On May 24, lakhs of members of Scheduled Tribe communities from across India gathered at the Red Fort in New Delhi. They were there for the Janjati Sanskritik Samagam, or “tribal cultural confluence”. It had been organised by the Janjati Suraksha Manch, or “tribal protection forum”.

The event was ostensibly being held to celebrate the 150th birth anniversary of the revolutionary Adivasi leader Birsa Munda. Publicity material also stated that it was intended to call for the preservation and protection of tribal culture and identity.

That the event had the Indian government’s approval was apparent from the fact that its chief guest was Home Minister Amit Shah. In his speech on the occasion, Shah likened the event to the Ulgulan, Birsa Munda’s revolt against exploiters from outside the region to which he belonged, in present-day Jharkhand. “This andolan will connect us to the earth, save our culture and unite our religion,” Shah said.

What had not been spelt out in promotional material was the specific demand at the heart of this call for protection: that tribals who converted to Christianity should lose their status as tribals.

Organisers that Scroll spoke to admitted this plainly, as well as the fact that they chose not to centre this agenda in publicity material. “We couldn’t have an event at the Red Fort with delisting as the main focus, so we gave it the name Janjati Sanskritik Samagam,” said Megha Oraon, the Jharkhand spokesperson of the Janjati Suraksha Manch. “But our main agenda was delisting.”

Five days after the gathering, on May 29, a delegation of 25 tribal representatives from the Janjati Suraksha Manch, from across India, met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and presented him a memorandum listing their demands.

It was perhaps the most visible week for an organisation that was founded 20 years ago, and is affiliated to the Akhil Bharatiya Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram, a Sangh Parivar organisation whose stated aim is to work for the welfare of tribals. The Janjati Suraksha Manch, too, falls under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar.

Megha noted that the organisation began planning for the event almost two years ago. “Tribals from every state in the country belonging to over 500 communities attended the event,” he said. “Our estimate is that over three lakh people attended it.”

The central demand, of delisting converted tribals, is a controversial one with a complex background. Organisations like the Manch claim that when a tribal person converts, they essentially give up their traditional way of life. Thus, they argue that they should be denied access to benefits that tribals receive, such as reservation in government jobs.

Many activists, however, argue that this demand, particularly since it is spearheaded by bodies linked to the Sangh, represents an effort to subsume Adivasi identity into the Hindu fold.

The Manch and other right-wing tribal outfits also argue that tribal Christians gain benefits from both their minority status and their Scheduled Tribe status. I asked the co-convenor of the Manch, Dr Rajkishore Hansda, what these benefits were. He added, “They are educated in minority institutions and then they take Scheduled Tribes’ reservations for government jobs. They take half the benefits from their religious status and the other half from their Scheduled Tribe status. This becomes a double advantage.”

The high-profile event and the government’s tacit support of it suggests that, going forward, the Manch will play a key role in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s efforts to shape tribal policy across the country.

The Adivasi writer and activist Gladson Dungdung noted that while “the Manch has been active for a while”, they had thus far met with limited success in Jharkhand. The key reason for this, he argued, was that apart from demanding the delisting of Christian tribals, the group also opposed the popular demand among many Adivasis for a separate code for the indigenous Sarna faith.

But, he added, “The demand for delisting will come up repeatedly until the next set of elections in 2029. And if a bill is introduced in the parliament, then we will have to wait and see what happens.”

The organisation and the demand

The Janjati Suraksha Manch was established in 2006 in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, a state where more than 30% of the population comprises Scheduled Tribes. Oraon noted that since then, it has opened branches or affiliates in all states that have a significant tribal population.

The Manch took its first major step in 2009, when it submitted a signature campaign to President Pratibha Patil, with their demand for delisting converted tribals. It has kept up a steady pressure on such matters since then. For instance, it has played a key role in persuading converted tribals to give up Christianity, and in carrying out ghar wapsi ceremonies. It has also mobilised to deny Christians burial rights and put in place other forms of social ostracism in villages.

The central demand has a history that goes back several decades. Among those who most prominently raised it was the Oraon Adivasi leader Kartik Oraon, whom the Manch lists on its website as an “unsung hero” of the Indian freedom struggle.

In 1962, Kartik Oraon stood for the Lok Sabha election from the Lohardaga constituency, then in Bihar, which was reserved for candidates from Scheduled Tribes. He lost to a Christian candidate, while another Christian candidate secured the third position.

Kartik Oraon challenged the result in an election tribunal, which ruled against him. He then appealed this decision in the Patna High Court.

The crux of his argument, as the judgement went on to note, was that his opponents had “nothing to do with the animistic faith and tribal way of life”, that they did not “follow the manners and customs of the tribes”, or have any “affinity nor any common interest, defence or aspirations with or for the tribal people”. Thus, he argued, they should be prohibited from contesting elections under seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes.

The Patna High ruled against Kartik Oraon, stating that it found “no merit in the appeal”.

In its reasoning, it noted that many Christian Oraons observed certain “tribal festivals not in conflict with Christianity” and maintained “tribal ways of life”. Further, it observed “non-Christian Oraons treat the converted Oraons as tribals”, calling them “Christian Oraons”. This demonstrated that Christian Oraons are “Oraons first and Christians next”, the court held. It also noted that the winning candidate had worked for the upliftment of both non-Christian and Christian Oraons, and that “both kinds of Oraons” considered him “to be one of them”.

Overall, it stated, “Christian Oraons are Oraons in spite of their conversion, and are entitled to the rights and privileges of the tribals”.

A contentious bill

Kartik Oraon’s involvement in this question did not end there. In the next Lok Sabha election, held in 1967, he won from the Lohardaga constituency and entered parliament. In August that year, the government introduced the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Order Amendment Bill to revise the lists of these groups across India. The bill was referred to a joint committee, of which Kartik Oraon was a member.

Among the amendments the committee debated recommending were that “no person who has given up the tribal faith or faiths and has embraced Christianity or Islam should be deemed to be a member of Scheduled Tribe”.

Many members opposed the suggestion. For instance, the member of parliament Emonsing M Sangma, from the Garo community in then Assam, argued that Christian tribals did not automatically become “advanced, civilised and rich” by forfeiting their tribal religion. The committee’s final report records his argument that the improvement the lives of these tribal people had seen were a result of the “special care and attention” provided by the Union government, and that taking away that care would become “a strong barrier for the Christian tribals to proceed on in their efforts towards progress and development”.

Sangma also argued that religion could not be the singular criterion for determining whether a community qualified as a Scheduled Tribe. Rather, he said that, as the 1965 Lokur committee had suggested, these criterion should include “primitive traits, distinctive culture, geographical isolation, shyness of contact with the community at large, and backwardness.” These traits, Sangma argued “abundantly existed” in both Christian and non-Christian tribal communities.

The proposed amendment did not secure adequate support within the committee. Its report noted, “After discussing the various aspects of the issues involved in the proposed amendment at considerable length, the Committee decided to put it to vote as a result of which it was lost.”

In his interview to Scroll, Megha Oraon claimed that the 1967 committee had conducted an assessment of the religion of government officials in reserved posts for Scheduled Tribes and found that a large majority of the posts were occupied by converted tribals. However, Scroll examined the report and found no mention of such a study or findings.

In fact, Sangma had addressed such claims in his arguments, stating, “If one, on the spot, studies carefully and learns the actual fact correctly, one will be glad to know that this sort of allegation against the Christian tribals is very unfair and not correct.”

Arguments and criticisms

One of the foremost critics of the demand to delist converted tribals has been former Jharkhand minister Geetashree Oraon, Kartik Oraon’s daughter.

In interviews to various news outlets, Geetashree has been reminding people that her late father wrote a book named “Bees Varsh ki Kali Raat” (Dark Night of Twenty Years), in which he categorically stated that Adivasis practice Adi Dharma, an animistic faith that predates Hinduism. Furthermore, she has noted, while her father did demand that Christian tribals be delisted, he also recommended that the government initiate a new category of reservations for backward Christians.

In contrast, the Manch blurs arguments about religion and tribal identity.

On the one hand, its leaders argue that major religions pose a threat to tribal identity and tribal religions. “When tribals convert to Islam and Christianity, they have to obey the Quran and the Bible respectively,” said Hansda. “If they continue to follow tribal customs, then they are betraying both their own religion and the Adivasi religion.”

At the same time, they exclude Hinduism from this list. “Hinduism is a way of life,” Hansda said. “Whoever is born in India, their nature and culture are one and the same.”

This is a key argument that critics of the Manch focus on. In Jharkhand, for instance, a mixed group of activists and leaders from various communities, including Adivasis of different faiths, put out a public appeal to boycott the May event. The appeal stated that organisations such as the Manch believe that “Adivasis are Hindu and part of the caste system”. This, they noted, is why they typically use the term Vanvasi rather than Adivasi. Many activists reject the former term, arguing that it reduces the description of Adivasis to just “forest dwellers”, whereas the term Adivasi foregrounds their indigeneity and their rights over land as first settlers.

“On one hand these organisations are working to destroy the independent existence of tribals by promoting the term Sarna Sanatan,” the appeal stated, referring to a term that conflated an indigenous Adivasi faith and a word used as synonymous with Hinduism.

Activists also argue that this line of thinking erases the long fight of Adivasi and tribal communities for their own religious code. The appeal added, “On the other hand, they are working to break the collective identity of tribals by demanding the delisting of Christian tribals from the tribal list.”

Another major concern among activists and members of tribal communities is that if Christian tribals are delisted, land that they own will lose protections afforded to tribal-owned land in areas listed under the fifth and sixth schedules of the constitution – for instance, the sale and transfer of such land to non-tribals is restricted. Many fear that delisting Christian tribals would leave these lands vulnerable to being taken over by outsiders, through legal and illegal routes – this, they fear will also gradually lead to a dwindling of the Scheduled Tribe population of these areas.

Hansda dismissed these concerns. “If people are concerned about this, then they should think, which will be more advantageous?” he said. “Remaining a religious minority or a Scheduled Tribe? If this amendment is made, we are expecting there will be mass drives of ghar wapsi across the country, so there should be no threat to land.”

While the debate has largely been centred on central Indian states like Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, critics also note that if converted tribals across the country are delisted, northeastern states like Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya which are Christian majority states, would be plunged into massive administrative confusion. According to the 2011 census, Christians comprised over 87% of the population in Mizoram and Nagaland and close to 75% of the population in Meghalaya.

Hansda dismissed these concerns also. “The Christians in these states will remain religious minorities,” he said. “If they wanted to retain the Scheduled Tribe status, then they should do ghar wapsi.”

A Muslim woman was arrested and her son detained on Saturday after he allegedly brought beef in his school tiffin and allegedly forced two Hindu classmates to eat it in Assam’s Goalpara district, The Times of India reported on Sunday.

The mother, who had cooked the meal, was charged with criminal conspiracy, wrongful restraint, deliberate and malicious intention of outraging religious sentiments and criminal acts done by several persons, the newspaper quoted the police as saying.

The first information reports were filed based on complaints by the families of the Hindu students.

The incident occurred at a higher secondary school in Krishnai town on Friday and sparked tensions in the communally sensitive district, according to the newspaper.

Private consumption of beef is permitted in Assam. It is prohibited in public spaces such as restaurants and at community events.

The police were questioning four other Muslim students who also allegedly tried to feed beef to their classmates, The Indian Express reported.

The four boys and the student who has been detained could be expelled, according to the newspaper. A decision would be taken at a meeting of the School Management Development Committee on Tuesday.

Mustafizur Rahman, the father of one of the four students, claimed that the boy who has been detained had brought beef biryani in his tiffin and shared it with his Muslim classmates, including his son.

The boy had also offered it to two other Hindu classmates, Rahman stated.

“He had only offered the rice, not the meat,” he told Scroll. “The Hindu classmates didn’t eat and ran towards the teacher’s office.”

Rahman added: “The headmaster heard the matter and resolved it. He had asked them not to tell this to their parents. However, the Hindu students told their parents and the [Hindutva group] Bajrang Dal and RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] people got to know.”

Hindutva groups held a protest the following day, after which the mother was arrested and the boy was detained, he added.

The school has directed that only vegetarian food be brought in tiffins, The Indian Express reported.

The newspaper quoted District Commissioner Prodip Timung as having directed the inspector of schools that “students should at most be allowed to bring eggs to school” and that fish should not be allowed.

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Sneha.

A Patna court on Tuesday directed that no coercive action be taken against Bihar educator and YouTuber Faizal Khan, popularly known as Khan Sir, in an attempted murder case until the next hearing, The Indian Express reported.

The court was hearing an anticipatory bail plea filed by Khan.

A first information report was filed against Khan on Friday after two of his security guards allegedly told the police that he had ordered them to open fire during violence outside his coaching institute in Patna on June 2.

Khan, the two guards and unidentified associates were booked under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to attempt to murder and the Arms Act.

The case came days after Khan claimed that “eight to ten rounds of gunfire” were fired outside his coaching institute, Khan Global Studies, after a group allegedly vandalised the premises in Patna’s Musallahpur area. Following the incident, he alleged that persons had attacked the institute and that business rivals were behind the violence.

On Tuesday, the court also reserved order on the bail plea of Raushan Anand, the owner of the rival coaching institute, who was earlier arrested in the case along with two others on the night of the violence, based on Khan’s allegations, The Hindu reported.

The investigation into the case had begun after videos purportedly showing firing outside the coaching centre were shared on social media.

Witnesses allegedly identified the men seen in the footage as Khan Global Studies’ security staff and claimed that they fired “two rounds each”.

The police had said on Friday that Khan confirmed that the men were his institute’s security guards and that the rifles used were licensed weapons. The guards were subsequently arrested.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read: ‘Aaj Tak’ anchor Anjana Om Kashyap files defamation suit against Bihar educator, YouTuber ‘Khan Sir’

The Bharatiya Janata Party-led West Bengal government on Monday restored the Central Bureau of Investigation’s “general consent” to conduct inquiries in the state, almost eight years after the previous Trinamool Congress government withdrew it, ANI reported.

In a notification issued under 1946 Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, 1946, the state government said the consent would allow the CBI to investigate offences allegedly committed by employees of the Union government, central public sector units and private persons.

However, the agency would require permission from the West Bengal government before investigating public servants controlled by the state.

The Mamata Banerjee-led government had withdrawn the “general consent” to the CBI in November 2018, alleging that the Union government was misusing central agencies for political vendetta.

Over the years, several states, mostly ruled by the Opposition, had withdrawn the CBI’s general consent, such as Mizoram, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Kerala, Jharkhand, Punjab, Meghalaya, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka.

Of these, Mizoram, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and now West Bengal have since restored the agency’s powers.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Eight persons have been booked after several posters with the “I Love Muhammad” slogan and a green flag allegedly resembling that of Pakistan were found inside a mosque that was being demolished in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal district, PTI reported on Monday.

The Mustafa Qadri mosque was demolished on Saturday after it was identified as having been illegally built on land earmarked for a graveyard, PTI quoted the police as saying.

Sambhal MP Ziaur Rahman Barq told reporters that said that he too had such posters and “could keep a green flag”, asking “what kind of case would they register against me for that?” PTI reported.

“Under what provisions will a case be registered?,” the news agency quoted the Samajwadi Party leader as having asked. “If I love my Allah and my prophet within the fold of my faith, which section of the law applies to that?”

Barq alleged that the demolition of the mosque was illegal and that he would challenge it in court.

Sambhal, Uttar Pradesh: Demolition of the Mustafa Qadri Mosque in Kaserwa village, Sambhal, continued following a Tehsildar Court eviction order. DM Ankit Khandelwal and SP Krishna Kumar Bishnoi inspected the site. Officials said posters and a green flag were recovered during… pic.twitter.com/lAoxjvJ5Db

— IANS (@ians_india) June 6, 2026

In September and October, more than 4,500 Muslims were booked and 265 arrested in 23 towns after a row erupted about banners saying “I Love Muhammad” at Muslim religious processions, according to civil rights group Association for Protection of Civil Rights.

The right group alleged disproportionate police action and administrative targeting of Muslims in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly after clashes broke out in the district on September 26 in connection with the banners.

The controversy began on September 4, when a group of Muslims held an “I love Muhammad” banner during an Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi procession in Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur. Hindu groups had objected to the banner, claiming that a “new tradition” was being introduced at the procession.

The police had claimed at the time that rules prohibited introducing new customs into religious processions.

On Sunday, Barq claimed that the mosque demolished in Sambhal was about 150 years old and had been registered as waqf property in the state gazette since 1995, the news agency reported.

A waqf is an endowment under Islamic law dedicated to a religious, educational or charitable cause.

Additional Superintendent of Police (North) Kuldeep Singh said that the case had been registered against the eight persons, including the mosque's caretaker, for statements leading to public mischief. An investigation is underway.

District Magistrate Ankit Khandelwal said the mosque committee’s appeal against the tehsildar court’s eviction order had been rejected as it had failed to submit evidence to support its claims.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Economist Jean Drèze was awarded the Global Inequality Research Award at the World Inequality Conference held at the Paris School of Economics on Friday.

Drèze was recognised for his work on poverty and inequality measurement in India, as well as his advocacy for the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and the National Food Security Act.

After winning the award, Drèze said: “This recognition is not something I achieved on my own. All the work I do is in collaboration with people and collectives working for change.”

“India has all possible varieties of inequality – not only astronomical economic inequality, but also the caste system, huge gender disparities, massive disparities in access to education, and so forth,” Drèze said. “The silver lining is that India also has a rich history of resistance to inequality. I’ve been very fortunate to be associated with some of these movements.”

The Global Inequality Research Award is presented every two years to researchers who have made significant contributions to the understanding of global inequalities.

This is the second edition of the award. The 2024 inaugural Global Inequality Research Award was jointly awarded to Bina Agarwal and James K Boyce for their work on social and environmental inequalities.

In recent years, Drèze has opposed the repeal of the MGNREGA and questioned Aadhaar authentication for food rations.

He has argued that the new rural employment guarantee law, the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, “provides a work guarantee without any guarantee that the guarantee applies”.

Drèze has also questioned citizens being denied food rations through the public distribution system due to the absence of Aadhaar authentication.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also Read:

• What free food rations hide: A rollback of social security in India
• ‘A bill to destroy MGNREGA’: Why experts fear the worst from new job guarantee bill

Every time you return from a vacation, things feel slightly different. The roads are annoyingly crowded, your bathroom is smaller and the people in your city are impatient. In a few days, you slip into a routine, those things blur.

But if you spend a few years away from home, a lot that seemed mostly normal begins to feel jarring.

After nearly a decade in the US, I returned to India with my family almost on this day last year. It was a well-planned move, with a lot of thought given to everything that matters: picking the city closest to family, finding friends to reconnect with, getting the children acquainted with the language and grammar of India, and making carefully calibrated financial decisions.

Readjusting means getting used to the kind of things you’ll hear on return-to-India subreddits and social media groups. The discourse, generally intelligent, focuses on the predictable upsides and downsides, with shocking levels of consensus.

The main complaints centre around quality of life, which means gripes about air and noise pollution, driving and navigating traffic, the state of bureaucracy and public infrastructure, the complexities of the school system, the lack of personal space, the quality of customer service, familial interference in everyday matters, the work culture, and the general trust deficit in everyone and everything.

There’s a term to describe this phase: reverse culture shock.

These start off as mild irritants, but turn into severe pain points after the first few weeks of peak NRI romanticisation. The initial months are about telling your old friends how nice it is to have access to family. It then shifts to extolling the virtues of five-minute grocery deliveries, and your plans to hire a chief of staff to manage your army of domestic workers – all of this without making a dent on your wallet.

Over the last year I’ve found a lot of my own thoughts neatly align with what the prodigals discuss. But there’s one aspect that I felt least prepared for both individually, and as a parent: the Indian caste system.

If you grow up in India, casteism is omnipresent, but only if you choose to look closely.

My observations are not unique – they’re just mundane things that feel painful after returning, and harder to explain to my children.

For example when Sushila, our cook, asks for a different cup to drink tea. Her expectation is to have a low-grade, old, chipped mug, not too different from the world where they still have separate taps and wells.

Or every domestic worker who visits finds it appropriate to sit on the floor. To them the couch feels intimidating, imposing and too equal. It’s not surprising, because some of them have told us the air conditioning is always turned off in the room they’re working in.

