Election Commissioner SS Sandhu, Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta and Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal are among 33 lakh electors in the national capital for whom notices have been generated in the special intensive revision process for them to prove their eligibility to vote, The Indian Express reported.

The list of persons to whom notices have been issued was released on Saturday on the website of the Delhi chief electoral officer.

Gupta, a voter from the Shalimar Bagh constituency, was sent a notice as the difference between her age and her parents’ age appeared to be below 15 years. Her details were later validated when she provided the necessary documents, the electoral registration officer from the constituency said.

Kejriwal and his family had not provided details about their inclusion in the last special intensive revision exercise, The Indian Express quoted the Electoral Registration Officer of the New Delhi Assembly seat as saying.

Commenting on Kejriwal being given a notice, AAP national executive member Anurag Dhanda remarked in a social media post: “We have been saying from the very first day that this isn’t just the SIR, but is the BJP’s game at play. If they had their way, they’d reserve voting rights just for [Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and [Union Home Minister] Amit Shah, and delete the votes of all their opponents.”

हम तो पहले दिन से कह रहे हैं कि ये SIR नहीं बीजेपी का खेल चल रहा है। इनका बस चले तो ये मोदी और अमित शाह का ही वोट का अधिकार रखें और सब विरोधियों के वोट काट दें।

तीन बार के दिल्ली के मुख्यमंत्री @ArvindKejriwal जी और उनके परिवार के वोट दिल्ली की वोटर लिस्ट से ग़ायब करना कौन सी… https://t.co/ayjeEfikoJ

— Anurag Dhanda (@anuragdhanda) September 19, 2026

Other prominent persons who received notices as part of the special intensive revision process include former Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar and his wife Sudesh Dhankhar, ex-Supreme Court judge Justice Madan B Lokur, former Union Minister Kapil Sibal and his wife Promila Sibal, The Hindu reported.

Lokur has been sent a notice as the age gap between him and his grandfather was not more than 40 years, the newspaper reported.

Bharatiya Janata Party veteran leader LK Advani, former Delhi deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, BJP MLA Kailash Gahlot, Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi, BJP MP Bansuri Swaraj and former Union Minister Subramanian Swamy have also received notices, Hindustan Times reported.

The 33 lakh voters who have been sent notice account for about one-third of the 97.5 lakh voters included in the draft voter rolls, The Hindu reported. Verification of such cases is to be completed by October 29, while the final electoral rolls are slated to be published on November 4.

On Sunday, the Delhi chief electoral officer’s clarified that receiving a notice does not mean that a voter’s name will be deleted from the electoral roll.

“System generated notices” are being sent to voters who could not be linked to the electoral roll from the previous special intensive revision or whose linking contained “logical discrepancies”, the poll body said.

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

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

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

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande and Sara Varghese.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Sunday laid the foundation for a thermal power project to be built by Adani Power Limited in the state’s Dhubri district on land where the homes of 1,400 Bengali-origin Muslim families were demolished in July 2025.

The project is located in Charuabakhra, Chirakuta I and II and Santoshpur villages under the Chapar revenue circle.

In July 2025, the Assam government had demolished the homes of more than 1,400 Bengali-origin Muslim families living on nearly 1,157 acres of government land in these villages to make way for a power project. The land was allotted to the state-run Assam Power Distribution Company Limited, which subsequently allotted it to Adani Power Limited for the project.

Nearly 10,000 Bengali-origin Muslims who had lived in the area for at least three decades to four decades were displaced following the demolitions, Scroll had reported.

A resident had said then that many were “erosion-hit people who lost their ancestral homes due to the Brahmaputra”.

On Sunday, the chief minister said that the 3,200 MW thermal power project was Assam’s “biggest-ever power project” and would generate enough electricity to meet the state’s entire power needs.

“The project is expected to generate up to 20,000 jobs during construction and around 5,000 jobs once operational,” the Adani Group said in a statement.

Assam has just launched its biggest-ever power project.

The 3,200MW Thermal Power project in western Assam will generate enough electricity to meet the State's entire power needs.

This ₹48,000 crore project is a direct outcome of #AdvantageAssam2.0,held just 18 months ago. pic.twitter.com/CbF1AQWTc5

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) September 20, 2026

Sarma had said earlier that the Adani Group had committed to investments worth Rs 50,000 crore that it had proposed during a business summit in the state in February.

On July 14, an Expert Appraisal Committee under the Union environment ministry had recommended granting environmental clearance to Adani Power Limited’s proposed coal-based thermal power plant.

In its submission for environmental clearance, the company told the ministry that there were no habitations at the site and therefore involved no rehabilitation or resettlement claims.

However, residents affected by the evictions have disputed this.

Abdur Rashid Sheikh, a resident, told Scroll that the Assam government had already cleared the project site through the “forceful eviction drives”, leaving 1,400 families without homes or rehabilitation and resettlement.

“Apart from the 3,500 bighas of government land that was taken forcibly, there were 1,700 bighas of land where people with land titles lived that were also taken,” Sheikh said. “About 50% of the landowners with land titles have not received compensation yet though their paperwork is done.”

The district authorities had allocated 300 bighas in Baizar Alga village to rehabilitate the affected perons and earmarked Rs 50,000 in a one-time relief to help them transport their belongings.

However, some residents said they were unwilling to move to the site because it is a low-lying riverine area in the middle of the Brahmaputra river.

On March 30, 2025, the district administration submitted a proposal to convert the village grazing land, a category of government land designated for cattle grazing, for the power project, according to minutes of a district-level land advisory meeting held on April 2.

The district administration subsequently issued eviction notices and demolished the homes.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Assam in 2016, multiple demolition drives have been conducted across districts, mostly targeting areas populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims. At least eight Muslims have been shot dead during evictions carried out since 2016.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The proposed three-lane, bidirectional tunnel road in north Bengaluru, intended to ease congestion at Hebbal Junction – a major interchange connecting the airport with the rest of the city – has run into rough weather.

At an estimated Rs 1,385 crore, the tunnel will cost about Rs 622 crore per kilometre. The tunnel’s long-term benefits in terms of easing traffic congestion are, however, unclear.

A recent analysis by the Sustainable Transportation Lab of the Indian Institute of Science points out that the tunnel is a “highly localised improvement” that “merely shifts the congestion point”, leaving bottlenecks at its entry and exit. The detailed project report or DPR shows that by 2047, the tunnel will operate at or beyond capacity in all scenarios modelled.

According to urban mobility expert Satya Arikutharam, apart from creating more chaos at these bottlenecks, the tunnel “will also worsen the local traffic, the very problem it intends to solve. Faster arrival rate at these local road intersections due to the new short tunnel capacity means quicker accumulation of traffic, queuing pile-ups and traffic jams,” he says.

Groundwater and flooding concerns

A bigger concern the citizens and environmental experts are raising is about the risks it could pose to groundwater and flooding.

The little over two-kilometre tunnel will run from the Hebbal flyover junction in north Bengaluru – about 30 km by road from Kempegowda International Airport – through the Gandhi Krishi Vigyana Kendra (GKVK) campus of the University of Agricultural Sciences and end at the Karnataka Veterinary, Animal and Fisheries Sciences University. Part of its proposed alignment will lie within metres of Hebbal Lake, a 141-acre water body that, experts say, is critical for groundwater recharge and flood mitigation in the region.

A public interest litigation filed in the Karnataka High Court argues that the project is being implemented without a hydrological or groundwater impact assessment, or lake study. The PIL seeks a stay on the project.

Acting on this petition, the court, on August 6, directed the state to file an affidavit clarifying if any studies have been conducted to understand the impact of the project on the Hebbal Lake. The court specifically sought information on whether the tunnel would cause any obstruction to the inflow and outflow of the water or disrupt any natural aqueduct or underground flow of water.

Subsequently, at a September 3 hearing, the court, that noted that a geotechnical report before it states that the lake’s inflow and outflow would not be affected, directed the state to arrange a presentation by an engineer explaining the measures taken to ensure that the lake’s inflow and outflow are not obstructed.

Yashwantha Kumar M, executive engineer at the Bangalore Development Authority, which is executing the project, informs Mongabay-India that the Bangalore Development Authority has undertaken hydrological studies as part of the project. He, however, did not provide details of what these studies assessed. “The BDA [Bangalore Development Authority] has filed a detailed response before the court to the hydrological questions raised in the petition,” he adds. This filing, however, is not publicly available.

The DPR has earmarked Rs 75 lakh for an environmental impact assessment. But no such assessment has been made available to the public, even as groundwork for the project, according to Kumar, began in the Karnataka Veterinary, Animal and Fisheries Sciences University campus in early August.

Kumar describes the Rs 75 lakh as “just a budgetary provision” that “can be done at any time”. As a standalone 2.2-km tunnel, the project does not fall under the category of projects for which environmental impact assessment is mandatory to obtain central government permission, he adds.

Earlier, the Union environment ministry clarified that a standalone tunnel does not automatically require prior environmental clearance under the Environmental Impact Assessment Notification, 2006, as tunnel projects are not listed in its Schedule. If a tunnel forms an integral part of a highway project covered by the notification, the highway project, including the tunnel, would require environmental appraisal.

The DPR admits that Hebbal junction and its surrounding areas are prone to urban flooding due to inadequate stormwater capacity and backflow from the lake, and that existing stormwater drains are insufficient to carry peak monsoon discharge.

Strained lake system

Bengaluru’s lakes are a part of a centuries-old engineered system built by damming the city’s undulating valleys to harvest rainwater in a region with no perennial river. This evolved into a network of interconnected lakes linked by stormwater drains or rajakaluve, allowing water to flow from one lake to the next across the city’s three principal valleys.

A 2022 study by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment found that urbanisation and poor governance have left many lakes encroached upon, degraded or disconnected from this cascading system. In the Hebbal-Nagavara valley, only 32 of 72 lakes had functioning inlets, outlets and stormwater drains, while the rest had damaged or encroached water channels.

Rashmi Kulranjan, an ATREE PhD candidate whose doctoral research includes the study, says Hebbal Lake sits midway in this cascade. Water flows into it from upstream lakes including Doddabommasandra and JP Park Kere before continuing downstream to Nagavara and Kalkere. She points to the Manyata area, once a low-lying wetland between Nagavara and Kalkere and now occupied largely by a technology park, where flood-prone roads continue to fill with water. “The elevation of the area continues to be low,” she says. “So you continue to have water.”

Independent of the tunnel, Hebbal’s catchment is getting increasingly concretised, says Shashank Palur, senior hydrologist at WELL Labs, a research organisation. Built-up neighbourhoods west of the lake now generate higher runoff, while two upstream lakes on the southern side have been lost to encroachment, sending even more water into Hebbal.

The result, he says, is that the lake has become the area’s last major flood buffer before water reaches Nagavara, which is under pressure. “Now Hebbal has to deal with more water coming in with less space to accommodate it,” Palur says.

What the tunnel could do underground

The DPR acknowledges the hydrological sensitivity of Hebbal Lake. The proposed tunnel will be built using the “cut-and-cover method”, involving excavation to 18.5 metres (60 feet), construction of the tunnel and covering it over, rather than boring through rock.

During construction, stormwater drains in the tunnel’s path may need to be temporarily diverted to prevent flooding of the excavation pit. Temporary barriers, or cofferdams, will keep water out, particularly during the monsoon, while groundwater may need to be continuously pumped out through dewatering, the DPR notes. Once complete, the tunnel will be a permanent “watertight (tanked system)” designed to prevent groundwater from entering it.

The concerns extend beyond construction. Groundwater supplies 50% of Bengaluru’s water needs, and the permanent structure could affect aquifer recharge. “Surface water is the only source to recharge the groundwater,” says TJ Renuka Prasad, retired professor of geology at Bangalore University. Drainage systems, including many rajakaluve and smaller streams, help supply water for recharge. “If you cut the supply of water through these drainage systems, then there will be less groundwater recharge,” he says.

Bengaluru’s underlying geology is predominantly hard rock: fractures, joints and larger “master joints” act as pathways for groundwater. Construction could disrupt these pathways, Prasad says. But the impact begins higher up, in the soil and weathered rock layers that feed water into the fractures. “The recharge of groundwater first happens in the soil zone, then in the weathered zone. These layers hold water and facilitate recharge to the fracture zones”. Excavating to 60 feet would remove these layers, he says, adding that that could alter our idea of raising the water table.

Dewatering during construction would also temporarily lower groundwater tables around the excavation, says Palur. The long-term impact of the watertight structure is harder to predict because Bengaluru lacks a detailed groundwater map. It could affect borewells or alter the amount of water reaching lakes. “What if there is an east to west movement of groundwater there and because of the tunnel – a solid concrete structure – coming in between, that stops?” he asks. “So there will be a lasting consequence, but we don’t know what that might look like.”

A 2025 groundwater assessment by the Central Ground Water Board identifies the Yelahanka taluk, where Hebbal falls, as overexploited. WELL Labs found average borewell depths in the region of 700-800 feet, with its deepest surveyed well reaching about 1,200 feet. Palur cautions that the data covers only 300 wells. During the 2024 summer water crisis, he says, “borewells were running dry in that area.”

The tunnel’s vulnerability

The tunnel also faces a specific vulnerability: its entrance sits in a flood-prone location. The IISc assessment found that the entrance is at “the point of lowest elevation on the Hebbal Lake side” and is “very likely to be flooded during rainfall events”. It also said evacuation plans for flooding conditions are not clearly addressed in the DPR.

Palur says established engineering solutions, including pumps, can keep water out of underground structures. “I don’t think overland flooding will have that much of an impact on the subsurface structures.”

The DPR proposes a watertight tunnel with continuous drainage to collect groundwater seepage, rainwater and other water entering the structure and pump it into municipal drains. The tunnel portals will also have flood barriers and sump pumping systems, while the ramps will have canopies, side drains and sumps to manage rainwater.

But the effectiveness of these measures will depend partly on surrounding stormwater systems, says GV Hegde, a hydrogeologist who has studied Bengaluru’s water systems. Maintaining the lake’s minimal environmental storage and improving stormwater flows will be important to prevent flooding in the area.

A shrinking buffer

What may aggravate flooding risks is that part of the proposed tunnel, as shown in the DPR, extends into Hebbal Lake’s buffer zone. The ongoing High Court petition, based on DPR drawings, puts the tunnel 8-12 metres from the lake boundary, within the 30-metre buffer prescribed for Hebbal Lake under the recently amended Karnataka Tank Conservation and Development Authority Act, 2025.

Four days before the hearing in the Karnataka High Court, the Karnataka Tank Conservation and Development Authority, the statutory body responsible for protecting, reclaiming and restoring the city’s lakes, transferred around three acres of land within the Hebbal Lake premises for the project, saying that the lake’s physical structure and natural inflow and outflow remain undisturbed.

How much of these three acres is buffer, and how much is lake, is disputed. Based on satellite imagery of the alignment, Palur says the tunnel does not cut through open water directly, but does touch the lake’s water-spread area at points, partly because the 30-metre buffer has not been maintained along this stretch in the first place. “The tunnel is on the downstream or the outlet side of the lake. So there will be reduction in the lake’s water-holding capacity because all of this land (3.3 acres) will now be filled up or converted so that it can support the tunnel below,” he says.

Buffer zones of lakes function as floodplains, says TV Ramachandra, Coordinator of the Energy and Wetlands Research Group at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at IISc. During the monsoon, the buffer zone lets excess water spread out and percolate rather than immediately backing up onto adjoining roads and buildings.

“The water stored in the underlying layer in the buffer zone is the water that, during the post-monsoon period, comes to the lake. That’s how the lake becomes perennial,” Ramachandra says. Paving over that layer, he argues, removes both functions at once: the immediate cushion against flooding and the slow recharge that sustains the lake later in the year.

The project also sits next to another initiative in the same lake: a Rs 20-crore rejuvenation of Hebbal Lake, started by the Greater Bengaluru Authority, to increase the lake’s water-holding capacity and reduce flooding in the surrounding areas.

Ramachandra calls this a case of fragmented governance: one arm of government talking about restoring storage capacity, while another “disrupts the whole system by reducing the storage capacity”. Palur agrees: the rejuvenation is being handled by one authority, the tunnel by another, and “they don’t necessarily talk to each other,” even though both ultimately report to the same government.

The question, then, is not just whether the tunnel would be effective, but whether the city can afford to gamble on an infrastructure project whose long-term impacts remain uncertain. The Hebbal project also exposes the consequences of planning roads and waterbodies as separate systems.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Nineteen of the 23 migrant workers from West Bengal’s Murshidabad who had been detained in Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh earlier this month on suspicion of being undocumented Bangladeshi citizens were released on Friday, reported The Hindu.

The men, who hail from Murshidabad’s Samserganj and Sahabad were detained on September 4 from their residences in Chunchiapara-Ganesh Nagar under Sirgiti police station.

The police had alleged that they were summoned multiple times with their documents, but failed to appear, reported The Hindu.

However, their families claimed that the police detained the men late at night despite them possessing voter cards, Aadhaar cards and PAN cards.

Bilaspur Senior Superintendent of Police Rajnesh Singh said that 19 of them were released following verification of their names in the voter lists, local administration records, family details and permanent residence documents, reported The New Indian Express.

“Further steps regarding the remaining four will depend on the reports we receive,” Singh was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

The police claimed that their names had been struck off voter lists during the special intensive revision exercise in West Bengal.

After the 23 men were detained, the Chhattisgarh unit of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties alleged that the action was taken without them getting any show-cause notices.

The organisation claimed that the men were also not given time to substantiate their document credentials

In May 2025, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs directed the states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Since the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025, the police in several states, most of them ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asking them to prove that they are Indian citizens.

Several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after the state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: In Bengal, Muslims picked up from homes in midnight raids, sent to detention centres

Protests broke out in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district on Saturday after six Kuki men were allegedly detained by security forces, reported PTI.

The protesters burned tyres on the roads and threw stones at government vehicles, the news agency quoted unidentified officials as saying on Sunday. They alleged that security personnel had detained the Kuki men without providing any reason.

They also dug portions of National Highway-2, which goes from Imphal to Dimapur, at Motbung to prevent security forces’ vehicles from moving, the officials alleged. Security personnel fired tear gas to force the protesters to disperse.

The protests had started around 10 pm on Saturday. Some of the demonstrators suffered injuries and were hospitalised.

The six Kuki men were subsequently released, after which the protest ended, reported PTI.

The men were natives of Kholen village, located close to the Naga-dominated Chawangkining village.

Unidentified persons had on Tuesday opened fire in the village at around 10.30 pm, reported India Today NE.

The Committee on Tribal Unity had alleged that cadres of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland-Isak-Muivah and Zeliangrong United Front-Kamson were involved in the firing.

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

This followed the ethnic clashes that broke out in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities. More than 300 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since then in the conflict.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Election Commission has told the Supreme Court that it may increase the number of appellate tribunals in West Bengal to 42, corresponding to the number of parliamentary constituencies in the state.

Currently, the state has 19 tribunals to hear the appeals filed against decisions taken during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The move to increase the number of tribunals would be in line with the demand of petitioners challenging the voter roll revision exercise.

Prasenjit Bose, the chairperson of the special intensive revision committee of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee, had urged the court to increase the number of tribunals to 42, keeping in mind the municipal polls scheduled for December, reported The Hindu.

In its affidavit filed before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the poll panel said that it is “proposed that the number of appellate tribunals in the state may be considered for increase to correspond with the number of parliamentary constituencies, so as to facilitate expeditious disposal of the pending appeals”.

The Election Commission added that the software it has developed is “location-agnostic”, which would facilitate hearings from locations other than the present tribunals, which are on the outskirts of Kolkata.

The poll panel made the submission in a reply to an application filed by Derek O’Brien, an MP of the former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led faction of the Trinamool Congress.

The appellate tribunals were set up after a Supreme Court order on March 10, which said that panels composed of former High Court chief justices and judges would hear appeals against exclusions in the voter roll revision process.

A person whose claim for inclusion in the electoral rolls has been rejected by a judicial officer can approach the tribunal.

The tribunals had started hearing appeals in April.

In its Wednesday affidavit, the poll panel also told the Supreme Court that of the 38.2 lakh appeals filed before tribunals, 22.2 lakh were filed by voters whose names had been deleted from the electoral rolls.

