For me, what I can see is that as soon as the Trinamool lost power in Bengal, those 20 representatives of people who fought on the plank of the Trinamool shifted their allegiance to NDA. That is the objective truth. The reasons i.e., whether they shifted their allegiance due to a fear of getting hounded by the ED, or due to there being no reason to be obedient to the Trinamool leadership anymore or due to the change in their own value system which now pushes them to support NDA, these could be multiple. Irrespective of the reasons, this article tries to understand the implications of this shift or any shift of political allegiances for that matter for the Indian polity, what it means for our Constitutional Democracy and where does the Tenth Schedule of the Indian Constitution sit in all of this.

The framers wrote no anti-defection provision into the document that took effect in 1950. This was less an oversight than a reflection of the assumptions of the age. The very term “political party” did not appear in the original Constitution; the framers conceived of Parliament as an assembly of representatives, not as a battlefield of disciplined party blocs. India had borrowed the Westminster model, in which party loyalty was a matter of political convention rather than constitutional law and where a member who “crossed the floor” answered to his conscience and his constituents.

There was a deeper philosophical inheritance too. The Burkean ideal of the representative — the member who owes the electorate his judgement and not merely his obedience — sat comfortably with a freedom movement whose leaders had been chosen for their moral standing. In the first decade after independence, defection was rare until the Congress started to lose the states. The four years between 1967 and 1971 saw 142 defections in Parliament and 1,969 in the state assemblies. Thirty-two governments collapsed and 212 defectors were rewarded with ministerial berths. Roughly half of the nearly four thousand legislators elected in 1967 and 1971 changed sides at least once. The link between the vote and the seat had broken.

It was this period, often called the era of “Aaya Ram Gaya Ram” politics, that turned defection from an occasional embarrassment into a structural crisis. The phrase itself came from a Haryana legislator who switched parties three times in a single day in 1967, and it entered popular vocabulary as shorthand for the mercenary nature of Indian legislative politics. Governments were being made and unmade in backroom negotiations, with ministerships traded like commodities. The democratic process, in effect, had been reduced to the first act of a play whose second act was written entirely by party managers and power brokers. The public mandate, once given, seemed to dissolve the moment the results were declared.

How the Tenth Schedule came to be?

Following the report of the Y. B. Chavan committee, two separate legislative attempts, both unsuccessful, were made to find a solution to defections. The first was made by Indira Gandhi’s home minister, Uma Shankar Dikshit, in 1973; the second, in 1978, by Shanti Bhushan, minister for law and justice in the Janata Party government of Morarji Desai. It was only in 1985, under Rajiv Gandhi’s government, that the Fifty-second Amendment inserted the Tenth Schedule. Its purpose was to address the culture of defections.

The mechanism was simple. A legislator would be disqualified if he voluntarily gave up the membership of his party or if he voted or abstained against the direction of his party whip. Two escape hatches were built in: a “split” involving one-third of the legislative party and a “merger” involving two-thirds. The split provision became the law’s most exploited loophole, and the 91st Amendment of the Indian Constitution (2003) removed it, leaving only the two-thirds merger.

Essentially, it is a constitutional provision engineered to discourage defections from one party to another, of legislators, except when an overwhelming majority of the legislators, as decided by the upper echelons of the party decide to merge with another parliamentary party. How does the schedule decide if someone switched sides or not? One, if the member voluntarily relinquishes the membership of the political party he was elected from. Two, when she does not vote according to the whip of the political party. The politics of power ensured that much interpretation happens on this schedule. Additionally, the fact that it is the speaker who decides whether an elected representative becomes disqualified or not has made it easier for ruling parties to mend the schedule to fit their whims. A very brief jurisprudential history of the tenth schedule is necessary before a systematic analysis of the philosophy behind it is done

In Kihoto Hollohan v. Zachillhu (1992), a five-judge bench upheld the law by a 3:2 majority, held that courts could intervene only after the Speaker passed a final order, and only on narrow grounds such as mala fides or violation of natural justice. In Ravi S. Naik vs. Union of India (1994) the Court held that “voluntarily giving up membership” need not mean a formal resignation; it can be inferred from conduct. In Rajendra Singh Rana v. Swamy Prasad Maurya(2007) it held that a Speaker’s prolonged inaction is itself open to review. In Keisham Meghachandra Singh vs. Speaker, Manipur Legislative Assembly (2020) it suggested a three-month deadline and openly questioned whether the Speaker should be the adjudicator at all, recommending that Parliament consider a permanent tribunal headed by a retired judge. In Subhash Desai v. Principal Secretary (2023), arising from the Shiv Sena split, it held that the Governor had no business ordering a floor test on the material before him, and that the whip belongs to the political party rather than to the legislature party.

The most recent chapter unfolded in Telangana, and it is the clearest indictment yet. In Padi Kaushik Reddy v. State of Telangana (2025), the Supreme Court held that a Speaker acting as a tribunal under the Tenth Schedule enjoys no constitutional immunity under Articles 122 or 212, and must decide within three months. Yet when the Telangana Speaker finally conducted his in-camera hearings, he dismissed the petitions and cleared the BRS legislators who had joined the Congress, finding no “conclusive documentary or legally sustainable evidence” of defection. How could he? He was elected to the legislature on a Congress ticket. He is neither accountable to the people nor to the court and in that case, it is naïve to expect the speaker to decide in any other way than in ways favoring the existing ruling party.

So, essentially, people can get disqualified but if the speaker deems so, they will not be. The judicial review on the decision of speaker does not have a wide scope. This is the result of the jurisprudence on the tenth schedule until now.

What emerges from this jurisprudential arc is a portrait of an institution trying, case by case, to patch the cracks of a fundamentally compromised design. The judiciary has steadily expanded the grounds for intervention — from conduct-based inference in Ravi S. Naik, to review of inaction in Rajendra Singh Rana, to stripping constitutional immunity in Padi Kaushik Reddy — and yet each judicial correction has only showed how little the law’s original architecture can bear the weight placed upon it. The courts have been forced into the role of reformers precisely because the schedule’s own enforcement mechanism, the Speaker, has repeatedly failed the test of impartiality. This pattern of judicial expansion and executive evasion provides the necessary context for asking the deeper question: what, structurally, makes the Tenth Schedule so easy to circumvent?

Now, we need to, in the context of this knowledge, question, examine, analyse and understand what it is that power defections despite a strong constitutional safeguard against it? There can be many explanations but two should come on top. One, that Tenth Schedule is inadequate in its strength to carry out its endeavour and it is prone to huge exploitation. Second, the Tenth Schedule is being made powerless by institutional ignorance of political realities of India and such powerlessness of the Schedule has created buffers where the ruling political apparatus can operate with impunity.

Inadequacy of the Tenth Schedule

If one reads a single election result-day newspaper and the Tenth Schedule, for the first time, one will easily understand the issue with the Schedule. The Schedule disqualifies those who defect and gives on exception where 2/3 of the members merge, as stated before. Now, when has it ever been the case that a ruling party speaker had to decide something and he/she did so in detriment to the ruling party? In the absence of such convention, the Tenth Schedule added in 1985, places the responsibility on the Speaker to be impartial. There would even be cases in which his own chair will be in danger if he decides in favour the party from which people have defected. The logic behind putting speaker at the centre of the system was not a prudent choice.

The Speaker problem, however, is only one face of the schedule’s inadequacy. Equally troubling is the merger exception itself. By permitting two-thirds of a legislative party to merge with another without attracting disqualification, the schedule inadvertently creates a perverse incentive i.e., rather than discouraging defection, it rewards it so long as it is done at sufficient scale. The very evil the law was designed to cure i.e., the wholesale shifting of political allegiance for the spoils of power, is precisely what the merger clause facilitates when a critical mass can be assembled. What was conceived as a safety valve for genuine ideological realignment has, in practice, become the preferred route for engineered political takeovers. And this structural vulnerability is the mechanism through which the TMC merger described at the outset of this article was made possible.

The whip and the death of debate

Because a legislator must vote as the whip directs on pain of disqualification, he is reduced to a voting machine for the party high command. His conscience, his constituency, and the deliberative function of the legislature are all subordinated to the leadership. The MP or MLA ends up representing neither the nation nor the voters of his constituency but only his political party. A law sold as a defence of democracy has, in practice, hollowed out the independence of the average legislator and concentrated power at the top.

Say for example, take the recent defector who went from TMC to the NCPI- Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar—the MP from Barasat, West Bengal. Imagine if all the electors of Barasat decide that Kakoli Ghosh should in fact support the NDA on the Delimitation Bill, should she not support the NDA? If this scenario occurs, the Tenth Schedule would stand as an impediment to the realisation of people’s goals. If the whip of TMC issues a diktat that all Members of the Parliamentary party shall vote against, Kakoli would be facing a disorienting dilemma—whether to vote for the bill and betray her party or vote against the bill and betray her constituency. Am I trying to say that Tenth Schedule is an impediment to functioning of democracy? No. Let that be clear. However, I am saying that the Tenth Schedule does not anticipate this sort of situation where a representative is understood beyond the party from which they won. Its binary nature, where a representative either obeys the party or disobeys it is too narrow to contain and engage with the intricacies of the Indian electoral politics.

Moreover, there is no way to know whether the electors of Barasat want Kakoli to vote one way or the other in case of any bill. One could argue that the BJP winning majority assembly constituencies in the Barasat Lok Sabha is an indication of the support however, this specific question was not asked to the electorate for us to assume it to be its decision. The constitution, as dynamic and foresighted as it is, has no provisions to understand the will of the people, especially when it seems to be changing in between the election cycle.

Does this mean the Tenth Schedule should not exist? No. It should. The material reality of realpolitik today is that there are resort politics where MLAs and MPs are threatened and wrongfully restrained and are traded across parties. Add to the mix the unholy duo of CBI and ED ready at the command of ruling establishment, institutional support is mandatory for the representatives of people, as ironic as it sounds. The Tenth Schedule in its current form does not give such institutional protection. What it merely does is add a step of buying more MLAs or MPs, for whoever wants to topple governments or merge parties.

In essence, the Tenth Schedule is inadequate in more than one way. On one hand, it does not have the institutional apparatus to engage with real change of values and ideas, real debate between members of parliament, belonging to the same party. It essentially says, if you as a Member of Parliament or the Member of Legislative Assembly have any differences with the party you won from, you better settle them at the headquarters of the Party rather than coming with them to the legislature.  This inadequacy serves as a tool in the hands of political parties to divide the house into fewer parts than when it would be divided into if the members were left to their own means or with minimal whip control.

