Tanya Arora | SabrangIndia https://sabrangindia.in/content-author/content-author-28800/ News Related to Human Rights Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:33:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.2 https://sabrangindia.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Favicon_0.png Tanya Arora | SabrangIndia https://sabrangindia.in/content-author/content-author-28800/ 32 32 Protest Denied, Dissent Policed: India’s crackdown on those challenging the Election Commission https://sabrangindia.in/protest-denied-dissent-policed-indias-crackdown-on-those-challenging-the-election-commission/ Fri, 09 Oct 2026 12:33:24 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=49587 From alleged house arrests and detentions to police checks on train journeys and restrictions in Delhi, activists say authorities are trying to stop citizens from reaching the October 10 protest demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over SIR

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]]> The most alarming feature of the crackdown ahead of the October 10 protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar is not any single detention, police visit, travel restriction or security deployment. It is the cumulative picture emerging from across India: students allegedly intercepted on trains, activists confined to their homes, civil society organisers summoned and detained, police personnel reportedly questioning citizens about their travel plans, and sweeping restrictions proposed across Delhi’s transport network. Even a reported visit by a police official to a mosque in Old Delhi, asking residents not to participate in the protest, raises a troubling question: is the state preparing to manage a public gathering, or attempting to prevent the public from assembling in the first place?

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), left organisations, student organisations, opposition parties and their youth groups, and civil society groups have called for a protest over alleged irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and are demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The Election Commission of India (ECI) maintains that the revision is intended to remove duplicate, deceased and otherwise ineligible entries. Critics, however, have raised concerns about the scale of deletions, the risk of eligible voters being excluded, and the transparency and independence of the electoral process.

This comes on the background of more than 130 million names being removed from electoral rolls during the revision exercise, although the ECI and the government dispute the allegation that the exercise is politically motivated. The scale of the deletions makes questions of verification, notice, appeal and effective remedy matters of democratic urgency, not issues that can be brushed aside as partisan agitation.

Yet, instead of treating dissent over electoral integrity as a legitimate part of democratic life, authorities across several states are accused of taking steps that could prevent people from travelling to Delhi, meeting fellow protesters or exercising their right to peaceful assembly. The distinction matters. A government may regulate a demonstration to protect public safety. It cannot treat the very possibility of mass dissent as a threat to be neutralised through preventive detention, surveillance, intimidation and restrictions that extend far beyond the protest site.

‘Jantar Mantar Chalo’ posters lead to detention as Delhi Police widen probe
Image: Praveen Khanna / The Indian Express

One must also not forget that with Delhi Police reportedly planning to shut entry and exit gates at 57 Metro stations and all train services to and from New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin railway stations set to be cancelled between 4 am and 2 pm on October 10, the national capital is bracing for extraordinary restrictions ahead of a protest demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. As reports emerge of activists allegedly detained, placed under house arrest or stopped from travelling to Delhi, the scale of the measures raises a disturbing question: is the state preparing to maintain law and order, or making it increasingly difficult for citizens to exercise their democratic right to protest? Is this an undeclared emergency?

The following incidents, reported by news organisations and raised by activists and student organisations, point to an increasingly disturbing pattern.

The incidents: A nationwide pattern of intimidation

Delhi: Delhi Police official enters an Old Delhi Mosque to discourage participation: A video circulated on social media, reported by ThePrint, purportedly shows a Delhi Police official inside a mosque in Old Delhi reading out an advisory asking people to keep their family members away from “unnecessary” protests. The official is heard saying: “Parivaar ko samjhayein ki unnecessary bheed ya protest mein hissa na lein, kyunki prashasan apna kaam kar raha hai.”

According to ThePrint, police officials confirmed that personnel had also approached other gathering places and marketplaces to discourage participation in what they described as unlawful assemblies.

This is troubling for reasons beyond the choice of venue. The police are entitled to communicate lawful restrictions and explain genuine safety risks. But when official messaging moves into community spaces to discourage people from joining a protest against the government and the electoral authorities, the line between public information and political demobilisation becomes dangerously thin.

Calling a protest “unnecessary” does not settle whether it is lawful, nor does it answer the concerns that brought people to the streets. The police cannot substitute their assessment of whether citizens ought to protest for citizens’ own constitutional judgment.

Delhi Police official goes to a mosque in Old Delhi, reads out text from his phone, asks people to not participate in CJP’s October 10 protest. “Parivaar ko samjhayein ki unnecessary bheed ya protest mein hissa na lein, kyunki prashasan apna kaam kar raha hai.”

Rajasthan: CJP spokesperson Deepak Baliyan allegedly detained, assaulted and confined

The CJP alleged that Rajasthan Police detained its national spokesperson and organisational co-in-charge, Deepak Baliyan, from his home in Mankheda village, Kathumar tehsil, Alwar district, on the night of October 8.

According to statements by CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and co-convener Ashutosh Ranka, Baliyan was taken away despite recovering from a fractured leg, allegedly dragged and injured further, and later released during the night. The organisation subsequently alleged that his phone was retained without a seizure memo or other documentation being provided.

On October 9, CJP and activists reported that around 20 policemen were stationed outside Baliyan’s home, preventing him from moving freely. The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), through its president Kavita Srivastava, condemned the reported restrictions and demanded that the police withdraw from his residence.

CJP Org In-Charge Deepak Baliyan (26) Former Bhartiya Kisan Union Leader & close aide of Ashutosh Ranka was detained from his village Kathumar, Alwar. Latest info is that police now wants his family to come. If arrested a team will appear for him!

 

Rajasthan: Sanju Verma allegedly taken away by Reengus Police

CJP activist Sanju Verma, from Reengus in Rajasthan’s Sikar district, was reportedly picked up by Reengus Police at around 9.30 am on October 9. The account supplied by activists alleges that police personnel pushed, pulled and dragged him away. The PUCL also reported that Verma had been taken to an undisclosed location and demanded his immediate release.

Rajasthan: Geegraj Jodli allegedly prevented from leaving home

Geegraj Jodli, a CJP activist from Neem ka Thana in Sikar district, was reportedly prevented from leaving his residence for work, with Sadar Police personnel stationed outside his home from approximately 8.30 am. PUCL described the action as an unlawful restriction on movement and demanded that police withdraw from the residences of Jodli and Baliyan.

Uttar Pradesh: Eighteen-year-old Arjun Sharma reportedly placed under house arrest

Arjun Sharma, an 18-year-old recent school graduate who had raised concerns about irregularities in the CBSE On-Screen Marking System, was reportedly detained by Uttar Pradesh Police in Ghaziabad at around 8.30 pm. An account circulated on X claimed that Sharma had not issued a call for the October 10 protest but was nevertheless placed under house arrest until Sunday.

Fresh school graduate Arjun Sharma (18) who raised CBSE On-Screen Marking System irregularities was detained by UP Police in Ghaziabad around 8:30 PM He didn’t give any 10th October call still under House Arrest till Sunday!

 

Maharashtra: Police allegedly demand written assurances that people will not attend

In a report published on October 9, The Indian Express documented allegations from activists in Mumbai, Thane, Nagpur and Pune that police had contacted them, visited their homes, questioned their travel plans and, in some cases, asked them to sign documents promising not to attend the Delhi protest.

Sadaf Raza Zaidi, a 31-year-old creative strategist from Santacruz, told the newspaper that officers visited her home, asked where she planned to go on October 10, sought information about other potential participants and asked her to sign a document stating that she would not attend the protest. She also said police asked for her live location, which she refused to share. Zaidi believed she had been approached because she had been detained during an earlier protest in July.

The Maharashtra Director General of Police’s office acknowledged that notices had been issued in a handful of cases but denied that detentions had taken place in the state.

Mumbai: Feroze Mithiborwala and Salim Saboowala reportedly detained and warned against protesting

Civil society activists Feroze Mithiborwala and Salim Saboowala, associated with Hum Bharat Ke Log, said police personnel from Mumbai’s MIDC police station took them to the police station on October 8 after visiting their homes. According to Hindustan Times, the activists said they were held for several hours and released after being warned against participating in the October 10 protest. The newspaper reported that a senior police official denied that the duo had been detained, describing the interaction as routine questioning.

Mumbai Police have started detaining Constitutional Activists. Saleem Saboowala and Feroze Mithiborewala have been detained at police stations in Mumbai.

 

Maharashtra: Police reportedly track travel plans and seek information about other protesters

The allegations extend beyond the two Mumbai activists. The Indian Express reported that Mayur Sharma, a Thane-based AISF member, received calls from police personnel in Mumbai and Delhi seeking details of his journey to the capital. Sharma said he feared being stopped at Bandra Terminus and boarded a train from Borivali instead. He later received a call from Delhi Railway Police asking about his journey and the number of people travelling with him. He eventually got off near Faridabad rather than arriving at Hazrat Nizamuddin, where he feared police might be waiting.

In Nagpur, CJP volunteers alleged that Railway Protection Force personnel contacted them for the names and numbers of people travelling to Delhi and even offered to check the status of their waitlisted tickets. At least two volunteers were reportedly served notices under Section 168 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS).

Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh: AISF students allegedly targeted on the Goa Express

The All-India Students’ Federation (AISF) alleged that a group of its student delegates travelling from Pune to Delhi aboard the Goa Express faced an attempt by police to forcibly remove them from the train at Bhusawal railway station in Maharashtra.

According to a statement attributed to AISF Pune district convener Shravani, around eight to ten personnel, including Police Inspector Govind Pathak and woman police officer Minal Tayade, entered the compartment and attempted to detain and deboard the students. The students alleged that police failed to produce warrants, written orders or other legal documents authorising their detention. AISF said its members refused to leave the train and remained aboard after a confrontation lasting more than 30 minutes.

30 heading to Delhi for CJP protest taken off trains and detained by Madhya Pradesh police | India News - The Indian Express
Image: The Indian Express

Separately, the organisation alleged that 22 women AISF activists were detained at Itarsi station in Madhya Pradesh after being assaulted by police and Government Railway Police personnel. Those named included Pune coordinator Shravani Buva and Pune committee member Preeti Londhe. The organisation demanded that authorities disclose the whereabouts of the detained students and explain the grounds for their detention.

Sixteen people from Maharashtra were on their way to Jantar Mantar to join the protest. In Itarsi, Madhya Pradesh, the police have detained all of them after disembarking them from the train.

 

Over dozens of students onboard Goa Express and on their way to participate in protests in Delhi were detained by the local police in Itarsi, Madhya Pradesh.

Madhya Pradesh: CJP volunteers from Telangana reportedly detained in transit

As reported by The Reuters, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke alleged that volunteers travelling from Telangana were detained by Madhya Pradesh Police aboard a train at Bhopal. The organisation also circulated footage purportedly showing young people inside a moving bus in Madhya Pradesh, with one person heard saying that police had detained them.

Delhi: Police reportedly enter the SFI national office carrying lathis

The Students’ Federation of India (SFI) alleged that Delhi Police personnel carrying lathis entered its central executive committee office at HKS Surjeet Bhawan in New Delhi and sought details of activists ahead of the October 10 protest. SFI also alleged that police personnel had visited activists’ homes and approached their families to discourage them from travelling to the capital.

A group of policemen carrying lathis arrived at HKS Surjeet Bhawan, New Delhi, where the SFI Central Executive Committee office is located, searching for SFI activists. The police also tried to collect details of SFI activists coming to Delhi to participate in the protest.

SFI will not back down in the face of such intimidation tactics by the BJP-RSS using the police.

SFI will participate in large numbers in the 10th October protest against Vote Chori.

Delhi Police, are you trying to scare us or silence us? Do you want to see how many of us will come?

Amit Shah ji, we will be in thousands.

Let’s wait and watch. Don’t panic.

 

Gujarat: Student activist Satyesha reportedly placed under house arrest

Former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Aishe Ghosh shared an account alleging that the SFI national vice-president, Satyesha, had been placed under house arrest in Gujarat.

1st video is from Delhi, where the police entered our National Office with sticks and enquired about the details of our activists. 2nd video is from Gujarat, where our National Vice President Satyesha has been kept on house arrest.

 

Chandigarh: Former IES officer Prempal Singh reportedly placed under house arrest

Prempal Singh, a former Indian Engineering Services officer who had joined the CJP’s July protest at Jantar Mantar, was reportedly placed under house arrest in Chandigarh ahead of the October 10 demonstration.

Prempal Singh, UPSC 2018 Ex IES who had joined the CJP’s call at Jantar Mantar in July has been put under House Arrest in Chandigarh.

 

Delhi: Political Youth Congress president Divy Gaur reportedly confined to his home

Divy Gaur, president of the Political Youth Congress in Delhi’s Hari Nagar area, was reportedly placed under house arrest for several days because of his involvement in the “Vote Chori” campaign. The allegation was that the restriction was intended to prevent him from participating in the October 9–10 mobilisation.

Hari Nagar Delhi PYC President Divy Gaur has been placed under House Arrest for being vocal in the VoteChori campaign since 3 days now. Maybe they don’t want any movement from 9 to 10th October. 

 

Uttar Pradesh: Student and youth activists reportedly placed under house arrest

The Communist Party of India (Marxist) alleged that Uttar Pradesh Police had placed Democratic Youth Federation of India state secretary Raj Kumar, DYFI activist Kunal and SFI Sultanpur district president Salil under house arrest.

The party further alleged that SFI Saharanpur district convenor Arif had been detained at home and taken to a private location, while All India Kisan Sabha leader Daud Rao had also been detained at his residence. The organisation said the actions were intended to prevent them from reaching Delhi on October 10.

UP Police’s Repressive Measures Continue! Student and Youth Activists Targeted! DYFI Uttar Pradesh State Secretary Raj Kumar, DYFI activist Kunal and SFI Sultanpur District President Salil have all been illegally placed under house arrest by the UP Police. Earlier, the UP Police had detained SFI Saharanpur District Convenor Arif from his home and are keeping him at a private location. AIKS leader Daud Rao was also detained at his home yesterday. All this to prevent them from reaching Delhi on 10 October!

 

Onground blanket restrictions

Police deny permission for the October 10 protest: The Delhi Police has refused permission for the CJP–All India Students’ Association (AISA) protest at Jantar Mantar, citing prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the BNSS. As reported by The Times of India, police have argued that the organisers did not comply with the required notice period and had not followed directions during a previous demonstration. Authorities have also cited public safety, law and order, and traffic management concerns.

Authorities can impose proportionate conditions on a demonstration, designate routes and times, and take action against specific unlawful conduct. But refusing permission, while simultaneously restricting travel, monitoring prospective participants and preparing detention facilities, risks making the right to protest meaningless in practice.

Around 23,000 central armed police personnel and 10 detention centres reportedly prepared: According to The Indian Express, the Union Home Ministry made 221 companies of Central Armed Police Forces, comprising approximately 23,000 personnel, available to the Delhi Police for October 8–12. The report also said that around 10 detention centres were being prepared across the capital, including facilities at Rajiv Gandhi Stadium in Bawana and Chhatrasal Stadium.

The scale of the proposed deployment is striking. Security arrangements must be based on credible assessments of specific risks, not on the political significance of a demonstration or the number of people expected to criticise the government.

The preparation of detention facilities before a protest also raises a question of institutional intent. Authorities may reasonably plan for arrests if unlawful conduct occurs. But when detention capacity is presented as a central component of a pre-emptive security strategy, the public is entitled to ask whether the objective is to facilitate a safe assembly or to prepare for its mass dispersal.

Entry and exit gates at 57 Metro stations reportedly targeted for restrictions: The Times of India reported on October 9 that Delhi Police had proposed closing entry and exit gates at 57 Metro stations and reducing train frequency ahead of the protest. The proposed restrictions were to begin at 9 pm on October 9 and continue on October 10 until the situation normalised.

The report made clear that the police communication sought arrangements from the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation; it did not establish that every proposed restriction had been approved or implemented. Notably, the stations listed extend well beyond the immediate vicinity of Jantar Mantar and include major transport interchanges and stations serving residential, educational and commercial areas. Public transport is not merely a convenience for demonstrators. It is an essential service for workers, students, patients and commuters. Restricting it across a wide geographical area imposes costs on people who may have no connection to the protest at all. If individual stations require temporary restrictions because of a specific and immediate danger, authorities should explain the grounds and keep the restrictions as narrow and brief as possible.

 

Notably, in a significant intervention on October 9, the Supreme Court expressed serious concern over the Delhi Police’s move to close entry and exit gates at 57 Delhi Metro stations ahead of the October 10 protest. A bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana asked the government to take corrective steps and ensure that restrictions did not bring public life to a standstill. “You cannot bring everything to a halt,” the bench observed, stressing that its concern extended to thousands of ordinary commuters, including workers, students and senior citizens travelling to Delhi from Gurugram, Greater Noida and other parts of the National Capital Region. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta assured the court that he would discuss the matter with the government and work towards proportionate measures.

The court’s intervention raises a fundamental question about the proportionality of the restrictions imposed in the name of maintaining public order. While authorities may regulate demonstrations and take lawful preventive measures, the potential disruption of essential public transport across large parts of the capital places an extraordinary burden on people who have no connection to the proposed protest. The court emphasised that maintaining law and order is not merely about protecting state property, but also about protecting people and ensuring that ordinary citizens can go about their lives. The intervention comes amid wider allegations of police detentions, house arrests and attempts to prevent activists from travelling to Delhi. However, the court also made clear that the right to protest must operate within the applicable legal framework, including questions of permission.

Train services to New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin reportedly cancelled: In a report published on October 9, The Indian Express said that train services to and from New Delhi Railway Station and Hazrat Nizamuddin railway station would be cancelled between 4 am and 2 pm on October 10. The report also identified the Howrah–New Delhi and Sealdah–New Delhi Rajdhani Express services among trains cancelled because of anticipated congestion around the stations.

Travelling to Delhi on October 10? Check These Train Cancellations Before Leaving | Dynamite News

The Ministry of Railways described the measure as precautionary, citing traffic congestion and the need to prevent passengers from facing difficulties reaching stations. The report also noted that approximately 5,000 passengers had missed trains on the preceding Thursday.

Those operational concerns cannot simply be ignored. But the cancellation of essential transport services on the day of a protest, with consequences extending to passengers travelling for entirely unrelated reasons, calls for a transparent assessment of necessity and proportionality. The state cannot treat the inconvenience caused by a protest as a reason to impose restrictions whose consequences are borne by the public at large. If the concern is congestion, targeted traffic management, alternative access routes and clearly communicated passenger arrangements should be considered before sweeping disruption.

Restrictions reportedly considered for taxis, hotels and guest houses: The Indian Express reported that police were coordinating with app-based cab operators such as Ola and Uber to regulate movement towards Lutyens’ Delhi. Police officials also said hotels, guest houses and other accommodation facilities in and around Central Delhi had been asked to restrict or stop fresh bookings for a specified period.

Such restrictions have consequences beyond the immediate protest. People may need transport to reach hospitals, workplaces, homes, railway stations or other essential destinations. Hotels and guest houses serve visitors with no connection to political mobilisation. If the police have evidence that particular vehicles or premises are being used to facilitate a specific offence, action should be directed at that conduct. Broad restrictions based on the possibility that protesters might use ordinary transport or accommodation risk turning routine urban infrastructure into a tool for controlling political participation.

Internet restrictions and action against citizen journalists reportedly under consideration: The same Indian Express report said internet restrictions might be imposed in areas where detainees were housed and potentially extended to parts of New Delhi and Central Delhi, depending on the security situation. It also reported that people recording or livestreaming the protest could face action if they obstructed police operations, violated restrictions or contributed to unlawful mobilisation. Journalists were asked to carry and prominently display valid press identification at barricades and sensitive locations.

Liquor outlets ordered to close on October 9 and 10: The Delhi government’s Excise Department ordered liquor stores to remain closed on October 9 and 10, citing public-order concerns and police inputs, according to report in Hindustan Times.

The constitutional question: Can the state prevent a protest before it begins?

The crackdown allegations have unfolded alongside police action against opposition politicians. Reuters reported that Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were among those briefly detained during protests in Delhi over the electoral roll revision. Their detentions are part of a wider confrontation over the ECI’s conduct and the opposition’s demand for Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation.

The Constitution does not grant an unconditional right to assemble anywhere, at any time, regardless of the consequences. The state may impose reasonable restrictions, regulate public spaces and intervene against credible threats to public safety. But these powers are not a licence to suppress peaceful dissent.

Article 19(1)(a) protects freedom of speech and expression, while Article 19(1)(b) protects the right to assemble peaceably and without arms. Article 19(1)(d) protects the right to move freely throughout India, subject to constitutionally permissible restrictions. These rights are essential to democratic participation, particularly when citizens seek accountability from public institutions.

In Himat Lal K. Shah v. Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad (1973), the Supreme Court recognised that the state may regulate public meetings on streets but cannot exercise its regulatory power in a manner that effectively destroys the right to hold them. In Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India (2018), the Court considered the competing interests involved in demonstrations at Jantar Mantar and the need to balance the right to protest with the rights of residents and the maintenance of public order. These principles matter in the present context. The existence of regulatory powers does not answer whether their use is lawful in a particular case. A blanket refusal of permission, restrictions on travel across several states, alleged confinement of activists, questioning of prospective participants and sweeping disruptions to public transport must each be justified on their own facts.

Section 163 of the BNSS, which empowers executive magistrates to issue urgent orders in cases of apprehended danger or nuisance, is not a free-standing authority to extinguish constitutional freedoms. Its application must satisfy the statutory conditions and remain open to legal scrutiny.

The question is especially acute when restrictions appear designed not merely to control the location or manner of an assembly but to prevent people from reaching it at all.

The central contradiction: Public order or the prevention of dissent?

The state has defended the SIR exercise as a lawful effort to clean electoral rolls. The Election Commission maintains that duplicate, deceased and ineligible entries must be removed. Those objectives can be legitimate. An accurate electoral roll is indispensable to free and fair elections.

But the legitimacy of cleaning electoral rolls does not place the process beyond scrutiny. Nor does it make questions about wrongful deletions, procedural safeguards, access to appeals or the independence of the Election Commission illegitimate.

The dispute has acquired greater urgency amid reports that more than 130 million names have been removed from electoral rolls. As Reuters has reported, the opposition and critics argue that the scale of the revision raises concerns about the possible exclusion of eligible voters, while the ECI and the government reject allegations of political manipulation.

The correct response to such concerns is transparency, accessible remedies and an evidence-based explanation of the revision process. It is not to treat those demanding answers as a public-order problem.

There is an obvious contradiction in claiming that electoral-roll revision is necessary to protect the integrity of elections while allegedly using the police to stop citizens from questioning how that revision is being carried out. The ECI’s decisions must withstand scrutiny, and citizens must be free to demand that scrutiny without being treated as enemies of public order.

The concern is not confined to the conduct of Delhi Police. The allegations span Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Chandigarh. If the reported interventions are established, their geographical spread would demand answers about coordination between police forces, the basis on which individuals were identified and whether lawful preventive powers were being used to obstruct political participation.

The police cannot become an instrument for deciding who may dissent

Delhi imposes restrictions ahead of protests against CEC Gyanesh Kumar — The Credible News

The police are not responsible for determining whether a political demand is correct, whether an opposition movement deserves public support or whether citizens should be persuaded to stay home. Their responsibility is to enforce the law impartially, protect life and property, facilitate lawful assemblies and intervene against specific unlawful conduct. Those responsibilities require professionalism and restraint, especially when a protest is directed against the government or a constitutional authority.

The reported use of police personnel to discourage participation through community spaces, visits to homes and inquiries about travel plans raises questions about institutional neutrality. So does the alleged use of preventive powers to restrict individuals who have participated in previous demonstrations.

If police action is justified by a credible threat, the authorities should disclose the relevant legal grounds and explain why the restrictions imposed were necessary. If a person has been detained, their whereabouts and legal status should be made clear. If a restriction is imposed on movement, its legal basis, duration and scope should be identifiable.

The burden cannot be shifted entirely onto citizens to prove that every intervention against them was unlawful. Public authorities exercising coercive power must be able to account for that exercise.

The refusal of permission for the October 10 gathering may be challenged or defended on its own legal merits. But it cannot automatically justify every other measure taken against prospective participants across the country.

A protest against electoral uncertainty cannot be answered with restrictions on democratic participation

Protests in Lucknow Against CEC Gyanesh Kumar on Gandhi Jayanti; Hundreds Detained During March - The Wire
Image: The Wire

The October 10 mobilisation centres on a fundamental question: whether India’s electoral institutions are functioning with sufficient transparency and public confidence. The demand for the Chief Election Commissioner’s resignation is a political demand, not a judicial finding of wrongdoing. Allegations of electoral manipulation must be investigated and assessed on evidence, and the ECI’s position must be fairly represented.

But peaceful protest is one of the means through which citizens raise questions that they believe existing institutions have failed to answer adequately.

The state’s response must therefore be judged not only by whether it prevents traffic disruption or maintains order at Jantar Mantar, but also by whether it preserves the conditions under which citizens can criticise those in power.

There is a difference between regulating an assembly and suppressing the possibility of assembly. There is a difference between investigating a credible threat and treating prospective protesters as suspects. And there is a difference between communicating lawful restrictions and using the authority of the police to persuade citizens that they should not exercise their rights. A democracy is not tested by how efficiently it prevents dissent from assembling. It is tested by whether it can accommodate dissent, protect those who express it and answer criticism without resorting to coercion.

Related:

Police detain Adivasi students for second day, force them out of Mumbai

From Nashik to Mumbai: Adivasi students’ protest meets police detentions

Youth Congress escalates fight against CEC Gyanesh Kumar as SIR controversy fuels nationwide protests

Unpacking a Coded Defence: What an IIT Professor’s post reveals about attitudes in elite institutions

‘Solidarity Is Not a Crime’: Mumbai activists protest alleged police harassment over Palestine event

 

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]]> Census 2027: How much personal data is too much? https://sabrangindia.in/census-2027-how-much-personal-data-is-too-much/ Mon, 28 Sep 2026 05:22:48 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=49480 From parents’ place of birth and religion to Aadhaar, voter ID, passports and bank accounts, the expanded questionnaire is prompting concerns over privacy, data use and its overlap with the NPR

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]]> India’s next Census is no longer simply a question of how many people live in the country, where they live and what their socio-economic circumstances are. The questionnaire for Census 2027’s population enumeration phase asks households for an unusually wide range of personal and family information. Alongside conventional demographic and economic questions, enumerators will record details relating to respondents’ parents, spouses, nationality, permanent address, caste, digital literacy, COVID-19 vaccination, bank accounts and identity documents, including Aadhaar, voter ID, passport, driving licence and mobile numbers where available. The expansion has triggered a larger question about what a population census is supposed to do, and where the boundaries of such an exercise should lie.

Despite significant objections being raised to this overarching methodology that clearly aims, through the backdoor, to achieve more than a socio-economic number enumeration of the Indian people to guide policy thrusts, the union government has chosen this path. Earlier such attempts after the controversial 2019 amendments to the Citizenship Act, 1955 have been analysed here, here and here.

The Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India notified 40 questions for the population enumeration phase on August 14, 2026. The questionnaire contains several new or modified fields compared with the 2011 Census. The exercise is also significant because, for the first time since Independence, caste(s) beyond the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe categories is being included in the population Census.

That combination has made Census 2027 an exercise of enormous significance, but also one surrounded by questions about methodology, privacy, confidentiality and the eventual use of the information being collected.

As reported by The Hindu on September 9, former Deputy Registrar General of India K. Narayanan Unni questioned whether several of the newly introduced questions could generate meaningful statistical information at all. His concern was not simply about the volume of information being collected, but whether asking for personal identifiers and family details risks moving the Census away from its traditional statistical purpose.

A Census is supposed to count a population, not create an identity dossier

The basic purpose of a population census is to enumerate a population to understand its socio-economic status. The United Nations defines a population census as the comprehensive process of collecting, processing, analysing and disseminating demographic, economic and social information relating to all persons in a country at a specified point in time. The purpose is to produce reliable statistics at the smallest possible geographical level so that governments and societies can understand population patterns and implement policies that serve this population. That distinction matters because individual-level identifiers do not ordinarily constitute the statistical information that a Census ultimately publishes.

The United Nations Fundamental Principles of Official Statistics also place confidentiality at the centre of official data collection. Individual information collected by statistical agencies is supposed to remain confidential and be used exclusively for purposes of policy generation.

India’s Census framework has historically reflected this principle. Section 15 of the Census Act, 1948 protects Census records from inspection and provides that such records are not open to inspection or admissible in evidence.

The question now is whether the enlarged questionnaire changes the nature of the information being collected without sufficiently clarifying how that information will remain insulated from other government databases and administrative purposes.