These 22.2 lakh appeals make up around 82% of the 27 lakh voters whose names were deleted and placed under adjudication during the revision ahead of the Assembly elections, which were held in two phases on April 23 and April 29.

At least 16.1 lakh appeals were filed against the inclusion of voters. The Election Commission did not specify who had filed these appeals.

The Election Commission data also stated that of the 38.2 lakh appeals, around 1.2 lakh had been decided by the time that the affidavit was filed – which translates to 3.1% of the total appeals filed.

While hearing a petition in July, the Calcutta High Court had verbally observed that it “will take 21 years for all appeals to be disposed of” if the appellate tribunals function at the current pace.

In the final rolls published in February, more than 61 lakh voters were initially excluded, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.

By April 6, ahead of the Assembly elections, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of West Bengal’s electorate before the revision process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read: Muslims accounted for 70% of 27 lakh voters under adjudication in Bengal roll revision: Study

The Allahabad High Court has directed the Uttar Pradesh Police to provide protection to a Hindu-Muslim lesbian couple whose families had threatened their live-in relationship, Bar and Bench reported.

In the order dated September 14, Justice Gautam Chowdhary noted that the petitioners were adults and had the freedom to live together peacefully without interference from their families.

The counsel representing the couple had urged the court to provide them immediate police protection, saying that they belonged to different religions, were unmarried and faced a serious threat to their lives from their family members, the legal news outlet reported.

The state government said that same-sex relationships were not socially accepted, arguing that they have a negative effect on the traditional framework of society.

The court, however, said that under the law laid down by the Supreme Court, two consenting adults have a fundamental right to choose to live together in a live-in relationship, the judge was quoted by The Times of India as having noted.

The judge also observed that the absence of marital recognition does not give anyone the right to violate the dignity or threaten the physical safety of adult citizens.

In a landmark judgement on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court had read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and held that the provision could not be used for consensual sexual intercourse betweeen adults. The judgement effectively decriminalised homosexuality in India.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Mumbai Police on Saturday filed a first information report against a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay, a day after a student at the institute died by suicide, The Times of India reported.

The parents of the student, 20-year-old Sahil Wakode, have alleged that he faced caste-based discrimination at the institute.

The police have filed a case against Professor Suryanarayan Doolla and other unidentified persons on charges of abetment to suicide and under provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

IIT-Bombay claimed that during an examination on Friday, Wakode was found using a mobile phone and uploading the question paper on artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to seek answers. Doolla was reportedly the invigilator at the time.

The institute, however, claimed that no disciplinary action was taken against Wakode. “The matter was also discussed with the student by the instructor, the faculty advisor and the Head of the Department, who counselled him and assured him that the incident would not adversely affect his academic career,” it said.

IIT-Bombay said it was extending support to Wakode’s family and friends. “The circumstances surrounding the death are being looked into by the appropriate authorities,” it said.

Unfortunate Death of A Student at IIT Bombay pic.twitter.com/2jq0ncl5RL

— IIT Bombay (@iitbombay) September 19, 2026

Wakode’s parents, however, alleged that their son was threatened with suspension, The Indian Express reported.

The student’s father Ravindra Wakode alleged that Doola had subjected his son to his caste discrimination for the last three months on the instructions of the institute’s director, Professor Shireesh B Kedare.

“Doolla was passing casteist remarks for the past three months and had threatened to implicate him in a wrong manner before the incident took place,” Ravindra Wakode alleged in his complaint, according to the newspaper.

Kedare, however, denied that there was any caste discrimination in the case. “In fact caste-based information of every student is completely hidden and not available for anybody’s information,” he was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

The institute’s Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Cell, in an email to students, had said it had not received any complaint of caste discrimination from Wakode, The Times of India reported.

The student’s family had initially refused to claim his body from the city’s Rajawadi Hospital for about seven hours, demanding the arrest of the accused persons.

The parents eventually claimed his body late on Saturday night after the police assured them that the investigation had been transferred to the Crime Branch, The Times of India reported. An officer of the rank of assistant commissioner of police will conduct the investigation.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Earlier this week, a woman biker shared a video on social media showing a car ramming into her in Gurugram. The biker, Shivani Chauhan, said that she had repeatedly signalled the driver to maintain a safe distance. Despite this, she alleged, the vehicle continued to pursue her before hitting her deliberately.

She was thrown off her bike. The car sped away.

The widely shared clip prompted the police to arrest Kalyan Bainsla, the man driving the car. A day before he was arrested, Bainsla claimed he did not know that a woman had been riding the bike and that he hit her “accidentally”.

That is a claim 35-year-old Ishani Sachdeva from Delhi finds difficult to believe. She has been riding motorcycles for 12 years and has lost count of how often men, seeing her Royal Enfield go by, view it as an opportunity to race against her.

“...Men tend to show their machismo by constantly riding either next to me, or trying to overtake me,” Sachdeva said.

She said that while she had not experienced anything like the incident in Gurugram, “everything that could have led to it has happened to me”.

It is not just men on motorcycles or driving cars that try to speed past women bikers, pointed out 27-year-old Kelley, a Mumbai resident.

“Even those who are riding everyday utility two-wheelers like the Honda Activa have tried to overtake me, while I am on my Triumph Speed 400,” said Kelley, who has been riding motorcycles for three years.

She said that it is not only on the roads that a woman is made to feel like she cannot handle her motorcycle. When Kelley went to buy her bike, a high-power vehicle that weighs around 180 kg, the salesmen hesitated about handing her the keys for a test ride.

“They initially wanted me to try something with smaller engines,” said Kelley. “It is only when I showed them that I could handle those bikes with ease was when I was given the keys to the one of my choice.”

Incidents like the one in Gurugram, Kelley said, make her extremely vigilant on the roads. “Because there are so few of us, I feel like I represent all women who ride motorcycles,” she said.

She added that she is extremely careful about avoiding any accidents, “lest it allows somebody to blame it on my gender”.

Sachdeva noted that because the number of women riders is tiny, it makes her conspicuous.

This was reiterated to her one day when she went to get her scooter repaired at a workshop near her home in South Delhi. The repairman asked her why she had come with a scooter when she usually rides a bike.”

Sachdeva had never taken her bike to this shop before nor did she remember speaking with the repairman.

“He said he had seen me pass by,” she said. “Multiple people, in multiple instances, have said things like these to me, which made me realise that everybody in the locality knows of me.”

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

Political battle. The Congress’ candidate for the Assembly bye-election in West Bengal’s Nandigram was arrested in an old murder case hours after the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress faction announced it would support him.

The Banerjee-led group’s decision had come after its own candidate withdrew her nomination. Hours before this, photos of the nominee meeting West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari were shared online.

Meanwhile, the Election Commission allotted new names and symbols to booth TMC factions. Banerjee’s group was assigned the name “Mamata All India Trinamool Congress” with the “football player” symbol. The rebel faction was allotted the name of “Democratic Trinamool Congress” with the envelope as its symbol.

This came a day after the poll panel barred both factions from using the party’s name and the “flowers and grass” symbol in the October 6 bye-polls.

TMC symbol order: EC gave repeated extensions to rebel group, then said ‘time not adequate’, reports Anant Gupta

UPI charges debate. Opposition leaders demanded that the Union government roll back charges on Unified Payments Interface payments. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to “have a spine” and “stop lying down in front of the United States”.

Aam Aadmi Party said the charges were part of Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance government’s “new loot policy”. It described this as an example of “Trump’s pressure on PM Modi’s decisions and his direct influence over India’s internal matters”.

The 2026 National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers by the US Trade Representative claimed that UPI’s state-backed governance and zero-fee models created unfair trade barriers against American payment giants.

However, the Union Ministry of Finance said claims that the charges had been introduced because of “foreign influence” were false and said decisions on UPI policy were “made independently”.

CBI case against an activist. The Central Bureau of Investigation filed a case against Arunachal Pradesh-based lawyer and environmental activist Bhanu Tatak for allegedly receiving funds from abroad in violation of the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. Tatak is a legal adviser to the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum and the coordinator of civil society organisation Dibang Resistance.

She and the organisations have been protesting against the Siang Multipurpose Project, a proposed 12,500-megawatt power project on Arunachal Pradesh’s Siang river. The organisation Dibang Resistance has also been protesting against a 2,880-megawatt power project on the Dibang river.

The CBI claimed that Tatak has never filed income tax returns and that the foreign funds that she allegedly received were not reflected in any official records.

Tatak told the Hindustan Times that she had “committed no violation of the law” and was cooperating with the authorities.

Also on Scroll last week

• A journalist exposing rape claims against Dera chief was killed. His son awaits justice 24 years on
• ‘Disappeared’: In Bengal, Muslims picked up from homes in midnight raids, sent to detention centres
• In Pune, noise pollution debate raises the pitch ahead of Ganesh festival
• Why parents prefer private schools over government schools – despite similar learning outcomes
• A new irrigation project threatens to displace both cheetahs and humans in Kuno
• Interview: ‘BRICS is attempting to break the dollar’s hegemony’
• When Delhi floods, the villages around it bear the brunt
• Mumbai better than London, Gorakhpur better than Spain: How nationalism is deployed to hide reality
• Review: The overall vibe in ‘Vibe’ is indulgence
• ‘Lust Stories 3’ review: Mild mischief and generous comedy

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AI was used in the post production of this story. Verified by :: Ipsita Basu, Producer, eco India

I work mostly by myself, and have resisted joining alumni associations and WhatsApp groups. I am, in other words, broadly of the same mind as Groucho Marx, who famously said that he would never join a club which would have him as a member.

Yet for a few brief years in Delhi in the 1980s, I associated myself with the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, a citizens group that sought to hold the Indian State to account for the varied crimes it committed against Indian citizens. I attended the PUDR’s Saturday meetings at the Triveni Kala Sangam, paid a very modest amount from my stipend to help fund its reports, and on one occasion even joined a fact-finding group it had organised.

I was never a core member of PUDR, merely a fellow traveller, a sympathiser hovering around its outer circle. However, I admired the organisation and its work enormously, and thus felt a certain kinship with it, which was lost when I left Delhi for Bangalore in the early 1990s. Memories of what the PUDR had once meant to me came back while reading Ankita Pandey’s recently published book, Becoming Allies: Civil Liberties Activism in India.

Pandey views civil liberties groups as an illustration of what she calls “ally activism”, defined as “collective action undertaken in solidarity with a marginalized group by those who do not have a direct, personal or material stake in the cause”. As she observes, there have been two broad trends in the civil liberties movement in India; one that focuses on safeguarding the rights of citizens as codified in the Constitution, a second that canvasses for broader social and economic rights.

By all accounts, the oldest civil liberties group in independent India is the Calcutta-based Association for Protection of Democratic Rights, which took shape in the early 1970s. Among its early campaigns was to urge the humane treatment in prison of those associated with the Naxalite movement. The prisoners themselves had launched a bidi-chiththi andolan, demanding access to cigarettes and letters from friends and family. The APDR then amplified these demands to include better food and living conditions, and also the release of the prisoners themselves.

If the APDR was chronologically the first of these groups, then perhaps the most wide-ranging in its work has been the PUDR. Over the decades, the PUDR has published close to 300 reports, documenting such issues as police brutality against undertrials, encounter deaths, the precarious condition of unorganised labour, laws dispossessing tribals of rights to forests and other natural resources, crimes against women, violence against Dalits, and state discrimination against religious minorities. Many (though not all) of these reports are available on the PUDR website.

Other important human rights groups in India include the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, headquartered in Delhi but with branches in several states, and whose prime mover was the jurist, VM Tarkunde; the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee; the Human Rights Forum, also active in Andhra Pradesh; and the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, which operates largely in Maharashtra, and one of whose founders was the social activist, Asghar Ali Engineer.

A key chapter in Pandey’s book focuses on the fact-finding reports that are “the predominant mode of activism for civil liberties groups in India”. These reports seek to document the culpability of the State and State officials in fuelling violence and thereby violating the safety, security, and democratic rights of citizens.

They are based on the findings of individuals deputed to conduct an on-the-spot investigation of the events concerned.

Pandey argues that these fact-finding reports have served three key functions. First, they “transformed people’s recollections into legally helpful artefacts. The teams systematised, verified and documented testimonies in a form that would render them acceptable to a judicial commission or a court”. Second, these reports contained “a detailed description of the context and history to counter the technical and depersonalised official records of the same events”. And “the third element in the practice of fact-finding was locating gaps, outlining inconsistencies and exposing fudged records within the police and administrative documentation and reports.”

In sum, these fact-finding reports have aimed “to contradict, expose and highlight the inconsistencies in the official narratives in order to question their credibility in the eyes of the press and the public. They brought governmental wrongdoing to the spotlight and exposed the biases and prejudices of state functionaries”.

Remembering Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer (10 March 1939–14 May 2013). Dr. Engineer made seminal contributions to the study of riot politics, Islam as a liberation theology and social reform in Bohra community and Muslims in general. He was a strong supporter of the Pasmanda Movement. pic.twitter.com/VZasYNvd1R

— Khalid Anis Ansari (@KhalidAAnsari4) May 13, 2021

These civil liberties groups are entirely volunteer-driven, sustained by the work of individuals committed to their cause. They do not take foreign or corporate funds and tirelessly labour on in the face of societal prejudice and state hostility. Apart from the external pressures on their functioning, they also face an internal challenge; namely, to demonstrate that, while being critical of the State, they are at the same time independent of all political parties.

A second internal challenge these groups have had to confront is the question of gender justice. Some of the leading activists of groups like PUDR and the APCLC were women. However, their male colleagues thought the focus should be exclusively on the public violence committed by the state against citizens, arguing that violence within the domain of the family or the household should not be their concern.

This was questioned by the female activists, who pointed out, for example, that in several parts of India the number of dowry deaths exceeded the number of custodial deaths. Eventually, these groups came to acknowledge that women’s rights were indeed a key part of a broader framework of democratic rights and incorporated this element in their work.

In Becoming Allies, Ankita Pandey notes that those active in civil liberties groups are disproportionately drawn from three professions; academics, journalism and the law. These members of the salaried middle-class are animated by a spirit of sacrifice and idealism, seeking to make India a more just and humane society. Their character is often marked by self-effacement, downplaying their own role.

Pandey quotes the activist lawyer, Sudha Bharadwaj, the daughter of two eminent academics and herself a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, as saying about her incarceration by the Indian state: “No doubt three years in jail has been painful, but there are many people more unfortunate than me. My heart went out to them. When you are in the midst of so much misery, it is difficult to be miserable for oneself; you have to help others.”

A true hero

This self-effacement was also characteristic of the late CV Subba Rao, for many years the moving spirit of the PUDR. He goes unmentioned in Becoming Allies, even though the book starts with Who are the Guilty, the landmark report on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984. Subba Rao played a key role in the writing of this report, as in giving shape to the work of the PUDR more broadly. His absence from Pandey’s narrative is not be held against her, for it is merely a mark of how the man himself refused ever to take any credit for the work he did for others. One had to meet and observe Subba Rao in flesh and blood to know him for what he really was, namely, a true hero of Indian democracy.

Such omissions notwithstanding, Ankita Pandey’s Becoming Allies provides a valuable overview of the civil liberties movement as a whole and may be read in conjunction with the late Nilanjan Dutta’s Civil Liberties Movement in India: From Colonial Times to the Present.

These books are particularly timely in the present context, when democratically-minded citizens face multiple threats – from, among other things, the apathy of the media, the brutality of the police, the indifference of the courts, and the active opposition of the Narendra Modi regime.

In light of a creeping authoritarianism and a galloping majoritarianism, India now needs civil liberties activists more than ever.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

Two Mumbai residents have alleged that a private screening of a documentary about jailed activist Umar Khalid, organised by them, had to be cancelled after police intimidated the managers of two venues they had approached to host the event.

Khalid has been in judicial custody for six years in connection with the conspiracy case related to the 2020 Delhi riots. The trial in the case is yet to begin.

Scroll has contacted the Mumbai police commissioner’s office for a response. The story will be updated if the police respond.

The screening of the documentary Prisoner No. 626710 is Present, scheduled for Saturday and expected to be attended by 40 to 60 persons, was cancelled after police personnel visited the two venues they had approached, one of the organisers Shrishti Khanna told Scroll.

Khanna said that after the first venue that they were considering for the screening became unavailable they finalised another venue and confirmed the screening with its manager.

She added that on Friday, after the arrangements had been completed for the event, persons in civilian clothes – purportedly police officers – arrived at the second venue around 7 pm and began questioning the manager. She alleged that they intimidated him and pressured him to cancel the screening.

Khanna further alleged that the venue manager received a call from the superintendent of police, after which a police vehicle arrived at the venue.

The manager called the organisers “in distress” to tell them that he could not allow the event to go ahead, she said.

“This was a private screening at a paid venue, with participants being registered in advance,” Khanna said. “It was not a public demonstration or an unlawful gathering.”

After the venue cancelled the event, Khanna said she and the other organiser, Prashant Pundir, informed the attendees that the screening had been called off. Despite this, the police reached the first venue that the organisers had considered, she added.

Khanna alleged that police personnel in plainclothes arrived at that venue, questioned the person in charge and asked them to cancel the screening, even though the event was not scheduled to take place there.

She also said that the organisers had not shared online details of the place where the screening will be held and questioned how the police had learned that they were in talks with the two venues.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Election Commission has informed the Supreme Court that of the 38.2 lakh appeals filed before tribunals against decisions taken during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal, 22.2 lakh were filed by voters whose names had been deleted from the electoral rolls.

These 22.2 lakh appeals make up around 82% of the 27 lakh voters whose names were deleted and placed under adjudication during the revision ahead of the Assembly elections.

At least 16.1 lakh appeals were filed against the inclusion of voters. The Election Commission did not specify who had filed these appeals.

The poll panel made the submission in a reply to an application filed by Derek O’Brien, an MP of the former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee-led faction of the Trinamool Congress.

The Election Commission data also stated that of the 38.2 lakh appeals, around 1.2 lakh had been decided by the time of the submission – which translates to 3.1% of the total appeals filed. The tribunals had started hearing appeals in April.

Data submitted in an annexure to the court showed that 93% of the appeals decided by the tribunals resulted in the inclusion of voters in the electoral rolls.

On August 6, The Telegraph quoted an unidentified poll official as saying that only 7 lakh of the 38.2 lakh appeals before the tribunals in West Bengal were against deletions from the electoral rolls and 31 lakh were challenging inclusion in the list.

This data was submitted before the court on August 25 by Congress leader Prasenjit Bose during a hearing of his plea related to the voter roll revision exercise. The appeals against inclusion were filed by the Election Commission and individual objectors, lawyer Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for Bose, had told the court at the time.

The special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal was carried out before the Assembly elections in April.

Final rolls published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.

By April 6, ahead of the Assembly elections, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of West Bengal’s electorate before the revision process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls.

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

Inputs from Anant Gupta. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: Muslims accounted for 70% of 27 lakh voters under adjudication in Bengal roll revision: Study

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday described the arrest of the party’s candidate for the Nandigram Assembly bye-election in West Bengal as a “murder of democracy”.

“...[It] is no coincidence,” Gandhi said in a social media post. “It is political revenge [by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party].”

The Congress candidate, Milan Pradhan, was arrested on Friday in connection with a 2007 murder case, just hours after former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee announced that her faction of the Trinamool Congress would support him in the bye-election scheduled for October 6.

Mamata Banerjee’s statement had come after her faction’s candidate, Sanchita Pradhan, withdrew her nomination.

Shortly before her withdrawal, photographs of Sanchita Pradhan meeting Chief Minister and BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari had been shared online.

Banerjee had questioned the timing of Milan Pradhan’s arrest, calling it the “usual BJP formula” to “dig out an old case”.

“Just after we announced support to the Congress!” she said in a social media post. “The BJP’s politics of vendetta and atrocities shows a clear pattern.”

She also accused the Election Commission of working with the BJP to “kill democracy”.

Meanwhile, Gandhi, in a social media post on Saturday, Gandhi alleged that the ruling BJP does not want to contest elections but wants to “end the electoral fight altogether”.

“The BJP has no faith in fair elections,” he said. “That is why it wants to cling to power sometimes through vote chori [theft], sometimes through sarkar chori [government theft], and sometimes through party chori.”

