The Cockroach Janta Party political campaign on Friday said it will launch a march to Delhi and hold a protest at Jantar Mantar on October 10 if Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar does not resign.

The announcement came after protests by several groups in Delhi and Mumbai earlier in the day. The demonstrators were demanding action against Kumar, and raised concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

“If Delhi Police tries to stop us, wherever they stop us will become our Jantar Mantar,” Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the political campaign, said on social media. “Ours will be a peaceful andolan.”

The Cockroach Janta Party said that “it is up to the government and the Delhi Police whether they respect our right to peaceful protest or repeat the brutality we witnessed on July 20”.

The campaign said that its protest is a fight to save democracy, and called on “every citizen who wants free and fair elections” to join.

On July 20, during the youth protests against alleged irregularities in the conduct of competitive examinations, several demonstrators were injured after the security personnel in Delhi used lathis, fired tear gas and pellet guns to disperse the crowd.

The Left parties and their affiliated groups, including the All India Students’ Association, said that they will continue their protest at Jantar Mantar on Saturday.

The protests on Friday

On Friday, more than 700 protesters and political leaders were detained by the police in Delhi.

Those detained near Jantar Mantar included Aam Aadmi Party’s Atishi and Saurabh Bharadwaj, and Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha. All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora was also detained. All persons detained were reportedly released later in the day.

Delhi Police detained several protesters on their way to Jantar Mantar, where they planned to protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and demand his resignation. Deputy Commissioner of Police Sachin Sharma said that “permission has not been granted for any type”… pic.twitter.com/Nk8fAEhRkP

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded, The Hindu reported.

The authorities on Friday also closed the entry and exit at 12 Delhi Metro stations, including Lok Kalyan Marg near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk in Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the protest site. Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, INA, Chawri Bazaar, New Delhi and Barakhamba Road were also affected.

The Cockroach Janta Party also held a protest in Mumbai against Kumar. The campaign had sought permission to demonstrate at Shivaji Park, but the Mumbai Police denied it. Dipke had said on Monday that the campaign would launch a “jail bharo andolan”, or mass voluntary arrest movement.

As hundreds hit the street to demand resignation of CEC #GyaneshKumar, @sighyush reports on how the Delhi Police is detaining protesters from the street that leads to #JantarMantar. pic.twitter.com/qj4ddPP9MK

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Demands for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

“We are living in Mumbai for decades, so why is our right to vote being questioned?” asks a woman whose family members' names were deleted from the voter roll during the recently concluded Spcial Intensive Revision in Maharashtra.@knowleena reports from #Shivajipark in #Mumbai pic.twitter.com/mZ9024nJwX

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: ‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes

The Election Commission has directed poll panels in states where the special intensive revision of electoral rolls has been completed to conduct an exercise for reinstating eligible voters who may have been wrongly removed from the voter lists.

The directive on Thursday came amid political parties, activist and civil society groups raising concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the SIR. They have also been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the alleged irregularities in the conduct of elections.

The poll panel announced that booth-level officers will compare the electoral roll prepared after the revision of voter lists to those before the exercise and identify persons whose names “were there in the pre-SIR roll but who are not included” in the new rolls.

The Election Commission also directed the booth-level officers to undertake house-to-house survey of voters identified during the process, ascertain their current status and facilitate their enrolment through Form 6 wherever the person is found to be eligible. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

The booth-level officers may cover at least 20 to 25 voters in a week “so as to complete this exercise within a period of about one month”, the poll panel said.

The officers will share the list of new enrolments with the booth-level agents of political parties, the Election Commission said.

The electoral registration officer will act “as deemed fit” in these cases.

At the end of the exercise, booth-wise lists would be shared by the electoral registration officer with the representatives of political parties, giving them a further opportunity for enrolment of any voters who have been left out.

The poll panel said that booth-level camps would also be organised to facilitate the submission of applications for such enrolments.

The Opposition has said that 13.8 crore voters had been removed from the voter lists of 31 states and Union Territories so far. This accounts for 14.6% of India’s 94.7 crore voters before the exercise began in 2025.

‘A criminal offence’, says former poll chief

After the drive was announced, former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi said that Form 6 cannot be filled by deleted voters as it is only for new voters.

“All those who have been forced to fill it have committed a criminal offence carrying one year prison,” he said on social media. “EC officials who forced them are abetters to crime. This press note shows ECI’s abetment!”

On September 26, the Election Commission had said that the old version of Form 6 will be used in periods when the SIR is not underway. It said that the declaration attached to Form 6 for the voter roll revision exercise had been upheld by the Supreme Court.

This came three days after The Indian Express reported on September 23 that two of the Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

One of their objections pertained to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6.

The new form asked applicants to state whether they or their parents or grandparents were part of the last special intensive revision of electoral rolls. Although the new declaration is not marked as mandatory, applicants cannot submit the online form without filling it.

Joshi and Sandhu had objected to the change, saying that it could not be made without amending the rules. Section 28 of the 1950 Representation of the People Act says that only the Union government can amend the rules governing electoral forms, including Form 6.

On Friday, the Cockroach Janta Party, political parties, activists and civil society groups held protests in Delhi and Mumbai demanding action against Kumar, and raised concerns about the functioning of the poll panel. More than 700 protesters and political leaders were reportedly detained by the Delhi Police.

Also read: ‘Delhi was a warzone, Mumbai a concert’: Protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar strike contrasting notes

Musicians stage a unique protest at Mumbai's Shivaji Park demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar's resignation.

Credit: Naresh Fernandes (@tajmahalfoxtrot) pic.twitter.com/QKAxxtfeWL

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial
• Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court

On 4 August 1924, Sitaram Keshav Bole moved a resolution in the Bombay Legislative Council granting untouchables access to public water bodies, wells, dharmashalas, schools, courts and hospitals. Three years later, it was this resolution that was invoked by BR Ambedkar, a lawyer who would go on to lead India’s Dalit rights movement, as he led thousands of so-called untouchables to Mahad to drink water from a public water tank that had been barred to them.

The Mahad satyagraha was a critical moment in the anti-caste movement – a movement whose young leader, Ambedkar, had been mentored by Bole since 1907.

Just over a decade later, in 1938, Bole – a man who had worked for decades on behalf of underprivileged castes and classes – became president of the Bombay Provincial Hindu Mahasabha, a Hindu nationalist organisation. This contradiction at the heart of Bole’s life has gone almost entirely unexamined.

Since branches were established in Maharashtra from 1923, the Hindu Mahasabha there had been dominated by Brahmins. Its politics centred on the challenges its leaders perceived from other religions, particularly Islam. Caste reform, the abolition of untouchability and the concerns of farmers and labourers were never part of its core agenda.

If anything, these issues became a point of contestation and conflict between the Hindu mahasabha on the one hand and the non-Brahmin movement and Ambedkar’s Dalit politics on the other. Bole’s later positions, it would seem, transformed him into a living paradox.

Caste and its early wounds

Bole was born into the Bhandari caste on June 29, 1869, in Palshet, in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district. Today, the Bhandaris in the Konkan region are classified among the Other Backward Classes. Caste discrimination entered Bole’s life early and stayed with him, sometimes through what he witnessed himself, sometimes through the ill-treatment meted out to people close to him.

Dhananjay Keer, in his biography of Bole, records some incidents. Brahmin children routinely addressed Bole’s elderly grandfather by his first name. Once, a Brahmin talathi (village accountant) invited Bole and his uncle home for a meal, then made them eat in the outer veranda and clean their own plates.

Though the Satyashodhak Samaj, started by Jotirao and Savitribai Phule, and other reform movements had already taken root in the region in the last few decades of the 19th century, their reach was uneven. Social hierarchies in villages in the Konkan had barely changed even in the 1930s, Keer says.

Bole’s early brush with caste discrimination and a more considered awareness of inequality that grew through his education in Mumbai prompted him to turn to social work. While still a student, he and some associates founded the Dnyanvardhak Mandali (Society for the Advancement of Knowledge), which organised lectures by eminent people. For a time, it even ran a night school for children from underprivileged backgrounds.

Broad reform vision

By the 1880s, the challenge to Brahmin dominance in politics, economy and culture was making non-Brahmin communities increasingly aware of their own condition and their rights.

The Brahman Sabha, established in Bombay in 1888 to safeguard Brahmin caste interests, deepened the sense of exclusion among members of other castes. Partly in response to this, the Maratha Aikyechhu Sabha was founded around the same time to spread education among Hindu castes that had lagged behind.

From 1891, Bole became associated with the work of the Sabha, serving as its secretary for nine years. He later became its president. In the same period, in 1890, at the age of 21, he founded the Kitte Bhandari Aikyavardhak Mandal, chiefly to resolve internal disputes within his own Bhandari community and help members advance through education.

Even so, Bole’s reformist outlook was not narrow or parochial. He expected educated individuals within each caste to reform their own communities but held that castes where education and reform had already spread bore a duty not to stop there – they had also to work for other, educationally backward castes. Only through this, he wrote in the Mandal’s manifesto, could Hindu society as a whole be reformed.

Contemporaries corroborate this broader vision: essays gathered for a volume to commemorate Bole’s birth-centenary in 1969 recall that he used caste-linked scholarships to put children from Koli, Bhandari, Maratha and other backward castes through school, so that they would be capable of reforming their own communities. His idea of Hindu society, these accounts insist, ran “from Brahmin to untouchable”.

Mill workers, political career

Bole’s energies soon spread well beyond caste-reform circles, though not beyond the logic driving them. For Bole, labour and caste were two parts of the same hierarchy. At the First Conference of Workers in December 1919, he argued that educating labourers was essential to their battle against capitalists and Brahmin priests alike, the two forces he held responsible for their condition.

In 1909, a wave of mill closures in Bombay left thousands of textile workers unpaid. Bole, with Harishchandra Anandrao Talcherkar and Bhiwaji Ramji Nare, responded by founding the Kamgar Hitvardhak Sabha, one of the city’s earliest organised labour bodies, which mediated strikes.

It also published a pamphlet arguing for European-style unions with strike funds and legislative representation for workers. Labour historian VB Karnik later credited the three men for stepping in at a time when Bombay’s mill workers had, in effect, no guardians.

Alongside this, Bole’s political career was growing. Through the Deccan Rayat Association (1916) and the Lok Sangh (1918), founded with the backing of Shahu Maharaj, the Kolhapur ruler and patron of the non-Brahmin movement, Bole pushed for non-Brahmin and depressed-class representation in the legislature and local boards.

He also resisted Maratha dominance within the non-Brahmin movement itself, a position that was among the factors for the party’s later splits.

Elected to the Bombay Legislative Council in 1920 and serving until 1936, he took up causes ranging from free primary education to the abolition of begging. He was sceptical of Gandhi’s non-cooperation and civil disobedience movements on the grounds that an unorganised, illiterate working class had more to lose than gain from confrontations it could not sustain.

Land, priests and legislative battles

Two of Bole’s toughest legislative fights show the same instinct at work against entrenched rural power. One was the khoti-kul dispute in Ratnagiri and Kulaba (now called Raigad), which ran through the 1920s. Hereditary landlords, or khots, extracted revenue from tenant-cultivators, or kul, under terms the tenants had little power to contest.

Many of these khots were upper-caste and many were aligned with the Congress and the Swaraj Party. Bole, together with his colleague AN Surve, repeatedly raised the plight of these tenants in the legislative council.

Around the same time, he backed the joshi-watan Bill, which sought to curtail the hereditary privileges enjoyed by village priests or joshis and other village functionaries.

Both bills attracted fierce resistance from the Swaraj Party and the Hindu Mahasabha, many of whose leaders were themselves landlords or hereditary priests with a direct financial and social stake in the status quo. However, both eventually passed.

Taken together with the 1924 resolution on access for the depressed classes to water and dharmashalas, these battles mark Bole as a legislator willing to take on landlords and priests alike, well before such positions became common currency in Bombay politics.

Turn towards the Hindu Mahasabha

But by the late 1930s, the ground beneath him had shifted: the non-Brahmin party had splintered, the Congress was dominating provincial politics, and communal lines were hardening across the country – a process that would accelerate with the Muslim League’s 1940 demand for a separate Muslim state.

What hadn’t changed was Bole’s own belief in a casteless, unified Hindu society, the same idea that had driven his reform work for four decades. Contesting as an independent candidate for the reserved Maratha and Other seat, Bole lost the 1937 election to the Congress candidate. He turned to the Hindu Mahasabha soon after, becoming the president of Bombay Provincial Hindu Mahasabha in 1938.

Through the 1940s, he aligned closely with VD Savarkar, the Hindutva ideologue who was leading the organisation.

During World War II, Bole backed the idea of a Hindu Sarakshak Dal to “militarise” Hindus. After the communal riots of the early 1940s, he denounced Gandhian non-violence. He also opposed Partition to the last.

Bole presented this as being compatible with his old commitment to a casteless, unified Hindu order, which Savarkar’s Hindutva rhetoric seemed to promise. In practice, though, that rhetoric functioned less as a commitment to caste equality than as a means of mobilising Hindus electorally against Muslims.

His position on caste inequality itself did not visibly soften. But that cannot fully absorb what his alignment meant in practice – active participation, in his final years, in a communal politics that deepened Hindu-Muslim polarisation on the eve of Partition.

There is a more personal thread worth noting. Bole’s father had died from injuries he received during a Hindu-Muslim riot in 1893, decades before Bole’s public life took this turn. It is a loss Bole never wrote about directly but it would be too neat to treat this as the explanation for his Hindu Mahasabha years.

A scattered legacy

Bole’s near-absence from standard and popular histories of Maharashtra’s reform movements is telling. Unlike Phule or Ambedkar, he built no enduring institutions that later movements could claim as inheritance. His work was scattered across the Kamgar Hitvardhak Sabha, the Maratha Aikyechhu Sabha, the non-Brahmin party and, finally, the Hindu Mahasabha, an organisation that anti-caste movements have rightly treated as an object of critique.

The first four decades of his life enabled some of the most consequential moments of Dalit assertion in colonial India. His final decades until he died in 1961 leave him unclaimable by any single political tradition.

Bole belonged to a generation of non-Brahmin reformers, shaped by the Satyashodhak Samaj but working before Ambedkar had built an independent Dalit political idiom.

He saw caste reform, labour rights and Hindu consolidation as compatible projects. That such a combination now reads as contradictory says as much about how far India’s categories of caste and religion have changed since his time as it does about Bole himself. But those categories were not entirely fluid even in his Bole’s lifetime, and his later choices were his own to make. Tellingly, his personal bond with Ambedkar survived even this final turn.

Whatever else changed in his politics after 1938, the two men’s regard for each other did not. Bole’s resolution helped make possible one of the century’s defining anti-caste movements. Yet the same man later became a leading figure in a politics that worked against that very movement.

Aniket Lakhpati is an Academic Associate for History, Philosophy and Political Science at Nayanta University, Pune.

Six allegedly undocumented Bangladeshi migrants were arrested in Mumbai, ANI quoted the police as saying on Friday.

The six persons have been accused of providing forged Aadhaar and other identity documents to Bangladeshi citizens to help them enter India, ANI reported.

Forty forged Aadhaar cards, Permanent Account Number cards, railway tickets with QR codes and other Indian identity documents were recovered from them, the news agency quoted the Mumbai Police as saying.

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 state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

Scroll has also reported on several cases of persons who were forced into Bangladesh being brought back to India, as the authorities had failed to follow the process laid down by the Union home ministry for such deportations.

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.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Another Muslim man from Bengal pushed into Bangladesh despite voter ID and passport, says family
• Bengal again: Muslim man and three sons picked up from home. Police say they have been ‘deported’

The Punjab Police on Friday arrested two persons for allegedly provoking students of Chitkara University to protest by spreading rumours on social media that two women students had gone missing from the institute’s hostel, The Indian Express reported.

The unrest at the private university began on the night of September 25 after rumours circulated on social media that two students had gone missing from their hostel.

The students allegedly damaged two police vehicles and assaulted a police officer during the protest. They also alleged that the officer was under the influence of alcohol when he reached the campus to control the situation.

On Friday, Patiala Senior Superintendent of Police Harmandeep Singh Hans said the arrested persons, Himanshu and Aryan, were former students of the university, The Indian Express reported. They allegedly incited students by spreading misleading messages in multiple social media groups.

They have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita pertaining to attempt to murder, wrongful confinement, obstructing a public servant, assault on a public servant, criminal intimidation, wrongful restraint, disturbing public peace, rioting, unlawful assembly and criminal conspiracy, the newspaper reported.

The first information report was registered on September 29, and police are trying to apprehend 10 other persons named in the FIR, the officer said.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Several protesters and political leaders, including Aam Aadmi Party’s Saurabh Bharadwaj and Atishi, were detained near Jantar Mantar in Delhi ahead of a proposed demonstration to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Manoj Kumar Jha and All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora were also detained by the Delhi Police.

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded.

In Mumbai, the Cockroach Janta Party also began a protest demanding Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The exercise has resulted in crores of Indians being deleted from the rolls.Read on.

Dehradun gym owner Deepak Kumar, who had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in January, was arrested for allegedly assaulting a trader. Kumar had purportedly uploaded a social media post about the Ujjain municipal authority demolishing a portion of a mosque as part a road-widening project ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela.

The complainant, Sanjeev Tonk, said in his complaint that he had commented on Kumar’s post.

Kumar then went to Tonk’s shop and assaulted him, said Sarvesh Panwar, the senior superintendent of police at Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal. Read on.

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer said that India and the US were nearing the end of negotiations for a trade deal, but added that an agreement was not imminent. The official said that the two sides had identified a “universe of items that are sticking points”.

Greer also said US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could speak again “very soon” to assess progress of the trade deal. Read on.

If you haven’t already, sign up for our Daily Brief newsletter.

Few people know more about India’s courts than Indira Jaising. In a career spanning more than half a century, Jaising has practised both at the Bombay High Court and the Supreme Court.

On this episode of ‘Scroll Adda’, she speaks to Shoaib Daniyal on the ills plaguing the judiciary. Dynasty has taken over the courts, she says, leading to a lack of intellectual development. Bright young lawyers without family contacts are forced to leave litigation.

The judiciary is not doing its job of being a check on the executive. Jaising argues that this government is simply ignoring the Constitution and the courts are unable to stop it. ‘The reason for Indian democracy’s downslide is the collapse of the judiciary,’ she says.

Meanwhile, public movements like the Jantar Mantar protests, sparked by the Chief Justice’s “cockroach” comment, show that anger against the judiciary is boiling over into the streets.

Producer: Raghav Kakkar

Host: Shoaib Daniyal

Editor: Hyder Habib

Several protesters and political leaders, including Aam Aadmi Party’s Saurabh Bharadwaj and Atishi, and Rashtriya Janata Dal’s Manoj Kumar Jha, were detained near Jantar Mantar in Delhi ahead of a proposed demonstration demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora was also detained by the Delhi Police, The Hindu reported.

Internet services were suspended in areas around Jantar Mantar, while the main protest area was barricaded, The Hindu reported.

The protesters are demanding action against Kumar and have raised concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

In Mumbai, the Cockroach Janta Party also began its protest against the chief election commissioner.

Delhi Police detained several protesters on their way to Jantar Mantar, where they planned to protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and demand his resignation. Deputy Commissioner of Police Sachin Sharma said that “permission has not been granted for any type”… pic.twitter.com/Nk8fAEhRkP

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Here’s more on this and other updates:

Protesters detained in Delhi

• Around 100 to 150 protesters were stopped by the police before they could reach Jantar Mantar, Newslaundry reported. 

शांतिपूर्ण प्रदर्शन के बावजूद दिल्ली पुलिस ने मुझे और विधायक संजीव झा जी को गिरफ्तार किया।

लेकिन आंदोलन रुकेगा नहीं! सभी साथी जंतर-मंतर पहुँचें और शांतिपूर्ण प्रदर्शन करें। pic.twitter.com/sRiQTdpOD9

— Saurabh Bharadwaj (@Saurabh_MLAgk) October 2, 2026

• The police said that orders prohibiting a gathering of five or more persons under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita remain in force in the New Delhi district. 
• On Friday, Deputy Commissioner of Police Sachin Sharma said that “permission has not been granted for any type of protest”, PTI reported.

#WATCH | Delhi | Heavy Security heightened at Janpath in view of a call for protest by activists, political leaders and civil society representatives against the Election Commissioner

Entry and exit gates of the nearby metro stations of Janpath, Patel Chowk, Central… pic.twitter.com/TUXF2ScIs5

— ANI (@ANI) October 2, 2026

Metro stations shut

• Entry and exit at 12 stations, including Lok Kalyan Marg near the prime minister’s residence, Rajiv Chowk in Connaught Place, and Patel Chowk and Janpath near the protest site, were closed. Central Secretariat, Seva Teerth, Mandi House, Ramakrishna Ashram Marg, INA, Chawri Bazaar, New Delhi and Barakhamba Road were also affected.

• Interchange facilities remained available at Rajiv Chowk, Mandi House, New Delhi and Central Secretariat.

• The Cockroach Janta Party, led by founder Abhijeet Dipke, started the protest Kumar in Mumbai at 4 pm. The campaign had sought permission to demonstrate at Shivaji Park, but Mumbai Police denied it. Dipke had said the party would launch a “jail bharo andolan”, or mass voluntary arrest movement.

Scenes from the scheduled protest at Mumbai's Shivaji Park, as hundreds have already gathered to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

📷Scroll Staff pic.twitter.com/LScK3BiN6T

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) October 2, 2026

Demands for Kumar’s resignation

The protesters have raised concerns after The Indian Express’ September 23 investigation revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

According to The Indian Express investigation, Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly objected to changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

The Opposition has also demanded the removal of Kumar.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha and Tanya Shrivastava.

United States Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on Thursday said that India and the US were nearing the end of negotiations for a trade deal, but added that an agreement was not imminent as the two sides had identified a “universe of items that are sticking points”, ANI reported.

