A cheetah cub at Kuno National Park died from pellet injuries on Monday, a day after it was found wounded in the forests of Madhya Pradesh’s Morena district, The Indian Express reported.

Dr Shobha Jawre, from the College of Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry in Jabalpur, confirmed to the newspaper that the 19-month-old male cub had died because of pellet injuries. “The pellets were removed from the cheetah cub’s body during an operation,” the doctor was quoted as saying.

A report has been submitted to the wildlife department.

It is the first killing, and the 25th death, of a cheetah since the wild animal was reintroduced in the country in 2022.

The cub was found injured by a monitoring team on Sunday in the Morena territorial forest division, the newspaper reported. The cub was taken to the veterinary institute in Jabalpur.

The State Tiger Strike Force, a wildlife crime investigation unit, is identifying persons responsible for the cheetah’s killing, The Indian Express reported.

The unit was focussing on a suspected poaching attempt besides human-animal conflict, the report added.

In September 2022, cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa were reintroduced to India seven decades after the species was declared extinct in the country.

The cheetah had been officially declared extinct by the Indian government in 1952. Before their reintroduction, the wild cats were last recorded in the country in 1948, when three cheetahs were shot in the sal forests in Chhattisgarh’s Koriya District.

There are now a total of 54 cheetahs in India, of whom 50 are in the Kuno National Park and four are in the Gandhi Sagar Sanctuary.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• A new irrigation project threatens to displace both cheetahs and humans in Kuno
• Did the government gravely underestimate the space needed for Project Cheetah?

The names of more than 99.3 lakh voters have been deleted from Karnataka’s final voter list following the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The number of voters fell to 4.5 crore from the 5.5 crore that were on the state’s electoral rolls before the exercise began.

In the final stage of the exercise, more than 8.6 lakh names were reinstated to the draft list. In August, the draft list had excluded over one crore voters.

Persons who applied for inclusion through Form 6 after Friday, when the period for claims and objections ended, will be added through supplementary lists to be published on a quarterly basis. Read on.

Follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.

The Supreme Court issued notice to the Union government seeking its response to a petition challenging the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and its rules. The petition has been filed by the Digital News Publishers Association, which represents 21 media publishers, including those owned by businesspersons Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani. They said the provisions of the act violated journalistic freedom.

The publishers said that the law “threatens the full spectrum of journalistic activity carried out by journalists, ground reporters, citizens, whistleblowers, Right to Information activists and other stakeholders”.

The law “impermissibly restricts” the fundamental right to information and freedom of speech and expression, they added. Read on.

Why the draft personal data protection rules are contentious, explains Vineet Bhalla

The Bombay High Court put on hold the Leave India Notice issued to actor Imran Khan. The hearing was adjourned till Monday after the Union government said that no coercive action would be taken against Khan until then.

On October 15, the Foreigners Regional Registration Office directed Khan, a citizen of the United States, to leave the country by October 28 allegedly for participating in the protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in Mumbai earlier this month. Read on.

Sixty-nine persons have been arrested and four detained under the Arunachal Pradesh anti-terror law for their alleged role in the violence that broke out on Friday in Arunachal Pradesh’s Pasighat during a protest against a proposed dam, said Inspector General of Police Hibu Tamang. The arrests and detentions were made in Upper Siang, Siang and East Siang districts under the Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

Those arrested face charges of rioting, torching of vehicles, as well as vandalism of office buildings and residential houses.

Several organisations have been protesting against the proposed 12,500-megawatt power project on the Siang river. On Friday, protesters vandalised and set fire to an office of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation and a police station. Read on.

Very severe cyclonic storm Arnab is expected to cross the coast of Andhra Pradesh in the early hours of Wednesday. The cyclone is expected to make landfall between Bapatla and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, close to Puducherry’s Yanam town, with the maximum sustained wind speed of 125 km per hour to 135 km per hour, with gusts of up to 150 km per hour, the weather department said.

In Andhra Pradesh, nearly 89,000 persons living on the Kakinada coast were being shifted to relief camps. Odisha was planning to shift 48,000 persons. The National Disaster Relief Force said that 31 of its teams had been deployed.

More than 60 trains have been cancelled as a precautionary measure. Read on.

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A century has passed since the publication of the autobiography of TE Lawrence, popularly known as Lawrence of Arabia. The title Seven Pillars of Wisdom is drawn from the Book of Proverbs in the Bible: “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.”

How appropriate, then, that in their wisdom, the founders of our Constitution went in for democracy as the form of government that would guide independent India’s destiny.

As it transpires, the structure of democracy in India rests on seven pillars, namely (i) legislature (ii) executive (political and bureaucratic) (iii) political parties (iv) judiciary (v) independent institutions (vi) media and (vii) civil society.

As of today, all the pillars appear shaky, threatening the future of democracy, although it could be argued that structural weaknesses in the Indian democratic edifice have existed right from 1947.

I Legislature

Let us start with the legislatures, both at the union and state levels. Cracks appeared in the post-Nehruvian era. The “aya Ram gaya Ram” phenomenon of politicians switching parties started in 1967, a legacy that continues to the present day. Reminiscent of Indian Premier League auctions, legislators are tempted by the highest bidders, though other pressures such as the fear of investigative agencies can also act as triggers for crossovers.

Disconcertingly, it is no longer just individual bait: shoals of legislators are willing to defect en masse, lured by the attractions of power and patronage and the fear of state action.

The anti-defection provisions in the Constitution have become a dead letter: in no case have presiding officers ruled against defectors. Major legislations are rushed through without adequate public debate and reflection. The quality of discussions in legislatures, especially Parliament, has taken a deep dive.

Presiding officers often give short shrift to Opposition demands for discussion or to notices for legislative intervention, as in the cases of the proposed impeachment of the chief election commissioner and a former High Court judge.

II Executive

At both the political and bureaucratic levels, there is inadequate engagement with public opinion, especially on crucial policy matters. The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the farm laws and the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls are just some of the glaring instances. Dissent and criticism are brushed off as the handiwork of “urban naxals”, “dimagi naxals” and “anti-nationals”.

The use of civil servants, especially those in the investigative agencies, to lodge cases and subject dissenters and political opponents to harassment has become commonplace. More disturbing is the fact that civil servants, in violation of the oath to the Constitution they take when joining public service, are more than willing and enthusiastic to implement the orders of their political masters, be it the sudden demolition of structures (by a curious coincidence, mostly owned or occupied by the Muslim community), the interference in prayer meetings of the Christian community and the harassment of interfaith couples on the bidding of lumpen vigilante groups.

It seems that the senior bureaucracy of the various services has virtually abdicated its role of pointing out to the political executive the absence of legality in the orders it is asked to carry out.

Infrastructure and mineral resource extraction projects are being given virtually blanket permissions, ignoring the voices of caution from environmental experts and groups and bypassing local consultation with affected stakeholders. The ecological consequences are becoming visible, with repeated hill landslides and flash floods, apart from growing desertification of arable lands.

III Political parties

The initial years after Independence saw many stalwarts from different political parties serve with distinction in Parliament and state legislative assemblies and councils. The watershed year was 1967, when the lure of pelf and patronage led to the mushrooming of political parties, many of them dominated by one family. The Indian National Congress was no exception.

Sycophancy became the path for political advancement, with genuflections to the ruling deities in various parties. The system of hereditary succession took firm root in nearly all parties. With hard work and meritorious performance receiving no returns, the decades from the 1990s saw wannabe politicians jumping ship whenever they felt the reward for switching loyalties was higher.

Loyalty to the ruling coterie in a party was the sole criterion for political survival. Criminals and carpetbaggers freely entered the political arena. Winning elections and deriving the benefits from exercise of power has become the sole preoccupation of politicians. Governance, legislative debate and the quality of enacted legislation have suffered grievously.

Today, India seems to live from election to election: what happens in the five-year interregnum between polls seems to concern neither the politician nor the ordinary citizen.

IV Judiciary

The judiciary, given the constraints of manpower and the burden of litigation, has often been the lumbering elephant in the room. What has been particularly disconcerting in recent years has been its propensity, especially at the highest levels of the Supreme Court and High Courts, to take an agonisingly long time in deciding issues that impact the life and liberty of the individual as also matters that have a crucial bearing on constitutional issues and on the lives of ordinary citizens.

Bail pleas are deferred for months on end, with the draconian provisions in laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Prevention of Money Laundering Act, ensuring that the process itself becomes the punishment. It took years for the accused in the Bhima-Koregaon and the Delhi riots cases to get bail, with some still in judicial custody after more than six years. Chargesheets are yet to be filed in these cases.

Stan Swamy and GN Saibaba were instances where the rigours of incarceration led to their deaths.

And who can forget most of the Aam Aadmi Party leadership in jail before and at the time of the 2025 Delhi elections, denying them the right of participating in election campaigning? The executive has also got away with omnibus clearances of projects that affect the environment, in the absence of meaningful judicial intervention.

V Independent institutions

At the heart of the crisis today is the severe weakening of nearly all independent institutions, meant to serve as the guardians of democracy. We are witnessing the continued unrest arising from the SIR, with the names of 130 million citizens being deleted from the rolls.

The functioning of the Election Commission has come in for scathing criticism. But it is by no means the only institution that has suffered a dent in its reputation. Information Commissions, the Lokpal, the National Green Tribunal, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, the National Commission for Women and the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights have proved ineffective in acting as a check and balance on executive action/inaction.

VI Media

In a cruel twist of irony, Lal Krishna Advani, one of the founders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, observed about the media after the Emergency: “When they were asked to bend, they crawled.” Today, large sections of the media, both print and electronic, need no such suggestions. They readily genuflect to authority and are more than willing to carry the messages of the government of the day, forgetting their duty of speaking truth to power.

The fear of losing government advertising revenues, the apprehension of coercive action and the outright purchase of independent news channels by powerful corporate interests have silenced the media.

News anchors and editors compete in displaying their loyalty to the powers that be. Responses of opposition leaders and prominent dissenters are given little coverage, if at all. Independent web-based channels face the inquisitions of investigative agencies, while their news reporters have to run the gamut of defamation cases galore.

All this while media channels that actively promote hate speech and incendiary comments get away freely. Little wonder then that a substantial section of thinking citizens have trashed both newspapers and television and rely only on internet-based independent media.

VII Civil society

It is difficult to decide whether civil society is civil anymore. Paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi on Western civilisation, one must say that civil society in the India of today would be a good idea. Whether on TV channels or on social media, haranguing and shrill accusations are the order of the day. Communities, families and friendships have been split down the middle. Dialogue and discussion have been replaced by partisan postures, with each side retreating into their respective echo chambers.

The polarisation of society, probably dormant before 2014, has come into the open in recent years, with disturbingly large sections of the “educated” majority community “othering” the Muslim community and lumpen groups and the arms of the state harassing the Christian community on the grounds of alleged religious conversion.

Governments may change in the future, but the damage to the ruptured social fabric may take far longer to repair.

Civil society stakeholders – corporate bigwigs, politicians, bureaucrats, academics, media persons, not to mention the large army of WhatsApp uncles and aunties – have enthusiastically espoused the ruling majoritarian ideology.

It might be out of blind adoration, bringing to mind Babasaheb Ambedkar’s warning that in politics, bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship. In many cases, ambition dictates obedience, as well as the apprehension of consequences and/or sheer apathy in the garb of self-interest.

What then?

It is becoming painfully evident that the ailment affecting Indian democracy is not one that a simple medicine of change in government is going to cure. We in India have drifted far away from the noble principles of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity enunciated in the Preamble to the Constitution of India, which alone give substance to the seven pillars above.

Unless there is the fullest commitment to these four principles, heart and soul, a just, equitable, free and harmonious society visualised by the framers of the Constitution cannot come into being.

Attaching these pillars firmly to the superstructure of democracy is the cement of trust, a trust that has significantly eroded today – between citizens and the state, citizens and the institutions charged with the protection of their fundamental rights and, indeed, between citizen and citizen. Restoring this trust is the sine qua non for the health of Indian democracy.

V Ramani is a retired IAS officer of the Maharashtra cadre and a member of the Constitutional Conduct Group. This article first appeared on his blog.

Very severe cyclonic storm Arnab is expected to make landfall along the coast of Andhra Pradesh on Wednesday, the India Meteorological Department said on Tuesday.

The cyclone will make landfall between Bapatla and Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh, close to Puducherry’s Yanam town, with the maximum sustained wind speed of 125 km per hour to 135 km per hour, gusting up to 150 km per hour, the weather department said. It is expected to make landfall in the early hours of Wednesday.

As of 2.30 pm Indian time on Tuesday, the cyclonic storm was centred about 170 km south of Vishakhapatnam.

Heavy rainfall

The cyclone will likely lead to isolated but extremely heavy rainfall in coastal Andhra Pradesh, Yanam, Odisha and Chhattisgarh on Tuesday and Wednesday, the weather department said.

It advised residents in these areas to remain alert, follow official weather updates and adhere to the advisories issued by the authorities.

Sea conditions will remain rough till at least Thursday morning, it added.

Relief measures

In Andhra Pradesh, nearly 89,000 persons living on the Kakinada coast were being shifted to relief camps, The Hindu reported.

Odisha was planning to shift 48,000 persons by Tuesday evening, PTI reported.

The National Disaster Relief Force said that it had deployed 31 teams in the states likely to be affected. Twelve teams had been deployed in Andhra Pradesh, nine in Odisha, four in Chhattisgarh, three in Telangana and two in Yanam, ANI quoted NDRF Deputy Inspector General Mohsen Shahedi as saying.

Additionally, about 11 State Disaster Response Force teams had been deployed in Andhra Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, he said. In Odisha, 60 teams of the state’s disaster rapid action force had been deployed.

Trains cancelled

At least 64 trains scheduled to operate on Tuesday and Wednesday were cancelled as a precautionary measure, The Hindu reported.

The affected routes include Vijayawada-Rajahmundry, Vijayawada-Narasapur, Vijayawada-Machilipatnam, Visakhapatnam-Parvatipuram, Machilipatnam-Gudivada, Kakinada Port-Visakhapatnam and Guntur-Repalle, the newspaper reported.

Union Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said that about 600 km of tracks were being closely monitored. Relief wagons with repair material had been stationed at several locations, he said on social media.

The heavy rainfall and strong winds may also hamper flights to and from the Alluri Sitarama Raju International Airport in Visakhapatnam, the airport operator said. It was unclear if flights had been cancelled.

Edited by Sneha.

The names of more than 99.3 lakh voters have been deleted from Karnataka’s final voter list published on Tuesday following the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, the Hindustan Times reported.

The number of voters fell to 4.5 crore from 5.5 crore that were on the state’s electoral rolls before the exercise began. This amounts to a decrease of about 17.9%.

In the final stage of the exercise, more than 8.6 lakh names were reinstated to the draft list, which had excluded over one crore voters in August.

Persons who applied for inclusion through Form 6 after Friday, when the period for claims and objections ended, would be added through supplementary lists to be published on a quarterly basis, The Hindu reported. Form 6 is used to register new voters.

Also read: Karnataka poll officials sought deletions of 61,000 voters without citing reasons: ‘The Hindu’

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

The enumeration phase of the exercise in Karnataka began on June 30.

At the end of the draft stage, 65.4 lakh voters had been marked as permanently shifted, 12.3 lakh as dead, 15.1 lakh as absent and 7 lakh as duplicate entries. The highest deletions were recorded in Bengaluru’s urban districts.

The state Election Commission had said at the time that notices would be sent to 43 lakh persons whose enumeration forms either had anomalies or those who had not been mapped.

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

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

In May, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the revision. But it said that the exercise 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.

Since October 2, nationwide protests have been held calling for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and the alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Sneha.

Follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.

SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday refused to stay the investigation into a first information report against a woman journalist whom Delhi Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat had accused of making casteist remarks about him, days after she alleged he had sexually harassed her, reported Live Law.

The journalist had alleged that Bhagat groped her while she was making a video of student leader Neha Bora being detained during protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on October 3.

In his complaint filed on October 13, Bhagat, who is a member of a scheduled caste community, alleged that the journalist had made derogatory remarks about his caste group during the protests.

During the hearing on Tuesday, advocate Tanvir Ahmed Mir, appearing for the journalist, said that the complaint by Bhagat was “nothing but a retaliated and revengeful action”, reported Live Law.

Mir also pointed out that the journalist is a member of the Lyngdoh community of Nagaland, which is a scheduled tribe group.

Justice Mini Pushkarna issued notice on the journalist’s petition.

“I will hear it on merits once [police] reply is there,” the judge was quoted as saying. “[The] investigation will continue.”

The court scheduled the matter for final hearing on November 17.

Bhagat had claimed in his complaint that on the evening of October 3, the journalist and her colleagues staged a protest outside the Parliament Street police station and described him as a “sexual predator” and “potential rapist”.

The police officer said that the alleged casteist remarks and accusations of sexual harassment against him had caused him mental distress and damaged his reputation

The FIR also mentioned that the sexual harassment complaint against him had been transferred to the Delhi Crime Branch.

On October 15, the Supreme Court granted interim protection to the journalist.

Edited by Sneha.

The Bombay High Court on Tuesday put on hold the Leave India Notice issued to actor Imran Khan, The Indian Express reported.

The hearing was adjourned till Monday after the Union government said that no coercive action would be taken against Khan until then, Live Law reported.

On October 15, the Foreigners Regional Registration Office directed Khan, a citizen of the United States, to leave the country by October 28 allegedly for participating in the protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in Mumbai earlier this month.

A Leave India Notice is a directive issued by the authorities requiring a foreign citizen to exit the country within a specified time period. Failing to comply with the order could lead to detention, deportation or blacklisting.

Khan holds an Overseas Citizen of India card, which is an immigration status that allows foreign citizens of Indian origin to live and work in India indefinitely.

The actor had moved the High Court against the notice, with his lawyer saying that rules do not prohibit Overseas Citizen of India cardholders from participating in a protest.

Khan had been detained during the protest at the August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai on October 10.

Speaking at the protest, the actor had said that he was attending in his capacity as a resident of Mumbai and was not affiliated with any organisation.

“I am here as a citizen, as a person who lives in this city,” he had said. “I am here to see why freedom of movement is being restricted. Why are people’s voices being suppressed?”

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: In Modi’s India, only ‘good’ OCIs are welcome

Sixty-nine persons have been arrested and four detained for their alleged role in the violence that broke out on Friday in Arunachal Pradesh’s Pasighat during a protest against a proposed dam, Inspector General of Police Hibu Tamang told Scroll on Tuesday.

Several organisations have been protesting against the proposed 12,500-megawatt power project on the Siang river. It will be built by the government-owned power company National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

On Friday, protesters vandalised and set fire to an office of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation and a police station in Pasighat after security personnel fired tear gas during the agitation.

An Itanagar-based senior police officer had told Scroll at the time that the homes of Pasighat West MLA Ninong Ering and Mariyang-Geku legislator Oni Panyang had also been vandalised, along with that of Kaling Moyong, the Bharatiya Janata Party state chief and former Pasighat East MLA.

On Tuesday, Tamang told Scroll that the police had filed 55 cases in connection with the violence. The arrests and detentions were made in Upper Siang, Siang and East Siang districts under the Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

Those arrested face charges of rioting, torching of vehicles, as well as vandalism of office buildings and residential houses.

Twenty-six criminal cases have been registered in Upper Siang, 21 in Siang and six in East Siang district.

Tamang said that additional forces had been deployed in the Siang Valley in the wake of the protests.

“Earlier, we had 21 companies of Central Armed Police Forces,” said the police officer. “Now, nine more have come. A total of 30 companies of CAPF and three companies of Assam Police are deployed apart from the Arunachal Police personnel.”

Residents of the Siang Valley say that the BJP government in the state has taken extraordinary measures in the last month to shut down the protests against the proposed dam project.

The government has detained activists, arrested protesters and flooded the villages in Upper Siang with paramilitary personnel, turning villages into “military zones”, said residents.

Since 2025, at least 40 first information reports have been filed in connection with protests against the dam, lawyers and activists have said.

On Monday, protests were also held against the proposed Subansiri Upper Hydroelectric Project, known as Menga Dam, as well as elsewhere in the state, The Hindu reported.

Several student and community-based organisations had called for a 12-hour shutdown in Upper Subansiri district, leading to the cancellation of a public hearing on the proposed project.

Also read: ‘Threats, detentions, militarisation’: How Arunachal government is choking anti-dam protests

Siang dam

The Siang flows into Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet and is the Brahmaputra’s main tributary.

The Siang Upper Multipurpose project was first proposed in 2017 by the Union government’s think-tank Niti Aayog and was meant to counter the threat posed by Chinese hydropower projects being developed on the Yarlung Tsangpo river upstream. The Siang is known as Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet, where it originates.

The Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum estimates that 27 villages along the river – in Siang and Upper Siang districts – will be affected because of the proposed dam. For years, the residents of the area have opposed the project.

Inputs by Rokibuz Zaman. Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice to the Union government seeking its response to a petition challenging the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and its rules, Bar and Bench reported.

The 2025 Digital Personal Data Protection Rules were notified by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in November 2025, bringing into effect the 2023 Digital Personal Data Protection Act.

Section 44(3) of the Act imposes a blanket ban on the disclosure of personal information without defining what constitutes “personal information”.

The Digital News Publishers Association, which represents 21 media publishers, including those owned by businesspersons Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani, has challenged the law, citing violation of journalistic freedom, The Hindu reported.

The petition said that the law “threatens the full spectrum of journalistic activity carried out by journalists, ground reporters, citizens, whistleblowers, Right to Information activists and other stakeholders”, The Hindu reported.

The Act was contrary to the Supreme Court’s privacy judgement, which recognised the right to privacy as inviolable and fundamental to human dignity and life, the association contended.

The law “impermissibly restricts” the fundamental right to information, and freedom of speech and expression, the newspaper quoted the petition as saying.

The rules had clarified how organisations processing personal data should handle it, notify individuals of data breaches and obtain consent for data collection.

The organisations, which the Act categorises as data fiduciaries, must provide notices to users that are easy to understand, explaining why they are collecting data and how it will be used.

A “data fiduciary”, according to the Act, is any entity that processes any personal data.

The notices must explain the types of data being collected​. Moreover, for users, withdrawing consent for their data to be used should be as simple as granting it, the law mandates.

