The Allahabad High Court has issued contempt notices to Bareilly District Magistrate Avinash Singh and Senior Superintendent of Police Anurag Arya for allegedly preventing members of the Muslim community from offering namaz inside a vacant house in Mohammadganj village, The Times of India reported on Tuesday.

On Thursday, a bench of Justices Atul Shreedharan and Siddharth Nandan initiated proceedings against the officials under the 1971 Contempt of Courts Act. It also stayed coercive action against petitioner Tarik Khan.

The court has sought responses from the district magistrate and the police officer on March 11, when it will next hear the matter.

The dispute relates to an incident on January 16, when a group of Muslims were stopped while offering prayers inside a vacant house owned by a woman, Reshma Khan. Several Muslim men were detained and four persons had been arrested for allegedly disturbing public order by gathering there, and were later released.

Reshma Khan said that she had permitted the gathering and that the prayers had been held within the premises.

The petitioners had approached the High Court, citing its January 27 ruling in a separate matter that no permission is needed for holding a religious prayer meeting on private property in Uttar Pradesh as long as the activity was within its premises.

The ruling had come on a plea by Christian organisations who had sought permission to conduct prayer meetings in private premises.

The court had said that if a gathering has to “spill over the public road or public property”, the police must be informed and, if needed, permissions need to be secured.

Tarik Khan, the petitioner in the case pertaining to the gathering in Mohammadganj, said that the January 27 order had clarified that prayers could be offered within a private property, The Times of India reported.

“We too are a minority, so the same rule should apply to us,” he said. “So far, we have been protected by the court’s stay, and that is why we resumed our prayers from the house.”

Tensions in Mohammadganj

Meanwhile, tensions have risen in Mohammadganj, where some Hindu residents objected to Friday prayers having resumed in the house, The Times of India reported.

Five families painted “house for sale” on the walls of their homes. They claimed that the house would eventually be converted into permanent places of worship, the newspaper reported.

They asked Chief Minister Adityanath to intervene in the matter.

The senior superintendent of police was quoted as saying that the situation was under control and that no coercive action had been taken.

“We have never interfered with religious practices as long as they do not violate established norms,” The Times of India quoted him as saying.

The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a petition challenging the Telangana High Court order that quashed a 2016 case against Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy filed under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act, Live Law reported.

The case pertains to allegations that Reddy allegedly instigated persons who broke into the SC Mutually Aided Cooperative Housing Society in Razole constituency, vandalised the premises with a bulldozer and shouted casteist remarks at the complainant, who had tried to stop them, the legal news outlet reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi observed that the High Court had, in July, correctly quashed the matter, as no prima facie case had been found against Reddy.

It verbally observed that the matter appeared to be a case of misusing courts for political battles, Live Law reported.

When the counsel representing the petitioner argued that the High Court had not considered Section 6 of the SC/ST Act that penalises abetment of offences, the chief justice said that the matter being raised was “only for political mileage”, Live Law reported.

While the counsel said that the case was from 2016 when Reddy was not the chief minister, the bench responded that the Congress leader was an active politician at the time.

Reddy was a member of the Telugu Desam Party at the time.

Bagchi observed that there was no evidence linking Reddy to the incident except for hearsay.

The interim government in Bangladesh on Monday provided compensation in savings certificates worth 2.5 million Bangladeshi taka, or about Rs 18.5 lakh, to the family of Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu man who was lynched in the country’s Mymensingh district in December, The Indian Express reported.

Das, a garment worker, had been accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by a mob on December 18, after which his body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Eighteen persons were taken into custody in connection with the killing.

Das was killed amid widespread unrest in Bangladesh following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi, who succumbed to gunshot injuries at a hospital in Singapore earlier that day.

Hadi was a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League government.

Das’ killing and several other attacks on religious minorities had been reported in Bangladesh at the time, which led to demonstrations in India.

The developments had worsened strained ties between New Delhi and Dhaka.

Following Das’ death, the Indian government on December 26 condemned his lynching, saying that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning. Two days later, Dhaka rejected the remarks and described them as “inaccurate, exaggerated or motivated”.

On Monday, the compensation was presented to Das’ family through Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus’ office. This came a day before the Bangladesh Nationalist Party was set to form the next government in the country.

Tarique Rahman, the chairperson of the party, will be sworn-in as the prime minister on Tuesday.

With this, the interim government’s term came to an end.

Yunus, a Nobel laureate economist, stepped down as the chief adviser to the interim government on Monday after the disbursal of the bonds, The Indian Express reported.

He had taken over as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government after Hasina was ousted and fled to India in August 2024 following several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday quashed criminal defamation proceedings against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a case filed by the Bharatiya Janata Party regarding allegations that the Hindutva party’s government in the state had taken bribes from contractors, Bar and Bench reported.

Allowing Gandhi’s petition, Justice Sunil Dutt Yadav held that permitting the case to continue would amount to an abuse of law.

The complaint in the matter was filed by BJP leader S Keshava Prasad against Gandhi, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar in May 2023. Prasad objected to campaign advertisements and slogans used by the Congress during the Assembly elections that year.

Prasad objected to the Congress’ allegations that the BJP government, which was in power from 2019 to 2023, was charging a 40% commission or bribes from contractors for undertaking public works.

The BJP had alleged that the Congress was spreading false claims against its members, including the then Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai.

The Congress was elected to power in the state in 2023, replacing the BJP government.

A magistrate court granted bail in the case to Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar on June 1, 2024 and to Gandhi on June 7, 2024.

Noting that the Union government has accused British-Indian writer and activist Amrit Wilson of engaging in anti-India activities, the Delhi High Court on Monday said that it cannot allow the country to be maligned on international platforms, Bar and Bench reported.

Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav made the remarks after examining a sealed cover report furnished by the Union government detailing the reasons for cancelling Wilson’s Overseas Citizen of India card.

Overseas Citizen of India is an immigration status that allows foreigners of Indian origin to live and work in India indefinitely. Its cancellation effectively barred Wilson from entering the country.

The judge directed the Union government to file its submissions on the petition by Wilson against the cancellation of her Overseas Citizen of India card, Live Law reported.

Kaurav said: “We should not be such a tolerant state that we allow our own country to be criticised… maligned at international platform.”

He added that there were Intelligence Bureau reports filed against Wilson and that the allegations against her were serious.

In 2023, the Union government had cancelled Wilson’s Overseas Citizen of India card after accusing her of being involved in several “anti-India activities” and “detrimental propaganda”. Subsequently, the 82-year-old moved the court against the decision.

She argued that the cancellation was illegal, arbitrary and made without proper application of mind.

The Union government was issued a notice on the petition in May 2023.

During the hearing on Monday, Advocate Trideep Pais, representing Wilson, said that the show-cause notice issued to her for the cancellation of her Overseas Citizenship of India card did not contain any details.

The Union government had initially referred to a tweet of hers on the social media platform X and one article on the farmers’ protest, Pais said. Another article on Kashmir was also cited, he added.

However, the show-cause notice was not issued based on this, the advocate said.

He also said that none of Wilson’s works was anti-India.

The matter has been listed for further hearing on August 27.

Wilson’s work has focused on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics.

Her publications include Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (1978) and Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain (2006). Her work has also been published in several outlets, including Ceasefire Magazine, Media Diversified, openDemocracy and The Guardian.

Similar cases in recent years

Several scholars and activists have similarly been denied entry into India in recent years.

In October, Francesca Orsini, a Hindi scholar and professor at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, was allegedly stopped from entering India despite having a valid five-year visa.

Orsini had arrived in Delhi from Hong Kong after attending an academic conference in China. However, the immigration authorities allegedly denied her entry into the country.

The scholar had said that no reason was provided for the denial.

In February 2025, Indian-origin anti-caste activist Kshama Sawant alleged that the Indian government had denied her an emergency visa thrice to visit her ailing mother in Bengaluru, claiming that her name was on a “reject list”.

The United States-based activist also claimed that officials had refused to give her an explanation for the rejection.

In January 2025, Swedish Indian-origin professor Ashok Swain moved the Delhi High Court seeking an early hearing of his petition challenging the cancellation of his Overseas Citizen of India status.

Swain is a professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University.

The Union government had cancelled Swain’s Overseas Citizen of India registration in July 2023 on the grounds that he had been found indulging in “illegal activities inimical” to the interests of the sovereignty, integrity and security of India.

The Delhi High Court in March 2025 set aside the Union government’s order cancelling Swain’s Overseas Citizen of India registration. However, it allowed the Union government to issue a fresh show-cause notice to the professor.

In February 2024, Nitasha Kaul, a British writer of Indian origin and professor of politics at the University of Westminster in London, alleged that she was denied entry into the country and deported from Bengaluru airport on the orders of the Union government “for speaking on democratic and constitutional values”.

In March 2022, anthropologist Filippo Osella was deported to the United Kingdom from the Thiruvananthapuram airport without being given any official reason. Osella, recognised for his work on societies in South Asia, had flown in to attend a research conference in the state capital.

In August 2022, US-based journalist Angad Singh was allegedly deported from Delhi airport when he was on his way from New York to visit his family in Punjab. In January 2023, the Union government told the Delhi High Court that Singh was blacklisted from visiting India because his documentary India Burning presented a “very negative view of India’s secular credentials”.

Singh is a US citizen and an Overseas Citizen of India cardholder.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to stay an amendment to the Right to Information Act made through the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, Bar and Bench reported.

The amendment bars the disclosure of personal information about public officials even on the grounds of larger public interest.

Hearing petitions seeking a stay on the amendment, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi observed that the matter was sensitive, and was about balancing competing interests because “it touches upon fundamental rights on both sides”.

“We have to iron out the creases and lay down what is personal information,” Kant was quoted as saying.

The court said that it cannot block a legislation by Parliament unless it hears the case. It agreed to “decide at the earliest” and said it would place the matter before a larger bench in March.

The court issued a notice to the Union government, Live Law reported.

The bench was hearing pleas filed by news organisation The Reporters Collective and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information, among others.

The Reporters Collective has challenged the constitutional validity of the 2023 personal data protection law and its 2025 rules.

The plea particularly challenges sections pertaining to consent, processing obligations, government access to data, amendments to the RTI Act and the setting up of the Data Protection Board, Bar and Bench reported.

The petitioners have contended that the rules notified in November alter the balance between privacy, transparency and free speech.

Section 44(3) of the digital personal data protection law amended Section 8(1)(j) of the RTI Act. This blocked the disclosure of “personal” information in larger public interest, which was allowed earlier.

The petitioners have contended that the change allows the authorities to withhold information on the grounds that it is personal even if it pertains to public activities or accountability.

The digital personal data protection law also does not contain exemptions for processing personal data for public interest or journalistic purposes such as investigative reporting, the plea has argued.

News associations have expressed concern about the digital personal data protection rules saying that the “ambiguous obligations” they impose could open the door for indirect censorship.

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

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

The Union Budget 2026-’27 presented on February 1 has explicitly recognised persons with disabilities as a distinct constituency, and enhanced allocations for two key schemes.

For the first time, disability is acknowledged as a category beyond being included as an “other marginalised group” in two new schemes under the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities and in an emphasis on mental health infrastructure.

But there is a familiar paradox: despite generous allocations, India’s disability budgeting is constrained by chronic underutilisation, weak institutional capacity and fragmented accountability.

More money

For 2026-’27, the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities has been allocated Rs 1,670 crore, an increase of nearly 30% over the revised estimates of 2025-’26, amounting to approximately Rs 380 crore more. Revised estimates are closer to the expenditure, unlike budget estimates which are proposed expenditures.

This increase has largely been driven by two new flagship schemes: the Rs 200-crore Divyangjan Kaushal Yojana, aimed at industry-aligned skill development, and the Rs 100-crore Divyang Sahara Yojana for assistive devices. Together, these schemes account for 79% of the increase, signalling the government’s emphasis on employability and technological support.

However, allocations for existing schemes, administrative expenses and institutions for the disabled have increased by only about Rs 80 crore. The department has consistently been unable to fully utilise funds in previous years, which throws into sharp relief the skewed allocations for projects over the machinery to implement them.

In 2024-’25, the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities spent 88% of the budget estimates, and returned nearly Rs 141 crore to the consolidated fund due to implementation bottlenecks.

Reports of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment have repeatedly flagged this trend.

In the report presented to Parliament in March 2025, the panel pointed out persistent underutilisation across key schemes, like the scheme to subsidise assistive devices such as wheelchairs, hearing aids, and prosthetics.

Similarly, the committee noted a marked decrease in 2024-’25 in the expenditure on the District Disability Rehabilitation Scheme: the allocation was allocated Rs 165 crore, which was revised to 139 crore but only 87.95 crore was actually spent. The scheme supports disability rehabilitation services, and scholarships for children with disabilities.

The problem, therefore, is a failure in translating allocations into outcomes.

Undermining schemes

The Scheme for Implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act exemplifies this problem. It is an umbrella framework that supports interventions such as the disability identity card, barrier-free infrastructure, digital accessibility and sensitisation initiatives.

In 2024-25, the scheme was allocated Rs 135.33 crore but only Rs 43.90 crore was actually spent, as of March 2025. In response to the committee’s queries on the low expenditure, the department said that the scheme is demand-driven and grants are released based on proposals from state governments with documentary evidence, like utilisation certificates for money from previous years.

Despite a revised estimate allocation of Rs 200 crore in 2025-’26, marking a rare mid-year increase reflecting rising demand, the allocation for 2026-’27 has been reduced to Rs 125 crore – a decrease of nearly 38%.

The Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities has previously acknowledged that funds under the scheme were unused because several states were unable to adopt the treasury single account system required to disburse funds.

This has meant penalising the scheme by reducing allocations instead of resolving administrative bottlenecks. It contradicts the government’s stated policy priorities and risks weakening the foundational architecture on which disability inclusion depends.

Undermining the Scheme for Implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act has cascading effects as it supports processes that enable access to education, employment and social protection.

Institutional support

Concerns are even sharper when examining allocations for statutory institutions, like the Office of the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities.

It is the principal enforcement and grievance redressal authority under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and has been allocated just Rs 20 lakh, unchanged from the previous year. This amount must cover staffing, infrastructure, hearings, monitoring and follow-up actions.

The inadequacy is stark. In 2025 alone, the commissioner’s office imposed penalties on nearly 100 establishments for violating digital accessibility norms. Effective enforcement requires resources for investigations, hearings and compliance monitoring. The unchanged allocation raises serious concerns about the seriousness of enforcing disability rights.

Similarly, the government has announced a new National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, or NIMHANS, in north India, but failed to provide allocations in the budget. Proposing a new institute acknowledges long-standing access barriers, particularly the high out-of-pocket costs faced by persons with psychosocial disabilities who must travel to Bengaluru for specialised assessments.

But there is no corresponding line-item allocation under the Ministry of Health. Unlike new All India Institutes of Medical Science, which are backed by explicit budgetary provisions, the absence of earmarked funds for the mental health institution casts doubt on timelines and the intention to implement announcements.

Political economy of disability

This cycle of underallocation and underutilisation shows that actually changing the lives of people with disabilities is a low political priority that has little to do with inadequate funding. Rights guaranteed under the law are reduced to discretionary welfare that depends on bureaucratic efficiency across multiple levels of the government.

As seen with the Scheme for Implementation of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, centre-state dynamics can further dilute accountability. The central government controls funding while states manage implementation of schemes and policies. Delays and failures are routinely attributed to this division of responsibility, with persons with disabilities caught in between.

The Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment, in its December report, had observed that disability policy in India suffers less from a lack of knowledge about required interventions and more from insufficient political will to execute them.

The disability allocations in the Budget 2026-27 hold real potential. The increase in funding and emphasis on skills, assistive technology and mental health signal intent that could prove transformative. However, real outcomes will depend on making the monetary allocations actually count.

Shashank Pandey is a lawyer and the founder of politics and disability forum.

A sessions court in Karnataka’s Koppal district on Monday sentenced three men to death for gang-raping two women and killing a man in March 2025, The Times of India reported.

The crime, which occurred about 25 km from the world heritage site of Hampi, had sparked widespread outrage at the time.

On March 6, 2025, two women, a 27-year-old from Israel and a 29-year-old homestay owner from Koppal, were assaulted and raped by the three men. The women were part of a group of five persons, which included three other male travellers from the United States, Odisha and Maharashtra.

The body of the male tourist from Odisha had been found two days after the incident.

On Monday, Judge Sadananda Nagappa Nayaka ruled that the crime fell under the “rarest of rare” category and warranted maximum punishment, NDTV reported.

The three men are 22-year-old Mallesh alias Handimalla, 21-year-old Sai alias Chaitanya Sai and 30-year-old Sharanappa alias Sharanabasavaraj.

The court had convicted them on February 6.

The case

In her complaint, the homestay owner said that the offence took place at about 10.30 pm, when she and her four guests were stargazing after dinner by the Tungabhadra Left Bank Canal.

She alleged that three men arrived on a motorcycle and asked where they could get petrol. One of them demanded Rs 100 from the tourists, and when they refused, he began arguing and attacking them. The altercation led to the three male tourists being assaulted and pushed into the canal, after which the women were sexually assaulted.

The three perpetrators then fled the crime scene on their bike with two mobile phones and Rs 9,500 in cash from the travellers, the complaint had alleged.

Two days after the alleged incident, search teams recovered the body of 26-year-old Bibash, who hailed from Odisha. The other two men, 23-year-old Daniel and 42-year-old Pankaj, had managed to swim ashore.

The police had registered a case on charges of gangrape, robbery, assault and attempt to murder against the three persons.

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav on Monday alleged widespread irregularities in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in the state.

The former chief minister demanded greater transparency in the process and action against persons responsible for the alleged irregularities.

Yadav said at a press conference that he will ask the Election Commission to clarify under which rules should first information reports be registered in the matter.

He asked why the Election Commission had not taken action so far and added that the Samajwadi Party will raise the matter in the Assembly, where the Budget Session is underway.

The Samajwadi Party chief demanded that the process of removing voters from the electoral rolls be initiated only by booth-level officers and not by others, PTI reported. Details such as the booth number, Assembly constituency and the name of the person who submitted Form 7s should be made public, he added.

Form 7 of the Election Commission is the official application used to object to the inclusion of a name or to request the deletion of a name from an existing electoral roll.

Names of SP supporters being removed, alleges Yadav

Yadav alleged that the names of Samajwadi Party supporters were being deleted unlawfully and that the poll panel had given the party “very little” information, PTI reported.

He claimed that in Sakaldiha town, the names of 16 voters had been deleted after allegedly forged signatures were submitted in the name of a Samajwadi Party MLA. He alleged that an analysis of the voters would show that they belonged to the “PDA”, or pichhda (backward), Dalit and alpsankhyak (minority) communities.

Yadav alleged that a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party had claimed that three lakh voters had been deleted in Kannauj and that more were to be removed in other districts. Yadav is the MP from Kannauj.

Yadav’s remark was an apparent reference to a claim made by former BJP MP Subrata Pathak in December.

The former chief minister stated that while the Samajwadi Party had filed 47 Form 7s in the state, the BJP had submitted 1,729 and “unknown persons” had 1.2 lakh applications. These unknown persons were linked to the Hindutva party, he claimed.

Uttar Pradesh is among the 12 states and Union Territories where the Election Commission is conducting the special intensive revision of the voter rolls. The exercise had begun on October 27.

The draft roll in the state was published on January 6. It showed that the names of 2.8 crore voters had been removed – the largest number of deletions among the 12 states and Union Territories.

The deletions included 2.1 crore persons who had shifted from their registered residences, 46.2 lakh voters who had died and 25.4 lakh duplicate entries.

The names of 12.5 crore voters out of the total 15.4 crore electors had been retained in the draft roll.

The deletions from the draft roll are provisional and citizens can object to their names being removed from the list. The poll panel had on February 6 extended the deadline to March 6 for voters to file their claims and objections.

The deadline for hearings and verification was extended to March 27 from February 27. The final electoral roll in the state will be published on April 10.

The Supreme Court on Monday questioned the Union government about the accuracy of transcripts of videos relied upon to detain Ladakh activist Sonam Wangchuk under the National Security Act, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and PB Varale was hearing a petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife, Gitanjali Angmo, challenging the activist’s detention.

Wangchuk was detained on September 26 and taken to a jail in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur after protests in Leh demanding statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. During the protests, demonstrators clashed with and threw stones at security personnel, injuring several of them. Four persons were killed in police firing.

