The Delhi High Court has said that forcing a woman to continue with a pregnancy violates her bodily integrity and harms mental health, PTI reported.

The order was passed on Tuesday in a matter in which a man had filed a case against his wife after their separation for medically terminating her 14-week pregnancy.

While highlighting a woman’s autonomy to seek an abortion in cases of marital discord, Justice Neena Bansal Krishna said that the petitioner-wife could not be said to have committed an offence under Section 312 of the Indian Penal Code, which pertains to causing miscarriage.

The Indian Penal Code was replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in July 2024.

The court observed that freedom of choice is an essential facet of personal autonomy, and that the control over reproduction is a basic need and right of all women, PTI reported.

It also said that the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act does not require a woman to obtain her husband’s consent for terminating a pregnancy.

“If a woman does not want to continue with the pregnancy, then forcing her to do so represents a violation of the woman’s bodily integrity and aggravates her mental trauma,” PTI quoted the court as saying. “...which would be deleterious to her mental health.”

The court further said that there are “social, financial and other aspects” attached to a woman’s pregnancy, which, if “unwarranted”, can have serious repercussions, PTI reported.

“It undoubtedly affects mental health,” it added.

The Delhi Police on Friday detained Trinamool Congress MPs who were protesting outside Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s office against what the party alleges were illegal searches by the Enforcement Directorate at several locations in West Bengal, including the office of political consultancy I-PAC a day earlier.

The Trinamool Congress said that the police action of forcibly removing eight of its MPs from a peaceful protest outside the Central Secretariat was “undemocratic, unconstitutional, shameful”.

The party’s Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra and Rajya Sabha member Derek O’Brien were among the leaders detained by the police, a video posted on social media showed. The MPs had been taken to the Parliament Street police station.

“This is an open assault on democracy and the Constitution,” West Bengal’s ruling party said on social media. “Only [the BJP]’s fear drives such reckless use of force.”

Shameless Amit Shah using Delhi Police to drag us away from peaceful protest at Home Ministry pic.twitter.com/6UHGvUZEwA

— Mahua Moitra (@MahuaMoitra) January 9, 2026

Hours after the raids by the ED, the Trinamool Congress and the Indian Political Action Committee on Thursday moved the Calcutta High Court challenging the legality of the searches at several locations linked to the political consultancy in Kolkata and Bidhannagar.

I-PAC has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including in the 2021 Assembly elections.

The ED also approached the High Court, alleging “illegal interference” during its search operations. The matter is scheduled to be heard on Friday.

The central law enforcement agency on Thursday conducted searches at I-PAC’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the residence of the firm’s head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood in connection with an investigation into alleged money laundering.

Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata 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 green file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were “taking away” party documents ahead of the Assembly polls.

The state is expected to head for polls in the next three to four months.

Banerjee alleged that the ED was confiscating the TMC’s “documents and hard disks, which has details about our party candidates” for the polls.

The ED on Thursday accused Banerjee of entering Jain’s residence and taking away “key evidences including physical documents and electronic devices”.

The agency stated that searches had been conducted in a “peaceful manner” until Banerjee arrived at the site. It claimed that the “search is evidence-based and is not targeted at any political establishment”, and said that no party office had been searched.

The searches were based on a first information report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation into an alleged coal smuggling syndicate that was used to “steal and illegally excavate coal from ECL [Eastern Coalfields Limited] leasehold areas of West Bengal”, the ED said.

The proposed trade deal between India and the United States did not materialise because Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not call US President Donald Trump, the country’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claimed.

Speaking on a podcast hosted by American venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, Lutnick said he had set up the deal but that its finalisation required that Modi call Trump directly.

He said India was “uncomfortable” with this step and that the call never happened. According to Lutnick, the US subsequently moved on and concluded trade deals with other countries.

“I set the deal up,” he said. “But you had to have Modi call President Trump. They were uncomfortable with it. So, Modi didn’t call.”

He added that the US had assumed that the agreement with India would be completed before agreements with Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Negotiations with those countries were conducted on that assumption, he said.

“So now the problem is, that the deals came out at a higher rate and then India claws back and says oh okay, we are ready,” Lutnick added. “I said ready for what?!”

Lutnick clarified the conditions under which India and the US had earlier appeared close to finalising a deal were no longer available. However he added that “India will work it out”.

BIG BREAKING: India trade deal isn't done because PM Modi did not call Trump, claims US Commerce Secretary Lutnick

"I set the deal up. But you had to have Modi call President Trump. They (India) were uncomfortable with it. So Modi didn't call." pic.twitter.com/gFiUGGaJRl

— Shashank Mattoo (@MattooShashank) January 9, 2026

New Delhi has not yet responded to Lutnick’s remarks.

The comments come amid ongoing trade tensions between the two countries.

Without a trade deal with Washington, Indian goods are facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%. A 25% so-called reciprocal duty was imposed on August 7, followed by an additional 25% punitive levy on August 27.

The punitive tariffs were introduced as part of Trump’s pressure campaign against countries purchasing discounted oil from Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

On November 10, Trump said that Washington will bring down the tariffs imposed on India “at some point” and claimed that New Delhi has substantially reduced its purchase of Russian oil. He also said that his country was getting close to a “fair deal” with India.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs neither confirmed nor denied Trump’s claim, but maintained that ensuring stable energy prices and secure supplies were the goals of the country’s energy policy.

After the punitive levies were announced, New Delhi had said it was “extremely unfortunate” that the US had chosen to impose additional tariffs on India “for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest”.

Six rounds of negotiations have been held so far on a proposed bilateral trade agreement, Moneycontrol reported.

On December 15, Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said that India and the US are “very close” to finalising an initial trade agreement on tariffs, but he did not specify a deadline.

A team of Indian officials led by Agarwal had visited Washington DC in October to hold trade negotiations with the US. In September, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal had also led a delegation to New York for trade talks.

Lutnick’s remarks also follow Trump’s approval of a bipartisan Russia sanctions bill that would authorise the US to impose tariffs of up to 500% on countries continuing to buy Russian oil.

A speech by Ladakh-based activist Sonam Wangchuk calling for peace was illegally suppressed from the detaining authority under the National Security Act, lawyer Kapil Sibal told the Supreme Court on Thursday, according to Live Law.

A bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and Prasanna Varale was hearing a habeas corpus petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife Gitanjali Angmo, who argued that his detention under the National Security Act was illegal and violated his fundamental rights.

Appearing for Angmo, Sibal argued that the suppression of material favourable to the detainee indicated “malice”, which constituted grounds to invalidate the detention order, Live Law reported.

Wangchuk was arrested in Leh on September 26 under the National Security Act, two days after four persons were killed in police firing during protests seeking statehood for Ladakh and its inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. He was later taken to a jail in Rajasthan’s Jodhpur

On Thursday, Sibal argued that the detention order was founded primarily on two videos from September 10 and September 11 and two from September 24. While the grounds of detention were supplied on September 29, the four videos relied upon were not furnished to Wangchuk, which, according to Sibal, violated Article 22 of the Constitution, Live Law reported.

Article 22 of the Constitution guarantees the right of a person in preventive detention to be informed of the grounds of detention.

Sibal further submitted that the grounds of detention were supplied after a delay of 28 days, in clear breach of the statutory timeline.

He added that although the Centre claimed the material had been supplied, there was no proof to substantiate this claim.

What was eventually provided, he argued, were only links to the videos. A pen drive given on September 29 did not contain the four videos, and although a laptop was provided on October 5, this “did not cure the defect”, Live Law reported.

Sibal also informed the court that Wangchuk had repeatedly written from custody pointing out that the videos were missing and requesting copies, but they were never furnished.

With the court’s permission, Sibal then played a video of this speech in open court and highlighted that the activist could be clearly heard stating that the movement should be through peaceful means and “not through violence, stones or arrows,” Live Law reported.

Sibal told the court that the tenor of the speech was not one that threatened national security or propagated violence, but one was consistent with national unity and integrity.

“According to detention law, if the detaining authority is aware of a certain fact that is central to what happened on [September 24], which is a video relied upon to show that I am propagating violence, then in centrality it must also include a video which in fact states through Wangchuk’s words that he was against violence,” Live Law quoted Sibal as submitting before the court.

The court has listed the matter for further hearing on January 12.

On September 24, police firing and violence broke out in Leh. Demonstrators clashed with and threw stones at the police, and set fire to the Bharatiya Janata Party office and a police vehicle.

The Union government has claimed that the violence was incited by Wangchuk’s “provocative statements”.

In October, Angmo filed a petition before the Supreme Court challenging his detention. She has contended that the order relied on “stale, irrelevant, and extraneous” first information reports, many of which did not name Wangchuk.

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

A family of 14 men, women and children – all Bengali Muslims from Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district – were allegedly forced into Bangladesh by the Border Security Force in December, a relative told Scroll. This was confirmed by Bangladesh border officials, who detained them in the no man’s land between the two countries.

The 14 people, belonging to one family, had been living in Odisha for over seven decades, their relative Saiful Ali Khan said. The eldest among them is a 90-year-old woman.

Their native village is in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, according to a gram panchayat certificate that is in the family’s possession.

Two months ago, the family was detained in Jagatsinghpur on suspicion of being Bangladeshi citizens, Khan said. Among them was Khan’s 36-year-old niece Sabera Bibi.

On December 26, the 14 members were forced into Bangladesh by the Border Security Force, Khan told Scroll.

The Border Guard Bangladesh detained them on the same night in Chuadanga district, which shares a boundary with Nadia district in Bengal.

Bangladeshi authorities told news outlets in the country that the 14 were formally sent back to India on December 28.

Mehdi Hasan, the officer in charge of Darshana police station, confirmed the incident to Scroll, saying that the group of 14 old people, women and children were handed over to the Border Guard Bangladesh which later sent them to India.

“They had come from Odisha and were later sent to India,” Hasan told Scroll.

But Khan told Scroll that the group was shunted back and forth between the two countries four times, as the border officials on either side refused to let them stay.

The BSF pushed them into Bangladesh three times, while the Bangladesh border officials expelled them from their territory once. Nine members of the family, Khan said, are still in hiding in Bangladesh. The whereabouts of five others are unknown.

In a video shot when they were in the custody of Border Guard Bangladesh, one of the 14 is heard saying that BSF officials threatened to open fire on them if they tried to return to India.

Scroll sent an email to the Border Security Force spokesperson asking about the repeated expulsions of the family. The story will be updated if they respond.

The superintendent of police of Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur, Ankit Kumar Verma, told Scroll that a statewide drive against “Bangladeshi infiltrators” is underway but refused to divulge more. “I can’t verify like this,” he said. “These are all confidential and secret things. I can’t share anything related to this.”

Last year, Scroll had reported on how Bengali migrant workers had been detained in several states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, including Odisha, and asked to prove they were Indian citizens.

The drives by the police ended up throwing several Indian citizens across the border, without giving them time or opportunity to prove their citizenship – in violation of the Centre’s own rules.

Last month, a heavily pregnant woman, Sunali Khatun, and her eight-year-old son Sabir were brought back to India from Bangladesh on the direction of the Calcutta High Court and, later, the Supreme Court.

Khatun, her child and her husband had been picked up from Delhi and “pushed” into Bangladesh, despite the fact that the family had land records in Bengal, going back five generations.

‘If you come back, we will open fire’

The family detained from Odisha is originally from South 24 Parganas district, Khan said.

Among the members of the family expelled include 90-year-old Guljan Bibi, her daughter and son-in-law, four grandsons and three granddaughters-in-law and four great-grandchildren.

Khan’s niece, Sabera Bibi, is married to Bibi’s grandson Sheikh Ukil.

The family had been living in Berhampur village under Balikuda Tehsil of Odisha’s Jagatsinghpur district for the last seven decades, Khan, who lives in the same district, told Scroll.

“Two months ago, the police came, demolished their homes and arrested them as they were speaking Bangla,” he said.

According to Khan, the family was detained for one month and five days, despite showing the Odisha police their identity documents, including voter and Aadhaar cards.

On December 17, the pradhan of West Bengal’s Moushuni gram panchayat in South 24 Paragnas issued a certificate, declaring that Sheikh Hosen – Bibi’s husband – was a permanent resident of Baliara village of the district, but now lives with his family at the Berhampur village in Odisha.

“After over a month of detention, they were made to cross the India-Bangladesh border and pushed into Chuadanga in Bangladesh on December 26,” Khan said. “They walked about 4 km but were later detained by the Bangladeshi police and Border Guard Bangladesh at Darshana bus stand in Chuadanga.”

He said he got to know of the family’s plight when one of them called him on January 7, having borrowed a phone from someone in Bangladesh.

In a video filmed when the family was in the custody of Border Guard Bangladesh, Sabera Bibi’s husband, Sheikh Ukil, is heard telling the officials in Hindi: “We were first brought to Kolkata from Odisha and then to the border where we were made to roam for three days before being pushed into Bangladesh.”

Scroll accessed the 3.37 minute video, and asked Saiful Khan to confirm the identity of the speakers. He identified them as his relatives.

Ukil is heard recounting in Hindi how they came to be in Bangladesh. “We showed Aadhaar and voter cards to the BGB,” he said. “Then the BGB people took us to BSF and handed us over to BSF. The BSF provided us food and they again threw us here. The BSF told us if you come back, they will open fire. Where will we go?”

The Trinamool Congress and political consultancy firm I-PAC on Thursday moved the Calcutta High Court, challenging the legality of searches conducted by the Enforcement Directorate at several locations linked to the firm in Kolkata and Bidhannagar earlier in the day, The Times of India reported.

Earlier in the day, the Enforcement Directorate also approached the Calcutta High Court, alleging “illegal interference” during its search operations. The matter is slated to be heard on Friday.

The central agency on Thursday conducted searches at I-PAC’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the residence of the firm’s head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood in connection with an investigation into alleged money laundering.

Trinamool Congress chief and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata 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 green file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were seizing party documents ahead of the Assembly polls.

On Friday, Banerjee will lead a protest in Kolkata against the Enforcement Directorate’s searches, ANI reported.

“Is it the duty of [Union] Home Minister Amit Shah and the ED to take away all my party documents?” she asked. “If I go to the Bharatiya Janata Party office, what will be the result?”

I-PAC, founded by political strategist Prashant Kishor, had managed the TMC’s campaign during the 2021 West Bengal Assembly elections, which the party won by a landslide. The state is expected to head for polls in the next three to four months.

The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday accused Banerjee of entering Jain’s residence and taking away “key evidences including physical documents and electronic devices”.

The central agency stated that searches had been conducted in a “peaceful manner” until Banerjee arrived at the site. It claimed that the “search is evidence-based and is not targeted at any political establishment”, and said that no party office had been searched.

The searches were based on a first information report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation into an alleged coal smuggling syndicate that was used to “steal and illegally excavate coal from ECL [Eastern Coalfields Limited] leasehold areas of West Bengal”, the Enforcement Directorate said.

Banerjee alleged that the ED was confiscating the TMC’s “documents and hard disks, which has details about our party candidates for Assembly polls”.

“I have brought those back,” she said.

She also claimed that ED had “raided my IT sector office, and searched the residence of the in-charge of my IT sector”.

On a late July evening, Ashish Dimri wound up work at his hotel. He then retired to his home in the same building. As he and his family went into deep slumber, heavy rains started to batter their village, Kaleshwar, high up in the mountains in Uttarakhand.

Around midnight, Dimri woke up to desperate calls of help from outside. When he looked out of his window at the road outside, he saw that large boulders and a mass of mud had fallen and almost buried a car of tourists. Dimri rushed out to help them.

While the tourists were pulled out of the debris in time, in the next four hours, the road became unrecognisable – boulders blocked it and mud and trees continued to slide onto it.

At 4 am, realising that even his house was on shaky ground, Dimri moved his family and staff, and the tourists, whom he had sheltered, to a relative’s home 5 km away. That was the last night the family slept in their own home.

“The mountain had come down,” said Dimri, when we met him in late October.

This was no ordinary landslide.

The road on which Dimri’s hotel stood is part of the Chardham Pariyojana, a project to widen around 890 km of existing roads in the Garhwal Himalayas to 12-metre double-laned highways. The project, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched in 2018, was supposed to make it easier and quicker for pilgrims to commute to four Hindu shrines in Uttarakhand – Kedarnath, Badrinath, Yamunotri and Gangotri. A fifth road that falls under the project connects Tanakpur to Pithoragarh.

But early on, an expert committee had warned that widening roads in the region without adequately protecting slopes ran significant risks. Appointed by the Supreme Court in 2019 in response to a petition filed by an NGO challenging the project, the committee found that out of the 174 slopes that were cut along just one stretch of the project between Tanakpur and Pithoragarh, 102 had become prone to landslides. The committee made recommendations to limit the damage, but these were eventually not accepted.

Now, as the project gathers pace, the consequences are becoming clear. This year, the Chardham yatra was suspended several times during the monsoon because of heavy rains and repeated landslides. Three pilgrims were also killed in a landslide.

For many living along the route, the project is extracting a heavy cost.

In Silli, a town nestled on the banks of the Mandakini river, on the Rishikesh-Kedarnath route, residents recounted that they began noticing a worrying phenomena in the landscape after construction on the Chardham highway began in 2019.

Pradeep, an owner of a mechanic shop on the road, pointed towards a landslide a little ahead of his shed, and explained that while elsewhere around his village, rain had historically triggered minor rockfalls and landslides, this particular location had only seen a landslide after the road was cut, and that its intensity was much more severe than the others.

“If they keep cutting for the road here, then the mountain will come down completely,” said Pradeep. “This settlement will cease to exist.”

Dimri’s home was on the Rishikesh-Badrinath portion of the Chardham route. Four months after the landslide in Kaleshwar, boulders still lay in front of his home – at the same spot where they had fallen in July after, slamming into a wall, cracking it and leaving glass windows shattered. He said he had not received any compensation for the damage.

Two policemen were directing traffic alongside the debris, in one direction at a time. Around 15 minutes after we reached, a bulldozer arrived at the location, and began scooping up muck and levelling the potholes with it, as a temporary measure to make traffic movement easier.

“Ever since the widening work began here last year, we had told the authorities to at least make a concrete wall to prevent the mountain from sliding,” said Dimri. He pointed to some patches of a brick-and-mortar wall that were visible amid the rocks and mud of the landslide – such protection walls are sometimes built to provide support to slopes that are cut to widen the road. “They made a weak wall that did not hold the falling rocks at all,” Dimri added.

Indeed, authorities have failed to build sufficiently strong protective walls right from the initial years of the project’s construction – as the Supreme Court-appointed committee had observed in 2019. “The most important observation by all the members of the committee was that very steep slopes were being cut and the security walls were breaking,” said Ravi Chopra, the head of the committee, when we met him in Dehradun on our way to the hills.

Over the next 300 km, driving between Rishikesh and Badrinath, we used a GPS app to tag the location of every landslide that we encountered. Dimri’s hotel was the location of the hundred-and-ninth landslide. By the time we reached Badrinath, 10,000 feet above the sea level, the count had climbed to 164.

“This is the national highway, this is the Chardham yatra,” Dimri said, shaking his head in disappointment as the bulldozer worked. “So many people come for darshan, is this what they have to see on the way to it?”