The concern is particularly acute because the questionnaire does not merely ask how many people live in a household or what their occupation, education or migration status is. It asks for information capable of directly identifying individuals and linking them to existing administrative databases.

Aadhaar numbers connect to UIDAI records. Voter identification numbers connect to electoral rolls. Passport numbers connect to passport records. Mobile numbers connect to telecommunications records. Bank information exists within the financial system. The significance of collecting such information in a single household-level exercise is therefore fundamentally different from collecting anonymous demographic information for policy-statistical tabulation.

Why are parents’ details being collected?

Among the most striking additions are questions about the parents of each individual. The questionnaire seeks information about parents and includes details such as their names, religion and place of birth. The information can extend to the village level. The respondent is also asked about the spouse in the case of married persons. These questions raise practical concerns as well as questions about purpose.

In an ordinary household, the person answering the Census may not know the precise place of birth of their parents or grandparents. The problem becomes even more complicated in institutional households such as hostels, old-age homes and prisons. The changing nature of Indian migration makes the issue still more complicated. Millions of students, workers and other residents live away from their permanent homes. Children may be living in hostels or as paying guests. Domestic workers and other persons may be temporarily residing with households during the enumeration period.

A respondent cannot necessarily be expected to know the identity-document details, parental information or other personal particulars of every person who happens to be eligible for enumeration at that location. The more information a questionnaire demands, the greater the possibility that respondents will either be unable to answer accurately or will provide hurried or incomplete responses. This is what former Census officials have described as the problem of “respondent fatigue”.

Aadhaar, voter ID, passport and mobile numbers

The inclusion of identity numbers presents a different problem. The questionnaire asks for mobile number, Aadhaar number and voter ID number “if available”, while also seeking passport information for Indian passport holders and information about driving-licence availability. But what exactly does “if available” mean?

As The Hindu reported, it is unclear whether the phrase means that the number should be provided if it exists for the individual concerned, or whether it means that it should be produced if the respondent has it at the time of enumeration. That distinction could become important in large households. A person answering the Census may not possess the Aadhaar, voter ID or passport details of every member of the household. Elderly parents, domestic workers, visitors and people living temporarily in institutional accommodation may not have their documents immediately accessible.

There is also a more fundamental question: what statistical purpose is served by recording the actual identification number?

As former IIPS director K.S. James told The Wire, individual identifiers are not inherently useful for Census tabulation because they cannot themselves be meaningfully computed into conventional population statistics. In his view, such identifiers are more characteristic of an identification or population-registration exercise.

The NPR question

The most politically sensitive issue is the overlap between several Census questions and information that was previously sought for the National Population Register. Eight of the new or modified fields identified by The Indian Express as overlapping with the 2020 NPR schedule include nationality as declared, parents’ particulars, mobile number, Aadhaar, voter ID, passport and driving licence.

The National Population Register is a register of “usual residents”, rather than a register exclusively of citizens. Under the framework governing it, a usual resident broadly refers to a person who has resided in an area for at least six months or intends to remain there for at least six months. A foreign national who satisfies the residence criterion can therefore fall within the NPR.

The team of Citizens for Justice and Peace (cjp.org,in) had, in 2020 extensively researched the issue and here is a document to understand the difference between NPR and Census, relevant even today. It may be read here.

The legal framework also connects the Population Register to the preparation of the National Register of Indian Citizens. The Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003 provide for verification of the Population Register in connection with preparation of the citizens’ register, including the possibility of marking cases in which citizenship is considered doubtful for further inquiry.

That legal architecture became particularly contentious when the government proposed updating the NPR alongside the Census process in 2019-20, shortly after the passage of the Citizenship Amendment Act and amid nationwide protests against the CAA-NPR-NRC framework. The political context has not disappeared.

The Indian Express reported that questions concerning parents’ place and date of birth had been among the most controversial elements of the earlier NPR exercise. The government at the time maintained that such information was optional and that people would not lose citizenship merely because they could not provide their parents’ birth details. The government also argued that the NPR was intended to create a comprehensive database of residents that could assist with policy formulation, welfare delivery and administrative efficiency. The present controversy is therefore not based solely on the similarity between two questionnaires. It is also shaped by the history of how the NPR was understood and contested.

The government’s position and the trust deficit

A comprehensive regularly conducted census (a socio-economic population database) is required to assist governments to craft policy on education, housing, transportation and health: this can be then broken down to plan schools, hospitals, housing, transport, welfare programmes and other public services.

However, the currently underway exercise, that includes questions that go beyond that limited purpose, has raised questions of both motive and application (use). Will the data be collected used solely for the purpose envisioned/mandated? To craft policies that respond to the socio-economic needs of the people?

As The Indian Express documented, the government’s assurances in 2019 and 2020 existed alongside previous official statements and the Citizenship Rules that established a legal connection between the Population Register and the process of preparing a citizens’ register. The NRC in Assam, which excluded roughly 19 lakh people, further intensified concerns about the consequences of citizenship verification. Consequently, questions about nationality, parents’ places of birth and identity documents are not being encountered in a political vacuum.

An information request that might appear administratively ordinary can carry very different implications when it is introduced against the background of previous debates over citizenship, migration and the NPR-NRC framework. This is why the central issue is not simply whether the government is legally entitled to ask a particular question. It is also whether citizens can clearly understand why the information is being collected, what it will be used for, who will have access to it, how long it will be retained and whether it can subsequently be linked to another government database.

The 1951 precedent

Former Census officials have also pointed to history. In a September 10 report, The Hindu noted that records from the 1951 Census demonstrate that Census information was used in the preparation of the National Register of Citizens at the time. The 1951 Census report of R.B. Vaghaiwalla, then Superintendent of Census Operations for Assam, Manipur and Tripura, described the NRC as having been prepared by transcribing important Census data from the Census slips. The report stated that the register was essentially a copy of the Census slips, with the same symbols and abbreviations. However, what is being ignored, omitted or missed is that the questions for the 1951 Census were those related to socio-economic status of citizens responding, nothing more. Ironically, this aspect is exactly the argument used by a vigilante bureaucracy in Assam not to accept presence in the 1951 NRC as adequate indication/ proof of citizenship!

This background underlies the need for specificity and confidentiality in 2026 Census data collection particularly important.

Caste Census: historic opportunity, unresolved methodology

The other defining feature of Census 2027 is caste enumeration. India has not conducted a full caste census since 1931. Census 2027 will therefore generate data of enormous potential importance for understanding social and economic inequalities. But the methodology has itself become controversial.

The questionnaire asks respondents to identify their caste, but unlike a standardised list-based system, the field is largely open-ended for castes beyond SC and ST categories. The problem is not merely technical. The experience of the 2011 Socio-Economic and Caste Census demonstrates the consequences of an unstandardised approach. That exercise produced more than 46 lakh reported caste names, including variations involving castes, sub-castes, clans and surnames. The Union government subsequently told the Supreme Court that the raw caste data had technical problems and had not been released. The government’s own earlier submissions to the Supreme Court have therefore become relevant to the current debate.

In 2021, the Centre had argued that caste enumeration, particularly of OBCs, was administratively complex and that the existing data contained serious problems of completeness and accuracy. Yet experts quoted by The Indian Express and The Hindu have questioned why the lessons of the 2011 exercise have not been incorporated into the 2027 methodology. Former IIPS director K.S. James suggested that a hierarchical system combining recognised state and central caste lists with an option for respondents to provide additional information could make the data more usable.

Sociologist Satish Deshpande went further, arguing that an open-ended system risks generating a proliferation of spelling variations and caste names that could make the resulting data difficult to analyse. These expert assessments identify a serious methodological question: if caste data is being collected precisely because it is expected to inform public policy, affirmative action and social-justice measures, then the method of collection must be capable of producing data that can actually be classified and analysed.

The OBC question

Another unresolved issue is the treatment of Other Backward Classes. The questionnaire includes Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and caste fields, but does not provide OBC as a separately identified category in the manner critics had expected.

Congress leaders Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi subsequently wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking changes to the questionnaire, arguing that the methodology could undermine the accuracy and usefulness of caste data. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh has also criticised the absence of a pre-prepared caste list and contrasted it with the approach used in caste surveys in Bihar and Telangana.

These are political claims and should be understood as such. The underlying methodological question, however, can be assessed independently: whether an open-ended caste field without adequate standardisation will produce reliable, comparable and policy-useful data.

That question is especially important because caste statistics are not merely academic numbers. They can influence the design of welfare schemes, reservation policies, educational interventions and other measures intended to address structural inequality.

A questionnaire that may become too long to be accurate

There is another, less politically dramatic problem: time. The population enumeration schedule contains 40 questions, many of which must be answered for every individual in a household. Adding questions about parents, spouses, identity documents, bank accounts, vaccination history and other personal details increases the amount of information that enumerators must collect and record.

Former Census officials told The Hindu that this could increase respondent fatigue, particularly when enumerators are required to work through lengthy questionnaires with multiple members of a household. The burden will fall heavily on enumerators, many of whom are government schoolteachers.

If a questionnaire takes substantially longer to complete, the consequences are not necessarily limited to inconvenience. Fatigue can affect accuracy. Respondents may become impatient. Enumerators may rush. Questions may be misunderstood. Answers may be guessed or left incomplete. A Census can therefore undermine its own statistical objectives by trying to collect too much information. The issue is particularly important in a country as large and diverse as India, where the credibility of population data depends upon consistent enumeration across hundreds of millions of people.

Migration creates another risk

The decision to advance population enumeration in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Goa because of their forthcoming elections has raised another concern: under-enumeration of migrants. As The Hindu reported, former Census official K. Narayanan Unni warned that conducting enumeration earlier in these States could affect migrant workers who move between their place of work and home State.

India follows a de facto method of enumeration, under which people are generally counted where they are physically present during the Census period. Traditionally, March 1 has been used as the reference date partly because migration patterns are relatively lower around that period.

If enumeration is advanced in some States because of elections, migrant workers may return to their home States to vote and potentially miss enumeration at their place of work. If enumeration has already concluded in the home State, there is a possibility that some migrants could be missed at both locations. That is a data-quality problem rather than merely an administrative inconvenience.

The Census is intended to provide a comprehensive picture of India’s population. Even relatively small levels of under-enumeration can affect the accuracy of demographic estimates, particularly for populations that are already mobile or difficult to reach.

Digital Census, digital vulnerabilities

Census 2027 is also being presented as India’s first fully digital Census, incorporating online self-enumeration and digital tools. Technology can make a national enumeration faster and potentially more efficient. But digitisation also changes the nature of the risks.

The more sensitive information that is digitised, the more consequential a data breach becomes. The Internet Freedom Foundation has raised concerns about the combination of Aadhaar, voter ID, passport and mobile numbers with caste, religion, language, migration history and other demographic information. Its argument is that these identifiers could potentially make it possible to connect Census information with other government databases. That concern is particularly significant because the value of a database to an attacker is not necessarily determined by any single field. It can arise from the ability to combine fields.

A database containing caste, religion, economic status, family relationships, migration history and unique identifiers would reveal substantially more about an individual than any one of those datasets considered separately.

Reports concerning the 2023 CoWIN data leak, for instance, demonstrated the potential consequences of vulnerabilities involving sensitive personal information. A breach of Census information could have consequences extending well beyond identity theft. Sensitive caste, religious and demographic information could potentially be used for discrimination, profiling, fraud or targeted harassment.

The legal framework is itself in transition

There is also a timing problem involving India’s data-protection regime. The Internet Freedom Foundation has pointed out that the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and its implementing framework do not provide a fully operational safeguard during the entire Census process in the way one might expect from a mature data-protection regime.

The organisation has specifically questioned the interaction between the Census Act’s compulsory nature and emerging data-protection safeguards. Section 8(2) of the Census Act makes persons legally bound to answer notified questions, while Section 11 provides penalties for refusal or obstruction. That makes the nature of consent particularly complicated.

The Census and the compact of trust

At its core, the Census is an exercise in trust. The State asks citizens to provide information about themselves and their families on the understanding that the information will serve a socio-economic indicator of the status of the population. That compact becomes more fragile when the questionnaire starts asking for information that appears capable of connecting an individual to multiple existing databases.

The danger in collecting excessive information is not confined to what the database is intended to do today. Large databases acquire value precisely because they can be used for purposes that may not have been contemplated when the information was initially collected. That is why purpose limitation and data minimisation are fundamental principles of responsible data governance.

If the objective is to understand India’s population, the government should be able to explain why each additional identifier is necessary to generate that understanding. If an Aadhaar number does not produce a demographic statistic, its collection requires a separate justification. If a passport number does not contribute to population tabulation, the government must explain the purpose for which it is being recorded. If parents’ precise places of birth are necessary for a statistical exercise, that purpose should be made explicit. The same standard should apply to mobile numbers, voter IDs and other identifiers. The larger the database, the stronger the justification must be for every additional category of information.

The fundamental question facing Census 2027 is consequently not merely how much information the State can collect. It is how much information a democratic State should collect for a stated purpose, and what protections must exist to ensure that information does not acquire a different purpose later. A population census is meant to tell the country who lives in it, how people live, where they live and what their circumstances are. It should not leave citizens wondering whether, in the process of counting them, the State is also building a much more detailed map of who they are.

 

Related:

Census v/s NPR

Census v/s NPR

Falsifying the Truth: PUCL condemns the systematic manipulation of census data & suppression of ground realities in census exercise

Ensure transparency and inclusion in the 2027 Census: CCG

To count or not to count, delays and India’s decadal Census

Caste Census Survey Result: 63% OBCs, 19% SCs and 1.68% STs constitute Bihar’s total population

The Whys behind a caste-based census point to an urgent imperative

The post Census 2027: How much personal data is too much? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> Satya Niketan Collapse: When students and neighbours had to rescue students from a system that had failed them https://sabrangindia.in/satya-niketan-collapse-when-students-and-neighbours-had-to-rescue-students-from-a-system-that-had-failed-them/ Wed, 09 Sep 2026 06:12:21 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=49206 From locals and NSUI volunteers digging through the rubble to AISA, SFI and others taking to the streets, the tragedy has exposed Delhi’s unsafe student-housing crisis and a State that acted after disaster struck

The post Satya Niketan Collapse: When students and neighbours had to rescue students from a system that had failed them appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> The collapse of the five-storey paying guest accommodation at Satya Niketan on September 6 has left seven people dead and several injured. But the tragedy cannot be reduced to the failure of one old building. What collapsed in Satya Niketan was a structure that reportedly housed students in a neighbourhood that has been transformed, over decades, into one of Delhi University’s principal student-housing hubs. It was a structure reportedly carrying floors beyond the permitted limit, being used as a private PG, and undergoing work in its basement. It was surrounded by other buildings whose safety is now also under scrutiny.

And when it came down, another fact became impossible to ignore: the people who were closest to the disaster became the first line of rescue, while the state institutions took 2 hours to provide “relief”. The accounts coming out through media outlets show residents, students and student volunteers scrambling over dangerous debris, pulling out bricks and concrete with their bare hands, arranging oxygen cylinders and water, clearing access routes and helping professional rescue teams locate survivors. That is not merely a story of community courage. It is also a deeply uncomfortable question about the State’s preparedness.

The first rescuers were the people who lived there

The most powerful images emerging from Satya Niketan are not of politicians arriving at the site. They are of ordinary people entering the rubble before they knew whether the adjoining structure might also collapse. As The Times of India reported, electrician Md Ishtiyaq and other local residents climbed onto the debris almost immediately after the building came down. There was fear that the neighbouring structure could collapse too. They went in anyway. Ishtiyaq borrowed a hammer from a nearby shop and used it to break a PVC pipe trapping a student’s leg. Around him, residents and students began improvising a rescue operation. Human chains were formed to move debris. Chunks of walls, concrete and iron rods were removed by hand.

The Indian Express reported that residents formed a human chain within minutes. Bricks, stone slabs, broken chairs, pillows and mattresses were pulled away so that trapped students could be located. Residents moved vehicles obstructing access and helped create space for rescue machinery. A former DU law student who lived in the building two years earlier told the newspaper that during the first hour, those who came forward to help were “mostly residents of the area”. The narrow lanes of Satya Niketan made the situation even more difficult. The very urban density that had made the locality attractive to students also made it difficult to bring heavy rescue equipment close to the collapsed structure. Yet the residents did what they could with what they had.

NSUI volunteers were not spectators — they were in the rubble

The role played by student volunteers deserves to be recorded with the same seriousness as the official rescue operation. The Times of India reported that DU students and NSUI volunteers Hariom Sisodiya and Pawan Thakur rushed to the site after receiving a call that a friend might have been inside the PG. They spent almost two hours removing bricks, pipes, rods, plaster and concrete. Their hands were scratched and bloodied from the debris. Their efforts, according to the report, helped rescue three people.

The The Hindu account records Krishna Bhardwaj, a DUSU campaigner, arriving with around 25–30 members of his team. He recalled pulling students from the rubble before police and fire personnel had fully taken over the rescue operation. He also described hearing a student pleading to be saved, only to later learn that the student had died.

The student volunteers did not know who was trapped beneath the rubble. They did not know whether the debris above them would shift. They went in because somebody had to.

 

The neighbourhood became a rescue infrastructure of its own

The community response did not end with pulling people out. According to The Times of India, local residents arranged water and refreshments for rescue workers through the night. A student volunteer, Gulaab, stayed at the site and helped control the crowd so that rescue personnel could work. By Monday, NSS cadres and students from nearby colleges arrived carrying biscuits, water, soft drinks and medical supplies.

ANI also reported something that is almost surreal in a city with an enormous disaster-response apparatus: local residents ordered oxygen cylinders through a quick-commerce application to assist people trapped under the debris. This is the kind of detail that should not be buried beneath official statements about “war footing”.

Because it raises a simple question: Why were ordinary residents having to improvise life-saving infrastructure at a disaster site?

There is, of course, an official account of the response. Police said a PCR call was received at approximately 1.34 pm and that Delhi Police, NDRF, Delhi Fire Service, DDMA and ambulances were deployed. NDRF officials have also said their teams reached the site soon after being alerted and began rescue operations. However, that official account exists alongside something that cannot simply be dismissed: repeated eyewitness accounts describing a slower response.

Times Now reported residents alleging that police and NDRF personnel were absent for nearly two hours. Another resident described the rescue operation as extremely slow. DU students Ankit Tiwari and Shivam Sharma said they helped residents remove debris and alleged that officials arrived more than an hour after the first call for help.

For some families, the rescue itself became another source of anguish

The story of Aditya makes the question of rescue time even more disturbing. According to the report carried by Rediff and PTI, Aditya had moved into the PG only four days before the collapse. After the building came down, he managed to call his family and tell them that he was trapped beneath the debris and that his phone battery was running out. He remained conscious and was able to communicate. His father later questioned why it took nearly four hours to bring him out.

Aditya survived and is being treated at AIIMS. However, while waiting, he recorded a video from beneath the debris. The footage showed the claustrophobic space in which he and another injured student were trapped. His father’s question is devastating precisely because it is so simple: if a conscious student could call for help, why did it take so long to reach him?

But the collapse did not begin on September 6

The most dangerous way to understand Satya Niketan would be to treat the collapse as an unpredictable accident. The reports collected in the file point to warning signs that existed well before Sunday afternoon. An MCD official told the media that the collapsed structure was a G+4 building on a roughly 55-square-yard plot where permission existed only for a G+1 structure. It was nevertheless being used as a student PG.

The adjoining girls’ PG was subsequently evac­uated and sealed after being found to be in a dilapidated condition. That immediately raises the question that cannot be avoided: If a building was allegedly four floors beyond what was permitted, how did it continue operating as a student accommodation in one of Delhi’s most prominent university neighbourhoods?

The responsibility cannot automatically stop with the property owner. The owner may face criminal liability if the investigation establishes wrongdoing. However, an unauthorised or unsafe building does not become invisible simply because a private person owns it. A building does not exist outside the reach of regulation. It requires approvals, must comply with prescribed building norms, and remains subject to inspection and enforcement by the authorities. Where a building is being used to accommodate dozens of students, safety standards become even more critical.

That makes the question of responsibility far bigger than simply asking who constructed the unauthorised floors. The real questions are: Who was responsible for monitoring the building? Who was supposed to inspect it? Were inspections actually carried out? If violations were visible, why was no timely action taken? Were notices issued, and if so, what happened afterwards? Why was the building not sealed or its use stopped? Most importantly, how was it allowed to remain occupied despite the risks?

The collapse, therefore, cannot be reduced to an act of unauthorised construction alone. It also demands scrutiny of the regulatory and enforcement machinery that was supposed to prevent precisely such a disaster.

Repair or construction work in the basement is another major line of investigation. Police said repair work was underway when the collapse occurred. Residents also reported basement work and water accumulation. The Chief Minister said preliminary information indicated that excavation in the basement may have caused a pillar to shift. MCD, however, has said the precise nature of the work cannot be established until the debris is cleared.

Residents told Times Now that they had warned the owners and workers about the condition of the building and the basement work. This is how preventable disasters happen: not necessarily because nobody saw the danger, but because danger becomes normalised.

Satya Niketan was built into a student-housing crisis

There is another uncomfortable truth here. Students did not simply choose Satya Niketan because private PGs were attractive. They went there because they needed somewhere to live. The Indian Express reported that Delhi University has more than 2.5 lakh students but only around 9,000 hostel beds, with hostel accommodation disproportionately available to postgraduate students. The result is that thousands of students, particularly those coming from outside Delhi, are pushed into private PGs and rental accommodation in neighbourhoods such as Satya Niketan and Mukherjee Nagar.

The question is not simply why students rented an unsafe building. The question is why a university that draws students from across the country does not have enough safe accommodation for them. The Delhi High Court put the issue far more directly.

As reported by The Telegraph, the Court questioned not only the role of the building owner and MCD but also the absence of adequate hostel facilities for outstation students. It directed the MCD to examine whether PG buildings had valid permissions and whether building laws had been violated, and asked DU to provide details of its outstation students and hostel capacity. The Court’s message was blunt: the government cannot escape responsibility.

The administrative response has now begun to look familiar. The MCD’s own pre-monsoon survey is now under scrutiny. According to The Hindu, the civic body had surveyed nearly 28 lakh of around 32.5 lakh properties identified for inspection by late June, but classified only 19 as dangerous and 74 as requiring immediate repairs. It remains unclear whether the Satya Niketan building had been inspected during that exercise.

What makes Satya Niketan different is the student unity emerging from the rubble

By Monday, September 7, the collapse had become the centre of a much larger student mobilisation across Delhi. AISA, SFI, NSUI and ABVP — organisations that occupy very different political and ideological spaces — took to the streets separately, but with strikingly overlapping demands: accountability for the deaths, safety audits of student accommodation, action against illegal construction and, above all, an end to the dependence on unsafe private PGs because universities have failed to provide enough hostels. The Telegraph, reporting on the protests, described the mobilisation as a response to both the deaths and the wider shortage of safe and affordable student housing.

AISA calls it an “avoidable disaster”: The All India Students’ Association has been among the most forceful in connecting the collapse to the larger failure of student infrastructure. AISA described the incident as an “avoidable disaster” and demanded strict action against those responsible as well as accountability from the Delhi government. Crucially, it also challenged the narrative that this was simply the consequence of one negligent property owner.

AISA pointed to the shortage of affordable hostels at Delhi University and argued that students are effectively pushed into expensive private PGs and rental accommodation because the university has failed to provide alternatives. It also alleged that police and JCB machinery reached the site around two hours late — a claim that must be independently investigated against official response records, but which has now become a significant part of the protest narrative. Instead of asking only, “Who owned this building?”, AISA is asking why students had to live in such buildings in the first place.

SFI has taken the housing question directly to the streets: The Students’ Federation of India has similarly refused to treat Satya Niketan as an isolated accident. The SFI Delhi State Committee held a protest rally and candlelight vigil at Delhi University’s Arts Faculty, demanding hostels for all students, immediate safety audits of PGs and private accommodation, closure of unsafe buildings and a cap on rents in student residential areas.

Its demand goes even further: until adequate hostel infrastructure is created, the government should bear students’ accommodation costs. Students interviewed after the collapse told the media that they were paying between ₹12,000 and ₹15,000 for cramped double-sharing rooms, precisely because many colleges do not provide hostels. Another DU student told The Indian Express that the university has more than 2.5 lakh students but only around 9,000 hostel beds. So when SFI demands a rent cap and state-funded accommodation until hostels are available, it is responding to a material reality students are already living.

 

NSUI is demanding hostels, inspections and closure of illegal PGs: NSUI has also taken the fight directly to the government and DU administration. NSUI president Vinod Jakhar alleged that no new hostel had been built for DU in the past decade, arguing that the shortage has forced students into private PGs where, in his words, safety guidelines are not followed.

The organisation has demanded new hostels within DU, inspections of all PG accommodations and the closure of illegally operated facilities. It has also called for regulation of rents in PGs and hostels. That demand exposes an obvious contradiction. The State cannot simultaneously fail to provide enough university accommodation, allow private housing to fill the vacuum, and then treat every unsafe PG as merely a private dispute between landlord and tenant.

 

Cockroach Janta Party demands range from student safety to a wider indictment of the State: The response from the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has also sought to place the Satya Niketan collapse within a much larger crisis of student safety and public infrastructure. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the contradiction between political attention to universities and the condition in which students are actually being made to live. Referring to Modi’s visit to Delhi University shortly before the collapse, Dipke asked how students could be expected to pursue their education when even their hostels and classrooms could not be guaranteed to be safe. He demanded safe classrooms, functional hostels and basic dignity for students, asking pointedly how long students would be made to pay for failures in public infrastructure.

The CJP’s later response went beyond the immediate building and towards the system that allows unsafe student accommodation to proliferate. Its spokesperson Saurav Das described students as being left to “live like cockroaches” and alleged the existence of a wider “PG mafia” involving unregulated paying guest accommodation and political interests. These are allegations, not established findings, but they point to precisely the questions that any serious investigation must answer: who owns these properties, who authorises or tolerates their conversion into student housing, whether inspections actually take place, what happens to violations once they are detected, and whether officials are held accountable when unsafe structures continue to operate. The CJP has demanded a seven-point action plan including structural audits of student accommodations, disclosure of building records, a public database of safety certificates, accountability of officials and compensation of ₹1 crore to each bereaved family.

 

Dipke also framed the tragedy as a question of political priorities. As reported by The Hindu, he contrasted the construction of grand political establishments with the unsafe and inadequate infrastructure available to students, arguing that the government should prioritise safe educational institutions and hostels rather than political grandstanding.

 

ABVP is demanding officials answer for the collapse: ABVP, meanwhile, has taken its protest directly to the civic administration. The organisation held demonstrations and sit-ins across DU campuses and demanded accountability from the MCD, including the suspension/resignation of the MCD Commissioner. It has called for a high-level and impartial inquiry, action against negligent PG operators and building owners, action against officials responsible for enforcement failures, and immediate structural and safety audits of private accommodation in student-dominated areas.

ABVP’s protest also escalated at the MCD headquarters, where protesters entered the Civic Centre and the premises were subsequently reported to have been vandalised. That escalation should be recorded honestly; a legitimate demand for accountability does not make vandalism acceptable. At the same time, the underlying question raised by the protest remains entirely legitimate: how was an allegedly unauthorised G+4 building permitted to operate as a student PG?

The Opposition response: From condolences to the question of accountability

Opposition parties have increasingly moved beyond expressions of grief to attack what they describe as a systemic failure of governance. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge called the collapse a “deeply distressing and avoidable tragedy”, arguing that students come to Delhi to build their futures, not to risk their lives merely to find a roof over their heads. Senior Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi similarly connected the deaths to the chronic shortage of university hostels, pointing out that students are pushed into private PGs where large numbers can end up living under one roof in what he described as inhumane conditions. He also said Congress and NSUI workers were present at the site and ready to assist affected students and their families.

 

Rahul Gandhi’s response became sharper the following day. He accused the BJP government of following a recurring pattern in which there is little prevention before disasters, followed by political grandstanding and the shifting of responsibility onto lower-level officials after lives have already been lost. Referring to the Satya Niketan collapse alongside other recent disasters in Delhi, Gandhi argued that the absence of preventive action was itself a form of political failure. He also questioned the notion of a “triple-engine” government in Delhi, asking why such administrative alignment had not translated into basic safety for students. NDTV reported his central argument as one of “no accountability”, with Gandhi saying that where there is no political intent, there is no accountability either.