“We are continually trying to finish the trade deal with India…,” he said.

Greer’s remarks came a day after he met Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal during the G20 Trade Ministers’ Meeting in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The US is hosting the G20 this year.

Greer described his conversation with Goyal as “very constructive”.

“At the same time, I do not think there is something imminent, but we truly have identified the universe of items that are sticking points,” ANI quoted him as saying. “We are working diligently towards them.”

Greer also said US President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi could speak again “very soon” to assess progress of the trade deal.

On Wednesday, Modi and Trump reviewed progress in bilateral cooperation, including trade, defence, energy and critical technologies, the Ministry of External Affairs said.

Greer’s statements came weeks after Trump 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.

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.

In July, the US imposed a 10% tariff on goods purchased from India and 16 other countries, citing inadequate measures to prevent the use of forced labour in production. India has denied the allegations.

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 Tanya Shrivastava.

Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer V Anbu Kumar on Thursday said that legal action would be initiated against anyone found to be filing bulk Form 7 applications to remove voters during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The directive was issued after Chief Minister DK Shivakumar and Congress legislators protested outside the election officer’s office.

On Tuesday, The Hindu reported that of the 4,000 applications filed to delete voters from Karnataka’s electoral rolls, a majority targeted Muslims. The newspaper report is based on data from Form 10, which consolidates details of Form 7 applications.

In a circular sent to district election officers and electoral registration officers in the state, Kumar said his office had received reports of bulk Form 7 applications being filed. The reports alleged that some applications were not genuine, said Kumar, directing officials to investigate the claims.

Shivakumar withdrew the protest after the announcement.

The chief minister stated electoral officials had been told to approve Form-7 applications only for deaths or duplicate entries.

Death claims must include a death certificate, while duplicate cases must include the second voter ID number in the remarks, the chief minister quoted Kumar as directing electoral officials.

The alleged irregularities

In two cases, The Hindu found already filled and printed Form 7s with names of voters whose deletion was being sought. Only the objectors’ names were handwritten.

In Vijayapura district’s Babaleshwar Assembly constituency, 1,373 Form 7 applications were received on September 22. Of these, 99.2%, or 1,363, were filed by just 10 persons, largely against Muslim voters in polling stations where the objectors themselves were not registered.

Similar patterns were reported in Bhalki in Bidar district, where more than 1,700 deletions were sought by 30 persons on September 23. Several of those who filed multiple objections on that day had also filed applications the previous day.

Shivakumar has alleged that large numbers of Form 7 applications were filed to remove eligible voters and has accused the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and Janata Dal (Secular) workers of being involved, The Hindu reported.

“This process was carried out by targeting voters from minority communities, backward classes, Dalits, and economically weaker sections,” Shivakumar said on social media.

The BJP has rejected the allegations. The party’s Karnataka unit chief BY Vijayendra said there was nothing wrong with asking the Election Commission to verify voters suspected of being ineligible, adding that names found to be valid would remain on the rolls, The Hindu reported.

“In the beginning, Muslim voters were pooled together in masjids and kalyana mantaps, officers also called to the spot, and voters were added to the list,” he claimed. “There is a suspicion that illegal Bangladeshi immigrants have made it to the voter list in some constituencies. We have flagged them.”

On Thursday, the police registered five first information reports over the alleged irregularities.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

The Opposition and civil society groups have been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over revelations in a September 23 report by The Indian Express.

The newspaper reported that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were related to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

“Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,” the poll panel stated. “They are a part of the decision-making process before a final decision is taken.”

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

Dehradun gym owner Deepak Kumar, who had opposed the harassment of an elderly Muslim shopkeeper by alleged Bajrang Dal members in January, was arrested on Thursday for allegedly assaulting a trader, reported The Indian Express.

Kumar had purportedly uploaded a social media post about the Ujjain municipal authority demolishing a portion of a mosque as part a road-widening project ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela, reported The Times of India.

The complainant, Sanjeev Tonk, said in his complaint that he had commented on Kumar’s post.

Kumar then went to Tonk’s shop and assaulted him on Thursday, Sarvesh Panwar, the senior superintendent of police at Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal, told The Times of India.

The first information report against Kumar was initially registered under provisions pertaining to criminal intimidation and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, reported The Indian Express.

The police said that they later added sections pertaining to promoting enmity between different groups and voluntarily causing hurt to the FIR.

“Considering the available evidence, the activities of the accused and the possibility of disturbance to peace and law and order in the area, Kotdwar Police took prompt and effective action and arrested Deepak under Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita,” the newspaper quoted the police as stating.

Section 170 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita allows preventive arrest of a person to stop a serious, cognizable crime.

Demolition in Ujjain

A road near the Shahi Masjid is being widened ahead of the Simhastha Kumbh Mela to be held in March 2028. The event is held every 12 years on the banks of the Kshipra River.

The administration’s plans to demolish portions of the mosque had led to violence near the structure on Monday, with the police firing tear gas at Muslim residents protesting against the notice. The demonstrators threw stones at police personnel during the clashes.

As of Wednesday, police had filed eight first information reports about the violence on Monday against 35 persons, 20 of whom had been arrested.

‘Mohammed’ Deepak incident

On January 26, alleged Bajrang Dal members had gone to the shop of an elderly Muslim man, Vakeel Ahmed, in Pauri Garhwal district and objected to him using the word “Baba” in the name of his establishment.

Kumar and another person, Vijay Rawat, had objected to the mob’s actions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edited by Sara Varghese.

In 1936, the African American scholar and activist WEB Du Bois wrote an article for The Aryan Path, a magazine published out of Mumbai that advocated Theosophical views but also carried articles on contemporary political events and philosophical ideas. The magazine was edited by BP Wadia, a Theosophist and a trade unionist.

The editors had asked Du Bois to write an article about the special features of African American culture. Du Bois asked if he could instead write about “The Methods of Increasing the Interest and Knowledge between Indians and American Negroes”. He titled the article “The Clash of Colour”.

Nearly a century later, his observations sound very contemporary. The difficulty in establishing any relationship between Indians and African Americans, he argued, lay “in the almost utter lack of knowledge which these two groups of people have of each other”. American schools taught very little of Indian history, and educated Indians tended to believe American and English propaganda about African Americans.

That is why, Du Bois said, it was important for Indians and African Americans to meet and know each other. He knew that Howard Thurman, a theologian, philosopher and mentor to Martin Luther King Jr, was undertaking his tour to India at that time.

Du Bois also observed that Indians who visit the United States often find themselves separated from the black world. When traveling in the American South, an Indian traveller could avoid Jim Crow discrimination by wearing traditional dress. Du Bois was writing at a time when Hitler had come to power in Germany and his ideas of a superior “Aryan race” had become internationally known.

Perhaps with the name of the magazine in mind, Du Bois wrote that Indians might be tempted to regard themselves as “Aryan” rather than “coloured”, and closer to Germany and England than to Africa and China. However, this was wishful thinking and European exploitation assigned the same place to “the black slave, the Chinese coolie and the Indian labourer”.

Du Bois made another argument that he had previously made, allegorically, in his novel Dark Princess. The problems of African Americans and Indians should be understood as part of a “world-wide clash of colour” and the “union of the darker races” could “bring a new and beautiful world” – but only if these movements and their leadership understood the importance of their own labouring masses.

The Aryan Path may not have had a large readership, but it had a considerable intellectual influence. Ram Manohar Lohia, who was then secretary of the foreign department of the All India Congress Committee, read Du Bois’ article and wrote to him, assuring him that the freedom struggle in India attached “the highest significance to the Negro front of anti-Imperialism”.

A different response came from NS Subbarao, who had been adviser to the Indian Princes’ Delegation during the Round Table Conferences. Subbarao wrote a rejoinder to Du Bois, taking exception to his statement that Indians may see themselves as “Aryans” and distinguished race from language. He claimed that “the strangeness” that Indians feel when coming into contact with Africans did not represent racial superiority but “non-parity of culture”.

Subbarao further argued that the hope of mankind lay in the darker races accepting humiliation and suffering while seeking cooperation of the white world for the sake of the “larger good”.

Du Bois and Subbarao subsequently wrote another response in the magazine. Their disagreement was fundamental. “I believe in man; in men of all colours and races,” Du Bois wrote, but he refused to give up his personhood “and acquiesce spinelessly in continued suppression”.

Du Bois gave a counterexample to show the kind of contact between Indians and African Americans that he felt was necessary: Lala Lajpat Rai. Lajpat Rai had gone to America in 1914. This was his second visit to the US and it was partly motivated by his wish to study the African American condition in the US. He devoted a significant part of his book on America to a study of the African American situation.

Lajpat Rai met Du Bois while in the US and the two became friends. They met on several occasions. Later, Lajpat Rai asked Du Bois for assistance when replying to Katherine Mayo’s Mother India with his Unhappy India. In turn, Du Bois sought Lajpat Rai’s comments on his manuscript Dark Princess.

After Lajpat Rai was killed in 1928 following a brutal assault by the British, Du Bois wrote, “I especially admired his restraint and sweet temper. If a man of his sort can be called a Revolutionist and beaten to death by a great civilized government, then indeed revolution becomes a duty to all right thinking men.”

While Lajpat Rai shaped Du Bois’ understanding of the Indian freedom struggle, Du Bois may have influenced Lala Lajpat Rai’s evolving views on labour and imperialism.

His friendship with Lajpat Rai was part of a long engagement that Du Bois had with India. He wrote to Gandhi and Tagore, and both sent him messages for The Crisis, the journal he edited. By the 1930s, he had met Tagore and established a wide range of contacts in Indian society.

These interactions contributed to Du Bois’ worldview, as revealed in a striking section of his unpublished manuscript, Russia and America. Du Bois imagined a new ideal for the world, “Marxian in its division of income according to need” but “distinctly Asiatic”.

“It would take a new way of thinking on Asiatic lines to work this out.” wrote Du Bois. This could happen “through the philosophy of Gandhi and Tagore, of Japan and China”, to “create a vast democracy into which the ruling dictatorship of the proletariat would fuse and deliquesce”. If this were done, “socialism”, instead of “becoming a stark negation of the freedom of thought”, “would expand to a great democracy of the spirit”.

This remarkable formulation, in which Du Bois brought together the philosophy of Gandhi, Tagore and Asian civilisations with the lessons of the Russian Revolution, was consistent with Du Bois’ understanding of 20th-century history. He repeatedly described the Russian Revolution and the freeing of India as the greatest events of the 20th century. In one article, he went further to describe the freedom of India as the singularly great event of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Du Bois personally knew the leadership of the freedom struggle but had very wide contact with sections of Indian society including the cultural and peace movements in the country. His admiration for this struggle related to his unique approach to world history and social analysis. His writing and influence became part of the worldview that shaped the relationship between African and Asian anti-colonial movements. Unfortunately, though he considered it one of his life’s ambitions to visit India, he could never visit the country.

Much has changed since Du Bois wrote in The Aryan Path. Most significantly, the US civil rights movement transformed the relationship between the Indian and the Black freedom struggles. The use of Gandhian methods of nonviolent social change in the American South greatly increased the interest and understanding of the black freedom movement in India. Martin Luther King Jr visited India in 1959 for a month-long trip and met Nehru and Vinoba Bhave, among others.

The expansion of citizenship rights won during the struggle opened a path for Indians, among others, to immigrate to the United States. Indians now constitute a very significant minority in the United States, and are very visible in the top echelons of American intellectual, political and economic life.

Nevertheless, Du Bois’ argument in The Aryan Path remains worth revisiting. The black world, he wrote, is “a world largely apart and organized; in its churches, industry and amusement, largely separate from the white world. It is not easily penetrated by strangers, except in lines of commercialized entertainment”.

Understanding the United States through the African American struggle for freedom substantially changes the way American society is understood. It helps us understand how the colour line in the United States is related to its global empire. WEB. Du Bois remains the central thinker for such an understanding. His call for Indians and African Americans to know each other was part of his reimagining of a different world.

The Intercivilizational Dialogue Project along with other organisations is undertaking a King-Du Bois Peace Pilgrimage to renew ties between India and Afro-America. More information here.

A portion of the Shahi Masjid in Madhya Pradesh’s Ujjain was damaged on Thursday when the municipal corporation was demolishing a minaret for a road-widening project, The Indian Express reported.

The minaret, which is a tower traditionally used to give the daily call to prayer, fell on the dome and first floor of the mosque, reported Maktoob Media. No one was injured.

The administration’s plans to demolish portions of the mosque had led to violence near the structure on Monday, with the police firing tear gas at Muslim residents protesting against the notice. The demonstrators threw stones at police personnel during the clashes.

The road near the mosque is being widened ahead of the Hindu religious gathering called the Simhastha Kumbh Mela to be held in March 2028. The event is held every 12 years on the banks of the Kshipra River.

Video shows the moment the minaret of India’s 600-year-old Ujjain mosque collapsed during demolition work for a road-widening project for a Hindu pilgrimage, triggering despair among Muslims onlookers.

Officials described it as an accident caused by faulty machinery. pic.twitter.com/2HmS4WpLdm

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 1, 2026

The Ujjain administration said that the damage to the mosque on Thursday was accidental, Maktoob Media reported.

Khaleeq ur Rahman, a Muslim religious leader in Ujjain, said the minaret fell after a strap on a crane being used to remove it broke, The Times of India reported.

He also pointed out that members of the Muslim community were demolishing portions of the mosque themselves after Monday’s violence.

An unidentified member of the Shahi Masjid committee asked why the administration had shown urgency in demolishing the minaret when “our people were removing” it, reported The Indian Express.

“Why did you have to intervene when the minarets were being removed?” asked the member.

Rahman appealed to the Muslim community to maintain peace.

“Make sure you don’t gather anywhere and say or write anything,” he was quoted as saying by Maktoob Media. It will only and only harm us. It is better to maintain calm and peace for now.”

Ujjain Collector Roshan Kumar Singh said that discussions were being held with members of the Muslim community.

After the incident, movement around the site was restricted and the area was barricaded, PTI reported. The police also said that photography and videography were prohibited within a 500-metre radius as a precaution while the work continued.

On Sunday night, police and municipal teams brought heavy machinery to the area, while several companies of police were also deployed.

As of Wednesday, police had filed eight first information reports about the violence on Monday against 35 persons, 20 of whom had been arrested, The Indian Express reported.

Edited by Sneha.

“These are only bye-elections, that’s all.”

Jharna Khatun, 22, frowned when she heard what Chief Justice Surya Kant had said in the Supreme Court on Monday. The judge’s dismissive response was in reaction to petitioners asking for cases related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal to be taken up urgently in light of the upcoming bye-polls.

Khatun had good reason to be displeased with the chief justice. She is one of the thousands who will not be able to vote in the bye-elections because her name was deleted from the voter list.

“Whenever elections come around, the mood is festive and we hope for change in our lives,” Khatun explained. “All our neighbours will experience this again, but not us. That is giving me a lot of grief.”

Her elder brother, Ibrahim Sheikh, whose name was also deleted along with hers, opposed the chief justice even more strongly. “Every vote holds value,” he stated. “You can never tell which vote could swing the result. People have even won elections by just one vote.”

For the second time in under six months, the siblings will watch the rest of Maradighi, a quiet hamlet dotted with ponds, queue up to vote at the village school – but not do so themselves. Their village falls in Murshidabad’s Rejinagar, one of the two Assembly seats in Bengal where bye-polls are scheduled on October 6.

Scroll spoke to several such deleted voters in Rejinagar who have for months been waiting for the Supreme Court-appointed tribunals to hear their appeals and restore their names to the electoral roll.

They now live in a state of legal limbo, fearful that their rights and status as citizens could be taken away. Most of them brought up the new state government’s late-night detention and deportation drive that has targeted deleted voters on the suspicion that they are undocumented migrants from Bangladesh. Others worried that they could stop receiving state welfare any moment, as Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari has repeatedly threatened.

Living in fear

Abdul Alim Sheikh, a 64-year-old farmer from Maradighi whose name was deleted from the rolls, was so scared that he would be sent to Bangladesh that he did not eat or sleep for several days when the detentions began.

He used to work in Bihar when he was young, but vows to have never been east of Murshidabad in his life. “I may have to spend my old age in Bangladesh, if the government so wishes,” he joked wryly.

Even those from his family whose names made it to the voter list found it distressing to talk about the upcoming bye-elections. “I don’t feel like voting anymore,” his wife, Beli Bibi, complained.

“Not voting is out of the question,” Sheikh retorted. “We are citizens and we must vote.”

When asked what he made of the chief justice’s comment about bye-polls, he reiterated: “Those in power can do as they wish. But we cannot afford to waste our votes.”

About 12 km away in Begunbari village, Belifa Bibi, who rolls bidis for Rs 100 a day, was also worried that the police would take away her husband, Golam Nur Reja, and push him into Bangladesh. He was removed from the electoral roll because his surname did not match that of his father’s.

“I fear that they will come and take him away any moment,” the 42-year-old said. “I will vote for anyone who can get his name back into the voter list.”

In limbo

All the voters whom Scroll met had filed appeals challenging their exclusion from the electoral roll. However, it is unclear when their appeals will come up for hearing.

Only 3% of the 38 lakh appeals filed across Bengal have been decided so far, the Election Commission told the Supreme Court earlier this month. Of these, the voters in question were found to be genuine in 93% cases. In all of Rejinagar, only four appeals were decided in six months – all in favour of inclusion.

These numbers raise serious doubts about the manner in which the Election Commission carried out the special intensive revision of voter lists in Bengal.

In Rejinagar alone, the names of 3,923 voters were removed from the rolls for minor errors in their documents, according to an analysis conducted by the Sabar Institute, a Kolkata-based public policy research organisation. It found almost all of them – 96% – to be Muslims.

A dangling sword

The aftermath of the deletions has left many feeling bitter in Rejinagar. Kulsom Bibi, 36, is the only member of her family who lost her right to vote because the person she paid to fill out her form made one tiny mistake: he put her details in the fields where her father’s details were supposed to be.

“I get so angry when I see politicians asking us to come to their public meetings before the vote,” she fumed as she cooked chicken at her home in Begunbari village. “I cannot forget how I had to keep running to Berhampore in that heat.”

Kulsom Bibi was referring to the district headquarters where she had to go repeatedly during and after the special intensive revision: first, to file an appeal against her exclusion, and then to make sure that she continues to receive government rations.

Under fire since its internal divisions became public knowledge, the Election Commission recently announced that officials will visit the homes of people who got notices for hearings. But it had extended no such relief to Bengalis, nearly 1.5 crore of whom received these notices earlier this year.

What upset Kulsom Bibi the most, though, was that she had stopped receiving a monthly cash transfer of Rs 1,500, which she used to get when Mamata Banerjee was the chief minister. “I bought medicines with that money,” she remembered, adding that she was diabetic.

Legally, deleted voters whose appeals are pending before tribunals are eligible to receive cash transfers from the government. In fact, the Bharatiya Janata Party has doubled the amount to Rs 3,000 after coming to power.

But in practice, many women whose names were deleted from the voter list have run into a wall while trying to enroll themselves for this scheme. Even those of them who have been getting the money are ill at ease.

“It could stop coming any time,” said Jaharbanu Bibi, a resident of Maradighi. “That is why I want my name to be included in the voter list. Already, I could not vote once. I was hoping that they would decide my appeal by now.”

Politicians apathetic?

Deleted voters are now left out of the election campaign. Politicians, who go door-to-door seeking votes, have stopped visiting their homes.

“The last time my MLA came by was during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections,” said Jharna Khatun, the woman quoted at the start of this piece. “If we could vote, all politicians would come here.”

When asked about this, Jamil Chowdhury, son of the former MLA Rabiul Alam Chowdhury, pleaded guilty. His father, he pointed out, had been too caught up with the crises confronting the Trinamool Congress to do anything for deleted voters.

“We are contesting this election only out of respect for Mamata Banerjee,” he stated, adding that the party had even lost its symbol. “We will look into the issues of deleted voters once we get our act together.”

Mohammed Sayeed, the candidate from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Rejinagar, promised that he would take up the cause of deleted voters if he wins the bye-election.

“Being a lawyer myself, I have helped many people file appeals,” he claimed. “If I win, I will voice their concerns in the Assembly as well.”

The High Court on Thursday directed the police to provide protection to the mother of the main accused in the killing of a 26-year-old man in Delhi’s Uttam Nagar area during Holi, Live Law reported.

The court was hearing a petition filed by the mother of the accused, Ismail. She had submitted that for the past two days, some residents of the area, including the family members of the erson who died, had been throwing stones and bricks at her home. Her counsel also showed the court CCTV footage to support the claim.

The court noted that it was a “serious situation”, Live Law reported.

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

The incident had led to an argument between the two neighbouring families from different religious communities. Ismail has been in Tihar Jail since March 5.

On Thursday, Justice Girish Kathpalia said the accused’s mother could not be left vulnerable to violence regardless of the legal proceedings against her son.

“At least till the situation becomes normal, local police in Uttam Nagar shall ensure continuous round the clock deployment of sufficient police personnel in that area, especially in the lane where the house of the petitioner exists,” Live Law quoted the court as saying.

The Delhi Police assured the court that adequate police deployment would be made to prevent any untoward incidents in the area.

The court also asked the police to file a status report within a week. The matter will be next heard on October 16.

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

On March 14, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi sealed and demolished portions of 70 shops in a drive against alleged encroachments in the area. The drive targeted a row of eateries next to the Uttam Nagar police station, a few hundred metres from Bhutolia’s house.

Allegedly illegal portions of properties linked to persons accused in Bhutolia’s death were also demolished in subsequent days, before a Delhi High Court order temporarily halted further action.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Chhinari is a medium-sized village of about 80 households nestled in Chhattisgarh’s Narayanpur district. Most of its residents are Adivasis from the Muria Gond community, while around 13 families belong to the Yadav community.

For two decades, the conflict between Maoist insurgents and the police violently disrupted their lives, bitterly dividing both Adivasi and Yadav families. Now, with the state announcing a victory over the Maoists, the residents of Chhinari are attempting to repair the ruptures in their social fabric and return to an older rhythm of life.