This story is part of Common Ground, our in-depth and investigative reporting project. Sign up here to get the stories in your inbox soon after they are published.

Geologists have pointed out that the risks of cutting the mountains to widen roads are exacerbated by the Himalayas’ inherent geological vulnerabilities.

A key reason for this is that large portions of the Chardham road go through the lesser Himalayas, which are mainly made up of relatively weak sedimentary rocks. In contrast, the higher Himalayas are made up of harder rocks, including igneous rocks like granite.

Further, three main thrusts or faults lie between the two regions, where tectonic plates push into each other – these faults make the region seismically active, and continue to raise the height of the mountains. “This is why Himalaya are young fragile mountains that are still evolving,” said Chopra.

He also noted that the rocks of the Himalayas tended to be disjointed – this, combined with the region’s tectonic instability, encouraged the formation of cracks and fissures. “So even if the rock itself is hard, the slope is weak because it has fissures,” Chopra said.

Indeed, a 2018 circular by the ministry of road transport and highways, had taken note of this fragility and overruled an older 2012 notification of the ministry that had recommended the construction of two-lane highways in hilly regions. The 2018 circular observed that building two-lane roads was not advisable in the mountains since it could result in “destabilisation of hill slopes” and damage to “higher contours on hills due to excavation works”, and would entail “large scale felling of precious trees”.

Chopra explained that when the committee was on the site inspection tour, all members had noticed the problems of vulnerable slopes and their cutting.

But the question of the committee’s recommendations became deeply contentious, and led to a split within it.

Five members suggested that the route should only be widened to 5.5 metres and cited the 2018 notification in support of their recommendation. They stated that the terrain would become “extremely unstable” if roads were widened to accommodate increased traffic “without due care and attention to engineering geology”. They recommended a “critical reevaluation considering inherent geological and geomorphological constraints”.

Fifteen other members, most of whom were government officials, however, rejected this recommendation and instead suggested a 12-metre road. Both these recommendations were compiled in the same report. After a hearing in September 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the recommendation to limit the width of the road to 5.5 metres.

But just three months later, the ministry of defence filed an application in the court, seeking a modification of this ruling, stating that the region needed a 10-metre-wide two-lane road in the “interest of the security of the nation and for defence of its borders”. This was a U-turn: while the high-powered committee was preparing its report, the then chief of army staff had told the members that the Indian army’s requirements were fulfilled by the existing roads.

The court accepted this request and modified its earlier order, saying that “armed forces’ infrastructure needs have to be met to safeguard borders, and highways that are of strategic importance cannot be treated the same way as those in other hilly terrains”. It allowed the widening of roads on the Chardham route to resume.

Many residents of the region that we spoke with agreed that it needed better roads, but expressed concern about the pace and design of the Char Dham project. Whether it was for the movement of people or troops, “We need disaster resilient roads,” said YP Sundriyal, a Himalayan geologist and adjunct faculty at Doon University. But, he added, “These roads are causing disaster after another.”

As we travelled through the region, we saw first-hand how the road-widening process destabilised slopes.

Ascending from Rishikesh, we came to a stretch of about 8 km called Tota Ghati. Here, to widen the road, the mountain had been cut to leave steep slopes above – in some cases, completely vertical slopes.

The high-powered committee report had noted that Tota Ghati had been a stable region before the Chardham project, and that “haphazard cutting” converted the region “into a disaster prone passage for local and defence movement”.

“The dominant rock in Tota Ghati is limestone,” said Sundriyal. “When the machines were not able to cut this rock, engineers used JCB and blasting.” He explained that engineers often used dynamite to blast this stretch, which led to the formation of “vertical cracks” in the mountains.

Further, Sundriyal said, “If natural slopes are cut and made vertical without giving it support at the bottom, then the loose material will come down” as landslides.

An official from the National Highways and Infrastructure Development Corporation, or NHIDCL, one of the implementing agencies of the Chardham project, agreed that cutting the mountain for the road had triggered landslides in the region. “If the slope is cut vertically, then sometimes they become stable over time, but many of them do not,” he said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak with the media.

He explained that scientifically cutting a mountain would entail creating a gentle slope rather than a vertical one. But, he added, such slope-cutting would require more land – in this region, that would include significant chunks of forest land, for the use of which approval from the forest department would be needed.

The official then showed us an exercise that he was carrying out similar to what we were attempting, to assess the roads after the monsoons – on a piece of paper, he had noted down latitudes and longitudes of landslides he had spotted on a 30-km stretch of the Chardham route for which he was responsible. He had marked at least 20 landslides.

Chopra explained that road widening also led to landslides when authorities did not create proper exit channels for water.

In an ideal scenario, he noted, after the road is cut, channels are also created that run along it, through which rainwater can flow, and which are directed down the slope through other channels at regular intervals – this helps prevent water from accumulating along roads, and weakening slopes. “The basic principle is that water is the enemy of the slope,” said Chopra.

In Gathra, a village in Chamoli on the Badrinath route, residents are suffering the consequences of this lack of drainage.

“If the road was made with a proper system, if they had provided us a drain, then any water, like rainfall, would go away on its own,” explained resident Anil Kumar. But after the road construction at the base of the mountain began around 2017, Kumar said, water collected along it without draining away. This eroded and weakened the mountain and led to it sinking.

Several homes in their village had developed severe cracks. “It’s not like this was some existing sinking zone,” said another resident who was on his morning walk. “People have been living here for ages without experiencing any sinking. This is a man-made issue.” He added, “Zyada vikas bhi vinash ho sakta hai” – too much development can be a disaster.

Along our 300-km journey, many locals articulated similar reasoning, which had led them to conclude that the widening work had caused landslides. “We see these landslides only on this national highway where the widening has happened,” said an electric appliance shop owner in Devprayag. “We don’t see them in the narrower state highways that connect our villages.”

In Karnprayag, Bhawan Singh Rawat’s home was one of 38 that had developed massive cracks in recent years.

Locals first noticed these cracks appear when the mountain on which their locality was built was carved out for a vegetable market. But after road-widening work began here in 2019, the appearance of cracks increased dramatically, especially in those homes on the portion of the mountain that was cut for widening.

Most of the impacted families moved out of the locality, either to relatives’ homes or, like Rawat, to rented accommodations. But every morning, Rawat walks to his home to spend the day there, before returning to the place he rented to sleep.

We spotted him on the morning we visited – he was sitting on a chair in the balcony of the third floor of his home, looking down at traffic. It seemed risky, given that the two floors below looked completely dilapidated.

“There is nothing to do there in the rented home, the rooms are so small,” said Rawat, who is almost 90.

Of the owners of 38 houses that developed cracks, the NHDCL has compensated only four. Mukesh Khanduri was among them. “Initially, they were not accepting that the sinking and cracks were because of them,” he said. He explained that the corporation argued that the problem could not have been caused by road-widening work since the construction was not directly impacting their homes.

But Khanduri and others argued that the work had destroyed the “roots” of the land in the area, “which were the large rocks, trees, and protection walls”. Once that base was weakened, Khanduri explained, the land started to sink, causing cracks in homes. A half-foot wide crack ran through a wall in his home, which he had filled with rocks in an attempt to provide some vertical support to the structure.

“Many disasters like earthquakes and cloudbursts are natural, we cannot do anything about them,” said Khanduri. “But this is unscientific work happening here. This is not natural.”

Khanduri first raised his complaint with officials in 2021, but only received the compensation early this year. His neighbour Purshottam Kothiyal, with whom he shares a boundary wall, was not compensated. “The houses are next to each other here,” said Kothiyal. “If my neighbour got the compensation, then everyone here should have gotten.”

Cracks run over the walls of his home too. We spotted a “crackometer”, a small plastic device that the administration had installed over a crack, like a band-aid, which measures the expansion of cracks over time. The device indicated that the crack had extended to almost 20 mm, or a little more than half an inch. “When they first put the crackometer two years ago it was very small,” said Kothiyal. He continues to live there with his wife.

In Silli, residents had another problem. This October, many residents woke up to notices on their doors that instructed them to vacate their homes in the next two days because the land would be needed to widen the road.

This came as a shock to many, since this work had begun in 2019, and one round of demolitions had already been carried out. “When they first demarcated it, they told us that around 14-metre-wide roads will be made,” said Manoj Benjwal, a resident.

Benjwal earlier had shops that fell within the land that was acquired for the widening work and hence were demolished – he believed that would be the last of his troubles. “But now about a month ago they told us that they will be demolishing up to 24 metres,” he said. Indeed, when we visited, several homes and shops were being demolished in Silli.

“Nowhere in the Rishikesh-Badrinath road has the widening been done up to 24 metres,” said Benjwal. “Everywhere else it is 12 metres, then why this much here?”

The NHIDCL official offered a clarification on this question. He said that although authorities only planned to widen the road to 12 metres currently, they typically sought to “acquire a right of way of 24 metres” – that is, to acquire rights to use this land for any associated work with the project. But, he added, at many places, this acquisition was stalled after residents protested.

Along our journey, we crossed several “landslide zones” – dusty stretches of road with boulders and debris on both sides, indicators that they had seen several landslides over the years. Many of these zones had existed even before road-widening under the Chardham project began.

Conversations with geologists and locals revealed that there was a contradiction inherent in authorities’ approach to some of these stretches, in contrast with their work on others.

For instance, one of the oldest such zones was Sirobagad, just short of Rudraprayag, which started seeing landslides around 1920. In 1969, the area saw such intense rockfall that the flow of the Alaknanda river, which runs parallel to the road, was blocked.

Incidents like this led the high-powered committee to term Sirobagad landslide the “most notorious” one “to affect Indian road network”. In 2020, the Supreme Court asked the committee to submit another detailed report examining the defence ministry’s application. In this submission, the committee noted that though the government had spent “crores of rupees” on trying to tackle the problem, it had not been successful – and that the landslide zone remained active today.

The committee found that authorities overseeing the road-widening work in the area took its history of landslides into account and, unlike on other portions of the Chardham route, carried out only minimal work on it.

But this caution did not extend to several other such “chronic” landslide and subsidence zones, the committee stated in its report. These “would have required special care and engineering treatment during the road widening by CD Pariyojana, but were ignored”, the committee observed.

Now, in the last year, the NHIDCL and the Public Works Department of Uttarakhand have been attempting different mitigation measures in many areas on the route, after most of the road widening has been completed. The most common measure we saw at work was “anchoring” – a process in which hollow iron poles between 10 and 15 metres long are drilled into the mountain, and concrete poured through them to fill cracks in mountains. This, authorities claim, can help stabilise a slope.

Sundriyal expressed doubts over whether this method was advisable. “Putting cement inside is dangerous,” he said. “This process is not making the rock any stronger.”

Another measure entailed covering mountain slopes with strong iron meshes intended to catch any large boulders falling onto the road. At a point between Totaghati and Devprayag, we had a short conversation with workers installing the iron mesh on the mountain face. “What is the advantage?” said one worker disinterestedly. “When large boulders fall into the mesh, the entire mesh will come down. We’ll have to put it up again.”

On mountain after mountain along our journey, we saw one of these two measures. “We have started to do these measures wherever we have noticed sliding happened because of the road cutting,” said the NHIDCL official. “Since we just started this year, we are yet to see how successful this measure would be.”

When we finally reached Badrinath, the Chardham season was coming to an end for the year, and only a thin stream of tourists were visiting the temple. The town’s few restaurants, hotels, and resthouses would soon wind up, and most locals would travel to Joshimath and Auli at lower altitudes to spend the winters.

A young prashad seller who was stationed on the path leading up to the Badrinath temple explained that this monsoon had seen roadblocks at several places in the area, especially in the last stretch from Joshimath to Badrinath, often leaving only a single lane operational. “We are looking forward to the next season,” he said. “This season was quite poor because of the rain.”

As we continued to drive downhill, we crossed the several landslides that we marked earlier, and passed through Joshimath, a town that has been in the news for its crisis of land subsidence, even as large hydropower projects come up near it, as well as a new railway line being built by blasting through the mountains from Rishikesh to Karnprayag.

As we drove through Karnprayag, dusk had fallen. We could not help but gaze up at 90-year-old Rawat’s dilapidated three storied home – there he was, sitting on his chair, peering down at the road.

This report was funded by Scroll readers.

When the government framed the new Viksit Bharat – Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), it seems to have borrowed the strategy that Greek philosopher Plato described in Republic of the captivating shadow play by puppet masters that conceals the real nature of reality.

Going by the sly acronym VB-G RAM G, the act hides the puppet strings that have effectively ripped a vital economic lifeline for the poorest Indians. It was hastily bulldozed through both houses of Parliament at the end of December.

For the last two decades, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which provided 100 days of guaranteed work a year to any household that requested it, has kept rural India afloat.

In 2025, the law provided employment to 79 million workers – nearly one of every three rural homes. It was the largest anti-poverty public works programme in the world.

VB-G RAMG has not only repealed MGNREGA in toto, but also squashed the legal guarantee to demand work.

MGNREGA was previously a centrally-sponsored scheme, with nearly 90% of the expenditure funded by the Centre, while the states were responsible for implementation.

Now, the central government, as the federal puppet master, while claiming that VB-GRAM G has increased the guarantee to 125 days of work per household, has in reality reduced its financial stake in the scheme.

Puppets of the gods

The new law violates the spirit of Indian fiscal federalism. The fine-print of the financial memorandum at the tail end of VB-GRAM G specifies that of the expected annual expenditure of Rs 1,51,282 crore (presumably for 2026-’27), the Centre will foot the bill for only 60%. The states will effectively have to shell out at least Rs 55,590 crore.

By contrast, in 2024-’25, states spent only Rs 10,120 crore on MGNREGA, mainly on material costs. Hundred percent of the wages of unskilled beneficiaries were funded by the centre.

In addition, VB-G RAM G offers sweeping powers to the central government. Now, the central government sitting in Delhi will not only decide how many workers can be employed by every state but also where they can work.

MGNREGA, on the other hand, was a universal guarantee that all rural families could claim across India, with no restrictions.

The new law will now be applicable only “in such rural areas in the State as may be notified by the Central Government”.

This effectively annihilates the universal guarantee to rural households across India to demand work. There is also no guarantee that the central government will actually pay its 60% share of the expenditure equally to all large states that run the programme.

It is now entirely at the Centre’s discretion to determine the “state-wise normative allocation for each financial year” based on supposed “objective parameters.” This could easily be used by the party in power in New Delhi to favour states that it governs, especially before elections.

Second, the Centre has consolidated its grip on the programme with a clause that all expansions beyond the earmarked budget will have to be borne “by the State Government in such manner and procedure as may be prescribed by the Central Government”.

Third, if employment is not provided to households that ask for it, the law places the financial burden of “unemployment allowance and delay compensation” entirely on the states.

Fourth, though the new law has on paper increased the employment guarantee from 100 days to 125 days, the promise itself is empty.

As experience has shown, rural households on average typically received only 50 days of work each year – half the guaranteed amount. In 2024-’25, for instance, only 7% of MGNREGA households received the full 100 days.

If the guarantee were to genuinely increase to 125 days for all households, the financial commitments from both centre and state would also have to be increased substantially.

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Lastly, since the introduction in late 2025 of the Single Nodal Agency - System for Prompt Release of Assistance for Development to receive real-time matching grants from the centre, states have to deposit their share of spending on centrally sponsored schemes in designated bank accounts in advance upfront.

But the ability of states to fulfil this increased burden is constrained, given that most are cash-strapped and have limited fiscal autonomy.

Fiscal autonomy

Between 2014 and 2025, the debt of all state governments has tripled from Rs 25 lakh crore to Rs 94 lakh crore.

Most states have already breached the debt-gross state domestic product ratio of 20% recommended by the 2017 Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Committee.

“Double-engine” Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states have a weighted average debt of 27% of their gross domestic state product. The average is weighted by the size of each state’s gross domestic product to reflect the size of its economy.

States ruled by National Democratic Alliance governments in which the Bharatiya Janata Party is a partner, have a debilitating load of 35%. States ruled by Opposition parties that were members of the INDIA alliance, meanwhile, have a load of 32%.

Constitutionally, the states also have limited powers to raise taxes and determine expenditure. In 2025-’26, PRS Legislative Research estimates that half of state revenue receipts were spent on committed expenditure such as salaries, pensions and interest payments – which often crowd out other development expenditures.

Opposition-ruled states such as Himachal Pradesh (83%), Kerala (69%), Punjab (74%) and Tamil Nadu (62%) spent the most on these committed items.

Burden on states

Some states have attempted to create their own work-guarantee schemes. In protest against VB-GRAM G, the West Bengal government renamed its Karmashree scheme as Mahatmashree and doubled the guarantee from 50 days of employment to 100 days.

But the work guaranteed in West Bengal has largely been only on paper. For four years, a financial tussle between the central and state government over alleged corruption had led to MGNREGA work being stopped.

It was not restarted despite both the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court ordering the central and cash-strapped state government to do so.

With the change in name to VB-GRAM G, firmly associating the law with the ruling party’s Hindutva ideology, Opposition-ruled states are unlikely to be eager to fund the new employment programme.

To establish their direct connection to voters, many have already committed outflows as cash transfers to women, from Tamil Nadu’s Rs 1,000 per month Magalir Urumai Thogai to Jharkhand’s Rs 2,500 CM Maiyan Samman Yojana.

In the last decade, the relationship between the central government and the states has become increasingly fractious. The VB-GRAM G sets a new precedent by burdening states with substantial financial responsibilities against the spirit of fiscal federalism.

The Indian Constitution clearly spells out in Article 258(3) that states have to be financially compensated for additional responsibilities imposed, based on mutual agreement or arbitration. As a consequence, experts say, the new law could be interpreted as unconstitutional.

Nationwide protests

Many opposition-ruled states have already vociferously objected to the new law and may even challenge it in the courts. Punjab and Telangana have already passed resolutions in their assemblies for the restoration of the entire architecture of MGNREGA.

Workers, labour unions, civil society collectives, political parties, too, in their thousands have taken to the streets in state capitals, districts, blocks and villages to demand the restoration of MGNREGA.

As one worker at an online consultation evocatively summarised it, “Yeh pet pe laath, NREGA ko khatam nahi, majdooron ko khatam kar dega.” This kick in the belly will not kill NREGA, it will kill workers.

Swati Narayan teaches at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, and is the author of Unequal.

India’s eminent ecologist Madhav Gadgil died on January 7. He was 83. His son Siddhartha Gadgil announced the death through a message to all those who had known and worked with Gadgil. His wife, Sulochana Gadgil, had predeceased him in July 2025.

Gadgil died in his home city Pune in Maharashtra. He had done his Bachelor’s from Fergusson College in Pune and Master’s from Mumbai University. He went to Harvard for his PhD on mathematical ecology and fish behaviour.

However, Gadgil did not restrict himself to being a purist academic, but also wanted to learn from the field and use his knowledge for the benefit of people and communities. His initial work involved the studying of sacred groves in the Western Ghats, after which he moved to studying forest and environment policies. In more recent years, he had become widely known for chairing a panel on the conservation of the Western Ghats.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), former environment minister Jairam Ramesh described Gadgil as a “top-notch academic scientist, a tireless field researcher, a pioneering institution builder, a great communicator, a firm believer in people’s networks and movements, and a friend, philosopher and guide to many for over five decades.”

