The Numbers behind the Screen

The data illustrates both advances and stagnation. On the one hand, the total number of reported cyber offences has increased, but they still account for only a tiny portion of overall (other) crimes. A 2023 Internet Freedom Foundation study found that nearly 68% of respondents who faced digital fraud or harassment did not report or seek help from the police because they did not believe the police would take action, or did not seek help due to fear of being shamed online. Even individuals who reported complaints were often turned away, told that the incident was “not serious enough” or “outside the jurisdiction” of their local police department.

The NCRB’s data on cyber offences is heavily biased towards documenting financial offences: 65% of total reported offences in 2023 were either banking or investment fraud, while non-financial classes of cyber offences – such as stalking, cyberbullying, morphing, etc. – are represented in total under 5%. Nevertheless, first-person reports from TN/NGO’s such as CyberPeace Foundation and Internet Democracy Project find that these personal and gendered violations may be even more pervasive, particularly for women, queer folks, and students. Statistically, these violations are invisible because the state cannot understand these forms of abuse as violence.

The NCRB’s Crime in India model is based on a First Information Report (FIR) registration. If a complaint is never registered as an FIR, it never appears in the Bureau’s reports. Consequently, what we have nationally is not a decrease in crime but an increase in barriers, this time bureaucratic, to counting crimes.

The Mirage of Decline: Delhi, Mumbai and the Art of Statistical Censorship

In Delhi, Mumbai, and many other large metro cities, the figures showed an abrupt decline despite the alarming figures. In Mumbai, the report shows a decline of 11.7% from the previous year in total cybercrime cases, whilst RTI data suggested that only two percent of all complaints made to the National Cyber Crime Portal were ever converted into FIRs. In Delhi, likewise, all categories show declines in clear contradiction to multiple news articles from the media presentations of data that clearly suggested increases in cyber fraud, phishing scams, and gender-based online harassment. The disconnection between the data provided through the official reports and lived human experience represents, in and of itself, a new type of censorship – a digital censorship.

The observable decrease in cybercrimes in regions such as Delhi and Mumbai illustrates how underreporting has functioned as a method of digital governance. Police officers in Mumbai, for example, privately confirmed to the Times of India (2023) that increased reports of cyber fraud were negatively affecting the public’s perception of law and order in the city, and many police stations even ceased to record phishing and fake-profile incidents as cybercrime, instead logging them as petty property offences. The entirety of the TOI report can be read here.

The situation in Delhi is paradoxically similar. The NCRB reports a slight decrease in the number of cybercrime incidents reported in 2023, yet, according to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, the city’s cybercrime reporting helpline received over 80,000 calls. This disparity is an articulation of what one officer termed “reclassifying for efficiency,” meaning the police advised the victims to call the bank, private website, or intermediary instead of filing a FIR or police report.

This form reduces the number of FIRs filed but improves the statistical reporting; using the data as a measure no longer reveals security; it is a measure of bureaucratic discipline. The illusion of a positive or outward improvement conceals a structural refusal to document crime. Therefore, the censorship of cyberspace does not come from assertion, but comes from data.

Gender, Class, and the Digital Divide

The statistics given by the bureau also erase the social hierarchies within digital victimisation. The usual victims within a phishing scam and job fraud scheme is not the urban middle class, but rather it is low-income workers, migrant families, or elderly populations – all of whom are least literate in navigating digital bureaucracy. In 2023, the National Payments Corporation of India found that UPI-linked fraud was up by 71%, yet many victims did not feel assured or capable of making a formal complaint. The NCRB marks this crime as “banking offences” and erases the human story of systemic victimization or exploitation.

For women, queers, and minors, the stakes are different but equally severe. While image-based abuse, stalking, and cyber blackmail are on the rise, the report lists only 10,730 cases of “cyberstalking” or “cyberbullying” in 2023. That is highly impossible statistically, in a population of 1.4 billion. Experts agree that it is “ludicrously low” given the modern reach of social media and similar avenues. Ground-level studies conducted by Sabrang India and The Hindu have shown police would often, depending on the situation, suggest to women that deleting accounts was better than pursuing legal action for cyberstalking.

This gendered digital divide reproduces offline hierarchies: women and marginalized communities endure disproportionate online violence, and the state responds in a procedural and disengaged manner. In converting these experiences into codes for action, as the bureau does, the violence itself is rendered invisible — a point stripped of dignity and pain.

Invisible Harms, Invisible Justice

Cybercrime, unlike conventional crime, leaves behind traces, such as screenshots, IP logs, and chat histories, yet the Indian legal system has not adapted to utilize these for legal accountability. Data from the bureau for 2023 denotes that 22% of cybercrimes were charged, and less than 3% were convicted at trial. This poor record is compounded by the fact that there is no system for protecting victims or offering mental health services for victims of online harassment.

The NCRB’s framework also does not distinguish between cyber offences that are conducted based on economic fraud and cybercrime that is motivated by gendered violence or political ideology. Hate campaigns against journalists and activists, such as doxing or coordinated trolling, rarely go as far as registration. The India Freedom of Expression Index (IFEI) reports that 226 journalists suffered online abuse in 2023, and it seldom seems to be reflected in the observation category in the report. The very Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 did focus on privacy, yet failed to discuss the accountability of platforms or intermediaries.

So, the issue is not that we lack data; rather, the data is abstract. Cybercrime is documented, but not interpreted or contextualized. Victims become statistics and records, devoid of narrative and recourse.

From Privacy to Accountability: Rethinking Digital Governance

A rights-based framework for cyber governance must move beyond the NCRB’s numerical formalism. Start with a recognition: that digital violence is not a niche technical problem, but a civic crisis that brings forward social hierarchies of power. Reforms should strengthen reporting mechanisms with a requirement of FIR registration if there is an investigation, and provide police with training to sensitively handle gendered and caste-based cyber offences.

Transparency is equally important. The bureau should report how many complaints on their portal turn into FIRs, and they should report on the data of those complaints in a disaggregated manner by gender, caste, and age. This would surface both the social pattern of online harms and expose the administrative bottlenecks to access to justice.

India’s approach towards cybercrime has primarily adopted an approach to surveillance more than safety, with broad internet shutdowns – recorded over 80 in 2023 by Access Now and SFLC.in – used as instruments for the appearance of prevention, even in the contexts of protests and communal tensions. Broad shutdowns, although often explained as security measures, mute voices and obfuscate evidence. Interventions instead of maintaining accountability for perpetrators, punish entire populations, thereby further complicating digital justice.

As the digital-acquainted world expands, so must the social governance moral imagination. Repairing safety for citizens online requires more than cybersecurity infrastructure, but accountability, empathy, and counting all the invisible victims.

Counting the Uncounted

The NCRB’s 2023 data on cybercrime showcases a contradiction within India’s digital transformation. A rise of 31.2% in reported offences demonstrates both acknowledgement of the growing threat of online crime and limitations in reporting incidents of crime. It is not that citizens are less threatened in cities such as Delhi and Mumbai; fewer offences are permitted to be documented in the first instance. The state’s digital apparatus is noting its accomplishments through denials and silence.

Gendered violence, class-based fraud, and ideological harassment thrive in the silence of non-reporting. When the NCRB records fewer incidences of crimes, it is not recognised as justice but rather accepted as erasure. In a democracy that prides itself on statistical knowledge, the absence of numbers becomes the strongest measurement of control.

Cybercrime is not, therefore, simply a technological challenge; it is a challenge to citizenship. Until every form of harm experienced in digital spaces can be translated into redress in the physical world, India’s digital democracy remains one of invisible victims, and a crisis of numbers devoid of presence.

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

Related:

Counting Crimes, Discounting Justice: The NCRB’s statistical blind spots

Mapping Gender-Based Violence in India: Trends, determinants, and institutional frameworks

State-sponsored attempts at surveillance erode right to privacy, target specific persons and expose lacunae in legislation

The Ghost of Shreya Singhal: Re-litigating digital free speech

The post Screens of Silence: What NCRB Data Misses about Cybercrime in India appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) filed three separate complaints with the Election Commission of India (ECI) during the Model Code of Conduct (MCC) period, citing violations of electoral law and criminal statutes. The fourth speech—by Union Home Minister Amit Shah in Siwan—was delivered two days later and completes the arc that the complaints had already begun to document.

The four speeches, read together, construct a continuum of rhetoric that moves from ridicule to coercion to threat: the ridiculing of religious language, the coercion of loyalty tests tied to welfare benefits, and the threat of identification and expulsion directed at an entire community.

The complaint against Giriraj Singh

Dates and locations: October 18 (Arwal) and October 19 (Begusarai), 2025

Union Minister Giriraj Singh’s two speeches are at the base of this chain. In Arwal, he told a story about a “Maulvi” and the Ayushman card, asking whether the man would swear “on Khuda” to acknowledge benefits received under Modi’s government. “I don’t need votes from namakharam people,” Singh declared, transforming gratitude for welfare into a religious oath of political loyalty.

A day later in Begusarai, he manipulated the word “haram” into a slur, questioning the faith and morality of Muslims who benefited from government schemes but did not vote for the BJP. The complaint describes these statements as “coercive and communal,” arguing they violate the MCC’s ban on religious appeals and constitute “undue influence” under Section 123(2) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA), 1951.

CJP’s complaint sought immediate ECI action, including a show-cause notice, FIR registration under sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) relating to promoting enmity, and removal of the videos from circulation. It framed Singh’s language as “a public loyalty test administered through humiliation.”

The complete complaint may be read below.

The complaint against Ashok Kumar Yadav

Date: October 16, 2025

Location: Darbhanga (Keoti constituency)

Three days earlier, Madhubani MP Ashok Kumar Yadav addressed “Muslim brothers” at a public rally, instructing them: “Say ‘tauba tauba,’ I will not eat free grain; I will not take a gas cylinder; I will not walk on the road built by Modi ji; I will not cross the bridge built by Modi ji.”

