One afternoon, at a small gathering in the US, a Brahmin man I shall call Gaurav spoke warmly about his son, Pranav – his academic achievements, his skilled batting on the cricket pitch and his good nature. It was a pleasant conversation, but something caught my attention.

Every time Gaurav uttered his son’s name, he emphasised the nasal weight on the “na” – Pranav. Gaurav, his wife and Pranav himself insisted on this. The retroflex nasal “na” Gaurav and his family insisted on is a caste marker, the performance of Brahmin caste identity. Language is a ledger of the mechanism of caste. It records who you are, where you come from and where you stand in the social caste hierarchy.

The mechanism of caste and the linguistic function to work and maintain it was remarkable. This is what I have described as the vulgar inequality of caste in my book, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India.

Consider another young man I know, also named Pranav. Curious about the divergence in pronunciation and because many parents invest much thought in naming, I once asked Pranav what his name meant. He smiled sheepishly, shrugged, and said, “I have no idea, aunty.”

I suggested it might be related to praan, the breath of life or pran (pronounced prun), an oath. I asked him something more specific: “Do you pronounce your name with a nasal “na” or a flat one? He looked puzzled. I demonstrated both. He laughed and said, “I don’t know much aunty. But it’s just Pranav,” with a soft “na”.

For Gaurav’s family, the nasal inflection was non-negotiable.

But it had never occurred to the other Pranav that his name had different meanings and, most importantly, to cultivate cultured pronunciations and speech. That gap – between those who police pronunciation, regulate language and those who are indifferent to it – is precisely where caste operates. At the same event, Gaurav spoke fondly of a college friend, Pravin. Yet, every time Gaurav said “Pravin,” he imposed the same hard “na”: Pra-vi-na.

Later, when I spoke to Pravin directly, he pronounced his name with a soft “na”. Yet Gaurav had been pronouncing his friend’s name differently: insisting on a sanitised brahmanical phonetic standard that Pravin himself had never claimed. Through his obsession with the hard “na”, Gaurav insisted on the language of high-caste Brahmins as the only correct spoken Marathi.

This is how linguistic caste hierarchy works, by inferences and insisting, pleasantly and politely, on a certain standard until it feels normal.

What’s at stake in the ‘na’?

Gaurav was brought up in Pune and Mumbai, his mother is from Pune, his father from Nagpur. Most importantly, Gaurav chose to speak in Puneri, that is brahmanical Marathi, and not Vidarbha Marathi. In Pune, long regarded as the cultural and intellectual capital of Marathi-speaking high castes, brahmanical Marathi occupies the apex of a linguistic hierarchy that most speakers recognise.

Its tonal markers, the nasal vowels, the enunciations signal education but also origin. Puneri brahmanical Marathi functions more as a credential and less as a dialect. Pune lives in the hard “na”.

Gaurav seemed like a kind and amiable man – and that is the point. The production and reproduction of caste through language requires the confidence of those who have inherited a particular form of speech and believe it to be the correct one.

What Gaurav was reinforcing, likely without reflection, is the brahmanical myth of orality: that there exists one legitimate Marathi, with one proper accent, tone and enunciation – and that is Puneri brahmanical Marathi.

This is not a purely Maharashtrian phenomenon, nor is it confined to the past or just Brahmans. In 2026, whether in Pune, Chennai, London, Houston or Melbourne, wherever Marathi speakers gather, these phonetic hierarchies travel with them.

A Brahmin woman fellow passenger on a train to Chennai said to me, “You said you are from Pune, but your Marathi is very different.” I responded, “Yes, because I have traveled all over the world my Marathi is influenced by global currents.”

Instead of befriending me as a Marathi speaker, this woman was more interested in what she inferenced was not proper Marathi speech and, as a result, I did not belong to her Brahmin community. Through my Marathi, she attempted to dig into my social background, because she could not recognise any other markers of my caste.

This is what I call segregated sociability: the fracturing of a shared linguistic community along caste lines, so that even speakers of the same language cannot meet and be sociable with each other.

People from Vidarbha – the eastern region of Maharashtra – hesitate to converse with me in Marathi, apologising with audible embarrassment: “Our Marathi is not as good as yours.” What they mean is that my Marathi carries the stamp of the Puneri brahmanical linguistic register. In the US, Marathi speakers from Vidarbha often switch to English or Hindi when speaking with me, even when Marathi was our obvious common language.

Although I am Dalit, my brahmanical-inflected Marathi has helped me enjoy some power and privilege in Dalit and some non-Dalit circles. I grew up in Pune and was socialised to speak its Marathi. Yet, my Marathi was not up to mark for the Brahmin woman traveler I mentioned earlier. To speak Puneri Marathi is to be “civilised” and “cultured,” “sanitised,” and sanskritised.

This is the caste mechanism Gaurav was perpetuating, probably without malice. While many non-Brahmin Marathi speakers spoke cultivated brahmanical Marathi, many others did not. But in the brahmanical Marathi framework, they were speaking incorrectly. As one Brahmin physician laughed and said, “People from Nagpur cannot even speak Marathi properly. They mix it with Hindi. Is that Marathi?”

Many non-Brahmins and Dalits also denigrate non-Puneri Marathi. During our conversations in Pune, a retired Dalit man said with disgust, “People from Nagpur cannot speak Marathi, they say abey, tubey.”

Many Marathi speakers from Vidarbha, Konkan, and elsewhere are acutely aware of this dispossession and often work hard to acquire brahmanical pronunciation. In response, while many non-Brahmin Maharashtrians assert their own Marathi, others in the process of linguistic self-erasure – replaced their natural “ha” with brahmanical “ho”, their flat “pani” with nasalised pani, and their incorrect “aani” with the more ornate nasal “aani”.

The goal is assimilation into a so-called legitimate linguistic sociality that conferred respectability. The tragedy is that they feel they must erase themselves to be heard. The cost is the slow disappearance of their own phonetic inheritance.

Puneri brahmanical culture does not need to say anything explicitly. The nasal “na” says it all, reinforcing segregated sociability. It drew lines separating many Marathis and its speakers and made it clear which side of the line conferred legitimacy and dignity.

That is why the urban, educated Indian’s denial of caste is flawed. Caste is hardly a “thing-of-the-past” or a rural malaise. It thrives in the way a father pronounces his son’s name in India and the US, or in the mild embarrassment of a man from Nagpur who apologises for his Marathi.

The linguistic project of caste has always organised who speaks, what counts as correct speech and who has the authority to define authenticity. To acknowledge that a pronunciation encodes caste hierarchy would be to acknowledge one’s own role in perpetuating it. Caste lives in the hard “na”.

Marathi is a plural language, shaped by region, class, caste and migration. It belongs to the Konkani Marathis, Vidarbha Marathis, Marathawada Marathis, the Marathi of the Dalit communities, just as much as it belongs to Brahmin households. Each carries its own grammar, music and dignity. There is no single, correct Marathi – only Marathis.

To speak Marathi freely – in all its registers, accents, tones – is an act of resistance. Recognising this is linguistic justice and intellectual honesty about the persistence of caste in the everyday.

Power operates most effectively along with brutal violence or overt practices of untouchability, but also through the covert insistence and inherited confidence of those who have never had to apologise how they say a name.

The hard “na” is a small sound with a long history and deep politics of caste creating segregated sociability.

Shailaja Paik is a Charles Phelps Taft Distinguished Research Professor and MacArthur “genius” fellow at the University of Cincinnati.

Clarifications: The phrase “nasal ‘na’” has been replaced with the words “hard ‘na’”.

The Election Commission has ordered a repoll at 15 polling stations in South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal on Saturday from 7 am to 6 pm, ANI reported.

Repolling will be held at 11 electoral booths in the Magrahat Paschim Assembly constituency and four stations in the Diamond Harbour Assembly constituency.

Voting at these booths had taken place on Wednesday during the second phase of the Assembly elections. However, the Election Commission declared the polls void under Section 58(2) of the 1951 Representation of the People Act.

The decision was based on reports submitted by returning officers and observers, the commission’s order stated, according to ANI.

The votes will be counted on Monday.

This was the first instance in which repolling was ordered as part of the Assembly elections in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.

On Wednesday, the Bharatiya Janata Party had alleged that the Trinamool Congress had tampered with voting machines in Falta in the Diamond Harbour area, NDTV reported. It had claimed that the button next to the BJP symbol was taped over at several polling booths.

The Trinamool Congress had denied the allegation, and had claimed that the BJP was raising false alarms as it was losing West Bengal, according to NDTV.

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

Opposition leaders on Friday questioned the Union government about the increased rates for commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders, noting that the price hike took place just two days after voting for the Assembly elections ended.

The rates of commercial LPG cylinders were increased by Rs 993 from Friday amid rising global energy prices triggered by the conflict in West Asia. With this, a 19-kg commercial LPG cylinder is now priced at Rs 3,071.5 in Delhi and Rs 3,024 in Mumbai.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi remarked that he had predicted earlier that the “heat of inflation” would rise after the elections. “Today, commercial gas cylinders have become costlier by Rs 993,” he said on social media. “The biggest increase in a single day. This is the bill for the elections.”

Gandhi noted that the prices of commercial liquefied petroleum gas have spiked by Rs 1,380 since February, which amounts to an increase of 81% in three months.

“From tea stalls to dhabas, hotels, bakeries and sweet shops, the burden on everyone's kitchen has increased,” the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha said. “And this will affect your plate too.”

Gandhi went on to add: “The first strike was on gas, the next will be on petrol and diesel.”

कह दिया था - चुनाव के बाद महंगाई की गर्मी आएगी।

आज कमर्शियल गैस सिलेंडर ₹993 महंगा। एक ही दिन में सबसे बड़ी बढ़ोतरी। यह चुनावी बिल है।

फरवरी से अब तक: ₹1,380 की बढ़ोतरी - सिर्फ़ 3 महीनों में 81% का इज़ाफ़ा।

चायवाला, ढाबा, होटल, बेकरी, हलवाई - हर किसी की रसोई पर बोझ बढ़ा। और…

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) May 1, 2026

Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav said that the increase in commercial LPG cylinder prices would translate into higher food prices for common people.

“If they [the government] had to make the cylinder expensive, they should have just hiked the prices to Rs 1,000 straightaway,” he remarked. “On whom are BJP leaders bestowing a favour by reducing seven rupees from Rs 1,000?”

The Communist Party of India also said that it strongly condemned the “unprecedented hike” in commercial LPG prices, the Deccan Herald reported. It said that continuous increases in fuel prices showed that the government had failed to safeguard the country’s interests in a challenging global situation.

“Coming just a day after voting, this confirms what the CPI had warned: that LPG and other fuel prices would be increased once elections were over, because the government is focused solely on electoral gains rather than people’s livelihoods,” the party alleged, according to the newspaper. “Once the votes are cast, the burden is pushed onto the common people in an unprecedented manner. This is deeply unjust.”

“If the flower of the palash is fully bloomed, that means it will be a good summer, and it will rain well that year,” says Sarita Devi, sitting under a tree in front of her home. “And if it does not bloom on time, the rains will not be good either.”

Sarita, 40, is a resident of Kundri village in Palamu district, Jharkhand. She belongs to the Dalit community. For generations, people here have predicted the weather through the palash tree. Their livelihoods also depend on it.

The palash tree is used to grow lac, a natural resin produced by the insect Kerria lacca (rangeeni), which farmers harvest and sell in the market. On the palash tree, lac is produced twice a year: once in the rainy season (harvested in October-November) and once in the summer (harvested in June–July).

For years, Sarita worked at the Kundri lac farm, widely described by officials as Asia’s largest lac plantation. Every October, she tied lac-bearing twigs to palash branches. Over the next few months, the resin slowly builds up on the branches and is later harvested and processed.

“We used to do all the lac work,” she says. “Putting it on the trees, taking it off, peeling it, collecting it. It gave us very good employment.” In a good season, she, her husband Satnarayan Bhuiyan, 45, and their son Deepak Bhuiyan, 18, would earn between Rs 50,000 and Rs 60,000.

A forest that built an industry

The Kundri lac farm, where Sarita worked, is no ordinary plantation. It is a natural forest spanning 421 acres, with more than 62,000 palash trees.

Jharkhand produces more than half of India’s lac, about 10,000 metric tonnes a year. The industry supports over four lakh rural families, mostly from tribal and Dalit communities. For many, lac makes up 25%-30% of their agricultural income.

“One palash tree produces 5-7 kg of lac, which sells for around Rs 500 per kg,” says Immanudeen Ansari, 60, who has worked at the Kundri farm for over 40 years. “If you have 15 trees, you can easily get one quintal in a season.”

The trade has a long history. For centuries, lac was used to seal official letters and court documents across India. Today, it is used in many ways. Shellac, made from lac, coats the medicinal capsules you swallow and the sweets you eat. It also gives shine to fruits and chocolates, and is used in medicines, nail varnish, and printing inks, says Ajay Rai, Scientist and Head at Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Khunti.

“Whatever government seals exist today, they are still made from lac,” says Rai.

India exports an estimated $133 million worth of lac, gums, and resins annually, with the United States, Bangladesh, and Germany as the top three buyers, as per 2022 official data.

But the women and farmers who produce this lac remain at the very bottom of the chain.

Months of work, no wages

The tension goes back years. Between 2015 and 2018, around 750 villagers took turns guarding the forest day and night. “Not only was the forest protected, but it also grew considerably,” says Kamlesh Singh, convener of Kundari Lah Bagan Cooperative Society.

But when the lac production happened in 2018, many workers never received their wages.

Village cooperatives and the Forest Department blamed each other for the mismanagement. The Forest Department was supposed to pay the cooperative, as it handled the sale. However, the village cooperative alleges that the department did not pay them. The department, on the other hand, says it has released all payments and that the cooperative failed to pay the villagers. But in the crossfire, the farmers, most of them Dalit and tribal women, simply did not get paid.

“So many women’s money is stuck, four to six months of hard work. My six months’ payment is stuck, too,” says Sarita. She, along with many other women, collected palash flowers, dried them, and made abir, a local festival colour, without ever being paid. They also received training in bangle making, but that income never came either.

The 2020 lockdown delivered the final blow. The plantation shut down, breaking the brood-lac supply chain for forests across the Chatra, Garhwa, Latehar, and Gumla districts. Palash grows in a natural forest, which was later developed into a lac farm.

With the farms collapse, many villagers, including Sarita’s husband and son, have now migrated to work as daily wage labourer.

But it just did not hit the employment; it hit the forest even harder. “Theft started in broad daylight, and trees began to be cut. There are only two guards, how many will they guard?” says Ansari.

Palash feeds the forest when nothing else does

The loss is not only economic, but also ecological. “Palash blooms in February-March when the forest is otherwise leafless. It is the primary nectar source for hundreds of bird and insect species during the dry months; a food bridge with no substitute,” says Nitish Priyadarshi, assistant professor of geology at Ranchi University. The tree also fixes nitrogen and improves soil fertility, making it one of the few species capable of restoring degraded land. “When palash thins out, the entire ecosystem structure shifts,” he says.

Sarita remembers what this forest once looked like. “There were tigers, elephants, jackals, nilgai, wild boar, everything. And in the evening, the birds made so much noise you couldn’t speak.”

In Jharkhand, more area is technically classified as forest, but it is thinner, sparser, and less ecologically functional. Fewer actual trees per hectare.

Jharkhand’s forest cover increased from 23,721 sq km in 2021 to 23,765 sq km in 2023, a rise of just 0.19%. But experts say even this modest figure overstates ecological reality. “The government counts plantations, scrubland, and degraded patches as forest if canopy density crosses 10%,” says Priyadarshi.

Nearly half of Jharkhand’s recorded forest falls in this open category. It is a forest that looks bigger on paper but has fewer trees and more empty space between them.

“The dense forests that once existed in Jharkhand, whether khair, palash, or sal, have seen a great decline,” says Priyadarshi.

What makes this particularly difficult to reverse is palash’s biology. “It is bird-pollinated and very slow-growing. It takes at least 10 years to mature,” says Rai. “Plantation is not successful; whatever lac farming happens in palash, it happens only in natural forest.”

The collapse of Kundri has accelerated the loss. When lac production was active, no trees were cut, and the forest had guardians in the people who depended on it. “Earlier, not a single tree was cut; year after year, it kept growing,” claims Sarita. “When everyone has fuelwood, no one cuts trees.” After the farm stopped, illegal cutting and theft intensified. “Now there’s nothing left in it. It’s completely empty,” she says.

Can the government bring it back?

The Jharkhand government has begun efforts to revive lac farming. In 2023, lac cultivation was classified as agriculture. For the first time, this brought farmers under government subsidy schemes.

As part of a revival project, the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society is working with 1,074 households from seven nearby villages. Around 21,000 palash trees have been pruned as part of the effort. Officials expect this to produce brood lac and provide families with an additional income of Rs 5,200.

“The most important thing is that villagers get employment and the forest is conserved,” says Satyam Kumar, Divisional Forest Officer of Palamu. “The idea is simple. When people earn from the forest, they protect it. And when they protect it, the palash can survive.”

But the challenges are real.

A JSLPS official, speaking on condition of anonymity as he didn’t want to get into any controversy, says that lac worth around Rs 6 lakh has already been stolen since the revival began. Around ₹4 lakh in payments from previous seasons is still pending.

“The theft and pending payments have demotivated them,” the official says.

Still, some believe the potential is large. “If lac production is revived here, and a processing unit is set up, this plantation alone could bring in around Rs 1 billion, and at least 1,500 families will benefit,” says Kamlesh Singh.

Lac farming depends on natural forests. It cannot be forced. The Kundri farm, precisely because it is a natural palash forest, may carry something that cannot be replicated elsewhere. “If it is revived, it could become a model. Proof that a collapsed natural forest economy can be brought back when livelihood and conservation are treated as the same problem,” says Priyadarshi.

“If the plantation comes back, the entire village will benefit,” says Sarita. “No one will have to go far to work.”

The palash outside Sarita’s home is in bloom again. But whether it will once again feed the village, or remain just a sign of a good monsoon, depends on whether this revival succeeds.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

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The Supreme Court granted anticipatory bail to Congress leader Pawan Khera in a case filed by the Assam Police. The bench passed its verdict on a petition challenging an April 24 Gauhati High Court order denying him anticipatory bail.

The Supreme Court held that the High Court’s observations were “erroneous” as they had shifted “the burden on the accused”. It also remarked that the allegations and counter-allegations in the matter appeared to be politically motivated, and did not constitute a situation that would warrant custodial interrogation.

Khera has been accused of defamation, forgery and criminal conspiracy by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, for claiming that she holds passports of multiple countries. Read on.

The Calcutta High Court dismissed the Trinamool Congress’ petition challenging the Election Commission’s decision to deploy Union government employees as counting supervisors during the West Bengal Assembly election results. The votes will be counted on Monday.

On Wednesday, the state chief electoral officer directed that at least one person at every counting station must be a Union government employee. The state’s ruling Trinamool Congress had moved the court against the order.

The bench rejected the claim that Union government employees are likely to be susceptible to the suggestion and control of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is in power at the Centre. Read on.

An above-normal number of heatwave days is likely in May, the India Meteorological Department said. The agency said that heatwaves are likely in parts of the Himalayan foothills, states along the eastern coast, Gujarat and Maharashtra.

Minimum temperatures are expected to be above normal in many parts of the country, the weather agency said in its monthly forecast. This came as India continues to experience higher-than-average temperatures that are pushing energy demand to ​a record high. Read on.

The Congress criticised Union Home Minister Amit Shah for his visit to Ladakh, accusing him of ignoring residents’ demands for statehood and inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The home minister arrived in Ladakh on Thursday for a two-day visit to view the holy relics of Lord Buddha.

This marks his first visit to the Union Territory since protests erupted in September, in which four protesters were killed in police firing. The absence of a legislature in Ladakh has stoked fears among the Ladakhi people about control of their land, natural resources and livelihoods. They also fear the region’s cultural identity and fragile ecosystem are in danger. Read on.

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

The Gujarat High Court on Thursday extended the temporary bail granted to religious leader Asumal Harpalani, also known as Asaram Bapu, till June 15 in a 2013 rape case in which he has been convicted.

The High Court had suspended Asaram’s sentence and granted him temporary bail on medical grounds on November 6. The religious leader then moved an application seeking an extension of the bail.

A division bench of Justices Ilesh J. Vora and R.T. Vachchani said it had taken into account the religious leader’s medical condition and the fact that “no untoward incident has been reported” during the period of his temporary bail.

Asaram’s lawyer contended that his client would need constant medical surveillance, periodic evaluation and immediate access to emergency care. The state government, meanwhile, urged the court not to entertain the application, noting that an appeal was pending before the Rajasthan High Court in another rape case against him.

The Gujarat High Court, while extending Asaram’s bail till June 15, listed the matter for hearing on June 12.

On Wednesday, the Rajasthan High Court also extended Asaram’s interim bail till May 25, or till the judgement on his appeal is delivered, whichever is earlier, Live Law reported.

In April 2018, a Jodhpur sessions court had sentenced the religious leader to life imprisonment for raping a minor at his ashram in 2013.

In January 2023, a Gandhinagar Sessions Court also sentenced Asaram to life imprisonment for raping a 16-year-old girl several times at his ashram between 2001 and 2006.

Before his convictions, Asaram was a religious leader who established his first ashram in the 1970s along the Sabarmati river in Ahmedabad and built a multi-crore business empire comprising various products and spiritual literature.

An above-normal number of heatwave days is likely in May in parts of the Himalayan foothills, states along the eastern coast, Gujarat and Maharashtra, the India Meteorological Department said on Friday.

