The vandalism and violence by members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) against a proposed discussion on February 24, 2026, by “Spark”, an informal student reading group of Azim Premji University (APU), Bangalore, are symptomatic of the increasing repression in campuses across the country, where dissent is criminalised and free debate and discussion is shut down. The proposed discussion was on the anniversary of the mass rapes in Kunan Poshpora in 1991.

On February 24, around 25 members of the ABVP, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vandalised the “Kabira” space, a designated location for cultural activities in the Sarjapur campus of the university and the venue of a discussion on Kunan Poshpora by the Spark Reading Group. They tore down posters and assaulted a student and a member of the university’s security staff.

While police arrested 25 members of the ABVP on charges of assault, vandalism and trespass., they were granted bail the next day.

However, police also registered an FIR, based on a complaint by the APU Registrar Rishikesh BS, against office-bearers and members of the Spark Reading Circle. The complaint against the group’s Instagram handle on the event was registered under Sec 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) 2023, on charges of deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings, a cognisable and non-bailable charge with a penalty of up to three years imprisonment.

The FIR also cites charges under Sec 66 (e) (violation of privacy by intentionally capturing, publishing, or transmitting images of a person’s private areas without their consent) and 67 (publishing or transmitting obscene material in electronic form) of the Information Technology Act,2000.

The APU Registrar’s complaint states that no permission was sought or granted for the event and that the group had no official connection with the university. The complaint further blames the reading group for seeking to host the event and said that, by “issuing such invitations, hostility arose between two groups, resulting in activists forcefully entering our campus and creating a disturbance.”

In a statement, the Student Council of Azim Premji University expressed concern over the FIR filed by the university against members of the ‘Spark Reading Circle’, stating that the matter should have been addressed through internal disciplinary mechanisms rather than criminal proceedings.

Indeed, the excessively punitive reaction of the APU administration towards the student reading group for merely planning to hold a discussion on the Kunan Poshpora incident is highly disturbing. A purely administrative and logistical issue of permissions for an event on campus became the basis of a complaint to the police to seek criminal action against a reading group and its members. The complaint against the group’s account on a social media platform amounts to an open invitation to police the academic lives of students. In the guise of a criminal investigation, it allows for surveillance of electronic devices of students and seeks to police their space and time outside the classroom.

Why don’t they want people to remember Kunan Poshpora?

 The ABVP’s protest against the Spark Reading Group’s discussion over Kunan-Poshpora seeks to erase and invisibilise the crucial process of recollection and analysis of painful and sensitive incidents, thereby silencing a historical record.

February 24, 2026, marked the 35th anniversary of the mass rape and torture of women of the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Jammu and Kashmir by the Indian Army. The allegations of rape and torture were denied by the army and the Indian government.

However, the testimonies of women of the two villages and the extensive records and interviews by researchers Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Munaza Rashid, Natasha Rather and Samreena Mushtaq, who documented the incident and its aftermath in their book “Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?” continue to challenge official narratives even as they persist in the struggle to seek justice and accountability. The book was among the 25 academic books banned in Kashmir last year.

Systematic censorship of academia

The violence by the right wing ABVP, the student wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ominously repressive measures taken by the APU administration result in the censorship and curbs on free discussion and debate on important issues. They are only the latest in the growing list of instances of censorship in academia.

Right-wing students are emboldened and weaponised by the ruling political dispensation. Regrettably, university administrations, including vice chancellors who are unabashed champions of right-wing ideologies, speedily crack down on students who dare to ask questions.

Last year, Free Speech Collective’s annual report “Free Speech in India 2025: Behold the Hidden Hand” documented at least 16 noteworthy instances of censorship in academia, including the criminalisation of student protests, the Delhi University Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Singh’s openly political exhortations to faculty and staff to push the ruling BJP’s agendas and the arrest of Prof Ali Khan Mahmudabad of Ashoka University over posts on Operation Sindoor even as the denial of permission for academic seminars on “sensitive subjects” became routine.

Now, barely two months into 2026, there are already more than six instances of censorship in academia in India.

At least 14 students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) were arrested for protesting the casteist remarks of the university’s Vice Chancellor Shantisree Dhulipudi Pandit. Granted bail by a Delhi court on February 27, the students continued to remain in jail till late evening on Sunday (March 1) as police took their time to complete the verifications of their permanent addresses. It took the court to direct their immediate release stating that procedural formalities could not be the excuse for their continued detention after bail had already been granted.

Earlier, on February 17, 2026, the Proctor Office of Delhi University (DU) issued an order stating that “public meetings, processions, demonstrations, and protests of any kind are strictly prohibited within the university campus for a period of one month.”

On January 29, 2026, Sarover Zaidi, an associate professor at OP Jindal Global University in Sonepat, was suspended for one semester (February 1 to July 31) for allegedly comparing Prime Minister Narendra Modi with Adolf Hitler. BJP MP from Kurukshetra Naveen Jindal is the founding chancellor of the university.

The action arose after a hearing in the Haryana Human Rights Commission (HHRC) on a complaint by Vishav Bajaj, father of Vikhyaat Bajaj, a first-year undergraduate student of the Jindal School of Design & Architecture, that on November 7, 2025, during a lecture on the course “Politics of Representation” taught by Zaidi, repeated remarks were made in class that were “politically derogatory, inflammatory and deeply disturbing”.

Bajaj alleged that PM Modi was compared to Adolf Hitler, national security operations such as Operation Sindoor were described as “gimmicks” and “branding exercises,” civilian deaths were trivialised and official accounts of terrorism were questioned. Audio recordings made by Vikhyaat were also submitted to the HHRC.

The student had also complained against another assistant professor, Ekta Chauhan, alleging their statements against the RSS. But Chauhan refuted the allegations and described herself as a “devout and practising” Hindu. Her family was associated with RSS-linked social service traditions since 1972, she said in a written statement.

The trend of disinvitation of distinguished persons from campus events continued unabated. In Banaras Hindu University, a lecture by scholar Kedar Mishra, scheduled for January 20, 2026, was cancelled allegedly under government pressure In Mumbai, actor Naseeruddin Shah was disinvited from an academic literary event at Mumbai University on January 31, 2026.

In Mumbai, an SRFTI (Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute) student film “Da’Lit Kids” was pulled out of the Animela Film Festival at Whistling Woods after it was reportedly denied permission for screening by the Ministry for Information and Broadcasting. In protest, film-makers of all the SRFTI films scheduled for screening at the festival pulled out but the festival went ahead.

The Animela Festival is an international Animation, VFX, Gaming, Comics & XR Festival run by a non-profit organisation – the Aniverse and Visual Arts Foundation (AVAF). While there is no clarity why government permission was sought for the films being screened, the festival website lists multiple sponsors, including the Maharashtra government, embassies of France and Australia and corporate support from sponsors like Adani.

All these instances of censorship further circumscribe the space for the free exchange of information and diverse viewpoints. APU prides itself on being “a space for social change” and a space for higher education that “can create critical and reflective practitioners with an understanding of the social impact of education, the law and development”. Instead of criminalising students, APU needs to ensure that its campuses remain safe spaces that nurture the spirit of enquiry. For a truly transformative educational institution, a climate of free discussion needs to prevail over censorship by vandals and vigilantes.

Courtesy: Free Speech Collective

The post The Throttling of Free Discussion in Academia: Strong-arm Tactics by ABVP and Cave in by Azim Premji University appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In his over, one-hour recitation cum talk Naseeruddin Shah introduced the audience to the charm and possibilities of Urdu and recited from many of the greats like Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Mirza Ghalib, Sahir Ludhianvi, Allama Iqbal and Imtiaz Ali Taj. Through narration, reflection and dramatic nuance Naseeruddin Shah revisited an era when literature shaped social thought and human values, celebrating poetry that spoke of love, injustice, hope and collective dreams

The Lectures That Needed to Happen series by Mumbai for Peace provides a platform to deserving lectures and events that are cancelled due to uncalled & non democratic interference by the State or non-state actors. “Mumbai for Peace” is a citizens’ platform formed by concerned Mumbaikars committed to safeguarding the city’s plural character and nurturing communal harmony.

Preet Nagar was a presentation that was scheduled in Mumbai University on February 1 but was unceremoniously cancelled at the last minute with no explanation. Earlier MFP had collaborated with other organisations to hold the Father Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture by Fr. Prem Xalxo that was similarly cancelled

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The post Censorship Broken: Naseeruddin Shah speaks on the Urdu language at Kalina, Mumbai & recites from its rich poetry appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Temple Pattas and the Politics of Sacred Property 

The decision to grant land titles to temples is being justified as a route to enable them to access government schemes. On the surface, this appears as a bureaucratic correction. But the social context matters. In Rajasthan, temple management and priesthood are overwhelmingly controlled by Brahmin and Bania networks. Regularising temple land thus strengthens institutions already embedded within caste hierarchies.

This is not merely about religion; it is about property, legitimacy, and state-backed sanctification. When the state confers pattas upon temples, it converts religious capital into legal capital. In effect, public land becomes anchored to institutions historically aligned with Brahmanical authority. The material beneficiaries are not abstract “devotees,” but specific caste-based managerial structures.

The larger concern is the asymmetry. If temples are to receive legal facilitation in the name of heritage and welfare access, where is the parallel policy for community institutions run by Dalits, Adivasis, or minority groups? Selective formalisation reproduces structural inequality while appearing neutral.

Meat Shops, NOCs and the Food Governance 

The mandate that meat shops cannot open without Panchayat NOC approval, especially near public places, carries heavy symbolic and economic implications. In Rajasthan, the meat trade is largely associated with Muslim, Dalit and Rajput communities. Introducing an additional layer of discretionary approval effectively subjects these livelihoods to local majoritarian pressures.

The language of “public sentiment” or “cultural sensitivity” often becomes a tool for social policing. Panchayats are not caste-neutral spaces; they reflect local hierarchies. Granting them veto power over meat shops risks institutionalising social prejudice under administrative cover.

Food regulation in India has increasingly mirrored ideological currents rather than public health concerns. When cow shelters receive hundreds of crores while meat sellers face regulatory tightening, the contrast is telling. One sector aligned with Brahmanical social ethos receives subsidy and legitimacy; another, tied to marginalised communities, faces scrutiny and conditionality.

Brahminism, State Patronage, and Sociopolitical Control 

These measures must be understood within the broader framework of Brahminism as a system of graded hierarchy sustained through cultural authority and economic leverage. Historically, Brahmanical power has not relied solely on theology but on proximity to the state and control over symbolic capital — education, ritual, law, and legitimacy. Historian Divya Cherian traces this food-policy in Rajasthan to the political rise of Brahmins, Banias, Mahajans and Jains as intermediaries between the local kings and the jagirdars. During the tenure of Maharaja Vijay Singh Rathore, a devoted Vaishnavite, policies promoting strict vegetarianism imposed legal sanctions on not just Muslims and Dalist but the Rajputs – causing unpopularity of the king among his own Rajput clansmen. His successor, Maharaja Man Singh Rathore, a Nath sampraday adherent, withdrew strict Vaishnavite vegetarianism but by then the state was heavily dependent bureaucratically on the ‘vegetarian’ mercantile- Brahmanical lobbies.

In the 21^st century, granting pattas to temples and privileging cow protection schemes extend this pattern into contemporary governance. They reinforce a moral economy in which Brahmanical religious institutions are treated as guardians of civilization, while occupations associated with lower castes are rendered morally negotiable.

Importantly, this is not confined to the BJP. While the BJP’s ideological articulation is explicit, earlier Congress governments in Rajasthan — especially those preceding Ashok Gehlot — often reproduced similar structural preferences. The rhetoric of socialism coexisted with conspicuous promotion of Brahmanical institutions and Bania-dominated capital networks. Socialist jargons were invoked vigorously only while fomenting caste conflicts between competitive agrarian castes like Rajputs and Jats, but economic policy frequently aligned with established mercantile and brahminical interests.

Thus, the current decisions are less an aberration and more a culmination — a clearer articulation of long-standing patterns.

Bania Capitalism and the Politics of Selective Regulation 

The political economy dimension cannot be ignored. Rajasthan’s commercial networks have historically been shaped by Bania capital, particularly in urban centres. Regulatory regimes tend to burden informal, small-scale, caste-bound occupations — such as local butchers or street vendors — while leaving entrenched commercial capital relatively unscathed.

