The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal and China rose to 750 on Sunday, reported AFP. Nearly 3,000 persons were missing.

On the Nepal side, 2,426 persons were out of contact as of Saturday, the country’s disaster management authority was quoted as saying. The number was 546 in Tibet, with 16 persons confirmed dead.

A total of 517 foreigners were among those out of contact. This includes tourists as well as foreign workers, reported AFP. New Delhi said on Saturday that 287 Indians were missing in Nepal.

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

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

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

Warning to rescuers

On Sunday, as the rescue efforts entered the fifth day, Nepal warned the teams involved in the operations about rising floodwaters in the Bhotekoshi river in Rasuwa.

“Therefore, all personnel engaged in search, rescue, and relief operations, those in riverside areas, and everyone else in affected areas including Rasuwa, Nuwakot, Dhading, and Chitwan are requested to exercise caution,” stated the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority.

India sends tunnel rescue team

A technical team from India for tunnel rescue has arrived in Nepal to assist with the operations, said the Ministry of External Affairs on Saturday.

This came as more than 100 workers are believed to be trapped inside multiple hydropower tunnels, reported AFP.

Apart from India, China has also sent a nine-person team to help with the tunnel rescue operations.

Additionally, New Delhi stated that it was sending to Nepal a 19-member contingent of six forensic teams to assist in the analysis of DNA samples for identification of mortal remains of those killed in the floods.

“Further targeted assistance, as per the requirements of Nepal, is being mobilised,” stated the external affairs ministry. “This includes Bailey bridges and associated technical teams for restoring connectivity and helping in relief efforts.”

Edited by Sneha.

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

The Kolkata Police has registered a first information report against West Bengal’s former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee for allegedly violating the Calcutta High Court order regarding the Trinamool Congress’s student wing foundation day event, reported The Hindu on Saturday.

The case was registered on Friday after Mamata Banerjee’s supporters allegedly blocked both flanks of Cathedral Road, where the event was held, disrupted traffic and continued the programme beyond the permitted time, reported The Indian Express.

On Tuesday, the High Court allowed both factions of the Trinamool Congress to hold the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad’s foundation event, specifying that movement of vehicles should not be stopped along one flank of the road, reported PTI.

Justice Saugata Bhattacharyya allowed the Mamata Banerjee-led faction to hold the event on Cathedral Road, while the Ritabrata Banerjee-led rebel group was granted permission for Rani Rashmoni Avenue. A maximum of 1,500 persons were to be allowed in the events, supposed to be held between noon and 3 pm on Friday.

The FIR against Mamata Banerjee was registered on a complaint filed by Sub-Inspector Apu Baidya of Hastings Police Station.

It alleged that the former chief minister had “entered into a criminal conspiracy” with members of the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad. She provoked her supporters, which resulted in the crowd pushing aside the barricades, clashing with police personnel “deployed for maintaining law and order, creating a chaotic situation and obstructing the vehicular movement of one flank of Cathedral Road”.

Along with Mamata Banerjee, the FIR also named organisers of the foundation day event.

They were booked under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to criminal conspiracy, using force against a government worker to prevent them from doing their job, and causing hurt to another by acting rashly or negligently.

During the rally on Friday, Mamata Banerjee had alleged that the Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal had turned the state police into a “monstrous entity”, reported The Indian Express.

“I do not recognise this police force,” said the former chief minister. “The police force I worked with was humane, not inhuman. They helped people. There may have been a couple of isolated incidents, but I have seen police personnel stand their ground, suffer injuries and shed blood. They did not run bulldozers over people, fire tear gas or bullets indiscriminately.”

Edited by Sneha.

On the morning of August 29, more than 5,000 people of Indian-origin trickled into New York’s Madison Square Garden to see one man take the stage: Mohan Bhagwat, the chief of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The event was titled the “Universal Oneness Celebration”. But outside the arena, there were two starkly different worlds.

On one side of the entrance sidewalk, attendees in festive clothes, saffron caps and rakhis took photographs in front of the Madison Square Garden logo. In one corner, a man played the dhol and sang a rap-like version of Jana Gana Mana. “Being woke is a joke,” he shouted. “We love Modi ji,” he continued, referring to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as some others joined in to shout “Vande Mataram”.

On the other side stood coalitions protesting Bhagwat’s appearance on grounds that the RSS and BJP fostered a climate of hate and violence against religious minorities in India. On Wednesday, echoing the same concerns, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had urged the Trump administration to revoke Bhagwat’s visa.

But the demonstrations on Saturday, organised by groups including Hindus for Human Rights and the Indian American Muslim Council, seldom bothered the attendees, many of whom had travelled from far and beyond to see Bhagwat speak.

“I saw Modi when he was here. It was wow. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I got it,” said Neelima Kallaru, who posed in front of the stadium with her husband and friends, referring to Modi’s public address in Long Island in September 2024. “And now I got the second one. There was no way I would miss it,” she said.

Her husband, Murali Kallaru, who immigrated from Andhra Pradesh to the US in 2000, felt similarly. The cacophony of protest slogans did not bother him either, he said.

“This is about India, not just about Hindutva,” said Kallaru. “It’s one family. And families can have different opinions,” he continued, referring to the demonstrations that had grown in numbers as the event got closer.

‘Oneness in diversity’

As the crowds began entering the arena, chants echoed: from “Vande Mataram” to “Jai Shri Ram”. The attendees were ushered in by volunteers with the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the RSS’s offshoot in the United States. The hall was packed to the brim.

The event, ostensibly centred on celebrating “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” or “the world is one family”, began with a call to action from the organisers, the American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue. The world is one, they said, calling around 48 faith leaders to the stage.

Then entered the guest of honour, Bhagwat. He was welcomed with a standing ovation.

He sat next to three people: a rabbi, an imam and a reverend. Each of them spoke one after the other. The common theme was “oneness”.

“It is one world, one humanity,” said Talib M Shareef, president and imam of Washington DC’s Masjid Muhammad and a retired US Air Force member. “Not one religion. Not one culture. Not one language. Not one ethnicity. Not one nationality. But one humanity.”

Finally, at the end of the nearly three-hour-long event, the RSS chief spoke.

For nearly 45 minutes, Bhagwat expounded on the “unity of existence” and “dharma”, which he said stood for balance, not religion.

“I come from a country where there is oneness in diversity,” he said. “We celebrate it.”

The RSS chief claimed a Hindu who does not want Muslims to live in India cannot be considered a Hindu. “If you want to call yourself Hindu, you must believe that all paths lead to the same goal and that every human has dignity,” he said.

Bhagwat told the Indians in the 5,000-odd crowd sitting in front of him to “be loyal” to their “karmabhoomi” or place of work – the United States. Their “janmabhoomi” or place of birth, India, “expects [them] to live the value imparted” to them.

“And the value is oneness,” he said. The crowd burst into cheers.

‘Hindus should come together’

Bhagwat’s speech was, in many ways, starkly different from his last major public speech in the US, according to Ajit Sahi, the Director of Public Affairs of the Indian American Muslim Council.

In 2018, at the World Hindu Congress in Chicago, Bhagwat spoke about the need for Hindus to “come together”, comparing them to a lion that could be overwhelmed by wild dogs if it stood alone.

“You have to remember that [speech],” said Sahi, who was one of the primary organisers of the protests outside Madison Square Garden on Saturday morning. “And now he is speaking about oneness?” he continued.

The contrast had become a central theme of the opposition to Bhagwat’s visit in the days leading up to his appearance.

On Tuesday, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he opposed the event, describing the RSS’s vision as “exclusionary” and at odds with the pluralistic and secular India he said he had grown up knowing. Mamdani, however, said the city might not have jurisdiction to cancel a private event at Madison Square Garden.

The same day, former New York city comptroller Brad Lander and city council members Shahana Hanif, Lincoln Restler and Julie Won joined more than 40 civil rights and community organisations at City Hall to call on Madison Square Garden to cancel the event.

Lander invoked the arena’s history as the site of a 1939 rally by the German American Bund. “MSG said it would not host hate-filled, bigoted rallies again,” he said. “It should not host this one.”

Hanif said Madison Square Garden should not provide a platform to Bhagwat and the RSS, which she described as a movement with a “documented history of persecution and violence against religious minorities”.

By Wednesday, the opposition had moved beyond New York.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom called on the Trump administration to consider targeted sanctions against RSS members and Indian officials involved in religious-freedom violations, and specifically urged the government to revoke Bhagwat’s US visa.

“The US government has an opportunity to hold India accountable and signal that the United States stands for religious freedom for the people of India,” said the commission’s vice chair, CeCe Heil. Not doing so would only lead to more attacks on minorities by “vigilante mobs,” she added.

The commission’s recommendation was non-binding, and Bhagwat remained in the country.

On Thursday, 65 US organisations, including Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Jewish, Dalit and civil-rights groups, issued a joint statement denouncing Bhagwat’s visit.

The organisers

As the controversy intensified, on Friday evening, Bhagwat’s face appeared on one of the giant digital billboards in Times Square. The images were accompanied by the words “Resolve, Harmony, Dialogue”, an unmistakable display of the public-relations campaign surrounding his visit.

The event itself was organised by AHEAD, a little-known nonprofit established in 2025. AHEAD presents itself as an organisation dedicated to engagement and dialogue among American Hindus and other communities.

But two recent investigations by Savera, a US-based organisation that researches Hindu nationalist networks, have questioned how independent AHEAD is from the RSS’s American infrastructure.

Savera reported that AHEAD was incorporated in May 2025, with its initial registration connected to Khanderao Kand, a longtime RSS and HSS figure and founder of the Foundation for India and Indian Diaspora Studies.

The report found that the organisation’s three listed directors also had connections to the American Sangh: Sudesh Agrawal, one of the directors, heads the HSS’s Cleveland chapter, while other directors have participated in HSS or affiliated organisations.

Savera also reported that AHEAD’s name and the “Universal Oneness” branding echoed language used by HSS in its own programming. It characterised AHEAD as part of a broader network through which the RSS’s overseas operations could organise Bhagwat’s visit while maintaining a separate formal identity. AHEAD has not publicly described itself as an RSS or HSS organisation.

By Saturday morning, the argument over Bhagwat’s visit had, hence, become larger than the event itself.

Inside Madison Square Garden, thousands of people listened to him. Neither did Bhagwat mention the opposition to his visit, nor anything about India or Prime Minister Modi.

Outside, protesters argued that giving the RSS chief one of New York’s most prominent stages was itself a statement about who gets to define that “oneness” – and its history.

All photographs by Oishika Neogi.

A Mumbai court has rejected the National Investigation Agency’s application to cancel the bail granted to four activists in the Bhima Koregaon case, reported Bar and Bench on Sunday.

The investigating agency had sought that the bail granted to activists Varavara Rao, Sudha Bharadwaj, Arun Ferreira and Vernon Gonsalves be cancelled on the grounds that they had attended a gathering at the Mumbai Press Club in January along with other persons accused in the case.

This violated their bail conditions, alleged the agency.

On Friday, Special Judge Chakor S Baviskar said that the activists may have spoken about the case when they met.

“By that alone, it cannot be concluded that, they committed breach of the condition imposed, that ‘the accused shall not come in contact or communicate with co-accused or any other person involved in similar activities’,” said the judge.

He also pointed out that the activists met each other inside and outside the courtroom during the hearing of the case.

“Hence, merely because a venue of the meeting/gathering of the accused changed, they cannot be said to have committed breach of the bail condition, as above and as alleged,” Bar and Bench quoted Baviskar as saying.

Rao was granted interim medical bail by the Bombay High Court in February 2021 and the bail order was confirmed by the Supreme Court in August 2022. Bharadwaj was granted default bail by the Bombay High Court in December 2021 as the agency had not filed a chargesheet within the stipulated time of 90 days.

Gonsalves and Ferreira spent almost five years in custody before the Supreme Court granted them regular bail in July 2023, with certain conditions.

In the application seeking the cancellation of bail of the activists, the NIA claimed that the gathering at the Mumbai Press Club was convened with the intention of propagating the ideology of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) and deciding on the future of the “Urban Naxal movement.

In April, the Mumbai Press Club suspended three members for having “facilitated” the gathering on January 19. The NIA had, on May 1, sought documents from the press club related to the gathering.

A Mumbai City Civil Court on May 7 stayed the expulsion of one of the Mumbai Press Club members, Gurbir Singh.

It held that on a preliminary reading, action had been taken against him “only with an intent to prevent him from contesting the elections of the club”.

The case

The Bhima Koregaon case pertains to the violence that broke out near Pune on January 1, 2018, a day after a conclave called the Elgar Parishad was organised to mark the 200th anniversary of the battle of Bhima Koregaon. One person was killed in the violence and several others were injured.

The NIA has alleged that the Elgar Parishad was part of a larger Maoist conspiracy to stoke caste violence, destabilise the Union government and assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Sixteen people were arrested in the case.

But when the Supreme Court in 2023 granted bail to two persons accused in the case, it noted that the primary evidence cited by the NIA – a batch of letters – was of “weak probative value or quality”. In addition, a digital forensics firm, Arsenal Consulting, concluded that false evidence had been planted on the laptops and devices of the accused persons.

Of the 16 accused persons, 14 have been released on bail. Jesuit priest Stan Swamy, who was also accused in the case, died in prison in 2021.

Another accused man, Surendra Gadling, got bail from the Bombay High Court on May 4. However, he remains in jail as his bail application in a 2016 arson case is pending before the Supreme Court.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: Anand Patwardhan writes about the taming of the Mumbai Press Club

On Wednesday morning, I woke up to a message from a disaster authority about tremors that were felt in Shimla and Chamba at around 5 am. Just a few hours later, the United States’ earthquake hazards programme reported another earthquake of 4.4 magnitude in Nepal.

I went about my day thinking that these were usual Himalayan tectonic activities. But soon, videos of a mammoth wave of water, silt and debris crashing down Nepal’s Bothe Koshi river near the Nepal-Tibet border overtook my X feed. More than 1,500 people are currently missing.

By evening, preliminary studies pointed towards some potential causes – a large volume of ice and rock debris from a glacier may have fallen into the tributary of the river, generating a sudden surge downstream. India has seen similar such events – in 2021, Chamoli in Uttarakhand saw massive devastation as a result of an ice and rock avalanche.

Experts soon began discussing the possible factors that could have led to such a fall. Some wondered if the earthquake had triggered it. But the US agency instead suggested another conclusion – that the glacial collapse and debris flow may have been so strong that it, in fact, caused the earthquake. Some speculated that the collapse may have been accelerated due to warming, though more evidence will need to establish such a connection.

Landsat 9 captured very clear images of the Himalayan glacier that collapsed, triggering the catastrophic flash floods in Nepal.

Estimating very roughly from these images, it appears that the area that failed may have spanned ~1 km² of ice and rock.

h/t @theiaincameron pic.twitter.com/L48gqGPTV8

— Dr. Robert Rohde (@RARohde) August 27, 2026

If the tragedy was found to have been caused by melting glaciers, it will unfortunately not be the first in Nepal or the rest of the Himalayas – though most others in recent years are classified as glacial lake outburst floods, or GLOFs. These occur when a lake fed by glacial melt breaches suddenly.

The Bothe Koshi river experienced another flood last July, which was a GLOF. The same year, Nepal saw two more such floods. In August 2024, Thame village was swept away when two lakes overflowed following a rock collapse. In India, the Sikkim flood of 2023 was a GLOF, as was the one in Kedarnath in 2013.

GLOFs are now increasingly common across the Himalayas. Scientists point out that warming temperatures have rapidly caused more snow melt, increasing the number and sizes of glacial lakes. Sikkim has almost 700 such lakes, of which 21 have been identified as “potentially dangerous with a high outburst probability”. The number of glacial lakes in Himachal Pradesh has increased by over 500% from 1990.

I have closely reported on two such GLOFs. In both instances, locals who lost homes, loved ones, and agricultural land pointed out that while a changing climate might be causing the floods, their impacts have been compounded by how rivers and floodplains have been used.

In the town of Melli, on the border of Sikkim and West Bengal, Akbar Lepcha who had lost his home in the 2023 flood explained that the string of hydropower projects on the Teesta river acted as a barrier when the flood came. Since these projects already had water stored to produce electricity, when floodwaters surged in, the authorities had no choice but to open the dam gates, releasing a cascade of water. “If the series of dams were not there, then the only water that would have come would have been from the glacier,” he said.

Moreover, when such cascading floods swallow everything in their path, debris of infrastructure like bridges and hydropower projects mix with silt and boulders, worsening the impact downstream. At Sikkim’s Chungthang, where the GLOF first hit, my colleague Kritika Pant and I were astounded to see what was left of the Teesta-III hydro project – massive blocks of concrete were strewn around, some crashed against what were once homes.

Improper disposal of muck near rivers during hydropower and other construction work also worsens the impacts of floods. Heavy rainfall can mix the muck with flowing water, aggravating erosion and flooding.