Historian Ramachandra Guha, who had co-authored two books with Gadgil, summarises his unique qualities as a deep knowledge of his land and its people; profound intellectual originality; courage to oppose intellectual fashion; the ability to unite intellectual and practical agendas; strong democratic instincts; and an absence of cynicism.

Raghavendra Gadagkar, who has worked with Gadgil at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, said: “Madhav Gadgil did pioneering work in life-history evolution under the mentorship of EO Wilson and William Bossert at Harvard University, as a PhD student. Returning to India, he rose to become India’s best-known ecologist and conservation biologist and founded the CES.

“Appreciation and conservation of nature was a way of life for Madhav Gadgil. He was deeply in love with the Western Ghats, its plants, its animals, its birds, its people, and its hills, and strove during his entire life to bring appreciation and respect to them.”

Confidence in democratic institutions

Though Gadgil’s contribution to ecological studies in India is enormous, he had become a household name because of the recommendations of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel submitted to the Ministry of Forests, Environment and Climate Change in August 2011. The panel, chaired by Gadgil, had recommended that the entire Western Ghats mountain chain be declared as an ecologically sensitive area. However, due to impracticalities in such a classification, the panel had suggested demarcating ecologically sensitive zones within the Ghats.

With state governments and local communities registering their reluctance and opposition to the demarcation of ecologically sensitive zones, the panel report has become the topic of much polarised discussions in the Western Ghat states. What was forgotten, in all the acrimony that followed, was the recommendation of the panel to do this process of zoning democratically, with the involvement of the local self-government institutions such as the biodiversity management committees in the villages and urban areas.

Known for his excellent science and blunt articulation, Gadgil created a controversy in 2022, with his statement that the Wildlife Protection Act was anti-people and anti-constitutional. Environment lawyer BJ Krishnan, who was a co-panelist in the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel, said that though Gadgil was a “thoroughbred scientist, he promoted community-centric conservation that helped and enhanced the local livelihoods”. This is the guiding principle that reflected in his democratic approach towards the conservation of the Western Ghats and his strong views on the Wildlife Protection Act.

Krishnan remembers how Gadgil always had an abiding interest in the Western Ghats. He was involved with the movement to conserve the Silent Valley rainforests from being submerged under the reservoir of a hydroelectric dam in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Between November 1987 and February 1988, a group of environmental activists and citizens undertook the Save the Western Ghats March, which culminated in a meeting in Goa. At the meeting, Gadgil suggested that the march should result in a people’s movement to conserve the Western Ghats.

It is this spirit that got Gadgil involved in the proceedings of a meeting organised in Kotagiri in the Nilgiris district, Tamil Nadu, in 2010, in which Jairam Ramesh had participated. This meeting resulted in the formation of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel. The untiring efforts of the panel led to the panel report which, according to Krishnan, was unparalleled in style, substance and depth.

Institution builder and mentor

Madhav Gadgil initiated the ecological research that led to the establishment of the Centre for Ecological Sciences in 1983. It was the first centre of excellence established by the then Department of Environment (which later grew into the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change). Over the next few decades, the Centre for Ecological Sciences did path-breaking ecological research and also groomed students who went on to become leaders in their own right.

Ecologist RJ Ranjit Daniels remembers him as the lead mentor for all those who came to study at the Centre for Ecological Sciences. Daniels joined Gadgil as a project assistant in 1983, helping his study of human impacts on biodiversity in Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka. In 1985, when the Centre for Ecological Sciences called for PhD students for the first time, Daniels applied and was selected under Gadgil’s guidance to study the birds of Uttara Kannada.

“Gadgil’s unique quality was that he was very open to new ideas,” said Daniels. “Even though he always brimming with ideas of his own, he never thrust any down the throat of his students. While he expressed his views strongly, he was open to others contradicting him.”

He encouraged his students to think independently. “Every time I had a new idea, I used to go to him with it. He used to listen to me patiently, and then pull out a paper or book from his personal library and asked me to read it. I learnt more and could polish my idea,” remembered Daniels.

Jayshree Vencatesan of the Care Earth Trust, who continued to receive mentorship from Gadgil even after she had completed her formal education, remembers him to be open to even diametrically opposite schools of thought. “On one hand he would be guiding students on mathematical ecology, while also discussing traditional knowledge.”

He was also open to his ideas being used by others without attribution, as long as they delivered results. After the publication of the Western Ghats Ecology Experts Panel report, Gadgil’s name became anathema to many state governments that had the Western Ghats running through them, for keeping aside areas for conservation is not an idea that administrators like. However, Vencatesan’s organisation could get policy action implemented by anonymising the ideas in their reports.

Gadgil was a recipient of multiple national and international awards and he was elected as a fellow in various academies of science. He received the Padma Bhushan in 2006. In 2021, a new species of plant from the Nelliyampathi hills of the Western Ghats was named in Gadgil’s honour – Elaeocarpus gadgilii.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Judicial directions to reduce the Goods and Services Tax on air purifiers would be unconstitutional and violate the doctrine of separation of powers, the Union government has told the Delhi High Court, Bar and Bench reported on Thursday.

In an affidavit filed on Sunday, the Union government noted that the GST Council was the sole body empowered to make decisions on the indirect tax under Article 279A of the Constitution. It added that tax rates were determined through cooperative federalism while also balancing competing fiscal interests.

Any judicial interference in the matter would bypass this constitutionally mandated process, it said.

The affidavit was submitted in response to a public interest litigation filed by advocate Kapil Madan, seeking directions to categorise air purifiers as a “medical device” and lower the GST levied on them to 5% from 18%.

On December 24, the court had directed the GST Council to convene an urgent meeting and consider lowering the levies on air purifiers in view of the high levels of pollution in Delhi and the surrounding areas.

Two days later, the Union government told the court that reducing the GST on air purifiers to 5% from 18% without following due process will open up a “Pandora’s box”.

The case will be heard by the court on Friday.

In its affidavit submitted ahead of the hearing, the Union government said that any direction issued by the court “to modify GST rates, convene a meeting of the GST Council, or to compel the GST Council to consider or adopt a particular outcome, would amount to the Hon’ble Court stepping into the shoes of the GST Council, thereby, exercising functions that the Constitution has consciously and exclusively entrusted to the GST Council”, Bar and Bench reported.

It added: “Such an exercise would violate the doctrine of separation of powers and render the elaborate and well-defined constitutional role of the GST Council otiose.”

The affidavit also said that the classification of air purifiers as medical devices would subject their import, manufacture, sale, stocking and distribution under the 1940 Drugs and Cosmetics Act and the 2017 Medical Device Rules. This would make their availability in the market regulated, it added.

It described the public interest litigation as a “motivated attempt to secure regulatory reclassification under the guise of public interest”, Bar and Bench reported.

“Such a regulatory shift would have the effect to favour a limited class of entities possessing the requisite licences, registrations, and approvals, thereby creating conditions for monopoly rather than advancing public access,” the legal news portal quoted the Union government as saying.

It added this, in turn, raised serious concerns about who was “really behind the institution of the present petition”.

During the last hearing on December 26, the court had maintained that something should be done to bring down the cost of air purifiers in Delhi in light of the air pollution crisis in the national capital.

“Why can’t it be done?” the bench had asked. “Do whatever you have to do. Right now, an air purifier costs Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000. Why not bring down the GST to a reasonable level where even a common man can afford an air purifier?”

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

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee accused the Enforcement Directorate of attempting to “take away” Trinamool Congress documents during searches at locations linked to the political consultancy firm I-PAC. The firm has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns.

The agency searched the firm’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the home of the firm’s head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood. The operation was based on an FIR filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation into an alleged coal smuggling syndicate. The ED said that the “search is evidence-based and is not targeted at any political establishment”.

It accused Banerjee of entering Jain’s residence and taking away “key evidences including physical documents and electronic devices”. The agency moved the Calcutta High Court on Thursday, alleging “illegal interference” during its operations. Read on.

Activist Sharjeel Imam told a court that Delhi Police’s allegations that Umar Khalid, a co-accused in the alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2020 Delhi riots, is his mentor and guru are false. Imam said that he never spoke with Khalid during the five years they studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University.

To establish a conspiracy, it is necessary to show there had been an agreement between us, Imam said “But they have failed to show any agreement,” he said.

“There is only one meeting in which Umar and I are seen together,” Imam added. “But even the witness statement from that meeting shows that there was no discussion of violence.” Read on.

Why SC denied bail to Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam but awarded it to five other anti-CAA activists

United States President Donald Trump has approved a bill that could pave the way for tariffs of up to 500% on countries buying Russian oil, said Senator Lindsey Graham. “This bill would give President Trump tremendous leverage against countries like China, India and Brazil to incentivise them” to stop buying Russian oil, said the Republican senator.

The bill could be put to vote in the Congress next week, he said, adding that he is expecting bipartisan support for it.

Without a trade deal with Washington, Indian goods are already facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%. The punitive tariffs on India and others had been introduced as part of Trump’s pressure campaign against countries buying discounted oil from Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Read on.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said that the Union Territory’s government will accommodate the students hurt by the closure of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence in other institutes through supernumerary seats. These are additional seats created in an educational institute over and above the intake approved by an authority.

The National Conference leader also said that accountability must be fixed if standards were not maintained at the institute. He added that the Union government must also reflect on the injustice done to the students’ futures by shutting down the institute. Read on.

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It is unusual for a slim family memoir to evoke a much larger nostalgia for an age we have left behind, in the way that Rajwati and Her Times succeeds. Through an endearing portrait of her grandmother, the author Madhu Bhaduri – a teacher of philosophy, a distinguished diplomat and a well-regarded Hindi novelist – recalls an age of social conservatism and catastrophic religious violence that was also one of steady reform, of shared living and inter-community trust. She writes of the idealism of the freedom struggle, of women emerging from the confines of domesticity, and of civility and social responsibility in public engagement.

Madhu was a child living with her extended family in Lahore when in 1947 Partition tore the country apart. Mulkraj, a reputed banker was her great-grandfather who refused to leave Lahore even as the city was tempestuously emptied out of its Hindu and Sikh residents. On the night of and August 14 and 15, when Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi made his epochal Tryst with Destiny address to the Indian nation, Mulkraj died in Lahore, probably of a broken heart.

In the darkness of the night, his son Shivraj and daughter-in-law Rajwati dismantled a door of the house and silently built with it a pyre for his cremation. Theirs was one of the last families that had not fled Lahore. Liaquat Ali, destined to become Pakistan’s first prime minister and a close family friend, smuggled them to the safety of Delhi in his private plane.

Her great-grandfather was deeply influenced by the Arya Samaj: its opposition to idol worship, its support for women’s education but also its downside of antagonism to Muslims. However, he was stubbornly opposed to the division of the country on the basis of religion. In June 1947, Lahore was set on fire. Trainloads of refugees escaping the violence in both directions were slaughtered. His son Shivraj still rejected the counsel even of Nehru, who had told the Punjab Chambers of Commerce and Industry that Lahore was likely to be part of Pakistan so they should shift their factories and businesses to east Punjab. Mulkraj insisted on staying on in Lahore, even as most of the remaining family urged him to shift with them to the safety of that part of the country which would remain in India. Madhu’s grandmother Rajwati and grandfather Shivraj, a secular rationalist, continued in Lahore with their father, even as most friends and families fled. They were among the last to leave the city of their birth, on the private plane of the first prime minister of Pakistan, to build a new life in India.

A prosperous family, the freedom struggle had closely touched their lives in many ways. The great revolutionary Bhagat Singh was born in the house neighbouring that of Madhu’s great-grandmother, and he had played in her lap. Lala Lajpat Rai, a friend of Mulkraj, supported the education of her grandfather Shivraj in America. Raghu, Madhu’s father, after returning to India from his studies in the London School of Economics, joined the Congress Party and, influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, gave up wearing trousers and shirts and replaced these with khadi kurta pyjamas. Much harsher was the fate of another member of the family Balraj, who joined a revolutionary group. Shortly after Rajwati was married and entered her new home, Balraj was arrested for what came to be known as the Lord Hardinge bomb case. The target of the bomb, the viceroy escaped unhurt, but some others were injured. The Lahore High Court punished Balraj with seven years’ imprisonment in the dreaded penal colony in Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. There he suffered torture and isolation, and was released after five years.

Mulkraj raised his children with the teachings of the Arya Samaj, but he still was able to find space for respect for other beliefs and cultures. Shivraj, among his sons, was not religious. He chose to marry Rajwati Seth, from Lucknow. She did not speak Punjabi and was not Arya Samaji. Knowing that the Arya Samaj resolutely opposed idol worship, she hid a locket with Krishna’s image under her clothes. But her husband’s parents were gentle with the newlywed bride’s religious beliefs, as also with her choices of language and dress. Mulkaraj reassured her that she was free to worship in their home in the way she chose. Likewise, she wore her preferred sari to the Punjabi salwar suit, and people who could, conversed with her in Hindi rather than Punjabi.

There was also in wealthy business families respect for those who chose public service over commerce. When Mulkaraj’s younger brother Hansraj spoke to him of his dream of contributing to public education instead of the family’s business, he said he would free him from the responsibility of earning a living, and instead give to him a monthly allowance of forty rupees (which at that time was substantial) so he could pursue his mission unencumbered. This allowed Hansraj to set up a large string of DAV (Dayanand Anglo Vedic) schools and colleges in Punjab, and then in the United Provinces, other northern states, and later even in the Madras Presidency. Years after, Rabindranath Tagore was to dub him Mahatma Hansraj.

The soul of Madhu Bhaduri’s family memoir is accounts of how, even in times when women from privileged families were still expected to live confined to the kitchen and domestic responsibilities, Rajwati Seth still asserted – always with quiet dignity and grace – her agency and choice. Born in Lucknow in 1896, her father, a judge, withstood the social conservatism of the times to send his daughter to a prestigious missionary school. Teaching was in English in the Christian convent school.

Her elder sister was widowed at the age of 16. Rajwati watched with grief the social ostracism that was heaped on her because of her widowhood, that barred her from joining festivities in weddings and festivals like Diwali. It took many years for her father to muster the courage to break social norms to arrange the remarriage of his daughter to a widower.

We saw how Rajwati, married into a Punjabi Arya Samaji family, persisted with her religious beliefs including worshipping a Krishna idol. She would speak of being drawn to the Christian faith along with her devotion to Krishna. The Arya Samaj shared with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh a deep hostility against Muslims, but Rajwati and Shivraj welcomed many Muslim friends to their home. Madhu Bhaduri recalls that many decades later, when she was preparing to leave for her studies in Cambridge University, her mother tried to set these boundaries for her: “Marry anyone except a Muslim”. But her grandmother Rajwati gently took her aside and said, “If you find someone of your choice, don’t hesitate to marry him. Follow your instinct”. It did not matter if he is Muslim, she said. Your parents will ultimately accept him.

Her husband Shivraj encouraged Rajwati to learn to drive a car. Successful as a banker, he established many factories, and set about building his dream house on the upscale Race Course Road in Lahore. He established one of the first production units for electric fans in the country, and proudly told his wife that every room would have a ceiling fan. Until then, fans were large horizontal stretches of cloth or canvas that were manually operated by servants sitting outside the room with a rope. “Why do we need a fan in every room?” she remonstrated with her husband. “ Why can’t the whole family sit together under one fan? What is the need to show off?”

After fleeing Lahore in 1947, the family moved into a large house in civil lines in Rajpur Road in Delhi. At that time, there were 16 families uprooted from Pakistan sharing that house. The family thrived, but as she grew older she wanted to give up her life of luxury. She found solace and meaning in an ashram in Rishikesh on the banks of the Ganga. She lived there in a small austere room. Her husband would visit her from time to time, but missed non-vegetarian food and the conveniences of his city life. Madhu and her friends would also visit her. One of them remarked that when Rajwati spoke, it sounded like a shower of flowers.

During Madhu’s postings as a diplomat to distant countries – Vietnam and Mexico – her grandmother would regularly write to her, and to Madhu’s two young daughters.

The last time that Madhu met her was when she returned to Delhi for a brief vacation in 1984, shortly after the massacre of Sikhs in the national capital in unhinged retribution for prime minister Indira Gandhi’s assasination. Rajwati was deeply saddened. “Religion does not teach us violence", she said, shaking her head. She had borne witness to this violence many years earlier, in Lahore. And now, once again.

In spare and chiselled prose, Madhu Bhaduri, through her portrait of this remarkable woman, spans a century of monumental social transformation in India. She evokes through her writing the slow chiselling away of social conservatism that had denied women their rights of education, remarriage and agency. She calls forth a time of idealism and public service in the struggle for India’s freedom. She elicits a way of living in which deep religious faith did not exclude respect for other beliefs and faiths.

In these many ways, Rajwati’s story becomes a fable for our troubled times.

Harsh Mander is a peace and justice worker, writer, teacher who leads the Karwan e Mohabbat, a people’s campaign to fight hate with radical love and solidarity. He teaches part-time at the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg University, and has authored many books, including Partitions of the Heart, Fatal Accidents of Birth and Looking Away.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah on Thursday said that the Union Territory’s government will help students affected by the closure of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence by accommodating them in other institutes through supernumerary seats, PTI reported.

These are additional seats created in an education institute over and above the intake approved by an authority.

The National Conference leader also said that accountability must be fixed if standards were not maintained at the institute.

Abdullah’s announcement came two days after the National Medical Commission withdrew approval for the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence in Reasi district to run its MBBS course for the academic year 2025-’26.

The regulatory body for medical education cited deficiencies in its infrastructure, including faculty strength and clinical material, for the withdrawal.

There had been protests at the institute in December after the release of the first admissions list for its MBBS programme by the Jammu and Kashmir Board of Professional Entrance Examinations. Of the 50 candidates selected for the institute’s first MBBS batch, 44 were Muslims from Kashmir and six were Hindus from Jammu.

Of the six Hindu candidates, only three reportedly joined the course.

The protests had been led by the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Sangharsh Samiti, with members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, its parent organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, its affiliate Bajrang Dal and the Shiv Sena. Other Hindutva groups had also participated in the protests.

The protesters had demanded that the first admission list be cancelled and that preference be given to Hindu students, as the institute was set up through donations to the Vaishno Devi shrine.

However, the rules do not allow the consideration of religion as a factor for admissions as the college is not classified as a minority institute.

On Thursday, Abdullah said that he had discussed the matter with the state health minister, adding that the selected students had passed the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test in a lawful manner and have merit, PTI reported.

NEET is a qualifying test for undergraduate courses in medical and dental colleges across India. It is conducted by the National Testing Agency.

“It is our legal responsibility to accommodate them,” the news agency quoted the chief minister as saying. “We will adjust them by creating supernumerary seats in colleges close to their homes so that their education does not suffer.”

However, the National Conference leader said that the Union government must also reflect on the injustice done to the students’ futures by shutting down the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence.

“Today, out of 50 seats, 40 were taken by Muslim students and objections were raised,” the news agency quoted him as saying. “But if, over time, the number of seats in this college had gradually increased to 400-500, it is possible that 250-300 students in the future would have been from Jammu. Where will those students go now?”

Noting that aspirants across the country struggle to secure medical college seats, Abdullah added: “We are perhaps the only place where we received a fully-built medical college and yet got it shut down due to protests.”

