However, only time can answer whether this was merely a display of rivalry between the two competing power centres within the Congress government — Siddaramaiah and D.K. Shivakumar — or a sign of the emergence of a new one. Likewise, the criticisms made by the opposition BJP regarding the Congress government’s three-year rule carry neither genuine public concern nor sincerity.

All these are discussions and critiques driven by the ruling circles’ own power interests. They attempt to portray their class interests as public interest. Therefore, these mainstream discussions should not overshadow the real questions concerning the people — namely, whether the Congress government has brought real winds of change into the lives of the people of Karnataka in the past three years.

Should not this be the fundamental question?

In 2023, the people of Karnataka, who had been distressed by the continuous attacks carried out by the Bommai-led Sangh-affiliated BJP government against Muslims, Dalits, and the poor of this land, brought the Congress government to power with a clear majority. Compared to the BJP, Congress received 7% more votes (43%) and won 70 more seats (136 seats).

In its manifesto and budget speeches, the Congress party had promised to provide a genuine alternative to the BJP government. In particular, it assured communal harmony, punishment for divisive forces, social justice, welfare, guarantees, and people-oriented development.

Although politically aware sections and large parts of the public may not have had very high expectations regarding these promises, the disappointments and betrayals committed by the Siddaramaiah government over the past three years have exceeded expectations.

In fact, when the Siddaramaiah government completed two and a half years, several scholars under the leadership of a Bengaluru civic organization conducted a detailed study of the government’s budget promises and their implementation and released a comprehensive report. According to that report, even after half the government’s tenure had passed, only 6% of the budget promises had been fulfilled. The remaining 94% were categorised as promises that had either not yet begun, had begun but were limping along, or had still not been fully implemented. The report identified lack of resources, lack of political will, and administrative negligence as the primary reasons.

Recently, the Karnataka Muslim Federation also conducted an in-depth study on the promises made by the Congress government to the Muslim community during the last three years and the manner of their implementation, and released its report through a massive convention.

The report mainly exposed the immense political irresponsibility shown by the government in failing to curb Hindutva oppressive forces that continue targeting the Muslim community even after three years, in not repealing laws introduced by the BJP government specifically to harass Muslims, in failing to provide adequate representation to Muslims within the party and government, and in protecting the state from the SIR measures currently being implemented by the Modi government allegedly to further marginalise Muslims. The organisation also warned of massive resistance if time-bound solutions were not provided.

Read reports on this initiative here and here.

In addition, various farmers’, workers’, Dalit, student-youth, women’s, transgender, slum dwellers’, and minority organizations have individually and collectively criticised several policies implemented by the Congress government over the last three years through their struggles and protests.

Taken together, all these constitute a public review of the Congress government’s three years in power.

At a time when the Congress government is celebrating its third anniversary with self-deception and self-indulgence, these public reviews must be used to examine the government’s promises. In particular, there is a need to remind people of the disillusionments experienced over the past three years regarding communal harmony, social justice, welfare of the poor, and development.

Communal Harmony or Soft Hindutva?

As soon as the Congress came to power, it had promised to consider banning the Bajrang Dal. But immediately after assuming office, the respected Home Minister performed a ceremonial foot worship (Padapooja) of Pejawar Swamiji, regarded as a spiritual patron of the Bajrang Dal, at  his  residence and declared that there was no proposal to ban the organization. According to studies, such organisations have been responsible for 270 communal incidents over the last three years. Whenever public pressure increased, the government merely registered FIRs and washed its hands of the matter.

On the other hand, in support of the saffronisation of the Baba Budan Dargah — considered one of the root causes for the BJP’s rise in Karnataka — the Congress government also agreed to appoint Vedic priests at the dargah! The anti-cow slaughter law and anti-conversion law introduced by the BJP government have still not been repealed. Only after suffering setbacks in the Davanagere by-election and realising that Muslims were prepared to organise warning conventions against the Congress despite all pressure, did the government reluctantly withdraw the hijab order.

Furthermore, as the West Bengal elections have reportedly made clear, the Election Commission’s implementation of SIR under Modi’s direction is primarily aimed at denying citizenship rights to Muslims. SIR is set to begin in Karnataka from June. Yet even on this issue, the Congress government’s stance appears mute indirectly helping SIR. After repeated perusal by the civil society organisations and protest movement on the streets, the cabinet met recently and deliberated about the SIR problems. Even though a larger meeting of the leaders of the Congress party and Minsiters has been scheduled to discuss the way in which it could intervene, it has been clubbed with the agenda of discussing upcoming Greater Bangalore Authority (GBA) and other local body elections. The Government is not even thinking of approaching the SC pleading to postpone the Third Phase of SIR until it settles the question of Unconstitutionality of the SIR or the question ill-intentioned Logical Discrepancy or the SC;s own promise of looking into specific issues where the SIR deletions is more than the margin of victory, which has happened in at least 83 constituencies all favouring BJP!

Behind all this lies not a commitment to communal harmony, but rather “soft Hindutva” — the fear that taking a stand for truth and justice may invite accusations of being anti-Hindu and result in losing Hindu votes.

Thus, the Congress government is not defeating the BJP. Instead, by continuing the BJP’s policies, it is helping the BJP to further its agenda. The Congress government is implementing BJP-style policies to such an extent that people may begin to wonder whether they elected Congress or BJP to power.

Social Justice or Injustice?

The deliberate delay in implementing the internal reservation policy, along with the manner of its implementation that allegedly harms the most oppressed communities, both serve as evidence that the Siddaramaiah government is continuing social injustice in much the same way as the BJP.

In particular, nomadic communities categorized as extremely backward were grouped within “Group C” alongside socially advanced touchable castes among Scheduled Castes, and allocated only 4.5% reservation, resulting in severe injustice. Although the law passed with BJP support during the Belagavi session created an additional internal reservation within Group C — reserving the fifth of the first five positions for nomadic castes — it also provided that if eligible candidates from nomadic communities were unavailable, those positions could be filled by touchable Scheduled Castes, thereby creating yet another layer of injustice.

Additionally, in the response prepared for submission to the court, the government reportedly argued that nomadic communities are socially as advanced as Lambani-Bhovi groups and therefore were included in Group C — a position described here as deeply unjust.

Beyond this, there continues to be neglect regarding implementing the much-needed internal reservation within the ST community and increasing the existing 17% reservation for Dalits to 24% along with constitutional protection for the same.

Although the Congress manifesto promised that resources for the guarantee schemes would be generated through development and administrative efficiency, none of this was done. Instead, every year ₹12,000–14,000 crore is being diverted from the SCSP-TSP fund — which was meant to reduce welfare and development disparities affecting SC and ST communities and the wider society — thereby worsening social injustice.

The Kantharaj Commission report, which was specifically constituted to ensure social justice, was withdrawn under pressure from socially dominant groups. Likewise, the newly constituted Nayak report has allegedly been prevented from being published.

All this, according to the writer, proves that the Congress government too is continuing the BJP’s deceptive policies regarding social justice.

Congress Government – BJP Bulldozer?

The demolition of the huts of the economically marginalised in both Kogilu and Thanisandra was carried out by the Congress government’s bulldozer. Across the country, it is BJP bulldozers that are rendering lakhs of poor people homeless, but in Karnataka the Congress has taken up that contract. Is there then really any difference between the BJP and Congress in this regard?

The bulldozer has become a symbol of the oppressive and anti-poor development model followed in this country. BJP governments use bulldozers treating people as though they are not even citizens, then classify the displaced as Hindu or Muslim to carry out communal politics. That is social injustice — uncivilised and inhuman.

However, even the Siddaramaiah government, which makes claims commitment to social justice, is running bulldozers overnight and pushing poor slum dwellers onto the streets. Street vendors are displaced to make way for luxury malls. Though slums lack drinking water, tunnel roads costing ₹24,000 crore are being built for car users. Through the Greater Bengaluru Authority, a city for the privileged is being created. For this, thousands of acres of farmers’ land in Devanahalli, Anekal, and Bidadi are sought to be forcibly acquired.

Even though lands acquired from farmers in Devanahalli were reportedly returned after protests, several deceptive and corporate-friendly conditions were imposed so that farmers would not remain complete owners of their land.

What difference exists between Modi’s corporate-driven “Developed India,” which legalizes encroachments by builders occupying over 25,000 acres in Bengaluru while criminalizing the poor living in tin sheds and huts, and Siddaramaiah’s “Greater Bengaluru” project for builders — apart from chanting the mantra of social justice?

Likewise, just as the BJP-led central government uses the NEP bulldozer to close down the government schools serving poor children in the remote villages in the name of ensuring excellence in few centres,  the Congress government in Karnataka is using the KPS (Karnataka Public Schools) as a  bulldozer to close down all government primary schools in the vicinity of 5-6 kms to act as feeder to the KPS schools.

If depriving children in remote villages of even basic literacy through the BJP’s NEP is injustice, does the same act become justice when the Congress government follows the same policy in the name of KPS?

A Socialist Land Grab?

On one hand, the Congress government has continued the BJP’s practice of forcibly acquiring fertile agricultural land from farmers for corporate interests. On the other hand, like the BJP, it has remained deaf for over a decade to the demands of landless and homeless people in this state.

Yesterday in Tumakuru, ministers proudly spoke about providing e-Pauti and land survey (darakhastu podi) records to farmers across the state. It is true that those who already possess at least some documentation may benefit from this scheme. But the Siddaramaiah government has rejected 3.4 million applications submitted by poor peasants and agricultural workers — many of whom have survived through bonded labour and tenant farming since Independence — seeking legal rights over the lands they cultivate and sites to build homes.

Despite the Karnataka government owning 1.11 crore acres of land, it refuses the demand to enact a law that would guarantee even one acre of land to landless farmers. Additionally, the Congress government has still not repealed the corporate-friendly APMC Amendment Act introduced by the BJP government.

How, then, is all this any different from the BJP’s position of “land to the wealthy instead of land to the tiller”?

Dissent Mukt Karnataka?

There is little doubt that the Modi government at the Centre seeks not merely a Congress-free India, but an opposition-free India by suppressing dissent. Even though the BJP currently rules at the Centre, it uses UAPA laws originally introduced during the UPA regime to imprison or eliminate dissenters.

But how is the Siddaramaiah-led Congress government in Karnataka fundamentally different?