People have also settled along the river beds, and this construction further obstructs the flow of water, experts have told me. In Himachal’s Lahaul, where glacial melt flash floods had become common, locals informed me that while most ancestral homes were higher up in the mountains, over time, people have moved lower, closer to the river, to be closer to a road head, market, and schools and hospitals. That has only made them more vulnerable to events like flash floods.

Our reporting has shown that the Indian government has ignored red flags about dangerous glacial lakes, even as people grew more aware of the risks. In Sikkim, we found that “GLOF” became a household term. In Lahaul, people called a stream susceptible to flash floods “pagal nala” because it could quickly turn from a reliable source of irrigation to a destructive torrent.

Yet, there have not been any changes in the developmental models followed in Himalayan states. A little over a year after Sikkim’s GLOF, the environment ministry gave the nod to rebuild the Teesta-III hydropower project, which had been completely washed away. In June, the Himachal government announced plans of a river interlinking project whose reservoir will be close to Sissu, on a tributary of Chenab, into which the “pagal nala” flows.

Residents of Sissu, situated right below a vulnerable glacial lake, told me they were worried about the impacts a glacial burst could have downstream. Suresh, a resident of another village in Lahaul, who lost his home in a 2022 flash flood, said, “The government keeps thinking of building such large infrastructure like dams here in Himachal, where even if a stone moves, a disaster can happen.”

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

Language politics. Auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers in Maharashtra will be given one year to learn Marathi, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said. No action will be taken against the drivers during this period for not knowing the language, he added.

This came amid a statewide inspection campaign to enforce the Maharashtra government’s rule making Marathi mandatory for auto-rickshaw and cab drivers in the state. As of Saturday, the Maharashtra Transport Department had issued notices to hundreds of drivers for lacking basic knowledge of Marathi.

Fadnavis’ announcement came hours after representatives of auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers’ organisations met him, seeking more time to comply with the rule.

Allegations against a HC chief justice. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said that the allegations made by a Supreme Court judge against Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma were being examined at the “appropriate level”. In letters to Kant earlier this month, Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma had manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts.

Mehta sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”.

Taking note of Mehta’s complaint, Kant said that Sharma had to be given an opportunity to respond.

New roadblocks. The Donald Trump administration in the United States paused immigrant visa appointments globally as consular officials undergo training to identify applicants who may become dependent on public benefits. Applicants scheduled for interviews have been told their appointments would be rescheduled.

The US State Department said that the training was intended to ensure visa applications are assessed “comprehensively and consistently”.

The pause comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration seeking to tighten the rules for entry into the US.

Also on Scroll last week

• Is Census 2027 the first step to a National Register of Citizens?
• The desperate wait of families of Indian men tricked into fighting Russia’s war
• ‘Planned failure’: Is the Modi government sabotaging its own caste census?
• The takeover of a Bandra football ground is part of a larger fight for Mumbai’s public spaces
• The 19th-century Indians who nurtured a self-reliant scientific culture in colonial India
• In Ladakh, an ancient art gallery is hiding in plain sight
• Why jobs are becoming unaffordable for some Indian women
• Why has India-Japan cooperation not translated into deeper strategic integration?
• ‘Toxic’ review: Blood, lust and something like love in unwieldy, overly long crime saga
• Why indie filmmakers are demanding screening fees – and turning down festivals if they aren’t paid

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 toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal and China increased to 682 on Saturday, AFP reported.

Of these, 675 deaths were in Nepal, the news agency quoted the country’s disaster management authority as saying. At least seven had died on the Chinese side of the border, state media reported.

More than 2,420 persons were missing. This included 287 Indians, New Delhi said on Saturday.

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

Here’s more on this and other top updates:

Search and rescue update

• India’s Ministry of External Affairs on Saturday said that 128 persons of Indian origin, who are foreign citizens, were also missing.
• It also said that 120 Indian citizens had crossed into Nepal from China on Saturday.
• The Nepal Tourism Board said that 167 Indian tourists had been rescued as of 6 pm Nepal time on Saturday.
• Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah had said on Friday that 4,451 persons have been rescued, including 191 from a hydropower tunnel and 517 persons rescued through air operations. He said that more than 15,400 security personnel, including 6,755 from the Army, 4,473 from the police and over 4,200 from the armed police forces were conducting the search and rescue operations.
• The Red Cross said that about 93,000 persons may have been affected by the deluge, and the toll is expected to rise, AFP reported.

Nepal agrees to foreign help

• The Nepali government reversed an earlier decision not to seek help from international search teams, after diplomatic pressure from countries whose citizens are missing after the floods, The Kathmandu Post reported.
• The government had said on Wednesday that Nepali personnel were capable of handling search and rescue efforts. However, the newspaper on Friday quoted an unidentified government official as saying that they “received massive pressure from the international community to allow at least search-and-rescue teams and some experts because their citizens have also gone missing in the floods”.

India sends more aid

• The Indian embassy in Kathmandu said that a third flight carrying aid from India has arrived in Nepal’s capital. An 11-member medical and tunnel rescue team, along with relief material, is now on the field, the embassy said.
• On Wednesday, India had handed over a second consignment of humanitarian assistance to Nepal, including 37.5 tonnes of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief material, medicines and food packets.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande and Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: The day after catastrophic flash flood, Nepal contemplates enormous cost of climate change

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Saturday demanded the registration of a first information report against those who carried out a “purification” ritual at a ground in Uttarakhand, where Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge had held a rally earlier this month.

Addressing a press conference in Delhi, Gandhi said that 20 days had passed since the incident, but no action had been taken. He demanded that the FIR be registered under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

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

देश के हर दलित व्यक्ति का जन्म से मृत्यु तक, हर जगह, हर कदम अपमान किया जाता है।

उनकी जितनी बुलंद आवाज़ होती है, उनपर उतना तेज़ हमला होता है।

कांग्रेस अध्यक्ष मल्लिकार्जुन खरगे जी के साथ हल्द्वानी में जो भी हुआ वो "शुद्धिकरण" का नाम दे कर उनके खिलाफ़ छुआछूत है - और छुआछूत भारत… pic.twitter.com/MJpDFRm9Zj

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) August 29, 2026

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

Gandhi also played a video of Uttarakhand BJP chief Mahendra Bhatt justifying the act, saying the venue had been polluted by slogans. Bhatt had claimed that the purification was not done against any person belonging to a Scheduled Caste.

The leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha further said that the incident showed the mindset of the BJP and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. He accused them of practising untouchability despite it being prohibited by the Constitution.

“The fight is between the Indian Constitution and the ideologies of the BJP and the RSS,” he said.

Gandhi said that it was the responsibility of the Centre and the state governments to ensure justice for Kharge, asserting that the Congress chief “will get justice in Uttarakhand, whether it is today or tomorrow”.

The purification ritual was performed by a group named Shri Ram Sena. The Congress’ Uttarakhand unit alleged that the group is associated with the BJP.

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

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

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari on Friday asked newspaper Anandabazar Patrika to apologise for using the phrase “saffron hooliganism” in its headline to describe the August 20 clash between student groups at Jadavpur University.

“I will ask a news outlet in West Bengal to do political campaigns, political criticism,” Adhikari said at an event to mark the Hindu festival Raksha Bandhan. “But don’t attack saffron. The result will be terrible. You will not be able to handle the terrible consequences.”

Adhikari added: “Apologise within 24 hours. Print it on the first page…the writing was wrong. Otherwise, there will be a protest by those wearing saffron.”

The chief minister did not name Anandabazar Patrika in his speech. However, the comments came amid criticism of the newspaper by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders.

On Thursday, a complaint was filed with the police seeking a first information report against the editorial team of Anandabazar Patrika over the newspaper having used “gerua gundami”, or saffron hooliganism, on its front page, The Wire reported.

The complainant filed by spiritual leader Sanjay Shastri Maharaj demanded that action be taken against two journalists working with the newspaper.

The colour saffron is a religious symbol to Hindus and not a political one, The Wire quoted the complainant as having stated. Linking the colour to “hooliganism” went “beyond criticism of any particular political organisation or ideology”, and hurt the religious sentiments of “crores of Hindus”, he alleged.

The complainant asked the police to find out “who proposed the expression, who approved it, who was involved in editing the report and determining the headline, and whether any of the persons concerned had the intention or knowledge that such wording could cause injury to religious sentiments”, The Wire reported on Saturday.

The complaint did not cite any legal provisions under which the FIR could be filed. It is unclear if the police have acted on the complaint.

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

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

Several students were injured and taken to a hospital.

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

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Ten bodies have been recovered from the Gandak river in Uttar Pradesh’s Maharajganj and Kushinagar districts in the past two days following the flash flood in Nepal, The Indian Express reported on Saturday.

The Gandak, also known as the Narayani in Nepal, flows from Nepal into India before joining the Ganga.

The deceased are yet to be identified.

All the deceased were adults and believed to be Nepalis, The Indian Express quoted unidentified officials as saying. The bodies have been kept at mortuaries in Maharajganj and Kushinagar for 72 hours, they added.

“If no one comes forward during the 72-hour period, further action will be taken in accordance with government guidelines,” the newspaper quoted Maharajganj Additional District Magistrate Prashant Kumar as saying.

The Gandak also swept away several other objects, including vehicles, household items, gas cylinders, drums, furniture, logs and other debris, which have been washing up along its banks.

The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal increased to 616 on Saturday. More than 2,400 persons were missing, the country’s disaster management authority said.

More than 4,400 persons had been rescued, Prime Minister Balendra Shah said.

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

Maharajganj and Kushinagar were put on high alert on Thursday as officials monitored the Gandak and other rivers flowing in from Nepal.

However, The Indian Express quoted an unidentified official as saying that the immediate flood risk has subsided after water levels receded.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

A special court has taken cognisance of the National Investigation Agency’s chargesheet in connection with the November 10 blast near Delhi’s Red Fort, ANI reported on Saturday.

This paves the way for judicial proceedings in the case to begin.

The NIA has named 13 persons in the chargesheet, including three who were named in a supplementary chargesheet.

The next hearing in the matter is scheduled for September 9.

The blast near the Red Fort metro station left at least 11 persons dead and several injured. Umar Un Nabi, a doctor, was believed to have been driving the car that exploded. Nabi died in the blast.

Two days after the explosion, the Union government described it as a “terrorist incident”.

In May, the agency filed its first chargesheet against 10 persons in the case. It alleged that all of them, including Nabi, were linked to Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind, which it had described as an offshoot of Al Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent.

The agency also alleged that the group aimed to overthrow the Indian government and impose Sharia, or Islamic law, in the country.

Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind was formed in Kashmir in 2017 when some militants broke away from Hizbul Mujahideen – the largest indigenous militant organisation in Kashmir – and claimed that they were affiliated to terror group Al Qaeda.

The supplementary chargesheet filed on June 27 named three residents of Jammu and Kashmir: Zameer Ahmad Ahanger, Tufail Ahmad Bhat and Muzafar Ahmad, also known as Faraz/Zafar.

The NIA alleged that Muzafar Ahmad was among the key conspirators behind the blast.

It said that Muzafar Ahmad attended a secret meeting at Eidgah in Srinagar in June 2022, where Ansar Ghazwat-ul-Hind Interim was formed.

The agency alleged that he was involved in manufacturing, testing and storing triacetone triperoxide-based improvised explosive devices at a clandestine facility allegedly run from Al-Falah University in Haryana’s Faridabad. A non-bailable warrant was issued against him.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Congress leaders on Friday alleged that Penguin Random House India succumbed to pressure from the Union government with respect to former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s memoir, Belonging: A Journey of Love.

Former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot alleged that the publisher was under pressure to remove portions from the book related to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the alleged “occupation of Indian territory by China”.

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

In a social media post, Gehlot questioned why Penguin Random House India wanted changes to be made to the book before its publication in India if Penguin Worldwide was ready to publish it in its original form globally.

He said that “suppressing” Gandhi’s book was akin to the murder of freedom of expression and democracy.

Penguin Worldwide is ready to publish Smt. Sonia Gandhi ji's upcoming book worldwide in its original form, but Penguin Random House India wants changes made to launch it in India. After all, what is the reason or what pressure is there that what is being published across the…

— Ashok Gehlot (@ashokgehlot51) August 28, 2026

Earlier on Friday, The Indian Express reported that Penguin Random House India dropped Gandhi’s memoir as she rejected certain “editorial changes and deletions” that the publisher wanted in the manuscript.

Penguin India, however, said that any suggestion that it decided not to publish the book because the author declined editorial changes was not accurate.

“As a publisher, it is both our prerogative and our responsibility to fact check and provide authors with recommendations that are in the best interests of the book,” it said on social media. “…Throughout the relevant discussions, Penguin Random House India’s position was that we remained willing and keen to publish the book.”

The publisher, however, declined to comment on “confidential discussions” with the Congress leader.

Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi described Penguin India’s statement as “weak”, saying that the publisher was willing to publish Exam Warriors and several books on the RSS.

Exam Warriors is a book by Modi, written for young students to help them deal with the stress of exams.

“No doubt there are those in the BJP government who have now become afraid of a book being read by the people of India,” Gogoi wrote on X.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

A controversy broke out in Navi Mumbai’s Kharghar area after 3,400 special intensive revision forms were found at a private photocopy shop, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

Five booth-level officers were suspended pending disciplinary action by the Raigad district collector after the matter came to light.

The police have also filed a first information report against a man named Suraj Patil under provisions of the Representation of the People Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the newspaper reported. The complaint alleged that Patil was in unauthorised possession of special intensive revision forms.

The police said on Friday that members of the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) confronted a man who they claimed was a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s youth wing when he was allegedly getting forms photocopied, PTI reported.

A video of the confrontation was widely shared on social media, after which the administration launched an inquiry into how SIR forms filled by voters were found at a photocopy centre.

An unidentified BJP leader from Panvel was quoted as saying by PTI that members of his party had no connection with the matter.

An inspection reportedly revealed that the forms were from 11 polling stations. The majority of the applications were from five polling stations, and while single copies were found from six other polling booths, The Indian Express reported.

Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) MP Rohit Pawar said that it was enough for booth-level officers to be suspended, and that action should also be taken against those gave orders to them.

“In this case, some face-saving action was taken because vigilant citizens brought the matter to light,” Pawar said in a social media post. “But what about several other such cases that have not yet become public? This is also a question that the Election Commission must answer.”

या प्रकरणात 4 BLO यांना निलंबित केल्याचं कळतंय… पण फक्त BLO यांना निलंबित करून भागणार नाही, तर त्यांना आदेश देणारे अधिकार कोण आहेत? तेही निलंबित झाले पाहिजेत आणि भाजप कार्यकर्त्यावरही कारवाई झाली पाहिजे. महत्त्वाचं म्हणजे जागरुक नागरिकांमुळं हा प्रकार उघडकीस आला म्हणून लाजेखातर… https://t.co/Ju2p7BKhKv

— Rohit Pawar (@RRPSpeaks) August 28, 2026

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Over a decade has passed since India sought to reorient its grand strategic discourse from continental to maritime Asia and anchored its vision of international order in the Indian Ocean Region.

In justifying this maritime turn within India’s national security discourse, both internal architects and external observers have pointed to the enduring strategic vision of Kavalam Madhava Panikkar (1895-1963). Panikkar was a historian, diplomat and influential foreign policy personality in pre- and post-independence India.

He served in different capacities at princely courts in the erstwhile British Raj, was part of deliberations over India’s geostrategic position during the interwar years, and had crucial stints as independent India’s ambassador to China and then Egypt. Panikkar’s influence was wide-ranging, but in contemporary foreign policy circles, one of his key legacies is the role he played in defining the contours of India’s maritime strategy.

Panikkar’s naval thought, laid out specifically in India and the Indian Ocean: An Essay on the Influence of Sea Power (1945), is consistently invoked to defend both the legitimacy of the grand strategic narrative embedded in New Delhi’s more recent maritime turn, and the convergence of partner states’ Indo-Pacific strategies seen through a “Mahanian” veneer. This entails control of the “ocean space” by leveraging India’s geostrategic position to project naval force over important sea lanes of communication, with the aim of keeping the high seas free and open for commerce and naval traffic.

Consequently, engagement with Panikkar’s work, both within the academia and policymaking circles, has served as a legitimating function internally and provided cover for any mismatch between Indian foreign policy objectives and those of its allies, real or presumptive, in the Indo-Pacific.

A study of Panikkar’s thought and the manner in which it is invoked offers a perspective through which to read India’s current posture toward the IOR while also revealing a contradiction that advocates will find it hard to square.

India has made its security concerns vis-à-vis China’s penetration of the Indian Ocean Region a priority. To this end, it has sought to leverage quasi-alliance arrangements like the Quad – a grouping of India, Australia, Japan and the US – and several bilateral arrangements, most prominently with the US, without signaling an open rivalry with China or committing to a “security alliance.”

