Two suspected cases of Nipah virus infections were detected at the Virus Research and Diagnostic Laboratory in West Bengal on Monday, Union Health Minister JP Nadda said.

The Nipah virus is a “zoonotic illness” transferred from animals such as pigs and fruit bats to humans. The virus can also be caught through human-to-human transmission.

It causes fever and cold-like symptoms in patients. The infection can also cause encephalitis, which is the inflammation of the brain, and myocarditis, or the inflammation of the heart, in some cases.

The two persons, a man and a woman, are healthcare workers at a private hospital in North 24 Parganas district’s Barasat and are undergoing treatment at the facility, the Hindustan Times reported.

They had gone to their homes in East Midnapore and East Burdwan in December, prior to falling ill. They have no history of travel outside the state, The Indian Express quoted West Bengal Chief Secretary Nandini Chakraborty as saying.

They are reported to be in a “very critical” condition and have been kept on ventilator support.

The chief secretary said the state’s health department is tracing persons who may have come in contact with the two healthcare workers in North 24 Parganas, Purba Bardhaman and Nadia districts. It is also investigating how the two contacted the infection.

The Union health ministry said on social media that it has assured the West Bengal government of comprehensive technical, logistical and operational support in the matter.

The Union health minister said that a national joint outbreak response team has been deployed to support the state government in containing the infections and for public health measures.

The national response team comprises experts from Kolkata’s All India Institute of Health and Public Hygiene, the National Institute of Virology in Pune, the National Institute of Epidemiology in Chennai, All India Institute Of Medical Sciences in Kalyani and the Union environment and forest ministry’s wildlife department.

While the last outbreaks of the Nipah virus were in West Bengal in 2001 and 2007, the last reported outbreak of the disease in the country was in Kerala in August.

The Delhi High Court on Monday told authorities in the national capital to ensure that adequate facilities are provided in night shelters to protect its occupants from the cold, The Hindu reported.

A bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia issued the direction after taking suo motu cognisance of a report in The Hindu titled “Night shelters packed, patients, kin brave the cold outside hospitals” on January 11.

The report detailed the condition of patients and their kin staying outside on the streets near All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi due to the lack of affordable accommodation.

The bench directed the court registry to file the matter as a writ petition and to implead the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, and the Delhi government as respondents, Live Law reported.

“What have you done?” the newspaper quoted the bench as asking the authorities when it heard the matter briefly on Monday. “If any one of us is required to live a night there, we don’t know what will happen. Be sensitive.”

The bench asked the authorities to compile complete information not only about the night shelter referred to in the report, but also on the situation prevailing in the shelters across the city.

“We also expect that the authorities concerned shall take adequate steps to ensure that residents of the shelters can save themselves from the chilling cold,” The Hindu quoted the court as saying.

The matter was listed for further hearing on Wednesday.

A delegation from the Communist Party of China met office-bearers of the Bharatiya Janata Party in New Delhi on Monday, marking the first engagement between the two parties since the Galwan clashes in 2020.

Vijay Chauthaiwale, head of BJP’s foreign affairs unit, said on social media that the delegation of the Communist Party of China led by Sun Haiyan, who is vice-president of its international liaison department, visited the headquarters of the Hindutva party.

A BJP delegation headed by party General Secretary Arun Singh “discussed at length the means to advance inter party communications between BJP and CPC”, Chauthaiwale added.

The six-member delegation from China’s ruling party will meet members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on Tuesday, The Hindu reported. The RSS is the parent organisation of the BJP.

A delegation of Communist Party of China under the leadership of H.E. Ms. Sun Haiyan, (Vice Minister, IDCPC) visited BJP head office today. During the discussion, a BJP delegation headed by party Gen. Sec. Shri Arun Singh Ji discussed at length the means to advance inter party… pic.twitter.com/5wa89nL4Ih

— Dr Vijay Chauthaiwale (@vijai63) January 12, 2026

The BJP and the Communist Party of China have maintained contacts since the late 2000s, with several delegations from the Hindutva party visiting Beijing to meet Chinese leaders.

In 2009, a delegation of BJP and RSS leaders visited China.

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

The clashes led to strained ties between India and China. The two countries have held several rounds of military and diplomatic talks to resolve their border standoff.

In October 2024, the two countries announced that they had reached a patrolling arrangement along the Line of Actual Control, “leading to the disengagement” of the two militaries in eastern Ladakh.

The agreement in 2024 had come two days before Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping held a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the BRICS summit in Kazan. This was the first formal meeting of the two leaders since the military standoff began in mid-2020.

The meeting on Monday also came in the backdrop of a thaw in bilateral relations. New Delhi and Beijing last year agreed to restore direct flights, ease visa restrictions and resume the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra.

The delegation from the Communist Party of China is also expected to meet members of the Opposition Congress, The Hindu quoted unidentified party leaders as saying.

The BJP and the Congress have traded accusations over ties with Beijing.

The Hindutva party has repeatedly accused Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and other party leaders of signing a “secret” Memorandum of Understanding with the Chinese Communist Party during a visit to Beijing in 2018, India Today reported.

It also alleged that Gandhi met Chinese officials at the Chinese embassy in Delhi during the Doklam standoff in 2017. The Opposition party has rejected the allegations.

The Congress has repeatedly accused Modi of being “scared of China” and failing to respond firmly to Beijing’s aggression along the Line of Actual Control.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday wrote another letter to Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, drawing the poll panel’s attention to “serious procedural lapses” in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state, The Telegraph reported.

The chief minister accused the Election Commission of harassing voters and endangering democratic rights through the voter roll revision process.

The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. They showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent.

The deletion from the draft roll is provisional and citizens can object to their names being removed from the list. Citizens whose names have been dropped from the list can file their claims and objections.

In her letter on Monday, Banerjee said that during the claim hearings, voters were submitting documents to support their claim of eligibility, but were often getting no clear acknowledgment or receipt, The Telegraph reported.

She said that no acknowledgment being issued was depriving voters proof of having made the submission and was placing them “at the mercy of internal record-keeping deficiencies”.

Subsequently, at the verification stage, “these documents are reported as ‘not found’ or ‘not available on record’, and on that basis, names of electors are being deleted”, she said in the letter.

Banerjee said that using artificial intelligence tools for digitising the 2002 electoral rolls had led to errors in voter details. This had led to several genuine voters being categorised as “logical discrepancies”, The Indian Express reported.

She accused the poll panel of disregarding its own statutory processes that had been followed after 2002.

“Why should the process revert to 2002?” she asked. “Does this imply that all revisions carried out over the intervening years were illegal?”

Banerjee said that several discrepancies had been minor, such as “Kr” and “Kumar”, “Shaik” and “Sk” or a person’s age, and should be resolved without calling voters for hearings, The Telegraph reported.

This was her fifth letter to the chief election commissioner since November.

West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the three to four months.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.

Also read: Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar

A two-judge bench of the Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a split verdict on the constitutionality of an amendment to the Prevention of Corruption Act mandating prior permission from the government to begin an investigation against a public servant under the law, Bar and Bench reported.

Justice BV Nagarathna held that the provision, Section 17A of the Act, contravenes the Constitution. On the other hand, KV Viswanathan upheld the provision, but read it down to state that sanction should depend on the recommendation of the Lokpal or Lokayukta, Live Law reported.

The Lokpal at the Centre and the Lokayukta at the state level are anti-corruption ombudsmen.

On account of the divergent views, the court directed that the case be placed before the chief justice, who could direct another bench to decide on the questions at hand.

The amendment to the Act requiring prior sanction was introduced in 2018. Earlier, such an approval was necessary only for inquiries against officials above the rank of a joint secretary.

Nagarathna said that the requirement of prior sanction contradicted the objective of the Act, Bar and Bench reported. “This section is nothing but an attempt to resurrect the section, which was struck down and is thus an attempt to protect the corrupt,” she said.

However, Viswanathan said that an independent entity that is free from the executive must decide on granting sanction. “Section 17A is constitutionally valid subject to the condition that the sanction must be decided by the Lok Pal or the Lok Ayukta of the state,” Live Law quoted him as saying.

Striking down the provision altogether would amount to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, Viswanathan said, adding that unless honest public servants were protected from frivolous investigation, “policy paralysis” would set in.

The Supreme Court passed the split verdict in response to a petition by non-governmental organisation Centre for Public Interest Litigation.

Lawyer Prashant Bhushan, representing the organisation, had contended that the requirement for prior sanction reintroduced a protection that had already been struck down by the Supreme Court in the cases of Vineet Narain vs Union of India and Subramaniam Swamy vs Director, CBI, according to Live Law.

Bhushan argued that Section 17A had the same flaw, as it allowed members of the executive to decide if an inquiry could be launched, leading to a conflict of interest.

However, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the Union government, argued that the previous judgements did not bar all forms of prior sanction. He argued that the Vineet Narain and Subramaniam Swamy cases were about reasonable classification under Article 14, which pertains to the right to equality, Live Law reported.

Mehta argued that Section 17A protects official decision-making and is intended to prevent frivolous cases that could lead to policy paralysis.

Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk cannot be seen in the videos relied upon by the authorities as grounds to detain him under the National Security Act, Bar and Bench quoted lawyer Kapil Sibal as having told the Supreme Court on Monday.

The submission was made before a bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and Prasanna Varale, which is hearing a habeas corpus petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo. She has argued that her husband’s detention is illegal and violates his fundamental rights.

Wangchuk was arrested in Leh on September 26, two days after four persons were killed in police firing during protests seeking statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. He was later taken to a jail in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur.

The bench on Monday said that it will not delay hearing the matter as it was a habeas corpus petition involving personal liberty, despite Solicitor General Tushar Mehta not being available because of personal reasons.

Sibal, representing Angmo, argued that four videos relied upon by the authorities for detaining Wangchuk had not been supplied, making it impossible for the activist to effectively contest the matter.

Sibal said that there was a time gap between the events that had been relied upon by the authorities and the detention order against Wangchuk, Bar and Bench reported.

He said that several documents that had been referred to were from events beginning in March 2024 but the detention order was passed on September 26, 2025.

The lawyer was quoted as having said that according to the detention order, the real trigger were the events of September 10, 2025, September 11, 2025, and September 24, 2025. But the videos relating to those dates had not been supplied to the activist.

The authorities had instead relied on older videos such as one from June 8, 2025, or May 25, 2025, where it was alleged that Wangchuk had incited people to engage in strikes and non-cooperation movements, Bar and Bench quoted Sibal as saying.

If a video from June 8, 2025, had been the basis of the detention, then Wangchuk should have been taken into custody on June 9, 2025, Sibal said.

The authorities had ignored Wangchuk’s speech in which he spoke about non-violence, Bar and Bench quoted Sibal as saying.

The videos of September 24 had been recorded after the violence and were being used against the activist, he alleged, adding that Wangchuk was not present in those videos.

The hearing will continue on Tuesday.

On September 24, police firing and violence broke out in Leh. Demonstrators clashed with and threw stones at the police, and set fire to the Bharatiya Janata Party office and a police vehicle.

The Union government has claimed that the violence was incited by Wangchuk’s “provocative statements”.

In October, Angmo filed the petition before the Supreme Court challenging his detention. She has contended that the order relied on “stale, irrelevant and extraneous” first information reports, many of which did not name Wangchuk.

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

The Maharashtra State Election Commission on Monday directed the state government to refrain from disbursing funds under the Ladki Bahin scheme in advance for January, citing the enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct for the upcoming civic elections, PTI reported.

The State Election Commission had received several complaints about media reports alleging that beneficiaries of the scheme would receive Rs 3,000, covering the December and January instalments, in their bank accounts before January 14 as a gift for the festival of Makar Sankranti.

The scheme provides a monthly transfer of Rs 1,500 to women aged 21 to 65 whose families earn less than Rs 2.5 lakh a year.

On Saturday, the Congress in Maharashtra also complained to the State Election Commission against a social media post by Bharatiya Janata Party leader and state minister Girish Mahajan announcing the disbursal of funds under the Ladki Bahin scheme ahead of the festival.

Makar Sankranti falls on Wednesday, a day before polling is slated to take place for 29 municipal corporations in Maharashtra, including Mumbai.

On Sunday, Maharashtra Congress chief Harshwardhan Sapkal alleged that Mahajan’s post announcing the release of installments for December and January amounted to an attempt to influence women voters and violated the model code of conduct. The Congress alleged that the announcement amounted to an attempt to influence women voters.

Following the complaints, the State Election Commission sent a letter to Chief Secretary Rajesh Agarwal on Sunday, seeking a clarification on the allegations and sought a response within a day.

After receiving a response from Agarwal, the poll panel said in a statement that it had issued consolidated orders on November 4 about the enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct for the elections in the state, The Hindu reported.

It added that the chief secretary noted in his response that development works and schemes that had started before the announcement of the elections were allowed to continue during the code of conduct period as per the provisions of the November 4 order.

“Considering this background, the regular benefits of this scheme can be given,” the newspaper quoted the State Election Commission as saying. “…but benefits cannot be given in advance; and, new beneficiaries will not be able to be selected.”

On Monday, the state Congress criticised the Mahayuti government, claiming that the leaders of the ruling party were “selfish brothers” who expected votes as a “return gift” from the beneficiaries of the scheme, PTI reported.

“These selfish brothers have no emotion,” the news agency quoted party spokesperson Sachin Sawant as saying. “They stopped the instalment for two months and disbursed the amount during the election campaign. They seek something in return. The sisters should show these selfish brothers their place as they expect a return gift in the form of votes.”

He added that the funding for the scheme is paid using the taxpayers’ money and was not the private property of those in power.

Hasan Ali spends days worrying about his father, Taher Ali.

How is the 58-year-old fending for himself in a foreign country? What might be doing in the bitter January cold? What dangers might he be facing?

In the last eight months, Taher Ali, a peasant from Assam’s Nagaon district has been forced out of India and into the no man’s land abutting Bangladesh not once – but three times.

Twice, he was sent back by Bangladesh border officials, Hasan Ali, a 31-year-old vegetable vendor, told Scroll.

Taher Ali is a “declared foreigner”, someone who has failed to prove that he is an Indian citizen before the state’s foreigners tribunals even though he has lived his entire life in Assam.

The tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies that have stripped thousands of Assam’s residents of their citizenship, many times through ex-parte orders that were passed without hearing the accused – as was the case with Taher Ali.

Those who lose their cases at the foreigners tribunals have the right to challenge their orders in the higher courts. In some instances, they have been sent to the state’s detention or holding centres. But, until May last year, they were rarely deported to Bangladesh, as a tribunal order is not proof that they are citizens of another country.

However, since May, the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Assam has repeatedly bypassed the legal process of deportation by “pushing back” declared foreigners across the border – in the dead of the night, and at gun point. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has invoked a 1950 law to justify the forced deportations.

Since November, the state government has issued orders to 22 declared foreigners to “remove themselves” from the country “within 24 hours”, leaving families with no opportunity to move court.

But with Bangladesh refusing to allow them in, people like Taher Ali are trapped in a vicious cycle of “push-backs” and returns.

Taher Ali is not alone. Scroll found that since December 19, at least seven Assam residents were forced into Bangladesh. When the Border Guard Bangladesh did not allow them in, they returned five days later – only to be forced out again. Some of them were last seen in a Facebook video from Bangladesh’s Kurigram district on December 28, shot by local mediapersons.

Four of them are now in the custody of Bangladesh police, officials in the neighbouring country said. At least one other person, apart from Taher Ali, was coerced into Bangladesh three times.

Scroll contacted the Border Security Force spokesperson and the Union ministry of home affairs, asking if declared foreigners expelled under the 1950 law were repeatedly pushed into Bangladesh, and if their nationality had been verified before. The story will be updated if they respond.

Lawyers and observers told Scroll that the Assam government’s new policy violated international and constitutional norms.

“This is the manufacturing of statelessness,” said Abhishek Saha, a doctoral student at Oxford University who researches on questions of citizenship in India. “India pushed these people toward Bangladesh, only for Bangladesh to reject them… These individuals are being tossed back and forth like tennis balls between the two nations.”

Ujjaini Chatterji, an advocate based in Delhi, said such “abrupt and arbitrary” removal of persons is in direct contravention of the Constitution of India and India’s international law obligations. “Any deportation must be preceded by nationality verification and the deported individual must be formally handed over to the official authorities of the alleged country of origin,” she said. “In the present cases of so-called pushbacks, the arbitrariness is stark.”

Hasan Ali asked why his father was being shunted back and forth between two countries. “My country has declared my father a foreigner from Bangladesh,” he said. “But Bangladesh has returned him twice. Taile amader desh kunda? Amader desh ase ki?” Then, which is our country? Do we have any country at all?

A cycle of pushbacks

In December 2009, Taher Ali was declared a non-citizen by a foreigners tribunal in Nagaon district by an “ex parte opinion”.

He spent four years in Tezpur detention centre from August 2015 to December 2019, and was then released.

In May 2025, after the Pahalgam terror attack, when the Assam government began a crackdown on declared foreigners, Taher Ali was picked up from his native village Goroimari in Nagaon and taken into police custody.

As Scroll had reported, after being picked up by the police, hundreds of declared foreigners were handed over to the Border Security Force, who forced them into Bangladesh at gunpoint. Ali was among 109 such declared foreigners taken to the Matia transit camp, India’s largest detention centre. This was corroborated by an affidavit filed by the Border Security Force in the Gauhati High Court in November.

Hasan Ali told Scroll that his father had phoned him in May, saying he had been forced out.

However, the Border Guard Bangladesh did not let Taher Ali and others into the country. “He was again brought back to India and kept at the Kokrajhar holding centre,” Hasan Ali said. “We were relieved.”

This, too, was confirmed by the affidavit filed by the BSF in the Gauhati High Court. Sixty declared foreigners were sent back by the Border Guard Bangladesh within a day, the BSF told the court. Scroll has seen the affidavit.

In September, Hasan Ali filed a petition in the Gauhati High Court, seeking his father’s release from the holding centre, their lawyer Amir Hussain told Scroll.

“On November 21, the High Court disposed of his plea saying that the 2009 tribunal opinion must first be challenged,” Amir Hussain said.

In November, Hasan Ali went to the Kokrajhar holding centre to get his father’s signature on court papers needed to challenge the FT order. That was the last time he met him.

Before they could move court, on December 17, Taher Ali and 14 others from Nagaon district were issued expulsion orders by the Assam government, asking them to leave the country in 24 hours.

The three expulsions

By the time Hasan Ali got to know of the order the next day, his father had already been whisked away from the Kokrajhar holding centre.

Hasan claimed that his father was taken 500-odd km away to Sribhumi district, formerly known as Karimganj, which borders Bangladesh’s Sylhet, and forced out on December 19.

Six days later, members of a village defence party in Sribhumi stopped seven people as they were re-entering India. Taher Ali was among them, Hasan said.