When the state intensifies scrutiny over meat shops but not over large-scale corporate food supply chains, it signals whose economic activity is deemed culturally legitimate. This differential treatment reinforces caste-coded divisions of labour. The rhetoric of protecting “public order” or “tradition” often masks an uneven terrain of enforcement. Regulation becomes a means of disciplining marginal livelihoods while consolidating a symbolic alignment with Bania and Brahmanical interests.

Studies show that upwards of two-thirds of Scheduled Caste rural households are landless or near-landless, underscoring how economic exclusion persists; state focus on symbolic assets like cows and temples further diverts attention from redistributive needs. Communities such as the Badhik—who traditionally make a living from butchery—are low caste, landless and historically marginalised, raising concerns that new Panchayat NOC requirements for meat shops disproportionately affect socially excluded groups.

Trade data from Rajasthan cattle fairs shows a dramatic decline in cattle sales — from 31,299 in 2010-11 to under 3,000 by 2016-17 — following stricter protective regulations, revealing real economic impacts on livestock trade.” This affects both pastoral and agrarian communities as well.

Cow Shelters and Cultural Priorities 

The allocation of substantial funds to establish cow shelters across Panchayat Samitis fits within a broader politics of sacralisation. Cow protection has long functioned as a mobilising idiom of Hindu identity. But in budgetary terms, prioritizing such projects over pressing issues like rural employment diversification or agrarian distress reflects ideological choice.

Rajasthan collected over ₹2,259 crore in cow protection surcharges and spent more than ₹1,500 crore on gaushalas and related schemes over a 5-year period, according to state finance data, showing the weight of symbolic welfare in the budget compared to other competing social expenditures. This means a major chunk of a designated revenue stream — meant ostensibly to support cow welfare — has gone to cow shelter grants, even as other social sector needs compete for attention. As per a report in the Financial Express.

When combined with land grants to temples and conditionality for meat sellers, a coherent pattern emerges: state resources flow toward institutions and symbols aligned with Brahmin-Bania identity, while regulatory burdens accumulate around occupations associated with Muslims, and Dalits.

Beyond Party Lines: Structural Continuities

It would be simplistic to attribute this entirely to one party or one chief minister. Rajasthan’s post-independence political culture has frequently oscillated between socialist rhetoric and social conservatism. Congress governments often invoked redistributive language in moments of caste tension among agrarian communities, yet maintained close proximity to Brahminical cultural authority and Bania commercial networks.

The BJP’s current moves under Bhajanlal Sharma represent a more overt consolidation of that legacy. The difference lies less in substance and more in explicit ideological framing.

Conclusion: Governance or Cultural Engineering?

At stake is not merely administrative reform but the moral architecture of the state. When temple institutions are regularised and empowered while meat sellers face new hurdles, governance crosses into cultural engineering. It privileges one vision of society over pluralistic livelihood realities.

For a state, that constitutionally promises equality and secular governance, the challenge is to ensure that policy does not become a vehicle for reinforcing inherited hierarchies. Rajasthan’s latest announcements raise difficult questions: Who receives the state’s protection? Whose work is dignified? And whose livelihood is made conditional upon local moral approval?

In answering these, one sees less a neutral reform agenda and more a calibrated reassertion of sociocultural power — rooted in long-standing Brahmanical and mercantile dominance, now articulated with renewed confidence.

(The author is a mechanical engineer and an independent commentator on history and politics, with a particular focus on Rajasthan. His work explores the syncretic exchanges of India’s borderlands as well as contemporary debates on memory, identity and historiography)

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

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Official figures spark political firestorm

During Question Hour, former Chief Minister and Leader of the Opposition Bhupesh Baghel sought detailed information on custodial deaths over the preceding 13 months. He asked whether judicial inquiries — mandatory in custodial deaths and guided by National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) protocols — had been completed in all cases, as reported by The Hindu.

Responding on behalf of the government, Deputy Chief Minister Vijay Sharma, who also holds the Home portfolio, confirmed that 66 inmates, including convicted prisoners, had died in custody during the specified period. He stated that:

• 18 cases have completed magisterial inquiries, and
• 48 cases remain under investigation.

Sharma assured the House that investigations were being conducted as per procedure and that action would follow if negligence was established.

However, the confirmation of the figures did little to calm tensions.

Opposition alleges overcrowding and healthcare breakdown

Baghel launched a sharp critique of the state’s prison administration, arguing that the figures pointed to a systemic crisis rather than isolated incidents.

According to him, prisons in Chhattisgarh are functioning at approximately 150% of their sanctioned capacity, severely undermining access to medical care and essential services. He questioned how such a high mortality figure could be divorced from structural conditions inside jails.

“How has law and order deteriorated to this extent?” Baghel asked in the House. “How many deaths have occurred in the last year, and what are the reasons?”

He further alleged that serious crimes — including murder, robbery, and extortion — had risen by nearly 35%, contending that rising crime rates coupled with prison overcrowding signal a deeper governance breakdown.

Opposition members argued that overcrowding, stretched medical infrastructure, and inadequate monitoring mechanisms could be contributing to preventable custodial deaths. They demanded immediate structural reforms, urgent strengthening of prison healthcare systems, and independent oversight.

The death of tribal leader Jeevan Thakur

The debate intensified when Baghel raised the case of tribal leader Jeevan Thakur, who died on December 4, 2025, while in judicial custody — a case that has drawn protests across Bastar, as reported by The Hindu.

According to Deputy CM Sharma’s statement in the House:

• Thakur was initially lodged in a jail in Kanker district.
• He was later shifted to a prison in Raipur following a court order.
• After his health deteriorated, he was admitted first to the Raipur district hospital and subsequently to the state-run Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Memorial Hospital, where he died during treatment.

Sharma said the jail superintendent informed the District Judge as per procedure, following which a committee was constituted to conduct an inquiry.

However, Baghel alleged that Thakur — described as a tribal community leader — had been falsely implicated in a case. He further claimed that Thakur was diabetic and did not receive timely medication or proper medical care in custody. According to the Opposition, there were complaints that medical advice was ignored by prison authorities.

Baghel emphasised that tribal communities in Bastar had staged protests demanding accountability and insisted that a magisterial inquiry was insufficient. He demanded that the matter be investigated by a House committee of the Legislative Assembly.

Sharma declined to comment directly on the demand for a legislative panel but maintained that the ongoing judicial inquiry should be allowed to conclude before further action is considered.

Bedlam, slogans, and walkout

As the exchange grew sharper, Congress MLAs stood up, raised slogans against the government, and disrupted proceedings. The Speaker attempted to restore order, but the protest escalated into a walkout by Opposition members.

The confrontation underscored a broader and recurring national concern: the condition of prisons, compliance with NHRC guidelines in custodial deaths, and the adequacy of medical care for inmates — especially undertrial prisoners and members of vulnerable communities.

Larger questions raised

The controversy raises multiple structural questions:

• Are judicial and magisterial inquiries sufficient safeguards in custodial death cases? Do these institutional checks and balances against state abuse which are available statutorily actually happen?

Judicial and magisterial inquiries into custodial deaths are not optional safeguards — they are statutorily mandated. Under Section 176(1A) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, a Judicial Magistrate or Metropolitan Magistrate must conduct an inquiry in cases of death, disappearance, or rape in custody, in addition to the regular police investigation. The provision was introduced to address the inherent conflict of interest in police investigating themselves. Its equivalent now exists under Section 196 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, thereby continuing the mandatory judicial oversight framework. On paper, this creates a layered accountability mechanism: FIR registration, police investigation, post-mortem examination, and independent magisterial inquiry — a structure intended to function as a check against state abuse.

However, the real question is not whether safeguards exist, but whether they operate meaningfully. Magisterial inquiries are often delayed, limited in scope, and heavily reliant on official records; their reports are rarely made public, and prosecutions do not automatically follow. Without transparency, time-bound completion, and clear consequences for negligence or abuse, these inquiries risk becoming procedural formalities rather than substantive accountability tools. The statutory framework under Section 176 CrPC and Section 196 BNSS is therefore institutionally sound in theory, but its effectiveness depends entirely on implementation, independence, and follow-through — without which the promise of checks and balances remains fragile.

• Is overcrowding directly contributing to preventable fatalities?
• Does the state’s prison healthcare infrastructure meet constitutional standards under Article 21 jurisprudence?
• Should legislative oversight mechanisms supplement judicial inquiries in sensitive cases?

While the government has assured procedural compliance and ongoing reforms, the Opposition has framed the 66 deaths not as statistical coincidence but as evidence of systemic strain.

As reported by The Hindu, the matter remains politically charged, with demands for accountability continuing both inside and outside the Assembly.

The numbers — 66 deaths in 13 months — now stand not merely as a legislative disclosure, but as the focal point of a deeper debate about custodial responsibility, institutional capacity, and the state’s duty of care toward those in its custody.

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According to Mid-Day, the Maharashtra government, through Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule, announced stricter norms for issuing birth and death certificates, particularly targeting “foreign nationals residing illegally.” The move followed allegations — amplified by BJP leader Kirit Somaiya — that thousands of birth certificates had been “fraudulently issued to Bangladeshi nationals.” A Special Investigation Team (SIT) was constituted, and a three-tier verification process introduced for delayed applications. Criminal prosecution was promised for those submitting allegedly “fake” documents.

On its face, preventing document fraud is a legitimate administrative objective. However, the framing of the issue — repeatedly tethered to “illegal Bangladeshis” — suggests that what is unfolding is not merely procedural tightening, but a securitised response to migration anxieties. More than anything else, privileging ruling party (read BJP) presence or dominance in the exercise makes it already suspect given the shrill (and brazenly anti-minority tones) in the party’s sloganeering on the question.

From administrative reform to political theatre

Reporting by CNBC-TV18 details that the BJP-led Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation cancelled 237 allegedly fake birth certificates and registered eight FIRs. Mayor Ritu Tawde publicly warned –on the very day of her election as Mayor of Mumbai–of a crackdown on “illegal Bangladeshis,” linking document irregularities to encroachment drives and street vendor verification.

The rhetorical shift is telling. What began as an investigation into possible irregularities in ward-level issuance of certificates has evolved into a broader political narrative about infiltration, encroachment, and demographic anxiety. Opposition leaders, including Uddhav Thackeray, questioned whether immigration enforcement falls within the municipal corporation’s mandate — a point also noted in CNBC-TV18’s coverage. Under India’s constitutional scheme, immigration control is squarely within the Union’s domain. The municipal body’s sweeping pronouncements risk conflating administrative lapses with nationality-based suspicion.

The Times of India reported that suspended civic officials had issued birth certificates for children older than one year without court orders — clearly beyond their statutory authority. That administrative overreach requires accountability. But the same report also highlighted systemic issues: hospitals failing to submit birth details within 21 days, procedural ambiguity at the ward level, and the absence of a standard operating procedure. These institutional gaps complicate –and even lay bare–the over-simplistic narrative of organised “infiltration mafias.”

Legal obligations under the registration regime

As The Indian Express clarified, under the Registration of Births and Deaths Act, all births in civic, government, or private hospitals must be registered irrespective of nationality. This is not a discretionary welfare benefit — it is a statutory obligation tied to identity, dignity, and access to rights. The same report noted that adult applicants require background verification, but infants born in hospitals must be registered without regard to citizenship.

This distinction is critical. Birth registration is a matter of civil documentation, not immigration adjudication. Blurring the two risks undermining India’s obligations under domestic law and international human rights standards, including the child’s right to identity.

The state government’s resolution — reported by Hindustan Times — now prohibits issuance of birth certificates based solely on documents such as school-leaving certificates, Aadhaar cards, or PAN cards, and mandates police verification, talathi reports, and multi-level scrutiny for delayed applications. While greater scrutiny for delayed registrations may be justified in cases of demonstrable fraud, the cumulative effect of police involvement, publication requirements, and criminal prosecution threatens to convert a civil registration process into a quasi-criminal proceeding.

The risk of overreach and chilling effects

Sweeping reviews of all birth records since 2016, as reported by The Indian Express, represent an extraordinary administrative exercise. Such retrospective scrutiny risks casting suspicion over entire communities, particularly those already subject to profiling. The political language accompanying the drive — references to “mafia raj,” “infiltrators,” and demographic threat — compounds that risk.