Panikkar, however, called for India to accept an alliance with a great power patron to secure its neighborhood, a policy that sits at odds with India’s notions of “strategic autonomy,” embraced even by those who otherwise seek to derive legitimacy from his maritime vision.

A ‘Panikkarian’ approach

Panikkar revivalists claim that his prescriptions, understood in a realist or geopolitical mold, were sidelined by Nehruvian non-alignment and “idealism”. In his subsequent reemergence at the dawn of India’s Indo-Pacific turn, Panikkar has come to be portrayed as India’s foremost naval strategic thinker and geopolitical sage, eschewing the non-alignment “rhetoric” of Nehru. This revival has coincided with a projection of India as a civilisation state, reflecting a view of the past popular with the Indian Right and a specific “international personality” as a facet of domestic politics.

Looked at broadly, Panikkar’s thought exhibits polyvalence – a consequence of his personal and professional development – as well as contingency with respect to his strategic and political views. Yet, if we are to derive a sequence or stability in his thought, at least with regard to grand strategy, we can isolate certain constants: Hinduism as a civilisational/cultural/political entity representing the unity of India, the “ocean space” as a source of insecurity and the pathway to rekindle past glory of India, and finally, the political form of empire which defined and mapped his strategy for India in the Indian Ocean Region.

Panikkar narrated what he called the subjugation of India through the colonial incursions from the sea, and concurrently critiqued continental imperial polities (including the Mughals) for a neglect of the ocean space in their strategic outlook.

Additionally, he struck off alternative lineages of statecraft such as those of Buddhism and Jainism (as idealistic or pacifistic) from what he discerned to be the Hindu theory and practice (realistic or coercive) of statecraft.

Instead, he recounted the exploits of earlier seafaring empires of ancient India, which conquered and organised the littoral geographies of the IOR, and formed a bulwark against “extra-regional” coercive incursions. This exercise was bound up with his idea of a reawakening of Hindus as a political force in the subcontinent and his idea of a “non-Islamic Asia,” forming Panikkar’s overarching narrative of India being a civilisational and political anchor to the Indian Ocean Region.

Yet, to achieve its maritime ambitions, Panikkar believed India would need help. From his vantage point of the inter-war years, Panikkar was fixated on the need to keep the Indian Ocean free from external incursions, into which he drafted the ideas of collective security and cooperation of Commonwealth states as well as an alliance with the British. In his near-term security strategy for India, Panikkar attested to the need for a great power patron to help India manage a transition to its potential through a harmonisation of interests in facing “external” threats.

The Indo-Pacific and India’s maritime turn

Many decades after Panikkar’s influential book, India has sought to reorient its strategy toward the sea, this time using the amorphous and contested concept of the Indo-Pacific.

On one hand, New Delhi has focused on creating a civilisational narrative at home and abroad, which not only signals a shift in its security priorities but also seeks to naturalise its role in the Indian Ocean Region. This narrative has also entailed the assertion of an Indian cartographic view of the Indian Ocean Region and the Indo-Pacific, distinct from the Western one.

On the other hand, the strategy has entailed the creation of maritime infrastructure to integrate and leverage India’s own economic potential in the trade networks of the region, as well as the development and deployment of its naval assets and maritime security routines in concert with other states to position India as a “net-security provider” in the Indian Ocean.

India’s relationship with, and its perception of, the US has been central to this aspect of its maritime strategy. Given the fateful US “pivot to Asia” announced under former President Barack Obama’s tenure, this reorientation, in hindsight, appears as a natural corollary to India’s perception of increasing threat from China.

Accordingly, successive regimes in New Delhi have utilised the concept of the Indo-Pacific to discursively and strategically project a convergence of maritime policies with like-minded states in the region such as Japan, Australia, and Vietnam, but most importantly the US. This approach is driven by the recognition that the Indo-Pacific is structured predominantly through the Sino-US rivalry and to a lesser extent, the Sino-Indian “competition”.

Much of this seems to echo Panikkar. Many have pointed out that Panikkar’s book on the Indian Ocean has been a staple text read by Indian Naval officers decades after it was published. However, it is the ongoing redefinition of India as a civilisational state on narrow terms defined by a Hindu politico-historical foundation, in New Delhi’s foreign policy, that forms the incision point to understand the newfound receptivity to Panikkar’s thinking.

The increasingly forceful expression of India’s domestic and international personality through a narrowed down religio-cultural register of Hinduism dovetails with Panikkar’s conscious exclusion of alternative lineages of Indian statecraft from India’s strategic register. This is occurring simultaneously with what some have referred to as the “saffronisation” of India’s diplomatic and foreign policy apparatus.

Additionally, the specific cultural and civilisational elements of India’s maritime turn blends with its domestic state-building narratives, similar to other participants in the Indo-Pacific littoral.

Accordingly, then, a combination of a long-time view of itself as a civilisational state and its rendering through a specific religio-cultural register defines India’s strategic narrative building project in the Indian Ocean. This extends specifically to Project Mausam, an effort to reinvigorate cultural connections around the Indian Ocean, and SAGAR, described as a “blueprint” for cooperation in the region, both of which aim to shape regional consciousness toward the acceptability and perhaps inevitability of India as the central polity in the IOR.

Continental divergence

India’s maritime turn was driven, in part, by the aim of sidelining the China-Pakistan factor within its overall approach to regional order building, while also seeking to address the growing Chinese salience in the Indian Ocean. In hoping to secure its own place as the net security and capacity provider of the region, India has looked toward deepening ties with the US as the key to fulfilling this role. This is primarily due to operational limitations of the Indian Navy and the technology intensive nature of naval power projection and capabilities.

Although broadly within the contours of a Panikkarian strategy, committing fully to this trajectory would come at the cost of India’s stated “multi-alignment” foreign policy strategy. The latter is an effort to square the circle of competing contradictions in the geostrategic priorities of key players, including the US, within the Indo-Pacific. The acuteness of the Chinese “threat” to Indo-Pacific nations is not equally shared, which, in turn, impacts how they view the efforts of New Delhi as well as Washington, DC to shape the region.

Moreover, as recent years have shown, no matter how much New Delhi wishes to commit to its maritime turn, “continental” challenges reassert themselves. Since 2020, India has had to deal with intense conflict situations on both the China and Pakistan land borders.

These sources of strategic insecurity have been compounded by an adversarial regime in the US, a worst-case scenario of rapprochement between Washington, DC and Islamabad, and other neighborhood challenges – including the aftermath of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and political instability in Nepal and Bangladesh.

As a result, India’s hopes of relying on a great power patron to build its Indo-Pacific maritime capacity has faced significant challenges, both in terms of priority as well as actual deployment and coordination with the US.

Venturing into the ocean(s), but to what end(s)?

Commentators and advocates who championed the maritime approach to India’s foreign policy – built around the concept of the Indo-Pacific – have found it hard to translate into reality. Herein, Panikkar’s pitch for an alliance with a great power patron and wider alliance commitments come up against the post-independence legacy of strategic autonomy, or non-alignment.

The tension arises from the complexities of the India-China-US triangular relationship, and the question of whether Indian naval strategy is willing to become an adjunct to the overarching strategic preferences of Washington, DC, and fully assert a view of China as an adversary.

The result is an awkward middle position – hedging rather than committing. Panikkar’s thought is relied upon for legitimacy, without engaging with the contingency of his maritime prescriptions, especially with respect to great power patronage and the changing character of technology.

To move forward meaningfully, India’s maritime turn needs to do more than invoke Panikkar’s naval vision as a straightforward source of legitimacy. Those advocating the Indian Ocean strategy need to genuinely interrogate what his ideas actually prescribe in today’s conditions.

This means engaging seriously with the full breadth of Panikkar’s thinking, which itself evolved over time, moving away from a fixed, interwar-era worldview toward a more dynamic reassessment of the balance between the ocean and the continental space as a starting point of inquiry.

Mujeeb Kanth is a doctoral candidate in the Department of International Relations at South Asian University.

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

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

Three persons allegedly linked to Hindutva groups were arrested on Friday for attacking participants of a book-reading session in Ahmedabad, PTI reported. Two persons were injured in the attack.

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

The organisers said that the session at Vastrapur Park was open to persons who wanted to read books of their choice. After the session ended, a group of men carrying hockey sticks and saffron flags reached the site, shouting “Jai Shree Ram” and allegedly abused the participants.

The group objected to a memoir by Nobel Peace Prize winner and Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala, being among the books available for reading at the session.

Vastrapur Police Station Inspector GM Chaudhary told PTI that about 20 persons, including women, had gathered for the reading session when the group of 18 to 20 persons claiming to be members of the two Hindutva groups attacked the participants.

Earlier this month, some parents of children at Ahmedabad’s Anand Niketan school had objected to Yousafzai’s book being made part of an optional reading list, alleging that the school was discriminating against students from a particular religion, The Indian Express reported. The school had terminated the services of a consultant following the controversy.

FIR against attackers

A first information report has been registered in connection with the attack on the book-reading session. Two of the persons accused in the matter were known to the participants, the news agency reported. “Apart from them, six individuals have been identified, and three have already been arrested,” PTI quoted the police officer as saying.

The FIR was registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to rioting, unlawful assembly and causing physical pain.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Karnataka minister B Nagendra resigned from the Cabinet on Friday amid pressure from the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party over alleged financial irregularities in the Maharshi Valmiki Scheduled Tribe Development Corporation, The Indian Express reported.

The alleged irregularities came to light in May 2024 after an accounts superintendent with the corporation died by suicide and left a note alleging unauthorised transfers of funds. The Congress leader was the tribal welfare minister at the time, but was not named in the case.

He stepped down in June 2024, saying that he wanted a fair investigation in the case. He was re-inducted into the Cabinet on August 3, a month after DK Shivakumar replaced Siddaramaiah as the chief minister.

On Friday, Nagendra accused the BJP of pressuring him to step down.

“I asked the BJP many times to discuss allegations against me in the Assembly but they did not come,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying. “Where is the proof?”

Nagendra alleged that he was being “attacked” because he is a Dalit.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

A passport is the most recognisable document the Indian state issues to its citizens. It carries the national emblem, is issued by a sovereign government, and allows its holder to cross international borders as an Indian national.

Yet, during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, the Ministry of External Affairs clarified that an Indian passport should be understood primarily as a travel document rather than as conclusive proof of citizenship, a distinction that took on particular significance amid the SIR debate.

It is correctly established as a matter of law that a passport is not conclusive proof of citizenship. It is a travel document, issued under the Passports Act, 1967, a statute that itself permits passports to be issued to non-citizens in specified circumstances.

If a passport does not settle the question, what should an ordinary citizen produce when the state asks whether he/she may vote? The question reaches well beyond documentation. It goes to the relationship between citizenship, evidence and democratic participation.

The Election Commission has framed the SIR as an exercise meant to ensure that no eligible citizen is left off the rolls while no ineligible person is included on them. It undertook the exercise under Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.

On May 27, the Supreme Court, in Association for Democratic Reforms vs Election Commission of India, upheld the commission’s authority to conduct the Bihar SIR, holding that the exercise did not conflict with the Act or its rules and bore a direct and proportionate connection to the constitutional goal of free and fair elections.

At the same time, the court held that the commission’s power to assess citizenship is limited and prima facie in character. It cannot conclusively adjudicate citizenship, a determination that remains the exclusive preserve of the Citizenship Act, 1955, and the authorities constituted under it. This is not a minor qualification. It is the load-bearing distinction on which the legitimacy of the entire exercise depends.

Citizenship is a legal status

Indian citizenship is governed by the citizenship provisions of the Constitution and the Citizenship Act, 1955. It does not depend, in every context, on possession of any single document such as a passport, Aadhaar card, voter identity card or birth certificate.

The Supreme Court’s treatment of Aadhaar during the Bihar SIR litigation illustrates this distinction. In its orders of August and September 2025, the Court made clear that Aadhaar is not proof of citizenship, while directing the Election Commission to accept it as an additional identity document, the twelfth document, for the limited purpose of electoral-roll verification under Section 23(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950.

The distinction matters because different documents establish different facts and carry different evidentiary weight. The commission’s framework should therefore make clear what each document establishes and what combination of evidence is ultimately sufficient. The inclusion of passports among the accepted documents, despite the ministry’s public position that a passport is not conclusive proof of citizenship, illustrates the uncertainty that can arise when this distinction is left implicit.

Older authority also bears on the issue. In Lal Babu Hussein vs Electoral Registration Officer, (1995) 3 SCC 100, the Supreme Court held that existing inclusion in the electoral roll carries substantial probative value and that deletion on the ground of suspected non-citizenship requires notice and a meaningful opportunity to rebut the allegation.

In Association for Democratic Reforms vs Election Commission of India, 2026 INSC 564 (ADR), however, the court distinguished Lal Babu Hussein on its facts, holding that its observations arose in the context of periodically conducted intensive revisions and could not be extended to create an enduring presumption of eligibility for entries subsequently carried forward through summary revisions.

The delay in the ADR judgment meant that the SIR process continued for months while key questions about its scope, evidentiary requirements and safeguards remained unresolved. That uncertainty also had implications for West Bengal and other States where similar revisions are underway, since the judgment would ultimately shape the legal framework within which those exercises proceed.

Article 326 provides that elections to the Lok Sabha and the state legislative assemblies rest on adult suffrage, and that every citizen who has attained eighteen years of age and is not otherwise disqualified is entitled to be registered as a voter.

This creates a constitutional link between citizenship and electoral registration. It does not, however, specify that possession of any particular document is the constitutional test of citizenship. Section 16 of the RPA disqualifies non-citizens from registration, while Sections 19 and 23 regulate the conditions of registration and the correction of entries in the rolls. None of these provisions supplies the evidentiary hierarchy that an exercise of this scale and consequence requires.

Problem of arbitrary standards

The commission has a legitimate interest in ensuring that the rolls contain only eligible voters. But the manner in which evidence is assessed must also satisfy the basic constitutional requirement that administrative discretion not collapse into administrative uncertainty. Article 14 demands more than a formally available procedure; it requires State action to be non-arbitrary and reasonably structured.

The right to vote itself, as settled authority holds, is not a fundamental right under Article 19 but a constitutional and statutory right operating within the framework of Article 326 and the Representation of the People Acts. That does not place its regulation beyond constitutional scrutiny.

Since Maneka Gandhi vs Union of India, (1978) 1 SCC 248, the Court has read Articles 14 and 21 together to require fairness and reasonableness in State action affecting life and personal liberty. While Article 21 does not directly constitutionalise the adult franchise, the broader principle of non-arbitrariness under Article 14 remains applicable to the State’s administration of the electoral process.

Article 325 adds a further dimension. It mandates a single general electoral roll for every constituency and prohibits exclusion from that roll on grounds only of religion, race, caste or sex. The provision reflects a foundational constitutional commitment to a common electoral roll rather than separate rolls based on communal identity. A revision process that focuses on identifying doubtful entries must therefore also ensure adequate protection against the erroneous exclusion of eligible voters.

Amit Upadhyay is Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana.

Abhinav Mehrotra is Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

At least 60 newborns died in August till Monday at the West Bengal government-run Malda Medical College and Hospital, The Indian Express reported on Friday. Ten of these deaths were reported on Monday alone.

The state government has sought a report from the hospital on the infant deaths.

The authorities are also conducting inspections at other hospitals and nursing homes in the district, where many of the children were treated before being referred to the government facility, The Times of India reported.

Of the 10 newborns who died on Monday, eight were born at other hospitals or nursing homes in the district and were brought to the government medical college in critical condition, The Indian Express quoted hospital Superintendent Prosenjit Bar as saying.

Of the 60 deaths reported till Monday, 44 babies were born elsewhere and later referred to the hospital, the newspaper quoted unidentified state health department officials as saying.

The hospital officials said that while some infants suffered from respiratory distress, others had jaundice or heart problems, the newspaper reported.

On Wednesday, state Health Minister Shardwat Mukhopadhyay said that the infant mortality rate in Malda district has increased. “We have asked for a detailed report to understand why and how this happened,” The Indian Express quoted Mukhopadhyay as saying.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Penguin Random House India on Friday denied a report that it decided not to publish Congress leader Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love in India after she rejected certain “editorial changes and deletions”.

Penguin India maintained that it is not the publisher of the book, and that it was incorrect to claim that it decided not to publish the book because Sonia Gandhi declined to make editorial changes.

“As a publisher, it is both our prerogative and our responsibility to fact check and provide authors with recommendations that are in the best interests of the book,” it said on social media. “…Throughout the relevant discussions, Penguin Random House India’s position was that we remained willing and keen to publish the book.”

The publisher, however, declined to comment on “confidential discussions” with the Congress leader.

Penguin Random House India official statement. pic.twitter.com/2g8y3F1p7m

— Penguin India (@PenguinIndia) August 28, 2026

A report in The Indian Express had claimed that Penguin had asked for certain changes to a “part of the manuscript”, but Sonia Gandhi rejected the proposed alterations.

