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.

Related:

CJP flags Zee News broadcast ‘Kalicharan Maharaj vs 4 Maulanas’ for communal framing before NBDSA

The case of “pushback” of Doyjan Bibi and the quiet normalisation of undocumented deportations

Communal Dog-Whistles in an Election Season: CJP flags hate speech by BJP’s Ameet Satam to election authorities

From Hate Speech to State Action: How communal vigilantism at Malabar Hill continues unchecked

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

Cohn, Bernard S. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton University Press, 1996.

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:

The Anatomy of Humiliation: Defining caste violence in the Constitutional era

It is religion-based politics that refuses to root out caste: Baba Adhav in conversation with Teesta Setalvad

Caste and community creations of human beings, God is always neutral: Madras HC

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.

Protest in 2025 was neither exceptional nor episodic. It formed part of the routine functioning of a democratic society in which citizens repeatedly turned to collective action when institutional mechanisms proved inadequate or unresponsive. From workers and farmers to students, environmental defenders, and religious minorities, different groups asserted their claims through peaceful assemblies, strikes, marches, sit-ins, and, at times, confrontational resistance.

Farmers returned to the streets years after the repeal of the farm laws because core demands remained unaddressed. Workers mobilised because new labour regimes threatened job security and social protection. Students protested because universities were being reshaped without consultation, autonomy, or academic rationale. Indigenous communities resisted development projects that endangered land, forests, rivers, and cultural survival. Women-led care workers demanded recognition of labour that the state depends upon but refuses to formalise. LGBTQIA+ communities marched not for symbolic inclusion, but for tangible civil rights denied through legislative inaction.

Equally significant was the geographic spread of these protests. They were not confined to metropolitan centres or politically oppositional states. Demonstrations occurred in border regions, hill states, conflict zones, university towns, industrial belts, forest villages, and district headquarters. This dispersion reflected a deeper reality: that the pressures producing dissent were systemic rather than sectoral.

The State’s response formed a critical backdrop to these mobilisations. Increasingly, protest was governed through prohibitory orders, preventive detentions, mass registration of FIRs, denial of permissions, barricading of public spaces, internet restrictions, and aggressive policing. Laws originally framed as exceptional—such as national security statutes or public safety legislation—were routinely invoked against demonstrators, students, and organisers. The language of governance shifted decisively from negotiation to control.

This year-ender documents these protests chronologically, treating each mobilisation as a distinct political event rooted in its own context. It does not seek to romanticise dissent or frame protest as crisis, but to record how public action functioned as a means of negotiation, contestation, and constitutional engagement throughout the year.

January 2025: Fragmented beginnings, shared democratic anxiety

1. Universities push back against the draft UGC regulations, 2025

January opened with Indian universities acting as early warning systems for democratic erosion. Students and faculty across campuses mobilised against the Draft UGC Regulations, 2025, which proposed fundamental changes to the governance of higher education. The regulations sought to centralise power in the hands of the Union government by altering Vice-Chancellor appointment processes, diluting academic qualifications, and legitimising the induction of non-academic ‘industry experts’ into university leadership.

Left-leaning Students’ Federation of India (SFI) organised marches, classroom boycotts, public readings of the draft regulations, and discussions highlighting how these changes threatened institutional autonomy. Faculty associations warned that the proposals undermined peer review, disciplinary expertise, and the principle of universities as self-governing communities. The protests framed higher education as a constitutional public good linked to equality and freedom of thought, rather than as a market-driven enterprise.

2. Trade Unions place economic justice at the centre of the budget debate

Parallel to campus mobilisations, organised labour intervened in the Union Budget process. Ten Central Trade Unions (CTUs) submitted a joint memorandum to the Union Finance Minister ahead of the 2025–26 Budget. The memorandum foregrounded unemployment, inflation, contractualisation of labour, and the erosion of social security.

Workers demanded the filling of vacant public sector posts, expansion of MGNREGA to 200 days with enhanced wages, introduction of an urban employment guarantee, restoration of the Old Pension Scheme, and a halt to privatisation and disinvestment. The memorandum underscored that fiscal policy choices have direct constitutional implications for the right to livelihood and social justice.

3. Farmers reclaim Republic Day as a site of constitutional assertion

On January 26, farmers once again occupied public space through tractor rallies organised by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha across northern and central India. The rallies reiterated unresolved demands following the repeal of the farm laws, including a legal guarantee of Minimum Support Price, loan waivers, compensation for families of deceased protesters, and withdrawal of criminal cases against farmer leaders.

By mobilising on Republic Day, farmers deliberately linked their demands to constitutional promises of dignity, equality, and economic justice. The presence of tractors in urban centres challenged narratives of growth that marginalise agrarian distress.

February 2025: Labour, pensions, and the crisis of secure employment

1. Nationwide government employees’ protests against the new pension scheme

Throughout February, government employees across states organised coordinated demonstrations demanding the restoration of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS). Rallies, organised by 10 central trade unions and independent sectoral federations and associations, were held in state capitals, district headquarters, and outside secretariats, with participation from teachers, clerical staff, engineers, health workers, and employees of public sector undertakings. Protesters argued that the New Pension Scheme (NPS), which links retirement benefits to market performance, fundamentally undermines the principle of social security.

Many participants highlighted that deductions from salaries over decades no longer translated into guaranteed post-retirement income. Retired employees spoke publicly about sharp reductions in expected pensions, while younger workers expressed anxiety about their future in the absence of defined benefits. The protests framed pensions not as a fiscal burden, but as deferred wages and a constitutional obligation of the welfare state.

State governments responded unevenly. While some engaged in negotiations, others invoked prohibitory orders and restricted assemblies. The persistence of these protests throughout the month underscored the depth of discontent among salaried public servants.

2. Trade Union mobilisation against the four Labour Codes

February also saw intensified mobilisation against the four Labour Codes passed earlier but yet to be fully implemented. Central trade unions organised gate meetings, factory-level demonstrations, and citywide rallies in industrial belts and banking centres. Workers argued that the Codes diluted protections relating to job security, union recognition, collective bargaining, and workplace safety.

Union leaders warned that provisions allowing longer working hours, simplified retrenchment processes, and reduced inspection mechanisms would institutionalise precarity. The protests connected labour law reform to broader economic trends—privatisation, contractualisation, and informalisation—arguing that the Codes formalised employer dominance.

Police presence was heavy in several cities, and union leaders were briefly detained during demonstrations. Despite this, protests continued across the month, signalling organised labour’s refusal to accept the Codes without substantive revision.

3. Education sector protests in Kerala against draft UGC Regulations

In Kerala, February witnessed sustained protests by teachers and academics against the Draft UGC Regulations. Under the banner of the All India Save Education Committee, faculty members organised marches, seminars, and symbolic actions including the public burning of draft copies. These protests explained in detail how the regulations threatened academic autonomy by centralising appointments and diluting qualification norms.

Speakers at the protest warned that universities would be transformed into administratively controlled entities, undermining peer review and disciplinary expertise. The protests framed education as a constitutional instrument of social justice rather than a market-driven service. The sustained nature of the protests reflected deep concern within the academic community.

4. Samsung workers continue sit-in against union suppression in Tamil Nadu 

Workers at Samsung India Electronics Limited’s Kancheepuram facility continued a sit-in protest that entered its fifteenth day on February 19, following the suspension of three office-bearers of the Samsung India Workers Union (SIWU). The union alleged that the suspensions were retaliatory and aimed at weakening collective bargaining.

The protest centred on two demands: reinstatement of the suspended union leaders and an end to the company’s reliance on contract labour. Workers accused the management of acting without due process, including suspending leaders without issuing show-cause notices.

Family members of workers joined the protest, underscoring the broader social impact of the labour dispute. The union announced plans to escalate the agitation if negotiations failed, including serving a strike notice.

The standoff highlighted ongoing tensions in India’s manufacturing sector over unionisation, labour rights, and state labour department intervention.

March 2025: Gendered labour and environmental resistance

1. Anganwadi and ASHA workers’ indefinite secretariat protest in Kerala

March marked one of the most sustained women-led protests of the year. Thousands of Anganwadi and ASHA workers gathered outside the Kerala Secretariat, launching an indefinite sit-in. These workers—central to nutrition delivery, maternal health, vaccination, and disease surveillance—demanded minimum wages of ₹21,000, recognition as government employees, pension benefits, and retirement security.

Protesters detailed long working hours, expanding responsibilities, and stagnant honorariums that failed to reflect their workload. Many women spoke of debt, health issues, and the absence of social protection despite decades of service. The protest highlighted how the welfare state relies on feminised labour while refusing formal recognition.

Negotiations with the government remained inconclusive, and police barricading restricted movement around protest sites. The sit-in continued through the month, becoming a focal point of labour resistance.

2. University of Hyderabad students defend the Kancha Gachibowli Forest

Students at the University of Hyderabad organised sustained protests against the proposed auction of the Kancha Gachibowli forest for commercial development. Marches, sit-ins, poster campaigns, and night-long vigils framed the forest as an ecological commons vital to the city’s environmental health.

Protesters demanded transparency, environmental impact assessments, and public consultation. They warned that urban expansion without ecological safeguards would exacerbate climate vulnerability. The protests linked environmental protection to democratic planning and the right to the city.

April 2025: Preventive Laws and the Criminalisation of Dissent

1. Statewide Mobilisation Against the Maharashtra Special Public Safety Bill

April saw widespread protests across Maharashtra against the proposed Maharashtra Special Public Safety Bill. Civil liberties organisations, lawyers’ collectives, farmers’ unions, student groups, and political parties organised district-level marches and public meetings. Protesters warned that the Bill’s vague definitions would enable preventive detention of activists without adequate judicial oversight.