In constitutional democracies, administrative reform must be proportionate and evidence-based. If specific officers exceeded their authority or accepted forged hospital documentation, targeted disciplinary and criminal action is appropriate. But when enforcement rhetoric singles out a nationality or ethnic category, it veers toward collective suspicion.

There is also a structural danger here: by insisting on police verification and multiple layers of approval for delayed registrations, the state may inadvertently make birth registration inaccessible to vulnerable populations — including internal migrants, the urban poor, and those born outside formal medical settings. The more onerous the process, the greater the incentive to remain undocumented — a perverse outcome for a system ostensibly designed to ensure accurate records.

Most critically, such subjective and selective pressures over what must be a routine and compulsory exercise, runs the risk of pushing Mumbai and Maharashtra back on registration compliance. India has not yet reached a 100 per cent mark in birth registration. Besides as UNICEF tells us “Birth registration is an essential prerequisite for legal identity and the fulfilment of children’s rights. By registering children at birth and providing a birth certificate – a passport to lifelong protection – their exposure to rights violations are minimized and their access to essential services are enabled.” Moreover, a “Functioning civil registration systems are the main vehicles through which a legal identity for all can be achieved. Such systems produce vital statistics, including those on birth registration, which are foundational for achieving sustained human and economic development. While most countries have mechanisms in place for registering births, systematic recording remains a serious challenge, highlighting the urgent need to improve and strengthen civil registration and vital statistics.”

Governance failure reframed as security crisis

Several media reports note technical glitches in the central registration portal and backlog accumulation during certain periods. Administrative dysfunction, however, is being reframed as evidence of organised foreign infiltration. This shift deflects attention from institutional reform toward securitised spectacle.

If undocumented migration is indeed a pressing concern, the responsibility for border management lies with the Union government. Municipal cancellation of certificates does not resolve border control failures. It cannot be ignored that the political spotlight on alleged “illegal Bangladeshis” coincides with the BJP’s control of the civic body — raising questions about whether document fraud is being instrumentalised as a governance narrative.

The constitutional stakes

Birth certificates are foundational identity documents. They enable access to education, healthcare, property rights, and citizenship documentation. When the state transforms their issuance into a policing exercise infused with demographic suspicion, it risks eroding procedural fairness and equal protection.

Fraud must be investigated. Officials who acted beyond their statutory authority must face consequences. But the line between lawful scrutiny and discriminatory overreach is thin — and easily crossed when political messaging foregrounds nationality rather than administrative integrity.

The current measures in Maharashtra, as reflected across reporting by press and media mentioned above, reveal more than a crackdown on paperwork irregularities. They illustrate how bureaucratic processes can become sites of political contestation — and how civil documentation regimes, if weaponised, can deepen rather than resolve anxieties around migration and belonging.

In the long term, the integrity of the registration system will depend not on securitised rhetoric, but on transparent procedures, clear statutory limits, accountability mechanisms, and a firm commitment to non-discrimination. Without these safeguards, the tightening of norms risks tightening something far more fragile: the constitutional promise of equal protection under law.

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Deported in Silence: India’s mass expulsions of alleged Bangladeshis without due process

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Between 1983 and 2012, over 3,03,000 Sri Lankan Tamils entered India in four distinct waves, as documented in the 2023 report After 40 Years, Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India Need Durable Solutions. Today, according to the Ministry of Home Affairs’ Annual Report (2023–24), more than 57,000 remain in refugee camps in Tamil Nadu and Odisha, while nearly 33,000 reside outside camps in Tamil Nadu.

These figures represent not a transient population but a settled community spanning generations. Many arrived as children in the 1980s. Many more were born in India. Among them are nearly 29,500 Indian-origin Tamils — descendants of plantation workers taken to Ceylon under British rule — whose citizenship questions were supposedly addressed under the 1964 Sirimavo-Shastri Pact. Yet decades later, many remain effectively stateless.

The humanitarian emergency of 1983 has become a structural condition of rightlessness.

From solidarity to suspicion

In the early years, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees were received with empathy in Tamil Nadu. Shared language, culture, and ethnicity fostered a sense of kinship. Refuge was extended not merely as policy but as solidarity.

That political climate shifted dramatically after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by LTTE operatives. Public sentiment hardened. Administrative vigilance intensified.

Non-camp refugees were moved into camps. Surveillance mechanisms were strengthened. Identity checks became routine. Refugees report periodic inspections requiring them to be physically present in camps for verification. The implicit message is clear: their presence remains conditional.

Although the Tamil Nadu government provides monthly financial assistance, the support is subsistence-level. Refugees are permitted to work outside camps, yet their formal classification as “foreigners” bars them from property ownership, government employment, political participation, and long-term financial security. Many educated refugees are confined to informal or precarious labour.

The camps are not detention centres — but neither are they spaces of dignity. They are administrative enclosures sustained by indefinite temporariness.

Repatriation as a hollow promise

The end of Sri Lanka’s civil war in 2009 theoretically opened the door to voluntary repatriation. In practice, it has not functioned as a meaningful solution.

The 2023 refugee report notes that despite the Sri Lankan government forming a committee in 2022 to facilitate returns, only a negligible number of refugees had repatriated by early 2023. UNHCR data similarly reflect extremely low return rates.

The reasons are layered. Economic instability in Sri Lanka persists. Many refugees lost land, documentation, and livelihoods. War trauma remains unresolved. For second-generation refugees born in India, Sri Lanka is not a lived homeland but a distant inheritance.

Media interviews in The Hindu and other national outlets consistently indicate that an overwhelming majority prefer integration in India over repatriation. After forty years, return is no longer a practical aspiration for most. It is a formal option detached from social reality.

Legal Limbo: Protection without belonging

For decades, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees were technically classified as “illegal migrants” under India’s foreigner laws because they entered without valid passports or visas. This label carried the theoretical risk of detention or deportation.

The Immigration & Foreigners (Exemption) Order, 2025, issued under the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, removed penal liability for registered Sri Lankan Tamils who entered on or before January 9, 2015. This administrative step eliminated criminal exposure and softened the “illegal migrant” stigma.

However, the Order did not recognize them as refugees. It did not confer residency rights. It did not open a pathway to citizenship. They remain legally classified as foreigners — without nationality, without passports, without full civil identity.

The relief is procedural, not transformative.

The CAA and the politics of exclusion

The 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) fast-tracked Indian citizenship for persecuted non-Muslim minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Sri Lankan Tamils were excluded from its scope.

This exclusion has drawn sustained criticism. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), in an affidavit before the Supreme Court, argued that the CAA is discriminatory in limiting its protection to three countries and six religions while excluding Tamil refugees who fled ethnic persecution. Reporting by The Hindu has highlighted these constitutional objections.

The Union Government has defended the CAA as a narrowly tailored law addressing specific historical circumstances. Yet the omission of Sri Lankan Tamils raises uncomfortable questions. If the moral justification of the CAA is protection of persecuted minorities, why exclude those who fled one of the longest ethnic conflicts in South Asia?

The selective humanitarianism embedded in the CAA exposes a deeper inconsistency in India’s refugee governance.

Naturalization blocked in practice

In theory, the Citizenship Act, 1955 allows naturalization after eleven years of residence. In practice, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees have faced administrative barriers.

A 1986 Ministry of Home Affairs communication reportedly instructed state authorities not to process naturalization applications of Sri Lankan refugees who arrived after July 1983. Though rarely debated publicly, this directive has effectively frozen citizenship claims for decades.

Thus, while the statute appears neutral, policy implementation has been exclusionary. Refugees who have lived in India for thirty or forty years remain without a viable path to citizenship.

Judicial Interventions: Islands of relief

The Madras High Court has periodically disrupted this inertia. In February 2023, Justice G. R. Swaminathan delivered a notable judgment directing the issuance of passports to individuals born in India under Section 3 of the Citizenship Act, which grants citizenship by birth for those born between 1950 and 1987 irrespective of parental nationality.

In other case, in October 2022, the High Court bench of Justice G. R. Swaminathan recommended that principles underlying the CAA could logically extend to Sri Lankan Hindu Tamils, describing them as victims of racism.

These interventions offer relief to individual petitioners and expose bureaucratic rigidity. Yet they remain case-specific. They cannot substitute for systemic reform.

Security concerns and collective suspicion

Authorities often cite concerns about residual LTTE ideology among sections of the refugee population. Over the years, some arrests have been made in connection with alleged smuggling or revivalist activity.

Security considerations are legitimate. However, collective exclusion based on historic militancy is disproportionate. Democratic governance requires distinguishing between individual criminal conduct and community identity.

Other countries with large Sri Lankan Tamil diasporas — including Canada and the United Kingdom — have managed security screening while still granting citizenship. Security vetting and integration are not mutually exclusive.

To indefinitely withhold rights from an entire refugee population due to past insurgency risks converting precaution into discrimination.

The stateless generation

Perhaps the most compelling dimension of this crisis is generational. Thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu were born in India. They studied in Indian schools, speak with local accents, and participate in local economies.

Yet they cannot vote. They cannot hold secure title to property. They cannot access the full range of civil and political rights guaranteed to citizens.

They are not transient outsiders. They are socially embedded but legally excluded. Their condition is neither classic refugeehood nor voluntary migration. It is structural statelessness.

Matua identity cards, CAA camps and the politics of assurance in Bengal

In Thakurnagar in North 24 Parganas — the spiritual headquarters of the Matua community — the year of 2025 witnessed scenes that resemble a political mobilisation drive as much as a religious gathering. Loudspeakers make repeated announcements, volunteers sit behind rows of wooden desks scrutinising Aadhaar cards and voter IDs, and long queues of men and women wait under plastic sheets clutching old refugee papers. What is being distributed is not merely a card, but a promise — or at least the suggestion — of protection.

Ground reports, including detailed coverage by The Wire, describe how camps run by factions of the All India Matua Mahasangha are issuing “Matua eligibility cards” and “Hindu identity cards.” Applicants pay ₹50 or ₹100, submit photographs and identification documents, and are told that possession of these cards will make it easier to apply under the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

The camps are associated with leaders aligned with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), including Union Minister of State for Ports, Shipping and Waterways Shantanu Thakur and his brother Subrata Thakur — descendants of the Matua founding family tracing back to reformer Harichand Thakur. As reported by The Wire, differently coloured cards (pink and yellow) are being issued by rival factions, each presented as proof of Matua and Hindu identity.

Legally, these cards are not citizenship documents. They do not confer nationality, voting rights, or statutory recognition under the Citizenship Act. Yet thousands are lining up to obtain them.

Electoral anxiety and the promise of protection

The surge in applications is unfolding against the backdrop of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal. The revision exercise has triggered widespread anxiety among refugee-origin communities who lack older documentation or whose names were missing in previous electoral revisions.

In this climate of uncertainty, the BJP has framed the CAA as a shield. In December 2025, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, speaking in Kolkata, publicly assured the Matua community that individuals who have applied for citizenship under the CAA would retain their voting rights and need not fear disenfranchisement. Media reports quoted him as reiterating that refugees from religious persecution would be protected and treated as citizens.

These assurances carry considerable political weight. The Matuas — largely Namasudra Hindus who migrated from East Pakistan and Bangladesh — constitute one of Bengal’s most influential Scheduled Caste communities. Concentrated in districts such as Nadia and North 24 Parganas, they play a decisive role in dozens of assembly constituencies. The BJP’s gains in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in Matua-dominated belts were widely attributed to its citizenship plank. However, subsequent state and panchayat elections indicated shifting loyalties, making continued consolidation electorally significant as fresh polls approach.

The visible intensity of the certificate drives — the public messaging, digitisation desks, and symbolic use of religious space — suggests that citizenship outreach is not occurring in a vacuum. It is unfolding in synchrony with electoral timing.

Symbolism, documentation and political strategy

For many Matua families, citizenship documentation has remained incomplete for decades. Some possess Aadhaar cards but lack legacy electoral roll entries. Others lost birth certificates long ago. The New Indian Express report highlighted cases such as that of Laturam Sikdar and Padma Sikdar in Nadia district, who reportedly received citizenship certificates after applying under the CAA framework following anxiety triggered by electoral roll revision announcements.