A few months back, while dusting our bookshelf, she came up to my wife holding our copy of Annihilation of Caste. “Didi, yeh hamare bhagwaan hain,” she said, pointing to the picture of BR Ambedkar. Sister, he is our god.

Sushila was recently docked a third of her salary by a neighbour because she missed work while tending to her daughter who went from pillar to post in a government hospital before undergoing heart surgery. Without asking, we were offered pictures as evidence.

Last Diwali, we were invited to a nightclub for a party organised by parents of an international school. The children were put through tacky games organised by a local emcee; the adults enjoyed cocktails while taking turns to meet a tarot card reader. When it was dinner time, the emcee announced: “Parents, the buffet is served. Please note, for your nannies, we have separate food boxes.”

Of course, it goes without saying the nannies had to first shovel food down the children’s mouths before getting to their own meals.

Then, there’s a building in South Mumbai we visit often. Every time we return late in the night, we walk down the stairs to show our children a sight that’s both sickening and eye-opening: men, employed as full-time live-in domestic workers, sleeping on the floor near the lift because it’s convenient to have someone clean up after you, but too inconvenient to have them actually live in the same apartment.

Thankfully it’s an old, post-Partition era building, and unlike the modern towers with “service lifts”, a clever name for a lift allocated for blue-collar workers so they’re invisible to wealthy residents. For most of the day it’s crowded with delivery workers scrambling to make it on time after braving the elements.

To be fair, not every example is reducible to caste alone. Class, money and occupation matter too. But in India, these categories have overlapped for so long that separating them is often impossible. Returning to India does not allow me to stand outside the hierarchy. But the discomfort – and it’s only a discomfort – comes from seeing this hierarchy play out so clearly.

Amidst all this, here’s my favourite anecdote from last year. On my daughter’s birthday, as I was running an errand in my neighbourhood, the plumber walked up and shook my hand. Over the previous few months, every time he stopped by our home to fix a broken tap or check the drain pipes, he did not come anywhere close to a handshake.

This happened because he noticed what I was wearing: a very worn-out Ambedkar T-shirt that I bought on Amazon for $18 while living in the US.

I didn’t ask him, but he evidently assumed something. And for a fleeting moment, the invisible line that divided us, felt a little lighter, almost as if it didn’t exist.

Rahul Fernandes divides his time between consulting and writing. He has spent more than two decades in media and technology, including at Google, Meta and TikTok.

Also read: How separate lifts in Mumbai highrises sustain caste prejudice in the city

Twenty-four Indian seafarers were rescued on Monday from the tanker Marivex off the coast of Oman that was struck by the United States military, The Hindu reported on Tuesday. The US had attacked the tanker as it has imposed a blockade restricting maritime traffic linked to Iran.

The US Central Command said that it had disabled the Palau-flagged vessel after it violated the blockade by attempting to sail to an Iranian port. It added that Marivex had been unladen at the time of the strike.

Marivex had been sanctioned by the US government in December over alleged links to Iran’s oil trade amid the conflict in West Asia. The vessel was among the few ships that exited the Strait of Hormuz on April 9 after a ceasefire was declared.

Following the strike, an audio message purportedly sent to General Secretary of the Forward Seamen’s Union of India Manoj Yadav said that the vessel was sinking after the attack on the ship’s engine room, the newspaper reported.

The message added that a fire had broken out, due to which lifeboats on one side of the ship were not accessible. The crew also claimed that there was a US warship nearby that was not helping.

The sailors were evacuated by helicopter and taken to Masirah Island in Oman. They are safe and expected to return to India in two days, The Hindu quoted Yadav as saying.

At a press briefing, Opesh Kumar Sharma, director at the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways also said that the 24 seafarers on board the Marivex are safe, but declined to comment on the cause of the fire.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Eight workers were killed on Monday after molten metal fell on them at the Visakhapatnam Steel Plant in Andhra Pradesh’s Anakapalle district, reported PTI.

Around 20 workers were on duty when a ladle carrying liquid steel exploded in the Steel Melting Shop-1 unit at around 4.40 pm, The Hindu quoted unidentified officials at the plant as saying.

The blast caused a massive fire and spilt hundreds of tonnes of molten steel across the shop floor.

An unidentified police officer told the newspaper that the molten metal was at about 1,600 degrees Celsius.

The Visakhapatnam Steel Plant is a public sector undertaking under the administrative control of the Union Ministry of Steel.

At least six workers suffered severe burn injuries and were admitted to hospital, The Hindu reported. The injured were identified as R Mallikharjuna Rao, P Srinivasa Rao, A Appa Rao, Satyanarayana, G Suribabu and Paidiraju.

Eight workers are feared dead after molten steel fell on them at the RINL-Visakhapatnam Steel Plant (VSP) on Monday.

The molten steel reportedly spilled from a ladle while the workers were working below.

More details awaited. pic.twitter.com/1uIms6RuC0

— The Hindu - Andhra Pradesh (@THAndhra) June 8, 2026

In a social media post, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was saddened by the accident and announced a compensation of Rs 2 lakh each for the families of those who died. The workers who were injured will receive Rs 50,000 from the Prime Minister's National Relief Fund.

Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu expressed grief and directed officials to undertake relief measures in coordination with all government departments.

HD Kumaraswamy, the Union steel minister, offered his condolences to the families of those who died and said he was “closely monitoring the situation”.

Former Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy demanded a comprehensive investigation into the incident and said that strict action should be taken against those responsible.

He said there was a need to accord “utmost priority to worker safety in industrial facilities” and stressed that there should be no negligence in implementing safety standards, the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party said on social media.

Edited by Sneha.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s appeal to farmers on May 10 to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers by 25%-50% had shades of his Independence Day speeches in 2019 and 2025, in which he had appealed for the judicious use of chemical fertilisers.

In this time, India’s chemical fertiliser use has increased 15%, from 61.4 million metric tonnes to 70.8 million metric tonnes.

The latest appeal is prompted by the economic impact of the war in West Asia – in the same speech, Modi appealed for the judicious use of fuel, which like chemical fertilisers, has ingredients majorly sourced from countries in the affected region. His previous appeals have been inspired by the harmful effect of the indiscriminate use of chemical fertilisers on soil.

In both instances, however, just appealing to farmers to reduce the use of chemical fertilisers without speaking of and facilitating the alternative isn’t enough to motivate a switch to natural farming. Reducing the use of chemical fertilisers in soil that is habituated to their use causes a significant drop in yield.

For the use of urea to reduce by 50% without jeopardising yield and food security, intelligent measures to improve soil health through biofertilisers, biodecomposers, organic manuring and soil conditioners, followed by the right rate, dose, time and method of application of nano fertilisers are vital, according to Kiritkumar J Patel, managing director of the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative, a pan-India cooperative engaged in manufacturing and distributing fertilisers. Nano fertilisers are made of tiny-sized nutrient molecules coated for slow release.

A Union government-sponsored scheme launched in November 2024 to promote natural farming has so far covered 880,000 hectares, which is less than 1% of India’s 154.20 million hectares of cultivated land.

Natural farming primarily relies on locally made bio-inputs to activate soil biology and enhance the nutrient cycle, and breaking insect-pest and disease cycles through diversified cropping systems and the use of plant-based botanical formulations prepared from locally available plants, explained N. Ravisankar, project coordinator for All India Coordinated Research Projects on Integrated Farming Systems.

“It also integrates scientifically proven agronomic practices such as soil cover through crop residues and cover crops, minimum soil disturbance, biomass recycling and livestock integration for sustaining soil fertility and ecosystem functions,” said Ravisankar, who is also national principal investigator, All India Network Programme-Natural Farming Project Coordination Unit, Indian Council of Agricultural Research-Indian Institute of Farming Systems Research.

“To scale natural farming, we need policy changes, not prayers,” Avinash Kishore, senior research fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, International Food Policy Research Institute, told IndiaSpend.

Among the key policy changes Kishore advocates to further a switch to natural farming are an increase in chemical fertiliser prices, especially urea, which have so far been kept artificially low, and well-structured motivational incentives.

Natural farming is difficult

Ajay Rattan, an engineer by qualification and profession until 2018 when he took up natural farming on his family’s two hectares of land in Niyun in Himachal Pradesh’s Bilaspur district, was inspired, he said, “by the increasing shortage of indigenous seeds in the market, and also by the thought that if I continued with my chosen profession I would be financially well off but putting chemical-laden food on the table, which would adversely impact my family’s health.”

In both Punjab and Himachal Pradesh, states where IndiaSpend reached out to an academic and agricultural department officer respectively, inquiries about natural farming have increased after the recent pandemic.

“Covid-19 helped raise awareness of the association between food and immunity; many people realised that immunity levels are largely low,” Sohan Singh Walia, director and principal agronomist, School of Organic Farming, Punjab Agricultural University, told IndiaSpend.

Punjab Agricultural University first brought out a recommendation for natural farming in 2004. It established a department dedicated to organic farming in 2017. Still, today, Punjab has only 10,000 hectares of cultivated land under certified organic farming, less than 1% of the state’s total 4.2 million hectares, according to Walia.

In Himachal Pradesh, where the government has been making a conscious effort to promote natural farming since 2018, about 22% of the state’s one million farmers have adopted chemical-free farming so far, according to Mohinder Bhawani, deputy director agriculture and state nodal officer, State Project Implementing Unit, National Mission on Natural Farming, Himachal Pradesh.

Self-sufficiency is inbuilt in natural farming, as it makes use of products like jivamrit, ghanjivamrit, dashparni ark, saptadhayankur ark, etc, which are made of cow dung, cow urine and other natural ingredients like medicinal leaves, jaggery, etc. In an all-out effort to go natural, Rattan bought desi cows to make inputs from their waste. He acknowledges that “buying readymade urea to sprinkle on land is much easier than making biofertilisers at home”.

“The hard work involved in natural farming is a put-off,” opined GV Ramanjaneyulu, executive director, Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, even as he pointed out that the problem lies in putting forward two extremes.

“Either the government supports conventional farmers unrealistically, incurring up to Rs 2 lakh crore annually on fertiliser subsidies, or leaves them to fend for themselves if they decide to try natural farming,” he said.

Urea is cheap, widely available

Indian fertiliser company Indian Potash recently accepted an overseas tender for the supply of 2.5 million tons of urea at double the price Rashtriya ⁠Chemicals and Fertilisers, another leading provider, paid two months ago.

Such a steep price rise would majorly add to the central government’s outlay on fertiliser subsidies, especially the subsidy on urea, which completely insulates farmers from inflation.

A 45 kg bag of urea has cost roughly Rs 242 since two decades.

If in 2010 a farmer had to sell 27 kg of rice at the prevailing minimum support price to buy 50 kg of urea; today a farmer could buy it for only 12 kg of rice, pointed out Kishore. “At such low prices, it simply doesn’t make economic sense for farmers to use urea judiciously or consider the alternative, natural farming, which involves much more hard work.”

While urea supplements soil nitrogen, phosphatic and potassic (P&K) fertilisers deliver phosphate and potash.

“Of the three kinds of chemical fertilisers used, demand for urea is the most inelastic, especially in the short-term because it has a perceived direct link to yields,” said Kishore.

This perception tends to drive the overuse of urea, whereas in reality, the optimal blend of nitrogen, phosphate and potash depends on the type of crop, soil health, the growth phase, etc.

Prices of all these fertilisers are covered by the Nutrient Based Subsidy policy introduced in 2010. Every year, the government fixes the fertiliser subsidies (in Rs per kg) after considering international prices, exchange rates, inventory levels and prevailing Maximum Retail Prices.

However, while the MRP of P&K fertilisers has been left open to be set by fertiliser manufacturers and marketers based on market dynamics, the price of urea is tightly controlled, which has so far not only defeated the cause of natural farming but also led to its overuse, measured as poor nitrogen use efficiency.

Nitrogen use efficiency refers to the percentage of applied nitrogen fertiliser that is effectively absorbed by crops to produce biomass or yield. Globally, the average NUE is around 55% as against 33% in India, meaning almost 70% of the applied nitrogen our farmers use is lost to the surrounding environment.

“Lost urea degrades soil, contaminates aquifers and accelerates climate change, not to mention eats into farmers’ profits,” said Kishore.

“The excessive and imbalanced use of urea adversely affects soil health and does not necessarily increase yields proportionately,” agreed Patel of Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative. He believes that “instead of focusing on ‘reducing nutrition’ by cutting the use of urea, the messaging should be ‘improve nutrient efficiency’”.

Patel supports bringing urea under the purview of the NBS policy, on similar lines as P&K fertilisers, and introducing direct benefit transfers to farmers, to rationalise urea prices without adversely impacting livelihoods.

“Bangladesh increased urea prices from 16 Taka/kg to 22 Taka/kg in August 2022 and to 27 Taka/kg in April 2023, after freezing the rates for a decade, yet it saw no major farmer protests and no decline in food production,” pointed out Kishore.

IndiaSpend reached out to the department of fertilisers to understand if the subsidies on urea are likely to be revised to encourage a switch to natural farming. We were informed that the department has no plans to increase the prices of urea at present, in the interest of the farming community and the nation’s food security.

Incentives, assistance

Ramanjaneyulu believes farmers want to make the shift but they need assistance.

“Promoting small scale rural enterprises manufacturing the inputs needed for natural farming would be helpful to farmers as well as promote the rural economy,” he proposed.

“Alternative nutrient solutions must be made available at scale for balanced fertilisation,” agreed Patel.

Even if natural inputs were to be produced locally, Ramanjaneyulu said, “farmers would need equitable subsidies at least on par with chemical fertilisers to cover their costs and the losses when they first make the switch.”

Rattan’s yield fell 50% in his first couple of years of natural farming but has since increased 25% as compared to what he was harvesting with chemical fertilisers.

Well-thought out incentives could also help to push change. An incentive structure could be built around motivating a switch from cereal monocultures to growing a pulse crop with rice or wheat or maize (multi-cropping) or growing a pulse crop between cereal crops (inter-cropping), because pulses help restore nitrogen to depleted soil.

“Sowing crops like Dhaincha or Sunn hemp after harvesting wheat, and mixing the crop into the soil after 45-60 days replenishes the nitrogen in the soil, to the extent that basmati rice grown thereafter needs no urea at all and ordinary rice needs half the amount of urea,” explained Walia.

Technically, this is called green manuring.

Rattan’s experience has been that the leguminous crop (chick peas or peas) he grows alongside wheat to fixate nitrogen in the soil covers his farming expense, which has increased his return three times.

“Multi-location trials conducted by ICAR under AINP-NF across different agro-ecologies also demonstrate that natural farming can maintain comparable productivity in several low-input and legume/pulse/millet-based cropping systems while significantly reducing paid-out costs on fertilisers and pesticides, and improving soil organic carbon, microbial activity, soil moisture retention and overall soil physical, chemical and biological health parameters over time,” said Ravisankar.

Incentives to promote balanced fertilisation could also cover the adoption of soil test-based fertiliser recommendations, precision farming practices and efficient nutrient-use technologies, proposed Patel.

To impact the actual application of urea and other fertilisers, Kishore emphasised, incentives need to be aligned with the dissemination of credible scientific recommendations.

“Farmers also need access to authentic knowledge, local advisories, inputs and a market for their produce to create demand pull,” said Ramanjaneyulu.

In Punjab, the state government has created mandis (markets) for organic crops, where they fetch 50% higher prices than regular crops, said Walia. “There is no shortage of demand for organic crops in Punjab, especially after the pandemic. Some organic produce like mustard is grown on demand and fully booked in advance.”

The ICAR, through the AINP-NF, has taken up research on natural farming across 20 centres in 16 states. Under the National Mission on Natural Farming, model farms are being established at identified ICAR institutes and state agricultural universities, and competitive research grants are available to generate long-term scientific evidence on productivity, profitability, soil health, ecosystem services and climate resilience.

However, so far, investments in research and extension, a base to develop new products, have been skewed towards conventional chemical fertilisers, Ramanjaneyulu believes, because academicians employed in universities and institutions at large “don’t believe in the model and have refused to shift”.

“We need research into indigenous seeds that aren’t dependent on chemical fertilisers,” Rakesh Tikait, national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, told IndiaSpend. “It’s easy to say switch to natural farming but even the seeds available today demand chemical fertilisers.”

Scaling and support

Switching over to natural farming overnight could be disastrous. A good example of this is the impact of the nationwide ban on chemical fertilisers imposed by Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in 2021, to follow through on his electoral commitment to replace the existing fertiliser subsidy scheme with an alternative system and promote the use of organic fertiliser over a period of 10 years.

Rajapaksa’s ban led to a more than 99% drop in fertiliser imports in the ensuing four months, and a more than 30% drop in the yield of rice, Sri Lanka’s primary food crop, from a high of 4,500 kg/hectare in 2020 to below 3,000 kg/hectare in the ensuing major growing season running from September to March (Maha), based on government statistics or remote sensing estimates. Consequently, rice imports, which were negligible prior to the ban, shot up to $450 million while domestic prices of the staple surged by around 50%.

Yields of Sri Lanka’s primary export and source of foreign exchange, tea, dropped 28.7% in 2022 as compared to the average yield of the 2014-2021 period.

Although Prime Minister Modi has appealed to farmers at large, to balance sustainability with national food security, instead of endorsing natural farming across India, the ICAR has identified potential domains for a transition through a strategic agro-ecological assessment integrating bio-physical and socio-economic indicators.

“About 8.01 million hectares fall under highly potential domains while another 29.37 million hectares under medium potential domains, together accounting for nearly 25.8% of India’s net cultivated area,” explained Ravisankar.

In 2023, a NITI Aayog working paper proposed that nearly 20% of India’s cultivated area be gradually brought under chemical-free farming by 2030. This target accounted for the projected annual growth of about 3.5% in food production against an estimated 2.8% annual increase in food demand.

“A phased scaling of natural farming in ecologically suitable areas will avoid risks associated with the abrupt withdrawal of conventional inputs and facilitate an evidence-based agro-ecological transition,” said Ravisankar. “A phased expansion strategy will also help generate long-term scientific evidence for wider scaling and policy support.”

IndiaSpend has reached out to the department of agricultural research and education to inquire on research on seeds suited for natural farming. We will update this story when we receive a response.

Charu Bahri is a freelance writer and editor based in Mount Abu, Rajasthan.

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

A group of 20 Trinamool Congress MPs wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, declaring their support for the ruling National Democratic Alliance. Led by party leader Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, the group held a meeting at the home of Union minister and Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal observer Bhupendra Yadav in New Delhi.

Bardhaman Purba MP Sharmila Sarkar, who was part of the group, later said that the MPs “want to sit separately”. She said that the new bloc “will help in the development of Bengal”, adding that “we need to support [the] NDA for Bengal’s development”.

This came days after 58 of the 80 MLAs of the TMC rebelled against the party and elected now-expelled party leader Ritabrata Banerjee as leader of the Opposition. Read on.

TMC leader Sukhendu Sekhar Ray resigned as Rajya Sabha MP and quit the party. He said that he has accepted the mandate delivered by voters in the recent West Bengal Assembly elections.

Ray said that the voters had “given huge mandate” to the Bharatiya Janata Party “to put an end to 15-year anarchical rule” by the TMC. The new government had taken steps for the “overall development and reconstruction” of the state, he added. Read on.

TMC leader and the party’s candidate from the Falta Assembly constituency, Jahangir Khan, was arrested by the police near India’s border with Nepal in northern Bengal. Khan was allegedly attempting to flee the country amid allegations of electoral malpractices during the second phase of polling.

After the BJP defeated the TMC in the state, several residents in Falta had accused Khan of land grab and extortion. The police have yet to disclose all the charges against the Trinamool candidate. Read on.

The Opposition INDIA bloc demanded the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The alliance alleged that Pradhan had presided over the “betrayal of lakhs of youth” who appeared for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical seats and the Central Board of Secondary Education exam.

Speaking at a press conference after a meeting of the bloc, Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge said that the Opposition will also approach the chief justice of India on the special intensive revision of electoral rolls underway across the country, “vote loot” and the “stealing of elections”.

Member parties of the bloc also announced that they had agreed to meet every two months and that they will continue to coordinate in Parliament. Read on.

The Indian embassy in Iran advised Indian citizens to leave the country “by available means” amid fresh strikes by Israel. The Indian embassy in Tel Aviv advised citizens to avoid non-essential travel within Israel.

The statements by the Indian diplomatic missions came amid a second round of strikes in Iran. The Mehrabad airport in Tehran and the Kermanshah airport cancelled all flights “until further notice”.