Scroll has seen the photograph taken by the village volunteers of the six men and one woman they had “captured”. It included Taher.

“They were later handed over to the Border Security Force,” Hasan Ali said.

Sribhumi district police chief Leena Doley confirmed to the media that the seven people had been detained while re-entering India. When Scroll asked for more details, Doley dodged the question, saying it is a “sensitive issue” before hanging up.

But that was not the end of it.

On December 29, Hasan Ali got a call from his father.

Taher Ali told his son that on the morning of December 28, he was put in a vehicle and taken 600 km to the other end of the state – to the South Salmara-Dhubri border and forced into Bangladesh for the third time. He asked his son to rescue him and get him out of Bangladesh.

“He does not even know how to read and write,” Hasan Ali said. “How will he manage there?”

He added: “My father is not Bangladeshi, he is Indian. He is a voter and his grandfather’s name is there in the 1965 voter rolls. All his 13 brothers and sisters are Indian. How can my father alone be a Bangladeshi?”

‘We are terrified’

Another declared foreigner forced into Bangladesh three times in the last eight months is Idrish Ali, a 45-year-old daily-wage worker from Raha town in Nagaon.

Idrish had been declared a foreigner in 2016, following which he spent three years in Tezpur detention centre.

Like many declared foreigners, who do not have much awareness of the legal process they are embroiled in, Idrish did not challenge the foreigners tribunal order in the higher courts.

“He thought his case was over after he was released,” said his 21-year-old daughter Sharjina. “He kept going to the police station every week.”

No other member of Idrish Ali’s family was served a notice by foreigners’ tribunals.

In May, the daily-wage labourer was picked up from Raha and sent to the Matia detention centre during the statewide crackdown against the declared foreigners.

According to the affidavit filed by the Border Security Force in May, Idrish Ali was among the 109 declared foreigners detained at the Matia transit camp on May 26.

A few days later, Idrish was forced into Bangladesh, Sharjina said – his first expulsion.

Like Taher Ali, he snuck back to India and was handed over to the Border Security Force, who took him to the Kokrajhar holding centre.

Since then, the family has been running around trying to release him.

“First, my mother went to the Matia detention centre, and the officials said he was not there,” she said. “Then she went to the Kokrajhar holding centre. First, they said he was not there. Then they asked to obtain an order copy from Gauhati High Court to meet him.”

The family hired a lawyer to file a case in the Gauhati High Court in June. But despite being paid, the lawyer did not challenge the tribunal order. Before he moved court, Idrish Ali had been served with expulsion orders on December 17.

He was spotted in the photograph taken by village volunteers on December 24 in Sribhumi, where he is seen standing next to Taher Ali and five other declared foreigners.

Sharjina told Scroll: “A few days later, we came to know that he had re-entered India and was caught in Sribhumi district with six others.”

Days later, the family spotted him in a Facebook video from Bangladesh’s Kurigram district, Sharjina told Scroll.

A Bangladeshi journalist, Mostafizur Rahman Tara, told Scroll that Idrish Ali was among three people detained by the Border Guard Bangladesh on December 28 for entering the country without valid documents.

She said the family had “no idea where he is now”.

“Everyone at home is terrified after he was seen at the Sribhumi border once and later in Bangladesh near the Dhubri border. That is when we realised he had been pushed across a third time,” Sharjina said. “I don’t understand why he was taken from one border to another.”

The 1950 law

In both these cases, the Assam government has justified the “push-backs” by invoking a 1950 law – the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950.

The law was enacted soon after 1947 as popular discontent grew in Assam over the growing migration of Partition refugees into Assam from East Pakistan.

Since November, the Assam government has used the law to issue expulsion orders to 22 people – and effectively bypass foreigners’ tribunals and the Centre’s own deportation rules.

In Taher Ali’s case, the Nagaon district administration invoked a new “standard operating procedure” under the law, which was approved by the Assam cabinet in September.

Ujjaini Chatterji, the advocate, said the 1950 law was enacted in a vastly different historical and geopolitical context in South Asia, before foreigners tribunals were set up. “Moreover, the Act does not contemplate, nor does it authorise, arbitrary expulsions without due process,” she said.

Political scientist Sanjib Baruah, too, argued that a “lot has happened in South Asia since the passage of the law”.

He said: “It is absurd to argue that an executive official can now circumvent the procedure established by [foreigners tribunals] and the judicial appeals that their decisions are subject to, and use a 75-year-old law meant to deal with migrants from a region that no longer exists (East Pakistan), and push someone to the ‘no-man’s land’ because the person in his opinion is a foreigner.”

Chatterji pointed out that the law permits expeditious “removal” only of those people “whose presence in Assam is detrimental to the interests of the general public of India, any section thereof, or any Scheduled Tribe in Assam”.

“Neither the notices nor any clear reports establish that the expelled persons were detrimental to the interests of India,” she said.

She added that the 1950 act cannot override existing mechanisms and laws dealing with deportation of foreigners. “The guidelines clearly mandate that before any lawful deportation, a detailed enquiry must be conducted into the nationality of the suspected persons,” she said. “This is not being done.”

After former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Arun Prakash said that he and his wife had been asked by the Election Commission to prove their eligibility during the special revision of electoral rolls in Goa, the poll panel clarified on Monday that the enumeration forms submitted by the retired officer were missing mandatory information, reported PTI.

Prakash, who settled in Goa after retirement, has been marked “unmapped” on the draft rolls that were published on December 16, according to The Indian Express.

The state has over 1.8 lakh “unmapped” voters. These are persons whose names appear on the draft voter list but were not found on the 2002 rolls, when the last special intensive revision was held. They will have to attend hearings with relevant documents to retain their name on the final voter list that is due to be published on February 14.

On Sunday, Prakash said that he and his wife, Kumkum, had received notices from the Election Commission, despite a booth-level officer visiting their home thrice. The retired officer said that the BLO had not asked for additional information during the enumeration phase.

The 82-year-old also highlighted that he and his wife, 78, have been asked to appear before Election Commission officials on two different dates at a location 18 km away from their residence.

In a post on Monday, Prakash said that the poll body could consider revising the form for the process to capture more relevant information, such as “occupation” and “location at last SIR”.

He also suggested that the Election Commission employ “full-time, fully trained youth as BLOs” to better interact with citizens and raise awareness.

2/2 For @ECIVEEP (b) Employ full time, fully trained youth as BLOs empowered to interact with citizens & vet docs; (c) INFORM THE PUBLIC that there exists an option to upload docs on EC website; (d) Do not forget the migrant labourer, away from home & unable to produce docs.

— Adm. Arun Prakash (@arunp2810) January 12, 2026

On Monday, the Election Commission said that the enumeration forms submitted by Prakash “did not contain the mandatory particulars relating to the previous SIR”, including the name of the elector, the electors’s photo identity card number, the name of the relative, the name and number of the Assembly Constituency, part number and serial number in the electoral roll, reported PTI.

These discrepancies meant the electoral officials were unable to establish an automatic linkage between the submitted enumeration form and the existing electoral roll database, said Electoral Registration Officer Medora Ermomilla D'Costa.

Apart from the unmapped voters, more than 1 lakh names were deleted from the draft electoral rolls in Goa after being marked dead, shifted or absent.

Besides Goa, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.

Also read: Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar

United States President Donald Trump on Monday said that a tariff ​rate of 25% will be imposed on goods from countries doing business with Iran. The action against Tehran came as anti-government protests in the West Asian country entered their third week.

While China is Iran’s largest trading partner, India has been among the top five countries with which Tehran has had trade ties in recent years.

Without a trade deal with Washington, Indian goods are already facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%. A 25% so-called reciprocal duty was imposed on August 7, followed by an additional 25% punitive levy on August 27.

On Monday, Trump said on social media: “Effective immediately, any country doing business with the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay a tariff of 25% on any and all business being done with the United States of America. This order is final and conclusive.”

Earlier on Monday, Trump had threatened to intervene militarily if Tehran killed protesters, the BBC reported. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt also said that military options, including air strikes, were still “on the table”, BBC reported.

The protests in Iran, which began on December 28, were initially focused on discontent about rising inflation. However, they later expanded in scope as protesters in more than 100 cities demanded an end to clerical rule.

The authorities in Iran have accused the US and Israel of inciting unrest. The government snapped internet access and telephone lines on Thursday, largely cutting off the country from the outside world.

More than 640 protesters have been killed in the past three weeks in Iran, the Associated Press reported. Nearly 10,700 persons have been arrested, CNN reported. The reports have attributed the numbers to US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency.

On Monday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Tehran was ready to negotiate with the US based on “mutual respect and interests”, CNN reported.

“As I have said repeatedly, we are also ready for negotiations – but fair and dignified negotiations, from an equal position, with mutual respect and based on mutual interests,” Araghchi told a group of foreign diplomats in a televised meeting in Tehran.

The foreign minister also warned that Iran remained prepared for war but dismissed a preemptive strike. “The reason is clear: the best way to prevent war is to be prepared for war, so that our enemies do not once again fall into miscalculation,” he added.

India’s trade with Iran

Since the reimposition of US sanctions on Iran in 2019, New Delhi’s trade with Tehran contracted sharply by 87%, falling to $2.3 billion in 2024 from $17.6 billion in 2019, Moneycontrol reported.

India’s import of mineral fuels, which earlier accounted for more than 90% of the bilateral trade, has plummeted by 99% since 2019.

India still imports about $1 billion worth of goods from Iran. But organic chemicals, edible fruits and nuts now account for more than 80% of the imports, replacing energy as the primary category.

New Delhi’s exports to the West Asian country also declined significantly, down 68% from 2018, according to Moneycontrol. In 2024, India exported $1.3 billion worth of goods to Iran, compared with $3.9 billion in 2019 and $5.4 billion in 2013.

When I returned to my village of Hemisshukpachan in Ladakh in November after a hiatus of three months, I noticed a new architectural trend: steel roofing.

The next day, at a meeting in the community hall called by an NGO to distribute solar lamps, some villagers were in a rush to leave because there were workers at their homes installing steel roofs. This sparked a discussion about this new trend. There was a general agreement that all the residents should install steel roofs.

The impetus to build these roofs had come from the unprecedented rainfall we received in August. Leh recorded 80 mm of rain – roughly 930%. The flat mud roofs of the region’s traditional houses could easily withstand the historical average annual precipitation (both rain and snow) of around 100 mm. But my neighbours thought that steel roofing was necessary to face the changing weather patterns.

As a result, Ladakhis were spending their early winter getting ready for the summer instead of the phenomenon we have historically spent our time preparing for – the cold.

As I see it, the loosening ties of Ladakhis with the cold is responsible for the region’s new obsession with heritage preservation – and even our political anxiety.

Till the early 2000s, Ladakh’s winters (October-March) were harsh. Agricultural activities came to a halt. Everything froze: the rivers, streams, water canals, grassland and land with moisture in it. Precipitation mostly came in the form of snowfall. “In the past, winters were very cold and snowfall was abundant,” an octogenarian fellow villager told me.

In the shaded parts of the village, the early winter snow was transformed into sheets of ice. As residents shovelled the snow off their roofs, towers of sleet grew in the alleyways. In the winter, some parts of the village used to be covered permanently with ice.

These tough conditions entailed that there was always the looming danger of food and fuel scarcity. As a result, Ladakhis spent their summers preparing for the winter.

The summer months were used to cultivate barley and wheat (the main foodgrains), collect apricots and vegetables (both wild and cultivated) for dry preservation, and to secure essentials not found locally, such as salt, from distant outposts.

Talking to my Buddhist neighbours about the time before Ladakh joined the Republic and a couple of decades after it became part of India, they told me many stories about the cruel, cold months. The most prominent theme was food scarcity.

By mid- to late winter, pantries became empty, and people went to seek loans of grain from relatively wealthy neighbours. Stories of people venturing to the nearby monastery to steal from the granary are also remembered. Young men went on expeditions to hunt wild sheep, goats and birds for subsistence. People slept early so they would be under the covers during the freezing nights.

The local architecture reflected the necessity of tackling the frosty conditions. The older houses have thick walls that act as thermal insulation. Homes had a special winter chamber, called yokhang, on the ground floor. This floor also had rooms for the livestock. Moving nearer to the animals provided the much-needed warmth.

The preparations made for the dreary winter months underscore the intimate relationship Ladakhis had with the cold. Living in Ladakh meant getting ready, tackling and facing the icy circumstances head-on.

Ladakh’s social institutions reflect this. Elaborate systems of community cooperation in villages – norms related to water sharing, social groups that assist in ploughing, funerals and weddings – were the safety nets. A powerful village-level decision-making institution headed by the goba (chief) and representing all the households had authority on important aspects like water sharing.

Social practices were designed to negotiate the frigid landscape. For instance, polyandrous marriage, in which a woman had several husbands, controlled the population. In many families, younger siblings became monks and nuns, which secured their survival in monasteries with generous endowments.

One bit of small talk in Ladakh is “Thogs babs se rag, ta” (the warm has descended). Essentially, Ladakhis, at both the individual and collective level, had a fundamental purpose in this world – to survive the cold environment.

But geopolitics-related increase in military deployment, development programmes and tourism slowly began to upend this purpose. Food and fuel also became available from the civil administration and the military, which provided employment to Ladakhis.

Life became easier. But it made a social world designed to negotiate coldness inconsequential. Practices like agro-pastoralism, settlement patterns, mud buildings, mud stoves, livestock and much more became anachronistic.

The upending of Ladakh’s social world produced a sense of crisis. This became evident in the rush to preserve traditional architecture, pottery, metal works, dress, languages, festivals, monasteries, stupas, water-mills, heirloom seeds, animals, agricultural practices, water distribution systems, the institution of goba and even villages (which were being depopulated by outmigration).

The region now has an abundance of heritage-preserving individuals and organisations.

The looming planetary ecological crisis that has widespread public acknowledgement in the region adds another dimension to the threats. For example, the majority of families in Kulum abandoned their village due to water scarcity. After the 2010 floods, the village spring, the main source of water, dried up.

Due to rising temperatures, glacier-lake outburst floods (GLOF) have become frequent. A prominent example is the 2014 Gya village GLOF. Studies have shown a significant increase in temperature in Ladakh and neighbouring regions of around 1.6 degrees celsius in the last century, with winters heating at an increased rate.

All of these processes portray Ladakhi people as endangered. This atmosphere of risk underpins the recent political movement in Ladakh.

The sense of crisis in contemporary Ladakh is fundamentally an altered relationship with coldness, which provided a purpose to live. This relationship with the coldness is deeply ingrained in the social psyche of Ladakhis. These broken ties with frigidity finds articulation with the help of common discourses of heritage protection, tribal rights, and local governance.

If all the important heritage items and sites are protected, if all the tribal rights are recognised, if the region is empowered through extension of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution and even statehood, the question is how do we live with our changed relationship with coldness on a dangerously warming planet even while enjoying modern amenities.

Steel roofs are only a temporary answer.

Padma Rigzin is a social anthropologist from Ladakh.

This is the first of a two-part series on Ladakh.

The Shiv Sena on Monday moved the Bombay High Court against the nomination of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) candidate and ex-mayor Kishori Pednekar in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections for allegedly suppressing details about the cases against her, PTI reported.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation is the governing civic body for Mumbai.

Susie Shah, a spokesperson for the Shiv Sena faction led by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, mentioned the petition before a bench of Chief Justice Shree Chandrashekhar and Justice Gautam Ankhad, and sought an urgent hearing.

The bench, however, refused the request, noting that there were only a few days left for the elections. The High Court added that the petition would be taken up after the polls.

The elections for 29 municipal corporations in Maharashtra, including the BMC, will be held in a single phase on Thursday. The results will be declared on January 16.

Pednekar had submitted her nomination form to contest the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections from Ward 199 (Central Mumbai), PTI reported.

In her petition, Shah sought a direction from the court to the returning officer to declare the form submitted by the former mayor as “illegal, invalid and improper”, and to reject it.

She claimed that Pednekar, in her affidavit, had hidden details of five first information reports filed against her in several police stations of Mumbai during her tenure as mayor, the news agency reported.

The FIRs include one pertaining to an alleged fraud committed during the Covid-19 pandemic, the petition claimed.

Shah alleged that the Uddhav Sena candidate had grossly misused the electoral process by submitting a “false and misleading” nomination form and affidavit, adding that she had no moral right to contest the elections.

SC extends timeline to complete polls

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Monday extended by two weeks the timeline to complete the process for the local body elections in Maharashtra, PTI reported. These elections are for all local bodies in the state, including the zilla parishads, panchayats and municipal corporations.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joyamalya Bagchi issued the order after the State Election Commission, represented by advocate Balbir Singh, said that it had filed an interlocutory petition seeking an extension by 10 days from January 31.

Singh said this was needed as elections were yet to be held for some zila parishads and panchayats.

On September 16, the Supreme Court criticised the State Election Commission for its failure to adhere to an earlier timeline set by it to conduct the local body elections and set January 31 as the final deadline.

The elections in 27 municipal corporations, including the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, 243 nagar parishads and 289 panchayats, had been stalled since 2022 amid a case in the Supreme Court pertaining to reservations for the Other Backward Classes.

This has meant that most urban and rural bodies in the state have been operated without elected representatives. The terms of these representatives for various bodies ended between 2020 and 2022.

China reiterated its claims on the Shaksgam Valley, saying that the infrastructure projects undertaken by its government in the disputed region were “beyond reproach”. This came two days after New Delhi stated that it reserved the right to take necessary measures to safeguard its interests in the region and that it was Indian territory.

The Shaksgam Valley is a disputed territory historically part of Jammu and Kashmir, which Pakistan ceded to China in 1963. India has not recognised this agreement. New Delhi has also repeatedly objected to the infrastructure projects being undertaken there by Beijing.

Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said that the area was part of “China’s territory”. She also reiterated that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was an economic initiative aimed at local economic and social development that will improve livelihoods. Read on.

United States President Donald Trump posted an image on social media declaring himself the “acting president” of Venezuela. The digitally altered image was captioned: “Acting President of Venezuela, Incumbent – January 2026”.

This comes after a US military operation in the South American country on January 3, during which Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were abducted. After Maduro’s capture, Venezuela’s Supreme Court ordered Executive Vice President Delcy Rodríguez to immediately assume the role of acting president.

However, hours after the military operation, Trump said that the US will run Venezuela and tap its huge oil reserves. Read on.

The Supreme Court sought the Election Commission’s response on pleas by Trinamool Congress MPs alleging procedural irregularities during the special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal. While the poll panel sought two weeks to file its response, the bench granted it a week.

The pleas by Rajya Sabha MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen will be heard next on January 19.

O’Brien has alleged that booth-level officers were receiving directions on platforms like WhatsApp instead of formal means, making it difficult to establish any audit trail of the process. Sen alleged that orders passed as part of the process were arbitrary, thereby leading to the deletion of eligible voters. Read on.