Such cases are cited by BJP leaders as proof that the CAA delivers security. At the same time, leaders of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) have questioned the legality of issuing religious certificates through private camps. As reported by The Wire, TMC MP Mamata Bala Thakur has argued that the Citizenship Act does not require any religious certificate issued by a socio-religious body and accused the BJP of collecting documents from vulnerable communities under misleading assurances.

The fees collected, the absence of statutory backing for the cards, and the overlap between religious identity and electoral messaging have intensified scrutiny. Yet for many in the queues, legal nuance is secondary. In an environment where documentation determines belonging, even unofficial paper can feel like insurance.

Selective urgency and the Sri Lankan Tamil contrast

The developments in Thakurnagar acquire deeper significance when viewed alongside another long-standing refugee question in India — that of Sri Lankan Tamils in Tamil Nadu.

For over four decades, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees — many of whom fled ethnic persecution during the civil war involving the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — have lived in camps in Tamil Nadu. As discussed earlier, over 57,000 remain in camps and tens of thousands more reside outside camps. Despite decades of residence, generations born in India, and repeated appeals by Tamil Nadu’s political leadership, they remain without a clear pathway to citizenship.

Notably, the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act excluded Sri Lankan Tamils from its fast-track naturalisation framework, even while extending protection to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The contrast is stark: while Matua Hindus from Bangladesh are being publicly assured that citizenship applications will safeguard their voting rights, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees — who have lived in India for up to forty years — continue to exist in legal limbo.

In West Bengal, citizenship drives are visible, vocal, and politically foregrounded as elections approach. In Tamil Nadu, long-settled refugee communities await structural reform without comparable urgency from the Union government.

This divergence raises uncomfortable questions about selective prioritisation. When citizenship becomes electorally salient, administrative energy appears to intensify. When communities lack equivalent electoral leverage at the national level, reform stagnates.

Citizenship as electoral currency

The Matua certificate camps in Thakurnagar reveal how citizenship, documentation, religion, and electoral politics intersect in contemporary India. For the community, the card represents reassurance against bureaucratic erasure. For the ruling party at the Centre, it consolidates a key voter base before polls. For opposition parties, it exemplifies the politicisation of identity and documentation.

But when placed alongside the unresolved plight of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, the contrast exposes a broader pattern: citizenship policy is not merely a humanitarian instrument — it is also an electoral strategy.

In one state, camps distribute identity cards amid public assurances of voting rights.
In another, refugees of forty years remain without statutory belonging.

Between these two realities lies a central question: Is India’s citizenship policy guided by uniform principles of protection and integration — or by political calculus shaped by the electoral map?

As state elections draw closer in Bengal, the queues in Thakurnagar are not just about paperwork. They are about power, protection, and the politics of belonging — a politics that appears far more urgent in some regions than in others.

A question of constitutional integrity

After forty years, the issue is no longer about temporary asylum. It is about justice, equality, and constitutional coherence.

The Immigration & Foreigners (Exemption) Order, 2025 removed criminal liability but not exclusion. The CAA fast-tracks citizenship — selectively. Naturalization exists in theory but is obstructed in practice. Political resolutions by Tamil Nadu’s government, led by M. K. Stalin, remain subject to Union discretion.

Protection without integration becomes containment. Containment without timeline becomes neglect.

Sri Lankan Tamils in India are no longer merely refugees seeking safety. They are a community woven into the social fabric of Tamil Nadu, awaiting formal recognition of what has long been a lived reality.

Forty years is not temporary protection. It is a generation denied belonging.

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The post From Permanent Refuge to Perpetual Limbo: Why Sri Lankan Tamil refugees remain without citizenship even as electoral assurances reshape belonging in Bengal appeared first on SabrangIndia.

By an opinion dated November 27, 2025, Foreigners’ Tribunal No. 5, Goalpara, presided over by Member N.K. Nath, declared that Anowara Khatun is an Indian citizen, answering the reference made by the Superintendent of Police (Border), Goalpara, in the negative.

The order brings to a close the said proceedings that originated over two decades ago and highlights persistent structural issues in Assam’s citizenship determination framework, particularly its impact on poor and marginalized women.

Team CJP Assam sits to discuss the case with Anowara Khatun and family outside their home in Assam

From IMDT to Foreigners’ Tribunal: A case born of institutional suspicion

Anowara’s case originated as far back as 2004, when the Superintendent of Police (Border), Goalpara referred her name under the now-defunct Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) Act, 1983, alleging that she had illegally entered India between 1966 and 1971. The referral admitted that the “doubt” arose because she could not immediately produce documents during verification — a familiar and deeply flawed basis used against the poor and illiterate.

Following the Supreme Court’s judgment in Sarbananda Sonowal v. Union of India (2005), which struck down the IMDT Act as unconstitutional, Anowara’s case was mechanically transferred to Foreigners’ Tribunal No. 5, Goalpara under the Foreigners Act, 1946, shifting the entire burden of proof onto her under Section 9.

Who is Anowara Khatun?

Anowara Khatun was born and raised in Kharda Manikpur (also recorded as Kharija Manikpur), Goalpara, Assam. She is the daughter of Late Alom Shah, a lifelong resident of Assam, and Korimon Nessa, and the granddaughter of Late Rose Mamud Shah. Documentary evidence showed that her father, Alom Shah, purchased land in Assam in 1947, 1952, and 1959. His name, along with that of Anowara’s mother, appears in the electoral rolls of 1966 and 1970, demonstrating their presence in Assam prior to the relevant cut-off dates.

Anowara studied up to Lower Primary level at Majgaon LP School, married Saiful Hussain of Mamudpur Part-I, and later settled in Sidhabari Part-II, where she has lived for decades. She first voted in 1985, and her name consistently appears in electoral rolls for 1985, 1997, 2005, 2011, and 2015.

Despite this, she was eventually marked a “D-Voter”, stripped of voting rights, and subjected to relentless suspicion — a fate shared by thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims in Assam.

Her personal circumstances make the cruelty of this process even more stark. Anowara suffers from mental imbalance and chronic health issues, lives in extreme poverty, has no proper bedding, and struggles daily for food and medical care. She and her husband survive on daily labour, entirely unequipped to navigate a legal system designed to break the poor.

CJP Steps In: Building a case where the State saw only suspicion

Recognising the grave injustice involved, Assam Team CJP took up Anowara’s case, committing to pursue it despite the enormous evidenti and procedural hurdles.

On behalf of Anowara, Advocate Ashim Mubarak, assisted by Advocate Shofior Rahman, and supported by CJP’s para-legal and community teams, presented a meticulous defence before the Tribunal.

Four defence witnesses were examined:

• DW-1: Anowara Khatun herself
• DW-2: Her brother, Kurban Ali
• DW-3: Her sister, Ambia Bibi
• DW-4: The Land Record Assistant, Matia Revenue Circle

CJP placed before the Tribunal a comprehensive documentary trail, including:

• Three registered land sale deeds executed in 1947, 1952, and 1959 in her father’s name
• Electoral rolls of 1966 and 1970, recording her parents as Indian voters
• Subsequent voter lists (1979, 1985, 1997, 2005, 2011, 2015) showing uninterrupted electoral presence
• Jamabandi and citha records proving inheritance of ancestral land in Assam

The Tribunal explicitly accepted that the land deeds were over 30 years old and required no further proof, and relied heavily on the voter lists of 1966 and 1970 to establish her father’s citizenship.

Even when Anowara’s deteriorating mental health made her continued presence difficult, CJP persisted with evidence and arguments, ensuring the case did not collapse under procedural cruelty.

Anowara Khatun with her husband and CJP Team Assam outside her home in Assam

The Tribunal’s Finding: Citizenship proven, suspicion rejected

After a detailed appreciation of evidence, the Tribunal held that:

• Alom Shah, Anowara’s father, was conclusively established as an Indian citizen, present in Assam since at least 1947
• Anowara, being his daughter, cannot be treated as a foreigner
• The state failed to rebut the overwhelming documentary record

The reference was therefore answered in the negative, and Anowara Khatun was declared not a foreigner, with directions issued to inform the Superintendent of Police (Border), Goalpara.

Anowara Khatun holding up the FT order outside her home in Assam

A system designed to break the poor

Anowara Khatun’s case is not an aberration — it is a window into a larger architecture of state oppression. Instruments such as D-Voter tagging, Foreigners’ Tribunals, NRC, detention camps, “push-backs,” the Passport Act, SR and SIR exercises operate together to produce statelessness among workers, farmers, minorities, and Bengali-speaking communities.

Assam has long served as a pilot project for citizenship stripping, but the same logic is now visible across India. Behind this bureaucratic machinery lie document-wars, midnight detentions, suicides, custodial deaths, and families torn apart — all in the name of identifying “Bangladeshis.”

India’s constitutional promise of secularism, dignity, and equality collapses when impoverished citizens are tortured for papers they were never equipped to preserve.

CJP’s Role: Law as resistance

At a time when the Chief Minister of Assam openly targets Muslims, spreads communal suspicion, and legitimises exclusion under the rhetoric of “illegal migration,” CJP continues to fight case by case, restoring citizenship through evidence, law, and persistence.

In the first week of February, members of Team CJP — State In-Charge Nanda Ghosh, DVM Goalpara Zeshmin Sultana, Community Volunteer Hasunir Rahman, and Office Driver Ashikul Hussain — stood by Anowara and her family, reaffirming that justice is not charity, but resistance.

Anowara Khatun’s victory is not just hers. It is a reminder that citizenship in India is increasingly something the poor must fight to prove, and that without sustained legal intervention, countless others will disappear into detention camps, deportation attempts, or silent graves.

This case stands as another testament to what determined legal solidarity can achieve — even in the face of a system designed to erase.

The complete order may be read here.

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The post From D-Voter Tagging to Citizenship Declaration: Anowara Khatun’s case before the foreigners’ tribunal appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Methodological Prologue: Theory as Lens, not Template

To be able to think caste within the same analytical field of reference as Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci— two intellectual giants who have left an indelible impression upon his generation—whose long shadows loom large over the landscape of modern Europe, demands a first-order methodological clarification. It is an undeniable premise that caste is uniquely South Asian, a totalising social system with a distinct ontology around indigenous cosmologies of purity, pollution and hierarchal interdependency. Its thinking, its historical trajectory and the experience it embodies can be only partially understood through terms drawn from European history such as class or feudalism or racism, as people like Gopal Guru, Sundar Sarukkai and Dalit Studies thinkers have never tired of insisting. To apply these categories would amount to an act of epistemic violence, the imposition of an artificial reality onto a queasy and never quite-fitting architecture that illuminates nothing but dims what appears from Indian soil, reiterating the colonial knowledge systems that sought once to solidify and regulate caste under alien rubrics. Such as it is, the critique of Eurocentrism isn’t merely an afterthought but a disciplinary sensibility tout court.

So, I provide an inversion in this engagement with Foucault and Gramsci. I am not trying to “apply” their theories to the Indian “case” (as if it were a case of universal concern) in order to fit caste into the Procrustean bed of their local historical referents (the clinic, the prison, the European factory or the making of the Italian nation-state). Rather, I seize their essential methodological insights as adaptable analytical heuristics for shedding light on an essentially novel object. Foucault’s dialectic of the scene and the obscene is indispensable if not as an explanation of European épistémès, at least for its sophisticate analytic tool for understanding how power arranges seeing and saying, produces zones of authorized words and tactical silence, articulates a frontier between what is audible and inaudible. And, once again, Gramsci’s idea of hegemony is not used as a theory of European class making but as a dynamic way to grasp the securing of domination through the construction of “common sense” and the combined action between coercion and consent. Within such a machine, theory is no longer a master narrative so much as an array of precision tools. I do this by deploying these instruments to dismantle the historically specific materiality of caste from its sacred roots to its colonial codification and postcolonial mutations making it possible for the specificity of the phenomenon itself to interrogate and remould the theoretical tools. This essay is then a thought experiment of a critical, situated translation. It deploys Foucauldian and Gramscian optics in order to illumine caste’s internal architecture, its historical transmogrification, while insisting that the image at which one arrives is thoroughly, irreducibly Indian and needs also to conjure up its own vocabulary even as it speaks a global language of power. 