Legal experts explained provisions clause by clause at protest sites, transforming demonstrations into spaces of constitutional education. The protests stressed that normalising preventive laws erodes the presumption of innocence and chills democratic participation.

Despite heavy police presence and restrictions on assemblies, protests continued throughout the month, forcing public debate on the Bill’s implications.

May 2025: Indigenous Land, Development, and Militarisation

1. Protests against the Siang upper multipurpose project in Arunachal Pradesh

Indigenous communities in Arunachal Pradesh organised continuous protests against the proposed 11,000 MW Siang Upper Multipurpose Project. Under the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum, villagers held sit-ins, road blockades, and village assemblies opposing displacement and ecological destruction.

Resistance intensified following the deployment of armed forces to facilitate survey work. Protesters described the move as intimidation, particularly in the absence of free, prior, and informed consent under the Forest Rights Act. Women led many of the protests, asserting custodianship over land, rivers, and cultural heritage.

The movement framed development as a political choice rather than a neutral necessity, demanding community consent as a binding requirement.

2. Tamil Nadu sugarcane farmers demand higher FRP and revival of SAP

Sugarcane farmers in Tamil Nadu held protests in Chennai demanding a Fair and Remunerative Price (FRP) of ₹5,500 per tonne and the reinstatement of the State Advisory Price (SAP) by scrapping the revenue sharing formula introduced in 2018. The agitation was led by the Tamil Nadu Sugarcane Farmers Association (TNSFA), affiliated to the All India Kisan Sabha.

Farmers argued that the Union government’s announced FRP of ₹3,550 per tonne for the 2025 season was insufficient to cover rising input costs. They reiterated demands for implementation of the M.S. Swaminathan Commission’s recommendation of MSP at C2+50, warning that current pricing policies were accelerating the decline of sugarcane cultivation in the state.

The protest also highlighted long-pending dues of ₹1,217 crore owed by private sugar mills for procurements between 2013 and 2017. Farmers accused mills of delaying payments despite legal obligations under the Sugar Control Order, 1966, and demanded immediate disbursal of arrears.

Additionally, farmers called for the reopening of closed cooperative sugar mills, citing mismanagement and policy failures. They argued that reviving these mills would not only ensure fair procurement prices but also provide rural employment and stabilise the sugar economy in Tamil Nadu.

June 2025: Rights, Recognition, and the Limits of Constitutional Morality

1. Pride marches as claims to substantive citizenship

June 2025 marked a significant shift in the character of Pride marches across India. Held in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, Hyderabad, and several smaller cities, Pride this year unfolded in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s refusal to recognise same-sex marriage, with the Court deferring responsibility to Parliament. This context fundamentally shaped the tone of the marches.

Participants framed Pride not as a celebration alone, but as a protest against legislative inertia. Placards, speeches, and manifestos articulated concrete demands: civil unions, inheritance and succession rights, joint adoption, medical decision-making authority, spousal benefits, and protection from discrimination in housing and employment. Protesters repeatedly emphasised that the absence of legal recognition translated into material precarity—particularly for queer persons estranged from natal families or excluded from informal social safety nets.

The marches also reflected generational differences within the movement. Older activists spoke of decades lost to criminalisation under Section 377 and warned against courts retreating from their role as protectors of minority rights. Younger participants highlighted intersections with caste, class, disability, and religion, arguing that queer exclusion compounds existing vulnerabilities.

Police presence was visible but restrained in most cities, though organisers reported heightened surveillance and bureaucratic hurdles in securing permissions. The marches collectively underscored a central contradiction: constitutional morality invoked in judgments remains hollow without legislative and administrative follow-through.

2. Mass mobilisation at Azad Maidan against Maharashtra Special Public Safety Bill 

Thousands gathered at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan on June 30 to protest the proposed Maharashtra Special Public Safety Bill, 2024, which critics described as a sweeping law aimed at curbing dissent. The protest brought together people’s movements, Left parties, and opposition formations under the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA), marking one of the largest coordinated mobilisations against the Bill.

The demonstration was organised primarily by the CPI(M) and CPI, with participation from trade unions, student organisations, farmers’ groups, and civil liberties collectives. Leaders from the Shiv Sena (UBT), Congress, and NCP (Sharad Pawar faction) attended, signalling a broad political consensus against the proposed legislation.

Addressing the gathering, CPI(M) state secretary Ajit Nawale characterised the protest as a decisive stand against what organisers viewed as an authoritarian expansion of state power. Protesters travelled from across Maharashtra, responding to calls to oppose provisions that allegedly allow for preventive action against vaguely defined threats to public order.

With the Bill expected to be tabled in the monsoon session of the Assembly, the mobilisation underscored growing concerns about legal frameworks that, according to critics, could be used to target activists, political opponents, and marginalised communities under the guise of public security.

July 2025: Mass Mobilisation and the Convergence of Long-Standing Struggles

1. Adivasi resistance to Forest Department overreach in Chhattisgarh

In July, Adivasi communities across Chhattisgarh intensified protests against forest department actions that curtailed Community Forest Resource (CFR) rights recognised under the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006. Large rallies were held in Bastar, Surguja, Dantewada, and Kanker districts, drawing participation from village councils and grassroots organisations.

Protesters detailed how administrative circulars and evictions undermined Gram Sabha authority. Marches culminated in district headquarters, where memoranda were submitted demanding withdrawal of orders that violated statutory rights. The protests were marked by repeated assertions of the constitutional principle that development and conservation cannot proceed by dispossessing Indigenous communities.

Police monitored demonstrations closely, and in some areas, prohibitory orders were imposed. Despite this, mobilisation continued throughout the month, reflecting deep-rooted resistance to bureaucratic encroachment.

2. Nationwide Bharat Bandh of July 9

On July 9, a nationwide Bharat Bandh called jointly by Central Trade Unions (CTUs) and the Samyukta Kisan Morcha brought together workers and farmers in one of the largest coordinated actions of the year. Banking services, transport networks, coal mining operations, steel plants, and manufacturing units were disrupted across multiple states.

The bandh opposed the implementation of the four Labour Codes, privatisation of public sector undertakings, rising unemployment, and inflation. Protesters emphasised that economic policy was being formulated without democratic consultation, disproportionately burdening workers and small producers.

Heavy police deployment, detentions of union leaders, and prohibitory orders were reported in several cities. Nevertheless, participation remained significant, underscoring the scale of economic discontent.

3. Protests by terminated school staff in West Bengal

July also saw repeated marches by thousands of teaching and non-teaching staff in West Bengal who lost employment following judicial scrutiny of recruitment irregularities. Protesters described themselves as “untainted” and demanded differentiated accountability rather than blanket termination.

Demonstrations in Kolkata included long marches, sit-ins, and symbolic actions highlighting the human cost of administrative failure. Families spoke of financial distress, interrupted education of children, and social stigma. The protests raised difficult questions about governance failures and the limits of punitive institutional responses.

4. Bipartisan protests over arrest of Two Keralite nuns in Chhattisgarh 

Protests intensified in Kerala and New Delhi following the arrest of two Catholic nuns—Sister Vandana Francis and Sister Preeta Mary—at Durg railway station in Chhattisgarh on July 25, on charges of kidnapping, human trafficking, and forced conversion. The arrests were made following a complaint by a Bajrang Dal member, triggering widespread outrage among religious groups, civil society, and political leaders across party lines.

The protests assumed a rare bipartisan character, with Members of Parliament from both the United Democratic Front (UDF) and the Left Democratic Front (LDF) publicly denouncing the arrests outside Parliament. Leaders alleged that the charges were fabricated and reflected a broader pattern of targeting minorities, while also criticising the role played by right-wing groups in precipitating police action.

As protests gathered momentum, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi demanding justice for what he described as the “unfair incarceration” of the nuns. Senior leaders from Left parties, including Brinda Karat and Annie Raja, travelled to Chhattisgarh to engage with local authorities and affected families. Opposition leaders in Kerala linked the arrests to a wider climate of hostility toward Christians in BJP-ruled states.

The Union Minister of State for Minority Affairs stated that the matter was sub judice, while noting efforts by BJP leaders to engage with church authorities. Despite these assurances, protests continued, reflecting broader anxieties over religious freedom, misuse of criminal law, and the growing role of non-state actors in triggering arrests related to alleged conversions.

August 2025: Electoral Integrity, Labour Precarity, and Agrarian Anxiety

1. Protests over electoral roll revisions and voter deletions

August 2025 saw sustained and coordinated protests across Delhi, Maharashtra, Bihar, Karnataka, Telangana, and West Bengal over alleged irregularities in electoral roll revisions. Opposition parties, civil society groups, student organisations, and independent election watchdogs mobilised demonstrations outside offices of the Election Commission of India (ECI) and district election authorities.

The immediate trigger for these protests was the publication of revised electoral rolls in several constituencies that showed large-scale deletions of voters, particularly from urban poor settlements, minority-dominated neighbourhoods, migrant worker colonies, and informal housing clusters. Protesters argued that many deletions were carried out without due notice, verification, or accessible grievance redress mechanisms.

Demonstrations included marches, sit-ins, submission of memoranda, and symbolic actions such as mock voter registration drives to highlight procedural opacity. Legal activists addressed gatherings, explaining how disenfranchisement—whether intentional or through administrative negligence—directly undermines the basic structure of electoral democracy.

Police responses varied by region. In Delhi and Mumbai, heavy barricading and preventive detentions were reported, while in smaller towns protests were dispersed citing prohibitory orders. The protests foregrounded electoral integrity as a constitutional concern rather than a partisan issue.

2. Prolonged agitations by sanitation and municipal workers

Across several cities in August, sanitation workers intensified protests against privatisation, contractualisation, and delayed wages. In Chennai, Hyderabad, Gurugram, and parts of Uttar Pradesh, municipal workers staged sit-ins outside civic offices, undertook hunger strikes, and halted sanitation services for limited periods.