The agency, in its monthly forecast, said that minimum temperatures are expected to be above normal in many parts of the country.

This came as India continues to experience higher-than-average temperatures that are pushing energy demand to ​a record high, Reuters reported. As the world's third-largest ​oil importer and consumer, India's energy ⁠supplies are already under pressure since the conflict in West Asia disrupted shipments through ​the Strait of Hormuz.

It added that several areas in northwest India, along with parts of central India, and adjoining areas of peninsular India and southern parts of northeast India, are likely to experience normal to below-normal minimum temperatures.

The country is likely to receive above-normal rainfall as a whole in May, at 110% of the long period average.

The long period average for May refers to the average rainfall recorded over a specific region for a month for a period of 50 years.

However, some parts of east, northeast and east-central India are expected to record below-normal rainfall.

The southwest monsoon is expected to reach the Andaman and Nicobar Islands between May 14 and May 16, India Meteorological Department Director General of Meteorology Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said.

India received below-average rainfall in April, while maximum and minimum ⁠temperatures ​remained above average, pushing ​peak power demand to a record 256.1 gigawatts, Reuters reported.

Also read: India’s summer forecast is a warning that extreme heat can affect democracy

The Allahabad High Court on Friday dismissed a petition seeking a case against Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi for his remarks that the Congress was fighting not just the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh but also the Indian state, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justice Vikram D Chauhan passed the order in response to a petition by Simran Gupta, an office-bearer of a Hindutva organisation called the Hindu Shakti Dal.

Gupta had approached the High Court after a court in Uttar Pradesh’s Sambhal district in November rejected her petition seeking a first information report against Gandhi.

The petitioner had objected to a statement by Gandhi at an event to inaugurate the Congress’ new headquarters in Delhi on January 15, 2025. The Congress leader had said that his party was not engaged in a fair fight with the BJP and its ideological parent, the RSS.

“If you believe we are fighting against a political organisation called BJP and RSS, they have captured almost every institution in our country,” he said. “We are now fighting not just the BJP and RSS, but the Indian state itself.”

Gupta had claimed that Gandhi’s statement had “deeply hurt the sentiments of people across the country”, and that it could have a destabilising effect on the country.

The Assam Police had in January last year booked Gandhi in connection with the comments on charges of endangering the country’s sovereignty and integrity and making assertions prejudicial to national integration. Both these are cognisable and non-bailable offences.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court dismissed a clutch of public interest litigations seeking a separate hate speech law. It said that existing criminal law is adequately deals with offences linked to public order, dignity and constitutional values.

But does it really? In this episode of our discussion series on the state of the republic, Harsh Mander discusses the question of regulating hate speech through law with Shahrukh Alam and Nizamuddin Ahmed Siddiqui.

Harsh Mander is a writer and peace activist. Shahrukh Alam is a lawyer, and Nizamuddin Ahmed Siddiqui is a researcher and co-founder of Project Mishkat.

The conversation examines the arguments for introducing legal provisions on hate speech, the challenges and limitations of such laws, and the implications of granting the state the authority to define and adjudicate harmful speech.

It also unpacks hate speech as a form of discrimination, exploring how it is articulated, circulated, and embedded in social and political life.

The name of Karwan e Mohabbat’s Yeh Daag Daag Ujala series is a tribute to the iconic poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

Several exit polls on Wednesday predicted that the Bharatiya Janata Party may defeat the Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, while the alliance led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam is likely to retain power in Tamil Nadu.

Most pollsters also predicted a win for the BJP in Assam, the Congress-led United Democratic Front in Kerala and the National Democratic Alliance in Puducherry.

The predictions came as voting for the second phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections concluded on Wednesday.

The first phase of the West Bengal Assembly election took place on April 23. Voting in Tamil Nadu took place in a single phase on April 23, while polling in Assam, Kerala and Puducherry took place on April 9.

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

West Bengal

The West Bengal Assembly has 294 seats. At least 148 seats are required for a party or coalition to attain a majority. The Trinamool Congress had won the 2021 Assembly election by an overwhelming majority of 215 seats.

Most exit polls predicted that the BJP may be on track to end the Mamata Banerjee-led party’s 15-year tenure in the state.

Pollster Chanakya Strategies predicted that the Hindutva party may win between 150 to 160 seats, while the TMC may win 130 to 140 constituencies. Matrize projected the BJP to win 146 to 161 seats and the TMC 125 to 140.

Another pollster, Praja Poll, predicted a bigger victory margin for the BJP at 178 to 208 seats, and forecast that the TMC may be reduced to 85 to 110 constituencies, according to ABP News.

However, Peoples Pulse predicted that the TMC may retain power and win between 177 and 187 seats, NDTV reported. It projected the BJP to win 95 to 110 constituencies.

Tamil Nadu

The Tamil Nadu Assembly has 234 seats. A party or coalition needs to win 117 seats to secure a majority. In 2021, an alliance led by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam had won the state election, ending the decade-long tenure of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam.

On Wednesday, most pollsters predicted that the MK Stalin-led party may return to power, even as one agency, Axis My India, predicted that the actor Vijay’s newly-founded Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam may emerge as the single largest party.

Chanakya Strategies predicted that the DMK-led alliance may get 145-160 seats, and the AIADMK-led coalition may be reduced to 50 to 65 places. Another agency, Praja Poll, projected that the DMK and its allies may win 148 to 168 seats, and the AIADMK and its allies may win 61 to 81 constituencies, ABP News reported.

Matrize suggested a closer contest, with the DMK-led alliance projected to win 122-125 seats, and the AIADMK-led coalition likely to win 87-100 constituencies.

Kerala

Kerala has 140 Assembly seats, and the majority mark for a party or coalition is 71 seats. In 2021, the Left Democratic Front led by Pinarayi Vijayan retained power with 99 seats, marking the first time since 1977 that an alliance won consecutive terms in the state.

Exit polls on Wednesday predicted that the United Democratic Front may edge ahead of the ruling Left Democratic Front in Kerala.

Pollster Matrize predicted that the Congress-led alliance may win 70 to 75 seats in the state, while the Left Front may win 60 to 65 constituencies. Chanakya Strategies predicted a clearer lead for the UDF at 72 to 80 seats, and forecast 58 to 64 seats for the Left Democratic Front.

Another pollster, Axis My India predicted 78 to 90 seats for the UDF, and 49 to 62 for the LDF.

Assam

Assam has a 126-member Legislative Assembly, and the majority mark for a party or coalition to form the government is 64. In 2021, the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance retained power with 75 seats. While Sarbananda Sonowal was the chief minister during the NDA’s first term, Himanta Biswa Sarma took over the top post in the second term.

On Wednesday, exit polls unanimously predicted that the BJP is likely to return to power for a third term. While Chanakya Strategies projected the alliance led by the Hindutva party to win 88 to 98 seats, Poll Diary predicted that it may secure victory in 86 to 101 constituencies.

Chanakya Strategies predicted that the Congress-led alliance will be reduced to 22 to 32 seats, while Poll Diary said that the coalition may get between 15 and 26 seats.

Puducherry

The Puducherry Assembly has a total of 33 seats, of which three seats are nominated by the Union government, and the rest are elected directly. The majority mark for a party or coalition to win power is 16 seats.

In 2021, the National Democratic Alliance led by the All India NR Congress secured power, winning 16 seats.

This time too, the alliance may retain power, pollsters have predicted. According to Axis My India, the ruling coalition may get 16-20 seats, while the Congress-led alliance may win only six to eight constituencies.

JVC predicted that the NDA may win 15 to 17 seats, while the Congress-led bloc may win 11 to 13 constituencies.

The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the National Forensic Sciences University to examine an audio clip allegedly linking former Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh to the ethnic violence in the state, PTI reported.

The order was issued by Justices Sanjay Kumar and K Vinod Chandran after the petitioners, the Kuki Organization for Human Rights Trust, said that they were placing the complete audio clip on record, which was more than two hours long.

The bench directed the forensic laboratory in Gujarat to analyse the recording and compare the voice sample in it with that of Biren Singh, the news agency reported.

In the recordings believed to be from 2023, a voice purported to be that of Biren 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 persons who snatched thousands of weapons from the state police armouries.

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.

Biren Singh had stepped down as the chief minister in February 2025 amid allegations from Kuki-Zomi-Hmar groups that his response to the violence had been partisan and that he had stoked majoritarianism.

After he resigned, Manipur was under the President’s Rule for a year until Yumnam Khemchand Singh became the chief minister on February 4.

The case so far

In February 2025, advocate Prashant Bhushan, representing the petitioner, told the court that the tapes had been examined by the independent forensic laboratory Truth Labs.

The laboratory had confirmed with 93% certainty that the voice heard in the recordings was that of the chief minister, he had said.

At the time, the court had passed an order seeking a report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Assam’s Guwahati on the audio clip in a sealed cover, Live Law reported. In May 2025, it expressed dissatisfaction with this report and asked for a new one.

In August, the court directed that the audio clips be sent for a fresh forensic examination to the National Forensic Science University laboratory to verify their authenticity.

The court had said at the time that a fresh examination would help clarify two aspects: whether the audio clips were modified, edited or tampered with in any manner and whether the voice in the disputed clips matched the admitted audio sample, with a clear finding on whether the same person is speaking in all the recordings.

The laboratory had been asked to submit its report directly to the court in a sealed cover.

However, the Kuki Organization for Human Rights Trust in November stated that the Manipur Police had forwarded only short and edited clips to the laboratory in Gujarat instead of the complete 48-minute recording.

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

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

In December, the court asked the state government why the full audio clip had not been sent to the National Forensic Science University for examination, adding that it was a “little disturbed” by the affidavit filed by the petitioners.

A month later, the court ordered the forensic examination of the 48-minute recording and directed that the entire available leaked audio be forwarded to the forensic laboratory, PTI reported.

It also directed the laboratory to expedite the process and submit the final report in a sealed cover, adding that the audio clips in question may be examined to determine whether they were modified, edited or tampered with in any manner.

On Thursday, the bench noted Bhushan as having submitted that the entire audio clip had been copied onto a pen drive from the original device by the whistleblower, Live Law reported.

This came after the court asked Bhushan to check whether the whistleblower could provide the first generation copy of the entire clip for forensic analysis.

“The said pen drive, being the first copy of the original, shall be furnished to the other side, to be forwarded to the NFSU for comparison with the admitted voice recordings of the individual concerned,” the bench said.

The Congress on Friday criticised Union Home Minister Amit Shah for his visit to Ladakh, accusing him of ignoring residents’ calls for statehood and inclusion in the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution while “basking in the glory of the Piprahwa relics”.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh accused Shah of “remaining silent on the demands of the people there for Statehood, Sixth Schedule status, and protection of land and employment”.

The home minister arrived in Ladakh on Thursday for a two-day visit to view the holy relics of Lord Buddha. This marks his first visit to the Union Territory since protests erupted in September, in which four protesters were killed in police firing.

Ladakh is hosting a two-week long exposition of the holy relics starting on Friday, which is Buddh Purnima. This is reportedly the first time that the relics have been taken out from their permanent location for an exhibition within the country.

Statehood demand

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

The lack of a legislature in Ladakh has stoked fears among the Ladakhi people over their land, natural resources and livelihoods. They also fear the region’s cultural identity and fragile ecosystem are in danger.

By 2022, the residents had four demands: statehood to Ladakh, constitutional safeguards under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, separate Lok Sabha seats for Leh and Kargil districts and the rollout of a recruitment process and a separate Public Service Commission for Ladakh.

All of Ladakh currently has one Lok Sabha seat.

The Sixth Schedule guarantees protection to land and a degree of autonomy for the country’s tribal areas.

The demands were pushed forward by groups such as the Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance, which have been coordinating protests since 2020.

Tensions erupted in 2024 and 2025 with renewed protests, including a hunger strike by activist Sonam Wangchuk supporting the demands and the resumption of talks with the Union government.

After the violence in September 2025, Wangchuk called off his hunger strike and appealed for peace.

However, the Union government accused him of involvement in instigating unrest. He was detained under the National Security Act and held in jail for more than five months.

The government had revoked his detention in March, saying the decision was aimed at “fostering an environment of peace, stability, and mutual trust in Ladakh so as to facilitate constructive and meaningful dialogue with all stakeholders”.

After his release, the activist called for a “win-win” dialogue with the Union government.

During the time of this detention, formal talks between the Union government and Ladakh’s leadership had largely paused. Lieutenant-Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena later announced that talks would resume on May 22.

The Supreme Court on Thursday granted anticipatory bail to Congress leader Pawan Khera in a case registered against him by the Assam Police, reported Bar and Bench.

Earlier in the day, a bench of Justices JK Maheshwari and AS Chandurkar had reserved its verdict on Khera’s petition challenging the Gauhati High Court’s order from April 24 denying him anticipatory bail, according to Live Law.

The police have filed a case of defamation, forgery and criminal conspiracy against Khera based on a complaint by Riniki Bhuyan Sarma, wife of Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma.

Riniki Bhuyan Sarma had filed a complaint against the Congress leader after he claimed on April 5 that he had documentary evidence showing she holds passports of the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Antigua and Barbuda. The chief minister and his wife denied the allegations. They also alleged that Khera’s claims were based on forged documents.

On April 10, the Telangana High Court granted Khera transit anticipatory bail for a week. Transit anticipatory bail is a temporary protection from arrest granted in one state to enable persons to approach the courts where the case has been filed.

However, the Supreme Court stayed the High Court order on April 15 and directed Khera to approach the Gauhati High Court instead.

After the High Court rejected his petition, he moved the Supreme Court.

In the Supreme Court judgement that was made public on Friday, the bench held that the High Court’s observations were “erroneous” as they had shifted “the burden on the accused”.

The court held that the allegations and counter-allegations made in the matter seem to be “politically motivated and seemingly influenced by such rivalry, rather than disclosing a situation warranting custodial interrogation”.

The allegations could be tested during trial, Live Law quoted the bench as saying.

“The right to personal liberty is a cherished fundamental right, and any deprivation thereof must be justified on a higher threshold, particularly where the surrounding circumstances may indicate the presence of political overtones,” it added.

The bench directed Khera to cooperate with the investigation and told him not to leave the country without the approval of the court. Besides, he was directed not to tamper with evidence.

The judgement also made a record of “unparliamentary remarks” made by Himanta Biswa Sarma about Khera.

Nepal Airlines on Thursday apologised for posting on social media a route map that showed Jammu and Kashmir as part of Pakistan.

It also appeared to show Ladakh as a part of China.

“The map contained significant cartographic inaccuracies regarding international boundaries that do not reflect the official stance of Nepal or Nepal Airlines,” the flag carrier said on social media.

The airline, which is owned by the Nepali government, said that it had removed the post and was conducting an internal review. “We deeply value our strong relationship with our neighbours and friends in the region and regret any offense the post has caused,” it added.

The airline’s network map posted online on Wednesday also showed countries such as Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan as part of China, The Print reported.

The Calcutta High Court on Thursday dismissed a petition moved by the Trinamool Congress challenging the Election Commission’s decision to deploy Union government employees as counting supervisors during the West Bengal Assembly election results, Bar and Bench reported.

Polling was held in the state in two phases on April 23 and April 29. The votes will be counted on Monday.

On Wednesday, the state chief electoral officer directed that at least one person at every counting station must be a Union government employee. The state’s ruling Trinamool Congress had moved the court against the order.

In his verdict on Thursday, Justice Krishna Rao rejected the claim by the TMC that Union government employees are likely to be susceptible to the suggestion and control of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is in power at the Centre, Bar and Bench reported.

It is not only the counting supervisor and the counting assistants that will be in the counting room, the judge said. Micro observers, agents of the candidates who are contesting the elections and counting personnel will also be present there, he added.

“Thus, it is impossible to believe the allegation made by the petitioner,” the legal news portal quoted him as saying.

Rao also said that it is the prerogative of the Election Commission to appoint the counting supervisor and counting assistant, either from the state government or the Union government.

The judge added: “This court does not find any illegality for appointing counting supervisor and counting assistant from the Central government/Central PSU [Public Sector Undertaking] employee instead of state government employee.”

The court also said that the Trinamool Congress could file an election petition if it is found that Union government employees are favouring BJP candidates, Bar and Bench reported.

An election petition is a procedure for inquiring into the validity of the polls results.

Earlier on Thursday, Rao had reserved his verdict after hearing arguments from the Trinamool Congress and the Election Commission.

Advocate Kalyan Bandopadhyay, representing the Trinamool Congress, told the court that the direction was beyond the jurisdiction of the state’s chief polling officer as the Representation of People Act only mentions the chief election commissioner and not state-level top officers, Live Law reported.

Bandopadhyay argued that persons who were unrelated to the election process were being brought in only for counting of the votes.

He questioned why Union government employees were being brought in at this stage when the polling process had been conducted with the assistance of state government employees.

The party also told the court that the matter involves a critical question of law, Bar and Bench reported.

The counsel for the state’s chief electoral officer contended that the appointments had been made in accordance with the law, adding that either state or Union government employees could be deployed.

Considering the submissions in his order, the judge noted that Section 19A of the Representation of the People Act provides the delegation of the functions of the Election Commission, Bar and Bench reported.

Therefore, it cannot be said that the additional chief electoral officer did not have the jurisdiction to issue such an order, Rao added. He also noted that counting is to take place under the surveillance of security cameras.

The provisional overall voter turnout in the state was a record 92.4%, the Election Commission said.

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

The Bangladesh government on Thursday summoned acting Indian High Commissioner Pawan Badhe to protest what it described as “anti-Bangladesh remarks” made by Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the Dhaka Tribune reported.

It was unclear what remarks made by Sarma had led to the action by Dhaka.

Director General (South Asia) Ishrat Jahan conveyed Dhaka’s position on the matter to Badhe during a meeting at the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, The Daily Star quoted an unidentified official as saying.

Dhaka described Sarma’s remarks as “disparaging” to bilateral relations and expressed its displeasure to New Delhi, The Times of India reported.

No statement was issued after the meeting.

Sarma’s recent comments

The Indian High Commissioner was summoned weeks after Sarma’s interview to Indian channel ABP News that was broadcast on April 15, in which he commented about relations between New Delhi and Dhaka, and security concerns.

“We like it when India-Bangladesh relations are not good,” Sarma said during the interview. “Because when relations are good, the Indian government also does not want to push back [undocumented migrants]. Therefore, people of Assam feel good when there is a hostile atmosphere between India and Bangladesh…When there is a friendly atmosphere, all things become loose.”

He added: “I always pray to God that the situation that the India-Bangladesh relationship should not improve. Then the BSF [Border Security Force] is on guard and the [Indian] Army also comes in, so people [undocumented migrants] cannot come in [from Bangladesh]…When relations improve, it’s alarming for Assam.”

“I pray to God…that the situation that existed during [Muhammad] Yunus’ time should remain the same, and that relations should not improve,” the Bharatiya Janata Party leader said.

Dhaka’s summons for Badhe also came after Sarma on April 25 claimed that 20 undocumented migrants from Bangladesh had been apprehended and sent back.

“Rude people don’t understand soft language,” the BJP leader had said on social media. “We continuously remind ourselves of this prophetic line when we expel infiltrators from Assam who don’t leave themselves.”

Bilateral relations

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

Following Hasina’s ouster, Yunus, a Nobel laureate economist, headed Bangladesh’s interim government.

There has been a thaw in the bilateral relationship after the Bangladesh Nationalist Party came to power in the parliamentary elections held in February. Tarique Rahman, the chairperson of the party, became the prime minister.

Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman had visited Delhi on April 10, marking the first high-level bilateral engagement hosted by India since the Hasina government was ousted.

The police in several states ruled by the BJP have been detaining Bengali-speaking persons – mostly Muslims – and asked them to prove that they are Indian citizens since the terror attack in Jammu and Kashmir’s Pahalgam in April 2025.

Several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

Sarma has repeatedly said that the Assam government was committed to ensuring an “infiltration-free” Assam, claiming that about 35 to 40 “illegal” immigrants were being “pushed back” every week.

In January, the chief minister said that the state government would “push back” undocumented migrants into Bangladesh within a week of them being declared foreigners by the Foreigners’ Tribunals, which are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship.

The tribunals have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and of declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

The state government did not need a repatriation treaty between New Delhi and Dhaka for this, he added.

Sarma had also said the Assam government had forced 2,000 persons into Bangladesh between October and December, adding that the policy had been adopted after the revival of the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act.

The Act grants power to district commissioners and senior superintendents of police to expel “illegal migrants” from the state by bypassing the Foreigners’ Tribunals.

Also read:

• Why experts contest Assam CM’s use of 1950 law to justify forcing out people into Bangladesh

• Bangladeshi or Indian? Investigating Modi government’s crackdown on ‘illegal immigrants’

The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that no cognisable offence for the filing of a first information report had been made out on a petition against alleged acts of hate speech by Bharatiya Janata Party leaders Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma in 2020, Live Law reported.

The judgement was delivered by a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta while dealing with a petition filed by Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Brinda Karat against a Delhi High Court order that upheld a trial court’s refusal to direct the registration of a case against the BJP leaders.

At a rally in January 2020, Thakur was heard shouting “desh ke gaddaron ko” and the crowd responded with “goli maaro saalon ko”. The slogan meant “shoot the traitors”, with an expletive used for “traitors” being a reference to those protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

In his speech, Parvesh Verma had told an audience that the “lakhs of protestors” who have gathered at Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh would enter their homes to “rape their sisters and daughters and kill them”.