The Election Commission stated that the enumeration forms submitted by a former chief of naval staff, who has been asked to prove his eligibility in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in Goa, were missing mandatory information. Former Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Arun Prakash and his wife have been marked “unmapped” in the draft rolls published on December 16.

The retired officer said that he had received the Election Commission notice despite a booth-level officer visiting their home thrice. He added that the Booth Level Officer had not asked for additional information during the enumeration phase.

On the other hand, the poll panel stated that Prakash’s forms “did not contain the mandatory particulars relating to the previous SIR”, including the name of the elector, the elector’s photo identity card number, the name of the relative, the name and number of the Assembly Constituency, part number and serial number in the electoral roll. Read on.

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On November 12, the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare announced the draft Seeds Bill, 2025, a proposed legislation for quality, sale and certification of seeds.

The bill seeks to “regulate the quality of seeds”, “curb the sale of spurious seeds”, and “liberalise import of seeds” while “protecting the rights of the farmers”, the agriculture ministry stated in a press release. Ajai Rana, Chairman of the Federation of Seed Industry of India, which represents multinational seed companies in the country, welcomed the draft bill, calling it “a timely and much-needed step toward modernising India’s seed regulatory framework.”

However, critics of the bill argue that it ultimately favours seed companies over farmers. They also argue that it is heavily centralised, undermining the authority of state governments.

Researchers and industry experts have long demanded reforms to the Seeds Act of 1966 to address changes in the commercial seed trade over the last six decades. Currently, the Seeds (Control) Order, 1983, under the Essential Commodities Act, helps circumvent the deficiencies of the ageing Seeds Act.

There have been prior attempts by both the United Progressive Alliance and National Democratic Alliance governments to pass new legislation to regulate commercial seed trade in the country in 2004 and 2019, respectively.

New provisions

One of the main new provisions in the bill is the mandatory printing of QR codes or labels on seed packets, which discloses information about seed health, expected seed performance, and producer certification. It can be generated through the Centralised Seed Traceability Portal, a central government entity for tracking seed production and distribution. “If the system functions properly, it can improve seed quality control in the country,” said Malavika Dadlani, the former Joint Director (Research) at the ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi.

Dadlani also welcomed the “pro-farmer” provision for conducting evaluation trials to assess the Value for Cultivation and Use of seed varieties. “Varietal traits and expected performance must be tested by accredited centres and disclosed to farmers,” she said.

However, Kavitha Kuruganti, founder of ASHA-Kisan Swaraj, a volunteer-driven network of farmers, argues that there is a consolidation effort for large seed companies within the bill. She points to the proposed Central Accreditation System, which would allow multinational seed companies to operate across states once accredited by the central government, thereby reducing checks for the “ease of business”. “I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this provision hasn’t emerged from the law ministry and has come from one of the seed industry bodies,” she added, about the ‘ease of business’ provision.

Erosion of state authority

The revised seed institutional architecture as per the draft Seeds Bill, 2025, proposes a 27-member Central Seed Committee and a 15-member State Seed Committee for each state government. While the 1966 Act provided for 22 state members in the Central Seed Committee, the new bill proposes only five.

The proposed composition of the Central Seed Committee is imbalanced, according to Dadlani. “Ideally, each state should have representation; if not, at least three member states from each geographic zone must be included by rotation, keeping the agricultural areas and crops in consideration,” she said. It is crucial to bring decision-making down to the appropriate level, Kuruganti adds.

“What is happening right now in Indian agriculture, not just in the sphere of seeds, almost all decisions are being taken by the union government,” Kuruganti said. “But when farmers are in a crisis, the first government to bear the brunt of any protests or resistance or even having to provide monetary compensation, is the state government.”

The new bill proposes seed price regulation during emergencies, but again, the onus lies with the union government. “The opinion of states should be sought in the matters of regulating seed prices,” Dadlani said.

The increasing seed prices, particularly for vegetables and certain high-value crops, have put pressure on farmers, says Kuruganti. “Seed prices must be regulated outside of emergencies so that we can reduce the cost of cultivation for farmers and keep it reasonable,” she added.

The unregulated seed prices are very apparent in the industry’s growth over the last few decades, Kuruganti shared. “The value of the seed industry has grown from about Rs 4,000 crores two decades ago Rs 60- 70,000 crores,” she said. The market share of the formal seed sector has remained the same during this period. According to a recent pan-India study, the overall contribution of formal seed sector has increased from 45% to 54% from 2016 to 2018.

“When it is clear that somebody else is profiteering at the expense of farmers, any new statute should think about regulating prices,” Kuruganti said. It will also force the regulator to develop a formula to set the price range, thereby bringing transparency to the costs incurred by seed companies during seed production, including the payments to contract seed multiplying farmers. “It will naturally shed light on the exploitation of seed multiplying farmers in the country,” she said.

Discrepancies with existing act

The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, 2001, is one of the foundational seed-related legislations in the country. It is a statutory framework India crafted to protect farmers’ intellectual property rights when it became a founding member of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995.

According to the draft Seeds Bill, 2025, it shall apply to every seed dealer, distributor, and producer who is not a farmer. The legislation will not restrict the right of the farmer “to grow, sow, re-sow, save, use, exchange, share or sell his farm seeds of any kind or variety registered under this Act.”

However, the definition of ‘farmer’ in the new bill differs from the Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act. In the draft Seeds Bill of 2025, a farmer is defined as “any person who (i) cultivates crops by cultivating the land himself; or (ii) cultivates crops by directly supervising the cultivation of land through any other person; or (iii) conserves and preserves, severally or jointly, with any other person any wild species or traditional varieties and adds value to such wild species or traditional varieties through selection and identification of their useful properties.”

Kuruganti argues that the definition should be presented verbatim from the Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, where it explicitly covers different farmer-producer organisations and cooperatives. “The definition of farmer in the singular (in the new bill) leads to problems where community institutions, including Self-Help Groups (SHGs), farmers’ cooperatives, and community seed banks are in danger of being criminalised in this act,” she said.

“Farmer producer organisations are registered under the Companies Act that sell seeds keeping a profit margin; it is justified that they must do so under a brand name and [that they are regulated],” Dadlani shared.

Also, the closer the seed producer and the seed consumer are, the lesser are the chances of quality compromise, Kuruganti added

Punishment and compensation

The new bill introduces graded penalties, with punishment for trivial, minor, and major offences such as the sale of non-registered seeds, ranging from a written notice to a fine of Rs 30 lakh and the cancellation of registration.

“Apart from hiking penalties, it may be more pertinent that the exact quantum of punishment be decided based on the merit of each case and be adjudged by an authorised person/ panel, as is done in a court of law,” Dadlani said.

Kuruganti also proposes an adjudication committee, including farmer representatives, to take cognisance of offences and dispense justice.

Currently, the legislation lacks provisions for compensation. A seed compensation fund set up by both the central and state governments would help alleviate losses incurred by farmers, according to Kuruganti. “Such a fund could also receive the penalties collected for offences under the Act, which could then provide compensation to farmers,” she said.

What is next for the bill?

According to Dadlani, “Its [The Seeds Bill] implementation will ensure quality seeds of the best varieties available to farmers at competitive prices, and will discourage unscrupulous and fly-by-night seed companies,” she said.

However, Kuruganti considers the proposed statutory framework to be inadequate to protect farmers’ interests. “We will only support a statute that is farmer-centric, upholds the constitutional authority of state governments, and supports community seed systems that have been the backbone of India’s food security and sovereignty over the last seven to eight decades,” she added.

Meanwhile seed industry leaders believe that the Seeds Bill, 2025, deserves to be passed. “It is futuristic, inclusive, may create ease of doing business by reducing the burden of compliance, while safeguarding the interest of farmers and researchers’ rights, focusing on quality seeds, rationalising the offences and penalties, and harmonising the seed regulatory system across the country,” said RK Tripathi, Director at the National Seed Association of India.

The public feedback period for the bill came to a close on December 11. The bill is expected to be introduced to the parliament for cabinet approval in early 2026.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

China on Monday reiterated its territorial claims on the Shaksgam Valley, saying that the infrastructure projects undertaken by its government in the region were “beyond reproach”, PTI reported.

This came two days after New Delhi stated that it reserved the right to take necessary measures to safeguard its interests in the Shaksgam Valley. India’s Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on Friday that the region was Indian territory.

The Shaksgam Valley is a disputed territory historically part of Jammu and Kashmir, which Pakistan ceded to China in 1963. India has not recognised this agreement.

New Delhi has also repeatedly objected to the infrastructure projects undertaken by Beijing there.

On Friday, Jaiswal said that New Delhi has “never recognised the so-called China-Pakistan boundary agreement signed in 1963” and consistently maintained that the agreement was “illegal and invalid”.

“We do not recognise the so-called China-Pakistan Economic Corridor either, which passes through Indian territory that is under forcible and illegal occupation of Pakistan,” Jaiswal said.

He added that the entire Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh were an “integral and inalienable” part of India.

Noting that this had been “clearly conveyed” to Pakistani and the Chinese authorities several times, the spokesperson added: “We further reserve the right to take necessary measures to safeguard our interests.”

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a major infrastructure project in Pakistan, launched in 2015 as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It aims to enhance economic connectivity between China and Pakistan by developing a network of roads, railways, pipelines and energy projects.

Responding to Jaiswal’s remarks at a press briefing in Beijing on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning said that the area mentioned by New Delhi was part of “China’s territory”, PTI reported.

“China’s infrastructure activities in its own territory are beyond reproach,” the news agency quoted Mao as saying.

She noted that China and Pakistan had signed an agreement that has determined the border between the two countries since the 1960s. These are the rights of Pakistan and China as sovereign states, she said.

Mao also reiterated that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor was an economic initiative aimed at local economic and social development that will improve livelihoods, PTI reported.

“Such agreement and CPEC will not affect China’s position on the Kashmir issue and China’s position remains unchanged in this regard,” the news agency quoted the spokesperson as saying.

China has repeatedly maintained that the “Jammu and Kashmir dispute is left over from history, and should be properly and peacefully resolved in accordance with the UN Charter, relevant UN Security Council resolutions and bilateral agreements”.

The Supreme Court on Monday sought a response from the Election Commission on pleas filed by MPs from the Trinamool Congress alleging procedural irregularities during the special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal, Live Law reported.

The counsel for the poll body sought two weeks to file its response. However, a bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi granted only a week to the Election Commission.

The matter will be heard next on January 19.

The court was hearing petitions filed by Rajya Sabha MPs Derek O’Brien and Dola Sen.

Appearing for O’Brien, advocate Kapil Sibal alleged before the court that booth-level officers were receiving directions on platforms like WhatsApp instead of through formal means, making it difficult to establish any audit trail of the process.

“The ECI cannot act arbitrarily, capriciously or dehors law, nor can it substitute legally prescribed and set procedures with ad hoc or informal mechanisms,” PTI quoted O’Brien as saying.

In her plea, Sen alleged that orders passed as part of the process were arbitrary and unconstitutional, thereby leading to the deletion of eligible voters, Live Law reported.

The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. It showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent.

The state’s chief electoral officer had at the time announced that an additional 1.36 crore voters would be called for hearings as they were removed from draft rolls due to mismatches or anomalies in voter details, such as spelling variations, inconsistencies in parental or age information, and other data irregularities identified by system-generated algorithms, Live Law reported.

An assistant electoral registration officer who has resigned alleged that these “logical discrepancies” were “due to sporadic errors in the conversion of the PDF of the 2002 Electoral Roll data to CSV [Comma-Separated Values] files”.

“The spelling of the names of 2002 was taken as ‘sacrosanct’,” she had said in her resignation letter. “However, in reality, many names were corrected through Form 8, later in accordance with the rules of ECI. This was the major cause for father name mismatch in cases of progeny mapping.”

West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the first half of 2026.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.

Also read: Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar

The Enforcement Directorate has moved the Supreme Court seeking an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation into West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee allegedly obstructing its raids at the offices of political consultancy firm I-PAC last week, Live Law reported on Sunday.

The Supreme Court is yet to hear the matter, according to Bar and Bench.

The enforcement agency has moved the top court under Article 32 of the Constitution. This provision allows any person to directly approach the Supreme Court to enforce their fundamental rights if they are violated.

On Thursday, the ED conducted searches at I-PAC’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the residence of the firm’s head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood in connection with an investigation into alleged money laundering.

I-PAC, or the Indian Political Action Committee, has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including in the 2021 Assembly elections.

Banerjee arrived at Jain’s home around noon while the search was underway and stayed for about 20 to 25 minutes. She then came out with a green file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were “taking away” party documents ahead of the Assembly elections.

The state is expected to head for polls in the next three to four months.

Banerjee alleged that the ED was confiscating the Trinamool Congress’ “documents and hard disks, which have details about our party candidates” for the elections.

The searches on Thursday were based on a first information report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation into an alleged coal smuggling syndicate that was used to “steal and illegally excavate coal from ECL [Eastern Coalfields Limited] leasehold areas of West Bengal”, the ED said.

In its petition before the Supreme Court, the ED alleged that Banerjee’s intervention derailed a lawful investigation into coal smuggling. The agency accused the Trinamool Congress chief of removing vital evidence.

The sites of the raids descended into scenes resembling a “showdown” due to the illegal intervention of the state machinery itself, The Hindu quoted the central agency as claiming.

The ED sought directions from the Supreme Court to restrain Banerjee and state government officials from obstructing its investigation, Bar and Bench reported.

Notably, the West Bengal government has already approached the Supreme Court to ensure that no ex parte orders are passed in the matter without hearing it first, The Hindu reported.

Earlier, the Trinamool Congress and I-PAC moved the Calcutta High Court challenging the legality of the searches at the locations linked to the political consultancy in Kolkata and Bidhannagar.

The ED also approached the court, alleging “illegal interference” during its search operations.

During the hearing of the matter in the High Court on Friday, Justice Suvra Ghosh rose from her chair as there was chaos in the courtroom before she could hear the petitions filed by the ED and the Trinamool Congress.

The judge listed the matter for hearing on January 14.

Meanwhile, the West Bengal Police also registered first information reports against the ED based on two complaints filed by Banerjee.

The Congress in Maharashtra on Saturday complained to the State Election Commission against a social media post by Bharatiya Janata Party leader and state minister Girish Mahajan announcing the disbursal of funds under the Ladki Bahin scheme ahead of the Makar Sankranti festival, The Times of India reported.

The festival falls on January 14, a day before polling is slated to take place for 29 municipal corporations in Maharashtra, including Mumbai.

The Ladki Bahin scheme, launched in June 2024, provides a monthly transfer of Rs 1,500 to women aged 21 to 65 whose families earn less than Rs 2.5 lakh a year. The scheme is said to have played a significant role in the Mahayuti alliance winning 230 seats in the 288-member Maharashtra Assembly in November.

The coalition comprises the Bharatiya Janata Party, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s faction of the Shiv Sena and the Nationalist Congress Party faction headed by Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar.

देवाभाऊंकडून लाडक्या बहिणींना मिळणार..
मकर संक्रांतीची मोठी भेट !

१४ जानेवारी पूर्वी लाडक्या बहिणींच्या बँक खात्यात डिसेंबर व जानेवारी महिन्याचे
३००० रुपये जमा होणार !#DevendraFadnavis #DevaBhau #MahaYuti #मुख्यमंत्री_लाडकी_बहीण_योजना pic.twitter.com/VEzpm7lczK

— Girish Mahajan (@girishdmahajan) January 7, 2026

On Sunday, Maharashtra Congress president Harshwardhan Sapkal alleged that Mahajan’s post announcing the release of installments for December and January amounted to an attempt to influence women voters and violated the model code of conduct, The Times of India reported.

State Election Commissioner Dinesh Waghmare told the newspaper that the commission would examine the complaint and take action in accordance with the law.

The commission has asked Chief Secretary Rajesh Agarwal to submit a report on Monday, PTI quoted unidentified sources as saying.

Commenting on the matter, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that the Ladki Bahin Yojana is a continuous scheme of the state government and does not fall under the restrictions of the election code of conduct, PTI reported.

The Election Commission on Sunday said that official employment records of workers at tea gardens and cinchona plantations in north Bengal would be counted as a valid document to prove their identity for the ongoing special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal.

This would be applicable for workers in seven districts of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar, Alipurduar, North Dinajpur and South Dinajpur, the poll body said in a letter to the chief electoral officer of West Bengal.

Many of these workers do not possess the documents mandated by the Election Commission for the voter roll revision process. The commission had earlier said that tea estate workers would be verified by district election officers, The Times of India reported.

Since October last year, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders have been making representations to the poll panel on the subject, The Telegraph reported.

Raju Bista, the party’s Darjeeling MP, had sent letters to the poll body in October and November highlighting that the North Bengal districts were home to large tea garden, tea tribe, and forest-dwelling communities who have been excluded from electoral rolls over the years.

“Historically, since the British era, and even decades after Independence, most workers in tea and cinchona gardens possessed no official documents other than their employment records,” he had said while pointing that many of them did not have land rights either.

In response to the poll body accepting the suggestion, Bista said the decision “will benefit thousands of citizens who have long been denied basic documentation and electoral inclusion”.

I am pleased to share that the Election Commission of India has approved the use of Tea Garden and Cinchona Plantation records for SIR verification.

In October 2025, I had written to the Hon’ble Chief Election Commissioner of India, Shri Gyanesh Kumar ji, and followed up in… pic.twitter.com/fLpDmesPi2

— Raju Bista (@RajuBistaBJP) January 11, 2026

The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. It showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent.

West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the first half of 2026.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll.

Also read: Single mother, BJP MLA, Marwari trader: The Bengal voters on EC’s SIR radar

The headmistress of a government school in the Raipur district in Chhattisgarh was suspended after a Class 4 English exam paper listed “Ram” as one of the possible answers to a question about the name of an individual’s dog, The Times of India reported on Monday.

The headmistress, Shikha Soni, said that she intended to write “Ramu” as an option, but inadvertently missed the letter “u'“.

A contractual assistant teacher who moderated the question paper, Namrata Verma, also said that she failed to spot the missing letter, The Times of India reported. In the wake of the controversy, proceedings are underway to terminate her services.

The incident took place at a school at Nakti in the Tilda block of Raipur district.

Both Soni and Verma maintained that they did not intend to hurt religious sentiments, and apologised for their actions.

Nevertheless, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal complained to the district collector and the police, after which a case was filed against unknown persons under a non-bailable section of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita that pertains to deliberate acts outraging religious feelings, The Indian Express reported.

District Education Officer Himanshu Bhartiya launched an inquiry into the matter. A five-member committee has been set up to investigate the complaint.

“Ram is a revered deity of the Hindu religion, and including ‘Ram’ as an option [for the answer] has hurt religious sentiments,” the education officer said, according to The Indian Express.

Bhartiya also issued warning letters to the block education officer of Tilda for failing to appoint an “experienced teacher” to set the paper and to the school principal for not selecting a proper moderator.

