The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted the Odisha government time till August 19 to decide on the remission plea of Bajrang Dal member Dara Singh, who is serving a life sentence for the 1999 murder of Australian missionary Graham Staines and his two sons.

The bench was informed that the state’s sentence review board had sought records but had not yet received them, preventing it from considering Singh’s plea.

The court took note of the submission and adjourned the matter till August 19, saying that it expects the panel to decide in the meantime.

Staines and his minor sons were burnt to death by a mob led by Singh in Odisha on January 22, 1999, when they were sleeping in a jeep. The attackers had accused the missionary of illegal religious conversion. The murders had sparked national and international condemnation.

Singh was among the 14 persons convicted in 2003 by a special Central Bureau of Investigation court. He was sentenced to death by the CBI court, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2005 by the Orissa High Court.

The High Court also acquitted 11 others in the case. Another person accused in the case, who was a minor at the time of the murders, was released in 2008.

The Supreme Court had upheld Singh’s conviction in 2011.

In his plea, Singh argued that he should be considered for remission as he is above the age of 60 and has been in jail for more than 24 years, Bar and Bench reported. Singh told the court that he regretted his actions, which the petition described as having been in the context of “protecting the nation”, the legal news outlet reported.

He also told the court that he had never been granted parole.

In April 2025, Mahendra Hembram, another person convicted in the case, was released from a jail in Odisha on the grounds of “good behaviour”.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Trinamool Congress MLA Madan Mitra, considered a key loyalist of party chief Mamata Banerjee, resigned from her faction and joined the rebel group. This came a day after Mitra’s wife and two sons were issued summons by the Enforcement Directorate in a municipal recruitment scam case.

Mitra claimed that his decision was not related to the summons and said that his family would cooperate with the central agency in its investigation.

The Kamarhati MLA said he was resigning from Mamata Banerjee’s faction as he was “no longer able to work efficiently” in it. He alleged that the leadership was focused on promoting TMC National General Secretary Abhishek Banerjee rather than strengthening the organisation. Read on.

A mob attacked an Assam Rifles camp in Manipur’s Senapati district on Tuesday night after security forces launched an operation against suspected armed cadres earlier in the day. While the mob allegedly threw stones, damaged property and set vehicles on fire, no injuries were reported.

The Assam Rifles had launched a patrol and search operation near Makuilongdi based on intelligence inputs about the presence of cadres of the armed Naga group, NSCN(I-M), outside designated camps, the defence ministry said.

The NSCN(I-M), or the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, has been under a ceasefire agreement with the Union government since 1997. On Tuesday, intelligence reports and social media posts indicated that armed cadres of the group were moving outside designated camps while carrying weapons and wearing uniforms, in violation of the agreement, the ministry said. Read on.

An Indian sailor who went missing after a commercial vessel was attacked off the coast of Oman has died, his father-in-law said. The body of Heramb Karmarkar, a 30-year-old marine engineer from Pune, has been recovered. The Indian government has not yet confirmed the death.

On Sunday, the Ministry of External Affairs said that one Indian seafarer was missing and 10 were rescued after the commercial vessel GFS Galaxy was attacked off the coast of Oman. The vessel had been disabled after a fire damaged its engine room. The United States had accused Iran of carrying out the attack.

The incident came amid a series of attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, as tensions between the US and Iran escalated again. Read on

The Karnataka government closed disciplinary proceedings against three Indian Police Service officers in the Bengaluru stampede case that killed 11 people. The state government has cleared the officers of all the charges.

The stampede had taken place at a gate of the Chinnaswamy stadium on June 4, 2025, leaving 11 dead and more than 50 injured. Fans had gathered at the stadium to celebrate the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s victory in the Indian Premier League.

The government said that the decision was taken after reviewing the officers’ written defence and the recommendations of the administrative department. Read on.

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India’s fast disappearing grasslands have long been targeted for afforestation – a practice that encourages tree planting on “degraded” parcels of land. With their vast and open landscapes, savannahs and grasslands are often considered barren land in need of more dense tree cover. But how does converting grassy, arid land to something woody and canopied transform an ecosystem, and the life within it?

New research from Maharashtra studies how old-growth savannahs, when planted with trees, changes bird populations and distributions. Grasslands and savannahs are estimated to cover 15%-20% of India’s land mass, and yet remain under-researched.

The lack of recognition of grassland ecosystems has meant their role in regulating microclimates and hosting endemic biodiversity has largely gone unnoticed. “There are very few studies on dry savannahs in general, and even fewer on the impacts of afforestation on them,” said Abi T Vanak, Director of the Centre for Policy Design at ATREE and a scholar of India’s grasslands.

The study from Maharashtra compared bird species and abundance across undisturbed savannahs and well-established plantations, creating new evidence for how the impacts of afforestation go beyond just changes to tree cover. It found that afforestation rendered the area uninhabitable for grassland specialist species like the Indian courser – a long-legged bird which scans the grass to forage – and the tawny pipit, which nests on the ground – among a host of others.

Instead, bird populations were maintained by an influx of other species better adapted to woody and forested habitats. The shift in species composition is a matter of concern because grassland specialists are declining at alarming rates across the country. The 2023 State of India’s Birds report found that across a 30 year period, from 1992 to 2022, populations of birds occupying open and natural ecosystems declined by half.

The recent study renews focus on the importance of landscape-level conservation, which is gradually finding recognition in state policies. On May 7, the Maharashtra government published a resolution mandating that afforestation drives be avoided on grasslands and wetlands, making it the first state in the country to do so.

“The intent of afforestation is to create rainforest density plantations everywhere, but water is a key limiting factor. Even if tree planting has to be done, it can be done in a way that suits the local climate and rainfall regimes,” said Vanak, adding, “You’d create a more open area that not only looks more natural, but consumes less water and improves the survivability of those trees.”

Relic of colonial rule

The impulse to plant trees in open natural ecosystems is a legacy of British colonial rule, when grasslands were labelled “wastelands” because – unlike forests, which could be harvested for timber – they did not generate revenue for the crown.

British policies in the 1860s thus focussed on making “improvements” to these lands by encouraging cultivation or afforestation on them, a 2019 study tracing the historical roots of India’s grassland governance, notes. “The colonial misconception of grasslands as degraded forests continued post-independence, creating an ostensible need to ‘reforest’ those landscapes that remained,” the paper added.

In Maharashtra, this legacy took shape in the form of Gliricidia sepium plantations. This exotic tree with pink flowers and a wide canopy was first brought to India for its ornamental value, and later planted widely in the state in the 1950s to improve fodder availability for livestock and biomass.

These plantations also provided the ideal setting to study how afforestation affected local bird populations, said Prabhav Benara, a student of wildlife biology and conservation at National Center for Biological Sciences, and a co-author of the Maharashtra-based study. “Birds are excellent habitat indicators, helping us understand how native biodiversity responds to land-use change,” he said. Benara worked with a team of five other students and researchers on the study.

Vishwatej Pawar, co-founder of the Grasslands Trust, a Maharashtra-based NGO dedicated to grassland conservation, who was not part of the study, said research into the state’s grasslands were needed to counter misconceptions about their utility. “There is no clear understanding of what a healthy grassland is, and what a degraded grassland is,” he said, adding, “There’s a basic need to document the biodiversity that exists on these lands, either through government departments or through gram sabha systems and people’s participation, to understand how rich these ecosystems are.”

The Grasslands Trust’s submissions and trainings on grassland management played a significant role in the state government’s adoption of its new resolution.

Winners and losers

Afforested patches of G sepium are located close to native, old-growth savannahs in the Pune and Satara districts, making comparison across both habitats viable.

The researchers recorded the presence of birds across 15 sites – each with one old growth savannah and one tree plantation – and divided them into three categories: savannah specialists (adapted to open grasslands), generalists (found in a wide variety of habitats) and woodland specialists (birds that thrive in more densely forested habitats).

Between December 2023 and February 2024, a total of 1,079 individual birds belonging to 69 species were recorded across all study sites. Out of these, 22 species were found only in the old-growth savannas, 21 species were found only in the tree plantations, and 26 species were found across both land uses.

Old growth savannahs included in the study were qualified by those which showed evidence of abundant native grasses, cattle grazing, and fire use – methods that humans have used to maintain grasslands for centuries – but were undisturbed by non-traditional interventions like mining and agriculture. Afforested patches that predominantly contained G sepium, as well as a smaller proportion of Eucalyptus, were also included for comparison.

All sites fell across an annual rainfall gradient ranging from 459 mm to 1,007 mm, indicating wide variation in precipitation levels. “We wanted to see whether rainfall also had an effect on which species were occupying these habitats. Both land use change and rainfall can affect biomes and species pools,” Benara explained.

The results show that while rainfall levels didn’t significantly impact the presence of savannah-specialist species across sites, those with tree plantations saw the biggest losses of these specialists in terms of both richness (diversity) and abundance (population). Woodland specialist species emerged winners, benefiting the most from the afforestation.

“Grassland specialist species like the harriers actually play an important role in stabilising the populations of insects, pests, and even rodents, which helps farmers,” said Pawar, adding, “When their habitats change, either due to afforestation or due to trenches, they compete for space or are unable to nest, roost, or properly forage, which causes population decline.”

Savannah specialist species like the rufous-tailed lark, tawny pipit, rock bush quail and long-tailed shrike saw the steep declines, according to the study.

How rainfall changes the picture

Factoring rainfall into the impacts of afforestation brings out an even more nuanced picture of how they change bird species composition.

For example, in areas that received intermediate rainfall (between 560 and 920mm), old-growth savannahs were found to host 11 more species compared to tree plantations. However, in areas with extreme rainfall (920 mm of rain and higher) or extreme dryness (560 mm of rain and less), afforested patches were found to host more diversity – up to 22 and 14 more species compared to savannahs.

According to the paper, “In the driest rainfall end, tree plantations have sparser canopy and relatively intact endogenous disturbance regimes (fire and cattle grazing), this leads to a mosaic of habitat patches that increases bird diversity in drier plantations… in comparison to the homogeneous, tree-less, drier old-growth savannas.” In the case of wetter regions, savannah specialists were relatively unaffected because these areas were less likely to host a diversity of them anyway.

The worst affected regions by plantations were in the intermediate rainfall zones, where plantations became dense enough to replace grassy understorey. “Tree plantations in this rainfall range are thus structurally homogeneous, and consequently lead to greatest diversity losses — with savanna specialists being the worst affected,” the paper reads.

“It’s not surprising that rainfall plays an important role in species diversity, but an important takeaway is that consistently, they found that savannah species tend to not do well where plantation density increases,” said Vanak from ATREE, adding, “Such insights are often missed in most restoration practices because savannah species aren’t treated with as much importance in India.”

Benera said the paper’s insights could also offer clues into how changing temperature and precipitation patterns due to climate change can affect plantations and biodiversity in the future. “Our findings suggest that as rainfall is projected to increase across Western Maharashtra, drier plantations may support fewer bird species as these habitats transition towards higher-rainfall conditions,” he said.

Apart from rainfall, irrigation from agriculture also contributes to making dry savannahs wetter, added Pawar of the Grasslands Trust.

The foremost recommendation is to stop planting over old-growth savannahs and focus on their conservation. “But a dual focus on preserving old-growth savannas and simultaneously acknowledging the supplementary role of some plantations and production landscapes in general might be pragmatic, given how rapidly old-growth savannas are disappearing despite our best efforts,” the paper stated.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

The Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) has not yet decided on its position about the delimitation bill, and media reports attributing a definitive stand to it are without basis, party leader Supriya Sule said on Wednesday.

Sule said that recent reports that the NCP(SP) would support the bill if it provided for a 50% increase in the number of Lok Sabha seats for all states were “inaccurate and speculative”. The party will decide its stand only after discussing the matter within the organisation and with the members of the Opposition INDIA alliance, she said.

Earlier in the day, the MP was quoted by The Indian Express as saying: “If the Union government amends the delimitation Bill by bringing a 50% increase in seats, then we will support it. This is not something new that I am saying. We have always maintained that we will support the bill if these amendments are brought.”

However, Sule said at a press conference on Wednesday that she had only told a journalist that her party would “consider” supporting the bill if the 50% increase was introduced, and that how the bill would be implemented remained a question.

“It would be inappropriate to comment on any proposal until the government formally places the revised delimitation legislation before Parliament,” she said on social media. “Since no such bill has yet been made available, any speculation regarding its contents or our position would be premature.”

In April, the NCP(SP) was among the Opposition parties that voted against the 2026 Constitution 131st Amendment Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha. The draft legislation proposed to amend the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act and redraw the boundaries of electoral constituencies.

The bill, one of the three draft legislations that were introduced, required a two-thirds majority of votes in Parliament to pass. The ruling National Democratic Alliance does not have a two-thirds majority of MPs in any House. Therefore, it required the support of Opposition parties to pass the amendment.

The consideration of the bill was rejected by the Lok Sabha with 298 MPs voting in its favour and 230 against. With 528 MPs present in the Lower House, the bill would have required the support of 352 of them.

After the bill was defeated in the Lok Sabha, the government withdrew the two other legislations, saying that they were linked and therefore could not be taken up for consideration separately.

#WATCH | Mumbai: NCP-SCP MP Supriya Sule says, "... We have neither held discussions with anyone regarding delimitation, nor has anyone approached us about it. We will formulate our stance once the bill is introduced. However, we will discuss any upcoming bill in detail within… pic.twitter.com/2fsSNfFKPX

— ANI (@ANI) July 15, 2026

She added that her party, along with the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Samajwadi Party, had earlier stated that they would consider supporting the legislation if it incorporated the demand for a 50% increase in seats.

Sule added that once the bill is introduced, the NCP(SP) will discuss it with other parties in the Opposition INDIA bloc.

“We will take a collective decision,” she said. “It is important that the delimitation formula is also presented to us and we are told how new demarcation will be done.”

Sule’s remarks came amid reports that some NCP(SP) leaders favour a tie-up with the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Mahayuti alliance in Maharashtra.

The speculation intensified after leaders of the Ajit Pawar-led Nationalist Congress Party faction, which is part of the state’s ruling coalition, and the NCP(SP) held a meeting at Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’ residence. The Sharad Pawar-led NCP group is part of the Opposition Maha Vikas Aghadi alliance that includes Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena faction and the Congress.

Sule’s remarks also came ahead of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, which will begin on July 20.

A contentious bill

The bill introduced by the Union government in April sought to increase the strength of the Lok Sabha to 815 from 543 and to operationalise the 33% quota for women in the Lower House and the Assemblies under the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act.

The INDIA bloc had said at the time that while it supports women’s reservation, it will oppose the bill for delimitation of Lok Sabha seats.

Opposition parties have said that population-based delimitation would give an undue advantage to northern and central states in the Lok Sabha, as the proportion of seats in the North would be higher. They also noted that the ruling BJP has greater support in northern states than in the South.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar and Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• How Modi government aims to use women’s representation to expand Lok Sabha using 2011 census numbers
• Why delimitation in Assam and Kashmir led to charges of gerrymandering
• The delimitation trap: Is India moving towards the Chinese model of domesticating debate?

The Karnataka government on Tuesday formally closed disciplinary proceedings against three Indian Police Service officers in the 2025 Bengaluru stampede case that killed 11 persons, The Indian Express reported.

The government cleared the officers of all the charges.

The stampede had occurred at Gate Number 3 of the Chinnaswamy stadium on June 4, 2025. More than 50 were injured. Fans had gathered at the stadium to celebrate the Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s victory in the Indian Premier League.

The government dropped departmental inquiries against former Bengaluru Police Commissioner B Dayananda, former Additional Commissioner of Police Vikash Kumar Vikash and former Deputy Commissioner of Police (Central) Shekhar H Tekkannavar.

It said that the decision was taken after reviewing officers’ written defence and the recommendations of the administrative department, the newspaper reported.

A day after the stampede, the government had at the time suspended five officers including Dayananda, Vikash and Tekkannavar for being “irresponsible and negligent”. The two others were Assistant Commissioner of Police C Balakrishna and Cubbon Park Inspector AK Girish.

The suspensions of all the officers, except Vikash, had been revoked on July 28, 2025.

Vikash had approached the Central Administrative Tribunal to challenge his suspension. The tribunal ruled in his favour, set aside the suspension and asked the government to extend the same relief to him as his colleagues. The state subsequently revoked his suspension.

By September 8, 2025, all five police officers had submitted detailed written responses to the home department, denying the allegations of negligence and seeking to be cleared of all charges, The Indian Express reported.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Trinamool Congress MLA Madan Mitra, long considered a key loyalist of party chief Mamata Banerjee, on Wednesday resigned from her faction and joined the rebel group led by Leader of Opposition Ritabrata Banerjee.

This came a day after Mitra’s wife and two sons were issued summons by the Enforcement Directorate in a municipal recruitment scam case.

Mitra said that his family will cooperate with the central agency in its probe and claimed that his decision was not related to the summons, the Hindustan Times reported.

He had been appointed as one of the general secretaries of the Mamata Banerjee-led faction earlier this month.

Mitra told ANI on Wednesday that he was quitting because he was “no longer able to work effectively” in it.