Responding to questions about the claims made by the National Medical Commission that norms were not complied with at the institute, the chief minister said that the matter was even more unfortunate, PTI reported.

“Who heads this university and who is its chancellor?” the news agency quoted Abdullah as saying. “They should also be questioned. Instead of questioning me alone, ask them as well.”

He added: “If today the BJP is happy that the university failed to maintain standards, then who is responsible and what action will be taken?”

Activist Sharjeel Imam on Thursday told a court that Delhi Police’s allegations that Umar Khalid, a co-accused in the alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2020 Delhi riots, is his mentor and guru are false, Bar and Bench reported.

The submission was made before Additional Sessions Judge Sameer Bajpai of the Karkardooma Courts, who is hearing arguments on the framing of charges in the case.

Imam said that he never spoke with Khalid during the five years they studied at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Live Law reported.

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.

On Thursday, Imam’s counsel told the court that there is no connection between his client and Khalid.

“In my five years at JNU, I never spoke to Umar Khalid,” Imam submitted. “I don’t know what coordination they [the police] are talking about.”

To establish a conspiracy, it is necessary to show there had been an agreement between us, Imam argued. “But they have failed to show any agreement,” he said.

His counsel was quoted as having contested the allegation that Khalid had instructed Imam.

“There is only one meeting in which Umar and I are seen together,” Imam was quoted as having said. “But even the witness statement from that meeting shows that there was no discussion of violence.”

On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Imam and Khalid bail. However, the bench allowed the bail applications of five others accused in the matter, Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Shadab Ahmed and Muhammad Saleem Khan.

Khalid and Imam can file bail applications after all protected witnesses are examined or after one year, the court said.

The bench argued that the two were “masterminds” and the material on record made out a “prima facie case” against them under the anti-terror law.

Also read: Why SC denied bail to Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam but awarded it to five other anti-CAA activists

The speaker in the Delhi Assembly on Thursday ordered the forensic investigation of a video purportedly showing Aam Aadmi Party MLA Atishi insulting Guru Tegh Bahadur, PTI reported.

This came amid the Bharatiya Janata Party accusing the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly of making insensitive remarks about the Sikh spiritual leader in the House on Tuesday after a special discussion on an event to mark his 350th martyrdom anniversary in November.

A video of the alleged comments was also shared by members of the ruling party in Delhi.

Atishi, however, rejected the allegations and said that she was talking about the BJP running away from a discussion on the worsening air pollution in the national capital and about their protest in the Assembly on the matter of stray dogs.

“But the BJP deliberately added a false subtitle and inserted the name of Guru Tegh Bahadurji into it,” PTI quoted her as saying about the video shared by the Hindutva party.

The allegations against Atishi have led to a ruckus during the Winter Session of the Assembly, with both the BJP and the AAP accusing each other of insulting Guru Tegh Bahadur.

The fourth day of the session on Thursday was also disrupted as BJP MLAs carrying posters descended into the well of the House demanding action against Atishi, PTI reported. The legislators also demanded the cancellation of her House membership.

Subsequently, Speaker Vijender Gupta adjourned the House for 30 minutes as slogans were shouted.

After the House resumed, Gupta said that the video will be sent for forensic examination as both the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party members have demanded it. He also directed that the report on the investigation be submitted within 15 days.

However, the protest by the BJP MLAs continued in the well of the House, which forced the speaker to adjourn the session till 1 pm.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday accused the Enforcement Directorate of attempting to “take away” the Trinamool Congress’ internal documents and digital data during searches at several locations linked to political consultancy I-PAC in Kolkata and Bidhannagar, PTI reported.

I-PAC has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including in the 2021 Assembly elections.

Earlier in the day, the Enforcement Directorate conducted searches at I-PAC’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the residence of the firm’s head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood in connection with an investigation into alleged money laundering, The Indian Express reported.

Banerjee arrived at Jain’s Loudon Street residence around noon while the search was underway and stayed for about 20 to 25 minutes, PTI reported. She then came out with a green file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were seizing party documents ahead of the Assembly polls.

West Bengal is expected to head for polls in the next three to four months.

“Is it the duty of [Union] Home Minister Amit Shah and the ED to take away all my party documents?” Banerjee asked. “If I go to the Bharatiya Janata Party office, what will be the result?”

On the other hand, the Enforcement Directorate accused Banerjee of entering Jain’s residence and taking away “key evidences including physical documents and electronic devices”.

The central agency stated that searches had been conducted in a “peaceful manner” until Banerjee arrived at the site.

VIDEO | Kolkata: West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee (@MamataOfficial) visits I-PAC Director Prateek Jain’s residence after an ED raid and says, “Is it the duty of Home Minister Amit Shah and the ED to take away all my party documents? If I go to the BJP party office, what will be the… pic.twitter.com/lRQOpKtVN4

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) January 8, 2026

The searches were based on a first information report filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation into an alleged coal smuggling syndicate that was used to “steal and illegally excavate coal from ECL [Eastern Coalfields Limited] leasehold areas of West Bengal”, the Enforcement Directorate said.

It added that Banerjee’s convoy went to the office of I-PAC, where she and her aides, along with the state police personnel, “forcibly removed physical documents and electronic evidences”.

The actions have “resulted in obstruction” in the investigation and proceedings under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, the ED said.

The agency said that the “search is evidence-based and is not targeted at any political establishment”, adding that no party office had been searched.

It also denied any links to elections and claimed that the action was “part of regular crackdown on money laundering”.

Meanwhile, the West Bengal chief minister alleged that the ED was confiscating TMC’s “documents and hard disks, which has details about our party candidates for Assembly polls”.

“I have brought those back,” she said.

She also claimed that ED had “raided my IT sector office, and searched the residence of the in-charge of my IT sector”.

The chief minister later went to I-PAC’s Salt Lake office, accompanied by state minister Sujit Bose and Bidhannagar Mayor Krishna Chakraborty, as Trinamool Congress workers gathered outside the building.

Kolkata Police Commissioner Manoj Verma and Director General of Police Rajeev Kumar also visited the locations where the searches were taking place, according to The Indian Express.

The Enforcement Directorate moved the Calcutta High Court on Thursday, alleging “illegal interference” during its operations, ANI reported. The matter is scheduled to be heard on Friday.

BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari criticised the chief minister’s visit to Jain’s residence and the I-PAC office, calling it “unconstitutional”, the newspaper reported.

“I-PAC is a corporate organisation,” the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly said. “They tried to interfere in an investigation by a central agency. ED should take legal steps against the chief minister. I-PAC is not a party office. Why should party documents be there?”

A YouTuber has been arrested and a police sub-inspector was booked in connection with the alleged abduction and gangrape of a 14-year-old girl in the Sachendi area of Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur, PTI quoted the police as saying on Wednesday.

The alleged assault sparked outrage in the state after a video of the girl accusing the police of inaction was widely circulated on social media.

Subsequently, Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Dinesh Chandra Tripathi was removed from his post and Sachendi Station House Officer Vikram Singh was suspended for alleged lapses and distortion of facts.

The girl, a Class 7 dropout, had been allegedly abducted in a SUV at about 10 pm on Monday, PTI quoted unidentified police officers as having said.

She was then taken to a deserted spot near a railway track and was allegedly sexually assaulted for nearly two hours before being abandoned outside her house in an unconscious state, the officers added.

Police Commissioner Raghubir Lal told reporters that Sub-Inspector Amit Kumar Maurya and YouTuber Shivbaran Yadav had been named in the first information report based on the girl’s statement.

While Yadav was arrested, four teams were formed to nab the absconding sub-inspector, Lal added.

Earlier, the family of the 14-year-old had alleged that the police were attempting to cover up the assault, claiming that they were initially turned away when they mentioned the involvement of an officer, PTI reported.

The girl’s brother claimed that the police had also seized her mobile phone and prevented her from returning home until her court statement was recorded.

Singh, the station house officer at Sachendi Police Station, was suspended for failing to invoke the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act initially and for allegedly misrepresenting facts in case records, according to the news agency.

While Deenanath Mishra has been given the charge of the police station, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police (West) Kapil Dev Singh was directed to take over the investigation.

United States President Donald Trump has approved a sanctions bill that could pave the way for tariffs of up to 500% on countries purchasing Russian oil, Senator Lindsey Graham said on Thursday.

This legislation, once passed by the US Congress, will allow Trump to “punish those countries who buy cheap Russian oil fuelling [Vladimir] Putin’s war machine,” Graham said.

“This bill would give President Trump tremendous leverage against countries like China, India and Brazil to incentivise them” to stop buying Russian oil “that provides the financing for Putin’s bloodbath against Ukraine”, the Republican senator said.

The bill could be put to vote in the Congress next week, he said, adding that he is expecting bipartisan support for it.

“This will be well-timed, as Ukraine is making concessions for peace and Putin is all talk, continuing to kill the innocent,” he added.

The announcement came four days after Graham on Sunday said that he was hoping to introduce the bill, “and it’s from 0 to 500”, indicating the tariff rate the legislation would assign.

“He [Trump] picks the number [tariff rate],” Graham had told reporters. “Nobody else does.”

He had added: “...if you’re buying cheap Russian oil, keeping Putin’s war machine going, we’re trying to give the president the ability [through the bill] to make that a hard choice by tariffs.”

To argue that the tariffs worked as intended, Graham on Sunday quoted the Indian ambassador as having told him in a private conversation that India was buying less Russian oil, and had urged him to request Trump to relax tariffs linked to such imports.

In the presence of Trump, Graham told reporters that to end the conflict in Ukraine, the countries buying Russian oil needed to be pressured.

The senator said that he believes that what Trump “did with India is the chief reason India is now buying substantially less Russian oil”.

The punitive tariffs on India and others had been introduced as part of Trump’s pressure campaign against countries purchasing discounted oil from Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Without a trade deal with Washington, Indian goods are facing a combined US tariff rate of 50%. A 25% so-called reciprocal duty was imposed on August 7, followed by an additional 25% punitive levy on August 27.

Trump has repeatedly alleged that the import of discounted Russian oil by countries, including India, was fuelling Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

Reacting to Graham’s comments, Trump told reporters that the US could raise tariffs on India if New Delhi does not cut Russian oil imports.

On Tuesday, Trump repeated his claim that the punitive levies had prompted New Delhi to reduce its imports from Russia.

India’s Ministry of External Affairs has not commented on the recent remarks made by Graham and Trump. But New Delhi has maintained that ensuring stable energy prices and secure supplies were the goals of India’s energy policy.

In the village of Nikunja Sen in West Bengal, far removed from the geopolitical manoeuvring of Caracas or Washington, stands the Bagu Primary School. In 2005, the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, during a visit that captured the imagination of Kolkata’s leftist intelligentsia, donated a significant sum of money to this modest institution.

In return, he requested that a new wing be named after El Libertador Simón Bolívar, a Venezuelan military officer who led the defeat of the Spanish colonialists in South America in the early 19th century.

Today, an otherwise unremarkable structure of brick and mortar, that wing of the school stands as a testament to a vision of South-South cooperation that transcended the transactional. It is a bond built on the shared memory of colonial struggle and the aspiration for autonomy, a bond characterised by flashes of ideological intimacy, yet historically hamstrung by vast geographical and geopolitical distances.

On January 3, news broke of the dramatic American military intervention in Caracas and the abduction of the Venezuelan president. The brazen violation of sovereignty echoes the grim days of Operation Condor in the 1970s and ’80s, when the United States-backed military dictatorships in eight South American countries cracked down on political opponents.

New Delhi’s reaction has been characteristically cautious. The Ministry of External Affairs, guided by the prudent realism that defines the Raisina Hill doctrine, has largely retreated into silence. It is likely viewing the event through the prism of strategic insulation.

However, a critical reflection on the past century of Indo-Venezuelan relations suggest that this silence is an aberration and a strategic blunder. In the light of this existential crisis for the Venezuelan state, a cursory overview of the past 100 years reveals that India’s relationship with Venezuela was never just about oil: it was about the slow, painful construction of a post-colonial order.

To abandon Venezuela now is to dismantle that very architecture. India must stand by its partner, not necessarily to endorse a regime, but to defend the principles of sovereignty and multipolarity upon which India’s own rise is predicated.

Continents apart, a familiar struggle

For the bulk of the 20th century, India and Venezuela existed in parallel solitudes. While India forged its identity through the Gandhian struggle, Venezuela wrestled with the “gomecismo” dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935). Both nations were peripheries serving imperial centres – India feeding the textile mills of Lancashire, Venezuela fuelling the automobile boom of Detroit.

The formal architecture of their relationship began in 1959, when diplomatic ties were established. This was a seminal year: the Cuban Revolution, which overthrew the Fulgencio Batista military dictatorship and paved the way for Fidel Castro, had just sent shockwaves through the hemisphere. Yet India and Venezuela chose a path of formal South-South recognition.

This spirit was codified in 1960 by Venezuelan visionary Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, the minister of mines and hydrocarbons, who co-founded the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. Alfonzo saw oil as a tool for Third World leverage, a philosophy that echoed Jawaharlal Nehru’s use of non-alignment as a moral lever against the Cold War blocs.

When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Caracas in 1968, the first such high-level visit by an Indian leader, it was an acknowledgment of this shared struggle against neo-colonial economic structures. In a joint communique with President Raúl Leoni, Indira Gandhi spoke of the problems developing nations face in common, explicitly linking the economic disparity between developed and developing nations as the primary threat to world peace.

This was the nascent language of the New International Economic Order, driven by the rhetoric of the Non-Aligned Movement. Yet, the tyranny of distance and the Cold War alignment, where Venezuela remained firmly in Washington’s “backyard” while India tilted toward Moscow, kept the two giants apart. Trade remained negligible.

The end of the Cold War and the rise of Hugo Chávez in 1999 shattered this inertia. For the first time, history, economics and ideology aligned. Chávez, a voracious reader of history, saw India not just as a market, but as a civilisational pole in a multipolar world. This period marked a distinctive shift from diplomatic cordiality to strategic symbiosis.

In 2008, India entered Venezuela’s crucial oil sector when OVL, the overseas arm of the Oil and Natural Gas Limited, acquired a 40% stake in the San Cristóbal project. Petróleos de Venezuela, the state-owned company held the rest. This was a strategic partnership that allowed an Indian state entity access to the heart of sovereign Venezuelan resources.

By 2012, India had replaced the United States as one of Venezuela’s preferred customers. The geology of the Orinoco Belt, rich in heavy sour crude, found its perfect metallurgical mate in the refineries of Reliance and Essar in Gujarat.

The “Chavista” era resurrected the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference. When Chávez visited New Delhi and Kolkata in 2005, declaring that the 21st century is the century of the South, he was articulating a vision that went beyond the barrel. He was proposing an alternative to Western hegemony, a vision of South-South cooperation, rooted in the shared history of the colonised.

From a passive observer, India was now a stakeholder in Latin America.

Historical amnesia

The current US “stabilisation operation” in Caracas is being framed as a necessary corrective to tyranny. However, for others it is the return of the Roosevelt corollary of 1904 to the Monroe doctrine, the assertion of US police power in the western hemisphere.

India’s muted response betrays a historical amnesia. The argument for standing by Venezuela is not an endorsement of the errors of the Maduro administration, which are undeniable. Rather, it is an argument based on three historical imperatives.

First, India’s post-1947 foreign policy is built on the sanctity of sovereignty. From India’s stance on Vietnam in the 1960s to its refusal to endorse the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the country has historically understood that if sovereignty becomes conditional on Western approval, no developing nation is safe.

If New Delhi accepts the legitimacy of a foreign military removing a sovereign government in 2026, it erodes the legal shield that protects its own strategic autonomy.

Second, history shows that regime changes imposed from the outside rarely honour the debts of the past. India has nearly $1 billion in pending dividends and sunk costs trapped in Venezuela. If India remains a passive spectator, it will be swept aside in the post-crisis scramble as US energy majors move to monopolise the Orinoco.

Solidarity is the only leverage India has to ensure it is not written out of Venezuela’s reconstruction.

Third, relations between states are often cynical, but they are also cumulative. Venezuela stood by India on Kashmir in international forums when few others would. It offered oil at preferential rates when global prices spiked. To treat these historical credits as worthless is to signal to the rest of the Global South that India is a fair-weather friend.

The children studying in the Simón Bolívar wing of the Bagu Primary School may not understand the intricacies of crude oil benchmarks or the Monroe doctrine. But the building they sit in is a physical reminder that globalisation can also be reciprocal rather than just predatory.

The crisis in Venezuela is a test of India’s historical memory. If the last 100 years are seen merely as a prologue to inevitable American dominance, then silence is the correct policy. But if the last century is looked upon as a slow march toward a genuinely multipolar world, a vision shared by Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Chávez, then silence is a betrayal.

India must speak up, not just for Venezuela, but for the idea that the Global South is more than just a resource colony for the North.

Niladri Chatterjee is a senior lecturer at the department of cultural sciences of Linnaeus University, Sweden.

Bangladesh will import 1.8 lakh tonnes of diesel from the Indian state-owned Numaligarh Refinery Limited till December for 1,462 crore taka, or Rs 1,076 crore, Prothom Alo reported on Tuesday.

Dhaka’s advisory committee on government purchases approved the proposal to import diesel from the refinery in Assam in a meeting chaired by the interim government’s Finance Adviser Salehuddin Ahmed.

While the state-run Bangladesh Petroleum Corporation will pay a part of the cost, the remaining will be funded through bank loans, Prothom Alo reported.

The Numaligarh Refinery is a subsidiary of Indian public-sector firm Oil India Limited.

The deal is part of an existing 15-year agreement signed by the previous Sheikh Hasina government that was ousted in August 2024 after a widespread student-led agitation.

In January 2025, the interim government had approved the import of 1.3 lakh tonnes of diesel from the refinery in Assam, the newspaper reported.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court on Tuesday directed Chief Secretary Anurag Jain to appear before it through video conference to explain the steps being taken to prevent water contamination, following several deaths linked to unsafe drinking water in Indore.

While the state government has said that eight persons died due to the polluted water, the Indore administration has given compensation cheques of Rs 2 lakh to 18 families, The Indian Express reported.

More than 1,400 persons have fallen ill with symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhoea and dehydration in Indore’s Bhagirathpura area, with cases being first reported on December 24. On Tuesday as well, 38 new cases of vomiting and diarrhoea were reported from the area, the Hindustan Times reported.

A total of 142 persons have been hospitalised due to the outbreak, including 11 in intensive care units.

A division bench of Justices Vijay Kumar Shukla and Alok Awasthi, hearing a batch of petitions about the outbreak on Tuesday, noted that the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution includes the right to clean drinking water.

The court observed that water contamination is not limited to Indore but is a statewide problem. It then directed the chief secretary to appear before it on January 15 to apprise the court of the steps being taken by the state to prevent such incidents.

The bench also asked the official to inform the court of immediate and emergency measures for affected persons in Bhagirathpura, including preventive and corrective steps.

It sought details on disciplinary and penal action, compensation for victims, directions to local bodies, and measures to ensure public awareness and transparency in the matter.

The court also directed the state to ensure that safe drinking water is immediately supplied to the affected areas through tankers or packaged water at government cost, and to provide free medical screening and treatment to affected residents.