Workers detailed chronic issues: employment through contractors despite performing perennial civic functions, absence of social security benefits, hazardous working conditions, and lack of compensation for occupational injuries. Many protesters belonged to marginalised caste communities, underlining the intersection of caste and labour precarity.

Municipal authorities responded with threats of termination, police complaints, and selective negotiations. Arrests of protest leaders and forcible dispersal of sit-ins were reported in some cities. The protests highlighted the contradiction between celebrating cleanliness initiatives and eroding the rights of those who perform essential sanitation labour.

3. Farmers’ mobilisation against trade policy and import liberalisation

A joint platform of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) and ten central trade unions across Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, and parts of Maharashtra organised rallies in August opposing trade agreements and import policies perceived to expose Indian agriculture to volatile global markets. Tractor rallies, village-level meetings, and district marches were held to articulate concerns over declining crop prices and rising input costs.

Farmers warned that tariff reductions and import liberalisation disproportionately harm small and marginal cultivators while benefiting large agribusiness interests. Protest speeches frequently referenced the unresolved demands from earlier farmers’ movements, including legal guarantees for Minimum Support Price (MSP).

Police presence remained significant, particularly near state borders, reflecting continued state sensitivity to agrarian mobilisation.

4. Farmers push back against scrapping of import duty on Raw Cotton 

The All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) strongly condemned the Union government’s decision to scrap the 11% import duty on raw cotton between August 19 and September 30, 2025, a move notified by the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC). According to the CPI(M)-affiliated farmers’ organisation, the temporary removal of the duty would lower the price of imported cotton, thereby exerting downward pressure on domestic cotton prices at a crucial point in the agricultural cycle.

AIKS highlighted that the timing of the decision was particularly damaging, as cotton farmers across major producing regions had already completed sowing and incurred substantial input costs in anticipation of remunerative prices. With harvesting approaching, any decline in prices would directly impact farm incomes. Cotton-growing regions, the organisation noted, are already marked by chronic agrarian distress, indebtedness, and a history of farmer suicides, conditions that could be further aggravated by this policy shift.

The organisation also drew attention to what it described as a contradiction between the decision and the Prime Minister’s Independence Day speech, in which assurances were made about safeguarding farmers’ interests. AIKS argued that India’s inability to protect its textile sector amid tariff measures imposed by the United States had resulted in domestic farmers bearing the burden of global trade pressures, despite being the weakest actors in the supply chain.

Citing data from the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), AIKS pointed out that cotton farmers were already receiving minimum support prices far below the C2+50 formula recommended by the Swaminathan Commission. The organisation further underscored the stark disparity between state support to cotton farmers in India and the United States, warning that continued concessions under external pressure could extend similar policy measures to other crops. AIKS called for a united nationwide agitation to compel the government to reverse the decision.

September 2025: Incarceration, representation, and regional discontent

1. Families of political prisoners protest prolonged undertrial detention

In September, families of activists and students incarcerated under stringent national security and anti-terror laws organised prolonged sit-ins and demonstrations at Jantar Mantar and in several state capitals. Many detainees had spent years in custody without commencement or completion of trial.

The protests were marked by testimonies from parents, spouses, and siblings who described the financial strain, psychological trauma, and social isolation caused by prolonged incarceration. Lawyers addressing the gatherings highlighted systemic issues: repeated denial of bail, delayed filing of chargesheets, and the normalisation of long-term undertrial detention.

Placards and speeches reframed the issue as one of constitutional rights rather than individual guilt or innocence. Police permitted the protests but maintained heavy surveillance, occasionally restricting movement citing security concerns.

2. Protests against media narratives and communalisation in Kashmir

In Srinagar and other parts of the Kashmir Valley, residents organised protests against national television channels accused of communalising incidents of violence and erasing local contexts. “Godi media hai hai!”- this is what a crowd of locals chanted today as they gathered around ABP News anchor Chitra Tripathi in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk during a protest to condemn the Pahalgam attack. Demonstrators gathered near press clubs and public squares, holding placards demanding ethical journalism and accountability.

These protests took place under intense surveillance, with movement restrictions imposed intermittently. Participants argued that misrepresentation in national media contributes to stigma, collective punishment, and further securitisation of civilian life in the region.

3. Intensification of the Ladakh movement for statehood and safeguards

September marked an escalation in the Ladakh movement demanding statehood and constitutional protections under the Sixth Schedule. Youth-led marches, hunger strikes, and shutdowns were organised across Leh and Kargil districts.

Protesters argued that prolonged central administration without elected representation had led to policy decisions taken without local consent, particularly regarding land, environment, and employment. Heavy security deployment, clashes, and reports of casualties deepened regional alienation and drew national attention to unresolved autonomy questions.

October 2025: Universities, autonomy, and administrative centralisation

1. Panjab University students’ shutdown over democratic deficit

In October, students at Panjab University enforced a complete shutdown of academic activities protesting delays in Senate elections and increasing centralisation of decision-making. Sit-ins, teach-ins, and marches were organised within and outside the campus.

Students argued that prolonged administrative control without elected bodies undermined institutional autonomy and student representation. Faculty members expressed solidarity, framing the issue as symptomatic of broader governance trends affecting public universities.

Police presence remained restrained, but university authorities initiated disciplinary proceedings against protest leaders. Similar, smaller protests were reported in other central universities, indicating a wider crisis of institutional democracy.

2. Dalit settlement demolished in Gurugram 

Residents of Premnagar Basti in Gurugram protested after large-scale demolitions razed most of the 45-year-old Dalit settlement. Families alleged forced evictions carried out despite legal protections and promises of rehabilitation.

The demolitions followed long-standing litigation initiated by local commercial interests. Protesters argued that the action violated constitutional protections and land acquisition laws.

Police action against protesting residents drew sharp criticism, reigniting debates over urban evictions and housing rights.

November 2025: Public health crisis, environmental breakdown, and faith under threat

1. Mass protests against lethal air pollution in North India

November 2025 saw sustained public protests across Delhi and the National Capital Region as air quality deteriorated to hazardous levels, with Air Quality Index readings remaining in the ‘severe’ category for extended periods. Residents, environmental groups, parents’ associations, and medical professionals mobilised protests demanding urgent state intervention to address the public health emergency.

Demonstrations were held outside government offices, pollution control bodies, and public squares. Protesters highlighted the failure of short-term emergency measures and criticised policy inertia despite recurring annual crises. Doctors and health experts participating in protests warned of irreversible harm to children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing respiratory conditions.

Placards and public statements framed air pollution not as an environmental issue alone but as a violation of the right to life and health. Protesters demanded long-term structural solutions, including regulation of industrial emissions, vehicular pollution control, agricultural stubble management through state-supported alternatives, and accountability of enforcement agencies. Police presence remained visible but protests were largely peaceful, reflecting broad public consensus on the gravity of the crisis.

2. Flash protest at Lalbagh against Hebbal–Silk board tunnel project

On November 15, student and environmental collectives held a flash protest inside Bengaluru’s Lalbagh Botanical Gardens opposing the proposed 17-km twin tunnel road project between Silk Board and Hebbal. The protest was led by the All India Students Association (AISA) and Fridays For Future–Karnataka, who described the project as an expensive and environmentally hazardous intervention being pushed forward without adequate scrutiny or public consultation.

Protesters alleged that the Karnataka government was advancing the multi-crore tunnel project despite expert warnings and unresolved gaps in the Detailed Project Report (DPR). They highlighted that the estimated cost of the project—between ₹17,000 and ₹20,000 crore—would make it one of the most expensive transport infrastructure initiatives in the state. Activists questioned the prioritisation of such expenditure at a time when metro fares were being increased on the grounds of funding shortages, arguing that the tunnel would primarily benefit a limited section of private vehicle users.

A central concern raised during the protest was the absence of a mandatory Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). According to the organisers, no comprehensive geological, hydrological, or biodiversity studies had been conducted, despite the tunnel passing beneath ecologically sensitive zones. Environmental groups warned that large-scale underground drilling could destabilise soil layers, disrupt groundwater flow, and worsen Bengaluru’s already severe flooding and drainage problems.

The protest also drew political attention, with Leader of the Opposition in the Karnataka Legislative Assembly, R. Ashok, accusing the Congress-led state government of damaging the environment in the name of development. Speaking at a separate event near Sankey Lake, he alleged that the project was proceeding without approvals from key departments, including the Environment, Archaeology, and Forest Departments. Together, the protests and political interventions highlighted growing public concern over transparency, environmental governance, and urban planning priorities in Bengaluru.

3. Workers’ and farmers’ protests mark five years of the 2020 Farmers’ Protest

On November 26, hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers across India participated in coordinated protests to mark the fifth anniversary of the 2020 farmers’ agitation. Rallies and demonstrations were reported in over 500 districts following a joint call by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) and Central Trade Unions (CTUs), making it one of the largest nationwide mobilisations of 2025.

The immediate trigger for the protests was the notification of the four Labour Codes on November 21, which trade unions opposed as anti-worker and detrimental to long-established labour protections. Workers from coal mines, railways, ports, refineries, textile mills, banks, and other sectors organised rallies, strikes, and workplace protests, with demonstrators in several locations burning copies of the labour code notifications as a symbolic rejection of the reforms.

Farmers joined the protests in large numbers, staging demonstrations at local, district, and state administrative headquarters in solidarity with workers and to press their own unresolved demands. SKM linked the mobilisation to the earlier farmers’ movement that forced the repeal of the three farm laws in 2021, while also highlighting the government’s failure to fulfil its commitment to provide a legal guarantee for Minimum Support Price (MSP), a key promise made at the time of the withdrawal of the protests.