While the Congress government grants permission to Sangh Parivar groups to conduct hate speeches and marches in every neighbourhood, lane, and street of Bengaluru, it tells protesting farmers in Devanahalli — because the area falls under the Bengaluru Commissionerate — that they cannot protest there and must instead demonstrate only at Freedom Park in Bengaluru, 40 kilometers away.

Even though the Congress party itself has taken a stand against Israel’s attacks on Palestine, the government denies permission even for peaceful protests demanding “No War, We Want Peace.”

During the Naxal surrender process, the Siddaramaiah government assured surrendered Naxals and the civil society groups mediating the process that it was committed to granting them immediate bail and livelihood support, claiming that the Congress government was different from the BJP. But even after one and a half years following this surrender, not only has bail not been granted, even a single case trial has not begun, and all of them continue to languish in prison.

Meanwhile, it is reported that in Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, BJP governments have reportedly not continued cases against surrendered Naxals. Most of those who surrendered there have either been released without charges or are out on bail.

Similarly, the Congress government has not conducted the necessary investigation into the alleged inhuman killing of unarmed Naxal leader Vikram Gowda, nor punished those responsible. In effect, the Karnataka Congress government too is assisting the BJP’s project of creating a “Naxal-free India.” Furthermore, it is cooperating in body, speech, and spirit with the BJP’s dream of turning India into an authoritarian nation free of dissent.

This does not mean that the BJP is better than the Congress. Certainly not.

The BJP is the Nations’ Menace.
The Congress is Indians’ disappointment.

The BJP is the problem.
The Congress has so far not been the solution but a continuation of the problem.

Even when Siddaramaiah is Chief Minister,
the Congress government softly continues the BJP’s capitalist and Brahminical policies.

The BJP implements the same policies more aggressively.

So, in summary:

Congress and BJP are not One and the same.
But…
the difference is too narrow to pin people’s hopes on.

Therefore, merely changing parties in power will not improve people’s lives.

The illusion that fascism can be defeated through the Congress will not succeed.

At the very least, the past three years of the Siddaramaiah government should dispel that illusion.

To realise the constitutional ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the country needs another freedom struggle.

Without that, there will be no escape from fascism.

Related:

Karnataka: Hindutva groups call for economic boycott of Muslim vendors at Siddheshwar Temple

In line with the approaching Karnataka polls, BJP MLA KS Eshwarappa gives anti-Muslim speech

Supreme Court takes action amid outrage following Karnataka Judge’s anti-Muslim and gender-insensitive comments in court

The post Three Years of the Congress Government appeared first on SabrangIndia.

That belief is fragile. It can endure for generations and yet weaken quietly, not through dramatic rupture but through gradual shifts in political culture. Institutions may survive, elections may continue, constitutions may remain unchanged, yet the moral foundations of citizenship can erode. The outward form of democracy remains while its inner ethic changes. Secularism is often the first casualty of that transformation, because it is the principle that prevents the majority from confusing its cultural identity with the nation itself.

Secularism is often misunderstood as hostility to religion. In many plural societies, it has meant something more demanding: not the exclusion of religion from public life, but the refusal of the state to privilege one faith as the defining essence of the nation. Religious traditions may shape festivals, language, and collective memory. Public life may remain visibly religious. Yet the political order must preserve equal standing among communities. The state may engage with religions, but it cannot derive its legitimacy from any one of them.

The secular state did not emerge solely from abstract philosophy. It was born from historical exhaustion. Across Europe, centuries of confessional conflict taught societies that political order could not survive if sovereignty belonged to a single religious truth. The memory of the Thirty Years’ War, sectarian massacres, and religious empire produced a practical conviction: citizenship had to supersede creed. Secularism was therefore not conceived as irreligion, but as a political settlement after the discovery that sacred certainty could destroy civil peace.

In India, this insight emerged through a different tragedy. The Partition of India revealed that when religion became the basis of statehood, centuries of coexistence could collapse into mass displacement and violence. The republic that followed chose a radically different path. It refused to define the nation through a single faith despite the overwhelming numerical presence of one religious majority. Citizenship, not belief, became the formal basis of belonging.

That choice was historically remarkable. India was not a homogeneous nation-state but a civilizational mosaic of languages, castes, sects, tribes, and regions. The republic’s founders wagered that diversity could endure not by assimilation but by constitutional equality. Secularism in India, therefore, differed from the Western model of strict separation between church and state. Religion remained visible in public life, and the state often engaged with religious institutions. The principle was not exclusion but equal dignity among communities within a common civic order.

A Shared Inheritance

Indian Muslims are not a peripheral chapter in the story of India; they are among its principal authors. Across centuries, they have helped shape the country’s civilizational fabric through architecture, language, music, governance, scholarship, and commerce. The plural culture that defines much of the subcontinent emerged through sustained exchange among communities, and Muslims were central to that process. To narrate India without this inheritance is to tell only part of its story.

In independent India, this legacy evolved into nation-building. In science and public life, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam embodied the aspirations of a modern republic, shaping India’s missile and space programmes while inspiring generations. In education, Abul Kalam Azad laid the foundations of modern higher learning, while Zakir Husain deepened that vision through scholarship and public service. Leaders such as Rafi Ahmed Kidwai strengthened the early administrative and political architecture of the republic.

In business and industry, Azim Premji transformed Wipro into a global enterprise while redefining corporate philanthropy through education. Yusuf Hamied expanded access to affordable medicine through Cipla, making life-saving drugs widely available and reshaping public health equity.

The republic’s constitutional and institutional foundations also bear this imprint. M. Hidayatullah upheld constitutional continuity during uncertain times, while jurists such as A. M. Ahmadi and M. C. Chagla strengthened the judiciary and the republic’s legal philosophy. Fathima Beevi broke historic barriers as the first woman to serve as a Supreme Court judge. In diplomacy and public life, Asaf Ali represented India in its formative years, while Idris Hasan Latif rose to the highest ranks of national defence.

The symbolic and political foundations of the nation also reflect this shared authorship. Surayya Tyabji contributed to the design of India’s national flag, while her husband, Badaruddin Tyabji, belonged to a distinguished constitutional tradition. The freedom movement was shaped by powerful voices such as Mohammad Ali Jauhar and Shaukat Ali, whose activism was deeply shaped by their mother, Abadi Bano Begum—one of the earliest and most forceful women’s voices of anti-colonial resistance. Alongside them, the reformist and aristocratic legacy associated with the Begum of Awadh represents another important strand of India’s layered political history.

Regional Muslim polities also contributed significantly to institutional and social development. The Nizam of Hyderabad presided over one of the most influential princely states. At the same time, the Begums of Bhopal created an enduring legacy of education, reform, and public welfare that shaped modern institutional culture.

In arts and culture, A. R. Rahman carried Indian music to global audiences, while Bismillah Khan elevated the shehnai into a classical concert instrument. Mohammed Rafi defined the emotional grammar of Hindi film music across generations. In cinema, Dilip Kumar redefined screen acting, while Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, and Salman Khan became defining figures of modern popular culture. Shabana Azmi, Waheeda Rehman, Naseeruddin Shah, and M. F. Husain further enriched India’s artistic imagination.

In literature and journalism, Qurratulain Hyder explored memory and migration; Khwaja Ahmad Abbas bridged journalism and cinema; M. J. Akbar shaped political commentary; while Rahi Masoom Raza, Ali Sardar Jafri, Kaifi Azmi, and Javed Akhtar expanded the moral and literary imagination of modern India.

Sport reflects the same shared legacy. Mansoor Ali Khan Pataudi, Mohammad Azharuddin, Zaheer Khan, Mohammed Kaif, and Syed Mushtaq Ali shaped Indian cricket across generations. In hockey, Aslam Sher Khan, Mohammad Shahid, and Zafar Iqbal strengthened India’s global standing. Sania Mirza and Syed Modi extended that excellence into international sport.

The significance of these contributions lies not in isolated achievement but in their cumulative pattern—stretching across institutions, disciplines, and generations. Taken together, they show how Indian Muslims have helped build the republic’s scientific capacity, strengthen its democratic institutions, and enrich its cultural and intellectual life. Their presence is not episodic but structural, running through the very architecture of modern India.

The Slow Erosion of Equality

The crisis begins when the majority community ceases to see itself as one part of the nation and comes to regard itself as the nation’s authentic owner. At that point, the distinction between citizenship and cultural inheritance collapses. The nation is no longer understood as a legal community of equals but as the historical possession of one tradition. Minorities retain formal rights, yet their belonging becomes conditional. They are tolerated as residents rather than recognised as equal co-authors of the republic.

This process rarely announces itself as a rejection of democracy. It often advances through democratic means. Elections provide legitimacy. Popular majorities empower governments that claim to restore the historical rights of the majority community. Electoral success is then invoked as proof that the state should reflect the majority’s civilisational identity. Political disagreement becomes cultural betrayal. Opposition is framed not as dissent from government but as disloyalty to the nation itself.

The challenge in India lies less in formal dismantling than in a shift of national self-understanding. Public ceremonies, educational narratives, historical memory, and political rhetoric increasingly align the state with one civilisational story. The constitutional framework remains, yet its symbolic centre changes. A republic founded on equal citizenship risks becoming culturally graded.

Democratic decline seldom begins with the destruction of institutions; it begins with their moral repurposing. Courts may continue to function, universities may continue to teach, and elections may continue to be held. Yet the ethos that animates them shifts. Institutions begin to internalise the assumptions of majoritarian power. Bureaucracies enforce selectively. Public media amplify one narrative. Silence becomes political, because institutions that should resist instead learn to accommodate.

This transformation is not only legal but atmospheric. A society need not revoke rights to alter belonging. It can create insecurity through rhetoric, targeted policing, selective prosecution, and vigilante enforcement. Citizens remain equal before the law on paper, yet feel perpetually scrutinised. Their citizenship remains legal, but no longer emotionally secure. Fear becomes ambient, shaping how people move, speak, worship, and participate.

Memory, Myth, and Majoritarian Power

Such transformations affect institutions beyond minority rights. Universities, media, courts, and civil society depend on the principle that criticism is compatible with citizenship. When the majority’s identity fuses with the nation, dissent becomes suspect. Journalists are portrayed as enemies, scholars as subversive, activists as foreign agents. Institutions survive but lose independence because they are measured against loyalty to the majority’s historical self-image.

