One of the three container ships at which Iran opened fire in the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday may have been headed for Gujarat, PTI reported, citing vessel-tracking data from maritime intelligence firm MarineTraffic.

The data indicated that the container ship, Liberia-flagged Epaminondas, was en route to the Mundra port, while another vessel, Panama-flagged MSC Francesca, signalled that it was headed to the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota, The Indian Express reported.

The third vessel, Panama-flagged Euphoria, had indicated Jeddah in Saudi Arabia as its destination.

The three vessels were attacked by Iran hours after United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that the US’ blockade of Iranian ports would continue, even as he announced the extension of the ceasefire with Tehran. In the past few days, the US had seized some Iranian ships that were trying to slip through the blockade.

Against this backdrop, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stated on Wednesday that it had opened fire on a ship in the Strait of Hormuz after it “ignored the warnings of the Iranian armed forces”, reported AP.

The MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas were “seized” off the coast of Iran, reported the Iranian state-owned news agency Tasnim. The Euphoria was also “grounded off the coast of Iran” by the military later.

The Indian Express cited MarineTraffic data as indicating that the Mundra-bound Epaminondas had departed from the United Arab Emirates’ Jabel Ali port on March 4, but had since been stuck in the Persian Gulf as the West Asia war led to Iran effectively closing the Strait of Hormuz.

The container ship is managed and operated by Greece-based companies, the newspaper quoted international shipping data as saying.

On April 17, Iran had fully reopened the strait to commercial vessels after a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. A day later, however, Iran had said it was reimposing strict military controls on the waterway, alleging “repeated breaches of trust” by the US.

Washington began blockading all ports in the Iranian gulf region on April 13.

The developments come amid continuing uncertainty over whether fresh talks between Iran and the US will take place. An initial round of peace talks between Iran and the US in Islamabad collapsed on April 12.

Last week, reports had said that two Indian vessels, Jag Arnav and Sanmar Herald, were forced to turn back from the strait. Jag Arnav was reportedly fired upon by the Iranian Navy while Sanmar Herald, which was in the vicinity, was not harmed.

The Indian government lodged a protest against the firing with the Iranian Ambassador to India Mohammad Fathali.

The war

The US and Israel launched an attack on Iran on February 28, claiming that Tehran’s action posed an existential threat to Israel. Washington acts as a guarantor of Israel’s security. Iran retaliated by striking Israel and US military bases in the region and targeting major cities in Gulf countries.

Tehran also effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterbody connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, for most international commercial vessels, triggering a global energy crisis. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

Israel has been claiming that Iran is close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, which could alter the regional security balance. Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

The Union government on Thursday said that there is “no proposal under consideration” to increase the prices of petrol and diesel amid the war in West Asia.

This came after a report by stock broker Kotak Institutional Equities estimated that fuel prices could be hiked by Rs 25 to Rs 28 per litre after the Assembly elections in five states conclude, reported CNBC-TV18 on Wednesday.

Polling in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry was held on April 9. Voting in Tamil Nadu and in the first phase of the West Bengal polls was taking place on Thursday. The second phase of polling in West Bengal will be held on April 29. The votes in all states will be counted on May 4.

On Thursday, the Union Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas said that the reports “suggesting a price hike of petrol and diesel are designed to create fear and panic amongst the citizens and are mischievous and misleading”.

“In fact, India is the only country where petrol and diesel prices have not increased in the last four years,” the ministry claimed. “Government of India and Oil PSUs [public sector undertakings] have taken relentless steps in order to insulate the Indian citizens from steep increases in international prices.”

FAKE NEWS

There are some news reports suggesting a price hike of petrol and diesel. It is hereby clarified that there is no such proposal under consideration by the Government.
Such news items are designed to create fear and panic amongst the citizens and are mischievous and… pic.twitter.com/yTAfJdah2o

— Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas #MoPNG (@PetroleumMin) April 23, 2026

In its report, Kotak Institutional Equities had estimated that fuel prices may rise as crude oil rates have remained high since the war in West Asia broke out on February 28. With the benchmark Brent crude hovering above the $100 per barrel-mark, the gap between global oil costs and domestic retail prices has widened.

The price of Brent was $78 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict started.

Fuel marketing companies in the country have been under strain as retail petrol and diesel prices have remained frozen despite a surge in global oil prices.

Global energy supplies have been disrupted as Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow water body connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of the global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

On April 17, Iran said that it had fully reopened the strait to commercial vessels after a 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah in Lebanon. However, a day later Tehran that said it was reimposing military control on the waterway, alleging “repeated breaches of trust” by the US.

Washington began blockading all Iranian ports on April 13.

West Bengal is holding elections even as more than 27 lakh voters have been deprived of their right to vote. Many of them are people who voted in the last election, but have been removed from the electoral roll despite attending hearings and producing their documents during the special intensive revision.

Analysts who studied the deletions found that Muslim voters have been hit the worst. How are those excluded from the voter list responding to this? And what does it mean for politics in the state?

To find out, Scroll travelled through the districts of Malda and Murshidabad, speaking to disenfranchised voters and politicians on the ground.

Ramjan Sheikh was among the hundreds from Ahiran village who showed up for a public meeting organised by the Trinamool Congress in Murshidabad’s Jangipur on April 10. The main attraction: Bengali film actor Srabanti Chatterjee, who had flown down from Kolkata to campaign for Jakir Hossain, the local MLA.

But Sheikh was not impressed.

“I came here hoping that they would talk about SIR [special intensive revision],” complained the 28-year-old whose name was deleted from the voter rolls last month. “But nobody from Trinamool is saying that the rights of voters like us should be ensured before elections.”

Sheikh is not alone. The names of 91 lakh voters have been removed from the state’s electoral rolls as part of the special intensive revision. In stark contrast to other states, many voters in West Bengal had to attend hearings and produced documents to establish their bona fides in this SIR.

Analysts who studied the deletions found that the state’s Muslim voters have been hit the worst. A disproportionately large number of Bengali Muslims will not be allowed to vote in the upcoming Assembly elections.

Travelling through the Muslim-majority districts of Malda and Murshidabad, which elect 34 of West Bengal’s 294 MLAs, Scroll found Muslim voters seething with anger. Their disenfranchisement has become the main election issue even for those who made it to the final list.

Anger against the Trinamool Congress-led administration for governance failures has taken a backseat as the SIR has triggered fears of detention centres and foreigners’ tribunals, similar to those faced by Muslims in neighbouring Assam. This benefits Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has pitched herself as the sole protector of Bengali Muslims against efforts to question their citizenship.

“I believe that only Didi [Banerjee] can get our names included in the voter list again,” said Ramjan. However, in the same breath, he complained that the Trinamool had backtracked on its promises of not allowing the election to proceed if legitimate voters were left out.

Other Bengali Muslim voters also shared grievances with the ruling party, but added that they would vote for Banerjee because she was their best bet to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party out of power. Activists and researchers argued that this shows how the citizenship politics unleashed by SIR has restricted the community’s political choices.

‘We have no choice’

Muslims make up nearly a third of West Bengal’s population, according to the 2011 census. While some members of the community, especially in and around Kolkata, are Urdu speakers who trace their roots back to Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the vast majority of them are Bengalis.

Bengali Muslims are among the most backward communities in India, faring poorly on crucial human development indicators. A sizeable chunk of their population is clustered in the backward districts of Malda, Murshidabad, Uttar Dinajpur and Dakshin Dinajpur, which have historically seen large-scale outmigration of labour to other states.

Over the past year, it is these Bengali Muslims that have repeatedly been mislabelled Bangladeshi as the BJP made a poll plank out of so-called illegal immigration. In some cases, migrant workers from the community have even been wrongly deported from BJP-ruled states on the mere suspicion that they were undocumented migrants from Bangladesh.

Mehebub Sheikh is one such Bengali Muslim who was picked up from a Mumbai suburb in June and pushed across the Bangladesh border, allegedly at gunpoint. Border Security Force officials subsequently brought him back after the government of West Bengal confirmed his Indian nationality.

“I thought I was done with NRC [National Register of Citizens],” Mehebub said at his home in Balia Hasennagar village of Murshidabad, likening his ordeal to Assam’s citizenship verification exercise in 2019. “When SIR began, the village pradhan [chief] had told me that my family would be ok because we had already been through NRC.”

As things turned out, the Sheikhs were put in the dock once again. Though some of their names were present in the 2002 voter list, Mehebub and his family were summoned for hearings because of so-called logical discrepancies in their documents.

When the final voter list came out on February 28, Mehebub’s father and his sister-in-law had been placed “under adjudication” along with half his village. His sister-in-law was eventually cleared to vote, but his father’s name was deleted. For this, he blames not only the Election Commission but also the state government.

“Trinamool has failed to protect its own voters,” Mehebub lamented, adding that most of the deleted voters in his village were Bengali Muslims who supported the ruling party. However, when asked who he would vote for, he named the chief minister. His wife liked Banerjee for her welfare schemes, he explained.

His brother Majibur, though, was more candid about why the family continued to support Banerjee. He had heard that if Trinamool lost the election and BJP came to power, deleted voters like his father would be placed in detention camps.

“We have no choice,” he said. “Whether we live or die, we have to keep voting for them [Trinamool]. No other party can win the whole state. Why waste our vote on somebody else?”

Spoilt for choice?

Contrary to this feeling of having no viable options, the political field in Murshidabad and Malda suggests that Bengali Muslims are spoilt for choice. Besides Trinamool and BJP, the Congress party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) are in the fray. Both parties have previously enjoyed considerable support from the community.

Then there are the smaller but more assertive Muslim parties such as MP Asaduddin Owaisi’s All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen and Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party, which is rallying support for the construction of a Babri Masjid replica in Murshidabad. But even voters sympathetic to their politics don’t see them as having a real shot at power in these elections.

Ajijul Sheikh, a 63-year-old resident of Alinagar village in Malda who worked as a labourer in Delhi and Mumbai before retirement, claimed that seven members from his family would not be able to vote this time because of the SIR. He saw Owaisi as the only leader who would take up the issue in Parliament. Still, he said he could not vote for his party.

“The AIMIM has just started building its organisation here,” he added. “It will take time to grow. I will vote for it when the time is right.”

As far as the Congress party is concerned, it is busy fighting battles of its own while voters feel disconnected from it. Two of its candidates from the region also found their names on the deleted list, which rendered them ineligible to contest elections.

Eventually, they moved the Supreme Court and managed to get the appellate tribunals set up for deleted voters to hear their appeals on an urgent basis. The tribunal found their documents to be legitimate and their deletions were reversed in the nick of time. But this, too, left a bad taste in the mouth of ordinary voters, given that no such hurry was shown in entertaining their appeals.

Asadul Hoque, an e-rickshaw driver, was loading sacks of watermelons into his vehicle when Congress candidate Motakkin Alam’s cavalcade went past him in Baharal village of Malda. He did not even stop to take a look at the leader.

“He got his name included, but I cannot,” the 30-year-old deleted voter told Scroll. “I don’t have a big party behind me. All I have is my two hands and legs.”

An SIR election

This kind of resentment is fast gaining ground among Bengali Muslims, explained Saifulla Samim, a professor of the Bengali language at the state-run Aliah University in Kolkata.

For the last month and a half, activists and intellectuals like Samim have been protesting against the SIR in Kolkata’s Park Circus Maidan. Their protest has received little attention from the media and political parties. Fellow Muslims have also largely stayed away from it, Samim complained.

“Urdu-speaking Muslims and non-Bengali Hindus have not stood up for us,” he added. “Only some Bengali Hindus have.”

Part of the reason for the resentment among Bengali Muslims was the state government’s decision last year to remove several Muslim castes from Bengal’s list of Other Backward Classes. According to Samim, the access to reservations had “opened a big door” for the community, which did not sit well with many Bengali Hindus.

“Bengali Muslims were acceptable only as long as they sold vegetables and drove rickshaws,” he said. “That we started using reservations to get government jobs and live with dignity angered reactionary forces.”

Samim blamed the Trinamool government for succumbing to the pressure from Hindutva groups and withdrawing reservation benefits from many Bengali Muslim castes. It was able to do so, researcher Sabir Ahamed argued, because it can afford to take their support for granted. The SIR has reinforced this dynamic, forcing Bengali Muslims to set aside their grievances with the Trinamool and vote for it to keep the BJP out.

“Elections should be fought based on developmental indicators, not who is able to vote,” Ahamed said. “Unfortunately, this election is solely about the SIR.”

“If you’re among the corrupt and wealthy 1% loved by the BJP, stop watching,” communist leader Dipsita Dhar said at the start of the video, looking into the camera. Though the line echoed the Communist Party of India (Marxist)’s longheld ideology of class struggle, the vocabulary of “1%” was new, borrowed from the politics of the United States.

The video also broke from the CPI(M)’s usually stern communication style. In this short video, which has garnered over a million views on Facebook since it was uploaded a week ago on March 29, the 32-year-old sounded cheeky while attacking the Bharatiya Janata Party. It was shot with her walking down the street with stylised music and colourful, blocky text.

The impetus for this change? “Zohran Mamdani,” said Dhar, who studied at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. “His videos are very refreshing to look at. As young people we should be talking like this.”

The research scholar is contesting the upcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal from Dum Dum North, a seat situated in a Kolkata suburb. She was not the only one to bring up the socialist Mamdani’s viral election campaign from 2025, which catapulted him from being a minor politician to mayor of New York.

Afreen Begum, who also appears in the video, seconded her. The CPI(M) has fielded Begum, 29, from Kolkata’s Ballygunge seat. “Mamdani’s campaign material inspired us a lot,” she said. “We got some ideas from there.”

David versus Goliath

The Communist Party of India (Marxist), which ruled West Bengal for 34 years before Mamata Banerjee rose to power in 2011, is fighting for its very existence in the state. In the last two Lok Sabha elections as well as the 2021 Assembly polls, it failed to win even a single seat in West Bengal.

While the BJP, too, has struggled to defeat Mamata Banerjee, it has successfully managed to replace the communists as her principal opponent. That is why the CPI(M)’s messaging is focused more on the BJP than the ruling Trinamool Congress.

“What we see today is less politics and more identity,” lamented Dhar, bemoaning the fact that many Bengalis have been voting along religious lines of late. “We want young people to think beyond that.”

Given that this is the predicament that the CPI(M) faces in West Bengal, taking a leaf out of Mamdani’s book was a no-brainer for Dhar. “Fighting in New York, which has a large number of Jewish people, he talked about Palestine so firmly and unapologetically,” she explained.

Besides Mamdani’s style and ideology, the young Bengali communist also spoke admiringly of the David-versus-Goliath nature of his victory in New York. The head of her party’s social media team in West Bengal echoed this.

“The lack of resources makes you creative,” said Dhrubajyoti Chakraborty, who conceptualised the viral CPI(M) video from last week. “If you don’t have money to do theatre, you start doing theatre in the streets.”

The two-minute video took over two days to make with most of the time spent on writing the script and planning the production, Chakraborty said. Shooting with the candidates was easy, he added, because they are both young, camera-friendly and social media savvy.

Once the footage was ready, the editors took over. Chakraborty remembers the prompt he gave them: “Make a Zohran Mamdani-like video.” The 44-year-old himself knows a thing or two about visual content. He has a master’s degree in film studies from Jadavpur University.

Now, he heads a team of roughly 25 people that has been tasked with making and circulating audio-visual content for the CPI(M). About half a dozen are volunteers with longstanding ties to the party, while the rest are paid professionals. Chakraborty underlined that nobody in his team is above 30.

The party plans to put out more Mamdani-style videos as the election campaign picks up. “It gets more viewership,” the social media head stated directly. “We have tested it over many weeks and analysed the reactions. During elections, people want to hear something from candidates, not other party leaders.”

Begum, who is contesting from Ballygunge, said the style was working. She even claimed that being in the video had made offline canvassing easier. Some residents of middle-class neighbourhoods and high-rise buildings had brought it up when she visited them. “We have seen your video,” is something she’s heard from voters, she told Scroll.

Speaking of revolutions

Directing time and resources towards promoting the party online, however, has opened them up to criticism, some of which comes from fellow communists. “Biplob social media tey hoy na,” Dhar recalled one of her comrades telling her. The revolution will not take place on social media.

But the “technological revolution” had already taken place, she argued, and CPI(M) was late to the party. Even though they finally had a team in place, they were still not the “narrative makers” in West Bengal.

“There is a lot more to do,” Dhar complained. “We should up our game and be more and more dominant on social media.”

Chakraborty, the party’s social media head in the state, agreed. While he, too, admitted that the CPI(M) was late to jump on the social media bandwagon, he attributed the delay to what he called a “tragic coincidence”.

“Between 2010 and 2015, when social media was on the rise and smartphones were becoming universal, the CPI(M) was going down in West Bengal,” Chakraborty pointed out. The party also had little money to play with, he added.

That is why adopting the Mamdani model made sense for the Bengal unit of the CPI(M). The videos look slick, but don’t cost a lot. In fact, Chakraborty claimed that they use iPhones, and not any sophisticated cameras, to shoot.

Still, the CPI(M) continues to face disapproval from sections of the Left for bringing professionals on board. When it put out a hiring call on Facebook last September, the comments section was flooded with adverse reactions.

“We are not like I-PAC [Indian Political Action Committee],” Chakraborty said in his party’s defence, referring to the political consultancy firm that works for the Trinamool in West Bengal.

“I-PAC is dictating what Mamata should do,” he alleged. “What we communicate is solely guided by the party. The professionals are just to make the content attractive so that people engage with it.”

The National Investigation Agency on Wednesday alleged before the Delhi High Court that separatist leader Yasin Malik was in contact with the top leadership of Pakistan, including its prime minister and president, and used these links to propagate the secession of Jammu and Kashmir from India, The Hindu reported.

The central agency made the remarks in a rejoinder before a bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Ravinder Dudeja while seeking to enhance Malik’s life term in a terror funding case to the death penalty.

The bench listed the case for hearing on July 21. It also told Malik, who virtually appeared for the proceedings from Tihar jail, that a copy of the rejoinder would be supplied to him through the jail authorities.

In May 2022, a trial court had sentenced the separatist leader to life imprisonment in the terror funding case.

Malik, along with other separatist leaders and groups, had been accused of allegedly acting in connivance with active militants of proscribed terrorist organisations for raising, receiving and collecting funds domestically and abroad.

He was found guilty of several offences under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Indian Penal Code.

In an earlier reply to the appeal for the death penalty filed by the central agency, Malik said that he spent nearly three decades as a key figure in a state-sanctioned “backchannel” mechanism, working with a succession of prime ministers and intelligence chiefs to foster peace in Jammu and Kashmir.

However, the NIA told the court that Malik’s claim of having a “working relationship” with successive Indian governments was only aimed at garnering public sympathy and had no connection with his crime, Live Law reporrted.

The agency in its rejoinder said that Malik had been in contact with the “top leadership of Pakistan, including the prime minister, the president, senators of the Pakistani Senate, and the chief ministers of all provinces, and was using such contacts to propagate narratives against India and to further the secessionist agenda in Jammu & Kashmir”, The Indian Express reported.

The rejoinder noted that the separatist leader had also “admitted that he was the commander-in-chief of JKLF [Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front]”, The Hindu reported.