“More and more of Mamata Banerjee’s long-time associates are leaving the party because, in my view, the leadership is focused on promoting Abhishek Banerjee rather than strengthening the organisation,” Mitra told the news agency. “TMC is not one person’s party...”

Abhishek Banerjee is the Trinamool Congress’ national general secretary, the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha and Mamata Banerjee’s nephew.

Mitra said that he had raised the concerns with Mamata Banerjee on several occasions, but they had not been addressed.

“In my view, Abhishek Banerjee wants decisions to be made solely on his terms and does not allow others to play a meaningful role,” the MLA told ANI. “As a result, I believe the party’s position is weakening...”

Mitra represented the Kamarhati constituency between 2011 and 2016 and again since 2021. He was a minister in the Mamata Banerjee government between 2011 and 2015.

The TMC has been beset by internal divisions and rebellions after it lost the Assembly elections to the Bharatiya Janata Party in May. Nearly 60 out of the TMC’s 80 MLAs have rebelled against the party leadership to choose Ritabrata Banerjee as the leader of the Opposition in the House.

The group has been recognised by the Assembly speaker as the party’s legislature party in the House, and Ritabrata Banerjee has been recognised as the leader of the Opposition.

In June, TMC leader Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar said that 20 of TMC’s Lok Sabha MPs will merge with the Tripura-based Nationalist Citizens’ Party and back the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance. Abhishek Banerjee has urged Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla to disqualify the 20 rebel MPs on the grounds of leaving the party.

On July 9, three TMC Rajya Sabha MPs who had resigned from the House joined the BJP.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, which is investigating the June 2025 Air India plane crash in Ahmedabad that killed 260 persons, told the Supreme Court that the “media speculation and narrative attributing blameworthiness to the pilots” had made some witnesses “restrictive and non‑responsive”, The Indian Express reported on Wednesday.

The bureau’s director general said in an affidavit that investigators were collecting evidence, and technical and forensic examination, “which is the core fact-finding stage”, the newspaper reported.

The investigation is expected to be completed within about six weeks and the draft final report may be ready by October, it added.

The affidavit was filed in response to a plea by Pushkarraj Sabharwal, the father of Captain Sumeet Sabharwal, the pilot-in-command. Pushkarraj Sabharwal and the Federation of Indian Pilots had moved the Supreme Court in October seeking a court-monitored judicial inquiry into the crash.

The Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner aircraft, which was en route to London’s Gatwick airport from Ahmedabad, crashed 33 seconds after taking off on June 12, 2025. There were 242 persons aboard the aircraft. One passenger survived with impact injuries.

Nineteen persons were killed on the ground after the aircraft crashed into the hostel building of the BJ Medical College and Hospital in Ahmedabad.

The petitioners had contended that the preliminary findings of the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau were “biased and incomplete”, and appeared to suggest pilot error while ignoring possible technical and systemic failures that warranted an independent probe.

In its preliminary report in July 2025, the bureau found that moments after the aircraft took off, its fuel control switches transitioned from “run” to “cut off” within a second of each other, because of which both engines shut down. The report said that one of the pilots could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder asking the other why he shut down the fuel, in response to which the other pilot said that he did not.

After about 10 seconds, the switches went back to the “run” position, in what appeared to be an attempt by the pilots to regain thrust in the engines. Subsequently, one of the engines progressed to recovery, and deceleration stopped. But deceleration could not be stopped on the second engine.

The Supreme Court judges hearing the matter in November had noted that the bureau’s preliminary report did not make any adverse findings against the pilot.

‘Narrative blaming pilots led to non-responsive witnesses’

In the affidavit filed on July 11, the bureau said that the investigators were at a stage where they were decoding the flight data recorder, collecting radar and air traffic control communications and maintenance records, among other details, and were consulting technical experts and the manufacturers. The phase had not concluded, it was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

The authority said that speculation in the media and a narrative “attributing blameworthiness” to the pilots had “caused some witnesses to become restrictive and non-responsive”. This was the “kind of prejudice to the investigation that the confidentiality protections” under the 2025 Aircraft Investigation of Accidents and Incidents Rules were designed to prevent, it added.

The bureau said that according to the rules, unless the Union government decides otherwise, it cannot disclose statements recorded from persons by the investigators, communications, medical and private information, transcripts of the cockpit voice recordings and air traffic control data, and opinions expressed while analysing the information.

If witnesses and persons involved in the operation of the aircraft know that their statements may be disclosed in litigation or public proceedings, they will become unwilling to cooperate or provide guarded responses, which will hurt the investigation, the bureau was quoted as saying.

It also opposed a request for the cockpit voice recordings to be made public, saying it was “an absolute statutory prohibition”, The Indian Express reported.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought responses from the Centre and the Delhi government on a petition seeking urgent intervention to end activist Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike, reported Bar and Bench.

Wangchuk has been on a hunger strike at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar since June 28. His fast is part of a protest by the political campaign Cockroach Janta Party to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan after alleged mismanagement in conducting competitive exams.

Describing the matter as urgent, a bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia posted the public interest litigation for Thursday. It noted that nobody was present on behalf of the Union government on Wednesday, Bar and Bench reported.

The petition, filed by lawyer and activist Rakesh Kumar Saini, stated that Wangchuk's health had deteriorated rapidly and that he had lost 8.5 kg during the demonstration. If the hunger strike continued, he could lose his life within two days, it added.

Saini has sought directions to the Centre and the Delhi government for taking Wangchuk to a hospital and force-feeding him.

If the activist dies, it would be a matter of great shame for the country and the world, Bar and Bench quoted the plea as saying.

On Tuesday, more than 1,800 members of civil society urged Wangchuk to withdraw his hunger strike.

In their letter, the signatories said that they were appealing for an end to the hunger strike because the Union government “does not have a heart or a conscience”.

The signatories include actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, author Arundhati Roy, academics Nivedita Menon and Jean Drèze, and activists Lalita Ramdas and Kavita Srivastava.

Abhijeet Dipke, who founded the campaign, said on Tuesday that after 17 days of the hunger strike, Wangchuk had started losing muscle mass and was in “immense pain”.

Dipke added that he had “begged him to end his fast”. He quoted Wangchuk as having asked in response why the Union government was not willing to hold a dialogue with the protesters.

Also read:

• Watch: Meet the ‘cockroaches’ who crawl out every night at Jantar Mantar

• How the ‘cockroaches’ at the Jantar Mantar sit-in are keeping themselves busy

In August 2024, Vikas Garg was appointed the convenor of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s economic cell in Delhi. Eight months later, his firms were raided by the Enforcement Directorate.

But the agency did not disclose what had prompted the action.

More than a year later, in a statement released on July 10, it has finally revealed that Garg is being prosecuted under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, for his involvement with “the Mahadev Online Book/Skyexchange illegal online betting case”. He was arrested in the case on Tuesday.

The Mahadev Book is a mobile app that claims to be a platform for “sports insights”. It has more than a million users. Skyexchange is a Dubai-based betting platform associated with Mahadev app.

Since 2022, central agencies have been investigating Mahadev’s promoters on charges that they used the app to run an illegal betting syndicate that laundered revenue through benami bank accounts, cryptocurrency and hawala networks, some of which was allegedly used to manipulate the Indian stock market.

The case first made national headlines in 2023 when the Enforcement Directorate alleged that the promoters of the app, Chhattisgarh-based businessmen Sourabh Chandrakar and Ravi Uppal, had paid nearly Rs 508 crore in kickbacks to then chief minister Bhupesh Baghel of the Congress party.

The revelations came months before the state assembly elections. Congress lost the election. Baghel has denied any wrongdoing.

Subsequently, the inquiry into the app by the Enforcement Directorate and Central Bureau of Investigation extended to private Indian firms, foreign institutional investors and even Bollywood celebrities who had attended Chandrakar’s lavish wedding in Dubai in February 2023.

While most of these alleged connections made headlines, what went unnoticed was that a member of the BJP was also under the scanner.

Businessman Vikas Garg belongs to an old BJP family. His father, Nand Kishor Garg, has been elected three times from the capital’s Trinagar constituency on the party’s ticket.

Although the central agencies remained silent on the proceedings against him, Garg’s firms acknowledged the Enforcement Directorate investigation as part of their mandatory stock market disclosures in 2024. In their annual reports, the firms denied all the allegations.

When Scroll asked Garg for a response in April, his lawyers sent a notice, threatening legal action. “That the contents of your communication with regard to the proceedings of Enforcement Directorate, it is submitted that the same is sub judice,” it said. “My Client has NOT been convicted of any offence of money laundering and/or any other offence, till date.”

In its July 10 statement, the Enforcement Directorate has said that it has attached assets worth Rs 940.7 crore worth belonging to Garg, his family and his firms under the money-laundering law. The agency described the attachments as “proceeds of crime” from illegal betting operations that were “routed into the entities owned and controlled by Vikas Garg”.

Garg did not respond to a request for comment.

In March 2026, the Enforcement Directorate said that it had searched more than 175 premises across the country in connection with this case, arrested 13 people, chargesheeted 74 and frozen assets worth nearly Rs 4,336 crore in India and abroad. In its latest statement, it pegged the value of attached assets at Rs 3,800 crore.

The BJP connection

Garg is the promoter of Vikas Lifecare Limited and Vikas Ecotech Limited, which manufacture chemicals and are listed on the National Stock Exchange, Ebix Limited, a global digital and financial exchanges firm which is listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, and Ebix Inc, which is listed on the American stock exchange Nasdaq.

On his social media profiles, he describes himself as “Convenor – Economic Cell, BJP”. A list of functionaries released by BJP Delhi in August 2024 also identifies him as holding this position.

Garg’s social media accounts showcase photos of him with senior BJP leaders, including Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The photos show him meeting Union Parliamentary Affairs minister Kiren Rijiju in April 2025, former Union minister Anurag Thakur in September 2024, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla in November 2022, and BJP’s former Delhi chief ministerial candidate Manoj Tiwari in November 2021.

In September 2025, Garg met Harsh Malhotra, the Union minister of state for corporate affairs and road transport and highways, and tweeted that they had discussed “key issues related to the economic cell and its functioning”. In May 2026, Malhotra became the president of the BJP in Delhi.

Raids and probes

The first time that Enforcement Directorate officials visited Garg and his firms was on April 16 last year, Vikas Lifecare disclosed in a filing to the National Stock Exchange on April 18.

The disclosure was made under regulation 30 of the SEBI (Listing Obligations and Disclosure Requirements) Regulations, 2015, which mandates listed entities to disclose significant information to stock exchanges to ensure transparency and prevent insider trading.

The firm said that Enforcement Directorate officials had visited its office and Garg’s home and the office of one of his companies. It added that the investigation pertained to “third-party entities and transactions”.

On April 21, an Enforcement Directorate statement said that it had raided premises across several Indian cities on April 16 in the Mahadev betting app case.

It added: “During the searches, evidence has been recovered to suggest that the promoters of such companies collaborated/colluded with the accused persons to manipulate to share prices of such companies with the help of ‘tainted money’ to raise their company’s valuation using a string of agents and middlemen.”

The agency did not name any firms and promoters.

In its 2024-’25 annual report published in September 2025, Vikas Lifecare, said that the Enforcement Directorate had initiated proceedings “against various persons including officials of the Company” under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

It denied the allegations and said that it was in the process of moving the High Court to quash the proceedings. While Scroll could not find pleas filed by the firm against the Enforcement Directorate in the Delhi High Court in 2025 and 2026 on the e-courts website, court proceedings from April 2026 show that Garg has moved the Prevention of Money Laundering Act appellate tribunal against the Enforcement Directorate’s Raipur branch, which is investigating the Mahadev betting operation.

In a stock filing on June 24, Vikas Lifecare said that the Enforcement Directorate had attached immovable properties worth Rs 13 crore as part of its investigation into the Mahadev betting app. Ebix Limited put out a similar filing on June 23 which did not mention the value of the attachments.

“The Parent company has represented that it is neither involved in nor a beneficiary of the alleged activities under investigation and is contesting the attachment before the appropriate legal forums,” Vikas Lifecare said.

The Enforcement Directorate, in its July 10 statement, said Garg’s attached assets included residential properties, land parcels, equity shares and other securities.

The Dubai connection

Since 2022, the Enforcement Directorate has released more than a dozen press releases on its probe into the Mahadev betting app, naming the owners Sourabh Chandrakar and Ravi Uppal and several others as under investigation. It has named those it has arrested and searched, detailed the modus operandi of the accused, and stated the assets it has frozen.

In a press release in March 2024, it identified businessman Hari Shankar Tibrewala “who hails from Kolkata but currently residing in Dubai” as a “huge hawala operator” who had partnered with the promoters of the Mahadev betting app and “owned and operated” Skyexchange.

Hawala is a network of brokers who move money across countries without physically transferring cash or using traditional banks. It is prohibited under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999.

In July 2025, India Today, based on information shared anonymously by officials, reported that the agency suspected that Tibrewala’s overseas firms had allegedly laundered the money generated by the Mahadev app by investing it in listed Indian firms and inflating their stock prices. Some of these listed firms, the report claimed, were owned by Garg.

The Enforcement Directorate did not respond to an email sent by Scroll to confirm these details.

However, filings with the National Stock Exchange show that in 2022 and 2023, Garg’s listed firms received investments from individuals and entities based in Dubai and Kolkata, which were accused of involvement in the Mahadev betting app in 2024.

For instance, Vikas Lifecare Limited’s shareholding disclosure from September and December 2022 shows that a Dubai-based investor, Ecotek General Trading LLC, had a 1.76% stake in it, valued around Rs 10 crore.

By March 2023, five other firms from Kolkata bought nearly 8% of Vikas Lifecare: Brilliant Investment Consultants Private Limited, Discovery Buildcon Private Limited, Dream Achievers Consultancy Services Private Limited, Forest Vincom Private Limited and Sawarnbhumi Vanijya Private Limited. This investment was worth nearly Rs 38 crore.

The common director in the Kolkata firms was a man named Suraj Chokhani, whom the Enforcement Directorate had described as an associate of Tibrewala in a March 2024 press release.

Sawarnbhumi Vanijya also owned 1.1 % shares of Vikas Ecotech as of September 2023, worth nearly Rs 5 crore.

National Stock Exchange data shows that towards the end of 2023, these investors sold their shares in Garg’s firms.

All six investors – the five Kolkata firms and the Dubai firm – have been accused of being part of the money-laundering operations of the Mahadev betting app, according to Enforcement Directorate documents. One is a March 2024 letter from the agency to the Chhattisgarh government’s Economic Offence Bureau and the Anti-Corruption Bureau. The other is a freezing order from February 2024.

The names of the Dubai and Kolkata firms also feature in a list shared by the Ministry of Finance as part of a Lok Sabha reply in August 2024. The list disclosed the names of 1,519 firms against whom the Enforcement Directorate had filed prosecution complaints – or chargesheets under the money laundering law – between 2019 and 2024.

Tibrewala, Chokhani and the six firms in Kolkata and Dubai did not respond to emails seeking comment.

In a bail hearing in the Supreme Court last year, Chokhani’s counsel had argued that his alleged involvement in money-laundering operations of the betting app was comparatively minor and limited to managing companies, not owning or operating the app directly.

The counsel also argued that the Enforcement Directorate case relied on statements by the co-accused, which were inadmissible in court and purportedly under retraction.

Chokhani was granted bail by the court citing extended duration of his custody, the fundamental right to a speedy trial, and the absence of trial proceedings.

In a petition before the Patiala house court in 2024, Tibrewala had denied any role in the Mahadev betting app and objected to being labelled a “hawala operator”.

Indian authorities have been trying to extradite and prosecute the app’s promoters – Uppal was reportedly arrested by the United Arab Emirates police in December 2023 and fled custody in November 2025. Chandrakar is reportedly in Oman.

A mob attacked an Assam Rifles camp in Manipur’s Senapati district on Tuesday night after security forces launched an operation against suspected armed cadres earlier in the day, the Ministry of Defence said.

The mob allegedly threw stones, damaged property and set vehicles on fire. No injuries were reported.

The Assam Rifles had launched a patrol and search operation near Makuilongdi based on intelligence inputs about the presence of cadres of the armed Naga group, NSCN(I-M), outside designated camps, the ministry said.

The NSCN(I-M), or the Isak-Muivah faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, has been under a ceasefire agreement with the Union government since 1997. The group refers to itself as the National Socialist Council of Nagalim.

On Tuesday, intelligence reports and social media posts indicated that armed cadres of the group were moving outside designated camps while carrying weapons and wearing uniforms, in violation of the ceasefire agreement, the ministry claimed. The matter was also reported to the Ceasefire Monitoring Group, it said.

The Assam Rifles said that as its personnel approached Makuilongdi and Oklong villages during the operation, they were obstructed by residents, including women. The force claimed that its personnel exercised “maximum restraint” and informed local representatives that the operation was aimed at maintaining security and that they would not enter any village without the consent of the authorities.

The ministry said that despite the withdrawal of the security columns, a mob reached the Assam Rifles camp at around 9.30 pm, and attacked it.

Security personnel, along with the Manipur Police and the Central Reserve Police Force, used tear gas grenades and fired blank rounds to disperse the crowd, the statement added.