A central mechanism of this shift is the rewriting of memory. The majority is encouraged to see itself as historically wronged even while politically dominant. Ancient invasions, medieval empires, colonial humiliation, and modern political contests are woven into one narrative of civilisational injury. Historical complexity gives way to moral drama. The majority becomes the eternal victim whose dominance appears as delayed justice.

This politics of grievance is powerful because it converts dominance into victimhood. Once the majority believes itself threatened, measures that weaken minorities appear defensive. Restriction becomes protection. Exclusion becomes restoration. Citizens are invited to feel simultaneously powerful and aggrieved—heirs to greatness and victims of history.

Majoritarian politics thrives on mythic time. It collapses centuries into a single emotional present. Old conquests become current injuries. Long-dead rulers become contemporary enemies. Memory is mobilised not to understand the past but to authorise the present. In such narratives, reconciliation appears as surrender and pluralism as weakness.

Economic and technological changes intensify this dynamic. Urbanisation dissolves traditional forms of belonging. Economic inequality produces resentment. Social media accelerates the spread of rumours and symbolic conflicts. Political movements fuse cultural nationalism with development, welfare, and strong leadership. Citizens are offered not only economic aspiration but a story of civilisational recovery. The nation becomes an emotional project, and secular restraint begins to appear rootless or unpatriotic.

India and the Global Future of Plural Democracy

What makes secular decline especially dangerous is normalisation. It proceeds through repetition. What once provoked outrage gradually becomes ordinary. Inflammatory speech, selective policing, communal targeting, and symbolic exclusion cease to shock. Citizens adapt. Institutions accommodate the acceptable range of shifts. Democracy may preserve elections while losing the plural ethos that confers moral legitimacy on elections.

This crisis extends far beyond India. Across Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and parts of Africa, majoritarian identities increasingly seek political expression as cultural entitlement. Immigration, demographic change, and economic anxiety create fertile ground for narratives of belonging and exclusion. The stranger becomes a political symbol. Citizenship becomes conditional on cultural conformity.

The global significance of India lies in scale and example. It is the world’s largest democracy and among its most diverse societies. If such a polity can sustain equal citizenship across profound civilizational differences, it strengthens the case for plural democracy everywhere. If it yields to cultural majoritarianism, it reinforces a darker proposition: that deep diversity ultimately requires one dominant identity to govern all others.

This pattern can be seen elsewhere. In Hungary, Turkey, Israel, and the United States, democratic legitimacy has increasingly been invoked to narrow constitutional pluralism. The challenge is no longer whether people can vote. It is whether majorities, after winning, can remain faithful to equality.

Secularism, therefore, matters not as a technical doctrine but as an ethical discipline. It asks the majority to accept restraint. It demands that numerical power not become moral entitlement. It insists that the stranger, the minority, and the dissenter are not outsiders but co-owners of the nation. That discipline is difficult because majoritarian politics offers emotional rewards: belonging, grievance, pride, and historical redemption.

The deeper crisis is moral. Secular democracy depends on a simple but demanding idea: that people can share a political future without sharing a single faith. It asks citizens to value equal rights above inherited hierarchy. It requires the state to treat difference not as a threat but as a condition of freedom.

A secular republic is not secured by courts alone, nor by constitutions, nor by ceremonial declarations of tolerance. It survives only when citizens accept a discipline more difficult than victory: the discipline of sharing power with those they did not choose, do not resemble, and may not fully understand.

When that ethic erodes, democracy may continue procedurally, but its soul changes. Citizenship survives in law but weakens in experience. Belonging becomes graded. The republic becomes a homeland for some and a conditional residence for others.

The siege of secularism is therefore not merely the rise of religious politics. Religion has always shaped public life. The deeper transformation occurs when the state ceases to mediate among communities and begins to embody one community’s historical self-image. At that point, the republic no longer belongs equally to its citizens. It becomes the inheritance of the majority, while others inhabit it by permission.

That is why the future of secularism remains a central question of the twenty-first century. It determines whether democracy can truly sustain equality amid big differences, or whether every plural society eventually yields to the oldest political instinct: that the majority alone owns the nation, and the rest belong only by grace.

…

Moin Qazi is an Indian author and development leader who advanced dignity-centred, community-led change. A pioneer of microfinance and grassroots institutions, he fused ethics with social innovation. With deep interdisciplinary scholarship, he bridged policy, justice, and lived realities. His legacy affirms ethical leadership and people’s agency as drivers of India’s progress…

Courtesy: The New Age Islam

The post The Faultlines In Secularism appeared first on SabrangIndia.

From the moment C. Joseph Vijay assumed power in Tamil Nadu, a well-oiled machinery of disinformation has been in overdrive. What distinguishes this particular misinformation wave from routine political spin is its structural character— it is not merely spontaneous enthusiasm from supporters, but an organised, multi-layered ecosystem comprising TVK-aligned influencer pages, meme networks, WhatsApp forwards, and, most alarmingly, mainstream commercial media houses that appear to have abdicated their basic editorial responsibility.

This is not simply a first-time entrant indulging in political cheerleading. This is a calculated attempt and systematic erasure of the DMK government’s policy legacy and its reattribution to a new administration that has, in many cases, not issued a single order, notification, or Government Order to justify the credit it is claiming. Interestingly, when the Modi 1.0 government came to power, a similar tool-kit was used by the Union government to appropriate previous government schemes through re-naming!

Case 1: The Phantom Government Order — Chairs in Revenue Offices

On May 16, 2026, a story swept across Tamil Nadu’s commercial media landscape: the Vijay-led TVK government had, in an act of compassionate governance, directed revenue department offices across the state to place chairs for citizens — so that the public would be made to sit before being attended to by officials. The story was framed as a landmark humanising reform, a signal of a “people’s government” in action.

TVK’s social media network amplified this with characteristic efficiency. Influencer pages shared it. Meme pages celebrated it. The news channels carried it.

There was one problem. The Government Order (GO) cited carried a date of May 15, 2025 — a full year before the TVK government came to power. It was a GO passed by the MK Stalin-led DMK government.

No correction was issued by most outlets. No clarification trended. The narrative had already done its work — lodging itself in public memory as a Vijay government initiative. The commercial media, which holds fact-checking as its foundational professional obligation, did not merely fail in that duty — it actively participated in the misattribution. Whether by editorial negligence or deliberate complicity, the outcome is the same: the public was deceived.

This is a textbook case of policy laundering — taking a prior government’s documented action, stripping it of its original context and authorship, and presenting it as fresh governance by a new regime.

Case 2: The TNPSC/SSC/IBPS Coaching Claim — Erasing the Naan Mudhalvan Legacy

The second case follows an identical pattern, and is arguably more egregious given the scale of the scheme being misappropriated.

Within days of the new government’s formation, news began circulating — again across both commercial channels and TVK’s social media architecture — that CM C. Joseph Vijay had directed the government to provide free coaching and training for competitive examinations including TNPSC, SSC, IBPS, and related government job entrance tests. The story was framed as a bold initiative to support Tamil Nadu’s youth in their aspirations for public sector employment.

The truth, however, is not merely different — it is extensively documented.

Naan Mudhalvan, launched under former Chief Minister MK Stalin, is one of the most significant skilling and career development schemes in Tamil Nadu’s recent history. Under this flagship programme, students have been receiving structured coaching for UPSC Civil Services, TNPSC, SSC, IBPS, and other competitive examinations for over three years. The results are not anecdotal — students trained under the Naan Mudhalvan Scheme have successfully cleared Civil Services examinations, with selections to the IAS, IPS, and allied services standing as verifiable testimony to the programme’s reach and effectiveness.

Naan Mudhalvan, a flagship skill development and competitive examination coaching scheme, was launched by Chief Minister M.K. Stalin on March 1, 2022, implemented jointly by the Department of School Education and the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation (TNSDC), with the goal of skilling 10 lakh students annually by bridging the gap between academic learning and industry requirements. The scheme is not a vague or symbolic initiative — it has a dedicated institutional vertical for civil services aspirants. Under the Naan Mudhalvan Competitive Exams Vertical, 1,000 candidates are shortlisted every year through a screening test, receiving ₹7,500 per month for 10 months, along with access to full-time residential coaching at the All India Civil Services Coaching Center in Chennai and the Anna Centenary Civil Services Coaching Academies in Coimbatore and Madurai. The scheme also supports candidates beyond the preliminary stage: those who clear the UPSC Mains receive a financial assistance of ₹25,000, and those who advance to the Interview stage receive ₹50,000.

The results of this sustained, three-year institutional investment are not anecdotal. They are on public record. In the UPSC Civil Services Examination 2024, three Tamil Nadu candidates figured in the national top 50 ranks — B. Sivachandran at AIR 23, S. Subash Karthik at AIR 29, and R. Monica at AIR 39 — all three of whom were trained under the Naan Mudhalvan Competitive Exams Vertical. In total, 50 aspirants cleared the UPSC that year through the scheme, of whom 18 underwent full-time residential coaching and two cleared the examination in Tamil medium. Monica, who secured AIR 39, spoke directly about the scheme’s role in her success: “I first got trained in the Naan Mudhalvan scheme. They gave me an incentive, which was very useful. They also promised me financial assistance for attending the interview.” Sivachandran, who became Tamil Nadu’s state topper, was one of 19 candidates from the scheme to clear UPSC CSE 2024, with his success under the initiative making him a role model for future aspirants in the state. As per a report in DT Next.

The Naan Mudhalvan scheme, managed by the Tamil Nadu Skill Development Corporation under IAS officer Innocent Divya, has so far impacted over 28 lakh students across the state. The scheme’s official portal — naanmudhalvan.tn.gov.in — carries all selection lists, scholarship notifications, and programme documentation publicly, with official PDFs dated and verifiable going back to 2023. As per a report in OneIndia.

None of this infrastructure, institutional memory, financial commitment, or track record was created after May 2026. It belongs, in its entirety, to the MK Stalin government’s tenure. To attribute it to a new administration that has yet to issue a single Government Order or policy notification on the matter is not a compliment to the new government — it is a theft of credit from the old one, executed in broad daylight, with the media as a willing accomplice.

