The four, Danish Sheikh, Sweety Bibi and her two sons, re-entered India through the Mahadipur border in West Bengal’s Malda district after spending months stranded in Bangladesh following their deportation in June 2025. This was the period (May-June 2025) when huge such undocumented “push out” efforts were carried out by the authorities under some instructions issued by the union government at the centre. Their return comes months after Sunali Khatun, who was pregnant at the time of her deportation, and her young son Sabir were allowed to return to India on humanitarian grounds. Together, the cases have become emblematic of the risks posed by administrative errors in citizenship determination and the constitutional imperative of ensuring that no individual is deprived of liberty without due process.

Detailed piece on Khatun’s deportation may be read here.

According to Scroll, residents of Paikar village in West Bengal’s Birbhum district confirmed that Danish Sheikh, Sweety Bibi and her two sons returned to the state after the Union Government complied with judicial directions requiring their repatriation. The families have consistently maintained that they are Indian citizens from Birbhum and had been living and working in Delhi when they were detained during an identity-verification exercise.

The deportations formed part of a wider crackdown that followed the April 2025 terror attack in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir. In the weeks that followed, police in several Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states reportedly detained large numbers of Bengali-speaking persons, predominantly Muslims, and demanded documentary proof of Indian citizenship. Several individuals who allegedly failed to immediately establish their nationality were deported to Bangladesh. Subsequent investigations and court proceedings revealed that, in multiple cases, Indian citizens had been caught in the sweep.

Detailed report may be read here.

Few cases illustrate the devastating consequences of such errors more starkly than that of Sunali Khatun and her family. As reported by BBC News, Khatun, her husband Danish Sheikh and their young son were detained in Delhi after officials suspected that they were undocumented migrants. The family maintained throughout that they were Indian citizens from West Bengal. According to Khatun’s account, authorities failed to adequately verify the family’s claims or examine available evidence before initiating deportation proceedings.

The family was transported across the border into Bangladesh, where Bangladeshi authorities treated them as undocumented entrants and detained them. Instead of returning to the country of which they claimed to be citizens, they found themselves imprisoned in a foreign nation, separated from relatives and stripped of the protections ordinarily available under Indian law. What began as an administrative decision soon evolved into a humanitarian crisis.

The case exposed the extraordinary consequences of mistaken deportation. Unlike routine immigration enforcement, an erroneous determination of citizenship can sever families, deprive individuals of their nationality in practice, expose them to detention in another country and leave them without any effective legal protection. For those wrongfully deported, the consequences extend far beyond the loss of physical liberty—they amount to the denial of identity, dignity and constitutional safeguards.

The legality of these deportations soon came under judicial scrutiny. In September 2025, the Calcutta High Court, while deciding Bhodu Sekh v. Union of India & Ors. and the connected matter Amir Khan v. Union of India & Ors., delivered a strongly worded judgment directing the Union Government to bring back the deported families within four weeks.

The Division Bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Reetobroto Kumar Mitra held that the authorities had acted in “hot haste” and failed to comply with basic procedural safeguards before deporting individuals who had asserted Indian citizenship. The Court found that the actions of the Delhi Police and the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) raised serious concerns under Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution and underscored that executive action, even in matters concerning illegal migration, must remain subject to constitutional limitations.

The Court directed the Union Government, through the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Indian High Commission in Dhaka, to facilitate the return of Sunali Khatun, Danish Sheikh and their son Sabir, along with Sweety Bibi and her two sons. In doing so, it reaffirmed that constitutional guarantees cannot be displaced by administrative expediency.

Detailed report may be read here.

The facts before the High Court painted a disturbing picture. According to the petitions, Sunali Khatun’s family was picked up by Delhi Police on June 24, 2025, during an identity-verification drive. Within forty-eight hours—and without any meaningful inquiry into their citizenship claims—they were deported to Bangladesh under orders issued by the FRRO under the Foreigners Act, 1946.

The petitioner’s case was that the family had longstanding roots in West Bengal. They possessed family members, land records and other documentary evidence linking them to Birbhum district. Significantly, Sunali’s Aadhaar and Permanent Account Number (PAN) records reflected her year of birth as 2000, directly contradicting the authorities’ assertion that she had entered India illegally in 1998—a claim that was factually impossible if the official records were accurate.

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.

The Union Government defended its actions by relying on Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946, arguing that the burden of proving Indian citizenship rested upon the individuals concerned. It claimed that the detainees had failed to produce sufficient documents establishing their nationality and asserted that statements recorded during interrogation indicated that they were Bangladeshi nationals who had entered India illegally. The High Court, however, found that such disputed claims required proper verification and could not justify immediate deportation without following the prescribed legal process.