One Assam Rifles vehicle was set on fire, two trucks were overturned and damaged, and a civilian car was also reportedly burnt. The situation was brought under control by midnight, the ministry said.

Three detained in Ukhrul

Three persons were detained on Tuesday in connection with the July 6 gunfight near Ukhrul town in Manipur in which two Assam Rifles personnel were killed, the Manipur Police said.

Ukhrul is a Tangkhul Naga-majority district.

However, the Tangkhul Naga Long, the apex body of the Tangkhul Naga community, claimed that four persons had been detained during the operation.

It demanded their release, alleging that those detained were “innocent villagers”.

This came against the backdrop of tensions between Kukis and Nagas in Ukhrul that had erupted on February 7 after an alleged assault involving members of the Tangkhul Naga and the Kuki-Zo communities escalated into clashes. At least 25 persons from the two communities have been killed since tensions erupted.

Ethnic clashes had first broken out in Manipur in May 2023 between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities. At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since then in the conflict.

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

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

Written by Sara Varghese. Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• How ambush of church leaders on a forested road escalated Naga-Kuki conflict across Manipur hills
• Naga-Kuki strife began with a drunken brawl. But five months later, Manipur fault lines run deeper

A court in Maharashtra’s Kalyan on Tuesday granted bail to Shiv Sena corporator Ramesh Mhatre, who was arrested for allegedly assaulting doctors and staff at a civic hospital in Dombivli, Bar and Bench reported.

Mhatre had been remanded to judicial custody on Monday after his police custody ended. His lawyer filed a bail application, which was heard on Tuesday.

The police opposed the plea, arguing that Mhatre's release could endanger the complainant doctor. They cited his alleged criminal record, including multiple first information reports registered against him, Bar and Bench reported.

The alleged assault on members of the medical profession warranted rejection of the bail application, the police further argued.

However, Mhatre's lawyer said that in almost all the cases cited by the police, the corporator had either been acquitted or the proceedings had been quashed, and that only one criminal case was currently pending against him.

His lawyer also said that the court could impose conditions to address the concerns raised by the police.

The court was also told that Mhatre has only one kidney and suffers from multiple ailments, Bar and Bench reported.

After hearing both sides, the court granted Mhatre bail on a bond of Rs 50,000.

The case relates to Mhatre and his associates allegedly assaulting doctors at Shastri Nagar Hospital on July 6 after they asked the family of a pregnant woman to transfer her to another hospital because there were no beds available in the neonatal intensive care unit, which the newborn was expected to require.

The family contacted Mhatre, a municipal corporator from the Shiv Sena faction led by Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde, who arrived at the hospital with his supporters, according to the police.

Surveillance camera footage shared on social media showed the corporator and his associates punching and slapping the hospital staff.

Mhatre had been absconding until he surrendered to the police on July 8.

After complaining of health problems, he was taken to hospital before being formally arrested following his discharge. Three of his associates had been arrested earlier.

The police have registered a case against Mhatre and his associates under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to assaulting a public servant, voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, unlawful assembly and rioting.

At least one of the doctors allegedly assaulted in the incident has resigned, saying he no longer feels safe returning to work.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Muslims accounted for around 70% of the more than 27 lakh voters placed under adjudication during West Bengal’s special intensive revision of electoral rolls ahead of the Assembly elections, according to analysis done by a Kolkata-based research organisation.

Women accounted for 51% of the voters in the category, Sabar Institute said in a social media post on Tuesday.

Most of these voters were placed under adjudication after they were flagged for alleged logical discrepancies during the revision process, the institute said.

In the voter roll revision exercise, logical discrepancies refer to a mismatch in parents’ names, low age gap with parents and the number of children of the parents being more than six.

In West Bengal, final rolls published in February initially excluded more than 61 lakh voters, with the process continuing through supplementary lists and adjudication of about 60 lakh “doubtful and pending” cases.

By April 6, about 91 lakh voters, nearly 11.9% of West Bengal’s electorate before the revision process began, had been removed from the electoral rolls.

Ahead of the Assembly elections, about 34 lakh appeals were reportedly pending before appellate tribunals. Of these, 27 lakh were filed by persons who were excluded from the voter list. The tribunals, set up as part of the special intensive revision process, had allowed 1,607 names to be added back to the electoral rolls.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sneha.

Also read:

• Millions of Bengalis may lose their vote. Not over citizenship but due to clerical errors

• Mehebub Sheikh was forced into Bangladesh – but still made it to the Bengal SIR voter list

An Indian passport is a document issued to “regulate the departure of Indian citizens” from the country, said the Ministry of External Affairs on Tuesday.

The statement came weeks after ministry officials said that a passport is a travel document and not proof of citizenship. This had prompted Opposition leaders to ask what documents Indians could rely on to prove their citizenship.

On Tuesday, ministry Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal made the statement while responding to a question about the legal status of passports.

Jaiswal said that passports are issued “after due verification through an established process”. He added that the issuance of passports to Indian citizens or other eligible persons is governed by the 1967 Passports Act and the 1980 Passports Rules.

“At present, fewer than 8% of Indian citizens hold a passport,” he added.

Jaiswal was also asked whether a passport is only a travel document or also proof of nationality. However, he did not address the point directly.

He said that questions on the matter should be taken up with the authorities concerned, adding that the ministry had explained the process through which passports are issued.

On June 25, the Union government said that passports had never been regarded as proof of citizenship and that no such policy change had been made recently.

The Supreme Court and different High Courts have, over the years, held that documents such as Aadhaar card, voter identity card, permanent account card and a certificate issued by the Gram Panchayat Secretary, as well as ownership of a bank account or property, are not evidence of citizenship.

There is no single document that proves Indian citizenship. Only foreign nationals who take up Indian citizenship are granted actual citizenship certificates. People born in India do not have any such document.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Also read:

• Anand Teltumbde: India’s citizenship riddle demands documents that prove nothing
• Explained: Why an Indian passport is not proof of citizenship – and no single document is

The Delhi Police on Wednesday arrested a law student who verbally abused Chief Justice Surya Kant on July 10 and threw papers inside a Supreme Court courtroom, ANI reported.

Prabal Pratap Singh was arrested along with another law student, Chander Bhan. Both are students at Lucknow University and were co-petitioners in the case that was being heard in the Supreme Court at the time of the incident.

Kant was not part of the bench that was hearing the matter.

When the hearing had begun that day, Singh said: “Mr judicial servant, I order you to order the registration of an FIR [first information report] against the assistant commissioner of police of Lucknow…”

Justices KV Vishwanathan had asked, “You are ordering me? You are ordering us?”

Singh replied: “That is all from my side. Everything is on record.”

In videos of the proceedings widely shared online, Singh can be seen throwing the case papers in the air and is heard verbally abusing Kant in the courtroom, after which he was escorted out by security personnel.

The bench noted that Singh, who was representing himself in a case, had made “incoherent and unparliamentary utterances” instead of presenting his argument.

However, the court decided not to initiate contempt proceedings “considering the condition of the petitioner”. The court had not elaborated on what condition it was referring to.

After the Supreme Court’s observation, the police said that the students were medically examined at the Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences and were declared mentally sound, NDTV reported. Police also found pamphlets containing allegedly objectionable language in their possession, the news outlet reported.

A case was registered at the Tilak Marg Police Station following a complaint from the Supreme Court security staff about the July 10 incident.

Edited by Sneha.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday issued notices on petitions filed by Muslim groups challenging the Madhya Pradesh High Court judgement that declared the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal Maula mosque complex to be a Hindu temple, Live Law reported.

The court, however, declined to issue an interim order restoring the status quo that existed before the High Court’s verdict, under which both sides were allowed to pray inside the complex on designated days.

On May 15, the High Court ruled that the complex in Dhar district is a temple of Hindu deity Saraswati and quashed a 2003 order of the Archaeological Survey of India allowing Hindus to perform prayers on the premises on Tuesdays and Muslims to offer namaz in the complex on Fridays.

The High Court had allowed the Muslim side to seek alternative land within the district to build a mosque.

On Tuesday, a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana said that the court would not pass an order that may cause tensions, Live Law reported.

However, it ordered the Madhya Pradesh government to make available an open space adjacent to the complex for Muslims to offer namaz on Fridays between 1 pm and 3 pm. The arrangement would be temporary and subject to the final ruling in the matter, the court added.

The bench also directed the Archaeological Survey of India not to make structural changes to the complex without the court’s permission.

In its judgement in May, the High Court had directed the Union government and the Archaeological Survey of India to decide on how the property would be administered. It had given the Archaeological Survey of India supervisory control over the preservation, conservation and regulation of religious practices at the site.

In March 2024, the High Court directed the Archaeological Survey of India to carry out a survey of the site on a plea by a group called the Hindu Front for Justice.

The Hindu Front for Justice had argued that the Kamal Maula mosque was constructed during the reign of Alauddin Khilji between the 13th century and 14th century by “destroying and dismantling ancient structures of previously constructed Hindu temples”.

The Archaeological Survey of India found in July 2024 that the mosque was constructed using parts from earlier temples at the site.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Union government on Tuesday said that it will establish a dashboard to track every Indian seafarer on vessels operating in the conflict-hit Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman.

This came after another Indian sailor was killed and 10 were injured earlier in the day in Iranian attacks on two oil tankers transiting the southern shipping lane of the Strait of Hormuz. The two vessels – Mombasa and Al Bahiyah – had a combined crew of 46, including 30 Indian seafarers.

Since the conflict in West Asia broke out on February 28, at least five Indian seafarers have died and one is missing. There have been 29 incidents of attacks on vessels carrying Indian seafarers, according to The Indian Express.

In an inter-ministerial meeting on Tuesday, Union Minister for Ports, Shipping and Waterways Sarbananda Sonowal directed that a “Seafarer-First” response should be adopted against the security threats in West Asia, according to a press release.

The measures include vessel-by-vessel monitoring of Indian seafarers, the appointment of dedicated liaison officers for affected crew members, and round-the-clock coordination between the shipping ministry, the Ministry of External Affairs, the Navy, the Directorate General of Shipping and Indian missions in Iran, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Regarding the dashboard, Sonowal said it will track every Indian seafarer on vessels operating in the region, regardless of the ship’s flag.

“The dashboard will provide real-time information on vessel position, ownership, cargo, crew strength, crew welfare, threat assessment, intended voyage, next port of call and the availability of facilities,” stated the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways.

It added that dedicated liaison officers will be appointed to act as the single point of contact for affected families, coordinating medical updates, travel documentation, repatriation, welfare fund support, outstanding wages, contractual entitlements and compensation.

All shipowners, vessel managers and Recruitment and Placement Service Licence agencies have been directed to submit compliance reports confirming that no Indian seafarer is being required to sail without adequate information, protection and support, the ministry stated.

This came after one Indian seafarer aboard Al Bahiyah was killed and another injured in the attack on Tuesday. Nine of the 18 Indian crew members on the Mombasa were injured, including two who were seriously hurt.

On Sunday, a Cyprus-flagged container ship, GFS Galaxy, was allegedly attacked by Iran off the coast of Oman.

One Indian crew member remains missing following the attack, while 10 other Indian seafarers were rescued.

The Indian external affairs ministry had said on Sunday that continued attacks on commercial shipping in West Asia were “deeply worrisome”. It called for the de-escalation of tensions and for the “conclusion of ongoing negotiations for a diplomatic solution so that peace and stability can return to the region”.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Sneha.

On June 24, the Ministry of External Affairs made a statement at a press briefing marking Passport Seva Divas that, had it not been almost immediately drowned in the noise of the Iran war, would have generated the political firestorm it deserved. “A passport is a travel document and not a document of citizenship,” a ministry official said.

The reaction from the Opposition was immediate. Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal posted on X: “Which document then is proof of citizenship? BLO can doubt my citizenship. Deprive me of my vote. Result: BJP wins the election.” The government responded that the Ministry of External Affairs had not introduced any new rule but had merely restated a long-settled legal position. Both sides were, in their own fashion, correct and that is what makes the situation so alarming.

India does not have a document that conclusively proves citizenship. Not a passport. Not Aadhaar, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled establishes only identity and residence. Not a voter ID card, which courts have held is an administrative tool for electoral participation. Not a ration card nor a PAN card.

In March 2020, Nityanand Rai, who was then minister of state for home affairs, in response to a question in Rajya Sabha that specifically asked which document proves citizenship, declined to identify any as definitive proof.

The only formal citizenship certificate India issues is upon naturalisation or registration of a person who was previously a foreign national. For the vast majority of Indians, who are citizens by birth or descent, there is, in the strict legal sense, no document.

This extraordinary void has been visible for decades in legal scholarship. The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls by the Election Commission has now made this void visible to 140 crore people.

The Modi Government is denying the validity of its own critical identity documents as proof of citizenship:

➡️ Aadhaar❌
➡️ PAN Card❌
➡️ Voter ID❌
➡️ Indian Passport❌@MEAIndia and @mygovindia must answer:

👉If not an Indian passport, what other document can establish… pic.twitter.com/cTZUCiUcdG

— Dr Syed Naseer Hussain, M P (@NasirHussainINC) June 25, 2026

Revision of electoral rolls

The Election Commission launched the Special Intensive Revision of Bihar’s electoral rolls in June 2025, ahead of the state’s elections later in November that year. It was described by the Election Commission as the first intensive revision since 2003.

The exercise was extended nationally: Phase II began on November 4 across nine states and three Union Territories covering approximately 51 crore electors while Phase three was announced in May covering 16 more states. Approximately 91 lakh voters were removed from West Bengal’s electoral rolls and 2.04 crore in Uttar Pradesh. In Bihar alone, approximately 47 lakh electors were removed from the rolls, around 5%-6% of the total electorate. Across nine states and three Union Territories, the cumulative deletions approached 6.5 crore names.

Three critical features of the SIR transformed it from a routine electoral housekeeping exercise into a constitutional crisis:

First, the Election Commission excluded the most commonly held documents – Aadhaar card, voter ID card and ration card – from the list of 11 valid documents for the initial enumeration phase. Those whose names were not in the 2003 voter lists were required to provide additional documents, including proof of date and place of birth of not just themselves but also their parents.

#BREAKING Supreme Court directs that Aadhaar card must be treated as the "12th Document" for the purpose of identity to include voters in the Bihar SIR exercise.

SC also clarifies Aadhaar is not a proof of citizenship.

SC asks ECI to issue instructions about Aadhaar to its…

— Live Law (@LiveLawIndia) September 8, 2025

Second, the burden of proof was placed entirely on citizens. The state did not have to demonstrate ineligibility, but individuals had to affirmatively prove their citizenship.

Third, the timeline was compressed to one month. In Bihar, July 25, 2025 was the deadline in a state where at least 75 lakh residents migrate to other parts of India for work or study and where significant portions of the population lack any of the 11 specified documents.

The political rhetoric and the fear of being erased from voter lists – linked by many to the threat of the proposed National Register of Citizens – allegedly led to multiple unnatural deaths and suicides among people who had migrated from Bangladesh.

Booth Level Officers, mostly government schoolteachers conscripted for the work, reported being “completely overburdened” and unable to eat or rest. In Tamil Nadu, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai captured the political substance: “When SIR was held earlier, it was not an exercise to prove citizenship but an electoral revision. That is not the case currently.”

The Supreme Court on May 27 upheld the constitutional validity of the SIR. But it inserted a critical limitation: the Election Commission’s role is confined to determining eligibility for electoral rolls, not citizenship. That distinction, between electoral eligibility and citizenship, is where the constitutional problem lies. The Court’s validation of the SIR notwithstanding, the distinction matters enormously.

Citizenship, Constitution and the law

The Election Commission justifies the SIR under Article 324 of the Constitution, which vests in it the superintendence, direction and control of the preparation of electoral rolls, and Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950. The Constitution specifies that only citizens are entitled to vote. The Election Commission argues, therefore, that verifying citizenship is implicit in its mandate to maintain accurate electoral rolls.

This argument contains a syllogism whose major premise it has no authority to establish. That only citizens may vote is correct. That the Election Commission may therefore adjudicate who is a citizen does not follow.

Citizenship determination is a legislative function vested by the Constitution in Parliament. Articles 5 through 11 of the Constitution set out the original citizenship provisions and, critically, Article 11 explicitly reserves to Parliament the power to make any provision with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship and all other matters relating to citizenship.

The Citizenship Act, 1955 – Parliament’s exercise of this power – vests the determination of citizenship in the Ministry of Home Affairs, not in the Election Commission.

The SIR, by requiring citizens to prove their citizenship to Block Level Officers who are schoolteachers, not trained adjudicators of citizenship, effectively delegates a parliamentary function to an electoral body through an administrative exercise. This is not merely a procedural irregularity. It is a constitutional category error.

The Election Commission is not the authority under law to establish the citizenship of any person; this lies with the home ministry. Yet the SIR, in practice, operates as a citizenship determination exercise by removing voters from rolls on the basis of their inability to produce documents that the law itself does not designate as proof of citizenship. The circle is vicious: citizenship cannot be proven by any document the state itself has issued, and the absence of that unattainable proof is used to deny electoral rights that citizenship confers.