The speeches were made ahead of the Assembly elections in Delhi in 2020. Soon after, riots had broken out in North East Delhi in February that year, in which 53 persons died and hundreds were injured. The majority of victims were Muslim.

In her petition seeking an FIR against the two BJP leaders, Karat had alleged that the speeches threatened use of force to remove protesters who were agitating at Shaheen Bagh against the Citizenship Amendment Act and to promote enmity towards Muslims by portraying them as invaders who will enter houses to rape and kill.

In June 2022, the High Court had upheld the verdict of the trial court and said that the petitioners had not followed the prescribed mechanism under the Code of Criminal Procedure for seeking the registration of an FIR in such cases.

Karat had then approached the Supreme Court.

In its order on Wednesday, the Supreme Court said that it did not find any grounds to interfere with the High Court order on merits, Live Law reported.

However, the bench said that it found fault with the High Court’s observation that prior sanction was required before a magistrate can order the filing of an FIR under Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure.

The Supreme Court noted that prior sanction was not required at the pre-cognisance stage and set aside that part of the High Court order.

However, the bench added that on viewing the material on record, including the alleged act of hate speeches, it agreed with the trial court and the High Court that no cognisable offence was made out against the BJP leaders, Live Law reported.

The prices for commercial liquefied petroleum gas cylinders were increased by Rs 993 from Friday amid rising global energy rates triggered by the conflict in West Asia, reported ANI.

A 19-kg commercial LPG cylinder is now priced at Rs 3,071.5 in Delhi and Rs 3,024 in Mumbai.

The rates for commercial cylinders were last increased by Rs 195.5 on April 1.

The rates for domestic cylinders were not changed. A 14.2 kg cylinder costs Rs 913 in the national capital.

State-owned Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum revise the prices of LPG and Aviation Turbine Fuel on the first day of every month based on international benchmarks and the exchange rate.

Energy supplies to India have been disrupted since the conflict in West Asia broke out on February 28. Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20% of global petroleum liquids supply passes, for most commercial ships.

This has affected LPG supplies in India. India imports 88% of its crude oil needs and about half of its natural gas requirement. This mostly comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

On Friday, the Indian Oil Corporation said that petrol and diesel prices were kept unchanged to insulate “domestic consumers from the recent increase in international fuel prices”, ANI reported.

Retail prices of petrol and diesel have been kept unchanged for consumers, who account for nearly 90% of total consumption, PTI quoted the state-owned entity as saying. Prices of kerosene supplied through the public distribution system have also remained unchanged.

The Indian Oil Corporation also said that aviation turbine fuel prices for domestic airlines remained unchanged as state-owned oil companies chose to “absorb the increase in global fuel costs to shield carriers and passengers”.

Windfall gains tax for exports

Meanwhile, the windfall gains tax on the export of diesel was cut to Rs 23 per litre from Rs 55.5 per litre and on aviation turbine fuel to Rs 33 per litre from Rs 42 per litre.

This tax is a one-time or temporary levy imposed by the Union government on specific industries, primarily oil and gas, that experience unexpected, massive profits due to unforeseen external events.

The Ministry of Finance stated that existing excise duty rates on petrol and diesel for domestic consumption will remain unchanged.

The road and infrastructure cess on the export of diesel will be nil for the next fortnight, from Friday.

The rate of duty on export of petrol will remain nil, the ministry said.

Airlines ask Centre for relief on jet fuel prices

The announcements came as Air India, IndiGo and SpiceJet told the Union government on April 26 that the country’s aviation sector was on the verge of “stopping operations”, and had sought a revision in aviation turbine fuel prices amid the conflict in West Asia.

“In order to survive, sustain and continue operation, we request your urgent intervention for immediate and meaningful financial support to tide over the current situation,” the Federation of Indian Airlines had said in a letter. The federation represents the three airlines.

Aviation turbine fuel accounts for about 40% of an airline’s operating expenses.

In its letter, the federation urged the civil aviation ministry to use a uniform fuel pricing system for domestic and international operations.

“Any ad hoc pricing [domestic vs international] and/or irrational increase in the price of [aviation turbine fuel] will result in unsurmountable losses for airlines and will lead to grounding of aircraft, resulting in cancellation of flights,” the federation had said.

Last month, the government capped the hike in aviation turbine fuel for domestic operations at Rs 15 per litre, but increased the rates for international operations by Rs 73 per litre.

The Federation of Indian Airlines said that this made both international and domestic operations unviable.

The war

The US and Israel launched an attack on Iran on February 28, claiming that Tehran’s action posed an existential threat to Israel. Washington acts as a guarantor of Israel’s security.

Iran retaliated by striking US military bases in the region and Israel, and targeted major cities in Gulf countries and some ships.

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

On April 13, Washington began blockading Iranian ports to mount economic pressure on Tehran.

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

Also read:

• Why the LPG crisis is reviving pandemic fears among migrant workers

• India’s push for clean cooking fuel goes up in smoke

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath in a column in the Indian Express on April 28 headlined “Story of new UP” spoke of restoring “dignity, belonging, and hope” to the state.

No child of Uttar Pradesh “should ever feel compelled to leave home in search of dignity and opportunity”, Adityanath wrote. “...Migration must be a choice, not a compulsion.” The Uttar Pradesh chief minister claimed that his administration was guided by the Jan Vishwas Siddhant policy – a “trust-based governance framework [that] replaces suspicion with partnership”.

A report published in the newspaper on the same day says that following the protest by factory workers in Noida for five days from April 9, the Gautam Buddh Nagar police have created a new post of Deputy Commissioner of Police (Industries). This officer will be supported by an Assistant Commissioner of Police, three inspectors and 25 other personnel.

Adityanath’s column and the police announcement together constitute the real policy statement of the New Uttar Pradesh. They must be read as a single document.

Forgotten workers

The chief minister writes that the youth of Uttar Pradesh were once forced to leave their janmabhoomi, or birthplaces, by “compulsion, not aspiration”. But many of the workers who protested in Noida are likely those who remained or returned – those who staked their futures on industrial employment in their home state, and migrants who came seeking it.

Contract workers in Noida’s factories are paid Rs 10,000-Rs-12,000 a month, forced into workdays of 10 to 13 hours, denied overtime pay or benefits under the Employees State Insurance Corporation, and provident fund contributions.

Roshan Kishore and Abhishek Jha in the Hindustan Times analysed the government’s Periodic Labour Force Survey data and found that the monthly salary of Rs 22,500 – what Noida workers are demanding as a minimum – places a manufacturing worker only in the top 20% of their salaried peers in the sector. The median manufacturing worker earns around Rs 15,000, the bottom decile Rs 7,000.

The average salaried manufacturing worker earns Rs 18,735, which is lower than the all-industry average of Rs 22,699. This gap widens with age: manufacturing workers above 40 earn almost 20% less than the average salaried person their age.

Manufacturing becomes less rewarding the longer you do it. Is this the reality behind Adityanath’s promise of “high-wage employment and new possibilities for our youth”?

Until the Noida agitation, Uttar Pradesh had not revised its minimum wages since 2014. The 21% hike, announced under pressure, brought the minimum prescribed earnings for unskilled workers in Noida to Rs 13,690 per month – barely half the living wage benchmark for Delhi-National Capital Region and well below the Rs 26,000 the workers demanded.

The new wage was rejected because workers doubted it would be implemented. They remember the demonetisation period when some contractors paid official wages through banks and then took back several thousand rupees in cash as a condition for continued employment.

The Indian Industrial Association has already expressed dismay at even this interim hike. When a state government cannot enforce its own minimum wage, announcing a new one carries no credibility.

The making of a crisis

The workers’ protest in Noida is hardly a sudden explosion of anger and neither is it a conspiracy pushed by foreign social media accounts – though the state’s invocation of Pakistani handles to delegitimise the protests is itself revealing. It came from the dismantling of institutions whose purpose is to prevent such an outburst.

First is the failure of ensuring minimum wages. Both Haryana and Uttar Pradesh failed to constitute their minimum wage advisory committees for over a decade, allowing real wages to be eroded by inflation while industries paid suppressed wages with impunity.

In Haryana’s Manesar, protests began on April 2 with contract workers from Honda Motorcycle & Scooter India Ltd, and quickly spread across contract workers of other companies in the industrial township. The agitation drew in thousands demanding implementation of the revised minimum wages.

Even after the Haryana government on April 8 announced a new minimum wage, garment workers continued to protest, simply asking that the signed notification of the revised rates be posted on company notice boards – the most basic act of enforcement.

On April 9, the district administration invoked prohibitory orders. The next day, the Gurugram Police arrested 55 workers and filed two FIRs.

But in both states the denial of freedom of association – the refusal to register unions, trade unions not being recognised, every meaningful grievance channel being blocked – left workers with no legitimate outlet to express or escalate their distress.

Over 90% of India’s workers are outside the purview of trade unions. Where experienced union leadership exists, it channels anger into negotiation and converts spontaneous outrage into collective bargaining.

Where such organising has been suppressed, workers eventually act without it, as seen repeatedly in the last few years. The disorder that follows is then used to justify the previous repressive tactics.

In Noida, the district administration and factory managements ignored the protests until desperate workers blocked major roads on April 13. Traffic jams forced media coverage, which then pushed the state government to respond. The state was aware of the workers’ distress but chose to ignore them until that was no longer possible.

From Manesar to Noida

This has happened before. After the 2012 violence at the Maruti car plant in Harynana’s Manesar, the police randomly arrested workers and anyone who came forward to lead them, using the loophole of FIRs that also listed “unknown others” as being among the suspects.

Haryana’s chief minister at the time, BS Hooda, said no new unions would be allowed to register. The institution of industrial relations – conciliation, collective bargaining, the Labour Commissionerate – was bypassed in favour of a permanent police presence: a battalion of 600 policemen was stationed in the Manesar industrial area as a security response to a labour dispute.

Fourteen years later, the Noida Deputy Commissioner of Police (Industries) is Uttar Pradesh’s version of Haryana’s template. But the repression in Noida went further.

Several leaders of the Centre for Industrial Trade Unions, like Mukesh Raghav and Ram Sarawat, were placed under house arrest during the protests. By April 16, two days after the protests subsided, the Uttar Pradesh police carried out mass detentions of at least 1,000 - 1,2000 workers. The police even tried to prevent lawyers from providing legal assistance.

In Manesar, between April 9 and April 12, at least 60 workers and local activists were arrested under serious charges, including arson and attempt to murder.

Criminalisation of labour organising

Adityanath’s column in the Indian Express is candid about the underlying philosophy of a new Uttar Pradesh. The “Udyog Vishwas” initiative to improve Uttar Pradesh’s industrial environment, he writes, rests on “decriminalisation, deregulation and digitisation” – replacing “complex, punitive regulations” so that “honest enterprises can operate without fear”.

The problem, however, is the asymmetry.

The Labour Codes of 2020, which came into force in November, clearly show what decriminalisation means in practice. The four labour codes mark a decisive shift toward the decriminalisation of employer non-compliance while expanding the criminalisation of workers’ collective action.

On the employer’s side, violations that earlier attracted criminal prosecution – failing to pay wages, provident fund violations – are now compoundable offences, settled through fines. The inspectorate has been replaced by an Inspector-cum-Facilitator, retreating from enforcement toward self-compliance.

The threshold for prior government approval for layoffs, retrenchment and closure of units has been raised from 100 to 300 workers, removing a large segment of establishments from regulatory oversight entirely.

On the worker’s side, the requirement of prior notice before striking – earlier limited to public utility services – has now been extended to all establishments, rendering spontaneous or protest strikes illegal and exposing workers to penal consequences.

Thresholds for standing orders – which are mandated workplace rules that set out conditions of employment and protect workers from arbitrary changes by employers – and retrenchment protections have been raised, stripping workers in smaller establishments of statutory protections. Fixed-term employment has been formally recognised, facilitating casualisation without safeguards.

The share of contract workers in organised industry has risen from 15.5% in 1998-’99 to 42% in 2023-’24. Of them, only 16.5% of manufacturing workers have a written contract and only 20.4% have any social security.

Employer violations are treated as regulatory lapses to be regularised. Workers’ exercise of collective rights is subjected to heightened procedural constraints backed by penal consequences. What is being decriminalised is the suppression of labour standards. What is being criminalised is the assertion of them.

A signal

India has institutions that are supposed to deal with industrial disputes: the Labour Commissioner, the industrial conciliation machinery, the minimum wage advisory committee. But these are underfunded, understaffed, and in the case of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, they have not been constituted for over a decade.

Uttar Pradesh’s DCP (Industries) is a signal that collective action is a law-and-order problem, instead of a matter of industrial relations. The message to workers is to accept whatever wages are dictated by the market, in its current unreformed state.

Adityanath writes that his government “neither fears the mafia nor bows to vested interests”. Workers in Noida can test that claim easily: recognise their unions, enforce the minimum wage Adityanath’s own government sets, reconstitute the minimum wage advisory committee, let the Labour Commissioner – not the police – adjudicate their demands.

If the answer is another police cell, it is clear whose interests the New Uttar Pradesh serves and whose dignity remains a promise perpetually deferred.

Rakhi Sehgal is an independent labour researcher with over two decades of association with the trade union movement.

The Calcutta High Court on Thursday reserved its order on a plea by the Trinamool Congress challenging the Election Commission’s decision to mandate the deployment of Union government employees as counting supervisors during the West Bengal election results, Bar and Bench reported.

Polling was held in the state in two phases, on April 23 and Wednesday. The votes will be counted on Monday. The provisional overall voter turnout in the state was a record 92.4%, the Election Commission said.

Justice Krishna Rao heard detailed arguments from both the ruling Trinamool Congress and the poll body before reserving his judgement, Bar and Bench reported.

On Wednesday, the state chief electoral officer directed that at least one person at every counting station must be a Union government employee, Live Law reported.

Advocate Kalyan Bandopadhyay, representing the Trinamool Congress, told the court that the direction was beyond the jurisdiction of the chief polling officer in the state as the Representation of People Act only mentions the Chief Election Commissioner and not state-level top officers, Live Law reported.

Bandopadhyay argued that persons who were unrelated to the election process were being brought in only for counting.

He questioned why Union government employees were being brought in at this stage when the entire polling process was conducted with the assistance of state government employees.

He added: “There is already a provision for micro observers who are PSU or central employees. That is accepted...But there is no scope for central employees to be brought as counting supervisor or counting assistant.”

At this point, the court questioned how the party was affected by the direction.

In response, the Trinamool Congress’ counsel asked whether such action had been taken in other states where votes are being counted on Monday.

The party also told the court the matter involves a critical question of law, Bar and Bench reported.

The Trinamool Congress’ lawyer further asked the Election Commission if it was insisting on such a deployment “for particular one party”.

“Do you disbelieve the state government employees?” he asked.

The West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer’s counsel maintained that the appointments were made in accordance with the law and pointed out that either state or Union government employees could be deployed .

The counsel for the Election Commission also told the court that similar orders were issued in Kerala.

“We have not singled out any state,” the counsel said.

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

As India’s renewable energy market diversifies, wind farms have emerged as an underexplored threat to bats. Globally, millions of bats die every year when they collide into wind turbines as they fly.

Currently, bat species across the world face significant threats such as habitat loss from deforestation and agriculture, persecution, hunting, urbanisation, energy production, and climate change, according to a 2025 Fact Sheet by the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species and Wild Animals (CMS). Yet conversations about biodiversity threats rarely acknowledge that climate solutions, such as renewable energy infrastructure, can themselves pose risks to biodiversity.

The latest State of Indian Bats report also brings attention to wind turbines as one of the threats affecting bat species.

However, there are data gaps in three major areas, bat researcher Rohit Chakravarty says. “One, what species are the most affected. Two, to what extent the mortality is and three, whether there are any seasonal patterns in the mortality across species,” he explains.

With about 135 bat species, India is home to roughly 10% of the global bat diversity. Of these, around sixteen are found only in India. According to Bat Conservation International, of the 122 species from India assessed by the IUCN, “only 23% have stable populations, with the rest decreasing”.

What is causing collisions?

While there is evidence of bats colliding with wind turbines, the reasons for it remain unclear.

“It could be because they are drawn to go check out something different. There is also some evidence that it may be some of the lighting that we use at wind turbines that might attract bats into a facility,” says Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International.

Chakravarty says that insects might also draw bats to a wind farm. Turbines can attract flying insects at rotor height, and bats following prey could collide while foraging. “The surrounding habitat plays a larger role. Bats could collide while pursuing this food abundance, not turbines themselves,” he adds.

He also points out that for echolocating animals, turbines are harder to detect. “It’s similar to how bats collide with fans, not because they can’t detect them, but because the rapid rotation confuses them,” Chakravarty explains.

Studies have found that bats are the most at risk of collisions with wind turbines during the autumn season, an important migratory and mating period for bats. “But the different reasons why this period is such a high risk are still hypothesised,” says Frick.

Researchers in India have found bat carcasses in and around wind energy farms.

For instance, a 2025 study found eight carcasses of an unidentified bat species at wind farms in the Thar desert. Chakravarty and colleagues have conducted studies in Satara, Maharashtra, and recently completed one season of sampling in Kanyakumari. “While we haven’t found many carcasses, we’ve identified collisions that are killing three bat species: the greater yellow house bat, the lesser yellow house bat, and the fulvus fruit bat,” he says. The common pattern is that these species fly at mid- to high altitudes, which puts them at risk of collision, he adds.

Regarding bat distributions in India, Chakravarty notes that southern India faces a greater risk. “The Kanniyakumari district particularly stands out as it has good bat species diversity, which is why we’re conducting our current study there. The landscape is highly heterogeneous with diverse habitats. Additionally, temples, houses, and other structures throughout the area serve as bat roosts,” he explains. By contrast, Rajasthan and Gujarat are drier savannah ecosystems with lower bat activity and fewer species, he adds.

Migratory bats

One of the major knowledge gaps around bats is the lack of understanding of their migratory pathways, says Frick. “Bat migration routes are comparatively not as well understood as bird flyways,” she says.

The bat fatality rates from wind turbines are high enough to cause “rapid declines in populations and increase the risk of extinction for some migratory species,” a 2019 study led by Frick noted.

An interim report released after the recent 15th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the CMS revealed that almost half of all CMS-listed migratory species are declining.

Bat migration can be long-distance movements within a country as well as across countries. However, because bats are usually nocturnal and hard to track, migratory movements of most species remain poorly documented, according to the Fact Sheet by the Conservation of Migratory Species and Wild Animals. Experts have stressed that identifying migratory pathways as well as how seasons impact their movement is important for global bat conservation.

Bats are at risk during low wind speed nights in the migratory period, Frick says. She also reveals that in Europe, her colleagues have found that placing turbines in woodland areas or forests can displace bats and be harmful not just to migratory bats but also to forest-dwelling bats.

However, India lacks sufficient data on bat migration, Chakravarty says. “We don’t anticipate large-scale migration, but certain species need attention,” he elaborates.

Tomb bats and mouse-tailed bats occur in both temperate and subtropical or tropical regions. In the north, during winter, mouse-tailed bats hibernate, but the tomb bat’s behaviour is unclear. “Tomb bats are likely to undertake short-distance migration, perhaps 300 to 400 kilometres. If they follow specific routes now occupied by turbines, winter becomes a critical monitoring period,” he explains.

“Additionally, India lacks infrastructure such as Motus, the US system which uses antenna networks to detect migrating tagged birds and bats. Without this, cost-effective migration studies are not possible,” Rajesh Puttaswamaiah, citizen scientist and trustee, Bat Conservation India Trust (BCIT) says.

Studies have also revealed that tree-roosting bats, which are usually long-distance migrants, seem to face more risk from wind turbines. Hoary bats are the largest proportion of bats killed at wind turbines in North America, with over 30% of all fatality records.

One of the bats that continues to face high risk is Lasiurus cinereus, which shows seasonal migratory behaviour with high activity in late summer and early fall. Experts have predicted the extinction of the L cinereus population within 40 years if projected wind energy expansion doesn’t include operational protections.

To better understand how migratory bats are impacted by wind turbines across India, winter carcass searches should focus on Rajasthan and Gujarat, where tomb bat density is higher, “We don’t expect to see migration in southern India because the temperatures don’t change much across seasons, unlike northern India, where winters are harsher. In the southern region, temperatures are more stable,” Chakravarty explains.

Bat mortality

In recent years, as more data suggest an increasing risk of bats colliding with wind turbines, researchers have looked into ways to balance the push toward renewable energy with its impact on biodiversity. However, this has met with quite a few hurdles.

Sreejith Jayakumar, who is part of the bat conservation project at Nature Conservation Foundation and is mentored by Chakravarty, talks about the difficulty of searching wind energy facilities for bat carcasses.

In 2024, he was part of the team that searched for bat carcasses in Satara, Maharashtra. He and his colleague selected a representative sample of turbines and searched for carcasses around each turbine using the standard global method of road and pad searches. The search focused on the turbine base and access road. During the study duration, they found one bat carcass.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that no bats were harmed, but it points toward the difficulty that researchers face during these searches. “Indian wind farms operate at a massive scale. For instance, the farm we looked at in Satara has nearly 1,000 turbines, and we were only two people. If we had systematically searched all turbines, we’d likely have a much clearer picture of actual mortality rates,” he says.

Jayakumar also adds that ideally, monitoring should begin from the moment a wind farm is established. “In India, this level of systematic monitoring isn’t happening,” he says.

Bat sizes can also make searches difficult. Chakravarty points out that some bat species, such as Pipistrelles, are tiny, weighing only five to six grams. “Even if killed by a turbine, their carcasses are extremely difficult to find in the field. This makes detection challenging for these species,” he says.