The crowd laughed. The complaint did not. CJP’s complaint describes the speech as “mocking religious practice and publicly demanding a ritual renunciation of entitlements,” amounting to psychological coercion of a targeted group. It invokes Sections 123(2), (3), and (3A) of the RPA and Sections 196 and 297 of the BNS, which criminalise promotion of enmity and acts prejudicial to public peace.

By equating welfare use with political loyalty and faith with betrayal, Yadav’s speech redefined citizenship as conditional. It fused spiritual vocabulary (“tauba tauba”) with partisan mobilisation, turning a phrase of repentance into a performative punishment.

The complete complaint may be read below.

The complaint against Nityanand Rai

Date: October 22, 2025

Location: Hayaghat, Darbhanga

When Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai took the stage in Hayaghat, the stakes rose. His speech moved beyond ridicule to overt nationalism, religion, and xenophobia. “I want to be born only as a Hindu, only in this Bharat. We live by Krishna’s teachings,” he began, before pivoting sharply: “Those wearing reshmi salwar and topi are against the message of the Gita. Some want to bring in Bangladeshi and Rohingya infiltrators and take away the livelihood of Bihar’s youth. You cannot include these infiltrators in the voter list.”

The complaint noted the gravity of a Home Ministry official using xenophobic tropes while the MCC was in force. It argued that such speech carries “the force of state policy” when uttered by a minister responsible for internal security. The complaint sought a show-cause notice, FIR registration, and referral to the Prime Minister’s Office for ministerial code violation.

In legal language, Rai’s speech blends three distinct offences: an appeal to religion for votes, the vilification of a religious group, and the use of a ministerial office to threaten administrative exclusion. In political terms, it sanctifies prejudice and embeds it within the authority of the state.

The complete complaint may be read below.

Amit Shah in Siwan: The arc completed

Date: October 24, 2025

Location: Siwan, Bihar

Speaker: Union Home Minister Amit Shah

Two days later in Siwan, Amit Shah’s campaign speech brought the narrative to its most explicit point. He invoked the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya as a triumph of faith and political will, asked voters whether they supported it, and immediately shifted to the question of “ghuspaithiya” — infiltrators.

“Rahul Baba says we should allow ‘ghuspaithiya’ in Bihar. People of Siwan, tell me — should these ghuspaithiya be removed or not? Should their names be on the voter list or not? I promise you, once the NDA wins again, the BJP will identify and expel each and every individual ghuspaithiya from the country.”

He concluded: “They are snatching our youth’s jobs and the ration of our poor. These infiltrators are involved in anti-national activities. The BJP is determined to pick them out one by one and expel them.”

In the arc that began with Giriraj Singh’s coercive mockery and moved through Rai’s sanctified nationalism, Shah’s words were the culmination: an explicit promise of identification and expulsion, tying the future of governance to the physical removal of a constructed internal enemy.

Delivered during the MCC period, it was not merely an opinion—it was a campaign pledge of state action.

A shared political logic

Across all four speeches, three interlocking strategies emerge:

1. Welfare as a political debt: Welfare schemes—rations, gas cylinders, Ayushman cards—are presented not as rights but as favours to be repaid through political allegiance. Those who refuse are branded “ungrateful” or “namakharam.”
2. Religion as a mobilising instrument: Sacred references are casually inserted into electoral appeals. “Swear on Khuda,” “tauba tauba,” “I want to be born only as a Hindu,” “Ram Mandir”—each invocation draws moral legitimacy from religion and aligns it with party identity.
3. ‘Infiltrator’ as the enemy within: The trope of the “ghuspaithiya” shifts the narrative from faith to belonging. It identifies a community—implicitly Muslim, explicitly Bengali-speaking or Rohingya—as outsiders usurping entitlements, jobs, and rations. It allows the campaign to move from gratitude and shaming to exclusion and threat.

Each strategy reinforces the next. Gratitude establishes hierarchy, religion sanctifies loyalty, and the “infiltrator” label converts political opponents into existential threats. Together, they blur the boundary between welfare policy, religious identity, and citizenship status.

Legal violations and democratic harm

The three complaints collectively invoke the Model Code of Conduct, the Representation of the People Act, and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Under the Model Code of Conduct, parties are prohibited from appealing to religion, caste, or communal feelings and from using temples, mosques, or religious symbols for electoral gain. The MCC came into force in Bihar in early October 2025 after the ECI announced the poll schedule.

Under the Representation of the People Act, these speeches fall within multiple definitions of “corrupt practice”:

• Section 123(2) – Undue influence through coercion or threat.
• Section 123(3) – Appeal to religion for votes.
• Section 123(3A) – Promotion of enmity or hatred for electoral advantage.
• Section 125 – Offence of promoting enmity between classes in connection with elections.

The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which replaced the IPC in 2023, reinforces this framework through Sections 196, 297, and 356, criminalising the promotion of enmity, insult to religion, and public mischief.

Each complaint demands that these provisions be activated: show-cause notices by the ECI, FIRs by the police, and debarment of the speakers from further campaigning.

The legal core is clear: these are not mere lapses in civility but prima facie offences that undermine the constitutional promise of free and fair elections.

The arc of escalation

When read in sequence, the four speeches trace a visible escalation in both tone and institutional proximity to power:

• Ashok Yadav’s speech begins with ridicule.
• Giriraj Singh’s adds humiliation through oaths and public shaming.
• Nityanand Rai’s brings religion and national security together, as a sitting Home Ministry official.
• Amit Shah’s completes the circle by translating rhetoric into an explicit promise of expulsion.

This progression is not accidental. It reveals a tested campaign grammar where each rung normalises the next: what begins as jest ends as policy.

The broader stakes

These episodes are not confined to Bihar. They speak to a larger transformation of Indian electoral speech where the distance between communal rhetoric and administrative policy has collapsed. When senior ministers use the language of exclusion, the threat is no longer hypothetical—it carries bureaucratic plausibility.

For voters marked by faith, language, or origin, such speeches blur the line between citizenship and suspicion. When welfare becomes conditional, religion becomes campaign currency, and “infiltrator” becomes a category of governance, the right to participate as an equal citizen is quietly replaced by a test of loyalty.

Conclusion

The complaints filed by CJP during the MCC period document more than isolated offences; they expose a deliberate strategy of electoral communication. The sequence from Ashok Yadav’s “tauba tauba” to Amit Shah’s “expel each and every ghuspaithiya” reveals how easily populist politics collapses welfare into servitude, faith into allegiance, and citizenship into a privilege contingent on identity.

If the Election Commission and the police fail to act decisively, the precedent will be set: that speeches promising the exclusion of communities can be made under the protection of the very laws meant to prevent them.

In the end, the question that echoes across these rallies in Bihar is the one Amit Shah himself asked in Siwan: “Should their names be on the voter list or not?” The answer, if democracy is to retain meaning, cannot be decided by a campaign crowd—it must remain the inalienable right of every citizen, beyond the reach of faith, fear, or political favour.

Related:

BJP leaders’ hate speech draws backlash ahead of Bihar elections

CJP urges YouTube to remove content targeting CJI Gavai from Ajeet Bharti’s channel

From slogan to sanction: how a Chief Minister’s words hardened into punitive policing after the “I Love Muhammad” row

CJP complains to Maharashtra DGP, Jalgaon SP over police role in Shiv Pratisthan rally amid Suleman Pathan lynching probe

CJP’s complaint leads to NBDSA action against India TV’s biased Bahraich broadcast

The post From Welfare to Expulsion: Bihar’s MCC period rhetoric turns citizenship into a campaign weapon appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In 2023, India reported 5,272 “Offences against the State”, a decrease from 6,062 in the previous year. During this period, independent monitors, journalists, and lawyers also reported an increase in arrests, summonses, and investigations under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the National Security Act (NSA). This contradiction suggests a pattern, suggesting the state is becoming better at not reducing conflict, but reclassifying dissent. What is not present in the data is often present in imprisonment, in FIRs filed under vague provisions, and in the long silences in the periods between bail hearings.

Counting the Uncounted

The category “Offences Against the State” used by the NCRB is conceptually neutral. It combines old offences of sedition, UAPA, breaches of official secrets, and offences against public order categories into one statistical grouping — thereby obscuring the legal distinction between offences, which have divergent political meanings. By reporting a decline without disaggregation, the NCRB holds out a possibility of “national calm”.

Field reporting tells a different story. In UP, over 260 people were booked under UAPA between 2020-2023 for affiliations with alleged banned organizations or protests. In Assam, about 240 UAPA cases were filed, most against ordinary villagers for alleged “extremist sympathies.” In Jammu & Kashmir, local officials confirmed over 400 preventive detentions under the Public Safety Act (PSA) in 2023, but the NCRB reported zero sedition or communal violence cases (and the only cases of communal violence reported under “Offences Against the State” came from UP).

The absence of sedition or communal offences amongst J&K’s tables is not statistical levelling; it is political theatre. When it ceased to report on communal violence after 2017 and discontinued hate crime data due to “unreliability”, the NCRB removed its capacity to log dissent and identity-based repression. The state achieves its calm through bureaucratic design: what is not coded does not exist.

The Geography of Dissent

In India, oppression has been increasingly localised. The national claim of 13% (decrease) in “Offences against the State” obscures serious variations at the state level. Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, and Jammu & Kashmir — states under direct or close control of the centre — accounted for over half of UAPA registrations.