But this was proving to be difficult – or so I heard from local contacts in the area.

One Saturday in June, I decided to find out more by travelling to Chinnari to attend the weekly village meeting where residents gather to discuss matters of common concern.

Around 7 am, when I reached the village, I found both the young and the old were walking down to the meeting point – an open space that once held two Maoist memorials, but is now ringed by a newly built panchayat bhavan, a primary school and a community centre.

The two memorials, now razed to the ground, had been erected in the memory of Mangtu Vinod and Karuna Somari, Maoist cadres from Andhra Pradesh with adopted Adivasi names, who had been killed by the security forces in 2005, I was told. Six years later, the security forces had returned to the area and used explosives to blast away the memorials, the villagers said, as some of them sat down on the brick rubble that still lay scattered around.

The year 2011 also saw an exodus of many Yadav families from the village. This left an indelible mark on Chhinari and its residents, as I would eventually discover – a social wound left to fester for 15 years, its pain and scars still woven into the lives and memories of those who live here.

“Those who left the village, abandoned us to our circumstances,” said Manket Salaam, among those perched on the brick rubble and on narrow wooden planks fixed on tree stumps. “Can they simply return now as if nothing ever happened?”

Based on fragments of information shared by several villagers at the meeting and in subsequent conversations which often brimmed with anger and indignation, I gradually came to understand what had happened in Chhinari, and how deeply the events of all these years had shaped the lives of those who remained as well as those who left the village.

This is a story that is not unique to Chinnari – it echoes across the wider Bastar region, of which Narayanpur is a part. Until recently, the region was a stronghold of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist), which waged an insurgency against the Indian state for over four decades. Over the past two years, however, the majority of its top leaders have either surrendered to the police or been killed.

As conflict abates in the villages, a painful search for truth and reconciliation has begun. Our series documents this process. This is the first part.

The first killing

In their quest to establish a parallel government in the forests of central India, the Maoists created an elaborate hierarchy. At the top was the regional committee called the Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee, which was divided into three bureaus, nine divisions and more than 20 area committees.

Chhinari came under the jurisdiction of the Bayanar area committee, one of four such committees under the Purvi Uttar Division, covering around 75 villages.

As the Maoists began making inroads into the Bayanar area in 2000, the same year that Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh, they identified Sukkanand Yadav as their contact person in Chinnari.

Even though the village had less than 15 Yadav families, the Adivasi-dominated village endorsed their choice. Sukkanand Yadav was “extremely helpful, vocal and a good leader,” recalled Jaggaram Salaam, a resident of Chinnari.

Sukkanand Yadav rose to become the president of the local unit of the Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Mazdoor Sangh, or DAKMS, a mass organisation of the Maoist party. He came to be known by a pseudonym, Vijay.

Eleven years later, in October 2011, the police killed him in an alleged gunfight or “encounter”, identifying him as Negi Rawat, a Maoist cadre carrying a reward of Rs 5,000.

“There was no encounter,” said Sanjay Kumar, Sukkanand Yadav’s eldest son. “Security forces entered our house and shot him dead.”

Sanjay sat alongside his younger brother and other villagers as he recounted the events from 2011.

Then 16 years old, he recalled, he was enrolled in a government school in Daudhai, about 12 km from Chinnari, and had come home for a break when security personnel stormed their house and killed his father.

Did the family report the killing to the police? “There was no possibility in those years of going to the police to file a case against the forces,” he said.

While acknowledging that his father had been an active member of the DAKMS, Sanjay insisted he was not an armed Maoist and did not possess any weapons. “The police could have easily arrested him instead of killing him so brutally,” he said, as the others around him nodded in agreement.

An exodus

Sukkanand Yadav’s killing sparked a chain of reactions that opened up a social chasm in Chinnari.

The Maoists conducted an investigation and concluded that Palli Yadav, Sukkanand’s cousin, had leaked information about him to the police. Within a month of Sukkanand’s death, the party held a jan adalat – a public trial – and pronounced Palli guilty, after which he was taken away and killed.

Fear gripped the rest of the Yadav community, and many families began considering leaving the village en masse.

When other villagers heard of their plans to leave, they tried to stop them. The Maoist leaders of the area also sent a message saying no one in Chhinari needed to fear any further retaliation.

And yet, two months later, one early morning, the village woke up to find that nine of the 13 Yadav families had left overnight with all their belongings.

The Yadav families even took away the village deity, provoking intense hurt, said Manglu Gawde, the wadde or healer of the village. “Taking away the devi means they want to settle elsewhere,” said Gawde. “They don’t care about what happens to the village.”

In Bastar, every village is believed to have a foundational deity around whom community life revolves. In the absence of the deity, the ghotul or community centre in Chinnari lost its spirit, said Gawde.The Yadav families that left Chinnari, while denying they had taken the deity, said they had no other choice but to leave. “The villagers did not convince us that they would stand by us,” said Mahesh Kumar Yadav, Sukkanand’s younger brother, who now lives in the Narayanpur district headquarters. “Otherwise, we would never have left our land and homes in a village that the Yadav community had founded.”

Not all Yadav families left, though. A few, including Sukkanand’s children, chose to stay back, only to find themselves confronting another kind of fear.

A few months after the Maoists killed Palli Yadav, the security forces descended on the village and took away Sukkanand’s son Sanjay, who had turned 17 by then, along with Jagaram Salaam, then 16.

The two were taken to the Narayanpur police station, where Sanjay alleged they were beaten in custody. After nine days in custody, they were produced before a magistrate, with the police levelling serious charges against them and claiming they were in their twenties. But Sanjay mustered the courage to tell the magistrate that they were both under 18. The magistrate, Sanjay recalled, reprimanded the police and ordered that the two boys be sent instead to the juvenile home in Jagdalpur. They were released six months later.

Police make inroads

In Narayanpur town, the headquarters of the district, the Yadav families from Chinnari came under the police radar. One of Sukkanand’s brothers and a cousin were recruited as gopniya sainiks or secret police personnel. Their job was to accompany the security forces on search operations in the Bayanar area, and help identify suspected Naxal supporters and jan militia members.

I managed to trace the phone number of Sukkanand’s brother, Sukhchand. When I called him, he was in Tamil Nadu, looking for wage work. He told me that he had worked with the police for five years, but had been fired from the job in 2017 after he skipped duty for 21 days to care for his wife after she had given birth to their child. His cousin, Manturam Yadav, who had been recruited with him, also quit in solidarity, Sukhchand said. In five years, their salary had risen from Rs 5,100 to 12,000, he said.

As for the work he did as a gopniya sainik, Sukhchand said he did what the police asked of him: “Naxaliyon ko pakadwao ya marwao” – get the Naxals arrested or killed. He said he and his cousin were posted in Chhote Pharasgaon, a village close to Chinnari, and they helped the police track down a couple of Naxal cadres and were rewarded for it.

Sukhchand did not put a number to the arrests. But, back in Chinnari, his nephew, Sanjay alleged that his uncles were instrumental in getting nearly 40 people arrested from the Bayanar area.

“Although only one person from Chhinari is currently lodged in Bilaspur jail, between 2010 and 2026, around 20 persons, both Adivasi and non-Adivasi, from the village were arrested and jailed,” Sanjay said.

He added that those arrested spent anywhere between six months and five years behind bars. Some were released on bail, but their trials dragged on for years. Meanwhile, the threat of rearrest continued to hang over them, with police repeatedly warning families that they could be taken back into custody.

For some, the harassment proved unbearable. Dholu Gawde, from Dobinpara of Chinnari village, died by suicide in 2020, unable to withstand what his family described as repeated beatings and harassment by the police, including demands that he provide information about Maoists and threats of being arrested again.

The financial burden on families with members in prison was equally heavy. They had to sell their cattle to raise money for lawyers, send weekly provisions to relatives in jail, and pay for repeated journeys from the village to the prison, a village resident said. Expenses could range from Rs 50,000 to Rs 1.5 lakh. Families who borrowed money to meet these costs were still struggling to repay their debts.

Cycle of violence

The villagers said the area also witnessed many killings from 2011 onwards – by both the police and the Maoists.

Between 2011 and 2026, the police killed 17 people from four villages of Chhinari gram panchayat, said Jagaram Salaam, in the group conversation that took place on the sidelines of the weekly meeting in June.

While some of those killed were Maoist cadres who perished in gunfights with security forces, others were unarmed villagers killed in cold blood by the police and subsequently labelled “khunkhar Naxali” or dangerous Maoists, he said.

One such victim, Salaam recalled, was a 14-year-old boy named Rajnu Salaam, who was killed in 2011. Others in the group then began listing down more names of those killed. While they had difficulty remembering the exact dates of the killings, they vividly recalled the years, the seasons, and the circumstances of each of the killings.

Jeetru, who was part of the group, interjected to say that retaliation by Maoist cadres was no less painful. Five people were killed by the insurgents after they were accused of being mukhbir or police informers, he said.

One of them was Sukhlal Gawde. His 35-year-old son Saithram Gawde, whom I later met in Chhinari, told me that the Maoists killed his father in 2020. The irony, he pointed out, was that his father had worked with the Maoists for a while, and had even spent a year in jail in a Maoist-related case.

But after he returned from jail, the party began suspecting him of being a police informer. He was hauled up in a jan adalat twice – the first time, he was allowed to go, but after the second one, he was taken away and killed. The Maoists left a parcha or note beside his body detailing the charges against him.

Saithram Gawde defended his father: “I don’t think he was a mukhbir”. He filed a police case against unnamed Maoists and received Rs 5 lakh in compensation from the state government. The police, warning him against Maoist retaliation, advised him to leave Chhinari and move to Narayanpur, but he refused.

“If there was any mistake, it was my father’s, not mine. Why should I leave my village and my land?” he said. He continues to live in Chhinari.

Another exit

Birsa Pottai, however, chose to leave Chinnari.

Pottai had spent five years with the Maoists before returning to the village to lead a farmer’s life. “I wanted to live a normal life,” he said.

But the two gopniya sainiks recruited from the Yadav family identified him during a security patrol in the area. Pottai said he somehow managed to evade the police – but it proved harder to escape the suspicions of the Maoists, who saw his purchase of a tractor as a sign that he was on the payroll of the police.

In 2015, the Maoists called him in for questioning, along with two other men from the village. A jan adalat was held where the villagers vouched for Pottai’s innocence and secured his release. The other two men, Manter Salaam from Bailapur and Ramlal Sori from Etpal, however, were killed by the Maoists.

Caught between the suspicions of both sides, Pottai eventually left the village in 2015, leaving his family behind. He surrendered to the police but did not join them, he was quick to add, when I met him at his temporary home in Gudri Para, Narayanpur, a government settlement of more than 1,000 families identified by the state as “naxal peedit” or victims of Naxals. Joining the police force, he was well aware, would effectively shut the door to his village.

In 2016, Pottai’s teenage brother, Rassu, died under mysterious circumstances. While villagers claimed Rassu had died of a snakebite when he went out looking for his cattle late in the evening, Pottai’s wife alleged that suspicious men had entered their house late in the evening and killed him.

Rassu had already been buried by the time Pottai reached the village. Pottai, however, obtained a magisterial order to exhume the body for a post-mortem, bringing along a large security contingent to the village.

“Who does this? Who exhumes a body after it has been buried with all the customary rituals and that too by bringing the police force?” Laluram Gawde, the village pujari or priest, had said in a conversation back in the village. “If he has lost even this much faith in the villagers, what is left?”

Although Pottai did not show me the post-mortem report, he insisted that it confirmed that Rassu’s death occurred because his neck had been twisted and not because of a snakebite as claimed by the villagers.

Feeling unsafe in the village, Pottai’s wife and children subsequently moved out and joined him in Narayanpur.

Conditional return

In Narayanpur, although the Yadav families and Birsa Pottai’s family have built a new life, they still yearn to return to Chinnari.

“How can we live here all our lives?” said Pottai, turning around to point to the uneven knot of concrete houses in Gudripara, none of which had the open courtyard typical of village homes.

Mahesh Kumar Yadav, Sukkchand’s brother, echoed the same sentiment. “Our forefathers had identified that village. Our gods and goddesses reside there. We have to return.”

The end of Maoist presence in Bayanar area initially raised hopes that a return was possible – but then complex negotiations began.

Four meetings were held this year between village representatives from Chinnari and those who had left the village, said sarpanch Manita Salaam. At the first meeting, which was held in the police station in Benur, the village representatives said they needed to convene a gram sabha meeting to discuss the matter.

The gram sabha meeting, which involved village elders and traditional functionaries like the wadde (traditional healer), pujari (priest), gaita (guardian) and others, did not result in a favourable decision – most people were unwilling to allow those who had left to return, the sarpanch said.

Subsequently, on June 18, another meeting was held, which was attended by political representatives from Narayanpur block and local officials including the tehsildar and the sub-divisional police officer.

The Narayanpur police superintendent told me that such meetings, called maitreyi chaupal, are part of a larger initiative by the local administration and the police to broker peace and resettlement in strife-torn villages. “Where there is more tension [in a village], higher officials also join the chaupal to settle matters,” Sandeep Patel, the superintendent, said.

The June 18 meeting culminated in a written agreement or panchnama, which laid down certain conditions for the return of those who had left Chinnari: that they withdraw cases filed against other villagers, promise not to abandon the village in times of trouble, give up their homes in Narayanpur and return to Chhinari permanently.

Although the written panchnama makes no mention of it, Mahesh Kumar Yadav claimed the villagers had demanded Rs 50 lakh as compensation from them. The compensation was partly for the legal expenses that the villagers had incurred on fighting police cases that had resulted from the Yadavs’ snitching on them, and partly to make up for their failure to contribute to village festivals over the past 15 years.

“How can we pay such a huge amount?” the Yadav women sitting around us exclaimed. “We work as daily-wage labourers here to make two ends meet.”

But money was not the only obstacle in their return. Although they would like to go back to their life as farmers – the Yadav families own registered agricultural land in Chhinari – their younger generation is now enrolled in schools and colleges in Narayanpur. Abandoning their homes in Narayanpur to abide by the stipulated conditions was not possible, they said.

Experts say the end of an insurgency, however laudable, cannot by itself ensure lasting peace, particularly when it has been brought to a close through violence. It requires a carefully laid-out peace plan to enable long-term peaceful coexistence in areas scarred by conflict.

“Years of violence and collateral hurt leaves people in insurgency regions traumatised, displaced, immiserated and alienated,” Anuradha Chenoy, adjunct professor at Jindal School of International Affairs, wrote in a response to Scroll on email.

As an academic who has extensively written on conflict resolution, and even served on a United Nations special group for South Asia on peace and security, Chenoy underscored the importance of providing support to people to return to “dignified daily existence” once a conflict is over. This could take the form of peace and development committees, involving the local panchayat with women representation.

While eventually it was for the local people to find the way, she said it was the government’s responsibility to ensure the necessary resources and infrastructure support for that.

Asked about Chinnari village, the Narayanpur police superintendent said: “It is quite normal for people to take time to adjust to new situations, but perhaps after two or three or even six months, things will settle down”.

Back in Chhinari, Sanjay Yadav rued: “If only the police had arrested my father and not killed him, our families would not have been scattered. After all, those who left the village are our own uncles.”

All photos by Malini Subramaniam

The Sunday church service had just ended in the hill-top village of Longpi in Manipur’s Noney district on the afternoon of September 13.

Longpi is home to about 320 Kuki residents, village officials said.

A group of five women and two men were on their way to gather some rice and wash some clothes when a group of 45-50 militants attacked the village.

“They were walking from one part of the village to another when they came under attack,” David Gangte, the son of Longpi village chief and a primary school government teacher at the village, told Scroll.

Gangte said the group found themselves cornered in a narrow lane when the militants opened fire with “automatic weapons”.

Two people – Thangvel Roel Gangte, 43, and Julie Singson 22 – were killed on the spot. Singson was two months pregnant at the time. Another 22-year-old woman, Ester Gangte, sustained severe bullet injuries and died later in a hospital in Churachandpur, about 250 km away.

They were not the only civilians to have lost their lives in a deadly surge of violence in Manipur.

In a span of a month – between August 27 and September 27 – 23 civilians, including at least seven women, were killed in the hill districts of Manipur, where Nagas and Kukis have been locked in conflict since February.

The dead include a 17-year-old walking to a nearby town to attend a birthday, two women working in their fields, a group of men travelling to a neighbouring district.

All were shot down by armed militants while going about their daily life in the remote villages of Manipur. Twelve of the dead are Nagas, 11 belong to the Kuki community.

At least 51 people have been killed in Manipur since the Naga-Kuki conflict began in February. Scroll analysis shows the majority of them were unarmed civilians.

“Nobody is there to protect us,” Gangte, the primary teacher at Longpi village, told Scroll. “No Army, no one from the government. How can we defend ourselves as civilians?”

A spate of attacks

On the same day that Longpi residents were ambushed, militants walked into a Kuki home in
L. Tollen village in Tamenglong district around 4 in the morning and fired indiscriminately. Lhingzangai Singsit, a mother of five children, was shot dead. Her husband, injured in the attack, later succumbed to his injuries.

Two days later, on September 15, 76-year-old Phalneichong Sitlhou had gone into her jhum fields at Leisangphai village in Tamenglong district with another younger woman.

According to a statement by the village authorities, Naga armed militants allegedly waylaid the women as they gathered firewood and shot them.

The spate of attacks by armed groups has left villagers in dread.

A Naga resident of a village along the Imphal-Tamenglong road told Scroll that people have stopped going out. “The militants from both sides do not spare civilians,” he said. “They will waylay people going to the paddy fields or going out for any work. So, people are spending all their time and energy guarding the village.”

Shokin Chauhan, former director general of the Assam Rifles, said the armed groups were picking “soft targets” in isolated villages to keep “the cycle of violence” going.

Several Manipur residents questioned the failure of the Narendra Modi government and Manipur’s Bharatiya Janata Party government to control the violence.

“We have been reminding both governments to intervene sincerely in this ongoing violence,” said Anteshang Charanga, leader of the All Naga Students’ Association, Manipur. “But they only come up with statements of condemnation like other civil society organisations. So, if they also are simply going to condemn, who is going to deliver justice?”

The conflict

In May 2023, fierce ethnic clashes broke out in Manipur between Meiteis and Kukis, leading to thousands displaced and at least 300 dead.

The violence culminated in an ethnic partition of Manipur, with Meiteis not allowed in the hill districts and Kukis purged out of the Imphal valley.

Nagas, who account for about 20 per cent of Manipur’s total population, remained neutral through the conflict. The Kukis constitute the third-largest demographic group in the state.

The two tribes live close to each other in the hills and have a history of conflict over competing claims over territory. In 1993, clashes between Nagas and Kukis led to a five-year spell of violence. Hundreds were killed and several villages burned down.

In February this year, as Scroll reported, a petty fight in Ukhrul district lit a fire between Nagas and Kukis.

Underneath the dispute was Naga hostility to the Kuki demand for a “separate administration” that would span most of the hill districts and cut off administrative links with the Meitei-inhabited Imphal Valley. The Nagas allege that the territory claimed by the Kukis encroach on Naga-dominated areas. Like the Meiteis, the Nagas dispute Kuki claim on land, accusing them of being “outsiders” and “illegal immigrants”.

Since February, the two communities have been engaged in a cycle of retaliatory abductions and killings across Tamenglong, Noney, Kangpopki and Kamjong districts, with armed groups from both communities involved in the conflict. Also at stake is control over a lucrative trade route along the Indo-Myanmar border, observers say.

Moving targets

The most recent cycle of violence began with an attack on the Imphal Tamenglong (IT) road, which passes through Kangpokpi district.

As Scroll had reported in July, roads and highways had been drawn into the conflict as both sides claimed control on territory. Residents of Naga and Kuki villages along the Imphal Tamenglong road had told us they were fearful of stepping out of their villages because of armed gunmen prowling the area.

Those fears came true again on August 27. A group of Naga men were on their way to Senapati town to attend a meeting when they were attacked, said Timothy Wijunamai, who heads the Liangmai Naga Council, the apex body of the tribe.

“We had been using this isolated hilly uneven road because it is not safe to take the highway,” Wijunamai said.

But that day suspected Kuki armed groups sprung a surprise, killing four Naga civilians and injuring one, a senior police official told Scroll.

Wijunamai blamed members of a militant group, Kuki National Front (Presidential), for the ambush.

The dead include leaders of Naga councils and schools in the area. The killings set off a series of revenge killings and attacks.

Over a dozen “innocent people have been brutally killed” on the road, the Naga Women’s Union said in a statement on September 22.

In many cases, civilians have been killed upon venturing out from their remote villages. Even minors have not been spared.

On September 21, a 17-year-old Naga boy, NK Wiphenbou, was walking from his village in Tamenglong district to Tamei town, where he studied, when he was attacked on a lonely stretch of the road.

“On normal days, he could have taken a jeep but because of the violence, there were no vehicles,” said Ch Sajulakbou, the chairman of Upper Takou village, where Wiphenbou lived. “So, he was walking. He had come to meet his parents and he was going back. We had heard that he also had plans to attend a friend’s birthday.”

Wiphenbou was allegedly ambushed by Kuki militants about 7 km from the village, Sajulakbou said.

Around 21 villages lie along the Tamei–Kuilong road, a vital 52-km interior hill route in Tamenglong district, where the teenager was killed. “Everyone is afraid now,” Sajulakbou said. “No one is stepping out. Even the police personnel are afraid.”

More attacks

The killing of the Naga teen was followed by an attack on a Kuki village in Tamenglong district on September 23, in which a 36-year-old Kuki electrician was shot dead.

According to the police complaint filed by the Kuki village chief, the attack was allegedly carried out by armed cadres of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah), one of the oldest insurgent groups in the North East.

