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.

Journalist Ravi Nair was granted bail on Friday in a criminal defamation case filed by Adani Enterprises Limited over a series of posts on social media platform X, The Indian Express reported.

A magisterial court in Gujarat’s Gandhinagar also suspended for a month the one-year prison sentence awarded to him.

The court had convicted Nair on Tuesday and sentenced him to one year of imprisonment, along with a fine of Rs 5,000.

The suspension of the sentence allows him to file an appeal before a sessions court within a month.

The case pertained to a series of social media posts by Nair from October 2020 to July 2021 about the Adani Group, including allegations by United States short seller Hindenburg Research and a strike against the proposed privatisation of the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust.

The case was based on a complaint filed by Adani Enterprises, the flagship company of industrialist Gautam Adani’s Adani Group, alleging that Nair published and disseminated a series of posts on the social media platform X containing false and defamatory statements intended to damage its reputation.

The company alleged that Nair’s posts did not amount to fair comment or legitimate criticism but were designed to undermine the credibility of the firm in the eyes of the public and investors.

On Tuesday, the court held that the offence of defamation had been proved. It had also noted that the matter was triable as a summons case and therefore did not require a separate hearing on punishment.

The magistrate had said that Nair, as a journalist and public commentator, was expected to be conscious of the reach and impact of the statements made on digital platforms, especially when making categorical allegations that could affect reputations.

The court had also refused to extend the benefit of probation, adding that the journalist was a mature individual aware of the consequences of his actions. The judge had added that granting probation in such cases would dilute the deterrent effect of the law and send a wrong message in cases involving reputational harm.

A simple imprisonment along with a financial penalty would adequately reflect the seriousness of the offence without being excessively harsh, the court had held.

Chhattisgarh Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Sharma on Friday said that 532 Maoists have been killed since January 2024 in the state.

He added that in the same period 2,004 suspected Maoists were arrested and 2,700 others surrendered.

“The government’s resolve against Naxalism is clear,” Sharma said in a press conference. “We are working with full force to ensure that Naxalism is completely eradicated from Chhattisgarh by March 31, 2026.”

Sharma said that seven rehabilitation centres are operational in the state. Around 1,700 former Maoists, including 410 women, have completed skills training at these centres, while 232 are currently undergoing training.

All those who surrender are provided with welcome kits, including mobile phones, to help them reintegrate into society, he added.

“After receiving that mobile phone, I think these people will create their own reels [for Instagram],” he said. “There’s no going back to the jungle. They will experience the entire thrill from the comfort of their own room.”

He added that the mobile phones facilitate those who surrender to connect better with the world outside.

Aadhaar cards, ration cards and Ayushman cards are also being prepared for those who surrender, Sharma said.

The deputy chief minister said the government aims to extend development to every village in Bastar, including access to schools, electricity, drinking water, hospitals and anganwadis.

“We are working to ensure that the Constitution of India reaches every corner of Bastar,” he said.

The Union government has vowed to end Maoism by March 31, 2026.

In February, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs said that the number of districts affected by “Left-wing extremism” has come down to eight from 11 in October.

These districts include Bijapur, Dantewada, Gariyaband, Kanker, Narayanpur and Sukma in Chhattisgarh, West Singhbhum in Jharkhand, and Kandhamal in Odisha.

The Union government had said in October that three districts remained in “most affected” category which are Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh.

In the course of the Union government’s anti-Maoist offensive in 2025, key Maoist leaders like Ganesh Uike and Madvi Hidma have been killed, while others like Vikas Nagpure, alias Anant, and Mallojula Venugopal Rao, alias Bhupathi, have surrendered.

A report by Malini Subramaniam for Scroll on Hidma’s killing noted that in the Andhra Pradesh village closest to where he was killed, no one heard gunfire.

She had earlier reported that while many of those killed in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar region in 2024 were declared by the police to be reward-carrying Maoists, several families dispute the claim. The families claim that the persons killed were civilians.

Civil liberties groups and Opposition parties have also questioned some of these killings, alleging that they constitute “fake encounters”.

Also read: As Maoists retreat, why many fear security forces in Chhattisgarh villages

The Bharatiya Janata Party received more than 82% of the Rs 3,826.3 crore disbursed by electoral trusts in the 2024-’25 financial year, according to a report released on Friday by the Association for Democratic Reforms.

The report analysed contribution statements submitted to the Election Commission.

Fifteen of the 20 electoral trusts registered with the Central Board of Direct Taxes submitted their contribution details for financial year 2024-’25 to the Election Commission. Of these, 10 reported receiving donations during the year.

Electoral trusts were introduced under the 2013 Electoral Trusts Scheme. They are set up to receive voluntary contributions from companies and individuals and distribute at least 95% of them to political parties registered under the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Approval for such trusts is granted by the Central Board of Direct Taxes and is subject to renewal.

According to the report, Rs 3,826.3 was distributed to political parties in the financial year.

The Bharatiya Janata Party received Rs 3,157.6 crore, amounting to 82.5% of the total funds distributed.

The Congress received Rs 298.7 crore, or 7.8%, while the Trinamool Congress received Rs 102 crore, or 2.6%. Nineteen other parties together received Rs 267.9 crore.

Among the trusts, Prudent Electoral Trust disbursed the highest amount, Rs 2,668.4 crore, to 15 political parties. Progressive Electoral Trust followed, distributing Rs 914.9 crore to 10 parties.

The association said that 228 corporate or business entities contributed Rs 3,636.8 crore, while 99 persons donated Rs 187.6 crore. The top 10 donors together accounted for Rs 1,908.8 crore, nearly 49.8% of total contributions.

Elevated Avenue Realty LLP was the single-largest donor, contributing Rs 500 crore. It was followed by Tata Sons Private Limited with Rs 308.1 crore and Tata Consultancy Services Limited with Rs 217.6 crore.

State-wise, Maharashtra was the largest source of contributions at Rs 1,225.4 crore. It was followed by Telangana at Rs 358.2 crore, Haryana at Rs 212.9 crore, West Bengal at Rs 203.8 crore and Gujarat at Rs 200.5 crore.

In February 2024, the Supreme Court struck down the electoral bond scheme, ruling that it is unconstitutional as it violates the right to information, freedom of speech and could lead to quid pro quo arrangements between donors and political parties.

Electoral bonds were monetary instruments that citizens or corporate groups can buy from the State Bank of India and give to a political party, which then redeemed them. The scheme was introduced by the Bharatiya Janata Party government at the Centre in January 2018.

This is a lightly edited version of the author’s keynote address delivered at the inauguration of the 14th Goa Arts and Literature Festival on February 12.

Each time I come to the Goa Arts and Literature Festival, I am struck anew by the manner in which this festival continues to create a space for voices from the margins and explore “ways of belonging”.

The idea of identity, of belonging, has shaped much of my recent work. At the same time, I am also concerned about the dark underbelly of belonging, the forces of othering that are gathering like dark clouds over our country. On this glorious day, in this wonderful setting , it seems strange to talk about fear and I thought long and hard whether I should or not, but then I decided if not at GALF where else can one speak one’s mind, where else can one speak of one’s deepest, darkest fears?

I want to talk about fear, a fear that is very real for very many of us, one that rubs away insidiously at the idea of belonging. While I will mostly talk about the fear that Muslims in India feel, I know that fear is shared by many – by other minorities in India, by communities who find themselves on the margins and many from the majority community who sense and share this fear, some of whom gather in echo chambers to vent “gham ghalat karna”, as it is referred to in Urdu.

I must confess to a crushing fear, one that weighs my chest with an inexorable weight and makes it difficult to breathe sometimes. Yes, with all my privileges – of education, of class, of having friends in “high places” – I feel scared, more scared than I have ever been in my entire life. I must also confess to an almost persistent depression, like a low-grade fever, over the past few years, that doesn’t quite halt the daily rhythm of life; it just slows you down by its continuous, relentless presence in your life making you feel sad and somehow empty, as though a great deal that one has taken for granted all one’s adult life is like sand slipping through one’s fingers.

I suspect I am not alone in this. I feel this fear and depression among a great many Muslims in urban India. I hear it in their silences. I sense it in their steadfast refusal to get drawn into political debates. I notice it in their stoicism in the face of virulent hate swirling about in school and college WhatsApp groups as well as RWA/housing society group chats. I spot it in the hastily withdrawn social media posts drawing attention to some recent communal outrage or atrocity. I recognise it in their zeal to distance themselves from instances of any sort of violence, be it a Muslim man killing his Hindu girlfriend and chopping her into pieces or a Muslim man killing his non-Muslim partner in a business dispute – where the perpetrator, not the victim, is a Muslim.

If my own fear and despair, and that of others like me, is so palpable and pronounced, what of those Muslims who are doubly marginalised by their poverty and illiteracy? Or vulnerable because they don’t have the safeguards and barriers, however flimsy, that “people like us” have in our gated communities and cushioned lives? What of those who live on the edge of survival because they must perforce go out into the real world every single day to eke out a living? What of the plumbers, electricians, painters, carpenters, maids and sundry service providers who don’t give their real, Muslim-sounding names for fear they will not be hired? Or the vegetable vendors who festoon their carts with saffron flags after every call to boycott small Muslim businesses? Or the biryani vendors, kabab sellers, quilt makers, car mechanics who have traditionally plied these trades for generations but now fear for their lives? What of the meat sellers whose makeshift stalls happen to be along the routes taken by the kawariyas during every monsoon? What of the imams and naib imams, often from the poorest of families, who are hired by Waqf boards to serve as custodians of small, isolated mosques often surrounded by hostile neighbours?

I don’t “look” like a Muslim so, to an extent, I am safe. I have written a book with the same title – But You Don’t Look Like a Muslim and I was invited some years ago to discuss it here at GALF. Unless called out to chant “Jai Shree Ram” to profess my Indianness, I am largely safe. But what of my name? How can I camouflage that? Or hide it when asked to provide proof of identity? While my first name can afford some benefit of doubt for it might pass as a Parsi’s, my surname is a dead give-away. When push comes to shove in the New India that is Bharat, not even speaking English will give me an exit pass if a mob baying for Muslim blood were to gherao me. All my so-called privileges can be brought to naught by a crowd of lumpens. The realisation is chilling.

And if I were a man? Imagine, over 75 years after Partition and after reading all the gory stories penned by Saadat Hasan Manto and other chroniclers of communal violence, having your pants pulled down to check whether you are a “katua” or not? But what if I did “look” like a Muslim? What if I chose to offer namaz perfectly peacefully and quietly while sitting on my berth in a train? Worse still, what if I had a beard, wore a topi or a hijab and indeed “looked” like a Muslim?

You might recall the incident that happened on a train to Mumbai when a railway protection officer shot dead three people in August 2023. What if I worked as an imam in a mosque? So what if I had just assured my family that all was well, that I was safe given the police presence all around me? What, then?

What if I, as an Indian, have been conditioned to believe that the tattered fabric of secularism will be held up no matter what? The violence in Gurgaon, also in July-August 2023, proved that these are no longer hypothetical scenarios. This is a lived reality for countless Indian Muslims. It gets an impetus when the chief minister of a state urges his people to “trouble the miyas” and to actively underpay them for services such as plying rickshaws. He goes on to post videos from his party’s official X handle – since deleted – showing Muslims being shot at point blank range

And there are other instances:

Jab mulle kaate jaainge
Ram Ram chillainge

Or:

“Hindustan mein rehna hoga
Jai Shri Ram kehna hoga”

And “Goli maro saalon ko” by someone who is now a Union minister are no longer isolated instances of random, unrelated, personal biases and prejudices. They are dog whistles. They are a clarion call to a large, restive majority that is being brain-washed to believe they are second-class, nay “seventh-class” citizens, in their own land. They are part of a larger narrative, a grand design.