For example, in Manipur, where ethnic violence resulted in over 200 deaths and displaced 60,000 residents, the NCRB classifies the killings under “riots” and “arson,” not “communal or ethnic violence.” By using lost naming conventions, the NCRB ignores assessing the political roots of the conflict, by framing a breakdown of civil war-like norms as a disturbance of law and order. The ongoing case in Assam, where the government has expanded the use of the UAPA to include dissent and protect values of citizenship after protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, includes student leaders and journalists arrested for lengthy periods that vanish into their generic form of “public disorder.”

The city creates a paradoxical calm by reframing the law. Its NCRB numbers are a model of stability because the repression is distributed across other sections of law. Delhi is an example of national law enforcement priorities: bureaucratic calm, obscuring political repression.

Delhi: The Capital of Control

According to the NCRB’s 2023 data in Delhi, there were just six cases under UAPA, and a few others under sedition- numbers which starkly contrast with all that we know about cases in relation to the 2020 anti-CAA protests, the farmers’ protests, and the arrests of students in Delhi University and their teachers. The Delhi police, which is a part of the Ministry of Home Affairs, has become a model of a censorship state for centralization of dissent: students arrested for conspiracy, comedians questioned for satire, protest organizers charged for “rioting” rather than “offences against the state”.

Journalists like Meer Faisal and Qazi Shibli have been called for questioning on multiple occasions; students such as Devangana Kalita and Asif Iqbal Tanha, who were held in remand in the Delhi riots conspiracy case, remain on trial under UAPA even though the evidence against them is tenuous, and judgments have pushed back against what appears to be prosecutorial overreach.

This way of representing counts permits the data from Delhi to paint a picture of a city governed well, which permits dissent, free expression, and fun within the law. The lived experience tells a different story, of a city policed not through clampdown but through the ever-present threat of surveillance, summons, and social media judicial action.

Hence, Delhi’s repression is expressed through bureaucratic restraint rather than overt cruelty. It is the capital of restraint—a city where peace is created through paper.

The Architecture of Silence

This illusion created by the NCRB falls into a fourfold architecture of reclassification, omission, preventive detention, and digital suppression, all meant to turn repression into bureaucratic routine.

Maharashtra exemplifies reclassification. The NCRB mentions one UAPA and one sedition case in its comparable figures for 2023, while the Bhima Koregaon prosecution is ongoing in the court system. The difference isn’t that there were fewer arrests, but rather changed categorization—political matters labelled as public disorder. At the same time, the Bureau has refrained from noting lynchings or hate crimes since 2017, removing entire categories of violence from the national bookkeeping. What cannot be counted cannot be questioned.

Preventive detention exacerbates this silence. In Jammu & Kashmir, over 400 individuals were placed in preventive detention under the PSA in 2023, without any of them being charged under UAPA nor sedition. This too can be said for temporary curfews or travel restrictions that never lead to even a formal FIR. Digital control fulfils the architecture of silence. India had more than 80 internet shutdowns in 2023, with the highest in the world (https://www.accessnow.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2023-KIO-Report.pdf). Each of these shutdowns limits the state’s violence from being documented and, therefore, the NCRB can write its next report everyone is in peace. Thus, the Bureau’s data, is, then, not a neutral mirror of crime and thus, a curated reflection of governance—a record that transforms coercion into an order.

Freedom on Paper

The judiciary occasionally intervenes to disrupt this silence, rarely dismantling it. In Patricia Mukhim v. State of Meghalaya, the Supreme Court quashed a criminal process pursued against journalist Patricia Mukhim, alleging that she incited enmity against the government by posting on Facebook about government inaction after communal violence erupted in Shillong. The police charged her under Sections 153A and 505 of the IPC for reportedly promoting enmity, but the Court concluded that the post was calling out for equality and accountability, and importantly, this call for accountability was an act protected by Article 19(1) (a) of the Constitution. The Court held, in line with its previous jurisprudence, that the rights to critique failures of government action is part of democratic discourse, and criminal law should not be employed to silence legitimate expressions of concern.

The disjunction is enhanced by the NCRB’s silence. The NCRB does not treat any of these prosecutions as “Offences Against the State, even though they indicate how dissent is managed in reality. By treating repression as unquantifiable, the Bureau sustains the illusion of order. In the national ledger, India appears peaceful because the noise has been intentionally erased. The fewer number of offences reported, the more successful it is reported to be in maintaining peace—not by freedom, but by silence.

Reading the Decline

A 13% decrease in “Offences against the State,” reported by the NCRB, is not evidence of tranquillity; it is evidence of repression managed through a suppression of data. The numbers convey a political culture in which repression is managed through administrative, legal, and digital means. The selective reporting of cases in Delhi, the statistical black hole of J&K, and the removal of entries under ‘hate-crime’ all combine to form a national tableau of calm, entirely upon paper.

India’s democratic crisis is now one of a repressive silence. The state can operate without overt censorship; it can operate with hollowed out categories. Once dissent disappears from official stats, accountability collapses into nothingness. The NCRB’s spreadsheets do not report a reality; they curate one.

To truly understand Crime in India 2023 is to recognize that the state has mastered the art of anticivilization reflecting in the official statistics. Every absent number is an absent story; every decline is evidence of a faltering democracy. The fewer the number of offences reported, the less physical space for dissent there is. Being silenced, in India’s democracy today, is not evidence of peace—it is policy.

Related

Counting Crimes, Discounting Justice: The NCRB’s statistical blind spots

The Myth of Neutral Data: The Disappearance of Communal Violence in NCRB Data

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Hate Surges in India, Reveal Disturbing Shifts in Patterns

The post Silence in the Statistics: What NCRB data won’t tell you about dissent appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In 2025, the country is still engaged in political debate regarding bail reform, while jails and prisons swell with people who have not been found guilty of a crime. The NCRB declared it “overcrowding.” However, rights defenders saw something much broader, which was the institutionalization of inequality. For the world’s largest democracy, wealth as a means of obtaining freedom is possible, but liberty is now a luxury.

While the NCRB 2023 report did provide numbers/data, it did not diagnose the primary reason for so many Indians who were jailed prior to a trial taking place. It did not address or ask why the poor and the marginal are consistently at the top of these tables, or why, year after year, freedom is deferrable by caste, class, and faith.

The Undertrial Nation

According to data from the 2023 NCRB, Muslims make up 16.5% of the overall prison population, an overrepresentation that continues despite numerous demands that this be revisited. Two years later, there remain 16.5% of Muslim prisoners, but the politics surrounding that number has hardened.

Faith-based profiling is no longer the subject of accusations; it is a quiet cynically accepted, administrative process. Detentions under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and the National Security Act (NSA) continue to be unevenly applied to Muslim men, particularly in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. However, the NCRB report for 2023 claims there is only one UAPA case in Maharashtra—even if the claim is absurd, there still continue to be ongoing prosecutions on UAPA grounds from Bhima Koregaon to the anti-CAA protests in Delhi.

The reasoning behind this invisibility was brutally exposed in Javed Ahmad Hajam v. State of Maharashtra. Hajam, a college professor from Kolhapur, posted two WhatsApp status updates in August 2022, one that said August 5 was “Jammu and Kashmir Black Day” and another that said “Happy Independence Day Pakistan” for August 14, which led to an FIR under Section 153A IPC (promoting enmity).

Ultimately, the Supreme Court quashed the prosecution, holding, in context, that the posts were political dissent, and that the malignity needed to bring Section 153A to bear was absent. In framing its position, the Court used a “reasonable person” test, held that dissent cannot become criminal, and that Section 153A cannot arbitrarily hush criticism.

The judgment even expressed concern of an institutional dimension to the whole inquiry – the way vague statutory language and untrained policing convert speech into a pathway to detainment. The case matters here because it illustrates this immediacy of the carceral leap: a single FIR, typically framed as ‘communal’ is potential for arrest, then detained (which can last indefinitely), and an undertrial is then captured as a unique entry status backed into an undeterred victimized group in yearly NCRB tables – but without record of the chilling context the data point entries rely on.

Caste, Community, and Architecture of Incarceration

If the data of 2023 offered a snapshot of social disparity, 2025 is telling us how deeply rooted that disparity is. Dalits still comprise more than one-fifth of India’s prisoners, Adivasis make up close to one-eighth and Muslims about one in six – these numbers have barely budged, nor has official concern.

The NCRB’s lack of willingness to make claims about any overrepresentations is simply political silence repackaged as bureaucratic neutrality. To them, these disparities are naturally occurring, which they are not. From police profiling to the refusal of bail, the criminal justice pipeline re-generates, with unsettling accuracy, India’s social order. Sociologist Harsh Mander once called Indian prisons “the moral underside of democracy”. By 2025, that description feels literal. The undertrial prisoner, mostly poor and caste-characterized, remains India’s longest-term prisoner.

Walled in, the caste labour persists. Dalit and Adivasi prisoners still carry out daily cleaning, cooking, and sanitation duties – caste work that replicates caste labour outside of prison. Freedom, as this data shows, is not evenly distributed, and neither is labour.

Faith Behind Bars

Faith-based profiling is no longer an accusation; it is well-established as an open secret. As with the speculative basis for immediate detention and discredited action, Muslim men are disproportionately subjected to both the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and preventive provisions of the National Security Act (NSA), particularly in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Delhi.

India’s jails have become a reflection of its hierarchies rather than a place of justice. In Prison Statistics India 2023, India has 5.8 lakh prisoners, of which 77.9% (≈ 4.5 lakh prisoners) are un-convicted, which is the highest proportion in over a decade. Overcrowding was reported at 133% of capacity on a national level, mostly in jails of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Behind the numbers is a familiar trend: Dalits at 22% of all prisoners, Adivasis at 13%, and Muslims at 16% of all prisoners, which is all considerably higher than their percentage of the population in India. The tables in the NCRB’s report list out these categories without any comment, presenting social injustices as administrative facts. By refusing to analyse factors surrounding why certain groups have disproportionately higher rates of representation in the prison system, the state legitimizes exclusion by normalising systemic inequality into statistical fact, reported The NEWS Minute.