 

The criticism also came from within the wider Congress organisation. Delhi Congress chief Devendra Yadav asked why students arriving in the capital from across the country should have to live without any guarantee of safety, arguing that a Prime Minister’s speeches at Delhi University could not substitute for actual protection of students. Congress media department head Pawan Khera described the recovery of a copy of A Thousand Splendid Suns from the rubble as a symbol of a generation that, in his words, was being left without adequate guarantees of dignity, safety or a future. NSUI president Vinod Jakhar separately alleged that the administration arrived nearly two hours after the collapse and said NSUI workers had immediately attempted to pull students from the debris.

 

The Aam Aadmi Party, meanwhile, placed the responsibility more directly on the Delhi civic and administrative machinery. AAP national convenor Arvind Kejriwal described the collapse as “extremely tragic and alarming” and said the government needed to “wake up from its slumber”, calling for comprehensive measures to protect public safety. AAP MP Atishi demanded a high-level inquiry and strict action against those responsible for negligence. Saurabh Bharadwaj went further, questioning the functioning of the MCD building department and alleging that corruption and political influence had allowed unsafe construction to continue. Those allegations should themselves be investigated rather than treated as established fact, but they underline the central issue: the collapse was not simply the consequence of one building owner’s decisions; it raises questions about the regulatory machinery that was supposed to identify dangerous construction before people were killed.

 

The protest has moved from grief to a demand for structural change

The students’ demands are also increasingly being translated into formal legal and institutional action. A PIL filed by DU law student Aniket Kumar Gupta has sought an independent investigation into the collapse, an immediate safety audit of private PGs and hostels in Satya Niketan, safe relocation of students from unsafe buildings and ₹1 crore compensation for each deceased victim, reported Indian Express.

NSUI has separately moved the Delhi High Court seeking a structured hostel-development policy for Delhi University. Moreover, the wider student mobilisation is happening against the backdrop of the Delhi High Court itself questioning the regulation of PGs and the adequacy of hostel facilities.

The Court has asked how buildings with permissions for limited floors are being turned into much larger PG structures and why there is no effective mechanism regulating such accommodation.

The significance of Satya Niketan is already travelling beyond the immediate site. The Times of India reported that students at Sir Chotu Ram Institute of Engineering and Technology in Meerut protested outside the vice-chancellor’s office over hostel shortages in the aftermath of the Delhi tragedy. The students were demanding accommodation and expressing heightened fears about being forced into private housing after seeing what happened in Satya Niketan, reported The Times of India.

Conclusion: The students should not have had to become their own rescue system

The most disturbing lesson of Satya Niketan is not simply that an allegedly unauthorised and structurally compromised building collapsed. It is that, in the crucial first moments after it did, ordinary residents and students were among those who climbed into the rubble, organised human chains, moved debris and searched for survivors. The government’s response cannot end with suspensions, sealing drives and post-disaster audits. Those measures may be necessary, but they are the beginning of accountability, not its conclusion. Authorities must establish who approved what, what the building was legally permitted to contain, whether it was ever inspected, whether violations were detected, whether notices were issued, whether enforcement was attempted, and why a property being used to house students was allowed to remain in operation. The precise cause of the collapse must also be established independently rather than prematurely attributed to basement work, rain, seepage or any other single factor while the investigation is still underway.

Most importantly, the State cannot simultaneously fail to provide adequate student housing and then treat the safety of the private housing market as someone else’s problem. When public universities provide only a fraction of the accommodation their students require, students are pushed into dense private neighbourhoods such as Satya Niketan. When those neighbourhoods become commercially dependent on student housing without corresponding infrastructure, regulation and enforcement, the resulting risk is not merely a “private” landlord problem. It becomes a question of urban governance and public responsibility. The collapse has therefore exposed more than one unsafe building. It has exposed a system in which students are expected to find their own roofs, residents are expected to improvise rescue operations, and governments arrive with audits after the deaths have already occurred.

 

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The post Satya Niketan Collapse: When students and neighbours had to rescue students from a system that had failed them appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> Maharashtra’s schools are struggling to survive as students protest, infrastructure crumbles and Marathi-medium institutions disappear https://sabrangindia.in/maharashtras-schools-are-struggling-to-survive-as-students-protest-infrastructure-crumbles-and-marathi-medium-institutions-disappear/ Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:16:03 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=49086 From Adivasi students on hunger strike to Class 10 students demanding teachers, government schools without electricity and internet, and hundreds of schools facing the loss of grant-in-aid, Maharashtra’s education crisis is increasingly visible on the streets

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]]> For years, Maharashtra’s education system has been showing signs of a crisis that has been difficult to ignore but remarkably easy for governments and political parties to treat as a mosaic of only isolated problems. Teacher shortages, deteriorating school infrastructure, disappearing Marathi-medium schools, inadequate facilities in tribal and residential schools, the relocation and proposed closure of low-enrolment schools, and the growing involvement of private entities in public education are not new developments. They are different symptoms of a deeper and sustained failure to ensure that every child has meaningful access to a well-staffed, adequately funded and accessible public school. The brazen shift towards privatisation is at the core of this shift.

Dalit, Adivasi, rural and economically disadvantaged communities have repeatedly raised these concerns, often from the sharpest end of the crisis. For children in remote villages and tribal settlements, the loss of a neighbourhood school can mean a long and unsafe journey to another village. For students in government and municipal schools, a vacant teacher’s post can mean months or years without instruction in crucial subjects. For children living in government hostels and Ashram schools, inadequate sanitation, food, security and medical facilities can turn access to education into a question of basic safety and dignity. Moreover, for families seeking education in Marathi, the steady weakening of Marathi-medium institutions raises questions about whether the State is preserving meaningful choice or allowing an entire public education network to wither.

The Maharashtra media and even some sections of the “national legacy media” have reported these failures repeatedly, but largely as separate episodes: a school without teachers here, a dangerous building there, a protest over toilets or hostels elsewhere, a proposed school merger or closure, a dispute over Marathi-medium education, or a new policy promising modernisation. The result has been a fragmented public conversation about what is, in reality, a connected and longstanding crisis. These issues crucial to access and participation in a democracy have never been the subject of a sustained media campaign. Successive governments have announced schemes, reviews, reforms and infrastructure programmes, while the underlying questions of staffing, access, funding and accountability have remained.

What is equally striking is how little political space this crisis has occupied as a sustained issue. Despite Maharashtra’s large network of government, Zilla Parishad and municipal schools, and despite repeated concerns raised by teachers, parents, educationists and marginalised communities, the condition of public schooling has rarely been made a central political question. Opposition parties have criticised individual decisions, school closures or government policies, but the broader deterioration of the public education system has not consistently been treated as a major political issue.

It was against this backdrop that the recent School Thik Karo campaign brought the condition of government schools into a more concentrated public spotlight. The campaign led by Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke has sought to document basic deficiencies in schools across Maharashtra and place them before the public. Its significance lies in something larger: it has attempted to connect problems that have too often been reported, protested and debated separately. The crisis, however, predates the campaign by years.

The evidence is now difficult to dismiss as a series of isolated incidents. Maharashtra’s own education data records schools without electricity, internet connectivity, functional computers, accessible toilets and adequate teaching staff. Students have protested because teachers are missing. Adivasi students have gone on hunger strike over hostel conditions. Parents and activists have opposed school closures, mergers and relocations. Marathi-medium schools have steadily declined. Teachers are being pulled away from classrooms for non-academic duties, including prolonged election-related work. At the same time, governments have explored cluster schools, school adoption and Public-Private Partnership models even as large parts of the public system continue to struggle with basic infrastructure and vacancies.

This is therefore not simply a story about a few poorly maintained schools, nor is it only about the latest government policy or the latest student protest. It is a story about what happens when the State’s responsibility to provide public education is repeatedly addressed through piecemeal interventions while the structural weaknesses of the system remain.

Maharashtra now speaks the language of a “modern”, digital and future-ready education system. However, before asking whether its schools are ready for artificial intelligence, coding, smart classrooms and digital learning, there is a more basic question to answer: are its schools adequately staffed, safely accessible, properly equipped and capable of providing every child with a meaningful education? The answer emerging from the experiences of students, teachers, parents, marginalised communities and the State’s own data is far more troubling than the language of modernisation suggests.

Justice Varale questions education spending as Marathi-medium schools face closure

Mumbai records drop in number of Marathi schools despite govt promoting language | Mumbai News - The Indian Express

Nothing exposes Maharashtra state’s education policy priorities more than what was highlighted by a Supreme Court Judge recently.

Speaking about the condition of Marathi-medium schools weeks ago, Supreme Court Justice P.B. Varale on Saturday, August 22, reportedly questioned the State’s spending priorities, saying that even a fraction of the funds earmarked for the Nashik Kumbh Mela could have helped prevent the closure of hundreds of Marathi-medium schools. The Times of India reported that Justice Varale made the remarks during an event at his former school in Nashik.

Justice Varale reportedly referred to the Maharashtra government’s proposed expenditure on Kumbh infrastructure and a corridor project, while clarifying that he did not oppose such spending. However, he questioned whether a small portion of the allocation could instead have been directed towards education. He said that 0.1% of the Kumbh allocation, amounting to around Rupees 32 Crore, could have helped save more than 100–150 Marathi-medium schools from closure, according to the report.

The Maharashtra government has informed the Union government that a comprehensive development plan of Rupees 22,425.39 Crore has been approved for the 2027 Nashik Simhastha Kumbh Mela. The plan was approved at a meeting of the Apex Committee chaired by the Chief Minister on March 13, 2026, with the Kumbh scheduled to begin in October 2026.

Justice Varale also drew attention to the condition of residential schools, particularly ashramshalas catering to students from marginalised communities. Referring to reports of three girl students at an ashramshala who died after allegedly being bitten by snakes while sleeping on the floor, he reportedly said that the overall condition of several residential schools remained “pathetic”.

His remarks also pointed to a broader concern over the State’s changing budgetary priorities. Justice Varale reportedly observed that the share of the budget allocated to education, which had earlier ranged between 8% and 12%, had declined.

Modern education system cannot be built on disappearing schools

Perhaps the most significant development in Maharashtra’s education story is that students and their families are increasingly refusing to remain passive recipients of policy. Adivasi students have gone on hunger strike, Dharashiv students have sat outside the Zilla Parishad CEO’s office, villagers have locked a school in protest over teacher shortages, parents have challenged school relocations, and activists have documented failures in school infrastructure.

The protests differ in geography and immediate demand, but they share a common message: children and their families are being asked to accept gaps in a system that the State continues to describe as modern, inclusive and future-ready. Educationist Prabhu Mohapatra, commenting on the wider rise in student protests, told PTI that students were increasingly asserting themselves as stakeholders in education policy and that the protests reflected concerns over infrastructure, teacher availability and the quality of learning.

That assertion of agency may be the most important shift in Maharashtra’s education story. Students are not demanding luxury. They are demanding teachers, safe school buildings, functioning toilets, drinking water, adequate classrooms, accessible schools and the ability to continue learning in their own language. They are asking for the basic conditions necessary for education, and for the State to treat those conditions not as discretionary benefits but as public obligations. Maharashtra now has two competing narratives about education.

The first is the official narrative: smart classrooms, artificial intelligence, coding, digital platforms, teacher training, modernisation and a “mission mode” transformation of the education system. The second is emerging from classrooms, villages, hostels and protests: missing teachers, inadequate infrastructure, unsafe or unsuitable accommodation, inaccessible schools, unreliable or disputed data, and institutions facing closure or merger. Both realities have to be confronted.

The government can legitimately point to improvements and new initiatives, and its officials have disputed some of the broader allegations concerning infrastructure. But the State’s own U-DISE data, the Centre’s Project Approval Board review, the Bombay High Court’s intervention and repeated student and parent protests point to structural weaknesses that cannot be resolved through announcements alone.

The decline of Marathi-medium schools makes the problem even more consequential. This is not simply an infrastructure crisis; it is also a question of what kind of public education Maharashtra intends to preserve. If Marathi is to be protected, Marathi-medium schools cannot merely be celebrated symbolically. They must be adequately funded, staffed, upgraded and made capable of providing quality education without forcing parents to abandon the language in which their children have been studying.

If a school has low enrolment, the first question should therefore not automatically be how soon it can be closed. The more fundamental question is why enrolment is falling in the first place.

Is the school inadequately staffed? Are its buildings and facilities deteriorating? Are teachers being diverted to non-teaching duties? Is the school too far from where families now live? Has urban redevelopment displaced the community it once served? Are parents choosing other schools because the Marathi-medium option is perceived to offer poorer infrastructure or fewer opportunities? Has the medium of instruction itself become stigmatised? In addition, crucially, could targeted investment reverse the decline?

These questions become particularly urgent when the children affected are poor, rural, tribal or dependent on Marathi-medium government schools. For such families, the closure of a neighbourhood school is not simply an administrative restructuring. It can mean longer journeys, additional transport costs, greater dependence on private education and, in some cases, the eventual withdrawal of children from school altogether. And where closure is genuinely unavoidable, the State must be able to answer a more basic question: where exactly will every child go?

The Maharashtra government has now promised a time-bound transformation of the education system. The measure of that transformation, however, should not be the number of schemes announced, platforms launched, classrooms labelled “smart” or meetings conducted. It should be visible in the ordinary conditions in which children actually study.

It should mean a functioning fan in a classroom, a usable toilet, clean drinking water, adequate teachers, a safe hostel, a working computer, a laboratory that has actually been built and equipped, and a school that remains within reasonable reach of the children it serves. It should also mean a Marathi-medium school that is not forced to fight simply to survive.

Until these become ordinary features rather than exceptional achievements, the phrase “modern education system” will remain more aspiration than reality. A State cannot credibly claim to be building the schools of the future while allowing existing schools to become inaccessible, under-resourced or disappear altogether.

August 2026: Students on hunger strike for the right to study

17-day tribal students' hunger strike ends after Maharashtra govt agrees to demands | Hindustan Times
17-day indefinite hunger strike by tribal students at Manjari tribal hostel ended on Saturday after tribal development minister Ashok Uike met protesters and provided written assurances on their demands. Image: Hindustan Times

The latest and perhaps most revealing episode came from Maharashtra’s Adivasi student community. In August 2026, tribal students in Pune and elsewhere in Maharashtra began protesting against a range of issues concerning government hostels and Ashram schools. Six students continued a hunger strike at the Adivasi Government Boys Hostel near the Hadapsar-Manjari border.

The immediate trigger was a Government Resolution issued on August 14, 2026, imposing a maximum age of 30 years for admission to tribal hostels. But the students’ demands went far beyond the age restriction.

The protest also brought allegations about the treatment of female students into focus. On August 24, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi wrote to Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis raising concerns about the conditions described to him by tribal students. He alleged that hostels were unsafe and lacked adequate food, sanitation and medical care, and referred to claims that female students returning after an extended absence were subjected to pregnancy and other medical tests.

The Hindu also reported on August 24, the protesting students demanded the withdrawal of the August 14 Government Resolution and a revised order based on the earlier November 11, 2011 framework, with allowances linked to inflation. They sought greater protection for students living in tribal hostels and Ashram schools, ₹1 crore insurance cover for tribal students, ₹1 crore compensation for the families of three tribal girls who died following a snake-bite incident in Gadchiroli, a safe and properly equipped hostel for female students in Pune, and immediate filling of vacant posts including peons, security guards and sanitation workers.

The scale of dependence on these hostels is itself significant. As The Indian Express reported on August 26, the Tribal Development Department runs 490 government hostels across Maharashtra, accommodating between 58,000 and 60,000 students every year. The government ultimately backed down on the immediate issue. On August 25, following discussions with tribal legislators and MPs, Tribal Development Minister Ashok Uike announced that the 30-year age limit had been scrapped and that there would be no age restriction for admission to Adivasi hostels. The Indian Express reported that the decision came a day after Rahul Gandhi had raised the matter with Fadnavis. The government therefore acted. However, it acted after 13 days of hunger strike.

That sequence matters. It raises the question of how many of the other problems raised by the students — safety, sanitation, staffing, food, medical care and financial support — will require another protest before they receive sustained attention.

July 2026: “We need teachers, not promises”

The same pattern was visible in Dharashiv. On July 31, India Today reported that Class 10 students of a Zilla Parishad secondary school in Sonari village had begun an indefinite sit-in outside the Zilla Parishad Chief Executive Officer’s office demanding regular secondary-school teachers. Their complaint was not new. According to the protesting students, several teaching and staff posts had remained vacant for nearly four years. Repeated representations had allegedly failed to produce concrete action. A day before the sit-in, villagers had locked the school to draw attention to the shortage.

Students particularly objected to primary-school teachers being used to teach secondary classes, arguing that students preparing for the SSC examination required qualified subject teachers. The protest carried an especially pointed message. Students invoked the government’s “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” campaign and asked, in effect: what does saving the girl child mean if she is then denied the teachers required to complete her education? They also invoked Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s call to “Educate, Organise and Agitate”.

They said they had already approached the Zilla Parishad CEO, Education Officer, District Collector and Superintendent of Police on July 28, but claimed that no effective action followed.

This is not merely a question of staffing. For a Class 10 student, a missing teacher is not an abstract administrative vacancy. It can mean an incomplete syllabus, inadequate preparation for a board examination and, for poorer families, pressure to pay for private tuition that they may not be able to afford. Moreover, the state already knows that teacher shortages are a wider problem.

The Government’s own data exposes the gap

On July 17, the findings emerging from the Ministry of Education’s U-DISE 2025-26 data provided that Maharashtra had 108,139 schools, 21.6 million students and 750,272 teachers. But 3,201 schools had no electricity connection at all. Another 10,938 had electricity connections that were not functional. A further 23,855 schools had no internet connectivity. Of the 90,419 schools that had computer facilities, computers were functional in only 84,530. That left 23,609 schools without operational computer systems.

The contradiction is hard to miss. The state is speaking increasingly about artificial intelligence, coding, smart classrooms and digital learning. Yet thousands of its schools are still struggling with the infrastructure required to switch on a computer, let alone build a digital classroom. The problem goes beyond technology. U-DISE data showed that 9,269 schools were single-teacher schools, catering to 179,104 students. More than 32,000 schools lacked separate toilets for children with disabilities, while 16,341 did not have ramps with railings.

There were 2,019 unusable girls’ toilets and 3,280 unusable boys’ toilets, with the data attributing the problem to issues including water, maintenance and pending repairs. Another 3,932 schools lacked playgrounds and 1,099 lacked a library or book bank. Only 13,550 schools had digital libraries, leaving 94,589 without one. These figures matter because they are not merely the claims of opposition parties or activists; they come from the government’s own education database.

Teachers are being asked to do more with less

Teachers have also described the consequences of this system. Vijay Kombe, president of the Maharashtra State Primary Teachers’ Committee, told ETV Bharat that schools continued to face shortages of basic items such as mats, desks and benches. He said local-government schools lacked dedicated cleaning staff and that teachers in some places were consequently forced to clean classrooms and toilets, sometimes with students’ help.

Kombe also claimed that more than 75 per cent of primary schools run by local self-government bodies lacked headmasters, leaving teachers to combine administrative duties with classroom teaching. He criticised the staffing arrangement in low-enrolment schools, under which one primary teacher may have to manage multiple classes, while one teacher may be required to teach all subjects for Classes 6 to 8.

There is, however, an important official counterpoint. Divisional Deputy Director of Education Rajesh Kankal said drinking-water facilities were available in more than 100,000 schools, while more than 107,000 had hand-washing facilities and more than 102,000 conducted annual health check-ups. He said the administration was working to rectify the remaining shortcomings. The issue, therefore, is not that Maharashtra has no facilities.

It is that the existence of facilities in the majority of schools does not erase the thousands of schools where they are absent, dysfunctional or inaccessible. For a child attending one of those schools, the state-wide average offers little comfort.

SIR extension keeps teachers away from classrooms

The extension of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maharashtra has prolonged the deployment of teachers as Booth Level Officers (BLOs) and support staff, affecting regular classroom teaching, unit tests and other academic activities. Teachers who were expected to return to schools by August 8 had been assigned election-related duties until August 17, with house visits, voter verification and form-related work continuing even as schools prepare for examinations and work to complete the syllabus.

The timing has added to existing pressures on schools. Unit tests scheduled for August and periodic assessments meant to track students’ learning are being affected, while teachers are also required to cover new textbooks introduced for Standards III, IV and VI under the National Education Policy. In some government and civic schools, more than 70% of teaching staff has reportedly been deployed for SIR-related work, leaving schools with reduced staff and, in some cases, forcing them to operate for only half the day. Teachers and school heads have said the prolonged absence is making it difficult to complete teaching and conduct examinations as scheduled.

The impact extends beyond teachers formally appointed as BLOs, with other teaching and non-teaching employees being assigned to assist with the exercise. In one school, Headmaster Tanaji Mane said three teachers initially appointed as BLOs were later joined by teaching and non-teaching staff who were relieved of their regular duties. Data cited by Progressive Teachers Association president Tanaji Kamble from Mumbai’s Ghatkopar East constituency reportedly showed that 184 of 283 BLOs were from the Education Department, including 157 teachers. Teachers have also faced pressure to report for election duties, with police notices reportedly issued to some who failed to do so. Educationists and teacher representatives have consequently questioned whether such prolonged deployment is compatible with the State’s responsibility to ensure uninterrupted schooling.

The issue ultimately raises a larger question about how election-related administrative work is being balanced against children’s right to regular education. Teachers have described the SIR process as continuous and demanding, while educationists have warned that prolonged absence from classrooms can disrupt learning, assessments and syllabus completion. With the electoral exercise continuing even as the academic year progresses, teacher organisations have suggested using trained personnel from other departments or other mechanisms for election work instead of repeatedly drawing teachers away from schools. The concern is not simply about teachers’ workload, but about what happens to students when the people responsible for teaching them are routinely pulled away from the classroom.

Detailed report may be read here.

The Centre’s review makes the picture worse

The Ministry of Education’s Project Approval Board raised similar concerns while examining Maharashtra’s Samagra Shiksha plan for 2026-27. Of 22,416 eligible upper-primary, secondary and higher-secondary schools, 21,009 did not have ICT laboratories. Another 4,286 lacked smart classrooms. Nearly 60 per cent of primary and upper-primary schools had fewer than 30 students each, while 7,186 schools had only one teacher.

The Union also noted that more than 4,300 villages did not have a secondary school within the prescribed distance and more than 6,500 villages lacked access to a higher-secondary school. More than 80 per cent of approved science laboratories had not been completed, while toilets sanctioned for children with special needs remained pending. The teacher vacancy figures were equally concerning; around 17% of secondary teaching posts and 25% of higher-secondary posts were vacant.

The Centre approved ₹2,494.17 crore under Samagra Shiksha for Maharashtra for 2026-27 and directed the state to complete pending infrastructure and digital projects in “mission mode”. The Maharashtra government, for its part, said most sanctioned ICT laboratories were under installation and would be completed by the end of the year.

But this creates an uncomfortable policy contradiction. The government is being asked to modernise schools while it has not yet completed the basics.

Then there is the question of closing schools

Perhaps the most consequential issue is not what is missing from schools, but what happens when the state decides a school is no longer viable. In April 2026, the Maharashtra government issued two Government Resolutions declaring 433 primary schools and 324 secondary schools ineligible for grant-in-aid. The schools were directed to apply under the Maharashtra Self-Financed Schools Act, 2012. If they failed to do so, their recognition could be cancelled, effectively leading to closure. The Bombay High Court intervened.

On April 29, 2026, the Kolhapur Bench held that the government’s action could not proceed against the petitioner schools without giving them an opportunity to be heard. As The Hindu reported on May 19, the court found that the resolutions violated principles of natural justice and directed that the petitioner institutions be removed from the list. Nevertheless, the court’s observations went beyond procedure.

The bench noted that the affected schools were predominantly Marathi-medium institutions, particularly in villages. It pointed out the contradiction in the state’s position: on the one hand, Maharashtra was insisting that Marathi be given greater importance; on the other, the government’s action could result in the closure of Marathi-medium schools.

The judges also asked questions that should have been at the centre of the government’s decision before the resolutions were issued: Could the students actually be accommodated in nearby schools? Would the medium of instruction continue? What would happen in villages where alternative schools were not available? What would happen to teaching and non-teaching staff? Could teachers be absorbed elsewhere? And could poor families be expected to bear the consequences of the shift to self-financed education?

The court concluded that these considerations had not been adequately addressed and directed the state to conduct hearings before taking action. That intervention is crucial because it exposes the danger of treating school closure as a mere question of numbers. A school with fewer students is not automatically a redundant school as it may be the only school within walking distance, or the only affordable school, or the only school teaching in the child’s language. And if it disappears, the state’s responsibility does not disappear with it.

2023: From school closures to “adoption”: A changing model of public education

The debate over low-enrolment schools cannot be separated from another policy shift: the growing role being given to private entities in the management and development of government schools. Maharashtra has increasingly presented private participation as a means of improving infrastructure and educational quality, even as questions remain about why the State is unable to adequately fund and maintain its own public-school system.

In September 2023, the Maharashtra government introduced an “Adopt a School” scheme under the National Education Policy’s Vidyanjali initiative. As reported by the Times of India on September 19, 2023, the scheme allowed private and public sector entities to adopt government schools for five or 10 years. The State proposed making more than 62,000 government schools available for adoption. Corporate entities could use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) funds for activities ranging from repairs, maintenance and painting to improving sanitation, health, enrolment and the use of technology.

Dalit groups strongly protested this move towards privatisation that would deny access to Dalit, Adivasi and OBC students especially in rural areas.

The financial commitments were substantial yet no audit of the scheme or the implementation have ever been held, nor demanded. According to the government resolution reported by The Times of India, entities adopting schools in “A” and “B” category municipal corporations, including Mumbai and Pune, were required to commit ₹2 crore for five years or ₹3 crore for 10 years. For “C” category municipal corporations, the amounts were ₹1 crore and ₹2 crore respectively, while other schools could be adopted for ₹50 lakh for five years or ₹1 crore for 10 years. The Business Standard, reporting on September 18, 2023, said the funds could be used for school-building repairs, painting, and toilets, infrastructure and sports equipment.

The government insisted that the scheme was not privatisation. In December 2023, then School Education Minister Deepak Kesarkar told the Hindustan Times that a major corporate house had expressed interest in adopting around 5,000 schools and stressed that the objective was to improve infrastructure and amenities, not to privatise schools. The government resolution also permitted an adopting entity to add its name to the existing school name for the duration of the agreement, although the original name was to be retained.

The distinction between “adoption” and privatisation, however, becomes more complicated when viewed alongside the State’s broader education policy. In July 2026, Frontline reported that Maharashtra was expanding public-private partnership models in school education, including the operation of five English-medium schools of the Pune Municipal Corporation through a PPP arrangement. The report said the same organisation that had previously operated the schools using CSR funds was subsequently awarded a contract worth ₹12 crore annually by the Pune civic administration. Frontline also reported concerns over proposals to hand over land reserved for Mumbai municipal schools to private entities under PPP arrangements.

This raises a fundamental question about the direction of public education. If private organisations are initially invited to improve government schools through CSR and are later given contracts to operate schools using public funds, the State’s role can gradually shift from being the primary provider of education to financing or facilitating private participation in its delivery. The issue is therefore not simply whether private money can improve a school building. It is who ultimately controls public educational assets, who determines priorities and whether access to education remains governed primarily by public obligations rather than the interests or capacities of private partners.

The question becomes particularly important in the context of Maharashtra’s low-enrolment and cluster-school policies. In September 2023, Mid-Day reported that the State had identified 14,783 schools with 20 or fewer students for consolidation into cluster schools. The proposed restructuring was expected to affect 1,85,467 students and 29,707 teachers. The government argued that very small schools could not provide adequate infrastructure, qualified teachers or opportunities for social interaction, and pointed to successful cluster models in Panshet and Toranmal.

Teachers and education activists, however, warned that consolidation could push students to travel longer distances and increase the risk of dropouts, particularly in rural and remote areas. Their concern was especially significant for young children, girls and students from economically weaker families for whom daily travel to a distant school may itself become a barrier to attendance.

The State subsequently sought to reassure critics. In July 2025, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde told the Maharashtra legislature, as reported by ET Education, that schools would not be closed merely because of low enrolment. He said the government would make adjustments to ensure that such schools continued functioning and that teachers would be redeployed only after appropriate adjustments were made. Yet the same report noted that around 18,000 schools had fewer than 20 students.

The policy trajectory therefore remains difficult to reconcile. On one side, the government says low-enrolment schools will not be shut and that every child must continue to have access to education. On the other, cluster models, school consolidation and private participation are being promoted as solutions to the perceived financial and infrastructural limitations of the existing public-school network.