The Union government has alleged that Wangchuk was the “chief provocateur” of the September 24 violence and that the protests in Leh came under control after the activist was taken into custody.

On Monday, the bench said it wanted the transcripts of Wangchuk’s statements after advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for Angmo, submitted that several words attributed to the activist were never spoken by him.

“The tabular list you [the Union government] have filed, some of these things don’t even find a place in the detention order,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying. “There should be at least the correct transcript of what he [Wangchuk] says.”

The bench added: “There should not be a variance. If the speech is of three minutes and your transcription goes on for seven-eight minutes, there is certainly malice in that.”

Additional Solicitor General KM Nataraj told the court that the transcription had been prepared by “a department” and that the government were not “experts” in the process, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench responded that in the age of artificial intelligence, the precision should be at least 98%.

It also directed the Jodhpur jail superintendent to produce before it, in a sealed cover, a pen drive that Union authorities had handed over to Wangchuk on September 29, Live Law reported.

This came after Sibal told the court that although the grounds of detention were supplied to Wangchuk that day, the four videos of his speeches referred to in the detention order were not present on the pen drive. He argued that the detention order was vitiated because the relevant material had not been properly supplied to the activist, Live Law reported.

At an earlier hearing, Nataraj had submitted that Wangchuk was shown all the videos and contents of the detention order and that the process was videographed, alleging that the activist was lying to the court. The bench, however, had at the time pointed out that Wangchuk had not endorsed that he was given an opportunity to watch the videos containing his alleged inflammatory speeches, the legal news outlet reported.

On January 13, Sibal told the court that Wangchuk cannot be seen in the videos relied upon by the authorities as grounds for his detention under the National Security Act.

A controversy broke out in Maharashtra’s Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district after a group of Bharatiya Janata Party workers on Sunday allegedly sprinkled cow urine inside a temple to “purify” it following a visit by Abdul Sattar, an MLA from the Shiv Sena group led by Eknath Shinde, PTI reported.

Sattar, a former state minister and four-term MLA from the Sillod Assembly constituency, had offered prayers at the Nageshwar Mahadev Temple in Rahimabad village on the occasion of Mahashivratri on Sunday.

Viral Video: Gomutra Sprinkled At Nageshwar Mahadev Temple After Abdul Sattar's Mahashivratri Visit Sparks Outrage In Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar | WATCH pic.twitter.com/ZFmRHTwLjc

— Maharashtra News (@MahaNews25) February 16, 2026

However, BJP leaders in the area and members of Hindutva groups objected to Sattar’s presence at the temple, alleging that he consumes non-vegetarian food and had thereby harmed the sanctity of the shrine, The Times of India reported.

Manoj Morellu, BJP’s Sillod unit chief said party workers sprayed cow urine to “restore sanctity” to the temple, The Indian Express reported.

He alleged that Sattar eats cow meat and had harmed the sanctity of the temple with his visit.

Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde on Monday described the incident as “unfortunate”, The Indian Express reported.

“Abdul Sattar is an elected MLA,” Shinde said. “He is a patriot and a lover of this country. Such action on the part of people is not good.”

An adjudicating authority under the Foreign Exchange Management Act has imposed a total penalty of Rs 184 crore on NewsClick founder and editor-in-chief Prabir Purkayastha, the Enforcement Directorate said on Monday.

The Special Director of Enforcement passed the order on Monday following adjudication proceedings based on a complaint filed under Section 16 of the Foreign Exchange Management Act.

The proceedings related to alleged violations of foreign exchange law involving foreign direct investment and foreign inward remittances.

The authority imposed a penalty of Rs 120 crore on PPK Newsclick Studio Private Limited, which owns the news outlet and Rs 64 crore on Purkayastha.

The Enforcement Director said Purkayastha, as director of the company, was found to be in charge of and responsible for its business operations and was therefore held liable under the Act.

The agency alleged that the company received foreign direct investment of approximately Rs 9.5 crore during the financial year 2018-’19 after incorrectly describing its business in official filings, which it said allowed it to bypass certain regulatory requirements.

It also stated that foreign remittances amounting to Rs 82.6 crore, received between 2018-’19 and 2023-’24 and shown as payments for export of services, did not comply with foreign exchange rules, including mandatory reporting requirements such as submission of Software Export Declaration forms.

The probe agency said that the adjudicating authority, after examining records, evidence and submissions from the parties, concluded “that the contraventions were substantial, deliberate and systemic in nature”.

The SDE (Adjudicating Authority), Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 (FEMA), has passed an Order-in-Original dated 16.02.2026 under FEMA,1999 imposing Rs.184 Crore Penalty, in an adjudication proceeding in the case of M/s PPK Newsclick Studio Pvt. Ltd relating to violations of… pic.twitter.com/d4FIPGMDXP

— ED (@dir_ed) February 16, 2026

Purkayastha told ThePrint on Monday that he had not yet received the order and had learnt of its existence through press releases and news reports.

“At this stage, therefore, I can only say that we believe there is no basis for such an order and will fight it legally,” he said.

The case pertains to a first information report registered by the Delhi Police in August 2020 against NewsClick for allegedly violating Foreign Direct Investment norms. The Enforcement Directorate then initiated an investigation into the matter after taking cognisance of the Delhi Police’s FIR.

In February 2021, the central agency conducted raids at the Newsclick office and Purkayastha’s home based on the allegations levelled by the Delhi Police. However, no arrests were made during the raids at that time.

In October 2023, the Delhi Police had raided the NewsClick office, along with the residences of nearly 80 journalists and other individuals associated with the portal. Purkayastha was arrested on the same day as the raids.

These raids were linked to another case filed against the news outlet under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act by the Delhi Police in March 2024, which alleged that it had received funds through Chinese entities “with the intention of undermining India’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”.

The case was registered after The New York Times alleged in an August 2023 report that NewsClick had received money from American businessman Neville Roy Singham, who worked closely with the “Chinese government media machine” to spread its propaganda.

In May 2024, the Supreme Court had declared Purkayastha’s arrest in the case invalid and ordered his release.

In February 2016, Jawaharlal Nehru University became the epicentre of one of India’s most polarising debates on nationalism, dissent, and free speech after a campus event triggered a sedition case against Kanhaiya Kumar, the head of the students’ union, and nine other students.

A decade later, the matter is in a legal stalemate.

The Delhi Police has filed a chargesheet against the accused but the trial cannot begin until the Supreme Court decides whether the offence of sedition remains on the statute book.

Introduced by British colonialists, sedition criminalises attempts to excite disaffection towards the government established by law. The provision has long been criticised for its vague and expansive wording, which critics argue enables its misuse against dissent and political speech.

In the JNU sedition case, for instance, the Delhi Police’s chargesheet states that the accused shouted slogans that supported the secession of Kashmir, criticised the Indian state, and expressed solidarity with Afzal Guru, who had been convicted in the 2001 Parliament attack case.

But in submissions to a trial court in Delhi, lawyers representing the accused have disputed the authenticity of the video clips and the witness statements the police have relied on. They have also argued that even if some slogans were shouted, they do not amount to sedition.

Here, the lawyers relied on past judgements such as in the Kedar Nath Singh case in 1962, in which the Supreme Court held that sedition applies only when there is incitement to violence or public disorder, and the Balwant Singh case in 1995, where shouting pro-Khalistan slogans was held not to be seditious because it did not lead to any violence or disturbance.

While these arguments remain in abeyance until the Supreme Court decides the future of the sedition law, the prolonged uncertainty has taken a toll on the accused.

Anirban Bhattacharya, one of the accused who is currently working with a research and advocacy organisation, said he had to renew his passports every two years. Anyone facing a criminal case is issued a passport valid only for two years, instead of the standard 10 years.

“Every time I had to travel – for instance, to attend a workshop – it became a major hassle. I had to arrange a surety, find someone willing to pledge around Rs 5 lakh, and then return the passport after coming back.”

Kumar’s lawyer Chinmay Kanojia told Scroll that there has been “no real movement in the case and that it is unlikely to progress in the near future”.

Since 2022, when the Supreme Court stayed the sedition provision, the trial court has listed the matter at least 14 times, the most recent being on January 13, 2026. The matter was adjourned and posted for the next hearing April 16.

Campus protest to criminal prosecution

On February 9, 2016, an event was organised at Sabarmati Dhaba, in the JNU campus. Initially proposed as a poetry reading titled “The Country Without A Post Office”, the programme had been granted permission by the university authorities.

After posters in circulation indicated that the event was being organised to mark the anniversary of Afzal Guru’s execution, the university withdrew permission. But the event went ahead despite the cancellation, says the chargesheet. Soon after, television news channels aired videos that they claimed showed students shouting “anti-India” slogans.

On February 11, the Delhi Police registered a first information report under Section 124A for sedition of the Indian Penal Code against unknown persons.

The FIR was based on complaints lodged by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Maheish Girri, JNU Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad leader Saurabh Sharma, and videos and television news footage claiming to show that anti-India slogans were shouted during the event on campus.

The next day, on February 12, the Delhi Police arrested Kanhaiya Kumar, who was then the president of the JNU Students’ Union. The police later named doctoral students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya as accused in the FIR. Both of them surrendered to the police and were arrested on February 23.

During the bail hearing before the Delhi High Court on February 29, the police told the court that it did not have video evidence showing that Kumar had shouted “anti-India” slogans.

On March 2, the Delhi High Court granted Kumar interim bail for six months, while criticising him as well as others who participated in the campus event for misusing free speech. The judge told Kumar that he had the freedom to raise “anti-national slogans” only because India’s borders are “guarded by our armed and paramilitary forces”.

Days later, on March 18, Khalid and Bhattacharya, who were in judicial custody, were granted six-month interim bail by a Delhi trial court. They were released from Tihar jail after furnishing personal bonds and sureties, with restrictions on travel and a requirement to cooperate with the investigation.

Later that year, on August 26, the Delhi trial court granted Kumar, Khalid, and Bhattacharya regular bail. The police did not oppose the plea, stating that the accused had complied with bail conditions and cooperated with the investigation.

Meanwhile, a high-level inquiry committee set up by JNU had submitted its report to the university administration on March 16, 2016. The committee concluded that a group of masked outsiders had raised provocative slogans at the event, including “Bharat ko ragda do” and “Pakistan zindabad.”

Some witnesses claimed that slogans such as “Bharat ki barbadi tak jung rahegi” were also shouted, but the committee noted that there was no video evidence to substantiate this allegation.

No trial in 10 years

For three years after the first arrests, the case remained under police investigation. The accused appeared in court periodically to mark their presence, attend routine hearings where the court reviewed the status of the investigation and comply with bail conditions.

On January 14, 2019, the Delhi Police filed a chargesheet in court against 10 accused, including Kumar, Khalid and Bhattacharya. The names of the six other students emerged during the course of the police investigation.

Apart from sedition, the police invoked other penal provisions of the Indian Penal Code such as 120B for criminal conspiracy, 34 for common intention, 147 for rioting and 149 for unlawful assembly.

Then there was further delay.

For a case of sedition, the police must seek permission from the government, in this case the Home Department of the Delhi government then ruled by the Aam Aadmi Party. Without government sanction, courts cannot proceed with the trial. In July 2019, an Indian Express report, quoting unnamed sources, said that the Delhi government’s legal officer had opposed granting sanction.

Nearly a year later, the Delhi government’s Home Department granted sanction to the police on February 27, 2020.

In February 2021, a Delhi court took cognisance of the police’s final report, which included the chargesheet, technical documents and the government sanction for prosecution. The judge’s order summoned the accused for trial on March 15.

Beginning the process of framing charges, the court in March 2021 directed the Delhi Police to supply copies of the chargesheet to the accused.

But a development in the Supreme Court would soon put off the trial.

Read Scroll’s special series: A decade after the JNU sedition case, we trace the trajectories taken by four student-activists – and what that reveals about political life in India.

Sedition law

In February 2021, two journalists filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of Section 124A for sedition.

Kishorechandra Wangkhemcha and Kanhaiya Lal Shukla contended that the formulation of Section 124A allows for arbitrary application and that it is routinely invoked to silence criticism of those in power. Nine other petitions were subsequently tagged to it.

Meanwhile, the JNU sedition case was proceeding slowly with hearings repeatedly adjourned for reasons such as delay in supplying documents to the accused and securing the presence of those witnesses. The judiciary was also struggling with an administrative slowdown following the Covid-19 pandemic.

In May 2022, the Supreme Court directed that all trials, appeals, and proceedings under Section 124A be kept in abeyance. In its order, it said “no coercive action” should be taken in pending sedition cases. A year later, the Supreme Court referred the constitutional challenge to a larger bench in.

In August 2025, the Supreme Court expanded the scope of scrutiny further by agreeing to also examine Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita alongside the challenge to sedition. Section 152 mirrors the language of sedition provision in the Indian Penal Code. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the Indian Penal Code in July 2024.

Deep freeze

The Supreme Court’s 2022 order had an immediate impact on the JNU sedition case.

In July 2022, while hearing the matter, a Delhi trial court recorded submissions from defence counsel citing the Supreme Court ruling putting all proceedings under Section 124A in abeyance.

Accepting the submission, the court stayed the trial, observing that “although other penal provisions were involved, allowing the proceedings to continue could prejudice the accused while the constitutional validity of sedition remained under consideration”.

Advocate Sahil Ghai, who represents Khalid and Bhattacharya said, “each successive judge hearing the case – the matter is now before its third judge – has followed the same course and after noting the Supreme Court’s order staying sedition proceedings, the court has simply adjourned the case.”

Lives in limbo

The lives of the 10 students named in the FIR have taken markedly different trajectories. Kanhaiya’s lawyer Chinmay Kanojia said the bail conditions imposed in 2016 continue to remain in force. “Similar conditions were imposed on the other accused as well, but life has moved on for them, some have even gone abroad to pursue postgraduate studies.”

Kanhaiya Kumar joined the Congress in 2021, contesting elections and doing organisational work. Umar Khalid has been in jail since 2020 in connection with the alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2019 Delhi riots. Anirban Bhattacharya is now working as a director of campaigns and team lead, National Finance Team at Centre for Financial Accountability.

Yet, the sedition case continues to hover over them.

Referring to the routine appearances in court every three to four months, Bhattacharya said, “All of this looks routine now, but the case never actually moves.”

Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha on Monday ordered the reopening of 14 tourist spots in the Union Territory that were closed after the Pahalgam terror attack in April.

The administration had shut down around 50 tourist destinations in Jammu and Kashmir following the attack.

The terror attack at Baisaran near Pahalgam town in Jammu and Kashmir on April 22 left 26 persons dead and 16 injured. The terrorists targeted tourists after asking their names to ascertain their religion, the police said. All but three of those killed were Hindu.

In a social media post on Monday, Sinha said that he had ordered the reopening of the tourist spots “after a thorough security review and discussions”.

The number of tourist spots reopened so far now stands at 26. On September 26, Sinha had ordered the reopening of 12 tourist destinations, PTI reported.

“Eleven tourist spots in the Kashmir Division, Yousmarg, Doodhpathri, Dandipora Park in Kokernag, Peer Ki Gali, Dubjan and Padpawan in Shopian, Astanpora, Tulip Garden in Srinagar, Thajwas Glacier, Hung Park in Ganderbal, and Wullar and Watlab in Baramulla, are to be reopened immediately,” Sinha said.

Three tourist spots in the Jammu division, Devi Pindi in Reasi, Mahu Mangat in Ramban and Mughal Maidan in Kishtwar, are also to be reopened with immediate effect, he said.

“Three sites in the Kashmir division, Gurez, Athwatoo and Bangus and one site in the Jammu division, Ramkund in Ramban, will be reopened once the snow is cleared,” he added.

The Supreme Court declined to entertain petitions seeking that a first information report be filed against Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for hate speech against Muslims. The bench told the petitioners to approach the Gauhati High Court.

It also declined a request to move the matter to another High Court, warning against “convenience forum shopping”.

The petitioners had pointed to several instances of hate speech by Sarma, and to a now-deleted social media post by the BJP’s Assam unit, containing a video depicting Sarma symbolically firing at images of two Muslim men at point-blank range. Read on.

Himanta Sarma’s remarks about ‘Miyas’ make a mockery of the Constitution, writes Amrita Dutta

The National Green Tribunal disposed of challenges to the Great Nicobar Project. A six-member special bench said that it found no grounds to interfere as there are “adequate safeguards” in the environmental clearance.

The panel had been tasked by the tribunal to revisit the environmental clearance granted to the project. It noted that the project was of “strategic importance”.

Concerns have been raised about the impact of the Great Nicobar Project on the Shompen, a vulnerable tribal group, and the Nicobarese community. The project has also faced criticism for its potential impact on the island’s biodiversity, rainforests and endemic species. Read on.

Experts fear the Great Nicober Project could wipe out species newly discovered on the island, writes Vaishnavi Rathore

Congress’ former Assam unit chief Bhupen Borah withdrew his resignation from the party hours after stepping down. In his resignation letter to Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge ahead of the Assembly elections, Borah had claimed that he was being “ignored” by the party leadership.

By afternoon, Jitendra Singh, who is in charge of the party’s campaign in Assam, announced that Borah had taken back his resignation.

Borah was the president of the Congress’ Assam unit between 2021 and 2025. He was replaced by Gaurav Gogoi in June. Assembly elections in the state will be held in March or April. Read on.

The Supreme Court dismissed a petition challenging a Chhattisgarh High Court judgement that said that hoardings restricting the entry of pastors and “converted Christians”, which had been put up in eight villages of the state’s Kanker district, were not “unconstitutional”. In October, the High Court ruled that the hoarding appeared to have been installed “as a precautionary measure to protect the interest of indigenous tribes”.

The top court said that the High Court order granted liberty to the petitioners to approach the statutory authority under the state Panchayat Upbandh Anusuchit Kshetron par Vistar Niyam, or PESA Rules. Read on.

Pastors say house churches in Chhattisgarh face an informal ban, writes Nolina Minj

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party has said that the presence of deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in India will not deter Dhaka from pursuing its broader relations with New Delhi. Dhaka’s ties with New Delhi will not be “captive” of one matter, said BNP general secretary Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir.

His comments come a day before the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is set to form the next government in the country. Tarique Rahman, the chairperson of the party, will be sworn in as the country’s prime minister on Tuesday. Read on.

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Before the sun rises over the jagged ridgelines around Kibber village in Himachal Pradesh’s Lahaul-Spiti district, 43-year-old Kalzang Gurmet is already on the move. On days when the monitoring site lies far from home, he leaves around five in the morning, walking across open steppe and rocky slopes for three to four hours. The early start matters. As the sun grows harsher, bird activity drops and sightings become fewer.

“Subah ka time sabse achha rehta hai,” he says in Hindi. (“Morning is the best time.”)

Kalzang Gurmet grew up in Kibber, studied history, completed a master’s degree, and returned to the village. Since 2007, he has worked with the Nature Conservation Foundation, helping scientists document birdlife across one of the highest inhabited mountain landscapes in the world.

Over the past two decades, Gurmet has played a key role in data collection and fieldwork. Along with Tanzin Thinley and other local field staff, he has walked the same transects summer after summer, counting birds in terrain where elevations exceed 4,000 metres and the growing season lasts only a few months.

That continuity, the same places, the same methods, year after year, now tells a troubling story.

The insights are documented in a study published in Ecological Applications in which the Nature Conservation Foundation researchers reports that bird densities declined across habitats, but the only statistically significant decadal decline was in the ungrazed steppe, the habitat facing the least direct human disturbance. Ungrazed steppe refers to high-altitude grassland kept free from livestock grazing, where vegetation is allowed to grow largely undisturbed over long periods.

Although often described as grasslands, the Spiti region is technically a cold desert, where vegetation occurs as rangelands, a mosaic of shrubs, alpine meadows, and sparse grasses.

The study, which spanned 2002 to 2023, tracked changes in bird populations across Spiti’s diverse habitats, shaped by both local human activity and broader climate forces.

While the study tracked bird populations over two decades, not all years were fully sampled. The analysis is based on data from 14 years of surveys between 2002 and 2023.

“We found that bird populations declined and species composition changed even in the least disturbed habitat over two decades,” said Sidharth Srinivasan, the study’s lead author and a researcher with Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysuru.