A definitional abyss

The Constitution’s definition of citizenship is deliberately provisional. Articles 5 to 9 establish who was a citizen at the commencement – those born in India, those with parents or grandparents born in India, those who had been ordinarily resident in India for five years – and Article 11 then hands the entire architecture to Parliament.

The Citizenship Act of 1955 has been amended repeatedly: in 1986 to introduce the requirement that at least one parent be a citizen by birth, abandoning pure jus soli – the principle of citizenship by birthplace; in 2003 making it a condition that neither parent be an illegal migrant, introducing jus sanguinis – citizenship by descent – more rigorously; and in 2019 when the Citizenship Amendment Act created a religion-based fast-track to naturalise non-Muslim refugees from three specified neighbours.

The practical effect of these amendments is the creation of three distinct populations. Those born before January 26, 1950 were citizens under the original constitutional provisions. Those born between January 26, 1950, and July 1, 1987 are citizens by birth regardless of parents’ nationality – a robust jus soli period. Those born between July 1, 1987 and December 3, 2004 require at least one parent to have been an Indian citizen. Those born after December 3, 2004 require one parent to be a citizen and the other not to be an illegal migrant.

Nearly 80 years after Independence, the Indian state still fails to provide 100% birth certificate coverage.

It is penalizing Indian citizens for its own failures.

There are crores in India who don't know their year of birth & age. Indian law & court ignore that reality. pic.twitter.com/gD1TiyXdLB

— Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh) July 4, 2026

The practical consequence of this framework is devastating in the SIR context. For the approximately three crore voters enrolled on Bihar’s rolls after 2003, the task of verifying documents to establish citizenship by establishing parental nationality is of gigantic proportions. This is because the documentary infrastructure that would be needed to prove parentage and parental citizenship simply does not exist for a population that has historically navigated daily life without formal documentation, that migrates extensively for work, and that has often been born in circumstances – home births, villages without municipal records, floods, famines – that left no administrative trace.

The passport declaration by the Ministry of External Affairs makes this concrete with uncomfortable precision. A passport is issued only after police verification, background checks and the affirmation of Indian nationality. Yet even this — the most internationally recognised proof of national identity – does not legally prove Indian citizenship, because Section 20 of the Passports Act, 1967 permits the government to issue a passport to a non-citizen in the public interest. The document that the rest of the world accepts as the definitive proof of who you are is, in the strict domestic legal sense, not proof of citizenship.

The politics of the void politics

None of this is accidental. Opposition parties – the Congress, the Trinamool Congress, CPI(M), Samajwadi Party, DMK and RJD – have alleged that the Election Commission was favouring the BJP ahead of assembly elections.

In May, the BJP won the election in West Bengal, a state it had been trying to make inroads into for years. Weeks before polling began, BJP leader Suvendu Adhikari confirmed, with unusual candour, the political calculation: “Once a clean voter list is prepared through the SIR, removing fake voters, the BJP will achieve a similar sweep in Bengal as in Bihar.” Earlier, Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress had described the SIR as implementing the National Register of Citizens “through the backdoor.”

The SIR, by requiring documentary proof of citizenship that a disproportionate number of Muslim, minority, migrant and economically marginal voters are structurally unable to produce, functions as a selective disenfranchisement mechanism.

The Citizenship Amendment Act offers fast-track citizenship for non-Muslim refugees from specified countries while some communities face enhanced scrutiny though others are given expedited inclusion. The National Register of Citizens – whose implementation has been suspended but never formally abandoned – looms large as the logical terminus of the process: a national register in which those unable to prove citizenship through documents they were never given would be designated foreigners.

The Supreme Court’s validation of the SIR, however carefully hedged, has provided constitutional cover for the next phase of this exercise. The Court ruled that the SIR is within the mandate of the Election Commission. It did not rule – because it cannot rule – that the underlying citizenship framework is adequate to the task it is being asked to perform.

So, what proves Indian citizenship?

Congress leader Kapil Sibal’s question deserves to be the central question of Indian politics: what document proves Indian citizenship? The honest answer, currently, is: none. The government’s response – that this is a settled legal position that has existed for decades – is technically accurate and politically evasive.

It has existed for decades without consequence precisely because no government had previously attempted to operationalise it at scale, in a context where inability to prove citizenship translates into loss of electoral rights, and where the SIR’s document requirements and compressed timelines are calibrated to produce exactly the kind of mass deletions from electoral rolls that have been documented.

The citizenship framework India has built – through seven decades of constitutional amendment, parliamentary legislation, judicial interpretation and administrative practice – has arrived at a position where the state can demand proof of what it has never provided the means to prove, where the electoral body is delegated a function Parliament reserved to itself, and where the consequence falls overwhelmingly on the poorest, the most mobile, the least documented: who are, not coincidentally, the least likely to vote for the incumbent.

A democracy that cannot tell its citizens what proves they are citizens, that removes millions from voter rolls on the basis of documentary standards no ordinary person can meet, and that calls this a routine electoral housekeeping exercise, is a democracy that is being systematically hollowed from within.

The apparatus of democracy – the Election Commission, the passport office, the Citizenship Act, the courts – are all in place. The substance of democracy – the equal, unconditional right of every citizen to vote without having to produce impossible proof of what they already are – is being quietly removed.

That is no legal technicality. It is the oldest and most fundamental form of political exclusion, conducted with modern instruments and constitutional camouflage.

Writer and civil rights activist Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO, Petronet India Limited and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management. His most recent book is The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir.

In the 18th century, the colonial kitchens of Madras became an unlikely meeting ground for two groups from different social worlds.

Imperialism brought Europeans to Madras, many of them civil and military officials of the East India Company, soldiers, traders, sailors, lower-level bureaucrats and planters.

In India, some of these Europeans were categorised as “beef-eating” untouchables, like those at the lower end of India’s caste order. This inadvertently fostered close contact between Europeans, the agents of imperialism, and lower-caste domestic workers, the victims of the caste system.

The “Madras curry” took shape in the exchange of culinary knowledge in this colonial paradox. Initially, Europeans tried imported tinned food. But as this proved impractical, they gradually adopted a hybrid food culture that combined European and local taste.

Colonial recipe notes provide a long list of ingredients, including various spices, coconut, curry leaves and mango. Other commonly recommended ingredients included turmeric, coriander, cumin, poppy seeds, dried ginger, black pepper and dried chillies. To these, memsahibs were instructed to add their desired meat. During the later period, they used curry powder or paste.

The transnational journey of Madras Curry reveals several intertwined histories, especially the complex interaction between colonialism and caste.

The European and the ‘outcastes’

Before the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, many Europeans in India were single men, bereft of a domestic life. But once the Suez Canal cut down the travel time between London and Madras from nearly six months to one, European men could bring their families along to the subcontinent. This familial migration gave rise to new demands and challenges, foremost among them the need for in-house domestic workers.

Upon settling in Madras, Europeans encountered an unusual form of exclusion from caste Hindus, who regarded them as “white pariahs”, below the position of untouchable outcastes, and refusing social or cultural interaction. This humiliating treatment was a recurring theme in colonial accounts. It included the refusal to exchange food or shake hands, breaking glasses touched by Europeans, and dismissing their meals as “Pariah food”.

Such attitudes also limited access to workers. A willingness to handle beef and wine was essential for employment in European households. Caste Hindus were reluctant to take up such work for fear of losing caste status, while Muslims were averse to handling alcohol for religious considerations.

Non-caste people, unbound by such restrictions, became domestic workers and cooks for European households.

The colonial kitchen

The colonial kitchen became a site of culinary experimentation and an exchange of knowledge, where Europeans developed a taste for Indian food.

Historians tend to view colonial homes in India in two ways: as places where white racial supremacy and Western imperial authority were asserted, and as sites where such unequal arrangements often frayed in everyday domestic life.

The wives of European men managed the household and kitchen. Some of their personal accounts of domestic servants often reveal not authority but a relationship of mutual dependence.

Colonel Kenney Herbert, who after his retirement from Madras, wrote many cookbooks and recipe columns under the pen-name “Wyvern”, noted that “unless amicable relations exist between the cook and mistress or master, the work will never be carried out satisfactorily”.

He added that “for all we know that Ramasamy’s domestic curry often gains, whilst we lose” and “the moment you betray irritation and hastiness in your manner towards Ramasamy, he ceases to follow you”. Ramasamy and Muthusamy were among the names English writers commonly used for their cooks.

Wyvern observed that “good curries, from our standpoint, are the result of a blend between European and Asiatic cookery, and whenever you get an especially nice one, depend upon it, the credit is more due to the mistress of the house than to the cook.”

Yet there were also occasions when cooks overruled the decisions of memsahibs in matters of food.

Colonial writings refer to dishes such as Bengal curry and Malay curry. But Madras curry, in terms of popularity and acceptance, outshone them all. The memsahibs received local knowledge of curry-making from the cooks and, in turn, seasoned, refined and made it palatable to the European tongue.

Alongside Madras curry, another Madras dish that won over European taste buds was mulligatawny, derived from the Tamil phrase milaguthannir, meaning “pepper water”.

When the prince tasted Madras curry

Anecdotes about Madras curry are plentiful, each testifying to the esteemed place it came to occupy in global culinary culture. Its popularity extended far beyond those who had lived in the Madras Presidency and their European relatives.

Its appeal also cut across social ranks – from ordinary soldiers craving Madras curry during long sea voyages to the Prince of Wales himself, who went out of his way to taste it during his visit to India.

In June 1876, newspapers in India and England reported the following: “When the Prince of Wales was in Madras, His Royal Highness expressed a desire to have a good tiffin of Madras curries. He was accordingly invited to the club, and expressed complete satisfaction with the manner in which tiffin at the club was served, and it appears that he asked the club committee to send a Madras cook to England, to enable His Royal Highness to have curries served in Madras fashion at the Royal table…”

Colonial authorities in Madras managed to send a cook to England at the cost of Rs 105. The news report concluded, “Happy Prince! still happier cook!”

‘Madras curry’ goes global

Madras curry was often promoted as a secret of the East. For many Westerners, especially those who returned to Europe or Australia after years in Madras, preparing curry paste with the proper texture remained a challenge. Yet they remained hopeful.

One writer in the Examiner newspaper observed, “I see no reason why the ingredients could not be obtained in England, with the exception of the fenugreek and green leaves”, adding that “Indian dishes are not beyond the power of the average cook.”

As Europeans developed a taste for Indian food, the trade in ready-made Madras curry powder and paste flourished in the 19th century. An advertisement in Allen’s Indian Mail in 1857 promoted “true Madras curry and Mulligatawney paste and Chutnies”, offering former residents of India a regular supply of these condiments.

Another brand, Vencatachellum Madras Curry Powder, was especially popular in Australia. At the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, Vencatachellum traders showcased nearly 30 products, including Madras curry powder.

Although curry appeared in English coffee houses as early as 1733, it became widespread only in the mid-19th century. The taste for “Oriental” food reflected a growing Western cosmopolitanism, initially confined to elite circles but later spreading more widely.

Historian Nupur Chaudhuri notes that memsahibs “were a major force in nurturing this newly acquired culinary taste.” But the culinary knowledge that sustained it came largely from lower-caste cooks, whose contribution has largely faded from view. Colonialism, however, helped global communities acquire a taste for what had once been dismissed as “pariah food”.

S Gunasekaran teaches history at Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

The Rajasthan High Court on Monday dismissed petitions challenging the proposed demolition of several mosques, dargahs and madrasas located within 50 kms of the India-Pakistan border, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench was quoted as having observed that the Union government’s decision to enhance the territorial jurisdiction and operational powers of the Border Security Force showed a well-calibrated approach to address security challenges, Live Law reported.

As the structures were near the border, there was a need for heightened vigilance and regulatory oversight, the bench added.

The court said the “attempt to attribute communal colour” to the demolitions was misplaced, Bar and Bench reported.

Justice Sameer Jain said that the matter was related to “national security and regulatory compliance”, and not religious discrimination.

Based on the material placed before the court, the judge observed that the structures proposed to be demolished were prima facie unauthorised.

The petitioners had been issued show-cause notices and that they had not participated in the process, the court observed. Therefore, the petitioners “cannot now be permitted to invoke writ jurisdiction” on the grounds of violation of natural justice, the bench said.

“...it is a thought deeply ingrained in the consciousness of every citizen of this nation that when the security of the state is at stake, the rigidity of procedure must yield to the imperative necessity of protection,” the court said.

The demolition of several mosques and dargahs in Rajasthan, among other states, had sparked a political row in June, with Opposition leaders alleging that Muslim places of worship were being targeted.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi said on June 21 that he had been informed by his party’s Bikaner unit that four mosques in the district had been demolished. Nine mosques and dargahs in Phalodi, Jaisalmer and Barmer had also been demolished, he added. All three districts are along the border with Pakistan.

Opposition leaders, including Owaisi and the Congress’ Ashok Gehlot, alleged that the demolitions disproportionately target Muslim religious sites.

Owaisi had claimed on social media that notices have been issued to hundreds of other religious sites, including the 250-year-old shrine of Hazrat Mahmood Shah Jilani in Jaisalmer.

Gehlot had accused the Bharatiya Janata Party government in Rajasthan of targeting “historical religious sites that are several decades old” as part of “this coercive action”.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Bharatiya Janata Party government in West Bengal on Tuesday withdrew its appeal before the Supreme Court against a Calcutta High Court judgement striking down the inclusion of 77 Muslim communities from the state’s Other Backward Classes list, Live Law reported.

The appeal had been filed by the Trinamool Congress government, which lost power in the state to the BJP in the Assembly elections in May.

The State Backward Classes Commission also withdrew its separate appeal.

The Supreme Court said that while it was allowing the state to withdraw its plea, its order in the matter would not prevent other parties from challenging the High Court verdict, the legal news outlet reported.

The West Bengal government’s earlier list of Other Backward Classes had 113 sub-groups, of which 77 were Muslim and 36 non-Muslim. In May 2024, the High Court struck down the list and reduced OBC reservations to 7% from 17%.

On June 29, the West Bengal Assembly passed two bills to amend laws pertaining to Other Backward Classes reservations and remove several Muslim communities from the OBC list as directed by the High Court.

The amendments will revise the share of the Other Backward Classes quota in the state to 7% from 17% and reorganise the backward classes categories.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

The Supreme Court declined to pass an interim order allowing Friday namaz at the disputed Bhojshala-Kamal Maula mosque complex in Madhya Pradesh’s Dhar district. However, the court told the state government to make available an open space adjacent to the complex for Muslims to offer namaz on Fridays between 1 pm and 3 pm.

The arrangement would be temporary and subject to the final ruling in the matter, the court added.

On May 15, the High Court ruled that the complex in Dhar district is a temple of Hindu deity Saraswati and quashed a 2003 order of the Archaeological Survey of India allowing Hindus to perform prayers on the premises on Tuesdays and Muslims to offer namaz in the complex on Fridays.

Muslims groups have approached the Supreme Court challenging the order. Read on.

How SC’s evasion on Places of Worship Act challenge is powering new Hindutva claims on mosques, writes Vineet Bhalla

More than 1,800 members of civil society urged activist Sonam Wangchuk to withdraw his hunger strike. The fast, now in its 17th day, is part of the protest by the political campaign Cockroach Janta Party to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over alleged mismanagement in the conduct of competitive exams.

The signatories include actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, author Arundhati Roy and academics Nivedita Menon and Jean Drèze.

In an open letter, academics, artists and activists said that they were concerned about the protesters’ health. The signatories said that they were making the appeal because the Union government “does not have a heart or a conscience”, and urged the protesters to withdraw the hunger strike “in the interests of the longer and more difficult struggle” ahead. Read on.

The Supreme Court imposed costs of Rs 3 lakh each on five comedians – Samay Raina, Balraj Paramjeet Singh Ghai, Nishant Jagadish Tanwar, Sonali Thakkar and Vipul Goyal. The court remarked that Raina had “taken the court for a ride” by not complying with an undertaking he had given in a case pertaining to allegedly insensitive jokes about persons with disabilities made on his show India’s Got Latent.

The order was passed after a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant was informed that Raina had not invited any persons with disabilities to his show, which was among the court’s directions in the matter. Read on.

The Supreme Court dismissed the Central Bureau of Investigation’s appeal against the Jharkhand High Court’s 2019 order granting bail to former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav in the Deoghar fodder scam case. The case pertains to the alleged embezzlement of Rs 89 lakh from the Deoghar treasury between 1991 and 1994, when Yadav was the chief minister of Bihar. He was convicted in the case in 2017.

The Supreme Court said that it was not inclined to interfere with the High Court’s order. “It will only be appropriate to request the High Court to expedite the hearing of the appeal, preferably within six months,” the bench said. Read on.

India summoned Iran’s deputy chief of mission in Delhi to register a “strong protest” after an Indian sailor was killed and eight persons were injured in attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. The attacks took place when the tankers were transiting the southern shipping lane of the strait, within Omani territorial waters, the United Arab Emirates said. The attacks also damaged the ships and resulted in fires on board.

The Emirati Ministry of Defence did not specify when the attacks took place. Of the eight injured, six were Indians and two Ukrainians. Four were in serious condition. Read on.