The petition said that the rules give the Union government an “unbridled and standardless authority to requisition any information from any data fiduciary or intermediary”, without any judicial oversight.

“Such a power is capable of being turned to the identification and targeting of journalistic sources and is thus constitutionally infirm,” it said.

After the rules were notified last year, press bodies had expressed concern about them, saying that the “ambiguous obligations” they impose could open the door for indirect censorship.

Critics have described the law as a serious threat to the principles of transparency and accountability that the Right to Information Act was designed to uphold.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also Read: Why the draft personal data protection rules are contentious

The Election Commission on Monday told the Supreme Court that appeals against the inclusion of voters in West Bengal’s electoral rolls during the special intensive revision were filed by state poll officials, Bar and Bench reported.

The special intensive revision in West Bengal was carried out ahead of the Assembly elections in April. The final rolls published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.

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

Appeals were allowed to be filed before tribunals against decisions taken during the exercise.

Of the 38.2 lakh appeals filed, 22.2 lakh were filed by voters whose names had been deleted from the electoral rolls. These 22.2 lakh appeals make up around 82% of the 27 lakh voters whose names were deleted and placed under adjudication during the revision ahead of the Assembly polls.

Meanwhile, at least 16.1 lakh appeals challenged the inclusion of voters, the poll panel had submitted in the Supreme Court. The Election Commission had at the time not specified who had filed the appeals.

On September 23, The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioner Sukhbir Singh Sandhu had written to officials asking who had authorised the filing of the appeals “on behalf of [the Election Commission] and by whom” and “who actually filed these appeals on behalf of [the poll panel]”.

Sandhu had recorded that neither he nor the other commissioner Vivek Joshi nor the West Bengal chief electoral officer had been informed about the basis or process for filing the appeals, the report said.

On Monday, the Election Commission said that the appeals were filed by officials of the West Bengal chief electoral officer’s office in their capacity as authorities under the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The state chief electoral officer’s office conveyed this to the poll panel in a letter dated October 22, Bar and Bench quoted the affidavit as stating.

The poll panel said the voters against whom the appeals were filed were already on the electoral rolls and were entitled to vote in the West Bengal Assembly elections held in April.

The disclosure is part of an affidavit filed by the Election Commission in response to petitions alleging unilateral decision-making by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar during the special intensive revision.

Scroll’s analysis of the Assembly election results in West Bengal found that in half the seats that the Bharatiya Janata Party won, the total deletions that took place during the voter list revision exercise outnumbered the victory margin. While the BJP won 207 seats in the 294-member Assembly, the Trinamool Congress won 80.

Also read: All SIR decisions were taken unanimously, EC tells Supreme Court

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, BJP-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.

Protests have been held in the country since October 2 against Kumar over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: Before election commissioners flagged ‘centralisation’ of voter rolls, it was done in Bengal SIR

A book by activist Umar Khalid has been removed from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune library to “avoid any misunderstanding or unrest”, The Indian Express quoted the administration as saying on Sunday.

Khalid has been in prison for more than six years without trial in connection with the 2020 Delhi riots conspiracy case.

The book, Fractured Communities: Adivasi Histories and the Politics of Power, was published earlier this year. It is based on Khalid’s PhD thesis at Jawaharlal Nehru University and examines the history of Adivasi societies in Singhbhum region of Jharkhand under British rule.

The book was removed after a social media account called Gems of Indian Academia shared a photograph showing it as a new addition to the institute’s library, The Indian Express reported.

Madabhushi Madan Gopal, chairperson of the institute’s board of governors, said on social media that he was “shocked” to learn that the book had been added to the library.

“This is retracted last night and action is initiated on those who played this mischief, I assure such things will not happen again in IISER Pune,” he said.

As incharge Chairman,BoG,IISER Pune,I am shocked to know this, this is retracted last night&action is initiated on those who played this mischief,I assure such things will not happen again in IISER Pune,Prof.Sunil Bhagwat,Director has taken immediately steps,we need to be alert

— Madabhushi Madan Gopal (@Madabhushi2) October 25, 2026

Delhi riots conspiracy case

The police had arrested Khalid 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.

Khalid, activist Sharjeel Imam and the others 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 Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Mumbai Police pressured 2 venues into cancelling Umar Khalid film screening, allege organisers

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The Election Commission on Monday told the Supreme Court that all decisions relating to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls were taken unanimously by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the two election commissioners, the Hindustan Times reported.

The poll panel also said that a petition challenging its functioning was based on a single newspaper report and was not maintainable, Bar and Bench quoted the affidavit submitted by the Election Commission as saying.

On September 23, The Indian Express reported that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

On Monday, the Election Commission said that media reports about internal differences and Kumar’s alleged unilateral or authoritarian functioning could not be considered evidence in court, The Hindu reported.

The poll panel also described as “misleading” the reports that Form 6 was amended, The Indian Express reported. It said that only the additional declaration attached to the form used to register new voters had been revised to introduce the concept of “mapping”.

The Election Commission stated that the special intensive revision declaration was a separate document. However, it acknowledged that displaying it alongside Form 6 online could be construed as an amendment, Bar and Bench reported.

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.

On the functioning of ECINet, the Election Commission’s online platform for voter registration and related services, the affidavit said no entry can be added, deleted or modified without an order from the electoral registration officer, The Indian Express reported.

Sandhu and Joshi had reportedly raised concern whether ECINet was restricting electoral registration officers’ access to voter lists.

Letter to cabinet secretary

The affidavit also addressed an internal work allocation order issued by Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg on July 28.

Garg, an Indian Administrative Service officer from the Himachal Pradesh cadre, had been given additional charge of the poll panel’s administration division on July 28 while Deputy Election Commissioner Bhanu Prakash Yeturu was on leave from July 27 to August 9.

Within hours of taking charge, Garg issued an order changing the work assigned to senior deputy election commissioners, deputy election commissioners, director generals and other officers, Sandhu and Joshi in letter to Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan on July 29 about Garg’s conduct.

They said that Garg had made the changes without consulting the Election Commission or the officers concerned, despite repeated verbal and written instructions that such changes required “prior discussion or approval” from the poll panel.

The Election Commission said the matter was not related to policy decisions or work handled by its Information Technology division, Hindustan Times reported.

It added the order was never implemented after Sandhu and Joshi jointly directed that it not be implemented on July 30.

It also said that any officer issuing orders beyond their delegated powers would face action.

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, BJP-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.

Protests have been held in the country since October 2 against Kumar over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

The Calcutta High Court on Monday barred the publication, uploading and sharing of a documentary about the alleged close ties between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and industrialist Gautam Adani until January 31.

The order came after Adani Enterprises Limited filed a Rs 50 crore defamation suit against tech entrepreneur Sabeer Bhatia and others, seeking to stop the circulation of the 36-minute video, The Friendship Files: How Modi and Adani Stole India.

The video was uploaded on October 9 on Bhatia’s YouTube channel and was also posted on X.

Justice Aryak Dutt said that the documentary was not a news report. He added that the allegations made in the video were not substantiated by any authority.

The court described the documentary as a dramatised narrative whose title “insinuates theft” and whose narration and visuals were presented as factual.

“Constructive criticism or truthful reporting on the petitioner or on government policy, backed by evidence, is not barred,” the court said.

The original video had already been disabled, but Bhatia uploaded it again, the court noted. It said this prima facie showed “want of good faith”.

It added that online content could spread quickly through reposts and re-uploads and that continued circulation could cause reputational harm that could not be compensated through damages.

The court directed social media platforms to remove or disable access to the video at each URL listed in Adani Enterprises’ petition. They were also directed to disable reposts, quote posts, shares and other engagements through which the video remained accessible at those URLs.

The court also directed YouTube, X and Instagram to preserve subscriber and registration details, as well as IP and access logs, for the accounts and URLs listed in the petition.

It also ordered the platforms to submit, in a sealed cover within two weeks, the basic subscriber details of accounts whose owners could not be identified.

The matter will be heard next on January 31.

Bhatia on Tuesday said that Adani had valued the damage to his reputation at Rs 50 crore, but that he would value it at Rs 0.

“I contend that wealth acquired through alleged wrongdoing does not confer credibility or reputation,” Bhatia wrote on social media. “My valuation of that reputation? Rs 0. And if the reputational damage is zero, the compensation should be zero.”

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Anamika Pathak.

Also read: Raj Thackeray deletes documentary alleging Adani-Modi ties from social media after police ‘request’

The demand by a special executive magistrate that student leader Neha Bora should furnish a peace bond of Rs 10,000 raises the uncomfortable question about whether the state is aiming to maintain public order or restrict dissent.

Peace bonds – legal promises to maintain public peace – are intended to prevent violence. But their use against protesters reiterates that in a democracy, the absence of protest is not proof of public peace.

Bora emphasised this in an article in The Indian Express on October 24. “What is this peace that I am being asked to maintain?” they asked. “...Is it the silence that follows when protesters have been dispersed, detained or frightened into staying home? Can we call a society peaceful because those experiencing injustice have been prevented from speaking about it?”

On October 16, Bora, the national president of the All India Students Association, was detained on their way to a protest in central Delhi. Released the following morning, they received a notice asking why they should not furnish a Rs 10,000 peace bond, supported by a surety. A surety is another person who agrees to be financially liable if the bond’s conditions are breached.

Bora has not been convicted of any offence. The police sought this undertaking because they believed Bora’s conduct might disturb public peace in the future.

The boundary between whether the state can prevent genuine disorder without treating peaceful disagreement itself as a threat has been brought into sharp focus as a result of these proceedings involving Bora.

What is Peace?

Who should it serve?
The people OR just the government? pic.twitter.com/fqWroMSkzP

— Neha (@neha_aisa) October 24, 2026

Protest call, detention

In October, there were a series of protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the poll panel’s handling of the Special Intensive Revision of voter rolls.

Bora had called for a gathering at Mandi House on October 16. According to the police, around 40-50 protesters assembled, chanted slogans and moved towards Barakhamba Road despite restrictions on public gatherings.

Bora was detained under Section 65 of the Delhi Police Act, which permits police to remove persons refusing to comply with lawful, reasonable directions in specified circumstances.

On October 17, a special executive magistrate issued a notice asking Bora to explain why they should not be required to furnish a Rs 10,000 personal bond with one surety during the inquiry. The notice referred to repeated Bora’s participation in prohibited demonstrations, loud sloganeering, encouraging unauthorised gatherings and hoisting the national flag without permission.

Bora challenged the notice, arguing that the magistrate had not independently examined the police allegations or established why they were likely to disturb public peace.

On October 23, Justice Subramonium Prasad of the Delhi High Court declined to quash the notice. The court found sufficient material to initiate proceedings, including police diary entries, statements of three witnesses and details of six FIRs mentioning Bora. It also accepted that prohibitory orders covered Mandi House.

The court held that the magistrate had considered material before issuing the notice. The state was directed to provide Bora with the material relied upon, and the magistrate was required to observe the principles of natural justice before deciding whether a bond was necessary.

The judgement leaves open the question of whether the allegations about Bora’s conduct justifies restricting her liberty.

#Breaking

Delhi High Court rejects AISA president Neha Bora's plea challenging a SEM notice directing them to execute a personal bond of ₹10,000 and "maintain peace".

Justice Subramonium Prasad passed the order. @neha_aisa @aisa_official_ pic.twitter.com/rCQDDRi5wU

— Bar and Bench (@barandbench) October 23, 2026

Preventing disorder

Peace bonds have colonial origins. British legal practice empowered Justices of the Peace to demand security from people considered likely to disturb public order. These powers from colonial criminal procedure have survived past Independence.

The Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure in July 2024, retains them.

Under Section 126, an executive magistrate may initiate proceedings upon receiving information that someone is likely to breach peace, disturb public tranquillity or commit a wrongful act likely to cause such a disturbance. Neither an FIR nor a previous conviction is necessary. Following an inquiry, a security bond may be required for a period of not more than one year.

Executive magistrates are government-appointed officials exercising preventive powers. District magistrates and sub-divisional magistrates are familiar examples. In Delhi, designated police officers may exercise these powers as special executive magistrates.

Unlike judicial magistrates, they function within the executive administration. As a consequence, the allegations made by the police should be independently assessed when personal liberty is concerned.

There are legal safeguards. Section 130 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita requires the magistrate to record the substance of the information received about the alleged likelihood of a breach of peace and the proposed bond conditions. Section 135 provides for an inquiry into the truth of that information.

An interim bond may be directed after the inquiry begins if immediate preventive measures are necessary, with reasons recorded in writing.

The inquiry ordinarily must conclude within six months, subject to statutory exceptions. If the necessity of security is proved, the magistrate may order it under Section 136. Otherwise, the person must be discharged under Section 137.

Receiving a notice does not mean that a bond must immediately be furnished and neither is executing one an admission of guilt. The amount must not be excessive. Failing to comply can, in specified circumstances, result in detention.

What is a ‘threat’ to public peace

Preventive powers serve a legitimate purpose. Where credible threats suggest that a dispute may turn violent, authorities can act pre-emptively. But a demonstration may obstruct traffic, attract crowds or require additional policing without necessarily threatening public tranquillity.

An FIR only records an allegation. Previous participation in protests does not, by itself, establish the likelihood of violence and nor does violating a restriction on public gatherings demand a peace bond.

In the case of Madhu Limaye vs SDM, Monghyr (1970), a seven-judge Supreme Court bench upheld preventive security provisions while insisting on strict procedural safeguards. Because these powers interfere with liberty on the basis of apprehended conduct, the prescribed inquiry and the grounds for demanding security require careful scrutiny.

The Delhi High Court recognised these safeguards in Bora’s case. The inquiry must now determine whether preventive security is necessary, rather than treating the allegations supporting the notice as conclusive.

One restriction leads to another

The proceedings also involved Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which permits urgent orders restricting public assemblies and processions to prevent specified dangers to safety or public tranquillity.

This creates a concern about how two preventive powers may operate together.

Section 163 can restrict a public gathering in the anticipation of disorder. If someone participates despite restrictions, the alleged violation may then be relied upon under Section 126 to suggest that the person could disturb public peace again.

Section 163 restricts assembly while Section 126 can impose obligations on an individual that continue beyond the demonstration. Each requires its own legal justification.

But a prohibitory order, by itself, is no settled answer to whether that individual poses a continuing threat requiring security. Otherwise, conduct that might justify action for violating an order will become evidence of a future threat to public peace.

This is made clear in the case of the Cockroach Janata Party’s leaders. Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka executed bonds of Rs 50,000 after they were first detained on October 10 when they arrived in Delhi for the protests. On October 13, Das and Ranka were arrested and jailed for seven days for allegedly trespassing in Jantar Mantar and being accused of breaching earlier undertakings.

It shows how preventive proceedings can have consequences extending beyond the original demonstration. Executing a peace bond does not itself prohibit future peaceful protests. Nor does it prevent fresh lawful action where independently justified.

Preventive arrest u/s 126/170 BNSS of Sh. Abhijeet Dipke, Sh. Ashutosh Ranka and Sh. Saurav Das was done on 10.10.2026. All due legal procedures were followed and they were produced before the SEM Court, Delhi Cantt on 11.10.2026.

A bail bond as Surety Bond of ₹50,000/- was…

— Delhi Police (@DelhiPolice) October 11, 2026

State’s responsibility

Articles 19(1)(a) and 19(1)(b) of the Constitution protect freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, subject to reasonable restrictions.

In Himat Lal K Shah (1972), the Supreme Court recognised the power to regulate public meetings but rejected unrestricted prohibition. In Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (2018), it sought to balance protesters’ rights with those of residents around Jantar Mantar. In Anuradha Bhasin (2020), it cautioned against using prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure to suppress legitimate expression and stressed proportionality.

These judgments recognise that public order and the freedom to protest must coexist. Citizens are not solely responsible for maintaining peace, the state must also make reasonable arrangements for peaceful assemblies and justify restrictions rather than treating disagreement itself as disorder.

Preventive proceedings can impose burdens with no conviction for a crime. For a student or ordinary citizen, repeated hearings, legal expenses, arranging sureties and the possibility of detention discourage participation in public demonstrations.

The Delhi High Court has left the question of Bora’s bond to the magistrate’s inquiry. That decision must address whether preventive security is necessary in her particular circumstances, rather than merely establishing that she participated in protests or that restrictions were in force.

Shubham Kumar is a constitutional lawyer, and an alumnus of the University of Delhi and NALSAR University of Law.

Sangeeta Prajapati applied for a Unique Disability Identity number for her 14-year-old daughter, Om Kumari, in April 2025. Since then, she has spent at least five nights at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in South Delhi, seeking appointments with specialist doctors to assess Kumari, who has autism.

The assessments are the most important steps in the generation of the UDID number. In Kumari’s case, doctors need to evaluate her reasoning, learning and problem-solving capabilities, as well as her adaptive behaviour, which covers a range of social skills, and skills required for activities of daily living. Additionally, Kumari will also need to be screened for associated comorbidities pertaining to hearing, visual or locomotor impairments.

Hospitals carry out the assessments for persons with autism, intellectual disability and cerebral palsy over a series of sessions. They issue an appointment for each session separately. “I get a message from the hospital to collect the token for a doctor to see Om,” said Prajapati. So far, she has received the message five times, asking her to be present the following day. Each time, she has left her home in southeast Delhi’s Harkesh Nagar with her daughter, travelled 10 km to reach AIIMS, and stayed at the facility overnight.

“The tokens are only handed out early in the morning,” explained Prajapati. “There are always too many applicants and too few tokens, which means getting one becomes a game of first-come, first-served. I camp at the hospital because of this. Reaching there on time in the morning with my daughter would be more difficult.”

She recalled that despite going through this ordeal, she has had to return from the hospital twice without Om undergoing any assessments, because she could not get a token. “There was nothing to do but wait for the hospital to call me back,” said Prajapati.

When Scroll met her in July, Om’s cognitive functioning had been evaluated. For other assessments, the hospital has asked her to return in February 2027. By then it will have been 22 months since she first applied.

Prajapati’s struggle is revealing of the immense hurdles that families with members with neurodevelopmental disabilities face in procuring the UDID number. The number is essential for disabled people – among other benefits, it allows them to avail of a monthly government pension of Rs 2,500, purchase subsidised assistive devices, such as wheelchairs, and also serves as proof of their disability if they seek jobs under quotas for the disabled.

It also allows disabled children to secure admission in government schools where they can avail of subsidised and special education through a curriculum adapted to their needs.

Kumari is currently among the 8.6 lakh people in the country who have applied for and are waiting for their UDID card. In Delhi alone, more than 24,000 applications are pending at different stages.

The union government’s department of empowerment of persons with disabilities has not set out a timeline for the card’s delivery once an application is filed. According to data from the department, currently, it takes an average of 218 days for a disabled person in Delhi to receive their UDID number – this makes it among the top five worst-performing states and union territories in this regard.

But Scroll’s reporting in Delhi suggested that the situation is even worse for those with neurodevelopmental disabilities. While Kumari had been waiting for nearly two years, one family we met had been waiting six years for a child with intellectual disability to receive their UDID number.

In contrast, in seven cases of children with locomotor disabilities that Scroll reviewed, the card had been delivered within six months of application.

Mohammad Arif, a social worker with the non-governmental organisation Astha, who has helped 173 families in low-income settlements of Delhi apply for their UDID numbers, pointed out that the delays in procuring the card were “longer, in fact, for those who are referred to bigger hospitals like AIIMS and Safdarjung”.

Arif has been accompanying families with disabled children to the two hospitals for their assessment. “I think the huge backlog is a result of the endless list of tests that children with neurodevelopmental disabilities have to go through,” he said, “and there not being enough specialist doctors to conduct them.”

This was reflected in a March 2025 report of the standing committee on social justice and empowerment, which stated that the UDID project continued to suffer due to “a shortage of medical professionals and inadequate hospital infrastructure”.

To remedy this, the committee suggested that specialised training programs should be conducted for medical authorities to “improve efficiency in issuing disability certificates and reduce delays”.

But Malini Dhir, who is 61, and whose 36-year-old daughter Divya has cerebral palsy, argued that the problem was a much more fundamental one, because the burden to enrol for UDID had been placed entirely on disabled people. “It is they who need to figure out how to apply for UDID and run pillar to post to complete the process,” said Dhir. “Unlike, for example, when Aadhaar was launched, and the government managed to prop up camps everywhere for people to enrol.”

The process

The UDID project was launched in 2017. The union government claimed that it would help in creating a comprehensive database of disabled people in the country, which would allow it to better formulate and implement plans for their welfare.

Disabled people or their family members can apply for the UDID number online, through the government’s Swalamban portal, or can submit an application offline by visiting the nearest district welfare office. As part of the application, they have to submit their Aadhaar card or Aadhaar enrollment number, a passport-size photo and medical records.

Once an application is submitted, the applicant is assigned to an empanelled hospital in their district that can assess their disability and prepare a report. This report is then presented to a medical board, headed by the medical superintendent of the hospital. Once the medical board validates the exact percentage of the applicant’s disability, they are assigned a UDID number and issued a card, which they should receive within 90 days, as per the government’s guidelines.

Dhir told Scroll that in her experience, it was typically the assigned hospitals that were responsible for the delays in the process. “The department of empowerment of persons with disabilities has also repeatedly told us that all they can help us with is to fill the form, which we are already equipped to do,” she said. “The rest is upon the assigned hospital.”

According to the 2011 census, India had around 2.68 crore disabled individuals – nine years since the launch of UDID, only about 1.43 crore have been able to successfully procure their UDID number, according to data published in October by the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities. According to a government pendency report, around 8.6 lakh applications are currently being processed by the government. These figures suggest that around 1.15 crore disabled people have still not even applied for their UDID number.

In Delhi, the ratio of UDID numbers issued to the total disabled population is similar to the national proportion. According to the 2011 census, Delhi had a total of 2.34 lakh disabled individuals – around 1.21 lakh have been issued a number. According to the pendency report, around 24,000 applications are currently being processed. This suggests that more than 88,000 disabled individuals have not applied for their UDID number.

The effects of the delays on children

It has been six years since the family of 11-year-old Shivam, who has intellectual disability, and speech and language disability, applied for his UDID number. A person with speech and language disability has trouble producing specific sounds. The condition also affects their cognitive ability to understand and use language. Shivam is among those in Delhi whose applications the government has not fully processed.