CM C. Joseph Vijay has issued no Government Order, no Executive Directive, no administrative notification, and no new policy framework for any such initiative. The infrastructure, the funding, the institutional arrangements, and the track record all belong to the DMK government’s tenure.

Yet the story was spread — relentlessly, as the pattern demands — without a single outlet pausing to ask: Where is the GO? What is the budget allocation? Which new institutions have been created? What is the implementation timeline?

These are not difficult questions. They are the minimum threshold of journalism. Their absence reveals something important about the current media environment in Tamil Nadu.

Case 3: The Bus Driver Mobile Ban — 2022 Law, 2026 Headlines

On May 19, 2026, established commercial media outlets ran a breaking news graphic announcing that the Tamil Nadu government had ordered a ban on government bus drivers using mobile phones while on duty. Drivers keeping phones in their uniform pockets was prohibited. Violations would attract strict disciplinary action. It was presented as a fresh government directive.

The order is real. The government that passed it is not the current one.

This is a law that came into force in February 2022 — under Chief Minister MK Stalin’s government. Asianet News Tamil reported it in full on 7 February 2022, with identical content: a ban on government bus drivers using mobile phones while on duty, strict action for violations, issued by the Transport Department. The order is over four years old.

Established media outlets broadcast it on 19 May 2026 as current news — without a date check, without source verification, without the basic editorial step of asking whether this directive already existed. Whether this was careless journalism or deliberate reattribution is a question these outlets owe their audiences an answer to. Either way, the effect is the same: a four-year-old Stalin-era public safety order is laundered into the TVK government’s early governance record.

This is not an isolated lapse. It is the third documented instance — within the first two weeks of the TVK government — of existing policy being stripped of its origin and recycled as new. The chairs in revenue offices. The Naan Mudhalvan coaching scheme. And now, a bus driver mobile ban from 2022.

When media outlets with state-wide reach operate this way, are they making errors or making choices?

A Note on Responsible Journalism: The Hindu’s Intervention

When most regional commercial channels were either actively spreading or uncritically amplifying this misinformation flood, The Hindu chose a different path. Their video analysis titled “Vijay, TVK and the rise of fake political narratives | Focus Tamil Nadu” — presented by D. Suresh Kumar, Deputy Resident Editor, Tamil Nadu — directly examined the surge of viral claims, AI-generated images, recycled government schemes, and fake “historic firsts” being attributed to the new administration. Within 19 hours it had crossed 55,000 views and 3,745 likes — proof that a substantial audience in Tamil Nadu is actively hungry for honest journalism. They simply cannot find it when the overwhelming weight of commercial media is pointed in the opposite direction. Responsible journalism in this environment is a choice. The outlets that did not make that choice made a different one.

The PhD MLAs Claim

A statistic went viral claiming that the TVK legislature party includes 6 PhD holders and numerous engineers — presented as proof of an exceptionally educated, meritocratic legislature. The claim was shared widely and celebrated across TVK’s online network.

The nomination affidavit data filed with the Election Commission tells a completely different story. Of TVK’s 108 total winners, these are the official figures from their own affidavits:

In other words, 33% – 35% of TVK’s elected MLAs — more than one in three — have HSC or below as their educational qualification. This is not a criticism of those MLAs. Educational qualification is not the sole measure of a legislator’s worth, and many capable public representatives have risen from humble educational backgrounds. The criticism here is directed entirely at the TVK online network that fabricated a flattering but false picture — inflating PhD holders six-fold, and claiming 126 MLAs when the actual number is 108.

The affidavits are public documents. The data is freely available. The viral claim required only a basic check to disprove. Nobody in the TVK ecosystem bothered — or wanted — to make that check.

SC Candidates in General Constituencies

It was widely claimed that TVK fielded as many as 28 SC candidates in general constituencies — presented as a historic gesture of social justice. Election Commission data tells a different story. Only one SC candidate was fielded in a general constituency — in Shankarapuram — and that candidate did not win. The gap between 28 and 1 is not a rounding error. It is a fabrication.

Tamil Nadu’s “First Woman Minister”

Among the most brazenly false claims circulating is that the Vijay government has given Tamil Nadu its first woman minister. Tamil Nadu has had two women Chief Ministers — J. Jayalalithaa and Janaki Ramachandran. Women ministers have served in Tamil Nadu’s cabinet since before Independence — including Rukmani Lakshmipathi and Jothi Venkatachalam. Sathiyavani Muthu aka Annai Sathiyavani Muthu have been in the cabinets of Arignar Anna and Kalaignar Karunanidhi. Even in the 16th LA led by MK Stalin, had Geetha Jeevan, Kayalvizhi Selvaraj in the cabinet. To claim a “first” here is not ignorance. It is an erasure of women who actually broke those barriers, decades before the TVK government existed.

SC Ministers and the “First” Portfolio Claim

It has been claimed that for the first time, a key portfolio like Education has been assigned to a Dalit Minister under Vijay’s government. This erases an entire history. Kakkan held the Home Ministry under Karmaveer Kamaraj’s cabinet. Parithi Ilamvazhuthi served as Deputy Speaker in Kalignar Karuanidhi’s regime. Dhanabal served as Speaker in J Jayalalitha’s regime. Kovi Chezhian, Madhivendhan held Higher Education and Forest & Tourism in MK Stalin’s government. Dalit leaders have held some of Tamil Nadu’s most consequential portfolios across multiple governments. Presenting this as a TVK first is not a celebration of Dalit representation — it is a falsification of the very history that Dalit political leaders fought to create.

The Chief Minister’s Grievance Portal — 25 Years Old

The CM’s helpline and online grievance portal has been presented as a Vijay government innovation. In reality, the Chief Minister’s Special Cell portal has been operational for over 25 years — serving citizens through DMK, AIADMK, and DMK governments alike. It predates TVK as a political organisation.

The Panic Button in Buses

The installation of panic buttons in buses for women’s safety has been projected as the fulfilment of a Vijay election promise — a new initiative, a new protection. Chennai’s Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) buses already have this facility operational. It was not invented by this government. It was inherited by it.

Still there are many more cases of such misinformation flooding, these are just examples.

The Structural Problem: When Media Becomes a Propaganda Relay

What we are witnessing is not a series of isolated errors. It is the normalisation of a post-verification media culture — one in which the virality of a claim, and its alignment with a dominant political mood, substitutes for the basic act of checking.

Several dynamics are at work here:

The Influencer-to-Mainstream Pipeline: Stories originate or are seeded — often without sourcing, often without documents — published by commercial media outlets looking for content that will generate engagement. By the time a GO is checked (if it ever is), the story has already circulated widely.

The Asymmetry of Correction: Misinformation spreads at the speed of sharing. Corrections, when they come, travel far slower and reach far fewer people. Media organisations that run false stories without correction are effectively choosing which version of reality reaches the public.

The Erasure of the DMK Record: Taken together, these stories form a coherent — if dishonest — narrative project: the systematic de-legitimisation of MK Stalin’s governance legacy and its absorption into the political identity of his successor. This is not incidental. Tamil Nadu has real, substantive policy achievements from the DMK years — in health, education, skilling, and social welfare — that deserve accurate attribution, both as a matter of historical record and democratic accountability.

A Note on Methodology

The cases documented here are not drawn from partisan counter-claims. They are verifiable through publicly available Government Orders on the Tamil Nadu government’s official portal, scheme documentation for Naan Mudhalvan, and the dates on the documents that the media itself published without reading carefully enough to notice the year.

Fact-checking in this context requires nothing more than reading the date on a document before broadcasting its contents. That this basic step was skipped — repeatedly, across multiple outlets — tells us everything we need to know about the current state of accountability journalism in Tamil Nadu.

Conclusion: The Chaos

The cases documented in this article are not exhaustive. They are representative. In the first two weeks of the TVK government alone, the recycled orders, misattributed schemes, unverified claims, and prematurely declared victories flooding Tamil Nadu’s media and social media landscape has been relentless. For every case fact-checked here, dozens more circulated unchallenged. So the question must be asked: is this a pattern? And if it is a pattern, who benefits from it?

In the digital era, misinformation is no longer merely a by-product of poor journalism. When a four-year-old GO becomes today’s headline, when a circular becomes a solved problem, when an announcement becomes a delivered promise — is that carelessness? Or is it architecture? When the same type of misattribution repeats itself across multiple issues, across multiple platforms, within the same two-week window, can we still call it coincidence?

The chaos that this kind of information flooding creates is worth examining carefully. When citizens cannot reliably distinguish what is real from what is recycled, what is new from what is four years old, what is promised from what is delivered — what happens to their ability to hold a government accountable? If the information environment is engineered to confuse rather than clarify, is democratic accountability even possible? Can you demand delivery on a promise if you have already been told, by a thousand voices simultaneously, that it has been delivered?

And here is the question that must be asked without flinching: have we not seen this playbook before? The systematic flooding of the information space with noise, the weaponisation of digital networks to manufacture consent, the deliberate blurring of the real and the fabricated — is this not precisely the strategy that the RSS-BJP machinery has deployed at the national level? Is this not how a government presiding over real failures continues to project an image of historic achievement? Is this not how legitimate criticism gets drowned, how democratic accountability gets quietly suffocated while the forms of democracy are preserved?

If the answer is yes — and the evidence increasingly points that way — then the next question is perhaps the most uncomfortable of all. A party that carries the intellectual and moral inheritance of Periyar and Ambedkar: is this the tradition it intends to honour? Periyar’s foundational demand was simple — think for yourself. Question authority. Refuse to be deceived. Ambedkar’s constitutional vision rested entirely on an informed, critically conscious citizenry as the only real safeguard of democracy. A political culture that actively works to prevent people from thinking clearly — is that carrying their legacy forward? Or is it dismantling it from within?

Democracy requires an informed public. When the distance between citizens and truth is deliberately widened, when people are kept away from what their government has actually done and not done — how can we expect any government to remain ideologically moral and accountable? And if we cannot expect accountability, what exactly are we left with?

The people of Tamil Nadu — and the democratic forces that wish to raise real issues, real failures, real demands — deserve an information environment in which truth has room to stand. The question is: who is responsible for ensuring that it does? And are they doing their job?