Since we have clearly turned into a nation of “whatabouters”, each of these hate-filled, terror-inducing slogans are instantly and viciously countered with those raised by the PFI [Popular Front of India] or other fringe minority outfits. When rapes, murders, corruptions, scams and scandals are thwarted in Parliament by elected representatives of the people by instances of whatabouts, how can these rising incidents of bigotry and hate not be similarly countered? It’s easier to come back with counter-accusations, to point fingers, to obfuscate, to fling more filth, to parry hate with hate than it is to understand fear, to acknowledge militant, muscular majoritarianism, to call out the elephant in the room.

As we spiral inexorably downwards, as every fresh instance of bigotry is outstripped and outdone by even bigger, bolder, more blatant, more bare-faced occurrences, we don’t seem to pause to think of the consequences. This rampant whataboutery – both at the political and the individual level – is exhausting, predictable and eventually empty. It will derail the India we have known and loved – probably forever.

What we are witnessing today is a creeping normality (also called gradualism, or landscape amnesia), a process by which a major change comes to be accepted as “normal”, even “acceptable” if it happens slowly through small, often unnoticeable, increments of change. A change that might otherwise be viewed as objectionable if it were to take place in a single step or short period is seen as quite all right – as some of us of a certain age can bear witness to the slow-building horror of the past few decades.

I don’t quite believe that one way of life ended in 2014 and another began in May 2014. No, I believe localised, small, seemingly insignificant events, beginning with the country-wide Rath Yatra of 1990 have kept adding a layer of “normal” till we have reached this stage of the New Normal where blatant bigotry, bare-faced communalism and publicly-aired prejudices are considered perfectly all right.

I will come back to the fear I began with. From this platform today, all I am asking for is an acknowledgement of this fear, a fear that I have about being a Muslim in India today. A fear that is shared – in different ways and in different degrees – not just by Muslims but by other minority groups, by adivasis, by LGBT communities, in fact by large numbers of those who are sneeringly referred to as LIBTARDS.

Many of you may not fully understand this fear, some might dismiss it as part of a victim syndrome, an exaggerated sense of harbouring a grievance, of wanting to wallow in self pity, a tendency to focus on the negatives; a handful among you might even accuse me of fear mongering. To you I say, try any one of these simple experiments: Walk into a Barista and announce your name as Salman or Salma or, for that matter, Umar Khalid or even Sharjeel Imam; wave off a friend or relative at a train station or airport by announcing “Khuda Hafiz”; go about your day as you would ordinarily with one single addition – wear a skull cap – as the Delhi journalist Mayank Austen Soofi did and recorded the chilling consequences; or do as I did on my flight from Delhi to Goa – read a book in Urdu in public. Try it.

However, it would be a sad day if one were to give in to fear or simply feel sorry for oneself. I am not a politician or an activist. I am only a writer. Words are all I have and I want to use them as tools in the only way a writer can: I can bear witness, I can speak up, I can record and chronicle both for the present and for posterity.

To come back to fear, its only antidote, I do believe, is empathy, cultivating the ability to say, I am not you, but I see you, I hear you. Remember these lines from To Kill a Mocking Bird, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Rakhshanda Jalil is a writer, translator and literary historian.

The Supreme Court ruling on January 30 recognising menstrual health as a fundamental right significantly expands constitutional guarantees, but experts have called for addressing stigma and implementing existing schemes for the verdict to resonate beyond the courtroom.

The court recognised menstrual hygiene as an integral component of a girl child’s fundamental rights. “The right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution includes the right to menstrual health,” said the court. “Access to safe, effective and affordable menstrual hygiene management measures helps a girl child attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health.”

Social activist Jaya Thakur had filed a writ petition in 2022 seeking uniform access to menstrual hygiene management facilities in schools, such as sanitary products, functional toilets, disposal mechanisms and awareness programmes. Thakur sought directions to address absenteeism among schoolgirls and the risk of their dropping out of education due to poor menstrual hygiene facilities.

The court directed state governments and union territories to ensure the availability of free, biodegradable sanitary napkins, separate toilets, clean water and safe disposal facilities.

However, experts said there are already several state and central government schemes which provide these facilities – like the Centre’s Samagra Shiksha for installation of sanitary pad vending machines and funding for toilets, or the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram for sexual and reproductive health awareness among adolescents.

Sunita Singh, a member of Sahyog, a non-governmental organisation working on sexual and reproductive health rights, told Scroll that existing schemes and policies are ineffective due to poor awareness and training. “There is a clear gap in planning,” she said. “Policies and schemes exist, but implementation fails because awareness at the school level is lacking.”

Dr Alka Barua, a member of CommonHealth, a coalition of individuals for maternal-neonatal health, told Scroll that the impact of the judgement finally depends on how it is implemented. “Courts can go only up to a certain level,” she said. “Implementation on the ground is the responsibility of the departments tasked with handling it, and that is where the real challenges are likely to arise.”

Biological reality

In its observations, the Supreme Court recognised that institutional neglect of menstruation can become a barrier to education for girls. Denying girls access to menstrual hygiene, the court said, “effectively undermines their right to participate equally in education”.

It located the recognition of menstrual hygiene as a fundamental right within the constitutional guarantees of dignity, health, equality, and education. Referring to the Right to Education under Article 21A and the Right to Education Act, which includes free and accessible education, the court said that “free” also means the absence of hidden costs that prevent attendance. Menstrual hygiene, it held, cannot become an “indirect financial or social barrier to schooling”.

Recognising menstruation as biological reality, the court said the absence of menstrual hygiene measures “entrenches gendered disadvantage by converting a biological reality into a structural exclusion”. This particularly affects girls from marginalised communities, it said.

It emphasised that the Constitution cannot accept discrimination based on biological characteristics, and that exclusion based on menstruation infringes women’s dignity, autonomy, and religious freedom under Article 25.

Here, the court built on its reasoning in the 2018 Sabarimala judgement, where a Constitution Bench struck down a rule barring women aged 10 to 50 from entering the Sabarimala temple in Kerala. In that verdict, the majority ruling by four of the five judges had held that “menstruation is a biological feature and an intrinsic part of a woman’s personhood”, and cannot be grounds for exclusion.

Existing schemes

The Supreme Court’s powerful observations can bring change to the lives of schoolgirls but turning constitutional principles into reality will be challenging.

Government findings show that menstruation remains a major barrier to education for girls. According to the latest National Family Health Survey, conducted in 2019-’21, nearly one in four girls aged 15-19 has missed school during menstruation, citing pain, lack of facilities or fear of embarrassment.

Despite multiple schemes, this gap persists, say experts. Singh of Sahyog pointed out that the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram programme “covers nearly 90% of schools, providing free sanitary pads, and mandates teacher training” where sensitivity gaps exist. However, such training, she said, is “rarely conducted in practice”. Many teachers are “unaware that their own schools are covered under these schemes”, said Singh.

Barua of CommonHealth said that in states like Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Uttarakhand, sanitary napkins were not provided for free but at a nominal price of Rs 10 to Rs 12. “In rural areas, even this nominal cost is often not affordable,” she said.

At times, schools fall short of sanitary products. “In an entire district, only one or two villages have sanitary pad vending machines, and many girls stay away from school for the first two days of their periods,” said Singh.

Poor disposal is another huge barrier. There is “little to no provision for menstrual hygiene management on the ground,” said Singh. “Girls often don’t know where to dispose of sanitary pads because dustbins are unavailable, and many are forced to use the same pad for an entire day.”

Barua echoed Singh. “In many programmes where sanitary napkins were supplied, there was no clear education on how they should be disposed of,” said Barua.

Experts have previously flagged these shortcomings. In 2020, the World Health Organization’s rapid programme review of India’s Adolescent Reproductive and Sexual Health Strategy and its successor, the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram, found “persistent implementation gaps despite improved policy design”.

The authors of the review said that the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram tried to improve where the previous scheme fell short – with better budgets and a clearer staffing framework. But it suffered from “rigid financial rules, poor coordination, delays in procuring essentials like sanitary pads”. Key posts were also left vacant at state and district levels, they said.

There is also a huge gap in awareness and training school staff about menstruation as a matter of public health and hygiene.

Dr J Kiranmai, an associate professor at the Institute of Public Enterprise in Hyderabad, said that in most rural government schools, teachers receive little to no formal training. “As a result, menstruation is frequently misunderstood and, at times, approached as a disciplinary or behavioural concern rather than recognised as a natural biological process,” she said.

In 2025, there were a series of incidents of schoolgirls facing scrutiny or being humiliated for menstruating.

In January 2025, the father of a Class 11 student in Bareilly, in Uttar Pradesh, submitted written complaints to district and state officials after his daughter was allegedly made to stand outside the classroom after she requested a sanitary pad while appearing for an exam.

In July, a school principal and an attendant were arrested in a village near Mumbai after allegations that 10-15 students were stripped to “check” if they were menstruating after blood stains were found on a toilet wall.

“Such experiences often lead to feelings of embarrassment, fear, low self-esteem, anxiety, and internalised shame about one’s own body,” said Kiranmai. “Over time, this can erode confidence, disrupt concentration, and create a sense of exclusion within the school environment.”

Kiranmayi said that educating girls and boys together can help schools move “from silence and shame to understanding and dignity”, ensuring that no child feels unsafe or inferior.

Taboos and stigma against menstruation are also widespread, adding to the difficulty in implementing already existing schemes. Barua said government schemes are well-intentioned but do not adequately take into account deep-rooted taboos.

“These include dietary restrictions and the perception that menstruating girls are impure,” Barua said. “Unless stigma and taboos within the community are addressed, the problem will persist.”

Author and activist Arundhati Roy on Friday said that she will not be attending the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, where her 1989 film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones has been selected to be screened under the Classics section.

She said she took the decision after members of the jury of the Berlin film festival said that art should not be political, when they were asked to comment about Israel’s military offensive in Gaza.

“We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics,” The Guardian quoted Wim Wenders, a director and a jury member, as saying. “But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”

Israel’s offensive in Gaza began in October 2023 after Hamas killed 1,200 persons during its incursion into southern Israel and took hostages. Israel has been carrying out unprecedented air and ground strikes on besieged Gaza since then, leaving more than 70,000 persons dead.

The film In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones was written by Roy and directed by Pradip Krishen.

The 76th annual Berlin International Film Festival, also called the Berlinale, is taking place from February 12 to February 22 in Berlin, Germany.

Read the full text of Roy’s statement below:

In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones, a whimsical film that I wrote 38 years ago, was selected to be screened under the Classics section at the Berlinale 2026. There was something sweet and wonderful about this for me.

Although I have been profoundly disturbed by the positions taken by the German government and various German cultural institutions on Palestine, I have always received political solidarity when I have spoken to German audiences about my views on the genocide in Gaza. This is what made it possible for me to think of attending the screening of Annie at the Berlinale.

This morning, like millions of people across the world, I heard the unconscionable statements made by members of the jury of the Berlin film festival when they were asked to comment about the genocide in Gaza. To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and filmmakers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.

Let me say this clearly: what has happened in Gaza, what continues to happen, is a genocide of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. It is supported and funded by the governments of the United States and Germany, as well as several other countries in Europe, which makes them complicit in the crime.

If the greatest filmmakers and artists of our time cannot stand up and say so, they should know that history will judge them. I am shocked and disgusted.

With deep regret, I must say that I will not be attending the Berlinale.