The mere mention of names of senior politicians and senior bureaucrats does not negate the fact that Malik “had linkages with militant Hafiz Saeed and other militants”, the rejoinder added.

The NIA also said that the separatist leader has admitted to having connections with Sayeed Salauddin, who is chief of the militant group Hizb-ul-Mujahideen.

The Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the conviction and life sentence of Amit Jogi, son of Chhattisgarh’s former Chief Minister Ajit Jogi, in a 2003 murder case, reported Bar and Bench.

He had been convicted by the Chhattisgarh High Court on April 2 for conspiring to kill Nationalist Congress Party treasurer Ramvatar Jaggi. The NCP leader had been shot dead in Raipur in June 2003, when Ajit Jogi was chief minister.

Jaggi was killed ahead of a massive rally by the NCP, which was said to have been posing a challenge to the Congress government at the time.

On April 6, the High Court sentenced Amit Jogi to life imprisonment.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and Vijay Bishnoi on Thursday asked how Amit Jogi could be sentenced without hearing him, reported Live Law.

“What kind of judgment...conviction and sentence before hearing?” asked the bench.

The court also issued notices on Amit Jogi’s application against the conviction.

In May 2007, a trial court convicted 28 persons for Jaggi’s murder. Amit Jogi, however, had been acquitted.

The Central Bureau of Investigation had challenged the acquittal in 2011. However, the High Court had rejected the application on the grounds of delay. It had also rejected appeals by the Chhattisgarh government and Satish Jaggi, son of Ramavtar Jaggi.

At the time, the CBI had moved the Supreme Court against the order.

In November, the top court referred the case back to the High Court, directing it to consider the investigating agency’s application afresh.

The Supreme Court had held that although the CBI filed the application after a significant delay, it was equally true that “the charges against respondent Amit Jogi were very grave, involving a conspiracy to murder a member of a rival political party”.

While convicting Amit Jogi, the High Court had described his acquittal by the trial court as “palpably illegal, wrong, perverse, contrary to the evidence available on record and without any concrete basis”.

“It is pertinent to note that the learned trial judge has unnecessarily attempted to distinguish the role of accused Amit Jogi from that of the other co-accused/convicts,” the High Court had said.

It added: “The finding that the co-accused acted independently to please Amit Jogi, without his knowledge, and in a manner not contemplated by him, is unsustainable.”

United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday shared on social media the transcript of comments made by an American political commentator about birthright citizenship in the US that described India as being among “hellhole” countries.

The comments were made by Michael Savage, an author and political commentator, on US-based TV channel Newsmax after hearings in the US Supreme Court about the case pertaining to birthright citizenship.

Trump has long been a proponent of ending birthright citizenship in the US. In January 2025, Trump signed an executive order to stop automatically granting citizenship to those born in the US in specific scenarios.

Legal consensus, however, broadly holds that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees birthright citizenship. The matter is being heard by the Supreme Court.

Savage said that the arguments should not be conducted “in the abstract of a courtroom” as the demand to revoke birthright citizenship was “really not about law” but rather about public opinion.

The political commentator said that the US Constitution, which guarantees birthright citizenship, had been written before air travel, and questioned “how relevant are some of these arguments when people are coming here by airplane in the ninth month of their pregnancy”.

“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet,” Savage claimed. “You don’t have to go far to see that. English is not spoken here anymore.”

He added that “there’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today, which was not always the case”. The immigrants are “not like the European Americans of today and their ancestors”, Savage added.

Savage argued that a referendum must be held to determine if birthright citizenship should continue.

“Our nation is being overrun with Chinese coming here just to drop a baby on our shore then bring in the entire family,” he said. “How about some common sense in a bankrupt nation?”

Savage alleged that American Civil Liberties Union Attorney Cecillia Wang was “pushing to destroy our national identity, turn us into a colony of China, but it’s not limited to China, it’s also India”. The American Civil Liberties Union is a non-profit civil rights organisation.

Savage added: “I used to be a great supporter of Indians in India until I opened my eyes up to what’s going on here.”

He said that white men “need not apply” for jobs in California, “never mind in high tech” as “you’re not getting a job at high tech in California” despite “what your qualifications are”.

“Your chances are nil,” he added. “You have to be from India or China because almost all the internal mechanisms are set up to [be] run by Indians and Chinese.”

Trump against birthright citizenship

On January 21, 2025, Trump directed federal agencies to refuse to recognise citizenship for children who were born in the country to mothers who are in the country illegally or are there legally on temporary visas, if the father is not a US citizen or a green card holder.

A green card, officially known as a Permanent Resident Card, allows an individual to stay and work permanently in the US.

The executive order would have denied citizenship to children who are born on US soil starting 30 days from the order, if at least one parent is not a United States citizen or a lawful permanent resident.

The executive order had been challenged in court by 22 states in the US.

Three days after Trump signed the order, a lower court temporarily blocked it and described it as “blatantly unconstitutional”.

On April 1, Trump attended the hearing in the Supreme Court, where the matter is now being heard, becoming the first sitting US president to attend such a session.

“We are the only country in the world stupid enough to allow ‘birthright’ citizenship!” Trump said on social media that day.

The Election Commission on Wednesday sent a show cause notice to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, alleging that he prima facie violated the Model Code of Conduct for the Assembly elections by calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “terrorist” on April 21.

Kharge had made the comment at a press conference in Chennai on the last day of campaigning for the Tamil Nadu elections.

The Congress chief later clarified that he meant to say that the prime minister was “terrorising” the country’s democratic fabric by misusing government machinery, and that he did not refer to him as a terrorist in the literal sense, the Hindustan Times reported.

Election Commission of India takes note of Congress National President Mallikarjun Kharge calling PM Narendra Modi a “Terrorist” and issues a notice to Kharge to explain his stand within 24 Hrs

The notice reads, "Whereas, the Commission is prima facie of the opinion that… pic.twitter.com/H7xaWWb6pw

— ANI (@ANI) April 22, 2026

The Election Commission said on Wednesday that the use of “intemperate and highly objectionable and dehumanising choice of words by a seasoned politician against a constitutional functionary” appeared to be inconsistent with the standards of public discourse and undermined the dignity of democratic institutions.

The poll panel said it was of the preliminary opinion that Kharge had violated provisions of the Model Code of Conduct, which state that criticism of political parties should be confined to their policies and programmes, past record and work.

It also said that the Congress chief appeared to have disregarded advice expressed in a letter to political parties to observe “utmost restraint and decency” in the election campaign.

The Election Commission directed Kharge to explain his stand on the matter within 24 hours.

The Congress chief had on Tuesday made the remark about Modi while questioning the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s decision to ally with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“How do these AIADMK people, who themselves put the photo of [former chief minister CN] Annadurai... how can they join with Modi?” he had asked. “He is a terrorist...He doesn’t believe in equality. His party won’t believe in equality and justice.”

#WATCH | Chennai, Tamil Nadu | Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge says, "How these AIADMK people, who themselves put the photo of Annadurai, how can they join Modi? He is a terrorist. His party won't believe in equality and justice. These people are joining with them; it means… pic.twitter.com/znLvE7hutP

— ANI (@ANI) April 21, 2026

A day later, a BJP delegation comprising Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal met the the Election Commission, seeking strict action and an apology from Kharge.

Voting is underway on Thursday in all Assembly constituencies in Tamil Nadu, and in 152 seats in West Bengal. Elections in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry took place on April 9, while the second phase of the West Bengal election will take place on April 29.

The results in all states will be announced on May 4.

In January, the Booth Level Officer of my village in West Bengal’s Purba Bardhaman district rang me with a routine request: could I meet him to submit copies of my passport for verification under the Special Intensive Revision – the Election Commission of India’s sweeping audit of the state’s electoral rolls? I handed them over to him at the local tea stall.

Two weeks later, our family had our scheduled hearing at the Khandaghosh BDO office with the assistant electoral registration officer and the booth level officer about our names on the rolls. I attended by video call from Manchester, where I work. I had every reason to feel confident. I had submitted my passport, my father’s passport and land ownership records predating Independence. What more could the state possibly require of us?

Quite a lot, it turned out. As I made plans to return to India this month, intending to vote in the assembly elections before travelling onward for academic engagements, I discovered that my family of four – my father, two siblings and myself – had been erased from the electoral register.

We were not alone. According to the independent Sabar Institute, approximately 91 lakh names have been deleted from West Bengal’s voter list. This happened in three phases. Around 58 lakh names were deleted in December with the publication of the draft electoral roll; a further 5 lakh in the “first final list” in February; and 27 lakh more between late March and early April, classified under the elastic category of “logical discrepancies”.

The category of “logical discrepancies”, which is being used for the special intensive revision only in West Bengal, has resulted in names being deleted because of a mismatch with the spelling of their parents’ names, the age gap between parents and children that is considered low, or because parents have more than six children.

According to Sabar Institute, even accounting for genuine deletions – about 24 lakh voters who have died and 15 lakh-20 lakh people who permanently shifted – about 45 lakh to 50 lakh of the names removed from the rolls in West Bengal are living, eligible people with every legal and moral right to participate in Indian democracy.

When I spoke to people in and around Khandaghosh in Purba Bardhaman, I encountered a scale of disenfranchisement that no set of statistics can adequately convey.

Among those struck off from the rolls was Golehara Begum, an 85-year-old widow I have known since I was a child. Begum has survived on the charity of neighbours. As documentary proof of her existence in this republic, she possesses only a voter card and an Aadhaar number. She has no land records, passport or paper trail compatible with the proof the Election Commission’s algorithms apparently demand.

She is, by any ordinary measure of belonging, more rooted in Bengal than most: her family’s presence in these villages predates the formation of the state itself. Yet under this revision, she has been classified – implicitly, bureaucratically – as suspect.

The overall deletions across West Bengal disproportionately affected Muslims like Begum, who account for 60%-65% of the deleted names, according to Sabar Institute. If the names of Dalits, Adivasis and other marginalised communities who have been deleted as counted along with Muslims, they all account for 90% of those wrongfully removed in the rural assembly constituency, according to this map prepared by the Sabar Institute.

The media coverage of the crisis has resolutely remained focussed on the individual and the anecdotal: the retired civil servant inexplicably deleted, the local politician forced to re-register, the statistical curiosity of a particular booth or region. There has been little sustained examination of the logic that produced these outcomes.

How did the Election Commission of India, a body whose independence is constitutionally mandated and historically celebrated, come to deploy artificial intelligence tools in a manner that systematically disadvantaged the most vulnerable sections of the electorate?

By what institutional reasoning was a verification process designed so that those with the fewest documents – precisely those whose precarity the democratic system ought to be most zealous in protecting – became the easiest to delete?

Glimpse of integrated District control room for media monitoring for #WBLA2026 at Dakahin Dinajpur District West Bengal. #WBLA2026 #DistrictControlRoom @ECISVEEP@SpokespersonECI@PIBKolkata@airnews_kolkata @DM_DDinajpur pic.twitter.com/NzkAEGBAfK

— CEO West Bengal (@CEOWestBengal) April 22, 2026

In January, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee wrote to the Election Commission claiming that the errors were the result of Artificial Intelligence tools being used to delete voters’ names. The same logic that presents algorithmic digital governance as neutral and efficient also insulates it from the kind of accountability that is implicit in human decision-making, however flawed.

When a booth-level officer makes a wrongful deletion, there is a face, a chain of command, a mechanism of redress. When an algorithm classifies a Bengali Muslim widow as a “logical discrepancy”, the process is opaque, remote, and apparently beyond appeal.

In the 1970s, postcolonial theorists described how colonial relations were reproduced within the boundaries of the nation-state. They showed how peripheral communities – rural populations, and historically marginalised groups – were subjugated by urban, educated and institutionally empowered elites. With the special intensive revision, it would seem that something similar is underway. But instead of colonial intermediaries, the exercise of control is being carried out through centralised algorithmic digital governance.

The political narrative that has enabled this process is well established. Hindutva supporters have reframed Bengali Muslims as a demographic threat and “infiltrators” from Bangladesh.

Ironically, many names of members of the Matua community, primarily Dalit Hindu refugees from Bangladesh, have also been deleted. The Bharatiya Janata Party has repeatedly promised them Indian citizenship under the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act. This act from 2019 introduced a religious element into Indian citizenship law. Together with a planned National Register of Citizens of “genuine” Indians, these instruments are being used to threaten Bengali Muslims in West Bengal.

The special intensive revision effaces the deep roots of many communities in Bengal – roots that, in many cases, precede the modern states of either India or Bangladesh. It also transforms bureaucratic exclusion from a failure of democracy into an instrument of democracy: a mechanism by which genuine citizens are distinguished from presumed interlopers.

The Election Commission has insisted that the special intensive revision process is routine and legally mandated. The courts have agreed. But legality and legitimacy are not synonyms. The question at stake here is what kind of democracy India is becoming and who, in that democracy, counts.

I think of Golehara Begum at her humble home in Purba Bardhaman, and I think of her erasure: silent, administrative, bloodless, and for that reason all the more difficult to resist. India is becoming a nation in which voters are removed by mechanisms that mistake documentation for belonging and algorithmic arbitrariness for democratic legitimacy.

The world’s largest democracy cannot mistake the disappearance of over a half a million citizens from its electoral rolls as a technical problem awaiting a technical fix. It is a political problem and it demands a political reckoning.

The author is an academic based at the University of Manchester, UK. He grew up in Purba Bardhaman district, West Bengal. The views expressed in this article are his own.

The Calcutta High Court on Wednesday stayed an order issued by Election Commission officials to the police in West Bengal to take preventive action against “troublemakers” ahead of the upcoming Assembly elections in the state, Bar and Bench reported.

The police observer in the office of the chief election officer had “erred in issuing a blanket direction by treating certain citizens as troublemakers”, the Hindustan Times quoted a bench of Chief justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Partha Sarathi Sen as saying.

The judges stayed the order till June 30.

The matter pertained to an alleged order, titled “Preventive action against persons involved in voter intimidation”, issued by the police observer in the CEO office to the state director general of police on April 21, the newspaper reported.

The order allegedly had a list of “troublemakers”, and had claimed that they were involved in intimidating voters and disturbing the electoral process.

Subsequently, a public interest litigation was filed in the court by an advocate named Mohammed Danish Farooqui, who claimed that he had found out about the list of “troublemakers” from “multiple credible, trustworthy and independent sources”.

The petition claimed the purported list of about 800 persons largely contained the names of workers, office-bearers and elected officials from the ruling Trinamool Congress in the state.

It alleged that the move was aimed at targeting the Trinamool Congress, adding that it could impact the conduct of free and fair elections in the state.

“Not a single ground exists, nor has any been communicated, for the proposed arrest of any of the persons featured in the said list,” Bar and Bench quoted Farooqui as saying. “This action is being taken solely to prevent these individuals from participating in the election process for their party.”

The petitioner contended that any such arrests would amount to a “direct assault on personal liberty and the democratic process”.

The first phase of polling is being held on Thursday and the second on April 29. The votes will be counted on May 4.

The West Bengal Police and the administration are reporting to the Election Commission as the Model Code of Conduct is in force in the state for the polls.

Read Scroll’s coverage of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections here.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the petitioner’s counsel said that citizens cannot be deprived of their right to personal liberty except according to the procedure established by law, Bar and Bench reported.

The Election Commission does not have any unbridled powers, the counsel said.

The counsel for the state government also supported the petition, saying that preventive action or detention that curtailed the freedom of a citizen could be taken only in accordance with law.

On the other hand, the Election Commission told the court that endeavour was to ensure free, fair and peaceful elections, the legal news portal reported.

“In order to do the same, concerned police authorities are reminded of their duties,” Bar and Bench quoted the counsel for the poll panel as saying.

The Election Commission has not directed the police to do anything without following due recourse of law, the counsel added.

The bench said that it will consider whether the poll panel, while exercising its powers under Article 324 of the Constitution, could issue such general instructions when election-related offences were already governed under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Representation of the People Act.

Article 324 vests the power of overseeing and conducting national and state elections in an independent Election Commission.

The poll panel was granted four weeks to respond to the petition, Bar and Bench reported. The bench also noted that the stay would not stop authorities from proceeding against any person who commits an offence.

Also read:

• Bengal elections: EC announces restrictions on motorcycles, pillion riders ahead of polling

• From jhalmuri to fish, how BJP is trying to shed its outsider image in Bengal

• Bengal SIR: EC adds 136 voters cleared by tribunals from 27 lakh appeals before first polling phase

“Why fuss over I-PAC like this?” an irritated Shashi Panja asked reporters at a Trinamool Congress news conference in Kolkata on Sunday when they inquired about a report in the Deccan Herald that the political consultancy had paused operations in West Bengal. Her reaction summed up her party’s confused position on the issue.

On the one hand, the cabinet minister from Bengal dismissed the report as “baseless”. On the other, she criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party for purportedly using Central investigative agencies to go after the Trinamool’s election consultant.

Panja claimed that her party was in close contact with the Indian Political Action Committee and that the consultancy was ensuring that the Trinamool’s campaign was “in full swing”.

However, according to an email that I-PAC’s human resources department sent out in the early hours of Sunday, all the company’s employees in West Bengal were asked to go on leave for 20 days with immediate effect. Scroll has seen this email, which says that the decision had been taken because of “certain legal issues”.

I-PAC has been on the radar of the Enforcement Directorate since January. The Central investigative agency has, in recent weeks, raided its offices in several cities and summoned its three directors for questioning. On April 14, it even arrested one of them, Vinesh Chandel, on allegations of money laundering.

The news of I-PAC deciding to retreat from the campaign came with just 10 days left for elections to conclude in West Bengal. The consultancy firm started by campaign strategist-turned-politician Prashant Kishor over a decade ago has acquired a reputation for delivering election victories. Could its absence prove to be a big setback for the Trinamool, which has for years relied on I-PAC to manage its affairs?

I-PAC employees, Trinamool insiders and other consultants said that the company usually plays a critical role in the final stages of campaigning and particularly on voting day. As a consequence, most of them expect I-PAC’s exit from the elections to hurt the party.

But, they added, the impact would be limited, given that both the Trinamool and I-PAC had time to prepare contingency plans for a situation like this after the January raids.

Advisors to event managers

Though the consultancy first came under the scanner three months ago, the pressure was ratcheted up last week after the Enforcement Directorate arrested one of its directors. After this happened, a mid-level employee had told Scroll that the company’s other directors were spending most of their time in Delhi, while middle management ran the show in Kolkata.

“They are smart people, but if you throw a spanner in the works, they don’t know what to do,” this person said, requesting anonymity. “This will obviously affect the Trinamool. It is already affecting [them].”

At the news conference on Sunday, Trinamool leaders sought to understate the role that I-PAC plays for the party, characterising it as a “political advisor”. But the company’s former employees say it offers more than advice.

“They do less advising and play the role of event managers,” said a consultant who spent a year working at the company before switching jobs. “In the final stages of campaigning, pamphlets have to be distributed, flags have to be put up, walls have to be painted and bike rallies have to be taken out. All of this is included in the I-PAC model.”

This person, requesting anonymity, explained that as voting day nears, the top leadership of political parties are wary of relying solely on local workers to organise campaign events.

“Politicians who did not get the ticket are unhappy and won’t organise rallies well,” this person added. Even those contesting an election, this person pointed out, sometimes view it as an opportunity to make a quick buck by embezzling party funds. This is where consultants come in, promising to hold events cheaply and efficiently.