The book was scheduled for release on November 10.

The newspaper reported that with Penguin Random House India out of the picture, several Indian publishers are in the fray, with HarperCollins India reportedly close to finalising an agreement to publish and distribute the memoir in the country.

The book traces the tragedies that shaped Sonia Gandhi’s life, including the deaths of Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi. She describes her eventual entry into politics, her years as president of the Congress and her decision to decline the prime minister’s post after the party-led United Progressive Alliance won the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.

On August 20, Rahul Gandhi welcomed his mother’s memoir in a social media post, saying that he was “happy, and so proud” that her story would finally be read by millions.

Recalling the years since Rajiv Gandhi’s death, he praised Sonia Gandhi’s “never-ending courage” and dignity. “I know how hard it was for someone as private as you to tell the world your beautiful story,” he added.

The development follows two other controversies involving Penguin Random House India.

In February, the publisher said it had “not printed” former Army chief General M M Naravane’s memoir Four Stars of Destiny, despite a hard copy of the book being displayed by Rahul Gandhi in Parliament.

In June, the publishing house also withdrew from distributing graphic novelist Joe Sacco’s nonfiction book on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, The Once and Future Riot.

Inputs from Arunava Sinha. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal and China increased to 552. Five deaths were reported on the Chinese side of the border and 547 on the Nepali side.

More than 1,400 persons are missing. Rescue operations were halted citing risks of renewed flooding caused by the bursting of a debris dam.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that 320 Indians in Nepal were not contactable. The numbers are based on preliminary information and are expected to change, said ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal. Read on.

Trinamool Congress leaders Abhishek Banerjee and Derek O’Brien were booked for allegedly assaulting police personnel and obstructing them from discharging their duties when they went to remove a signboard of the party from a building on Kolkata’s Camac Street. Three first information reports have been registered in connection with the incident.

At least 13 persons have been arrested in the case so far.

On Thursday, an altercation broke out between Banerjee and the Kolkata Police when security personnel and officials of the municipal corporation arrived at the party office to remove the signboard. Read on.

Penguin Random House India denied a report that it decided not to publish Congress leader Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging: A Journey of Love in India after she rejected certain “editorial changes and deletions”. Penguin India maintained that it is not the publisher of the book, and that it was incorrect to claim that it decided not to publish the book because Sonia Gandhi declined to make editorial changes.

“As a publisher, it is both our prerogative and our responsibility to fact check and provide authors with recommendations that are in the best interests of the book,” it said. “…Throughout the relevant discussions, Penguin Random House India’s position was that we remained willing and keen to publish the book.” Read on.

India plans to buy Javelin anti-tank guided missile systems from the United States, US Ambassador Sergio Gor said. He said on social media that the deal was a “great step forward” in the US-India defence relationship and opened the door to co-production opportunities.

“The engagement between our two nations is at record high levels,” he wrote. New Delhi is yet to comment on Gor’s announcement.

The Javelin is a portable anti-tank missile that can be carried and operated by a single soldier. Read on.

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India plans to buy Javelin anti-tank guided missile systems from the United States, US Ambassador Sergio Gor said on Friday.

In a post on social media, Gor said the purchase was a “great step forward” in the US-India defence relationship and opened the door to co-production opportunities. “The engagement between our two nations is at record high levels,” he wrote.

New Delhi is yet to comment on Gor’s announcement.

The Javelin is a portable anti-tank missile that can be carried and operated by a single soldier. It uses a “fire-and-forget” system, allowing the missile to track and hit its target without further guidance from the operator.

The weapons system is used by the US military, its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and some other countries such as Ukraine and Saudi Arabia.

The potential Javelin deal comes amid deepening defence relations between the two countries.

In October, India and the US signed a 10-year framework for “major defence partnership”.

The US had designated India as its “major defence partner” in 2016. In 2018, India was elevated to tier one of the Strategic Trade Authorisation, which allows New Delhi to receive license-free access to a range of US military and dual-use technologies.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge on Thursday, in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, demanded that the existing strength of the Lok Sabha remain at 543 seats for the next 25 years and sought an all-party meeting to discuss the Bharatiya Janata Party government’s proposed delimitation exercise.

The process of fixing the boundaries of electoral constituencies is called delimitation.

Kharge also said that one-third reservation for women should be implemented from the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress leader said that after the meeting on the government’s delimitation proposal, all political parties should be given adequate time to study it before it is introduced in any special session of Parliament the government may be considering.

He added that the delimitation proposal was a matter of “enormous significance” for the country and urged the government not to “bulldoze” it through again, as it had attempted to do on April 16 and 17.

During a three-day special session of Parliament in April, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government introduced the 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

The bill, one of the three draft legislations that were introduced, required a two-thirds majority of votes in Parliament to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House. Therefore, it required the support of Opposition parties to pass the amendment.

The consideration of the bill was rejected by the Lok Sabha with 298 MPs voting in its favour and 230 against.

Kharge had also urged Modi to hold an all-party meeting on the matter on July 16.

The Congress leader said that he was reiterating his request after Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Kiren Rijiju said in a television interview that a special session of Parliament could be convened.

In an interview with India Today on Wednesday, Rijiju was asked whether the government could call a special session of Parliament. He said, “When the House is not prorogued, then the session can be called,” without giving a direct answer.

The Monsoon session of Parliament concluded on August 13, when both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned sine die, but the session has not yet been formally ended, or prorogued, PTI reported. Typically, prorogation takes place within three to four days of adjournment, but no notification had been issued as of Friday.

On August 20, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay asked the Union government to provide a legislative assurance that any state’s representation in Parliament will not reduce due to the delimitation exercise.

He made the statements a week after the Tamil Nadu Assembly passed a resolution calling for the Lok Sabha’s strength to permanently remain at 543 seats.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Trinamool Congress leaders Abhishek Banerjee and Derek O’Brien have been booked for allegedly assaulting police personnel and obstructing them from discharging their duties when they went to remove a signboard of the party from a building on Kolkata’s Camac Street, The Hindu reported on Friday.

Three first information reports have been registered in connection with the incident under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to unlawful assembly, obstructing and assaulting public servants, causing hurt, criminal intimidation and use of force against a woman, among others.

At least 13 persons have been arrested in the case so far, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime) Kunal Aggarwal told the newspaper.

On Thursday, an altercation broke out between Banerjee and the Kolkata Police when security personnel and officials of the municipal corporation arrived at the party office to remove the signboard.

The board, with the name “All India Trinamool Congress”, was installed on the top of the building. Most of the units in the building are part of Banerjee’s office.

In one of the FIRs, the police have alleged that the signboard was hanging dangerously and stated that the municipal corporation had been directed to remove it for safety, The Hindu reported.

On Thursday afternoon, a team of police personnel, accompanied by municipal corporation officials, reached the building to remove the signboard. Banerjee and other TMC leaders tried to stop them and questioned whether they had the orders to enter the premises, the newspaper reported.

But the police entered the building and removed the board. While the police personnel and municipal officials were making their way to the roof, O’Brien fell on the stairs, The Hindu reported.

After the incident, Banerjee had asked whether the Bharatiya Janata Party would decide “what billboard will I put outside my office”.

“There are 400 posters of the BJP on this road,” the newspaper quoted Banerjee as saying. “Will the police and KMC remove any of them?”

On Thursday, the party had said that the Kolkata Municipal Corporation had failed to provide a valid notice to the TMC about the signboard. It also alleged that the municipal officials had assaulted Banerjee and O’Brien after “trespassing” into the party office.

The official “pushed and heckled” TMC supporters and staff, the party alleged. It further alleged that the clothes of the office’s women security personnel were torn.

In the FIR, the police have claimed that while assisting the municipal officials, some unknown persons obstructed its personnel on the staircase and snatched the government-issued wireless handheld radio from a constable. When he tried to apprehend one of them, the persons allegedly assaulted the police personnel.

It is further alleged that a woman police personnel was attacked with intent to outrage her modesty.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Congress on Wednesday urged President Droupadi Murmu to dismiss the Madhya Pradesh Cabinet, alleging that the state government had blocked the judicial proceedings against minister Vijay Shah for his remarks allegedly targeting Army spokesperson Colonel Sofiya Qureshi last year.

In a letter to Murmu, Madhya Pradesh Congress chief Jitu Patwari said that the government’s refusal to sanction Shah’s prosecution showed that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was shielding its leaders from accountability and obstructing the judicial process. He added that the government is providing political protection to a “loudmouth” minister.

On May 13, 2025, the BJP leader said, at an event in Mhow, that those who had widowed the daughters of India had been taught a lesson by Prime Minister Narendra Modi “by sending the sister from their own community”. He repeated the remark immediately after saying it the first time.

While the BJP leader did not name a person, Opposition parties had alleged that the minister was alluding to Qureshi, one of the spokespersons during the media briefings relating to Operation Sindoor held by the external affairs ministry and the defence ministry.

On May 14, 2025, the Madhya Pradesh High Court took suo moto cognisance of the matter and ordered the registration of a case against Shah.

Shah was subsequently booked under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, an act hurting harmony between communities and for making statements about a member of a community in a manner that could adversely affect communal harmony.

The BJP leader had moved the Supreme Court challenging the first information report.

On May 13, 2025, Shah apologised for his remark. However, the Supreme Court rejected his apology and ordered the formation of a Special Investigation Team to look into the matter.

In August 2025, the Special Investigation Team submitted its request to the state government for a sanction to prosecute the minister.

On Tuesday, the state Cabinet decided not to grant sanction for prosecution against Shah, Dainik Bhaskar quoted unidentified officials as saying. Shah was also present at the meeting.

When the discussion began, most of the officials were asked to leave the meeting room, the newspaper reported. The matter was then discussed and a decision taken in the presence of Chief Minister Mohan Yadav, Chief Secretary Ashok Barnwal, Additional Chief Secretaries Neeraj Mandloi and Sanjay Kumar Shukla and some other ministers, the report added.

It was argued at the meeting that Shah had publicly apologised several times for his remarks, Dainik Bhaskar reported.

However, the government has not officially provided any information on the matter. Instead, while briefing reporters about the meeting, minister Rakesh Singh denied that the issue was on the agenda of the meeting.

On May 8, the Supreme Court had criticised the state government for delaying its approval to prosecute Shah. The next hearing in the matter is scheduled for Monday, by which date the state is expected to file its reply.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

An organisation that is slated to host an event in the United States where Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat will speak said on Thursday that its X account was blocked for several hours before being restored.

The American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue Forum said that its X account, @AheadForum1, had been “botted” by “misguided opponents” who allegedly tried to manipulate the platform’s algorithm to get the account blocked.

“A big thank you to @X @Support for the prompt response, restoring our account and clearing out the bots,” the organisation said.

We are back up! 🚀

We got “botted” by misguided opponents who tried to game the X algorithm and get our handle blocked.
A big thank you to @X @Support for the prompt response, restoring our account and clearing out the bots.

Now, back to what really matters: celebrating…

— AHEAD Forum (@Aheadforum1) August 27, 2026

Bhagwat arrived in the US on Tuesday to participate in the RSS’ centenary-year global outreach programme. He is scheduled to address around 5,000 Hindu Americans and Hindu non-resident Indians at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

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

The event is facing opposition from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which has urged the Donald Trump administration to revoke the visa issued to Bhagwat.

The commission said that it was “deeply concerned” about Bhagwat’s visit and alleged that groups associated with the RSS “have perpetrated violent attacks against religious minorities, including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs” in recent years. It also urged the US government to impose sanctions on the RSS.

Other organisations criticising the visit include Hindus for Human Rights, Save America from Hindutva, Indian American Muslim Council and Dalit Solidarity Forum, PTI reported.

The American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue Forum is a nonprofit organisation working to promote civic engagement among communities in the US, according to its website. The forum’s X account has been posting videos about Bhagwat’s event.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Four Naga civilians were killed and one injured after suspected Kuki armed groups allegedly attacked them along the Imphal-Tamei road in Manipur on Thursday, the police told Scroll.

The incident took place between Makui Ashang and Thanamba Naga areas in the Kangpokpi police station area.

Naga leader Wilubao Newmai alleged that armed Kuki militants had attacked the civilians.

The civilians killed in the attack have been identified as Wisobou Charenamai, Tadsongbou Ringkangmai, Mariakdibou Wijunamai and Anil Wijunamai.

Following the incident, the Naga People’s Organisation, a civil society group of the community, called for a shutdown in the headquarters of the Senapati district to protest the killings, Ukhrul Times reported.

The attack took place on an alternate route the Nagas have been using to avoid the highway that connects Senapati to Imphal, through Kangpokpi town, a community leader said.

“They were on the way to Senapati town to attend a meeting when they were ambushed on the way, the first such kind of killing in this area,” said Timothy Wijunamai, the president of the Liangmai Naga Council.

“We have been using this off road as an alternative route to connect with the rest of the world since the beginning of the ongoing crisis,” he said. “We were using this isolated hilly uneven road because we cannot use the highway after the Kuki Naga strife.”

This came less than two weeks after two Naga persons were killed in firing by suspected militants in Kangpokpi.

On August 14, a group of men armed with “sophisticated weapons” attacked Langka Naga village.

The Liangmai Naga Council-Manipur had condemned the attack and alleged that militants from the Kuki National Front (P) were behind it. The council had also announced an immediate shutdown of Liangmai Naga-inhabited areas of the state until further notice.

Tensions between the Kukis and the Nagas escalated in Manipur in February after an alleged assault involving members of the Tangkhul Naga and the Kuki-Zo communities in the Ukhrul district. At least 30 persons from the two communities have been killed since tensions erupted.

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

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Anamika Pathak and Neerad Pandharipande.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article had quoted the police as saying that five persons had been killed in the attack. The article has been updated to reflect the correct number.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad has urged Durga Puja organisers in West Bengal to follow “traditional” religious practices, including keeping meat outside puja pandals, India Today reported on Wednesday.

It clarified that it was not asking for organisers to adopt an exclusively vegetarian approach, but suggested that “non-vegetarian” food stalls be kept in designated areas outside pandals.

“We are not unaware of Bengal’s culture or food habits,” Nirgunananda, a member of the VHP’s central advisory council, said. “Durga Puja in Bengal has never been synonymous with an exclusively vegetarian way of life.”

He claimed that the VHP’s concern was to keep the area around the deity “clean” and uphold the “sanctity and cleanliness” of the space immediately surrounding it.

“Non-vegetarian food can be sold at designated places, but its leftovers must not find their way into the pandal or contaminate the area around the deity,” he added.

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

The Hindutva organisation has also warned that it could “intervene” if committees do not comply with its suggestions.

The VHP also criticised the slogan “Dharmo jarr jarr, utsob sobar”, meaning “religion is personal, festival universal”, which was widely associated with former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, The Times of India reported.

“Whatever constitutes Hindu culture, emotion and enthusiasm within our religion will be carried forward by Hindu Sanatanis alone,” Nirgunananda said. “Therefore, religion belongs to individuals, and festivals belong to those individuals, too.”

He added that people from other religions were welcome to visit pandals, but said it was the duty of Hindus “to protect” their religious practices, the newspaper reported.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Great Indian Peninsula Railway – the GIPR – is the railway that operated India’s first commercial passenger line between Bombay and Thane in 1853. The Bombay-Thane line was not merely India’s first passenger railway route. It was the beginning of a system that transformed the country. The railway that began with three locomotives, 14 coaches and about 400 passengers on April 16, 1853. eventually grew into the vast Indian Railways network.

Today’s Central Railway suburban system in Mumbai still runs across much of that original landscape. That continuity is extraordinary. We should be proud of it. But pride cannot simply mean celebrating the first train every April 16 and then allowing the physical evidence of that story to disappear year after year.

This August, that question has arrived at Sion.

A portion of the old Sion railway station, on the original Bombay-Thane line of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, is being dismantled to make way for railway expansion. Among the elements that could disappear along with the old station hut (used as station manager’s cabin) are old iron roof brackets bearing the imprint of the GIPR era.

This train has also left the station. The most beautiful thing in Sion station is going. Hope the old GIPR emblem finds a place in whatever new plan they have or a museum. #IndianRailRomeo pic.twitter.com/JV0ckljYSq

— Mumbai | | Paused (@SloganMurugan) August 20, 2026

I have appealed for at least some of these brackets to be carefully removed and preserved — at the heritage gallery at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, the outdoor exhibition gully or the National Rail Museum in New Delhi. The Railway Board’s Heritage Directorate has acknowledged the appeal to save the Sion relics, while the Rail Enthusiasts’ Society has extended formidable support to the effort.

This is not the first time I have made such an appeal.

I have been fighting this battle for over three decades now.

Much of the original alignment of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway survives within today’s Mumbai suburban system. The trains have changed, the traction has changed, the stations have changed and the railway is now Central Railway. But the basic geography of that first line remains remarkably alive.

