Air India, IndiGo and SpiceJet have told the Union government that the country’s aviation sector is on the verge of “stopping operations”, and have sought a revision in aviation turbine fuel prices amid the conflict in West Asia, PTI reported on Tuesday.

“In order to survive, sustain and continue operation, we request your urgent intervention for immediate and meaningful financial support to tide over the current situation,” the Federation of Indian Airlines said in a letter on April 26. The federation represents the three airlines.

This came against the backdrop of the West Asia conflict, which began on February 28 and has disrupted energy supplies to India. The war has also pushed up global oil prices and led to airspace restrictions that have increased operating costs. Aviation turbine fuel accounts for about 40% of an airline’s operating expenses.

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

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

The airlines have also sought that the excise duty on aviation turbine fuel, currently set at 11%, be temporarily deferred.

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

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

The airlines said that Delhi, the country’s largest aviation hub, has the second-highest value-added tax on aviation turbine fuel at 25%. The highest rate, 29%, is charged in Tamil Nadu, they said.

“The other major aviation cities…Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Kolkata range between 16% and 20%,” the news agency quoted the federation as saying. “These six cities cover more than 50% of airlines’ operations within India.”

Since the conflict in West Asia broke out, Iran has effectively blocked the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterbody connecting the Gulf to the Arabian Sea, for most international commercial vessels. About 20% of global petroleum supply passes through the maritime chokepoint.

Two Indians and their companies are among 23 persons and entities sanctioned by the United States for allegedly being part of a global supply chain linked to a Mexico-based drug cartel.

Satishkumar Hareshbhai Sutaria and Yuktakumari Ashishkumar Modi are among the individuals mentioned in a list of sanctioned entities published by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control on April 23.

The sanctions mean that all US properties of the persons and entities listed are to be blocked and reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The US treasury department alleged that Sutaria and Modi, through the companies SR Chemicals and Agrat Chemicals, facilitated the sale and shipment of precursor chemicals to Mexico and Guatemala by falsely labelling them as safe chemicals. These precursor chemicals were used to produce illicit fentanyl, the department alleged.

Both were arrested by the Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad in connection with the allegations in March 2025. They got bail from the Gujarat High Court in February, The Indian Express reported.

Sutaria and Modi have been booked under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act. A chargesheet against them was filed on May 15, and they are now awaiting trial.

On Tuesday, the United States Embassy in India said that Indian law enforcement authorities were “instrumental in disrupting key elements of this criminal network”.

The Gujarat ATS alleges that Sutaria and Modi and been smuggling precursor chemicals from Maharashtra to Guatemala-based J&C Imports, which is suspected to be a front for Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, according to The Indian Express.

However, the case registered in Gujarat does not mention SR Chemicals or Agrat Chemicals.

A Guatemala -based broker of fentanyl precursors, Jaime Augusto Barrientos Camaz, was also among those sanctioned by the United States on April 23. Barrientos allegedly sourced the precursor chemicals from Agrat Chemicals and SR Chemicals, according to the US treasury department.

Barrientos and J&C are also among the individuals and entities sanctioned by the United States.

These actions are part of a crackdown by the United States against gangs allegedly pushing illicit drugs, including fentanyl and methamphetamine, into the US. The Sinaloa cartel, said to be among the world’s most powerful drug cartels, was among eight such groups declared as foreign terrorist organisations by the US State Department on February 20, 2025.

Messaging platform WhatsApp has banned 9,400 accounts linked to “digital arrest” scams following an investigation launched in January, Live Law quoted a status report filed by the Union government before the Supreme Court as saying.

The Ministry of Home Affairs informed the court that the action was part of a coordinated effort involving multiple agencies to address the problem of impersonation-based cyber fraud.

WhatsApp stated that its investigation went beyond inputs shared by government agencies, treating them as starting points to identify and dismantle wider criminal networks rather than isolated accounts, Live Law reported. .

While about 3,800 accounts had been flagged by authorities, WhatsApp said that its internal processes enabled it to act against a much larger network involved in such scams.

According to submissions placed before the court, many accounts targeting Indian users were operated from organised scam centres in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia.

WhatsApp told an Inter-Departmental Committee in March that it had introduced and strengthened several enforcement tools, including systems to detect misuse of official logos, logging of account display names and machine learning models designed to identify evolving scam patterns.

It also said that it maintains a database of known scam-related assets to detect repeat offenders, Bar and Bench reported.

The company added that it is developing further safeguards, such as warnings for suspicious first-time messages, visibility of account age for unknown contacts and enhanced caller identification features, the legal news outlet reported.

The status report also noted that WhatsApp is working on “SIM binding” or linking accounts to physical SIM cards, The Hindu reported.

It has also agreed to retain data of deleted accounts for at least 180 days to support law enforcement investigations, the newspaper quoted the report as saying.

The report, filed through the Attorney General R Venkataramani on behalf of the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre, forms part of ongoing suo moto proceedings initiated by the Supreme Court in response to a rise in digital arrest scams in the country.

The court had on December 1 also extended a “free hand” to the agency to launch an anti-corruption investigation into bankers involved in the opening of mule accounts linked to cyber crimes.

The bench had expressed shock at the “staggering amounts” digital arrest scammers have been able to siphon off from India.

Government data cited in the report indicated that more than 2.41 lakh complaints related to digital arrest scams have been recorded, involving losses of approximately Rs 30,000 crore, according to The Hindu.

‘Digital arrest’ scams

In cases of “digital arrest”, criminals usually orchestrate the fraud by posing as law enforcement officers, often wearing uniforms and making video calls to victims from locations made to resemble government offices or police stations. They demand money for a “compromise” and “closure of a case” against the victims.

In some cases, the victims are “digitally arrested” with the scamsters claiming that the persons are required to be visible until their demands are met.

In January 2025, Scroll published a series of extensive reports about Chinese crime syndicates that run cyber crime centres from Southeast Asia, mainly Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos. These highly sophisticated “scam compounds” are staffed with thousands of people, many of them from India, who are lured with fake job offers and then forced to work on scamming people back home.

Also read:

• My father lost Rs 10 lakh in a digital arrest scam. Here’s how he got some money back

• ‘Felt like I was under hypnosis’: How digital arrest scams dupe Indians of their hard-earned money

The draft electric vehicle policy issued by the Delhi government on April 11 aims to promote electrification for vehicles through a mix of incentives, road-tax waivers and restrictions on new registrations of vehicles that use petrol and diesel.

However, the policy suffers from two fundamental limitations that require urgent reconsideration. First, the policy frames the measures as a solution to air pollution and, indirectly, as a justification for extending subsidies for switching to electric to even car users who are among the most affluent in the city.

Such a framing is myopic because it assumes that air pollution is the only effect of transport. Automobile use also hurts the health of residents through traffic injuries, reduced physical activity, traffic noise and by occupying scarce public space.

Beyond health, vehicle production contributes to carbon dioxide emissions, while battery manufacturing relies on minerals such as lithium, cobalt and nickel, the extraction of which is the subject of serious environmental and social concerns globally.

By presenting electrification of two-wheelers, three-wheelers, four-wheeled goods vehicles and passenger cars primarily as an air pollution solution, the policy narrows the scope of what should be a much broader rethinking of urban mobility.

The more pertinent question is not simply how to reduce air pollution, but how to do so while simultaneously addressing climate change, improving road safety, enabling walking and cycling and reclaiming urban space for more egalitarian use.

The second limitation is more structural: the policy is almost entirely silent on the street governance of vehicle charging. Nowhere does it engage with the question of urban space, particularly the curb, the edge of the road. In a city like Delhi, where onstreet parking is widespread and largely unregulated, the curbside is already a highly contested space. There is a severe lack of formal parking locations to accommodate the rising number of cars every year.

The combined capacity of the parking facilities in the city’s two municipal areas is estimated at around 60,000 cars. Even if we assume that each parking space is used by an average of three cars per day, this is miniscule compared to the total car population of 21 lakh.

Unsurprisingly, improper parking is the largest category of on-the-spot challans given by Delhi Police totalling more than four lakhs per year.

There are also rapidly increasing cases of parking disputes leading to road-rage and some even resulting in deaths. The number of calls made to police every year to report such cases more than tripled over a brief period of 2021 to 2023.

Besides parked cars, curb space is used by street vendors, pedestrians, buses and para transit users, and delivery vehicles. Introducing large numbers of electric vehicles in the city without a clear framework for how charging infrastructure will be integrated into this space risks deepening existing conflicts.

Who gets priority access to the curb? Will charging stations displace pedestrians or street vendors? Or will they simply formalise the current practice of cars occupying public land for free, as is the status currently?

The framework to answer these questions has already been codified in the Delhi Maintenance and Management of Parking Places Rules, 2019. Despite more than five years since its notification, the parking policy has seen limited implementation. These rules recognise parking as a demand management tool and provide a detailed guidance framework for developing Parking Area Management plans in consultation with local stakeholders to rationalise the use of street space.

The rules give clear priority of using on-street spaces to pedestrians and cyclists, formal and para-transit users, and street vendors, while short-duration parking is at the end of this list.

Yet, the draft electric vehicle policy makes no mention of these rules, not even as a footnote, even while acknowledging that the land parcels will have to be identified for public charging stations.

The word parking does not occur even once in the policy. This omission has serious consequences. Planning for space for charging stations without embedding it within parking management plans risks giving automobiles precedence, which goes against the priority given in government's own parking rules.

A more forward-looking electric vehicle policy must do three things differently. First, it should explicitly integrate electrification with parking reform, making strict implementation (and not just formulation) of Parking Area Management Plans a condition for public charging stations to be deployed in areas. This would ensure that electrification goes only as fast as the governance in the city provides space for it, and that the curb space is allocated transparently and equitably.

Second, the policy should aim for a transformative impact by shifting incentives towards smaller, lighter, and slower vehicles that use less space and pose lower risks to others. The subsidy should be progressively reduced for larger passenger vehicles, based on, for example, engine size, to nudge consumers towards low-powered, smaller vehicles, and should be completely removed for personal cars.

The inclusion of electric bicycles in the previous EV policy (2020-’24) framework was a step in this direction. Their absence represents a missed opportunity.

Electrification is undoubtedly an important part of Delhi’s response to air pollution. But if pursued in isolation from questions of space, safety, and equity, it risks reinforcing the very problems it seeks to solve. A true reset would require moving beyond a vehicle-centric approach to one that places people, and the shared use of urban space, at its core.

Rahul Goel is an Associate Professor, Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre, at IIT Delhi. His email address is rgoel@iitd.ac.in.

The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday sought a response from the Central Bureau of Investigation on a plea filed by Congress MLA Vinay Kulkarni challenging his conviction and life sentence in the 2016 murder of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yogeshgouda Goudar, Live Law reported.

A division bench of Justices Venkatesh Naik and Mohammed Nawaz was hearing Kulkarni’s petition against the trial court’s April 15 verdict. The High Court issued notice to the CBI and directed its registry to call for the trial court records.

Goudar was killed in June 2016. The case had been investigated by the CBI.

The central agency had filed a chargesheet for murder, criminal conspiracy, public servant disobeying the law to shield a person accused in a matter, destruction of evidence, rioting and illegal possession of weapons.

On April 15, the trial court convicted Kulkarni along with 15 others. Two days later, it sentenced the Dharwad MLA to life imprisonment.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Kulkarni’s counsel requested an early listing of the matter on Wednesday. The CBI, however, sought time to file its objections, noting that the trial court judgement runs is 680-pages long.

The court said that the CBI can seek the time they require for filing response before the vacation bench when the matter is taken up, Live Law reported.

Kulkarni had been arrested in November 2020, but was granted bail by the Supreme Court in August 2021.

The top court cancelled his bail in June 2025, observing that there was credible evidence of him having tried to influence witnesses during the trial.

Kulkarni was the Dharwad MLA between 2013 and 2018, when he lost the polls. He again became the MLA in 2023.

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Appellate tribunals set up as part of the special intensive revision process in West Bengal allowed 1,468 names to be added back to the electoral rolls, a day ahead of the second phase of the state Assembly election. These electors will be able to vote on Wednesday.

It is unclear how many cases could be heard by the tribunals before the polling begins for the second phase of West Bengal elections. Earlier, the Election Commission had said that the 19 appellate tribunals had received 34 lakh applications. Of these, seven lakh were against names being included in the rolls and 27 lakh were filed by persons who were excluded. Read on.

Aam Aadmi Party leader Manish Sisodia said that he too “will not participate” personally or through a lawyer before a Delhi High Court bench of Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma. The judge is hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s challenge to him and several others being discharged in the liquor policy case.

This came a day after party chief Arvind Kejriwal said that he would not appear before Sharma. In his letter to the judge, Sisodia said that his doubts about her impartiality in the case stood unresolved, adding that he was in “respectful agreement” with the position taken by Kejriwal.

On April 20, Sharma rejected a plea filed by Sisodia and others that she recuse herself from hearing the case. The petition had raised concerns about her “perceived ideological proximity”, referring to Sharma attending events of an organisation linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Read on.

The Delhi High Court granted interim bail for one week to jailed Lok Sabha MP Abdul Rashid Sheikh to visit his critically ill father. Sheikh, who is popularly known as Engineer Rashid, has been in jail since August 2019 in connection with a terror-funding case filed by the National Investigation Agency. He has been held under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

On April 24, a Delhi court dismissed the Baramulla MP’s petition for interim bail, after which he approached the High Court.

Noting that Sheikh has been in jail for more than six years, the High Court on Tuesday allowed the MP to visit his father. The court directed that the MP be accompanied by two police officials in plain clothes. It also said that he remain at the hospital or at the house where his father is present. Read on.

An Adivasi man in Odisha exhumed his sister’s body and took her skeletal remains to a bank branch to prove that she had died two months ago, so that he could withdraw money that was deposited in her name. The incident occurred at the Maliposi branch of the Odisha Grameen Bank, a regional rural bank sponsored by the Indian Overseas Bank.

The police said that bank officials failed to explain the correct procedure for withdrawing the money to the man. Jeetu Munda, was seeking to withdraw Rs 20,000 from the account of his elder sister Kalra Munda, who died on January 26. He said that bank officials repeatedly told him “to bring the account holder to withdraw money deposited in her name”, even though he told them that she was dead.

The man said he eventually exhumed her body “out of frustration”. The police later took away the skeletal remains and buried them again. Read on.

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Six names were removed from the voter lists, according to the newspaper. Out of these, five are Muslims, and one is a Hindu woman, said Kolkata-based research organisation Sabar Institute.

The 1,468 electors added back to the rolls can vote on Wednesday, the Hindustan Times quoted an unidentified Election Commission official as saying.

“The polling station-wise names of voters, whose names have been included or deleted, has been uploaded on the website,” the official was quoted as saying. “We would also give a copy of the updated list to the political parties, candidates, the returning officers and district election officers. The individual electors would be informed through the booth level officers.”

However, there was no clarity on how many cases could be heard by the tribunals before the polling begins for the second phase of West Bengal elections on Wednesday.

Earlier, the Election Commission had said that the 19 appellate tribunals had received 34 lakh applications. Of these, seven lakh were against names being included in the rolls and 27 lakh were filed by persons who were excluded.

In the second phase of the West Bengal election, polling will take place in 142 Assembly constituencies. The first phase of polling in the state was held on April 23. Votes will be counted on May 4.

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

Ahead of the first phase of the election on April 23, the Election Commission added the names of 139 voters whose appeals had been accepted by the appellate tribunals. The names of eight voters were deleted from the rolls.

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

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

SIR appellate tribunals

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

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

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

Also read: The Bengal result will decide the future of Indian electoral democracy

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday granted one week of interim bail to jailed Lok Sabha MP Abdul Rashid Sheikh to visit his critically ill father, Bar and Bench reported.

Sheikh, who is popularly known as Engineer Rashid, has been in jail since August 2019 in connection with a terror-funding case filed by the National Investigation Agency. He has been held under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.

On April 24, a Delhi court dismissed the Baramulla MP’s petition for interim bail, after which he approached the High Court.

Noting that Sheikh has been in custody for more than six years, the High Court granted him interim bail on the condition that he be accompanied by two police officials in plain clothes, Live Law reported.

The court directed that he remain at the hospital or at the house where his father is present. It also said he must use only one mobile phone number, which should remain switched on at all times, Live Law reported.

Sheikh was directed not to contact any witnesses or attempt to influence them. He was also asked to furnish a personal bond of Rs 1 lakh and a surety of the same amount.

In July 2024, Sheikh was granted custody parole for two hours to take the oath in Parliament. He had contested and won the 2024 Lok Sabha election from Baramulla while in jail, defeating National Conference leader Omar Abdullah.

He was also released from Delhi’s Tihar jail in October to allow him to campaign for the Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir.

An Adivasi man in Odisha’s Keonjhar district on Monday exhumed his sister’s body and took her skeletal remains to a branch of the Odisha Grameen Bank to prove that she died two months ago so that he could withdraw money that was deposited in her name, The Indian Express reported.

The incident occurred at the Maliposi branch of the Odisha Grameen Bank, a regional rural bank sponsored by the Indian Overseas Bank.

The man, Jeetu Munda, was seeking to withdraw Rs 20,000 from the bank account of his elder sister, Kalra Munda, PTI reported. The inspector-in-charge at the Patna police station, Kiran Prasad Sahu, said that the bank failed to explain the correct process for withdrawing the money to the man.

Kalra Munda died on January 26.

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

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

The police took away the skeletal remains and buried them again, The Indian Express reported.

The woman’s husband and child had died earlier, leaving Jeetu Munda as her sole surviving relative.

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

“The individual who was in an inebriated condition became disruptive and later returned with human remains, reportedly exhumed after being buried a few days earlier, placing them in front of the branch and claiming it to be his sister while demanding withdrawal from her account,” the statement said.

The bank claimed Munda’s action “created a highly distressing situation at the premises”, adding that the local police was immediately informed.

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

The bank added that it was in contact with the local authorities to ensure a death certificate was issued to allow it to settle the claim “on priority”.

A Bengaluru court on Friday sentenced Congress MLA Vinay Kulkarni to life imprisonment for the 2016 murder of Bharatiya Janata Party leader Yogeshgouda Goudar, Bar and Bench reported.

Kulkarni and 15 others had been convicted on Wednesday by a special court. He was also fined Rs 30,000 as part of the sentence delivered on Friday. Kulkarni is the MLA from Dharwad.