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More than 1,800 members of civil society on Tuesday urged activist Sonam Wangchuk to withdraw his hunger strike in Delhi.

Wangchuk’s fast is part of the protest by the political campaign Cockroach Janta Party to demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan on account of alleged mismanagement in conducting competitive exams.

In an open letter, the signatories, who include academics, artists and activists, said that while they support those on hunger strike, they were also concerned about the protesters’ health.

Wangchuk had begun the hunger strike at Jantar Mantar on June 28.

Abhijeet Dipke, who founded the campaign, said on Tuesday that after 17 days of the hunger strike, Wangchuk had started losing muscle mass and was in “immense pain”.

Dipke added that he had “begged him to end his fast”. He quoted Wangchuk as having asked in response why the Union government was not willing to hold a dialogue with the protesters.

In their letter, the signatories said that they were appealing for an end to the hunger strike because the Union government “does not have a heart or a conscience”.

The signatories include actors Naseeruddin Shah and Ratna Pathak Shah, author Arundhati Roy, academics Nivedita Menon and Jean Drèze, and activists Lalita Ramdas and Kavita Srivastava.

They said that “we have seen time again how they have behaved in the most inhuman and dastardly manner” with protesters.

“We worry that their negligence in responding to your demands will only further worsen the already fragile state of health that many of you are in,” they said.

The civil society members also said that the hunger strike should be withdrawn “in the interests of the longer and more difficult struggle” ahead. “This battle is a marathon not a sprint and we need you, your strength and leadership in the days to come,” they added.

Also read:

• Watch: Meet the ‘cockroaches’ who crawl out every night at Jantar Mantar
• How the ‘cockroaches’ at the Jantar Mantar sit-in are keeping themselves busy

After holding its first protest at Jantar Mantar on June 6, the Cockroach Janta Party – which started as a satirical political campaign – organised demonstrations in several cities demanding the resignation of Pradhan.

Wangchuk had participated in the protest in Delhi on June 6.

The campaign was launched on May 16 in response to reports of remarks by Chief Justice Surya Kant on the previous day comparing some unemployed youngsters to “cockroaches”. Within a week, the campaign had garnered more than 22 million followers on social media platform Instagram.

The chief justice claimed on May 16 that he had been misquoted by sections of the media and that it was baseless to say that he criticised young people in general. Kant claimed he had specifically criticised “those who have entered professions like the Bar [legal profession] with the aid of fake and bogus degrees”.

Written by Nachiket Deuskar. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Also read:

• Why India’s Opposition parties should be worried about the cockroach movement
• ‘We want accountability’: Voices from the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest in Pune

The Supreme Court on Tuesday imposed a Rs 3 lakh cost on comedian Samay Raina, observing that he had “taken the court for a ride” by not complying with an undertaking he had given in a case pertaining to allegedly insensitive jokes about persons with disabilities made on his show India’s Got Latent, Live Law reported.

Costs of the same amount were also imposed on four other comedians – Balraj Paramjeet Singh Ghai, Nishant Jagadish Tanwar, Sonali Thakkar and Vipul Goyal.

The order was passed after a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana was informed that Raina had not invited any persons with disabilities to his show, which was among the court’s directions in the matter, Bar and Bench reported.

“We have reason to believe that Samay Raina has taken the court for a ride and has brazenly violated the orders of this court,” the bench was quoted as having observed.

In November, the court had directed the comedians to, as an act of reparation, conduct special shows to highlight the success stories of persons with disabilities. The Supreme Court had also asked them to raise funds for the treatment of persons with disabilities, especially those with Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

The directions had been issued in a petition filed by Cure SMA Foundation seeking guidelines against jokes that violate the dignity of persons with disabilities.

The petition was prompted by a joke allegedly made by Raina about a child with Spinal Muscular Atrophy. The comedians had earlier appeared before the Court and were directed to publish public apologies on their platforms.

On Tuesday, advocate Aparajita Singh, representing the petitioner, claimed in court that Raina had not contacted the organisation or any person with disabilities to be a part of his shows, Bar and Bench reported.

Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal on Monday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, urging him to provide consumers the choice to choose between pure petrol and ethanol-blended fuel at petrol pumps.

The former Delhi chief minister also sought an appointment with Modi to discuss concerns about E20 petrol, or a fuel blend that consists of 20% ethanol and 80% petrol.

In his letter, Kejriwal said that there is no “logical, scientific, engineering or economic argument” that justifies the government's decision to “impose E20 petrol on vehicles”.

The Union government’s Ethanol Blended Petrol programme currently mandates the sale of petrol blended with 20% ethanol. India hit its target of reaching a 20% ethanol mix in petrol in July 2025, five years ahead of schedule.

The government maintains that blending ethanol with petrol is part of India’s broader energy transition strategy aimed at reducing dependency on fossil fuels, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and boosting income for sugarcane farmers.

The Aam Aadmi Party leader on Monday urged the Centre to implement two measures: “provide consumers the choice between pure petrol and E20 at fuel stations and reduce the price of E20 petrol”. He said that the reduced price should reflect the “lower calorific value and reduced mileage” E20 petrol delivers, so that citizens are not paying full price for a “compromised product”.

कल मैंने प्रधानमंत्री जी को पत्र लिखा।

आइए मिलकर E20 के खिलाफ आवाज़ उठाते हैं। नीचे दिए गए लिंक पर क्लिक करें और प्रधानमंत्री के नाम पेटिशन पर साइन करें। प्रधानमंत्री के साथ अपने अनुभव भी साझा करें।https://t.co/YUCS3YFl4U pic.twitter.com/qci8Ja6QPg

— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) July 14, 2026

He said the Aam Aadmi Party has launched an online petition inviting citizens to share their experiences with E20 petrol, particularly its impact on mileage and any other issues they may have faced.

Consumer concerns

Consumers have complained that the new fuel mix damages engines and reduces their mileage.

An opinion poll by LocalCircles published on July 5 showed that 53% of the surveyed petrol vehicle owners said that they believe that the government’s handling of the E20 rollout was “disastrous” or “ineffective”.

Sixty-six percent of the respondents said that they were experiencing a more than 10% drop in mileage with E20. Forty-five percent of the surveyed users said that their cars had suffered a moderate to major increase in wear and tear, or needed repairs, according to the polling conducted in June.

On July 10, the Centre said that E20 petrol is “cleaner and superior” than fuel variants that do not have ethanol blended in them.

The quality, safety and compatibility of petrol blended with 20% ethanol had been validated by automobile manufacturers, testing and homologation agencies, oil marketing companies, and regulatory authorities, said the Ministry of Petroleum.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

Jyothibai Naik has never been to Delhi. She has not even seen photographs of the iconic India Gate, which stands opposite the National War Memorial. So, when the Ministry of Defence inscribed the name of her late son, Mood Muralinaik, on one of the walls at the memorial last month, she did not quite know what to make of it.

To make matters worse, “nobody from Delhi” told them about the honour, she complained over a phone call from her village in Andhra Pradesh. “We heard about it from journalists here,” she said. Her husband, Shriramnaik, who was also on the call, asked: “Have they put up his photo too?”

Their 24-year-old son was killed in cross-border shelling on May 9, 2025, at the peak of the four-day war between India and Pakistan. Since then, the couple have been waging a battle of their own – against the government of India.

They want the Union government to extend to them the same benefits and protections that it provides to the families of other soldiers killed in military action. These include a lifelong pension, health insurance, and subsidies on travel as well as consumer goods. Jyothibai has even filed a petition in the Bombay High Court, asking for her demands to be fulfilled.

However, the government has so far pleaded helplessness in the case, citing the fact that Muralinaik was recruited to the Army under the Agnipath scheme. Soldiers engaged under the scheme are known as Agniveers. Unlike regular soldiers, Agniveers serve a short, four-year stint with the armed forces and are, therefore, ineligible for the same entitlements as them.

“If Agniveers have to be treated differently, why send them to war in the first place?” Muralinaik’s mother asked. “Only regular soldiers should be made to fight wars. Why did they send my child?”

While the Bombay High Court has yet to decide if it will admit the petition, the case has once again put the spotlight on the controversial recruitment scheme. The Opposition has repeatedly criticised the Agnipath scheme for allegedly dividing the armed forces. The military leadership, too, has reportedly sought changes in its design.

Raising a soldier

Muralinaik was part of the first batch of Agniveers recruited by the Army after the scheme was rolled out in 2022. “We did not think much about it at that time,” his mother, Jyothibai, recalled. “We were just happy that he was going to serve the country.”

The family belongs to the Sugali tribe, which is on the list of Scheduled Tribes in Andhra Pradesh. They live in the tribal hamlet of Pudagundlapalli Thanda in Sri Sathya Sai district.

Murali, the name by which his parents call him, was raised by his grandparents in the hamlet, while his parents worked in Mumbai.

Jyothibai worked as a domestic help in Ghatkopar, a suburban neighbourhood located in east Mumbai, while Shriramnaik used to ferry rice and grains door to door for a living.

“It was very laborious work,” Shriramnaik said, describing how he carried sacks of rice and grains on his back and walked through the streets of the city to sell them by the kilogram.

After Muralinaik joined the Army, his parents, now in their 40s, gradually cut down on work. “She [Jyothibai] suffers from allergic asthma,” his father said. “When Murali was alive, he used to take her to the hospital.”

In her petition before the Bombay High Court, Jyothibai has stated that Muralinaik was her only child and that she and her husband depended on his income. When Scroll asked the couple how they were making ends meet since his death, they said that they were using the money they had received from the government.

According to the Agnipath scheme, the family of an Agniveer killed in military action is entitled to receive an insurance cover of Rs 48 lakhs and a one-time payment of Rs 44 lakhs. In addition to that, the government is also required to pay them the Agniveer’s salary for the remaining, unserved part of their four-year engagement.

In court, the government has claimed to have paid Rs 1.2 crore to the parents. It also pointed to compensation announced by state governments for Muralinaik’s parents, which includes five acres of land.

Muralinaik’s father, however, said that they had received only about Rs 76 lakhs so far, adding that it was not enough. “How long will this money last?” he asked. “Will it help us get through the rest of our lives?”

Jyothibai even claimed that she was ready to work again if given a chance. “The government should give a job either to me or my husband,” she said. “If it cannot do that, it should give us a pension.”

The legal issues at play

The legal debate on the Agnipath scheme was settled in 2023, when the Delhi High Court upheld its constitutional validity.

Even at that time, the petitioners against the scheme had argued that it was discriminatory by design because it denied long-standing benefits to some recruits. But the court decided that the Agnipath scheme was in the national interest and said that the government was within its powers to decide how to recruit soldiers.

However, Sandesh More, one of Jyothibai’s lawyers, argued that the death of Muralinaik had created a legal opening for them to challenge the scheme afresh. No Agniveer had been killed in action when the 2023 judgement on the scheme was passed, he explained.

More is associated with the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi, a Maharashtra-based political party founded by lawyer and activist Prakash Ambedkar. The legal cell of the party as well as its district-level activists have been helping Muralinaik’s parents since last year. Ambedkar himself has appeared in court on their behalf.

The petition, of which Scroll has seen a copy, asks the Bombay High Court to intervene in the matter in light of the “actual, irreparable loss” suffered by Muralinaik’s parents. It argues that the families of Agniveers who die in action must be treated at par with those of regular soldiers and given lifelong pension.

“Soldiers fighting shoulder-to-shoulder cannot be treated differently in death,” the petition states. The argument for pension rests primarily on Article 14 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to equality before the law to all persons living in India.

Describing the government as a “model employer”, the petition contends that it has a greater obligation to ensure that its labour policies are “fair, reasonable and equitable”.

In response, the government has argued before the court that Agniveers are not the same as regular soldiers and there can be “no parity” between the two. Muralinaik, it added, knew of and accepted the difference between the two categories when he enrolled in the Army as an Agniveer.

“It is well settled that a person who voluntarily accepts the terms and conditions of service cannot subsequently challenge those very terms,” the government said in its court filing.

It also claimed that pension is not an “inherent or fundamental right”. Even the regular soldiers entitled to one, it argued, only become eligible for it after a minimum of 15 years in military service.

But Jyothibai’s lawyers have disputed this. “The liberalised pension scheme for martyred soldiers, which the government introduced in 2022, does not consider their duration of service,” Hitendra Gandhi, another lawyer from the Vanchit Bahujan Aaghadi working on the case, pointed out. He was hopeful that the court would take note of this and accede to their demand.

A question of honour

For defence journalist Ajai Shukla, the government’s stance is not surprising. He said officials in the Ministry of Defence thought their job was to save money for the government “rather than to ease the burden of sacrifice for parents of Agniveers who have laid down their lives” for the country.

This was in keeping with the recent trend of the Modi government trimming expenditure on the welfare of defence personnel even as it put them at the centre of its nationalistic claims. As Shukla reported in 2016, it cut down disability pensions for soldiers while the Army was carrying out “surgical strikes” in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. The decision was rolled back after the report generated controversy.

A former soldier himself, Shukla argued that denying pension to Agniveers killed in action was “not just unconstitutional, it is unconscionable”. “It really is beyond disgraceful,” he said. “How can anyone justify something like this?”

The Army has maintained that it treated Muralinaik’s sacrifice with the honour that it deserved. Besides inscribing his name at the National War Memorial along with five other soldiers killed in action during Operation Sindoor, it posthumously awarded him with the Sena Medal.

For the lawyers representing his mother, though, these honours only underscored their legal arguments. As they state in the petition: “The State cannot confer the language of honour at the funeral and then deny the substance of that honour in pension, welfare and institutional treatment.”

When they travelled to Ahmedabad earlier this year to receive their son’s Sena Medal, Muralinaik’s parents even raised their concerns with an army officer. “He said he would talk to his seniors about it,” Jyothibai said. “But nothing happened.”

It is not as if they do not appreciate the honours conferred upon their son. Jyothibai said that they made her proud. Shriramnaik called them “big” achievements. But that did not take away from the feeling that the government had neglected them.

“Ministers talk so much about Operation Sindoor,” he said. “The authorities in Delhi must be feeling proud of themselves after putting up his name on the wall [at the memorial]. But they don’t think about the families of those who were killed.”

The Karnataka High Court on Monday criticised the “culture of repeated adjournments” in criminal trials, observing that a 2014 case involving the alleged sexual assault of a six-year-old girl at a Bengaluru school was still pending after 12 years.

Describing the delay as “shocking”, Justice M Nagaprasanna noted in a July 3 order that Section 35(2) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act requires trials under the law to be completed within one year of a court taking cognisance of the offence.

The judge said that the victim could not be compelled to endlessly relive the trauma “because the criminal justice system has surrendered to the culture of adjournments”.

“Every unnecessary adjournment compounds the original injury and converts the process itself into an instrument of oppression,” the court said. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly deprecated this unhealthy culture of mechanical adjournments and has warned that such acts of adjournments ultimately become a silent accomplice to miscarriage of justice.”

It directed a special court to to complete the trial within eight weeks.

The case pertains from the alleged sexual assault of the six-year-old girl at a Bengaluru school in 2014. The chargesheet was filed under sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Pocso Act pertaining to rape.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Karnataka High Court on Monday criticised the West Bengal government for requesting more time to review documents proving the citizenship of a school bus driver detained in Bengaluru after the police alleged that he was an undocumented Bangladeshi migrant, The Indian Express reported

Rafikul Biswas was detained in August 2025. He had told Scroll at the time that he was from West Bengal’s Nadia district and had been living in Bengaluru for more than seven years with his wife and daughter. He had stated that the police were threatening to deport him to Bangladesh.

The 32-year-old has records showing that he is an Indian citizen by birth and was issued a fresh voter identity card in the special intensive revision of Bengal’s electoral rolls, The Indian Express reported.

However, the counsel for the West Bengal government had sought more time to receive fresh instructions from the state in the matter. The new authorities wanted to review the document submitted before the court, the newspaper quoted the counsel as saying.

The Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in West Bengal after defeating the Trinamool Congress in the Assembly elections in May.

On Monday, Biswas’ lawyer asked in court: “Can my citizenship depend on vagaries of who is in power in a particular state? This is extremely dangerous.”

The lawyer said that the West Bengal government had filed a report on inquiries conducted by two agencies in the state.

The inquiries conducted by the police and the block development officer in Nadia in October had found that Biswas is an Indian citizen, The Indian Express reported.

Justice Suraj Govindaraj took exception to the request made by the Bengal government’s counsel.

“How many times do you need time?” the newspaper quoted the judge as having verbally remarked. “Not fair. You are wasting the court’s time and everybody’s time.”

The court asked all parties to file documents and said that it will hear the matter next on July 23.

In May 2025, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs directed the states and Union Territories to verify the credentials of persons suspected to be undocumented migrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

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

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

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas on Monday urged the Election Commission to withdraw a new declaration added to the online version of Form 6 on the ECINET portal that requires applicants to state whether they or their parents were included in the last special intensive revision of electoral rolls.

The new declaration appears only in the online Form 6 available on the ECINET portal. The downloadable statutory version of the form remains unchanged.