The issue is not that private participation is inherently harmful, nor that every small school must necessarily remain open regardless of circumstances. The concern is whether the State is addressing the reasons behind low enrolment and poor infrastructure before declaring a school inefficient, relocating its students or inviting private entities to take over functions that should ordinarily be part of public educational provision.

A government school is not merely a building that can be repaired through CSR funding or managed through a contractual arrangement. It is part of the public infrastructure through which the State fulfils its constitutional obligation to provide education. When schools are under-resourced, the answer cannot automatically be to reduce the State’s responsibility by transferring greater functions to private actors. The more important question is whether Maharashtra is investing sufficiently in making its public schools viable before concluding that they need to be consolidated, adopted or operated through PPP models.

Marathi schools: Declining enrolment or a policy-created cycle?

The decline of Marathi-medium education in Maharashtra is particularly troubling because it cannot simply be reduced to a story of parents “choosing English”. The numbers in Mumbai are stark. According to BMC data cited by ThePrint on July 24, 2025, the number of Marathi-medium schools in Mumbai fell from 460 in 2019-20 to 421 in 2025-26 — a loss of 39 schools. Around 50,000 students had moved elsewhere from the 2019-20 academic session onwards.

The longer-term numbers are even more striking. Mid-Day, reporting on May 4, 2025, said Mumbai had 413 Marathi-medium schools in 2010-11, 368 in 2014-15 and only 262 by 2023-24. That is not a temporary fluctuation, but rather a sustained decline.

The government has attributed the decline largely to parental preference for English-medium education. Parents do indeed have reasons to make that choice. English is widely perceived as providing better access to higher education, employment and social mobility. But educators and activists argue that parents are also responding to the relative quality and visibility of the schools being offered to them. As ThePrint reported in July 2025, educators pointed to inadequate infrastructure in Marathi-medium schools and alleged that English-medium institutions received greater preference when it came to development.

Deepak Pawar of the School Education Action Coordination Committee argued that Marathi-medium schools should be upgraded without changing their medium to English. Teachers cited in the report similarly described a communication gap with middle-class families and said some Marathi-medium schools had modern facilities such as Atal Tinkering Labs and robotics labs, but that efforts to publicise and develop these came only after enrolment had already begun to collapse. The important point here is thus, if the state allows a school to deteriorate, then points to falling enrolment as evidence that the school is no longer viable, it risks creating a self-fulfilling cycle. One cannot ignore the vicious cycle of how poor infrastructure erodes parental confidence, leading to declining enrolment, reduced allocation of teachers and resources, and a further deterioration of schools, creating a cycle that ultimately pushes schools towards closure. The final closure can then be presented as the inevitable consequence of “parental preference”. But inevitability is not the same as neutrality.

The fate of one of Mumbai’s oldest Marathi schools

The uncertainty surrounding Dadar’s Nabar Guruji Vidyalaya brought this crisis into sharp relief. In May 2025, Mid-Day reported that the Marathi-medium school, which dates back to the 1940s, was facing an uncertain future amid falling admissions. Thirty-five students had appeared for its SSC examination that year, but only 17 students remained in Classes 9 and 10 for the new academic year. The management clarified that it had not decided to close the school.

Trustee Satish Rama Nayak said the institution remained financially capable of functioning because it offered free education and teachers’ salaries were supported through government grants. The difficulty was the collapse in enrolment and its impact on the teacher-student ratio. Nayak also described a social transformation.

Parents who had themselves studied in Marathi-medium schools were increasingly choosing English-medium or CBSE schools for their children, sometimes even taking loans to pay for them. That is the other side of the story. It would be too simplistic to blame the government for every parent who chooses English. But it is equally simplistic to blame parents for the disappearance of Marathi-medium schools without asking why government and aided Marathi schools have not been made equally attractive, well-equipped and aspirational.

As Sushil Shejule of the Marathi Abhyas Kendra told ThePrint, the decline had been visible for years and, despite the availability of data, neither governments nor political parties had taken meaningful action.

The irony of Marathi’s “classical language” status

In October 2024, Marathi received classical-language status from the Union government. Maharashtra has also repeatedly asserted the importance of Marathi in public life and education. The Maharashtra Compulsory Teaching and Learning of Marathi Language in Schools Act, 2020 made Marathi compulsory in schools across the state, including CBSE and ICSE schools. Yet the institutions that actually provide education through Marathi continue to shrink.

The Mid-Day report of May 2025 placed the decline against precisely this backdrop: Marathi had acquired classical-language status, but one of Mumbai’s oldest Marathi-medium schools was struggling with falling admissions. The contradiction was also noticed by the Bombay High Court in its April 2026 intervention.

The state cannot convincingly claim to protect Marathi while allowing the network of Marathi-medium schools, particularly those serving poorer and rural families, to become increasingly fragile. Protecting a language is not merely about official resolutions, signboards or declarations. It also means ensuring that a child who wants, or needs, to study in that language has a functioning school in which to do so.

Mumbai’s municipal schools: when “repair” means displacement

The infrastructure problem becomes even more complicated when schools are declared unsafe and children are moved elsewhere. In December 2025, Outlook reported on the closure and relocation of Mumbai municipal schools, including New Mahim Municipal School. Students were shifted from August 2025 to another municipal school operating from a few rooms on the first floor of a residential building.

According to the report, the replacement premises lacked a playground, proper drinking-water facilities and adequately supplied toilets. The concern raised by parents and activists was not that unsafe buildings should continue to operate. A genuinely dangerous school building cannot be defended in the name of access to education. The concern was about what children were being offered after their school was shut.

When a school has to close because its building is unsafe, the replacement should provide an equivalent educational environment. It should be sufficiently close to the children’s homes, have adequate classrooms, functional toilets and drinking-water facilities, and provide children with access to a playground. Parents and children should also have a say in decisions that directly affect their education. For Marathi-medium schools, relocation should not result in the loss of the medium of instruction. These are not peripheral concerns. They determine whether a “relocation” actually amounts to continued and meaningful access to education.

When official records themselves threaten to erase students

Another warning emerged in January 2026. On January 10, ETV Bharat reported discrepancies between Aadhaar-linked records and UDISE Plus data that had left thousands of students classified as “invalid”, “not provided”, “under verification” or “out of school”. The report said that of 2,14,68,288 students registered in the relevant Maharashtra UDISE Plus data, 5,78,433 were listed with invalid Aadhaar details and 4,98,759 had not provided Aadhaar details. Another 69,688 were shown as out of school. Educationists warned that such discrepancies could have consequences for school enrolment figures and, consequently, teacher deployment and funding. The concern was particularly acute for Marathi-medium schools.

Rajan Mahadeshwar, principal of Govandi’s Jagruti Vidyamandir, told ETV Bharat that his school had 430 students actually registered, while the UDISE system showed only 380 because 50 were marked invalid or pending verification. He feared that an artificially reduced enrolment could eventually affect the school’s viability. Officials disputed the extent of the danger.

Divisional Deputy Director Rajesh Kankal said only around five per cent of students in numerous schools did not have Aadhaar updated and said he did not expect grant-in-aid schools to face major problems. Yet the larger policy concern remains valid: when funding, staffing and school viability are increasingly linked to enrolment data, the accuracy of that data becomes an educational rights issue. A child should not become statistically invisible because a database has failed to correctly reflect their presence in a classroom.

The state is promising a transformation

The government has not remained silent. On August 22, 2026, Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde held a detailed review meeting with School Education Minister Dada Bhuse and senior officials. As Deccan Herald reported on August 23, Shinde directed the Education Department to prepare a clear, comprehensive and time-bound action plan to modernise schools and bring about “real, visible and qualitative improvements”.

The proposed plan includes teacher training, capacity building, greater involvement of education experts and experienced teachers, health check-ups, nutrition, a review of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme and attention to students’ mental and emotional well-being. The state has also expanded digital education initiatives. Digital Learning reported on August 4 that the Vinoba Digital Education platform had been expanded to 45,000 government schools across 25 districts, reaching more than 31 lakh students and nearly 1.3 lakh teachers.

These initiatives may be useful. However, the timing of the government’s August review is telling. It came after weeks in which government-school conditions had repeatedly been placed in the public eye — including through the “School Thik Karo” campaign launched in Maharashtra by Cockroach Janta Party convenor Abhijeet Dipke.

On August 15, Telangana Today reported that Dipke had launched the campaign in Hingoli after inspecting a Zilla Parishad school where he alleged that toilets lacked water, windows were broken and students lacked adequate benches. He said the campaign would document basic facilities in government schools across Maharashtra. The campaign itself is not a substitute for institutional inspection or government monitoring. Its allegations must therefore be independently verified before being treated as established facts.

But its very existence points to a troubling question: Why are political and citizen campaigns increasingly having to inspect schools to make basic educational infrastructure visible?

When will policy on public education, access and representation actually be formulated with the stakeholders? Who are the stakeholders? They are communities that demand education for the young, the most marginalised and teachers who form the other crucial arc. All the policies hurriedly formulated are however top heavy and solely the creation of bureaucrats and politicians, often concealing blatant private interests.

This is not democracy but public policy turned on its head.

 

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The post Maharashtra’s schools are struggling to survive as students protest, infrastructure crumbles and Marathi-medium institutions disappear appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> When Faith Becomes a Licence for Control: The 2026 Kanwar yatra, violence, vigilantism and the politics of meat https://sabrangindia.in/when-faith-becomes-a-licence-for-control-the-2026-kanwar-yatra-violence-vigilantism-and-the-politics-of-meat/ Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:17:36 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=48904 From attacks on vehicles and commuters to the targeting of Muslim-owned businesses and meat shops, the 2026 pilgrimage raises urgent questions about vigilantism, selective policing and the State's accommodation of majoritarian demands

The post When Faith Becomes a Licence for Control: The 2026 Kanwar yatra, violence, vigilantism and the politics of meat appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> Every year during Shravan, millions of devotees of Shiva, Kanwariyas, travel, often on foot, to collect Gangajal from places such as Haridwar, Gaumukh, Gangotri and Sultanganj and carry it back to offer at Shiva temples. For many devotees, the journey is an intensely personal act of faith, austerity and discipline. The 2026 Yatra formally ran from July 30 to August 11, culminating in Sawan Shivratri. There is nothing inherently incompatible between such a religious practice and a constitutional democracy. The problem begins when the exercise of religious freedom is transformed into a claim over everyone else’s freedom.

That distinction has become increasingly difficult to ignore. The 2026 Kanwar season was marked not simply by the ordinary logistical difficulties of accommodating millions of pilgrims, but by repeated reports of assaults, vandalism, intimidation, attacks on vehicles, confrontations with police, targeting of Muslims, pressure on Muslim-owned establishments, and an increasingly aggressive campaign around what citizens may eat or sell during Shravan. The question, therefore, is not whether the Kanwar Yatra should be allowed. It should.

The question is what happens when the State begins accommodating a religious procession to such an extent that the rights of everyone outside the procession begin to appear negotiable? That is where the 2026 Yatra becomes constitutionally significant.

A pilgrimage of millions — and a State willing to rearrange public life around it

The sheer scale of the Kanwar Yatra makes substantial administrative arrangements inevitable. Uttar Pradesh deployed approximately 35,000 police personnel, 151 companies of the Provincial Armed Constabulary and 11 companies of paramilitary forces for the 2026 pilgrimage. According to The Times of India, the State also installed nearly 29,500 CCTV cameras and deployed 395 drones, alongside 1,222 police helpdesks and 829 medical camps. The Uttar Pradesh government had announced an elaborate security and logistical plan even before the Yatra began. The Indian Express reported that round-the-clock control rooms, CCTV surveillance, additional buses and other arrangements were being put in place, with Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath stating that nobody could stop the annual pilgrimage.

Kanwariyas return carrying Ganga water during the annual Kanwar Yatra, in New Delhi on July 20, 2025. Within just a week of the Yatra’s commencement this year, over 170 cases of violence and disorder had been registered against Kanwariyas.
Image Credit: Deepak/ANI

The administration’s preparations were explicitly framed around ensuring the safety, convenience and dignity of the Kanwariyas. Uttar Pradesh DGP Rajeev Krishna announced a “zero incident, zero accident” target, while senior officials discussed interstate coordination, medical preparedness, traffic management and surveillance. Again, there is nothing objectionable about this in itself. A democratic State should facilitate the peaceful exercise of religion. But the scale of accommodation raises another question: where is the corresponding obligation to protect those who are not participating in the pilgrimage?

During the Yatra, roads are closed or heavily restricted, schools and institutions in some areas are shut or their schedules altered, businesses are asked to modify operations, and entire stretches of public space are effectively reorganised around the movement of pilgrims. In western Uttar Pradesh, Hindustan Times reported extensive traffic restrictions, including the planned closure of the Delhi-Haridwar National Highway and Ganga Canal Road in Muzaffarnagar for the movement of Kanwariyas. Non-vegetarian eateries and liquor shops were cleared from parts of the route. The Delhi-Meerut Expressway was also closed to regular traffic at the peak of the Yatra, causing severe congestion on alternative routes, according to The Times of India.  Such measures can be justified when they are proportionate, temporary and genuinely necessary for public safety. But accommodation cannot become capitulation. And that distinction becomes particularly important when the very group being accommodated is also involved, in individual cases, in disrupting public order.

When a minor collision becomes collective punishment

One of the most disturbing patterns emerging from the 2026 Yatra is the repeated escalation of relatively minor road incidents into collective violence. On July 16, in Purkazi, Muzaffarnagar, a pickup vehicle reportedly brushed against Kanwariyas, reported by The Hindu. What should have been an ordinary traffic dispute escalated into an attack on the vehicle. Videos showed men climbing onto the pickup, smashing its windshield and striking it with sticks. Police intervened, registered a case against unidentified persons and began examining video footage to identify those involved.

Kanwariyas Allegedly Vandalise Pickup After Vehicle Reportedly Brushes Against Kanwar On Delhi-Haridwar Highway | Video
Image: Video | X / @HateDetectors

The incident is revealing because the vehicle was not accused of deliberately attacking a religious procession. The reported trigger was an accidental collision. Yet the response was collective retaliation. The same pattern appeared in Manglaur town, Haridwar district, Uttarakhand on August 1, when an Alto collided with a Kanwariya and broke his Kanwar. As reported by ETV Bharat, a crowd reportedly pulled the driver from the vehicle, assaulted him and then vandalised the car. Significantly, the driver was himself reportedly a Kanwariya returning with Gangajal. Police eventually intervened and registered an FIR.

These incidents demonstrate that the problem cannot simply be explained as hostility between Hindus and Muslims or as attacks by outsiders upon a religious procession. The underlying problem is the normalisation of mob justice. A collision becomes “desecration”; desecration becomes an excuse for anger; anger becomes collective violence and the crowd becomes the adjudicator. That is precisely the opposite of the rule of law.

The school van attack: When even children are not outside the zone of religious aggression

Perhaps the most disturbing example occurred in Lucknow. On August 3, six Kanwariyas allegedly attacked a school van after a motorcycle associated with the group collided with the vehicle at Charak Chowk. The men allegedly smashed the rear windshield and side mirrors and threatened the driver. The van was carrying schoolchildren. The incident was reported by Hindustan Times, which provided that police subsequently arrested one person in connection with the attack.

Image: https://www.nationalheraldindia.com

The children were not physically injured, but the psychological dimension cannot be dismissed. A school vehicle is not an ideological adversary; a child sitting in a school van is not an obstruction to religious freedom; and a driver involved in a traffic dispute cannot lawfully be subjected to collective punishment because the other side happens to be carrying a Kanwar.

The newspaper records allegations by parents that the police initially refused to register the complaint and instead threatened action against the van for alleged documentation violations. Parents also alleged that the assault occurred in the presence of policemen who failed to intervene. Those allegations require independent investigation and should not be treated as established fact without verification. But they raise an important institutional question: what message is communicated when citizens perceive that the police are more comfortable questioning the victim than confronting the mob?

When the police themselves become targets

The violence has also extended to law-enforcement personnel. In Meerut, as reported by Deccan Herald, a dispute between groups of Kanwariyas following a motorcycle collision reportedly escalated into a fight. A head constable who attempted to intervene was allegedly pushed and beaten before police eventually brought the situation under control. The significance of such incidents goes beyond the injury to an individual officer.

Kanwar damaged by bike triggers clash between two groups of devotees in Meerut, cop injured
Image courtesy: Deccan Herald

The State cannot maintain public order if the police are expected to negotiate with a mob whose religious identity is treated as a reason for exceptional restraint. A police officer cannot be expected to enforce the law only when the crowd permits him to. Once a group begins attacking police personnel, damaging vehicles and obstructing roads, the religious nature of the gathering cannot operate as a shield. The constitutional obligation is precisely the opposite: the more sensitive the religious context, the more carefully and impartially the State must enforce the law.

The communal turn: When the Kanwar route becomes a map of exclusion

If the violence were limited to road accidents and crowd-management failures, it would be a serious law-and-order problem. But the 2026 Yatra has also revealed a distinctly communal dimension.

The material compiled for this piece records a series of incidents in which Muslim-owned businesses, Muslim participation and Muslim presence along Kanwar routes were specifically targeted.

On July 28 in Dehradun, members of the Hindu Raksha Dal reportedly submitted a memorandum demanding that Muslim shopkeepers remove their shops from the Kanwar route and refrain from offering food or water to pilgrims. The organisation reportedly threatened to shut Muslim-owned shops itself if they did not comply. This is an extraordinary demand. A Muslim offering water to a Hindu pilgrim is not a constitutional violation. A Muslim-owned shop selling lawful food is not a threat to religious freedom. A citizen does not lose the right to conduct a business because a religious procession happens to pass through the locality. And no private organisation has the legal authority to decide that another citizen’s shop must close because of that citizen’s religion.

Location: Dehradun, Uttarakhand

Date: July 28

Members of the Hindu Raksha Dal, led by Uttarakhand State President Lalit Sharma, submitted a memorandum at the SDM Office and declared that the Hindu Raksha Dal would not allow its religion to be “destroyed” during the Kanwar Yatra. Sharma demanded that Muslims remove their shops from the yatra route, avoid obstructing the procession, and refrain from offering food or water to pilgrims, stating that such offerings were not needed. He warned that Muslims should comply with these demands “for their own good,” threatening that the organisation would otherwise enforce them through violence. He further threatened that if Muslim-owned shops continued to operate along the Kanwar Yatra route after July 30, members of the organisation would shut them down themselves.

The danger lies in the gradual normalisation of precisely this idea. The controversy surrounding shopkeeper identity is particularly revealing. In 2024, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand authorities had directed eateries along the Kanwar route to display the names of their owners and employees. The Supreme Court intervened and stayed the directions. It permitted authorities to require disclosure of the nature of food being served but rejected the requirement that owners and employees be identified by name. The constitutional concern was obvious. A food item can be vegetarian or non-vegetarian; a restaurant can be licensed or unlicensed; a kitchen can meet or violate health standards. But the religion of the person selling the food is not a food-safety category.

The Supreme Court’s intervention therefore went directly to the danger of converting a dietary preference into a system of religious identification. The 2026 incidents suggest that the politics behind that controversy has not disappeared. The document records an alleged incident in which a Muslim shopkeeper was pressured to display his name prominently so that Kanwariyas could determine whether the establishment was Muslim-owned. This is the politics of the nameplate in another form. The underlying message is: Know who owns the shop. Know whether he is Muslim. Decide whether you will enter.

That is not neutral consumer information, rather it is communal sorting. And communal sorting becomes particularly dangerous when it occurs in an environment where vigilante groups have already threatened violence. The politics of the Kanwar Yatra in 2026 cannot be understood without examining the increasingly aggressive campaign against meat and non-vegetarian food.

This is where an individual’s religious observance begins to collide with another citizen’s personal autonomy and livelihood. Kanwariyas may choose to abstain from meat. They may insist that the food they themselves consume during their pilgrimage is vegetarian. They may choose not to enter a restaurant serving meat. None of this is controversial. The constitutional problem begins when their dietary discipline is converted into a rule for everyone else.

In Meerut, the district administration issued directions concerning food served along the Kanwar route, including restrictions concerning onion and garlic, while meat and liquor shops were to be closed or covered, according to Hindustan Times.

In Hapur, authorities ordered meat, fish, egg and other non-vegetarian outlets shut from July 26 until further orders, explicitly citing the need to ensure the peaceful passage of the Kanwar Yatra. India Today reported that the closure extended to all such outlets in the relevant area. In Delhi, the MCD ordered action against unauthorised and unlicensed meat shops along Kanwar routes and near 308 Kanwar camps. Hindustan Times reported that the order followed a meeting chaired by Delhi minister Kapil Mishra.

Again, there is an important legal distinction. If a meat shop is illegal, it can be shut. If a business violates municipal rules, it can be proceeded against. If an establishment lacks a licence, the law can be enforced. But if the underlying principle becomes “meat must disappear because Kanwariyas are passing through”, then the State is no longer merely regulating illegal businesses. It is imposing the religious preferences of one group upon the everyday life of everyone else. And this becomes even more troubling because meat businesses in many parts of north India are disproportionately dependent on Muslim workers and proprietors. Thus, what is presented as a religious restriction on food can have a distinctly communal economic impact.

From administrative restriction to vigilante enforcement

The State’s actions are only one part of the story. More alarming is the extent to which private Hindu nationalist organisations have attempted to enforce these restrictions themselves. On July 30, an incident in Ghaziabad took place where a Hindu Raksha Dal member allegedly assaulted a man transporting meat, objecting to the transportation during Shravan.

Location: Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh

Date: July 30

Bajrang Dal members, led by leader Pankaj Arya, assaulted a Muslim man and accused him of deliberately damaging a Kanwar carried by a Hindu pilgrim near Guldhar. They claimed the man struck Kanwar with a stick while the pilgrim was carrying Ganga water from Haridwar to Bharatpur, Rajasthan and later handed the man over to the police.

In Mainpuri, members of Hindu organisations reportedly entered non-vegetarian establishments and egg carts, allegedly abusing shopkeepers and ordering them to close. In Deoband, members of VHP-Bajrang Dal reportedly objected to the sale of chicken and called the police, after which employees were detained and meat was seized. This is where the distinction between religious practice and religious policing becomes essential.

Location: Mainpuri, Uttar Pradesh

Date: August 9

Members of Vishva Hindu Mahasangh and Gau Raksha Dal, led by Golu Rathore, raided several non-veg outlets and egg carts, wielding sticks, hurling abuses at shopkeepers, and forcibly ordering them to shut their businesses, citing the Hindu month of Shravan and the ongoing Kanwar Yatra.

The most striking example of this convergence of religion, meat and administrative power came from Baheri in Uttar Pradesh, where a chicken-biryani shop near the Kanwar route was demolished after Bajrang Dal workers complained about the sale of non-vegetarian food. As reported by Maktoob Media, the owner, Mohd Salman, was detained. Police described the action as preventive and said the establishment was disturbing public peace, while municipal authorities said the structure was an illegal construction over a drain. If the structure was genuinely illegal, the administration must be permitted to enforce municipal law.

But the central question remains one of procedure and proportionality: Was the law enforced because there was an established municipal violation, or did the religious complaint trigger the enforcement action?

The Constitution does not prohibit the State from removing an illegal structure. It does prohibit the State from using public power as a disguised instrument of communal punishment. A shopkeeper cannot be punished for being Muslim. A business cannot be demolished because a vigilante group dislikes what it sells. And “public peace” cannot become a vague administrative formula through which the State converts the demands of a mob into enforceable orders.

The Kanwar Yatra and the politics of Muslim belonging

The communalisation of the Yatra has also extended beyond shops and food. Many inciteful statements from Hindu religious figures and organisations were reported where they were seen demanding that Muslims participating in the Kanwar Yatra conform to Hindu visual markers, including saffron clothing. As reported by Deccan Herald, Right-wing leader Swami Yashveer of Yog Sadhna Ashram questioned the participation of Muslims wearing skull caps or burqas in the Kanwar Yatra, stating that such attire is inappropriate for the pilgrimage and suggesting that those who participate genuinely should formally return to Hinduism. This is an extraordinary conception of religious participation.

If a Muslim chooses to participate in a Hindu pilgrimage peacefully, that should be understood as an expression of individual conscience.

Instead, the political framing asks: Why is a Muslim here?

And then: If he is here, why does he still look Muslim?

The implication is that participation in the religious life of another community is acceptable only after the Muslim has symbolically surrendered his Muslim identity. The rhetoric surrounding the Yatra has also spilled into explicitly territorial and historical claims. Slogans invoking Mathura, Kashi and Deoband, including the formulation that “Mathura and Kashi are just a glimpse; Deoband is yet to come.” Such slogans cannot be dismissed as harmless rhetoric.

Location: Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh

Date: July 14

Members of the Hindu Raksha Dal from Uttarakhand staged a protest against Darul Uloom Deoband, claiming that the site was originally a Shiv Mandir and asserting that they would reclaim it. Lalit Sharma, Uttarakhand State President of the Hindu Raksha Dal, demanded an administrative investigation, accusing the authorities of delaying the process. He asserted that if no action was taken, they would return with trishuls and perform jalabhishek at Darul Uloom. He further threatened that Kanwar pilgrims would march to Deoband, after which “everything would belong to us.” He derogatorily referred to Muslims as “topiwale,” alleged that Muslims had occupied the site for the past 100 years, claimed that digging 14 feet beneath the site would reveal “their father Shiv,” and declared that there was no need for mosques anywhere. Participants also raised the slogan, “Mathura and Kashi are just a glimpse; Deoband is yet to come.”

The same political impulse surfaced in Agra, where members of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha reportedly attempted to enter the Taj Mahal with Kanwar water, asserting the claim that the monument was actually “Tejo Mahalaya”. The Kanwar is consequently being made to carry political baggage far beyond the act of carrying Gangajal. It becomes a symbol of territorial assertion. And, increasingly, a means of demonstrating who can occupy public space and on what terms.

Location: Agra, Uttar Pradesh

Date: August 3

Members of Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha attempted to enter the Taj Mahal to offer Hindu ritual prayers with Kanwar water, claiming that the monument is a Hindu Shiva temple called “Tejo Mahalaya.”

 The political nature of the Yatra was especially visible in Maharashtra. During a Kanwar procession in Muslim-majority Mumbra, BJP legislator Nitesh Rane reportedly made remarks asserting that Mumbra “was and will remain” Hindu, according to NDTV‘s reporting. The significance of such rhetoric is difficult to miss. A religious procession in a particular neighbourhood becomes an opportunity to make a claim about the religious ownership of that neighbourhood.

The question is no longer simply: Can Hindus carry out a religious procession in Mumbra?

Of course they can, subject to ordinary law-and-order requirements. The political question being manufactured is: Who does Mumbra belong to?

That is an entirely different proposition. A constitutional democracy does not assign neighbourhoods to religions. Mumbai’s Muslims do not cease to be equal citizens because a Hindu procession passes through their locality. Nor does a Hindu procession become a declaration of territorial ownership. Yet political rhetoric increasingly attempts to make precisely that transformation.

The state, selective enforcement and the constitutional line

There is an uncomfortable contradiction running through the entire Kanwar season. On the one hand, the State has undertaken extensive measures to regulate and facilitate the pilgrimage, deploying thousands of police personnel, installing CCTV cameras and drones, closing roads, diverting traffic, inspecting businesses, shutting meat shops and, in some areas, even altering school schedules. Entire districts have effectively been reorganised around the movement of Kanwariyas. On the other hand, when members of the same pilgrimage are accused of vandalising vehicles, assaulting drivers, confronting police personnel or intimidating businesses, enforcement has at times appeared hesitant, delayed or reactive. The document records several instances in which police intervention allegedly came only after violence had escalated, alongside allegations that FIRs were initially resisted or that accused persons were subsequently released on bonds. These allegations must, of course, be examined individually and should not be used to suggest that every police officer or administration acted in favour of violent Kanwariyas. Yet the recurrence of such allegations raises a larger constitutional concern: selective enforcement is itself a rule-of-law problem. A State that is willing to deploy extraordinary resources to facilitate a religious pilgrimage must be equally willing to enforce the law when individuals participating in that pilgrimage are accused of violating the rights of others.