Hours later, United States President Donald Trump said that Israel and Iran “must immediately stop ‘shooting’”. He later said that both sides were “looking to do an immediate ceasefire”. Read on.

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Retired Bombay High Court judge Gautam Shirish Patel and his family have been facing a sustained campaign of threats and violence in India and the United Kingdom since August over his 2024 judgement in the Dawoodi Bohra succession dispute, he told Scroll on Monday.

The most recent incident was reported on Friday, when his daughter Aditi Patel received an anonymous letter threatening the “cremation of you and your family” for failing to comply with directions contained in earlier threats.

On April 22, she was physically assaulted by a masked attacker when she was returning home after dropping her child at school in London. She suffered a bloodied nose in the incident.

The threats are linked to Gautam Patel’s April 22, 2024, judgement in the Dawoodi Bohra succession case. Patel had held that Mufaddal Saifuddin was the rightful leader of the sect of Shia Muslims and dismissed a petition challenging his leadership by the faction led by Taher Fakhruddin.

The letter received by his daughter on Friday claimed that a “gang” had been paid to kill the family and stated that the attack could be called off “by doing what you were told in the last letter”.

It was sent from a fake London address and bore a German stamp, the Hindustan Times reported.

A memory card attached to the letter was seized by Hertfordshire Police. The family decided not to open it on their computer, fearing that it could contain malware or be used to take control of their electronic device.

Since August 2025, he and his family members in Mumbai and London have allegedly received repeated threats demanding that he “recant”, or disavow, the judgement through a YouTube video.

Previous threats and attacks

The intimidation campaign reportedly began in August 2025 with an attempted break-in at his daughter’s home in London. This was followed by three identical letters sent to Aditi Patel and her husband in London, and to the retired judge’s wife Malashri Patel in Mumbai.

“We are a powerful guild of the DB [Dawoodi Bohra] community members interested in justice being served for our community,” the Hindustan Times quoted one of the letters as saying. “We have employed a very capable and dangerous syndicate who carried out the warning in London.”

Reacting to the latest threat, Gautam Patel told Scroll that the letter amounted to an “outright death threat” and questioned what such attacks meant for the judiciary.

He described the developments as “outrageous” and said that it was “absolutely impossible” to recant a judicial decision through a YouTube video.

“I’m not succumbing to these threats,” he added.

The retired judge also said: “I didn’t ask them to come to court. They could have protested on the streets, but instead you came to my court, which means ‘you may very much lose’.”

He further said that the attacks in London demonstrated how the perpetrators understood how the “jurisdictional divide [between the two countries] can be leveraged”.

The succession dispute

The Dawoodi Bohras are a sect of Shia Muslims, originally from Gujarat. While about five lakh live in India, the rest are spread out across the world.

The death of Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin, the 52nd “dai” or spiritual leader of the community, in January 2014 at the age of 103, was followed by a succession dispute.

While Saifuddin, the second son of Burhanuddin, is said to have been publicly named as the next leader by his father in 2011, his claim had been disputed by the late syedna’s half-brother, Khuzaima Qutbuddin, who had been Burhanuddin’s second-in-command since 1965.

Although the majority of the community pledged allegiance to Saifuddin, Qutbuddin approached the Bombay High Court challenging his claim to the position.

After a nine-year trial, Gautam Patel had reserved his judgement in the matter in April 2023.

On April 22, 2024, he ruled that Saifuddin was the rightful leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community and dismissed the suit, holding that the challenger had failed to prove his appointment as syedna.

Qutbuddin had died in 2016 while evidence was still being recorded. His son Taher Fakhruddin was substituted as the plaintiff, Bar and Bench reported.

The Fakhruddin faction has appealed the ruling before a division bench of the High Court. The appeal is pending.

Inputs from Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: Already rocked by a succession battle, Bohras face up to new leader’s views on women

A group of 20 Trinamool Congress MPs, led by party leader Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla on Monday, declaring their support for the ruling National Democratic Alliance, PTI reported.

The Mamata Banerjee-led party has 28 MPs in the Lower House of Parliament. Although the TMC had won 29 seats in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the MP from Basirhat has since died and a bye-poll is yet to be held.

The development comes amid turmoil within the TMC at the state level and in the Rajya Sabha.

On Wednesday, 58 of the 80 MLAs of the TMC rebelled against the party and elected now-expelled party leader Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition.

The stand taken by the 58 MLAs is being viewed as a challenge to former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who is supporting Sovandeb Chattopadhyay as the Opposition leader in the Assembly.

On Monday, the 20 MPs wrote to Birla after holding a meeting at the home of Union minister and Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal observer Bhupendra Yadav in New Delhi, The Hindu reported.

West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari was also present during the meeting, The Indian Express reported.

Those part of the breakaway faction include Howrah MP Prasun Banerjee, Bankura MP Anup Chakraborty, Cooch Behar MP Jagadish Chandra Barma Basunia, Bolpur Lok Sabha MP Asit Kumar Mal, Birbhum MP Satabdi Roy, Jhargram MP Kalipada Soren and Bardhaman Purba MP Sharmila Sarkar, the newspaper reported.

Sarkar told The Indian Express that the MPs “want to sit separately”.

“I respect Didi,” the MP was quoted as saying. “I wanted to work, but I could not.”

She said that the new bloc “will help in the development of Bengal”, adding that “we need to support [the] NDA for Bengal’s development”.

The defections come after the BJP won 207 seats in the 294-member West Bengal Assembly, ending the TMC’s 15-year rule in the state.

TMC moves High Court

Meanwhile, the TMC moved the Calcutta High Court on Monday, challenging Assembly Speaker Rathindra Bose’s decision to recognise Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition in the state, Live Law reported.

The petition sought a judicial review of Bose’s decision, arguing that it goes against established parliamentary norms, the legal news outlet reported.

A bench of Justice Krishna Rao will hear the plea on Thursday.

The future of the Trinamool Congress’ Rajya Sabha contingent also remains uncertain, with MP Sukhendu Sekhar Roy resigning earlier on Monday. The party currently has 13 members in the Rajya Sabha.

On Wednesday, the TMC dissolved all its committees and organisational units in the state, saying it would undertake a “comprehensive” review of its performance and party structure.

Edited by Sneha.

Trinamool Congress leader and the party’s candidate from the Falta Assembly constituency, Jahangir Khan, was arrested on Monday by the West Bengal Police near India’s border with Nepal in northern Bengal, reported The Telegraph.

Khan was allegedly attempting to flee the country amid allegations of electoral malpractices during the second phase of polling, unidentified officers told the newspaper.

While voting in Falta was held on April 29, the Election Commission on May 2 ordered repolling in the constituency citing “severe electoral offences” and alleged “subversion of the democratic process”. There had been allegations of electoral malpractices in the seat.

The fresh vote was held on May 21 and votes were counted on May 24.

However, just as the 48-hour silence period came into effect in the constituency for the re-polling, Khan withdrew from the contest. He claimed that he took the decision “for Falta’s development and the public good” after a special package announced by Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari.

He had been on the run since the re-polling was held, The Hindu reported.

The TMC had said that the withdrawal of the candidature was Khan’s “personal decision and not that of the party”.

BJP candidate Debangshu Panda won the polls by more than one lakh votes.

A probe report by the Election Commission had found that voting machines in at least 60 of the 285 polling stations in the constituency had been tampered with when the polls were held in Falta on April 29.

On May 4, the BJP defeated the TMC in the state polls, ending the 15-year rule of the Mamata Banerjee-led party.

After the change of government in the state, several residents in Falta had accused Khan of land grab and extortion, The Hindu reported.

The police are yet to disclose all the charges against the Trinamool candidate.

The arrest came weeks after the Calcutta High Court on May 26 vacated an interim protection granted to Khan, The Telegraph reported.

On May 18, the High Court directed the West Bengal Police not to take coercive action against him until the repolling concludes, provided he cooperated with the investigation into criminal cases filed against him.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Union government’s recent decision to liberalise the sale of liquor in Ladakh and end the ban in Lakshadweep has sparked criticism.

In Ladakh, the Ladakh Buddhist Association has opposed the new policy, saying that it wants a “safe, healthy and drug-free future” for the Union Territory, The Hindu reported. The Jamiat Ul Ulama Isna Asharia Kargil also opposed the decision and demanded an immediate ban on the sale and distribution of liquor.

Muslim-majority Lakshadweep has long supported prohibition, where it has been in force since 1979. “Residents and civil society groups have repeatedly opposed attempts to liberalise liquor regulations, arguing that such measures are being imposed without the consent of local communities,” Maktoob Media reported.

Opposition in Ladakh

The liberalised policy approved by Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena on May 30 permits the sale of hard liquor. This would include foreign liquor and Indian Made Foreign Liquor. Earlier, only beer, wine and ready-to-drink beverages were permitted for retail sale through shops.

The administration said this had been done “to strengthen regulation, curb illicit trade and support tourism by giving wider choice to people for consumption in a regulated manner”.

The policy also allows liquor shops to be set up in guest houses and homestays. Earlier, only hotels were permitted to serve liquor.

The administration will now allow the setting up of 20 liquor vends instead of the two that were operational in the Union Territory.

Earlier, liquor could only be consumed in bars. Under the new rules, alcohol consumption will be allowed within the premises of hotels, including rooms.

The Ladakh Buddhist Association said that the new policy was “a serious threat to the region’s social fabric, youth welfare and future generations”, The Hindu reported.

It demanded that the notification for new liquor licenses be immediately withdrawn and urged the administration to retain the existing excise framework.

The association’s youth wing leader Jigmet Rafstan said that the administration should not transform Ladakh into “another Goa or Delhi”, The Statesman reported.

Jamiat Ul Ulama Isna Asharia Kargil General Secretary Sheikh Ibrahim Khalili and the political head Sajjad Kargili expressed concerns about the administration’s decision, stating that the promotion of liquor sales is against the cultural, social and religious values of the people of Ladakh.

The new excise policy would have “negative consequences for the younger generation and society at large”, they said.

They also warned that the public would launch “democratic and peaceful protests” against the decision if liquor is allowed to be sold or consumed openly in Kargil.

Lakshadweep ends prohibition

The administration in Lakshadweep on Friday cleared the 2026 Lakshadweep Excise Regulation that repealed the 1979 Lakshadweep Prohibition Regulation, ending a framework that banned alcohol in the Muslim-majority archipelago for 47 years except in some tourist resorts.

Under the new framework, the administration can issue licences and permits for the import, export, manufacture, sale and purchase of liquor, Maktoob reported.

It also permits firms owned by the government to obtain licences for importing and selling alcohol.

In February, the administration issued an order to allow liquor in eight government-run guest houses.

Lakshadweep MP Muhammed Hamdullah Sayeed had said at the time that the order was unacceptable and that it be withdrawn, The Hindu reported.

Sayeed noted that liquor shops had been permitted on four islands in 2021 to promote tourism and said that extending liquor distribution would increase alcohol addiction among the youth.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Several protesters, including Left leaders, were detained on Sunday while protesting a demolition drive near Jadavpur railway station in Kolkata, the Hindustan Times Bangla reported.

The railway authorities brought in several bulldozers to demolish allegedly illegal shanties and shops along Jadavpur Station Road. The Left and the Congress leaders were among the crowd that had gathered at the site to protest the demolitions. The demonstrations continued past midnight.

This was the second attempt to carry out the demolition in the area. During an earlier drive, protesters had gathered at the site and shouted slogans, following which the bulldozers had been withdrawn, The Hindu reported.

On Sunday, some protesters lay in front of the bulldozers while others climbed onto it in an attempt to stop the drive, the Hindustan Times Bangla reported.

A large number of personnel from the police, central forces and Rapid Action Force were deployed at the site.

As the protests intensified, the police lathi-charged the demonstrators, including students, and detained several persons, The Hindu reported. Among those detained was Students’ Federation of India leader Srijan Bhattacharyya.

The Left and Congress alleged that the eviction drive was carried out without rehabilitating those affected and had violated court’s directions.

Following the detention and the alleged lathi-charge, Students’ Federation of India supporters held a dharna near Jadavpur University, The Telegraph reported.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party government came to power in West Bengal, several drives to remove alleged encroachments have been carried out in the state.

The drives have been criticised by Opposition parties.

On Monday, the Community Party of India (Marxist) condemned the “anti-people evictions and repression” by the BJP government. It also claimed that senior leader Sujan Chakraborty was assaulted and was injured during the police action on Sunday.

The Congress said that it would stand with the hawkers in future protests “wherever the government attempts to snatch away their livelihoods in this manner”, The Hindu reported.

The party also alleged that several of its leaders and workers were injured during the protests on Sunday.

Meanwhile, state minister and senior BJP leader Dilip Ghosh said that illegal encroachments by “a few people are disrupting the lives of citizens”, The Hindu reported.

He added: “They have to think of alternative spaces. Government is also looking for alternative, but thousands of such encroachers cannot be provided with places.”

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief MK Stalin on Sunday claimed that the actor-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam government in Tamil Nadu may not survive beyond three months, PTI reported.

Speaking at an event where former Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi MLA Panaiyur Babu and his supporters joined the DMK, the former chief minister said: “When [the new government] assumed office, I had said I would not criticise it for six months. However, there is now fear that circumstances may force me to speak sooner.”

“Many people are already talking about it, and criticism is mounting,” PTI quoted Stalin as saying. “It is not a question of six months, five months or even four months. The question now is whether this government will last even three months.”

This came a day after he claimed that his party had allowed its alliance partners to support the TVK with the “sole intention of preventing the imposition of president’s rule in the state”.

Stalin said that he had not opposed the allies’ decision because he believed that president’s rule “could have paved the way for BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] rule” in Tamil Nadu.

“But soon, we must take a pledge to bring down the TVK government,” he had said at an event in Chennai where he welcomed former All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam members into the DMK.

While the TVK emerged as the single-largest party in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections, it had fallen short of the majority mark by 10 seats. It formed the government with the support of the Congress, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and the Indian Union Muslim League.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari on Sunday said that 4,800 alleged undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh who are not eligible for citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act have been deported in the past month, The Hindu reported.

The Bharatiya Janata Party leader said that 836 more “illegal infiltrators” who are currently in holding centres will soon be deported to Bangladesh.

The holding centres were ordered to be set by the state government on May 22 for alleged undocumented immigrants and for released foreign prisoners awaiting deportation or repatriation.

“There is a law of the government of India under which they [undocumented immigrants] can be handed over to the Border Security Force instead of being sent to prisons,” The Hindu quoted Adhikari as saying on Sunday. “This law was used by other states, but [in West Bengal], they were treated as guests and lodged in prisons, fed our food, given our clothes and treated with our medicines.”

The chief minister noted that the new BJP government, in its first cabinet meeting, approved the transfer of land to the Border Security Force so that it could carry out border fencing, The Telegraph reported.

“Border security is our top priority,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “That is why we have handed over nearly 100 km of land to the BSF for fencing work out of 556 km required.”

Ahead of the elections, the BJP had accused the former Trinamool Congress government of failing to allocate land for border fencing, even as the TMC had alleged that the Border Security Force was unable to prevent infiltration into the country.

Adhikari’s statement came two days after Bangladesh claimed that it had thwarted attempts by India’s Border Security Force to force at least 30 persons into its territory through four border points on June 4 and June 5.

On June 3 as well, Bangladesh had similarly claimed that it foiled 10 attempts within 24 hours by India to force persons across the border into its territory.

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

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

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

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• ‘Let me die at home’: Back from Bangladesh, an Assam woman struggles to recover from ‘pushback’

• View from Bangladesh: The hardening of Hindutva in West Bengal will stifle pro-India voices

When India explains the killings along the Bangladesh borders by the Border Security Force, it has long relied on a dependable script: the people who were shot were criminals, they were smugglers or the Indian forces had acted in self defence. In short, it relocated moral responsibility for the deaths from the force that fired to the Bangladeshis who had been killed.

In the two decades until 2020, the Border Security Force has killed 1,236 Bangladeshi citizens, according to the human rights organisation Odhikar.

This framing, policy analysts in Bangladesh say, allows New Delhi to avoid bilateral accountability and ensure that the body count along the world’s deadliest peacetime border remains, diplomatically speaking, somebody else’s problem.

However, what irks policy analysts in Bangladesh is the fact that Dhaka has been willing to accept India’s explanations.

On June 2, just six days before Bangladesh’s Border Guard sits across from the Border Security Force at Director General-level talks in New Delhi from June 8, Bangladesh Home Minister Salahuddin Ahmed told reporters that deaths occurring when someone is “involved in crime or illegal intrusion” by a border force within its own territory should not be described as a border killing.

It was a pre-conference concession that India had not even negotiated for.

But Salahuddin is not the first Bangladeshi official to make a statement of this sort. In a 2020 interview with The Daily Star, Abdul Momen, who was foreign minister at the time, went further. He suggested that many deaths inside Indian territory were criminal transactions gone wrong.

Momen argued that victims were sometimes armed, that they attacked Border Security Force personnel, and that journalists ought to investigate the transactions rather than the killings. He told reporters to expose that side of the story instead.

This was a foreign minister of Bangladesh advising the press to redirect scrutiny from the force to the victims.

The numbers these officials were explaining away are not in dispute. The legal aid organisation Ain o Salish Kendra recorded that 34 Bangladeshis had been killed by the Border Security Force in 2025 – 24 in shooting incidents, 10 allegedly following physical torture. The figure was 30 in 2024, 31 in 2023, 23 in 2022.

The majority were cattle traders, farmers and day labourers. In 2021, Human Rights Watch said that even though the Indian government had instructed border forces to exercise restraint and limit the use of live ammunition, this had “not prevented new killings, torture, and other serious abuses”.

“Border killing” has no rigid definition in domestic or international law, but its meaning in human rights practice has never been ambiguous: it is widely perceived as the extrajudicial use of lethal force by border security agencies against civilians, regardless of whether those civilians were trespassing or smuggling.

The right to life under the United Nations’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights cannot be suspended or restricted under any circumstances, experts point out. Even allegations of criminal activity do not justify any exception to it.

India’s own law is equally unambiguous. Section 46(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, retained in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, explicitly prohibits the security forces from causing the death of a person not accused of an offence punishable by death or life imprisonment.

Illegal border crossing carries a maximum sentence of seven years.

The 2011 Coordinated Border Management Plan, signed by both countries, mandates non-lethal methods specifically for transborder crime. India’s home minister at the time, P Chidambaram, said at the signing that under no circumstances should the Border Security Force fire on anyone crossing the border. That instruction has been violated more than 1,000 times since, according to Odhikar.

The allegation that victims were criminals does not resolve this. A cattle trader crossing a border wire may be a criminal by one definition but he is not a person a border force is legally entitled to shoot.

India’s consistent use of lethal force in these encounters is not law enforcement. It is extrajudicial execution, human rights experts say – one India has never seriously prosecuted.

Momen’s statement in 2020 and Salahuddin’s in 2026 both share the logic of accommodation.

Momen served under the Bangladesh Awami League government led by Sheikh Hasina, whose foreign policy rested entirely on Indian goodwill. Explaining away Border Security Force killings was the price of that warmth, paid quietly and repeatedly.

Salahuddin serves under the Bangladesh Nationalist Party that came to power partly on the promise of a more dignified bilateral relationship with India – a demand that featured prominently in the 2024 uprising in Bangladesh and the reform agenda that followed.

Still, the pattern is beginning to look familiar. Just as the Awami League calibrated every border position to the temperature of its relationship with New Delhi, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party now in power appears to be making the same calculation, differently packaged.

The aspiration for Indian warmth, it seems, transcends party lines. But the cost, as before, is borne by the people shot at the border.

India has a genuine stake in changing this. A border where unarmed people are routinely shot generates grievance and erodes bilateral trust, creating a situation that eventually becomes difficult to manage. The Border Security Force’s impunity is a short-term convenience and a long-term liability.

Jannatul Naym Pieal is a Bangladesh-based writer, researcher and journalist. He can be reached at jn.pieal@gmail.com.

The municipal corporation in Uttar Pradesh’s Varanasi has approved a proposal to have meat and fish shops relocated to the outskirts of the city, The Hindu reported on Sunday.

Around 350 to 400 meat and fish shops operate in the city, Varanasi Municipal Corporation’s Public Relations Officer Sandeep Srivastava was quoted as saying.