The November 26 actions also carried constitutional significance, as the date coincides with Constitution Day. Protesters accused the BJP-led central government of undermining constitutional values through labour reforms, majoritarian politics, and policies that marginalise religious minorities. The participation of student unions, women’s organisations, agricultural workers, and civil society groups reflected a convergence of labour, agrarian, and democratic rights concerns across the country.

4. Goa mobilises against Coal Transportation corridors 

People’s movements in Goa, supported by the National Alliance of People’s Movements, organised mass protests against infrastructure projects facilitating coal transportation through the state. Protesters warned that rail, road, and port expansions threatened Goa’s ecology and livelihoods.

Demonstrations demanded the halting of port expansion, railway double-tracking, and denotification of rivers declared national waterways. Activists argued that public hearings had been ignored.

The Chalo Lohia Maidan protest highlighted sustained resistance to projects perceived as prioritising corporate interests over environmental protection.

December 2025: Workers’ rights, environmental resistance, and targeted violence

1. ASHAs, Anganwadi and midday meal workers’ day-and-night agitation in Hubballi 

December opened with a significant mobilisation of women workers in Hubballi, Karnataka, where hundreds of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs), Anganwadi workers, and midday meal workers launched an indefinite day-and-night agitation outside the office of Union Minister Pralhad Joshi. Workers travelled from Vijayapura, Bagalkot, Belagavi, Gadag, Haveri, Dharwad, and Uttara Kannada districts to participate in the protest, converging at Chitaguppi Park adjacent to the minister’s office.

The protest was centred on long-pending demands for regularisation of services, improved honoraria, and recognition as workers rather than volunteers or part-time staff. Protest leaders highlighted that despite performing essential public health, nutrition, and education-related work, ASHAs and Anganwadi workers remain excluded from basic labour protections, social security benefits, and fair wages.

As negotiations with officials failed to yield immediate results, protesters spent the night in the open, continuing their agitation into the following day. Trade union leaders, including representatives from Akshara Dasoha Noukarara Sangha, CITU, and the Anganwadi Workers Association, addressed the gathering, framing the struggle as one for dignity of labour and gender justice. The agitation was suspended only after assurances were given by both State and Central Ministers, including an offer for dialogue in Delhi, underscoring the persistence required even to secure negotiations.

2. Violent clashes over Amera Coal Mine expansion in Surguja, Chhattisgarh 

On December 3, tensions escalated sharply in Chhattisgarh’s Surguja district as villagers protested against the proposed expansion of the Amera coal extension mine operated by South Eastern Coalfields Limited (SECL) in Lakhanpur block. Residents alleged that attempts were being made to expand mining operations without lawful land acquisition, consent, or adequate compensation, threatening agricultural land, water sources, and residential areas.

When villagers attempted to prevent officials and workers from accessing the mine site, clashes broke out between protesters and police personnel deployed at the location. According to reports, villagers used sticks, axes, and slingshots, while police resorted to force to control the crowd. Around 40 police personnel sustained injuries, and several villagers were also hurt during the confrontation.

The protest reflected deep-seated anger over extractive projects proceeding without community consent, particularly in tribal and rural areas. Villagers demanded an immediate halt to mining activities until land acquisition was carried out lawfully and livelihood concerns were addressed. The incident highlighted the volatility of resource conflicts and the consequences of bypassing participatory decision-making processes.

3. Farmers’ ‘Rail Roko’ protest against Electricity (Amendment) Bill in Punjab 

On December 5, farmers and farm labourers in Punjab, under the banner of the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM), staged a statewide ‘symbolic rail roko’ agitation to protest the draft Electricity (Amendment) Bill, 2025, and the installation of prepaid smart meters. Railway tracks were blocked at several locations, including near Amritsar, for a few hours.

Protesters argued that the proposed amendments would adversely affect the agriculture sector by increasing electricity costs and exposing farmers to market-driven tariff regimes. Farmer leaders accused the Centre of ignoring their concerns and warned that the policy would deepen agrarian distress. Several farmer leaders were reportedly detained by police ahead of the protest, though farmers continued to mobilise in large numbers.

The agitation was framed as part of a broader resistance to policy decisions perceived as undermining rural livelihoods. Farmer unions warned of escalating protests, including the removal of smart meters, if demands were not addressed.

4. Anganwadi workers’ statewide strikes in Andhra Pradesh and sit-ins in Tamil Nadu 

Between December 10 and 12, over one lakh Anganwadi workers in Andhra Pradesh went on a statewide strike, while workers in Tamil Nadu organised sit-ins and protests in Chennai demanding improved working conditions and recognition as full-time government employees. Clad in pink saris to symbolise unity, Anganwadi workers and helpers gathered in large numbers, raising slogans and submitting memoranda to authorities.

Key demands included twelve days of menstrual leave annually, twelve months of maternity leave, substantial pay hikes, travel allowances, and regularisation of services. Workers highlighted the contradiction of being classified as part-time employees while routinely working more than eight hours a day for meagre honoraria. Police removed protesters from protest sites in Chennai, underscoring the constrained space for collective bargaining.

The protests foregrounded gendered labour exploitation within state-run welfare schemes and drew attention to the emotional, physical, and economic toll on women workers delivering essential services.

5. Protests against threats to the Aravalli Hills in Rajasthan (December 23)

On December 23, protests intensified across Rajasthan against a new definition of the Aravalli hills accepted by the Supreme Court, which activists and Opposition leaders warned could leave over 90 per cent of the range vulnerable to mining and construction. Demonstrations were held in cities including Jodhpur, Udaipur, and Sikar, with protesters demanding environmental protection and review of the decision.

Clashes were reported in some locations, with police resorting to baton charges and detentions. Environmentalists, lawyers, and local communities argued that the revised definition threatened not only ecological balance but also the livelihoods and cultural sites of tribal and rural populations residing below the 100-metre elevation threshold.

The protests drew on decades-long histories of environmental resistance in the Aravalli region and framed the issue as a struggle to protect a fragile ecological heritage from renewed extractive pressures.

6. Kerala Protests After Attack on Children’s Christmas Carol Group 

Widespread protests erupted in Kerala after an alleged attack on a children’s Christmas carol group in Palakkad by an RSS-BJP worker. The incident, involving physical assault and damage to instruments, triggered condemnation from political parties and church authorities.

Youth organisation DYFI announced district-wide protest carols, framing the response as a defence of communal harmony. Political leaders across parties criticised attempts to justify the attack. Police arrested the accused, who was already facing charges under the Kerala Anti-Social Activities Act. The incident came amid heightened concern over communal violence in the state.

7. Protests against Christmas-time violence targeting Christian communities 

Between December 24 and 26, Christian communities and civil rights groups organised protests and solidarity gatherings across multiple cities in response to a wave of violence, intimidation, and disruptions targeting churches and worshippers during the Christmas period. Incidents included vandalism at Raipur’s Magneto Mall and disruptions of worship services in Jabalpur and Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar.

A prominent silent protest was held in Mumbai’s Goregaon West, organised by the Samvidhan Jagar Yatra Samiti and the Bombay Catholic Sabha. Participants held placards invoking constitutional values and freedom of religion, deliberately avoiding slogans to underscore the dignity and gravity of the protest.

Organisers described the attacks as part of a broader pattern threatening the constitutional right to freedom of conscience and worship. The protests demanded accountability, protection for religious minorities, and an end to impunity for perpetrators.

8. Women protest outside Delhi High Court over bail in Unnao Rape Case (December)

Women’s groups staged protests outside the Delhi High Court following its decision to grant conditional bail to former BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the Unnao rape case. Protesters expressed fear for the survivor’s safety and criticised the suspension of sentence in a case involving grave violence.

The survivor and her family publicly voiced distress and loss of faith in the justice system, stating their intention to approach the Supreme Court. Demonstrators demanded accountability and reversal of the bail order.

Police issued warnings to disperse, but protests continued over several days. Women’s rights activists described the agitation as a response to systemic failures in protecting survivors of sexual violence.

Following sustained public pressure, the Central Bureau of Investigation announced it would challenge the bail order, underscoring the impact of protest on institutional responses.

9. Nationwide gig workers’ strike against unsafe work conditions

The year closed with escalating mobilisation by gig and platform workers across India. Following a digital protest on December 25 that saw tens of thousands of workers log off delivery apps, unions announced a nationwide strike on December 31 under the banner of the Indian Federation of App-Based Transport Workers.

Workers demanded the removal of 10-minute delivery models, restoration of earlier payout structures, transparency in algorithmic management, grievance redress mechanisms, and social security benefits. Union leaders highlighted unsafe working conditions, income instability, and intimidation of workers through account deactivations and deployment of bouncers near warehouses.

The strike underscored the growing collective strength of gig workers and marked a significant moment in the evolution of labour resistance within the platform economy.

Conclusion: Protest as the moral record of a year

The protests of 2025, as documented month by month, form a cumulative moral and political record of India’s democratic life. Far from isolated eruptions, these mobilisations reflected sustained citizen engagement across issues of livelihood, environment, identity, labour, and governance.

Throughout the year, people protested not only against specific policies but against patterns of exclusion, neglect, and impunity. Farmers demanded economic justice, workers resisted precarity, students defended institutional autonomy, Adivasi communities protected land and forests, minorities asserted the right to live and worship without fear, and urban residents claimed the right to clean air and dignified survival.

Importantly, 2025 demonstrated that protest in India is adaptive. When streets were policed or permissions denied, dissent moved to courts, documentation, digital spaces, and symbolic action. When large mobilisations were curtailed, smaller local protests sustained democratic pressure. This adaptability reflects a deep-rooted commitment to constitutional values rather than episodic outrage.