On the same day, armed Kukis set 41 Naga homes and churches on fire in the remote Makui region of Kangpokpi district. Several Naga residents had to be shifted to the neighbouring Senapati district headquarters.

Leaders from both communities alleged that they have no protection from security forces. “The security forces were not able to reach Makui even two days after the arson,” Wijunamai said. “The villagers have been left alone there. The response of security forces is very slow. That is why houses are being burnt down repeatedly.”

Wijunamai said efforts to move those whose homes had been burnt down have been thwarted in the absence of security cover.

“There are thousands of security personnel in the headquarters, be it in Kangpokpi, Senapati, or Tamenglong,” Wijunamai, the Naga leader, said. “Why are they not being deployed in vulnerable areas?”

Kukis have also urged deployment of central security forces to safeguard vulnerable Kuki-Zo villages across Tamenglong and adjoining districts.

“To date, 29 Kuki villages have been systematically attacked, looted, or reduced to ashes,” Janghaolun Haokip of Kuki Inpi, the apex body of the community. “This ongoing violence has caused the forced displacement of over 2,000 Kuki civilians across multiple districts.”

Scroll sent questionnaires to the Manipur director general of police, chief secretary and the official spokesperson of the defence ministry. The story will be updated if they respond.

Control over territory

Security officials underlined that the presence of armed groups on both sides has made it difficult to control the violence. “The rivalry between NSCN-IM-linked formations and Kuki armed groups is increasingly intersecting with the wider Naga–Kuki confrontation,” said Shokin Chauhan, the former director general of the Assam Rifles, a key central security force dealing with the crisis.

A Senapati-based armed Naga volunteer told Scroll that it would be impossible for village residents alone to defend their territory.

“We would have already lost Makui to Kuki militants if we were fighting with the single-barreled guns most villagers have,” the 34-year-old Naga volunteer said. “A section of Naga guards are trained militants with sophisticated weapons. The Kuki side, too, has sophisticated guns."

Chauhan pointed out that the recent pattern of violence shows that the armed groups are picking up “soft targets”.

“They are operating in areas where civilian settlements are exposed, making ordinary villagers particularly vulnerable,” he said. “An attack [on isolated villages] can provoke retaliation and a cycle of violence between communities. That is precisely what the security forces have to prevent.”

Empty villages

Several villages have sent away women and children in fear of more violence.

Only five men had been left to guard Pilong, a remote village in Kamjong district along the Myanmar border.

“The people of the village had vacated their homes due to the conflict,” an NSCN-IM member told Scroll.

On September 24 afternoon, armed Kuki cadres entered the village and opened fire. Four of the men were killed. One of them, Akhan Kaping of Ukhrul, managed to escape.“I want to say don’t hurt and kill the civilians. Their time will also come,” he warned.

But despite civilians from both communities being killed in the violence, neither side appears to be open to dialogue.

Wijunamai, the Naga leader, said “now there is no question of talking to one another”.

“We are [going] heads-on,” he said. “I don't think there is any initiative to have a talk or dialogue between the communities. Everything is on a war footing.”

In Longpi village, where a 22-year-old pregnant woman was shot dead, most residents have left. Gangte, the government school teacher, said the school had been shut down. “We all had to leave. All the students are scattered in different places. We don’t know when we can resume classes.”

India’s exotic pet trade has grown from a niche pursuit into a significant industry. Over 40,000 people across 30 states and union territories declared their exotic pets in the government’s 2020 Voluntary Disclosure Scheme, making the scale of ownership hard to ignore, according to a Humane World for Animals report published this year. Even that, the report cautions, could represent only a fraction of actual ownership.

So, what draws people to animals that are often unfamiliar, expensive and difficult to keep?

Conservation researcher working on illegal wildlife hunting and trade Uttara Mendiratta identifies several motives: the desire to own something others do not, the appeal of animals perceived as unusual or “cool”, and the belief that some exotic species are easy to maintain.

Research into exotic pet buyers in Japan points to another dimension. A consumer study found that people were drawn to the “mental healing” (Iyashi in Japanese) they associated with animals, as well as their cuteness (Kawaii).

Social media can amplify these attractions, creating a ready marketplace where people can see what is trending, find sellers and learn how to care for unfamiliar species.

But the impulse to own an unusual animal can be very different from the reality of living with one.

“People buy a small, cute animal that eventually becomes bigger,” says Mendiratta. A teenager may lose interest in a reptile as they both grow older. A turtle may outgrow its enclosure. A parrot may live for decades. A snake may become difficult to house, a primate harder to manage as it reaches sexual maturity, or an iguana, increasingly aggressive. An owner may move cities, face rising veterinary costs or simply find that caring for the animal is far more demanding than expected.

The exotic pet that once seemed unusual, fascinating or adorable can suddenly become a problem. And that is when abandonment begins.

Possession and abandonment

A January 2026 Kerala study of red-eared sliders (Trachemys scripta elegans) offers more insight into why people buy exotic pets. The study interviewed people involved in the pet trade and found that the most common motivation was personal interest in exotic pets (54.8%). Other reasons included the species’ friendly nature and ease of care (16.1%), religious beliefs (12.9%) and its long lifespan (9.7%). Overall, 55% of the turtles were purchased for children, 13% by adults and 32% by both.

The same study also points to what can happen when the appeal wears off. Sixteen per cent of respondents said some owners released turtles into natural or open areas when they grew larger.

Abandonment, however, is not only a welfare concern. The possession, release or abandonment of exotic species can have long-term ecological consequences, both in their native habitats and in the places where they are introduced.

Removing animals from their native ecosystems can also mean removing the ecological functions they perform. This is particularly relevant for species such as gibbons and orangutans, as well as some birds and reptiles, that play important roles in their ecosystems.

A 2024 analysis of the global primate trade, for instance, notes that primates can be important seed dispersers and, in some cases, pollinators. Their removal from forests can therefore affect plant recruitment, forest composition and, potentially, carbon storage. Primates are also culturally important to many Indigenous communities, meaning their loss can have consequences beyond the ecosystem. The analysis also points to the potential for wildlife trade and the removal of primates to alter disease dynamics by changing wildlife pathogen reservoirs.

Ecological damage

Conversely, introducing a species into a new environment can alter the ecology of the place where it is released. Exotic animals with invasive potential can compete with native species for food and other resources, prey on native wildlife, introduce pathogens, hybridise with related species and alter food webs.

Red-eared sliders are a classic example, says Sumanth Bindumadhav, India director of Humane World for Animals and co-author of the 2026 report. Native to the Mississippi River basin in North America, these freshwater turtles have become popular pets in India within a relatively short period.

“They can become extremely dominant in water bodies, eating other organisms and establishing themselves as a dominant species,” says Bindumadhav.

Multiple studies point to the species’ invasive potential. A 2023 paper describes the red-eared slider as one of the world’s worst invasive species and notes records from India suggesting that it may be expanding into natural habitats. Climate change could further increase the areas of India suitable for the species, including regions with high native chelonian diversity, the study says. A Herpetology Notes paper similarly describes a free-living slider recorded in Kerala as an “Invasive Alien Species” capable of causing severe harm to native ecosystems.

Part of the problem may stem from how the turtles are sold. Red-eared sliders are commonly bought as tiny hatchlings but grow considerably larger as adults, making them increasingly difficult to keep as pets. This can encourage owners to release them into local waterways, according to a study published in the Journal of Threatened Taxa.

Their ecological impact can also increase as they mature. Their diet shifts from predominantly carnivorous to omnivorous, and they can compete with native turtles for food, basking and nesting sites, while also preying on native aquatic animals.

The species has now been recorded in water bodies across several parts of India, including Gujarat, Karnataka, West Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, Goa and Telangana. In Gujarat alone, the study documented them in 35 water bodies that are also home to native turtle species.

“There are videos on social media of people releasing them (red-eared sliders) into lakes and ponds and presenting it as a good deed. It is not a good deed; they are releasing a highly invasive alien species,” says Mendiratta.

The red-eared slider is classified by the IUCN’s Invasive Species Specialist Group as one of the 100 “World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species”. The Zoological Survey of India’s reptile checklist, however, notes that no reptile has currently been formally designated as an invasive alien species under India’s biodiversity legislation.

Red-eared sliders are not the only exotic reptiles raising concerns. Green iguanas (Iguana iguana), native to Central and South America, are also popular among pet keepers in India. Their ability to thrive in tropical environments raises concerns about what could happen if they become established outside captivity.

“We are seeing green iguanas in large numbers, along with species such as ball pythons and others, during seizures and on social media,” says Mendiratta. She adds that they could damage crops and create problems for native species.

A 2025 study modelled the invasion potential of green iguanas in India. It found substantial areas with climatic conditions suitable for the species to establish and reproduce, and concluded that the species poses a serious potential ecological threat.

The scale of import and release

The scale of the trade in these reptiles is striking. Reptiles, both native and non-native, form a majority of pets: The latest Directorate of Revenue Intelligence data points to reptiles constituting the highest number of wildlife seizures.

In July 2024, Chennai Customs seized 402 baby iguanas arriving from Bangkok: 229 green, 113 orange and seven yellow iguanas, along with 53 blue iguanas (Cyclura lewisi). Blue iguanas are listed in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which provides the species with the highest level of protection from international commercial trade. Sixty-seven of the animals were already dead when they were seized.

The scale of red-eared slider imports is equally concerning. Customs authorities seized 12,385 red-eared sliders at Chennai and Tiruchirappalli international airports between 2018 and 2020, according to a study covering the period. Their small size, relatively high survival rate and low price in exporting countries make them particularly suited to being transported in large numbers, the study says.

The difficulty of keeping some of these animals as they grow can create another problem. An Indian veterinary review notes the popularity of juvenile green iguanas as pets, but says they are often donated to zoos or other agencies once they grow and become more difficult to manage.

Snakes are also increasingly turning up in rescues, including both venomous and non-venomous species. A Burmese python hanging from an apartment balcony in Mumbai went viral a few years ago. “These are often animals that people have kept as pets and which have either escaped or been deliberately released,” says Bindumadhav.

Pawan Sharma, an advocate and wildlife conservationist with RAWW, says he has encountered anacondas, both juveniles and large individuals. “There have been cases where large snakes have broken out of their enclosures and disappeared. In some cases, we simply don’t know where they have gone.”

The presence of venomous exotic snakes raises an additional concern: India does not have antivenoms for many of these species. “People are bringing animals such as black mambas and Gaboon vipers into the country. These pose an even greater health risk because they are venomous,” says Bindumadhav. “If they escape or are released, they could potentially establish populations because they can adapt to tropical conditions.” He adds that venomous tarantulas are also increasingly being kept as pets, raising similar concerns.

Sharma concurs that escape is a potential pathway for exotic animals to enter the wild. During rescues, he has encountered abandoned or escaped African grey parrots and macaws, as well as marmosets and sugar gliders, in addition to snakes, iguanas and turtles.

Parrots, among the more popular exotic pets, can also enter the rescue system when owners no longer want or are unable to care for them. In Visakhapatnam, a rescue organisation reported taking in exotic parrots and other birds abandoned by owners who had lost interest or moved away. More recently, a media report described a rescue network caring for African greys, eclectus parrots, conures, African lovebirds and cockatiels, among other exotic animals. In that case, however, abandonment was not established.

There is little systematic data on the scale of exotic bird abandonment in India, making it difficult to assess how widespread the problem is.

Dealing with invasive species

The growing number of exotic animals entering the country raises an important question: what happens when owners no longer want or are able to keep them?

Mendiratta points to gaps in law, infrastructure and awareness in dealing with invasive fauna. “We have relatively clear approaches for some invasive plants, such as Lantana camara. But what do you do with thousands of red-eared sliders? If we remove them from these waterbodies, where do they go? Can they be euthanised humanely? Do you keep them in captivity indefinitely? There is very little clarity around those questions.”

The Central Zoo Authority recognises non-native animals abandoned by owners or rescued from unsuitable environments, including animals originating from the exotic-pet trade, as rescued animals that may be placed in recognised zoos or rescue centres. While its guidelines provide a management framework for zoos receiving rescued or abandoned exotic animals, it doesn’t create a general right for an exotic-pet owner to surrender an animal to a zoo. Acceptance depends on the zoo’s facilities, the animal’s circumstances and applicable legal requirements.

Sharma says CZA guidelines are largely applicable for species listed under CITES. Other species such as red-eared sliders face a challenge. His organisation, RAWW takes them in and in many cases, puts them up for adoption so they go to a home. “We do not have the capacity to take a large number of abandoned animals, so we do this at a smaller scale,” he explains.

Mendiratta says the system for surrendering unwanted exotic animals to the government or rescue centres needs to be better developed. “There are only so many rescue centres, and many are understaffed. Once you hand an animal over, you may also have very little control over what ultimately happens to it,” she says.

Bindumadhav believes India needs a national surrender policy. “It needs to come after we have the infrastructure to take these animals that people don’t want to keep anymore. In the absence of it, people often end up releasing animals where they see fit,” he says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The southwest monsoon ended with a 12.6% deficit in rainfall, said the India Meteorological Department. This makes the season the driest in 11 years and the fourth driest this century.

The four-month rainy season began in the country on June 4, three days later than its usual onset date. It covered the entire country on July 9, a day later than the normal date.

The country had received 759.4 mm of rainfall against the long-period average of 868.6 mm, the weather agency said. The long-period average is the measure of the mean rainfall during the monsoon season over the last 50 years. Read on.

Jet fuel prices for domestic airlines has been hiked by about 13% or Rs 15.8 per litre. This is the third consecutive monthly increase in jet fuel prices. It will now cost to Rs 137 per litre.

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

The prices of 19-kg commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders were also increased by around Rs 62.5 per cylinder. With the latest hike, a 19-kg commercial LPG cylinder costs Rs 2,810 in Delhi and Rs 2,764 in Mumbai. Read on.

The Supreme Court has stayed the death sentence awarded to one of the 38 persons convicted in the 2008 Ahmedabad serial bomb blasts case. Ahmed Bawa Abbu Abubakar Barelvi’s counsel submitted that the conviction was based entirely on “conspiracy”.

The court was hearing a challenge to the Gujarat High Court’s July 7 judgement upholding the death sentences handed to 38 of the 49 persons convicted in case.

Twenty-two explosions had ripped through the city on July 26, 2008, leaving 56 dead and more than 200 injured. In February 2022, a special court convicted the 49 persons, of whom 38 were sentenced to death, and the others were given life imprisonment. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the West Bengal government, seeking its response to Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra’s petition seeking protection during her visits to her parliamentary constituency, Krishnanagar, PTI reported.

A bench of Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana also directed the West Bengal and Union governments to file their responses to Moitra’s allegation that works funded under the Members of Parliament Local Area Development Scheme were being obstructed in Krishnanagar, Live Law reported. The scheme enables MPs to recommend local development work.

Appearing for the state and Union governments, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta questioned the maintainability of the petition, saying there are more than 500 MPs in the country and it would create difficulties if all of them approached the court.

The bench said it would hear the matter after the respondents file their replies within a week, followed by a rejoinder from Moitra, PTI reported.

In her petition, Moitra alleged that the Nadia district administration directed her to vacate the circuit house in Krishnanagar late at night on August 14, despite her having been allotted a room at the state government-owned property.

Moitra had posted on social media at the time that she had arrived at the circuit house around 6.30 pm and was given the same room she usually stayed in. However, at 9.47 pm, she was asked to vacate the room while a large crowd outside the gates shouted “Jai Shri Ram” slogans, she said.

She alleged that, as an MP, she was entitled to stay at the circuit house but was pressured by district authorities to leave in the middle of the night in an attempt to harass her.

Following the incident, Moitra wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking his intervention, PTI reported. She said no one had objected when she made the booking or informed her of any alleged embargo on bookings when she checked in.

The Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the death sentence awarded to one of the 38 persons convicted in the 2008 Ahmedabad serial bomb blasts case, Bar and Bench reported.

Ahmed Bawa Abbu Abubakar Barelvi’s counsel submitted that his conviction was based entirely on “conspiracy”.

A bench was hearing Barelvi’s petition challenging the Gujarat High Court’s July 7 judgement upholding the death sentences handed to 38 of the 49 persons convicted in case.

On Thursday, the court also issued notice to the Gujarat government, seeking its response on Barelvi’s petition, Live Law reported.

Twenty-two explosions had ripped through the city on July 26, 2008, leaving 56 dead and more than 200 injured. In February 2022, a special court convicted the 49 persons, of whom 38 were sentenced to death, and the others were given life imprisonment.

Twenty-eight persons had been acquitted in the case and one person accused in the matter had turned an approver for the prosecution.

In July, the Gujarat High Court had upheld the death sentence handed to 38 of the 49 persons. It also upheld the sentence of life imprisonment given to the remaining 11 persons.

The blasts

The blasts on July 26, 2008, took place at the municipal-run Lallubhai Gordhandas Hospital, on buses, parked bicycles and in cars.

The police had claimed that persons associated with the banned terror outfit Indian Mujahideen were responsible for the serial blasts. The Indian Mujahideen is a faction of the outlawed Students Islamic Movement of India.

The investigators alleged that the explosions were planned as revenge for the 2002 Gujarat riots in which the majority of those killed were Muslims.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Jet fuel prices for domestic airlines rose by about 13% or Rs 15.8 per litre, on Thursday, PTI reported.

The price of aviation turbine fuel was raised to Rs 137 per litre. This is the third consecutive monthly increase in jet fuel prices.

In September, the prices were increased by Rs 6.2 per litre, following a Rs 5 per litre hike in August.

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

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

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

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

Commercial LPG prices hiked

The prices of 19-kg commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders were increased by around Rs 62.5 per cylinder from Thursday.

The increase applies to commercial cylinders used by businesses and industrial consumers, while prices of domestic cooking gas cylinders remain unchanged.

With the latest hike, a 19-kg commercial LPG cylinder costs Rs 2,810 in Delhi and Rs 2,764 in Mumbai.

The hike was steeper in Patna, where the price of a commercial cylinder increased by Rs 71.5 to Rs 3,100.5, The Indian Express reported.

In Chennai, the price increased to Rs 2,983 per cylinder.

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

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to hear a plea filed by the Mamata Banerjee-led faction of the Trinamool Congress challenging the freezing of four of its Indian Bank accounts by the West Bengal Police, Live Law reported.

A bench noted that the matter was pending before the Calcutta High Court and declined to exercise its powers under Article 136 of the Constitution, which allows the Supreme Court to hear appeals against judgements of courts and tribunals.

The court said that it would not go into the merits of the case, noting that the Election Commission had frozen the party’s symbol in an interim order. It also noted that the larger question about which TMC faction would be entitled to use the money lying in the accounts was still pending.

On Monday, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to decide within four months which faction is authorised to use the party’s name and symbol.

On Thursday, however, the bench requested the High Court to expedite the hearing.

The accounts were debit-frozen following a criminal investigation initiated by the West Bengal Police over a complaint filed by MLA Biswanath Das.

The case is separate from the matter involving three HDFC bank accounts of the party that were frozen by the Enforcement Directorate.

On August 11, the Supreme Court declined to interfere with the High Court’s interim arrangement permitting the TMC to operate those accounts for its day-to-day expenses.

In the present case involving the four Indian Bank accounts, the High Court had denied relief to the TMC, after which it appealed against the order in the Supreme Court.

Rift within the 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 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 Bharatiya Janata Party-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.

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.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Of the 4,000 applications filed to delete voters from Karnataka’s electoral rolls during the special intensive revision, a majority targeted Muslims, The Hindu reported on Tuesday.

The newspaper report is based on data from Form 10, which consolidates details of Form 7 applications filed to remove voters.

In two cases, The Hindu found already filled and printed Form 7s with names of voters whose deletion was being sought. Only the objectors’ names were handwritten.

In Vijayapura district’s Babaleshwar Assembly constituency, 1,373 Form 7 applications were received on September 22. Of these, 99.2%, or 1,363, were filed by just 10 persons, largely against Muslim voters in polling stations where the objectors themselves were not registered.

Similar patterns were reported in Bhalki in Bidar district, where more than 1,700 deletions were sought by 30 persons on September 23. Several of those who filed multiple objections on that day had also filed applications the previous day.

Before September 22, Form 7 applications seeking deletion on the grounds that a voter had shifted were generally limited, usually to two or three applications per polling station. Such applications were mostly filed by electors who had moved, the newspaper found.

However, the bulk applications began appearing on September 22, a day before the last day to file claims and objections.

Officials in Bidar and Vijayapura told The Hindu that the objections would be scrutinised before any action is taken.

They also said people who filed objections in bulk had been told that submitting claims without valid grounds, if established, could lead to punishment.

Booth agents exceed limit to file Form 7 in Delhi

In Delhi, booth-level agents used the Election Commission’s online portal to submit more than 10 Form 7 applications a day during the claims and objections phase of the voter roll revision process, reported The Hindu.

The Election Commission’s guidelines state that booth level agents of recognised political parties may file applications in bulk, subject to a limit of 10 forms a day after publication of the draft electoral roll.

Its portal has no mechanism to enforce the limit.

Between September 21 and September 27, more than 1,000 Form 7 objections were filed in Delhi. Of this, four individuals filed more than 10 applications in a day.

One of them, a BJP booth-level agent, Chitresh Chandoliya, filed 35 objections in two days, the newspaper found.

He told the newspaper that he had filed all the applications online.

“If I were to submit the forms to the EC office, I would not be allowed more than 10,” he said. “You need to be a party-appointed BLA to fill forms in bulk. For online, there is no such condition.”

The poll panel’s guidelines require Form 7 applications to be computerised and uploaded on the Delhi chief electoral officer’s website daily.

However, The Hindu found that these application-level details had not been published on the website nearly a month into the claims and objections period.

The deadline for filing claims and objections in Delhi has been extended from September 30 to October 30. The final electoral roll is due to be published on December 4.

A contentious exercise

Since the exercise began in June 2025, the SIR has faced questions about the manner and pace of its implementation, amid concerns that it could deny genuine electors their right to vote and shape election outcomes, as Scroll has reported.

