The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India on Saturday suspended the licence of Priyagold biscuit manufacturer Surya Food and Agro Limited for using cattle-feed bran as a raw material.

During an inspection, the regulator found that bran meant for cattle feed and not intended for human consumption was being used as a source of fibre.

In a post on social media, it added that legal proceedings have been initiated against the company for several food safety violations relating to plant hygiene, pest control, raw material storage and segregation, personnel hygiene, premises maintenance, and the handling of intermediate formulations.

The company has not yet responded to the regulator’s action.

The regulator has also initiated prosecution proceedings against Dodla Dairy Limited and UEIR Organic Foods Private Limited for alleged food safety violations.

A sample of Dodla Dairy’s full-cream milk was found to contain detergent or caustic soda and also failed to meet the prescribed milk-fat specifications. Yellow raisins sold by UEIR Organic Foods were found to contain pesticide residues.

The action came amid a recent crackdown by food regulators on food adulteration and misleading advertisements.

On October 3, the food regulator said that a sample of Nestlé’s low-fat dairy whitener collected from The LaLiT hotel in Delhi’s Connaught Place was found to be “unsafe and substandard”.

The regulator had directed that the sale of the product be immediately prohibited.

However, Nestlé India said the product was “safe to consume” and complied with applicable regulations.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read:

• Food regulator took credit for a ‘crackdown’ on Bournvita. But it gave the drink a clean chit
• India’s food regulator flagged over 160 misleading claims. Years later, 120 are still around
• How India’s ambitious plan to curb unhealthy food failed

A bulldozer sent to remove a Communist Party of India (Marxist) book stall in Kolkata’s Jadavpur area on Saturday had to retreat after party workers, residents and students gathered to oppose the move, The Telegraph reported.

The incident is the latest in a series of disputes over Left parties’ book stalls during Durga Puja in West Bengal.

Police and central forces were present as a team from the Kolkata Municipal Corporation arrived with the bulldozer to remove the stall, which had been set up four days earlier.

What an image for this #DurgaPuja in Kolkata! No one has seen this, #Bulldozer coming to destroy the bookstalls of the left at #Jadavpur.
The resistance was given by local people & all the @CpimlWestBengal @CPIM_WESTBENGAL & other democratic forces. Ultimately it had to go back. pic.twitter.com/4Z1oPV6pX7

— SS #Andolanjeevi #SaabYaadRakhaJayega (@sumonseng) October 17, 2026

“We have permission from the Kolkata Police, the corporation and for the electricity consumed at the stall,” Sudip Sengupta, a Communist Party of India (Marxist) state committee member, told The Telegraph. He alleged that officials had arrived to clear the site after the court went on vacation.

The Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation criticised the action, accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh of targeting Left-run book stalls.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of the BJP.

“The BJP-RSS regime fears books because it fears ideas,” the party said on social media. “It fears the history of people’s struggles, the ideas of equality and justice, and the spirit of resistance that no bulldozer can crush.”

The action followed the demolition of book stalls in nearby Dhakuria earlier on Saturday, the newspaper reported.

Communist Party of India leader Prabir Deb, a Dhakuria resident, said the party had been setting up its book stall in Dhakuria for 49 years and had informed the local police station every year.

“Why can’t we sell books?” he asked.

On Thursday, another CPI(M) book stall in the state’s North 24 Parganas district was allegedly vandalised and set on fire by unidentified people, PTI reported. The stall was located in the Palashi Majhipara area of Bijpur.

Book stalls run by the CPI(M), the CPI and the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) Liberation have faced opposition and attacks across West Bengal in the weeks leading up to Durga Puja, The Hindu reported.

The dispute follows Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari’s September 10 call for Durga Puja committees to deny space to such stalls if they use the term “Sharodotsav” or autumn festival instead of Durga Puja, the newspaper reported.

Left parties have long set up book stalls during the festival, selling books on politics, literature and other subjects.

The parties say they have traditionally informed local police about their stalls and paid the required fees to the civic body. However the authorities have disputed whether some stalls had the necessary permissions, Alt News reported.

The dispute has also reached the Calcutta High Court.

On Friday, a division bench of the Calcutta High Court stayed an earlier order allowing the CPI(M) to set up a book stall near its party office in Bongaon, preventing it from operating during the remaining days of Durga Puja, Bar and Bench reported.

The state government had challenged the single-judge order issued on Thursday, which directed that the party be allowed to set up the stall within 100 metres of its intended location.

The court also directed the state to check whether a Hindutva group called the Hindu Jagran Manch, which had set up a stall at the proposed location, had the necessary permission.

After the order, the CPI(M)’s counsel said it “is only related to the CPM’s Bongaon stall and does not apply to all other stalls across Bengal,” The Telegraph reported.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

A Supreme Court-appointed enquiry committee investigating alleged police excesses during youth protests in July and violence against security forces, launched a portal on Saturday for the affected persons to submit their complaints.

Priority will be given to complaints concerning the use of pellet guns, targeted violence and harassment of women protesters, and the excessive use of force and destruction of property by either side, the committee said.

The committee said the portal was designed to protect vulnerable witnesses and keep the identities of affected persons confidential if they wished to remain anonymous.

On August 20, the court had formed the five-member enquiry committee headed by Justice R Subhash Reddy, a retired Supreme Court judge.

The court had set up the panel while hearing petitions alleging that the police used excessive force against protesters marching to Parliament in Delhi on July 20.

The youth protests against alleged mismanagement of several competitive examinations had begun on June 6, when the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign staged a demonstration at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to demand the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the Union education minister at the time. Pradhan resigned as the education minister on July 25.

During the protest, several demonstrators were injured after security personnel used lathis, fired tear gas and pellet guns to disperse the crowd.

The committee will also assess the medical and other assistance, including compensation, provided to those affected by the alleged police abuse, and whether it was adequate. It will also consider injuries sustained by police personnel while on duty and the “mental and emotional trauma” experienced by their family members.

The portal allows users to submit information under four categories: affected persons, witnesses wishing to file complaints, anonymous information and suggestions for the committee. Each section contains a set of questions and allows users to upload supporting material, including complaints, photographs and videos.

Those wishing to submit complaints in person about matters being examined by the committee can visit its office at Shiksha Sadan in New Delhi, between 2 pm and 4 pm on working days.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Also read:

• Ten persons injured by pellets during youth protest march to Parliament, shows RTI response
• Youth protests: Constable fired AK-47 after being ‘trapped’ in crowd, Bihar tells Supreme Court
• Watch: Young protesters in Delhi face police lathi-charge and tear gas

At least 19 persons, including women and children, were killed and 25 injured in a stampede at a Durga Puja pandal in north Kolkata on Saturday evening, Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari said.

The stampede occurred at around 7.40 pm as crowds gathered at the pandal during rainfall, ANI quoted the Kolkata Police as saying.

The rain prompted people waiting outside the pandal to rush inside for shelter. An announcement warning that the pandal might collapse if the crowd was not brought under control reportedly added to the confusion and triggered a sudden rush, according to The Indian Express.

The injured were taken to Kolkata Medical College and Hospital and other hospitals for treatment.

Never in our bloodline we have seen a stampede in #DurgaPuja & people dying! pic.twitter.com/ve4cMWTLVY

— All India Trinamool Congress (@AITCofficial) October 17, 2026

Seven persons, including the secretary and vice-president of the organising committee, have been arrested in connection with the incident, PTI quoted the Kolkata Police as saying on Sunday. Two persons in-charge of security and a person responsible for construction work were among those arrested.

Police have registered a suo motu case of culpable homicide not amounting to murder at the Girish Park police station. Fourteen persons were detained for questioning on Saturday night, of whom seven have been arrested. The police said more arrests could follow.

Adhikari said surveillance camera footage would be examined and those found responsible for failures in crowd control would face action, ANI reported.

He also said the government would seek the appointment of a sitting judge of the Calcutta High Court to oversee a special investigation team probe.

The pandal has since been closed to visitors, and the site was handed over to investigators and forensic teams, the chief minister said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced Rs 2 lakh in compensation from the Prime Minister’s National Relief Fund for the family of each person killed in the stampede, and Rs 50,000 for each injured person.

Adhikari announced Rs 25 lakh for the family of each person killed, along with a government job for one family member in a Group D post, which typically involves entry-level support work such as office assistance.

The state government will also provide Rs 5 lakh to each injured person and cover their medical treatment costs, the chief minister said.

President Droupadi Murmu, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee were among those who expressed condolences.

Major pandals temporarily shut, prohibitory orders imposed

The Kolkata Police on Saturday asked several major Durga Puja organisers to temporarily close their pandals following the stampede, including at Tala Pratyay, Alipore Sarbojanin, Chetla Agrani and Ballygunge Sarbojanin, The New Indian Express repororted.

The police said the closures were temporary measures to control crowds, with a review meeting scheduled for Sunday.

Prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita were imposed in parts of Bowbazar on Sunday until Tuesday to “prevent a breach of peace”, ANI reported.

The restrictions prohibit gatherings of five or more people, carrying lathis or dangerous weapons, and activities that could disrupt public harmony.

The restricted area includes the vicinity of Kolkata Medical College and Hospital in central parts of the city.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Six United States lawmakers, including Pramila Jayapal and Ilhan Omar, have urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to raise with Indian authorities concerns about alleged police excesses against those protesting to demand Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation and the suspension of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

Rubio will be visiting Mumbai and Jamnagar between October 19 and October 22. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar will travel to Mumbai to meet the Trump official on October 20.

In a social media post on Saturday, Indian-born Jayapal said that the US and India have an obligation to defend human rights as the world’s largest democracies.

In a letter addressed to Rubio on Friday, Jayapal, Omar, Jim McGovern, Rashida Tlaib, Eleanor Holmes Norton, and Jesus Garcia expressed concern about a “pattern of repression, wrongful detention, and excessive use of force” by authorities in India during nationwide protests to demand Kumar’s resignation.

This came against the backdrop of protests in the national capital and other parts of the country since October 2 over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

On October 10, around 7,000 protesters in Delhi were detained and allegedly assaulted for taking part in the demonstrations.

The Democratic Party leaders, in their letter, urged Rubio to press the Indian government to investigate the alleged human rights violations during the protests and release any persons detained “for peacefully exercising the rights of freedom of expression and assembly”.

The lawmakers also accused the Indian diplomatic missions in the US of surveilling protesters on American soil.

“Members of US human rights organisations and the Indian diaspora who joined protests in Washington DC, Chicago and San Francisco disclosed that they had been photographed by individuals who identified themselves as having been hired by the Indian embassy and the consulates general,” read their letter.

Tweet does not exist

The trigger for the protests in India was a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

India responds to Jayapal’s comments on SIR

On Wednesday, Jayapal said that the Indian government’s actions to “purge” 13 crore persons from the electoral rolls through the special intensive revision appeared similar to measures being taken by the Donald Trump administration to “undermine voting rights in a democracy”.

Since the special intensive revision began in June 2025, concerns have been raised that the revision could eliminate genuine voters from the rolls and even shape electoral outcomes, as Scroll has reported. Overall, more than 13 crore names have been removed from voter lists and draft rolls since the first phase of the exercise in June 2025 in Bihar.

Responding to Jayapal’s comments on Friday, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that the remarks were “unwarranted and uninformed, and tantamount to interfering in the electoral practices of a democracy”.

“This is an approach that undermines democracy itself,” Jaiswal added.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Sneha.

A Delhi court on Saturday ordered the police to release Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke a day after he was placed under preventive arrest, reported Live Law.

The conditions imposed on Dipke will be clear once the bail order passed by the special executive magistrate is made public. However, one of the conditions will require him to maintain peace for one year.

He was released from Mandir Marg police station after being granted bail, reported ANI.

Dipke and student leader Neha Bora had been detained on Friday in connection with separate demonstrations in central Delhi. Bora was released on Saturday at 5 am.

Earlier in the day, the Cockroach Janta Party said that Dipke’s whereabouts were “still unknown” and that his lawyers had not met him.

He was detained when he was on his way to Connaught Place in central Delhi for the campaign’s “Lehra Do Tiranga” demonstration.

The demonstration to wave the national flag in central Delhi was announced as a response to the arrest of the campaign’s leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde on Wednesday.

Ranka and Das were sent to judicial custody for five days by the special executive magistrate court, while Shinde was released on a personal bond.

The three men had been arrested after they “sneaked into” Jantar Mantar to protest the authorities’ decision to denotify the area as a designated protest site.

Police notice to Dipke

Before he was detained on Friday, the police had served a notice to Dipke, ordering him not to hold a protest at Connaught Place, citing heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic in the area. The police said that a demonstration at such a location could “hamper emergency access”.

The police added that orders prohibiting gatherings of four or more persons are in force in central Delhi and warned that violations could invite charges of disobedience.

The notice also claimed that the political campaign had previously violated the conditions under which permission was granted to it for protests. This had resulted in a breach of peace and disruption of public order, said the police, in an apparent reference to protests in July against alleged irregularities in several competitive examinations.

Protests against CEC

Dipke and other leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party were arrested against the backdrop of protests in the national capital by the the political campaign, the Opposition parties and student groups to demand the resignation of Kumar over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

Protests against Kumar have been held in the national capital and other parts of the country since October 2.

The trigger for the protests was a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: How the Modi government radicalised a generation to rise in revolt against it

“Twenty years ago, all this was paddy,” says Nazir Ahmad, a farmer from Qaimoh, a village in south Kashmir’s Kulgam district, pointing at the rows of apple saplings that now cover his land. Today, much of that landscape has changed. The irrigation channels set up for paddy still exist, running through the fields as they always have. However, the paddy they once fed has given way to apple plantations.

Across Kashmir, farmers are increasingly replacing food crops with horticulture, especially apple orchards, as they seek higher returns amid rising cultivation costs.

For many growers, the calculation is straightforward. Paddy offers modest returns, while apples, particularly high-density plantations, promise significantly higher earnings. The move makes economic sense for individual farmers. However, this is now leading to Kashmir Valley becoming increasingly dependent on outside states for its staple food – rice.

Nisar Ahmed from Kulgam district in Kashmir, used to cultivate paddy on his nine-kanal (0.46 hectares) farmland, which earned him between Rs 30,000 and Rs 50,000 annually. A few years ago, he converted the land into a high-density apple orchard because he was facing losses. After the shift, Nisar and his family saw a considerable increase in their earnings. “Every season, we earn around Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh,” he said.

Fareed Ahmed Wagay, a farmer who converted six kanals (0.30 hectares) of paddy land into an apple orchard also said that paddy cultivation could not fetch healthy returns. “As a result, hundreds of farmers are now shifting towards horticulture and planting high-density apple trees.”

A changing agricultural map

The transformation has been underway for decades. A 2019 study based on Landsat satellite imagery found that agricultural land in Kashmir Valley declined by around 28% between 1992 and 2015, while plantation cover increased by about 88%. The expansion of plantations was part of a broader shift in land use that came alongside a decline in agricultural land, the study said.

The latest official figures suggest the trend has continued. Jammu and Kashmir’s paddy acreage has fallen to 258,840 hectares in 2024-2025 from 304,500 hectares in 2015-2016, a drop of around 15%. Conversely, the area under apple increased to 173,073 hectares in 2024-2025 from 107,930 hectares in 2004-2005, an increase of around 60%.

Another study examining land-use changes across the Kashmir Himalaya between 1990 and 2017 found that cropland agriculture declined by around 5%, while horticulture expanded by around 4.3%. The researchers linked the changes to economic, demographic and natural drivers and warned that declining agricultural land could pose a threat to regional food security.

The contrast is particularly visible in Kashmir’s traditional rice-growing belts – Anantnag, Kulgam, Pulwama, being a few districts.

In Kulgam, the area under apple is now more than twice the area under paddy. According to government data, only 6,951 hectares remained under paddy in 2024-2025, compared to 18,255 hectares under apple. In the neighbouring Pulwama district, paddy covered 10,990 hectares, while apple orchards occupied 15,928 hectares.

A spatial land-use analysis published in 2020 found that the area under rice cultivation in Kulgam district declined from 18,500 hectares to 12,900 hectares between 2011 and 2020, a loss of 5,600 hectares. Over the same period, land under apple orchards increased from 14,667 hectares to 20,787 hectares.

A 2022 study of Anantnag found that around 6,908 hectares of agricultural cropped area had shifted towards horticulture. Among surveyed farmers, the area under paddy fell from around 83% in 2000-2001 to 40% in 2014-2015, while apple cultivation increased from around 16% to 59%.

Yet, the precise scale of paddy-to-orchard conversion for the whole of Kashmir Valley remains difficult to establish. That is because the Agriculture Department does not maintain data on how much paddy land has been converted into orchards, according to Sartaj Ahmad Shah, Director Agriculture in Kashmir. He, however, acknowledged that Kashmir’s dependence on rice supplies from outside the region has increased, as paddy cultivation has declined.

While a regulation from 2022 addresses the conversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes, which requires permission from the concerned District Collector, no other policy specifically looks at paddy-to-orchard conversion to protect paddy regions.

The economics of the shift

For farmers, the move is largely about returns. Sameena Lone, a researcher at the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology of Kashmir, said the shift reflects rational economic choices rather than a rejection of food crops.

“Apple orchards can generate several times the returns from paddy per unit of land, while shrinking landholdings due to fragmentation push farmers towards higher-value crops,” Lone told Mongabay-India.

A study of household-level paddy production in Kulgam between 2007 and 2014 also found that farmers were already moving away from food crops towards cash crops, particularly apple, almond and walnut, as horticulture was considered more remunerative.

“Converting paddy fields into perennial orchards changes soil structure and moisture regimes,” Lone said. Orchards require less standing water than paddy, but depend on irrigation at critical stages and are vulnerable to weather events during flowering.

As orchards expand, she said, the cropping pattern is also narrowing, potentially increasing farmers’ exposure to market fluctuations, pests, disease and climate-related shocks.

A recent hailstorm in South Kashmir illustrates that vulnerability. Several apple-growing villages in Shopian and Kulgam suffered extensive crop damage, with some areas reporting losses for the third time that season. For grower Mohd Shafi Wagay, the damage threatened his family’s annual income. “Almost our entire orchard is completely damaged,” he said.

A changing water landscape

The agricultural transition is also unfolding against a changing water landscape.

A 2020 study of the Lidder watershed in Anantnag district found that agricultural land declined by 39% between 1980 and 2018, while orchard area expanded by 176%. The researchers linked the conversion of irrigation-intensive rice paddy to less water-intensive orchards to both economic considerations and declining streamflow.

The shift from paddy fields to orchards could also alter the Valley’s groundwater recharge patterns. According to Pir Rayees Ahmad, a hydrogeologist at Central Ground Water Board, paddy fields can act as natural recharge zones, as standing water during the growing season allows water to infiltrate the soil and replenish shallow aquifers.

“Orchards generally require less standing water and increasingly rely on localised irrigation methods. Consequently, opportunities for groundwater recharge decline,” he said.

Pir Rayees added that paddy fields also act as natural flood buffers by temporarily storing rainfall and irrigation water, slowing runoff and reducing flood peaks. Their conversion can reduce this storage capacity, potentially increasing flooding and waterlogging, particularly within the Jhelum floodplain, he said.

The food-security trade-off

Government data reports that Jammu and Kashmir produced around 6.5 lakh tonnes of rice in 2024-2025. Yet the region also relies heavily on government food supplies from outside.

Ashaq Hussain, a professor of agronomy at Kashmir’s agricultural sciences university, primarily attributes the reason for paddy decline to orchard conversion, followed by urbanisation and the expansion of roads and railway infrastructure.

“The conversion had affected Kashmir’s capacity to produce rice locally, although improvements in varieties and farm-management practices had helped raise productivity,” Hussain said.

He estimates that Jammu and Kashmir produces roughly 50%-55% of its own rice requirement, with 45%-50% coming from other states, particularly Punjab, through the Food Corporation of India. But not all agricultural land is equally suited to orchards, Hussain added.

