Nationalist Congress Party chief and Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Ajit Pawar on Sunday announced that his party will contest the upcoming Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation elections in alliance with the Sharad Pawar-led faction of the NCP, PTI reported.

Ajit Pawar made the announcement while launching his party’s election campaign at Talewade in Pimpri-Chinchwad, The Indian Express reported.

The Pimpri-Chinchwad area near Pune is considered a stronghold of the Nationalist Congress Party.

The principal rival for the NCP alliance in the area is the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is an ally of Ajit Pawar’s faction at the state level.

The state’s ruling Mahayuti coalition comprises the BJP, the Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena faction and the Nationalist Congress Party group led by Ajit Pawar.

The Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi comprises the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray), the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party faction led by Sharad Pawar.

Ajit Pawar’s announcement came days after the Uddhav Sena and Raj Thackeray’s Maharashtra Navnirman Sena announced an alliance for the municipal elections in the state.

“In Pimpri Chinchwad, NCP, the party with the clock symbol and NCP, the party with the trumpet symbol, will contest the civic election in an alliance,” Ajit Pawar said on Sunday. “A parivar [family] is coming together as many people wanted this to happen.”

He added that seat-sharing talks would be finalised within the next two days, The Times of India reported.

VIDEO | Pune, Maharashtra: Ahead of the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation (PCMC) elections, Deputy CM Ajit Pawar says he and his uncle Sharad Pawar will contest the polls together. "For the sake of the upcoming PCMC polls, the clock and the trumpet have come together," he… pic.twitter.com/UeKSUVg3VL

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 28, 2025

The municipal polls in 29 cities, including Pimpri-Chinchwad, will take place on January 15 and the votes will be counted a day later. The process of filing nominations began on December 23 and will conclude on Tuesday.

Ajit Pawar said that the Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation “was considered one of the richest municipal corporations in Asia”, The Times of India reported.

“Today, it is burdened with debt and allegations of corruption, which were never part of its earlier history,” he was quoted as saying.

While the two NCP factions have decided to contest together in Pimpri-Chinchwad, discussions are still ongoing regarding the Pune Municipal Corporation elections, the newspaper reported.

Leaders of the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi said the development had not unsettled them and that they already had a Plan B ready, The Indian Express reported.

Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) leaders in Pune told the newspaper that they had anticipated the Sharad Pawar faction’s move and that the alliance had prepared an alternative plan.

They said the Congress and Uddhav Sena would continue to contest together and explore arrangements with smaller parties such as the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi.

A Congress spokesperson also said the party would fight the civic elections alongside the Uddhav Sena, while accommodating other partners.

The Election Commission has directed to stop personal hearings for those voters in West Bengal who were marked as “unmapped” during the ongoing special intensive revision of electoral rolls, but whose names or ancestral connections were present in the 2002 voter list, reported The Hindu on Sunday.

The direction was issued on Saturday as the state authorities found upon verification with the 2002 rolls that several voters or their children who were shown as “unmapped” on the poll panel’s central software were present in the area, The Indian Express quoted state officials as saying.

The state’s draft electoral rolls were published on December 16. It showed that more than 58 lakh voters were removed after being marked dead, shifted or absent. In addition, 31 lakh voters were “unmapped”, or not found on the 2002 rolls, when the last special intensive revision was held.

In a letter to district election officers, the West Bengal additional chief electoral officer said that several voters were marked “unmapped” as the 2002 electoral roll data had not been fully converted to plain text format, reported Hindustan Times.

Due to this, “linkage could not be fetched in BLO [booth-level officer] app in respect of many electors”, said the additional chief electoral officer.

The letter added that the state chief electoral officer had requested the poll panel to allow booth-level officers, electoral registration officers and additional electoral registration officers to upload the relevant portions of the 2002 voter roll’s hard copy directly for mapping the voters.

After the draft rolls were published, the poll panel generated notices for the unmapped electors to prove their eligibility through personal hearings.

The state additional chief electoral officer wrote in the letter that despite the notices, “these electors may not be called for hearing”.

Instead, the notices can be kept with the electoral registration officer or assistant electoral registration officer, reported The Hindu.

“BLOs may be sent to the field [to] take a photo with such elector and the same may be uploaded,” the newspaper quoted the letter as saying.

It added: “In cases where discrepancies are detected later on with the hard copy of 2002 Electoral Roll by ERO/AERO or on complaints, the concerned electors may be called for hearing after servicing notices.”

This came on the same day that the West Bengal Civil Service Executive Officers’ Association expressed objections to what it described as “suo motu system-driven deletion” of voters from the draft electoral rolls.

The association argued that such deletion of a large number of electors at one time appeared to infringe on the rights of voters who might otherwise be eligible but were unable to participate in the enumeration process.

West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the first half of 2026.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

Also read: I struggled to fill SIR forms. BLOs have it much worse

The Supreme Court on Monday stayed the Delhi High Court order suspending the life sentence of former Uttar Pradesh MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case involving a minor, Live Law reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices JK Maheshwari and Augustine George Masih was hearing a petition filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation challenging the December 23 High Court order.

The bench asked Sengar’s counsel to file a response in four weeks.

The court also directed that the woman be given legal aid, The Hindu reported.

The High Court had suspended the sentence and granted bail to Sengar while the former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA’s appeal against conviction is being heard. However, Sengar was directed not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

Despite the High Court order, Sengar was to remain in jail as he is also serving a 10-year sentence in connection with the custodial death of the complainant’s father and has not been granted bail in that case.

The High Court had observed that, on the face of it, the facts of the case did not fulfil the conditions required to apply the stricter offence of “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” under Section 5 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. This was because Sengar did not fall within the definition of a “public servant”, it said.

Section 5 of the Pocso Act sets out conditions in which a “penetrative sexual assault” against a child is treated as a more “aggravated” offence. An aggravated offence is treated as serious because it is committed under special or severe circumstances that make the crime graver than usual.

Under the Act, an offence becomes “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” when it is committed by persons holding positions of authority, such as a public servant or a police officer within their jurisdiction, members of security forces, or staff of hospitals or prisons.

An aggravated offence carries a minimum sentence of 20 years, which can be extended up to life imprisonment, under the Pocso Act.

In 2019, the trial court convicted Sengar, noting that since he was an MLA at the time of the incident, he qualified as a “public servant” under Pocso. This made the offence a serious one and attracted a harsher punishment.

Thereafter, Sengar was sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeal against conviction and sentence had been pending before the High Court since 2020.

On December 23, the High Court rejected the trial court’s reasoning. It held that Sengar, as an elected MLA at the time of the incident, could not be treated as a “public servant” under the Pocso Act.

Security personnel had on December 23 and December 24 forcefully stopped the complainant in the rape case and her family members from protesting in Delhi against the High Court order. They were detained at the Kartavya Path police station for around an hour.

On Saturday, the Delhi Police detained Congress leader Mumtaz Patel and other protesters who had been holding a sit-in near the Parliament complex to oppose a High Court order.

It had been 20 minutes since Vaishnavi Rathore and I had begun our little trek in a dense forest in Dzongu in North Sikkim. We were lucky the rain had stopped just before we began, but the wet mud was a challenge we city folks were not ready for. I was worried about slipping, not just because of the risk of injury, but also of damaging the expensive camera in my bag.

We were being led by Mayalmit Lepcha, an environmental activist and local resident, whom we had met earlier in the day. We had been reporting on the impact of a glacial lake outburst flood that devastated parts of Sikkim in 2023 and on the broader consequences of hydropower projects in the ecologically sensitive region. As we spoke about what the construction of dams in the Himalayas meant for indigenous communities, Mayalmit said she wanted to show us a Lepcha ritual.

As we continued our trek, the sun had begun to set, and by the time we saw a small house emerging amidst the wild ferns, the sky had turned a purple-blue. It was the house of a shaman, a spiritual leader of the Lepcha community.

The ritual was to take place inside a small hut near the main house. The family was preparing for the upcoming ritual, and the house was bustling. As soon as we said “Khamree” to the family, a Lepcha greeting, I took out my camera and began shooting – I did not want to miss a single moment of the evening.

Almost immediately, there was a power cut and the lights went out – this, we learnt, was a regular occurrence.

The Lepchas are an indigenous community of North Sikkim, whose culture is deeply rooted in nature worship. Those we met told us that for them, mountains, forests and rivers are divine entities. The ritual we were invited to witness is performed every year to welcome the spring season. During it, the shaman interacts with the “spirit world” to bring prosperity to the community. The ritual this year was particularly special because it was being performed by a young shaman.

As preparations for the ritual were underway, a wisp of smoke rose from a nearby outdoor kitchen. Men and women were cutting vegetables and preparing for a special dinner. We also helped with the cooking. Families had come from around the village, and some from as far as Gangtok, to participate in the ceremony. Their shy smiles and curious eyes followed me around as I photographed them.

The hut where the ritual was to take place was made from natural material, such as mud and bamboo. Mayalmit explained that this was a requirement for the ritual. Inside, I saw the young shaman helping his family with the arrangements. He was around my age and seemed very calm – yet I sensed a hint of nervousness as the time for the ritual drew closer.

As we waited, we met a diverse group of people, including a senior shaman, an environmental activist, a Buddhist monk and a farmer. They were united by a strong resistance to dams. The Lepcha shaman told us that the community believes that the Teesta river is sacred, and that it is the path towards salvation for departed souls in the afterlife. Building dams, he said, would block this passage. So far, ten large hydropower projects have been built on the river.

When it was time for the ritual, everyone headed towards the hut. It had started raining again, and the smell of wet earth filled the air. The hut was dark inside, lit only by oil lamps. There was an altar in the middle, in front of which the older shaman and the young shaman sat. The younger shaman was playing a traditional instrument while the older shaman was chanting and praying.

I sat on the left side of the altar in the front row, wanting to capture the ritual. I had also placed my zoom recorder in front of me. After about 10 minutes, the young shaman suddenly stood up. Mayalmit told us that an older ancestor had entered him.

The young shaman's demeanor changed completely. He crouched and walked with the support of a stick. I raised my camera to film this, but it was not recording. The display showed it had overheated, which surprised me, since this usually happens when I record long takes or shoot in high temperatures.

Neither was the case here.

The young shaman slowly walked around the altar, swinging his stick in the air to ward off evil spirits. As he approached us, he looked up and stared at Vaishnavi and me for a few seconds. I met his gaze and felt he knew we were outsiders.

Mayalmit gestured for us to lower our eyes.

The shaman lifted his stick. For a moment, we thought he would strike us. Instead, he brought it down on my Zoom recorder. I immediately switched it off. My heart raced. He then turned away and continued circling the altar.

Vaishnavi and I looked at each other, shaken, but awed by what we had witnessed. Through the hut’s single window, a flash of lightning lit up the sky.

I realised how deeply the community's identity was intertwined with nature, an identity now under threat from the growing number of hydropower projects built in the name of development.

For them development is not what is added, but what must not be lost.

For the two days we stayed in Dzongu, the electricity did not return. When night fell, the village would return to darkness, lit only by night lamps.

Flights were disrupted in the National Capital Region and northern India on Monday because of dense smog.

The air quality in Delhi was in the “severe” category with 22 of the city’s 37 active monitoring stations recording Air Quality Index readings above 400, according to data from the Sameer application at 8.05 am.

The national capital’s average AQI stood at 402, showed the application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

Low visibility disrupts flights

At 9 am, the Delhi airport said that “dense fog” may cause delays and cancellations and urged passengers to check their flight status with their airline.

On Monday, an Air India Express flight from Goa to Delhi was diverted to Ahmedabad, ANI reported.

IndiGo said that foggy conditions were hampering operations in Delhi and several airports in northern India. “If reduced visibility conditions persist, flight departures and arrivals may be impacted as the day progresses,” it said.

The airline said that the dense fog in Jammu had also impacted flights operating to and from the city. “As conditions evolve, some services may experience delays, and a few may need to be cancelled depending on clearance and operational feasibility,” IndiGo said.

‘Severe’ AQI in NCR

On Monday, the cities adjoining the capital also reported hazardous air quality levels. While Noida recorded an AQI of 416 and Greater Noida 406, Ghaziabad was in the “very poor” category at 398 and Gurugram 326.

An index value between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air. Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution.

An AQI in the “severe” category signifies hazardous pollution levels that can pose serious risks even to healthy individuals.

VIDEO | Delhi wakes up to a dense blanket of smog choking the National Capital.

Visuals from the AIIMS Flyover show traffic crawling through the haze, as air quality plunges into the 'very poor' and 'severe categories', shrouding the city in a murky winter grip.#DelhiSmog… pic.twitter.com/Z4HXmCWbvL

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 29, 2025

On Wednesday, the Commission for Air Quality Management revoked Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in the National Capital Region after the air quality improved.

Stage 4 restrictions had come into force on December 13 after the air quality slipped into the “severe plus” category.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR.

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

A booth-level officer died allegedly by suicide in West Bengal’s Bankura district on Sunday, reported The Indian Express.

In a note found near his body, 53-year-old Haradhan Mandal said that mounting stress related to the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in the state had led him to take the step, the newspaper quoted unidentified police officials as saying.

Mandal’s body was found by his family inside a classroom of a school, where he was the headmaster.

He was the booth-level officer for booth number 206 in Rajakata village of the Ranibandh block.

His family members alleged that he had been suffering from depression because of being unable to cope with the “immense workload” of the voter roll revision exercise.

“My father was suffering from various physical ailments,” Mandal’s son, Soham Mandal, was quoted as saying by The Indian Express. “Despite that, he used to work on the SIR until 3 am or 4 am. On top of that, there were various other forms causing mental pressure.”

Soham Mandal said that his father “could no longer bear this mental strain”.

Haradhan Mandal’s wife, Mala Mandal, claimed that he had not received help for the work related to the voter roll revision and “was forced to take this step”.

His body has been sent for post-mortem, reported The Hindu.

With this, at least 10 suicides of booth-level officers and two deaths due to stroke have been reported because of alleged work pressure in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan amid the revision of electoral rolls.

The Election Commission is conducting the revision of the electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

Overall, around 3.6 crore electors in the 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far in the exercise. The draft electoral roll for Uttar Pradesh is scheduled to be published on December 31.

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union Territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

The task of preparing voter lists before elections is typically assigned to primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are required to go door-to-door and check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

In the Election Commission’s parlance, they are called booth-level officers. Each booth-level officer is responsible for maintaining the voter list for one polling booth, which can sometimes have as many as 1,500 registered voters.

Reacting to Mandal’s death, Trinamool Congress leader Abhishek Banerjee said that the special intensive revision of electoral rolls should have been a “methodical process”, but has instead been “bulldozed through by a pliant, complicit Election Commission”.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s West Bengal observer Mangal Pandey blamed the TMC, saying that the leadership of the state’s ruling party was “constantly pressuring the BLOs to do their work incorrectly”, reported The Indian Express.

“This pressure has led to several tragic incidents,” said Mandal. “The state government and the Trinamool party must take full responsibility for this.”

As the world’s most populous nation, changes in the way India is growing deeply affect the world. Yet these key shifts are not adequately documented or discussed, both within India and globally.

At Data For India, we track these changes closely, using high-quality Indian and global data sources. Through this three-part series, we attempt to pull together vital Indian data on demographic shifts, place them within the context of other socio-economic changes taking place in India, and set them against a global backdrop. With this, we identify new areas of research as well as directions for policy and discussion.

In Part I, we brought together the data to describe the current moment, and the key recent data points that we argue have gone relatively unnoticed. In Part II, we examined data around falling birth rates, and shared research that suggests India is both an outlier and a part of a global trend. In Part III, we look at the data on demographic differences between Indian states and how it feeds into current socio-economic and political tensions.

India’s demographic dilemmas are, in many ways, shared challenges for the country – the end of the demographic dividend, the progress of an epidemiological transition, the steady fall in birth rates, and the specter of aging. Based on an accurate reading of high-quality data, policy and politics will need to come together to take on these challenges.

However, deep schisms divide the country’s demographics on several key issues, putting India at risk of splintered political responses. In this piece, we look at these schisms and their implications.

The determinants of change

Three broad processes drive demographic changes: births, deaths, and migrations. We first look at these three determinants to understand their impact on the populations of Indian states.

We use the United Nations World Population Prospects, 2024 Revision, for global data for past years and projections up to the year 2100. We use India’s Sample Registration System and the National Family Health Survey for data on Indian states up to the year 2023, the most recent year for which there is data.

For data beyond 2023, as well as projections up to 2036 for Indian states, we use population projections made by India’s Registrar General of India based on the 2011 Census. One important caveat is that India has not had a decennial Census since 2011.

i) the fertility differential

Even as the broad story of fertility – the number of children an average woman in a region has – is one of steady decline, as we saw in Part II of this series, the differential rates of this change between India’s richer and poorer states lie at the heart of this schism.

Historically, India’s southern and western states have been richer and have achieved better development outcomes, including on women’s education and women’s health. As a result, these states have significantly lower fertility rates than the eastern and northern states, which are poorer and less developed, and hit the key milestone of “replacement fertility” much earlier.

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is the average number of children that a woman is likely to have in her lifetime. As countries get richer and women get better access to healthcare and education, fertility rates begin to fall – a phenomenon seen across the world.

When a country’s TFR drops to 2.1, meaning that women will have an average of 2.1 children over their lifetimes, demographers say that the country has reached “replacement fertility.” What this means is that if two adults have a notional 2.1 children between them, then, accounting for some likelihood of death during childhood or adolescence, that couple will produce two adults, and the size of the population will remain the same. This is a key milestone in a country’s demographic journey. If fertility falls below that level, the population will begin to decline in absolute numbers.

Despite the fact that fertility has fallen in all Indian states, their trajectories differ by decades. Of the four Indian states that are yet to reach replacement fertility, all of them lie in India’s impoverished center and north. Uttar Pradesh is projected to reach this milestone in 2025 and Madhya Pradesh by 2028.

Bihar is the sole remainder, expected to be the last state to achieve replacement fertility only in 2039. (By 2023, the most recent year for which there is data, Chhattisgarh had not yet achieved replacement fertility despite the projections for the state estimating that it would reach this milestone in 2022).

The immediate impact of this fertility differential is the extra years of high birth rates in the northern and eastern states. One in every three Indian children (under the age of 14) lives in two states alone – Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Bihar’s child population is not expected to decline in absolute terms up until 2036, the furthest year for which we have projections, while all of the southern states are seeing their child populations decline.

This difference in fertility and the impact that it will have on population growth in these states is a growing cause of conflict between India’s richer and poorer states.

ii) Changes in mortality

Despite doing better on health indicators than poorer states, India’s richer states face not only lower birth rates, but also higher mortality rates as a result of their age structures.

Communicable diseases and conditions around childbirth and infancy are responsible for far fewer deaths in India’s richer states than in its poorer states. In Kerala, for instance, the Infant Mortality Rate (IMR) has now fallen to 5 (five infant deaths for every 1,000 live births in a year), which is comparable to northern European countries, while the relatively poorer states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh have an IMR of 37, similar to that of Sudan.

Yet, the relatively low share of the elderly in the populations of these poorer states keep their overall mortality rates down. The Crude Death Rate – the number of deaths for every 1,000 people – in Kerala, for instance, has surpassed that of Madhya Pradesh’s. What’s driving it up is the relatively large share of the elderly in its population.

These relatively high mortality rates contribute, alongside lower birth rates, in driving down the population of India’s better developed states.

iii) Low inter-state migration

Alongside fertility and mortality, the movement of people is another factor that affects the size of the population. In the developed world, as birth rates fall, the immigration of working-age adults into the country is seen as an important factor that helps counterbalance the impact on the economy (including on the care economy) of an aging population.

The level of international migration into and out of India is too small in relative terms to affect the population. Fewer than one in every 1,000 people had migrated out of the country as of 2023, according to the World Bank, compared to neighboring Sri Lanka where more than three in every 1,000 have migrated out.

Internal migration within India is, on the other hand, an order of magnitude higher. Three in ten Indians report that they now live somewhere different from their last residence for at least six months at a stretch. This data is from India’s National Sample Survey’s 78th round “Multi Indicator Survey” (2020-’21).

Yet these high rates of movement do not have the impact of significantly altering the population or demographic structure of India’s more prosperous states that are labour magnets.

The vast majority of India’s internal migrants have not moved very far from where they were earlier – migrants are most likely to move within their own district (nearly 60% of all migrants), followed by those who move to another district in the same state (nearly 30% of migrants), and last of all, to another state. Only a little over 10% of Indian migrants currently live in a different state from the one they last lived in for a six-month stretch.

Driving the majority of these intra-district movements are women. Female migrants make up the majority of Indian migrants as a result of social norms around caste and marriage that lead to the marriages of Indian women being arranged outside the villages they were born, and the convention that married women move to live with their husband and his family.

While just over 10% of Indian men report being migrants, that figure is nearly 50% for Indian women. Marriage is the most common reason for migration for women, while for men, it is the search for jobs.

Migration of this variety in India appears to have grown very little in the last 15 years for which there is data – in 2007-’08, 28.5% of Indians were migrants, a share which rose only slightly to 29.1% in 2020-’21.

Impact of these processes

As a result of these three demographic trajectories, India’s states are moving in somewhat divergent directions, driving conflict over resource allocation and political representation. This impacts two areas in particular: the relative sizes of Indian states by population and the age structure of the populations of these states.

i) State populations

Until the 1970s, population growth rates across Indian states were quite similar. However, since the 1980s, India’s southern states have been growing far slower than the central, northern, and eastern states.

As a result, over one-third of the total increase in India’s population between 2011 and 2036 will have come from two states alone – Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – while all of the southern Indian states will have seen their share in the population declining.

Rajasthan is estimated to have grown bigger than Tamil Nadu in 2017, and Bihar is estimated to have surpassed Maharashtra to become India’s second most populous state after Uttar Pradesh by 2023. People from the four most populous southern Indian states will account for fewer people than from Uttar Pradesh alone over the next five years.