Introduction: The Architectonics of Invisibility

One of the most enduring and complex systems of social stratification in the world—India’s caste system (varna-jati)—is found in the Indian subcontinent. Its analysis requires tools that can penetrate not only its economic or political aspects, but its deep entrenchment in the spheres of knowledge production, body and space. Michel Foucault’s conceptually rich dyad of the “scene”, (what is made visible, sayable and governable) and the “obscene” (that structurally figured beyond but which in its beyond-ness constitutes the scene) provides a powerful prism. When coupled with Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, the means by which ruling groups achieve consent via an ideological “common sense”, this set-up reveals how power functions not just through suppression but through careful organization of social reality itself.

This paper opines that the history of caste has to be considered as a history involving managing (or mismanagement) of this scene/obscene border. The shift from premodern India to modern makes for a seismic change in such tactics of management: from an integral sacral-political scene to a fragmented modern settlement, where the official defacement of caste on real constitutional law and its attendant discourse on the public scene is the very condition for its raucous (albeit often underhand) existence in that social obscene. In it, the dominant scientific and technological discourses on which the ‘normalisation’ of modern society is based cohabits uneasily with remnants of an archaic and pre-modern social universe intricately woven into a powerful hegemonic discourse that systematically normalizes denial akin to what we have called here the hermeneutics of caste. The analysis draws from, among others, works by Nicholas Dirks (2001), Anand Teltumbde (2014) and Gopal Guru (2016) to map this transition showing that contemporary caste should be best understood as a sort of social schizophrenia driven by imaginative acts whereby power perpetuates itself through a convoluted hermetic legitimising act in India.

I. The Integrated Premodern Scene: Inscription, Spectacle and Sacral Hegemony

The caste hierarchy was a relatively coherent and explicit “scene” in the precolonial and early colonial environment. Its effectiveness was based on its thoroughgoing visibility and its cosmological basis. This can be felt clearly through the texts and inscriptions of medieval India.

Case of the Chola Temple Inscriptions and the Smritichandrika: The walls of the temples in Chola period (approx. 9th-13th centuries) are not just structural, but are public records of the social scenario. That act of reciprocation is documented in countless inscriptions which record the details of gifts but also control in great detail the spatial and ritual order: which castes could offer which kinds of gift, how close they might reside to the temple, and what the penal fines would be if they broke faith. At the same time, codified legal digests such as Devanna Bhatta’s 13th-century Smritichandrika continued to systematise dharma for a wide range of varnas and jatis, dictating clothing and ornaments suitable for narrow groups and stipulating edible diets or respectable partners in marriage.

They are performances of sovereign power. The law was not concealed in statute books but carved onto the holiest public edifices. That made the caste system, already a great monument to human pettiness and pride, permanently, monstrously visible. The elaborately clothed body of the Brahmin (instituted with the sacred thread, instringent in particular fabrics) contrasted with the regulated “nakedness” or coarse apparel of those belonging to “lower castes” was a wearable map of social arrangement- status could be read at once on bodies. “Conjugable” was not private, but public, scripture-regulated machinery for the perpetuation of biology and society.

This was an order that was not only maintained through coercion. It was the centre of agrarian economic and ritual life. Writing caste duties on the walls, the ruling powers (the Chola king, Brahmin sabha) attached social status to divine will and royal command. What it did was not to punish, but explain, rationalise and naturalise. It was polished over by embedding caste inside a sanctified “common sense” in which following one’s svadharma was identified with piety, social tranquillity and karmic reward. Consent was produced by the reaffirmation of ritual incorporation and cosmological tale.

An opulent calligraphy of gleaming inscriptions is what this glittering scene silences. The manual, waste-dirty work of temple purification, cleaning, and waste management, labour assigned to the lower (in caste hierarchy) communities, was the necessary but repelled root. There they were a required obscenity, consigned to literal geographical peripheries (the cheri outside the village) in order to keep unsullied, the jatra’s pure centre. The violence required to maintain this order, whenever necessary, was a public spectacle in its own right, a Foucauldian “scene” of sovereign punishment that reaffirmed the parameters of the permissible.

The coherence of this “scene” can be better appreciated, and the premodern character of it more clearly identified, by consideration to a ritual control of everyday practices that makes hierarchy in large measure visible and ever self-evident. The very access to water for instance worked as a micro-theatre of caste power. Shudras and untouchables were forbidden to draw water from a common source that the Savarna castes drank. The prohibition was not just economical or hygienic, it was dramaturgical. The distance at which awaiting castes waited to receive water from above the threshold through a high-caste intermediary enacted hierarchy as embodied choreography. Here, power did its work not by abstract law alone, but through disciplined gestures and spatial distance and the policing of touch. The practice of pollution was practised time and again on the body, making domination a matter of course.

Temple Restrictions of Entry Again, temple entry restrictions circumscribe how the holy solidified the sightedness of the field. As a condensation of the cosmic arena for legitimacy, these were the gatekeepers to those who could and could not come near divinity itself but whose mere presence would cause ritual chaos. Therefore, being kept out of temple space was not just  marginalisation but rather the ontological disqualification from the moral order which organized village life. The untouchable body was constitutively “ob-scene”, that which was vulgar so as to be excluded from the sacred frame, and thus a figure of purity in the visible scene. But this exclusion, counter-intuitively, verified centrality: the system needed what it banished. Carcass removal, tanning and sanitation-labour were materially integral to the agricultural way of life, and that the obscene was not external to power but its hidden basis.

This paradox has the kind of echo that Foucault will say later, that power creates what it seemingly excludes. The untouchable was, then, not simply oppressed but discursively produced as pollutant, essential to the symbolic unity of Brahmanical purity. Visibility and invisibility therefore comprised one and the same machine. Although his labour was required to be concealed in the sacred space of ritual, it was common for punitive violence against him to become hyper-visible. Public flogging, forced parade or head-shaving was used as exemplary scenes; measures which were not so much punishments for the individual violator but white lines re-drawn in the scene for all its observers. Acts of sovereign violence, in this respect, reconfigured ritual order by sporadic eruption into theatrical display.

But coercion alone cannot account for the endurance of this structure. Hegemony in Gramsci’s sense explains how domination hardened into “common sense.” The karmic reading of suffering converted structural inequality into a moral story: One’s birth deserved, one’s duty redemptive. Most importantly, this imagination was not the prerogative solely of the dominant castes. The participation of the subalterns in ritual hierarchies, through service function in festivals, acceding to hereditary occupation or practicing endogamy indicates to what extent voluntary and coercive approaches were complementary. This was not passive belief, but lived practice that was realised through kinship, worship and toil.

At the same time, however, that premodern scene was never perfectly sealed. Bhakti movements in various regions periodically disrupted the ritual hierarchy by emphasising devotional equality and vernacular expression. Literary figures like Ravidas or Nandanar made religious claims that transcended caste lines, briefly disturbing the visibility of the status quo. Even these challenges, however, were frequently absorbed (or re-absorbed), their radical potential domesticated within particularities of tradition. This ability to absorb demonstrates the strength of hegemonic formations: protest could be recognised symbolically without altering the material basis of hierarchy.

Here, the premodern caste order is not merely a system of hardened stratification but a staged totality through which space, body, work, force and belief converged aesthetically. The Foucauldian pairing of scene and obscene demonstrates the need for purity to be premised upon exclusion, as well as how visibility became a mode of discipline, while the Gramscian lens helps us understand that the long half-life was driven by moral internalization and quotidian consent. Together they reveal a system whose stability was founded on portraying hierarchy as both sacred and natural, a portrayal that subsequent historical developments would gradually start to undo, but not without enormous effort.

II. The Colonial Interregnum: Re-Scenography, Biopower and Taxonomic Hegemony

With the beginning of colonial governance, a significant change occurred. The British colonial state, a modern bureaucratic state at work, wanted to know, categorise and govern its subjects, effectively transforming the performance of caste.

Case of the 1901 Census and Risley’s Anthropometry: The Census, especially under Superintendent Herbert Risley, turned into one of the effective colonising projects. Risley tried to confer a “scientific” legitimacy on caste hierarchy through the use of anthropometry (the measuring of nasal indexes, skull shapes and other bodily features) to construct a racial taxonomy of Indian castes. This information was then used to generate all-India rankings for caste status. This was biopolitics in the pure, administrative state. Power worked in the colonial state by treating the Indian as an object to know, measure, and categorize. The caste became a fixed category rather than the fluid groups of jati relations that it had been, as well as an enumerated and pan-Indian taxonomy, a trope of colonial “governmentality” (Dirks 2001). The muddled local logic of purity/pollution was transformed into a clean, bureaucratic chart. This gave rise to a new all-India “scene” for caste: the statistical report, the ethnographic survey, the gazetteer. The ritual body became a racialised or datafied body.

This scene of bureaucracy had far-reaching hegemonic implications. In cataloguing (and ranking) castes so consistently, the Census rendered new identities that groups came to accept even as they fought them. It laid the groundwork for caste-based political organisation, as represented in the Non-Brahmin Manifesto of Madras (1916) or in the demands for separate electorates. The strategy of the colonial state was one of “divide and rule,” but it did so by offering the vocabulary, among the enumerated caste identity, through which political claims could be made. It fragmented older, more local solidarities and forced a re-configuration of the political terrain along these freshly rigidified lines.

In fact, this act of scientific observation ushered in an obscene that was entirely new. The native logic of purity/pollution, the “scene” which could be publicly declared is now called by the colonial “civilising” eye primitive, irrational and obscene to modernity. The colonial state could thus present itself as a modernising referee, underling proving to the world that it was not some backward social order the British had themselves rendered calcified. The “native obscenity” of caste practices became the rationale for the colonial mission, just as the colonial economy frequently solidified caste-based divisions of labour.

Colonial rule did not just “disperse” (de Kiewiet’s word) the prehistoric caste “scene”; it re-staged its appearance through its interventions in western technology of knowledge, and techniques of administration and surveillance. If the previous order was premised on ritual spectacle and cosmological legitimacy, colonial modernity made caste legible as an object of bureaucratic reason. Authority was transformed from the dramatic practice of impurity to its less conspicuous, but more far-reaching, work of sorting and classifying. In Foucauldian terms, there was a substitution of sovereignty for governmentality: the village stage of hierarchy was slowly but never entirely replaced by that of archive, census table and legal code.

And enumeration was central to this transformation. Colonial census, from the end of the 19th century onwards, attempted to freeze caste identities into universal pan-Indian categories. What had been a locally contingent and regionally flexible hierarchy became interpretable to the state through lists, schedules and ethnographic description. This act of naming was not neutral. In forcing the community to map onto certain fixed classificatory grids, the colonial state both reinforced and naturalised caste. The scene was not just spatial and ritual; it had turned statistical. From the village square, visibility moved onto the bureaucratic paper. The hidden ‘obscene’ here was not just secret labour, but the insecurity and indeterminacy of everyday caste relations, just what enumeration aspired to hide.

The law additionally re-fashioned the grammar of hierarchy. Colonial law did not assimilate such norms of Dhar­mashastras to create “Hindu Law” but the principles selectively codified in colonial jurisprudence and statutes, transformed Brahmanical textual traditions into enforceable legal standards. But this juridification introduced an unintended ambivalence. On the one hand, it consolidated some structures of endogamy or patrimonial inheritance and, on the other hand, made possible certain space for contestation. Instead, pursuing cases in court and challenging bureaucratic rulings or attempting legal reform created new sites for subordinated groups to express grievance. Power was less visibly violent, but more extensively inscribed in institutional procedure. Foucauldian discipline supplanted sovereign terror, at the same time as older types of social coercion remained a reality.

Meanwhile, colonial political economy transformed the economic basis of caste. Monetisation, commercialisation of agriculture and a new exposure to labour mobility disrupted hereditary occupations to an extent. Emigration to plantations, railways or cities created scenarios in which ritual oversight was diluted and anonymity expanded. These spaces didn’t eliminate caste, but they broke the hermetic unity of the premodern set. Hierarchy had to be re-made in unfamiliar landscapes, creating new solidarities along with new exclusions. The obscene, once exiled from the village borders, began to seep back in through developing public forms, often in submerged or indirect ways.