“Lower-lying areas with high soil moisture are particularly suited to paddy, while converting such land to orchards can create problems including excess moisture, root rot and disease.”

Data from the Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs Department show that 4.86 lakh tonnes of rice were largely brought in from surplus states, particularly Punjab and Haryana, during 2024-2025, compared with 4.36 lakh tonnes in 2023-2024 and 3.74 lakh tonnes in 2022-2023.

Waseem Hassan, an FMCG wholesaler, described what he sees as growing demand for rice outside the ration system. “The ration is never sufficient for a household’s entire requirement, so people have to buy additional rice from the market,” he said.

The increasing reliance on rice from outside the region raises a larger question: How resilient is a food system when a staple that was once produced locally in abundance has to now increasingly be sourced through external supply chains?

Lone describes this as structural vulnerability, arguing that greater dependence on outside food supplies ties the Valley’s food security to transport networks, market conditions and the stability of supply routes.

Ejaz Ayoub, a Kashmir-based economist, argues that the movement away from paddy is a rational response to market forces.“Labour and resources flow towards things which have more returns,” he said.

From an economic perspective, Ayoub said, Kashmir need not produce everything it consumes. Instead, it can focus on crops in which it has a comparative advantage, such as apples, saffron, almonds and walnuts, and use the income generated from these crops to purchase commodities such as rice from elsewhere in the country.

However, another associate professor in the Department of Economics, University of Kashmir – Javaid Iqbal Khan, called the shift a “macro-level structural hazard.”

“The shift has accelerated with the spread of high-density apple plantations, which allow farmers to plant more trees per unit of land and are promoted as a more remunerative model of horticulture,” he said. “At the micro level, it is a rational and income-maximising decision. But when these individual decisions aggregate, they can create a macro-level structural hazard.”

The cumulative shift away from paddy can reduce the region’s capacity to produce its staple food, even as individual households become more prosperous. According to him the implications of this change need to be viewed in a social and dietary context. Unlike a commodity that can simply be substituted through trade, rice is a culturally entrenched staple in the Valley.

Khan cautioned that this model could create another form of vulnerability if household purchasing power for food becomes increasingly dependent on the performance of the apple economy.

Apple production, he noted, is itself vulnerable to spring hailstorms, autumn temperature fluctuations and global demand cycles. “A poor horticultural year could therefore reduce both farm incomes and the purchasing power available to buy food from outside.”

He described this as a “negative covariance” risk, in which the two sides of the food system become linked through the same vulnerable income stream.

A transition to be managed

This transition could become increasingly difficult to reverse, Khan explains. “It is very easy to move from paddy to apple, but it is increasingly going to be difficult to move from apple to paddy,” he said.

Apple is a perennial crop: once an orchard is established, returning the land to paddy is not as simple as changing the crop in the next planting season.

Lone argues, the solution is not to reverse Kashmir’s shift towards horticulture. “That would neither be realistic nor necessarily desirable given the importance of horticulture to farmers’ livelihoods,” she said.

Instead, she advocates protecting strategic paddy-growing areas as a food-security buffer, promoting diversified horticulture rather than excessive dependence on apples, investing in climate-resilient varieties and developing water-efficient irrigation systems suited to orchards.

At SKUAST-K’s Rice Research Station at Khudwani, scientists are pursuing another way of responding to the shrinking land base: producing more rice from the land that remains. The Vice Chancellor, Professor Nazir Ahmad Ganaie, said the station has developed high-yielding, disease-resistant and climate-resilient paddy varieties, with some showing yield potential of up to 12 tonnes per hectare. He also pointed to technologies such as direct-seeded rice that can reduce water and labour requirements.

“On the one hand, our population is increasing, agricultural land is shrinking, and climate change and global warming are creating new challenges,” Ganaie said. “On the other hand, our food requirements are increasing.”

Meanwhile not all farmers are moving away from paddy. Bashir Ahmad, a farmer from Bijbehara, continues to cultivate rice, citing assured irrigation, manageable costs and the needs of his family of nine.

“I grow paddy because I have assured irrigation and the costs are manageable,” Bashir said, adding that the fruit economy was riskier because of climate uncertainties. He said high-density apple plantations require significant investment, while traditional orchards can take years to become productive.

For Bashir, paddy also provides food security, particularly as rice prices rise and ration supplies do not meet his family’s entire requirement. He said some farmers also grow traditional Kashmiri rice varieties for the market, where they can fetch good prices and are sought after for occasions such as weddings.

“If we lose the crop, we could lose both our income and the food we produce,” he said.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

A Delhi court on Saturday issued a bailable warrant against YouTuber Dhruv Rathee in a defamation case filed against him in 2018 regarding a video he had posted on his channel, reported Bar and Bench.

The case had been filed by Vikas Sankrityayan, alias Vikas Pandey, after Rathee posted a video in May 2018 alleging that the Bharatiya Janata Party’s publicity wing had bribed the complainant to defame the YouTuber.

Then-Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had shared the video on social media.

On Saturday, Judicial Magistrate Rahul Jain of Saket Court was told that summons could not be served to Rathee earlier this week because his home was found locked, reported Bar and Bench.

On October 12, the court issued summons to Rathee after Pandey moved an application seeking early hearing of the matter on the grounds that the YouTuber, who otherwise lives abroad, was in India for protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, reported Live Law.

The next hearing is scheduled for October 31.

On October 10, Rathee was detained by the Delhi Police from Gurugram ahead of a protest by youth groups to demand the resignation of Kumar. The YouTuber had arrived in the national capital a day earlier to participate in the protest.

Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court has said that every citizen, including children, has a fundamental right to use the internet.

“To deny the same altogether would be as absurd as saying children below a certain age do not have a conscience worth protecting or a freedom of speech worth expressing,” said a bench of Justices JB Pardiwala and K Vinod Chandran in an order passed on Thursday.

The bench was hearing a petition alleging that social media platforms were failing to meet their legal obligations to report child sexual exploitation and abuse material to the authorities.

In its judgement, the court deliberated whether children should be completely shielded from the internet and social media platforms.

However, it pointed out that children's safety and freedom were not at odds. “Our children are entitled to both,” the court noted.

The observations came months after the BBC reported that it had found that social media platform Instagram, which is owned by Meta, had been running paid advertisements that promote child sexual abuse material in India.

Publishing or transmitting child sexual abuse material is illegal and constitutes a serious criminal offence under the 2000 Information Technology Act and the 2012 Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act.

The advertisements use phrases such as “rape video” and “child video”, and direct users to channels on the messaging application Telegram, where such material can be purchased, the BBC reported on July 3.

Two days later, the Union government issued a notice to Meta, directing it to disable all advertisements and content allegedly promoting access to child sexual abuse material.

Internet a ‘marketplace of ideas’: SC

During the hearing on Thursday, the Supreme Court pointed out that the internet functioned as a marketplace of ideas, creative expression and a means to gather information. “For many children, particularly in remote areas, it is often the only source of learning and information,” added the bench.

For children with special needs, the bench said, the internet was often the only place to find companionship.

The court noted that recently there have been growing efforts globally to limit internet access for children below a certain age, especially social media platforms, “in the name of their safety”.

However, upon “anxious consideration”, the court decided not to endorse the same.

Social media ban on children

This came against the backdrop of Australia, in December, becoming the first country to block social media for those under 16.

In June, the United Kingdom also announced that it will ban users under the age of 16 from accessing social media to protect them from being exposed to “dangerous” and harmful content

Two Indian states are planning to ban the use of social media for children under the age of 16.

In March, Siddaramaiah, the Karnataka chief minister at the time, announced that the state government will ban the use of social media for children under the age of 16. He did not mention when the ban would take effect.

The Andhra Pradesh government had also said in 2025 that it was considering a ban on social media for children in that age group.

After the Karnataka government’s announcement, advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation had said that child safety online “demands serious, evidence-based policy not headline-driven prohibitions”.

In India, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act requires a data fiduciary to obtain verifiable consent from a parent or lawful guardian before processing the personal data of a child.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Sneha.

The International Monetary Fund has said that Bangladesh’s per capita gross domestic product is higher than that of India in 2026.

The per capita gross domestic product of Bangladesh at current prices is $2,886 against India’s $2,749, according to long-term data and forecasts in IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook published on October 13.

Per capita gross domestic product is a measure of a country’s economic output per person. It is calculated by dividing the country's gross domestic product by its population.

The average per capita gross domestic product in emerging markets and developing economies is about $7,746. The global average is about $15,889.

In 2027, Bangladesh’s per capita gross domestic product is estimated to be $3,219, ahead of India’s $3,036, the data showed. Bangladesh will maintain the marginal lead in 2028.

However, in 2029, India’s per capita gross domestic product of $3,661 will top Bangladesh’s $3,334, according to the International Monetary Fund.

A previous version of the report published on April 14 said that the per capita gross domestic product of Bangladesh at current prices at the time was $2,911 against India’s $2,812.

In 2025, India’s per capita gross domestic product was $2,670, marginally ahead of Bangladesh’s $2,635, the data had shown at the time. However, Bangladesh was leading India in 2023 and 2024.

The data in April had also shown that India’s per capita gross domestic product in 2027 was estimated to be ahead of Bangladesh. It also showed that India was projected to lead Bangladesh in terms of per capita gross domestic product till at least 2031.

However, the data released on October 13 showed that India’s per capita gross domestic product will not regain the lead until 2029.

The World Economic Outlook is a survey usually published twice a year that analyses the global economy and makes projections in the near and medium terms.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha and Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: Why do India-Bangladesh GDP comparisons generate so much controversy?

Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke has been placed under preventive arrest, the political campaign said on Saturday.

Dipke and student leader Neha Bora had been detained on Friday in connection with separate demonstrations in central Delhi. Bora was released several hours after being detained.

The Cockroach Janta Party founder will be presented before the magistrate court on Saturday.

Dipke’s whereabouts were “still unknown” and that his lawyers had not met him, the campaign’s legal affairs head said.

He was detained when he was on his way to Connaught Place for the campaign’s “Lehra Do Tiranga” demonstration.

The demonstration to wave the national flag in central Delhi was announced as a response to the arrest of the campaign’s leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde on Wednesday.

Bora, the head of the All India Students’ Association, was detained while participating in a flash protest by the student group near Barakhamba Road to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

#WATCH | Delhi: AISA National President Neha Bora says, "Law and order are being flouted in every possible way. Ordinary citizens are treated as if they were hardened criminals, a practice that has persisted in this country for a long time. The current movement has clearly… https://t.co/s5EqwjaPfG pic.twitter.com/3gAeYHI60r

— ANI (@ANI) October 17, 2026

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

Before detaining Dipke on Friday, the police had served him notice, ordering him not to hold a protest at Connaught Place, citing heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic in the area. The police said that a demonstration at such a location could “hamper emergency access”.

The police added that orders prohibiting gatherings of four or more persons are in force in central Delhi and warned that violations could invite charges of disobedience.

After the police detained Dipke, the Cockroach Janta Party said that the action was a “gross violation” of his rights. “Every arrest this government makes, more youth will hit the streets!” said the political campaign.

On October 11, a day after Dipke, Ranka and Das were detained from inside an aircraft after it landed in Delhi ahead of a protest against Kumar, a magistrate court had ordered their release on the condition that they do not breach peace for one year.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

United States President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order putting on hold a law that allows him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on India and other countries that purchase Russian oil and gas.

Trump told the US Congress that the waiver was in the interest of the US.

While Trump had given his assent to the legislation on September 18, the signing of the bill into law had not automatically triggered the tariffs.

The law states that the tariffs could apply to the five countries that imported the largest volumes of Russian crude oil or natural gas in the 12 months before the law takes effect, if they knowingly continue buying Russian crude oil 30 days after the law is enacted.

The president’s order pausing the implementation of the law comes before the 30-day period was to conclude on Sunday.

Trump’s decision also came a week after he announced that the US had agreed to purchase diesel from Russia to lower global energy prices. This was despite such a purchase potentially hurting its partner Ukraine in its war with Russia.

Washington has for long claimed that the purchase of Russian energy has been fuelling Moscow’s war on Ukraine, which began in February 2022.

The sanctions bill was passed by the House of Representatives on September 16. The Senate had cleared it on August 7. The law is named after late Republican legislator Lindsey Graham, who had spearheaded it before he died in July.

The tariffs were to also target any of the five countries identified as helping Russia evade oil-related sanctions.

However, countries that have significantly reduced their imports of Russian natural gas, or whose Russian gas imports account for less than 15% of Russia’s gas exports, would be exempt.

After the bill was passed in the US Congress, India’s Ministry of External Affairs had said that New Delhi is committed to ensuring energy security for its people. “It will continue to do so through diversified sourcing and on the basis of evolving market dynamics,” it said.

Over the past year, there have been diplomatic tensions between Washington and New Delhi over India’s continued purchases of Russian crude oil.

The Trump administration had in August 2025 imposed a 25% punitive levy on India for buying oil from Russia amid the Ukraine war. This had taken the combined US tariff rate to 50%.

In January, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed that India had stopped buying Russian oil after Trump imposed the punitive tariff.

In February, after New Delhi and Washington agreed to an interim trade deal, Trump removed the additional 25% punitive levy linked to the purchase of Russian oil.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Karnataka High Court on Friday quashed a criminal case against former Republic TV Editor Arnab Goswami and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Amit Malviya registered for their claims that the Congress has an office in Istanbul, Bar and Bench reported.

Justice M Nagaprasanna was hearing petitions filed by Goswami and Malviya to quash the first information report against them.

On May 15, 2025, during a news segment on the TV channel, Goswami had falsely claimed that the Istanbul Congress Center is an office of the Indian National Congress. The building shown during the show is a convention centre owned by the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Alt News reported.

Malviya had shared a video on May 17, 2025, asking why the Congress had a registered office in Turkey.

“Did you know that the Congress Party has a registered office in Turkey?” he wrote on social media. “Can Rahul Gandhi explain what necessitated this move? This is bizarre and inexplicable on multiple levels. India deserves to know. Remember: the enemy’s friend is an enemy too.”

The Bengaluru Police had at the time booked Goswami, and Malviya on a separate complaint by an Indian Youth Congress leader. The FIR had been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot and intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace.

The complainant had alleged that the claim was made “with clear and undeniable criminal intent to deceive the Indian public”, defame the party, manipulate nationalist sentiments and undermine national security and democratic integrity”.

Republic TV said in May 2025 that the image had been mistakenly used by a video editor on the digital desk due to a “technical error”.

However, the Congress had said that an apology was not sufficient as redressal for the error.

The Indian Youth Congress had further noted that the claims were made in the context of frosty India-Turkey relations because of Ankara’s support for Pakistan during heightened tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad after Operation Sindoor.

Although the Congress had announced plans in 2019 to open an overseas office in Istanbul and appointed Mohammad Yusuf Khan to lead it, there have been no updates since, and Turkey is not listed on the Indian Overseas Congress website, Alt News reported in May 2025.

The Delhi High Court is also hearing a defamation case against Goswami in the matter.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

At around 2 pm on October 2, around one hundred students from the All India Students’ Association made an attempt to reach Jantar Mantar in Delhi. The protestors were demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls.

As they approached, they chanted, “Vote Chor, Gaddi Chhod!”, vote thief, leave your seat.

Delhi Police personnel intercepted the group and began to chase protestors in an attempt to detain them. The protestors dodged the police. “Dilli Police wardi kholo, RSS ka knicker pehno!” they chanted as they ran. Delhi police take off your clothes, put on RSS shorts.

Among the students was Sahil, a 17-year-old first-year student of sociology from Hindu College. “I was part of the group that broke through two sets of barricades to reach Jantar Mantar,” said Sahil, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym. “We were detained near the third one.”

In the throes of the protest, Sahil said, he was beaten by the police and suffered some bruises. The police herded Sahil and protestors onto a bus, and drove them in circles for a few hours, before finally releasing them close to Delhi’s border with Haryana. “My hands were shaking throughout the bus ride even though I knew from beforehand that we were only going there to get detained,” said Sahil.

From the border, Sahil took a bus and a metro and reached home around 9 pm. His parents had no idea that he had been detained or even taken part in the protest. “I had told them that I would be home late because of a cultural event at college,” he said.

This was the second time in five months that Sahil stepped out to protest. In June, Sahil had joined thousands of other youth at Jantar Mantar in protests led by the Cockroach Janata Party pressure group to demand the resignation of the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan over irregularities in the national exam for medical college seats.

Sahil has been participating in agitations even though he knows this family would probably disapprove of his actions. “Most of my relatives are teachers whose understanding of education has always been apolitical,” he said. “My parents believe politics exists outside of the domestic sphere. They think kids should not be involved in protests, as they will only be used by political parties for their own ends.”

Despite this, Sahil said he had felt a growing sense of frustration and anger against the union government for several years. He decided to start giving vent to these emotions when he learnt about the Cockroach Janata Party’s protests in June against the leaks of the papers for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test for medical colleges – this despite the fact that he is a student of a different discipline.

“The starting point was indeed NEET,” he said. “But it’s the nature of protests that as more people join, the spectrum of issues also expands, and there are so many issues that people are angry about.”

Sahil’s account of his decision to participate in the protests captures something of the present moment of tumult in the country, in which young “Gen Z” protestors have taken to the streets in huge numbers.

Scroll spoke to ten young protestors in Delhi and Mumbai to understand how their worldviews were shaped and what had drawn them to the streets. Six of the ten said they had been manhandled or detained by police during the protests.

Like Sahil, most said they had felt anger build up over time as a result of several crises. Apart from the NEET paper leaks and the contentious SIR, they also mentioned what they saw as the government’s mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis and its decision to push through the Citizenship Amendment Act and to announce a National Register of Citizens.

Many were also frustrated by the government’s ineffective education reforms and the damage these are doing to the education system, as well as rising unemployment, and an increasing dilution of personal and political freedoms.

“A lot of people did come because of the education system and everything that's wrong with it,” said Vanessa, a political science student in Delhi. “But I went because of the larger issues that we have faced as a country in the past 12 years.”

She added, “I recently turned 21, so these protests were the first time where I felt like I could participate in dissent and express my own dissatisfaction with the government.”

While the young protestors have displayed great courage, they are also aware of the real risks they face by voicing their dissent on the streets. “I am really scared about it. I am not gonna lie,” said 18-year-old Shubhi Singh, a student of Hindu College. “But if I don’t stand up today, I am more scared of how things will only get worse in the future. What kind of world will we leave for the next generation?”

Personal experiences and political consciousness

Like with Sahil, three other students Scroll spoke to said their parents were also totally unaware about their involvement in the protests. Many of the students asked to be identified only by their first names. Some asked to remain anonymous.

Eighteen-year-old Khiteesh said that his parents do not know that he was brutally lathi-charged on July 20, or that he has been detained by the police four times since July. On two of these occassions, he jumped out of the bus to escape detainment.

Khiteesh who studies at Ambedkar University Delhi, belongs to a right-wing upper caste business family in eastern Delhi. “My parents are proper saffronised fascists,” he said. “We rarely talk about politics, but when they do talk about it, they are always like Modi is so great, he is a saviour of our religion.”

He added, “They know that our economy is not doing that well, that prices are rising quite fast. But they don’t care about all that.”

Vaishnavi Sonawane, a 26-year-old, lives in Mumbai, and has participated in protests in the city. She also travelled to Delhi for the protests in July, and again in October. On the latter visit, she said, she was manhandled by the police. Her parents, who live in Gujarat, do not know about her political activities.

Despite this absence of political engagement in their families, many young people told Scroll that they grew interested in politics because of the various government policies and decisions that had hurt them over the years. Some of these played out before these young people became adults.

In 2020, for instance, Vanessa was studying in school in Lucknow when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. When her father, who had a government job fell ill during this period, Vanessa remembers that her family desperately hunted for an oxygen cylinder. “My dad was in need of pretty serious medical help,” she said. “We finally managed to admit him in what was the last vacant hospital bed in Lucknow, I think after three days.”

