diversity,” he said. “We celebrate it.”

The RSS chief claimed a Hindu who does not want Muslims to live in India cannot be considered a Hindu. “If you want to call yourself Hindu, you must believe that all paths lead to the same goal and that every human has dignity,” he said.

Bhagwat told the Indians in the 5,000-odd crowd sitting in front of him to “be loyal” to their “karmabhoomi” or place of work – the United States. Their “janmabhoomi” or place of birth, India, “expects [them] to live the value imparted” to them.

“And the value is oneness,” he said. The crowd burst into cheers.

‘Hindus should come together’

Bhagwat’s speech was, in many ways, starkly different from his last major public speech in the US, according to Ajit Sahi, the Director of Public Affairs of the Indian American Muslim Council.

In 2018, at the World Hindu Congress in Chicago, Bhagwat spoke about the need for Hindus to “come together”, comparing them to a lion that could be overwhelmed by wild dogs if it stood alone.

“You have to remember that [speech],” said Sahi, who was one of the primary organisers of the protests outside Madison Square Garden on Saturday morning. “And now he is speaking about oneness?” he continued.

The contrast had become a central theme of the opposition to Bhagwat’s visit in the days leading up to his appearance.

On Tuesday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he opposed the event, describing the RSS’s vision as “exclusionary” and at odds with the pluralistic and secular India he said he had grown up knowing. Mamdani, however, said the city might not have jurisdiction to cancel a private event at Madison Square Garden.

The same day, former New York city comptroller Brad Lander and city council members Shahana Hanif, Lincoln Restler and Julie Won joined more than 40 civil rights and community organisations at City Hall to call on Madison Square Garden to cancel the event.

Lander invoked the arena’s history as the site of a 1939 rally by the German American Bund. “MSG said it would not host hate-filled, bigoted rallies again,” he said. “It should not host this one.”

Hanif said Madison Square Garden should not provide a platform to Bhagwat and the RSS, which she described as a movement with a “documented history of persecution and violence against religious minorities”.

By Wednesday, the opposition had moved beyond New York.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom called on the Trump administration to consider targeted sanctions against RSS members and Indian officials involved in religious-freedom violations, and specifically urged the government to revoke Bhagwat’s US visa.

“The US government has an opportunity to hold India accountable and signal that the United States stands for religious freedom for the people of India,” said the commission’s vice chair, CeCe Heil. Not doing so would only lead to more attacks on minorities by “vigilante mobs,” she added.

The commission’s recommendation was non-binding, and Bhagwat remained in the country.

On Thursday, 65 US organisations, including Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Dalit and civil-rights groups, issued a joint statement denouncing Bhagwat’s visit.

The organisers

As the controversy intensified, on Friday evening, Bhagwat’s face appeared on one of the giant digital billboards in Times Square. The images were accompanied by the words “Resolve, Harmony, Dialogue”, an unmistakable display of the public-relations campaign surrounding his visit.

The event itself was organised by AHEAD, a little-known nonprofit established in 2025. AHEAD presents itself as an organisation dedicated to engagement and dialogue among American Hindus and other communities.

But two recent investigations by Savera, a US-based organisation that researches Hindu nationalist networks, have questioned how independent AHEAD is from the RSS’s American infrastructure.

Savera reported that AHEAD was incorporated in May 2025, with its initial registration connected to Khanderao Kand, a longtime RSS and HSS figure and founder of the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies.

The report found that the organisation’s three listed directors also had connections to the American Sangh: Sudesh Agrawal, one of the directors, heads the HSS’s Cleveland chapter, while other directors have participated in HSS or affiliated organisations.

Savera also reported that AHEAD’s name and the “Universal Oneness” branding echoed language used by HSS in its own programming. It characterised AHEAD as part of a broader network through which the RSS’s overseas operations could organise Bhagwat’s visit while maintaining a separate formal identity. AHEAD has not publicly described itself as an RSS or HSS organisation.

By Saturday morning, the argument over Bhagwat’s visit had, hence, become larger than the event itself.

Inside Madison Square Garden, thousands of people listened to him. Neither did Bhagwat mention the opposition to his visit, nor anything about India or Prime Minister Modi.

Outside, protesters argued that giving the RSS chief one of New York’s most prominent stages was itself a statement about who gets to define that “oneness” – and its history.

All photographs by Oishika Neogi.

The Kolkata Police has summoned Trinamool Congress leaders Abhishek Banerjee and Derek O’Brien in connection with a case involving allegations that they assaulted police personnel and obstructed them from discharging their duties when a team went to remove a signboard of the party from a building on Camac Street, The Indian Express reported on Sunday.

Banerjee and O’Brien have been asked to appear at the Shakespeare Sarani police station on Monday.

Three first information reports have been registered in connection with Thursday’s incident under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita relating to unlawful assembly, obstructing and assaulting public servants, causing hurt, criminal intimidation and use of force against a woman, among others.

The incident took place when police personnel and officials of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation arrived at the Trinamool Congress office on Camac Street to remove a signboard bearing the party’s name, “All India Trinamool Congress”, installed on the top of the building. Most of the units in the building are occupied by offices associated with Banerjee.

In one of the FIRs, the police have alleged that the signboard was hanging dangerously and stated that the municipal corporation had been directed to remove it for safety.

A team of police personnel, accompanied by municipal officials, reached the building on Thursday afternoon to remove the board. Banerjee and other TMC leaders allegedly tried to stop them and questioned whether they had the authority to enter the premises.

But the police entered the building and removed the board. While the police personnel and municipal officials were making their way to the roof, O’Brien reportedly fell on the stairs.