Supreme Court intervention and the government’s assurance

The Union Government challenged the Calcutta High Court’s directions before the Supreme Court, questioning both the High Court’s jurisdiction and its order directing the return of the deported individuals. However, the proceedings before the apex court marked a significant shift in the Centre’s position.

On May 22, 2026, the Union Government informed the Supreme Court that it would facilitate the return of the deported individuals to India and conduct a proper inquiry into their citizenship claims before taking any further action. Appearing before a Bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submitted that, “keeping in view the peculiar facts and circumstances of the case,” the Government had decided to bring the individuals back and verify their citizenship status in accordance with law.

Detailed report may be read here.

Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde, appearing for the affected families, requested that the Government’s assurance be formally recorded. Accepting the submission, the Supreme Court directed that the deported individuals be brought back to India and clarified that their continued stay would depend upon the outcome of a lawful inquiry into their citizenship claims. At the same time, the Court recorded the Government’s submission that the undertaking was being made in the peculiar facts of the case and should not be treated as a precedent for future deportation disputes.

The Centre informed the Court that the process of bringing the individuals back from Bangladesh would take approximately eight to ten days. The undertaking marked a notable departure from its earlier stand, under which it had defended the deportations as lawful exercises of executive power under the Foreigners Act.

The Supreme Court had, in fact, intervened even earlier in December 2025 in respect of Sunali Khatun. At the time, she was in an advanced stage of pregnancy and remained stranded in Bangladesh along with her young son. Considering the humanitarian dimensions of the case, the Court permitted their return to India while the dispute regarding citizenship remained pending. During those proceedings, the Bench observed that certain situations required “law to bend to humanity”—a remark that underscored the Court’s attempt to reconcile immigration enforcement with constitutional compassion.

Detailed report may be read here.

Constitutional questions beyond individual cases

The litigation has raised issues that extend far beyond the fate of a handful of families. At its core lies a fundamental constitutional question: can the State deport a person claiming Indian citizenship without first conducting a fair, thorough and lawful determination of that claim?

The Calcutta High Court answered this question emphatically in the negative. The Court observed that documentary material placed before it, including electoral records relating to members of the deportees’ families, prima facie indicated Indian lineage and warranted a detailed inquiry before any coercive action could be taken. Instead, the authorities acted with what the Court described as “hot haste”, deporting individuals within days of detention and without adhering to procedural safeguards contained in the Ministry of Home Affairs’ own guidelines.

The proceedings also highlighted the constitutional significance of Articles 14 and 21. Even where the State suspects an individual to be a foreign national, executive action must satisfy the requirements of fairness, reasonableness and due process. Citizenship disputes cannot be resolved through hurried administrative action that disregards evidence or deprives individuals of an effective opportunity to establish their identity.

The Government relied heavily on Section 9 of the Foreigners Act, 1946, which places the burden of proving citizenship upon the person concerned. However, the High Court made it clear that the statutory burden cannot justify dispensing with procedural fairness. Where credible evidence exists supporting an individual’s claim to Indian citizenship, authorities are required to conduct a meaningful verification before resorting to the irreversible step of deportation.

The cases have also revived discussion around the principle of non-refoulement—the international law norm prohibiting the forcible return of individuals to territories where they may face persecution, arbitrary detention or other serious harm. Although India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Indian courts have repeatedly read elements of this principle into Article 21’s guarantee of life and personal liberty. The petitioners argued that deporting individuals without adequately determining their nationality violated these constitutional protections.

It is crucial to note that in the month of October 2025, a Bangladesh court had ruled that these six individuals were forcibly deported from Delhi as “illegal Bangladeshis”, and are in fact Indian citizens citing their Aadhaar and home addresses. Even pursuant to this, the Union government challenged the Calcutta HC order in the Supreme Court

Detailed report may be read here and here.

A reminder of the cost of administrative error

The legal battle reached an important milestone when Danish Sheikh, Sweety Bibi and her two sons finally returned to West Bengal through the Mahadipur border crossing in Malda district. Their return followed months of litigation and judicial scrutiny that ultimately compelled the Union Government to revisit its position.