During a meeting of the corporation’s governing body on Saturday, Municipal Commissioner Himanshu Nagpal said that the shops would be shifted to five locations: Ramnagar, Sujabad, Ganeshpur, Avleshpur and Shivpur.

The move was intended to improve sanitation and optimise the operation of such markets while ensuring that consumers continue to have access to meat and fish shops, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

However, the Congress said that the decision was unconstitutional.

“Such a decision goes against the right to livelihood, which is the fundamental right to earn a living with dignity, and it amounts to depriving a large population of their means of survival,” Congress national secretary Shahnawaz Alam was quoted as saying by The Hindu.

Alam contended that the move was part of a broader design to “impose uniformity on the Hindu society”.

Ahead of Bakrid, the Varanasi Municipal Corporation had closed down a decades-old goat market in the city, claiming that it had received complaints about overcrowding and poor sanitation.

Bakrid, also known as Eid al-Adha, is a Muslim festival that commemorates the spirit of sacrifice. The festival, which is traditionally marked by the slaughtering of goats, was observed on May 28.

Similar restrictions on the sale of meat have been proposed in other cities as well.

In April, the Haridwar Municipal Corporation approved a proposal to ban the sale of raw meat within city limits ahead of the Ardh Kumbh. The 45-day-long Ardh Kumbh will begin on January 14, 2027, the day of the Hindu festival of Makar Sankranti.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

In India and Bangladesh, two recent changes of government on either side of the border have brought two shared river systems into focus: the Ganges and the Teesta.

The Teesta, the tributary of the Brahmaputra river, which flows from the north-eastern Indian state of Sikkim, through West Bengal into Bangladesh, has been at the centre of a water-sharing stalemate for decades. The Ganges’ existing treaty is set to expire this year.

The first political change was Bangladesh’s newly elected government, formed by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which came into power in February 2026. India immediately made key gestures of consequence, such as the restoration of visa services.

It appointed Dinesh Trivedi, a veteran politician whose career has been spent in West Bengal, as the next envoy to Dhaka, signalling Delhi’s intent at direct engagement on sensitive bilateral issues and an effort to reset ties strained significantly by its harbouring of deposed prime minister Sheikh Hasina.

The second change was in India earlier in May, when the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party won elections in West Bengal, effectively securing power in most states bordering Bangladesh. The BJP win, its first in West Bengal, could create an effect described by some – especially the party itself – as a “double-engine government”, indicating the seamlessness that ostensibly comes with the same party ruling at both state and national level.

This political shift coincides with the central Indian government’s April 2026 initiation of a five-year River Basin Management (RBM) scheme for select transboundary, Himalayan river basins, including the Teesta and Ganges. The scheme is designed to promote basin-level planning for the sustainable use, protection and development of river resources, and covers potentially contentious issues such as planning for irrigation expansion, hydropower development and the interlinking of rivers; plans that are often sensitive subjects for neighbouring countries, such as downstream Bangladesh.

The political alignment of India’s central and state governments presents a unique and timely opportunity for a transboundary river governance reset, offering opportunities to gradually and systematically shift from the status quo. For instance, India’s central government can now take a stronger stance in its negotiations on water sharing with Bangladesh, where agreement between the central and state government, until recently run by Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress party, could not be reached previously.

While a unified governmental position helps facilitate coordination and implementation, political alignment alone might not be enough to secure a treaty, given structural issues such as water demand exceeding supply during the dry season in both countries. There are opportunities for both the Teesta and the Ganges, but there are also domestic caveats to overcome. What is required are innovations in governance and political will.

The Teesta deadlock

Bangladesh and India have twice come close to finalising a water-sharing agreement: in 2011, and again in 2017. On both occasions, Banerjee, then Chief Minister of West Bengal, opposed the deal, arguing in 2017 that the Teesta did not have enough water to share, offering water from other rivers instead.

In both instances, India’s central government administrations – Manmohan Singh’s United Progressive Alliance government in 2011, which Banerjee was in a coalition with until the next year, and Narendra Modi’s BJP government in 2017 – remained in a deadlock with Banerjee’s state government of 2011 to 2026. This reflected the central government’s hesitation in pushing an international water treaty.

Negotiations for dry-season water sharing of the Teesta started in the 1950s. In 1983, the two countries arrived at a temporary agreement for two years, which gave 39% of the water to India and 36% to Bangladesh, while the rest remained unallocated. However, Teesta’s mean dry season flow has, over time, declined and become highly variable due to factors such as land use change, upstream dam operations and a changing climate.

Both India and Bangladesh acknowledge that reduction in the Teesta’s flow has become a major impediment to meaningful negotiations, especially as it affects planned dry-season paddy cultivation in both countries. In 2005, the Joint River Commission, a bilateral working group to advance common interests including sharing of water resources, noted that any formula for sharing Teesta’s flows must be based on “shared sacrifices”. With neither side willing to make them, the stalemate remains protracted.

The concerns over Teesta are also anchored in issues of security and geopolitics. According to the RBM scheme’s press release, selected river basins have been prioritised due to their importance in India’s national water security and transboundary water management, indicating the growing strategic sensitivity of the Eastern Himalayan region which the Teesta and Ganges are connected to. This is especially relevant as Bangladesh seeks China’s support for Teesta restoration, adding a layer of diplomatic posturing.

As climate change-induced risks emerge, the new Indian political alignment could increase the likelihood of a more unified Indian stance on such shared river-related questions. These include action on mitigating glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) such as those in the Teesta river basin in 2023 that proved disastrous for both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Yet the alignment does not guarantee water cooperation, given the political tightrope the new government of West Bengal must walk. The BJP outlined holistic development of the state’s relatively economically weaker region of North Bengal, one of the party’s strongholds, as a key priority in its election manifesto. North Bengal is home to growing demands for developmental investment, as well as infrastructural and agricultural expansion. The region’s Teesta Barrage diverts water for irrigation and hydropower and plays an important role in supporting the area’s economic activities.

Such issues show that concerns over the Teesta are more than just a zero-sum contest over lean season flow. Instead, discussions should shift towards a shared understanding of water-related risks and other interdependencies. There have been attempts to undertake an India-Bangladesh joint scientific assessment of the Teesta, and the new political alignment in India presents an opportunity to revisit these.

A Ganges gesture?

The India-Bangladesh Ganges Water Sharing treaty is slated to expire by the end of 2026. The recently elected Bangladeshi government is expected to seek its renewal, potentially alongside obtaining a better deal while the two countries continue to engage through the Joint River Commission this year.

It has been widely reported that Bangladesh may request a guaranteed release of 40,000 cusecs (cubic feet per second) of water within the dry season period of February to May, an increase from 35,000 to reflect population growth and growing needs. The country could also seek a longer treaty renewal period and enhanced flood data sharing. BNP secretary general Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir recently remarked that improvement of bilateral relations with India “will depend on the signing of the Ganges Water Sharing Treaty”.

This is consistent with the historic water grievance that Bangladesh has had with India. Bangladesh has long argued that the 30-year-old treaty lacks an enforceable minimum water guarantee during the dry months when the country’s irrigation demand peaks. It contends that floodgates are mainly opened only during monsoon season when excess water aggravates conditions of flooding downstream. As climate change impacts worsen, these may become a larger issue for Bangladesh due to its position downstream.

To deal with these uncertainties, Dhaka recently approved the construction of the Padma Barrage, creating storage capacities downstream of West Bengal border town Farakka. But without a Ganges treaty in place, India is not obligated to release water and the project would only be able to provide a small amount of water during the dry season. This dooms the project to becoming an expensive science experiment.

Diplomatically, India’s central government is now in a better position to accept Bangladesh’s demands for the minimum exclusive use guarantee if it wishes to. This may pave the way for governance innovations addressing the realities and uncertainties along the Ganges created by climate change and the downstream ecosystems’ need for water. These are considerations that were not seen as a pressing need when the treaty-based regime was designed in the 1990s.

Favourable bilateral negotiations on the Ganges will hinge on a calm geopolitical landscape, with issues such as Bangladesh leaning on China as it did under the interim government of 2024-2026, and Hasina’s extradition, being potential sticking points. The Indian government has chosen to use water as a geopolitical tool in the past, as seen with Pakistan and the Indus treaty. It could always do so with the Ganges if tensions were to rise.

Domestically, the political alignment means the BJP in West Bengal could improve conditions in districts like Malda and Murshidabad, where stretches of the Ganges’ densely populated banks have faced unprecedented erosion due to controlled releases of water since the Farakka Barrage was built in the 1970s.

Funding of such anti-erosion works is now unlikely to be collateral damage in squabbles between central and state government. For the benefit of the shared delta downstream, water sharing negotiations must cater to these environmental risks and considerations, moving from the reductionist, volumetric water negotiation happening now, towards a framework agreement for long-term water- and livelihood-based environmental cooperation.

Federal coherence

India’s river basin management has long been constrained by its federal structure and multi-party system. The country’s water bureaucracy has largely focused on responding to domestic water insecurities while enhancing its dry season flows in the Teesta and Ganges through upstream storage and diversion barrages as well as river interlinking projects.

Against this backdrop, political reimagining might be a more pragmatic way forward. A few possible scenarios emerge from the political alignment. First, central government schemes for managing irrigation water demand can potentially be pursued more intensely to address lean season water demand.

Second, fiscal transfers and ad hoc discretionary grants from the central government become more likely. Together with a conducive state-level policy framework, this should enable investment in West Bengal that broadens the economic base, facilitating a shift away from water-intensive agriculture, and improving livelihood opportunities.

Lastly, initiatives like the RBM scheme, with sustained budget allocation, can be institutionalised at the state level to address environmental risks such as flooding, sedimentation and erosion control. Plans under the scheme would benefit from cordial, bilateral relations with treaty-bound arrangements in place, to dispel any potential downstream fears in Bangladesh.

These interrelated strands could usher in a more balanced approach to domestic concerns while providing space for transboundary water cooperation. For the first time, most of the Ganges and Teesta basin states are either directly governed by the BJP or part of BJP-led coalitions. This encourages inter-state cooperation and presents a rare opening to overcome institutional bottlenecks that have long hindered the holistic management of these transboundary river basins.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of their affiliated institutions.

Debarshee Dasgupta is a doctoral researcher at SOAS University of London and an associate at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.

Sayanangshu Modak is a doctoral researcher at the University of Arizona and research fellow at the Earth System Governance Project.

This article was originally published on Dialogue Earth under the Creative Commons BY NC ND licence.

Two six-month-old babies – one in London, the other in Delhi – are both fed Nestlé Cerelac. The same brand, the same cheerful yellow packaging, and the same promise of nutrition.

But the baby in Delhi gets nearly three grams of added sugar per serving, according to an investigation by the Swiss non-profit Public Eye, while the baby in London gets none.

The investigation, released in 2024, sparked global controversy. It found that baby food products sold by Nestlé in Asian and African markets had higher sugar levels compared to their European counterparts. Global health bodies have cautioned against added sugars for infants and children.

The multinational company denied the finding, claiming it had “a consistent approach to nutrition for all babies everywhere”. In India, Nestlé underscored the fact that it was “fully compliant” with Indian laws – a position the company reiterated in its response to Scroll’s questions in May.

Its spokesperson said that Cerelac “is in full and strict compliance with local regulations and standards” under both the Food Safety and Standards Authority, as well as the Bureau of Indian Standards, and that this extends to “the requirements of all nutrients including added sugars”. This was echoed by India’s health ministry in parliament: it said the product “was found to be in compliance with the provisions”.

But the 2024 controversy seems to have had an impact.

As the Nestlé statement to Scroll noted, that year, it introduced a variant “with no refined sugar, which now forms a majority of the Cerelac range in India”. It added, “Some variants with the original recipes continue to be available to offer a choice to consumers.”

This is not an isolated case.

Walk down any supermarket aisle in India and you will find Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, a popular breakfast cereal for children, on the shelves. In 2016, a global survey of 19 breakfast cereals across 29 countries found that the version of Kellog’s Corn Flakes sold in India had the highest salt content in the world. In Argentina and Brazil, the same product contained 46% less salt.

Five years later, Kellogg’s European arm pledged to make its children’s cereals healthier. “Without affecting taste, at least 20 per cent of salt will be removed from its cereals by the end of 2022,” the company announced in its Wellbeing Manifesto for European consumers. “Again, without affecting taste, sugar will decrease by 10 per cent across the same time frame in cereals aimed at children,” it added.

In India, it made no such pledge. Questions emailed to the company remain unanswered at the time of publication.

But an investigation by Scroll revealed that it is not only corporations who bear the responsibility for the poor nutritional standards of such products in India.

In 2017, the Modi government launched an ambitious plan to target foods high in fat, salt and sugar, commonly known as HFSS. Eight years later, key aspects of the plan remain on paper.

In official documents, the government frequently described foods as HFSS, or “high in fats, sugar and salt”. Despite this, “the government is yet to implement a legally binding definition” of the term, Dr Arun Gupta of Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest pointed out. “The main problem with Indian food safety standards is that they are ineffective and vague,” he said.

Further, the government is yet to put in place regulations to curb the marketing and promotion of these foods, show internal and public records Scroll reviewed.

The latest Economic Survey made its apprehension over existing policies to tackle unhealthy foods clear. “Policies have so far focused on advocacy to reduce consumption of foods high in added fats, sugar, and sodium, many of which are UPFs (Ultra Processed Foods),” it noted. “However, improving diets cannot depend solely on consumer behaviour change; it will require coordinated policies across food systems that regulate UPF production, promote healthier and more sustainable diets and marketing.”

Gupta noted, “With no regulation, we are witnessing a meteoric rise in the consumption of HFSS and ultra processed foods. The rise in non-communicable diseases is linked directly to this.”

He added, “The government’s inability to regulate the promotion of these foods is leading to a public health crisis.”

Scroll emailed the Food Safety and Standards Authority, the health ministry, the information and broadcasting ministry, seeking responses to criticisms that the government has not done enough to regulate the marketing of unhealthy packaged foods. This story will be updated if they respond.

Unhealthy packaged food is fuelling an epidemic of lifestyle diseases in India. The government knows this. But its measures to regulate the industry are falling short. This series, based on previously unpublished internal documents, takes a hard look at this failure.

A health crisis

India is seeing a rapid rise in lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, blood pressure and heart conditions, which fall under the broader umbrella of non-communicable diseases.

A government report said non-communicable diseases accounted for over 60% deaths in the country in 2015.

The last Economic Survey linked their rise to the “more than 150 per cent” growth of the ultraprocessed foods market in India between 2009 and 2023.

Ultraprocessed foods are factory-manufactured food products with few or no whole food ingredients. While they are often high in fat, salt and sugar, they also typically contain chemical additives and flavours. Children who consume sugary treats and salt-smothered crisps are especially vulnerable to developing lifestyle diseases.

It was these concerns that prompted the Modi government to put in place an inter-ministerial plan in 2017 as part of a wider roadmap it had devised to curb the surge of non-communicable diseases in India.

Called the National Multisectoral Action Plan, it included proposed measures to reduce air pollution and alcohol consumption, promote walking and rein in foods high in fat, salt and sugar.

The plan recommended a range of interventions, to be implemented by 2025, to check the rising consumption of these foods.

Ambitious targets

Under the plan, the health ministry established expert committees, taskforces, and technical advisory groups to tackle the problem of HFSS foods, along with the problems of tobacco, alcohol, and air pollution.

Among the measures the plan called for was the raising of taxes on HFSS food products and non-alcoholic sugar-sweetened beverages, under the goods and services tax regime, to reduce consumption – a so-called “sin tax” approach that mirrored the strategy used to curb the use of tobacco and alcohol.

This measure was not implemented in the years that followed. In January 2026, the Economic Survey noted, “the possibility of introducing the highest slab of GST and a surcharge on UPFs which exceed thresholds for sugar, salt, or fat could be explored”.

But in March 2026, nearly a decade after the action plan was launched, the government admitted in parliament, “There is no separate treatment for GST rates on ultra-processed foods and foods High in Fat, Sugar or Salt (HFSS).”

The action plan also called for the introduction of “interpretative front-of-pack-labelling” – that is, an easy-to-understand labelling system at the front face of the packaging that informs consumers of the product’s nutrition profile, and so can help them move away from HFSS foods.

Along these lines, in September 2022, the Food Safety and Standards Authority published draft regulations for labelling food products, in which it proposed a star-rating system. The system would rate “the overall nutritional profile for packaged food by assigning it a rating from ½ star (least healthy) to 5 stars (healthiest)”, the draft regulations noted.

But this proposal was challenged in the Supreme Court. Experts cautioned that under the proposed system, a company could add a few healthy ingredients, like nuts, to a product high in sugar or fat, to increase its health rating. Meanwhile, the fundamental problem, of curbing high sugar, fat and salt consumption, could remain unaddressed.

Public health organisations instead demanded mandatory warning labels that more specifically cautioned consumers when foods were high in saturated fats, salt and sugar.

The case is ongoing. In February 2026, the Supreme Court rapped the Food Safety and Standards Authority, noting that the issue was “important” and related to “the right to health of the citizens of this country”. It observed that “whatever exercise has been undertaken so far has not yielded any positive or good result”.

The 2022 draft notification also suggested a legally enforceable definition of an HFSS food. Specifically, it was to refer to a product that “does not satisfy the value of energy (kcal) from total sugar less than 10 percent of total energy, or from saturated fat 10 percent of total energy, and sodium less than 1 mg/1 kcal.”

Four years on, with no definition still in place, the Economic Survey noted, “UPF (ultra-processed foods) may be defined in addition to HFSS”.

Scroll emailed the health ministry, seeking its responses to claims that there had been inadequate progress on tackling the problem of HFSS foods. This story will be updated if it responds.

The marketing challenge

Another challenge flagged in the Economic Survey is related to how HFSS foods were promoted. “Adolescents exposed to unhealthy food and beverage advertising showed a high desire and intention to consume the advertised foods,” it observed.

The 2017 action plan had, in fact, proposed steps to regulate the advertising, marketing and promotion of unhealthy food to children, through amendments to the Cable Television Networks Rules and relevant trademark regulations.

The plan was candid about what it would take to meet its target of halting obesity by 2025: “high-level political commitment, sustained investment of resources and the concerted involvement of governments, communities and other stakeholders in society”.

While front-of-pack-labelling has garnered much-needed public attention, the issue of reforming Indian food advertising has taken a back seat. While the 2026 Economic Survey does note the importance of regulating marketing of HFSS foods, it omits a crucial detail – that the government took up the matter, but did not see it through.

At an interministerial meeting held in June 2018, chaired by a health ministry official, the ministry of information and broadcasting was given a slew of “action points” aimed at minimising the risk of HFSS foods. Scroll accessed a copy of the minutes of the meeting, obtained via a right-to-information request.

The action points included amending existing advertisement regulations “to include regulation of advertisement of High in Fats, Salt, Sugar” foods, so as to reduce their “exposure to children”. The minutes note that the information and broadcasting ministry stated that the idea “can be explored”.

The action points also included “advocacy with media and entertainment industry to allocate free airtime and space for health promotion”, with a particular focus on risks of non-communicable diseases. The ministry agreed to consider this, while noting that it could pose a challenge when it came to private media houses.

The proposals mirrored regulations in countries like the United Kingdom which, in 2022, imposed sweeping curbs on how HFSS products are advertised.

But in 2024, when researchers from Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest filed right-to-information requests asking the information and broadcasting ministry about the proposed amendments, its response, which Scroll has reviewed, was telling.

The ministry only said it “ensures” that advertisements telecast on private satellite TV channels are “in adherence to the Advertising Code prescribed under Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995”.

It added, “No advertisements shall be carried which endangers the safety of children or creates in them any interest in unhealthy practises.”

Gupta noted that there had been “no amendment of advertising regulations even though it was a part of the national multisectoral action plan”. He added, “This is a clear failure of the government’s duty. If they believe existing regulation is enough to curb non-communicable diseases then they should come clean on their logic and share data with the public.”

A progress report from later in 2018, also procured through right-to-information requests, on the action points pertaining to the regulation of HFSS foods suggested that the ministry had not moved forward with plans to put in place the legal framework that had been discussed. It was instead relying on the Advertising Standards Council of India, an industry-led body, to do this work, noting that its guidelines stated “that caution and care should be observed” in advertisements, particularly of HHSS foods.

Scroll emailed the ministry of information and broadcasting to ask whether it intended to follow through on plans to amend regulations pertaining to marketing and advertisements. This story will be updated if it replies.