On the other hand, it leaves a big hole in its own regime. While it might be hard to convince a good 60 MPs, it is rather easy, as can be seen, to convince or somehow make 20 MPs of a smaller party to support the ruling government. This becomes a cakewalk when the decision-making power is vested in speaker, a defacto appointee of the ruling government and by extension, the party.

How to fix this?

The remedies have been on the table for decades. Some suggest a narrowing of the scope of the whip. They argue that limiting it to votes that genuinely threaten the survival of a government, namely confidence motions and money bills, and freeing legislators to vote their conscience on everything else will be a better appreciation of the Westminster model of the government.

Another suggestion is to take the decision away from the Speaker and place it in an independent authority like the President or Governor acting on the binding advice of the Election Commission, as the Dinesh Goswami Committee recommended in 1990, or a permanent tribunal headed by a retired judge, as the Supreme Court suggested in Keisham (2020).

While these suggestions are noteworthy and require a serious consideration, it is necessary to note the rot in the Indian electoral politics wherein no amount of freedom can have many of the legislators act with conscience. They all require contracts, tie-ups with big businesses and maintenance of their riches in their own constituencies. This is not a version of ‘cynic-speak’ but a reality that we face today. Many of the members of Parliament have business interests that align and meet with political interests. The average assets of ruling BJP MPs today are Rs. 50 Crore and the opposition Congress MPs’ average assets are Rs. 22 Crore and over 100 MPs’ assets grew by 110% between 2014-2024. To assume that they will use their free conscience is imprudent. Moreover, there are hardly any institutions left in this country where the ruling establishment has not put its hand into and has not started to control. From interpretation of the law to enforcement of the law, from preparation for elections to conduct of elections, the institutions are under a threat of unimaginable proportion. Therefore, if institutions like the President, or the Governor or the Election Commission are to be trusted with the enforcement of a renewed Tenth Schedule, they would not yield any drastically different and positive results than what we have today.

Until now, the discussion has been this. A lot of legislators have been jumping ship. The Tenth Schedule which was brought in to stop exactly that is failing on multiple fronts. One, it is not able to foster a healthy debate between members of parliament due to its archaic notion of party loyalty. Two, it is not able to stop the mass defections, evidently, from one party to another to the extent of destabilising governments and changing popular mandates. For us to somehow put trust in supposedly independent institutions like the President or the Election Commissions to enforce the Tenth Schedule would be imprudent given how their powers are being taken over and how they are becoming mere extensions of the executive.

What is to be done then?

The honest answer begins with admitting that no single institutional fix will suffice, because the problem is not only with the institutions. The issue is rooted in the very relationship between the voter, the representative, and the party. The Tenth Schedule attempted to regulate that relationship from above, by threatening disqualification. What it did not do, and what no amendment since has attempted, is to restructure the relationship from below i.e., by giving the electorate a continuing stake in the conduct of its representative.

We do not have a recall mechanism. Once elected, a legislator is answerable to no one for five years. Not to the voters who sent her to the legislature, not to any independent body tasked with monitoring her fidelity to the mandate on which she sought votes. The Tenth Schedule fills this vacuum by substituting party discipline for popular accountability, but party discipline, as we have seen, is itself a currency that can be bought and sold. A recall provision, carefully designed to prevent its misuse as a tool of harassment by ruling parties, would fundamentally alter the calculus of defection. A legislator contemplating a switch would have to weigh not merely the Speaker’s likely indulgence or the party’s ability to engineer a merger, but the concrete possibility that her own constituents could unseat her for betraying the mandate. The recall would not need to be easy to trigger. A high threshold of signatures, a mandatory cooling-off period, and supervision by the judiciary rather than the executive would prevent frivolous attempts but its mere existence would reintroduce the voter into a process from which the Tenth Schedule has, paradoxically, excluded them entirely.

The second structural reform, without which any amendment to the Tenth Schedule will remain cosmetic, is the statutory regulation of intra-party democracy. Indian political parties are, with rare and partial exceptions, autocracies. Decisions about candidate selection, whip issuance, alliance formation, and merger are taken by a small coterie at the top, often by a single leader whose authority within the party is unquestioned. The Tenth Schedule, by making disqualification contingent on obedience to the whip, effectively constitutionalises this autocracy. It converts the internal hierarchy of a private political organisation into a binding legal obligation on a public constitutional office-holder. If we are serious about the deliberative function of the legislature, we must first be serious about the deliberative function within parties themselves. A law mandating regular internal elections, transparent candidate selection processes, and a formal mechanism by which legislators can dissent from the whip without facing expulsion, a kind of intra-party conscience vote, would do more to restore the dignity of the individual legislator than any tinkering with the schedule’s merger arithmetic.

None of these reforms will emerge from the political class voluntarily. The irony of the Tenth Schedule is that any amendment to it must pass through the very legislature whose members benefit from its weakness. This is not a counsel of despair but a recognition that constitutional reform in India has always required pressure from outside the legislature, from the judiciary, from civil society, from the press, and from the slow but real force of public opinion. The Right to Information Act did not emerge because politicians wanted transparency; it emerged because citizens demanded it. The reform of the Tenth Schedule, if it comes, will follow a similar path.

A final word on what we owe ourselves

There is a temptation, when confronted with the scale of institutional decay, to conclude that the system is beyond repair and that the only rational response is cynicism. This temptation must be resisted, not because the system is working (it manifestly is not) but because cynicism is itself a form of complicity. Every time we shrug at a mass defection, every time we treat the engineering of a merger as just another episode of Indian politics, we normalise the very evil the Tenth Schedule was written to combat. The twenty Trinamool MPs who crossed over did not act in a vacuum. They acted in a political culture that has, over decades, made such crossings routine, predictable, and consequence-free. Changing that culture requires better laws, a more demanding electorate, and one that treats a defection not as a fait accompli but as a breach of trust serious enough to end a political career.

The Tenth Schedule’s purpose remains legitimate. However, a law that was designed to protect democracy has, through its design flaws, its capture by partisan Speakers, and its inability to engage with the economic and structural realities of Indian politics, become a tool for its subversion. The fix, if it comes at all, will come from a combination of institutional redesign, deepening of democratic values, and most importantly, a refusal by citizens to accept the corruption of their mandate.

(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

Related:

Understanding the Supreme Court’s Interim Intervention in the Waqf Amendments, 2025

Smoke & Mirrors, 130th Constitution Amendment Bill: Real issue is the trading of MLAs

Liberty, Evidence and Cooperation: A legal analysis of Jugraj v. State of Punjab

The post Defectors & Democracy: A critique of the Tenth Schedule of the Indian Constitution appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Pause for a moment and ask yourself. Where was all of that sitting before you opened up your email? Your emails were not hiding inside your laptop. They were not floating in air. They were sitting on a computer, not yours, but someone else’s; in a building, you have never seen, possibly thousands of kilometres away. A building, filled with row upon rows of powerful computers humming away around the clock, these are data centres.

Think of it this way. When you post a photo on Instagram, it does not just stay on your phone. It is copied to a data centre so that your friend in Delhi or your cousin in Dubai can see it on their phone too. When you stream a film on Netflix on a Friday night, that film is not beamed from a studio in Hollywood directly to your television. It is stored in a data centre and delivered to you through the internet. When you ask Google a question , “best biryani near me”, Google’s computers in a data centre somewhere race to find the answer and send it back to your screen in less than a second. Every time you send a WhatsApp message, make a UPI payment, book a cab on Uber, or even ask ChatGPT to help you draft an email, a data centre somewhere in the world is doing the heavy lifting.

Now, while billionaires (apologies, trillionaires) like Elon Musk are busy trying to beam the internet down from satellites, the vast majority of the world’s internet still travels through undersea cables made of optical fibre, thin glass threads that carry pulses of light across ocean floors from continent to continent. These cables connect to data centres on land. And it is inside those data centres that the internet, in a very physical sense, actually lives.

A data centre is, at its simplest, a very large, very expensive warehouse full of computers. But unlike the laptop on your desk, these computers never shut down. They run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. And because they are working so hard, they produce an enormous amount of heat, like thousands of kitchen ovens running simultaneously in a sealed room. If that heat is not removed, the computers melt. Literally. So data centres need massive cooling systems: giant fans, industrial air conditioners, and increasingly, systems that circulate chilled water or specialised liquids directly over the machines. All of this, the computing and the cooling, requires a staggering amount of electricity. A single large data centre can consume as much power as a small city. Some of the newer ones, built for artificial intelligence, need as much electricity as eighty thousand to eight hundred thousand homes.

And that is before we talk about water. Many cooling systems work by evaporating water, the same principle that makes you feel cool when you step out of a swimming pool on a windy day. A large data centre can gulp down up to five million gallons of water in a single day , roughly the amount an entire town of fifty thousand people would use.

The Boom

For decades, data centres existed without the current levels of scrutiny. They were modest buildings tucked away in industrial parks, and nobody paid much attention to them. But in the last three or four years, something changed dramatically. The explosion of artificial intelligence, tools like ChatGPT, image generators, self-driving car software, sent demand for computing power through the roof. Training a single AI model can require thousands of specialised chips running for months, consuming electricity equivalent to what several thousand homes use in a year. And once trained, these AI systems need even more data centres to actually serve millions of users asking questions, generating images, and running code every second of the day.

The result has been a construction frenzy unlike anything the technology industry has ever seen. In 2025, the fourteen largest data centre companies spent close to seven hundred and fifty billion dollars building new facilities. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta alone spent over four hundred billion dollars, nearly double, what they spent the year before. For the first time in American history, spending on data centre construction surpassed spending on office buildings. By the end of 2025, more than twenty-three gigawatts of data centre capacity was under construction worldwide across over eight hundred sites. The International Energy Agency projects that global electricity consumption by data centres will roughly double by 2030, reaching levels comparable to the entire electricity consumption of Japan.

The counter-current in America

Naturally, a movement of this much capital will have repercussions. Across the United States, ordinary citizens, farmers, retirees, schoolteachers, small-town mayors, have started fighting back against this expansion with remarkable success.

The reason is simple. A data centre may power the global internet, but the costs are borne locally. When a giant facility moves into a rural county, it strains the local power grid. Electricity bills go up for everyone. Noise from the industrial cooling fans is relentless, a constant low hum that residents describe as maddening. Millions of litres of water is diverted from farms and homes. Fertile agricultural land gets paved over. In addition, the number of permanent jobs these highly automated facilities create? Often just a few hundred.

A 2026 Gallup poll found that seventy per cent of Americans now oppose having a data centre built near their neighbourhood. This is not a left-versus-right issue. Both Republicans worried about corporate tax breaks and Democrats concerned about the environment have found common ground. Over a hundred and forty activist groups across two dozen states have organised against data centre projects. In the last two years alone, roughly sixty-four billion dollars’ worth of projects have been either blocked outright or significantly delayed.