(The author is an independent Tamil journalist with YouTube channels, Peralai, AranSei)

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

Related:

Delimitation: A false solution driven by centralised power

PM Narendra Modi’s frequent visits to Tamil Nadu, his “love” for Tamil culture exposed

The post Flood of Fake Narratives & Misinformation: How TVK’s propaganda machine is attempting a re-write of TN’s governance history appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In this wider context, therefore, this attempt, “India Economic & Social Justice Report 2025”, authored by none less than Professor K S Chalam, former Vice Chancellor, Dravida University, Andhra Pradesh and former Member, Union Public Service Commission, Chairman, Institute for Economic and Social Justice, Vishakhapatnam, is both significant and path-breaking. This report analyses the historical, constitutional, and socio-economic landscape of justice in India, with a specific focus on marginalised communities. This report is first of its kind to measure and indicate where both the Union and State governments stand in providing constitutional guarantees of Justice –both economic and social— equally and to all citizens of the country. Inspired by Human Development Index (HDI) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), this report has examined several indictors to determine the Economic and Social Justice Index.

Finally, it has fixed following three dimensions.

1: MPCE (monthly per capita expenditure) per family, among Scheduled Castes to signify economic Justice. (The MPCE for ST is not produced because, states the author, it reflects the same trend).

2: Atrocities committed on Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribe population published by NCRBI

3. Human rights violations as recorded by NHRC are considered for estimating the Index.

The report has followed a statistical method on the lines of UNDP’s HDI. The report presents data for two periods 2011 and 2023. It is surprising to find states that are economically proactive are socially regressive in protecting the SC and ST populations; as a result, the overall ranks of ESJI are getting depressed over a period of time for such states. The report provides data and information on castes, sub castes of SC, ST and OBC population by states with caste wise data on education, economic status, reservations etc given in the Appendix. This analytical appraisal under pioneering concepts reviewing 75 years of the implementation of the Constitution is both profoundly innovative and also, bold.

The text begins with highlighting the concept of “Justice” in the Indian Constitution noting that it was heavily influenced by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who served as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee.  The report cited how Ambedkar argued in the Constituent Assembly that social and economic justice could only be achieved through a socialistic economy, including the nationalisation of land and industry. The Preamble places “Justice—social, economic, and political” as its first element, signalling its role as the ultimate goal of the Republic.  The report emphasises that democracy in India is a “top dressing” on an undemocratic soil, requiring the cultivation of constitutional morality to overcome historical cultures of inequality as its back drop.

The report contrasts Western theories of justice with the Indian social reality of the caste system.  It discusses John Rawls’s “Justice as Fairness” and Amartya Sen’s critique, which utilises the Indian concepts of niti (organizational propriety) and nyaya (realized justice). The text argues that Western libertarian and liberal theories often fail to account for the “caste mode of production” and the “Composite Index of Discrimination” (CID) inherent in Indian society. To assess the achievements and limitations of the Constitution during the last 75 years of its operation, the report identified the instruments and institutions of justice with which they can be interrogated the transactions both in the legislature and in the judiciary. Given the limitations of the scope of the study, it broadly discusses the instruments of justice as legal documents, including Acts, Rights, Rules, Property, Budget provisions, Atrocity rates, Gini Co-efficients etc.

The institutions of Justice in India can be identified as the judiciary, civil society, market, and state represented by the proceedings of Parliament/Assembly and not necessarily the private institutional structures, as the report is concerned here with public documents: the Constitution and Government Reports .The process of delivering or dispensing social justice through the passing of various Acts, such as the SC ST (prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, including the Protection of Civil Rights Act (prevention of Untouchability) 1955, 1976, and the judicial interpretations or interventions over a period of 70 years, is termed ‘a saga of social justice drama in India’. The report opines that the appointment of the SC, ST, Minorities and Backward Classes commissions indicate the government’s intentions and obligations as per the mandate of the Constitution. However, the imagined constitutional objectives of social justice seem to have not been realized due to litigation. The issue of social justice as part of the routine prevention of untouchability cases is not limited to the broad understanding of the term Dalit at the all-India level and goes beyond. The report brings out a significant fact that some of the untouchables of North India like in UP, Bihar etc are listed as Scheduled castes there and are recorded as Backward Classes (BCs) in South India. It is difficult; the report agrees to understand the social categories without looking at the evolution of each caste group in the social history of India. The report however, has not gone deep in to that dimension here.

The first part of the report examined various aspects of each dimension, namely the Economic and Social measures of justice. After identifying the dimensions, the data was normalised. In the second stage, the indicators for economic justice, consisting of monthly per capita expenditure are considered. The maximum and minimum values of each dimension were obtained from the internal dimensions of the factors considered. For example, the four categories of social groups SC, ST, OBC, and others for which data are made available have been tested as to which group was the most deprived in terms of their mean values, and the group with the least value was used for the calculation of the indicator (the data are given in the appendix Tables not in the text). As noted above, the economic dimension of MPCE adequately explains literacy; therefore, it is dropped at the stage of calculating the index. Finally, the ESJI is arrived at by combining the three dimensions and dividing it by 1 by 3 to arrive at the average and subtracting the value from 1 to arrive at the comprehensive index. The ESJI value indicates deprivation, with zero indicating absolute justice and one indicating Absolute Injustice or Deprivation.

The significant finding of the report is estimation of Wealth Stolen from Native Indians including ‘Untouchables and lower (depressed) castes’ who suffered the loss of lands cleared and cultivated by them. These were ultimately stolen by the traivarnikas[1] with the support of the state, argues the report Native Indians have remained landless and poor. Yet, they were the ones who were involved in the production process and created wealth. The report obtained data from the Madison study on the World GDP and GDP for India from the year 0 to 1973 as published by OECD. The data was used to arrive at the contribution of ‘lower (depressed) castes’ to India GDP and its proportion in the World economy. It is surprising to find that one fourth of the Wealth of the World was created by these ‘depressed’ castes of India amounting to around $ 25 billion in the year 0 and this figure could have reached $ 25 trillion cumulatively by the end of 1000 AD known as the age of conflicts and regional satraps. The Report notes (observes) that a vast portion of India’s historical wealth was created by depressed (lower) castes but appropriated by “non-productive groups”. The report has cited the Oxfam Report on India 2025 to show that the amount of colonial plunder of the British India is almost equal to the amount estimated to have been stolen by the upper castes from Dalits and Bahujans. This is a very important statistic that might, in future, lead to probing debates across activist groups.

A significant portion of the text is dedicated to the unequal distribution of assets and wealth.  Historically, Dalits (Scheduled Castes) were forbidden from owning land, gold, or weapons. As of 2015-16, the average land holdings of Scheduled Castes have dropped to 0.78 hectares, and roughly 58% of them remain landless at all India. The author of the report introduces the concept of “Caste-Based Cronyism,” arguing that modern economic liberalisation has primarily benefited the “Dvija” (upper-caste) groups through Multi-Caste Corporations (MCC), effectively recreating Varnashrama Dharma in the 21st century.

Social Injustice is measured in terms of the atrocities data for SC and ST obtained from the NCRB reports. It is noted that despite Article 17 of the Constitution, the report notes a sharp rise in atrocities. NCRB data shows atrocities on Dalits increased from 17,667 in 1990 to 53,886 in 2020, more than threefold raise.  In the context of women empowerment as part of Social Justice the text of the report recognizes the “Founding Mothers” of the Constitution (e.g., Sarojini Naidu, Amrit Kaur) who fought for women’s rights and the Hindu Code Bill against “blatant sexism” in the Assembly. The judiciary is critiqued for its “non-representative character,” with allegations that it remains influenced by a small number of elite families (as reported by Prof Mark Gallanter etc.), often leading to the acquittal of those accused of atrocities against Dalits implying that it did not result in reducing the intensity of injustice. Apart from the NCRB data, the report makes use of the NHRC data on human rights violations recorded by caste and state to arrive at the Economic and Social Justice Index.

The report proposes a new quantitative tool, the ESJI, inspired by the UNDP’s Human Development Index. This is calculated using the three dimensions: MPCE: Monthly Per Capita Expenditure of SC households, SC and ST Atrocities: Rates recorded by the NCRB per lakh of population and Human Rights Violations: Cases recorded by the NHRC.  The index aims to provide a measurable “deprivation index” where a value of zero indicates absolute justice and one indicates absolute injustice.  The report concludes that while the Constitution provides a mandate for justice, institutional structures—particularly the judiciary and the market have failed to gift justice to the victims and the same have largely helped to reinforce traditional caste-based inequalities rather than dismantling them.

The report notes that Justice is not quantifiable, but its impact can be envisaged in terms of the dimensions through which it affects the human condition. There are several measures developed and used to state the economic circumstances of the people like the PQLI (Physical Quality of Life) Index constructed by ODA in the 1970s. There are other indices that are now being used to quantify and analyse human quality of life, economic and social development indicators along with the aggregate concept of GDP, HDI etc. Against this background, the objective of this report as claimed by the author is to determine where Economic and Social Justice, as defined in the text, stands at different periods of time in India. The values are arranged such that the highest value indicates more deprivation and the lowest value nearing zero indicates perfect justice. The ESJI was 0.212 in 2011 and climbed to 0.305 in 2023. This means that economic and social justice deprivation has almost doubled over 12 years in India.

Economic and social justice are interdependent, complimentary and it is only a comprehensive approach that will tremendously help India grow. Such ‘growth’ is simply not possible unless the fruits of development reach the most marginalised sections. The report examines state wise indicators in terms of the above-mentioned dimensions and found the major former BIMARU states, Bihar, U.P, Rajasthan that are being touted now as improving in terms of economic indicators like per capita income or expenditure, are however consistent in getting higher ranks of deprivations except U.P that records minor change.

In 2011, the ESJI of Bihar was 0.141, M.P 0.184, Rajasthan 0.225 and U.P 0.510. The ESJI for 2023 for Bihar is 0.281, M.P 0.412, U.P 0.443 and Rajasthan 0.433. Uttar Pradesh (UP) that had an index of 0.443 in 2011 has the highest rank among the states now and has lowered its value to 0.470. Rajasthan with 0.480 has replaced U.P in the dubious position of highest rank in 2023.  These five states are listing as the better performing West Bengal 0.040, Assam 0.041, Chhattisgarh 0.074, Tamil Nadu 0.099, Punjab 0.101 and Maharashtra 0.107 in 2011. The same states remained as better though their ranks have altered. In 2023 Assam with 0.077, West Bengal 0.110, Chhattisgarh 0.112, Jharkhand 0.167 and Punjab 0.162 are found to be in a better position with lower ranks. Interestingly Jharkhand a predominantly tribal state joined the ranks of better performed states in 2023 and Maharashtra slid down one mark in its rank.