Other Opposition leaders also questioned Pradhan’s arrest. Mahua Moitra, MP of the Mamata Banerjee-led TMC faction, on Saturday asked where Pradhan had been taken after he was “picked up” from a hotel.

The bye-poll

The bye-poll in Nandigram was necessitated after Adhikari vacated the seat.

The chief minister had won the Nandigram and Bhabanipur seats during the Assembly elections in May. He had defeated the TMC’s Pabitra Kar by more than 9,600 votes in Nandigram.

While the rival TMC faction has nominated Ehteshamul Haque in Nandigram, the ruling BJP has fielded Hasirani Rath. The Left Front has fielded Communist Party of India’s Santigopal Giri.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Mumbai Police on Friday allegedly searched the home of an activist who participated in an event to fly kites to express solidarity with Palestinian children.

Five activists associated with Indian People in Solidarity with Palestine citizens’ group who were in the home were not allowed to leave when the operation was underway, people familiar with the situation said.

A sixth activist was interrogated at the Bandra police station on Friday before being released in the evening.

On September 15, participants around the world had flown kites to raise awareness about Israel’s war on Gaza.

The group alleged that persons in plainclothes claiming to be police officers arrived at the home of a volunteer and student, Harshada. Harshada told Scroll on Saturday that at some point there were as many as 15 police officers.

Starting 5.30 pm, uniformed police personnel carried out searches “without any warrant and without furnishing any written notice or document”, the group alleged.

Police officers left the woman’s residence at 2.30 am on Saturday, Pooja, a member of Indian People in Solidarity with Palestine, told Scroll.

“More than nine hours – and counting – for ‘searching’ a person’s place of residence without a warrant merely for flying kites in solidarity with Palestinian children!” the group said in a social media post on Saturday.

Harshada alleged that the police made a list of some of her books, among other things, and took photos and videos during the searches.

She also alleged that the police had confiscated the phones of two of the persons who were with her, but returned them two hours later.

The police eventually filed a panchnama, she said. A panchnama is a legal document that records the observations, findings and evidence collected by an investigating officer during searches.

Pooja said that the police did not state why they were conducting the searches.

The police’s actions not only demonstrate an “all-out assault on our democratic rights and civil liberties”, but also a “blatant violation of an individual’s right to privacy”, the group stated.

The organisation demanded action against the “illegal actions” by the police.

Two deputy police commissioners did not respond to Scroll’s request for comment. Ravindra Salunkhe, a senior police inspector in Bandra, said that he was not aware of the details of the incident. This report will be updated if we receive a comment.

The kite-flying campaign was held in solidarity with Palestinian children following Israel’s threat to intensify its attacks in Gaza because kites and balloons are being flown there. Tel Aviv said it would treat kites and balloons as a security threat on par with drones.

This had prompted parents in Palestine to prevent their children from flying kites, Al Jazeera reported.

Israel has been carrying out unprecedented air and ground strikes on Gaza, leaving more than 73,300 persons dead. The Israeli military’s offensive in Gaza had begun in October 2023 after the Palestinian militant group Hamas killed 1,200 persons during its incursion into southern Israel and took hostages.

In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry said that Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

In June, the commission said that the Israeli military had deliberately targeted and killed Palestinian children to commit a genocide. The Israeli forces have killed more than 20,000 children and injured 44,000 since October 2023, the panel said.

Inputs from Tabassum Barnagarwala. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Opinion: Could India be considered complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza?
• India’s discernible shift away from Palestine

I can name 11 cities I have lived in, but not even half the people who made them liveable.

Somewhere in a drawer is an old SIM card with 200 phone numbers, and all I remember are names or just faces. Sometimes a vague detail surfaces: the flatmate who ate the crust of the bread first; the friend who could not sleep without the fan on, even in December, and who once made me sit through three hours of a film he loved; the friend who knew every bus route in a city I have not returned to in nine years.

In your 20s, everyone you meet seems like a permanent friend, when proximity feels like intimacy and frequency gets mistaken for love. There is that person one sees every day, whose voice you would recognise through a wall, whose kitchen you know better than your own; surely, that is the kind of life-long sentence, a good one. Surely, such a person cannot vanish from your life.

Yet, they do, and mostly without any drama.

I lost people to time, which is the ordinary way. Some I lost to death, ordinary when you’re older but unbearable when you’re younger. Some I lost to plain uncertainty: an illness, a marriage that swallowed them whole, a visa refused, a phone number that stopped working and was never replaced with another.

Some I lost to politics, unexpectedly. One assumes affection could hold the weight of disagreement. It turns out that for some you can be a friend of 15 years right up until the evening you are not: an argument built up over dinner as I heard myself sounding faster and surer while he got quieter. At the door, we said goodbye and I stood there while he walked to his car, and I went back in and cleared the plates.

Some were lost to distance as I moved a city, then another, and suddenly there came a border, a change in my field of work and a life – moving does the work that an argument might have. Distance grows over time, becoming noticeable over the years as correspondence dwindles to birthdays and then nothing – all quite painlessly.

I look at their lives from the outside, like gazing into a window from the street. They have the same five people they have always had. The five have become 10 with spouses and 15 with children. They holiday together. They have inside jokes and probably a group chat I am not in and would not know what to say if I were.

I am not missed, nor do I want to be. I was not there for the hospital visits, the house moving, or the bad years. You cannot be absent for the substance of a life and then expect to be present in its accounting. I have a life, a good one. It has almost none of the people I once knew as indispensable. I do not know what to do with that.

At 33, you stop blaming distance and geography and start doing an audit.

I lost friends because I was short-tempered, too much, too loud in the room, too insistent, and too quick to turn an evening into an argument I had to win. I lost people because I was too little, because I did not call, because I let three months become a year for no defensible reason.

I lost people because I drank too much.

I lost people because I read too much, bringing my thoughts into rooms where nobody had asked for them. I lost people because I had travelled and they had not. I lost people because I had not travelled enough, and they had.

Some of that is remorse. But what I have arrived at provisionally is that friendship is a shared present that lasts as long as two people occupy the same stretch of time together. When that stops, the friendship fades into completion. We are the ones who insist on reading completion as failure, because we were taught that only the permanent counts.

I no longer think permanence is the measure.

I have a life, a good one. It has almost none of the people I once knew as indispensable. On the days I can carry this lightly, it seems like evidence that I was loved in 11 cities, briefly and sufficiently, by people who have gone on to be loved elsewhere. Other days I open the drawer and look at the SIM card, and I cannot remember a single name.

Pranav Sharma is a historian of science who lives and writes from New Delhi, India and Paro, Bhutan.

United States President Donald Trump on Friday gave his assent to a legislation that allows him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on India and other countries that purchase Russian oil and gas.

The signing of the bill into law does not automatically trigger the tariffs.

The law states that the tariffs could apply to the five countries that imported the largest volumes of Russian crude oil or natural gas in the 12 months before the law takes effect, if they knowingly continue buying Russian crude oil 30 days after the law is enacted.

Washington has for long claimed that the purchase of Russian energy has been fuelling Moscow’s war on Ukraine that began in February 2022.

The bill was passed by the House of Representatives on Wednesday. The Senate had cleared it on August 7. The law is named after late Republican legislator Lindsey Graham, who had spearheaded it before he died in July.

The tariffs could also target any of the five countries identified as helping Russia evade oil-related sanctions.

However, countries that have significantly reduced their imports of Russian natural gas, or whose Russian gas imports account for less than 15% of Russia’s gas exports, would be exempt.

After the House passed the bill, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said on Thursday that New Delhi is committed to ensuring energy security for its people. “It will continue to do so through diversified sourcing and on the basis of evolving market dynamics,” it said.

The external affairs ministry also said that during discussions with US interlocutors, the potential implications of the matter on the bilateral relationship and the international energy market “have been very clearly articulated by the Indian side”.

“The Indian side has also made clear its determination to take all necessary measures to protect its trade and economic interests,” the ministry said. “Government will work closely with Indian trade and industry bodies to deal with the implications of these developments.”

India’s Russian oil imports

The legislation comes as India has increased its purchases of Russian oil this year, while New Delhi and Washington negotiate a preliminary trade deal. India’s import of Russian oil rose to an 11-month high in April, following the US and Israel’s war on Iran.

Before this, India had reduced its purchases of Russian oil, which fell to a 38-month low in December.

Over the past year, there have been diplomatic tensions between Washington and New Delhi over India’s continued purchases of Russian crude.

The Trump administration had in August 2025 imposed a 25% punitive levy on India for buying oil from Russia amid the Ukraine war. This had taken the combined US tariff rate to 50%.

In January, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that India had stopped buying Russian oil after Trump imposed the punitive tariff.

In February, after New Delhi and Washington agreed to an interim trade deal, Trump removed the additional 25% punitive levy linked to the purchase of Russian oil.

The US Treasury had later paused global sanctions on Russian oil shipments that were already in transit before March 11, amid supply disruptions caused by war in West Asia.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

High drama erupted in the small hours of a suspense-filled January day in Kolkata. Masked officers of the Enforcement Directorate swept into the glossy offices of I-PAC (Indian Political Action Committee), one of the country’s leading political consultancies.

They hauled away computers and files as the stunned staff looked on. Mamata Banerjee, then the Bengal chief minister and leader of the state’s governing party, rushed to the scene and walked out with several files. She complained to the reporters at the site that the “politically motivated” raid was being orchestrated by Delhi to steal information on her Trinamool Congress party’s election strategy and potential candidate lists for the 2026 state Assembly elections scheduled later in the year.

Television channels played on loop the drama of one mystery-filled “green file” she had walked out with, in this latest episode of Banerjee’s running battles with the Centre.

It was only the beginning of I-PAC’s woes – and Banerjee’s – as the Bharatiya Janata Party dispensation in the Centre was closing in on her. It unleashed federal probe and regulatory agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and the Central Bureau of Investigation to break her aides and financiers, flew in top BJP leaders and ace workers for the campaign, and poured money like water for the April election. Simultaneously, through the Special Intensive Revision under a pliant Election Commission, it made sure that the state’s 27% Muslims – who used to rally behind Banerjee fearing the BJP’s Hindu supremacist politics – were strategically whittled down in the electoral list.

The war on I-PAC was a surgical strike on the Trinamool Congress’s campaign machine delivered on top of these multiple strategies to break Banerjee’s 15-year grip on power in Bengal. A few months later, the Enforcement Directorate would arrest I-PAC’s co-founder and director on a money laundering case just two weeks before the election in April.

Narendra Modi eventually got what he wanted, and the BJP won a landslide with a two-thirds majority in the state Assembly, his strategies of vote capture complemented by the strong undercurrent of aversion for Banerjee’s party for its pervading corruption and thuggery. Job done, the I-PAC director was released on bail by a court the very day after the state election concluded. The Enforcement Directorate did not even oppose the bail in court this time.

Thus ended the reign of Banerjee whose supposedly well-knit grass-roots organisation almost made her invincible, till she wasn’t. It would seem odd that a consulting firm would be so central to a political party with what looked like a high level of organisational coherence. But it presents a stark reality of the deepening global recession of democracy: the professionalisation of politics with the withering of mass political parties.

As foundational institutions of democratic governance, political parties worldwide are experiencing organisational decay and popular disengagement, eroding their capacity for connecting citizens to the state and political processes.

As parties are becoming ever more dependent on big money while grass-roots party organisations such as unions and associations decline as primary sources of funding and mobilisation, political accountability shifts from party constituents to shadowy patrons and technocrats. And politics increasingly moves from volunteer-driven social activism to specialised, expert-managed campaigns driven by data analytics, public relations strategies and digital marketing. Political consultancies are the key in mediating this transition.

They provide voter databases, targeted messaging strategies, ground‑level micro‑campaigning and organisational planning – functions that would once be considered the domain of political parties but which are now too incapacitated to perform these themselves. Consultancies even find and rent crowds to attend rallies to help parties and leaders project popularity.

In this managerialisation of politics, corporate management ideologies, techniques, and values replace ideological contestation and elections come to resemble corporate marketing campaigns rather than battles of ideas. Nothing screams crisis of democracy louder than political parties having to pay consultants to tell them what voters want.

Political consultancies have now become an integral part of India’s party politics. Most parties not only work with consultants, they have also themselves created in-house consultancy-like wings staffed with professionals, often drawn from consulting firms.

In December 2022, police in Hyderabad raided the office of a consulting firm handling the Telangana Congress’s “war room”. They were clearly doing a great job – the Congress came to power in Telangana within a year. The Trinamool Congress, which also created an in-house consultancy, similarly came to depend on I-PAC to provide it the party’s technical core that made the crackdown such a crippling blow.

Dark money and demagogues

It was the 2014 general election that marked the beginning of the rise of political consultancies in a major way. Modi himself benefited hugely from a professionalised campaign modelled on the US presidential strategies, primarily focusing on the person of the candidate rather than the party’s programmes.

The pioneering consultancy co-founded by political strategist Prashant Kishor that managed Modi’s campaign revolutionised Indian elections with data-driven outreach, voter analytics, booth-level mapping and social media drive; Kishor’s team later evolved into I-PAC that was consulting Banerjee.

In a country with poor campaign finance laws, this managerial invasion of politics has grave cost implications for campaigns, and in turn, for its democracy. Indian elections are now among the costliest in the world. In India’s 2019 general election, campaign spending reached $7.2 billion surpassing the $6.5 billion spent in the 2016 US presidential and congressional elections put together – despite India’s per capita income being just 3% of that of the United States.

Election campaigns were never cheap, but when professional managers and specialists replace voluntary political workers, somebody has to foot the additional bill. With the decline of traditional sources of party funds such as trade unions and membership subscriptions, parties have become even more dependent on business fat cats to meet the rising expenses.

This not only makes parties more accountable to financial patrons than their constituencies, it also tilts the balance decisively in favour of politicians with access to pots of money, affecting the quality of representation. Elite capture is exacerbated, adding to the already debilitating pathologies of poor internal democracy that has long characterised the institutional weakening of Indian political parties.

The end of the party

Party deficiencies such as the absence of mobilising organisations embedded in society have contributed to the distancing between people and political parties that lies at the core of the worldwide loss of public trust in politicians and governments. It is manifested in Gen Z movements from Madagascar to Nepal, and most recently in India itself, where a meme-inspired “cockroach movement” against the country’s broken public examination system forced Modi to accept the resignation of his education minister. Gen Z movements have thus stepped into the void left by hollow parties.

In The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics, Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld describe US political parties as hard shells lacking internal cohesion and positive loyalties, failing to link citizens to governments or build governing coalitions. The book traces this hollowness through over 200 years and concludes that party weakening in the US accelerated since the 1970s, when external groups started filling the void in the political parties. This happened as the Vietnam war, stagflation, and the 1960s civil rights revolution ended the union-boosting New Deal order of regulated capitalism and welfare expansion that once helped mass parties thrive.

Political consultancies, pressure groups like Political Action Committees and think-tanks emerged to fill the void as political reforms in the US made nominations and funding more participatory but weakened party gatekeeping. By the 1990s, political consultants were handling polling, media, and voter targeting – tasks once handled by parties. They grew into a billion-dollar industry, which simply exploded after 2010 when the US Supreme Court removed all legal limits on independent political spending. In India, political consultancies began to boom soon after, replicating the model in the US.

The corporatisation of political parties has the effect of accentuating an old pathology of democratic politics: the tendency towards elitism. Modern democracy, as argued by thinkers like Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Michels, is essentially controlled by a small elite group even if it allows for mass participation. Corporatisation of politics intensifies the process. As greater professionalisation of politics necessitates more financial resources to wage campaigns, democratic elitism deepens.

Power becomes more concentrated among a small, privileged group with wealth and connections helping them to gain primacy and leverage over the grass-roots. Power also becomes stickier as access to power increases a party’s ability to afford technocratic avenues of retaining power, such as the services offered by political consultancies. Power begets money, and money begets power.

Noticeably in India, since Modi’s rise to national power in 2014, the turnover rates in governments, both at federal and state levels, have dropped sharply. The electoral outcome in Bengal ending Banerjee’s reign is one of the few exceptions to this rule but the scale of the challenge mounted against her regional party could only have been pulled off by a party like the BJP that has access to power, and hence the resources; Modi’s party now gets 10 times the corporate donations received by all other national parties put together. The traditionally strong parties in Bengal, namely the Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) that have ruled the state in the past and still have a fair bit of organisational presence, could not have remotely matched either the Trinamool Congress’s or the BJP’s campaign. Lack of power and money can spell political death in this post-political, technocratic world of politics.

Banerjee’s party, now stripped of state power and the associated access to business funding minted on the ability to dispense state favours, joins this vast landscape of zombies. Within days of her party’s defeat, it began to collapse like a house of cards. The majority of her 80 MLAs have joined a rebel faction, while 20 of the 28 of her MPs merged with a little-known party. Having lost control over the legislative wing of the party, Banerjee is now at the very real risk of losing the registered name and symbol of the party that she built from scratch.

The unravelling of the Trinamool Congress again shows the ability of technocracy in surrogating power in hollowed out parties. Its dependence on the managerial expertise of a consultant is hardly a surprise in retrospect. If Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress had a semblance of the social-movement qualities or ideological and organisational coherence that bind together parties, it would have been impossible to disintegrate at the pace it has. Absent all of these, it was held together by what the Russians call “politicheskya tekhnologiya”, or political technology. It is the engineering of politics that fills polities with zombie parties rolling on dark money and dark structures with no ideological or programmatic coherence.

In countries like India, where electoral funding is highly opaque and political donations are tax-exempt, parties are also prime sites of political technology through their role in money laundering and deal-making rather than as vehicles of social change. An extreme form of this is registered unrecognised political parties, which fail the minimum threshold of vote share and seats to be recognised as political parties but cannot be legally de-registered.

The unknown party that Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress rebels merged with was a registered unrecognised political parties called the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, which contested in all of three seats in Tripura’s last state election and its best performer garnered just 536 votes. There are over 3,200 such zombie parties that received more than Rs 10,000 crore in electoral donations in two years from 2022 to 2024, pulling in more than the BJP and the Congress even though they barely participate in elections.

Democracy is supposed to be about popular demand, but political technology, which spans everything from manipulating the news agenda to seeding proxy parties and dummy political organisations, engineers the political system from the supply side with the help of consultants and other variants of political technologists. In “Political Technology: The Globalisation of Political Manipulation”, Andrew Wilson writes that political technology helps explain “the speed of democratic deterioration in previously stable liberal democracies…Democracy has lost power to technocracy.”

This technocratic churn makes parties hollower, the political playing field uneven, political contestation unfair, and democracy weaker. The professionalisation of politics that replaces ideological contests also hollows out party identity. Big-tent parties begin to resemble one another and their programmatic differences begin to lose practical salience. Politics begins to resemble a marketing war between different sets of elites. Public trust in conventional parties erodes as politics looks performative and detached from ordinary life and voters look for authenticity, even it is to be found in the extremities. Like, the virtually indistinguishable Tories and Labour are driving voters towards Reform and the Greens in the UK.

The unqualified malice of polarisation’s “us versus them” appeal is an easy foil to this technocracy-mediated political ambiguity of hollow parties. Polarisation helps differentiate a distinct ideological brand in an anodyne political space. The rabid Hindu supremacism of Modi’s BJP affords it a clear brand advantage in a crowded field of parties mouthing the same homilies of development, welfare and governance.

Its distinct ideological appeal combined with its incremental capture of governing institutions and the backing of Big Money makes the BJP a juggernaut on a roll. A rudderless opposition struggling with the universal pathologies enervating conventional parties everywhere offers no roadblock. If anything, they smoothen its ride.

Hollowed out political parties offer little resistance to authoritarian encroachment because when parties lose organisational strength, the opposition becomes easier to sideline, reducing the possibility that abuses of power will be checked before they metastasise into a new regime. Without organised parties, civil society pushbacks lose sting as such pressures lack a durable route to state power, helping authoritarian actors consolidate. Like, the recent Gen Z “cockroach movement” may have dimmed Modi’s aura, but is unlikely to dent his power.

Without translation into political change, policy, or institutional reform, which is only possible through political parties, the energy of such mass movements can dissipate. Which increasingly appears to be the case as hollowed out opposition parties are in no state to act on the opening created by the success of the cockroach movement.