Goudar was killed in June 2016. The case had been investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation.

The central agency had filed a chargesheet for murder, criminal conspiracy, public servant disobeying the law to shield a person accused in a matter, destruction of evidence, rioting and illegal possession of weapons, Bar and Bench reported.

Kulkarni had been arrested in November 2020, but was granted bail by the Supreme Court in August 2021.

The top court cancelled his bail in June 2025, observing that there was credible evidence of him having tried to influence witnesses during the trial.

On Wednesday, the special court ruled that Kulkarni and several others accused in the matter had entered into a criminal conspiracy to murder the BJP leader, Bar and Bench reported.

However, Kulkarni was acquitted of charges under the Arms Act.

Kulkarni was the Dharwad MLA between 2013 and 2018, when he lost the polls. He again became the MLA in 2023.

A court in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg on Monday convicted minister Nitesh Rane in a case related to him pouring mud on a civic engineer and tying him to a bridge near Kankavli in 2019, PTI reported.

However, soon after, Additional Sessions Court Judge VS Deshmukh temporarily suspended the sentence to allow the Bharatiya Janata Party leader to appeal the verdict before a higher court.

“Even though Rane’s intention was to raise a voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by the people, he was not supposed to humiliate or insult a public servant in public,” the news agency quoted Deshmukh as saying.

The judge added that such incidents would not allow public servants to “discharge their duties with dignity”.

The incident took place on July 4, 2019, when Rane, who was a Congress MLA from Kankavli at the time, was inspecting potholes on the Mumbai-Goa highway. He was reportedly upset because of the deteriorating condition of the road.

In a video, the legislator was seen pushing the engineer, identified as Prakash Shede, while his supporters poured buckets of mud over the official’s head. A group of Rane’s supporters were then seen tying up Shede by the side of the bridge.

“Throw it [mud] on him,” Rane was heard saying in the video. “Throw it on his head. Now you will understand...What should people do, should they die in front of you? What will happen if the wall collapses?”

Thirty persons, including Rane, were named in the first information report and were charged with offences pertaining to rioting, assault to deter a public servant and criminal conspiracy, PTI reported.

On Monday, the court acquitted the others after finding insufficient evidence to support the claims. However, it held Rane guilty of assaulting a public servant and deterring them from performing duties.

The 2019 incident was not the first time Rane’s actions had sparked controversy.

In 2017, he had thrown a dead fish at the additional commissioner for fisheries in Sindhudurg during a meeting called to discuss problems faced by the fishermen in the Konkan region.

The BJP leader has also repeatedly made inflammatory statements targeting Muslims.

Rane had joined the Hindutva party in October 2019.

Aam Aadmi Party leader Manish Sisodia on Tuesday said that he “will not participate” personally or through a counsel before Delhi High Court Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma in the proceedings related to the liquor policy case.

This came a day after party chief Arvind Kejriwal said that he will not appear in person or through a lawyer before Sharma. The judge is hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s challenge against a trial court order discharging the former chief minister, Sisodia and several others in the case.

On April 20, Sharma rejected a petition filed by Kejriwal, Sisodia and the others that she recuse herself from hearing the case.

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

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

In a letter to the judge on Tuesday, Sisodia said that his doubts about her impartiality in the case stood unresolved.

Referring to a letter written by Kejriwal on Monday, Sisodia said that he was in “respectful agreement” with the stand taken by the AAP chief. He added that the decision was based on Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings on Satyagraha.

Sisodia added that Sharma’s repeated public attendance at Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad events, her children’s professional engagement with a Union government panel and their apparent closeness with government law officers appearing against him troubled him.

The Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta Parishad is a lawyers’ group linked to the RSS.

In an affidavit before the High Court, Kejriwal had stated on April 14 that the judge’s son and daughter have been empanelled as counsels by the Union government.

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

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

In his letter on Tuesday, Sisodia noted that no one had argued that the judge’s children could not practise law, and neither did anyone argue that they could not become government counsel if selected through a fair, transparent and merit-based process.

However, he asked if there was not a duty on the judge to disclose the circumstances of her children’s engagement with the Union government.

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“Was there not a duty to pause and ask whether a matter of such extraordinary political sensitivity demanded a higher degree of caution, disclosure, and institutional self-scrutiny?” asked Sisodia.

He noted that he was apprehensive about the appearance of impartial justice.

“My concern too, much like Mr Kejriwal’s, is not born out of hostility to the court,” Sisodia said.
”It is born of a deep unease that, if I continue to participate despite these circumstances, I would be acting against my own conscience too while pretending before my fellow countrymen that all doubts stand resolved.”

The AAP leader said: “The question before me is therefore a simple one: can I, with honesty, continue to take part in these proceedings while carrying a serious apprehension about the appearance of impartial justice. After much reflection, my answer is similar to Mr Kejriwal’s. I cannot.”

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

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

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

The liquor policy case

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

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

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

On February 27, the trial court discharged Kejriwal, Sisodia and 21 others accused by the CBI in the case. There was no overarching conspiracy or criminal intent in the excise policy, the court had ruled.

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

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

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

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

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

A first information report has been registered against 13 persons, including students from Delhi University’s Hansraj College, for alleged violence and misconduct during an annual festival earlier this month, The Indian Express reported on Tuesday.

Among those are students who were suspended by the college between April 20 and April 25, according to the newspaper.

In the past week, the college has suspended 30 students for alleged breach of discipline and defaming the institute on social media.

Rama Sharma, the principal of Hansraj College, told The Indian Express on Monday that the administration of the institute had to involve the police as the “situation was getting out of hand”.

“Since the student union was the one that held the fest, we had to name the four office-bearers [of the students’ union] as well in our complaint,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.

The case pertains to the incident that took place at the annual festival of the college earlier this month. During the event, students had allegedly clashed physically with outsiders who trespassed onto the campus.

Videos circulating widely on social media between April 8 and April 9 purportedly showed clashes between students during the event.

On April 24, an FIR was filed against the 13 persons at the Maurice Nagar police station based on a complaint filed by Sharma, The Indian Express reported.

The case was registered under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita pertaining to criminal trespass and voluntarily causing hurt.

The notices

The FIR is the latest development in a series of disputes between students and the administration at Hansraj College in the past few months.

In February, students had protested against the wedding of the principal’s son being held on campus, alleging that it restricted access to the college grounds. Tensions over permissions for the student festival escalated soon after, The Indian Express reported.

Students have also accused the college administration of stifling dissent.

In the first notice issued by the administration on April 20, former students’ union chief Parth Srivastava was accused of “acts of indiscipline”, including defaming the institute and using “derogatory language” about teaching and non-teaching staff.

The notice stated that he had been given “multiple opportunities” to appear before a disciplinary committee with his parents, but failed to do so. When he appeared alone on March 23, he “neither expressed remorse nor acknowledged his conduct”, it added.

Srivastava has claimed that he is being targeted, PTI reported.

He said that he had participated in the protests in February and filed a Right to Information application regarding alleged irregularities, after which he was suspended. He has approached the Delhi High Court, PTI quoted him as saying.

On April 20, the college issued another notice suspending 14 students for a “serious incident of violence, misconduct and breach of discipline” during the annual festival held on April 8 and April 9.

On April 22, four students were suspended for alleged physical violence on campus. A day later, seven students were suspended for allegedly defaming the college on social media and engaging in activities that have “adversely affected the academic environment of the institution”.

Another notice issued on Saturday suspended the president, vice-president, secretary and joint secretary of the students’ union with immediate effect, pending disciplinary proceedings, citing “serious incidents of violence, misconduct and breach of discipline” during the festival.

Earlier, the students’ union president, Abhijit Singh, claimed that the crackdown disproportionately targeted those active in campus politics, The Indian Express reported.

“Some students were singled out because they intended to contest elections,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Singh described the action as discriminatory.

However, the administration maintained that the measures were necessary to restore order.

On Monday, the principal said that the college had agreed to review two of the notices, including the one naming the four office-bearers, after requests from students, The Indian Express reported.

However, no such review has yet been initiated for those named in the FIR, Sharma added.

“If they are willing to realise their mistake and come forward to talk and sort things out with the administration, the college will cooperate in helping them out in any way possible,” the newspaper quoted her as saying.

Rimjhim Sinha has been an activist since 2016, first as a student at Kolkata’s Presidency University and then as part of the vibrant women’s movement in the city. But, by her own estimate, her activism never reached more than “100 or 150 people”.

So when lakhs of ordinary women across West Bengal and in other parts of the country responded to her call for raat dakhal, or reclaim the night, on August 14, 2024, Sinha was taken aback. To this day, the left-wing activist struggles to explain why her appeal resonated with so many people on that day.

For nearly a week before that, Kolkata had been rocked by the news of a brutal rape-and-murder case at the city’s famous RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. The victim, a trainee doctor, was working a night shift when the crime took place.

Sinha had asked women to reclaim the night in response to Sandip Ghosh, the former principal of RG Kar College, blaming the victim for being in the hospital’s seminar room late in the night. The public response to her call, the 30-year-old recalled, had filled the victim’s mother, Ratna Debnath, with “hope”.

“Later, she asked me to organise another raat dakhal and said she would join us,” Sinha remembered. But the activist, who now works with an organisation called Reclaim The Night, Free The Day, was not sure if another protest would receive a similar response.

Almost two years later, Debnath announced that she would contest the Assembly elections in West Bengal on a Bharatiya Janata Party ticket. The saffron party has fielded her from the Panihati seat.

Sinha, the young activist, was “hoping against hope” that Debnath would not join the BJP because she considers it to be an “anti-women” party. While her hopes now laid “shattered”, she told Scroll that the RG Kar protests were never about one victim. “It was about all women and marginalised gender communities,” she added.

Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

How do you look back on the RG Kar protests?

The Reclaim The Night movement did not support any party and the people involved in it did not want to be associated with a single flag. The most important part was that it was decentralised. It was not only in Jadavpur or Kolkata.

Different women who have never been part of any political parties called for protests in their own localities and managed it themselves. They wrote slogans, delivered speeches and talked about their experiences.

The national media was eager to know what was happening. I knew that some of them were part of the godi media – they did not believe in our politics. But I saw a shift while talking to them.

Usually, women anchors took our interviews. I could see them smiling while I was saying something. It made me hopeful. They were relating to what I was saying.

Two years on, are women in Bengal any safer than they were before?

I don’t think they are safer. But they are more opinionated and expressive. That is more important. I see that as the success of the movement.

You made efforts to ensure that no political party took over the movement back then. But the Bharatiya Janata Party seems to have done that now by fielding Ratna Debnath, the RG Kar victim’s mother, in the upcoming elections. How do you see that?

I have met Ratna Debnath at least two or three times. I thought she would go with the Communist Party of India (Marxist) because it had been helping her from the beginning.

I am shocked by her decision because I thought whatever happens, a woman would not side with the BJP. It is a party which garlands convicted rapists because it says they are Brahmins who cannot rape.

I have come to realise that after two years, we are standing exactly where we were. Even now, the RG Kar incident is the topic, and not the demands that were raised by the movement. That creates a feeling of hopelessness.

During the movement, we never asked the parents to come and talk. From the beginning, we were clear that justice for the RG Kar victim was very important. But Reclaim The Night was not only about her. It was about all women and marginalised gender communities.

In your view, is there something that the Left could have done differently to keep the victim’s mother on its side?

The biggest problem with our politics is that it takes a lot of time, hope, spirit and patience. When you have lost someone so dear to yourself, the hardest thing to do is wait. If she [Ratna Debnath] comes up to me and asks, ‘Could you give me justice?’ I am not in a position to say yes.

However, the CPI(M) had the resources to stand with her more firmly. They could have told her to keep her distance from Suvendu Adhikari, who represents a party which is completely anti-women.

On May the 4th, the crimes against all victims of the TMC’s #MahaJungleRaj will be avenged. pic.twitter.com/tsyUUW0SIg

— BJP West Bengal (@BJP4Bengal) April 24, 2026

Smaller organisations like ours were able to keep the BJP away from our platform. We could tell them to their faces that they were not welcome. The CPI(M) could have done the same.

Do you think there is a pattern to this? Time and again, we see the CPI(M) take the lead in organising protests in Bengal. But when push comes to shove, the BJP gains from them.

A lot of the CPI(M) vote has gone directly to the BJP. It cannot be a coincidence. The CPI(M) has always been a very regimented party. I think there is a set-up [between the CPI(M) and the BJP]. There is some sort of strategic alliance.

They do not plan their protests in a way that would keep the BJP completely out. They just want the Trinamool Congress out of power. Ever since I have gained consciousness, I have seen the CPI(M) being more vocal about the Trinamool than the BJP.

They are more focussed on a woman leader who is winning elections than what the BJP is doing. In their press conferences, they are more aggressive when they are talking about the Trinamool than when they are talking about the BJP. Why?

The Trinamool does not even have an ideology. When it came to power in 2011, it was because of the anti-incumbency against the CPI(M). 2026 is about the anti-incumbency against the Trinamool. It is just that we don’t have an alternative.

I don’t think we can try the BJP. It’s like we have been poisoned and we are asking for cyanide. We are going to die. We don’t get to see what happens in the future if BJP comes in.

Mamata Banerjee is one of the two women chief ministers in India right now. She is the only one running a big state. How do you see her politics?

I see her as a woman who has power. She does not think she needs to be progressive, believe in feminism or answer to anyone. She knows how Bengalis see her. Even though what she wears costs a lot, it looks like she is representing the working class.

I have heard this from a lot of women who work as domestic workers or in factories. They see Mamata Banerjee as their representative. She does not represent feminist politics, but autocratic politics led by a woman.

She definitely has political understanding and charisma. She is not a very good orator, but someone who has not had the opportunity to be educated relates with her.

And how do you see her policies for women?

Mamata Banerjee depends on women as a vote bank. She wants women to be beneficiaries of her welfare schemes, not opinionated souls who talk about their rights. If that was not the case, ASHA workers would not have had to wait for an entire day to talk about raising their salaries.

Rs 1,500 [what Bengali women get under the Lakshmir Bhandar scheme] is not sufficient at all. The Trinamool projects these schemes as empowerment, but they don’t even go back and study what the schemes are doing. The Kanyashree amount of Rs 25,000 is given for pursuing higher studies, but a lot of women are married off with that money.

The way she [Banerjee] treated the Reclaim The Night movement is also an example of how she sees women. She sat at least three times with the doctors because they had a more organised presence, but not us women.

So what choice do women have in these elections?

The biggest heartbreak is that because of the special intensive revision, many women have lost their voting rights. My mother’s name was deleted even though my father served in the central government for 37 years. He is a live pensioner.

When I saw my mother’s name get deleted, I understood that she never had an identity of her own. After everything she has tried to achieve in her life with education, marriage, the way she brought me up, she could not save herself from this.

If someone coming from such a privileged position cannot get her name included, I wonder what other women must be going through. Many women who might have expressed their opinion in these elections will not be able to cast their vote. The power of women’s opinions has been destroyed.

And what is at stake for those women who will be able to vote in these elections?

The biggest thing at stake is keeping BJP out of Bengal. We Bengali women do not subscribe to the politics of the BJP. We have always been taught to not accept anything at face value. The most important thing right now is to prove to the BJP that even if they try to win Bengal by hook or by crook, they will still lose.

We women are becoming more apprehensive of our safety because of how much ground the BJP has gained in Bengal. We are seeing more Jai Shri Ram flags and more angry Hanuman stickers on cars and motorbikes. It makes us anxious because we associate the idea of an alpha male with those things.

It is very frightening. I have seen how women in north Indian states are forced to live their lives. I don’t want to live like that.

If the BJP does come to power, do you think the RG Kar protests will have played a part in that?

I don’t think so. Every time a people’s movement like this has surfaced, some or the other party has benefited from it. Does that mean we are not supposed to voice our opinions? I don’t see it like that. Reclaim The Night talked about things that are polar opposite to the BJP. We managed to keep them away. That was our biggest success.

The West Bengal Police has arrested 1,543 persons, including a Trinamool Congress councillor in the state, ahead of the second phase of the Assembly elections, PTI quoted an unidentified official as saying on Monday.

The action was taken to prevent any attempt to disturb the poll atmosphere, the official added.

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

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

Intensified search operations and checks were carried out between Sunday and Monday, The Times of India reported.

Naru Gopal Bhakat, the Trinamool Congress councillor from Ward 22 of the Bardhaman municipality in Purba Bardhaman district, was arrested on charges of intimidation and for allegedly being involved in an attack on a Bharatiya Janata Party leader’s home.

A complaint was also filed against him with the Election Commission, PTI reported.

However, Bhakat denied the charges.

Of the total, 479 arrests were made in Purba Bardhaman, 319 in North 24 Parganas, 246 in South 24 Parganas, 109 in North Kolkata, 49 in Hooghly, and 32 each in Nadia and Howrah, The Times of India reported.

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

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

The judges stayed the order till June 30.

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

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

Guidelines on webcasting

Additionally, the CEO office on Monday issued fresh guidelines on handling webcasting equipment deployed at polling booths, PTI reported.

In a notification, it said that cameras used for webcasting must be dismantled after the conclusion of polling on Wednesday in the presence of sector officers and deposited at designated receiving centres.

An unidentified Election Commission official said that the step is aimed at ensuring the security and preservation of poll-related data and equipment after voting.

During the day, Union Home Minister Amit Shah also said that the Central Armed Police Forces would remain deployed in West Bengal for at least 60 days after the Assembly elections and told voters not to be concerned about “Didi’s goons”.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is popularly known as “Didi”, or elder sister.

Ahead of the elections, the Election Commission deployed 2.4 lakh Central Armed Police Forces personnel in the state. About 500 companies, or 50,000 personnel, are expected to remain in place even after polling.

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

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Monday said that the Central Armed Police Forces would remain deployed in West Bengal for at least 60 days after the Assembly elections and told voters not to be concerned about “Didi’s goons”.

Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is popularly known as “Didi”, or elder sister.

Ahead of the elections, the Election Commission deployed 2.4 lakh Central Armed Police Forces personnel in the state. About 500 companies, or 50,000 personnel, are expected to remain in place even after polling, according to The Indian Express.