The authorities in Indore had earlier said that residents of the Bhagirathpura area had complained that the water supplied to them had an unusual smell.

On Monday, unidentified officials told the Hindustan Times that more than half the groundwater samples taken from borewells in Bhagirathpura had tested positive for E coli bacteria, a day after the outbreak. The presence of E coli in water indicates faecal contamination and a possible risk of disease.

Around 1,200 homes of Bengali Muslim families in Assam’s Sonitpur district were demolished in an eviction drive carried out earlier this week.

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that the evictions, carried out on January 5 and 6, were aimed at clearing alleged encroachments from around 650 hectares of land inside the Burhachapori Wildlife Sanctuary.

The evictions were conducted in areas under the Tezpur Sadar and Dhekiajuli revenue circles, including Jamuktol, Arimari, Siyalichar, Baghetapu, Galatidubi, Lathimari, Kundulichar, Purba Dubramari and Batulichar, PTI reported.

The alleged encroachers had constructed houses and cultivated crops inside the wildlife sanctuary, the news agency quoted an unidentified official as saying.

Ahead of the eviction, most residents had demolished their homes and left the area themselves. However, many had stayed back due to the severe cold, requesting the authorities to give them time to harvest their crops.

“Despite the encroachers’ request not to evict them in the ongoing winter season, they will not be excused by administration from the ongoing eviction drive as they were illegally staying in the forest areas,” PTI quoted Sonitpur District Commissioner Ananda Kumar Das as saying.

In February as well, the administration had cleared 2,099 hectares of land in the wildlife sanctuary and nearby villages in one of the state’s largest eviction drive.

Since the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Assam in 2016, multiple demolition drives have been conducted across districts, mostly targeting areas populated by Bengali-speaking Muslims.

Sarma claimed on Monday that the government has reclaimed close to 1.5 lakh bighas of land in the course of the eviction drives, Northeast Now reported.

Many of those displaced have claimed that their families had been living in the areas for decades, and that their ancestors had settled in the areas after their lands in riverine areas were washed away because of erosion by the Brahmaputra river.

In July, one person was killed and several others injured after the police opened fire at protesters amid clashes at the site of an eviction drive in the Betbari area of Goalpara district.

Also read:

• How can Indian democracy allow the open oppression of Bengali-origin Muslims by Assam?
• Behind wave of Assam evictions, a hungry river, and a land policy loaded against Miya Muslims

Renowned Indian ecologist Madhav Gadgil died in Pune late on Wednesday after a brief illness, Hindustan Times quoted his son Siddhartha Gadgil as saying. He was 83 years old.

Widely regarded as a leading figure in Indian ecology, Gadgil was best known for chairing the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel, appointed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in 2010. The panel’s 2011 report, commonly referred to as the Gadgil Report, warned that activities such as mining, quarrying, large dams and unregulated infrastructure development posed serious risks to the ecologically fragile Western Ghats.

The report, despite strong opposition, recommended that 75% of the mountain range be declared environmentally sensitive owing to the presence of a variety of endemic species and dense forest cover, Hindustan Times reported.

These recommendations are yet to be fully implemented.

Gadgil, born in Pune in 1942, was educated in Pune and Mumbai, after which he went Harvard University to pursue higher studies. At Harvard, he completed a doctoral thesis in mathematical ecology.

He spent more than three decades on the faculty of the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru and founded the Centre for Ecological Sciences there in 1983.

Gadgil authored or co-authored seven books and over 225 scientific papers. His major works include This Fissured Land, co-authored with Ramachandra Guha, Ecology and Equity and his autobiography A Walk Up the Hill.

Gadgil has also served on the Scientific Advisory Council to the prime minister and chaired international bodies, including the Science and Technology Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility.

He received several national and international honours, including the Padma Shri in 1981, the Padma Bhushan in 2006, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2015 and the Volvo Environment Prize.

In 2024, the United Nations Environment Programme named him a Champion of the Earth, describing him as a “people’s scientist”.

“His research has helped to protect marginalized people, promote the community-driven conservation of ecosystems, from forests to wetlands, and influence policymaking at the highest level,” the UN body had said then.

In a social media post after Gadgil’s death, former Environment Minister and Congress leader Jairam Ramesh described him as “a top-notch academic scientist, a tireless field researcher, a pioneering institution-builder, a great communicator, a firm believer in people’s networks and movements, and friend, philosopher, guide, and mentor to many for over five decades”.

Madhav Gadgil, the pre-eminent ecologist, has just passed away. He was a top-notch academic scientist, a tireless field researcher, a pioneering institution-builder, a great communicator, a firm believer in people’s networks and movements, and friend, philosopher, guide, and… pic.twitter.com/gJMOTdzuXw

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) January 8, 2026

Also read: Ramachandra Guha: What I learnt from Madhav Gadgil, towering ecologist with a social conscience

The national president of Hindutva outfit Hindu Raksha Dal and his son were arrested in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad for allegedly distributing swords in a residential colony and disturbing communal harmony, PTI reported on Wednesday.

Deputy Commissioner of Police (Trans Hindon) Nimish Patil was quoted as saying that Bhupendra Chowdhry, alias Pinki (50), and his son Harsh Chowdhry were arrested on Tuesday from the city’s Shalimar Garden Colony.

The two were produced before a court the same day and remanded to 14-day judicial custody.

Ten members of the outfit had been arrested in the same case on December 27.

The arrests were made after videos started circulating on social media, in the last week of December, showing members of the Hindutva group displaying and handing out swords.

Chowdhry was heard saying in one of the videos that Hindus needed to keep swords to defend themselves considering “the way our Hindu brothers have been killed in Bangladesh”.

Chaudhary was referring to the killing of Dipu Chandra Das, a factory worker, who was beaten to death by a mob in Bangladesh’s Mymensingh district on December 18 after being accused of blasphemy.

According to the Uttar Pradesh Police’s FIR, members of the Hindu Raksha Dal also shouted communal slogans while holding a rally through the area with weapons.

The case was filed under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to rioting, rioting with deadly weapons and wrongful confinement, along with provisions of the Criminal Law Amendment Act.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday orally observed that there was prima facie no bar on the Lok Sabha setting up an inquiry committee to look into corruption charges against Allahabad High Court Justice Yashwant Varma after a similar motion was rejected in the Rajya Sabha, PTI reported.

A bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and SC Sharma, however, said that it will examine if the question was so prejudicial to Varma’s interests as to warrant the intervention of the court, The Indian Express reported.

The court was hearing a petition filed by Varma challenging the legality of the three-member judicial committee constituted by Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla under the 1968 Judges Inquiry Act to investigate the impeachment proceedings against him in the unaccounted cash row.

The Allahabad High Court judge had sought to quash Birla’s decision to constitute the committee. He had argued that although the notices for his impeachment had been submitted both in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, Birla formed the committee unilaterally without waiting for the admission of the motion by the Upper House chairperson.

Unaccounted cash was allegedly recovered at Varma’s official residence in Delhi when emergency services responded to a fire there on March 14. He was a judge at the Delhi High Court at that time. The judge said he was in Bhopal when the cash was discovered and claimed that it did not belong to him or his family.

Amid the row, he was transferred to the Allahabad High Court.

A report of the in-house inquiry committee into the matter, released on May 3, concluded that there was “sufficient substance” in the charges against Varma. It held that the judge’s misconduct was “serious enough to call for initiation of proceedings for removal”.

To impeach a judge in Parliament, a removal motion is required to be signed by 100 Lok Sabha MPs or 50 Rajya Sabha MPs. If the motion is admitted in both Houses, a three-member judicial committee investigates the matter. The Parliament votes on the impeachment if the committee finds misconduct. If the motion gets two-thirds of the votes, the president is advised to remove the judge.

On July 25, Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said that the decision to impeach Varma was unanimous and that 152 MPs from the ruling coalition and the Opposition parties had signed the motion.

There is consensus that the removal of Varma should be a joint effort, he had said, adding that the Lok Sabha will take up the proceedings before they move to the Rajya Sabha in line with the Judges Inquiry Act.

However, on August 12, the Lok Sabha speaker formed a three-member committee, comprising Supreme Court Justice Aravind Kumar, Madras High Court Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and advocate B Vasudeva Acharya, to look into the matter.

In November, the committee sought a written statement from Varma on the charges against him. In response, the judge sought authenticated copies of the motions before both the Houses in July and any orders passed consequent to them.

However, the Lok Sabha’s secretary general said that the Rajya Sabha had not admitted the impeachment motion, Bar and Bench reported.

During the hearing on Wednesday, advocate Mukul Rohatgi, representing Varma, said that there were procedural irregularities that vitiated the inquiry proceedings set in motion against the judge by the Lok Sabha speaker.

He added that the “proviso says when notices are given on the same day [in both Houses of Parliament], no committee shall be constituted unless motion is admitted in both the Houses and the speaker forms a joint committee”.

However, an affidavit from the Lok Sabha secretary general in the matter stated that the deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha had rejected the motion on August 11, the advocate added.

“On July 21, the motion was moved,” Bar and Bench quoted Rohatgi as saying. “Chairman resigned in the evening that day. On August 11, the motion was rejected by the deputy chairman.”

The advocate was referring to the resignation of Jagdeep Dhankhar as vice president and the Rajya Sabha chairperson on July 21.

In response, the court asked whether any law prevented the Lok Sabha speaker from setting up an investigation committee after the Rajya Sabha chairperson rejected an impeachment motion when such motions are raised in both Houses.

It noted that a joint committee is contemplated only if both Houses admit the impeachment motion, Bar and Bench reported. However, Datta asked what would happen if one motion fails and one succeeds.

“If both Houses admit [the motion], then there is a joint committee,” Bar and Bench quoted the judge as saying. “But if one rejects it, then where is the bar for Lok Sabha to appoint [a probe committee]? If one motion is not accepted, why should the motion of the other House fail?”

Datta also observed that a purposive interpretation of the law was required.

The judge noted that he did not prima facie agree with Rohatgi’s argument that an impeachment motion in the Lok Sabha must fail if a similar motion is rejected in the Rajya Sabha, Bar and Bench reported.

During the proceedings, Rohatgi further argued that there was an acknowledgement by the Rajya chairperson of the impeachment motion, adding that he had also stated that proceedings under the Judges Inquiry Act had been triggered, Bar and Bench reported.

The advocate argued that this implied that the motion had been admitted in the Rajya Sabha. Rohatgi added that the deputy chairperson cannot sit over the chairperson’s decision in such matters.

The bench listed the matter for further hearing on Thursday, The Indian Express reported.

Earlier, Varma had also challenged the in-house committee report that indicted him in the matter, as well as the recommendation made by Sanjiv Khanna, who was the chief justice of India when the report was submitted to the president and the prime minister to initiate impeachment proceedings against him.

In August, the Supreme Court dismissed both the petitions.

The local alliances were formed after the civic elections in December. Fadnavis said that disciplinary action will be taken if party workers are found to have violated orders.

Meanwhile, the Congress dissolved its Ambernath block committee and suspended 12 of its corporators for allying with the BJP without the approval of the party’s state leadership. Read on.

The Supreme Court directed that the entire audio recording allegedly linking former Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh to the ethnic violence in the state be sent to the National Forensic Science University. The bench also directed that voice samples be sent for examination and asked the laboratory in Gandhinagar to expedite the process.

In the recordings believed to be from 2023, a voice purported to be that of Singh is heard taking credit for “how and why the conflict started”, bragging that he had defied Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s order against the use of “bombs” in the conflict and shielding from arrest individuals who snatched thousands of weapons from the state police armouries. Read on.

Five police personnel were injured in clashes that broke out after the Municipal Corporation of Delhi started a demolition drive near a mosque in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan area. The drive was being carried out on land adjoining the Faiz Elahi Mosque and a nearby graveyard at Turkman Gate.

Around 100-150 persons gathered at the spot when the demolition machinery was about to arrive. Madhur Verma, Joint Commissioner of Police, Central Range, said that “a few miscreants” attempted to create a disturbance by throwing stones.

The Delhi Police has detained five persons and lodged a first information report in connection with the violence. Read on.

The Supreme Court granted interim protection from arrest to Bhojpuri singer Neha Singh Rathore in a case pertaining to her social media posts about the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam. The bench also issued a notice on Rathore’s plea challenging the Allahabad High Court order denying her anticipatory bail in the matter.

But the court said that Rathore must appear before the investigating officer when summoned. Rathore was booked in April for a video posted on social media in which she said that the Pahalgam attack was an intelligence and security failure on the part of the BJP-led Union government. Read on.

United States President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that his country will get up to 50 million barrels of oil from Venezuela. The oil will be sold at the market price and the money “will be controlled by me…to ensure it is used to benefit the people” of Venezuela and the US, Trump said.

With the current oil prices of $56 per barrel, the arrangement could be worth $2.8 billion.

This came days after the US military abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in an operation for alleged drug trafficking. Read on.

What the US invasion of Venezuela reveals about international law

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The Madras High Court on Wednesday stayed the release of a book allegedly targeting Justice GR Swaminathan, observing that it was “highly derogatory” and “virtually abusive”, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Srivastava and Justice Arul Murugan passed the order on an urgent petition seeking an injunction against the release of the book Thiruparankundram issue: Is Justice GR Swaminathan a judge or an RSS rowdy? at the Chennai Book Fair on Thursday, The New Indian Express reported.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre.

The court also initiated suo motu contempt proceedings against Keezhaikaatru Publishers, which published the book, and directed the police to seize all copies.

The book was being released against the backdrop of Swaminathan’s order on December 1 directing the authorities of the Subramaniya Swamy temple at Thirupparankundram in Madurai to ensure that the Karthigai Deepam was lit at the deepathoon, a stone pillar, near a dargah on the top of a hill.

The judgement rejected objections by the temple authorities and the dargah management, and stated that the lighting of the lamp would not infringe on the religious rights of the Muslim community.

On Tuesday, the court upheld Swaminathan’s single-judge order allowing the lighting of the lamp at the stone pillar.

While hearing the plea against the book on Wednesday, the court said that its title and the caricatured depiction on its cover appeared intended to ridicule a sitting judge rather than offer legitimate criticism, Bar and Bench reported.

The book crosses permissible limits and raises serious concerns about undermining the dignity of the judiciary, the bench said.

It “needs to be dealt with firmly by the court”, The New Indian Express quoted the bench as saying.

While criticism of judgements is permissible, personal attacks on judges, especially using mocking visuals and language, could not be justified under the guise of free speech, the bench said. It added that scandalising a judge through publications had a direct bearing on public confidence in the judiciary.

Noting that the book was to be displayed and sold at the Chennai Book Fair, the bench held that permitting it to be released at this stage could cause irreparable harm, Bar and Bench reported.

The court directed the authorities to ensure that copies of the book were not made available online and listed the matter for further hearing after three weeks, Live Law reported.

The petitioner claimed that the book was directed against Swaminathan, alleging that its title and cover were “scandalous, abusive and derogatory”, Bar and Bench reported.

The petitioner also argued that permitting such material to be publicly displayed and sold at a large public forum such as the Chennai Book Fair would cause “serious and irreversible damage” to the credibility and institutional authority of courts.

Swaminathan’s order on December 1 in the Thirupparankundram matter had triggered a controversy.

On December 9, a group of Opposition MPs submitted an impeachment notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla against Swaminathan, saying that the judge’s recent orders and actions have been viewed as “disruptive to social harmony and detrimental to integrity of the judiciary”.

The MPs had stated that Swaminathan’s conduct had raised serious questions regarding the impartiality, transparency and secular functioning of the judiciary. They alleged that the judge had shown undue favouritism towards a senior advocate and lawyers from a particular community in deciding cases.

Also read: ‘RSS agenda, favours Brahmins’: The controversial career of a Madras HC judge under impeachment fire

The Supreme Court on Wednesday granted interim protection from arrest to Bhojpuri singer Neha Singh Rathore in a case pertaining to her social media posts about the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices JK Maheshwari and Atul S Chandurkar also issued a notice on Rathore’s plea challenging the Allahabad High Court order denying her anticipatory bail in the matter.

But the court said that Rathore must appear before the investigating officer when summoned.

The terror attack at Baisaran near Pahalgam town on April 22 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.

In late April, Rathore was booked for a video posted on social media in which she said that the Pahalgam attack was an intelligence and security failure on the part of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government.

She had also claimed in the video that Prime Minister Narendra Modi would seek votes in Bihar in the name of the attack just as he allegedly did after the 2019 Pulwama terror attack.

A first information report was registered against Rathore based on a complaint in Lucknow. She was booked for sedition under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and under the Information Technology Act.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the government claimed that Rathore had not cooperated with the investigation, Live Law reported.

Contesting the claim, her counsel said that Rathore had appeared before the investigating officer on Saturday.

In September, the Allahabad High Court had refused to quash the case, observing that the allegations prima facie disclosed a cognisable offence and warranted investigation. The court said that Rathore had used Modi’s name in a derogatory manner in her posts.

The singer challenged the ruling in the Supreme Court, which also refused to quash the case in October.

Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Rathore before the Supreme Court, had contended that the charges invoked in the case, including sections related to mutiny and waging war against the state, were grossly disproportionate.

But the court had said that it would not interfere in the matter at this stage.

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday ordered the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party, actress Urmila Sanawar and others to take down allegedly defamatory social media posts linking Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dushyant Gautam to the 2022 Ankita Bhandari murder case, Live Law reported.

Justice Mini Pushkarna issued the interim order on a defamation petition filed by Gautam, the national general secretary of the Hindutva party. The judge also restrained the defendants from posting any content referring to him as the alleged “VIP” in the murder case.

“…a prima facie case is made out by the plaintiff,” Live Law quoted Pushkarna as saying. “Balance of convenience is in his favour and irreparable injury would be caused to plaintiff if defendants 1-9 are not restrained from posting the defamatory content.”

She added that if the content were not taken down within 24 hours, the social media platforms would have to remove it as per the Information Technology rules, PTI reported. She also asked the platforms to take down any “identical” content once it was flagged by the BJP leader.

In December, Sanawar had uploaded videos and an audio recording of her alleged phone conversation with her supposed former husband, expelled BJP MLA Suresh Rathore, in which Gautam was allegedly mentioned.

Following the social media posts, the Congress and other Opposition parties had alleged that Gautam was also involved in the case and demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe in the matter.

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

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

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

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

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

In his defamation suit, Gautam alleged that the online posts by Sanawar falsely linked him to Bhandari’s murder and caused him severe reputational harm.

Gautam accused Uttarakhand Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal, the AAP, Sanawar, Rathore and several users of the social media platform X of defamation. Social media platforms Meta, Google and X have also been accused of defamation by him.

“Serious allegations have been levelled against me, suggesting I was the ‘VIP’ connected to the Ankita Bhandari case, all without any judicial conclusion,” his petition said.

The petition said that despite clarifications and the registration of first information reports, the content continued to be shared without correction or apology, causing ongoing harm to his reputation.

He had sought damages of about Rs 2 crore and injunctions to restrain further circulation of the material.

During the hearing on Wednesday, the counsel for Gautam argued that his “impeccable reputation” of five decades was being tarnished by the Congress, the AAP and others by linking him to a murder case in which the conviction had already taken place after a trial, PTI reported.