The stories are vivid. In Cascade Locks, Oregon, residents were so angry about a proposed hundred-million-dollar data centre that they organised a recall election, voted out the officials who had approved it, and the new board promptly cancelled the project. In Warrenton, Virginia, over five hundred residents packed a town council meeting, a hundred and thirty of them stood up to speak against an Amazon data centre, and in the next election, every single council member who had supported the project lost their seat. In a small town in Missouri called Peculiar, a grassroots group calling itself “Don’t Dump Data in Peculiar” fought a billion-and-a-half-dollar project so effectively that the town’s planning commission rewrote the zoning code to ban data centres entirely.

The Search for New Ground

Faced with this wall of resistance, the tech giants have started looking elsewhere. If Americans do not want these facilities in their backyards, the companies will build them in countries where governments are more welcoming, land is cheaper, and opposition is less organised.

India has become a prime destination. The Indian government has rolled out an extraordinary welcome mat: it granted data centres formal “infrastructure status” to make financing easier, offered cheap land, reduced electricity tariffs, and in its February 2026 budget, announced a twenty-year tax holiday for foreign companies building data centres. Under this framework, income of such foreign cloud service providers from global cloud operations routed through India-based data centres will not be subject to Indian taxation, subject to specified conditions. Additionally, services to Indian customers must be delivered through an Indian reseller entity, ensuring that domestic transactions remain within the tax net.

India also has what the industry needs i.e., a massive domestic market of over nine hundred and forty million internet users, the world’s highest per-capita mobile data consumption, and a financial system(think of the tens of billions in UPI transactions processed every single month)  that desperately needs local computing infrastructure to keep running securely.

The Gulf States, particularly the UAE, have made a similar pitch, offering land, cheap energy, and streamlined approvals.

Why your Data Forces these Centres onto Indian Soil

There is another, less visible reason why data centres are being built inside India at this pace, and it has nothing to do with cheap land or tax breaks. It has to do with the law, specifically, laws that govern where your personal data is allowed to physically exist.

Think about what happens when you make a payment using Google Pay or PhonePe. Your transaction details   your bank account number, the amount, the merchant, the time, are all pieces of personal data. Now, the question is, where is that data stored? Is it sitting on a server in Virginia? In Singapore? Or in India? The answer matters, because governments want to make sure they can access, audit, and protect the financial data of their citizens. If your transaction records are stored on a server in a foreign country, an Indian regulator cannot simply walk in and inspect them.

This is the logic behind data localisation, the idea that certain categories of data must be stored on servers physically located within the country’s borders. And India has been tightening these rules steadily.

The most sweeping example is the Reserve Bank of India’s 2018 directive. The RBI issued an unambiguous order that said all entities operating in India’s payment ecosystem, banks, payment gateways, wallets, third-party processors, must store the complete data of every domestic transaction exclusively on systems located within India. This covers everything like transaction details, customer data, payment credentials like OTPs and PINs, and settlement instructions. This single directive forced global payment giants like Visa and MasterCard to scramble for server space inside the country. Specialised cloud providers reported that up to seventy per cent of their communication volume now runs through strictly Indian data centres to comply with the RBI’s rules.

The securities regulator, SEBI, followed suit. In August 2024, through its Cybersecurity and Cyber Resilience Framework, SEBI mandated that all data relating to Indian securities markets, trade records, client KYC documents, fund flows, margin records, must be hosted exclusively within India. The order was so sweeping that the industry pushed back hard over the costs of migrating data from offshore servers. SEBI placed the strictest parts of the mandate in temporary abeyance in December 2024, but the rule has not been repealed. Companies are actively preparing for the day it is enforced, building flexible systems that can rapidly move workloads back to Indian soil.

Overarching all of this is India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act of 2023. Earlier drafts of this law proposed a strict blanket rule that all Indian user data must stay in India. The final version adopted a more flexible approach. Under Section 16 of the Act, cross-border data transfers are permitted by default, but the central government retains the power to blacklist specific countries at any time, instantly cutting off data flows to those jurisdictions. This creates a powerful incentive for global technology companies. Even though the law does not currently require blanket localisation, the threat of future restrictions hangs permanently in the air. Any company that has invested billions in serving Indian users knows that the government could, with a single notification, force them to store all Indian data domestically. Building data centres inside India is, in effect, an insurance policy against that risk.

The combined effect of these regulations, the RBI’s hard mandate for payments data, SEBI’s framework for securities data, and the DPDP Act’s latent power to restrict cross-border flows, has created an enormous, legally driven demand for data centre capacity within India’s borders. It is not just that companies want to be in India for its market. In many cases, it is also because they are legally required to be here. The scale of the data centre could however be a choice of the company. Essentially, the discussion over the data centres would then become whether we need massive data centres like the proposed Google AI Data centre in Visakhapatnam.

The Data Centre in Vizag

In October 2025, Google announced plans to build a massive data centre campus in Vizag, a one-gigawatt facility, among the largest anywhere in the world outside of Untied States, backed by an estimated ten to fifteen billion dollars in investment. The project, developed in partnership with AdaniConneX and Airtel’s Nxtra, would include three subsea cable landings connecting Vizag directly to global internet networks stretching to Singapore, Australia, the Middle East, and the United States. The Andhra Pradesh government allotted roughly 600 acres of land across three locations: Tarluvada, Adavivaram, and Rambilli. Construction officially broke ground on April 28, 2026. State leaders hailed the project as transformative, a chance to position Vizag as a major global technology hub.

But on the ground, the story looks very different.

About two hundred acres at Tarluvada belong to Dalit families. These are parcels of land that were allotted to landless families in the 1970s under land reform programmes,  small plots, about two acres each, meant to give the poorest communities a foothold of economic security. Under the Andhra Pradesh Assigned Lands (Prohibition of Transfers) Act of 1977, these lands cannot legally be sold, gifted, leased, or transferred to anyone. They were meant to stay with marginalised families forever. Farmers allege that parcels held by dominant castes are being left untouched, while Dalit-owned land is specifically targeted.

The promises of prosperity have come under sharp scrutiny. The skills required to run a hyper scale data centre, thermal engineering, cybersecurity, network architecture, are worlds apart from the agricultural livelihoods of the communities being displaced.

The Water Question

But the concern that cuts deepest in Vizag is water.

To understand why, we need to step back and look at the larger picture. In 2018, NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s own policy think tank, published a report that should have shaken the country. It warned that twenty-one major Indian cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad, were on track to run out of groundwater by 2030. Six hundred million Indians, the report said, already face “high to extreme” water stress. India holds eighteen per cent of the world’s population but has access to just four per cent of its freshwater. Per capita water availability has fallen to around eleven hundred cubic metres, below the international water stress threshold of seventeen hundred, and dangerously close to the scarcity line of a thousand.

Visakhapatnam is not exempt from this crisis. It is already a water-stressed city. Groundwater monitoring data shows that any parts of the district have seen 20 metres drop in ground water levels from 2025-26. Scanty rainfall, rapid urbanisation, and industrial expansion have drained the city’s aquifers faster than they can recharge. Women queuing at public taps and water tankers is a recurring sight every summer.

It is into this reality that a one-gigawatt data centre is being built. Data centres are extraordinarily thirsty. Google itself disclosed that its data centres worldwide-consumed roughly thirty-one billion litres of water in 2024 alone. Industry analysts estimate that eighty to ninety per cent of the water used by data centres comes from potable sources, lakes, rivers, and aquifers, often the same sources that supply drinking water to local communities. This is not theoretical harm. In Joliet, Illinois, an aquifer that historically supplied the city’s drinking water has been so depleted, partly due to data centre construction in the surrounding Chicago region, that expert’s project it will be entirely gone by 2030. Loudoun County in Virginia, home to the world’s densest cluster of data centres, supplied over a billion gallons of potable water to those facilities in a single year.

Has a direct, proven causal link between a data centre and groundwater collapse been formally established in India? Not yet. The Vizag facility has only just broken ground. But the physics are not in doubt. A June 2026 report by the United Nations University warned that by 2030, the water footprint of global data centres would equal the basic annual domestic water needs of all 1.3 billion people in sub-Saharan Africa. The question is not whether data centres consume enormous quantities of water. The question is what happens when you plant one of the largest such facilities on earth in a city that is already struggling to give its residents enough water to drink.

The Human Rights Forum has pointed out that part of the Vizag project sits barely a hundred and twenty metres from the Mudasarlova reservoir, one of the city’s crucial drinking water sources. Environmental groups allege that hill-cutting, forest clearance, and construction activity near the reservoir’s catchment area have already begun altering the natural water flows that feed it,  and that all of this proceeded before environmental clearances were properly completed. On June 10, 2026, the state environment authority granted clearance to the Adavivaram site, but the HRF condemned the decision as a “brazen injustice,” noting that the clearance document was conspicuously silent on the project’s implications for drainage patterns, groundwater recharge, and the long-term water security of the city.

Conclusion

The uprooting of communities in Vizag, the silence on water, the rushed clearances, these are not failures of one project but symptoms of a model in which technology investment arrives in India as a kind of coronation, where the politician who secures the deal is anointed a visionary and the sheer scale of the numbers announced creates a gravity so strong that democratic friction , the town hall, the impact assessment, the voice of the farmer whose land is being taken, gets crushed before it can form.

Perhaps the most troubling part is not that India is building data centres, it must, given its data localisation mandates and nine hundred and forty million internet users, but that it appears to be building them without demanding what other nations have already begun to insist upon.

Singapore imposed a three-year moratorium on new data centres, lifted it only under the strictest green energy and efficiency standards in the Asia-Pacific, and now approves capacity solely on sustainability merit. Stockholm integrated its data centres into the city’s heating grid, turning waste heat into warmth for thirty thousand apartments; Microsoft has moved to zero-water cooling designs; waterless chip-level cooling systems that halve energy consumption are commercially deployed today. None of this is speculative. The technologies and the governance frameworks exist.

What does not yet exist in India is the institutional feedback loop that would allow a resident of Tarluvada or a woman queuing at a water tanker in Vizag to say, credibly and consequentially that “we are not against progress, but we need to know where our water will come from, whether our land can lawfully be taken, and what, specifically, we stand to gain” and to have that question shape the project rather than be swept aside by it.

Until that loop is built, India risks winning the data centre and losing the aquifer, gaining the investment headline and hollowing out the communities it was supposed to serve, and discovering, perhaps too late, that for a country of one and a half billion people living on four per cent of the world’s freshwater, the cost of unaccountable development is not abstract but existential.