Shah made the remarks while addressing a gathering after a roadshow in south Kolkata’s Behala area on the last day of campaigning ahead of the second phase of polling on Wednesday.

“Do not worry about the goons,” PTI quoted Shah as saying. “Even though the BJP will come to power, central forces will remain here for 60 days.”

The first phase of polling in the state was held on April 23, and the second phase will take place on Wednesday. Votes will be counted on May 4.

दीदी के गुंडों की चिंता मत कीजिए, चुनाव आयोग ने चप्पे-चप्पे पर CAPF तैनात की है।
आज मैं बोलकर जाता हूँ—चुनाव के बाद भाजपा सरकार आने वाली है। फिर भी 60 दिनों तक CAPF यहीं रहने वाली है।

দিদির গুন্ডাদের নিয়ে চিন্তা করবেন না, নির্বাচন কমিশন প্রতিটি এলাকায় CAPF মোতায়েন করেছে।
আজ… pic.twitter.com/lQpFsVGzQa

— Amit Shah (@AmitShah) April 27, 2026

‘Biking in groups’ restricted during poll phase 2: HC

The Calcutta High Court on Monday partly restored restrictions on motorcycle use ahead of the second phase of the West Bengal Assembly elections, banning motorbike rallies and “biking in groups” from two days before polling, Live Law reported.

Earlier, the Election Commission had imposed on motorcycle riding and pillion travel ahead of first phase of elections in the state. The poll body had stated that motorcycles will not be allowed on the roads between 6 pm and 6 am starting two days before the polling for the Assembly elections. In a directive, the poll panel had also said that pillion riders will not be allowed during the relaxation window between 6 am and 6 pm, except in medical emergencies, for family functions or for dropping and picking up children from school.

On Friday, a single-judge bench of Justice Krishna Rao set aside these blanket restrictions, holding that they could not be imposed without statutory backing.

“In the name of free and fair poll, the authorities cannot pass a blanket restriction on the motorcycle riding,” the judge had held.

The Election Commission had challenged this order, after which a division bench of Justices Shampa Sarkar and Ajay Kumar Gupta reviewed the matter.

On Monday, the division bench said the earlier order required limited modification to ensure free and fair elections. It restored restrictions only on group activities, banning bike rallies and coordinated group riding.

All other relaxations granted by the single judge remain in place, including individual motorcycle use, family pillion riding for essential purposes, and exemptions for office-goers with valid identification as well as gig workers employed with delivery platforms and emergency services.

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

The Jammu and Kashmir High Court on Monday quashed the preventive detention of Aam Aadmi Party MLA Mehraj Malik under the Public Safety Act, setting aside the order issued by the Doda district administration in September.

Malik, who represents the Doda constituency and heads the party’s Jammu and Kashmir unit, had been detained for one year on September 8 on charges of disturbing public order.

The Public Safety Act is a preventive detention law that allows persons to be taken into custody to prevent them from acting against “the security of the state or the maintenance of the public order” in the Union Territory. He was the first sitting legislator in the Union Territory to be detained under the law.

On Monday, the court ruled that the grounds cited for Malik’s detention did not meet the legal threshold of “public order” and were largely related to matters of law and order already covered under existing first information reports.

Justice Mohammad Yousuf Wani said that a preventive detention order “cannot be made a substitute for pressing into service the ordinary law of the land so as to relieve and absolve the investigating authority of its functions to investigate crimes”.

He added that there was no sufficient basis to show that Malik “is likely to act in any manner prejudicial to the social disorder”.

The court noted that many of the cases against Malik were either under investigation or related to Model Code of Conduct violations during elections or protests, and did not justify preventive detention.

It also observed that there was no proximity or “live link” between older “stale allegations” and the detention order issued in September.

Malik has been named in 18 first information reports and 16 daily diary reports at police stations in Doda district. The cases allege that he disrupted public order when the administration was engaged in relief work after heavy rains and flash floods in Jammu and Kashmir.

Malik has also been accused of attacking officials on duty, locking them in their offices, and abusing and intimidating them in public. He is also facing charges of abduction.

Malik was elected from Doda in the 2024 Assembly elections, defeating Bharatiya Janata Party candidate Gajay Singh by 4,538 votes, securing the AAP its first entry into the Jammu and Kashmir legislature.

He had earlier won a seat in the Doda District Development Council from Kahara in the 2020 elections, from which he resigned after becoming an MLA.

Colour is at the heart of Kashmir’s textile traditions, especially for the world renowned Pashmina shawls and Kashmir silks. Yet producing these rich hues often comes with an environmental cost to ecosystems.

Studies show that many textile industries use synthetic dyes during dyeing and printing processes. When wastewater from these processes is released without proper treatment, these chemicals can enter rivers and streams polluting water and harming aquatic life. Globally, the textile industry is among the largest sources of water pollution, with the dyeing processes contributing significantly to chemical discharge.

Researchers in Kashmir are now exploring alternative ways to colour these fibres using plant-based natural dyes for pashmina and feeding pigment-infused diets to silkworms for them to spin naturally coloured silk. These approaches, they say, aim to reduce textile production’s contribution to pollution while maintaining the value of high-end natural fibres.

Plant-based natural dyes

Pashmina from the Ladakh region is considered one of the world’s most luxurious natural fibres. The woollen fibre comes from the undercoat of Changthangi goats raised in the extremely cold, high-altitude Changthang plateau of Ladakh at around 3,500-4,000 metres above sea level.

“The global reputation of Kashmiri Pashmina is also closely linked to the traditional craftsmanship of Kashmiri artisans,” Asif Hassan, a professor in the division of Livestock Products Technology, Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Science and Technology of Kashmir (SKUAST-K) says.

“Pashmina’s processing methods have historically relied on labour-intensive manual techniques such as dehairing, combing, hand spinning and hand weaving, carried out without machines or chemicals. These skills, passed down through generations, are central to the authenticity and value of genuine Pashmina products.”

Hassan’s research work focuses on eco-friendly dyeing, which involves the extraction of natural dyes from plant sources and their application on natural fibres such as Pashmina, wool, and silk.

Chemicals are used in washing and dyeing, including non-ionic detergents, sodium carbonate, synthetic dyes such as acid dyes and metal-complex dyes, and mordants (a mordant is a substance used in dyeing that helps the dye attach firmly to the fibre and improves colour durability) like ferrous sulphate and copper sulphate.

“Finishing treatments may also involve chemical softening agents to enhance the texture and appearance of the fabric,” Hassan says.

“Textile dyeing wastewater is one of the major sources of environmental pollution,” Hassan adds. In fragile Himalayan ecosystems, such pollution can severely impact freshwater systems that communities rely on for drinking water, agriculture and livelihoods.

A recent study conducted by Hassan and his colleagues identified plant species such as the Indian barberry (Berberis aristata) and red bistort (Bistorta amplexicaulis) as promising natural dye sources for Pashmina.

Published in the journal Coloration Technology in 2025, the study found that these plants can produce a range of shades — from golden hues to reddish and pinkish tones due to their natural pigments. “These dyes show strong affinity for protein-based fibres like Pashmina,” Hassan says. “The use of mordants helps improve dye uptake and enhances the depth and uniformity of colours. Alum was found to be a particularly effective mordant compared to chemical alternatives, making the dyeing process more environment -friendly.”

The results show that these natural dyes demonstrate good fastness properties, meaning the colours remain stable under light exposure, rubbing and washing. Researchers suggest that the use of locally available plant biodiversity could support sustainable livelihoods, by creating income opportunities for rural communities.

According to Aijaz Ahmad Shah, a Pashmina spinning trainer associated with SKUAST-Kashmir, natural dyes are biodegradable and do not produce toxic effluents. They are also gentle on delicate Pashmina fabric and help preserve its softness and fibre integrity.

Moreover, natural dyes have historically been used by artisans across India, including Kashmir, in the handloom and handicrafts sectors for centuries, Shah adds.

However, Hassan notes that further research is needed before these techniques can be adopted at an industrial scale. “Optimisation of extraction processes, dye concentration and mordanting protocols will be necessary to ensure consistency,” he says. “Standardisation of colour shades, fastness and cost-benefit analysis will also be required for widespread commercial adoption.”

He adds that environmental sustainability in the Pashmina sector requires improvements across the entire value chain – from goat rearing to processing and certification. “Better grazing management, nutrition, shelter, healthcare and scientific breeding of goats can improve production, while eco-friendly processing and reduced chemical use can lower environmental impact. Quality assurance technologies such as microscopy, DNA testing, colourimetry, geographical identification (GI) tagging and QR-code labelling are also helping verify authenticity and strengthen consumer trust,” says Hassan.

Dietary supplement for silkworms

Researchers in Kashmir’s silk sector are experimenting with a more radical approach – eliminating the dyeing stage altogether.

While Pashmina remains a heritage fabric, silk produced in the Kashmir Himalaya is also distinctive. The region’s temperate climate influences mulberry (Morus alba) growth and silkworm physiology, resulting in high-quality bivoltine silk known for its long filament length, strength and natural lustre.

Kashmiri silk has historically been used in high-end garments, furnishings, and ceremonial textiles, linking the region to international textile and design industries.

“However, conventional silk dyeing relies heavily on synthetic dyes such as acid dyes, reactive dyes, metal-complex dyes and azo dyes,” Firdose Ahmad Malik, an assistant professor and scientist at the College of Temperate Sericulture, SKUAST-Kashmir says. “Although these dyes produce bright and durable colours, they can generate chemical effluents and environmental pollution if not properly treated.”

Malik’s research focuses on improving silkworm nutrition, disease management and technologies to improve silk production in Kashmir. He and his team are now exploring in vivo silk colouration, where silkworms (Bombyx mori) produce coloured silk directly through dietary supplementation. He explains that this method represents a significant shift – from dyeing silk after production to generating colour during silk formation.

According to the research team, during the final larval stage, silkworms are fed a specially formulated diet containing selected pigment molecules. After ingestion, the pigments are absorbed into the silkworm’s digestive system and transported through the hemolymph – the insect’s circulatory fluid – to the silk glands. Inside these glands, the pigments interact with silk proteins such as fibroin and sericin. As the silkworm spins its cocoon, the pigments become integrated into the silk fibre, producing naturally-coloured cocoons.

Malik says this approach could significantly reduce effluents and pollution from the textile dyeing industry by reducing the need for dye baths, repeated washing cycles and chemical treatments.

The coloured cocoons could therefore lower water consumption, reduce chemical waste and improve energy efficiency in silk processing. Farmers could also benefit economically, as speciality-coloured cocoons may fetch higher prices in markets seeking textiles manufactured with less-polluting processes, he adds.

However, several challenges remain before the technology can be widely adopted. “Researchers must ensure uniform colour intensity, pigment stability during processing and consistent pigment absorption by silkworms. The cost and availability of pigments and the development of scalable feeding protocols also require further research.”

Besides, the scientists are also exploring other innovations to make sericulture more sustainable. These include developing disease-resistant silkworm breeds, using precision technologies such as sensors and artificial intelligence to optimise rearing conditions, and adopting renewable energy systems like solar-powered reeling machines.

“Circular practices are also being promoted, such as recycling silkworm waste into compost, animal feed or biomaterials,” Malik explains. “With continued research and collaboration between scientists and industry stakeholders, these innovations could strengthen sustainable sericulture while creating better economic opportunities for silk farmers.”

Market and industry perspectives

Pashmina traders say sustainability is also becoming important in the global market. Sheikh Adnan, founder of Srinagar-based store The Shawlwala, says producing a genuine Pashmina shawl is a time-intensive process that can take weeks or even months depending on the design.

“The artisans are gradually experimenting with natural dyes and traditional processing methods,” he says. “While natural dyes can make colour consistency more difficult, the slight variations also make each piece unique.”

International buyers – particularly in Europe and the Middle East – show strong interest in sustainably-produced textiles, though younger Indian consumers are also increasingly valuing handmade and ethical products.

Riyaz Bhat, a Kashmiri rug trader based in Qatar, says, there is growing demand from international buyers for sustainably produced textiles, including Pashmina and silk.

“Natural dyes and green processes yield unique textures and colours that attract customers more than synthetic colours,” Bhat says. “Not only that, they also are much longer lasting than synthetic ones,” Bhat says.

However, shifting to sustainable practices presents challenges. “Eco-friendly methods take more time and can be expensive, while markets still expect reasonable prices,” Adnan says.

He believes sustainable production can strengthen the global value of Kashmiri crafts. “In the long run, sustainable practices can help preserve both the heritage of Kashmiri crafts and the livelihoods of the artisans who depend on them.”

Bhat explains, “Eco-friendly products are definitely at least 20%-30% more expensive but worth it as they are more sustainable and long lasting with no synthetic materials or dyes used. Since it takes a lot more time to work on these products, the labour costs increase and prices go up.”

Hassan argues that it is not the methods that inherently increase costs, but factors such as limited availability of raw materials, lack of systematic cultivation, small-batch dye extraction, and labour-intensive traditional processing techniques, that may increase the overall cost by approximately 15–20% compared to synthetic dyeing methods.

While the in vivo silk colouration is in the research and development phase, Hassan adds that even Pashmina products with natural dyes remain a small niche segment and are not part of mainstream production.

Steps for scaling up

Scaling up eco-friendly Pashmina production requires a multi-pronged approach, notes Hassan. “This includes developing a reliable raw material supply chain through the identification and systematic cultivation of suitable plant biodiversity for natural dyes. There is also a need for research and development (R&D) for technology standardisation in dye extraction and application to ensure consistency and scalability.”

While adding that financial incentives and policy support for eco-friendly processing would help, he points out that targeted support for artisan clusters adopting green technologies is essential.

“Additionally, assistance with certification mechanisms (such as organic, GI, and eco-labels), enhanced consumer awareness about authentic eco-friendly Pashmina, and strong branding and marketing strategies will play a crucial role in expanding this segment,” Hassan added.

Regarding the in vivo silk colouration, Malik says that researchers expect support in terms of funding, infrastructure, and policy backing to further develop and scale this eco-friendly dyeing approach. “This includes financial assistance for advanced trials, access to well-equipped laboratories, and collaboration with industry partners for commercialisation. Additionally, regulatory support and awareness initiatives are needed to promote adoption of this sustainable technology among stakeholders in the sericulture sector,” he concludes.

This article was first published on Mongabay.

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Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal said that he would not appear in person or through a lawyer before a Delhi High Court bench of Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma. The judge is hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s challenge to him and several others being discharged in the liquor policy case.

The former Delhi chief minister’s comments came a week after Sharma on April 20 rejected his plea that she recuse herself from hearing the case. During the hearings, Kejriwal had raised concerns about her “perceived ideological proximity”, referring to Sharma attending events of an organisation linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

Kejriwal had also contended that the judge’s children had been empanelled as counsels by the Union government and had been allocated cases by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who is representing the CBI in the liquor policy case. Read on.

The Bharatiya Janata Party now has 113 MPs in the 245-member Rajya Sabha after chairperson CP Radhakrishnan accepted the merger of the Aam Aadmi Party’s legislature party in the Upper House of Parliament with that of the Hindutva party. AAP now has three MPs each in the Rajya Sabha and the Lok Sabha.

The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance now has 137 members in the Rajya Sabha. A party or a coalition needs the support of 123 members to command a majority in the House. Read on.

Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Union minister Dinesh Trivedi has been named India’s next high commissioner to Bangladesh. This marks a rare appointment of a non-Indian Foreign Services officer to the post.

The appointment comes as India seeks to reset ties with Bangladesh. Relations between the two countries were strained in 2024, when former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled to India following widespread protests against her government. Bangladesh has repeatedly sought Hasina’s extradition after a tribunal sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity, a request India has not accepted. Read on.

The police in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur have filed cases against the social media handles of the Congress and the Samajwadi Party for allegedly spreading rumours about the case linked to the death of a teenage girl on April 15. The social media accounts were posting false information, the police alleged, adding that the case has been filed for statements allegedly conducing to public mischief.

The 17-year-old girl had gone missing on the night of April 14. Her body was found about 3 km from her home in a river the next morning. Her family has alleged that she was sexually assaulted and murdered.

The administration has also imposed prohibitory orders in the district till April 30, restricting demonstrations related to the case. Read on.

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India on Monday named Bharatiya Janata Party leader and former Union minister Dinesh Trivedi as its next high commissioner to Bangladesh.

The appointment is a rare instance of a non-Indian Foreign Service officer being named to the role and comes as New Delhi seeks to reset ties with Dhaka.

Trivedi will replace Indian Foreign Service officer Pranay Verma, who is moving to Brussels as India’s envoy to the European Union and the Kingdom of Belgium.

Trivedi served as railway minister in the Manmohan Singh government as a member of the Trinamool Congress before joining the BJP in 2021. He has been a member of both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha, representing constituencies in West Bengal and a Rajya Sabha seat from Gujarat.

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

Bangladesh has repeatedly demanded that India extradite Hasina after a tribunal there sentenced her to death for alleged crimes against humanity. Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal held Hasina guilty of having ordered a deadly crackdown on the protests against her government. India has not agreed to the extradition request so far.

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

After parliamentary elections in February, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party formed the new government in the country. Tarique Rahman, the chairperson of the party, was sworn in as prime minister.

In December, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had said that it was for Hasina to decide whether she wanted to return to Bangladesh.

In April, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman visited New Delhi, marking the first high-level bilateral engagement hosted by India since the Hasina government was ousted.

Thirty students of Delhi University’s Hansraj College have been suspended in the past week for alleged violence and misconduct during an annual festival, and allegedly defaming the institute on social media, The Indian Express reported on Monday.

The college administration issued five notices between April 20 and April 25 to announce the suspensions. Among those suspended are four office-bearers of the students’ union.

Principal Rama Sharma told The Indian Express that the action was necessary to maintain discipline and restore order on campus, stating that it was wrong to “put false allegations on the college and defame it on social media”.

“Maximum students come to Hansraj College to study,” she said. “Their academic performance should not be disturbed…This is a very prestigious college.”

In the first notice on April 20, former students’ union chief Parth Srivastava was accused of “acts of indiscipline”, including defaming the institute and using “derogatory language” about teaching and non-teaching staff.

The notice stated that he had been given “multiple opportunities” to appear before a disciplinary committee with his parents but failed to do so. When he appeared alone on March 23, he “neither expressed remorse nor acknowledged his conduct”, it added.