Wrote to the Chief Election Commissioner @ECISVEEP challenging the legality of the Election Commission's introduction of a ‘new mandatory declaration’ in the online Form 6 for voter registration through the ECINET portal.

This is not merely a technical change. It is a serious… pic.twitter.com/wAtyskBBV2

— John Brittas (@JohnBrittas) July 13, 2026

Form 6 is used by persons applying to be included in the electoral roll after turning 18, acquiring Indian citizenship or if their name has been deleted from the voter list.

The change to the new voter registration form came as the third phase of the special intensive revision exercise is underway in 16 states and three Union Territories.

The form has not been amended since the Election Commission began the special intensive revision in June 2025. Section 28 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 says that only the Union government can amend the rules governing electoral forms, including Form 6.

Although the new declaration is not marked as mandatory, applicants cannot submit the online form without filling it.

The added section asks applicants to choose one of the three options: “my name exists in electoral roll of last SIR, my parents name (father, mother, grandfather, grandmother) exists in the electoral roll of last SIR, neither my name nor my parents name exists in the electoral roll of last SIR”.

Those selecting the first two options must provide details such as the Assembly constituency, booth number and serial number from the earlier electoral roll. It is unclear what applicants should do if they do not have these details.

On Monday, in a letter to the poll body, Brittas argued that the Election Commission had no legal authority to alter a statutory form through administrative instructions.

“Form 6 is not an administrative document that can be modified at executive discretion,” Brittas said in his letter. “Once a form is prescribed by statutory rules, it becomes an integral part of subordinate legislation.”

He added: “It can be altered only in the manner recognised by law, namely through amendment of the rules by the competent authority following the prescribed statutory procedure.”

“If this is allowed, tomorrow any statutory safeguard governing voter registration can be altered through a change in the portal, without amending the rules, without parliamentary oversight and without authority of law,” he said in a social media post. “That strikes at the very foundation of the rule of law.”

Brittas argued that the “arbitrary requirement” could create hurdles to voter registration for “millions of first-time voters, students, migrant workers, internally displaced persons, adopted children, orphans, persons estranged from their families and citizens whose parents or grandparents have migrated across constituencies over several decades may have no practical means of furnishing legacy electoral particulars”.

“A requirement incapable of reasonable compliance by large sections of the electorate inevitably operates as a barrier to electoral inclusion,” the letter said.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Neerad Pandharipande.

India on Tuesday summoned an Iranian diplomat to register a “strong protest” after an Indian sailor was killed and eight persons were injured in attacks on two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz.

The attacks took place when the tankers were transiting the southern shipping lane of the strait, within Omani territorial waters, the United Arab Emirates said. The attacks also damaged the ships and resulted in fires on board.

The Emirati Ministry of Defence did not specify when the attacks took place. Of the eight injured, six were Indians and two Ukrainians. Four were in serious condition.

On Tuesday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that the two vessels – Mombasa and Al Bahiyah – had a combined crew of 46, including 30 Indian seafarers.

Of the 12 Indians on board Al Bahiyah, one was killed and another was injured. Of the 18 Indian citizens on board MT Mombasa, nine were injured, including two who were seriously hurt, the external affairs ministry said.

The ministry said its diplomatic mission in the United Arab Emirates was in contact with the Emirati authorities to provide assistance to the Indian seafarers who had been affected.

It added that Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Iran’s deputy chief of mission in Delhi, was summoned on Tuesday and a “strong protest” over the attacks was conveyed.

“We strongly condemn these attacks and acts of violence targeting seafarers and disrupting free and safe navigation through international waterways like the Strait of Hormuz,” the ministry said in a statement.

This came two days after an alleged Iranian attack on the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy left an Indian crew member missing. Ten other Indian seafarers on board the vessel were rescued after it was targeted off the coast of Oman.

The Indian external affairs ministry had said on Sunday that continued attacks on commercial shipping in West Asia were “deeply worrisome”. It called for the de-escalation of tensions and for the “conclusion of ongoing negotiations for a diplomatic solution so that peace and stability can return to the region”.

Written by Sara Varghese. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Maharashtra Police have arrested the project head of a company running a waste processing unit that collapsed on July 8, killing nine workers in the Pune district, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

A first information report was registered against Ashok Gupta, the project head, along with Vijay Sapkal, the safety officer at the plant, under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to culpable homicide not amounting to murder and rash or negligent act that endangers human life, PTI reported.

The three-storey administrative building of a waste-to-energy plant in the Moshi area of the Pimpri-Chinchwad city had collapsed when an adjacent mound of garbage fell on it.

Twenty-three employees of Antony Lara Renewable Energy Limited, the company that had been given the contract to run the unit by the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, were inside the building at the time.

Sapkal, the safety officer, was also injured in the incident and is being treated at a hospital, an unidentified police officer was quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

Gupta sustained minor injuries and has been arrested, the officer added.

The complaint in the case was filed by officials of the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation, reported PTI.

It stated that no safety measures were taken despite knowing that the heavy rains could pose a danger to the sanitary landfill at the site.

On Monday, the civic corporation stated that an inquiry into the collapse showed that the company had only been issued an occupancy certificate for the ground floor of the building, according to the news agency.

The Maharashtra government has also constituted a technical inquiry committee to investigate the incident, Vijay Suryavanshi, the commissioner of the civic corporation, was quoted as saying.

Earlier, Mahendra Ananthula, the president of the Antony Waste Group, said that the collapse was an “act of God” which could not have been predicted.

“The kind of rainfall witnessed over the last four to five days could not have been predicted,” Ananthula was quoted as saying on Sunday. “Similar incidents have occurred in different parts of the country over the past week.”

Ananthula announced a compensation package of Rs 25 lakh for the families of each of those who died, and added that the company would bear the medical expenses of those injured.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

A total of 193 persons declared foreigners by Assam’s tribunals have been forced into Bangladesh in the last two years, according to data submitted by Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma in the Assembly on Monday.

The figure includes an infant girl who was forced across the border with her mother, who had been declared a foreigner.

Of the 193 persons, 67 were “expelled” under the 1950 Immigrants Expulsion from Assam Act. The Act empowers district commissioners and senior superintendents of police to expel “illegal migrants” from the state by bypassing the foreigners tribunals.

Overall, the Bharatiya Janata Party led-Assam government said that it had sent back 1,679 undocumented immigrants to Bangladesh between July 1, 2024 and June 30. The figure includes convicted foreign nationals, identified undocumented immigrants and those declared foreigners by tribunals.

The data was tabled by Sarma in response to a question from All India United Democratic Front MLA Badruddin Ajmal during the ongoing Assembly session.

The data was released on the same day that the Supreme Court set aside Gauhati High Court judgements that had declared 27 persons to be foreigners.

Remanding the cases to foreigners tribunals for fresh adjudication, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta held that determining citizenship and foreigner status carries a “high field of constitutional significance” and must be decided through a “fair, lawful and reasonable” process.

The foreigners tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship based on lineage and a 1971 cut-off date. They rely primarily on documents submitted by persons to establish their family’s residency in Assam or India before 1971.

Those declared foreigners by the tribunals have the option to appeal the decision before the High Court or the Supreme Court.

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

On Monday, in response to a question by Ajmal how many of the “deported persons” have appealed in the High Court and Supreme Court, the government said that no “identified illegal immigrant is repatriated if any appeal is pending” in the courts.

It added: “There is no information available if any repatriated people appealed before the [High Court and Supreme Court].”

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Inputs by Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Sara Varghese.

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

The Supreme Court on Tuesday dismissed the Central Bureau of Investigation’s appeal against the Jharkhand High Court’s 2019 order granting bail to former Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav in the Deoghar fodder scam case, reported Bar and Bench.

The case pertains to the alleged embezzlement of Rs 89 lakh from the Deoghar treasury between 1991 and 1994, when Yadav was the chief minister of Bihar. He was convicted in the case in 2017.

In 2019, the High Court granted Yadav bail and suspended his sentence. The CBI challenged the order in the Supreme Court, which issued notice in the matter in February 2020. The case has been pending since then.

On Tuesday, the CBI argued before the Supreme Court that the High Court had granted suspension of sentence on an erroneous premise that Yadav had completed half his sentence, Live Law reported.

It contended that Yadav was convicted in multiple fodder scam cases arising out of separate trials. The agency argued that, unless directed otherwise by a court, sentences awarded in subsequent convictions begin only after the earlier sentence has been served.

The High Court incorrectly treated the sentences as concurrent while calculating the period of imprisonment undergone, the CBI submitted before the Supreme Court.

“The very yardstick applied is wrong,” Live Law quoted the CBI’s counsel Additional Solicitor General SV Raju as saying. “He has delayed the trial.”

Appearing for Yadav, advocate Kapil Sibal said: “This whole argument that he should have undergone the first sentence then the second sentence is completely wrong.”

“The judge has applied a uniform yardstick,” the legal news outlet quoted Sibal as saying. “It’s the discretion of the judge.”

The Supreme Court said that it was not inclined to interfere with the High Court’s order.

“It will only be appropriate to request the High Court to expedite the hearing of the appeal, preferably within six months,” the bench was quoted as saying.

Apart from the Deoghar case, Yadav has also been convicted for fraudulently withdrawing money from the Dumka and Chaibasa treasuries for purportedly purchasing fictitious medicines and fodder for cattle in the early 1990s.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

A committee constituted to draft a Uniform Civil Code for the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Madhya Pradesh has recommended excluding Adivasis from the scope of the bill, PTI reported on Tuesday.

The Uniform Civil Code aims to introduce a common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all citizens. Currently, such personal affairs of different religions are based on community-specific laws, largely derived from religious scripture.

The report of the government-appointed multi-member panel, headed by retired Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai, was submitted to Chief Minister Mohan Yadav on Monday and forwarded to the law department.

Desai also headed the panels that drafted Uniform Civil Codes for Uttarakhand and Gujarat. Earlier this month, the Maharashtra government also constituted a committee headed by her to prepare a draft Uniform Civil Code for the state.

After scrutiny and approval by the Cabinet, a Uniform Civil Code Bill is likely to be introduced during the Monsoon Session of the Madhya Pradesh Assembly, which begins on July 20.

The panel was tasked with studying existing laws governing marriage, divorce, maintenance, inheritance, adoption and live-in relationships before preparing a draft suited to the state’s social, cultural and economic conditions, PTI quoted a statement by the state government as saying.

“The committee has recommended excluding Scheduled Tribes from the Uniform Civil Code,” the state government was quoted as saying. Scheduled Tribes account for about 21% of Madhya Pradesh’s population.

BJP and UCC

It has long been on the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s agenda to implement a common personal law and several states ruled by the party have made progress towards achieving the goal.

In January 2025, BJP-ruled Uttarakhand became the first state to implement the Uniform Civil Code after independence. The Gujarat Assembly cleared a similar legislation in March amid protests by the Opposition.

The Assam Assembly on May 27 passed the Uniform Civil Code bill seeking to ban polygamy and make the registration of live-in relationships compulsory. The Opposition had demanded that the bill be sent to a select committee for scrutiny.

A common civil code has been in place in Goa since the Portuguese Civil Code was adopted in 1867.

Edited by Sneha.

Also read: Uniform Civil Code will not apply to Adivasis, says Amit Shah

Although the trade deal between India and the United States was “ready” to be signed, the countries were discussing a comparative advantage for New Delhi over competing economies, Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal was quoted as saying by The Hindu on Monday.

“The framework deal is ready, and whenever it is the right time, it will be signed,” Agrawal reportedly said at a press briefing. “We are just waiting. Because deals are about comparative advantage.”

The commerce secretary added: “When you do a deal, you get preferential market access in India and India gets preferential market access in that market.”

He said that the aspect of these preferences over some competitors “is getting structured”. “Whenever it is ready, the deal will get signed,” The Hindu quoted Agrawal as saying.

Earlier in the day, Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal rejected a Reuters report that India had declined a quick trade agreement with the US during talks in June and was holding out for a better deal.

Reuters quoted an unidentified Indian government official as saying that the trade deal had not been signed because Washington had not assured New Delhi on its key demands.

The demands included a tariff advantage over competitors such as China and a commitment that the US would not impose fresh levies after the agreement.

“Our position is clear,” the news agency quoted the official as saying. “We don’t intend to rush into a deal that is not on favourable terms or compromise on red ​lines like ceding ground on agriculture.”

The report also mentioned remarks made by Goyal on June 25.

Speaking at the India Global Forum in London, Goyal had said that the agreement had already been agreed to by both sides in February, but its implementation depends on finalising a “competitive advantage” for India compared with countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The minister had said at the time that the negotiations between the two countries had centred on reducing tariffs to 18% from 50%, which he described as creating an advantage for India over several competing economies.

On Monday, Goyal described the Reuters report as “completely false, baseless and misleading”.

Referring to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s June visit to Delhi, Goyal said that he had “fantastic meetings” with the official.

“Both sides reaffirmed their commitment to an agreement that is balanced, commercially meaningful, and delivers tangible benefits for businesses, farmers, workers and consumers in both countries,” Goyal said. “Our teams remain fully engaged in achieving this objective.”

Trade deal uncertainty

After an interim bilateral trade deal was agreed on February 2, US tariffs on Indian goods would have been reduced to 18% from a combined rate of 50%. The earlier rate of 50% had included a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August over India’s purchase of Russian oil.

However, negotiations on the final deal were postponed after the US Supreme Court on February 20 struck down global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, ruling that he had exceeded his authority.

In response, Trump imposed a temporary 10% tariff on goods imported into the US, citing his authority under the 1974 Trade Act. The new tariff rate is for a maximum of 150 days, unless the US Congress approves an extension.

On February 21, the US president said that he was increasing the tariffs to the “fully allowed, and legally tested” level of 15% from 10% with immediate effect. However, it is unclear as to when the increased tariff rate would take effect.

This has left the status of US’ trade deals with countries, including India, unclear.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

One Indian sailor was killed and six were injured after after Iran attacked two ships in the Strait of Hormuz, stated the United Arab Emirates on Tuesday.

The UAE’s Ministry of Defence did not specify when the attacks took place. It said the eight hurt included six Indians and two Ukrainian nationals. Four were in serious condition.

The attacks took place when the tankers – Mombasa and Al Bahiyah – were transiting the southern shipping lane of the Strait of Hormuz, within Omani territorial waters, said the ministry.

“The attack also caused material damage to both tankers as a result of the fires that broke out on board, which have since been brought under control,” it added.

The Ministry of Defence announces that the national tankers Mombasa and Al Bahiyah were targeted by two Iranian cruise missiles while transiting the southern shipping lane of the Strait of Hormuz, within Omani territorial waters.

The attack resulted in the death of one Indian… pic.twitter.com/i1HrXY0fKP

— وزارة الدفاع |MOD UAE (@modgovae) July 13, 2026

Taking responsibility for the attacks, Iran stated on Tuesday that its forces had hit two “offending” super oil tankers, reported Al Jazeera.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was quoted as saying that the ships had been “deceived by the US” into taking the southern route in Omani waters “by turning off their navigation systems”.

The tankers ignored repeated warnings and “were hit and disabled”, it added.

The attacks came amid renewed tensions between the United States and Iran. On July 8, Washington initiated strikes in response to Tehran’s alleged attacks a day earlier on three liquefied natural gas and crude oil tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

The UAE is a key US ally in the region.

On Sunday, Tehran said that “the Strait of Hormuz will be closed until further notice and until the end of American interventions in this region”.

A day later, US President Donald Trump said that his country’s military was reinstating the naval blockade of Iran and would be “reimbursed” 20% on all cargo shipped through the Strait ‌of Hormuz for keeping the crucial waterway open.

On Tuesday, the UAE condemned the attack on the two ships, calling it a “serious violation and breach of international law” that threatened the security of the region.

“The UAE reserves its full right to respond to this escalation and to take all necessary measures to protect its territory, its citizens and residents, in a manner that safeguards its sovereignty, security, and stability, and protects its national interests,” it added.

The ministry stated that it was “taking all necessary measures to respond decisively to any attempt to undermine the security and stability of the country”.

On Sunday, India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that one Indian was missing and ten were rescued after a commercial vessel, GFS Galaxy, was attacked off the coast of Oman.

Oil prices jump

Amid the renewed escalation in tensions, the global benchmark Brent crude was up nearly 1.8% at 8.50 am on Tuesday, trading at $84.7 a barrel. The price of Brent crude was $78 per barrel on February 27, a day before the conflict started.

Since the war in West Asia began, the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, had effectively been blocked for most international commercial vessels, triggering a global energy crisis. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

On June 15, the US and Iran arrived at an interim agreement to stop the fighting and reopen the strait for commercial vessels. They also held talks in Switzerland aimed at reaching a final peace deal within two months.

The US had ended its blockade of Iran as part of the interim agreement.

However, on Thursday, the US military launched fresh attacks on Iran hours after Trump said that the ceasefire was “over”. Iran retaliated by striking sites in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar.

Deal still ‘possible’: Trump

Despite the US launching fresh strikes on Iran on Monday, Trump said later in the day that a deal with Tehran to end the crisis in West Asia was still possible, reported AFP.

“Yeah, I think a deal is possible,” Trump was quoted as telling reporters. “We had a deal with them two days ago and then they said ‘Oh we can’t make that deal. We have to negotiate it further.’”