Another challenge that researchers face in carcass searches is that while it’s easier to find carcasses during the dry season in savanna ecosystems, during the wet season, grass growth makes finding tiny bats (5 to 40 grams) extremely difficult, Chakravarty explains.

In some wind energy facilities, such as in Kanniyakumari specifically, old turbines exist, and these are situated next to houses, farms, cliffs, or water bodies, which drastically reduces the search area.

Jayakumar recalls that during his field visits in Muppandal, Tamil Nadu, he came across a big well, in the centre of the wind farm, in which thousands of Fulvous fruit bats were roosting. “So there are high chances of mortality for this species, which has not been recorded yet,” he says. This further shows that bats’ roosting sites might exist very close to wind farms.

According to Bhattacharya, one of the biggest challenges is the lack of call libraries for Indian bat species. Bat calls can be recorded, but without comparing them to existing repertoires, one can’t identify the species, he says. “Currently, only one library exists in India, which is Rohit Chakravarty’s. We need larger, comprehensive libraries because bat calls vary seasonally, by mating as well as foraging behaviour. A complete library must capture this variation,” he says.

⁠Without considerable scientific evidence, it is very difficult to convince stakeholders about implementing mitigation strategies and solutions, Bhattacharya further explains.

Legal challenges

The bat species in India, which are likely to die in the collisions with wind turbines, as identified by researchers, are not protected by law. Only six species in India have the highest legal protection by being categorised under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Amendment Act, 2022, including the Wroughton’s free-tailed bat (Otomops wroughtonii) and Salim Ali’s fruit bat (Latidens salimalii).

There are no specific regulations that focus on bats, says Saumabha Bhattacharya, ESG consultant at Environment Resources Management. “However, general protections apply: no development projects can occur within protected areas such as sanctuaries, wildlife reserves, national parks, or eco-sensitive zones. These protections extend to all wildlife, including bats and birds. But bat-specific regulations remain absent,” he explains.

Moreover, there’s an important nuance: the Indian government does not mandate Environmental Impact Assessments for green energy projects; they’re exempt from it. However, major banks such as the Asian Development Bank, which finance wind farms, are mandating Environmental Impact Assessments as lending conditions, Chakravarty says.

A significant issue is that bats receive minimal attention compared to other species, Jayakumar says. “While extensive bird research occurs at wind farms, bats are often overlooked,” he says.

Possible solutions

Currently, one of the most effective ways to reduce bat collisions with wind turbines is curtailment, Frick says. Curtailment is the reduction of electricity output from wind turbines, which is done by shutting down turbines through feathering blades or braking. There’s also algorithmically informed curtailment, which uses wind speed, season, and other weather parameters to predict when bat activity will be highest and curtail during those periods.

While there is substantial research abroad on curtailment strategies, their effectiveness in India is uncertain. However, some strategies are promising, Chakravarty says. “For example, increasing cut-in (the minimum wind velocity required for a wind turbine to start turning and generate usable electricity) speed could work. However, the challenge is implementation,” he explains.

Testing these strategies requires energy company cooperation. “Experiments need turbines within the same wind farm operating at different cut-in speeds, then comparing the resulting mortality. Without industry partnership, we can’t conduct this research,” he says.

Researchers have also looked into acoustic deterrents, such as broadcasting ultrasonic noise, which have received attention, but Frick says that the evidence shows they are “generally ineffective and can actually attract some bat species.”

Wildlife Acoustics, a technology company focusing on bioacoustics has come up with the SMART system, wherein turbines shut down only when bats are present. “The goal is to maximise energy production while minimising bat risk. Acoustically triggered curtailment appears to be a very promising pathway to achieve both,” Frick says.

But Puttaswamaiah points out that the solutions must start before installing turbines by conducting baseline surveys to identify bat species present, locate large roosts, and assess whether they contain endemic, critically endangered, or crucial species.

“This assessment should inform turbine deployment decisions, including height, capacity, placement,” he says.

“The baseline that applies in Rajasthan won’t apply in Tamil Nadu. Activity baselines must be measured individually across different areas,” Chakravathy adds.

An effective way to reduce bat collisions is curtailment, the reduction of electricity output from wind turbines, which is done by shutting down turbines through feathering blades or braking. Image by Sreejith Jayakumar.

He also points out that companies are only invested in pre-construction surveys, which aren’t very useful. “Any area could be a decent bat habitat. Additionally, there’s the baseline problem: what threshold triggers a no-build decision? Is it a certain number of species detected? We lack standardised baselines for what constitutes significant bat activity. Without it, we can’t set defensible thresholds.” Ongoing periodic assessments and post-construction monitoring over many years are also needed, say experts.

In recent years, there has been a change in perspective, Puttaswamaiah notes. “International banks financing projects are increasingly recognising bat assessment as an important factor,” he says.

Bhattacharya echoes this and says lender-driven projects with strong ESG performance have their own safeguards. “For example, major lenders like the World Bank implement protective mechanisms and specific screening criteria. They assess whether project locations are ecologically important for bats, identify large roosting cave sites, and evaluate potential impacts accordingly,” he elaborates.

However, often financing projects reference guidelines from South Africa, Canada, and the U.S., standards designed for those regions, not India, Puttaswamaiah points out. “Following foreign protocols blindly is inappropriate for Indian conditions and the species found here,” he says.

This correspondent reached out to the Indian Wind Turbine Manufacturers Association for their comments but did not receive a response at the time of publication.

As India continues to invest in wind energy, this has to come with a better understanding of its impact on biodiversity, especially bats. “Wind energy is really important today, but there is a pressing need to ensure that it is done in a way that doesn’t cause biodiversity harm,” Frick emphasises.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The rupee on Thursday fell to a record low of 95.3 against the US dollar on account of rising global oil prices and selling in the domestic equity markets, PTI reported.

The Indian currency opened at 95 against the dollar at the interbank foreign exchange market and lost 46 paise to touch a record intraday low of 95.3, the news agency reported. It had recovered to 94.2 against the dollar by the time the day’s trade session closed.

On Wednesday, the rupee depreciated by 20 paise to close at an all-time low of 94.8 against the US dollar.

Global oil prices rose more than 7% on Thursday to a four-year high following a report that United States President Donald Trump was planning for an extended US blockade of Iranian ports.

The benchmark Brent crude touched $126.4 per barrel before falling to $116 per barrel. The price of Brent was $78 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict started.

The Wall Street Journal had reported on Tuesday that Trump has instructed US officials to prepare an extended blockade to put pressure on Iranian exports and force Tehran to reach a peace deal.

The uncertainty had led global oil prices to jump more than 3% to $114.8 per barrel on Wednesday.

In India, the stock market tumbled on Thursday, with the benchmark Sensex as well as Nifty falling by over 0.7%.

Exchange data showed that foreign institutional investors had offloaded equities worth more than Rs 2,460 crore on Wednesday, PTI reported.

The US and Israel launched an attack on Iran on February 28, claiming that Tehran’s action posed an existential threat to Israel. Washington acts as a guarantor of Israel’s security.

Iran retaliated by striking US military bases in the region and Israel, and targeted major cities in Gulf countries and some ships.

Iran has also effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz since the war broke out on February 28. About 20% of the global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

India imports 88% of its crude oil needs and about half of its natural gas requirement. This mostly comes through the Strait of Hormuz.

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The rupee fell to a record low of 95.3 against the US dollar on account of rising global oil prices and selling in the domestic equity markets. It had recovered to 94.2 against the dollar by the time the day’s trade session closed.

Global oil prices rose more than 7% on Thursday to a four-year high following a report that United States President Donald Trump was planning an extended US blockade of Iranian ports.

The benchmark Brent crude touched $126.4 per barrel before falling to $116 per barrel. The price of Brent was $78 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict started. Read on.

India’s rank in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index fell to 157 of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontières said. In 2025, the country was ranked 151st.

It remains in the “very serious” category, said the non-government organisation that has been publishing the World Press Freedom Index since 2002. “In India, judicial harassment of independent media is intensifying, driven by the growing use of criminal statutes – defamation and national security laws among them – directly targeting journalists,” said the organisation.

Among its neighbours, India ranks below Nepal (87), the Maldives (108), Sri Lanka (134), Bhutan (150), Bangladesh (152) and Pakistan (153). Read on.

A Delhi court granted bail to Vinesh Chandel, director of political consultancy firm I-PAC, in a money-laundering case linked to an alleged coal smuggling operation in West Bengal. The Enforcement Directorate, which had arrested Chandel on April 13, did not oppose his bail.

Chandel was arrested days before the first phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections. I-PAC, or the Indian Political Action Committee, has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including the 2021 Assembly elections. It was also managing the party’s campaign for the 2026 Assembly polls.

Voting for the West Bengal elections was held on April 23 and April 29, the results will be announced on May 4. Read on.

Peoples Democratic Party leader Iltija Mufti was booked for sharing on social media an old video of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani discussing the importance of the Urdu language. The police accused her of propagating “separatist and secessionist narrative through digital platforms”.

In her post, Iltija Mufti said that while she “may not concur” with Geelani’s ideology, she agreed with his remarks in the undated video.

Iltija Mufti has been leading the Peoples Democratic Party’s protest against the Omar Abdullah government for dropping Urdu, one of the official languages of Jammu and Kashmir, from the newly amended draft recruitment rules for revenue posts. Read on.

The Supreme Court declined to entertain a petition by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences against an order from last week allowing the termination of a 30-week pregnancy of a minor girl. Chief Justice Surya Kant noted that the minor had been raped and would have a “lifelong scar and trauma” if the medical procedure was not allowed.

The court said that it would “not allow the institution to choose for the parents”. However, it allowed AIIMS doctors to counsel the girl and her family so that they could make an informed choice.

Earlier in the day, Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati told the bench that the foetus is now 30 weeks old and in four weeks, the newborn could be given for adoption. Kant, however, said that the hospital should consider not just the condition of the foetus, but also the trauma faced by the minor. Read on.

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The Supreme Court on Thursday declined to entertain a petition by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences against an order by a two-judge bench allowing the termination of a 30-week pregnancy of a minor girl, The Indian Express reported.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant said that it would “not allow the institution to choose for the parents” and noted that the girl was pregnant because she was raped. However, it allowed doctors from the institute to counsel the girl and her family so that they could make an informed choice, Live Law reported.

On April 24, a separate bench headed by Justice BV Nagarathna had allowed the pregnancy to be medically terminated, and had directed AIIMS to carry out the procedure. On Wednesday, the same bench dismissed a review petition filed by the institute on Wednesday, after which it moved a curative petition before another bench.

On Thursday, Additional Solicitor General Aishwarya Bhati told the bench headed by the chief justice that the foetus is now 30 weeks old and in four weeks, the newborn could be given for adoption, Live Law reported.

She argued that there was a high likelihood of the foetus being born alive and added that termination at this stage could cause irreversible harm to the minor.

Bhati also said that the termination of the pregnancy would involve administering an injection through the womb to stop the foetus’ heart, which is a complicated procedure.

Kant, however, said that the hospital should consider not just the condition of the foetus, but also the trauma faced by the minor. “This is a case of child rape,” The Indian Express quoted Kant as saying. “Victim will have a lifelong scar and trauma. This is a foetus vs child fight.”

Bhati then said that the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act has prescribed a limit of 24 weeks due to health risks beyond that period.

However, the chief justice verbally remarked that the Union government should amend the law to clarify that the 24-week limit would not apply in cases where a minor who was raped is pregnant.

In its curative petition, AIIMS contended that while the April 24 order referred to termination of pregnancy, the medical reality was that the procedure would result in the premature delivery of a “viable child”, The Indian Express reported.

Bhati said the procedure to terminate the pregnancy would amount to foeticide and could harm the minor.

However, Justice Joymala Bagchi said that any curative petition should be filed by the girl’s parents, not by the institute. “Let us not make it a fight between the state and the citizens,” The Indian Express quoted Bagchi as saying. “It is not for AIIMS to choose for the citizens. It is just to render medical service.”

The bench said that the medical institute could counsel the parents, but it could not approach the court with another petition.

Peoples Democratic Party leader Iltija Mufti was booked on Thursday for sharing allegedly secessionist content on social media, the Deccan Herald reported.

This came a day after Iltija Mufti, daughter of former Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti, shared an old video of separatist leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani discussing the importance of the Urdu language.

In her post, Iltija Mufti said that while she “may not concur” with Geelani’s ideology, she agreed with his remarks in the undated video.

In the video, Geelani can be heard saying that a substantial body of Islamic religious literature “across India, Pakistan, and Jammu and Kashmir” has been preserved in Urdu.

He also alleged that efforts were underway to undermine this linguistic heritage, with the help of “people imposed on us”. Geelani died in September 2021.

On Thursday, the Jammu and Kashmir Police filed a case against Iltija Mufti at Srinagar’s Cyber Police Station under provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to endangering the sovereignty of India, promoting enmity and making statements conducive to public mischief.

“Preliminary inquiry indicates that the circulation of such content is a deliberate attempt to propagate separatist and secessionist narrative through digital platforms,” the Deccan Herald quoted an unidentified police officer as saying,

“Such activities have the potential to incite public disaffection, disturb public order and undermine national integration,” the officer added.

Iltija Mufti has been leading the Peoples Democratic Party’s protest against the Omar Abdullah government for dropping Urdu, one of the official languages of Jammu and Kashmir, from the newly amended draft recruitment rules for revenue posts, The New Indian Express reported.

Reacting to the FIR, Bharatiya Janata Party leader and the party’s media in charge for Kashmir, Sajid Yousuf Shah, said that the case against the PDP leader was “long overdue”.

Shah added: “Let’s see if this marks the start of real enforcement or turns out to be just another headline.”

Also read: Why Kashmir is worried about the sidelining of Urdu

The Bombay High Court on Wednesday granted bail to Sharad Kalaskar, one of the convicts in the murder of anti-superstition activist Narendra Dabholkar, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Ajay Gadkari and Ranjitsinha Bhonsale also expressed doubts about the manner in which the Central Bureau of Investigation secured his identification by witnesses, the Hindustan Times reported.

Dabholkar, who was the founder of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, was shot dead in Pune in August 2013. In May 2024, a special court in Pune convicted Kalaskar, along with another man Sachin Andure, for the murder and sentenced them to life imprisonment.

Two others – Virendrasingh Tawade, Vikram Bhave and Sanjeev Punalekar – were acquitted.

The judgement was pronounced after a trial that lasted almost three years.

Subsequently, Dabholkar’s daughter filed an appeal in the High Court against the acquittal of Tawade, Bhave and Punalekar, The Hindu reported. Additionally, Kalaskar moved the High Court against his conviction and also sought bail till the appeal is disposed of.

On Wednesday, a division bench of Justices AS Gadkari and RR Bhosale suspended the life sentence imposed on Kalaskar by a Pune sessions court and granted him bail, observing that the prosecution’s case relied heavily on unreliable witnesses. The court also took into account Kalaskar’s long incarceration of more than eight years.

The High Court also directed him to furnish a bail bond of Rs 50,000. The judges also declined to allow a petition filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the case, to stay the bail order for four weeks.

“Since we have already raised doubts over the identity of the applicant Kalaskar as the assailant, there is no question of staying this order,” Live Law quoted the bench as saying.

The case

The Pune Police was initially investigating Dabholkar’s murder in 2013. However, the CBI took over the inquiry in 2014 following an order from the High Court.

The CBI had subsequently arrested Tawade, a doctor linked to Hindutva group Sanatan Sanstha, in 2016. It had alleged that Tawade was the mastermind of the conspiracy to murder Dabholkar.

According to the central agency, the Sanatan Sanstha was opposed to the work carried out by the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti, an organisation working to fight superstition.

In 2018, Kalaskar and Andure, also linked to the Sanatan Sanstha, were arrested. The next year, the CBI arrested Punalekar and Bhave, who were also linked to the group.

Tawade, Kalaskar, Andure and Bhave were charged under sections of the Indian Penal Code pertaining to murder and criminal conspiracy as well as sections of the Arms Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act. Punalekar was charged for destroying evidence in the case.

Dabholkar’s murder in 2013 had been followed by the murders of rationalist and Communist Party of India leader Govind Pansare in Maharashtra’s Kolhapur and MM Kalburgi, a Kendriya Sahitya Akademi awardee and anti-superstition activist, in Karnataka’s Dharwad district in 2015.

Investigating agencies have said the three cases and the killing of journalist Gauri Lankesh in 2017 were linked and Hindutva groups were behind them.

In a separate development, Kalaskar, along with Tawade and another person identified as Amol Kale, were granted bail by the Kolhapur bench of the High Court in October 2025 in the murder of Pansare.

A Delhi court on Thursday granted bail to Vinesh Chandel, director of political consultancy firm I-PAC, in a money-laundering case linked to an alleged coal smuggling operation in West Bengal, Bar and Bench reported.

The Enforcement Directorate, which had arrested Chandel on April 13, did not oppose his bail, according to Live Law.

Chandel was arrested days before the first phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections.

I-PAC, or the Indian Political Action Committee, has managed the Trinamool Congress’ election campaigns, including the 2021 Assembly elections. It was also managing the party’s campaign for the 2026 Assembly polls.

On Thursday, Additional Sessions Judge Amit Bansal of the Patiala House Court held that since the Enforcement Directorate did not oppose Chandel’s bail, the twin conditions under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act would not apply in his case.

Section 45 of the act states that bail can only be granted after there is prima facie satisfaction that the suspect has not committed the offence and is not likely to commit further offences.

Polling was held in the state in two phases, on April 23 and Wednesday. The votes will be counted on Monday.

On Tuesday, Additional Sessions Judge Shefali Barnala Tandon rejected Chandel’s interim bail application. He had sought relief citing his mother’s deteriorating health due to dementia. However, the court held that his mother’s ill-health was not sudden or life-threatening, The New Indian Express reported.

What is the case?

On April 2, the ED searched Chandel’s residence in Delhi, as well as the premises of another I-PAC director, Rishi Raj Singh, in Bengaluru and former Aam Aadmi Party communications in-charge Vijay Nair in Mumbai, among others, as part of the investigation.

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

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

According to the ED, Chandel owns a 33% shareholder of the company, Bar and Bench reported.

It has claimed to have found several instances of financial irregularities involving the company, such as the receipt of both accounted and unaccounted funds, unsecured loans lacking legitimate business backing, bogus invoices and routing of funds through third parties.

The agency told the court that it has detected around Rs 50 crore worth of irregularities so far, Bar and Bench reported.

The central agency had also conducted searches on January 8 at the political consultancy’s office in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area, the home of its head Pratik Jain and the office of a trader in the city’s Posta neighbourhood as part of the investigation into alleged money laundering.

The January searches led to a political dispute after 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 file and claimed that the central agency’s officials were “taking away” party documents ahead of the Assembly polls.

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

Later, the agency also approached the Supreme Court, under Article 32 of the Constitution, which grants individuals the right to move the top court for enforcement of their fundamental rights.

Also read: From rallies to booth management, I-PAC is critical for Trinamool. Will its exit hurt the party?

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge on Thursday said that there will be no change in leadership in Karnataka “for now”, PTI reported.

Congress leader Siddaramaiah is the chief minister of the state, while party leader DK Shivakumar is the deputy chief minister.

Kharge’s remark came a day after state Home Minister G Parameshwara said that party members would “be very happy” if Kharge were to become chief minister, “because he is a senior politician with a lot of experience”, PTI reported.

This also came against the backdrop of fresh speculation about a possible change of chief minister after the Congress government completed half of its five-year term on November 20, PTI reported.

After the Assembly polls in May 2023, reports claimed there had been competition between Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar for the chief minister’s post.

At the time, some reports claimed that a compromise had been reached based on a “rotational chief minister formula”, under which Shivakumar would take over the post after two and a half years.

The Congress has never confirmed that there had been such an agreement and in July, Siddaramaiah said that he would remain in office for the full five-year term.

On Thursday, Kharge acknowledged that sections of the media and Parameshwara had suggested it would be “better” if he led the state, but said that the decision was not his to make.

“More than fate, as per my ideology and as per my service to the party so far, Sonia Gandhi takes decisions regarding me,” IANS quoted the Congress chief as saying

He added that the “question does not arise now” as Karnataka already has a chief minister.

“If Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and I, together have to take any decision in the direction of a change, it will take some time,” Kharge added.

India fell to 157th rank out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, media watchdog Reporters Sans Frontières said on Thursday. In 2025, the country was ranked 151st.

It remains in the “very serious” category, said the non-government organisation that has been publishing the World Press Freedom Index since 2002.

The organisation said that “legal frameworks are increasingly being weaponised to silence newsrooms” even in democratic countries.

“In India, judicial harassment of independent media is intensifying, driven by the growing use of criminal statutes – defamation and national security laws among them – directly targeting journalists,” said the organisation, which is known as Reporters Without Borders in English.

The global media watchdog added that, for the first time since the index started, more than half of the countries are in the “difficult” or “very serious” categories for press freedom. Only 13.7% of the countries were in this category when the index started in 2002.

The average press freedom score of the 180 countries and territories that had been studied had never been so low, it further said.

The expansion of increasingly restrictive legislative tools, “particularly those linked to national security policies”, have been steadily eroding the right to information, even in democratic countries.

Reporters Without Borders evaluates press freedom in countries on the basis of five indicators – economic, legal, security, political and social environments for journalists.

The legal indicator had declined most severely in the year and was a “clear sign that journalism is increasingly criminalised worldwide”, it added.

The score deteriorated in more than 60% of the countries. “This is the case in India, Egypt, Israel and Georgia,” said the organisation.