Shivam’s mother, Lakshmi, applied for his UDID number in 2020 on the advice of doctors at Safdarjung Hospital, where he was being treated. The boy’s medical assessment started at the hospital in 2021, when he turned six. That process concluded only this year, in September.

Lakshmi said that on the day of Shivam’s last appointment, officials at the hospital told her that he would receive the UDID number by December.

As a result of the interminably long process, getting Shivam admitted to a school has also been a trying experience for Lakshmi. She recounted, for instance, that a school run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi in southeast Delhi’s Kalkaji had refused to admit Shivam because he had not received his UDID number.

She noted that government-run schools “are supposed to take in special children, at least provisionally, on the basis of their UDID enrollment number, which is assigned to them when they apply”. But, she added, “they don’t seem to be abiding by it”.

Lakshmi said that it was only when representatives from Astha, which works with children with disabilities to ensure they can access welfare schemes, wrote to the school to remind them of the relevant guidelines issued by the Department of Education, that they accepted Shivam and he began attending school.

Not all families with disabled children have managed to overcome this hurdle. Rajveer Singh applied for a UDID for his 10-year-old son Shivansh, who has autism, in September 2025. He has been assigned to AIIMS for his medical assessment – the hospital has instructed him to visit on February 24, 2027, to start the process.

For the interim period, Singh wanted to admit Shivansh to a school that can support his needs. He first approached the Balvantray Mehta Vidya Bhawan in South Delhi’s Greater Kailash. The school imparts education to disabled children in a curriculum tailored to their needs, and also provides them vocational training in a printing press and handlooms, as well as in activities such as paper recycling, candle making, envelope making, stitching and home management.

“This would have been ideal for Shivansh because he could get trained in skills that may help him support himself in future, when we would no longer be around,” said Singh. “However, the school told us they cannot admit him without a UDID.”

Singh then sought to get Shivansh admitted to a school in Kalkaji, run by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which has special educators. But this institution also refused him admission without a UDID number.

Shivansh is now attending a much smaller public primary school in South Delhi’s Sangam Vihar. It does not have a special educator. “We send him there nonetheless so that he interacts with children his own age,” said Singh.

For more than a year after they applied, Singh did not receive any updates on Shivansh’s UDID application. He recounted that he made several trips to AIIMS to find out if the process could be sped up – but got no clear answers.

This was despite the fact that the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities advises applicants who face a delay in the processing of a UDID application to “visit the hospital” designated for their assessment, which is also the facility that issues the card. Further, its guidelines state that if the hospital delays the process “without justified reasons”, the applicant can escalate the problem with the “higher authority in the hospital or Directorate General of Health Services/Health Department”.

But to many parents, like Somini Devi, whose nine-year-old daughter Sonakshi Kumari has intellectual disability, following through on such a process is simply not practical.

Devi applied for Sonakshi’s UDID number in 2023 and the process of her medical assessment at the Safdarjung Hospital is ongoing. “I don’t know which assessments have been concluded and which are remaining,” said Devi. “The doctors never explain what is wrong with the child or the process forward.”

She explained that at one point after they had made the application, doctors “also asked us to take Sonakshi to the Savitribai Phule National Institute of Women and Child Development in Hauz Khas.” According to the institute’s website, it offers “comprehensive diagnostic assessments” by various specialists, for children up to the age of 12 who show developmental delays. Under the ministry of social justice and empowerment’s guidelines, after a child being assessed for neurodevelopmental disability is screened for developmental delays, they should be referred to clinical or rehabilitative psychologists for further evaluations.

But Devi was not informed about why she was being referred to the institute. “I don’t know if that was part of the assessment,” she said.

This lack of clarity about the process left Devi confused about how to proceed. “How will we challenge the delays when we don’t know why the process is being delayed?” she said.

In fact, when Scroll checked the government’s list of empanelled hospitals to conduct medical assessments as part of the UDID application process, the Savitribai Phule National Institute of Women and Child Development was not among them. But several parents Scroll spoke to said they had been referred to the centre by the hospital conducting the medical assessment, without being told why.

Because they have had to wait years for their UDID number, and because their families do not have the information they need to navigate the process, Om, Divya, Shivam, Shivansh and Sonakshi have not started receiving their disability pension.

While families noted that the amount was not large, they added that it could offset some of the expenses they incurred. “We try to take Shivam for speech therapy. The funds could have contributed towards it,” said Lakshmi. Prajapati, meanwhile, observed that, ironically, the pension could have at least covered the cost of the multiple trips she has had to make for Om’s assessment.

A shortage of specialists?

Dhir explained that after visiting Safdarjung Hospital six times to get Divya’s UDID and making several appeals to the department of empowerment of persons with disabilities, she had learnt that the backlog of applications was due to a shortage of specialist doctors. “I was told this by additional secretary for the department, Manmeet Kaur Nanda,” said Dhir.

A welfare officer at the office of the chief commissioner for persons with disabilities in Delhi told Scroll that he was not aware if there was such a shortage of specialist doctors to assess disabled persons.

The officer, Mahender, explained that if they receive any complaints about delays in procuring a UDID number, they attempted to resolve them within six months.

But he did not have an explanation for why the medical assessment for many individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities was taking years to complete. “Some delays could be because there are mistakes in the way the application is filled,” said Mahender.

Dhir argued that to facilitate disabled people’s inclusion in a national database, the government needed to simplify the process that it expected them and their families to follow, and ensure that the medical assessment happens in one step. “Divya’s cerebral palsy affects her balance and speech,” said Dhir. “How am I to take her to the hospital over months and spend countless hours there to complete the medical assessment?”

As a result of the massive delays, she said she has put the process on the back burner for now. “My suggestion to the government is that they must come to the disabled to give them UDID,” said Dhir. “Instead of expecting them to run around for it.”

This story was supported by the International Foundation for Disability Inclusion’s Journalism Fellowship on Disability Inclusion.

The Union government has amended rules to allow vehicles designed for flex-fuel to run on E100, a fuel made up of nearly 100% ethanol.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways issued the notification amending the Motor Vehicles Rules on Friday. The changes came into effect on Monday.

The modified rules allow flex-fuel vehicles to run on E100 alongside E85, which contains 85% ethanol and 15% petrol.

Flex-fuel vehicles can run on different blends of petrol and ethanol. However, regular petrol vehicles, including those designed to run on E20 fuel, which contains 20% ethanol and 80% petrol, cannot use E85 or E100, Hindustan Times reported.

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

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

An opinion poll by LocalCircles published on July 5 showed that 53% of the surveyed petrol vehicle owners said that they believe that the government’s handling of the E20 rollout was “disastrous” or “ineffective”.

In July, the Union government acknowledged that petrol blended with 20% ethanol can reduce fuel efficiency by 2% to 6% in vehicles designed to run on fuel blended with 10% ethyl alcohol.

Despite this, it said that the suggestion that petrol not blended with ethanol and E10 should be available at fuel stations alongside E20 “ignores the realities” of India’s fuel distribution network.

In June, Maruti Suzuki India introduced the Wagon R Flex Fuel, designed to run on blends ranging from E20 to E100. Other automakers, including Toyota, Tata Motors and Hyundai, are also developing flex-fuel vehicles for the Indian market, The Indian Express reported.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• Ethanol lessons for India from Brazil: Transition took decades of building trust, offering options
• India’s poorest will pay the most for ethanol-fuel push

A Delhi Special Court’s decision to allow seven foreign nationals under National Investigation Agency investigation in a terrorism-related case to travel home for a month raises a constitutional question: how should criminal law balance national security, investigative deadlines and personal liberty?

The accused, an American national, Matthew Aaron VanDyke and six Ukrainian citizens were arrested in March 2026. The allegations included drone assembly, electronic warfare training and support to ethnic armed organisations along the Indo-Myanmar border.

However, after the statutory period for filing a chargesheet expired, the NIA’s report omitted substantive charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, and instead cited regulatory violations under the Foreigners Act, 1946. The agency maintained that its wider investigation into scheduled terrorism offences continued.

The Special Court for the NIA at Rouse Avenue, New Delhi, granted default bail and later allowed the accused to travel abroad, subject to personal bonds and diplomatic undertakings. They did not decide the merits of the allegations or represent judicial leniency; they enforced a statutory deadline. The central question is not why these foreign nationals secured release, but why comparable safeguards remain difficult for many Indian undertrials to exercise.

Default bail was provided under Section 167(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, and is now governed by Section 187 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. Ordinarily, an investigating agency must file its police report within 60 or 90 days, depending on the offence. If it fails, an accused ready to furnish bail acquires an indefeasible statutory right to release.

For scheduled UAPA offences, Section 43D(2)(b) permits the Special Court to extend the 90-day investigation period up to 180 days. Extension is not automatic.

In Hitendra Vishnu Thakur vs State of Maharashtra (1994) and Bikramjit Singh vs State of Punjab (2020), the Supreme Court held that detention beyond 90 days requires an independent, reasoned report from the Public Prosecutor demonstrating investigative progress and explaining why further detention is necessary.

The accused in the Rouse Avenue case were detained on March 13, 2026, and the 180-day period expired on September 8, 2026. Although the NIA filed a chargesheet that day under Section 193 Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, it omitted the substantive UAPA offences that had justified extended detention. The agency said supplementary charges could follow.

The court rejected this approach. In M Ravindran vs Intelligence Officer, Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (2021), the Supreme Court affirmed that default bail protects Article 21 liberty and that statutory deadlines are substantive safeguards, not technicalities. In Ritu Chhabaria v Union of India (2023), the Court also rejected incomplete or piecemeal chargesheets used to defeat an accrued right to bail.

An agency cannot maintain custody indefinitely by reporting peripheral offences while leaving the principal investigation unresolved. Once the statutory period expired without the requisite chargesheet, the basis for continued detention ceased.

Constitutional remedies

Default bail differs from regular statutory bail under the UAPA. Section 43D(5) restricts bail for offences under Chapters IV and VI where the court finds reasonable grounds to believe the accusation is prima facie true.

In National Investigation Agency v Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali (2019), the Supreme Court held that courts should not undertake a detailed assessment of evidence or witness credibility at this stage. They examine whether the prosecution’s allegations, taken at face value, disclose a prima facie case. This standard makes regular bail difficult and prolongs pre-trial detention.

Constitutional courts nevertheless retain the power to protect liberty. In Union of India vs K.A. Najeeb (2021), the Supreme Court held that statutory restrictions, including Section 43D(5), cannot exclude the jurisdiction of courts under Articles 32 and 226 where prolonged incarceration and no realistic prospect of a timely trial violate Article 21. In Javed Gulam Nabi Shaikh v State of Maharashtra (2024), the Court reiterated that criminal law cannot become a vehicle for indefinite detention without trial.

The routes to release thus differ. Default bail enforces statutory investigation deadlines; regular UAPA bail is constrained by the prima facie standard in Watali; and constitutional bail addresses detention incompatible with fundamental rights, particularly the right to a speedy trial. Each reflects the principle that pre-trial detention must remain subject to lawful process.

After granting bail, the Special Court considered the accused persons’ request to travel overseas. In Maneka Gandhi v Union of India (1978), the Supreme Court recognised that travel abroad forms part of personal liberty under Article 21 and may be restricted only through a just, fair and reasonable procedure. Article 21 protects every person in India, irrespective of citizenship. In National Human Rights Commission v State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996), the Court confirmed that non-citizens enjoy protection of life and personal liberty, although Article 19 rights are reserved for citizens.

In the Rouse Avenue proceedings, the court permitted temporary travel subject to personal cash bonds of Rs 100,000 each, detailed travel itineraries and diplomatic undertakings. Following default bail and the omission of substantive national-security charges, the court required travel restrictions to have a lawful basis rather than rest on apprehension alone.

Unequal access to liberty

The broader concern is not that foreign nationals were released, but that these protections are unevenly accessible. According to National Crime Records Bureau prison statistics, undertrials constitute more than three-quarters of India’s prison population. Many lack the legal representation needed to monitor deadlines and seek prompt relief.

Financial barriers remain even after bail is granted. In In Re: Policy Strategy for Grant of Bail (2023), the Supreme Court highlighted that undertrials may remain imprisoned because they cannot meet surety requirements or provide local guarantors. The ability to furnish cash bonds or secure diplomatic undertakings, as in the Rouse Avenue case, is unavailable to many ordinary prisoners.

The Rouse Avenue orders should not be treated as an unjustified concession to foreign nationals. They show that statutory safeguards can bind the state even where allegations involve national security. The gravity of an accusation cannot make deadlines optional, and an ongoing investigation alone cannot justify detention beyond the period authorised by law.

The deeper constitutional failure is the unequal practical enjoyment of these protections. A legal system committed to Article 21 must ensure that every undertrial can access legal assistance, invoke default bail in time and meet bail conditions without being defeated by poverty or procedural complexity.

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

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

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Rahul Gandhi was acquitted by a court in Uttar Pradesh in a criminal defamation case for his 2018 remarks referring to Union Home Minister Amit Shah as a “murder accused”. The case was filed on a complaint by a Bharatiya Janata Party leader.

Gandhi had said that while the BJP claimed to believe in clean politics, its president was a “murder accused”, apparently referring to the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh case. Shah was the BJP’s national president at the time.

In 2014, a special court in Mumbai discharged Shah in the case concerning the alleged extra-judicial killing of Sheikh. Read on.

Several students of Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi were detained by the police as protests continued on the campus to demand time-bound elections to the students’ union. Earlier in the day, the university administration announced that student union elections would be held within 15 days of the union’s constitution being approved.

However, students said the administration had not addressed all their demands. They also alleged that they had been pressured into signing the agreement early in the morning.

Two students, Ebin Basil and Rehan Khan, continued their hunger strike on the 15th day over the lack of clarity in the university’s order. Read on.

The Supreme Court has verbally assured that voters would not face prosecution for submitting Form 6 to restore their names to the electoral roll after being excluded during the special intensive revision. Form 6 is meant for first-time voter registration and requires applicants to state that they have not registered or voted previously.

“Pre-existing voters misrepresenting themselves as fresh voters is an offence and liable for prosecution,” said the petitioner’s advocate. In response, Chief Justice Surya Kant said: “Do not worry. Nobody will be prosecuted.”

The petitioner said that a separate form should be introduced for voters whose names had been deleted. Read on.

Explainer: Why the Election Commission’s Form 6 for new voters has triggered a legal row

Some vehicles in Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s convoy met with an accident on the Purvanchal Expressway in Uttar Pradesh while he was travelling from Lucknow to Sultanpur for a court hearing in the defamation case. No one was injured in the accident.

The Uttar Pradesh Police has formed a special investigation team to probe what led to the accident and determine whether there were any lapses in security, escort arrangements or traffic management. Read on.

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Several students of Jamia Millia Islamia university in Delhi were detained by the police on Monday as protests continued on the campus to demand time-bound elections to the students’ union, reported Hindustan Times.

The university has not held student union elections since 2006. Students have been protesting on the campus since October 12, with five of them going on hunger strike, to demand the restoration of their union.

On October 16, the university rusticated one of the students on hunger strike, suspended two and banned all three from entering the campus for a year.

Earlier on Monday, the university administration announced that student union elections would be held within 15 days of the union’s constitution being approved.

The administration also revoked suspension and show-cause notices issued to students during the protest and said a committee would be formed to investigate the conduct of security personnel during the agitation.

Office of the Chief Public Relations Officer, JMI pic.twitter.com/S0ydd6j8xo

— Jamia Millia Islamia (NAAC A++ Grade Central Univ) (@jmiu_official) October 26, 2026

However, students said the administration had not addressed all their demands. They also alleged that they had been pressured into signing the agreement early in the morning, The New Indian Express reported.

Two students, Ebin Basil and Rehan Khan, continued their hunger strike on the 15th day over the lack of clarity in the university’s order, The Indian Express reported.

They demanded that the chief proctor resign from his post, Hindustan Times reported. The students also objected to a condition recorded in the university’s order requiring protesters to issue a “public apology” at a press conference for allegedly defamatory statements, actions or social media posts directed at the administration during the agitation.

“We will not apologise for exercising our constitutional right to peaceful protest,” The Indian Express quoted Lubaib Basheer, one of the protest organisers, as saying.

2:50 pm :: Tensions escalate on #Jamia Millia Islamia’s campus on the 15th day of the hunger strike. Protesters are dodging police deployment, running towards different gates and attempting to force them open amid loud sloganeering. Heavy police presence on campus, with personnel… pic.twitter.com/4mYXoNvjKx

— Ifrah Mufti (@ifrahmufti) October 26, 2026

As of Monday evening, access to the protest site through Gate 7 and nearby gates remained restricted, The New Indian Express reported.

Students alleged that they were not being allowed to bring food or water inside, while police personnel made repeated announcements over loudspeakers asking students to vacate the campus and nearby areas.

On Wednesday, the university had constituted a five-member committee to draft the students’ union constitution. The committee has been asked to examine the circumstances surrounding the union’s dissolution in 2006, relevant court rulings and the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations, The Indian Express reported.

It is expected to submit a draft constitution by December 20.

On Saturday, the university shifted all classes online until further notice. Students alleged that the administration had “attacked” students who had been on hunger strike and tried to dismantle the protest site.

Separately, two Congress MPs, Lok Sabha member Imran Masood and Rajya Sabha member Imran Pratapgarhi, were booked for “trespassing” after visiting the campus during the protests on Friday.

Edited by Sneha.

Some vehicles in Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s convoy met with an accident on the Purvanchal Expressway in Uttar Pradesh at around 10.15 am on Monday while he was travelling from Lucknow to Sultanpur for a court hearing in a defamation case, PTI reported.

Sultanpur Superintendent of Police Vineet Jaiswal said no one was injured, The Indian Express reported.

Media reports had initially said that several persons were injured.

Gandhi was travelling to Sultanpur to appear before a special MP-MLA court in connection with a 2018 defamation case for his remarks about Union Home Minister Amit Shah. He has been acquitted in the matter.

The incident occurred when a private vehicle at the front of the convoy, reportedly belonging to a Congress leader, applied the brakes suddenly for an unspecified reason, causing vehicles behind it to collide, a police officer told PTI.

The vehicles involved had joined the convoy midway. Congress workers from neighbouring districts were travelling in them.

The Uttar Pradesh Police has formed a special investigation team to probe what led to the accident and determine whether there were any lapses in security, escort arrangements or traffic management, PTI reported.

The team has been directed to investigate all aspects of the incident and submit a detailed report to police headquarters at the earliest.

Edited by Sneha.

A court in Uttar Pradesh’s Sultanpur on Monday acquitted Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a criminal defamation case over his 2018 remarks referring to Union Home Minister Amit Shah as a “murder accused”, Bar and Bench reported.

Gandhi was present in court when Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate Shubham Verma pronounced the verdict. The court said the remarks were not defamatory in nature.

The case was filed in August 2018 on a complaint by Bharatiya Janata Party leader Vijay Mishra, who alleged that Gandhi had made objectionable remarks about Shah at a press conference in Bengaluru on May 8, 2018, during the Karnataka elections. Shah was the BJP’s national president at the time.

Gandhi had said that the BJP claimed to believe in clean politics but had a party president who was a “murder accused”, in an apparent reference to the 2005 Sohrabuddin Sheikh case.

Sohrabuddin Sheikh, who was a wanted criminal, was killed by the Gujarat Police in November 2005 in an “encounter”, which is alleged to have been staged. He and his wife were travelling by bus from Hyderabad to Sangli in Maharashtra when they were stopped by the Gujarat and Rajasthan police, allegedly abducted and shot dead near Gandhinagar.

A sub-inspector also allegedly raped Kauser Bi before murdering her. Prajapati was the sole witness to the murders. He was in police custody after the incident but was shot dead in another “encounter” in December 2006, when the police claimed he was trying to escape.

Shah had been accused of allegedly ordering the fake “encounter”. The Gujarat Police reported to Shah at the time, as he was the state home minister. He was investigated for both destruction of evidence and murder.

A special Central Bureau of Investigation had discharged the Bharatiya Janata Party leader in the case in 2014. In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld the decision, rejecting an appeal by activist and former bureaucrat Harsh Mander seeking a reinvestigation into Shah’s role in the case.

While Gandhi was on his way to the special court, his convoy had met with a minor accident on the Purvanchal Expressway. Gandhi was unhurt.

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

The Supreme Court on Monday verbally assured that voters would not face prosecution for submitting Form 6 to restore their names to the electoral roll after being excluded during the special intensive revision, Live Law reported.

Form 6 is meant for first-time voter registration. It requires applicants to state that they have not registered or voted previously.

The court was hearing a petition challenging the revision of voter rolls in Maharashtra.

“Pre-existing voters misrepresenting themselves as fresh voters is an offence and liable for prosecution,” the petitioner’s advocate was quoted as saying by Live Law.

In response, Chief Justice Surya Kant said: “Do not worry. Nobody will be prosecuted.”

The court also issued notice to the Election Commission, while refusing to pass an interim order extending the deadline for filing claims and objections or restraining the poll panel from publishing the final electoral roll.

The petitioner had told the court that nearly three crore of Maharashtra’s approximately nine crore voters had been deleted after the draft electoral rolls were published, Live Law reported.

The lawyer appearing for the petitioner told the court on Monday that a separate form should be introduced for voters whose names had been deleted during the revision of electoral rolls rather than requiring them to submit Form 6, The Hindu reported.

He pointed out that redevelopment of residential buildings in Mumbai and Pune had led to around 40% of the residents being marked as absent and subsequently removed from the electoral rolls, Live Law reported.

“Old residential buildings are undergoing redevelopment for new flats,” The Hindu quoted the lawyer as saying. “As a result, residents are shifted out. They number in thousands. They are all found to be marked absent in the SIR and later deleted from the electoral roll.”

He said there were 3,500 such redevelopment projects in Mumbai and 1,500 in Pune.

The bench listed the matter for further hearing on November 5.

Delhi HC’s directions

On October 19, the Delhi High Court said that a voter’s apprehension of being accused of making a false declaration by submitting Form 6 to restore his name to the electoral roll after being excluded during the special intensive revision was “misplaced” since the direction to do so had come from the Election Commission.

Earlier this month, the Election Commission directed poll panels in states where the voter roll revision has been completed to conduct an exercise to restore eligible voters who may have been wrongly excluded through Form 6.