The Meghalaya Police has arrested three persons in connection with the killing of the member of a non-governmental organisation, Chief Minister Conrad Sangma said on Saturday.

The chief minister made the statement after the killing of the man led to tensions in the state’s West Garo Hills district, which borders Bangladesh.

The man, identified as Dilseng Sangma, died on Friday after unidentified assailants attacked a team of the non-governmental organisation ACHIK in Goalgaon village, The Shillong Times reported. Another member of the team was seriously injured.

The team had gone to the village in the Rajabala police station area to examine an allegedly illegal stone quarry.

The motive behind the attack was not clear.

“We can be specific after the investigation is over,” West Garo Hills Superintendent of Police Abraham T Sangma was quoted as saying by The Hindu.

On Saturday, the district and the broader Garo Hills region observed a shutdown to protest the killing of the man, The Hindu reported.

Chief Minister Conrad Sangma on Saturday condemned the killing.

He said that the police had conducted several raids in the district on Friday night, which led to the arrest of the three persons. He added that efforts were being made to apprehend others involved in the matter.

The chief minister urged the people of the district to ensure peace and communal harmony continues to prevail.

“There may be a lot of news circulating on social media,” he added. “Please filter them carefully.”

The deputy commissioner of the West Garo Hills district was holding discussions with civil society groups to form a peace committee to ensure that concerns are addressed through a dialogue, the chief minister said.

Rajabala MLA Mizanur Rahman Kazi said on social media that the administration’s priority was to maintain law and order. He added that the “overall situation is currently peaceful and the spirit of brotherhood prevails”.

British doctor Sangram Patil was on Saturday detained at the Mumbai airport in connection with allegedly derogatory social media posts about the Bharatiya Janata Party and its leaders, The Indian Express reported.

Patil, who is also a content creator, was later allowed to leave after he was given a notice under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita to join the investigation later.

The complaint, a member of the BJP, had alleged in December that the doctor had deliberately made allegedly defamatory and misleading posts about the Hindutva party and its leaders, according to Mumbai Tak.

The online posts could create feelings of enmity and hatred between groups, the complainant was quoted as having alleged.

A case had been registered against Patil by the cybercrime department under the Information Technology Act, Mumbai Tak reported. Following this, a lookout notice had been issued against him.

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

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

Condemning the detention of Patil, Congress’ Maharashtra chief Harshwardhan Sapkal asked if democracy was still alive in India.

The condemnation of Patil’s detention “is not enough – it’s woefully inadequate”, Sapkal said on social media. “The arrest (sic) of Dr Sangram Patil, who takes bold political stances, is an international embarrassment for the country,” he added.

The Congress leader demanded that the Mumbai Police and the home ministry immediately clarify why Patil had been detained.

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Friday appointed a person accused in the Badlapur sexual abuse case as a co-opted councillor in the Kulgaon-Badlapur Municipal Council in Maharashtra’s Thane district, reported The Hindu.

As the decision triggered widespread criticism of the party, the order was revoked the same day, according to The New Indian Express.

A co-opted councillor is selected and appointed by an existing councilto fill a vacant seat, rather than being directly elected by the public.

Tushar Apte was the secretary of the educational institution where two four-year-old girls were sexually abused in 2024.

The girls were allegedly sexually assaulted by Akshay Shinde, a male attendant at their school, on August 12, 2024, with the complaint being filed four days later.

Shinde was arrested on August 17, 2024 and was killed on September 23, 2024, while being taken from Taloja Jail to the Thane Crime Branch, with police claiming he snatched a weapon and was shot in retaliatory fire

On January 20, 2025, a Thane magistrate told the Bombay High Court that five police officers were found responsible for Shinde’s custodial death.

Apte was charged in the case under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act section 21(2) for allegedly failing to report the assault, PTI reported. He was arrested 44 days after the case and granted bail within 48 hours. The case against him is sub judice.

Council chairperson Ruchita Ghorpade said that Apte had been selected as one of five co-opted councillors. Of the five, two were nominated by the BJP, two by the Shiv Sena and one by the Nationalist Congress Party.

Defending the appointment earlier, BJP councillor Rajan Ghorpade said: “Though he was named as an accused, his guilt has not been proven.”

“Apte worked actively for the party and contributed to the party candidate’s victory, and therefore, he was given this responsibility,” Ghorpade added.

However, state Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule later said that Apte had submitted his resignation and that the party leadership would take action against those responsible for appointing him, The New Indian Express reported.

A man accused of having raped a woman with a mental illness in Assam’s Kokrajhar district was shot and injured in police firing after officials claimed that he tried to flee custody, The Assam Tribune reported.

The shooting occurred amid tensions in Kokrajhar town following protests and communal clashes linked to the alleged rape.

The police claimed that on Sunday, the accused man, Rafikul Islam, was being taken from a “safe zone” location to the court of the Chief Judicial Magistrate in Kokrajhar when he asked for a toilet break near the Rani Ghuli area.

During the stop, he allegedly snatched a weapon from an accompanying policeman, assaulted him and attempted to flee, The Assam Tribune reported.

The police claimed that they fired in retaliation, injuring Islam in the waist. Two police personnel were also reportedly injured.

Islam has been taken to hospital for treatment.

The woman was allegedly raped on Saturday, following which protests broke out in Kokrajhar town, India Today NE reported.

On Sunday night, an old mosque in Kokrajhar town was attacked by a group of people who shouted religious slogans while vandalising the structure.

A picnic bus named Ma Sarada was also attacked during the night. Several students travelling in the bus sustained injuries and were taken to hospital, India Today NE reported.

In view of the violence, the district administration subsequently imposed orders prohibiting public gatherings under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.

When even an advocate who defends the rights of others every day ends up “completely helpless”, it lays bare crucial failures in laws and procedures meant to ensure women’s safety.

In July, a Chennai-based lawyer approached the Madras High Court after her former partner had secretly filmed their intimate moments during a relationship built on false promises of marriage. Without her knowledge or consent, he uploaded these videos across the internet.

These events formed the basis of the case X vs Union of India.

By the time a friend told her about the videos, the damage was widespread. The videos were on more than 70 platforms: pornographic sites, Twitter or X, Telegram channels, Google Drive links. The videos kept spreading with shifting URLs, multiple accounts and relentless re-uploads.

She took every step required. A first information report was registered on April 1. She made formal representations to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in June, asking for removal under Section 67A of the IT Act. Still, by July, nothing moved. The videos kept circulating. As a lawyer, she found herself publicly and professionally shamed.

Reflecting upon the slow pace of action in this and other such cases, Justice N Anand Venkatesh noted that “the right to privacy and dignity guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution were being violated every second”.

If someone equipped with legal knowledge and access is helpless, what chance does anyone else have?

Structural pattern

Research across 10 countries shows that one in five people experience Image-Based Sexual Abuse, with women carrying the burden and suffering the harshest consequences.

In India, public exposure can mean familial disgrace, social ostracism and professional ruin.

On paper, Indian laws promise urgency: the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2025, require platforms to remove flagged content within 24 hours. But complainants wait weeks, sometimes months, for even the first takedown order. In the internet where “what’s online once is online forever”, 24 hours is already too late.

Images spread, screenshots multiply, re-uploads appear faster than any notice can reach them. Instead of swift protection, survivors have to deal with police apathy, unanswered ministry emails and endless legal processes. Platforms shrug off responsibility while perpetrators operate with near-total impunity.

Even in this case, despite registering an FIR, the advocate waited three months before the court intervened.

Law without protection

When the law refuses to acknowledge the gendered nature of the harm, it reproduces it, leaving women to absorb the fallout.

The IT Act frames such harms as “privacy violations” and “obscenity”. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which has replaced the Indian Penal Code, scatters relevant offences across unrelated provisions as though the non-consensual sharing of intimate images is a technical problem rather than a targeted act of gendered abuse.

That framing makes a violation of trust, autonomy and dignity into a routine content issue. It also shapes institutional behaviour: police routinely dismiss these cases as “relationship disputes” and platforms treat them as terms-of-service infringements.

Platform accountability is an illusion. The IT Rules have a 24-hour removal requirement, but platforms have to take down only the specific links flagged to them. There is no statutory duty to prevent re-uploads, no requirement to use hash-matching, no obligation to coordinate with other platforms and no mechanism to track circulation across the digital ecosystem.

Survivors end up playing an exhausting game of whack-a-mole while platforms meet minimal compliance thresholds and perpetrators shift to the next space.

Most critically, India offers survivors no civil remedies at all. Criminal law is the only path and it depends on police cooperation, digital evidence that survives long enough to be collected and years of proceedings in an overburdened system.

Even when a conviction is eventually secured under the IT Act or Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, any fine imposed goes to the state, not to the woman who lost work, safety, relationships and mental health. The offender is punished symbolically while the survivor is left to deal with the real consequences.

Comparative models

Examples from Canada, Germany and Australia show that online safety for women demands proactive safeguards and institutions that understand the toll survivors carry long after images spread across the internet.

In 2016, an Ontario court awarded an 18-year-old woman $100,000 after she sued her former romantic partner for breach of privacy for sharing intimate videos of her on a pornography website. In addition to ordering takedowns, the court recognised measurable harm such as therapy costs, reputational damage, career loss and continuing psychological trauma. It noted the “permanent and irreversible” nature of online distribution.

Similarly, Germany’s Network Enforcement Act, 2017, imposes fines of up to 50 million euros on platforms that fail to remove illegal content, including non-consensual intimate imagery, within 24 hours of notification. The NetzDG law creates financial incentives for proactive content moderation systems, with mandatory transparency reports detailing complaint volumes and response times.

While criticised for potential over-removal, the model shows that financial consequences can encourage platforms to shift from minimal compliance to systemic investment in safety infrastructure.

In India, where platforms routinely resist compliance citing technical limitations or procedural ambiguities, Germany’s deterrent-based framework shows how to bring about enforceable accountability.

In 2015, Australia established the world’s first eSafety Commissioner, with dedicated powers to issue removal notices for image-based abuse. The commissioner can order platforms to take down content within 24 hours and levy penalties up to 111,000 Australian dollars for non-compliance.

It is a survivor-centered procedure: victims report to one authority rather than navigating multiple platforms and the commissioner coordinates takedowns across platforms simultaneously, preventing the exhausting pattern of content reappearing on new platforms.

This contrasts with the case of the Indian lawyer who had to separately approach the information and technology ministry, the police and more than 70 platforms while content continued spreading.

Systemic accountability

Rather than sweeping new laws to protect women online, India needs a legal and practical system that works as promised.

India can learn from other countries to build its own version by creating a unified framework, placing responsibility on platforms rather than victims, and ensuring compensation and timely support.

Digital safety is a human rights concern that cannot be addressed with technical fixes. Shifting the burden of proof from survivors onto platforms and perpetrators can help make online spaces where women are equal participants.

Vidya Kakra is a lawyer working to support women survivors of sexual and gender-based violence at the Migration and Asylum Project.

Ten persons were arrested after communal clashes broke out on Saturday in Tripura’s Unakoti district over the collection of donations for a local temple, PTI quoted the police as saying on Sunday.

Superintendent of Police Avinash Kumar Rai told PTI that four police personnel and six civilians were injured in the clashes.

“Prohibitory orders under section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita remain in force in the area,” Rai said. “Internet service continues to remain suspended.”

Paramilitary forces are conducting foot patrols in sensitive areas and no fresh violence has been reported in the district, the police officer said.

The violence began after members of a local club stopped a truck allegedly transporting smuggled timber and sought money from the driver in the name of a festival, The Times of India reported. The driver refused to pay the money, leading to an altercation.

The violence triggered a political row, with Leader of the Opposition Jitendra Chaudhury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party-led state government of failing to protect the lives and properties of persons belonging to the minority community.

“When Kumarghat [town in Unakoti district] was burning, the chief minister was busy leading a roadshow in Kanchanpur in North Tripura,” PTI quoted him as saying. “He has not made any statement against the communal violence.”

State BJP president Rajib Bhattacharjee condemned the violence and praised the police for taking action against those responsible.

It had been a long day at work for Sumana, but she still decided to visit her booth-level officer’s home in a South Kolkata neighbourhood that December evening. The officer had not been answering her phone calls, making the 45-year-old restless.

She was worried because the Election Commission had categorised her daughter, 19, as an “unmapped voter” in the ongoing special intensive revision of West Bengal’s voter lists. This means her daughter was unable to show that either she or her close relatives were voters back in 2002.

Neither Sumana nor her late husband were registered to vote at that time so she could not provide their information in her daughter’s enumeration form. There are close to 32 lakh so-called unmapped voters across the state.

Starting from the last week of December, the commission has held hearings to examine their documents and determine their eligibility to vote in the future. Bengali war veterans, international cricketers and even former ministers have been summoned so far.

Sumana – who requested that her actual name not be disclosed in this report – wanted to save her daughter from this ordeal. So she scanned scores of voter lists from 2002 till she finally found the names of her in-laws, who live in north Bengal and are no longer in touch with her. Then, she gathered her daughter’s papers and set off for her booth-level officer’s home around 8.30 that night.

When she got there, the officer’s husband stepped out. “You think you can come here whenever you like?” he asked her angrily. “What do you think of yourself?”

Sumana was shaken. “If you knew what I have been through in life, you would not have spoken to me like this,” she said to him.

Sumana is estranged from her late husband’s family. In the fourteen years since his demise, she has worked hard in her job with a private company in Kolkata to provide for her daughter.

“It is a chapter of my life that I wanted to forget,” she told Scroll. “Just because of this SIR, I had to go through it again. It reminded me of all the past memories that I had set aside to move forward in life.”

The SIR has made Sumana bitter about politics. “I will not vote for anybody from now on,” she said. “What difference does my vote make? Some illiterate people come to power and play with our lives.”

The Election Commission has pushed the SIR on war-footing, citing the alleged mass inclusion of foreigners in India’s voter lists as one of its reasons for carrying out the exercise. Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, too, have repeatedly demanded an SIR in West Bengal, claiming that there are over one crore “Bangladeshis, Rohingyas” on the state’s voter rolls.

Yet, the actual process on the ground is more complex. Many of the so-called unmapped voters are Hindi-speaking migrants and Hindu refugees from Bangladesh, according to an analysis conducted by the Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research organisation.

Scroll also found that people from these backgrounds have been called for the Election Commission’s hearings. Most interviewees said that the SIR has turned out to be stressful, and even traumatising, for them.

Trinamool using SIR to ‘strike off Hindi-speaking voters’

Navratan Jhawar, 64, moved to Kolkata decades ago. Born in Rajasthan’s Parbatsar town, he came to the city at the age of 19 and settled in Kolkata’s Burrabazar area, a business hub teeming with traders from northwest India. For years, he ran a business sourcing mustard oil from Alwar and Bharatpur and selling it in Kolkata.

Jhawar has voted regularly in elections over the years. He claims his name is on the 2002 voter list as well. Still, the Election Commission tagged him as an “unmapped voter” and called him for a hearing on January 2.

The reason? Jhawar changed his first name from Noratmal to Navratan in 2006. He did so, he claims, because Bengalis would find it difficult to pronounce his original name. He said he followed the legal process for changing his name at that time.

But at the hearing, the commission asked him to show a government gazette notification and two newspaper cuttings to prove that he had publicised the change in his name. Alternatively, Jhawar could also re-register himself as a new voter. However, he is vehemently opposed to the idea.

“This is not merely about my vote,” he explained. “Today my voter ID is being declared invalid, tomorrow it could be my Aadhaar. It is possible that the registry office will freeze my properties next. These things cannot be taken lightly.”

Though Jhawar still supports the SIR in principle, he is concerned about how the process is panning out in West Bengal.

“The ruling party [Trinamool Congress] is pressuring state government officials to strike off names of Hindi speakers and Hindu refugees who support the BJP,” he alleged. “The Election Commission is unable to help us.”

‘Refugees are under stress’

One such refugee is Ashis Kumar Biswas, the BJP MLA from Krishnaganj in the border district of Nadia. Biswas, 59, is a Namasudra, a Scheduled Caste, who came to West Bengal with his parents in order to flee religious persecution in what was then East Pakistan.

He recalled how he worked his way up in life as a landless refugee. He attended a government school and later enlisted in the Indian Air Force as a sergeant. The job took him to 14 states across India, he remembered. After retiring from the air force, he joined the BJP and became an MLA in 2019.

On December 30, Biswas, too, was called in for an SIR hearing. But he sought to downplay the impact of the experience.

“The hearing was only to clarify why my name was not in the 2002 voter list,” he said. “I explained that I was in a transferable government job so I was not available in West Bengal then. I showed them my PPO [Pension Payment Order] and caste certificate. That was the end of it.”

While the BJP MLA did admit that the SIR was causing panic among Hindu refugees, he blamed Trinamool for politicising the issue.

“They [Trinamool] are creating terror in the minds of refugees,” he contended. “The refugees who came after 1971 are under stress. The government of India is making arrangements to help them.”

Notably, Biswas differs with many of his partymen in how he views the SIR. “Finding Bangladeshis is not the Election Commission’s job,” he stated.

‘Grating’ but need to stop ‘illegal migration’

Even so, some Hindu voters such as Tushar Laddha, a Kolkata-based entrepreneur, are putting up with the “grating” SIR process precisely because they view it as a step against illegal migration.

“Many people have come here just to live off the land,” Laddha said. “I see it across the canal from my house. And it causes problems for me daily, whether it is in terms of traffic congestion or littered streets. So most people in my family are happy that at least something is being done about this.”

The 30-year-old manufacturer of plastic additives traces his roots to Rajasthan. He estimated that his family had lived in Kolkata for seven or eight decades. When the Election Commission first rolled out the SIR in November, the Laddhas were plunged into confusion.

They dialed up about a dozen old neighbours and distant relatives with whom they had lost touch over the years. At one point, Laddha assigned two of his employees the task of scanning the 2002 voter list for their names.

Eventually, they realised that their names were missing from the old list because they had shifted homes around that time. In the late 1990s, the family left their small apartment in the modest north Kolkata neighbourhood of Phoolbagan and moved into a bungalow in the posh suburb of Salt Lake.

On January 8, Laddha and five of his relatives attended an SIR hearing in Kolkata. He described the experience as “smooth”.

‘Profound insecurity’ of hauling up a 72-year-old poet

For many others, the hearings have been anything but smooth. Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Bengali poet Joy Goswami, 72, was summoned on January 2 because his name was not in the 2002 voter list.

He could not appear for the hearing as he underwent multiple surgeries only in November, his daughter Debotri Goswami, who also goes by the name of Bukun Chorai, told Scroll. His doctors have mandated bed rest for him, she added.

Ever since the Election Commission began with physical hearings for so-called unmapped voters last month, the question of whether elderly people should be spared has repeatedly made the news. In the face of public outrage, the commission decided to allow officials to visit elderly voters’ homes and verify their details. However, the relief was extended only to voters aged 85 or above.