“The criminalisation of journalism, which is rooted in circumventing press law and misusing emergency legislation and common law, is proving to be a global phenomenon,” it added.

Among its neighbours, India ranks below Nepal (87th), the Maldives (108th), Sri Lanka (134th), Bhutan (150th), Bangladesh (152nd) and Pakistan (153rd). It fares better than Myanmar (166th), Afghanistan (175th) and China (178th).

Norway, the Netherlands and Estonia hold the top three spots.

The United States fell seven places in the ranking to 64.

Aam Aadmi Party leader Durgesh Pathak on Tuesday told Delhi High Court Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma that he will not participate personally or through a counsel before her in the proceedings related to the liquor policy case.

On Monday, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal said that he would not appear before Sharma. A day later, party leader Manish Sisodia also told Sharma that he would not appear before her in the liquor policy case.

The judge is hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s challenge to a trial court order discharging the former chief minister, Sisodia, Pathak and several others in the case. On April 20, Sharma rejected a petition filed by the AAP leaders that she recuse herself from hearing the case.

Their petition had raised concerns about “perceived ideological proximity”, referring to Sharma attending an event of an organisation linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

Kejriwal also argued before Sharma that she had repeatedly passed orders in favour of the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate in the liquor policy case.

In his letter on Tuesday, Pathak said that he agreed with the concerns raised by Kejriwal.

“Accordingly, I too have resolved not to participate further in the present proceedings, either personally or through legal representation,” Pathak said, adding that his letter should not be seen as a sign of disrespect towards the court.

“I take this opportunity to unequivocally affirm my abiding faith in the Constitution of India and in the institutional integrity of the judiciary of this nation,” he added.

‘Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done.’

With respect and humility, I have written to Justice Swarnakanta Sharma, that I too - along with Arvind Kejriwal ji and Manish Sisodia ji - will not participate in the current legal proceedings before her, either… pic.twitter.com/TMdfF5BfSb

— Durgesh Pathak (@ipathak25) April 29, 2026

In separate letters, Kejriwal and Sisodia had reiterated their concern about Sharma’s “public association” with the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad, which is a lawyers’ group linked to the RSS.

The two party leaders also noted that Sharma’s son and daughter have been empanelled as counsels by the Union government. Kejriwal highlighted that they are both allocated cases by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who is appearing before the High Court representing the CBI.

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

In a video posted on social media on Monday, Kejriwal further said that he was preparing to challenge in the Supreme Court the refusal by Sharma to recuse herself from the matter.

The AAP chief said that he has no personal enmity with the judge or her children, but added that “justice should not only be done, but should also be seen to be done”.

“This matter is no longer about my case,” he said. “It is about the common person’s trust in the judicial system.”

The liquor policy case

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

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

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

On February 27, the trial court discharged Kejriwal, Sisodia, Pathak and 20 others accused by the CBI in the case. There was no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent in the excise policy, the court had ruled.

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

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

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

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

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

The provisional overall voter turnout in the West Bengal Assembly elections was a record 92.4%, the Election Commission said on Wednesday.

The average turnout in 152 of the state’s 294 constituencies where polling was held in the first phase on April 23 was 93.1%.

In the second phase, polling was held in the remaining 142 constituencies. According to a press release issued by the Election Commission on Wednesday night, the average turnout in the second phase was 91.6%.

The votes will be counted on Monday.

Data from more than 5,300 polling stations in the second phase was yet to be updated, the Election Commission said. The data also did not include service voters or the postal ballots, it added.

As of 9.30 am on Thursday, the poll panel’s app showed the turnout in the second phase to be 92.6%.

The average turnout among men was 93.1% in both phases and 91.6% among women, said the Election Commission.

The polls are taking place against the backdrop of the Election Commission having carried out a special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories, including West Bengal.

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

This was the first time that voter turnout in the state had crossed the 90% mark. In the 2021 Assembly polls, the overall turnout was 82.3%.

The previous highest turnout in the state was 84.7% recorded in the 2011 polls, when Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress came to power.

Several exit polls released on Wednesday forecast that the BJP was ahead of the TMC.

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

The TMC has been in power in the state since 2011. The main Opposition in the state over the years has shifted from the Left Front to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In the 2021 polls, the BJP managed to win 77 seats in the 294-member Assembly. The TMC had won 215. A party or an alliance needs 148 seats for a majority. The other alliance, comprising the Left, the Congress and some smaller parties, despite securing a 10% vote share, had won just one seat.

Continued deployment of central forces

About 700 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces will remain deployed in West Bengal after the polling completes, PTI quoted an unidentified Election Commission official as having said on Wednesday.

This came after Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said that the Central Armed Police Forces would remain deployed in the state for at least two months after the elections and told voters not to be concerned about “Didi’s goons”. Banerjee is popularly known as “Didi”, or elder sister.

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

Ahead of the polls, the Election Commission had deployed 2.4 lakh Central Armed Police Forces personnel in the state.

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

A judge of the Allahabad High Court has alleged that the National Human Rights Commission was ignoring the lynching of Muslims in the country and instead “dabbling in matters that prima facie do not concern them”, reported Live Law on Wednesday.

Hearing a petition filed by the Teachers Association Madaris Arabia against a directive issued in February 2025, Justice Atul Sreedharan said on Monday it was “surprising” that rights commissions in the country are trying to indulge in matters beyond their jurisdiction, according to The Indian Express.

However, Justice Vivek Saran, who was part of the same division bench, said that he did not agree with such sweeping observations.

In February 2025, the rights body directed the Economic Offences Wing to investigate allegations against 558 aided madrasas in Uttar Pradesh, The Hindu reported.

This stemmed from a complaint filed before the NHRC alleging financial irregularities, including the misuse of government grants and the appointment of unqualified teachers through corrupt practices to madrasas.

Challenging this, petitioners told the High Court that the human rights body lacked the authority to initiate inquiries into alleged violations beyond one year, the newspaper reported. They had sought an adjournment of the matter.

In his order on Monday, Sreedharan said that he is prima facie astounded by the order passed by the NHRC on the investigation into the madrasas, The Indian Express.

He added that the court was not aware of the rights body taking suo motu cognisance in situations where vigilantes take the law into their own hands and harass ordinary citizens of the country, Bar and Bench reported.

This included when such groups “harass individuals on account of the nature of the relationship between persons of different communities, or where even having a cup of coffee at a public place with the person of different religion becomes a fearful act”.

In such cases, no instance has been placed before the court about whether a state human rights commission or the NHRC had taken suo motu cognisance, said the judge.

“But instead it has the time to entertain matters which would fall within the precincts of the High Court under Article 226 and which could be effectively render justice,” the judge said.

Article 226 empowers High Courts to issue writs for the enforcement of fundamental rights.

Listing the case for May 11, Sreedharan directed that a notice be issued to the NHRC to appear before the court and file a response in the matter.

In a separate order, Saran said that he did not agree with the observations made by Sreedharan.

The judge said that all parties should be heard if any order touching on the merits of the case or about the role of the NHRC had to be passed, Bar and Bench reported.

He added that he was conscious of the fact that a court can pass an order in the absence of any particular party.

“…however, in the instant case, when in Paragraph Nos. 6 and 7, certain definite observations were being made, then it would have been in the fitness of things that parties were properly represented in the Court,” Bar and Bench quoted Saran as saying. “In the absence of the parties, no adverse observations were required.”

In October 2025, Devlal Watti found himself in trouble because of his Whatsapp status.

That month, the young sarpanch of Dompadar village, in Chhattisgarh’s Kanker district, changed his status on the app to a quote from Article 25 of the Indian Constitution, which guarantees all Indians the freedom to practice and propagate any religion.

Watti is a believer of Koya Punem, the indigenous religion of the Gond, or Koitur, Adivasis in Chhattisgarh. But he had chosen his Whatsapp status in response to increasing hostility against converted Christians in his locality.

“I had been observing for a while that Christians were being criticised for conversions,” he said. “But the fact is all religions and sects that have entered Bastar have left an impact on our indigenous faith.”

Kanker falls within south Chhattisgarh’s Bastar division, widely seen as ancestral homeland for Central India’s Adivasis. While Adivasi communities in the region have historically practiced their ancestral religions, over the centuries, Hindu sects have also made inroads among them.

Christianity arrived in central India in the 19th century. Its spread in north Chhattisgarh provoked Hindu anxieties. In 1952, as a counter to Christian missions, the Sangh Parivar established the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram in Jashpur, helped by its erstwhile royal family. A member of the family, Dilip Singh Judeo, elected to parliament on a Bharatiya Janata Party ticket, devised the ghar wapsi ceremony in the 1990s to bring converted Adivasi Christians into the Hindu fold.

Bastar, in South Chhattisgarh, was slower to witness similar mobilisations. It was only in the past decade that reports of ghar wapsi ceremonies began to surface with increasing regularity – often, they were supported by BJP leaders.

As the region saw a rise in evangelical forms of Christianity, with many pastors setting up house churches in villages, other forms of hostility also came to the fore – in recent years, news frequently appeared of Christians being physically attacked by non-Christian villagers, forced to leave their homes and prevented from burying their dead relatives in their villages.

A few days after he changed his WhatsApp status, Watti said he was summoned to a community meeting and “made to publicly apologise for sharing the Constitution!”

He explained that he did, in fact, believe that larger organised religions presented a threat to Adivasi faiths, but that he nevertheless opposed the targeting of specific communities. “Yes, the entry of Christianity in Bastar is erasing our traditional religion, but so is the spread of Hinduism and Sikhism,” he said. “Why is Christianity the only religion being targeted?”

Last year, a few months before Watti changed his Whatsapp status, anti-Christian hostilities took a new turn.

In June, several villages in Kanker district erected hoardings banning the entry of Christian pastors and priests, and even ordinary Christians, from outside. Local authorities claimed that the ban had been put in place to safeguard Adivasi culture and heritage. They argued that the move had a legal basis under the Panchayat’s Extension to Scheduled Area’s Act.

The act, a landmark piece of legislation passed in 1996, aimed to restore a measure of self-governance to Adivasi-majority areas listed under the Fifth Schedule of the Constitution. It granted gram sabhas powers over a range of matters, including those pertaining to local development and resource management. It also recognised them as a consultative authority in matters pertaining to land transfers and the extraction of minor minerals.

Most of the boards that came up in villages cite clause 4 (d) of the law. This clause states that “every Gram Sabha shall be competent to safeguard and preserve the traditions and customs of the people, their cultural identity, community resources and the customary mode of dispute resolution”.

The bans by villages were challenged by two different petitions in the Chhattisgarh High Court, one by a pastor named Digbal Tandi, and the other by an individual named Narendra Bhawani. The key argument that the former made against the ban was that it “suspended the fundamental right of conscience and free movement” of Christians in the region, and thus violated articles 25 and 19 (1) (d) of the Indian constitution, which guarantee the right to freedom of religion and the right to move freely throughout the territory of India, respectively.

The court ruled against the petitioners. In its order, passed on October 28, it observed that the “hoardings cannot be termed as unconstitutional” and that they were installed as “a precautionary measure to protect the interest of indigenous tribals and local cultural heritage”. It further noted that it was disinclined to hear the petitions because the law provided for avenues through which the petitioners could raise their grievances – specifically, under rule 14 of the Chhattisgarh PESA Rules, 2022 they could approach the sub-divisional officer (revenue) and the concerned gram sabha.

In mid-December, the petitioners appealed against the order in the Supreme Court. However, on February 16 the apex court dismissed the petitions, reiterating the high court’s directions to the petitioners to approach the gram sabha and the sub-divisional officer.

When I travelled to Bastar in February, including to villages that had implemented the ban, some locals explained that Hindutva bodies had, in effect, exploited a long-running rift in Adivasi society, between those who followed the traditional faiths, and those who adopted Christianity. In doing this, they argued, these bodies were seeking to consolidate Adivasi communities under the broader Hindu fold.

But there was something of a contradiction in the use of PESA to this end, they observed.

Even as the law was being invoked in a divisive manner now, in the 30 years since it was enacted, little progress had been made on most other fronts in its implementation in the state. In Chhattisgarh, rules for the act’s implementation were framed only as recently as 2022. In fact, my conversations with villagers, including chiefs, confirmed an observation that some activists had made – that many Adivasis were, in fact, unaware of the powers that the law granted to communities.

Activists have for years flagged instances where PESA provisions have been blatantly ignored by the state. “Across Chhattisgarh, there are mining and other deforestation projects happening, where the consent of the gram sabhas has been fabricated,” said Adivasi activist Yogesh Nareti. “The system doesn’t abide by the law in such cases, which has led to the steady loss of land. But somehow in the case of Christian conversion, the PESA is suddenly being recognised and executed very well.”

The village of Kudal is around 70 km from Dompadar, in the neighbouring block of Bhanupratappur. In June last year, it was the first village to erect a hoarding that banned the entry of outsider Christians.

Kudal’s sarpanch Binesh Goti, whom I met on February 21, was firm in his stand against Christianity. “Christianity is a threat to our Gond culture,” he said. “After conversion, people stop worshipping our ancestral deities and let go of our ways.” He explained that Kudal had a total of around 30 families, and that a little less than ten years ago, 12 of these families had converted to Christianity.

He recounted that he had participated in measures against the spread of Christianity even earlier. “All these years, I was a ward council member, so I did what I could,” he said. “Like taking pastors to the police when they would come to my village to preach. Last year, when I became sarpanch, I decided to erect that board.”

Goti spoke with great pride of the decision, and the effects he believed it had had. “Since I erected the board last year, some 650 people in Kanker district have done ghar wapsi, including two from my own village,” he said. He noted that community leaders in the region tracked such statistics and regularly shared them with each other in Whatsapp groups.

Goti conceded that the ban had in some ways deepened divides in the villages – many of the Christian families had stopped interacting with others, he noted. “Such rules are working, but not everybody is convinced by them, no matter how many times we tell them,” he said. “We hope that eventually they see what’s right and come back to us.”

In my conversations with others in the village, I did not come across anyone who opposed the ban. In fact, many expressed discontent with those who had converted to Christianity. They noted that Adivasi culture was deeply tied to Adivasi faith, and that those who adopted Christianity usually went on to totally renounce Adivasi deities.

“My maternal uncle converted a few years ago,” said Khileshwar Gawde, one villager. “He threw out the idols and other markers of our gods, and was about to burn them, when my other relatives intervened.” He also noted that villagers who converted typically ceased visiting sites in the village that are believed to be inhabited by traditional deities. Citing the example of the deity Sheetlamani, he said, “She is the prime deity of the village. Everyone in the village is supposed to visit her periodically. Even the non-Adivasis visit her, but the Christians have stopped going to her completely.”

Bansilal Salam, the owner of a small grocery store, argued that “People converting to Christianity causes a divide in the Adivasi community. Our culture and identity start to fade away.” He added, “Once they convert, they stop participating in Adivasi rituals and festivals and paying obeisance to our deities.”

Those who converted had also withdrawn from social events, Gawde observed. “Conventionally, the entire village participates collectively in festivals, weddings and other events seasonally,” he said. “In a few months, we will harvest mangoes and then paddy, so we will collect money to perform the worshipping rituals. But Christians have stopped partaking in these events or even contributing money for them.”

Many saw this move away from local practices as a threat to the spiritual order that the community believed in. “This is why we tell them – either return to our traditional belief system or leave and go live elsewhere,” Gawde said.

However, some Christians had a different account of the situation. “It is them and not us who stopped interacting with us and socially boycotted us,” Anit Gota, a Christian villager from Kudal, told Scroll over the phone. Other Christians recounted similar experiences. Gota alleged that non-Christian villagers often threatened Christians in public, and had also banned them from local shops and the weekly bazaar. To access a bazaar, he said, they now traveled to Bhanubeda, which is about 7 km from the village.

Gota explained that his key motivation to become a Christian was to guard against caste-based social ostracism. “I belong to the Lohar community. In Chhattisgarh, we are categorised as OBCs, but society practices untouchability against us,” he said. “Living through that, one looks for love and acceptance, and I found that in Jesus and the church. The ostracism still continues, but now I at least have god’s love.”

The effort to draw Adivasis in the region into the Hindu fold are playing out even as Adivasi communities – here and elsewhere in the country – have been fighting for the recognition of their distinct religions.

While members of the Koitur or Gond tribes in central India have been demanding the recognition of Koya Punem, the Munda, Santal, Ho, Kharia and Kurukh, or Oraon, tribes in the Chotanagpur Plateau have been demanding the recognition of the Sarna religion. Similarly, members of the Tani group of tribes in Arunachal Pradesh have been demanding the recognition of the Donyi Polo faith.

Academics note that in the colonial era, Adivasis were often assigned a distinct religious identity in censuses, such as “aboriginals”, “animists” and adherents of “tribal religion”. In post-Independence India, however, these categories were excluded – thus, in their official documents, Adivasis were often forced to identify as Hindus, or as followers of “other religions”.

The Sangh Parivar has emphatically rejected Adivasis’ assertion of their distinct religions. Chhattisgarh’s chief minister Vishnu Deo Sai, who is from the BJP, has publicly asserted that “Adivasis are the biggest Hindus”, not just currently, but since “ancient times”.

In fact, Watti, the sarpanch of Dompadar village, described the spread of Hinduism as more insidious than other religions. “It begins slowly, say with the entry of a small Ganesha statue placed amongst the other village deities,” he said. “But in the following years, the Ganesha statue will grow larger in size, and the celebrations of Ganesha festival will become bigger and louder as it draws money and support from outside the village. Finally, it starts to dwarf traditional Adivasi celebrations.”

He argued, “This is precisely why we need our very own religious code. Our elders have taken the trouble to remind us. But in many villages, they accept Hinduism as a norm.”

In fact, on the ground in Kanker, conversations with villagers revealed confusion among some about the distinctions between Adivasi faiths and Hinduism, even among those who asserted that Adivasis needed a separate religious code.

For instance, when Kuda’s sarpanch Goti remarked that Christian Adivasis should return to their “own traditional religion”, I asked whether he meant Hinduism or Koya Punem. He replied, “See, Adivasis don’t have a separate religious code yet. It will definitely become official someday, but until then Adivasis are Hindu.”

In Bhainswada village of Risewada panchayat, an anganwadi centre was closed in December last year, after villagers alleged that one of the anganwadi workers, a Christian convert, was teaching their children Christian prayers. “If the worker returns to her traditional religion tomorrow, we are willing to reopen the school immediately,” said Lakhan Singh Komre, an elderly villager sitting on a public bench with his peers, who nodded and murmured in collective agreement. When I asked them which religion they were referring to, they stated that Hinduism and Koya Punem were the same.

Elsewhere, however, locals had a sharper sense of Adivasis’ distinct faith. In Musurputta, another village with a prominent board barring the entry of outsider Christians, villagers I met in the community hall asserted that converted Christians should return to their traditional faith.

I asked what faith they were referring to. They replied, without hesitation, that they were referring to Koya Punem.

Apart from the bans on entering villages, Shalini Gera, a lawyer and member of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, noted that Christian tribals in Bastar were also subjected to several other forms of social ostracism. For instance, they could be expelled from villages, subjected to economic boycotts, and prevented from tilling their lands or burying their dead.

This was echoed in interviews with lawyers working at the Chhattisgarh High Court involved in the case challenging the ban on outsider Christians, who had filed right-to-information requests pertaining to the gram sabha resolutions on the bans.

They found that some villages had sought to pass other, similarly harsh resolutions. For instance, a gram sabha in Pairvi village decided in June 2025 that no assistance of any kind would be provided to Christians in the village, that goods from grocery stores would be denied to them, as would benefits under government schemes. Further, if they had received government employment, their caste certificate would be cancelled. In Dompadar, the sarpanch noted that he, too, had heard of gram sabhas being encouraged to deny rations to Christians.

Gera noted that a group called the Janjati Suraksha Manch, associated with the Sangh Parivar, which was active up to 2022, had played a key role in the past in these processes.

Among the key demands that the group had made were that Adivasis who converted to Christianity should be stripped of their Scheduled Tribe status, and denied benefits that flowed from it, such as access to reserved government jobs. But, in fact, current Indian law contains no provision under which a member of a Scheduled Tribe would lose that status as a result of professing a particular faith. In contrast, under the law, an individual can only be a member of a Scheduled Caste if they profess Hinduism, Buddhism or Sikhism.

Among the most prominent recent incidents of extreme ostracisation occurred in December 2025 in Bade Tevda village in Kanker, and involved its sarpanch Rajman Salam.

Salam and one of his brothers had begun attending a local church, though his father continued to follow Adivasi traditions. When his father died, another brother made plans to hold the funeral according to Adivasi customs. Salam sought permission to attend the funeral, but villagers denied him entry. In response, Salam buried his father on his own land.

According to Gera, members of a newly created platform called Sarv Samaj then mobilised hundreds of people from nearby villages to exhume the grave. Members of the Dalit rights organisation Bhim Army arrived to support Salam, leading to a violent standoff. The next morning, Sarv Samaj members attacked Salam’s house and burned it down, along with a nearby church.

The administration later exhumed the father’s body and buried it in a location unknown to the family. According to local news reports, Salam and his family are now untraceable.

Such ostracisation has led to many leaving their homes and leading displaced lives.

On February 23, I met with Christian families, both Adivasi and non-Adivasi, of Dhantulsi and Salebhaat villages, who had been forced to leave their homes between December and January and were now living in ramshackle houses on the outskirts of Kanker town.