The TMC has alleged that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation had failed to provide a valid notice to the TMC about the signboard. It also alleged that the municipal officials had assaulted Banerjee and O’Brien after “trespassing” into the party office.

The official “pushed and heckled” TMC supporters and staff, the party alleged. It further alleged that the clothes of the office’s women security personnel were torn.

In the FIR, the police have claimed that while assisting the municipal officials, some unknown persons obstructed its personnel on the staircase and snatched the government-issued wireless handheld radio from a constable. When he tried to apprehend one of them, the persons allegedly assaulted the police personnel.

It is further alleged that a woman police personnel was attacked with intent to outrage her modesty.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Kolkata Police has registered a first information report against West Bengal’s former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for allegedly violating the Calcutta High Court order regarding the Trinamool Congress’s student wing foundation day event, reported The Hindu on Saturday.

The case was registered on Friday after Mamata Banerjee’s supporters allegedly blocked both flanks of Cathedral Road, where the event was held, disrupted traffic and continued the programme beyond the permitted time, reported The Indian Express.

On Tuesday, the High Court allowed both factions of the Trinamool Congress to hold the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad’s foundation event, specifying that movement of vehicles should not be stopped along one flank of the road, reported PTI.

Justice Saugata Bhattacharyya allowed the Mamata Banerjee-led faction to hold the event on Cathedral Road, while the Ritabrata Banerjee-led rebel group was granted permission for Rani Rashmoni Avenue. A maximum of 1,500 persons were to be allowed in the events, supposed to be held between noon and 3 pm on Friday.

The FIR against Mamata Banerjee was registered on a complaint filed by Sub-Inspector Apu Baidya of Hastings Police Station.

It alleged that the former chief minister had “entered into a criminal conspiracy” with members of the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad. She provoked her supporters, which resulted in the crowd pushing aside the barricades, clashing with police personnel “deployed for maintaining law and order, creating a chaotic situation and obstructing the vehicular movement of one flank of Cathedral Road”.

Along with Mamata Banerjee, the FIR also named organisers of the foundation day event.

They were booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to criminal conspiracy, using force against a government worker to prevent them from doing their job, and causing hurt to another by acting rashly or negligently.

During the rally on Friday, Mamata Banerjee had alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal had turned the state police into a “monstrous entity”, reported The Indian Express.

“I do not recognise this police force,” said the former chief minister. “The police force I worked with was humane, not inhuman. They helped people. There may have been a couple of isolated incidents, but I have seen police personnel stand their ground, suffer injuries and shed blood. They did not run bulldozers over people, fire tear gas or bullets indiscriminately.”

Edited by Sneha.

A Mumbai court has rejected the National Investigation Agency’s application to cancel the bail granted to four activists in the Bhima Koregaon case, reported Bar and Bench on Sunday.

The investigating agency had sought that the bail granted to activists Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves be cancelled on the grounds that they had attended a gathering at the Mumbai Press Club in January along with other persons accused in the case.

This violated their bail conditions, alleged the agency.

On Friday, Special Judge Chakor S Baviskar said that the activists may have spoken about the case when they met.

“By that alone, it cannot be concluded that, they committed breach of the condition imposed, that ‘the accused shall not come in contact or communicate with co-accused or any other person involved in similar activities’,” said the judge.

He also pointed out that the activists met each other inside and outside the courtroom during the hearing of the case.

“Hence, merely because a venue of the meeting/gathering of the accused changed, they cannot be said to have committed breach of the bail condition, as above and as alleged,” Bar and Bench quoted Baviskar as saying.

Rao was granted interim medical bail by the Bombay High Court in February 2021 and the bail order was confirmed by the Supreme Court in August 2022. Bharadwaj was granted default bail by the Bombay High Court in December 2021 as the agency had not filed a chargesheet within the stipulated time of 90 days.

Gonsalves and Ferreira spent almost five years in custody before the Supreme Court granted them regular bail in July 2023, with certain conditions.

In the application seeking the cancellation of bail of the activists, the NIA claimed that the gathering at the Mumbai Press Club was convened with the intention of propagating the ideology of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and deciding on the future of the “Urban Naxal movement.

In April, the Mumbai Press Club suspended three members for having “facilitated” the gathering on January 19. The NIA had, on May 1, sought documents from the press club related to the gathering.

A Mumbai City Civil Court on May 7 stayed the expulsion of one of the Mumbai Press Club members, Gurbir Singh.

It held that on a preliminary reading, action had been taken against him “only with an intent to prevent him from contesting the elections of the club”.

The case

The Bhima Koregaon case pertains to the violence that broke out near Pune on January 1, 2018, a day after a conclave called the Elgar Parishad was organised to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. One person was killed in the violence and several others were injured.

The NIA has alleged that the Elgar Parishad was part of a larger Maoist conspiracy to stoke caste violence, destabilise the Union government and assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sixteen people were arrested in the case.

But when the Supreme Court in 2023 granted bail to two persons accused in the case, it noted that the primary evidence cited by the NIA – a batch of letters – was of “weak probative value or quality”. In addition, a digital forensics firm, Arsenal Consulting, concluded that false evidence had been planted on the laptops and devices of the accused persons.

Of the 16 accused persons, 14 have been released on bail. Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, who was also accused in the case, died in prison in 2021.

Another accused man, Surendra Gadling, got bail from the Bombay High Court on May 4. However, he remains in jail as his bail application in a 2016 arson case is pending before the Supreme Court.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: Anand Patwardhan writes about the taming of the Mumbai Press Club