However, former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi had said at the time 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,” Quraishi said on social media. “EC officials who forced them are abetters to crime. This press note shows EC’s abetment!”

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 Sneha.

Also read: Explainer: Why the Election Commission’s Form 6 for new voters has triggered a legal row

Election officials filed 61,059 Form 7 applications seeking to remove voters from Karnataka’s electoral rolls without stating any reason during the special intensive revision, The Hindu reported on Monday.

The 1960 Registration of Electors Rules mandate that an application to delete voters should be rejected if it does not state the reason for the request.

In the case of Karnataka, electoral registration officers and assistant electoral registration officers said that the system “auto-generated” these forms and added their digital signatures when voters could not be reached during hearings of notices issued for no mapping or “logical discrepancies”, reported The Hindu.

In such cases, voters were marked as “ineligible”.

“Logical discrepancies” flagged by the poll panel during the voter list revision included mismatches in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six.

The officials said that they had been instructed to file Form 7 applications if a voter had moved, had a duplicate entry elsewhere, was underage, had died or was not an Indian citizen, The Hindu reported. However, since the forms were auto-generated, the reason for seeking deletion was left blank.

The names of more than one crore voters were removed from Karnataka’s draft list published on August 24 as part of special intensive revision. The excluded names account for 19.4% of the state’s electorate, with most deletions attributed to voters having permanently shifted, followed by those marked as absent.

Voters could file claims and objections against their removal from the draft list between August 24 and September 23. The appeals were scheduled to be heard by October 22, ahead of the publication of the final electoral roll on October 27.

Most Form 7 applications were filed by election officials after the claims and objections period ended, with more than 60,000 forms being filled between September 24 and October 22, The Hindu reported.

More than 50,000 of these applications were filed in less than a week before the last day for disposing of claims and objections.

After cross-checking the names and voter identity numbers of several voters, The Hindu reported that they had been deleted from the electoral rolls. Names of persons against whom objections were filed after September 23 were also deleted, even though only claims and objections received by the deadline were to be considered for the final electoral roll.

Applications filed after September 23 were to be considered only for a supplementary roll following the special intensive revision.

It is unclear whether notices or orders were issued in these cases.

Election officials filed more Form 7 applications than voters or third parties in at least 26 Assembly constituencies, with the highest number recorded in Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike South district.

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, BJP-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.

Protests have been held in the country since October 2 against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

The Mumbai Police on Sunday detained at least 20 protesters during a demonstration at Chaityabhoomi in Dadar, demanding an investigation into the death of Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay student Sahil Wakode, The Hindu reported.

Sahil Wakode was found hanging in his hostel room on September 18. His family has alleged that he faced caste-based discrimination at the institute.

The protesters alleged that the police used force during the detentions, including manhandling women while removing them from Chaityabhoomi, the memorial and cremation site of BR Ambedkar, The Hindu reported.

The police said the gathering was unauthorised but did not respond to the protesters’ allegations of manhandling and misconduct.

Those detained were released from Tardeo, Worli and Dadar police stations after 8.30 pm.

Stand-up comedian Masoom Rajwani was among those detained. Rajwani shared a video of his detention on Instagram, showing police personnel taking him away from the protest site.

View this post on Instagram

He also alleged that the police detained women protesters after 6 pm, “which is against the law”.

“Look at the Mumbai Police and their brutality,” he wrote on Instagram. “Shame on police for using brute force, detaining eight woman, tearing clothes of one woman.”

Sahil Wakode’s death

Police have registered a case against Professor Suryanarayan Doolla and unidentified others on charges of abetment to suicide and under provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

IIT-Bombay claimed that during an examination on September 18, Sahil Wakode was found using a mobile phone and uploading the question paper on artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to seek answers. Doolla was reportedly the invigilator at the time.

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

However, Sahil Wakode’s parents alleged that their son had been threatened with suspension.

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

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

Kedare, however, denied that there was any caste discrimination in the case. “In fact caste-based information of every student is completely hidden and not available for anybody’s information,” he had said at the time.

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

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Two Congress MPs have been booked for “trespassing” into the Jamia Millia Islamia campus during a student protest on Friday, The Times of India reported on Sunday.

The university filed a complaint against Lok Sabha MP Imran Masood and Rajya Sabha MP Imran Pratapgarhi, accusing them of “inciting unrest” during their visit, amid protests demanding elections to the students’ union, PTI reported.

Mahtab Alam Rizvi, the university’s registrar, alleged that Masood jumped a wall to enter the premises, while Pratapgarhi broke a lock, The Times of India reported.

Students have been protesting on the campus since October 12, with five going on hunger strike to demand student union elections. The university has not held student union elections since 2006.

On Sunday night, the university said that the protest would be discontinued with immediate effect following a “mutual understanding” between the administration and the protesting students, NDTV reported.

However, the protesting students have yet to issue a statement confirming that the protest has been called off.

Under the agreement, the university said that the elections will be held within 15 days of the approval of the students’ union constitution. The university also agreed to revoke the suspensions and show-cause notices issued during the protest. A committee will be formed to investigate the actions of security personnel during the agitation.

The university had taken disciplinary action against students during the protest. On October 16, it rusticated one of the students, suspended two others and barred all three from entering the campus for a year.

On Saturday, the university shifted all classes online until further notice. Students alleged that the administration had “attacked” students who had been on hunger strike and tried to dismantle the protest site.

Asked to vacate hostels, students allege

On Sunday, students from at least three hostels at the university alleged that they had been asked to vacate their rooms, the Hindustan Times reported.

Women students living in Gerda Philipsborn Hostel, Begum Anis Kidwai Hostel and Begum Hazrat Mahal Girls’ Hostel alleged that wardens had asked them to vacate their rooms, citing the shift to online classes.

There were no reports of an official communication directing students to vacate the hostels.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Kargil Democratic Alliance on Saturday rejected the Union government’s draft governance framework for Ladakh, presented on October 15, saying that it would give the lieutenant governor and the bureaucracy overriding authority while leaving the proposed elected body with little legislative, executive or financial power, The New Indian Express reported.

This came a week after a subcommittee comprising members of the Kargil Democratic Alliance and Apex Body Leh – which are leading the agitation for statehood in Ladakh – met home ministry officials to discuss greater democratic representation for the region, The Indian Express reported. Talks have since stalled, with both sides blaming each other for the lack of progress.

Until 2019, Ladakh was part of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir. In August 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government abrogated the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution and bifurcated the state into two Union territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

Unlike Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh was made a Union territory without a legislature, fuelling concerns among the Ladakhi people about their land, natural resources and livelihoods. They also fear that the region’s cultural identity and fragile ecosystem are in danger.

By 2022, the residents had four demands: statehood for Ladakh, constitutional safeguards under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, separate Lok Sabha seats for Leh and Kargil districts and the rollout of a recruitment process and a separate Public Service Commission for Ladakh. All of Ladakh currently has one Lok Sabha seat. The Sixth Schedule guarantees protection to land and a degree of autonomy for the country’s tribal areas.

On September 24, 2025, four people were killed in police firing and 50 were injured after protests demanding statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule turned violent. The protesters clashed with security personnel and threw stones at them.

Ladakh body warns of protests

On Saturday, the Kargil Democratic Alliance warned of protests and shutdowns if the home ministry failed to implement the governance framework it said had been agreed upon at a May 22 meeting, The New Indian Express reported.

The alliance Co-Convener Asgar Karbalai said that the minutes of the May 22 meeting, signed by ministry officials and leaders on July 6, recorded an understanding that statehood would remain the ultimate aspiration of the people of Ladakh and that joint efforts would continue towards achieving it.

“In the first instance, it was agreed that Ladakh would be given ‘sui generis’, a customised UT-level structure with legislative, executive and financial powers, strong enough to bring the bureaucracy, including the chief secretary, under the control of the elected body,” the newspaper quoted Karbalai as saying.

He said the agreement also proposed a governance model and constitutional safeguards based on Articles 371 (A-J), customised as Article 371-K for Ladakh. These provisions give certain states special constitutional protections and, in some cases, greater autonomy over matters including land, customary practices, administration and development.

Karbalai alleged that the draft presented by the home ministry at the October 15 meeting instead placed the proposed governance structure under Article 240, which allows the President to make regulations for the administration of certain Union territories.

Kargil Democratic Alliance co-convener Sajjad Kargili called the draft an “attack on the rights of the people of this region”, The Indian Express reported.

“We have seen the allegations of ‘vote chori’ [vote theft] in other parts of the country,” the newspaper quoted Kargili as saying. “Ladakh has been turned into a testing lab, and they have stolen representation from here.”

Ladakh MP Mohammad Hanifa said that it had taken nearly six years for Ladakh and the Union government to reach a consensus, raising hopes among the region’s people. The home ministry’s current position, he said, “is against the spirit of the agreements reached earlier”, the newspaper reported.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• How Ladakh’s proposed elected governance body can safeguard the region

• Why five new districts in Ladakh have led to fears of exclusion, gerrymandering

On October 21, Delhi’s air quality slipped into the “poor” category, prompting the Commission for Air Quality Management to invoke Stage I of the Graded Response Action Plan across the National Capital Region.

This stage involves measures such as intensifying the mechanical sweeping roads and sprinkling water on them to keep the dust from rising. It also bans some kinds of construction and demolition activities.

As winter progresses, the air quality in the capital is likely to deteriorate further. Pollution-control measures will be activated, agencies will issue advisories, monitoring stations will track concentrations and dashboards will show the public how air quality is changing.

There is no shortage of information about Delhi’s air. A 2019 review of five emission-inventory studies by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water found that transport accounted for roughly 18% to 39% of PM2.5 emissions and road dust for 18% to 38%, while road dust alone accounted for 36% to 66% of PM10.

PM2.5 refers to airborne particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers or less. It is about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair and can easily be breathed into the lungs and the bloodstream. PM10 particles are about one-fifth to one-seventh the width of a human hair.

Road dust and transport are largely responsible for both these sources of pollution. Waste burning and industrial emissions also contribute. The pollution moves across the National Capital Region, cutting across administrative and state boundaries. The Commission for Air Quality Management has issued detailed directions about how to contain many of these sources.

Yet every winter, the same question returns: if so much is known about the problem, why is it still so difficult to solve? Winter makes Delhi’s pollution most visible, but the sources identified by the data, from road dust to traffic, exist throughout the year. So do the institutions responsible for addressing them.

The question is not unique to air. Cities know which roads need repair, which drains clog and which neighbourhoods lack waste collection, and health and education departments know where facilities have inadequate staff or equipment. Governments have dashboards, databases and geospatial systems that make these problems visible.

But knowing is not the same as doing. The capacity to deliver solutions depends on whether institutions have the people, money, technology, infrastructure and authority to act on what the data shows.

Poshan Tracker: India's Real-Time Nutrition Monitoring Platform ✨🙌

✱ #PoshanTracker is a mobile-based governance application that forms the digital backbone of POSHAN Abhiyaan. It serves as the primary governance tool to strengthen digital monitoring under the Abhiyaan.

✱… pic.twitter.com/uHW64JMJFO

— PIB India (@PIB_India) July 8, 2026

This distinction matters especially in a developing country like India, where much of the basic infrastructure required for good public services is still being built, expanded or maintained. The risk is that governance reform moves too quickly from building the foundations of delivery to measuring outcomes from systems that cannot yet produce them.

A municipality can have a sophisticated dashboard showing how quickly complaints are resolved. But that amounts to little if the civic engineering department is functioning on half its sanctioned staff, with ageing machinery while replacing equipment takes months.

This gap persists in Delhi’s agencies. In May 2025 the Supreme Court noted that 55% of the posts in the Delhi Pollution Control Committee were vacant and directed the Delhi government to fill them by September that year. This is one of the agencies responsible for addressing the problems highlighted by data.

Other civic bodies have similar inadequacies.

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s compendium of performance audits of 393 urban local bodies in 18 states, covering 2014 to 2021, found an average staff vacancy of 37% against sanctioned strength, roughly one post in three. Urban bodies in 16 states had limited or no power over recruitment.

Meanwhile, governments, and the wider financing and support ecosystem, have spent two decades building management information systems, monitoring frameworks, project management units, geospatial platforms and technical assistance. Much of this was necessary since public programmes often suffered from poor information and weak visibility into implementation.

But there is a difference between strengthening the systems that measure implementation and strengthening the institutions that carry it out. Research on “capability traps” describe how governments can adopt the form of effective institutions without the underlying capability to deliver. Performance systems can grow faster than the capacity to perform.

Dashboards record outcomes far better than the conditions that produced them. The result is a peculiar form of accountability, in which one measures whether an institution has performed without examining whether it was capable of doing so.

Core aspirations of ICCC: Enhancing effective administration, Encouraging inter-departmental coordination, and Ensuring prompt action towards incidents. pic.twitter.com/HK1VldDnuZ

— INTEGRATED COMMAND AND CONTROL CENTRE (@ICCCBengaluru) August 16, 2023

Delhi’s roads show progress but what is still needed. Road dust is among the biggest sources of coarse particles, and the city is responding: the Municipal Corporation of Delhi tracks its Mechanical Road Sweeping Machines on a live portal, runs 66 on roads wider than 60 feet and will add 70 more from mid-November. The Delhi government approved 30 electric sweepers on September 29 to bring mechanised sweeping to about 609 km of narrow roads.

These are welcome steps. The next step is to treat capacity as seriously as the machines: the operators, maintenance, contracts and budgets that keep them running every night.

The same problem arises when public systems adopt the logic of the private sector without accounting for the demands and objectives of public service delivery. Outsourcing street cleaning may look efficient on cost and response-time indicators, but the city still needs the capacity to design contracts, supervise providers and enforce standards. It cannot choose to serve only neighbourhoods where the business model works.

Four changes would help. First, capacity must be measured with performance: any public dashboard tracking governance outcomes must also show sanctioned and filled posts, functioning equipment and the funds released against budget.

Second, urban bodies should be given real control over assessing their staffing needs and recruiting for them, rather than leaving both to state governments. Third, every new project should be assessed on what it adds to the city’s capacity to deliver public services, with the same weight as its ability to attract private finance, so that financial viability never substitutes for public purpose.

Fourth, development partners that fund and design these projects and programmes should be held to the same standard: success should be measured by improvements in public institutions’ capacity to deliver services and in outcomes instead of just by digital and performance matrices that track progress.

As a country, we have become better at measuring public problems. The harder task is ensuring that the institutions expected to solve them have the staff, money, infrastructure and authority to do so.

Kabeer Arora is a policy and development professional. Views are personal.

The Election Commission on Sunday ordered the reverification of all names added to, deleted from or amended in Uttar Pradesh’s electoral rolls through Forms 6, 7 and 8 by computer assistants in all 403 Assembly constituencies after the special intensive revision ended on April 10, the Hindustan Times reported.

The forms are used to register new voters, delete names and correct entries.

The Election Commission also barred computer assistants from entering forms related to electoral rolls. Forms submitted physically by voters should only be digitised by booth-level officers through the BLO App, the poll panel said.

The order came after the Congress on Wednesday alleged that the names of more than 13,000 voters had been replaced with those of other persons after the final electoral rolls were published in the Pilibhit Sadar Assembly constituency.

A day after the Congress’ allegation, Uttar Pradesh Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa said that “irregularities” had been found in 10,470 electoral roll entries in the constituency after the revision.

In the 2022 Assembly polls, Bharatiya Janata Party leader Sanjay Gangwar had won the seat by a margin of less than 7,000 votes.

An investigation by the Pilibhit district election officer had found that the computer assistant had entered 13,779 Form 8 applications. Form 8 is used to correct details in an existing electoral roll or shift a voter’s residence.

On Thursday, Rinwa said that legal action would be taken against the current and former electoral registration officers in the constituency. He had also said that the services of a computer assistant at the Voter Registration Centre in Pilibhit would be terminated.

Uttar Pradesh was part of the second phase of the voter roll revision.

More than two crore, or 13.2%, names were deleted from the final rolls published on April 10. The BJP-ruled state had more than 15 crore electors before the roll revision. Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh are expected to be held in February or March.

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, BJP-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.

Protests have been held in the country since October 2 against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

Since February this year, an office space in Lucknow’s Sapru Marg has become the home of an audacious political experiment. Every day, a handful of men gather here and brainstorm how they can subvert the Bharatiya Janata Party in the upcoming assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh.

Curiously, the men admit to having been BJP voters all their lives. They are mostly Brahmins, the privileged caste group that is a core constituency of the Hindutva party.

“The BJP was our party,” says Rajesh Shukla, a businessman who is a regular visitor here. “It has now been hijacked by backwards.”

The businessman was referring to other backward classes, or OBCs, a collection of castes that make up nearly half of UP’s population. Traditionally, the BJP has been seen as a party catering to upper-caste Hindus. Its earliest political architects like Deendayal Upadhyaya, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Murli Manohar Joshi were Brahmins from UP.

However, over the past decade, it has won two consecutive state elections after successfully wooing OBC and Scheduled Caste voters.

This strategy might now come with a cost. The upper castes, especially Brahmins, feel that they have lost ownership of a party they considered their own. “Brahmins were the pillars in the house of BJP,” said Rajendra Nath Tripathi, the leader of a Brahmin-first social organisation with presence in several states. “But today, we can’t even openly claim to be its tenants.”

It is this sentiment that a new Brahmin-centric political party, the Rashtriya Adhikar Morcha, or RAM, seeks to tap into. Its founder, Alankar Agnihotri, told Scroll that RAM would contest from 150 seats in the upcoming assembly polls.

While the fledgling outfit appears unlikely to make an electoral dent in the coming polls, its formation is a symptom of a deeper discontent that the BJP faces among its core voters.

“If the momentum against the BJP among Brahmins sustains till the [UP] election, if it converts into votes, then the party will be kicked out of the state for generations,” Tripathi, 65, told Scroll.

But conversations with Brahmin voters suggest that the picture is more complicated. For one, a section of them say their anger is at the prime minister, but they are willing to stick with the BJP at the state level. Others are still undecided and considering which Opposition party – chiefly the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party – can best meet their demands.

‘A big problem’

The immediate trigger of Brahmin angst against the BJP was a set of draft rules notified by the Narendra Modi government in January this year – the University Grants Commission (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations.

It laid down guidelines to deal with discrimination and harassment faced by students, faculty and staffers from OBC groups, Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in India’s higher education institutions.

The regulations were introduced to counter a rising number of student suicides in colleges and universities, particularly among Dalits. But it stoked protests by upper-caste groups that demanded a rollback citing fear of false cases and lack of provisions to deal with discrimination against upper-caste students and staffers.

Weeks later, the draft rules were stayed by the Supreme Court. However, the upper-caste anger it led to is yet to subside. Rajan Kumar Dixit, 48, who runs a shop in Todarpur village in Hardoi district, has voted for the BJP for as long as he can remember. But now he has doubts.

“The UGC [draft rules] is a big problem,” Dixit told Scroll. “It will cause distress to the next generation of our children.” The shopkeeper was grateful to the “Brahmin judges” in the Supreme Court who halted the rules, which he called “the new SC/ST act” – a reference to the law that criminalises atrocities against Dalits and Adivasis.

His brother, Kalka Dixit, however, said that the Brahmin backlash against the draft rules will be against PM Modi, and not Chief Minister Adityanath. “Yogi’s government in UP keeps the Muslims and SCs [Dalits] in check,” said Kalka. “It protects us and keeps the peace.”

About 150 km away in Sarojini Nagar assembly constituency outside Lucknow, a Thakur youth who came to attend an Adityanath rally on September 24 made the same point. “Our vote for the BJP in 2027 will be for Yogi,” he said, referring to the CM who is also a Thakur. “We will not vote for BJP in 2029. The people are frustrated with Modi.”

Todarpur falls in Shahabad assembly constituency, where the BJP has been successfully fielding a Brahmin legislator, Rajani Tiwari, since 2017. Brahmins are numerically dominant here and a section of them are still with the Hindutva party. “Where else will we go?” asked Rakesh Mishra, a local resident. “The pandits are speaking against the party a lot – but they will ultimately vote for it.”

Everyone can agree on one thing: the elections will see a “takkar” – a tight bipolar contest between the BJP and the Samajwadi Party. “Some OBC and SC voters here are moving towards SP,” said Kalka Dixit. “In that scenario, if Akhilesh Yadav offers us a better Brahmin face, his party will take the seat like a breeze.”

Nothing is this simple in politics, no less in UP. OBC and SC voters in Shahabad told Scroll that they wanted the local domination of Brahmins to ebb. Not only the legislator, but the block chiefs in the constituency were Brahmins too. They claimed that this allowed the local landowners to pay workers less than the minimum wage and collude with the bureaucracy to capture the land of other castes.

“The BJP has brought peace to the region, no doubt,” said Ajay Prakash, a voter from the Teli caste, an OBC community, in Saidpur village. “But often, only the strongmen here run their writ, and the poor get nothing.” Prakash added that he has voted for the BJP for over a decade, and will vote for it again only if a local leader from his caste gets a ticket. “What more do we want than security? That’s all.”

‘Jayenge toh jaye kahan?’

The Bharatiya Janata Party understands too well that Brahmins in UP, like Rakesh Mishra in Hardoi, are its captive voters. “Jayenge toh jaye kahan?” Anant Dwivedi, the party’s president in Lucknow city, uttered the oft-repeated question to Scroll. Where will they go if they want to?

While Dwivedi was happy to offer platitudes about BJP’s imminent success in the upcoming elections – popularity of Modi and Adityanath, better law and order than the previous SP government, the Opposition’s weakness on the ground – his deputy, Vinayak Pandey, was more candid.

“When the BJP loses [the polls], the savarnas will see the light and learn their lessons,” he said, visibly annoyed. “Muslims will enter their house and kill them.”

Any assembly constituency has voters of all castes, Pandey added, and a party cannot only cater to Brahmins. “Brahmins want everything. You can do a dozen things for the community, but you don’t meet just one demand and they are up in arms.”

Dwivedi and Pandey said that their party workers were doing a lot of homework before setting out to meet voters – they had a lot to answer for after an unprecedented 10 years in power in the state. And yet, they believed that the issue of Brahmin anger was an exaggeration propped up by “thekedaars” of the caste – a pejorative for community leaders rallying against the BJP.