The relics here talk to tell the story of the first railway line which can be elaborately read in my first book Halt Station India, The Dramatic Tale of the Nation’s First Rail Lines.

Scattered along it are the last physical witnesses to that beginning.

Some are substantial structures. Others are tiny pieces of iron.

To most people, an old bracket may look like scrap metal. To me, a GIPR bracket carrying the company’s distinctive markings is a piece of the birth certificate of Indian Railways.

That is why the dismantling of the old Sion station structure now worries me deeply.

We have been here before

In 2017, when redevelopment was taking place at Bhandup, I similarly reported the demolition of the old Bhandup station hut along with its wrought-iron brackets bearing the GIPR logo. Bhandup was not just any suburban station. It was similarly one of the stations on the original Bombay-Thane line, and the first passenger train had made a watering halt there.

At Mumbra, demolition of the old hut in the east, along with brackets revealed another extraordinary survivor – a Victorian-era Tucker & Reeves wall safe embedded in the old booking office. There were efforts to save them, but not for long. All the relics may not have survived, but the discovery demonstrated precisely why demolition of old railway structures needs to be approached with an archaeological eye.

I wrote about both cases and pushed for the relics to be saved.

1897: Sion railway station#IndianRailways #OldMumbai #mumbailocal pic.twitter.com/6OnAf7tZeY

— Mumbai Heritage (@mumbaiheritage) August 20, 2026

The result was encouraging. Central Railway decided to preserve the Bhandup GIPR brackets and the Mumbra safe, eventually moving them to the heritage gallery at CSMT. I don’t if they are still there, but those brackets and the safe were at the CSMT heritage museum for some days because somebody stopped the demolition process long enough to ask a simple question: What are we throwing away?

That question has followed me ever since my school days, when I discovered that the railways I had been travelling on (between Kurla and Matunga) was a part of India’s first line and the relics here were the central pieces of India’s railway heritage story.

I have repeatedly documented the surviving fragments of the GIPR – from old railway lamps and safes to GIPR plaques, electric-mast markings, signal structures, old tiles, stonework and roof brackets. Some were rescued. Some were documented. Some were lost.

I have learnt the hard way that heritage disappears piece by piece, project by project, work order by work order.

Kalyan provided another painful reminder. The station’s arched roof went in 2022. A year earlier in 2021, a roughly 168-year-old GIPR-era bridge near Shahad was dismantled and replaced because its steel structure had become dangerously corroded.

I understand completely that railway infrastructure has to remain safe. But when an original railway structure has to go, there should be a parallel obligation to document it properly and preserve representative components wherever possible.

Byculla, meanwhile, shows us what is possible when the approach is different. Byculla has an extraordinary place in railway history. The first railway passed through the area, and the station precinct is associated with the earliest years of the Bombay–Thane railway. During its restoration, original features were painstakingly identified and restored in the west side. That is the lesson.

Modernisation and heritage conservation do not have to be enemies. The railway can add tracks and still save a bracket. It can demolish an unsafe structure and still retain a representative section. It can replace a bridge and still preserve a girder, plate, maker’s mark or other historically significant component. What is required is awareness before the excavator arrives.

Byculla station #Mumbai. Station restoration architect wins '2022 Award of Merit' at UNESCO Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation. One of the oldest stations built circa 1870s on #India's oldest passenger railway. pic.twitter.com/ufxGfJWapa

— Rajendra B. Aklekar (@rajtoday) December 1, 2022

Sion is particularly important

Sion is not an arbitrary railway location. The first sod (the foundation stone) for the GIPR line was ceremoniously turned near Sion on October 31, 1850. The Indian Railways itself records this association, noting that the first sod for the GIP line from Bombay to Kalyan was turned at a place near Sion.

The first railway line subsequently ran through this landscape, linking Bombay with Thane and eventually becoming the foundation of not just the enormous Central Railway suburban system that exists today, but Indian Railways as a whole.

So when the old Sion railway structure carrying GIPR imprints disappears in August, it is not simply an old building being demolished, but a fragment of the physical landscape associated with the birth of Indian Railways is disappearing.

And this time there is an important difference. The Railway Board’s Heritage Directorate has acknowledged the appeal to save the Sion brackets. That acknowledgment matters.

It means the issue has reached precisely the part of the railway establishment that exists to recognise and protect such history.

The Rail Enthusiasts’ Society has also extended formidable support to the effort. It has also acknowledged that these are not merely objects of nostalgia but tangible pieces of India’s industrial history. There is therefore an opportunity to turn an appeal into action.

We cannot save everything. But we can save something. I have never argued that every old railway object must remain exactly where it stands.

That would be unrealistic. Mumbai’s suburban railway is a living, heavily congested system. It carries millions of passengers and has to expand. Tracks have to be added, bridges rebuilt, stations remodelled and obsolete structures removed. I understand that better than most. Safety is paramount.

But I also believe that development cannot be allowed to erase memory.

1853: Historic Day
Today 165 yrs ago, the first train in India ran between Bori Bunder (Mumbai) & Tanna (Thane).
(Rep pic) pic.twitter.com/FX2PHduzC4

— Mumbai Heritage (@mumbaiheritage) April 16, 2018

The answer is documentation and selective preservation. Put it somewhere where the next generation can see it, the central pieces of India’s industrial heritage.

The Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus heritage gallery itself is proof that this can work. I had been involved in originally setting it up years ago, listing and taking old relics there. These objects tell a story that no textbook can tell quite as powerfully.

A child looking at a GIPR relic in a museum can understand that this was once physically attached to a railway building through which the earliest trains of India passed. That is living history. Mumbai is ground zero of Indian railway history. That is the reason I keep returning to this subject.

We need a systematic GIPR heritage programme for Mumbai, start with a basic plaque at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, acknowledging its role. I have been arguing for this for years.

A proper documentation and inventory should identify the surviving structures and movable relics along the original GIPR alignment – from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus) and Byculla through Sion, Bhandup and Thane and onwards to the later extensions towards Kalyan and beyond.

Every surviving relic should be photographed, mapped, catalogued and graded. Those of exceptional significance should be protected in situ wherever possible. Those that cannot remain should be transferred to a museum or heritage gallery. And demolition proposals affecting known GIPR structures should automatically trigger a heritage review before work begins.

This is not about stopping the railway. It is about making the railway remember itself.

Sion gives us one more chance

I have seen too many of these pieces disappear. I have watched old railway fabric become debris. I have written about it, photographed it, argued about it, appealed to railway officials and, sometimes, succeeded in getting something saved. Sometimes I have failed.

I am therefore making this appeal once again. For the generations that will one day ask, “Where did India’s railway begin and what remains of it today”?

Rajendra B Aklekar is the author of several books on India's rail history and transport heritage. They include Halt Station India, India’s Railway Man: A Biography of E. Sreedharan A Short History of Indian Railways. This article first appeared on his website.

Decades ago, in the Banni grasslands of Kachchh, an invasive tree was planted to solve one environmental crisis. Today, big companies are paying to convert the same trees into a charcoal-like substance to solve another problem.

In January 2025, Google announced one of the largest biochar carbon removal deals to date, agreeing to purchase 1,00,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide removal credits from Varaha ClimateAg Private Limited, a Gurugram-based climate tech startup. Biochar is a carbon-rich charcoal produced by heating organic matter in low-oxygen conditions, which can store carbon in soil for hundreds of years.

By January 2026, Varaha had added Microsoft to its roster of corporate buyers, with Lufthansa, Swiss Re, and Capgemini also signing offtake agreements.

Among Varaha’s initiatives is a project in Kachchh, Gujarat, combining carbon sequestration with ecosystem restoration.

An invasive species

Prosopis juliflora was introduced to Kachchh around the 1960s to arrest desertification. The Banni grassland now has around 50% of its area dominated by this single invasive species, according to Khyati Thacker, a botanist who has spent over five years working on community-led ecosystem restoration in Kachchh and Saurashtra.

Research shows the grassland produced up to 4,000 kg of fodder per hectare in the 1960s; by 1999, that had fallen to around 620 kg. “This Prosopis juliflora has destroyed the jungle, the native trees (such as Vachellia nilotica, Prosopis cineraria, Senegalia senegal) and the grazing grass,” said Kaiyan Rabari, a herdsman from Sangnara village, Kachchh.

Around late 2022, a private project developer approached Sahjeevan, an NGO working in Kachchh, with a proposal to link the restoration work to the carbon market.

A pilot was launched in Dedhiya village, Kachchh, using low-cost Kon-Tiki kilns, cone-shaped metal structures in which Prosopis wood is burned under low-oxygen conditions and then doused with water to produce biochar. “All this was speculation,” said Kavita Mehta, Executive Director of Sahjeevan. “They weren’t sure either, and we weren’t sure either, so it was a pilot for both of us.”

Based on Sahjeevan’s 2023-24 annual report, the Kachchh pilot processed around 800 tonnes of Prosopis, generating approximately 2,000 carbon credits sold on the European voluntary market at roughly $120 per credit.

A credit built on a promise about soil

The climate logic of a biochar carbon credit rests on one central premise: that the biochar produced ends up durably buried in soil, storing carbon for centuries. But on the ground in Kachchh, soil application is not being tracked with the same rigour as production itself.

In Sangnara village, farmer Umra Pala Jepar, 48, described a stockpile left behind after production. “The biochar has been lying in the open at the outskirts of the village since it was all made. Two years have passed, and it is lying just like that.”

In a written response to questions submitted by Mongabay-India on May 28, Varaha said, “In none of our projects does biochar leave the production site before it is mixed with cow dung or manure. Furthermore, Varaha’s systems are designed so that unmixed biochar cannot be submitted to the registry for credits.”

Sahjeevan, in its 2024-25 annual report, noted that in the same Sangnara village, the local Biodiversity Management Committees cleared Prosopis from 30 hectares, converted it into 100 tonnes of biochar, and generated 220 carbon credits.

Gafur Mutva, a contractor in Gorewali village, Kachchh, who produced biochar in Banni, explained the structural difficulty of soil application in the grassland context. “We produce biochar, but there is no agriculture here in this specific area to apply it to. If we transport it outside Banni, the logistics cost increases. That is why we dig a pit there and apply it directly into the soil.” He flagged an unintended consequence, “The biochar retains soil moisture, but we noticed that instead of helping native grasses, that moisture appeared to be benefiting the invasive Prosopis juliflora. Double the baval grows instead of native grass,” he said.

Shailesh Vyas, an agriculture expert who conducted biochar soil trials across multiple locations in Kachchh as an assessment for Sahjeevan, found the results troubling. “We experimented in the arid and semi-arid landscapes of Kachchh. The results were entirely negative. The crop production actually dropped across all biochar plots compared to the control plots.”

His explanation is rooted in soil chemistry, “Whenever you burn wood, the resulting product is largely alkaline. The soil in Kachchh is already naturally alkaline. When you introduce an alkaline additive to an already alkaline environment, it does not reduce the pH (a scale that tells us how acidic or alkaline soil is); it increases it,” Vyas said.

In response to Mongabay-India’s queries, Varaha said biochar is mixed with cow dung in a 1:1 ratio, saving farmers the cost of inputs such as urea and DAP. Vyas raised a fundamental methodological point, “Cow dung is globally recognised as one of the best soil inputs. If you apply one tonne of biochar with one tonne of cow dung, any benefit you see is highly likely coming from the cow dung itself, not the biochar.”

The ecological cost of restoration

Producing biochar in a Kon-Tiki kiln requires water to quench the burning biomass. Thacker’s field data put the requirement at 500 to 600 litres per kiln. “Kachchh is an arid landscape facing severe water scarcity, where people struggle for drinking water. You are providing funding to do something good, but in the process of doing that good deed, no one has considered how many other vital resources are being wasted,” she said.

Mutva, who ran up to 20 kilns simultaneously, said around 12,000 litres were needed each day, trucked from Khavda or Bhuj since saline water corrodes kilns. “The entire Banni population, along with thousands of pastoralist livestock per village, relies primarily on one Narmada pipeline. The water crisis here is severe.”

Varaha said approximately 500 litres are required per kiln cycle and that it recycles quench water by digging a trench beside each kiln. Mutva found this unworkable. “These theoretical solutions simply do not work on the ground. We made a genuine attempt to recover and save the water. However, at best, we might recover a very small portion from certain batches, which we can then reuse for the next cycle. Beyond that, the overall water consumption in this process is high.” He added, “The kilns are constantly relocated to wherever the raw wood supply is. The labourers handling the heavy wood simply will not take on the additional headache of managing water pipelines.”

The other concern is regrowth. “Babul (P juliflora) grows back to its original state in just two years,” said Babubhai Ravabhai Lalwani, a contractor in Khanpar village, Kachchh. Mutva was more direct, “We destroyed the baval, clearing everything with a JCB. But it still comes back, and it comes back denser. Within a month, this Prosopis juliflora can grow nearly a metre.”

Thackar warned of a structural drift in the model’s purpose. “Rather than restoration, this may become a business model where, once removal is done, you wait three to four years for the Prosopis juliflora to grow back, and then you utilise the biomass again from the same landscape. This would benefit neither the native ecosystem nor the local community,” she said.

In Banni, Prosopis removed from degraded grazing lands when the first Kon-Tiki pilot began in 2022 had, by 2025, reinvaded the same areas, with growth nearly doubling, according to Thacker. “A similar pattern played out in Sangnara, where Prosopis was cleared from around 11 hectares in 2024. Within a year, the number of new recruits had nearly doubled. Villagers said that while funds are being allocated for biochar production and the removal of mature trees, there is no financial support for clearing the new recruits that rapidly regenerate,” Thacker said. “Without that, biochar production alone cannot restore the grasslands. For this reason, many of them were not in favour of biochar production.”

Varaha acknowledged that “significant restoration following Prosopis juliflora removal at a particular site would take at least three to five years of continuous effort.” Mutva said the economics of thorough removal were unworkable. “The compensation rate from the company is also low, so it is difficult to justify the expense of uprooting it every single time,” he said. He received Rs 7 to Rs 8 per kg of biochar; processing one metric tonne of raw biomass yielded only around 200 kg. Mehta confirmed that community institutions were paid Rs 7.2 per kg.

Communities may not know the price at which their credits are sold. “Are we transparently sharing with them at what price their carbon credit will be sold? All these are matters of transparency. With the community, it is necessary because it is their right,” Mehta said.

Varaha said it discloses credit sale prices and revenue breakdowns to communities, signs Free, Prior and Informed Consent agreements with participating communities and village panchayats before production begins, and makes all payments to communities in advance, before credits are issued. Asked for specific figures on how revenue is divided, including its own margin, the company did not provide them.

Mehta flagged issues related to auditing. “The auditor is paid by the same company whose project is being verified, creating a built-in conflict of interest,” Mehta argued. A July 2025 paper by the University of Pennsylvania concluded that the voluntary carbon market’s auditing process is inherently flawed, pointing to the financial relationship between project developers and verifying bodies as compromising genuine independence.

Varaha said its projects are validated annually by a Validation and Verification Body independently appointed by the registry, with unannounced site visits as part of the process. “The audit covers the entire chain, from biomass sourcing through to biochar application,” the company said.

The emissions question

Google has backed biochar as a carbon removal solution because of what it describes as its “ability to scale worldwide.” Even as it invests in such carbon removal projects, however, the company’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 81% between 2019 and 2025. Mongabay-India contacted Google for comment and will update this story if a response is received.

Carbon Market Watch, a non-profit watchdog, argues that this reflects a broader problem with carbon offsetting. “Offsetting is a highly problematic practice because it diverts the focus away from the real emissions reductions that must be urgently achieved, provides ample opportunity for greenwashing and usually does not represent the claimed climate impact,” it said.

“The systems being normalised today will shape how carbon markets function in India,” Mehta said. In Banni, where the monsoon is underway, gando baval is already sending up fresh shoots through land cleared just two years ago.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

This story was produced with support from Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

An altercation broke out between Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee and the Kolkata Police on Thursday when security personnel and officials of the municipal corporation arrived at a party office to remove a banner.

A TMC worker was detained, a video posted by PTI showed.

The TMC alleged that the police had “barged into” Banerjee’s office at Camac Street with what it described as an “illegal notice” to take down the banner.

“Upon hearing, Mr Banerjee rushed to the spot and sought notice from the concerned govt official,” the party said. “The Kolkata Municipal representative failed to display any valid notice...”

With the help of the police, the municipal officials entered the office, assaulted Banerjee and TMC MP Derek O’Brien, the party said.

The official “pushed and heckled” TMC supporters and staff, the party alleged. It further alleged that the clothes of the office’s women security personnel were torn.

Kolkata Police has started behaving like puppets of @BJP4Bengal!

Do we need more proof? pic.twitter.com/dbYFgVZ8o7

— All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) August 27, 2026

TMC said that it will approach the court against the “brutality, harassment and illegal action/trespassing” by the police.

West Bengal is “witnessing the steady erosion of constitutional governance and an alarming descent” into a police state”, Banerjee said on social media after the incident.