The septuagenarian Joy Goswami could not avail this option. In an interview Bukun gave to The Times of India, she said that she was withholding news of the hearing from her ailing father because she feared it would “hurt” him.

She, too, has been asked to attend a hearing, given that the names of both her parents are not in the 2002 voter list. That her father was a well-known public figure did not stop the Election Commission from summoning him and his daughter. Both are facing scrutiny from the commission only because her father chose not to be a voter in the past.

“Such scrutiny does not strengthen democracy. It exposes a profound insecurity within it,” Bukun said. “The central issue is not why my father made a particular choice, but why the state assumed the right to demand an explanation in the manner that it did.”

‘I feel helpless’

A banker by profession, Girish Dubey came to Kolkata from Sultanpur, Uttar Pradesh, when he was four. He received all his education in the city and takes great pride in his knowledge of Bengal’s geography and culture.

While his work has taken him to various parts of eastern India, Kolkata is the only home he has ever known. The 56-year-old claims to have voted in as many as seven state and national elections before 2002 and many more after that.

This is why he was shocked to discover that his name was missing from the 2002 voter list uploaded online by the Election Commission. He could not tell why with certainty, but he suspects politics had something to do with it.

“In those days, we Hindi speakers were considered Congress voters so the communists wanted to strike off our names,” Dubey said. “Now we are believed to be BJP voters. I feel helpless when people develop such preconceived ideas without understanding how I think or what my ideology is.”

Dubey’s hearing is scheduled for January 19. He will go for it with all his documents, especially his old voter card that was rendered invalid after 2002. He worries the day will be “painful” for him. Yet, he is determined to have his name included in the final voter list.

Social media platform X has accepted lapses in its content moderation, blocked 3,500 posts and deleted more than 600 accounts after the Union government directed it to remove sexually explicit content generated by its artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

The social media platform reportedly told the government that it will comply with Indian laws and that it will not allow explicit imagery on the platform, ANI reported.

On Friday, the platform limited Grok’s image-generation feature to paid subscribers, which effectively meant the names and payment information of those using the feature would be on file.

Grok had earlier allowed requests by users to digitally manipulate photos of real persons – mostly women – by undressing them and sexualising their images without their consent. It had been creating thousands of such images every hour, Bloomberg reported.

Even after the feature was limited on X, the standalone Grok app was still allowing users to generate such images without subscribing, according to the social media platform.

On January 2, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology told X to “undertake a comprehensive technical, procedural and governance-level review” of Grok to ensure that it does not generate content that contains nudity or sexually explicit material.

The Centre warned the social media platform that not complying with the directive could lead to action against its officials under the Information Technology Act, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.

In the letter to X’s chief compliance officer in India, the Union government said that users were misusing Grok to create fake accounts to generate and share obscene photos and videos of women with the intent of denigrating them.

“Importantly, this is not limited to creation of fake accounts but also targets women who host or publish their images or videos, through prompts, image manipulation and synthetic outputs,” the ministry said.

Hosting or publishing obscene and sexually explicit content, including through AI-enabled tools, is invasive of bodily privacy and attracts serious penal consequences, the Centre said.

The government also directed X to submit an action taken report within 72 hours, detailing the measures undertaken to oversee the Grok application, the oversight exercised by the chief compliance officer, the action taken against offending content and the mechanisms put in place to comply with mandatory reporting requirements.

Amid criticism, X owner Elon Musk said on January 3 that “anyone using Grok to make illegal content will suffer the same consequences as if they upload illegal content”.

The 70 million citizens of India’s national capital region and its extended districts are choking on air pollution. Freshwater underground is depleting rapidly in the NCR with the pressure of urbanisation. Delhi’s 70 million are not alone in their environmental misery. India, with its 1.5 billion population, is the most environmentally-stressed large economy in the world.

Environmental stress is a global problem: the air above and aquifers underground, cross state and national boundaries. Nations are unable to cooperate to arrest global climate change. The US, the wealthiest nation, and the largest polluter per capita, has backed away from global climate agreements. Even wealthy, “green conscious” European nations are avoiding the “polluter pays” principle. They want to impose a carbon tax on poor countries, who have suffered the most from the Western, techno-centric, free market driven model of economic growth that has been imposed on all.

“Decarbonisation” is not happening fast enough to reverse the addition of more carbon into the atmosphere. Global temperatures will continue to rise for much longer than they should to attain the moonshot goal of “net zero”.

Albert Einstein, who upended the physical sciences in the 20th century with his theories of relativity, said that it is madness to continue solving problems with the same thinking that may have caused them. Even scientists now admit that the present approach to arresting climate change is not working. The time has come to take a much broader systems view and to reexamine the physics and economics of climate change.

The physics of climate change

Runaway climate change is fuelled by the relentless drive to increase the “productivity” of economies and humans by replacing the energy of humans with energy extracted from the Earth’s resources. Obtaining energy by burning wood was the first technological advance of humans over other animals. Coal was tapped next, a denser source of energy which required more technology but produced more energy.

Then came the extraction of energy from hydrocarbon sources and its use for driving machinery and transportation equipment, with which the pace of industrialisation and economic growth accelerated. These combined factors have led to the climate crisis, and the search for “renewable” sources of energy.

Today’s artificial intelligence algorithms operating in the cloud are supported by large server farms on earth, running on massive amounts of electricity.

There is no escape from the universal law of conversion of material energy. All energy is derived from materials. The amount of energy that can be extracted from materials is limited by Einstein’s famous formula, E=MC2.

The Earth is a complex system of materials and energy. The extraction of so-called renewable energies, whether nuclear, hydro or wind, alters the configuration of the Earth’s material structures with long-term consequences. Large dams affect geological structures while irrigation systems alter the chemistry of soils. Though immediately increasing the availability of low-cost energy and improving agriculture productivity, these large-scale Earth-altering solutions harm livelihoods and lives in the medium and long term.

The production of “clean” nuclear energy, by radically transforming basic materials, produces dirty materials, the safe disposal of which is an existential hazard. Finally, the only additional “new energy” for increasing productivity that comes from outside the Earth’s bio-sphere is solar energy from the Sun.

Energy is not the only resource that humans need for their existence. Water is fundamental for the sustenance of life. Scientists are looking for signs of water on other planets to determine whether other planets may be habitable for humans in the future. Large-scale industrial, and even clean energy projects like nuclear, impact the availability and quality of water while harming the lives of communities around them.

Tribes and nations, even states within nations, demand their fair share of the Earth’s water resources. For centuries, populations have warred with changing geographies of water availability and soil fertility caused by changes in climate patterns; large-scale migration, in search of better livelihoods, has caused immense human suffering and continues to.

The resort to narrow scientific solutions to the many problems affecting humanity simultaneously – carbon in the air, dwindling freshwater availability and increasing soil infertility – are affecting the sustainability of the whole ecosystem. Systemic solutions are necessary for the sustainability of livelihoods and economic growth, which will ensure the self-sustainability of the Earth as a self-adapting complex system.

Therefore, a new systems science must be applied.

The economics of climate change

An intractable problem for economic policymakers is how to finance “green energy” technological solutions. Finance is available with the richer countries in the West, who have accumulated their resources and also increased their geo-political power, with their scientific, technological advances. But they are reluctant to share their technologies without adequate protection of their intellectual property and compensation. They are also unwilling to share their wealth with the poorer and, so far, less technologically-advanced nations who need new technological solutions.

Food, clean water and energy are basic human needs to sustain life. The United Nations’ sustainable development goal, SDG 7, on affordable and clean energy’ “aims to ensure universal access to modern, reliable, and sustainable energy by 2030”. Even the poorest human beings, who may have no income or wealth, are entitled to adequate and affordable clean energy. Here lies a core problem of 21st century economics. Who will pay for the energy they must have if they cannot pay for it themselves?

A private business should not be expected to bear a social burden. The business of a business must be only business. It must stay focused on improving its internal efficiency and producing better returns for its financial owners and investors.

Social investments should be made by governments who must provide for those who are not earning enough to pay market prices for their basic needs. However, 21st century economics is making this difficult, by insisting that governments balance their own budgets and also insisting that governments must not tax the rich and private corporations because it would curb their animal spirits to make more profits for themselves.

If their governments will not pay, and the people themselves cannot, then how will they sustain their lives amidst the many ecological and economic crises listed in the 17 sustainable development goals, all of which were aimed to be achieved by 2030?

The privatisation of the financial sector has gone too far with the swing away from “socialist” and more humanist economic models towards the new millennium’s free market, private capital-driven models. They are driven by the late 20th century “Washington Consensus”, with American control of the global financial system.

India’s policymakers must break out of the Western, techno-economic paradigm of progress to find a new path for socio-economic progress with equitable improvement of living conditions of all Indian citizens. They should look East, and search inwards for native wisdom for a new paradigm of progress.

China, for example, is the world’s leader in green technologies. China’s exports of green technology products now exceed exports of the US hydrocarbon industry. Moreover, China has lifted its billion-plus citizens much faster and much further out of poverty than India has.

India should give up slavishly following Western models but must not blindly imitate China either. India must find its own, ecologically sustainable way to its tryst with destiny, to provide poorna swaraj – equal, political, social and economic freedom – for all its citizens. Local systems solutions, cooperatively implemented by communities, is the only way global systemic problems of climate change and persistent poverty can be solved sustainably. We can learn a lot within India and don’t have to rely on imported solutions.

Arun Maira is the author of Reimagining India’s Economy: The Road to a More Equitable Society.

The Delhi Police on Friday night arrested three more persons in connection with the clashes that broke out during an anti-encroachment drive near a mosque and a graveyard at Delhi’s Turkman Gate on Wednesday, reported The New Indian Express.

With this, the total number of arrests in the case reached 16.

The clashes had broken out when the Municipal Corporation of Delhi was carrying out a demolition drive on land adjoining the Faiz Elahi Mosque and a nearby graveyard.

An unidentified official of the civic body claimed that the mosque was not damaged during the drive.

However, unidentified police officials told PTI that the situation escalated after social media posts claimed that the mosque was being demolished, leading to a large crowd gathering at the site.

They claimed that around 150 to 200 persons were involved in the violence, and six police personnel, including the local station house officer, were injured.

Those arrested on Friday were identified as Mohammad Naved, Mohammad Faiz and Mohammad Ubaidulla. They have been remanded to judicial custody till January 21.

“Further investigation is underway,” Delhi Police Additional Commissioner Nidhin Valsan was quoted as saying by The New Indian Express.

He added that the police were searching for 10 more persons suspected to be involved in the violence, The Indian Express reported.

On Friday, a Delhi court remanded eight of those arrested to 12 days of judicial custody, stating that, prima facie, their presence at the site of violence was apparent, PTI reported.

Five others sought bail, alleging assault inside jail premises, following which the court issued notices to the Delhi Police and the jail superintendent, and sought medical records. The case will be heard next on Tuesday.

Police have invoked Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita provisions related to rioting and obstructing public servants, along with section 109, pertaining to attempt to murder.

The demolition drive followed a December 22 order of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi declaring that structures beyond 0.19 acres of land around the mosque were encroachments and liable to be removed.

The civic body said that no documentary evidence had been produced to establish ownership or lawful possession of the land by the mosque’s managing committee or the Delhi Waqf Board. The mosque is located within the 0.19-acre land.

The corporation’s order was issued after a November 12 direction of a division bench of the Delhi High Court, which granted the civic body and the Public Works Department three months to clear 38,940 square feet of encroachments near Ramlila Ground at Turkman Gate.

However, on January 6, the Delhi High Court said that the matter “requires consideration” while hearing a plea filed by the mosque’s managing committee challenging the December 22 order.

The Supreme Court has urged the Union government to consider introducing a “Romeo-Juliet” clause to protect consensual adolescent relationships from criminal action under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

The court said on Friday that such a clause should exempt “genuine adolescent relationships from the stronghold of this law” and should put in place a mechanism enabling the prosecution “of those persons who, by the use of these laws, seeks to settle scores, etc”.

A “Romeo Juliet” clause is a legal exemption to statutory rape laws where the age difference between the persons involved is low and the relationship is consensual.

A bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and NK Singh made these observations while setting aside a set of directions issued by the Allahabad High Court in a bail case under the POCSO Act.

The High Court had directed that in cases under the Act, the police must conduct medical tests to determine the age of the victim at the very start of the investigation. Bail courts should assess these medical reports, and determine the credibility of age-related documents such as school or birth certificates, the High Court had said.

The Supreme Court, however, said that the High Court exceeded its jurisdiction by passing such orders in response to a bail petition. The top court said that the directions contravened the provisions of the Juvenile Justice Act.

Section 94 of the Juvenile Justice Act says that age of a person should be determined on the basis of a matriculation or equivalent certificate from the school, failing which a birth certificate issued by a municipal body or panchayat can be relied upon. Medical tests such as ossification tests should be ordered only in the absence of these documents, the provision states.

Although the Supreme Court on Friday set aside the directions on age determination, it did not interfere with the High Court’s order granting bail to a man accused of kidnapping a minor and sexually assaulting her.

The bench said that courts have repeatedly seen cases in which the age of a woman is falsely shown to be below 18 years so that the provisions of the POCSO Act can be invoked against the man.

The misuse of the POCSO Act “highlights a grim societal chasm”, the court said.

“…On the one end children are silenced by fear and their families are constrained by poverty or stigma, meaning thereby that justice remains distant and uncertain, and on the other hand, those equipped with privilege, literacy, social and monetary capital are able to manipulate the law to their advantage,” the court said.

The bench directed that a copy of the judgement be sent to the Union law secretary so that the ministry could “consider initiation of steps as may be possible to curb this menace”.

Also read: Why the protection of teenagers needs to be balanced with respecting their sexual autonomy

A 22-year-old man allegedly killed a Dalit woman and abducted her daughter in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Meerut district earlier this week, PTI reported.

The killing and abduction allegedly took place on Thursday morning in the Kapsad village. The 20-year-old daughter was rescued from Haridwar in Uttarakhand on Saturday, the Hindustan Times reported.

The crime sparked protests from opposition leaders, due to which additional security personnel were deployed in the area.

The police alleged that a man named Paras Som and his aides attacked the woman with a sharp-edged sugarcane-cutting weapon when she was trying to shield her daughter. The men subsequently fled with the daughter, while her 45-year-old woman succumbed to her injuries, according to the Hindustan Times.

Som worked as a compounder for a local doctor, and lived in the same village as the woman. The police have not yet ascertained the motive for his alleged actions.

Senior Superintendent of Police Vipin Tada said that the 20-year-old woman has been rescued, and the main accused man has been arrested, the Hindustan Times reported. Both of them were being brought to Meerut, the official said.

The family of the woman was given a compensation cheque of Rs 10 lakh from the chief minister’s office. The authorities were also considering giving them an arms licence considering their security concerns, PTI quoted District Magistrate VK Singh as saying.

The 45-year-old woman was cremated late on Friday evening after hours of negotiations between her family and officials. Earlier, the family had refused to conduct the last rites, demanding that the accused men be arrested and action be taken against their allegedly illegal properties.

The 45-year-old woman’s death sparked protests, during which members of the Bhim Army demanded the immediate arrest of the accused, leading to brief altercations with the police, PTI reported.

On Saturday, Samajwadi Party MP Ramji Lal Suman and other members of the party were stopped at a toll booth while they were on their way Meerut, the Hindustan Times reported. This sparked protests and led to the Rapid Action Force being deployed. The MP and his supporters were later convinced by the police to return.

Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati described the crime as “extremely heartbreaking, shameful and worrisome”.

She called on the government to take crimes against women seriously and ensure strict action against those responsible.

यूपी में मेरठ के सरधना थाना अन्तर्गत दलित माँ की हुई हत्या तथा बेटी के अपहरण की ताज़ा घटना अति-दुखद, शर्मनाक एवं चिन्तनीय। महिलाओं की इज़्ज़त-आबरू से खिलवाड़ और फिर हत्या आदि की घटनाओं को सरकार पूरी गंभीरता से लेकर दोषियों के खिलाफ तत्काल सख़्त कार्रवाई करे ताकि आपराधिक तत्वों…

— Mayawati (@Mayawati) January 8, 2026

The Indian cricket board last week instructed the Indian Premier League’s Kolkata Knight Riders team to drop Mustafizur Rahman from its squad. It cited “recent developments that are going on all across” but the reason was evident: he is a Bangladeshi.

In response, the interim Bangladeshi government banned the broadcast of the 2026 IPL tournament, saying that no reason had been communicated for excluding Rahman. The Bangladesh Cricket Board on its part declared that its team would not travel to India for the Twenty20 World Cup scheduled to begin in February, citing the purportedly “violent communal policy” of the Indian cricket board.

After the International Cricket Council rejected Bangladesh’s request to play its matches in co-host Sri Lanka (just like Pakistan will do), Dhaka said that it was concerned about the safety of its team in India.

The world cup matches will take place around the time Bangladesh heads for its first national election since the ouster of the Sheikh Hasina government in August 2024. A tense political situation could cause passions on both sides of the border to run high.

The removal of Rahman – the only Bangladeshi picked in the 2026 IPL edition – was not abrupt. It came amid diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Dhaka after the killing of a Hindu man in Bangladesh in December.

The decision was reportedly taken at the highest level of the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

Kolkata Knight Riders, whose co-owners include actor Shah Rukh Khan, had faced sharp criticism for picking Rahman from some in the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, spiritual leaders and others in the Hindutva ecosystem.

BJP leader Sangeet Som had on December 31 called co-owner Shah Rukh Khan a “traitor” for recruiting Rahman despite the attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh.

The Opposition Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) party described Bangladeshis as “enemies” and said that Khan did not understand the country’s sentiments.

There was a time when such grievances were reserved for Pakistan, which has not played a cricket match in Mumbai in 46 years and none in India – barring world championships – since 2012 following objections from Hindutva groups. Pakistanis have also not played in the IPL except for the inaugural season in 2008.

Dhaka’s manoeuvres

The public resentment, it seems, is mutual. Shifts in Bangladeshi sentiment about India have been starkly visible since the Hasina government was ousted.

Some public hostility against India has been fuelled by the fact that Hasina, who faces a death sentence in Bangladesh, has been allowed to live in Delhi. Her seeming impunity adds to the friction in recent years between a more Islamised Bangladeshi society and strident Hindutva in India.

Religious minorities in Bangladesh are being attacked in a manner that New Delhi has described as “systematic persecution”. The attacks include the lynching in December of a Hindu man, which triggered the latest diplomatic crisis.

New Delhi has also been troubled by strategic moves by the Muhammad Yunus government to improve military cooperation and cultural ties with Pakistan – the country against which Bangladesh fought for freedom. Dhaka’s talks to purchase the JF-17 fighter jets from Pakistan (jointly developed with China) have only added to India’s anxieties.

In New Delhi’s view, this could hurt regional balance and possibly open up another front that is unstable, if not outright hostile, for India to tackle.