(The author is part of the legal research team of the organisation)

Related:

Himalayan Courts: Young folds & new cracks in environmental jurisprudence

Environmental Jurisprudence: The Bombay High Court’s shifting language

Cracks in Indian Environment Jurisprudence: An examination of High Courts of central India

The post The what’s & why’s of Data Centres and how are they hijacking the India Story appeared first on SabrangIndia.

To understand the operational logic of contemporary majoritarian governance, we must look beyond the reassuring rhetoric of constitutional democracy and examine the citizen’s physical body. At its core, citizenship is the violent imprint of the nation-state on the human form. Those whose bodies fall outside this sovereign mark are not merely seen as uncivilised or unmapped; they are structurally marked as targets for systemic elimination. As Giorgio Agamben famously observed, the sovereign sphere includes life primarily through its exclusion, defining a body by its capacity to be killed. Consequently, entry into the polis is never unconditional; it is permanently anchored in the structural possibility of expulsion.

This reality thoroughly dismantles the modern fiction that human rights are inalienable from birth. Proclaiming the existence of natural rights obscures a deeper, more troubling mechanism: the law inscribes itself onto your biological form the moment you enter the world, instantly circumscribing existence within parameters policed by a sovereign who arbitrates what constitutes a protectable and worthy life.

This structural stratification has deep historical and cultural roots. In the ancient Greek polis, women and slaves were entirely excluded from political life and relegated to the realm of bare animal existence (zoe). Similarly, the traditional Indian caste system organised society by dividing populations into those with surplus social capital and those without, marginalising Avarna and Dalit communities and reducing them to beasts of burden through a traditional, ritualistic biopolitics.

While modern democracy apparently extends political rights to all, the underlying exceptions persist. Hannah Arendt exposed this systemic vulnerability by questioning the existence of a foundational “right to have rights.” Without this primary, irrevocable guarantee, any specific civil right can be suspended or revoked by the state at will. A body stripped of this structural protection moves from a state of qualified political life (bios) to a phase of bare life, where its franchise is stripped by opaque administrative measures, and ultimately into the “death worlds” of permanent, unlivable conditions. Such a body becomes depoliticised, de-nationalised, and destined for institutional annihilation (like Umar Khalid and other UAPA victims).

This violent gap between abstract legal definitions and brutal lived experience is vibrantly illustrated by the targeted treatment of the politically or physically vulnerable. The tragic incarceration and structural neglect of the late activist Father Stan Swamy demonstrate how state security pretexts are weaponised to deny basic human dignity and judicial empathy, completely severing formal citizenship from actual human existence.

In the contemporary landscape, dissenting intellectuals (labelled “urban Naxals”) and Indian Muslims are subjected to a terrifying mutation of this power, rendered necropolitical citizens. Through the lens of Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, the sovereign power to dictate who may live and who must die, the state constructs “death worlds” for politically inconvenient populations.

In life, these populations are pushed to the fringes, harassed by selective administrative tools such as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and the UCC, and threatened with legal exile. Yet a supreme irony occurs at the moment of biological collapse: the state recognises their citizenship primarily in death or through the execution of state violence on their lives. The living body is treated as an existential threat that must be subdued, whereas the deceased body is perfectly safe; it can be seamlessly reintegrated into the legal record through meticulous posthumous processing, inquests, and closed case files. Thus, they become citizen by death; a sort of necropolitical citizenship is emerging.

To maintain this absolute control, the state capitalises on the latent vulnerability embedded in every civic body. By levying sweeping charges of treason, waging war against social justice movements, and branding critics or writers as national security threats for merely possessing radical literature, the sovereign instils a pervasive state of fear. The law ceases to function as an objective arbiter and instead becomes a tool of majoritarian discipline. By systematically assigning disparate values to majoritarian and minority lives, the legal system enforces an ethnic democracy, a political ecosystem in which the state manages populations not to protect them, but to legally manage their elimination.

The Judicial Rubber-Stamp: EVM Opacity and the Legalisation of the SIR hunting

This biopolitical shift from public sovereignty to bureaucratic control is not achieved merely through overt violence; it is systematically entrenched through the legal architecture of the democratic state, where judicial mechanisms increasingly insulate the apparatus of power from public oversight. The erosion of the citizen’s democratic agency is dual-pronged: it targets how votes are counted and, more fundamentally, who is allowed to remain on the voting rolls in the first place.

The first mechanism was legitimised by the Supreme Court’s judgment on Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) verification. In that case, the Court rejected petitions led by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) seeking 100% physical verification of VVPAT slips. By prioritising automated efficiency over absolute transparency, the Court detached the biological voter from independent validation of their franchise. Public intellectuals such as Yogendra Yadav noted that reducing voting to a state-managed computational loop isolates the citizen. The Court ruled that popular suspicion of proprietary source code is insufficient grounds to disrupt bureaucratic machinery, affirming that the citizen’s expressive political act (bios) is subordinate to executive design.

However, this electronic opacity forms only the defensive perimeter of the state. The offensive biopolitical manoeuvre is found in the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment upholding the Election Commission of India’s (ECI) Special Intensive Revision (SIR).

Delivered by a Bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant, the judgment unanimously upheld the ECI’s authority to deploy the SIR under Section 21(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1950, and Article 324 of the Constitution. The petitioners argued that the SIR was a surreptitious, backdoor move to conduct citizenship screening and mass profiling under the guise of purifying electoral rolls. Under the cover of this non-transparent process, a partisan ECI has conducted sweeping purges of voter registries, deleting more than 10% of voters across multiple states and disproportionately targeting minority populations, particularly Indian Muslims.

The profound danger of the SIR judgment lies in its striking internal contradiction, which exposes the thanatopolitical character of the contemporary state. On the one hand, the Supreme Court attempted to provide an alibi for its decision by declaring that deletion from an electoral roll “does not amount to a declaration that the individual is not a citizen of India.” It framed the deletion merely as the “Commission’s inability to be satisfied” for electoral purposes.

Yet, in the very same breath, the Court directed the ECI to forward all such deleted names to the competent authorities under the Citizenship Act within four weeks, setting a strict deadline for the “adjudication of their citizenship” before the upcoming elections.

This directive turns the foundational presumption of regular citizenship on its head. By sending millions of arbitrarily deleted individuals to executive tribunals under the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Court has institutionalised a mechanism that shifts the entire burden of proof onto marginalised individuals. The biological body is stripped of its political skin (the franchise) by an opaque administrative swipe, and is then forced to prove its right to exist before the lethal apparatus of state citizenship laws.

Senior advocate Prashant Bhushan delivered a strong critique of the verdict, calling the development “very unfortunate for democracy” and explicitly accusing the Election Commission of “working as an agent of the BJP.” Bhushan’s intervention cuts to the core of the institutional collapse: when the apex court validates an opaque, executive-led hunt that strips millions of their political status without prior due process, long after elections have already been altered by these very deletions, the judiciary ceases to be a shield against tyranny. Instead, it becomes the ultimate legitimising organ of fascist majoritarianism.

When the EVM-VVPAT judgment and the SIR verdict are integrated, the full anatomy of Hindutva’s biopolitical state is laid bare. The SIR hunt determines which bodies are excluded from the polis altogether, reducing them to Homo Sacer, bare lives marked for legal and political exile. Meanwhile, the unverifiable EVM matrix ensures that the bodies permitted to remain within the polis are reduced to compliant components of a state-controlled ritual.

Through this dual design, the transition from democracy to an ethnic fascism is completed, not by violating the law, but by rewriting it to ensure that the preservation of majoritarian purity becomes the highest constitutional mandate.

Read the first part of the article here 

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post The Biopolitical Anatomy of Hindutva Fascism: Part II: SIR, EVMs and the Judiciary appeared first on SabrangIndia.

NTA STATEMENT REGARDING THE ACTION ON TELEGRAM PLATFORM IN INDIA

1. The National Testing Agency (NTA) welcomes the directions issued today in respect of the Telegram platform in India. The directions, issued on recommendations of NTA are calibrated and bounded in time:

(a) a…

— National Testing Agency (@NTA_Exams) June 16, 2026

The government has justified these measures as a response to organised examination fraud, alleged paper-leak scams and misinformation campaigns. According to statements carried by Mint, WION and other media outlets, authorities identified several Telegram channels allegedly offering access to examination papers in exchange for money. The NTA further claimed that Telegram’s message-editing feature had been exploited to create fabricated evidence of paper leaks by allowing administrators to insert examination papers into older messages while retaining original timestamps.

The importance of maintaining the integrity of national examinations cannot be disputed. The future of lakhs of students depends upon a fair and credible examination process, and organised cheating networks undoubtedly deserve stringent action. However, the constitutional question raised by the Telegram ban is not whether examination fraud should be prevented. The question is whether the State can suspend access to an entire communication platform used by millions because some actors are allegedly misusing it. Once that question is asked, the government’s decision begins to appear far less straightforward than official statements suggest.

The real problem is not Telegram

The government’s explanation begins from a fundamentally flawed premise. The recurring problem in India’s examination system is not Telegram, WhatsApp or any other communication platform. Paper leaks do not originate on social media. They originate within the examination apparatus itself. Every leak necessarily begins somewhere in the chain of printing, storage, transportation, administration or distribution of examination materials. By the time a question paper appears on a messaging platform, the breach has already occurred.

Detailed report on paper leaks may be read here.

This distinction is critical because it reveals the extent to which the government’s response is directed at symptoms rather than causes. Telegram may be one of the channels through which leaked material is circulated, but it is not the source of the leak. The source lies within the institutions responsible for safeguarding examination integrity. A serious response to examination fraud would therefore focus on identifying vulnerabilities within the examination system itself: who had access to the papers, how the chain of custody was compromised, where security protocols failed and what reforms are required to prevent future breaches.

Instead, the government’s intervention directs public attention towards the platform through which information allegedly travels. This approach risks obscuring the more uncomfortable reality that examination fraud is ultimately a governance failure. Blocking Telegram may create the appearance of decisive action, but it does little to address the institutional weaknesses that make such fraud possible in the first place.

The NTA’s own explanation undermines the ban

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the government’s justification is that it appears to undermine the necessity of the measure it seeks to defend. The NTA’s own statement acknowledges that the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), state police forces and specialised cybercrime units had already identified and removed numerous Telegram channels, groups and bots allegedly involved in examination fraud. Law enforcement agencies had reportedly conducted investigations, tracked financial transactions and made arrests.

These admissions raise a difficult question for the government. If authorities were already capable of identifying specific channels and specific offenders, why was it necessary to block the entire platform? If targeted interventions were available and functioning, what justified the escalation to a nationwide platform-wide restriction affecting millions of lawful users?