“Someone like Mamata [Banerjee] or Abhishek [Banerjee] trusts I-PAC more than their own workers or party leaders,” this person claimed, referring to the Trinamool’s top leaders. “This is the reason for the proximity between them and consultants. Why else did Mamata come forward to protect Pratik?”

This was a reference to the Enforcement Directorate raid on the Kolkata home of Pratik Jain, one of I-PAC’s founders, in January. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had made headlines at the time by dramatically interrupting the search midway and walking away with what she said were party documents.

Another former employee who worked on the Trinamool campaign during the 2021 Assembly elections said that the impact of I-PAC’s absence went beyond events. This person contended that the party needed I-PAC’s ground teams on voting day.

According to this person, these ground teams spent months studying constituencies to identify booths they consider to be strong, weak or could swing for the party. Then, on the day of polling, they monitor the turnout trends across booths from the candidate’s war room.

“If voting is slow in favourable booths, they have ways to mobilise voters,” this person explained. “Likewise, sometimes they tell the candidate, ‘See, this is a BJP booth. A lot of votes are being cast there.’ In my experience, this can make a difference of about 2%-5% on the vote share.”

I-PAC still around?

If I-PAC’s exit indeed reduces the gap between the vote shares of the Trinamool and the BJP, it could theoretically swing the election. The gap between the two leading contenders for power in West Bengal shrank from 10 percentage points in the 2021 Assembly polls to seven in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

Given that the Trinamool alleges that the special intensive revision carried out by the Election Commission has targeted its voters, this gap could have narrowed even further in the run up to voting.

However, most consultants and Trinamool politicians that Scroll spoke to said that there was little need to discuss the impact of I-PAC’s exit since many of its ground teams were still at work in the campaign.

“They will not pull out all their ground resources because it is just a matter of a few days,” said the former employee quoted above, pointing out that voting in Bengal is scheduled to conclude on April 29. “Those on the ground will try to finish their work quietly.”

At least three Trinamool insiders also claimed that the ground teams were still working with the war rooms of candidates. Scroll was unable to independently confirm this. Neither I-PAC’s media team nor its leadership team responded to calls and messages.

The chief minister’s own comments on this issue, too, have given legs to the theory that I-PAC staffers on the ground are working for her party. “If you [BJP] scare those who work for us, we will absorb them in our party and give them jobs,” she announced at a rally on Sunday.

One former I-PAC employee who worked at the company till last year suggested that it must have anticipated this situation and put plans in place after the January raids.

“Both the party and the company had time to prepare for something like this,” they said, adding that the arrest of director Vinesh Chandel did not come out of the blue. “After the first raid in January, they must have prepared a plan.”

Shutting down the head office in Kolkata was not the same as stopping work altogether, this person underlined. In their assessment, the impact of I-PAC’s so-called pause in operations would be “marginal”, if at all.

In the final analysis, the effect of the scrutiny on the consultancy and its eventual retreat from the campaign might turn out to be psychological. One of the former employees quoted earlier contended that this is what the BJP at the Centre wanted.

“They want to tell undecided voters that BJP has become strong enough to enter Trinamool’s home turf and hit it where it hurts,” this person surmised. “That was the primary intent behind all of this. It is a psychological game.”

Congress MP TN Prathapan has moved the Supreme Court against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national address on April 18 which was aired by public service broadcaster Doordarshan, Bar and Bench reported on Wednesday.

The petition has alleged misuse of government-controlled television channels to criticise Opposition parties during an active election period, in violation of the Model Code of Conduct.

Prathapan highlighted in his petition that the speech was broadcast live on Doordarshan and Sansad TV, both of which are funded from the public exchequer and are controlled by the government, the legal news outlet reported.

Modi, in his address, had criticised Opposition parties for defeating in the Lok Sabha the Union government’s bill to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

On April 17, the 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, one of three draft legislations introduced by the Centre during a special session, was defeated in the Lower House of Parliament.

As a Constitution amendment bill, it required a two-thirds majority of votes to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House and had required the support of the Opposition to pass the amendment.

In his address the following day, Modi had claimed that Opposition parties stood against the draft legislation, which he described as the women’s reservation bill, for their “selfish political interests”.

Opposition parties, including the Congress, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Trinamool Congress, have maintained that they supported the amendments to the Women’s Reservation Act, but were opposed to the proposed delimitation of electoral constituencies.

On Tuesday, the Congress submitted a privilege notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla against Modi, alleging that his national address “cast aspersions” on Opposition MPs.

India’s top metros – Delhi, Kolkata and Mumbai, home to 75 million people – rank among the world’s 10 most populous cities. However, “population scale has not translated proportionately into urban productivity, liveability or global economic influence,” the Union government’s Economic Survey 2025-26 admits.

While calling cities “engines of growth, magnets for talent, and crucibles of innovation”, the Survey also labels them “sites of daily strain: long commutes, uneven services and shared spaces that often fall short of collective expectations”.

Indian cities score low in their liveability quotient despite allocations to urban local bodies by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs and the XIV and XV Finance Commissions topping Rs 8.36 lakh crore in the last decade, according to a new report by Janaagraha and the Jana Urban Space Foundation, not-for-profits working to transform the quality of life in the country’s towns and cities.

The key reason for this lapse, experts say, is the fragmentation of urban functions across urban local bodies, development authorities, state line departments and parastatal agencies. Essentially, local governments haven’t been empowered to do whatever is expected of them.

India’s urban population is expected to grow from 522 million today to 723 million by 2050.

If nothing is done to improve the way cities are managed, Akash Pharande, managing director of Pharande Spaces, a real estate developer in Pune, expects “escalating water wars, public-health emergencies and economic drag” to impede life in them.

Already, India’s affluent – desirous of bettering their lifestyle – are shifting to integrated townships and gated communities to make up for deficient urban public services. But their choosing to do so is worsening conditions for the less privileged.

“When the wealthy disengage, cities see deteriorating services and weakened political pressure for municipal reform,” said Amit Kapoor, chair, Institute for Competitiveness, the Indian knot in the global network of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.

Urban service

Sonia Sarkar, 45, shifted from rental accommodation in Delhi’s Chittaranjan Park to a gated complex in Noida in 2015, a move prompted by the need “to own a place because how long could I have kept living out of rented accommodation”, the Kolkata-native told IndiaSpend.

Sarkar opted for an apartment in a gated community consisting of 11 high-rise buildings in Noida because “high-rises started booming when I booked the apartment in 2010”. Safety, an important element when a single woman like Sarkar goes house-hunting, was much better in the complex than in a building opening onto the street in the same area, even if it meant contending with the residents’ welfare association’s rules that disallow a cab or three-wheeler into the premises.

The complex is clean “because maintenance employees are accountable to residents”, added Sarkar. The electricity back-up works, and the pavement stays intact unlike the road beyond, which “is dug up by civic authorities without any prior intimation of the utilitarian project they are undertaking”.

Unsafe, dark, potholed roads in cities across India are an outcome of governance vacuums. Speaking of Pune, Pharande points out that “three years without elected corporators had left the city’s residents chasing departmental signatures for streetlights and pothole repairs”.

With no general body, budget oversight has vanished, and project slippages have also multiplied, added Pharande, citing Pune’s Mahalunge-Maan town planning scheme, the region’s flagship hi-tech city launched in 2017 as an example. Nine years on, “flood-line errors, litigation and a lapsed contractor have left 250 hectares of half-built towers surrounded by dirt tracks, tanker water and construction debris”.

Essentially, “legal RERA-approved buildings now stand in an officially unapproved city”, he said.

Meanwhile, previously serene Pune suburbs such as Baner, Kalyani Nagar, and NIBM Road have seen bungalows flipped into restaurants, tuition centres and hostels without parking, fire access or waste systems, turning residential lanes into 24×7 traffic corridors.

Bureaucratic bottlenecks for routine civic issues as well as municipal urban planning failures are a national challenge, according to Pharande. “While 39% of state capitals lack an active master plan, those that do routinely see spot-modifications, plots are de-reserved within months of notification to monetise land before public scrutiny.”

Integrated townships that boast green spaces, and harmonious commercial and residential spaces – a step beyond gated communities – represent India’s best urban model today, he said, adding that “bringing such harmony at a city level is a monumental task given the decades of damage and neglect that have already passed, and requires far more political will than we have seen to date”.

What about the rest?

Two in five households in India’s top 50 cities today opt to live in a gated complex, up from one in three households five years ago, according to a new report from Redseer Strategy Consultants on the rise of gated communities in India.

Leading metros such as Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Hyderabad have a lot of supply and matching demand for gated community living, including integrated townships, according to Santhosh Kumar, vice chairman of the ANAROCK Group, real estate consultants.

“Other cities seeing rapidly improving infrastructure and real estate development options at lower price points like Pune, Lucknow, Indore, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Nagpur, and Coimbatore are capturing 15-20% of the annual demand,” he said.

Satellite images of leading cities in 2003 and 2020 – which clearly show increasing densification, and as a result a loss of green cover and shrinking water bodies – as IndiaSpend reported in January 2026, explain why this shift has become a national trend.

Those who can afford a better lifestyle are relocating to pockets that promise to deliver what they’re looking for.

Forty-four-year-old Arshia and her family relocated from an ungated apartment complex in Panchkula, Haryana, to a gated community in Noida consisting of eight high-rise buildings, a place she saw as “safer, especially for parents and children, and offering better quality living by virtue of a host of amenities – a clubhouse, swimming pool, play area, hobby classes, building maintenance and so on".

Advertisements for upcoming or exclusive communities promise landscaped open spaces, play areas, gyms, club houses, sports centres, all of which are supposed to be part of city development plans, but aren’t.

So while on the one hand, “shortcomings in municipal service delivery have played a role in the rise of gated communities”, Ravi Shankar Singh, managing director of Residential Services at Colliers India, a real estate advisory, also attributes this trend to “lifestyle aspirations and the desire for hassle-free living”.

“For many families, the appeal lies not in escaping the city, but in experiencing a more organised, community-oriented and convenient version of it,” said Singh.

The Covid-19 pandemic, which introduced the hybrid work formats that endure even today, also gave self-contained living a new meaning, and thereby majorly contributed to the rise of gated communities, added Kumar.

Municipal lapses, social fabric

Framing the rise of gated communities as a story about the wealthy and their preferences misses the entire picture, and the consequences thereof.

“The rise of gated communities is also a story about who bears the cost when public systems fail and that cost is not borne equally,” said Kapoor of the Institute for Competitiveness.

Residents of gated communities are wealthier than those living outside gates. Redseer has estimated their per capita income to be about $14,500, five to seven times the India average. Essentially, they are wealthy enough to pay a municipal tax for living in a city and a monthly maintenance fee to a Residents’ Welfare Association for water, waste management, security and green spaces.

In choosing so, however, they are disengaging from urban governance, a disengagement that people who cannot choose likewise – the sanitation worker, the auto driver, the family in the resettlement colony 3 km away – pay a heavy price for.

The “active engagement of citizens, especially in critical domains like budget formulation and urban development planning… guarantees that the concerns and perspectives of underprivileged individuals receive top priority in policy formulation”, according to the Institute for Competitiveness’s 2024 report on municipal performance, which evaluated governance, services, technology, finance and planning in 134 cities.

“When a city’s most resourceful residents disengage, it can create conditions where the needs of the less affluent are more easily deprioritised and over time, the city’s sense of shared responsibility can quietly narrow,” said Kapoor.

In India, gated communities have another drawback, tending to be exclusionary along intersecting lines of class, caste, and often religion, said Ubaid Sidique, research associate, Department of Political Science, Aligarh Muslim University. He is the author of a March 2026 paper in Discover Cities on sustainable urbanisation in non-metropolitan India, which looks at reasons for the failure of public services in Aligarh.

Sidique points out that housing societies in metros like Mumbai, Delhi and Ahmedabad routinely, albeit informally, employ discriminatory screening practices against people of scheduled caste, Muslim or other marginalised backgrounds.

In doing so, “gated communities risk hardening pre-existing social hierarchies into the very geography of our cities”, he said. “The sanitised enclaves where the urban elite effectively secede from the broader city restrict access to roads, parks and amenities that could otherwise serve the wider public.”

Alongside this deepening socio-spatial inequality, Sidique said gated communities also raise concerns about the weakening of the social contract between citizens and municipal institutions.

Public services

The Twelfth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, added in the 74th Constitutional Amendment of 1992, outlines the powers, authority, and responsibilities of municipalities. With this amendment, for the first time in independent India, cities got a constitutional identity, and were envisaged to have elected, empowered, locally-accountable city governments.

However, a Comptroller and Auditor General audit of urban local bodies across 18 states in 2024 found that while on average, they have been entrusted with 17 of 18 listed functions, only four of these functions have been entrusted with full autonomy.

Urban planning, the function that would most directly prevent the fragmented, infrastructure-starved sprawl that drives people behind gates, is among the least devolved functions of all, Kapoor pointed out.

Urban local bodies in 10 of 18 states had no powers over the recruitment of their staff and the average staff vacancy against the sanction strength stood at 37%.

Cities also need sufficient resources to run but India’s municipalities are under-resourced, and don’t have the authority to make financial decisions.

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s audit found that urban local bodies have a resource-expenditure gap of 42%, a gap that has steadily been growing despite the Twelfth Schedule. Own revenue made up 89% of municipal revenue in 1961, but barely 51% in 2021.

“GST reforms introduced in 2017, while nationally necessary, stripped ULBs of a further 19% of their own-source revenue as octroi, entry tax and local surcharges were absorbed into the central pool without direct compensation to cities,” noted Kapoor.

Urban local bodies also don’t have the autonomy to decide their own property tax rates, which Kapoor said is “a structural incompatibility between the scale of India's urban ambition and the fiscal architecture actually available to its cities”.

Presently, cities realise only 56% of their own property tax demand, and that too, Kapoor points out, “at anaemic rates”.

While urban India generates 66% of the country’s gross domestic product, municipal own revenues – primarily from property taxes and user fees – are less than 1% of GDP. Property tax yield is estimated to be between 0.16% and 0.24% of India’s GDP as compared to 1.9% of GDP in OECD countries.

Insufficient revenue leaves cities heavily dependent on government grants but financial transfers to municipalities amount to 0.45% of GDP in India, much lower than 5.1% in Brazil, 5.4% in Indonesia, 2.5% in the Philippines, and between 6% and 10% in parts of Europe, according to the Institute for Competitiveness.

Its report evaluating municipal performance clearly saw “adequate intent and absent authority in practically every city”, said Kapoor. “This points to an issue of delegation without devolution.”

He attributed this to the wording of the 74th Amendment. While the Amendment imposes mandatory obligations on states with respect to elections and institutional structure, the devolution of the 18 functions listed in the Twelfth Schedule remains discretionary.

“Article 243W’s use of ‘may’ rather than ‘shall’ has left the pace and extent of functional devolution to the discretion of state governments,” said Kapoor. “That permissive language has, over time, created space for state governments to centralise authority in ways that were perhaps not originally intended.”

IndiaSpend has reached out to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs for comment on what the ministry is doing to alleviate this situation. We will update this story when we receive responses.

Urban body reform

Reform would involve the genuine devolution of functions from state governments to municipalities. For this to happen, “India needs a shift in political culture,” said Sidique. “Without that, India’s urban governance ecosystem will continue to operate within a deeply centralised state-level framework, wherein chief ministers and state bureaucracies treat municipalities as extensions of state authority rather than as autonomous democratic institutions.”

Until that occurs, to improve service delivery, “coordination across ULBs, parastatal agencies and line departments, the different agencies entrusted with different functions, is a must”, said Sidique.

Cities must be given the authority to assess what personnel they need, advertise positions, select candidates and determine pay scales.

“Nothing else will work if the institution at the centre of delivery cannot hire the people it needs,” said Kapoor. “Cities cannot function without adequate, well trained and remunerated engineers, planners, public health officers, accountants and administrators.”

Cities also need more revenue resources and greater control over them.

The 16th Finance Commission recommended significant fiscal corrections for urban local bodies include an allocation of Rs 3.56 lakh crore for 2026-31, more than double the previous Commission’s outlay. With this, the urban share of local-body grants will rise to an all-time high of 45%. Sidique emphasised the need to “make fiscal decentralisation a priority so that ULBs have greater control over revenue sources”.

The spending of this allocation matters more than allocations by Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs because the latter’s allocations have been predominantly consumed by metro rail and affordable housing projects in the last decade, according to analysis by Janaagraha and the Jana Urban Space Foundation.

In fact, more than a third of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affair’s current year budget is for metro projects alone. Consequently, schemes covering the delivery of everyday urban services like Swachh Bharat Mission (Urban), for solid waste management, and Atal Mission Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation, for water security and sewerage coverage, have seen 50% and 20% reductions in the last year alone.

Sidique also emphasised the need to operationalise accountability and citizen participation provisions to rebuild trust in public institutions, some of which already exist on paper but remain largely dormant. For instance, the 74th Constitutional Amendment proposed ward committees to be the grassroots tier of urban democracy. But in most states, he said, “they either don’t exist or function as rubber stamps”.

“Social audits, which have been successfully employed in rural India under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, particularly in states like Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, need to be adapted and mandated for the delivery of urban services such as water supply, sanitation and waste management,” he added.

Participatory budgeting wherein people have a direct say in how municipal funds are allocated is another step towards citizen participation, which Sidique pointed out had had a good start in Pune in the early 2000s, although it lost momentum due to the lack of political will.

Although new schemes like SMART Cities and Swachh Bharat have introduced digital tools to track the delivery of public services, Sidique said that they remain “top-down in design, rarely translate into genuine downward accountability, and lack grievance redressal platforms”.

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

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

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In a supplementary list, the Election Commission added 136 voters to the electoral rolls in West Bengal whose appeals were accepted by the appellate tribunals. However, 27 lakh appeals filed by persons who have been excluded are pending.

As the first phase of the Assembly elections in the state will be held on Thursday, the approval rate of appeals was 98.5%, as only 138 cases had been decided on by the tribunals so far as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. Read on.

Watch: As lakhs of Muslim voters lose out to Bengal SIR, who stands to gain?

The Calcutta High Court asked the Election Commission why it needed to order the arrest of alleged “troublemakers” ahead of the Assembly elections in West Bengal. The court was hearing a plea by an advocate who claimed that he had found out about the list from “multiple credible, trustworthy and independent sources”.

The plea claimed that the purported list largely contains the names of the Trinamool Congress’ workers, leaders and elected officials.

The counsel representing the Election Commission told the court that there were “emergent circumstances” that required such measures, adding that the information was sensitive and could not be disclosed at the moment. Read on.

The Election Commission has directed that “outsiders” have been barred from the housing societies designated as polling booths for the West Bengal polls. “No outsiders who are not electors of that constituency can stay as guests in residential complexes where booths are located,” said the poll panel.

The restriction will remain in place until the end of the second phase of voting. Read on.

Iran opened fire on three container ships in the Strait of Hormuz hours after United States President Donald Trump said that he was extending the ceasefire with Tehran. Trump said the US will “hold our attack on the country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal”.

However, Mahdi Mohammadi, advisor to the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said that the extension of the ceasefire “means nothing”. “The losing side cannot dictate terms,” he asserted. Read on.