Political and legal advocacy around the issue was not confined to the courtroom. Even before the present litigation reached the Supreme Court, the Trinamool Congress (TMC) had repeatedly raised concerns over the treatment of Bengali-speaking migrant workers and alleged instances of wrongful detention and deportation. In May 2025, Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam wrote to Union Home Minister Amit Shah seeking immediate intervention against the reported harassment, detention and violence faced by Bengali-speaking workers in BJP-ruled states. Around the same time, Berhampore MP Yusuf Pathan also expressed concern over reports that migrant labourers from his constituency were being systematically targeted in Odisha, calling for measures to ensure their safety and protection.

The issue soon reached the Supreme Court in a broader constitutional challenge. In August 2025, the Court sought responses from the Union Government and nine States on a petition filed by the West Bengal Migrant Welfare Board alleging that migrant labourers from West Bengal were being detained on unverified allegations of being illegal Bangladeshi immigrants. As reported by The Hindu, a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi acknowledged the State’s legitimate concern over illegal infiltration but observed that there must be a mechanism to identify and protect “bona fide workers.” The petition challenged the implementation of the Ministry of Home Affairs’ May 2, 2025 circular, contending that inter-state verification drives had resulted in arbitrary detention of genuine Indian citizens.

The party also remained actively involved after the deportations of the Birbhum families. In September 2025, TMC Rajya Sabha MP Samirul Islam visited the families of Sunali Khatun and Sweety Bibi in Murarai, Birbhum, after the two women and their children were allegedly pushed into Bangladesh despite claiming Indian citizenship. In a post on X, Islam described them as “bona fide Indian citizens” whose families had lived in Birbhum for generations and said the party, under Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, was pursuing the matter before both the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court. He assured the families that every possible legal and institutional assistance would be extended, including enrolment in the State government’s Shramshree welfare scheme once the women returned to India.

Speaking to Scroll, Trinamool Congress MP Samirul Islam remarked that it was “only because of the judiciary’s intervention” that the Government ultimately brought back what he described as “poor Indian citizens.” While affirming that genuine foreign nationals could lawfully be deported, he questioned why Indian citizens should be subjected to harassment, detention and expulsion before their citizenship was properly verified.

For the affected families, the return to India represents only partial relief. Their citizenship claims are yet to be conclusively determined, and the litigation continues. Nevertheless, their repatriation serves as an acknowledgement that irreversible executive action cannot precede a lawful determination of nationality.

The episode also carries wider implications for citizenship verification exercises across the country. Since the Pahalgam terror attack, numerous reports by SabrangIndia and Citizens for Justice and Peace have documented allegations of Bengali-speaking Muslims being detained, questioned and, in some cases, deported without adequate verification. The present litigation demonstrates the serious constitutional consequences of such practices and reinforces the judiciary’s role as a safeguard against arbitrary executive action.

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

CJP has also been providing legal aid in cases of forced and illegal deportations. Details may be read here.

Ultimately, the case is not merely about immigration enforcement or citizenship documentation. It is about the constitutional obligation of the State to exercise its powers fairly, cautiously and in accordance with due process. A mistaken deportation is not a routine administrative error—it can separate families, expose individuals to imprisonment in a foreign country and effectively deprive them of their nationality. The return of these families, secured through persistent judicial intervention, stands as a reminder that constitutional guarantees acquire their greatest significance precisely when the State exercises its most coercive powers.

Related:

The Battle of Belonging: Why India’s Passport Controversy Matters

IR 2025-2026: A backdoor exercise to bring in the NRC?

SIR 2025-26: Dismantling the very Idea of India?

“They were once sent back”: Court refrains from probing State’s claim as Assam seeks to justify continued detention

The Uneasy Calm in Assam: The Limits of Control of a Nervous Government

The post The cost of a wrongful deportation appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Speaking at a memorial meeting in Bandra, Mumbai, Teesta Setalvad reflects on the extraordinary journey of the 84-year-old Jesuit priest who dedicated decades of his life to defending Adivasi communities, battling systemic injustice, achieving path-breaking victories through India’s judicial system.

Setalvad also recalls his constitutional values, his powerful writings, and the circumstances that led to his incarceration under the UAPA in the Bhima Koregaon case.

As his health deteriorated in custody, repeated pleas for bail were denied.

He died a sick man, a victim of a failed system.

The post Did Indian Democracy fail Father Stan Swamy? appeared first on SabrangIndia.

In other words, the Supreme Court recognised that the labour performed within households is labour. It creates value, sustains lives, reproduces communities, and makes possible the very forms of productive activity that economists, governments, and policymakers are accustomed to celebrating.

