Culture

From citizenship and reservation to encounter accountability, privacy, environmental protection and minority rights, the Court's most contentious judgments of 2025 reveal an increasing preference for institutional deference and procedural compliance over substantive constitutional justice

What began as a case about encroachments has become a searching inquiry into the State's failure to implement the Street Vendors Act, the rights of pedestrians and informal workers, and the growing role of identification and verification in urban governance

The right of voters to recall representatives who defect—as seen in West Bengal, Maharashtra, Goa and Arunachal Pradesh—and the requirement of intra-party democracy could form part of a broader institutional redesign. Such measures would deepen democratic values and, above all, signal a refusal by citizens to accept the corruption of their mandate. These may be among the reforms that India's Parliament and democracy most urgently need

Unable to stay the statute, High Courts have charted a middle path—protecting petitioners already undergoing hormone therapy while the broader constitutional challenge awaits adjudication by the Supreme Court

While countries such as Singapore and Sweden are curbing the environmental costs of data centres through regulation and innovation, India is actively courting these resource-intensive facilities with little regard for their water and energy demands. From Stockholm's waste-heat recovery systems to zero-water cooling technologies, solutions exist. Yet India continues to trade away land, water and public resources with scant consideration for environmental sustainability or local communities.

Invoking exam security to suspend access to a platform used by millions raises serious questions about proportionality, transparency and the growing tendency to restrict communications whenever governance challenges arise

Savarkar’s grandnephew who had lodged a criminal defamation case against LOP Rahul Gandhi, stated and admitted during his testimony that while there were other freedom fighters who refused to file clemency petitions before the British, his uncle Vinayak Savarkar  had filed as many as ten!