The year also revealed the costs of dissent—surveillance, arrests, delayed justice, and social stigmatisation. Yet these pressures did not extinguish public mobilisation. Instead, they underscored the centrality of protest as a corrective mechanism when institutional responsiveness falters.

This year-ender records protest as democratic labour: the continuous work undertaken by citizens to make constitutional promises meaningful. In doing so, it affirms that the strength of a democracy is measured not by the absence of conflict, but by the presence of people willing to publicly contest injustice, month after month, across the country.

Related:

Defending Citizenship, On the Ground | CJP Assam 2025

A Cultural Burden: The ascending hierarchy of caste warfare and the crisis of the Indian republic

From Fringe to Framework: How AHP’s hate ecosystem reconfigured law, society, and electoral politics

2025: On the ground, the bulldozer still arrives before the rule of law

The post 2025 in Protest: Across issues, across India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Video of the General Strike

From the paddy fields of Punjab to industrial belts in Tamil Nadu, from tea gardens in West Bengal to transport hubs in Uttar Pradesh, and across the National Capital Region in New Delhi, workers and peasants converged in a rare display of coordinated dissent. Coal miners downed tools. Electricity employees joined demonstrations. Banking and insurance services reported disruptions. In ports, transport depots and manufacturing clusters, protest meetings and road blockades signaled a shared disquiet.

The Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) described the strike as “one of the largest ever General Strikes in the history of Independent India,” arguing that it cemented worker-peasant unity as the backbone of resistance to what it termed corporate-driven policies. Congratulating the Joint Platform of Central Trade Unions, the SKM said the action had instilled confidence among working people to resist “exploitative, corporate-oriented measures” and warned that if the Union government persisted with its trajectory, “more intensified, continuous, united pan-India struggles” would follow.

At the heart of the mobilisation was opposition to the four labour codes. But the anger spilled far beyond them. The SKM pointed to resentment against Free Trade Agreements, the proposed Electricity Bill, and the Seed Bill. Rural participation, it noted, was not symbolic but structural. “There was much more effective and widespread coordination than ever before,” the statement said, highlighting the large-scale involvement of women and rural workers. The issue of scheme workers — denied worker status and statutory minimum wages — figured prominently in protest speeches across states.

For the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the strike was a “historic success,” with demonstrations reported at more than 2,000 locations nationwide. The organisation characterised the mobilisation as a warning to the ruling dispensation: withdraw what it called anti-people laws or face prolonged resistance. Participation, it emphasised, cut across organised and unorganised sectors, underlining the breadth of social discontent.

AIKS leader Vijoo Krishnan framed the moment as one of political clarity rather than episodic protest. “This unity of workers and peasants is not accidental,” he said. “It reflects deep anger against policies that privatise profits and socialise losses. The government must withdraw the anti-worker labour codes and anti-farmer measures. If it fails to listen, today’s strike will only be the beginning of a longer and stronger struggle.”

Significantly, the mobilisation was not confined to physical spaces. Social media became an extension of the protest ground. Hashtags trended across platforms, live videos from picket lines travelled instantly between states, and infographics explaining the labour codes and farm-related legislations were widely circulated in multiple languages. Leaders used digital tools not merely for publicity but for political education — simplifying complex policy questions into accessible, shareable content.

Farmers gather at Freedom Park in Bangalore on February 10 to launch an indefinite strike. Photo: Vijoo Krishnan/FB

Vijoo Krishnan and other SKM leaders conducted regular live briefings  in real time and amplified ground reports from district-level actions. Short video messages from protest sites in Punjab, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal created a sense of simultaneity — of a nation rising together rather than isolated pockets of unrest. In an era where narratives are shaped as much online as on the streets, the strike demonstrated that digital platforms can be harnessed to deepen organisational coordination and expand the moral reach of collective action.

Video of strike from Tamil Nadu

In Haryana’s Kurukshetra, where the SKM is scheduled to hold its National Council meeting on February 24, the emphasis is already shifting from assessment to escalation. The coming phase, leaders indicate, will be shaped both independently and in coordination with trade unions and agricultural workers’ platforms.

If the Modi led BJP – NDA government reads February 12 as a routine disruption, it may be misreading the mood. What unfolded across India was less a stoppage of work than a consolidation of resistance — an assertion that the grammar of economic reform cannot be written without the consent of those who labour in fields, factories and public services.

Courtesy: The AIDEM

The post February 12: Workers and Farmers Forge a Historic Axis of Resistance Across India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Beyond addressing deep fakes and non-consensual synthetic imagery, the notification also restructures executive takedown authority and conditions safe harbour protection more explicitly on active compliance. The three-hour removal window for court orders and authorised government intimations marks a substantial shift from the earlier 36-hour framework. While the amendments respond to documented harms arising from AI misuse, they also expand administrative discretion and increase compliance pressure on platforms—raising important questions about proportionality, due process, and the risk of over-removal.

A close reading of the Gazette text suggests that the impact of these changes will depend not only on their stated objectives, but on how the enhanced takedown powers and compressed timelines are exercised in practice.

Formal definition of “synthetically generated information”

For the first time, the Rules define “synthetically generated information” as audio, visual or audio-visual content that is artificially or algorithmically created, generated, modified or altered using a computer resource in a manner that appears real and depicts a person or event likely to be perceived as authentic.

The definition is focused on deception and perceptual realism. Routine editing, accessibility tools, formatting, transcription and good-faith technical corrections are excluded, provided they do not materially alter the meaning of content.

Compared to the draft released in October 2025, the final rules narrow the scope. As reported by Mint, the government dropped the proposal to watermark 10% of general online content and confined labelling requirements to content that materially misrepresents persons or events.

This narrowing addresses some industry concerns about over breadth. However, the definition remains perception-based and could potentially capture satire, parody or political manipulation depending on interpretation.

Mandatory labelling and metadata requirements

Intermediaries that enable the creation or dissemination of synthetic content must:

• Ensure clear labelling of such content;
• Provide audio disclosures where applicable;
• Embed permanent metadata or provenance markers;
• Prevent removal or suppression of such markers.

These requirements are framed as transparency obligations. The objective appears to be traceability and user awareness.

However, two concerns arise:

1. Technical feasibility and cross-platform interoperability — not all platforms may be able to uniformly embed and preserve provenance markers, particularly where content travels across services.
2. Privacy and surveillance implications — embedding permanent identifiers may allow tracking beyond immediate moderation needs.

The Rules state that metadata must be embedded “to the extent technically feasible,” but no standards are specified. This leaves compliance interpretation to executive discretion.

Prohibition and automated safeguards

The Rules require intermediaries to deploy reasonable and appropriate technical measures to prevent the generation or dissemination of unlawful synthetic content. The Gazette does not mandate any specific technological solution. The amendments require intermediaries to deploy automated and technical safeguards to prevent synthetic content involving:

• Child sexual abuse material;
• Non-consensual intimate imagery;
• False electronic records;
• Impersonation;
• Obscenity;
• Content relating to explosives, arms or ammunition;
• Deceptive portrayal of individuals or events.

The inclusion of non-consensual deep fake pornography is a significant development, given the documented increase in such cases.

However, mandating automated safeguards raises operational and rights-based concerns. Automated detection systems are prone to error, bias and over blocking — especially in politically sensitive contexts. Without procedural safeguards or appeal transparency requirements, erroneous removals may be difficult to contest.

User declaration and verification obligations

Significant Social Media Intermediaries (SSMIs) must:

• Obtain a declaration from users stating whether content is synthetically generated;
• Deploy technical tools to verify such declarations;
• Ensure prominent disclosure if content is confirmed synthetic.

Failure to act may result in loss of due diligence protection under Section 79 of the IT Act. This requirement effectively shifts platforms from reactive moderation to proactive verification. The obligation to verify user declarations may require AI-based detection systems, increasing reliance on automated moderation.

Given the three-hour takedown window (discussed below), platforms may choose conservative enforcement strategies, increasing the likelihood of over-removal.

Reduced takedown timelines

The most operationally significant change is the reduction of takedown timelines:

• Government or court orders: 36 hours → 3 hours
• Non-consensual intimate imagery: 24 hours → 2 hours
• Complaint resolution: 72 hours → 36 hours
• Grievance acknowledgement: 15 days → 7 days

The three-hour compliance window applies specifically to removal or disabling of access upon receipt of a court order or a written, reasoned intimation issued by an authorised government officer of the prescribed rank. It does not apply to all user complaints. The reduction from 72 hours to 36 hours applies to specified unlawful content categories under grievance redressal provisions. The three-hour timeline is limited to formal governmental or judicial directions. The government has argued, as reported by Mint, that platforms have the technical capacity to act within minutes and that government requests form a small proportion of total removals. However, experience from prior litigation suggests concerns about misuse of takedown powers are not hypothetical.

In litigation before the Karnataka High Court, X (formerly Twitter) argued that government notices lacked adequate reasoning and were procedurally deficient. Although the High Court dismissed X’s plea, the case highlighted recurring issues regarding:

• Insufficiently reasoned takedown notices;
• Lack of transparency;
• Pressure to comply within tight deadlines.

As reported by Scroll, advocacy group Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) has warned that compressed timelines, combined with expanded executive powers, may increase over-removal and chill lawful expression.

When liability risk is high and time is limited, platforms are likely to remove content first and review later.

Clarification of authorities empowered to issue takedown notices

The amendments specify that takedown directions may be issued:

• By a court of competent jurisdiction;
• By a government official not below the rank of Joint Secretary or Director through a written, reasoned intimation;
• By police officers not below Deputy Inspector General rank.