Gramscian hegemony likewise underwent mutation. The karmic “common sense” which previously helped to naturalize hierarchy faced rival ideological formations: missionary critiques, liberal ideas of equality, print-mediated reform movements and pre-modern anti-caste intellectual traditions. Cosmology alone could no longer determine consent, it had to be negotiated in the languages of rights, representation and progress. But hegemony did not disappear; it was transformed. Domination groups re-articulated caste privilege through discourses of tradition, community autonomy or social order that translated ritual authority into cultural capital in the colonial public- sphere. What emerged was not rupture but re-arrangement: An older hierarchy learned to speak new idioms.

More importantly, the colonial moment created conditions for a systematic anti-caste politics. Access to education, print circulation and associational life facilitated figures like Jotirao Phule and later B.R. Ambedkar to unveil the hidden underpinning of social order. Their criticisms made visible that which had been structurally hidden for so long, the historical making of caste inequality. In Foucauldian terms, new counter-discourses challenged the regime of truth supporting hierarchy; in Gramscian terms, subaltern groups revolted for moral-intellectual hegemony. The very scene itself became a battleground not one that was divinely settled.

Colonial modernity then should be neither mistaken for sheer continuity nor for simple break. It eclipsed spectacle with surveillance, ritual fixity with bureaucratic classification and karmic inevitability with ideological contest. But that dialectic of inside-outside, the mobile frontier between scene and obscene endured in the new guise. Caste lived by infiltrating modern institutions, even as the very same institutions nurtured the forces that would eventually question its legitimacy. The oneness of the pre-modern theatre was broken, and what followed was a much more complex and unstable stage for caste drama to develop.

III. The Postcolonial Modern: Schizophrenia, Eruptions and the Hegemony of Denial

The founding of the Indian republic was a script most thrillingly re-written of the scene/obscene dialectic. Inspired by liberal democracy and led by a modernising elite, this new nation-state wanted to make a complete break with the past. And India’s public, legal “scene” was dramatically re-scripted. The framework of the Constitution, authored under B.R. Ambedkar, a Dalit jurist deeply critical of caste, effectively banished it as obscene to the political-juridical order. Articles 15, 17 (which destroyed untouchability) and the guarantee of equality before the law erected a new platform that transformed individuals into citizen, rather than caste subject. The reservation policies (Articles 15(4), 16(4)) became a temporary, exceptional instrument in this stage, as corrective historical justice until achieving the final goal of “Join Casteless India”. The rhetoric of secular nationalism and, later, that of neoliberal meritocracy helped create a public sphere in which caste was meant to be sloughed off in the interests of national or consumer identity.

Caste, however, did not vanish. It had strategically migrated from the public-sacral scene to the privatised, affective, and social “obscene.” This obscene is no negative empty but a powerfully busy shadow stage. Endogamy would still be the strongest fortress. As sociologist G. Shah (2002) and others have shown, the “c­onjugable/u­nc­onjugable” binary flourishes in the private domain of family alliances, matrimonial ads, and community networks concealed from the law’s scrutiny. Purity/pollution practices can draw back into the private and daily life, who in principle may enter the kitchen, share a water glass, sit as an equal at a meal. These are not officially recorded, but they are vital to social reproduction. In contemporary institutions, the corporate office, the university, elite social clubs, caste operates as though it’s based on race and class, if by its own ecosystem of social capital and unspoken biases. The Dalit expert may be officially welcome on the corporate stage, but exclusion thrives in the obscene of informal circuits and cultural codes (such as hearing a last name). Anand Teltumbde (2010) calls this the “persistence of caste” in new, “camouflaged” versions in hitherto seemingly-casteless modern sites. Lynchings, social humiliations and caste-based rapes are not vestiges of a pre-modern past. They are modern obscene eruptions, as scholars such as Kalpana Kannabiran contend. They are frequently sparked, as others have also noted, by a perception of Dalits “overstepping” their bounds, owning land, riding horseback, sporting a moustache or falling in love across castes. Recorded on cell phones and disseminated through the social media, this violence is at once secret in its execution and hyper-visible in its sharing, revealing the brutal truth that the official scene seeks to deny.

The dominant casts in modern India have had a project: to naturalise the split. The new “common sense” is an aggressive discourse of the successful erasure of caste: “Caste doesn’t matter anymore,” “We are all casteless now,” “Only the backward castes talk about caste.” To talk about pervasive caste discrimination is characterised as “playing the caste card”, an obscene game of etching a primitive poison into the modern body politic. This is the hegemony that allows dominant caste persons to populate public spaces as generalised liberal individuals, free from caste bias while their social and intimate worlds are structured through caste power. It vulgarises the systemic character of caste to analysis, when it is reduced into ‘incidents’ alone or individual prejudices.

Case 1: The Khairlanji Massacre (2006): At Khairlanji town of Maharashtra wherein a Dalit family- the Bhotmanges—was lynched and women were sexually violated before they were murdered. The flash point was their testimony in a police case and the perceived social disobedience of owning property and being educated. Khairlanji is not a remnant of the archaic: it is a contemporary obscene explosion. The violence was not a spectacle of sovereign power but a secret, community-approved atrocity, later brought to light through the media and activism. It was a bid to violently re-assert a weakening local hegemony. By using the tools of modernity (courts, education, land titles), the Bhotmanges broke the “common sense” of Dalit acceptance by demanding subordination. The massacre was a demonstration to force a restoration of that “common sense.” The State’s initial reticence in using the PoA Act[1] was very much present. An alternate dialectic reveals: the progressive law (integral to constitutional scene) was subverted by the police, who were seeing it as a local arm of an obscene social order. The massive Dalit protests that followed were a counter-hegemonic gesture, dragging the obscene out of the closet and into the national eye-scape, compelling the official scene to abandon its hollow bromides and reckon with the violence it had rendered invisible.

Case 2: Corporate India and Duality of the Sabhya-Gavva: In the glass-and-steel offices of Bangalore or Gurgaon, it’s a different story. The office is a place of casteless modernity, it is run by HR (human resource) manuals and meritocratic ideology and professional dress codes. Here, caste is officially obscene; to mention it is a breach of professional etiquette. But it flourishes in the obscene of social capital (Teltumbde, 2010): weekend resorts gupshup, references and mentor chains; and crucially, ‘off-siting’ matrimonial alliances. Attempts to bring the Dalit professional into the elite corporate fold abound but they are not part of these obscene networks driving genuine career mobility and cultural identity. The hegemonic “common sense” is strong: “We don’t see caste here.” Such is the hegemony of caste, the many-layered monopoly by which privilege functions when you are a dominant caste, that it can reproduce itself updated to the gilled hilt with practised ease like no other marauding bandit – and all Dalit assertion of identity or complaint about bias can be counterpoised not as an obscenity but even better – since there’s always a reason why an obscenity cannot be effective enough in its monstrosity: casted as something that comes from ob-scoot-ated couches. This is the crowning achievement of modern caste schizophrenia: an absolute disconnection between the formal scene of liberal equality and the informal obscene of caste-reinforcing sociability.

Independence and the acceptance of a new constitution did not so much lead to the death of caste as to a transformation in the means adopted by it. If colonial modernity banished ritual spectacle in favour of bureaucratic classification, the postcolonial state ushered in a new grammar of visibility mediated by democracy, rights and representation. Caste was no longer publicly exalted in the form of sacred hierarchy; it now existed in the juridical idiom of egalitarianism and administrative calculus of reservations. The stage went from the village square and census archive to the courtroom, legislature, and electoral arena. But this transformation did not erase the old boundary of scene and obscene, it transformed it.

The explicit abjuration of untouchability and fundamental rights in the Constitution was a symbolic break with Brahmanical social ontology. In other Foucauldian terms, a new regime of truth was articulated: caste discrimination became something that it is illegal to speak about, but something that persists. That created a paradox of democratic visibility. Dalit presence in educational institutions, government bureaucracy, Parliament indicated an entry into the national scene, but leaves a lot of mediation through categories of injury, backwardness and compensatory justice. The reservation system, which is and was both re-distributive and emancipatory of caste identity, necessitated –for its operation– ongoing administrative naming of caste identity. By this, the very mechanism proposed to erode hierarchy itself re-inscribed caste within state knowledge. Visibility (to use the title of a good read) became two-edged: recognition and regulation.

This ambivalence is indicative of the larger movement from sovereign or disciplinary power toward what Foucault named bio-political administration. The post-colonial state manages its populations through welfare, quotas, development programmes and statistical surveillance. Caste in these instances is neither simply ritual nor only juridical, but becomes a demographic for techniques of governance. The obscene is no longer the occult labour that sustains ritual purity, but the residue of structural degradation that survives beneath the language of formal equality. Day-to-day violence—social boycott, atrocities, denial of access to housing or marriage networks—is frequented in a domain beyond the spectacular optics of national democracy, where it appears as exception rather than rule. What cannot be incorporated into this story of progress is relegated to the fringe of visibility.

Hegemony, as in Gramsci, thereby assumes a new form. The national promise of unity, development and democratic citizenship generates a strong ‘common sense’ that situates caste as a left-over social problem being slowly dissolved by the process of modernisation. This story line allows for some reform but overcomes more radical change. Dominant castes adjust by converting historical privilege into educational capital, bureaucratic power and management of local political establishments. Hegemony now moves away from ritual superiority to meritocratic language; inequality is no longer described using karma, but as the result of competition, culture, or efficiency. You win consent not so much by theology as by the aspirational rhetoric of the nation-state.

But the post-colonial picture is also one of an un-anticipated countervailing assertion. Dalit protests, Ambedkarite politics, literary publics and mass mobilizations turn humiliation into a collective critique. Public conversion ceremonies, acts of remembrance and symbolic appropriations of public space such as university campuses or spaces of atrocity re-perform the terrain from which Dalits were once confined. In Foucaldian parlance, subjugated knowledge systems explode into discourse questioning the neutrality of law and development. In Gramscian terms, these struggles are driven not only to inclusion but to moral-intellectual leadership capable of redefining the very order. Democracy doubles as instrument of regulation and terrain of insurgency.

This visibility is also complicated by both media and modern popular culture. Caste now whirls through television debates, digital activism, electoral rhetoric and bureaucratic documentation. The scene widens to a national and ever more virtual canvas. But growth is not the same as change. This is the realm of spectacular, and sometimes scripted, moments of outrage which can be simultaneous with banal indifference, giving rise to what could be termed a politics of intermittent visibility- caste appears dramatically in crisis and disappears back into normalcy. The obscene endures right in this several back and forth.

The postcolonial condition, then, is to be understood as a dynamic antagonism [rather than resolution]. Inherited hierarchy is contested by constitutional morality, but is also constantly re-articulated through social practice. Caste becomes subject to critique under democratic inclusion, even as administrative governance secures its categories. Power works less by oppressive and direct prohibition than by selective recognition; hegemony less by naturalised order than by promised development. It is not the distinction between scene and obscene that disappears, but rather becomes mobile, contested and historically contingent.

On this slippery ground, caste endures not as immobile tradition but as malleable entity materialised in modern institutions. Its strength is its adaptability; its weakness, the very visibility that democracy requires. The postcolonial stage then sets the stage for the contemporary moment, where neoliberal recalibration, digital moderation and new identity politics will once again realign what is visible, sayable and contestable in caste’s name.

IV. The Contemporary Neoliberal-Digital Scene: Circulation, Concealment, and Algorithmic Power

The late modern and early postmodern era represents another re-organization of caste’s scene of action, one related to neoliberal financialization, ever-faster urban transformation and digital communication. If the postcolonial constitutional order made caste visible in the languages of rights and welfare, neoliberal modernity deflects attention to markets, mobility, and privatised aspiration. Power increasingly functions by means of circulation rather than repression: capitalist, informational or affective flows transform social existence. In this terrain, caste does not vanish; it mutates, finding solace in infrastructures that seemingly are formal and neutral. The scene becomes diffuse, meshed and not entirely transparent.

Urban anonymity at first appeared to hold the promise of eroding inherited hierarchy. This was a society of skill, and with the migration to metropolitan labour markets, service economies now expanding, and meritocratic competition as the order of the business day it was implied a world governed by skill rather than by birth. But a closer look shows that caste does indeed change in response to these conditions through more subtle forms of recognition and exclusion. The segregation of housing in both the formal and informal real-estate markets, matrimonial advertisements coded by surnames and community markers, professional networks organized around kinship: All are reminders of how caste survives beneath the surface equality of contract. Free choice is, quite often, the cover for inherited social capital. In the Foucauldian sense, discipline becomes internalized as self-improvement: people structure their education, language and behaviour to mimic upper-caste cultural models. Power functions through aspiration.