For Gurmet, who is also one of the co-authors of the study, the declining numbers of once-familiar species is more than just data points. It’s a reflection of a landscape and a way of life changing before his eyes. “We grew up with these birds,” he says, “and seeing them fade away feels like losing a part of our heritage. I hope my children will know the same Spiti I knew.”

Four habitats, one landscape

The study followed bird communities across four habitat types, crop fields, grazed meadows, grazed steppe, and ungrazed steppe, within a roughly 16-square-kilometre area around Kibber village. Together, these habitats form the agropastoral mosaic typical of the Trans-Himalaya, where farming, livestock grazing, and wildlife coexist in close proximity.

Crop fields represented the most intensive land use. At the other end of the gradient lay the ungrazed steppe, a grazing-free reserve demarcated by the Kibber community in 1998. The reserve was created as part of a community-based conservation effort to increase blue sheep populations, an important prey species for snow leopards. Over time, it has become a rare patch where land use remained unchanged for decades.

Between May and September each year, coinciding with the bird breeding season, researchers and local field staff walked fixed transects across all four habitats. Using distance-sampling methods, they recorded bird species, numbers, and how far each sighting was from the transect line. After filtering out non-breeding and rare species, the analysis included more than 17,000 individual birds belonging to 44 species.

Higher numbers, fewer specialists

The results found that bird communities differed significantly across habitats.

Crop fields supported the highest bird densities, but those communities were dominated by generalist and commensal species such as house sparrows and hill pigeons. Habitat specialists, birds closely tied to steppe vegetation and structure, were largely absent or present in very low numbers.

“Traditional farming in Spiti still seems to host birds in high densities,” Srinivasan said. “However, some specialist species are absent or present in very low densities here. This is probably because of their habitat specificity and or diet, which agricultural landscapes might not provide.”

Farming in Spiti remains largely low-intensity. Pesticide use is minimal, and inputs such as organic manure and irrigation water are common. These conditions likely increase insect availability, which benefits generalist insect-eating birds. But the authors note that such landscapes do not replace the structural complexity of natural steppe habitats that specialists require.

Ungrazed steppe, by contrast, supported both high bird densities and the highest species richness, including habitat specialists such as Tibetan sandgrouse and leaf warblers. Grazed habitats consistently fared worst, with lower bird densities and fewer specialist species.

Temporal signal

While spatial differences reflected land-use intensity, the most concerning findings emerged when the researchers examined change over time.

Comparing the early period of the study (2002-2010) with the later years (2016-2023), bird densities declined across all habitats. However, the decline was statistically significant only in the ungrazed steppe.

“This finding is worrying because it points to deeper, systemic pressures beyond land-use change alone,” Srinivasan said. “If birds aren’t doing so well in disturbed habitats, they might have the ability to choose to use other undisturbed habitats. However, if their populations are declining in undisturbed habitats, we might have to go beyond our conservation interventions of maintaining undisturbed areas.”

Several common insect-eating species, including black redstarts, desert wheatears, and leaf warblers, showed marked declines. One species, Hume’s lark, has not been detected in the study area since 2009, suggesting possible local extirpation.

Crucially, land use in the ungrazed steppe remained stable throughout the study period.

“The undisturbed habitat serves as a natural control site because land use remained stable and unchanged there,” Srinivasan explained. “Therefore, something else must be driving these changes.”

Climate stress on the roof of the world

The study cannot directly separate climate effects from land-use change in disturbed habitats, but the authors hypothesize climate change could be contributing, especially because the ungrazed steppe remained stable in land use.

Unlike land-use change, climate stress operates across entire landscapes. In Spiti, where elevations already approach the upper limits of habitable terrain, birds have little room to shift further upslope in response to warming.

“Climate change is known to make birds move their ranges upslope, tracking their historical temperatures,” Srinivasan said. “However, because the Spiti landscape already sits on the highest possible elevation on Earth, I wonder how birds here would adapt, if they do, to climate change.”

Year-to-year fluctuations in bird density were synchronised across all habitats, suggesting the influence of shared regional drivers such as weather. But long-term, on-ground weather data from the Trans-Himalaya remain sparse, limiting the ability to formally link these patterns to climate trends.

Similar studies in the Tibetan Plateau have shown that high-altitude birds are facing mounting pressures from climate change and land-use intensification. Spiti, while remote, is part of a wider pattern in the Trans-Himalaya, where the effects of warming are compounded by changing agricultural practices and infrastructure development.

A separate study from 2024 on Himalayan birds highlights that “birds and much of the flora and fauna in tropical mountain ranges are extremely temperature-sensitive and are responding to global heating rapidly.” This supports the recent findings in Spiti, where birds are already facing significant declines in both disturbed and undisturbed habitats due to climate and land-use pressures.

Rethinking conservation baselines

The findings challenge the assumption that protecting land from direct human use is sufficient to safeguard biodiversity.

“Continuous monitoring and teasing apart the mechanisms behind these declines are important next steps,” Srinivasan said. “Much needed from a conservation perspective.”

The study also cautions against framing conservation and livelihoods as opposing forces. Kibber’s agropastoral community has played a central role in maintaining both the landscape and the research.

“In 1998, they demarcated a part of their landscape as a grazing-free reserve as part of a community-based conservation initiative,” Srinivasan said. “Our on-ground team, who are from Kibber, have been walking these transects almost every summer for around two decades.”

Walking the same paths

For Kalzang Gurmet, the changes described in graphs and density estimates are felt on the ground.

As a child, he walked through grazing lands to reach school. There were ponds scattered across the landscape then, places where children played, and birds gathered. He remembers migratory birds appearing regularly. Some of those ponds have disappeared. Some of those birds no longer show up.

Today, he sometimes notices waterbirds in places where they were not seen earlier, while local species feel harder to find. He is careful not to overstate what he sees. “Maybe it’s because the weather is changing,” he says.

When unfamiliar birds appear, Kalzang photographs them and shares the images with scientists, discussing subtle differences in colour and markings. At the same time, village elders recall local names and histories tied to those birds, offering memories that stretch further back than formal surveys.

“Scientists tell us about the bird, and village elders share the history connected to it. Information comes from both sides,” Gurmet says, adding that many in the village worry the changes they are seeing may be linked to shifting weather patterns. While he does not believe the landscape is deteriorating rapidly, he remains cautious about the future. “If things are not managed, the damage will be substantial,” he says, pointing to what he sees as a growing use of chemicals in some fields, which he worries could worsen the problem.

Two decades after the first transects were laid, Kalzang still begins his mornings before sunrise, walking the same paths across the cold desert. What he sees along them has changed.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Supreme Court on Monday dismissed a petition challenging a Chhattisgarh High Court judgement from October, which said that hoardings restricting the entry of pastors and “converted Christians” that had been put up in eight villages of the state’s Kanker district were not “unconstitutional”, reported Live Law.

On October 28, a High Court bench of Chief Justice Ramesh Sinha and Justice Bibhu Datta Guru ruled that the hoardings appeared to have been installed “as a precautionary measure to protect the interest of indigenous tribes and local cultural heritage”.

The court was hearing a petition filed by a resident of the district, Digbal Tandi, who argued that the signs amounted to segregation and discrimination against members of the Christian community.

The list of villages in the petition are Kudal, Parvi, Junwani, Ghota, Ghotiya, Havechur, Musurputta and Sulangi.

On Monday, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta declined to interfere with the High Court order, saying that it granted liberty to the petitioners to approach the statutory authority under the state Panchayat Upbandh (Anusuchit Kshetron par Vistar) Niyam, or PESA Rules, reported The Indian Express.

Appearing for the state, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submitted that the plea before the High Court was limited. But before the Supreme Court, several new facts and dimensions had been added, and the High Court could be approached again, Live Law reported.

Advocate Colin Gonsalves, representing the petitioners, argued that the High Court had made observations on missionary activities in Adivasi areas without material on record. He questioned why the petitioners should approach the gram sabha or any other authorities, Live Law reported.

Gonsalves referred to other matters pending before the court, including cases concerning around 700 alleged attacks on pastors during prayer meetings and disputes over the burial of Adivasis who had converted to Christianity. He also claimed that there had not been a single conviction in a religious conversion case in Chhattisgarh in the past 10 years.

“You should have approached the appropriate authority under the Rules… they would have examined the matter on affidavits, on material, on evidence,” Live Law quoted Nath as saying.

Also read: House churches in Chhattisgarh face an informal ban, say pastors

The presence of Bangladesh’s deposed Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in India will not “deter” Dhaka from pursuing its broader relations with New Delhi, Bangladesh Nationalist Party general secretary Mirza Fakhrul Islam Alamgir told The Hindu on Monday.

Alamgir added that Dhaka’s relation with New Delhi will not be “captive” of one matter.

His comments come a day before the Bangladesh Nationalist Party is set to form the next government in the country. Tarique Rahman, the chairperson of the party, will be sworn in as the country’s prime minister on Tuesday.

An alliance led by the party swept the parliamentary elections held on February 12, winning 212 out of 299 constituencies. The Jamaat-e-Islami-led coalition emerged as the main Opposition with 77 seats.

This was the first national election in Bangladesh since Hasina was ousted and fled to India in August 2024. Her ouster came after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus subsequently took over as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government. With the elections now complete, the interim government’s term will come to an end.

Ties between New Delhi and Dhaka had been strained after Hasina had fled to India.

Bangladesh has repeatedly demanded that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal in that country sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government.

In December, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that it was for Hasina to decide whether she wanted to return to Bangladesh.

Speaking to The Hindu on Monday, Alamgir said that Bangladesh would expedite the projects that were in its interest and would also intensify its development partnership with India.

“We believe that Hasina has really committed serious human rights violations,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “There is a popular demand to punish her and we believe that India should hand her over to us.”

He added: “But not handing over Sheikh Hasina to Bangladesh will not be a deterrent to build broader relation including trade and commercial ties. We want to build even better ties.”

The general secretary of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party also said that there was a legal process for Hasina, her ministers and bureaucrats who have been accused of carrying out murders and criminal acts during the uprising in 2024, the newspaper reported.

This process will continue, he added.

After the Bangladesh Nationalist Party won the election, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday was the first national leader to congratulate Rahman on his party’s victory. In a social media post, he “reaffirmed India’s continued commitment to the peace, progress and prosperity of both our peoples”.

In response, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party on Saturday said it was looking forward to “engaging constructively” with India to advance the bilateral relationship.

It also invited Modi, along with the heads of government of 12 other countries, to Rahman’s swearing-in ceremony. However, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla will travel to Bangladesh to represent India at the ceremony, as Modi has meetings scheduled with French President Emmanuel Macron in Mumbai on Tuesday.

On Saturday, Humayun Kabir, adviser to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party chief, told PTI that with Hasina no longer in power, his country now wanted to reset ties with India. He added that both countries should work together for mutual benefit.

However, he asserted: “The change has to come from the mindset in India.”

Kabir urged India to ensure that its territory is not used by Hasina or other Awami League leaders in ways that could hurt Bangladesh’s stability.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to entertain petitions seeking that a first information report be filed against Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma for hate speech against Muslims, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant told the petitioners to approach the Gauhati High Court. It asked the High Court to hear the matter on priority.

The Supreme Court declined a request to move the matter to another High Court, warning against “convenience forum shopping”, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench said that High Courts are constitutional entities meant to ensure access to justice. “Please do not undermine the sanctity of constitutional High Courts,” the legal news outlet quoted Kant as saying.

Petitions seeking action against the Bharatiya Janata Party leader were filed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Communist Party of India leader Annie Raja. The petitioners pointed to several instances of hate speech by Sarma, and to a now-deleted social media post by the BJP’s Assam unit, containing a video depicting Sarma symbolically firing at images of two Muslim men at point-blank range.

In the past month, Sarma has made a series of remarks targeting Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam, calling them “Miyas”. The Assam chief minister had said that it was his job to “make them suffer”.

In Assam, “Miya” is a derogatory word used to refer to undocumented immigrants and is exclusively directed at Muslims of Bengali origin. They are often accused of being undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.

Once a pejorative in Assam, from the common use of the honorific “Miya” among South Asian Muslims, the term has now been reappropriated by the community as a self-descriptor to refer to Muslims who migrated to Assam from Bengal during the colonial era.

Petitions before SC

The CPI(M) and Raja, in their petitions, had sought the setting up of a Special Investigation Team by the Supreme Court, arguing that state and central agencies cannot be expected to conduct an independent and impartial inquiry.

They placed on record statements made by the chief minister between 2021 and February 2026 that allegedly call for the social, economic and civic exclusion of Bengali-origin Muslims, including calls to restrict access to livelihoods, transport, land and voting rights.

The petitioners contended that the remarks have had real-world consequences, with reports of discrimination and harassment allegedly being justified by perpetrators as acting on the chief minister’s directions.

The CPI(M) and Raja also added that the remarks violate the oath taken by the chief minister to uphold the Constitution, sovereignty, integrity, fraternity and equality.

Also read:

• Himanta Sarma’s remarks about ‘Miyas’ make a mockery of the Constitution
• Himanta Sarma’s remarks about ‘Miyas’ prejudicial and ‘alarmingly hateful’, say activists, lawyers
• Assam CM’s remarks violate Constitution, urge Supreme Court, president to intervene: Ex-bureaucrats

The Congress on Sunday distanced itself from comments by party member Mani Shankar Aiyar that Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Pinarayi Vijayan would continue as Kerala’s chief minister.

Party leader Pawan Khera said that Aiyar had “no connection whatsoever” with the Congress in recent years and added that the party would return to power in the state.

The Kerala Assembly elections are expected to be held in April.

Speaking at an event inaugurated by Vijayan in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday, Aiyar said amendments should be introduced to legally secure Kerala’s leading position in implementing the panchayati raj system, PTI reported.

“But while Kerala is the first state in panchayati raj in practice, it ranks only second in law,” PTI quoted him as saying. “So in the presence of the chief minister, who I am sure will be the next chief minister, I renew my plea that in order to reinforce Kerala as the best panchayati raj state in the country, state laws should be amended based on practical experience…”

Later in the day, Congress leader Pawan Khera said on social media that Aiyar speaks and writes “purely in his personal capacity” and has no connection with the party.

Congress MP Jairam Ramesh also shared Khera’s post and said that the residents of Kerala would bring the United Democratic Front back to power.

“Let there be no doubt,” the Rajya Sabha MP said. “The people of Kerala will bring the UDF back for more responsible and responsive governance. They also know LDF [Left Democratic Front] and BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] are covert partners.”

The ruling Left Democratic Front in Kerala is led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist).

Congress general secretary KC Venugopal described Aiyar’s remarks as his “personal opinion” and not the party’s position, ANI reported on Monday.

“Mani Shankar Aiyar is not currently in the Congress party,” the news agency quoted him as saying.

Sachin Pilot, appointed by the party as senior observer for the Kerala Assembly elections, also said that Aiyar was not part of the Congress, according to ANI.

On Monday, Aiyar said his remark that Vijayan would be the next chief minister had been “blown out of proportion” by the media, PTI reported.

He said the comment was “half a line” in his speech and had been exaggerated. However, Aiyar added that the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala was doing “outstanding work”, the news agency reported.

The former MP also said that only Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge could remove him from the party.

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a petition filed by gangster Abu Salem seeking premature release from prison in the 1993 Mumbai serial bomb blasts case, NDTV reported.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta directed him to move the Bombay High Court for relief, India Today reported.

It further refused Salem’s request for urgent directions, saying that his conviction under the now-repealed Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act and criminal record did not justify special consideration.

In September 2017, a special court under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act in Mumbai sentenced Salem to life imprisonment for his role in the blasts that killed more than 250 persons.

He was extradited from Portugal in November 2005.

Salem had filed a petition claiming the benefit of three years and 16 days of remission earned for good conduct toward the computation of his 25-year jail sentence, after completion of which he would be eligible for premature release, Live Law reported.

Remission is the reduction of the duration of a prison sentence without changing its nature, allowing for earlier release.

The gangster also cited the decision by the Supreme Court in July 2022, which relied on the extradition treaty between India and Portugal. The terms of this treaty had held that Salem would have to be released on completion of 25 years in jail.

However, the Maharashtra government has maintained that Salem had not completed 25 years.

At an earlier hearing, the Supreme Court had asked Salem to produce rules in Maharashtra under which remission could be granted to someone convicted under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act.

On Monday, the counsel for Salem submitted Rule 4 of the 1962 Maharashtra Prisons Remission System Rules, which outlines the types of remission, Live Law reported.

His counsel said that he had sought ordinary and annual good conduct remission.

During the hearing, the bench asked against which order the gangster had come before it. In response, his counsel said that Salem had moved the High Court with a petition for premature release, according to the legal news outlet.

In the High Court, Salem had sought a direction for the authorities to specify a release date after completing 25 years, saying that his right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution was being breached as he was being kept in prison beyond the 25-year jail term as agreed by the Indian authorities while signing the treaty with Portugal.

However, the High Court in July 2025 prima facie observed that Salem had not completed 25 years, Live Law reported.

It referred to the Supreme Court’s order, which took the date of Salem’s arrest as October 12, 2005, to provide for the premature release.

In the Supreme Court on Monday, Salem’s counsel said that the gangster had surpassed 10 months of his jail term.

“It is the case of habeas corpus, illegal custody,” Live Law quoted his counsel as adding.

The bench asked him to file an application in the High Court.

During the hearing, Salem’s counsel claimed that the gangster had been in illegal custody for more than 10 months.

“You have stayed for 25 years for not doing something good to the society,” Live Law quoted Nath as having said verbally. “You have [been] convicted under TADA.”

The case

In June 2017, the special Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act court had found Salem and five others guilty of conspiring and carrying out a series of bomb blasts across Mumbai in 1993, which ended up killing over 250 persons, Live Law reported.

Salem was convicted for offences punishable under sections of the Indian Penal Code, the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, the Arms Act, the Explosive Substances Act and the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.

According to the prosecution, Salem had transported and distributed arms and ammunition used in the blast.

In September 2017, the special court had sentenced Salem to life imprisonment.

This came after he was extradited from Portugal.

In December 2002, the Union government issued a gazette notification under the 1962 Extradition Act, directing that its provisions would apply to the Portuguese government, Live Law reported.

At the time, former Deputy Prime Minister LK Advani assured Portugal that it would exercise its powers conferred by Indian laws to ensure that if extradited for trial in India, Salem would not be given a death penalty or imprisonment for a term beyond 25 years.

The National Green Tribunal on Monday disposed of challenges to the Great Nicobar Project, saying that it found no grounds to interfere as there are “adequate safeguards” in the environmental clearance, The Indian Express reported.

The six-member special bench noted the “strategic importance” of the project, saying that the problems were dealt with by a committee. The panel had been tasked by the tribunal to revisit the environmental clearance granted to the project.

The Great Nicobar Project includes the construction of new townships, a power plant, a greenfield international airport and a transshipment port.

It is expected to use 166 sq km of the Great Nicobar island, which is part of the Nicobar Islands. The island falls within the Sundaland Biodiversity Hotspot, spanning the western half of the Indonesian archipelago.

Concerns have been raised about the impact of large infrastructure projects on the Shompen, a vulnerable tribal group, and the Nicobarese community. The project has also faced criticism for its potential impact on the island’s biodiversity, rainforests and endemic species.

On Monday, the National Green Tribunal directed the authorities and regulatory agencies to ensure “full and strict” compliance with the conditions laid down in the environmental clearance, The Indian Express reported.

The tribunal’s ruling came on two pleas filed by environmental activist Ashish Kothari alleging that the 2019 Island Coastal Regulation Zone notification was being violated.

The activist had sought that hundreds of hectares earmarked for the proposed port, airport, a township for defence and other residential areas be excluded from the project because their locations are within the coastal regulation zone where such construction is prohibited, The Indian Express reported.

Kothari also alleged that the tribunal’s 2023 order for the project’s environmental clearance to be reviewed had not been complied with. The committee set up for the task had examined select aspects of the project’s environmental impacts and not the entire clearance process, the newspaper quoted the activist as having argued.

Also watch: True Story: How we investigated the disappearing corals of Great Nicobar

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin on Sunday urged the Union government to grant citizenship to eligible Sri Lankan Tamils living in the state and provide legal clarity on their status.

“They have been living on Indian soil for more than 30 years,” Stalin wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Of these, 40% were born on our soil! Therefore, they should not be considered illegal immigrants. The Indian government should come forward to provide legal solutions, including citizenship, for them.”