Chainu Ram, a quiet labourer from Salebhaat, who is in his fifties and who belongs to the Pardhi community, was also present in the room. The Pardhi community were historically nomadic and rarely own ancestral land. About five years ago, Ram applied for and received an individual forest rights title for about two acres of land, some of which he used for subsistence farming. In 2019, Ram, who is a widower, and his son, converted to Christianity.

Last year, Ram and his son, as well as other Christians in the village, were run out of their homes by fellow villagers. “The gram sabha took over my land, saying I don’t have rights over it due to my conversion,” he said. “When they first threw us out of our home, I lived under a tree for some days. My son went to live with his in-laws, but I have been left homeless.”

Ram now lives with other excommunicated Christians near Kanker, and earns a living by working as a daily-wage labourer.

Radhika Darro, a resident of Salebhaat, who once oversaw ASHA workers in the village, and four neighbouring villages, also in Kanker after being displaced from her home. She recounted that she and her niece converted to Christianity in 2019, and believed they obtained relief from health troubles after this. When they resisted undergoing ghar wapsi ceremonies, she said, other villagers beat them up and dragged them out of their home.

The extreme ostracisation that followed left them with no choice but to leave Salebhaat. “The gram sabha leaders told people, including my ASHA workers, that they would have to pay a fine of Rs 25,000 just for speaking with me,” Darro said. “And the person who reported these interactions to them would receive Rs 5000.”

The December incident at Bade Tevda appears to have been followed by a spike in hostility against Adivasis who converted to Christianity. “We converted some six-eight years ago. While people did oppose us, we still maintained cordial relations with them,” said Sanjay Kachlam, a resident of Mandri talking about his family and friends. “But the religious intolerance has risen sharply in recent months in Bastar, ever since the incident at Bade Tevda.”

Kachlam recounted that in late January he and other Christians were called by the gram sabha individually and told to return to their traditional faith. When they refused, he recounted, they were told, “You have to pick between Jesus or your land, you can’t have both.”

Kachlam and others refused to comply with this demand. Since then, he said, the other villagers had stopped interacting with them. Alongside, they were also denied rights over common land, forests, and public water supply. “We believe in Jesus Christ but we are also attached to our land and community,” Kachlam said. “Where will we even go if we leave?”

Kachlam, his wife Urmila Kange, and other friends are social workers who, among other activities, conduct workshops on matters of importance to Adivasis, such as the Panchayats Extension to the Scheduled Areas Act and the Forest Rights Act. “The recent setting up of boards prohibiting Christian pastors and outsiders are not what the PESA act was intended for,” said Kange. “The act was meant to empower tribal communities to govern themselves. Besides the protection of culture, there are various other provisions that are not being implemented.”

Research supports these accounts a paper published in 2025 states that “the promise of PESA remains under realized due to systemic constraint.”

Indeed, in Dompadar, Watti the sarpanch noted that Adivasis’ efforts to assert rights over nearby forest land had thus far been thwarted by the forest department. “We know about our rights, but whenever we make any decisions about the forest or even the village land, the administration prohibits us from doing do so,” he said.

Goti, the sarpanch from Kudal, was unapologetic about how the law was being deployed. “There is some work being done under the forest rights,” he said. “But our main focus under the PESA is to stop conversions.”

Meanwhile, activists noted that the current focus on religious conflict in Bastar had sidelined questions of tribal land alienation in the region. “There was a time when jal, jangal, jameen was on every Adivasi villager’s tongue,” said Yogesh Nareti. “People would constantly organise some or the other protest over local land or forest issues but now the protests have lessened.”

Gera agreed. “Before this violence, the local Adivasi communities were united in their mission to safeguard jal, jangal, jameen,” she said. “But the Right has managed to shift the discourse to religion.”

Villagers, too, echoed this fear. “The Bajrang Dal always talks about religion but never about jal, jangal, jameen,” Watti said. “I tell them that if you don’t protect jal, jangal jameen then nothing will survive, not even your religion.”

Just before dawn, small fishing boats sail into the creeks dotting Mumbai’s coastline. By mid-morning, the catch will be sorted, packed and delivered to the city’s many markets. Living along the coast of this Indian megacity, the Indigenous Koli fishing community has followed the same routine for generations.

Along these creeks, mangrove forests stand firm in the mudflats. Forming the city’s first line of defence against floods, they break the force of tides, hold the shoreline in place, sequester carbon and shelter the fish that sustain these waters.

In local Marathi dialects, mangroves are known as kaandalvan, teewar and khaarphuti. For fishers, they are the foundation of daily survival.

But a new 26 km coastal road planned between the upscale Versova neighbourhood and the suburbs of Bhayandar threatens these ecosystems.

“I earn around Rs 1,500-2,000 rupees a day. We fish 365 days,” says Sanjay Bhandari. The 50-year-old fisher works in Charkop, a Mumbai municipality the road will pass through. “If this coastal road comes, my income will go to zero.”

In March, India’s Supreme Court declined to overturn a ruling by the high court in Mumbai that permitted the removal of around 46,000 mangrove trees. The city’s planning authority, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, will be undertaking the work. The road is expected to be completed in 2029.

The Supreme Court ruled the road would “benefit the general public” by easing congestion on several major thoroughfares, as well as reducing travel times and fuel consumption for Mumbai residents.

But for fishing communities on the city’s outskirts that depend on the mangroves, their immediate reality has already begun changing.

Within a week of the Supreme Court’s decision, dozens of fishers from Versova to Charkop told Dialogue Earth they were seeing lower catches. They also claimed of being denied access to fishing areas. The BMC’s mangrove felling and foundational work has only just begun, but these fishers are already facing uncertainty over their livelihoods.

Manohar Bhandari, a fisher in Charkop, where the felling has begun, explains why catches are already declining: “The piling and constant hammering have scared away the fish. The fish understands changes in nature before humans do.”

Fishers always last to know

The proposed road is planned as a continuation of the existing Mumbai coastal road, and as an extension of the coastal corridor connecting to Bhayandar in the north.

According to the BMC, around 55% of the coastal road will be built on stilts, with some sections passing through tunnels.

The road is expected to pass through key fishing areas for several coastal villages including Charkop, Malvani, Gorai, Aksa, Manori and Marve.

According to the most recent data, tens of thousands of fisherfolk live along Mumbai’s central and suburban coastlines. Fishers fear the project will restrict access to creeks and traditional routes that have been used for generations.

In areas like Charkop and Gorai, located a few kilometres apart, mangroves stretch deep into the creeks. The air is thick with the sounds of birds and crabs. They move through the mudflats and tangled roots, exposed as the tide recedes.

Several fishers in Charkop, including Manohar and Sanjay Bhandari, say they first learned about the mangrove felling on social media, primarily through the citizens’ group Save Mumbai Mangroves. The group has been collecting geotagged footage of mangroves being felled along the route. Barricades have been installed around the mangroves, so members film from above in their apartment buildings.

The BMC’s submission to the high court in Mumbai reveals around 60,000 mangrove trees are within the project’s zone of influence, and therefore may be “affected/destroyed”. It states around 9,000 trees are to be destroyed in the areas occupied by the bridge and road construction. Nearly 37,000 mangroves in a 68-hectare zone will be “temporarily diverted and affected” during construction, before being subject to a detailed restoration plan.

The court has directed another 36,925 mangroves to be planted on land that will become available following construction. This will be carried out by the Mangrove Cell of the state of Maharashtra, a government unit dedicated to mangrove protection, conservation and management.

Fishers also allege that mangrove trees are being felled late at night, only to be discovered when they fish near the creeks in the daytime. They question the BMC’s intent: “Why hide it?” asks Manohar. “Why not let us see?”

Dheeraj Bhandari, president of the local Charkop Koliwada Society fishing association, says fishing communities and villagers are often the last to be informed of infrastructure projects.

According to Stalin Dayanand, director of the Mumbai environmental group Vanashakti, fishing communities in the project sites were not even informed while the first phase was being planned. “They only found out when their jetties were taken over, access was restricted, and their boats were removed,” he claims.

“Informing them is what an ethical government should do,” says Stalin. “[The fishing communities] always have to fight back, and then some settlement is reached.”

Dialogue Earth has contacted the Mangrove Cell of Maharashtra but not received a response.

Fisherfolk associations from the Koli fishing village of Worli Koliwada petitioned the Bombay High Court in 2019. They challenged aspects of the coastal road project, and alleged a lack of consultation and adequate surveys when assessing potential impacts on fishers’ livelihoods and marine life. Though the high court ordered a halt to the work, the Supreme Court eventually allowed the project to continue, with certain restrictions.

The Coastal Regulation Zone framework, established under the Environment Protection Act, regulates development along India’s coasts. Under this framework, state governments are required to form district-level committees to enforce it and monitor projects. The committees must include at least three representatives of local traditional coastal communities, including fisherfolk.

“However, in Maharashtra state government projects, representation in actual decision-making processes is often missing,” Stalin claims.

He adds that Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers are granted statutory rights under the 2006 Forest Rights Act. But fishing communities do not have equivalent comprehensive and national rights-based legislation.

“They should be treated on par with tribal communities, because they are Indigenous people who depend on the land and the water for their livelihood,” Stalin says.

Malvani village is located in the central stretch of the project. In early April, around 30 members of the Koli community gathered near their fishing grounds here, protesting the construction of a boundary wall enclosing the site. Pradeep Koli, a fisher, alleges the work began without residents being consulted.

Villagers claimed the construction work meant access to traditional fishing grounds was being restricted. “This land belongs to us. We were never asked,” says Koli. “We have come here to protect our existence, to save our lifeline.”

Livelihoods and cultural ties at stake

Mangrove systems, such as those the road is expected to cut through, serve as rich breeding grounds for marine life. During high tide, fish and crabs spawn in the shallow, nutrient-rich waters. Fishers tell Dialogue Earth they sustain local fisheries that have been depended on for generations.

“If you cut down these mangroves and damage these mudflats, how will they ever grow back?” asks Dheeraj of the Charkop Koliwada Society. “The plan must be changed. We cannot destroy natural resources.” Fishers and campaigners consulted by Dialogue Earth say the loss of mangroves is not just ecological or economic but deeply cultural.

Mangroves have long been part of the communities’ everyday life. Their wood and branches have traditionally been used to build homes. The mangrove ecosystems have shaped daily life, knowledge systems and traditions, notes Stalin, who has been studying the ecology of Mumbai.

Fishing communities have historically used mangroves sustainably and long played a role in protecting them in and around Mumbai, Stalin says: “Even for firewood, they would take fallen branches. Cutting mangrove trees is not part of their practice.”

Mohit Ramle, Mumbai president of the All Koli Community and Culture Preservation Association, has been raising awareness about mangroves and their key role in Koli life using social media.

Standing near Versova Beach, he tells Dialogue Earth how mangrove resources were used in folk medicine for snake bites and insect bites: “Leaves and bark helped treat wounds. Some leaves, when crushed, release a smell that repels mosquitoes. This knowledge comes from our ancestors.”

Mangroves have always held importance in Koli traditions, too. This is reflected in oral traditions and folk songs passed down through generations. These include stories of the sea, nature and spirits believed to inhabit these landscapes, Ramle notes, such as the goddess Holika.

For the Kolis, who have long been nature worshippers, the disappearance of mangroves is not just environmental degradation – it is the erosion of memory, belief and belonging.

‘Mindset more dangerous than a tsunami’

Dozens of fishers Dialogue Earth spoke to say they have complained to the BMC, and have been actively participating in protests around the city. Dialogue Earth reached out to the BMC but has not received a response.

For Sanjay Bhandari, fishing is his only source of income. He wishes to support his daughter to become a cricketer – an expensive pursuit. He laments: “If fishing stops, how will [she] move forward?”

Around him, others are asking similar questions. “We don’t know whose dream project this [road] is,” says Dheeraj. “What we do know is that it cuts through mangroves and will destroy the biodiversity here.”

For a city that has repeatedly withstood devastating floods, water levels rising further due to the loss of mangroves is a real worry, he notes: “If we cut down the mangroves, it will be worse for us.”

For Ramle, the issue runs deeper than a single project: “Concrete alone is not development; living in peace with nature is real development.”

What worries him more is how easily nature is dismissed: “This mindset is more dangerous than a tsunami. A tsunami comes once; this keeps destroying nature again and again.”

Ramle insists the community is not opposed to development. “Our fight is against unsustainable development.”

He thinks many in the fishing community are still unaware of the project itself. Among those who are aware, Ramle says, there is growing fatigue: “Our community is tired of protests and legal fights. People are fed up. They should be able to focus on their livelihoods instead.”

This story was supported by Earth Journalism Network.

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

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

At least seven persons died after a compound wall at the Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital in Bengaluru collapsed during heavy rain on Wednesday evening, The Hindu reported.

Seven others were injured in the incident, the newspaper quoted Shivajinagar MLA Rizwan Arshad as saying.

The police said that the wall collapse was reported around 5.30 pm.

Preliminary findings indicate that most of those who died were roadside vendors who may have been taking shelter near the wall when it collapsed, reportedly close to the hospital’s mortuary, the Deccan Herald reported.

It was not immediately clear whether the structure was already in a dilapidated condition.

#WATCH | Bengaluru, Karnataka | Visuals from the spot where a compound wall collapsed near the Bowring and Lady Curzon Hospital, claiming the lives of seven people pic.twitter.com/kwznt2PCcC

— ANI (@ANI) April 29, 2026

Chief Minister Siddaramaiah visited the injured at the hospital and sought details from officials regarding the mishap, including about the condition and safety assessment of the structure, The Hindu reported.

Heavy rain, thunderstorms and hailstorms lashed the Karnataka capital on Wednesday evening, leading to waterlogging and road cave-ins in several areas and disrupting traffic.

Voting for the second and final phase of the Assembly elections concluded on Wednesday amid tight security.

Polling in 142 of the state’s 294 constituencies began at 7 am.

A provisional voter turnout of 91.4% had been recorded, according to the Election Commission.

The first phase of polling, which covered 152 seats, was held on April 23 and a record turnout of 93.2% was reported.

The votes will be counted on Monday, along with those in Assam, Kerala, Puducherry and Tamil Nadu.

In West Bengal, the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has been in power since 2011. The main Opposition in the state over the years has shifted from the Left parties to the Bharatiya Janata Party.

In the 2021 polls, the BJP managed to win 77 seats in the 294-member Assembly. The Trinamool Congress had won 215. A party or an alliance needs 148 seats for a majority. The other alliance comprising the Left, the Congress and some smaller parties, despite securing a 10% vote share, had won just one seat.

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

Violence, vandalism in early hours

The West Bengal Police on Wednesday said that incidents of violence and vandalism were reported from parts of the state during the early hours of voting in the second phase, PTI reported.

In Hooghly, clashes broke out between workers of the Trinamool Congress and the Indian Secular Front at a booth in Khanakul on allegations that fake polling agents were appointed, PTI reported.

Chaos also erupted outside a booth in Howrah as voters said that polling began at 8.30 am after three failed attempts due to an Electronic Voting Machine malfunctioning, ANI reported. Voters also alleged that a few persons trying to disrupt polling were taken away by the security personnel.

Leader of Opposition Suvendu Adhikari alleged that he was surrounded by “Mamata’s goons” and attempts were made to attack him at a polling booth in the Bhabanipur constituency, where he is the BJP’s candidate against Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, PTI reported.

Adhikari alleged that his attackers were not voters but “outsiders” and claimed he would not leave the area until Central Reserve Police Force personnel were sent, the news agency reported.

Ahead of polling, a booth worker from the BJP alleged that he was attacked by Trinamool Congress “goons” in the Chapra Assembly seat in Nadia district, ANI reported. The agent, identified as Mosharraf Mir, was reportedly attacked at around 5.30 am with an iron rod.

Security arrangements, arrests ahead of polls

Ahead of the second phase of polling, the Election Commission deployed 2,321 companies of Central Armed Police Forces in the state, The Hindu reported. In Kolkata, where 11 seats are going to the polls, 273 companies have been deployed.

In the past month, 390 arms and 598 rounds of ammunition were recovered during raids in the state, PTI quoted an unidentified official from the poll panel as saying.

The official added that steps had also been taken to regulate licensed arms, with 41,706 out of 52,869 licensed weapons deposited so far. Explosives weighing over 222.5 kg were seized during the raids that began on March 15 in the state, he added.

“A total of 390 arms and weapons have been seized till now, along with 1,348 crude bombs,” the news agency quoted him as saying.

Over the past two days, 2,473 persons have also been apprehended in West Bengal as part of intensified surveillance ahead of the second phase of voting, PTI reported.

An Election Commission official told the news agency that the arrests and detentions were made in 60 hours in several districts going to the polls.

Most of those detained were identified as potential “troublemakers”, the official added.

The police and the administration are reporting to the Election Commission as the Model Code of Conduct is in force in the state.

The arrests come days after the Calcutta High Court on April 22 stayed an order issued by Election Commission officials to the police in West Bengal to take preventive action against “troublemakers” ahead of the Assembly elections.

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

The judges stayed the order till June 30.

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

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

SIR in Bengal

The polls are taking place against the backdrop of the Election Commission having carried out a special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories, including West Bengal.

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

About 27 lakh appeals filed in tribunals against exclusion from the voter lists are mostly undecided.

All decisions made by the tribunals on the addition and deletion of voters by April 21 for the first phase and April 27 for the second must be reflected in the final voter lists, the Supreme Court has told the Election Commission.

Only 138 of the 27 lakh appeals had been decided on by the tribunals ahead of the first phase.

Before the second phase, the Election Commission permitted 1,468 voters excluded during adjudication to cast their votes, after tribunals cleared their names, The Hindu reported. Six voters were also deleted by the tribunal.

Also read:

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

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

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

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Voter turnout in the second and final phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections is set to cross 90%. As of 5 pm, a voter turnout of 89.9% had been recorded in the state, according to the Election Commission.

Polling took place in 142 of the state’s 294 constituencies. The first phase of polling, which covered 152 seats, was held on April 23 and a record turnout of 93.2% was reported.

The West Bengal Police said incidents of violence and vandalism were reported from parts of the state during the early hours of polling. Read on.

The Election Commission said that it will conduct repolling in election booths where it is “verified” that the Electronic Voting Machines had been tampered with. It said so after the Bharatiya Janata Party alleged that in several booths in Falta, tape had been used to cover the button that is to be used for vote for the Hindutva party.

The party’s publicity chief Amit Malviya demanded an immediate re-election in “all affected booths”. A video posted by him on social media purportedly showed that the voting buttons for the BJP candidate and another nominee in booth number 170 had been covered with a tape. Read on.

The Supreme Court refused to pass additional directions to curb acts of hate speech, saying that existing laws are sufficient to deal with the problem. The order said that the court can only draw attention to the need for reforms.

The bench said that the power to create criminal offences lies within the legislative domain. It also noted that the existing framework of the criminal law, including provisions of the Indian Penal Code and linked legislations “adequately addresses” acts that promote enmity, outrage religious sentiments or disturb public order. Read on.

Has the Supreme Court gone soft on hate speech, examines Ratna Singh.

Benchmark Brent crude rose more than 3% to $114.8 a barrel by 6 pm, as uncertainties continue about whether the United States and Iran will resume talks to end the conflict in West Asia. The price is at its highest level since June 2022.

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

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Government officials in Maharashtra will no longer have to stand up and greet MLAs or MPs if they have been convicted in a criminal case, summoned for an inquiry or hearing, or are visiting the office for election-related work.

Maharashtra’s general administration department issued a circular to this effect on Tuesday.

It amended an earlier directive dated November 20, which had stated that when members of the state legislature or members of Parliament visit officials, the officials should stand up and greet them when they arrive and when they depart.

The amended directive states: “If a public representative has been convicted in a criminal or other case, or has been summoned as an appellant or a party for an inquiry/hearing, or is present in a government office for election-related processes [such as filing nomination papers, scrutiny, or hearings], officials are not required to stand up or greet the Member of the Legislative Assembly / Parliament upon their arrival or departure.”

The circular, signed by Chief Secretary Rajesh Agarwal, said that in such situations, officials should treat elected representatives like ordinary citizens without any special protocols.

The directive from November 20, which consolidated all previous government resolutions on how to interact with public representatives, had been issued after several MLAs complained that they were not being treated respectfully by government officials, The Times of India reported.

Commenting on the amendment issued on Tuesday, Congress MLA Amin Patel remarked that even now, legislators are treated as ordinary citizens when they file nomination papers, which he said was absolutely fine.

Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Ameet Satam said that the fresh directive only deals with some specific situations, according to The Times of India.

“If an elected representative has come as an accused, has come to record a statement, or has come to file his nominations, then the returning officer need not stand up and greet him to maintain neutrality and transparency,” Satam told the newspaper. “I find nothing objectionable in it.”

The Madras High Court on Wednesday directed the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe an alleged loss of Rs 397 crore to the state exchequer linked to irregularities in the procurement of transformers during V Senthil Balaji’s tenure as Tamil Nadu electricity minister, Bar and Bench reported.

The alleged irregularities purportedly took place between 2021 and 2023, when the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader was the state minister.

A First Division Bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G Arul Murugan was hearing a writ petition filed by non-governmental organisation Arappor Iyakkam and members of other political parties.

The NGO had approached the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption on July 6, 2023, and later moved the High Court seeking directions to the agency to act on its complaint and register a first information report.

On Wednesday, the bench directed the state anti-corruption agency to transfer all relevant material to the CBI within two weeks, and asked the central agency to conduct a fresh investigation into the matter, Bar and Bench.

The alleged scam

The Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corporation procures distribution transformers through competitive bidding based on varying load-capacity requirements.

Arappor Iyakkam reportedly analysed 10 tenders floated between 2021 and 2023 for the procurement of 4,58,000 distribution transformers, at a value of Rs 1,182 crore.