This brings the discussion to the constitutional limits of religious freedom. The answer to the violence surrounding the Kanwar Yatra is not to restrict the right to practise religion, but to understand that right within the constitutional framework in which it operates. Article 25 guarantees freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, but that freedom is expressly subject to public order, morality and health, as well as the other fundamental rights guaranteed by Part III of the Constitution. Religious practice is therefore protected, but violence is not; pilgrimage is protected, but vandalism is not; devotion is protected, but intimidation is not. Similarly, while a Kanwariya is free to observe vegetarianism as part of religious practice, that preference does not automatically confer a right to determine what another citizen may eat or sell. A religious assembly is protected, but it cannot become a licence to assault a person who happens to cross its path. The State’s obligations under Articles 14 and 21 are equally important: equality before the law, equal protection, life and personal liberty cannot be subordinated to the preferences or sensitivities of a religious crowd. The Supreme Court’s intervention in the 2024 Kanwar nameplate controversy is instructive in this regard. The Court permitted authorities to regulate the nature of food being served but stayed directions requiring establishments to disclose the names and identities of their owners and employees. The distinction is fundamental: the State may regulate conduct where the law permits it; it cannot turn religious identity itself into a regulatory category merely to accommodate the preferences of one group.

When the state outsources public order to majoritarian sentiment

The otherisation being normalised through meat deserves closer scrutiny because it is often reduced to a question of religious sensitivity, when its consequences extend far beyond individual dietary preferences. Food is closely connected to identity, livelihood, caste, class and community, and for a large number of Indians, eating meat is an ordinary part of everyday life. At the same time, for thousands of workers employed in slaughterhouses, meat markets, restaurants, transportation and allied businesses, the sale and distribution of meat is a source of livelihood. The consequences become even more significant when meat-related businesses are disproportionately associated with particular communities, including Muslims. When the consumption or sale of meat is therefore politically constructed as something that must disappear from public spaces during a Hindu pilgrimage, the impact is not confined to Kanwariyas who voluntarily choose to abstain from it. It can result in restaurants being forced to shut, meat sellers losing their income, workers being sent home, shopkeepers being pressured to alter their businesses and Muslim-owned establishments becoming more visible and vulnerable to targeting. It also sends a wider social message that the everyday dietary choices and livelihoods of one section of citizens can be restricted to accommodate the religious sensitivities of another. The politics of meat, therefore, is not merely a disagreement over food; it is a question of economic freedom, equal citizenship and the extent to which one community’s religious preferences can determine the conditions under which others live and work.

This has a direct constitutional dimension. Article 19 (1) (g) protects every citizen’s right to practise a profession or carry on an occupation, trade or business, subject to restrictions imposed by law. Such restrictions must have a legitimate legal basis and satisfy the requirements of reasonableness; they cannot become constitutionally valid merely because a section of society considers a particular occupation offensive or incompatible with its religious beliefs. A lawful meat business cannot be treated as inherently illegitimate simply because a religious procession is passing through the area. If an establishment is unlicensed, violates municipal regulations or breaches food-safety requirements, the State has both the authority and the responsibility to act against it. But the basis of that action must remain the law and not the demands of a religious crowd.

This leads to the deeper institutional concern surrounding the Kanwar Yatra: the danger of the State allowing majoritarian sentiment to determine the boundaries of public order. A democratic State possesses the legitimate authority to regulate public spaces and enforce the law; a vigilante organisation does not. If the administration considers that meat shops should be temporarily closed along a particular route for a legally defensible public-order or regulatory reason, that decision must emerge from a lawful order, a clearly identifiable statutory basis and a proportionate exercise of administrative power. What cannot happen is for a private organisation to first threaten or demand the closure of businesses and for the administration to subsequently give effect to that demand, whether directly or indirectly. Such a process effectively reverses the constitutional chain of authority: the mob demands, the administration accommodates, and the police enforce.

That inversion is particularly dangerous because it allows majoritarian power to acquire the appearance of State authority. A vigilante group does not become legitimate simply because its demands are subsequently reflected in administrative action, just as a religious sentiment does not become a legal standard merely because it is politically popular. The State’s responsibility is not to determine which community is numerically or politically stronger and then organise public life around its preferences. Its responsibility is to ensure that the strength of one community cannot be converted into the power to determine the rights, livelihoods or freedoms of another. Public order cannot mean the preservation of peace by asking the more vulnerable to surrender their rights; it must mean the equal protection of all citizens, including those whose presence, food, occupation or identity may be politically unpopular.

And yet, there are alternative examples

It is important not to reduce the entire Kanwar Yatra to a narrative of violence or communal hostility. Such a portrayal would be both inaccurate and unfair to the millions of devotees who undertake the pilgrimage peacefully and to the many instances in which Kanwariyas and local communities have demonstrated restraint, accommodation and mutual respect. These examples are important precisely because they establish that confrontation between the Yatra and other communities is neither inevitable nor intrinsic to the religious practice itself.

A recent example from Bijnor illustrates this possibility. Navbharat Times reported that Kanwariyas halted their procession and switched off the DJ music to allow a Muslim funeral procession to pass. Rather than treating the funeral as an obstruction to their religious journey, the pilgrims reportedly made way for the procession and maintained silence as the funeral passed. The incident is a small but significant illustration of what religious coexistence can look like in practice: the exercise of one’s own faith does not require denying another community the space to mourn, pray or move through the same public space.

Such instances matter because they expose the artificiality of the claim that religious processions must necessarily generate confrontation with other communities. There is nothing inherent in the Kanwar Yatra that requires hostility towards Muslims; there is nothing inherent in Hindu devotion that requires meat shops to be vandalised; there is nothing inherent in religious faith that requires a school van carrying children to be attacked; and there is certainly nothing inherent in pilgrimage that requires a neighbourhood to be treated as the exclusive property of one religious community. Where devotees choose restraint, the same public space can accommodate different religious practices without one being perceived as a threat to the other.

Indeed, these instances provide a useful counterpoint to the more disturbing episodes documented during the 2026 Yatra. They demonstrate that the conflict is not an unavoidable consequence of the scale of the pilgrimage or of competing religious practices. It is shaped by choices — by the conduct of individuals, by the rhetoric of political and religious actors, and crucially, by the manner in which the State responds to both cooperation and provocation. The choice to transform religious devotion into confrontation, exclusion or majoritarian assertion is not dictated by faith; it is political.

The 2026 yatra must be understood against the history of 2024 and 2025

The events of 2026 cannot be viewed as a series of isolated disturbances detached from the history of the Kanwar Yatra. The document records at least 20 incidents of violence during the 2024 pilgrimage, while Hindustan Times reported that more than 170 Kanwariyas were booked within just five days of the 2025 Yatra in Uttarakhand for alleged offences including hooliganism, rioting, obstruction of highways and wrongful restraint. The recurrence of similar incidents in 2026 therefore demands something more than the familiar administrative response of treating each episode as an unfortunate, isolated altercation.

When vandalism, assaults, road blockages, confrontations with police and intimidation of civilians repeatedly emerge around the same pilgrimage year after year, the question is no longer simply what happened in a particular incident, but whether there is a systemic failure in the way the State anticipates, manages and responds to violence associated with the Yatra. That necessarily raises questions about how processions are regulated, what protocols are followed when a Kanwar is damaged, how quickly arrests are made, whether FIRs are registered without regard to the religious identity of the parties involved, and whether the police are exercising a different degree of restraint when the accused are members of a religious procession. It also requires scrutiny of whether Muslim-owned establishments are disproportionately exposed to intimidation, whether restrictions on businesses are genuinely grounded in neutral statutory criteria, and whether threats issued by vigilante organisations receive the same seriousness from law-enforcement agencies as threats allegedly directed at pilgrims. These are not questions directed at Hinduism or at the legitimacy of the pilgrimage. They are questions about whether the State is capable of administering a mass religious event without allowing religious identity to influence the application of ordinary law.

The Azeem Case: When a Traffic Dispute Ends in Death

The death of 27-year-old Mohd Azeem in Hapur brings these questions into their most serious and tragic form. According to The Hindu, Azeem, a mini-truck driver from Moradabad, was involved in a road collision near Garhmukhteshwar on July 31 and was allegedly assaulted following the incident before being shifted to a Delhi hospital, where he died on August 4. Hapur Police subsequently arrested Lokesh and Shivam and booked them for murder and rioting, with police stating that two of the four named accused had been arrested and efforts were underway to apprehend the remaining accused. The case, however, involves competing accounts that must be carefully distinguished.

Azeem’s family alleged that he was assaulted after the collision, while the father of the auto-rickshaw driver involved in the incident filed a separate complaint alleging that Azeem had deliberately rammed his vehicle into the auto-rickshaw. Police indicated that the competing allegations were being investigated. Those competing versions must ultimately be tested through evidence, investigation and trial rather than public speculation. Yet irrespective of how the underlying collision is eventually established, the death illustrates the grave consequences of allowing a road dispute to become a matter for collective retaliation. A traffic accident is supposed to activate the ordinary machinery of the criminal justice system — police intervention, investigation, collection of evidence, identification of individual responsibility, prosecution and trial. It must never become a progression from collision to anger, from anger to mob mobilisation, and from mob mobilisation to assault and death. Where the alleged perpetrators are members of or associated with a religious procession, the State’s responsibility becomes even greater: religious identity must neither shield an accused person from accountability nor prejudice the investigation against the victim. The ultimate test is whether the law can operate with the same force and impartiality when the accused belong to a politically influential or numerically dominant religious group as it would when the circumstances were reversed.

A pilgrimage should not become a test of submission

The 2026 Kanwar Yatra therefore raises a question that extends far beyond individual incidents of vandalism, assault or the closure of particular shops. It forces us to ask whether religious freedom is increasingly being interpreted not simply as the freedom to practise one’s faith, but as the freedom of one religious group to determine the conditions under which everyone else must live. That is not the guarantee contained in Article 25. The Constitution protects the believer, but it also protects the person who does not share that belief; it protects the vegetarian, but it also protects the meat-eater; it protects the Hindu pilgrim, but it equally protects the Muslim shopkeeper whose business happens to lie along the pilgrimage route. It protects the right to assemble and practise religion, but it also protects the right of other citizens to move through public spaces and carry on their livelihoods.

These rights do not exist in separate constitutional compartments; they operate within a common framework of equality, liberty and the rule of law. The State must therefore resist the tendency to treat criticism of violence or vigilantism associated with the Kanwar Yatra as criticism of Hinduism itself. The two are fundamentally different. It is entirely possible to respect the faith of millions of peaceful Kanwariyas while demanding accountability from those who vandalise vehicles or assault civilians; to respect Hindu religious practice while opposing intimidation of Muslim-owned businesses; to recognise the religious significance of Shravan while insisting that meat sellers and other lawful businesses retain their rights; and to facilitate a religious procession while requiring those participating in it to remain subject to the same law as everyone else. Indeed, that is what genuine secularism requires: not hostility towards religion, but equal constitutional protection irrespective of religion.

Faith deserves protection; impunity does not

The 2026 Kanwar Yatra should therefore not be remembered merely as another annual pilgrimage marked by massive crowds, saffron flags, elaborate security arrangements and traffic diversions. It should instead prompt a more serious examination of the relationship between religious practice, political mobilisation and State power. The recurring incidents — from the vandalism of vehicles in Muzaffarnagar, the attack on a school van in Lucknow and confrontations involving police, to the reported targeting of Muslims and meat sellers, threats against Muslim-owned businesses, communal rhetoric surrounding Mumbra and Deoband, attempts to turn the Taj Mahal into another site of religious contestation, and ultimately the death of Mohd Azeem — cannot simply be dismissed as a collection of unrelated disturbances. Taken together, they point towards the gradual normalisation of religious exceptionalism: the assumption that a religious procession is entitled to extraordinary accommodation, that religious sentiment can justify extraordinary restrictions, that meat can be removed from public spaces because pilgrims prefer vegetarianism, that Muslim businesses can be identified or pressured, that a crowd can punish what it perceives as an insult, and that political actors can use religious gatherings to make claims about the ownership of neighbourhoods and public spaces.

The danger lies precisely in allowing these assumptions to become normal. The answer, however, is not to diminish or delegitimise the Kanwar Yatra. It is to restore its constitutional boundaries. Faith must be protected, pilgrims must be protected and religious processions must be protected, but no person can be placed above the law merely because they claim to be acting in the name of religion. The real test of the State’s commitment to secularism is therefore not how warmly it welcomes a majority religious procession, but whether, while facilitating it, it can extend the same protection to the Muslim shopkeeper, the meat seller, the commuter, the schoolchild and every other citizen affected by it. It must be able to say to the shopkeeper that his lawful business cannot be destroyed because someone finds it religiously offensive; to the meat seller that his livelihood cannot be extinguished by a mob; to the vigilante that religious identity gives no authority over another citizen; to the politician that a neighbourhood cannot be claimed as the property of one religion; and to the Kanwariya that faith may be sacred, but it does not place anyone beyond the Constitution. The Kanwar Yatra can and should remain a journey of devotion. What it cannot become is a vehicle through which majoritarian power determines who may eat, who may trade, who may move, who may pray, who may belong — and who must simply get out of the way.

 

Related:

How deviant acts mar the sacred Kanwar Yatra

Faith v/s Environment: 17,600 trees felled in U.P. to pave way for proposed Kanwar Yatra route, fact-finding panel tells NGT 

Hindu-Muslim Unity: The other side of Kanwar Yatra

Kanwar Yatra episode: Pasmanda Muslims, ‘wooed’ by BJP, perhaps biggest losers

Supreme Court stays directive of state forcing food sellers along Kanwar Yatra to display names, states authorities cannot usurp power without legal foundation

Pay heed to Article 21 and its order in the Kanwar Yatra case: SC to Kerala Gov’t

Aligarh: Woman allegedly raped while undertaking ‘Kanwar Yatra’

The post When Faith Becomes a Licence for Control: The 2026 Kanwar yatra, violence, vigilantism and the politics of meat appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> ‘How Can Rehabilitation Work If We Are Not Safe?’ Sanjay Tickoo on the fresh threat to Kashmiri Pandit employees https://sabrangindia.in/how-can-rehabilitation-work-if-we-are-not-safe-sanjay-tickoo-on-the-fresh-threat-to-kashmiri-pandit-employees/ Mon, 17 Aug 2026 08:03:36 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=48872 Sanjay Tickoo speaks to Sabrang India on repeated threats, targeted killings and security lapses have eroded Kashmiri Pandit employees’ faith in the State.

The post ‘How Can Rehabilitation Work If We Are Not Safe?’ Sanjay Tickoo on the fresh threat to Kashmiri Pandit employees appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> The recent threat to Kashmiri Pandit government employees working in the Valley has brought back a question that has remained unresolved for years: what does rehabilitation mean when those who have returned to work in Kashmir continue to live with the fear of being identified, targeted and forced to leave again?

In a conversation with Sabrang India, Sanjay Tickoo, president of the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti (KPSS), said the latest incident must be understood against the backdrop of targeted killings, repeated security concerns and what he described as a persistent failure to address vulnerabilities faced by Kashmiri Pandit employees.

The immediate trigger is a purported threat letter circulated online in the name of the United Liberation Council (ULC), which warned Kashmiri Pandits working in the Valley to “change their ways” and published the names and phone numbers of employees. Police are reportedly verifying the authenticity of the letter, while security officials have suggested that the group could be a front or shadow organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

According to The Indian Express, six employees, all from the Revenue Department, were named in the letter. The newspaper reported that departments, particularly the Revenue Department and School Education Department, had informally asked Kashmiri Pandit employees to remain at home or take leave, although the Director of School Education denied that any formal instructions had been issued. The New Indian Express likewise reported that Pandit employees had been asked to work from home for some time.

The detailed report may be read here.

Tickoo, however, argues that the immediate controversy over the letter obscures a much deeper problem.

Fresh Terror Threat in Kashmir: Kashmiri Pandit Employees Sent on Leave Amid Security Concerns | Dynamite News
Image courtesy: https://www.dynamitenews.com

A threat that cannot be seen in isolation

According to Tickoo, targeted killings of Kashmiri Pandits began to re-emerge as a serious concern from 2021 onwards. On October 5, 2021, prominent Kashmiri Hindu pharmacist Makhan Lal Bindroo was shot dead inside his pharmacy in Srinagar. Two days later, on October 7, Supinder Kour, a government school principal, and Deepak Chand, a teacher at the same school, were shot dead inside the school premises in Srinagar’s Eidgah area. These killings were part of a broader spate of targeted attacks against civilians, including Kashmiri Pandits and non-local workers. Government data recorded four Kashmiri Pandits among those killed by terrorists in 2021, further deepening the sense of vulnerability among the community and raising renewed questions over the security of those living and working in the Valley. The killings generated widespread fear within the community and renewed concerns over whether Kashmiri Pandits working in the Valley could be adequately protected.

The security environment subsequently intensified, with security forces conducting anti-militancy operations and authorities questioning individuals suspected of having links with militant networks, including alleged overground workers.

But for employees under the Prime Minister’s employment package, the problem was not limited to attacks themselves. The availability and circulation of personal information of employees became a recurring security concern. Around 6,000 Kashmiri Pandits have received government employment under the Prime Minister’s Special Rehabilitation and Employment Package, introduced in 2010 as part of the government’s effort to facilitate the return and rehabilitation of Kashmiri Pandits displaced from the Valley following the outbreak of militancy and the mass displacement of the community in the 1990s.

The employment package was premised on an important condition: beneficiaries were expected to work in the Valley. But, as Tickoo points out, the same requirement that forms the basis of the rehabilitation policy also leaves employees particularly vulnerable when security deteriorates.

The lists that keep resurfacing

This is not the first time the publication of employee details has raised alarm. In December 2022, Kashmiri Pandit employees protested after a purported hit list released by The Resistance Front (TRF) named 56 Kashmiri Pandits working in the Valley under the Prime Minister’s Rehabilitation Package. The employees demanded a high-level investigation into how official information identifying them had reached a militant organisation.

At the time, the employees were already protesting outside the Relief Commissioner’s office in Jammu following the targeted killing of Rahul Bhat in Chadoora on May 1, 2022.

The concern was straightforward: if the State had collected the personal information of employees for the purposes of rehabilitation and employment, how was that information reaching organisations issuing threats against them? Tickoo told Sabrang India that the problem has never really been resolved. According to him, lists containing details of Prime Minister’s Package employees have continued to circulate publicly on social media.

He believes the same publicly available information is now being exploited again. Tickoo said that while a larger list of around 20 employees is allegedly available on social media, the latest threat letter specifically identified seven employees with their full names and phone numbers. This differs from reports in The Indian Express, which identified six employees named in the purported letter.

For Tickoo, the issue is therefore not simply the existence of a threatening poster. It is how such specific personal information continues to become available in the first place. “How are these posters being posted on social media?” is the question he says the government must answer. More importantly, he asks, who is providing private information about government employees to those circulating the threats?

‘Since 2022, meetings have resulted in nothing’

Tickoo said the issue has repeatedly been raised with the government. According to him, several meetings have taken place with the Secretary of the Home Department since 2022, but they have not resulted in any meaningful resolution of the concerns raised by Kashmiri Pandit employees.

The latest episode comes after a period in which violence and insecurity have again been building in parts of Kashmir. Tickoo referred to the recent killing of a policeman in Anantnag and the subsequent killing of two migrant workers in Kulgam. The Wire reported the killing of policeman Ashiq Hussain Qureshi in Anantnag on June 22 while he was deployed for Amarnath Yatra duty, followed by the July 31 killing of two migrant workers from Chhattisgarh at a brick kiln in Kulgam.

The sequence, Tickoo argues, has heightened apprehension that further attacks could take place, including against minorities and migrant workers. For him, the responsibility ultimately rests with the government. Tickoo described the situation as a security lapse on the part of either the Union government or the Jammu and Kashmir administration, while expressing frustration that neither level of government has accepted responsibility.

J&K Govt Asks Kashmiri Pandit Staff to Work From Home After After Alleged Threat From Group Associated With LeT
Security personnel keep a vigil following the recent terrorist attack in the Kelam area of Kulgam district, in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, Saturday, Aug. 1, 2026. Photo: PTI /S Irfan

When security concerns undermine rehabilitation

The contradiction at the heart of the Prime Minister’s Package is difficult to ignore. The government encourages displaced Kashmiri Pandits to return to the Valley and provides employment as part of its rehabilitation programme. Yet when security threats emerge, the immediate response is reportedly to ask those very employees to stay indoors or remain away from work.

That contradiction has existed for years. In 2022, after a series of targeted killings, Kashmiri Pandit employees staged a prolonged protest and demanded transfers outside Kashmir. The Indian Express reported that employees protested for around 350 days and sought permanent relocation to Jammu. The government rejected the demand and instead relocated some employees to areas considered safer within the Valley.

Tickoo argues that the latest episode risks producing the same outcome: employees who have been asked to return to Kashmir are once again made to feel that their presence there is unsafe. And the consequences extend beyond the immediate threat.

According to Tickoo, when employees leave the Valley because they feel unsafe, they risk losing the benefits attached to the rehabilitation package because those benefits are linked to their continuing residence and employment in Kashmir.

In other words, the employee is caught between two vulnerabilities: remaining in Kashmir despite a credible fear for personal safety, or leaving and potentially jeopardising the very rehabilitation benefits that were meant to facilitate their return.

‘They cannot simply return to work’

The latest threat has also created a practical problem for the employees whose names and numbers were published. Tickoo said that once an individual’s identity and telephone number have been publicly circulated alongside a threat, simply telling that person to return to work does not address the fear created by the threat.

The issue is particularly serious, he argues, because several of the employees named in the latest poster work in departments where their official responsibilities may place them in contact with people who have vested interests in government enforcement.

Tickoo specifically referred to employees working in Regional Transport Offices and alleged that private agents operating around these offices had historically relied on bribery to obtain driving licences and vehicle fitness certificates. According to him, the arrival of Kashmiri Pandit employees under the Prime Minister’s Package and their adherence to official procedures had disrupted such practices. He alleged that this could be one reason why employees working in these positions had become targets.

These claims are Tickoo’s allegations and would require independent investigation. But they point towards another dimension of the controversy: whether threats against government employees are connected not only to their identity as Kashmiri Pandits, but also to the particular government functions they perform.

The problem of the ‘unofficial’ order

Another striking feature of the present episode is the absence of a formal government order. The Indian Express reported that departments had verbally instructed Kashmiri Pandit employees to remain at home, while the Director of School Education publicly denied issuing such instructions. The Wire similarly reported that employees had received work-from-home directions through departmental or internal channels, without a publicly available formal order.

Tickoo says this informality is not accidental. According to him, governments in Kashmir often avoid issuing formal orders in such situations because an official directive to keep an entire section of employees away from their workplaces would amount to an acknowledgement that the security establishment has failed to protect them.

He also argues that a formal order could invite judicial scrutiny, particularly if employees are effectively prevented from discharging their duties because of their identity. The result, he says, is a system of verbal instructions in which everyone understands what is expected, but nobody formally accepts responsibility for the decision.

The question of the source

For Tickoo, the publication of phone numbers is perhaps the most troubling aspect of the latest episode. He questioned how individuals operating underground could obtain such specific information and circulate it publicly. He also questioned whether the source of the information could be traced and why the authorities had not yet established who was behind the dissemination of the posters.

The question is particularly significant because the purported threat does not merely make a general warning against a community. It identifies individuals. That transforms the issue from a broad security concern into a question of data security, official confidentiality and institutional responsibility. If employee lists are available openly on social media, the government must establish how they reached the public domain, whether official databases were compromised, whether the information was leaked deliberately or inadvertently, and whether those responsible for the disclosure can be identified.

Without such an investigation, the cycle is likely to repeat.

Kashmiri Pandit Land, Terror And The Mafia: Property Claims Trigger Threats In Valley | Exclusive | India News - News18
Image: AFP

A growing lack of faith

Tickoo also spoke of what he described as a wider erosion of faith in the security establishment. According to him, people in Kashmir have been warning the Union government for the last three to four years that something appeared to be building up. Those concerns, he believes, have not received adequate attention. The latest threat therefore carries significance beyond the employees reportedly named in it.

If employees believe that their personal details can be obtained, that threats can be issued against them, and that the government response will be to ask them to remain indoors rather than identify the source of the threat, confidence in the security system inevitably weakens. For the Kashmiri Pandit community, this is particularly consequential because rehabilitation itself depends on a measure of trust.

Rehabilitation cannot mean confinement

The contradiction becomes even sharper against the backdrop of public celebrations and government campaigns in the Valley. The Wire reported heightened security arrangements ahead of Independence Day, including additional checkpoints, frisking, night patrols and surveillance. At the same time, authorities and BJP workers have been organising Tiranga rallies, cultural programmes, sporting events and other public activities as part of the Har Ghar Tiranga–Vande Mataram campaign.

Tickoo questions the contrast. If a minority community is being informally asked to remain indoors because of security threats, he asks, how can the government simultaneously claim that normalcy has been restored and organise public celebrations across the Valley?

For him, the issue is not opposition to public celebrations. It is the contradiction between projecting normal public life and privately instructing a vulnerable section of the population to restrict its movement. The question is ultimately one of whose normalcy is being protected.

‘Why are the Pandits still suffering?’

Tickoo’s larger argument is that the government cannot continue treating every such episode as an isolated security incident. The latest threat may be attributed to a purported militant organisation. The police may establish that the letter is genuine or fabricated. The perpetrators may eventually be identified—or they may not. But, Tickoo argues, the underlying problem remains.

Over the past several years, Kashmiri Pandit employees have faced targeted killings, threats, protests, demands for transfers, security restrictions and repeated uncertainty over whether they can safely continue working in the Valley.

A rehabilitation policy that requires employees to live and work in Kashmir cannot succeed merely by providing employment. It must also ensure that they can move freely, access public spaces, perform their jobs and live ordinary lives without being forced into periodic confinement because of their identity.

The latest threat therefore raises questions that go beyond the purported organisation behind the poster. Who has access to the employees’ personal information? Why have repeated concerns about leaked lists not produced a satisfactory answer? Why are employees once again being asked to stay indoors instead of being given a transparent security assessment? And how long can a rehabilitation policy function if its beneficiaries repeatedly feel compelled to leave the Valley for their own safety?

For Tickoo, the larger failure is one of accountability. He argues that when security lapses occur, the State can point towards an organisation, a militant network or actors across the border. But if threats are able to reach identifiable employees and disrupt their everyday lives, the State must also account for the security failures within its own institutional framework.

The danger, he says, is that anyone could claim to represent a fabricated organisation, circulate threats and create fear and disruption, while the government simply attributes the episode to forces operating from across the border. That, however, does not answer the question of how the information reached them. Nor does it answer the question of why, after years of assurances and repeated meetings, Kashmiri Pandit employees continue to feel that their return to the Valley comes with an unresolved risk.

The latest threat letter may disappear from social media. The informal work-from-home instructions may eventually be withdrawn. Employees may be asked to return to their offices. But unless the questions around security, accountability and leaked personal information are answered, the larger problem will remain: a community encouraged to return in the name of rehabilitation, but repeatedly reminded that its safety in the Valley remains uncertain.

 

Related:

This is what we feared: Sanjay Tickoo on the rising attacks in Kashmir since March

Pleas of non-migrant Kashmiri Pandits have fallen on deaf ears: Sanjay Tickoo

Time has come to go on fast unto death: Sanjay Tickoo

Kashmiri Pandit leader Sanjay Tickoo talks about Governor’s Rule in J&K

A Kashmiri Pandit fact-checks The Kashmir Files

10 reasons why Kashmiri Pandits feel betrayed in the Valley

 

The post ‘How Can Rehabilitation Work If We Are Not Safe?’ Sanjay Tickoo on the fresh threat to Kashmiri Pandit employees appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> ‘Deportation Cannot Begin without Nationality Verification’: Union’s Rajubala affidavit clarifies legal limits on executive power https://sabrangindia.in/deportation-cannot-begin-without-nationality-verification-unions-rajubala-affidavit-clarifies-legal-limits-on-executive-power/ Wed, 05 Aug 2026 07:26:04 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=48740 In an affidavit filed in the Rajubala Das case, the Union reaffirms that deportation requires nationality verification, travel documents and acceptance by the receiving State, while setting out the legal framework governing detention pending deportation

The post ‘Deportation Cannot Begin without Nationality Verification’: Union’s Rajubala affidavit clarifies legal limits on executive power appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> For years, the debate surrounding persons declared to be “foreigners” in India has largely revolved around one question: who can be declared a foreigner? The proceedings before Foreigners Tribunals, the burden of proof under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946, and the evidentiary standards required to establish citizenship have dominated constitutional litigation. Comparatively little judicial attention had been devoted to the equally important question that arises after a person has been declared a foreigner—what does the Constitution require before the State can deport that individual?

The affidavit filed by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) on July 31, 2026 in Rajubala Das v. Union of India marks an important intervention in that debate. Filed pursuant to the Supreme Court’s order dated March 21, 2025, the affidavit seeks to explain the legal and administrative framework governing deportation where the nationality of a declared foreigner remains unknown or unverified. In doing so, the Union makes one of its clearest judicial admissions to date: deportation cannot even be initiated unless the individual’s nationality has first been verified by the receiving State, appropriate travel documents have been obtained, and the receiving country has agreed to accept the individual. This is no ordinary procedural clarification.