Discrimination is not only seen in prison numbers, but also in parole and the speediness of trials. Baba Ram Rahim, who is a convicted murderer and rapist, was granted parole a staggering 14 times, from October 2020 to August 2025, with three terms being in 2025 itself. In contrast, Umar Khalid, who is an activist, has been in jail for five years without trial, and his bail has been denied multiple times under the pretext of “threat to national security.”

In flattening faith into numbers, the NCRB reduces prejudice to neutrality. The state of the prison, like the data, either becomes a place of discrimination in plain sight.

Women, Gender, and the Data of Absence

Women made up 4.3% of prisoners in the NCRB’s 2023 data – enough of a smidgeon that it could begin to be ignored. But, as reports from Sabrang India and the NHRC (2024) point out, their invisibility is not statistical; it is structural.

Most women’s incarceration is tied to a survival offense: theft, domestic disputes, or moral policing. Very few get access to a lawyer, healthcare, or childcare. By 2025, only 22 prisons in the country had crèches available to inmates.

Gender minorities are truly invisible. NCRB continues to count “male/female” – which leaves out transgender and non-binary prisoners. Activists are quick to inform us about the fact that data does not equal policy – no transgender cells, no hormone therapy, no protections against abuse.

The prison manual has not been updated to adjust to constitutional morality; its silences are administrative, but the reality is lived experience.

The Data of Denial

One of the more evident lessons of 2023, then, was the degree to which data can make inequality appear normative. Two years later, the lesson has only gained in strength.

The NCRB’s refusal to disaggregate incarceration data according to religion, caste or class across the bail stage and the conviction stage continues to obscure systemic bias. By counting only what fits within bureaucratic constructs, all of it can work to conceal acts of discrimination as neutrality.

The same governmental decision to stop collecting data on lynchings and hate crimes after 2017 appears again in the prison context — a continuation of silence on the part of the state. What the state does not collect, it cannot be held accountable for reporting.

In Jammu & Kashmir, where hundreds have been pre-emptively detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA) after the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, the NCRB’s Crime in India 2023 – with its stunningly low figures – reported zero cases of sedition or communal violence. However, reports on the ground indicate otherwise, as do court files. Fahad Shah, the editor of Kashmir Walla, and journalist Sajjad Gul were jailed under UAPA and PSA in March 2023, despite numerous bail orders, for their articles deemed “anti-national.” In the same year, the Jammu & Kashmir Police reported under RTI, accessed by Article 14, that they had invoked PSA against 412 persons on a preventive basis. The contradiction here is not criminality versus adherence to justice but rather the moral experience of being measured: if one is not on the record, proof of adherence is sworn. The fewer crimes, the more the state can claim it has successfully imposed “peace.” What one measures is not justice but rather compliance.

The Republic Behind Bars

Looking back from 2025, India’s prisons do not seem an exception to justice, but its crucible. The state’s preoccupation with order has turned imprisonment into governance. The 77% undertrial rate isn’t about the administration of justice; it is about the exercise of power.

As Dr. B.R. Ambedkar warned, democracy in India does not rest on what we write on paper, but on how the state treats the utterly powerless; two years on from the NCRB 2023 report, the statistics continue to accuse us.

They illustrate a Republic where faith dictates remand, caste controls bail, and poverty dictates punishment. If freedom is going to mean anything, it will have to mean spilling the data. Prison reform, bail parity, and accurate evidence-based transparency reporting are not just procedural niceties; they are unfinished business from the Constitution itself.

Until then, the incarceration ledger will remain the most honest reflection of modern India — meaning a nation where justice, for far too many, begins only after imprisonment ends.

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

Related:

Almost 2 Lakh Undertrials Languishing Behind Bars: Outbreak of COVID-19 Exposed Inequality in Indian Prisons

Data Without Justice: What NCRB’s Prison Statistics Reveal About Caste, Faith and Inequality

Who Gets Bail, Who Stays Behind Bars: A Tale of Unequal Liberty in India’s Criminal Justice System

NCRB’s Prison Statistics Report 2019 paints a bleak picture

The post Counting the Caged: What India’s prison data refuses to see appeared first on SabrangIndia.

There is a story of unbroken violence behind the language of percentages. The NCRB might record a few percentage points of change year to year, but the factual curve of cruelty, fear, and impunity is steep and continuous. In projecting a neutral and comprehensive approach, the Bureau displays a sort of bureaucratic amnesia: it renders visible structural violence and the inaction of the State as statistical.

The Myth of ‘Marginal’ Improvement

According to NCRB 2023, India recorded 471,000 reports of crimes against women, a nominal increase of three percent from the previous year. The largest single category remains “cruelty by husband or relatives” under section 498-A of IPC, at over 31 percent of all crimes against women. Reported rapes amounted to 32,032, roughly the same as the reports in 2022; assault with intent to outrage modesty was recorded at about 20 percent. However, the situation is worse for children: POCSO (Prevention of Children from Sexual Offences) and associated crimes increased by 9.2% this year, exceeding 170,000 cases.

In June 2023, the Dewas district in Madhya Pradesh experienced a tragedy resulting from coercive harassment. A married woman, Reena Joshi, 26 years old, died after allegedly ingesting acid as the culmination of months of harassing behaviour by a local man, Zakir Hussain. The FIR her husband filed stated that Hussain had been harassing Reena, threatening her to end her marriage, to convert to Islam, and to marry him. The FIR also noted that despite the couple’s multiple complaints to the local police, no preventive measures were taken. On 10 June 2023, Reena died from her injuries, and at the time of her death, she directly named Zakir in her statements to those trying to save her life. Zakir was charged with and arrested under Sections 306 (abetment of suicide), 354D (stalking), and the Madhya Pradesh Freedom of Religion Act, 2021. The incident led to protests by women’s and community groups, calling for accountability from police for their inaction in the face of reported harassment. In aggregate, this was an episode that illustrated structural neglect, collapsing everyday harassment into fatal violence: the law can then only respond after someone dies, while the accused would not be charged with murder but instead abetment of suicide as recorded by the NCRB —both minimizing and removing the gendered and communal motivation behind the behaviour.

At first glance, these small percentage increases may seem to indicate stability or a sense that things haven’t really changed. Yet the small percentage increase masks the inability of gendered justice to make progressive change, improvement. Further, an increase of three percent represents over 14,000 more women reporting violence against women. In India, however, we know that one in ten assault cases will be reported at the very least – on an already underreported crime according gf to the NFHS-5. Thus, NCRB appearances of reported cases are a fragment of a much larger, certainly unreported crisis and violation, and depend upon those individuals to sacrifice their dignity in an institutional and systemic sense. Statistically, the NCRB is relying on reported FIRs (first information reports), so that the illusion appears real.

The rationale suggests that if we don’t file a complaint, there is no problem. Mainstream coverage also advances the invisibility: by attributing the word “marginal” to the increase, the newsroom and media outlets unconsciously (or otherwise) participate in the state’s rhetoric of containment, as if gendered violence is merely a data problem, not a social emergency. What masquerades as stability is, in fact, indifference, which has both institutional and systemic impact.

Data without Identity: How Categories erase Vulnerability

If NCRB’s percentages flatten time, its categories flatten people. Crimes committed against women are presented as one large, lumped category that does not disaggregate for caste, religion, class, or disability, all of which structure vulnerability and allow access to justice, anywhere in the 2023 report. The only modest exception is “Crimes against Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe women,” and that is put into its own category, marking the pattern of intersectional violence as totally separate from the gendered whole.

This structural erasure substantiates what feminist scholars have termed the violence of difference itself: that a Dalit woman’s rape, an Adivasi girl’s trafficking, or a disabled woman’s assault do not happen on their own but at the intersection of several hierarchies. The Hathras case (2020) stands as an emblematic instance of this: a Dalit woman was raped, her story ignored and erased, her body burnt to the ground. However, NCRB’s data design ensures that no such trend can be evidenced statistically again.

Furthermore, the Bureau’s gender binary means that LGBT survivors are entirely erased from the data. Trans women, gender non-conforming people, and male survivors of sexual violence disappear from the Bureau’s reporting, making counts impossible. To only count individuals that conformed to gender is to reproduce the very harm again through “neutrality.” In the NCRB’s data-driven justice, invisibility signifies that count.

The West Bengal Case Study: Acid Violence and Everyday Cruelty

Few forms of gendered violence are as literal or as haunting as acid attacks. West Bengal is, not surprisingly, the epicentre of the violence. It accounted for nearly one-fifth of all reported acid attacks in India in 2023. The vast majority of victims are young women, punished for rejecting advances, defying control, or asserting self-determination.

Behind every NCRB statistic lies the face of a survivor, disfigured by both acid and inaction. Survivors describe experiences of being transported between hospitals without burn units, climbing a three-to-five-year waiting list for a hearing at court, or working with police officers who treat the investigation as a waste of time. A field report from 2023 conducted by the Hindu from North 24 Parganas documented that survivors have yet to receive the Rs 3 lakh mandated compensation prescribed under the Supreme Court, an entire decade after the attack. For more than half of the survivors, the only consistent part of their experience after the attack is falling into poverty.

Where acid attacks appear in NCRB 2023, they appear under a neutral, bureaucratic category entitled “grievous hurt.” The neutralised language, substituted in place of targeted misogynist violence, reduces it to bodily harm and ignores its symbolic and social identity. There is also no data about rehabilitation, conviction rates, or disbursal of compensation. Defining acid violence in an unqualified way allows the State to distance itself from characterizing this as a moral failure, under the medical lexicon.