Vanessa added, “And this was for someone coming from substantial privilege. I can only imagine what the other people went through.”

This experience and her wider conclusion that the government had mismanaged the pandemic “radicalised” her, she said. “I had always known there was something wrong with the government, but after that I was like this government has to go,” Vanessa said. “They had the resources to prepare, but they didn’t.”

Khiteesh too said that the Covid-19 pandemic shaped his political ideology. Though he was not seriously impacted personally, he keenly remembers the struggles of his fellow citizens during that time. “I was horrified to see how common people were suffering on my socials,” he said. “Covid really exposed the inequality in our country.”

During this time, he also noticed communal discrimination by the authorities in his own neighbourhood when it came to helping ordinary families. “I live in an area dominated by Jain and Brahmin families,” he said. “But just next door there is a Muslim majority community and I remember how they were struggling to dispose of their dead.”

In some instances, earlier waves of protest sowed seeds of dissent in young people, who took to the streets in the recent agitations. “Before 2022, I wasn’t that interested in politics,” said 22-year-old Mohammed Akram, a resident of Loni, in Ghaziabad. But when the CAA-NRC protests played out in 2019, “I remember thinking that the government wants to remove minorities from living in the country and put them in camps where they won’t even have basic facilities”, he said.

This sentiment stayed with Akram over the years, and earlier this year, he gave voice to it on Delhi’s streets. In fact, he went further than most. Akram used to work as a hairdresser until June, but quit his job then to participate in the Jantar Mantar protests and work as a full-time organiser for the All India Students Association.

Some young people, from marginalised caste, religious and gender groups, explained that their political leanings were deeply entwined with their community identity. Vanessa, who is from an Adivasi community said, “Both my parents instilled a sense of community identity in me, as we were raised outside of our native place. So ever since the NDA [National Development Alliance] government came into power in 2014, I have known that it was bad for our people.”

Twenty-year-old Karishma, a 20-year-old literature student who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, explained that her Christian identity was crucial to her political development. “I don’t want to claim that Christians get the same kind of hatred that Muslims do,” she said. “But there is a lot of marginalisation toward Christians that often gets ignored and it is definitely one of the things that has politicised me.”

She recounted occasions from her school days, when her classmates would scream “Jai Shri Ram” at minority students, egged on by their sports teachers. “There was a lot of anger toward Christians because my school had minority reservation for Christian students, as a lot of institutions do,” she said.

Over the years, she grew to realise that these experiences were connected to a larger environment of intolerance perpetrated by the ruling dispensation’s Hindutva ideology. She also became aware of common prejudices and slurs that her community was at the receiving end of – for instance, the term “rice bag converts”.

Her growing political consciousness was only sharpened by incidents in which she also experienced discrimination from people she did not know. She recalled that a few years ago, she was travelling in a general compartment of the Delhi metro, wearing a chain with a crucifix visible on her neck. “There was a pundit seated across me, and he kept staring at me, until I tucked the cross inside my top,” she said. “After that, he nodded at me and looked away.”

Education crises

Several students told Scroll about their concerns about the dilution of the quality of education, at both the school and higher levels.

“I come from a small Muslim neighbourhood in Ghaziabad,” Akram said. “We have very basic facilities and the quality of our schools is terrible. There is not much scope for our youth.”

Akram wanted to continue his studies after school, but had to stop because his father’s health deteriorated around then. “I wanted to attend college in Delhi but I had to earn money to keep my family running,” he said. “I still hope to study further someday.”

He explained that he quit his job because he believed that individuals needed to organise and fight for a better future. “See, I might be able to get out of my neighbourhood,” he said. “But then I think of all the children in my neighbourhood. With the way things are going in this country, what kind of future awaits them?”

Twenty-one-year-old Manav from Rajasthan is pursuing a master’s degree from Delhi University. He spoke of how he believed that working-class students who sought upward mobility were being failed by changes made to the education system, especially under the New Education Policy. “The quality of education has declined significantly,” he said. “In several colleges of Delhi University, regular classes are not being held and the recruitment process of professors is botched.”

Manav observed that the policy had led to poorly planned increases in student course loads, which prevented many, like him, from preparing for their professional futures. “The NEP has been a major hindrance,” he said. “Earlier, our classes used to get over by the afternoon and we had time to prepare for government exams. But now our classes get over by 5 pm, so we are tired by then and we also have multiple assignments. So we can’t attend coaching classes.”

He added, “Someone like me can’t afford to study until the age of 30. The entire ecosystem has become very repressive.”

Sharanya, a 20-year-old student of Ambedkar University Delhi, and a member of the Student’s Federation of India, echoed these observations. “Students have been feeling the pressure,” she said. “They’ve realised that no matter how much they study, they still don’t qualify for NET or JRF. And then they find out that answer papers are being sold for Rs 3- 5 lakh.”

She also noted that campus infrastructure and the quality of teaching had also suffered dramatically in the last decade. “In many campuses, the buildings are crumbling, and students don't get basic facilities, such as water coolers,” said Sharanya. “Meanwhile students are dying in paying guest homes.”

She recounted that while her semester had started in August, they had no classes for two months because some faculty members were only appointed in early October. This was despite the fact that students paid fees of between Rs 40,000 and Rs 50,000 per semester. “So when all this happened to students, I think it caused enough anger and resentment among them to finally figure out what is wrong,” she said.

In fact, apart from joining centralised protests, students have also been expressing frustration with the conditions in colleges and universities across Delhi – in addition to elsewhere in the country. In early October, protests were underway in at least three universities or colleges, and students I spoke to were also involved in these protests on their campuses.

One of these was Ambedkar University Delhi. Khiteesh said that students had been protesting since late September over poor infrastructure, barricading that restricts student movement and a lack of water supply in water coolers, among other problems.

Meanwhile, students from the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union have been on hunger strike since October 4 over rules by the proctor that impose penalties on those who hold protests, and over concerns with the renovation of campus infrastructure, as well as to demand the restoration of the university’s internal entrance exam system.

Students from Hindu College said that they had been protesting along with their professors for three weeks over alleged admission irregularities and the authoritarian functioning of the governing body. “There are also many arbitrary rules such as students not being allowed to access the lawns,” said 18-year-old Shubhi Singh, a student of the college. “Even though our professors tell us that the lawns were easily available earlier and students used to sit and study there on sunny days during the winter.”

Students also spoke of how the weakening of the education system had left them to fend for themselves when it came to employment. Sonawane, who earned a bachelor’s degree in technology from a small university in Gujarat, recalled how as a student she knew her curriculum was not training her for a well-paying job.

“Engineering is meant to be a promising degree,” she said. “But as an engineering student, I understood how badly the system was failing us. There is virtually no employment opportunity.”

Sonawane added, “I graduated two years ago, I remember companies coming on campus and offering annual packages of Rs 3.5 lakh, and my peers took it.”

News media and the internet

All ten young people I spoke to said either that they never watched television news channels, or that they only remembered watching them in their childhood, and now only consumed online sources of information.

Most named internet content creators such as Dhruv Rathee, Meghnad, Kunal Kamra and Medusa among those whose work they followed. They also expressed a preference for print media, such as newspapers like The Hindu and the Indian Express, and independent media outlets like The Wire or Newslaundry, as sources of information, over television channels.

Many developed these news diets despite having grown up in relatively conservative environments. Sonawane, for instance, recounted that her friends in Gujarat were largely pro BJP. At home, meanwhile, her parents either watched “hyperlocal news” or “godi media”.

But Sonawane was exposed to liberal and left-wing views online. For instance, she recounted watching satirical American talk shows hosted by Jon Stewart, John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel. “I was 19 when I watched these shows, and I was really enjoying it,” she said. “So I started reading up on geopolitics to know what’s happening in the Middle East, what's happening in the US. Eventually, I felt guilty that I should know what's happening in my own country, and then I started reading up on Indian politics.”

Avanish, a 25-year-old from a conservative Hindu family in Assam, said that around 2019, he began to seek out reading material online in response to the social upheaval in the country around the CAA-NRC protests. He read Bhagat Singh’s Why I Am an Atheist and then To Young Political Workers, and then went on to learn about communism and figures such as Marx and Lenin. He also became a member of the branch of the Students Federation of India in Kota, where he was taking coaching classes for the Joint Entrance Exam.

He also recalled an air of unease in Kota when the Babri Masjid judgement was about to be announced in 2019. “I remember our coaching class was shut for the day,” he said. “When I went out in the morning with my friends to drink some tea, the stall owners told us to drink quickly as they too wanted to shut shop soon.”

Avanish also got a call from his father, warning him to stay indoors as he was expecting violence. “But when the verdict was basically declared in the favour of Hindus, no such rioting happened,” he said. “And everybody went about their day normally.”

Emotional and political

Despite their own politicisation over the years, many youth argued that one of the reasons the July protests had been successful was that the Cockroach Janata Party had maintained a somewhat ambiguous and apolitical ideology, and instead sought to tap into the broader emotional angst among youth.

“The momentum they gained, I don't think anyone else could have achieved that,” Karishma said. “And that’s because they actually grew under this banner of being apolitical.”

She added, “In a large part, it was because the NEET deaths were such an emotional issue. But it’s also because they systematically excluded a lot of overt politicisation too.”

Mansi Usha, a 25-year-old from an informal settlement in Mumbai, noted that to many young people, the emotional appeal of the protests was itself political. She cited the example of 16- and 17-year-olds that she saw at the protests in Mumbai, who felt an emotional resonance with the movement despite not having clearly articulated political stances.

“They weren’t necessarily aware of the Constitution or our fundamental rights,” she said. Rather, they “connected what was happening to anime shows like One Piece”. And yet, she observed that they felt moved by news they had heard about. “They spoke of how the parents of the dead NEET aspirants must have felt and were moved to protest,” she said.

Later, when police began manhandling and detaining protestors, Usha said that many of these young people came forward in solidarity. “They saw what the police was doing to their friends and simply said this is wrong and joined the protests,” she said.

A few protestors spoke of how Jantar Mantar had turned into a much needed “third space” where people coming from varying backgrounds could discuss politics and social matters. “The concept of a third space has been almost eliminated in India,” said Khiteesh. “Earlier there were many, where people could talk to each other, but most of them are gone.”

Akram remembers being inspired by the speeches of left-wing student group leaders. “I was touched that despite being upper caste and Hindu, they were still speaking about caste and Muslim issues,” he said. “I began wondering why they were doing that and I realised that there’s something that lies outside my understanding. So, I decided I need to learn more from people.”

As was well documented on social media, in July, the protest site also became a place for young people to take satirical digs at the government, through memes, placards and videos. “A new language of protests emerged. People saw that the language of protests doesn’t necessarily have to be sombre. Dissent can also be joyful and humorous,” said Karishma. “Many people came to the protests because they felt deeply for the cause, but a lot of people also came just to enjoy themselves.”

But the risks that the young protestors faced were very real. Akram’s friends tried to dissuade him from going to the protests, reminding him that Muslims in the country have paid a higher cost for expressing dissent. While Akram saw reason in what they said, he felt that there was a sense of unity to the protests that had been missing earlier. “Agar ab nahi toh kab? Agar hum nahi toh kaun?” he said – if not now, then when, if not us, then who?

Last year, around the time of Durga Puja, public anxiety in West Bengal was mounting with reports of Bengali-speaking people being expelled across the border after being accused of being Bangladeshi.

There was nervousness about citizenship rights and the right to vote due to the approaching Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls.

In response, Durga Puja pandals erected for the state’s most popular festival became powerful vehicles for asserting Bengali identity.

For instance, the theme at the Chaltabagan Sarbojanin pandal in Kolkata was “Ami Banglay Bolchi”, I Am Speaking Bengali. It traced the history of the Bengali language. The Aswininagar Bandhumahal pandal explored the historical journeys of Bengalis through changing political and riverine landscapes. The pandal of the Ramgarh Raipur Club told the stories of migrant workers who could not return home for the festival.

These were artistic interventions confronting exclusion in a political climate in which language and identity had become grounds for suspicion.

In 2026, after the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the state elections, the new chief minister issued a warning before the festival. “All organisers are instructed to ensure that idols, pandal themes, and decorations strictly respect the rich religious traditions and cultural heritage of Durga Puja,” said Suvendhu Adhikari. “Any practice causing offense or harm to these traditions is strictly prohibited.”

However, visits to pandals across Kolkata this year show that dissent has not disappeared nor has every committee mounting pandals retreated from contemporary politics. Instead, the relationship between the political circumstances and its artistic representation appears more varied.

Some pandals have embraced overtly religious and nationalist narratives, while others explore power through themes of natural resources, labour and environmental change, inviting visitors to draw their own conclusions.

This shift raises a question: what happens when political messages can only be expressed indirectly?

This year, there has been a rise in environmental themes. The theme of the Yuba Sangha in Telipukur is “Ek Pukur Bhalobasha” (A Pondful of Love). It draws attention to the neighbourhood pond and the threats posed by pollution, urbanisation and commercialisation. The theme offers an affectionate portrait of a diminishing water body.

Yet the more difficult questions concern the political economy of its disappearance: who encroached on the pond, which development decisions reduced its size, and who benefited from its transformation? When ecological loss is presented primarily as a consequence of collective littering, responsibility risks becoming everyone’s and, therefore, nobody’s.

Other pandals reveal the tensions within this cautious vocabulary by trying to forge harmony between the sacred and the political. Nalin Sarkar Street’s “Jalalipi” explores the life of River Ganga and its possibility of death through pollution, repeatedly invoking the river as Maa Ganga even as its imagery recalls a familiar cultural reference – the Raj Kapoor film from 1985, Ram Teri Ganga Maili.

Its emphasis on reverence and pollution invites reflection on whether devotion can be separated from the political responsibilities of protecting a river.

Behala Club Sarbojanin’s “Tel: The Market of Faith” takes a more explicitly geopolitical route. Oil emerges through the mythological imagery of the Samudra Manthan, connecting the sacred narrative to a commodity that shapes domestic and sacred life, economic exchange and international power.

Its juxtaposition of ordinary people with world leaders makes the politics of extraction visible through an apparently familiar mythological material.

Thakurpukur SB Park’s Colliery, meanwhile, emphasises coal miners and the human costs of industrial extraction, crystallising its message in the observation that the most important thing to emerge from a mine is the miner.

The theme raises questions about environmental destruction, labour and corruption, although its political implications also invite scrutiny of how responsibility is distributed between successive governments.

Yet its retrospective emphasis on the failures of a previous government also exposes a familiar problem in political art: criticism can become partisan accounting when responsibility is confined to one administration and the structures that sustain extraction remain unexamined.

These examples demonstrate how indirect political art has become a mode through which artists negotiate the boundaries of permissible speech. The question is whether historical and religious references deepen political critique or become substitutes for confronting the present.

Environmental themes can provide language to raise questions than is relatively less confrontational language for raising questions that might otherwise become politically contentious. At the same time, however, such themes can sanitise these questions by translating conflicts about power into appeals for collective responsibility.

Whether environmental art sustains dissent depends on how far it moves from representing ecological damage to investigating its historical causes

The spine, the pillar

While themes of environmentalism and ecological ruin are capable of shifting attention from specific actors, at Barisha Club, indirect expression takes a different form as political ideals emerge from the pandal’s architecture.

“Kalrekha: The Story of Verticals” approaches political expression through historical and religious imagery. Its pillars trace the changing relationship between material structures, sacred forms and human understandings of the divine. The visual journey begins with the human spine, another vertical reaching towards the sky.

The metaphor carries political possibilities. The pillar derives its strength from its structure; the spine evokes the capacity to stand upright. Read in the context of the present moment, the installation suggests that institutions and traditions depend on the integrity of those who sustain them.

Its political force lies in implication rather than accusation. Visitors can connect the image of the upright spine to questions of courage, conformity and public responsibility without being directed towards a particular political conclusion.

However, such ambiguity should not automatically be celebrated as resistance. Coded expression can preserve a space for dissent, but it can also leave the object of criticism conveniently unspecified. Its significance depends on whether it opens a space for questioning authority or substitutes a general moral lesson for political analysis.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four offers a useful vocabulary for understanding this predicament. Thoughtcrime names the criminalisation of ideas that challenge an authorised political order. Its reach extends beyond explicit censorship. The anticipation of punishment can shape what people are willing to imagine, articulate and display.

In his essay The Prevention of Literature two years before, Orwell had similarly argued that intellectual freedom is indispensable to creative work. It withers when artists are compelled to falsify what they perceive, as artistic freedom depends upon the possibility of intellectual honesty.

Durga Puja in West Bengal has historically offered precisely the possibility of intellectual honesty. Since the late 20th century, its pandals have developed into art installations where histories of displacement, environmental destruction, labour and social inequality can be made visible. The politics of the pandal artists lies as much in their choice of subjects as in their treatment of them.

A change in artistic themes cannot, by itself, establish that organisers have been censored or intimidated. Nevertheless, artists and organising committees operate within networks of sponsorship, public administration, neighbourhood expectations and religious sentiment, and hence, their decisions about what to represent are consequently shaped by more than aesthetic considerations.

Historical and religious subjects have long occupied the festival’s artistic repertoire. Yet when direct engagements with contemporary politics give way to coded references, we must consider whether the change reflects an aesthetic choice, a strategic accommodation or a narrowing of the space for dissent.

The significance of Durga Puja’s pandals lies in their capacity to make competing histories and uncomfortable truths visible in public space. The question is whether this capacity can survive an atmosphere in which artists, organisers and vendors must anticipate the consequences of expression before acting.

Orwell’s warning remains pertinent: creative freedom diminishes when the artist begins censoring the imagination in advance. Environmental consciousness, religious history and cultural memory can all generate extraordinary art. But they cannot replace the freedom to identify those responsible for injustice.

The spine in Barisha Club’s Kalrekha offers a fitting image for the moment. The challenge before Bengal’s artists is to keep it straight, allowing the pandal to remain a place where the sacred can meet the political, and where celebration does not demand silence.

Amrita DasGupta has a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies and teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Student leader Neha Bora and Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke were detained on Friday.

Bora was detained while participating in a flash protest by the All India Students’ Association near Barakhamba Road in central Delhi to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Dipke had been detained on his way to Connaught Place for the political campaign’s “Lehra Do Tiranga” demonstration scheduled for 5 pm. The demonstration to wave the national flag in central Delhi was announced as a response to the arrest of Cockroach Janta Party leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde on Wednesday.

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

Against this backdrop, the Delhi Police denotified Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site in the national capital, based on recommendations from a committee constituted by the Union home ministry.

Here’s more on the protests today:

Notice to Dipke

• Earlier in the day, the police served a notice to Dipke, ordering him not to hold a protest at Connaught Place, citing heavy pedestrian and vehicular traffic at Connaught Place, reported IANS. The police said that a demonstration at such a location could “hamper emergency access”.

• The police told Dipke that disruptions at Connaught Place could disrupt businesses in the area, claiming that more than 15 lakh traders and employees depend on the orderly functioning of the marketplace.

• The police added that prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita are in place and warned that violations could invite charges of disobedience to an order duly promulgated by a public servant.

• It also raised concerns about the area’s proximity to Parliament, the Central Secretariat and diplomatic precincts.

• The notice also claimed that the political campaign had previously violated the conditions under which permission was granted to it for protests. This had resulted in a breach of peace and disruption of public order, said the police, in an apparent reference to protests in July against alleged irregularities in several competitive examinations.

• The group’s “unauthorised calls” for a march to Parliament in July had resulted in public and private property being damaged, the police claimed further.

• Visuals of the exchange between the police and Dipke were streamed on the Cockroach Janta Party’s social media pages. As Dipke read through the notice, he could be heard telling the police that the political campaign did not say it would stage a protest. “We will just wave the Tricolour,” he said. “Is that not allowed either?”

• After the police detained Dipke, the Cockroach Janta Party said that the action was a “gross violation of his rights”. “Every arrest this government makes, more youth will hit the streets!” said the political campaign.