The significance of these questions becomes even clearer when viewed through constitutional principles. Democracies do not permit governments to adopt the broadest possible restriction merely because it is administratively convenient. The burden lies on the State to demonstrate why less restrictive alternatives were inadequate. Yet the government’s own account suggests that channel-level takedowns, criminal investigations and targeted enforcement actions were already underway. The NTA therefore appears to have supplied the strongest argument against its own decision.

A constitutional problem of proportionality

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that restrictions on fundamental rights must satisfy the doctrine of proportionality. In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the Court made clear that even where the State pursues a legitimate objective, it must demonstrate that the measure adopted is necessary, that less restrictive alternatives are unavailable and that the benefits of the restriction outweigh the harm caused.

Preventing examination fraud is undoubtedly a legitimate objective. The difficulty lies in establishing that a nationwide platform ban was necessary to achieve it. The government’s own statements reveal the existence of multiple alternatives. Channels could be removed. Fraud networks could be investigated. Individuals could be arrested. Financial transactions could be traced. Criminal prosecutions could be initiated.

Once these alternatives are acknowledged, the constitutional burden shifts to the State to explain why they were insufficient. The public explanation offered thus far does not convincingly do so. Instead, it suggests that a platform-wide restriction was adopted despite the existence of narrower measures. That is precisely the scenario the doctrine of proportionality seeks to prevent.

What Anuradha Bhasin case actually says about internet restrictions

The Telegram ban also cannot be separated from the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020). While that case arose in the context of internet restrictions in Jammu and Kashmir, the principles articulated by the Court have broader relevance for all forms of digital restrictions.

The Court recognised that access to the internet is closely intertwined with the exercise of freedom of speech, access to information, education, trade and professional activity. It held that restrictions affecting digital communications must satisfy standards of necessity and proportionality and cannot be imposed through opaque executive processes. Most importantly, the Court emphasised transparency. Orders restricting communications must be published. Citizens must know why their rights are being restricted. Affected parties must have an opportunity to challenge such restrictions before courts.

In the present instance, however, the public has largely been presented with press releases and official explanations rather than the actual legal order. The reasoning adopted by the authorities remains unavailable. Whether Telegram was given an opportunity to be heard remains unclear. Whether less restrictive alternatives were seriously considered is unknown. These omissions are not procedural technicalities; they go to the heart of the constitutional safeguards identified by the Supreme Court.

The Shreya Singhal problem

The legal basis of the government’s action raises another serious concern. The reported reliance on Section 69A of the Information Technology Act immediately invites scrutiny because the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that provision in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015) only because it was presented as a narrow and carefully structured mechanism.

The Court accepted Section 69A because it involved targeted blocking of specific information under limited circumstances and subject to procedural safeguards. Its constitutional validity depended upon its narrow scope.

The Telegram ban raises the question of whether that narrow provision is now being transformed into a sweeping power capable of disabling entire communication platforms. As the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has argued, there is a significant difference between blocking particular content and shutting down an intermediary used by millions. If Section 69A is interpreted broadly enough to justify platform-wide restrictions, the reasoning that underpinned its constitutional validity begins to weaken considerably.

The message editing direction may be even more troubling

The direction requiring Telegram to disable its message-editing feature raises concerns that extend even beyond the platform ban itself. While the government has publicly explained why it believes the feature was being misused, it has not clearly identified the legal authority under which it can compel a platform to redesign a feature for an entire country’s user base.

This distinction matters because blocking information and redesigning technological architecture are fundamentally different exercises of power. One concerns content regulation; the other concerns direct intervention in the design of digital infrastructure.

The implications are far-reaching. If governments can order the removal of editing functions today, similar arguments could potentially be invoked tomorrow against encryption, anonymous communication or other platform features. The issue is therefore not confined to Telegram. It concerns the broader relationship between state power and digital architecture.

Another example of India’s growing shutdown culture

The Telegram ban is not an isolated incident. It forms part of a broader pattern in which communication restrictions increasingly become the preferred response to administrative challenges. Over the last decade, multiple states have suspended internet services during recruitment examinations, teacher eligibility tests and competitive entrance examinations. These shutdowns are almost always justified as temporary and necessary measures to prevent cheating.

Yet despite repeated restrictions, examination leaks continue to occur. Fraud networks continue to operate. Recruitment scandals continue to emerge.

What persists is not the effectiveness of these measures but their repetition. Instead of reforming institutions, authorities increasingly appear to restrict communications. The result is a governance model in which the burden of institutional failure is shifted onto citizens rather than addressed at its source.

The real danger is the normalisation of censorship

The most significant concern raised by the Telegram ban is not its duration but the principle it reflects. Every time the State confronts a difficult administrative problem, there appears to be a growing willingness to restrict communications as part of the solution. Each restriction is presented as temporary. Each is described as exceptional. Yet collectively they establish a troubling precedent.

Over time, extraordinary measures become ordinary ones. Communication restrictions become routine administrative tools. Fundamental rights become subject to considerations of convenience and expediency.

The future of lakhs of students deserves protection. But constitutional freedoms deserve protection as well. A secure examination system will ultimately be built through accountability, transparency, stronger institutions and effective criminal investigation—not through platform bans and communication restrictions. The Telegram ban therefore raises a question that extends well beyond NEET. It forces us to confront whether India is becoming increasingly comfortable with restricting communications whenever governance becomes difficult. If that trend continues, the consequences will be felt far beyond a single examination cycle.

Related:

When Morality Meets Surveillance: The court’s push toward state-regulated digital content

Repeal recent amendments to the RTI act, 2005: Justice A.P Shah in an Open Letter

Safe harbour or shadow censorship? The battle over India’s digital speech

State-sponsored attacks of surveillance reveal an erosion on Indians’ right to privacy, especially journalists, political opposition

The post Telegram before NEET: When governance fails, censorship takes its place appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Satyaki was testifying in a Pune Court and made this disclosure in his cross-examination before Special Judge Amol Shinde; who is presently dealing with the criminal defamation case he has filed against Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for allegedly defaming his grand uncle in a speech in London.

Leader of the Opposition (LOP) Rahul Gandhi’s counsel Milind Pawar is presently cross-examining Satyaki in the trial. In his testimony, Satyaki on Monday stated that his granduncle was labelled as a ‘Veer’ in a periodical run by the Gadar Organisation even before he was sent to the Andaman.

“It is true to say that, Savarkar had filed a clemency petition ten times. It is true to say that, he was referred to as a ‘Veer’ when the clemency petition was filed. It is true to say that, Savarkar was referred to as ‘Veer’ even when he submitted clemency petitions ten times. It is not true to say that, it is a contradiction to call someone a ‘Veer’ who has filed a clemency petition ten times. It is true to say that, revolutionists from that same period— Rajguru, Batukeshwar Dutt, and Ashfaqulla Khan— did not file a clemency petition. It is true to say that, Savarkar filed a mercy petition within the first month after being sentenced. I was unaware that Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt had petitioned the British government, demanding to be treated as prisoners of war and refusing any concessions or acts of leniency. It is true to say that, Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt remained steadfast in their ideology and principles until the very end. I am aware that revolutionist Bhagat Singh and Batukeshwar Dutt did not compromise on their principles and ideologies in their dealings with the British right to the end,” Satyaki told the court.

Further, Satyaki also told the court that the records pertaining to the 10 mercy or clemency petitions filed by Savarkar are kept in the official government records. He added that the language in these mercy petitions filed by Savarkar did not indicate his ‘loyalty’ to the British regime.

“These clemency petitions used to be forwarded by the prison administration to the British government for approval. It is true to say that the British government had the authority to commute or alter the sentences in any mercy petitions that were submitted. It is true to say that, the authority to reduce or remit a sentence depended on the policy and procedure of the British government. It is true to say that, Savarkar’s clemency petitions are available in government records. It is true to say that, these petitions exist and that I have not filed them,” the testimony reads.

Satyaki has further stated that the British government rejected all of Savarkar’s clemency petitions and in their replies, expressed the apprehension that if Savarkar were released, he would once again participate in the revolutionary movement, leading to the end of British rule.

“It is true to say that, filing a clemency petition to seek a reduction in the sentence was a standard procedure under the British government. It is true to say that, not only Savarkar but other prisoners also filed clemency petitions. It is true to say that, filing a clemency petition was neither exceptional nor illegal. It is not true to say that the language Savarkar used in that clemency petition was one of humility. It is not true to say that the petitions contained words expressing loyalty to the British government. It is true to say that, in that petition, Savarkar requested a reduction of his sentence,” the complainant Satyaki said.

In his testimony, Satyaki further stated that the language Savarkar used in the clemency petitions was in keeping with official protocol. He also opined that the reason revolutionists took up arms was the injustice perpetrated by the British and that Savarkar had expressed the view that had the British implemented reforms earlier, the revolutionists would not have resorted to arms.

During the ongoing proceedings, the Pune court has recorded the excerpts from one of the mercy petitions filed by Savarkar, stating that others sent to the Andaman jail along with him were released but he was not and instead was classified as a Class D prisoner and was subjected to harsh punishments.

“I am not aware that Savarkar signed every petition with the text: ‘I beg to remain, Sir, your most obedient servant, V.D. Savarkar.’ It is not true to say that the process of Savarkar’s release began after these ten petitions were filed. I do not have a report available that makes a comparative study of the mercy petitions filed by Savarkar and those filed by other prisoners, as well as their contents. It is true to say that, filing a mercy petition is an official procedure intended to seek a reduction in the sentence, and Savarkar availed himself of this very process. There is no expert report available to demonstrate that the content and language of Savarkar’s mercy petition were merely formal or part of his strategy,” Satyaki further added to his testimony LiveLaw stated.

Further, Satyaki stated, “It is true to say that, no prisoner was under any obligation to submit a mercy petition. It is true to say that, whether or not to file a mercy petition depended on the preference of the concerned prisoner. It is true to say that, these revolutionists endured great hardships; however, I do not know the names of the specific prisoners among them who filed mercy petitions.”

Satyaki’s cross-examination will continue on July 1.

Background:

The defamation complaint asserts that Gandhi has repeatedly defamed Savarkar on various occasions over the years. One specific incident highlighted was on March 5, 2023, when Gandhi addressed the Overseas Congress in the United Kingdom. The complainant, who testified yesterday, Satyaki Savarkar, has claimed that Gandhi intentionally made wild allegations against Savarkar, knowing them to be untrue, with the intention of harming Savarkar’s reputation and causing mental agony to the complainant and his family. He states that the defamatory speech was delivered in England, but its impact was felt in Pune as it was published and circulated throughout India.