The Bombay High Court quashed an order passed by a special court for framing of charges against four men accused in the 2006 Malegaon blasts case. They were the last remaining persons accused in the matter.

The special court had in September ordered that Manohar Narwaria, Rajendra Chaudhary, Dhan Singh and Lokesh Sharma be charged for murder and criminal conspiracy, and under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

On September 8, 2006, bomb blasts took place near a mosque and a cemetery in Maharashtra’s Malegaon in which 31 persons were killed. The case is not linked to the 2008 Malegaon blast in which Bharatiya Janata Party leader Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit and five others were acquitted in July. Read on.

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

In a supplementary list published on Wednesday, the Election Commission added 136 voters out of the 27 lakh whose appeals were reportedly pending before the appellate tribunal, ABP Ananda reported. The appeals of these 136 voters were accepted before the first phase of the Assembly elections.

The approval rate for the appeals was 98.5% as only 138 cases had been decided on by the tribunals before the first phase of polling, as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls. The remaining two appeals were rejected, Aaj Tak Bangla reported.

About 34 lakh appeals were reportedly pending before the tribunals. Of these, seven lakh were against names being included in the rolls and 27 lakh were filed by persons who were excluded, News9 reported.

On April 16, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to publish a supplementary electoral roll in West Bengal to include voters whose appeals against deletions have been accepted by the appellate tribunals.

Persons whose appeals have been cleared by the tribunals before April 21 should be included for voting in the first phase of Assembly elections, the court had said. Those who are cleared by April 27 should be included in the final electoral rolls for the second phase of the polls.

All decisions made by the tribunals on the addition and deletion of voters by those dates must be reflected in the final voter lists.

The first phase of polling will be held on April 23 and the second on April 29. The votes will be counted on May 4.

This came after the Election Commission froze the electoral rolls for the first phase of polling on April 9.

SIR appellate tribunals

The Election Commission on February 28 published the final electoral roll for West Bengal, showing that more than 61 lakh voters had been excluded. However, the process had continued with about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases remaining under adjudication based on their objections to their exclusions from the draft rolls published in December.

Several supplementary lists were released, in which the names of more voters have been included.

The process had concluded on April 6 after judicial officers adjudicated the 60 lakh claims and objections. However, voters who were removed during the adjudication process can appeal in 19 tribunals set up for the purpose.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ordered that judicial officers of the rank of district judge or additional district judge be appointed to help complete the revision exercise in the state.

On March 10, the top court ordered the formation of appellate tribunals composed of former High Court chief justices and judges to hear appeals against exclusions. A person whose claim for inclusion in the electoral rolls has been rejected by a judicial officer can approach the tribunal.

Nearly 91 lakh voters have been removed from West Bengal’s voter lists as part of the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls. The deletions represent nearly 11.9% of the state’s electorate of 7.6 crore that existed before the revision process began.

Videos of a commuter in Mumbai confronting Bharatiya Janata Party leader Girish Mahajan and police personnel for blocking a road during a protest march were widely shared on social media on Tuesday.

The protest by the ruling Mahayuti coalition led to traffic congestion in the Worli area on Tuesday. The protest was to be held at the Jambori Maidan. The woman reportedly stepped out of her vehicle, and was heard asking Mahajan and the police officers not to block the road and protest at a ground instead.

The woman, whose identity is unclear, said that she had been stuck in the traffic and had to pick up her child. She told a police officer that she had been waiting in traffic for more than an hour.

When Mahajan asked her to calm down, the woman asked him to “get out of here”.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked. “There are hundreds of people waiting. There's an empty ground there.”

She asked the police to clear the traffic.

Get out of here!

Mumbai woman explodes at Maharashtra Minister & BJP MLA Girish Mahajan during a BJP's "Mahila Jan Aakrosh" rally in Worli that blocked roads over the failed Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill. Stranded while rushing to pick up her child from school, she… pic.twitter.com/Fin9zXjU2o

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) April 22, 2026

On Wednesday, Mahajan told IANS that the woman was not wrong.

However, he said that a protest march such as this, irrespective of the organiser “has to move from one place to another” which would mean that the “road is bound to be blocked”.

“Some inconvenience is inevitable in any protest,” he said. “Still, there is a proper way to express anger and I feel the language used was inappropriate.”

Mumbai, Maharashtra: On his viral Video, Minister Girish Mahajan says, "I will not say it was wrong. Yesterday, there was a women’s ‘Jan Aakrosh Morcha’ organised by women against Congress after the Bill was passed, and thousands of our sisters participated in it. But when such a… pic.twitter.com/SA2j8qc7Hk

— IANS (@ians_india) April 22, 2026

Aam Aadmi Party’s Mumbai chief Preeti Sharma Menon said that while the police allow protests only at Azad Maidan, the BJP “was allowed to protest on the roads”.

In August, the Maharashtra government had designated Azad Maidan as the only venue for all protests in South Mumbai.

The woman was praised by social media users.

A user said that the BJP’s “event-mongering has now started directly testing the patience” of residents. “Is jamming the roads and harassing ordinary people just to spread a false narrative in the name of women's reservation really your politics?” the handle asked on social media platform X.

The BJP was protesting against the Opposition for defeating a constitutional amendment bill in Parliament on Friday. The ruling party claimed that the opposition was against women’s interests because it stood against what the BJP describes as the women’s reservation bill.

The 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, one of three draft legislations, was defeated in the Lok Sabha. As a constitutional amendment bill, it required a two-thirds majority of votes to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House and had required the support of the Opposition to pass the amendment.

Opposition parties have maintained that they supported the amendments to the Women’s Reservation Act, but were opposed to the proposed delimitation of electoral constituencies.

Commenting on the video of the confrontation on Tuesday, a social media user said that the woman had “taught a very good lesson to these two-bit leaders who keep harassing the public day and night”.

इस महिला ने बहुत हीं अच्छा सबक सिखाया है इन दो दो कौड़ी के नेताओं को जो दिन रात पब्लिक को बस परेशान करते हैं

मुंबई में BJP के नेता और कार्यकर्ता महिला आरक्षण बिल को लेकर सड़क जाम करने की नौटंकी कर रहे थे, तभी घंटों भर जाम में फंसी एक महिला ने इनलोगों को इनकी औकात दिखाई और सबको… pic.twitter.com/1YzwyeXmdy

— Gautam Thakur (@gautamthakurx) April 21, 2026

Another user said that “BJP’s ‘Nari Shakti’ [women power] drama in Mumbai got busted by one bold woman!”

“They blocked Worli roads for hours ‘for women’s reservation’ – while real women were stuck in traffic, late to pick up kids,” the account said.

The user added: “Protesting for women by torturing women? The hypocrisy is real. Even women aren't buying this anymore. Real Nari Shakti doesn’t block roads.”

Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) MP Priyanka Chaturvedi praised the woman “who showed a mirror to minister Girish Mahajan and BJP protesters for blocking traffic to carry out their political protest”.

The woman’s anger “is not just of hers but every single Mumbaikar who face the commute woes”, she added.

Chaturvedi asked asked: “Why was BJP protesting on the streets instead of designated ground? Who gave them the permission to carry out the protest during peak traffic hours? Why should people suffer due to political showmanship of BJP?”

Hats off to the lady from Mumbai who showed a mirror to Minister Girish Mahajan and BJP protestors for blocking traffic to carry out their political protest.
In Mumbai daily commute includes hours of being stuck in traffic jams and instead of understanding the fast losing…

— Priyanka Chaturvedi🇮🇳 (@priyankac19) April 22, 2026

The women’s wing of the Congress said that the woman was brave and had “raised her voice and gave a proper scolding to the shameless BJP minister who was shedding crocodile tears!”

“Outsiders” have been barred from the housing societies designated as polling booths for the West Bengal Assembly elections, The Times of India quoted the Election Commission as directing on Tuesday.

“No outsiders who are not electors of that constituency can stay as guests in residential complexes where booths are located,” the state’s Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Agarwal was quoted as saying.

The restriction will remain in place until the end of the second phase of voting, added Agarwal.

Polling in the state will take place in two phases on April 23 and April 29, with results scheduled to be declared on May 4.

The new curbs came a day after the poll panel announced several restrictions on motorcycles during the night and disallowed tourists from visiting Digha, a popular beach destination in the state.

Additionally, the sale of liquor was also banned on Monday for 96 hours ahead of polling on Thursday. The Election Commission usually mandates a 48-hour ban on the sale of liquor before polling across the country.

Read Scroll’s coverage of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections here.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday stated that a chief minister cannot “put democracy in peril” by interfering with an investigation, reported Bar and Bench.

“What right of the state does this involve?” asked a bench of Justices Prashant Kumar Mishra and NV Anjaria while hearing a petition filed by the Enforcement Directorate against West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and several state police officers for allegedly obstructing the searches at the premises of political consultancy I-PAC on January 8.

The bench added that this was not a dispute between the state and the Union government, reported Live Law.

The Enforcement Directorate had moved the court under Article 32 of the Constitution that allows persons to approach the Supreme Court directly against the alleged violation of fundamental rights.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the court said that the chief minister cannot walk in the “midst of an inquiry”, Live Law reported.

The court’s statement came in response to the state government questioning the maintainability of the plea, arguing that Article 32 was available only to individuals and not a government department.

“There was no criminal conduct, there was no intimidation, there was no infraction,” said advocate Menaka Guruswamy, representing the West Bengal government.

She further submitted that the matter raises a “substantial question of law” and must be referred to a five-judge bench.

However, the court disagreed with the contention. “In every question there will be some question of law,” it said. “That does not mean every 32 petitions are referred to a five-judge bench.”

The raids

In January and April, the Enforcement Directorate carried out searches at locations in several cities, including premises linked to I-PAC officials.

One of its directors, Vinesh Chandel, was arrested on April 13 in connection with the case and remanded to 10 days custody of the central agency.

The January 8 searches at the political consultancy’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the home of its head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood had led to a political dispute.

Banerjee arrived at Jain’s home around noon while the search was underway and stayed for about 20 to 25 minutes. She then came out with a file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were “taking away” party documents ahead of the Assembly polls.

After the raids, the Trinamool Congress and I-PAC had moved the Calcutta High Court, challenging the legality of the searches. The central agency also approached the High Court, alleging “illegal interference” in its work.

The agency’s case stems from a November 2020 first information report registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation about an alleged coal smuggling syndicate that was used to “steal and illegally excavate coal from [Eastern Coalfields Limited] leasehold areas” in West Bengal.

The ED has alleged that a hawala operator linked to the network facilitated transactions worth tens of crores of rupees to Indian PAC Consulting Private Limited, the registered entity of I-PAC.

I-PAC has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including the 2021 Assembly elections. It is also managing the party’s campaign for the upcoming state polls.

The elections in West Bengal will be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29. The results will be announced on May 4.

The Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday asked the Election Commission to take “strictest action” against Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge for calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “terrorist”, reported PTI.

On Tuesday, while criticising the All India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam for its alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party, Kharge had said, “How can [the AIADMK] join with Modi…He is a terrorist”, The Hindu reported.

The Congress leader made the comments in Chennai on the last day of campaigning for the Tamil Nadu elections to be held on Thursday. The votes will be counted on May 4.

Kharge later said that he had not called the prime minister a terrorist but said that he was “terrorising” Opposition leaders.

“I said that tax terrorism is happening, the Enforcement Directorate, the Income Tax department and the Central Bureau of Investigation are conducting raids,” he told ANI.

He added: “This terrorism is being facilitated by the prime minister. I did not call him a terrorist...he is scaring people. He is trying to silence people through raids and attempting to defeat them in elections.”

On Wednesday, a delegation of BJP leaders, including Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju and Union Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal, met the Election Commission, reported PTI.

Speaking to reporters later, Sitharaman, who was part of the delegation, described Kharge’s remarks as “outrageous”.

“It is an insult to the mandate given by the people of India,” the finance minister was quoted as saying. “More importantly, it is an insult to the entire system where people choose their leader through elections, and once chosen, he is the leader for the entire country.”

She added: “We have demanded that the Election Commission take the matter in all seriousness. We requested the poll panel to act firmly and sternly.”

Rijiju said that the BJP delegation had “demanded that Kharge and the Congress be directed to apologise to the country”, reported PTI.

He added that the poll panel had assured it would take “appropriate action” in the matter.

The Calcutta High Court on Wednesday verbally asked the Election Commission why it needed to order the arrest of alleged “troublemakers” ahead of the Assembly elections in West Bengal, Live Law reported.

The bench of Chief Justice Sujoy Paul and Justice Parthasarathy Sen was hearing a plea by an advocate who claimed that he had found out about the list from “multiple credible, trustworthy and independent sources”, Bar and Bench reported.

The plea claimed the purported list largely contains the names of Trinamool Congress workers, office-bearers and elected officials, Live Law reported.

The petitioner contended that any such arrests would amount to a “direct assault on personal liberty and the democratic process”.

The first phase of polling will be held on April 23 and the second on April 29. The votes will be counted on May 4.

On Wednesday, the counsel representing the poll body told the court that there were “emergent circumstances” that required such measures, adding that the information was sensitive and could not be disclosed at the moment.

The counsel asked for time until Monday to file a counter affidavit in the matter.

In response, the chief justice verbally asked why there was a need for such an order.

“If there is an offence, they are described under the Acts, and there are statutory authorities who are under a duty to carry out the law,” Live Law quoted the chief justice as saying. “Those authorities have the power to ensure fair elections take place.”

The poll body’s counsel asserted that the order was required to tell the state administration that the persons on the list “cannot interfere” with the elections.

“Judicial officers were held at gunpoint and gheraoed,” the lawyer told the High Court. “The Supreme Court had come down heavily on us. They said it was our duty to take all steps necessary.”

Read Scroll’s coverage of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections here.

HC allows college faculty deployment for election duty

A separate bench of the High Court on Tuesday stayed a single-judge bench’s order that had disallowed the Election Commission to deploy government college faculty as presiding officers of polling stations in the state, Bar and Bench reported.

A division bench of Justice Shampa Sarkar and Ajay Kumar Gupta set aside Justice Krishna Rao’s Friday order in which he had held that the poll body failed to justify the “unavoidable circumstances” mandating such appointments.

On Friday, the single-judge bench had said the poll body’s power to appoint officials is not unfettered.

It highlighted that the body must comply with its own circulars, and pointed out that such appointments violate a 2010 circular that said unavoidable circumstances requiring the deployment must be recorded in writing, Bar and Bench reported.

The petitioner’s main argument was that the Election Commission had made procedural lapses in the process. It also alleged that the poll panel had failed to consider the rank, status and pay mandated by its own guidelines for such deployments.

However on Tuesday, the two-judge bench held that the Friday order could pose last-minute logistical challenges to the polling process.

“The effect of the order impugned before us will result in a chaotic situation,” the bench said. “The Election Commission will not be in a position to either requisition fresh persons to act as presiding officers and more importantly impart training to them.”

Also read:

• Bengal elections: EC announces restrictions on motorcycles, pillion riders ahead of polling
• From jhalmuri to fish, how BJP is trying to shed its outsider image in Bengal
• Bengal SIR: EC adds 136 voters cleared by tribunals from 27 lakh appeals before first polling phase

The Union government has alleged before the Delhi High Court that the YouTube channel 4PM News had been blocked in March for “peddling anti-India sentiments” and alleging that Indian authorities were involved in the Pahalgam terror attack, reported Bar and Bench on Tuesday.

In an affidavit filed before the court, the Union government also alleged that the channel’s content was a classic case of “digital lobbying” to aid foreign actors who intend to influence India’s sovereign decision-making, according to Live Law.

The Union government had ordered the blocking of the channel on March 12, citing concerns about national security and public order.

4PM News and its editor Sanjay Sharma had moved the court challenging the decision. They said that neither Google, which owns YouTube, nor the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had provided them with a formal order or reasons for blocking the channel, reported Bar and Bench.

In response, the ministry has alleged before the court that the channel had a “sustained pattern” of hosting content that was speculative, one-sided, malicious and unsubstantiated, reported Live Law.

“It is submitted that the videos hosted on the blocked channel attributed grave acts to the Union of India, such as compromising India’s strategic autonomy, having prior awareness of military action in West Asia and endangering Indians abroad,” read the affidavit.

The content on the channel also includes “per-se false, inciting, destabilising information on subjects such as terrorism, internal security of the border state of Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur”, it added.

The Union government told the court that the channel had also questioned the genuineness of India’s military response to the Pahalgam terror attack and “presented defence-related debts and schemes through fabricated narratives that could erode confidence in the armed forces”.

The terror attack at Baisaran near the town of Pahalgam on April 22, 2025, had left 26 persons dead and 17 injured. The terrorists targeted tourists after asking their names to ascertain their religion, the police said. All but three of those killed were Hindu.

The ministry stated in the affidavit that the content on 4PM News was found to be detrimental to the sovereignty and integrity, defence and security of India, and friendly relations with foreign states, which fell within the ambit of the grounds referred to under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.

Under Section 69A of the Act, an authorised official in the Union government, not below the rank of a joint secretary, can send content removal orders to social media platforms if the content is deemed to threaten national security, sovereignty or public order.

“It is submitted that the manner in which petitioner’s channel operates, clearly reflects the hallmark of a ‘digital echo chamber’, where selected and repetitive content is circulated to promote a single narrative to influence public opinion,” the ministry alleged.

Speaking to The Wire after the channel was blocked, Sharma had claimed that the Union government had been repeatedly banning the portal because of its sharp criticism.

In April 2025 as well, the Union government had blocked the YouTube channel. At that time too, it had cited “national security or public order”.

Also read: Shifting viewership and Centre’s fresh attempt to control news online

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday quashed an order passed by a special court for framing of charges against four persons accused in the 2006 Malegaon blasts case, The Indian Express reported.

They were the last remaining persons accused in the matter.

The special court had in September ordered the charges to be framed against Manohar Narwaria, Rajendra Chaudhary, Dhan Singh and Lokesh Sharma for murder and criminal conspiracy under the Indian Penal Code, along with provisions of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

The High Court on Wednesday allowed their appeals against the special court’s order, PTI reported.

On September 8, 2006, bomb blasts took place near a mosque and a cemetery in Maharashtra’s Malegaon. The blasts killed 31 persons and injured more than 300.

The state’s Anti-Terrorism Squad had arrested nine Muslim men in connection with the blasts, PTI reported.

The Central Bureau of Investigation, which took over the probe in 2017, had also named them as the accused in the matter, The Indian Express reported.

However, the National Investigation Agency, which began its probe in 2011, had said that the Muslim men were innocent and had suspected members of Hindutva organisations of having carried out the blasts, the newspaper reported.

The prosecution’s change of stance was based on a statement made in 2010 by Aseemanand, a person accused in other cases, The Indian Express reported. Aseemanand had alleged that members of Hindutva organisations had planted the bombs, Live Law reported.

The National Investigation Agency had then charged the four men, among others.

Aseemanand later retracted his statement and was acquitted in other blast cases in which he had been accused. The courts hearing the other matters had rejected Aseemanand’s confession as having been unreliable.

During the hearing in the High Court in the present case, the counsel representing the four men had argued that there were no eyewitnesses in the matter, The Indian Express reported. The lawyer also contended that a confession that no other court was willing to accept could not be used to frame the four men.