• The campaign also alleged that Dipke was taken “to an undisclosed location”. “We have lost contact with him,” the Cockroach Janta Party said 7.57 pm. “He is not being allowed to talk to lawyers.”

How many will the Modi-Shah put under arrest?

Abhijeet’s detention is gross violation of his rights. Every arrest this government makes more youth will hit the streets! pic.twitter.com/rb0vqyBkbR

— Cockroach Janta Party - CJP (@Cockroachisback) October 16, 2026

Neha Bora taken to ‘unknown location’

• After Bora was detained, a post from their social media account said that they had been taken to “an unknown location”.

• “They don't have their phone!” read the post. “Delhi Police must answer: where is Neha?”

• AISA alleged that the vehicle in which Bora was detained had “two unidentified individuals who are not detainees, are assisting the Delhi Police and are not in police uniform”.

Several protesters detained

• Activist Anjali Bharadwaj said that hundreds of protesters, including hers, were detained by the police in the Central Park of Connaught Place.

• “Is it a crime to raise the national flag?” she asked. “Is it a crime to peacefully protest? Why is the govt so scared of people raising their voice to demand the scrapping of SIR and resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar?”

Hundreds detained by the Delhi Police today for trying to peacefully gather in the Central Park in Connaught Place. Is it a crime to raise the national flag? Is it a crime to peacefully protest? Why is the govt so scared of people raising their voice to demand the scrapping of… pic.twitter.com/owW5XNCs1e

— Anjali Bhardwaj (@AnjaliB_) October 16, 2026

Opposition leaders back CJP

• After Dipke was detained, former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee said that action is being taken against “our youth for peacefully asserting their democratic rights”. “This is nothing short of an undeclared Emergency,” she. “A government that fears dissent is now trying to intimidate an entire generation into silence.”

• Banerjee said that such detentions were part of a “fascist regime that cannot tolerate a voice it cannot control”.

• “Abhijeet, Ashutosh, Saurav – you represent the courage, conscience and aspirations of India’s youth,” said Banerjee. “You cannot silence an entire generation by suppressing its voice. Your Didi stands firmly with you.”

• Aam Aadmi Party president Arvind Kejriwal said Dipke’s detention was “nothing but outright dictatorship”. “Is it a crime to hoist the Tricolour?” he asked.

• Kejriwal also asked that if citizens would not hoist the national flag “in our own country, then will we hoist it in Pakistan”? “Those who have a problem with the Indian Tricolour should go to Pakistan,” he said.

हम अपने देश में तिरंगा नहीं लहरायेंगे तो क्या पाकिस्तान में लहरायेंगे?

जिन्हें भारतीय तिरंगे से परेशानी है, वो पाकिस्तान चले जायें। https://t.co/57vwsvtSVe

— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) October 16, 2026

Curbs ahead of CJP’s demonstration

• The Delhi Police was deploying more than 6,000 personnel in and around Connaught Place, the Hindustan Times reported. Barricades had been installed along roads near Connaught Place, Patel Chowk, ITO and Sansad Marg on Thursday, the newspaper reported.

• Additional surveillance cameras were being installed at Central Park and the Rajiv Chowk metro station in Connaught Place on Thursday, The Indian Express reported.

• This is in addition to the 26,000 personnel from the central armed police forces already deployed in central Delhi in the past week amid protests by the Cockroach Janta Party, the Opposition parties, Left groups and the civil society demanding the resignation of Kumar.

• The deployment of central police forces is among the largest in the national capital since the 2020 riots in northeastern Delhi, the Hindustan Times quoted an unidentified police officer as saying.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

On October 8, the US Department of Labour decided to stop processing PERM labour-certification requests from eight technology firms, including Microsoft, Adobe, Cognizant, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Capgemini. The Department of Labor said it would neither accept new applications nor process pending applications involving the named companies.

PERM, or Program Electronic Review Management, is the initial step in the employment-based green-card process for most immigrants applying under the EB-2 and EB-3 categories. In order to proceed to the next stage, employers are required to prove that they have tried to hire Americans for the jobs in question.

The processing of the applications has been suspended in accordance with 20 CFR § 656.31(b), which allows for the temporary interruption of services if there are grounds to believe that fraud or wilful misrepresentation is involved.

Notwithstanding the administration’s justification, it is important to study how allegations must not be confused with provided proof of fraudulent activity. Vice President JD Vance accused companies that employ people on H-1B visas of creating a caste of foreign indentured servants.

On the heels of the H-1B controversy came reports of investigations into the J-1 visa program, which have seen the involvement of dozens of American universities. In the context of Vance’s comments on H-1B visas and intensified scrutiny of J-1, the latest development suggest that the debate over America’s immigration policy and the prospects of its labour market will continue to gain momentum. This would, in the meantime, systematically erode India’s IT service sector’s integrative loop with American companies and vice-versa.

The stages of the H-1B-to-green-card process could therefore be described as entering the United States, living there as a worker, and eventually receiving permanent residency. Each of these possesses its own restrictions.

Successful applicants

Indian nationals comprise a significant part of successful H-1B applicants. A US Citizenship and Immigration Services’ FY2024 H-1B characteristics report says, Indians comprised 71% of successful applicants in 2024.

The immigration system has also become more expensive and unpredictable: the $100,000 H-1B fine announced in September 2025 was later clarified by USCIS to be applicable only to petitions made after September 21, 2025, as a one-time payment rather than an annual renewal.

This has become an IT programme. Infotech workers made up 32% of H-1B holders in fiscal 2003 and averaged over 65% across the last five fiscal years. H-1B status permits temporary employment, subject to immigration rules and the conditions of the petition. Workers may continue working lawfully while their green-card applications are delayed, provided their existing authorisation remains valid.

Program Electronic Review Management, or PERM, falls under the third category, which concerns the transition from being a temporary resident to receiving permanent residency. The suspension interrupts a stage of the process for affected applications, potentially delaying workers’ transition to permanent residency. Its consequences depend on the status of each application.

The size of the employment-based immigration backlog explains why the PERM suspension impacts individual workers: its immediate relevance for corporate profits is limited.

The Cato Institute estimated the US employment-based waiting list to contain approximately 1.8 million people in 2023, around 1.1 million of whom are Indians. This puts the portion of Indians in the queue at around 68%. The report estimated the time necessary to clear the backlog for Indian applicants to be up to 134 years with approximately 424,000 Indians dying before obtaining a visa.

This might have more of an impact than it seems, as permanent residency is a significant factor in the worker’s life, affecting their decision-making and planning. Another obstacle in their employment-based residency application might disrupt their lives severely.

Erosion of revenues

An RBI survey tracks an erosion in on-site revenues, from US$19 billion to US$18.4 billion. These are wages paid to staff members who work at client facilities overseas. The reduction implies that the traditional approach of sending numerous Indian professionals to work overseas is being de-emphasised relative to other approaches to technology services delivery. The larger industry trends confirm this shift.

Nasscom data reveals that Indian IT revenue totalled $315 billion in FY2025-26, up 6.1%, with exports of $246 billion, up 5.6%. The industry employed some 5.95 million workers and created about 135,000 net jobs in the past fiscal year. An American client can continue to buy software development, consulting, maintenance and other tech services from an Indian team without requiring those professionals to be based inside America.

A restriction on permanent residency might well impose genuine costs on workers while having limited impact on the revenue-generating capabilities of their employers. The differential impact will vary from company to company, project to project, and staffing model to staffing model, but the nuance explains how the market’s response to the policy change need not reflect the impact on individual workers’ circumstances.

For Indian IT companies, the PERM freeze may prove a small financial blow rather than a major threat to their business model. Most of their American revenue streams do not rely on having every employee on their payroll based in the US, and the fall in on-site earnings suggests an industry growing more capable of providing services beyond borders.

For Indian professionals, the implications are more personal. A green-card process that already takes years to complete has just become even more unpredictable for those considering applying, and for whose employers are affected. Even if their American jobs are unaffected, their plans for permanent residency may be set back.

And for India, the long-term impact is harder to assess. Restrictions on immigration may motivate multinational companies to invest more in local infrastructure, creating jobs and cementing India’s role as a centre for tech production. But it would also shift work away from Indian outsourcing firms and towards the captive centres of their American clients.

The short-term financial pain may be minimal.

The anxiety for those affected is however far greater. And the longer-term challenge will be whether the US can prevent a rush to move work to where it will have value, by closing access to where it currently does.

This moment also marks a troubling low-threshold point in US-India relations almost causing an irreparable harm to the long decadal diplomatic relationship between the two countries.

First, tariffs on Indian imports, and now restrictions on skilled human capital mobility from India to American companies could erode and dismantle core areas of economic integration between the two countries which was cementing a strong political bond as well. Where this leaves India and its economic integration strategy viz-a-viz the US (amidst a more conflicting relationship with China) should trouble policymakers than it seems to do in the current scenario.

Deepanshu Mohan is Professor of Practice and Director, Centre for New Economics Studies, Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana.

Geetaali Malhotra, a Research Assistant with the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, contributed with research.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

The Supreme Court on Friday described a letter from the Nadia district magistrate asking Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra and other legislators from the district to give three to four days’ notice for circuit house accommodation as “seemingly retaliatory”, Live Law reported.

The court directed Moitra to inform the district administration a day before her visit and said her request for accommodation should be processed in accordance with protocol.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant was hearing Moitra’s petition alleging that the Nadia district administration had directed her to vacate the circuit house in Krishnanagar late at night on August 14, despite her having been allotted a room at the state government-owned property.

Moitra is the Lok Sabha MP from Krishnanagar.

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

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

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

During Friday’s hearing, the advocate appearing for Moitra said that the September 1 letter from the Nadia district magistrate was targeted at her, Live Law reported.

He said that Moitra had routinely secured accommodation with three to four hours’ notice over the past decade, in line with the practice followed for other legislators. He also said that although other rooms were occupied by government officials that night, only Moitra was asked to vacate her room.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the state, argued that the letter applied to all legislators from the district and was not directed only at Moitra.

However, the court said that the reference to “recent incidents” in the first paragraph of the letter indicated that it was “retaliatory”.

“We would like you to withdraw this [the letter],” Live Law quoted Justice Joymalya Bagchi as saying. “She is the member from that district.”

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday asked the Union government to explain why United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio had “summoned his employee” to Mumbai.

Rubio will be visiting Mumbai and Jamnagar between October 19 and October 22.

US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said on Thursday that Washington was “expecting” Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and other officials to travel to Mumbai to meet Rubio.

Gor also said that Rubio will meet “some of the folks at Reliance” at Jamnagar.

“Reliance is one of the biggest oil refinery companies in the world...” Gor said at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Thursday. “They are opening the first refinery in the United States in 50 years...”

As of Friday afternoon, New Delhi had not announced the details of Rubio’s visit.

On Wednesday, the Ministry of External Affairs said that it would “make the announcement at the appropriate time as to what will be the issues to be taken up”.

During a press briefing on Friday, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that Jaishankar will hold talks with Rubio on October 20 “and attend the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the independence of the United States as the guest of honour”.

Jaiswal said that it had been a practice “in the last decade or so that we have hosted foreign secretaries outside Delhi”.

He noted that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had hosted his counterpart from Spain in Gujarat’s Vadodara. “The prime minister of Mauritius was hosted by him in Varanasi, and then the external affairs minister hosted the foreign ministers’ meeting in Goa,” added Jaiswal.

On Thursday, the Congress said that it was “not surprising” that the US ambassador had given more details about Rubio’s visit than New Delhi had.

Gandhi added: “Modi ji, your officials in the external affairs ministry are confused about what’s going on…You might want to explain. Unless, of course, you want me to.”

Jamnagar is home to the world’s largest single-location refining complex, operated by Reliance Industries. The facility is known to have refined Russian crude.

New Delhi’s purchase of Russian oil has been a source of friction with Washington. In August 2025, the US imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian imports to discourage New Delhi from buying Russian crude. The tariff was removed in February after the two countries reached an interim trade deal. Rubio’s visit comes as India and the US seek to conclude negotiations on the agreement.

The US secretary of state is expected to meet senior officials of the Indian government to strengthen relations, “exchange views on regional and global dynamics, and discuss prospects for enhanced energy cooperation”, Washington said on Tuesday.

Rubio will also meet business leaders to “promote opportunities for commercial investment and economic cooperation”, the US state department added. It did not specify who Rubio will meet.

‘Extraordinary’ for US to say ‘we expect’ Jaishankar to meet, says Congress

On Thursday, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that it was “quite extraordinary” for Gor to say “we expect the minister Dr Jaishankar to be joining us there” along with others.

“Since when has the announcement of India’s Minister of External Affairs meetings within India been outsourced to somebody other than official spokesperson of the MEA?” he asked. “India gets to know from the US ambassador just as it first got to know from Mr Rubio himself on the evening of May 10, 2025, that Operation Sindoor had been halted.”

Ramesh added: “Why is the MEA silent on the external affairs minister’s tryst with Mr Rubio in Mumbai?”

The ceasefire that ended the four-day conflict between India and Pakistan in May 2025 had been announced by Washington minutes before New Delhi or Islamabad.

The relations between India and the US have been frosty since Donald Trump became the president for the second term in January 2025.

The Trump administration imposed tariffs on import of India goods and a punitive levy for New Delhi’s purchase of Russia oil. Washington has repeatedly alleged that India’s purchases were helping fund Russia’s war on Ukraine.

The combined tariff rate was 50% before it was reduced after an interim trade deal was reached in February.

The agreement, which would bring the tariff rate on Indian goods to 18%, has not been finalised, with New Delhi saying talks with Washington had reached a “plateau” and further concessions might be difficult.

On September 18, Trump gave his assent to a legislation that allows him to impose tariffs of up to 100% on India and other countries that purchase Russian oil and gas.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Student leader Neha Bora and Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke have been detained. Bora was detained while participating in a flash protest by the All India Students’ Association near Barakhamba Road in central Delhi to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Dipke was detained when he was on his way to Connaught Place for the political campaign’s “Lehra Do Tiranga” demonstration scheduled for 5 pm. Protestors were to wave the national flag in central Delhi as a response to the arrest of Cockroach Janta Party leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde.

They had been arrested on Wednesday for trespassing after they entered the Jantar Mantar area that had been denotified as a protest site overnight and waved the national flag. While Ranka and Das remain in judicial custody, Shinde was released on a personal bond.

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

‘Groped and pushed’: Women allege sexual harassment while being detained during Delhi protests, write Vaishnavi Rathore and Nolina Minj

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi asked the Union government to explain why United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio had “summoned his employee” to Mumbai. Rubio will be visiting Mumbai and Jamnagar between October 19 and October 22.

US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor said on Thursday that Washington was “expecting” Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and other officials to travel to Mumbai to meet Rubio. The Congress asked, “Since when has the announcement of India’s minister of external affairs meetings within India been outsourced to somebody other than official spokesperson of the MEA?”

However, ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that it had been a practice “in the last decade or so that we have hosted foreign secretaries outside Delhi”. Read on.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Friday urged President Droupadi Murmu to advise the Union government to reconsider the appointment of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dushyant Kumar Gautam as Sikkim governor amid a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the murder of Ankita Bhandari. Bhandari was murdered in Uttarakhand in 2022.

Her family and activists have alleged that Gautam is linked to the case. “By recommending the appointment of Dushyant Gautam, Prime Minister Modi has demonstrated that he has absolutely no concern for the safety of women,” Gandhi said on social media.

A day ago, Bhandari’s parents and Congress MPs were detained by security personnel during a sit-in protest at Delhi’s India Gate against Gautam’s appointment. Read on.

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The Gujarat Police on Thursday detained around 70 factory workers of embroidery units in Surat who had staged a protest to demand weekly holidays and higher wages, The New Indian Express reported.

The workers were detained from outside the collector’s office. The police said that they did not have permission to hold the protest.

In Surat dozens of workers were detained by local police before they could start their protest demanding Sunday off, 8 hours shift, better pay, among others. They also alleged their senior leaders were arrested to suppress their agitation "Gaon Chalo Andolan" @DeccanHerald pic.twitter.com/bOEEEnzubi

— satish jha. (@satishjha) October 15, 2026

Migrant workers in Surat have been protesting against alleged 12-hour shifts, the denial of statutory weekly holidays and dismissals for seeking leave, the newspaper reported.

The protests began on August 15 as part of a campaign called Gaon Chalo Abhiyan or Go to the Village Campaign, Down to Earth reported.

Surat, one of India’s major textile manufacturing hubs, employs large numbers of migrant workers from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha and other states.

Union Textiles Minister Giriraj Singh visited Surat on October 9 and urged workers and employers to “resolve the issue like a family”.

“Employers and workers are two sides of the same coin,” Down to Earth quoted him as saying.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

As more than 25,000 security personnel continue to be deployed in New Delhi to thwart protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the special intensive revision of electoral rolls he has been spearheading, a 27-year-old engineer has turned the ordeal faced by demonstrators attempting to evade detention to reach Jantar Mantar into a satirical video game.

Suraj Kushwah created Jantar Mantar Chalo after the agitation began on October 2. “I was watching the protest on the news and I imagined how it could be a 2D game,” he told Scroll.

Players can choose to be andolankaris (protesters) or Delhi Police officers.

Protesters must recruit others into their kafila (procession) and break through barricades to stage a dharna (sit-in demonstration) in central Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, which was a designated protest site until it was denotified on Monday.

Meanwhile, players who decide to be police officers can use lathis and tear gas, detain protesters and load them into buses.

This option for players to chose which side they are on has contributed to the popularity of the game, Kushwah said. “Even people who support the government are happy because they can beat up the protesters,” he said.

Not only does the game factor in the police action against protesters, it also takes into account the internet blackouts imposed in central Delhi and the temporary detention centres that have been established to hold protestors.

“I wanted it to be a very simple game that anyone can play,” Kushwah said, adding that he wanted to keep it “accurate and detailed”.

When internet connectivity disappears in the game, the minimap is disabled. Detained players may find themselves transported to Narela Stadium or the Kapashera border – detention centres on the outskirts of the national capital.

Every now and then, pop-up notifications announce that the gates of the metro have been closed or that a lathi charge has taken place.

Media organisations are another part of the scenario. Encounters with independent media can bring more people into the procession, while “godi media” could cause some protesters to become “brainwashed” and leave.

At one point on Thursday, the game had 2,000 concurrent players, Kushwah said, adding that technical constraints had limited the number of people who could play at the same time.

“There are users playing it offline as well and I haven’t been able to keep a count of that,” he added.

Jantar Mantar Chalo isn’t the only video game based on the protests. Bhag Neha Bhag, referencing the athleticism of student leader Neha Bora, who has been at the forefront of the protests in Delhi, is also gaining traction.

In this game, players must try to gather “democracy coins” as they avoid being caught by the Delhi Police and Hindutva supporters.

Inputs from Nachiket Deuskar. Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

The Gauhati High Court on Wednesday directed the Ministry of External Affairs and the Assam government to trace the whereabouts of a woman who was expelled to Bangladesh in June after being declared a foreigner, The Times of India reported.

As Scroll had reported, Mumtaz Begum’s family realised that she had been forced out of the country after her husband, Mujammel Hoque, filed a habeas corpus petition in the High Court.

Begum was taken into custody on May 30 after a foreigners tribunal declared that she was not an Indian citizen. About two weeks later, she was expelled to Bangladesh.

Foreigners tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies unique to Assam that decide matters of nationality based on documentary evidence.

A bench comprising Justices Kalyan Rai Surana and Pranjal Das noted that Begum had neither been provided a copy of the tribunal’s order nor given an opportunity to challenge it, NDTV reported.

“In the meantime, the Ministry of External Affairs as well as the State machinery [should] take steps to ascertain the whereabouts of the declared foreigner,” the newspaper quoted the bench as saying.

The next hearing is scheduled for November 6.