Cockroaches and lame-duck parties

In his seminal book, “Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy”, Peter Mair argues that as political parties stop functioning as social organisations, they become more appendages of the state than society. Stability becomes more their thing rather than disruptive political movements. Wedded to the state and Big Money, India’s hollow parties increasingly manifest these pathologies.

When a fully captured Election Commission launched the Special Intensive Revision last year in Bihar, the opposition parties first launched protests alleging it was a ploy to manipulate voter lists to steal elections. Then, they went on to participate in, and validate, the same election rather than boycott it. The SIR has been rolled out nationwide since, shaving off roughly a tenth of the electorate and helping Modi’s party pull off incredible wins, like in Bengal, without much substantive resistance from the opposition parties.

India’s political parties thus hold important lessons for global democratic decay. Parties are central to democratic politics but are often overlooked in the analyses of degrading democracies, yet democratic politics cannot be bolstered without addressing the pathologies of the political parties that lie at the heart of it. As the Indian case shows, hollow parties can’t make solid democracies.

Much of the contemporary understanding of democratic erosion rests on institution capture (or, supply-side backsliding), the rising inequality and the associated resentments paving the way for demagogues (demand-side), and distortions of intermediary institutions like the media. The supply-side analyses mostly deal with governing institutions such as the legislatures and the courts, which modern despots capture and systematically hollow out. But that is not the only way democracies go bad. As the Indian case shows, they also begin to rot when political parties lose the vitality to act as a countervailing force against totalising power. And, open the gates to cockroaches.

Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a journalist, researcher and author based in Hong Kong, having recently co-authored To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism, OUP/Pan Macmillan.

A longer version of this article first appeared on the Toda Peace Institute website.

Non-profit digital rights organisation Software Freedom Law Centre said on Friday that technology conglomerate Meta had restricted in India its Instagram post about the censorship faced by digital fact-checking outlet Alt News.

The action was taken in compliance with the Union government’s Information Technology Rules, Instagram told the organisation.

In July, an Alt News post about the upcoming Bollywood film Chauhaan was removed twice by Instagram. The posts were based on an analysis of the film’s 2.24-minute-long teaser, which described injuries sustained by Kashmiris due to the use of pellet guns as “limited damage”.

In reality, more than 6,000 persons had been injured by pellet guns in Kashmir between July 8, 2016 and February 27, 2017. Out of these, 728 had been hit by pellets in their eyes. At least 54 individuals had their vision impaired due to pellets.

The first Alt News post about the teaser, uploaded on July 1, contained visuals of pellet injuries. After it was taken down, the outlet modified the post and changed the visuals before uploading it again. However, Instagram took down the second version of the post as well.

The third version, which was uploaded after references to Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani were removed, was allowed to remain online.

Another Alt News post fact-checking a claim that armed Nihangs clashed with police and breached barricades during the July youth protests in Delhi was taken down by Instagram as well as Facebook, which is also owned by Meta.

On Thursday, Software Freedom Law Centre said on social media that the instances of takedowns faced by Alt News “show that opaque censorship regimes exist within platforms”.

“This form of censorship can operate even without a formal government order,” it said. “If journalists know that certain subjects, images, words, or forms of reporting may trigger restrictions, they may begin self-censoring and altering their content before publication.”

The instances of takedowns faced by @AltNews show that opaque censorship regimes exist within platforms. This form of censorship can operate even without a formal government order.

If journalists know that certain subjects, images, words, or forms of reporting may trigger… pic.twitter.com/6P2JKhBZSq

— SFLC.in (@SFLCin) September 17, 2026

This post, which also contained a reference to the Alt News post mentioning Wani, was restricted in India by Instagram, the organisation said on Friday.

It stated that Meta had not specified “the reason for these restrictions or explained how they can be challenged”.

“Such opaque moderation practices undermine users’ ability to understand how platform policies are enforced and make it difficult to distinguish between legitimate moderation and arbitrary decision-making,” it added.

In its notification, @Meta has not specified the reason for these restrictions or explained how they can be challenged. Such opaque moderation practices undermine users’ ability to understand how platform policies are enforced and make it difficult to distinguish between…

— SFLC.in (@SFLCin) September 18, 2026

‘Scroll’ Instagram post taken down

Instagram has also blocked four posts by Scroll on the social media platform since June, citing “legal requirements”.

On August 6, a post about Scroll’s report on how most pellet gun victims in Kashmir have not received compensation even a decade after they were injured was blocked. A second post with a photo in which pellet injuries were not visible, published later in the day, was also restricted. Instagram did not provide a specific reason for the actions.

On July 5, a post relating to a Scroll article about how Kashmir’s turbulent history has, for several years, provided grist for Bollywood creators looking to generate xenophobic content, was initially restricted when it included a screenshot from the teaser of Chauhaan, showing pellet injuries. A separate post with a photograph of Srinagar’s Lal Chowk was allowed and is still available. No specific reason was provided for this.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Congress candidate for the Nandigram Assembly bye-elections in West Bengal was arrested on Friday in a 2007 murder case, said party MP KC Venugopal.

This came hours after former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that her faction of the Trinamool Congress will support Milan Pradhan in the bye-elections scheduled for October 6.

Minutes before this, the group’s candidate, Sanchita Pradhan, had withdrawn her nomination. This came soon after photographs of her meeting West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari had been shared online.

Venugopal said in a social media post that Milan Pradhan’s arrest showed “democracy is on ventilator in BJP’s West Bengal”.

“This is the BJP’s latest effort to ensure ‘Opposition-Mukt Bharat’, successfully converting our great constitutional democracy into a banana republic,” said the MP.

He added that “these petty intimidation tactics by their cheap copycats are not going to scare” the Congress.

“We will stand tall against this misuse of power, and we will ensure the BJP’s defeat,” he said.

Democracy is on ventilator in BJP’s West Bengal. This is BJP’s latest effort to ensure “Opposition-Mukt Bharat”, successfully converting our great Constitutional democracy into a Banana Republic.

Using a dormant 19-year old case from 2007 to arrest our candidate - minutes after… https://t.co/khRTAzRYZ6

— K C Venugopal (@kcvenugopalmp) September 18, 2026

During a press conference earlier in the day, Banerjee said that her faction had decided to support the Congress “in the greater interest of the country” and to strengthen the Opposition INDIA bloc.

“I want that Bharatiya Janata Party must go from India,” she said. “Our solidarity is with the INDIA bloc.”

The bye-poll was necessitated after Adhikari vacated the Nandigram seat.

The chief minister had won the Nandigram and Bhabanipur seats during the Assembly elections in May. He had defeated the TMC’s Pabitra Kar by more than 9,600 votes in Nandigram.

The Representation of People Act allows a candidate who has won two seats to retain only one.

While the rival TMC faction has nominated Ehteshamul Haque in Nandigram, the ruling BJP has fielded Hasirani Rath. The Left Front has fielded Communist Party of India’s Santigopal Giri.

The Mamata Banerjee-led faction also said that while it will contest the other Assembly bye-poll being held in Bengal’s Rejinagar constituency, it will not do so in Assam’s Nagaon Lok Sabha seat.

The announcement came hours after the Election Commission allotted new names and symbols to the two factions of the TMC.

The group led by Mamata Banerjee was assigned the name “Mamata All India Trinamool Congress” with the symbol “football player”. The Arup Roy faction of the party was allotted the name of “Democratic Trinamool Congress” with the envelope as its symbol.

This came a day after the poll panel had barred both TMC factions from using the party’s name and the “flowers and grass” symbol in the upcoming bye-polls in Nandigram and Rejinagar.

The factions had been asked to submit alternative names and symbols for the bye-elections by 11 am on Friday.

Rift within TMC

The TMC has been beset by internal divisions and rebellions after it lost the Assembly elections to the BJP in May. Nearly 60 out of the TMC’s 80 MLAs have rebelled against the party leadership to choose Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. The faction later appointed Arup Roy as its chairperson.

The group was also recognised by the Assembly speaker as the TMC’s legislature party in the House, and Ritabrata Banerjee has been recognised as the leader of the Opposition.

At the national level, 20 of the TMC’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs in June announced a merger with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens Party of India. The group is supporting the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in the Lower House of Parliament.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament in July, the Lok Sabha speaker accepted the request of the rebel MPs to sit separately in the Lok Sabha. However, the group is yet to be recognised as the Nationalist Citizens Party of India in the House.

Mamata Banerjee’s faction of the TMC has initiated disqualification proceedings against the rebels. It has also moved the Supreme Court alleging delay by the speaker in deciding the disqualification appeals.

In the Rajya Sabha, four TMC MPs have resigned since June. Three of them joined the BJP and were re-elected unopposed to the Upper House of Parliament on the Hindutva party’s tickets. With this, the TMC’s strength in the Rajya Sabha fell to nine from 13 in May.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha.

The Election Commission decision on Thursday to bar both factions of the Trinamool Congress from using the party symbol and name in upcoming bye-elections followed repeated delays by the rebel faction.

Thursday’s order holds for the bye-elections scheduled for October 6 for two Assembly seats in West Bengal and the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat in Assam. The last date for candidates to file their nomination papers for the contest was September 16.

In the interim order, the Election Commission noted that settling the dispute over which faction can legitimately claim to be Trinamool Congress “requires a substantive determination” and that the “time available is not adequate”.

However, the same order shows that the Election Commission had repeatedly yielded to the rebel faction’s requests for more time to submit documents to support its claims. It had given the rebel faction led by West Bengal Leader of Opposition Ritabrata Banerjee three extensions in the last two months.

The order does not explain why this was done. Scroll has asked the Election Commission about this. This report will be updated if it responds.

Deadline after deadline

The dispute between the rival factions of the Trinamool Congress for control of the party and its election symbol dates back to June. The previous month, the party had been swept out of power in its bastion of West Bengal by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The tussle began when Ritabrata Banerjee wrote to the Election Commission challenging former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s authority to appoint party office bearers. Trinamool politicians allied with the former chief minister, in turn, shot off letters to the commission countering his claims.

The Election Commission shared these letters with the leaders of both factions on July 2 and asked them to send in their replies by July 6. While Mamata Banerjee met this deadline, Ritabrata Banerjee sought another week, according to the Election Commission’s interim order. It gave him till July 10 to file his reply.

On July 10, Ritabrata Banerjee wrote to the Election Commission claiming he was “diligently engaged in procurement of necessary documents for the purpose of submitting a complete and effective response” and needed 15 more days to do so. Thursday’s order states that Mamata Banerjee categorically objected to these requests.

Despite her objection, the Election Commission gave the leader of the rebel faction time till July 25 to file his reply. Ritabrata Banerjee failed to meet even this deadline and, on July 25, asked for another 10-day extension.

The order does not state how the Election Commission responded to this request.

All it says is that Ritabrata Banerjee finally submitted his reply on September 11, over two months after he was originally supposed to do so.

Time for polls

By then, the Election Commission had notified the schedule for bye-elections for the Rejinagar and Nandigram assembly constituencies in West Bengal and the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat in next-door Assam.

Both factions of the Trinamool Congress fielded candidates from Rejinagar and Nandigram in West Bengal. Only the Mamata Banerjee faction had nominated a candidate from the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat in Assam. On Friday, it withdrew from the contest in Nagaon and decided to support the Congress candidate in Nandigram.

This became necessary because Sanchita Pradhan, the group’s candidate in Nandigram, withdrew her nomination. Hours before, photographs of her meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari had been shared online.

The Trinamool’s flowers-and-grass symbol has been associated with the party for nearly three decades. On Friday, the Election Commission cleared new symbols and party names which the two factions may use for now.

With less than three weeks to go before voting takes place in the two Assembly seats and one Lok Sabha seat, candidates face the uphill task of going door-to-door to inform voters about their new symbols.

The Election Commission’s handling of the dispute did not sit well with the Mamata Banerjee faction from the start.

“This issue cannot simply be left hanging,” Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra, a prominent leader of this camp, had said at a news conference in Delhi on July 13. At that time, Mamata Banerjee had already submitted her reply to the Election Commission, while the Ritabrata Banerjee faction had got an extension.

“Why has this additional time and special treatment been given to the other side after they failed to meet the original deadline?” Moitra had asked then. “That is not how a fair process is supposed to work. You cannot have a compromised referee.”

A Delhi court on Friday granted default bail to a United States citizen who was arrested by the National Investigation Agency in March for allegedly having links to ethnic armed groups in Myanmar that are hostile to India, PTI reported.

Default bail is granted when an investigating agency fails to complete its probe and file a chargesheet within the statutory period while an accused is in custody.

The US citizen, Matthew Aaron Van Dyke, and six Ukrainians had been arrested on March 13. They were allegedly involved in supplying weapons and military equipment to ethnic armed groups operating in Myanmar, as well as providing them with training.

On September 8, the NIA filed a chargesheet against the seven foreigners for illegally entering, staying and moving in India under the 2025 Immigration and Foreigners Act.

Although they had been arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the agency had only accused them of immigration violations in the chargesheet.

Investigators alleged that they had entered India on valid visas, but later travelled to Mizoram without the mandatory restricted area permit. They were also accused of entering Myanmar and meeting ethnic groups hostile to India.

Officials alleged that the individuals received drone deliveries from Europe while in Mizoram.

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

On Friday, the NIA court granted Van Dyke bail on a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh and a surety of the same amount. The court directed him not to leave Delhi and to appear before the NIA whenever he is summoned for questioning.

Edited by Sneha.

The Election Commission on Friday allotted new names and symbols to the two factions of the Trinamool Congress. The group led by Mamata Banerjee was assigned the name “Mamata All India Trinamool Congress” with the symbol “football player”.

The Arup Roy faction of the party was allotted the name of “Democratic Trinamool Congress” with the "envelope as its symbol.

On Thursday, the commission had barred both factions from using the name of the Trinamool Congress name as well as the “flowers and grass” symbol in the upcoming Assembly bye-polls on October 6. Read on.

Mamata Banerjee said that her faction of the TMC will support the Congress candidate in the Nandigram Assembly bye-elections. This followed the announcement of the group’s candidate, Sanchita Pradhan, that she was withdrawing her nomination.

The Congress has fielded Milan Pradhan from Nandigram. Banerjee said that her faction had decided to support the Congress “in the greater interest of the country” and to strengthen the Opposition INDIA bloc.

Before Sanchita Pradhan withdrew her nomination, photographs of her meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari were shared online. Read on.

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, cancelled the screening of a documentary film about activist Umar Khalid after the Central Board of Film Certification objected to it. The censor board had asked the institute to take “necessary action” against the screening of Prisoner No. 626710 is Present.

It said that public screening of a documentary that has not yet been certified by the censor board violates the 1952 Cinematograph Act. In response, the institute said it had cancelled the screening and the booking of the venue.

In an email sent to students hours after the censor board’s statement, IIIT Hyderabad's director said that no permission had been sought for the screening and that the announcement about the viewing was “not legitimate”. Read on.

First-time feature director Santosh Davakhar’s Marathi-language Gondhal will represent India at the Oscars in 2027. Gondhal was released in cinemas in November 2025.

Davakhar’s film uses the Gondhal folk performance tradition to explore a woman’s efforts to escape a stifling relationship. Read on.

Surendra Koli, who was acquitted last year in the 2005-’06 Nithari killings case, died by suicide. Koli had been convicted by the Supreme Court in February 2011.

He had moved the top court again with a curative petition after the Allahabad High Court acquitted him in October 2023 in 12 cases against him related to the Nithari killings.

In response, the Supreme Court had, in November, acquitted him in the last pending murder and rape case too. He had spent nearly 19 years in jail. Read on.

The food regulator said that it had initiated legal action against Nestlé India after a sample of one of the company’s baby food products was found to be substandard during testing. It also flagged allegedly misleading claims on two other baby food products.

The company said that their products are “fully compliant with all the applicable regulations”, after the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India sought clarifications from it. Read on.

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The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration on Thursday suspended the licence of a canteen at the civic-run Nair Hospital and the 108-year-old Olympia Coffee House in Colaba, reported PTI.

At the Nair Hospital, the inspectors found that safety and health norms were being violated, reported India Today. Its licence was suspended considering the health and safety of patients, the FDA said, adding that legal action was underway.

The hospital’s Dean, Shailesh Mohite, told Scroll that the FDA had conducted inspections at the hospital on February 12 when the mess was closed after lunch.

Mohite added that the hospital authorities were yet to receive a report from the agency about the alleged violations it had found. “They have sent notice to the mess contractor,” he said.

He told India Today that the hospital has three canteens, two of which are functioning. They provide food for patients and their relatives.

The one that was shut after the inspection prepared food for around 400 nurses who are studying and working at the hospital, added Mohite.

Inspection at Olympia Coffee House

The FDA conducted an inspection at the restaurant on Wednesday and found a urinal in the food storage area, reported The Indian Express.

The inspectors also found that there was an infestation of cockroaches and flies, and the refrigerator had meat blood residue. Food was allegedly being handled directly on the floor.

They also said that the utensil-washing facilities were unhygienic and the water being used was unclean, reported The Indian Express. Raw vegetarian and non-vegetarian food were not segregated properly, and wooden chopping boards being used were damaged.

Food handlers were not wearing appropriate protective clothing, the newspaper quoted the agency as saying.

Additionally, of the 35 food handlers, 34 had not undergone mandatory food-safety training. The water-testing reports and sanitation records were also unavailable at the restaurant.

In addition to the canteen and the restaurant, the FDA also suspended the license of Blink Commerce Private Limited in Chembur for alleged violations of hygiene and health standards.

Other establishments in Mumbai whose licences were suspended following inspections are Vishwas Sweets and Snacks and A-1 General & Dry Fruits in Ghatkopar West, Milan Punjab in Worli, and Sadguru Sweets in Malad East.

The action was part of the FDA’s ongoing drive against eateries and other establishments for alleged violations of food safety norms during the festive season.

On Tuesday, the FDA suspended the licences of four Mumbai restaurants – Colaba’s iconic Café Mondegar, Maharashtra Biryani Center in Kandivali East, Tribhuvan Dairy Farm in Ghatkopar West, and Mahavir Cashew & Foods Private Limited in Ghatkopar East.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Balakrishnan V, a 44-year-old auto driver, has lived in the same locality all his life, an area predominantly occupied by low-income households, in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district.

Balakrishnan has four children: a son and three daughters.

The older two attend private schools. The son, who is in Class 11, is enrolled in a school that charges around Rs 50,000 a year. Balakrishnan’s eldest daughter, a Class 8 student, pays fees of around Rs 20,000 per year.

In contrast, the other two children study for free. His third child studies in a government-aided school and his fourth studies in a government school.

Balakrishnan would have liked to send his younger children to private schools also, but the fees for the first two are already a huge burden on the family. He explained that sometimes they have to even take loans to pay them.

But he has no doubt about the kind of schools he prefers. “Teachers are a lot better in private schools,” he said. “They pay more attention to individual students, and that will eventually help the child prepare well for their future as well.”

Such a preference among parents is reflected in attendance at the neighbourhood government school, where Balakrishnan studied as a child. He recounted that when he was there, the school had between 200 and 300 students. Today, it has only 30 students.

Balakrishnan’s neighbour Preetha also believes that children are better off in private schools. Her daughter used to study in a government school, but now studies in a private school. Preetha’s husband died years ago. She only has her earnings as a domestic worker to manage her expenses and her daughter’s fees of about Rs 50,000 a year.

This is a strain but she and her family say that only a private school education will guarantee her daughter a chance of landing a good job.

A key reason for this, Preetha said, is that teachers in government schools have assured salaries, so do not have any pressure to ensure that their students perform well. But as Preetha’s mother explained, “…If the child is not studying well, we can question private school teachers because we are paying fees.”

Balakrishnan, the auto driver, echoed this contention. Government school teachers “just come and teach but it’s up to the student whether or not they want to learn”, he said, “There is no pressure to push students to perform.”

Their perceptions are at odds with the findings of a recent study on low-fee private schools in Tamil Nadu. Researchers from the Centre for Public Policy and Research analysed the academic performance of students in Classes 3, 6 and 9 across several categories of schools and found that “once socio-economic factors, household characteristics and parental education levels are taken into account, the learning differences between government and private schools become minimal”.