The southern and western states are not just growing more slowly than the northern and eastern states. Some states will stop growing entirely. Even while India’s population is expected to continue to grow until 2060, Tamil Nadu’s population is projected to start to decline in absolute terms over the next decade.

ii) A generation gap within India

Not only will the southern and western states grow more slowly, they will also age more rapidly.

When fewer children are born every year and life gets safer, a country starts to age. The median Indian is just over 28 years old, while the median age of the world is over 30. By 2050, however, the median Indian will be over 38 years old.

Within India, a decade separates some of the northern and southern states, with Kerala and Tamil Nadu being India’s oldest states and Bihar its youngest. Kerala, for instance, has twice the share of elderly people (age 60+) in its population that Bihar or Uttar Pradesh have.

By the mid-2030s, Tamil Nadu is projected to be India’s oldest state. Given the differences in birth rates and mortality rates in the two regions, this gap will grow. At 40, the median Tamil man will be over 12 years older than the median Bihari man.

These figures are based on a Technical Group on Population Projections that was set up in the office of the Registrar General of India to provide the country with population estimates for the period of 2011-2036, using data on fertility, mortality, migration, and urbanisation.

When countries or states have either a very large child population or elderly population – meaning they are either very young or very old – it affects the way their economies are structured. In economic terms, the working age population is seen as productive, while dependents – whether they are children or the elderly – need household and state support in the form of welfare.

By 2031, over a quarter of the population in Tamil Nadu and a third in Kerala will be dependent elderly persons, and even the absolute number of people of working-age in these two states will have started to decline.

In the northern and eastern states, on the other hand, the working-age populations (aged 15-59) are still growing. In the decade ahead, the southern states will see their working-age populations begin to shrink, even as the north-central states will see their working-age populations grow.

One key indicator tracked by demographers and economists is the dependency ratio: the ratio of dependents (those who cannot work as they are either children or the elderly) to the working-age population. In states or countries with a higher dependency ratio, there is a greater financial burden on the working-age population and the state to provide welfare.

Since the northern and eastern states are seeing a gradual aging with birth rates now declining, their dependency ratios are poised to fall, as the working-age population grows and is more able to support dependents. However, the southern and western states will see their dependency ratios rise steadily as their populations age, and their workforces shrink.

Implications for the Indian Union

This growing schism between two broad halves of the country has spilled over into two key areas of policy and politics in India – redistribution and representation.

The relatively small populations of the southern states alongside their relative economic progress has resulted in sustained friction over how revenues generated from the southern states should be put to use by the Indian union government for redistributive policies that would result in larger shares to the more populous and poorer northern and eastern states.

Southern states argue that the devolution formula – which determines how centrally collected taxes are distributed to the states – of India’s Finance Commission, particularly under the 15th Finance Commission (2020–26), penalises them despite being major revenue contributors.

A core complaint is that the heavy reliance on population and income-distance parameters – states with higher population and lower per-capita income get a larger share – results in the southern states receiving proportionally less. The combined share of the five southern states in devolution declined from 18.6% under the 14th Commission to 15.8% under the 15th Finance Commission.

Another flashpoint is the growing weight of cesses and surcharges in central tax revenue. The Union Government in New Delhi does not share these levies (which can be over 10%-15% of gross tax collections) with the states. Southern leaders claim this disadvantages them, since despite their large contribution to the Goods and Services Tax and direct taxes, they do not receive commensurate redistributed funds.

There is also the question of political representation. According to Article 81 of India’s Constitution, each state must receive seats in proportion to its population and allocate those seats to constituencies of roughly equal size. The Constitution also regulates the total number of seats in the Lok Sabha, India’s lower house of Parliament, currently at 545.

To divide these seats proportionally, seats are to be reallocated after every census based on updated population figures, according to Article 82 of the constitution. In 1976, when civil liberties were suspended during India’s Emergency, the Forty-Second Amendment was enacted, pausing the revision of seats until after the 2001 Census. In 2002, parliament delayed reallocation even further, passing the Eighty-Fourth Amendment and extending this freeze until the next decennial census after 2026. The next Census is scheduled to be conducted in February 2027.

When the next delimitation takes place, the southern states are likely to see a significant reduction in their political representation to accommodate the growth in population in the northern states, and have begun to voice strong objections to such a realignment, calling it once again a penalisation of their relative success in developmental and demographic terms.

Apart from these challenges to the Indian union, the southern states will also have to confront the prospect of their growing dependency ratios and the pressure this will put on state finances and the care economy. In particular, the southern states may need to rethink some of their more strident rhetoric on inter-state migrants, given that the working-age population of the future is more likely to come from the north than the south. Simultaneously, the need to better equip the workers and potential workers of India’s northern states with the skills they will need for the workplaces of the future has never been more important.

India’s demographic dilemmas come at a grave time. They could present an opportunity for foundational thinking around reproductive freedoms, women’s rights, and labour markets of the future – shared challenges that ought to animate citizens across the country. But the massive divergences can also be manipulated to create ethnic divisions in pursuit of political fortune. The possibility that these schisms will be pried further open to cause lasting harm is also dangerously apparent.

How India – and Indians – treat these demographic dilemmas will also determine the trajectory of its democracy.

Rukmini S is the founder of Data For India (where she leads research and writing) and a CASI Non-Resident Fellow. Her areas of focus include demography, health, and household economics. She has previously led data journalism in Indian newsrooms and is the author of Whole Numbers & Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India (Westland, 2021).

The article was first published in India in Transition, a publication of the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania.

Two days after India flagged the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in Bangladesh, Dhaka on Sunday rejected the remarks and described them as “inaccurate, exaggerated or motivated”, reported The Daily Star.

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

On Friday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal condemned the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das, a Hindu man, in Bangladesh, saying that continued hostilities against minorities in the country, including Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, at the hands of extremists was a matter of great concern.

Das was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by a mob in Mymensingh district on December 18, after which his body was allegedly tied to a tree and set on fire. Eighteen persons have been taken into custody for the lynching.

“We condemn the recent gruesome killing of a Hindu youth in Mymensingh and expect the perpetrators of the crime to be brought to justice,” Jaiswal said.

The spokesperson also claimed that independent sources had documented more than 2,900 incidents of violence against minorities in Bangladesh during the tenure of the interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus.

Alam claimed on Sunday that Jaiswal’s remarks do not reflect facts, reported The Daily Star.

“With much regret, we note systematic attempts to portray isolated criminal acts as persecution of Hindus and to maliciously use them to propagate anti-Bangladesh sentiments in different parts of India,” he added.

The Bangladeshi spokesperson also said that there was a “selective and unfair bias in certain quarters” and claimed that isolated incidents were amplified to incite Indians against Bangladesh, its diplomatic missions and other establishments in the country.

Referring to the death of another Hindu man, Amrit Mondal, alias Samrat, Alam said that he was a listed criminal and was killed “when he was committing extortion with his Muslim accomplice”, reported The Indian Express.

He said that the accomplice had been arrested.

“To portray this criminal act through the lens of minority treatment is not factual but misleading,” added Alam.

Mondal was beaten to death by a mob in Rajbari’s Pangsha Upazila on Wednesday. The police said that they rescued Mondal and took him to hospital, where doctors declared him dead.

The man was accused in several criminal cases, including matters relating to murder and extortion filed in 2023, ANI quoted the Bangladeshi government as having said.

On Thursday, the interim government in Bangladesh condemned Mondal’s killing but said the incident was not communally motivated.

Dhaka said that it had “noted with great concern” that a “certain segment has made the unholy attempt to highlight the religious identity of the slain person and describe it as a communal attack”. It had urged “all concerned sections” to behave responsibly.

The Supreme Court of India has taken suo motu cognisance of concerns arising from a change in the definition of the Aravalli Hills, following apprehensions that the move could lead to unregulated mining and severe environmental degradation, Live Law reported.

A vacation bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justices J K Maheshwari and A G Masih will hear the matter on Monday.

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

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

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

On Wednesday, amid the criticism, the Union environment ministry directed states not to grant new mining leases in the Aravalli Hills. The ban on new mining leases is to preserve the integrity of the landscape and applies to the entire Aravalli range, the ministry had said.

The Congress described the government’s directives to state governments on Wednesday as a “bogus attempt at damage control that will not fool anybody”. The “dangerous 100m+ redefinition” had remained unchanged, party leader Jairam Ramesh said on social media.

On Monday, the Union government denied that the redefinition weakens environmental safeguards, stating that over 90% of the Aravalli region remains protected.

On Wednesday, the Congress asked the Union government why it was “pushing through a fatally flawed” redefinition of the Aravallis, despite opposition from key expert bodies and advisers to the Supreme Court.

Ramesh shared on social media a report by The Indian Express saying that the Supreme Court’s acceptance of the government’s new definition of the Aravalli hills contradicts the recommendations of its own Central Empowered Committee.

Also read: The slow destruction of Delhi’s forgotten spine

Cooped up at the back of Anil Mishra’s SUV, driving through the narrow lanes of Gwalior, my colleague Kritika and I had become a captive audience for the garrulous lawyer.

He would occasionally turn around to look at us while speaking, but he never really bothered to wait for our response. And, truth be told, I am glad that he didn’t because I remember feeling very conflicted about what was happening.

We were in the city to cover the controversy over the proposed installation of an Ambedkar statue in the premises of the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s Gwalior bench.

Anil Mishra was part of a group of mostly Brahmin lawyers who had blocked the statue on the pretext that due process had been flouted to rush through its installation in May.

In an interview he had given us in his chambers, Mishra had spoken at length about the technical grounds on which he was opposed to the statue.

But in the car, with Kritika’s camera locked away, the real reason for his opposition tumbled out. “This statue will never be erected anywhere in or around Gwalior,” Mishra declared. “Not even in a toilet.”

The casteist import of what he said was not lost on us. But we sat quietly at the back of the car, grateful for his help in navigating the city.

That day, the Ambedkarite group Bhim Army had called for a public meeting in Gwalior to protest against the stonewalling done by upper-caste lawyers and to demand that the statue be installed.

The police had turned the city into a fortress and journalists like us were struggling to get anywhere close to the court. When Kritika tried to click a picture of the court’s facade, the police officials on duty chased her away.

So when Mishra offered to take us to the court and show us around, we jumped at the opportunity – unaware of what we were signing up for. All through the drive, Mishra held forth on how Gwalior’s upper castes had fought back Ambedkarite assertion.

He harked back to 2018, when caste clashes had claimed over half a dozen lives, mostly of Dalits, in Gwalior and its neighbouring districts. The fear of a repeat of 2018-like violence, Mishra argued, would stop Ambedkarites from escalating matters over the statue beyond a point.

He seemed to be acutely aware that the dispute over the statue was bigger than a lawyers’ squabble over legal minutiae. “We have shown the country that these Ambedkarites can be stopped in their tracks,” he boasted.

Mishra’s choice of metaphor was telling. He likened the spread of social justice politics in the Hindi belt over the past four decades to the Ashwamedha yajna – a Vedic ritual performed by kings to expand their territories.

The ritual involved a horse traversing foreign lands with the king’s army in tow to battle any opponents who came in their way. All the area that the horse covered thereafter became the king’s own.

“Nobody thought that it could be done but we have captured the horse from their yajna and tied it up,” he said.

Then, out of the blue, came his confession.

“Jhanda toh humne zabardasti laga diya,” Mishra chuckled sheepishly. We put the flag there for no good reason.

He was talking about the tricolour that some upper-caste lawyers had forcibly hoisted on the podium meant for the Ambedkar statue. When we visited the court, the flag was still flying high while the statue was gathering dust far away from the city, in the factory where it had been sculpted.

To this day, I have not been able to figure out why Mishra opened up to us the way that he did.

It is, of course, possible that we had nothing to do with it and that we merely happened to be there when he was doing and saying what he usually does and says. Perhaps he was bragging in a markedly casteist manner because that is his wont.

But there is another potential explanation that haunts me. Soon after we met, he had asked us about our castes and appeared to be at ease knowing that we, too, came from upper-caste backgrounds.

What if he felt comfortable enough to let his guard down and express himself freely because he had assumed that we shared the same views as him? While we had not said anything to him that would feed such an assumption, we did not say anything that could have countered it either.

These are the thoughts that I was grappling with as Mishra took us around the court that evening. Only some police officials were present in the complex at that hour. When we reached the podium, a policeman came forward and requested us not to use our phone cameras.

Mishra, however, took us to the first floor of the building and gently nudged my colleague to record a video of the flag. We were grateful for all that he did to help us that day and thanked him profusely.

But on the way back to Delhi, I thought about the unease I experienced listening to some of the things he said. I wondered what I could have done differently. It is a question that has bothered me ever since.

Three orders passed by the Supreme Court in November on environmental matters harm citizens’ interests and impede nature conservation in the country, a group of 79 retired civil servants and diplomats said on Sunday in an open letter.

The former bureaucrats, who are part of the Constitutional Conduct Group, urged the Supreme Court to “prioritise the health of…citizens over the waste of money of…corporates”.

The signatories to the letter expressed “deep anguish” about the Supreme Court reversing an earlier ruling that had barred retrospective clearances for developmental projects, another order accepting a new definition for the Aravalli Hills and a third verdict barring the government from disbanding the present Central Empowered Committee without the Supreme Court’s permission.

The ex-bureaucrats said that the orders have led them to fear that “the last bastion meant to uphold the constitutional provisions to protect and conserve our natural world and the right to life of the people of India is crumbling before the onslaught of rich and powerful vested interests”.

Retrospective clearances

In May, a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court had restrained the Union government from granting ex post facto clearances in any form to regularise illegal constructions. However, on November 18, a three-judge bench through a 2:1 decision reversed the verdict, allowing the Centre to once again consider granting environment clearances to projects retrospectively.

The retired civil servants and bureaucrats said on Sunday that while they do not know when a larger bench of the court will hear the case, they hope that the larger bench upholds the verdict passed in May “sooner rather than later”.

“The extreme climate events that are sweeping across the country and the worst ever air pollution levels in Delhi-NCR and north India should surely cause sufficient concern in the Supreme Court to warrant an early hearing,” the former bureaucrats said.

Definition of Aravallis

The Supreme Court on November 20 accepted a new definition of the Aravallis which classified the hills as landforms rising 100 metres above local relief. Environmentalists have warned that defining the Aravallis solely by their height could leave many lower, scrub-covered but ecologically important hills vulnerable to mining and construction.

The signatories to the letter on Sunday noted that the Aravalli range acts as a natural barrier slowing the spread of the Thar desert, stabilising micro-climates and recharging aquifers.

“The new definition will potentially exclude from environmental protection over 90% of the Aravalli range, opening it up to mining and construction and practically removing its ability to be a dust barrier for the Delhi-NCR region,” the former bureaucrats said. “It will also actively allow the advance of desertification into Delhi-NCR.”

They further contended that the new definition would lead to habitat loss and would fragment wildlife corridors, thus harming leopards, hyenas and other animals.

The Supreme Court has, however, taken suo motu cognisance of concerns arising from the change in the definition. A vacation bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justices J K Maheshwari and A G Masih is slated to hear the matter on Monday.

Also read: The slow destruction of Delhi’s forgotten spine

Composition of Central Empowered Committee

The third Supreme Court order flagged by the former civil servants is one in which the bench told the Union government not to disband the Central Empowered Committee – set up to flag non-compliance with environmental conservation orders – without the court’s approval.

The retired civil servants and bureaucrats said on Sunday that the current membership of the committee, set up by the Supreme Court in 2002, has resulted in the court “being advised to approve a number of anti-environmental actions and orders passed by the government”.

The committee has now come under the influence of the Union environment ministry, and entirely supports all government action, irrespective of how harmful it is to the environment.

“It is also to be noted that a CEC member was a member of the Expert Committee which defined the Aravallis as landforms higher than 100 meters above base level,” the letter noted.

An association of West Bengal government officers has expressed objections to what it described as “suo motu system-driven deletion” of voters from the draft electoral rolls under the ongoing revision of voter rolls in the state, PTI reported.

In a letter to the state’s Chief Electoral Officer Manoj Kumar Agarwal, the West Bengal Civil Service Executive Officers’ Association alleged that the exercise bypassed the statutory role of electoral registration officers.

The association flagged that a large number of electors whose enumeration forms had not been returned – on account of reasons such as death, migration, absence or duplication – were deleted from the draft rolls on the day of their publication.

The Election Commission published the state’s draft electoral rolls, in which more than 58 lakh voters were removed, on December 16.

Referring to existing legal provisions, the association said the law allows for a voter’s name to be deleted only on specific grounds, such as when “the person concerned has ceased to be ordinarily resident in the constituency or that he is otherwise not entitled to be registered in the electoral roll of that constituency”.

It added that in all such cases, the concerned electoral registration officers must provide the voter a reasonable opportunity of being heard, as required under Section 22 of the 1950 Representation of the People Act.

The association argued that “system-driven deletion” of such a large number of electors at one time appeared to infringe on the rights of voters who might otherwise be eligible but were unable to participate in the enumeration process.

It also cautioned that names of electors might be deleted from the voter roll “without the knowledge of the ERO, who is the competent authority as per the statute”.

While acknowledging that the Election Commission, as a constitutional authority, has the power to issue directions for electoral revision, the association said affected voters were likely to blame electoral registration officers without realising that they too had been excluded from the entire deletion process.

Seeking remedial measures, the officers’ body requested the West Bengal chief electoral officer to issue directions to ensure electoral registration officers can perform their duties with greater clarity and authority, PTI reported.

West Bengal is expected to head for Assembly elections in the first half of 2026.

Besides West Bengal, the special intensive revision of electoral rolls is underway in 11 other states and Union Territories.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

Also read: In Bengal, BJP faces growing anger of Hindu migrants over SIR

The police in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly on Sunday booked two persons a day after members of the Bajrang Dal disrupted a birthday celebration and accused two Muslim boys of “love jihad”.

The celebration was organised by a nursing student for her classmates, which included six girls and four boys, The Times of India reported. Members of the Bajrang Dal reportedly barged in during the gathering, accusing the Muslim guests of “love jihad”, and assaulted one of the male guests and a girl who tried to intervene.

Those arrested have been identified as Rishabh Thakur and Deepak Pathak, The Wire reported. Thakur was expelled from the Bajrang Dal over a fortnight ago.

Love jihad is a Hindutva conspiracy theory that Muslim men trick Hindu women into romantic relationships with the aim of converting them to Islam. The Union home ministry has told Parliament that Indian law has no provision defining such a term.

The police on Sunday filed a case against two named and other unidentified accused persons under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to voluntarily causing hurt, house-trespass after preparation for hurt, intentional insult to provoke breach of peace, criminal intimidation and mischief.

Earlier on Sunday, the police said they found that no objectionable or illegal activity was taking place at the cafe. It added that “preventive action” was taken against the persons involved under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita.

Videos of the incident showed a group of men barging into the cafe and assaulting some of the men who were at the celebration, while shouting slogans of “Jai Shri Ram”. A video also showed the police restraining a girl as she was objecting to those who barged into the cafe.

The videos had led to several social media users asking why the police took action against the Muslim boys instead of the attackers.

A nursing student in Bareilly, UP, hosted a birthday party for her classmates at a café. The group included six girls and four boys, two of whom were Muslim. Shortly after the celebration began, members of the Bajrang Dal barged in, assaulted the Muslim boy and the girl and… pic.twitter.com/T8b1d7lQvw

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) December 28, 2025

In UP's Bareilly, a mob of Bajrang Dal stormed a cafe and, accusing of "Love-Jihad", began assualting two Muslim boys who happened to be at the party. Bareilly police took exemplary action and challaned the Muslim boys for breach of peace. pic.twitter.com/q3aFwdC107

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) December 28, 2025

Congress leader Digvijaya Singh on Saturday said the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and its parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, had an “impressive” organisational structure, while that of the Congress had room for improvement.

The remarks drew sharp reactions from several Congress leaders, who said that it was the BJP and the RSS that should learn from the Congress.

Singh had posted an old photograph of Prime Minister Modi with veteran BJP leader LK Advani and remarked: “See how a grassroots swayamsevak of the RSS and the worker of Jan Sangh and BJP sits on the floor at the feet of leaders and goes on to become a chief minister and then the prime minister.”

The former Madhya Pradesh chief minister said: “This is the power of organisation. Jai Siya Ram.”

Singh later clarified that his comments were only about the organisation and not an endorsement of the BJP or the RSS, ANI reported.

“I've been saying this from the beginning: I am opposed to the ideology of the RSS,” he said. “They neither respect the Constitution nor the country’s laws, and it’s an unregistered organisation. But I admire their organisational capacity.”

On the Congress party’s organisational capacity, Singh said there was “room for improvement”. He added that Congress is “fundamentally a party of a movement” and should remain so, but noted that it falls short in converting that movement into votes, ANI reported.

#WATCH | Delhi | On his tweet sharing an old photo of veteran BJP leader LK Advani and PM Modi, Congress leader Digvijaya Singh says, "I've been saying this from the beginning: I am opposed to the ideology of the RSS. They neither respect the Constitution nor the country's laws,… pic.twitter.com/sDfyS3Ldwr

— ANI (@ANI) December 28, 2025

The BJP said Singh’s comments marked an “open dissent” against Rahul Gandhi’s leadership in the Opposition party, PTI reported.

The party’s spokesperson, Pradeep Bhandari added that Singh’s remarks made “it clear that under Rahul Gandhi, the Congress organisation has collapsed”.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said Singh was free to speak for himself but added that he also wanted the party to strengthen its organisation, ANI reported.

“There should be discipline in our organisation,” he said.

#WATCH | Delhi | On Congress leader Digvijaya Singh praising the organisational strength of the RSS, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor says, "Even I want our organisation to strengthen. There should be discipline in our organisation. Digvijaya Singh can speak for himself..." pic.twitter.com/VuawKAwRim

— ANI (@ANI) December 28, 2025

On the other hand, party colleague Pawan Khera claimed that there was nothing to learn from the RSS, ANI reported.