In September, the High Court had asked the foreigners tribunal to reconsider its decision in Begum’s case, saying that it had not considered all the evidence she had submitted while deciding that she was a foreigner.

The court had also directed the Assam government to pay Begum Rs 2 lakh in compensation for expelling her to Bangladesh in violation of deportation rules.

The order was the first time any court imposed a cost on the state for forcing out a person to Bangladesh, in violation of deportation rules.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi on Thursday urged President Droupadi Murmu to advise the government to reconsider the appointment of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dushyant Kumar Gautam as Sikkim’s governor amid a murder probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The parents of Ankita Bhandari, who was murdered in 2022, and Congress MPs were detained by security personnel on Thursday during their sit-in protest at Delhi’s India Gate against Gautam’s appointment.

The BJP leader was named as the next governor of Sikkim on Monday even as Bhandari’s family and activists have alleged that Gautam is the alleged VIP linked to the murder case.

“By recommending the appointment of Dushyant Gautam, Prime Minister Modi has demonstrated that he has absolutely no concern for the safety of women,” Gandhi said on social media.

Bhandari worked as a receptionist at a resort in Uttarakhand’s Rishikesh that was owned by Pulkit Arya, the son of former BJP leader Vinod Arya. The 19-year-old went missing on September 18, 2022. A day later, Pulkit Arya, resort manager Saurabh Bhaskar and his assistant Ankit Gupta filed a missing person report.

However, they later confessed to killing Bhandari by pushing her into a canal following an altercation. Bhandari’s body was recovered from the Chilla Canal in Rishikesh six days after she had gone missing.

The BJP expelled Vinod Arya and his other son Ankit Arya after the matter came to light.

In May 2025, Pulkit Arya, Bhaskar and Gupta were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Evidence recovered later, such as WhatsApp messages from Bhandari to a friend, seemed to suggest that the men were allegedly trying to force Bhandari into prostitution. It was claimed that she was killed for refusing to provide “special services” to a “VIP”.

In audio and video clips made public later, former BJP MLA Suresh Rathore had allegedly identified Gautam, a BJP national general secretary at the time, as the VIP in question. However, Rathore denied releasing the audio or video clips, or making any remarks against senior party leaders.

The police’s special investigation team had earlier stated that it found no evidence establishing the involvement of an influential leader in the murder, The Indian Express reported.

Gautam, who was in charge of the BJP’s Uttarakhand unit, has denied the allegations.

He had filed a defamation petition in the Delhi High Court against the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party and others for social media posts linking him to the Bhandari murder case. The court directed the Congress and the AAP to remove the posts linking Gautam to the case.

In January, following demands from the Opposition, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami announced that the state government had recommended a CBI probe into the allegations.

In his post on Thursday, Gandhi said that no criminal proceedings can be initiated against Gautam for as long as he holds the office of governor.

The Congress leader urged Murmu to ensure that Gautam does not assume the position until the CBI investigation is complete.

“Do not let the hope for justice held by Ankita’s parents be shattered,” Gandhi added.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Madras High Court verbally said on Thursday that the Tamil Nadu Police should not cite the presence of mosques on the route to deny permission for the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to hold marches, Bar and Bench reported.

Justice V Lakshminarayanan criticised the police for portraying minority communities as opposed to RSS processions despite earlier judicial orders rejecting such grounds for refusing permission.

“Don’t give Muslims a bad name,” the legal news outlet quoted the judge as having stated verbally.

The RSS, a Hindutva organisation, is the ideological parent of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The court was hearing a petition challenging the police’s refusal to permit the RSS to hold route marches as part of its annual Dussehra celebrations. The organisation had sought permission to conduct processions at 128 locations in Tamil Nadu, but the police were willing to allow them at only 58 locations, Bar and Bench reported.

The marches, originally scheduled for Sunday, were postponed to October 25 in northern Tamil Nadu and November 1 in the southern districts, the legal news outlet reported.

During the hearing, the court noted that the presence of mosques and Eidgahs along the proposed routes was among the reasons cited by the police for refusing permission, Live Law reported.

“Eidgah is for Ramzan and Bakrid,” Live Law quoted the judge as saying. “For gathering and praying. You’re saying that they [Muslims] will celebrate Ramzan in October? You’re giving a bad name for Muslims.”

The court noted that its earlier rulings had dismissed similar grounds for refusing permission as “lame”.

The judge also questioned the police for citing incidents involving the banned Popular Front of India while opposing the processions, Bar and Bench reported.

Lakshminarayanan asked whether members of the Muslim community had actually objected to the proposed marches.

The dispute over RSS route marches in Tamil Nadu has been in court since 2022, with the High Court and Supreme Court issuing rulings allowing the processions.

In February 2023, the court told the Tamil Nadu government to grant permission to an RSS march and remarked that the state must uphold citizens’ right to free speech.

The Supreme Court in April 2023 upheld the ruling after the Tamil Nadu government filed appeals challenging the High Court order that had allowed the RSS to hold rallies in the state.

The High Court will continue hearing the matter on Friday.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The newly appointed Odisha governor’s remarks that he would work to increase the Bharatiya Janata Party’s vote share have sparked a political row in the state.

Ram, a former BJP MP from Jharkhand, was appointed as the Odisha governor on Monday. Speaking to PTI a day after his appointment, he said he would work to activate the BJP’s Scheduled Caste Morcha and increase the party’s vote share.

“I will see the situation there and will connect people, activate our morcha and organisation and think how BJP will get votes,” Ram told PTI.

“The party has recognised an ordinary worker like me,” the news agency quoted him as saying. “Even after being denied a ticket, we continued to work honestly and actively for the party.”

He added that some leaders leave for another party after being denied a ticket, but that he continued to work for the BJP even after being denied a ticket three times.

Ram also thanked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah for giving him the “appropriate constitutional position”.

On Wednesday, the Opposition Biju Janata Dal said that it was “shocked” by Braj Mohan Ram’s comments, Hindustan Times reported.

“We condemn the remark as it negates the fact that the governor is above party politics,” the Biju Janata Dal said in a statement.

Newly appointed Odisha Governor, BJP’s Braj Mohan Ram openly declares that he will use his constitutional office to secure more votes and electoral victories for the BJP in Odisha.

He has made his intention clear - the party is above the people, the constitution, and the… pic.twitter.com/5UxFErgG5m

— Pawan Khera 🇮🇳 ಪವನ್ ಖೇರಾ (@Pawankhera) October 14, 2026

Congress leader Pawan Khera said Ram had made his “intentions clear” that “party is above the people, the constitution, and the country”.

“Ram openly declares that he will use his constitutional office to secure more votes and electoral victories for the BJP in Odisha,” Khera wrote on social media. “That is why, look carefully, remember his face. This is what a traitor looks like.”

Trinamool Congress leader Mahua Moitra said the BJP was appointing “unemployed” senior leaders linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Odisha. The RSS is the parent organisation of the BJP.

“Hello Odisha-this is your new governor,” she wrote on social media. “He says his job is to strengthen saffron organisation [BJP] in Odisha.”

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Reliance Industries on Friday said that it has “never feared competition”, a week after trillionaire Elon Musk repeatedly accused the Indian conglomerate and “oligarchs” of stalling the launch of his Starlink satellite internet network.

The Mukesh Ambani-led business group did not name Musk, but said that it was responding to “recent remarks about Reliance and the Indian market”.

Reliance said that the “openness” of the market in India rests on the rule of law, adding that the same regulatory process applies to all applicants irrespective of whether they were based in India or a foreign country.

It said that the satellite services of its own telecommunications company, Jio, await clearances.

“We have never feared competition…” the conglomerate said. “We welcome competition in satellite communications, including Starlink. Every player, Jio included, must serve the people of India and abide by the laws and policies of the land.”

Starlink provides internet access through a constellation of satellites placed in low-earth orbit by Musk’s spacecraft manufacturing company SpaceX.

If launched in India, Starlink will compete in the country’s satellite internet market with Jio Space Technology, a joint venture part of Reliance Industries, and Eutelsat OneWeb, backed by Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel Group.

On October 8, Musk accused “certain oligarchs” in India of blocking the launch of Starlink, saying that they are trying to protect their “monopolistic chokehold” over the industry. He had not named any Indian businessperson at the time.

After his claims, the Union government defended India’s regulatory framework for satellite communication services, saying it was “fair and non-discriminatory”. The Ministry of Communications did not specifically mention Musk or Starlink in its statement but referred to a widely shared post on social media.

The ministry said that New Delhi had a common authorisation framework for all telecommunication services, including satellite communications and that licensees were required to comply with “security conditions”.

Starlink has obtained authorisation for a global mobile personal communications by satellite from the Department of Telecommunications, but is yet to receive the security clearances required to begin operations, The Hindu reported.

The security rules, some of which were amended in May, require Musk-owned SpaceX to disable Starlink receivers purchased outside India and terminals sold within the country if they are taken abroad, the newspaper reported.

‘Ambani is the real boss’, Musk had said

Amid an online debate sparked by Musk’s comments about Starlink not having received clearance to operate in India, the trillionaire on October 9 had asked if “Ambani is the real boss” of the country. He had not specified which member of the Ambani family he was referring to.

“Starlink is licensed in over 165 countries and has spent five years complying with every single law and requirement of the government of India, so why still no license?” he had asked.

A day later, Musk asked whether “Prime Minister Ambani” would consider allowing Starlink to compete in India.

“Please accept my humble apologies for not realising that you are the real boss of India,” Musk said on social media platform X, which he owns.

He accused Ambani of wanting to maintain a “monopolistic exploitation” of Indian consumers.

“There are many areas of India, as there are in all countries, with no internet access, which denies children the opportunity for education and for small businesses the opportunity to sell their goods to a global market,” Musk wrote. “Starlink would change their lives for the better.”

Reliance Industries had not commented on the allegations at the time.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MP Sanjay Raut to explain his remarks about the judiciary and the chief justice, Live Law reported.

On Monday, Raut had criticised Chief Justice Surya Kant for declining a meeting with Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi. The Congress leader had sought a meeting with Kant to submit a memorandum raising concerns over alleged irregularities in electoral processes, the functioning of the Election Commission and the large-scale deletions during the voter roll revision.

The Uddhav Sena leader had claimed that the chief justice and several judges had played badminton in London with Bharatiya Janata Party leaders and attended dinners with ministers, but Kant could not meet the leader of the Opposition.

Meanwhile, Attorney General R Venkataramani granted consent to the Supreme Court Bar Association to initiate criminal contempt proceedings against Raut and journalist Nikhil Wagle for their remarks about the judiciary and the chief justice, the legal news outlet reported.

The court’s order seeking an explanation from Raut came as the bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was hearing petitions filed by Opposition leaders challenging the large-scale deletions during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

During the hearing, the court verbally said that it would ask one of the petitioners, an Opposition leader, to explain his conduct. The bench had not elaborated on which petitioner it was referring to.

In its order uploaded later, the bench said that Raut’s petition was being provisionally entertained, subject to him explaining his conduct, Live Law reported.

After Kant declined the meeting, Opposition leaders filed the petitions that the court heard on Thursday.

During the hearing, Kant, without naming Raut, said that the judges were aware of statements being made outside the courtroom and were not living in “ivory towers”, Live Law reported.

While granting permission for contempt proceedings, the attorney general said that the claims made by Raut about judges playing badminton with ministers was false. He cited a Delhi High Court order in the matter, the legal news outlet reported.

Venkataramani said that Raut’s claims had undermined the dignity of the judiciary and were scandalous, Live Law reported.

The Supreme Court issued notice to the Election Commission and Kumar on the Opposition's petitions.

Contempt case against Nikhil Wagle

The attorney general also granted consent to the Supreme Court Bar Association to initiate criminal contempt proceedings against Wagle for remarks he made about the chief justice.

The journalist had used an abusive phrase for the chief justice in a social media post, according to Live Law. The journalist later deleted the post.

In its request for sanction, the bar association stated that the remark made by Wagle was deliberately and knowingly made to scandalise and diminish the authority of the Supreme Court, Live Law reported.

Later on Thursday, Wagle apologised to the chief justice and the Supreme Court for his remarks. “Out of sudden anguish and frustration with the system, I posted on [social media platform] X something which I should not have,” he said.

“The post was nothing but an emotional outburst,” he said in a statement, adding that he had deleted the post and was not seeking to justify it.

The journalist requested the attorney general to “consider the circumstances” in which the post was made and not proceed with the sanction for contempt proceedings.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Delhi Police was imposing widespread restrictions in Connaught Place and central areas of the national capital ahead of a protest by the Cockroach Janta Party planned for Friday.

The political campaign has announced that it will hold a “Lehra Do Tiranga” demonstration at Connaught Place at 5 pm on Friday, to wave the national flag.

The demonstration comes as a response to the arrest of Cockroach Janta Party leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde on Wednesday, a day after they trespassed at Jantar Mantar and waved the national flag.

While Ranka and Das remain in judicial custody, Shinde was released on a personal bond.

They were detained on Tuesday with other members of the Cockroach Janta Party after they “sneaked into” Jantar Mantar to protest the authorities’ decision to denotify the area as a designated protest site. The leaders have also been accused of violating a bond and obstructing a public servant from discharging their duties.

The arrests were widely condemned by the Opposition, with several leaders including Congress’ Rahul Gandhi saying that “waving the tricolour” at Jantar Mantar during a peaceful protest “is not a crime” and jailing young persons for it is an “act of cowardice”.

Besides the Cockroach Janta Party, the Aam Aadmi Party has urged its workers and supporters to join the protest.

Curbs in central Delhi

The Delhi Police was deploying more than 6,000 personnel in and around Connaught Place, the Hindustan Times reported.

This is in addition to the 26,000 personnel from the central armed police forces already deployed in central Delhi in the past week amid protests by the Cockroach Janta Party, the Opposition parties, Left groups and the civil society demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

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

The deployment of central police forces is among the largest in the national capital since the 2020 riots in northeastern Delhi, the Hindustan Times quoted an unidentified police officer as saying.

Barricades had been installed along roads near Connaught Place, Patel Chowk, ITO and Sansad Marg on Thursday, the newspaper reported.

Additional surveillance cameras were being installed at Central Park and the Rajiv Chowk metro station in Connaught Place on Thursday, The Indian Express reported.

#WATCH | Delhi: CJP Founder Abhijeet Dipke has called for a ‘Lehra Do Tiranga’ protest at Connaught Place’s Central Park today.

Security forces have been deployed in and around the area to maintain law and order.

(Morning Visuals from CP) pic.twitter.com/PgxHEQK6pi

— ANI (@ANI) October 16, 2026

Gatherings barred, say police

The police reiterated on Thursday that an order prohibiting gatherings of four or more persons was in effect in central Delhi.

The police said that protesters should not join gatherings in the area and legal action would be taken against those violating the law.

The municipal council said that the Central Park at Connaught Place will be closed on Friday and Saturday “for administrative reasons”.

The civic body has asked the police for “proper safety and security” of the park and “to prevent any unauthorised access of any one, keeping in view the importance and sensitivity of this iconic public park”, the police said.

The police added that it “can facilitate a group of selected persons for carrying the national flag and signing of the national anthem at a suitable place”.

The Delhi Traffic Police said that the movement of vehicles on certain roads in and around Connaught Place is likely to be affected starting from 3 pm on Friday.

On Thursday, the Delhi High Court refused to stop the protest. It noted the police’s submission that all possible steps would be taken to regulate and control the gathering.

Dipke claims he could be detained

At a press conference at midnight on Friday, Cockroach Janta Party founder Dipke claimed that the Delhi Police were following him and could detain him. “If one has to go to jail for waving the tricolour in this country, then we are ready for it...” PTI quoted him as saying.

Dipke added: “We had earlier given the call for a protest on October 10. You shut down all of Delhi, shut the buses, shut the metros, shut the railways, shut down the internet, put up barricades. Now we said that on the 16th we will wave the tricolour at Connaught Place, in Central Park, so you shut Central Park.”

Earlier on Thursday, Dipke had posted photos of who he claimed were “undercover cops” keeping a watch on him.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Election Commission on Thursday said that it would conduct the special summary revision in 13 states and three Union Territories where the special intensive revision of electoral rolls has been conducted, as well as in Assam, where the poll panel decided not to undertake the exercise.

The poll panel had been conducting a special revision of the voter list in Assam, which is similar to the usual updates to the electoral roll.

Writing to the chief electoral officers of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Goa, Gujarat, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Madhya Pradesh, Manipur, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and West Bengal, the poll panel said that the special summary revision with the qualifying date of January 1 would be conducted from November.

The draft rolls after the revision will be published on November 12. Following this, claims and objections will be invited till December 11 and the final rolls will be published on January 4.

The poll panel’s announcement came days after media reports said that the freezing of the annual revision of electoral rolls after 2024 due to the special intensive revision could affect the enrolment of voters who have recently turned 18.

On September 24, The Economic Times reported that the poll panel had overshot its May-June announcement timeline for the annual revision due to a lack of consensus between Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi.

The newspaper reported that Sandhu and Joshi had been advocating for resuming the exercise, while Kumar sought legal opinion on it.

A day later, the Congress accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of stopping the special summary revisions of electoral rolls “to ensure that Gen Z voters are not enrolled”.

“This is a PM [prime minister] who fears the youth having dashed their hopes and aspirations,” said party leader Jairam Ramesh.

“Gen Z” refers to persons born between the late 1990s and 2010.

This is a Tale of Two PMs

One PM got Parliament in its regular Winter Session in Dec 1988 to amend Article 326 of the Constitution to reduce the minimum age for voting from 21 years to 18 years. This was a PM who empowered the youth.

There is another PM who has ensured that the…

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) September 25, 2026

This had followed a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express that showed that Sandhu and Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

On Thursday, the Election Commission said that in states and Union Territories where the special intensive revision is going on or has just been completed – Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Daman and Diu, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Delhi, Odisha, Sikkim, Tripura, and Telangana – the schedule for special summary revision will be announced later.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the Congress, its leader Rahul Gandhi and other INDIA bloc leaders seeking their responses to a petition filed in connection with the Opposition’s march to the apex court, Bar and Bench reported.

The petition, filed by four lawyers, sought regulations for processions and protests in the vicinity of the Supreme Court.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant was hearing the matter when the lawyers appearing for the petitioners told the court that advocates practising in the Supreme Court had expressed “anguish” over the procession. The lawyers had signed a memorandum stating that such conduct amounted to “browbeating of the judiciary”, the legal news outlet reported.

“Nobody can browbeat the judiciary,” Kant said.

“We are not sitting in ivory towers,” Bar and Bench quoted him as saying. “We know what statements they are making outside and what they are saying in court. We know everything.”

On Monday, Gandhi, Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and several Opposition leaders led a march towards the Supreme Court to file a petition challenging the Election Commission’s special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The petition also sought an independent audit of voter deletions, disclosure of the poll panel’s internal records and an interim suspension of the exercise.

The march came after the leaders’ request for a meeting with the chief justice to submit a memorandum on the voter roll revision was declined.

The march was part of protests being held across the country demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. It was joined by other INDIA bloc leaders, including former chief ministers Mamata Banerjee and Akhilesh Yadav. Student leaders, including All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora, also joined the protest.

Protests against Kumar

Protests are being held in several parts of the country calling for Kumar to resign over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision exercise.

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

The steel industry announces itself early on the road from Raipur airport into the city. Hoardings for Goel TMT, GK TMT, Concrete TMT and many others appear one after another. These steel brands are deeply interwoven with Chhattisgarh’s economy but are barely known outside the state.

Farther out, towards the industrial clusters of Urla and Siltara, the advertisements give way to the plants themselves: ironmaking units, rolling mills, steel-melting shops, trucks carrying coal and iron ore, and stacks of steel bars and tubes waiting to be transported across the country. The air changes, too, thick with smoke and dust. The environmental cost of steelmaking is difficult to miss, but so is its economic importance.

These industrial clusters support tens of thousands of workers and a much larger network of transporters, traders, contractors and small suppliers. They also reflect a wider reality across India.