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

Despite this, Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have cited the SIR to deny ration cards to those who have been eliminated from the rolls. In some cases, the police have denied permission for their passports to be renewed.

The Opposition and civil society groups have been demanding the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over revelations in a September 23 report by The Indian Express.

The newspaper reported that two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the SIR, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were related to the registration of new voters and changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters.

Kumar has not yet commented on The Indian Express’ investigation. However, after the report was published, the Election Commission had said that “operational queries or inputs raised by commission members during draft stages are part of standard administrative practice” to safeguard voter rights.

“Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,” the poll panel stated. “They are a part of the decision-making process before a final decision is taken.”

Edited by Sneha.

The southwest monsoon ended on Wednesday with a 12.6% deficit in rainfall, said the India Meteorological Department. This makes the season the driest in 11 years and the fourth driest in this century.

The southwest monsoon had set in on June, 4 marking the beginning of the four-month rainy season in the country. This year, the monsoon arrived three days later than its usual onset date of June 1.

It covered the entire country on July 9, a day later than the normal date of July 8.

On Wednesday, the IMD said that the country had received 759.4 mm of rainfall against the long-period average of 868.6 mm.

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

The weather department further said that monsoon rainfall over northwest India was 94.1% of the long-period average, over central India it was 97%, over the southern Peninsula it was 74% and over the North East, it was 74%.

At 1,017.1 mm, the rainfall in eastern and northeastern states was the lowest since 1901. During a press conference, the IMD also pointed out that the average rainfall received by northeastern states has been showing a consistent decline.

Southern Peninsula received 542 mm of rainfall, which is the fourth-lowest since 1901 and second since 2001. Central India received normal rainfall, said the weather department.

Overall, the country received 65% of the long-period average rainfall in June, 101% in July, 84% in August and 92% in September.

The last time that monsoon rainfall in the country had fallen below 90% of the long-period average was in 2015, which was also influenced by El Niño weather conditions.

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

On August 31, the IMD said that strong El Niño conditions are prevailing over the equatorial Pacific Ocean, with sea surface temperatures remaining above normal in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific.

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

Amid the deficit in rainfall, the Maharashtra government on Saturday declared drought conditions in 74% of the state’s subdistricts.

On Wednesday, the weather department forecast that the northeast monsoon will arrive in the southern Peninsula between October 15 and October 21. This would bring “normal” rainfall to Tamil Nadu, Puducherry, Karaikal, coastal Andhra Pradesh and Rayalaseema region, Kerala and south interior Karnataka during the October to December period.

However, most other parts of the country are likely to experience below-normal rainfall during this time.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• In arid Bundelkhand, farm ponds falter as monsoon dries up

• Has El Niño’s monsoon effect hit India’s kharif crops?

September has seen an avalanche of reported attacks against women and girls. I use the word “reported” because there is always more violence than is reported at any time and private violence tends to be invisibilised.

I want to write. To say something. I stare at my computer screen. Nothing. I try sitting with a pen and paper but the paper stays blank. What do I even write that someone, perhaps even I, have not said before?

It seems impossible that in 2026 we are still having the same conversations and the context is, if anything, more misogynist than when we started out a three-year project researching women’s access to public space in 2003.

We were not the only ones asking questions about gendered public space. On this journey we met Jasmeen Patheja, student at the Shrishti School of Design working on street sexual harassment, a project titled Blank Noise, a project that became a campaign. With her, we staged an intervention on the streets following the rape perpetrated by a police constable on Marine Drive in 2005.

Thousands of women gathered at Delhi University’s North Campus after the alleged gangrape of a 17-year-old girl.

“The system is literally rotten to the core,” said one student, recounting her friend’s experience of alleged harassment by a police officer.@kri_tikka reports pic.twitter.com/bUsRBjav2z

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) September 29, 2026

We also met Kalpana Vishwanath who along with colleagues at Jagori were studying safety in Delhi. We shared journal space with her in one of our early publications in the Review of Women’s Studies for the Economic and Political Weekly in 2007. Before that I’d tried to write about risk for a seminar on Risk Rationality and City Life, and managed to publish it under the title “You Can be Lonely in a Crowd”.

Shilpa Ranade, Sameera Khan and I took over two years to write the manuscript that became the book Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets, which was published in 2011. Life has a way of happening as you are trying to write. Mostly we’d roll with it but every now and again one of us would turn to the others and say anxiously, “We’d better write this quickly before our data gets old and our ideas date.”

When we first presented our work to feminist scholars and activists, we talked about the right to risk and loiter as citizens. We argued that the only way women could claim space unconditionally was if we claimed it for everyone through the act of loitering, that is hanging out in public space without reason or purpose for pleasure. We were asked why women would want to loiter?

The other question we were asked regularly was how we planned to operationalise loitering. Now 20 years later, loitering has entered a feminist lexicon of access to public space and even people who have never heard of our book use it. As for operationalising it, thanks to Neha Singh and the loitering feminists who read our book and put its ideas into operation, that’s a question we didn’t have to answer.

Earlier this month, I was at a United Nations Women National Consultation on Safe and Inclusive Public Spaces, an event celebrating 15 years of their safe cities initiative of which ironically Delhi was one of the first five cities. In the last decade one has seen a great deal of scholarship, policy advocacy and activism around the question of gendered public spaces, a significant amount of this in South Asia and within South Asia, in India.

For women the language has changed irrevocably. We are no longer petitioning for safety – we are claiming our rights. However, politicians among others, seem to have missed the memo. For many others, loitering, protesting, even just choosing a romantic partner are all offensive things for women to do.

One politician talked about a more decent and elegant way to moral police. Yes. You read that right.

In the face of an establishment that garlands rapists, grants rapists parole after parole, moves classes online when a rape takes place, restricts entry to parks in response to a rape and expresses cultural shock when women use swear words as acts of protest, women are not going to back down.

This is a different moment from 2012 when thousands were out on the streets protesting another rape. That rape was followed by a change in the law, the Criminal Law Amendment Act 2013. We’ve made the arguments, written papers, signed petitions, and been part of advocating for policy change. We’ve protested over and over again. And here we are on the streets again.

Women in India’s capital New Delhi have taken to the streets after a string of rape cases, using bold slogans to demand safer public spaces and challenge restrictions placed on their movement in the name of safety.

The slogans have sparked a wider social media campaign. pic.twitter.com/eGkVLfhlva

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) September 30, 2026

In past few days the Why Loiter Campaign (entirely separate from the book) loosely, and I do mean loosely because there were no leaders here just a large group of women collectively taking ownership, orchestrated not one but nearly a dozen walks across Mumbai and some in other cities as well, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Nagpur simply by putting out a social media call.

Angry and determined women joined the group chat in singles and groups taking responsibility for different routes in different parts of Mumbai. A group that just the previous day had been less than 100 people grew to over 800. I’ve been a privileged observer of this group from almost its inception. Each loitering expedition with its attendant pictures and notes brought a thrill. Now the group was buzzing with new voices, voices connecting in camaraderie and allyship, voices raised in rage and friendship.

Women’s rage, often seen as illegitimate even pathological, was spilling all over the group chat and finding resonance and affirmation. In Delhi, university students are protesting as if their lives depend on it and in many ways they do. We are not mad, but we are mad and we have every right to be so. So here we are on the streets again.

For women, all women, the conversation on access to the city has moved in the last two decades. We know that the streets are our right. We know that we belong as much as anyone else. The tragedy is that the rest of the country, especially those who run the institutions that could provide the infrastructure that facilitates women’s access have chosen to wilfully not keep up with this conversation, some even attempting to move it backwards. And so here we are on the streets again.

I wish so hard that our data would get old and not just keep on being endorsed with each new assault and the regressive response to it from the powers that be. I wish so hard that our ideas would date.

Some day. Until then, here we are on the streets again. Someday we will belong there fearlessly, hopefully and endlessly.

Shilpa Phadke is a teacher, writer and researcher.

A 43-year-old Muslim fish trader from West Bengal’s Uttar Dinajpur district was picked up by Raiganj Police for being an allegedly undocumented Bangladeshi immigrant and pushed into Bangladesh, his family told Scroll.

The police had detained Abdul Barek, a resident of Gopalpur village, in June.

The family told Scroll that the police had ignored that Barek’s name was on the electoral rolls after the special intensive revision exercise was conducted in the state and had voted in the Assembly elections held in May. The man also has an Indian passport issued in 2021. Scroll has seen the voter list, his voter identity card and a copy of the passport.

The police had arrived at Barek’s home at 3 pm on June 2 and enquired about his identity documents.

“My father was sitting at a shop near our house when a police party came and took him away to Bhatol outpost,” said Jahidul Islam, the 24-year-old son of Barek. “I went with all the documents and he was released after document verification.”

However, Islam said that Barek had been told by the police that he was required to go to the police station if he received summons.

About 15 days later, Barek was called by the police.

“At this time, he was immediately detained and was first taken to Raiganj police station and later they shifted to a detention camp,” Islam said.

“Police did not check our papers at all,” he alleged. “They did not even talk to us. They were taking him away forcefully.”

Some days later, he received a phone call from Bangladesh.

“This is when we got to know that our father was sent to Bangladesh,” Islam said. “It has been more than two and a half months that we have not seen him. We don’t know where he is and how he is spending his days in Bangladesh. He sometimes makes calls but we are unable to bring him home.”

Islam said that the police told the family that Barek had been “proven to be” a Bangladeshi.

“I then asked them to show the document proving he is Bangladeshi, but the police did not show any documents,” he said. “What proof do they have that he is Bangladeshi? They could not show any Bangladeshi proof as my father is Indian.”

Islam said that his father was born in India and that their entire family is in the country. “He has a passport and even voted in the 2026 assembly elections after his name was included in the SIR,” Islam said, adding that the police ignored these documents.

Barek is the main source of livelihood for the family of about 23 members. He earns his livelihood through pisciculture and owns landed property. Him being pushed into Bangladesh has led to uncertainty and financial distress for the family.

“My family has been in tension…we don’t know how he is spending his days in a foreign country,” Islam said. “He has been suffering a lot. My mother has stopped eating food. How dare the police send him to Bangladesh?”

The inspector-in-charge at the Raiganj police station refused to give any information citing the Official Secrets Act and suggested that he be sent an email seeking the information. Scroll sent an email. This report will be updated if we receive a reply.

The incident came to light on Wednesday after human rights group Banglar Manabadhikar Suraksha Mancha filed a complaint with the state home department seeking an urgent intervention into the “alleged illegal arrest, unlawful detention and unexplained disappearance” of Barek. It also sought his present whereabouts to be disclosed.

Kirity Roy, the secretary of the human rights group, said that Barek’s family is living in uncertainty.

“Their immediate concern is not merely to establish responsibility but also to know a basic and fundamental fact: where is Abdul Barek?” Roy said.

A person having Indian identity documents, including an Indian passport issued after police verification, cannot be treated as a foreign citizen and pushed out of the country on the basis of an administrative or police assertion, Roy said.

Any dispute about Barek’s citizenship must be determined in accordance with the law and through due process, with appropriate judicial safeguards, he added.

“In a constitutional democracy governed by the rule of law, no person can simply disappear after being taken away by the state authorities,” Roy said. “The police must be able to account for every person whom they arrest or take into custody. The existence, liberty and whereabouts of a citizen cannot depend upon the discretion or silence of individual police officers.”

Also read:

• Bengal again: Muslim man and three sons picked up from home. Police say they have been ‘deported’
• Muslim man detained on suspicion of being undocumented Bangladeshi released from Bengal jail

Since the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025, the police in several states 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 state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

In May, soon after the BJP came to power in West Bengal, the state government announced it was setting up holding centres – to house alleged undocumented migrants – as part of a “detect, delete, deport” policy.

Scroll’s reporting has revealed that at least 16 Muslim men and two children have been picked up by the West Bengal Police since June and accused them of being Bangladeshis. The case of Abdul Barek takes the number of such detentions to 17.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• The Indian state has made Bengali Muslims outsiders in their own land
• ‘Illegal, arbitrary’: Why experts say detention regime in Bengal has fewer safeguards than Assam

Protests by residents of the Siang basin in Arunachal Pradesh against a proposed multipurpose dam intensified on Wednesday, as demonstrators clashed with security personnel and set a police vehicle on fire during Chief Minister Pema Khandu’s visit to Yingkiong in Upper Siang district, the Hindustan Times reported.

Residents of the Siang basin have opposed the Siang Upper Multipurpose Project for several years. Members of the Adi tribe, who live in the basin, have maintained that the project threatens their land and way of life. The protests intensified after the government began deploying Central Armed Police Forces for the pre-feasibility survey of the proposed project.

The Siang river flows into Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet, and is the main tributary of the Brahmaputra. The river is the site of the proposed 11,000 MW Siang Upper Multipurpose Project, described to be India’s largest dam.

On Monday, villagers and security personnel clashed in Geku during protests against the project and the deployment of Central Armed Police Forces for the pre-feasibility survey, Arunachal24 reported. Four persons were arrested in connection with the incident.

As tensions rose on Wednesday, protesters allegedly entered and vandalised the residence of Tuting-Yingkiong MLA Alo Libang in Yingkiong. Several government vehicles were also reportedly damaged.

Movement along the Yingkiong-Komkar-Geku stretch and towards Dite Dime was disrupted as protesters put up blockades at several locations. Some vehicles used by security personnel were also set on fire by the demonstrators in Dite Dime and Komkar. Both villages are among the areas proposed for the project.

CM’s visit to Yingkiong

Khandu, along with Deputy Chief Minister Chowna Mein and other state officials, was in Yingkiong on Tuesday and Wednesday to meet residents and advocate for a pre-feasibility study of the proposed multipurpose project.

Northeast Live reported that the protests forced Khandu to cut short his visit. However, Upper Siang Deputy Commissioner Ashok Tajo told the Hindustan Times that the chief minister completed his scheduled official meeting in Yingkiong before leaving the district by helicopter.

Activist Ebo Mili told Scroll that Khandu’s meeting in Yingkiong was a “complete failure” and that villagers were frustrated.

“The chief minister and the authorities are violating the basic rights of the villagers,” Mili said.

“The chief minister left Itanagar saying that he wanted to have a dialogue with the villagers,” Mili added. “He then came to Boleng [town in Siang district], put up banners and held meetings with government officials, before leaving for Yingkiong.”

At a meeting in Boleng, Khandu said the government was not seeking to rush the project beyond the feasibility stage.

“If the experts determine after the preliminary feasibility report that the project cannot be built, there will be no further process,” he added.

Mili said that while Khandu had maintained that only the pre-feasibility studies would be conducted and that the public would decide on the project after that, MLAs Ojing Tasing and Ninong Ering had publicly said that the dam would be built.

In June 2025, a collective of 114 scientists, researchers and practitioners had called for suspending all construction, surveys and pre-clearance activities related to the proposed project, citing its ecological, cultural, and socio-political risks.

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Arunachal Pradesh: Scientists, researchers call for suspending Siang Valley dam construction
• ‘Are we militants?’ In Arunachal Pradesh, anger over plan to send armed forces for mega dam survey

The Instagram account of political cartoonist Satish Acharya has been restricted in India after the Meta-owned platform received a legal request from the government.

A message displayed by the platform when users try to access the account says: “We reviewed it against our policies and conducted a legal and human rights assessment. After the review, we restricted access to the content in the location where it goes against local law.”

Another political cartoonist, Manjul, also said that Instagram had restricted one of his works about the Election Commission to users in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India/Law Enforcement”.

Acharya’s account was blocked under the 2021 Information Technology Rules, which require social media platforms to remove “unlawful content” within three hours of receiving directions from the government or a court.

Among Acharya’s recent works were cartoons on The Indian Express investigation from September 23 that revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

Acharya told Scroll that he had not received any communication from Meta before some of his posts were taken down. He later received a notification saying that his profile would be unavailable in India.

“This regime boasts about being the most powerful and fearless government,” he said. “But every bit of criticism scares this government, forcing it to resort to cowardice measures.”

On Monday, the cartoonist said on X that he had never seen a government that is “so scared of cartoons”.

I have never seen a govt which is SO SCARED of cartoons! 😀 https://t.co/gbETc5mpUk

— Satish Acharya (@satishacharya) September 28, 2026

Acharya also shared a news report from 2018, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi had said that cartoons do not hurt, but have a “healing power”. Cartoonists are “closer to god” as they can minutely observe characteristics of human beings, Modi had said at the time.

On whether he was planning to challenge Meta’s action, Acharya said that he was trying but had not been able to contact Instagram’s help centre.

“Everything is [Artificial Intelligence]-controlled, which makes it difficult to get any solution there,” he said.

“I have heard that the only solution is to approach the court,” Acharya told Scroll. “For any institution or any organisation, it would be easier to take legal route, but for an independent cartoonist like me it is not affordable.”

Invincible Modi Image? #ECI #SIR #ECIexpose https://t.co/96I1LEOlKi

— Satish Acharya (@satishacharya) September 24, 2026

Also read: ‘Satire must remain free’: Cartoonists push back after Meta blocks works by Satish Acharya, Manjul

Manjul’s cartoon was also about the Election Commission. He said Instagram had restricted access to it in India.

“When satire gets censored, perhaps the cartoon has made its point,” he said on X.

In a separate post, Manjul alleged that other cartoonists had also had their posts blocked or restricted following government orders, but flagged that some may not speak publicly about it because they are associated with organisations and fear that doing so could affect those associations.

Instagram has restricted this cartoon in India.

I am posting the cartoon again, along with the notice I received from Instagram.

According to the notice, access has been restricted in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India / Law Enforcement” and based on… pic.twitter.com/y3UXWCCDIg

— MANJUL (@MANJULtoons) September 27, 2026

The blocking orders came nearly a month after The Indian Express reported on August 19 that the government issued nearly two lakh orders to social media platforms Instagram, Facebook and YouTube between March and July to take down content.

This amounts to nearly 1,275 orders every day. Each blocking order may cover hundreds of individual posts, pieces of content or accounts.

In comparison, 2,312 blocking orders were sent to 19 online platforms through the Sahyog portal, which facilitates the sending of blocking notices, between October 2024 and October 2025, the newspaper quoted Right to Information records as having shown.

Of the three platforms, Instagram received the highest number of blocking orders, nearly 1 lakh. While Facebook received about 80,000 orders, YouTube got nearly 15,000.

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has integrated its Application Programming Interface with the Sahyog portal to comply with the government orders.

The integration allows content flagged through government directions on the portal to be automatically removed from Meta’s platforms without a separate human review.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• The Art of Resistance: Satish Acharya, Manjul bring smiles (and insight) to a world of despair
• Shifting viewership and Centre’s fresh attempt to control news online
• Centre amends IT Rules to allow only senior officials to issue content takedown orders

Despite a record maize production last year, India’s poultry farmers are contending with higher retail prices of the poultry staple due to its increasing demand for ethanol blending. With a decline in sowing and deficient rainfall this year, experts say this is likely to get worse.

Maize was available to poultry farmers for Rs 12-14 per kg around the year 2019 but it now sells for Rs 27- Rs 28 per kg in the retail market. Since maize is the primary, starch-heavy food for all poultry and soymeal is the secondary food, farmers maintaining egg-layer and broiler poultry are both facing a crisis. They have to buy feed at these high prices and either pass on the cost to the consumer or bear the losses.

The contribution of maize towards ethanol blending increased from 0% in 2021-’22 to around 37% in 2025-26. India’s move to blend 20% ethanol in petrol has been a subject of much discussion this past year after vehicle owners alleged damage due to the biofuel. Besides, when sugar prices surged recently, it led to debate on whether it was due to the Ethanol Blended Petrol programme.

Poultry farmers from Maharashtra spoke to ISignal of their losses, especially when a weak monsoon might mean lower maize and soybean production this year, and said that unless maize cultivation increases, it should not be diverted for ethanol. Eggs are a cheap source of protein, important to improve the nutritional status of Indians.

The E20 programme is targeted at reducing India’s import bill from fossil fuels such as petrol and diesel. But if the area under maize cultivation goes up at the expense of pulses and oilseeds and we have to import them, would that not cancel the E20 gains and therefore miss the point, asked agriculture expert R Ramakumar, a faculty member at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, currently on sabbatical.

ISignal wrote to the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairy for comment on how the government plans to protect the interests of poultry farmers in this context. We will update this report when we receive a response.

Maize 0 to 37

Ethanol can be blended into petrol to reduce the quantity of petrol required to run a vehicle, thus reducing dependency on imported, costly and polluting petroleum, as ISignal explained in May 2022. Ethanol is a principal biofuel naturally produced by the fermentation of sugars by yeasts or via petrochemical processes.

In India, it was initially primarily produced from sugarcane-based raw materials or certain types of heavy molasses, sugarcane juice/sugar/sugar syrup, followed by surplus rice available with the Food Corporation of India and maize. These are known as first generation biofuels.

Since the beginning of the EBP programme in 2003, average blending remained in the 0.1% to 1.5% range up to 2013-’14, according to a roadmap for ethanol blending released by NITI Aayog in 2021.

A number of interventions by the government, including eased tender conditions, an interest subvention scheme – a financial support scheme for distilleries – for augmentation of production capacity and more, led to 5% blending by 2019-’20.

India achieved the E20 target in 2025-’26 and, the government said, saved Rs 1.9 lakh crore in foreign exchange spent on importing fossil fuels since 2014-’15.

Currently, nearly three-fourths of the ethanol produced in the country comes from grains, particularly maize. The contribution of maize towards ethanol blending has increased from 0% in Ethanol Supply Year (ESY) 2021-’22 to around 37% in ESY 2025-’26 (ESY runs from November to October, unlike the financial year which is April to March). This amounts to around 4.8 billion litres of maize-based ethanol in the same year, requiring about 12.6 million tonnes of maize. The share of sugar diverted for ethanol declined from around 12% in 2022-23 to around 9% in 2025-26.