Satyaki, in his complaint, has submitted several news reports and a YouTube link to a video of Gandhi’s speech in London as evidence. He has claimed that Gandhi falsely accused Savarkar of writing a book in which he described beating up a Muslim person, which Savarkar never wrote and such an incident never happened.

Satyaki argued that Gandhi made these false, malicious, and wild allegations with the specific objective of defaming Savarkar and harming his reputation. The criminal defamation application filed by Satyaki demands maximum punishment for Gandhi under Section 500 (Punishment for defamation) of the IPC and seeks imposition of maximum compensation as per Section 357 (Order to pay compensation) of the CrPC.

SabrangIndia has carried multiple analyses and reports of Savarkar and how his attitudes could be dubbed as casteist. These may be read here and here.

Related:

Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva: Book Review

Savarkar’s grandson calls for trade boycott of Muslims: HJS, GOA

Teaser of Film on Savarkar: Lies Galore

The post Yes, Savarkar did file 10 Mercy Petitions before the British, revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh refused to Compromise: Grandnephew tells Pune Court appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Census as a Fundamental Rights Instrument

Further, PUCL points out that “the Census is not merely a bureaucratic exercise in counting heads and tabulating assets. The Indian State fulfils its constitutional obligations to its citizens through the foundational instrument. The data collected determines the allocation of welfare entitlements, targeted poverty programmes, infrastructure investments, and, crucially, delimitation of parliamentary constituencies. The Census is therefore inseparable from the right to equality (Article 14), the right to life and dignity (Article 21), and the right of citizens to be counted truthfully as bearers of rights. To falsify Census data is not an administrative irregularity: it is a violation of fundamental rights,” the statement states.

The Ground Reality

The testimony of enumerators, government school teachers, anganwadi workers, and other frontline functionaries paints a picture of deprivation that is profoundly at odds with the government’s self-congratulatory claims.

Enumerators across Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have reported:
– Households without toilets, where residents defecate in the open, contradicting the government’s declaration that India is Open Defecation Free (ODF).
– Households without piped or treated tap water, contradicting the Jal Jeevan Mission’s claim of near-universal household water connectivity.
– Households dependent on firewood, dung cakes, and kerosene for cooking, contradicting data on LPG connections under the Ujjwala scheme.
– Households with tin roofs being instructed to be reclassified as having concrete roofs, a naked falsification of housing conditions.
– Households without electricity or internet, contradicting claims of digital inclusion.
– Residents so impoverished and excluded from state welfare that they pleaded with enumerators to help them access basic entitlements, housing, LPG, water, pensions, that they had never received despite being counted as beneficiaries in government data.

These are not discrepancies in methodology. They are the face of structural deprivation of a welfare architecture that has been constructed on paper while millions remain without its basic provisions in reality.

The Direction to Falsify: A Grave Institutional Offence

PUCL Rajasthan draws particular attention to the letter issued on June 2, 2026 by the Director of Census Operations, Rajasthan, to all district-level functionaries, directing them to ‘verify’ and correct ‘discrepancies’. Read alongside the testimony of enumerators who have been explicitly told ‘not to select options that may show the government in a poor light’, this letter constitutes institutional cover for data manipulation.

The instruction to enumerators to check whether households practising open defecation have access to a neighbour’s toilet or a public urinal, so as to revise the classification away from ‘open defecation’, is particularly egregious. It is not enumeration; it is the manufacture of consent to a falsehood.

This is not the first time that official welfare data has been found to diverge sharply from ground realities. The SIR exercise, deletions from voter rolls, manipulated BPL lists, these form part of a consistent and dangerous pattern of state-manufactured invisibility of the poor. The Census, which carries unique constitutional weight and long-term demographic and electoral consequences, cannot be permitted to become another instrument in this edifice of official falsification.

The Vulnerability of Enumerators

PUCL states, “It is equally alarmed at the position in which frontline enumerators, government school teachers, anganwadi workers, and other contractual and regular state employees, have been placed. These individuals are being required to choose between their professional integrity and their institutional subordination. Many have raised their voices on social media at considerable personal risk. They deserve full protection, not coercion.”

The manner in which the Census exercise is being conducted entirely on digital platforms using enumerators’ personal phones, in conditions of inadequate mobile connectivity in rural and tribal areas, with grossly insufficient reimbursement (a mobile recharge of Rs. 66 has been reported from Uttarakhand) enhances this vulnerability, states PUCL.  These conditions, compounded by the simultaneous performance of regular duties, render the exercise not merely flawed but structurally compromised.

Warning

PUCL “reminds the Central and State Governments that a Census whose data is manufactured to validate governmental claims rather than to enumerate lived realities is not merely a statistical fraud, it is a political and constitutional one. The decennial Census shapes delimitation, welfare targeting, fiscal devolution, and the entire architecture of representative democracy. Falsified Census data will not only deprive the poor of entitlements they urgently need; it will corrupt the very basis of democratic representation for decades.

“The invisible poor, those without roofs, toilets, electricity, or clean water, have a fundamental right to be seen, counted, and heard by the Indian State. Their erasure from official data is not a technicality. It is a rights violation.

Hence, the organization demands:

– An immediate halt to all instructions, formal or informal, to enumerators to revise or ‘correct’ data that truthfully reflects ground conditions. The CMMS portal must not be used as an instrument of real-time surveillance to pressurise enumerators into data revision.
– A full, independent, and transparent inquiry into the letter issued by the Director of Census Operations, Rajasthan, on 2 June 2026, and all allied communications issued by Charge Officers, Sub-Divisional Census Officers, and District Coordinators in this connection.
– Guaranteed protection for all enumerators who have raised concerns about pressure to falsify data, whether on social media or through other means, against any form of institutional retaliation, transfer, or disciplinary action.
– The constitution of an independent oversight mechanism, including civil society, retired senior bureaucrats, and statisticians with no government affiliation, to audit and verify Census data at the block level before final records are compiled.
– A public statement from the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India reaffirming the constitutional obligation of the Census to capture truthful ground realities, and explicitly disavowing any instruction to enumerators to align data with government welfare scheme claims.
– Adequate material support to enumerators, including data reimbursement, dedicated time, and relief from concurrent official duties during the HLO exercise.

The detailed statement has been issued by Kavita Srivastava, national president, V. Suresh, National General Secretary and Anant Bhatnagar, PUCL state Rajasthan President among others.

Related:

Ensure transparency and inclusion in the 2027 Census: CCG

Long-delayed Census to be Conducted in Two Phases From October 2026

To count or not to count, delays and India’s decadal Census

The post Falsifying the Truth: PUCL condemns the systematic manipulation of census data & suppression of ground realities in census exercise appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Kharge went public with this intention last week and today made public a detailed letter that he posted on ‘X’, the afternoon of Monday June 15. In this post, addressing the RSS Supremo, Mohan Bhagwat, the Karnataka’s home minister around 4 p.m., said, “My letter will reach you shortly. However, I thought it was important to draw your attention to this matter early. Firstly, congratulations to the RSS on completing 100 years. An organisation that claims over 60,000 shakhas and crores of swayamsevaks must also uphold transparency and constitutional accountability. As per RSS’ highest and most important decision-making body Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha’s 2025–26 Karnataka report, the RSS has 4,127 daily shakhas, 1,389 weekly milans, 60 monthly mandalis, 2,194 Samajotsavas with 19.61 lakh participants and held 562 route marches with 2.21 lakh uniformed participants in the state. With such scale and influence, the RSS must clarify its legal status, registration, office bearers, funding, expenditure, taxation and permissions for public activities. If citizens, labour, NGOs, trusts, temples and companies are expected to register, disclose and comply with the law, why should the RSS remain exempt? In its centenary year, the RSS must responsibly abide by the Constitution and register, disclose, pay applicable taxes and function transparently within the Constitution.” The letter is signed off by Priyank Kharge, Minister for Home, Information Technology & Biotechnology and e-Governance and has created ripples already.

Dear Shri Mohan Bhagwat ji,

My letter will reach you shortly. However, I thought it was important to draw your attention to this matter early.
——————————-

Firstly, congratulations to the RSS on completing 100 years.

An organisation that claims over 60,000 shakhas and crores of… pic.twitter.com/IZy4oeKdMp

— Priyank Kharge / ಪ್ರಿಯಾಂಕ್ ಖರ್ಗೆ (@PriyankKharge) June 15, 2026

The text of the letter may be read below:

Date: 13.06.2026

To,

Shri Mohan Bhagwat

Sarsanghchalak Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh Nagpur

Subject: Congratulations on completing 100 years of existence and request for legal clarification on organisational status

Dear Sir,

At the outset, I extend my congratulations to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on completing 100 years of its existence. An organisation that claims to have over 60,000 shakhas and crores of swayamsevaks across India and abroad undoubtedly has a significant presence in public life and society.

It is precisely because of this scale, influence and reach that the RSS must be held to the highest standards of transparency, accountability and constitutional compliance.

According to the annual report for 2025-26 released by the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha (ABPS), the highest decision-making body of the RSS, the organisation has a significant footprint in Karnataka, with 4,127 daily shakhas, 1,389 weekly milans and 60 monthly mandalis.

The RSS’ public mobilisation is equally extensive. As per your report, the organisation conducted 2,194 Samajotsavas, drawing 19,61,158 participants. You also claim to have organised 562 route marches across the State, usually covering 2.5 to 3 km, with 2, 21,963 uniformed participants. Taken together, these figures show a vast, disciplined and deeply embedded network operating across Karnataka through daily cadre-building, weekly and monthly outreach, mass public events and uniformed route marches.

Such an extensive organisational presence, especially when it involves regular public mobilisation, uniformed route marches and large-scale social outreach, cannot be treated as a private or informal arrangement. It raises legitimate questions about legal status, accountability, financial transparency, public order, permissions, and sources of funding and compliance with the Constitution and laws of India.

We therefore request the RSS to depute its authorised office bearers to explain the legal grounds on which an organisation of such magnitude continues to function with anonymity and without being formally registered as a legal entity or as a “body of individuals” under the applicable laws.

In a constitutional democracy, no organisation, however old, large or influential, can remain above scrutiny. Every citizen, association, institution and body that operates in public life is expected to comply with the law. In Bharath, even a safai karamchari must be registered to avail government benefits. Every religious institution and religious trusts are audited. Charitable bodies, NGOs, trusts, societies, companies and other institutions are required to disclose their structure, activities, finances and sources of income.

In this context, it is only fair and necessary that the RSS also comes forward and places the following information in the public domain:

1. Its legal status and organisational structure.
2. Details of its office bearers and authorised representatives.
3. Sources of donations, contributions and income.
4. Details of expenditure and assets.
5. Whether applicable taxes are being paid in accordance with law.
6. The legal basis on which organisation activities are conducted without formal registration.
7. The constitutional and statutory framework under which it claims the right to operate at such scale without public accountability.
8. Details of permissions, authorisations and compliance mechanisms for public events, route marches, mass gatherings and other organised activities.