They had been arrested in 2013 and had been granted bail in 2019.

The nine Muslim men had been discharged in 2016. An appeal against the discharge has not been heard since 2019, The Indian Express reported.

The case is not linked to the 2008 Malegaon blast in which Bharatiya Janata Party leader Pragya Singh Thakur, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Purohit and five others were acquitted in July.

With two days to go for the first phase of polling in West Bengal, the Election Commission on Monday announced several restrictions in the state.

Among the curbs is a ban on motorcycles on roads during the night and tourists not being allowed to visit Digha, a popular beach destination in the state.

Polling in the state will take place in two phases on Thursday and April 29. While curbs ahead of phase one began on Tuesday, phase two curbs will begin from April 27.

Ban on motorcycles

Motorcycles will not be allowed on the roads between 6 pm and 6 am starting two days before the polling for the Assembly elections in West Bengal, The Telegraph quoted Election Commission officials as saying on Monday.

In a directive, the poll panel further said that pillion riders will not be allowed during the relaxation window between 6 am and 6 pm, except in medical emergencies, for family functions or for dropping and picking up children from school.

“In order to ensure free, fair, peaceful and violence-free elections... in the state and to prevent any form of intimidation and source jamming… restrictions on use of motorcycles are hereby imposed with immediate effect from polling day minus two onward,” the newspaper quoted the poll panel as saying.

An unidentified Election Commission official told The Telegraph that motorcycles with multiple riders, or groups of bikes, were often used to intimidate voters.

The directive was to ensure that motorcycles did not become “a tool of intimidation or inducement”, added the official.

However, delivery services, riders working with transport apps and office-going commuters with proper identification will be exempted from the ban, the Election Commission clarified later on Tuesday.

96-hour liquor ban

Additionally, the sale of liquor was also banned on Monday in West Bengal for 96 hours ahead of polling on Thursday, The Telegraph reported.

The Election Commission usually mandates a 48-hour ban on the sale of liquor before polling across the country.

The poll panel stated that there was an “unusual spurt” in the sale of liquor in West Bengal.

“There has also been a sudden growth in lifting of packaged liquor by retailers from WBSBCL [West Bengal State Beverages Corporation Limited] Depots during April, 2026 in comparison to the corresponding period last year,” NDTV quoted the poll panel as saying.

Ban on tourists

The Election Commission has also instructed tourists to leave Digha, reported the Bengali daily Bartaman Patrika.

Hotels in the Purba Medinipur were reportedly directed not to allow anybody from outside the district.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notice on a public interest litigation challenging the validity of the 2008 National Investigation Agency Act, Live Law reported.

The Act set up the National Investigation Agency in 2008 and contains a list of scheduled offences that it has the power to investigate. Under the legislation, state governments forward all cases relating to these scheduled offences to the Centre, which then determines whether the NIA should investigate them.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta sought responses from the Centre, the NIA and others on the petition that described the Act as arbitrary, lacking in legislative competence and an encroachment on state power.

The petition against the NIA Act was filed by an advocate based in Kerala who had been booked in connection with the activities of the banned organisation Popular Front of India. The NIA had filed the first information report in 2022 under sections of the erstwhile Indian Penal Code, the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the Arms Act on the orders of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs.

The petitioner was arrested in relation to the case and had been in custody for a year before being granted bail by the Kerala High Court, Live Law reported.

The petition also referred to a another case filed by the Kerala Police in 2022 about the killing of a Bharatiya Janata Party member allegedly by PFI members. While proceedings were pending in the matter, the Centre passed an order under the NIA Act asking the central agency to take up the investigation.

The petitioner challenged the invocation of Section 6(5) read with Section 8 of the NIA Act by the central agency and the investigation of a case already being looked into the state police, Live Law reported.

Section 6(5) of the NIA Act empowers the Centre to direct the central agency to investigate a scheduled offence if it believes such an offence has been committed, overriding the requirement for a state recommendation. Section 8 allows it to investigate any non-scheduled offence if it is connected to a scheduled offence (terror-related or serious crime) under investigation.

Noting that the police is a state subject under Schedule 7 of the Constitution, the petitioner added that it also has the power to investigate offences under the Code of Criminal Procedure, according to the legal news portal.

Urging the Supreme Court to set aside the NIA Act as unconstitutional, the petitioner sought a direction for the Centre to frame appropriate rules and guidelines for the exercise of powers under the Act.

For most tourists heading to the picturesque meadows of Pahalgam in Kashmir, the first stop for many years has been a stone-paved pathway built along the banks of river Lidder.

Standing in its middle, a decorative frame of wooden beams with colorful letters saying “I love Pahalgam”, serves as a popular “selfie point” for travellers.

But now, just 200 metres away, a wall of black granite competes for attention. Two tricolours flutter on top of it. As you step closer, you see etched into stone the names of 26 people gunned down by militants on April 22 last year.

The memorial has come up about 6 km from the Baisaran meadow, the site of the terror attack.

As he stood looking up at the wall in mid-April, Manu Madhavan, a tourist from Kerala, described the experience as “a bit unsettling”.

“Until now, we had just heard about the Pahalgam massacre on television or read it in the newspaper,” said Madhavan, who was visiting Kashmir with his family. “Now, it feels real.”

But not many tourists are likely to share Madhavan’s experience – very few of them have been making their way to Pahalgam after last year’s terror attack.

The attack more than halved the number of tourists coming to Kashmir – from nearly 30 lakh in 2024, the number fell to less than 12 lakh in 2025, official data shows.

While tourist arrivals in the rest of Kashmir have largely recovered this year, Pahalgam, once a popular destination for travellers, continues to lag behind.

“Tourists prefer spots like Sonmarg and Gulmarg,” said Adil Ahmad, a cab operator in Srinagar. “There is a sense of fear about Pahalgam.”

Abdul Waheed Wani, president of the local ponywallah association, agreed. “Before April 22, 2025, there was one Pahalgam,” said Wani, who was among the first to reach Baisaran on the day of the attack. “Today’s Pahalgam is a different one.”

Security lapse

It was a sunny afternoon last year when a group of militants swooped down on the Baisaran meadow and shot 25 tourists in the head after identifying them by their religion. A local ponywalla was also killed in what was the deadliest attack on tourists in the history of Kashmir’s 37-year-old armed insurgency.

The attack came at a time when militancy-related violence in Kashmir had fallen to its lowest. Ever since the Modi government had scrapped the special status of Jammu and Kashmir in August 2019, the region’s security apparatus had come under the direct control of the Centre through its representative, the lieutenant governor.

However, on the day of the attack, despite the presence of hundreds of tourists in the area, no security personnel were deployed in the Baisaran meadows or along the trekking route leading up to it, survivors said.

After the gunshots rang out in the meadow, the first persons to respond were local ponywallas who earn a living by offering horse rides to tourists.

Wani, the president of the ponywalla association, still has on his phone WhatsApp voice notes that he sent out that day, beseeching more and more ponywallas to reach Baisaran and join the rescue operation.

“The police came twenty minutes after we had reached the spot,” he said.

Another ponywalla, Rayees Ahmad, recalled reaching the Baisaran meadows through a shortcut to help rescue the tourists. When he saw many of them were injured and bleeding, he borrowed shawls and fabrics from local sellers “to cover their wounds and prevent their blood loss”.

Wani added: “That day, none of us cared for our life. We just went and started rescuing people.”

Act of bravery

A ponywalla, Syed Adil Hussain Shah, even lost his life while trying to protect the tourists. According to eyewitness accounts, he confronted one of the militants in an attempt to stop him from firing upon the visitors. In the process, Shah sustained several bullet injuries, including two on his chest, said his father.

Shah, 29, a daily-wage worker from Anantnag’s Hapatnar village, was the eldest among his parents’ six children. He used to earn Rs 300- Rs 500 per trip for taking tourists on horseback to Baisaran.

His father Syed Haider Shah said: “We miss him a lot but then there is this contentment that he died while trying to save people irrespective of their religion or identity. He set an example of humanity for all of us.”

Despite the bravery and courage shown by the ponywallas, in the weeks after the attack, there was a rise in the vilification of Kashmiri Muslims in sections of the media.

A security crackdown in the region saw nearly 3,000 youth being detained for questioning.

Although security agencies said two of the three militants responsible for the massacre were Pakistanis, they demolished nine houses belonging to the families of local militants. This was a first in the Valley.

In July, Union home minister Amit Shah announced in Parliament that the three suspected militants involved in the Pahalgam attack had been killed in a gunfight with security forces in Srinagar.

‘Take us to Baisaran’

In the last one year, the Shah family has, somehow, learnt to live with the loss.

His parents wanted to visit the spot where their son fell to the bullets – but were unable to.

“I have never been to Baisaran in my life,” remarked Syed Haider Shah. “My wife and I tried to go to Baisaran a couple of times, but we weren’t allowed by the security forces.”

A week after the terror attack, the administration had ordered the closure of 48 of the 87 official tourist destinations in Kashmir Valley. By October, the administration reopened at least 28 spots for visitors. But the Baisaran meadow has remained shut, along with several other sightseeing spots in Pahalgam, said local people working in the tourism industry.

As a result, tourism-related businesses in Pahalgam continued to suffer. “I came here to check if there is any flow of tourists,” said a Srinagar local, whose hotel in Pahalgam has almost zero business since April 22 last year. “Last year, I had taken a loan of Rs 20 lakh and renovated my hotel before the season. After the Baisaran episode, my investment sank,” the hotelier said, adding that his hotel will continue to remain shut due to lack of tourists. “I will close this by evening and head back to Srinagar.”

“Earlier, a tourist would spend at least two nights in Pahalgam,” said Wani, the president of the ponywalla association. “But ever since the main sightseeing spots have been closed down for tourists, they return to Srinagar by evening.”

An activist in Pahalgam said the government – both the administration led by the Lieutenant Governor as well as the elected government led by Omar Abdullah – need to do more to attract tourists to Pahalgam.

The closure of tourist spots “sends the wrong message,” said the activist, who requested anonymity. “Why can’t just the government deploy security at these spots so that tourists can visit these places and be safe?”

He also questioned the specific closure of the Baisaran meadow. “A tourist from the mainland doesn’t have an idea of the geography of the place. When he comes to know that Baisaran is closed, he feels as if that place is under the control of militants,” the activist said.

The activist also suggested that the memorial wall for the victims of last year’s terror attack be relocated to a more appropriate spot. “Tourists come to experience nature and its beauty,” he said. “If the first thing they see on their arrival is a memorial of a massacre of tourists, it disturbs them and creates fear in their mind.”

At least 13 persons were killed and 40 injured in a series of explosions at a manufacturing unit preparing fireworks for the annual Thrissur Pooram festival in Kerala on Tuesday, The Hindu reported.

This comes two days after another explosion at a fireworks factory in Tamil Nadu’s Virudhunagar district left 23 persons dead on Sunday.

In Thrissur, workers had been inside a set of temporary sheds situated on a five-acre paddy field in Mundathikode and were assembling fireworks for the Thiruvambady Devaswom, one of the temple bodies that organise the Thrissur Pooram.

The fireworks were being assembled for a sample display scheduled for Friday, The Indian Express reported. This comes ahead of the annual temple festival that will be held on April 26 at the Vadakkunnathan temple.

On Tuesday, two massive explosions that were seconds apart tore through the sheds at about 3.30 pm and triggered a blaze. Five of the eight sheds on the site were gutted, The Hindu reported.

Unidentified officials from the Thrissur Government Medical College told The Hindu that five of the injured person are critical, with one victim having suffered over 90% burns. The other four had sustained around 70% burn injuries.

Several others were undergoing treatment across different hospitals in the region.

City Police Commissioner Nakul Rajendra Deshmukh told The News Minute that as per preliminary information, it was a sudden explosion that was followed by a chain reaction. “The remaining materials kept exploding for about 20 minutes,” he said.

Following the incident, District Collector Sikha Surendran ordered a magisterial inquiry. State Health Minister Veena George also directed that specialised medical care be ensured for the injured.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan directed the release of Rs 50 lakh to the district collector for immediate relief, The Indian Express reported.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed his condolences and announced an ex gratia of Rs 2 lakh each for the families of the dead. He also announced Rs 50,000 for the injured.

The protests by workers across Indian cities through early April are an urgent signal that survival is impossible on wages that hover around the bare legal minimum.

Domestic, gig and delivery workers to industrial labourers in the Delhi-National Capital Region protested demanding an increase in wages and overtime pay. Most of them are often migrant workers to India’s urban centres.

The spark was the increase in basic expenses following the shortage of cooking gas and economic uncertainty after the US-Israel launched military strikes on Iran in February, setting off a conflict which is now closing in on two months.

In Noida, protesting workers told the Indian Express that their monthly salaries ranged from Rs 13,000 to Rs 20,000 but expenses had increased, with rent costing Rs 5,000 and food Rs 4,000, and nothing to save. One factory worker in Noida told a news publication that his employer hiked his monthly pay by Rs 39. Worse still, workers report deductions as punishment for protesting and their wage demands were met with batons.

Across urban India, the numbers tell the same story.

Domestic workers manage to earn anywhere between Rs 7,000 - Rs 12,000 a month by working in multiple homes, with no leave or social security in the National Capital Region, says a report in the Hindustan Times. Security guards working at Delhi’s leading hospitals earned between Rs 10,000- Rs 13,000 a month for 12-hour shifts, according to a report in Hans India.

In upscale malls and fast-fashion outlets, retail workers start out by earning Rs 9,000- Rs 13,000, with sales targets that stretch their workday without pay. Delivery and warehouse workers, who form the backbone of “quick commerce”, report earning between Rs 14,000-Rs 18,000 after 10-12 hours of work. Anecdotal evidence suggests that private drivers in NCR average around Rs 15,000-Rs 22,000.

These earnings fall short of the living-wage estimate of Rs 23,086 per month in Delhi-NCR in 2025 by the Anker Research Institute, a nonprofit that researches benchmarks for wages across countries.

At the same time, India’s national floor level minimum wage was last revised in 2017 to Rs 178 a day, which amounts to less than Rs 5,500 per month. The Centre sets the national floor wage as a benchmark to guide states in setting their own minimum wages. Without revisions to reflect increasing costs and inflation, the low minimum wage has practically legalised poor pay and enabled a race to the bottom.

Aajeevika’s study, carried out between July 2024 and February 2026 in Ahmedabad, shows how low wages are inadequate to sustain a dignified life. The current wage frameworks assume that workers and their dependents form a single household in one location. However, migrants’ realities are “bilocal”: their wages must sustain their life in the city while remittances are essential to support their native villages and homes.

Strained incomes have unsurprising consequences: debt, unhygienic and cramped living conditions and compromising on healthcare and education, which results in children being pulled into work.

The workers’ protests also erupted months after the Centre’s four labour codes came into effect in November 2025. The government has said the four new codes modernise and consolidate India’s labour and worker-related laws. But workers’ rights organisations have warned of a dilution in labour protection and rights.

The same month, amendments to the Uttar Pradesh Factories Act were enforced which allowed the government to extend the workday to 12 hours and raise quarterly overtime limits from 75 to 144 hours. The NCR’s Noida industrial hub comes under the jurisdiction of Uttar Pradesh.

In response to the protests, state governments have marginally revised wages. Uttar Pradesh raised wages for unskilled workers to Rs 13,690, Haryana to Rs 15,221. Both are far below conservative living-wage benchmarks and well short of the Rs 26,000 long demanded by unions. These wage revisions also come after years of inflation, and it is unlikely that they are enough to meet current expenses.

VIDEO | Faridabad, Haryana: After Noida, workers in Faridabad stage a protest demanding a wage hike; several detained. pic.twitter.com/FMTiQwkA4y

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) April 14, 2026

Why businesses must pay more

It might seem profitable to keep wages low, but it is a liability. It sparks frustration and unhappiness among workers, leads to their exit and drives up costs through recruitment and training expenses while lowering service quality.

Stable wages guarantee dignity and lower attrition, while fixed hours reduce errors and fatigue. Predictable hours will reduce defects and returns. Workers who can afford transport show up on time. Those who can eat and sleep well sell better, drive safer, and stay. Paying fair wages is far from a charitable act. Corporations must weigh the costs of increasing wages or grappling with the costs of lost output and other losses.

Setting minimum wages

Faced with labour unrest and the increasing cost of living in expenses in the midst of global economic turmoil, the government must reframe minimum wages to living wages. It must notify a time-bound roadmap to reach city-wise, Anker living-wage benchmarks with annual increases based on inflation. The national floor level minimum wage must also be revised urgently.

Enforcement often becomes the main failure. Here, governments must cap the workday at eight hours, ensure overtime is voluntary and paid at double rates, bring about digital muster rolls and wage slips. Non-payment of wages must become a cognisable offence, which means police can begin investigations and make arrests as the relevant laws.

Wages must also be accompanied by social security nets. Welfare benefits like insurance and provident fund should be portable across states and employers.

Grievance systems should work on the ground: district wage-facilitation cells with a 30-day disposal rule, protection against retaliation, dialogue before detention, and quarterly compliance disclosure. The state must also stop underwriting low wages through its own contracts, by demanding, for instance, Rs 20,000 but paying Rs 13,000 in its tenders.

The workers’ anger is grounded in the desperation of surviving from day to day. Their demands for a minimum of Rs 20,000 per month and overtime are modest given the cost of living in the capital of India.

From factory and industry workers to the labourers who deliver food and groceries and clean homes, it is their sweat and effort that is central to making Indian cities what they are today.

Rajiv Khandelwal is the co-founder and Director of Aajeevika Bureau, a workers’ rights and services organisation supporting migrant and informal workers everywhere.

A total of 345 or 23% of the candidates in the first phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections have declared criminal cases against themselves, the non-governmental organisation Association for Democratic Reforms said in a report on Tuesday.

The organisation analysed the affidavits of 1,475 out of the 1,478 candidates contesting the elections on Thursday.

Of these, 294 candidates or 20% have declared serious criminal cases. Ninety-eight candidates have cases related to crimes against women, while 19 have declared cases of murder, the report said.

Among major parties, the Bharatiya Janata Party has the highest proportion of candidates with declared criminal cases at 70%. Around 44% of candidates fielded by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) have declared criminal cases.

In the ruling Trinamool Congress, 43% of candidates have declared criminal cases, while 26% of candidates fielded by the Congress face such charges.

The organisation defines serious criminal offences as those carrying a maximum punishment of five years or more, non-bailable offences, or cases involving loss to the public exchequer. This category includes offences such as assault, murder, kidnapping, rape and crimes against women or those mentioned in the Representation of the People Act. They also include offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Polling in West Bengal will be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29, with results scheduled to be declared on May 4.

21% candidates have assets over Rs 1 crore

A total of 309 candidates, or 21% of those analysed have declared assets worth more than Rs 1 crore. The average assets of candidates contesting in the first phase of the West Bengal elections are Rs 1.34 crore.

Among the major parties, 106 out of 148 candidates analysed from the Trinamool Congress had assets above Rs 1 crore.

This is followed by 71 of 152 candidates from the Bharatiya Janata Party, 50 of 151 from the Congress and 24 of 98 from the CPI (Marxist).

The Trinamool Congress’ Jangipur candidate Jakir Hossain is the richest with assets valued at more than Rs 133 crore, according to the study.