Srivastava has claimed that he is being targeted, PTI reported.

He said that he had participated in protests in February and filed a Right to Information application regarding alleged irregularities, after which he was suspended. He has approached the Delhi High Court, PTI quoted him as saying.

In February, students had protested against the wedding of the principal’s son being held on campus, alleging that it restricted access to the college ground. Tensions over permissions for the student festival escalated soon after, The Indian Express reported.

On April 20, the college issued another notice suspending 14 students for a “serious incident of violence, misconduct and breach of discipline” during the annual festival held on April 8 and April 9.

Videos widely shared on social media purportedly show clashes between students during the event, The Indian Express reported.

On Wednesday, four students were suspended for alleged physical violence on campus. On Thursday, seven students were suspended for allegedly defaming the college on social media and engaging in activities that have “adversely affected the academic environment of the institution”.

Another notice issued on Saturday suspended the president, vice-president, secretary and joint secretary of the students’ union with immediate effect, pending disciplinary proceedings, citing “serious incidents of violence, misconduct and breach of discipline” during the festival.

Ladakh Lieutenant Governor VK Saxena on Monday approved a notification to create five new districts in the Union Territory.

The region currently has only two districts: Leh and Kargil. The five new districts will be Nubra, Sham, Changthang, Zanskar and Drass.

Saxena said on social media that the decision was taken to fulfil “the aspirations and long pending demand of the people of Ladakh”.

The decision, which had been cleared by the Ministry of Home Affairs in August 2024, aligned with the vision of a “developed and prosperous Ladakh”, the lieutenant governor added.

Statehood demand

The announcement comes amid long-standing demands from residents for statehood for Ladakh.

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

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

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

All of Ladakh currently has one Lok Sabha seat.

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

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

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

In September, protests in Leh turned violent when clashes broke out between protesters and security forces, leaving four people dead in police firing.

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

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

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

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

During the time of this detention, formal talks between the Union govenrment and Ladakh’s leadership had largely paused. Saxena announced on Sunday that talks would resume on May 22, The Hindu reported.

Also read: What Ladakh makes of Sonam Wangchuk’s release from detention

The Jammu and Kashmir administration has declared Jamia Siraj-ul-Uloom, one of South Kashmir’s biggest seminaries, as an unlawful entity under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act for alleged “covert linkages” with the banned group Jamaat-e-Islami, The Indian Express reported on Monday.

The administration also alleged “serious legal, administrative and financial irregularities” at the seminary in Shopian and accused it of fostering “an environment conducive to radicalisation”, the newspaper reported.

It was declared unlawful under Section 8(1) of the anti-terror law. The provision allows the divisional commissioner to notify any place that is used for the purposes of an unlawful association. It also paves the way for action against the entity such as freezing of assets or sealing of the premises.

The decision came following a report from the police, the newspaper quoted the order as saying.

The examined records showed that the institute “though ostensibly functioning as a religious educational establishment, is marred by serious legal, administrative and financial irregularities, including questionable land acquisition, lack of mandatory registration with competent authorities, and deliberate attempts to evade statutory oversight”, the order was quoted as alleging.

The order further stated that “credible inputs and evidence on record further indicate sustained and covert linkages of the institution with Jamaat-e-Islami...including continued de facto control by individuals affiliated with the said organisation and their placement in key administrative and academic positions”.

It also quoted reports as having “indicated” that the institute had allegedly “fostered an environment conducive to radicalisation, with a number of its former students having been found involved in militant activities” and acts hurting national security, “thereby suggesting misuse of the institution for purposes detrimental” to India’s sovereignty and integrity.

The order said that the institute had been given an opportunity to respond but that the objections it had submitted were “misconceived, factually untenable and devoid of legal merit”.

On Monday, the institute said that it had responded to the notice issued to it by the administration and urged it to again verify the seminary’s activities.

The institute said that it had no links to the Jamaat-e-Islami.

Peoples Democratic Party chief Mehbooba Mufti said that declaring the seminary as an unlawful entity was “flagrant injustice” to the underprivileged sections of society.

The institute had “served as a beacon of quality education for students unable to afford expensive schooling”, she said, adding that it had “produced reputed doctors and professionals who served this nation with dedication”.

Banning the institute “without any solid evidence of anti-national activity shows a deep seated prejudice and ill intention”, she alleged.

Mufti also attacked the National Congress-led Jammu and Kashmir government saying that it was acting “as a mute bystander” and a “timid enabler of vicious assaults on J&K’s identity and dignity”.

The Election Commission on Sunday directed the West Bengal Police to conduct a special drive to arrest bomb makers ahead of the second phase of the Assembly elections in the state, The Indian Express reported.

Earlier in the day, the police said on social media that it had recovered bombs and explosive material from an abandoned house in Majherhat in the South 24 Parganas district.

“The seizure includes 79 crude bomb-like objects, approximately 3.3 kg of gunpowder, 1.6 kg of sulphur, jute ropes, and 10 packets of roll caps, with the assistance of the Bomb Disposal Squad,” the police stated. “All materials have been seized as per prescribed procedure.”

An investigation was underway, it added.

The seizures were made three days before the second phase of polling is to be held on Wednesday. The first phase was held on April 23. The votes will be counted on May 4.

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

An unidentified poll panel official told The Indian Express that a special drive had begun to arrest those who are making explosives, adding that all such cases would be investigated by the National Investigation Agency.

The official said that the Kolkata Police commissioner, deputy commissioners of police, superintendents of police and other officers had been told that they would face action if explosives were found in their jurisdiction.

All such materials should be seized in the next 24 hours, the newspaper quoted the official as saying.

Ahead of the elections, the Election Commission had deployed 2.4 lakh Central Armed Police Forces personnel in the state, with about 500 companies or 50,000 personnel expected to remain in place even after polling, according to The Indian Express.

TMC moves HC against police observer

The Trinamool Congress has moved the Calcutta High Court alleging “serious misconduct” by Parmar Smit Parshottamdas, an Indian Police Service officer who has been appointed by the poll panel as a police observer for the elections, ANI reported on Monday.

In a writ petition, the state’s ruling party claimed that Parshottamdas held an “unofficial and undisclosed meeting” with Gour Ghosh, a Bharatiya Janata Party candidate from the Magrahat Paschim Assembly seat, Live Law reported.

The seat is part of the observer’s assigned jurisdiction, it added.

The petition said that such conduct by an observer appointed by the poll panel strikes at the heart of the principles of neutrality, transparency and institutional integrity that govern the electoral process, Live Law reported.

It added that the alleged evidence of the meeting had been captured in security camera footage.

The administration in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur has imposed prohibitory orders in the district till April 30, restricting any demonstration linked to the death of a teenage girl on April 15, The Indian Express reported on Monday.

Varanasi Zone Additional Director General of Police Piyush Mordia said that the 17-year-old girl had gone missing on the night of April 14. Her body was found about 3 km from her home in the river Ganga the next morning.

Her family has alleged that she was sexually assaulted and murdered, PTI reported.

On Friday, the Opposition Samajwadi Party announced that a delegation led by party chief Akhilesh Yadav would visit the village and meet the girl’s family on Wednesday. Earlier, a delegation from the party tried to reach the village but had been attacked, The Indian Express reported.

Yadav on Sunday also criticised the Bharatiya Janata Party government in the state, alleging that attempts were being made to “change statements” of the girl’s family.

In a social media post, Yadav said that Uttar Pradesh has “never seen such a weak chief minister who pressures poor, helpless victims to change their statements”.

The Samajwadi Party chief further asked why there was a delay in filing the first information report in the case and why statements had been allegedly being altered.

Yadav also shared a video of the girl’s father on social media, in which he can be heard purportedly accusing a village head of intimidating the family.

On Saturday, the father had told reporters that he did not want political leaders to visit his home for “political mileage” and added that the district officials have assured him of strict action against the persons accused in the matter, The Indian Express reported.

Amid tensions after the death, District Magistrate Anupam Shukla told the newspaper that no political party, group or person will be “allowed to gather, enter the district to stage protests or organise demonstrations related to the incident”.

The state government also claimed that “unverified rumours” were being spread by certain “mischievous elements”, PTI reported.

It alleged that Opposition parties were attempting to “sensationalise” the matter, adding that this had raised apprehensions about the situation in the district becoming volatile.

“Given the gravity of the situation, Ghazipur District Magistrate Anupam Shukla has imposed Section 163 of BNSS [power to issue order in urgent cases of nuisance or apprehended danger] across the district,” the news agency quoted the statement as saying.

No political party or group is permitted to gather anywhere in the district under this provision, according to the statement.

It added that for maintaining law and order, no person or delegation shall visit the village to offer their condolences to the family, PTI reported.

Congress MP Rahul Gandhi had earlier called for a high-level inquiry into “the rape and brutal murder” of the girl. Party leader Priyanka Gandhi had also alleged that there was initially a “reluctance” to register a case and claimed that the girl’s family had received threats.

Case against Opposition’s social media accounts

The police registered cases against social media handles of the Congress and the Samajwadi Party for allegedly spreading rumours by making “baseless, misleading and false” remarks about the case, PTI reported on Monday.

The social media accounts were posting false information, the police alleged, adding that the case has been filed for statements allegedly conducing to public mischief.

“This has created an atmosphere of tension in the village,” PTI quoted the police as having claimed.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Saturday claimed that 20 undocumented migrants from Bangladesh had been apprehended and sent back.

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

Sharing a blurred image of the persons who had been detained, Sarma said: “For instance these 20 illegal Bangladeshis who were pushed back last night. Assam will fight, pushbacks will continue.”

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

In January, the chief minister said that the state government would “push back” undocumented migrants into Bangladesh within a week of them being declared foreigners by the Foreigners’ Tribunals. The state government did not need a repatriation treaty between New Delhi and Dhaka for this, he added.

लातों के भूत बातों से नहीं मानते।

We continuously remind ourselves of this prophetic line when we expel infiltrators from Assam who don't leave themselves.

For instance these 20 illegal Bangladeshis who were PUSHED BACK last night.

Assam will fight, Pushbacks WILL CONTINUE. pic.twitter.com/wLiIoR4TJc

— Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) April 25, 2026

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

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

In September, the Assam Cabinet approved the framing of a standard operating procedure under the Act. Earlier, cases pertaining to undocumented migrants were handled by the Foreigners’ Tribunals.

Such tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. They have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and of declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

Those declared foreigners by the tribunals have the option to appeal the decision before the Gauhati High Court or the Supreme Court. Additionally, as the formal process entails undocumented migrants being handed over to the authorities of the other country after verifying their citizenship, several persons have not been deported despite being declared foreigners.

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

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

Also read:

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

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

Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal on Monday said that he will not appear in person or through a lawyer before a Delhi High Court bench of Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma.

The judge is hearing the Central Bureau of Investigation’s challenge to him and several others being discharged in the Delhi liquor policy case.

Kejriwal said that he has written to the judge to inform her about his decision. He added that he will reserve his right to challenge in the Supreme Court the verdict given by Sharma in the case.

Kejriwal’s contentions

The former Delhi chief minister’s comments came a week after Sharma on April 20 rejected his plea that she recuse herself from hearing the case.

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

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

On April 14, the Aam Aadmi Party leader filed a fresh affidavit before the court seeking Sharma’s recusal. He had contended that the judge’s children had been empanelled as counsels by the Union government.

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

Kejriwal had highlighted that the judge’s children had been allocated cases by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who is representing the CBI in the liquor policy case. The former chief minister had argued that the apprehensions of bias are “direct, grave and impossible to ignore”.

Sharma had said that her “recusal would not be prudence but abdication of duty”. The judge added that she would decide the main case “without being affected by the recusal application”.

The case filed by the CBI will be heard on Wednesday.

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

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

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

“If in the future, if there is any other matter in which the BJP, the Union government and Tushar Mehta is not the party against me, I will appear before her court,” he said.

जस्टिस स्वर्णकान्ता शर्मा जी से न्याय मिलने की मेरी उम्मीद टूट चुकी है।

अपनी अंतरात्मा की आवाज़ सुनते हुए, गांधी जी के सिद्धांतो को मानते हुए और सत्याग्रह की भावना के साथ, मैंने फ़ैसला किया है कि मैं इस केस में उनके सामने पेश नहीं हूंगा और कोई दलील भी नहीं रखूँगा। pic.twitter.com/vhTSEZabqa

— Arvind Kejriwal (@ArvindKejriwal) April 27, 2026

The liquor policy case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Mumbai Police on Sunday registered a first information report against Aam Aadmi Party leaders for holding a protest against party MP Raghav Chadha and six others merging with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s legislature party in the Rajya Sabha.

The FIR was registered against seven leaders of the Aam Aadmi Party, including its Mumbai working president Ruben Mascarenhas, under sections pertaining to unlawful assembly, reported Hindustan Times.

Earlier in the day, several members of the party were detained ahead of the planned protest. Mascarenhas alleged that this was done to prevent the demonstration.

The AAP leader told Scroll that he had written to the police a day earlier, informing them of the party’s plan to protest outside Chadha’s Mumbai home, and had received an acknowledgement on Sunday morning.

However, he alleged that police personnel arrived at his house at about 1.45 pm, ahead of the planned protest at 3.30 pm, and prevented him from leaving. He was later detained.

“I am not being allowed to leave [my house],” Mascarenhas said on social media. “This is illegal and unacceptable.”

He said that he was taken to the Khar police station along with others before being released.

Despite the restrictions, about 50 AAP volunteers staged a protest, Mascarenhas said.

The police had blocked roads leading to Chadha’s home in Khar, restricting vehicular movement and preventing any gathering near the site, PTI reported. As access to the area was curtailed, AAP members initially gathered at the Bandra railway station before a group held a protest outside Chadha’s home.

Later in the evening, Mascarenhas said that an FIR had been registered against them and a notice under Section 35(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita was served to them.

This section mandates that police issue a notice to persons in cases involving offences punishable by less than seven years, rather than making an immediate arrest.

Chadha’s merger with BJP

On Friday, Chadha said that seven of the party’s 10 Rajya Sabha MPs were merging with the BJP. He claimed that two-thirds of AAP’s members in the Upper House supported the move, which he said was in line with constitutional provisions allowing such a merger.

Chadha made the announcement at a press conference with AAP MPs Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal. However, he claimed that other AAP MPs Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikram Sahney and Swati Maliwal were supporting the decision to merge with the BJP. Except Maliwal, all other MPs had been elected from Punjab, where the AAP is in power.

On Sunday, AAP leader Sanjay Singh said that he has submitted a petition to Rajya Sabha Chairperson CP Radhakrishnan seeking the disqualification of the seven AAP MPs.

The AAP had 10 members in the Rajya Sabha before the split and has three MPs in the Lok Sabha.

The defeat of the 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill in Parliament on April 16 has reignited the debate about delimitation – redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies to ensure that the share of the population is distributed fairly among them.

The bill sought to increase the maximum representation in the Lok Sabha to 850.

The delimitation bill failed to secure the required two-thirds majority in Parliament because it sought to carry out delimitation based on the 2011 Census, effectively bypassing the constitutional requirement to wait for the first Census after 2026, which was already underway.

In addition, Southern states maintained that they would be penalised by delimitation. They point out that their success in controlling population growth compared to Northern states could reduce their share of representation in an enlarged parliament.

Since the delimitation bill has been defeated, the task of finding a solution to the challenge of redrawing the boundaries of constituencies to ensure fair representation is more urgent now than ever.

Perhaps India could take a lesson from Europe and look to its “Cambridge compromise” of 2011 as it decides how the seats of an enlarged Lok Sabha should be apportioned among the Indian states and Union Territories.

There is no doubt that the Lok Sabha needs to be expanded. Currently, 1.5 billion Indians are represented by just 543 MPs, each of whom represents roughly 2.8 million people. Every Indian MP represents a population approximately the size of Qatar.

By contrast, the European Parliament, representing approximately 450 million people, has 720 members. This means that each Member of the European Parliament represents approximately 625,000 people.

According to Article 82 of the Indian Constitution, the Delimitation Commission is entrusted with the task of redrawing the constituencies based on the data of the most recent census. This practice was followed until the 1970s. Constituencies were redrawn to account for decadal changes due to natural increases in population and migration.

However, this provision meant that states that had a higher fertility rate would enjoy greater political representation across generations. This contradicted the Indira Gandhi government’s population control objective.

As a consequence, in 1976, through the 42nd Amendment, Parliamentary seats that were determined by the 1971 Census were frozen till the 2001 Census so that states were not penalised for effectively executing family planning programmes. This freeze was later extended till 2026, working on the assumption that all the states would have stabilised their population growth by this point.

This has created a discrepancy between the number of voters per constituency: the sole MP of Lakshadweep represents approximately 60,000 voters but MPs in Rajasthan represent approximately 3 million voters. This violates the parity in the value of the vote of each elector.

In 1971, the states of Tamil Nadu and Madhya Pradesh (undivided, including Chhattisgarh) had a population parity of about 42 million people. As a result, Tamil Nadu got 39 seats and Madhya Pradesh has 37. Now, according to the 2011 Census, the present population of Madhya Pradesh is slightly more than that of Tamil Nadu. But while Madhya Pradesh has 29 seats, Tamil Nadu has 39.

Europe offers a useful model for parliamentary representation.

In many respects, the European Union and India are similar. Both have a socially and culturally diverse population. Members of the European Parliament are elected by direct universal suffrage, for five-year terms, like in India.

The principle of “digressive proportionality” used to determine the distribution of the 720 seats in the European Parliament among the 27 member-states could be localised to the Indian context.

In the European Parliament, more populous member-states each have more seats than small ones, but smaller member-states have more seats per population.

According to this principle, the representation ratios of member states – that is, the population figure divided by the number of seats before rounding – decrease from a more populous member state to a less populous member state.

While the Netherlands has more seats overall, with 31 compared to Denmark’s 15, each Dutch MEP represents around 590,000 people, compared to about 400,000 per Danish MEP.

The Lisbon Treaty of 2007 added another safeguard by setting the maximum number of seats to 96 for the largest member-state of Germany and the minimum number to six for the smallest member-states of Malta, Luxembourg and Cyprus.

To achieve this, the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament commissioned a group of mathematicians to recommend a formula that would apportion the seats of the among member states in a manner that was “durable, transparent and impartial to politics”.