Hon’ble @PMOIndia Thiru. @NarendraModi, please provide a humane legal solution for Sri Lankan Tamils living in Tamil Nadu for decades by enabling citizenship pathways, granting long term visa relief, and removing administrative barriers that keep them in legal uncertainty.… pic.twitter.com/9L83qONtlG

— M.K.Stalin - தமிழ்நாட்டை தலைகுனிய விடமாட்டேன் (@mkstalin) February 15, 2026

Stalin described the matter as one of “profound humanitarian, constitutional and national importance”, The Hindu reported.

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam chief asked the Union government to withdraw the 1986 administrative instructions that stopped Sri Lankan Tamils from applying for citizenship.

Stalin also sought an executive clarification to waive passport and visa requirements, where appropriate, for citizenship or long-term visa applications based on verified identity documents issued by the Tamil Nadu government, The Hindu reported.

He asked that suitable powers be delegated to the district-level authorities to streamline the processing of applications.

Stalin further requested that the Union government formally clarify the legal status of registered Sri Lankan Tamil citizens “sheltered” in India up to January 9, 2015.

“These individuals have lived in India with dignity, discipline and deep cultural affinity for more than four decades,” he said. “The continued characterisation of their status as irregular does not reflect the humanitarian context of their entry nor the state-sanctioned nature of their stay.”

Thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils have been living in India since 1983 after fleeing an ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. As of Sunday, about 89,000 persons from the community were in Tamil Nadu, according to Stalin.

Stalin said that while successive Tamil Nadu governments, with the support of the Union government, had provided shelter, subsistence support, education and healthcare to the Sri Lankan Tamils, several refugees continue to face prolonged legal uncertainty without access to durable solutions such as citizenship or long-term visas.

An advisory committee constituted by the state government examined their status and found that several categories of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees were eligible for regularisation under existing legal frameworks, The New Indian Express reported.

These include persons born in India before June 30, 1987, those born to one Indian parent, spouses of Indian citizens, persons of Indian origin having lineage documentation and others eligible for long-term visas.

The chief minister highlighted that the 2003 amendment to the Citizenship Act, which introduced the category of “illegal migrant”, had the unintended consequence of retrospectively affecting those who entered India under extraordinary humanitarian circumstances with “the tacit approval of the Union government”, The Hindu reported.

The debate and voting on the no-confidence motion moved by the Opposition against Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla will be taken up on March 9, The New Indian Express quoted Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju as saying on Sunday.

The minister said that it is a rule to take up such a motion on the first day after the House reconvenes.

The second part of the Budget Session of Parliament is scheduled from March 9 to April 2. The session began on January 28 and went into recess on Thursday.

Rijiju said that the government intends to proceed with its legislative agenda once the motion against the speaker has been disposed of.

He described the upcoming sittings of the House as “interesting”, stating that several important legislations would be introduced for debate and passage.

“We will bring some important bills, including one critical bill,” the newspaper quoted him as saying. “We will not disclose now as to what the bill is, but we will bring up one very important business in the second part. We will pass all these bills.”

He was also quoted as saying that if Opposition parties continued protests in way similar to that seen during the first part of the session, “we will go for the guillotine”.

“It will be a loss for them,” he added.

The first part of the session saw repeated disruptions.

Since February 2, the Opposition has been protesting against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi not being allowed to quote an excerpt from an unpublished memoir of former Indian Army chief MM Naravane about the political decision-making during the 2020 border tensions between India and China.

The excerpts from the book that Gandhi had been attempting to quote from had been reported in December 2023 and were quoted by The Caravan magazine on February 1.

BJP MPs had objected to the Congress leader speaking on the matter, arguing that he cannot quote from a book that had not yet been released.

On February 5, the Lok Sabha passed the Motion of Thanks on the president’s address without Prime Minister Narendra Modi giving his customary reply, as Opposition MPs continued their protest. This was the first time since 2004 that the prime minister has not replied to the motion in the Lok Sabha.

On February 10, the Opposition submitted a notice indicating its intention to move a no-confidence motion against Birla, citing the “blatantly partisan manner” of conducting proceedings in the House.

“On several occasions, leaders of Opposition parties have just not been allowed to speak, which is their democratic right in Parliament,” the notice said.

According to Article 94 of the Constitution, a Lok Sabha speaker can be removed if the House passes a no-confidence resolution. However, a 14-day notice needs to be given indicating the intention to move the resolution.

The final voter list in Tamil Nadu will be published on February 23 following the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls, the Election Commission said on Sunday.

The poll panel said that following a January 30 order by the Supreme Court, it had displayed the list of persons in the logical discrepancies category at gram panchayats centres, public places and taluka/sub-divisional offices, including ward offices in urban areas.

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

The draft electoral rolls for Tamil Nadu were published on December 19. The names of 97.3 lakh persons were removed from the draft lists in the state.

In its January 30 order, the Supreme Court had directed that persons facing “logical discrepency” notices be given 10 days from the date of its display to submit their documents for verification.

On Sunday, Chief Electoral Officer Archana Patnaik said that in line with the court's directives, the lists had been displayed and persons had been given 10 days to make their objections and submit documents.

Assembly elections will be held in Tamil Nadu in April or May.

The Election Commission has suspended seven officials in West Bengal for alleged serious misconduct, dereliction of duty and misuse of statutory powers during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, PTI reported on Monday.

The officials had been working as assistant electoral registration officers for the poll panel. They are state government employees deputed by the Election Commission to work on election duties, including the revision of voter lists.

The officials were working in the Samserganj, Farakka, Maynaguri, Suti, Canning Purba and Debra Assembly constituencies, ANI reported.

The poll panel asked the state Chief Secretary Nandini Chakravarty to initiate disciplinary action against the officials.

The West Bengal government and the Election Commission have been at odds over the special intensive revision of voter lists.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has accused the poll panel of harassing voters and endangering democratic rights through the voter roll revision process.

The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. They showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent.

The deletion from the draft roll is provisional and citizens can object to their names being removed from the list. Citizens whose names have been dropped from the list can file their claims and objections.

The Assembly elections in the state are expected to be held in April or May.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly elections in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Sunday renewed his criticism of the Union government about the trade deal with the United States, alleging that it amounted to “a betrayal of India’s farmers”.

India and the US agreed on a framework for the interim trade deal on February 2. While the agreement has reduced US tariffs on Indian goods to 18% from 50%, Opposition parties have expressed concerns that the interests of farmers and small and medium enterprises may be jeopardised through the agreement.

Gandhi on Sunday referred to the proposed import of Dried Distillers’ Grains, and asked what this would mean in practice. He questioned whether Indian cattle would be fed distillers’ grain derived from genetically modified American corn and whether that would effectively integrate India’s dairy supply chain with the US agricultural system.

The Congress leader also raised concerns about the possible import of genetically modified soya oil, and asked what the consequences would be for soya farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and elsewhere in the country. He questioned how they would withstand another price shock.

Gandhi further asked what the term “additional products” meant in the context of the deal, and whether it indicated pressure to open up pulses and other sensitive crops to US imports over time.

He also asked whether removing “non-trade barriers” would require India to dilute its position on genetically modified crops, weaken procurement systems, or undermine minimum support prices and bonuses in the future.

“Once this door opens, how do we prevent it from widening every year?” he asked. “Will there be safeguards, or will more crops steadily be put on the table in each negotiation round?”

On February 12, Gandhi had accused Modi of being “anti-farmer”, and of “selling” the interests of the country in the trade deal with the US.

Indian goods had been facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%, including a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August for purchasing Russian oil. Trump had on February 7 removed the additional 25% punitive levy, bringing the effective US tariff rate on Indian imports down to 18%.

On February 4, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said in Parliament that the interests of sensitive sectors such as agriculture and dairy will be protected under the trade deal between India and the US.

However, farmer unions have alleged that the framework contradicts repeated assurances by Goyal that agriculture and dairy would be kept outside of the agreement.

Also read: How India’s tariff regime can be reworked to the country’s advantage

In over a decade of the stewardship of prime minister Narendra Modi, India’s criminal justice system has become nakedly, unapologetically, even stridently communally partisan. This partisanship is not new. Virtually every regime – with the arguable partial exception of Jawaharlal Nehru’s tenure as prime minister and the Left state governments – has displayed this partisanship.

However, after 2014, the Indian criminal justice system has bared its unrepentant, even defiant partisan character.

There are no pretences now. There is no need for them.

One of the striking ways in which the rankly communal partisanship of state institutions manifests is in the many ways that the state has ensured impunity for perpetrators of grave hate crimes and mass murder that target India’s Muslim minorities. I will illustrate this with two stories of how impunity was sought for persons convicted for the gravest mass hate crimes. Both relate to the mass murder in the Gujarat carnage of 2002.

The first is the aborted bid to secure remission for the mass rape of Bilkis Bano and the slaughter of 14 members of her family including her young daughter.

And the second is the story of the acquittal of Maya Kodnani, a former minister in the cabinet of chief minister Narendra Modi in Gujarat, who was convicted for the largest single massacre during the communal carnage in 2002 in Gujarat. She was slapped with perhaps the highest punishment given to a senior public servant in communal riots in the history of the Indian republic, of 28 years of life imprisonment.

She is now fully acquitted of all charges.

Remission on Independence Day

The Gujarat government celebrated the 75th anniversary of India’s Independence in an unorthodox way. It did this by setting free 11 men who had been sentenced to life in prison for gang-raping Bilkis Bano who was five-months pregnant and five other women, and murdering 14 members of her family – including smashing her three-year-old daughter’s head with a stone.

As I heard the stunning news of this Independence Day remission, I began to wonder what freedom meant. Freedom from what? Freedom for whom?

My thoughts went then to words I wrote after the Bombay High Court had confirmed in 2017 the conviction of these 11 men for the unspeakable crimes that they had perpetrated on Bilkis Bano, her three-year-old child and 14 members of her extended family:

“Nightmares still haunt Bilkis Bano,” I wrote, “and even now she gets sick when she remembers that day in 2002”. In Radhikpur village in Dahod, 200 km from Ahmedabad, her neighbours had set fire to all of around 60 Muslim homes there. As she and her terrified family ran into the fields behind their house, she turned around for one last look at their burning home.

In the exodus that followed, Bilkis Bano and her family sought refuge first at the residence of the village sarpanch, then in a school in the village of Chunadi, and thereafter in the village mosque of Kuvajal. Here, Shamim, her cousin, delivered a baby girl in the house of a midwife.

The next day, the family fled again, knowing that they were not safe. Hiding in the shadows and the overgrowth of forests all the way and avoiding the big highways, they tried to reach a Muslim-majority settlement. Along the scary journey, they were shielded and provided for by compassionate people.

As Special Judge UD Salvi of the Mumbai sessions court observed in his judgement in 2008, despite its gruesomeness, the case also brought to light instances of human kindness shown by neighbours and acquaintances of victims of the massacre who gave shelter to those on the other side of the communal divide. The search for a sanctuary set them on the path to Pannivel village. But they were never to reach their refuge.

On March 3, 2002, on the kachha road leading to the village, two truckloads of 20 to 30 people brandishing swords and sickles obstructed their truck. “Aa rahya Musalmano, emane maaro, kaato,” they shouted – These are the Muslims, kill them, cut them.

They were all men from their village, people they knew and had been raised with. Among them was the son of a medical practitioner who treated Bilkis Bano’s father and lived right across the street; a man who owned a bangle shop in the village; another who owned a hotel in the neighbourhood where Bilkis Bano and her family resided; and the husband of an elected member of gram panchayat. Bilkis Bano would say years later that what rankled her most in her memories of that day was that men she had known since she was a child were the ones who brutalised her so mercilessly.

Bilkis Bano was clutching her three-year-old daughter, Saleha, in her arms when one of the men snatched the little girl away and smashed her head on the ground, killing her instantly. Three men, all known to her and from her village, grabbed Bilkis Bano and tore her clothes away even as she pleaded that she was pregnant. They also ignored her entreaties that they were like her brothers and uncles, and they raped her by turn. In the mayhem around her, the 14 members of her family were being raped, molested and hacked to death by others in the mob. Shamim, who had delivered a child the day before, and her infant child were also killed. When Bilkis Bano ultimately lost consciousness, the assailants took her for dead and after their pillaging, left the scene of the carnage.

When she regained consciousness, she found herself naked, surrounded by the corpses of her family members. She covered her body in a petticoat lying nearby and ran up a hillock, and spent a night there in dread, foreboding and mourning. The next day, she came upon an Adivasi woman near a hand pump when looking for water. The woman gave her some clothes. She then spotted a uniformed police officer and approached him for help. He took her to the Limkheda police station in his vehicle.

Bilkis Bano was the lone witness and survivor of eight gangrapes and 14 murders. She knew the names of her attackers, and told the policeman all that had happened in painful detail. But the head constable, Somabhai Gori, refused to register her complaint. He despatched her instead to a relief camp, where she was reunited with her distraught husband, Yakub Rasool, and told him of her unthinkable suffering, and how they had lost their daughter and so many members of their family.

Two days after the killings, some local photographers found some of the bodies of the massacred family – and it was this public exposure that forced the police to act. Bilkis Bano was devastated as she identified the bodies of several members of her family, including her three-year old daughter. Four days after her rape, she was medically examined at Godhra Civil Hospital and biological samples were sent to the local pathology lab, after she had been sent to the Godhra relief camp.

Meanwhile, no inquest was carried out as required by law and the bodies were left unguarded to rot away. Doctors performing the post-mortem did not collect any blood or biological samples, and recorded evidence and opinions that they knew to be false. It was later proved that the bodies were buried in unmarked mass graves on the orders of the police.

In 2004, when the bodies were exhumed as part of a fresh investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation, they found that none had skulls. It seems that they had been decapitated after the post-mortem to prevent identification, and salt had been sprinkled on the corpses so that they would decompose quickly. A prosecution witness testified that he was taken by the police to the place where the bodies were buried in unmarked graves, and he found two doctors there as well. He buried the corpses with the help of two other men the police had brought in to dig the pits, and they were each paid Rs 200 for their labours and silence.

Fifteen years later, the high court was to describe the policemen as “villains” who “wanted to suppress the fact of rape committed on Bilkis”. They manipulated evidence, ensured the post-mortem of the dead was not done properly, and they also did not take Bilkis Bano to the crime spot so that she could identify it, even though she was at the police station at that time. This “tainted” their investigation, reflecting “dishonesty and callousness”.

Bilkis Bano was 21 years old, and five months pregnant, when she was raped and her 3yo daughter killed along with six others from the family.

Bilkis Bano fought a long battle for justice.#StandWithBilkisBano pic.twitter.com/SxZ7q8RnUO

— Natasha Badhwar (@natashabadhwar) August 17, 2022

Fifteen days after her gang rape, Bilkis Bano finally managed to register her statement to the police in the relief camp. The police made her place her thumb impression on a blank sheet, and obliterated all significant details in her statement like the names of the men who had raped her. She could do nothing at that time as she was both unread and powerless. The police dismissed her repeated pleas and ultimately, the judicial magistrate on March 25, 2003, closed the case for want of evidence, claiming that there were inconsistencies.

Undeterred, Bilkis Bano moved the Supreme Court with the assistance of the National Human Rights Commission. The Supreme Court ordered the Gujarat government to stop the state investigation, as the Criminal Investigation Department had by 2003 begun to harass and intimidate Bilkis Bano and her family. Two months later, it asked for an independent investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation into the murders and rapes. The Central Bureau of Investigation team seized police documents, photographs, reports and evidence, recorded the statements of Bilkis Bano and other witnesses, and exhumed the remains of seven of the victims, four females and three children. The bodies of the other seven were never found.

The investigation was exemplary both for its independence, fairness and professionalism. “On May 12, 2004, the CBI submitted its final report to the Supreme Court in which it catalogued the complicity and involvement of the Gujarat government in the cover-up which followed the March 2002 crime,” reads a report in The Wire. “Most significantly, it asked that the criminal trial be held outside the state… that the government of Narendra Modi, who was chief minister at the time, could not even be trusted with the conduct of court proceedings in the matter. The Supreme Court concurred and on August 6, 2004, ordered the trial venue shifted from Gujarat to Maharashtra.”

For six years, much of which she and her family were forced to spend in hiding, Bilkis Bano fought her case with robust and unshaken resolve, supported all along by fine activists like Farah Naqvi and Gagan Sethi of Jan Vikas. These human rights workers did all they could to bolster her morale, and guide her through the intricacies of the legal process. Yakub Rasool, Bilkis Bano’s husband, remained steady in his support to her through these many years of legal battle. The family was in effect exiled from their village, because they would not be safe there. They shift from place to place, their identities hidden, their faces covered when they appear in public meetings and courts.

On January 18, 2008, the special court in Mumbai sentenced the 11 accused to life imprisonment (one had died), and incarcerated a policeman for three years for trying to destroy evidence. This case marked the rarest instance in which sexual violence during a communal massacre was punished. Even so, the special court refused to punish the doctors and policepersons accused of burying the bodies of the victims to destroy evidence of the crime. It did, however, convict Somabhai Gori, the head constable of Limkheda police station, who had refused to take down Bilkis Bano’s initial complaint. It is this part of its order that the Bombay High Court reversed 15 years after the hate crime.

The Central Bureau of Investigation, in its appeal, sought the death penalty for the 11 convicts. They argued that the case was one of mass murder as 14 members of a family had been killed, and that the riots had caused an exodus and, thus, belonged to the rarest of rare category. The High Court did not concur, and maintained the punishment of imprisonment for life. “We do agree that it is a rare massacre manifesting ugly animosity and hostility,” it noted.

But it added that the convicted men are not “history-sheeters or hard-core criminals”. They were part of “a mob on account of the Godhra incident… in search of Muslims. They were boiling with revenge… We do agree that the crime is uncommon and a large number of persons from the Muslim community were murdered, however, the sentencing policy is also required to be balanced on the scale of proportionality… We also cannot be unmindful of the fact that the incident occurred in 2002, 15 years have elapsed since then. These accused have been in custody all this while. Looking to this fact, after a gap of 15 years, we are not inclined to enhance the sentence”.

In a stark but telling coincidence, the day after the Bilkis Bano ruling, the Supreme Court upheld the death penalty for four men convicted of the gruesome gangrape and murder of a paramedical student in Delhi on December 16, 2012, to celebratory headlines across the country. The judges described this as a “barbaric crime” that had created a “tsunami of shock”. That it was, no doubt, but it is hard to understand why one crime – in which the face of a child was also smashed, eight people gangraped and 14 people killed in a frenzy of mob hate – was more grievous than the other.

Surely, the learned bench could not be suggesting that “boiling for revenge” after the Godhra train burning created a context that somehow mitigated the hate crimes that followed? Some unconfirmed news reports indicate that Bilkis Bano and Yakub Rasool would have preferred the death penalty for the rapists and killers. But human rights workers and feminists (including this writer) are emphatic that they do not support the demand for the death penalty for any crime, even those as brutal as those endured both by Bilkis Bano and the young woman in Delhi.

The judicial triumph of upholding the life terms of the killers but also punishment for the policemen and doctors who tried to save them was made possible because of many extraordinary people. Bilkis Bano and Yakub Rasool’s singular and exemplary courage and perseverance. The steady and understated – and, therefore, even more precious – support they received from human rights activists like Farah Naqvi and Gagan Sethi. The unparalleled role played by the National Human Rights Commission under the leadership of the late Justice JS Verma. The independence and professionalism of the officers of the Central Bureau of Investigation. And the contribution of judges at various levels and times.

Bilkis Bano’s rapists were out for about 1000 days each before they were all released for ‘good behaviour’.

And you thought justice for sexual harassment, assault / murder cases was easy. pic.twitter.com/f0BJr17uTf

— Chinmayi Sripaada (@Chinmayi) August 10, 2023

But it is sobering and instructive also to remember that all of this became ultimately possible only because the case was moved out of Gujarat where, as this judgement establishes, police officers felt free to destroy evidence and protect those who committed the gravest hate crimes. There can be little doubt that they derived their impunity from the top. The judgement is a glowing endorsement of what institutions of secular democracy can accomplish if they are fair-minded, just and compassionate. But it is also a reminder of what transpires if these are wilfully subverted.