An organisation that regularly evokes nationalism, discipline and duty must also demonstrate these values through transparency, compliance and respect for the Constitution of India.

The RSS cannot ask ordinary Indians to follow rules while exempting itself from the same standards. If workers, small associations, religious institutions, NGOs, trusts, companies and citizens are expected to register, disclose, audit and pay taxes, then the RSS too must set an example by abiding by the rules of the land.

We therefore call upon the RSS to use the occasion of its centenary not merely for celebration, but for constitutional introspection. The best tribute it can pay to India in its 100th year is to register itself, disclose its activities and finances, pay all applicable taxes, and function as a transparent and accountable organisation within the framework of Indian law.

We look forward to receiving a formal response and to the deputation of your authorised office bearers for a discussion on the above matters.

Thank you.

PRIYANK KHARGE.

The RSS Supremo was quoted by social media users in a video stating that Responding to a query during a program in #Thrissur, Mohan Bhagwat said the RSS has always functioned openly and never operated in secrecy. “We are not secretive; we are working on open ground. Our shakhas are held in public spaces, our karyakartas live in localities, and people see them daily. We have enormous outreach programs, including Hindu Sammelans in every block this year,” he stated.

Mohan Bhagwat emphasized that the Sangh has faced similar challenges since its inception. “After 10–15 years of starting Sangh, we had to face all these things. We are used to it. If they don’t happen, we feel something is amiss,” he remarked, adding that the organization was born out of “public will” during British rule. He pointed out that the RSS had been banned twice in the past, but the bans were lifted, once through a court order and once through satyagraha.

“Government knows Sangh is there. Our constitution was submitted to the government in the 1950s. Nobody told us to register. Hindu Dharma is not registered. Many things are not registered. So why should I respond? All this is politics. Nothing serious,” Bhagwat said.

The RSS chief accused political opponents of attempting to “hamper Sangh work” and “create doubts in the minds of people,” but insisted such efforts would fail, as “people know us.”

Related:

Appeal by Adivasi-Mulvasi leaders to Jharkhandis: Protect Birsa Munda’s legacy from the RSS

Womens Reservation Bill 2026: Women’s Rights & the RSS

Denigration of martyrs like Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, Sukhdev – a peep into RSS archives

The post Register, Disclose, Pay Taxes: Karnataka HM Priyank Kharge to the RSS appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Dear friends,

Some newspapers reported that after a meeting with officials yesterday, Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar instructed authorities to immediately provide residence certificates to those who require them for SIR. As per a report in The New Indian Express.

However, according to the list of 11 documents released by the Election Commission for SIR, a simple “Residential Certificate” is not sufficient. The Commission specifically requires:
Permanent Residence Certificate (PRC) issued by the competent State authority
To obtain a Residential Certificate, documents such as Aadhaar, ration card, electricity/water bills, rental agreements, etc., are usually sufficient.
However, for a Permanent Residence Certificate, additional proof is required showing permanent residence in the state for more than six years. This may include long-term ration cards, property records, or evidence of having studied in the state or resided in the state for more than six years.
Only after verification of such documents can the competent authority—the Tahsildar or Deputy Tahsildar—issue the certificate.

The question is: if the government hurriedly issues certificates without fully following these requirements, will the Election Commission accept them?

The West Bengal Experience

When SIR was conducted in West Bengal, residents submitted domicile certificates issued by the state government to prove their status. Attention: These were not ordinary residence certificates but permanent residence (domicile) certificates.

However, the Election Commission initially rejected them, arguing that they did not satisfy its prescribed Permanent Residence Certificate requirements. It also ordered that even those who had already submitted domicile certificates could be issued fresh notices. This was reported here.

As a result, then Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee publicly protested and later approached the Supreme Court. Only after these developments did the Election Commission, on February 9, agree to accept West Bengal domicile certificates as SIR eligibility documents, subject to several conditions. The conditions included:

1) EROs and AEROs could accept only those residence certificates issued in accordance with the West Bengal Government Order dated November 2, 1999.

2) The certificates had to be issued only by competent authorities such as District Magistrates, Additional District Magistrates, Sub-Divisional Officers, or the District Collector of Kolkata.

3) The certificates had to be issued strictly according to government guidelines.

4) All officials were required to be informed of and comply with these guidelines.

This has been detailed here.

This demonstrates the Election Commission’s “strict” (or exclusivist) approach—even toward permanent residence certificates issued by a state government. The Supreme Court has also upheld this authority.

States like Karnataka May Face Greater Difficulties

The ordinary residence certificate referred to by the Chief Minister of Karnataka, DK Shivakumar does not meet the “Permanent Residence Certificate” requirement under SIR. Given the West Bengal experience, only a Karnataka Domicile Certificate is likely to satisfy the Commission’s Permanent Residence Certificate requirement.

However, the same conditions imposed in West Bengal may effectively apply in Karnataka as well.
Generally, to establish Karnataka domicile status, one may need to show:

– Residence in Karnataka for seven years,
– More than six years of education in Karnataka,
– Parents residing in Karnataka, or
– Ownership of property in Karnataka.

These documents must then be verified and approved by the competent authority, usually a Tahsildar or higher-ranking official.

Therefore, since the Election Commission appears determined to use SIR to remove/exclude as many people as possible from electoral rolls on technical grounds, even minor procedural lapses in obtaining domicile certificates could be treated as discrepancies and lead to rejection.

Karnataka’s Chief Electoral Officer, Ambu Kumar, has already stated that a “discrepancy” AI will be applied after submission of Enumeration Forms in Karnataka as well.

Consequently, D.K. Shivakumar’s general instruction to issue residence certificates to everyone who needs them is unlikely, by itself, to protect Dalit and other marginalized communities in Karnataka from the risks posed by SIR. For this reason, the instruction to issue residence certificates should not be viewed as a victory, nor is a cause for complacency.

Therefore, let us remember:
– A Residential Certificate does not satisfy the Permanent Residence Certificate requirement.
– Obtaining a Domicile Certificate that may satisfy the Permanent Residence Certificate requirement is not easy for many eligible members of marginalized communities.

– Documents obtained without following the proper procedure and authority may not be accepted by the Election Commission.

Let us remain alert and not get carried away

Let SIR be completely withdrawn — let democracy survive

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the author’s personal views, and do not necessarily represent the views of Sabrangindia.

Related:

Jharkhand’s Biggest Democratic Test Yet: The SIR Challenge

SC greenlights SIR, upholds ECI’s power to revise electoral rolls

Documents Cannot Decide Democracy: How CJP is training communities to navigate the SIR process

The post Anti-SIR Activists Beware: A mere Residential Certificate does not satisfy SIR requirements appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The current football World Cup is the most expansive in history. It is also the most exclusionary. International Federation of Association Football (FIFA), the governing body of world football, has expanded this World Cup (WC) to 48 teams and a total of 104 matches, the most ever.

The post How FIFA is Asphyxiating the Beautiful Game appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The idea of a UCC in India has been debated for decades including within the Constituent Assembly itself, but its recent passage in BJP-governed states has reignited the question of whether this reform is genuinely about protecting women’s rights across communities, or is it primarily a political tool aimed at communalising what is, at its core, a secular problem of gender justice. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has openly linked the passage of the UCC to the BJP-RSS ideological project, stating that, “Had I not been a BJP CM and a swayamsevak of RSS, probably I would not have been able to bring the UCC to the assembly.” Interestingly Sarma currently serving as the 15th Chief Minister of Assam was a former member of the Indian National Congress (INC) who joined the BJP only on August 23, 2015!

‘Uniform Civil Code or Gender Justice?’ was the question raised around thirty-two years ago by the 1994 cover story of Communalism Combat. Teesta Seetalvad wrote:

“Through its constant argument that enacting a uniform civil code will bring about national integration, the Sangh Parivar has succeeded in making many Hindus believe that, one, only “separatist-minded” Muslims are opposed to a uniform law, and, two, the uniform civil code will only affect Muslims.”

Remarkably, that observation remains just as germane today. What this narrative however ignores is one, the call to do away with several practices, including polygamy, have come from Muslim women themselves (all while the BJP has adopted this issue as one of its own), and, two, all personal laws irrespective of religion have an-anti woman bias. Reported the Hindustan Times. Practices such as restitution of conjugal rights and the absence of no-fault divorce have existed in many religious communities. The broad powers granted to testators to will away property have long enabled the disinheritance of vulnerable family members across many faiths. The 2018 Law Commission report suggested that the legislature first consider guaranteeing equality within communities‘ between men and women, rather than equality between communities while suggesting that personal law reform over a UCC is recommended.

“Various aspects of prevailing personal laws disprivilege women. This Commission is of the view that it is discrimination and not difference which lies at the root of inequality,” the report read.

What the Bill changes 

The Bill aims to unify all personal family laws, including issues related to marriage, divorce, intestate and testamentary succession, and live-in relationships within the State of Assam. It applies to all residents of the state; including those living outside its territories, but it specifically excludes members of any Scheduled Tribes.

It sets uniform conditions for a valid marriage, including a minimum age of 21 for men and 18 for women, replacing the varying thresholds that existed under some personal laws. The religious ceremony through which a marriage is solemnised (whether a Saptapadi, Nikah, Holy Union, Anand Karaj, or any other recognised rite) remains valid and untouched.

The Bill explicitly prohibits polygamy; however, this is not a novel change as only last year, Assam had passed a law banning polygamy across the state. The UCC also standardises the list of prohibited relationships. This has an impact on Muslim personal law, which permitted marriage between first cousins.

Compulsory registration of all marriages within sixty days of the ceremony is introduced for the first time as a uniform requirement though several states, notably Maharashtra had introduced a separate law for this in 1999 while retaining personal laws (Maharashtra Regulation of Marriage Bureaus and Registration of Marriages Act, 1998). Failure to register attracts penalties, though importantly the UCC clarifies that non-registration does not by itself render a marriage invalid. The Bill also establishes procedures for judicial separation and the restitution of conjugal rights. The framework provides standardised grounds for divorce (such as cruelty, desertion, or mutual consent) and extrajudicial methods of dissolving a marriage or unilateral divorce are no longer legally recognised for any community. Maintenance during the pendency of proceedings and permanent alimony after a decree are available to either spouse, again, without any community-specific distinction.