The office of the chief justice received 8,630 complaints against sitting judges in the last 10 years, the Union government told Parliament on Friday.

The data tabled in the Lok Sabha by Minister of State for Law and Justice Arjun Ram Meghwal pertained to complaints received between 2016 and 2025. The highest number of complaints, at 1,170, was received in 2024, while the lowest was in 2020 at 518.

The minister was responding to a question by Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam MP Matheswaran VS, who sought a list of complaints on corruption, sexual misconduct or other serious impropriety received against judges of the High Courts or the Supreme Court.

#BREAKING: Over 8,600 complaints were received against sitting judges by the Office of the Chief Justice of India in last ten years alone!

The Supreme Court of India presented this data to the Union Law Ministry in response to a Parliamentary question by Mr. Matheswaran V.S.… pic.twitter.com/fWNMJF89DW

— Saurav Das (@SauravDassss) February 13, 2026

The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam MP asked if action was taken on the complaints. He further sought to know whether the Union government was aware of any mechanism used by the Supreme Court to maintain records or databases of such complaints.

The minister did not respond to the question on the action taken or the maintenance of records.

However, Meghwal said that the chief justice and the chief justices of the High Courts were competent to receive complaints against judges as per the in-house procedure.

The Supreme Court’s in-house procedure is a non-statutory mechanism to handle allegations of misconduct against judges.

The minister also noted that complaints against members of the higher judiciary received via the Centralised Public Grievance Redress and Monitoring System or in any other form were forwarded to the chief justice or the High Court chief justice concerned.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance has so far won 212 of the 299 constituencies that went to polls in Bangladesh’s 13th national parliamentary election. The alliance led by the Islamist party, Bangladesh 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 following widespread protests in 2024 and she fled to India. Ties between New Delhi and Dhaka have been strained since then.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the first national leader to congratulate BNP chairperson Tarique Rahman on his party’s victory. In a social media post later, he said he had conveyed to Rahman that 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”. Read on.

Read Scroll’s coverage of the Bangladesh national elections here.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin announced that Rs 5,000 each has been credited to the bank accounts of 1.3 crore women under the Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai scheme in the poll-bound state. The amount includes the advance disbursal of the monthly entitlement of Rs 1,000 for February, March and April, along with a “special summer assistance” of Rs 2,000.

The elections for the 234-seat Assembly are likely to be held in April or May.

The chief minister also announced that the monthly entitlement would be increased to Rs 2,000 from Rs 1,000 if the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam returns to power. Read on.

Tamil Nadu 2026 elections: Will the dawn of coalition politics end the era of Dravidian parties?

Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge claimed that portions of his February 4 speech in the Upper House of Parliament were “either expunged or removed” without justification. The omitted portions were from his speech on the Motion of Thanks on the President’s address and included comments on the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government's policies, said Kharge.

“I wish to respectfully request that [Rajya Sabha Chairperson CP Radhakrishnan] review the portions of my speech that have been removed and that contain nothing unparliamentary or defamatory,” Kharge said.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman objected to Kharge’s charge as “disrespectful” and “not appropriate”. Read on.

The Supreme Court sought a status report from the Central Bureau of Investigation on the progress of the cases related to the violent clashes that took place in Manipur in 2023. The bench proposed that the Gauhati and Manipur High Courts could monitor the conduct of trials in these cases.

It also expressed reservations about whether a remote committee would be adequately equipped to monitor these matters. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said that the High Court may be better suited to monitor the matter. Read on.

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

The White House’s latest announcement on finalising the Indo-US deal, and lowering of tariffs from 25% to 18% for India has once again brought to the fore the complex geopolitics of trade negotiations.

The exchange between the US and India over the past year proves that modern trade negotiations extend beyond tariff schedules. Sanction regimes and geopolitical alignment have come to shape tariff discussions.

In other words, domestic tariff policy has now become inseparable from foreign policy.

For India, then, to insulate itself from these shocks, the need of the hour is to recalibrate its tariff framework from a protectionist, reactive shield, to a strategic tool that can boost its export competitiveness, strengthen trade-negotiation credibility, and allow it to integrate more deeply into global value chains.

In this respect, 2026 is significant. The year has begun with two powerful yet contradictory trade narratives: India continues to maintain a protective tariff regime, even as it pursues a liberal trade agenda through high-profile trade agreements with the UK, US, Netherlands, UAE and Australia.

The paradox is evident. On one hand, India is seen as protecting vulnerable domestic industries such as solar PV cells and modules, dairy, toys and steel. On the other hand, it is liberalising selected sectors such as electronics, pharmaceuticals and engineering.

Data reveals that India’s simple average Most Favoured Nation tariff rate is 15.8%; the country’s simple average bound rate, or the maximum tariff rate that can be applied, is 48.5%.

In agriculture, the most favoured nation rate stands at 36.7%, and the maximum rate that can be applied is 113.1%. This means that at any given point, India can levy tariffs ranging from 36.7% to 113.1% to restrict agricultural imports.

These rates are the highest among G20 countries and reflect the high tariff flexibility that India enjoys.

However, given that the tariff regime is unfolding in the backdrop of a highly politicised, protectionist global trade environment – G20 countries continue to introduce trade-restrictive measures even while publicly endorsing rules-based trade and open markets – it is undoubtedly a valuable strategy for a country such as India.

From a political economy perspective, this flexibility in levying higher tariffs allows rapid intervention in response to sectoral distress, dumping allegations, and import surges.

But seen from the lens of trade policy, there are definite downsides.

High tariffs mean input costs rise and supply chains are complicated, leading to weakening of exports. This risks credibility in global markets and a risk of retaliation, such as in the case of the trade war between US and India. US officials have consistently flagged India’s tariff levels as a barrier to deeper trade integration.

Here’s what happens when tariffs are frequently adjusted: to begin with, prices of imported goods may rise or fall in the domestic market. The more significant impact is seen in altered supply chains – prices for intermediate goods such as components, packaging materials, machinery, specialised metals, and chemicals that might be used as inputs for exports increase, thus undermining export competitiveness.

High or frequently adjusted tariffs on these inputs increase the production costs of exportable goods, even if the final products do benefit from Free Trade Agreement-based export incentives.

Thus, India’s high tariff regime is putting a structural constraint on its export competitiveness and supply-chain integration.

Disruption by tariff asymmetries

Lately, the stress of tariffs has been most visible in the manufacturing sector. In December 2025, the Indian government imposed a three-year safeguard duty of 11%-12% on selected steel products. This was done to counter the surge of low-priced imported raw materials.

Also, provisional anti-dumping duties have been imposed on low-ash metallurgical coke imports in the same month.

These tariffs are meant to protect certain domestic industries such as steel, provide relief to upstream producers (those who supply inputs to be used in the production of goods), and often redistribute rents within the industry.

However, downstream export-oriented firms (that transform intermediate inputs into final goods) such as consumer durables, engineering exports and automobile manufacturers end up facing higher production costs, thereby eroding their export competitiveness.

This is also the reason why such tariff asymmetries often lead to “reciprocal tariff” arguments.

Earlier last year, this led to growing concerns among Indian exporters about potential US retaliation linked to tariff differentials and geopolitical tensions. The Indian government was compelled to roll out support measures to cushion Indian exporters, including financial and institutional assistance.

Indian exporters may have shown resilience by diversifying markets across Africa, West Asia and parts of Asia, but export market diversification is not a substitute for competitiveness in the long run. New markets are often volatile and small, hence less profitable.

Sustainable export growth primarily depends on export competitiveness, scale and cost efficiency, and reliability, which are directly leveraged by tariff policy and strategy.

Boost investor confidence

To strategically align its tariff policy with an export-led growth vision, India could consider a few solutions.

First, while maintaining high tariff flexibility at the aggregate level, India can rationalise tariffs on critical intermediate inputs used by export-oriented sectors such as engineering goods, chemicals, food processing and electronics.

This will protect final goods and reduce the cost burden on exporters.

Second, tariff decisions should also be thoughtfully aligned with Production-Linked Incentive schemes and logistics reforms to increase exports and enhance productivity.

While tariffs play an important role in protecting vulnerable sectors, complementary policies are essential for driving advancements and overall economic growth.

Narrowing the gap between bound and applied tariffs in certain export-oriented sectors will enhance India’s credibility while preserving flexibility, and reassure reliable trade partners.

Finally, the government should view free trade agreements as commitments with trading partners, not just as tools for reducing tariffs.

In modern free trade agreements, market access is traded for outcomes beyond tariffs to include a broad range of economic interactions, thus creating predictable conditions for cross-border trade and investment and allowing for deeper engagement with trading partners.

Given that 70% of international trade now entails several transactions where services, raw materials, parts and components are exchanged before being incorporated into final products for consumers across the world, such agreements now increasingly cover several dimensions of global value chains such as customs barriers, rules of origin, facilitation and services. These create stability for specific industries while maintaining flexibility in others and boost investors’ confidence without limiting policy options.

Going ahead, India should position its tariff framework strategically as a negotiating tool in trade negotiations to secure concrete and high-value gains in areas where India’s real strengths and interests lie – especially services, digital trade, standards recognition and foreign investment.

If this happens, tariffs will become an instrumental tool and asset rather than a constraint in India’s export growth trajectory.

Anusree Paul is a trade economist and Associate Professor, School of Business, UPES University, Dehradun, Uttarakhand.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that he congratulated Bangladesh Nationalist Party chairperson Tarique Rahman on the victory of his party in the country’s 13th national parliamentary election.

He added that he also reaffirmed India’s commitment to peace and progress in the region in a phone conversation with Rahman.

The Bangladesh Nationalist Party-led alliance won 212 seats of the 299 constituencies that went to polls in the election a day earlier. The alliance led by the Islamist party, Bangladesh 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.

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 elections, the interim government’s term will come to an end.

On Friday, Modi was the first national leader to congratulate Rahman on the win.

He said in a social media post that he had conveyed to Rahman his “best wishes and support in his endeavour to fulfil the aspirations of the people of Bangladesh”.

“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,” added the Indian prime minister.

Delighted to speak with Mr. Tarique Rahman. I congratulated him on the remarkable victory in the Bangladesh elections.

I conveyed my best wishes and support in his endeavour to fulfil the aspirations of the people of Bangladesh.

As two close neighbours with deep-rooted…

— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) February 13, 2026

After Modi expressed his wishes to Rahman, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party thanked India and the prime minister for recognising the verdict of the country’s election and said that it hoped that the relations between the two countries would be strengthened under the new government.

Nazrul Islam Khan, the party’s chief coordinator of the election, said: “We believe that under the leadership of our leader…Tarique Rahman, the relation between these two countries and the people of these two countries will be strengthened.”

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.

Relations between India and Bangladesh further strained in recent weeks amid unrest following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi on December 18. Hadi had been a prominent figure in the July 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 have also been reported in Bangladesh, which led to demonstrations in India as well.

In December, New Delhi and Dhaka had summoned each other’s envoys to convey concerns over the situation.

On January 9, India accused Bangladesh of downplaying a “disturbing pattern of recurring attacks on minorities” and urged Dhaka to act “swiftly and firmly” against communal violence.

Earlier in December, New Delhi also condemned the lynching of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, saying that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning.

Dipu Chandra Das, a factory worker, was beaten to death by a mob in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district on December 18, after which his body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Eighteen persons have been taken into custody for the lynching.

Jaiswal had said at the time that continuing hostilities against minorities in Bangladesh, including Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, at the hands of extremists was a matter of great concern.

Two days later, Dhaka had rejected New Delhi’s remarks and described them as “inaccurate, exaggerated or motivated”.