It calls to question once again claims that courts have established the freedom from guilt of those on whose watch the carnage of 2002 unfolded, but even more importantly, on whose watch justice against the perpetrators of these crimes was deliberately, cynically and – yes – criminally subverted. With Amit Shah as home minister and Narendra Modi as chief minister, did not officials at various levels feel secure in committing and enabling hate crimes, and cynically destroying the process of just investigation, prosecution and trial?

I wrote at that time that we – the citizens of India – also “need to carry on our conscience the reality that her tormentors may be in jail but she and her surviving family remain banished, probably for a lifetime, from the village of their birth and from a normal life. For 15 years, they have rarely been able to live in one place. They keep shifting from one secret location to another, and there seems no end to this kind of life”. Fear, her husband Yakub Rasool told The Indian Express, has become a “constant presence” in their lives. “Why don’t people understand that we don’t have any security?… Do you know that the convicts were not always kept in Mumbai jails? They kept getting parole. We are not free. When they are out on parole and in the area, we feel insecure,” he said.

And I recalled that Bilkis Bano was wistful as she remembered her village. “I miss Randhikpur… Yaad to bahu aave che pan shun kariye? Mane daar lage che.” I miss my village very much but what can be done? I am afraid. “Think of this”, I wrote. Fifteen years had passed, “but Bilkis Bano and Yakub Rasool remain refugees with their children, fugitives from hate, probably for their lifetimes”.

Bilkis Bano had declared after the special court verdict in 2008 sentencing the accused men to life imprisonment, “This judgement does not mean the end of hatred that I know still exists in the hearts and minds of many people… but it does mean that somewhere, somehow, justice can prevail.”

I wrote after the High Court confirmed life sentences for the rapists and killers of her family, “Bilkis Bano and her husband may have heroically seized justice from a system that very rarely cedes this to survivors of communal violence. However we – the state, the courts, you and I – have done nothing to free them from a life of fear and exile”.

Fast-forward now to the time that Bilkis Bano’s killers, after spending 14 years in prison – with frequent interludes of parole – walked free.

As her rapists and the murderers of 14 members of her family including a three-year-old child stepped outside the jail gates, crowds greeted them with garlands and sweets at the office of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The BJP legislator CK Raolji defended the remission recommendation with the words: “They were Brahmins and Brahmins are known to have good sanskaar (values). It might have been someone’s ill intention to corner and punish them…”

Bilkis Bano, who had earned the admiration and gratitude of the nation for the extraordinary courage with which she fought a 15-year-long battle for justice against all odds, now said she was “bereft of words” and “numb”.

“Today, I can only say this – how can justice for any woman end like this? I trusted the highest courts in our land. I trusted the system, and I was slowly learning to live with my trauma. The release of these convicts has taken from me my peace and shaken my faith in justice. My sorrow and my wavering faith are not for myself alone but for every woman struggling for justice in the courts,” Bano declared to Article 14. “I appeal to the Gujarat government, please undo this harm. Give me back my right to live without fear and in peace. Please ensure that my family and I are kept safe.”

Her lawyer Shobha Gupta said that “we thought about appealing against lesser punishment – 14 murders, five gang-rapes, a pregnant woman gang raped – we felt life imprisonment was mild and inadequate for the heinous offence. But the thought was that let peace come, let her live peacefully now, let us accept the judgment and allow the matter to have closure”. She continued, “We have seen cases where the death penalty has been given for a single murder. This was a serious crime. Fourteen murders, gang rapes, the gang rape of a pregnant woman and her child thrashed on a stone and murdered in front of her eyes. What more should there be for it to be a death penalty case? In my practice of 25-26 years, this was 100% a death penalty case”.

She continued, “They have been convicted by one court, a second court, and a third court and their review (petition) was dismissed. Every single court has made serious observations against them. Do you not ask the victim that we know you have suffered for the past 20 years and (has) safety concerns?...It is a matter of judicial record that she is living the life of a nomad, running from place to place to ensure that she is surviving. We don’t know the committee officers who passed the order, but isn’t it a constitutional duty to consider and ensure that she is feeling safe and has a sense of fulfilment?”

She also expressed grief at the public celebration. “For what? They are convicted of rape and murder by the highest court in the country. My heart bleeds when I see this kind of society. A gang rape convict, a person convicted for 14 murders, comes out and is publicly facilitated and honoured…What is happening to our society? Even that village has women. What would women be thinking? How could women dare after this to make a complaint?”

When influential voices from India and the world questioned the Gujarat government for its decision to recommend the remission of the sentence of Bilkis Bano’s tormentors, it diverted responsibility to the Supreme Court and the union government. It said that the Supreme Court had asked the state government to consider the remission application, for which it established a committee headed by the district collector and with two BJP MLAs as members. The committee was unanimous in recommending their premature remission. The proposal was sent to the union government, where it was approved by the union home minister headed by Amit Shah. The file moved with exceptional speed, as though to meet the deadline of Independence Day.

The Supreme Court on January 8, 2024, just short of five months after the remission of 11 convicts sentenced to life imprisonment for the gang rape of Bilkis Bano and murder of her family, reversed this order. It directed that the men be returned to jail within two weeks of the order. It held firstly that the Gujarat government was not the appropriate government to consider the remission petition.

It annulled the May 2022 order of the Supreme Court that had directed the Gujarat government to consider the remission petitions, ruling that this was obtained through fraud and suppression of facts before the court. It held that the appropriate government for considering the remission petitions in the instant case was Maharashtra and expected that it would consider the remission petitions in accordance with law and the guidelines laid down by the Court.

The grounds cited by the highest court for striking down this remission order are for me disappointingly technical rather than delving into deeper questions of the ethics of punishment and reformation and laying down guidelines for the future.

Justice BV Nagarathna, who authored the judgment, however does quote the Greek philosopher Plato to justify directing the convicts back to prison: “... punishment is to be inflicted not for the sake of vengeance but for the sake of prevention and reformation. In his treatise, Plato reasons that the lawgiver, as far as he can, ought to imitate the doctor who does not apply his drug with a view to still the pain only, but to do the patient good”.

The sentencing, bail and acquittal of Maya Kodnani

A gynaecologist by training, Maya Kodnani was a member of the Gujarat legislature at the time of the Gujarat communal carnage of 2002. She was later elevated to the position of a minister for women and child welfare in chief minister Narendra Modi’s cabinet.

Maya Kodnani went on to be convicted of instigating and leading the largest single communal massacre in Gujarat, in the village Naroda Patiya in which 89 people, the majority of whom were women and children. Her punishment, of 28 years imprisonment, was probably the highest penalty for a public official in anti-Muslim violence in the history of the Indian republic.

Come 2014 with a change in the government in Delhi and first she is given long-term bail (in the way that Sadhvi Pragya Thakur who was charged with terror crimes was also freed from jail). Her sentence is suspended.

And then she is acquitted of all crimes.

Kodnani spent a cumulative total of approximately three years and five months in jail across two separate periods and is at the time of writing a free woman.

#JustIN | A special court of Gujarat has ACQUITTED all 68 accused including former minister Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Gujarat Riots-Naroda Gam Massacre Case.#GujaratRiots #NarodaPatiya pic.twitter.com/uxJFoWuGDR

— Live Law (@LiveLawIndia) April 20, 2023

The brief facts are that on February 28, 2002, a day after the fateful fire broke out in a train compartment in the Sabarmati Express at Godhra killing around 59 people, a murderous mob of nearly 1500 people gathered in Naroda Patiya, a Muslim majority neighbourhood in the suburbs of Ahmedabad.

The law took many years to catch up with Maya Kodnani. After the carnage, chief minister Modi thought it fit to elevate Kodnani, a gynaecologist, into his cabinet. I do not know if the irony was intentional, that she was allotted the portfolio of women and child welfare even though she was being investigated for leading a massacre in which the majority of victims were women and children.

Finally, in 2008, the Supreme Court-appointed a Special Investigation Team led by former CBI director RK Raghavan to investigate the carnage. In February 2009, the SIT declared Kodnani an absconder after she failed to appear for her deposition. A month later, the Gujarat High Court revoked her anticipatory bail and she was arrested. She resigned as minister of state for women and child development.

According to the Special Investigation Team report, a crowd had gathered in Naroda Patiya to enforce a bandh called by the Vishva Hindu Parishad to protest the deaths in fire of persons in the train at Godhra the day before. Maya Kodnani, then an MLA, and VHP leader Jaideep Patel arrived separately at the site in their respective vehicles. Eleven witnesses confirmed that both of them made hateful speeches to instigate the already agitated mob. Kodnani allegedly incited the mob to kill Muslims.

The carnage that followed went on for 10 hours. At least 97 people (according to the official toll) were killed, many of them stabbed and burnt alive. An uncounted number were looted, raped and sexually assaulted. A local mosque was vandalised.

Witnesses testified to the special SIT court that she handed out swords to rioters, exhorted them to attack Muslims and at one point fired a pistol. Even phone records placed Kodnani in Naroda at the time of the incident, contrary to what Amit Shah was to testify later.

I quote from a couple of witness statements. We “went near Natraj Hotel, saw a mob of 5 to 10 thousand persons, Mayaben came there in (a) Maruti Frontie with her PA. They got down from the car. By seeing her (sic.), the people who were standing there shouted the slogans of ‘Jai Shri Ram’. Mayaben delivered a provoking speech, the gist of speech spelling her instigation to the mob (sic.) is, “I have seen dead bodies of Kar Sevaks at Godhra. You Ram Bhakta – devotees of Ram should kill Muslims here, cut them, as the Babri Masjid had been demolished, the Masjid here also should be destroyed, I am with you etc.”, you will have no difficulty. She then left”.

And another witness: “Dressed in a white saree with a saffron scarf on her neck she then went in her white Maruti car to..... the S.T Workshop Gate. Mayaben .....was followed by a Trax Jeep. Mayaben gave (a) signal to the mob near Natraj and she called upon the mob (near) the Gate of S.T. Workshop by indicating to them to come. About 100 leaders came ....Mayaben was discussing something with all of them and then instructed her P.A., the P.A. took out the weapons from the Trax Jeep, the weapons were swords, Bhala (spears),Trishul (tridents), revolvers etc. Under the instructions, her P.A. gave all these weapons to the leaders of the mob.. After Mayaben went away, the men of the mob including the P.A. had attacked (the) Nurani (Masjid). ...Mayaben said “Kill them. I am and will be with you always. You will always have my backing.”

In August 29, 2012, the special SIT court judge, Jyotsna Yagnik, convicted Kodnani under Indian Penal Code sections for murder, conspiracy, and inciting hatred. She was held to be the “kingpin” and “principal conspirator” of the massacre. The judgement said Kodnani was “proved to be the kingpin of the entire communal riot and one of the principal conspirators who has actively instigated the rioters and has abetted them to form unlawful assembly to execute the conspiracy hatched under her leadership with other co-conspirators. Judge Yagnik sentenced Kodnani to 28 years in prison (10 years for unlawful assembly + 18 years for murder, to run consecutively).”

In April 2013, the Gujarat state government initially prepared to file an appeal seeking the death penalty for her but withdrew this decision in May 2013. In 2021, senior advocate Kapil Sibal highlighted in the Supreme Court this failure to challenge her acquittal, as unmistakable indications of executive partisanship. But in November 2013, she was granted interim bail for three months to treat intestinal tuberculosis and heart health issues.

Her fate turned after Modi’s election in May 2014. On July 30, 2014, the Gujarat High Court suspended her sentence and granted her regular bail on grounds of ill health. It noted that she was suffering from “intestinal tuberculosis with IBS [irritable bowel syndrome] and gastro reflux disease and with severe weight loss”. She surfaced before the public eye from time to time, such as in yoga camps. In September 2017, Amit Shah, then BJP national president, appeared as a star defense witness in her defence. He testified that he saw Kodnani in the Gujarat Assembly and at the Sola Civil Hospital on the day of the riots, contradicting the SIT’s claim that she was at the crime scene during those hours.

Finally, on April 20, 2018 a division bench of the Gujarat High Court overturned her conviction and acquitted her of all charges. It cited to justify its decision “contradictions” in witness testimonies. It noted that none of the 11 key witnesses named her when the police first registered the case in 2002; her name only appeared later when the SIT took over in 2008. The court gave her the “benefit of doubt”. However, although the same witnesses testified against Bajrang Dal leader Babu Bajrangi, the court upheld his conviction, although it reduced the quantum of his punishment.

Bilkis Bano’s appeal

The words of Bilkis Bano after the judgement in 2008 convicting the 11 men responsible for the mass rape and slaughter of her family, keep coming back to me:

“To fellow Indians, I appeal to all of you, at a time when we hear news everyday of people being attacked and killed because of their religion or community – please help affirm their faith in the secular values of our country and support their struggles for justice, equality, and dignity.”

Confronted by a nakedly partisan criminal justice system, I wonder what she would say to her fellow citizens today.

I am grateful for the research support of Sumaiya Fatima.

An engineer associated with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority has been suspended after a part of an under-construction viaduct in Mumbai’s Mulund area collapsed, leaving one dead and three injured, The Hindu reported on Sunday.

Satyajit Salve, an executive engineer of the Mumbai Metro Line 4 project, was suspended on the orders of Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

“The officials who compromise public safety will not be spared,” Shinde was quoted by the newspaper as saying. He also announced that the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority would bear the medical expenses of the injured.

The incident occurred on Saturday at about 12.20 pm near the Mulund fire station on the Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg.

Videos posted on social media showed a large concrete block, which appeared to be part of the parapet segment of the viaduct, falling on an auto rickshaw and a car.

The person who died was identified as Ramdhani Yadav, 46. He was sitting in the back of the auto rickshaw.

Rajkumar Indrajeet Yadav, one of those injured, is in a critical condition in intensive care, while Mahendra Pratap Yadav and Deepa Ruhiya are reported to be stable.

A first information report has been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to culpable homicide and criminal acts with common intent against managers, engineers, a supervisor and a worker associated with the project, The Hindu reported.

Five persons have been arrested in connection with the collapse so far.

The metro development authority has formed a high-level inquiry to investigate the collapse, NDTV reported.

Umar Khalid was uncharacteristically laconic in his response to questions about his life in prison.

It has been more than five years since the former student-activist from the Jawaharlal Nehru University was arrested and imprisoned for his alleged involvement in the 2020 Delhi riots. The trial is yet to begin.

In January, the Supreme Court denied Khalid bail. Days later, Scroll interviewed him through one of his JNU friends who regularly visits him in Tihar Jail.

Khalid, 38, said his first couple of years “away from social media” in Tihar were “good”. Over time, the detachment with which he approached the experience gave way to “restlessness”. And as his bail pleas snailed through the corridors of Indian courts, that restive feeling “metamorphosed to resignation”.

Today, he feels “disconnected” from reality. “Do I even know the world any more?” he asked.

A national storm erupted in February 2016 when the Modi government ordered a police crackdown against students of the Jawaharlal Nehru University for slogans raised at a campus event. Three students were arrested on charges of sedition, sparking a debate on nationalism and democratic freedoms.

Ten years later, we revisit the legacy of that moment by tracing the trajectories of four student-activists – the choices they made, the outcomes that followed, and what that reveals about political life in India.

Before his prolonged incarceration, Khalid used to believe that he knew the world quite well. In fact, in 2016, this confidence landed him in trouble.

Television crews had swarmed JNU the day after Khalid and nine others organised a controversial event on campus that February. At that time, most students were amused by the media frenzy over a gathering that they saw as ordinary. Some of them even engaged the visiting journalists in all earnest.

That day, Khalid volunteered for what, in hindsight, turned out to be risky assignments – he went on the primetime shows of establishment-friendly television channels where anchors like Arnab Goswami of Times Now shouted him down.

“That is when he realised that we were like frogs in a well,” said Apeksha Priyadarshini, his friend from JNU. “He understood that there were many people out there who did not wish to listen to him and that the world was nothing like the campus.”

Other television channels went one step further, singling out Khalid for his Muslim identity and labelling him a terrorist sympathiser.

He was researching his PhD at the time of his arrest. His doctoral thesis had nothing to do with the social milieu he came from, and instead focused on how the historical experience of colonialism disrupted the lives of Adivasis in Jharkhand.

Coming into his own

Born in 1987, Khalid grew up in Delhi and is the eldest of six siblings. His middle-class parents made sure to provide him and his sisters the best education that they could.

His father was steeped in Muslim politics, but as early as 2009, Khalid told the makers of a student documentary that he was “hardly a Muslim”. He was a student of history at Delhi University’s Kirori Mal College then.

Later, as a postgraduate student in JNU, he immersed himself in Left politics and began professing atheism. He first became a member of the Democratic Students’ Union, a hard Left campus outfit that was severely critical of India’s mainstream communist parties.

But he fell out with the organisation over disagreements with its approach to gender justice, and along with a few others, floated the Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Students Organisation in 2016. The group aspired to integrate the “struggle against caste system and patriarchy” within the Left’s class politics.

Political sparring, however, never came in the way of making friends. On campus, Khalid was known for his affability.

A professor who met him while he was still writing his PhD recounted an anecdote about his love for conversation. She knew him to be a charismatic speaker but it was when she debated a range of social issues with him one-on-one in her home that she discovered his keenness to listen, his openness to being contradicted, and also his verbosity.

“Hours into the chat, he got up to step out for a smoke, saying he would be back shortly,” the professor recalled. “I told him, ‘Don’t come back. It is quite late.’ But he wanted to keep talking.”

A question of faith

Beneath the geniality, though, Khalid was experiencing inner turmoil. As Hindutva assertion pushed Muslims into a corner, he started thinking deeply about faith-based discrimination.

His artist friend Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who first met him at a 2012 convention in Delhi on the rights of political prisoners, said the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015 triggered the churn.

Around that time, the two had a long conversation about the philosopher Hannah Arendt exhorting those oppressed as Jews to respond as Jews. The young scholar was moved by the text, and even wanted to set up a reading circle to explore the potential for justice and freedom “within an Islamic framework”.

During the 2016 sedition controversy, television channels had labelled Khalid a “terrorist”. While he had publicly taken them on, the impact lingered – he could no longer take the metro or go anywhere alone because of the fear of an attack, said one of his friends.

These fears came true in August 2018, when two men from Haryana made an unsuccessful attempt on his life. At that time, he had just completed his PhD and was busy with United Against Hate, the campaign that he had co-founded with the intention of tackling hate crimes.

“After the assassination attempt, he would always keep looking over his shoulder,” his friend Anirban Bhattacharya recalled. “If anybody stared at him for more than three seconds, he would get uncomfortable.”

The incident prompted Khalid’s return to Jamia Nagar, the predominantly Muslim neighbourhood in southeast Delhi where he had grown up. His friend Nabiya Khan, who also lived in the area then, said she saw him develop deeper roots within the community as he organised medical camps and took part in other local initiatives in those months.

“The major change I noticed in him was that he went from theory to practice,” she said. “His engagement deepened and he became more grounded in the community. His days and nights were spent among the people of Jamia Nagar.”

They can't scare us into silence, a lesson I learnt from Gauri Lankesh!

(Detailed response in the morning). pic.twitter.com/MJbtPK5El4

— Umar Khalid (@UmarKhalidJNU) August 13, 2018

A reluctant leader

In December 2019, Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, which for the first time introduced a religious criteria for Indian citizenship.

Khalid emerged as one of the most vocal critics of the new law, which many saw as an instrument of discrimination against Muslims. For months, he criss-crossed the length and breadth of the country as protesters, largely Muslim, sought him out for his speech-making.

An activist who shared the dais with him at one of the many protests against CAA in those days recalled feeling uneasy at Khalid being introduced as “the new leader of Indian Muslims”. Khalid, to this activist’s great surprise, did not object to the use of this descriptor.

Was the newfound popularity making him embrace identity politics? His friend, journalist Kaushik Raj, said Khalid had little time to think about such questions then. He was clear that the opposition to CAA must be broad-based and not merely driven by identity.

“If you are against attacks on the Constitution, you can speak up against it as a Muslim, a Hindu, a Sikh or even an atheist,” Raj recalled Khalid once telling him.

In public, too, Khalid stressed on the “socio-economic demands” of the Muslim community more than its religious grievances, drawing on his long-held leftist frameworks. Privately, though, he was growing tired of repeating himself at one anti-CAA protest after another.

“I don’t want to do all this,” Khalid said to a friend who used to accompany him on these trips then and requested not to be identified. The two were headed to a protest in Kerala, but got stuck in Bengaluru airport because of a flight delay. Khalid, his friend recollected, had been silently ruminating for a long time before he spoke.