In West Bengal, civil society organisations such as Acid Survivors Foundation India (ASFI) have consistently pointed out how police evade filing complaints under the relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (326A, 326B) to suppress “rising crime rates,” and the National Crime Records Bureau then records this reduction in cases, rounding out this circle of denial. Each entry is then not progress toward justice, but rather a record of silence, reported the Indian Express.

On August 16, 2023, Jayanta Roy, a 35-year-old resident of Zamindar Para, a locality in Jalpaiguri town, threw acid on his neighbour, a 22-year-old woman, after she consistently turned down his romantic gestures. The woman, whose name family asked to be concealed, suffered deep burns to her face, chest, and shoulders. She was rushed to North Bengal Medical College, where doctors found she had incurred third-degree chemical injuries. Roy’s attack followed her, attracting weeks of trailing and loud harassment. The woman’s family reported that both times reported her was rebuffed by police, who told them to leave as it amounted to a “personal dispute.” Local outrage finally prompted local police to arrest Roy, superficially charging Roy under IPC Sections 326A (acid attack), 341 (wrongful restraint), and 354 (assault on a woman). The event was treated as a fast-track case, and the Jalpaiguri District and Sessions Court ultimately sentenced Roy in February 2024 to 15 years’ rigorous imprisonment with a fine of ₹3 lakh.

The case is noteworthy not only for the infrequent conviction but also for revealing the important procedural bias that ASFI has been publicly advocating for as long as two years — that is, most acid attacks are never afforded the appropriate legal formality and thus simply disappear from the NCRB records altogether. As The Hindu reported, West Bengal had 16 acid attacks in 2023, the highest in India, but local NGOs report the actual number is likely double that when misclassifications of burns and withdrawn FIRs are considered. 

Structural Underreporting and the Politics of Marginality

The structure of India’s justice system guarantees that the majority of gendered violence never reaches official visibility. FIRs rely on police discretion; prosecution relies on political will; data on conviction relies on judicial efficiency; and all this relies on survivors’ emotional stamina. For poor and marginalized women, it is deadly.

Data from the 2023 NCRB indicates there are a little over 1.3 lakh rape cases and over 2 lakh domestic cruelty cases that are pending. The time taken to complete a trial averages at over 5 years. One-Stop Centres (OSCs) that are supposed to provide integrated support to survivors are woefully underfunded and are not well-served. In many states, there are fewer than a dozen functioning centres. The NCRB does not provide cross-references for these service inadequacies; all it does is count cases, not conditions.

In digital spaces, gendered violence is finding new forms. Offences of online stalking, non-consensual sharing of images, and blackmail comprise a substantial proportion of the complaints now received under the IT Act. But, as indicated by the data from RTI from Mumbai, only a fraction of these offences turn into FIRs. Cyber harassment, in particular of journalists and women activists, has simply become a normalized way of life, but these acts are often framed as ‘defamation’ or ‘obscenity’ and thus escape the NCRB’s gendered lens entirely.

This type of structural undercount is not by mistake; it is a performance of stability. By keeping official numbers deceptively low, the State can suggest that its policies from Beti Bachao Beti Padhao to dispersing Nirbhaya Fund are “working.” Meanwhile, the continuum of harm remains intact, only concealed under an administrative façade of calm.

The Absences of Intersectionality and Enumeration

The omissions by the NCRB in categories like mob lynching, honour killing, or hate crimes further impoverish our understanding of how gender inter-relates with other forms of violence. Most forms of violence against women in interfaith or inter-caste relationships, for example, then get recategorised under “murder” or “kidnapping.” The political decision to stop monitoring 2017 these forms of violence reflects a larger trend of erasure.

The same erasure occurs in more publicly visible anti-feminist violence against women, whether they are journalists, protestors, or organizers. The 2023 IFEI Press Freedom Report recorded 226 accounts of harassment, hindrance, and threats, including for women journalists covering communal or gender issues. When we looked at the NCRB categories of “Offences Against the State” and “Offences Affecting Public Tranquility,” there are essentially no entries.

It’s the same when thinking of women online. The cyber restrictions and internet shutdowns during the farmers’ protests, or in Manipur, severed women from online safety resources – an erasure that does not fall under any NCRB recognisability.

What cannot be charged is not counted, and what is not counted does not exist in the eyes of the State.

The Cost of the Systemic Erasure of Crime

The NCRB’s 2023 report, similar to its precedents, is not just a record of data — it is a story about denial. By calling violence “marginal,” it converts the devastating meaningfulness of persistent crises to that of a simple statistical aberration. By disregarding intersectional detail, it obliterates how caste, poverty, and gender are complicit. And, by ignoring certain crimes, the NCRB builds a semblance of peace.

To think of a 3% increase as being “marginal” does not grapple with the implications of suffering from systemic violence or marginalization. Each number signifies a life subjected to fear, shame, and bureaucratic indifference. The NCRB’s visibility is selective. It only displays what the State is open to confronting.

When data conceals more than it presents, counting becomes collusion. To genuinely see the reality of gendered violence in India today, you need to see beyond the numbers, in survivors, in silence, in omissions, etc. Because in the measures of oppression, what the State frames as marginal is often collected in massive quantities. 

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

Related:

Mapping Gender-Based Violence in India: Trends, determinants, and institutional frameworks

The ‘Missing Women’ in Crime Data: Caste, Gender, and Institutional Blindness

Acid Survivors Speak: The Long Road to Justice and Rehabilitation

Digital Violence, Silence, and State Failure: Women’s Safety Online in India

The post Invisible Assaults: How India’s crime data erases violence against women and children appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The Forest Rights Act was passed in 2006 following decades of struggle by forest-working peoples to redress the exclusionary legacy of colonial and post-colonial forest laws. The FRA acknowledges the rights of individual and community access to land, housing, and to minor forest produce, and grants the Gram Sabhas authority to manage and protect forests. The intent of the FRA was to transfer authority from the centralised forest-administrative bodies (like the Forest Department) to local communities and to make the Gram Sabha’s consent a precondition for the approval of any forest diversion. And de-centralisation was recognised as key to protection of both land rights and forest protection.

The Forest (Conservation) Act, enacted in 1980 –and hurriedly amended in 2023 without debate– has a centralised approach to conservation and, following amendments in 2023, has gone further still to consolidate centralized control over forest land. The amendments narrowed the definition of the term “forest” and included broad exemptions for strategic and commercial projects, and also authorised the regularization of diversions under the law. The amendments to the FCA have dismantled community consultation, removed environmental protection, and ultimately weakened the requirements to divert land from indigenous peoples in favour of land acquisition for development. The FCA now enables diversion of forest land for national security and infrastructure development, particularly in border areas, and weakened the requirement for Gram Sabha consent, designed to make community consultation a formality after the diversion has occurred.

It is crucial at this junction to recall the eviction order, passed by the Supreme Court in February 2019 that became the ground for nationwide and lasting protests by forest dwellers and Adivasis. The intent and impact of the order would have been to displace as many as one crore forest community members. Hence, its passage became yet another pivotal moment in the struggle for land and forest rights in India. The order triggered mobilisation among Adivasi and forest community members and immediate civil society response at the nation level, notably the All India Union of Forest Working Peoples (AIUFWP) and Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP). Within two weeks, national civil society intervention (close to a dozen and a half interim applications were finally filed) led to the Court staying its eviction order. This move was also necessitated after an affidavit, filed by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs that requested a full reconsideration of the case. The matter still awaits hearing before the Supreme Court, and demonstrates the ongoing struggle over the rights of statutory recognition against conservation. On October 24, 2025, again, the Ministry of Tribal Affairs (MOTA) has –once more–sharply rebutted a plea which has challenged before the Supreme Court (SC) the legal validity of the 2012 Rules, made under the law, The Indian Express has learnt. In a counter affidavit filed before the SC in the same matter, the Centre has not only defended the legal validity of the Act but also stressed that the law goes beyond mere land ownership regularisation and aims to restore dignity, livelihoods, and cultural identity of forest-dependent communities.

AIUFWP is a national, women-led membership union representing forest-dwelling communities, agricultural workers, and Adivasis. It creates leadership for grassroots communities, especially among Adivasi women, advocates for distributive justice, and works with stakeholders across India to secure legalisation and recognition of community based customary forest rights. CJP operates as a legal rights and advocacy organisation, in close alliance with the AIUWFP by supporting ground-level training and legal interventions. CJP is both drafter and co-petitioner in the detailed interlocutory application (IA) filed before the Supreme Court in 2019. This IA detailed the historic disenfranchisement of India’s indigenous peoples that led to the enactment of the 2006 law, the systemic grievances with claims being denied, due process failings and the deliberate bypassing of Gram Sabhas, and violations of the statute scheme for the Forest Rights Act, 2006 by the forest administration. It also emphasised that mass evictions (not mandated in the law itself) were without constitutional justification and violated natural justice and legal protections.

In the follow-up hearings, the Supreme Court, going well beyond its original order, required states to file affidavits investigating state processes concerning the assessment of forest rights claims and about claims that were denied altogether. Determining whether community land rights are properly granted is now a question of what the Court would deem sufficient transparency in state action.

Apart from this crucial matter (Wildlife First, in which Adivasi unions and others have intervened), at the same time, the apex court of India –another bench–is considering challenges to amendments made to the Forest (Conservation) Act enacted hurriedly in 2023, which would broaden the chasm between statutory protection (under the FRA 2006) and state sovereignty (under the FCA). As publicly noted in one of the recent bench observations, the principle basis for halting mass evictions focused on the unresolved policy and law contradiction between the tenurial and welfare entitlements granted by the Forest Rights Act and the hard restrictions allegedly imposed for sake of conservation by the Forest (Conservation) Act. Thus, this continuing litigation is sitting at the crossroads of India’s obligations—to forest-dwelling peoples and conservation—creating a tension and dispute between rights-based justice and regulatory control the recurrent subject for adjudication in the future.