SM Mahbubul Alam, the spokesperson for the Bangladeshi foreign ministry, had said at the time that the statements “misrepresent the country’s longstanding tradition of communal harmony”.

Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge on Friday claimed that portions of his February 4 speech in the Upper House of Parliament on the Motion of Thanks on president’s address were “either expunged or removed” without justification.

The Congress president alleged that the omitted portions included comments on the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government's policies.

“I found that the unrecorded portions of my speech are those in which I made comments, supported by facts, on the functioning of Parliament during the current government’s tenure,” Kharge said in a social media post.

He added: “[I] criticised certain policies of the prime minister, which is also my duty as the leader of Opposition because I believe those policies are having an adverse impact on the Indian public.”

Kharge said that he was aware and sensitive to the dignity of the House and the duties of the presiding officer.

“I wish to respectfully request that [Rajya Sabha Chairperson CP Radhakrishnan] review the portions of my speech that have been removed and that contain nothing unparliamentary or defamatory,” Kharge said.

He also said that such a move violated the right to freedom of expression guaranteed to MPs.

From the treasury benches, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman objected to Kharge’s charge against the chairperson as “disrespectful” and “not appropriate”, The Indian Express reported.

Sitharaman said the chairman has the discretion to expunge remarks. “To suggest that it is protect the honourable prime minister, it is not appropriate for the position of the leader of the Opposition,” the newspaper quoted Sitharaman as saying.

She added: “If the chairman is of the opinion that a minister or a member has used word/words in debate which is/are defamatory, indecent, unparliamentary or undignified, the chairman may, in his discretion, order that such word or words be expunged from the proceedings of the council.”

The Supreme Court on Friday sought a status report from the Central Bureau of Investigation on the progress of the cases related to the violent clashes that took place in Manipur in 2023, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi proposed that the Gauhati and Manipur High Courts could monitor the conduct of trials in these cases.

At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since ethnic clashes broke out between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities in May 2023. There were periodic upticks in violence in 2024 and 2025.

Amid the violence, a video showing two women being paraded naked by a mob in the Kangpokpi district was widely shared on social media on July 19, 2023.

The assault took place near the B Phainom village in the Kangpokpi village on May 4, 2023, a day after clashes first erupted between the Meitei and Kuki communities. One of the women in the video was brutally gang-raped, according to a police complaint.

The Supreme Court had subsequently taken suo moto cognisance of the violence in the state.

It has since issued several directions on curbing the clashes.

In August 2023, the court issued an order directing that trials in the violence cases be conducted in Assam, while permitting the parties to appear via video conference from Manipur.

During the proceedings on Friday, advocate Vrinda Grover argued that in one case, the family of a woman killed during the violence in the state were not informed that a chargesheet had been filed, Bar and Bench reported.

There were also instances where the accused in the matter and the CBI did not appear for trial, she added.

In response, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta noted that the central agency must answer the concerns, adding that nobody could oppose what Grover had said.

“The victim’s rights cannot be affected,” Bar and Bench quoted Mehta as saying. “CBI must answer on Ms Grover’s plea, whether here or in the High Court.”

The solicitor general also said that the overall situation in Manipur had returned to a state of normalcy and peace.

Kant said that the CBI can file a status report on the progress of cases. He further noted the need to ensure that free legal aid was provided to victims who could not afford lawyers.

Suggesting that the Gauhati and Manipur High Courts could be entrusted with the task of monitoring the proper conduct of the trials in the cases, the bench sought a response on this proposal.

It expressed reservations about whether a remote committee would be adequately equipped to monitor these matters.

“In view of the fact that a new Chief Justice has taken charge in Manipur High Court and .... in order to have an effective [monitoring] mechanism by coordination between Guwahati and Manipur High Courts... Let there be instructions regarding the same,” Bar and Bench quoted the court as saying.

Agreeing with the court’s observation, Mehta said that the High Court may be better suited to monitor the matter. “Situation is peaceful there [in Manipur],” Bar and Bench quoted him as saying. “People are moving. Local environment can be appreciated better by HC.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday put on hold the Aravalli Jungle Safari project being undertaken by the Haryana government in Gurugram, saying that it cannot proceed until there was a clear definition of the Aravalli Hills, the Hindustan Times reported.

The 700-km Aravalli mountain range stretches diagonally from southwest Gujarat, through Rajasthan, to Delhi and Haryana. Its highest point is Guru Shikhar in Mount Abu, which rises to an elevation of 1,722 metres.

The project, also called the Aravalli Zoo or the Aravalli Safari Park, was conceptualised by the Haryana government in 2021-’22 in the Aravalli foothills spanning Gurugram and Nuh. The project will be among the world’s largest safari parks once completed.

Under the Union government’s new Aravalli Hills definition that had been accepted by the Supreme Court in November, an Aravalli hill is any landform that rises at least 100 metres above the surrounding terrain. An Aravalli range is formed by two or more such hills located within 500 metres of each other, including the land between them.

Environmentalists have warned that defining the Aravallis solely by their height could leave many lower, scrub-covered but ecologically important hills vulnerable to mining and construction. Experts say these smaller hills are crucial for preventing desertification, recharging groundwater and supporting local livelihoods.

In December, the court had taken suo moto cognisance of the matter amid the concerns. A case pertaining to the new definition is pending before the Supreme Court.

On Thursday, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi said that “not a single inch of land” in the ecologically sensitive Aravalli range will be permitted to be used for any purpose until experts comprehensively examine all aspects of the matter, the Hindustan Times reported.

The court was hearing a petition filed by five retired Indian Forest Service officers challenging the Jungle Safari project.

On Thursday, the bench observed that Aravalli is a composite range.

“It neither starts in Haryana nor ends in Haryana,” the Hindustan Times quoted the bench as saying. “There is no scope of permitting the project unless there is a clear definition on Aravalli.”

Also read:

• The slow destruction of Delhi’s forgotten spine

• Can a safari park outside Delhi make up for a lost Nicobar forest?

A bucket filled with water was thrown at historian and professor S Irfan Habib while he was speaking at the Arts Faculty of Delhi University during a literature festival on Wednesday, reported The Indian Express.

The event was organised by the Left-affiliated All India Students’ Association.

Habib was speaking near Gate 4 of the Arts Faculty when, about 20 minutes into his address, a bucket full of water was thrown at him from behind a wall, the Hindustan Times reported.

The bucket did not hit him directly, but the water fell on him. He paused briefly before continuing his speech for several more minutes. A video of the incident was widely shared on social media.

देश के जाने-माने इतिहासकार प्रो. इरफान हबीब दिल्ली विश्विद्यालय परिसर में एक नुक्कड़ सभा को संबोधित कर रहे थे। तभी किसी ने उनपर पानी से भरा डस्टबिन फेंक दिया। मतलब अब कौन खुद को सुरक्षित महसूस करें? pic.twitter.com/3thj0cV7Sg

— Ashraf Hussain (@AshrafFem) February 13, 2026

“I was talking about history and how it is being rewritten, when the bucket full of water came out of nowhere,” Habib told the Hindustan Times.

The professor told The Indian Express that while the bucket contained water, it could have contained “anything, even stones”.

Describing the incident as “disturbing”, he said that universities are spaces for diverse voices which should be respected, The Times of India reported.

“If someone does not agree with what I have to say, they can have a dialogue or conversation regarding it,” the Hindustan Times quoted him as saying. “This is certainly not the way.”

The event had opened with a session on “Caste in Society and University”, addressed by Habib, who spoke on what the All India Students’ Association described as “attempts to rewrite history and marginalise discussions on caste within higher education”, The Indian Express reported.

The All India Students’ Association also accused the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad of “attacking the stage” while Habib was speaking and shouting “violent and threatening slogans”, Hindustan Times reported.

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

The association described the incident as a “deliberate, organised attack on a platform dedicated to equality, social justice and the voices of marginalised”, the newspaper reported.

The ABVP rejected the allegations as “baseless and false” and accused Left-wing student groups of spreading “misleading and distorted narratives”, The Indian Express reported.

Unidentified officials of the Delhi University told the newspaper that they had not received any formal complaint regarding the incident but would look into the matter.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin on Friday announced that Rs 5,000 each has been credited to the bank accounts of 1.3 crore women beneficiaries under the Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai scheme in the poll-bound state.

The amount includes the advance disbursal of the monthly entitlement of Rs 1,000 for February, March and April, along with a “special summer assistance” of Rs 2,000.

In a video message posted on social media, Stalin said that there was information that there was a conspiracy to stop the disbursement of the grant for three months by a “group in Delhi and another group in Tamil Nadu, who were slaves to the Delhi group”, in view of the elections, The Hindu reported.

The elections for the 234-seat Assembly are likely to be held in April or May.

“This Dravidian model government has overcome it [attempts to stall the disbursal],” the newspaper quoted the chief minister as saying in the video message. “This…was an assurance made by Stalin to the women of Tamil Nadu. I will not step back, irrespective of whoever places obstacles.”

The chief minister also announced that the monthly entitlement would be increased to Rs 2000 from Rs 1,000 if the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam returns to power.

தமிழ்நாட்டு மகளிருக்கு இந்த ஸ்டாலின் தந்த உறுதிமொழிதான் உரிமைத்தொகை. யார் தடை ஏற்படுத்தினாலும் அதிலிருந்து பின்வாங்க மாட்டேன்.

தேர்தலைக் காரணம் காட்டி, மூன்று மாதங்களுக்கு உரிமைத்தொகையை முடக்கப் பார்க்கிறார்கள். முந்திக்கொண்டது நமது #DravidianModel அரசு!

பிப்ரவரி, மார்ச்,… pic.twitter.com/n7VrMqcrb7

— M.K.Stalin - தமிழ்நாட்டை தலைகுனிய விடமாட்டேன் (@mkstalin) February 13, 2026

The Kalaignar Magalir Urimai Thogai scheme was launched in September 2023, initially covering 1.1 crore women with a monthly assistance of Rs 1,000. The coverage was later expanded to 1.3 crore beneficiaries across the state.

On January 17, the Opposition All India Anna Dravid Munnetra Kazhagam released the first phase of its manifesto for the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections, promising a monthly assistance of Rs 2,000 for women under the Kula Vilakku scheme.

Also read: Tamil Nadu 2026 elections: Will the dawn of coalition politics end the era of Dravidian parties?

A week after a book discussion at Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda Arts Festival featuring activist Anand Teltumbde was cancelled on police orders, the director of the festival said it was best to “avoid controversy and unnecessary sensationalism”, The Indian Express reported.

Brinda Miller told the newspaper that she was unaware of the matter till the police contacted her.

“I then reached out to my literature curator, who told me that the event is only about his book [The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir], more from the psychological point of view,” Miller was quoted as saying by The Indian Express. “The book had already cleared the censor board.”

She said that after the police contacted her, the organisers cancelled the event and told the panelists to take down their posts. “But they spoke to the media and people overreacted,” she said.

The discussion, titled “Incarcerated: Tales from Behind Bars” was scheduled for February 6, and was to feature Teltumbde, Neeta Kolhatkar, the author of The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners. It was to be moderated by Scroll editor Naresh Fernandes.

However, on February 4, the event was cancelled and participants were asked to delete social media posts about the event.

Teltumbde had been arrested on allegations that he was among the 16 who conspired to trigger caste riots in the village of Bhima Koregaon near Pune in 2018. He is currently out on bail. He is the author of several books, including The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir.

Miller was on Thursday quoted as saying by The Indian Express that she had not read the book and does not intend to either.

“I am not saying I am for it or against it,” she said. “I am neutral because I have a bigger responsibility towards Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, and as Festival Director, its safety is paramount to me.”