One of them is Rajendra Nath Tripathi, the national president of the Akhil Bharatiya Brahmin Mahasabha, a 28-year-old organisation that claims to be the largest non-electoral forum of the community. His clout can be gleaned from the fact senior Brahmins leaders of the BJP, like deputy Chief Minister Brijesh Pathak and member of parliament Manoj Tiwari, publicly wish him on his birthday every year.

When I met Tripathi at his farmhouse on the outskirts of Lucknow, he claimed that he had just finished touring 42 districts of the state. “There is so much anger that this jayenge-toh-jaye-kahan will not work this time,” he said. “The savarnas are good at lending support but even better at bringing someone down.”

One of his grouses against the Hindutva party was that it had not produced a single tall leader among the Brahmins in UP in the last decade. “There is none,” he said. “They only take from us and give back nothing.”

And yet, he conceded that three months away from polls, confusion prevailed in the community. Despite overtures by the Samajwadi Party, Brahmins were struggling to find an Opposition player that they can rally behind for their demands: rollback the UGC draft rules, amend and dilute the SC/ST atrocities act, and make changes to caste-based reservations.

“Voters are not showing their cards yet. They will vote with a dabi zubaan” – a quiet manner, he added.

‘We are cutting BJP votes in at least 100 seats’

The 1931 census pegged the population of Brahmins in erstwhile United Provinces – today’s Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand combined – at 11%. In absolute numbers, this indicates that UP has the highest population of Brahmins in India.

Brahmin politics seems to rest its success on this number and also on old assumptions: it votes as a bloc and also sways voters from other castes.

The political upstarts at the Brahmin-first Rashtriya Adhikar Morcha rely heavily on these numbers and assumptions to sell their political strategy.

The party’s founder, Alankar Agnihotri, was a judicial officer until recently – he resigned from his position in February to protest against the UGC draft rules.

He told Scroll that RAM would contest from 150 seats in the upcoming assembly polls and lend unconditional support to the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party in the remaining 253 seats.

Why not support the SP? “Brahmins voters are on the backfoot whenever one mentions SP,” said Agnihotri.

Agnihotri, 44, is an engineering graduate from the erstwhile Institute of Technology at the Banaras Hindu University. He has a law degree from Lucknow University and has worked in the United States for two years.

Under his leadership, RAM’s political rhetoric is stridently anti-BJP. More specifically, it is anti-Modi. In his interviews, Agnihotri has implicitly referred to the PM and Home Minister Amit Shah as “Gujarati gangsters”.

Its optics are also muscular. The party’s Sapru Marg office has several portraits of Parshuram, a mythical Brahmin warrior-sage who killed Kshatriyas to restore cosmic order – a possibly awkward icon given RAM’s attempt to build an alliance with the Karni Sena, a Kshatriya-centric organisation in North India.

“We are cutting BJP votes in at least 100 seats,” Agnihotri told Scroll. “Our message to the BJP is simple: open your mouths on injustices against Brahmins else your leaders will be beaten up in every gali.”

In its eight months of existence, RAM has deployed office-bearers in every district in UP. It even has a minority cell, a backward cell and a women’s wing. Most of its functionaries claim to have been previously associated with the BJP and the RSS, especially the Vishwa Hindu Parishad.

When asked about the accusation that his outfit was channeling Brahmin anger and votes away from the Opposition, which would ultimately help the BJP, Agnihotri said: “If Owaisi can fight for his community and Chandrasekhar Azad [of the Azad Samaj Party] can fight for his, then so can I.”

Despite such rhetoric, Scroll found that in September, ordinary voters across UP had not heard of either Agnihotri or RAM.

Rajendra Nath Tripathi, who first gave a public platform to Agnihotri in a Brahmin Mahasammelan in Lucknow in February, offered an explanation. “One can’t run a political party with the temperament of a bureaucrat,” he said. “One needs to be humble, whereas bureaucrats are haughty. Many Agnihotris come and go without making a dent.”

Tripathi added that often he did not trust his own community’s electoral choices. “The decision will be made 10 days before the elections,” he said, adding that he was banking on Brahmins to go with those who are best placed to defeat the BJP.

All photographs by Ayush Tiwari.

Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray on Sunday said he had deleted a documentary that detailed the alleged “long-standing friendship between [industrialist] Gautam Adani and [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi, and how the Indian industrial landscape is consequently being handed over to Adani”.

Thackeray said he took down the documentary, made by Hotmail founder Sabeer Bhatia, following a request conveyed through the Mumbai Police commissioner.

He said the documentary had been viewed more than 48 lakh times on X alone, besides reaching audiences on other social media platforms.

He alleged that the documentary’s wide reach had made those in power anxious about the allegations being brought to light.

“My intention was for this serious issue to reach the public, and that objective has been achieved,” Thackeray said.

The MNS chief said he had been raising concerns about “how the Adani Group is effectively setting out to swallow the entire nation” since January, in the run-up to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation elections.

However, Thackeray said on Sunday that his opposition was not directed at any individual, but “against the rise of a monopoly”.

“I have often stated in my speeches that the prime minister should foster the growth of many industrialists across the country, creating vast employment opportunities and generating immense wealth for the nation, and empower them to conquer global markets,” Thackeray said.

He said that if the government favoured one industrialist to an extent that it “poses a threat to the nation”, he would oppose it.

“My opposition is, therefore, directed against any form of monopoly, whether it involves Adani or anyone else,” he added.

Thackeray said he had decided to delete the post “out of respect” for the Mumbai and Maharashtra police forces.

He added that removing the documentary would not end his campaign against the “authoritarianism in this country, which has now grown into a raging wildfire”.

On October 18, the Mumbai Police issued legal notices to 24 users of social media platform X, who had shared the documentary, PTI reported.

The notices alleged that the content contained false, misleading and disparaging claims about the Adani group, which were “circulated without any factual or legal basis and caused ongoing harm to its reputation, goodwill and public image”.

Bhatia, who had also shared the documentary on X, said on Wednesday that he had removed the posts following a request from Mumbai Police.

Besides being shared by Bhatia and Thackeray, the documentary was also screened at a Maharashtra Navnirman Sena shakha on Saturday, a day before the party’s chief announced that he had removed it from his social media accounts, PTI reported.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Rights groups and the Opposition have condemned the arrests of doctor Randall Sequeira and Dalit activist Laxman Naik in Odisha, alleging that the police action is part of a wider crackdown on Adivasi and Dalit communities opposing mining projects.

Sequeira and Naik were arrested on the night of October 16 in Bhawanipatna town in Kalahandi district, in connection with a case linked to an April clash between police and residents in the Rayagada district.

The clash took place during protests against a road project linked to Vedanta Limited’s proposed Sijimali bauxite mine.

Both activists have been charged with offences, including attempted murder and rioting, and booked under the Arms Act, PTI quoted the police as saying.

The police have alleged that two had instigated Adivasi residents to attack security personnel during the protest in April.

However, civil society groups and Opposition leaders have questioned the arrests, pointing out that neither activist was named in the first information reports relating to the April clash.

Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, a public health non-governmental organisation, on Sunday demanded the immediate and unconditional release of both activists.

The group also demanded the withdrawal of all cases against them and an independent inquiry into “the larger process of intimidation, arrests and threats in the entire area”.

In a statement, the group said that Sequeira had worked with Adivasi communities in Kalahandi and Rayagada for years. It said his work on the social and mental health challenges faced by communities affected by mining could not be “termed a crime”.

The group alleged that the two men were taken from their homes without warrants and that their phones were seized without a memo.

The organisation said the two had not been named in the FIR but were subsequently charged with serious offences.

“We have clear reasons to believe that these charges are fabricated,” the group said.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) Odisha State Committee on Tuesday condemned the arrests, alleging that they were “part of a campaign of state repression against Adivasi and Dalit communities” who were “resisting mining projects linked to Vedanta and the Adani Group”.

It alleged that more than 100 people had been jailed and several criminal cases filed against those opposing mining projects in the region.

The party has demanded the immediate release of jailed activists, the withdrawal of “politically motivated” cases and an independent judicial inquiry into the police action.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh alleged that Sequeira and Naik were detained because they had supported protests by Adivasi and Dalit communities against bauxite mining projects.

Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra also criticised the arrests, alleging that it amounted to a “mockery of the law and due process”.

Addressing Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi on a social media post, Moitra alleged that the government was acting in the interests of Vedanta and Adani.

April clashes

The case relates to a clash in Kantamal on the night of April 6 and April 7, when police entered a village in Rayagada, amid protests against a road project linked to Vedanta Limited’s proposed Sijimali bauxite mine.

The residents were opposing the construction of a roughly 3-km road from Purlong to Sagabari Ghat, which would provide access to the mine in the ecologically sensitive Sijimali hills. Vedanta secured the bauxite block through an auction in 2023.

The project has faced opposition from residents, mainly belonging to the Adivasi community, who have said that the mining threatens their land, livelihoods and the environment.

During the protests, the police used tear gas and lathis to disperse the crowd.

The police had said that they had entered the village to execute a non-bailable arrest warrant against a resident and that protesters attacked personnel with stones and sharp weapons. More than 50 persons, including 33 police personnel, were reported injured in the clash.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Election Commission has refused to reveal the name and version of the software that it purportedly used to detect errors and anomalies in the electoral rolls during the special intensive revision, citing the exemption for information relating to “commercial confidence, trade secrets and intellectual property” under the Right to Information Act, the Hindustan Times reported.

In response to a Right to Information application filed by activist MA Mujeeb Ayyub, the Election Commission on October 16 added that “no new software has been developed or procured for the special intensive revision”.

It said that electoral registration officers decide on the inclusion or exclusion of an elector “on the basis of facts and records”.

“The electoral registration officer of the concerned constituency is the statutory authority responsible for the preparation and revision of electoral roll of that constituency,” the Hindustan Times quoted the Election Commission as saying.

The response comes amid protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the functioning of the Election Commission and the alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

In his application, Ayyub had also asked whether the software or artificial intelligence platform being used automatically flags voter records for verification, correction or deletion, and what safeguards are in place to prevent false positives and the wrongful flagging of genuine electors, the newspaper reported.

He also asked whether AI, machine learning, predictive analytics or automated decision support tools were used at any stage.

The Election Commission in its reply said that the some of information sought by the applicant was a “clarification” that does not fall within the definition of “information” under the Right to Information Act.

On the question of who reviews the flagged anomalies, the poll body refused to disclose the information, citing an exemption under the Act for details that could endanger a person’s life or physical safety or reveal confidential sources of information provided for law enforcement or security purposes, the Hindustan Times reported.

The Congress on Sunday said that the poll body continued to “hide information” about ECINEt, the Election Commission’s online platform for voter registration and related services.

“The lack of transparency around the ECINET software and the use of AI has damaged the credibility of the entire process among citizens,” Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote on social media. “The Election Commission is repeatedly refusing to provide this information because it will reveal the reality of the massive, centralised manipulation that has taken place.”

He asked why the poll body was denying the use of AI in the special intensive revision of voter rolls, “when it is clearly being used”.

Referring to a report by The Indian Express, he added, “The ECINET software and the Information and Technology Division of the Election Commission were the focus of several objections raised by Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi.”

On September 23, The Indian Express reported that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

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.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read:

• SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial
• Delhi SIR notices seem ‘machine-generated’, clarity needed on ‘logical discrepancies’, says SC
• Cabinet Secretariat noted action on ECs’ complaints may be seen as ‘interference’: RTI reply

The Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration destroyed 564 litres of milk during inspections across Mumbai on Friday and Saturday, The Hindu reported. The department also took action against against seven dairies in the city as part of a statewide crackdown on food safety violations.

The dairies in Mumbai that faced action included Sainath Dairy & Farsan Mart in Govandi, Maharana Dairy in Mankhurd, Agasti Milk Agency in Mankhurd, Yadav Dairy in Govandi, Shakti Dairy in Dharavi, Rahul Milk Centre in Mahim and Sagar Milk Centre in Antop Hill.

Separately, the department suspended the licences or registrations of seven Mumbai food establishments for violations including unclean kitchens and drainage systems, improper storage of vegetarian food and meat, the use of unauthorised food colours and the absence of medical certificates for workers, The Hindu reported.

These include Ottoman Cafe in Andheri, Chacha Eagle Kulfi Falooda in Jogeshwari, Bharat Canteen in Andheri, Green Turtle Hospitality in Oshiwara, Atul Tiffin in Byculla, Mumbai Darbar Family Restaurant in Lower Parel and PB Enterprises in Sewri.

Statewide crackdown on food worth Rs 1.5 crore

Across Maharashtra, the department’s enforcement drive covered food products estimated to be worth more than Rs 1.5 crore, The Hindu reported.

Officials seized approximately 43.5 tonnes of food stock, while 719.2 litres of milk and ghee were seized or destroyed, the newspaper reported.

The drive targeted suspected food adulteration, substandard products, incorrect labelling, unhygienic storage conditions and the sale of prohibited food items.

The Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar division recorded the highest seizure by quantity, with officials confiscating around 26.8 tonnes of food items worth Rs 64 lakh, The Hindu reported.

In the Konkan division, the department seized nearly 10 tonnes of food products worth Rs 53.5 lakh. This included spices, dry fruits and other items suspected of being substandard or incorrectly labelled.

In Pune division, officials seized more than 2 tonnes of food products worth Rs 7.9 lakh, the newspaper reported.

The action comes amid a statewide drive by the department against eateries and other establishments that allegedly violate food safety norms.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read: How a bureaucrat has forced Maharashtra’s eateries and other food businesses to clean up their act

Former Chief Justice DY Chandrachud was “too deferential to the government” in judicial appointments, The Indian Express quoted quoted ex-Supreme Court judge Sanjay Kishan Kaul’s unpublished memoir as saying.

Kaul’s memoir Without Fear of Favour is scheduled to be published by Juggernaut later this month. The Indian Express has reviewed the unpublished manuscript.

Kaul, who retired in December 2023 after serving as the second-most senior judge of the Supreme Court, wrote in his book that Chandrachud had on one occasion sought the government’s “nod” before the Collegium had formally considered a candidate. He also wrote that the government had raised a “bizarre” query about the caste of a judge candidate from a minority faith.

After joining the Collegium in June 2022, Kaul said that he suggested that Chandrachud and he “face the government together…if one likes since I was not the chief justice and could afford to be the firmer of the two”.

But “Dhananjay [Chandrachud], with a few exceptions, preferred to handle that relationship all on his own”.

Kaul talked about the Collegium’s first major exercise after joining it, when the judges had to fill six vacancies.

He wrote that the members had agreed on five names in advance. But on the way to the meeting, Chandrachud proposed a sixth name, he said.

The other judges resisted the proposal. Kaul said that he suspected that the name had been proposed at the government’s instance. Chandrachud then took him aside and “wondered aloud whether he should telephone out to check the government’s view”.

“My suspicions were confirmed, and I told him to see sense: He could not, in the middle of a collegium, do such a thing,” Kaul wrote.

The five names went through, while the sixth did not. Kaul also described a disagreement over the candidature of a judge from a minority faith, saying that the tension between him and Chandrachud “peaked” over such issues.

According to the memoir, the government asked whether more representation of minority faiths was needed, pointing to judges from other religious minorities who were already serving.

“I was troubled by this logic,” Kaul wrote. The government then asked about the caste of the candidate’s family.

“If this is how we are going to appoint judges,” Kaul wrote that he told Chandrachud, “you may as well consult and appoint yourself. Chief Justices used to appoint judges before the Collegium was created. You may do it that way. I cannot be party to such a decision.”

He wrote further, “this is the reality of the appointment process”.

“It is fantasy to imagine that the Collegium is isolated from political pressures,” he said in his book. “Governments assert themselves. If you give them an opening, they will grab it. The challenge is to maintain institutional integrity while navigating these pressures.”

He added: “Indeed, I found that the government has far more respect for judges with a spine in such matters and the need for balance.”

Asked for his response to Kaul’s remarks, Chandrachud told The Indian Express that he could not comment unless he had read the book.

“Having said that, I would like to say that I have had excellent Collegium meetings as [the Chief Justice], and even with Sanjay Kaul it has been a very respectful relationship as members of the Collegium,” he told the newspaper. “There have been good conversations, reasoned dialogue and we have had affable meetings in the Collegium together.”

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

The Janata Dal (United) on Saturday expelled its leader Anant Singh and his wife, Neelam Devi, for six years for “anti-party activities”, including campaigning for an Opposition party candidate in the recently concluded Legislative Council elections.

A statement issued by the party said that Mokoma MLA Anant Singh’s primary membership was terminated with immediate effect for “defying party directives” and “using insulting language against top leadership”.

Devi is a former MLA from the Mokama Assembly constituency.

The party has also asked the Bihar Legislative Assembly speaker to initiate proceedings to disqualify Anant Singh from the House.

Reacting to his expulsion on Sunday, Anant Singh said that he had “no regrets” and claimed that the JD(U) would not win even “10 seats” in future elections, ANI reported. He also said he would not join another party and would instead float his own.

Elections for eight Legislative Council seats from teachers’ and graduates’ constituencies were held on Friday.

Anant Singh had accused Neeraj Kumar, the JD(U)’s sitting MLC from the Patna graduates’ constituency, of framing him in several cases and vowed to ensure his defeat in the biennial polls, the Hindustan Times reported.

Anant Singh had said that he would support Jan Suraaj Party candidate Anuj Singh and had participated in his nomination roadshow.

“I have all respect for former Chief Minister Nitish Kumar,” the Hindustan Times quoted Anant Singh as saying. “But I have certain issues with JD(U) MLC, and I want his defeat.”

He added that the party belonged to Nitish Kumar and “after he left, the party is finished”, ANI reported.

Nitish Kumar had resigned as Bihar chief minister on April 14 after he was elected to the Rajya Sabha on March 16.

“Who among those in the leadership, the ones who expelled me, has actually contributed anything?” ANI quoted Anant Singh as saying. “The JD(U) is finished.”

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Crockery from the Awadh palace. Silver items and animals from Nana Saheb Peshwa’s Bithur palace. Ornaments and silk garments belonging to Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. These were among the items looted by the British during the uprising of 1857.

But looting, it seems from books written by British men and women who experienced the rebellion, was only what violent Indians did. Their accounts present a rather different framing of the marauding. Their descriptions of the plunder by the British suggest that they were heroes who were merely rectifying an unfortunate mistake.

Even as they expressed a fear of their belongings falling into Indian hands, British writers also describe indulging in the plunder and destruction of Indian property and cheering it on – despite a proclamation from the East India Company authorities forbidding this.

They did so with impunity, fearing neither social ostracisation nor judicial repercussions.

‘All we valued was lost to us…’

When the uprising began in Meerut on May 10, 1857, the looting was incidental since the focus of the sepoys of the East India Company was to punish their British officers.

But Delhi, where the sepoys went next, witnessed large-scale looting.

The British residents of the city fled their homes, taking with them what they could. Maria Germon in A Lady’s Diary During the Siege of Lucknow wrote that she “put together all the things we had with us”. Ruth Coopland, author of A Lady’s Escape from Gwalior selected, “one or two trifles that we prized”.

In her book An Englishwoman in India, Harriet Tytler, one of the many British people forced to flee Delhi, wrote, “It was a sickening sight knowing all we valued most was lost to us forever…”

For the memsahibs, the pain of possibly losing their possessions was as great as the fear of these items being seized by the sepoys.

The British exacted a cruel revenge, as Keith Young calmly observed in Delhi-1857. “I fear, when we get beyond Paniput, it will be found necessary to utterly destroy some six of the villages which are said to have harboured plunderers and ill-treated the fugitives,” he wrote.

Later, Young saw villagers with goods plundered from a “boxwalla” – an itinerant merchant. But rather than punish them, he pocketed some of this as “prize property” and sent it to his wife as the “plunder” he had picked up.

Young was not the only officer to indulge in casual theft. In Lucknow, Maria Germon’s husband sent her items stolen from palaces, which she declared were “his own looting!” She accepted the booty with a complacent satisfaction at her husband’s achievements. Her attitude sits awkwardly with someone who had mourned the loss of her own possessions.

When Martin Gubbins, author of An Account of the Mutinies in Oudh and of the Siege of the Lucknow Residency, plundered crockery from the Awadh palace, he justified it as providing replacements for his own plates and bowls destroyed in shelling by the rebels.

This attitude helped the British rationalise their theft of crockery, mirrors and furniture from Indians – plunder that they carried out while still under siege.

Soldiers ‘wild with fury and lust’

Once the tide turned towards the end of 1857, after the fall of Delhi in September, and the British star was in the ascendant, plundering became a part of every battle. Colonel James Neill, marching to Kanpur, plundered villages along the way and left in his wake a landscape of devastation.

Outrage against Nana Saheb was particularly acute since this adopted descendant of the Peshwa had led an attack on the British in Kanpur during the uprising. The British sacked his palace in Bithur in present-day Uttar Pradesh, carrying away silver items and even animals from his menagerie.

Jhansi was plundered by Hugh Rose’s Central Indian Field Force. William Howard Russell, travelling with the British forces in March 1858, described the soldiers in Lucknow as “wild with fury and lust for gold – literally drunk with plunder”.

The British justified their plunder by calculating the value of goods from their homes much higher than items appropriated from Indians. Harriet Tytler, having valued her lost belongings at 20,000 pounds, wrote that these included, “things that no money could purchase – a beloved dead child’s hair, manuscripts and paintings for a book my husband was going to publish some day…”

Ruth Coopland was furious that furniture plundered from British homes was thrown into the river. The sepoys, Coopland suggests, were incapable of valuing the plundered objects.

It was not just economic value that allowed the British to rationalise their actions. They believed that they were doing the “right thing”.

In The Siege of Lucknow, Lady Inglis notes that with the imminent arrival of the sepoys in June 1857, “It did not seem fair to leave the Khaiser Bagh palace of the King of Oude [Awadh] to be plundered by the enemy.” The British reasoned that they were honour-bound to protect the Nawab – and therefore the contents of his palaces – if he stayed loyal to them.

If he was not loyal, Inglis said, “the crown jewels of Oude would make a pleasant addition to the army prize money”. She concluded, “Either way, it was necessary to get hold of” the nawab’s jewels.

These included, “some very fine pearls and emeralds, some of the latter being as big as eggs”. They were brought into the Lucknow Residency in the conviction that here, among the British, they would be safe. But sometime during the siege of Lucknow, the jewels were stolen.

Licenced looters

Why didn’t the British attempt to find the looters and take appropriate action?