In fact, when it came to primary education in the state, the study found that government school students showed better outcomes than private school students. Specifically, Class 3 students of state government schools and aided schools, as well as central government schools, performed better in both maths and languages than their counterparts in private schools.

The study noted that a key problem private schools struggled with was the quality of teachers. “There is a lack of teacher motivation; few are entering the profession owing to low salaries,” it noted. “Low-fee schools, especially, cannot afford to pay a lot to qualified teachers.”

In fact, other research also found that among teachers it looked at, government-school teachers were more qualified. A 2018 paper by Azim Premji University, on school choices in “low-information environments” studied 121 public and low-fee private schools and 1,210 families, in 10 districts across four states and found that 64% of public school teachers had a postgraduate degree, while only 44% of teachers from private schools had a postgraduate degree.

Preetha’s daughter, disagreeing with her mother, said she preferred her government school teachers, instead of the teachers she now has in the private school. “They taught us better,” she said. “These teachers don’t teach us properly. The one difference is that I speak English better now. But with regard to other subjects, I think the government school was better.”

And yet, data shows enrolment in private schools continues to grow even as government school enrolment declines. What is driving this shift to private school education in India? We looked for answers in Tamil Nadu, a state where around half of all school students now study in private schools.

Many parents Scroll spoke to cited surprising explanations for their preference for private schools. The conversations provided a snapshot of the fears and hopes that are driving Indian parents to move their children away from the government school system and into private schools.

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

The state of India’s government school system has been in the headlines ever since the Cockroach Janata Party recently launched its School Thik Karo – Fix the Schools – campaign. Fresh from their success at leading youth protests against the Modi government in Jantar Mantar, the activists of the new political outfit visited schools across the country including Rajasthan and Maharashtra in July and August. Videos from these visits showed a range of problems in these schools, including shortages of teachers, crumbling infrastructure and poor hygiene.

For many, these accounts from the ground are enough to explain why Indian parents’ preference has been shifting towards private schools.

In 2023-’24, government schools had 35.21 crore students enrolled in them, while private schools had 15.67 crore students. Within two years, the number of students enrolled in government schools fell to 32.48 crore, while private school enrolment shot up to 26.07 crore. (This period also coincided with a trend of students returning to private schools after families in economic distress during the Covid-19 pandemic shifted them to government schools.)

Currently, according to the Unified District Information System, which collects and maintains information on the public and private school system in India, 51.9% of students in India are enrolled in private, government-aided schools and “other schools”, while 48.1% are enrolled in government schools.

In contrast, in most Western countries, public schools form the bulk of the school systems. In the United States, for instance, only around 10% of students go to private schools, while in the United Kingdom around 7% do so.

While the term “private school” usually evokes an image of elite institutions that charge several lakhs in fees, these form only a small fraction of schools. A large proportion of the India’s private schools are of the kind that Balakrishnan and Preetha’s children study in, which charge much lower fees and cater to low-income or lower-middle income families.

These schools are referred to by educationists and researchers as low-cost or low-fee private schools, often defined as schools where monthly fees range between Rs 400 and Rs 3,500.

According to the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, 70% of students in private schools paid less than Rs 1,000 per month as fees.

In Tamil Nadu, too, a large number of private schools fall in this category. A 2026 paper on private schools in the state noted that “77.4% of schools in Tamil Nadu charge less than Rs 20,000 per year” and this includes “35.6% charging between Rs 5,000 and Rs 10,000, and 38.5% charging between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000”. At the higher end of the low fee private schools were those that charged between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000 per year, which made up 6.8% of the total.

On the face of it, data on the number of schools in the state, often lauded for its public schooling system, does not reflect a shift towards private school education. The total number of government schools in the state is 37,478, compared to 11,638 private unaided schools.

But student enrollment numbers tell a different story, more in keeping with trends across the country: according to Unified District Information System data, 46 lakh students are enrolled in government schools and 62 lakh are enrolled in private schools.

In some areas, the difference is stark. For example, in Tamil Nadu’s capital, Chennai, 1.64 lakh students are enrolled in government schools and 8.3 lakh students are enrolled in private schools. In Salem district, though only 20% of schools are private, around 2.75 lakh students study in them, while around 2.45 lakh study in government schools.

“It is understandable that parents are forced to send their children to private schools, we cannot blame them for it,” said Prince Gajendra Babu, general secretary of the State Platform for Common School System Tamil Nadu. “The government has pushed parents to private schools, by refusing to invest more and run government schools better.”

Parents cited more complex reasons for their choice.

Balakrishnan, for instance, said better communication was one reason parents preferred private schools. “In private schools they call us frequently, if a child is sick, they will call and tell us, but government school teachers don’t do that,” he said.

Preetha’s family, meanwhile, explained that they felt reassured by the hours that private schools maintained, a sentiment that other families also echoed. “When she was in the government school, she would come back home early. Now she comes back very late,” Preetha’s mother said. “The teachers keep the children back after school and do extra coaching, so we know that the child is studying.”

Christuraj S, a child rights activist based in Salem said many parents told him they preferred private schools because they seemed safer. “A van comes and picks the kids,” he said. “If the child goes to a government school, they have to rely on the bus, which they deem unsafe.”

Babu, meanwhile, characterised the shift to private schools as part of a larger shift towards exam-oriented schooling, in response to which many of these schools began to advertise 100% pass rates. “Government schools never had 100% pass rates initially,” he said. “Kids would fail but pass in the supplementary exams, and then go on to do great things in their life.”

He added, “Exams weren’t everything, but learning was crucial, today that has changed.”

Among the surprising insights that many parents offered in conversations with Scroll was that they saw schools close to their homes as undesirable for their children.

This attitude presents a contrast with the direction of government policy on the matter – under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, it is mandatory for the government to ensure that children at the primary level have a school within a one-kilometre walking distance of their homes.

But 43-year-old Krishnamurthy A, an electrician who also works as a preacher and lives in the same locality as Balakrishnan, explained that he was wary of the social environment in the vicinity of his home, which has a government school within a kilometre. He said that he often finds boys and young men who use “bad words” loitering outside the school. “I cannot bear to hear the kinds of words they use,” he said.

He also said that there were problems of violence and drug abuse among youngsters in the area. “Since my wife is a nurse, a lot of children go there for treatment, and I hear very bad things about what the children are up to,” he said.

Thus, Krishnamurthy has chosen to send all his three children to different private schools, which are more than 5 km away, even though the family often has to borrow money to pay their fees. “Money will come and go but my children’s education is of utmost importance,” he said.

He hopes that this decision will be a step towards ensuring that his children can grow up and move out of the neighbourhood. “I wanted them to go to a school that is far away from this area,” he said. “And I hope they find a way to get out of here.”

Another fear loomed large over Krishnamurthy, one that was rooted in his own experience of studying in a government school: that his children would always be identified by their caste identity if they went to a nearby government school. “It’s because I know what that experience would be like,” he said. “I don’t want my children to face the same issues I faced.”

He recounted, “My teachers always identified me with my community. No matter what I did, I was the student who was from a lower caste.”

Indeed, Nandamma, a neighbour who is identified by a pseudonym for the story, said that her son, who went to the neighbourhood government school, faced discrimination in the classroom. “He would study well, but the teachers would say, ‘Oh even though you are from the cheri, you are studying well,” she said, referring to a derogatory term for a marginalised community settlement. “They always treated children who went from this area in an inferior manner.”

This problem extended even to activities outside school, the family explained.

Nandamma’s sister explained with pride that her daughter, who is now in the second year of her engineering degree, had learnt bharatanatyam, and had even had her inaugural performance – but for her training, the family had to find her a teacher far away from their residence. “We tried to find teachers nearby but because they knew where we were from, they knew what caste we were,” Nandamma said. “They did not allow her to attend classes.”

Parents also cited a range of other factors that guided their decision to send their children to private schools. Some, for instance, said they felt that the number of teachers in government schools had declined, as had their skill and enthusiasm.

Balakrishnan noted, for instance, that in the government elementary school in his locality, there were currently only two teachers for the 30 students. He recounted that earlier, government school teachers would go from house to house, urging families to enroll their children in the neighbourhood school. “But now nobody comes,” he said.

One government school teacher at an elementary school agreed that there had been an overall decline in the number of teachers in public schools – a key reason for this, she said, was that students had begun to opt for private schools in larger numbers. She recounted that when she joined 15 years ago, the school had a few hundred students. Today, they only have 30 students and two teachers. “According to the education policy, there must be two teachers for 30 students, so there are only two postings here,” she said. “The teachers we had got transferred to other schools.”

But this smaller number of students is also spread out across several grades – thus, teachers are forced to teach two or three grades simultaneously during a single period. “We also have both English and Tamil mediums at the school, so we have to speak once in one language and then in the other,” she said.

The teacher, who spoke to Scroll on the condition of anonymity, echoed Krishnamurthy’s reasoning for parents’ decision to opt for private schools. “They feel if a child goes to a school far away, they will get better education.”

Another key reason parents cited for preferring private schools is that most were English medium, whereas most government schools use the local language as the medium. “Parents feel English medium schools are better,” the teacher said.

Nandamma’s niece explained that though she and her schoolmates had found “decent jobs” after studying in government school, “because I don’t know English, I lose out on so many opportunities and I also struggle with simple tasks that I’m supposed to do in English”. She added, “Even during placements, government students lose out because we have not studied in English medium schools.”

These include opportunities outside the state. “If children only study in Tamil medium, then they will only be able to get jobs within Tamil Nadu, but if they want to go outside Tamil Nadu, or India, they need English,” Nandamma said. “Private schools also offer Hindi. It’s good for students to learn an extra language.”

Many also noted that children were exposed to more extracurricular activities at private schools. Balakrishnan recounted that in the past, government schools also offered these activities. “There would also be small programmes and festivals, fancy-dress competitions on Independence day,” he said. “But nothing of that kind happens these days either.”

Nandamma echoed this observation. “In government schools, there are hardly any activities for students, but private schools have such a wide range of activities,” she said. “Academics is just one part of school, it’s important to learn other things as well.”

Elsewhere in Salem district, some of the concerns about government schools were even more pronounced.

In the semi-urban area of Omalur, for instance, Ramya R, a parent of two children who study in government-aided private schools, said that the elementary government school in her neighbourhood was in such a dilapidated condition that she sometimes spotted snakes near it. “There’s no compound around the school either,” she said. “We’ve noticed all this when we have gone there to vote. It’s falling apart.”

In the same neighbourhood, the parents of a joint family of six, with three children, send all of them to a private school – their rationale echoed other parents’ desire that their children move out of the circumstances they were born into. “I feel so happy when I see her in a full neat uniform with proper shoes. I didn’t have that,” said the father, Surya Prakash, said about his eight-year-old daughter, Yashika. “I would be treated badly because I could not afford to wear shoes.”

The mother, Viveka, said, “When I was in school, I had to go home to use the toilet, and the food used to be terrible.”

At this, Yashika chimed in. “But I prefer the government school,” she said. “I don’t want my parents to struggle to pay my fees.”

Around 60 km away from Salem city, in the rural area of Attur taluk, locals told Scroll that many of the private schools in the area had come up only in the last few years – nevertheless, many preferred these schools, and cited similar rationale as their counterparts in the urban parts of the district.

Among the main reasons the parents preferred private schools here, too, were that they were English medium. “English is more important today than ever,” said one parent in the town of Yethapur, whose daughter is in upper kindergarten. “They need to be able to speak to get good jobs.”

In fact, the desire for an English-medium education was so pronounced that some parents said they only intended to enroll their child in a private school for as long as they needed to learn it. One mother, A Jayapradha, said that she planned to enroll her daughter in a private school until Class 5, because by then she would have mastered English. “Once they learn English well, then they can join Tamil medium school in high school,” she said.

Other parents had also planned to enroll their children in private schools up to Class 5, and cited better safety and attention from teachers as key factors for this decision. Another mother said, “The child is too young to manage on their own. Government school kids are usually left on their own in the schools.”

In these parts of the district, too, the cost of these schools was a major concern for parents.

Uma Maheshwari, who lives with her husband and two children in Yethapur, explained that their son studies at a private school that charges around Rs 30,000 a year. Maheshwari’s husband works as an accountant and the family is struggling to make ends meet.

As a result, their son’s education had seen a rocky path. During the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, the couple were forced to shift their son from a private school to a government school, because they could not afford his fees.

However, they were unhappy with their son’s performance in the government school, and shifted him back to a private school when they could afford it again. “He had learnt so much at the private school that he was in and then he forgot everything when he went to the government school,” she said. “I would check his notes too and felt like the teachers were not teaching well.”

Despite parents’ strong preference for private schools, conversations with them and teachers specifically about children’s academic performance revealed a more complex picture, which suggested that students were not necessarily assured a better education in the private schools.

This was reflected in the study by the Centre for Public Policy and Research on low-fee private schools in Tamil Nadu.

It found that while both categories of schools displayed “persistent gaps in student proficiency”, “private schools do not demonstrate a consistent or significant advantage over government schools, particularly in foundational literacy and numeracy”.

The principal of a government-aided school in Salem city said that she felt that these results corresponded with her experience. The management of her school also manages a private school. “So I know the kind of students who study there and study here,” she said.

The principal, who asked not to be named, said that she found that when students from the aided school decided to move to the private school, they had no difficulties catching up. “But students who come from there know very little. They struggle with basics,” she said. “It’s because the teacher quality is so poor.”

She argued that government-school teachers were often more qualified and skilled. “The teachers who come here are paid good salaries from the government and they are very experienced and are highly educated,” she said.

She added, “Private schools charge high fees, but don’t pay their teachers, and they don’t have any experience. And so the child learns nothing.”

Some parents’ accounts also reflected these observations on academic performance. Most who had children enrolled in private schools told Scroll that their children were average academic performers, and that they would attempt to discuss their worries with their teachers. “Sometimes they’ll tell us to send him to tuition, but we cannot afford it,” Maheswari said.

Balakrishnan said that his last daughter, who is enrolled in a government school, is happy to continue there and doesn’t want to change to a private school. In fact, he explained with pride that she “was studying very well in Tamil medium” and that her teachers had told them to shift her to an English medium government school. “She’s a very smart child,” he said.

The Azim Premji University study also suggested that the basis for parents’ preference for private schools was not always sound. “Data told us that there are mismatches between parental perceptions and school realities,” it stated. In large part, it observed, this was owing to private schools’ emphasis on marketing themselves heavily. “Most private schools organised systematic enrolment drives to generate admissions. These drives advertised safety elements like conveyance, CCTV cameras,” the study said.

Babu agreed with this assessment. “All private schools do is advertise,” he said. “It’s all marketing.”

The food regulator on Friday said that it had initiated legal action against Nestlé India after a sample of one of the company’s baby food products was found to be substandard during testing. It also flagged allegedly misleading claims on two other baby food products.

The company said that their products are “fully compliant with all the applicable regulations”, after the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India sought clarifications from it, ANI reported.

The regulator has said that a sample of a “follow-up formula”, a milk product for infants, was found to be “sub-standard with respect to biotin”.

It also flagged two other products, NAN Excella Pro Stage 1 and Lactogen Pro 1, for making allegedly misleading ​claims violating the 2020 Foods for Infant Nutrition Regulations and the 1992 Infant Milk Substitutes Act.

In the case of NAN Excella Pro Stage 1, claims relating to “5 HMOs” and whey protein were observed, the food authority said. In the case of Lactogen Pro 1, a claim relating to whey protein “being easy to digest” was observed, the regulator added.

“5 HMOs” refers to a blend of five Human Milk Oligosaccharides.

While the 2020 rules restrict promotional material or claims intended to increase the saleability of infant foods, the 1992 Act bars their advertisements.

In its statement, Nestlé India spokesperson said that NAN Excella Pro and Lactogen Pro were approved by the “expert committee” of the regulator.

“We have again submitted our detailed response to the authorities regarding statements appearing on the label, which are factual in nature, and supported by scientific literature,” ANI quoted the company as stating. “We confirm to adherence of all regulations including all norms and label declarations as per applicable laws.”

After the food regulator’s announcement on Friday, the share price of Nestlé India fell 2.4%, but recovered to a fall of 0.5% by the time the market closed. The firm is the Indian subsidiary of Swiss food-processing conglomerate Nestlé.

The company had not responded to the allegations.

The cases against Nestlé India come amid a crackdown by the food regulators in the country on food adulteration and misleading advertisements of products in recent months.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Food regulator took credit for a ‘crackdown’ on Bournvita. But it gave the drink a clean chit
• India’s food regulator flagged over 160 misleading claims. Years later, 120 are still around
• How India’s ambitious plan to curb unhealthy food failed

The Election Commission on Friday allotted new names and symbols to the two factions of the Trinamool Congress, reported ANI.

The group led by Mamata Banerjee was assigned the name “Mamata All India Trinamool Congress” with the symbol “football player”.

The Arup Roy faction of the party was allotted the name of “Democratic Trinamool Congress” with the envelope as its symbol, reported ANI.

This came a day after the poll panel had barred both factions of the TMC from using the party’s name as well as the “flowers and grass” symbol in the upcoming Assembly bye-polls on October 6.

The factions were asked to submit alternative names and symbols for the Nandigram and Rejinagar bye-elections by 11 am on Friday.

The Election Commission had passed similar orders after the split of the Shiv Sena in 2022 and the Nationalist Congress Party in 2023.

In its order on Friday, the Election Commission said that the nomination papers filed by the candidates of both the TMC factions for the bye-polls will be considered if all the other requirements are fulfilled by them.

Rift within TMC

The TMC has been beset by internal divisions and rebellions after it lost the Assembly elections to the Bharatiya Janata Party in May. Nearly 60 out of the TMC’s 80 MLAs have rebelled against the party leadership to choose Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. The faction later appointed Arup Roy as its chairperson.

The group was also recognised by the Assembly speaker as the the TMC’s legislature party in the House, and Ritabrata Banerjee has been recognised as the leader of the Opposition.

At the national level, 20 of the TMC’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs in June announced a merger with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens Party of India. The group is supporting the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in the Lower House of Parliament.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament in July, the Lok Sabha speaker accepted the request of the rebel MPs to sit separately in the Lok Sabha. However, the group is yet to be recognised as the Nationalist Citizens Party of India in the House.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Election Commission has informed the Supreme Court that only 1 lakh of the 38.2 lakh appeals filed in tribunals against inclusions and exclusions made during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls have been disposed of.

The number amounts to only 2.6% of the appeals, which the tribunals had started hearing in April.

On July 17, the court, in a plea filed by Congress leader Prasenjit Bose, had asked the Election Commission to file a counter-affidavit providing details of the pending appeals, and inclusions and exclusions made to the state’s voter lists.

However, the affidavit did not provide a classification of how many appeals were filed by voters who had been deleted and by the Election Commission challenging the inclusion of names.

The data submitted by the poll panel showed that between December 17, 2025 – when the draft electoral rolls in West Bengal were published – and August 7 this year, 34.1 lakh voter registration forms were submitted, the newspaper reported. This includes persons enrolling as first-time voters, and also includes those from the 60 lakh voters who had been deleted from the draft electoral rolls.

Of the 34.1 lakh applications, more than 7 lakh were accepted, 7.2 lakh were rejected and 4.8 lakh are yet to be processed.

The data also showed that 6.3 lakh forms against deletions in the draft stage had been filed. Of these, more than 3,550 were accepted and over 14,500 rejected. It was unclear if the remaining 6.2 lakh applications had been processed.

On August 25, the Supreme Court was informed that only 7 lakh out of 38.2 lakh appeals before the tribunals in West Bengal were against deletions from the electoral rolls and 31 lakh were challenging inclusion in the list.

The appeals against inclusion were filed by the Election Commission and individual objectors, lawyer Gopal Sankaranarayanan, appearing for Bose, had told the court.

The counsel had also pointed out that out of nearly 83,000 appeals disposed of at the time, tribunals had allowed voters to be included in the electoral rolls in more than 75,000 cases. This meant that more than 90% of the decided appeals had been ruled in favour of the voters.

The special intensive revision of voter rolls in West Bengal was carried out before the Assembly elections in April.

Final rolls published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.

By April 6, ahead of the Assembly elections, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of West Bengal’s electorate before the revision process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls.