“What can an organisation known for Godse teach an organisation founded by Gandhi?” Khera asked.

#WATCH | Delhi | On Congress leader Digvijaya Singh praising the organisational strength of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Congress leader Pawan Khera says, "...There's nothing to learn from the RSS. What can an organisation known for Godse teach an organisation founded by… pic.twitter.com/aD4PWgz3fM

— ANI (@ANI) December 28, 2025

Congress leader Supriya Shrinate echoed the sentiment and said “we do not need to learn anything from anyone, people should learn from us”.

She also accused the BJP of presenting “statements by twisting and distorting them”, PTI reported.

VIDEO | Delhi: On Congress leader Digvijaya Singh's praise for the organisational strength of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Congress leader Supriya Shrinate (@SupriyaShrinate) says, "BJP presents statements by twisting and distorting them. We have no need to learn anything from an… pic.twitter.com/sV3LMuhTVA

— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) December 28, 2025

A group led by the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Sangharsh Samiti staged a protest outside Lok Bhavan in Jammu on Saturday, demanding that the MBBS admission list of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence be revoked, The Indian Express reported.

The protesters objected to the selection of a large number of Muslim students from Kashmir, the newspaper reported.

The protesters clashed with police personnel, shouted slogans and burnt an effigy of Lieutenant Governor of Jammu and Kashmir Manoj Sinha. The lieutenant governor serves as the chairman of the Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board, which runs the institution.

Some demonstrators attempted to climb the walls of Lok Bhavan, the official winter residence of the lieutenant governor, before being stopped by security personnel, the Hindustan Times reported.

Members of the Bharatiya Janata Party, its parent organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Shiv Sena, Bajrang Dal and other Hindutva organisations also joined the protest.

The agitation was triggered by the release in November of the first admission list to the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence by the Jammu and Kashmir Board of Professional Entrance Examinations. Of the 50 candidates selected for the institute’s first MBBS batch, 44 were Muslims from Kashmir and six were Hindus from Jammu, The Indian Express reported. Of the six Hindu candidates selected, only three reportedly joined the course.

In November, unidentified officials had told The Indian Express that admissions to the medical course were done according to the National Medical Commission rules. Of the 50 seats, 85% are reserved for Jammu and Kashmir domiciles and 15% are open nationally.

On Saturday, the protesters demanded that the shrine board cancel the first admission list issued for the institute.

Retired Colonel Sukhvir Singh Mankotia, convener of the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Sangharsh Samiti said that the protesters want that the MBBS seats in the college should be reserved for Hindu students.

“We are not against students of any particular religion,” The Indian Express quoted Mankotia as saying. “ [We] want the MBBS seats in [Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Institute of Medical Excellence] reserved for Hindu students as the medical college has been set up on the basis of donations made by pilgrims visiting the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine.”

The Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University is not a minority institution. Therefore, religion cannot be a factor for admissions to the university.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, however, called the protests baseless, the newspaper reported.

He said that when the J&K Assembly passed the Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University Act and allotted land for the campus, it was clearly stated that admissions would be based on merit alone.

“Where was it written that boys and girls from a particular religion will be kept out?” The Indian Express quoted Abdullah as saying. “It was said that admissions will be based on merit and not religion… If you want to admit without merit, then take permission from the Supreme Court.”

In November, a political row had erupted in Jammu and Kashmir after Sinha accepted a memorandum submitted by the BJP seeking cancellation of the admission list. While the ruling National Conference had described the memorandum as “divisive and communal”, the Opposition Peoples Democratic Party had said that the BJP’s move was “shameful”.

On November 22, the BJP, along with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal, asked the lieutenant governor to amend admission rules and reserve all seats at the university for Hindu students. The BJP’s memorandum submitted to Sinha had not sought minority status for the university but objected to the admission of “the majority of students from a particular community”.

At least eight police personnel were injured on Saturday after an ongoing protest against a coal mining project in Tamnar block in Chhattisgarh’s Raigarh district turned violent, PTI reported.

Tensions escalated at the Jindal Coal Handling Plant chowk in Libra village, where villagers had been staging a road blockade and sit-in protest since December 12, The Indian Express reported.

Residents from 14 villages affected by the Gare Pelma Sector-I coal block have been protesting against a public hearing held on December 8 at Dhaurabhatha for the project, the district administration was quoted as saying. The villagers have demanded the cancellation of the proposed mining project, alleging that the public hearing violated prescribed norms.

Police said that the situation deteriorated when personnel attempted to clear the road, following which the crowd swelled and turned violent, the newspaper reported. Stones were thrown at police teams.

“The mob, which grew from 300 to 1,000, went on a rampage,” an unidentified police officer told The Indian Express. “They torched a police bus, a jeep and an ambulance. Several policemen were attacked with sticks and stones.”

Those injured included Sub Divisional Police Officer Anil Vishwakarma, Tamnar police station in-charge Kamla Pusam and a constable, PTI reported.

The protestors later entered the Jindal Coal Handling Plant premises, where a conveyor belt, two tractors and other vehicles were damaged and office property vandalised, PTI reported.

Raigarh District Collector Mayank Chaturvedi told PTI that villagers had been sitting peacefully at the protest site for the past 15 days and that the administration had been ensuring necessary facilities.

“On Saturday at around 2 to 2.30 pm, some anti-social elements provoked protesters,” triggering the clashes, Chaturvedi told PTI.

“Since they didn’t have orders to retaliate, the officers were forced to retreat for their own safety,” The Indian Express quoted the collector as saying.

He said that two hours later, the police made two further attempts to engage in dialogue. During an effort to physically approach the group, the crowd became aggressive again, resumed throwing stones and chased the police team.

Protesters, however, alleged that the situation worsened after police carried out a lathi charge, including against women who were sitting on the road to stop mining-related vehicles.

“One old woman’s hand was injured because a cop pulled her up,” a protestor told The Indian Express. “Later, the crowd swelled up and got out of control.”

In a separate incident on December 4, more than 30 police personnel were injured after residents protesting coal mining in Parsodi Kala village in the state’s Surguja district threw stones at the mining team’s security cover, The Indian Express reported.

The protest was held against South Eastern Coalfields Limited’s 1.0 million tonne per annum opencast mine in Amera.

South Eastern Coalfields Limited is a subsidiary of Coal India Limited.

Police used lathi charges and tear gas to disperse the crowd, and mining operations were halted for the rest of that day.

According to South Eastern Coalfields Limited, the land for the Amera mine had been acquired under the 1957 Coal Bearing (Acquisition and Development) Act, with compensation and rehabilitation benefits paid, but alleged that some landowners, instigated by miscreants, were resisting possession and engaging in violence.

However, residents say they were opposing the loss of agricultural land and livelihoods.

A protestor told The Indian Express: “The soil of our village land is very dear to us and we do not want to give it away. SECL wants to dig it for minerals. Where do we go?”

The Delhi Police on Saturday detained Congress leader Mumtaz Patel and several other protesters who were staging a sit-in near the Parliament complex to oppose a Delhi High Court order suspending the life sentence of former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case involving a minor, PTI reported.

The protesters reached the area around 4 pm, sat on the road, chanted slogans and demanded the cancellation of the bail granted to Sengar by the Delhi High Court on December 23, the news agency reported.

आज उन्नाव पीड़िता और उनकी माताजी के साथ मुलाकात की । जब इनके और भारत की बेटियों के हक में आवाज़ उठाई तो मौजूदा भाजपा शासन में अपने हितों की रक्षा के लिये धरना करने को भी अपराध ठहराया जा रहा है — संसद के बाहर 6 महिलाओं का शांतिपूर्ण विरोध भी सत्ता को अखर गया, और उन्हें हिरासत में… pic.twitter.com/FiRUZhTeNy

— Mumtaz Patel (@mumtazpatels) December 27, 2025

Police officials announced through loudspeakers that the area near Parliament was not a designated site for protests and asked the demonstrators to disperse. When they refused to vacate the spot, they were removed and detained, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

रेप आरोपी को घूमने की आज़ादी क्यों?

और न्याय की आवाज़ उठाने वालों को सज़ा क्यों?

यह व्यवस्था किसके लिए काम कर रही है?#JusticeForUnnaoVictim pic.twitter.com/5W3ZrPuQBs

— Yogita Bhayana योगिता भयाना (@yogitabhayana) December 27, 2025

The detentions came a day after the complainant’s mother, along with others, staged a protest outside the Delhi High Court against the order.

On December 23, the Delhi High Court granted Sengar bail while the former MLA’s appeal against conviction is being heard. However, the former MLA from Uttar Pradesh was directed not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

Sengar will, however, remain in jail as he is also serving a 10-year sentence in connection with the custodial death of the complainant’s father and has not been granted bail in the case.

Complaint against investigating officer

The complainant has approached the Central Bureau of Investigation, seeking that a first information report be registered against the then investigating officer, alleging that the officer was working in collusion with Sengar, PTI reported on Saturday.

She alleged that the officer conducted the investigation dishonestly and in such a manner that the former MLA and other persons accused in the case may get the benefits of “deliberate lapses and manipulation of fact introduced, and secure a favourable outcome”.

She also claimed that several statements were falsely attributed to her in the chargesheet, the news agency reported.

On Friday, the Central Bureau of Investigation moved the Supreme Court challenging the Delhi High Court order.

When Wazir Khanam married Mirza Fakhru, the third heir apparent to the Mughal throne, on the cold evening of January 24, 1845, she probably thought this was the pinnacle of her success – and the last stop in her tumultuous journey.

The 31-year-old Khanam was already the mother of four children from various liaisons. But undaunted by her circumstances and confident of her beauty, Wazir bargained hard to secure the most advantageous terms for the marriage contract. It involved a dower of one lakh Shah Alami rupees, to be paid to her later.

Wazir, who composed ghazals under the pen name Zuhra or Venus, was welcomed into the Red Fort by Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. She was elevated to the title of “Shaukat Mahal”, the splendour of the palace.

The match gave a boost to the rising poetic career of her teenage son, Nawab Mirza Dagh Dehlvi, who accompanied her to her new residence and was to be brought up and educated as the son of Mirza Fakhru.

By the time of Wazir’s death in 1879, three of her sons and one daughter had become well-regarded poets. She had moved between households and kingdoms. But despite her adventurous life and position in the household of the Mughal emperor, she has earned a mention in the footnotes of history only because of the eminence of the men she loved and the children to whom she gave birth.

Yusuf’s daughters

Born in 1811, Wazir Khanam was the youngest of three daughters of Muhammad Yusuf, a Kashmiri ornament craftsman, and Asghari Begum, the daughter of a famous courtesan of Delhi’s Chowri Bazar.

In Bazm e Dagh, Dagh’s biographer, Rafiq Marehrvi, refers to Yusuf as a “dereydar”, implying that he was also the proprietor of a kotha. In the bazaars of Chandni Chowk, the three girls were famous for their beauty but known somewhat demeaningly as “Yusuf waliyan”, Yusuf’s girls.

Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, in his rigorously researched novel about Wazir’s life, The Mirror of Beauty, describes Yusuf’s despair in trying to keep his daughters away from the glittering kotha of their grandmother and his anger at Wazir’s later choices.

However, the younger two girls, Wazir and Umdah, were immersed in the world of Akbar Bai’s kotha: they attended musical and poetic soirees and met with the grandees who graced the salon. The tawaifs of the time were learned in Persian poetry and the works of great philosophers – a privilege their purdah-observing sisters were denied. Both Umdah and Wazir were mentored by renowned scholars of Delhi.

As evidence of their education, Faruqi includes corrections and comments Wazir’s mentor, Mian Shah Nasir, made on her ghazals. However, most of her writings are now lost to us.

It was in the kotha that Umdah met Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan, scion of the royal family of Rampur. She became his concubine. The elder sister had already been married into a respectable Mirza family of Delhi. The teenage Wazir had a choice of both worlds.

The decision she made would shape her life.

A Bibi

It is not clear when Wazir met the handsome young British officer, Captain Edward Marston Blake, but she decided to accompany him as his bibi or concubine to Jaipur, where he was posted as the assistant political agent.

According to Faruqi, Edward came to an agreement with Wazir’s father. British officers at that time used to have Indian concubines in their “bibi khanas”. Wazir and Marston had two children, Sophia (also known as Maseeh Jan) and Martin Blake (also known as Amir Mirza).

When Edward was killed in a riot in Jaipur in 1830, Wazir was forced to give up her children to be brought up in the Christian faith by Blake’s cousins. She returned to Delhi.

She had no claims to Edward’s estate or their children, and no resources to support herself. Sophia, or Miss Blake, would go on to become a famous Urdu poet under the pen name “Khafi”.

A Begum

Umdah, who still lived in Delhi with Nawab Yusuf, became Wazir’s support and introduced her to William Fraser, the British Resident of Delhi. It is likely that Wazir took up the profession of a tawaif. From the accounts of the time, we know that she met Fraser’s interest in her was sparked by her beauty and intellect as she attended the grand mehfils.

Soon after, she met Nawab Shamsuddin of the Jhirka and Loharu states, possibly through the offices of Nawab Yusuf, and became his mistress. Nawab Shamsuddin brought her a three-storeyed house in Chandni Chowk’s Khanam Bazar, with shops on the ground floor. The rental income was hers for perpetuity. She was also given a regular allowance.

It was in this house that her son, Nawab Mirza, was born. He would become a renowned poet under the name Dagh Dehlvi. Nawab Shamsuddin was overjoyed. Nawab Mirza was his first male heir.

But happiness and security were always ephemeral in Wazir’s life as the fortunes of the men in her life cast her adrift. On October 8, 1835, Nawab Shamsuddin and his servant, Karim Khan, were hanged for the murder of William Fraser.

Fraser had been instrumental in dispossessing the Nawab of his Loharu estate and conferring it on Nawab Shamsuddin’s stepbrother. Some suggest that Fraser coveted Wazir. Though the enmity between the Nawab and the British Resident was common knowledge, some have written that there was no substantial proof of the Nawab’s involvement in the murder.

Dagh’s account of the events recorded in the roznamcha, or daily diary written by his pupil Marehrvi, says that Karim Khan executed the murder on the behest of Nawab Shamsuddin and, in a hurry, disposed of the weapon in a well. It bore the Nawab’s initials, and was recovered during the investigations.

Rampur years

Though the British seized all the Nawab’s property, they could not confiscate the Khanam Bazar house as it was in the name of Wazir. However, Wazir, fearing for her four-year-old son Dagh’s life, sent him to live with Umdah in Rampur. Nawab Yusuf’s father, Nawab Saeed Ali Khan, had ascended the throne of Rampur. He ruled from 1840 to 1855.

Wazir herself spent some years in hiding from the British. Finally, Umdah managed to effect an alliance for her with a Rampur nobleman Agha Turab. Wazir settled in Rampur and was united with her beloved son. Wazir had a son with Turab, Mirza Shagil. He too would become a noted poet.

But these few years of respite in Rampur were shattered by the death of Agha Turab at the hands of thugs in 1842. Wazir returned to Delhi with her two sons to live in her house in Khanam Bazar. Nawab Saeed possibly provided her with some financial support, but her circumstances were greatly reduced.

Shaukat Mahal

Faruqi quotes Muhammad Husain Azad’s Collected Works of Zauq to narrate an incident when the poet and scholar saw the painting of Wazir with Mirza Fakhru. Zauq reportedly described her as a “whore” and a “harlot” out to ensnare the young prince. Regardless, it’s clear that Mirza Fakhru was enamoured of Wazir and she became Shaukat Mahal, the respectable begum of a Mughal prince.

The mushairas of Delhi – held at the royal court, the courtyards of Delhi College and noblemen’s houses – resounded with the words of Ghalib, Momin, Zauq, Azad, Azurda and others, says writer Farhatullah Baig in Dilli ki Akhri Shama. Emperor Bahadur Shah, a pensioner of the British, was a prolific poet too.

There was one disappointment for Wazir, however. She had to reluctantly leave behind her toddler son, Shah Muhammad Agha with a caregiver until he grew up. Mirza Fakhru probably didn’t want her to be distracted by the demands of a child.

But in these twilight years of Mughal Delhi, another of her sons, the teenaged Dagh, was gaining repute for his youthful, extempore poetry. He had been educated at the Rampur court with the crown prince, Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan. Living at the Mughal fort, Dagh was tutored by Zauq in poetry, and his talent was lauded by the emperor himself.

It is possible that Wazir agreed to the match with the Mughal prince Mirza Fakhru to encourage Dagh’s career and to forge ahead toward the chimaera of stability.

But the 1840s, Mughal court was a slippery, inconstant world. The equilibrium between the British and the Mughals was lost with the death of the first heir apparent in 1849. Mirza Fakhru made himself the heir apparent with the support of the British lieutenant general – which led to the alleged poisoning of three British officials. It is said that Zinat Mahal, the chief queen, was responsible for their deaths because they were instrumental in Mirza Fakhru’s elevation.

Then on July 10, 1856, Mirza Fakhru died too. It was said that he died from cholera, though that seemed suspicious to some.

For Wazir, life had assumed a familiar rhythm where every crescendo was followed by a descending note. She was unceremoniously evicted from the fort by the chief queen, who was happy that her son, Jawan Bakht, had finally become the crown prince.

Wazir moved back to her Delhi house with Dagh and Khurshid, her son with Mirza Fakhru. She was 43.

Dagh soon received an appointment at the court of Nawab Yusuf Ali Khan, and the family moved to Rampur, where the poet lived till 1887. The historical record falls silent once Wazir’s life moved beyond the orbit of illustrious men.

Marehrvi writes that she might have found employment with a gentleman from the Deccan. But it is possible that she lived with Dagh in Rampur till her death in 1879. That is what is mentioned in a condolence letter written by Nawab Kalb e Ali Khan of Rampur to Dagh.

Her learning and artistic sensibilities had shaped the lives of three of her four sons – Dagh, Shagil and Khursheed, who had all become poets. But only one fragment of Wazir’s own work survives.

It is quoted by Faruqi in his novel.

It is from her early years and echoes her desire to forge her own way in the constrained world of women:

Sun lein naseh ke chup rahein behtar
Hum na deingey jawab jahil ko

Better to listen to the words of the counsellor quietly,
I shall not respond to an ignorant person.

Tarana Husain Khan is a writer and culinary revivalist based in Rampur. Her latest novel is The Courtesan, Her Lover and I. Her website is here.

On December 5, six months after being forced across the border into Bangladesh by Indian authorities, 25-year-old Sunali Khatun was allowed to return to her home state of West Bengal. She is eight months pregnant.

Indian officials had detained Khatun, her husband and eight-year-old son in Delhi’s Rohini area on June 20, claiming that the family were “illegal migrants of Bangladesh”.

But when Scroll’s Anant Gupta travelled to Khatun’s village in Birbhum district in August, her family showed him land records going back five generations. Gupta even interviewed the midwife who had delivered Khatun.

Though Khatun is relieved that her baby, due in January, will be born in India, she is worried about her husband. She and her son were let back in after India’s Supreme Court urged the government to allow them to return on “humanitarian grounds”. But her husband remains stranded in Bangladesh.

Khatun is just one of the many victims of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s cynical strategy of weaponising anxieties about belonging and citizenship to brutalise India’s most vulnerable citizens – especially Muslims.

The horrific cost paid by the scapegoats of this campaign has been the focus of Scroll’s journalism for much of 2025.

The BJP declared its intention to show Indian Muslims exactly where they stood in 2016, when it moved the Citizenship Amendment Bill. This discriminatory law, which was eventually passed in 2019, offered undocumented immigrants belonging to religious minorities from three neighbouring countries a fast track to Indian citizenship – except if they were Muslim.

The programme to underscore who belongs (but more expressly, who does not) is playing out especially savagely in Assam, where those pronounced non-citizens by the state’s notorious foreigners’ tribunals are “pushed” across the border into Bangladesh in the dead of the night.

Our colleague Rokibuz Zaman reported on the drive to detain Bengali-speaking Muslim migrant workers across the country, demand that they prove that they are Indian – and sometimes expel them. Anant Gupta investigated instances in which the police had bypassed the rules that regulate deportations.

From Kashmir, Safwat Zargar wrote about 80-year-old Abdul Waheed Bhat, paralysed and incapable of speaking, who died in a bus at the Attari-Wagah border post on April 30, waiting to be deported to Pakistan.

He had little with him: a blanket, a few medicines, doctor’s prescriptions, a water bottle and some diapers.

Bhat had lived a life fractured by the vagaries and malign intransigence of bureaucracy. He had been born in India and had mostly lived in Kashmir – save for 15 years, when he was stuck in Pakistan after taking a trip with an aunt at a time when crossing the international boundary did not require a passport or visa.

But the sudden outbreak of war in 1965 left Bhat stranded. Returning home required elaborate documentation that he did not possess. Only after he had acquired a Pakistani passport was he allowed to be reunited with his family.

At the end of April, in the wake of the Pahalgam terror attack, Bhat was served notice to leave India. The authorities ignored the pleas of his relatives that Bhat was bed-ridden and unable to take care of himself – a fact to which doctors had attested.

Had Bhat not been Muslim, he would perhaps have been spared this Mantoesque tragedy.

The programme to reify Indian identity was not conducted only on the borders. It spread to the heartland in earnest in July, when the Election Commission began a “special intensive revision” to “purify” the electoral rolls in Bihar. Three months later, the commission decided to expand the exercise to 12 states and Union Territories.

This is ostensibly being done to excise duplicate entries and remove the names of voters who may have died. It also aims to stop undocumented migrants from casting their ballots. Critics fear that the names of Muslims and voters from other communities that oppose the policies of the BJP will be deleted, claiming that they – like Sunali Khatun – are “illegal migrants”.