Missing standards

Many experts argue that the government’s failure to curb the marketing of foods high in fat, salt and sugar begins with its failure to enforce threshold levels for these ingredients.

Faced with regulatory gaps, Indian nutrition and public health experts published an analysis of 43 products’ claims and their ingredients. These included confectionery, baked goods, beverages, savoury snacks and pasta and noodles. They found that based on a nutrient profile model established by the World Health Organisation, “all 43 products exceeded the cut-off limits of at least one nutrient of concern”. Specifically, the analysis by the Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest found that “total sugars were high in 31 products, total fat was high in 29 products, and sodium was high in 19 products”.

Consider Nestle’s instant noodle product, Maggi. According to the analysis by nutrition experts, the noodles have over 1,000 mg sodium per 100 g serving – almost half of the entire recommended daily intake for an average adult. Meanwhile, Maggi’s competitor, ITC’s Yipee noodles, contains more than 1,200 mg sodium per 100 g.

In an emailed response to queries from Scroll, a Nestle India spokesperson said that the “sodium content in one serving (70 g) of Maggi Masala noodles is 700 mg, meeting approximately 35% of the Recommended Dietary Allowance.” They added, “It’s important to note that Maggi Noodles are intended to be enjoyed as light (small) meals as part of a balanced, diversified diet, and the sodium contribution is similar to that of other common recipes consumed, such as paratha, pav bhaji etc.”

The report by the nutrition experts also detailed the ways in which the marketing and advertisements of products violated different regulations and guidelines, such as by concealing important information, and making claims without evidence.

Popular brands of chips, juices, cereals, and fizzy drinks all made it to the list of products that the Nutrition Advocacy for Public Interest flagged, all while being promoted by celebrities.

In the United Kingdom, such marketing would have been subject to stringent controls. The government uses a nutrient profiling model to calculate a score that balances harmful and beneficial nutrients. Products that exceed specified thresholds face restrictions on how they can be marketed – for instance, on their promotion in retail stores, and the time slots on television in which their ad campaigns are allowed to run.

In India, the fact that the government has entrusted the problem to the Advertising Standards Council of India means that the only recourse for a concerned parent would be to write to the industry-led body’s consumer complaints committee.

This committee includes executives from Kelloggs India, a company that has made headlines for high sodium in its India products. It also included executives from Dabur, which, we found, is under official scrutiny – India’s food safety regulator has flagged several Dabur products for making misleading claims. More on this in the next report in this series.

In the next report in this investigative series, we take a closer look at the problem of misleading claims made by food manufacturers. And we ask: has India’s food regulator, the FSSAI, has done enough to curb them?

Nepali Foreign Minister Shisir Khanal said on Sunday that Kathmandu was focused on resolving any border disputes with India bilaterally and had not sought third-party mediation in the matter.

He added that Nepal had also communicated to India, via diplomatic channels, its claims over the Kalapani-Limpiadhura-Lipulekh region.

India maintains that the area is part of Uttarakhand and has rejected Kathmandu’s territorial claims to the region.

Khanal’s statement on Sunday came while he was addressing a press conference at the Nepali embassy in New Delhi.

He was responding to a question about Nepal Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s statement that Kathmandu had held discussions with China and the United Kingdom regarding the Kalapani-Limpiadhura-Lipulekh region.

On May 31, Shah said his country had held discussions about the dispute with China, as the region sits near the trijunction of India, Tibet and Nepal.

“Our view is that the UK should also take an interest, as the issue dates back to the period when British India left the region,” said the Nepali prime minister.

On June 2, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that there is no role for any third party in bilateral matters between India and Nepal.

India and Nepal have established bilateral mechanisms to deal with all aspects of boundary matters, added ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal.

Khanal said on Sunday that Kathmandu wants to “solve our disputes through diplomatic processes”.

“We just want to see if we can access some of the documents that might be in libraries or museums in the UK,” he said. “However, this does not mean that we have sought mediation. That is not what he [Shah] intended to convey.”

Border problems with Nepal

The border problem between India and Nepal began in 2019 after Kathmandu objected to a new map released by India, which showed the Kalapani area as part of Indian territory.

In response, New Delhi said that it had not made any change to its border with Nepal and that the new map depicts Indian territory accurately.

The tensions escalated in May 2020 when Defence Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated a new route for the Kailash Mansarovar Yatra through the Lipulekh Pass.

Nepal has repeatedly claimed that India’s decision to build the road was a breach of an agreement between the two countries. It claims the Lipulekh Pass on the basis of a treaty signed with British colonisers in 1816.

Edited by Sneha.

The Rajasthan High Court has set aside the order suspending a government school teacher for posting allegedly objectionable comments about a minister on social media, Bar and Bench reported on Saturday.

In an order issued on May 12, Justice Farjand Ali held that the action against Lal Singh Chouhan, a Class 3 teacher, was legally unsustainable.

Chouhan was suspended by the Banswara district education officer on September 23. A chargesheet issued the same day alleged that he had posted inappropriate comments on WhatsApp that tarnished the image of a minister and the education department, Live Law reported.

Challenging the order, the teacher argued before the High Court that the action was arbitrary, beyond the officer’s jurisdiction and not supported by the 1958 Rajasthan Civil Services Classification, Control and Appeal Rules, according to Bar and Bench.

Agreeing with this, the court said that even if the allegations were assumed to be true, they could not justify bypassing the statutory framework governing suspension.

The judge observed that allegations of damaging a minister’s image did not give the administration “unbridled authority” to suspend an employee.

“Administrative convenience or subjective perception cannot supplant mandatory legal requirements,” the court said.

It added: “The district education officer is indeed a statutory functionary, but certainly not the ruler of a dynasty empowered to govern according to personal predilections or administrative absolutism.”

The state had also failed to identify any statutory basis for the action, said the judge.

The court rejected the argument that the teacher’s conduct justified suspension because it allegedly harmed institutional discipline and public perception. It held that such allegations could form the basis of a departmental inquiry conducted in accordance with law and ordered that Chouhan be reinstated immediately with all benefits.

Edited by Sneha.

Aaj Tak journalist and managing editor Anjana Om Kashyap and TV Today Network, the owner of the news channel, have filed a defamation suit in the Delhi High Court against Bihar educator and YouTuber Faizal Khan, popularly known as Khan Sir, reported Live Law on Sunday.

Demanding Rs 2 crore in damages, Kashyap and the network have alleged that Khan made defamatory remarks about her after she criticised online educators during a broadcast about the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical college admissions.

Kashyap had reportedly accused online educators of being frauds and said that they had been commenting on matters beyond their understanding.

In a video, Khan then accused Kashyap of spreading fake news and being a “broker” for the government.

The development came amid allegations of widespread mismanagement of the 2026 NEET-UG and the Common University Entrance Test-Undergraduate for admissions into undergraduate programmes in central universities.

On May 12, the testing agency cancelled the exam following fresh allegations of a paper leak. More than 22 lakh candidates had appeared for the test that was conducted on May 3.

Separately, the CBSE’s On-Screen Marking evaluation process for evaluating Class 12 answer sheets had come under criticism in the past two weeks following complaints about alleged glitches and irregularities during the evaluation process.

Many students had alleged that the scanned copies of answer sheets uploaded by the CBSE did not match their handwriting, raising concerns about possible answer sheet mismatches.

Students seeking re-evaluation also alleged that they faced portal failures, delays in payment confirmation and, in some cases, were asked to pay excess fees because of technical glitches.

In their petition, Kashyap and the TV Today Network have sought that Khan remove the allegedly defamatory material from social media platforms, reported Live Law.

The matter will be heard on Monday by a vacation bench of Justice Neena Bansal Krishna.

Edited by Sneha.

The Cockroach Janta Party will be “forced to continue” its protest if Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan is not removed or does not resign within seven days, said the founder of the satirical political campaign, Abhijeet Dipke, on Sunday.

His statement came a day after the Cockroach Janta Party launched a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to demand Pradhan’s resignation over alleged mismanagement in the conduct of competitive exams.

“Yesterday, thousands of us made history,” Dipke said in a social media post. “Our peaceful protest at Jantar Mantar showed the government a trailer of what cockroaches are capable of when we unite.”

He added: “But this doesn't end here.”

Speaking to reporters from Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district later, Dipke said the “agitation would go nationwide”, reported PTI.

“We will roll out a further action plan to take this agitation nationwide,” the news agency quoted him as saying.

The protest on Saturday had been held in the wake of the cancellation of the undergraduate National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical college admissions following allegations of a paper leak.

Students and job seekers have also alleged irregularities in the Class 12 exam conducted by the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Staff Selection Commission test for government posts.

The Cockroach Janta Party describes itself as a “political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth”.

It was launched on May 16 in response to reports of remarks by Chief Justice Surya Kant on the previous day comparing some unemployed youngsters to “cockroaches”. Since then, the campaign has garnered more than 22 million followers on Instagram.

The chief justice claimed on May 16 that he had been misquoted by sections of the media and that it was baseless to say that he criticised young people in general. Kant claimed he had specifically criticised “those who have entered professions like the Bar [legal profession] with the aid of fake and bogus degrees”.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• ‘They have sold themselves’: At ‘cockroach’ gathering in Delhi, protestors rage against the system
• Does Abhijeet Dipke’s popularity signal a new age of Dalit leaders?

Four former ministers from the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam quit the party and joined the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam on Saturday, The Hindu reported.

They are MC Sampath, NR Sivapathi, Kadambur C Raju and Udumalai K Radhakrishnan. Except for Sivapathi, the other three had contested and lost the Assembly elections in May.

Sampath had contested from the Cuddalore constituency, Raju had contested from Kovilpatti in the Thoothukudi district and Radhakrishnan was in the fray from Udumalpet in the Tiruppur district.

All four of them had served as ministers under AIADMK leaders J Jayalalithaa and Edappadi K Palaniswamy. On Saturday, they joined Tamil Nadu’s ruling party at its headquarters in Panaiyur on the outskirts of Chennai.

Former Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam MLA J Karunanidhi also joined the TVK along with them, India Today reported.

The TVK, led by Chief Minister Vijay, formed the government with the support of the Congress, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and the Indian Union Muslim League.

The DMK won 59 seats, while the AIADMK won 47 constituencies.

Vijay took oath as chief minister on May 10, and the TVK won a floor test three days later.

During the floor test, 25 AIADMK MLAs led by former ministers CV Shanmugam and SP Velumani voted in favour of the new government. Of the 25, four MLAs – Maragatham Kumaravel, Sathyabama P, Jayakumar S and Esakki Subaya – resigned from the party and joined the TVK the same day.

Twenty-two MLAs led by former Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami had voted against the government.

This had led to a rift within the AIADMK, with MLAs from the two groups filing disqualification petitions against each other. However, on May 27, the two groups arrived at a truce, and withdrew the disqualification petitions.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

At least 731 internally displaced persons living in relief camps and pre-fabricated houses built as temporary shelters in Manipur have died since ethnic violence broke out in the state in May 2023, Times of India reported on Sunday, quoting information disclosed under the Right to Information Act.

The information was provided by the state home department to writer and political activist Hareshwar Goshwami on Friday after the Manipur Information Commission directed the disclosure.

Official figures compiled from district administrations show that displaced people have died across relief camps and temporary settlements in nine districts.

Churachandpur recorded the highest number of deaths at 248, followed by Bishnupur (151), Kangpokpi (128), Imphal West (94), Kakching (60), Imphal East (25), Jiribam (13), Thoubal (11) and Tengnoupal (1), The Times of India reported.

The data also recorded 25 unnatural deaths among the displaced persons. Churachandpur accounted for six of these cases, including four drownings, one electrocution and one sexual assault case that resulted in an arrest.

Imphal West reported four unnatural deaths, including two cases of death by hanging, one case of substance overdose and one fatal bullet injury, according to the newspaper.

The RTI response also indicates that more than 43,000 persons remain displaced and continue to reside in relief camps nearly three years after the conflict began.

As of April 30, Kangpokpi had the largest displaced population with 15,694 persons, followed by Bishnupur with 10,092 and Churachandpur with 6,365.

The data further highlights ongoing health concerns among displaced residents. Imphal East reported 217 camp residents suffering from terminal or incurable illnesses, while Imphal West and Bishnupur reported 41 and 26 such cases, according to The Times of India.

Ethnic clashes had broken out between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities in Manipur in May 2023. According to official estimates in April 2025, the violence has left at least 260 people dead. The conflict has seen periodic spikes in violence in 2024 and 2025.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief MK Stalin on Saturday claimed that his party allowed alliance partners in the state to support actor-politician Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam with the “sole intention of preventing the imposition of President's rule in the state,” PTI reported.

The former chief minister said he had not opposed the decision of the alliance parties to back the TVK because he believed the imposition of President’s Rule “could have paved the way for BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) rule” in the state.

“But soon, we must take a pledge to bring down the TVK government,” The Hindu quoted him as further saying.

Speaking at an event in Chennai where he welcomed former All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam members into the DMK, Stalin said leaders of the alliance parties had informed him before extending support to the TVK after the Assembly election results.

He said he told them: “You may go, it is your choice and your democratic right; I will not stop you.”

He added that the current government was “in a way, being sustained by our support because our former alliance partners are backing it,” The Hindu reported.

While the Vijay-led TVK emerged as the single-largest party in the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections, it had fallen short of the majority mark by 10 seats. It formed the government with the support of the Congress, the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi and the Indian Union Muslim League.

Congress informed DMK before backing TVK: Chidambaram

Congress leader P Chidambaram said on Saturday that the party had informed the DMK leadership before extending support to the TVK after the Assembly election results, Puthiyathalaimurai News reported.

“We want to prevent another election if TVK failed to secure majority in the House,” he said. “This was wider feeling among alliance partners. Even people do not want another elections.”

Chidambaram said that the Congress had informed all alliance partners, including the CPI, VCK and IUML, of its decision to support the TVK government.

He added that “the only difference is that we have announced the support to TVK one day before allies did”.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The 18th-century portrait of an East India Company official, by the artist Dip Chand, contains a detail that one might easily miss. The ornate hookah with its coiled pipe is obvious as the Englishman, likely to be William Fullerton, reclines on a richly carpeted platform, as Indian attendants, two of them holding fans, stand around him.

But placed prominently before Fullerton is a pāndān, a spittoon and vessels, likely containing lime, areca nut, or aromatics, arranged with deliberate care. A rosewater sprinkler and itr container complete the ensemble. These objects signal that chewing paan was an accepted component of elite sociability.

The spittoon, within easy reach, acknowledges the bodily process associated with paan while containing it within the codes of courtly decorum.

In pre-colonial artwork of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, paan appears across canvases as an integral element of courtly culture and elite status. In these images, the paraphernalia associated with paan – the betel box (pāndān), spittoon (pīkdān) and implements used to prepare the leaf – are part of a carefully ordered constellation of objects that structured elite social interaction.

Paintings and written accounts from the pre-colonial years show that European travellers to the subcontinent, growing in number as colonial ambitions expanded, were curious about social and cultural practices.

Over the years, as colonial trade and exchange gave way to administrative control, English perceptions of hygiene, sanitation and conduct meant that paan was increasingly condemned by colonial officials as an unsanitary, “native” habit.

Paan began to fade from social life and canvas, reflecting its trajectory from a practice of curiosity – that Europeans wrote of chewing and trying themselves – to an ethnographic detail and finally to a perfunctory observation.

Paan in the royal courts

Like the image of Fullerton, a depiction of David Ochterlony, the British resident in Delhi’s Mughal court shows the pāndān and spittoon on the carpet while he smokes a hookah and watches a nautch performance.

The painting seems like a deliberate attempt to capture the lives of “White Mughals”. However,the durbar scene with objects of leisure and opulence – the carpet, the nautch, hookah and the etiquette of paan – do hint at the significance of each of these seemingly innocuous objects.

Paan is embedded in an environment of leisure and sensory refinement in both artworks. An early 18th-century painting of a courtly gathering shows writing implements, paper-trimming tools, floral offerings, and paan paraphernalia arranged on the carpet between the host and guests.

Juxtaposing intellectual tools with objects of consumption signals a culture of etiquette in which conversation, hospitality and bodily pleasure were inseparable. Paan, in such images, is a part of sociability and cultivated leisure.

Paan appears in scenes that are not explicitly concerned with courtly ceremony. In the 16th-century Mughal painting from the Tuti-nama series, depicting Khujasta awaiting a romantic evening while her parrot delays her through storytelling, there is a bowl of prepared paan in the composition.

Though unmentioned in the text, the presence of paan signals anticipation and sensory readiness, linking it to romance. In the Kamasutra of Vatsyayana, offering of paan was seen as the initiation of steps leading towards the moments of pleasure.

Across such artworks, paan and its associated implements are present within the scene but rarely named – their meanings operate tacitly within shared cultural codes.

Travel accounts, like that of Thomas Roe in the early 17th century, reflect upon the ceremonial symbolism of paan. Roe, the English envoy to Mughal Emperor Jahangir, wrote that the emperor once offered him paan from his own betel box, a gesture of exceptional honor.

Courtly etiquette to ethnographic detail

In 19th-century colonial imagery, paan and its paraphernalia start becoming an ethnographic detail. Paan shifts from being a marker of courtly etiquette and sociability to a cultural habit that is classified and documented.

The writings and illustrations of James Forbes are an early example of this transition. Forbes made drawings of the betel plant and the areca nut with detailed descriptions: he writes of the areca nut – “better known as suparee” – as resembling a large nutmeg enclosed within a membranous covering and growing upon a tall, slender trunk crowned with graceful branches.

Beyond botanical description, Forbes also noted the social uses of paan. He observed that most Indians carried paan in small boxes – like Europeans carried tobacco. Paan was offered to visitors during social calls and served throughout the day as a sign of hospitality.

On ceremonial occasions the areca nut was sliced thin, mixed with cardamom and lime, folded into a betel leaf, and secured with a clove. The prepared leaves were presented on silver trays by attendants to each member of the company. Forbes remarked that offering paan at the end of a visit served as a subtle signal that it was time for guests to depart.

Such descriptions record the symbolism of paan while translating it into categories legible to European readers. In colonial visual culture, this process intensified as artists began depicting paan as a discrete ethnographic object.

In images such as A Hindoo Man of Rank eating Pawn by Charles D’Oyly, chewing paan is detached from the social interactions that previously structured it. The man is alone, surrounded by the identifiable paraphernalia of paan consumption – the betel box and spittoon.

Similarly, representations of paan vendors foreground their occupation rather than social exchange. Here, the preparation of paan becomes a craft rather than a part of hospitality rituals, especially among the elite.

Such images reflect a broader colonial impulse to visually catalogue Indian customs, transforming practices of social relationships into ethnographic data.

In a series of works from Thanjavur dating to the 1840s, occupational couples – such as a Sikh soldier and his wife or a Jain horse groom and his wife – are depicted with the wife offering betel to her husband. The act of presenting paan becomes the defining feature of these images, reduced to a labeled cultural type.

The history of paan

The linguistic history of paan shows that its cultural circulation is wide, shaped by currents of trade and exchange in the Indian subcontinent. The many names of paan reflect its geographical and cultural spread.

The Anglo-Indian dictionary Hobson-Jobson says that the word paan derives from the Sanskrit parṇa, meaning “leaf”. Another Sanskrit term, tāmbūla, became tambul in Persian and al-tambul in Arabic. Betel sellers in North India were known as tambolis or tamolis.

The word supari for areca nut is derived from the Sanskrit supriya, meaning “pleasant”. In the Malabar region, the nut became known as areca, a term adopted by the Portuguese. Gujarati and Deccani usage rendered it as suparji. Among the Marathas, a prepared roll of betel leaf filled with areca nut and lime was known as kali, meaning “bud.” The Malayalam word vettila, meaning “leaf,” entered Portuguese usage as betle or betre.

Indigenous to South Asia and Southeast Asia, the betel plant was cultivated in humid conditions, with ritual observances. In parts of Bengal, for instance, owners of betel vineries were required to bathe before entering them, while women in states of ritual impurity were forbidden to approach the plants.

Beyond the subcontinent, offering of betel had distinct cultural meanings. In the Malay world, the presentation of “sirih” was a formal gesture of apology for serious offenses. In Sri Lanka, paan was believed to provide digestive and medicinal benefits. Classical Indian texts also recommended consuming betel leaves after meals and prescribed them for ailments ranging from headaches to swollen glands.