‘Bangladesh is not Pakistan’

But there is a contrary view: despite Dhaka’s decisions, Bangladesh is not Pakistan.

Shashi Tharoor, the chairperson of India’s parliamentary committee on external affairs, wrote in The Indian Express that what differentiates Bangladesh from Pakistan is that Dhaka has not made “the export of terror a pillar of state policy”. Imposing a “‘Pakistan-like’ isolation” on it means ignoring the nuances of geopolitics, he contended.

“To conflate the complex internal dynamics of Bangladesh with something like the state-sponsored hostility of Pakistan is not merely a visceral overreaction; it is a diplomatic blunder that reveals a profound failure of imagination,” the Congress leader said.

While there are groups in Bangladesh whose actions deserve condemnation, a blanket boycott of their cricketers “is to play into the hands of the extremists” and a “troubling departure from…strategic common sense”, Tharoor said.

Even some among BJP’s key allies understand this.

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

No bail. The Supreme Court denied bail to activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who are accused of being part of an alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2020 Delhi riots. The bench, however, allowed the bail applications of Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan.

The court said that Khalid and Imam can file bail applications after all protected witnesses are examined or after one year. It said that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the conduct of the two men was prima facie a terrorist act as defined under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

The activists were arrested between January 2020 and September 2020. The police have claimed that the February 2020 violence in North East Delhi, between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it, was part of a larger conspiracy to defame the Narendra Modi government and planned by those who organised the protests against the amended law.

Ratna Singh explains why the Supreme Court denied bail to Khalid and Imam, but granted it to the five other activists.

The state of India-US relations. The proposed trade deal between India and the United States was not finalised because Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not call US President Donald Trump, the country’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed. He claimed that India was “uncomfortable” with this step and that the call never happened.

Lutnick said that the conditions under which India and the US had earlier appeared close to finalising a deal were no longer available. However, he added that “India will work it out”.

New Delhi said that Lutnick’s characterisation of the trade discussions was not accurate.

Without a trade deal with Washington, Indian goods are facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%. The punitive levies on India and others had been introduced as part of Trump’s pressure campaign against countries buying discounted Russia oil amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Lutnick’s comment came a day after Senator Lindsey Graham said that Trump had approved a bill that could pave the way for tariffs of up to 500% on countries such as India for buying Russian oil. The bill could be put to vote in the Congress next week.

To argue that the tariffs worked as intended, Graham had on January 4 quoted the Indian ambassador as having told him in a private conversation that India was buying less Russian oil, and had urged him to request Trump to relax tariffs linked to such imports. Reacting to Graham’s comments, Trump said that the US could raise tariffs on India if New Delhi does not cut Russian oil imports.

Strange alliances. Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s post-poll alliances with the Congress in Thane district’s Ambernath and the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen in Akola district’s Akot were unacceptable. “It will have to be broken,” he said.

The local alliances were formed after the municipal council elections in December. Fadnavis said that disciplinary action will be taken if party workers are found to have violated orders.

The Congress dissolved its Ambernath block committee and suspended 12 of its corporators for allying with the BJP without the approval of the party’s state leadership.

Tabassum Barnagarwala writes about why Opposition workers are crying foul in Maharashtra civic polls.

Also on Scroll last week

• India repeatedly forced 14 members of Bengali Muslim family from Odisha into Bangladesh, says kin
• ‘As helpless as a common man’: Why Jammu and Kashmir’s MLAs say they are powerless in the new regime
• On the road to Chardham, a landslide every two kilometres
• India’s car-first cities should prioritise walking to help tackle smog
• The spectacle of justice in the Delhi riots case is cover for polarisation and violence
• Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another
• MGNREGA gone, Centre is puppet master of new scheme with no guarantees
• What the US invasion of Venezuela reveals about international law
• US intervention in Venezuela was wrong – but now, a Japan-style rebuilding plan must unfold
• Sriram Raghavan interview: The ‘certain ache in the heart’ that led to ‘Ikkis’

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

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The recent crisis involving IndiGo has exposed deep structural problems in India’s aviation sector.

What unfolded early this year was not merely an operational lapse or a temporary disruption, but a reflection of the power imbalance in a high demand aviation market with two dominant players.

Sixty percent of India’s domestic market share is held by IndiGo; out of nearly 900 domestic routes, IndiGo is the only carrier on 514 routes.

Together with Air India, the two carriers control a staggering 86% of the market.

By itself, high market concentration is not proof of monopoly. But it does create grounds for business practices that may fall under the Abuse of Dominant Position clause in India’s Competition Act, 2002.

For instance, in the recent crisis, it created a situation where the airline made decisions that severely inconvenienced passengers and compromised their welfare – flight cancellations and subsequent charging of exorbitant prices – without worrying that it would lose customers.

The Competition Commission of India has decided to investigate IndiGo under this clause.

The immediate reason for the crisis lay in the airline’s non-adherence to the Flight Duty Time Limit regulations, announced early January. These guidelines were designed to ensure safety by preventing pilot fatigue, a critical concern in aviation worldwide.

Airlines such as IndiGo had enough time to prepare for the transition, adjust crew schedules, hire appropriately, and strengthen operations. Yet, they delayed implementation, creating a situation where operational capacity was strained to the breaking point.

By failing to prepare for a well-anticipated regulatory change, IndiGo and other carriers left regulators with no option but to put Flight Duty Time Limit regulations in abeyance.

Trouble in the skies

If found guilty by the Competition Commission of India, under Section 4 of the Competition Act, IndiGo can be penalised for up to 10% of its total revenues, and depending on the findings, the Commission can also order structural remedies, including changes to business practices or removal of certain routes from its network.

Here, one might be reminded of IndiGo’s past encounters with the CCI, where no anti-competitive intent could be established. In 2015, when IndiGo was accused of poaching pilots from other airlines, the matter was investigated under Section 4 of the Competition Act. The regulatory body concluded that there was no evidence of anti-competitive intent.

In 2018, in a separate case against IndiGo, Spice Jet and Jet Airways, the CCI found that they had colluded over fuel surcharge rates on cargo flights, and fined them.

In 2020, in yet another case, the Competition Commission of India found no evidence of collusion over ticket prices by IndiGo, SpiceJet, GoAir, Air India and Jet Airways.

Monopoly practice or policy failure?

Post-liberalisation, with the entry of several private players, the monopoly of Indian Airlines and Air India on air transport was diluted.

As of January 2008, there were 14 scheduled and 70 non-scheduled airlines in India. This included several low-cost carriers such as Deccan, Go-Air, and Spice-Jet.

IndiGo entered the market in 2006.

These low-cost carriers changed the aviation industry: multiple slab tariffs allowed the entry of a whole new segment of air travellers.

Increased passenger volumes compelled incumbent full-service airlines to revisit their cost structures and pricing strategies.

The market share of nine major airlines ranged from 1% to 23%, with IndiGo accounting for 9%. In terms of fleet size, Jet airways was the biggest player next to Indian Airlines, with IndiGo operating just seven aircrafts in 2007.

From that modest beginning, to today’s position of a dominant carrier, IndiGo’s journey is about business acumen and well thought out strategies that helped the carrier outlive a policy space that failed to adapt to the emerging competitive environment.

In the early 2000s, the aviation sector faced several structural challenges.

Though the modernisation and privatisation of airports improved infrastructure, it was accompanied by extremely high user fees and airport development fees. The User Development Fees varies across airports and is passed on to both the passengers and carriers, affecting profitability of carriers.

ATF accounts for more than 40% of the operating expenses of carriers, and volatility in ATF prices have implications for profitability. Add to this the stringent compliance regime and multiple administrative reporting procedures for The Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Airports Authority of India, and the Ministry of Civil Aviation.

In short, the Indian aviation sector can be described as high on investment, and low on what is referred to as “ease of doing business”.

At play was also IndiGo’s business strategy of aggressive bulk purchases and advance ordering, that locked airplane manufacturer discounts, and ensured an inventory of new fuel-efficient aircrafts in a volatile fuel cost environment. This enabled IndiGo to achieve significant cost advantages over competitors and maintain consistently low operating expenses.

A modern, fuel-efficient fleet also meant higher reliability and quicker turnaround times.

The carrier was consistent on its low cost approach and maintained a highly homogenised single-type fleet. The dividends came in the form of simplified training requirements, savings on training costs and overall cost efficiency.

The airlines also took advantage of the emerging markets, and continued to deliver on its brand positioning as a reliable and cheap option.

Other airlines failed to respond to the new competitive environment and the adverse policy landscape. Their exit, including that of Jet Airways, created a vacuum that IndiGo swiftly filled.

Thus IndiGo’s growth is an outcome of tight financial prudence and a competitive edge despite an unfavourable aviation policy regime.

The going was good, until it was not.

Healthy competition

A recent estimate pegs the growth of the Indian airline industry at 104.24%, and passenger capacity at 1 billion per annum.

With the government’s UDAN scheme democratising air travel and bridging the infrastructure gap, passenger traffic in the country is expected to grow six-fold. By 2040, the airline fleet is predicted to grow to 2359 – it stood at 400 in 2014 – and generate 25 million jobs by 2040.

But consumer welfare in aviation – or any other industry – depends on healthy competition. Ideally, India needs at least three to four strong players to absorb shocks, maintain service standards, and give customers viable alternatives.

With air travel becoming essential for millions of Indians, this is no longer just a business concern. It is a public interest issue.

Besides, the recent crisis raises concerns not just about airline accountability, but also regulatory oversight.

The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) must enforce stricter compliance, monitor airline preparedness, and act decisively when service lapses cause widespread public hardship.

IndiGo’s dominance may have grown organically, but its responsibilities have grown equally. It cannot be allowed to evade accountability for the turmoil it created.

Only then can the aviation sector function with reliability, fairness, and resilience.

Sangita Dutta Gupta is Professor, Economics at BML Munjal University, Haryana. M Manjula is Faculty, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Tania Ghosh is Assistant Professor, Shri Shikshayatan College, Kolkata.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Friday announced that the state government has recommended a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the 2022 Ankita Bhandari murder case, The New Indian Express reported.

Bhandari worked as a receptionist at a resort in Uttarakhand’s Rishikesh that was owned by Pulkit Arya, son of former BJP leader Vinod Arya. She went missing on September 18, 2022. A day later, Pulkit Arya, resort manager Saurabh Bhaskar and assistant manager Ankit Gupta filed a missing person report.

However, they later confessed to killing Bhandari by pushing her into a canal after an altercation. Bhandari’s body was recovered from the Chilla Canal in Rishikesh six days after she had gone missing.

The BJP expelled Vinod Arya and his other son Ankit Arya after the matter came to light.

Evidence recovered later, such as WhatsApp messages from Bhandari to a friend, seemed to show that the men were allegedly trying to force Bhandari into prostitution. It was claimed that she was killed for refusing to provide “special services” to a “VIP”.

In May 2025, Pulkit Arya, Bhaskar and Gupta were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Dhami’s announcement on Friday came two days after a meeting between the Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Bhandari’s parents. During this meeting, the parents handed Dhami a letter requesting a CBI investigation into her death under the supervision of a Supreme Court judge, The Times of India reported.

The parents, in the letter, alleged that their daughter had been killed because of a “VIP” whose identity was still not known.

The Opposition Congress and several civic groups have also held protests in recent days over the matter.

In a statement on Friday, the chief minister said that the state government had approved the recommendation for a CBI investigation “respecting the request and deep sentiments” of Bhandari’s parents.

He added that the state government remained committed to ensuring justice in a manner that was fair, transparent and sensitive, PTI reported. Swift action had also been taken earlier after the incident, including the setting up of a Special Investigation Team, he added.

“All the accused were promptly arrested, and strong legal representation was ensured, as a result of which no bail was granted during the investigation or trial,” the news agency quoted Dhami as saying.

The chief minister further said that separate first information reports had been filed in connection with audio clips circulating on social media, which were being investigated.

In December, actress Urmila Sanawar uploaded videos and an audio recording of her alleged phone conversation with her supposed former husband in which a senior leader of the BJP was allegedly mentioned.

Following the social media posts, the Congress and other Opposition parties had demanded a CBI investigation in the matter.

On Wednesday, the High Court, while hearing in a defamation petition, ordered the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party, Sanawar and the others to take down the allegedly defamatory posts linking the senior BJP leader to the case. The matter will be heard next on May 4.

On Friday, Uttarakhand Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal said that the decision on the CBI probe was a “partial victory” but raised concerns about the impartiality of the investigation.

“The CBI is controlled by the same party [BJP] that rules both the Centre and the state,” the news agency quoted him as saying. “Questions regarding the agency’s credibility are therefore natural.”

Godiyal said that the case warranted monitoring by a sitting judge of the High Court or the Supreme Court. Only such supervision could ensure that the full truth comes out, he added.

Many of us who were born in independent India and taught social sciences in universities until recently had taken academic freedom for granted (“‘Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar’: A JNU teacher’s message for her jailed students”). We had often forgotten that others suffered so that we could live in a better country and enjoy the freedoms that we hold dear to our heart and are considered essential for our academic pursuit.

Some of us fought for freedom during the Emergency and encouraged our students to put in practice what we taught them in classes or made them read about the basic values of democratic societies.

With the emergence of communal fascism in the country, academic freedom has become virtually absent. Fighting for the freedom of thought and expression has not only become difficult but necessary. We need to stand up for the heroes of our time, Umar and Sharjeel, and also celebrate their fight. – Apurba K Baruah

***

This was a touching write-up. I enjoyed reading every word of the article. – HG Jayalakshmi.

***

Brilliant review (“Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another”). It is very sad that Dr Umar Khalid has been denied bail once again. – Nagaraj NP

***

How courageous is Ramachandra Guha. It is unfortunate that this country is fast becoming a fascist regime. – A Rajamohan

India and Venezuela

This is an insightful assessment of India’s spineless stance on the American annexation of Venezuela (“A school in West Bengal is a testament to why India must speak up for Venezuela”). It uncovers the mask of the “Vishwaguru” who hides under the table whenever anybody mentions the name of Donald Trump. This is a sham on our legacy. – Santosh Kumar

Independent journalists are anti-national

Dear independent journalists, you are just anti-Indian (“Over 50% drop in communal riots in 2025, but violence shifted to more systemic forms: Study”). You are not addressing the truth but want to satisfy those who are against the government. For example, those denied burial in tribal areas of Chhattisgarh were tribals not Christians. You should address the main discourse and punish missionaries who convert poor people

Similarly, Muslims don’t gel with Indian culture. Hindus have been oppressed by earlier government for vote politics.

As independent journalists, you must address the root cause and support nation building. But you want financial support from Europe and western countries. – Sunil Nair

***

This biased writing is no different than the Islamic State’s propaganda in Syria or Hamas in Palestine (“Assam’s agenda for Muslims goes national”). This is evident to every patriotic individual from the article and the intent of this anti-national mentality is easily perceived. – Tipparaju Venu Prakash Rao

Honouring Shanta Gokhale

Ipshita Mitra’s latest review left me viscerally moved (“‘The Way Home’: Everyday tensions of social belonging and personal truth in Shanta Gokhale’s stories”). What a finely attuned response to a sublimely talented writer! I love the way she has inhabited the subtexts of the stories and their philosophical underpinnings. I am also inspired by the candid projections of her own humanity into Shanta Gokhale’s understated and deeply nuanced depths. It is a joy to encounter such dialogic flow that reaches the heartspace.

Thank you for honoring the legendary Shanta Gokhale with your review, and for creating an illuminative invitation to her book’s offerings. – Shabnam Mirchandani

The administration in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya on Friday banned the delivery of non-vegetarian food within a 15-km radius of the Ram temple, The Times of India reported.

The decision came following complaints about food apps delivering non-vegetarian food in areas marked as the “panchkosi parikrama”, a 15-km spiritual circumambulation path around Ayodhya, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

The administration also issued a warning to hotels and homestays serving non-vegetarian food and alcoholic drinks to guests, The Times of India reported.

Manik Chandra Singh, the assistant food commissioner in Ayodhya, told the newspaper that complaints had been received about online platforms delivering non-vegetarian food.

This was happening despite a ban imposed in May 2025 on the sale of meat and liquor along the 14-km Ram path, which is the route connecting Ayodhya and Faizabad.

Singh said that the ban has now been extended to the delivery of non-vegetarian food by online platforms.

“All hotels, shopkeepers and delivery companies have been informed of the ban order,” The Times of India quoted the assistant food commissioner as saying.

He added that continuous monitoring would be done to ensure compliance.

The Babri Masjid in Ayodhya was demolished in December 1992 by Hindutva extremists because they believed that it stood on the spot on which the deity Ram had been born. In January 2024, the Ram temple was inaugurated at the site in a ceremony led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Five migrant workers from Jharkhand who had been abducted in Niger in April were released and have returned to India, The Indian Express quoted the state government as saying on Friday.

The workers, Sanjay Mahto, Raju Mahto, Chandrika Mahto, Faljit Mahto and Uttam Mahto, are residents of Giridih district.

They had migrated to the West African country in January 2024 to work for Kalpataru Power Transmission Limited.

The five workers were kidnapped on April 25 after an armed group raided the camp where they were working. They and a resident had been taken away at gunpoint after the armed group killed 12 security personnel deployed at the site.

On Friday, Shikha Lakra, team leader of Jharkhand State Migrant Control Room, said that the five workers have arrived in Mumbai, NDTV reported.

They were undergoing mandatory health checks and completing legal formalities, Lakra said, adding that the persons will return to homes on Wednesday.

Giridih Deputy Commissioner Ramniwas Yadav said that coordination between the Jharkhand government, the state migrant control room and the Ministry of External Affairs had helped ensure the return of the five workers, NDTV reported.

The Punjab Police on Friday filed a first information report in connection with the uploading and sharing of an allegedly doctored video purportedly showing Aam Aadmi Party MLA Atishi insulting Guru Tegh Bahadur in the Delhi Assembly, The Hindu reported.

The video was uploaded by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra.

However, the police did not specify who or how many persons have been named in the FIR.

The police commissionerate in Jalandhar registered the case based on a complaint filed by a person named Iqbal Singh, India Today reported.

Unidentified police officers said that a forensic examination of the video posted by Mishra showed that the word “guru” was “not uttered” by Atishi, The Hindu reported.

On Tuesday, a row erupted after the BJP accused Atishi of making insensitive remarks about the Sikh spiritual leader during a special discussion in the Delhi Assembly to mark the 350th martyrdom anniversary of Guru Tegh Bahadur, observed in November.

A video of the alleged comments was uploaded by Mishra and shared by others on social media.

Atishi had, at the time, rejected the allegations and said that she was talking about the BJP running away from a discussion on the worsening air pollution in the national capital and about their protest in the Assembly on the matter of stray dogs.

“But the BJP deliberately added a false subtitle and inserted the name of Guru Tegh Bahadurji into it,” the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly said on Thursday.