Among the South Indian states, the ranks of Andhra Pradesh in 2011 was 13 with 0.196, Kerala with 0.317 in 16^th rank were among the lowest five ranks. It is noted that in 2023 Telangana joined the ranks of lowest performing states with 0.380 at the 20th rank and Andhra Pradesh has improved its rank with a value of 0.285. The ranks and values of ESJI are given for all the states and Union Territories are given in the Appendix to the Report.

The author is very pragmatic in accepting the limitations of the study: restrictions in data and the inadequacies of reports of the government for an all-India study of this nature.   However, the estimated indices to quantify and explain how India is performing in terms of the Constitutional objectives of Economic and Social Justice is a first rigorous endeavour and commendable. With all these limitations, this is an excellent report with useful parameters and matrix on economic, social and other related issues. These tables and data are presented in the Appendix of Tables for reference to assist scholars and activists and lead them towards compiling more such indices.

The report is not a simple exercise of research and reflection. The exercise reveals the author’s commitment to the most marginalized peoples, Constitutional categories of persons that were promised justice, economic and social about 75 years ago and who have suffered betrayal for decades since. This section is also the major segment of our population.

The study is not just presentation of figures and statistical tables to substantiate the arguments, but the sheer writing —sentences with emotions carried through the paragraphs reflect the agony and despair the author experienced both as a scholar and perhaps as a silent worker. Frankly speaking, much has been talked about Human Development Reports but they fail to take into account Caste discrimination and other systematic deprivations that are both social as well as political.

Prof K.S.Chalam should be applauded for the effort of producing such a report despite acute hardships of access, especially because most of data relied upon is institutional data. It is also important that the publication of such/similar reports becomes an annual feature to assist and guide policy makers who frame policies for the widest sections of Indians.

We hope that NITI Ayog and other important institution both at the Centre as well as in the states will benefit from these reports and encourage each state to engage with such an approach to publish HDIs on social, economic and political justice. The Institute for Economic and Social justice along with Prof Chalam’s vast experience in socio-economic and political economy studies should continue this exercise and bring in greater nuances into the public debate. The report is an important step in that direction.

Pre-launch orders (before May 31, 2026 are discounted and the price for the single copy is at Rs 400 including postage charges during this period) Contact for copies: Email: Chalamks@hotmail.com

[1] Traivarnikas (or Traivarṇika) is a Sanskrit term referring to the members of the three upper classes (varnas) in traditional Hindu society: the Brahmins (priests/scholars), Kshatriyas (warriors/rulers), and Vaishyas (merchants/traders); the term translates directly to “those of the three colors” or “three classes.” It serves to group these three communities together and distinguish them from the Shudras (laborers) and Avarnas (those considered outside the traditional four-fold Varna system).

Related:

Protecting India’s future: Why Ladakh, Himachal and Uttarakhand deserve special status

River Ganga, communities, cultures & livelihood: will Indians preserve its life-sustaining legacy?

Dr BR Ambedkar: How the ongoing tussle between the BJP and Congress is both limited & superficial

The post India Economic & Social Justice Report 2025: First-ever study measures constitutional justice across union and state governments, have they delivered? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Millions of people sharply criticized the contrast between the approach taken in Karnataka in 2018 and that later adopted in Tamil Nadu. They wondered what strategy or constitutional reasoning lay behind that decision. The Union Government, particularly the Union Home Ministry, also bears responsibility for protecting constitutional federalism in such situations.

If such a long leash could be offered in Bengaluru, could a similar blueprint unfold for Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) leader Vijay in a fractured Tamil Nadu Assembly? In a hypothetical scenario where the state is staring at a deeply divided mandate, what determines who grabs the crown? Is it a masterstroke strategy, a calculated constitutional interpretation, a political illusion, or sheer cinematic magic?

A Matinee Idol as CM

Vijay’s transition from a cinematic powerhouse to a frontline political contender has broken the conventional speed limits of Dravidian politics. As a young Scheduled Caste Christian leader, his political identity carries deep symbolic resonance:

• Breaking the Reservation Mold: Defying traditional identity politics, Vijay chose to contest and win from two unreserved general constituencies.
• Rapid Mainstream Acceptance: Within days of the election results, he transformed TVK from a nascent political startup into a formidable claimant for the Chief Minister’s office.
• Strategic Representation: For his supporters, his ascent represents a generational shift, a rare moment where a Dalit-Christian leader commands center stage in Tamil Nadu without relying on traditional Dravidian umbrellas.

During the height of this post-election instability, the acting Governor of Tamil Nadu, Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar, holding temporary additional charge, maintained a calculated, unusual silence. Free from dramatic public posturing or polarizing declarations, the Raj Bhavan silently allowed the political gears to turn toward an eventually stable resolution.

When TVK initially staked its claim with the backing of roughly 108 legislators, critics pointed out that Vijay lacked an absolute majority. Vijay countered by demanding the right to prove his strength on the floor. This brought a classic constitutional debate back to life: does the “single largest party” hold an inherent right to form a government?

The short answer is no. The phrase “single largest party” is conspicuously absent from the text of the Constitution of India, nor is there any legally binding convention that forces a Governor to invite them first. Once sworn in, the authority of the office is to engineer defections and gather support over several days or weeks.

SC radically redefined federalism.

In the landmark S. R. Bommai v. Union of India case, the Supreme Court radically redefined federalism and gubernatorial discretion. The judgment laid down ironclad principles that directly govern hung assemblies:

• The Assembly Floor is Supreme: Majority support cannot be assessed through headcount lists in Raj Bhavans or resort roll-calls; it must be tested exclusively on the floor of the House.
• No Partisan Preferences: Governors cannot act on personal political whims or align their decisions with partisan agendas.
• Limits on Article 356: The threat of President’s Rule cannot be wielded arbitrarily to dismantle or prevent elected governments.
• No Studio Mandates: Legitimate majorities are manufactured through constitutional processes, not in television studios or luxury hotels.

Commissions and Conventions

While the Constitution is silent, successive expert panels, most notably the Sarkaria Commission and the Punchhi Commission, have outlined a clear hierarchy of preferences for Governors navigating a fractured mandate.

Though these guidelines lack the force of codified law, they heavily guide gubernatorial ethics. In this instance, constitutional strategist Vikas Bansode reportedly advised that the Governor’s primary duty is not just tracking down the biggest single entity, but actively facilitating a regime that promises long-term structural stability.

This explains why a Governor functioning under a BJP-led Central Government acted with unexpected institutional restraint, deviating from past controversies. In places like Goa and Manipur (2017), governors skipped the single largest party (Congress) to invite BJP-led coalitions that demonstrated stable post-poll numbers. Conversely, rushed swearing-in’s in Karnataka (2018) and Maharashtra (2019) ended in public embarrassment and abrupt resignations within days.

Vijay’s transition

Vijay’s transition from a vulnerable claimant with 108 seats to an unassailable leader was a masterclass in quiet political realignment. The operation moved through three distinct phases:

1. The Initial Staking (108 MLAs): On May 5th, Vijay approached Raj Bhavan with a base of 108 legislators. The crucial momentum shift came when 5 Congress MLAs broke ranks to back him. Remarkably, they did this while their party formally remained a part of the DMK-led INDIA alliance—moving like silent grandmasters on a multi-dimensional chessboard.
2. The Governor’s Validation (120 MLAs): Backed by the Bansode stability doctrine, the Governor permitted a floor test once Vijay’s consolidated file reached 120 MLAs.
3. The Coronation (144 MLAs): During the actual voting process on the floor of the House, the numbers swelled dramatically to 144, transforming a fragile minority into an absolute, commanding majority.

Twin titans of Dravidian politics

Vijay’s rise evokes memories of iconic actor-politicians like M.G. Ramachandran, J. Jayalalithaa, and N.T. Rama Rao. Yet, his structural consolidation raises deep, lingering questions about what truly transpired behind the scenes.

If the twin titans of Dravidian politics- the DMK and the AIADMK- wanted to stop TVK, they possessed the combined numbers to do so. Why did they falter?

• The DMK’s Calculated Retreat: Former Chief Minister M.K. Stalin publicly announced that the DMK would not destabilize a TVK government for at least six months. During the final vote, his party staged a strategic walkout rather than voting Vijay down.
• The AIADMK’s Internal Fractures: The AIADMK, traditionally aligned with the BJP, suffered sudden internal rifts at the exact moment of the vote, effectively paralyzing their opposition and indirectly strengthening Vijay’s hand.

Ultimately, this sequence of events enters the realm of political philosophy. Was Vijay the ultimate architect of his own destiny, a lucky beneficiary of a fractured era, or an unsuspecting protagonist in a larger, intricate script written within the quiet corridors of Raj Bhavan? Thus, the Governor steered Tamil Nadu, protecting the constitutional propriety.

While the public witnessed a spectacular, cinematic climb to the apex of power, the real puppeteers steering the strings may choose to remain forever invisible.

Dr. Madabhushi Sridhar, Professor of Media Law, LL.D., Advisor, Mahindra University, Hyderabad.

Courtesy: CounterCurrents

The post Twin Titans of Dravidian Politics and Vijay’s Rise appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The extraordinary public support that poured out in his favour at a time when widespread speculation suggested that the Congress high command might consider alternative candidates for the Chief Ministership revealed that his legitimacy had moved beyond mere organisational arithmetic. His popularity emerged through two political strategies that liberal politicians often hesitate to adopt openly. On the one hand, he cultivated a partially anti-neoliberal political language regarding state expenditure, public welfare, and social protection, reassuring ordinary people that welfare measures, subsidies, pensions, and social support systems would not be dismantled in the name of fiscal discipline. On the other hand, he sharply distanced himself from sectarian caste calculations and the overt pressure politics of dominant community organisations that have historically exercised influence over both the UDF and LDF. This combination gave him credibility among sections of the middle class, lower middle class, youth, minorities, and welfare-dependent populations who increasingly fear both aggressive neoliberal restructuring and majoritarian politics.