Read Scroll’s coverage of the 2026 West Bengal Assembly elections here.

The Income Tax Department on Tuesday filed a complaint with the commissioner of police in Chennai against Tamil Nadu Congress chief K Selvaperunthagai for his social media posts alleging that he had been “unlawfully confined” within the Sriperumbudur Assembly constituency under the “pretext of a search”, Live Law reported.

On Monday, Selvaperunthagai also alleged that the search, which coincided with party leader Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Tamil Nadu in the run-up to the Assembly elections, was a “calculated attempt to obstruct democratic functioning and weaken the activities of the Opposition”.

Voting for the Assembly polls in the state will be held in a single phase on April 23, with results scheduled to be declared on May 4.

On Tuesday, the Income Tax department said that the Congress leader’s claims were also repeated to the media and it was reported widely that a search was conducted at his home in Kilpauk, Chennai, Live Law reported.

The department claimed that it had not conducted any searches.

“The allegations are entirely baseless and factually incorrect,” the legal news outlet quoted the department as saying. “It is clarified that no search, survey or any form of enforcement action was carried out by the…department against…Selvaperunthagai on [April 20] or on any date in the recent past.”

The department added: “No action whatsoever was undertaken that could have restricted his movement. It is also clarified that no premises, including his residence at Kilpauk, Chennai, were covered under any Income Tax proceedings as claimed in the reports.”

The central agency also said that though it had carried out some verification exercises in the state, they were in connection with an intelligence report of the movement of unaccounted cash. The action was not connected to the Congress leader, added the department.

It further said that the matter has been reported to the Election Commission and a formal police complaint has been filed.

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The Congress submitted a privilege notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, alleging that his national address on April 18 “cast aspersions” on Opposition MPs. A prime minister criticising the Opposition for not being able to pass a bill in Parliament was “unprecedented and a blatant abuse of power”, stated the party.

Party MP KC Venugopal wrote that the Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, “in the guise of implementing women’s reservation” in Lok Sabha and Assemblies, “surreptitiously sought” to do away with guardrails against delimitation.

“This is what the Opposition MPs in the Lok Sabha were protesting,” the Congress leader reiterated. Read on.

With two days to go for the first phase of polling in West Bengal, the Election Commission has announced several restrictions in the state. Among the curbs is a ban on motorcycles on roads during the night and tourists not being allowed to visit Digha, a popular beach destination in the state.

The sale of liquor was also banned in West Bengal for 96 hours ahead of polling on Thursday. The Election Commission usually mandates only a 48-hour ban on the sale of liquor before polling across the country. Read on.

Five workers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and four Trinamool Congress members were arrested after a clash outside a Kolkata police station last night. The clash erupted during the campaign for the Assembly elections, the first phase of which will be held on Thursday.

The supporters of the BJP’s Kolkata Port candidate Rakesh Singh had gathered at a meeting on Hossain Shah Road and shouted slogans. Trinamool Congress workers also shouted slogans in response, leading to violence.

Clashes between workers of the two parties were also reported in the Nandigram constituency. Read on.

Watch: As lakhs of Bengali Muslims lose their votes to SIR, who gains? BJP or Trinamool?

Petitioners seeking action against Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday that he had continued to make “religiously provocative, incendiary and needless comments” even after notices were issued to him. They also submitted to the court remarks made by Sarma in March and April, highlighting that the Bharatiya Janata Party leader continued to use the term “Miya”.

The petitioner urged the court to pass interim orders to restrict his speeches. The court did not accept the request and held that it must wait for Sarma’s response in the matter. It then granted four more weeks to the Assam government and the BJP leader to respond to the petitions seeking action against him for hate speech. Read on.

Has the Supreme Court gone soft on hate speech? writes Ratna Singh

Iranian state television reported that no delegation from the country has left for Pakistan to hold peace talks with the United States amid the conflict in West Asia. This came amid continuing uncertainty about whether fresh talks to end the war will take place between the two countries.

The two-week ceasefire in West Asia, which took effect on April 8, will end on Wednesday. Read on.

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India has withdrawn its bid to host the UN climate conference, COP33 scheduled for 2028, a move that reflects shifting priorities in global climate negotiations and geopolitics.

Rajat Agrawal, Joint Secretary at the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, informed the Asia-Pacific group of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change about India’s decision on April 2.

A ministry spokesperson, Virat Majboor, confirmed to Mongabay-India that the decision had been communicated to the UNFCCC secretariat, but said no further information was available.

At COP28 in Dubai in 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced India’s interest in hosting the climate conference scheduled in 2028. India had earlier hosted COP 8 in New Delhi in 2002.

The COP presidency and the responsibility for hosting the annual climate conference rotate among the five United Nations regional groups – the African Group, Asia-Pacific Group, Eastern European Group, Latin American and Caribbean Group, and Western European and Others Group.

After Brazil hosts COP30 in 2025, Australia and Türkiye will jointly host COP31, followed by Ethiopia hosting COP32 for the African Group. This would be followed by the Asia-Pacific Group’s turn to host COP33, for which India had put forward its bid.

The process of selecting a host remains “opaque” and takes place within regional groups, Joanna Depledge, a research fellow at the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance at the University of Cambridge, said. India’s bid was still under consideration within the Asia-Pacific Group and had not been finalised.

“It is not a good sign,” Depledge said, referring to the withdrawal. She pointed to Brazil’s withdrawal from hosting COP25 after the election of President Jair Bolsonaro, widely interpreted as a signal of reduced interest in climate action, which did follow.

In India’s case, however, the move is likely to be seen differently, she said, linking it to the country’s dissatisfaction with developments at COP29 in Azerbaijan, particularly over the decision on a new climate finance goal.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, former chief negotiator for climate change (2013-2021) and distinguished fellow at CEEW, said Modi had earlier indicated India’s interest in hosting the climate negotiations, and added that several geopolitical changes have since emerged, including challenges around climate finance, energy security, and critical minerals. CEEW is a New Delhi-based think tank.

Evolving reality

The global climate landscape has undergone significant shifts in the two and a half years since India announced that it would host COP33. At the time of the announcement, in December 2023, the United States remained part of the Paris Agreement.

By November 2024, it had become clear that Donald Trump was likely to return to power in the United States. He has indicated plans to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the first global treaty to set specific climate goals, including limiting temperature rise to well below 2 degrees celsius and pursuing efforts to keep it to 1.5 degrees celsius.

In January 2025, he issued an executive order in this regard.

At the same time (November 2024), countries were negotiating a new climate finance goal at COP29 in Baku. After long and tough negotiations, developed countries agreed to mobilise $300 billion annually by 2035 under the New Collective Quantified Goal. The outcome was seen as inadequate by many developing countries, with India among those raising strong objections.

Earlier, the Prime Minister, while announcing India’s interest in hosting COP33, had also emphasised the need to scale up climate finance commitments from billions to several trillions, which shows India has realised the importance of climate finance in setting up ambitious climate goals.

RR Rashmi, India’s former principal negotiator under the UN climate process at several COPs and a distinguished fellow at TERI, said that global climate finance has remained inadequate, and countries have to factor this in and work within these constraints. TERI is a New Delhi- based think tank.

Regarding the changing reality, he said the focus has largely been on mitigation, but as climate impacts become more visible, attention is shifting towards resilience. He said public budgets are increasingly being directed towards supporting vulnerable communities, while mitigation is expected to be driven by private capital.

Another major development has been rising concerns over energy security. The Iran-Israel conflict is the latest geopolitical episode to strain global energy supply, highlighting vulnerabilities in supply chains. Earlier, the Russia-Ukraine war and restrictions on critical mineral exports by China had already exposed these risks, particularly for large energy consumers such as India.

These developments are also reflected in India’s domestic policy discourse. The latest Economic Survey, which was tabled in the Parliament in January, questioned the prevailing narrative by saying, “…deterministic or catastrophic policy narratives often compresses nuance and downplays uncertainty.” It argued that “development is, in itself, a form of adaptation,” adding that growth and resilience should be seen as complementary to climate action.

Similar views are emerging globally. Writing ahead of COP30, US-based billionaire and philanthropist Bill Gates noted that excessive focus on near-term emissions targets could divert attention from practical solutions to improve resilience in a warming world.

Against this backdrop, Karthik Nachiappan, a Research Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, linked India’s withdrawal from hosting the COP to a broader shift.

He said India’s climate diplomacy is moving from symbolic leadership, such as hosting summits, towards a more instrumental leadership focused on finance, technology, and industrial policy. This includes prioritising forums such as the G20, multilateral development bank reforms, and partnerships across the Global South, making COP hosting less central.

Increasing expectations on ambition

The year 2028, when COP33 will take place, is significant because it coincides with the second Global Stocktake, a process under Article 14 of the Paris Agreement that assesses collective progress towards its long-term goals. The first Global Stocktake was concluded in 2023 at COP28 in Dubai.

The Global Stocktake assesses emissions trends, policies, finance, and adaptation efforts, and evaluates whether current actions are sufficient to meet the Paris Agreement’s temperature goals of limiting warming to below 2 degrees celsius and pursuing efforts to keep it to 1.5 degrees celsius. Current assessments, including the latest emissions gap report by the United Nations Environment Programme, show that global efforts remain insufficient.

The outcome of the 2028 Global Stocktake is expected to trigger calls for more ambitious climate action, placing greater expectations on the COP presidency to push mitigation efforts. This comes even as India has emphasised adaptation and resilience in its domestic policy discourse, including in the Economic Survey.

The call for increasing ambition is getting visible even now at other forums. It is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as its seventh assessment report is expected towards the end of this decade. However, there is a push by developed countries, the Alliance of Small Island States, and several Least Developed Countries, to advance these reports to embed their findings in Global Stocktake. Countries, including India, have expressed their concerns about compressing timelines and early release of these reports.

Amid this, the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement, given its share of around 12% in global emissions, creates a gap difficult for others to fill, increasing pressure on the host country to address the widening emissions gap.

Experts say these dynamics make it difficult for developing countries to bridge the emissions gap. RR Rashmi said developed countries were expected to lead mitigation efforts, but are not acting in line with their capacities, shifting the burden onto developing countries.

He added that while global efforts to address climate change have been inadequate, the impacts cannot be ignored. The resulting pressure on developing countries, already dealing with climate impacts, underscores the importance of climate justice.

Prasad said, “Developed countries were expected to play a leading role in mitigation, but they are not acting in line with their responsibilities and capacities. This points to a harsh reality: the world is likely to overshoot its warming targets. The challenge now is how to respond to that, and developing countries are already grappling with this question.”

Increasing scrutiny of the COP host/presidency

In recent COPs, host countries’ domestic energy policies, especially those related to fossil fuels, have come under scrutiny. From the United Arab Emirates’ oil expansion during COP28 to Azerbaijan’s gas strategy ahead of COP29 and the United Kingdom’s North Sea projects during COP26, questions have been raised about the alignment between climate leadership and fossil fuel policies.

India faces a similar dilemma. Coal remains important to its energy needs, even as global climate efforts increasingly focus on phasing down fossil fuels. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced India’s interest in hosting the COP, he also emphasised the need for technology transfer and strengthening clean energy supply chains.

However, it remains uncertain how much traction such demands from developing countries will receive, even as coal continues to come under scrutiny in climate negotiations.

While India’s per capita emissions remain low, its overall share of around 7%-8% makes it one of the world’s largest emitters, placing its climate and energy policies under increasing global scrutiny.

Nachiappan said hosting a COP brings visibility but also pressure to raise climate ambition and defend domestic choices. He said withdrawing from the bid allows India to avoid that exposure and preserve flexibility. He added that the move reflects a broader shift in climate politics, away from large multilateral moments towards negotiations and discussion on finance, technology, and sectoral cooperation.

Joanna Depledge said the prospect of intense scrutiny could deter potential hosts. However, she added that COPs will remain highly relevant, even as climate action becomes more dispersed across smaller initiatives and groupings.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Congress on Tuesday submitted a privilege notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, alleging that his national address on April 18 “cast aspersions” on Opposition MPs.

In a letter to Birla, Congress MP KC Venugopal said that a prime minister criticising the Opposition for not being able to pass a bill in Parliament was “unprecedented and a blatant abuse of power”.

Modi, in his address, criticised Opposition parties for defeating in the Lok Sabha the Union government’s bill to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

On April 17, the 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, one of three draft legislations introduced by the Centre during a special session, was defeated in the Lower House of Parliament.

As a Constitution amendment bill, it required a two-thirds majority of votes to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House and had required the support of the Opposition to pass the amendment.

In his address, Modi claimed that Opposition parties stood against the draft legislation, which he described as the women’s reservation bill, for their “selfish political interests”.

Opposition parties, including the Congress, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Trinamool Congress, have maintained that they supported the amendments to the Women’s Reservation Act, but were opposed to the proposed delimitation of electoral constituencies.

On Tuesday, Venugopal wrote that the Constitution 131st Amendment Bill, “in the guise of implementing women’s reservation” in Lok Sabha and Assemblies, “surreptitiously sought” to do away with guardrails against delimitation.

“This is what the Opposition MPs in the Lok Sabha were protesting,” the Congress leader reiterated.

My senior colleague in the Lok Sabha, KC Venugopal, has issued a notice of question of privilege against the Prime Minister for his so-called address to the nation following the defeat of his nefarious designs in the Lok Sabha by something he did not expect—absolute Opposition… pic.twitter.com/ZbGDaphZiQ

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) April 21, 2026

He added: “It is well established that casting reflections, aspersions, imputing motives to Members of Parliament in regard to speeches made by them in Parliament tantamount to gross breach of privilege and contempt of House.”

Parliamentary privilege refers to the rights and immunities enjoyed by members of the two Houses. If proven, the House can issue a warning against an MP, impose fines, or even sentence them to prison.

Venugopal said it was “appalling” that the prime minister was “so annoyed that he chose to address the nation casting aspersions on Members of Parliament who were honestly performing their duties”.

In his letter, he told Birla that this matter “deserves to be treated with utmost seriousness, as questioning an elected representative performing his duty is not merely a personal assault but a direct affront to the authority of Parliament”.

Soon after Modi’s address, the Congress had said that Modi had turned an official address to the nation into a political speech “full of mudslinging and outright lies”.

The party also said that the Model Code of Conduct is in force in several states because of Assembly elections and “it was very clear how PM Modi misused official machinery to attack his opponents”. “This is a travesty of democracy and the Constitution of India,” said Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge.

Over two billion years old, the Aravalli mountain range in north-western India feels like an oasis running through Rajasthan’s hot, arid landscape.

Its rolling hills, biodiverse forests and water bodies form a massive green wall protecting the rest of the country from the heat and dust that rises from the Thar Desert on the western edge of the state.

Yet despite its ecological significance, commercial mining has been degrading the Aravallis. At least 29,209 instances of illegal mining were reported between 2018 and 2023 in Aravalli districts.

Mining pressure linked to urban expansion continues to reshape the landscape. At least 65 minerals are mined across the Aravalli range, including lead, zinc and copper, as are industrial minerals used in urban infrastructure, like marble, quartz, limestone and granite.

Environmental activist Kailash Meena has felt the impact of this mining in his hometown of Neem Ka Thana, a village in northern Rajasthan. His father was a shepherd, whose livelihood was his livestock and subsistence agriculture. But marble mining in his village has made it hard to sustain these.

Mining and blasting are causing groundwater levels to fall in the area, and risk fracturing the ancient rock formations that allow rainwater to percolate underground. Dust generated by mining crushers and heavy transport vehicles settles on crops, degrading soil quality and contaminating water and air, Meena tells Dialogue Earth. Grazing lands and forest produce on which many rural households depend have gradually disappeared.

“Villages in the Aravalli belt where mining has been rampant have seen a major fall in livestock numbers, thereby negatively impacting people’s traditional livelihoods,” Meena says. Those who continue to farm have seen their earnings take a hit.

“Villages like ours are aggrieved by the mining mafia,” he says. “A lot of construction that takes place in regions like Delhi … get their materials through mining in our small eco-sensitive villages.”

Further alarming native communities and environmentalists is the central government’s proposed redefinition of what comprises the Aravalli Hills and range. “Any landform located in the Aravalli districts, having an elevation of 100 metres or more from the local relief, shall be termed as Aravalli Hills,” stated a government press release. The Aravalli range, meanwhile, has been defined as all landforms existing within 500 metres of two adjoining hills of over 100 metres in height.

Environmentalists and experts say these definitions are narrow and endanger a substantial chunk of the Aravalli landscape, especially vast stretches of low-lying scrub hills, grasslands and ridges. Locals worry they might open up the Aravallis for more mining, this time legally.

“People sitting in air-conditioned rooms cannot understand the complexities of the ground realities of the Aravallis. Our voices should become a part of decision-making,” says Kusum Rawat, a 30-year-old researcher from Banswara district in southern Rajasthan that lies within the Aravallis. Further worrying her is a new gold mine discovered in the district, which is expected to result in more mining on the hills.

The new definitions had been accepted by the Supreme Court in November, but sustained criticism and protest led the court to suspend that decision just weeks later, shortly after the central government halted new mining leases in the region.

A Supreme Court petition filed in January by two villagers from Neem Ka Thana, for instance, resulted in action from the Rajasthan state government.

Authorities recognised that land designated to a private company for mining was within the Aravalli range, and ordered a stop to all activity. Mining operations had begun despite an earlier Supreme Court ruling that no mining can be allowed without the court’s approval, leading to the villagers’ petition.

Communities come together

Rawat was among activists, researchers and community leaders who recently completed a 700-km, 38-day Aravalli sanrakshan yatra (protection procession). It passed through all the states and territories the mountain range stretches across – Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana and Delhi.

Along the route, members of the procession met at least 1,000 people who shared the challenges they face living along the Aravallis. While mining-induced air pollution came up often, many also reported suffering from silicosis, an incurable lung disease caused by inhaling large amounts of crystalline silica dust, which gets released into the air during mining. To date, more than 25,000 cases of silicosis have been identified by the state of Rajasthan, with over 1,100 deaths recorded.

The Rajasthan state government was approached for comment on these figures but did not respond.

Kanchi Kohli, an independent forest analyst, says one of the biggest mining pressures typically comes from urban expansion, with the Aravallis being a source of raw materials for real estate and road expansions around the ecoregion. She urged governments to keep in mind the social and ecological impacts of urbanisation on important ecoregions like the Aravallis in their planning.

Across the Aravalli range, individuals and collectives are fighting the threat of even more mining arising from the government’s definitions of the ancient mountain system.

In May 2025, the citizen-led collective People for Aravallis, who played a key role in the yatra, submitted a citizens report to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the Haryana government. The report claimed that licensed mining operations had wiped out most of the Aravalli range in two districts, Charkhi Dadri and Bhiwani.

“Aravalli hills in Gurugram, Nuh and Faridabad districts were ravaged during the time when licensed mining took place before the Supreme Court banned mining [there],” says founder of the collective, Neelam Ahluwalia. “However, illegal mining still continues brazenly. In Mahendergarh district where ground water levels in many areas have reached a depth of 1,500-2,000 feet, licensed and illegal mining have caused immense devastation.”

“The whole range is bleeding,” she says.

Referring to communities like Meena’s village, Ahluwalia adds: “These are communities with almost no carbon footprint. Yet they are the ones facing the impacts of environmental destruction.”