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei reportedly said earlier in the day that Tehran was continuing talks with mediators from Qatar, Pakistan and Oman to prevent further escalation of the crisis.

Meanwhile, the US Central Command stated on Tuesday morning that the country’s military had completed the latest wave of strikes against Iran.

“During the five-hour mission, US forces successfully struck military targets across Iran, including Bushehr, Chah Bahar, Jask, Konarak, Abu Musa, and Bandar Abbas to further degrade Iran’s ability to attack commercial shipping,” it added.

Written by Sneha. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Monday rejected a Reuters report that India declined a quick trade agreement with the United States during talks in June and is holding out for a better deal.

In a social media post, Goyal described the report, published on Monday, as “completely false, baseless and misleading”.

Referring to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s June visit to Delhi, Goyal said that he had “fantastic meetings” with the official.

“Both sides reaffirmed their commitment to an agreement that is balanced, commercially meaningful, and delivers tangible benefits for businesses, farmers, workers and consumers in both countries,” Goyal said. “Our teams remain fully engaged in achieving this objective.”

The delay in signing the deal comes as the Narendra Modi government was drawing “confidence from new trading partners, easing economic risks and political gains at home”, Reuters had quoted unidentified officials and analysts as saying.

Reuters had also quoted an unidentified Indian government official as saying India and the US failed to finalise an interim trade agreement during Greer’s visit as Washington did not assure New Delhi on its key demands. The demands included a tariff advantage over competitors such as China and a commitment that the US will not impose fresh levies after the agreement.

“Our position is clear,” the news agency quoted the official as saying. “We don’t intend to rush into a deal that is not on favourable terms or compromise on red ​lines like ceding ground on agriculture.”

The report also mentioned remarks made by Goyal on June 25.

Speaking at the India Global Forum in London, Goyal had said that the agreement had already been agreed to by both sides in February, but its implementation depends on finalising a “competitive advantage” for India compared with countries such as Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

The minister had said at the time that the negotiations between the two countries had centred on reducing tariffs to 18% from 50%, which he described as creating an advantage for India over several competing economies.

He had added that with changes in the US tariff system following a US Supreme Court ruling and the introduction of a temporary 10% tariff that expires on July 24, further work was needed before the bilateral agreement could be implemented.

A US official told Reuters on Monday that Washington is still engaging with India to finalise an agreement, but did not offer a timeline. The news agency quoted the official as claiming that New Delhi had at times been “slow, bureaucratic and difficult” during the talks.

Trade deal uncertainty

After an interim bilateral trade deal was agreed on February 2, US tariffs on Indian goods would have been reduced to 18% from a combined rate of 50%. The earlier rate of 50% had included a punitive levy of 25% imposed in August over India’s purchase of Russian oil.

However, negotiations on the final deal were postponed after the US Supreme Court on February 20 struck down global tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, ruling that he had exceeded his authority.

In response, Trump imposed a temporary 10% tariff on goods imported into the US, citing his authority under the 1974 Trade Act. The new tariff rate is for a maximum of 150 days, unless the US Congress approves an extension.

On February 21, the US president said that he was increasing the tariffs to the “fully allowed, and legally tested” level of 15% from 10% with immediate effect. However, it is unclear as to when the increased tariff rate would take effect.

This has left the status of US’ trade deals with countries, including India, unclear.

Written by Anamika Pathak. Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read: Why the India-US bilateral trade deal is on hold

One jawan was killed and four injured in a suspected improvised explosive device blast in Nagaland’s Sukhovi on Monday, the defence public relations officer in Kohima told Scroll.

The explosion occurred between 2.30 pm and 3 pm near Assam Rifles vehicles, the officer said.

The security forces launched a search operation in the area and more details were awaited, ANI quoted the officer as saying.

Inputs from Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Anamika Pathak and Nachiket Deuskar.

A Delhi court on Monday convicted former Aam Aadmi Party councillor Tahir Hussain and four others for the murder of Intelligence Bureau staffer Ankit Sharma during the 2020 riots in the national capital, The Indian Express reported.

The others who were convicted are Javed, Anas, Nazim and Kasim. Six persons were acquitted in the matter.

Sharma was killed by a mob during the violence and his body had been dumped in a drain.

The Karkardooma court convicted Hussain for murder, rioting, disobedience to an order promulgated by a public servant, promoting enmity between groups, rioting armed with a deadly weapon, unlawful assembly, and kidnapping or abducting with intent to secretly and wrongfully confine a person, Bar and Bench reported.

However, it cleared him of a criminal conspiracy charge.

The court said that the evidence before it showed that Hussain played the role of an instigator to kill Hindus and exhorted the mob to “not spare Hindus”, Bar and Bench reported.

The first information report in the matter had been filed by Sharma’s father.

In February 2020, communal violence broke out in North East Delhi between supporters of the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it. The violence had left 53 dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.

Edited by Anamika Pathak.

The Supreme Court set aside Gauhati High Court orders declaring 27 persons to be foreigners. The bench remanded the cases to foreigners tribunals for fresh adjudication.

The court said that determining a person’s citizenship status carries a “high field of constitutional significance” and must be decided through a “fair, lawful and reasonable” process.

The High Court had said that the appellants had not challenged the tribunals’ orders for nearly 23 years. Acknowledging that they should be given a fair chance to establish their Indian citizenship, the bench said that the opportunity cannot be “enlarged into an endless exercise”. Read on.

Both Hindu and Muslim parties declined the Supreme Court’s proposal for mediation in the disputes relating to the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, the Shahi Idgah mosque in Mathura and the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal. The litigants will continue to pursue the cases in court.

Each of these mosques, Hindutva groups contend, is actually a Hindu temple.

The court had sought consent of parties involved in the three cases to engage in mediation of the disputes under the 2026 Supreme Court Action for Mediated Adjudication and Disputes Harmonization Across Nation Samadhan Samaroh. The initiative began in April and will conclude with a Special Lok Adalat in August. Read on.

The Supreme Court stayed a Madras High Court order that banned cow slaughter in Tamil Nadu. The bench issued notice on the special leave petition filed by the state government, adding that the High Court order prima facie required a correction.

On the eve of Bakrid on May 28, the High Court passed a blanket order banning the slaughter of cows and calves across the state on any day. The ruling came on a plea filed by the general secretary of the Hindu Makkal Katchi, a Hindutva party, seeking directions to ensure that slaughter in Coimbatore took place at designated locations and not in public places.

The Tamil Nadu government contended that the High Court had granted a relief that “was neither pleaded nor prayed”. Read on.

Assam activist Pranab Doley, who has been opposing a proposed luxury hotel near the Kaziranga National Park, was arrested in connection with a June 28 protest against the project in Golaghat district. Doley has been booked for criminal conspiracy, unlawful assembly, criminal trespass, rioting, obstructing public servants from carrying out their duties and criminal intimidation.

The first information report alleged that Doley was the organiser of an “unlawful” gathering in Kohora on June 28. Kohora is the main entry point to the national park.

The proposed hotel is to come up at Ingleng Pathar near the national park, where about 45 farming families depend on a 19-acre plot. Of this, 9.9 acres have been earmarked for the project. Although the plot has been classified as government land, the families have been paying land revenue for more than a decade. Read on.

A suspended staffer in the office of the Badrinath temple committee chairperson was arrested in connection with the alleged theft of donations made to the shrine. Pramod Nautiyal was arrested on Sunday night from his home in Uttarakhand’s Dehradun.

On July 7, the Uttarakhand Police registered a case against Nautiyal for alleged theft by a clerk or servant and aggravated criminal breach of trust of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. The temple committee had suspended Nautiyal and filed a complaint accusing him of unlawfully taking the donation money for “personal gains”. Read on.

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Bihar educator and YouTuber Faisal Khan, popularly known as Khan Sir, was granted anticipatory bail by a Patna court on Monday in an attempted murder case, PTI reported.

The case is linked to violence outside his coaching institute, Khan Global Studies, in Patna on June 2. Days after the incident, Khan claimed that “eight to 10 rounds of gunfire” had been fired outside the institute after a group allegedly vandalised the premises in Musallahpur area. He alleged that business rivals were behind the attack, reported.

Later, Khan was booked after two of his security guards allegedly told the police that he had instructed them to open fire during the violence.

On Monday, the Patna Civil Court also granted anticipatory bail to three staff members of the coaching institute and two security guards, PTI quoted Khan’s lawyer as saying.

Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Uttar Pradesh government to file a status report on the investigation into the alleged embezzlement of donations made to the Ram temple in Ayodhya, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant also issued notice to the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust on petitions seeking a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the alleged financial irregularities. The trust manages the temple.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre and Uttar Pradesh government, said that a Special Investigation Team had been constituted and that the probe was underway, with arrests having been made. He offered to submit a status report in a sealed cover.

The bench accepted the request and directed the state to file the report by July 20, The Hindu reported. It also asked the government to include details of the composition of the probe team.

The three-member SIT was formed on June 13 at the request of the temple trust after Opposition leaders and a whistleblower raised questions about how donations were being handled at the temple. It is expected to submit its final report on July 22.

In its preliminary report, submitted to the Uttar Pradesh home department on June 23, the SIT found 70 instances of counting staff hiding bundles of notes and loose cash in their clothes, pockets and shoes. Scroll has seen a copy of the report.

The report alleged that offerings were stolen during the counting process with staff routinely hiding cash on their bodies and walking out with it, as systems meant to stop this were not enforced. It also flagged serious lapses by the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust and the State Bank of India, the banker to the trust.

The report held trustee Anil Mishra, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh leader, responsible for the dilution of security protocols in the counting room but did not recommend any action against him.

While it did not name Champat Rai, the trust’s general secretary, one of his aides was among the eight staffers it recommended the police investigate. The eight persons were also named in a first information report registered on June 25.

Mishra and Rai have resigned from their positions in the trust.

Ram temple trust invites applications for CEO

The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust on Monday invited applications for the post of chief executive officer.

The chief executive officer will report to the trust’s general secretary. The trust has appointed retired Indian Forest Service officer Krishna Mohan as its interim general secretary, after Rai resigned from the post.

The applicants must be practising Hindus. Being a devotee of the deity Ram and belonging to the Vaishnava tradition is listed as a “desirable” qualification.

The candidates must be graduates from a recognised university and have at least 20 years of experience in administration or finance, among other criteria.

The shortlisted candidates will be interviewed by a three-member search committee comprising retired Supreme Court judge Pramod Kohli, retired Lieutenant General Vishnukant Chaturvedi and former National Institute of Technology Raipur Chairperson Suresh Haware, PTI reported.

The selection process is expected to be completed within a month of the July 18 application deadline.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Also read:

• What the SIT report on Ram temple donation theft does and does not say
• In Ayodhya, it’s Sangh Parivar vs Sangh Parivar as Ram temple fund ‘theft’ charges blow up

The Supreme Court on Monday stayed a Madras High Court order banning cow slaughter in Tamil Nadu, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta passed the interim order and issued notice on the special leave petition filed by the state government.

The bench noted that the last paragraph of the High Court order prima facie required a “correction”.

On May 27, the High Court passed a blanket order banning the slaughter of cows and calves across the state on any day. The order came on a public interest litigation filed by the general secretary of the Hindu Makkal Katchi seeking directions to ensure that slaughter in Coimbatore takes place at designated locations and not in public places.

The High Court order came a day before Bakrid.

The Tamil Nadu government argued that the High Court granted a relief “which was neither pleaded nor prayed”, Live Law reported.

Advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing the state, argued that the High Court order was in contrast to the 1958 Tamil Nadu Animal Preservation Act, Live Law reported. The Act allows the slaughter of cows older than age 10 that are unfit for work or breeding, subject to a certificate issued by the authorities.

Similarly, other applicable laws regulate the conditions under which animals may be slaughtered but do not impose a complete ban. The state argued that by directing a blanket prohibition, the High Court had effectively replaced statutory law with judicial legislation.

In its order, the High Court had relied on a Tamil Nadu government order stating that a ban on cow slaughter was necessary to boost milk production and strengthen the rural economy. It also cited Supreme Court precedents holding that cow slaughter is not an essential religious practice associated with Bakrid.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

Hindu and Muslim parties have declined the Supreme Court’s proposal for mediation in the disputes relating to the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi, the Shahi Idgah mosque in Mathura and the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal, Bar and Bench reported on Monday.

The litigants will continue to pursue the cases in court.

The court had sought consent of parties involved in the three cases to engage in mediation of the disputes under the 2026 Supreme Court Action for Mediated Adjudication and Disputes Harmonization Across Nation Samadhan Samaroh. The initiative began in April and will conclude with a Special Lok Adalat in August.

In the Gyanvapi case, the Hindu litigants have claimed that an oval-shaped object found on the mosque premises in May 2022 is a shivling, a representation of the Hindu deity Shiva. However, the caretaker committee of the mosque has maintained that the object was a defunct fountainhead in the wazu khana, or ablution tank.

In January 2024, a Varanasi court allowed Hindus to offer prayers in the basement of the Gyanvapi complex after an Archaeological Survey of India report claimed that a Hindu temple that existed at the site was destroyed in the 17th century and built over.

In the Shahi Idgah case, the plaintiffs have claimed that the mosque was built at the spot where Hindu deity Krishna was born after demolishing a temple there.

The Sambhal mosque dispute stems from a petition claiming that the Shahi Jama Masjid was built in 1526 by Mughal ruler Babar on the site of the “centuries-old Shri Hari Har Temple dedicated to Lord Kalki”.

In November 2024, a civil court in Sambhal ordered a survey of the mosque. Violence erupted in Sambhal when a team returned to conduct a second survey. Five persons were killed in the violence.

Edited by Nachiket Deuskar.

The Supreme Court on Monday set aside Gauhati High Court judgements that had declared 27 persons to be foreigners, Live Law reported.

Remanding the cases to foreigners tribunals for fresh adjudication, a bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta held that determining citizenship and foreigner status carries a “high field of constitutional significance” and must be decided through a “fair, lawful and reasonable” process.

The foreigners tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship based on lineage and a 1971 cut-off date. They rely primarily on documents submitted by persons to establish their family’s residency in Assam or India before 1971.

Those declared foreigners by the tribunals have the option to appeal the decision before the High Court or the Supreme Court.

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

In the lead case in the batch of petitions heard by the Supreme Court, the Gauhati High Court had dismissed the challenge to a foreigners tribunal order declaring the petitioners to be foreigners, reported Live Law.

The High Court had also noted that none of the appellants had challenged the tribunal’s order for nearly 23 years. While acknowledging that they should be given a fair opportunity to establish their Indian citizenship, it said that such an opportunity could not be “enlarged into an endless exercise”, the legal news outlet reported.

On Monday, without commenting on the merits of the appellants’ claims, the Supreme Court said that the government’s objectives of preventing illegal immigration cannot “come at the cost of procedural fairness”.

In view of this, the bench set aside the Gauhati High Court judgements and the corresponding opinions and orders passed by the foreigners tribunals, reported Live Law.

“The concerned tribunals shall decide the cases afresh and uninfluenced by any of the observations made by the High Court or by the tribunals in the earlier opinions,” said the bench.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

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

A suspended staffer in the office of the Badrinath-Kedarnath Temple Committee chairperson has been arrested in connection with the alleged theft of donations from the Badrinath shrine, PTI quoted the police as saying on Monday.

Pramod Nautiyal, who served as a personal assistant in the chairperson’s office, was arrested on Sunday night from his home in Uttarakhand’s Dehradun, according to the news agency.

He was taken to Badrinath for questioning and is expected to be produced before a court on Monday, said Chamoli Senior Superintendent of Police Surjit Singh Panwar.

On July 7, the Uttarakhand Police registered a first information report against Nautiyal under charges of alleged theft by a clerk or servant and aggravated criminal breach of trust of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

The temple committee had served a show-cause notice to him on July 3 after the alleged irregularities came to light. Following this, a four-member inquiry panel conducted a preliminary investigation.

The investigation found that the counting of offerings made in the temple’s donation plate on July 2 “established that temple funds were illegally removed from the donation counting centre between 9 am and 9.30 am”.

The temple committee had suspended Nautiyal and filed a complaint accusing him of unlawfully taking the donation money for “personal gains”.

Nautiyal was also directed not to leave the temple committee’s headquarters without approval from the authorities.

Hemant Dwivedi, the trust’s chairman, had said that “the suspended man has been an employee during the term of three former chairpersons”.

Dwivedi added that the action “was taken so that no tampering can be done during the investigation”, adding that the probe aims to “ascertain the level of misappropriation in the counting centre”.

Following the developments, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami had directed the formation of a three-member “high-level committee” to probe the allegations.

The committee has been directed to submit its report to the state government within 15 days.

The developments came days after allegations that donations made to the Ram temple in Ayodhya had been embezzled.

Edited by Sara Varghese.

Criticising the Union government for delaying statehood for Jammu and Kashmir, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah asked on Sunday if he should approach United States President Donald Trump with his request and hold a demonstration outside the White House, reported The Indian Express.