At the national level too, as the Indian National Congress intensified its confrontation with the Modi government, Satheesan appeared to internalise that oppositional spirit. He did not soften his criticism of the Modi apparatus of power, centralisation, federal pressure tactics, and the expanding ideological influence of Hindutva politics. Unlike many regional leaders who tactically maintain ambiguity, he often spoke in direct political terms, which contributed to his image as a confident opposition leader capable of confronting centralised authority.

However, the challenges before him are enormous. Electoral promises regarding welfare expansion, social protection, employment generation, rising living costs, healthcare, public education, infrastructure, and development will now have to move from rhetoric into governance. He will have to negotiate the pressures exerted by the Modi government through financial control, administrative leverage, central agencies, and the increasingly aggressive posture of the BJP’s Keralam unit. At the same time, he will face an extremely vigilant and politically experienced LDF opposition and its frontal organisations, which will not tolerate any dilution of welfare commitments or visible capitulation to central pressure. Internal dissensions within the Congress and coalition management will remain another continuing challenge.

Despite the several pitfalls and political failures of the previous Left Democratic Front government that eventually contributed to its defeat — issues that the party and its cadre are now reportedly examining with seriousness — one important strategic direction evolved during that period should not be abandoned. The attempt to balance anti-neoliberal welfare politics with large-scale infrastructure expansion, public investment, and calibrated capital inflow represented a significant and imaginative political-economic experiment within the constraints of contemporary federal India. Keralam’s future cannot lie either in crude market fundamentalism or in a stagnant developmental conservatism incapable of generating employment, technological growth, and infrastructural modernisation. The challenge before the new government is therefore not to dismantle that developmental balance, but perhaps to refine it more democratically, transparently, and efficiently while preserving Keralam’s welfare commitments, social indicators, and relatively egalitarian social ethos. More than anyone else, a liberal leader like V. D. Satheesan would recognise that the contributions of the LDF are not something to be discarded or forgotten, but to be critically examined, reassessed, and refined in pursuit of better future outcomes.

Yet the ultimate challenge before V. D. Satheesan lies elsewhere. However progressive his instincts may be, he still operates within the structural and ideological limits of the liberal-democratic framework represented by the Indian National Congress and the United Democratic Front. There are institutional compulsions, entrenched interest groups, coalition pressures, electoral calculations, and inherited political taboos that no leader within that framework can easily transcend. Keralam’s liberal politics functions within a relatively ossified structure in which welfare commitments, development aspirations, market compulsions, caste-community negotiations, coalition management, and Centre-State dependencies are held together through delicate balancing acts rather than through deeper structural transformation.

This creates a fundamental contradiction. A leader may articulate socially progressive positions, defend secularism, support welfare expansion, and even criticise aggressive neoliberalism, but the political system itself imposes limits on how far such positions can be translated into policy. The compulsions of attracting investment, maintaining fiscal discipline under neoliberal federalism, accommodating dominant social blocs, and surviving within coalition arithmetic often restrict the possibility of more radical redistributive or democratic interventions. In that sense, the problem is not merely individual leadership, but the narrowing horizon of liberal politics itself under contemporary capitalism.

He is known to be a voracious reader with wide exposure to literature, political thought, and contemporary debates, and this has enabled him to establish a rapport with writers, artists, public intellectuals, and progressive cultural figures in a manner rarely seen among liberal political leaders today. He often identifies himself broadly with a Nehruvian-Left democratic orientation. More important than ideological labels, however, is his ability to resonate with progressive currents within Keralam’s public sphere that continue to value secularism, civil society freedoms, environmental concerns, democratic dissent, and human rights. This cultural credibility may become politically significant in a period when Keralam itself faces difficult questions regarding development, ecological vulnerability, minority rights, and the future of democratic public culture.

At the same time, the excessively celebratory tone adopted by sections of the media may itself become a source of future difficulty for him. Keralam’s media culture has a tendency to rapidly construct heroic political narratives around leaders during moments of transition, often inflating expectations beyond what any government can realistically deliver within existing structural constraints. Such overflowing adulation can quickly turn into impatience, scrutiny, and disappointment once governance confronts the inevitable realities of fiscal limitations, bureaucratic inertia, coalition pressures, environmental conflicts, and public dissent. In that sense, media-driven personalisation of political success may unintentionally weaken the very leadership it seeks to glorify by transforming complex structural challenges into questions of individual performance and charisma. Satheesan’s real political brilliance will lie in how carefully he navigates this slippery path.

Beyond electoral politics, Keralam itself faces a new developmental crossroads. Questions of ecological sustainability, environmental vulnerability, urban expansion, climate-related disasters, public transport, digital infrastructure, and the future of welfare-oriented development demand serious attention. The expectation is not merely administrative continuity, but innovation in governance and a new developmental imagination suited to Keralam’s changing social realities.

At this moment, however, he deserves congratulations for achieving what many considered politically improbable. Against considerable odds, he succeeded in sustaining public expectations and translating them into an extraordinary mandate. He now carries the aspirations of millions of ordinary Malayalis who look towards the new government with hope — for improved living standards, humane governance, welfare assurances, and a development model capable of combining social justice with infrastructural transformation. Whether he will ultimately live up to these expectations remains to be seen, but the scale of the trust placed in him is itself politically significant in an age marked everywhere by democratic fatigue and public cynicism.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post V.D Satheesan and the Challenges Before a Liberal Leader in Keralam appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Avani Rai did not actually set out to make a film about her father. What she wanted was to get to know him better by observing him on one of his photo trips. In the film that she ended up making anyway, father and daughter travel together to Kashmir, where political unrest prevails and violence is commonplace. They photograph their surroundings and each other, in the meantime reflecting on their lives, politics and his craft, which is richly illustrated with material from Raghu Rai’s archive.

The elder Rai started taking photos in the 1960s, and has now published more than 50 books. He is best known for his powerful series on the aftermath of the Bhopal toxic gas tragedy in 1984, portraits of Mother Teresa and Indira Gandhi.

Avani films and photographs her father as he works—and as he instructs her on viewpoints and framing. In the process, the film becomes a portrait not only of a passionate photographer, but also of a father-daughter relationship

Born in Jhang, British India (now in Pakistan), Rai was the youngest of four siblings. His family moved to Delhi after Partition in 1947, and he followed his father into civil engineering before a chance encounter with a donkey changed the course of his life. Accompanying his elder brother, the photojournalist S Paul, he became fixated on a stray donkey caught in a shaft of light and spent hours trying to frame it. The resulting photograph, made with a borrowed camera, was later published in the Times, London. Rai described the experience as his first sense of “the magic of holding a moment”, as the Guardian wrote in it’s obituary on his passing.

I could also connect with Raghu Rai in another way, his first wife Usha Rai was the well-known journalist and a colleague in the Time of India (where I worked for several years). She was also a fellow student at the Jesuit SFS College in Nagpur around 1960.

Prominent photographer Mukesh Parpiani and Neeraj recalled their association with Rai at the Press Club last Saturday. Avani said in response to questions that an exhibition of Rai’s works would be held in Mumbai soon. As Harish Nambiar of the Press club’s film group mentioned Rai reminded one of the works of Cartier-Bresson and Selgado.

The day before Gandhi’s assassination, Cartier-Bresson photographed the leader, who had been fasting to call for an end to the violence over the India-Pakistan partition, as he was physically—and perhaps emotionally—supported by his nieces. Cartier-Bresson returned the next day to interview Gandhi about the fast. On January 30, 1948, hours after their conversation, Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu ‘nationalist’, Nathuram Godse. In the aftermath, Cartier-Bresson returned once again to Birla House to document Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s announcement of Gandhi’s death. Cartier-Bresson’s quiet pictures of Gandhi’s body lying in state led to a commission from Life magazine to document the funeral (the February 16, 1948 issue included nine of Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, compared to only five by Margaret Bourke-White, despite her close relationship to the magazine.)

Rai also reminds one of the renowned Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado, who died in 2025 at age 81, Salgado, who in his lifetime produced more than 500,000 images while meticulously documenting every continent on Earth and many of the major geopolitical events since the second world war, will be remembered as one of the world’s most prodigious and relentlessly empathetic chroniclers of the human condition.

The Press club terrace overlooking Azad Maidan is one of the best spaces in Mumbai for a meeting and discussion. A most pleasant aspect of the venue is the lawn of the Museum flanked by the garden of the David Sassoon library on the other side of the road. We need more such open spaces that function so much better than closed spaces with air-conditioning.

Note: The Film Study Group (FSB) of the Mumbai Press Club paused its series of war movies to present Avani Rai’s intimate portrayal of her legendary father. Presented from a lens as a daughter of a celebrated father, the documentary brings an immediate urgency to the narrative that traces her father’s fraught journey from Pre Partition India and his steady, steely rise as photographer of international eminence. 

(The author is a veteran writer formerly with The Times of India group, Mumbai.)

Related:

‘The Elephant Whisperers’ & the banality of Hindu American Foundation’s Attempt to co-opt Adivasis

‘Newton’ An Allegory on Vulnerabilities of Indian Democracy

The post Through The Lens of Raghu Rai: An evening in Mumbai appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Trade unions all over the world were gearing up to observe the centenary, so also CITU. Janam decided to do a play to commemorate this occasion and to take the legacy of May Day to workers. Safdar wrote a play called Mai Divas Ki Kahani (‘The Saga of May Day’).

It dramatized three historic moments: the trial of the May Day martyrs in Chicago in 1886; the 1905 parade in Russia, based on Brecht’s May Day scene from The Mother; and May Day in Nazi Germany.

While the play was successful, it was hard to do – not for any other reason but simply because Janam didn’t have enough actors available, even though it was written such that it could be done with only six actors. Safdar sought to compensate for the lack of actors with innovative use of properties, including masks.

Mai Divas is probably one of Janam’s most visually interesting street plays, using nearly ninety different pieces of properties in an intricate choreography of who picks up what object from where in the circle, and keeps it down where. And workers watched the play with great interest, even though it told stories from long ago, and had characters with names unfamiliar to Indian workers. What connected, however, was the shared experience of exploitation and the struggle against it.