This long-suffering part of India hardly gets any attention, Meena notes. “In the last few years, pollution and heatwaves in north India have made headlines. But our areas have been facing these issues for 30 years now,” he says, adding that without the Aravallis, the northern areas will, like Neem Ka Thana, “have a difficult time surviving”.

With the Aravalli yatra, Ahluwalia notes, activists set out to bring local voices into the conversation through meetings and public consultations across the region. “People who depend on the Aravallis for their sustenance and live in its lap need to be consulted as to what they want before taking any decision which will directly impact their lives, health and livelihoods,” she says.

The interventions of communities and environmentalists are bearing fruit.

In March, the Supreme Court reportedly assembled a committee of experts from fields including forestry and geology to come up with a new uniform definition for the Aravallis.

Impact on the environment

The ecological importance of the Aravalli range is undisputed, experts say.

The 100-metre definition for the range risks excluding from protection ecologically connected areas such as forests, wildlife corridors and groundwater recharge zones, Ahluwalia notes. “The idea is to open up everything for mining and make it legal.”

A report from the Forest Survey of India submitted to the Supreme Court in September 2025 observed that smaller hills in the Aravallis, located at the edge of the Thar Desert, serve as natural barriers against desertification by stopping heavier sand particles. They act as windbreaks, protecting Delhi and neighbouring plains from sandstorms.

This report was suppressed by the Ministry of Environment, K Parameshwar, the amicus curiae (who provides specialised expertise in cases) said in his report to the Supreme Court. Parameshwar noted that the 100-metre definition was not supported by several key parties involved, including the Forest Survey of India. The proposed definition was also never put up for public consultation.

The reduction of the Aravalli Hills would also jeopardise the role they play in rainwater harvesting. “There could be clear impacts on the groundwater recharge in the area which is likely to affect agriculture and access to water,” disrupting cropping patterns, says Kohli.

Government figures have found these concerns alarmist. In December 2025, environment minister Bhupender Yadav said that nearly 90% of the Aravalli landscape will be protected and that only 0.19% of the range could ever be eligible for mining under existing rules. An analysis by Down To Earth, however, notes that nearly 49% of the Aravallis would be exposed once the definition is applied.

After being approached by Dialogue Earth, a representative of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change responded that the matter was subjudice, or under judicial consideration, and did not comment. However, its press release noted that because its definition of the Aravalli range protects the 500 metres of land between two adjoining hills, “it is, therefore… wrong to conclude that mining is permitted in all landforms below 100 metre height”.

In his report, Parameshwar noted that land would not be protected if it lies between hills above 100 metres but farther than 500 metres from each other.

The fight goes on

The need to define the Aravalli range is being questioned by some citizen-led conservation groups. Jyoti Raghavan, from the conservationist group Aravalli Bachao Citizens Movement, notes that the landscape is already widely understood and recognised. “When it is already accepted that this is what Aravallis are, why do we need to narrow down its definition?”

Despite the ban on the new mining leases, the lack of resolution remains a cause for worry to those directly impacted by it.

“Clean air and pure water are the necessities of life. What will happen to our future generations if we do not conserve our ecology?” says Rawat. “It is our duty.”

Raghavan, who lives near the Aravallis in Gurugram, near Delhi, notes the biodiversity loss she has observed over her years of working in the region. “The birds, the jackals and the neelgai that I used to see are vanishing right in front of my eyes,” she says.

“I am in this fight for the ones who cannot speak for themselves… the animals, the wildlife that do not have a voice.”

For communities like Meena’s, their whole lives are at stake. “We are trying to protect our livelihoods. We are trying to protect our existence. Our farms, livestock, and water have been threatened. At what cost are we mining the hills?”

This article was updated on April 21 after Dialogue Earth updated its story to include a response from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and re-edited parts of it based on requests made by a source.

Shalinee Kumari is Dialogue Earth’s South Asia editorial assistant, based in New Delhi.

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

Petitioners seeking action against Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma told the Gauhati High Court on Tuesday that the Bharatiya Janata Party leader had continued to make “religiously provocative, incendiary and needless comments” even after notices were issued to him, reported Live Law.

Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for the petitioners, said that Sarma’s “entire thought process is reserved for a minority only”.

The High Court granted four more weeks to the Assam government and the BJP leader to respond to the petitions seeking action against him for hate speech.

On his part, Singhvi said that “a constitutional functionary is supposed to maintain peace and balance”, reported Live Law.

“In his eyes, there is no regulatory, judicial, adjudicatory framework at all,” added Singhvi.

The advocate also filed a note before the bench referring to fresh remarks made by Sarma in March and April, highlighting that the Bharatiya Janata Party leader continued to use the term “Miya”.

The petitioner urged the court to pass interim orders to restrict his speeches. The court did not accept the request and held that it must wait for Sarma’s response in the matter.

However, the court verbally told the state’s counsel that a response in the matter cannot be evaded.

The matter will now be heard on May 28.

Since January, Sarma has made a series of remarks targeting Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam, calling them “Miyas”. The BJP leader had said that it was his job to “make them suffer”.

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

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

Petitions against Sarma have been filed by the Congress, Assamese scholar Hiren Gohain, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and others.

On February 26, the court had sought Sarma’s response on the petitions.

Earlier in February, the Supreme Court had declined to entertain the petitions seeking that a first information report be filed against Sarma for hate speech against Muslims.

The bench had told the petitioners to approach the Gauhati High Court. It had also asked the High Court to hear the matter on priority.

Also read: Has the Supreme Court gone soft on hate speech?

The Allahabad High Court has upheld the detention of a man under the National Security Act for allegedly slaughtering a cow and two calves in March 2025, reported Live Law on Monday.

Cow slaughter triggers spontaneous “strong emotions and violent reactions for obvious injury to religious beliefs of a large section of the society”, held a bench of Justices JJ Munir and Sanjiv Kumar in an order delivered on Thursday.

Such acts have an “inherent potentiality” of triggering “widespread ripples in society that would affect the even tempo of life”, the bench added.

On March 15, 2025, the police allegedly discovered the remains of a calf in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli district, reported Live Law. The discovery coincided with the Hindu festival of Holi. It had triggered unrest among the Hindu community.

According to the police, a group of residents and members of Hindutva organisations had gathered at the site, shouted slogans and blocked a road while demanding the arrest of those involved.

The petitioner and his associates were arrested after an investigation, said the police. They also claimed that the accused persons had confessed to slaughtering a cow and two calves in a jungle.

The police further alleged that the petitioner, who was trying to secure his bail, had sent messages from jail that he would again slaughter a cow upon being released, reported Live Law.

Following this, a detention order was passed against him under the National Security Act.

The Act allows the Union or state government to order the detention of a person “with a view to preventing him from acting in any manner prejudicial to the defence of India, the relations with foreign powers, or the security of India”.

On Thursday, the court held that the detaining authority was “absolutely justified” in assuming that the petitioner could “indulge in activity prejudicial to the maintenance of public order” after being released from prison.

The Chhattisgarh High Court has refused to quash a case against a professor accused of coercing non-Muslim students to offer namaz during a National Service Scheme camp, Bar and Bench reported on Monday.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Ramesh Sinha and Justice Ravindra Kumar Agrawal noted on April 15 that on a preliminary reading, the chargesheet showed that there was evidence against the accused man, Dilip Jha, Live Law reported.

However, it also noted that there was no conclusive proof at this stage that the proceedings were instituted with ulterior motives.

The alleged incident took place at a seven-day National Service Scheme camp organised by Guru Ghasidas Central University in Bilaspur in March 2025. During the camp, Muslim students were asked to offer namaz on stage on the occasion of the Muslim festival Eid-ul-Fitr.

Other students were also allegedly compelled to participate in the prayers without their consent. As per a police complaint filed by them, it was alleged that those who objected were threatened with adverse consequences, including cancellation of certificates, Live Law reported.

After the complaint was filed, the police conducted a preliminary inquiry and then registered a first information report. Following this, a chargesheet was filed naming Jha, who served as a project coordinator, along with several others.

A trial court had taken cognisance of the chargesheet in October.

In his petition seeking the quashing of the FIR, Jha argued that he had no operational role at the camp. He added that he was implicated on “baseless” grounds, Bar and Bench reported.

Opposing the petition, the state government said that the matter involved disputed questions of fact that must be tested during trial.

On April 15, the High Court rejected Jha’s contention that he had no operational role at the camp and was not present during the alleged incident, Bar and Bench reported. It added that the investigation had already been completed and sufficient material had been collected to proceed against him.

The bench also held that such factual disputes cannot be adjudicated in a petition for quashing the petition.

“The petitioner’s contention regarding absence from the scene or administrative role is a matter that can be fully addressed during the trial through cross-examination and presentation of evidence,” the legal news portal quoted the bench as saying.

The High Court added that interference at this stage would amount to “pre-judging issues of fact and evidence” that it is not empowered to do.

A special court in Assam on Monday convicted 20 persons and acquitted 25 others in the 2018 mob lynching of two men, PTI reported.

They were killed by a mob that had accused them of being child abductors.

The sentence will be pronounced on Friday.

The incident had taken place in June 2018 when the two men from Guwahati, 29-year-old Nilotpal Das and 30-year-old Abhijeet Nath, went to Kangthilangso waterfall in Karbi Anglong.

While they were returning, a group of villagers stopped their vehicle at Panjuri, dragged them out and beat them to death. In a video widely shared on social media at the time, Das and Nath could be heard telling the mob that they were not child abductors but were visiting Karbi Anglong, PTI reported.

The incident had taken place amid rumours of incidents of children being abducted spreading on social media.

On Monday, Nagaon District Sessions Judge DJ Mahanta convicted 20 of the 45 persons accused in the case under several sections of the Indian Penal Code, including murder committed by one or more members of an unlawful assembly, rioting and voluntarily causing hurt, PTI reported.

The judge said that the prosecution had failed to prove its case against the 25 others who had also been arrested in the case and were in jail. Mahanta ordered them to be released.

At the time of the incident, 48 persons had been arrested in the case. However, three were minors and had been at a juvenile home, the news agency reported.

Five workers of the Bharatiya Janata Party and four Trinamool Congress members were arrested after a clash outside a Kolkata police station on Monday, reported ANI.

The clash erupted during the campaign for the Assembly elections. Polling in West Bengal will be held in two phases on April 23 and April 29. The votes will be counted on May 4.

The campaign for the first phase concludes on Tuesday.

On Monday, the supporters of BJP’s Kolkata Port candidate Rakesh Singh gathered at a meeting on Hossain Shah Road and shouted slogans, ANI quoted police officers as saying.

Trinamool Congress workers also shouted slogans in response, leading to violence, the news agency reported.

A few persons were injured in the clashes, IANS quoted Deputy Commissioner of Police Harikrishna Pai as saying.

Three first information reports have been registered in connection with the incident, the police said.

Clashes between workers of the two parties were also reported in the Nandigram constituency, reported The Hindu on Monday. BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari is contesting the polls there.

TMC moves High Court

Amid this, advocate and Trinamool Congress’ Lok Sabha MP Kalyan Banerjee moved the High Court on Monday, raising concerns that several party workers could face arrest ahead of polling, reported The Telegraph.

The Election Commission is said to have prepared a list of nearly 1,000 individuals described as “troublemakers”, he told the court.

Banerjee said that “there is a strong fear of arrest of those Trinamool workers, so the court needs to intervene in this matter immediately”, reported The Telegraph.

Restrictions of use of motorcycles

Meanwhile, the poll panel said that motorcycles will not be allowed on roads between 6 pm and 6 am starting two days before the polling, according to the newspaper.

In a directive, the Election Commission further said that pillion riders will not be allowed between 6 am and 6 pm, except in medical emergencies, for family functions or for dropping and picking up children from school.

The restrictions were being imposed to ensure “free, fair, peaceful and violence-free elections” and to prevent “any form of intimidation and source jamming”, the newspaper quoted the directive as saying.

Also read:

• From jhalmuri to fish, how BJP is trying to shed its outsider image in Bengal

• ‘Live or die, we have to vote TMC’: How SIR has left Bengali Muslims with no political choices

• Watch: As lakhs of Bengali Muslims lose their votes to SIR, who gains? BJP or Trinamool?

Over 700 citizens have written a letter to the Election Commission, alleging that Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national address on April 18 violated the Model Code of Conduct for elections.

The signatories, which included former civil servants, academics, activists and journalists, said that the use of official government machinery and mass media by Modi, for what amounted to “electioneering and partisan propaganda”, constituted a serious violation of the Model Code of Conduct.

They noted that the address was broadcast live by Doordarshan, Sansad TV and All India Radio, which are funded by the public exchequer.

Modi, in his address, had criticised Opposition parties for defeating in the Lok Sabha the Union government’s bill to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

The prime minister alleged that the Opposition parties stood against the women’s reservation bill for their “selfish political interests”, and that they insulted the framers of the Constitution by doing so.

Modi made the statement amid Assembly elections taking place in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal. Elections in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry took place on April 9. Voting in Tamil Nadu will take place on April 23, while polling in West Bengal will take place in two phases on April 23 and April 29.

700+ citizens have filed a complaint to the ECI regarding the gross violation of the Model Code of Conduct by the PM in his address to the nation on 18th of April. The use of official government mass media platforms by the PM, for what amounted to electioneering & partisan… pic.twitter.com/fbUqvcxk9M

— Anjali Bhardwaj (@AnjaliB_) April 20, 2026

The signatories to the letter to the Election Commission said that the prime minister gave the address in his official capacity, and that it was broadcast using official mass media at public expense.

“It thereby violated the explicit prohibition contained in clauses 1(a), 1(b) and 4 of Section VII of the MCC [which pertains to the party in power not misusing its official position],” they contended.

The citizens who wrote the letter urged the Election Commission to initiate an inquiry into the contents of Modi’s address. They also said that if the address was delivered with the permission of the poll panel, then “equal time on the national media should be provided to other political parties to present their points of view”.

Among those who signed the letter were transparency activist Anjali Bharadwaj, former Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung, political economist Parakala Prabhakar, activist Yogendra Yadav and former civil servants Ashish Joshi, Amitabha Pande and Avay Shukla.

Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma on Monday rejected the plea filed by Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal and others seeking that she recuse herself from hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s challenge to their discharge in the Delhi liquor policy case, Live Law reported.

Sharma had reserved her verdict in the case on April 13.

In her judgement on Monday, she said that she would decide the main case “without being affected by the recusal application”, Bar and Bench reported.

“Recusal would not be prudence but abdication of duty,” Sharma was quoted as saying. “It would be an act of surrender.”

She also said that the petition seeking her recusal amounted to putting “the institution of judiciary on trial”, adding that the “strength of judiciary lies in its strong resolve to decide the accusations”.

The main CBI case has been listed for further hearing on April 29, after Sharma said that some respondents had not filed their replies yet.

On April 14, Kejriwal had filed a fresh affidavit before the court seeking the judge’s recusal from the case. The former Delhi chief minister’s affidavit had stated that the judge’s son and daughter have been empanelled as counsels by the Centre.

Kejriwal had highlighted that they are both allocated cases by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who is appearing before the court representing the CBI.

An empanelled counsel is a lawyer selected by a government body, public sector undertaking or organisation to represent their legal cases for a designated period.

Kejriwal had argued that the apprehensions of bias are “direct, grave and impossible to ignore”.

Responding to the allegations pertaining to her children, Sharma said that the alleged conflict of interest must be clearly demonstrated in the particular case to mandate recusal, Bar and Bench reported.

She highlighted that her children have not been associated with this case in any capacity.

“A recusal would lead the public to believe that judges are aligned with a particular political party,” the legal news outlet quoted the judge as saying.

The case

The CBI had alleged irregularities in the Delhi government’s liquor excise policy, which has since been scrapped. Based on the CBI case, the Enforcement Directorate also launched an investigation into allegations of money-laundering.

The policy came into effect in November 2021. It was withdrawn in July 2022 with Vinai Kumar Saxena, the Delhi lieutenant governor at the time, recommending an investigation into the alleged irregularities of the policy.

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

On February 27, the trial court discharged Kejriwal and 22 others accused by the CBI in the case. There was no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent in the excise policy, the Rouse Avenue Courts had ruled.

The trial court also criticised the central agency for implicating Kejriwal without any cogent material. It said that the chargesheet had several gaps not supported by any witnesses or statements.

However, the High Court on March 9 stayed the adverse observations made by the trial court about the CBI. The matter was heard by Sharma, who prima facie observed that the trial court’s findings were erroneous.

Kejriwal had written to the chief justice of the High Court seeking the transfer of the case from Sharma to another judge, but the request was declined. The former Delhi chief minister had contended that no specific reasons had been recorded for commenting against the trial court’s order.

He also noted that the judge had earlier denied bail to several persons accused in the case who had been subsequently granted relief by the Supreme Court.

The Aam Aadmi Party chief sought the transfer on the ground of a “grave, bona fide, and reasonable apprehension that the matter may not receive a hearing marked by impartiality and neutrality”.

Odisha Chief Electoral Officer RS Gopalan on Monday directed electoral registration officers to verify the voter details “properly” before deleting names from the electoral rolls, PTI reported.

This came amid allegations of “wrongful deletion” of around 9.8 lakh names during an electoral mapping exercise conducted ahead of the special intensive revision of voter lists in the state, The Indian Express reported.

During the door-to-door mapping exercise, carried out between January and March, booth level officers had identified around 9.8 lakh names for deletion. These voters were flagged for reasons such as death, migration, duplicate entries or doubtful matches, PTI reported. Booth level officers are not authorised to delete names from the rolls.

Unidentified poll officials told The Indian Express that a large number of complaints had been received regarding wrongful deletion of names, including cases where electors were found to be present. These complaints also included instances where booth level officers had neither conducted field visits nor carried out proper verification.

Gopalan said that “usually 7-9 lakh names are deleted from the lists every year in Odisha on account of deaths and shifting of residences”, PTI reported.

He added that the number is “slightly high because of door-to-door mapping by the [booth level officers] ahead of the SIR exercise”, The Indian Express reported.

The voter roll revision process in Odisha was scheduled to start from April 1 but has been deferred due to the ongoing elections in five states. The process is likely to start in May.

In March, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi informed the Assembly that approximately 7.6 lakh names were deleted between June and March 22, PTI reported.

After weeks of protests and hunger strikes by activists and concerned local residents, the Maharashtra government temporarily halted further action on the Lohardongri iron ore mining project in the Bramhapuri forest division of Chandrapur district, which had ecologists and environmentalists in a bind for months.

Nagpur-based Sunflag Iron and Steel Company Ltd was allotted almost 36 hectares of forested land under the Mineral (Auction) Rules, 2015. News reports suggest that an estimated 18,000 trees would be felled to make way for the project.

While Mongabay-India couldn’t access the documents to verify the number of trees to be felled, a 2022 tree enumeration survey report available publicly points to over 11,773 trees to be cut and experts suggest that more trees have likely been added to this number in the last few years.

What truly concerns residents is the environmental cost of the project, including a potential rise in negative interactions with tigers.

Rising tiger interactions

Chandrapur district of Maharashtra is the epicentre of rising human–tiger interactions, often resulting in fatalities. Mongabay-India visited the conflict areas in late 2024 to report on this, and found that a staggering 111 human deaths from tiger attacks were reported in 2022-2023, with 59 deaths already recorded in 2023-2024. The latest official numbers are awaited.