“When the power of the state operates without constitutional restraint, the judiciary becomes the last line of defence,” he said. “If judicial intervention does not come when fundamental rights are being undermined, what is at stake is no longer merely the liberty of individuals. It is the survival of democracy itself.”

Police acting on an unsigned, incomplete, error filled KMC notice illegally trespassing into a building housing a TMC office. See hrs of VIDEO PROOF of mayhem unleashed on Abhishek Banerjee, our team & I by BJP police for 3 hours+. Police atrocities on MPs & all. WE WON’T BEND.

— Derek O'Brien | ডেরেক ও'ব্রায়েন (@derekobrienmp) August 27, 2026

Inputs from Anant Gupta. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Construction work costing Rs 250 crore on Mumbai’s Metro Line 7A may have to be demolished and rebuilt after the authorities found that nearly 1 km of a viaduct in Vile Parle East does not have enough height clearance for the overhead electrical equipment, The Indian Express quoted unidentified officials as saying on Thursday.

The line is planned as a 3.4-km extension of Metro Line 7 from Andheri East to the Mumbai airport.

The stretch falls within the airport funnel zone, where height restrictions are put in place by the Airports Authority of India.

When the airports authority had issued the no-objection certificates for the project in 2022, the additional height for the overhead electrical equipment was not factored into the design, the newspaper reported.

This has led to a mismatch of about 2.5 metres in height.

The concern was raised in 2025, following which construction was paused and revised permissions sought from the Airports Authority of India. The work on the stretch has been halted since.

“If we do not arrive at a solution, the viaduct may have to be reconstructed,” The Indian Express quoted an unidentified Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority official as saying.

The line was originally scheduled to open in 2021 and has already missed several deadlines.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

During my summer break in my hometown in northeast India’s Assam this year, I found myself craving a favourite summertime fruit from my childhood: Leteku, or Burmese grape. A quick run to the local fruit market offered fruits of different kinds, including imported kiwis and avocados, but not the one I was looking for. I finally found it at a weekly haat, a makeshift market where locals from nearby villages gather to sell their produce.

“The availability of indigenous, local fruits has definitely decreased over time,” says Dharindra Nath Hazarika, head of the horticulture department at BN College of Agriculture under Assam Agriculture University. “There is a lack of research and documentation on this subject, so we don’t know the exact magnitude of the decline.”

This loss is not restricted to just one region.

In the neighbouring state of Meghalaya, for instance, local communities say they are observing that local fruits that once grew abundantly in people’s homesteads are now less commonly seen.

Pius Ranee, executive director of North East Society for Agroecology Support, agrees. “Many traditional fruits, vegetables, and edible plants once commonly found in homesteads and villages are becoming less common. Older generations often recall a greater diversity of food plants around homes, fields and forests than what is seen today. While systematic data are limited, observations from communities across Meghalaya suggest that many indigenous and semi-wild food species are disappearing from everyday diets and local landscapes,” he shares.

Poniol is another fruit found most notably in Assam and a few other northeastern states. It is not commonly seen now. Then there is Thekera. Dried Thekera adds sourness to many Assamese dishes and is said to cure indigestion. Sohthang and Sohlong are indigenous fruits that were once commonly seen in Meghalaya but have now become rarer.

Local, indigenous fruits that are not commercially grown are often termed “underutilised” because of their untapped potential to enhance food security, provide health benefits, generate income, and support environmental sustainability, according to a paper published last year. Such fruits are regarded as “protective foods” across India because of their rich medicinal properties, abundance of phytochemicals and essential minerals, according to the study.

An earlier paper elaborates on the availability of micronutrients in indigenous fruits of arid and semi-arid regions. Pilu (Salvadora oleoides) and chironji (Buchanania lanzan) are rich sources of iron, while karonda (Carissa carandas), mahua (Madhuca indica) and khirni (Manilkara hexandra) are rich sources of vitamin A.

Alethea Kordor Lyngdoh, Deputy Executive Director of North East Society for Agroecology Support, says, “Indigenous crops often provide food during lean seasons and periods of scarcity, thus providing food security. They are also a rich source of antioxidants, minerals and vitamins.”

What is causing the decline?

There are several reasons behind the slow disappearance of local fruits from diets. Urbanisation, land-use change and a lack of awareness about the significance of these fruits, especially in the face of large-scale cultivation of commercial crops, are some of them.

“Farmers are encouraged to grow market-oriented and often non-native crops such as strawberries, kiwi and other exotic fruits, which can offer better economic returns. As a result, many traditional indigenous fruit trees and local varieties that were once maintained in homesteads and mixed farming systems are receiving less attention and are gradually disappearing from the landscape,” Pius Ranee says.

Many local fruits are highly seasonal, have uneven shapes or ripening patterns, bruise easily, cannot withstand long-distance transport, or are available in volumes too small and unpredictable for conventional retail. Market structures, on the other hand, reward consistency.

“This does not mean that commercial horticulture is the inherent enemy,” says chef Thomas Zacharias, founder of The Locavore, a platform that champions local food through storytelling, events, advocacy and partnerships. “Farmers need crops that give them reliable returns, and commercial cultivation can sometimes rescue an overlooked fruit by creating demand and improving propagation. The problem arises when incentives encourage landscapes to become less diverse, or when only a few profitable species and varieties receive research, nursery, extension, procurement and marketing support.”

From his experience travelling across the country, tracing indigenous food and cooking, Zacharias says he feels that there is a knowledge gap when it comes to local produce. “If people no longer know a fruit’s name, season, taste or uses, demand naturally weakens. And heavily marketed foods acquire greater social value,” he says.

This is both a challenge and a way out. In Meghalaya, Richard Ranee, a community member, points out that he grows local fruits and medicinal plants and tries to tell as many people in his family and village about their significance. “I am also a traditional healer, so I tell my people about the importance of conserving local biodiversity,” he says.

Similarly, Hazarika has been planting seeds and saplings of local varieties of fruits and herbs from Assam in the botanical garden on his college campus. “Some of these minor fruits have medicinal value and are an inexpensive source of vitamins and minerals. But there is a lack of awareness. People are letting go of their homesteads and home gardens and cutting down these trees without realising their importance,” he says.

Home gardens have also been found to maintain environmental equilibrium, sustaining not just rich biodiversity but also good soil carbon stocks.

Apart from nutritional security and medicinal value, conserving local produce is also important for saving genetic diversity. In Africa, there are over 800 species of fruits. However, only three or four of these varieties can be found in the market, risking nutritional diversity.

“Farmers may see little incentive to intentionally grow indigenous fruits as a crop, because the trees are perceived as taking years to mature,” the paper says. This may be true in the wild, but not always when trees are cultivated, and “especially when domesticated by horticultural techniques such as rooting cuttings and grafting,” according to the paper.

The way forward

Value addition of these fruits into processed products such as jams, jellies and pickles is one way to incentivise people to grow these fruit trees. In Africa, a local fruit, baobab, is now sold in the form of baobab powder in the European Union and the United States as a superfood.

According to Chris Dohse, managing director of Tree Crops, a Malawi-based manufacturer of wild plant ingredients, the fruit was “rotting on the forest floor” until it found new life when demand grew for the powder form.

Here in India, producer organisations are doing something similar with local fruits. Uttarakhand-based Himalayan Haat, for instance, offers a range of products, including preserves and coolers made from local, seasonal produce.

Divya Chowfin, co-founder of this social enterprise, says, “Seasonal fruits and other produce are easily perishable, so value addition is key (in conserving and making them available to consumers). For example, hisar is a Himalayan raspberry which is found only for three weeks and is not cultivated. So we have introduced a limited edition of its preserve.”

They also have malta cooler, rhododendron cooler and spiced peach preserve, and are now mulling over either a cooler or squash made from kafal, another local fruit.

The risk here is of turning an everyday food product into something exotic that, ironically, locals are not able to afford. “Commodification can shift the control away from the local community, so it is crucial to ensure that the process is ethical, community-centred, and linked to sustainable harvesting and cultivation practices,” Pius Ranee says.

Zacharias also stresses the need for documentation and crop-specific research, as well as support for farmers, forest-dependent communities, home gardeners and community orchards to maintain living trees, while also strengthening gene banks, nurseries, herbariums and germplasm collections.

The decline of indigenous fruits is not simply a loss of food, but also a loss of knowledge, genetic diversity and local ecological resilience. Bringing these fruits back into diets will require greater awareness, better documentation and research, and markets that create value for both the produce and the communities that conserve it.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, has cancelled the convocation for the graduating batch of 2026, citing “unavoidable circumstances”, Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.

The cancellation came against the backdrop of opposition from more than 700 NLSIU students and alumni to the Chief Justice Surya Kant and Bar Council of India Chairperson Manan Kumar Mishra attending the convocation, the legal news outlet reported.

The students from the law college had also condemned the Bar Council of India’s now-withdrawn action against the outgoing National Academy of Legal Studies and Research batch and demanded an unconditional apology from the regulatory body.

The statement had expressed solidarity with NALSAR students and faculty over two letters issued by the council on August 13. It had directed state bar councils to defer the enrolment of NALSAR’s graduating batch as advocates, objecting to a campaign by some students against the university inviting Kant to attend their convocation.

The council withdrew the decision a few hours later, but said that it had sought an inquiry report from the university identifying those who were “principally instrumental” in opposing Kant’s participation in the convocation.

Later in the night, the council closed all proceedings against the students, saying it was satisfied that the 2026 batch had no role in any “disturbance or movement”.

NALSAR had invited the chief justice for the upcoming convocation despite students urging the university to reconsider the decision, citing Kant’s response to a petition alleging that police had used excessive force against protesters in Delhi on July 20.

On July 22, a bench headed by the chief justice refused to urgently hear a petition about police excesses against protesters. “Don’t waste our time and don’t waste your time,” Kant had been quoted as having told the petitioners at the time.

When the lawyer for the petitioners said that he could present video evidence of the police excesses, the chief justice had said the bench was “not interested” in watching them.

Referring to the remarks, the students had told the university authorities that it did not sit right to receive their degrees from a dignitary whose recent public conduct appeared dismissive of serious allegations of police brutality against protesting citizens.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The toll in the flash flood and mudslide in Nepal increased to 359. Search and rescue operations continued as more than 1,380 persons were missing.

At least 288 Indian citizens in Nepal are “uncontactable”, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said. He said that the numbers are based on preliminary information and are expected to change. There may be some Indians missing on the Chinese side of the Nepal border as well, Jaiswal added.

Twenty-one Indians, all from Tamil Nadu, have been rescued so far, New Delhi said. Read on.

Auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers in Maharashtra will be given one year to learn Marathi, Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said. No action will be taken against the drivers during this period for not knowing the language, he added.

This came amid a statewide inspection campaign to enforce the Maharashtra government’s rule making Marathi mandatory for auto-rickshaw and cab drivers in the state. As of Saturday, the Maharashtra Transport Department had issued notices to hundreds of drivers for lacking basic knowledge of Marathi.

Fadnavis’ announcement came hours after representatives of auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers’ organisations met him, seeking more time to comply with the rule. Read on.

The National Company Law Tribunal approved a repayment plan under which media baron Subhash Chandra will pay Rs 6.2 crore to creditors against admitted claims of about Rs 22,006 crore in his personal insolvency resolution process. This translates into a haircut of approximately 99.9%.

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

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

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said that the allegations made by a Supreme Court judge against Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma were being examined at the “appropriate level”. In letters to Kant earlier this month, Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts.

Mehta sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”.

Taking note of Mehta’s complaint, Kant said that Sharma had to be given an opportunity to respond. Read on.

A United States panel on religious freedom urged the Donald Trump administration to revoke the visa issued to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat and “make him ineligible” to enter the country in the future. Bhagwat is in the US to participate in the RSS’ centenary-year global outreach programme.

He is scheduled to address about 5,000 Hindu Americans and Hindu non-resident Indians at New York’s Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said that it was “deeply concerned” about Bhagwat’s visit and alleged that groups associated with the RSS “have perpetrated violent attacks against religious minorities, including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs” in recent years. Read on.

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Twenty-three-year-old Ayesha* fought hard to study a master’s degree in social sciences and finally land a corporate job in Delhi in 2024. But within a year, she was struggling to stay afloat with her starting salary of Rs 40,000.

She was paying Rs 18,000 a month for a gated, paying guest accommodation, a metro-adjacent location and a neighbourhood she could come home to at night without planning ahead. After food, travel, groceries and sending money home, she was saving Rs 1,000 at best.

The latest annual Periodic Labour Force Survey data says that women’s workforce participation stood at 40% from January to December 2025. It means the number of Indian women working has nearly doubled from 23.3% in 2017-’18.

However, the rise in women’s workforce is largely among rural workers, and a significant part of it appears to be driven by a change in the definition that reclassified women performing subsistence and domestic tasks as “self-employed”.

These numbers also conceal the high costs paid by first-generation Dalit or Muslim women to attain a private sector job and remain employed in an Indian city. These are the women who are most likely to have broken through family resistance and constrained networks to land a job that offers upward mobility.

This “intersectional tax”, as I call it, falls hardest on the women who have the least capacity to absorb it, becoming a drain on income and savings.

The price of safety

The first might be called the safety premium.

A woman migrating alone to Bengaluru, Mumbai, or Delhi for her first salaried job is likely to pay more for safe accommodation unlike male colleagues. For first-generation working women, this can be a high added cost on trainee-level salaries.

Entry-level salaries range between Rs 30,000-Rs 40,000 a month, according to two estimates.

A 2023 Foundit report on the white-collar jobs market puts entry-level salaries at Rs 3.45- Rs 6.75 lakh per annum in IT and Rs 3.28-Rs 5.40 lakh in Banking, Finance Services and Insurance. Similarly, GetWork’s fresher salary data for the financial year 2025 shows an average of Rs 4.29 lakh per annum in Mumbai and Rs 4.05 lakh in Delhi.

A gated paying guest facility with a security guard, a building within walking distance of a metro station, a neighbourhood where coming home at 10 pm does not require a prior risk assessment, all command a premium. Zaira (name changed), a 25-year-old Muslim woman in Delhi, paid Rs 16,000 a month for safe accommodation, leaving her with savings of Rs 2,000 at best, she told me.

These costs add up. For instance, an app-based cab during late hours instead of a shared auto became another expense. My conversations during 2023-’25 with 10 women employed in entry-level roles in Delhi suggested these differential costs can account for 10%-15% per cent of a fresher’s take-home pay.

Housing discrimination

Religious and casteist discrimination can compound these costs.

In a 2012 research paper, scholars including SK Thorat documented discrimination against Dalits and Muslims in the housing markets of Delhi, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon and Noida. Another study found that the probability of a landlord responding to an upper-caste applicant is 0.35, but it is only 0.22 for a Muslim applicant, and Muslim applicants are especially disadvantaged when applying for one-bedroom houses.

Brokers have been documented advising Muslim clients to conceal their religious identity and to remove visible markers of faith. Dalits and people of other marginalised identities face a similar version of discrimination: scrutiny of surnames, steering them towards particular neighbourhoods, terms and conditions that would not be offered to others.

A young Muslim woman arriving in Mumbai is unlikely to choose her neighbourhood so much as being assigned one by a housing market. The cost of housing bias is longer commutes, higher transport costs and more brokerage payments as she cycles through unwilling landlords. Alongside these is psychological fatigue: of the cumulative weight of concealment, rejection and second-class treatment could affect her performance at work.

Among the 12 Muslim women I met at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 2023-25, several chose not to pursue jobs in Mumbai because of the city’s hostile rental market.

Almost none of them work in Mumbai or Delhi now, except one woman who is a member of a political organisation and has a support system. They repeatedly talked about how difficult it is to navigate the housing market as a visibly Muslim woman. Finding accommodation was described as one of the biggest barriers to living and working independently in these cities.

Then there is the cost of menstruation.

India currently has no national menstrual leave policy. One study from 2015 of about 1,000 women found that at least 70% of the participants suffered from dysmenorrhea, or painful menstruation cramps. Most Indian companies offer between 18 and 21 days of combined earned, sick and casual leave annually.

A 23-year-old, first-generation Muslim woman employed at a five-day, work-from-office company told me that she needs a sick leave every month. Her organisation offers 18 days of combined leave annually and has a no-sandwich-leave policy, which means if she takes a Friday and Monday off, four days are deducted. She told me that managing her menstruation through the year left her with barely any days off to travel home.

How it adds up

Consider two women graduates entering Delhi’s formal economy at starting salaries of Rs 40,000 a month. The woman from a socially-privileged background is much better placed to afford these added costs.

For the first-generation Dalit or Muslim woman, the higher rent for safe housing, additional transport costs and the cost of living in a city adds up.

The cumulative savings divergence between two workers on identical incomes will compound. The financial cushion that makes risk-taking in careers possible, investing in further education, surviving a period of unemployment or leaving a bad job gets built at a slower rate, or not at all.