“Our patience is running out,” the National Conference leader was quoted as saying by The Times of India. “First they said statehood won’t come by raising it in Assembly, then not by protesting in Jammu and Kashmir. Now they say we won’t get it at Jantar Mantar either. Should I go to Donald Trump at White House to seek J&K’s statehood?”

Until the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Union government clarifies this, we will “hold demonstrations and knock on the doors in our own national capital” to demand the restoration of Jammu and Kashmir’s statehood, added Omar Abdullah.

The National Conference is slated to hold a protest in New Delhi on the first day of the Monsoon Session of Parliament, seeking that statehood for the Union Territory be restored.

The Monsoon Session of Parliament will be held from July 20 to August 13.

On August 5, 2019, Article 370 of the Constitution – which granted special status to Jammu and Kashmir – was abrogated and the erstwhile state was split into two Union Territories: Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir.

In December 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the validity of the 2019 order abrogating Article 370 and ordered the Centre to restore statehood to Jammu and Kashmir.

In October, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that statehood would be restored to Jammu and Kashmir at an “appropriate time” after discussions with political stakeholders.

On Saturday, Omar Abdullah asked the Union government to clarify what it means by an “appropriate time”.

“I ask them, for God’s sake, how will we know that the appropriate time has come,” the chief minister had asked. “What do I and my colleagues have to do to reach that appropriate time?”

He also questioned whether the “appropriate time” implies the BJP coming to power in Jammu and Kashmir.

“Have the courage to say it publicly,” said Omar Abdullah. “At least, we will not remain in this deception that you will fulfil the promise.”

Two days before this, his father and National Conference chief Farooq Abdullah urged leaders across political lines to join the party’s protest on July 20.

Farooq Abdullah questioned why the Union government has offered “no timeline” for when statehood will be restored to Jammu and Kashmir.

“This is not merely a delay,” he wrote. “It is an affront to the democratic will of an entire people.”

Edited by Sara Varghese.

India ranked 176th out of 177 countries in the 2026 Environment Performance Index, a global assessment of environmental health, ecosystem vitality and climate change mitigation.

It also ranked last among the eight South Asian countries assessed, behind Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Maldives and Bangladesh.

India scored 22.4 out of 100, compared with 74.79 for Estonia, the highest-ranked country in the index.

Compiled every two years by researchers from Yale and Columbia universities and other institutions, the Environment Performance Index evaluated 177 countries.

The countries were assessed across 47 indicators covering 12 categories and three broad policy objectives: environmental health, ecosystem vitality and climate change mitigation.

India ranked 174th in environmental health, 171st in ecosystem vitality and 130th in climate change mitigation.

“India, whose per-capita emissions remain relatively low but are growing rapidly, faces an acute development-versus-pollution tension as hundreds of millions of people gain access to modern energy services but at the price of serious urban air pollution and spiking [green house gas] emissions,” the report noted.

Several of India’s air quality indicators in the last 10 years, including the burden of death and disease from exposure to fine particulate matter and exposure to carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide, showed negative values.

The Environment Performance Index researchers said that India’s weak performance reflected critical air quality problems, continued reliance on coal-fired power and inadequate biodiversity protections.

Despite ranking near the bottom, India recorded an improvement over the past decade under the index’s measure of 10-year change. Its score on this metric was +7.47.

According to Zachary Wendling, the index’s research director, applying the current methodology to historical data shows that India’s overall performance has improved over time, The Wire reported.

While emissions remain high, the rate of increase of some pollutants, including sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides, has slowed, he told The Wire. “While emissions of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases are still too high and rising, they are not rising as quickly as they have in the past,” he was quoted as saying.

When the 2022 Environment Performance Index ranked India last among 180 countries, the Union environment ministry had said that it “does not accept” the index’s analysis and conclusions, The Wire reported. It cited changes in methodology and alleged that the index was based on “surmises and unscientific methods”.

The ministry also said the index failed to account for India’s historically low per-capita emissions and objected to changes in the weighting of environmental indicators, the news outlet reported.

Responding to the criticism, the Environment Performance Index’s lead scientist told The Wire that the rankings have always been based on the current state of environmental conditions rather than historical emissions or policy intentions.

Written by Tanya Shrivastava. Edited by Sara Varghese.

Assam activist Pranab Doley, who has been opposing a proposed luxury hotel near Kaziranga National Park, was arrested on Sunday in connection with a June 28 protest against the project in Golaghat district.

Doley has been booked under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to criminal conspiracy, unlawful assembly, criminal trespass, rioting, obstructing public servants from carrying out their duties and criminal intimidation.

A Guwahati police official told @scroll_in that activist Pranab Doley, who has been protesting against a proposed luxury hotel in the vicinity of Kaziranga, has been arrested in Guwahati in connection with a Golaghat case. The hotel is threatening the livelihood of 1500 Aadivasi pic.twitter.com/6uKSayXX77

— Rokibuz Zaman (@ZamanRokibuz_) July 12, 2026

The first information report was registered on the basis of a complaint by Sub-Inspector Sujib Basumatary, in-charge of the Kohora outpost under the Bokakhat police station in Golaghat district. It names 16 persons, including Doley, and around 50 unidentified persons.

The FIR alleged that Doley was the “mastermind” behind an “unlawful assembly” at Rongajan field in Kohora on June 28. Kohora is the main entry point to Kaziranga National Park.

The proposed hotel is to come up at Ingleng Pathar near the national park, where about 45 farming families depend on a 19-acre plot. Of this, 9.9 acres have been earmarked for the project. Although the land has been classified as government land, the families have been paying land revenue on it for more than a decade, Mongabay reported.

Doley has said that the project would infringe on the rights of local communities and block animal corridors, The Hindu reported.

In the FIR, the police alleged that at about 2.30 pm on June 28, the protesters entered the proposed hotel site. They were allegedly armed with machetes and sharp sticks.

“The unlawful assembly ignored the lawful directions of the police and forcibly entered the premises and started removing the survey ribbons and other demarcation materials installed by the architects [of the hotel],” the FIR said. “They also raised anti-government slogans.”

It added: “The unlawful assembly proceeded towards the cement mixer machine…threatened the construction workers with dire consequences and compelled them to flee from the worksite.”

It also alleged that 12 police personnel were injured in the incident.

“Pranab Doley and others, again instigated the crowd and threatened that they would bring persons from Silchar, Dibrugarh, Sivsagar, Tinsukia and Khumtai,” the FIR said. “If their demands were not fulfilled, they would mobilise tea garden workers from across Assam to launch further agitations like road blocks and paralyse the administrative structure.”

On Sunday, Doley was detained from Guwahati, where he was staying with a friend. He was taken to Golaghat on Sunday night and remanded to seven days of police custody on Monday.

Doley alleged that he was taken into custody without being shown any documents.

“If we can’t raise the voice for the people, what kind of democracy is this?” he told reporters while being escorted to a police vehicle. “No paper has been given to us. I am being kidnapped…Why am I being taken into custody? They don’t allow peaceful democratic protest. The authoritarianism of Himanta Biswa Sarma will not be tolerated.”

Opposition, land rights groups condemn arrest

Assam Congress president and MP Gaurav Gogoi described the arrest as an attempt to silence “any voice critical of the government and turn citizens into mute spectators”.

“The actions of this government only expose the hollowness of the [Bharatiya Janata Party’s] claims of protecting indigenous rights in Assam,” Gogoi said on social media.

Land rights organisation, the Bhumi Adhikar Joutha Sangram Samiti, described Doley’s arrest as “arbitrary” and “unjust”.

It alleged that the Assam Police had targeted Doley for leading the struggle to protect the land rights of Assam’s working people.

It also noted that only a few days earlier, Adit Chandra Rabha, adviser to the Borduar Tea Garden Land Patta Demand Committee and a prominent land rights leader, had also been arrested for his role in defending the land rights of indigenous and working communities.

“Pranab Doley has now been arrested as part of a similar conspiracy,” the land rights group said.

Inputs by Rokibuz Zaman. Edited by Tanya Shrivastava.

Mumbai is reclaiming the sea again. This time so that cars can exit a tunnel faster.

Near Girgaum Chowpatty, where Marine Drive curves into the sea, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority proposes to reclaim about 2,200 square metres of the Arabian Sea and widen the road from eight lanes to 13, absorbing traffic from the Orange Gate tunnel that will connect the Eastern Freeway to the Coastal Road.

The Maharashtra Coastal Zone Management Authority has cleared the lane reconfiguration. Final approval now rests with the Union environment ministry. All this in a city where fewer than one in 10 trips is made by car.

How Mumbai moves

Mumbai’s suburban railway network carries about 80 lakh passengers every day, according to 2025-’26 figures. The metro network adds around nine lakh riders across its lines. BEST buses, even in their diminished state, carry close to 30 lakh passengers.

Autorickshaws and taxis move millions across the metropolitan region, but no reliable data is available for the total number.

Against this, roughly 15 lakh people commute by car daily. Public transport moves nearly eight times as many people as cars do. Yet, the car has a majority claim on road space, public capital and political attention. In a city of an estimated 1.2 crore daily public transport commuters, the imbalance is absurd.

Investments in road expansion

The scale of the current road-building investments is unprecedented.

The Coastal Road’s southern phase alone – 10.58 km from Marine Lines to the Worli end of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link – has cost Rs 14,977 crore. There have been seven price escalations from its 2018 estimate.

The remaining 19 km of the corridor to Kandivali is still under construction.

The Goregaon-Mulund Link Road, at Rs 14,000 crore, includes twin 4.7-km tunnels bored beneath Sanjay Gandhi National Park, for which 19.43 hectares of forest land inside a protected area have been diverted.

Now, the plan to widen the Orange Gate tunnel and the Marine Drive extend the same logic southward.

The Coastal Road bans two-wheelers, autorickshaws and heavy vehicles. Two-wheeler users outnumber car users on Mumbai’s roads, while autorickshaws are crucial connectors for the suburbs. The city’s largest transport investment is engineered to exclude the majority of its own vehicle users, apart from every transit user.

The congestion will return

The promise attached to this spending deserves scrutiny. The Coastal Road is projected to carry 1.3 lakh vehicles a day and to cut the journey from South Mumbai to the western suburbs from two hours to 40 minutes. At Mumbai’s car occupancies, 1.3 lakh vehicles is roughly two lakh people – about one-fiftieth of the city’s daily public transport ridership.

“Reducing travel time for cars” is the old dictum of mid-20th-century traffic engineering, and it fails on its own terms. Added road capacity fills with induced traffic within a few years and the congestion returns, at a higher volume of cars.

The evidence runs across cities and for decades.

In 2008, Houston widened its Katy Freeway to 26 lanes at a cost of $2.8 billion dollars. Within three years, peak commutes were 30% to 55% longer. Los Angeles has expanded its freeways for seventy years and remains a byword for gridlock. Seoul went the other way and demolished an elevated expressway through its centre to showcase a river.

No city in the world has built its way out of congestion, though many have disfigured themselves trying. Road expansion in a dense city without road pricing, transit investments, parking restraints and land-use policy is an expensive way of purchasing the inevitable congestion a few years later, with more cars in it.

Prioritise public transport

The first claim on Mumbai's transport budget should be its public transport commuters. Nearly 66,500 people died on the suburban railway between 2004 and 2024 – around nine deaths a day. A toll of this magnitude, sustained over two decades, is a public health crisis. Spending on capacity and comfort is spending on safety and sustainability.

The Rs 14,977 crore sunk into the Coastal Road’s first 10.58 km would have bought more than 180 new air-conditioned 12-car local trains. The railways’ entire 238-train fleet-modernisation programme is sanctioned at Rs 19,293 crore. That money could also have bought more than 8,000 electric buses, three times the fleet the BEST currently runs.

The buses need that investment most urgently. The BEST ran 4,700 buses in 2011 and carried over 42 lakh passengers a day. By January, the fleet had shrunk to 2,744, of which only 249 are owned by the undertaking. Ridership has fallen below 30 lakh. The wet-leased buses that now dominate the fleet break down at three times the rate of the BEST's own vehicles.

Alongside expansion, the city’s various modes of transit must be stitched into one system. The new metro lines, built under separate contracts and institutional arrangements, are poorly integrated with one another. They do not meld in – in ticketing, fares, interchange or information - with the railway and buses that carry seven times their ridership. The platform navigation between two public modes is confusing and cumbersome.

London shows that fragmented contracting is no excuse. Its buses are run by private operators, its rail lines by different concessionaires but the passenger never sees any of it, because Transport for London is one authority with one fare system and one map.

Mumbai has achieved the inversion with many agencies and a fragmented system, after spending crores of public money. A single integrated network should also reach the places like the northern areas of Nalasopara and the Vasai-Virar belt, where formal public transport is thin to absent and lakhs of commuters depend on autorickshaws alone.

These “transit deserts” hold the city's fastest-growing working population. They appear nowhere in the urban transport policy blueprint.

Surrendering the city to cars

There is also an honest accounting to be made of what road expansion has already taken from the city. Reclamation has altered the shoreline, access to the sea and the intertidal ecology, forest land under a national park has been diverted for a vehicular tunnel. Now, the sea vistas and public spaces of Marine Drive are on the table. Crossing 13 lanes at Girgaum Chowpatty on foot will be hostile.

The city will have engineered its own separation from the seafront it reclaimed the road from. There is also going to be a behavioural shift. People who once thought twice before driving to South Mumbai are already bringing their cars, and the Coastal Road and Orange Gate tunnel will pour that induced traffic into the narrow streets around Churchgate and Mantralaya, which cannot be widened. When a city plans for more traffic, it will get more traffic.

The National Urban Transport Policy of 2006 committed India to planning for the movement of people rather than vehicles, and to prioritising public transport and pedestrians in the allocation of road space. Twenty years on, Mumbai is executing the opposite of our own national policy.

The explanation is political: decision-makers travel by car, road contracts are lucrative in ways that bus procurement never will, and a fatality on an overcrowded train has less political weight than a traffic jam at Peddar Road.

A Look-East policy for urban transport

The alternative blueprint is visible to Mumbai’s East, not its West. Tokyo manages an agglomeration of nearly four crore people with railways carrying the overwhelming share of motorised trips, built through decades of relentless investment in rail capacity, seamless interchange and integrated fares.

Mumbai already has what most cities like Bangalore would like to develop: crores of daily riders and a culture of commuting. It is a pedestrian and commuter city.

Its administrators must fix the trains so commuters stop dying on them. Rebuild the bus fleet. Stitch the metro, the railway and the buses into one system that reaches every locality in the region. Invest in moving people, not vehicles alone.

They must read the evening queue outside every suburban station for what it is. It is not an accidental growth in an accommodative city but a policy choice of spending public money into expanding a lane instead of a bus. Mumbai’s commuters have stood in that queue long enough.

Rutul Joshi is a Professor and Chair of urban planning program at CEPT University, Ahmedabad.

The counter-intelligence unit of the Jammu and Kashmir Police on Sunday arrested three publishers in a case linked to the circulation of two books that allegedly contained “pro-separatist content”, reported PTI.

The arrests came a week after the administration in the Union Territory suspended eight officials and terminated a contractual employee from service following protests by the Bharatiya Janata Party against the content of the books.

The books – Personalities and Legends of J&K by Hilal Ahmed and Santosh Meena and Great Personalities of Jammu and Kashmir by Dr Sushant Giri – were also withdrawn from school libraries.

On Sunday, the police arrested Inderpaul Singh from Oberoi Book Service, and Amardeep Singh and Girish Arora from the Noida-based Dominant Publishers.

The role of the publishers in the distribution of books deemed to contain “highly inappropriate content” was being investigated, unidentified officials were quoted as saying by The Indian Express.

While 123 copies of one book were distributed to the Jammu, Ramban and Udhampur districts, 128 copies of the other book were sent to the Jammu and Baramulla districts, reported PTI.

On July 4, the police had registered a case under Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita sections pertaining to abetment of an offence, criminal conspiracy, endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, promoting enmity and disharmony, publishing or circulating false statements, rumours or reports, as well as the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

Both Oberoi Book Service and Dominant Publishers were also blacklisted by the government, according to the news agency.

On July 6, the counter-intelligence unit of the police conducted raids at premises linked to the publication houses, reported The Indian Express.

Content of the books and protests

The book Personalities and Legends of J&K contained a detailed passage on Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front founder Maqbool Bhat, who was hanged in 1984 for seeking independence for Kashmir.

An official spokesperson was quoted as saying by The Hindu that the inclusion of the reference reflected “serious negligence, dereliction of duty and lack of proper due diligence”.

The books were supplied to school libraries as part of the Samagra Shiksha education

The BJP had protested against this, with Leader of Opposition Sunil Sharma accusing the Union Territory’s National Conference government of promoting “academic jihad”.

“This is not history or education,” Sharma said. “This is academic subversion. It is academic jihad against India. The book attempts to revive separatist ideology among the youth.”

Soon after, the Jammu and Kashmir government directed heads of public and recognised private schools, as well as coaching centres in the Kashmir division, to review all books on their premises for “inappropriate or objectionable content”.

The heads of institutions had also been instructed to submit certificates to their respective chief or zonal education officers confirming that no book on campus contains any “objectionable material”.

Edited by Sara Varghese.