The process reverses the principles of natural justice: rather than the state providing evidence for why it believes names should be deleted, voters are expected to prove that they belong.

It is not a coincidence that the crusade to identify undesirables has been accelerated in a year that marks the centenary of the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – the BJP’s ideological parent.

Since 1925, the Sangh has been relentless in its pursuit of a Hindu rashtra, a theocratic state that would afford supremacy to Hindus. It isn’t surprising that the Sangh’s supporters, now that they occupy the pinnacle of power, have deployed grey areas in the law to turbocharge their effort to paint India saffron.

If it weren’t so tragic, it would be amusing to remind them of the warning issued by MS Golwalkar, the second head of the RSS, in We or Our Nationhood Defined, a foundational text for the Hindutva movement.

“We have learnt to call a class of people patriots, saviours of the nation,” Golwalkar noted in 1939. “We have also learnt to dub all the rest as unnational. Really, have we thought over it well? Do we, in fact, understand what it is to be a national? Or do we merely echo a well-worn slogan without appreciating the essence thereof?”

Here is a summary of last week’s top stories.

Hindutva vs Christmas. Several attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations were reported in the past week.

On Wednesday, a Hindutva mob vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Raipur, Chhattisgarh. Videos of the incident showed a mob armed with sticks barging into the mall and destroying decorations on Christmas eve. Hindutva groups had called for a state-wide strike on Wednesday to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in the state.

In Uttar Pradesh, members of Hindutva groups on Wednesday sat outside a church in Bareilly’s Cantonment area, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”. In Assam, members of Hindutva organisations barged into a school in the Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Tuesday raised concern about the “alarming rise in attacks” on Christians in several states ahead of Christmas and said that the incidents undermine India’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the right to worship without fear.

A balmy Christmas: Indians have made the festival and Christian faith their own, writes Divya Aslesha

The Akhlaq lynching case. A trial court rejected a petition filed by the Uttar Pradesh government to withdraw all charges against 10 persons accused in the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in 2015. It directed that the matter be categorised as “most important” and heard on a daily basis.

The court also told the authorities to write to the police to ensure that the evidence is protected.

On September 28, 2015, 50-year-old Akhlaq was lynched following rumours that he and his family had killed a calf and eaten beef during Eid festivities.

A forensic report in May 2016 said the meat found in Akhlaq’s home was that of a cow or its progeny. The police had said that the report “does not diminish the case as murder is an offence”. All the accused persons have been out on bail since 2017.

Crimes against women. Security personnel stopped the complainant in the Unnao rape case and her family members from protesting in Delhi against the High Court granting bail to the convicted former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar. They were reportedly dragged and forcefully removed from India Gate on Tuesday.

Earlier in the day, the High Court had also suspended the life sentence of Sengar, while directing him not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

Hours after the judgement, the complainant, accompanied by her mother and activist Yogita Bhayana, held a protest at India Gate against the bail. However, they were dragged and forcefully removed from the protest site, showed videos shared on social media.

On Wednesday morning, the complainant’s mother alleged that the Central Reserve Police Force stopped her and her daughter from protesting at Mandi House.

Ratna Singh explains why the Delhi High Court released the former BJP MLA convicted of raping a minor.

Also on Scroll last week

• Backstory 2025, where Scroll journalists share their reporting experience
• Why a nativist group is targeting Muslims in Arunachal Pradesh
• BJP cornered 85% of political donations last year, up from 56%
• ‘The police watched as my home was burnt’: Why Assam’s Karbi Anglong went up in flames
• Why West rushed to mourn the killing of an anti-India youth leader in Bangladesh
• After Bihar, is the INDIA bloc dead? Yes and no, say Opposition parties
• Why caste is central to India’s ‘civic sense’ problem
• Bollywood’s mantra in 2025: If it bleeds, it leads
• The best Indian films of 2025: Sabar Bonda, Dhadak 2, Agra and more
• Review: ‘Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri’ is as long-winded and exhausting as its title

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On December 28, 1885, Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit Pathshala in Bombay hosted the inaugural meeting of the Indian National Congress – a modest assembly of 72 delegates that ignited the subcontinent’s quest for self-rule.

Held from for four days in the hall near Gowalia Tank, the meeting drew delegates who were mostly lawyers, educators and professionals. They came primarily from Bombay, Madras, Bengal and the North-Western Provinces.

Allan Octavian Hume, the retired British civil servant pivotal in organising the gathering, envisioned the Congress as a “safety valve” to peacefully channel the grievances of educated Indians in order to prevent unrest of the kind experienced during the 1857 Revolt.

Pattabhi Sitaramayya’s seminal History of the Indian National Congress describes how Hume circulated invitations in mid-1885, recruiting luminary even as fears of an outbreak of the plague prompted the venue to be shifted from Poona to Bombay.

Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsi economic thinker and political leader, later called the “Grand Old Man of India,” proposed the name Indian National Congress, supplanting the bland National Indian Association.

Prominent delegates included Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji, Surendranath Banerjee, and S Subramania Iyer, whose diverse regional backgrounds symbolised nascent unity. No avowed radicals like Bal Gangadhar Tilak participated, underscoring the moderate character of the enterprise. Neither did any women.

Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee, a Calcutta barrister and the first president, delivered a concise opening address on 28 December, setting a tone of constitutional loyalty. He urged delegates to deliberate on India’s administrative woes – being excluded from the civil service, the drain of India’s fiscal resources and arms import bans – while pledging allegiance to the British Crown.

Bonnerjee emphasised not confrontation but “loyal and constitutional agitation” to secure reforms.

The speech, brief and indirect per archival records, highlighted nine resolutions: expanding the Imperial Legislative Council, simultaneous exams for the Indian Civil Service in India and England, reducing military spending, and fostering famine relief. These pragmatic demands were rooted in Hume’s gradualist blueprint.

Delegates like Tyabji, who became president in 1887, echoed calls for the Indianisation of the services, while Mehta pushed for Bombay’s commercial interests. Rafiq Zakaria’s edited volumes on Congress history portray this as a forum for deliberation, not protest, where views coalesced around petitions to Viceroy Lord Dufferin.

Hume’s role, as Sitaramayya and Zakaria describe it, blended altruism with imperial strategy: he claimed divine inspiration from a theosophical “storm warning”, though critics later decried it as viceregal sanction to monitor nationalists. Zakaria, in 100 Glorious Years (1885-1985), credits Hume for the logistical arrangements – drafting the rules for the meeting, funding it via his wife’s dowry. But Naoroji and Banerjee, he said, shaped the organisation’s ideology.

The interventions of the delegates reflected optimism tempered by realism. Banerjee advocated press freedoms; Iyer demanded judicial reforms. Discussions spanned three days, culminating in a 1,200-word address to Dufferin. Sitaramayya notes the session’s success in fostering elite consensus, with no major rifts.The Congress would galvanise millions en route to Independence. The Moderate era (1885-1905), led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Naoroji, pursued petitions and swaraj. After the partition of Bengal in 1905, extremists such as Tilak, Lajpat Rai, and Bipin Chandra Pal surged, demanding swadeshi and boycotts.

Gandhi’s entry in 1915 transformed the Congress into a mass-based organisation. The Non-Cooperation movement (1920-’22), Civil Disobedience mvement (1930) and Quit India movement (1942) mobilised peasants, workers and women.

By 1947, the moderate seeds sown in Bombay in 1885 had burst into a rich harvest.

Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai.

Names of more than 10 lakh voters were identified to be deleted in Assam after a house-to-house verification process as part of the special revision of electoral rolls, the Election Commission stated on Saturday.

Of the total, nearly 4.79 lakh names were to be deleted due to deaths and over 5.23 lakh voters were identified to have shifted from their registered locations.

Assam is set to go to the polls next year.

The Election Commission is not conducting a special intensive revision exercise in Assam, unlike in 12 other states and Union Territories. Instead, on November 17, it had directed the state chief electoral officer to conduct a “special revision” of the electoral rolls, saying that January 1, 2026, would be the qualifying date for Assam to carry out the exercise.

This had come less than a month after Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, on October 27, announced a special intensive revision exercise of the electoral rolls in West Bengal, Kerala, Rajasthan, Goa, Puducherry, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Lakshadweep, and Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

At the time, Kumar had said that another order would be issued later for Assam as the Citizenship Act had separate provisions for the state.

Assembly polls are also expected to take place in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kerala and Puducherry in the first half of 2026.

In Assam, the door-to-door verification took place between November 22 and December 20. This process did not involve document verification, unlike the special intensive revision.

On Saturday, the poll panel stated that there are 2,52,02,775 electors in Assam.

The number stands at 2,51,09,754 exclusive “D” voters, or doubtful voters whose cases are pending before Foreigners’ Tribunals. They are not allowed to vote until their citizenship is upheld by a court.

Additionally, 53,619 duplicate entries were identified, stated the poll panel, adding that booth-level officers visited 61,03,103 households to verify voters.

After the draft rolls were published, the period of filing claims and objections began. It will continue till January 22, and the final list will be published on February 10.

In November, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma welcomed the decision to undertake the special revision exercise.

“This will help ensure clean, updated and accurate electoral rolls for all eligible citizens,” the Bharatiya Janata Party leader had said. “Assam will extend full cooperation to the Election Commission to complete the revision in a transparent and time-bound manner.”

Meanwhile, around 3.6 crore electors in 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far as part of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The draft electoral roll for Uttar Pradesh is scheduled to be published on December 31.

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union Territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

For years, many farmers across Kashmir had gradually stopped growing Mushq Budji, the region’s prized aromatic rice, after frequent outbreaks of blast disease made the crop too risky and expensive to maintain. But in the fields today, the tide is slowly beginning to turn.

Mushq Budji is a premium traditional rice variety native to the Kashmir Himalayas. It grows at an altitude of 1,600-1,800 metres above sea level and has a short, bold, translucent, and highly aromatic grain. It is especially prized as the preferred rice for Wazwan, the valley’s famed traditional feast. In 2023, the rice variety also received a Geographical Indication tag, protecting its authenticity and regional heritage.

However, Mushq Budji faced a major challenge. It was highly susceptible to blast disease, a fungal infection that can infect all above-ground parts of the plant, causing lesions on leaves, stems, and panicles and leading to total crop failure. Moreover, changing weather patterns worsened disease outbreaks. This disease had become so serious that the variety was almost on the verge of extinction.

The rice blast disease outbreak in Mushq Budji rice began in the early 1960s. Its cultivation began to decline from 1980 onwards, reaching its lowest level in 2000. “We worked specifically on addressing this issue. The SKUAST-Kashmir launched a revival programme in 2007. It is considered a rare case where a traditional farmers’ variety was genetically improved and saved from extinction,” says Asif Bashir Shikari, Professor, Genetics and Plant Breeding at Sher e Kashmir University Of Agricultural Sciences & Technology.

Disease-resistance rice

The researchers used marker-assisted selection to develop the improved, disease-resistant Mushq Budji variety. In this procedure, it is possible to select useful traits, such as disease resistance or improved nutrition, within the same crop species and combine them through conventional breeding without altering the original genetic background. This way, the crop maintains its identity and taste while becoming healthier and more resilient.

In India, marker-assisted selection for disease resistance began in the early 2000s, with the first improved crop variety released in 2007. It was done in crops like rice, wheat, and maize. The results included the release of rice varieties resistant to diseases like bacterial blight (eg, Improved PB-1 and Improved Pusa Basmati-1), a maize hybrid (Vivek QPM9) with improved nutritional content, and a pearl millet hybrid (HHB-67-2) resistant to downy mildew. These efforts aimed to develop climate-resilient and higher-quality crops more quickly than traditional methods.

According to Shikari, the researchers at SKUAST-Kashmir took 10 years to develop two versions of Mushq Budji: SKUA-485, which has three genes that protect the plant against blast disease, and SKUA-528, which has two such genes.

Although these new rice varieties were not explicitly designed for weather-related tolerance, they still retain essential traits of the traditional Mushq Budji, such as cold tolerance. “They are also shorter and stronger, which means they do not fall over easily during strong winds or heavy late-season rains. The presence of genes responsible for cold tolerance, early maturity, and other adaptive traits was confirmed through genome sequencing,” Zahoor Ahmad Dar, Professor of Genetics and Plant Breeding at SKUAST-Kashmir, says. Genome sequencing involves reading a plant’s complete DNA code to identify the genes responsible for specific traits.

To evaluate the success rate of the improved Mushq Budji variety, it has been tested in farmers’ fields across many districts, including Anantnag, Shumnag, Kupwara, and Beerwah (Budgam). “During unusually warm and humid periods – the conditions that make blast disease worse in the old variety – the improved version performed much better because of its disease resistance. We visited farmers in several districts, and they gave very positive feedback. The research team is hopeful that the area under the new variety will continue to grow,” Dar says.

That said, there are several challenges towards developing this variety as it is a highly technical and demanding job. “At one time, our team had to manage lakhs of cross-bred plants, conduct many field trials, perform DNA-based laboratory tests, and check cooking quality. In the beginning, we struggled with poor laboratory facilities, but later we improved our labs using funding from the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, and through the Holistic Agriculture Development Program, Government of J&K,” Shikari say.

When asked whether the improved seeds of this variety are readily available and what is needed to increase their use among small farmers, the research team explained that this season they have produced two quintals of breeder seed of the improved Mushq Budji. “We have further multiplied the foundation seed at Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops, Khudwani, a research and development centre under the SKUAST-K.

Breeder seed is the first and most genetically pure seed produced by scientists who develop a variety. It is used to produce foundation seed, which is then multiplied further to generate certified seed for farmers.

Meanwhile, in a study published in 2024, scientists at SKUAST-Kashmir have also shown that Mushq Budji’s prized aroma is closely linked to altitude and temperature. In a study analysing rice samples from eight locations across the valley, ranging from about 1,500 to 2,000 metres, researchers identified nearly 35 aromatic compounds that together shape its distinctive fragrance.

“We found that rice grown at higher altitudes had a richer and more complex aroma profile, with key fragrance compounds more abundant in cooler locations. Notably, 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (2-AP), a compound commonly associated with aromatic rice, was detected mainly in samples from higher-altitude areas such as Budgam and Kupwara, suggesting that Mushq Budji’s aroma is shaped as much by its environment as by its genetics,” Syed Zameer Hussain, Professor at Division of Food Science and Technology, SKUAST, Kashmir and corresponding author of the study, said.

Farmers reclaim a lost grain

Zafar Ahmad Bhat, a farmer from Sagam village in Anantnag district, owns 19 kanals (0.96 ha) of land under rice cultivation. Of this, he grows the improved variety of Mushq Budji on 11 kanals (0.56 ha), while the rest of the land is used for other rice varieties such as SR-4 (Shalimar Rice-4) and K39.

“My family has been growing rice for many generations. We last cultivated the traditional Mushq Budji in 1980, but frequent disease outbreaks reduced the yield, so we stopped growing it,” he says.

In 2012, Bhat first heard about the improved variety of Mushq Budji. Scientists from SKUAST-Kashmir visited his village and held an awareness programme, during which they explained the importance of the crop and new cultivation methods. Farmers were given one kg of improved Mushq Budji seeds for field trials. “That is how my journey with Mushq Budji started again,” Bhat recalls.

The results were encouraging. The crop matured on time, and no fungicides were used. From one kanal (0.05 ha) of land, Bhat harvested 2.5 quintals of Mushq Budji, while common rice varieties yield about five quintals per kanal. However, Mushq Budji sells at a much higher price – Rs 10,000 to Rs 15,000 per quintal compared to Rs 3,200 for regular rice.

A similar story comes from Kulgam district, where Ghulam Rasool, a farmer, grows the improved Mushq Budji on one kanal (0.05 ha) of land. He now plans to expand the area under the crop. “At first, I was worried that rice blast disease would damage the new variety too. But after attending awareness programmes and learning the new farming techniques, I felt confident,” he says.

He explains that traditional rice varieties are planted with a gap of only three to four centimetres between seedlings, which reduces sunlight as the plants shade each other. For the improved Mushq Budji, farmers leave a gap of about one square foot between seedlings. This allows more sunlight to reach the plants and helps the soil retain heat, improving crop health and preventing rice blast.

Pleased with the results, Ghulam Rasool now plans to grow Mushq Budji on five kanals (0.25 ha) of land. “This new variety has given me confidence to expand cultivation and grow it for commercial sale,” he says.

According to official documents accessed by Mongabay-India, seed production has expanded steadily over the past three years. The area under cultivation increased from about 250 ha in 2022-’23 to an estimated 1,000 ha by 2025, while production is projected to rise from around 600 tonnes to about 2,500 tonnes over the same period.

Despite these successes, farmers face challenges. Marketing remains weak, with demand mostly limited to local consumers. National and international demand is still low. “Last year, the Department of Agriculture distributed Mushq Budji seeds in almost every district under the HADP programme, which increased production manifold. But due to fewer consumers, around 20% of farmers still have unsold stock,” Bhat claims.

Another significant issue is rice milling. “Local mills often produce broken grains, with nearly 20% of the rice breaking during processing. In contrast, basmati rice brought from outside the region is usually full grain. These are some of the challenges that we are facing,” he says.

To address these problems, SKAUST-K and the Jammu & Kashmir Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority, have started exploring export opportunities for Mushq Budji rice to Japan and Southeast Asian countries.

“The rice was showcased at the International Trade Fair 2025 in New Delhi, where international chefs praised its quality and suitability for global cuisines. The initiative aims to create new markets beyond Kashmir and ensure better and more stable incomes for farmers,” Asif Shikari says.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Congress will launch a nationwide protest from January 5 to demand the repeal of the 2025 Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, said party chief Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday.

Speaking to reporters after a meeting of the Congress Working Committee in New Delhi, Kharge stated that an oath had been taken to protect the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act under all circumstances.

“MGNREGA is not a scheme, it is the right to work granted by the Constitution of India,” the Congress chief said. “We will unite and struggle for the dignity of rural labourers, employment, wages, and the right to timely payment, and protect the right to demand-based employment and gram sabha.”

He added that the party will also democratically oppose every “conspiracy to erase” Mahatma Gandhi’s name from MGNREGA.

The 2025 Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Bill was given assent by the president on December 21, two days after it was passed by Parliament amid protests by Opposition parties. The new rural employment law will replace the MGNREGA.

The MGNREGA was introduced in 2005 by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and aimed at enhancing the livelihood security of households in rural areas. The scheme guaranteed 100 days of unskilled work annually for every rural household that wants it, covering all districts in the country.

Under the new law, the number of guaranteed workdays will increase to 125, while states’ share of costs will rise to 40%. The Union government will continue to bear the wage component, with states sharing material and administrative expenses.

The legislation has drawn criticism from economists and labour rights experts.

On Saturday, Congress MP and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi also noted that MGNREGA was not just a work programme but a conceptual development framework that has been appreciated across the world.

“This has been destroyed single-handedly by the Prime Minister [Narendra Modi] without asking his Cabinet, without studying the matter,” Gandhi said. “This is an attack on the states of India because they are simply taking away money that belongs to the state, decision-making power that belongs to the state.”

He added that the party was going to fight the replacement of the Act, adding that he was confident that the entire Opposition was going to be aligned with them.

Kharge flags voter deletions, attacks on churches

Kharge also flagged the deletion of voters during the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls being conducted by the Election Commission, claiming that it was a “well-planned conspiracy” to limit democratic rights, ANI reported.

Noting that it was a matter of serious concern, the Congress chief claimed that the “collusion” between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the Centre and the Election Commission was “well known to all”.

He said that Rahul Gandhi had also previously presented evidence of “vote theft” in the country with facts and examples.

Gandhi and the Congress have repeatedly accused the Election Commission of large-scale vote rigging, including in the Maharashtra and Haryana Assembly polls held in 2024, alleging what they called “industrial-scale rigging involving the capture of national institutions.” The Election Commission has rejected those allegations.

“We must ensure that the names of our voters are not deleted,” Kharge said. He also directed party workers to ensure that the votes of marginalised communities were not removed or transferred to other booths.

The poll panel is conducting the revision in 12 states and Union Territories. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4. Overall, around 3.6 crore electors in 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far in the exercise.

The draft electoral roll for Uttar Pradesh is scheduled to be published on December 31.

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union Territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

The Congress chief on Friday also condemned the attacks on the Christian community during Christmas celebrations by organisations that he claimed were linked to the BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, adding that this had disturbed communal harmony and tainted India’s image globally.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP at the Centre.

Several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations have been reported in the past week.

The Congress Working Committee meeting on Friday comes ahead of Assembly elections in Assam, Kerala, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry next year.

Also read:

• BJP chief ministers wanted MGNREGA to include farm work. Modi government’s bill goes another way

• ‘A bill to destroy MGNREGA’: Why experts fear the worst from new job guarantee bill

The Delhi Police on Friday arrested 285 persons for offences under the Excise Act, the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances and the Public Gambling Act in a crackdown ahead of New Year celebrations, ANI reported.

Additionally, 504 persons were apprehended under preventive measures. A total of 116 persons identified as having a “bad character” were also arrested, the news agency quoted Deputy Commissioner of Police (South East) Hemant Tiwari as saying.

The arrests were part of an operation named Aaghat 3.0, aimed at preventing crimes during the festive period. Coordinated searches were held in several areas within 24 hours, NDTV reported. The joint operation was carried out by the South and South East District Police.

Twenty-one country-made pistols, 20 live cartridges, 27 knives, 12,258 quarters of illicit liquor, 6 kg of ganja, Rs 2,30,990 in cash, 310 mobile phones, 231 two-wheelers and one four-wheeler were also recovered as part of the operation.

Tiwari said that the operation was a significant step in maintaining law and order, ANI reported.

In September, 70 persons were arrested and firearms, narcotics, illicit liquor and stolen property seized, during Aaghat 1.0, the Hindustan Times reported. In the second edition of the operation in October, 500 persons were apprehended.