The allegations against Atishi had led to a ruckus during the Winter Session of the Assembly, with both the BJP and the AAP accusing each other of insulting Guru Tegh Bahadur. On Thursday, Speaker Vijender Gupta also ordered a forensic investigation of the video.

On Friday, a spokesperson for the Jalandhar police commissionerate said in a statement that “several social media posts containing a short video clip showing…Atishi allegedly making derogatory and blasphemous remarks against [Sikh] Gurus with highly inflammatory captions have been uploaded on social media platforms”, PTI reported.

The statement said that an investigation had been conducted scientifically and the video containing Atishi’s audio had been “downloaded from a social media platform of Delhi Minister Kapil Mishra”.

It added that video had been forwarded to a forensic science laboratory to be examined.

In the Delhi Assembly on Friday, BJP MLAs raised the filing of the FIR in Aam Aadmi Party-ruled Punjab, The Hindu reported. Gupta said that the move amounted to a “breach of privilege”, as video recordings from inside the Assembly “belong exclusively to the House”, the newspaper reported.

He added: “The House takes cognisance of the matter formally and will consider appropriate action against the police commissioner of Jalandhar”.

Meanwhile, the Punjab Congress on Friday claimed that its MLAs Sukhpal Khaira and Pargat Singh had been booked for sharing the allegedly doctored video, PTI reported.

In a social media post, Khaira said that the “false FIR” filed by Jalandhar Police against Singh and him was the “most shocking and blatant case of extreme political vendetta” by the Bhagwant Mann government.

Five Opposition parties in Assam on Friday filed a police complaint accusing the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of conspiring to delete the names of a large number of genuine voters from the state’s electoral rolls, The Hindu reported.

The parties are the Congress, the Raijor Dal, the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the Assam Jatiya Parishad.

The complaint was filed at Guwahati’s Dispur police station.

The parties claimed that Assam BJP president and MP Dilip Saikia was involved in the alleged conspiracy and had directed party MLAs to ensure the deletion of the names of “anti-BJP voters” in at least 60 of the state’s 126 Assembly constituencies, The Hindu reported.

The allegations came amid the “special revision” of electoral rolls in Assam ahead of Assembly elections, expected to be held in March-April.

On December 27, the Election Commission said that the names of more than 10 lakh voters were identified to be deleted in Assam after a house-to-house verification process under the ‘special revision’ exercise. The final list will be published on February 10.

Unlike in 12 states and Union Territories, the Election Commission is not conducting a special intensive revision exercise in Assam. Instead, on November 17, it had directed the state chief electoral officer to conduct a “special revision” of electoral rolls.

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

In their complaint on Friday, the Opposition parties alleged that Saikia discussed the deletion exercise with Health Minister Ashok Singhal during an online meeting held on January 4.

They urged the police to secure the footage from the meeting and to book the “culprits and conspirators” for a free, fair and transparent special revision in the state, The Hindu reported.

Separately, Raijor Dal chief and Sivasagar MLA Akhil Gogoi wrote to the Election Commission on Friday seeking a high-level, independent probe into the January 4 online meeting held allegedly for the purpose of “voter list management”, the newspaper reported.

Gogoi asked the poll panel to secure all digital records and communication logs of the BJP leadership linked to the alleged directive of deleting “10,000 votes per constituency”, The Hindu reported.

He also sought an audit of Form 7 applications filed over the past three months in the state and demanded that the “special revision” process be halted until the matter was resolved.

Form 7 is used to object to inclusion of the name of other persons on the voter list.

The BJP rejected the allegations.

Party spokesperson Jayanta Kumar Goswami said that Gogoi had misrepresented the deletion of names during the revision exercise.

“More than 11,000 Muslims were evicted following the eviction drive carried out at Uriamghat in Sarupathar Assembly constituency of Golaghat district,” The Times of India quoted Goswami as saying. “During the ongoing SIR, names of around 11,000 persons from the constituency were deleted.”

Goswami alleged that the Opposition parties had filed the police complaint to “indulge in Miya appeasement”. “Miya” is a derogatory term for Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Quick commerce and delivery platforms have become the lifeline of urban consumers. The delivery rider, zipping through chaotic traffic, is now a ubiquitous symbol of urban convenience. However, a troubling paradox defines this sector: the very speed with which workers take up gig work is matched by the rate at which they abandon it.

Beneath the glossy facade of the sector’s “flexibility” and “earning potential” is the reality of financial instability, physical risk and systemic neglect that pushes a vast majority of riders to exit in a matter of months.

The strikes by riders across India during Christmas and New Year protesting against unrealistic promises of 10-minute delivery and slashed payments highlight the growing collective frustration.

In response, Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato’s parent company, claimed that gig work is “one of the largest organised job creation engines in India” and that this work allows riders to build a better future, secure jobs in the formal sector and educate their children.

It would “bring more people into the fold, who will be able to earn some money, upskill themselves and later join India’s organised workforce”, he declared pointing to the high churn rate in the sector as evidence of this.

The high churn rate is certainly true. Over half of all riders quit every week, replaced by new entrants. As a gig worker myself, I can testify that the claim of gig work being a stepping stone into the formal sector holds true only for a small percentage of riders, those who already enter the workforce with education and specific skills.

For everyone else, delivery work is primarily a means of desperate survival, a dead-end trap with no scope for career progression or skill development relevant to the formal economy.

The sector attracts individuals from diverse backgrounds from Class 12 pass-outs, graduates, ITI dropouts to former factory workers. What unites them is not educational qualification or class but economic necessity, the lack of alternative job opportunities and the alluring myth that this work offers freedom.

The journey often begins with attractive incentives and bonuses, painting a picture of a promising future. But the actual experience quickly reveals a harsher truth. The platform economy promotes an ideal worker – one who can work like a machine for 16-18 hours non-stop, unburdened by social or familial responsibilities.

A tiny fraction of riders who can withstand this model might manage to save a little money. For the vast majority, their earnings barely cover two meals and the monthly rent.

A primary driver of this high attrition is the constant decline and extreme volatility of income. Raghav, a 27-year-old graduate from Agra who moved to Ghaziabad, turned to delivery work for Blinkit after losing his job during the Covid lockdown. As the sole earning member supporting his father, who had retired from the army, his housewife mother and a younger brother, the initial promise soon faded.

“It seemed okay at the start, but I would end up with only about Rs 7,000 a week,” he said. He worked for eight to nine months before quitting, due to falling payment rates, increasing targets and no future.

Surjeet, from Delhi, who worked for Swiggy for five years, drove himself relentlessly for 18 hours a day to support his wife, children and siblings. He even received an award from the company for his flawless record, but the post-lockdown changes broke his resolve.

“After the lockdown, the company cut the pay... earnings started decreasing and I was forced to leave the job,” he said.

Companies often make promises such as “earn Rs 40,000 a month” but Vijender, a 25-year-old from Delhi studying for a Bachelor of Computer Applications degree while shouldering family responsibilities after his father’s death, found the promise hollow.

“To earn Rs 40,000, you have to work 17-18 hours,” he said.

The uncertainty of not knowing how many orders will come each day nor how much time will be wasted searching for addresses, creates permanent anxiety. Income fluctuates wildly while costs like fuel, vehicle maintenance and mobile data are. This is the economic mill that grinds down riders' savings and traps them at a bare subsistence level.

The physical dangers of the job add another layer of peril. Sameer, a 22-year-old from Bihar living in Delhi, had to leave his ITI course in motor mechanics due to family circumstances. He took up work with a delivery service hoping for flexibility, but found the costs and risks overwhelming.

While delivering a parcel in Noida, a car hit him, leaving his vehicle destroyed and his leg fractured. His plea to the company for help went unanswered. It was a kind customer who assisted him. Worse, when he recovered and returned, the company slapped him with a Rs 15,000 penalty for the damaged vehicle.

Vijender faced a similar ordeal after his accident in Greater Kailash in Delhi. “I asked the company for help, they didn’t help at all,” he said. It was a fellow rider who took him to the hospital.

Though platforms call their riders “partners”, in times of crisis, they offer no health insurance, financial aid or even basic human empathy. The rider is left to their own devices and, occasionally, the mercy of generous customers.

Beyond the economic and physical risks, there is also immense psychological pressure. Riders are caught in the twin grind of customer ratings, complaints and the app’s stringent, often opaque, rules. A small delay or mistake perpetuates the constant fear of their ID being blocked, leading to the loss of livelihood.

Working 18-hour shifts makes spending time with their families nearly impossible. Vijender explained the worry he caused at home: “My family was also constantly worried about me... what if I have an accident?”

For Surjeet, the breaking point was his mother’s emotional plea. “Son, we don’t even see your face anymore,” she said. This pressure is crushing for riders who are the sole breadwinners in their families.

Where do riders go after they quit? Their destination depends on their educational and economic capital. Riders such as Raghav, a graduate with previous skills, leveraged his education when his former manager offered him a position. He found a better role as a field manager within the same platform ecosystem.

On the other hand, riders like Sameer, whose education was interrupted and who possesses no specialised skills, often return to their previous occupations. Sameer is back to working at a factory, earning Rs 13,000.

Some, like Surjeet, shift to traditional sectors. He now drives an auto-rickshaw for Rapido and Uber, where earnings might be lower but he has more control over his time and family life.

The most tragic situation is that of riders like Vijender, who, after quitting on his mother’s insistence and following his accident, found himself completely unemployed, dependent on his brother to start a business, a dream with no clear path.

The dream of self-employment is almost universal among riders, it materialises only for those few, like Surjeet, who could save something after years of working for 18 hours a day. For the rest, the gig economy is a cyclical trap: easy to enter, but incredibly hard to escape or advance within.

The high turnover rate in the delivery sector is an inevitable outcome of a system designed for maximum flexibility with minimum responsibility to the companies.

This work has become a stop-gap solution for immediate economic distress and is no way a sustainable livelihood. The fundamental reason behind riders entering and exiting is the same: the compulsion of subsistence.

Their departure is just a “churn rate” statistic for the companies, but stories like those of Raghav, Sameer, Surjeet, and Vijender paint a picture of the human reality behind numbers: broken limbs, lost dreams and strained families.

Finding a solution to this crisis cannot rely solely on the perceived resilience of the riders. It requires a concerted effort from platforms, the government and society to build policies that guarantee a fair minimum wage, comprehensive accident and health insurance, social security benefits and humane working conditions.

Only then can gig work transform into a genuine livelihood option with dignity, rather than a quicksand trap where workers struggle against exhaustion, uncertainty and despair.

Javed is a gig worker and organiser. This article was compiled and translated by Ambika Tandon, who is affiliated with Rajdhani App Workers Union of the Centre of Indian Trade Unions.

Last week, Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, better known by his social media, moniker @liverdoc, caused quite the stir on social media by revealing the results of a crowdfunded study that he had conducted on the quality of generic drugs sourced from various outlets, especially government funded pharmacies or schemes like the Jan Aushadi programme, rebranded as the Pradhan Mantri Bharatiya Janaushadhi Pariyojana by the present government.

While the peer-reviewed publication of the study is still awaited, the big takeaway from @liverdoc’s Twitter thread is that each and every of the 131 generic drugs he tested, including those from government supplied pharmacies passed every quality parameter laid down by the Indian Pharmacopeia Commission in its official publication, the Indian Pharmacopeia.

These results, especially the ones pertaining to government-funded pharmacies are quite incredible since historically the government’s own data has revealed chronic problems with generic drugs sold through these outlets.

For example, in 2017, a government-funded survey of drug quality in India involving 47,954 samples from various sources revealed that 10% of drugs sampled from government pharmacies failed testing in government laboratories. For the rest of the market, the rate of failure of drugs was approximately 3.16%.

The survey did not include fixed-dose combination drugs that contain two or more active pharmaceutical ingredients. These constitute the majority of the nation’s drug supply. There are other reports like one by Comptroller and Auditor General from 2012 which claimed that 25% of locally sourced drugs by the Armed Forces Medical Services Depot failed quality tests.

Similarly with the Jan Aushadhi programme, there have long been complaints from patients and doctors of poor quality outcomes from taking these drugs. In the last Parliamentary session, in December, the government disclosed that between 2020 and 2025, a total of 206 prosecutions were filed by state drug controllers against pharmaceutical manufacturers because samples of their drugs drawn from the Jan Aushadhi programME failed testing in their laboratories.

Given that state drug controllers prosecute only the worst cases of quality failures, the actual number of Not of Standard Quality drugs are likely much higher.

For example, if a drug has only 75% of the active ingredient, the prosecution guidelines laid down by the government prohibit criminal prosecution. Only if that number falls below 70% are state drug controllers required to prosecute. So the figure of 206 prosecutions disclosed in the Parliament represents only serious cases of Not of Standard Quality drugs, not every drug which failed quality testing.

Previous tests

There is then also regular news in the press of other drugs, drawn from private pharmacies and hospitals failing testing in government laboratories. In 2024, over 3,000 samples failed testing in government laboratories. In February 2025, the state government of Himachal Pradesh informed the state legislature that 1,683 samples of drugs manufactured within the state had reportedly had failed quality testing in the previous two years.

Given this weight of history, the results published by Philips are astounding and we look forward to the peer-reviewed publication of this study that hopefully provides more details on the design of the study and actual test results.

For example, were the samples which were sent for testing adequately “blinded”? This is crucial in today’s India because private laboratories are aware of the possibility of government backlash if they were to report a large number of drugs from the government’s flagship scheme failing quality testing.

In 2014, the government of India threatened to sue a group of American academics who had concluded on the basis of testing “made in India” generic drugs that the Indian pharmaceutical industry was more likely to sell poor quality generics in Africa. That study did not even mention the names of any Indian companies and yet it attracted a threatening legal action.

Blinding the lab to the source of the drugs was therefore a crucial requirement.

Similarly, the statistical model for the sample size of 131 samples included in the study. If one were to model based on the government's own Not of Standard Quality data, the number of samples from Jan Aushadhi stores would have to be more than twice that of the sample size to give a 90% confidence to an assertion that all samples sourced pass quality test.

Lastly, there has to be some disclosure on how exactly the laboratory procured “reference samples” from the Indian Pharmacopeia Commission. These “reference samples” are basically small quantities of the pure active ingredient against which the sample is tested in order to establish purity of the assay.

We raise this issue because there have been several complaints from state run laboratories regarding long delays by the Indian Pharmacopeia Commission. in supplying reference samples.

A couple of drugs mentioned in the doctor’s Twitter thread, (rifaximin and febuxostar) do not feature in the list of available reference standards published on the Indian Pharmacopeia Commission’s own website. An explanation of how the lab procured reference standards from Indian Pharmacopeia would go a long way in establishing the credibility of the study.

Critical issues

In addition to the above, we feel it is necessary to clarify some critical issues pertaining to the claim that pharmacopeial testing is all that matters for the purposes of establishing quality.

This is not completely true. In the 1960s, when the first antibiotics were going off patent in the United States, the country’s regulator was faced with the question of how exactly to validate the quality of generics. Repeating clinical trials was an expensive proposition and also unethical since some patients would have to be given a placebo.

The other option was to rely on pharmacopeial testing in the laboratory. However, this option was not considered a reliable indicator of the ability of a drug to dissolve in the stomach and permeate the intestinal lining of a patient in order to enter a patient’s bloodstream.

This is important because although both the innovator and generic use the same active ingredient, the other excipients such as the binding agents may differ from one another, affecting the ability of the generic to dissolve at the same rate as the innovator.

For this reason, the US Food and Drug Administration made it mandatory for generics to conduct bioequivalence testing – the generic drug would be given to healthy volunteers and the rate at which the drug became bioavailable in the human body would be measured in the volunteers’ blood and urine. If the dissolution curve matched the curve of the innovator drug, it was considered bioequivalent to the innovator and hence interchangeable.

The World Health Organisation released a technical recommendation regarding bioequivalence testing in 1996. India made it mandatory only in 2017, except that the rules were so vaguely formulated that we still do not know if the requirement extended to previously authorised generics. We also do not know the parameters of the waiver provided to generics that are highly soluble and permeable.

As a result, we do not know which generics in India are bioequivalent. In other countries such as the United States, the regulator publishes an “Orange Book” that allows patients and doctors to check the generics which have been rated to be “bioequivalent”. India does not do this.

We have been asking the government for quite sometime now to at least force the manufacturers to indicate on their labelling whether their drugs have been declared bioequivalent.

To return to Philips’ study, doctors should recognise that even if the drugs in question have all passed pharmacopeial testing, there is no guarantee these drugs will have the same effect in patients unless these drugs have also been established to be bioequivalent.

This is especially true for Narrow Therapeutic Index drugs. These are drugs where even a small change in bioavailability can have a significant effect in treatment outcomes. Examples of such drugs include Tacrolim, which is used to suppress the immune system after organ transplantation surgeries and drugs such as Levothyroxine, which is used to treat thyroid deficiencies. There are many documented studies of how generic Levothyroxine has caused poor treatment outcomes in patients due to bioavailability issues.

That the Indian pharmaceutical industry has had an issue with bioequivalence is not a secret. In fact, faked bioequivalence studies was one of the starting points of the scandal at Ranbaxy. Similar allegations were made against GVK Bio by international regulators.

There are also studies conducted by doctors at PGIMER which demonstrated with clinical trials that bioavailability of generic Tacrolimus and generic Itraconazole varied significantly from the innovator brands. For the second study, these brave government doctors were rumoured to have received backlash from the powers that be in Delhi.

Batch-to-batch consistency

Two more issues before we conclude.

The first is that surveys based on drug samples drawn from the market have limited value for the simple reason that such surveys rarely capture batch-to-batch consistency issues: the toughest part of pharmaceutical manufacturing is ensuring batch-to-batch consistency. In addition, testing of limited samples fails to capture contamination problems that are not consistent across batches.

It is precisely for this reason that regulatory practices in the West focus more on compliance with Good Manufacturing Practices – adherence to processes is the surest guarantee of quality. On this count, we have a huge mountain of evidence in American and European drug inspection reports of Indian facilities failing to comply with Good Manufacturing Practices standards. The rigour expected of the pharmaceutical industry in India is simply missing.

The second is that bulk procurement conducted by public agencies or private hospitals tend to deal with larger companies. They also have their own testing requirements before the release of drugs into the market. As a result, most of the drugs sampled as part of the Philips study had already cleared one round of testing that likely weeded out many poor quality manufacturers as evident from “blacklists” published by government agencies.

We suspect that results may have been very different if samples tested were procured from the smaller private pharmacies and government hospitals that follow a localised procurement strategy rather than a centralised bulk strategy. The former attracts more smaller manufacturers.

To conclude, while we are surprised by the results presented by Philips on Twitter, he has started an important public debate on the quality of generic drugs.

A peer-reviewed publication must now follow to establish the study’s credibility and hopefully, we will see more such studies in the future along with the necessary caveats. At stake are important issues of public health and the cost of access to medicine.