Describing it “outright defamation”, the counsel said that the BJP leader’s name had never come up in the investigation and added that the defendants’ social media posts were damaging his reputation “without an iota of evidence”.

Sanawar was a “habitual offender” who had many criminal cases against her, the counsel alleged, adding that the Congress and AAP further propagated her false narrative.

The matter will be heard next on May 4.

Gautam has also filed a police complaint against Rathore, Sanawar, the Congress and the AAP, citing provisions of the Information Technology Act and defamation under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

In the complaint, he alleged that the audio and video clips had been deliberately circulated to defame him, damage the image of the BJP, provoke the public and disturb public order.

The Uttarakhand Police said a case had been registered based on Gautam’s complaint and that the evidence provided would be examined.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed that the entire audio recording allegedly linking former Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh to the ethnic violence in the state, along with his voice samples, be sent to the National Forensic Science University for examination, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Sanjay Kumar and K Vinod Chandran asked the laboratory in Gandhinagar to expedite the process and submit its report in a sealed cover.

The order was passed while hearing a plea filed by the Kuki Organization for Human Rights Trust, which has sought an independent investigation into the audio clips purportedly featuring Singh’s voice.

In the recordings believed to be from 2023, a voice purported to be that of Singh is heard taking credit for “how and why the conflict started”, bragging that he had defied Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s order against the use of “bombs” in the conflict and shielding from arrest individuals who snatched thousands of weapons from the state police armouries.

In its order on Wednesday, the bench said that the entire 48-minute conversation, along with all admitted voice recordings and other audio material furnished by the petitioner, should be forwarded to the laboratory.

In November, the petitioner informed the court that the Manipur Police had forwarded only short and edited audio clips to the laboratory instead of the full recording.

The Kuki group had made the allegation in an affidavit responding to a report submitted by the laboratory in October, which claimed that the audio clips had been tampered with and were not scientifically fit to compare the voice.

The laboratory had told the court that it could not provide an opinion on whether the voice in the clips is that of Singh.

On Wednesday, advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the Kuki organisation, said that the matter had been listed about 10 times and that the transcript of the full 48-minute conversation, along with the audio, had been placed on record with the petition, Live Law reported.

The court then questioned the government about the reason for not sending the audio clip in its entirety, The Hindu reported.

Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati said that the authorities had received the full recording only after the last hearing in December and that the petitioner had not provided it earlier, Live Law reported.

Bhushan was quoted as having responded that the authorities could have sought the recording from the petitioner during their repeated appearances before the court.

When the bench asked Bhushan why the recording had not been provided, Live Law quoted him as having said that there had been no formal direction to do so.

The bench then issued directions for the entire clip to be sent to the forensic laboratory.

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

President’s Rule was imposed in February 2025 after Singh resigned as the chief minister amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the violence had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

The Uttar Pradesh Police on Tuesday arrested climate activist Harjeet Singh, a day after the Enforcement Directorate conducted raids at premises linked to him in connection with alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act, The Indian Express reported.

Singh was arrested under sections of the Uttar Pradesh Excise Act after a complaint was filed by the state excise department earlier in the day. The complaint was based on information shared by the central agency that a large quantity of liquor was found at his home in Ghaziabad during the raids.

“The said liquor is not valid for sale in the state of UP,” the newspaper quoted the first information report filed in the matter as stating. “..it has been informed that the liquor found at Harjeet Singh’s residence is prima facie more than the capacity determined by the state government for holding liquor.”

A local court later granted bail to Singh.

The searches conducted at three premises in Delhi and Ghaziabad linked to Singh and Satat Sampada Private Limited, a climate advocacy group co-founded by him, were part of a wider probe into the suspected misuse of foreign funds to “run narratives to influence government policies in the energy sector”, the Enforcement Directorate had claimed on Monday.

Satat Sampada Private Limited also runs the non-governmental organisation Satat Sampada Climate Foundation. It was co-founded by Singh and his wife Jyoti Awasthi.

According to Satat Sampada, its work includes sustainable agriculture, promotion of traditional food systems, marketing of organic produce, supporting a transition away from fossil fuels, climate adaptation and resilience and addressing climate impacts and migration.

In a statement on Tuesday, the central agency said that the searches were part of an investigation into “suspicious foreign inward remittances” of more than Rs 6 crore received by Satat Sampada Private Limited between 2021 and 2025.

It added that the funds were received in the “garb of consultancy charges” from foreign entities, including Climate Action Network and Stand.earth. These entities themselves had received funds from non-governmental organisations such as Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, it added.

ED, Hqrs. Office carried out a search operation on 05.01.2026 under the provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), 1999, at various premises in Delhi-NCR linked to M/s Satat Sampada Private Limited (SSPL). The searches were conducted as part of an ongoing… pic.twitter.com/82Gh4zXIiW

— ED (@dir_ed) January 6, 2026

“However, cross-verification of filings made by the remitters abroad indicates that the funds were actually intended to promote the agenda of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty (FF-NPT) within India,” the Enforcement Directorate said.

The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty is an international civil society initiative to limit the expansion of coal, oil and gas and promote a transition to renewable energy. India is not a participant in the campaign.

The central agency claimed that the proposed international treaty was aimed at phasing out fossil fuel production, adding that its adoption could expose India to legal challenges in international forums and “severely compromise” the country’s energy security and economic development.

The statement added that Satat Sampada Private Limited, which describes itself as an agro-based company promoting organic farming and marketing organic produce, was being used as a “front” to channel foreign funds to run narratives furthering the cause of the proposed treaty in India.

This was being done on behalf of “foreign influencer groups”, it added.

The central agency also said that it was investigating Singh’s visit to Pakistan for the “Breathe Pakistan Summit” earlier last year.

His trip to Bangladesh in December during a period of “anti-India protests”, where he delivered a lecture at Sher-e-Bangla University allegedly without an official invitation, and met “various individuals unconnected to the stated purpose” of the visit was also being examined, it added.

Additionally, the funding for these trips was under scrutiny.

The statement further alleged that Singh and Awasthi diverted funds received from foreign non-governmental organisations to their personal accounts for private use.

An organisation of Kuki tribes in Manipur on Tuesday said that members of the Kuki-Zo community “cannot and shall not” participate in the formation of a new government in the state.

The Kuki-Zo Council’s governing body reiterated the demand made by the tribal groups for a separate Union Territory.

Manipur has been under President’s Rule since February 2025, when Bharatiya Janata Party leader N Biren Singh resigned as the chief minister.

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

Singh had stepped down amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the violence had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

While the Meiteis dominate the valley region, the Kukis are in the majority in the state’s hill districts.

Last month, BJP MLAs from Manipur were called to Delhi for a meeting, which had led to speculation about government formation in the state.

In this backdrop, the Kuki-Zo Council said on Tuesday that considering the “present realities and the unanimous sentiment that the Kuki-Zo people can no longer live together” with the Meitei community, its governing council was reaffirming its political demand for a separate administration in the form of a Union Territory.

The decision had been taken at the meeting of the council’s governing body on December 30 and was made public on Tuesday.

The Cabinet of the Kuki-Zo Council also said that if a person from the community takes part in the government formation, “such participation shall be solely at his or her own responsibility”.

The Committee on Tribal Unity, a Kuki group, on Wednesday said that it endorses the Kuki-Zo Council’s decision.

The group urged the Union government not to impose “stringent directives” on the 10 MLAs from the Kuki-Zo community for “political reconciliation with the valley-based representatives without first settling our political demand and resolving our security concerns for long term peace and stability in the region”.

Oxford University Press India on Tuesday issued a public apology for publishing what it described as “unverified” statements about 17th-century ruler Shivaji in a book released more than two decades ago, following objections by Satara MP Udayanraje Bhosale, the Hindustan Times reported.

Bhosale is the 13th-generation descendant of Shivaji.

Two decades ago, James Laine’s book “Chh.Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India” triggered massive outrage in Maharashtra for casting aspersions on Jijau Maa Saheb’s character. Today, the publisher Oxford University Press has officially issued an apology. pic.twitter.com/bPtSU2OfYM

— Mahesh Patil - Benadikar (@MaheshPatil_B) January 6, 2026

The apology relates to the book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India, written by American historian James Laine and published by Oxford University Press India in 2003.

The book became controversial after some groups objected to a statement about Shivaji’s parentage.

The remarks had sparked protests, and in January 2004 the controversy escalated across Maharashtra, particularly in Pune, where more than 150 protesters vandalised the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, alleging it had assisted the author in making the allegedly objectionable statements about Shivaji.

The Maharashtra government had banned the book.

In a public notice published in newspapers on Tuesday, Oxford University Press India said that certain statements on pages 31, 33, 34 and 93 of the book had not been verified, adding that it regretted the publication.

The publishing house said it was apologising to Bhosale and “the public at large, for any distress and anguish” caused to them.

The apology followed a directive from the Bombay High Court’s Kolhapur bench in a case arising from a complaint filed by Bhosale, in which criminal defamation proceedings had been initiated in 2005 against Oxford University Press India’s former Managing Director Sayeed Manzar Khan and others.

During the hearing on December 17, the publisher’s counsel said they were willing to issue a nationwide apology, after which the court quashed the proceedings.

A representative of the publishing house told The Times of India on Wednesday that the book had been published for a brief period more than 20 years ago, and that the publisher had taken steps at the time to recall the book and withdraw it from circulation following concerns about its content.

Oxford University Press India seeks to “consider cultural sensitivities and context carefully to ensure that our products can be read and enjoyed by as many people worldwide as possible”, the publishing house told the newspaper.

At least five police personnel were injured in clashes that broke out during an anti-encroachment drive near a mosque in Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan area on Wednesday, PTI reported.

The clashes occurred when the Municipal Corporation of Delhi was carrying out a demolition drive on land adjoining the Faiz Elahi Mosque and a nearby graveyard at Turkman Gate.

An unidentified official of the civic body was quoted as saying that the mosque was not damaged during the drive.

The Delhi Police have detained five people and lodged a first information report in connection with the violence, The Indian Express reported. Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central) Nidhin Valsan told the newspaper that “the five were detained based on beat intelligence for questioning and to cross check with CCTV footage,” adding that other individuals involved in the clashes are being identified.

The FIR has been registered under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita relating to obstructing a public servant, using assault or criminal force to deter a public servant, voluntarily causing hurt to prevent a public servant from performing their duty, rioting and disobeying a public servant’s order, as well as under the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act.

Valsan told PTI that the municipal corporation had scheduled the demolition for the intervening night of Tuesday and Wednesday, after which police personnel were deployed at the site.

Around 100-150 persons gathered at the spot when the demolition machinery was about to arrive.

Madhur Verma, Joint Commissioner of Police, Central Range was quoted as saying by The Hindu that “a few miscreants” attempted to create disturbance by throwing stones.

“The situation was promptly brought under control through measured and minimal use of force, ensuring that normalcy was restored without escalation,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

The demolition drive followed a December 22 order of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi declaring that structures beyond 0.19 acres of land around the mosque were encroachments and liable to be removed, The Hindu reported.

The civic body said that no documentary evidence had been produced to establish ownership or lawful possession of the land by the mosque’s managing committee or the Delhi Waqf Board. The mosque is located within the 0.19-acre land.

The corporation’s order was issued after a November 12 direction of a division bench of the Delhi High Court, which granted the civic body and the Public Works Department three months to clear 38,940 square feet of encroachments near Ramlila Ground at Turkman Gate, The Hindu reported.

However, on Tuesday, the Delhi High Court said that the matter “requires consideration” while hearing a plea filed by the mosque’s managing committee challenging the December 22 order.

Every winter, Delhi and dozens of other Indian cities disappear under a toxic blanket of smog. The arguments are predictable: stubble burning, factory emissions, construction sites, vehicle exhaust. Yet we ignore one of the simplest solutions: walkable cities.

Walking is already how most Indians move through cities. Studies consistently show that up to 60% of daily urban trips are made on foot, especially by members of low-income households who cannot afford cars or even public transport. For millions of Indians, walking is an economic compulsion.

However, in 2023 alone, 35,221 pedestrians were killed on Indian roads – 20.4% of all road fatalities that year, according to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. Between 2019 and 2023, nearly 1.5 lakh pedestrians died as a result of vehicle crashes, about one in every five road deaths in that period, a Supreme Court panel audit estimated.

These accidents occurred because India’s infrastructure does not value pedestrians.

Most Indians walk. But Indian cities are built for cars.

Across urban and semi-urban India, footpaths are either missing or unusable. Where they exist, they are broken, narrowed by shop extensions, encroached upon by vendors, blocked by electric poles, billboards, and open drains or simply taken over by parked vehicles.

Pedestrians are routinely forced into fast-moving traffic. What should be the safest and cleanest mode of transport has become one of the most dangerous.

This failure makes air pollution worse. When walking becomes risky and unpleasant, people turn to two-wheelers and cars even for distances under 1km-2km. More vehicles flood in. Fuel and vehicular emissions rise. The congestion never ends.

Proper footpath infrastructure can reduce private motorised trips by 9%-29% in Indian cities where walkability improved, studies show. Fewer vehicles on the road mean cleaner air, lower fuel imports, healthier cities.

Instead, roads are widened, flyovers are built, public money is poured into car-oriented infrastructure. Traffic eases for a few months, then more vehicles take to the streets. This locks cities into higher emissions and perpetual congestion.

The problem runs deeper than engineering. Footpaths are treated as leftover or extra space: what remains after cars are accommodated. Pedestrians are marginal in planning documents and invisible on the street. Master plans speak of “pedestrian priority” and “non-motorised transport” but the implementation is token.

Fixing this cannot be left to municipal engineers alone. It demands coordination across the departments that oversee transport, urban development, public works, the police and health. Pedestrian infrastructure must become mandatory in all road projects.

Continuous, obstruction-free footpaths, safe crossings, proper lighting, traffic calming at intersections and guaranteed access to public transport must be non-negotiable design features.

Encroachments – public and private alike – must be penalised without political discretion. Budget lines for footpaths should not be the first to be cut.

But a genuinely walkable city places everyday needs – markets, schools, clinics, bus stops, workplaces – within a short walking distance. This demands compact, mixed-use urban form. Dense neighbourhoods with shops, services and homes close together naturally reduce the need for motorised travel and create the kind of street life that improves safety and social trust.

India is moving in the opposite direction. Low-density gated communities proliferate 15km-20km from city centres. Inside the walls are landscaped walking tracks, manicured gardens. Outside there is car dependence for every errand: groceries, school runs, work and healthcare all require driving. This setup forces everyone into cars, increases emissions, and splits the city between those who drive and those stuck on dangerous streets.

It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of development. Political success is still measured in flyovers, expressways, IT corridors, malls – infrastructure that serves the car-owning minority. Inclusive development would prioritise the majority who walk, cycle or depend on public transport.

Walkable streets boost local commerce, lower healthcare costs, improve workforce productivity and it is great for the environment.

The class bias is also unmistakable. Resistance to pedestrianisation – whether in India’s shopping districts or market streets elsewhere – rests on the claim that cars are essential for business. Evidence shows the opposite: pedestrian-friendly streets attract more footfall and higher retail spending. Walkable streets benefit everyone – formal and informal workers, women, children, the elderly, the poor and the elite.

Public campaigns urging people to “walk more” ring hollow when streets are structurally hostile to walking. Behaviour cannot change without infrastructure. Why will people risk their lives for clean air?

Walkability alone is not the solution to India’s pollution crisis. But without it, no pollution-control strategy will succeed. Walkable streets reduce emissions, strengthen public transport and improve public health. Most importantly, they return dignity to how most Indians actually move around.

A shift in priorities will treat pedestrians as first-class users of urban space, not intrusions into traffic flow. New fuels and electric vehicles may certainly reduce emissions, but cleaner air will become reality when walking – the simplest, oldest form of transport – is finally given the respect, safety, and space it deserves.

Rajesh Advani is a founding editor at ArchitectureLive! and Unbuilt Ideas.

Bangladesh’s Youth and Sports Adviser Asif Nazrul said on Sunday that the country’s cricket team will not travel to India for the 2026 Twenty20 World Cup, scheduled to begin on February 7.

“Bangladesh Cricket Board has taken this decision today,” Nazrul wrote on social media. “We welcome this decision taken in the context of the violent communal policy of the Cricket Board of India.”

This came a day after the Kolkata Knight Riders dropped Bangladeshi cricketer Mustafizur Rahman from its squad ahead of the upcoming Indian Premier League, following instructions from the Board of Control for Cricket in India.

The decision had come amid diplomatic tensions between New Delhi and Dhaka after the killing of a Hindu man in Bangladesh in December. India has also repeatedly condemned hostilities against religious minorities in the country.

On Sunday, Khaled Mashud Pilot, the director of the Bangladesh Cricket Board, told The Business Standard that the country had sent a letter to the International Cricket Council, “requesting that our match be moved from India to Sri Lanka”.

“If they [India] cannot provide security to one of our players, how will they ensure the security of our entire team?” said Pilot. “That is why we will not go there to play.”

India is co-hosting the World Cup with Sri Lanka, as Pakistan has refused to play in the country.

The International Cricket Council is yet to respond to Bangladesh’s request.

Kolkata Knight Riders, a franchise co-owned by actor Shah Rukh Khan, had hired Rahman at the players’ auction on December 16. The 30-year-old was one among seven Bangladeshi players in the auction pool but the only one to find bidders.

Rahman’s inclusion in the franchise had triggered a controversy, with political parties and spiritual leaders criticising Khan for hiring the player.

Spiritual leader Jagadguru Swami Rambhadracharya described the actor as a “traitor” for hiring the Bangladeshi player. Another Hindu spiritual leader, Devkinandan Thakur, had also criticised the actor for hiring Rahman in light of the situation in Bangladesh.

The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) described Bangladeshis as “enemies” and said that Khan did not understand the sentiments of the nation if he retained Rahman in the squad.

“They are terrorising the country, and Shah Rukh Khan should use this time to show gratitude towards the country,” The Hindu quoted the party as saying. “Boycott these players, choose Indian players.”

Rahman has played in eight Indian Premier League seasons since 2016. He has played for Sunrisers Hyderabad, Mumbai Indians, Delhi Capitals, Chennai Super Kings and Rajasthan Royals. The upcoming edition was going to be his first for Kolkata Knight Riders.

The National Medical Commission on Tuesday withdrew approval for the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence in Jammu and Kashmir’s Reasi district to run its MBBS course for the academic year 2025-’26, the Hindustan Times reported.

The regulatory body for medical education said that to safeguard the interests of students already admitted, the authorities in the Union Territory have been authorised to accommodate them in other medical colleges.

The Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence had seen protests in December after the release of its first admissions list for its MBBS programme by the Jammu and Kashmir Board of Professional Entrance Examinations.

Of the 50 candidates selected for the institute’s first MBBS batch, 44 were Muslims from Kashmir and six were Hindus from Jammu. Of the six Hindu candidates selected, only three reportedly joined the course.

The protests were led by the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Sangharsh Samiti, with members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, its parent organisation the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and other Hindutva groups also participating.

Protesters had demanded that the first admission list be cancelled and that preference be given to Hindu students, as the institute was set up through donations to the Vaishno Devi shrine.

However, the rules do not allow for considering religion as a factor for admissions, as the college is not classified as a minority institute, The Indian Express reported.