The affidavit fundamentally distinguishes between being declared a foreigner and being legally deportable. While a declaration by a Foreigners Tribunal may settle a person’s legal status within India, it does not, the Union now accepts, authorise the State to physically remove that individual from Indian territory. Deportation remains contingent upon a separate process involving diplomatic engagement, nationality verification, issuance of travel documents and, most importantly, the consent of another sovereign State. In other words, the executive cannot unilaterally deport a person merely because Indian authorities believe them to be a foreign national. That proposition carries consequences far beyond the Rajubala case.

For months, instances of forced deportations and illegal pushbacks have surfaced from Assam, West Bengal, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Delhi of individuals “suspected” of being Bangladeshi nationals. In many of these cases, the family of those deported have approached the courts alleging that the removals were carried out without any disclosed nationality verification, without travel documents, and without Bangladesh formally acknowledging or accepting the individuals concerned.

Detailed reports may be read here, here, here, here and here.

Against this backdrop, the Union’s affidavit assumes a significance that extends well beyond the immediate dispute before the Court. By placing on record the legal prerequisites for deportation, the Government has simultaneously articulated a benchmark against which its own recent executive actions may now be tested. If nationality verification and acceptance by the receiving State are indeed indispensable legal requirements, as the affidavit repeatedly states, the obvious constitutional question is whether recent deportations and border removals have consistently adhered to those very standards.

The case of Rajubala Das

What began in 2020 as a challenge to the continued detention of one individual has gradually transformed into the Supreme Court’s most comprehensive examination of India’s detention and deportation regime. The litigation traces its origins to Rajendra Das, who was declared a foreigner by a Foreigners Tribunal in Morigaon, Assam, in 2011 under the Foreigners Act, 1946, on the allegation that he was a Bangladeshi national. Following that declaration, he was eventually detained in 2018 and remained incarcerated for years despite there being little indication that his deportation was imminent. His wife, Rajubala Das, approached the Supreme Court through the present Writ Petition, arguing that the State’s inability to deport him could not constitutionally justify his indefinite detention. The petition did not primarily dispute the Foreigners Tribunal’s declaration. Instead, it raised a deeper constitutional challenge. If deportation was not realistically possible because nationality remained disputed, travel documents were unavailable, or Bangladesh had not accepted the individual, could the State continue to deprive a person of liberty indefinitely? That question went to the heart of Article 21. For several years, the proceedings remained relatively limited. However, from 2024 onwards, the litigation underwent a remarkable transformation.

2024: The scrutiny of Matia Detention Centre- The case assumed far greater constitutional significance in 2024 when the Supreme Court considered reports of deplorable conditions inside Assam’s Matia detention centre. A report submitted by the Assam State Legal Services Authority documented severe shortages of drinking water, poor sanitation and prolonged detention of hundreds of individuals in conditions raising serious Article 21 concerns.

The Court’s inquiry consequently expanded beyond Rajendra Das’ detention to the functioning of the entire deportation regime. It directed the Assam Government to disclose the legal basis of every detainee’s incarceration, the documents supporting their detention and, crucially, the concrete steps taken towards their deportation. The Court was no longer prepared to accept broad assertions that deportation was “under process.” It demanded documentary proof that deportation was legally and practically feasible.

January–March 2025: Contradictions exposed- The affidavits filed by Assam only deepened the Court’s concerns. The State failed to explain the continued detention of nearly 270 individuals, many of whom had spent close to a decade in detention, while offering little evidence of meaningful diplomatic efforts to secure their deportation. The absence of information regarding nationality verification, travel documents and communication with Bangladesh prompted the Court to observe on January 22, 2025 that prolonged detention without any demonstrable prospect of deportation raised serious concerns under Article 21.

When the matter was heard again on February 4, 2025, Assam attributed the delays to the inability to ascertain addresses in Bangladesh. The Supreme Court was unconvinced. It directed the State to produce complete records of every detainee, explain the absence of a deportation roadmap and required the Chief Secretary to personally oversee compliance.

The contradictions became even more apparent in March 2025. Although Assam informed the Court that thirteen individuals had been deported after nationality verification through Nationality Verification Requests (NVRs), the same affidavit disclosed that 33 of the 63 persons earlier identified for deportation were simultaneously challenging the Foreigners Tribunal orders against them before the Gauhati High Court and the Supreme Court. One such detainee, Ajabha Khatun, had already secured protection against deportation from the Gauhati High Court. Even more strikingly, the thirteen persons ultimately deported were reportedly not from the original list of sixty-three individuals the State had earlier claimed were awaiting deportation. These contradictions exposed the absence of a coherent and transparent deportation framework and significantly undermined the State’s earlier assertions.

Detailed report may be read here and here.

CJP’s legal intervention in Ajabha Khatun’s matter may be read here.

The March 21, 2025 order- Faced with these inconsistencies, the Supreme Court shifted its focus from Assam to the Union Government. Recognising that deportation ultimately depends upon diplomatic engagement through the Ministries of Home Affairs and External Affairs, the Court, by its order dated March 21, 2025, directed the Union to explain the legal procedure applicable where a declared foreigner’s nationality remains unknown or unverified. The July 31, 2026 affidavit is the Union’s response to that direction.

Detailed report may be read here.

The Union’s Affidavit: A judicial admission that deportation cannot occur without nationality verification

If the earlier phases of the Rajubala Das litigation exposed the constitutional deficiencies of India’s detention regime, the Union Government’s affidavit dated July 31, 2026 seeks to explain the legal framework governing deportation itself. Filed pursuant to the Supreme Court’s order of March 21, 2025, the affidavit is, on its face, an attempt to answer a seemingly straightforward question: what happens when a person has been declared a foreigner but their nationality cannot be verified?

The answer offered by the Union is strikingly clear. According to the affidavit, such a person cannot be deported. More importantly, the Union goes a step further and states that the deportation process itself cannot even be initiated until nationality verification is complete. This is perhaps the single most important legal proposition emerging from the affidavit. It is also one that may have consequences extending far beyond the Rajubala case and Assam.

Deportation is not a unilateral exercise of sovereign power: Public discourse often treats deportation as though it were entirely within the executive’s control—that once Indian authorities conclude that someone is a foreign national, they may simply escort that individual across the international border. The Union’s own affidavit rejects that understanding. Instead, it recognises that deportation is an exercise involving two sovereign States, not one.

The affidavit explains that where a foreign national possesses valid travel documents, the concerned State Government, Union Territory Administration or the Foreigners Regional Registration Office may proceed with deportation after criminal proceedings conclude and provided no other criminal case remains pending. However, the affidavit makes it equally clear that this represents only one category of cases.

A much larger legal problem arises where the individual possesses no passport, travel document or proof of nationality. In such situations, deportation cannot simply proceed on the basis of India’s unilateral determination. Instead, the receiving State must first verify that the individual is indeed its national, and only thereafter can travel documents be issued and deportation can legally occur.

A declaration by a Foreigners Tribunal answer only one question—whether, under Indian law, the person has established lawful citizenship or lawful residence. It does not determine whether another sovereign country recognises that individual as its citizen. That determination belongs exclusively to the receiving State.

The three preconditions the Union says are indispensable: Coming to the legal prerequisites for deportation, the affidavit effectively recognises three cumulative conditions.

  • First, the individual’s nationality must be verified.
  • Secondly, the concerned foreign government must issue or facilitate the issuance of appropriate travel documents.
  • Thirdly, the receiving country must agree to receive that person.

The Union leaves little ambiguity. It states:

“ That, a foreign national whose nationality is unknown/unverified can be deported to their home country only upon confirmation of their nationality/possession of a valid travel document/ acceptance by the home country concerned. The deportation procedure cannot be initiated without nationality verification.” (Point 10)

The Union’s formulation is significant because it elevates nationality verification from a mere procedural formality to a legal precondition for deportation. By stating that the deportation process “cannot be initiated” without nationality verification, the affidavit makes clear that verification is not simply one step in the process but the foundation upon which any lawful deportation rests. In effect, the Union acknowledges that, until nationality is confirmed and the receiving State agrees to accept the individual, there is no legally valid deportation process that can commence.

The Ministry of External Affairs emerges as the central actor: The affidavit also clarifies an aspect of deportation that has often remained opaque in public discourse. It explains that nationality verification is not undertaken directly by State Governments. Instead, once an individual is apprehended—or, in certain cases, once an FIR is registered—the concerned State Government or Foreigners Regional Registration Office is required to immediately forward the individual’s particulars, including photographs, to the Ministry of External Affairs.

The Ministry of External Affairs then engages with the Embassy or High Commission of the country believed to be the person’s home State. Only after the foreign government examines the material, verifies nationality and agrees to issue travel documents can the deportation process move forward. This explanation is legally significant because it reveals that deportation is not merely an exercise under the Foreigners Act; it is simultaneously an exercise in diplomacy.

“That, in case the foreigner does not have a valid travel document/passport, it is necessary to obtain the requisite travel document from the Embassy/High Commission ofthe country concerned through the process of nationality verification before he/she can be deported in accordance with Clause 12(4) of the Immigration & Foreigners Order, 2025.” (Point 8)

“That, in such cases, the State Government/UT Administration/FRRO/FRO concerned may take up the matter regarding issuance of travel document in favour of the foreigner with the Ministry of External Affairs (Consular Division), with detailed particulars and photograph of the said foreigner immediately on arrest of the foreign national or on filing of FIR, whichever is earlier.” (Point 9)

The affidavit acknowledges the limits of Indian sovereignty: The Union expressly states that no time limit can ever be prescribed for nationality verification because the process is entirely within the domain of the foreign government. This is a significant concession as it amounts to an acknowledgment that India cannot compel another sovereign State to decide whether a particular individual is its citizen. Nor can India dictate the speed with which that determination must be made.

“That, since verification of nationality is a sovereign function of the foreign government, no time limit can be fixed for completion of the process of nationality verification. Consequently, until such time as nationality is duly verified and deportation is effected, the movement of the illegal migrant, must remain restricted within a designated holding centre to ensure his/her physical availability for deportation.” (Point 12)

Yet this admission also exposes a constitutional dilemma. The affidavit acknowledges that nationality verification is entirely dependent on the receiving State, over which India has no control, and that no timeline can be prescribed for its completion. If so, on what constitutional basis can the State continue to detain a person for an indeterminate period while awaiting a process whose duration is uncertain and potentially indefinite? The affidavit offers no limiting principle. It merely states that such individuals should remain in holding centres until verification is completed, without addressing what Article 21 requires if that process takes years—or never concludes at all.

The affidavit attempts to justify continued detention: To address this obvious constitutional concern, the Union argues that persons awaiting nationality verification should remain in designated holding centres. According to the affidavit, restricting their movement is necessary to prevent absconding, protect national security and ensure that deportation can be carried out once nationality is verified. While these are familiar justifications for immigration detention, they do not fully answer the concerns raised by the Supreme Court in Rajubala. Article 21 may permit temporary restrictions on liberty, but it does not sanction detention for an indefinite period. The affidavit assumes that detention can continue until nationality verification is complete, without addressing the constitutional question of how long such detention can remain lawful if deportation continues to be uncertain or remote. The Court’s concern has consistently been not merely whether deportation is pending, but whether continued detention remains proportionate when there is no foreseeable prospect of removal.

“That, in pursuance of the orders of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India dated 28.02.2012 in the matter of Bhim Singh vs Union of India & Ors. the Ministry has advised State Govt/UT Administrations to ensure that all foreign nationals who have completed their sentence but whose deportation/repatriation is awaited due to nonconfirmation of nationality/issue of travel documents by the country concerned may  be réleased from jails immediately and may be kept at appropriate place outside the 4 jail premises with restricted movements pending their repatriation. State Govts/UT Administrations have also been advised to ensure that the places where such foreign nationals are being kept must have basic facilities of electricity, water and hygiene.” (Point 13)

The reliance on Bhim Singh is both important and incomplete: To support its position, the Union relies upon the Supreme Court’s decision in Bhim Singh v. Union of India. The affidavit notes that, following that judgment, the Ministry of Home Affairs advised States and Union Territories that persons who had completed their criminal sentence but whose deportation remained delayed due to non-confirmation of nationality or non-issuance of travel documents should ordinarily not continue inside prisons. Instead, they could be accommodated in designated places outside prison premises where their movement could remain restricted pending deportation. The Union cites this advisory as demonstrating that the present practice of housing such individuals in detention or holding centres has judicial support. That reliance is only partly persuasive.

The Bhim Singh framework sought to distinguish immigration detention from ordinary criminal incarceration. It recognised that individuals who had completed their sentences should not continue to be treated as convicted prisoners merely because deportation had become difficult. However, Bhim Singh did not answer the larger constitutional question now arising in Rajubal, which is how long can a person remain in such a holding centre before the detention itself becomes arbitrary?

The July 31 affidavit reproduces the administrative framework flowing from Bhim Singh, but it does not confront its constitutional limits. That omission becomes especially significant given the Supreme Court’s repeated observations since 2024 that Article 21 cannot permit indefinite executive detention unsupported by a realistic prospect of deportation.

The affidavit and the question of recent deportation practices

The Union’s affidavit is notable not only for the legal framework it sets out, but also for what it does not address. It repeatedly states that deportation is contingent upon three conditions: verification of nationality by the receiving State, issuance of travel documents, and acceptance by that State. Yet, it is silent on how these requirements align with the recent allegations of “push back” operations reported from Assam and other States, where individuals were allegedly taken across the border without any publicly disclosed process of nationality verification or acceptance by the receiving country.

This omission is significant because the affidavit is a sworn statement before the Supreme Court, setting out the Union’s own understanding of the law. The Government does not describe nationality verification as a matter of administrative convenience; it states in categorical terms that the deportation process “cannot be initiated” without it. The affidavit also recognises that verification is a sovereign function of the receiving country and that deportation is possible only after that country confirms the individual’s nationality and agrees to accept them. These are presented as legal prerequisites, not procedural formalities.

Against this backdrop, the affidavit inevitably invites comparison with recent events. The Supreme Court is already seized of petitions alleging that several persons from West Bengal were forcibly pushed into Bangladesh without due process. One such case came to forefront in November 2025, wherein Sunali and her husband, Danish Sheikh, along with their son, were apprehended in Delhi’s K.N. Katju Marg in June, labelled as illegal immigrants. Their deportation was ordered by the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) and executed despite Sunali’s family presenting Aadhaar and PAN documents. The petitioners further argued that the authorities had ignored the Ministry of Home Affairs’ own guidelines dated May 2, 2025, which required verification from the individual’s home State before deportation. They contended that no meaningful opportunity of hearing had been provided and that the deportations violated both statutory procedure and the constitutional guarantee of fairness. In the case of Bhodu Sheikh v. Union of India, the Union ultimately was made to undertake the decision of bringing these six people back, on humanitarian grounds, after they had allegedly been pushed across the border.

Detailed reports may be read here and here.

Similarly, in the Rajubala proceedings themselves, the Court has repeatedly insisted that deportation must follow nationality verification through Nationality Verification Requests (NVRs), issuance of travel permits and other documented procedures. The affidavit, however, does not explain whether these safeguards were followed in the recent removals that have become the subject of litigation.

The affidavit also has significant implications for how constitutional courts scrutinise deportation cases. Once the Union itself has stated on oath that deportation cannot even be initiated without nationality verification, travel documents and acceptance by the receiving State, courts can no longer be satisfied with bare assertions that an individual has been “deported” or “repatriated”. The legality of deportation necessarily turns on whether these mandatory procedural steps were actually followed.

This issue was focussed on by the CJP legal team in Gauhati Court after the illegal deportation of Doyjan Bibi in May 2025. CJP’s legal intervention in Doyjan’s case may be read here, here and here.

This shifts the focus of judicial review. It will no longer be sufficient for the State to merely state that a person has been deported. Courts will increasingly have to insist on the underlying record: when the Nationality Verification Request (NVR) was sent, whether the receiving country confirmed the person’s nationality, whether travel documents were issued, whether the receiving State formally agreed to accept the individual, and whether the deportation was carried out pursuant to a lawful order after the individual had exhausted or waived available legal remedies.

Indeed, this is precisely the direction in which the Rajubala litigation has already moved. Dissatisfied with vague assertions of impending deportation, the Supreme Court repeatedly sought detailed data from the Assam Government on detainees, nationality verification, pending litigation and the actual steps taken towards deportation. The Union’s July 31 affidavit reinforces that approach. If compliance with these procedural safeguards is what makes a deportation lawful, then those safeguards cannot remain matters of executive assertion—they must be demonstrated through documentary evidence capable of judicial verification.

In that sense, the affidavit has implications beyond the immediate case. It raises the evidentiary threshold for the State in future deportation litigation. Courts will have to examine not only whether a person was deported, but how the deportation was carried out and whether it conformed to the legal framework that the Union itself has now placed before the Supreme Court.

The affidavit leaves little room for informal “push back” operations

Perhaps the most significant implication of the affidavit lies in what it suggests about the legality of the recent “push back” operations reported from Assam and other States. Over the past few months, multiple petitions before the Supreme Court and High Courts have alleged that persons suspected of being Bangladeshi nationals were taken across the international border without any publicly disclosed deportation process. In several cases, families have alleged that individuals were picked up without prior notice, denied access to lawyers or relatives, and removed without any disclosed deportation order or travel documents.

Detailed report may be read here, here, here and here.

The Union’s affidavit describes only one legally recognised route to deportation. According to it, removal can take place only after the receiving country verifies the individual’s nationality, issues the necessary travel documents and agrees to accept them. Significantly, the affidavit states that the deportation process itself cannot be initiated before nationality verification. It does not recognise any separate category of “push back” operations or explain the legal basis on which such removals could take place outside this framework.

That omission is important. If “push back” is treated as a form of deportation, it would necessarily have to satisfy the procedural safeguards outlined in the affidavit. If it is not deportation, the affidavit offers no explanation of the statutory or constitutional authority under which such cross-border removals are carried out. The affidavit therefore leaves unresolved a question that is already before constitutional courts: whether recent removals complied with the legal process that the Union itself now says is mandatory.

Beyond Nationality Verification: The missing due process framework

While the affidavit sets out the broad mechanics of deportation, it is noticeably thin on the procedural safeguards that accompany the process. It explains how nationality verification is to be initiated but says almost nothing about the rights of the individual who is its subject.

For instance, the affidavit does not clarify whether a person is informed when a Nationality Verification Request (NVR) is sent to a foreign government, whether they have access to the material relied upon for such verification, or whether they have any opportunity to contest incorrect or incomplete information before it is acted upon. Equally, it is silent on what follows once nationality is confirmed. Is a formal deportation order issued? Is the individual notified that the receiving State has accepted them? Can that decision be challenged before a constitutional court? None of these questions are addressed.

These are not peripheral procedural details. They go to the heart of procedural fairness under Article 21. Deportation is among the most coercive powers the State can exercise—it results in the physical removal of a person from the territory of India. Such a power necessarily requires a transparent legal process, one that affords notice, an opportunity to be heard where appropriate, and meaningful judicial oversight before the final act of removal.

The significance of these omissions becomes even more pronounced in light of recent litigation concerning alleged “push back” operations. If the Union’s own position is that deportation cannot commence without nationality verification and acceptance by the receiving State, the procedural steps connecting those two stages assume constitutional importance. Without clarity on how those decisions are communicated, documented and implemented, it becomes difficult for courts to effectively scrutinise whether the legal requirements identified by the Union have actually been followed in an individual case.

The affidavit therefore provides only part of the legal architecture. It explains the prerequisites for deportation, but not the due process safeguards that ensure those prerequisites are fairly implemented. That gap is likely to assume increasing significance as constitutional courts continue to examine the legality of detention and deportation in the Rajubala proceedings and in the growing number of cases challenging recent removals across the country.

Beyond Rajubala: Why this affidavit reinforces the constitutional limits of deportation

The significance of the Union Government’s July 31 affidavit extends well beyond the immediate dispute in Rajubala Das. Rather than introducing an entirely new legal framework, the affidavit reiterates and reinforces the procedural safeguards that the Supreme Court has been examining throughout the proceedings. In doing so, it re-emphasises a central constitutional question: what constitutes a lawful deportation?

For years, courts have largely focused on whether an individual was correctly declared a foreigner under the Foreigners Act, 1946. The Rajubala case has broadened that inquiry by examining the legality of what follows—the process of detention and eventual deportation. The Union’s affidavit continues that shift by setting out the legal conditions that, according to the Government itself, must precede any deportation.

A key takeaway from the affidavit is that deportation is not a unilateral executive act. While Indian authorities may identify a person as a foreign national and initiate the process, deportation ultimately depends on nationality verification by the receiving State, issuance of travel documents and that State’s willingness to accept the individual. Until these steps are completed, the Union says, deportation cannot be initiated.

The affidavit therefore re-emphasises that executive power under the Foreigners Act is not unfettered. Declaring a person to be a foreigner may establish that they have no legal right to remain in India, but it does not automatically authorise their physical removal from the country. Deportation remains a separate legal process governed by procedural safeguards and diplomatic engagement.

This is an important clarification because it places legal limits on the State’s deportation powers. Those limits arise not only from constitutional guarantees under Article 21 but also from the Union’s own understanding of the deportation process, as placed before the Supreme Court. In that sense, the affidavit is significant not because it creates a new legal standard, but because it reaffirms one before the country’s highest court. That reaffirmation is likely to shape future judicial scrutiny of deportation cases, particularly where allegations are made that individuals were removed without following the safeguards that the Union itself now says are mandatory.

Related:

Aadhaar, Voter ID and PAN Cannot Prove Citizenship: Calcutta High Court’s Foreigners Order and the burden of belonging

They Belong Here: An elderly couple’s victory for citizenship

Another CJP Victory: Barpeta Tribunal declares Alam Khan ‘not a foreigner’

When a narrow reading of documents decide citizenship: GHC in Aminul Hoque

‘Fairness & reason ‘: SC rules that due process is a must for citizenship determination

Gauhati High Court upholds foreigner declaration, rejects mental illness plea

The post ‘Deportation Cannot Begin without Nationality Verification’: Union’s Rajubala affidavit clarifies legal limits on executive power appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> The Citizenship Proof Paradox: Calcutta HC holds Aadhaar, Voter ID and PAN cannot prove citizenship, burden on detainee https://sabrangindia.in/the-citizenship-proof-paradox-calcutta-hc-holds-aadhaar-voter-id-and-pan-cannot-prove-citizenship-burden-on-detainee/ Fri, 31 Jul 2026 12:39:08 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=48659 The Court’s refusal to treat voter IDs, PAN cards, bank records and ancestral documents as proof of nationality highlights the widening gap between documentary recognition by the State and legal recognition of citizenship

The post The Citizenship Proof Paradox: Calcutta HC holds Aadhaar, Voter ID and PAN cannot prove citizenship, burden on detainee appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> The law governing foreigners in India is undergoing a profound transformation. Since the enactment of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, questions of citizenship, detention, deportation and illegal migration have increasingly reached constitutional courts. The recent case before the Calcutta High Court capture this transition.

In Suman Molla v. State of West Bengal, the Calcutta High Court was asked to examine whether a person detained as an alleged Bangladeshi national had produced sufficient material to establish Indian citizenship. Rejecting a habeas corpus petition, the Division Bench of Justice Debangsu Basak and Justice Ajay Kumar Gupta held that documents such as Aadhaar cards, voter identity cards, PAN cards, bank records and ancestral land records, though important indicators of identity and residence, are not conclusive proof of citizenship. The judgment reinforces the statutory burden placed upon persons alleged to be foreigners while simultaneously illustrating how difficult that burden can become in practice, particularly for individuals whose lives have long been documented through the very instruments of the Indian State.

At its core, the dispute was not whether the State could regulate immigration or deport undocumented migrants. Rather, it concerned a more fundamental legal question: what must a detainee prove to establish Indian citizenship once the State alleges that they are a foreign national? The Court undertook a detailed examination of what constitutes legally acceptable proof of citizenship under Indian law, reiterating that citizenship cannot be inferred from possession of government-issued identity documents alone. Instead, the Court emphasized that citizenship must be established strictly in accordance with the Citizenship Act, 1955, and that when authorities allege a person to be a foreign national, the burden of disproving that allegation rests squarely upon the individual concerned.

Background

The habeas corpus petition was filed by the detainee’s relative, challenging the detention of a man who had been apprehended on June 18, 2026 after authorities concluded that he was a Bangladeshi national. The petitioner argued that the detention was illegal because the detainee’s citizenship remained under dispute following the 2026 Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. According to the petition, the detainee had initially been placed “under adjudication” during the SIR exercise, his name had subsequently been deleted from the electoral roll, and an appeal against that deletion remained pending. Consequently, it was argued that the authorities could not proceed to detain him before the citizenship dispute had been finally resolved.

To establish Indian citizenship, the petitioner relied upon several documents, including:

  • the detainee’s Voter Identity Card;
  • Aadhaar Card;
  • PAN Card;
  • bank account records;
  • ancestral land records; and
  • the passport of the detainee’s paternal aunt.

The petitioner also relied upon the Supreme Court’s decision in Sabitri Dey @ Swasthi Dey v. Union of India to contend that a meaningful opportunity of hearing ought to have preceded the detention.

The State, however, maintained that the detainee had already been identified as a Bangladeshi national after inquiry, interrogation and verification, and had been detained in accordance with the Ministry of Home Affairs Circular dated May 2, 2025 governing deportation proceedings. It further informed the Court that the detainee had failed to produce any document capable of legally establishing Indian citizenship within the period prescribed under the circular.

“There is an acknowledgement on the part of the detainee that he is a Bangladeshi national. However, such acknowledgement was made when the detainee was in the detention centre.” (Para 19)

“There is no criminal proceedings initiated as against the detainee as on date. Without entering into the debate as to whether or not an admission of civil liability made while in detention will be visited with the same consequences as that of an admission made to the police while in custody in respect of the criminal proceeding, we propose to examine the documents and materials put forward by the detainee and the writ petitioner in support of the claim of Indian Citizenship of the detainee. Even if we are to apply the principle that, an admission made in the custody of the police 6 should be discarded, none the less, the onus of establishing citizenship remains with the detainee.” (Para 20)

Court’s reasoning

Citizenship cannot be proved merely through identity documents: The central question before the Bench was not whether the detainee possessed official identity documents, but whether those documents legally established citizenship under the Citizenship Act. The Court answered that question emphatically in the negative.

Examining each document individually, the Bench observed that a Voter Identity Card merely evidences enrolment in the electoral roll and is not conclusive proof of citizenship. That conclusion assumed greater significance in the present case because the detainee’s name had already been deleted from the electoral roll during the SIR process.

The Court further held that an Aadhaar Card does not certify citizenship, noting that Aadhaar is fundamentally an identity document linked to residence and not nationality. Likewise, a PAN Card merely facilitates tax administration and cannot establish citizenship. Even the opening or operation of a bank account does not prove that the account holder is an Indian citizen.

Similarly, ancestral land records, although relevant to ownership or lineage, do not establish the citizenship of descendants. Nor could the passport of the detainee’s paternal aunt conclusively prove his own nationality, since citizenship is an individual legal status that cannot be inferred solely from the citizenship of relatives without satisfying the statutory requirements governing acquisition by descent.

In doing so, the Court effectively distinguished between documents that establish identity or residence and documents capable of legally proving citizenship, observing that the former cannot automatically establish the latter.

“There is a Voter Identity Card of the detainee appearing at page 27 of the writ petition, AADHAAR Card at page 28, PAN Card issued by the Income Tax Department at page 29, a Pass book of United Bank of India from pages 30 to 35 of the writ petition.” (Para 38)

“Voter Identity Card is not a conclusive proof with regard to Indian Citizenship. It is evidence of enrolment of the detainee in the electoral roll. Name of the detainee stands deleted from the electoral roll in the SIR, 2026 process.” (Para 39)

“AADHAAR Card, cannot by itself be a conclusive proof of Indian citizen. So also a Permanent Account Number issued by the Income Tax Department. Opening of a Bank Account, by itself, again is not a proof of Indian citizenship.” (Para 40)

“Record of Rights of the great grand-father and the grand-father of the detainee are annexed to the writ petition. Again, those do not establish conclusively the Indian citizenship of the detainee.” (Para 41)

For millions of Indians, these are precisely the documents through which the State recognises their existence. They are required to open bank accounts, obtain welfare benefits, access government schemes, pay taxes, register property, secure employment and participate in elections. Yet, when citizenship itself becomes disputed, the Court holds that these very documents carry limited evidentiary value.