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

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, on Friday cancelled the screening of a documentary film about activist Umar Khalid on its campus after the Central Board of Film Certification objected to it, The News Minute reported.

Khalid has been in judicial custody for six years in connection with the conspiracy case related to the 2020 Delhi riots. The trial in the case is yet to begin.

IIIT Hyderabad Director Sandeep Kumar Shukla said that the institute had cancelled the screening and the booking of the venue.

In an email sent to students hours after the censor board’s objection, Shukla said that “no public or private screening” in any institute space including “any lab or classroom or offices will be allowed,” The News Minute reported.

The director added that “no permission for such a film show was sought” from the authorities and that the announcement of the screening to those on campus or outside was therefore “not legitimate”.

The censor board had asked IIIT Hyderabad to take “necessary action” against the screening of Prisoner No. 626710 is Present.

Public screening of a documentary that has not yet been certified by the censor board “is a violation” of the 1952 Cinematograph Act “unless a specific exemption has been sought under the act”, the film certification body said on social media.

Public Screening of a Documentary film that has not yet been Certified by the CBFC is a violation of the Cinematograph Act unless a specific exemption has been sought under the Act. Authorities of @iiit_hyderabad may take note for necessary action. pic.twitter.com/KeZlkbqrFn

— CBFC केंद्रीय फिल्म प्रमाणन बोर्ड (@CBFC_Bharat) September 17, 2026

It also shared a screenshot of the invitation for the planned screening at the KRB Auditorium on Friday, five days after Political Prisoners’ Day.

The censor board is a statutory body under the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting that regulates the public exhibition of films under the Cinematograph Act.

Earlier, a student organisation at Bengaluru’s National Law School of India University had postponed the documentary’s screening on the campus, scheduled for September 14, after the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad objected to it, The Hindu reported.

The ABVP is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The student groups’ Bengaluru unit also wrote to Union ministers seeking a permanent cancellation of the screening and a high-level inquiry into the university’s administration.

Khalid, activist Sharjeel 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.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Surendra Koli, who was acquitted last year in the case pertaining to the 2005-’06 Nithari killings, died by suicide on Friday, NDTV India reported.

Koli had been convicted by the Supreme Court in February 2011. However, he had moved the top court again with a curative petition after the Allahabad High Court acquitted him in October 2023 in 12 cases against him related to the Nithari killings.

In response to the curative petition, the Supreme Court had in November acquitted him in the last pending murder and rape case as well. He had spent nearly 19 years in jail.

Following the acquittal, Koli had moved to Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, where he had been running a tea stall, India Today reported.

The killings came to light after body parts of children and young adults were traced to Moninder Singh Pandher’s house in Noida’s Nithari village in December 2006. Later, the police also discovered 19 skeletons in the house.

The Central Bureau of Investigation took over the case and alleged that Koli, Pandher’s domestic worker, had been raping and killing the women and girls, even eating their body parts, and, in one case, cooking them.

Pandher had also been acquitted by the High Court in October 2023.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Supreme Court on Thursday questioned the use of majority in legislatures as a test to decide on the dispute about Shiv Sena name and symbol, Bar and Bench reported.

The court was hearing a petition by the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena faction challenging the Election Commission’s decision to recognise the Eknath Shinde group as the official party and allot it the bow and arrow symbol.

Justice Joymalya Bagchi was quoted as having observed that while membership of legislatures is relevant in recognising a political party, a question arises when legislators switch their political allegiance after being elected.

“Today, the voter actually votes for a party, not for the representative,” Bagchi was quoted as saying.

He asked whether the votes received by an MLA who joins another party can continue to be treated as reflecting support for him or her and the new party.

“Will that be a correct reflection?” Bagchi asked. “That is something that has not been considered in any of the decisions.”

The Shiv Sena dispute

The Shiv Sena had split in June 2022 after Shinde claimed the support of 39 out of the Shiv Sena’s 55 and rebelled against Thackeray’s Maha Vikas Aghadi coalition. The alliance comprised the undivided Shiv Sena, the undivided Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress.

Shinde went on to dislodge the Thackeray-led Maharashtra government, becoming chief minister with the support of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In February 2023, the Election Commission handed over the official name and election symbol – the bow and arrow – of the Shinde Sena.

The poll panel had said that 40 MLAs backing Shinde got nearly 76% of the votes polled in favour of the 55 Shiv Sena candidates who had won their seats in the 2019 Maharashtra Assembly polls. On the other hand, the Thackeray faction’s 15 MLAs got 23.5% of the votes polled.

In May 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that Bhagat Singh Koshyari, Maharashtra’s governor at the time, had erred in deciding that the Thackeray government had lost its majority in the Assembly after the Shinde-led faction rebelled.

However, the five-judge Constitution bench said that it could not restore the Maha Vikas Aghadi government as Thackeray had resigned as the chief minister without facing a floor test.

The court had asked the speaker to determine which faction was the real Shiv Sena in the Assembly. However, it had stated that the speaker “must not base their decision…on a blind appreciation of which group possesses a majority” in the House. “This is not a game of numbers, but of something more,” the court had ruled.

It had also said in its judgement that it is not necessary for the Election Commission to rely on the test of majority in the legislature alone to decide which faction of the party was the real Shiv Sena.

In January 2024, Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar also held that the group of MLAs headed by Shinde constituted the real Shiv Sena when rival factions of the political party emerged in June 2022.

The Uddhav Sena has since had a new election symbol – the mashal, or torch.

The hearing

The Supreme Court bench, also comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice V Mohanna, on Thursday observed that it is the discretion of the Election Commission to decide on the matter, , Bar and Bench reported.

However, it said that a judicial review would allow the court to examine how the poll panel had exercised its discretion and whether all considerations and possible outcomes were explored.

“I have never said that the decision will be wrong because of this,” the legal news outlet quoted Bagchi as saying. The question was whether “all options have been addressed”, he added.

The counsel representing the Shinde Sena defended the Election Commission, relying on the legislative strength of the factions, arguing that the poll panel had not only counted their legislators in the state, but also considered the vote shares, votes polled and the strength of the two groups in Parliament.

The lawyer argued that the 40 MLAs who had rebelled with Shinde had won 76% of the votes received by the undivided Shiv Sena.

The court will hear the matter further next week.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read: Explained: How the EC recognised Eknath Shinde’s faction as the real Shiv Sena

The Election Commission, in an interim order on Thursday, barred both Trinamool Congress factions from using the party’s name and symbol in the upcoming Assembly bye-polls on October 6.

The poll body asked the factions led by former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Ritabrata Banerjee, who is the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, to pick new names and symbols until the dispute is resolved.

The factions have been asked to submit alternative names and symbols for the Nandigram and Rejinagar bye-elections by 11 am on Friday.

The TMC has been beset by internal divisions and rebellions after it lost the Assembly elections to the Bharatiya Janata Party in May. Nearly 60 out of the TMC’s 80 MLAs have rebelled against the party leadership to choose Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly. The faction later appointed Arup Roy as the faction’s chairperson.

The group has been recognised by the Assembly speaker as the party’s legislature party in the House, and Ritabrata Banerjee has been recognised as the leader of the Opposition.

At the national level, 20 of the TMC’s 28 Lok Sabha MPs in June announced a merger with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens Party of India. The group is supporting the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance in the Lower House of Parliament.

Ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament in July, the Lok Sabha speaker accepted the request of the rebel MPs to sit separately in the Lok Sabha. However, the group is yet to be recognised as the Nationalist Citizens Party of India in the House.

The EC issued the order on Thursday after the rival factions appeared before it earlier in the day, their second hearing in less than five days.

The poll panel said in its order that going by past precedent, neither group would be permitted to use the name All India Trinamool Congress and the party’s “flowers and grass” symbol, in order to “place both rival groups on even keel”.

“Both the groups shall be known by such names as they may choose for their respective groups, including, if they so desire, linkage with their parent party All India Trinamool Congress,” the order read. “Both the groups shall also be allotted such different symbols as they may choose from the list of free symbols notified by the Election Commission for the purposes of the current byelections.”

The EC’s order was in line with its handling of the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party splits. In both cases, the poll panel temporarily barred the rival factions from using the original party name and symbol before eventually recognising the rebel factions and assigning the names and symbols to them.

Ritabrata Banerjee said on Thursday that the Election Commission’s order “proves that there is no room for dynastic politics” and that a political party “is not a private limited company, nor can there be an heir to a political party”, IANS reported.

Kalyan Banerjee, a leader from the Mamata Banerjee-led faction, said that the group did not accept the order, PTI reported.

“This order is contrary to law,” he was quoted as saying. “We are not accepting it, as there are so many legal infirmities. Facts have not been placed in the order. But at times you have to accept things which may not be in adherence to norms, rules and law for a temporary period."

Other Opposition leaders also criticised the EC’s order, with Rahul Gandhi accusing the poll body of aiding the forces that overturn popular mandates.

“First Shiv Sena, then NCP [Nationalist Congress Party], and now TMC,” the Congress leader said on social media. He alleged that the EC and the BJP were following the same pattern each time, in which they “join forces” to split a party and then “snatch away” its election symbol.

Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal also remarked on social media that the Election Commission’s order was “a gift to the country from Modi ji on his birthday”, and asked if this was how the Bharatiya Janata Party would win elections.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Ashwini Bhide, Mumbai’s municipal commissioner looked at the city’s green spaces and declared the city was doing better than New York or London.

“Given the kind of land area we have have done more than enough,” she said in response to a question from an Indian Express journalist about whether official efforts to create forests and parks were adequate. “We are better than New York or London if you see the per capita availability of green space.”

Definitions, as urban researcher Hussain Indorewala noted in a column in the Mumbai Mirror, are important. Green space, he pointed out, “includes natural areas, fields as well as playgrounds” – not all of which “may be available for play or recreation”.

Of the 31.5% of Mumbai’s area that the municipal corporation classifies as green space, Indorewala writes, 27.8% “is mostly inaccessible ‘natural areas’ (forest areas, mangroves, water bodies, etc)”.

Open space for recreation, though, is woefully inadequate.

The numbers, for those who still bother with such boring things, are simple. Mumbai has about 1.58 square metres of open space per person. London has 31.68. New York has 26.2.

Mumbai’s open spaces, as Indorewala pointed out, constitute roughly 3.7% of its area. London’s is around 33%. New York’s is 27%.

That is not a gap. That is a chasm.

By declaring that Mumbai is better, Bhide is not just offering a comparison. She is demonstrating a profound lack of respect and esteem for the public she is supposed to serve.

“Mumbai is better than New York and London” said Mumbai Civic body Chief Ashwini Bhide as Mumbai’s shortage of open spaces came up during this Indian Express Idea Exchange.

Watch the full Idea Exchange on YouTube.`#IdeaExchange #BMC #Maharashtra #AshwiniBhide #MumbaiCivicBody… pic.twitter.com/bA04RoBngj

— The Indian Express (@IndianExpress) September 13, 2026

She wasn’t the only official to have deployed this strategy. Last month, MP Ravi Kishan informed a gathering in Uttar Pradesh that his constituency of Gorakhpur is better than a country in Southern Europe.

“I feel it is Spain,” he declared. “I feel it is an amazing place. I feel it is a smart city because I have seen places everywhere. I feel you are blind if you can’t see the development…”

Chief Minister Adityanath was in the audience and even he laughed. When your own chief minister chortles at your comparison, you know you have crossed the line from patriotism into not comedy but self mockery.

But you still garner the publicity.

In politics, wild statements are not meant to survive scrutiny. They are meant to dominate the news cycle. And they do.

There’s another dynamic at work. In both cases, nationalism was deployed as a substitute for obvious reality. To say Mumbai is better than New York, andGorakhpur trumps Spain is to underscore a kind of national pride.

Question it and you are anti-national. If you can see the garbage, you hate the country. If you notice the potholes, you are a traitor. This rhetorical trick works because it shifts the argument from what is true to who is loyal.

But the weakness of such comparisons is becoming increasingly apparent as more Indians travel to Dubai, Vietnam and even Sri Lanka.

This has become a debate about whether we can say the obvious with honest intent. And the obvious is that we are not better. We are far behind.

We can catch up. We can build parks. We can clean the air. We can make our cities livable. But first we have to stop pretending.

Bikram Vohra is a columnist and media consultant.

The Delhi High Court on Thursday said that it could stay the counting of votes and declaration of results in the Delhi University Students’ Union elections if it was not satisfied with the responses of the university, the Delhi Police and the Union government to incidents of violence during campaigning, Live Law reported.

“Enough is enough,” the court verbally remarked while hearing the matter concerning incidents of alleged violence and vandalism across Delhi University campuses on Wednesday, the final day of campaigning.

A division bench comprising Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia directed the three authorities to submit status reports by Friday on the action taken against those responsible for the violence.

On Wednesday, a teacher was allegedly assaulted by a student campaigning for the elections at Motilal Nehru College (Evening), Times of India reported. The teachers alleged that a group of students was trying to enter the college and assaulted the teacher who tried to stop them.

At the university’s north campus, a clash broke out outside Law Centre-I following an argument over the removal of campaign banners, the newspaper reported.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, alleged that three of its members were injured. The National Students’ Union of India, the student wing of the Congress, alleged that workers linked to the ABVP attacked one of its Adivasi student members outside the college. The ABVP denied the allegation.

A separate clash was reported at Sri Aurobindo College, while other colleges also witnessed altercations.

The elections are scheduled for Friday, while the counting of votes will take place on Saturday.

On Thursday, the court said that the university, along with the Delhi Police, has been assuring it that the incidents reported this year would not be repeated, Live Law reported.

However, the court said the material placed on record painted a picture of an almost complete failure by the authorities, students and other responsible sections of society to ensure the smooth conduct of the elections.

“We cannot permit this,” the legal news outlet quoted the court as saying. “You are thrashing your own teachers in the name of being creative. Brandishing guns. Or you [Delhi University] simply say you cannot control anything.”

The court also said the material on record showed repeated violations of both the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations and judicial orders issued from time to time.

The Supreme Court constituted the Lyngdoh Committee in 2005 to recommend measures to curb violence and unrest linked to student elections, including an age limit for candidates. Its recommendations also state that student elections in colleges and universities should remain free from the influence of political parties.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Welcome to The India Fix by Shoaib Daniyal. A newsletter on Indian politics.

As always, if you’ve been sent this newsletter and like it, to get it in your inbox every week, sign up here (click on “follow”).

In his book Eclipsing the West: Eclipsing the West: China, India and the Forging of a New World, Vince Cable, a fomer member of the UK Cabinet as Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills as well as President of the Board of Trade, argues that we are in the final stages of Western hegemony.

The future is multilateral, controlled by what he calls “superstates”: countries large enough to shape but not dominate the international system. The three superstates in his view: The United States, China and India. Where the book really shines, though, is when comparing the two Asian giants. Cable is a rare person who understands both India and China well.

He is largely positive about India but is also realistic. “I am bullish and at the same time recognise that the current performance is well below potential,” Cable told Scroll in an interview, arguing that India has failed to develop manufacturing in a way that China had.

Excerpts from an edited interview:

Do you think that India can ever be the next China or have we missed the bus?

I think you’ve missed the bus in terms of the economic model that China adopted, which was industrialisation through international trade based on exports and manufacturers to the rich world. And then that model which was underlined by China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.

That model cannot be repeated now. China has already done it. And the Western world is now becoming much more inward looking and protectionist. So even if India was capable of mounting a similar, sustained policy, it would not be able to reproduce it.

India’s democracy is sometimes blamed for this gap with China. Do you think that’s fair?

I’m a believer in democracy as ultimately a better system. I don’t always quote Churchill, but his argument that “democracy is a terrible system apart from all the others” – there’s quite a lot of thought to it.

The Indian democratic system certainly does inhibit rapid reform and rapid change, which could be pushed through in China. But it has one great merit that you do have a feedback loop. If things are going wrong, the people at the top get to know about it.

But it’s undoubtedly the case that when Deng Xiaoping embraced radical reforms back in 1979-’80-’81, he was able to push this through largely because there wasn’t democratic opposition. Democracy, in many ways, is a drag on drastic, difficult decision-making, but it ultimately has strengths and I think in India’s case, these will prove dominant.

How does Mr Modi’s last 12 years add or detract from this thesis?

There is a whole lot of argument around the way that the Modi government has operated and the BJP’s links with Hindutva. But if we’re just talking about economic decision making, they have broadly adopted the same framework inherited from the Manmohan Singh era. There hasn’t been any significant reversal of the reforms which Manmohan Singh introduced.

You don’t often see people say that India and China have the same economic system, which you said they both practice – what you call state capitalism.

State capitalism is a phrase that the Chinese hate. But it is a pretty good description of the way that system operates. What I mean for both countries is that you have roughly 50-50 between state-directed activities and market transactions.

You still have a lot of state regulation in India and certainly in China, state financial institutions, a very large, highly competitive market economy, millions and millions of small-scale enterprises.

Agriculture in both countries is largely peasant-based. In China there are some restrictions on individual land ownership and in India you haven’t got complete land reform, but nonetheless, the idea of largely privatised agriculture and small business is common in both countries.

What do you think then China got right and India got wrong in this model of state capitalism for there to be such a big gap between the two countries?

I think they both had the same per capita GDP at the start: Indian independence and the Chinese Communist Revolution. The big divergence took place in Mao’s time.

And although terrible things happened in Mao’s China, there was fairly substantial economic growth and industrialisation, and things which didn’t happen in India; land reform was one – on a radical scale, pretty brutal in China but it happened.

The other very important thing is that the Chinese children learned to read and write. Whereas literacy and basic primary education has lagged behind in India partly because of the federal system and the neglect of state governments and basic health and education. That was one big difference.

The most crucial point, however, is that the big market-led reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping happened 10 years earlier in China and they were much more radical and consistent. Big reforms in India were 10 years later. They were more hesitant, less far-reaching.

One of the big consequences is that China then became the factory of the world and India, despite its attempt at industrialisation, never achieved anything remotely like that.

China now has something like a third of all manufacturing in the world, India is only about 3% in terms of value added. So that was the big difference – that China’s economic reforms were earlier, far more radical and far more outward looking. The Chinese embraced international trade, inflows of foreign investment in a far more radical way than India ever has.

You have a line in your book which says, “the crucial state is India”. I think the West, or at least some sections of the West, have a tendency to view India as a counterweight to China. Delhi has generally resisted this framing. How do you see this going forward?

The Indian authorities have managed this global interaction with considerable skill and they’ve maintained, in large measure, non-alignment; not in the old, Cold War sense but in this more modern sense of multi-alignment; of keeping relationships with Russia, for example, while at the same time looking to the United States, not just for economic integration but in a loose security framework.

But looking at what has happened over the last few years, it is now very clear that President Trump, that the United States cannot be relied upon. Also the relationship in the Indian subcontinent, which is triangular with Pakistan, and not just the bilateral issue with China, is much more complex; and Trump’s attempts to interfere in that in a very candid, clumsy way.

A big symbol of what is now happening are the photographs that emerged from the BRICS Summit this weekend with Mr Modi in the middle and you have Xi Jinping on one side and Putin on the other and they’re all grinning happily. That in many ways reflects the way India has had to adapt to a United States which is no longer reliable.

You’ve spoken of the world going from win-win to zero-sum. You’ve also spoken of the rules-based order breaking down. Is the era of global free trade ending? Are we going to see the world break up into national security camps or is that a bit too drastic?

I think that is too drastic. With people using this phrase about the “end of globalisation and global free trade” – it was never really free – financially, the changes that are taking place are really quite subtle; we’re seeing a slowdown in world trade in goods, though mostly it’s switching from one market to another with the Americans trying to disrupt Chinese supply chains.

Global trade in services hasn’t really been affected at all as far as I can see and to the extent to which we can measure global data flows, for example, that aspect of globalisation remains. And we’re living in a world where manufacturing goods are becoming progressively less important and service-based activities, data-based transactions are much more important.

So the idea that we’re moving from an open trading system to a much more closed one is very premature. It's also, incidentally, a change I think that is to India’s advantage. The Chinese have a global monopoly, a global dominance in many aspects of manufacturing, but that’s a depleting asset.

The BRICS statement in Delhi pledged to put in cross-border payments amongst member countries. So much of the US’s power is based on this hegemony of the dollar. Do you think this puts that in danger?