In a letter issued on Tuesday, the National Medical Commission said that its Medical Assessment and Rating Board had invited applications in December 2024 for new medical colleges for the 2025-’26 academic year, the Hindustan Times reported.

After “scrutiny of documents and physical inspection” the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence was granted the Letter of Permission to run an MBBS course with 50 seats for the academic year.

“Accordingly, admissions were made by the institution,” the Hindustan Times quoted the letter as saying. “Over the past two weeks, the [commission] has received multiple complaints containing serious allegations against the institution…regarding inadequate infrastructure, insufficient clinical material, shortage of qualified full-time teaching faculty and inadequate number of resident doctors.”

After receiving complaints, the Medical Assessment and Rating Board conducted a surprise physical inspection and found that the “deficiencies” were “gross and substantial in nature”, the commission said.

The regulatory body was further quoted by the newspaper as saying: “Continuation of the institution under such circumstances would have seriously jeopardised the quality of medical education and adversely affected the academic interests of the students.”

United States President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was “not that happy” with him because of the tariffs imposed by Washington on New Delhi for purchasing Russian oil, PTI reported.

Speaking at the House GOP Member Retreat, Trump claimed that the tariffs had prompted New Delhi to reduce its imports from Russia.

“Prime Minister Modi came to see me, ‘Sir, may I see you please’,” PTI quoted Trump as saying. "I have a very good relationship with him.”

The US president added: “He is not that happy with me because you know they are paying a lot of tariffs now because they're not doing the oil, but they are, they’ve now reduced it very substantially, as you know, from Russia.”

Trump has repeatedly alleged that the import of discounted Russian oil by countries, including India, was fuelling Moscow’s war.

In August, the Trump administration doubled the tariffs on goods imported from India to 50% for purchasing Russian oil. A 25% so-called reciprocal tariff had already taken effect.

New Delhi had said at the time that it was “extremely unfortunate” that the US had chosen to impose the punitive levies on India “for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest”.

Trump’s remarks on Tuesday came a day after he said the US could further raise tariffs on India if New Delhi does not cut Russian oil imports.

Speaking to reporters about US policy and trade ties with India, he said his administration expected greater support from New Delhi in reducing such purchases.

On Monday, Trump said: “They wanted to make me happy, basically… Prime Minister Modi’s a very good man. He’s a good guy. He knew I was not happy. It was important to make me happy. They do trade, and we can raise tariffs on them very quickly.”

India’s Ministry of External Affairs or the embassy in Washington have not yet commented on Trump’s recent comments. New Delhi has maintained that ensuring stable energy prices and secure supplies were the goals of India’s energy policy.

The Congress on Monday criticised the Union government saying that India deserved an independent foreign policy and “not silent submission”.

On Sunday, The Hindu reported that India’s Russian oil imports had risen to a six-month high in volume and value in November. However, India also increased its purchases of oil from the US to a seven-month high that month, the report added.

When Pia Sethi accompanied her friend Nitu Sethi to Great Nicobar this summer, she was hoping to get a glimpse of some of the island’s rare and endemic bird species. Nitu, an avid birdwatcher, maintained what is referred to as a “life list”, of all the species that a birder sees in their lifetime. The two hoped to add some names to Nitu’s list on their trip.

What they were not expecting was to chance upon a bird new to science.

On a May evening, Pia and Nitu were in a forest in Campbell Bay, looking for the slaty-legged crake, an orange-headed bird with black and white stripes on its belly. Suddenly, they heard a bird call that they could not identify – they did not manage to find the source of the call.

Pia, who is an ecologist and a senior fellow at the Centre for Ecology Development and Research, in Dehradun, remembered that she had read about the possibility that the island housed another species of crake, as yet unconfirmed. Excited by the prospect of spotting it, the duo along with Vikram Shill, a bird tour guide from Port Blair, returned to the site the next morning. As they walked around, they saw a bird cross the road and disappear into vegetation. It was not a slaty-legged crake; it had far less distinct black and white stripes on its underbelly. Further, while the slaty-legged crake has a dark beak and grey legs, this bird had a pale green beak and orange-red legs.

Pia took quick photographs of the bird, while others captured the first-ever recording of its call. Later, the three analysed the call and the bird’s physical characteristics, and confirmed in a paper they jointly authored that it was likely to be a new species – it is colloquially being called the Nicobar crake, and has yet to be given an official name.

“In areas like Great Nicobar, you never neglect things like unrecognised calls, because you never know what you might see, since the islands are so under-surveyed,” Pia told Scroll.

Their discovery was not an unusual occurrence – apart from this bird, nearly 40 new species have been reported from the island in the last four years, including flies, beetles, frogs and a snake.

But a shadow looms over such discoveries: the crake and the new species of snake were found in Galathea Bay, where the Indian government plans to build an international transshipment port, as well as in Gandhi Nagar and Govind Nagar, which are sites of a new airport proposed on the island. This infrastructure is part of the Rs 92,000-crore Holistic Development of Great Nicobar Island project, which also includes a new township and a power plant. Nearly 10 million trees of ancient rainforests will be cut for the project, which will occupy almost 20% of the island.

Ecologists and activists fear that the project will spell doom for a range of flora and fauna on the island, much of which has not even been identified. “The fact that you are finding these new species just shows that we have not even scratched the surface of the different types of species found in Great Nicobar,” Pia said. The upcoming project worried her immensely, especially since “these sightings have happened exactly where it is coming up”, she said.

Why species are unique in the islands

Of the over 8,000 species of fauna that have been recorded on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, around 1,100 are listed as endemic by the Zoological Survey of India – that is, they do not occur naturally anywhere else in the world. Specifically, 33% of birds, 50% of reptiles and 24% of the insects found on the islands are endemic to them.

Biologists note that the islands have a high level of endemism because they have long been geographically isolated from the main landmasses.

Islands in the two groups also have species that are distinct from each other because they formed from different geographic landmasses – the Andaman’s northern islands were joined with the landmass of Myanmar, while its southern islands and the Nicobar islands were joined with the Sumatra landmass.

“Migration and dispersal abilities of wildlife have been influential in the species structure of these islands,” said Zeeshan Mirza, a biologist with the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Germany. When these islands were connected to their respective landmasses, he explained, it is possible, for instance, that a mammal would have walked up to a certain point and established itself, but that subsequently, sea levels rose to form an island, thus preventing it from dispersing further.

Biologists involved in the discoveries of the new crake and the snake, known as Irwin’s wolf snake, suggest that based on the limited data, these new species too, are likely endemic to the island.

Mirza, who was a co-author of the paper that officially recorded the new snake species, added that he was “100% sure” that there are more species to be discovered on the islands. In both groups of islands, he added, “We have seen photos of snakes from the place and not been able to immediately recognise the species.”

“Description” of species

Once a species is discovered, it needs to go through a rigorous process of “description” – it is only after this that it is recognised globally as a species.

Typically, for this process, scientists deposit at least one specimen in a museum or a laboratory. Researchers study this specimen closely, documenting its physical attributes in detail, and making comparisons with other closely related species. “This ensures that what you are describing is something new, along with strong evidence,” said Harikrishnan S, manager of the Amphibian Recovery Project with Wildlife Trust of India, who worked on the reptiles and amphibians of Andaman and Nicobar Islands between 2008 and 2014.

After this process, those overseeing the study usually publish their findings in a peer-reviewed publication and suggest a name for it.

In the case of the Nicobar crake, the recent paper provides details about how and where it was discovered, and some of its physical attributes – but the species is yet to be fully described, a process that would entail further research and the collection of samples such as feathers, through which its genetic material can be analysed. For now, it is listed as “undescribed”.

But Pia noted that this process might need time, since the bird is known to be “shy” and is hard to find – meanwhile, the infrastructure project is rolling steadily forward. “Are we losing the bird without it being ever described to science?” she said.

Time for identification

Biologists noted that to identify new species, it was essential that an ecosystem be left undisturbed over time – since correct identification is often a long process that can begin with misidentification.

For instance, while Irwin’s wolf snake was formally listed as a new species this year, it was first documented more than a decade ago, in 2010. At that time, however, the available morphological information of the snake’s physical attributes, like its color and shape, suggested that it was similar to the Malay wolf snake found across south-east Asia. “Because of increasing interest in taxonomy, scientists started looking at it in greater detail, and started realising that these are different species,” said Harikrishnan, who was part of the team that first discovered the snake on the island in 2010.

Later, a team that included Mirza re-examined the specimen of the snake collected by Harikrishnan, as well as a new specimen, and conducted molecular comparisons with other closely related snake species. Their study found that the snake had a “distinct lineage”, and the biologists went ahead to describe and gave it the scientific name Lycodon irwini, after the Australian conservationist Steve Irwin.

“This is only possible because we are accumulating and gaining more information about the snake,” said Harikrishnan.

The discovery of the Nicobar crake also had a similar trajectory. It was first found on Great Nicobar in 2012. At first, scientists reasoned that it might be a distinct species – but after the red legged and slaty-legged crake were discovered in subsequent years, scientists speculated that the other bird might be a hybrid between the two species.

It was only 13 years later that Pia and her team analysed the bird's characteristics and concluded that there was a likelihood that it was a new species. Among the evidence that the team assessed was the bird’s physical attributes – they found that in the few sightings of the bird over a decade, its physical traits had remained consistent. This, they noted, meant that it was unlikely that it was a hybrid, since hybrids typically display less consistent characteristics.

Pia’s team’s analysis of the bird’s call also contributed to the conclusion. “Even though it is fairly similar sounding to the red-legged crake found on the island, the Nicobar crake was more halting, had fewer notes per phrase, and more gaps between phrases,” said Pia.

Mirza argued that to allow for such discoveries, even if the infrastructure project went through, it was vital that some areas be left untouched for wildlife to thrive. This could help avoid a “complete wipeout” of the island’s species, he noted. But even to identify these important areas, he said, “there needs to be more research”.

“It’s much easier to wipe out a forest when there is nothing recorded in the forest,” said Mirza.

The administration of Jawaharlal Nehru University on Tuesday wrote to the Delhi Police seeking the registration of a first information report after students allegedly shouted slogans against Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah during a protest held on campus, The Indian Express reported.

The protest on Monday had been organised by the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union to mark six years since a mob stormed the campus on January 5, 2020, leaving several students and teachers injured.

Videos of the alleged sloganeering during the protest had been circulated on social media.

In a letter to the Vasant Kunj (North) Police on Tuesday, the security department of the university said that a programme had been organised at about 10 pm a day earlier by students “associated with the JNUSU”.

The letter claimed that the gathering near the Sabarmati Hostel on campus initially appeared to commemorate the January 5, 2020, incident and about 30 to 35 students participated, The Telegraph reported.

However, the letter said that “the nature and tone of the gathering changed significantly” after the Supreme Court denied bail to activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who are accused of being part of an alleged larger conspiracy behind the 2020 Delhi riots.

Subsequently, some students “began raising highly objectionable, provocative, and inflammatory slogans”, it added.

“Such an act reflects a wilful disrespect for constitutional institutions and established norms of civil and democratic discourse,” The Telegraph quoted the letter as saying. “All stakeholders must understand the clear distinction between dissent, abuse and hate speech which leads to public disorder.”

The slogans were “clearly audible, deliberate and repeated”, the university administration said, adding that they reflected “intentional and conscious misconduct rather than any spontaneous or inadvertent expression”.

It further claimed that the actions were “in direct contempt of the Supreme Court” and violated the code of conduct of the university.

The letter also listed several students who were allegedly “identified during the programme”, including four members of the students’ union, The Indian Express reported.

In a separate statement on Tuesday, the Jawaharlal Nehru University administration said that it had taken “serious cognisance” of the videos being circulated of the protest organised near the Sabarmati Hostel, India Today reported.

“The raising of such slogans is wholly inconsistent with democratic dissent, violates the JNU code of conduct, and has the potential to seriously disturb public order, campus harmony, and the safety and security environment of the university and the nation,” India Today quoted the statement.

Aditi Mishra, president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, told PTI that students hold a protest every year to denounce the violence that took place on the campus on January 5, 2020.

“All of the slogans raised in the protest were ideological and do not attack anyone personally,” the news agency quoted her as saying. “They were not directed towards anyone.”

Incident triggers row

The incident has triggered a war of words between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Opposition.

Union Minister Giriraj Singh told ANI that Jawaharlal Nehru University had become the “office of the ‘tukde tukde’ gang”, adding that those who harbour pro-Pakistan sentiments would not be tolerated in the country.

Leaders from the BJP and its affiliated organisations often accuse their opponents and dissidents of being members of a “tukde tukde” gang, or a group of persons trying to divide India.

Singh said that “people like [Congress leader] Rahul Gandhi, [Trinamool Congress] TMC, communists are part of this gang”, adding that these individuals “do not even believe in the Supreme Court”, India Today reported.

“Slogans are being raised against PM Modi, Amit Shah,” he said. “Such people should be tried for treason…The graves of enemies have been dug before, and they will be dug again.”

#WATCH | Pune | On the reported sloganeering against PM Modi and Union HM Amit Shah in JNU campus yesterday, Union Minister Giriraj Singh says, "JNU has become the office of the 'Tukde-Tukde Gang' and people with anti-national mindsets like Rahul Gandhi, whether they belong to… pic.twitter.com/bLJuZR6UoJ

— ANI (@ANI) January 6, 2026

BJP leader Shahnawaz Hussain also said that the slogans were shouted to vent frustration against the prime minister after Khalid and Imam were denied bail by the Supreme Court, India Today reported.

Congress leader Rashid Alvi, however, suggested that those who shouted the slogans were associated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

“Delhi Police has claimed that they had information on this, so why did they not make arrests before?” ANI quoted Alvi as saying. “I am confident that those who raised the slogans were associated with RSS and BJP... This is the same policy as Hitler had, which benefited him.”

Congress leader Udit Raj also claimed that the sloganeering was a way of expressing resentment, India Today reported.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday criticised the Commission for Air Quality Management for what it described as an “unserious” approach towards tackling the air pollution crisis in the National Capital Region, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi directed the statutory body, formed in 2020 to address pollution in the National Capital Region and adjoining areas, to convene a meeting of experts in two weeks and submit a report on the major causes of the worsening air quality, PTI reported.

The court was hearing a batch of petitions on the poor air quality in the national capital.

Noting that the commission was failing in its duty, the bench criticised it for seeking a two-month adjournment on the temporary closure or relocation of toll plazas at the borders of Delhi to ease traffic congestion.

On December 17, the court had suggested the closure of toll plazas in the National Capital Region.

“Have you been able to identify the causes of pollution?” PTI quoted the bench as asking the statutory body on Tuesday. “During all these days, a lot of material is coming in public domain, experts are writing articles, people are having opinions, they keep on sending to us on mail.”

The court noted that expert bodies had varying views about the sources of pollution and their proportions leading to the deterioration in air quality.

In its order, the bench said that several expert institutions, including technical bodies such as the Indian Institute of Technology, had attributed widely varying percentages to the causes of pollution.

The court observed that the air quality in the National Capital Region remained persistently poor, if not aggravated, despite several measures taken over time. It added that it had been compelled to take up the matter intermittently over the years and seek advice from experts.

However, the situation continued to deteriorate, it said.

The bench, referring to another order passed on December 17, said that the commission had been directed to look into long-term remedial measures to tackle air pollution.

The statutory body filed a status note, which the bench said did not “reflect any seriousness on the part of the authority, and is unfortunately silent on most of the issues raised by this court”, Live Law reported.

It also observed that the commission did not appear to be in a hurry to either identify the causes of worsening air quality or to formulate long-term solutions.

The court said that the Commission for Air Quality Management was obligated to bring all relevant domain experts under one umbrella and arrive at a uniform set of causes based on available data, Live Law reported.

The bench said that the report identifying the major causes of pollution, which will be submitted to the court, would be placed in the public domain.

The commission was asked to look into long-term solutions and plan their phased implementation. It also directed the statutory body to consider the matter on the toll plaza in the National Capital Region without being influenced by the stance taken by stakeholders, PTI reported.

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

Names of 2.8 crore voters were removed from the draft voter lists in Uttar Pradesh as part of the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls. Of the total, 2.1 crore names were of those who had shifted from their registered residences, 46.2 lakh were voters who had died and 25.4 lakh were duplicate entries, said the State Election Commission.

The names of 12.5 crore out of the total 15.4 crore have been retained. This is the largest number of deletions that have been reported among the 12 states and Union Territories where the voter rolls are being revised. Citizens whose names have been dropped from the list will be able to file claims and objections till February 6. Read on.

Reliance Industries said that it has not received any deliveries of Russian oil at its Jamnagar refinery in the past three weeks. The Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate added that it was not expecting consignments in January.

The statement came in response to a report by Bloomberg on Friday, which cited data from analytics firm Kpler to say that three ships carrying Russian oil were heading to the refinery in Gujarat. The report is “blatantly untrue”, Reliance said.

On November 20, Reliance Industries said that it had stopped importing Russian oil into its Jamnagar refinery and that it will abide by western sanctions against Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Read on.

The Madras High Court upheld an order passed by Justice GR Swaminathan allowing the lighting of a lamp at a stone pillar on Thiruparankundram hill near Tamil Nadu’s Madurai. The hillock has the Arulmigu Subramania Swamy temple and the Sikkandar Badhusha dargah.

Swaminathan had ruled on December 1 that the stone pillar was a deepathoon, or a structure designed to hold lamps, and that the temple should restore the tradition of lighting the lamp at the site. He had also held that the practice would not infringe upon the religious rights of the Muslim shrine nearby.

The Tamil Nadu government, the temple authorities and the dargah management, among others, had challenged the order, raising concerns about law and order, ownership of the site and the nature of the ritual that had been allowed. Read on.

‘RSS agenda, favours Brahmins’: The controversial career of a Madras HC judge under impeachment fire

The Supreme Court asked Haryana if it can show magnanimity and deny the sanction to prosecute Ashoka University Associate Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad in the case pertaining to his comments about the press briefings on Operation Sindoor. If the state government is willing to show leniency in the matter, Mahmudabad must also “act in a very responsible manner” in the future, said the bench.

Mahmudabad had been booked in May for a social media post highlighting the apparent irony of Hindutva commentators praising Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who had represented the Indian Army at the press briefings. Read on.

Why Ashoka University professor’s arrest has no legal basis

Former Union minister Suresh Kalmadi died at a hospital in Pune following a prolonged illness. Kalmadi, who had served as Union Minister of State for Railways and as the president of the Indian Olympic Association, represented Pune for three terms in the Lok Sabha.

He had been suspended from the Congress in 2011 after he was accused of corruption while handing out contracts for the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in 2010. He was then the chairman of the CWG Organising Committee. He had been arrested in April 2011 and was granted bail about nine months later. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked Haryana if it can show magnanimity and deny the sanction to prosecute Ashoka University Associate Professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad in the case pertaining to his comments about the press briefings on Operation Sindoor, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi was quoted as saying that if the state government is willing to show leniency in the matter, Mahmudabad must also “act in a very responsible manner” in the future.

Mahmudabad, who heads the political science department at Ashoka University, had been booked in May for a social media post highlighting the apparent irony of Hindutva commentators praising Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, who had represented the Indian Army during the press briefings.