This is the mechanism through which caste and religious disadvantage reproduces itself in the formal labour market.

The Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation should consider publishing labour force participation data disaggregated by social group and urban-rural residence.

As long as policymakers cannot see urban Dalit women and urban Muslim women as distinct analytical categories, they will continue designing interventions for an average that corresponds to nobody’s actual experience.

India’s efforts to improve women’s economic participation has focused on what keeps women out of the labour market: skill deficits, household norms, patriarchal gatekeeping. Apart from job creation, equity in India’s urban labour markets will require a reckoning with costs paid by some women to stay in the workforce.

Fathima Althaf is a development sector professional with experience in public policy and government advisory. Her research interests are in gender, labour and urban employment.

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday said that non-Marathi speaking auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers in Maharashtra will be given one year to learn the language. He added that no action will be taken against the drivers for not knowing Marathi during this period.

This comes amid a statewide inspection campaign to enforce the Maharashtra government’s rule making Marathi mandatory for auto-rickshaw and cab drivers in the state. As of Saturday, the Maharashtra Transport Department had issued notices to more than 770 drivers for lacking basic knowledge of Marathi.

On Thursday, representatives of auto-rickshaw and taxi drivers’ organisations met Fadnavis, seeking more time to comply with the rule.

The chief minister said that the representatives supported the government’s decision to make basic knowledge of Marathi compulsory. However, they said that it would be difficult for people of different age groups, many of whom had left school years ago, to learn the language in such a short period.

He also said that the organisations have prepared a plan to teach Marathi to the drivers and the government will support them by providing study material.

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led government on April 14 made basic knowledge of Marathi mandatory for all licensed taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers from May 1. The requirement also applies to drivers working with cab aggregators such as Ola, Uber and Rapido.

On April 29, it deferred the implementation of the decision until August 15.

The Regional Transport Office has deployed marshals to conduct language tests on roads, at rickshaw stands and at junctions.

Among the questions asked by the marshals in Marathi are “Where do you want to go?”, “Please start the meter” and “Do you have change?”

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Wednesday said that the allegations made by a Supreme Court judge against Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma were being examined at the “appropriate level”, reported Live Law.

In letters to Kant earlier this month, Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts.

Mehta sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”.

Taking note of Mehta’s complaint, Kant said on Wednesday that Sharma had to be given an opportunity to respond, reported Bar and Bench.

“The contents of the letters cannot be adjudicated in the public domain and that the concerned judge must be given a fair opportunity to place his response before any conclusion is reached,” Kant was quoted as saying by the legal news outlet.

He added: “The fact that allegations have been made, therefore, cannot by itself be treated as a finding against the judge.”

Kant said that a decision regarding Sharma’s transfer would be taken after examining his response as well as the material presented by Mehta.

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

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

In May 2025, a fresh collegium recommended his return to Rajasthan. He later became the acting chief justice of the Rajasthan High Court.

Mehta was elevated to the Supreme Court from the Rajasthan High Court.

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

The Supreme Court judge also highlighted a complaint by an advocate addressed to Justice Vikram Nath and copied to him and 15 others, which alleged that Sharma had used his position as acting chief justice to secure permanent appointments to Lok Adalats in Jaipur and Ajmer for persons close to him. These included a childhood friend and the spouses of two district judges.

In letters dated August 2, August 10 and August 17, Mehta repeatedly urged Kant to appoint a chief justice from another High Court, warning that the continued failure to act was “wholly against the interest of the institution”.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

A United States panel on religious freedom on Wednesday urged the Donald Trump administration to revoke the visa issued to Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat and “make him ineligible” to enter the country in the future.

Bhagwat arrived in the US on Tuesday to participate in the RSS’ centenary-year global outreach programme. He is scheduled to address around 5,000 Hindu Americans and Hindu non-resident Indians at Madison Square Garden on Saturday.

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

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom said that it was “deeply concerned” about Bhagwat’s visit and alleged that groups associated with the RSS “have perpetrated violent attacks against religious minorities, including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs” in recent years.

“Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has enforced policies that closely align with the RSS’ Hindutva ideology, inherently discriminating against religious minority communities,” it added.

The commission again urged the US government to impose sanctions on the RSS.

It had made the demand on August 19 as well, saying that members of the RSS should not be given high-level meetings or diplomatic courtesies in the US.

Dismissing the remarks, India’s Ministry of External Affairs had said on August 21 that the commission was “biased” and lacked credibility.

Randhir Jaiswal, the ministry’s spokesperson, said that the US panel had been making “misleading and provocative statements” about India for years.

“We should stay away from such organisations because they have their own agenda and at the same time have no credibility,” he added.

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

On Wednesday, Cece Heil, the commission’s vice-chair, said that the US government has an opportunity to hold India accountable “and signal that the United States stands for religious freedom for the people of India”.

“Without this accountability, religious freedom will only deteriorate further, as vigilante mobs continue to attack religious minorities and their houses of worship under the guise of enforcing anti-conversion laws and other harmful policies,” Heil added.

In March, the commission recommended in its annual report that the US government designate India as a “country of particular concern” over alleged systematic, ongoing and egregious violations of religious freedom.

This was the seventh time that the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had made this recommendation.

Objections have also been raised in Canada about Bhagwat’s upcoming visit from August 31 to September 1.

On August 7, two Canadian MPs urged Ottawa to ban the RSS and prevent Bhagwat from entering the country, citing his “history of hate speech” and advocacy of violence against religious minorities.

They said his visit could “lead to social disorder”.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Delhi Police has told the High Court that the bail petitions filed by activist Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in the 2020 riots conspiracy case were “illegal” and an “attempt to mislead the court”, reported Bar and Bench on Wednesday.

The police also repeated its allegations that Khalid and Imam were the “masterminds” of the riots, reported Live Law.

Khalid, Imam and several other activists were arrested between January 2020 and September 2020 in connection with the communal violence that broke out in North East Delhi in February 2020 between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it. The violence had left 53 dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.

Those accused in the matter have been charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, the Arms Act and sections of the Indian Penal Code.

The police have claimed that the violence was part of a larger conspiracy to defame the Narendra Modi government and was planned by those who organised the protests against the amended Citizenship Act.

The trial against Khalid and Imam is yet to begin.

This is the third round of bail pleas the activists have filed. On the first two occasions when they petitioned to get bail, their pleas were rejected right up to the Supreme Court.

Referring to the Supreme Court’s January order denying them bail, the police have told the High Court that according to the order, the “risk profiles” of all accused are “markedly dissimilar”, which justifies the continued detention of the activists, reported Live Law.

On January 5, a bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria granted bail to Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan in the Delhi riots case.

The bench had said that Khalid and Imam could file fresh petitions after all protected witnesses are examined or after one year. It also said that in cases under the anti-terror law, delay in trials cannot act as a “trump card” overriding statutory safeguards.

The police have argued before the High Court that the threshold then set by the Supreme Court has not yet been met, reported Bar and Bench.

Noting that the two activists’ petition relies on an order delivered in May by the Supreme Court, the police said that the judgment of a co-ordinate bench in a different case cannot override the directions issued in January.

On May 18, a Supreme Court bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan criticised the January verdict, saying that “bail is the rule and jail is an exception” even in prosecutions under the anti-terror law.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• Umar Khalid’s five years of incarceration: ‘Do I even know the world any more?’

• ‘Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar’: A JNU teacher’s message for her jailed students

Sonya Gill, women’s rights activist and co-founder of the digital news outlet People’s Archive of Rural India, died after a prolonged illness on Tuesday. She was 70.

Gill was a former secretary of the Maharashtra unit of the All India Democratic Women’s Association. She had founded PARI with her husband, journalist P Sainath, in December 2014 and continued to serve as its trustee.

With deep regret, we share the sudden passing of Sonya Gill, PARI Co-Founder and Trustee, on August 25, 2026.. Sonya worked for decades on women's rights issues and had been Secretary of AIDWA, Maharashtra. She was the wife of PARI Founder, Journalist P. Sainath. pic.twitter.com/ZMHSXsM0Xx

— People's Archive of Rural India (@PARInetwork) August 26, 2026

The All India Democratic Women’s Association described Gill’s death as an “immense and irreparable loss” to the women’s movement.

“She was a dedicated organiser, a committed fighter for women’s rights and a comrade whose warmth, grace and determination touched all those who worked with her,” stated the association.

It added that Gill had built the association from the grassroots. Her efforts at it had started with the work she did to support women living in Mumbai’s chawls.

“Comrade Sonya was a courageous fighter,” added the association. “Even while battling a prolonged illness, she continued to participate in AIDWA activities until the very end. She faced her illness with extraordinary courage and dignity, never allowing her personal difficulties to come in the way of her commitment to the movement.”

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In her tribute to Gill, human rights activist Teesta Setalvad wrote that she was a mentor to hundreds of activists from the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

“Sonya Gill’s own quiet revolutionary journey will and must be treasured, by comrade husband Sainath, family, women saathees and party as it undoubtedly will,” wrote Setalvad in The Wire.

CPI(M) General Secretary MA Baby said that Gill’s death was “a huge loss for the progressive women’s movement in the country”.

“She will always be remembered as a committed communist, fierce feminist and tireless organiser who worked wholeheartedly to advance the working-class movement in the country, especially in Maharashtra,” he added.

Baby also expressed condolences to Sainath and all of Gill’s family members.

Comrade Sonya Gill’s untimely demise is a huge loss for the progressive women’s movement in the country. She will always be remembered as a committed communist, fierce feminist and tireless organiser who worked wholeheartedly to advance the working-class movement in the country,… pic.twitter.com/4kAcvvmSWE

— M A Baby (@MABABYCPIM) August 27, 2026

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

In the vast mangrove delta of the Sundarbans, where the Bengal coast dissolves into tidal rivers and dense forest, survival depends on more than a boat and a net. Before entering the forest to collect honey or cut wood, fishermen and wood-gatherers stop at small shrines along the treeline to invoke Bonbibi, a figure one 19th traveller called a “strange goddess”, believed to be the keeper of the forest.

Bonbibi is, by origin, a Muslim figure. Her legend, interwoven with the tiger god Dakshin Ray and the mediating saint Ghazi Miyan, forms the cosmological grammar of an entire ecosystem: a shared sacred world in which tigers, humans, forest spirits, and Muslim saints negotiate the boundary between the wild and the habitable.

What, exactly, makes this a Muslim ecology? Not the presence of Muslims as such. Hindu, animist, and tribal communities too invoke Bonbibi. What makes it Muslim is that an Islamic idiom – a saint, a sacred genealogy, a moral vocabulary of protection and transgression drawn from Islamic devotional practice – has become one of the registers through which an entire regional community, across religious lines, understands and regulates its relationship with a dangerous and necessary landscape.

This essay is about Muslim ecologies: not environmental knowledge that happens to be held by Muslims, but ecological practice and ethical reasoning in which an Islamic vocabulary does identifiable work: dividing the forest, sanctifying a pond, regulating a water channel, restricting a tree.

The claim here is not that Muslims have a special relationship with nature. It is that, across several regions of India, the vernacular life of Islam – its saints, its legal concepts, its devotional geography – has shaped how land, water and animals are managed. This history has gone almost entirely unrecognised in how India thinks about its environmental past and present.

The Bengal Delta

The story of Bonbibi is best understood not as folklore decoration but as a working cosmology for an unworkable landscape. The Sundarbans are a tidal forest where the line between land and water shifts with every monsoon, where the Bengal tiger is a constant and lethal presence, and where any human entry into the forest interior is, in a quite literal sense, a negotiation with death.

According to the “Bonbibi Johuranama”, a narrative poem that has circulated among fishing and forest-dwelling communities for generations, Bonbibi is sent by God to protect the poor of the forest. She defeats Dakshin Ray, the tiger god and lord of the wild, but does not destroy him: she negotiates. The forest is divided – the deep interior remains the tiger’s domain, while humans may use the margins, provided they enter with humility and seek her blessing first. Ghazi Miyan, the Muslim warrior-saint, witnesses and seals this compact.

This is, in effect, a zoning law expressed as theology. It tells honey-collectors and woodcutters where they may go, on what terms, and what ritual obligations attach to entry – and it does so by fusing an Islamic figure of sainthood with a pre-existing, non-Islamic tiger-deity and forest-spirit complex that long predates the arrival of Islam in Bengal.

The historian Richard Eaton’s account of how Islam became local in Bengal helps explain why this fusion occurred where and how it did. Eaton describes the eastward expansion of Bengali agriculture into forested, sparsely settled tracts of the delta from the 16th century, often led by pirs, Sufi pioneers, who arrived not as conquerors but as forest-clearers. They were granted land by Mughal authorities precisely because they could mobilise local labour and command local legitimacy. These pirs became, in local memory, figures who could ride tigers, command crocodiles, and negotiate with the spirits already understood to inhabit the forest. Sufi shrines functioned, in Eaton’s phrase, as nodes of a “moral ecology” – a cognitive map in which the authority to clear land, the authority to mediate with dangerous animals, and the authority to bless or curse were all held by the same sacred figure.

This is the specific historical mechanism by which an Islamic idiom became a vernacular ecological expression: not through doctrine imposed from above, but through the practical role Sufi pioneers played in the agrarian and ecological frontier of premodern Bengal. The legendary Zindah Ghazi, said to ride tigers, and Khan Jahan, credited with clearing the forests of what is now southwestern Bangladesh by mediating between settlers and the animals and spirits of the land, belong to this same genealogy. Bonbibi is its most enduring popular form – still invoked today by Hindu and Muslim forest-goers alike, in a region where the practical business of staying alive in the mangrove has outlasted, and absorbed, the religious categories that produced it.

The shrine pond

A second, more widely distributed pattern concerns the role of Sufi shrines as informal sanctuaries for endangered wildlife. Here the mechanism is different again, and worth spelling out carefully.

At the shrine of Bayazid Bistami in Chittagong, the sacred pond harbours the black soft-shell turtle, among the rarest turtles in the world. Across present-day Bangladesh and Pakistan, researchers have documented similar shrine ponds inhabited by protected fish and crocodiles, which devotees feed and will not harm. The animals are understood to be in some sense the shrine’s own, connected to the saint’s baraka, his spiritual charge, in ways that vary from place to place but that consistently mark the pond and its inhabitants as off-limits to ordinary use.

The mechanism here is not an abstract Islamic teaching about animals in general. It is the specific, local logic of shrine sanctity: a saint’s tomb radiates a kind of protection outward into its immediate environment, and the pond, being physically continuous with the shrine, falls within that radius. Catching the fish or harming the turtle would be to violate the sanctity of the place itself; a transgression against the shrine, which only secondarily, and almost incidentally, has the effect of protecting the species.

The result, in ecological terms, is nonetheless real. Centuries before the language of conservation biology existed, a religious geography of sanctity was functioning as a de facto protected-area network, scattered across the subcontinent wherever Sufi shrines stood near water. The turtle in the shrine pond is not a religious symbol pressed into ecological service. Its survival has depended on the specific local belief that this pond belongs to this saint: a belief that is simultaneously about Islam, and about this place.

Islamic law as resource law

A third pattern, in the high-altitude cold desert of Kargil in Ladakh, shows the same Islamic idiom doing different ecological work: not zoning a forest or sanctifying a pond, but regulating water and timber in a landscape where both are catastrophically scarce.

Field studies of Muslim communities in Kargil describe how the cutting of juniper – a slow-growing tree that is ecologically critical for soil stability and fuel in this fragile environment – is restricted through community norms. Participants explicitly describe these norms in the vocabulary of Islamic stewardship: the idea that resources are held in trust and that wasteful or excessive use is a kind of wrongdoing for which one is accountable.

Water in Kargil is distributed through collective irrigation arrangements that draw on a specific principle of Islamic law , that flowing water (as distinct from water that has been collected or stored) cannot be privately owned and access to it is a shared right that no individual can foreclose. This is not a vague spiritual orientation toward nature. This legal concept, drawn from the fiqh tradition, performs a distributive function in the irrigation system: determining who may take water, in what order, and on what basis a dispute over a channel is resolved.

What is striking about Kargil is how precisely the Islamic vocabulary maps onto the ecological problem. A cold desert’s two scarcest resources – wood and water – are governed by, respectively, an ethic of accountable stewardship and a legal doctrine about the non-ownability of flowing water. Neither of these is a generic “Islam is green” claim.

Both are specific doctrinal resources, selected and emphasised because they happen to fit the ecological problem at hand. This is exactly what one would expect when religious vocabulary is used as a regulation by people living with scarcity, rather than being read into their practices after the fact by an outside observer.

Vernacular architecture

A fourth, more diffuse pattern is visible in the way mosques across India took on entirely different built forms depending on region. The multi-pitched terracotta roofs of rural Bengal echo the thatched bamboo-and-mud houses of the delta and shed the region’s heavy monsoon rain.