Harriet Tytler offered an explanation as she noticed British soldiers in Delhi looting the city they had just won back: “We have fought hard for it and mean to keep it.” The British belief that soldiers who had fought in battles deserved a share in the spoils allowed them to turn a blind eye to the looting.

This, despite the September 1857 pronouncement by the East India Company British that, “indiscriminate plunder will not be allowed”. Instead, the company appointed Prize Agents to deal with the plunder of cities under British control. They were, in effect, British officers licensed to loot.

Ordinarily soldiers were promised a share of the spoils too but W Gordon Alexander exposed this system in Recollections of a Highland Subaltern. “I, as a Lieutenant, received the equally munificent share of about £18 sterling!” he wrote. “The question was universally put in the army, ‘What became of the rest?’”

In Delhi, the Prize Agents seized horses, carriages, furniture and having developed an understanding of Indians, dug up floors and excavated walls for valuables. Soldiers pocketed treasures instead of handing them over.

Florence Wagentreiber, who had fled Delhi with her parents, returned to this scene of plunder. Harriet Tytler informed the Wagentreiber family she was “treasure seeking” and her share of the plunder included ornaments and silk garments belonging to Bahadur Shah Zafar.

Plundering only required a “digging ticket” issued by the British authorities. Florence’s family, seeing an opportunity to regain lost fortunes, obtained one. They found treasures in the most unlikely of places – once even hidden among onions.

The British, who normalised the looting of goods belonging to Indians, were of course extremely possessive of their own belongings. Packing to leave the Residency in November 1857, Adelaide Case in Day by Day describes sewing clothes into pillowcases, with other items secreted in between.

Another Residency occupant, Maria Germon, described how she put on three of each kind of undergarment – a pink flannel dressing-gown, and plaid jacket, and then over all of them, a cloth dress and jacket.

“I then tied my Cashmere shawl round my waist, and also Charlie’s silver mug, and put on a worsted cap and hat, and had my cloak placed on the saddle; in my pink dressing gown I had stitched dear mamma’s last present to me, and I filled several pockets with valuables also ; in two under ones I had all my little stock of jewellery, and my journal, and some valuable papers,” she wrote. “I also wore a bustle, in which I had stitched my Honiton lace wedding dress, veil, &c., and two black and white lace shawls; so that I was a pretty good size.”

Her clothes made her so heavy that she had to be hoisted on her horse by two men.

The other women burnt their belongings rather than let them fall into the hands of the sepoys. Having themselves looted so many belongings of Indians, they were in the perfect position to understand the trauma of losing their possessions to indiscriminate plunder.

Nandini Nayar is a children’s writer whose most recent book is People, Places, Things: The Story of 1857 (Scholastic, 2026).

The Maharashtra government has moved the Bombay High Court against the Union health ministry and the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, alleging that the food regulator has created a parallel enforcement system and encroached on the powers of the state’s food safety authorities, The Indian Express reported on Saturday.

The petition, filed through Maharashtra Food Safety Commissioner Tukaram Mundhe, challenged a 2023 Food Safety and Standards Authority of India order that, the state claimed, restricted its officials from enforcing food safety laws at businesses holding a central licence.

The state government argued that the 2006 Food Safety and Standards Act was intended to decentralise food safety enforcement, with state commissioners and their officials responsible for enforcing the law.

It alleged that the food standards authority has “usurped” the power of state authorities by appointing central licensing authorities and central food safety officers.

Maharashtra also challenged changes made by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India in March to the turnover limits determining whether food businesses require registration, a state licence or a central licence. The state alleged that these changes were made without first seeking public feedback.

A bench led by Chief Justice Mahesh Chandra Tripathi on Friday posted the hearing of the petition for November 26.

The action comes amid a statewide drive by the department against eateries and other establishments that allegedly violate food safety norms.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: How a bureaucrat has forced Maharashtra’s eateries and other food businesses to clean up their act

On October 17, a group of women gathered outside the Delhi Police headquarters to protest against the brutality and allegations of sexual assault by police personnel during the demonstrations against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in the national capital last week.

“Delhi Police, sharam karo,” they shouted. Delhi Police, you should be ashamed.

Among them was Devyani Sarkar, a master’s student at Delhi University. In between the slogans, she told me that the more effort the authorities expend in trying to suppress people’s voices, the greater will be the anger that will spill into the streets.

To describe the ferocity of the police actions against young protesters, Sarkar invoked a line she had heard attributed to freedom fighter Bhagat Singh: “Gore angrez chale jaayenge, kaale angrez aa jaayenge.”

Independence would mean little, Singh had said, if the British exploiters were merely replaced by Indian ones.

For Sarkar, this quote captured the continued “daman”, or repression, by the Delhi Police and the Narendra Modi government – which, she contended, was comparable to the actions of the colonial administration.

Sarkar is not the only one reaching to the past to try to describe the current situation.

On October 9, ahead of a protest in central Delhi against Kumar for alleged irregularities in the special intensive revision of the voter rolls, All India Students’ Association leader Neha Bora likened the government’s restrictions on demonstrations to the Quit India Movement of 1942.

The government had already announced that train and metro services would be curtailed, and the police had begun detaining students and activists travelling to Delhi for the protest. With such actions, Bora declared, the Modi government was replicating the “playbook of the British”.

References to the freedom struggle have been widespread on social media. On October 17, after actor Imran Khan, an American citizen, was asked to leave the country for participating in protests in Mumbai, comedian Shamik Chakrabarti in an Instagram clip referred to the action as “Quit India Movement 2”.

The Cockroach Janta Party that sparked the season of protest has also drawn heavily from the symbolism of the freedom struggle. For instance, the political campaign chose October 2 as the date for a protest in Mumbai – conscious that a protest on the birth anniversary of Mohandas Gandhi would have special resonance.

When the police refused permission for the event, Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the campaign, said that the protesters would view it as a “jail bharo andolan” – taking a page from the playbook of freedom fighters who violated colonial laws to get arrested en masse and “fill the jails”.

Such historical references had appeared during the first round of youth protests too. After the July 20 crackdown on student protesters in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Bhim Army chief and Nagina MP Chandra Shekhar Azad compared the police action to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919 that left hundreds dead.

Some protesters inverted the chant “Simon Go Back” that greeted a commission appointed by the British colonial government in 1928 to recommend constitutional reforms for India. Headed by a Liberal Party lawyer John Simon, it had no Indian members.

They waved placards declaring, “Simon, come back”, a satirical suggestion that British rule was perhaps preferable to the repression they were facing.

These references are striking because of the symbolic resonance of these events. Jallianwala Bagh has become a reprehensible emblem of state violence. The Quit India Movement sparks memories of the mass movement that the colonial government tried to suppress.

For the young protesters in Delhi, history is also how they understand their own place in the political system.

Kriti Gupta, a BA student at Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, said that young people increasingly felt that decisions were being made in their name, supposedly for their benefit, without taking into account their opinions. She compared this with the colonial system, when Indians were forced to grow crops and produce goods that served the interests of the British empire rather than their own.

Annapurna, a master’s student at Lady Shri Ram College, said it was disturbing to see the state deploy the security forces against its own citizens. The “routine mass detentions of Opposition leaders and students” as they tried to stage protests in recent weeks reminded her of 1942, when the British government arrested tens of thousands of Indians who joined the Quit India Movement, she said.

For some young protesters, the images of police action gave them a real life experience of the kind of state power they had previously encountered mainly in their history books – the police menacing demonstrators, citizens being detained for dissent and the state using its authority to prevent a political movement from gathering momentum.

Shubhit Kumar, a protester from Haryana, said that under British rule, Indians could neither speak freely nor have a say in how they were governed. In independent India, they have the right to speak and to vote. If a government starts taking away these rights, he said, it begins to feel like a colonial government – one that does not belong to the people and that they need to fight.

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

Is your banking data safe? The State Bank of India said that a cyberattack had led to about 3.7 lakh customer records being leaked on the dark web, of which 3,897 contained personally identifiable information. The records included customers’ names, mobile numbers, dates of birth, gender, email addresses and residential addresses.

The bank said the leak was not expected to have any impact on its operations and the account balance of its customers was safe.

Delhi pollution season. Stage 1 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan took effect in the national capital. This came as the air quality in the region worsened to the “poor” level.

Since Wednesday, the average Air Quality Index in Delhi was in the “poor” category. Some areas recorded “very poor” air quality.

Under GRAP 1 measures, vehicles without a valid pollution control certificate will not be allowed to refuel, while parking charges will be doubled across Delhi.

Meanwhile, in Mumbai, the Bombay High Court said it was “shocking” that the city’s pollution levels had surpassed those in Delhi, despite the seaside city’s natural geographical advantages.

In the past week, Mumbai has been experiencing smog and reduced visibility. Referring to reports about this, the court pulled up the municipal authorities, the Maharashtra Pollution Control Board and the police for failing to implement its orders on air and noise pollution.

What you read, watch and hear. The Union government asked Meta to ensure that the algorithms on its social media platforms do not disproportionately amplify “a single or limited set of narratives”. It also asked the technology company to monitor posts that could trigger public disorder, incite violence or fuel other unlawful activity.

The advisory came amid protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. Although the advisory did not explicitly mention the protests, it referred to “periods of heightened public-order sensitivity” and “ongoing public events”.

Digital rights organisation Internet Freedom Foundation said that such measures could enable the “suppression” of reporting on the demonstrations and called for the directive to be withdrawn.

Also on Scroll last week

• As winter comes, a drought-hit district in Maharashtra fears the worst
• ‘Impinges on freedom’: Former Delhi HC Justice S Muralidhar on CJP leaders’ custody
• Why Modi government’s rural jobs scheme is a sham in drought-hit Maharashtra district
• ‘Vote chori’ protests: Congress leaders say aim is to put pressure on Supreme Court
• In Bengal, Christians allegedly assaulted by Bajrang Dal mob, forced to perform Hindu rituals
• In Modi’s India, only ‘good’ OCIs are welcome
• Why a Bengaluru company’s ‘hiring ban’ on men from four northern states is flawed
• Months after its big political win, some lessons for India’s cockroach movement
• Review: ‘Doosra’ tries to force-fit two incompatible ideas
• ‘Udta Teer’ review: Cartoonish spy comedy is low in general intelligence

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The deletion of nearly 13 crore names from the draft list as a result of the Special Intensive Revisions of electoral rolls under Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has echoes of a controversy in Gujarat in 2002. The situation was similar, but the outcomes were different.

It was July 2002. Five months of sustained violence in the aftermath of the Godhra train burning in February that year had torn Gujarat apart. The post-Godhra attacks, largely on Muslims, had displaced thousands. Many had migrated from their homes and were living in relief camps.

In the middle of the mayhem, at 3 pm on July 19, Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Arun Jaitley met with Chief Election Commissioner JM Lyngdoh. The situation in Gujarat is “normal”, Jaitley said, so why not hold early elections? If elections in Punjab and Assam could be held before normalcy had returned there, why not in Gujarat, he argued.

The chief election commissioner replied, “Gujarat is different because it is the case of a discredited government.” Jaitley accused him of using political language.

“Language of that kind is not a politician’s prerogative,” Lyngdoh countered. After all, there had to be an end to this sophistry, Lyngdoh writes in his book, Chronicle of an Impossible Election.

The Election Commission had refused to conduct elections in July instead of December because the electoral rolls, revised with reference to January 1, 2002, were no longer valid since a large number of voters had been displaced from their homes.

But the BJP was desperate for a victory in Gujarat. In September the year before, the party had lost two bye-elections. Three days before the attack on the train, the BJP had received news of yet another bye-election loss. Its vote in the Gujarat assembly had fallen on an average by 14 percentage points from 1998.

By holding early elections, they hoped people who had previously voted for the Congress or other parties would switch to the BJP amid the prevalent anti-Muslim sentiment.

However, the Election Commission remained steadfast in its decision.

Yet, at 5.30 pm the same day, the government of Gujarat, under Chief Minister Narendra Modi, prematurely dissolved the assembly.

Pressure on the Election Commission to hold premature elections in Gujarat rose steadily. The BJP national president Venkaiah Naidu, along with Jaitley, visited the chief election commissioner on July 24 once again urging him to hold early elections.

Personal attacks were made. At a public rally in Vadodara in August, Modi referred to JM Lyngdoh by his full name to underscore that he was Christian. “Has James Michael Lyngdoh come from Italy?” Modi asked. “Is he a relation of Sonia Gandhi? They sometimes meet in the church, so there have to be ties. His interests lie with the minorities, hence against the Hindus.”

It looked like Modi had not heard of atheism, Lyngdoh told the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai in an interview later.

#ElectionTimeline
Shri J.M. Lyngdoh was the 12th Chief Election Commissioner of India (14 June 2001 to 7 February 2004).
Before joining the ECI, Sh. Lyngdoh also served as the Secretary, Public Grievances and Coordination, Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India.#ECI pic.twitter.com/04E50hvXL5

— Election Commission of India (@ECISVEEP) May 9, 2020

Pressure from the BJP government in the state and the Centre did not deter the Election Commission. Lyngdoh, alongside election commissioners BB Tandon and TS Krishna Murthy, steered their own independent fact-finding inquiry in Gujarat and confirmed that the electoral rolls were “defective” and likely to “deprive many voters of their franchise [and also] encourage unscrupulous people to impersonate them”.

After their fact-finding inquiry, the Election Commission on August 16 issued a press release, Strongly emphasising the commission’s obligation to conduct free and fair elections, it read, “The electoral rolls in the State of Gujarat… cannot be said to be as reasonably accurate and up-to-date as desirable for a free and fair election, as these contain the names of a large number of electors who are either dead or are not ordinarily resident at the address at which they have been registered in the electoral rolls; nor the names of these displaced persons included at the addresses at which they are presently resident… ”

The BJP had to eventually comply with the Election Commission’s determination to remedy the voter list. Elections were held as originally scheduled, in December 2002, after the commission had ensured that the rolls were fixed. A total of 1.76 lakh displaced voters were included after revision.

Despite their failed attempt at an early election, the BJP won the assembly elections decisively. Anti-minority violence has been a tried and tested electoral strategy in India and this was no different. What was not allowed to happen was the dilution of integrity towards “democratic institutions, (which) mean free and fair elections and not merely a ritual to be gone through periodically”.

It is true that electoral roll revision has always been a “serious and recurring” problem, JM Lyngdoh says in his book, but that can be resolved if there is official accountability. He recalls in his book how the heads of district magistrate and electoral registration officers had rolled when 15,800 Muslim voters had been deliberately left out in Thakurdwara in Uttar Pradesh in 2002 while 21,000 non-existent but, apparently, Hindu voters were added.

In Punjab, the same year, electoral officers accepted blank submissions without signatures and bulk applications for inclusion of names in the electoral rolls. Again, heads rolled.

Today, despite the contentious SIR, the dissent within the Election Commission and inexplicable additions and deletions of voters in and around election time – affecting mostly Muslims and marginalised groups – the only action visible is a state clampdown on protesting voices.

A Freedom House report once said that the misappropriation of the word “democracy”is a testament to its wide appeal – as North Korea calls itself the Democratic Republic of North Korea, Russia and China see themselves as democracies. Over the past few years, India has entered the realm of a flawed democracy where free and fair elections, the bare minimum for a government to be considered democratic are suspect.

Raheel Dhattiwala is a sociologist.

Student leader Neha Bora on Saturday said that they will not sign the bond to “maintain peace” that they had been directed to do by a special executive magistrate.

This came a day after the Delhi High Court rejected the petition by the president of the All India Students’ Association challenging the notice to sign the bond.

Bora had been detained on October 16 while participating in a flash protest by the student group near Barakhamba Road demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

The student leader has alleged that they were taken to an undisclosed location and later to the RK Puram Police Station. Bora was held at the police station overnight before being released at 6 am, the following day.

In a notice issued on October 17, the special executive magistrate had directed them to furnish a personal bond of Rs 10,000 with a surety to “maintain peace during the period of inquiry”.

On Saturday, speaking at a press conference at the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation parliamentary office in Delhi, Bora asked whose “peace” they were being asked to keep, reported PTI.

The student leader added that “regardless of the direction” that the protests against Kumar take, they “must not come at the cost of labelling the right to dissent as a threat to peace”.

Protests against Kumar have been held in Delhi and other parts of the country since October 2 over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

Bora said that they will not sign the peace bond as “it is in contradiction to our democratic right to dissent”.

The notice issued by the special executive magistrate had invoked Section 126 and Section 130, read with Section 135(3), of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. These provisions allow a magistrate to require a person to show cause why they should not be asked to furnish a bond to maintain public peace and, in certain circumstances, require them to furnish one while an inquiry is pending.

It cited allegations that Bora had shouted slogans at Mandi House, repeatedly protested near Jantar Mantar despite prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, and instigated people to participate in a protest at Connaught Place.

In their petition against the notice, Bora had argued that no material had been disclosed that could establish a likelihood of a breach of peace or identify a specific event or period during which such a breach is apprehended.

Edited by Sneha.

Right before the Mapusa river meets the Mandovi river near Panjim, it crosses the wetlands, creeks and low lying paddy fields of Salvador Do Mundo. Surrounding these large stretches of paddy fields are houses and forested hills with steep slopes. Telangana-based real-estate company, KGL Realtors Private Limited bought 20,000 square metres of land on one of these hills.

When the land was bought, the sale deed described it as “barren and waste land”. In Goa, a state-wide regional plan dictates what activities are permitted on a piece of land. The land that KGL bought is zoned as eco-sensitive land where development is regulated. It specifically categorises all of it as Natural Cover and part (4,000 square metres) of it as Natural Cover with “No Development Slopes”.

The Regional Plan 2021, published in 2010, marked nearly 82% of the state as eco-sensitive zones, providing them with protection from rampant construction and development.

Land is a state subject in India and all states have town planning acts which govern spatial planning. But other than seven states, these acts only focus on urban areas. In Goa, the regional plan was created based on the provisions of the Town and Country Planning Act and covers the entire state.

Over the last eight years, the government has introduced three successive amendments to the Act allowing the government to do plot-by-plot change of zones in the regional plan. The latest of these amendments was introduced in 2024 as Section 39A, which allows land owners to apply for zone changes of their plots.

On June 10, 2026, Goa’s Town and Country Planning board recommended that the zoning for the plot bought by KGL be changed to settlement zone, which once finalised, will allow the company to construct on the land. As per the rules for processing these applications, slopes over 25% gradient are eco-sensitive land and cannot be considered for conversion.

Yet, over a quarter (26%) of the 901 applications that received provisional approvals under section 39A in the last two years have been for plots that had such steep slopes, as per an analysis of data collated from official gazettes by citizens groups.

This included KGL’s application to convert over 4,000 square metres of No Development Slope – the special demarcation for areas with a slope greater than 25% – to settlement area. The Town and Country Planning board, which gave the provisional approval, said that the change of zone was recommended because the area was “within permissible gradient”.

In July 2026, some of the residents of Salvador Do Mundo wrote a letter to the Chief Town Planner objecting to this conversion. A key objection was that the recommendation was based on slope data submitted by a private engineer hired by the applicant, without independent verification. The contour plan submitted by the applicant showed the slope gradient of the plot to be 18.49% but data from ISRO’s satellite model shows that parts of the land have over 25% gradient.

While Goa’s laws are clear that no construction is permitted on slopes over 25%, the government is relying on data from private surveyors and engineers to determine which slope fits this criteria.

Activists said that these surveyors can have a conflict of interest as they are hired by applicants seeking permission for hill cutting and that the lack of independent verification of this data is diluting protection given to steep slopes.

We have asked the Chief Town Planner Vertika Dagur if these plans are independently verified and how they assess these discrepancies. We will update this story when we receive a response.

In 1997, Goa amended the Town and Country Planning Act and introduced Section 17A that prohibits cutting of hills, with an aim to reduce the state’s vulnerability to landslides.

India is among the top four countries with highest landslide risk, with nearly 12.6% of the land prone to landslides. Most vulnerable areas are the mountainous region of the North-Western Himalayas, the Sub-Himalayan terrain of the North-East, the Western and Eastern Ghats. A landslide is essentially the failure of a slope triggered either by natural causes like excess rainfall, flooding, earthquakes or anthropogenic activities like deforestation, hill cutting and excessive development.

Many states, such as Maharashtra, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, have introduced provisions restricting development on slopes and hills with an aim to keep the slopes stable and reduce landslide risks. But Goa explicitly demarcates areas with slopes where development is prohibited, a feature that activists said helps in pushing back against illegal hill cutting.

Between March and August 2026, ISignal analysed publicly available data on these conversions, examined physical files of some of the applications and interviewed environmentalists, architects, land surveyors and land policy researchers to understand how Goa managed to protect its slopes and how that protection is being systemically dismantled.

Construction on hilly land

Since the 1980s, tourism and real-estate development have exerted tremendous pressure on the land in coastal stretches of Goa. Over the last two decades, this demand has further soared, largely driven by the desire for a “second home” among metropolitan Indian elites and Goan ex-pats. This demand further surged during the Covid-19 pandemic and has been steadily shifting from saturated coastal areas to hilly areas of the state’s midlands.

Similar pressures on land due to tourism and rampant real-estate development is a recognised threat to the stability of hills and mountains in India, and are known triggers for major landslides. But India does not have any specific national laws governing what kind of development is allowed or prohibited on these hills.

Instead, state governments and local body authorities regulate these activities. And all of them have different parameters and metrics.

Himachal Pradesh does not allow real estate projects on slopes that have an incline of more than 45° and bans hill cutting of more than 3.5 metres. In some areas of Maharashtra, building construction is prohibited on a hilly site with more than 20% gradient. Tamil Nadu, in its hill stations, only allows trees to be grown on land with more than 1:3 gradient, prohibiting all other uses.

Other states like Sikkim and Meghalaya, and cities like Manali, Dalhousie and Mussourie, regulate what percentage of the total plot area can be developed, the idea being that a larger footprint would mean more cutting of slopes and trees and hence increased instability.

But enforcing these restrictions has been a major challenge. In a 2014 paper on building regulations in hill towns, authors said that some hill towns do not have appropriate regulations needed for achieving systematic development in environmentally sensitive hill areas. And in towns where regulations exist, they are not followed or monitored efficiently.

In Goa too, the regulations face multiple implementation challenges but active citizens movements have been pushing the government to safeguard the hills.