The micro, small and medium-size enterprises that largely make up the “secondary” steel sector are responsible for around 40% of crude steel production in India, the world’s second-largest steelmaking nation. They supply steel for construction, industry and infrastructure, all while operating on tight margins and relying heavily on coal to make direct reduced iron, also known as sponge iron. This, along with scrap metal, is a key input for secondary steelmakers, who mostly use electric or induction furnaces, rather than firing virgin iron ore in blast furnaces as in the “primary” route.

Producers using this coal-based direct reduced iron method alone cover almost 30% of India’s crude steel output, according to the thinktank, the Council on Energy, Environment and Water. But this is also the most emissions-intensive steelmaking route, producing 2.7-3.1 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of crude steel, tthe Council on Energy, Environment and Water explains. The global average is about 1.92 tonnes.

Pressure to decarbonise, coming from both the Indian government and overseas markets, will require smaller producers to invest in cleaner technologies, improve energy efficiency and, in some cases, rethink the fuels and raw materials they use.

“The point is that the government is pushing us to be energy efficient and that is the need of the hour. But the way forward is a bit confusing,” said Saurabh Agrawal, president of Raipur-based Real Ispat & Power Ltd, which reportedly produces around 800,000 tonnes of both sponge iron and various steel products a year. “How can the secondary steel industry actually reduce emissions is a big question mark.”

Small steelmakers face tight conditions

Raipur offers a window into the challenge facing this part of India’s steel industry. The city and neighbouring districts of Bilaspur, Bastar, Raigarh and Durg are rich in coal, iron ore, limestone and other minerals. An estimated 316 micro, small and medium-sized secondary steel enterprises operate in the Raipur cluster, according to Sameeksha, a platform that promotes energy efficiency among India’s small businesses.

While large integrated iron and steel producers such as Tata Steel and JSW Steel generally have greater financial and technical capacity to pursue decarbonisation, secondary steelmakers operate in a highly competitive market, with limited access to capital and little room to absorb higher costs.

“Most secondary steel companies don’t have the financial bandwidth. They would need supportive fiscal measures right now such as concessional finance, viability gap funding, or dedicated credit guarantee support, that make decarbonisation financially viable for players who don’t have the balance sheet to absorb it alone,” Saurabh Trivedi, lead specialist for sustainable finance and carbon markets at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Dialogue Earth by email.

The Indian government has shifted its emissions focus from energy-efficiency targets towards carbon-intensity targets. It has also introduced its carbon credit trading scheme under the Indian carbon market, with draft emissions-intensity targets proposed in June to cover all types of steel plants, though implementation has been delayed until the 2026-’27 financial year.

“Because of the very tight market conditions, people [in steel MSMEs] are literally not interested in doing anything in decarbonisation because they are struggling for survival, they are scared to invest,” said Vivek Agrawal, an independent consultant who works with medium and small firms in Chhattisgarh to improve operations. He was previously chief operating officer at Godawari Power & Ispat Ltd, a publicly listed steelmaker in Raipur.

The looming demands of the carbon credit trading scheme come at a time when the local industry is already struggling with weaker-than-expected demand, overcapacity in the region, and higher electricity tariffs in Chhattisgarh. Margins have been squeezed, leaving smaller and non-integrated producers in particular under financial pressure.

Infrastructure spending also slowed around India’s 2024 general election due to restrictions under its electoral code of conduct. A power tariff increase announced by the state government in June added further pressure. Secondary steel producers are particularly exposed because they account for over 60% of the country’s long steel products.

Real Ispat’s Agrawal said that the list of actions and guidelines that he had seen proposed by the government for secondary steelmakers to reduce their emissions “is not for a running [operational] plant”, but the “complete replacement” of their equipment. “I told them: if you expect us to spend so much money to reduce our CCTS score, I won’t find a single client to buy our steel.”

Some energy progress, but limits to uptake

In its 2024 Green Steel Roadmap, the Indian government identified hydrogen-based steelmaking, carbon capture, utilisation and storage, and other emerging technologies as important routes towards decarbonisation.

But a switch to green hydrogen-based DRI, a potentially key near-zero emissions pathway, remains technologically challenging and economically unviable for most smaller producers. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage is also prohibitively expensive today and unlikely to be viable in the short-to-medium term, according to the June 2026 CEEW report.

“I would view India’s secondary steel sector as facing one of the most complex decarbonisation challenges anywhere in the global steel industry,” said Ashima Tyagi, economics associate director for pricing and purchasing at S&P Global Market Intelligence.

So how prepared are these companies for a low-carbon transition?

Raipur steel industry experts who spoke to Dialogue Earth suggested its coal-fired rotary kilns, covering 80% of Indian secondary steel’s DRI production, cannot become truly low-carbon without a fundamental technological shift. However, there is considerable scope to reduce emissions intensity by using less coal per tonne of DRI and less fossil-fuel-based electricity per tonne of steel, the CEEW report noted. In a fragmented and cost-conscious market, however, such changes are most likely to be adopted when the economic benefits justify the capital expenditure.

History offers some examples of what has worked.

Almost all sponge iron producers in Raipur, including larger companies such as Real Ispat and Godawari, operate captive power plants equipped with waste heat recovery boilers. The technology was introduced more than two decades ago and has since been widely adopted here despite the initial capital cost, largely because it delivers immediate energy savings. By capturing and reusing waste heat, plants can cut both energy costs and emissions.

Other technologies adopted by some medium-sized integrated producers in Raipur include continuous casting and hot charging. These processes allow molten steel from an induction furnace to be cast directly into semi-finished shapes to be processed into products such as rods, bars and wires. This removes the need for coal-intensive reheating furnaces, used to heat cooled steel before further processing, and can significantly reduce energy consumption and emissions.

The technology, however, is more difficult for smaller producers to adopt. Micro-scale companies further down the supply chain often lack the land and capital needed to integrate more stages of production.

“I don’t do hot charging because I don’t have land. You require 10 to 15 acres extra land for melting equipment, scrap and raw material,” said Sanjay Tripathi, owner of Shivam Structural & Steel in Urla and president of the Chhattisgarh Steel Re-rollers Association. “Hot charging reduces coal costs by 1,000 rupees [$10] per tonne of steel, but don’t forget the capital costs. Only companies with scale benefit from it; for us the margin benefit isn’t much.”

Solar a growing option

The growing use of solar power offers another example of how cleaner technologies can gain traction when the economics are favourable. Captive solar installations have expanded across Chhattisgarh’s steelmaking belt, particularly among medium-sized and smaller companies, as installation costs have fallen and grid electricity prices have risen.

Although solar projects require substantial upfront investment, the savings can be significant. Company representatives consulted in Raipur told Dialogue Earth that captive solar power costs around Rs 3- Rs 3.5 per kilowatt-hour unit, compared with Rs 6.5-7 for grid electricity.

Mahamaya Steel, a publicly listed secondary steel company with 400,000 tonnes of capacity, said it plans to establish a 150-megawatt (MW) captive solar plant near Bilaspur to meet most of its electricity requirements. Real Ispat also expects to have 150 MW of solar capacity operational this year.

If shared by neighbouring steelmakers, captive renewable energy could lower electricity costs for India’s small and medium-sized steel units by as much as 34% compared to sourcing from the grid, according to a report released at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Green Steel and Mining Summit, held in Raipur in August.

Again, however, high land costs, upfront expenditure and transmission charges prevent many micro-scale producers from benefitting. A ground-mounted solar power plant typically requires capital expenditure of between Rs 3.5- Rs 4 crore per MW ($370,000-$423,000). One Raipur steelmaker consulted by Dialogue Earth estimated that only around 10% of rolling mills currently have access to solar power. (Producers that only run rolling mills are usually micro-scale.)

Companies have also made smaller investments in equipment where the technology is proven, and the financial returns are clear. Real Ispat told Dialogue Earth it had recently replaced hundreds of gearboxes across its plant with more energy-efficient models, while Mahamaya Steel said it has likewise upgraded its furnaces.

“We have replaced our five old induction furnaces over the last three to four years and installed one new furnace,” said Rajesh Agrawal, managing director of Mahamaya Steel. “By replacing these old furnaces, we were able to save 35 units per tonne in power costs. That comes to Rs 3.5 crore in savings per year. We have also considered using batteries to store solar energy but the costs are higher than what we can afford. We are waiting for prices to come down.”

Real Ispat also uses a higher proportion of imported steel scrap alongside sponge iron to produce higher-quality steel for lucrative government and industrial projects. Given India’s tight domestic scrap supply, imports are often needed for scrap with fewer impurities, meaning higher yields and lower energy use to process it. Scrap use also reduces carbon emissions, though this is largely a secondary benefit for many companies, with Agrawal primarily emphasising the business case for its usage.

Support for MSMEs

Other approaches have proven less successful.

This April, the Chhattisgarh government approved the Urban Gas Distribution Policy 2026 to accelerate the rollout of piped natural gas and last-mile infrastructure. Only a few months later, Godawari temporarily suspended operations at its two-million-tonne-a-year iron ore pellet plant in the Siltara industrial area after GAIL, the state-owned gas utility, curtailed gas supplies due to disruptions linked to the conflict in West Asia.

Steelmakers in Raipur also pointed to natural gas being at least twice as expensive as coal. Greater dependence on imported gas has raised concerns around energy security and foreign-exchange costs.

“No one is using piped natural gas in Raipur. It is neither available because of the war nor economically viable. It is very volatile also due to currency fluctuations. The rupee has also weakened against the dollar,” said Tripathi, the re-rolllers association president. “Coal is available everywhere [in coal-rich Chhattisgarh]. Logistically it is also not expensive, as the coal mines aren’t too far.”

Several government schemes to support investment in green technologies and energy-efficient equipment have struggled to gain traction. The MSE Green Investment and Financing for Transformation (MSE-GIFT) scheme disbursed only 3.7% of its targeted interest-subsidy allocation. Meanwhile, some MSME leaders in Raipur and industry think-tanks told Dialogue Earth that a dedicated scheme supporting industrial technology upgrades for MSMEs, launched by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency in 2025, has seen low interest due to complex paperwork, low awareness and insufficiently attractive interest subsidies.

“Industrial decarbonisation is not going to happen through market forces alone. It would require public capital and policies to move first and the markets will follow accordingly,” IEEFA’s Trivedi told Dialogue Earth.

Hemant Mallya, a fellow in industrial sustainability at CEEW, told Dialogue Earth that the central government should operationalise public procurement of green steel to create demand, roll out the proposed National Mission on Sustainable Steel with capital support aimed at secondary producers. He also said it should leverage the India-EU, India-ASEAN and India-UK free trade agreements to build trade corridors for “green iron”, a transportable form of the metal processed using renewables, seen as a potentially key input for near zero-emissions steel.

The secondary steel sector’s decarbonisation pathway “is likely to be gradual and focused initially on operational improvements rather than disruptive technological change”, said S&P’s Tyagi. “Over the medium to long term, achieving deeper emissions reductions will require significantly higher capital investment.”

Megha Mandavia is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore, India, with bylines in the Wall Street Journal, Mint, and Forbes Asia. She writes on India’s industrialisation and global trade integration.

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

The Supreme Court issued notices to the Election Commission and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on petitions filed by Opposition leaders challenging the large-scale deletions during the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls. The Union government and the Delhi Police were also issued notices on a separate petition challenging the de-notification of Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site.

The bench clubbed the Opposition’s pleas with petitions already pending before the court challenging the validity of the voter roll revision.

In the case of Jantar Mantar, the police had earlier this week told the Delhi High Court that the decision to de-notify the site was made following a Supreme Court order, which prompted the authorities to consider better-equipped alternative venues. Read on.

The Supreme Court granted interim protection to a woman journalist whom Delhi Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat had accused of making casteist remarks about him. Bhagat had accused her days after she alleged that he groped her while she was reporting from protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Advocate Indira Jaisingh told the court that Bhagat had filed his caste discrimination case vindictively against the journalist.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the government said that in the digital era, “we do not know who is a reel-maker and who is an independent journalist”. Read on.

The Mumbai Police has directed actor Imran Khan to leave India by October 28 after he joined a protest demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The police issued a Leave India Notice after Khan had taken part in the agitation at August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai on Saturday “despite not being an Indian citizen”.

Khan is a citizen of the United States and holds an Overseas Citizen of India card. The police have initiated action against him under the Immigration Act. Read on.

United States lawmaker Pramila Jayapal said that the Indian government’s actions to “purge” 13 crore persons from the electoral rolls through the special intensive revision appeared similar to measures being taken by the Donald Trump administration to “undermine voting rights in a democracy”. The Democratic Party leader’s comments came amid protests in Delhi and other parts of the country over alleged irregularities in how the voter roll is being revised.

Jayapal said that “non-violent resistance movements are essential”. She added that she stood with Indians engaging in “non-violent protests to counter anti-democratic efforts in India”. Read on.

The Supreme Court upheld a Madras High Court ruling that said that a person from the Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes, Denotified Communities and Scheduled Castes who converts to Islam cannot came reservations under the Backward Class (Muslim) category. “His former caste status cannot be transposed to the Muslim backward class category, nor can his private religious body conclusively determine such status entitlement,” the court said.

On March 24, the Supreme Court said that only persons belonging to the Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh faiths can claim the Scheduled Caste status. A Dalit person converting to any religion other than the three loses his or her Scheduled Caste status. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday granted interim protection to a woman journalist whom Delhi Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat had accused of making casteist remarks about him, days after she alleged he had sexually harassed her, reported Bar and Bench.

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

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

On Thursday, a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymala Bagchi was hearing a petition filed by a press body to examine allegations of sexual violence against women journalists covering the protests against Kumar, reported Live Law.

Advocate Indira Jaisingh told the court that Bhagat had filed his caste discrimination case vindictively against the journalist who accused him of sexual harassment, reported Bar and Bench.

“I am asking for an order that no coercive action be taken against any woman journalist who has made a complaint,” Jaisingh said, adding that media persons should not be met with criminal prosecution for their work.

In response, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing the government said that in the digital era, “we do not know who is a reel-maker and who is an independent journalist”.

Mehta added that Jaisingh’s prayer for no coercive action against journalists “would be too wide a direction”, reported Bar and Bench.

He also told the court that the journalist’s allegations of sexual harassment were being dealt with and no blanket order should be passed without first hearing the government.

The journalist who accused Bhagat of sexual harassment was among the three women journalists who alleged that they were sexually harassed by police officers while covering the protests at Jantar Mantar.

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

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

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

An unidentified police official was quoted as saying by The Hindu on October 6 that registering cases against police personnel for actions taken while performing law and order duties could “deter them from working”.

Another unidentified police official told the newspaper on October 4 that there was no evidence to substantiate the journalist’s allegation.

On October 4, the Delhi Police said that the allegations of sexual harassment had been received “in context of the emergent law and order situation” a day earlier.

The police had also arrested a person for allegedly creating and circulating an artificial intelligence-generated poster depicting Bhagat sexually assaulting a woman.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Mumbai Police has directed actor Imran Khan to leave India by October 28 after he joined a protest demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, ANI reported on Thursday.

The police issued a Leave India Notice after Khan had taken part in the agitation at August Kranti Maidan in Mumbai on Saturday “despite not being an Indian citizen”, the news agency reported.

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

Khan is a citizen of the United States and holds an Overseas Citizen of India card, Hindustan Times reported.

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

The police have initiated action against him under the Immigration Act, the newspaper reported.

Khan’s lawyer said that rules do not prohibit Overseas Citizen of India cardholders from participating in a protest, PTI reported. The actor will move the Bombay High Court against the notice, Bar and Bench reported.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kirit Somaiya welcomed the action by Mumbai Police. “All such foreign citizens, persons using foreign fund to create anarchy in India should face such action,” he said.

Before the notice was issued, Somaiya had written to the Mumbai Police seeking an inquiry into Khan’s participation in the protest.

Khan had been detained during the protest on Saturday.

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

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

Protests are being held in several parts of the country calling for Kumar to resign over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision exercise.

The trigger for this round of protests was a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

A contentious exercise

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

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

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

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Ambedkar University Delhi has suspended 11 students for allegedly clashing with security personnel during a protest at the institute’s Kashmere Gate campus on Tuesday, a student involved with the demonstrations told Scroll on Friday.

In the orders issued on Wednesday to suspend the students, the university administration alleged that they misbehaved with security personnel and attempted to break a campus gate.

The alleged incident occurred before a proposed screening of Anand Patwardhan’s documentary Jai Bhim Comrade at the campus’s Wall of Democracy on the 16th day of a sit-in protest by the All India Students Association-led students’ collective of the university, reported The Indian Express.

The students are protesting against a circular issued by the university on July 31 that mandated giving four working days’ notice before organising demonstrations, rallies, marches and other public gatherings on campus, reported Deccan Herald.

They have also demanded that iron gates and barriers on campus be removed, the fee waiver for PhD students be waived and completion of faculty recruitment.

Ahead of the screening on Tuesday, security personnel tore down posters of the documentary, switched off the electricity on the campus at around 6 pm and assaulted students, The Indian Express quoted AISA as alleging.

Clothes of some female students were reportedly torn.
However, the university claimed that the protesting students damaged property on the campus and clashed with the security personnel.

It also alleged that officials trying to start a dialogue with the students were met with “abusive behaviour”.

The university administration said that it had informed the police on Tuesday after “observing that the situation was becoming unmanageable, and keeping in view the safety and security”, The Indian Express reported.

In the orders issued on Wednesday, the university barred the 11 students from entering its campuses during their suspension period and referred the matter to the Proctorial Board and Disciplinary Committee for further inquiry.

The committee has been asked to submit its report in a week, reported The Indian Express.

With inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a Madras High Court ruling that said that a person from the Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes, Denotified Communities and Scheduled Castes who converts to Islam cannot claim reservations under the Backward Class (Muslim) category, Bar and Bench reported.

On June 24, the High Court struck down a Tamil Nadu government order, after which the state challenged it in July.

On Thursday, the bench said that a person who converts to Islam does not automatically become a member of one of the seven notified backward class social communities in the state, Live Law reported.

“His former caste status cannot be transposed to the Muslim backward class category, nor can his private religious body conclusively determine such status entitlement,” it said.

On March 24, the Supreme Court said that only persons belonging to the Hindu, Buddhist and Sikh faiths can claim the Scheduled Caste status. A Dalit person converting to any religion other than the three loses his or her Scheduled Caste status, regardless of the status at birth, the court had ruled at the time, citing Clause 3 of the 1950 Constitution Scheduled Caste Order.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the Election Commission and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on petitions filed by Opposition leaders challenging the large-scale deletions during the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, Bar and Bench reported.

The court also issued notice to the Union government and the Delhi Police on a separate petition challenging the de-notification of Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site, The Indian Express reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi clubbed the Opposition’s pleas with petitions already pending before the court challenging the validity of the voter roll revision.

The court said that it will ask one of the petitioners, an Opposition leader, to explain his conduct, Bar and Bench reported. However, the bench did not elaborate on which petitioner it was referring to.

“The notice on behalf of one of the petitioners will be entertained on a provisional basis, subject to his explaining his conduct,” the court was quoted as saying.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and 10 other INDIA bloc leaders had on Monday moved the court challenging the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, seeking an independent audit of voter deletions, disclosure of the poll panel’s internal records and an interim suspension of the exercise.

The petition was filed after the leaders’ request for a meeting with Kant to submit a memorandum on the voter roll revision and the functioning of the Election Commission was declined.

Kant had said at the time that similar matters were already pending before the Supreme Court and that the leaders were free to approach the court through the judicial process.

Besides Gandhi and Kharge, the other listed petitioners are Saugata Roy of the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress faction, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal and Sanjay Raut of Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray).

The petitions were filed amid protests in Delhi by the Opposition parties, student groups and the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign to demand Kumar’s resignation over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the voter roll revision.

Protests against Kumar have been held in the national capital and other parts of the country since October 2.