This year’s edition of the annual Kala Ghoda Arts Festival started on January 31 and ended on February 8. Among the collaborators for the event were the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, the Maharashtra Tourism Department and Unesco. The Maharashtra Police and the Mumbai Traffic Police were listed among the supporters of the festival.

The programme contains a wide range of events relating to dance, stand-up comedy, theatre, music and heritage walks.

Also read: Shutting down Anand Teltumbde talk, the authorities are imprisoning our imaginations

The Centre on Thursday told the Supreme Court that the violence in Leh in September came under control after activist Sonam Wangchuk was detained, and said this showed that taking him in custody was justified, PTI reported.

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.

Additional Solicitor General KM Nataraj, appearing for the Union government, submitted before a bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and PB Varale that Wangchuk was the “chief provocateur” of the September 24 violence in Leh.

The bench was hearing a petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo challenging the activist’s detention under the National Security Act.

Nataraj added that there was complete application of mind by the detaining authority while detaining Wangchuk and that all procedural safeguards were followed, Bar and Bench reported. The additional solicitor general said that while the petitioner was pointing to fundamental rights, the “person coming before this court should also be aware of his fundamental duties towards citizens and the country”.

The case will be heard further on February 16.

During a hearing on February 4, the court had verbally asked the Union government to rethink Wangchuk’s detention considering that his “health is not that good”.

However, the Centre told the court on Wednesday that he is “fit, hale and hearty”.

Protest for statehood

In August 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government abrogated the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution and bifurcated the state into the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

The lack of a legislature in Ladakh has led to increasing insecurities among the residents of the Union Territory about their land, nature, resources and livelihoods, and stoked fears that the region’s cultural identity and fragile ecosystem may be in jeopardy.

Including Ladakh in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution would allow for the creation of autonomous development councils to govern land, public health and agriculture.

Following Wangchuk’s detention, key regional groups Apex Body Leh and Kargil Democratic Alliance withdrew from the talks with the government, stating that “talks cannot be held at gunpoint”.

Also read: Nine false claims about Sonam Wangchuk – and why they fall flat

One of two nurses infected with the Nipah virus in West Bengal’s North 24 Parganas district died on Thursday afternoon, The Hindu reported.

The two nurses, a 25-year-old woman and a 25-year-old man, were infected with the virus in the Barasat area in North 24 Parganas district on January 11. While the man recovered and was discharged from hospital last week, the woman remained critical for several days afterwards.

The woman tested negative for Nipah on February 8, but had by then developed sepsis, The Telegraph quoted an unidentified state health department official as saying. She died after a cardiac arrest on Thursday.

This was the first death of a Nipah patient in West Bengal since 2007, when an outbreak of the virus took place in the state, the health official was quoted as saying.

This is the seventh documented Nipah outbreak in India and the third in West Bengal, following outbreaks in Siliguri in 2001 and Nadia in 2007. The last reported outbreak of the disease in the country was in Kerala in August.

On February 6, the World Health Organization confirmed that one person had died in Bangladesh after contracting the Nipah virus.

At a press briefing in Geneva on Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that three cases of the virus had been detected in India and Bangladesh in recent weeks.

“The two outbreaks are not related although both occurred along the India-Bangladesh border,” The Hindu quoted him as saying. “WHO is working with India and Bangladesh for risk assessment, follow-up of contacts and community engagement.”

The global health body said its assessment did not indicate a broader outbreak or transmission of the virus.

The Nipah virus is a zoonotic illness transferred from animals such as pigs and fruit bats to humans. The virus can also be caught through human-to-human transmission.

It causes fever and cold-like symptoms in patients. The infection can also cause encephalitis, which is the inflammation of the brain, and myocarditis, or the inflammation of the heart, in some cases.

Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Thursday asserted that he will “not budge” and will continue to speak up for farmers regardless of any legal or parliamentary action against him, following a notice from Bharatiya Janata MP Nishikant Dubey seeking his expulsion through a substantive motion.

“Narendra Modi has sold the country and its farmers,” Gandhi said in a video posted on social media. “You put cases against me, abuse me. Do whatever you want, file a privilege motion, it does not matter to me, I have spoken the truth in Parliament, you may not like it, that is a different matter, but the country knows the truth.”

He accused Modi of being “anti-farmer”, and of “selling” the interests of the country in the trade deal with the United States.

Gandhi has alleged that in the recently-announced trade deal, the BJP-led Union government compromised India’s energy security and harmed farmers’ interests.

FIR हो,
मुकदमा दर्ज हो या
Privilege प्रस्ताव लाएं - मैं किसानों के लिए लड़ूंगा।

जो भी ट्रेड डील किसानों की रोज़ी-रोटी छीने या देश की खाद्य सुरक्षा को कमजोर करे, वह किसान-विरोधी है।

अन्नदाताओं के हितों से किसान-विरोधी मोदी सरकार को समझौता नहीं करने देंगे। pic.twitter.com/gNVMEYFp3i

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) February 12, 2026

On Thursday, Dubey submitted a notice for a substantive motion against Gandhi for allegedly “fomenting public sentiments” in Parliament through foreign funding.

A substantive motion is a formal proposal placed before the House for discussion and decision. If admitted by the speaker, it entails a debate followed by a compulsory vote.

In his notice, the BJP MP said that Gandhi has engaged with the Soros Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, and travelled to countries such as Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and the US to take part in “anti-India activities”.

Dubey alleged in the notice that Gandhi has “very cleverly…captured the most pious dais of Parliament to foment public sentiments, levelling unsubstantiated allegations…against the Election Commission…[and] Supreme Court…lowering the dignity of the government without any substantive evidence and putting various other institutions in bad light”.

He also said that Gandhi’s conduct is unethical and added that the Congress leader is a key part of a “thuggery gang to destabilise India from within”.

Gandhi, participating in the debate on the Union Budget on Wednesday, alleged that the BJP-led Union government had “sold Bharat Mata” through the trade deal between India and the United States.

He claimed the deal was a “wholesale surrender” with India’s energy security handed over to the US and farmers’ interests compromised.

The Congress leader also mentioned that Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri’s name featured in the Epstein files.

The “Epstein files” refer to millions of documents, emails, photos and videos released by the US Department of Justice detailing the activities of Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier and convicted child sex offender, and his social circle that included politicians, celebrities and several public figures.

The documents released on January 30 contained email exchanges between Puri and Epstein that began in June 2014.

Puri has said his conversations with Epstein had nothing to do with the crimes for which the American financier had been convicted.

On Wednesday, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said that the BJP “will demand expunging of whatever lies Rahul Gandhi has spoken”.

The repeal of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme amounts to an “assault on Gandhian principles of local governance and Ambedkar’s vision of empowering people with rights”, a group of 88 former bureaucrats said on Thursday.

The retired bureaucrats, who are part of the Constitutional Conduct Group, said that the promise of 125 days’ employment in the Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin Act, which replaces the MGNREGA, appears to be “hollow”. They contended that if the Union government truly wanted to provide more employment, it could have done so with the MNREGA itself.

The signatories to the statement alleged that in the past decade, the MGNREGA faced “deliberate slow poisoning”, and was eventually repealed on the grounds that it needed overhauling.

The MGNREGA, introduced in 2005 by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, guaranteed 100 days of unskilled work annually for every rural household that wants it, covering all districts in the country.

Under the VB-G RAM G, which replaces it, the number of guaranteed workdays has been increased to 125, while states’ share of costs has risen to 40%. The Union government continues to bear the wage component, with states sharing material and administrative expenses.

The new bill was given assent by the president on December 21, two days after it was passed by Parliament amid protests by Opposition parties.

The retired bureaucrats on Thursday said in an open statement that there was ample academic research and workers’ testimonies that showed the positive impact of MGNREGA. “Making employment a right was a way to address several debilitating asymmetries such as caste, class, poverty, gender, socioeconomic inequality, and bureaucratic control,” they contended.

The signatories to the statement cited studies showing that within a few years of the MGNREGA being started, workers’ incomes increased, overall poverty fell and school enrolment increased. During the Covid-19 pandemic as well, the old employment guarantee scheme proved to be a lifeline, they said.

“…MGNREGA worksites became novel schools for learning about other constitutional rights and entitlements,” the former civil servants said. “It was where liberty and fraternity became actionable as people across castes and religions worked and ate together.”

While the MGNREGA was not a perfectly implemented law, it was one of the most effective means of “involving people in processes of development and democracy,” the ex-bureaucrats said.

They, however, said that the old scheme was under strain in the past 10 years because of “woefully inadequate budget allocation”, and wage rates that remained below minimum wages in most states, in violation of Supreme Court orders.

The former bureaucrats also contended that the [VB-RAM G] scheme became a “laboratory of technocratic adventures like the National Mobile Monitoring System [NMMS] attendance app and the imposition of Aadhaar Based Payment System [ABPS]”. These measures, they argued, led to the denial or work and wages, and to exclusions.

“The VB-G RAM G Act does not address any existing concerns of MGNREGA but will only worsen the condition of rural workers and will increase corruption,” the ex-bureaucrats said. They contended that the new Act does away with the demand-driven nature of the MGNREGA, and turns states “into supplicants of the Union government”.

The Centre “has turned right to work into a centrally sponsored scheme for the central government, and an unquantified legal and financial responsibility of state governments”, the signatories to the open statement alleged.

Also read:

• MGNREGA gone, Centre is puppet master of new scheme with no guarantees
• The end of MGNREGA is the undoing of a social revolution in rural India

Charged with sedition in February 2016, Kanhaiya Kumar spent nearly three weeks in prison and was even attacked by a mob. But this did not stop the president of the students’ union at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University from delivering a blistering indictment of Prime Minister Narendra Modi once he was out on bail.

From the steps of the university’s administrative block, rechristened Freedom Square by protesting students, the young communist outlined his political vision in a speech that went viral.

“I don’t have faith in destiny, but something good is about to happen,” he said at the time. “If we can unite the Ambedkarite movement and the left movement in this country, we will form a government that guarantees justice to all.”

Today, Kumar is with the Congress party, which has made him a senior observer for the upcoming Assembly elections in Kerala. Far from uniting leftists and Ambedkarites, the assignment entails locking horns with the state’s ruling left coalition, of which his old organisation, the Communist Party of India, is a crucial constituent.

The Kerala gig represents just the latest in a series of contradictions that have loomed over Kumar’s political journey in the last decade. But Kumar insists that his beliefs are still the same and claims to have more clarity now than ever before.

“I feel no urgent pressure to prove that I am right,” he told Scroll. “I will be proven right 50 years later.”

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.

Kumar had to overcome a major disadvantage to become president of the JNU students’ union in 2015 – the student outfit that he belonged to, the CPI-affiliated All India Students’ Federation, was a marginal player on campus, dwarfed by dominant left groups.

But his earthy oratory and rootedness won him followers. Anshul Trivedi, a JNU contemporary who voted for Kumar, recalled that he talked of students’ scholarships and the bed bugs in their hostel rooms instead of waxing eloquent about global conflicts.

Four years later, keen to capitalise on Kumar’s newfound fame, the CPI fielded him from Bihar’s Begusarai in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Kumar filled the rally grounds every time he spoke, but finished a distant second behind the Bharatiya Janata Party candidate.

The CPI, though, promptly gave him a place in the party’s top decision-making body – only to see him jump ship and join the Congress in 2021.

“We gave everything, still we lost him,” lamented Ram Naresh Pandey, CPI’s Bihar secretary. “Was this what he was aspiring to do? Fight the Left to weaken it and suppress its voice? I wish him all the best for that in Kerala.”