He had said that the optics of the press briefings by Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh were important, “but optics must translate to reality on the ground otherwise it’s just hypocrisy”.

“Perhaps they [commentators] could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings, arbitrary bulldozing and others who are victims of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s hate mongering be protected as Indian citizens,” he had said.

Mahmudabad was arrested on May 18 but was granted bail by the Supreme Court three days later.

However, the court had at the time declined to halt the investigation against him. It had also instructed the Haryana Police chief to form a Special Investigation Team to look into the meaning of the words used by Mahmudabad.

Mahmudabad faces charges under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to acts prejudicial to maintaining communal harmony, making assertions likely to cause disharmony, acts endangering national sovereignty and words or gestures intended to insult a woman’s modesty, among others.

The comments by the Supreme Court on Tuesday came after Additional Solicitor General SV Raju informed the bench that while the chargesheet in the matter had been filed in August, the Haryana government’s approval to prosecute Mahmudabad was pending.

Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Mahmudabad, agreed to the comments made by the bench, Live Law reported.

The court said it will hear the matter after six weeks to allow Raju to take instructions from the state government on whether it is willing to show “one-time magnanimity and close the issue”.

On August 25, the Supreme Court restrained a magistrate from taking cognisance of the chargesheet filed by the Haryana Police’s Special Investigation Team in the case. It had also quashed all proceedings in the second first information report against Mahmudabad in the matter, based on a police closure report.

The Haryana State Women’s Commission had accused the professor of attempting to “vilify national military actions”.

The panel said that he had ignored its summons on May 14. It further said that when the commission visited the university on May 15, he did not appear before it.

Mahmudabad has said that he only exercised his fundamental right to freedom of speech in order to promote peace and harmony.

The professor maintained that his remarks had been “completely misunderstood” by the commission and that its notice failed to highlight how his posts were “contrary to the right of or laws for women”.

Also read:

• Why Ashoka University professor’s arrest has no legal basis
• Harsh Mander: The message from the persecution of Ali Khan Mahmudabad

Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dushyant Gautam, who is in charge of the party’s Uttarakhand unit, has filed a defamation petition in the Delhi High Court against the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party, actress Urmila Sanawar and others for social media posts linking him to the 2022 Ankita Bhandari murder case, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

Gautam alleged that the online posts by Sanawar falsely linked him to Bhandari’s murder at a resort near Haridwar, causing him severe reputational harm, The New Indian Express reported.

In December, Sanawar had uploaded videos and an audio recording of her alleged phone conversation with her supposed former husband, expelled BJP MLA Suresh Rathore, in which Gautam was allegedly mentioned.

Following the social media posts, the Congress and other Opposition parties had alleged that Gautam was also involved in the case and demanded a Central Bureau of Investigation probe in the matter.

Bhandari worked as a receptionist at a resort in Rishikesh that was owned by Pulkit Arya, son of former BJP leader Vinod Arya. She went missing on September 18, 2022. A day later, Pulkit Arya, resort manager Saurabh Bhaskar and assistant manager Ankit Gupta filed a missing person report.

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

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

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

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

In his defamation suit, Gautam accused Uttarakhand Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal, the AAP, Sanawar, Rathore and several users of the social media platform X of defamation. Social media platforms Meta, Google and X have also been accused of defamation by him.

“Serious allegations have been levelled against me, suggesting I was the ‘VIP’ connected to the Ankita Bhandari case, all without any judicial conclusion,” The New Indian Express quoted his petition as having said.

The plea said that despite clarifications and the registration of first information reports, the content continued to be shared without correction or apology, causing ongoing harm to his reputation.

He has sought damages of about Rs 2 crore and injunctions to restrain further circulation of the material, The New Indian Express reported.

Gautam also filed a police complaint against Rathore, Sanawar, the Congress and the AAP, citing provisions of the Information Technology Act and defamation under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, The Indian Express reported.

In the complaint, he alleged that the audio and video clips had been deliberately circulated to defame him, damage the image of the BJP, provoke the public and disturb public order.

The Uttarakhand Police said a case had been registered based on Gautam’s complaint and that the evidence provided would be examined, ANI reported.

Matter being politicised, alleges chief minister

Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami on Tuesday said that no one was being shielded from an investigation and alleged that the matter was being politicised, The Indian Express reported.

“When the paper leak protests began, it was also sparked by an audio,” Dhami was quoted as saying. “This time, another audio clip has led to the current state. Doesn’t this look like a conspiracy to you?”.

The chief minister said that a Special Investigation Team had been set up to investigate the audio clip and check the credibility of the claims.

The police are trying to trace Sanawar and Rathore, Dhami said.

As a modern Indian historian, I am accustomed to reading the records produced by the colonial state “against the grain”. This means reading them for purposes they were not intended to serve. It means retrieving, from the condemnations and indictments of the colonial record, some sense of the persons who would, in our times, be seen as the architects of the independence we enjoy, of the liberties we take for granted.

This is as true of the peasants of 1830s Mysore who rose in rebellion, as it is for those who took part in declaring freedom from British rule in 1942, in a small village of Issur, also in Mysore. They all paid the price so that we might be free.

So it is the historian in me that hopes that the Supreme Court’s decision to deny bail to activists Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid as a document will be read “against the grain”, perhaps in the not-too-distant a future. One must today divorce hope from reason in order to do this. Such an action is vital to our sanity today.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to be in the Delhi region in late 2019 early 2020, such as myself, were able to witness, if not participate, in one of independent India’s most creative, sustained, non-violent and therefore powerful movements against the Indian state’s intention to restrict definitions of a hard-won citizenship.

The movement brought onto the streets, quite literally, large numbers of Muslim women who had rarely participated in public political life, and who sustained their movement for weeks, with little or no overt political support.

Is it any wonder that young people were mesmerised by the hopes of that moment, that site, which experimented with new styles and repertoires of protest and communication? Is it any wonder that Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, given their interest in historical research and their political awareness, were drawn to the movement, like many of their age and background?

Can't make this up:

The court held that Khalid's and Imam's prolonged custody of 5+ years without trial is a serious concern, but in this case, “it has not reached a stage where detention has become unconstitutional”.
https://t.co/RY4f3vNMYy via @scroll_in

— shoaib daniyal (@ShoaibDaniyal) January 6, 2026

Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid were no bomb-throwing revolutionaries. I taught both of them, and they impressed me with their intelligence, diligence and capacity for thinking differently. I did not always agree with the ideas they had. They both shared the arrogance of youth, which was sometimes irritating. But like most students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (and the Centre for Historical Studies), they were passionately attached to argument, driven by the elemental hunger to read, write, argue, and speak boldly, sometimes even giddily, of many things that had come into their grasp.

Jawaharlal Nehru University’s mission was to provide that intellectual space where the young could take the risks of thinking, arguing, and arriving at conclusions, even dreams that may remain unrealized. This happened not only in our classrooms, and seminars, but in our canteens, messes, open spaces, and in the wonderful “philosophy of the night” that went on into the wee hours in all our hostels, night after night.

Can we fault Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid, Natasha Narwal or Devangana Kalita for dreaming of a better world than the one our generation had left them? Many students from the Centre for Historial Studies were similarly gripped by the desire to build a new future. Our students enjoyed and appreciated the chance of framing questions, reading sources, and assessing ideas on their own. Some of these were harebrained, some shot through with brilliance.

But the Centre for Historical Studies and Jawaharlal Nehru University fostered spaces where these, and other contrary ideas could be tried out, adopted, defeated in argument, or abandoned, without fear of reprisal.

Instead, Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid have been incarcerated for five-plus-one-more years of the most creative, productive time of their lives – all because of words they chose to use in public.

On this 75th year of our Republic, we must commemorate figures like Sharjeel and Umar who are paying a heavy price for their speech acts, ideas. We must never forget, that legions of others, who openly called for violence against other Indians, continue to enjoy their freedoms today, and even occupy public office – because they have the right names, and have the right political patrons.

This reverberating sound of the National Anthem is the mark of Shaheen Bagh's love for the country.
India is our nation and we our its citizens.
Come celebrate #JantakaRepublicDay pic.twitter.com/p96NWRngdp

— Shaheen Bagh Official (@Shaheenbaghoff1) January 26, 2020

We have become acutely aware of the contradictions that BR Ambedkar had warned us about. He had known that democracy was just top dressing in India. He knew that violent contradictions would erupt when the social structure of our inherently hierarchical, unjust society collided with the Republic’s hard-won political freedoms and liberties.

As the insightful literary scholar, Rahamat Tarikere, has pointed out, India has a long history of producing some of the loftiest ideas, whether religious or not, but our social practice has never matched these ideals. What chance of a less inequitable world – I hesitate to use the more decisive “just’ and ‘equal” – when the very people who are capable of dreaming that possibility, our young, are forced into a form of social death?

But I am confident that Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid will emerge from these trials with all their ideals intact. In fact, I am sure, that even behind those prison walls, they think, read, dream, and survive, perhaps even transforming the oppressive space to which they have been condemned.

Here I can do no more than cite the brilliant words of Mahmoud Dervish, the Palestinian poet, translated by Ben Bennani:

It is possible . . .
It is possible at least sometimes . . .
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away . . .

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers:

What did you do with the walls?

I gave them back to the rocks.
And what did you do with the ceiling?
I turned it into a saddle.
And your chain?
I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

He came back to see me
In the morning.
He shouted at me:

Where did all this water come from?
I brought it from the Nile.
And the trees?
From the orchards of Damascus.
And the music?
From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got mad.
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn’t like my poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:

Where did this moon come from?
From the nights of Baghdad.
And the wine?
From the vineyards of Algiers.
And this freedom?
From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad . . .
He begged me to give him back
His freedom.

Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar.

Janaki Nair taught at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University until her retirement in 2020.

Names of 2.8 crore voters were removed from the draft voter lists in Uttar Pradesh as part of the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls, announced the State Election Commission on Tuesday.

Of the names that were removed, 2.1 crore were of those who had shifted from their registered residences and 46.2 lakh were voters who had died. A total of 25.4 lakh names were duplicate entries, said Chief Electoral Officer Navdeep Rinwa.

The names of 12.5 crore out of the total 15.4 crore have been retained in the draft electoral rolls after the exercise, he added.

Rinwa said that mapping could not be done for 8.5% of the voters, among the names on the draft list.

“Such people will start receiving notices from today,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying. “The notice will contain a list of documents that they can submit for inclusion in the final list.”

This is the largest number of deletions that have been reported among the 12 states and Union Territories where the voter rolls are being revised. Tamil Nadu, with 97.3 lakh deletions, was at second spot and Gujarat, where 73.7 names were removed, was at third, as per the states’ draft rolls published in December.

The Election Commission had begun the exercise on November 4.

The deletion from the draft roll is provisional and citizens can object to their names being removed from the list. Citizens whose names have been dropped from the list will be able to file their claims and objections till February 6.

The process of issuing notices, hearing claims and objections and deciding on enumeration forms will be conducted from January 6 to February 27.

On Tuesday, Rinwa said that the final voter list in Uttar Pradesh will be published on March 6.

The draft voter list for Uttar Pradesh was published after being postponed three times since the exercise began.

The first extension was given on November 30 when the Election Commission extended the enumeration phase for all 12 states and Union Territories by one week from December 4 to December 11.

On December 11, the poll panel once again extended the enumeration deadline for six states and Union Territories, with Uttar Pradesh receiving the longest extension of two weeks.

The poll panel then postponed the publication of the draft list for the state for a third time from December 31 to January 6.

“… in UP, there were a large number of deletions – about 2.97 crore,” The Indian Express quoted Rinwa as saying on Tuesday. “Thus, we asked for another 15-day extension for UP from the EC. The field exercise ended on December 26.”

He added that during the extended deadline, another eight lakh were added to the list.

Before Uttar Pradesh, about 3.6 crore voters in the 11 other states and Union Territories had been deleted from the draft electoral rolls.

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

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners had moved the Supreme Court against it.

The Uttar Pradesh Police on Monday arrested the parents of a resident doctor at King George’s Medical University for alleged forcible religious conversion of two women, The Indian Express reported.

The matter pertains to a complaint filed by another resident doctor from the medical university with the police on December 23. She alleged that the doctor, Rameezuddin, who has been absconding, had started a relationship with her on the pretext of marriage, The Times of India reported.

He also allegedly forced her to terminate her pregnancy.

Another resident doctor at Agra Medical College also accused Rameezuddin of sexual assault, forcible religious conversion and causing a miscarriage.

Based on the complaints, a first information report was filed under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to sexual intercourse by employing deceitful means, causing miscarriage without the woman’s consent and criminal intimidation, besides charges related to religious conversion.

Deputy Commissioner of Police Vishwajeet Srivastava told The Times of India that 70-year-old Salimuddin and 60-year-old Khadija, parents of Rameezuddin, played a key role in the alleged conversion of the two women.

Police teams have been dispatched to trace Rameezuddin after obtaining a non-bailable warrant, The Indian Express reported. The police have also decided to move the court seeking directions to attach his property.

The police have also increased the reward for information about the absconding doctor from Rs 25,000 to Rs 50,000.

King George’s Medical University had suspended him after the complaint was filed on December 23.

A special court in Mumbai on Monday summoned businessperson Raj Kundra in connection with the Rs 2,000 crore GainBitcoin cryptocurrency scam case, in which he has been named as an accused by the Enforcement Directorate, The Indian Express reported.

The summons were also issued to Dubai-based businessperson Rajesh Satija. Both have been directed to appear before the court on January 19, PTI reported.

Special judge RB Rote took cognisance of a supplementary chargesheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate and directed that Kundra and Satija be summoned for offences under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

Kundra and Satija were named in the case in September in the supplementary chargesheet filed by the probe agency in the case.

Amit Bhardwaj, the promoter and founder of GainBitcoin, has been accused of cheating investors by promising high returns through cryptocurrency mining, The Indian Express reported.

According to the Delhi Police, Bhardwaj had allegedly set up a multi-level marketing scam by luring investors to give him bitcoins with the promise of higher returns. He never gave the returns and instead fled the country, the police said.

He was eventually traced to Bangkok and arrested in April 2018.

According to the Enforcement Directorate, Kundra received 285 bitcoins from Bhardwaj, which the agency has described as proceeds of crime, The Indian Express reported.

The agency alleged that the bitcoins were transferred for setting up a bitcoin mining farm in Ukraine, a plan that did not materialise, and that Kundra continues to be in possession of the cryptocurrency, currently valued at more than Rs 150 crore, PTI reported.

In his statement to the agency, Kundra said that Bhardwaj had approached him through social media and that they had discussions related to bitcoins. He claimed that he acted only as a mediator for the transfer of the 285 bitcoins on behalf of an Israeli friend, The Indian Express reported.

However, the Enforcement Directorate said Kundra did not provide “any underlying documentary evidence to prove the same”, PTI reported.

The agency further alleged that despite several opportunities since 2018, Kundra failed to provide wallet addresses to trace the bitcoins, stating that the phone he was using at the time had been damaged, the news agency reported.

The agency has alleged that this amounts to a deliberate attempt to conceal the proceeds of crime.

The agency in 2024 provisionally attached assets worth Rs 97.7 crore, including five residential flats in Juhu valued at Rs 82.7 crore owned by Kundra and his wife actor Shilpa Shetty, and a bungalow near Pawna dam in Pune valued at Rs 11.1 crore, The Indian Express reported.

The agency alleged that Kundra and Shetty entered into a “sale transaction” of the Juhu flats without any change in ownership, with money transferred between their joint accounts to shield the properties from attachment.

Reliance Industries on Tuesday said that it has not received any delivery of Russian oil at its Jamnagar refinery in the past three weeks and is not expecting such consignments in January.

The Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate made the statement to deny a report by Bloomberg on Friday, which cited data from analytics firm Kpler to say that three ships carrying Russian oil were heading to the refinery in Gujarat.

The report is “blatantly untrue”, Reliance said.

On November 20, Reliance Industries said that it had stopped importing Russian oil into its Jamnagar refinery and that it will abide by western sanctions against Russia amid Moscow’s war on Ukraine, while maintaining ties with existing oil suppliers.

The Jamnagar facility is considered the world’s largest single-location refining complex.

The United States and its European allies have imposed a series of sanctions on Russian businesses, especially oil exporters, since February 2022, when the war in Ukraine began. The sanctions are aimed at forcing Moscow to end the conflict and sign a peace deal with Kyiv.

US President Donald Trump has repeatedly alleged that the import of discounted Russian oil by countries, including India, was fuelling Moscow’s war.

In August, the Trump administration doubled the tariffs on goods imported from India to 50% for purchasing Russian oil. A 25% so-called reciprocal tariff had already taken effect.

New Delhi had said at the time that it was “extremely unfortunate” that the US had chosen to impose the punitive levies on India “for actions that several other countries are also taking in their own national interest”.

On October 23, Reliance Industries had told Reuters that “recalibration of Russian oil imports is ongoing” and that the company “will be fully aligned to GOI [Government of India] guidelines”.

On November 20, the Indian conglomerate’s spokesperson was quoted as saying by Reuters that from December 1, all products exported from the Jamnagar facility will have been produced from crude oil not sourced from Russia.

On Sunday, US Senator Lindsey Graham quoted the Indian ambassador as having told him in a private conversation that India was buying less Russian oil, and urged him to request Trump to relax tariffs linked to such imports.

Graham quoted the conversation, in presence of the US president, to claim that the punitive measures being imposed by Trump worked.

Reacting to Graham’s comments, Trump told reporters that the US could raise tariffs on India if New Delhi does not cut Russian oil imports.

The Congress on Monday criticised the Union government saying that India deserved an independent foreign policy and “not silent submission”.

Former Union Minister and Pune MP Suresh Kalmadi died at a private hospital in Pune early on Tuesday following a prolonged illness, PTI quoted his family as saying. He was 81 years old.

Kalmadi, who had served as Union Minister of State for Railways and as president of the Indian Olympic Association, represented Pune for three terms in Parliament. He was credited with starting several developmental and cultural projects in the city.

Kalmadi was first elected to the Rajya Sabha in 1980 as a Congress (Secular) MP and was re-elected in 1986 and again in 1992.

He entered the Lok Sabha in 1996 and was re-elected in 2004 and 2009. He lost the 1998 Lok Sabha election as a Pune Vikas Aghadi candidate supported by the Bharatiya Janata Party and Shiv Sena.

Kalmadi was suspended from the Congress in 2011 after he was accused of corruption while handing out contracts for the Commonwealth Games held in Delhi in 2010. He was then the chairman of the CWG Organising Committee. He had been arrested in April 2011 and was granted bail about nine months later.

Kalmadi had been accused of giving out inflated contracts for the Games, including one worth Rs 141 crore to Swiss Timing for equipment. He had denied the allegations against him.

The Congress’s Pune spokesperson Ramesh Iyer told The Indian Express after his death that Kalmadi had been acquitted in most cases related to the alleged scam. “Only one case was pending,” he said.

Kalmadi is survived by his wife, two daughters, son and grandchildren.

According to his office, his mortal remains will be kept at Kalmadi House in the Erandwane area of Pune until 2 pm. The cremation will be held at Vaikunth crematorium in Navi Peth at 3.30 pm, ANI reported.