“I just want to go to a village in Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh and be there with people in greater need,” he said to his friend.

Arrest and incarceration

Eventually, it was a speech he made at an anti-CAA protest in Amravati, Maharashtra, that led to his arrest in the Delhi riots conspiracy case in September 2020.

In the speech, Khalid had invoked Mahatma Gandhi and called for non-violent protests to coincide with the upcoming visit of the United States President Donald Trump in February that year. But Delhi Police blamed the violence that erupted during Trump’s visit on Khalid and other activists, holding up the Amaravati speech as evidence of a “premeditated” conspiracy.

A professor who was with Khalid on the day he was called in for questioning by the Delhi Police, and later arrested, was struck by how composed he was: “He was not stressed at all.”

His friends insist that he has not changed much in the five years and five months that have lapsed since then. Sometimes, his spirits drop, especially after he returns to jail after having spent a few days outside on interim bail. But he somehow manages to pull himself out of these low phases, a close friend said.

He also continues to read voraciously and write with more or less the same academic rigour.

One source of frustration that Khalid has expressed in recent meetings with close friends is “the language” of those vowing support for him. As one friend put it, he is tired of being “pigeonholed” as an atheist while he and other political prisoners are “persecuted” on the basis of their faith.

Another friend of over 12 years recalled talking to Khalid about the “transformation” in how he sees himself when he was out on interim bail last December.

“A communist does not believe in these identities, but can you really escape them?” she asked. “Many elite Muslims like Javed Akhtar are uncomfortable with their identity. The other trap is getting caught up in identity politics.”

Khalid, she said, “has been dealing with this question”.

Also read: Shehla Rashid is now a college teacher in Kashmir: ‘Democracy cuts everyone down to size’

From JNU night meetings to Kunal Kamra podcast, how Anirban has kept the conversation going

From JNU to Congress, Kanhaiya shrugs off contradictions: ‘Will be proven right 50 years later’

The captains of the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams, Suryakumar Yadav and Salman Ali Agha, on Sunday did not shake hands ahead of their group stage match during the men’s Twenty20 World Cup in Sri Lanka’s Colombo.

During the Asia Cup in September too, the Indian team skipped the customary handshake with Pakistan. This came in the backdrop of tensions between the two countries after the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack and India’s subsequent military strikes in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir – codenamed Operation Sindoor.

The Indian team had also refused to accept the Asia Cup trophy from Asian Cricket Council chairperson Mohsin Naqvi, who is also Pakistan’s interior minister and chief of the country's cricket board. The Indian team is yet to receive the trophy.

Ahead of the Twenty20 World Cup match against India on Sunday, the Pakistani government had on February 1 had said that it would boycott the fixture.

At the time, the International Cricket Council, the governing body of the sport and the organiser of the event, had said that while it respects the roles of governments in national policy, the decision was “not in the interest of the global game or the welfare of fans worldwide, including millions in Pakistan”.

On February 9, Pakistan reversed its decision and directed its national team to take the field against India.

India and Sri Lanka are co-hosting the men’s Twenty20 World Cup. But Pakistan is scheduled to play all its matches in Sri Lanka as it has been unwilling to travel to India.

On January 24, ICC formally replaced Bangladesh with Scotland in the tournament after Dhaka denied its team the permission to travel to India. This came amid diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Dhaka.

Since early January, the interim government in Bangladesh had been saying the country’s cricket team did not want to travel to India citing what it alleged was a “violent communal policy” of the Indian cricket board.

Also read: No handshakes, big revenues: Indian cricket board’s Pakistan pieties

“A thousand leopards in a forest patch the size of a football field!” This is how marine conservation researchers Rucha Karkarey and Vardhan Patankar described unusually large shoals of squaretail groupers (Plectropomus areolatus) gliding along the coral reefs, off the shores of Bitra, an island in northern Lakshadweep.

In 2010, Karkarey’s team recorded densities of over 3,600 fish in over four hectares – an area roughly the size of five football fields. “This was between two and six times higher than any density previously recorded across south-east Asia,” recalled Karkarey, who is now a senior research associate at Lancaster University, UK.

Geographically, the Union Territory of Lakshadweep comprises 12 atolls, three reefs, and five submerged banks. Out of a total of 36 islands in the Lakshadweep archipelago, with a total area of 32 sq km, only 10 are inhabited.

Among them Bitra is a tiny shark-fin-shaped strip of sand that is home to just about 271 people. The island is 570 metres in length and 280 m at its widest point, with an area of 0.105 sq km.

The smallest inhabited island of the archipelago with its ecologically-sensitive marine landscape, Bitra is now under spotlight. The Lakshadweep administration is planning to take over the island, because of its strategic location, its national security relevance, and the inherent logistical and administrative challenges associated with civilian habitation.

The islanders however, say this is “land-grabbing” for tourism, trade and development, especially in the post-Covid-19 tourism boom. “The islanders have been fishing here for generations,” said a resident who requested anonymity due to security concerns. “Our history dates centuries back. Of late, however, the local fishers fear they are losing their place,” they said.

Geostrategic imperatives

Bitra is located 483 km from the port city of Kochi. “The move forms part of a larger national plan to boost defence presence on India’s critical island territories,” reported the CSR Journal. Along with recent upgrades to naval facilities in Minicoy and the Coast Guard presence at Androth, Bitra can strengthen surveillance of busy sea lanes, help counter illegal activities, and enable faster responses to maritime threats, the report noted, citing defence experts.

However, a move that could threaten the fishers’ livelihoods that depend on the lagoon may not be good for the local ecology, conservationists and marine scientists have cautioned in media reports.

“The island’s huge significance lies in its lagoon, the largest in the archipelago, a rich fishing ground,” said Ajith Raj, a doctoral scholar in the Transdisciplinary Sustainability programme at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. Islanders from elsewhere in the archipelago come here to fish, generation after generation, and they conserve these biodiversity-rich coral reefs, ‘rainforests of the sea’,” he noted.

Fishers as keepers

Much of Lakshadweep’s reefs are looked after by the traditional fishers. Conserving an archipelago with the highest rural population density in India – with over 64,000 people living in the 10 inhabited islands of the archipelago, is very rare.

For instance, after an unusually severe El Niño in 1997-98 drove global heat records causing large-scale coral deaths, it was the local traditional fishing practices that helped Lakshadweep’s lagoon ecosystems recover, reported Rohan Arthur in his 2004 doctoral thesis.

Arthur, who is currently a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation specialising in oceans and coasts, explained that the pole and line tuna fishing – promoted by the government for economic development back in the 1960s – took away the pressure on reef fishing, allowing this speedy recovery. “Thus local regulations have played an important if inadvertent role in controlling marine resource in Lakshadweep,” he noted in his thesis.

Focusing on the fisheries dimension of this argument, Ishaan Khot from the University of Manitoba, Canada, and co-authors including Raj closely studied “live-bait pole and line tuna fishery” in Lakshadweep. Their 2024 study in Maritime Studies calls it a rare example of environmentally-sustainable, equitable livelihoods that ensures food security – an “outlier”.

However, of late, traditional small-scale fishing that was once dominated by seven- to nine-metre-long artisanal boats, has been undermined by bigger operators. Boats that are bigger than 15 metres long entered the deeper parts of the lagoons, and the fishers increasingly used LED lights to attract fish at night, the study noted.

There were conflicts between commercial fishers and small-scale fishers. There was a shortage of smaller fish used as bait for tuna, Raj and colleagues found. Conservation groups such as Dakshin Foundation promoted co-management measures as a solution. However the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted such work, as “visions of maritime development that do not take local social-ecological contexts into consideration” took over, as the study noted.

Corals in warming oceans

The stewardship of the traditional fishers attains added significance in a global warming context that requires careful steps of local adaptation, as recent research shows. Gradual warming of the ocean and the cyclical El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events affect corals, explained researcher Wenzel Pinto, who works for NCF’s oceans and coasts programme.

“They get bleached, and sometimes die en masse. Live corals decline,” Pinto told Mongabay-India. (ENSO) is a naturally occurring climate pattern involving periodic warming or cooling of the central–eastern Pacific Ocean and associated shifts in atmospheric pressure, which together drive major weather extremes worldwide.

There were global coral bleaching events in 1998, 2010 and 2014–2017. The fourth event, the biggest recorded, is happening now, the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration confirms. “Bleaching-level heat stress” has impacted about 84.4% of the world’s coral reef area from January 2023 to September 2025, with 83 countries and territories reporting “mass coral bleaching”.

“Coral bleaching, especially on a widespread scale, impacts economies, livelihoods, food security and more,” scientists noted. However, when the stress driving the bleaching diminishes, corals can recover and reefs can continue to provide the ecosystem services, they added. If at all such recovery is possible, a more eco-friendly local resource use pattern is necessary for that, Raj told Mongabay-India.

“The ecological impact depends less on the mere presence of fishing and more on its intensity, methods, and the kinds of species people target.” Experiences in tropical coral reefs confirm this viewpoint.

Ecosystem recovery

In a new study of Lakshadweep published in Diversity and Distributions, led by NCF’s Mayukh Dey with Pinto, Arthur and Karkarey, noted, that over 24 years, coral cover declined from about 37% to 19%, reflecting a roughly 50% reduction from the 1998 baseline. “This decline was explained by reduced recovery rates after each bleaching event, despite coral mortality (both absolute and proportional) decreasing with successive events. Recovery rates dramatically increased after six years, suggesting a critical period of bleaching-free years needed for reefs to recover,” it stated.

Along the coral atolls and reefs of the Lakshadweep-Maldives region, traditional fishing also helped the plant-eating reef fish thrive. Such fish prevent excess growth of algae that could possibly smother corals, shows a new study published in the ICES Journal of Marine Science.

It notes, “Over the past 1,000 years, the pelagic tuna fishery has kept reef fishing light in the Maldives, promoting the functional resilience of these reefs and buffering them from climate change-related disturbances, like mass coral bleaching events.”

While tuna fishing has traditionally been prioritised over near-shore reef fishing – possibly shaped by early Indian Ocean trade and a market for dried tuna – mass tourism and new forms of globalisation are now increasing demand for reef fish and disrupting these practices, the study said.

Lessons for Bitra

A “top-down push” for high-end tourism models with infrastructure development can harm the ecosystem, Khot’s study points out. Such a push keeps traditional fishers away from the lagoons and still opens up the water for more tourists and traders, Karkarey explained.

Traditional fishers who still follow their ancestors’ deep knowledge of the sea and the sky, and the modern reef anglers who catch tuna in the open ocean with pole and line to have conserved the reefs.

As Khot’s study notes, the “dominant developmental thinking manifests at local scales and trickles down to highly remote regions and induces vulnerability in small-scale fisheries.” That means conserving Bitra’s lagoon means recognising the rights and the key roles played by the artisanal fishers. “They are the stewards, the guardians of the sea,” Karkarey stated.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla will travel to Bangladesh to represent India at the swearing-in ceremony of Tarique Rahman as the country’s prime minister, the foreign ministry said on Sunday.

Rahman, the chairman of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, will take oath on February 17. An alliance led by the party swept the parliamentary elections held on February 12, winning 212 out of 299 constituencies. An alliance led by the Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as the main Opposition with 77 seats.

This was the first national election since former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government was ousted in 2024.

After the Bangladesh Nationalist Party won the election, it had invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with the heads of government of 12 other countries, for Rahman’s swearing-in ceremony. However, Modi has meetings scheduled with French President Emmanuel Macron in Mumbai on February 17, The Indian Express reported.

The Ministry of External Affairs said on Sunday that Birla’s participation in the oath-taking ceremony “underscores the deep and enduring friendship between the peoples of India and Bangladesh, reaffirming India's steadfast commitment to the democratic values that bind our two nations”.

The foreign ministry further said: “As neighbours united by a shared history, culture, and mutual respect, India welcomes Bangladesh's transition to an elected government under the leadership of H.E. Mr. Tarique Rahman, whose vision and values have received an overwhelming mandate of the people.”

On Friday, Modi was the first national leader to congratulate Rahman on his party’s victory. In a social media post, he “reaffirmed India’s continued commitment to the peace, progress and prosperity of both our peoples”.

Ties between New Delhi and Dhaka have been strained since Hasina fled to India in August 2024 after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

After her ouster, Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus took over as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government. With the elections now complete, the interim government’s term will come to an end.

Bangladesh wants to reset ties with India: Rahman aide

Humayun Kabir, adviser to the Bangladesh Nationalist Party chief, told PTI that with Hasina no longer in power, his country now wants to reset ties with India, and said that both countries should work together for mutual benefit. However, he asserted: “The change has to come from the mindset in India.”

Kabir urged India to ensure that its territory is not used by Hasina or other Awami League leaders in ways that could hurt Bangladesh’s stability, PTI reported.

Bangladesh has been demanding that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal in that country sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government.

A 22-year-old student from Karnataka who went missing six days ago in San Francisco in the United States has been found dead, the Indian Consulate General in the city said on Sunday.

Saketh Sreenivasaiah, who had been pursuing a Master of Science (Product Development Programme) degree at University of California since August 2025, had gone missing on February 10, The Hindu reported.

On Sunday, the Consulate General of India in San Francisco said that the local police had confirmed the recovery of Sreenivasaiah's body. Expressing its condolences to his family, the statement added that consulate officers were in contact with the family and will extend all required support to them.

Sreenivasaiah’s body was found at Lake Anza, a recreational swimming reservoir, The Berkeley Scanner reported.

The 22-year-old was last seen about a kilometre from the university campus. His backpack, which contained his passport and laptop, was found on a doorstep in the Park Hills neighbourhood after he was reported missing, the local newspaper reported.

Sreenivasaiah completed his schooling at Sri Vani Education Centre in Bengaluru, The Indian Express reported. He then went on to complete his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

The Uttar Pradesh Police on Sunday said that a 22-year-old man has been arrested in Muzaffarnagar for posting a video allegedly containing objectionable remarks about Prime Minister Narendra Modi, PTI reported.

Satyanarayan Dahiya, station house officer of the Charthawal police station, said that the person accused in the matter has been identified as Jitendra Kumar Kashyap.

Kashyap was arrested on Saturday evening after the video of the prime minister was circulated widely on social media, the news agency quoted unidentified police officers as saying.

The case against Kashyap had been filed under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace and statements conducing to public mischief.

West Bengal’s chief electoral officer on Saturday said that despite repeated summons, 4.9 lakh voters did not show up for hearings after notices were sent to them as part of the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in the state, The Hindu reported.

Additionally, 1.6 lakh voters were flagged as “ineligible” due to errors, added Manoj Kumar Agarwal.

The statement came after the hearings of the notices were formally completed in the state

On February 10, the Election Commission extended the deadline for hearing responses to the notices to February 14. The date for publishing the final voter list had also been moved to February 28.

The Supreme Court had on February 9 directed that the deadline for scrutinising documents and objections under the revision of the electoral rolls in West Bengal be extended at least for a week after February 14.

On Saturday, Agarwal said that those whose names were in the draft roll but did not feature in the final list would get an order, The Hindu reported. They would then have a chance to appeal before the district election officer and subsequently before the chief electoral officer, he added.

“They can always get their names back [on the rolls] if they were removed due to errors,” the newspaper quoted Agarwal as saying.

All the hearings related to the special intensive revision had been officially completed in West Bengal within the extended deadline, he added.

The poll officer also said that this was not the end of inclusions and deletions from the electoral list, as voters could still apply for fresh inclusions via Form 6 during other elections.

However, all the 4.9 lakh persons who did not show up for the hearings related to the exercise and the 1.6 lakh ineligible voters could be removed from the 2026 final list, The Hindu reported.

Assembly elections in the state are expected to be held by April.

The draft electoral rolls for West Bengal under the special intensive revision exercise were published on December 16. The names of over 58 lakh voters were removed from voter lists in the state as they had either died, migrated outside the state or did not submit their enumeration forms.

The deletion from the draft roll was provisional and citizens could object to their names being removed from the list. Citizens whose names had been dropped from the list had been permitted to file their claims and objections.

During the claims and objections stage in the state, voters identified for verification had been called for personal hearings.

Over 94.4 lakh persons had also been summoned for hearings under the “logical discrepancies” category. More than 31.6 lakh voters who were classified as “unmapped” were also asked to appear for hearings.

Voters with “logical discrepancies” in their forms were separate from those whose names were removed, and from the “unmapped voters”, who could not establish a familial link with the voters’ list of 2002.

Logical discrepancies include a mismatch in parents’ names, a low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being above six.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly elections in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath on Saturday likened Delhi to a “gas chamber” due to air pollution in the national capital, adding that the residents of his state enjoy a clean environment and are not being suffocated despite developmental work, PTI reported.

While Delhi is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital, Uttar Pradesh in November accounted for six of the most polluted cities in the country.

Speaking at an event in Gorakhpur, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader said that one of the biggest global challenges today was environmental degradation. However, the environment in Uttar Pradesh was quite good, Adityanath said, adding that there was no pollution.

“Without pollution, there are fewer diseases,” the news agency quoted him as saying. “Whenever pollution exists, it harms the lungs. If our supply of oxygen is compromised, the entire body suffers.”

The chief minister added that the situation in Delhi was dire.

“It feels like a gas chamber,” he said. “…breathing is difficult, and there’s a burning sensation in the eyes. Doctors advise those suffering from asthma, as well as the elderly and children, to stay indoors. What kind of life is this?"

Any disruption to the environment could lead to similar circumstances, he said. “We are fortunate here,” PTI quoted Adityanath as saying. “We have development without a suffocating environment.”

Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital. Stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, along with the lighting of firecrackers during Diwali, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants contribute to the problem.

However, Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad was ranked the most polluted city in the country in November, registering an average PM2.5 concentration of 224 micrograms per cubic metre, according to a report by the think tank Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

PM2.5 refers to tiny airborne particles that are about 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair and can easily be breathed into the lungs and the bloodstream.

India’s National Ambient Air Quality Standards prescribe a “safe” PM2.5 limit of 60 μg/m3 (micrograms per cubic metre of air) over a 24-hour period. The World Health Organization prescribes 15 μg/m3.

According to the report released on December 5, Ghaziabad was followed by Noida, Bahadurgarh, Delhi, Hapur, Greater Noida, Baghpat, Sonipat, Meerut and Rohtak in the list of most polluted cities in the country.

Uttar Pradesh accounted for six of these cities, followed by three in Haryana.

Nationalist Congress Party leader Chhagan Bhujbal on Saturday said there was no proposal for his outfit to merge with the Nationalist Congress Party faction led by Sharad Pawar, reported The Indian Express.

After NCP president and Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar died in a plane crash on January 28, several reports had said that the group was considering a merger with the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar).

“If you ask me, there is no such proposal for merger before us,” Bhujbal was quoted as saying by the newspaper. “Moreover, we have a captain. All the decisions will take place accordingly.”

On January 31, Rajya Sabha MP Sunetra Pawar was elected as the leader of the legislative party of the NCP faction that Ajit Pawar led.

Ajit Pawar died when a small aircraft crashed near an airstrip in Baramati town during its second attempt to land after having initiated a go-around. Two pilots, a flight attendant and Ajit Pawar’s security officer were the others who died in the incident.

The cause of the crash was unclear. The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, a unit of the civil aviation ministry, is investigating the incident.

In 2023, Ajit Pawar, along with several party MLAs, joined Maharashtra’s Mahayuti coalition government comprising the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Shiv Sena faction led by Eknath Shinde.

The move had led to a split in the NCP, with one faction supporting him and the other backing his uncle and party founder Sharad Pawar.

The two NCP factions had in January contested the municipal elections in Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad in an alliance.

On Saturday, NCP(SP) state president Shashikant Shinde said that they would not talk about any merger at the moment, reported Hindustan Times.

NCP national working president Praful Patel was quoted as saying by the newspaper that the party’s priority was “to stand with Deputy Chief Minister Sunetra Pawar”.

“She is our leader and our priority is to work together to strengthen the party under her leadership,” he said.

Five persons were arrested after the parapet segment of an under-construction metro bridge in Mumbai collapsed, killing one person and leaving three others injured on Saturday, reported The Times of India.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority also imposed Rs 5 crore penalty on the contractor, Reliance Infrastructure-Astaldi, and its sub-contractor, Milan Road Buildtech LLP, according to Hindustan Times.