What BRICS [an international organisation comprising Brazil, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and the UAE] has done is act as a catalyst for attempts to break the dollar’s hegemony. The use of the dollar is perhaps the only way in which the US can claim to have truly hegemonic superpower status. They’ve lost control of manufacturing and the Chinese are now matching them in new technologies. But the dollar gives them leverage in the way that nothing else does.

It’s perfectly understandable that, whatever their differences, China, India, Brazil and the others should be trying to develop independent payment arrangements because of the threat of sanctions and secondary sanctions.

There are a whole lot of different schemes: the so-called bridge, the kind of relationship that India now has with the Emirates, the Saudi-Chinese arrangement for payments in oil. All of these are bespoke, specific agreements, but together they add up to a substantial diminution in the power of the dollar.

It’s very unlikely in the near future that we’ll see an alternative currency as a method of wealth storage of reserves. But in terms of payments, the grip of the United States through the dollar on global payments is slowly but gradually diminishing thanks to these innovative schemes which are being developed amongst the BRICS countries.

Your book came out before the Iran war. Do you think something like the Iran war speeds up what you are predicting? The US’s position as a security provider for West Asia seems to be failing.

What is very clear is that the authority of the United States has been considerably diminished. It’s very clear that despite massive superiority in weapons, they have been unable to force the Iran regime and their allies like the Houthis to come to heel.

Many other countries will notice that outside of the Western hemisphere, the United States is no longer able to impose its will – and that is quite an important observation in itself.

The second point is what we have, say in relation to the international rule of law, is something we all took for granted, which was the freedom of maritime passage; that is now being called into dispute not just the Strait of Hormuz but the entrance to the Red Sea. One of the underlying principles of the international rule of law, which is maritime law, is now being questioned.

The Supreme Court on Thursday sought the Union government’s response to a plea filed by the son of a woman who was forced into Bangladesh without any verification.

Sahida Fakir, who hails from Gobindapur in West Bengal and had been working in Mumbai for about 20 years, was detained on July 19 on “suspicion of being an illegal immigrant”, her son’s lawyer told Scroll.

The petitioner said that Fakir was kept in custody for more than 100 hours before being produced before a judicial magistrate. He alleged that she was neither informed of the grounds for her detention nor allowed to communicate with her family.

Also read: ‘She had stepped out to buy food’: Another Bengali woman forcibly pushed to Bangladesh from Mumbai

Five days later, she was handed over to the Border Security Force, which allegedly forced her across the international border into Bangladesh, the petition said.

Fakir managed to contact her family on July 31 after being provided temporary shelter in Bangladesh on humanitarian grounds.

The petition stated that her forced deportation violated Articles 14, 21 and 22 of the Constitution, which guarantee equality before the law, protection of life and personal liberty, and safeguards against arbitrary arrest and detention.

It also included several documents cited as evidence of her Indian citizenship, including a voter identity card issued in 2008.

Fakir’s parents were also included in the 2002 electoral roll, a copy of which Scroll has seen. However, during the recent special intensive revision of electoral rolls, Fakir was marked as “under adjudication”. An appeal against her exclusion is pending before the tribunal hearing similar challenges.

In May 2025, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs directed the states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Since the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025, the police in several states, most of them ruled by the BJP, have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asking them to prove that they are Indian citizens.

Several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after the state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: ‘Disappeared’: In Bengal, Muslims picked up from homes in midnight raids, sent to detention centres

After the United States House of Representatives passed legislation that would allow tariffs of up to 100% on India and other countries that purchase Russian oil and gas, New Delhi said it remains committed to ensuring energy security for its people. We “will continue to do so through diversified sourcing and on the basis of evolving market dynamics”, said the Ministry of External Affairs.

The draft law passed on Wednesday said that the tariffs could apply to the five countries that imported the largest volumes of Russian crude oil or natural gas in the 12 months before the law takes effect, if they knowingly continue buying Russian crude oil 30 days after the law is enacted.

India has increased its purchase of Russian oil this year, while New Delhi and Washington negotiate a preliminary trade deal. Read on.

The Delhi High Court asked the police how it could impose a “blanket ban” on protests at Jantar Mantar against caste-based reservations and the University Grants Commission’s January regulations to address discrimination in colleges. The police had granted permission to the Rajput group Karni Sena for a demonstration on September 20, but withdrew it, anticipating that a large crowd would gather.

Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma asked the police how permission could be entirely denied “just because you apprehend that some people will come”.

The police told the court that such action has also been taken earlier because Jantar Mantar “is a very sensitive area”. Read on.

The external affairs ministry said that speculation on social media about some world leaders having fallen ill after attending the BRICS summit in Delhi was misleading. “We caution against such malicious posts on social media platforms,” it said.

The posts came after the South African government on Wednesday said that President Cyril Ramaphosa will not be participating in public events for a few days because of “ill health”.

Some of the posts and reports also cited speculation that Chinese President Xi Jinping had fallen ill during the summit. The claims were based on Xi skipping the leader’s dinner on Saturday and Prime Minister Narendra Modi pausing mid-speech during a session on Sunday to ask the Chinese president “is it okay?” Read on.

At least 75 government schools in Delhi have been directed to light diyas, or earthen lamps, on their premises to celebrate Modi’s birthday. The prime minister turns 76 on Thursday.

The Delhi government has mandated activities that the schools need to conduct for a month till October 17, including competitions for speeches, drawing and making reels, or short vertical videos for social media.

Saurav Das, the co-convener of the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign, alleged that Anganwadi workers in Madhya Pradesh had been directed to light diyas to celebrate Modi’s birthday, “record videos praising him” and government schemes. They have been warned of action if they do not comply with the directive, Das alleged. Read on.

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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.

Based on Sahjeevan’s experience with carbon credits in the region, she added, “The invasion of Neltuma juliflora (Prosopis juliflora) has severely degraded grassland habitats, eroding native flora diversity and threatening endangered wildlife. Given the high per-hectare cost of initial removal and multi-year management, carbon credits offer a self-sustaining financing mechanism for Community Forest Resource Management Committees. Our long-term monitoring suggests systematic removal allowed native seed banks to recover, raising species richness by 10%-12%, further applying finely ground biochar back to grassland soil, reduced EC and pH levels, yielding a 30% increase in productivity. Rooted in strong community governance, this complete lifecycle approach transforms degradedlands into thriving ecosystems, offering a replicable model for invasive management across arid and semi-arid savannas globally.”

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.

Anshul Chhatrapati grew up knowing his father was different.

The name he inherited from him was itself a giveaway – Chhatrapati, a Sanskrit word for sovereign ruler, is most commonly associated with 17th century Maratha king, Chhatrapati Shivaji. That it was being used as a family name in Sirsa, a town in Haryana on the border with Punjab, was highly unusual.

“It was during his college days,” explained Anshul, speaking of his father Ram Chander Chhatrapati, “that one of his teachers had given him the title Chhatrapati for his leadership qualities and passion”.

It was Ram Chander Chhatrapati’s passion for truth and journalism that eventually cost him his life.

In October 2002, two assailants shot at him outside his home in Sirsa. As they fled, one was nabbed by the police. They turned out to be followers of Gurmeet Ram Rahim, a self-styled godman who had set up a religious organisation called the Dera Sacha Sauda, which had grown politically influential on the back of its following among the Dalits of Punjab and Haryana.

Ram Chander Chhatrapati died of his injuries a month later at the age of 52. In the run-up to the murder, he had been relentlessly publishing stories about rape allegations against Ram Rahim.

The godman’s driver later told investigators that he had overheard him instructing his followers to murder the journalist. But the driver dithered in court, taking years to eventually stand by his testimony. It took 17 years for Ram Rahim to be convicted for Ram Chander Chhatrapati’s murder.

In March, the Punjab and Haryana High Court overturned the 2019 conviction, taking the view that the driver’s word could not be relied upon.

Anshul Chhatrapati is unfazed by the setback. He has filed an appeal in the Supreme Court, which will hear his petition in November, just months before Punjab votes in the state assembly elections. Behind bars, Ram Rahim has continued to wield political influence: in the nine years he has spent in jail after being convicted on rape charges in 2017, he has been released on parole 17 times, often coinciding with elections.

“We are not going to stop,” said Anshul Chhatrapati. “The struggle is not over.”

It is a struggle that has reshaped his life. He was in college when his father was murdered. Pursuing justice through the legal system meant he could not attend classes and eventually had to drop out. Fighting the powerful godman came with its own risks: an armed guard of Haryana Police shadowed him for decades. The security cover extended to his entire family.

“My children haven’t had a normal childhood,” said Anshul Chhatrapati, now in his mid-40s. “For a better part of their childhood, going out for them only meant heading to school and back.”

But he has no regrets. “My father would have been very proud of me,” he said. “This struggle has made a man out of me.”

With this, the Dera Sacha Sauda chief has exhausted his annual entitlement of 10 weeks of parole and three weeks of furlough.https://t.co/L0wJsQicbG pic.twitter.com/jJM4FBaVdi

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) August 25, 2026

A fearless journalist

Like thousands of families in North India, Anshul Chhatrapati’s family traces its roots to Pakistan. After Partition, his grandfather had tried to build a new life. “Once he settled in India, the refugees were allotted agricultural land to derive their livelihood,” he recalled. “At that time, Sirsa’s land was not cultivable at all but our ancestors had no choice.”

Born in 1950, Ram Chander Chhatrapati, however, was a non-conformist. He did not have much interest in farming. “His true calling was writing and activism,” Anshul recalled. “He loved reading newspaper editorials, Munshi Premchand and Lenin.”

After he completed his college education in Haryana, Chhatrapati moved to Delhi. “My father spent quite a long time in Delhi with Swami Agnivesh, a follower of Arya Samaj,” Anshul said. The Arya Samaj is a Hindu reform movement. His parents felt he was wasting time and brought him back home to get married, said Anshul. “They felt it was the only way to make him serious about life and his share of land.”

After his marriage, Chhatrapati studied law and began practising at Sirsa district court. The family was also supported by the income from his share of the agricultural land. “But he was not satisfied being a lawyer,” said Anshul.

In 2002, Ram Chander Chhatrapati quit the legal profession and revived an old newspaper registered in his name under a new title – an evening daily called Poora Sach, the complete truth.

An anonymous letter

In May 2002, a three-page letter written to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was the prime minister then, began circulating in Sirsa. A female disciple of Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh had written the letter alleging that he had raped her. The letter, which was also copied to senior officials in Punjab and Haryana, mentioned that she was not his only victim.

On May 30 that year, Chhatrapati published a two-column front page story about the letter in his newspaper. He did not mention the name of the Dera where the incident had taken place or the guru accused of rape, but he followed the story very closely. Anshul said the anonymous letter had been published by national newspapers but there had been no follow-up reports on it.

Lekh Raj Dhot, Chhatrapati’s friend from his lawyer days, said the journalist had a “passionate” temperament. Everyone told Chhatrapati not to write against the Dera as they could harm him, but that did not deter him, said Dhot. “His psyche was different. There was no fear in him.”

Panicked by the circulation of the letter, there were numerous incidents around Sirsa that year where Dera followers targeted men accused of circulating the letter. “A couple of Xerox shops, accused of making copies of the letter, were vandalised by Dera followers,” recalled Anshul. “My father continued to file stories on these incidents but we had no idea that he had been receiving threats from the Dera henchmen.”

In July 2002, Chhatrapati wrote to the Sirsa superintendent of police, detailing the intimidation he was facing at the hands of Dera. “He mentioned a phone call in which he was threatened and how some suspicious people outside his office had created an atmosphere of terror for him and his staff,” said Anshul.

In September 2002, the Punjab and Haryana High Court took cognisance of the anonymous letter and sought a report from the district sessions judge of Sirsa. In a report to the high court, Sirsa district judge MS Sular recommended a probe by a central investigation agency. On September 24, 2002, the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered the the Central Bureau of Investigation to investigate the rape allegations.

According to Anshul, his father had managed to get the copies of the correspondence between the two judges. “He filed stories on all these developments.”

The Dera Sacha Sauda soon approached the high court, seeking a stay on the directions for a CBI probe, but the court dismissed its application. “On October 23, 2002, my father published a story about that,” said Anshul. “The next evening, he was shot five times outside our home by two men from Dera Sacha Sauda.” Chatrapati died a month later in a hospital in Delhi.

Anshul recalled his father as someone who could not look away from wrongdoing, even if he knew the consequences could be harmful. “He used to tell his friends that if someone ever dared to hurl anything at him, it wouldn’t be a shoe but a bullet,” said Anshul. “And he will take that bullet on his chest.”

The fight for CBI investigation

In its initial statement on Chhatrapati being shot at, the Sirsa police had described the incident as a “property dispute.”

However, the police had to discard that theory immediately. “There’s a police post near our house and one of the shooters had run towards the post in panic,” recalled Anshul. “He ran directly into the policemen who were rushing towards the commotion.”

The shooter was identified as Kuldeep Singh, a Dera follower from Faridkot Punjab. The other shooter was his cousin Nirmal Singh, who was arrested a few days later. “The police recovered a walkie-talkie from their possession which was registered in the name of Dera Sacha Sauda and a pistol which was licensed in the name of Krishan Lal, a manager at the Dera,” Anshul added.

According to Anshul, the arrest of Kuldeep Singh on the spot was a fundamental piece of evidence in establishing the role of the in Dera Sacha Sauda his father’s murder. “We would have cried all our life about the Dera’s involvement but who would have trusted us?”

All the three accused whose names surfaced in the preliminary investigations were arrested by the Sirsa police, but Chhatrapati’s family was not satisfied. “The Sirsa police had avoided naming the Dera chief as the main conspirator behind the murder even when my father had given a statement on his death bed while being hospitalised,” said Anshul.

In early 2003, the family filed a petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation probe.

Another development helped Chhatrapati’s family.

Three months before Chhatrapati’s killing, Ranjit Singh, a Dera follower and former manager of Ram Rahim, was shot dead on July 10, 2002, at his native village in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district. Ranjit Singh’s family had also approached the Punjab and Haryana High Court, demanding a CBI inquiry in his murder. “The high court clubbed both these petitions together.”

On November 10, 2003, the High Court ordered the CBI to investigate the journalist’s murder case anew. The CBI registered a first information report in Chhatrapati’s murder on December 9, 2003.

But the CBI could not start its investigation as some female disciples of the Dera Sacha Sauda challenged the High Court’s order in the Supreme Court. In 2004, the Supreme Court stayed the high court’s CBI probe order . “It took the Supreme Court a year to dispose of the Dera’s petition and uphold the high court’s order.”

This would become a permanent feature in the more than two-decade-long battle to pin down the role of Ram Rahim in Chhatrapati’s murder. “From day one, we wanted the investigation agency to go to the root of the murder which was the Dera chief Gurmeet Singh,” said Anshul. For Chhatrapati’s family, that meant a constant vigil on the developments in the case. “Every time we felt there were attempts to shield him, we approached the court. Once the court ruled in our favour, the sect would approach the Supreme Court.”

While these legal skirmishes took a lot of time and frustrated the family, they did not give up. “How could we face the world if Chhatrapati’s family gave up the fight against evil?”

Chasing a witness

In July 2007, the Central Bureau of Investigation filed a chargesheet against Dera chief Ram Rahim, his manager Krishan Lal and the two shooters, Kuldeep Singh and Nirmal Singh. The agency charged all four with murder and criminal conspiracy. Nirmal Singh and Krishan Lal were also charged under the Arms Act.

In its separate chargesheet filed the same year, the agency established that the Dera chief suspected Ranjit Singh of circulating the anonymous letter which accused the godman of raping female disciples in the sect’s premises. This was the same letter which Chhatrapati had written about extensively in his newspaper between May 2002 until his murder in October, 2002.

A key witness who helped the CBI pin down Ram Rahim was Khatta Singh, a long-time driver of the self-styled godman.

Khatta Singh had recorded a statement before the agency in 2007 in which he deposed that he had witnessed Gurmeet Singh ordering Krishan Lal, Nirmal Singh and Kuldeep Singh to “eliminate” Chhatrapati so that “he may not write against Dera Sacha Sauda in future.” Singh had recorded the same statement under section 164 of the Code of Criminal Procedure before a judicial magistrate in Chandigarh.

This testimony was crucial but Khatta Singh turned hostile during the trial in 2012. According to the CBI, Khatta Singh was under “tremendous pressure” due to “threats.”

Khatta Singh also happened to be a witness in the murder of Dera manager Ranjit Singh which was being investigated separately by the CBI.

It was only after the conviction of Gurmeet Singh for raping his two female disciples and subsequent imprisonment in August 2017 that Khatta Singh changed his mind.

Nearly three weeks later, Khatta Singh moved an application before the CBI court in Panchkula, seeking to be re-examined as a witness in the trial of Chhatrapati’s murder. However, the trial court dismissed Singh’s application, forcing him to move the Punjab and Haryana High Court in 2018.

In January 2019, the Chhatrapati’s family found a semblance of justice. The CBI special court convicted Ram Rahim and three others for the journalist’s murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment.

Seven years later, the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted Ram Rahim in the journalist’s murder case in March. The court said “absolutely no reliance can be placed on a witness like Khatta Singh”. It observed that Khatta Singh had chosen to stay silent for a number of years after the incident and “kept on tossing from one side to the other like a ping pong ball.”

Earlier, in May 2024, the High Court had also acquitted Ram Rahim in the murder case of his former manager and follower Ranjit Singh. The Dera chief, however, remains in jail, serving a 20-year-long imprisonment for rape.

Dera Sacha Sauda Chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh granted parole to meet his ailing mother (reports 'The Indian Express').

He is currently undergoing a 20-year jail sentence on charges of raping two of his women disciples and murder of a journalist, Ram Chander Chhatrapati. pic.twitter.com/SVnkyb2XKO

— Live Law (@LiveLawIndia) May 21, 2021

‘Inspired by father’s sacrifice’

Ram Chander Chhatrapati was survived by his wife, two sons and two daughters. As the eldest child, it fell upon Anshul to take charge of the legal battle against his father’s murderers. Anshul was just like any other college student then, but his father’s death inspired him. “The struggle for justice became the purpose of my life,” he said.

“All my life, every stranger felt like a threat to me,” said Anshul. “But that never stopped me from going out and facing the world.”

“The common perception is that law took its course and eventually punished the culprit,” he continued. But the reality was different. “From day one, there were attempts to keep away Dera’s involvement in the murder. That’s why we had to fight from the very first step and follow the case’s development obsessively.”

This left him with no time to finish college. “During all these years, I had tried to restart my education but I couldn’t continue because there would be a development in the case and I had to act accordingly, meet lawyers and approach courts, etc,” he noted.

The family’s agricultural land proved to be a safety net. Anshul earns his living from farming even though he looks like a corporate employee, dressed in stylish clothes and shiny shoes.

A soft-spoken man, he joked as he wondered what his life might have been like, had his father not been murdered. “I was recently telling my daughter that we both should pursue our graduation together,” he chuckled.

At a post office in Assam, Bandana Devi, has found herself doing a job that has little to do with letters, parcels or money.

Since December 2025, Devi has been working as an accredited social eye care worker, testing the eyesight of people who come into the post office. She is part of a pilot project by the nonprofit VisionSpring Foundation, in partnership with India Post, to bring basic vision care closer to people who may have limited access to eye clinics.

“There have been a lot of footfalls since I began working on the programme,” said Devi. “People here suffer from short-sightedness and vision problems. I have seen over 3,000 people, and many are happy after coming here.”

Easier to reach a post office

The post office seems like an unlikely place to get an eye test. But for people in parts of Assam, the post office can be considerably easier to reach than a hospital or an eye clinic.

The early results of the pilot project indicate that basic eye care is a significantly unmet need. Five post offices are being used to screen eyesight and provide reading glasses to those who need them.

As of July, nearly 9,000 people had been screened. Around 72% – 6,421 people – were found to have presbyopia, which is the age-related difficulty in focusing on things close up, and were provided with eyeglasses.

Eighty-two per cent of those who received spectacles were wearing them for the first time. Anjali Deka, 47, who runs a small tea stall, said, “Since I started wearing them, life has changed so much.” It was a liberating experience for her. “I am able to help my children with their homework and one of them has got over 97% in her exams,” said Deka.