The NGO alleged that seven of these tenders showed irregularities to favour specific bidders through “collusive bidding and cartelisation”, leading to a loss of Rs 397 crore, The Hindu reported.

Balaji was serving as minister for electricity, prohibition and excise at the time. He was arrested in June 2023 in an unrelated cash-for-jobs case, and continued as a minister without portfolio until his resignation in February 2024.

He also faces allegations of money laundering.

The Kerala High Court on Tuesday questioned the Election Commission about allegations that 21,156 government officials deployed on election duty were unable to cast their votes during the Assembly polls on April 9, The Hindu reported.

The allegations were unfortunate, Justice KV Jayakumar said, adding that the poll panel ought to provide the necessary voting facilities to all eligible citizens.

The court was hearing a batch of petitions alleging large-scale denial of voting rights to government officials on poll duty during the elections. The petitions sought directions to make postal ballots available to the officials and to extend the deadline for casting the votes.

At an earlier hearing on April 8, the court had directed the Election Commission to take corrective steps to ensure that the personnel on duty received their postal ballots without delay, Live Law reported. Subsequently, the poll panel issued an order to facilitate their voting.

However, the petitioners’ counsel told the judge that several officials on election duty did not receive the postal ballots despite submitting their applications within the prescribed timeframe.

On Tuesday, the counsel reiterated that a large number of personnel had been effectively denied the opportunity to vote. “Postal ballots were not properly issued,” the legal news portal quoted the counsel as having argued.

However, the counsel for the Election Commission told the judge that applications for postal ballots were either rejected, not received or found to be defective in several cases. The appropriate remedy for the petitioners would be to file an election petition after the conclusion of the electoral process, the counsel added.

An election petition is a procedure for inquiring into the validity of the polls results. Such petitions are filed in the High Court of the state in which the election was conducted.

Expressing concern, the judge described the allegations as serious, Live Law reported.

“Twenty thousand people could not vote,” the news agency quoted Jayakumar as saying. “They are working for you [Election Commission]…Why are you so adamant?…It is your duty to ensure that they vote. It is very unfortunate.”

Votes for the Assembly elections in Kerala will be counted on Friday.

Odisha Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi on Tuesday ordered an inquiry into the circumstances that led to an Adivasi man in Keonjhar district exhuming his sister’s body and taking her skeletal remains to a Odisha Grameen Bank branch to prove that she had died two months ago, PTI reported.

Jeetu Munda did this so that he could withdraw money that was deposited into her account.

The inquiry will also ascertain “how to prevent such episodes in future”, PTI quoted an unidentified official in the chief minister’s office as saying.

The official added that Majhi had “expressed grief” over the incident and directed officials to “be more sensitive towards people”, PTI reported.

The revenue divisional commissioner of state’s northern division has been directed to conduct the probe.

Jeetu Munda was provided financial assistance of Rs 30,000 from the District Red Cross Fund, the death certificate of his sister and the inheritance certificate, PTI quoted the statement as having added.

He has reportedly also received the money from his sister’s account.

Meanwhile, the Indian Overseas Bank in a follow-up statement on Tuesday evening said that the Odisha Grameen Bank, a rural bank that it sponsors, has “settled the claim amount of Rs 19,402 in the name of three legal heirs and money handed over to them, in accordance with established norms”.

It did not specify who the heirs were.

Reported Incident at Odisha Grameen Bank of claimant bringing sister’s skeleton for death claim process.

We would like to submit that, today the Government Authorities have issued the Death Certificate and Legal Heir Certificate. Immediately on receipt of these documents, Bank…

— Indian Overseas Bank (@IOBIndia) April 28, 2026

The incident of the woman’s skeletal remains being taken to the bank’s Maliposi branch occurred on Monday.

The sister, Kalra Munda, died on January 26.

Jeetu Munda was quoted as saying by PTI: “I have gone several times to the bank, and the people there told me to bring the account holder to withdraw money deposited in her name. Though I told them that she had died, they insisted on bringing her to the bank.”

He said that he eventually exhumed her body “out of frustration”.

Earlier on Tuesday, the Indian Overseas Bank had claimed that the matter was “due to a lack of awareness of the claim settlement process” and Jeetu Munda’s “unwillingness to accept the procedures”.

“There is no case of any harassment,” it said.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to pass additional directions to curb acts of hate speech, saying that existing laws are sufficient to deal with the problem, Bar and Bench reported.

The notion that the offence is unoccupied by the law is misconceived, Live Law quoted a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta as saying. The court added that there is no legislative vacuum in this regard.

The observations came on a batch of petitions seeking directions and guidelines to address hate speech.

In its order, the bench said that the power to create criminal offences lies within the legislative domain. “The constitutional scheme founded upon the doctrine of separation of powers does not permit the judiciary to create new offences or expand the contours of criminal liability through judicial directions,” Live Law quoted the court as saying.

The order said that the court can only draw attention to the need for reforms.

It also noted that the existing framework of the criminal law, including provisions of the Indian Penal Code and linked legislations “adequately addresses” acts that promote enmity, outrage religious sentiments or disturb public order, the legal news outlet reported.

The court further said that the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita provides for a first information report to be filed in case of cognisable offences. It also provides remedies before the magistrate in case of default by the police, the bench added.

The bench also said that the grievances highlighted by the petitioners did not arise from the absence of law but from a lack of its enforcement, adding that such concerns do not justify law-making by the judiciary.

However, the court said that “issues relating to hate speeches and rumour-mongering bear directly upon the preservation of fraternity, dignity and constitutional order”, Live Law reported.

It is open for the Centre and the state governments to consider whether changes are warranted in the light of evolving societal challenges and to bring about suitable amendments, Bar and Bench reported.

The petitions

The current batch of hate-speech cases traces its origins to 2020.

The first one was during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the so-called “corona jihad” campaign blamed Muslims for the spread of the virus in India. Second, a television programme had alleged a conspiracy by Muslim candidates to enter the civil services.

The petitioners argued that such narratives violated “constitutional values of equality, dignity and fraternity”, and contended that the authorities had failed to act against them.

In an early intervention in 2020, the court had restrained the telecast of the controversial programme. It recognised that certain forms of hate speech, especially when amplified through media, could reshape social relations and deepen exclusion, going beyond ordinary free-speech disputes.

Between 2021 and 2022, the matter being heard by the court expanded after a series of religious gatherings known as Dharam Sansads. At these events, speakers allegedly called for violence against Muslims, economic boycotts, armed mobilisation and genocide.

Among the pleas were also public interest litigations seeking legislation against acts of hate speech.

In 2023, the court directed all state governments and Union Territories to act proactively in cases involving speeches promoting communal hatred or offending religious sentiments, Live Law reported.

It asked the police to file FIRs without waiting for formal complaints.

Following this, petitions were also filed alleging that the directions had not been implemented effectively.

Reports indicate that while documentation of such incidents has increased over the years, actual police action against offenders has often remained limited. As per a June-August 2025 hate crime tracker report by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights, enforcement remained very poor.

In February, the court declined to entertain petitions seeking that a FIR be filed against Assam chief minister and Bharatiya Janata Party leader Himanta Biswa Sarma for the act of hate speech against Muslims.

The petitions seeking action against Sarma pointed to several alleged acts of hate speech by Sarma, and to a now-deleted social media post by the BJP’s Assam unit, containing a video depicting Sarma symbolically firing at images of two Muslim men at point-blank range.

In January, the court hearing another petition stated that matters pertaining to hate speech pending before it since 2021 would be closed. These were matters in which the court has asked the police to register FIRs suo motu.

In doing so, the court said that the parties could pursue other legal remedies. Only one case relating to a 2021 alleged act of hate crime against a Muslim cleric in Noida was kept open to monitor the progress of the trial.

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

The Election Commission on Tuesday transferred the joint block development officer of Falta in South 24 Parganas district, a day ahead of the second phase of Assembly polls in West Bengal, PTI reported.

The officer, Sourav Hazra, was transferred to Purulia, where polling concluded on April 23. In Falta, he was replaced by Ramya Bhattacharya.

No reason for the transfer was cited in the Election Commission’s orders, PTI reported. The news agency quoted an unidentified official of the poll panel as saying that it was a routine transfer.

However, Hazra’s transfer came following allegations that he had not cooperated with Ajay Pal Sharma, a special police observer appointed by the Election Commission, the news agency reported.

Workers of the Trinamool Congress protested against Sharma on Monday after videos of him going to the home of the party’s Falta candidate Jahangir Khan were widely shared on social media. The action, reported by some news organisations as a search operation, was carried out after complaints were allegedly raised that Khan was intimidating voters.

Sharma is a deputy inspector general of police in Uttar Pradesh’s Prayagraj.

On Monday, the Bharatiya Janata Party posted a video on social media showing Sharma purportedly “reading the riot act” to Khan’s family.

“Listen carefully: if there is any mischief, the ‘treatment’ will be such that crying later won’t help,” Sharma can be heard purportedly saying in the video. He was standing in front of Khan’s home after he could not locate him, The Indian Express reported.

On social media, the TMC described Sharma as “Uttar Pradesh’s notorious ‘Singham’ and [Chief Minister] Adityanath’s favourite ‘encounter specialist’”.

“This is the same officer infamous for his trigger-happy ‘thok do’ [bump off] attitude,” the party alleged.

On Tuesday, the poll panel also removed two additional district magistrates, but had not provided reasons in the notice, the news agency reported. One of them was in charge of poll-related activities in the South 24 Parganas district.

Pleas against Sharma’s appointment as observer

A public interest litigation has been filed before the Supreme Court challenging the decision of the Election Commission to appoint Sharma as a police observer during the polls, Live Law reported on Wednesday.

The petitioner has alleged that the officer was behaving in a “highly partisan” manner and threatening candidates.

It is also alleged that Sharma’s actions violate the functions of the observer, which are to “watch the conduct of the elections” and be a “neutral institutional safeguard, whose presence is meant to reinforce public confidence in the conduct of elections”, according to the 1951 Representation of the People Act.

On Tuesday, the Calcutta High Court refused to pass an order on a plea that challenged Sharma's appointment as an observer. The court said that it cannot interfere with the polling process, Live Law reported.

Also read: Interview: RG Kar protester is ‘shocked, shattered’ to see victim’s mother contest on BJP ticket

The Maharashtra government on Tuesday said it will defer enforcing its decision to make Marathi mandatory for auto rickshaw and taxi drivers.

On April 14, the state government made it mandatory for all licensed rickshaw and taxi drivers to have basic knowledge of Marathi from May 1. State Transport Minister Pratap Sarnaik had warned that the licences of drivers who are unable to clear the Marathi proficiency test will be cancelled.

On Tuesday, the government’s publicity department quoted Sarnaik as having said at a meeting with representatives of auto rickshaw and taxi drivers’ organisations that all stakeholders had given a positive response and were supporting the decision to make Marathi mandatory.

“Everyone has accepted the stance that ‘if you want to do business in Maharashtra, knowing Marathi is essential’,” Sarnaik was quoted as having said.

The government stated that instructions have been given to all Regional Transport Offices to conduct a special inspection campaign from Friday. During this drive, action will be taken against drivers who violate rules or those involved in illegal transport.

“However, licenses will not be cancelled solely on the grounds that the driver does not know Marathi,” the government said, adding that “action will be taken only in accordance with other legal provisions”.

After the campaign ends on August 15, a report will be submitted and a policy decision will be taken in the matter, Sarnaik said.

Following the announcement, non-Marathi drivers’ unions withdrew their call for a strike on May 4, The Hindu reported.

The government also said that Regional Transport Offices will provide facilities for drivers who are interested in learning Marathi. Booklets and e-books for learning the language will also be made available.

Drivers who learn Marathi will be issued certificates, which will be required while renewing licenses, Sarnaik was quoted as having said.

The training for drivers will be provided in collaboration with the Konkan Marathi Sahitya Parishad and the Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh.

The draft electric vehicle policy issued by the Delhi government on April 11 aims to promote electrification for vehicles through a mix of incentives, road-tax waivers and restrictions on new registrations of vehicles that use petrol and diesel.

However, the policy suffers from two fundamental limitations that require urgent reconsideration. First, the policy frames the measures as a solution to air pollution and, indirectly, as a justification for extending subsidies for switching to electric to even car users who are among the most affluent in the city.

Such a framing is myopic because it assumes that air pollution is the only effect of transport. Automobile use also hurts the health of residents through traffic injuries, reduced physical activity, traffic noise and by occupying scarce public space.

Beyond health, vehicle production contributes to carbon dioxide emissions, while battery manufacturing relies on minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, the extraction of which is the subject of serious environmental and social concerns globally.

By presenting electrification of two-wheelers, three-wheelers, four-wheeled goods vehicles and passenger cars primarily as an air pollution solution, the policy narrows the scope of what should be a much broader rethinking of urban mobility.

The more pertinent question is not simply how to reduce air pollution, but how to do so while simultaneously addressing climate change, improving road safety, enabling walking and cycling and reclaiming urban space for more egalitarian use.

The second limitation is more structural: the policy is almost entirely silent on the street governance of vehicle charging. Nowhere does it engage with the question of urban space, particularly the curb, the edge of the road. In a city like Delhi, where onstreet parking is widespread and largely unregulated, the curbside is already a highly contested space. There is a severe lack of formal parking locations to accommodate the rising number of cars every year.

The combined capacity of the parking facilities in the city’s two municipal areas is estimated at around 60,000 cars. Even if we assume that each parking space is used by an average of three cars per day, this is miniscule compared to the total car population of 21 lakh.

Unsurprisingly, improper parking is the largest category of on-the-spot challans given by Delhi Police totalling more than four lakhs per year.

There are also rapidly increasing cases of parking disputes leading to road-rage and some even resulting in deaths. The number of calls made to police every year to report such cases more than tripled over a brief period of 2021 to 2023.

Besides parked cars, curb space is used by street vendors, pedestrians, buses and para transit users, and delivery vehicles. Introducing large numbers of electric vehicles in the city without a clear framework for how charging infrastructure will be integrated into this space risks deepening existing conflicts.

Who gets priority access to the curb? Will charging stations displace pedestrians or street vendors? Or will they simply formalise the current practice of cars occupying public land for free, as is the status currently?

The framework to answer these questions has already been codified in the Delhi Maintenance and Management of Parking Places Rules, 2019. Despite more than five years since its notification, the parking policy has seen limited implementation. These rules recognise parking as a demand management tool and provide a detailed guidance framework for developing Parking Area Management plans in consultation with local stakeholders to rationalise the use of street space.

The rules give clear priority of using on-street spaces to pedestrians and cyclists, formal and para-transit users, and street vendors, while short-duration parking is at the end of this list.

Yet, the draft electric vehicle policy makes no mention of these rules, not even as a footnote, even while acknowledging that the land parcels will have to be identified for public charging stations.

The word parking does not occur even once in the policy. This omission has serious consequences. Planning for space for charging stations without embedding it within parking management plans risks giving automobiles precedence, which goes against the priority given in government's own parking rules.

A more forward-looking electric vehicle policy must do two things differently. First, it should explicitly integrate electrification with parking reform, making strict implementation (and not just formulation) of Parking Area Management Plans a condition for public charging stations to be deployed in areas. This would ensure that electrification goes only as fast as the governance in the city provides space for it, and that the curb space is allocated transparently and equitably.

Second, the policy should aim for a transformative impact by shifting incentives towards smaller, lighter, and slower vehicles that use less space and pose lower risks to others. The subsidy should be progressively reduced for larger passenger vehicles, based on, for example, engine size, to nudge consumers towards low-powered, smaller vehicles, and should be completely removed for personal cars.

The inclusion of electric bicycles in the previous EV policy (2020-’24) framework was a step in this direction. Their absence represents a missed opportunity.

Electrification is undoubtedly an important part of Delhi’s response to air pollution. But if pursued in isolation from questions of space, safety, and equity, it risks reinforcing the very problems it seeks to solve. A true reset would require moving beyond a vehicle-centric approach to one that places people, and the shared use of urban space, at its core.

Rahul Goel is an Associate Professor, Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre, at IIT Delhi. His email address is rgoel@iitd.ac.in.

There is a sleight of hand at the core of Indian democracy, repeated so often it now passes for normal. Once every five years, the citizen is briefly sovereign: courted by parties, venerated by leaders, drenched in the rhetoric of jan shakti and loktantra, people’s power and democracy. For that moment, the voter is king.

Then the ballots are counted, the winners declared and the citizen reverts, instantly and completely, to being a subject.

For the next five years, elected representatives take decisions that shape every aspect of life – taxation, infrastructure, education, healthcare, land, and law – without any meaningful citizen intervention. There is no continuous mechanism of accountability, no institutional channel for participation, no enforceable right to intervene between elections.

Call it what it is: not democracy, but an elective oligarchy, a ritualised transfer of power to a political class that, once installed, answers to almost no one.

Ritual of the vote

The vote is both the start and the limit of democratic participation in India. In many constituencies, it is also a transaction, shaped by cash, liquor, caste alignments, or manufactured communal fear.

The Centre for Media Studies estimated that parties and candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha election spent roughly Rs 100,000 crore, with a significant share that went towards influencing voters. In such conditions, sovereignty gives way to exchange – commercial or communal – by design.

Even a genuinely free vote leads to immediate disempowerment. The Constitution provides no mechanism for ordinary citizens to recall representatives, initiate legislation, veto laws, mandate referendums or enforce accountability between elections.

The courts offer recourse in theory, but remain structurally inaccessible to most Indians. Their record in delivering justice is unimpressive and in recent decades their credibility has been eroded. The Right to Information Act, 2005, once enabled transparency but has been hollowed out.

The media – the so-called Fourth Estate – stands largely captured, corporatised, and domesticated, reduced to a propaganda machine of the ruling party.

Protest on the street is routinely throttled by policing.

Taken together, few institutions today function as reliable democratic safeguards for the ordinary citizen.

The result is stark: a democracy of inputs, where citizens supply votes, and an oligarchy of outputs, where everything after the vote belongs to those who receive it.

How representatives became rulers

This was not the original promise of the Constitution. Its architects recognised the dangers of concentrated power. Yet the system they built – a Westminster model of parliamentary sovereignty, the anti-defection regime of 1985 and steady centralisation at the expense of local governance – has produced a political class with vast authority and scanty accountability.

The anti-defection law is central to this distortion. It compels MPs to vote as their party directs or lose their seat, effectively extinguishing legislative conscience. Representatives cease to speak for constituents and instead act as delegates of the party leadership. In practice, citizens vote not for individuals, but for decisions taken by a small, unelected party elite, for whom they did not vote.

Parliament, as a result, functions less as a deliberative forum and more as a ratifying mechanism. Real decisions are made in party high commands and executive offices; Parliament formalises them. Hence, laws of sweeping consequence pass with minimal debate, sometimes in minutes.

The 2020 farm laws, pushed through by voice vote, and the abrogation of Article 370 of the Constitution illustrate a pattern: procedure substitutes for deliberation. The citizen remains a spectator – formally sovereign, substantively powerless.

Over time, the state has also fortified itself against dissent. Laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act have been used to constrain activists, journalists, and civil society.

Protest, the most direct form of democratic expression, is frequently met with repressive policing. The legal architecture increasingly regulates participation rather than enabling it.

The proposed Delimitation Bill, 2026, followed the same logic. Expanding Parliament from 543 to 850 members aimed to multiply seats, but it did not deepen citizen power. It would have enlarged the political class – its reach, its patronage, its control – while the citizen remained, as before, outside the structure of decision-making.

The Delimitation Bill debate, and the defeat of the government, has opened a window. The national conversation is, briefly, about the structure of representation. The question is whether citizens and their advocates will seize this moment to push the conversation further – from the number of MPs to the accountability of MPs, from the mechanics of election to the mechanics of governance, from who represents us to how we represent ourselves.

Spectators in theatre of democracy

Between elections, the Indian citizen’s role is largely that of a spectator. Parliament appears as theatre – noise, walkouts, little deliberation. Constituency politics reduces MPs to patronage brokers: inaugurations, symbolic presence, selective favours. Welfare arrives, if at all, through layers of discretion, mediated by middlemen, paperwork, and entrenched hierarchies that often block access before benefits reach the citizen.

For most, especially the poor, rural, marginalised, and tribal, this is the lived reality. Constitutional promises of equality, dignity, and opportunity remain aspirational. The political class, insulated from these failures by its own parallel world of privilege, rarely bears their consequences. The distance between rulers and ruled is not just economic but also structural.

When that gap becomes visible, the response is rarely reform. It is spectacle: new schemes, symbolic legislation, calibrated polarisation and the manufacture of external or internal adversaries to redirect public attention.

Even institutional changes framed as reform tend to expand political capacity rather than citizen control, leaving the underlying deficit of accountability untouched.

Participatory democracy

It is time to move the conversation from the question of who represents us to the question of how we govern ourselves. This is the transition from representative democracy – a system designed for an era when citizens could not practically participate in governance – to participatory democracy, a system that uses every available institutional mechanism to return sovereignty to its rightful owners.

The tools of participatory democracy are not theoretical. They exist. They function. They have transformed the political cultures of the countries that have adopted them. India need not invent them from scratch. It need only have the political will to import them – and the citizens’ movement to demand that will.