The provision to protect Goa’s hills was introduced because of multiple letters that an activist wrote to the government in the 1980s, said Tahir Noronha, an architect, researcher and a doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley. “Shridhar Kamat was writing letters every six months for almost a decade saying that we need to stop construction on hill slopes and that will save us from landslides,” he said.

The Planning and Development Authority (Development Plan) Regulations issued in 1989 prohibited construction on Goa’s slopes with a gradient of more than 25%.

Further, Kamat’s letters resurfaced in 1990s after a major landslide in Panaji’s Altinho, prompting the formation of a fact-finding committee to figure out the cause of the landslides. “The committee in its report said that caution must be exercised on any hill steeper than 10% slope, and there should be strictly no construction on hills steeper than 25% slope,” said Noronha.

Based on this report, in 1997, the Town and Country Planning act was amended and Section 17A was introduced. It said that no hilly or sloping land over 10% gradient can be cut or filled up without prior permission from the Chief Town Planner.

Regardless of the provisions, hill cutting continued unabated, said Noronha. “Because the State government never maintained records of hilly land, action was taken only on the basis of complaints. Often after the hill was cut. They would inspect the site, file a complaint, and not pursue the matter further,” he said, adding how such action also depended on the location of the violation. The government would be more strict in cities such as Panaji while being lax with permissions in remote villages.

In 2007, when the Regional Plan 2021 was being drafted, the planners attempted to resolve enforcement issues. Using maps from the Survey of India to identify all the locations with slopes over 25% gradient and marking them in green zigzag lines as No Development Slopes in the spatial plan.

This helped community members seek accountability and push against illegal hill cutting. “The government itself has shown that these slopes are 25% slopes. So, if a construction comes up there, you have a solid proof by just showing a copy of the regional plan. It also showed investors and property owners that certain lands were undevelopable,” Noronha said.

“The logic was that the law can be compromised, the officers of the law can be compromised, but the map can never be compromised,” said Noronha.

‘Legal’ pathway for hill cutting

In July 2024, a major landslide in Kerala’s Wayanad killed 373 people and injured another 200, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in the state’s history. During an assembly discussion on rampant development and hill cutting, Goa Chief Minister Pramod Sawant called the landslide in Kerala an “eye-opener” for Goa and said, “We cannot compromise on their [the hills’] stability. A system will be developed to report and monitor hill cutting in the state.”

In June 2026, the Town and Country Planning Board approved an increase in fine for illegal cutting, introducing a graded system with fines ranging from Rs 50 lakh to Rs 1 crore.

While ministers have reiterated that cutting slopes over 25% is prohibited, the government diluted the legal protection for such slopes by introducing a circular that disregarded the Regional Plan and instead began relying on contour maps submitted by private companies and land owners as sole evidence, said Noronha.

Section 17A gives the Chief Town Planner the powers to give permission for hill cutting. In 2023, the Chief Town Planner issued a set of additional guidelines allowing land owners to apply for such permission, for developing on slopes between 10% and 25% gradient.

An applicant has to attach a contour plan with a 1-metre interval as proof to show that the gradient falls within this bracket. A contour plan is a map of the plot that shows how steep a slope is using lines connecting points at the same altitude. It is a data-generation exercise, where errors can get introduced at multiple stages.

The process begins with a land surveyor who walks around a piece of land with a machine that captures coordinates and elevation. They collect data from points chosen at regular intervals and then upload them to a design software like AutoCAD. The software then joins the points at the same altitude, creating the lines that show the contours of the area.

An interval of 1 metre means that the software will draw a line for every 1 metre of difference in altitude. The distance between these lines is used to calculate the gradient of the slope. The ratio between the interval and the distance shows how steep or flat that area is. For example, if the distance between two lines in a 1 m interval map is 4 metres, then that area has a slope of 1:4 or 25%. So, the closer the lines are, the steeper the slope of that specific area is.

As per the guidelines, these plans have to be created by “Chartered Surveyors, Architects or Engineers” registered with the Town and Country Planning department. These professionals are hired by the applicants and hence can have a vested interest to manipulate these contour maps to show a lower gradient, said Dean D’Cruz, an architect who was also a member of the Task Force for the 2021 regional plan. “The client will tell the architect to not worry and they will do what they want [with the contour plan].”

ISignal spoke to a land surveyor, who helped create a contour map for a major real estate project, on condition of anonymity. He showed us how the map was later altered by the architect to show a lower slope gradient. “If you look at these lines,” he said, showing two lines on the AutoCAD interface, “The distance between them is less than 4 metres, meaning that this area has a slope of over 25%. But, later when the map was submitted to the TCP department for approval, many of these lines were deleted. So the distance between the lines widened and the slope gradient went down.”

Despite these loopholes in the process, the Town and Country Planning department does not independently verify these maps.

A contour map’s accuracy is also dependent on how granular the data is. A map with a lower interval will have more lines and hence more details. The Survey of India maps that the regional plan used has a 10-metre interval and is from the 1970s, while a contour plan that the applicant submits is supposed to be more recent and granular with a 1-metre interval.

In November 2025, the Bombay High Court dismissed a petition filed by residents of Sancaole against technical clearance given to a mega real-estate project by Bhutani Infra. One of the key objections of the petitioners was that the contour maps were manipulated to show the gradient to be just under 25%. The High Court said that it did not find any discrepancy in how the slope was computed and that the plans submitted by the company were made based on surveys carried out on location with a “total station survey” with 90%-95% accuracy, as compared to the Survey of India data.

In the last two years, the Town and Country Planning board has used similar maps submitted by land owners as proof for the gradient of a plot and approved 240 applications seeking conversion of plots that have No Development Slopes into settlement zones, data collated by the citizen’s group show. The total area to be converted based on these applications was over 20 lakh square metres. The board recommended most of these conversions because the slopes were found to be within “permissible gradient”.

Noronha and a group of volunteers have been examining slope conversions that have received provisional approvals and have found several inconsistencies. Many have unsigned contour maps, some applications claim that the plot has a “gradual slope” but does not specify the gradient and some do not even have a contour plan attached–yet, in all of these cases, the Town Planning Board gave provisional approval.

“Unlike in the past, most of the constructions on hills now are “legal” because now they have permissions from the Goa government. Even if it is a hill, even if an authoritative document of the government [Regional Plan] says it is a hill, a private engineer hired by the landowner declared it not a hill and the state of Goa is going with whatever the property owner says.”

The case for a new regional plan

Since 2018, three consecutive amendments – Sections 16B, 17(2) and now 39A – have been introduced in Goa’s Town and Country Planning Act to allow plot-by-plot conversion of zones in the regional plan. The rationale behind all of them have largely been about errors or anomalies in the plan and the need to correct them.

In September 2024, the Town and Country Planning Minister Vishwajit Rane told the Times of India that a lot of people have benefitted from Section 17(2). “Some people’s lands were originally settlement areas which were made into paddy fields and orchards and put in different zones,” he had said in September 2024.

“While there may be some such cases, the minister, when challenged in the assembly, has not been able to give any detailed maps or listing of what he alleges,” said Solano DaSilva, an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at BITS Pilani, Goa and one of the authors of the book The Great Goa Land Grab. He added that the plan does need corrections but not the ones that the minister claims.

The plan, in its list of issues that need new policies, stressed on the need for updating the plan using a GIS system to make the data geo-referenced and spatially linked. It also said that certain departments have only provided them with incomplete data.

“We did not have GIS then, we only had survey maps and had to collate data from each department separately. All of the layers came one-by-one and we did the best we could given the limited resources,” said D’Cruz, the architect who was also a member of the Task Force for the 2021 regional plan. “That was 20 years ago and that support system was not there. Now we have better technology.”

The year mentioned in a regional plan is the horizon year until which the planning had been done. Activists and researchers have also been demanding an update.

“This regional plan was planned up to 2021. The natural process for a new plan ought to have started, which the government has not done,” said former chief justice of Allahabad High Court, Justice Ferdino Rebello, who also has been leading a citizen’s movement called “Enough is Enough” to protect Goa’s environment and people’s rights. A new plan would have to undergo public consultation and would be a more transparent process, all of which the government has bypassed by introducing amendments like Section 17(2) and 39A, he added.

In January 2026, Justice Rebello shared a 10-point Citizen’s Charter of demands aimed at protecting the environment and ecology of the state. The first point of the charter called for immediate halt to hill-cutting by declaring them the heritage of the people.

“Goa is dependent on rain water. The rain which falls percolates into these hills and filters out into streams and rivers. If we cut down all the hills, and the trees then where will we get water from?” asked Justice Rebello, “And we also have soft laterite soil. If trees are cut, then the soil will fall down and we will have landslides.”

Risk for landslides also depends on the composition and integrity of the lateritic soil. “The iron and silica makeup of lateritic soil changes based on distance from the coast. With acid rain, lateritic soil weakens; with certain types of plants, lateritic soil becomes stronger,” said Noronha, while stressing the need for location-specific soil sampling and testing before permissions are given. “Because, in places where the laterite is degraded, even disturbing a 10%-15% slope could risk landslides,” he added.

Moreover, the current provisions are not enough, said D’Cruz. “Most of the slopes in Goa have gradients closer to 1:4 (25%) and they are highly ecosensitive forested patches. So, to protect these borderline cases, it is better to consider 1:5 (20%) as the threshold,” he said.

“If we can only correct the RP-2021 in the manner it was sought to be corrected. By ensuring all of the slopes and paddy are marked out properly. Tenanted lands should also be marked because they also cannot be used for non-agricultural purposes. The government has all this data. If we can only do that, we will be able to protect most of Goa,” said DaSilva.

Shreya Raman is an independent journalist and a resident at the Climate Change Media Hub at the Asian College of Journalism.

Jamia Millia Islamia university on Saturday shifted all its classes online until further notice amid protests on campus demanding elections for the constitution of the students’ union, reported The Indian Express.

The announcement came soon after students alleged that the university administration had “attacked” those who have been on a hunger strike for 13 days and tried to dismantle the protest site.

The university has not held student union elections since 2006.

Jamia administration with the help of guards and Delhi police is trying to remove the peacefully protesting students from the campus using brutal force. Students have been on hunger strike and sit in for more than 10 days now in the campus demanding reinstating of Jamia Millia… pic.twitter.com/XVEiYQBtNt

— Adarsh.M.Saji (@Adarshmsaji) October 24, 2026

Since October 12, five students have been on a hunger strike to demand the restoration of the union.

On October 16, the university rusticated one of them, suspended two and banned all three from entering the campus for a year.

In a joint statement on October 17, student organisations in the university alleged that “more than 100” security guards had entered the protest site and “manhandled” the students on hunger strike, The Indian Express reported.

Protests on the campus have grown since then, with the students demanding an official notification announcing the schedule for elections to the Jamia Millia Islamia Students’ Union, withdrawal of disciplinary action against protesting students and removal of the institute’s chief proctor and security advisor.

The university cited the “safety and security” of students for the decision to shift all classes online.

Videos being shared on social media showed large-scale deployment of security forces outside the campus.

Earlier on Saturday, the university officials met the protesting students.

After the meeting, Mahtab Alam Rizvi, the university registrar, told reporters that a committee had been constituted to draft the constitution of its students’ union, reported ANI.

“They then asked for a deadline,” Rizvi was quoted as saying. “I told them that the sooner they complete the draft constitution, the sooner we will conduct the elections.”

He claimed that the students had agreed to this.

However, students had earlier said that the decision to constitute another committee to draft the union’s constitution by December 20 was a delaying tactic, reported The Hindu. They had said that their hunger strike would continue until the university released the election notification.

The institution has said elections were discontinued after recurring violent clashes, attacks on teaching staff and disruptions of classes, The Indian Express added.

Edited by Sneha.

Demonstrators protesting against a dam project on Friday vandalised and set fire to an office of the National Hydroelectric Power Corporation and a police station in Arunachal Pradesh’s Pasighat after security personnel fired tear gas during the agitation, a government official told Scroll.

Several organisations have been protesting against the proposed 12,500-megawatt power project on the Siang river. It will be built by the government-owned power company National Hydroelectric Power Corporation.

On Saturday, the Pasighat administration imposed prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita to ban the assembly of four or more persons.

The buildings that house the office and the police station were not entirely burnt down, the Pasighat-based official said. However, the vehicles on their premises “were torched and the protesters threw stones at the police station”, the official added.

The violence followed the police firing tear gas at the demonstrators who were demanding the release of 10 protesters who had been arrested earlier this month.

“The immediate cause of the violence was that the security personnel unprovoked fire tear gas shelling on the peaceful protest,” the official said. “The crowd got angry.”

Eyewitnesses told @scroll_in that anti-dam protesters have set fire to the NHPC office in Pasighat after police fired tear gas on peaceful protestors.

A statement from police is awaited. pic.twitter.com/BM53vcTw4E

— Rokibuz Zaman (@ZamanRokibuz_) October 23, 2026

Purported videos of the incident were widely shared online. In one of the videos, tear gas was seen being fired at protesters while they were talking amongst themselves.

The official alleged that the protesters also vandalised the homes of the leaders of the state’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

An Itanagar-based senior police officer told Scroll that the homes of Pasighat West MLA Ninong Ering and Mariyang-Geku legislator Oni Panyang had been vandalised, along with that of Kaling Moyong, the BJP state chief and former Pasighat East MLA.

The office of the apex tribal body, Adi Bane Kebang United, in Pasighat was also damaged, the officer added. Pasighat is located in the East Siang district.

On Saturday afternoon, Ebo Mili, an advocate, and Otul Jerang, a youth leader from Pasighat, surrendered at the Pasighat police station. They said that the youth protesting against the Siang project had no role in the recent mob violence.

Also read: ‘Threats, detentions, militarisation’: How Arunachal government is choking anti-dam protests

Five injured at Dite-Dime

Earlier on Friday, at least five women were injured at Dite-Dime near Geku in Siang district after a clash broke out between the police and the protesters, leading security forces to fire tear gas to disperse the mob, officials said.

Siang Superintendent of Police Kamdam Sikom said that tear gas had been fired at Dite-Dime to disperse the demonstrators protesting against the hydropower project, as the protesters allegedly threw stones at the security personnel.

The district police chief told Scroll that the protesters from Siang District had been conducting their bandh peacefully. “However, this morning, around 7 am, approximately 150 to 200 protesters from Upper Siang district, particularly from Geku and Komkar, arrived at Dite-Dime,” he said.

The officer added: “They attempted to enter Siang District while carrying machetes, lathis, slingshots and other items. They also attempted to vandalise the barricades, obstructed the duty personnel deployed at the location and violated the prohibitory order issued by the district magistrate. They also threw stones at the deployed security forces.”

Lawful action against the protesters was initiated in the presence of the executive magistrate after proper announcement, the officer said.

The bandh had been jointly called by the Adi Bane Kebang United and other local civil society groups such as the SUMP Affected Area Youth Association, the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum Youth Wing and the Adi Galo Welfare Society.

The protesters have been demanding the release of the 10 activists held earlier this month, reinstatement of suspended village heads or community leaders, withdrawal of all pre-feasibility activities linked to the dam project and the removal of paramilitary and central forces deployed in the region.

On October 11, Chief Minister Pema Khandu defended the detention of the protesters, saying that individuals involved in disrupting law and order would be dealt with according to the law.

Khandu had said that many villagers in the Siang belt had been misinformed about the project, stating that the current stage involves only drafting a pre-feasibility report.

On Friday, Khandu said that he was inviting civil society groups to discuss the matter and said that he will visit Siang till the pre-feasibility report is completed. It appeared that the protesters had been “fed some misinformation”, the chief minister said.

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Odisha government has moved the Supreme Court against Andhra Pradesh’s decision to conduct panchayat elections in the disputed villages of the Kotia region, PTI reported on Saturday.

Both Odisha and Andhra Pradesh have claimed jurisdiction over the 21 villages of Kotia district in Koratpur district along the inter-state border. In 1968, Odisha had challenged Andhra Pradesh’s claim in the Supreme Court.

The court had asked both states to maintain the status quo in 2006.

Tensions between the two states arose again in 2021, when Andhra Pradesh held panchayat polls in Kotia. Following this, Odisha filed a contempt petition in 2022.

On October 10, the Andhra Pradesh government issued a notification to conduct zilla parishad and panchayat samiti elections in three of the villages – Phagunasineri, Ganjeipadar, and Phatusineri.

Following this, Odisha’s Revenue and Disaster Management Minister Suresh Pujari said that Andhra Pradesh had violated the Supreme Court order, reported PTI.

The petition in the Supreme Court was filed by the Koraput collector against Andhra Pradesh’s election commissioner, the collector concerned and other officials involved in the polling process, Pujari was quoted as saying by The Times of India.

“We will also pray to the Supreme Court to direct the Andhra Pradesh government to refrain from such illegal activities in the future,” added the minister.

Andhra Pradesh is ruled by a Telugu Desam Party-led alliance, of which the BJP is a part. The TDP is also a part of the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance at the Centre.

After reports about the polls, Naveen Patnaik, the leader of Opposition in Odisha, wrote to Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi, alleging that his government had adopted a soft approach to the Kotia dispute because of the NDA’s dependence on the TDP at the Centre, The New Indian Express reported.

Edited by Sneha.

A Delhi court on Friday extended till February the permission for United States citizen Matthew VanDyke and six Ukrainians to stay abroad while the investigation in an arms training case was pending, the Hindustan Times reported.

They had been arrested by the National Investigation Agency in March for allegedly having links to ethnic armed groups in Myanmar that are hostile to India.

The court allowed the seven foreign citizens to stay outside India after the agency said that it needed more time to investigate the case, the newspaper reported.

On September 24, VanDyke and the Ukrainians were allowed by the court to travel to their home countries for a month on the condition that they would return and cooperate with the investigation.

They had been directed to return to India after one month and inform the court of their return within 72 hours.

While VanDyke returned to India for the court hearing on Friday, the six Ukrainians did not.

The Ukrainians appeared through video conferencing, citing health problems, The New Indian Express reported. After their counsel submitted that they were unwell, the court extended the permission for them to stay outside India.

However, VanDyke told PTI that he will remain in India till the case is over.

#WATCH | Myanmar Training camp case: Bailed-out US National Matthew Aaron Vandyke arrives at Delhi's Rouse Avenue Court to appear before the NIA court, after returning from the USA.

He was granted permission to travel to the USA to meet his family. In September 2026, the court… pic.twitter.com/Dlt98iMCt1

— ANI (@ANI) October 23, 2026

The Congress asked why such a liberty was being extended to a foreign citizen “accused of terrorism”.

This came even as the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government has “shown no hesitation in detaining and arresting youth activists and peaceful protesters during the anti-Vote Chori protests this past month”, said party leader Jairam Ramesh.

Ramesh said that it was also worth noting that VanDyke’s case was raised during US Secretary of State Rubio’s last visit to India in May, who visited again this week.

The case

VanDyke and the six Ukrainians were arrested on March 13. They were allegedly involved in supplying weapons and military equipment to ethnic armed groups operating in Myanmar, and training them.

VanDyke leads Sons of Liberty International, a US-based organisation that claims to provide security consulting, training and weapons supplies “to vulnerable populations to enable them to defend themselves against terrorists and insurgents”.

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

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

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

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

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

VanDyke was granted default bail on September 18. The six Ukrainians were granted bail on September 23.

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

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

On the morning of October 9, Adum Tayom was getting a haircut in a town in Arunachal Pradesh when the police barged into the barber’s shop.

They grabbed Tayom, a leader from the Upper Siang district, and three other activists and pushed them into a police van. They were taken from Pasighat to the state capital, Itanagar, where they remain in preventive detention.

All four are residents of Geku, a village on the banks of the Siang river that has been at the heart of protests against a proposed 11,000 MW dam in the district.

The activists are members of the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum or SIFF, which represents agriculturists from the Adi community. The group has been stalling surveys for the dam for years, claiming that it will submerge their ancestral lands and displace them.

For several hours after Tayum was picked up, the police gave no information about his and his colleagues’ whereabouts, nor were their families informed. “We were not told about his arrest for more than eight hours,” Osunam Tayom, his wife, told Scroll. “He was not told why he was being arrested. We did not know which jail he was taken to.”

Later that night, the Upper Siang district magistrate said the four had been held under the state’s draconian preventive detention law, the Arunachal Pradesh Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 2014. The law allows for detention up to six months, with little to no legal recourse.

The order said the four were being held “to contain unlawful activities” in Upper Siang district.

‘Fighting to be heard’

The detentions are not isolated. Residents of the Siang Valley say that the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Arunachal has taken a set of extraordinary measures in the last month to shut down the protests against the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose project.

The government has detained activists, arrested protestors and flooded the villages in Upper Siang with paramilitary personnel, turning villages into “military zones”, say residents.

It has blocked Facebook pages and social media accounts of mediapersons and activists reporting on the protests – and the Arunachal Pradesh department of information and public relations has warned that criticism or gatherings will lead to arrests.

On Friday morning, a protest demanding the withdrawal of paramilitary forces and release of the detained in Ditte Dime village was met with tear gas, leading to injuries to five women. The police said that the protestors pelted stones and were carrying weapons, leading them to take action. By evening, the agitation had spread to Pasighat town, with protestors torching police vehicles after tear gas was fired at them.

Activists also alleged that the government was pressuring village officials to toe its line. Scroll spoke to two village headmen, who said they were sacked by the district administration because of their opposition to the dam.

However, Chief Minister Pema Khandu defended the detention of protestors, saying those involved in disrupting law and order would be dealt with according to the law. He claimed that many villagers in the Siang belt had been misinformed about the project.

The playbook used by the government is similar to the one used in Delhi to frustrate protestors who came to Central Delhi in support of the youth outfit, the Cockroach Janata Party, on October 11, some protestors pointed out. “As they tried in Delhi, they have made sure that social media posts against the dam are no longer visible,” said Heenu, a protestor from the state. ‘They don’t want to show that people in Arunachal are fighting and united against the dam.”

The difference is that the anti-dam protests have not “got national media attention or the solidarity they deserve”, an activist associated with a feminist group in Arunachal Pradesh said. “They are not just fighting to protect their homeland, they are also fighting to be heard.”

The dam

The Siang flows into Arunachal Pradesh from Tibet and is the Brahmaputra’s main tributary.