Criticism of the FCA amendments is directed specifically to their consequences in the North-East, where a multitude of forests are not recognised officially by the state yet serve as crucial in-state clearings for indigenous communities or communities in general. The amendments have bypassed (pushed aside) Gram Sabhas, authorised less participatory governance, and fostered concerns regarding green credits and monoculture afforestation. The Godavarman judgment (1996) expanded the definition of “forest” to include unclassified and community forests; however, the newly repealed law does not recognise large areas subject to exploitation.

The approach of the Supreme Court has fluctuated over the years: see for example the direction of the Wildlife First case, and then the Niyamgiri judgment acknowledged consent from Gram Sabhas prior to forest diversion. Nevertheless, the legal condition for indigenous rights is presently ambiguous and somewhat unpredictable on fore use, where the discretion of execution has taken priority over community rights and constitutional guarantees.

The exclusion of indigenous communities from forest governance has a historical precedent, as far back as colonial rule where laws regarded them as encroachers instead of custodians of land and resources. The FRA can be understood as an acknowledgement and a corrective action towards this injustice, recognising the rights of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers to land, resources, and self-governance. The FRA was a multifaceted, energising outcome for these communities after decades of mobilising their rights and advocating for their access to and enjoyment of forests as an acknowledgment of their livelihoods and to democratise forest governance and restore dignity to marginalised communities.

In many ways, the expansion of centralised governance through The Forest (Conservation) Act has been legitimized via the Supreme Court’s Godavarman judgement of 1996, an important case that greatly expanded the administrative definition – and control over the meaning of “forest.” Centralization directly contradicts the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 (FRA), which creates firm ground for a decentralised, community-based rights agenda of forest management. The tension is not simply administrative or logistical but is an observed and constitutionally established tension in the power relationship between the executive and authoritative and empowered Gram Sabhas, flooring the foundational conflict of purpose between development, conservation, and indigenous rights.

The Godavarman judgment explicitly stated, “…the word ‘forest’ must be understood according to its dictionary meaning. This description covers all statutorily recognized forests, whether designated as reserved, protected or otherwise for the purpose of Section 2(i) of the Forest (Conservation) Act. The term ‘forest land’, occurring in Section 2, will not only include ‘forest’ as understood in the dictionary sense, but also any area recorded as forest in the government record irrespective of the ownership.” (Godavarman v UOI, 1996). By contrast, the FRA 2006 frames the legal mandate as, “…to recognize and vest the forest rights and occupation in forest land in forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who have been residing in such forests for generations but whose rights could not be recorded; in order to correct the historical injustice done to the forest dwelling Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest dwellers who are integral to the very survival and sustainability of the forest ecosystem.”

The 2023 FCA amendments, with a narrower definition of what qualifies as “forest,” and less opportunity for Gram Sabha participation, are yet another movement towards executive power, effectively disenfranchising the FRA’s commitment to decentralisation and democracy. This constitutional tension is yet to be resolved and is at the forefront of ongoing litigation and policy discussions concerning forest governance, development priorities, and the protection of indigenous and community rights.

Conclusion

There is an urgent need for a renewed and comprehensive framework that reconciles the inherent community and historic rights of communities over land/the commons and those of “the state” that seeks to unilaterally claim land for corporate development. Such a people’s right driven scheme would be one that upholds constitutional protections, revives community governance, and ensures community participation in environmental assessments. It will take the reversal of community jurisdiction and accountability of the state to limit logging in India’s forests, and the Supreme Court’s intervention could be a new beginning. India will only be able to protect its forests when it also protects the rights of those who have historically cared for them; by reaffirming the primacy of Gram Sabhas, transparency in impact assessments, and a stronger legal basis for rights recognition.

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

Image Courtesy: business-standard.com

References:

• India: Legacies and Challenges of the Land & Forest Rights Movement Booklet
• https://cjp.org.in/forest-conservation-amendment-act-2023-a-challenge-to-adivasi-land-rights-and-environmental-protections/
• https://cjp.org.in/what-is-the-forest-rights-act-2006-and-how-are-we-defending-it/
• https://cjp.org.in/sokalo-gond-and-nivada-rana-lead-the-campaign-for-forest-rights-in-sc/
• https://cjp.org.in/forest-rights-case-sc-directs-states-to-file-compliance-affidavits/
• https://cjp.org.in/forest-conservation-amendment-bill-north-east-to-bear-the-brunt/
• https://thewire.in/environment/the-forest-rights-act-and-the-battle-for-indias-forests
• https://www.scobserver.in/cases/constitutionality-of-the-frawildlife-first-v-ministry-of-forest-and-environment-eviction-of-forest-dwellers-background/
• https://www.sanctuarynaturefoundation.org/article/the-forest-%28conservation%29-amendment-act%2C-2023
• https://www.scobserver.in/journal/the-amended-green-law-is-full-of-red-flags-forests-amendment-act-2023/
• https://www.scobserver.in/reports/arguments-on-february-28th-2019/
• https://www.scobserver.in/reports/wildlife-first-v-ministry-of-forest-and-environment-eviction-of-forest0dwellers-arguments-on-september-12th-2019/
• Godavarman v UOI, 1996, Supreme Court of India

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About a month ago the Draft Policy had been circulated and the Ministry had invited feedback on the draft Shram Shakti Niti 2025. While the initiative to update India’s labour and employment policy in light of changing technological, demographic, and economic realities is welcome states CJP, a careful examination of the draft, has led the human rights organisation to submit detailed comments and actionable recommendations aimed at ensuring that the policy truly advances constitutional values of equality, dignity, and social justice.

Giving a rationale for this need to actually dis-aggregate the policy and detail its application to different kinds of workers, CJP has in the detailed tabular Comments and Recommendations underlined that “Work demand under MNREGA work is increasing, the gig workers are facing precarious work conditions and there is huge amount of supply of gig workers. Agricultural labour face one of the most intense employment insecurities and yet, the availability of agricultural labour is scarce in rural regions. The problems they face are different.  Therefore, different action plans and policy outlook need to be envisaged for different kinds of workers. Administrative ease of linking people with jobs and jog givers, and management of data across ministries and departments is a centralised advantage for the government.” This and “the absence of an articulated framework for tripartite negotiation among workers, employers, and the State risks concentrating decision-making power within government and weakening workers’ ability to secure equitable outcomes. At a structural level, the continued whittling down of state powers in the concurrent domain, undermines the federal balance essential for meaningful labour reform.”

Addressing these lacunae in the focus of the entire policy, CJP has stated that, a revised approach should:

• Address these issues in the further drafts by incorporating specific visions for different kinds of workers mentioned above.
• Introduce tripartite negotiation frameworks at national and state levels where the State is not the arbiter of worker interests but a facilitator of dialogue.
• Strengthen the section on cooperative federalism, a basic feature of the Constitution, by emphasising a federal policy structure, ensuring meaningful participation of State governments in labour governance.
• Explicitly recognise trade unions and collective bargaining as constitutional mechanisms for worker participation and policy co-creation under Articles 19. 41 and 43 of the Constitution.

The rest of the Tabular Comments on the Draft Shram Shakti Niti may be read here:

Related:

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Beyond insurance: addressing the needs of India’s agricultural labour force

The post CJP submits detailed feedback to Labour Ministry on Draft Shram Shakti Niti 2025 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The dissonance between a lived experience and official data is not new. It showcases how the language of state statistics can redefine brutality in state bureaucracy. By detaching violence from motive and identity, the NCRB articulates a false sense of neutrality, one that ultimately offers protection for both state and non-state actors.

The issue lies not in the numbers themselves, but rather in the methodology through which they are presented. The NCRB statistics are based on registered crimes, not the actual incidence of crime. Changes in reporting or policing can significantly influence the figures. The current structure and functioning of India’s police force render it vulnerable to diktats (ideological and other) from the state executive, ensuring that crimes, especially hate crimes against India’s most marginalized, Minorities and Dalits, sometimes women, remain buried. Conversely, higher crime numbers (for such crimes) in some states may reflect citizen-centric, pro-constitutional, police initiatives rather than an actual spiral or increase in crime.

In 2023, the country experienced the longest span of ethnic violence in its contemporary history when Meitei and Kuki–Zo communities mobilized against one another in Manipur. Life lost and displacement suffered by the Kuki-Zo were marked and significant. Kuki women experienced the brunt of gendered targeted violence at the hands of the other community and law enforcement. Yet, for the NCRB, hundreds of pages of the report yield only a handful of cases of “rioting” and “arson.” And what cannot be articulated in a statistic cannot be held accountable in law.

The Language of Neutrality

Over time, the NCRB has—instead of acquiring an autonomous rigour and credibility– grown into a reflection of a majoritarian state’s unease with terms such as communal, ethnic, or targeted violence. You won’t find such terms of classification in the 2023 report. The words used are “riots,” “group clashes,” and “public disorder.” This is not merely playing with words, but rather moral repositioning. By using terms such as “communal” and “ethnic,” motive is acknowledged, and therefore, responsibility. In contrast, “rioting” makes violence seem spontaneous and even-handed!

This kind of linguistic strategy is being increasingly normalised. In 2017, the NCRB surreptitiously removed its specific sections “communal and social violence,” “mob lynchings,” and “honour killings.” Officials defended their actions by stating that states were providing inconsistent data. The outcome of this was an administrative silence, allowing governments to claim hate crimes were falling when, in fact, they are just not being officially documented. Initially, data classification soon became a political shield. Without naming hate, India’s crime data reads now like a bureaucratic novel: correct, procedural, and utterly dissociated from reality.