The trigger for this round of protests and the petition was a September 23 investigation by The Indian Express, which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected 14 times in 10 months to decisions by the poll panel related to the special intensive revision, saying some had been taken without their knowledge.

Pleas against Jantar Mantar denotification

Amid the protests, the Delhi Police on Sunday denotified Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site in the national capital, based on recommendations from a committee constituted by the Union home ministry. The police order was reported on Monday.

The police on Tuesday told the Delhi High Court that the decision was made following a Supreme Court order on Friday, which prompted the authorities to consider better-equipped alternative venues where residents could exercise their democratic rights without compromising public safety, Hindustan Times reported.

The High Court was hearing a petition against the police’s refusal to grant permission for a protest at Jantar Mantar.

The police have designated three alternative venues for protests: Ramlila Ground in central Delhi, Burari Ground in northern Delhi and CBD Ground in eastern Delhi’s Shahdara area.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the Ministry of External Affairs to issue a public notice inviting families of Indians who have died while fighting as part of the Russian military in the Ukraine war to claim compensation from Moscow, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi directed New Delhi to assist the affected families in securing compensation from the Russian authorities. The court also asked the ministry to place on record the compensation amounts determined by Moscow and the money actually disbursed to the families.

The bench noted that only six families had sought compensation despite 51 reported deaths. It also noted that the ministry was contacting the families individually to collect documents required to process the claims.

The order was passed on a petition filed by the family members of 26 Indians who had been recruited by the Russian military after they travelled to the country looking for work. The petitioners alleged that the men had been trafficked and deceived into fighting in the conflict.

On Monday, the ministry told the court that 267 Indians had joined the Russian military since the war began. While 139 of them had been discharged, 51 had been killed.

The whereabouts of the remaining 77 persons was unknown. This included seven who the Russian authorities say are missing.

Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, triggering the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.

The external affairs ministry has repeatedly issued advisories warning Indian citizens against joining the Russian military. New Delhi contends that many are duped by unscrupulous agents and are often hired as support staff, such as cooks and helpers, amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

On October 10, Anna Oommen, a 28-year-old advocate in the Supreme Court, stood on a road outside the Supreme Court with dozens of lawyers, demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

As they marched towards Mandi House, past heavy barricades, they were halted by the police near a gate of the Supreme Court. “By the third barricade, my hair was being pulled by a woman police officer,” Oommen told Scroll. “They pulled my neck and collar, my kurti was pulled. I was pushed with such force that I experienced difficulty in breathing and was left gasping for air for several minutes.”

Anne Mathew, another advocate who was part of the protest, saw Oommen struggle to breathe and ran to help her. But four to five female police personnel pushed both into a bus. “We were physically lifted, pushed and dragged into the bus,” Mathew said. “Anna was dealt with especially roughly.”

For about 30 minutes, they were confined in the stationary bus, with its windows shut. When the bus finally started moving, they were not told about where they were taken. Their requests for drinking water were denied.

“We usually tell detainees that they should know their rights – the police should give you a detention memo, they are supposed to inform you where you are being taken, give you water,” Mathew said. “None of this was done. We are officers of the court. Imagine the level of authoritarianism if this is happening to us.”

She added: “We were lawyers, but we were treated like criminals.”

The group of 20-odd lawyers were eventually driven to the Yamuna Sports Complex, 11 km from the court complex, and detained for three hours. They were released following interventions by Supreme Court bar bodies.

According to Oommen, about 100 lawyers, five of them senior advocates in the Supreme Court, were detained on Saturday as the Narendra Modi government cracked down on protests called by the Cockroach Janta Party and Left student groups against the alleged rigging of the electoral system.

Later in the day, videos emerged of senior Supreme Court advocate Shaadan Farasat being dragged on the streets and violently detained, even though he was not taking part in the protests.

Oommen and Mathew, two other advocates and the Lawyers’ Association for Constitution moved the Supreme Court on October 12 against the police action, demanding an independent inquiry and action against the police personnel.

But, in a sign of a growing distance between the bench and a section of the bar, neither Oomen and Mathew, nor other detained lawyers Scroll spoke to said they have hope of the court taking any action against the police or the Centre. “We know that the Supreme Court is not going to do anything. Justice is a very far-fetched term for the court now,” said Oommen.

Shirt torn, thrown into bus

On the afternoon of October 10, senior advocate Shadan Farasat was driving back from a seminar when he stopped at a flyover where Left student leader Neha Bora had just been detained.

He got out of the car and watched another group of protestors surround the bus Bora was in. “They managed to whisk Bora away and then immediately started grabbing whoever was standing there,” Farasat told Scroll.

In the melee, police officials also grabbed Farasat, still in his lawyer’s coat. “They tore my shirt and pulled me by my shirt and then threw me in that moving bus,” he said.

Farasat alleged that the Delhi Police “was not functioning as a police force which is bound by law, it is functioning like the private army of our ruling party at the Centre.”

He is a senior advocate of Supreme Court - taken away by #DelhiPolice like this as surprise protest erupts. Location south delhi flyover. Several detained pic.twitter.com/UTeS9AoDwU

— Tamal Saha (@Tamal0401) October 10, 2026

Mentions in court

The action against the lawyers triggered a wave of outrage and condemnation by bar associations across the country.

The members of the Supreme Court Bar Association Executive Committee wore a white ribbon pinned to their coats on Tuesday to express solidarity with advocates.

The Delhi High Court Bar Association asked its members to wear black ribbons during court appearances on Monday.

The Supreme Court Bar Association moved the Supreme Court, seeking accountability of the officers involved in detaining lawyers, while the Supreme Court Advocates-On-Record Association has sought the court’s intervention in ensuring an independent probe. The Bombay Bar Association passed a resolution expressing “unequivocal outrage” at the incidents of police excesses and detention of peaceful protestors and lawyers in New Delhi and Mumbai and sought an impartial, time-bound inquiry into police conduct.

The action against lawyers has also been mentioned several times before the Supreme Court.

On Sunday, when the Supreme Court held a special hearing to address petitions against mass detentions, KK Venugopal, senior advocate and former Attorney General for India, told the court that a former junior colleague was arbitrarily lifted by the Delhi Police.

"A former junior of mine was lifted and taken away in a police van, and dropped 11 km away. The man [who detained her] had no badge. Multiple violations. She was not informed of anything whatsoever,” he said.

The Supreme Court bench, comprising Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, did not pass any adverse orders against the police, although it directed authorities not to carry out “illegal detentions”.

On Monday, senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, too, mentioned how “senior advocates are being physically dragged through the streets, Mr Farasat was dragged through the streets.”

He also appeared to push the court to restrain the police. “The court has repeatedly said that we must cooperate and exercise restraint. I would hope that the court says the same to the police. That has not come from this bench so far. I am hoping that happens.”

‘All cosmetic’

Five days later, however, lawyers pointed out that the Supreme Court has not passed any significant order against the Delhi Police and Centre despite multiple petitions.

Anne Mathew, the 46-year-old advocate-on-record, said she was “deeply disappointed” by the Supreme Court’s “inadequate” response on alleged police excesses against lawyers. She also said she had little hope of any meaningful intervention from the courts.

“My expectations from the present proceedings are limited,” she said. “I am concerned about whether these issues will receive the degree of independent and effective consideration that they warrant.”

Senior Advocate Dinesh Dwivedi, who was detained by the Delhi police on Saturday, when he was simply standing in central Delhi, echoed Matthew. He said he did not “expect too much from the Supreme Court”. “Even if the court passes some precautionary orders, that will neither be enforceable, nor is anyone going to enforce them,” he told Scroll. “So, this is all cosmetic.”

Shashank Singh, an advocate-on-record who was also detained at the Yamuna Sports Complex, said he was disturbed by the silence of the Supreme Court on police excesses. “The bench is not saying anything against the abuse by the police and that is the one thing which is disturbing us,” he told Scroll.

Farasat pointed out that when the state cracks down on legitimate protests, the role of the court “is to facilitate peaceful protest in the city”. “The state does not have a right to prevent protests against itself,” he said. “If the police force is going beyond its constitutional and legal bounds, which it is, then it’s for the court to then call it out and restrict it. That is all. That’s the simple ask.”

The lawyers said their misgivings are not new, and have only grown because of the Supreme Court’s refusal to curb the Election Commission as its Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls ended up disenfranchising lakhs of Indians.

“We have been pointing out again and again the deficiency in the electoral rolls,” Singh said. “But the kind of orders we are getting and the kind of response we are getting from the court, it's very unfortunate.”

He cited Justice Bagchi’s comment during the SIR hearings, suggesting that lakhs of Bengal voters not included in the voter roll could “cast their vote next year. “Those things perturbed us a lot and that is why we hit the streets and demanded the resignation of the election commissioner.”

Other lawyers said they were concerned by the convergence of views of the executive and the judiciary on several issues.

Mathew pointed out that the Delhi Police’s statement that it had denotified Jantar Mantar as a place of protest on the Supreme Court’s intervention was worrying. “It is important that the independence of institutions is not merely maintained in substance, but is also seen to be maintained,” she said.

The Supreme Court will hear Oommen and Mathew’s petition on Thursday.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday made absolute the interim protection from coercive action granted to journalist Abhishek Upadhyay in a road rage case and any subsequent first information reports, The Hindu reported.

The bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi also quashed a notice issued by the Uttar Pradesh Police to social media platform X that sought data pertaining to Upadhyay’s account, Live Law reported. The notice had sought data covering a three-month period before the alleged road rage incident.

Upadhyay has claimed that the road rage case was filed to harass him for his reports on the alleged embezzlement of donations at the Ram temple in Ayodhya. He was among the first to report on the alleged corruption.

In a petition against the first information report against him, Upadhyay had filed an application challenging the police’s notice to X.

During a hearing on September 7, the counsel for Upadhyay stated that the police’s notice had sought information about the account dating back to June 1, even though the FIR in the road rage case had been filed on August 18.

The lawyer argued that the police were trying to identify Upadhyay’s journalistic sources.

The attorney general representing the Uttar Pradesh government said that there was a medico-legal case report showing injuries that warranted investigation.

Bagchi had at the time asked why a person’s “digital footsteps” were needed in a road rage case.

On Wednesday, the court said that the police’s claim that the data had been sought to find Upadhyay was inconsistent with the contents of the notice, which had sought his details such as login credentials and email ID, and the IP addresses and equipment identity numbers of his devices, Live Law reported.

The bench said that “seizing data of three months prior to the date of alleged incident seems to be an overkill”.

No confidential or personal information can be obtained prior to the date of the incident, the court was quoted as having said. “Even with respect to information post the FIR, cannot be sought unless alternative measures are found to be inadequate,” the bench said.

It ordered that any information received by the police as a result of the notice cannot be used against the journalist.

The court clarified that it was not commenting on the merits of the case.

The FIR against Upadhyay, based on a complaint by a two-wheeler rider, alleged that the journalist hit his vehicle from behind and then threatened and abused him. It invoked provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Prevention of Atrocities Act.

On August 25, the Supreme Court granted Upadhyay protection from arrest in the case.

During the hearing, the journalist had claimed that the road rage allegations were baseless and that the security camera footage from the site would prove this. He also sought preservation of the footage from the area.

Kant, while granting Upadhyay protection from arrest, had verbally remarked that while the court did not know the truth of the matter, it could understand the journalist’s apprehension.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

A surly-looking elderly man sat behind the counter of an empty jewellery store in Delhi’s bustling Karol Bagh on October 11, reading The Sunday Times of India.

“Restrained, detained, contained,” said the front page banner headline of the newspaper, describing the events of the previous day.

The jeweller grumbled and put it more pithily: “Such a nuisance.”

On Saturday, thousands of ordinary citizens had defied the unprecedented security cover in Central Delhi to show up to protest against the chief election commissioner who they believe is rigging voter lists in the ruling party’s favour.

To thwart the protest, the government had cancelled trains, closed down metro stations, and even shuttered markets like Karol Bagh.

The jeweller, who did want to disclose his name, said he was feeling “very frustrated” – it was the start of the festive season, and chaos on the streets was not good for business. “There has been a lot of disturbance and it is not going to be over soon,” he said.

His annoyance with the protestors aside, he was sympathetic to their cause. “There is definitely something fishy about the voting system currently,” he said.

Despite having lived and voted in Delhi all his life, he had received a notice during the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls – the controversial exercise that had struck 13 crore names off voter lists across India.

“When voter cards were given out 20-25 years ago, everything was verified, everything was perfect,” said the jeweller. “Yet they have started this thing to reverify the credentials of voters. This is all absurd.”

The merchant community he belongs to is counted among the staunchest supporters of the Bharatiya Janata Party. But when asked if the protests were a sign that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was losing ground, the jeweller said: “Of course, this has dented his popularity.”

The protestors were even demanding that the prime minister resign, he said, “because they say he is a vote chor [vote thief], he has done dhandli [manipulation] in the voting system”.

But Modi’s challenge may be bigger than the ongoing protests over alleged electoral rigging. In the national capital, even among those who have only a vague idea of what the street demonstrations are about, support for them runs high.

If anything, the protests may have blown the lid off brewing discontentment with the government, with ordinary people feeling more emboldened to express their grievances. Inflation is the most common complaint. But there is much more that surfaces in discussions that often culminate in voters stating the need for political change, even if there is no clear roadmap for it, with the next general elections two-and-a-half years away.

“It is best to change the government every five years,” said Ram Prasad, a security guard, originally from Bihar. “This one has stayed for over 10 years.”

“Badlaav hone chahiye.” Change is necessary.

At Kashmere Gate metro station, the gateway to Old Delhi, 8 pm is usually rush hour. But on October 10, the station wore a deserted look.

Its entry and exit gates, like those of 44 other stations, had been locked since the previous night – all part of the Delhi Police’s extraordinary measures to scotch the protests. A trickle of passengers were using its interchange facilities to switch from one metro line to another. Not many were interested in fried momos or steamed corn, though, which had left the food kiosks empty and forlorn.

Do you have the time to speak, I asked a man behind one of the kiosks.

“Aaj to time hi time hai, batao,” he said. I have all the time, tell me.

What did he think of the protests, I asked.

“I have no time to follow all this,” he said, looking around warily.

But you just told me you have all the time, I replied.

At this, he smiled.

“Look, they [the protestors] would not have shown up for no reason,” he said, cautiously. “They must have something to say, that is why they have come.”

The government should listen to them, he said. “You have come to me, I am listening to you. And you are listening to me. It is only through conversation that a solution can be found.”

The food vendor’s name was Rajendra Prasad. He was in his mid-forties. Originally from the hills of Uttarakhand, he said he was not loyal to any party. His vote alternated between the Congress and the BJP – “we give it to whoever is winning.”

The BJP had won the last two Assembly elections. With elections in Uttarakhand due soon, Prasad was unwilling to disclose his voting preference. His response was cryptic: “Let’s see, change is usually the best.”

The conversation was interrupted as a group of young college-goers came over to buy a packet of potato chips.

As they left, Prasad said, “It is people of this age who are protesting. They do not like Modi.”

“Age ho gayi hai,” he reasoned. Modi has grown old.

“Ab dosra hi aayega jo aayega.” Now someone else will come.

“Teen baar se zyada koi kya jeetega.” How can anyone win more than three times?

At a kiosk further down, the young vendor was more emphatic in his disavowal of Modi – and his support for the protests.

“Sarkar kuch galti kar rahi hai tabhi to public uske upar chadh rahi hain na,” he said. The government is making mistakes, that is why the public is taking it to task.

What were these mistakes, I asked.

“The price of everything is going up,” he said. “Onions are so expensive at Rs 80. Sugar which used to cost Rs 50, now costs Rs 70.”

With inflation steadily rising over the past six months, similar complaints echoed even among business-owners and managers in Karol Bagh.

A soft-spoken entrepreneur running a mid-sized fabrics business railed against the government forcing vehicle owners like him to use petrol blended with ethanol, a bio-fuel produced using sugar molasses and grains.

“They claimed it would save fuel costs,” said Praveen Kumar, 57. “But the price of petrol did not come down. Instead the price of sugar rose.”

Referring to the BJP’s campaign in the run-up to the 2014 election, he added: “They used to allege that Congress was looting us by raising petrol prices to Rs 65. But now the price has crossed Rs 100.”

Even cooking gas, which used to cost Rs 400, is now at Rs 1,000, he added.

As examples of economic mismanagement under Modi, Kumar brought up demonetisation, the 2016 move that left 86% of currency notes worthless overnight, and GST – the goods and services tax introduced to streamline indirect taxes.

The BJP had won elections despite this, he said, because of its loud advocacy for Hindus. “Muslims rued that their mosque was demolished but we, Hindus, exulted that our temple had been built.”

“They managed to ensnare people in these issues, but now this is changing,” he said.

Back in Kashmere Gate, the young man, Satish Kumar, a migrant from Bihar’s Jamui, spoke about farm distress. “The crop has been destroyed this year.”

Food prices were rising but farmers were not the beneficiaries, he said. “The farmer sells wheat for Rs 20 for a kilo. When he buys it, he has to pay at least Rs 32.”

His companion, Mohit Paswan, also from Bihar, from Nalanda district, said: “Modi has ruined everything.”

“Our elders voted for him because they trusted him,” he continued. “But only Adani and Ambani have flourished under him. Uske baap hain. They are his bosses.”

If that was the case, then how did the BJP win Bihar elections? “Through vote chori,” he said – by stealing votes.

At a nearby food stall, two young men from Uttar Pradesh harboured similar views. “Agar ballot paper se chunaav hue to rahenge nahi,” said one of them, from Etawah district. If elections are held using ballots and not machines, the BJP will be wiped out.

Uttar Pradesh, India’s most politically significant state which has been under BJP rule for 10 years, goes to polls early next year – a high-stakes battle since the results will shape national perceptions of Modi’s grip on power.

Both the young men were Dalit. The second man, from Loni district, who did not want to be identified by name, said he had always voted for the Bahujan Samaj Party, no matter how it stood to perform. But he conceded that a section of Dalit voters had gravitated towards the BJP in recent elections.

His friend from Etawah put it down to: “Sarkari galla bant raha tha, laalach mein aa gaye.” The government was distributing free grains, and people got greedy. Ahead of the 2022 Assembly polls in UP, the Modi government had extended its free food rations scheme introduced during the coronavirus pandemic – only to end it months later.

“The public has now wisened up,” he said.

But in Uttar Pradesh’s fractious, multipolar politics, it was not clear who was benefitting from the disenchantment with the BJP.

The Samajwadi Party, seen as the BJP’s principal challenger, is still seen as primarily a Yadav outfit. As part of its outreach to other communities, it has crafted an acronym PDA that stands for pichhda, Dalit, alpasankhyak – backward, Dalit and minorities.

But the young man from Etawah, where Dalits have a long history of being oppressed by Yadavs, dismissed the PDA outreach as hollow. The Yadavs “are now bending because they want to form the government”, he said.

As for the Congress, he noted, “uska patta khatam hain” – it has no cards left to play in Uttar Pradesh.

Even Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party is now facing a challenge from Chandrashekhar Azad’s Bhim Army, a relatively new outfit that has acquired a following among young Dalits.

The split in the Opposition ranks in Uttar Pradesh and nationally is what BJP supporters are counting on to ride out growing public disaffection.

In Karol Bagh, Ramesh Astha, the owner of a jewellery store, a self-professed supporter of the BJP, smugly argued: “They cannot dislodge Modi since they have no common leader.”

He also trotted out another familiar argument: “Even if the Opposition unites in order to remove Modi, who among them is capable of running the government?”

On October 12, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi led a protest march to the Supreme Court that drew tens of thousands of participants, most of them party workers, but with a noticeable presence of ordinary citizens.

For two days, Delhi Police had brutally disrupted flash protests led by student groups and social activists, bundling protestors, even journalists, into buses and driving them to detention centres, some of them outside city limits. Many protestors accused the police of beating them up and snatching their phones.