This led to the publication in 2011 of the “Cambridge Compromise” , which was drafted abiding by the constraints set by the Lisbon Treaty. The recommendations proposed a two-step process termed the “ base+prop method”.

Under this formula, in the first stage, a fixed number of seats is allocated to each country. In the second stage, the remainder is distributed proportionally to population sizes with upwards rounding. This rule does not apply to the most and least populous countries, for which a maximum ceiling and minimum floor is predetermined.

Though the Cambridge Compromise was rejected after Brexit in 2020 in favour of a “pragmatic solution” where no European Union country loses any seats and underrepresented countries gained between one and five seats, it could be adjusted and localised to the Indian context.

In the Indian case, the seats for the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh could be capped, with a similar floor applied for the least populated states and Union Territories. The principle of degressive proportionality could be applied to the other states and Union Territories, with the larger states having more seats in total, but the small states receiving more seats per capita.

This is not to say that this system does not have critics. Despite the composition of the European Parliament broadly adhering to the principle of degressive proportionality, some scholars say it is a highly unequal parliament.

They argue that smaller member states are overrepresented, leading to a “structural democratic deficit” in the European Union.

In the Indian context, however, the bigger challenge would be to garner the political will to enact such dramatic parliamentary reforms.

Irrespective of the solution adopted, it’s clear that India should utilise this opportunity to reform representation in the Parliament in a way that protects the interests of smaller states while simultaneously distributing seats to reflect population differences.

Vishwesh Sundar is a lecturer of International Relations at Leiden University in the Netherlands. A previous version of the article was published by the University of Cambridge in May 2020.

The Mumbai Police on Sunday detained several Aam Aadmi Party members who were protesting against the party’s Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha and six other AAP MPs merging with the Bharatiya Janata Party’s legislature party in the Upper House of Parliament.

The AAP’s Mumbai leader Ruben Mascarenhas, who was among those detained ahead of the planned protest on Sunday, alleged that this was done to prevent the demonstration.

Mascarenhas told Scroll that he had written to the police a day earlier, informing them of the party’s plan to protest outside Chadha’s Mumbai home and had received an acknowledgement on Sunday morning.

However, he alleged that police personnel arrived at his house at about 1.45 pm, ahead of the planned protest at 3.30 pm, and prevented him from leaving. He was later detained.

“I am not being allowed to leave [my house],” Mascarenhas said on social media earlier in the day. “This is illegal and unacceptable.”

Mumbai Police has orders from the very top that today’s peaceful protest by @AAPMumbai against Raghav Chaddha and Sandeep Pathak’s treachery, has to not take place at any cost. We intimated the police, well in time.

Police has arrived at my home. I am not being allowed to… pic.twitter.com/L2ecaNG3rP

— Ruben Mascarenhas (@rubenmasc) April 26, 2026

He said that he was taken to the Khar police station along with others before being released.

A police officer confirmed that Mascarenhas and some others had been taken to the police station but did not provide further details, PTI reported.

Despite the restrictions, about 50 AAP volunteers staged a protest, Mascarenhas said.

The police had blocked roads leading to Chadha’s home in Khar, restricting vehicular movement and preventing any gathering near the site, PTI reported.

As access to the area was curtailed, AAP volunteers initially gathered at the Bandra railway station before a group held a protest outside Chadha’s home.

AAP Mumbai’s chief Preeti Sharma Menon alleged that the police had disrupted a peaceful demonstration.

“Mumbai Police has no other work but to guard Raghav Chadha’s Mumbai residence,” Menon said on social media. “Volunteers were prevented from protesting peacefully…But BJP is allowed to block roads at their whim.”

.⁦@CPMumbaiPolice⁩ @mumbaipolice has no other work but to guard Raghav Chaddha’s Mumbai residence. @aapmumbai volunteers prevented from protesting peacefully against the GADDAR. Ruben hasbeen detained at Khar Police Station. But BJP is allowed to block roads at their whim pic.twitter.com/HocdbxJzKO

— Preeti Sharma Menon (@PreetiSMenon) April 26, 2026

On Friday, Chadha announced that seven of the party’s 10 Rajya Sabha MPs were merging with the BJP. He claimed that two-thirds of AAP’s members in the Upper House supported the move, which he said was in line with constitutional provisions allowing such a merger.

Chadha made the announcement at a press conference with AAP MPs Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal. However, he claimed that other AAP MPs Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikram Sahney and Swati Maliwal were supporting the decision to merge with the BJP. Except Maliwal, all other MPs had been elected from Punjab, where the AAP is in power.

On Sunday, AAP leader Sanjay Singh said that he has submitted a petition to Rajya Sabha Chairperson CP Radhakrishnan seeking the disqualification of the seven AAP MPs.

The AAP had 10 members in the Rajya Sabha before the split and has three MPs in the Lok Sabha.

Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh on Sunday submitted a petition to the Rajya Sabha Chairperson seeking the disqualification of seven of the party’s 10 MPs in the Upper House who had on Friday announced their merger with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Singh claimed the seven MPs, led by Raghav Chadha, have violated anti-defection provisions.

The AAP petition will be the most consequential test in two decades of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, which lays out the disqualification of legislators and parliamentarians on the grounds of defection.

The Rajya Sabha chairperson faces interlocking issues. A Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court has, in its 2023 ruling on the split in the Shiv Sena, already supplied most of the guidance – mainly, that two-thirds of the members joining another party must also be supported by what is happening in the parent party outside the House.

However, India’s constitutional law has landed in a strange place: a single member who votes against the party whip risks losing their seat, but a group from a party doing the same thing together can avoid any consequences if two-thirds of them in the legislature do so and call it a “merger”.

In effect, what is punished when done alone is permitted when done collectively.

The merger exception under Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule is what allows the wholesale claim. The Rajya Sabha chairperson’s task is to now decide whether the merger claim is genuine or manufactured.

जिस पार्टी ने चुनकर आपको संसद में भेजा, उस पार्टी को छोड़कर दूसरी पार्टी में जाना लोकतंत्र और देश के संविधान के साथ धोखा है। ऐसे सांसदों की सदस्यता रद्द होनी चाहिए।

— @SanjayAzadSln जी, राज्यसभा सांसद, AAP pic.twitter.com/cXXwonWDyB

— AAP (@AamAadmiParty) April 26, 2026

The ‘two-thirds’ requirement

In this case, the first question the chairperson will have to answer is what Paragraph 4(2) demands. The clause states that a merger of the original political party shall be deemed to have taken place if two-thirds of the legislature party agrees.

Read in isolation, the two-thirds figure looks sufficient on its own: gather the numbers and the merger follows.

The Bombay High Court adopted this reading in the 2022 case of Girish Chodankar, where 10 of 15 Goa Congress MLAs had crossed over to the BJP in 2019. The High Court read two sub-clauses of Paragraph 4 disjunctively, or separately, holding that a two-thirds vote of the legislature party was, by itself, enough.

In 2025, it applied the same reasoning to a fresh set of facts, when eight Congress MLAs in the new Goa Assembly crossed over to the BJP in 2022. A Special Leave Petition against the 2025 ruling is pending before the Supreme Court.

The Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in Subhash Desai vs Principal Secretary (2023) read the clause differently in the case that arose when Eknath Shinde led a faction of Shiv Sena MLAs out of the Uddhav Thackeray-led government and into a BJP-backed coalition.

Strictly speaking, Paragraph 4 was not the issue the court had been asked to decide. The central questions concerned the speaker’s powers and the governor’s role in calling a floor test in the Maharashtra assembly to determine which group had a majority.

The pronouncements of the Supreme Court bench on the merger exception are persuasive observations rather than binding. But since they come from a five-judge bench, they are the most authoritative reading of the clause Indian law currently has.

The two-thirds among legislators, the bench said, is a qualifying condition; the merger must originate in the political party. Reading “political party” to mean “legislature party” would render the Tenth Schedule unworkable, because the entire defection regime is built on the distinction between the two.

To collapse them would be to “sever the figurative umbilical cord”, as the Supreme Court ruling noted, that connects the legislator to the organisation that nominated, financed and elected them.

In the AAP case, therefore, the chairperson of the Rajya Sabha confronts a real choice: on the one hand is the text of Paragraph 4(2) and the Bombay High Court stance, and on the other are the observations of the Supreme Court’s Constitution bench.

The first is not yet wrong and the second is not yet binding. But everything else points the same way as the second.

The AAP-to-BJP merger in the Rajya Sabha faces an obvious problem: the national organisation of the AAP has not merged with the BJP. Its president has publicly disowned the move. The seven Rajya Sabha members cannot constitute the party for the purpose of effecting its absorption into a rival.

The ‘real’ party

The presumption that the legislative-majority test settles factional disputes is not new.

In 1972, the Supreme Court in the Sadiq Ali vs Election Commission of India case approved the Election Commission’s use of numerical strength as the decisive marker of which group was the “real” Congress when the party split in 1969 between Indira Gandhi’s faction and the “Syndicate” led by S Nijalingappa.

The Sadiq Ali case was decided 13 years before the Tenth Schedule existed. Its logic has, for 50 years, shaped how Indian politics understands defection.

In 2023, the Subhash Desai ruling on the split in the Shiv Sena case set limits on the precedent established by the Sadiq Ali case up until then.

When legislators are themselves facing disqualification, the court said, the legislative-majority test is diluted, because the legislators whose conduct is being examined are themselves part of the count being relied upon. To let their numerical strength settle the question would be to let the alleged defectors vote on whether they have defected.

The chairperson of the House, the Supreme Court said, must not base his decision on which faction commands a majority. This is “not a game of numbers, but something more”, said the court. The structure of leadership outside the legislature, the constitution of the party and the rules under which it organises itself are what he must look to.

This has a direct implication for the Rajya Sabha chairperson. The numerical fact that seven of 10 AAP MPs have walked out is, by the standards laid out in the Subhash Desai ruling, the wrong place to begin.

An asymmetry

When a single member wishes to give up their seat, Article 101(3)(b) of the Constitution insists on three things: that the member does so in writing, that they do so before a named officer, and that the Chairperson is satisfied that the resignation is voluntary and genuine.

In a looser reading, Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule permits the collective reassignment of two-thirds of a party’s mandates with no such inquiry. The chairperson who must examine the authenticity of one resignation needs, in the AAP case, only to count seven heads.

Bringing down governments

The Anti-Defection Law was enacted in 1985 to prevent legislators from toppling governments by crossing the floor. The Rajya Sabha cannot topple a government. It plays no role in confidence motions, does not elect the prime minister, and does not sustain the ruling coalition’s working majority.

But the mischief the statute was designed to address does not exist in the Rajya House, which the seven AAP parliamentarians are members of. What does exist, and what the statute now stands to permit, is that the state whose Assembly elected these MPs on one party’s symbol will, for the remainder of those terms, find itself represented by the very party it had defeated at home.

In the 2006 Kuldip Nayar case, the Supreme Court held that the integrity of an MLA’s vote in a Rajya Sabha election was weighty enough to justify abandoning the secret ballot. Twenty years later, the Rajya Sabha chairperson is a constitutional official in a position to give effect to that ruling in view of post-election conduct.

The AAP’s disqualification petition has now placed these questions before the Rajya Sabha chairperson. The pending Supreme Court appeal in the Girish Chodankar case, on the two-thirds of the members being allowed to cross over being a sufficient requirement, will eventually settle the question for good.

Until it does, the Tenth Schedule will continue to do what it now does best: punish the retail act of conscience and bless the wholesale act of departure.

The author is a lawyer and a postgraduate from NALSAR University of Law with a specialisation in Public Law. His dissertation focused on the anti-defection law.

In December, Suvendu Adhikari, the leader of opposition in the West Bengal Assembly, had led a series of high-octane demonstrations in Kolkata against the lynching of Dipu Chandra Das, a Bangladeshi Hindu. “The blood of Dipu Das cries out for justice,” Adhikari tweeted out, posting a video of himself prostrating dramatically before Hindu ascetics outside the deputy high commission of Bangladesh.

The protests were part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s efforts to derive political mileage out of the communal situation across India’s eastern border. According to the saffron party, the plight of minority Hindus in Bangladesh foretold what would become of Hindus in Bengal if what it calls demographic change is not stopped.

For a while, it seemed as if the BJP had found its central poll plank for the Assembly elections in the state, which were only a few months away at the time.

However, that was not to be.

Since Tarique Rahman became prime minister in February, the BJP has noticeably omitted the mention of Bangladesh from its political messaging in Bengal. The party’s campaign has, in recent weeks, mostly focused on highlighting crime and corruption under the ruling Trinamool Congress as well as promising a range of cash-transfer schemes. Even when it does talk about so-called infiltrators, it takes care not to mention the government of Bangladesh.

This has left Hindutva activists and sympathisers feeling disappointed. Some of them told Scroll that the reset in ties between New Delhi and Dhaka after Rahman’s victory has meant that the Modi government is going soft on his government. As a result, the Bengal BJP is unable to reap political dividends from the communal situation in Bangladesh.

Change in tack

BJP politicians acknowledge that the party has dialed down its anti-Bangladesh rhetoric, but frame the shift as a natural one.

“We were aggressive when Hindus were facing atrocities in Bangladesh,” said Anirban Ganguly, a member of the BJP’s national executive committee and the chairman of the Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation, a Hindutva thinktank. “Now, with the new dispensation, those kinds of atrocities have practically stopped. It is not a dispensation which is talking about our landlocked Northeast or collaborating with Pakistan on the nuclear issue. There is no provocation from that side.”

Ganguly, who contested the 2021 Assembly elections as well as the 2024 Lok Sabha polls from Bengal, is not in the fray this time. Still, he is touring the state with a book that he co-authored, outlining the prime minister’s vision for the state in small public gatherings. The Bengali edition of the book is titled Narendra Niti: Banglar Pragati. Narendra’s Plan: Bengal’s Progress.

The researcher-author explained how the suffering of Hindus in Bangladesh was always on the minds of Bengali Hindus in India, given the memories of Partition. His party, he added, was trying to tell them that if Trinamool’s politics of Muslim appeasement continued in West Bengal, they would meet the same fate.

“For us, Hindu consolidation against infiltration is a big issue now,” Ganguly claimed. “The prime minister is raising it in every rally. We need not name Bangladesh.”

But other BJP leaders are not pleased with this tiptoeing. Tathagata Roy, the former governor of Tripura and Meghalaya who served as the BJP’s president in Bengal over two decades ago, expressed his disappointment over New Delhi’s posture.

“I would have liked the issue of Bangladeshi Hindus to have been given a little more emphasis,” he said, arguing that the persecution of Hindus had not completely stopped under Rahman. “Perhaps, the central government is exerting quiet pressure. But being a little more vociferous would have satisfied me.”

Roy, 82, belongs to a family that traces its roots back to Bangladesh and has written a book on the uprooting of Hindus from that country. He put the change in tack from his party down to the caste divide in Bengali society.

Upper-caste Hindus made up the bulk of refugees who came from East Pakistan to West Bengal in the initial years after Partition, according to him. They managed to get white-collar jobs and did relatively well for themselves in comparison to the lower-caste Hindus who stayed behind.

“The upper-caste and lower-caste Bengalis have been so far removed from each other that they have very little empathy for each other,” Roy complained. “Their means of livelihood are different.”

Most of the Hindus remaining in Bangladesh, he added, belonged to the lower castes and practiced agriculture or owned small businesses. Their caste identity means that their plight does not by itself generate a surge of political support in Bengal, not even among refugees who once faced the same persecution as them. The BJP is, therefore, focussing more on corruption and cash transfers now.

‘It is very complicated’

For Santanu Sinha, the BJP’s approach was a reminder of the limited success Hindutva has had in cultivating what he calls a shared identity and consciousness among the Hindus of West Bengal. Sinha is the president of Hindu Samhati, a splinter group of Bengali Hindutva activists who broke from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh because they found it to be timid.

He contended that if the saffron party had continued talking about Bangladeshi Hindus, the tactic would have boomeranged in districts that are far from the border and do not have refugees. The Trinamool, in his view, still understood the psyche of the average Bengali, particularly those who were not refugees, better than the BJP.

“When we try to talk about Bangladesh in Medinipur [about 200 km from the border], Trinamool workers tell voters that we plan to settle refugees in their area,” Sinha said. “It is a very complicated problem. Changing the minds of all Hindus is very difficult.”

While dyed-in-the-wool Hindutva activists understand these challenges, ground-level BJP workers struggle to explain why the party has gone silent about Bangladesh all of a sudden.

Sujit Jaiswal, a middle-aged BJP volunteer in the Jorasanko area of north Kolkata, admitted that he did not know anything about the subject. “Only the leadership can say what is going on between the governments of the two countries,” he stated frankly.

This sentiment was echoed by Samar Dey, a 72-year-old BJP worker helping the party’s candidate in Maniktala. However, Dey insisted that the BJP had not stopped raising the issue of so-called illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

“Mamata [Banerjee] is not giving land to the Border Security Force for fencing the Bangladesh border,” he alleged. “People from her party have been caught with bags full of fake Aadhaar cards and voter ID cards.”

The BJP hopes that this emphasis on what it calls infiltration will be enough to mobilise voters. But even voters who believe that the entry of undocumented migrants from Bangladesh has led to an increase in the Muslim population of Bengal don’t consider this to be an election issue.

Kartik Das, 58, has sold vegetables in the upscale Lake Market area of south Kolkata for over three decades. He pointed at the homes of Hindus in the neighbourhood and claimed that nearly all young residents either lived in other states or had moved out of India altogether. The population of Muslims, on the other hand, was growing because they had more children and some of them had supposedly come from Bangladesh, according to him.

When asked what would decide who he votes for, though, Das simply patted his belly. The border problem, he argued, was irreparable. It was better to focus on bread-and-butter issues.

“I don’t think anybody can stop infiltration,” Das said. “It is an international problem. I don’t worry about it.”

He added that he had enough problems of his own: “My income has reduced because people are ordering vegetables online. I don’t have time to worry about anything else.”

Rarely does the word brilliant fall short for an exceptional artist. For Raghu Rai, it does. His eyes were a camera and the camera held his gaze and blinked exactly to his command. Browsing through his photographs, viewers are more than stunned by his timing, his eye, and his presence in places were life was aching to be discovered and caught in the stillness of motion.

A protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raghu Rai worked as a photographer-journalist in The Statesman and India Today. His images appeared in scores of other publications around the world. He covered the Bangladesh war of 1971 and the Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984, among other events.

Rai’s most memorable projects keep probing the question of calamity – natural, historical and political. He was a keen observer of the destitution of human life faced by displacement and the disappearance of destination. The camera frames and reframes the question of survival, where you are left with something more than agony and empathy.

Rai’s images of the Bhopal tragedy are surreal: they focus on empty eyes and gazes that do not look at us and prevent us from looking at them. They are caught in their own time that separates us from them.

They ask a question: how do you connect to epic suffering? You forget the camera and think of yourself: with what lens will you see faces that have left us with an enormous silence of their expressions? They are not speaking to us. But they provoke us to speak to ourselves.

Raghu Rai’s searing pictures from the Bhopal Gas tragedy were, for me, the most impactful of his work, it made us all aware of massacre that took place and why journalism is important - https://t.co/U3WiJr3Umo

— Nistula Hebbar (@nistula) April 26, 2026

Even when the odd pair of eyes in the images meets our gaze, you can feel they do not look at us. They look at the empty face of fleeting time. Those eyes appear shocked by time. In these images, you feel time itself has fled the scene and left behind bodies to wonder what it was, or is, to live.

In Rai’s images, the gaze is always gazing back at you, probingly. I’m reminded of Spanish poet Antonio Machado’s lines from Proverbs and Songs: “The eye you see is not an eye because you see it; it is an eye because it sees you.”

In Rai’s images of the Bangladesh War, you revisit Partition. It was Bangladesh’s double tragedy. Image after image tells you, history has no mercy. It is a machine with repetitive compulsion. War is not simply about how it kills, but how it uproots and displaces.

War sticks to the eyes of survivors like a still lizard on the wall. Wartorn bodies are also in movement, walking to live. Their bodies are straight, or bent, and their unknown destination is their destiny. War often turns bodies into a single, extended body of people huddled together on the top of a bus, or in a train, fleeing for safety.

1971 :: Condition of Refugees During Bangladesh War

( Photo - Raghu Rai / Magnum ) pic.twitter.com/MtvqeKm1j0

— indianhistorypics (@IndiaHistorypic) April 26, 2026

Ironically, you notice in Rai’s images, that the most harrowed faces carry proof of the beastly face of war. War has no face, but it sticks to the faces of its survivors like poisoned glue. You realise through Rai’s images that war is a lived memory of the body, and that survival is beyond instinct. Misery does not obliterate what is precious: food, cloth, child and umbrella.

Imagine having to deal with hunger and fear together, with no idea where to go. War returns people to the original condition of belonging to the inhospitable earth. A nation is a home bound by territory. Refugees experience the cruelty of that paradox.

Rai had an eye for bodies that were oblivious of time, either in joy, or suffering. He was a keen observer of strategies of survival. In Rai’s images, you realize the thin veneer of order, as something or the other is always falling apart.

A poor man and his wife push a cartwheel full of heavy boxes piled up on each other. They must keep pushing it till they reach their destination. The cartwheel must be as precariously balanced and moving as their bodies. The machine is the extended body of labour.

Great artists always leave you with something more in their work, where curiosity doesn’t die. It keeps alive our larger curiosity for the world and people, despite all the provocations and limitations against it. Raghu Rai’s art is a testament of what we have lost, but will never lose.

Churchgate’s station. Mumbai, India
© Raghu Rai pic.twitter.com/O5LluUeHdf

— louise (@louise43678507) April 28, 2021

Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Gandhi: The End of Nonviolence.

The India Meteorological Department on Sunday warned of heatwave-like conditions in parts of northwest and central India over the next three days as temperatures continued to rise sharply, with Delhi crossing 44 degrees Celsius.

In Delhi, the weather agency forecast a partly cloudy sky and issued an orange alert for heatwave-like conditions at isolated places.

An orange alert indicates that authorities should be prepared for severe weather and take necessary precautions.

The capital recorded a minimum temperature of 26.2 degrees Celsius, while relative humidity stood at 43% in the morning.

Several parts of Uttar Pradesh also reported severe heat, with temperatures crossing 47 degrees Celsius in Banda on both Saturday and Sunday, making it one of the hottest places in the country.

Data from the IMD showed that most districts in the state recorded maximum temperatures above 42 degrees Celsius.

Also read: Rising humidity across India’s coast in summer is a health danger

Indian families are increasingly spending on private coaching out of school to improve children’s learning outcomes. Nearly two in five students in secondary school are enrolled in some coaching classes, up from under a quarter in primary school, according to the Comprehensive Modular Survey on Education 2025, conducted across 52,085 households between April and June 2025.

In addition, about 38% of students are enrolled in private schools, where overall household expenditure per student, on average, is 10 times that in government schools. Taken together, families with school-going children spend between 5% and 10% of their monthly expenditure on education and related costs, our analysis shows. Spending patterns vary across social groups.

“When we say that parents are not paying any fee under the Right to Education [RTE Act], we need to understand that there is a lot of ‘opportunity cost’ of education that parents pay,” said Kishore Darak, a senior educationist working in the sector for close to three decades. “For example, a child going to school may require her mother to stay at home as a caregiver to younger siblings. In that case, she loses her daily wages, adding to the opportunity cost the parents must bear.”

In six charts, we analyse household spending on school education.

Pre-primary costs

The survey asked respondents for a breakdown of expenditure on education and found that, on average, households spent Rs 9,807 per year per student in pre-primary school. This is two-thirds the amount spent in secondary school.

“The pre-primary education sector in India is highly unregulated, we do not even know the number of nurseries and preschool centres in the country,” Darak said. “Lack of regulation leads to unchecked profiteering. Sending a child to an expensive preschool has become a symbol of prestige or class, a vehicle of upward mobility, so parents want to believe they should spend more.”

Similarly, private coaching expenditure rises nearly four times between primary and higher secondary school.

Urban elementary schools

Families in Indian cities and towns spend more on education and related costs than their rural counterparts. Until middle school, spending in urban areas is nearly three times that in rural areas. By higher secondary levels, urban spending is about twice the rural spending.

Urban households are more likely to enroll children in private schools, while rural households depend more on government schools, a 2023 study noted.

Private schools

An average student in government school incurs Rs 2,863 per year in education-related costs, compared to Rs 28,693 in private schools. The difference is seen across both rural and urban areas.

Enrolment in government schools has declined in recent years, while private school enrolment has increased, with many parents citing better learning outcomes as a reason for choosing private schools, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2025.

“Parents are concerned about the quality of education. They want their children to have better education. The circumstances are forcing them to pay for quality education,” said Darak.

In government schools, books and stationery account for about 40% of total school expenditure. In private schools, course fees account for about 65%.

These figures capture reported spending, but may not include all expenses households incur. “There are a lot of hidden and allied costs of education and coaching. Parents often report only fees, but there are additional costs like transport for private coaching, which are not captured.” said Darak.

Coaching boom

About one in 10 students (11.6%) at the pre-primary level take coaching, rising to – as we said – almost four in 10 (38.1%) at the secondary level.

Average coaching expenditure rises from Rs 525 at the pre-primary level to Rs 6,311 at the higher secondary level. The increase is seen in both rural and urban areas, with urban spending higher at each stage.

“As children move to higher grades, the cost of education increases. Entry to higher education is now almost totally driven by the entrance examinations and the coaching industry is the gatekeeper there,” said Kishor Darak. “Coaching centres teach techniques of cracking exams. Almost any child cannot crack those exams without such coaching support that preaches ‘academic manipulations,” he added.

Research based on data from the Annual Status of Education Reports has found that private tutoring is linked to better learning outcomes, suggesting that households use coaching to support school learning. The findings also suggest that reliance on private tutoring may point to limitations in the school system.

Education spending

Household spending on education also varies across social groups. Scheduled Tribes households spend Rs 7,363 annually on education and related costs, amounting to about 5% of their consumption expenditure, while Other Backward Classes households spend about twice and “others” spend nearly thrice that amount annually, amounting to about 10%.

A 2024 study on household expenditure in urban India found that spending on education varies across socioeconomic groups, caste and type of institutions, with households allocating a significant portion of their budgets to schooling despite the provision of free education.

Spending also increases across grades for all social groups, with the gap widening at higher grades. At the higher secondary level, households in the “others” category spend Rs 40,348 per student, compared with Rs 15,303 among ST households.

Enrolment drops at higher grades, particularly among ST students, we had reported in 2025.

“If India wants to become a developed country, as is harped in the Viksit Bharat 2047 narrative, it should ensure free and high-quality mandatory education for all children,” said Darak. “Education is and should always be seen as a fundamental right, part of the Right to Life. The state cannot run away from its responsibility of providing equitable quality education to every child,” he added.

IndiaSpend reached out to the Union education ministry’s school education department for comment on household spending on school education. We will update this story when we receive a response.

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

Aam Aadmi Party leader Sanjay Singh on Sunday said that he has submitted a petition to Rajya Sabha Chairperson CP Radhakrishnan seeking the disqualification of seven AAP MPs in the Rajya Sabha who have announced their merger with the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The AAP had 10 members in the Rajya Sabha before the split and has three MPs in the Lok Sabha.

Addressing a press conference, Singh said that the move by the seven MPs amounted to defection and violated the anti-defection law.

On Friday, AAP MP Raghav Chadha announced that seven of the party’s 10 Rajya Sabha MPs were merging with the BJP. He claimed that two-thirds of AAP’s members in the Upper House supported the move, which he said was in line with constitutional provisions allowing such a merger.

Chadha made the announcement at a press conference with AAP MPs Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal. However, he claimed that other AAP MPs Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikram Sahney and Swati Maliwal were supporting the decision to merge with the BJP. Except Maliwal, all other MPs had been elected from Punjab, where the AAP is in power.

On Sunday, Singh, however, termed the development a “betrayal of the people’s mandate”, particularly in Punjab.

“These members were elected by the AAP and later chose to leave and join another party,” Singh said. “This is a betrayal of the people of Punjab and also of the Constitution of India.”

He said the AAP had consulted constitutional experts, including Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal and a former Lok Sabha secretary general on the matter, and it had been made clear that “the MPs were liable for disqualification under the law”. “

He also dismissed claims that AAP MLAs in Punjab were in touch with Chadha, calling them “misinformation and rumours”.

Photographer Raghu Rai has died, his family said on Sunday. He was 83.

Considered a protégé of French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Rai became a photographer in the 1960s and worked for The Statesman in Delhi and India Today magazine before freelancing.

He was on the jury for the World Press Photo contest between 1990 and 1997.

Rai published more than a dozen photo books: on the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Mother Teresa, the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, the Taj Mahal and Bangladesh.

In 1972, he was awarded the Padma Shri, India’s fourth-highest civilian honour.

In pictures:

• Thirty years later, photographer Raghu Rai returns to site of his iconic Bhopal images
• Capturing the moments of a movement: Raghu Rai’s chronicle of JP and the Bihar students agitation
• Raghu Rai’s five-decade career captures the essence of India
• ‘I can never be true to my experiences without a camera’: Raghu Rai

Rest in peace to the greatest documentary photographer out of the subcontinent Raghu Rai. Just a beautiful way of seeing https://t.co/8SaGhHlBUU pic.twitter.com/8PrfMdvrvC

— yogi (@DJpastawater) April 25, 2026

Masses are other people.
-Raymond Williams

Raghu Rai 2010 (Mumbai-Where Dreams Don’t Die) pic.twitter.com/saJc9njpP7

— Andrea Alba (@blanc_alba) May 9, 2025

Mother Teresa descending the stairs, photographed by Raghu Rai, Kolkata, India, 1970.#MotherTeresa #RaghuRai #Calcutta1970 #Photography #HumanitarianLegacy #TimelessMoments #IconicImages #CompassionInAction #HistoricalPortraits #FaithAndService pic.twitter.com/GmkUQbgS9B

— JF AGER. 🇫🇷 & 🇺🇸 United by shared values. (@jager1108) May 5, 2025

Kashti-e-ziist khe rahe haiñ "Atash",
Bahr kaar-e-muhaal meiñ gum haiñ #KhwajaReazuddin_Atash
P. C : Raghu Rai pic.twitter.com/ExKJdMArmJ

— Munaf (@Munaf_Ali) April 25, 2026

Classical artists photographed by the great Raghu Rai pic.twitter.com/xSuscie219

— Love of Cinema (@loveofcinemasf8) April 26, 2026

Inside the Shantinath Jain Temple, 1986, Photograph by Raghu Rai. pic.twitter.com/qCqWupTOpn

— Yadu (@Yaduvam) April 25, 2026

Raghu Rai’s extraordinary images of the 1971 Bangladesh crisis are featured in today's Chartbook Top Link. Sign up to learn more about the photos and subscribe to Chartbook: https://t.co/V31UlvZ23U pic.twitter.com/DoULBuHvf3

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) December 30, 2024

Fishermen at night near the Taj Mahal, India, 1985

Photo by Raghu Rai pic.twitter.com/Fwk5FCxUiV

— Remnants of the Past (@remnantsofpast) April 20, 2026

The lens of Raghu Rai doesn’t just take photos; it captures the weight of history. 📸

1971: Lt. Col. K. S. Pannu stands at the threshold of victory, demanding the surrender of enemy forces. One of the most powerful frames from the Bangladesh Liberation War. pic.twitter.com/lAuk6fnojL

— SILENT BRIEF (@SilentBriefHQ) April 19, 2026

Republic Day
Raghu Rai, 1998 pic.twitter.com/7cgXgyLVyV

— 𖤓 (@Vigraharaja) April 3, 2026

Family scene behind the Taj Mahal. Agra, India, 1985 | Raghu Rai pic.twitter.com/CRlNSnhlB4

— Eye On Axis (@eyeonaxis) March 18, 2026

Diving into Ugrasen Baoili, Delhi, 1971 • Raghu Rai • pic.twitter.com/PpBZG6OYvF

— 𝑷𝒂𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒄𝒌 (@LKpaddy) August 5, 2025

📸 Raghu Rai pic.twitter.com/F02YoBr7IV

— Fabio (@Solitudinario) July 16, 2025

A 43-year-old share trader, Debdeep Chatterjee, was beaten to death allegedly by a mob in Asansol on Saturday after an argument broke out when his car brushed against a parked motorbike near his home, The Telegraph reported.

His wife, Piyali Chatterjee, told the newspaper that the incident took place around 1 am when she, her husband and their 10-year-old son were returning home after attending a party. After their car brushed against a parked motorbike outside their housing complex, a group of men stopped them.

Debdeep Chatterjee got out of the car and apologised, but an argument broke out and he was assaulted.

Local Congress leaders alleged that those who attacked him were aides of a Trinamool Congress leader.

Debdeep Chatterjee, a Congress supporter, was allegedly punched multiple times, fell to the ground and hit his head, losing consciousness. He was taken to hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival, The Telegraph reported.

Police said the body has been sent for a post-mortem examination. Three persons have been arrested, IANS reported.

The Congress’ West Bengal unit condemned the killing and alleged that the attackers were linked to the ruling Trinamool Congress. It said the incident showed a “complete collapse of law and order” in the state and raised concerns about the safety of Opposition workers.

“The fact that such violence has occurred immediately after polling highlights a deeply disturbing pattern of political intimidation and vendetta,” the party said.

Congress MP Rahul Gandhi described the incident as “utterly reprehensible”.

“In West Bengal today, it is not democracy but TMC's reign of terror that prevails,” he said. “Intimidating, attacking, and eliminating opposing voices after votes are cast – this has become the defining character of TMC.”

कांग्रेस के कार्यकर्ता देबदीप चटर्जी की चुनाव बाद TMC से जुड़े गुंडों द्वारा की गई हत्या बेहद निंदनीय है। शोकाकुल परिवार के प्रति मेरी गहरी संवेदनाएँ।

पश्चिम बंगाल में आज लोकतंत्र नहीं, TMC का गुंडा राज चल रहा है। वोट के बाद विरोधी आवाज़ों को डराना, मारना, मिटाना - यही TMC का… https://t.co/kQn4T9deL0

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) April 26, 2026

However, Trinamool Congress leaders said that the allegations were “baseless”, The Telegraph reported.

“The Congress has no credibility in Asansol, and so they are cooking up stories and bringing false allegations against us to drag the attention of the media,” the party’s district convenor V Sivadasan Dasu said.

While the Trinamool Congress and the Congress are part of the Opposition INDIA bloc at the Centre, they are contesting the West Bengal polls separately. The first phase of polling was held on Thursday. The second phase will be conducted on April 29 and votes will be counted on May 4.

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

Hundreds of protesters in Imphal clashed with security forces on Saturday after being stopped from marching to the chief minister’s residence, The Hindu reported. They were demanding justice for two children killed in a recent attack and permanent peace in Manipur.

More than 20 protesters were injured in the clashes, the newspaper quoted eyewitnesses as saying.

Manipur today.
Imphal and Ukhrul pic.twitter.com/wvYnoUwHx3

— Vijaita Singh (@vijaita) April 25, 2026

The protest rallies organised by the Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity, a civil-society organisation, began from eight locations but were blocked by security forces at several points that led to the chief minister’s residence, The Indian Express reported.

Tensions escalated in some areas as protesters attempted to breach barricades, with some throwing stones and the security forces using tear gas to disperse the crowds in places including Keishampat, Lamlong, Ima Keithel and Singjamei, the newspaper reported.

The police said on Saturday that six persons had been arrested for their alleged involvement in “violence and disruption of public order and peace in greater Imphal area”. But it was unclear if the police was referring to incident on Saturday.

A delegation of protesters was later allowed to meet Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh and submitted a memorandum outlining their demands, The Hindu reported.

Following the meeting, Singh appealed to the family of the two children killed on April 7 in Tronglaobi to accept their bodies that have remained in a morgue for more than two weeks, India Today NE reported.

He said the government was working with security agencies to identify the perpetrators.

Singh added that “there is no other way to bring peace other than through talks on the negotiating table”, The Indian Express reported.

The two children were killed in Bishnupur’s Tronglaobi on April 7 after a suspected projectile struck their home. The incident, which occurred while the family was asleep, left a five-year-old boy and five-month-old girl dead.

The village where the incident took place is located near the hill areas of Churachandpur and has witnessed tensions since the ethnic clashes broke out between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo-Hmar communities in May 2023.