This paradox of visibility and obscurity is only magnified by digital media. Social media, internet archives and digital journalism created, and continues to create, new Dalit self-presentation, memory-making and political mobilization. Stories of discrimination spread quickly and turn localised instances of pain into national or global conversations. Hashtag activism, digital memorialisation and virtual community building generate new counter-publics that challenge hegemonic narratives of caste vanishing. Subaltern knowledges gain a technological magnification, attempting to recall Foucaultian perceptions of the growth of discourse as a place for resistance.

Yet it is precisely these digital infrastructures that produce new forms of obscuration. Algorithmic sorting, datagov and platform economies all function through categories that look caste-blind even though they frequently reproduce historical inequality. Bandwidth access, linguistic capital, digital literacy, and social networks are variously unevenly distributed such that who can speak and what differences ultimately get heard is formed accordingly. Online anonymity can obscure caste identity, but it also opens the doors to a revival of abuse, harassment and symbolic violence stripped from responsibility. And so once more the obscene moves: not invisible work outside the ritual space, nor systematic humiliation under constitutional equality, but coded replication of hierarchy within seemingly neutral technological systems.

Neoliberal political economy also recasts Gramscian hegemony. Developmental nationalism is displaced by entrepreneurial individualism, with success recast in terms of personal realization rather than collective redistribution. This is an ideological shift that pulls the rug from under solidarity-based politics, while eclipsing structural constraint. Dominant caste privilege is reformulated as excellence, professionalism or global-competitiveness. Today, it is not through moral doctrine (as ideology) that hegemony functions but through desire: the desire for upward mobility within market society. Consent is obtained by promising the irrelevance of caste when in fact, material divisions remain.

Simultaneously, counter-hegemonic energies take on new shapes. Dalit entrepreneurship, trans-national mobilization, inter-sectional alliances, and cultural production in literature, film, and digital art re-invent dignity beyond the abjection of victimhood or what Geisser calls state-replaced recognition. Memory turns into political technology: archives of atrocity, commemoration of historical resistance, re-imagining Ambedkarite thought travel across geographies to confront neoliberal amnesia. These operations are not content with coming in from the outside: they want to redraw the lines of its deck, show us the hidden continuities between ritualized past and digital present.

The result is that the present period is one not of stability but rather of heightened contradiction. Caste is there and it is not; submerged in words while floating above them, crushed and dispersed in the personal but ominous in its structural totality, sundered across experience but knit tightly through data. The Foucauldian analysis shows that there is a move towards power as dispersed and infrastructural – algorithmic, not spectacular – while the Gramscian emphasises a hegemonic order built on aspiration, consumption and selective memory. The line between scene and obscene is constantly reconfigured by media circulation and political contestation.

In this neoliberal-digital formation, caste continues because it is able to occupy invisibility and exploit visibility: become visible when mobilised, disappear when asked. Its fate will rest on whether emerging counter-publics are able to change technological exposure into structure-changing possibilities, converting sporadic oppositional outcry’s to new moral-intellectual leadership. The drama of caste, far from being over, therefore moves on to a stage where power itself is more and more ethereal, and the fight to make inequality observable becomes the primary political act.

Anand Teltumbde’s analysis of caste’s “camouflaged” persistence provides a powerful lens for understanding the modern obscene. As he argues, “caste today is not what it appears to be. It has shed its religious garb and put on the secular attire of modernity” (Teltumbde 2010, 23). This insight resonates deeply with the Foucauldian scene/obscene dialectic: caste thrives precisely because it has migrated from the visible ritual scene to the hidden networks of social capital, professional networking, and matrimonial alliance. The corporate office that publicly celebrates meritocracy while privately excluding Dalits from informal mentorship networks exemplifies this schizophrenic condition. Yet Teltumbde’s Marxist commitments also remind us that this is not merely a matter of discourse or visibility: caste’s persistence is ultimately rooted in material control over land, capital, and labour. The scene/obscene dialectic, therefore, must be understood not as an alternative to materialist analysis but as a framework that reveals how power organises the visibility and invisibility of material exploitation itself.

V. Dalit Politics: Shattering the Proscenium Arch

It is possible to see the history of anti-caste resistance, from Jyotirao Phule’s radical philosophy through Ambedkarian revolutionary constitutionalism to today’s post-bahujan (radical) politics, as a prolonged struggle against this forced dialectic.

It may be noted that Dr. Ambedkar’s public burning of Manusmriti in 1927 was an archetypal act of shattering the sacred instrumentality constitutive of the old stage in scene making. In drafting the Constitution, he was seeking to reconstruct a new, fair scene from below. Dalit political and cultural assertion is, at bottom, a way of calling the obscene into the eye of the scene. The Bahujan political parties (such as the BSP party) emerging to prominence have put caste identity, previously considered a shame marker, on the national stage of the electoral politics for a source of pride and community mobilization. The taking of public space, a public scene which performs the exhibitionism of “dalitness” could be interpreted by authorities as a sign that dalits are trying to create some kind of counter-­public space. The “cattle meet festival” is striking in this regard, by publicly eating the meat deemed most polluting within Brahminical norms, activists force the unspeakable into public space, undermining the grammar of purity/pollution itself.

Dalit Studies, as it is being launched by veteran scholars such as Gopal Guru and others, does this important labour of theorising from the site of the obscene. It confronts the hegemonic “common sense” with a systematic recording and analysis of the lived experience of caste, not leaving it as anecdotal or passé.

VI. Synthesis and Conclusion: The Dialectic’s Enduring Grip and Its Cracks

The Foucauldian Gramscian analysis discovers that caste-modernity is not to be located in its end, but rather its strategic disintegration. Power circulates by keeping intact the gap between disavowing public scene and luminous private torque. The state’s role turns Janus-faced: progressive legislation that has made lives more livable and breathable in some ways, but that has also all too frequently, through institutional bias and political compromise, proved itself powerless to prevent obscene eruptions of violence.

This arrangement suits liberal democracy down to the ground, for it provides protection for the “private” sphere as an area beyond state interference and lets caste flourish there behind a screen of personal choice and cultural preference. It is also conducive to global capitalism, which can use caste-based social networks to control labour even as it floats a veneer of meritocratic neutrality.

But the dialectic is also an inherently unstable one. Every Khairlanji that turns into an issue of national interest, every corporate diversity report that whispers exclusion, every inter-caste marriage that invites ridicule is also a moment of rupture. In its varied avatars, it is Dalit politics that remains the sustained force challenging this division. The last struggle, as Ambedkar hoped, is not one for entry into the existing scene so much as to destroy the double stage itself, to establish a social order where the caste-based history and present are not some dirty secrets but an openly avowed basis for a common sense that is genuinely universalist and egalitarian. So long as that dialectic exists, caste in its morphed and schizophrenic form continues to survive.

(Note-An earlier version of this paper has appeared on SSRN E-Library, Elsevier.)

(The author teaches history at Shivaji College, University of Delhi. He can be reached at skandpriya@shivaji.du.ac.in)

References

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Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage, 1977.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers, 1971.

Guru, Gopal. Humiliation: Claims and Context. Oxford University Press, 2009.

Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai. The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Pandian, M.S.S. Brahmin & Non-Brahmin: Genealogies of the Tamil Political Present. Permanent Black, 2007.

Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. University of California Press, 2009.

Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonios. Zubaan, 2006.

Risley, H.H. (Sir). Census of India, 1901. Vol. I, India. Part I, Report. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903.

Teltumbde, Anand. The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid. Zed Books, 2010.

The Smritichandrika of Devanna Bhatta (Trans. J.R. Gharpure). 1948.

South Indian Inscriptions (Vol. III, Chola Inscriptions). Archaeological Survey of India.

[1] Prevention of Atrocities Act (1989)

Related:

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The post The Double Stage: Caste’s Schizophrenic Modernity between Spectacle and Shadow appeared first on SabrangIndia.

At the centre of the controversy are two distinct but intertwined developments:

1. AISA women leaders alleging verbal sexual abuse and threats inside and outside a police station. There are videos of this abuse circulating online
2. YouTuber Ruchi Tiwari claiming she was attacked by a mob of nearly 500 people while covering the protest.

As FIRs have been registered and political leaders have entered the fray, the struggle has increasingly shifted from what happened on campus to who controls the narrative of victimhood.

The Protest: UGC equity regulations and campus tensions

The protest on February 13 was organised by the All India Students’ Association (AISA) and allied groups demanding implementation of the University Grants Commission’s (Promotion of Equity in Higher Education Institutions) Regulations, 2026.

The regulations — intended to strengthen safeguards against caste discrimination affecting SC, ST and OBC students — were recently stayed by the Supreme Court of India, which observed prima facie concerns of vagueness, particularly in the definitional scope of caste-based discrimination, and directed that the 2012 framework would remain in force pending further hearings.

Details may be read here.

Students supporting the regulations have emphatically argued they are essential to address structural caste bias within higher education. Opponents –many who have led aggressive and violent protests against their implementation –claim certain provisions are “vulnerable to misuse.”

This mobilisation was framed as part of a broader “Adhikar” campaign asserting dignity and institutional accountability.

The Flashpoint: Ruchi Tiwari’s presence and the confrontation

According to reports in The Print, tensions escalated when Ruchi Tiwari, who runs the YouTube channel Breaking Opinion, arrived at the site to cover the protest.

Tiwari describes herself as an “independent ground reporter”. Her channel, which has over 59,000 subscribers and more than 460 uploaded videos, frequently features a privileged caste lens depicting confrontational campus coverage, particularly around reservation, caste debates and identity politics. One of her recent YouTube Shorts is titled: “They want reservation but say don’t indulge in casteism.”

She has alleged that before she could begin reporting, individuals began calling out her name, asking her full identity and caste, after which a crowd surrounded and assaulted her. In statements to ANI (an agency that has increasingly been called out for its right-wing bias) , she claimed nearly 500 people attacked her, that she was held by the neck and arms, subjected to rape threats, and that there was an attempt to push her into a vehicle with its door open — which she described as an attempted abduction and “mob lynching.”

Videos online show pushing and scuffling. However, the full sequence remains disputed.

AISA’s Counter-Version: Provocation, altercation and selective framing

AISA has rejected Tiwari’s allegations as “false and motivated.”

According to statements cited by The Print, AISA leaders allege that the confrontation began when Tiwari engaged in provocative questioning and allegedly made casteist remarks referencing the Mahad Satyagraha led by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar. AISA further claims she harassed a Dalit journalist named Naveen and attempted to snatch his camera.

Some circulating videos, according to AISA, show Tiwari striking Naveen and later pushing or punching AISA activist Anjali during the confrontation. Another clip shows activists holding Tiwari while attempting to escort her toward police presence.

AISA has argued that several clips being widely shared omit audio or preceding events and therefore reshape public perception.

It is at this point, AISA claims, that the narrative began to shift — from a protest demanding caste equity to a viral storyline of a “woman journalist attacked by Left mobs.”

Another video from the February 13 incident at Delhi University exposes the conspiracy of Sanghi-Casteist-Feudal goons against students demanding equity and social justice. These goons threatened AISA activists and DU students with vulgar abuses inside the Maurice Nagar Police… pic.twitter.com/ObROzq3H4r

— CPIML Liberation (@cpimlliberation) February 14, 2026

Condemn the right-wing assault and hooliganism against Comrade Anjali in DU! Today, AISA DU Secretary Anjali was physically assaulted by a right wing group. Despite the heavy presence of Delhi Police and CRPF, the attackers were given a free hand.

This violence is the clearest… pic.twitter.com/0AS2xYOyIZ

— CPIML Liberation (@cpimlliberation) February 13, 2026

Statement of Communist Party of India -Marxist Leninist- Liberation:

The Police Station Incident: Allegations of sexualised abuse

The most serious allegations, however, concern what happened later at Maurice Nagar Police Station.

AISA leaders Anjali and Neha allege that when they went to file complaints, a right-wing mob gathered outside the police station premises. According to AISA, the crowd swelled from dozens to hundreds, shouting slogans and issuing rape and death threats.