The district administration in Bihar’s Patna has ordered an inquiry after a video widely shared on social media showed students alleging caste-based discrimination at a government school in Alawalpur village, The Indian Express reported on Friday.

In the video, students claimed that they had been made to sit separately and were prevented from mingling with upper-caste students. They also alleged that they were denied food at times.

“They ask the other students, ‘Why do you sit with them?’,” the newspaper quoted one of the students as having alleged in the video. “They seat us separately.”

The student added that upper-caste students were moved if found seated next to lower-caste students.

The alleged administrative irregularities such as poor teacher attendance, irregular classes and low-quality food were also raised in the video, The Indian Express reported. Claims were also made about students being forced to do manual labour.

Ranjan Kumar, the principal of the government school, told The Hindu that the allegations were baseless. “We only ask the girls and boys students to sit separately,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

This video is from a school in Alawalpur village of the Patna Sahib Lok Sabha constituency in Bihar, The students claim that the teachers are adopting a caste-discriminatory attitude towards students, isolating them and keeping them separate from other students. Interestingly,… pic.twitter.com/5lHfiXbLml

— Mohammed Zubair (@zoo_bear) December 23, 2025

Nitan Devi, the panchayat head of Alawalpur, said that she has asked the principal not to spoil the education system in the area. Any teacher violating the guidelines deserves punishment, The Hindu quoted Devi as saying.

Patna District Magistrate Thiyagarajan SM told The Indian Express that the district education officer has been directed to inquire into the matter and submit a report.

Alawalpur is located about 20 kms south of Patna.

The village had been adopted by Lok Sabha MP Ravi Shankar Prasad under the Saansad Adarsh Gram Yojana in 2014. Under the scheme, MPs are required to adopt a village to develop it into a model village.

India on Friday stated that it has conveyed its concerns to the United States about the cancellation of pre-scheduled interviews of Indian applicants for H-1B visas, adding that both sides were discussing the matter.

Earlier this month, Washington said that it would expand the vetting of social media profiles to applicants for H-1B visas and their dependents from December 15. As a result, interviews of thousands of H-1B visa applicants in India were abruptly postponed by several months.

Some of the applicants, whose visa appointments were scheduled a week after the announcement on the vetting, received emails from the US immigration authorities informing them that their interviews had been pushed to as late as May.

The rescheduling hurt applicants who were previously given appointments after December 15.

H-1B visas allow companies in the US to temporarily employ foreign workers for special occupations.

Over the past few years, Indians have constituted the majority of H-1B visa holders. Indians comprised 72.3% of all H-1B visas issued by the US in the financial year 2022-’23.

On Friday, Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that it had received several representations from Indian citizens who were facing delays or problems with the rescheduling of their US visa appointments.

Jaiswal noted that visa-related problems pertain to the sovereign domain of a country. However, he said that the problems and concerns of Indians had been flagged to the US, in New Delhi and in Washington. “We hope that these delays and disruptions will be addressed,” he added.

The spokesperson said that there were several persons who had been stranded for an extended period of time because of the scheduling or rescheduling of consular appointments.

“And these have also caused a lot of hardships to their families, to the family life that they have, as also to the education of their children, as you would understand,” Jaiswal said.

He added: “The Government of India remains actively engaged with the US side to address and minimise the disruptions that have been caused to our nationals.”

On December 3, Washington directed all foreign workers applying for H-1B visas and their dependents, who are issued H-4 visas, to keep their social media profiles public for them to be reviewed.

In June, the Donald Trump administration issued similar directions for student visa applicants, stating that the government would conduct a “comprehensive and thorough vetting”, including of their online presence.

These directions came amid Trump’s intensified crackdown on immigration.

On September 19, Trump had signed an order requiring companies to pay $100,000 for each H-1B worker visa. However, two days after the rule came into effect, his administration clarified that the fee applies only to new applicants and does not affect current holders.

On Tuesday, the US Department of Homeland Security also said it had finalised amendments to regulations governing the H-1B visa selection process to favour workers who are higher-skilled and better-paid.

The new rules would take effect on February 27 and will be applicable for the financial year 2026-’27 registration period. The number of H-1B visas issued annually is limited to 65,000, with an additional 20,000 for US advanced degree holders.

The Trump administration said that replacing the lottery system of granting the visa with a process that gives greater weight to persons with higher skills will “better protect the wages, working conditions and job opportunities for American workers”.

The Central Bureau of Investigation on Friday approached the Supreme Court challenging the Delhi High Court order suspending the life sentence of former Uttar Pradesh MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case involving a minor, Live Law reported.

The petition was filed against the High Court’s decision to suspend the sentence and grant Sengar bail while the former Bharatiya Janata Party MLA’s appeal against conviction is being heard. However, Sengar was directed not to travel within a five-km radius of the complainant’s home.

On Tuesday, the High Court observed that, on the face of it, the facts of the case did not fulfil the conditions required to apply the stricter offence of “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” under Section 5 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act. This was because Sengar did not fall within the definition of a “public servant”, it said.

Section 5 of the Pocso Act sets out conditions in which a “penetrative sexual assault” against a child is treated as a more “aggravated” offence. An aggravated offence is treated as serious because it is committed under special or severe circumstances that make the crime graver than usual.

Under the Act, an offence becomes “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” when it is committed by persons holding positions of authority, such as a public servant or a police officer within their jurisdiction, members of security forces, or staff of hospitals or prisons.

Under the Pocso Act, an aggravated offence carries a minimum sentence of 20 years, which can be extended up to life imprisonment.

In 2019, the trial court convicted Sengar, noting that, since he was an MLA at the time of the incident, he qualified as a “public servant” under Pocso. This made the offence a serious one and attracted a harsher punishment.

Thereafter, Sengar was sentenced to life imprisonment. His appeal against conviction and sentence had been pending before the High Court since 2020.

On Tuesday, the High Court rejected the trial court’s reasoning. It held that Sengar, as an elected MLA at the time of the incident, could not be treated as a “public servant” under the Pocso Act.

Security personnel had on Tuesday and Wednesday forcefully stopped the complainant in the rape case and her family members from protesting in Delhi against the High Court order.

They were detained at the Kartavya Path police station for around an hour, reported the Hindustan Times.

In March 2020, Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother Jaideep Singh Sengar, among others, were sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for the killing of the woman’s father in judicial custody.

A Tripura student from the Chakma community on Friday succumbed to his injuries from an attack on him in Uttarakhand’s Dehradun that took place two weeks ago, India Today NE reported.

Angel Chakma, an MBA student, and his brother had been attacked allegedly by a group of assailants on December 9.

The 24-year-old’s brother Michael Chakma was quoted as saying that the attackers, who were drunk, harassed them because of their appearance and shouted racial slurs.

The assailants allegedly stabbed Angel Chakma several times with knives. He was critically injured and taken to a hospital in Dehradun, where he was in the intensive care unit for the past two weeks. His condition deteriorated and he died on Friday morning.

The brothers were on their way to buy groceries in the Selaqui area of Dehradun, East Mojo reported.

The police have arrested five persons in the matter. The suspects have been identified as Avinash Negi, Shaurya Rajput, Suraj Khawas, Ayush Badoni and Sumit, India Today NE reported.

One of those arrested is from Manipur and the others from Uttarakhand.

Legal action is being taken against one more suspect who is a Nepali citizen, The Hindu quoted Senior Superintendent of Police Dehradun Ajay Singh as saying.

A murder charge was added to the initial first information report about the assault, the officer was quoted as saying.

Angel Chakma was a resident of Debram Para near Agartala. He was from Pecharthal in North Tripura district.

The student’s family has demanded strict punishment for those involved in the killing.

TIPRA Motha chief Pradyot Debbarma condemned the killing. “We have lost Angel Chakma but his murderers are yet to be convicted – we demand justice for the departed soul,” Debbarma said on social media.

“We will ensure that the murderers of Angel Chakma get due punishment,” Debbarma added in another post.

The junta in Myanmar, which snatched power through a coup in 2021 and now calls itself the State Security and Peace Commission, is about to conduct a heavily stage-managed, geographically restricted and politically stunted “election”. The first phase will take place on Sunday, the second phase on January 11 and potentially a third phase on a yet unannounced date.

According to data collated by the Asian Network for Free Elections, only 99 out of the country’s 330 townships – the country’s basic administrative unit – are slated to vote in full. Ninety three others will likely post a partial ballot. Ten townships are expected to vote only the areas that are controlled by the military and not in the tracts controlled by the resistance. The military regime has entirely cancelled voting in 56 townships.

Geographically, most of the polling is slated to take place in the central part of the Bamar heartland, the Irrawaddy deltaic region, Yangon region, parts of the eastern ethnic states bordering Thailand, parts of northern Kachin State bordering China and India, and a few patches across the southeasternmost coastal regions.

Large parts of the country remain under resistance control, negating the possibility of any campaigning or polling.

What ‘election’?

By no standard can such a territorially constricted election be considered a genuine democratic exercise. Besides, some of Myanmar’s largest civilian parties, including Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the influential Shan National League for Democracy and more than four dozen others, are not participating in the junta’s electoral exercise.

While the junta-appointed election commission dissolved these parties under a newly-enacted election registration law 2023, most of them would have anyway likely boycotted the polls as a mark of protest against the coup regime, not unlike in 2010 when the National League for Democracy boycotted a similar junta-held “election” that put in place a quasi-civilian government led by President Thein Sein.

While both elections must be placed squarely within inverted quotes, there is a crucial difference.

In Issue No. 25 of #DataDive, @Anfrel maps four key dimensions of the #Myanmar junta's #election project focused on how the Election Protection Law criminalizes dissent and why there is no real choice for voters. #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar pic.twitter.com/fiWeO19usj

— ANFREL (@Anfrel) December 19, 2025

The 2010 moment paved the way for Myanmar’s first free and fair election five years later, partly due to Sein’s consultative leadership style and a difficult but long-due peace process between the government in the national capital of Naypyidaw and ethnic armed organisations that helped repair some of the trust deficit between the centre and ethnic peripheries.

This time, the “election” is being held under the stewardship of junta chief Min Aung Hlaing, an obstinate political figure who is disinterested in federal democracy-building, lacks a grand political vision and fancies a firm grip on power.

In refusing to cede power back to a civilian government and instead, waging a war against his own people, Hlaing has not only bulldozed the delicate relationship between Naypyidaw and the ethnic minorities, but also alienated and provoked the very same Bamar majority from which the military draws legitimacy.

In a conspicuous show of his pathological insecurity and awareness that most of his own people reject the sham polls, Hlaing has been using a draconian election law to order the arrest of hundreds for criticising the election plan. Thus, the uncertain yet genuine sense of cautious optimism that seemed to shadow the 2010 election is completely missing in the upcoming “election”, which rests on half a decade of bloodshed, distrust and despondency.

Optimism or self-interest?

Despite the grave cynicism among the people of Myanmar, governments in the immediate neighbourhood, flustered by nearly five years of armed conflict, economic decay and political instability, have quietly wagered on the upcoming “elections” as a pathway towards stability and predictability, if not peace.

In this, they are guided by a culture of foreign policy pragmatism drilled deep into modern Asian statecraft, which seeks a strong central government, stable provincial centres, a flexible economy and manageable frontiers. It has little time for disruptive social or political movements next door, let alone a revolution. In fact, the word “revolution” is anathema for government officials and their policy allies in most of Myanmar’s neighbourhood, not least because it generates a sense of anxiety about the political status quo in their own countries.

This is true even for the Communist Party of China, which was born out of the crucible of a historic revolution but has moderated itself over the decades for the sake of statecraft and geopolitics. In fact, the Xi Jinping government has emerged as the Myanmar junta’s leading backer today.

It has thrown all its weight behind the “elections”, and helped the coup regime stabilise large parts of northern Myanmar by forcing warring ethnic groups to cease fire. India and Thailand have followed in lockstep, extending notional support to the junta’s “elections”, although without the accompanying strategic groundwork that China has done in Myanmar.

As Myanmar’s military prepares for the first phase of voting on December 28, even as a civil war rages across large parts of the nation, an analyst explains why the election will not produce anything new in the Southeast Asian country https://t.co/btkccLYBqU pic.twitter.com/uKXiRdnIgL

— Reuters (@Reuters) December 26, 2025

All three know well that polling will be far from free and fair, but are willing to bet some of their cards on the process, hoping that it yields a set of outcomes that is favourable to their own strategic interests. In doing so, they are willing to either overlook or undermine the aspirations of the majority of the people of Myanmar who see the junta as their sworn enemy and will not accept any election that is held under the military-drafted 2008 constitution.

It is precisely this self-serving realpolitik optimism about an impending positive transition in Myanmar that the junta seeks to exploit through an illusory electoral exercise.

Faux franchise

There is also a general view in government (or pro-government) circles in some of Myanmar’s neighbours that the election would force Hlaing to be accountable to his own people. They believe an exercise in franchise will ultimately humble him. This is a view that is naïve at best, and foolish at worst. It ignores two things about the “election”.

One, the junta has closely curated the electoral landscape and polling architecture in a way that makes a loss virtually impossible. By dissolving Myanmar’s most popular political parties, allowing pro-military parties, such as the Union Solidarity and Development Party, to seek a mandate, and switching from a first-past-the-post to a proportional representation system, it has ensured that political power remains firmly in the military’s own stead even before polling begins.

The Asian Network for Free Elections has also shown that the Electronic Voting Machines that the junta has deployed for the polls were introduced without any consultation, consensus or trials, which opens up serious possibilities of large-scale fraud. In such a structurally rigged and thoroughly opaque electoral system, the win-loss binary becomes utterly meaningless.

Two, despite the spokesperson for the junta stating otherwise, the key target audience of “election” is not the people of Myanmar, but rather, regional governments and entities like ASEAN who have preconditioned their support for the regime on a notional transition to democracy. Therefore, the question of domestic accountability does not arise.

For Hlaing, holding the election, no matter how staged it might seem, is a path back to regional diplomatic circles.

In fact, it is China that Hlaing wishes to primarily placate through the elections. Beijing, frustrated by a lack of progress on Belt and Road Initiative projects in post-coup Myanmar and Hlaing’s abject failure to restore peace, believes that an election might calm the waters. It is also aware that any government that emerges out of the junta would be beholden to Chinese interests, not least because of the critical support that Beijing has extended to the military rulers in taming a set of powerful of ethnic rebels in the north.

Backing the “election”, therefore, is China’s way to consolidate its influence in Myanmar’s Bamar heartland at a time when the US seems to have retracted from the country. The costs of its realpolitik geopolitics are, of course, severe – it stands to become even more unpopular in a country where large parts of the population already see their northern neighbour as a disruptive and extractive force.

But, this is a cost that Beijing is willing to pay to ensure that its high-speed road and rail corridors cutting across Myanmar are completed on time.

🇲🇲🇨🇳Beijing’s vote of confidence for Myanmar polls.

Myanmar's military-run elections are being pilloried abroad and shunned at home, but neighbouring China has emerged as an enthusiastic backer of the pariah poll.https://t.co/XfEIjTI3XF pic.twitter.com/fEZoM7mQsF

— AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 24, 2025

The Indian play

The lesson here is for the others around Myanmar, including India. Any support for the junta’s election, even if in notional terms, could be seen as an attempt to legitimise the coup regime. In fact, it could disturb the relationship that India has quietly built with ethnic armed organisations in western Myanmar, most prominently the powerful Arakan Army and Chin groups that now control territory through which the New Delhi-funded Kaladan project passes. The multi-crore project aims to connect Kolkata with Northeast India via the Sittwe port in Myanmar’s Rakhine state by sea, river and land.

Yet, it is clear that New Delhi is not cutting itself loose from the junta yet. In fact, in the upcoming “election”, the Narendra Modi government sees an avenue to rationalise its relationship with the junta and, as a recent meeting between the two sides indicated, find “better opportunities” to work together. For India, a strong central government in Naypyidaw, regardless of its political provenance and popular legitimacy, is an ideal partner to work with.

This emanates from a longstanding Indian diplomatic posture to engage with whoever is in power in the Burmese capital. But, seen from another angle, it is a reflection of the Modi government’s own preference of a centralised democracy over a federal one at home. The home and the world collapse into each other in foreign policy decision-making more often than we might believe.

It is unlikely that the resistance groups with which India has built a rapport over the last year will abruptly sever their ties with New Delhi if the Modi government endorses the “election” result. But, India’s choice to do so may certainly leave a bitter taste among Myanmar’s pro-democracy forces who see in their western neighbour an exemplar model of federal democracy that is worth emulating in the Burmese context, unlike the Chinese model of a one-party authoritarian state that is ill-fitted to Myanmar’s rich multi-ethnic sociopolitical landscape.

India must capitalise on this critical distinction. To do so, it must slowly but surely expand its relations with the pro-democracy groups next door. Simultaneously, it must scale down its ties with the grossly unpopular military regime and any subsequent quasi-civilian government that Hlaing might install, while quietly building strategic clout in western Myanmar’s ethnic pockets where almost every group remains keen on working with India for mutual benefit.

The key here is to keep the ear to the ground and listen to the aspirations and suffering of the people, rather than the self-serving fantasies of a rogue military clique that has never been serious about protecting Indian security interests. It is only by adopting a truly people-centric foreign policy that India can kill two birds with a stone: outsmart China in its own backyard, and build political-strategic depth in a rapidly transforming Myanmar.

Angshuman Choudhury is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies jointly at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London.

Australia has issued an advisory warning that counterfeit batches of a rabies vaccine have been circulating in India since November 1, 2023.

The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation issued the alert about counterfeit batches of the vaccine Abhayrab on December 22. It stated that while the vaccine is not available in Australia, those who received it while in India may still be affected.

Rabies is a viral zoonotic disease that affects the central nervous system. Infected dogs are responsible for transmitting the virus in the vast majority of rabies cases among humans.

According to the World Health Organization, the disease is fatal in 100% cases once it infects the central nervous system and clinical symptoms appear.

Abhayrub is manufactured by the Human Biologicals Institute, a division of Hyderabad-based Indian Immunologicals Limited.

Indian Immunologicals Limited told Scroll that in January, it “proactively identified an issue related to a specific batch of Abhayrab (Batch # KA 24014) in the market place with a packaging that was different”.

It added that it immediately notified Indian regulators. “We are working closely with regulatory authorities and law-enforcement agencies to swiftly curb this batch specific issue, and a formal complaint has been lodged to facilitate investigation,” stated the company.

In its advisory, the Australian advisory body said that those “who have received the counterfeit vaccine may not be fully protected against rabies and are recommended to receive replacement doses with a rabies vaccine registered in Australia”.

As it would be difficult to confirm whether an individual received a genuine or fake vaccine, anyone who received a dose of Abhayrab in India from November 1, 2023, onwards should be considered to have potentially been administered the counterfeit vaccine, it added.

The advisory body said that such persons should be offered replacement doses of a vaccine in Australia.

The World Health Organization says that as per available information, rabies causes 18,000 to 20,000 deaths every year in India. The country accounts for 36% of the total deaths due to rabies in the world.

In recent years, there have been several concerns about medical products manufactured in India being found to be substandard in foreign countries. Deaths allegedly linked to India-made cough syrups have been reported from the Gambia and Uzbekistan, while Indian-made eye drops were suspected to have been linked to infections in Sri Lanka.

‘Supplies made through authorised distributors safe’

The company told Scroll that every batch of vaccine made at Indian Immunologicals Limited is tested and released by the Central Drugs Laboratory under the Government of India prior to release for public use.

Abhayrab has been manufactured by Indian Immunologicals Limited since 2000, with over 210 million doses supplied in India and across 40 countries, the vaccine-maker said, adding that the vaccine holds about 40% of the market share.

“We would like to reiterate and provide adequate confidence to health care professionals and the general public that all supplies of Abhayrab made by IIL to the various government institutions and all supplies made through our authorised distributors are safe and of standard quality,” it added.

Indian Immunologicals Limited is committed to the highest standards of quality, safety, and transparency in the interest of public health, the statement added.

A booth-level officer has allegedly died by suicide in Uttar Pradesh’s Sitapur district, PTI reported on Friday. His family has alleged that he took the step due to work pressure related to the special intensive revision of the electoral rolls in the state.

The booth-level officer, identified as 30-year-old Umesh, lived in Ataria town and was employed as an instructor at Dariyapur pre-secondary school, said Rakesh Kumar Gupta, an inspector in charge of the Ataria police station.

Umesh was a resident of the Rampur Kala police station area, he added.

Gupta said that Umesh was alone in his room when he allegedly killed himself.

“After the door remained unopened for a long time, police were informed,” PTI quoted the inspector as saying. “As the iron door was locked from inside, it was cut open, following which Umesh was found hanging from a noose.”

Umesh’s family members told the news agency that he had been assigned duties as a booth-level officer during the revision exercise and was under pressure due to the increased workload.

The police said that the matter was being investigated and that a case would be registered after a preliminary probe.

The Election Commission is conducting the revision of the electoral rolls in 12 states and Union Territories, including Uttar Pradesh. Booth-level officers began distributing enumeration forms on November 4.

Overall, around 3.6 crore electors in the 11 states and Union Territories have been deleted so far in the exercise.

The draft electoral roll for Uttar Pradesh is scheduled to be published on December 31.

The final electoral rolls for all states and Union territories where the exercise is underway are to be published on February 14.

The task of preparing voter lists before elections is typically assigned to primary school teachers and anganwadi or health care workers, who are employed by state governments. They are required to go door-to-door and check the identities of new voters and verify the details of those who have died or permanently moved out of an area.

In the Election Commission’s parlance, they are called booth-level officers. Each booth-level officer is responsible for maintaining the voter list for one polling booth, which can sometimes have as many as 1,500 registered voters.

At least nine suicides and two deaths due to stroke have been reported due to alleged work pressure in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan amid the revision of electoral rolls.