In this case, neutrality does not refer to having no opinion. It refers to being complicit through action. Omission of the name the state uses for targeted violence does not depoliticize criminality; it simply conceals the injustice of violence and hate crimes being perpetrated.

A Pattern written in History

The NCRB’s refusal to report hate and communal crimes in 2023 is not a new practice. This is simply a reiteration of a policy first established in 2017, when the Union government acknowledged in Parliament that, due to state governments’ “unreliable inputs,” it would stop collecting data on “lynching” and “hate crimes.” This bureaucratic explanation has since served as the basis for the Republic’s statistical loss of memory.

By the year 2023, while the increase in targeted violence in India was expected, the Bureau’s tables did not reflect much of anything. The Centre for Study of Society and Secularism (CSSS) tracked 21 mob-lynchings in 2023, representing a 23% increase from 2022 The CSSS report can be read here  Of these incidents, twelve were related to allegations of cow slaughter, two related to interfaith relationships, and nearly all of the victims were Muslim. For example, in Bharatpur in Rajasthan, 35-year-old Nasir and 25-year-old Junaid were kidnapped and burned alive in February 2022 by people said to be affiliated with the Bajrang Dal. In Bhopal in July, two cattle traders were lynched for being suspected to be transporting beef, an inappropriate standard of evidence. Neither case shows up under any communal category in the NCRB 2023 tables: both fold quietly into “murder” and “rioting.”

The same narrative can be found across the nation. In Kolhapur, for instance, a Dalit youth was beaten to death based on rumours about “religious insult.” In Ramgarh, Jharkhand, a mob killed a tribal man, accused of theft. The CSSS report noted that the violence was accompanied by hate speech and communal harassment. The report adds that this kind of violence is smaller-scale and does not fit within the category of violence documented by the NCRB’s rather narrow definitions. Ultimately, the data architecture favours an emphasis on procedural clarity at the expense of human truth.

In another incident in Maharashtra’s Satara district in August 2023, a single social media post mocking a Hindu god led to two days of violent conflict. Two people were killed, approximately 100 were injured, and businesses owned by Muslims were targeted. But if one looks in the NCRB ledger, a single entry gathers the Satara episode with every other instance of what NCRB has recorded as “rioting.” There is nothing to suggest the motive was religious; no record of what happened next; no note of the fact that the riot occurred on established communal lines.

The NCRB’s avoidance of the caption of motive is not unlike the state’s avoidance of calling out hate. Where communal violence once barely allowed for reckoning about the moral heart of the atrocity, instead it is now public disorder. This linguistic flattening eliminates not only the prejudice underlying the violence, but also the impunity enabling it.

Manipur: A Case Study

In 2023, Manipur became the clearest example of how violence can happen in public view and disappear from the official records. On May 3, 2023, a protest was launched by the All Tribal Students’ Union of Manipur (ATSUM) against a court directive to recommend Scheduled Tribe status for the Meiteis, and it quickly transformed into a spiral of armed ethnic conflict between the Meitei majority of the Imphal Valley and the Kuki–Zo tribal communities of the hills.

The violence swept the villages and towns with historic severity. Mobs burned homes, churches, and community centres. Independent estimates from the Hindu, Scroll, and Sabrangindia indicated that over 200 people were killed, over 60,000 displaced, and approximately 5,000 houses burned down. Entire communities disappeared; satellite images confirmed the damage. Over 350 churches and several temples were daubed and destroyed, highlighting the sectarian edge of the violence.

For months, the state was essentially divided into two: Imphal with its Meitei surplus on one hand and the hill districts on the other. There was a complete internet shutdown for over 200 days, severing survivors from aid networks and reporters from the outside world. Civil society and reporters who attempted to document the torture perpetrated by armed forces faced threats and FIRs for their expressions. Still, the reports of rape, sexual violence, women stripped and paraded through the streets to cheers from the crowds, filming as soldiers carried out any forms of violence, remained concealed. Only when a viral video found its way into social media in July 2023, a good three months after the first outbreak, did India’s national conscience briefly awaken to the abuses, and forced the SC to intervene to provide the state some accountability.

In the NCRB 2023 report, however, all of this collapses into a few rows of data. Manipur shows just a few dozen “rioting” cases and scattered cases of “arson”, nothing that would even suggest that a state had descended into a type of civil war. No mention of mass displacement, custodial abuses, or gendered violence. This silence is not incidental; it is institutional. The NCRB is merely flattening ethnic cleansing cited through “law and order disturbances” and provides a bureaucratic alibi for one of the worst governance failures in recent memory.

The Geography of Denial

If the NCRB’s omissions were haphazard, they might be brushed off as misprints. However, the odious erosion is visible across a vast geographical area. In 2023, the India Hate Lab noted 378 incidents of hate speech and hate crime ( CJP Report based on Hate Lab 2023 – Study reveals 668 hate speech cases in 2023, BJP major player), with Uttar Pradesh (62), Maharashtra (42), Bihar (34), and Madhya Pradesh (28) highest on the list. Each of these states also noted “declines” in the NCRB data for “Offences Promoting Enmity”.

Examine Haryana, where riots erupted in Nuh during a religious procession on 31 July 2023. Six died, 200 were arrested, and bulldozers crushed a number of Muslim homes in “retaliation”. The NCRB, by contrast, categorises the outrage as “rioting” without even insinuating it was communal or that the demolitions were punitive. The numbers create an illusion of symmetry — as if both sides were violent, both guilty, and both punished.

In Delhi, more than twenty public rallies were documented during the months of February and August 2023, with hate slogans. Nevertheless, the NCRB notes a decline in “Offences Promoting Enmity Between Groups” – a decline from 231 in 2022 to 194 in 2023. If the absence of numbers is not demonstrated evidence of peace, it is an established case of selective factual erasure.

Even the desecration of religious sites – like an attack on St. Michael’s cemetery in Mahim, Mumbai, in January 2023, when 18 crosses were defaced – does not even make “religious offences”, which are non-existent in the NCRB figures. These types of harassment, which obviously relate to religious identity, are absorbed into the property crime statistics.

The data from Jammu & Kashmir is close to surreal. NCRB 2023 records zero cases of sedition or communal violence, despite the Union Home Ministry stating in Parliament that over 230 people were detained under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in the same calendar year. This tranquillity reflects not peace, but policy in action – the imposition of normalcy through erasure.

When Counting Conceals

The exclusions in the 2023 report, when evaluated in conjunction with each other, prioritized overt intent over deficiencies in capacity. By outright removing categories such as “hate crime” and “mob lynching,” the state is able to absorb violent acts based on religion, caste, or ideology into broadly neutral categories. While the crime may still be recorded, its cause is erased. The foundation of hate crime — the identity of the victim — is swept away from the record.

This administrative erasure dramatically exceeds the parameters of the chart. It alters public discourse, limits accountability, and relieves the state of its obligation to protect. When violence is relabelled rioting, the victims are stripped of recognition; when hate speech is recoded as “public mischief,” performers possess plausible deniability.

In the NCRB’s framework for 2023, there are the demolitions in Haryana, the ethnic murders in Manipur, the lynching deaths in Bharatpur, and the “riots” in Satara all clubbed into the same “neutral labelling.” The motive behind the violence is absent; all we are left with is a ledger of something resembling lawlessness, which tells us nothing about the injustices inflicted.

The statistics of the NCRB are not indicators of safety but of silence. Every statistic contains a choice — what to include, how to rename, and what to omit. This much is clear: the Bureau’s neutrality is not objectivity but ideology — a way of regulating how we think, and bringing about tranquillity through the absence of visible conflict.

A Nation without Witnesses

When the NCRB came out with its 2023 report, it was apparent that India’s data regime had transitioned from being an instrument of transparency to an apparatus for denial. The numbers corroborate what human rights organizations, journalists, and survivors have reported: that violence in India is not simply physical but epistemic — a battle over who gets to be viewed, tagged, and remembered.

Not having lynching, hate crime, or communal violence as categories is more than an oversight; it is political. In a democracy founded on data as a bedrock of policy, invisibility serves as a way to maintain control. As crimes are recorded, the government looks safer with fewer recorded instances.

This is the irony of modern India: a country in which the spreadsheet of data silencing has replaced the FIR; the number of riots has decreased as the number of victims increases; and the act of counting is now indicative of support for the machinery of impunity.

Here, the NCRB’s neutrality is not the neutrality of law, but of silence — a silence that indicates the price of counting, and the larger price of erasure.

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

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The post Statistical Amnesia: How Communal Violence Vanishes in NCRB 2023 appeared first on SabrangIndia.

A calculated campaign of vilification: CJP

In its complaint, CJP alleges that a “coordinated campaign of caste-based vilification, violent provocation, and criminal intimidation” directed at CJI Gavai—India’s second Dalit Chief Justice. It asserts that the content uploaded by Ajeet Bharti’s channel is not merely hate speech but “digital violence designed to demean a constitutional authority through caste-based insult and explicit threats.”

“This is not just abuse,” the complaint states, “but a direct and calculated assault on the dignity and personal safety of India’s highest judicial functionary, and consequently, a grave threat to the independence of the Indian judiciary itself.”

Factual background: Documented pattern of hate

The complaint highlighted that the creator of these videos, Mr. Ajeet Bharti, is a person with known antecedents of disseminating hateful and divisive statements. His broader social media profile is already under active surveillance and investigation by Indian law enforcement for similar offenses. As per complaint, the criminal nature of the content in question is not a matter of CJP’s interpretation but is confirmed by direct police action. On October 8, 2025, police in the state of Punjab have officially booked Ajeet Bharti in over a dozen First Information Reports (FIRs). The official grounds for these criminal proceedings are his “casteist” and “provocative” remarks made on social media targeting Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai.