At least 260 persons have been killed and more than 59,000 persons displaced since the conflict began. There were periodic upticks in violence in 2024 and 2025.

Also read:

• How to end the sufferings of the people of Manipur?
• ‘We thought peace was coming’: Manipur’s buffer zones are back in grip of violence

Six passengers were injured after a Swiss International Air Lines flight from Delhi to Zurich aborted its takeoff after its engine failed and caught fire in the capital on Sunday, The Economic Times reported.

The passengers and crew of the flight LX147 were evacuated on the runway at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. The Airbus A330 aircraft had 228 passengers and four infants on board.

Emergency evacuation from Swiss Delhi - Zurich flight LX0147 pic.twitter.com/rvzhCPb3bg

— Ishan Jain (@JainIshan316) April 25, 2026

The aircraft had reached a speed of 104 knots, or 196 km per hour, before the pilots aborted the takeoff, according to data from FlightRadar24.

After assessing the situation, the crew “decided as a precaution to evacuate the aircraft”, NDTV quoted the airline as saying.

All passengers and crew exited the aircraft using emergency slides, while stairs were provided for some persons who were unable to use the slides, The Economic Times reported.

Six passengers were injured during the evacuation and were taken to hospital for treatment. The crew were unharmed.

The airline said that it has set up a task force and was assisting the passengers by arranging rebookings and hotel accommodation.

“We are determined to fully understand what led to this incident,” The Economic Times quoted the airline as saying. “SWISS technical specialists will travel to Delhi to inspect the aircraft and initiate the next steps.”

The Delhi airport authorities said all other operations were unaffected after a full emergency was declared on runway 28/10. All prescribed safety protocols were promptly executed and passengers were safely evacuated, they added.

The Election Commission has ordered the West Bengal government to suspend five police officers in Diamond Harbour for alleged misconduct and failing to maintain neutrality during the Assembly polls, PTI reported on Saturday.

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

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

In a communication to the West Bengal chief secretary, the poll panel said that the suspension was ordered after a report submitted by the state chief electoral officer about the conduct of police personnel.

The officers to be suspended are Additional Superintendent of Police Sandip Garai, Sub-Divisional Police Officer Sajal Mondal, Inspector in charge of Diamond Harbour police station Mausam Chakraborty, Inspector in charge of Falta police station Ajay Bag and Officer in charge of Usthi police station Subhechha Bag, PTI quoted unidentified officials as saying.

The Election Commission has also told the state government to send a report about Additional Superintendent of Police Garai to his cadre controlling authority in the Union Ministry of Home Affairs, according to the news agency.

It has also been directed to issue a warning to Diamond Harbour Superintendent of Police Ishani Pal for “failing to ensure discipline and fairness” among subordinate officers in election-related duties.

The poll panel asked the state administration to implement the directions and submit a compliance report by 11 am on Saturday.

No repoll in Bengal, Tamil Nadu

Meanwhile, the Election Commission also said that no repoll has been recommended in any polling station in West Bengal or Tamil Nadu where Assembly elections were held on Thursday, PTI reported on Saturday.

An unidentified official from the poll panel told the news agency that the election process in West Bengal was completed without any major disruption that would warrant fresh voting at any booth.

“No repoll has been recommended in any of the 44,376 polling stations of West Bengal where polls were held on Thursday,” PTI quoted the official as saying.

Similarly, no repoll has been recommended in Tamil Nadu in any polling station, the news agency quoted officials as saying. All 234 Assembly seats in the state went to vote in a single phase on Thursday.

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

Twenty-three percent of the candidates contesting the ongoing Assembly elections in West Bengal have declared criminal cases in their affidavits, a study published by the Association for Democratic Reforms has shown.

The report released on Tuesday analysed the self-sworn affidavits of 2,920 out of the 2,926 candidates contesting the elections.

Out of the candidates analysed, 683 had criminal cases filed against them. Additionally, 20% of these candidates, or 589 of them, declared serious criminal cases against themselves, the report showed.

A serious criminal case includes offences with a maximum punishment of five years or more, non-bailable offences, electoral offences, or charges related to assault, murder, kidnapping, rape, and crimes against women and children.

Polling in 152 of West Bengal’s 294 constituencies was held on Thursday. Voting in the remaining seats in West Bengal will be held on April 29 and the results will be announced on May 4.

In the first phase of polling, 23% of the candidates, which is 345 out of the 1,475 analysed, have said that they face criminal cases, as per the report. Of these, 294 candidates, or 20% have serious criminal charges filed against them.

In the second phase too, 23% of the candidates, which is 338 out of the 1,445 analysed, have criminal cases against them, the Association for Democratic Reforms said. About 20%, or 295 of them, have serious criminal cases against them.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has the highest number of candidates with criminal cases filed against them, the report said. As many as 208 out of its 293 candidates analysed in the report, or 71%, face criminal charges.

From the Congress, 76 (26%) out of 293 analysed candidates had criminal cases, while 112 (39%) out of 290 candidates from the Trinamool Congress had such charges. Ninety-four, or about 47%, of the 198 candidates from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) also had criminal cases.

The BJP also topped the list of candidates with serious criminal cases. At least 188 (64%) out of the 293 candidates from the Hindutva party had such charges.

Overall, 192 candidates of the 2,920 candidates looked into have declared cases related to crimes against women, the report said. Out of them, eight candidates declared cases related to rape. Thirty-five candidates also declared cases related to murder, while 185 declared cases of attempt to murder.

The Association for Democratic Reforms added that 129, or 44%, out of 294 constituencies are red alert constituencies. Such seats are those where three or more contesting candidates have declared criminal cases against themselves.

The report further noted that 629 (22%) of the total candidates have assets worth over Rs 1 crore.

Among the major parties, 209 (72%) out of 290 candidates from Trinamool Congress, 143 (49%) of 293 candidates from the BJP and 86 (29%) of 293 candidates from the Congress have declared assets valued more than Rs 1 crore.

The Union government on Friday said that of the 26 Indians whose families had moved the Supreme Court seeking their safe return from Russia, 10 have died while fighting the war in Ukraine, reported Live Law.

Most of them had joined the Russian military voluntarily, the Centre claimed.

In December, the Union government told Parliament that 26 Indian citizens, of the 206 believed to have been recruited into the Russian military, had been killed. Seven Indians were missing, Minister of State Kirti Vardhan Singh had said.

The external affairs ministry has repeatedly issued advisories warning Indian citizens against joining the Russian military. New Delhi contends that many are duped by unscrupulous agents and are often hired as support staff, such as cooks and helpers, amid Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, triggering the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II.

On Friday, a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi was hearing petitions by the family members of 26 Indians who were allegedly forced to fight the war in Ukraine.

The families said that the Indian citizens had gone to Russia in search of jobs, reported Live Law.

During the hearing, the petitioners alleged that the Ministry of External Affairs had not contacted the family members of the Indian citizens who had been forced to fight in Russia’s war.

“They have not collected our DNA sample, we have been trafficked out of the country, they are not even in touch with us, it is not a case of inaction, they are not even in contact with us,” the petitioners alleged.

In response, Additional Solicitor General Aiswharya Bhati said that though there were some instances where recruiting agents had misled Indian citizens into joining the Russian military, “many of the individuals had entered into voluntary contracts with Russian entities”, reported Live Law.

Bhati added that apart from the 10 who have died, one person was in jail in a criminal case, and another was “voluntarily continuing” in the military.

“The Indian government has been doing a multi-pronged strategy, we have been guiding them not to accept these [job offers],” said Bhati.

The Russian defence ministry stopped recruiting Indians in April 2024, according to the country’s embassy in New Delhi. However, contracts for military service have delayed the release of several Indians.

In December, Singh said that 119 Indians have been discharged from service in Russia. Efforts are being made to secure the release of the remaining 50 persons, he added.

He also said that New Delhi and Indian diplomatic missions in Russia have been assisting citizens discharged from the Russian Army for their return to India by facilitating their travel documents and providing them with air tickets.

“The Indian mission in Russia has also assisted with the task of evacuation of mortal remains,” Singh said. “Once the mortal remains are shifted to a safe zone, the identification process involves matching of DNA samples with the next of kin.”

The discharge of Indian citizens is discussed bilaterally at several levels, including during interactions between leaders, ministers and officials, he added.

How does a country conduct free and fair elections in a multi-party system where one party controls the government and, hence, the levers of power? And how does it ensure that bitter electioneering does not harm the social fabric?

Democracies across the world have grappled with these questions. India’s answer was to implement a model code of conduct. In the run up to elections, governments give up their powers over the bureaucracy to the Election Commission. Moreover, hate-based campaigning, which emphasises communal or caste identities, is forbidden.

Largely a creation of TN Seshan, the election commissioner from 1990 to 1996 and his successor MS Gill, the model code of conduct initially played a significant role at a time of great political tumult.

Lately, however, as the independence of the Election Commission has come under question, the model code has also gone from being an impartial instrument to one that is seen as having significant problems – and is sometimes so arbitrarily applied, it borders on the absurd.

For one, the model code now resembles de facto President’s Rule. In West Bengal, the Election Commission has taken over the entire state machinery. Mass transfers have been affected for bureaucrats and policemen. Given that there have been grave doubts about the Election Commission’s independence, this, in effect, means Central rule.

So strict is the model code now, that it can even seem bizarre. In the days before polling, tourists have been barred from beach towns in Bengal and the use of motorcycles was restricted (a rule so absurd the Calcutta High Court had to intervene to overrule it). Even private homes have not been spared. If an apartment complex has been designated a polling booth, visitors from other constituencies cannot enter.

However, these draconian measures are not uniformly applied. Even obvious violations of the model code are ignored – if they come from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party at the Centre responsible for appointing election commissioners.

The most obvious example: Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s televised address on April 18 in which he criticised the Opposition right in the middle of the elections. Aired on Doordarshan, the public broadcaster, the speech used government machinery to carry out a party’s campaign – an obvious violation of the model code.

A prime minister has already been disqualified for the same offence. In 1975, the Allahabad High Court held that Indira Gandhi, the prime minister at the time, was guilty of using state machinery for her campaign and disqualified her from holding public office for six years. Gandhi's act of using bureaucrats to arrange rostrums was minor compared to Modi’s much greater violation of using state-run mass media for partisan purposes.

Even worse, the Election Commission has ignored Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath’s Wednesday speech in Kolkata attacking Muslims. He said that Bengal’s identity is unrelated to the Kaaba, Islam’s holiest site. In theory, this is a clear model code violation, given its communal tilt. But in practice it seems, the Election Commission is more interested in chasing after motorcyclists and tourists.

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

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

Record polling. Tamil Nadu and a part of West Bengal went to the polls on Thursday. Tamil Nadu recorded its highest voter turnout, with 84.6% of the voters casting their ballots, according to the Election Commission. In 2021, the turnout was 76.6%.

In West Bengal, the turnout was a record 91.7% in 152 of the state’s 294 constituencies where the polls were held. The overall turnout was 85.2% in 2021. Sporadic instances of violence were reported in Bengal.

Strategic allies. United States President Donald Trump shared on social media the transcript of remarks made by an American political commentator that described India as being among “hellhole” countries. The statements were made by Michael Savage, an author and political commentator, who was speaking about birthright citizenship in the US.

Birthright citizenship means that children born in the US automatically become US citizens, regardless of their parents' citizenship or immigration status.

“A baby here becomes an instant citizen, and then they bring the entire family in from China or India or some other hellhole on the planet,” Savage said, adding that “there’s almost no loyalty to this country amongst the immigrant class coming in today”.

The Congress party said it was “extremely insulting and anti-India” that Trump had shared the comments. The Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson initially said that New Delhi had “seen some reports” about Trump’s post and “that’s where I leave it”. However, following the criticism, the government described the remarks shared by Trump as “inappropriate” and “in poor taste”.

Political churn. The Aam Aadmi Party’s legislature party in the Rajya Sabha was splitting and a faction was merging with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, said AAP MP Raghav Chadha. Chadha claimed that he had the support of two-thirds of AAP’s members in the Upper House of Parliament.

The announcement was made at a press conference alongside AAP MPs Sandeep Pathak and Ashok Mittal. Other AAP MPs Harbhajan Singh, Rajinder Gupta, Vikram Sahney and Swati Maliwal were supporting the decision to merge with the BJP, Chadha claimed. The AAP had 10 members in the Rajya Sabha before the split. It has three MPs in the Lok Sabha.

AAP leader Sanjay Singh said that the seven MPs had “backstabbed the people of Punjab”, from where they had been elected.

Also on Scroll last week

• One year after terror attack, Pahalgam remains off the tourist map
• ‘We thought peace was coming’: Manipur’s buffer zones are back in grip of violence
• Watch: As lakhs of Muslim voters lose out to Bengal SIR, who stands to gain?
• From rallies to booth management, I-PAC is critical for Trinamool. Will its exit hurt the party?
• The life of Puja: How a young woman from rural Bengal became an internet star
• Amid West Asia war, a ‘coalition of the willing’ aims to draw a roadmap for fossil fuel phase-out
• The workers who keep India’s cities running have a simple message – pay us living wages
• Opinion: When ritual becomes moral evasion, political tool and spectacle of power
• How a Bangladeshi film uses sand to explore the ‘fragility of urban, modern life’
• ‘Nukkad Naatak’ review: Full marks for sincerity in film about the value of education

Follow the Scroll channel on WhatsApp for a curated selection of the news that matters throughout the day, and a round-up of major developments in India and around the world every evening. What you won’t get: spam.

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Before sunrise reached the lower slopes of the Gonasika Hills in Odisha’s Keonjhar district, Parmedhenu Juang was already in his field. It was early monsoon in June as the 54-year-old farmer bent over a patch of soil and let ragi fall through his fingers, examining the colour, weight and shape of the grain.

“Desi bihana are like living beings,” said Juang, referring to “traditional seeds” in Odia. “If they are cared for, they stay strong. If they are neglected, they slowly lose themselves.”

In Iruda village, at least three generations of Juang’s family, who are one of Odisha’s Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups, have preserved traditional seeds such as finger millets, sorghum, little millet, pearl millet, black gram, cowpeas, green gram and paddy.

Once cultivated for food by the Adivasis in the region, many of these seeds are now disappearing.

The Green Revolution transformed India’s agricultural system, focusing on high-yielding hybrid seeds and chemical-intensive monocropping, such as wheat and rice. Diverse seeds, especially of crops grown outside government procurement, were sidelined.

The varieties Adivasi communities preserve have been shaped over generations by local rainfall, altitude, soil and food culture.

Some are like para dhan, a type of paddy suited for water scarcity since it is ready to harvest in 60 days. These varieties can survive poor soil and carry flavours that farmers say no market seeds grain can reproduce.

Others like ratanchudi, a short-duration paddy variety, and laiseri, which has a longer 120-day harvest cycle, have vanished, say Adivasi farmers.

This has meant the loss of a sustainable source of food as well as a cultural aspect of their identity and life, said Adivasi communities in Odisha’s Keonjhar, Mayurbhanj, Rayagada and Koraput districts during conversations in between May and August last year.

Migrating seeds, changing homes

Juang’s ancestors once cultivated millets, pulses, paddy and tubers across hill slopes nearly 3,000 feet above sea level in the Gonasika mountain range, according to oral tradition and stories passed down by community elders. Finger millet grown in the hill slopes looked and tasted different, said Juang. “The grains were bigger and sweeter,” he said. “Even after cooking, the aroma was intense.”

When Juang Adivasi families gradually moved to the foothills, the seeds travelled with them, but something changed. “The same seed does not behave the same way in every soil,” said Juang. “It was shaped by a specific place for generations. When we moved it, something changed inside it.”

Migrating seeds struggle like humans, said Juang, pointing to a handful of pearl millets, which farmers of the Juang community grow as food. “Seeds also migrate with us and struggle to thrive in an alien environment.”

This belief shapes how the Juang farmers handle seeds for preservation. Only grain from healthy plants are selected for storage. The seeds are carefully dried, in partial shade. They are also touched, examined and remembered – instead of written information, Juang Adivasi farmers rely on oral knowledge to recognise seeds by colour, grain size, shape, weight, taste and aroma.

“If a seed is treated carelessly, it weakens,” said Juang. “If it is respected, it feeds many seasons.”

In neighbouring Mayurbhanj district, seed preservation by Santal households is being affected by the changing architecture of homes as mud houses are replaced by concrete and cement buildings. Traditionally, millet, pulses and paddy seeds were stored in bamboo baskets, earthen pots and handmade containers lined with ash and dried neem leaves.

Subasa Mohanta, a 54-year-old Santal farmer from Goili village in Jashipur block, said mud houses kept seeds cool even in summer. “Inside cement houses, they heat up quickly and insects arrive sooner,” she said.

Mohanta is known as mandia maa, or millet mother, for conserving traditional varieties of millets. She now opens stored seeds frequently to inspect them. “Earlier, I trusted our kutcha house to protect the seed,” said Mohanta. “Now I must constantly keep watch in the pucca house.”

After finger millets are harvested between October and December, Mohanta exchanges seeds with the women of her neighbouring homes. Traditionally, farmers exchange seeds to get other varieties. “A handful is enough,” said Mohanta. “A seed must keep moving, otherwise it dies in storage.”

Cultural heritage

In southern Odisha, traditional grains are inseparable from the way of life of the Paroja Adivasi communities in Koraput, Rayagada and Malkangiri districts.

Abhiram Jhodia, a farmer from Siriguda village of Kashipur block in Rayagada district, said Adivasi festivals will have no meaning without their traditional produce. “Seeds are present wherever our people gather,” said Jhodia. “In festivals, in songs, in what we cook together.”

In summer, before the annual Chait Parab celebration honouring nature, families prepare mandia pej, a porridge made from finger millet, rice and maize. “It cools the body before dhemsa,” said Abhiram, referring to the Paroja community’s traditional dance. “Without it, we do not have the strength for dhemsa.” Seeds and traditional produce are crucial to festivals and cultural rituals, said Abhiram. “Food gives them meaning.”

Like Abhiram, Mohanta said that if seeds vanish, so do the traditional recipes and the stories around that food. Her husband, Suresh Chandra Mohanta, said seeds are a living link to their ancestors. “When we hold our traditional seeds, it feels as if our elders are still with us.”