In Bihar, where the revision was completed ahead of the Assembly polls in November, at least 47 lakh voters were excluded from the final electoral roll published on September 30.

Concerns had been raised after the announcement in Bihar that the exercise could remove eligible voters from the roll. Several petitioners also moved the Supreme Court against it.

Also read: I struggled to fill SIR forms. BLOs have it much worse

Jhalo Devi and her husband, Basu Oraon, tried cultivating hybrid paddy for five years. The result? Higher costs, more pesticides, and less nutrition. The couple are third-generation Oraon tribal farmers from Jahupkokotoli village in Gumla district of Jharkhand. Like many farmers in the state, they eventually made a choice – to abandon modern hybrids and return to the Indigenous rice their ancestors cultivated for generations.

“Look how healthy these grains are,” says 64-year-old Jhalo Devi, standing in a field that defies the usual image of a lush green paddy crop. Under the winter sun, the grains glow like black diamonds. “This is our dehati dhan (native paddy), Kala Jeera.”

The reasons are both practical and profound. “Hybrids get a lot of diseases; they don’t grow without pesticides,” says Basu, 60. In contrast, their Kala Jeera yields well, fetches a premium price, and needs no fertilisers.

This shift is not merely about tradition; it is a strategic response to climate change and rising costs. Native varieties have evolved to withstand local adversities. “They have built-in resistance and possess diverse genes. In case of drought, flood, or pest attack, they perform better than hybrids,” explains Brijesh Pandey, scientist at Krishi Vigyan Kendra, Gumla. Agroecologist Debal Deb notes that these folk varieties have an “amazing capacity for adaptation”, honed over generations to suit local soil, climate, and pests.

More resilient

The couple recall the days when they grew several varieties of red and black rice. “We once grew a variety called Namri, which was red, then Kalamdani, also red, and Karhani, a black rice rich in vitamins (nutrition),” says Jhalo.

They also cultivated Mehia, a small, white-grained variety; a red grain, Ramdi; and a sweet, black-grained rice, Gopal Bhog. “Earlier, our harvest was so good that three chatka (traditional bamboo grain storage) would fill up with grain,” she recalls. But over time, the younger generation distanced itself from farming. Today, the couple cultivate seven acres – six acres with native varieties, Kala Jeera and Mehia, and one acre with hybrid paddy, a compromise Jhalo jokingly attributes to her husband.

“The black rice tasted so good. There’s a world of difference between today’s hybrid rice and the old varieties. Even when eaten as leftover or as fermented water rice, it was delicious,” she says. Hybrids, she explains, spoil quickly. “If you cook hybrid rice in the morning, it will spoil by evening. But if you cook black rice and keep it in water, it won’t spoil even after three days.”

Jhalo has even preserved seeds of Karhani, a black variety she says has medicinal value. “We eat it only when someone falls sick. It’s beneficial for people with diabetes and even for ailments like jaundice,” she adds.

What Jhalo knows from her experience is supported by scientific data. Rice and wheat – which meet over 50% of India’s daily energy requirements – have lost up to 45% of their nutritional value in the past 50 years. Zinc content in rice has fallen by 33%, iron by 27%, and most troublingly, arsenic levels have surged by 1,493%. At this rate, researchers estimate that grains could become nutritionally impoverished for human consumption by 2040.

“The Indigenous paddy tastes better than hybrid varieties,” says Lambodar Behera, Principal Scientist at the ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Cuttack. “Black and red rice often have antioxidant and medicinal properties. They can be useful for people with diabetes, have anti-inflammatory compounds and may help with joint pain. The deeper the red or black colour, the richer the nutrition; some have a good aroma, even better than Basmati.”

A 2021 study found that traditional black rice is nutritionally richer, with more vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and medicinal properties than commonly consumed white rice varieties. “I tell him to plant only Indigenous varieties, but this old man doesn’t listen,” says Jhalo, teasing Basu. “But when I serve him hybrid rice, he won’t eat it. He says it has no taste.”

It is not just about taste and health; Kala Dhan also fetches a fair price. “This rice sells easily for Rs 80-Rs 120 a kilo in the market,” says Basu. The couple sell their produce in the local markets of Lohardagga and Banari. “Everyone loves our rice and often asks for it during festivals and special occasions.”

Greater resilience

This year, Jharkhand received almost 1,200 mm of monsoon rainfall (June-September) – 17% above normal and the third-highest since 2001, causing damage to Kharif crops, especially paddy and maize, across the state.

Dinbharan Nageshiya, 32, a farmer from Chorkakhar village in Latehar district who cultivates Indigenous paddy on his 5.5 acres, explains that traditional varieties such as the red rice Sanpiya and black rice varieties Karhani, Baghpanjara, Jeera Phool, and Rani Kajra were once common in their diet.

Over the past decade, many villagers switched to hybrids. But Dinbharan and a few neighbours who held on to Indigenous varieties were proved right during this year’s rain. “All farmers who grew hybrid paddy lost their crops, while those with Indigenous varieties had good harvests,” he says.

“We bought hybrid seed and planted it on three acres. They failed this year,” says Dasi Kisan, 42, from the same village, who spent over Rs 30,000 on this season’s paddy. Standing between two fields, Dinbharan points out, “This traditional paddy is thriving without fertiliser. That hybrid field? Dead.”

For Jharkhand, the resilience of Indigenous varieties matters. The state is prone to climate extremes and has suffered 10 droughts in the last 25 years. As climate variabilities intensify, farmers like Dinbharan are showing that older seeds may offer better survival odds than newer ones.

Yet many Indigenous varieties have already been lost. RH Richharia, one of India’s leading rice experts, documented and collected around 19,000 varieties during his career, estimating that India was once home to 200,000 rice varieties.

Lifeline in mining areas

Indigenous varieties not only have greater climate resistance but also remarkable adaptability. One such black rice variety is Gauda Dhan of the Pat region. Gauda Dhan thrives in southern Gumla district, part of the Chhotanagpur plateau scarred by open-cast bauxite mines. “We have grown Gauda Dhan for at least five generations,” says Sukhani Asur, 56, of Kujam village. She belongs to the Asur tribe, classified as a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group.

Villagers grow only kharif crops; rabi cultivation is impossible. “There is no water source here,” she says. For locals, Gauda Dhan means survival.

“We must conserve Gauda genotypes,” says Somnath Roy, Scientist at ICAR-National Rice Research Institute, Hazaribag. “They tolerate drought and phosphorus starvation, which are common in acidic mining soils. Their longer roots extract phosphorus from deeper layers.”

A study of the Sundarban’s traditional rice varieties found that farmers grow many local types suited to salty soil. But these yield less than modern high-yielding varieties, so most farmers switched to newer types for bigger harvests.

Yet older varieties persist. They resist salt well, protecting crops during floods and storms. Farmers also value their taste, reminiscent of childhood. Seeds cost nothing – farmers save them after harvest. These varieties need little fertiliser or pesticide, keeping costs low.

About 50 km from the Pat region, in Latehar district, lies Vijaipur. The village grows only Indigenous dehati dhan. As in the Pat region, no crops are grown in the Rabi season due to lack of water. But the village has its own way to endure the dry spell. Some grow Sathi (a 60-day, drought-escaping rice) and Fakthi (a 70-90 day, late-sown option). “Even in upland fields or dry years, Sathi yields if planted,” says farmer Joseph Kujur, 37.

“Sathi completes its life cycle before water stress hits,” explains Somnath Roy. “If rain doesn’t come until mid-August, farmers sow Sathi or Fakthi later. It still survives.” Some varieties thrive under excessive rain. “Karhani grows well in low-lying fields with heavy rainfall,” says Joseph. “It matures quickly and yields well.”

Indigenous paddy is hardier and less disease-prone. “Even after storms, grains don’t fall,” Joseph says. “You can delay harvest a week and still get a full crop. Hybrids lack that toughness. Their seeds sprout if they fall.”

This article was first published on Mongabay.

Criticising the lynching of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, India said that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning. Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson also said that New Delhi “expects the perpetrators of the crime to be brought to justice”.

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

Jaiswal also claimed that independent sources had documented more than 2,900 incidents of violence against minorities in Bangladesh during the four-month tenure of the interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus. Read on.

Why West rushed to mourn the killing of an anti-India youth leader in Bangladesh

Amid strained diplomatic ties between New Delhi and Dhaka, a group of hoteliers in West Bengal’s Siliguri decided to stop providing accommodation to Bangladeshi citizens. A notice issued by the Greater Siliguri Hoteliers Welfare Association said that the decision was linked to provocative statements allegedly made by some Bangladeshi citizens and alleged disrespect towards the Indian national flag.

Siliguri, located close to the border with Bangladesh, is an important entry point for Bangladeshi citizens who travel to India on tourist, medical and student visas.

Ujjwal Ghosh, the joint secretary of the association, said that the decision was an extension of a ban that was first imposed in December 2024. He said that the association has 180 hotels in and around Siliguri, all of which are strictly following the ban. Read on.

The Union government told the Delhi High Court that reducing the Goods and Services Tax on air purifiers to 5% from 18% without following due process will open up a “Pandora’s box”. Seeking more time to offer a measured response, the Union government said that it will inform in its counter-affidavit when a GST Council meeting can be scheduled.

“It is a federal levy,” said the Centre’s counsel. “All states and Union ministry has to argue...If anything has to be voted, it can only be done physically.” The Union government also asked whether a public interest litigation could be filed in the matter, stating that the petitioner could instead make a representation before it.

On its part, the court maintained that something should be done to bring down the cost of air purifiers in light of the air pollution crisis in the national capital. This came as the Air Quality Index in the national capital plunged again to the “very poor” category. Read on.

How Delhi’s rich are escaping air pollution

The internet was suspended for 24 hours in the town of Chomu near Jaipur after four police personnel were injured due to stones being thrown at them during a protest. The protesters were objecting to the police removing iron railings erected along the road outside a mosque.

The dispute was linked to stones placed along the road outside the mosque. Representatives of the Muslim community held talks with the district administration on Thursday and agreed to remove the stones.

However, some persons allegedly began installing iron railings outside the mosque to create a boundary after the stones were removed, leading to the unrest. Read on.

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Internet has been suspended for 24 hours in the town of Chomu near Jaipur after four police personnel were injured due to stones being thrown at them during a protest, the Hindustan Times reported.

The protesters were objecting to the police removing iron railings erected along the road outside a mosque on Friday.

The incident took place at about 3 am near the bus stand area in the Chomu town, which is 40 km from the Rajasthan capital, PTI reported.

Director General of Police (Law and Order) Sanjay Agarwal told the Hindustan Times that the situation was completely under control, adding that strict action would be taken against those who took the law into their own hands.

The dispute was linked to stones placed along the road outside the mosque, unidentified police officers told the newspaper. Representatives of the Muslim community held talks with the district administration on Thursday and agreed to remove the stones.

However, some persons allegedly began installing iron railings outside the mosque to create a boundary after the stones were removed, PTI reported. This led to fresh objections and unrest as the railings encroached on the road.

Early on Friday, the police attempted to remove the railings using a JCB machine. However, a few persons allegedly started throwing stones, injuring four police officers who were later admitted to a hospital.

The police had to resort to tear gas shells and used mild force to force the crowd to disperse, officers said.

Police officers have been conducting flag marches in the town, PTI reported. Teams have been formed to identify and arrest those involved in the violence.

The Delhi Police has registered a first information report against Aam Aadmi Party leaders Saurabh Bharadwaj, Sanjeev Jha and Adil Ahmed Khan for allegedly hurting religious sentiments by posting on social media a video skit, which showed men dressed as Santa Claus fainting due to high levels of pollution in the national capital, reported ANI on Thursday.

According to the FIR, the “political skit” showed “individuals dressed as Santa Claus – a revered religious and cultural icon for Christians worldwide – in a derogatory and mocking manner”, reported ANI.

“The videos depict these religious icons ‘fainting’ and ‘collapsing’ on the street to be used as mere props for political messaging,” it added.

The video was posted by Aam Aadmi Party leaders on December 17 and December 18, ahead of Christmas celebrations. It was shot in Delhi’s Connaught Place area and titled: “Santa Claus fainted in Delhi pollution”.

It showed Bharadwaj, the party’s Delhi unit chief, trying to revive the men through cardiopulmonary resuscitation after they fell down upon seeing that the Air Quality Index in the national capital was in the “very poor” category.

Bharadwaj was also heard criticising Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta for her inaction in curbing air pollution in the city.

The FIR was registered on the complaint of an advocate, Khushboo George, who alleged that AAP leaders maliciously committed acts intended to outrage religious feelings, reported The Tribune.

Responding to the case, Bharadwaj said that photos of the complainant “are all over social media with Bharatiya Janata Party leaders”. He shared photos of George with the Delhi chief minister and BJP MP Manoj Tiwari.

“We shouldn’t give these folks free publicity,” he added.

AQI in Delhi

Delhi’s air quality on Thursday remained in the “poor” category, according to data from the Sameer application at 7.05 pm.

The national capital’s average AQI stood at 241, showed the application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

An index value between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air. Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

As the AQI further improved on Wednesday, the Commission for Air Quality Management revoked Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region.

Stage 4 restrictions had come into force on December 13.

The commission, however, said on Wednesday that air quality forecasts provided by the India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras suggest that in the coming days, the air quality index may increase because of slower winds.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region. The commission is a statutory body formed in 2020 to address pollution in the NCR and adjoining areas.

India on Friday condemned the lynching of a Hindu man in Bangladesh, saying that the “unremitting hostility” against minorities in the country was concerning.

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

On Friday, Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that continuing hostilities against minorities in Bangladesh, including Hindus, Christians and Buddhists, at the hands of extremists was a matter of great concern.

#WATCH | Delhi | On Bangladesh, MEA Spox Randhir Jaiswal says," The unremitting hostility against minorities in Bangladesh is a matter of great concern. We condemn the recent killing of a Hindu youth in Bangladesh and expect that the perpetrators of the crime will be brought to… pic.twitter.com/UbacgqSskh

— ANI (@ANI) December 26, 2025

“We condemn the recent gruesome killing of a Hindu youth in Mymensingh and expect the perpetrators of the crime to be brought to justice,” Jaiswal said.

The spokesperson also claimed that independent sources had documented more than 2,900 incidents of violence against minorities in Bangladesh during the tenure of the interim government headed by Muhammad Yunus.

Such incidents cannot be brushed aside as media exaggeration or dismissed as political violence, he added.

Das was killed amid widespread unrest in Bangladesh following the death of student leader Sharif Osman Bin Hadi, who succumbed to gunshot injuries at a hospital in Singapore earlier that day.

Hadi was a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the earlier government headed by Awami League leader Sheikh Hasina.

On Friday, Jaiswal also reacted cautiously to the return of Tarique Rahman, the acting chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, to Bangladesh on Thursday after 17 years in exile, reported PTI.

He said that Rahman’s return should be seen in the context of ensuring inclusive polls in the country.

Rahman, who is a key contender to be the next prime minister of the country after the general elections in February, had been living in London since he fled Bangladesh in 2008.

He was sentenced to life in prison for allegedly masterminding a grenade attack on a rally in 2004 that killed 24 leaders and activists of Hasina’s Awami League.

While in exile, he was also convicted on charges of money laundering and faced around 100 lawsuits. The convictions were overturned after Hasina was ousted from power in August 2024, following large-scale student-led protests against her government.

Rahman’s return to Bangladesh ahead of the 13th national election, to be held on February 12, is being seen as a defining moment for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party. This will be the first election in the country since the ouster of Hasina.

Yunus, a Nobel laureate economist, had taken over as chief adviser of Bangladesh’s interim government three days after Hasina resigned as the prime minister and fled to India on August 5, 2024.

Hasina was ousted from power after being the prime minister of Bangladesh for 16 years.

A group of hotel owners in West Bengal’s Siliguri has decided to stop providing accommodation to Bangladeshi citizens in view of the unrest in the country, PTI reported on Friday.

A notice issued by the Greater Siliguri Hoteliers Welfare Association said that the decision was linked to provocative statements allegedly made by a section of Bangladeshi citizens and alleged disrespect towards the Indian national flag.

The decision was aimed at ensuring the safety and well-being of guests and hotel staff members, the association was quoted as saying by the news agency.

Ujjwal Ghosh, the joint secretary of the association, said that the decision was an extension of a ban that was first imposed in December 2024, The Telegraph reported.

“In December 2024, our members had stopped providing accommodation to Bangladeshi citizens,” Ghosh said. “However, on humanitarian grounds, exceptions were made for students and patients visiting India on student and medical visas, respectively.”

Ghosh told The Telegraph that the association has now decided to ban all Bangladeshis from its hotels because of the violence in the country and the “anti-India rhetoric” being spread there. He said that the association has 180 hotels in and around Siliguri, all of which are strictly following the ban.

The association said that the ban will be reviewed from time to time, with the "possibility of reinstating accommodation facilities once conditions are deemed safe and respectful”, PTI reported.

Siliguri, located close to the border with Bangladesh, is an important entry point for Bangladeshi citizens who travel to India on tourist, medical and student visas.

Since December 18, Bangladesh has been rocked by unrest that was sparked by the death of activist Sharif Osman Hadi, a prominent leader in the 2024 student protest that led to the ouster of the former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina-led government.

Hadi was shot on December 12 in Dhaka and died on December 18 at a mosque in Singapore.

His death triggered protests, vandalism and attacks across Bangladesh, including stone-throwing at the residence of the Assistant Indian High Commissioner in Chittagong on December 18.

Further, the killing of a Hindu man named Dipu Chandra Das in Bangladesh after a mob accused him of blasphemy sparked protests in India.

These developments have led to a strain in India-Bangladesh ties, which had already been tense since Muhammad Yunus took over as the country’s interim leader on August 8, 2024 – three days after Hasina was ousted from power.

Bangladesh has been demanding that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal in that country sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government.

The Union government told the Delhi High Court on Friday that reducing the Goods and Services Tax on air purifiers to 5% from 18% without following due process will open up a “Pandora’s box”, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Justices Vikas Mahajan and Vinod Kumar was hearing a public interest litigation filed by advocate Kapil Madan, seeking directions to categorise air purifiers as a “medical device” and lower the tax levied on them.

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

During the hearing on Friday, Additional Solicitor General N Venkataraman, representing the Union government, said that the matter was being examined at the highest level, Bar and Bench reported.

Seeking more time to give a measured response, he said that the Union government will inform in its counter-affidavit when a GST Council meeting can be scheduled.

Venkataraman also said that there was a legislative process to deal with recommendations made in parliamentary standing committee reports, as well as how GST Council meetings deliberate on proposals, The Indian Express reported.

“How can this process be scuttled through a court process?” the newspaper quoted the additional solicitor general as asking.

He said that the GST Council was a constitutional body. “It is a federal levy,” Bar and Bench quoted Venkataraman as saying. “All states and Union ministry has to argue... If anything has to be voted, it can only be done physically...”

However, Madan said that the residents of the national capital will continue to suffer if a decision is not taken promptly, adding that it was a simple process. “Not only is the clean air taxed, it is being taxed wrongly,” the legal news portal quoted him as saying.

In response, the court also noted that these decisions may have to wait until the GST Council meets.

During the proceedings, the additional solicitor general also asked whether a public interest litigation could be filed in the matter, stating that the petitioner could instead make a representation before the Union government.

“We want to know who is behind this writ petition,” Bar and Bench quoted Venkataraman as saying. “It is not a PIL at all.”

Madan, however, opposed the argument, stating that his petition was not “adversarial”.

“Maybe the learned counsel for UOI [Union of India] has not seen the notification by which these slabs have been imposed,” Bar and Bench quoted the advocate as saying. “On a bare reading of this notification itself, I will be able to demonstrate that they are taxing air purifiers under the wrong category.”

The court, on its part, maintained that something should be done to bring down the cost of air purifiers in Delhi in light of the air pollution crisis in the national capital.

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

The court directed the Union government to file its counter-affidavit within ten days and listed the matter for further hearing on January 9. The petitioner has also been allowed to file his rejoinder by then.

During the last hearing on Wednesday, the court criticised the Union government for its failure to tackle air pollution in the national capital, saying that the least it could do was to reduce the GST on air purifiers during such an “emergency”.

“How many times do you breathe in a day?” the bench had said at the time. “21,000 times. Just calculate the harm you are doing to yourself.”

AQI in Delhi

The hearing came as the Air Quality Index in the national capital plunged again to the “very poor” category, after improving earlier this week.

Delhi’s average AQI stood at 336 at 5.05 pm, according to data from the Sameer application, which provides hourly updates from the Central Pollution Control Board.

An index value between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air. Between 401 and 450 indicates “severe” air pollution, while anything above the 450 threshold is termed “severe plus”.

On Wednesday, the Commission for Air Quality Management revoked Stage 4 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the National Capital Region.

The commission, however, said that air quality forecasts provided by the India Meteorological Department and the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras suggest that in the coming days, the air quality index may increase because of slower winds.

GRAP is a set of incremental anti-pollution measures that are triggered to prevent further worsening of air quality once it reaches a certain threshold in the Delhi-NCR region. The commission is a statutory body formed in 2020 to address pollution in the NCR and adjoining areas.

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

The man, Kupwara resident Bilal Ahmed Ganie, was attacked when he was going from door to door to sell shawls. The assault came to light on Thursday when a video of it was widely shared on social media platform Instagram.

In the video, Ganie was seen being beaten up by men who demanded that he shout “Bharat mata ki jai”.

Ganie told The Times of India that the assailants asked him his name and where he was from.

“When I said Kashmir, they started beating me with kicks and punches,” he said. “One of them hit my legs with a cane, and I fell to the ground.”

The shawl seller was further quoted as saying: “They asked me to say ‘Bharat mata ki jai’. I said I would proudly say ‘Hindustan Zindabad’ as this is our country.”

Ganie said that bystanders goaded the mob and verbally abused him, The Indian Express reported.