A fine of Rs 1 crore was imposed on a consultant linked to the project – a consortium of DB Engineering & Consulting, Hill International Inc and Louis Berger Consulting Private Limited.

The incident occurred at about 12.20 pm near the Mulund fire station on the Lal Bahadur Shastri road.

Videos posted on social media showed a large concrete block, which appeared to be a parapet segment part of the viaduct, on an auto rickshaw and a car.

The person who died was identified as Ramdhani Yadav, 46. He was sitting in the back of the auto rickshaw.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis expressed his condolences to the family of Yadav and ordered an inquiry into the matter.

The Maharashtra government said it will provide assistance of Rs 5 lakh to the family of the person who had died and will bear the cost of treatment for the injured.

Mulund MLA Mihir Kotecha alleged that workers had installed the parapet segment without supervision, reported The Times of India. He added that 54 violations by the contractor were earlier flagged, but ignored.

On the other hand, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority said that reports and social media posts linking the incident on Saturday to an earlier misleading post questioning the structural stability of the metro line four construction were “inaccurate”.

Meanwhile, Opposition leader Aaditya Thackeray asked whether the government will blacklist the contractor.

“Not likely – may be it’ll show a penalty of a few lakhs and let the contractor get more tenders,” the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader said on social media.

The former state minister added: “Even today, most infrastructure works have terrible barricading that either lead to traffic jams or vehicles falling into open pits. Life has no value under the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] regime. Falling pieces from metro lines, unsafe modes of transport, cars/bikes falling into open pits with no help for hours.”

The Congress said that the incident on Saturday was “proof of the BJP government’s gross negligence and corruption, where there’s no concern for the public and no value for human lives”.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

India’s big cities are learning that electric buses need trained drivers to handle them.

Public electric buses in Bengaluru caused 18 accidents, six of them fatal, over 15 months ending August 2025, while two crashes in Mumbai between December 2024 and January 2025 killed a dozen people. The accidents have also stretched beyond major metros, with a speeding electric bus killing four in Gujarat in April 2025 and another crushing a stationary auto in Odisha in January, killing two.

Insufficient driver training, not faulty technology, is the leading cause, according to municipal corporations and civil advocates. Vehicular issues have been ruled out in most incidents, with driver error accounting for about 60% of accidents involving both electric and conventional buses, according to Pawan Mulukutla, executive program director for Integrated Transport, Clean Air and Hydrogen at World Resources Institute India.

More than 10,000 electric buses already operate across 50 Indian cities, with 20,000 more in procurement, according to the World Resources Institute. The rapid expansion is outpacing efforts to train drivers on distinct challenges like sudden acceleration and hard braking, and experts say systemic reforms will be needed to resolve the deepening labour crisis.

“It is easy to blame the technology always, but it is difficult for me to believe that six or seven manufacturers do not know how a bus is to be designed,” Ravi Gadepalli, founder of Transit Intelligence, an advisory and analytics firm supporting the e-bus transition in Indian cities, told Rest of World.

These buses are tested and certified by the Indian government, Gadepalli said, adding that manufacturers like Olectra, PMI, and Solaris operate buses in countries like China and Poland without incident.

There’s a clear experience gap between drivers of diesel or CNG buses and those operating electric buses, said Amegh Gopinath, head of mobility and climate action at New Delhi-based Innpact Solutions. He documented this in an 18-month study for the German Agency for International Cooperation in 2020-’21, interviewing officials, drivers, and other ground staff of several state road transport corporations.

“With electric buses, there’s not a lot of exposure to the technology, exposure to the drivetrain,” Gopinath told Rest of World.

Private contractors conduct brief interviews and check for a heavy-duty vehicle license, and hire drivers with minimal electric bus-specific onboarding, Gopinath found. This contrasts sharply with the European and US markets, where drivers undergo rigorous initial training, attend refresher courses, and have their driving behavior monitored via simulators and real-world tracking.

“There’s a lot of push for defensive driving [abroad] as well – that you don’t accelerate at junctions, intersections, and at crossings,” Gopinath said. “But these things are not given a lot of importance in India at this point.”

State transport authorities contract private operators to run electric buses but do little to enforce training and safety standards. Oversight is largely manual and inconsistent, according to Gadepalli, who helped the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation set up a digital contract management system in 2025.

“At the end of the day, the authority cannot write a contract and forget about it,” he said. “They need to still have staff monitoring the operations in a lot of detail.”

Aggressive bidding to win contracts created a race to the bottom on pay. BMTC-hired drivers earn Rs 30,000 monthly on average, while private operators pay around Rs 22,000, Gadepalli said. Low salaries and poor working conditions have led to high attrition, with drivers opting for ride-hailing services like Uber and Ola instead, Shivanand Swamy, executive director at Centre of Excellence in Urban Transport, told Rest of World.

“In recent years, there have been instances where accidents were reported due to extended duty hours and driver fatigue,” Mulukutla said. “It is crucial to have clear regulations around duty hours and to ensure periodic training.”

Still, Swamy, who is facilitating technology adoption, operations, financing, and capacity building for the transition to electric public mobility, remains optimistic that these growing pains will subside. India’s road transport and highways ministry updated guidelines for EV driver training in January 2025 to be more rigorous and stringent

“This is a transition phase right now. Options are limited in terms of drivers’ availability,” Swamy said. “It will settle down very soon, I’m sure.”

In the aftermath of the fatal incidents, the Mumbai and Bengaluru governments have said they will mandate licence reviews as well as training and refresher courses even for privately hired drivers.

Some experts argue that a philosophical shift is also needed, viewing public transport as a public service rather than a revenue-generating model. The pressure on institutions to generate revenue adds stress to ground staff, Gopinath said.

“The focus has been about how much are you generating in terms of revenue, how many kilometres have we operated, what are our fuel savings,” Gopinath said. “If that shift happens, I think a lot of stress is taken off from these ground staff, especially the drivers.”

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

I met Professor Andre Béteille almost 47 years ago in rather an unusual setting. It was a cold, foggy, winter morning. I was enrolled as a M Phil student at the department of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics. I had just escaped from my one-and-a-half-year-old child and landed at the D School gate at 8 am to find it locked.

As I wondered what to do, a youngish, handsome man appeared from nowhere and asked me what I was doing at the department so early in the morning. I told him that I was a student and that the reason I was so early was that if my son saw me leave, he would scream his head off. The only solution was to creep out of the house at the crack of dawn.

He asked me if I had tea and breakfast, which of course, I hadn’t. I asked him who he was. He said his name was André Béteille and that he was a professor in the department. I almost dropped dead with shock. This was the famous André Béteille whose books were compulsory reading during my MA in Pune University. I couldn’t believe that I was standing in front of this famous man and telling him my Ram Katha.

Professor Béteille promptly helped me climb over the gate in my saree, and took me to the dhaba near the department of economics. There he treated me to masala chai, masala omelette and toast – a pattern which continued almost every morning that term.

When he asked me what I was up to, I told him about my husband, Sundar, an IAS officer who was posted in Jalgaon in Maharashtra and how my son Arudra and I would commute every four weeks from Delhi to Jalgaon by third-class train.

Indian sociologist, and long-time contributor to EPW, André Béteille passed away today. Through this thread of articles, we reflect upon his legacy and some of his important works published in EPW. pic.twitter.com/VTB0lISBtP

— Economic & Political Weekly (@epw_in) February 4, 2026

One day, I must have been looking a bit worried so he asked me what the matter was. I told him that I would not be able to come to the department for a few days because there was no one at home to look after Arudra, and I was worried that I would not make the 75% attendance that was necessary for me to continue my studies. He then suggested that I bring Arudra to the department and leave him in his room.

I took him up on the offer without thinking twice. Every morning for about ten days, I would bring Arudra in an autorickshaw with his bag of Lego and leave him in Béteille’s room. After classes, I would dash down to collect him. It was a beautiful sight. Arudra would be sitting at the feet of the guru, quietly playing with his Lego and Béteille would be reading or writing. There was absolute silence in the room.

André Béteille cared for his students in ways that were very unusual. Apart from being an amazing teacher who could explain the most complex issues in a simple manner, he was interested in the well-being of his students. Once classes finished, he called me to his room and said, I am going to be your M Phil supervisor. I know how difficult it is for you to manage in this manner, with Sundar posted in Jalgaon. I suggest that you analyse the Reports of the Commissioner for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. These are government reports and Sundar will be able to get them in Maharashtra.

I want you to take your books and go home and write your thesis. I don’t want you to announce this around because technically you are supposed to be in Delhi. But if I don’t get your thesis on June 5, I will throw it in the dustbin.

He was, at that time, the head of the department.

I finished my thesis on time and got my degree and then enrolled for a PhD at D School. By that time Sundar had been transferred to Beed district, which was completely unconnected to the rest of the state. Coming to Delhi was impossible. Luckily for me, Sundar helped and during my infrequent visits to Delhi, I would meet Professor Béteille and ask his advice on how to proceed with fieldwork.

As it happened, my own supervisor, Professor MSA Rao was critically ill and in no position to guide me. So, I was back to asking Béteille for help, and he became what he called my “shadow supervisor”

Fortunately, two years in Beed were over and Sundar got posted to Mussoorie as a Deputy Director on the faculty of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration. To my great delight, I found that Béteille was a regular guest lecturer at the academy.

After his guest lectures were over, he would walk across to our house and Arudra and Béteille and I would walk to Company Gardens and discuss my PhD thesis. I don’t know how many versions of my thesis he read during these visits to the academy.

Finally, he said, “Neera, don’t make the best the enemy of the good. Just submit your thesis.” He told Professor BS Baviskar, who was then the head of the department, that my thesis was ready for submission.

But for Professor Béteille, I would never have finished my education. The kind of support he provided was unusual and we established a life-long bond. I would drop in to see him often in his Jor Bagh house, sometimes just to say hello and touch base.

I didn’t become an academic but I was interested in writing and he was a terrific sounding board. It didn’t matter if the subject of my research was child labour or the memoirs of my great grandfather – he always took the trouble to read what I had written and give his honest opinion.

Devastated to hear that the great sociologist André Béteille is no more. He was the Indian scholar I most admired, for me (and many others) a moral and intellectual anchor. Here's a tribute I published on his 90th birthday in September 2024: https://t.co/gxhwlQBdK1

— Ramachandra Guha (@Ram_Guha) February 4, 2026

In the meantime, Arudra took a year off from the Yale Law School to write a paper on the Indian Civil Service, and asked Professor Béteille to be his supervisor. He readily agreed, writing to Arudra, “You seem to be an unusual research scholar. No ordinary scholar would like to be supervised by someone who was also his mother’s supervisor.” (He told me later, “This is the only time I have been supervisor to both mother and son!” Amita Baviskar just noted, though, that he taught both her as well her father.)

Very often I would drop in around noon. He would be sitting in his verandah reading and watching over his grandson who would be playing in the garden. He would ask after Sundar and Arudra. I would get quite irritated and say to him, “How come you never ask about me? It’s always about Sundar or Arudra. I am the one who was your student!”

Much of our conversation was about food. He asked me once if I knew how to make marmalade. He missed eating good bread and marmalade. He remembered the bread he ate in his childhood from the bakery near his house. He described it in great detail, so I decided to try my hand at it. He loved it and so even if I couldn’t go myself, a loaf of homemade bread and marmalade would be sent regularly to “Professor Sahab’s” house!

Last April, I suddenly felt I needed to see him. I had just lost Sundar, and I wanted to talk to Professor Béteille because I panicked – he was already 90 years old and frail. I rushed there one evening. He was sitting in his chair in the bedroom, and smiled when he saw me. I told him about Sundar and then burst into tears. I told him that I had come to give him a big hug because he had been such an important person in my life.

I reminded him of the masala chai and breakfast on cold winter mornings, baby-sitting Arudra, walking to Company Gardens and discussing my PhD thesis. He smiled at me and said, “It all worked out in the end, didn’t it?” Then he kissed my hand and told me to come and see him again.

Neera Burra got her PhD from the Delhi School of Economics in 1986 and worked for many years with various United Nations agencies in India. After an early retirement, she turned to a second career as an amateur historian, publishing A Memoir of Pre-Partition Punjab: Ruchi Ram Sahni 1863-1948 in 2017. Her email address is neeraburra@gmail.com. Her blog can be read here.

India’s gig workers on quick commerce platforms ended 2025 on a rebellious note. Over 200,000 “delivery partners”– as the poorly-paid, overworked, and precarious delivery workers ferrying food, groceries and almost everything else are euphemistically termed – called a strike on New Year’s Eve to press for fair pay, social security benefits, and safe work conditions.

It followed flash strikes by 40,000 app-based delivery workers on Christmas Day against falling incomes, excessive working hours, lack of job security, and unsafe delivery targets such as “10-minute delivery” models that put the life of the ubiquitous two-wheeler-borne delivery workers negotiating India’s congested and deadly roads at grave risk.

The New Year’s Eve strike saw some success but platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato, which aggregate restaurants, managed to blunt the effect somewhat by offering more incentives to the workers. Zomato’s founder gloated at the high sales on the day despite the strike and thanked the local authorities for keeping the “miscreants” in check. Social media and workers’ unions were aghast at this characterisation of peaceful strikers and the use of state violence to suppress union work.

The strike has triggered a debate on dignified work and capitalist greed, but these are dark days for India’s powerless labour up against a triumphant capital in India. The implications of this face-off extend beyond economic policymaking – they also explain the deeper undercurrents that are dragging down India’s democracy and its unmistakable passage to despotism.

While democracy studies generally concentrate on executive overreach, institution capture and crumbling social foundations that delegitimise governing institutions and enable the rise of demagogues, the effect that the relationship between labour and capital has on democracy is far less understood.

This winter holiday season alone bore enough signs of a clear pattern of uneven contest between labour and capital in India, which is now not only considered an “electoral autocracy” by V-Dem Institute, it is also seen as “one of the worst autocratisers”.

It began with air travel across the country going into a tailspin early December as India’s leading airline, IndiGo, abruptly cancelled thousands of flights with nearly a million reservations, leaving air passengers stranded across the country.

The chaos was triggered by IndiGo’s failure to implement new government rules mandating longer rest hours for pilots and fewer night landings. New rostering rules were meant to give pilots and cabin crew more weekly rest – 48 hours instead of 36 for pilots – and two instead of six night landings, to protect them from fatigue. Aligning with the new regulation would require IndiGo to provide for more staff. It did not bother. Controlling about 65% of the aviation market, IndiGo evidently inferred it was “too big to tame”.

It was right. Facing an unexpected aviation meltdown, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government buckled. One of its first actions to restore order was to suspend the new rules. The Airline Pilots Association of India called the climbdown a “dangerous precedent” reversing safe and equitable work rules for the sake of “commercial expediency”.

This has been happening a lot lately in India’s broken democracy, where the balance between labour and capital has moved decisively against labour, breaking the back of one of the most potent forces against authoritarianism.

Just days before the aviation meltdown began, labour unions howled in protest against the rollout of new labour codes they say reverse hard-won worker rights since India’s independence in 1947. And, within days of the aviation crisis, the government introduced a bill in Parliament aimed at diluting an employment guarantee scheme that was conceived to empower rural labourers with the “right to work”.

Known popularly by its acronym MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee), the scheme enacted by the previous government made the state legally bound to provide at least 100 days of work to every rural household demanding it.

With Modi’s amendments, the government will no longer be obliged to provide work on demand. The bill also pauses guaranteed work for two months during agricultural seasons, eroding the bargaining power of farm labourers vis-à-vis land holders in setting farm wages. The employment scheme has long been a bugbear of both landed elites and business leaders because it made it harder to prey on distressed labour. Its alteration is a major concession to capital.

To market, to market

The withering of labour power and the state’s privileging of capital have been the norm since a neoliberal consensus emerged in India in the early 1990s leading to economic reforms ending the prevailing dirigiste era. The logic of the market now undergirds public policy, with the state ceding more and more space to private business. The process has intensified since Modi’s rise to national power in 2014 set in motion India’s democratic backsliding.

A weaker labour and the growing dominance of capital have contributed to a weakening of democratic institutions and enabled elite capture and rise of authoritarianism.

The neoliberal ethic is now morphing into a new kind of state capitalism that blurs the boundary between state and private capital in a new schema of authoritarian neoliberalism: a rapidly centralising state showers chosen corporations with policy favours to help them dominate market segments as vectors of economic nationalism. The corporations, in turn, bankroll Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to make it India’s richest party, giving it the financial firepower to outspend the opposition and consolidate its programme of Hindu supremacism.

The BJP pulled in more than 85% of corporate donations to political parties last year, 12 times the collection of the second-biggest opposition party, the Indian National Congress. IndiGo was a major contributor to an electoral trust fund of corporate donors that gave away 80% of its collections to the BJP.

The result is a parallel concentration of power in politics and business. A handful of major companies and conglomerates dominate every market segment. While IndiGo rules the air, Gautam Adani—called “Modi’s Rockefeller” – rules the airports, for example; Adani’s growth trajectory has closely tracked Modi’s, having built a ports-to-solar empire in just a decade that Modi has been in power.

Age of monopolists

Such rapid ascent is enabled by a favourable regulatory environment that reduces capitalist competition, creating monopolists with enormous powers over both consumers and workers. IndiGo’s power play to ignore the directives for equitable work rules stemmed from the state’s indulgence that gives it a semi-monopoly status in an expanding market.

The pilots association accuses IndiGo of “cartel-like behaviour”, adopting a hiring freeze despite increasing flights, and squeezing out profits through a rostering system that dangerously overworks pilots. Exploitative practices like these are of a piece with the government’s conscious weakening of labour power dressed as investment-friendly policymaking that fetishises capital through the rhetoric of “ease of doing business”.

The unions are calling the new labour codes – the draft rules of which happened to be published the same day as the gig workers went on strike – an escalation in this ongoing exercise of eviscerating labour rights. Layoffs in 60%-70% of industrial units across India will no longer require prior government approval under the new codes, says the All India Trade Union Congress.

The new codes also weaken state regulation of businesses by allowing companies to self-certify their labour and safety standards, make unionisation more difficult and industrial action almost impossible. It allows 12-hour workdays, in keeping with the suggestion of corporate leaders, and facilitates casualisation of the workforce by encouraging more contract work.

The new measures, it is feared, will worsen the predatory labour practices that are already rife in India because of its giant informal sector, which generates 80% of the jobs. Even state employees do not escape workplace deprivations. Following the aviation crisis over unfulfilled rest rules for pilots, train drivers have again been drawing attention to their own inhuman work conditions. The state-run Indian Railways recently rejected loco pilots’ longstanding demand for meal and toilet breaks while on duty, ruling that these elementary necessities of workers were “operationally unfeasible”.

Labour-capital balance, democracy

The rampant workplace exploitation is emblematic of the rising inequality as a consequence of an imbalance between labour and capital. Wages have been falling – salaried workers now earn less than in 2017 – while corporate profits have shot up to a 15-year high. The top 1% of India’s population holds 40% of the wealth, making the country one of the most unequal in the world, according to the 2026 World Inequality Report. The richest 10% hold about 65% of the total wealth while the bottom 50% only 6.4%.

The state’s neoliberal ethic of treating labour rights as a hindrance to investment and economic growth rather than a component of social justice contributes to this deepening inequality. It has led to policies encouraging contractualisation and casualisation of work that has weakened the ability of workers to organise.

The share of contract workers in India’s organised manufacturing sector has already doubled in the past couple of decades. Trade unions have been in a state of decline, with union density – percentage of employees who are trade union members – now at a lowly 6.3%.

As labour power weakens, so does India’s democracy. Unions are thought to strengthen democracy as they force more redistributive policies, push back against organised business groups, lend support to democratic institutions, build social solidarity, limit the rise of right-wing populists by decreasing economic inequality in which populists thrive, and mitigate racial and ethnic divisions that populists prey on.

Despite a few instances of working-class mobilisation against democracy (Yugoslavia and Romania in 1991, for example), strong democratic unions are thus mostly linked to strong political democracy and seen as a bulwark against authoritarianism. The success of the Arab Spring in Tunisia is largely credited to the strikes and protests mobilised by its strong trade unions.

State of the union

The economist Kenneth Galbraith envisaged labour unions as central to the countervailing force against the market power and influence of large corporations, along with a strong regulatory state and consumer cooperatives. Strengthening the bargaining power of unions and supporting this countervailing force as part of the New Deal, to him, were “perhaps the major peacetime function of the Federal Government” for limiting economic concentration.