Climate resilience

Odisha’s heirloom seeds have survived because Adivasi farmers have protected them outside formal systems, in kitchens, granaries, earthen pots, bamboo bins and through farmer-to-farmer seasonal exchange. No official seed vault could preserve diverse varieties and their cultural ties.

Suresh Chandra Mohanta said that after harvest, the seed is hard and strong. But while it is stored in the granary, it slowly changes. “It becomes quiet like a sleeping child,” he said.

The seed wakes with the rains and then gives life anew. “Its journey is like human life, from the mother’s womb to youth and adulthood under the care of parents,” said Mohanta. “In the same way, our forefathers protected these seeds and handed them to us. A company selling hybrid seeds will never understand this bond.”

These seed varieties are crucial in building food and climate resilience among Odisha’s Adivasi communities. “Our seeds thrive in our land,” said Juang. “When the rains are late or too little, they still grow and give us food. Sometimes the harvest is small, but it is enough for our family.”

All photographs by Abhijit Mohanty.

Abhijit Mohanty is a Bhubaneswar-based independent journalist who reports on sustainable food, livelihood, women’s leadership and climate change with a special focus on Adivasi and marginalised Indian communities.

April 26 is International Seeds Day.

It is an appeal from the helpless and
Voiceless of our rotten society
Now our society is going from bad
To worse because of the situation
That obtains. The people
Have forgotten to share happiness and
Enjoy their life because of the news of terror,
Massacre, rape, corruption…
How to end this suffering?

This was written by a Manipuri poet for a play called Shooting the Sun in 2020, three years before the violence in Manipur made headlines. The question remains: how to end the sufferings of the people living in Manipur?

This year began with attacks on Meiteis, and then moved on to deadly attacks on Naga villages and people travelling on the Ukhrul-Imphal road despite security being provided for them. Once again, Manipur is gearing up for another deadly round of violence and this time too there are allegations that the security forces are not neutral and are not protecting civilians.

Manipur has been divided into zones which even the chief minister or a Supreme Court judge cannot cross if they belong to one or the other community. And the communities are armed to the teeth despite the claims that most of the arms looted from armories and police stations in 2023 have been recovered.

But there still are the illegal arms in the hands of insurgent groups, village defence groups, community militias, armed volunteers, criminal groups and armed vigilante outfits (such as Arambai Tenggol, Meitei Leepun) and individuals.

The people have no one to represent their interests and they turn to the armed groups for protection. Civilians going about their daily business fall victims to bullets and firebombs being thrown on their homes and to rocket launchers. Children find their schools and colleges are closed for months on end. Thousands have left Manipur in search of jobs, mostly as migrant workers in cities and towns. Ironically, far from home they share accommodation, help each other and share a meal because they share a bond of being from Manipur.

There are calls for disarming all groups but how can anyone lay down their arms when their very life or the lives of their family or community needs protection? It is a deadly and vicious circle.

Manipur today.
Imphal and Ukhrul pic.twitter.com/wvYnoUwHx3

— Vijaita Singh (@vijaita) April 25, 2026

For the security establishment, the only way to deal with the spiralling violence is by more repression and security measures with greater militarisation in the name of dealing with the flourishing trafficking in arms and drugs.

Taking advantage of this situation, various foreign interests are taking advantage. This has caused the situation to become even more complex. Even this danger has been weaponised for a narrow political agenda by the government. The issue of Chinese role is used to justify a more pro-American policy, ignoring the role of US and Western interference. In the name of fighting foreign infiltrators, genuine refugees are made the target of state repression.

All this distracts from the decades-old grievances of various communities and the negligence of Manipur, both economically and politically.

The people have no one to represent them. The state has three MPs in the Parliament and none of them can speak for all the communities of Manipur.

The intelligence agencies have an overwhelming role in deciding policy towards Manipur. The main weapon in their arsenal is divide and rule: they have succeeded in splitting the armed ethnic organisations. For instance, the government of India began talks with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland in 1997. At that time. the NSCN was divided into two groups. By 2024, there were an estimated 27 factions of Naga political outfits (not all split from the NSCN), each claiming to represent the Nagas.

With the Naga and Kuki-Zo communities straddling both sides of the India-Myanmar border, there are links between the communities living in each country. This means the insurgents have easy access across international borders and also the possibility of procuring arms and armed actions.

This leads to military action by the states. For instance, last year India carried out a series of drone bomb attacks on Naga villages in Myanmar, apparently with the permission of the military junta ruling the country then. These kinds of cross-border attacks only complicate the already volatile situation by encouraging cross-border actions by insurgents.

The number of people from Myanmar coming into Manipur and settling on land is a cause for concern.

#WATCH | Imphal, Manipur: The Coordinating Committee on Manipur Integrity (COCOMI) protest rally today turned violent. Police fired tear gas shells to disperse the crowds. The site was cleared, and protesters were sent back.

COCOMI today organised a mass rally across Imphal and… pic.twitter.com/krN2ubhsP3

— ANI (@ANI) April 25, 2026

This divide and rule policy has extended to dividing communities against each other, sometimes taking a small section of one community and creating a militia. It could be a Naga militia created from surrendered militants or Kuki commando units for counter-insurgency operations. The co-option of insurgents becomes easier because of the lack of any vision for the future except for identity politics, which has proven to be sterile and leads to nowhere.

I have been witness to the suffering of the people in Manipur: in 1982 when I first went to the newly created Ukhrul district home of the Tangkhul Nagas, the main conflict was between insurgents and the Indian armed forces. At that time, many thought that the cause of their suffering was the fact that the armed forces had too much arbitrary power under the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958. All communities were united on the demand for the act to be repealed.

But then even this demand for repeal, which brought people on one platform, was usurped by one community and human rights movement in Manipur also split along ethnic lines especially during the historic protest by Irom Sharmila.( See: Nandita Haksar, Sharmila’s Struggle against Military Repression: A Critique.)

In 2023, the security forces too were split along communal lines with the police protecting the Meiteis and the Assam Rifles protecting the Kuki-Zo. This split has still not resolved.

And then the communities moved further away from each other and the clashes were between communities rather than with the security forces, although that too continued.

In 1988, I took up the case of human rights violations of Naga villagers in Senapati district. At the time we were a team of four lawyers, I leading and three others: one from Tangkhul Naga community, other from Kom and a third a Meitei. We worked well together.

In 1988 there was a national uprising in Myanmar and in 1990 a brutal military crackdown when Burmese refugees poured into Manipur. All communities welcomed them. The High Court was very sympathetic towards the Burmese.

When I returned to Manipur I could see that the communities had developed mutual suspicion but ordinary people still met warmly at least in the market and in public places.

Three people were killed in a firing incident this morning in Ukhrul district of Manipur. Two of them were wearing army-like uniforms. Kuki groups have accused Naga militants of attacking their homes at around 5:30 am. However, Naga militants have denied these allegations. pic.twitter.com/Xht8IPyYeW

— Bhadohi Wallah (@Mithileshdhar) April 24, 2026

Then came 2021 the military coup in Myanmar. This time when the Burmese refugees came, there was a marked hostility. The Kukis were protecting them, since many shared an ethnicity, though the state was hostile. Even when the Imphal High Court ordered that seven Burmese refugees (two journalists and their families, including three small children), I was representing be allowed to come from Moreh on the India-Myanmar border to Imphal, we were escorted by the commando unit to protect us from a possible intervention by the Assam Rifles, which was determined to deport all refugees.

Burmese refugees had become targets of hate and demonised. Among the refugees from Myanmar, the fate of the Rohingyas has been the worst.

And in 2023 I watched a video, silent but deadly. It was of ordinary civilians blowing up a government colony in the foothills of Langol in Imphal with a two-inch mortar. That was the place where I had lived with so many happy memories.

The homes of people being blown up by weapons civilians in the time of peace in a democratic country.

I was watching a video in the safety of my home in Goa. Others in Manipur were watching all their memories, their homes and their future destroyed.

Today, the chasms within Manipur society are deep, divided by trenches and buffer zones guarded by armed groups with highly sophisticated guns.

But if you walk into a café in Goa, you are likely to see a bunch of North Easterners enjoying themselves, beer and a plate of pork and laughing at jokes only they can understand and a shared sorrow hidden behind brilliant smiles.

They are no longer enamoured with guns or life of insurgents; they want to earn and have a good life. For most, it means a family and friends to share two square meals, a small home and a secure future for their children.

But even these small dreams seem impossible when they lay down their tired heads far from home, they are reminded of the scenes in their home towns, they feel angry from helplessness, from fear for their loved ones left in the villages and then the tears flow quietly.

There seems to be no end to their sorrow and to their suffering. No one to offer solace or succour.

Nandita Haksar is the author of Shooting the Sun: Why Manipur Was Engulfed by Violence and the Government Remained Silent (Speaking Tiger, 2023).

The Congress on Saturday said that it stands “solidly in solidarity” with party leader Pawan Khera, adding that the Gauhati High Court order denying him anticipatory bail in a case registered against him by the Assam Police will be challenged in the Supreme Court.

“We are confident that justice will prevail over the politics of threat, intimidation, and harrassment,” wrote party leader Jairam Ramesh on social media.

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

Khera was denied anticipatory bail on Friday.

The entire Indian National Congress stands solidly in solidarity with @Pawankhera, the Chairman of its Media and Publicity Department. The verdict of the Guwahati High Court is in the process of being challenged in the Supreme Court. We are confident that justice will prevail…

— Jairam Ramesh (@Jairam_Ramesh) April 25, 2026

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

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

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

Himanta Biswa Sarma alleged on April 6 that the documents cited by the Congress had been supplied by a Pakistani social media group.

The chief minister had also claimed that the Congress had used details from a passport that had been allegedly lost. This document, he claimed, had been uploaded to the Pakistani social media group.

Every tech giant in the world is interested in building AI data centres in India. Late last year, Microsoft, Amazon and Google committed tens of billions of dollars to doing so. This year, the Adani Group pledged $100 billion, bringing the combined first wave to $167.5 billion.

India is now confronted with a question societies need to field time and again as technologies evolve. It is not whether the country should embrace AI, but on whose terms and at what cost.

Technologies do not arrive as neutral instruments. They come as forces – creative or destructive, liberating or dispossessing – shaped by the interests and ideologies of those who deploy them. The steam engine inaugurated industrial capitalism and facilitated colonial extraction. The Green Revolution fed millions and indebted millions more. Artificial intelligence carries similar epoch-making potential, but India is welcoming it at a peculiarly fraught moment.

The country is simultaneously one of the world’s most ambitious technology adopters and one of its most unequal societies, beset by deepening environmental stress, caste-based discrimination and resource scarcity.

In early 2026, it hosted a high-profile international summit on AI governance, signalling its aspiration to be a rule-setter rather than merely a rule-taker in the global AI order. However, the current trajectory of AI infrastructure investment in India is a deeply political allocation of a scarce common resource. How water is being shared is systematically disadvantaging society’s most vulnerable.

A government press release indicates that India’s data centre IT capacity has quadrupled, from 0.4 gigawatts in 2020 to 1.5 GW by 2025, with consultancy firm Deloitte projecting 8-10 GW more to be built by 2030.

Every large data centre requires enormous quantities of water to cool its servers. A single 100-megawatt facility can consume roughly two million litres of water per day. India’s data centres collectively consumed about 150 billion litres in 2025. That is projected to more than double, to approximately 358 billion, by 2030.

Where in India are these facilities being built? Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Delhi-NCR – major hubs already confronting acute water shortages or inequities.

Bengaluru’s data centres alone consume over 26 million litres each year, even as the city recently experienced what was described as its “worst water crisis” in nearly five centuries. Hyderabad faces a projected water deficit of 870 million litres per day by 2027, yet Amazon continues to expand its facilities there.

Chennai, which experienced its own “Day Zero” in 2019 when the city’s main reservoirs ran completely dry, remains among the most sought-after destinations for server farms. Much of the investment is, in other words, heading into water-stressed places.

The social geography of water

Access to water in India has always been saturated with relations of power – caste, gender and class structures – which dictate who receives it, who is denied it and who is punished for claiming it.

Caste remains the most pervasive determinant. Dalits have been systematically excluded from accessing water sources for centuries. In the Mahad Satyagraha of 1927, B. R. Ambedkar led Dalits to drink from a public tank that caste custom forbade them to touch. It was a watershed moment in modern Indian history precisely because it named water access as a fundamental question of human dignity and political equality.

That battle is not over. Dalits continue to be denied access to wells, taps and water distribution systems in villages across the country; in some regions, when they fetch water from areas frequented by the dominant caste, they are subjected to violence, social boycott or both.

Class also mediates access in urban India in particularly sharp ways. In cities like Bengaluru, water has become a commodity distributed through informal tanker networks whose prices spike dramatically during shortages.

During the 2024 Bengaluru water crisis, residents in peripheral areas reported steep increases in private tanker prices. Older core urban districts with piped supply were comparatively better protected, whereas rapidly growing peripheral neighbourhoods and many commercial developments – including in the city’s tech corridors – depended on borewells and tankers and experienced the sharpest price shocks.

The urban poor, lacking the capital to stockpile or to purchase from private suppliers, absorb the most severe impacts of water scarcity; in this sense, the informal economy of water operates as a regressive tax on poverty.

Ambedkar’s argument at Mahad was simple and devastating: “We are not going to the Chavadar Lake merely to drink its water. We are going to the lake to assert that we too are human beings like others. It must be clear that this meeting has been called to set up the norm of equality.”

Applied to the age of AI, this assertion on the norm of equality requires little modification. When 342 million Indians still lack access to safe drinking water, the decision to prioritise the cooling of AI servers, operated by some of the most profitable corporations in human history, is not a technical policy choice. It is a political one. It is a choice about whose consumption matters and whose deprivation is acceptable collateral damage.

The latest UN water report’s warning is stark: diverting water from agricultural and household use can mean unemployment, social unrest and cascading humanitarian consequences. In the Indian context, this is already happening at the margins, and the current scale of data centre investment will push it to the centre. The communities most likely to bear the cost are those already most water-insecure: Dalits, Adivasis, women in water-scarce districts, the urban poor living outside the formal supply grid.

Hierarchies of sacrifice

The standard corporate response to these concerns is a set of technocratic pledges: recycled wastewater, air cooling technologies, “water-positive” commitments, and efficiency star ratings. These deserve scrutiny. Only about half of data centre operators globally tracked their water usage in 2020; just 10% did so across all their facilities. Google’s global water consumption increased by 17% in 2023 alone.

Microsoft, the New York Times found, has internally projected “that water use at its data centres will more than double by 2030 from 2020, including in places that face shortages”. Globally, roughly two-thirds of all new data centres built since 2022 have been in water-stressed regions, and only five of 15 Indian state data centre policies contain any sustainability parameters.

The so-called solutions on offer are, in this light, technocratic adjustments to a fundamentally flawed premise: that this scale of expansion is inevitable and desirable. They tinker at the margins of the problem while accepting its structural cause. The efficiency metric improves, the water still disappears, and the communities downstream still go without. This is not sustainable development; it is the optimisation of extraction.

The defenders of this model will argue that AI is critical national infrastructure, that data centres create employment and tax revenue, and that India cannot afford to be left behind in the global AI race. These arguments deserve engagement, but they cannot be engaged with honestly without acknowledging what they elide: that critical infrastructure, historically in India as elsewhere, has often been built on the dispossession of those with the least political voice.

The AI revolution need not be a resource-injustice revolution. But averting that outcome needs more than corporate sustainability pledges and efficiency metrics. It requires a binding national framework aligning data centre siting and water consumption with hydrological realities. It requires mandatory disclosure of water usage, enforceable targets and genuine penalties for non-compliance.

It requires environmental clearance for large-scale digital infrastructure to incorporate water-equity assessments that centre the rights of Dalits, Adivasis, women and the poor – not merely the interests of investors. India’s aspiration to be an AI power is legitimate. But it will be hollow, and ultimately unstable, if it is built on the thirst of those who already have the least.

Technologies are, in the end, social choices. The choice before India today is whether its AI infrastructure will deepen existing inequalities or help to dismantle them. That choice must be made not only in the server rooms of Bengaluru or Hyderabad, but equally importantly in the laws, regulations and political priorities that govern whose water, and whose future, is considered worth protecting.

David Sathuluri is a research scholar at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, whose work focuses on the intersection of AI governance, caste-climate/environmental justice, politics and public policy.

Mukul Sharma is a professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University whose work focuses on the intersections of caste, ecology, and environmental justice in India.

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

Former Bharat Rashtra Samithi leader K Kavitha on Saturday launched her party Telangana Rashtra Sena.

The name of the new party echoes the former name of Bharath Rashtra Samithi, which was earlier called Telangana Rashtra Samithi.

Kavitha’s announcement came months after she resigned from the Bharat Rashtra Samithi and stepped down as a member of the Telangana Legislative Council on September 3, a day after she was suspended by her father and party chief K Chandrashekar Rao for alleged anti-party activities.

In January, Kavitha announced that her outfit, Telangana Jagruthi, would emerge as a political party and contest the next Assembly elections in the state.

Elections in the state are likely to be held either in 2028 or 2029. Telangana Jagruthi was a non-profit cultural and social organisation founded by Kavitha in 2006, which initially worked to promote Telangana’s identity during the statehood movement.

Launching the party at an event on the outskirts of Hyderabad, Kavitha criticised the ruling Congress in the state, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Bharat Rashtra Samiti, alleging that all three parties were plagued by corruption, favouritism and “family rule”, The New Indian Express reported.

She also alleged that Rao was no longer the leader who spearheaded the struggle for a separate Telangana, The Hindu reported.

“The KCR we saw during the Telangana movement is no longer there,” the newspaper quoted her as saying. Kavitha said that Rao’s absence from active public engagement reflected this transformation.

The former Bharat Rashtra Samiti leader also accused the Congress government led by Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy of becoming increasingly authoritarian. She said that the state was “being crushed” under its rule.

Kavitha also claimed that she was expelled from the Bharat Rashtra Samiti for raising questions about alleged corruption in the Kaleshwaram Lift Irrigation Project.

“…those who looted in its name continue to surround Mr KCR,” The Hindu quoted her as saying.

Kavitha had been suspended a day after she accused her cousins, former minister T Harish Rao and ex-MP J Santosh Rao, of amassing assets while making K Chandrashekar Rao a “scapegoat” in the alleged Kaleshwaram project scam.