A couple of years later, in 1988, a Dutch theatre scholar, Eugene van Erven, visited India. He sought out Safdar and the two became friends. Eugene van Erven’s interview with Safdar (reproduced in Theatre of the Streets) is an invaluable resource for the street theatre activists and historians. Safdar invited him to the May Day performances that Janam did that year, at dawn, at the Swatantra Bharat Mill in West Delhi. Eugene van Erven took some beautiful photos of the performance, including the one below, where you see Safdar speaking before the performance.

I sometimes think that this photograph, with all the posters and the notices on blackboards, is itself source material for labour historians!

Courtesy: https://sudu26.substack.com

The post May Day Dramatised appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Declaring on March 31, 2026, that the Maoist insurgency in central India had been defeated after six decades, Union Home Minister Amit Shah announced the redeployment of battle-hardened Central Armed Police Forces from Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha, promising to end insurgency in the hills before the 2029 general elections.

Shah described the period since Narendra Modi became Prime Minister in 2014 as a golden era for internal security, covering Kashmir and the north-east alongside the defeat of left-wing extremism.

Shah has not indicated how he intends to help the Manipur government resolve the crisis that continues to grip the state, where more than 260 people were killed, mostly Christian Kuki-Zo, over 300 churches and some 10,000 houses destroyed, and a lakh of persons displaced. Around 60,000 shelter in churches and private refuges in the hills where the Kuki-Zo have lived for generations; several hundred others are scattered across Delhi, Bangalore, Shillong and Guwahati as migrant workers.

The violence began on May 3, 2023, in the Meitei-dominated valley with arson and sexual assault. Political groups loyal to then Chief Minister Biren Singh paraded through the streets alongside police as naked women, just raped, were forced to walk in public view.

Singh, compelled to resign on February 9, 2025, has not reconciled to his removal and is considered still capable of manipulating volatile public opinion; he is also allegedly in the know of the drug economy that underpins instability in this border state.

For the Kuki-Zo still in relief camps or rented accommodation in Delhi, Bangalore, Shillong and Guwahati — dispossessed, un-rehabilitated, watching the third anniversary of their ethnic cleansing pass with no arrest for rape or murder — the prospect of more boots in Manipur carries a particular, bitter meaning.

More than 270 lives have been lost since May 3, 2023, including several central and state force personnel. Not one person has been convicted.

The CRPF, the force being redeployed from Chhattisgarh, is the same force that on April 7, 2026, fired on civilian protesters in Bishnupur district, killing three. More men and weapons — without accountability, without justice, without rehabilitation — is not a peace plan.

The immediate political crisis is in Imphal. COCOMI, the most powerful Meitei civil society umbrella body, announced in mid-April a complete boycott of the BJP in Manipur, appealing to the public to refuse to participate in any party activities and demanding a statement from Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh on his government’s failure to protect civilians.

On April 25, after a statewide shutdown and processions from multiple Imphal neighbourhoods, a COCOMI delegation submitted a seven-point memorandum, warning: “We will not be submitting a memorandum anymore after this.”

The seven demands — abrogating the Suspension of Operations agreement with Kuki-Zo armed groups, updating the National Register of Citizens, securing accountability for killings since May 2023, ending narco-terrorism, and ensuring accountability for the Tronglaobi deaths — reflect Meitei political grievances.

What the Meitei group is pressing for is not justice for Kuki-Zo rape survivors but the elimination of Kuki underground groups and the exclusion of alleged illegal immigrants from Myanmar who are kin tribes of the Kuki-Zo.

The two communities’ definitions of justice are irreconcilable without political mediation that has yet to arrive. A Kuki-Zo political bloc of ten MLAs — seven of them BJP members — has said it will not re-enter government without written commitments on a separate administration.

For 864 days after violence began, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not visit Manipur, speaking of the crisis for the first time only on July 20, 2023, more than two months after it erupted.

He finally visited on September 13, 2025 — a three-hour trip to Churachandpur, headquarters of the Kuki region, and Imphal. He promised housing for internally displaced persons without specifying location or timeline, since the return of Kuki tribals to the valley depends on talks that remain inconclusive.

Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra responded: “It is unfortunate that he allowed this to go on for so long, with so many killed and so much strife, before deciding to visit. That has not been the tradition of Prime Ministers in India.”

The government officially confirmed 58,821 displaced persons in 174 relief camps, 7,894 permanent houses destroyed and 2,646 partially destroyed. It had promised all displaced would return home by March 31, 2026.

That deadline passed without a single return. The Kuki-Zo cannot return to the Imphal valley — their homes no longer exist or are occupied by others. National highways between the hills and the valley function, in effect, as ethnic frontlines, with members of both communities unable to cross safely into each other’s areas.

Human rights defender Babloo Loitongbam, himself a Meitei who faced assault and threats for speaking out, stated: “Thousands are still unable to return home — not by choice, but due to ongoing fear and insecurity. Numerous homes have been destroyed, while others remain occupied by vigilante groups, making return impossible without proper state intervention and guarantees of safety.”

Amnesty International India’s chair Aakar Patel said in May 2025: “It is unacceptable that the Indian government has failed to address the humanitarian needs and implement a rehabilitation policy for displaced communities who remain in relief camps two years since the ethnic violence began. This inaction has left tens of thousands in limbo, forced to endure life in inhumane conditions with no end in sight.”

The thousands of Kuki-Zo in Delhi, Shillong and Bangalore receive no official recognition as internally displaced persons and have no status under any central government scheme. Their children are enrolled wherever schools will accept them; their elders are dying far from their ancestral villages. The Kuki Students’ Organisation, Delhi and NCR, has functioned as a government in exile — maintaining documentation, filing petitions, holding vigils at the Constitution Club — with no other institution stepping forward for them.

The single most damning fact, at the start of the fourth year, is that no one has been convicted for any act of violence, murder, rape or arson committed since May 3, 2023.

The Supreme Court expressed shock at the fourteen-day delay in registering a Zero FIR for two women stripped, paraded naked and gang-raped by a mob whose perpetrators were clearly visible in a viral video circulated in July 2023.

One of those survivors, aged eighteen at the time of the assault, spent nearly three years moving between hospital wards in Guwahati. She died on January 10, 2026, aged approximately twenty, from injuries sustained during the violence.

Aakar Patel said: “This woman’s death is a devastating indictment of the Indian state’s continuing failure to deliver timely justice to survivors of sexual violence.” Committee on Tribal Unity spokesman Ng. Lun Kipgen noted: “Our brave girl survived the violence, but not the silence.” No perpetrator has been arrested. No senior police officer has faced disciplinary proceedings for the delay in filing the FIR or for failing to pursue the investigation.

The Wire’s investigative correspondent Greeshma Kuthar stated: “The Arambai Tenggol led mobs to Kuki-Zo villages that were burnt down, killed people and slaughtered them. There are FIRs naming them as accused in sexual assault of Kuki-Zo women. There are viral videos of their members beheading people — with no consequences.” No Arambai Tenggol leader has been arrested. Neither the central government nor Manipur state officials condemned the group’s violence.

The PUCL Independent People’s Tribunal, chaired by former Supreme Court judge Justice Kurian Joseph, released its report in August 2025 after taking testimony across Manipur and Delhi over more than a year. It documented survivors’ deep-rooted belief that the state either allowed the violence to happen or actively participated in it.

Many deponents attributed the killings to the political and administrative decisions of former Chief Minister Biren Singh. The jury recorded its disturbance at the brutality — people killed, butchered, tortured, dismembered, disrobed and sexually assaulted in public, their suffering then displayed on social media.

Audio evidence submitted to the court suggested that Singh had prior knowledge of the village attacks. The government’s own Commission of Inquiry, headed by former Guwahati High Court Chief Justice Ajai Lamba (he resigned and was replaced by retired Supreme Court judge Balbir Singh Chauhan as chair in February 2026), has had its mandate extended multiple times and now runs to May 2026.

The Supreme Court’s observation of an “absolute breakdown of law and order,” its shock at police delays in registering FIRs for sexual violence, and its orders transferring certain cases to the CBI produced documentation but not accountability.

The International Crisis Group, in its February 2025 report, called on New Delhi to urgently address the Kuki-Zo demand for a separate administration, noting that the constitutional precedent already exists in the autonomous district councils of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram. That call has not been answered.

More CRPF battalions were present in Manipur on May 3, 2023, than in most Indian states. They did not stop the burning of churches in Churachandpur. They did not prevent the looting of police armouries. By October 2023, an estimated 6,000 weapons and 600,000 rounds of ammunition had been seized, along with mortars, grenades and police uniforms, of which only approximately a quarter had been recovered. They did not arrest Arambai Tenggol commanders. On April 7, 2026, they fired on Meitei protesters in Bishnupur, killing three. Armed force, without political will or accountability structures, does not resolve ethnic conflict.

Benjamin Mate, chairman of the Kuki Organisation for Human Rights Trust, has stated what justice requires: “The Government of India must appoint an independent commission to thoroughly investigate the role of senior officials, state bureaucrats, police officials and armed groups during the ethnic violence. Accountability is essential, and only through a transparent and impartial inquiry can justice be delivered to the victims. By consistently failing to hold those suspected of serious human rights violations accountable, the government risks signalling that impunity will persist — ultimately paving the way for further abuses.”

Courtesy: India Currents

The post Manipur Year 4: Guns Without Justice appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Residents have also accused the state power department of pushing the rollout as part of a broader privatisation drive, while protestors have demanded a halt to the installations until their concerns about billing transparency and affordability are addressed. Protests have been witnessed in Ferozabad, Lucknow, Meerut, Agra, Kanpur, Haamirpur, Banda and Hapur indicating w widespread public backlash on the question. Protesters allege that these metres have been programmed to run fast leading to inflated electricity bills. Due to the protests, installation of these pre-paid smart metres has been temporarily suspended or stopped.

Officials have acknowledged growing resistance in multiple areas, with demonstrations continuing in towns and villages as authorities attempt to manage the escalating situation.

A wave of protests against smart electricity meters is intensifying across #UttarPradesh, with women emerging at the forefront of the agitation. In #Firozabad, women took to the streets in large numbers, in some cases removing installed meters and throwing them onto roads, as… pic.twitter.com/BXRruL9ZZf

— News9 (@News9Tweets) April 30, 2026

Related:

Villagers in UP claim their bills have doubled due to smart meters throw them in protest

The post UP: Women protest installation of prepaid smart electricity metres in several districts appeared first on SabrangIndia.