AAP MP Sanjay Singh publicly condemned the episode on X, sharing a video and alleging that in the presence of police personnel, AISA women leaders were abused with explicit insults directed at their mother and were told to “remove their clothes.”

देश की राजधानी दिल्ली में थाने के अंदर, पुलिस वालों के सामने AISA की महिला नेता अंजली और नेहा को मां की गाली देते हुए कहा गया, “कपड़े निकाल।” एक बिहार की बेटी, दूसरी उत्तराखंड की — दोनों सवर्ण हैं, लेकिन वंचितों के हक की आवाज उठाना उनका गुनाह हो गया। अगर यह घटना पंजाब या बंगाल… pic.twitter.com/JgRZ9cgf99

— Sanjay Singh AAP (@SanjayAzadSln) February 15, 2026

Singh questioned how such an incident could occur in the national capital and linked it to broader concerns about women’s safety. He alleged that the targeting of the two women leaders was connected to their vocal advocacy for marginalised communities.

AISA has termed the episode “state-sponsored hooliganism,” alleging that activists were effectively confined inside a room for hours while threats were issued outside. Anjali was reportedly taken for a medico-legal examination.

Delhi Police, according to ANI, has registered two FIRs — one based on Tiwari’s complaint and another based on a complaint by a female AISA student — under sections relating to assault, voluntarily causing hurt, wrongful restraint and common intention under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.

UGC का समर्थन कर रही दिल्ली यूनिवर्सिटी कि छात्राओं को दिल्ली पुलिस के सामने थाने में भद्दी-भद्दी गालियां दी जा रही हैं। UGC के नए प्रावधानो का महत्व इसी बात से लगाया जा सकता है कि दलित और पिछड़ों के हुकूक का उलंघन ना हो… pic.twitter.com/Qs8e7eew71

— Ashraf Hussain (@AshrafFem) February 15, 2026

ABVP, DUSU and administrative responses

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has maintained that Tiwari was present in her professional capacity and was attacked for asking questions. Its Delhi state secretary described the episode as an attack on media freedom and characterised Left-affiliated campus politics as violent.

Aryan Maan, President of the Delhi University Students’ Union, condemned the alleged assault on Tiwari and called for a fair and impartial investigation. DUSU leaders have stated that violence has no place in campus politics.

Meanwhile, Vice-Chancellor Yogesh Singh described the incident as a matter of concern and urged the university community to maintain social harmony. He confirmed having spoken with student and teacher groups as well as police authorities.

मैं दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय के सभी शिक्षकों और विद्यार्थियों से अनुरोध करता हूं कि वह आपस में सौहार्द बनाए रखें। कोई भी ऐसा काम न करें जिससे आपसी मनमुटाव बढ़े और राष्ट्र व विश्वविद्यालय की छवि को नुकसान हो।

दिल्ली विश्वविद्यालय में कल जो घटना हुई वह चिंता का विषय है।…

— University of Delhi (@UnivofDelhi) February 14, 2026

The Larger Question: When violence becomes a narrative weapon

What unfolded at Delhi University is no longer simply a dispute about who pushed whom in a scuffle.

It is a case study in how protests over caste equity are rapidly reframed into spectacles of disorder; how women activists alleging sexualised abuse must compete for credibility against viral video clips; and how digital ecosystems determine which injury becomes the “real” one.

At stake is not merely the credibility of AISA or the veracity of Ruchi Tiwari’s claims. It is the deeper question of whose victimhood travels faster, and why.

When allegations of rape threats and sexualised slurs inside or outside a police station struggle to command sustained outrage — while a competing claim of assault dominates headlines within hours — it reveals something structural about public discourse. Gendered abuse against politically inconvenient women often dissolves into “partisan noise.” Caste-based mobilisation is quickly recast as mob aggression. And campus politics becomes content.

This is not to prejudge the outcome of the FIRs. Due process must determine individual liability. But focusing exclusively on the procedural neutrality of “both sides have filed complaints” risks obscuring the larger asymmetry: narrative power in the digital age is unevenly distributed.

A protest demanding the restoration of equity regulations meant to protect SC, ST and OBC students has been displaced by a battle over viral footage. The structural issue — caste discrimination in higher education — has receded behind the spectacle of confrontation.

This shift is not accidental.

Related:

Campuses in Revolt: How the UGC Equity Stay and Criminalised Dissent Have Ignited Student Protests Across India

The stay of UGC Equity Regulations, 2026: The interim order, the proceedings, and the constitutional questions raised

Higher Education: How Centre is Undermining State Autonomy & Politicising UGC

‘Diluted Existing Rules’: Rohith Vemula, Payal Tadvi’s Mothers Slam UGC’s Draft Equity Regulations

Academic Freedoms at Risk: Federalism and autonomy challenged by UGC’s VC appointment guidelines

The post UGC Guidelines 2026: AISA Protest at Delhi University followed by sexual abuse allegations amid police presence appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The notice did not specify the grounds for the ban but The Wire’s founding editor, Siddharth Varadarajan, who attended the meeting, was informed orally before he was invited to speak that the grounds for blocking the cartoon were that it spread rumours/unverified information that would affect the defence, security, reputation of the country and India’s relations with foreign countries.

The Wire then presented its views to the IDC – which includes senior officials from the ministries of defence, home, information and broadcasting, external affairs, IT and law, as well from the MOD/army.

The Wire has also handed over a written submission to the IDC, which is appended below.

§

The Wire received a notice by email at 6:55 pm on February 10, 2026, purporting to be an “opportunity to appear and submit its comments/ clarifications” before the Inter-Departmental Committee with regard to a ‘request’ for blocking of certain social media URLs where a 52 second animated cartoon was posted by us.

We have been directly informed by one of the social media platforms that the blocking order they received explicitly cites Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.

No ground on which the blocking is permissible or sought or to be considered has accompanied the notice to us or to the social media platforms. Though couched as a hearing on a ‘request’ to block, the fact is that the blocking of the URLs mentioned in the Annexure to the notice has already occurred more than 22 hours prior to the notification to the Wire of this “opportunity”. In other words, this is an ex post facto notice.

At the hearing on February 11 2026 at 3 pm I was told orally that the grounds were – spreading rumours/unverified information that would affect defence, security, reputation of the country and India’s relations with foreign countries. Since this was brought up for the first time, I am placing my written submissions on record.

I was not informed which part was rumour, and how it affected any interest. Can a critical perception of the Prime Minister by a section of the people of his country be inimical to national interest? When has a cartoon video caricaturing a leader or the government ever been viewed in that light? Only a paranoid administration can even suggest this.

The content blocked is a 52-second cartoon clip, containing a humorous depiction of the Prime Minister, whose decision to absent himself from a Parliament debate on account of a purported physical threat from women Opposition MPs (including that they may use their teeth to bite him!) has been widely reported and commented upon.

The Prime Minister is a political personality answerable to the people. The manner in which he deals with questions raised by the Opposition or other issues is eminently a matter for the media and people at large to criticise, discuss – and even mock. To suggest that the Prime Minister of the world’s largest democracy needs to be protected from a satirical 52-second video or that the nation needs to be protected from it is an insult to the Indian State.

The protection of an elected leader in a democracy from criticism or even mockery is not the function of law and indeed not contemplated by Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, under which the order to block access to our cartoon was purportedly made. The Supreme Court has repeatedly noted the importance of uninhibited public debate, even that expressed through “sarcastic and sometimes unpleasant sharp criticism of Government and public officials”. (D.C. Saxena v. Chief Justice of India, (1996) 5 SCC 216, para 30)

In any event, there is nothing in the video which can be said to affect even remotely the interests of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order. Neither the executive nor the IDC can direct the blocking of content on grounds not recognised by Section 69-A. There is no legitimate power to block the URLs and the blockage you have ordered is an abuse of authority.

The only power available to the executive for blocking of content under the Intermediary Rules, 2021 comes from and is also limited by Section 69-A of the Information Technology Act (IT Act). Rule 16 of the IT Rules, 2021 merely operationalises the manner of exercise of the power and cannot go beyond the limits of the IT Act.

Section 69-A(1) reads:

“(1) Where the Central Government or any of its officers specially authorised by it in this behalf is satisfied that it is necessary or expedient so to do, in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence relating to above, it may subject to the provisions of sub-section (2), for reasons to be recorded in writing, by order, direct any agency of the Government or intermediary to block for access by the public or cause to be blocked for access by the public any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in any computer resource.” (emphasis supplied)

It may be recalled that the Supreme Court in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, (2015) 5 SCC 1 had upheld the constitutionality of Section 69-A upon the twin conditions that a block should be effected by a reasoned order relatable strictly to the limited grounds enumerated in Section 69-A, and a pre-decisional hearing given to the originator, where the originator is identified or identifiable. None of this has been done.

Your attention is also drawn to the fact that the cartoon only refers to issues already in the public domain and is a simple light-hearted presentation of the issues and use of words that the news media in India has been full of. Absence from Parliament of leaders of government has always been a matter of both comment and concern. Moreover, scores of news items, videos,TV debates and discussions in the social media have used the very words in the video in recent times and as such there is nothing in the cartoon clip that is not already in the public eye.

Since you are now saying that our cartoon has been banned for spreading rumours and unverified information that adversely affects national security, I have appended a list of several reports, including one going back to December 2023, which use words drawn from General Naravane’s book, which I imagine is the source of maximum concern/embarrassment for the prime minister. Not once have these words been denied, either by the government or the general, and scores of reports which reproduce these words – or rumours/unverified information as your IDC may call it – are currently in circulation. But it is The Wire’s 52-second cartoon which has been banned!

In the past, India’s leaders have welcomed and enjoyed satire at their own expense, and the mark of a confident leader is exactly that. This manner of blocking is as unfair to the ruling dispensation as it is to the media houses and to the very essence of freedom of expression.

You may recall that in the past when I have appeared before the IDC for post-facto hearings – first on the forced deletion of an extract from Caravan magazine and then on the blocking of The Wire’s website and the deletion of a story on CNN’s reporting about a downed Indian Rafale jet – neither the proceedings of the same nor the conclusions (reasoned or unreasoned) arrived at after the hearing, have ever been communicated to me, which again is a gross violation of the powers entrusted to the executive government by the IT Act and Rules.

While on the subject, I wish to bring to your notice that The Wire’s entire Instagram account was blocked for a period of time, and when I sought an explanation from the Joint Secretary, MIB, on February 9, I was told “We have not blocked your account.” Since the order to block content came from the MIB, triggering the blocking of the account itself for a while, a public official should surely have given a more transparent answer.

Since the point is a fairly obvious one, which is that the content blocked has no nexus with any of the stated objectives of Section 69-A IT Act, the blocking order must be rescinded with immediate effect. Also, it is only fair that the decision upon these proceedings should be communicated to The Wire, without delay, along with a copy of the order already issued under Section 69-A of the IT Act forming the basis for the blocking of the URLs mentioned in your notice.

LK Advani kept a diary during the Emergency which he published later under the title, A Prisoner’s Scrapbook. There is an entry from August 31, 1975, lamenting the closing down of Shankar’s Weekly, India’s premier satirical publication, that I wish to share with you.

The last issue, dated August 31, carries an editorial captioned ‘Farewell’, in which writes Advani: “Even the word emergency does not find a place in the editorial. But there can scarcely be a more devastating indictment of the emergency than this piece. Shankar writes, inter alia… ‘Dictatorships cannot afford laughter because people may laugh at the dictator, and that wouldn’t do’.”

In the end, I wish to say this. Democracies do not fall in a single dramatic moment. They erode slowly and quietly when those entrusted with power fear laughter and start taking action against it. Before you sign your names on to whatever decision you take, I ask only that you consider whether the Constitution you took an oath to serve was designed to protect authority from satire — or to protect citizens from the abuse of authority.

Thank you.

Annexure

Recent news items on the controversy in parliament

1. Lallantop
2. ⁠Jansatta 
3. ⁠National Herald 
4. ⁠Hindustan Times 
5. ⁠Deccan Herald 
6. ⁠The Federal
7. ⁠NDTV
8. ⁠Outlook 
9. ⁠The Leaflet 
10. The Organiser 
11. India Today (December 2023 report quoting the same words which were referred to in Parliament)

Courtesy: The Wire

The post ‘Democracies Erode When Those Entrusted With Power Fear Laughter and Start Taking Action Against It’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.