“Restrictions on sugar diversion following consecutive monsoon disruptions limited the availability of cane juice and molasses,” the All India Distilleries’ Association noted. “To maintain blending targets, policy incentives were extended to grain-based ethanol, including higher procurement prices.”

The price of maize-based ethanol is actually higher – Rs 71.86 per litre in 2025-’26 – than other feedstock, rising from Rs 52.92 in 2021-’22. During the same period, the price of ethanol from C-heavy molasses increased from Rs 46 to Rs 57.97.

In 2025-’26, India achieved record production of maize, at 55 million tonne, which is 11 million tonne higher than the previous year. Yet, India’s maize production finds itself under strain from the competing demands for human consumption, poultry and livestock feed, and the rising demand from the ethanol industry.

Poultry lower in the pecking order

In the five years between 2021 and 2026, poultry farmers found themselves scrambling for cheap maize for their birds.

Sujit Patil, a poultry farmer from Sangli, used to buy maize for about Rs 12 per kg in 2019. Now in the off season, the price goes up to even Rs 32 per kg. “Back when maize was Rs 12 and soya was around Rs 25-26, the cost to produce a single egg was Rs 2.50- Rs 2.60. Now, it costs the farmer Rs 4- Rs 4.50. So the egg which you used to get in the market for Rs 5 now goes for Rs 8- Rs 10,” said Patil.

“Because maize got diverted for ethanol, its availability for poultry reduced and rate increased,” Anil Phadke, a poultry farmer from Nashik, said. “Maize prices five years ago used to be Rs 14-Rs 15 per kg. Now they are Rs 25 to Rs 28 per kg. This inflation rate is much higher compared to other commodities.”

If the use of maize in ethanol production continues to rise and if the vital feedstock becomes unavailable for poultry, Phadke estimates that the price of chicken will rise from Rs 200 per kg to Rs 400-500. “Eggs that are Rs 10 per piece will become Rs 20 or 25. If India wants to feed its large population, our cultivable land has to increase but it is decreasing,” said Phadke.

But poultry farmers’ profit margins are still the same, Patil said.

“Either maize production must be increased to meet the demands of both the poultry sector and ethanol or for now, you must stop supplying it for ethanol. Food should be a priority,” said Patil.

In December 2025, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution told parliament that “the quantity of maize is sufficient to cater the demand of ethanol production, poultry and other purposes. To maintain feed availability, the poultry feed industry is also adopting other domestically available ingredients such as Rice bran, Broken Rice, Bajra and Wheat offal”.

But Patil said that de-oiled rice bran as mentioned by the Ministry above has also become costlier—from Rs 7-8 per kg in 2019 to Rs 22-23 now.

This year’s deficient monsoon means India has sown less rice, soybean and maize this Kharif season.

Sanjay Nalgirkar of the Maharashtra Poultry Farmers and Breeders Association and a poultry farmer himself is worried about poor rainfall this year and believes it will yield only 30% to 40% of the usual maize harvest. The international body Food and Agriculture Organization had also warned in June how the El Niño could lead to a weak monsoon over India and particularly impact rice and maize.

“If ethanol continues taking maize from the market, maize prices can go up to Rs 30 next year, the highest ever,” said Nalgirkar. “The cost of eggs has increased around 40% because maize and soymeal prices increased. The third input is imported vitamins and minerals and even there, prices have increased. We are facing around 20% losses. Traders can choose to wait to sell (eggs) but we cannot. We have to sell at whatever the price.”

Ranpal Dhanda, president of the Poultry Federation of India and himself a poultry and maize farmer from Panipat, Haryana, agreed that poultry farmers’ cost of production is increasing but corresponding prices are not.

“The moment the price increases even slightly, there is uproar. So, we cannot increase prices. Then what should we do?” asked Dhanda.

He believes production of maize needs to increase per hectare, for which high quality seeds need to be made available for maize farmers.

“Right now, if maize farmers are getting better prices, poultry is suffering. There needs to be balance. India produces only three to four tonnes of maize per hectare but with high quality seeds, that can go up to 11 tonnes,” said Dhanda.

Even distilleries are afraid of a looming shortage.

“Industry estimates for 2025-’26 indicate a potential maize shortfall of 17 million tonnes, prompting calls for duty-free imports and alternative feed options. India has already shifted from being a net exporter of maize to a net importer to manage this gap,” AIDA noted.

India cultivates non-genetically modified maize and allows only up to 0.5 million tonnes of corn imports annually at 15% import duty. Beyond that, maize imports have a 50% import duty.

A corn job

Domestically, despite increasing demand, increasing the area under foodgrain production is also not easy and experts argue that investing in renewable energy to reduce fossil fuel-dependence is a better option.

For example, you need 187 hectares worth of maize-derived ethanol to match the annual travel distance of an EV recharged from one hectare of solar energy – even accounting for losses from electricity transmission, battery charging and grid storage – according to a 2022 report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, as we explained that year.

Ramakumar said the increase in maize demand has reduced the area under other crops. “India has limited land. So where will maize grow? It has to substitute something else,” he said. “Incentives to convert from rice to maize are limited but incentives to convert from oilseeds or pulses to maize are much higher.”

He explained that across the board, cropping patterns have shifted from pulses, oilseeds, etc. to maize, “which creates a larger question at the national level, because India has a target to reduce its dependence on oilseed imports”. He cited the example of soybean, another feedstock for cattle, for which sowing area has gone down in Madhya Pradesh due to maize.

India spends more than $20 billion a year importing edible oil, and that bill is rising, we explained in June 2026. The government launched a mission two years ago to boost domestic oilseed production by nearly 80% by 2031, but experts say the numbers don’t add up without solving deeper problems: India farms 15%-20% of the world's oilseed acreage yet produces only 6%-7% of global vegetable oil.

Ramakumar called the entire E20 exercise unplanned.

“Maize supply simply could not catch up with the increasing demand which means that we have a maize shortage now and it is affecting everybody,” he said. “If you had planned for an increase in the demand for ethanol, did you plan for the increase in supply also? What happens to your overall food security concerns including pulses, oilseeds, etc? Have you done a cost-benefit analysis? No. If the import bill from fossil fuels is falling and the import bill from oilseeds is rising, what is the net gain? Ultimately, distilleries are benefiting more than even maize farmers. They are the winners here.”

(Uday Narayanan and Sanket Dagade, interns with ISignal, contributed to this report)

Tanvi Deshpande is a special correspondent (environment and climate change) at ISignal. She is based in Mumbai.

This article first appeared on ISignal, a data-driven and public-interest journalism non-profit.

A flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was diverted to Saudi Arabia after a “violent incident” involving its two pilots, Israeli officials said. Flight FZ1073 landed safely at Tabuk airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia, with all passengers accounted for, Flydubai airline said.

Both the captain and co-pilot were taken to hospital with injuries, the Tabuk airport operator said. It did not provide details about how they were injured and said that the incident was under investigation. Read on.

The Delhi High Court denied bail to activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in the 2020 riots conspiracy case, registered under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. This is the third time the court has denied them bail. The trial in the case is yet to begin.

The High Court said that it was “bound by judicial discipline” and could not modify conditions imposed by the Supreme Court in its January 5 order concerning the two men.

The apex court had said that Imam and Khalid could renew their bail pleas after the examination of protected witnesses was completed or after one year, whichever came earlier. Read on.

The Communist Party of India candidate for the bye-election in West Bengal’s Nandigram has alleged that he was assaulted by a Bharatiya Janata Party member while campaigning in the constituency.

Santi Gopal Giri alleged that Abbas Beg, a member of the BJP’s minority cell, stopped him in a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood, questioned how he “dared” to enter the area and assaulted him.

Giri has filed a police complaint against Beg. The BJP leader has also filed a counter-complaint alleging that Giri and his supporters assaulted him. Read on.

After Meta restricted the work of political cartoonists Satish Acharya and Manjul about the Election Commission in India, their colleagues responded with cartoons of their own, saying that “satire must remain free”.

Acharya’s Instagram account has been restricted in India after the Meta-owned platform received a legal request from the government. Manjul, also said that Instagram had restricted one of his works about the Election Commission to users in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India/Law Enforcement”. Read on.

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After Meta restricted the work of political cartoonists Satish Acharya and Manjul about the Election Commission in India, their colleagues responded with cartoons of their own, saying that “satire must remain free”.

Acharya’s Instagram account has been restricted in India after the Meta-owned platform received a legal request from the government. Manjul, also said that Instagram had restricted one of his works about the Election Commission to users in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India/Law Enforcement”.

Rachita Taneja, who goes by the name “Sanitary Panels”, took a swipe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s response to satire.

Satish Acharya and Manjul, two of India's leading political cartoonists, are facing restrictions by Meta on their cartoons mocking the Election Commission of India.https://t.co/5oSQzVfYM7@satishacharya @MANJULtoons pic.twitter.com/19rFgqbec5

— Sanitary Panels (@sanitarypanels) September 30, 2026

Sandeep Adhwaryu, chief cartoonist at The Times of India, made a point about freedom of expression.

The tambourine in place of the alphabet “O” in his illustration is a reference to Modi’s appearance at a “bhajan clubbing” event in Delhi on September 25, where he was seen holding and playing the instrument.

Satire must remain free. Standing with @MANJULtoons @satishacharya #FreedomOfExpression pic.twitter.com/ojOYZ4MfmW

— Sandeep Adhwaryu 🇮🇳 (@CartoonistSan) September 30, 2026

Sajith Kumar, a senior cartoonist with Deccan Herald, poked fun at the prime minister’s inability to take “pointed jokes”.

With @satishacharya @MANJULtoons pic.twitter.com/AXchPkIjMk

— sajithkumar (@sajithkumar) September 30, 2026

Illustrator Ashish Bagchi questioned the state of democracy in India.

Aisi Taisi... pic.twitter.com/Fhm7HjULhe

— Ashish Bagchi (@BagchiAsh) September 27, 2026

Both Acharya and Manjul also responded to the restrictions with their own cartoons.

Block! Block! Block! #NarendraModi@TheSouthfirst cartoon. pic.twitter.com/y3jJZS1wls

— Satish Acharya (@satishacharya) September 30, 2026

Manjul’s cartoon took a dig at the judiciary for playing down serious concerns.

#cartoon #Justice #Judiciary #ModiGovt https://t.co/yvUij6YhNf pic.twitter.com/vAPLuLDhqr

— MANJUL (@MANJULtoons) September 29, 2026

Restrictions on cartoonists

Acharya’s Instagram account was restricted in India after the Meta-owned platform received a legal request from the government.

Among Acharya’s recent works were cartoons about The Indian Express’ investigation published on September 23. The report showed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions taken by the poll panel on the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge.

A message displayed by Instagram when users try to access Acharya’s account says: “We reviewed it against our policies and conducted a legal and human rights assessment. After the review, we restricted access to the content in the location where it goes against local law.”

Manjul later said that Instagram had also restricted one of his works about the Election Commission to users in India “pursuant to a notice from the Government of India/Law Enforcement”.

On Monday, Acharya told Scroll that he had not received any communication from Meta before some of his posts were taken down. He later received a notification saying his profile would be unavailable in India.

“This regime boasts about being the most powerful and fearless government,” he said. “But every bit of criticism scares this government, forcing it to resort to cowardice measures.”

Acharya said he was trying to challenge Meta’s action but had been unable to contact Instagram’s help centre. “Everything is [Artificial Intelligence]-controlled, which makes it difficult to get any solution there,” he said.

“I have heard that the only solution is to approach the court,” Acharya told Scroll. “For any institution or any organisation, it would be easier to take legal route, but for an independent cartoonist like me it is not affordable.”

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

A case of attempt to murder and rioting was registered against Congress workers on Tuesday for allegedly defacing Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s ancestral home in Agra during a protest against alleged irregularities in the conduct of elections, Times of India reported.

Six party workers were also arrested, the newspaper quoted an Agra Police statement as saying.

The protesters had allegedly written slogans with black paint on the gate and wall of Kumar’s residence, PTI reported.

The first information report was registered on the basis of a written complaint by Sub-Inspector Gaurav Gupta against eight named persons and 15-20 unidentified Congress workers, the news agency reported.

They were booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to voluntarily causing hurt, wrongful restraint, using criminal force against a public servant, house trespass and criminal intimidation.

Congress city president Amit Singh said that the case should have been limited to provisions related to the protest. He alleged that the police had invoked several “false” charges against the workers, PTI reported.

On Tuesday, the Congress demanded Kumar’s resignation, accusing him of organising a “vote chori” or vote theft, campaign on behalf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. The demand was part of a resolution adopted at a meeting by the Congress Working Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body.

The resolution came after The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Their objections were reportedly related to the changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

The Election Commission has rejected reports of a rift, saying differences in views and observations are a normal part of its deliberations.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Punjab and Haryana High Court on Wednesday directed the Punjab Police to clarify whether a student was raped at Lovely Professional University before violence broke out on the campus, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench sought a status report from the Punjab government in a petition filed by a university student, who has sought a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the violence.

The court asked the Punjab government to specify “whether any incident…occurred as was reported on Reddit” on September 26.

It also asked the police to report what steps they had taken to verify the allegation. If no such incident took place, the court directed the police to inform it of the steps taken to have the social media post removed.

The allegation of rape on campus has not been confirmed. The alleged incident came to light after an unverified Reddit post claimed that a worker had raped a student on campus after which the university sent her home and she later died by suicide, Live Law reported.

The petition stated that the post and subsequent WhatsApp messages led to around 2,000 students gathering outside a girls hostel, after which some of them blocked National Highway 44 between Phagwara and Jalandhar.

The petitioner has claimed that the violence was not a spontaneous protest but a planned attack intended to create unrest on the campus.

Additional Advocate General Chanchal K Singla told the court that first information reports had been registered and that an investigation was under way into both the alleged rape and the source of the Reddit post.

“We are in touch with Reddit and trying to find out the source of it,” Bar and Bench quoted Singla as saying.

The court has listed the matter for further hearing next week.

The protests and alleged rape on campus

The agitation began on Saturday after students alleged that an “outsider working as a plumber” had entered a student’s hostel room and raped her three days earlier. The protesting students claimed that the university administration had not taken action after the alleged sexual assault.

The campus protests turned violent on Sunday, with students damaging university property, setting some objects on fire and blocking the Jalandhar-Phagwara highway. In videos shared online, some protesters could be heard shouting “we want justice”.

The institute’s Registrar Monica Gulati, on the other hand, claimed that the allegation of rape on campus “appears to be a deliberate and concerted attempt to malign the reputation of the university and tarnish its image”.

In a social media post on Sunday evening, the university shared a video of three students who are purportedly staying in room number 504 of girls’ hostel 3, where the alleged assault was reported to have taken place.

The three students could be heard saying that no such incident had taken place in their room. They appealed to the police and fellow students not to repeatedly disturb them in the name of an investigation. They said that they would inform their parents if they were troubled further.

However, soon after, a separate video emerged on social media in which the same three students said they had been instructed on what to say and that their statements had been used without their knowledge or consent.

On Monday, the university suspended classes for 10 days and postponed its mid-term examinations until further notice.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

On September 18, 2026, Sahil Wakode, a BTech student from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay died by suicide. Wakode’s parents have alleged that their son faced casteist harassment from a professor on campus.

Students mounted protests after the suicide and submitted an 18-point memorandum to the institution, demanding a fair investigation and better support systems for students.

After three days of protests, media outlets reported that the institute’s director signed the memorandum, indicating that the demands would be considered. On September 24, the institute announced that a ten-member committee would investigate the incident.

The previous month, IIT Delhi had also seen protests after the death by suicide of a student, named Rishikesh Kumar. The institution’s students demanded that an external inquiry committee be formed, and that the student’s family be compensated, and also called for broader policy changes.

The students paused their protests after six days, after the institution formed the committee – Kumar’s parents declined compensation.

Many students told Scroll that the protesting IIT students had been inspired by the protest launched by the Cockroach Janata Party in July. “There are student protests happening all over the country so, even we felt emboldened to raise our issues,” said one student from IIT Bombay. “For the first time, we are seeing that protests can actually be impactful and I think students also feel like they can make demands for a better life.” All those who spoke to Scroll requested anonymity because they feared retribution from their institutions.

Nevertheless, the intensity of the protests was striking, given that the IITs have not typically been known as sites of student politics.

A key reason for this is institutional opposition to such activities. In 2023, IIT Bombay explicitly stated in its rules and regulations that all protests, including marches, and gathering on campuses “require prior permission from the institute and the local police”.

The institution also warned students against speaking to “the press, media persons, or any external agencies on any matters related to the Institute without prior approval from authorized Institute officials”. The rules also state that students cannot “post, share, or disseminate any false information related to the Institute on social media platforms” and that “unauthorized sharing of confidential or sensitive Institute matters on social media is strictly prohibited”.

The institution enforced these rules in 2025, and suspended a student for allegedly making “unauthorised comments” to the media. He was reinstated after approaching a court, which ruled in his favour. The professor who headed the disciplinary committee that decided on the suspension is the same one named in the recent incident.

IITs have also restricted political activities in specific circumstances. Earlier this year, during the Cockroach Janata Party protests, for instance, IIT Rourkee asked students and faculty to refrain from political activity without seeking the institution’s permission.

Similarly, in 2020, as protests against the Constitutional Amendment Act played out, the IIT Bombay director told students to keep politics off campus. In 2018, IIT Kharagpur issued a circular banning students from “political/apolitical gathering/meeting” ahead of a planned march in support of students from Aligarh Muslim University who had been assaulted by police.

In another, earlier instance, from 2015, IIT Madras derecognised the student group Ambedkar Periyar Reading Circle – it withdrew its decision a week later, after strong protests from students across the country.

Unsurprisingly, then, student political groups like the left-leaning Student Federation of India or the right-leaning Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad have not established a presence in the IITs. In fact, IIT Madras’s rules explicitly state that students are allowed “to form associations and student organizations as long as they are not affiliated to external political parties”, or groups that “promote hatred”.

But faculty and students noted that in the absence of forums in which to speak up, frustrations over several problems have been building up in recent years. These include inadequate infrastructure, social isolation and uncertain job prospects.

One faculty member observed that securing a seat at an IIT is an immensely difficult task, and that most students spend several years and several lakhs of rupees at coaching centres to be able to crack the entrance exams. “After all that, they come to the institutions to find out that there are even more struggles here,” they said. “The institutions don’t match up to the students’ expectations.”

Causes of unrest

The IIT Madras student noted that student suicides become “flashpoints” for unrest, and that in such situations, administrations “really cannot stop the student from protesting”.

According to data compiled by Dheeraj Singh, founder of the Global IIT Alumni Support group and an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, in the last 10 years, 120 students have died of suicides or unnatural causes, while the the previous decade saw 51 such deaths. The data also showed that Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe students died by suicide at roughly two times higher rates than general category students.

Since 2023, a total of eight students have died by suicide in IIT Delhi, and this year alone, three have died by suicide at IIT Bombay.

One alumnus of an IIT observed that students were frustrated with the absence of measures to tackle this problem. “Every time such a suicide happens, the administration will form such committees, show some interest in the matter and then ten days later everything goes back to normal,” they said. “We see the same thing happen every single time there is a suicide, nobody seems to be taking any concrete steps.”

The first faculty member noted that the deeper infrastructural problems that students have been frustrated about include a lack of space. In IIT Delhi, for instance, they noted, there were simply not enough classrooms to accommodate students, and hostel rooms were inadequate as well. “Students are crammed into hostel rooms, there have been issues regarding drinking water and hygiene too,” they said.

A key reason for this is that while student numbers have increased dramatically over recent years, the institutions have not been allocated sufficient additional resources. “Infrastructure has not evolved with time,” one student from IIT Delhi said. Further, the first faculty member noted that they were struggling to teach the expanded classes.

Faculty and students’ impression of IITs diminishing reputation is also reflected in their concerns over placements. While once IITs would boast of students bagging huge salary packages, the alumnus said, “That doesn’t happen any more. Students still get, but they are few.”

The first faculty member also said that students were finding it difficult to land “high salaried jobs”. According to data submitted by the Centre to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education, Women, Children, Youth and Sports in 2025, in 22 out of 23 IITs, placements had fallen significantly in the three years between 2021-’22 and 2023-’24. While some attribute this fall to a normalisation after a spike in hiring after the Covid-19 pandemic, recent media reports indicate that securing jobs did, indeed, remain a challenge.

“The image of IITs being this prestigious institute that guarantees a secure future is being shattered,” the alumnus said. “In the last few years, the institution is not releasing placement data.”

At the same time, the fees at the institutions have also seen significant hikes in recent years. In 2022, students of IIT Bombay held a month-long protest against a fee hike of 39% for MTech students and 45% for PhD students. The institution partially rolled back the fees after the protests.

“Students are forced to take loans to pay their fees and after that if they are graduating with loans and not a good job, then that causes a lot of stress,” the first faculty member said. “Both to the student and the parents.”

Campus environment

Students also decried what they said was an increasingly restrictive environment on IIT campuses. “There is such high security everywhere. There’s a running joke that entering our campus is like going to the airport,” another IIT Bombay student said. “We see people in uniforms all over campus.”

She added, “There are also several places on campus that are now forbidden, there are so many rules regarding every single thing. It has become suffocating. All of these reasons combined is what is causing so much frustration among students.”

The IIT Madras student explained that though their campus had a wide range of clubs, students could not have free conversations within them. “The administration assigns a professor to each of these clubs, and I think this is because they want to keep an eye on what we are up to,” he said. “So, students feel like they are being watched and there is no space to discuss issues.”

The IIT Bombay student also argued that the attitude of many faculty members was outdated. They see the teacher-student relationship as “purely transactional”, she said, an approach that had “reached its limit and is now crashing and burning”.

The first faculty member noted that the challenges students face are particularly acute for those from Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Class communities – these students often have to take loans to enroll in the institutions, and once they arrive on campuses, find themselves isolated from other students. “Even general category students find it hard to feel a sense of belonging, so obviously it is worse for students from marginalised backgrounds,” they said. “It is very difficult for them to navigate these spaces.”