The Siang Upper Multipurpose project was first proposed in 2017 by the Central government think-tank Niti Ayog and was meant to counter the threat posed by Chinese hydropower projects being developed on the Yarlung Tsangpo river upstream. The Siang is known as Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibet where it originates.

The Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum estimates that 27 villages along the river – in Siang and Upper Siang districts – will be affected because of the proposed dam. For years, the residents of the area have opposed the project.

In September, Chief Minister Pema Khandu visited the Siang Valley to push for a pre-feasibility survey for the proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose project. He defended the dam as a way to protect the Adi tribes from a massive 60,000 MW Chinese dam that is yet to be built.

However, angry villagers torched government vehicles, vandalised the house of a Bharatiya Janata Party legislator and prevented cabinet ministers from attending a government meeting. On October 5, eight protesters were arrested from Riga village for setting a building on fire in protest.

One of them, a 65-year-old woman protestor Yalek Tair, was allegedly assaulted in police custody which left her with two fractured ribs on the right side of her chest, Arunachal Times reported.

“This is a clear assault on the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly,” advocate Ebo Mili said. Mili’s Facebook account was one of several social media handles run by journalists and activists that were temporarily blocked on orders from the Union Information Technology ministry.

At least 40 FIRs have also been filed in relation with the protest against the dam since 2025, lawyers and activists said.

“I'm dealing with 34 cases and there are at least six more I am aware of,” said advocate Sunny Tayeng, who is representing villagers booked in several cases.

‘Intimidation’

The government also issued notices to several government employees and village heads for allegedly joining protests against the dam.

Tapir Jamoh, the gaon burah in Riew village in Siang district, said he was removed from his post in March this year after he did not sign a letter consenting to a pre-feasibility survey.

“The government’s supporters threatened me with guns,” the 68-year-old, who is also a BJP member, told Scroll. “But how can we say yes to the dam which will wash our paddy fields and homes away? There are no options but for us to resist.”

Jamoh also claimed that at least 18 headmen have been suspended for opposing the dam. Six were reinstated after they changed their stance.

“The government is forcing the dam on us with the security forces deployment and other threats,” he said.

Another headman at Parong village, Abu Abing, also told Scroll that the government suspended him because he spoke against the dam. “In our village, the government has managed to take support of 40% of the population by threats and intimidation and money,” he said.

Tayi Taggu, the deputy commissioner of Siang district, denied that village headmen were suspended because of their opposition to the dam. He then cut the phone, saying he was busy.

‘They have turned the village into a military zone’

The residents of Siang Valley are also uneasy about the sharp increase in military presence in the area.

Opang Boko, a resident and farmer from Komkar village, told Scroll that hundreds of personnel are stationed in the villages where the stiffest opposition to the dam has been voiced. “They have erected temporary camps in several villages like Beging, Parong, Riga, Komkar and also in Yingkiong, the administrative headquarters of the Upper Siang district.”

Dubit Siram, a resident of Parong and a leader of SIFF, said that the paramilitary personnel have been patrolling the villages at night.

“Whenever we go to our paddy fields, they check IDs and sometimes prevent us from going to our own field,” Siram said. “Pura gaon ko military zone kar diya. The whole village has been turned into a military zone. That’s why we don’t trust the government.”

Sarkar Tayom, Adom’s brother, also criticised the deployment of police personnel in front of the homes of Geku villagers who oppose the dam. “It is absolutely wrong for police to wait outside the homes of villagers at night to apprehend them,” Sarkar said. “They want to intimidate us.”

Slew of detentions

However, the villagers said the arrests and detentions would not deter them.

“My brother was apprehended because he was leading the villagers,” Sarkar Tayom, Adom’s brother, said. “He has not committed any crime. We support him in the fight for our land.”

Orik Taku, a resident of Geku, said the government was making a mistake in detaining the community leaders and might risk inflaming emotions.

“The anger against the government is being somewhat controlled by these leaders,” Taku told Scroll. “If they don’t release them, things will get out of hand.”

Also read:

‘Are we militants?’ In Arunachal Pradesh, anger over plan to send armed forces for mega dam survey

Why Arunachal Pradesh residents are stalling surveys for a mega dam

In August 2024, Vikas Garg was appointed the convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s economic cell in Delhi. Eight months later, his firms were raided by the Enforcement Directorate.

But the agency did not disclose what had prompted the action.

More than a year later, in a statement released on July 10, it has finally revealed that Garg is being prosecuted under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, for his involvement with “the Mahadev Online Book/Skyexchange illegal online betting case”. He was arrested in the case on Tuesday.

The Mahadev Book is a mobile app that claims to be a platform for “sports insights”. It has more than a million users. Skyexchange is a Dubai-based betting platform associated with Mahadev app.

Since 2022, central agencies have been investigating Mahadev’s promoters on charges that they used the app to run an illegal betting syndicate that laundered revenue through benami bank accounts, cryptocurrency and hawala networks, some of which was allegedly used to manipulate the Indian stock market.

The case first made national headlines in 2023 when the Enforcement Directorate alleged that the promoters of the app, Chhattisgarh-based businessmen Sourabh Chandrakar and Ravi Uppal, had paid nearly Rs 508 crore in kickbacks to then chief minister Bhupesh Baghel of the Congress party.

The revelations came months before the state assembly elections. Congress lost the election. Baghel has denied any wrongdoing.

Subsequently, the inquiry into the app by the Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation extended to private Indian firms, foreign institutional investors and even Bollywood celebrities who had attended Chandrakar’s lavish wedding in Dubai in February 2023.

While most of these alleged connections made headlines, what went unnoticed was that a member of the BJP was also under the scanner.

Businessman Vikas Garg belongs to an old BJP family. His father, Nand Kishor Garg, has been elected three times from the capital’s Trinagar constituency on the party’s ticket.

Although the central agencies remained silent on the proceedings against him, Garg’s firms acknowledged the Enforcement Directorate investigation as part of their mandatory stock market disclosures in 2024. In their annual reports, the firms denied all the allegations.

When Scroll asked Garg for a response in April, his lawyers sent a notice, threatening legal action. “That the contents of your communication with regard to the proceedings of Enforcement Directorate, it is submitted that the same is sub judice,” it said. “My Client has NOT been convicted of any offence of money laundering and/or any other offence, till date.”

In its July 10 statement, the Enforcement Directorate has said that it has attached assets worth Rs 940.7 crore worth belonging to Garg, his family and his firms under the money-laundering law. The agency described the attachments as “proceeds of crime” from illegal betting operations that were “routed into the entities owned and controlled by Vikas Garg”.

Garg did not respond to a request for comment.

In March 2026, the Enforcement Directorate said that it had searched more than 175 premises across the country in connection with this case, arrested 13 people, chargesheeted 74 and frozen assets worth nearly Rs 4,336 crore in India and abroad. In its latest statement, it pegged the value of attached assets at Rs 3,800 crore.

The BJP connection

Garg is the promoter of Vikas Lifecare Limited and Vikas Ecotech Limited, which manufacture chemicals and are listed on the National Stock Exchange, Ebix Limited, a global digital and financial exchanges firm which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and Ebix Inc, which is listed on the American stock exchange Nasdaq.

On his social media profiles, he describes himself as “Convenor – Economic Cell, BJP”. A list of functionaries released by BJP Delhi in August 2024 also identifies him as holding this position.

Garg’s social media accounts showcase photos of him with senior BJP leaders, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The photos show him meeting Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju in April 2025, former Union minister Anurag Thakur in September 2024, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla in November 2022, and BJP’s former Delhi chief ministerial candidate Manoj Tiwari in November 2021.

In September 2025, Garg met Harsh Malhotra, the Union minister of state for corporate affairs and road transport and highways, and tweeted that they had discussed “key issues related to the economic cell and its functioning”. In May 2026, Malhotra became the president of the BJP in Delhi.

Raids and probes

The first time that Enforcement Directorate officials visited Garg and his firms was on April 16 last year, Vikas Lifecare disclosed in a filing to the National Stock Exchange on April 18.

The disclosure was made under regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015, which mandates listed entities to disclose significant information to stock exchanges to ensure transparency and prevent insider trading.

The firm said that Enforcement Directorate officials had visited its office and Garg’s home and the office of one of his companies. It added that the investigation pertained to “third-party entities and transactions”.

On April 21, an Enforcement Directorate statement said that it had raided premises across several Indian cities on April 16 in the Mahadev betting app case.

It added: “During the searches, evidence has been recovered to suggest that the promoters of such companies collaborated/colluded with the accused persons to manipulate to share prices of such companies with the help of ‘tainted money’ to raise their company’s valuation using a string of agents and middlemen.”

The agency did not name any firms and promoters.

In its 2024-’25 annual report published in September 2025, Vikas Lifecare, said that the Enforcement Directorate had initiated proceedings “against various persons including officials of the Company” under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

It denied the allegations and said that it was in the process of moving the High Court to quash the proceedings. While Scroll could not find pleas filed by the firm against the Enforcement Directorate in the Delhi High Court in 2025 and 2026 on the e-courts website, court proceedings from April 2026 show that Garg has moved the Prevention of Money Laundering Act appellate tribunal against the Enforcement Directorate’s Raipur branch, which is investigating the Mahadev betting operation.

In a stock filing on June 24, Vikas Lifecare said that the Enforcement Directorate had attached immovable properties worth Rs 13 crore as part of its investigation into the Mahadev betting app. Ebix Limited put out a similar filing on June 23 which did not mention the value of the attachments.

“The Parent company has represented that it is neither involved in nor a beneficiary of the alleged activities under investigation and is contesting the attachment before the appropriate legal forums,” Vikas Lifecare said.

The Enforcement Directorate, in its July 10 statement, said Garg’s attached assets included residential properties, land parcels, equity shares and other securities.

The Dubai connection

Since 2022, the Enforcement Directorate has released more than a dozen press releases on its probe into the Mahadev betting app, naming the owners Sourabh Chandrakar and Ravi Uppal and several others as under investigation. It has named those it has arrested and searched, detailed the modus operandi of the accused, and stated the assets it has frozen.

In a press release in March 2024, the Enforcement Directorate stated: “It was found that one Hari Shankar Tibrewal who hails from Kolkata but currently residing in Dubai…has partnered with the promoters of Mahadev Online Book.”

It added: “The searches revealed that Hari Shankar Tibrewal owned and operated one of the illegal betting websites viz. skyexchange.”

In April 2024, the Enforcement Directorate filed a prosecution complaint in court – the third supplementary chargesheet in the Mahadev app case – naming Tibrewal as accused number 24 and charging him with money laundering under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002.

In the prosecution complaint, the Enforcement Directorate said: “Investigations had further revealed that the accused, Mr Hari Shankar Tibrewal had laundered the proceeds of crime emanating from the betting operations through multiple companies operating both in India and outside India.” It added: “The operations of Indian companies were managed by Mr Suraj Chokhani.”

In a petition before a district court in Delhi in 2024, Tibrewala denied any role in the Mahadev betting app.

Questions emailed to Tibrewal and Chokhani about the Enforcement Directorate’s charges against them remain unanswered.

Filings with the National Stock Exchange show that in 2022 and 2023, Vikas Garg’s listed firms received investments from individuals and entities based in Dubai and Kolkata, which were accused of involvement in the Mahadev betting app in 2024.

For instance, Vikas Lifecare Limited’s shareholding disclosure from September and December 2022 shows that a Dubai-based investor, Ecotek General Trading LLC, had a 1.76% stake in it, valued around Rs 10 crore.

By March 2023, five other firms from Kolkata bought nearly 8% of Vikas Lifecare: Brilliant Investment Consultants Private Limited, Discovery Buildcon Private Limited, Dream Achievers Consultancy Services Private Limited, Forest Vincom Private Limited and Sawarnbhumi Vanijya Private Limited. This investment was worth nearly Rs 38 crore.

The common director in the Kolkata firms was Suraj Chokhani.

Sawarnbhumi Vanijya also owned 1.1 % shares of Vikas Ecotech as of September 2023, worth nearly Rs 5 crore.

National Stock Exchange data shows that towards the end of 2023, these investors sold their shares in Garg’s firms.

All six investors – the five Kolkata firms and the Dubai firm – have been accused of being part of the money-laundering operations of the Mahadev betting app, according to Enforcement Directorate documents. One is a March 2024 letter from the agency to the Chhattisgarh government’s Economic Offence Bureau and the Anti-Corruption Bureau. The other is a freezing order from February 2024.

The names of the Dubai and Kolkata firms also feature in a list shared by the Ministry of Finance as part of a Lok Sabha reply in August 2024. The list disclosed the names of 1,519 firms against whom the Enforcement Directorate had filed prosecution complaints – or chargesheets under the money laundering law – between 2019 and 2024.

The six firms in Kolkata and Dubai did not respond to emails seeking comment.

In a bail hearing in the Supreme Court last year, Chokhani’s counsel had argued that his alleged involvement in money-laundering operations of the betting app was comparatively minor and limited to managing companies, not owning or operating the app directly.

The counsel also argued that the Enforcement Directorate case relied on statements by the co-accused, which were inadmissible in court and purportedly under retraction.

Chokhani was granted bail by the court citing extended duration of his custody, the fundamental right to a speedy trial, and the absence of trial proceedings.

Indian authorities have been trying to extradite and prosecute the app’s promoters – Uppal was reportedly arrested by the United Arab Emirates police in December 2023 and fled custody in November 2025. Chandrakar is reportedly in Oman.

Corrections and clarifications: This article has been updated to include details from the Enforcement Directorate’s prosecution complaint. A paragraph that relied on a news report published in the India Today has been removed.

The police in Imphal on Friday fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators who were protesting against recent killings in Manipur, PTI reported.

The demonstrations were held in five Meitei-dominated valley districts against the ethnic violence and the government’s alleged failure to restore normalcy in the state.

No injuries were reported during the “sound protest” called by the Federation of Haomee, a civil society group. In several parts of Imphal, protesters banged utensils and struck electric poles with hammers, and motorists honked their vehicle horns as part of the demonstrations, India Today NE reported.

In Imphal, the protesters marched to the Kangla fort near the governor’s residence and the chief minister’s secretariat, PTI reported. Kangla is the historic political and cultural centre of the erstwhile Manipur kingdom.

While security personnel stopped several protesters at Palace Compound, Moirangkhom and Keisampat junctions, hundreds managed to reach the Kangla gate, the news agency reported. They were prevented from entering the fort premises.

Imphal, Manipur: A large number of people staged a statewide protest, marching towards Kangla and entering through its Western Gate despite security forces using tear gas and mock bombs. Organized by the Federation of Haomee, protesters demanded NRC updation, the return of… pic.twitter.com/dbvtZbPuIq

— IANS (@ians_india) October 23, 2026

The police fired several rounds of tear gas to disperse the protesters who had gathered near the governor’s residence, PTI reported.

The protests came four days after three persons from the Meitei community were killed in Kuki-dominated Kangpokpi district.

On Friday, state Home Minister Govindas Konthoujam said that searches were underway to arrest persons involved in the killings, The New Indian Express reported. Three persons have been held.

The protesters were also demanding that the National Register of Citizens be implemented in Manipur, alleged undocumented migrants be deported and the Suspension of Operations agreement be abrogated, India Today NE reported.

The Suspension of Operations agreement was signed between the Centre, the Manipur government and two conglomerates of Kuki militant outfits – the Kuki National Organisation and United Peoples Front – in 2008.

Under the agreement, the security forces and the militant groups are prohibited from launching operations. The militant groups must abide by the laws of the land and are also confined to designated camps identified by the Union government.

The agreement was renewed in September 2025.

This followed the ethnic clashes that broke out in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities.

At least 306 persons have been killed and 49 are missing in Manipur since the beginning of the ethnic violence in the state in May 2023, the Assembly was informed in September. About 60,000 persons were displaced during the violence. Of them, 36,000 persons had been resettled and 24,000 remained in relief camps across Manipur.

Tensions between the Kuki and the Naga communities have also escalated in the state since February.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Cabinet Secretariat did not initiate action against an Election Commission officer despite complaints by two election commissioners, noting that doing so without a formal complaint from the poll panel as a whole could amount to “executive interference”, The Indian Express quoted a reply under the Right to Information Act as having shown on Thursday.

The records were provided in response to an application by Right to Information activist and Navy officer Commodore (retired) Lokesh K Batra.

The records show that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi separately wrote to Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan on July 29, seeking action against Senior Deputy Election Commissioner Maneesh Garg.

Garg, an Indian Administrative Service officer from the Himachal Pradesh cadre, was given additional charge of the poll panel’s administration division on July 28 while Deputy Election Commissioner Bhanu Prakash Yeturu was on leave from July 27 to August 9.

Within hours of taking charge, Garg issued an order changing the work assigned to senior deputy election commissioners, deputy election commissioners, director generals and other officers, Sandhu and Joshi had alleged. The order revised the work allocation set out in a previous order dated September 2025.

In their letters, Sandhu and Joshi alleged that Garg had made the changes without consulting the Election Commission or the officers concerned, despite repeated verbal and written instructions that such changes required “prior discussion or approval” from the poll panel.

As a follow up to @IndianExpress story on ‘CEC vs ECs’, official documents accessed by RTI Activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (Retd) sheds more light on the issue.

Election Commissioners Dr Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Dr Vivek Joshi wrote to Union Cabinet Secretary individually on the… https://t.co/bk21NiyeSE pic.twitter.com/jQec7hP2nC

— Arvind Gunasekar (@arvindgunasekar) October 22, 2026

Sandhu said that the revised allocation had been issued “without discussing or informing” the commission or him, The Indian Express reported.

On the other hand, Joshi wrote that when he “requested for the relevant file from the administration division, it was not provided”.

Both commissioners alleged that Garg’s actions were contrary to established practice and violated provisions of the 2023 Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, PTI reported.

A Cabinet Secretariat file dated August 3 proposed seeking Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s opinion on the complaints. A note dated August 4 said that the Election Commission was an independent constitutional body and the letters from the two commissioners, sent in their individual capacities, did not constitute a formal complaint from the poll panel as a whole.

Citing Section 18 of the 2023 Act, the note said the poll body should make decisions unanimously as far as possible, with differences settled by a majority.

The note added that although Garg was appointed by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet, his conduct was governed by the Election Commission’s rules and guidelines.

The Cabinet Secretariat noted that taking action without an official communication from the poll panel as a whole could be “inappropriate” and “construed as interference in the functioning of the constitutional body”, The Indian Express reported.

The Cabinet Secretariat decided to acknowledge the letters and send copies to Kumar’s office.

On August 5, Somanathan sent separate letters to Sandhu and Joshi acknowledging their complaints.

The records released under the Right to Information Act do not establish whether the chief election commissioner subsequently responded to the proposed request for his opinion.

On September 23, The Indian Express reported that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

On September 26, the poll body said the revised work allocation orders issued by Garg had not been implemented following directions from the two commissioners.

Since October 2, nationwide protests have been held calling for Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and the alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: SIR explained: Why the voter roll revision has become so controversial

Confrontations between Indian and Chinese troops have been taking place at several locations along the Arunachal Pradesh border, The Hindu quoted Indo-Tibetan Border Police Director General Shatrujeet Singh Kapur as saying on Thursday.

“In the past few days, a situation arose where face-off happened at several locations in Arunachal and it still continues,” Kapur said at an event in Alwar, Rajasthan.

The Indo-Tibetan Border Police, a central force, guards the 3,488-km Line of Actual Control with China.

Told you so! ITBP DG Shatrujeet Singh Kapur confirms several face-offs between Chinese & Indian troops in Arunachal, including Taksing, which are still continuing. The face-offs were even taking place when Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Delhi for BRICS. #IndiaChinaBorderRow pic.twitter.com/DMyFdRnUnB

— Rajat Pandit (@IamRajat_Pandit) October 23, 2026

The force is stepping up preparations for modern warfare with drones, specialised commandos and new underground shelters, PTI quoted Kapur as further saying.

Reports of a stand-off between Indian and Chinese soldiers near Taksing in Arunachal Pradesh’s Upper Subansiri district emerged in July, with several confrontations reportedly taking place along the boundary.

“Sometime in July, during routine patrolling, Indian and Chinese troops came face to face near Maja,” an unidentified official told The Hindu. “After [a] brief confrontation, both sides returned but the Chinese PLA [People’s Liberation Army] came back in larger number few days later and pitched tents, around 6-7 kms within India’s perception of the LAC.”

The Indian military and the Union government had not commented on the reports at the time.

In August, the Ministry of External Affairs said that maintaining peace and tranquillity along the Line of Actual Control was of “utmost importance” and warned that the “state of the border affairs” will affect bilateral relations in general.

In June, The Arunachal Times quoted the Nah Welfare Society as having alleged that Chinese soldiers were occupying areas near the Line of Actual Control, building roads and military camps, and taking over grazing grounds.

BJP ‘suppressing’ reports, alleges Congress

On Friday, the Congress accused the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government of “suppressing” reports of skirmishes along the border since July.

The Opposition said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi “was seen joking around” with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the BRICS summit in September instead of taking action.

“Modi has abandoned our soldiers every time, betrayed the country and shirked his responsibility,” the Opposition party said on social media. “This weak prime minister has caused immense harm to the country.”

Xi visited India for the summit between September 11 and September 13. The visit came amid a thaw since 2024 in India-China relations, following years of tensions over a military standoff in Ladakh.

The two countries have held three rounds of high-level border talks since July, The Hindu reported.

China has for long sought to rename places in Arunachal Pradesh. Beijing lays territorial claims over a large portion of Arunachal Pradesh, claiming that it is “South Tibet”. China refers to Arunachal Pradesh as Zangnan. India has rejected China’s claims.

Situation along LAC gets disturbed from time-to-time: MEA

Ministry of External Affairs spokekesperson Randhir Jaiswal said on Friday that the situation along the India-China border areas “gets disturbed from time-to-time when Chinese forces diverge from established patrolling patterns”.

Answering a question about Kapur’s remarks, Jaiswal said during the ministry’s weekly media briefing that New Delhi and Beijing continue to use “existing diplomatic and military mechanisms” to resolve outstanding issues and “avoid misunderstanding and miscalculation along the Line of Actual Control”.

He added that the two sides have agreed to discuss ways to “improve understanding of LAC in appropriate areas” for better border management.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar and Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: Why accepting ‘differing perceptions’ on the LAC might be hurting India strategically