Bilal Ahmad a shawl seller was brutally assaulted by right wing goons in Kashipur Uttarakhand. Despite approaching the Pratappur Goshala Police Station no FIR has reportedly been registered so far.
Urge the DGP Uttarakhand to kindly intervene & ensure that an FIR is registered so… pic.twitter.com/LCWeAiNFvU

— Mehbooba Mufti (@MehboobaMufti) December 25, 2025

Ganie said he had lodged a complaint, but added that he did not want to pursue the case as he feared facing reprisal from the group.

“As much as I want justice and condemnation for the act, I am scared of the consequences,” he was quoted by the newspaper as saying. “I have to travel back to Kashmir in two months, and the case would tie me to Uttarakhand.”

The police in Udham Singh Nagar said that as the video of the assault was of a sensitive nature, they had it removed from the social media platform.

A case has been registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to rioting, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, snatching of property and public nuisance, The Indian Express quoted a statement from the office of the senior superintendent of police as saying.

“The police have identified the men seen in the viral video and taken them into custody,” the police said. “A fair and thorough investigation is being conducted and strict legal action against the guilty will be ensured.”

Peoples Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti urged the Uttarakhand police chief to intervene and ensure “that the perpetrators are held accountable and such incidents are not repeated in future”.

Jammu and Kashmir Students Association National Convenor Nasir Khuehami said that Ganie had been selling shawls in Udham Singh Nagar for the past nine to ten years. “Despite this, he was threatened, asked to vacate the area and leave the state immediately, his stock was looted, and he was even threatened with death,” he said.

Khuehami urged Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami to “immediately intervene, put an end to this reign of terror, and ensure the prompt arrest of the culprits”.

The Assam Police has arrested four persons associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal for allegedly vandalising Christmas decorations at a school in Nalbari district, the administration said on Thursday.

The persons were identified as the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s district Secretary Bhaskar Deka, its district Vice President Manash Jyoti Patgiri, its Assistant Secretary Biju Dutta and the Bajrang Dal’s district Convenor Nayan Talukdar.

The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bajrang Dal are part of a group of Hindutva organisations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.

The persons allegedly carried out the vandalism at St Mary’s School in Panigaon village on Wednesday. A video by India Today NE showed them setting fire to Christmas decorations and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

A case was registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to criminal trespass, unlawful assembly, criminal intimidation and criminal conspiracy. The persons have also been booked for mischief by injury, inundation, fire or explosive substances.

In another incident in Nalbari, about 15 to 20 alleged members of the Hindutva organisations burnt Christmas decorations at a shop and forced the establishment to close, Asom Live had reported.

Kerala minister says Lok Bhavan employees denied Christmas holiday

Kerala Labour Minister V Sivankutty on Thursday criticised the decision of the Lok Bhavan, formerly the Raj Bhavan, to organise programmes on Christmas day, alleging that it effectively denied employees a holiday, Onmanorama reported.

The governor’s official residence observed the Good Governance Day on Thursday to mark the birth anniversary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

The minister said that the clarification by the authorities that participation was optional was misleading. “As long as instructions come from senior officials, ‘optional’ remains only in name,” he was quoted as saying.

Sivankutty cited orders issued by the Uttar Pradesh government to say that the Lok Bhavan’s decision appeared to follow a broader pattern.

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh had on Wednesday announced that schools in the state will not be closed on Christmas day, but will remain open to commemorate Vajpayee’s birth anniversary.

Attacks on Christians, disruptions to Christmas celebrations

This came amid several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations being reported in the past week.

In Chhattisgarh’s Raipur, a Hindutva mob on Wednesday vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall. The videos of the incident posted on social media showed the men, armed with sticks, barging into the mall and destroying decorations a day ahead of Christmas.

The incident occurred on the day a Hindutva group had called for a state-wide strike to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in Chhattisgarh.

In Uttar Pradesh, members of Hindutva groups on Wednesday sat outside a church in Bareilly’s Cantonment area, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and the shouting slogan “Jai Shri Ram”, The Hindu reported.

In Kerala, a worker of the RSS was arrested after a Christmas carol group of children was attacked while visiting homes in Pudussery village in Palakkad district on Monday.

Last week, some schools in Kerala run by Hindutva organisations and a privately-managed Hindu institution had allegedly halted Christmas celebrations. The managements of the schools, however, denied the allegations.

In Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, a hotel run by the state tourism department cancelled a Christmas celebration on the banks of the river Ganga after protests called by the Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat.

On Monday, Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bharadwaj shared a video purportedly recorded in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar showing men threatening women and children wearing Santa Claus caps.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Tuesday raised concern about the “alarming rise in attacks” on Christians in several states ahead of Christmas and said that the incidents undermine India’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the right to worship without fear.

On the morning of December 24, Kalpana Dey stood outside the burnt remains of her shop and home at the Kheroni daily market in Assam.

A day earlier, a mob of more than 200 people had descended on the 58-year-old’s home on the bank of the Kopili river in West Karbi Anglong.

“I hid behind the bushes and trees to save my life,” Dey, who has been living in Kheroni for the last 40 years, said. “I saw others jumping into the river to escape.” By the time they left, nothing much had remained of her home.

Violence erupted in the area on December 22 after the police broke up a protest by the Karbi tribes against the alleged encroachment of grazing reserves by non-tribal settlers.

Over the next two days, angry tribal residents burnt down the ancestral home of a senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader, looted shops and then finally burnt homes and establishments in the Kheroni market.

Dey’s home and shop are only about 600 metres from the police station, reached by crossing the bridge over the Kopili river. But she alleged that they did nothing to stop the crowd.

“For the last two days, hundreds of police personnel have been stationed at the station,” she said. “But they did not do anything to stop the fire.”

Several Bihari residents of the area told Scroll that the angry men dragged out tables and other belongings of non-tribals and set them on fire right in front of the Kheroni police station.

“The police simply watched,” said a Bihari resident, who lives near the police station.

Dey’s neighbour Suraj Dey, a 32-year-old disabled man, was inside his home when the mob set it on fire. He could not get out in time. “By the time someone tried to rescue him, the fire had already spread,” she said.

When Scroll visited the Kheroni market on Wednesday, we found that all the non-tribal shops were either charred or looted. Over a dozen non-tribal houses had been burnt down.

“Not a single Karbi shop was burnt,” said 48-year-old Pannalal Das, whose hotel and homes were set on fire. “The police could have done a lathi charge or fired blanks to scatter the crowd but they only watched.”

Scroll contacted the Assam director-general of police and the inspector-general of police for a response to the allegations of the residents. The story will be updated if they respond.

Suraj Dey was among two people killed in the violence. The other person, a Karbi man, was killed in police firing, said a doctor at Kheroni Model Hospital.

The Karbi residents, too, blamed the police for triggering the violence by forcibly “dragging away” protestors at Phelangpi, about 3 km from Kheroni, on December 22.

Holiram Terang, a veteran Karbi politician and former minister, told Scroll: “The civil and police administration behaved almost indifferently, as if the situation were allowed to escalate.”

Leaders of the Karbi community said the violence was a response to the growth in non-tribal settlers in a Sixth Schedule area, which risks turning the Karbis into a minority. Terang alleged that the “open presence” of “Hindutva forces aggravated the situation.”

The fault line

A dispute has been brewing in the Karbi hills between the tribals and non-tribals over land for a while now. The hills are governed under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, which gives tribal communities exclusive rights over land, political rights and businesses.

Last February, a group claiming to represent the interests of Hindi-speaking communities of Karbi Anglong, met President Droupadi Murmu in Shillong to demand “protection of land rights of settlers” over village grazing reserves.

The move set off ripples of alarm in the tribal community.

In response, the Karbi Students Association held protests and demonstrations, demanding the eviction of non-tribals from the area. They also asserted that attempts to grant them land rights were against the provisions of the Sixth Schedule.

In February 2024, the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council ordered officials to evict over 2,000 families, mostly Biharis, from grazing land in the hills of Assam, describing them “unauthorized occupants” of the land.

The order was then challenged in the Gauhati High Court by 300-odd families. The court granted the petitioners interim relief.

However, Karbi residents said not all 2,000 families benefited from the court order and the state government could evict the others.

Litsong Rongphar, who has been leading the protest against the settlers since 2024, accused the BJP government of prioritising “vote bank” politics over the rights of tribal people. “If Muslims or Miyas were living in Kheroni today, they would have been evicted long back,” he said, referring to Bengal-origin Muslims in the state, thousands of whom have been evicted from government land by the Himanta Biswa Sarma government.

Rongphar added: “The BJP came to power with a promise to protect the natives’ land but here the illegal encroachers are Hindu communities. So, they don’t want to upset their vote bank.”

A hunger strike, and a riot

On December 6, a group of nine tribal residents, led by Rongphar, sat on an indefinite hunger strike at Phelangpi village, about 3 km from Kheroni daily market, demanding the immediate eviction of alleged illegal settlers from grazing land.

About 10 days later, the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council announced a meeting between Tulimar Ronghang, the chief executive member of the council, and the protestors on December 22.

But at 3 am on December 22, the police allegedly removed the protesters, including women, from the site. “The video showing how police commandos held guns to our necks and dragged us from the site triggered the common Karbi people,” said Rongphar. “It all started from there. Whatever happened was the fault of the government.”

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma later said the protestors had been taken to Guwahati for medical examination. “Why did they come in the dark and take us to Guwahati and not any hospital nearby?” Rongphar asked.

Said Holiram Terang, the former minister, “Even an ordinary man knows this is an unjust way to force the struggle to stop.”

He added: “The people's shock and anger are quite justified. With no organisation to lead the people and elected representatives nowhere to be seen, mob violence is expected.”

As news of the police removing protestors on December 22 spread, agitated Karbi residents protested in front of the Kheroni police station, clashed with the police and set fire to the ancestral home of Ronghang.

Later in the evening, they turned their fury on the non-tribal shops in the Kheroni daily market.

By Monday evening, however, the situation appeared to improve with the state government agreeing to talks with the protestors.

Rongphar returned from Guwahati and called off the hunger strike.

Senior minister Ranoj Pegu along with the officials visited the place on Tuesday morning and held talks with both the groups.

But the situation took a turn for the worse when two communities began to gather on both sides of the river near Kheroni.

Hours before, the tribal community had been inflamed by a video of Bihari protesters allegedly shouting “Karbi go back” and calling the tribal residents derogatory names. They also carried saffron flags and shouted “Jai Shri Ram”.

While Karbis came on vehicles from villages 20 km away, Biharis arrived from nearby towns of Hojai and Lanka to protest the police inaction.

The police personnel took their positions on the bridge while both sides pelted stones at them. As the situation threatened to go out of hand, the police opened fire.

Linus Phangcho, a 40-year-old evangelist who works at a church, was among the hundreds of villagers who came to Kheroni from his native village, which is 20 km away. He was killed in police action.

“He sacrificed his life for our land and protection of Karbis,” his brother-in-law Wilson Keap told Scroll. Phangcho is survived by four children and his wife.

A doctor at Kheroni Model Hospital, where he was admitted, told Scroll that he was killed by “suspected bullet injuries”.

Inspector-general of police Akhilesh Kumar, however, said they had only fired tear gas shells and rubber bullets.

‘Sixth Schedule protections have collapsed’

The Karbis are Assam’s third-largest tribe, constituting 11.1% of the tribal population, after the Bodos and the Mising.

For decades, politics in the Karbi hills has revolved around the need to protect Karbis’ political, cultural and linguistic identity from outsiders. The anxiety stems from many waves of past migration.

The current violence is tied up with that fear.

Rongphar alleged that Sixth Schedule protections for the Karbis have “collapsed”.

“Non-tribals are not allowed to get land pattas and trading licences in a Sixth Schedule area, but they are still getting it,” he said. “The Bihari population has grown as they start many businesses and settle on land.” He alleged that Karbis have become a minority in several constituencies of Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council.

Another reason for the disquiet is that since 2017, a Bihari BJP leader Pawan Kumar has been the elected member of the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council from the local Kopili constituency.

“How can he contest the elections if he doesn't have land in Karbi hills?” Rongphar said. “The Biharis have already outnumbered us in Kopili constituency.”

Of the 42,000 voters in Kopili constituency, 18,000 are Hindi speakers, 10,000 Karbis, and 3,500 Gorkhas, Rongphar said.

However, Kumar told Scroll that his family had come to Kheroni before 1951, when the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council was created. He agreed that there were more Hindi speakers in Kopili. “But it is a false narrative that the Biharis are still coming to Karbi Anglong,” he said.

Terang, the Karbi politician, argued that the Karbis are “more vulnerable as a community now” than before, as the Assam government signs agreements to set up solar plants and palm oil plantations.

“As the government openly facilitates large corporations to establish large palm oil plantations, solar projects, and mine limestone and other minerals, including rare earth, in the hill areas, the common indigenous people will be pushed to further impoverishment,” he said.

All photographs by Rokibuz Zaman.

In August, a strange story from Mumbai appeared in the news.

The city’s municipal corporation began to shut down 51 kabutarkhanas in response to a silent health crisis – the bird droppings were causing respiratory troubles for residents. It was not the decision that was strange but the response to it. Rallies and marches were held across the city to demand that the pigeon feeding sites be reopened.

Most of the protestors were Jains, members of a community that believes that feeding pigeons is “punya ka kaam” or a work of charity. They feared that the birds would starve if they were not fed. Even monks from the community went on fasts to press for their demand.

A side note is relevant here. Increasing urbanisation may have wiped out large numbers of birds, such as sparrows, but pigeons have learnt to live around humans, nesting comfortably near air conditioners, on parapets and sheltered ledges. That is why most Indian cities have seen a spike in pigeon populations. It is only in recent years that authorities have begun to identify pigeons as pests whose droppings can cause serious, sometimes fatal, lung infections in humans.

And so I set off to cover the story, chasing pigeons to where they had shifted – to buildings around the kabutarkhanas, now covered in tarpaulin.

Hundreds of pigeons were flying around, perching on tree branches and building ledges, leaving their droppings on balconies and tin roofs as they tried to adjust to the new situation.

When I returned to my scooter, it was covered in bird poop.

While covering the story, I noticed an odd world of human behaviour. Near these kabutarkhanas in Dadar and Matunga squatted many beggars, some in desperate need of food and clothes. But they were ignored by the benevolent pigeon feeders, who chased after the birds to offer them grain.

The bird feeders were also diverting resources from critical tasks. Municipal staffers had been pulled away from cleaning the storm water drains, filling up potholes and pruning trees to patrol the area. In accordance with directions of the Bombay High Court, they were expected to fine people feeding pigeons.

It didn’t take long for the bird feeders to figure out the patterns of the civic staff. When I visited the Matunga kabutarkhana, a shop owner told me proudly that he would secretly throw a bag of grain on the road when municipal workers were not around. In the middle of traffic, I saw several birds pecking enthusiastically at grain.

One resident of a nearby building, who was more than 70, said she had been unable to eat for two days because she was not allowed to feed pigeons any longer. She said that she had cried the day the kabutarkhana was shut. I did not doubt her.

Her 60-year-old neighbour told me she had created a new place for feeding on their building terrace. The woman grew emotional when she recounted how her grandmother had fed pigeons described how this charitable practice had been passed on to her generation.

“We never saw anyone die of pigeon shit,” she said. “This is something new. It's a conspiracy by those who hate pigeons.”

Two floors above, I met a family of five, all of them had respiratory troubles. Pigeons nest right outside their balcony; I could see hundreds of birds right by their window. But the family was scared to complain. “It’s like being branded anti-national,” the father joked. “People come to fight if we say that pigeons are a nuisance for our building.”

In the same building, I found that pigeons had driven away a family from the in which their daughter was born and had grown up. Some years before, the mother had been diagnosed with hypersensitivity pneumonitis. A doctor advised the family to shift to ensure her survival.

Pigeons had led to people falling sick, had driven away families, had left many too scared to walk without covering their heads – yet they had a prominent lobby.

In September, a state minister inaugurated a kabutarkhana near a temple in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, on land provided by the Jain community. Eventually, the municipal body allotted four more areas for feeding pigeons in various parts of the city.

Pigeon feeding has been restricted in several cities across the world, including New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Paris, Venice, Tokyo, Melbourne and Singapore. Even Chandigarh and Ahmedabad have also put restrictions in place. Though animal support groups did protest in some of these places, the municipal corporations did not budge.

Mumbai, it seems, is determined to be unique.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

When Amrith Shenava began experimenting with large language models shortly after the launch of ChatGPT, he quickly realized that Tulu – the language he and some 2 million people spoke in the southern Indian state of Karnataka – had virtually no digital data set. He decided to build one.

Shenava, who has a degree in computer science from Kent State University in Ohio, had earlier launched a translation app, and a language learning app for Tulu. To build the data set for the LLM, he had to collect voice and text data from native speakers including teachers, professionals, homemakers, and members of the Tulu diaspora.

“Most AI systems are built in the US. They don’t understand Indian languages or contexts,” Shenava, the 27-year-old founder of TuluAI, told Rest of World. “We need our own models that represent us.”

India has more than 1,600 languages and dialects, but most artificial intelligence systems cater to those that are widely spoken. OpenAI’s ChatGPT supports more than a dozen Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada, the dominant language in Karnataka. Google’s Gemini can chat with users in nine Indian languages.

Spurred by their success, and keen to be a part of the rapid global transition to AI, a handful of Indian startups are building AI tools for so-called low-resource languages such as Tulu, Bodo, and Kashmiri, which have a limited online presence and few written records. The startups are having to build data sets nearly from scratch.

TuluAI holds storytelling sessions and workshops in rural areas, in which local residents – particularly women and elders – narrate their stories, or are asked to read texts and simulate everyday conversations. Participants are taught to record and label the data. Each workshop of one to two days produces over 150 hours of labeled voice and text data, Shenava said.

The startup also collects WhatsApp voice notes from anyone who wishes to send one, with annotators checking transcripts and labels for accuracy.

“Major translation tools miss the context that gives meaning to words. The only way to fix that is to use authentic, human-recorded data that reflects real-life language use,” Shenava said. “The goal is for the model to talk like a native speaker. We want it to understand humor, idioms, and cultural context. So we’re building slowly, verifying every sample.”

Across the country, in the northeastern state of Assam, Kabyanil Talukdar, the 25-year-old co-founder of Aakhor AI, follows a similar process to build data sets in Bodo and Assamese. Talukdar’s team conducts community workshops and classes, and holds voice-note drives via WhatsApp groups, with simple daily prompts like “Talk about your morning tea.”

Each submission is tagged with metadata such as dialect, region, and speaker demographics to ensure diversity. The clips, 20-60 seconds long, are processed, transcribed, and anonymised. Each three-month campaign produces over 5,000 voice samples, Talukdar told Rest of World.

“When people see that their voices help preserve their language, they feel ownership,” he said. “They are driven by the shared goal of creating AI that understands and speaks their native language.”

Big tech LLMs such as GPT and Meta’s Llama are trained on a wide range of data, including in languages other than English. Yet their performance in low-resource languages can be unpredictable, particularly in dialects and local idioms. Countries keen to support their languages and become self-sufficient in AI are building their own multilingual LLMs, which can support translation, speech recognition, and tools for customer service, education, health care, and other applications.

These include the Chile-led LatamGPT project, Southeast Asia’s Sealion, and efforts by Masakhane – a grassroots organisation that aims to build AI data sets and tools in African languages. India’s BharatGPT and Sarvam support many major Indian languages, and the government is building open-source models for several languages under the Bhashini project.

It is not easy.

Tulu’s ancient script lacks a Unicode standard that would allow computational processing of text. Shenava’s team is digitising literature written in the script, and training the model to identify patterns. While more complicated, the process helps capture the cultural nuance that is often lost in translation, he said.

The team avoids AI-generated or machine-translated data, which is often riddled with grammatical errors, made-up words and phrases, and other inaccuracies, he said.

“Even open-source models produce text that doesn’t make sense. That’s why we decided to build it from scratch,” Shenava said. This also ensures ethical data use, he said. “We don’t use any personal data without explicit permission.”

Aakhor AI’s models are voice-first, targeting areas with low literacy and weak internet access. The company recruits speakers from underrepresented areas to prevent dominant dialects from overshadowing smaller ones, and ensure “balanced sampling,” Talukdar said.

For Saqlain Yousef, it was the fear that Kashmiri – a language spoken by about 7 million people in India – might disappear that drove him to build the KashmiriGPT app using OpenAI’s application programming interface.

The platform accepts input in English as well as Kashmiri written in the Roman script, and generates responses in the Kashmiri script, Roman Kashmiri script, and English.

“Our language is vulnerable and at risk of disappearing. So I took matters into my own hands,” the 25-year-old told Rest of World. “This will help preserve Kashmiri in the AI age.”

Yousef is right to be concerned, C Vanlalawmpuia, an independent researcher in language and AI, told Rest of World.

“These languages are already marginalised, and without proper digital representation, they risk disappearing from online spaces entirely,” he said.

AI makes it easier to preserve a language through translation tools, transcription systems, and data sets that can make a language more visible and accessible, according to Vanlalawmpuia. But the lack of digital resources and funding are a challenge, and community-led efforts are one way to sustain the platforms, he said.

AI platforms from deep-pocketed big tech firms including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity are also targeting India. The country is already the biggest market for ChatGPT outside the US, and OpenAI this month offered its ChatGPT Go service free for a year to users in India.

Aakhor AI is aware of its challenge. “We don’t compete with GPT on scale,” Talukdar said. “We compete on relevance.”

By sourcing data from the ground, the community is involved in preserving linguistic diversity and advancing linguistic inclusion, Shenava said.

“Anyone can contribute. That’s how language preservation will happen,” he said. “If AI can help keep it alive, that’s worth all the effort.”

For Rita D’Souza, a 32-year-old primary schoolteacher in coastal Karnataka, TuluAI is already making a difference, helping students improve their pronunciation and spelling, she told Rest of World.