This legal distinction between identity recognised by the State and citizenship recognised by law may be doctrinally sound, but it also reveals the fragmented nature of India’s documentary architecture. Individuals often accumulate multiple layers of State-issued identification over decades without ever possessing a singular document conclusively proving citizenship. The judgment therefore reinforces a legal principle while simultaneously highlighting the evidentiary difficulties faced by persons accused of being foreigners.

Citizenship must be established under the Citizenship Act, 1955: Through the judgement, the Bench had emphasised that citizenship cannot be inferred from possession of identity documents. Instead, it must be established through one of the statutory modes recognised under the Citizenship Act, 1955.

The Court carefully analysed whether the detainee could claim citizenship by birth under Section 3, by descent under Section 4, or by registration under Section 5. It concluded that none of these routes had been satisfactorily demonstrated. No birth certificate or reliable proof of birth was produced to substantiate citizenship by birth. The claim of citizenship by descent failed because the documentary record contained inconsistencies regarding the detainee’s parentage and failed to establish the Indian citizenship of the relatives through whom descent was claimed. Citizenship by registration was never pleaded at all.

The Court was particularly critical of the manner in which the petition had been argued, observing that despite repeated opportunities, neither the petitioner nor the detainee identified the statutory provision under which citizenship was claimed. Instead of addressing the legal requirements of the Citizenship Act, the petition relied primarily upon documentary indicators of identity and residence.

“Neither the writ petitioner nor the detainee despite repeated opportunities being granted to them addressed the Court on the core issue of citizenship of the detainee. Queries of the Court as to under which provision of the Act of 1955 is the detainee a citizen of India is met with either stoic silence or thunderous utterances completely removed from the issue at hand, by the learned Advocate for the petitioner.” (Para 23)

This insistence on grounding every citizenship claim within the framework of the Citizenship Act is legally significant. It reinforces that citizenship disputes cannot be resolved through broad assertions of long residence or possession of government documents alone; they must satisfy the statutory conditions prescribed by Parliament.

Yet this approach also raises broader concerns. In practice, many citizenship disputes arise precisely because documentary trails spanning several decades are incomplete, inconsistent or unavailable. Particularly in border regions and among economically vulnerable populations, births frequently went unregistered, family records remain fragmented and documentary continuity across generations is difficult to establish. By requiring claimants to trace citizenship strictly through statutory categories while simultaneously according limited evidentiary value to commonly held documents, the threshold for proving citizenship becomes considerably more demanding. Whether such a standard strikes the appropriate balance between sovereign control over immigration and protection against erroneous detention is a question that extends well beyond the facts of this individual case.

The burden of proof survives the transition from the Foreigners Act to the Immigration and Foreigners Act: The second major contribution of the judgment lies in its treatment of the burden of proof under the newly enacted Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025. Although the legislation repealed the Foreigners Act, 1946, the Court makes it abundantly clear that the fundamental evidentiary principle governing foreigners’ proceedings has remained unchanged—the person alleged to be a foreign national bear the burden of proving otherwise.

The Court located this burden in Section 16 of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, observing that once the Indian authorities allege that a detained person is a foreign national, “the onus is on the detainee to establish his or her nationality.” The Bench noted that the detention had been effected pursuant to the Ministry of Home Affairs Circular dated 2 May 2025, which lays down the procedure for apprehension and deportation of illegally staying foreign nationals.

“When Indian authorities alleged that, a person detained is a foreign national, the onus is on the detainee to establish his or her nationality. This is so by reason of Section 16 of the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 1946.” (Para 12)

Importantly, neither the validity of the Circular nor the procedure prescribed therein had been challenged by the petitioner. In the absence of such a challenge, the Court confined itself to examining whether the authorities had acted within the framework of the Circular, ultimately concluding that they had.

This aspect of the judgment is significant because it effectively signals judicial continuity despite legislative change. While the statutory framework has shifted from the Foreigners Act, 1946 to the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, the Court treats the burden of proof as having been substantially carried forward into the new regime.

In doing so, however, the judgment raises a larger constitutional question. The allocation of the burden of proof has long distinguished foreigners’ law from ordinary civil and criminal proceedings. In most legal disputes, the party making an allegation must establish it. Foreigners legislation reverses that position. Once the executive forms the view that an individual is a foreign national, it is the individual who must prove Indian citizenship. This reverse burden has historically been justified on the basis that facts concerning one’s birth, parentage, family lineage and migration history lie within the “special knowledge” of the individual concerned. The Calcutta High Court adopts precisely this rationale.

Inconsistencies in the petition weakened the claim: Apart from deficiencies in documentary evidence, the Bench found significant inconsistencies in the petitioner’s own case. While the police complaint described the petitioner as the detainee’s cousin, the writ petition claimed he was the detainee’s uncle. The Court also found the assertion that the petitioner had raised the detainee after his father’s death to be implausible, noting that the petitioner himself was only 38 years old whereas the detainee claimed to be 46.

The Bench further recorded that despite repeated opportunities, neither the petitioner nor the detainee disclosed the burial place of the detainee’s parents, even after the Court indicated that such information could facilitate DNA testing to establish lineage. Their refusal prompted the Court to draw an adverse inference against the claim that the parents were Indian citizens. These inconsistencies, according to the Court, further eroded the credibility of the petitioner’s assertions regarding the detainee’s citizenship.

The Court’s reliance on Sabitri Dey: A part of the petitioner’s argument rested on the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Sabitri Dey @ Swasthi Dey v. Union of India, where the Court had underscored the importance of procedural fairness in foreigners’ proceedings in Assam. The petitioner argued that the detainee ought not to have been detained before his citizenship claim had been adjudicated and relied upon Sabitri Dey to contend that an opportunity of hearing was an indispensable safeguard before coercive action could be taken.

The Calcutta High Court, however, distinguished the decision rather than applying it directly. It observed that Sabitri Dey arose under an entirely different statutory framework—the Foreigners Act, 1946 read with the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964, which governed proceedings before Foreigners Tribunals in Assam. That regime, the Court noted, involved formal adjudication before specialised tribunals and was therefore materially different from the procedure presently being followed under the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025 and the MHA Circular dated May 2, 2025. Nevertheless, the Court did not reject the principles articulated by the Supreme Court altogether.

On the contrary, it expressly acknowledged that Sabitri Dey reaffirmed an important proposition that although the burden of proof rests upon the proceedee, the adjudicatory authority is not relieved of its obligation to conduct a lawful adjudication. The Bench recognised that the Supreme Court had interpreted Section 9 of the Foreigners Act as operating alongside ordinary evidentiary principles, placing the burden upon the person proceeded against because matters such as birth, parentage, residence and family history ordinarily remain within that person’s special knowledge.

A detailed report on the Sabitri Dey judgment may be read here.

Yet, having acknowledged these principles, the Court concluded that they did not assist the petitioner because the challenge before it was fundamentally different. The present detention had been carried out under the new statutory framework; the applicable MHA Circular itself had not been challenged; and there was no allegation that the authorities had departed from the procedure prescribed therein.

The distinction is legally coherent. However, it also leaves certain constitutional questions unresolved. The Supreme Court’s observations in Sabitri Dey were not confined merely to the procedural architecture of Assam’s Foreigners Tribunals. They reflected broader constitutional concerns regarding fairness where questions of citizenship carry the gravest of consequences—loss of liberty, detention and eventual deportation. Those concerns do not disappear merely because Parliament has enacted a new immigration statute. Indeed, one may argue that the repeal of the Foreigners Act does not diminish the constitutional obligation to ensure that executive determinations of nationality remain subject to meaningful procedural safeguards.

An impossibly high evidentiary threshold?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the judgment is not its reiteration that Aadhaar, PAN or Voter ID are not conclusive proof of citizenship, that proposition has long been accepted in law, but its treatment of the cumulative evidentiary value of multiple public documents.

The petitioner did not rely upon a single document. Instead, the record contained an array of government-issued and historical documents: a Voter Identity Card, Aadhaar Card, PAN Card, bank account records, ancestral land records, and the passport of a close blood relative. Yet the Court held that none of these documents, whether considered individually or collectively, established citizenship.

This raises an important evidentiary question. While each document may not independently prove citizenship, should courts entirely discount the probative value arising from their cumulative existence?

The Bench correctly reiterates a settled proposition that identity documents are not citizenship documents. Legally, Aadhaar establishes identity and residence, PAN facilitates taxation, while the Voter ID merely evidences electoral enrolment. None is issued after a formal determination of citizenship.

However, in practical governance, these documents are issued by different State authorities after varying levels of verification. When an individual has simultaneously been recognised by electoral authorities, tax authorities, banking institutions and other public agencies over a prolonged period, those records may not conclusively establish citizenship, but they do create a significant evidentiary narrative that deserves weight. By treating every document as legally irrelevant once citizenship is questioned, the Court risks reducing decades of governmental recognition to virtually no evidentiary value.

The burden of proof may become nearly impossible to discharge

The Court places considerable emphasis on the statutory burden under the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, holding that once authorities allege that an individual is a foreign national, the burden shifts to that individual to establish Indian citizenship.

However, in India, birth registrations were not uniformly maintained across rural India, particularly before universal civil registration became commonplace. Land records may be incomplete, names frequently vary across official records, and multiple generations may never have possessed formal documentary proof of citizenship. Against that backdrop, if voter registration, Aadhaar, PAN, banking records, ancestral property records and even close relatives’ documents are all held insufficient, the question naturally arises: what evidence would realistically satisfy the burden?

The Court also found inconsistencies regarding the petitioner’s relationship with the detainee, discrepancies in the father’s name across documents, and the inability to identify the burial place of the detainee’s parents, drawing adverse inferences from these circumstances. Those inconsistencies undoubtedly weakened the petitioner’s case. Yet the reasoning also reflects an expectation of documentary precision that may not always align with Indian administrative realities.

Minor spelling variations, inconsistent recording of names across generations, differing descriptions of familial relationships and gaps in historical records are hardly uncommon in citizenship litigation. Courts have repeatedly recognised such inconsistencies in other contexts without treating them as determinative. Viewed through that lens, the judgment arguably privileges documentary consistency over the broader social realities of record-keeping in India.

Detailed reports of small errors costing people their citizenship may be read here and here.

Interestingly, the Court distinguishes the Supreme Court’s decision in Sabitri Dey primarily because it arose under a different statutory framework. However, Sabitri Dey was not merely about the Foreigners Act—it also reaffirmed the broader constitutional requirement that nationality determinations affecting liberty must be undertaken through fair and meaningful procedures.

The judgment therefore raises a larger constitutional question that extends beyond the facts of this case: when the State itself has, over decades, repeatedly recognised an individual through various statutory systems, should those recognitions collectively carry greater evidentiary weight in citizenship adjudication, even if none is independently conclusive?

The complete judgment may be read below:

Download PDF

Related:

SC remands 27 citizenship cases, reaffirms constitutional fairness

Gauhati High Court upholds foreigner declaration, rejects mental illness plea

Abdul Sheikh Citizenship Case: Gauhati High Court issues notice, continues protection against deportation

“All I Wanted Was Peace”: How 55-year-old widow Aklima Sarkar won back her citizenship

Defending Citizenship, On the Ground | CJP Assam 2025

From Despair to Dignity: How CJP helped Elachan Bibi win back her identity, prove her citizenship

The post The Citizenship Proof Paradox: Calcutta HC holds Aadhaar, Voter ID and PAN cannot prove citizenship, burden on detainee appeared first on SabrangIndia.

]]> The Supreme Court’s Uneasy Middle Path on Protest Policing https://sabrangindia.in/the-supreme-courts-uneasy-middle-path-on-protest-policing/ Wed, 29 Jul 2026 13:33:51 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=48625 The July 28 interim order preserves evidence and contemplates an SIT, but leaves unresolved who should investigate when the police themselves stand accused

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]]> The Supreme Court’s interim order of July 28 in the batch of petitions concerning police action during the nationwide student protests is, at one level, a judicial acknowledgement that allegations of police excess cannot simply be left to the ordinary investigative process. The Court recognised that the petitions disclose a prima facie case for an “independent and impartial investigation”, indicated that it may constitute a Special Investigation Team (SIT) under the supervision of a retired Supreme Court judge, directed preservation of crucial electronic evidence, restrained the publication of protesters’ personal information, and granted limited protection against coercive action.

Yet the order is equally notable for what it leaves untouched. While expressing sufficient doubt about the conduct of law enforcement to contemplate an independent investigation, the Court simultaneously permits the same police machinery to continue investigating protesters under the FIRs already registered. It further conditions its interim protection upon the absence of “criminal antecedents”, effectively creating two classes of protesters for the purposes of constitutional relief. Read closely, the order reveals not merely judicial caution but an unresolved constitutional contradiction that lies at the heart of the litigation.

From a challenge to police violence in Delhi to a nationwide constitutional controversy

The hearing itself reflected how dramatically the litigation has expanded since the events at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on July 20. What began as petitions concerning police action in the national capital has evolved into a challenge to policing practices across multiple States. The Bench, comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana, heard petitions alleging police brutality in Delhi, Bihar, Maharashtra, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Kerala, alongside petitions filed on behalf of injured police personnel, journalists and individual protesters. The order correspondingly issues notice not only to the Union and the Government of NCT of Delhi but also to the Chief Secretaries of the seven States where similar allegations have arisen, making it clear that any eventual investigation may extend well beyond Delhi.

The courtroom exchanges demonstrated that the litigation had also moved beyond disputes over individual incidents. As reported by LiveLaw, Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan argued that the issue before the Court was systemic rather than episodic, referring to alleged departures from established crowd-control protocols, the deployment of plain-clothes police personnel and the need for an investigation independent of the very agencies accused of violence. Senior Advocate Shyam Divan drew attention to allegations of electronic shock batons, assaults on women protesters and threats allegedly issued by police personnel. Senior Advocate Shadan Farasat highlighted the continued detention of minors in Bihar despite the State’s announcement that cases would be withdrawn, reported LiveLaw. Advocate Prashant Bhushan referred to the petition of Junaid Malik, who alleged illegal detention, harassment and police action against his family. On the other side, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta accepted that allegations concerning injuries to students required serious examination but maintained that “anti-social elements” had infiltrated the protests and that hundreds of police personnel had themselves suffered injuries.

It was against this backdrop that the Chief Justice repeatedly observed that the Court was confronted with two competing narratives, each accusing the other of serious violence. The question, therefore, was not simply whether police had used excessive force or whether protesters had attacked police personnel, but whether either version could be accepted without an investigation independent of those directly involved. That concern ultimately shaped the Court’s reasoning.

The Court’s recognition of a prima facie case is constitutionally significant

The order carefully records the allegations placed before the Court. It refers to the alleged use of pellet guns causing severe injuries, including the loss of eyesight of one student, the deployment of rubber bullets, electronic batons and nail-studded lathis, assaults by police personnel both in uniform and in civilian dress, and attacks on members of the media. At the same time, it records allegations that police personnel suffered serious injuries owing to stone-pelting and violence allegedly perpetrated by protesters or anti-social elements. Rather than accepting either version, the Court concludes that the material placed before it establishes a “compelling case” for an independent and impartial investigation capable of addressing both sets of allegations. This finding carries greater constitutional significance than the interim directions themselves.

Ordinarily, investigations conducted by the police are presumed to possess institutional legitimacy. Constitutional courts do not lightly transfer investigations or contemplate court-monitored inquiries. Such departures occur only where the Court concludes that confidence in the ordinary investigative process has been sufficiently undermined. The very logic behind an SIT is that the institutional mechanisms ordinarily entrusted with criminal investigation may not command public confidence in exceptional circumstances. The Court’s observation that an independent investigation may be necessary is therefore, in itself, a recognition that the allegations against law enforcement cannot simply be left to the agencies whose conduct has come under challenge. That premise, however, sits uneasily with the operative directions that follow.

The order simultaneously questions and preserves the ordinary criminal process

Despite concluding that the allegations disclose a prima facie case warranting an independent investigation, the Court expressly permits Delhi and all concerned States to continue investigating the FIRs already registered in connection with the protests. The only restriction imposed is that “no coercive measures” shall be taken against protesting students, subject to an important qualification discussed later.

“(iv) The NCT of Delhi and other States may proceed with the investigation of the FIRs registered; however, no coercive measures shall be taken against the protesting students. Such protection, nonetheless, shall not be extended to the persons with criminal antecedents.” (Para 8)

This aspect of the order deserves closer attention than it has received. The Court does not stay the FIRs; it does not transfer the investigations or direct that future investigative steps be undertaken by an independent agency. Instead, the police authorities whose conduct is alleged to require independent scrutiny continue to exercise the full range of investigative powers available under criminal law. Statements may still be recorded, electronic devices may still be seized and examined, witnesses may still be questioned, forensic reports may still be prepared, and charge-sheets may continue to take shape.

The Court thus creates a constitutional arrangement in which two investigations are expected to proceed simultaneously: one, a proposed independent inquiry into police conduct; the other, the ordinary police investigation into the conduct of protesters. The order never explains how these two processes are to coexist.

This is not merely a procedural curiosity. Criminal investigations shape the evidentiary record. They determine which witnesses are examined, what evidence is collected, how events are reconstructed and ultimately which narrative enters the criminal justice system. If the Court considers the neutrality of the ordinary investigative process sufficiently doubtful to contemplate an independent investigation, it is difficult to understand why that same process should continue exercising authority over the protesters arising out of the same sequence of events. The contradiction is never confronted.

“No coercive measures” does not suspend the coercive force of criminal process

The Court’s direction that no coercive measures shall be taken against protesting students has understandably attracted public attention. Yet, as a matter of constitutional law, the protection is considerably narrower than it first appears. Orders restraining coercive action ordinarily operate against arrest or similarly drastic steps. They do not suspend investigation itself. Nor do they prevent repeated summons, compulsory appearances before investigating officers, seizure of electronic devices, extraction of digital data, surveillance, examination of social media activity or the continuing collection of evidence. The distinction is significant in cases concerning political protest.

The chilling effect upon constitutional freedoms is produced not only by arrest but by the criminal process itself. A protester compelled to repeatedly appear before investigating agencies, surrender personal devices or remain subject to an ongoing criminal investigation continues to bear the burden of state action irrespective of whether arrest is immediately threatened. The Court therefore restrains one manifestation of coercion while leaving intact the broader investigative machinery through which coercion may continue to operate.

If the purpose of the interim order is to ensure that constitutional rights remain meaningful while allegations of police excess are independently examined, it is not immediately apparent why the continuation of the ordinary criminal process should remain unaffected.

The exception for “criminal antecedents” undermines the logic of constitutional protection

Perhaps the most constitutionally troubling aspect of the order is the qualification that protection against coercive action shall not extend to persons with criminal antecedents. The same qualification also governs the release of detained children. 

The order does not explain what constitutes a criminal antecedent. Nor does it distinguish between previous convictions and pending criminal cases. However, that omission is significant. In practice, the expression “criminal antecedents” is routinely employed by investigating agencies to refer not only to persons previously convicted of offences but also to individuals against whom criminal proceedings are pending or FIRs have previously been registered. For those engaged in political mobilisation, this distinction assumes particular importance.

Student leaders, trade union organisers, civil rights activists and political workers frequently accumulate criminal cases because they repeatedly participate in demonstrations. Many such prosecutions culminate in acquittal or remain pending for years without adjudication. The mere existence of previous criminal proceedings therefore cannot be equated with criminality. Yet the Court’s formulation effectively permits previous executive allegations to determine the scope of present constitutional protection.

The result is that the protesters most likely to have prior experience with the criminal justice system, precisely because they have participated in earlier movements, become least likely to receive interim judicial protection. This sits uneasily with first principles of constitutional law- the presumption of innocence does not disappear because an individual has previously been named in an FIR. Nor are the guarantees of Articles 19 and 21 reserved only for first-time protesters. Constitutional rights do not fluctuate according to the number of criminal cases the State has chosen to register against a citizen. The Court’s order, however unintentionally, risks producing precisely that consequence.

The Court’s instinctive turn towards an SIT also deserves scrutiny

The Court’s indication that it may constitute a Special Investigation Team headed by a retired Supreme Court judge has naturally been welcomed as evidence of judicial seriousness. It is also entirely consistent with an increasingly familiar pattern in Indian constitutional adjudication. Whenever allegations involve politically sensitive policing, communal violence, custodial abuse or failures of ordinary investigation, constitutional litigation frequently culminates in demands for an SIT.

The institutional appeal of this mechanism is obvious. It reassures the public that the investigation will not remain entirely within the control of the executive while allowing the Court to maintain supervisory distance. Yet experience also warrants caution. An SIT is not itself a constitutional remedy. It is only an investigative mechanism.

Indian constitutional history is replete with court-monitored investigations that have extended over years, produced little by way of institutional accountability or concluded long after the immediate constitutional crisis had passed. Judicial supervision has not invariably translated into meaningful prosecutions, as one may understand with the SIT on Manipur violence. Nor have SITs consistently addressed questions of command responsibility, systemic policing failures or institutional reform. They frequently identify individual culpability while leaving broader structures of power untouched.

The Supreme Court’s growing reliance on SITs also reflects a deeper institutional tendency. Faced with allegations of executive misconduct, the Court increasingly responds by creating new investigative mechanisms rather than directly interrogating the legality of executive action or crafting structural constitutional remedies. An SIT may well uncover facts. It does not necessarily answer the constitutional questions that those facts reveal.

If the present litigation ultimately results only in another prolonged investigation, without examining the legality of protest policing, the use of force, surveillance practices, deployment of plain-clothes personnel or the repeated invocation of criminal law against dissent, the constitutional significance of the proceedings may prove considerably narrower than their immediate political importance.

Preserving evidence is necessary, but accountability requires more

Among the strongest features of the order are its directions preserving CCTV footage, drone recordings, body-camera footage, wireless communication records and PCR logs, alongside the prohibition on publishing protesters’ personal information. These directions recognise the centrality of digital evidence in contemporary protest litigation and respond to legitimate concerns regarding surveillance and the destruction of electronic records.

They are undoubtedly important; but they are also procedural safeguards. They preserve the possibility of accountability without guaranteeing accountability itself. The harder constitutional question remains unresolved. If the Court has already concluded that there exists a prima facie case warranting an independent investigation because the allegations against the police cannot be left to the ordinary investigative process, should that conclusion not also have consequences for the criminal investigations being conducted by the same police authorities?

The July 28 order does not answer that question. Instead, it reflects a familiar pattern in constitutional adjudication. The Court acknowledges serious allegations of state excess, preserves evidence, contemplates an independent investigation and grants carefully calibrated interim relief, but stops short of disrupting the ordinary machinery of criminal administration. Meanwhile, the more enduring constitutional issue, however, lies elsewhere. The order proceeds on the premise that police conduct is sufficiently doubtful to justify independent scrutiny, while simultaneously leaving the architecture of criminalisation almost entirely intact. 

The complete order may be read here. 

Download PDF

 

Detailed reports on the protests and the state violence may be read here, here, here, here and here. 

Related:

Maharashtra: After backlash, govt. moves to withdraw FIRs against student protesters but questions remain

Governments begin rolling back cases against protesters, but questions over violence, arrests and accountability remain

From Feeding Students to Fighting in the Supreme Court: The story of Mohammad Junaid Malik

A deleted tweet, an NSA order, and the shadow of past crackdowns

Youth Uprising: A protest, a brute crackdown, a continuing countrywide response

Mumbai stands with students, but the state pushes back

The exam crisis that became a battle for accountability

Brute Police Action: Mumbai’s crackdown on protestors in solidarity with CJP & Student Groups, AISF, SFI & AISA

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]]> SC: Reasoned & Fair adjudication by Foreigners Tribunals, a must for proving citizenship https://sabrangindia.in/sc-reasoned-fair-adjudication-by-foreigners-tribunals-a-must-for-proving-citizenship/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:44:34 +0000 https://sabrangindia.in/?p=48410 The Court held that declarations of foreigner status must follow meaningful notice, proper appreciation of evidence and a reasoned decision, even where proceedings are ex-parte

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]]> The Supreme Court has reaffirmed that the determination of citizenship and foreigner status cannot be reduced to a mechanical exercise, holding that every person facing proceedings before a Foreigners Tribunal is entitled to a fair, lawful and reasoned adjudication, irrespective of whether they are ultimately able to establish Indian citizenship. In a significant judgment delivered on July 13, a Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta set aside a series of Gauhati High Court judgments affirming declarations of 27 individuals as foreigners and remanded the matters to the concerned Foreigners Tribunals (FTs) for fresh adjudication. The Court clarified that while the statutory burden under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946 continues to rest upon the proceedee, that burden operates within a constitutionally compliant legal process and cannot substitute the Tribunal’s obligation to independently examine evidence, ensure meaningful notice and deliver a reasoned decision.

The judgment in Sabitri Dey @ Swasthi Dey v. Union of India and the connected appeals marks one of the most important pronouncements on the functioning of Foreigners Tribunals in Assam in recent months. While it does not decide the citizenship claims of any of the appellants, it significantly strengthens procedural safeguards governing citizenship determination by reiterating that the constitutional guarantees of fairness, equality and due process extend to every individual, including those whose nationality is under question. The ruling assumes particular significance amid renewed debates around citizenship documentation and verification processes, including the ongoing discussions surrounding electoral roll revisions and proof of citizenship.

Background: 27 appeals arising from ex-parte declarations

The batch comprised 27 appeals challenging judgments of the Gauhati High Court, which had upheld opinions of various Foreigners Tribunals, and, in certain older matters, the erstwhile Illegal Migrants (Determination) Tribunals, declaring the appellants to be foreigners. Although the factual circumstances varied, a common thread ran through all the cases: the declarations had either been passed entirely ex-parte or had become effectively ex-parte after the individuals failed to continue participating in the proceedings.

In several matters, the appellants never appeared before the Tribunal despite notices being recorded as served. In others, they initially entered appearance, filed written statements or sought adjournments but subsequently defaulted, resulting in ex-parte opinions. A third category involved cases where the Gauhati High Court itself examined documentary evidence, including electoral rolls, family linkage documents and citizenship records, for the first time while exercising writ jurisdiction, instead of remitting the matters to the statutory Tribunal for factual determination.

The appellants contended that they had been declared foreigners without receiving a meaningful opportunity to contest the references and that the proceedings before the Tribunals failed to satisfy statutory as well as constitutional requirements of fairness. The Supreme Court, therefore, framed the central question not as whether Tribunals possess the power to proceed ex-parte, but whether such proceedings can culminate in declarations of foreigner status without meaningful adjudication, independent assessment of evidence and adherence to procedural safeguards.

Image: Anupam Nath/AP Photo

Citizenship determination cannot become a mechanical exercise

At the heart of the judgment lies the Court’s unequivocal rejection of the proposition that the burden of proof under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act authorises Tribunals to mechanically declare a person a foreigner merely because the individual failed to appear or failed to discharge that burden.

“In view of the above factual backdrop, the common issue which arises for consideration is whether, in proceedings under the Foreigners Act, 1946 (hereinafter referred to as “the 1946 Act”) and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964 (hereinafter referred to as “the 1964 Order”), an opinion declaring a person to be a foreigner can be sustained where the proceeding before the Tribunal was ex parte or had become effectively ex parte, without a meaningful examination of service of notice, opportunity of hearing, the material forming the basis of the reference, and the evidence adduced by the State. The issue is not whether a Tribunal is powerless to proceed ex parte in every case. The narrower and more important question is whether an ex parte or effectively ex parte proceeding can result in a mechanical declaration of foreigner status without the Tribunal satisfying itself that the minimum requirements of lawful and fair adjudication have been met.” (Para 7)

Section 9 provides that where any question arises as to whether a person is a foreigner, the burden of proving that he or she is not a foreigner rests upon that individual, notwithstanding the provisions of the Indian Evidence Act. The State relied heavily upon this statutory burden to justify the Tribunal proceedings. However, the Court drew a crucial distinction between the burden of proof and the adjudicatory process itself.

Another crucial verdict that deals with these issues related to Assam’s acute citizenship crisis is the 2013 Gauhati High Court ruling in State of Assam vs Moslem Mandal that mandated that Foreigners Tribunals must adhere to fair investigation and due process, including providing the “main grounds” for suspicion, while acknowledging the severe burden of proof on individuals. This article on Citizens for Justice and Peace website examines the ramifications of Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946.

The Bench held that the rationale behind Section 9 is understandable because questions relating to birth, ancestry, family lineage, migration and nationality ordinarily lie within the special knowledge of the person concerned. Yet, the existence of such a burden does not absolve the Tribunal of its independent obligation to conduct a lawful inquiry.