The writers are co-authors of The Truth Pill: The Myth of Drug Regulation In India.

India on Friday accused Bangladesh of downplaying a “disturbing pattern of recurring attacks on minorities” and urged Dhaka to act “swiftly and firmly” against communal violence.

Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said, “We have observed a troubling tendency to attribute such incidents to personal rivalries, political differences or extraneous reasons.”

Bangladesh’s disregard of such incidents “only emboldens the perpetrators and deepens the sense of fear and insecurity among minorities”, he said at the weekly media briefing.

Several attacks on minorities in Bangladesh were reported in the aftermath of widespread unrest following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi. Hadi succumbed to gunshot injuries at a hospital in Singapore on December 18.

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

On Tuesday, the Bangladesh Hindu Buddhist Christian Unity Council said that it has recorded 51 incidents of communal violence in December, NDTV reported.

These included 10 killings, 10 cases of theft and robbery, 23 instances of occupation of homes and business establishments, and incidents of looting and arson targeting temples, the association was quoted as saying.

On December 26, India condemned the lynching of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, saying that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning.

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

Jaiswal had said at the time that continuing hostilities against minorities in Bangladesh, including Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, at the hands of extremists was a matter of great concern.

Two days later, Dhaka had rejected New Delhi’s remarks and described them as “inaccurate, exaggerated or motivated”.

SM Mahbubul Alam, the spokesperson for the Bangladeshi foreign ministry, had said at the time that the statements “misrepresent the country’s longstanding tradition of communal harmony”.

About 20 years ago, someone at Mumbai’s Philips Antiques learned that a unique album of photographs was going up for auction in London. He quickly contacted the theatre director Ebrahim Alkazi, who purchased the album for the Delhi-based Alkazi Collection of Photography. Although small and unassuming, the album, known as the Nursey album, has now helped a group of scholars tell some remarkable new stories about one of modern India’s most decisive turning points: the Civil Disobedience Movement, led by Mahatma Gandhi in 1930-’31.

Along the spine of the album runs a rather vague title, “Collection of Photographs of Old Congress Party – KL Nursey”. While the identity of KL Nursey remains a mystery, the 245 black-and-white photographs inside the album show the city of Bombay convulsed by nationalist protest and the mass manufacture of contraband salt.

Working with the Alkazi Foundation for the Arts and its curator, Rahaab Allana, two historians at Duke University, Avrati Bhatnagar and Sumathi Ramaswamy, have published a book and organised two museum exhibitions on the photographs. They now join Past Imperfect to discuss their work and how photography can reveal very different histories of a well-documented event.

Photographing Civil Disobedience: Bombay 1930-1931 (published by Mapin) features 150 photographs and essays by historians which unpack the stories captured on film nearly a century ago (full disclosure: I am one of the contributors to this volume). Once they first encountered the album, Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy were struck by its historical importance. Photography has a long and storied history in India, but here was something beyond studio portraits and staged pictures. The Nursey album’s pictures were live, raw, and pulsating with activity. Swarms of khadi-clad nationalists take over Bombay’s streets and several of its landmarks. Protesters clash with police officers and react to blows from bamboo lathis.

Above all, the photographs demonstrate how women participated, led, and even dominated street activity during the Civil Disobedience Movement. Historians have long recognised the Civil Disobedience Movement as a watershed moment for female political participation, but the Nursey album reveals, like never before, how women wielded power and stood up to colonial authority.

Who were these women? Some of them are easily recognisable. Sarojini Naidu, raising her fist, addresses a crowd of volunteers in crisp white Gandhi topis. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay poses for the camera while hundreds of protesters are seated behind her.

But the Nursey album reveals thousands of ordinary female volunteers whose identities have been lost to time. Many of these women stare defiantly into the camera, conscious of being photographed and wanting their actions to be documented for posterity. A number of women bring their daughters into the frame, providing their very early induction into nationalist politics.

This mass female participation is all the more notable because, when Gandhi began his Salt March in March 1930, he urged women not to get involved in confrontational protests and salt-making activity. A number of female Indian National Congress leaders, like Chattopadhyay, convinced Gandhi to relax this prohibition. But the women of Bombay went several steps further by directing nationalist activity into new channels, on a hitherto unimaginable scale.

As Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy point out, many of the photographs show female protesters testing the limits of non-violence by defensively reacting to police activity. A group of desh sevikas, members of a Congress-aligned volunteer group, wrestle with a pith-helmeted British police officer who is trying to confiscate their national flag.

Violence, indeed, pulsates through the album’s photographs. Captured in film, perhaps for the first time, was visual evidence of what happened when throngs of urban protesters confronted phalanxes of policemen and soldiers. Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy speak about how this proves that the British Raj was a “lathi raj”, a regime propped up by brutal disciplinary action. Outside of the Bombay High Court, one Indian police officer raises a lathi, about to bring it down on a protester lying on the street. A jackbooted British superior officer stands in front, preventing the protester from moving. These photographs are populated not just by nationalists and colonial forces, but also by medics, ambulance drivers, nurses and thousands of curious onlookers.

Lastly, Bhatnagar and Ramaswamy speak about what the Nursey album tells us about the city of Bombay. In the 1930s, Bombay was very much a masculine space: male residents greatly outnumbered female ones and social conventions relegated most women far away from the public gaze. This male-dominated world came crashing down with the Civil Disobedience Movement. In several pictures, female protesters quite literally push men to the very edges of streets. In others, they commandeer the entrances to prominent landmarks, like the Town Hall and Bombay Municipal Corporation building.

Here is a city witnessing a revolutionary transfer of power. Colonial landmarks like Victoria Terminus and Fitzgerald Fountain are taken over by Congress volunteers, while other protesters block access to tony European department stores such as Whiteaway Laidlaw. Importantly, the loci of political activity shifts north from Fort, embracing places such as Bandra.

Numerous pictures feature nationalists’ “raids” on the salt pans in Wadala, with policemen on horses trailing behind. Salt became a symbol of political power in Bombay. “The resulting salt was not particularly high quality, but it did not matter,” Ramaswamy comments. “It was the fact that the illicit product was proudly made, and that a camera witnesses the act that was important.”

Aside from being republished in Photographing Civil Disobedience, these pictures are now on display at special exhibits in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai and Duke University – exhibits timed with the hundredth birth centenary of the man who rescued them from obscurity, Ebrahim Alkazi. They provide a stirring visual testament to how a handful of contraband salt produced by Gandhi at Dandi Beach triggered incredible change in India’s most cosmopolitan city.

“Disobedient Subjects” runs at the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai through March 31 and at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University through January 19.

Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.

A family of 14 men, women and children – all Bengali Muslims from Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district – were allegedly forced into Bangladesh by the Border Security Force in December, a relative told Scroll. This was confirmed by Bangladesh border officials, who detained them in the no man’s land between the two countries.

The 14 people, belonging to one family, had been living in Odisha for over seven decades, their relative Saiful Ali Khan said. The eldest among them is a 90-year-old woman.

Their native village is in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, according to a gram panchayat certificate that is in the family’s possession.

Two months ago, the family was detained in Jagatsinghpur on suspicion of being Bangladeshi citizens, Khan said. Among them was Khan’s 36-year-old niece Sabera Bibi.

On December 26, the 14 members were forced into Bangladesh by the Border Security Force, Khan told Scroll.

The Border Guard Bangladesh detained them on the same night in Chuadanga district, which shares a boundary with Nadia district in Bengal.

Bangladeshi authorities told news outlets in the country that the 14 were formally sent back to India on December 28.

Mehdi Hasan, the officer in charge of Darshana police station, confirmed the incident to Scroll, saying that the group of 14 old people, women and children were handed over to the Border Guard Bangladesh which later sent them to India.

“They had come from Odisha and were later sent to India,” Hasan told Scroll.

But Khan told Scroll that the group was shunted back and forth between the two countries four times, as the border officials on either side refused to let them stay.

The BSF pushed them into Bangladesh three times, while the Bangladesh border officials expelled them from their territory once. Nine members of the family, Khan said, are still in hiding in Bangladesh. The whereabouts of five others are unknown.

In a video shot when they were in the custody of Border Guard Bangladesh, one of the 14 is heard saying that BSF officials threatened to open fire on them if they tried to return to India.

Scroll sent an email to the Border Security Force spokesperson asking about the repeated expulsions of the family. The story will be updated if they respond.

The superintendent of police of Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur, Ankit Kumar Verma, told Scroll that a statewide drive against “Bangladeshi infiltrators” is underway but refused to divulge more. “I can’t verify like this,” he said. “These are all confidential and secret things. I can’t share anything related to this.”

Last year, Scroll had reported on how Bengali migrant workers had been detained in several states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Odisha, and asked to prove they were Indian citizens.

The drives by the police ended up throwing several Indian citizens across the border, without giving them time or opportunity to prove their citizenship – in violation of the Centre’s own rules.

Last month, a heavily pregnant woman, Sunali Khatun, and her eight-year-old son Sabir were brought back to India from Bangladesh on the direction of the Calcutta High Court and, later, the Supreme Court.

Khatun, her child and her husband had been picked up from Delhi and “pushed” into Bangladesh, despite the fact that the family had land records in Bengal, going back five generations.

‘If you come back, we will open fire’

The family detained from Odisha is originally from South 24 Parganas district, Khan said.

Among the members of the family expelled include 90-year-old Guljan Bibi, her daughter and son-in-law, four grandsons and three granddaughters-in-law and four great-grandchildren.

Khan’s niece, Sabera Bibi, is married to Bibi’s grandson Sheikh Ukil.

The family had been living in Berhampur village under Balikuda Tehsil of Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district for the last seven decades, Khan, who lives in the same district, told Scroll.

“Two months ago, the police came, demolished their homes and arrested them as they were speaking Bangla,” he said.

According to Khan, the family was detained for one month and five days, despite showing the Odisha police their identity documents, including voter and Aadhaar cards.

On December 17, the pradhan of West Bengal’s Moushuni gram panchayat in South 24 Paragnas issued a certificate, declaring that Sheikh Hosen – Bibi’s husband – was a permanent resident of Baliara village of the district, but now lives with his family at the Berhampur village in Odisha.

“After over a month of detention, they were made to cross the India-Bangladesh border and pushed into Chuadanga in Bangladesh on December 26,” Khan said. “They walked about 4 km but were later detained by the Bangladeshi police and Border Guard Bangladesh at Darshana bus stand in Chuadanga.”

He said he got to know of the family’s plight when one of them called him on January 7, having borrowed a phone from someone in Bangladesh.

In a video filmed when the family was in the custody of Border Guard Bangladesh, Sabera Bibi’s husband, Sheikh Ukil, is heard telling the officials in Hindi: “We were first brought to Kolkata from Odisha and then to the border where we were made to roam for three days before being pushed into Bangladesh.”

Scroll accessed the 3.37 minute video, and asked Saiful Khan to confirm the identity of the speakers. He identified them as his relatives.

Ukil is heard recounting in Hindi how they came to be in Bangladesh. “We showed Aadhaar and voter cards to the BGB,” he said. “Then the BGB people took us to BSF and handed us over to BSF. The BSF provided us food and they again threw us here. The BSF told us if you come back, they will open fire. Where will we go?”

The Budget Session of Parliament will start on January 28 and conclude on April 2, said Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju on Friday.

“On the recommendation of the Govt of India, Hon’ble President of India, Smt. Droupadi Murmu ji has approved the summoning of both the Houses of Parliament for the Budget Session 2026,” Rijiju said on social media.

The minister added that the first phase of the session will conclude on February 13, after which Parliament will reassemble on March 9 and end on April 2.

On the recommendation of the Govt of India, Hon’ble President of India, Smt. Droupadi Murmu ji has approved the summoning of both the Houses of Parliament for the Budget Session 2026.
The Session will commence on 28 January 2026 and continue till 2 April 2026.

The first phase… pic.twitter.com/FxGYCL7keq

— Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) January 9, 2026

This break will be used to review the Budget proposals, during which discussions on the ministries’ demands for grants will take place, completing the budgetary process.

As per convention, the Union Budget for the financial year 2026-’27 is likely to be presented on February 1 by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The Economic Survey is likely to be presented on January 30, PTI reported.

The two Houses will not meet on January 29 due to the Beating Retreat ceremony.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Friday registered two police complaints against the Enforcement Directorate in connection with its searches at several locations in the state, including the office of political consultancy I-PAC a day earlier, PTI reported.

An unidentified police officer told the news agency that the Kolkata and Bidhannagar Police have registered first information reports and initiated an investigation based on the two complaints.

This came on the same day that the Delhi Police detained Trinamool Congress MPs protesting outside Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s office against what the party alleged were illegal searches by the central agency. The MPs were released from the Parliament Street police station later in the day.

On Thursday, the ED conducted searches at I-PAC’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the residence of the firm’s head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood in connection with an investigation into alleged money laundering.

I-PAC, or the Indian Political Action Committee, has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including in the 2021 Assembly elections.

Banerjee arrived at Jain’s home around noon while the search was underway and stayed for about 20 to 25 minutes. She then came out with a green file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were “taking away” party documents ahead of the Assembly elections.

The state is expected to head for polls in the next three to four months.

Banerjee alleged that the ED was confiscating the Trinamool Congress’ “documents and hard disks, which has details about our party candidates” for the elections.

On the other hand, the central agency on Thursday accused Banerjee of entering Jain’s residence and taking away “key evidences including physical documents and electronic devices”.

It stated that the searches had been conducted in a “peaceful manner” until Banerjee arrived at the site. It claimed that the “search is evidence-based and is not targeted at any political establishment”, and said that no party office had been searched.

On Friday, Banerjee filed one complaint against unidentified ED officials and Central Reserve Police Force personnel at the Shakespeare Sarani police station in connection with the searches at Jain’s Loudon Street residence.

She filed a second complaint against unidentified ED officials at the Electronic Complex police station under the Bidhannagar Police in connection with the searches at I-PAC’s office in the Salt Lake area.

A police officer told PTI that the case at the Shakespeare Sarani police station had been filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to criminal intimidation, theft and criminal trespass, as well as under Section 66 of the Information Technology Act.

This section deals with computer-related offences, criminalising dishonest or fraudulent acts like unauthorised access or data damage.

Similar sections were invoked in the FIR based on the chief minister’s second complaint.

Additionally, the police also filed a suo motu case at the Shakespeare Sarani police station against the ED on Thursday evening, according to the news agency.

The searches on Thursday were based on a first information report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation into an alleged coal smuggling syndicate that was used to “steal and illegally excavate coal from ECL [Eastern Coalfields Limited] leasehold areas of West Bengal”, the ED said.

Hours after the raids by the ED, the Trinamool Congress and I-PAC moved the Calcutta High Court challenging the legality of the searches at several locations linked to the political consultancy in Kolkata and Bidhannagar.

The ED also approached the court, alleging “illegal interference” during its search operations.

During the hearing of the matter on Friday, Justice Suvra Ghosh rose from her chair as there was chaos in the courtroom before she could hear the petitions filed by the ED and the Trinamool Congress, The Indian Express reported.

The court listed the matter for hearing on January 14.

Mamata attends protest rally against ED raids

Banerjee on Friday also took part in a protest rally against the ED raids, saying that one cannot have the Bharatiya Janata Party rule India, the Hindustan Times reported. The Trinamool Congress chief added that the Opposition needs to “win Delhi” after winning the Assembly elections in West Bengal.

Defending her arrival at Jain’s home when the central agency was conducting its raids on Thursday, the chief minister said that she had “every right to protect” herself and repeated her allegations of theft of confidential data.

“Whatever I did yesterday, I did as the All India Trinamool Congress chairperson,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. “I did nothing wrong…Why did they [ED] come like thieves? They were stealing our party’s confidential data from the I-PAC office, which we had authorised.”

Banerjee also threatened to “reveal” confidential information about the BJP if she was targeted.

Today, Bengal showed the streets what its roar truly sounds like. Row after row, people poured out in numbers that left no room for doubt.

Answering the call of Hon’ble Chairperson Smt. @mamataofficial, ordinary citizens stepped forward to give a fitting reply to every… pic.twitter.com/Z3d8ACxX4v

— All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) January 9, 2026

India stated that the characterisation of the trade discussions between New Delhi and Washington by United States Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick during a podcast was “not accurate”. Lutnick had claimed that the proposed trade deal between India and the US did not materialise because Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not call US President Donald Trump.

He claimed that India was “uncomfortable” with Modi calling Trump to finalise the deal, and so the US moved on and concluded trade deals with other countries. Lutnick said that the conditions under which India and the US had earlier appeared close to finalising a deal were no longer available.

Responding to this, India’s Ministry of External Affairs stated that New Delhi and Washington have held multiple rounds of negotiation “to arrive at a balanced and mutually-beneficial” trade deal. “Incidentally, prime minister [Modi] and President Trump have also spoken on phone on eight occasions during 2025, covering different aspects of our wide-ranging partnership,” said ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal. Read on.

Responding to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani writing a note to jailed activist Umar Khalid in December, the Indian government said that public representatives are expected to respect the independence of the judiciary in other democracies. “Expressing personal prejudices do not behove those in office,” said Jaiswal.

Mamdani had written a note to Khalid, saying that he often thought about the activist’s words on bitterness and the “importance of not letting it consume one’s self”. “We are all thinking of you,” the note added. Read on.

Ramachandra Guha: In praise of Dr Umar Khalid, from one historian to another

The Delhi Police detained several MPs of the Trinamool Congress while they were protesting outside the office of Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The MPs were protesting against what the party alleges were illegal searches by the Enforcement Directorate at several locations in West Bengal, including the office of political consultancy I-PAC.

They were released later. I-PAC has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including in the 2021 Assembly elections.

The party said that the action against its MPs was “undemocratic, unconstitutional, shameful”. TMC chief Mamata Banerjee had claimed that the ED officials, during the searches, were “taking away” party documents ahead of the Assembly polls. Read on.

Social media platform X appeared to have limited the image-generation feature of the company’s artificial intelligence application Grok to subscribers. This came after the tool drew condemnation for creating non-consensual sexually explicit photos.

Grok had allowed requests by users to digitally manipulate photos of real persons – mostly women – by undressing them and sexualising their images without their consent. The change limiting the use of the feature to subscribers came after the United Kingdom government on Friday asked regulator Ofcom to use its powers, including an effective ban, against the social media platform.

However, the standalone Grok app was still allowing users to generate such images without subscribing. The Indian government had on January 2 directed X to remove sexually explicit content generated by Grok. Read on.

A Delhi court on Friday framed charges against Bihar’s former Chief Minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal president Lalu Prasad Yadav in a money-laundering case linked to an alleged land-for-jobs scam. Charges were also framed against his son and party leader Tejashwi Yadav.

A total of 103 persons had been named as accused in the case by the Central Bureau of Investigation, of which five have died. Of the remaining 98, the court discharged 52. Read on.

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