That marginalised students find themselves in an oppressive environment was apparent from the tenor of some public conversations that followed Wokade’s death – for instance, rather than consider the allegation of casteist harassment that his family had raised, some social media users scrutinised CCTV footage of the exam to determine whether or not he had cheated in the exam.

The second faculty member also noted that the professor in question received a groundswell of support from faculty from IIT Bombay, IIT Delhi, IIT Madras and other IITs after the family raised the matter of caste. “After the family invoked the SC/ST atrocity act, immediately everyone came to the defence of the professor,” the faculty member pointed out. “Until then everyone was protesting.”

Further, some argued that support systems on the campuses for distressed students were inadequate. “Students don’t find the counselors to be good and prefer to get a reference from the campus hospital to go see therapists outside the campus,” the second IIT Bombay student said.

This difficulty is compounded by the intense competition within the institutions, and a view that prevails among many students who perform poorly or do not graduate simply could not cope with the pressure. “By design, life in an IIT is isolating, even spaces within the campus are designed in a way to prevent proper socialisation among students,” the student said. “Everybody on the outside thinks that life in IIT is perfect but it really isn’t.”

Increased politicisation?

Are the recent agitations then an indication of a shift on IIT campuses, and of an increasing politicisation of the institutions’ students?

Conversations with students and faculty members from four IITs suggest that this is not the case. The first student from IIT Bombay said that she had observed that the initiative to start a protest was taken by students with “some political leanings” but that as the protests grew, so did demands to ensure they remained apolitical. “There have been protests and marches in the past as well,” she said. “Students will come together for some issues, but even in this one, they said they don’t want it to get political. Even though all things are political.”

A student of IIT Madras said he felt that “‘politics’ is kind of a bad word” in the institutions. “But I feel that there is a kind of awareness that is also emerging among the students,” he said. “Probably because the peer groups are also changing, thanks to diverse students from different backgrounds and socio-economic background students who are coming into the campuses.”

Many protesting students, however, worried that unrest would damage the institution’s name, the IIT Bombay student observed. “They may voice out issues but they don’t want the issues to get out and for the institution’s reputation to be affected,” she said. “They don’t see themselves as separate from the institution and so don’t want the institution to be criticised.”

In fact, one professor from an IIT said that in the protests in Mumbai, they had observed some students raising slogans against party-affiliated student groups like the Students Federation of India. “They want their protests to be ‘pure’, they seem to view student politics that happen in other campuses as ‘dirty’,” the professor said. “And they seem to not want these protests to be tainted by that kind of politics.”

Four Central Industrial Security Force personnel were killed in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua after their colleague opened fire at them allegedly following an argument about him and his wife bringing their child to the power project site, reported The Hindu.

All the personnel were posted at the Sewa Hydel-II power project. The accused head constable, Avdesh Kumar Singh, has been arrested.

It is unclear what led to the incident.

Singh and his wife work for the Central Industrial Security Force, reported The Indian Express. An unidentified police officer investigating the matter told the newspaper that Singh had an argument with his colleagues and company commander Ankit Kumar Pandey for bringing his child to the project site frequently.

“The couple worked in different shifts at the same site,” the officer said. “So, when one parent reported for duty, they would bring the toddler along to hand him over to the spouse returning home.”

The officer said that the couple was asked not to bring the child to the project site. On Tuesday, when the child was at the site, “someone complained about it to the company commander”, which led to the argument, he added.

Apart from Pandey, the others who were killed are sub-inspector Lakshman Singh and constables Sanjeev Kumar and Muhammad Rafiq.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday denied bail to activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in the 2020 riots conspiracy case, registered under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, Bar and Bench reported.

This is the third time the court has denied bail to Khalid and Imam. The trial in the case is yet to begin.

A division bench of Justices Prathiba M Singh and Dinesh Bhatt dismissed their appeals against a July 4 trial court order refusing bail.

The High Court said that it was “bound by judicial discipline” and could not modify conditions imposed by the Supreme Court in its January 5 order concerning the two men, Live Law reported.

In January, the Supreme Court denied bail to Khalid and Imam, but granted relief to activists Gulfisha Fatima, Meera Haider, Shifa-Ur-Rehman, Muhammad Saleem Khan and Shadab Ahmed.

It had said that Imam and Khalid could renew their bail pleas after the examination of protected witnesses was completed or after one year, whichever came earlier.

Khalid and Imam “stand on a qualitatively different footing as compared to other accused”, the Supreme Court had said at the time.

On Wednesday, the High Court said it could not find fault with the trial court’s decision in view of the Supreme Court’s conditions and dismissed the appeals, Live Law reported.

Khalid and Imam had approached the court, relying on a Supreme Court judgement in an unrelated bail plea of a person booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, in which another bench had questioned aspects of the January ruling concerning their bail.

On May 18, a Supreme Court bench criticised the January order, observing that “bail is the rule and jail is an exception” even in prosecutions under the anti-terror law.

The Delhi Police had opposed the fresh pleas, arguing that a judgement by a coordinate bench in another case could not override the findings and directions issued by the Supreme Court in Khalid and Imam’s own case, Bar and Bench reported.

Khalid, Imam and the other activists had been 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.

The persons 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.

The Communist Party of India candidate for the bye-election in West Bengal’s Nandigram has alleged that he was assaulted by a Bharatiya Janata Party member while campaigning in the constituency on Monday, The Times of India reported.

Santi Gopal Giri alleged that Abbas Beg, a member of the BJP’s minority cell, stopped him in a Muslim-dominated neighbourhood, asked him how he “dared” to enter the constituency and assaulted him.

“I was thrown to the ground and beaten so mercilessly that I nearly lost consciousness,” Giri told The Times of India. He had filed a police complaint against Beg.

The CPI strongly condemn the brutal attack on Comrade Shanti Gopal Giri, CPI candidate backed by the Left Front in the Nandigram by-election. This assault exposes the level of goondaism, intimidation and undemocratic practices prevailing under the BJP and Suvendu Adhikari in West… pic.twitter.com/wEsyouw5Yk

— D. Raja (@ComradeDRaja) September 29, 2026

Beg has filed a counter-complaint, alleging that Giri and his supporters assaulted him, The Times of India reported. He claimed he had stopped Giri from “communal fear-mongering”, following which “the CPI candidate and his armed henchmen attacked me with bamboo sticks”.

On Tuesday, the CPI condemned the attack on Giri, describing the incident as an assault on democratic rights.

“This assault exposes the level of goondaism, intimidation and undemocratic practices prevailing under the BJP and Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal,” the party said on social media. “A mandate cannot become a licence for political violence.”

The BJP won 207 seats in the 294-member Assembly, ending the 15-year rule of the Trinamool Congress.

The CPI also alleged that the BJP’s victory in the Assembly elections was aided by the deletion of lakhs of voters through the special intensive revision and the use of “money power”.

Congress tableau damaged

In a separate incident in Terepekhya, the windscreen of a Congress campaign tableau supporting candidate Milan Pradhan was smashed, The Times of India reported.

Congress leaders alleged that BJP-backed persons were responsible for the vandalism and raised the matter with the Election Commission.

The Nandigram bye-poll is scheduled for October 6. It was necessitated after Adhikari vacated the seat. He had won both Nandigram and Bhabanipur in the May Assembly elections, defeating former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur.

Campaigning for the bye-poll will end on October 4 while counting of votes will be held on October 9.

On Tuesday, the High Court granted interim bail to Congress’ Nandigram candidate in six criminal cases from 2007, allowing him to campaign for the bye-poll.

Pradhan had been arrested on September 18 in connection with a 2007 murder case. He was subsequently shown to be arrested in five other cases.

The High Court also dismissed a petition by the West Bengal Congress challenging an alleged discrepancy in the election affidavit of the BJP’s Nandigram candidate Hasirani Rath. The petition had questioned the difference between Rath’s declared age and the year in which she claims to have passed her Class 10 examinations.

Rath has not mentioned her date of birth in the affidavit but has stated her age as “60+ years”. In her educational qualifications, she has stated that she passed the Class 10 examination in 1965.

If Rath is between 60 and 65 years of age now, she would have been between four and nine years old in 1965, when she has stated that she passed Class 10.

Edited by Sneha.

The Indian Coast Guard on Wednesday said that it has seized 526 kg of narcotics valued at more than Rs 3,000 crore from an Iranian boat off Lakshadweep in the Arabian Sea.

Five Pakistani citizens were arrested from the boat during the operations conducted with the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad, the coast guard said.

The seizures were made near Lakshadweep on September 25, reported PTI. The seized narcotics comprised high-grade methamphetamine and heroin, said the coast guard, adding that it had “neutralised a transnational narco-smuggling vector”.

The seized vessel and the crew were taken to Mumbai for investigations, it added.

In an intelligence-led joint operation with ATS Gujarat, and Central Intelligence Agency, @IndiaCoastGuard units interdicted a suspicious Iranian dhow in the Arabian Sea, west of #Lakshadweep. Positive detection, sustained tracking and a hot pursuit culminated in tactical… pic.twitter.com/p2BthJvndS

— Indian Coast Guard (@IndiaCoastGuard) September 30, 2026

Written by Sneha. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar has warned that there may be a “major food crisis” in the coming months amid fertiliser shortages and disruptions in grain shipments caused by the wars in Ukraine and West Asia.

On top of it, “there’s the super El Niño”, said Jaishankar while speaking at an event hosted at Asia Society in New York on Monday.

The El Niño phenomenon involves the warming of ocean surface temperatures in the eastern and central Pacific. It typically occurs every few years and has been linked to crop damage, fires and flash floods.

On Tuesday, the Union government revised its food grain production target to 373.9 million tonnes for 2026-’27, which is 2.6 million tonnes lower than the estimated output in 2025-’26, reported The Indian Express. The decision was taken in view of the situation created by El Niño, said Union Agriculture Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan.

Additionally, India’s fertiliser industry is reeling under the disruption in energy supplies from West Asia amid the conflict there. The industry depends heavily on liquefied natural gas imported from the region as raw material to manufacture fertilisers domestically.

India also directly imports finished products such as urea and diammonium phosphate from Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. With the Strait of Hormuz largely shut since the outbreak of the war in February, supplies of these raw materials and products have dwindled.

Further, Russia, whose oil refineries have come under Ukrainian drone and missile attacks, accounts for about 18% to 20% of the global fertiliser market share.

In view of this, Jaishankar said on Monday that the situation has been “really very very stressful” for economies in the Global South.

“If you have energy as a big crunch, and then food and fertilisers on top of it, and finance because every time there’s a conflict, money moves towards safe harbours and away from the Global South,” he explained.

The minister said that countries cannot be “so self-centred that they are in their own world”.

On Tuesday, the Congress alleged that the crisis is looming because the Narendra Modi government had not acted in time.

“Narendra Modi’s minister has revealed that a crisis of food and drink items is looming in the coming months,” said the party. “If Narendra Modi had acted in time, the country wouldn’t be facing these crises today, but how can he think about the country when he’s busy making a spectacle.”

नरेंद्र मोदी के मंत्री ने बता दिया कि आने वाले महीनों में खाने-पीने की चीजों का संकट आने वाला है।

देश पहले ही Energy Crisis से जूझ रहा है। खाद की भयंकर कमी है। अब खाने-पीने की चीजों पर भी संकट मंडरा रहा है।

अगर नरेंद्र मोदी ने वक्त रहते काम किया होता तो आज देश के सामने ये संकट… pic.twitter.com/EpRsxLLdcz

— Congress (@INCIndia) September 29, 2026

Written by Sneha. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: Does India have enough fertiliser stocks to tide over Iran war shock?

Scroll’s Rokibuz Zaman on Tuesday won the 2026 Biswajit Roy Memorial Award for people-centric journalism.

He was awarded in the emerging journalist category for his commitment to people-centred journalism.

Zaman won the prize for his ground reporting from West Bengal, Assam and the rest of the North East on matters of citizenship, identity, displacement and the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

His reportage has “consistently tried to put the people affected by these processes at the centre of the story, rather than treating citizenship and electoral issues only as political or statistical questions”, the organisers said.

Zaman’s reports on the citizenship crisis in Assam, “including the experiences of persons facing foreigners tribunals and citizenship scrutiny, has documented the human consequences behind what are often reduced to political or statistical debates”, they added.

The award is given by eNewsroom India, an independent public-interest media platform and an initiative of the DigiPrism Media Foundation.

The award will be presented at an event in Kolkata on Saturday.

Read Rokibuz Zaman’s stories here.

The Calcutta High Court on Tuesday granted interim bail to Congress’ Nandigram candidate in six criminal cases from 2007, allowing him to campaign for the October 6 bye-poll, Live Law reported.

Milan Pradhan has been directed to surrender before the trial court by October 21, PTI reported.

Pradhan was arrested on September 18 in connection with a 2007 murder case. He was subsequently shown to be arrested in five other cases.

Meanwhile, the High Court dismissed a petition by the West Bengal Congress challenging an alleged discrepancy in the election affidavit of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Nandigram candidate Hasirani Rath. The petition had questioned the difference between Rath’s declared age and the year in which she claims to have passed her Class 10 examinations.

Rath has not mentioned her date of birth in the affidavit but has stated her age as “60+ years”. In her educational qualifications, she has stated that she passed the Class 10 examination in 1965.

If Rath is between 60 and 65 years of age now, she would have been between four and nine years old in 1965, when she has stated that she passed Class 10.

Cases against Pradhan

Pradhan’s arrest had come hours after former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said her faction of the Trinamool Congress would support him in the October 6 bye-poll. Minutes earlier, the faction’s candidate had withdrawn her nomination, shortly after photographs of her meeting Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari were shared online.

On Tuesday, Justice Tirthankar Ghosh said that Pradhan had been arrested after filing his nomination papers and should be given an opportunity to contest the bye-poll.

Pradhan has been booked in cases related to the protests in Nandigram in 2007 against the plans by the Left Front government at the time to set up a chemical hub. Fourteen persons were killed in police firing during the protests.

On Tuesday, the High Court noted the police had “more than sufficient” time to execute the warrants against him, and that the state government had produced no material to show that he had been wanted in any case after 2007, Live Law reported.

The court directed Pradhan to furnish a bail bond of Rs 20,000 in each of the six cases.

On Thursday, the High Court had said that it was “surprising” that Pradhan was arrested in a sixth case from 2007 while he was in custody.

Justice Saugata Bhattacharyya had directed the police not to take any coercive action against Pradhan in connection with the sixth case till October 12, adding that the Congress candidate should not be treated as arrested in the case.

The Nandigram bye-poll was necessitated after Adhikari vacated the seat. The chief minister had won the Nandigram and Bhabanipur seats during the Assembly elections in May.

Campaigning for the bye-poll will end on October 4 while counting of votes will be held on October 9.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Calcutta High Court dismissed a petition by the West Bengal Congress challenging an alleged discrepancy in the election affidavit of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Nandigram bye-poll candidate, Live Law reported on Tuesday.

The petition had questioned the difference between Hasirani Rath’s declared age and the year in which she claims to have passed her Class 10 examinations.

Rath has not mentioned her date of birth in the affidavit but has stated her age as “60+ years”. In her educational qualifications, she has stated that she passed the Class 10 examination in 1965.

If Rath is between 60 and 65 years of age now, she would have been between four and nine years old in 1965, when she has stated that she passed Class 10.

The Congress argued that the two details were prima facie inconsistent and questioned whether the Election Commission and the returning officer had properly scrutinised her nomination papers.

The party said that if Rath’s declared age was correct, her educational details needed to be verified, and vice versa. It asked the court to direct the authorities to examine the documents submitted by Rath, PTI reported.

During the hearing, the Congress’ lawyer clarified that the party was not seeking cancellation of Rath’s candidature or any order that would delay the election.

The Election Commission opposed the petition, arguing that the objection had been raised after the statutory period for challenging the nomination papers had ended, Live Law reported.

Its lawyers said no objection had been raised by the Congress during scrutiny on September 17 and that the alleged discrepancy did not affect Rath’s eligibility to contest the election.

The poll body’s lawyer also said there was no maximum age limit for contesting an election.

On Tuesday, the High Court granted interim bail to Congress’ Nandigram candidate Milan Pradhan in six criminal cases from 2007, allowing him to campaign for the bye-poll.

He had been arrested on September 18 in connection with a 2007 murder case. He was subsequently shown to be arrested in five other cases.

The arrest had come hours after former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said her faction of the Trinamool Congress would support Pradhan in the bye-poll. Minutes earlier, the faction’s candidate had withdrawn her nomination, shortly after photographs of her meeting Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari were shared online.

The Nandigram bye-poll is scheduled for October 6 after Adhikari vacated the seat. Adhikari had won both Nandigram and Bhabanipur in the May Assembly elections, defeating former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee in Bhabanipur.

The BJP has fielded Rath, who is the mother of an aide to Adhikari who was shot dead two days after the Assembly election results were announced.

Campaigning for the bye-poll will end on October 4 while counting of votes will be held on October 9.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Reading news reports in recent weeks has made one thing clear: being a Bengali-speaking Muslim has, by itself, become incriminating in today’s India.

Simply having this ethno-linguistic identity is enough to trigger the suspicion of state officials. Amid the fervid political rhetoric about “ghuspetiya” – infiltrators – and supposed demographic change, being a Bengali-speaking Muslim has come to be associated with being an outsider.

Across the country, Bengali-speaking Muslim marginal workers are being picked up for questioning, detained and even deported to Bangladesh. For instance, last month in Bengaluru, 3,000-odd Bengali Muslim garbage and waste workers were picked up by the police as part of a massive verification drive against allegedly unauthorised migrants.

Only 31 of them were eventually determined to be Bangladeshi nationals and sent to West Bengal to be deported to Bangladesh. In Chhattisgarh, 23 workers from West Bengal – only one Hindu and the rest Muslims – were detained on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals this month.

In July, a Muslim woman tracing her roots to North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal was detained and deported to Bangladesh in July.

These three episodes are a continuation of a phenomenon that began last summer, when the authorities detained thousands of Bengali Muslim workers across the country, deporting hundreds to Bangladesh – mostly without trial or due process.

While some of those deported were indeed irregular migrants from Bangladesh living and working in India, many were Bengali-speaking Muslim Indian citizens who had migrated to other parts of the country for work. Several of those deported had to be readmitted to India later.

Maleka Begum has passed away at her native village in Assam's Barpeta district today. @scroll_in

‘Let me die at home’: Back from Bangladesh, an Assam woman struggles to recover from ‘pushback’https://t.co/Y9OhgyT892 pic.twitter.com/15hQCadLkB

— Rokibuz Zaman (@ZamanRokibuz_) September 23, 2026

From media stories about those arrested, and deported, two distinct patterns emerge clearly. First, the state’s suspicion is rooted in a combination of ethnicity, language and religion. Scrutiny is triggered primarily by the individual’s identity markers, and documentary checks come only later.

Second, the documents presented to support rightful claims of belonging hold little weight. Though families submit many documents relating, for example, to schooling, land ownership and enrollment in the electoral rolls, officials often disregard them and proceed with arrests and deportations.

This suspicion reveals narrow and ill-informed ideas about linguistic and ethnic diversity in India, wedded to majoritarian ideas about who belongs – and who does not. This kind of profiling, in which bias about identity comes first and bureaucratic verification comes later, ignores the fact that India is composed of a vast array of ethnic, religious, and linguistic communities. The Bengali-speaking Muslim identity exists on both sides of the border but in India, state functionaries seem to be automatically treating members of this community as unauthorised migrants.

To be sure, nation-states have the prerogative to address unauthorised migration within their territory. But it is deeply problematic when they cannot do so without jeopardising their own citizens. As political scientist Niraja Jayal Gopal wrote in the context of the Assam National Register of Citizens, “With what justification can a state that does not have the ability to ‘detect’ aliens, or even to secure its borders against illegal immigrants, set out to find aliens by elimination? This is tantamount not only to using an elephant to crush an ant, but of torturing the elephant to do it.”

Dablu Sheikh, 60, and his three sons – 29-year-old Kayem Sheikh, 20-year-old Rajaul Sheikh and 16-year-old Asmaul Sheikh – were picked up by the police. https://t.co/FPAboru9Gj

Dablu and Kayem had featured on the electoral rolls of West Bengal after the SIR.@ZamanRokibuz_… pic.twitter.com/NNiclRfRL7

— Scroll.in (@scroll_in) September 24, 2026

Many of these cases are examples of the contradiction that legal scholar Mohsin Bhat calls “documentary doublethink”. On the one hand, officials cast acute suspicion on the documents submitted as proof of citizenship, treating them as compromised. At the same time, they affirm the authority of documentation itself by demanding more and more documents, which can be difficult for individuals and families to produce.

Moreover, even when valid documents are presented, minor discrepancies in the spelling of names can render them ineffective.

It is pertinent to consider certain cases in which people deported to Bangladesh were accepted back into India, often under court directions. Among them were Sunali Khatun and Sweety Bibi: Bengali Muslims from West Bengal who were forcibly pushed into Bangladesh and then accepted back into India after Supreme Court direction.

Mumtaz Begum, a Bengali Muslim woman from Assam remains in Bangladesh, even though the Gauhati High Court has asked the state government to pay Rs 2 lakh in compensation for her expulsion and the central government to facilitate her return

Our small video report from Murshidabad.

Since the BJP came to power in West Bengal in June, the police have been picking up Muslims in midnight raids. This list includes even two children.
pic.twitter.com/1DaItjUERg

— Rokibuz Zaman (@ZamanRokibuz_) September 16, 2026

Alongside these instances of legal intervention, there have been several episodes in both West Bengal and Assam in which people pushed into Bangladeshi territory were subsequently repatriated to India following negotiations between border officials of the two countries and, perhaps, political intervention.

What do such cases say about the nature of the state that deports its own citizens in inhumane ways, without following due process or completing necessary checks – only to accept them back?