Rejecting a mechanical interpretation of Section 9, the Court observed that the provision neither authorises automatic declarations nor permits the Tribunal to treat the mere existence of a reference—or the absence of the proceedee—as conclusive proof of foreigner status. Instead, the statutory burden operates only within the framework of a legally valid adjudicatory process.

“However, the existence of a statutory burden under Section 9 of the 1946 Act cannot be read to mean that the Tribunal is relieved of its own obligation to conduct a lawful adjudication. Section 9 does not authorise a mechanical declaration. It does not permit the reference to be accepted as conclusive merely because it has been made. It also does not permit the Tribunal to treat absence of the proceedee as a substitute for examination of the material placed before it. The burden on the proceedee operates within a legal process. It does not replace the legal process itself.” (Para 12)

The Bench stressed that absence from proceedings cannot substitute proof. Even where a proceedee defaults, the Tribunal remains duty-bound to examine the material placed by the State, assess whether it supports the allegation and independently arrive at a reasoned conclusion.

Reading Section 9 alongside the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964

The Court devoted considerable attention to harmonising Section 9 of the Foreigners Act with Paragraph 3 of the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964, which prescribes the procedure governing Tribunal proceedings.

Paragraph 3 requires the Tribunal to furnish the proceedee with the “main grounds” on which they are alleged to be a foreigner, provide a reasonable opportunity to make a representation, permit production of evidence and thereafter consider the evidence produced before rendering its opinion. It also obligates the Tribunal to hear persons considered necessary, record concise findings of fact and state its conclusions in the final order.

“The burden under Section 9 of the 1946 Act must therefore be understood in the context of the 1964 Order. Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order requires that the proceedee must be served with the main grounds on which he or she is alleged to be a foreigner. The expression “main grounds” is of significance. It cannot be reduced to a bare assertion that the person is suspected to be a foreigner. The proceedee must know, at least in substance, the basis on which the allegation is founded. Only then can the proceedee meaningfully answer the reference and discharge the burden cast upon him or her.” (Para 13)

According to the Court, these procedural requirements demonstrate that Foreigners Tribunals perform adjudicatory, not merely administrative, functions.

The Bench rejected any interpretation reducing the expression “main grounds” to a vague allegation or a bare suspicion that an individual may be a foreigner. Rather, the Court held that the expression necessarily requires disclosure of the essential factual basis underlying the allegation, enabling the proceedee to meaningfully answer the reference.

Without such disclosure, the statutory burden imposed by Section 9 becomes impossible to discharge because an individual cannot reasonably rebut an undefined allegation or prove a negative without knowing the case they are required to meet.

“The procedure prescribed under Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order also shows that the proceeding before the Tribunal is not an administrative formality. The proceedee has to be given an opportunity to file a reply, produce evidence and be heard. The concerned Superintendent of Police may also produce evidence. The Tribunal may hear such persons as it considers necessary. After the case is heard, the Tribunal is required to submit its opinion. The final order must contain a concise statement of facts and the conclusion. These requirements are inconsistent with any notion that the Tribunal may simply affirm the reference upon non-appearance of the proceedee.” (Para 14)

The Court emphasised that the procedure prescribed under the 1964 Order contemplates far more than formal compliance. The opportunity to file replies and produce evidence must be genuine and effective rather than illusory. Consequently, the Tribunal cannot simply affirm the police reference upon the non-appearance of the proceedee without examining the material independently and recording reasons.

“Even in a case where the proceedee fails to appear despite service, the Tribunal continues to act as a quasi-judicial forum. It must satisfy itself that notice was duly served in accordance with law. It must examine whether the main grounds were made available to the proceedee. It must consider the evidence produced by the State. It must assess whether the material placed before it is capable of supporting the conclusion that the proceedee is a foreigner. It must record reasons, even if briefly. An ex parte proceeding may dispense with the participation of the absent party, but it does not dispense with objective consideration and meaningful adjudication by the Tribunal.” (Para 15)

Constitutional guarantees apply even when citizenship is under challenge

Having interpreted the statutory framework, the Supreme Court proceeded to anchor the entire process of citizenship determination within the Constitution. The Bench held that proceedings before Foreigners Tribunals cannot be viewed merely as statutory exercises under the Foreigners Act, 1946. Rather, they engage constitutional guarantees under Articles 14 and 21 because the consequences of being declared a foreigner directly affect a person’s liberty, dignity and legal status.

The Court laid particular emphasis on the language employed in the Constitution. Article 14 guarantees equality before law and equal protection of laws to “any person”, while Article 21 provides that “no person” shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law. Neither provision confines its protection exclusively to Indian citizens.

Accordingly, the Bench held that constitutional safeguards extend even to individuals whose citizenship is itself under dispute.

“Article 14 of the Constitution uses the expression “any person”. Article 21 of the Constitution uses the expression “no person”. Neither provision is confined to citizens. The protection of equality before law, equal protection of laws, life and personal liberty is, therefore, available to every person within the territory of India. A person proceeded against before a Foreigners Tribunal may ultimately fail to establish Indian citizenship, but the process by which such determination is made must still satisfy the constitutional requirements of fairness, reasonableness and non-arbitrariness.” (Para 20)

This distinction forms the constitutional foundation of the judgment. The Court clarified that while Parliament possesses the authority to regulate citizenship and the State is fully empowered to identify and remove illegal migrants, the procedure adopted for doing so cannot be arbitrary or unfair merely because the individual is ultimately found not to be an Indian citizen.

The judgment therefore separates the substantive outcome of citizenship determination from the fairness of the process by which that determination is reached, holding that constitutional protections govern the latter irrespective of the former.

Process should be fair" | Supreme Court protects individuals declared foreigners in Assam

Fair procedure survives even where the State seeks to identify foreigners

The Bench relied upon a long line of constitutional precedents to reinforce this principle. Referring to Louis De Raedt v. Union of India (1991), the Court reiterated that although foreigners do not enjoy the freedoms guaranteed under Article 19, they nevertheless possess the protection of Article 21 in respect of life and personal liberty. Consequently, while the State may regulate the entry, residence and removal of foreigners, those actions must still conform to fair procedure.

The Court also relied upon National Human Rights Commission v. State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996), where the Supreme Court had rejected the argument that persons whose citizenship is disputed can be denied constitutional safeguards. That decision recognised that Article 21 continues to protect individuals even when their nationality remains under inquiry.

The Bench further invoked the landmark judgment in Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978), which transformed Article 21 by holding that “procedure established by law” must mean a procedure that is fair, just and reasonable, rather than arbitrary, oppressive or fanciful.

Applying this principle to proceedings before Foreigners Tribunals, the Court observed that the existence of a special burden of proof under Section 9 does not dilute constitutional requirements of procedural fairness. Simply because Parliament has shifted the evidentiary burden onto the proceedee does not authorise the Tribunal to disregard principles of fairness or natural justice.

Mechanical proceedings offend Articles 14 and 21

The Court’s reasoning extended beyond Article 21 to Article 14. The Bench observed that arbitrariness is fundamentally inconsistent with equality before law. Therefore, proceedings culminating in a declaration of foreigner status cannot survive constitutional scrutiny if they are conducted mechanically, one-sidedly or without genuine application of mind.

The Court explained that equal protection requires far more than formal compliance with statutory requirements. Merely issuing a notice or mechanically passing an order does not satisfy constitutional standards.

“Article 14 of the Constitution also upholds the content of fair procedure. A State action which is arbitrary cannot claim the protection of law merely because it is clothed in statutory form. A proceeding which may result in a person being declared a foreigner cannot be sustained if the procedure adopted is mechanical, one-sided, or devoid of application of mind. Equal protection of laws requires that the statutory procedure be applied in a real and meaningful manner. It is not enough that a notice is formally issued or that an order is formally passed. The Tribunal must examine whether the proceedee had a fair opportunity, whether the main grounds were disclosed, whether the evidence before it was capable of supporting the reference, and whether the conclusion follows from the material on record.” (Para 24)

Instead, the Tribunal must actively satisfy itself that:

  • notice was properly served in accordance with law;
  • the “main grounds” of the allegation were adequately disclosed;
  • the proceedee had a genuine opportunity to respond;
  • the evidence produced by the State is capable of supporting the allegation; and
  • the conclusion logically follows from the material available on record.

The Court thus made clear that fairness is measured by the substance of the proceedings rather than their formal appearance.

Natural justice remains integral to Foreigners Tribunal proceedings

Another significant aspect of the judgment is its detailed reaffirmation of the principles of natural justice. The Bench observed that proceedings before Foreigners Tribunals carry consequences far more serious than ordinary civil disputes. A declaration that a person is a foreigner may result in detention, deportation, separation from family and community, loss of civil rights and, in certain situations, even statelessness. Because of these grave consequences, adherence to natural justice assumes exceptional importance.

“In proceedings before the Foreigners Tribunal, this principle assumes particular importance. The person proceeded against is often required to establish facts relating to ancestry, residence, identity and family linkage through old public documents. Such a person cannot be expected to discharge the statutory burden under Section 9 of the 1946 Act unless the main grounds of the allegation are disclosed and a meaningful opportunity is afforded to file a response and produce evidence. The opportunity contemplated by Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order must therefore be an effective opportunity, and not a merely formal one.” (Para 28)

The Court reiterated the foundational rule of audi alteram partem—that no person should be condemned unheard. Tracing the development of this doctrine through Cooper v. Wandsworth Board of Works, the Bench observed that even where a statute is silent, fairness ordinarily requires that a person likely to be affected by an adverse decision be given an opportunity of hearing. The rule, the Court noted, is not merely technical but constitutes a fundamental principle of fair play.

The Court also relied upon A.K. Kraipak v. Union of India, which recognised that principles of natural justice supplement statutory provisions rather than supplant them. Applying this principle, the Bench held that nothing in the Foreigners Act excludes natural justice. On the contrary, the procedural safeguards contained in Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order reinforce those principles by requiring meaningful notice, opportunity to respond, consideration of evidence and reasoned findings.

Similarly, relying on Canara Bank v. Debasis Das, the Court reiterated that notice constitutes the first and most essential limb of natural justice. A notice must precisely inform a person of the case they have to answer; vague allegations or undefined suspicions cannot satisfy this requirement.

The Court reinforces its earlier decision in Md. Rahim Ali

A substantial part of the judgment builds upon the Supreme Court’s decision in Md. Rahim Ali @ Abdur Rahim v. State of Assam (2024), which had already interpreted Section 9 of the Foreigners Act alongside Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order. Reaffirming that precedent, the Bench held that authorities cannot initiate proceedings on mere suspicion unsupported by material. Instead, the reference must disclose the “main grounds” underlying the allegation so that the proceedee understands the essential basis of the case.

“The Court explained that the burden under Section 9 is not to be understood as permitting the authorities to proceed on a bare allegation or an unsupported suspicion. The authority must possess some material basis for initiating the proceeding, and the proceedee must be informed of the substance of the case which he or she is required to meet.” (Para 17)

The Court drew an important distinction between a formal accusation and the statutory requirement of disclosing “main grounds”. The latter, it held, demands disclosure of the essential factual basis of the allegation rather than a vague assertion that an individual is suspected to be a foreigner. Without such disclosure, the opportunity to defend oneself becomes illusory, rendering the statutory burden under Section 9 practically impossible to discharge.

“The decision in Md. Rahim Ali (Supra) is important for another reason. This Court drew a clear distinction between the mere allegation that a person is a foreigner and the “main grounds” contemplated under Paragraph 3(1) of the 1964 Order. The expression “main grounds” requires something more than a formal accusation. It requires disclosure of the essential basis on which the allegation is founded, so that the proceedee is not left to answer an undefined suspicion. Without such disclosure, the opportunity to file a representation and produce evidence would be more illusory than real.” (Para 17)

The Bench reiterated another observation from Md. Rahim Ali: a declaration of foreigner status carries extraordinary civil consequences, including detention, deportation, and disruption of family life and the possibility of statelessness. Consequently, such declarations must always rest upon material capable of supporting the conclusion and must emerge from a process that satisfies constitutional standards of fairness.

Having established these constitutional and statutory principles, the Court proceeded to examine the three categories of appeals before it and explain why each required remand despite the differing factual circumstances.

“This Court in Md. Rahim Ali (Supra) also clarified that Section 9 does not exclude the principles of natural justice. The statutory burden placed upon the proceedee operates only after the proceeding is lawfully initiated and after the proceedee is placed in a position to understand the case against him or her. The burden cannot be shifted in a vacuum. A person cannot be expected to prove the negative without being told, with reasonable clarity, the material basis on which he or she is alleged to be a foreigner. The consequence of a declaration by a Foreigners Tribunal was also discussed by this Court as it was held that such a declaration is not a routine civil consequence. It may lead to detention, deportation, separation from family and community, and in a given case, even the possibility of statelessness. This Court therefore emphasised that the process by which such a declaration is made must satisfy the minimum requirements of fairness and must rest upon material capable of supporting the conclusion.” (Para 18)

Supreme Court identifies three categories of cases but applies a common constitutional standard

Having laid down the statutory and constitutional framework, the Supreme Court examined the 27 appeals before it by classifying them into three distinct categories. While the factual circumstances differed, the Court observed that the underlying concern remained identical in every case: whether a declaration of foreigner status carrying grave civil consequences could be sustained where the proceedings before the Foreigners Tribunal were either entirely ex-parte or had effectively become ex-parte without meaningful adjudication.

The Bench clarified that this classification was adopted only for analytical convenience. Regardless of whether the proceedee never appeared, appeared initially before defaulting, or whether the High Court later examined evidence in writ proceedings, every case ultimately raised the same constitutional question—whether the Tribunal had discharged its adjudicatory responsibility before declaring a person to be a foreigner.

Category I: Mere non-appearance cannot justify automatic declaration as a foreigner

The first category comprised cases where the appellants never appeared before the Foreigners Tribunal despite the Tribunal or the Gauhati High Court recording service of notice. The State argued that once notice had been served and the proceedee failed to participate, the Tribunal was entitled to proceed ex-parte and declare the individual a foreigner.

The Supreme Court agreed only in part.bThe Bench recognised that Paragraph 3(7) of the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964 obligates a proceedee to appear before the Tribunal after due service of notice and that the Tribunal cannot indefinitely postpone proceedings merely because a person chooses not to participate. Accordingly, the Court held that Tribunals possess the statutory authority to proceed ex-parte where notices have been duly served.

However, the Court emphatically rejected the proposition that the power to proceed ex-parte automatically authorises a declaration of foreigner status. Reading Paragraph 3(7) together with Paragraphs 3(1), 3(10) and 3(16), the Bench held that even in the absence of the proceedee, the Tribunal continues to function as a quasi-judicial body and must independently discharge its adjudicatory responsibilities. It cannot simply endorse the police reference because the person failed to appear.

Instead, the Tribunal must still:

  • verify whether notice was lawfully served;
  • ensure that the “main grounds” of the allegation were communicated;
  • consider the evidence produced by the Superintendent of Police;
  • assess whether the material is capable of supporting the allegation that the proceedee is a foreigner; and
  • record a reasoned opinion containing a concise statement of facts and conclusions.

The Court observed that Section 9 places the burden upon the proceedee, but that burden does not convert the absence of the proceedee into proof of the allegation. This distinction constitutes one of the judgment’s central legal holdings. Non-participation may deprive an individual of the opportunity to lead evidence, but it cannot relieve the Tribunal of its obligation to independently examine whether the State has established sufficient material to justify the declaration.

“Thus, even where the proceeding is ex parte, the Tribunal is still required to perform an adjudicatory function. The non-appearance of the proceedee may deprive him or her of the opportunity to lead evidence, but it does not relieve the Tribunal of the obligation to examine whether the reference is supported by the material produced by the State. Section 9 of the 1946 Act places the burden upon the proceedee, but that burden does not convert the absence of the proceedee into proof of the allegation. The Tribunal must still apply its mind to the main grounds, the proof of service, the evidence placed before it and the question referred.” (Para 32)

Finding that the appellants in this category had been declared foreigners without such meaningful adjudication, the Supreme Court held that the matters required fresh consideration before the respective Foreigners Tribunals. At the same time, it clarified that this opportunity was being granted only once and subject to stringent conditions to prevent delay or abuse of process.

“The matters falling in this category show that the appellants have been declared foreigners without any contest on their behalf before the Tribunal. Having regard to the grave consequences of such declaration, and having regard to the statutory requirement that even the final order of the Tribunal must contain a concise statement of facts and conclusion, we are of the view that these matters deserve to be remitted to the concerned Tribunals for fresh consideration. This opportunity shall be granted only once and shall remain subject to strict conditions so that the remand is not used to delay the proceedings.” (Para 33)

Image: The Wire

Category II: High Courts cannot become the primary forum for deciding citizenship facts

The second category dealt with cases in which the Gauhati High Court, while exercising writ jurisdiction, undertook its own appreciation of documentary evidence—including electoral rolls, family lineage documents and other citizenship records—to uphold ex-parte declarations passed by the Tribunals.

The Supreme Court held that this approach fundamentally misconceived the statutory framework governing Foreigners Tribunals. The Bench observed that Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order clearly designates the Tribunal as the primary fact-finding authority. It is before the Tribunal that the proceedee must produce documents, the State must lead evidence and disputed questions concerning ancestry, identity, electoral records, residence and family linkage must be examined.

Nationality disputes often involve complex factual inquiries requiring scrutiny of decades-old public records, oral testimony, linkage evidence and documentary proof. Such evidence may require explanation, comparison, corroboration and rebuttal. These exercises, the Court held, fall squarely within the statutory jurisdiction of the Foreigners Tribunal rather than the writ jurisdiction of the High Court. Accordingly, where the Tribunal itself has failed to undertake a complete adjudication because proceedings became ex-parte, the deficiency cannot ordinarily be cured by the High Court appreciating evidence for the first time.

“In matters concerning nationality, the evidence often relates to ancestry, family linkage, residence, identity, electoral records and other public documents. Such material may require proof, explanation, comparison, and where necessary, rebuttal. The burden under Section 9 of the 1946 Act is also to be discharged before the Tribunal. The State evidence is likewise to be placed before and considered by the Tribunal. Therefore, where the proceeding before the Tribunal was ex parte and the documents relied upon by the proceedee were not tested before the statutory forum, the High Court should not ordinarily become the first forum for appreciation of such material.” (Para 37)

The Bench therefore ruled that factual examination undertaken directly by the High Court cannot substitute the adjudicatory process contemplated by the Foreigners Act and the 1964 Order. The proper course in such circumstances is to remit the matter to the Tribunal so that both parties may lead evidence before the designated statutory forum and obtain a fresh, reasoned opinion.

In doing so, the Court reaffirmed an important principle governing judicial review: while High Courts possess wide constitutional powers under Article 226, they ordinarily should not become the first forum to evaluate disputed evidence where the legislature has created a specialised adjudicatory mechanism for that purpose.

“In the matters falling in this category, the High Court examined the documents and material placed before it while declining interference with the ex parte opinion of the Tribunal. Such an exercise, in the facts of the present batch, cannot cure the absence of a proper adjudication before the Tribunal under Paragraph 3 of the 1964 Order. The appropriate course is to remit these matters to the concerned Tribunals, so that the appellants may produce their material, the State may adduce its evidence, and the Tribunal may return a fresh opinion in accordance with law.” (Para 38)

Category III: Default after participation does not absolve the Tribunal of its duties

The third category comprised appeals where the appellants had initially participated in the proceedings before the Foreigners Tribunal—by entering appearance, filing written statements, seeking adjournments or appearing through counsel—but later defaulted, resulting in ex-parte opinions.

The Supreme Court acknowledged that these cases stood on a somewhat different footing from the first category because the appellants had knowledge of the proceedings and had, at least initially, availed themselves of the opportunity provided under the statute. The Bench accepted that Paragraph 3(7) obligates a proceedee to remain present throughout the proceedings, while Paragraph 3(12) expressly provides that adjournments should be granted sparingly and only for recorded reasons.

Accordingly, the Tribunal cannot be faulted merely because it refused repeated adjournments or proceeded with the matter after the proceedee repeatedly remained absent. The Court emphasised that individuals cannot frustrate the adjudicatory process through deliberate or negligent non-participation, particularly because Section 9 places the burden of proving citizenship upon them.

Nevertheless, the Bench held that the proceedee’s default does not alter the legal character of the Tribunal’s function. Even where proceedings become effectively ex-parte after initial participation, the Tribunal remains bound by Paragraphs 3(15) and 3(16) of the 1964 Order. Its final opinion must continue to reflect independent application of mind to the issues referred, consideration of the State’s evidence and evaluation of whatever material has already been placed on record by the proceedee.

The Court observed that many appellants in this category had been declared foreigners before the evidence they sought to rely upon was fully considered by the statutory forum. Given the severe consequences attached to such declarations, the Bench held that these matters too required fresh adjudication so that citizenship could be determined after a complete evidentiary inquiry.

‘In the matters falling in this category, the proceedings had become effectively ex parte at the stage when the appellants were required to continue their defence or adduce evidence. The consequence is that the declarations against them were made without a complete adjudication on the material which they seek to place before the statutory forum. In view of the serious consequences which follow such declarations, and in order to ensure that the determination of status is made after a complete and reasoned adjudication, we consider it appropriate to remit these matters also to the concerned Tribunals.” (Para 43)

At the same time, the Court cautioned that the remand should not be interpreted as condoning the conduct of the appellants. It described the opportunity as one final chance, requiring the individuals to appear before the Tribunal, file their written statements and documents within the prescribed time and cooperate fully with the proceedings. Failure to do so would entitle the Tribunal to proceed in accordance with law.

“This remand is not to be understood as approval of the conduct of the appellants in defaulting before the Tribunal. It is granted only as one final opportunity, keeping in view the nature of the determination and the consequences which may follow. The appellants in this category shall therefore be required to appear before the concerned Tribunals, file their written statements and documents within the time granted, and cooperate with the proceedings without seeking unnecessary adjournments. If they fail to do so, the Tribunal shall be at liberty to proceed in accordance with law.” (Para 44)

By adopting this balanced approach, the Supreme Court ensured that procedural fairness was preserved without permitting repeated defaults to obstruct the statutory process of citizenship determination.

Court stops short of deciding citizenship claims, orders fresh adjudication

While allowing all 27 appeals, the Supreme Court was careful to define the limited scope of its intervention. The Bench repeatedly clarified that it was not adjudicating upon the citizenship claims of any of the appellants, nor was it expressing any opinion regarding the authenticity, admissibility, relevance or evidentiary value of the documents relied upon by them. Those questions, the Court held, must be independently decided by the concerned Foreigners Tribunals after a fresh evaluation of the evidence placed by both sides.

The judgment therefore does not confer citizenship upon any of the appellants, nor does it weaken the statutory framework governing the identification of foreigners. Instead, it reinforces that the legitimacy of the outcome depends upon the legitimacy of the process by which that outcome is reached.

The Court recognised that Parliament, under Article 11 of the Constitution, possesses the legislative authority to regulate citizenship, while the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964 establish the statutory mechanism for determining whether an individual is or is not a foreigner. It also acknowledged the State’s legitimate interest in ensuring that persons who are not entitled to Indian citizenship do not obtain such status through false claims, procedural abuse or delay.

At the same time, the Bench emphasised that this sovereign interest cannot justify compromising procedural fairness. Reiterating the central principle running throughout the judgment, the Court held that the determination of citizenship and foreigner status must always emerge from “a process which is fair, lawful and reasoned.” It clarified that the statutory burden under Section 9 remains fully applicable and that the remand does not dilute or shift that burden in favour of the appellants. Rather, it ensures that the serious consequences of a declaration as a foreigner follow only after an adjudication consistent with the Foreigners Act, the 1964 Order and the constitutional mandate of fairness under Articles 14 and 21.

“Citizenship and foreigner status occupy a field of high constitutional and legal significance. Article 11 of the Constitution preserves the power of Parliament to make provisions with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship and all other matters relating to citizenship. Separately, the 1946 Act and the 1964 Order provide the statutory mechanism through which questions as to whether a person is or is not a foreigner are referred to and determined by the Tribunal. The State has a legitimate and compelling interest in ensuring that persons who are not legally entitled to claim Indian citizenship do not secure such status by misuse of process, by false claims, or by taking advantage of procedural delays.” (Para 46)

“At the same time, the determination of such status must be made through a process which is fair, lawful and reasoned. The statutory burden under Section 9 of the 1946 Act remains fully applicable. The remand being directed by this Court is not intended to dilute that burden, nor is it intended to confer any equity in favour of a person who is unable to establish his or her claim in accordance with law. It is only to ensure that the serious consequence of being declared a foreigner follows from an adjudication which satisfies the requirements of the 1946 Act, the 1964 Order, and the constitutional mandate of fairness.” (Para 47)

Gauhati High Court and Tribunal orders set aside

Applying these principles, the Supreme Court set aside all the impugned judgments of the Gauhati High Court affirming the declarations of the appellants as foreigners. Consequently, the corresponding opinions rendered by the concerned Foreigners Tribunals, as well as the erstwhile Illegal Migrants (Determination) Tribunals in certain older matters, were also quashed. The Bench directed that every reference be adjudicated afresh by the competent Foreigners Tribunal, independently and without being influenced either by the earlier Tribunal opinions or by the findings recorded by the Gauhati High Court.

The Court thereby restored the statutory Tribunal to its role as the primary fact-finding authority in nationality disputes, reaffirming that factual questions relating to ancestry, electoral records, family linkage and documentary evidence must first be examined by the specialised forum created under the law.

Strict conditions attached to the remand

The Supreme Court was equally careful to ensure that its judgment was not interpreted as rewarding procedural default. Recognising that many of the appellants had either failed to appear before the Tribunals or had discontinued participation midway through the proceedings, the Bench imposed a series of stringent conditions while remanding the matters.

The appellants were directed to appear before the respective Foreigners Tribunals within four weeks from the date of the judgment. Upon their appearance, the Tribunals were instructed to permit them to file written statements, affidavits and documentary evidence within a reasonable period to be fixed by the Tribunal. However, extensions of time were to be granted only upon sufficient cause recorded in writing.

The State and the concerned reference authorities were likewise granted liberty to produce additional material and lead evidence in accordance with law. Thereafter, the Tribunals were directed to evaluate the evidence produced by both sides before rendering fresh opinions under the Foreigners Act and the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order.

The Bench further directed the appellants to cooperate fully with the proceedings and specifically restrained them from seeking unnecessary adjournments. Should any appellant fail to appear within the stipulated period, or, having appeared, fail to participate meaningfully, the Tribunal would be at liberty to proceed in accordance with law.

Interim protection from coercive action

Recognising the serious consequences that flow from declarations of foreigner status, the Supreme Court granted limited interim protection to the appellants pending fresh adjudication.

The Court directed that no coercive steps, including detention or deportation based on the earlier Tribunal opinions, should be taken against the appellants until fresh opinions are rendered by the concerned Tribunals.

This protection, however, was expressly made conditional upon the appellants appearing before the Tribunals within the stipulated time and cooperating with the proceedings. If they defaulted once again, the protection would cease, leaving the Tribunal free to proceed in accordance with law.

To avoid prolonged uncertainty, the Bench also requested the Foreigners Tribunals to dispose of the remanded references expeditiously, preferably within six months from the date on which the appellants first appear pursuant to the judgment.

A significant reaffirmation of procedural safeguards

The judgment represents one of the Supreme Court’s clearest articulations of the constitutional limits governing citizenship determination. While preserving the statutory burden under Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, the Court has made it equally clear that this burden cannot transform Foreigners Tribunal proceedings into a mechanical exercise or permit declarations based solely on non-appearance or unsupported allegations.

By harmonising the Foreigners Act with the procedural safeguards embedded in the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964 and the guarantees of equality and personal liberty under Articles 14 and 21, the Bench reaffirmed that fair procedure is not contingent upon citizenship. Even where an individual ultimately fails to establish Indian citizenship, the determination must emerge from a meaningful adjudication marked by adequate notice, disclosure of the grounds of allegation, independent scrutiny of evidence and reasoned findings.

The ruling also reinforces the institutional role of Foreigners Tribunals as the primary adjudicatory forums for citizenship disputes, cautioning High Courts against becoming the first forum for factual appreciation of documentary evidence in writ proceedings. At the same time, it balances individual rights with the State’s sovereign authority to regulate citizenship by reiterating that the remand neither weakens the burden under Section 9 nor creates any presumption in favour of the appellants.

In doing so, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed a foundational constitutional principle: the State’s power to determine citizenship must be exercised through procedures that are fair, lawful and reasoned, because the legitimacy of the outcome depends as much upon the integrity of the process as upon the correctness of the final decision.

The complete judgment may be read below:

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