The majority of the accused are from outside Punjab and have been charged under non-bailable sections of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, along with other relevant laws.

The videos hosted on the YouTube platform are not isolated incidents but are part of a wider, documented campaign of hate by an individual whose activities are already subject to serious legal action by multiple state authorities i.e. Punjab and Noida Police. This established profile of spreading hate speech adds profound gravity to the content and heightens the urgency for its immediate removal.

Shoe hurled at CJI B.R. Gavai during live court proceedings

Tensions rose after October 6, 2025, when Advocate Rakesh Kishore hurled a shoe at the CJI during a Supreme Court hearing, shouting “Sanatan ka apman nahi sahega.” The Bar Council of India immediately suspended Kishore, calling his act “prima facie inconsistent with the dignity of the court.”

Despite the outrage, the complaint notes that Ajeet Bharti amplified the aggression. This episode came just a week after Bharti’s earlier broadcast on September 29, where his panel had already invoked open calls for violence against the Chief Justice.

Deleted Post by Ajeet Bharti

Detailed legal examination of the videos by CJP

In its complaint, CJP has very carefully examined the transcript of this podcast, premiered on September 29, 2025, and October 6, 2025 from the Ajeet Bharti’s YouTube channel [@ajeetbharti] and highlighted their relevant timestamps and context, unequivocally establishing grounds for immediate action against the channel.

The first video, “S2E2: CJI Gavai Vs Sleeping Hindus | Sonam Wangchuk A Deep State Project | Kaushlesh, Anupam, Ajeet,” was uploaded on September 29, 2025.

Barely a week later, on October 6, Bharti livestreamed “Shoe Attack on CJI Gavai: Leftist Baying for Ajeet Bharti Blood | Ajeet Bharti LIVE.”

The videos are called “a continuous chain of hate speech, culminating in physical aggression and social intimidation.”

Timeline of incitement:

• September 29, 2025 – Bharti’s podcast calls for explicit violence against the CJI: “One Hindu lawyer should grab Gavai ji’s head and smash it against the wall.”
• October 6, 2025 – A week later, a lawyer physically attacks the CJI in the Supreme Court, proving, the complaint says, “that YouTube’s inaction turned speech into assault.”

The complaint situates this within a historic pattern—where dehumanising propaganda precedes violence against Dalit and Adivasi communities. “This hate speech,” it warns, “is not isolated; it draws from India’s long history of caste oppression, social boycotts, and pogroms fuelled by rhetoric portraying Dalits as subhuman.”

The flashpoint of incitement

At in the first video, one of the speakers says: “If Gavai ji bumps into someone somewhere… one Hindu lawyer should grab Gavai ji’s head and smash it against the wall with such force that it breaks into two pieces.”

The complaint calls this a “direct call to commit assault”—not metaphor but provocation. Moments earlier, another participant had sneered: “What is the punishment in the IPC for spitting on Gavai’s face? Hindus can’t even do that.”

The complaint observes that such remarks “normalise public humiliation of a sitting Chief Justice and encourage copycat behaviour.” Later, at, a panellist declares: “The amount of inherent inferiority I have seen in Gavai… you have reached the topmost post and you still have it.”

In the complaint, this line “weaponises caste psychology to demean Dalit achievement” and qualifies as an offence under section 3(1)(r) and 3(1)(s) of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

“He (CJI) drinks Neel in the morning”, derogatory remark against CJI

The October 6 livestream, the complaint argues, crossed every boundary of legality and decency. At, Bharti sneers that “The judge doesn’t understand the dignity of his post and reaches court after drinking ‘neel’ and distributing ‘Ambedkar Neel Vachanamrit’ instead of giving orders.”

Here, “neel” (blue)—the emblem of Dalit and Ambedkarite assertion—is distorted into a slur. Minutes later, Bharti escalates to grotesque caste imagery: “He dried the leather of a dead cow in the scorching sun of the slum, smeared it with sewer blackness, and while picking garbage, joined pieces of ‘L’ and ‘V’ to make Louis Vuitton shoes.”

The complaint describes these lines as “abhorrent, dehumanising, and a deliberate resurrection of the language of untouchability.” The complaint stresses that such statements insult not just Justice Gavai but the entire Dalit community, reducing symbols of dignity into “the vocabulary of filth and servitude.”

By broadcasting and monetising this content, YouTube, it argues, has “hosted, profited from, and algorithmically promoted material amounting to cognisable offences under Sections 3(1)(r) and 3(1)(s) of the SC/ST Act.”

From digital hate to real violence

When, days later, the lawyer hurled a shoe/object at the CJI, Bharti’s livestream turned the assault into spectacle. At in second video on October 6, he remarked “If judges continue to make such anti-Hindu statements, then what happened in court today can happen on the streets tomorrow.”

CJP calls this “not commentary but endorsement”—a public justification of violence.

“The sequence of events provides a stark and undeniable correlation between specific incitement broadcast on YouTube platform and the subsequent act of violence,” the complaint stated, warning that such narratives normalise courtroom desecration and seek to punish judicial independence—particularly when embodied by a Dalit judge.

Police action, platform silence

CJP alleges that despite multiple FIRs and legal summons against Bharti, YouTube has taken no suo-moto actions.

“By continuing to host these videos,” the complaint writes, “YouTube is facilitating the spread of content from an individual under investigation for caste-based offences.”

The complaint alleges YouTube of “double standards”—acting swiftly against hate speech in Western contexts but remaining inert when the target is a Dalit Chief Justice in India. Under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, intermediaries must remove unlawful content upon notice—an obligation the Complaint says YouTube has ignored.

Legal and ethical violations

The complaint cites violations under multiple Indian laws—including Sections 109, 117, 152, and 342 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023, and the SC/ST Act, as well as Supreme Court precedents which recognise hate speech as a precursor to violence.

Failure to act, the complaint warns, “undermines India’s constitutional promise of equality and the independence of its judiciary.”

“The continuous dissemination of derogatory and inciting content against the Chief Justice of India,” the complaint asserts, “is not merely an attack on an individual, but a direct and insidious assault on the very foundation of India’s constitutional democracy—the independent judiciary.”

Global standards, local silence

CJI reminds YouTube of its international responsibilities under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the EU Digital Services Act, which demand swift removal of hate and incitement.

“YouTube cannot adhere to one set of standards in Europe and another in India,” the complaint notes. “Corporate self-regulation must not end where profit begins.”

CJP’s four-point prayer to YouTube

CJP’s complaint concludes with a clear four-point prayer to YouTube, asserting that failure to comply would be treated as complicity in the alleged offences, the complaint demands the immediate removal of both inflammatory videos and the permanent suspension of the @AjeetBharti channel to halt the dissemination of further hate; furthermore, CJP calls for an internal investigation into the platform’s moderation failures and a compliance response within 72 hours detailing the steps taken to address the grave legal and ethical violations cited in the complaint.

The complete complaint may be read here:

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The post CJP flags casteist, anti-Dalit videos on YouTube targeting CJI Gavai; seeks urgent takedown appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Appearing for the petitioner, Advocate Mrinmoy Dutta reiterated that Doyjan Bibi had been picked up by police and subsequently declared as “deported” without any formal record of transfer, handover certificate, or receipt from Bangladeshi authorities. He reminded the Bench that throughout the proceedings, no evidence had been produced to show compliance with the established protocol of “handing over and taking over” mandated in cross-border transfer cases. “The wife had been picked up. Then it was informed that she had been deported. We have not been given any letter of handing over or any details,” he submitted.

The Bench, taking note of these submissions, asked whether notice had been issued earlier in the case, to which counsel confirmed that it had. The Court observed that the State’s current position — that Doyjan Bibi had been deported back to Bangladesh — was being challenged on the ground of lack of due process. The Bench therefore directed the FT counsel to obtain instructions from the authorities and to file a detailed affidavit addressing the allegations.

The order records:

“In view of the nature of the grievance raised in this petition, the respondents will file an affidavit two days prior to the next date of listing.”

The matter has been listed for further hearing on October 29, 2025. CJP has been providing legal aid in the said case.

Background of the case

The petition concerns the disappearance of Doyjan Bibi, wife of petitioner Abdul Rejjak, who was allegedly picked up by police on May 25, 2025, without any formal documentation, and subsequently reported as “handed over to the BSF” for deportation to Bangladesh.

In the June 25 hearing, the State had produced written instructions from the Frontier Headquarters, BSF Guwahati, claiming that Doyjan Bibi — identified as the wife of Abdul Munnaf — had been handed over to Bangladeshi authorities on May 27, 2025. However, the petitioner had clarified that his wife’s name and all case particulars matched, and that she was indeed “Doyjan Bibi, wife of Abdul Rejjak,” not “Abdul Munnaf.” The Court had then directed the FT counsel to obtain clarification regarding the manner of her handover.

In the July 25 hearing, when a further set of documents was produced, the petitioner’s counsel raised strong objections, pointing out that no handover certificate, no Bangladeshi acknowledgment, and no procedural record of deportation had been placed on record. The Bench observed that if the State’s position was that Doyjan Bibi had been pushed back, the petitioner could challenge the legality of that act. “Human beings cannot just disappear like that,” Advocate Dutta had argued, stressing that pushback procedures are meant for persons intercepted at the border — not those already in custody.

The present direction, therefore, stems from the continuing absence of any formal proof or procedural compliance in the alleged deportation of a woman who had been under police custody, not caught at the border.

The High Court’s October 15 order marks a crucial development as the Court has now required the State to formally defend its actions through affidavit.

Details of previous hearings may be read here.

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