In colonial archives, these layers were flattened. By the early 20th century, colonial attitudes had already been reshaping the perception of paan.

In a 1923 essay, English author EM Forster contrasted the curiosity early European travellers had for paan with the moral disdain later exhibited by Anglo-Indian society. Forster described paan as a mild sacrament that enabled sociability in a society marked by strict dietary restrictions.

He emphasised the grace with which an Indian hostess prepared and presented paan, treating it as an art form comparable – if not superior – to the celebrated ritual of English tea. He also admired the craftsmanship of traditional paandaan, suggesting that Western spice boxes might even have been inspired by betel boxes.

By the 19th century, the material culture of paan in India was being transformed. The decline of princely courts weakened patronage that supported elaborate metalwork for the paandaan and spittoons.

The rise of colonial bureaucratic institutions imposed new norms of bodily discipline and spatial regulation. The spittoon, once an accepted fixture of elite gatherings, had no place within the sanitised interiors of colonial offices. Its disappearance from public spaces signaled a subtle yet significant reordering of bodily practices.

Paan continued to be consumed in domestic and informal settings, but the visible traces of its consumption were being excised from environments governed by colonial standards of hygiene and propriety.

Paintings from the late 18th and early 19th century reflect these changes.

In some depictions of durbars influenced by European conventions – where chairs replace carpets and the space bears resemblance to English aristocratic settings – the traditional paraphernalia of paan is conspicuously absent.

But the etiquette of paan represented an enduring form of shared human pleasure. Whether offered in a Mughal court, exchanged among guests in a household, or depicted in a painting, paan was a social and cultural symbol of hospitality and refinement, one that colonial frameworks misunderstood or reduced to a spectacle.

Sonal is Assistant Professor of History at Motilal Nehru College and currently a Fulbright Scholar at Kenyon College, Ohio.

When I met Helle Lyng Svendsen in Oslo this Monday, she was writing about the proposed upgrade of Norway’s busiest train station. “They want to build the station all over again, as a tall tower,” she explained. “And many don’t like the idea.”

In her current job at the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen, Svendsen covers “labour markets and regular people’s lives”. But the 28-year-old journalist has previously reported from the United States, where she door-stepped politicians and even posed questions to Donald Trump.

In May, when she heard that India’s prime minister was coming to Oslo for a state visit, she could not resist pitching an idea to her editor: how about asking him a question? She knew his reputation for avoiding press conferences.

“My boss said just do it at the best possible time,” she recounted, with a smile. “I said there won’t ever be a great time. But I will find the most comfortable one.”

And so, on May 18, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi walked off the stage after shaking hands with his Norwegian counterpart, Svendsen’s voice rang out behind him. “Prime Minister Modi, why don’t you take some questions from the freest press in the world?”

The young journalist captured the moment on her camera and posted the video on X. “I was like maybe it could reach some people in India,” she said.

When I last checked, the video had over 11 million views on X.

Primeminister of India, Narendra Modi, would not take my question, I was not expecting him to.

Norway has the number one spot on the World Press Freedom Index, India is at 157th, competing with Palestine, Emirates & Cuba.

It is our job to question the powers we cooperate… pic.twitter.com/vZHYZnAvev

— Helle Lyng (@HelleLyngSvends) May 18, 2026

By attempting to corner Modi, Svendsen had ended up sparking a firestorm about press freedom in India. In the process, she had also become a target of online harassment. She was called a foreign spy. Some accused her of being on the payroll of China, others linked her to the Congress party in India.

On social media, trolls dug out her personal photos, which left her amused. “I was like, you have way too many photos of yourself with a glass of wine out there, why do you have so many?” she laughed. “Some of them, I hadn't even published myself, I had been tagged on them by friends. But they found them, which is impressive.”

Svendsen’s phone number and address were also leaked online, which got her mother worried about her safety. “No one is going to come from India to be mad at me,” she reassured her mother.

In case the people making edits of me would like other photos of me than my holiday photos, here is one from the 17th of May last Sunday.

Freedom of expression, press freedom and participation in democracy was vital when the Constitution was established.

I am wearing my… pic.twitter.com/DgB7LVOmdb

— Helle Lyng (@HelleLyngSvends) May 20, 2026

But it was not just trolls on social media. Journalists from Indian TV channels also took a hostile line of questioning while interviewing her. “I did not want to be rude and say maybe you should start grilling your politicians,” Svendsen said.

She added: “Ideally, in the Indian media, it should have been about Modi being pressed, not about me. But they made it about me.”

As a reporter in the US, Svendsen said she used to be fascinated with the American media, but she has now concluded that “the Indian media is American media on steroids”. “Right-wing platforms there will do critical coverage of the Iran war – not so much as the CNN does, but they will still do it,” she explained. “But in India, it feels like there is no critical coverage from these giant channels.”

Not that she thinks everything is perfect with the Norwegian press. In particular, she is disappointed with the way it covers visiting foreign leaders. “There is so much investigative journalism going on in Norway, with journalists trying to make sure politicians don’t get the easy way out,” she said. “But there is just something about a state visit that makes everyone go a little, ‘oh yeah, we’re just here to watch.”

She rejects this conservative approach. “We are not there to just take notes and transcribe them,” she said.

As I sat speaking to her, I was impressed by her clarity of thought. We were meeting on the sidelines of the Oslo Freedom Forum, where I had met scores of outstanding activists, journalists and writers, many of whom had spent decades challenging authoritarianism in their countries. But there was something about Svendsen’s steadfastness that moved me.

She had never experienced a stifling of freedom – she lived and worked in a country where journalists could easily access the corridors of power and go up to the prime minister, or any other politician, and ask a question. And yet she knew the value of press freedom and cared enough to stand up for others who did not have it.

I was also struck by how open and accountable she had been, responding to even hostile questions thrown at her. Like many other young journalists, she had a natural ease with social media – and she put it to good use. When Congress leader Rahul Gandhi shared her post on X, she immediately wrote back to him to ask for an interview. He did not reply. “It would have been fun if he did,” she laughed.

But what impressed me the most was that like all good journalists, Svendsen was quietly working on follow-up stories linked to Modi’s visit. We exchanged notes, like journalists often do, and concluded that, who knows, maybe in the future, we could even collaborate on something.

On that exciting note, we walked out of our meeting room into the courtyard of the Oslo Concert Hall, where people who had come to attend the forum milled about.

An attendee from the Indian diaspora came up to Svendsen and asked: “Are you the journalist who asked Modi a question?” She nodded, looking a bit embarrassed. “Thank you so much,” the man said effusively, adding quickly: “I won’t be able to say this in India.”

An Indian-born female cheetah died on Saturday died while undergoing treatment at a veterinary facility in Palpur in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park.

The 27-month-old cheetah, officially named KGP11, was found injured near the Pahargarh area of the Morena district on June 1. It was then taken to the veterinary facility at Palpur within the national park for treatment.

“Despite all efforts by the veterinary and field teams, it succumbed to injuries this evening,” Cheetah Project Field Director Uttam Sharma said in a press release. “Post-mortem examination will be conducted tomorrow on 7th June. The exact cause of death will be known after the post-mortem examination report is received.”

This was the 23rd death of a cheetah in India since the animals were reintroduced in the country.

There are now a total of 52 cheetahs in India, of whom 49 are in the Kuno National Park and three are in the Gandhi Sagar Sanctuary.

Of the cheetahs in the Kuno National Park, 32 are Indian-born ones. “Out of these, 19 cheetahs are currently ranging freely in the wild,” the field director said. “All remaining cheetahs are healthy and doing well.”

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.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read: India’s male cheetahs are wandering far beyond Kuno, raising questions about rewilding project

“Inquilab zindabad! Vande mataram! Jai Bhim!” Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke shouted a few minutes past noon on Saturday at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. Long live the revolution! I bow to you, my motherland! Victory to Bhimrao Ambedkar!

Dipke started the Cockroach Janta Party in May as online satire in response to the Chief Justice of India allegedly comparing India’s unemployed youth to cockroaches. The campaign soon trained its guns on the Modi government and Dipke called for its first street protest in Delhi on June 6.

The three slogans he had chosen were ordinarily associated with three distinct, and often warring, political groups in India: communists, Hindu nationalists and Ambedkarites. But the Cockroach Janta Party leader blended them together seamlessly in his short address to the crowd that had gathered to listen to him.

Questions of ideology did not seem to matter much for the hundreds of people who showed up in the sweltering Delhi heat either. Nearly every protestor that Scroll spoke to echoed Dipke’s demand that Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan must be held responsible for the spate of paper leaks under his watch.

“I have come here to seek the education minister’s resignation,” said Zeenat, a 16-year-old from Bihar’s Gaya district, who will have to re-appear for the entrance examination for medicine undergraduates on June 21 because her earlier attempt at clearing it was annulled last month.

But Pradhan was only the tip of the iceberg. As Scroll spoke to teenagers like Zeenat, left-wing activists, early-career professionals and middle-aged business owners who had gathered at Jantar Mantar, it was clear that the protestors were disillusioned with the institutions of the republic itself. They had little hope that things would self-correct.

‘Can't even conduct an exam’

Zeenat was among the 22 lakh students affected by the recent cancellation of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test.

“I feel very disheartened,” she added. “I was certain that I would get into a medical college this time, but they cancelled the paper. My Class XII results were not good either, even though I had thought that I did well in the examinations.”

Zeenat moved to Delhi to prepare for the NEET. She was staying with her elder sister, Zainab, in the Mukherjee Nagar neighbourhood, known to be a hub of coaching centres for entrance examinations. Zainab, too, had accompanied her to the protest. Both sisters had worn cockroach masks to cover their faces.

“If they can’t even conduct an examination properly, what hope will we be left with?” Zainab asked. “For her NEET paper, I took her to Bihar in the general compartment of the train because no other ticket was available. Soon after we came back to Delhi, that paper was cancelled. The least that the education minister can do is resign. He must take accountability.”

Aarav Kejriwal, another 16-year-old at the protest, invoked the same word when asked why he had come to Jantar Mantar.

“To demand accountability from the government,” declared the Class XII student from Noida, Uttar Pradesh, as he rattled off recent instances of paper leaks. “There are so many discrepancies in the system. We need a person to take accountability.”

Mobilising Gen Z

Aarav Kejriwal had defied his parents to come to the protest, where he was distributing Cockroach Janta Party flyers. He said that he had discovered the initiative on social media.

Political parties and their student outfits have been raising the issue of paper leaks repeatedly in recent years, but could not make much headway in capturing the attention of teenagers like Kejriwal. The cockroach campaign appears to have broken new ground in this regard.

Student activist Aishe Ghosh, 31, attributed this success of the Cockroach Janta Party to the youth-oriented vocabulary of its campaign. “We have been saying the same thing, but there is sometimes a certain lingo that people connect with,” argued the PhD scholar.

Ghosh is a former president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union. She shot to national fame after a violent attack on her university in January 2020 had left her with an injured head. She was among the several left-wing student activists who attended the protest on Saturday.

“We welcome the response that the Cockroach Janta Party has got,” Ghosh added. “We see it as a reflection of how frustrated the youth is.”

Divyanshi, a second-year student of political science at the Delhi University, put the campaign’s popularity down to its innovative messaging. While the party’s failure to appoint even a single woman as spokesperson had not sat well with her, she still appreciated its overall presentation.

“It’s new for us,” said Divyanshi, who grew up in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand. “I don’t know what will be the outcome, but it is good to see. Such things have become very rare. It is a rare aesthetic.”

For many, the Cockroach Janta Party protest was the first such protest they had attended. The suspense about whether the police would grant permission for the event caused confusion among those interested in attending. The green signal from the police only came after Dipke had landed in Delhi from the United States, which delayed proceedings at Jantar Mantar by over an hour.

The ever-changing instructions from the organisers, communicated via X and Instagram, also added to the chaos. As a result, the campaign’s spokespersons, who were on the ground before Dipke reached the venue, had to face questions from angry protestors.

Growing disillusionment

However, most people that Scroll met were willing to look past these lapses and welcomed the initiative, citing what they described as their frustration with the state of institutions in India.

“How dare the chief justice compare our children to cockroaches?” asked Pradeep Kumar, a 44-year-old business owner who drove down from Moti Nagar in west Delhi. “If we protest against paper leaks, the police try to stop us. The system is compelling us to become cockroaches.”

Retiree Kulbhushan Tandon, who had accompanied Kumar to the protest, seconded him. “They have sold themselves out,” the 75-year-old remarked when asked about institutions such as the judiciary and the media. “The police, the judiciary are all good for nothing.”

Some attendees even questioned the integrity of the Election Commission of India. The Cockroach Janta Party’s manifesto alludes to the controversial special intensive revision exercise carried out by the commission.

“If a single legitimate vote is deleted – in any state, of any party – the Chief Election Commissioner shall be charged under UAPA,” its website reads, referring to India’s draconian anti-terror law, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. “Stripping a citizen of their vote is terrorism by other means.”

Vicky, 25, hails from Nalanda in Bihar and is preparing for the civil service exams in the Karol Bagh area of central Delhi. He wore a t-shirt with Mohandas Gandhi’s picture and was carrying a copy of the Constitution to the protest.

“The Bharatiya Janata Party has come to power by fraud,” he said, referring to the November elections in Bihar, which followed the special intensive revision exercise in the state. “The Election Commission has sold its soul. We will all have to take to the streets sooner or later.”

‘Godi media go back!’

No other institution drew more criticism than the media at the protest. Chants of “Godi media go back!” were raised repeatedly and several protestors had run-ins with journalists seen to be working for pro-establishment outlets.

Deepti, a 36-year-old scientist, was taking part in a protest for the first time on Saturday. She complained that a television journalist to whom she gave an interview had tried to discredit the cockroach campaign by questioning her intelligence and not letting her speak.

“That journalist ruined my whole experience,” she lamented. “I wanted to talk about the problems that the youth are facing. I came here with a lot of hope. But I was not able to express myself.”

The state of the media also finds mention in the Cockroach Janta Party’s manifesto.

“Media houses owned by Ambani and Adani shall have their broadcasting licences cancelled to make room for genuinely independent press,” it says on its website. “Bank accounts of compliant anchors shall be audited.”

In recent years, the figure of the Mughal emperor Akbar has become a battleground in contemporary debates over Indian history. A growing body of popular writing and commentary, particularly from proponents of Hindutva historiography, seeks to portray the Mughal period as one of unrelieved religious oppression and cultural alienation.

In this narrative, Akbar appears either as a cynical politician whose gestures of tolerance masked imperial ambitions, or as a lone exception whose policies supposedly confirm the alleged intolerance of all other Muslim rulers.

More recently, commentators such as Vikram Sampath have revived arguments questioning the depth and sincerity of Akbar’s inclusivism. Drawing on a long tradition of skeptical scholarship, Sampath and others suggest that Akbar’s policies were primarily instruments of political expediency rather than expressions of a broader vision of governance, a perspective that has gained considerable traction in public discourse, particularly following his interviews on platforms like NDTV.

Such interpretations, however, tend to flatten a far more complex historical reality. No serious historian would deny that Akbar was an empire builder or that his policies were shaped by political calculations. Yet the same may be said of virtually every successful ruler in history.

The question is not whether Akbar’s policies were political, but what kind of politics they embodied. A careful examination of the evidence suggests that Akbar consciously sought to construct a polity that transcended narrow sectarian identities, and that his vision represented one of the most remarkable experiments in inclusive governance in the early modern world.

The Mahzar of 1579: An Assertion of State Authority

The clearest indication of this vision is the famous Mahzar of 1579. Often misunderstood as a declaration of personal infallibility or a step toward founding a new religion, the document was actually a more nuanced political intervention.

The Mahzar, a legal attestation signed by leading Muslim scholars, did not proclaim Akbar a prophet. Rather, it acknowledged him as an Imam-i ‘Adil (Just Ruler) and granted him the authority to choose between competing juridical opinions when leading scholars disagreed. As the scholar FW Buckler argued in a classic reinterpretation, the document was a diplomatic victory that allowed Akbar to rise above the squabbling factions of the ulama.

The context is crucial. Akbar was confronting a situation in which rival groups of religious scholars frequently advanced contradictory and self-serving interpretations of Islamic law. The Mahzar was therefore an attempt to subordinate sectarian legal disputes to the ultimate authority of the state. In effect, Akbar was asserting that political sovereignty should not be held hostage by clerical rivalries.

The Ibadat Khana

The institutional expression of this approach was the Ibadat Khana, or House of Worship, at Fathpur Sikri. Established initially as a venue for discussions among Muslim scholars, it soon expanded to include representatives of a remarkable range of traditions. Sunni and Shia scholars debated alongside Sufis, Jains, Brahmins, Zoroastrians, and even Jesuit priests from Portuguese Goa. The Jesuits were received with courtesy and were encouraged to present Christian doctrines before the emperor. Akbar’s objective was not theological conversion but intellectual engagement. He believed that truth could not emerge from dogmatic isolation.

As I have shown in my own work on the Ibadat Khana, these disputations were not mere courtly entertainment. They were part of a deliberate project to elevate reason (‘aql) over blind adherence to tradition (taqlid). The Ibadat Khana was designed as a space where competing claims to truth could be tested through dialogue rather than asserted through authority.

A social contract for the 16th-century

What made Akbar’s vision truly radical was the theory of kingship that he and his official chronicler Abu’l Fazl articulated. At a time when rulers across the world claimed divine right or inherited privilege, Akbar and Abu’l Fazl advanced a theory of governance based on the social contract. In this framework, the ruler’s authority was not a gift from God nor a license for tyranny. Rather, the ruler existed to safeguard the people.

Kingship was a trust, a responsibility, and its legitimacy derived from the protection and welfare of all subjects, regardless of their faith. This was not merely philosophical abstraction. It translated into concrete policies: the abolition of punitive taxes on non-Muslims, the protection of temples and churches, and the incorporation of diverse elites into the highest levels of imperial administration.

The divine light that falls on everyone

Underpinning this political theory was a profound metaphysical vision drawn from the Ishraqi or Illuminationist tradition. Akbar invoked the concept of Farr-e Izadi, the divine light or royal radiance. But unlike exclusivist interpretations of divine favour, Akbar understood this light as something that falls upon and illuminates everyone and everything without discrimination. It did not distinguish between Muslim and Hindu, between noble and commoner, between Persian and Rajput. The divine light shone equally on all creation. The emperor, as the recipient of this light, was therefore bound to reflect its universality. His justice, his protection, and his patronage could not be selective. They had to extend to every being touched by the same divine radiance.

This was the philosophical heart of sulh-i kul, or universal peace. The doctrine argued that the state should transcend sectarian divisions and treat all subjects with equal concern. Contrary to some modern caricatures, sulh-i kul was not merely a slogan. As the work of M Athar Ali, Irfan Habib, Shireen Moosvi, BL Bhadani, and Savitri Chandra has consistently shown, it shaped recruitment to the nobility, administrative practice, and imperial ideology. The cosmopolitan nobility that emerged under Akbar had no parallel in the early modern world. Rajputs, Indian Muslims, Persians, Central Asians, Afghans, and members of other communities participated in a remarkably inclusive ruling class.

Akbar’s radical alternative

The significance of these ideas becomes even clearer when we place them in global context. The 16thcentury was an age of intense religious conflict across much of the known world. In Europe, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had unleashed waves of bloody violence. Catholics and Protestants burned each other at the stake. The French Wars of Religion, the Spanish Inquisition, and the Dutch Revolt were all fought over competing visions of Christian truth.

Meanwhile, the Safavid Empire in Persia had made Shia Islam its official state religion, often persecuting its Sunni minorities. The Ottoman Empire, for all its administrative sophistication, waged relentless war against Shia Safavids and regularly enforced Sunni orthodoxy within its domains.

At the very moment when much of Eurasia was tearing itself apart over sectarian differences, Akbar was moving in the opposite direction. He did not merely tolerate other faiths; he actively invited them into his court. He did not enforce a single orthodoxy; he created a platform for multiple voices.

No other major ruler of the 16th century routinely convened public discussions among representatives of so many religious traditions. While European monarchs were burning heretics, the Mughal emperor was sponsoring comparative religious dialogue. While Safavid shahs and Ottoman sultans enforced sectarian uniformity, Akbar articulated a vision in which political community could transcend differences of faith. The contrast is not merely striking; it is historically unprecedented.