Notices must specify the legal basis, statutory provision invoked, and the precise URL or electronic location of the content. A monthly review by a Secretary-level officer is required to ensure necessity and proportionality. The monthly review mechanism is internal to the executive and does not create an independent or judicial oversight structure. The Rules do not require publication of review outcomes.

On paper, this introduces greater formalisation compared to the earlier reference to “appropriate government or its agency.”

However, two structural concerns remain:

1. Executive dominance — court orders are not mandatory; executive officials retain independent takedown authority.
2. Limited transparency — the Rules do not require publication of takedown statistics, redacted orders, or independent oversight.

As per Scroll, IFF has criticised the amendments as entrenching opacity and weakening procedural safeguards, particularly since they were notified without fresh public consultation.

Safe Harbour: Narrowed through due diligence

Safe harbour protection under Section 79 remains conditional upon compliance with due diligence obligations. The Rules clarify that removal of unlawful or synthetic content, including through automated means, will not by itself jeopardise immunity. However, immunity may be affected where an intermediary knowingly permits or fails to act upon prohibited content.

The effect is to condition immunity more tightly on active compliance.

In combination with compressed timelines, this may incentivise platforms to err on the side of removal in borderline cases.

Below is a table based on the recent amendments that have been made.

Risk of over breadth and chilling effects

The amendments aim to address genuine harms — including deep fake pornography, impersonation scams and misinformation.

However, the regulatory design raises concerns:

• Short compliance windows reduce scope for contextual evaluation.
• Automated safeguards may suppress lawful content, including satire or political critique.
• Executive takedown authority remains broad, with limited independent review.
• Procedural safeguards are internal rather than judicial.

India has previously witnessed allegations of overbroad or insufficiently reasoned takedown orders. In the absence of transparency requirements or appeal mechanisms within the Rules themselves, concerns about misuse persist.

Constitutional Implications

Under Article 19(1)(a), any restriction on speech must satisfy reasonableness and proportionality.

The amendments pursue legitimate aims — protection against deception, exploitation and harm. However, proportionality requires that restrictions be narrowly tailored and accompanied by adequate safeguards.

Key questions that may arise in future litigation include:

• Whether a three-hour takedown window is proportionate in all categories of speech;
• Whether executive-issued takedown notices provide sufficient procedural fairness;
• Whether automated moderation requirements lead to systematic over-removal;
• Whether metadata embedding raises privacy concerns.

Conclusion

The amended IT Rules represent a significant expansion of regulatory oversight over synthetic and AI-generated content. They respond to real harms, particularly non-consensual deep fakes and impersonation.

At the same time, the framework strengthens executive takedown powers, shortens compliance timelines, and conditions safe harbour more strictly on active intervention by intermediaries.

The complete rules may be accessed here.

Related:

IT Rules 2023: Union Government can now flag content relating to any of its “businesses” as “misleading”

More than 100 YouTube channels blocked under new IT Rules: GOI

Madras HC restrains action against digital news platforms under IT Rules 2021

IT Rules: Oversight mechanism may rob the media of its independence, says Madras HC

The wide terms of the IT Rules 2021 have a chilling effect on freedom of speech: Bom HC

Draft DPDP Rules, 2025, seeds of both surveillance and freedom

By striking down the IT (Amendment) Rules, 2023 as unconstitutional, Bombay HC curbs Union Govt control over online content

The post Synthetic Content, Three-Hour Compliance and the Risk of Over-Removal: Analysing the IT rules amendments appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In spite of being one of India’s wealthiest state, Karnataka continues to perform poorly on key public health indicators compared to some of the other southern states (see Table 1 below) primarily because of structural and policy failures. However, it is no accident that the state continuous to be promoted as a ‘model’ for healthcare reforms, largely due to its aggressive adoption of privatisation, public–private partnerships (PPPs), contracting out critical health care services and insurance-based healthcare. The state has been quick to uptake the mandates of the

Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) -economic reform packages pushed onto India by International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.

Table 1: Comparison of mortality indicators for Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu 

Table 2: Health coverage indicators for Karnataka (NFHS-5) 

What should a Public Health law look like?

When there is a failure of voluntary compliance to public health policies, laws may be required. However, laws in themselves may be inadequate unless there is a political and moral mandate by governments to protect populations from threats to health and even to healthcare systems themselves. Public health laws should:

• Set clear rules of behaviour for individuals, public bodies, and private actors
• Define powers, limitations, and duties
• Protect fundamental rights
• Apply universally and predictably under the rule of law
• Must be transparent, publicly debated, and widely
• Embed principles of autonomy, privacy, transparency, accountability, and least
• Include Collective Rights to Social Determinants of Health such as safe drinking water, sanitation, nutrition and housing at the very least.
• Explicitly provide right to universal, free health care services that includes free diagnostics, free treatment and free drugs for ALL citizens for ALL health conditions without any conditions or exceptions.
• Prevent any role of private/ corporate entities in planning, regulating, monitoring or provisioning of public health care services
• Explicitly list violations of citizens’ health, health care and patient rights with clear redressal and enforcement mechanisms with proportionate penalties.

• Regulate unnecessary tests, procedures, referrals, bribes, negligence, and staff
• Clarify responsibility for service delivery
• Prevent sabotage by regulated
• Apply Siracusa principles to limit state power during emergencies
• Cap the costs of drugs and treatment in private/ corporate entities and enforce evidence based, standardised government protocols for treatment of diseases of public health importance.

How Karnataka government perceives health rights

A government draft Karnataka Right to Health and Emergency Medical Services Bill 2025 has been circulating, without any due process of public consultation and mostly borrowed from the Rajasthan Right to Health Act (2022). Some activists in Karnataka have been clamoring for a replication of the Rajasthan Right to Health Act without investing too much thought into whether this is what Karnataka requires.

This critique by Karnataka Janaarogya Chaluvali (KJC) illustrates that the draft Bill for Karnataka neither protects the public health system not citizens’ health care rights. Instead, it seems to legitimise large scale privatisation with a predominant focus on empanelling hospitals for emergency medical care and outsourcing ambulance services to any entity that ‘volunteers’ to do so.

The Preamble of the draft Bill invokes Articles 47 and 21 of the Constitution claiming to commit to providing “protection and fulfilment of rights and equity in health and well-being”, “free accessible health care for all residents of the State with the progressive reduction in out of pocket expenditure in seeking, accessing or receiving health care’ and “to provide for the people of Karnataka rights to health including emergency Health services with participation of stake holders and people for realization of people’s right to health services”.

In the case of Pt. Parmanand Katara vs Union of India & Ors on August 28, 1989, the Supreme Court has quoted the Constitutional mandate of the state to preserve life and obliging every doctor (government and medical institutions) to protect life. The Indian Medical Council Act (1860) and Indian Medical Council/Code of medical ethics also state the importance of immediate medical aid in all cases. No law or State action can intervene to avoid or delay these paramount obligations of the medical profession and all standards of care and quality must be upheld while doing so. Doctorscannot put the life of a patient at stake while waiting for fees to be paid. The Karnataka Private Medical Establishments (KPME) Act further reaffirms this mandate. Indeed, there can be no Right

to health without the intrinsic right to emergency healthcare1, so it is unclear why this has to be specified separately as the Karnataka Right to Health and Emergency Medical Services Bill 2025.

Vague definitions and commitments defeat the purpose of a law

The Karnataka draft bill and the Rajasthan Right to Health Act have failed to use standardised globally accepted definitions related to public health and therefore leave wide room for (mis)interpretation, going against the very principle of a good law. Defining public health as “the health of the population, as a whole especially as monitored, regulated, and promoted by the Government” is not only inadequate but also mischievous because it leaves out the crucial term “provisioned” absolving the state from being primary provider.

“health care”, taken verbatim from the watered down Rajasthan Health Act is defined as “testing, treatment, care, procedures and any other service or intervention towards a preventative, promotive, therapeutic, diagnostic, nursing, rehabilitative, palliative, convalescent, research and/or other health related purpose or combinations thereof, including reproductive health care and emergency medical treatment, in any system of medicines, and also included any of these as a result of participation in a medical research program”. Including health research into the definition of healthcare has many implications. Similarly the term “government funded healthcare services” legalises handing over funds to NGOs and private entities further absolving the government from its own Constitutional responsibilities.

The draft further reduces public health to a scheme (Karnataka Scheme of Public Health) with the planned State Health Authority (SHA) being expected to ensure availability, not of comprehensive health care or health, but only “medical services” free of cost, not to all, but only to “eligible patients”. Public health rights must include social determinants of health such as water, sanitation, nutrition, housing etc and include not just related to curative care services.

The SHA is expected to oversee medical, clinical, and social audits; hear all appeals against decision of District /city Health Authority; empanel private medical establishments and outsource ambulance services. It is not clear why a regulatory body should be carrying out executive functions like empanelment of private, placing the Suvarna Arogya Suraksha Trust (SAST) Executive Director as member-secretary of the SHA. SAST is an autonomous body with representatives of empanelled private hospitals on its Board and conflict of interest. Typically, the Director of Health and Family Welfare should be the member secretary of state level regulatory bodies.

Further, the corresponding District /city Health Authority includes the IMA as member. It is not clear what a member of the IMA is doing in a district level regulatory body which also hears people’s grievances. IMA members also have their own hospitals in the district. How can a legislation allow such a conflict of interest?

Grievance redressal

An aggrieved person should first approach the concerned person within the health care institution. If their complaint does not get resolved or if the person is not satisfied with the action taken by the health care institution, then she may approach the District Health Authority. Finally, an appeal can be made to the SHA and the latter should look into the matter and resolve it. There don’t seem to be any serious consequences of violating the provisions of the Bill apart from “a fine up-to rupees ten thousand for the first contravention, and up-to rupees twenty-five thousand for the subsequent contraventions”. Thus, human life is reduced to a few thousand rupees on the pretext of grievance redressal!