Kumar countered this by saying he was opposed to the policies of the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government, not its ideology. “It is a government led by a left party, yet it is working against left principles,” he alleged. “So I will speak against it.”

Those not connected to CPI are more understanding of Kumar’s choice, given that the party is a spent force in the Hindi belt. Rohit Azad, an economics professor at JNU who has known him since 2016, does not believe he compromised his ideology unlike, say, Shehla Rashid.

“I would have been happier if he had stayed with the Left, but the way he speaks, the issues he raises and his politics on the whole has not changed,” Azad said. “Yes, he is an ambitious man, as all politicians should be. If you are not driven by ambition, how will you act?”

Some, in fact, argue that Congress is an obvious home for Kumar. It is, after all, trying to bring left and Ambedkarite forces together under one roof, just as he had envisioned in 2016.

“Any left-minded person in today’s India should accord primacy to the battle in defence of the Constitution,” said Kolkata-based economist Prasenjit Bose, who was once a prominent member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and recently joined the Congress in an event attended by Kumar.

Bose and other leftists from JNU who are now in the Congress party, position themselves in the long line of socialists that the grand old party has historically kept in its fold.

“From the time of Nehru and Bose, the Left and the Right within the Congress have been clashing,” explained Trivedi, Kumar’s friend from JNU who became a Congress member alongside him in 2021. “We are doing left-of-centre politics in this mainstream space. We are saying the same things that we said when we were with the Left.”

Struggle and resilience

Kumar did not set out to become a politician. Born in 1987 in a rural pocket of Begusarai, among the last remaining communist bastions in central Bihar, he had tried his hand at a range of professions even before he came to Delhi and got admission in JNU.

In his book From Bihar to Tihar, Kumar recounts that when he was 15, he almost took up a job at a bookstore in Begusarai to support his poor family. For some time, he even distributed polio vaccines to earn a daily wage.

However, his father took note of his good academic performance and let him go to Patna, the state capital, to finish school and obtain a college education. There, he learned how to repair electronic appliances and taught tuitions to make ends meet while preparing to become an engineer.

Eventually, he discovered his penchant for debating and gravitated towards the humanities, opting for a bachelor’s degree in geography. In 2009, he moved to Delhi to prepare for the civil services exam. When this, too, did not work out, Kumar turned to JNU two years later, hoping to become an academic.

He writes in the book that he felt drawn to the “big-big” political posters on the walls from the day he first set foot in the campus. It did not take long for him to start contesting students’ union elections and, ultimately, run for the post of president.

As part of his 2015 campaign, Kumar railed against the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the dominant left parties in one breath, deftly weaving campus concerns with national and international ones. It was this speech that swung the polls in his favour, according to his contemporaries in university politics.

That was not the first time that he made his mark as an orator, though. Back in 2012, the young scholar had impressed attendees at an exchange event in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir.

On that occasion, Kumar had countered a proponent of Kashmiri independence, or azaadi, by underlining the primacy of bread-and-butter issues, according to three others present there.

Even when the sedition row erupted in February 2016, Kumar and the students’ union put out a statement criticising the allegedly secessionist slogans that were raised in JNU. Still, he was arrested three days after the controversy broke out.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one of the organisers of the gathering where the contentious slogans were raised told Scroll that Kumar shielded them from arrest.

“Just leave. I’ll manage the rest,” Kumar told them a night before he was himself arrested. Such leadership “required a different kind of grit”, this person added.

JNU professor Meenakshi Sundriyal recalled Kumar’s sense of indignation after he came out of jail about three weeks later. “The resilience really showed in his eyes,” she recollected. “He was like, ‘What the heck? How can you do this to me?’ That sort of a feeling.”

Measured words

During his 20-day incarceration, Kumar planned “every line” of the speech he delivered upon his release, said a person who helped Kumar at the time and did not wish to be identified.

But his words soon began to fall short. Samim Asgor Ali, a scholar-photographer who captured many of Kumar’s speeches on camera and catapulted him to fame, grumbled about how much the activist began to “measure” his words over time.

“Once he became popular, he began to worry about losing his Hindu supporters,” Ali said. “He used to come for Muslim protests, but he would avoid speaking wholeheartedly.”

Kumar denied this, and expressed solidarity with Muslims who, in his view, were being “demonised” by the ruling regime. But he also contended that the politics of hatred was part of a “design”.

“The whole country burns in the fire of hatred while forests are cut down, mines are looted, ports and airports are sold off, farmer suicides increase,” he elaborated. “All these questions disappear. To take attention away from them, hatred is necessary.”

Another subject that Kumar has been accused of skirting is the arrest and prolonged incarceration of his fellow JNU alumnus Umar Khalid in the 2020 Delhi riots case.

Soon after Khalid was arrested, Kumar, still with the Communist Party of India then, agreed to attend a press conference in Delhi to condemn the police action. However, he failed to show up.

“We put his name on the poster only because he had confirmed that he would join,” remembered Banojyotsna Lahiri, Umar Khalid’s partner. “We have never called him for any programme after that.”

Kumar put this down to party protocol – after he discovered D Raja, the general secretary of CPI, was attending the press meet, he felt his presence was not needed.

He scoffed at the allegation that he had, in any manner, let down Khalid. “I will consider this important if Umar comes out of prison and says that I betrayed him,” he bluntly stated.

“My friendship with Umar was forged in struggles even though we always differed ideologically,” he continued. “Whenever he comes out of prison, we will work against the BJP together.”

An uncertain future

As he inches towards completing five years with the Congress, Kumar, now 39, is still to find his footing. In 2024, he fought and lost yet another Lok Sabha poll – this time, from North East Delhi.

A Congress politician representing its social justice plank argued, “A lot of politicians can speak well, but you need followers to succeed in politics.” Kumar needs to “develop a political constituency”, he said. “Just going to TV studios will not help. People must believe that he is fighting for them.”

If Kumar’s upper-caste identity is coming in the way in the backward-caste dominated polity of Bihar, Praveen Chakravarty, chairman of the All India Professionals’ Congress, suggested that he model himself into a Delhi leader. “Whether we like it or not, politics is about geography,” he said. “He needs to pick his territory.”

For now, the party has put him in charge of its students’ wing, the National Students’ Union of India. Kumar said he was “trying to promote those from activist backgrounds and induct new ideas in the NSUI”.

But others believe his talents are getting wasted in this role.

“He was the performer,” said Ayesha Kidwai, a JNU professor who helped him and other student-activists with their lawsuits after 2016. “But now he has willingly embraced a position in which he does not speak.”

For his part, Kumar did not dismiss this criticism – he said he had heard similar things from others in his close circle. But he added that since 2019, he had deliberately chosen to speak less, especially on social media, and do more work among people on the ground.

“I am not a cartoonist, a blogger, a YouTuber or someone who makes reels,” he reasoned. “I am primarily a political worker. My work is organising people.”

Press bodies have criticised the Union government for blocking a parody animation featuring Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted by news outlet The Wire on social media, describing the actions as a sign of “an alarming erosion of freedom of expression in India”.

Condemning the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s decision, the Editors Guild of India stated on Thursday that The Wire was not informed of the reason for the removal of what it described as a “harmless cartoon”.

The “ostensible reason”, conveyed orally to the publication’s founders, was that the cartoon would affect the security and reputation of the country, said the guild.

If that was indeed the case, the excuse was “laughable”, it added.

The guild described the incident as “yet another example of the rising intolerance to comment and scrutiny” on the part of the Union government and its representatives, arguing that such actions tarnish India’s credentials as an accommodative democracy that gives space to media, including satire and humour.

It also said that the government introduced the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Amendment Rules, 2026a day after this action. The new rules hasten the takedown of offensive and illegitimate content prepared synthetically, said the guild.

Citing the Internet Freedom Foundation, the guild said the relevant clause was “overbroad” and could affect creative interpretation by cartoonists, potentially placing “a prior restraint on synthetically generated content that is satirical, parodical, and part of political commentary and artistic expression”.

The guild called on the government to undertake a serious review of the new rules and ensure that measures introduced in the name of regulating artificial intelligence do not undermine media freedom and free speech.

Digipub News India Foundation, an association of independent digital news organisations and journalists of which Scroll is a member, said on Tuesday that the Union government had offered no reasoning for how the cartoon violated the law.

It said the measures did not “appear incidental” but reflected a growing pattern in which satire, critical journalism and dissenting voices are constrained through “opaque and unaccountable ‘legal demands’” that undermine due process and democratic norms.

The organisation called for the immediate restoration of all blocked accounts and posts, as well as full transparency from the authorities and social media platforms regarding the legal basis for the actions.

DIGIPUB News India Foundation expresses deep concern over a series of recent actions that signal an alarming erosion of freedom of expression in India. pic.twitter.com/TlZLckOh0U

— DIGIPUB News India Foundation (@DigipubIndia) February 10, 2026

Also read: Centre fixes three-hour deadline for social media platforms to take down flagged AI content

The Press Club of India also condemned the arbitrary nature of the action against The Wire and said that moves of this kind have become “shockingly common”.

It emphasised that satire and cartoons have long been an important part of Indian news publishing and argued that disregarding this tradition undermines the freedom of expression guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Press Club demanded an immediate explanation for why the video was censored and why The Wire’s Instagram page was unavailable for two hours.

It urged the government to “refrain from acting in opaque ways that deeply undercut press freedom and create a censored media environment”.

The statement added that “these are not the actions one expects in a vibrant, thriving democracy”.

The Press Club of India condemns the temporary blocking of The Wire's Instagram page on Monday (February 9) and the takedown of a 52-second satirical clip from the website's Instagram, Facebook and X handles based on an undisclosed "legal request". pic.twitter.com/bhXuFLBaw3

— Press Club of India (@PCITweets) February 10, 2026

The Wire’s Instagram account was reportedly unavailable in India for nearly two hours on Monday evening. Visitors to the page saw a message stating that the page was “not available” in India because the platform was complying with “a legal request to restrict this content”.

The action followed the blocking of a parody animation by the news outlet across platforms.

The 52-second animated video, which was uploaded to Instagram, Facebook and X at about 6.30 pm on Saturday, was blocked on all three platforms. As of 3 pm on Tuesday, The Wire’s Instagram account had been restored, though the parody animation remained inaccessible on all three sites.

The animation satirised the prime minister for allegedly avoiding questions in Parliament about an unpublished memoir by former Indian Army chief MM Naravane.

On Monday, The Wire claimed that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting told the news outlet that it had not specifically ordered the blocking of its account.

The news outlet, however, claimed that it had “learned informally that the ministry asked Meta to block a 52-second satirical cartoon on Instagram” and that the platform’s parent company had blocked the entire account “in error”.

Under the Information Technology Act, the Union government is required to inform a publisher in advance before blocking specific content. The Wire has claimed that it had received no written communication on the matter.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday claimed that a 24-year-old migrant worker from the state was murdered in Maharashtra’s Pune, allegedly for speaking Bengali.

“This is nothing short of a hate crime,” Banerjee alleged. “A young man was hunted, tortured, and murdered for his language, his identity, his roots. This is the direct consequence of a climate where xenophobia is weaponised and innocents are turned into targets.”

However, the Pune Rural Police said their initial investigation showed that the man, identified as Sukhen Dhiren Mahato, was killed due to a dispute with the residents of the area, reported The Indian Express.

“We have registered a murder case,” Pune Rural Additional Superintendent of Police Ramesh Chopde told the newspaper. “Two suspects have been identified, and a search is underway for them.”

Mahato died due to a severe head injury on Monday night, said the police.

His body was found on Tuesday morning in an open plot in Koregaon Bhima in the Shirur taluka of Pune district.