Practical policies

Akbar’s practical policies reflected the same outlook. He abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya in 1564. These measures removed fiscal disabilities that disproportionately affected non-Muslims and signalled that imperial subjects were to be treated primarily as members of the political community rather than as adherents of particular faiths. Recent controversies over textbook revisions have brought these policies back into public debate, with some commentators questioning the timing and motivations behind the abolition.

Critics often dismiss these actions as political expedients designed to win support from Hindu elites, particularly the powerful Rajput clans. Yet such criticism overlooks an obvious point: rulers reveal their priorities through the policies they choose to pursue. Akbar could easily have maintained these taxes, as many contemporary rulers elsewhere maintained discriminatory burdens on religious minorities. Instead, he chose to abolish them.

Akbar as Vishnu

The depth of Akbar’s acceptance among his non-Muslim subjects is perhaps best captured in research by BL Bhadani, who has demonstrated that Akbar was hailed as an avatar of Vishnu by Brahmins of his time. This was not a fanciful exaggeration or a mere diplomatic courtesy. It reflected a genuine perception that Akbar’s rule embodied righteous governance (dharma) in a way that transcended his own religious identity.

Contemporary accounts describe how Brahmins would gather below Akbar’s jharokha, or viewing balcony, to catch a glimpse of his face before breaking their fast. This ritual, which echoes the darshan (sacred viewing) traditionally associated with Hindu deities, suggests that for many of his subjects, Akbar was not merely a tolerant ruler but a sacred figure in his own right.

Such evidence is difficult to reconcile with portrayals of Akbar as a cynic or a tactician. Brahmins were not known for bestowing divine status upon rulers who merely calculated political advantage. Their embrace of Akbar as Vishnu’s avatar indicates that his policies of inclusion were experienced as genuine and transformative by those they were meant to benefit.

Political pragmatism or vision?

It is important to take the critics’ arguments seriously. Vikram Sampath and others are correct to point out that Akbar was not a secularist in the modern sense. He remained a Muslim monarch, and his policies were certainly aimed at consolidating his empire. Furthermore, the Mahzar can be read as a power play against the orthodox ulama who challenged his authority. Some historians also note that while Akbar promoted interfaith dialogue, the debates at the Ibadat Khana were eventually discontinued in 1582, possibly because they led to greater bitterness rather than understanding.

Yet to reduce Akbar’s policies to mere political opportunism misses the larger historical point. Successful states are always built through political calculation. The question is whether those calculations promote exclusion or inclusion. Akbar’s genius lay in recognising that a subcontinent as diverse as India could not be governed through sectarian domination. Stability required accommodation; legitimacy required inclusion.

The fact that he maintained these policies for decades, and that they were largely continued by his successors Jahangir and Shah Jahan, suggests they were more than fleeting tactics. They represented a genuine governing philosophy. Even his great-grandson Aurangzeb, who reversed many of these policies by reinstating the jizya, struggled to govern an empire that had been built on the foundation of Akbar’s inclusive model. This is not to excuse Aurangzeb’s policies, but to acknowledge that Akbar’s framework was a deliberate choice, not an inevitable feature of Muslim rule.

Inclusion versus exclusion

Unlike what is happening in many parts of the world today, where the politics of exclusion has gained disturbing currency, Akbar believed in inclusion. He believed that a ruler’s legitimacy derived from the protection of all people, not just those of his own faith. He believed that divine light illuminated everyone equally, without discrimination. He believed that a stable and just polity required space for many voices, many traditions, and many ways of life. These were not merely political calculations. They were convictions, tested and sustained over a long reign, and they left an indelible mark on the subcontinent’s political imagination.

The contrast with contemporary politics could not be starker. Today, we see the rise of governments and movements that thrive on identifying enemies, on drawing lines of exclusion, on declaring certain communities unwelcome. Akbar’s model offers a powerful alternative. It reminds us that inclusion is not weakness, that diversity is not a threat, and that the most durable political communities are those built on the recognition of shared humanity rather than on the enforcement of narrow loyalties.

The enduring legacy

This does not mean that Akbar was a modern secular democrat. He was an early modern emperor whose authority remained deeply personal and monarchical. Nor does it mean that all conflicts disappeared under his rule. Yet historical understanding requires us to judge figures within their own context. By the standards of the 16th century, where religious persecution was the norm across much of the globe from Europe to Safavid Persia to the Ottoman Empire, Akbar’s policies represented an extraordinary departure from prevailing models of confessional governance.

Indeed, the most enduring legacy of Akbar may not be his military conquests or administrative reforms, but the political imagination he bequeathed to the subcontinent. At a time when much of the world was torn apart by religious conflict, he articulated a vision in which political community could transcend differences of faith.

The Mahzar, the Ibadat Khana, the abolition of discriminatory taxes, the patronage of temples and churches, the social contract theory of kingship, the Ishraqi philosophy of divine light illuminating all beings, and the doctrine of sulh-i kul were all manifestations of this larger project.

Modern attempts to portray Akbar as either a tyrant disguised as a liberal or a ruler whose inclusiveness was merely tactical reveal more about contemporary ideological anxieties than about the 16th century. Serious historical scholarship, from M Athar Ali, Irfan Habib, Shireen Moosvi, BL Bhadani, and Savitri Chandra to my own work on the Ibadat Khana, has consistently demonstrated the complexity of Mughal governance. The evidence does not support the image of an empire organised around religious persecution. Rather, it reveals a state that, especially under Akbar, sought to reconcile diversity with imperial authority.

In an age increasingly tempted by exclusionary visions of the past and the present, Akbar’s experiment remains historically significant precisely because it points in the opposite direction. His reign reminds us that one of the most powerful states in pre-modern India was built not upon religious uniformity but upon the recognition that a durable political order required space for many faiths, communities, and ways of life. He chose inclusion over exclusion, light over darkness, and peace over perpetual conflict. That lesson, perhaps, is what makes Akbar so controversial and so profoundly relevant today.

Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi teaches medieval Indian history at Aligarh Muslim University, where he is a senior professor. He is the general secretary of the Indian History Congress.

This article was first published on Blast from the Past, the blog of the Aligarh Society of History and Archaeology.

The price of domestic liquefied petroleum gas was increased by Rs 29 per cylinder, in what was the second increase in three months, PTI reported.

A 14.2-kg LPG cylinder in Delhi will be priced at Rs 942 per cylinder from Sunday, as against Rs 913 earlier.

On March 7, the prices of domestic LPG cylinders were increased by Rs 60 per cylinder, as the war in West Asia led to elevated global energy costs.

Despite this, state-run marketing companies were estimated to have been losing Rs 703 on every cylinder before the latest revision, PTI quoted unidentified sources as saying.

The price of crude oil in international markets influences domestic LPG costs by affecting fuel costs and shaping supply decisions across energy markets.

The rate hike in domestic LPG comes amid a series of fuel price increases.

On June 1, Indian Oil Corporation, the country’s largest state-run refiner and fuel retailer, raised the price of a 19-kg commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinder by Rs 42, bringing its cost in Delhi to Rs 3,113.5.

Petrol and diesel rates have been increased by a total of Rs 7.50 per litre since mid-May, while the prices of compressed natural gas have been increased by Rs 6 per kg.

India imports 88% of its crude oil needs and about half of its natural gas requirement. This mostly comes through the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively blocked due to the conflict in West Asia.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

On Saturday, a day after the authorities demolished shops at Kolkata’s famous Mullick Ghat flower market, vendors tried to pick up the pieces.

It was part of an anti-encroachment drive that the newly elected Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal had started in several parts of the city.

The demolition at Mullick Ghat, situated under the Howrah Bridge and dating back to the 1850s, drew a great deal of attention. Mullick Ghat is one of Kolkata’s best-known landmarks and among the country’s largest wholesale flower markets.

Every day, about 4,000 flower vendors and wholesalers do business here. On Friday, more than 200 makeshift shops built on government land were demolished, reported The Times of India.

“The objective of the drive was to reclaim public space and ensure free movement in the area,” a police officer who was part of the exercise told the newspaper. He said that the authorities had informed the occupants of the illegal structure about the demolition drive Many, he told the newspaper, had already moved their wares.

Several shopkeepers confirmed this. They said they had been informed about the demolition drive a week before.

On Saturday, many flower sellers told Scroll about their long association with the market. One claimed that his family has been selling flowers at Mullick Ghat for over a century. “My forefathers used to come here to sell flowers,” he said.

He added that many of the vendors travel from places such as Chengail, Mecheda and Kolaghat, located roughly 40 km to 70 km from Kolkata, to sell flowers at the market.

Another vendor claimed that some of the demolished structures were being used not only for business but also as residential spaces. “People were cooking, sleeping and running shops from the same place,” he said.

The owner of a shop selling miscellaneous said that traders had appealed to the government through their market committee not to carry out the demolition drive. He mentioned that they had sought formal permission to operate in the area in 2014 and also before the 2026 Lok Sabha election.

“We are scared because of the demolition that was carried out yesterday,” he said. However, he added that traders had been assured that the ruling government would hear their concerns and that necessary relocation arrangements would be considered.

He said representatives had met BJP leaders yesterday, including West Bengal Cabinet Minister Tapas Roy, regarding the issue.

Not everyone is opposing the action. One customer who has been sourcing flowers from Mullick Ghat for around 30 years for his small business said overcrowding had become a problem. “Before, export and import used to happen directly from this market, but due to excessive congestion, it stopped,” he said. “It affects the packing and quality.”

Another customer said, “These things are needed for development.”

The High Commission of India in London on Friday described as “unacceptable” an audience member’s question about dissent in India at an event addressed by Chief Justice Surya Kant during his visit to the United Kingdom

Kant delivered a lecture titled Artificial Intelligence and International Law at Birkbeck, University of London, on Thursday, followed by an interaction with the audience.

Videos shared on social media showed an audience member attempting to ask a question about the “growing hostility to dissent within India”. The moderator interrupted the audience member, saying that the question was not related to the event’s theme.

In a statement, the High Commission said: “Such indecorous audience behaviour is unacceptable and inconsistent with respectful engagement that should govern public discourse.”

It added that “differences of opinion are a natural part of a democratic society…however, they must be expressed in a manner that is civil and respectful”.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Singaporean government on Saturday ordered social media platforms to block 14 posts that target the Indian community.

The posts had made claims such as that the island nation was being overrun by Indians.

The Singaporean home ministry said that the content “likely originated from a China-based platform” and was carried by other websites.

The ministry said in a statement that the narratives had started circulating online “in the Chinese information space” in May that Singapore was displaying anxiety about its cultural identity and ethnic politics.

The posts used “derogatory and demeaning language” to refer to the Indian community, it said.

The posts also selectively used images and footage of crowded streets in Singapore’s Little India area and of Indian devotees at a religious festival at Pagoda Street to claim that the country was being “overcrowded” with Indians, the ministry added.

The content undermined Singapore’s “model of multiculturalism”, the government said.

“Singapore firmly opposes nativism and xenophobia,” it said. “Any attempt to pit one community against another here must be firmly rejected. These attacks coming from a foreign source are doubly unacceptable.”

The government said that it had taken a “serious view of threats” to Singapore’s social cohesion and racial harmony, “including from external actors, and will act resolutely against them”. It urged citizens to be discerning when consuming and sharing information online.

The home ministry said that it had, along with the Singapore Police Force, assessed that the content was likely to constitute an offence for knowingly promoting feelings of enmity, hatred or ill-will between groups on grounds of race, or committing an act prejudicial to the maintenance of harmony between racial groups.

It issued orders for social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and X to block the content under the 2023 Online Criminal Harms Act.

Law Minister Edwin Tong told reporters on Saturday that there was no evidence showing that the posts had been part of a coordinated campaign by any country, The Straits Times reported.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

More than 140 students of a school in Kerala’s Wayanad district fell ill in the last three days, PTI reported.

It was unclear what caused the illness. The health department has collected food samples for testing.

Thirty-eight of them have been taken to hospital after showing continued discomfort, the news agency quoted an unidentified official as saying. They are being treated for fever and vomiting.

All patients were in stable condition, Onmanorama reported.

A special ward has been set up at the taluk hospital, Mathrubhumi reported.

The children are students of an aided upper primary school at Koliyadi.

The news agency quoted the district medical officer as saying that there was no need for panic and that a week-long holiday had been announced for the school as a precautionary measure.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Cockroach Janta Party, which began as a satirical political campaign, launched a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on Saturday to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged mismanagement in the conduct of competitive exams.

The protest began after the campaign’s founder Abhijeet Dipke arrived in the national capital from the United States.

Dipke said that the only objective of the protest was to demand Pradhan’s resignation.

“It has been a month since we started demanding Pradhan’s resignation on social media,” PTI quoted Dipke as saying. “But these individuals are so shameless that instead of taking action, they have been focused on other distractions, like hacking our accounts and getting our posts deleted.”

He said: “You may be able to delete our posts, but you cannot erase us from this space.”

Dipke said that protests will be held across the country if Pradhan did not resign by 5 pm on Saturday, The Indian Express reported. “The cockroach will return next Saturday,” he added.

“For the past 10 to 12 years, these people have kept us trapped in Hindu-Muslim politics,” The Quint quoted Dipke as having told the protesters, asking who had benefited from it.

“Did Hindu-Muslim politics get jobs for anyone in the country?” he asked.

Dipke accused the government of focusing on the organisation’s social media activity instead of responding to its demands.

The campaign was “not a planned party”, he said, adding that it was “students’ outrage”.

“My mother was very scared that this government would throw me in jail,” he said. “In this country, every mother feels this fear when their child raises their voice against this government.”

Earlier in the day, the police had stepped up security at Dipke’s home in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar city, PTI quoted a police officer as saying.

Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk also participated in the protest.

The Delhi Police on Saturday granted permission for the Cockroach Janta Party to protest at the site till 5 pm. Officials had earlier said that no request had been received from the group and that more than 1,000 personnel had been deployed in the national capital.

Some persons were detained for shouting slogans against the Cockroach Janta Party, The Hindu reported.

View this post on Instagram

देश का युवा अब डरेगा नहीं लड़ेगा

कॉकरोच डरते भी नहीं, कभी मरते भी नहीं #cjpprotest pic.twitter.com/BxUMDJv6Sl

— Cockroach is Back (@Cockroachisback) June 6, 2026

The Cockroach Janta Party describes itself as a “political front of the youth, by the youth, for the youth”.

It was launched on May 16 in response to reports of remarks by Chief Justice Surya Kant on the previous day comparing some unemployed youngsters to “cockroaches”. Since then, the campaign has garnered more than 22 million followers on Instagram.

The chief justice claimed on May 16 that he had been misquoted by sections of the media and that it was baseless to say that he criticised young people in general. Kant claimed he had specifically criticised “those who have entered professions like the Bar [legal profession] with the aid of fake and bogus degrees”.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava and Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Interview: ‘Good chance that BJP will co-opt Cockroach Janta Party’s demands’
• Does Abhijeet Dipke’s popularity signal a new age of Dalit leaders?

The Supreme Court on Friday stayed the deportation of four women declared foreigners by tribunals in Assam, Live Law reported.

The bench issued notice to the Centre, the Assam government and the Election Commission, seeking their reply on the separate pleas within a month, The New Indian Express reported.

The pleas

Saleha Khatun, has been held at the Goalpara detention camp since March 2, The Indian Express reported. The 50-year-old said that a tribunal at Darrang had declared her a foreigner.

The Gauhati High Court had upheld the order by the foreigners tribunal.

The foreigners tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship based on lineage and a 1971 cut-off date. They rely primarily on documents submitted by persons to establish their family’s residency in Assam or India before 1971.

Those declared foreigners by the tribunals have the option to appeal the decision before the High Court or the Supreme Court.

Foreigners’ tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring persons foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

Saleha Khatun stated in her plea that she had submitted evidence before the tribunal showing that she is the daughter of Indian citizens who were in the pre-1971 voter list of Nagabandha village in Nagaon district, Live Law reported.

The woman also stated that she had submitted other evidence such as linkage certificates, her family’s electoral documents and the verbal testimony of her sister to establish continuity of her residence and lineage.

However, the tribunal had in December rejected her claim on the grounds of human errors, and discrepancies in the family details and age, Live Law reported. It also rejected her linkage certificates because the authority that issued the certificate had not been examined, the legal news outlet reported.

Sarbhanu Begum, another woman who is also at the detention camp, stated in her petition that her father’s name was in the pre-1971 voter roll of Barkur village in Darrang district, Live Law reported. She added that she had also submitted documents and testimonies of witnesses to establish continuity of her residence and lineage.

The tribunal had reportedly rejected her claim because of a spelling mistake in her name and a discrepancy in an electoral detail relating to her husband’s name.

Musstt Nureza Begum stated that she was illiterate and had signed a register at the tribunal upon receiving a notice, according to Live Law. She argued that she had been declared a foreigner by the tribunal in an alleged ex-parte order, or a judgement issued by a court without notifying or hearing the opposing party.

The High Court had rejected the pleas by Sarbhanu Begum and Nureza Begum seeking the quashing of the tribunals’ orders.

Basiram Nessa stated that she had submitted as evidence a voter list from 1965 that included the name of her grandfather and one from 1989 mentioning her father. Nessa said that she had also submitted documents issued by the village chief certifying that she is the daughter of Zakir Hussain and had married Osman Gani, Live Law reported.

However, the tribunal held that she had failed to prove that she was the daughter of Hussain.

She had approached the Supreme Court alleging that the tribunal had not considered the documents she had submitted. In 2020, the court allowed her to file a review petition before the High Court, where she did not get a relief.

The Supreme Court will hear the matter next on July 16.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

India went through great trouble to internationally adopt the official rupee symbol – ₹. One would imagine that a publication of Scroll’s standing would be able to use it correctly. It is not even a BJP-era invention, so it need not trigger Scroll’s usual fear of “all BJP action bad”.

Before taking up the burden of correcting everyone and yelling about the sky falling in each article, perhaps the editors could begin their actual job – editing properly. – Sachi Poudyal

‘Propaganda’ on Bangladesh barrage

The writer took the example of India suspending the water treaty with Pakistan (“As Bangladesh approves Padma Barrage, India must confront failure of its Neighbourhood First policy”). But some things should have been included, like multiple wars raged by Pakistan, thousands of terrorist attack on Indian civilians by Pakistan and how the country is still taking a bigger share of water flowing from Indian territory.

By assuming that India will do the same to Bangladesh, it means that Bangladesh might also make same the mistake like Pakistan did of terrorist attacks and waging war. If this is the case, then Bangladesh will face the consequences.

Why doesn’t the article give the full picture. The dam will be good for Bangladesh so they are building it. But India has in fact shown a lot of patience and still was backstabbed. This not journalism but bolstering your propaganda and agenda on readers. – Vishu, not your member and never will be

Detention of children going to madrasas

This report is heart-wrenching (“How false trafficking charges led to detention of hundreds of Bihar children going to madrasas”). Since the BJP government came to power, there has been an increase in the double standards against the Muslims of the country.

The treatment of the innocent madrasa children should make anyone worry. How can the police ask if innocent children are becoming “terrorists”? This environment is a warning bell for the future of the country and the survival of its secularism and integrity. – S Mujahid Husain

Bengal seats and vote counting

These allegations are not founded on the truth but on some presumptions (“How slow counting of votes in Bengal helped BJP win a lost seat from Trinamool”). Nowhere in the report have I read that the vanquished candidate is contemplating an election petition. We should remember that the nature of all candidates is the same. The defeated candidate should file an election petition challenging the counting process and election result. – SK Paul

***

Interesting assessment but not what I would call a deep dive (“In half the seats BJP won in Bengal, total SIR deletions outnumber victory margin”). The SIR deletions were in two categories: 1) Absent shifted, Dead, Double, which formed almost 60 lakh, and 2) 27 lakh voters whose appeals could not be heard on time.

I would like to see how many of these voters are there across constituencies, the Hindu-Muslim ratio among them and what would have been the outcome and in how many seats if they all had been allowed to vote, and we assume they would have voted for the Trinamool Congress. – Manoj Mohanka

The hard ‘na’

It is obvious that both forms of “na” are part of the barakhadi and I have observed that the “hard” na is more prevalent in the south compared to the north (“Rejoinder: The retroflex, like the Marathi ‘na’, has little do with caste”).

I grew up in Mumbai and the hard na was used quite commonly – and we did not live in a brahmin-only community. As for the name Pranav, I have never heard it pronounced with the soft na.

I remember there used to be a television serial called Amchi Maati Amchi Manse where people from different regions of Maharashtra would sit together and talk in their own dialects.