The sloping tiled roofs of the Malabar coast in Kerala, which use locally available materials, are suited to its different but equally intense rainfall. The tiered wooden forms of Kashmir are built for snow load and for a climate where wood, not stone, was the available building material.

These adaptations are sometimes described simply as evidence of Islam’s capacity to absorb local aesthetic traditions. This is true but understates the point. A roof pitched to shed monsoon rain or built from the timber a forested hill region produces, is a building in working relationship with its climate and its materials.

It is, in a modest but real sense, an ecological adaptation arrived at by communities who needed their houses of worship to survive the same weather as their houses of living. That this adaptation happened differently in Bengal, Kerala and Kashmir – producing three quite different built vocabularies, all recognisably Islamic and local – is itself evidence against any singular “Muslim” relationship to the environment.

What is Muslim about this?

What is Muslim here is a set of practices that took shape differently in each place, in dialogue with each place’s ecology. In each of the four cases described – a forest cosmology in Bengal, shrine ponds across the subcontinent, water and timber law in Kargil, and mosque architecture in three regions –what makes the practice “Muslim” is different and specific.

In the Sundarbans, it is a saint-figure and a sacred narrative, of Islamic provenance, that organises a cosmology shared across religious communities. It is Muslim in origin and idiom, but not Muslim in exclusive ownership or practice. In the shrine-ponds, it is the specific logic of Sufi sanctity – the baraka of a tomb extending into its surroundings – that produces a conservation effect as a side-consequence of devotional geography. In Kargil, it is Islamic legal doctrine that supplies the rules of a resource-management system. In mosque architecture, it is the way Islamic religious building, as a category, take on the specific ecological grammar of each region it arrived in.

What unites these cases is not a shared “Islamic environmental ethic” that exists prior to and independent of local context, waiting to be applied. It is rather that Islam in India has also been local and environmental. It arrived in, and took shape within, specific ecological and social landscapes, via specific historical agents: Sufi pioneers in Bengal’s forest frontier, jurists and irrigation communities in Ladakh’s cold desert, builders working with regional materials and climates.

In becoming local, it became, in these instances, ecological. Islamic vocabulary did not arrive as an abstract doctrine and get “applied” to nature in general; it arrived embedded in specific practices of settlement, sanctity, law and building, each of which had to come to terms with a specific landscape.

This also clarifies what this essay is not claiming. It is not claiming that anything done by a person who happens to be Muslim – a Muslim farmer, a Muslim scientist, a Muslim novelist – constitutes “Muslim ecology” simply by virtue of the practitioner’s identity. That would make the category so broad as to be analytically empty and would risk exactly the kind of forced or essentialising move that this framing wants to avoid. The cases above are different in kind. In each, an identifiably Islamic vocabulary, narrative, legal concept or institutional form is doing identifiable work in how land, water, trees, or animals are actually treated.

Faith as vocabulary

None of these amounts to a singular claim that Islam determines ecological outcomes, or that Muslim communities are inherently more conservation-minded than others. Region, caste, livelihood and local political economy all matter – often more, in any given instance, than religious identity. The Kargil irrigation system would not function on doctrine alone; it depends on local enforcement, kinship obligation, and the practical fact that everyone in a watershed needs the system to work. The Bonbibi cosmology did not, in itself, prevent the colonial-era and postcolonial destruction of large parts of the Sundarbans mangrove. A cosmology is not a conservation policy, and treating it as a substitute for one would be its own kind of error.

What religious identity does provide, in each of these cases, is a vocabulary: a set of terms – stewardship, sanctity, the non-ownability of flowing water, the moral geography of a saint’s protection – through which ecological relationships can be named, argued about, and handed down.

Concepts like khalifah (often glossed as stewardship), hima (a pre-Islamic and early Islamic institution of protected land, adapted in various local forms), and fasaad (corruption or disorder on the earth, a Quranic term) are available, across the Muslim world, as a moral vocabulary for ecological argument. Whether, and how, that vocabulary gets taken up in any given place depends also on local circumstance. The vocabulary is portable; its ecological uptake is complex and also local.

Seen this way, what is distinctive about this material is not that it represents a separate or parallel ‘Muslim environmentalism’, set apart from other Indian environmental traditions. It is that it is irreducibly syncretic and transregional in a way that other, better-recognised strands of Indian environmental thought – indigenous forest-rights traditions rooted in specific territorial claims, or Dalit ecological politics rooted in the specific experience of caste and pollution – are not, or not in the same way.

The Bonbibi cosmology is simultaneously Islamic, animist, and Hindu, crossing all three registers in a single narrative shared by communities who do not share a single religious identity. The shrine-pond pattern recurs, with local variation, from Chittagong to the Sindh – the same logic of saintly sanctity producing parallel conservation effects across very different ecologies and political boundaries.

Kargil’s water law draws on a legal tradition that is simultaneously rooted in this specific Ladakhi watershed and connected to a body of jurisprudence shared across the Muslim world. This trans-regional portability, combined with deep local specificity, is most distinguished feature. It is also, not incidentally, a direct rebuttal to the idea, current in some political discourse, that Muslim presence in a landscape is inherently foreign to it, or stands outside its ecological history. The opposite is closer to the truth: in these cases, an originally extra-regional religious vocabulary became one of the idioms through which intensely local ecological relationships were – and in places still are – organised.

Recovering the Frame

Indian environmental scholarship has, over several decades, expanded its sense of who counts as an environmental subject. Indigenous communities are recognised as ecological stewards with territorial claims. Women are recognised as primary managers of household and agrarian resources. Dalit communities are recognised as disproportionate bearers of environmental risk and as holders of a distinct ecological politics rooted in the experience of pollution and exclusion. Each of these recognitions involved identifying a specific relationship – a specific vocabulary, a specific structural position – through which a community’s environmental experience could be named and analysed.

Muslim communities, by contrast, remain largely outside this frame, not because the relevant material does not exist, but because it has not been organised around a comparably specific analytical question. This essay has tried to pose that question narrowly: not “what have Muslims done for the environment”; but where has an Islamic vocabulary done identifiable work in how a landscape is managed, and what does that tell us about how Islam became, in these places, local and ecological.

The answer, in the cases surveyed here, is that this has happened more often, and more substantively, than India’s environmental discourse currently recognises. Recovering this history does not add a footnote to existing accounts of Indian environmentalism so much as it complicates the map: showing forest cosmologies, shrine ecologies and resource law that are at once Islamic, regional, and shared across religious lines, in landscapes from the Bengal delta to the Ladakhi highlands.

This matters, too, against the political backdrop of the present moment, in which Muslim presence in a landscape – a herd on a riverbank, a settlement on a floodplain, a community near a forest – is increasingly read through the vocabulary of encroachment and threat: “land jihad”, “flood jihad”, the figure of the Muslim as ecological transgressor. The material recovered here does not, by itself, answer that politics. But it does establish that the relationship between Islam and the Indian landscape has a much longer and more intimate history than either side of that argument usually allows, a history in which an Islamic vocabulary became, in particular places and for particular reasons, part of how the land itself was understood.

Mukul Sharma is a professor of environmental studies at Ashoka University, Sonipat, Haryana. His research focuses on caste, Dalits, Hindu nationalism, environmental justice, and ecological politics in India and South Asia.

This article was first published on The India Forum.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subsuming the NPR

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

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

Specifically, questions about where and when a respondent’s parents were born caused concern as these could, in theory, help determine whether they were Indian citizens. A 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act made the citizenship of those born in India after June 30, 1987, contingent on the citizenship of their parents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it legal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facing blowback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Several BJP spokespersons declined interview requests for this story.

With inputs from Safwat Zargar.

Former Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain has moved the Delhi High Court against his conviction for the murder of Intelligence Bureau staffer Ankit Sharma during the 2020 riots in the national capital, Bar and Bench reported on Wednesday.

On July 31, Hussain was sentenced to life imprisonment in the case.

Sharma was killed by a mob during the violence, and his body had been dumped in a drain.

In his appeal before the High Court, Hussain alleged that the investigation against him had been tainted from the start and was aimed at implicating him to satisfy public anger.

“Witnesses have been planted, statements of genuine eyewitnesses manipulated and the actual perpetrators have not been brought to book,” Bar and Bench quoted Hussain as saying in his appeal.

On July 13, a sessions court had convicted Hussain for murder, rioting, disobedience to an order promulgated by a public servant, promoting enmity between groups, rioting armed with a deadly weapon, unlawful assembly, and kidnapping or abducting with intent to secretly and wrongfully confine a person.

However, it cleared him of a criminal conspiracy charge.

In February 2020, violence broke out in northeast Delhi between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it. The violence left 53 people dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: What exactly happened in Delhi locality where AAP councillor stands accused of IB staffer’s murder?

At least 95 persons died in a flash flood and mudslide in Nepal, the police said. Several more are feared dead, with a search and rescue operation underway. More than 100 Indian tourists have been reported missing, amidst a total of 291 foreign citizens who have not yet been traced.

The incident occurred in the Rasuwa district along Nepal’s border with China. The mountainous district is located about 120 km north of Kathmandu.

The flash flood swept away several villages along the Bhotekoshi river, and damaged roads and bridges. The cause of the flood has not yet been established. Read on.

The Donald Trump administration in the United States paused immigrant visa appointments globally as consular officials undergo training to identify applicants who may become dependent on public benefits. Applicants scheduled for interviews have been told their appointments would be rescheduled.

The US State Department said that the training was intended to ensure visa applications are assessed “comprehensively and consistently”.

The pause comes against the backdrop of the Trump administration seeking to tighten the rules for entry into the US. Read on.

A Supreme Court judge has accused Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma of misusing his administrative powers ahead of his retirement next month. In letters to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Justice Sandeep Mehta has sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”.

Mehta has alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts. He also claimed that Sharma had “frequently” threatened fellow judges with “retributive action”, including transfer while “claiming his closeness” with the chief justice of India. Read on.

An Indian jewellery firm withdrew an advertisement about Raksha Bandhan featuring actor Kriti Sanon after it received backlash for the outfit she had worn in it. The company, Giva, had released the advertisement for the upcoming Hindu festival during which women tie threads, known as rakhis, around their brothers’ wrists.

Sanon’s outfit was criticised by some social media users, who called it inappropriate for the Hindu religious event and said that it showed a lack of sensitivity towards the festival.

Giva said that it had “highest regard and deep respect” for Indian culture, traditions and festivals. “If our recent advertisement has inadvertently hurt the sentiments of some segments of society, that was not our intent at all,” it said. Read on.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that he does not support an event on Saturday at which Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to speak. However, he said the city may not have “jurisdiction to cancel a private event”.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Mamdani said he was “deeply” opposed to the RSS, describing it as a “movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country”.

Bhagwat arrived in the US on Tuesday for the RSS’ centenary-year global outreach programme. He is expected to address around 5,000 Hindu-Americans and Hindu non-resident Indians in Madison Square Garden. Read on.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday said he does not support an upcoming event in which Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat is scheduled to speak. However, the city may not have any “jurisdiction to cancel a private event”, he added.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Bhagwat arrived in the United States on Tuesday to participate in the RSS’s centenary-year global outreach programme. He is scheduled to address around 5,000 Hindu-Americans and Hindu NRIs at the Madison Square Garden on Saturday, PTI reported.

Responding to questions about the event and the RSS, Mamdani said it was “incredibly troubling to see the rise of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision of any country”.

Mamdani said he was “deeply” opposed to the RSS, both as an Indian-American and as mayor of New York.

He said that the vision of India he had grown up with was that of “a pluralistic society, of a secular republic that believed in the belonging of each and every person who was from India”.

His statement came against the backdrop of activists and political figures asking him to cancel Bhagwat’s event.

Objections have also been raised in Canada about Bhagwat’s upcoming visit from August 31 to September 1.

On August 7, two Canadian MPs urged Ottawa to ban the RSS and prevent Bhagwat from entering the country, citing his “history of hate speech” and advocacy of violence against religious minorities.

They said his visit could “lead to social disorder”.

On August 19, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom called for sanctions against members of the RSS, describing the organisation as “biased” and lacking credibility.

The commission had said that RSS leaders should not be given high-level meetings or diplomatic courtesies.

Dismissing this, New Delhi on August 21 described the organisation as “biased” and lacking credibility.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

An Indian jewellery firm withdrew a Raksha Bandhan-themed advertisement featuring actor Kriti Sanon after it received backlash for the outfit she had worn in it.

The company, Giva, had released the advertisement for the upcoming Hindu festival during which women tie threads, known as rakhis, around their brothers’ wrists. The outfit worn by Sanon was criticised by some social media users, who claimed that it was inappropriate for a religious occasion and said that it showed a lack of sensitivity towards the festival.

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Bharatiya Janata Party MP and actor Kangana Ranaut also criticised the advertisement, saying that it looked “intentionally creepy”.

“Why would you tie your brother a rakhi in your bikini/under garments? Where are all your styling options?” she said.

In a statement released on Wednesday, Giva said that it had “highest regard and deep respect” for Indian culture, traditions and festivals. “If our recent advertisement has inadvertently hurt the sentiments of some segments of society, that was not our intent at all,” the brand said.

The brand said it had withdrawn the advertisement from all media platforms “out of respect”.

Before the advertisement was withdrawn, Sanon had said on Tuesday that culture and traditions are in a woman’s heart, and not in her neckline.

“The essence of festivals is not in the clothes you wear, it is in the emotions and meaning you hold for the traditions,” she wrote on Instagram.

Sanon also questioned why women continue to be told what to wear, saying that ethnic fashion had evolved over the years but women’s respect for their culture was still judged by their clothing.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi shared Sanon’s comments and said that what a woman wears, what she does and where she goes is her choice. “Stop trolling women for exercising their freedom. #SmashThePatriarchy”, he wrote on social media.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

A Delhi man on Monday sent a legal notice to Meta and an Instagram creator who allegedly covertly recorded him using camera-equipped smart glasses manufactured by the technology conglomerate.

The creator had posted the video, recorded using the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, as a reel on Instagram on July 26. The social media platform is also owned by Meta.

When the man tried to report the video to Instagram, he was told that the content does not violate its community standards.

Digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation, which has provided pro bono legal assistance to the man, contended that the conglomerate is liable for the design and marketing of the device that is “deliberately styled to be indistinguishable” from regular spectacles.

This may be among the first legal actions in India that seek to fix liability on a manufacturer of smart glasses for the harm that the product design may cause.

A man was covertly recorded at a café in Khan Market through camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses while being harassed by a stranger. The footage was uploaded to Instagram, where it crossed 4.19 lakh views and attracted hundreds of mocking comments. IFF has provided pro…

— Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (@internetfreedom) August 25, 2026

In the legal notice, the man said he was covertly recorded at a café in Delhi’s Khan Market. He said that the video posted on Instagram was viewed more than 4.19 lakh times over 10 days and got several comments ridiculing him.

The Internet Freedom Foundation said that the man tried to report the video to Instagram, but the application offered no specific privacy-violation category. He also approached Meta’s grievance officer for India, but received no acknowledgement or decision.

Instagram eventually contacted him on July 28 and July 30, maintaining that the material did not violate its community standards.

In the legal notice, the man has demanded that the video be taken down and that the Instagram creator publish an apology for posting it. He has also demanded Rs 2.05 crore in damages.

The notice asserted that Meta “owed and breached a duty of care to [the man] as a victim, and is liable in negligence for its contribution to the intrusion upon his privacy”.

Meta smart glasses have a small indicator light near the right temple that turns on when a video is being recorded and flashes when a photo is being taken. However, the legal notice asserted that the “recording indicator on the said devices is inadequate and easily overlooked”.

Responding to a query from Scroll about the legal notice, Meta said that its smart glasses are designed with in-built privacy and safety features such as the light.

Meta also said that it removes accounts and content from its platforms that violate its policies, including content that encourages or facilitates harassment, regardless of the device used to capture it. It further said it had taken down accounts that systematically shared content filmed without people’s awareness or consent.

Written by Neerad Pandharipande. Edited by Sneha.

A Supreme Court judge has accused Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma of misusing his administrative powers ahead of his retirement next month, Bar and Bench quoted letters sent to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as saying.

Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts.

Mehta has sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”, the legal news outlet reported.

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

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

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

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

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

He alleged that Sharma had “frequently” threatened fellow judges with “retributive action”, including transfer while “claiming his closeness” with the chief justice of India.

Among the allegations, the Supreme Court judge also highlighted a complaint by an advocate addressed to Justice Vikram Nath and copied to him and 15 others, which alleged that Sharma had used his position as acting chief justice to secure permanent appointments to Lok Adalats in Jaipur and Ajmer for persons close to him. These included a childhood friend and the spouses of two district judges, Bar and Bench reported.

In letters dated August 2, August 10 and August 17, Mehta repeatedly urged Kant to appoint a chief justice from another High Court, warning that the continued failure to act was “wholly against the interest of the institution”, Live Law reported. Mehta was elevated to the Supreme Court from the Rajasthan High Court.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.