Mahesh Dongare, the sub-inspector at the Shikrapur police station, told The Indian Express that it was not yet known whether it was a hate crime.

The Trinamool Congress has consistently accused the Bharatiya Janata Party of inciting hatred against Bengali-speaking migrant workers.

Since May, thousands of Bengali-speaking migrant workers have been rounded up in states ruled by the BJP and asked to prove that they were Indian citizens – and not undocumented immigrants.

In several cases, workers have been declared foreigners within days and forced into Bangladesh, despite being Indian citizens.

Also read: Why Bengali migrant workers in BJP-ruled states are being asked to prove they are Indians

As the morning mist clears over the Sahyadri mountains, the jagged silhouette of the Rajgad Fort becomes visible to the trekkers beginning their ascent from the base village of Gunjavne. For most visitors escaping the nearby concrete Pune in Maharashtra, the landscape appears to be a lush, emerald paradise. They buy bottles of mineral water from local stores, perhaps unaware of the irony beneath their feet: scarcity amid plenty.

Velhe (officially renamed as Rajgad), the smallest taluk in Maharashtra’s Pune district, records an average annual rainfall of over 2,500 mm, the highest in the district.

Yet, by February, many of its 129 villages have historically faced a dry reality, relying on water tankers for drinking and farming during the summer months. The problem is not a lack of water, but its refusal to stay in this hilly, undulating terrain. Rainwater slides off the slopes almost immediately, eroding soil, briefly filling wells and streams, then disappearing.

Slowing the flow

Near the base of the Rajgad trail, Laxman Rasal, Gunjavne’s sarpanch and a veteran of the gram panchayat for 32 years, walks over massive boulders that have tumbled down along the mountain stream. He points out a series of gabion structures, walls built of local stones, punctuating the stream. These are part of a deliberate “microwatershed” strategy to manage the Gunjavne river’s water.

“We should slow down running water, stop fast-flowing water, and allow stagnant water to seep into the ground,” says Raintree Foundation field officer Pravin Sanga Shetty, explaining the idea of watershed management. Because parts of Velhe’s local geology consist of dense hard basalt rock, letting water seep deep into the ground is difficult; the focus instead is on holding surface water and soil moisture.

This is a community-driven effort. The sarpanch, gram sevak (the secretary and chief executive officer of the gram panchayat), and the voluntary Village Development Committee play a crucial role in mobilising the community to participate in watershed activities.

While some labour is paid, much of the work relies on shram daan (voluntary labour). With this collective action and financial support from the non-profit organisations, the village residents also revived an old percolation tank that was once choked with silt.

In Gunjavne, a village of about 1,100 people, well water levels have risen, and the benefits extend downstream as well, says Rasal. According to Raintree Foundation, the water level in the wells around the tank is one foot higher during the wet season and about seven feet higher during the dry season. The desiltation activity was carried out in 2023, and the water levels were compared between 2022 and 2024.

Maintenance has brought another advantage: the nutrient-rich silt removed during desiltation. Instead of dumping it, the silt is distributed among farmers, returning washed-away topsoil to farms.

Planning for every drop

The breeze in October and November occasionally carries a hint of Indrayani rice, Maharashtra’s signature aromatic grain, which originated in the Pune district. While rice is the primary crop in Velhe, it is a rain-fed gamble. With the least irrigated area in the district, it was also difficult to grow a second or third crop to increase income.

“Rice alone is not profitable,” says Mohammad Shaikh from Sakhar village, close to Gunjavne, standing beside neatly arranged brown bundles of harvested rice. His capital would be “stuck” during the traditional May-to-November rice cycle. Now, powered by water-saving irrigation techniques, he has moved beyond just rice. On his three acres, he uses a sprinkler system to grow chickpeas and leafy greens like methi (fenugreek) and coriander in short 45-day cycles.

But where does Shaikh get the water from?

About four-five lakh litres of rainwater are stored in an artificial pond, slightly larger than a badminton court, dug on his land. Raintree Foundation provided the technical support and about Rs 75,000 for the installation, a plastic lining, and the maintenance of these farm ponds.

The non-profit has spent about Rs 45 lakh in watershed activities across nine villages in Velhe, says Swanand Damle, Vice President (Operations). Through the VDCs they mapped local water challenges and identified farmers who needed support. They dug ponds in 73 farms and implemented other interventions such as river desilting, percolation tank desilting, farm pond construction, water budgeting awareness.

Depending on the pond’s size, the farmers spend around Rs 30,000 on digging the ground and labour. The foundation also trains farmers to select crops suited to local conditions and to budget water for both domestic and agricultural use, explains Damle.

Mangoes and buffaloes

For farmers who can afford the investment, farm ponds allow them to pursue long-held dreams.

In Sakhar, farmer Sandeep Renuse stands on an acre of farmland overlooking the hills. For years, his father dreamed of growing hapus (Alphonso) and kesar mangoes. These trees require a high quantity of water during their first few years, a demand that was once impossible to meet in the dry season. After coordinating a team of labourers to dig a five-lakh-litre farm pond, Sandeep now successfully supports 70 mango trees with drip irrigation.

Horticulture – growing mangoes, jamun, jackfruit, leafy vegetables – has been a natural means of supplementing income in Velhe, but the inability to access water, limits its growth.

If you buy milk in Pune, it may have passed through a checkpoint near Lavhi, a village where livestock owners sell their yield every morning. For Anant Renuse, who owns 17 buffaloes, water is a matter of hygiene and health. When water is scarce, and tankers are the only option, a buffalo might get a bath only once every eight days, which affects its well-being. With the self-sufficiency provided by his wells and a farm pond, he can now bathe his buffaloes every two to three days during the dry season.

However, this level of security is not yet universal. Nazim Shaikh, a young farmer wrestling with his goats, looks at his field, which begins to lose moisture as early as December. For him, the initial investment and land required for a farm pond make the solution feel distant.

In Lavhi’s main meeting square, adjacent to an Indrayani rice field and a temple, a group of residents says that during peak summer, spending Rs 1,000 for a 5,000-litre private water tanker is the norm, particularly for households with higher needs.

Paradox in Velhe’s water story

In nearby Merawane and Phanshi villages, BAIF Development Research Foundation, which works on resilient rural livelihoods, has installed a solar-powered irrigation system that brings water from the river to farms almost 1.5 kilometres away. The usage is regulated by a local operator to ensure equitable distribution, explains Akash Salunke, an agriculture field officer with BAIF. The legacy non-profit is also piloting rainwater-harvesting devices at schools to recharge borewells in areas that fall within rechargeable zones.

While monitoring well water levels each season might reveal changes, Damle of the Raintree Foundation states that it would take a 15-year horizon to measure impacts on watershed ecology. The organisation, which started work in 2018, is planning a midline survey to track changes in the watershed. The ultimate goal, he says, is for the community to fully take over the discussions, monitoring, and desiltation of watershed structures.

Meanwhile, climate change also adds a layer of uncertainty. In 2025, unusually heavy September rains damaged the rice crop, while extreme summer heat rotted mangoes, highlighting the vulnerability of even diversified farmers. Field officers also point to the spread of eucalyptus, locally termed Nilgiri, on surrounding hillsides. These fast-growing, non-native trees consume large amounts of water, further stressing local systems.

Planning watershed conservation according to local geography and situation is critical, notes Himanshu Kulkarni, founder of the Advanced Centre for Water Resources Development and Management. “But shifting to water-intensive crops like sugarcane would undo much of this effort,” he warns.

There is a systemic irony to Velhe’s story. Pune district has one of the highest dam densities in the country, explains Kulkarni, and Velhe lies within a typical dam catchment of the Western Ghats. Water from such catchments is diverted to irrigation command areas, cities, and industrial zones, while the villages themselves often remain underserved. Kulkarni argues that such regions deserve compensation for the ecosystem services they provide.

By 2025, the government’s Jal Jeevan scheme had brought taps to nearly 97% of families in villages such as Gunjavne and Lavhi. The Rural Water Supply Sub-Division in Velhe notes that tanker demand has dropped sharply. But the water in the taps installed, still depends on the health of the local watershed.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey said that he has submitted a notice in the Lok Sabha to initiate proceedings for cancelling Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s membership of the Lower House. He alleged that Gandhi was “fomenting public sentiments” in Parliament through foreign funding.

“He should be debarred from contesting the election for a lifetime,” said the BJP MP. Dubey also alleged that Gandhi’s conduct inside Parliament is unethical and added that the Congress leader is a key part of a “thuggery gang to destabilise India from within”.

In response, Congress leader KC Venugopal said that Dubey’s move was an attempt to divert attention from the matters Gandhi had raised. Read on.

A court in Assam’s Guwahati restrained Congress leaders Gaurav Gogoi, Jitendra Singh and Bhupesh Baghel from making “defamatory statements” about Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma. The judge held that not passing such an order would “defeat the justice” and may lead to multiple proceedings.

Sarma had accused the three leaders of making malicious allegations against him and sought Rs 500 crore in damages. However, he did not specify the allegations he was referring to. This had come the same day the Congress’ Assam unit filed a police complaint against the BJP for sharing a video depicting Sarma symbolically firing at images of two Muslim men at point-blank range. Read on.

Voting in Bangladesh’s first national election since the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government was held on Thursday. A turnout of 47.9% was recorded till 2 pm.

The counting of votes began soon after, with early trends expected around midnight and final results likely by Friday morning.

During the day, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party alleged that its Khulna city leader Mohibuzzaman Kochi died after being attacked by members of the Jamaat. On the other hand, the Jamaat’s centre director said that its women activists were being forced out of polling stations by supporters of the BNP.

The director added that Kochi had fallen during the commotion and that he had not been pushed or assaulted. In Gopalganj, three persons were injured in a crude bomb explosion at a polling centre. Read on.

Read our coverage of the Bangladesh election here.

The Union government’s Defence Acquisition Council approved several proposals to buy military equipment, including more Rafale fighter jets. While the defence ministry did not state the number of Rafales being purchased, news reports widely said it would be 114.

The fresh order for the Rafales, manufactured by French firm Dassault Aviation, was cleared days ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Delhi on February 17.

The council cleared proposals worth Rs 3.6 lakh crore that also include buying combat missiles and an airship-based high-altitude pseudo-satellite for the Indian Air Force, additional P-8I Poseidon long-range maritime reconnaissance aircraft for the Navy. It also includes the overhaul of the Army’s armoured recovery and infantry combat vehicles, and T-72 tanks. Read on.

The Supreme Court asked the makers of the film Ghooskhor Pandat to file an affidavit confirming that the movie’s title has been withdrawn. The affidavit must also mention the new name of the film, it directed.

This came after the counsel for the film’s producers told the court that the process was underway to change the title. The court was hearing a plea objecting to the film’s title for allegedly defaming the Brahmin community.

The court said that the right to freedom of speech is subject to restrictions. “Why should you denigrate a section of society by this kind of title?” the bench asked. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the makers of the film Ghooskhor Pandat to file an affidavit confirming that the movie’s title has been withdrawn, Live Law reported.

The court also directed that the affidavit must mention the new name of the film.

This came after the counsel for the film’s producers told the court that the process was underway to change the title.

Issuing a notice to the Union government, the Central Board of Film Certification and the film’s director Neeraj Pandey, a bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan said that it cannot allow the movie to be released unless the new name is placed on record.

It was hearing a public interest litigation objecting to the film’s title for allegedly defaming the Brahmin community.

The plea was filed amid a row that erupted after streaming platform Netflix on February 3 released its slate of films and series for 2026. A teaser for Ghooskhor Pandat, directed by Panday and Ritesh Shah, was also released.