The UCC’s most far-reaching provisions concern succession, where it departs most sharply from the existing personal laws of several communities. It defines a clear ‘Order of Preference’ for how property is distributed when a person dies without a Will. Class-1 heirs (including the spouse, children, and parents) generally succeed simultaneously and take equal shares. For a detailed understanding of this, read a previous analysis by Citizens for Justice and Peace here

Lack of stakeholder consultation 

Hasina Khan and Mridul Kaintura writing for Sabrang India in 2024 noted that conservative and orthodox religious leaders had failed their community as they sought to control their bodies under the guise of protecting the religion. However, they also wrote, “Despite spearheading the movement to bring reforms within our own communities, including the formulation of Nikah-Nama, protesting against fatwas and advocating reforms in discriminatory personal laws, the state has never taken any steps to hear our concerns and protect our rights effectively,” they added.

The UCC Bill was cleared without con­sult­ing any minor­ity organ­isa­tions who had demanded further consultations before the Bill was passed. Beyond the absence of consultations, even the text of the Bill was not placed in the public domain, despite the 2014 circular mandating that draft legislation be made publicly available for at least thirty days to invite comments and feedback. The Bill was vetted by the Assam Cabinet only May 12 before it was introduced on May 25 in the State Assembly and passed on May 27 after about five hours of discussion and debate. As per reports in both The Hindu and The Shillong Times.

The manner in which the Assam government pushed through the UCC Bill is not an isolated instance but reflective of a growing pattern across India where major legislative changes are introduced with little transparency and minimal consultation with those most affected. Similar criticisms accompanied the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026, and the Delimitation Bill.

CM Sarma in fact went on record to say that Congress’s opposition does not matter because except one Congress MLA, rest of the 18 MLAs represent a particular religion.  He was referring to eighteen of the 19 MLAs of Congress, the largest opposition party, who are Muslims. This brazen vocal exclusion and segregation of elected representatives of the religious minorities bodes ill for any representative and participative democracy. Reported in The Times of India.

Dr Noorjehan Safia Niaz, co-founder of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, had said last December that her organisation had twenty-five points specifically relating to Muslims that must be included in any UCC, among them the preservation of mehr (the compulsory payment by the husband to the wife upon marriage, which provides a measure of financial security). The Bill does not incorporate any of the positive and progressive aspects of Muslim personal law. The mehr, nikahnama (which allows spouses to negotiate mutually agreed and legally enforceable conditions in the marriage contract) have completely omitted or left out, as has the one-third limit rule on willing away property for the first spouse and children, which served as a protection against complete disinheritance. The practice of khula, through which a Muslim woman may initiate divorce on grounds such as irreconcilable differences, neglect, or lack of financial support, has not been codified and extended to all women representing a missed opportunity to give every woman a meaningful right to exit a marriage independently. Such legislative exclusion is reflective of a majoritarian bias through exclusion that fails to introduce or include cultural-religious norms from varied communities that are or maybe progressive. As per a report in reddif.com.

The restitution of conjugal rights, which legally compels an unwilling spouse to return to cohabitation, and in the case of a wife could expose her to the risk of rape and forcible pregnancy, has also been retained at a time when its constitutional validity is actively challenged before the Supreme Court and the 21st Law Commission Report recommended its removal. The Bill is entirely silent on custody, and guardianship which are the areas in which Hindu law and Mohammedan law (after seven years of age) gender-based discrimination has been extensively commented upon as the guardianship of a minor boy or unmarried girl vests in the father before the mother.

Had the government followed stakeholder consultations and the Law Commission’s recommendations, would a Bill ostensibly rooted in gender justice have overlooked such regressive practices?

“Instead of maintaining a silence on all these anti-women and pro-men or pro-Hindu provisions of family laws, should not the debate on reforms in family laws be re-framed by secularists incorporating all these arguments with a correct perspective?” had asked Setalvad in 1994.

Exclusion of Scheduled Tribes

In a report in The Times of India, the most glaring contradiction in a supposedly uniform code is the blanket exemption granted to Scheduled Tribes. As per the last census (which was over 15 years ago!), 12.4 per cent of Assam’s population constitute of scheduled tribes meaning their exclusion removes a significant section of the state’s residents from the scope of legislation. When asked to justify this, CM Sarma reportedly stated that,

“Medicine will be given where there is illness… UCC will give radiotherapy, chemotherapy where there is cancer. Where there is no cancer, there is no necessity of giving radiotherapy.”

“Whether we bring UCC or not, our tribal people never accept polygamy … Our tribal people give equal rights to girls, they do not accept live-in relations. Self regulation is the best regulation. If Hindu and Muslim societies also had customary rights like tribals and our society would have been tied together with equal rights like them, maybe a UCC would not have been required for anyone,” he added.

In his speech in the House, he also stated that the society rarely sees distressed or neglected women within tribal societies, like that of the Shah Bano case because through their customary rights and customary courts, these communities had already been regulating their social systems.

This stance is perhaps ignorant of first, the socio-economic status of tribal women and how that could affect their access to courts and second, the available data and judicial record! Were consultations with tribal women held for the State to arrive at this conclusion?

According to the International Institute for Population Sciences, compared to the national average of 1.4 per cent (NFHS-5), the rate of polygamy was 2.4 among STs. Tribal communities have also historically opposed women’s inheritance rights on the grounds that recognising such rights would result in land being alienated to non-tribals through inter-community marriage. As per reports in The Print and the Hindustan Times.

There are also cases where tribal women have knocked on the doors of courts! In Gopal Singh Bhumij v. Giribala Bhumij (1990), a ST woman who sought the partition of her father’s property, was denied the same by the Patna High Court as she was bound by tribal custom, which excluded daughters from inheritance. In Smt. Butaki Bai v. Sukhbati (2005), a daughter of the Halba tribe similarly failed to obtain inheritance rights because she could not provide sufficient evidence of Hinduisation. In Ram Dev Ram v. Dhani Ram (2016), a daughter of the Uraon tribe was denied inheritance rights because she did not follow the tribal custom. All of this demonstrates that customary tribal law is neither beyond scrutiny nor inherently gender-just.

“What does uniform mean?… The content of this large Bill does not align with its title. Because to be uniform, it has to be the same for everyone staying in this state. I have no objection with someone being left out from it, I respect all tribes and communities, but the name should be changed… The CM and the other MLAs have been talking about ‘rights’ being secured by the Bill, but in that case, aren’t the women of those who are being left out being deprived of their rights?” said MLA Jakir Sikdar. As per a report in the Indian Express.

Mandatory registration of live-in relationships

One of the most controversial features of the recent UCC framework is its mandatory registration framework for live-in relationships which is a significant expansion of state and community oversight into intimate relationships. This applies even if the partners are residents of Assam living outside the state territories. Partners in such a relationship are obligated to submit a statement to the Sub-Registrar; who then conducts a summary inquiry, and must either register the relationship and issue a certificate or refuse to register with written reasons within thirty days. If either partner is below twenty-one years of age, the Sub-Registrar is legally obligated to inform their parents or guardians. In all cases, a copy of the statement is forwarded to the officer-in-charge of the local police station. Third parties are also permitted to provide information or file complaints regarding unregistered live-in relationships.

This means that a woman may marry at eighteen without parental consent, but must wait until twenty-one to enter a live-in relationship without triggering mandatory parental notification. This inconsistency is difficult to justify on any coherent principle of personal autonomy, nor has the State done its bit to explain the reason behind it.

“These are also matters concerning Muslim women, who may once again find themselves subjected to suffering at the hands of the institution of family, the state, and third parties. Here, the third party could be the involvement of any institution, from community Khaps, Jamaats to even Fatwa-judgements. The punitive measures after being unable to register the live-in relationships are in no way a protective measure but to further surveil the relationships that challenge the institution of marriage,” wrote Khan and Kaintura for Sabrang.

The Uttarakhand UCC Rules also require individuals seeking registration of a live-in relationship to furnish certification from a religious leader or community representative. In January 2025, CJP raised concerns that such rules “make it practically impossible for interfaith or inter–caste individuals to be in a live-in relationship. The requirement of religious sanction for two consenting adults to enter a live-in relationship defeats the principle of secularism provided in the Preamble of the Constitution of India.”

The UCC Rules for Assam are expected to be formulated within six months of Presidential assent. One will have to wait and see whether such draconian provisions are a part of the Assam UCC Rules too. On his X, Biswa has already linked the UCC as a panacea from ‘Love Jihad’ signaling the intent to regulate and restrict inter-faith relationships.

This is consistent with a rising trend across India where anti-conversion laws along with the mandatory public notice provisions of the Special Marriage Act, and now the UCC, create records that right-wing and Hindutva vigilante groups use to track and harass interfaith couples. Reports of young couples being attacked, or forcibly separated have become disturbingly common. Read weaponisation of laws to prevent interfaith marriages in Uttrakhand here. Stated a report in The Polis Project.

This was precisely what CJP tried to address when it challenged the constitutional validity of various State enactments regulating religious conversion. Read detailed reports here and here. By forwarding relationship data directly to police stations and permitting third-party complaints, has arguably created a fresh infrastructure for exactly this kind of extra-legal intimidation.

The Bill also maintains a complete silence on the rights of queer and transgender persons within the family, their rights to marry, and their inheritance and succession rights. In a country where the legal recognition of same-sex relationships remains contested and transgender persons continue to face pervasive discrimination, the UCC’s failure to even acknowledge their existence within the family law framework is a profound omission that no claim to progressiveness can easily paper over.

Conclusion

Women across every community have demanded reforms in personal law for decades. That is not the contention here. The concern, however, is that the UCC in name of reform is plausibly being deployed as a selective intervention that leaves comparable inequalities untouched and exempts a portion of the population on grounds it refuses to apply consistently. By introducing registration of live-in relationships, surveillance mechanisms are introduced that go against the right to privacy and dignity guaranteed by the Constitution and judgments by the Supreme Court.

Reports indicate that Madhya Pradesh is next in line and consultations have already begun. A law that is serious about gender justice would incorporate the best practices from every community and also address the silences around queer persons, HUFs, guardianship, and resist the temptation to use intimate relationships as a theatre for communal politics. By these measures, the Assam, Gujarat and Uttrakhand UCCs as passed have already fallen significantly short. Reported The Hindu.

The full draft of The Uniform Civil Code, Assam, 2026 can be accessed here

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this resource has been worked on by Tanishka Shah)

Related:

The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) of Uttarakhand: Advancement in gender justice or violating individual liberties?

Calls for Uniform Civil Code, Population Control Bill by Right-Wing groups amplified with divisive rhetoric

Destroying the basic standards of legislation- the Uttarakhand Model of UCC

The post Assam Becomes Third State to Adopt UCC: Reform for Gender Justice or Communal Politics? appeared first on SabrangIndia.