How are we to understand the policies of a state that forcibly pushes some of its own – incriminated by their identity and their documents rendered meaningless – beyond its borders, leaving them to languish in no man’s land or face arrest and detention in foreign jails?

Pushing the marginalised towards statelessness upends the very premise of equal citizenship guaranteed in the Constitution. History is witness to what dehumanising, barbaric outcomes such racial and ethnic exclusion can lead to.

Abhishek Saha is doing his DPhil at the University of Oxford. He is the author of No Land’s People: The Untold Story of Assam’s NRC Crisis.

In March 2022, Rahul Kumar’s family hired a nurse from a private agency to assist him for three days.

Kumar had been diagnosed with a motor neurone disease five years earlier. He was in his late thirties, and had begun losing sensation in his toes. Before long, he found it difficult to lift or move his feet.

While doctors did not immediately understand the cause of these symptoms, a series of diagnostic tests helped rule out possibilities such as inflammation from allergies and heavy metal toxicity. Neurological examinations eventually pinpointed his ailment.

Doctors told Kumar that the disease would cause muscles that control activities like walking, speaking, swallowing and breathing to weaken over months or years. Its progression could not be predicted, and it could not be cured. All he could hope to do through treatment was manage the symptoms.

Within five years, Kumar had become wheelchair-bound and dependent on caregivers to support his daily needs. His family hired a full-time helper who could assist him with everyday activities, as well as typing on a computer and phone. In March 2022, the family hired the home nurse from a private agency because the regular helper was unavailable. The service cost them Rs 8,300.

On the second day of working in Kumar’s home, the nurse helped him to the bathroom, left him there and fled with several of the family’s belongings.

When the family contacted the agency, they agreed only to repay Rs 4,900 of the fee for the nurse, and no other costs. “They also told us that they had not checked the man’s criminal record before hiring him as a nurse and sending him to our home,” said Kumar’s brother-in-law, Sumeet Parikshit.

Parikshit had a broader perspective of the incident because he works as a programme manager at the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People, in Delhi. He explained that his family’s ordeal was revealing of the massive challenges that disabled people and their families face in securing regular care. The problem is particularly acute for families of individuals with intellectual or neurological disabilities, many of whom need a high level of support with day-to-day tasks.

“The cost of living with a disability is high,” he said. For one, he explained, families incur medical expenses, such as of medicines and nurses. In addition, families also incur “housing-related expenditures”, he said. “There are no accessible houses in Delhi, and the monthly rents for those that are somewhat accessible may go upwards of Rs 45,000.” He noted that “for persons with neurological or intellectual disabilities particularly, this is a big burden, because their condition often does not allow them to hold a full-time job”.

In fact, the theft in the family’s house was an indirect result of financial burdens – Parikshit’s sister took care of Kumar earlier, but she was forced to take up a job to meet their high expenses. Thus, “The family became dependent on the caregiver,” Parikshit said.

He added that the absence of a “dedicated, trained cadre of caregivers for persons with disabilities, and the sector being unregulated, left my brother-in-law vulnerable”.

The Sahyogi scheme

Families like Kumar’s are particularly disheartened about their struggle to find trained caregivers because the Indian government launched a scheme in 2015 to tackle this problem, only to wind it up in four years, with few results to show for it.

The Sahyogi scheme was aimed at creating a skilled workforce of caregivers for persons with multiple disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy. Parikshit explained that the idea underpinning the scheme was that crises such as the one his family faced “could be avoided if families have a formal cadre of caregivers to choose from”.

The scheme was open to candidates who had completed schooling till at least Class 8. It aimed to train them in helping disabled people carry out activities of daily living and using assistive devices, as well as in matters of health and nutrition.

Candidates were also to be trained in mobility and sensory-motor stimulation, a form of therapy that uses sensory signals such as touch, vibration, or mild electrical currents to help the brain and muscles improve movement.

Scroll filed a Right to Information query with the National Trust, a statutory body under the ministry of social justice and empowerment responsible for implementing the Sahyogi scheme, to try to find out how many people had been trained under the scheme. In its response, the body said that between 2015 and 2019, only 1,762 persons were trained as caregivers.

By comparison, according to the 2011 census, India had 2.68 crore individuals living with disabilities (The census does not break down this figure into the number of persons with specific disabilities).

“Despite this lack of data, it is clear to us that the demand of families of persons with autism, or other intellectual or neurological disabilities, could not be met with so few caregivers,” said Rubina Lal, trustee of the Mumbai-based Society of Parents of Children with Autistic Disorders. Lal, whose daughter Shinjini has autism, has been working in the field of disability rehabilitation for more than 30 years.

In 2019, the National Trust shut the scheme down. Many were dismayed to realise that they could not find any information even about the small number of individuals who had been trained under it. “We do not know where they are now,” Lal said. “The National Trust never kept a register.”

Lal has also served as chairperson of the expert committee on autism and multiple disabilities of the Rehabilitation Council of India, the apex government body that regulates courses and training programmes for professionals that wish to work with people with disabilities. She pointed out that one of the reasons for the scheme’s dismal performance was that the organisations that had registered to run the training programme did not successfully place many trainees in jobs as caregivers.

“The trainees did not know where to look for jobs,” she said. “The families who needed them did not know where to find these caregivers. So, there was no amalgamation of the demand and supply.”

In addition, she said that the scheme’s design was itself limiting in terms of ensuring that candidates were employable. The scheme provided for two levels of training – a three-month-long primary programme and an advanced six-month course.

Even in the latter time frame, she noted, participants could only be trained on supporting disabled persons with their everyday tasks, and not in more advanced skills, like administering injections.

“Naturally, families were not ready to hire someone with such limited skill sets for the long term,” said Seema Chadha, deputy director of the Delhi-based Muskaan – Parents Association for Empowerment of Persons with Intellectual Disability.

“Caregiving is a long-term commitment,” she added. “In most cases, especially with adults, there is no scope for any marked improvement in the conditions of those with intellectual disabilities or degenerative neurological disorders.”

Lal explained that when trainees found that there was limited demand for caregivers with their skill level, they began to seek out nursing courses, which they believed could help them secure full-time jobs. They were further discouraged from pursuing work through the scheme upon realising that after rolling it out, the government had not standardised the pay for home-based caregivers.

“This made the work less lucrative,” said Lal. “Eventually, people just stopped applying for the training programme.”

A lack of political will

Parikshit argued that the government should have learnt from the failure of the Sahyogi scheme and continued to evolve other approaches to the problem. “But that requires political will, which is missing when it comes to strengthening the caregiving sector for disabled people,” he said.

Lal noted that, in contrast, the government had shown significantly greater will in training caregivers for elderly people.

For instance, in 2022, the ministry of social justice and empowerment announced the PM Special (Training of Geriatric Care Givers) scheme, which aimed to train 1 lakh caregivers over three years. This was to be implemented by the ministry with the help of the National Institute of Social Defence.

In March 2025, the union minister of state for social justice, BL Verma, told Parliament that in the financial year 2023-’24, 36,785 persons had been trained under the programme.

Lal pointed out that this year, the government seemed to have further strengthened the scheme. She recounted that in an ANI podcast, Shamika Ravi, a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council, stated that the Union Budget announced in February had envisioned building a “strong care ecosystem, covering geriatric and allied care services” by training 1.5 lakh caregivers.

“To my mind, it is natural that we link this to caregiving for persons with disabilities,” said Lal. “Caregiving is labour intensive, a job that technology definitely cannot replace. Maybe we need to be experimenting with different models of it.”

She observed that another scheme aimed at caregiving for disabled persons had also seen limited progress. The scheme, called the Samarth-cum-Gharaunda scheme, entailed the establishment of residential care facilities specifically for orphaned individuals who have autism, cerebral palsy or intellectual disabilities, or multiple disabilities, and whose families live below the poverty line. The scheme is implemented through non-profit organisations that are registered with the National Trust.

There are currently only 11 such registered organisations. No facility under the scheme is operational in Delhi.

In principle, the scheme was a sound one, Lal observed. “This would have meant that persons with disabilities were not isolated, instead were living and learning some vocational skills in a community,” she said.

But its focus on only one specific set of individuals and families meant it could not reach many who could have benefited from it. Thus, it “fails to quell the anxieties of a large number of parents who are dealing with the question of who will take care of their disabled children after them”, said Chadha.

Financial hurdles

In the absence of adequate government support, families with disabled individuals face huge financial hurdles. Kajal Kashyap, who is 28, and whose six-year-old daughter Ridhisha has cerebral palsy, explained that the child was enrolled in a school run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi that does not currently have a special educator to adapt the curriculum to the needs of children with intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities.

More specialised education is out of reach for the family, whose monthly income is Rs 20,000. “The special schools are either too far away, or cost upwards of Rs 5,000 per month,” said Kashyap. “That is, of course, not affordable for families like ours.”

Ridhisha could avail of free schooling at a government facility for children with intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities. But there is only one such school in Delhi, located in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar, around 13.5 km from the family’s home in Okhla Phase-3 in the capital’s south-east. “I had to fight a long battle against my family members even to get her admitted to the nearby government school,” said Kashyap. “None of them support me. In fact, they berate me for giving birth to a child with special needs.”

Fighting back tears, she said she remains focused on helping her daughter become self-reliant in the future. “The hope is that there are also some formal systems in place to provide support for my daughter when I am no longer around,” said Kashyap.

There are some avenues through which the government offers financial support for people with disabilities. The Delhi government, for instance, pays a monthly pension of Rs 2,500 to disabled individuals. Further, in September 2025, the Delhi government announced a financial assistance scheme to provide a monthly allowance of Rs 6,000 to those with “benchmark disabilities” – the term refers to individuals whom a doctor has certified as having an impairment of more than 40%.

But to access either of these schemes, individuals have to possess a Unique Disability ID card. By the Union government’s own admission, a disabled person may need to wait up to 264 days to receive the card after application.

In fact, parents of children with intellectual disabilities, autism or cerebral palsy, whom Scroll met, said that they have had to wait more than a year to receive their cards. “I had applied for UDID for my 10-year-old son Shivansh in September 2025,” said Rajveer Singh, a resident of Okhla. “I have only received an appointment for February 2027 to get his medical assessment done at Safdarjung Hospital.”

Pratik Aggarwal, executive director of the Delhi-based non-profit organisation Astha, explained that there was also a need for programmes that could support caregivers, who were typically mothers. “The National Trust needs to find a way to put money in the hands of mothers,” he said. “They require this fund to ensure therapy for their children, and to drop and pick them up from schools, to start with.”

In the absence of this support, Astha’s helpline and Aggarwal individually get phone calls every week from parents who request the organisation take in their children. “The team has been tackling these situations by counselling the families about the schemes available for them, including the disability pension,” said Aggarwal. “But with its rollout being mired in several problems, sometimes I am dumbfounded about where to refer them.”

Filling the gaps

Some private organisations have sought to bridge this gap in care for disabled people. Among them is an assisted living facility for adults with autism, cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities at southwest Delhi’s Vasant Kunj, founded by Muskaan.

Chadha, the organisation’s deputy director, lives on the campus with her 33-year-old daughter, Isha, who has cerebral palsy.

The facility is open to individuals above the age of 20, and can house up to 16 residents. While living here, they are trained in vocational skills, like making lamps and paper bags, and packaging spices, as well as working on assembly lines. Residents also participate in taking decisions about household tasks and planning events for various festive occasions. “This helps strengthen their confidence and build autonomy,” said Chadha.

In the year 2024-’25, the residents produced 200 mufflers. When these were sold, the profits were distributed equally among them. “Efforts like these don’t just help build the confidence of persons with intellectual disabilities, it also tells the world that these individuals can be productive members of society,” Chadha said.

She also noted that living in close quarters and working with each other helps build camaraderie among the residents. The centre also provides counselling to help them deal with feelings of isolation that arise because they live away from their families.

Chadha explained, however, that running the facility required significant money and resources: the 16 residents are supported by a dedicated staff of 15, who have been trained in assisting them with hygiene, helping manage behavioural challenges and administering medication.

The centre meets its expenses through fees that families of residents pay. “Families may have to incur costs up to Rs 42,000 for the disabled persons to get the support they absolutely need,” Chadha said.

She added, “This means that the impact that residential facilities like Muskaan can make is limited in the larger scheme of things. Our hope is that the government treats us and other such facilities as paradigms after which it can model the care homes it runs.”

This story was supported by the International Foundation for Disability Inclusion’s Journalism Fellowship on Disability Inclusion.

A first information report has been registered against Aam Aadmi Party leaders Saurabh Bharadwaj and Jarnail Singh, and other party workers for allegedly assaulting a head constable, ANI reported on Tuesday.

The incident took place on Monday when AAP leaders, led by former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, went to the Tilak Nagar, a day after Delhi minister Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma slapped a man in the area.

On Monday, the constable was recording videos in the area when a crowd of AAP supporters surrounded and allegedly assaulted him, police said.

The AAP leaders have been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to voluntarily obstructing a public servant in the discharge of public functions, using criminal force against a public servant while discharging their duty and voluntarily causing hurt.

Bharadwaj alleged that the police were trying to intimidate AAP leaders by implicating them in false cases.

“Police personnel are scared,” The Times of India quoted Bharadwaj as saying. “They think that implicating us in false cases will scare us. This hooliganism by police won’t work.”

Delhi minister slaps man

On Sunday, Verma had slapped Sahib Singh during an altercation over the alleged poor quality of a road in Tilak Nagar. Sahib Singh handles social media for Tilak Nagar MLA Jarnail Singh.

In a video shared by the Opposition party, Verma was seen grabbing Sahib Singh’s mobile phone before he hit him.

An FIR has also been registered against Sahib Singh for allegedly assaulting the constable.

On Sunday, Sahib Singh said that he had pointed out sections of the road where the surface was breaking apart, after which the Bharatiya Janata Party leader slapped him.

Jarnail Singh claimed that instead of addressing concerns about the road, Verma slapped his colleague.

However, Verma claimed that the AAP worker had allegedly abused his family. He also alleged that Jarnail Singh arrived at the site with “history-sheeter goons” and used abusive and indecent language.

On Monday, the police registered a non-cognisable report against Verma for voluntarily causing hurt.

Separately, they filed an FIR against Jarnail Singh based on a complaint by a Public Works Department official for obstructing a public servant from discharging his duties and interfering with government work.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Two home ministry officials were arrested on Monday for allegedly seeking a bribe from an association in return for facilitating its pending registration under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act.

Registration under the Act is mandatory for non-profit organisations to receive foreign funds.

One of the officials was posted in the ministry’s Foreigners Division, while the other worked in a Pay and Accounts Office and had previously been posted in the Foreigners Division, the Ministry of Home Affairs stated on Tuesday. Both officials were accountants.

“Preliminary questioning indicates that they were in contact with certain associations for facilitating their registration and renewal in lieu of illegal gratification,” the ministry added.

The investigation is underway.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Congress on Tuesday accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of organising a “vote chori”, or vote theft, campaign on behalf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.

The Opposition party demanded that the three resign to ensure the “safety of the Constitution and hard-earned democracy”.

The demands were part of a resolution adopted at a meeting by the Congress Working Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body.

To Save Democracy 👇 pic.twitter.com/DC10biarSW

— Congress (@INCIndia) September 29, 2026

The Congress also called for the suspension of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, citing concerns about the Election Commission’s functioning following “recent reports of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party’s capture of the entire electoral process”.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the BJP.

The resolution came after The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

CONGRESS WORKING COMMITTEE RESOLUTION.

Indira Bhawan, 28 September 2026 pic.twitter.com/nfeU2c8pC0

— INC Sandesh (@INCSandesh) September 29, 2026

Their objections were reportedly related to the changes to Form 6, appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal and the handling of voter data in Goa, among other matters. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

In one written objection, Sandhu was quoted as having stated that the poll panel had acted against the advice of both commissioners and described the action as “unauthorised and illegal”.

The two election commissioners had also raised concerns over access to the digital electoral roll database.

The Election Commission has rejected reports of a rift, saying differences in views and observations are a normal part of its deliberations.

However, the Congress said that the reports raised questions about the constitutional validity of the SIR process. It argued that a process that already shifts the burden on voters to establish their eligibility had been “executed in haste without transparent safeguards”.

“An exercise of doubtful constitutional validity cannot be allowed to decide who may vote in the world’s largest democracy,” the resolution said.

The party also called for the restoration of 13.3 crore names that it said had been removed from electoral rolls as part of the voter list revision process.

The Congress also demanded independent and time-bound inquiries wherever evidence of serious discrepancies in the electoral rolls emerges.

“The BJP and its handpicked officials must understand that this brazen theft of the people’s franchise will not go unanswered,” the resolution said.

The demands came a day before the Opposition INDIA bloc is set to meet in Delhi to discuss a possible nationwide campaign against alleged electoral irregularities.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court quashed the detention under the National Security Act of a man who was accused of being responsible for the November 2024 Sambhal violence. “Confessional statement cannot be the sole ground for detention,” a bench held.

Mulla Afroz had been arrested about 54 days after the violence. Although the Allahabad High Court had granted him bail, the Uttar Pradesh government passed an order to detain Afroz under the National Security Act on October 13, 2025, on the basis of a confession he made while he was in police custody. Read on.

How a court order sparked a deadly dispute over a mosque, explains Abhik Deb

The Congress accused Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar of organising a “vote chori”, or vote theft, campaign on behalf of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. The Opposition party demanded that the three resign to ensure the “safety of the Constitution and hard-earned democracy”.

It also demanded that the special intensive revision exercise be suspended, saying that it had been “executed in haste without transparent safeguards”. The demands were part of a resolution adopted at a meeting by the Congress Working Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body.

The resolution came after The Indian Express reported last week that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to the poll panel’s decisions about the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, saying that some had been taken without their knowledge. Read on.

Conflict of interest concerns follow CEC Gyanesh Kumar from Sambhal to the Supreme Court, writes Ayush Tiwari

After Instagram restricted the account of political cartoonist Satish Acharya in India following a legal request from the government, another cartoonist, Manjul, said that the Meta-owned platform had also blocked access to one of his cartoons about the Election Commission.

Acharya told Scroll that he had not received any communication from Meta before some of his posts were taken down. He later received a notification saying that his profile would be unavailable in India. “This regime boasts about being the most powerful and fearless government,” he said. “But every bit of criticism scares this government, forcing it to resort to cowardice measures.” Read on.

Shifting viewership and Centre’s fresh attempt to control news online, writes Nachiket Deuskar

The Calcutta High Court granted interim bail to Congress’ Nandigram candidate in six criminal cases from 2007. The court allowed Milan Pradhan to campaign for the October 6 bye-poll. He has been directed to surrender before the trial court by October 21.

Pradhan had been arrested on September 18, just hours after former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that her faction of the Trinamool Congress would support Pradhan in the October 6 bye-poll.

A separate bench dismissed a petition by the West Bengal Congress challenging an alleged discrepancy in the election affidavit of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Nandigram bye-poll candidate. The petition had questioned the difference between Hasirani Rath’s declared age and the year in which she claims to have passed her Class 10 examination. Read on.

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Online hate in the United States against South Asians surged 240% between January 2024 and June 2026, according to a study by Washington-based think tank Center for the Study of Organized Hate.

More than half a million posts with racist, dehumanising and xenophobic slurs and narratives targeting South Asians appeared on social media platform X between January 2025 and June 2026, found the study published on Monday.

The monthly volume had risen by 75% during this period and 240% between January 2024 and June 2026, it added.

Such posts had “dramatically increased” across mainstream and fringe social media platforms, the study found.

The study examines the scale, nature and tactics of online hate targeting South Asian Americans, including those of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and other South Asian backgrounds across social media platforms such as X, 4chan, 8chan and Gab.

The think tank identified nearly four lakh hateful and dehumanising posts targeting South Asians across platforms such as 4chan, 8chan and Gab in 2025.

Five of the six highest-volume months were between November 2025 and June 2026, it said.

This indicates that anti-South Asian hate was “intensifying rather than receding”, said the Center for the Study of Organized Hate.

The study found that anti-South Asian hate was cutting across national, religious and political identities. “Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims and other South Asian communities are frequently collapsed into one another and targeted with interchangeable racial and religious stereotypes,” it said.

The hate against South Asians was driven by state power, racist policy and incendiary rhetoric; digital amplification of hate; political visibility and perceived demographic threat; racial hostility; economic resentment; and xenophobic nationalism, added the study.

Posts portraying South Asians as invaders, job thieves and a demographic threat comprised 45% of anti-South Asian hate on X, with H-1B visas and immigration serving as major drivers, the study found.

The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows companies in the US to temporarily employ foreign workers for special occupations.

In the past few years, Indians have constituted the majority of H-1B visa holders. Indians comprised 72.3% of all H-1B visas issued by the US in fiscal year 2023.

The narratives included the Great Replacement and “remigration” rhetoric, while on fringe platforms they overlapped with antisemitic conspiracy theories.

“Great Replacement” is a Western far-right conspiracy theory, which claims that white populations are being culturally and demographically “replaced” by non-white persons through immigration and differential birth rates.

Slurs and dehumanisation aimed at South Asians were noticed on every platform, the Center for the Study of Organized Hate said.

The slur “pajeet” and its variants appeared in 30% of all posts on X and 45% of mentions on fringe platforms, the study found. Dehumanising discourse related to the “unclean and unhygienic character” of South Asians grew the fastest of all narratives on X, rising 171%.

The study found that generative artificial intelligence was rapidly amplifying visual hate, turning anti-South Asian slurs and stereotypes into degrading and racist caricatures “at unprecedented speed and scale”.

In September 2025, the Center for the Study of Organized Hate said that the tariff dispute between India and the United States and the outrage based on specific incidents such as an accident by a Sikh truck driver that left three dead in Florida had coincided with a spike in racist social media posts against Indians.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• ‘Pajeet’: The white supremacist slur weaponised by South Asians is amplifying anti-Indian hate
• Surge in anti-Indian hate should come as no surprise – it has deep, racist roots