The West’s three decades of spectacular growth and unprecedented prosperity following the second world war was largely possible because a balance was struck between capital and labour to prevent such concentration. There is century-long evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant part of the dramatic fall in inequality in the US between the mid-1930s and late 1940s.

This compromise between labour and capital began to unravel in the early 1970s as stagflation, oil shocks, wage disputes and falling profits triggered social and political turbulence and revived liberal market ideology and reforms.

The onset of globalisation and offshoring began to erode the bargaining power of labour vis-à-vis a globally mobile capital. As unions declined, wages began to stagnate and inequality rose. This has had far-reaching political consequences, in the form of voter apathy fuelling populist messages, culminating in the Trump phenomenon.

The decline in the strength of unions in the US between 1964 and 2004 contributed to a drop in overall voter turnout as the weakening of unions impacted the mobilisation mechanism of political parties. When labour has strong organisation and voice, it can help maintain democratic norms, empower citizens, and push for fairer economic conditions.

When it does not, and capital dominates without robust labour representation, economic inequality rises, trust in democratic institutions is undermined, and demagogic forces rise on the back of social divisions unmediated by the cohesive and mobilising capacity of unions. Countries where unions are hit the hardest by neoliberalism tend to offer the right-wing movements the most fertile ground. Look no further than India.

Authoritarian neoliberalism

India has witnessed a marked decline of trade unionism and erosion of worker rights in past decades. In a country where much of the economy operates in the shadows of informality and the trade unions have in any case represented a small, formal labour, rapid informalisation of even the formal sectors of the economy in the name of making the labour market “flexible” has rapidly diminished trade unionism.

Shrinking since the mid-1970s, union membership has waned precipitously since market liberalisation in the early 1990s, and with it, the power and influence of trade unions. From its peak of 35.8% in 1989, the trade union density fell to just 6.3% by 2021. The labour income share as a percentage of the GDP has fallen much more steeply than in the rest of the world, while the share of profits has increased dramatically.

The Indian state’s privileging of private enterprise and capital in national development has hardened in recent years as the state itself has become a facilitator of capital rather than an ombudsman. State power now serves capital, and capital in turn solidifies state power. An emaciated labour helps solidify both.

A weak labour helps minimise the risk of pushback to authoritarian power; the only time that Modi has been forced to roll back his own laws is when farmer unions mounted a year-long siege demanding the repeal of three controversial farm laws. Capital and the despot have a convergent stake in keeping labour weak.

This intertwining of state and capital shapes a new kind of neoliberalism that poses an existential threat to democracy. If the 2008 financial crisis signalled the fatal maladies of neoliberalism, Covid was widely understood to have sounded its death knell. Yet, the death of neoliberalism has been greatly exaggerated. The debate over what comes after neoliberalism notwithstanding, there is also a great deal of doubt whether “post-neolilberal” is just hyper-neoliberal, yielding an intensified form of cronyism and state capitalism.

The pandering to monopoly capitalists points to a fusion of the two in India. As neoliberalism and authoritarianism entangle in a mutually reinforcing dynamic, the world’s fourth largest economy offers important lessons in the direction capitalism and democracy are heading as neoliberalism shifts shapes. If the experience of bike-ridden delivery workers, IndiGo pilots and train drivers in the world’s largest failing democracy is anything to go by, it’s going to be one rough ride.

Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a journalist, researcher and author based in Hong Kong. With John Keane, he has co-authored To Kill A Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism (OUP/Pan Macmillan).

This article was first published by the Toda Peace Institute.

The Supreme Court has stayed proceedings before the Orissa High Court in an election petition challenging Odisha Deputy Chief Minister Kanak Vardhan Singh Deo’s win in the Patnagarh constituency in the 2024 Assembly polls, The New Indian Express reported on Saturday.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta issued a notice to the respondent, Saroj Kumar Meher, asking him to file a response within a month. It directed that the proceedings in the High Court will be stayed in the meantime.

The dispute pertains to the 2024 Assembly elections, when Singh Deo won the Patnagarh seat.

Meher, who was the Biju Janata Dal candidate in the constituency, had approached the High Court questioning the validity of Singh Deo’s election, alleging that the nomination papers submitted by the BJP leader had been improperly accepted.

Meher claimed that Singh Deo had suppressed material information about his alleged criminal antecedents and assets in the statutory forms submitted with his nomination, Bar and Bench reported.

This was a corrupt practice under the 1951 Representation of the People Act, he alleged.

Singh Deo had sought the dismissal of the petition arguing that it did not include the required affidavits as per the election law, and lacked material facts and full details of the alleged corrupt practices.

On November 28, the High Court dismissed Singh Deo’s application, ruling that the defects were curable and allowed the election petition to continue.

The deputy chief minister then challenged the order in the Supreme Court.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

India recently released a draft proposal requiring artificial intelligence companies to pay royalties when they use copyrighted work from the country to train their models. If enacted, the law could reshape how Meta, Google, OpenAI, and other big tech firms operate in one of their biggest markets.

With the world’s largest population, India has leverage that few other countries have. It is the second-biggest market for OpenAI’s ChatGPT after the US. It is one of the fastest-growing markets for Perplexity’s AI search engine, and the largest user base for WhatsApp and Facebook, where Meta is rolling out its AI tools. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon recently announced some $67 billion in AI infrastructure investments in the country.

India is therefore justified in demanding payment for its copyrighted data. Tech companies “will have to fit those payments into their deployment models – or give up this massive, lucrative market, and all of the scale advantages that being part of it confers,” James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell University, told Rest of World.

India’s linguistic diversity is another reason why AI companies need to treat the country differently, Grimmelmann said. The government is keen to develop multilingual large language models that can cater to the specific needs of businesses and individuals, which means companies need local data that belongs to local creators.

India isn’t the only country thinking about a fee. Brazil’s new AI bill also has a provision that mandates compensation for copyright holders when their data is used for training. The bill is awaiting a final vote.

As AI models are adopted more widely, dozens of cases have been filed against tech firms in the US and elsewhere for using copyrighted material – including journalism, literature, music, photography, and film – without the consent of creators. In India, the ANI news agency has sued OpenAI for copyright violations, while writers in Singapore have pushed back against a government proposal to let AI companies train on their work without compensation.

Tech companies have generally put forward the argument of “fair use”, which permits use of copyrighted material, without consent, for purposes such as teaching or research. It is the model that the US favours, even as Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit. Europe’s opt-out system places the burden on creators to police companies: track use, send notices, and hope for compliance.

Both the US’s fair-use model and European opt-outs rely on companies voluntarily disclosing the data they use. Yet companies are increasingly opaque about their training data, according to an index that tracks the transparency of foundation models.

“This is robust evidence that market incentives are insufficient to increase transparency for most companies, including on training data,” Rishi Bommasani, a senior researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and one of the authors of the report, told Rest of World.

India’s hybrid framework proposes companies pay a mandatory blanket licence fee – a percentage of their global revenue – for using copyrighted materials to train their AI models. It also recommends the establishment of an agency to collect the license fee and distribute it to registered creators.

The proposal has had pushback even within India. Nasscom, the tech industry lobbying body, formally dissented, saying mandatory licensing would slow innovation, and that India should adopt the US approach of allowing training on lawfully accessed content. It is also likely “to do more harm than good to the small creators it is supposed to protect,” Rahul Matthan, a partner and head of the technology practice at law firm Trilegal, wrote on his website.

The proposed payment model is “deeply flawed”, wrote Matthan, a former adviser to the government. Big, established artists are likely to receive a disproportionately large share of the license fee, while small creators “would have to settle for a pittance.” The proposal prohibits opt-outs, so small creators cannot withhold their works from being used for AI training, he noted.

Rather than focus on the training data, it would be more effective to focus on the outputs that the models generate, Matthan wrote. “If it can be shown that an AI system, in response to a prompt, has reproduced a substantial portion of a copyrighted work, that would be clear evidence of copyright infringement … and entitle the author to appropriate legal remedies.”

But litigation is expensive, and can drag on for years. Remember the lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild against Google? The company had scanned more than 20 million books without permission, and this went on for more than a decade. Mandatory licensing provides certainty: Companies know what they owe, and creators know they will be paid. AI companies also wish to avoid lengthy legal fights, and are inking licensing deals with major publications and creators. India’s preemptive approach creates a framework before the lawsuits pile up.

With tech companies having already made massive financial commitments in India, they cannot afford to walk away. Once they adjust their business models to accommodate the payment framework, extending the practice to smaller countries can become routine. Countries with valuable training data but less market power can simply adapt India’s framework – much like they did with the European Union’s GDPR privacy law.

To be sure, mandatory licensing doesn’t solve every problem. Figuring out how much each individual work contributed to a model’s output is difficult, Grimmelmann said. Implementation also has real challenges. “It requires government administrative capacity – it’s actually a bigger involvement by the state than litigation would be,” he said.

Yet for all its flaws, this is a proactive – and feasible – solution to the question of fair compensation for creative work. If India stands up to AI firms – as it once did in refusing Facebook’s Free Basics scheme – other countries may well follow suit. The outcome in New Delhi and Brasília will determine whether smaller countries without their scale adopt mandatory licensing, or get stuck choosing between costly litigation and opt-outs that have already failed elsewhere.

Javaid Iqbal Sofi is an artificial intelligence researcher and policy analyst at Virginia Tech.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

One person was killed and several were injured in Mumbai’s Mulund area on Saturday when a portion of an under-construction metro viaduct fell on vehicles on the road underneath.

Three to four persons were injured, PTI quoted an unidentified fire department official as saying. The injured had been taken to hospital, The Times of India reported.

The incident occurred at about 12.20 pm near the Mulund fire station on the Lal Bahadur Shastri road.

Videos posted on social media showed a large concrete block, which appeared to be a parapet segment part of the viaduct, fallen on an auto rickshaw and a car.

STORY | Part of metro rail pillar collapses in Mumbai's Mulund area; 3-4 persons feared injured

Three to four persons are feared injured after a portion of a pillar of an under-construction metro rail route in Mulund in north-east Mumbai collapsed on Saturday afternoon, a fire… pic.twitter.com/f31K3vsYNj

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) February 14, 2026

It was unclear what had caused the incident.

The viaduct is part of Mumbai Metro line four.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority said that the metro project team was at the site and securing it in coordination with the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation and the disaster management authorities.

Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis expressed his condolences to the family of the person who had died and ordered an inquiry into the matter.

The Maharashtra government said it will provide assistance of Rs 5 lakh to the family of the person who had died and will bear the cost of treatment for the injured.

Contractor fined, construction halted, says MMRDA

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority urged the public to wait for the findings of the investigation report, assuring that persons found responsible for the incident will be acted against.

The authority said that immediate corrective measures will be implemented to prevent such an incident.

As a precautionary measure, construction in that stretch has been halted, it said, adding that the contractor had been fined Rs 5 crore and the general consultants Rs 1 crore.

The metropolitan region development authority also said that reports and social media posts linking the incident on Saturday to an earlier misleading post questioning the structural stability of the metro line four construction were “inaccurate”.

“The visuals used in that misleading post were from a different pier and a different location,” the development body said. “Also, today’s unfortunate incident involved the falling of a portion of the parapet.”

The incident on Saturday had occurred at pier number P196, it added.

Life has no value under BJP government, says Opposition

Opposition leader Aaditya Thackeray asked whether the government will blacklist the contractor.

“Not likely – may be it’ll show a penalty of a few lakhs and let the contractor get more tenders,” the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader said on social media.

“If you notice, pillars are already painted – before the work was completed,” Thackeray said. “This will cost the state some crores – and then once work is finished, crores again to do them up.”

The former state minister added: “Even today, most infrastructure works have terrible barricading that either lead to traffic jams or vehicles falling into open pits. Life has no value under the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party] regime. Falling pieces from metro lines, unsafe modes of transport, cars/bikes falling into open pits with no help for hours.”

“Soon a day will come when countries will issue travel warnings for such things in our country too,” he added.

The Congress said that the incident on Saturday was “proof of the BJP government’s gross negligence and corruption, where there’s no concern for the public and no value for human lives”.

“Across the country, the BJP government’s shoddy infrastructure is claiming people’s lives, but no one steps forward when it comes to taking accountability,” the Opposition party said on social media.

One person was killed and three others injured after a portion of an under-construction elevated Metro bridge collapsed onto moving vehicles on LBS Road near the Johnson & Johnson premises in Mulund (West) on Saturday afternoon. pic.twitter.com/2xNtsJqK0A

— Richa Pinto (@richapintoi) February 14, 2026

A day after winning the national election, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party on Saturday said it was looking forward to “engaging constructively” with India to advance the bilateral relationship.

“We look forward to engaging constructively with India to advance our multifaceted relationship, guided by mutual respect, sensitivity to each other’s concerns, and a shared commitment to peace, stability, and prosperity in our region,” the Bangladesh Nationalist Party said on social media.

The statement was in response to a congratulatory message from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Bangladesh Nationalist Party chief Tarique Rahman.

Rahman is expected to become Bangladesh’s next prime minister.

On Friday, the alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party won 212 seats of the 299 constituencies that went to polls a day earlier. The rival alliance led by the Islamist organisation Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as the main Opposition party with 77 seats.

This was the first national election in Bangladesh since the Sheikh Hasina government was ousted in August 2024.

The election result on Friday “reflects the trust and confidence the people of Bangladesh have placed in our leadership and in the democratic process”, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party said.

It added that Dhaka “remains committed to upholding democratic values, inclusivity and progressive development” for all its citizens.

On Friday, Modi said on social media that he had spoken with Rahman and congratulated him on his “remarkable victory” in the polls.

Modi said he had conveyed his best wishes and support in Rahman’s “endeavour to fulfil the aspirations” of Bangladeshis.

“As two close neighbours with deep-rooted historical and cultural ties, I reaffirmed India’s continued commitment to the peace, progress and prosperity of both our peoples,” the Indian prime minister had said.

Humayun Kabir, Rahman’s foreign policy adviser, told WION on Saturday that the Bangladesh Nationalist Party will invite Modi for the swearing-in ceremony.

Responding to a social media post by Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party said on Saturday that India and Bangladesh’s “deep-rooted bonds of history, language and culture” form a “strong foundation for engagement even as we navigate evolving realities”.

On Friday, Kharge had congratulated Rahman and the BNP for winning the polls, and said that a “democratic, progressive and inclusive Bangladesh would always be supported by all Indians for the stability and peace of our region”.

Read Scroll’s ground reports from Bangladesh here.

The relations between India and Bangladesh had seen periods of frostiness during the Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s previous government in Dhaka. The party was earlier widely viewed as having an anti-India stance.

On Friday, Modi was among the first global leaders to congratulate Rahman on the win.

Ties between New Delhi and Dhaka have been strained since Hasina fled to India in August 2024 after several weeks of widespread student-led protests against her Awami League government. She had been in power for 16 years.

After her ouster, Nobel laureate economist Muhammad Yunus took over as the head of Bangladesh’s interim government. After Thursday’s polls, the interim government’s term will come to an end.

Bangladesh has been demanding that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal in that country sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government.

In December, Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said that it was for Hasina to decide whether she wanted to return to Bangladesh.

Relations between India and Bangladesh further strained in recent months amid unrest following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi on December 18. Hadi had been a prominent figure in the 2024 protests that led to the ouster of the Hasina government.

His death triggered protests, vandalism and attacks in Bangladesh. Several attacks on minority communities had also been reported in Bangladesh, which led to demonstrations in India as well.

Indian citizen Nikhil Gupta on Friday pleaded guilty in a plot to assassinate a Khalistani separatist in New York in a case United States officials allege is linked to an Indian government employee.

Gupta, 54, pleaded guilty to murder-for-hire, conspiracy to commit murder-for-hire and conspiracy to commit money laundering before US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn in a Manhattan federal court. The charges carry a maximum combined sentence of 40 years in prison.

In 2023, the United States Department of Justice accused Gupta of conspiring with an Indian government official to kill Khalistani separatist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.

Pannun, an American and Canadian citizen, is an advocate for Khalistan, an independent state for Sikhs. He is the general counsel of an organisation called Sikhs for Justice, which was banned in India in 2019. Pannun was declared an “individual terrorist” in India under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act in 2020.

The US charges came months after the Canadian government alleged the involvement of Indian government agents in the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar near Vancouver in June 2023.

On Friday, after the hearing, Federal Bureau of Investigation Assistant Director in Charge James C Barnacle Junior said that Gupta had facilitated “a foreign adversary’s unlawful effort to silence a vocal critic of the Indian government”.

Barnacle claimed that Gupta had done so “at the direction and coordination of an Indian government employee, Nikhil Gupta plotted to assassinate a United States citizen on American soil”.

In October 2024, the US charged a man named Vikash Yadav with murder-for-hire and money laundering in connection with the matter.

In a statement on Saturday, US officials said that Yadav “at relevant times” was “employed by the government of India’s Cabinet Secretariat, which houses India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing”.

Gupta had at the time denied having links to Yadav and told The Indian Express that the evidence presented by the US was “fabricated”.

Following an investigation by FBI New York, @DEANEWYORKDiv, and @SDNYnews, Nikhil Gupta pled guilty to plotting to assassinate a U.S. citizen in New York City.

Read more about the FBI's continued commitment to defend the homeland from foreign nationals targeting our citizens… pic.twitter.com/cElDtolY5y

— FBI New York (@NewYorkFBI) February 13, 2026

New Delhi has denied involvement in the alleged plot to assassinate Khalistani separatists. However, it had said that it constituted a high-level committee to examine the inputs provided by the United States.

There was no immediate comment from the Indian government on Gupta’s guilty plea.

Gupta was extradited to the US on June 14. The Czech authorities had arrested him on June 30, 2023, at the request of the United States when he travelled from India to the Czech capital Prague.

US prosecutors have alleged Gupta paid $100,000 in cash to a hitman to assassinate Pannun. The hitman turned out to be an undercover United States federal agent.

The plot was part of a larger conspiracy to kill one person in California and at least three in Canada, the US justice department has alleged.

Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Vikram Randhawa on Friday alleged that residents of the Kashmir Valley had illegally occupied land belonging to the Jammu Development Authority in Jammu city, The Hindu reported.

The claims made by Randhawa sparked a political row.

Raising the matter in the Assembly, Randhawa claimed that more than 16,000 kanals of land in Jammu had been encroached and claimed that 90% of it had been occupied by persons from the Kashmir Valley.

“The Jammu and Kashmir government should probe and take action,” he said.

He further alleged that the alleged encroachments were a “sinister move to change the demography of Jammu”, The Hindu reported.

He said that there would be no objections to Kashmiris purchasing land and building houses in Jammu by following due process, but they should not do so on government land, PTI reported.

Outside the House, the BJP MLA alleged that the government had been withholding the list of alleged encroachers because they were Kashmiris.

Land Grabbing in Jammu a Sinister Move to Change Demography: Vikram Randhawa pic.twitter.com/foJHsWmNDn

— Daily Excelsior (@DailyExcelsior1) February 13, 2026

Replying to Randhawa, Social Welfare Minister Sakina Itoo cited records as showing that 688 kanals and 17 marlas of land in Bahu tehsil and 579 kanals in Jammu South tehsil had been encroached upon, the Hindustan Times reported.

Eight kanals and 160 marlas both amount to one acre.

“These encroachments are old and are being removed as per the provisions of the Public Premises Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants Act and other relevant laws,” she said.

She said that since January 2025, 34 drives had been conducted to clear encroachments in the two tehsils, resulting in the retrieval of 140 kanals and 11 marlas of land belonging to the Jammu Development Authority.

Itoo rejected Randhawa’s allegations and said that encroachments should not be viewed through a regional or religious lens, the Hindustan Times reported.

Jammu and Kashmir should not be divided on such grounds, she added.

Altaf Kaloo, another legislator from the ruling National Conference, said that the “people from Kashmir are well off and have the purchasing capability to buy land in Jammu”.

“People have bought land in Jammu,” The Hindu quoted him as saying.

Randhawa’s remarks prompted protests from members of the House.

Peoples Democratic Party MLA Waheed-ur-Rehman Parra said that the matter should not be framed in communal terms.

“We feel that the people, irrespective of caste, creed, colour and religion, who are landless and homeless but live on state land, should be regularised,” the Hindustan Times quoted Para as saying.

He accused the BJP of “spreading politics of hate”, The Hindu reported.