Romesh Chandra Sharma, a local priest, knew something was wrong with his sight. “My vision was dipping and things looked blurry,” he said. Then he visited the post office to get his eyes tested. “I can read my religious texts better now and it is proving a boon,” he said.

These experiences point to a problem that can easily go unnoticed: people often live with deteriorating near vision without seeking help.

In poorer households, an eye examination may not be a priority. Visiting a clinic can involve travel, time away from work, and the cost of spectacles. If a vision problem develops gradually, people may simply adjust.

Assam’s pilot project is trying to remove some of those barriers with a screening service where many people are frequent visitors. “We chose post offices because they are the most trusted address across India,” says Anshu Taneja, s managing director, India, at VisionSpring Foundation. “People in Assam may have never seen an eye doctor but they have been to their post offices several times.”

Millions may be living with blurred vision

India’s postal network gives the experiment considerable reach.

There are nearly 165,000 post offices across the country, a majority in rural areas and remote villages. Apart from mail, the local post office is also where people collect pensions, send money, make savings deposits and access a range of government services. Can that existing network now help close a gap in basic healthcare?

The financial circumstances of the people reached by the pilot underline why access matters. The average monthly household income among Assam’s beneficiaries is approximately Rs 7,000, while 41% come from households earning less than Rs 5,000 a month, according to VisionSpring Foundation which relied on data from the state’s Socio Economic and Caste Census from 2015.

On those incomes, even a relatively inexpensive pair of glasses can compete with immediate household needs.

Assam is a useful setting for the experiment because of its large tea industry. Thousands of people depend on tea gardens for their livelihoods, and some tea workers have been among those coming to the participating post offices for eye tests. Tea picking requires workers to distinguish between leaves, often while working for long periods. Declining near vision can make that more difficult.

Clement Songate, a senior social sector professional involved in the project, said tea garden workers are among those using the service, although the pilot does not yet have separate figures for them.

“Tea pickers are an important constituency,” said Songate. “We do have post offices where there are tea gardens, and some of the workers do come to the post offices and use the service.”

Expanding the programme

At the Baihata post office, 35 km from the state capital, postmaster Putesh Kumar Deka has watched the eye-testing service become part of the activity around his counters. “People come here for all kinds of postal work, and now they are also coming here to have their eyesight checked and get their glasses,” he said. “They are really happy with the service.”

The first phase of the Assam project has established that there is a need for such service. The next challenge is whether this model can continue. The organisations involved are looking at a possible incentive or paid model for every pair of glasses dispensed, as they consider how the service could be sustained.

In Bangladesh, VisionSpring Foundation’s research found that while providing reading glasses to low-income workers, they associated spectacles as something accessible to people with higher incomes. In Uganda, it has been working with health authorities and other partners to train community-level workers to identify and address presbyopia.

Now, it remains to be seen if India’s postal system can make basic vision care a part of its vast and busy network.

Murali Krishnan is an independent journalist.

The Supreme Court on Thursday told the Tamil Nadu government to change its “mindset” on teaching Hindi in the state’s schools while hearing a case about setting up Union government-run Navodaya schools in every district, Live Law reported.

Tamil Nadu has repeatedly resisted the establishment of the centrally funded schools, which come under the Union Ministry of Education, arguing that the Navodaya model is in conflict with the state’s two-language policy.

Political parties in Tamil Nadu have long opposed attempts to introduce Hindi as a third language under the three-language formula.

The three-language policy refers to teaching students English, Hindi and the native language of a state. It was introduced in the first National Education Policy in 1968, and was retained in the new policy from 2020.

During the hearing on Thursday, Nagarathna said that “you have to change your mindset, it can’t be that Hindi will not be taught in the soil of Tamil Nadu,” Bar and Bench reported.

The bench said that “having something in addition will not bring down your standards” and argued that Navodaya schools would instead “enhance the high standards” of education in the state.

“If Navodaya schools were going to lower the standard of education in Tamil Nadu we would have said that irrespective of what you would have said,” the court said.

The bench added that “people in Chennai should not alienate Delhi and vice-versa”.

In 2017, the Madras High Court directed the state government to set up Navodaya schools in every district, holding that doing so would not violate the Tamil Nadu Tamil Learning Act.

The state government approached the Supreme Court, arguing that education falls within the state’s domain and that the Navodaya school model was incompatible with Tamil Nadu’s two-language policy.

In December, the Supreme Court directed the state government to identify the land required to establish the schools within six weeks. The state filed an application seeking to recall this order.

On Thursday, the court refused to rescind the order and granted the state government three more months to comply.

The matter will be heard next on December 14.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Delhi High Court on Thursday asked the police how it could impose a “blanket ban” on protests at Jantar Mantar against caste-based reservations in jobs and education and the University Grants Commission’s January regulations to address discrimination in colleges, reported Live Law.

The police had earlier granted permission to the Rajput group Karni Sena for a protest at Jantar Mantar on September 20, the petitioner told the court. However, it withdrew the permission on Tuesday, apprehending that a bigger crowd than what was permitted would turn up.

Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma asked the police how permission could be entirely denied “just because you apprehend that some people will come”.

Sharma said the police could “put any restrictions or conditions” and that the protesters would “be there only for a few hours”.

Appearing for the Delhi Police, Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma said that Jantar Mantar “is a very sensitive area”. He added that “whenever there is a concentration in Jantar Mantar it affects the entire central government”, Bar and Bench reported.

“Others also we have refused,” said Chetan Sharma. “It is not that they have been singled out. The amount of likes and social media dissemination is so much, the executive thinks it will overspill.”

The court then asked if the protest could be allowed at a different venue, which the police said it would consider.

The Kshatriya Karni Sena had initially sought permission to hold a demonstration at Jantar Mantar on September 6. However, the Delhi Police had denied the request on August 28, citing preparations for the BRICS Summit.

The group approached the High Court against the refusal. On September 3, the court asked the organisers to consider changing the date, following which they decided to gather on September 20.

What do the UGC rules say?

The 2026 University Grants Commission Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions Regulations required institutes to set up special committees, helplines and monitoring teams to address complaints, particularly from members of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.

The commission had in 2012 first released equity rules for higher education institutes, which required them to set up Equal Opportunity Cells and Anti-Discrimination Officers. However, those rules did not provide for action against institutions that did not comply with them.

In contrast, the 2026 rules required the commission to set up a monitoring committee to oversee their implementation.

Institutes that do not comply with the regulations could be barred from participating in the commission’s schemes, offering degree programmes and online courses, and could be removed from the list of institutes eligible to receive central grants.

The rules had led to protests by upper-caste students who argued that it could lead to discrimination against them. The protesters contended that the rules were biased against students from the general category as they did not provide for measures against “false complaints”.

On January 29, the Supreme Court stayed by the rules, observing that their provisions were “prima facie vague and capable of misuse”.

Edited by Sneha.

The Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday said that speculation on social media that world leaders had fallen ill after attending the BRICS summit in Delhi was “misleading”.

Sharing screenshots by accounts claiming that “multiple” or “numerous” leaders had become unwell after they attended the summit, the ministry described the claims as “fake” and misleading. “We caution against such malicious posts on social media platforms,” it said.

The summit was held on Saturday and Sunday.

Some of the posts on Thursday that made the claims had been viewed more than 7.7 million times on social media platform X as of 3 pm on Thursday.

The posts came after the South African government on Wednesday said that President Cyril Ramaphosa will not be participating in public events because of “ill health”.

Ramaphosa’s office said that he had returned from the BRICS summit in Delhi on Monday and “has been advised by his medical team to rest and recover”.

However, the South African government did not state the nature of the illness and whether it was believed to be linked to Ramaphosa having attended the summit.

Some of the posts and reports also cited speculation that Chinese President Xi Jinping had fallen ill during the summit. The claims were based on Xi skipping the leader’s dinner on Saturday and Prime Minister Narendra Modi pausing mid-speech during a session on Sunday to ask the Chinese president “is it okay?”

However, videos posted on Thursday purportedly showed Modi asking the question as Xi’s staff helped him with his audio translation device.

No other leader who attended the summit is reported to have fallen ill.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

India on Wednesday rejected the “so-called” Pakistan-China Boundary Joint Commission, saying that it was constituted “without any legal basis”.

The commission was operationalised earlier in the day, with its inaugural meeting in Islamabad. It originates from a 2013 agreement between Pakistan and China to manage their boundary.

After the meeting, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated that the meeting had set the stage for “enhanced cooperation in border management, joint border surveys, trade flows and people-to-people connectivity”.

In response to queries about the development, India’s Ministry of External Affairs stated that instead of engaging in “such theatrics”, Pakistan should “immediately vacate the areas under its illegal and forcible occupation”.

It asserted that there was no boundary between Pakistan and China.

“Our position on this matter is clear and consistent,” said the ministry. “We have never recognised the so-called ‘China-Pakistan Boundary Agreement’ of 1963 and have consistently maintained that it is illegal and invalid.”

The agreement was signed on March 2, 1963, to demarcate the border between China’s Xinjiang region and the territory in Gilgit-Baltistan, part of Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

As part of the agreement, Pakistan had ceded approximately 5,180 sq km of territory known as the Shaksgam Valley to China. New Delhi has consistently rejected the agreement, maintaining that the Shaksgam Valley is Indian territory under illegal occupation.

India has also opposed the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as part of it passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.

New Delhi reiterated this on Wednesday, saying that the “Union Territories of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh have been, are and will always remain integral and inalienable parts of India”.

“Pakistan has no locus standi to enter into arrangements concerning Indian territory under its illegal and forcible occupation,” it said.

The ministry added that it “resolutely opposes and rejects” any attempts to “legitimise illegal occupation, impinging on India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Thursday granted two weeks to Bajrang Dal member Dara Singh to challenge the Odisha government’s decision rejecting the petition for his early release, ANI reported. Singh is serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons.

The director general of prisons and correctional services and the authorities at Kendujhar Jail had earlier recommended his release on grounds of good behaviour. Singh has spent more than 26 years in prison.

At a meeting on August 31, the state sentence review board decided against Singh’s early release stating that it could lead to communal disturbance in the area.

The board also noted that on August 15, a group of 200 to 250 persons associated with Dara Sena had assembled outside the Kendujhar district jail in connection with the proposed release of the convict, during which “provocative slogans” were shouted.

Dara Sena – named after Singh – is an outfit that campaigns for his release.

On Thursday, a Supreme Court bench was informed of the state government’s decision. The court will hear the matter next after three weeks.

Staines and his minor sons were burnt to death by a mob led by Singh in Odisha in January 1999 when they were sleeping in a jeep. The attackers had accused the missionary of illegal religious conversion.

Singh was among the 14 persons convicted in 2003 by a special Central Bureau of Investigation court. He was sentenced to death by the CBI court, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2005 by the Orissa High Court.

The Supreme Court had upheld Singh’s conviction in 2011.

In his remission plea, the Bajrang Dal member had argued that he should be considered for early release as he is above the age of 60 and has been in jail for more than 24 years. Singh told the court that he regretted his actions, which the petition described as having been in the context of “protecting the nation”.

He also told the court that he had never been granted parole.

In April 2025, Mahendra Hembram, another person convicted in the case, was released from a jail in Odisha on the grounds of “good behaviour”.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday said that “callous and criminal conduct” had led to the collapse of the five-storey building in the Satya Niketan area, in which seven persons were killed, reported Bar and Bench.

“It’s not an ordinary incident of any mishap,” said a bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Kari, referring to an article in The Indian Express that detailed why five of the students who were killed had come to Delhi.

The boys – all aged between 17 years and 19 years – were natives of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. They were enrolled in colleges of Delhi University.

The High Court said that the students had Delhi “with lots of hopes and dreams”, reported Bar and Bench.

“They came from small towns,” said the bench. “All of that has been shattered by such a callous and criminal conduct on the part of...Who doesn’t know the problem of hostel in the city?”

The bench added that students were “flocking to Delhi for higher education” and this was not a new phenomenon.

“It has been happening for 20 to 25 years in the hope that they will build their career,” it remarked. “See what has happened.”

The court was hearing a public interest litigation about the collapse of the building. It listed the matter for September 25, when other cases about the incident will be heard.

The building that collapsed was reportedly 40 to 50 years old, and repair work was underway in the basement when it collapsed.

The owners allegedly knew the building could not bear the weight of four additional floors and still leased it out as paying guest accommodation, The Indian Express quoted an unidentified police officer as having alleged on Saturday.

The building’s owner, Hari Ram, his son Mahesh, his wife Urmila and labour contractor Saroj have been arrested. Sudhanshu, who ran the “Hostel Daze” paying guest accommodation in the building, has also been held.

The police are investigating whether Hostel Daze operators had conducted due diligence to ensure that the building was safe. They are also examining the rent agreement under which the accommodation was let out to the tenants.

The agreement stated that the operators would not be responsible for any “casualties or risk” to tenants.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: Why social media thinks government intentionally slowed internet after Delhi building collapse

Maratha quota activist Manoj Jarange-Patil on Thursday called off his hunger strike, but warned the Maharashtra government that he would launch a protest in Mumbai if his demands for reservations for the community were not considered within three months, PTI reported.

Jarange-Patil had been on an indefinite hunger strike since August 29 to press for the issuance of Kunbi caste certificates to eligible members of the Maratha community to help them avail reservations in government jobs and education.

The Kunbis form a sub-caste within the Maratha community. They are included in the Other Backward Classes.

Jarange-Patil’s announcement on Thursday came after he held talks with a government delegation comprising two ministers, legislators and officials in Beed district. The activist had halted in Beed while on his way to Mumbai.

The delegation informed Jarange-Patil about the step the government had initiated.

This came after Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said that the state government would not tolerate intimidating tactics and questioned the timing of the agitation during the Ganesh festival.

On Saturday, Jarange-Patil announced that he and his supporters will begin a march to Mumbai to hold an indefinite hunger strike at Azad Maidan from September 19. The announcement came on the same day that the Bombay High Court refused to issue an order against it.

In August 2025, Jarange-Patil and his supporters had launched an indefinite hunger strike in Mumbai to reiterate his demand for quotas for the Marathas under the Other Backward Classes category.

The High Court had observed at the time that Mumbai “had been practically brought to a standstill” because of the protests.

Jarange-Patil had broken his fast on September 2, 2025, after the Maharashtra administration issued a government resolution to give Kunbi status to Marathas of Marathwada.

On Saturday, the activist began the fresh hunger strike, alleging that the state government had failed to honour assurances given in September 2025 and again during his protest in May this year.

Quota demand

The Maratha community’s long-standing demand for reservations in education and government jobs resurfaced in 2023 with protests led by Jarange-Patil. The movement witnessed violence, suicides and the resignations of legislators.

In February 2024, the Maharashtra legislature passed a bill allowing for the creation of a 10% quota in government jobs and education for the Marathas. This would be in addition to the state’s 52% reservation quota, which includes a 10% quota for the Economically Weaker Sections.

The introduction of the 10% quota is similar to the 16% quota for Marathas under the Other Backward Classes category that was introduced in 2018 by the state government at the time comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party and the undivided Shiv Sena.

That decision was blocked by the Supreme Court in 2021, citing the 50% cap on a state’s total reservations that the court had ordered in 1992. The court said that there were no “exceptional circumstances” or “extraordinary situation” in Maharashtra for the state to breach the limit on quotas.

Jarange-Patil has insisted that reservations for Marathas be given under the Other Backward Classes category, on the grounds that the separate quota exceeds the constitutional ceiling of 50% and would likely be struck down by the judiciary.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

At least 75 government schools in Delhi have been directed to light diyas, or earthen lamps, on their premises on Thursday to celebrate Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s birthday, The Wire reported.

The programme is among several events planned in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states to mark Modi’s birthday on Thursday.

The earthen lamps will be lit at schools designated under the Chief Minister Schools of High Relevance and Innovation scheme, the news outlet reported. The schools were provided the lamps and other material by the administration. The school authorities have been told to record videos of the lamps being lit and upload them on a Google Drive.

Teachers have been asked to visit the homes of students who topped the Class 10 exam with earthen lamps and to give them blessings, The Wire reported.

Modi turns 76 on Thursday.

The Delhi government has mandated activities that the schools need to conduct for a month till October 17. The activities include competitions for speeches, drawing and making reels, or short vertical videos for social media.

The BJP governments in several states describe the month-long celebrations as a “Seva Sankalp Abhiyan”, or a resolution for public service. Similar events have been held in past years.

It was unclear whether only government schools under the CM SHRI scheme will carry out the activities or all government schools in Delhi.

#WATCH | Siliguri, West Bengal: On the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s 76th birthday, schoolchildren in Siliguri celebrated the day in a unique way, dressed like PM Modi and wearing masks featuring the Prime Minister. The students cut a birthday cake and took part in… pic.twitter.com/rtefGklVlq

— ANI (@ANI) September 17, 2026

Saurav Das, the co-convener of the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign, alleged that Anganwadi workers in Madhya Pradesh had been directed to light diyas to celebrate Modi’s birthday, “record videos praising him” and government schemes.

They have been warned of action if they do not comply with the directive, Das alleged on social media.

“If BJP governments had spent this energy addressing the actual problems Anganwadi workers face – poor pay (Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000), crushing workloads, vacancies, no social security or healthcare, and centres functioning out of crumbling buildings – then perhaps these women wouldn’t need to be ‘ordered’ to praise anyone,” Das said.

If the government had “genuinely transformed their lives, their gratitude will come naturally,” Das said.

He added that governments were “focussed on manufacturing gratitude” for Modi through public relations activities.

#WATCH | Uttar Pradesh | 'Vedpathi Batuks' studying to become Vedic priests play 'Damrus' to mark PM Narendra Modi's 76th birthday, at Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi pic.twitter.com/XexvAWKqmL

— ANI (@ANI) September 17, 2026

Government events mark Modi’s birthday

In Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain, more than 25 lakh earthen lamps will be lit to mark Modi’s birthday, PTI reported. About 30,000 persons will participate in the event, the district collector said.

The Delhi government will also organise the lighting of 1.2 lakh lamps at Kartavya Path in the national capital during an “Aashirwad Ka Diya”, or lamp of blessings, event. A yagya, a Hindu ritual, was performed by Chief Minister Rekha Gupta at the Khatu Shyam Dham in Delhi’s Alipur area on the occasion of the prime minister’s birthday.

In Haryana’s Rohtak, 10,000 lamps will be lit at the state-run Pandit Bhagwat Dayal Sharma University of Health Sciences, The Times of India reported. This comes even as patients complained about delays of up to 10 days to get ultrasound tests done at the facility, the newspaper reported.

The Times of India on Wednesday quoted the director of the institute as saying that it does not have enough staff to operate the ultrasound machines.

#WATCH | Delhi: CM Rekha Gupta performs hawan at the Shree Khatu Shyam Mandir on GT Karnal Road on the occasion of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 76th birthday. pic.twitter.com/ANTidY8a8I

— ANI (@ANI) September 17, 2026

More than 88 lakh lamps will be lit at 18,500 locations across Gujarat on Thursday as part of the event Ashirwad No Divdo, or lamp of blessings, to mark Modi's birthday, The Times of India reported. The earthen lamps will be lit in the evening to coincide with the temple aartis, a Hindu ritual of worship.

Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel will attend an event at Ahmedabad’s Kankaria lake where 1.2 lakh lamps will be lit.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read: How BJP governments, companies celebrated PM Modi’s 75th birthday

Two suspected militants were killed in a gunfight with security personnel in Jammu and Kashmir’s Udhampur district on Wednesday, the Indian Army said.

The Army’s White Knight Corps said that Operation Sohan was launched after inputs indicating the presence of militants in the Brattal area.

The security forces detected suspicious movement after a search operation was launched.

The militants opened fire at the security personnel during the search operation, prompting the forces to retaliate that triggered the gunfight in which the two militants were killed, The Indian Express quoted unidentified officers as saying.

They added that arms and ammunition were recovered from the militants. The process of establishing their identities and affiliations to militant groups is underway.

The counter-terrorism operation in “hostile weather, difficult terrain and poor visibility” involved personnel from the White Knight Corps, Jammu and Kashmir Police and the Central Reserve Police Force, the Army said.

It added that the search operation was still in progress and security forces remained deployed to track and counter any remaining threat.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.