AAP MP Raghav Chadha (@raghav_chadha) posts, "If voters can HIRE a neta, they should be able to FIRE the neta too. If Indian voters have the Right to Elect, they should have the ‘RIGHT TO RECALL’ too. Right to Recall is a mechanism that empowers voters to de-elect an elected… pic.twitter.com/L4ltc73Enb

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) February 11, 2026

The right to recall

The most basic accountability mechanism missing from Indian democracy is the right of citizens to remove an elected representative before the end of their term. Currently, an MP elected on a particular platform can, within days of election, do the exact opposite of what they promised – cross the floor, support governments they campaigned against, vote for bills that harm their constituents, vanish entirely from the constituency – and face no consequence until the next election, five years later.

The right to recall, practised in various forms in the United States (at the state level), in Switzerland, in parts of Latin America, allows a defined percentage of voters in a constituency to trigger a fresh election if their representative fails to meet the basic terms of their mandate.

This is not a mechanism for the political class to weaponise against each other – the percentage threshold and procedural safeguards prevent that. It is a mechanism for citizens to exercise ongoing sovereignty, not just periodic franchise.

Panchayati Raj institutions in several Indian states already have provisions for recall of elected Panchayat leaders. There is no principled reason why this cannot be extended to MLAs and MPs.

Citizens’ initiative and referendum

A democracy that cannot consult its citizens on the major decisions that shape their lives is a democracy in name only. Switzerland has held over 600 national referendums since 1848. Virtually every major question – from immigration policy to financial legislation to constitutional amendments – has been put to the direct vote of Swiss citizens. The country is not paralysed. It is, by most measures, one of the best-governed nations on earth.

India has never held a single national referendum. Decisions of staggering consequence – the integration of Jammu and Kashmir, the Emergency of 1975, demonetisation, the abrogation of Article 370, the Citizenship Amendment Act – were made by the executive and legislature without any formal consultation of the citizenry.

Some of these may have had popular support; many did not. But in no case were the people asked. They were told. They were managed. They were presented with fait accompli and expected to ratify or absorb.

Citizens’ initiative – the right of a defined number of citizens to place a proposed law or constitutional amendment directly before the voters – would transform the relationship between the citizen and the state. It would compel politicians to take seriously the expressed preferences of their constituents on matters that powerful interests would prefer to keep off the formal agenda.

It would allow communities affected by specific policies – environmental regulations, land acquisition, educational curricula – to have a formal democratic say in those policies, rather than being reduced to protest and petition.

Citizens’ assemblies

Beyond the referendum, which is a binary instrument, the most exciting development in democratic theory and practice over the past two decades is the citizens’ assembly – a randomly selected, demographically representative body of ordinary citizens convened to deliberate on a specific complex question and produce recommendations.

Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies on abortion rights and same-sex marriage produced recommendations that the Parliament then put to referendum. Both passed. The assemblies succeeded where the political process had failed for decades – precisely because their participants were ordinary citizens, not professional politicians, not lobbyists, not party operatives.

They had no careers to protect, no donors to please, no constituencies of ideology to satisfy. They could, and did, reason carefully about difficult questions and arrive at nuanced, considered conclusions.

Citizens’ assemblies have been convened in the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Belgium, Iceland, and dozens of other countries. They are not a replacement for Parliament. They are a complement to it – a mechanism for bringing the genuine wisdom of ordinary people into democratic processes that have been captured by professional political elites.

In a country as large and diverse as India, citizens’ assemblies at the state and local level could be transformative instruments for participatory governance.

Mandatory participatory budgeting

Porto Alegre, Brazil, pioneered participatory budgeting in 1989 – a system in which citizens directly decide how a portion of the municipal budget is allocated. The model has since spread to over 3,000 cities worldwide, including experiments in the United Kingdom, South Korea and Kenya.

Where it has been implemented well, it has increased civic engagement, reduced corruption and improved the quality and equity of public spending by directing resources toward the priorities of communities rather than the preferences of contractors and political networks.

India has Gram Sabhas, village assemblies guaranteed by the 73rd Constitutional Amendment, that are, in theory, exactly this kind of participatory institution. In practice, they are widely dormant, irregularly convened, poorly attended, and systematically starved of the resources and authority they would need to be meaningful.

Reviving and empowering the Gram Sabha, and creating equivalent institutions for urban wards, is not a constitutional innovation. It is a constitutional obligation that has been comprehensively evaded.

The Right to legislative initiative

Beyond recall and referendum, citizens should have the formal right to propose legislation – to place a draft bill before the Parliament by collecting a defined number of signatures, compelling the legislature to at least debate and vote on it.

This right exists in the European Union (the European Citizens’ Initiative), in 17 American states, in Switzerland, in Italy and in Austria. It is a recognition that the legislative agenda of a Parliament should not be the exclusive property of the government and the opposition parties. It should also include what the citizens themselves want addressed.

In India, if citizens petition Parliament, they are carrying out a symbolic act that has no binding consequences. A petition, however many signatures it carries, does not compel any action.

The difference between a petition and a legislative initiative is the difference between begging and claiming.

The problem of political will

The obvious objection to all of these ideas is that the political class, which would have to legislate these mechanisms into existence, has no interest in doing so. The right to recall is an existential threat to every sitting politician. Referendums take power away from Parliament. Citizens’ assemblies bypass party structures. Participatory budgeting reduces the discretionary power that is the currency of political patronage.

Political reform never comes from those who benefit from the existing political arrangement. It comes from organised citizens who create political costs for inaction that exceed the political costs of reform.

The history of democratic expansion everywhere – the extension of franchise to women, to the propertyless, to formerly colonised peoples; the establishment of free speech and assembly; the right to organise and to strike – is a history of citizen movements that made the status quo untenable for those in power.

None of these rights were gifts from magnanimous rulers. They were wrested from resistant establishments by people who refused to remain spectators of their own governance.

India has a rich tradition of such movements – from the Independence struggle to the JP movement to the Right to Information campaign to the anti-corruption mobilisations of 2011. What it lacks is a sustained, institutionally sophisticated movement for democratic reform that translates popular frustration with politics into a specific, coherent, constitutional agenda. The energy is there. It dissipates because it has no programmatic home.

More MPs will not serve democracy

The proposal to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 members is, in this light, not merely expensive and pointless. It is actively regressive. It takes a system in which citizens are already overwhelmed by the scale, opacity and inaccessibility of the political class and makes it larger. It creates more nodes in a network of political power that citizens cannot access, more intermediaries through which the state’s resources are filtered and diminished, more masters to whom the citizen is nominally connected and practically irrelevant.

The answer to the crisis of Indian democracy is not more representatives. It is more representation – a fundamentally different thing. Representation is what exists when citizens have genuine, formal, ongoing mechanisms to shape the decisions that govern their lives.

It is what exists when an elected official knows that their constituents can recall them, can place alternative proposals before the public, can convene assemblies that speak with democratic authority, can directly allocate a portion of the taxes they pay.

What exists when democracy is not a ritual performed every five years but a practice embedded in the daily life of self-governing communities. India’s Constitution begins with three words: We, the People. Seventy-five years later, the people are waiting to be let in.

The price of letting them in is not a larger Parliament. It is a humbler one.

Writer and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO, Petronet India Limited and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management. His most recent book is The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir

The narrow lanes of Varaccha in Surat are crammed with buildings that are connected to each other. Most of these have several small rooms in which workers sit at tables.

Tubelights attached to the tables rise above the workers’ heads. At the centre of each table is a round disc, usually made of metal, which hums softly as it spins. Workers hold metallic devices that look like thick pens. At the tip of each device is a tiny diamond, which a worker gently strikes against the disc to shape and polish it.

One of these rooms is rented by Harish Patel, who for three decades polished diamonds as an employee with a unit, before deciding to start his own unit in October 2025. He bought five such tables with discs, and hired 30 workers. “I had thought I would be able to earn at least Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 more every month,” Patel said, sitting at a table at the end of the room. As he spoke, he handed out to his employees diamonds they had to work on, after noting in a register the number of diamonds he was giving each.

But in late February, when the West Asia conflict began, the diamond industry was hit with a massive slowdown – soon, Patel could hardly get hold of any rough diamonds in the market to polish.

The diamond polishing industry in Surat employs between an estimated 8 and 10 lakh workers. It relies on the import of rough diamonds from countries like the United Arab Emirates, Belgium and Russia. The industry also imports rough diamonds from African countries like Angola and Botswana. After polishing, diamonds are exported to major markets in countries like Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.

But trade disruptions since the outbreak of the war have led to a sharp drop in the import of rough diamonds into the country. While India imported 134 lakh carats of rough diamonds in March 2025, this March, it imported just 95 lakh carats. At the same time, exports of polished diamonds fell in the same period by 27%, including to the United Arab Emirates, which was the top buyer of India’s polished diamonds in 2025-’26.

The slowdown presents an existential threat to the diamond polishing sector, particularly to relatively new entrants like Patel. “In the last two months, many diamond workers have left for their villages,” Patel said. His employee Deepali briefly looked up from her work and added, “Many workers were also asked to leave because there was no work.”

Older blows to imports and exports

The current disruption has those in the polishing business particularly worried because the industry had already suffered other blows in recent years.

The first such blow was the broader economic slowdown brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. This led to a decline in imports of rough diamonds, from quantities worth $19 billion in 2017-’18, to just around $11 billion in 2020-’21. By 2021, imports rose to levels that were seen before the pandemic.

But in 2022, imports fell once again, by 8%, data from the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council shows. The council attributed this fall to “rising global inflation, diminished supply of rough diamonds, economic slowdown in key economies such as the USA, China, Europe and Hong Kong and persisting supply chain issues due to the geopolitical conflict in Ukraine”.

Some observers also linked the decline to sanctions that G7 countries imposed on Russian goods, including diamonds, to try and limit the country’s ability to fund the war in Ukraine. They noted that Russia earlier sent around 30% of its rough diamonds to India for polishing, but that India grew reluctant to continue buying these diamonds because European countries had ceased buying Russian-origin diamonds. Between 2022-’23 and 2023-’24, imports of Russian diamonds fell by around 4%, and diamond imports overall fell by 18%.

Since then, too, the imports of rough diamonds have fallen steadily, eventually dropping to quantities worth $10 billion in 2025-’26 year.

In all, data from the Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council shows, between 2022 and 2026, the import of rough diamonds into India fell by a massive 40%.

The industry was also hit by changes in the export market. In April 2025, the United States slapped tariffs on Indian diamonds sold to the United States. These tariffs fluctuated between 26% and 50%, and presented a massive hurdle for India to make sales to one of its largest diamond markets. Though the tariffs were lifted in February this year, until then, manufacturers were hesitant to buy as much rough diamond as they did earlier.

The impact of these tariffs was evident in export figures: while 40% of all exports of polished diamonds from India were sent to the United States in 2024-’25, this dropped to just 15% in 2025-’26.

In fact, through these years, the United Arab Emirates gained dominance as a source of rough diamond imports for India, and as an export market for polished diamonds. In 2025-’26, India imported 68% of its rough diamonds from the country, up from 48% in 2021-’22. Exports to the United Arab Emirates also increased – India exported 21% of its polished diamonds to the country in 2025-’26, up from 8% in 2021-22. (A recent investigation showed that diamonds coming from the UAE likely originated from Russia.)

But now, the escalation of the West Asia conflict has threatened this import and export trade. “On one hand, there were no raw diamonds in the market to polish, and on the other, what we were making was not getting sold,” said Dipak Ghetiya, a former diamond worker.

Workers’ struggles

These years of slowdown left diamond workers in Surat facing serious job crunches, particularly since they earn a commission on each diamond they polish.

Ghetiya noted that in 2023, “I used to reach my unit at about 9 am, and some days, till 5 pm I would be sitting with no diamonds to work on.” He added, “I worked for around two months like this.”

While earlier, he would earn at least Rs 30,000 a month, this dipped to “only about Rs 15,000 a month”, he added.

The instability in the diamond business since 2023 has pushed some diamond workers to tragic ends. Twenty-two-year-old Keval Makwane joined a small diamond-polishing unit in Surat in 2017 – his family needed the income because his father had to quit the same work after a road accident.

In 2024, Makwane lost his job. For six months, he tried working at different polishing units, and took up other work, but none of the jobs lasted. On a late afternoon in April 2025, when his family was not home, Makwane overdosed on medicines. Upon returning home, his mother found him unconscious and rushed him to the hospital. He died two days later.

“He never spoke to me about his stress,” said Divya, Makwane’s mother, her eyes welling up. “I had thought I would speak to him about it after he returned from the hospital, but he never did.”

Makwane’s is not the only such story. Since January 2024, more than 80 diamond workers have died by suicide in Surat, according to the Surat Diamond Workers Union. “Since the slowdown in the business, many workers had borrowed loans to make ends meet or start other businesses, but were not able to pay them back,” said Bhavesh Tank, the union’s vice-president. “Unfortunately, that led them to take this extreme step.”

The union has been demanding that the Gujarat government establish a welfare board for workers and provide financial support to the families of the those who died by suicide.

Shifting to lab grown diamonds on lower wages

In response to the decline in the industry, small diamond manufacturing units in Surat began to adopt alternative ways to stay afloat. Many began polishing lab-grown diamonds. These are diamonds that are chemically created under high heat to be identical to a natural or mined diamond. While they are cheaper than natural diamonds, they too require polishing.

Gem and Jewellery Export Promotion Council data shows that exports of polished and unpolished lab-grown diamonds from India have boomed in recent years – rising almost tenfold, from exports worth $130 million in 2018-’19, to exports worth $1.13 billion in 2025-’26.

But workers soon realised that lab-grown diamonds took more time to polish. “Its a difference of the hardness,” said Ghetiya. He explained that natural diamonds are less hard to work on, and that a small one can usually be polished in between five and ten minutes. In contrast, a lab-grown diamond of the same size can take around 30 minutes to polish.

Moreover, because lab grown diamonds are cheaper, workers are also paid less for polishing them. Depending on the size, a worker can earn between Rs 15 and Rs 60 for polishing a natural diamond, whereas they only earn around Rs 12 for polishing a lab grown one. Thus, “we are earning less for the same number of hours and same work”, said Deepali as she closely inspected the diamond she was polishing. Specifically, she noted, workers’ earnings had dropped from between Rs 20,000 and Rs 25,000 a month to around Rs 15,000.

The challenges led some workers, like Ghetiya, to leave the diamond business entirely. For more than a year now, he has been starting his day at a rented shop, where his mother, wife, and he roll out dough into small, flat rounds. They then fill them with boiled potatoes, fold them in half and fry them till they are golden brown to make a popular street snack known as ghughra.

He then packs them up in an iron trunk attached to his motorcycle and drives 7 km away to a textile hub, where customers soon crowd him. The shop and the iron box display the name of the small business venture in Gujarati script – “Ratnakalakar ghughra and nasta house”. Ratnakalakar is a term used to describe the diamond workers.

“People often put MBBS or engineer in front of their name,” Ghetiya said while preparing the snack and topping it with onions and chutneys for a young customer. “I worked as one for 22 years, and being a ratnakalakar is a part of my identity. I decided to name the shop this even though I left the industry.”

But the war in West Asia has hit even this business, just as it was finding its feet. The massive crunch in the supply of liquid petroleum gas after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz for over a month left Ghetiya with no fuel for his cooking. He invested in an electric stove that cost Rs 20,000, but soon found that it was only able to support much smaller vessels than his gas stove. “Now if the war continues for longer, I will have to rethink this business too,” said Ghetiya.

Air India, IndiGo and SpiceJet have told the Union government that the country’s aviation sector is on the verge of “stopping operations”, and have sought a revision in aviation turbine fuel prices amid the conflict in West Asia, PTI reported on Tuesday.

“In order to survive, sustain and continue operation, we request your urgent intervention for immediate and meaningful financial support to tide over the current situation,” the Federation of Indian Airlines said in a letter on April 26. The federation represents the three airlines.

This came against the backdrop of the West Asia conflict, which began on February 28 and has disrupted energy supplies to India. The war has also pushed up global oil prices and led to airspace restrictions that have increased operating costs. Aviation turbine fuel accounts for about 40% of an airline’s operating expenses.

In its letter, the federation urged the civil aviation ministry to use a uniform fuel pricing system for domestic and international operations, NDTV reported.

“Any ad hoc pricing [domestic vs international] and/or irrational increase in the price of [aviation turbine fuel] will result in unsurmountable losses for airlines and will lead to grounding of aircraft, resulting in cancellation of flights,” PTI quoted the federation as saying.

The airlines have also sought that the excise duty on aviation turbine fuel, currently set at 11%, be temporarily deferred.

Last month, the government capped the hike in aviation turbine fuel for domestic operations at Rs 15 per litre, but increased the rates for international operations by Rs 73 per litre.

The Federation of Indian Airlines said that this made both international and domestic operations unviable, PTI reported.

The airlines said that Delhi, the country’s largest aviation hub, has the second-highest value-added tax on aviation turbine fuel at 25%. The highest rate, 29%, is charged in Tamil Nadu, they said.

“The other major aviation cities…Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata range between 16% and 20%,” the news agency quoted the federation as saying. “These six cities cover more than 50% of airlines’ operations within India.”

Since the conflict in West Asia broke out, Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterbody connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

Two Indians and their companies are among 23 persons and entities sanctioned by the United States for allegedly being part of a global supply chain linked to a Mexico-based drug cartel.

Satishkumar Hareshbhai Sutaria and Yuktakumari Ashishkumar Modi are among the individuals mentioned in a list of sanctioned entities published by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on April 23.

The sanctions mean that all US properties of the persons and entities listed are to be blocked and reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The US treasury department alleged that Sutaria and Modi, through the companies SR Chemicals and Agrat Chemicals, facilitated the sale and shipment of precursor chemicals to Mexico and Guatemala by falsely labelling them as safe chemicals. These precursor chemicals were used to produce illicit fentanyl, the department alleged.

Both were arrested by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad in connection with the allegations in March 2025. They got bail from the Gujarat High Court in February, The Indian Express reported.

Sutaria and Modi have been booked under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. A chargesheet against them was filed on May 15, and they are now awaiting trial.

On Tuesday, the United States Embassy in India said that Indian law enforcement authorities were “instrumental in disrupting key elements of this criminal network”.

The Gujarat ATS alleges that Sutaria and Modi and been smuggling precursor chemicals from Maharashtra to Guatemala-based J&C Imports, which is suspected to be a front for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, according to The Indian Express.

However, the case registered in Gujarat does not mention SR Chemicals or Agrat Chemicals.

A Guatemala -based broker of fentanyl precursors, Jaime Augusto Barrientos Camaz, was also among those sanctioned by the United States on April 23. Barrientos allegedly sourced the precursor chemicals from Agrat Chemicals and SR Chemicals, according to the US treasury department.

Barrientos and J&C are also among the individuals and entities sanctioned by the United States.

These actions are part of a crackdown by the United States against gangs allegedly pushing illicit drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, into the US. The Sinaloa cartel, said to be among the world’s most powerful drug cartels, was among eight such groups declared as foreign terrorist organisations by the US State Department on February 20, 2025.

Messaging platform WhatsApp has banned 9,400 accounts linked to “digital arrest” scams following an investigation launched in January, Live Law quoted a status report filed by the Union government before the Supreme Court as saying.

The Ministry of Home Affairs informed the court that the action was part of a coordinated effort involving multiple agencies to address the problem of impersonation-based cyber fraud.

WhatsApp stated that its investigation went beyond inputs shared by government agencies, treating them as starting points to identify and dismantle wider criminal networks rather than isolated accounts, Live Law reported. .

While about 3,800 accounts had been flagged by authorities, WhatsApp said that its internal processes enabled it to act against a much larger network involved in such scams.

According to submissions placed before the court, many accounts targeting Indian users were operated from organised scam centres in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia.

WhatsApp told an Inter-Departmental Committee in March that it had introduced and strengthened several enforcement tools, including systems to detect misuse of official logos, logging of account display names and machine learning models designed to identify evolving scam patterns.

It also said that it maintains a database of known scam-related assets to detect repeat offenders, Bar and Bench reported.

The company added that it is developing further safeguards, such as warnings for suspicious first-time messages, visibility of account age for unknown contacts and enhanced caller identification features, the legal news outlet reported.

The status report also noted that WhatsApp is working on “SIM binding” or linking accounts to physical SIM cards, The Hindu reported.

It has also agreed to retain data of deleted accounts for at least 180 days to support law enforcement investigations, the newspaper quoted the report as saying.

The report, filed through the Attorney General R Venkataramani on behalf of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, forms part of ongoing suo moto proceedings initiated by the Supreme Court in response to a rise in digital arrest scams in the country.

The court had on December 1 also extended a “free hand” to the agency to launch an anti-corruption investigation into bankers involved in the opening of mule accounts linked to cyber crimes.

The bench had expressed shock at the “staggering amounts” digital arrest scammers have been able to siphon off from India.

Government data cited in the report indicated that more than 2.41 lakh complaints related to digital arrest scams have been recorded, involving losses of approximately Rs 30,000 crore, according to The Hindu.

‘Digital arrest’ scams

In cases of “digital arrest”, criminals usually orchestrate the fraud by posing as law enforcement officers, often wearing uniforms and making video calls to victims from locations made to resemble government offices or police stations. They demand money for a “compromise” and “closure of a case” against the victims.

In some cases, the victims are “digitally arrested” with the scamsters claiming that the persons are required to be visible until their demands are met.

In January 2025, Scroll published a series of extensive reports about Chinese crime syndicates that run cyber crime centres from Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. These highly sophisticated “scam compounds” are staffed with thousands of people, many of them from India, who are lured with fake job offers and then forced to work on scamming people back home.

Also read:

• My father lost Rs 10 lakh in a digital arrest scam. Here’s how he got some money back

• ‘Felt like I was under hypnosis’: How digital arrest scams dupe Indians of their hard-earned money