I do admit dialects that can and are used as indicators of caste and class, which was the entire premise of the famous movie, My Fair Lady. – Gururaj A Rao

***

In our house, we have different pronunciations – I was brought up in Chennai and speak tamil but my wife and relatives have not studied Tamil properly, so their pronunciation is bad. Where does caste come into all this? – Vishwanath Giriraj
***

I am very happy to read the rejoinder. ln Kannada, mahaprana sounds are now regarded as obsolete and elitist. The phonemic element is disregarded.Why lndians mispronounce Ganesha is a mystery. – Vimala Rao

***
Thank you for addressing this. – Vibhor Deshmukh

Praise for books, poems

What an honest, touching chapter. I enjoyed reading it whilst stuck waiting in Bengaluru traffic. Gratitude in abundance (“‘A butterfly will still be beautiful’: Ruskin Bond, 92 today, writes about his wartime childhood”)! – Joya Lall

***

Readers of Ruskin Bond's books are accustomed to his old, smiling face. Most who love him are uncomfortable to come across the frail, tired face of Bond at 92. It would be appreciated if readers find his face at a younger age with this beautiful article. – Prabhas Lahiri

***

I am speechless (“‘I’m fine, because that’s what the world wants to hear’: Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s lament for Gaza”. The poems show poet Nongkynrih's capacity as a poet who is “too full of the milk of human kindness." His dissenting voice speaks for itself. He is one of the best poets writing in English in India right now. – Somnath Barui

The Ministry of External Affairs on Friday said that 1,174 Indians have been deported from the United States so far in 2026.

The figures were shared by ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal during the weekly media briefing. He said that 3,576 Indians were deported from the US in 2025.

“In matters of migration and mobility, discussions are ongoing between both sides.” he said. “Both sides are working on how to curb illegal migration and try to stop it.”

He added: “At the same time, they are also ensuring that legal migration is not adversely affected.”

Since US President Donald Trump came to power for a second term in early 2025, his administration has launched a crackdown on immigration, and has carried out mass deportations.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Penguin Random House India has decided not to distribute graphic novelist Joe Sacco’s nonfiction book on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, The Indian Express quoted the head of the publishing house as saying.

The Once and Future Riot, first published in October 2025, is based on Sacco’s visit to Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh a year after the riots.

Communal violence had erupted in Muzaffarnagar in September 2013 after Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including state minister Suresh Rana, former party MLA Sangeet Som and former MP Bharatendra Singh allegedly made inflammatory speeches.

At least 60 persons were killed and thousands of Muslim families were displaced in the riots that followed. There were also several reports of sexual assault and abuse in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts.

Sacco’s book was expected to be distributed in India starting August.

Chief Executive Officer of Penguin Random House India Gaurav Shrinagesh told The Indian Express that the title was red-flagged during a pre-check and legal scrutiny process.

“We had highlighted certain things on the Joe Sacco title but [Penguin United Kingdom] did not get back to us,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “One problem was a map in the book showing inaccurate boundaries of India. Besides that, we had raised some content questions and asked for citations which never came.”

He added: “We are very clear about this: if we know there is an inaccurate map and no changes are forthcoming, we will not do it. We have decided there will be no distribution of the book due to these red flags not being attended to.”

Sacco is the award-winning author of Palestine, Footnotes in Gaza and Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also Read: The Joe Sacco interview: ‘If my work is going to be journalist, it needs to be representational’

On Tuesday evening, 50-year-old B Anandababu stood outside the Chief Minister’s Mini Stadium in Kolathur, watching his teenage son play badminton. Dressed in a red t-shirt and jeans, Anandababu said his family had voted for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam for decades. The stadium, which offers badminton and swimming facilities, is one of several development projects sanctioned by former Chief Minister MK Stalin during his tenure as Kolathur’s MLA.

For Anandababu, Stalin’s defeat in the state elections in April from Kolathur was deeply upsetting. When the former chief minister visited the constituency the day after the results were announced, Anandababu deliberately stayed away. “I could have waited to see him before going to work, but I didn’t,” he said. “I felt like crying that day.”

Stalin lost the seat to VS Babu, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam candidate, by a margin of just over 8,000 votes. His visit was meant to thank constituents he had represented for three consecutive terms. Until the TVK won the elections, party leader Vijay was best known as a movie superstar.

A month after the results, the public projects that Stalin left behind in brick-and-mortar continue to draw crowds. Behind the badminton courts, the swimming pool was packed with children learning to swim, churning the water as instructors guided them through their lessons.

Many projects bear Stalin's smiling portrait alongside the slogan, “Engal Mudhalvar, Engal Perumai” (Our Chief Minister, Our Pride). Residents say these initiatives have helped transform their ooru or neighbourhood into what many describe as a model constituency.

“My son plays badminton here, my wife walks in the park near the temple, and I use the marriage hall for some events,” Anandababu said, listing how much his neighbourhood has become public friendly. “Have you seen the marriage hall? It is as big as the Taj Mahal. It’s a real ‘wow’ moment.”

Scroll visited the Perarignar Anna Marriage Hall, named after the DMK founder CN Annadurai, where preparations were underway for the wedding of two Kolathur residents, Jagan and Mahalakshmi. The building was every bit as imposing as Anandababu had described.

The election results delivered a stunning upset for the DMK and ushered in a change of government in Tamil Nadu after a decades-long Dravidian duopoly. Since 1977, power in the state had alternated between the DMK and AIADMK.

More than a month later, the outcome continues to dominate everyday conversations. “My son has a black dot on his forehead because his grandmother insists he wear one like Vijay, whom she sees on television every day,” Anandababu said. Since taking office, Chief Minister Vijay has frequently appeared in a black suit with a black dot on his forehead, a distinctive look that has begun to catch on among some of his admirers.

Across the road, outside Sampath Hairstylist, R Elappan, 71, a resident of GKM Colony, insisted that Stalin had transformed his “ooru” from a forgotten corner of the city into a thriving neighbourhood.

“We shouldn’t say Stalin lost. That’s the wrong word,” he said. “Tamil people have a tendency to give political parties a chance for only five years. We like going back and forth between parties. Think about the Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa days. Just as Stalin got only five years, Vijay will also only get five years.”

Elappan, who said his admiration for former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had made him a Bharatiya Janata Party supporter, nevertheless voted for the DMK in state elections. When he was young, he had once seen Stalin as a college lad and had taken a liking to the then young politician. He even found a similarity, both him and Stalin, he said, moved around with a group of friends.

“Stalin has worked hard for this constituency and that’s why I respected him and voted for him,” he said. “He has done a lot specifically for Butmedu,” he said, referring to the neighbourhood by its old name.

Like many Kolathur residents, Elappan pointed in different directions to describe what once stood there – usually a swamp, a vacant plot or an overgrown field – and what has replaced it: swanky public facilities. “That mini stadium over there used to be swampy land where water would stagnate. Look at it now!”

Around Elappan, his friends chipped in about playgrounds, study centres, a market complex, bus stands, hospitals, schools, colleges and even a gym exclusively for women.

But Elappan, after listing Stalin’s accomplishments, grew reflective about the DMK’s defeat in this constituency. “The DMK is responsible for its own loss,” he said. “They didn’t do enough fieldwork during the elections. After winning here three times, they became careless and complacent. They assumed they would win again.”

He said he recalled seeing Stalin when he had visited Kolathur the day after the results. “He looked sad,” Elappan said. “But what’s the point? It is like the saying, ‘kan ketta piragu Surya Namaskaram’” – offering prayers to the sun after losing one’s eyesight.

On Kolathur’s streets, reactions to the election results and the new government varied. Visalakshmi, 62, a flower seller, was annoyed that officials threw her flower cart aside each time Stalin visited the constituency over the past five years.

In protest, she voted for Vijay.

Babu, a bicycle repairman, took the opposite view. In his opinion, Stalin had done enough to deserve another term.

Others offered various theories for the upset. Some argued that the DMK had not spent enough money to secure voter loyalty, or that the BJP had propped up Vijay in order to split the Dravidian vote base. A few blamed social media and the internet, saying children influenced their parents’ vote.

R Sridhar, who rents out chairs and tables for functions, loudly declared that he had voted for “Thalapathy”. “Not Thalapathy Vijay,” he clarified with a laugh. “I mean Stalin. Vijay is a good actor but that is different from politics!”

Outside a sleek co-working space called “Mudhalvar Padaippagam”, Ramesh*, appreciated the public projects but questioned their timing. He pointed out that most had been inaugurated a year ago eyeing the elections.

“People say most of these projects came up only in the last year but I’d say that is fine given the time it took to build them,” he said. “But the condition of the roads were truly pathetic and that could have been addressed much earlier. Fixing roads is a three-month long job, but the roads were only fixed last year too.”

At the public park on Amman Koil Street, Jasmine* sat watching a group of women exercise at the outdoor gym. Nearby, two children set themselves a finish line. “Let’s race till that DMK leader’s photo!” one shouted, as they sprinted towards Stalin’s smiling face. In the park’s pond, swans preened themselves, plucking mites from their feathers as instrumental music drifted from overhead speakers. Jasmine was a member of the Ladies Gym that was closed for the day and had come to join several of Kolathur’s walkers around the park.

“Are cinema and politics the same thing? Sometimes I feel like we are living in a movie these days,” Jasmine said. “People who know nothing about politics have voted for TVK. I was heartbroken when Stalin lost and Vijay became chief minister.”

As a friend joined her on the park bench, Jasmine gestured around at the landscaped grounds. “People keep saying they want change,” she said. “Look around you. This place used to belong to pei, pisasu, palli and pambu [ghosts, lizards and snakes] but now it has beautiful swans and birds.”

She recalled avoiding the road beside the park on her way to church because it was so deserted and poorly maintained. “What does maatram [change] mean?” she asked. “Apart from everything you see around you, what more do people want?”

Later that evening, the signs of the maatram were visible on the streets of Kolathur. On the 70 Feet Road, TVK’s winning candidate, Babu waved to people drinking lemon tea, from an open car. He was on a roadshow to say thanks.

Next to him was a man dressed in a black suit and beard, exactly like Chief Minister Vijay, who also enthusiastically waved at passersby. Amidst the din of a road show, the TVK campaign song rang out: “Unga Vijay Unga Vijay Unga Vijay, Uyirena Varen Naan…” Your Vijay, Your Vijay, I am coming as your life.

Except that here on the streets of Kolathur, it was a lookalike of Vijay saying thanks.

*Names changed at the request of the interview subjects.

Sowmiya Ashok is a journalist in Chennai. She is the author of The Dig: Keeladi and the Politics of India’s Past.

Bihar educator and YouTuber Faizal Khan, popularly known as Khan Sir, has been booked for attempted murder after two of his security guards allegedly told police that he had ordered them to open fire during violence outside his coaching institute in Patna on June 2, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

The first information report was registered under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to attempt to murder and the Arms Act against Khan, the two guards and unidentified associates.

The case came days after Khan claimed that “eight to 10 rounds of gunfire” were fired outside his coaching institute, Khan Global Studies, after a group allegedly vandalised the premises in Patna’s Musallahpur area. Following the incident, he alleged that persons had attacked the institute and that business rivals were behind the violence, The Indian Express reported.

The complaint filed by Sub-Inspector Anil Kumar of the Kadamkuan police station stated that the investigation had begun after videos purportedly showing firing outside the coaching centre were shared on social media.

Witnesses allegedly identified the men seen in the footage as Khan Global Studies’ security staff and claimed that they fired “two rounds each”, the newspaper reported.

The police said that Khan confirmed that the men were his coaching institute’s security guards and that the rifles used were licensed weapons. The guards were subsequently arrested.

The development came a day after police had said that CCTV footage and local inquiries had found no evidence of firing during the June 2 incident.

Earlier, based on Khan’s complaint, the police had arrested three persons linked to the rival Gyan Bindu Coaching Institute, including its director, Raushan Anand, The Indian Express reported.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Bangladesh has claimed that it thwarted attempts by India’s Border Security Force to force at least 30 persons into its territory through four border points from Thursday night to Friday morning, Prothom Alo reported.

The BSF’s attempts were foiled by personnel from the Border Guards Bangladesh, who were assisted by residents of the area, the newspaper reported. The 30 individuals were later seen waiting on the zero line between the two countries with their luggage.

The Indian government is yet to respond to the allegations.

The Border Guards Bangladesh claimed that the BSF tried to force persons, including women and children, through border points in the Aditmari, Hatibandha and Patgram upazilas in the Lalmonirhat district in northern Bangladesh, Prothom Alo reported. They also claimed that BSF personnel were confronted by Border Guards Bangladesh members, leading to a standoff along the border.

In the Aditmari upazila, Border Guards Bangladesh personnel reportedly identified 12 “suspected individuals” near two border pillars. They retreated to the Indian side after they were issued warnings through hand-held microphones, according to the newspaper.

The Bangladeshi security force sought a flag meeting with the BSF’s Raniganj-3 battalion, but did not receive a response, according to Prothom Alo.

On Thursday as well, Bangladesh claimed that it foiled ten attempts within 24 hours by India to force persons across the border into its territory.

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

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

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

Dhaka has repeatedly said that anyone identified as a Bangladeshi national should be returned through formal legal and diplomatic channels rather than being driven across ⁠the border.

On May 7, the Ministry of External Affairs said that it had asked Bangladesh to verify the nationality of 2,862 suspected Bangladeshi nationals living illegally in India.

Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said New Delhi expects Dhaka expedite the process of verifying the nationality of the undocumented Bangladeshi migrants so that they could be repatriated “in a smooth manner”.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• ‘Let me die at home’: Back from Bangladesh, an Assam woman struggles to recover from ‘pushback’
• An ‘indigenous’ Assamese woman was pushed into Bangladesh. A year later, she is still stuck there

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India’s “growth momentum remains strong”, even as the Reserve Bank of India’s Monetary Policy Committee downgraded the real gross domestic growth for the financial year 2026-’27 to 6.6%. This is 0.3% lower than the 6.9% projection made in April.

According to the central bank, prolonged disruptions of global supply chains, heightened volatility in financial markets and problems created by the weather pose risks to domestic growth.

However, in a social media post, the prime minister stated: “GDP growth rate of 7.7% in FY 2025-26 and 7.8% in Q4 of FY 2025-26 reflect the inherent strength of our economy, the success of reforms and the hard work of 140 crore Indians.” Read on.

Modi is asking Indians to make sacrifices for an economic crisis he oversaw, writes Anand Teltumbde

The new BJP government in West Bengal has begun verifying the eligibility of beneficiaries under the public distribution system based on the outcome of the special intensive revision of the state’s electoral rolls. The food and supplies department said that it would mark as inactive the ration cards of persons deleted from the voter list.

This means that beneficiaries who were marked as absent, shifted, duplicate or dead in the draft list published in December would become ineligible for their food entitlements under the public distribution system. Those who were removed from electoral rolls in the subsequent supplementary lists would also become ineligible. Read on.

Former chief of the Tamil Nadu Bharatiya Janata Party K Annamalai quit the organisation. The party has formally accepted his resignation from its primary membership.

Annamalai said that he had quit the party after coming “to the conclusion that our views don’t align regarding Tamil Nadu”.

In a video message after his resignation, he said that he would launch a new political party that would contest the next Assembly elections expected to be held in 2031. “Today, we are going to start a movement,” he said. Read on.

Two days after Karnataka Chief Minister DK Shivakumar’s new Cabinet took office, Congress leader Ramalinga Reddy submitted his resignation as a minister. Reddy said he had taken the decision due to displeasure about the portfolio allocated to him.

Reddy was made the irrigation minister on Thursday. In a press conference, the MLA claimed that he had twice been promised the Bengaluru development department by the party, adding that he had “never asked anyone for any portfolio”. Read on.

The Delhi High Court declines to urgently hear a petition seeking preventive directions to the authorities in connection with a protest by satirical political campaign Cockroach Janta Party. The demonstration is scheduled to be held on Saturday.

The petition was filed by Delhi-based activist group Save India Foundation, which contended before the court that such a protest, if left unregulated, could hamper public safety, traffic and security in the national capital. Read on.

Interview: ‘Good chance that BJP will co-opt Cockroach Janta Party’s demands’

Three Kuki civilians were killed in an attack in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district. Additionally, at least seven houses in the Loibol Khullen village were burnt in the suspected militant attack at about 4 am, said Kuki Inpi Manipur, an apex body representing Kuki tribes in the state.

The residents were forced to flee after the houses were set on fire. The deaths reportedly took place during an exchange of fire between rival groups that lasted several minutes.

The developments came amid tensions between Kukis and Nagas in Ukhrul that had erupted in February. Read on.

‘We thought peace was coming’: Manipur’s buffer zones are back in grip of violence, reports Rokibuz Zaman

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The Delhi Police on Friday registered a case under the Information Technology Act after a complaint filed by the Central Board of Secondary Education alleging that its revaluation portal had been hit by a series of coordinated attacks earlier this week, ANI reported.

The case has been filed under provisions pertaining to computer-related offences and denial of authorised access to a computer.

Earlier in the day, the board said that it had filed a complaint with the Intelligence Fusion and Strategic Operations unit of the police “regarding coordinated cyber attacks on its Post-Result Services Portal”. However, it claimed that there had been no data breach or compromise of systems.

CBSE PRESS RELEASE:
CBSE lodges complaint with Delhi Police regarding coordinated cyber attacks on its Post-Result Services Portal. All attacks were successfully mitigated through 24×7 monitoring, with no data breach or compromise of systems.
Details here…

— CBSE HQ (@cbseindia29) June 5, 2026

“As the portal caters to lakhs of students across the country for availing post-result services, any disruption to its functioning has the potential to adversely impact a large number of stakeholders, cause significant public inconvenience, and affect public order and create dissatisfaction amongst students against the Board,” the CBSE said in a press release.

The board said that the apparent objective of the attackers was “to destabilise the platform, deny access to legitimate users, and attempt unauthorized extraction of information by the elements inimical to national interest”.

In the last two weeks, several discrepancies were flagged in the CBSE’s On-Screen Marking evaluation process for Class 12 answer sheets.

Many students had alleged that the scanned copies of answer sheets uploaded by the CBSE did not match their handwriting, raising concerns about possible answer sheet mismatches. Students seeking re-evaluation also alleged that they faced portal failures, delays in payment confirmation and, in some cases, were asked to pay excess fees because of technical glitches.

The chairman of the Central Board of Secondary Education, Rahul Singh, and its Secretary Himanshu Gupta were on Tuesday transferred in the wake of allegations of mismanagement.

A one-member inquiry committee chaired by S Radha Chauhan, the head of the Capacity Building Commission, was also set up to look into the procurement of On-Screen Marking Services by the board.

The West Bengal government on Thursday began verifying the eligibility of beneficiaries under the public distribution system based on the outcome of the special intensive revision of the state’s electoral rolls.

The food and supplies department said that it would mark as inactive the ration cards of persons deleted from the voter list.

This means that beneficiaries who were marked as absent, shifted, duplicate or dead in the draft list published in December would become ineligible under the public distribution system. Those who were removed from electoral rolls in the subsequent supplementary lists would also become ineligible.

Unmapped voters identified during the revision exercise who were excluded after the hearing process and persons removed from the electoral roll after adjudication will also be ineligible under the public distribution system.

However, persons who have filed appeals before the appellate tribunals or submitted their applications under the Citizenship Amendment Act will continue to receive the benefits until the process concludes, the department said in an order.

The verification exercise will conclude by June 15, it said.

On May 27, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said that about 30 lakh beneficiaries of a cash transfer scheme for women would also become ineligible for it after being removed from the voter list.

The same day, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls conducted by the Election Commission, saying that the exercise “advances the constitutional imperative of free and fair elections”.

However, the court said that the poll panel’s inquiries for the purpose of including a person in the voter list do not mean that it can decide on whether the person is an Indian citizen.

“Such an inquiry does not amount to a determination of citizenship in the strict sense and any action taken pursuant thereto is confined to electoral consequences alone,” Chief Justice Surya Kant had said.

By April 6, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of the electorate before the process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls.

Ahead of the Assembly elections in April, about 34 lakh appeals were reportedly pending before the tribunals. Of these, seven lakh were against names being included in the rolls and 27 lakh were filed by persons who were excluded. Appellate tribunals set up as part of the special intensive revision process had allowed 1,607 names to be added back to the electoral rolls.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.