But on October 12, the sheer size of the gathering mobilised by the Congress and its INDIA alliance partners made the police step back.

About 15 km away, in Khirki village, the news of the Opposition march was slow to filter in. An urban village near Saket in South Delhi, Khirki is home to Jats and Chauhan Rajputs, who now rent out homes to migrants.

Rameshwar Satpute, an architect from Pune on a temporary assignment in Delhi, stood at the entrance of his rented house waiting to collect his dinner tiffin box. He hadn’t seen visuals of the Congress protest march, he said, but he had heard it was massive.

“For 10-15 years, they called him pappu,” he said, speaking of the BJP’s derisive campaign targeting Rahul Gandhi. “But it is no longer working. People can see Rahul Gandhi is smart. He has good upbringing.”

Satpute said he had voted for the BJP in 2014 and 2019, but had seen through its divisive agenda in 2024.

“If you need to progress as a country, you need to take everyone along,” he said. “Ram apne ghar mein hain. Aur Muslim apne ghar mein khaata hain.” Devotion to Ram is a private matter, so is the food that Muslims eat.

A Muslim fruit seller was similarly aware of the protests that were taking place. He said joblessness was so high that people did not have money to buy fruit. “The only people prospering are those connected with the BJP,” he said. Turning Modi’s slogan on its head, he said, “Khaata bhi hai khilaata bhi hai apno ko.”

Further inside the village, an elderly Jat woman, Angoori Devi, sat on a bench. She had no idea what people were protesting about, but said she was happy they were protesting. “Modi ne hadd kar rakhi hai, beti,” she said. Modi has crossed all limits. “Milk, vegetables, sugar, everything is so expensive. What will people eat?”

Then, pointing to her leg, which bore faint stitch marks, she said, “My family had to spend Rs 20 lakh after I broke my leg.” The Modi government’s insurance programme, Ayushman Bharat, which promises a health cover of Rs 5 lakh for all senior citizens, proved to be of no use, she claimed. “My son had to borrow money for my treatment.”

It was not just the skyrocketing cost of private healthcare, as the Jantar Mantar protests had highlighted in the summer, there is considerable public anger over growing educational inequality.

“The children of the big people are studying in expensive private institutions, while the poor have no option but to fall back on government schools, and even those are being closed down,” said Ram Prasad, a security guard who was just starting his night shift in Khirki.

In the past decade, over 90,000 government schools have been shut as part of the government’s policy to consolidate and merge schools. The policy had affected lakhs of students, with many forced to drop out.

Expressing his support for the protests, Prasad, from Champaran, Bihar, listed a litany of complaints against the Modi government. “The BJP came up with a slogan: ‘desh bachao, beti bachao.’ Protect the country, protect your daughters. But what is happening? Neither are daughters safe, nor is the country on the right track.”

“Railway bech diya, LIC bech diya,” he said, bringing up the growing privatisation of the Indian Railways and the Life Insurance Corporation of India.

“We will now know in 2029 who will form the next government,” he said. “Change is necessary.”

The parents of Ankita Bhandari, who was murdered in 2022, and Congress MPs were detained by security personnel on Thursday during their sit-in protest at Delhi’s India Gate.

The protest began after Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dushyant Kumar Gautam was named as the next governor of Sikkim on Monday.

Bhandari’s family and activists have alleged that Gautam is the alleged VIP linked to the murder case. They were demanding that the BJP leader not be allowed to assume his new post until the allegations against him are investigated.

The parents were released less than two hours after they were detained, ANI reported.

They were detained hours after Opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with several Congress MPs, had joined the protest on Wednesday. The Congress leaders and party workers had remained at the site after Gandhi and Vadra left.

At 3.45 a.m. Delhi Police along with CRPF detained parents of Ankita Bhandari and Congress MPs from India Gate.#justiceforankitabhandari pic.twitter.com/KvA66WWY9S

— Jothimani (@jothims) October 14, 2026

The murder case

Bhandari worked as a receptionist at a resort in Uttarakhand’s Rishikesh that was owned by Pulkit Arya, the son of former BJP leader Vinod Arya. The 19-year-old went missing on September 18, 2022. A day later, Pulkit Arya, resort manager Saurabh Bhaskar and his assistant Ankit Gupta filed a missing person report.

However, they later confessed to killing Bhandari by pushing her into a canal following an altercation. Bhandari’s body was recovered from the Chilla Canal in Rishikesh six days after she had gone missing.

The BJP expelled Vinod Arya and his other son Ankit Arya after the matter came to light.

In May 2025, Pulkit Arya, Bhaskar and Gupta were sentenced to life imprisonment.

Evidence recovered later, such as WhatsApp messages from Bhandari to a friend, seemed to suggest that the men were allegedly trying to force Bhandari into prostitution. It was claimed that she was killed for refusing to provide “special services” to a “VIP”.

In audio and video clips made public later, former BJP MLA Suresh Rathore had allegedly identified Gautam, a BJP national general secretary at the time, as the VIP in question. However, Rathore denied releasing the audio or video clips, or making any remarks against senior party leaders.

The police’s special investigation team had earlier stated that it found no evidence establishing the involvement of an influential leader in the murder, The Indian Express reported.

Gautam, who was in charge of the BJP’s Uttarakhand unit, has denied the allegations.

He had filed a defamation petition in the Delhi High Court against the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party and others for social media posts linking him to the Bhandari murder case. The court directed the Congress and the AAP to remove the posts linking Gautam to the case.

In January, following demands from the Opposition, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami announced that the state government had recommended a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into the allegations.

In June, Rathore was arrested for allegedly making statements linking Gautam to the murder case.

चार साल से अंकिता भंडारी के परिवार को इंसाफ नहीं मिला, लेकिन एक ‘VIP’ आरोपी को संरक्षण और संवैधानिक पद का इनाम ज़रूर मिला।

जहां बलात्कारियों और हत्यारों का फूल-मालाओं से स्वागत होता है और अपराधियों को सत्ता की ताकत से नवाज़ा जाता है - उस महिला-विरोधी BJP से कोई उम्मीद की भी नहीं… pic.twitter.com/RksgdL2DUR

— Uttarakhand Congress (@INCUttarakhand) October 14, 2026

Parents’ protest

On Wednesday, Bhandari’s father said that Gautam “should be behind bars” and requested President Droupadi Murmu not to appoint the BJP leader as Sikkim’s governor until the CBI investigation concludes, ANI reported.

The father also said that he wanted the CBI investigation to focus on the alleged VIP angle and not repeat the probe into the roles of persons who had already been convicted.

After meeting Bhandari’s parents, Gandhi said that the family had not received justice for four years, but an alleged VIP had been “rewarded with protection and a constitutional position”.

The Congress had on Tuesday announced protests against the appointment of Gautam.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Assistant Commissioner of Police Vivek Bhagat, who had been accused by a journalist of sexual harassment during a protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on October 3 in Delhi, has alleged that she had made casteist remarks about him, reported PTI on Wednesday.

The Delhi Police has registered a first information report against the journalist based on Bhagat’s complaint, reported ANI.

A woman journalist had alleged that Bhagat groped her while she was making a video of student leader Neha Bora being detained during protests demanding the resignation of Kumar.

She said that she had gone to the Parliament Street police station to file a complaint, but no action was taken.

An unidentified police official was quoted as saying by The Hindu on October 6 that registering cases against police personnel for actions taken while performing law and order duties could “deter them from working”.

Another unidentified police official told the newspaper on October 4 that there was no evidence to substantiate the journalist’s allegation.

In his complaint, Bhagat, who is a member of a scheduled caste community, alleged that the journalist had made derogatory remarks about his caste group and asked how he had become the assistant commissioner of police, reported The Print.

He claimed he and a constable had heard her make the remarks while he was performing his duty during the protest.

Bhagat further claimed that later that evening, the journalist and her colleagues staged a protest outside the Parliament Street police station and described him as a “sexual predator” and “potential rapist”, reported The Print.

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

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

The journalist who accused Bhagat of sexual harassment was among the three women journalists who alleged that they were sexually harassed by police officers while covering the protests at Jantar Mantar.

On October 4, the Delhi Police said that the allegations of sexual harassment had been received “in context of the emergent law and order situation” a day earlier.

The police had also arrested a person for allegedly creating and circulating an artificial intelligence-generated poster depicting Bhagat sexually assaulting a woman.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said it would not accept “lame excuses” from the Election Commission after the poll panel claimed that it was unable to trace the video recording of the counting of votes for the 2023 Assembly elections, reported Bar and Bench.

“How can the Election Commission of India say that it has lost its record?” said a bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and Sanjeev Sachdeva while hearing an election dispute between Congress leader TD Rajegowda and Bharatiya Janata Party’s DN Jeevaraj.

Rajegowda had won the Assembly elections from the Sringeri constituency in 2023 by a margin of 201 votes.

Jeevraj had moved the Karnataka High Court against Rajegowda’s victory. On April 6, the High Court ordered to re-count the votes, including verification of 279 postal ballots that had been rejected, reported The New Indian Express.

After the votes were counted again, Jeevaraj’s tally increased to 690, while Rajegowda’s dropped to 314, which marked a reduction of 255 votes, reported The Indian Express. Jeevaraj was declared the winner by 52 votes.

Rajegowda had moved the Supreme Court against the declaration.

On May 11, the court directed that he will remain the MLA from Sringeri till a judgement is reached on his appeal.

The court said on Wednesday that it would direct the Election Commission to produce the election observer’s report, video recordings of the original vote counting and the re-counting, reported Bar and Bench.

In response, the poll panel said that it was unable to trace the video of 2023.

“Your whole purpose is to hold an election, and you need to have a document,” said the bench. “Where is the question of you saying, ‘Yeah, we are trying to trace it’?”

It added: “Whatever you have, produce it on the next date. Otherwise, we will have to draw an adverse inference against you. We will not accept these kinds of lame excuses.”

The court’s statements came in the wake of nationwide protests to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Opposition condemned the arrest of Cockroach Janta Party leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde for trespassing on Jantar Mantar. Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said that “waving the tricolour” at Jantar Mantar during a peaceful protest “is not a crime” and jailing young persons for it is an “act of cowardice”.

Ranka and Das have been sent to judicial custody for five days by a magistrate court, while Shinde was released on a personal bond.

Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee said that the Union government was “arresting Indians for unfurling and waving the tricolour in their own country” and wrongfully constituting the act as a “breach of peace”. Read on.

Delhi Police arrested thousands far away from Jantar Mantar. Was this legal, explains Anant Gupta

The Indian government said that it would sell 60.7% stake in IDBI Bank for Rs 52,878 crore to Canadian financial holding company Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited. The divestment would bring the “largest foreign direct investment in the financial sector of our economy so far”, said the Union Ministry of Finance.

The decision was taken in view of the repeated infusion of capital, initially provided by the Union government and later by Life Insurance Corporation. After the transaction is complete, the Centre will be left with a shareholding of 15% of the bank and LIC will have 19%. Read on.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s decision not to attend the BRICS summit in New Delhi last month was “immature” and did not serve the country’s national interest, former PM Sheikh Hasina told PTI. She said it was “deeply unfortunate” if her presence in India was the reason behind the prime minister not attending the event.

On September 10, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humaiun Kobir said that Dhaka would not send a government representative to the BRICS Summit as Rahman was “not invited” to the meeting. However, Bangladesh had received two invitations from India. Read on.

A Saudi court overturned the death sentence of a Sri Lankan migrant worker who had been convicted of blasphemy in September for a Facebook comment, said Sri Lankan Deputy Foreign Minister Arun Hemachandra. Anojan Sivarasa had been sentenced to death by a Saudi appellate court for an allegedly derogatory comment he had made about Islam and Prophet Muhammad.

The case had spurred diplomatic efforts by Sri Lanka to seek clemency for Sivarasa. Read on.

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The metro services in Delhi were “fully operational” on Saturday and reduction in ridership may be because of the protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar which prompted a large number of commuters to refrain from travelling, the Live Law quoted the metro authority as telling the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation said that nearly 32 lakh passengers travelled in the trains that day, compared with around 58 lakh on a normal second Saturday.

On Friday, the Supreme Court barred the authorities in Delhi from imposing a complete closure of metro services in the national capital.

The order came on petitions filed in the Supreme Court challenging the proposed closure of 57 metro stations and other restrictions.

On Sunday, a bench of Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana heard petitions challenging the detention of protesters and restrictions on public transport during Saturday’s demonstrations. The bench said that it had taken note of the alleged violations of its earlier order.

It directed the authorities to submit a short affidavit explaining why contempt proceedings should not be initiated.

On Wednesday, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation submitted that while there was no reduction in the number of train trips, entry and exit were restricted at 45 of the 303 metro stations on directions of the Delhi Police.

It also said that the restrictions at 45 stations were lifted at 10 pm on Saturday, following directions from the police.

Protests against Kumar

Protests are being held in several parts of the country calling for Kumar to resign over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision exercise.

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

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• How Modi put Delhi under siege to protect Gyanesh Kumar
• ‘Citizens being silenced’: What ordinary Indians think of the crackdown on the Delhi protests

Bangladesh Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s decision not to attend the BRICS summit in New Delhi last month was “immature” and did not serve the country’s national interest, former PM Sheikh Hasina told PTI in an interview on Wednesday.

Hasina, who has been in Delhi since the collapse of her government in August 2024 following massive student-led protests, said that it was “deeply unfortunate” if her presence was the reason behind Rahman skipping the summit. She added that “short-term political calculations are inherently counterproductive”.

“Relations between two countries cannot be determined by personal considerations or political sensitivities involving one individual,” she told PTI.

On September 10, State Minister for Foreign Affairs Humaiun Kobir had said that Dhaka would not send a government representative to the BRICS Summit as Rahman was “not invited” to the meeting.

However, Bangladesh had received two invitations from India. One from Prime Minister Narendra Modi for a bilateral visit, while the other for Rahman, in his capacity as chairperson of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation to attend the BRICS summit which was held on September 12 and 13.

Bangladesh assumed the chairmanship of BIMSTEC in April 2025 for a two-year term. The regional grouping comprises Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

The BRICS grouping comprises India, Brazil, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

On Wednesday, Hasina said that Bangladesh could have gained valuable experience and opened new opportunities for its own economic and social development had it participated in the summit.

Hasina also said that India was Bangladesh’s “closest neighbour and an important historic partner”.

She said that China was also an important development partner and Bangladesh’s engagement with Beijing or any other country was not the problem, but using the relationship with one nation against another was.

“It begins when anti-India rhetoric is encouraged for domestic politics,” the news agency quoted her as saying. “It begins when major decisions are taken without transparency.”

The neighbouring countries have had strained relations since the July 2024 protests against a controversial quota scheme for government jobs and later snowballed into a broader agitation against Hasina’s government.

Hasina told PTI that her return to Bangladesh “is part of the struggle to restore democracy, voting rights and the rule of law”.

She did not comment on when she would return to her country.

In November, Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal sentenced Hasina to death for crimes against humanity in connection with the deadly crackdown on protesters in 2024.

In February, a court sentenced her to 10 years’ imprisonment in two corruption cases relating to alleged irregularities in the allocation of land in a government housing project in Dhaka.

Dhaka has repeatedly demanded that Hasina be extradited. It has also expressed concerns about the ousted leader being allowed by the Indian authorities to address her supporters from Delhi.

New Delhi has previously said that it was for Hasina to decide whether she wants to return to Bangladesh.

Rahman took office in February and has since visited Malaysia and China, departing from the tradition of Bangladeshi leaders heading to India for their first overseas trip.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

At least 80 infants have died at a government hospital in Madhya Pradesh’s Seoni district in the past six months, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

Hospital officials attributed the deaths mainly to premature births and low birth weight, The Indian Express reported. They said 34 infants died between April and June, followed by 46 between July and September.

On Saturday, Dinesh Rai Munmun, a legislator from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, inspected the hospital after receiving reports of infant deaths and called for an investigation.

Rai told The Indian Express that hospital staff initially tried to stop him from entering the premises. He said no doctor was present and that the staff told him an inquiry and audit were under way.

The MLA alleged that 46 infants had died in the past three months due to breathing difficulties.

“The hospital has a ventilator for children who have difficulty breathing, and a doctor is supposed to be appointed for this,” he said. “But the doctor does not remain there at night. The nurses are not trained for this work.”

Civil surgeon Dr Vinod Kumar Navkar said that critically ill infants from rural areas of the district were referred to the special newborn care unit of the hospital.

“Many a times, these babies are born at six, seven or eight months,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying.

He added that the hospital had treated 1,188 newborns over the past six months, more than half of whom had low birth weight.

The World Health Organization defines low birth weight as less than 2.5 kg.

“When a baby is born prematurely and weighs less than this, the mortality rate can be as high as 48%,” Navkar said. Some infants treated at the hospital weighed as little as 1,100 grams, 900 grams and even 500 grams, he added.

Navkar also said that the neonatal mortality rate at the hospital was lower than that of other districts in the Jabalpur division, the newspaper reported.

Rai disputed this assessment, saying the recorded deaths might not reflect the full picture because critically ill newborns were being referred to other hospitals.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

The Opposition on Wednesday condemned the arrest of Cockroach Janta Party leaders Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde by the Delhi Police for trespassing on Jantar Mantar a day earlier.

Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, said that “waving the tricolour” at Jantar Mantar during a peaceful protest “is not a crime” and jailing young persons for it is an “act of cowardice”.

Jantar Mantar belongs to the people of India and “we will reclaim it”, he said on social media.

Ranka and Das were sent to judicial custody for five days by a magistrate court. Shinde was released on a personal bond.

They were detained on Tuesday with other members of the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign after they “sneaked into” Jantar Mantar to protest the authorities’ decision to denotify the area as a designated protest site.

The leaders have also been accused of violating a bond and obstructing a public servant from discharging their duties.

Calling out the arrests, Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee said that the Union government was “arresting Indians for unfurling and waving the tricolour in their own country” and wrongfully constituting the act as a “breach of peace”.

All India Students’ Association head Neha Bora said that the government was trying to crush dissent through the arrests and “ensure this resistance vanishes”.

Meanwhile, Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh asked if India was under British rule once again. “Modi ji, are you British?,” he asked on social media.

The Rajya Sabha MP said that the BJP “hated the tricolour” because, he alleged, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s headquarters did not hoist the national flag for 52 years.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the BJP.

मोदी जी क्या आप अंग्रेज़ हैं?
क्या भारत में ब्रिटिश राज है?
मुझे मालूम है आप लोग तिरंगे से नफ़रत करते हैं आप लोगों ने “52 साल तक RSS के मुख्यालय पर तिरंगा नही फहराया”
आपने CJP के नेता @AshutoshRanka और @SauravDassss को तिरंगा फहराने और भारत माता की जय लगाने के कारण जेल भेज दिया।… pic.twitter.com/YHRpGQ5Q1L

— Sanjay Singh AAP (@SanjayAzadSln) October 14, 2026

Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leader Aaditya Thackeray said that the fight between the “regime” and “patriotic young Indians” would go on till “we reclaim democracy from this dictatorship!”

Former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin expressed his solidarity with the Cockroach Janta Party leaders, saying that his party Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam was ready to provide them with legal support.

“The more young people they jail, the more ordinary citizens, with no political affiliation, will take to the streets and show them the true power of the people!,” Stalin said on social media.

Movement at Jantar Mantar

The Cockroach Janta Party, the Opposition parties and student groups are protesting in Delhi to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over concerns about the functioning of the Election Commission and its handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

Protests had also been held in June and July at Jantar Mantar against alleged exam irregularities.

The Cockroach Janta Party had started a sit-in demonstration at Jantar Mantar on June 20, which continued till July 28. The protest resulted in BJP leader Dharmendra Pradhan resigning as the Union education minister.

Written by Abeer Khan. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• Delhi Police arrested thousands far away from Jantar Mantar. What this legal?

• How Modi put Delhi under siege to protect Gyanesh Kumar

• Watch: A generation’s revolt against Modi