The film, starring Manoj Bajpayee, Nushrratt Bharuccha and Shraddha Das, was criticised by some groups for its title that allegedly vilified the Brahmin community.

The use of the word “pandat”, associated with the Brahmin community and also meaning a priest, with “ghooskhor”, a term for someone who accepts bribes, sparked the uproar.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court said that the right to freedom of speech is subject to restrictions. “Why should you denigrate a section of society by this kind of title?” Live Law quoted the bench as having asked.

On Tuesday, Netflix told the Delhi High Court that the film will be renamed and all its promotional material had been taken down. The counsel for the streaming platform had told the High Court that the producers had decided to change its title to something that would more accurately reflect its narrative and intent.

The petitioner in this matter had claimed that the title was communally offensive, and could cause harm to the dignity and reputation of the Brahmin community.

The High Court bench had disposed of the petition before it, noting that nothing more was required to be adjudicated.

The Uttar Pradesh Police had also filed a first information report against the makers of the film for allegedly hurting public sentiments and disturbing social harmony.

‘Used simply as a colloquial name’

In light of the controversy, Pandey said on February 6 that the film was a fictional police drama, adding that the term “pandat” had been “used simply as a colloquial name for a fictional character”.

The story focused on a character’s actions and choices, and did not comment on or represent any caste, religion or community, the director had said in a statement.

Pandey had also said that in light of the concerns raised about the film, his team had “decided to take down all promotional materials for the time being, as we believe the film should be experienced in its entirety and understood in the context of the story we intended to tell, rather than judged on partial glimpses”.

Bajpayee had said in a statement that he respected the emotions and concerns shared about the film, adding that he took them seriously. The actor also said that the film was not meant to be a comment about any community.

A court in Assam’s Guwahati on Wednesday restrained three Congress leaders, including the head of the party’s state unit Gaurav Gogoi, from making “defamatory statements” about Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, PTI reported.

Civil Judge Nayanjyoti Sarma ordered an interim injunction on Gogoi, Jitendra Singh and Bhupesh Baghel from “making, publishing, circulating or disseminating any further defamatory statements or materials” about the Bharatiya Janata Party leader until they appear before the court.

The judge held that not passing such an order would “defeat the justice” and may lead to multiple proceedings.

The court directed the Congress leaders to appear before it on March 9, PTI reported.

The chief minister’s counsel said that the defendants have been issued notices by the court to furnish proof of their allegations, The Assam Tribune reported.

On Tuesday, Himanta Biswa Sarma filed a defamation suit against the three leaders, claiming that they had made malicious allegations against him.

Sarma said on social media that he had sought Rs 500 crore in damages, but did not specify the allegations he was referring to.

The case came following a press conference on February 4 in which the Congress launched a campaign against the chief minister, alleging that around “12,000 bighas of land have been grabbed in the name of his family members in different parts of the state in violation of rules”.

Gogoi had said that the party was investigating and tracing the sources of the chief minister’s assets.

Hours after that press conference, Himanta Biswa Sarma said that he would initiate contempt proceedings against the three politicians and Congress’ Legislative Party leader Debabrata Saikia.

“The era of hit-and-run politics is over,” he had said on social media at the time. “If they have even an ounce of courage or evidence, let them prove every allegation before a court of law.”

The defamation complaint came the same day the Congress’ Assam unit filed a police complaint against the BJP for sharing a video depicting Sarma symbolically firing at images of two Muslim men at point-blank range.

The video, which was posted by the BJP’s Assam unit on Saturday, has been deleted following criticism.

The clip combined what appeared to be original footage of the BJP leader handling rifles with artificial intelligence-generated images portraying Muslims as targets. On-screen text included slogans such as “Foreigner free Assam”, “No mercy”, “Why did you not go to Pakistan?” and “There is no forgiveness to Bangladeshis”.

The BJP’s Assam unit has claimed that the post was unauthorised. One of the four co-convenors of the party’s state social media cell has been removed from his position in connection with the video, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

Assembly elections are expected to be held in the state between March and May.

The Enforcement Directorate told the Delhi High Court on Thursday that it will challenge former Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s acquittal in cases about him not appearing before the agency after its summons in the liquor policy case, Live Law reported.

Additional Solicitor General SV Raju said this after Kejriwal’s counsel sought to withdraw a plea challenging the summons issued to the Aam Aadmi Party chief in the matter.

Kejriwal’s counsel told the High Court that he did not want to pursue the matter further as he had already been acquitted in the criminal cases against him for failing to appear before the Enforcement Directorate, PTI reported.

The High Court allowed Kejriwal to withdraw the plea.

On January 22, a trial court acquitted the former chief minister in two separate cases filed against him for not appearing before the Enforcement Directorate, PTI reported.

The trial court held that as a serving chief minister, “he too enjoyed his fundamental right of movement” and that the Enforcement Directorate failed to prove that Kejriwal intentionally disobeyed the summons.

Kejriwal was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in March 2024. Till then, he had been summoned nine times by the law enforcement agency in connection with alleged irregularities in the Delhi government’s now-scrapped liquor excise policy.

The chief minister had skipped all nine summonses.

Kejriwal was granted bail in his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate by a trial court on June 20, 2024. The Delhi High Court, however, issued an interim stay on the order the next day as it allowed an urgent hearing of a petition by the central agency.

On June 25, 2024, the High Court stayed the bail in its final order and said that the trial court “did not properly appreciate the material on record and the averments of ED [Enforcement Directorate]”.

On July 12, 2024, the Supreme Court granted Kejriwal interim bail in the case. However, he remained in jail as he had been arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation in the same case on June 25, 2024.

He was eventually released from jail in September 2024 after the Supreme Court granted him bail.

Liquor policy case

The Enforcement Directorate’s case is based on a first information report registered by the CBI alleging irregularities in the Delhi government’s liquor excise policy, which has been scrapped.

The policy came into effect in November 2021. It was withdrawn on July 30, 2022, with Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena recommending an investigation into the alleged irregularities of the policy.

The two central agencies have alleged that Delhi’s Aam Aadmi Party government at the time modified the liquor policy by increasing the commission for wholesalers from 5% to 12%. This allegedly facilitated the receipt of bribes from wholesalers who had a substantial market share and turnover.

Also read: A ‘liquor scam’ has put AAP leaders in jail. But has it dented the party’s image in Delhi?

The Union government’s Defence Acquisition Council on Thursday approved proposals to buy several military equipment, including additional Rafale fighter jets for the Indian Air Force.

The council, which reports to the defence ministry and is headed by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, granted the acceptance of necessity for proposals worth Rs 3.6 lakh crore. The proposals included the purchase of combat missiles and an airship-based high-altitude pseudo-satellite.

The majority of the Rafale aircraft being ordered will be manufactured in India, the ministry said.

Procuring more Rafales will “enhance the capability of undertaking air dominance roles” and boost the Air Force’s deterrence capabilities, “with long-range offensive strikes”, it added.

While the defence ministry did not state the number of Rafales being purchased, news reports widely said it would be 114, with 90 being manufactured in India. Some of the remaining jets are likely to be acquired in fly-away condition to meet the Air Force’s immediate operational needs.

The withdrawal of the last two MiG-21 squadrons in September had dropped the Air Force’s combat squadron strength to 29, against the 42 sanctioned in 2012. A fighting squadron typically has 16 to 18 jets.

The fresh purchase of the Rafale aircraft was cleared days ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Delhi between February 17 and February 19. The Rafales are manufactured by the French firm Dassault Aviation.

The Air Force already operates the Rafales. The deal to procure 36 of them was signed by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government in 2016 at a cost of Rs 58,000 crore.

The Congress had accused the Narendra Modi government of corruption. The Centre has denied the allegations.

The Opposition party had also alleged at the time that the Modi government had helped a defence firm owned by industrialist Anil Ambani land a major contract under the deal even though it had no experience in the sector. Ambani has denied the allegations.

Also read: MiG-21 retirement a reminder about slacking defence procurement

On Thursday, the defence ministry said that the combat missiles being procured are meant to enhance the Air Force’s stand-off ground attack capability “with deep strike power and very high accuracy”.

The air-ship based high-altitude pseudo satellite, the ministry said, will be used by the military for surveillance and reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, communications and remote sensing.

For the Indian Navy, the council cleared the acquisition of additional Boeing P-8I Poseidon aircraft, which are meant for long-range maritime reconnaissance. The acquisition will also boost the Navy’s long-range anti-submarine warfare and maritime strike capability, the ministry said.

The purchase of six P8I aircraft had been cleared, The Indian Express reported. The Indian Navy already operates 12 P-8Is.

For the Indian Army, the council approved the procurement of anti-tank mines named Vibhav, and overhaul of armoured recovery vehicles, T-72 tanks and infantry combat vehicles to increase their service life.

The proposals cleared by the council are required to get a final approval from the Cabinet Committee on Security, which is headed by the prime minister.

In April, India had signed a deal with France to buy 26 Rafale Marine fighter aircraft for the Indian Navy at a cost of about Rs 64,000 crore. The Rafale Marine is an aircraft carrier-borne fighter jet.

The Supreme Court on Thursday refused to entertain a petition filed by the management of a dargah in Karnataka’s Kalaburagi district seeking directions to restrain rituals related to the Hindu festival of Mahashivratri at the shrine’s premises, Bar and Bench reported.

This year, Mahashivratri will be celebrated on Sunday.

The Aland Ladle Mashaik Dargah is associated with 14th-century Sufi saint Hazrat Shaikh Alauddin Ansari, also known as Ladle Mashaik, and 15th-century Hindu saint Raghava Chaitanya, whose remains lie at the site. A structure referred to as the Raghava Chaitanya Shivling is also located within the premises, The Hindu reported.

Both Muslims and Hindus have historically offered prayers at the site. However, communal tensions erupted in 2022 regarding worship rights.

In February 2025, the Karnataka High Court permitted 15 members of the Hindu community to conduct Shivaratri prayers at the Raghava Chaitanya Shivling amid heavy security. A similar arrangement was reportedly made in 2024, when 15 Hindu persons were allowed to enter the premises and perform rituals without any untoward incident occurring, Bar and Bench reported.

In its plea, the dargah management has contended that although the property has been declared a Waqf property by the Waqf Tribunal, third parties have repeatedly filed petitions before the High Court seeking permission to conduct prayers on specific occasions, Live Law reported. It said that the High Court has been granting permission for temporary arrangements from time to time, including for the upcoming Mahashivratri festival.

The petitioners raised concern that there has been a strategic attempt by Hindu groups to change the religious character of the shrine by securing interim court orders for Shivratri prayers.

“The pattern is unmistakable and deeply troubling,” Bar and Bench quoted the petition as having said. “What cannot be proved through evidence and adjudication is sought to be manufactured through interim orders sought from the High Court.”

The petition added: “What is barred by the Places of Worship Special Provisions Act, 1991 is sought to be achieved through police-facilitated entry during festivals.”

The Act does not allow any changes to the religious character of a place of worship as it existed on August 15, 1947.

The management of the Aland Ladle Mashaik Dargah had approached the court under Article 32 of the Constitution, which allows persons to directly move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of fundamental rights.

On Thursday, advocate Vibha Datta Makhija, appearing for the petitioner, submitted that the High Court had already decided related matters and that the petitioner was constrained to approach the Supreme Court, Live Law reported.

However, a bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and SC Sharma noted that an Article 32 petition was not appropriate in the matter.

“Unless it’s a pan-India issue, [no]...You get the dismissal thereafter we will consider,” Live Law quoted Datta as saying. “This is no way of entertaining Article 32 [petition].”

The plea was then withdrawn.