Strict conservation measures at one of the country’s most popular tiger reserves – the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve – have contributed to an impressive rise in tiger numbers in the state.

According to a nationwide tiger estimation released in April 2022, Maharashtra is home to 444 tigers out of a national population of 3,682. The Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve reportedly has around 97 tigers, though unofficial estimates suggest the number may be closer to 150.

“Tadoba has become a cradle of tigers in central India. It has connectivity with several important tiger reserves and landscapes. This connectivity is critical from a long-term conservation perspective,” said Kedar Gore, Director of The Corbett Foundation, a conservation non-profit.

If the proposed mining project comes into effect, it is likely to disrupt natural tiger dispersal and movement, as it is located on a highly sensitive wildlife corridor connecting the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve with the Bramhapuri-Gadchiroli forest division. Other than tigers, the landscape also supports a range of wildlife, including wild pig, gaur, sambar deer, leopard, and more.

The site allotted for mining, a forested area, connects the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve, which lies to the west of the proposed site, with other forests on all sides – Gadchiroli district, with its dense forests, to the east; the Nawegaon-Nagzira Tiger Reserve to the north; and Chhattisgarh, with tiger reserves such as Indravati Tiger Reserve, to the south.

Explaining the ecological importance of the proposed mining site within a landscape significant for wildlife movement, Gore says that these forest patches form natural ecological connectivity.

“When corridors are officially mapped, however, they are often shown as narrow strips, just three to four kilometres wide. This is a very limited way of representing connectivity. In reality, for ecologists, the entire forested landscape functions as a corridor and a dispersal area for tigers moving out of tiger reserves, because tigers do not recognise these narrow, mapped areas,” he says, adding: “Because of this, anything that falls outside the officially designated corridors is often treated as if it is not important, even though it may be ecologically critical.”

“As tigers move out of Tadoba and into Bramhapuri and beyond, they rely on these forest patches for connectivity. The proposed mining project would take up a substantial patch of forest land, further fragmenting an already stressed system,” shares Mandar Pingle, assistant director of the Satpuda Foundation, a non-profit focused on wildlife and landscape conservation in central India.

These wildlife corridors are already under severe anthropogenic stress, with roads, canals and railway lines cutting across the region. “These infrastructures are unavoidable in a developing country, but mines can be reconsidered, considering the importance of the area for wildlife,” Gore adds.

Increased human pressure

Another concern raised by environmentalists is the potential spike in infrastructure such as access roads and other associated facilities, along with increased heavy vehicle movement to facilitate open-cast mining. This could result in disturbances in the forest, increase the risk of roadkills, and open up critical forest areas to further pressure.

From an economic perspective, Pingle shares that the project makes little sense. Human-wildlife conflict already imposes a significant burden on the state, with compensation of about Rs 25 lakh paid per human death. Any increase in conflict due to habitat disruption would further escalate these costs.

On the other hand, the mining project is expected to generate only around 32 permanent jobs, with about 40 additional temporary positions. Pingle says that this limited economic benefit does not justify the ecological and social costs.

The proposal includes compensatory afforestation in Yavatmal, which Pingle says does not offset the loss of old-growth forest at the mining site. The mining project raises critical concerns of net ecological and economic loss, exacerbating conflict, fragmenting a critical tiger landscape, and undermining long-term conservation in the region.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

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The Supreme Court has dismissed a review petition filed by activist Umar Khalid challenging its January 5 order denying him bail in the Delhi riots conspiracy case. The court held that it did not find “any good ground and reason to review the judgement”.

On January 5, the court had denied bail to Khalid and activist Sharjeel Imam in the case. However, the bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria had granted bail to Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan.

Khalid had challenged this order last week. Although his petition was dismissed on Thursday, the order was made public on Monday. Read on.

Umar Khalid’s five years of incarceration: ‘Do I even know the world any more?’

Amid allegations that the appellate tribunals set up to hear appeals against the deletion of voters in West Bengal were not functioning, the Supreme Court said that it will ask the chief justice of the Calcutta High Court to submit a report. Chief Justice Surya Kant also expressed displeasure that matters related to the special intensive revision of voter rolls were being mentioned before the court almost every day.

Earlier in the day, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra alleged on social media that “all 19 appellate tribunals for SIR hearings housed in the same building in Joka is closed for entry, guarded by CAPF” or the Central Armed Police Forces. Read on.

‘Live or die, we have to vote TMC’: How SIR has left Bengali Muslims with no political choices, reports Anant Gupta

The Congress’ Tamil Nadu unit chief K Selvaperunthagai alleged that officials from the Income Tax department had “unlawfully confined” him under the “pretext of a search”. The action coincided with party leader Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Tamil Nadu in the run-up to the Assembly elections.

The case in connection with which the searches were conducted was not immediately clear.

The Congress alleged that the department’s action was “not routine”, but was a “blatant misuse of central agencies by the Bharatiya Janata Party to intimidate and obstruct Opposition leaders at a crucial moment”. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin also alleged that the searches were a “conspiracy to silence” Selvaperunthagai. Read on.

Congress leader Pawan Khera moved the Gauhati High Court seeking anticipatory bail in a case registered against him by the Assam Police. This came two days after the Supreme Court declined to vacate a stay on a Telangana High Court order granting him transit anticipatory bail.

Khera has been accused of defamation, forgery and criminal conspiracy by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, for claiming that she holds passports of multiple countries. Read on.

Iran stated that it has no plans to participate in the second round of negotiations with the United States in Pakistan. This came after United States President Donald Trump said that a US delegation will arrive in Pakistani capital Islamabad on Monday for talks with Iran.

Meanwhile, the Congress said that Pakistan playing a role in facilitating the talks between the US and Iran was a “monumental setback” for the Narendra Modi government’s foreign policy. Read on.

‘Calling Pakistan a dalal made India look churlish and jealous’: Christine Fair

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The Supreme Court has dismissed a review petition filed by activist Umar Khalid challenging its January 5 order denying him bail in the Delhi riots conspiracy case, reported Bar and Bench on Monday.

On January 5, the court denied bail to Khalid and activist Sharjeel Imam in the case. A bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria had, however, granted bail to Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan.

Khalid had challenged this order last week. Although his petition was dismissed on Thursday, the order was made public only on Monday, reported Live Law.

“Having gone through the review petition and also the documents enclosed, we do not find any good ground and reason to review the judgement,” the Supreme Court was quoted as saying.

The activists were arrested between January 2020 and September 2020 in connection with the communal violence that broke out in North East Delhi in February 2020 between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it. The violence had left 53 dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.

The accused were charged under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, the Arms Act and sections of the Indian Penal Code.

The police have claimed that the violence was part of a larger conspiracy to defame the Narendra Modi government and was planned by those who organised the protests against the amended Citizenship Act.

In its order rejecting bail for Khalid and Imam, the bench had said they could file fresh petitions after all protected witnesses are examined or after one year.

The court had been hearing their petitions jointly challenging the Delhi High Court’s September 2 judgement dismissing their bail applications.

Opposing their bail pleas in the Supreme Court in October, the Delhi Police said in an affidavit that their alleged actions were part of a coordinated “regime change operation” under the guise of civil dissent. The police also alleged that the petitioners were “playing the victim card” due to long incarceration and were responsible for delaying the trial for “mala fide and mischievous reasons”.

The accused had said that they were exercising their right to peaceful protest and argued that the case criminalises dissent. They had also contended that their prolonged incarceration amounts to punishment before conviction.

In its January order, the Supreme Court said delay in Unlawful Activities Prevention Act trials cannot act as a “trump card” overriding statutory safeguards. It had also said that while bail in cases under the anti-terror law is not given as a matter of routine, the “law does not mandate denial of bail as default and does not exclude the court’s jurisdiction to allow bail”.

Also read:

• Umar Khalid’s five years of incarceration: ‘Do I even know the world any more?’

• Why has the JNU sedition case gone nowhere in a decade?

The Madras High Court on Monday sought responses from Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam chief Vijay, the Income Tax Department and the Election Commission on a petition alleging discrepancy of more than Rs 100 crore in the election affidavits filed by the actor-turned-politician, Bar and Bench reported.

The notices were also issued to the returning officers in Perumbur in Chennai district and Tiruchirapalli East in Tiruchirapalli district, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice SA Dharmadhikari and Justice G Arul Murugan was hearing a petition by a Chennai resident who alleged that the affidavit filed by Vijay in Tiruchirapalli East was inconsistent with the one filed in Perambur.

In Perambur, the actor-turned-politican had disclosed assets over Rs 105 crore while he disclosed assets worth more Rs 224 crore in Tiruchirapalli East, Bar and Bench quoted the petitioner as submitting.

“This is an irregularity,” the bench was quoted as observing verbally. “More than Rs 100 crores has not been disclosed in one constituency.”

However, the court did not express any final view on the merits of the allegations.

The bench has posted the case for further hearing next week, Live Law reported.

Voting for the Assembly polls in the state will be held in a single phase on April 23, with results scheduled to be declared on May 4.

Also read: Can Vijay’s electoral debut shake up Tamil Nadu’s politics?

Congress leader Pawan Khera on Monday moved the Gauhati High Court seeking anticipatory bail in a case registered against him by the Assam Police, Live Law reported.

Khera has been accused of defamation, forgery and criminal conspiracy by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Riniki Bhuyan Sarma had filed a first information report against the Congress leader after he claimed on April 5 that he had documentary evidence showing she holds passports of the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Antigua and Barbuda. Both the chief minister and his wife denied the allegations. They also alleged that Khera’s claims were based on forged documents.

On April 10, the Telangana High Court granted Khera transit anticipatory bail for a week.

Transit anticipatory bail is a temporary protection from arrest granted in one state to enable persons to approach the courts where the case has been filed.

However, the Supreme Court stayed the High Court order on April 15.

Khera then filed an application seeking that the stay order be vacated. On Friday, the Supreme Court refused to do so.

The top court also declined to extend the transit bail until Tuesday and directed the Congress leader to approach the Gauhati High Court instead.

The Supreme Court had said that neither the Telangana High Court’s observations nor its own stay order should influence the Assam court that decides on the Congress leader’s petition for anticipatory bail.

Himanta Biswa Sarma alleged on April 6 that the documents cited by the Congress had been supplied by a Pakistani social media group.

The chief minister had also claimed that the Congress had used details from a passport that had been allegedly lost. This document, he claimed, had been uploaded to the Pakistani social media group.

Pakistan playing a role in facilitating the second round of talks between the United States and Iran was a “monumental setback” for the Narendra Modi government’s foreign policy, said the Congress on Monday.

In a social media post, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said that India needed an “overhaul of its diplomatic engagement strategy and tactics which…Modi is simply incapable of doing”.

This came a day after United States President Donald Trump said that a US delegation would arrive in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad on Monday for the second round of negotiations with Iran.

On Monday, however, Iran stated that Tehran has no plans to participate in the talks.

On April 8, Washington and Tehran agreed to a two-week ceasefire to allow further negotiations to end the conflict. However, the peace talks, which were also held in Islamabad, collapsed on April 12.

On Monday, Ramesh stated that Pakistan was playing a “pivotal diplomatic role” amid the conflict in West Asia despite the country’s economy being in “dire straits” and depending on “largesse given to it by friendly countries”.

“It is abundantly clear that the substance and style of Prime Minister Modi’s regional and global engagement and narrative management have failed to isolate Pakistan, which has received a whole new branding,” the Congress leader wrote on social media.

He added that Pakistani military chief Asim Munir becoming “such a huge favourite of President Trump” is a “particularly severe setback for India”.

The ‘dalal’ country, as the erudite and always nattily dressed External Affairs Minister described it, is reportedly hosting the second round of US-Iran peace talks today.

After the completion of the first round of these talks on April 12th, Pakistan borrowed $6 billion from…

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) April 20, 2026

The Congress had criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government on April 8 as well, when Trump had announced the two-week ceasefire.

Ramesh had said then that Modi’s “self-styled vishwaguru [world leader]” image had been “thoroughly exposed”, with his “self-declared 56-inch chest shrunk and shrivelled”.

In a resolution adopted at a Congress Working Committee meeting on April 10, the party said that the Centre must “stop subordinating the national interest to electoral and ideological considerations” and take the Opposition into confidence on its strategy with respect to the conflict in West Asia.

The party had also alleged that the BJP-led government’s “myopic, xenophobic and unprincipled internationalism” has alienated India from its neighbours, and has also undermined efforts by successive governments to diplomatically isolate Pakistan.

The war

The US and Israel launched an attack on Iran on February 28, claiming that Tehran’s action posed an existential threat to Israel. Washington acts as a guarantor of Israel’s security. Iran retaliated by striking Israel and US military bases in the region and targeting major cities in Gulf countries.

Tehran also effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterbody connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, for most international commercial vessels, triggering a global energy crisis. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

On April 8, Washington and Tehran agreed to a two-week ceasefire to allow further negotiations to end the conflict. While Israel, which was not involved in the talks, has not struck Iran since the ceasefire took effect, it had continued to attack Lebanon until the deal reached on Thursday.

The peace talks between Iran and the US that were held in Islamabad collapsed on April 12.

Israel has been claiming that Iran is close to obtaining a nuclear weapon, which could alter the regional security balance. Tehran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.

The Supreme Court on Monday said that it will ask the chief justice of the Calcutta High Court to submit a report on the same day amid allegations that the appellate tribunals set up to hear appeals in the special intensive revision of electoral rolls in West Bengal were not functioning, PTI reported.

Advocate Devadatt Kamat cited reports to submit before the bench that the appellate tribunals “are not functioning”, The Indian Express reported.

The lawyer is representing a group of persons whose names had been removed from the voter list during the exercise and who had challenged the decision before the tribunals.

“Lawyers are not being allowed,” PTI quoted Kamat as having told the court. “They are only taking internet and computer-based applications.”

Chief Justice Surya Kant expressed displeasure that matters related to the revision exercise in Bengal were being mentioned before the court almost every day, the news agency reported.

Kamat then said that the orders passed by the court were not being followed.

He filed an application seeking that the hearings be expedited so that the names of the petitioners could appear on the supplementary list if their appeals are upheld.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court directed the Election Commission to publish a supplementary electoral roll in West Bengal to include voters whose appeals against deletions have been accepted by the appellate tribunals.

Persons whose appeals have been cleared by the tribunals before April 21 should be included for voting in the first phase of Assembly elections, the court had said. Those who are cleared by April 27 should be included in the final electoral rolls for the second phase of the polls.

All decisions made by the tribunals on the addition and deletion of voters by those dates must be reflected in the final voter lists.

The first phase of polling will be held on April 23 and the second on April 29. The votes will be counted on May 4.

On Monday, Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra alleged on social media that “all 19 appellate tribunals for SIR hearings housed in the same building in Joka is closed for entry, guarded by CAPF [Central Armed Police Forces]”.

“Nobody [has] been called, no hearings have happened,” Moitra alleged, adding that 27 lakh persons were waiting. Joka is an area located south of Kolkata in South 24 Parganas district.

This came after the Election Commission froze the electoral rolls for the first phase of polling on April 9.

SIR appellate tribunals

The Election Commission on February 28 published the final electoral roll for West Bengal, showing that more than 61 lakh voters had been excluded. However, the process had continued with about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases remaining under adjudication based on their objections to their exclusions from the draft rolls published in December.

Several supplementary lists were released, in which the names of more voters have been included.

The process had concluded on April 6 after judicial officers adjudicated the 60 lakh claims and objections. However, voters who were removed during the adjudication process can appeal in 19 tribunals set up for the purpose.

On February 20, the Supreme Court ordered that judicial officers of the rank of district judge or additional district judge be appointed to help complete the revision exercise in the state.

On March 10, the top court ordered the formation of appellate tribunals composed of former High Court chief justices and judges to hear appeals against exclusions. A person whose claim for inclusion in the electoral rolls has been rejected by a judicial officer can approach the tribunal.

Nearly 91 lakh voters have been removed from West Bengal’s voter lists as part of the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls. The deletions represent nearly 11.9% of the state’s electorate of 7.6 crore that existed before the revision process began.

Also read: Millions of Bengalis may lose their vote. Not over citizenship but due to clerical errors

The Congress’ Tamil Nadu unit chief K Selvaperunthagai alleged on Monday that officials from the Income Tax department had “unlawfully confined” him within the Sriperumbudur Assembly constituency under the “pretext of a search”.

Selvaperunthagai further alleged that the search, which coincided with party leader Rahul Gandhi’s visit to Tamil Nadu in the run-up to the Assembly elections, was a “calculated attempt to obstruct democratic functioning and weaken the activities of the opposition”.

The case in connection with which the searches were conducted was not immediately clear. The Income Tax department searched Selvaperunthagai’s home in Sriperumbudur, the constituency he represents in the Assembly, according to PTI.

Voting for the Assembly polls in the state will be held in a single phase on April 23, with results scheduled to be declared on May 4.

The Congress alleged that the department’s action was “not routine”, but was a “blatant misuse of central agencies by the Bharatiya Janata Party to intimidate and obstruct Opposition leaders at a crucial moment”.

The search had prevented the MLA from carrying out his political duties ahead of the polls, the party further alleged.

“Such actions strike at the very heart of democracy,” stated the Congress. “Silencing dissent and targeting political opponents through state machinery is unacceptable.”

As LoP Shri Rahul Gandhi arrives in Tamil Nadu to campaign, a shocking incident has unfolded.@SPK_TNCC ji, President of the Tamil Nadu PCC, was unlawfully confined in Sriperumbudur by the Income Tax Department under the pretext of a “search,” preventing him from carrying out…

— Congress (@INCIndia) April 20, 2026

On his part, Selvaperunthagai said 10 to 15 Hindi-speaking officials had gathered outside his home on Sunday night, reported ANI. They remained there on Monday morning as well, he added.

The timing of the “intervention exposes its true intent – not enforcement, but intimidation”, said the MLA in a social media post.

“It reflects a disturbing pattern of using central agencies as instruments of political pressure to silence dissent, restrict political participation and create an atmosphere of fear among opposition leaders and workers,” he added.

Describing the action as a “blatant misuse of authority”, he said it is “an attack on the foundational principles of democracy, where free movement, free speech and fair political engagement must be protected”.

“When institutions meant to uphold the law are used to serve political ends, it undermines public trust and erodes the integrity of our democratic system,” added Selvaperunthagai. “I strongly condemn this politically motivated action and reaffirm my commitment to stand firm against such attempts to suppress democratic voices.”

As Shri. @RahulGandhi Ji arrives in Tamil Nadu today to undertake a crucial election campaign, the Income Tax Department with the hindi speaking officials as, under the pretext of a ‘search’, unlawfully confined me within the Sriperumbudur Assembly Constituency, effectively…

— Selvaperunthagai K (@SPK_TNCC) April 20, 2026

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin also alleged that the searches were a “conspiracy to silence” Selvaperunthagai.

“Forgetting that India is a democratic nation, with just 48 hours left for the election campaign to conclude, the BJP government, united in the fear of defeat, is resorting to atrocities to suppress the opposition,” Stalin wrote on social media. “The people of Tamil Nadu will give a fitting response to this.”

Stalin’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam is contesting the Assembly polls in an alliance with the Congress.