Tauseef Ahmad is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

Sajid Raina is a freelance journalist based in Delhi.

This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.

When leaders of “the Quad” last met in September 2024, host and then-President Joe Biden declared the partnership between the United States, India, Australia and Japan to be “more strategically aligned than ever before”.

“The Quad is here to stay,” trumpeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Fast-forward a little over a year, however, and the tune has changed.

Leaders of the Quad were due to hold their latest summit in November 2025, with India hosting. But the month came and went, and no event was held. A future date has yet to be announced.

Why the silence? As experts of international institutions and the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the Indo-Pacific, we believe the answers can be found in the calculus of the two largest members involved: India and the US.

For the Trump administration, the domestic dividends of the Quad are not immediately obvious. Meanwhile, New Delhi is more concerned about how to position itself amid the great power competition between China and the US.

The result is paralysis for the Quad, for now.

On the sidelines of Operation Christmas Drop, Quad partners carried out the first Indo-Pacific Logistics Network Field Training Exercise (8-12 Dec 2025) to enhance shared logistics capacity for swift and effective responses to regional humanitarian needs. pic.twitter.com/DzDLCLiYGr

— Randhir Jaiswal (@MEAIndia) December 19, 2025

Evolution of Quad

The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, to give the Quad its full name, began life in 2004.

The Quad 1.0 focused on humanitarian disaster assistance and cooperation after the Indian Ocean tsunami. In 2007, under the vision of then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the Quad was recast as a platform to promote a free and prosperous Indo-Pacific, with an eye toward maritime security and economic cooperation.

Since then, the Quad has seen many fits and starts. Australia withdrew from the partnership in 2008 when it prioritised trade relations with China. India, too, has at times been tepid about the Quad’s continuation, partly due to its legacy of nonalignment and concerns over managing relations with Beijing.

The Quad 2.0 came to life in 2017 as the four core members coalesced around a shared sentiment of countering China’s rising power.

Despite its name, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue has increasingly gravitated toward nonsecurity agendas, from global health to maritime domain awareness and critical technologies.

Yet even as this emerging Quad 3.0 has foregrounded cooperation around the slogan “development, stability and prosperity”, it is over trade and tariffs that the two largest members of the Quad are not seeing eye to eye.

Tariff tussle

On August 1, 2025, Washington imposed a 25% reciprocal tariff on Indian goods over long-standing trade frictions, notably over access to India’s agricultural market. It was followed by an additional 25% punitive duty for New Delhi’s continued purchases of Russian oil.

The combined 50% US tariff was accompanied by another move that upset New Delhi: new US restrictions on H-1B visas. Some 70% of all holders of the US visas, designed for temporary skilled workers, are Indian nationals.

The rift between New Delhi and Washington widened with India’s decision to attend a meeting in Rio de Janeiro in September of the so-called BRICS nations. That was interpreted as an “anti-US” summit by Washington given its composition of largely Global South nations and other countryies antagonistic to the West, including Russia and China.

As a key member of the BRICS grouping, India’s attendance should have come as no real surprise. Even so, and despite Modi’s decision not to attend personally, the US took umbrage, with US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick criticising India’s BRICS membership and accusing New Delhi of having “rubbed the United States the wrong way”.

Lutnick’s comments are indicative of the cooling ties between New Delhi and Washington. Since the end of the Cold War, India has been seen by Washington as a democratic ally and a vital US partner in the Indo-Pacific. The two countries have shared strategic and defence partnerships – a foundational aspect of the Quad.

And despite recent tensions, the factors underpinning US-India relations remain constant. The US is India’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade reaching US$131.84 billion in the 2024-’25 fiscal year.

This gives New Delhi not only economic leverage over the US but also a strategic rationale to continue its cooperation with Washington.

Just finished a very productive meeting of Quad Foreign Ministers in Washington DC.

Discussed how to make Quad more focused and impactful on contemporary opportunities and challenges.

Today’s gathering will strengthen strategic stability in the Indo - Pacific and keep it free… pic.twitter.com/M9Vg5NaxMR

— Dr. S. Jaishankar (@DrSJaishankar) July 1, 2025

Dragon-elephant tango

Yet at the same time, India appears to be increasingly tilting toward China, both economically and in geopolitics.

Modi visited China during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit meeting in August and framed the two countries as development partners, not rivals. This has been interpreted as a rapprochement between China and India after decades of border skirmishes and maritime friction.

Earlier this year, Chinese leader Xi Jinping used the term “Dragon-Elephant Tango” to promote a vision of India-China ties based on “mutual achievement.”

Despite the US surpassing China as India’s biggest trading partner in 2021-’22, investment ties between New Delhi and Beijing have grown steadily between 2005 and 2025, with only some intermittent friction.

However, what can appear as a tilt toward Beijing is better understood through structural roots in India’s economic realities as well as the country’s long-standing commitment to nonalignment.

The relationship between India and China is marked by significant economic interdependence rather than political convergence. India’s imports are largely coming from China, especially in the areas of machinery, electronics and other intermediate goods.

Yet for all of the convergence, areas of bilateral tensions remain. India’s growing trade deficit with China and Beijing’s ironclad relationship with Pakistan – along with unresolved border issues – limit how far New Delhi is willing to align with Beijing strategically.

Nevertheless, India-China relations are no doubt warming, especially in the wake of Trump’s tariffs. Indicative of that shift were India’s exports to China, which surged by 90% in November to $2.2 billion.

India-US tension

It isn’t just the warming China-India relationship that has thrown a wrench into the Quad’s works. The Trump administration’s growing embrace of India’s archrival Pakistan has also soured US-India ties.

Trump’s claim to have mediated an end to the brief Pakistan-India war in May and his subsequent invitation of Pakistan’s army chief to the White House were met with anger in India.

That dispute was mirrored by the one over Russian oil, which had precipitated some of Trump’s tariffs on India. Modi’s government has walked a tightrope between the US and Russia, wanting to keep open the possibility of good relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, while managing tensions with the US. That’s why Putin’s visit to India in December held such symbolic value.

The Modi government stopped short of explicit long-term commitments to new Russian oil purchases and did not chart any new defence deals. In that, as with the issue over Washington’s embrace of Pakistan, India has sought to balance competing camps, creating space to maintain an open door with the US without abandoning India’s strategic autonomy on what nations it does business with.

Optimism amid paralysis

So, how does all this diplomatic tangoing affect the Quad?

The result, it appears, is paralysis at this juncture. But it is important to point out that neither country wants to pronounce the Quad dead. The latest National Security Strategy of the United States explicitly mentions the Quad as part of efforts to “win the economic future” in Asia.

And both nations continue to reaffirm their commitment to the partnership – betting that political conditions will stabilize and that global trends may turn in their favor.

So there are still reasons for guarded optimism. Recent progress in trade negotiations and gradual reductions in Russian oil imports could ease Washington’s scepticism over India.

And for their part, Japan and Australia are trying to keep the momentum going – Japan with its naval and coast guard capabilities and Australia with infrastructure and health initiatives.

If a mutually acceptable trade deal with the US can emerge, and New Delhi can craft an agenda for the Quad framework that is acceptable to the current US administration, a leaders summit could still materialize in 2026.

But the louder the tariff wars between India and the US become, the slimmer the chance for a stronger Quad in the near term.

Hyeran Jo is Associate Professor of Political Science, Texas A&M University.

Yoon Jung Choi is Visiting scholar, Texas A&M University; Sejong Institute.

This article was first published on The Conversation.

A migrant labourer from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district was lynched in Odisha’s Sambalpur on Wednesday. Six persons have been arrested for the murder.

The co-workers and family members of the man, Jewel Sheikh, alleged that he was attacked on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant from Bangladesh. However, the Odisha Police denied this and claimed that the victim and the persons accused in his lynching knew each other.

The assault took place in the Shantinagar area late Wednesday evening when Jewel Sheikh and other construction workers were returning from work. Two other workers, Akir Sheikh and Palash Sheikh, were also injured in the attack and were hospitalised in Sambalpur.

Samirul Islam, the head of the West Bengal Labour Welfare Board, said that Bengali-speaking migrant workers were once again being targeted in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Read more.

A Hindutva mob vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Chhattisgarh’s capital Raipur. This was among several attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations over the past week.

Videos of the incident in Raipur showed a mob armed with sticks barging into the Magneto Mall and destroying decorations a day ahead of Christmas. Hindutva groups had called for a state-wide strike on Wednesday to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in Chhattisgarh.

In Uttar Pradesh, members of Hindutva groups on Wednesday sat outside a church in Bareilly’s Cantonment area, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

In Assam, members of the Bajrang Dal barged into a school in the Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations and smashing posters on the premises. Read more.

Tarique Rahman, the acting chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and son of former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia, returned to the country after 17 years in exile. He is a key contender to be the country’s next prime minister after the general elections in February.

Speaking at a rally after landing in Dhaka, he outlined his vision for the country and invoked the words of American civil rights activist Martin Luther King.

Referring to the killing of Sharif Osman Bin Hadi on December 12, Rahman said that the student leader wanted the citizens of the country to regain their economic rights.

He also claimed that “agents of various dominant powers are still engaged in conspiracies” in the country.

While in exile in London, Rahman had been convicted on charges of money laundering and faced around 100 lawsuits. The convictions were overturned after the ouster of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in August 2024. Read on.

A key Maoist leader who carried a reward of Rs 1.1 crore on his head, Ganesh Uike, was killed in a gunfight with security forces in Odisha’s Kandhamal district. Three other suspected Maoists were also killed in the gunfight, which took place in a forest in the Chakapad police station area.

Uike was the chief of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Odisha. The identities of the three others who were killed are yet to be ascertained.

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

In the course of the Centre’s anti-Maoist offensive this year, key Maoist leaders like Uike and Madvi Hidma have been killed, while others like Vikas Nagpure alias Anant and Mallojula Venugopal Rao, alias Bhupathi have surrendered. Read more.

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A 30-year-old migrant labourer from West Bengal’s Murshidabad district was lynched in Odisha’s Sambalpur on Wednesday, The Indian Express reported. Six persons have been arrested for the killing.

The victim, Jewel Sheikh, hailed from Murshidabad’s Chakbahadurpur village, and was working as a labourer in Odisha’s Sambalpur.

While his co-workers and family members alleged that he was attacked on suspicion of being an undocumented immigrant from Bangladesh, the Odisha Police denied this and claimed that the victim and the persons accused in his lynching knew each other.

The assault took place in the Shantinagar area late Wednesday evening when Jewel Sheikh and other construction workers were returning from work, The Indian Express reported.

Paltu Sheikh, who was also with Jewel Sheikh and is from Murshidabad, said that the group was at a tea stall.

He added that another group of men asked for a beedi from Jewel Sheikh.

“Then they started asking for Aadhaar cards and wanted to know where we were from,” The Indian Express quoted Paltu Sheikh as saying. “We showed our Aadhaar cards. Suddenly, the group, armed with bamboo sticks, started beating us. Jewel was hit on the head. Some others were injured.”

Paltu Sheikh said that Jewel Sheikh was taken to a hospital but doctors declared him dead. Two other workers, Akir Sheikh and Palash Sheikh, were also injured in the attack and were at a hospital in Sambalpur.

Paltu Sheikh said that he had been working in Odisha for 12 years. “This is the first time we faced such an incident,” The Indian Express quoted him as saying.

Sambalpur Additional Superintendent of Police Srimanta Barik told the newspaper that the labourers from West Bengal had been living in the area for several years and had become familiar with the residents there.

He claimed that the assault occured over a demand for a beedi.

“A group suddenly attacked the Bengali migrant workers after they refused,” the newspaper quoted Barik as saying. “We have arrested six people and are identifying whether more were involved.”

Northern Range Inspector General of Police Himansu Lal also claimed on Thursday that the murder was a result of a sudden provocation and not a targeted attack, The New Indian Express reported.

He added that all the persons accused had been apprehended.

After the incident, local Trinamool Congress leaders and Emani Biswas, MLA from West Bengal’s Suti, visited Jewel Sheikh’s home and promised assistance, The Indian Express reported.

Samirul Islam, Trinamool Congress MP and chairperson of the West Bengal Migrant Labour Welfare Board, said that Bengali-speaking migrant workers were once again being targeted in states ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

“How many lives of innocent Bengali speaking people the BJP wants?” he asked. “This is nothing but another example on how BJP treats Bengalis.”

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

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

The Uttar Pradesh Police has arrested a Bajrang Dal member and is searching for eight others who are accused of demolishing a two-century-old shrine in Fatehpur’s Mawai village on Tuesday, the Hindustan Times reported.

The arrested man, identified as Narendra Hindu, has been produced before a court. Narendra is the Bhitoora block coordinator of the Bajrang Dal.

The shrine of Wali Shah Baba, located in a predominantly Hindu area, had been partially damaged during previous road work and repaired by residents. Villagers alleged that a group of about 24 men demolished the structure on Tuesday with hammers, spades and sticks, while making references to Bangladesh.

Alok Pandey, the station house officer at the Husainaganj police station, said that the incident came to light after a video of the demolition was widely circulated on social media.

A first information report was subsequently filed against five named persons and four others who remain unidentified, based on a complaint by a sub-inspector, the Hindustan Times reported.

The men were accused of damaging the shrine, delivering communally provocative speeches, disturbing social harmony and hurting religious sentiments, according to the newspaper.

The FIR was registered under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to rioting, injuring or defiling a place of worship, trespassing on burial places, promoting enmity, hatred, or ill-will between different religious, linguistic or caste groups, and mischief.

“One person has been arrested and sent to jail,” the Hindustan Times quoted Pandey as saying. “Action against others named in the FIR is in progress.”

According to local revenue records, the structure, which measures about 10-12 square metres, is not officially recognised as a shrine, the newspaper reported.

Amresh Kumar Singh, the tehsildar of Sadar, said that the “so-called shrine had been constructed several years ago on land recorded as part of the village settlement”. He added that the surrounding area was inhabited by Hindu families.

Members of the Bajrang Dal claimed that the shrine was linked to a land dispute, the Hindustan Times reported.

Virendra Pandey, a provincial coordinator of the Hindutva group, claimed that the structure was being used to assert ownership of the land. “Some bricks were removed, but there was no shrine,” the newspaper quoted Virendra Pandey as saying. “Residents cleared the site themselves.”

Key Maoist leader Ganesh Uike was killed in a gunfight with security forces in Odisha’s Kandhamal district on Thursday, PTI quoted police officials as saying.

Apart from Uike, who carried a reward of Rs 1.1 crore on his head, three suspected Maoists were also killed in the gunfight, which took place in a forest in the Chakapad police station area.

Uike was the chief of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in Odisha.

The identities of the three others who were killed are yet to be ascertained.

This came days after the Union government told Parliament that 335 “Left-wing extremists” had been killed, while 2,167 others had surrendered in 2025.

On December 16, Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai told the Lok Sabha that 942 Left-wing extremists had been arrested this year.

Overall 1,841 such persons had been killed, over 16,000 had been arrested, while 9,588 others had surrendered since 2014.

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

In October, the Union home ministry said that the number of districts across states affected by “Left-wing extremism” has come down to 11 from 18 in March.

In 2025, the number of “most affected” districts has also come down from six to three, it added. These are Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh.

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

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

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

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

Also read: In Andhra village closest to where Maoist commander Hidma was killed, no one heard gunfire

Uttar Pradesh minister Om Prakash Rajbhar on Wednesday mocked the complainant in the Unnao rape case and laughed at her for staging a protest in Delhi, asking why she was at India Gate when her home is in Unnao, The Indian Express reported.

The complainant and her mother on Tuesday protested at India Gate against the High Court having suspended the life sentence of former Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the rape case and having granted him bail. However, they were dragged and forcefully removed from the protest site by security personnel.

Rajbhar, commenting on the developments on Wednesday, laughed loudly and asked: “India Gate? Ghar to unka Unnao hai [Why India gate? She is from Unnao].”

The Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party leader was responding to reporters seeking his response to the woman being removed from India Gate by security personnel.

Reporter: Police took away Unnao rape survivor from India gate.

BJP allay OP Rajbhar: But her house is in Unnao. Hehehehehe. pic.twitter.com/HXFjj6qBcw

— Piyush Rai (@Benarasiyaa) December 24, 2025

The state minister was further quoted as saying by The Indian Express: “The court has issued directions that Sengar would stay away from the family, maintaining a 5-km distance. Why a dharna in Delhi when the court has given directions ensuring security. Where is the question of lack of security?”

Sengar was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment in December 2019 for raping the woman in Unnao in 2017. She was a minor at the time.

In March 2020, Kuldeep Singh Sengar and his brother Jaideep Singh Sengar, among others, were also sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment for the killing of the woman’s father in judicial custody.

On account of the conviction in the second case, Sengar remains in jail despite getting bail from the Delhi High Court.

Nevertheless, the complainant told PTI on Wednesday that the court’s decision was “no less than death” for her.

“If the convict gets bail in cases like this, how will the country’s daughters remain safe?” she asked. She also said that she would challenge the verdict in the Supreme Court.

A video of the complainant and her mother being removed from the protest site led Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to ask in a social media post if “such treatment of a gangrape survivor” was appropriate.

Gandhi said that Sengar being granted bail was “extremely disappointing and shameful – especially when the survivor is being repeatedly harassed, and is living under the shadow of fear”.

“Bail for rapists, and treating survivors like criminals – what kind of justice is this?” he asked.

Also read:

Explained: Why Delhi HC released a former BJP MLA convicted of raping a minor

A Hindutva mob on Wednesday vandalised Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, The Indian Express reported.

The videos of the incident posted on social media show the mob, armed with sticks, barging into the mall and destroying decorations a day ahead of Christmas.

The incident occurred on the day a Hindutva group called for a state-wide strike to protest the allegedly illegal religious conversions in Chhattisgarh, NDTV Madhya Pradesh-Chhattisgarh reported.

रायपुर में बंद का समर्थन नहीं करने पर तोड़फोड़, मैग्नेटो मॉल में जमकर की गई तोड़फोड़#chhattisgarh #raipur #magnetomall#christmas #christmaspreparations pic.twitter.com/waK8KYhLgh

— ShubhCg (@ShubhCg) December 24, 2025

An unidentified employee of the mall told The Indian Express that about 80 to 90 persons barged in, “threatened us…shouted at us” and “indulged in violence”.

“For the last 16 years, since we began operations here, we have always supported bandh calls,” the employee was quoted as having said. “But I have never seen such behaviour.”

The call for the bandh followed communal clashes over the Christian burial of a person in Kanker district of Chhattisgarh.

The tensions began on December 16 in Bade Teoda village after the sarpanch Rajman Salam buried his 70-year-old father a day after his death. In a video released the same day, Salam said that he had converted to Christianity, while his father had not.

Salam claimed that he sought permission from village elders to bury his father according to tribal customs, but was told that the burial could not take place in his presence because he is a Christian.

He then went ahead with a Christian burial on his private land, after which the clashes were reported, The Wire reported.

Clashes broke out on December 16 and December 17, after which the police cordoned off the area. On December 18, tensions escalated when a mob armed with sticks breached the police barricades and entered Bade Teoda village, triggering fresh violence.

Several incidents of attacks on Christians or disruptions to Christmas celebrations have been reported in the past week.

In Uttar Pradesh, members of Hindutva groups on Wednesday sat outside a church in Bareilly’s Cantonment area, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa and shouting slogans of “Jai Shri Ram”, The Hindu reported.

Bareilly, UP: Bajrang Dal and Vishav Hindu Parishad members sat outside a prominent church (Bishop Conrad school) in the Cantonment area of Bareilly and recited Hanuman Chalisa amid police presence. They raised slogans of Jai Shree Ram as well. pic.twitter.com/uBBMNdYGC9

— Krishna Chaudhary (@KrishnaTOI) December 24, 2025

In Assam, members of the Bajrang Dal on Wednesday barged into a school in Nalbari district, destroying Christmas decorations and smashing posters on the premises, the police said.

The alleged members of the Hindutva group carried out the vandalism at St Mary’s School in Nalbari’s Panigaon village. A video by India Today NE showed them setting fire to Christmas decorations and shouting “Jai Shri Ram”.

In Kerala, a worker of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh was arrested after a Christmas carol group of children was attacked while visiting homes in Pudussery village in Palakkad district on Monday.

The RSS is the parent organisation of the ruling BJP at the Centre.

Last week, some schools in Kerala run by Hindutva organisations and a privately-managed Hindu institution had allegedly halted Christmas celebrations. The managements of the schools, however, denied the allegations.

In Uttarakhand’s Haridwar, a hotel run by the state tourism department cancelled a Christmas celebration on the banks of the river Ganga after protests called by the Ganga Sabha, which administers the Har-ki-Pauri ghat.

On Monday, Aam Aadmi Party leader Saurabh Bharadwaj shared a video purportedly recorded in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar showing men threatening women and children wearing Santa Claus caps.

The Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India on Tuesday raised concern about the “alarming rise in attacks” on Christians in several states ahead of Christmas and said that the incidents undermine India’s constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and the right to worship without fear.

No Christmas holiday for UP schools

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttar Pradesh announced that schools in the state will not be closed for Christmas on Thursday, but will remain open to commemorate the birth centenary of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

An order issued by the state Basic Education Department stated that attendance for students would be mandatory. It also directed schools to organise speeches, cultural programmes and remembrance activities to honour Vajpayee.

The order applies to government primary and upper primary schools and coincides with the conclusion of the official birth centenary year celebrations of the BJP leader.

In Rajasthan’s Sriganganagar district, the education department on December 22 issued an order stating that private schools should not force students to dress as Santa Claus during Christmas celebrations.

Additional District Education Officer Ashok Wadhwa said in the order that action would be taken if any complaint was received, PTI reported. “Action will be taken under the rules if any school is found forcing students,” the news agency quoted Wadhwa as saying.