Finance

As per Chapter 6 and 8 of the draft Bill, the SHA will receive INR 100 crores as token fund from the state government to be used as corpus fund. The SHA as well as the District/ City authority can to raise its own funds not only through government bodies but also receive “donations” from any “individuals or body”. Isn’t it obvious that if individuals or groups donate funds then they will have a stake in the functioning of this regulatory body? These bodies can also borrow money from the open market for carrying out its activities. So the government will set up a regulatory body which the government itself will be unable to fund? How is the government expected to have any kind of control over this regulatory body? Further, the accounts of these agencies will be accounted by auditors appointed by themselves. While audited accounts have to be placed before the state legislature, it does not mention if it will be audited by the CAG. These provisions make the government’s intent highly suspect and does not infuse any confidence that the government has citizens’ interest in mind.

No real commitment to Right to Health or Emergency services

In this draft Bill, the government primarily commits to a Right to Information, a right to free OPD services and IPD consultations at public health institutions “accordantly to their level of health care as may be prescribed by rules made under this Act” and “emergency treatment and care for accidental emergency, emergency due to snake bite/animal bite and any other emergency decided by State Health Authority under prescribed emergency circumstances, without prepayment of requisite fee or charges including prompt and necessary emergency medical treatment and critical care, emergency obstetric treatment and care, by any public health institution, health care establishment and empanelled health care centres, qualified to provide such care or treatment accordantly to their level of health care, promptly as prescribed or as per guidelines and in a case of medico-legal nature of case, no health care provider or health care establishment shall delay treatment merely on the grounds of receiving police clearance or a police report”

Further it states that “Provided that after proper emergency care, stabilisation and transfer of patient, if patient does not pay requisite charges, healthcare provider shall be entitled to receive requisite fee and charges or proper reimbursement from State Government in prescribed manner as the case may be”. The statement ‘if the patient does not pay’ implies that payment by the patient is the first option and only if that does not happen, there will be reimbursement by the State.

The clause in the Act that emergency medical services means “any reasonable measure to render first-aid, advise or assistance to an injured person of an accident or incident of crime or any other emergency” is alarming. A private entity no matter how well equipped is now (by definition) allowed to wash its hands off by simply providing first aid, advice or assistance. This is no more than what anyone on the street can do if trained in basic first aid. It absolves private medical professionals and institutions from any kind of moral or ethical obligation to a patient in an emergency.

The bill says that to “stabilise” means the “rendering of any immediate emergency care of the injured person as may be necessary to assure within reasonable medical probability, that no material deterioration of

the condition of such injured person is likely to result from or occurred during the transfer of such injured person from one hospital to another, where such appropriate facilities are available to render the requisite treatment” goes against the Supreme court directive in the case of Pt. Parmanand Katara vs Union Of India & Ors on 28 August, 1989 where preserving life by the health professional and the State is over reaching. Terms like ‘as maybe necessary to assure within reasonable medical probability’ will not hold up in a court of law and will allow negligence to be absolved. Further emergencies happen to anyone in the state – visitor or resident. The language of “eligible individual and eligible households” being brought into emergency services is concerning. Are people now expected to carry identification documents or money for healthcare emergencies everywhere they go?

Other Provisions in the Bill

Karnataka Bill has two chapters dedicated to Empanelled Hospitals (Chapter 9) and Requirements of Ambulances (Chapter 10). Chapter 9 is about empanelling private hospitals for “providing or directing the life support system or limited life support system and pre-hospital care system to provide Health care facility and treatment under Government Funded Scheme”. It is not clear what the terms “directing life support”, “life- support system”, “limited life support system” and “pre-hospital care” even mean. With funds from the government, empanelled hospitals will set up emergency departments in their respective facilities without clearly stating what their commitments and accountability mechanisms will be using government funds. District/ City Authority are expected to ensure availability of ambulances, ensure easy access to medical emergency services as also handing over ambulance services to “persons voluntarily registered”.

Conclusion

With the spate of new privatisation friendly healthcare policies, the state has moved further and further away from its core commitments. If the government of Karnataka is seriously invested in the health care, it needs to commit to sustained direct investment into government health care facilities at all levels (primary, secondary, tertiary and super-specialty); strengthened district and government medical colleges as the final referral point; a permanent and well-supported health workforce; strict regulation of private providers; transparent data reporting; and, accessible and enforceable grievance redressal mechanisms. Instead the government breezes over all of these in its draft Bill and instead undermine citizens’ health rights, public accountability, and the core principles of public health.

In the Karnataka State Integrated Health Policy in 2004 and later again in 2017, the state had committed to quality healthcare with a focus on equity, accountability, community participation to improve health and well-being of ALL the people of Karnataka and reducing health disparities.

The vision foregrounded the social determinants of health and Constitutional mandates thus foregrounding health within which healthcare is situated.

Any law that legalises privatisation (public private partnerships, health insurance, contracting) will only further drain public resources will leaving patients at the mercy of market vagaries.

Unless there is a core commitment by the government to revisit these mandates, a law can only be toothless and an ineffective band aid for optics. It is time that the citizens of the state play a more informed role in demanding for our health rights.

The Draft Bill may be read here.

Related:

Labour rights, health of workers hit in the name of “reform”: PUCL Maharashtra

Why health and sex education for young is crucial: Supreme Court

ASHA workers, Anganwadi workers and sanitation workers overlooked in India’s healthcare protection reforms

The post Healthcare in Karnataka: Is a Health Bill the Need of the Hour? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Addressed to the Chief Election Commissioner and copied to the Chief Electoral Officer, Assam, the memorandum documents a disturbing pattern of unauthorised deletions, fabricated objections, false declarations of death, and misuse of statutory forms, allegedly targeting legitimate voters across multiple districts of the State. Along with CJP, Assam Majuri Sramik Union, Banchana Birdodhi Mancha and Forum for Social Harmony are also the signatories to this memorandum.

Dead voters filing objections, living voters declared dead

Among the most alarming allegations are instances where “dead persons” are shown as having filed objections against living voters, as well as complaints branding living electors as deceased. The memorandum flags this as a grave subversion of electoral procedures, calling for immediate scrutiny of how such objections were accepted during the SR process.

In several cases, voters who never changed residence were issued objections falsely claiming that they had shifted addresses. A separate annexure, the groups state, lists such affected voters.

A single woman, 64 objections — all denied

The memorandum details a striking case from Goalpara town, where a woman named Naba Bala Ray from Jyotinagar, Krishnai, was shown to have filed 64 objections against voters. When the affected voters approached her, she categorically denied filing any objections. While she later withdrew some complaints in Assamese, the memorandum notes a glaring inconsistency: her signatures also appeared on Form 7 complaints in English, which she claimed she could not write or understand.

CJP annexed these complaints as evidence of forgery and fabrication within the objection process.

Man objects to himself — and 133 others

In another extraordinary instance from Shribhumi district (formerly Karimganj), a man named Salim Ahmed was shown as having filed objections against himself and 133 other voters, alleging they were not genuine electors. According to the memorandum, Ahmed told the Booth Level Officer that he never filed any such objection, pointing to what the groups describe as a “fully fabricated” complaint attributed to him without consent or knowledge.

BJP leaders accused of unauthorised access to election data

Beyond individual cases, the memorandum raises grave institutional concerns. It alleges that office-bearers of the Bharatiya Janata Party, including district-level leaders and ST Morcha functionaries, unauthorisedly entered the office of the Co-District Commissioner, Boko-Chhaygaon, and accessed official documents and the Election Commission’s electronic database.

Such actions, if proven, would amount to a serious breach of electoral neutrality and administrative safeguards, the groups warn.

Migrant workers disproportionately affected

The memorandum also flags how migrant labourers from Assam were particularly vulnerable during the SR process. Voters who had temporarily left the State for work during verification reportedly returned to find fresh objections raised against their names, effectively penalising economic migration and seasonal labour mobility.

Allegations of partisan signalling from political executive

Calling for institutional impartiality, CJP and other groups cite alleged interference in the Boko-Chhaygaon constituency and refer to statements attributed to Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, which they characterise as “blatantly partisan” and inconsistent with the constitutional requirement of a neutral electoral process.

Demands to the Election Commission

The memorandum places eight specific demands before the ECI, including:

• Withdrawal of objections where the original complainant is absent during hearings
• Investigation and penal action for false Form 7 complaints
• Action under Section 31 of the Representation of the People Act, 1950 against false declarants
• Compensation for victims subjected to mental, physical, or financial harassment
• Extension of timelines for claims and publication of the final electoral roll

At its core, the memorandum urges the Election Commission to restore procedural integrity and ensure that Assam’s electoral rolls are prepared “free and fair, in the interests of democracy”.

Why was this memorandum submitted?

Coming amid heightened national scrutiny of electoral processes, the allegations — if substantiated — point not merely to clerical lapses but to a structural vulnerability in voter list revision mechanisms, particularly in politically sensitive regions. The memorandum underscores that electoral rolls are not administrative lists but constitutional instruments, foundational to the exercise of universal adult franchise.

The Election Commission has not yet responded to the memorandum.

The complete memorandum may be read below.

Detailed report may be read here.

Related:

Supreme Court defers hearing in batch of petitions, led by CJP, challenging state Anti-Conversion laws; interim relief applications pending since April 2025

CJP flags Zee News broadcast ‘Kalicharan Maharaj vs 4 Maulanas’ for communal framing before NBDSA

A voter list exercise under scrutiny: Assam’s Special Revision of electoral rolls, allegations of targeted harassment and misuse of Form-7

The case of “pushback” of Doyjan Bibi and the quiet normalisation of undocumented deportations

The post Assam’s Electoral Rolls in Crisis: CJP flags structural manipulation in Summary Revision appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Wangchuk was detained on September 26, 2025, under the National Security Act, 1980 (NSA), following weeks of protests in Ladakh demanding statehood and Sixth Schedule protection—a movement that later spiralled into violence, leading to the deaths of four civilians.

A Bench of Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice P. B. Varale is hearing the Article 32 habeas corpus petition filed by Wangchuk’s wife, Dr Gitanjali Angmo, which challenges the legality of his continued detention. Proceedings have been closely tracked by LiveLaw and other media.

Union’s core defence

1. Court’s review is procedural, not substantive

Opening arguments for the Union, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta emphasised that judicial scrutiny in preventive detention matters is narrowly circumscribed. The Court, he argued, is not entitled to examine whether the detention was “justified”, but only whether statutory and constitutional procedures were followed so as to ensure fairness to the detenue.

Mehta relied on established precedent to submit that once the detaining authority records subjective satisfaction, courts must exercise restraint.

He further underscored the “inbuilt safeguards” within the NSA:

• The District Magistrate’s detention order must be confirmed by the State Government; and
• The detenue has a right to make a representation before an Advisory Board headed by a former High Court judge.

Crucially, Mehta pointed out that Wangchuk has not independently challenged either the confirmation order or the Advisory Board’s opinion, a submission clearly aimed at narrowing the scope of judicial interference.

2. Dispute Over Supply of Materials: Union calls allegations an “afterthought”

Responding to the petitioner’s contention that four video clips relied upon in the detention order were not supplied to Wangchuk, Mehta rejected the claim as factually incorrect and a belated fabrication.

According to the Union, the service of the detention order itself took nearly four hours, during which a senior police officer personally went through each page of the grounds and the video material, a process that was videographed.

“The DIG Ladakh sits with him, shows him every page, every clip, and asks if he is satisfied. He answers in the affirmative,” Mehta told the Court, offering to place the recording on record if required.

3. “Borrowed satisfaction” argument rejected

When the Bench raised the argument that the detention order was based on borrowed or mechanically reproduced material, Mehta countered that this misunderstands the nature of preventive detention.

He argued that a District Magistrate is not expected to personally witness each incident but is entitled—indeed required—to rely on inputs placed before him by law enforcement agencies to arrive at subjective satisfaction.

“What the authority must assess is the speech as a whole,” Mehta said, warning against isolating references to non-violence or Gandhian philosophy while ignoring the allegedly inflammatory core.

4. Union alleges “hope for riot-like situation” in Ladakh

The centrepiece of the Union’s case lies in its reading of Wangchuk’s speeches. According to Mehta, Wangchuk deliberately invoked foreign protest movements to emotionally mobilise young people in Ladakh—a region that shares borders with volatile and geopolitically sensitive areas.

He referred to Wangchuk’s alleged references to:

• Nepal’s youth-led protests,
• Political upheavals in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and
• The Arab Spring, where multiple governments were overthrown following mass unrest.

“What is the relevance of Nepal and Ladakh?” Mehta asked. “You are not addressing Gen-Z in isolation—you are hoping for a Nepal-like situation.”

The Solicitor General dismissed Wangchuk’s invocation of Mahatma Gandhi as a rhetorical façade. “Gandhi was resisting an imperial power. He was not instigating violence against his own democratic government,” Mehta argued.

5. Alleged security concerns and references to self-immolation

The Union further alleged that Wangchuk attempted to create distance between civilians and Indian security forces by lamenting the deployment of armed personnel in Ladakh.

“Security forces become ‘they’, and the people become ‘we’—this is dangerous in a border region,” Mehta submitted.

The most serious allegation concerned Wangchuk’s references to self-immolation, drawn from the Arab Spring narrative.

“This is an invitation to bloodshed,” Mehta claimed, arguing that such examples could incite impressionable youth to extreme and irreversible acts.

Petitioner’s response

1. Non-consideration of crucial exculpatory material

On behalf of the petitioner, Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal mounted a systematic dismantling of the detention order in earlier hearings.

Sibal argued that the September 24 speech, in which Wangchuk broke his hunger strike and publicly appealed for peace after violence erupted, was the most proximate and relevant material—yet was never placed before the detaining authority.

Its suppression, he argued, vitiates the very foundation of subjective satisfaction, particularly when the speech was publicly available and known to authorities.

2. Failure to supply relied-upon materials violates Article 22(5)

Sibal further submitted that four key videos, explicitly relied upon in the detention order, were never supplied to Wangchuk along with the grounds of detention, in violation of Article 22(5) of the Constitution and Section 8 of the NSA.

Without access to the complete material, Wangchuk was denied the right to make an effective representation—not merely before the Advisory Board, but also before the government itself.

3. Section 5A cannot rescue a composite detention order

Rejecting the Union’s reliance on Section 5A of the NSA, Sibal argued that the provision applies only where distinct and independent grounds of detention exist.

Here, he said, the detention rests on a single composite ground, stitched together through selective videos, stale FIRs, and allegedly distorted interpretations.

Relying on Attorney General of India v. Amratlal Prajivandas (1994), Sibal submitted that a chain of events cannot be artificially severed to salvage an otherwise unlawful detention.

4. Stale FIRs, copy-paste orders, and non-application of mind

Sibal also pointed out that:

• Several FIRs relied upon date back to 2024,
• Many are against unknown persons, and
• Even the FIR registered after the Ladakh violence does not name Wangchuk.

He further demonstrated that the District Magistrate reproduced the Superintendent of Police’s recommendation verbatim, betraying a mechanical exercise of power rather than independent application of mind.

5. Allegations of anti-army rhetoric and plebiscite “completely false”

Addressing allegations that Wangchuk discouraged civilians from assisting the Indian Army during wartime, Sibal said the claim was entirely false, arising from mistranslation or deliberate distortion.

He quoted Wangchuk as urging Ladakhis not to mix political grievances with national defence, and to stand by the country during any external conflict.

Similar distortions, Sibal argued, were made regarding:

• Alleged support for plebiscite, and
• Claims of disrespect toward a Hindu goddess—both of which he described as manufactured narratives, widely debunked by fact-checkers.

Health, custody, and court-ordered medical care

Amidst these proceedings, concerns over Wangchuk’s health have also engaged the Court’s attention.

On January 29, the Supreme Court directed that Wangchuk be examined by a specialist gastroenterologist at a government hospital, after he complained of persistent stomach pain during his detention.

He was subsequently taken to AIIMS Jodhpur on January 31, where he underwent medical tests. While jail authorities claimed he had been examined 21 times, the Court accepted that specialist care was warranted and sought a report by February 2.

Voices Outside Court: Gitanjali Angmo speaks

Speaking to The News Minute at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters in Thiruvananthapuram, Dr Gitanjali Angmo framed her husband’s detention as an attempt to silence a sustained and principled critique of how Ladakh is being governed after the abrogation of Article 370. She suggested that Sonam Wangchuk’s insistence on environmental safeguards and public participation in decision-making had increasingly placed him at odds with a governance model driven by centralised authority rather than local consent.

Dr Angmo emphasised that Ladakh’s demands for statehood and Sixth Schedule protection were neither sudden nor radical, but rooted in the region’s fragile ecology, high-altitude geography, and distinct cultural identity. With temperatures plunging to sub-zero levels and ecosystems highly vulnerable to disruption, she argued that policies designed for the rest of India cannot be mechanically applied to Ladakh without severe consequences for both people and environment.

She cautioned against what she described as a “one-size-fits-all” approach to governance, warning that excessive centralisation risks erasing India’s constitutional commitment to diversity and federal balance. India, she noted, has historically functioned as a plural federation, united not by uniformity but by accommodation of difference—a principle she fears is being steadily undermined.

Rejecting any suggestion that Wangchuk’s activism was anti-national, Dr Angmo characterised his work as firmly anchored in constitutional values and long-term national interest. She alleged that his speeches were selectively excerpted and stripped of context, while his repeated appeals for peace and unity were ignored, creating a distorted narrative that portrayed dissent as a security threat.

In Dr Angmo’s account, the case transcends the legality of one preventive detention and raises a deeper question about the health of Indian democracy. When region-specific political demands and environmental concerns are met with the extraordinary power of preventive detention, she suggested, it signals a troubling intolerance for dissent—particularly from India’s geographic and political margins.

A growing constitutional unease

As the hearings unfold, the case has come to symbolise a broader constitutional tension: the use of preventive detention laws against political dissent, particularly in regions demanding greater autonomy and constitutional safeguards.

At its core lies a troubling question—can references to global protest movements, stripped of context and divorced from subsequent calls for peace, justify the extraordinary power of preventive detention?

Wangchuk, notably, was detained two days after publicly calling for calm, breaking his fast, and dissociating himself from violence. The leap from that moment to the conclusion that he posed an imminent threat to national security remains at the heart of the Court’s scrutiny.

In a constitutional democracy, where preventive detention is meant to be the exception rather than the rule, the outcome of this case may well define the line between legitimate security concerns and the impermissible criminalisation of dissent.

Further hearings are awaited.

Orders of the said case may be read below.

Related:

How the Centre used a ‘Draconian’ law to silence Sonam Wangchuk and Ladakh’s aspirations

A victory for Ladakh’s voices: Sonam Wangchuk and Ladakhi activists break 16-day fast as union government agrees to renew talks on demands

Centre cancels FCRA licence of Sonam Wangchuk’s NGO, cites violations including study on ‘sovereignty’

Gen‑Z’s furious stand for Ladakh statehood, centre blames Sonam Wangchuk for violence incitement

The post When Protest becomes a “Threat”: Inside the Supreme Court hearing on Sonam Wangchuk’s NSA detention appeared first on SabrangIndia.