Yet beneath the welcome symbolism of the judgment lies a more disquieting question. If homemakers are indeed nation builders, why has the nation found it so difficult to see them? Why does recognition arrive most readily at the moment of death, when a court is compelled to calculate the consequences of a woman’s death, while the labour itself continues to unfold every day in a space that remains curiously peripheral to the language of economics?

The question is worth dwelling upon because it directs attention away from the judgment itself and towards the assumptions that make such recognition appear exceptional in the first place. For decades, feminist scholars have pointed out that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, between economy and household, between production and reproduction, is neither natural nor self-evident. It is a political distinction that has acquired the appearance of nature or natural through repetition. Once established, however, it produces a peculiar inversion. The activities most essential to sustaining life become those least likely to be recognised as economically significant.

This was the insight that animated the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign of the 1970s. When Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Selma James demanded wages for domestic labour, they were not merely seeking a salary for homemakers, they sought to expose the hidden structure upon which capitalist economies rest. The worker arriving at a factory, an office, a school, or a government institution does not arrive fully formed. Somebody has fed that worker, cared for that worker during illness, raised that worker as a child, absorbed emotional crises, maintained living spaces, and performed the innumerable acts of care through which human beings become capable of participating in economic life. Yet the labour that reproduces labour power strangely remains outside the categories through which production is understood.

Federici’s contribution lies in her insistence that housework is not external to capitalism but one of its conditions of possibility. Capital accumulates not merely through what happens in factories and offices but through its ability to extract enormous reservoirs of labour for which it does not pay. Domestic labour though highly valuable, is ignored because its invisibility is economically useful.

If Federici exposes why domestic labour remains unpaid, Marilyn Waring reveals why women remain uncounted. In her influential work If Women Counted, Waring demonstrated that national accounting systems were never designed to measure the activities that sustain social life. They were designed to measure only the market transactions. Hence, the frameworks through which nations calculate wealth and prosperity were constructed in ways that rendered large portions of women’s work conceptually invisible from the very outset. To put it simply, it sounds nothing short of absurd. A woman preparing meals for her family contributes nothing to GDP. The same meal purchased from a restaurant contributes to economic growth. A mother caring for her child remains economically inactive. The same care purchased through the market becomes productive labour. The activity remains unchanged. What changes is its relationship to exchange.

Waring’s argument exposes the extent to which economic measurement reflects a particular philosophy of value. GDP records transactions with extraordinary precision while remaining largely indifferent to the activities that make those transactions possible. It can quantify military expenditure, financial speculation, and commodity production, yet fails to recognise the labour involved in feeding children, tending to the elderly, caring for the sick, or maintaining households. The economy, in other words, counts what passes through markets and quietly excludes much of what sustains life.

Devaki Jain, the Indian economist explained this conundrum by demonstrating how statistical categories themselves reproduce invisibility. Through her ‘Time Use Surveys’, Jain shows that women who appeared “economically inactive” within conventional labour statistics were often engaged in a dizzying array of activities like collecting water, gathering fuel, tending livestock, processing food, caring for children, supporting agricultural work, managing households, and sustaining networks of community survival. Once ‘time’ instead of ‘wages’ become the unit of analysis, an entirely different economy comes into view. Women who had been categorised as ‘non-workers’ now emerged as individuals performing longer hours of labour than men.

The ‘Time Use Survey’ extends beyond methodology as it reveals that invisibility is produced through the categories by which societies choose to organise knowledge. Michel Foucault’s analysis that systems of knowledge do not simply describe reality but actively organise it, reveals that statistics, classifications, surveys, and economic indicators function not as neutral instruments but as technologies of visibility. They determine what becomes legible and what recedes into oblivion. GDP does not simply measure the economy, more dangerously it defines what economy is. And if the homemaker disappears, it is because the dominant economic frameworks have already determined where value resides. Even when the homemaker finally gets recognition as with the Court’s ruling, it only addresses the cultural invisibility because as Nancy Fraser argues, it is the redistribution that would addresses material inequality. The problem confronting homemakers is that they have historically been denied both. Their labour has been culturally devalued and materially uncompensated. In order to recognize homemakers as nation builders, structural redistribution is essential, lest it remains only a symbolic inclusion.

Diane Elson extends the argument in analysing how economies depend upon women’s unpaid labour not only within households but also as a mechanism through which states manage crises. When public healthcare deteriorates, when childcare remains inaccessible or when welfare provisions are reduced, the resulting burdens do not vanish, it gets transferred and more often than not, they reappear within households as additional responsibilities carried by women. Elson’s description of women as the economy’s “shock absorbers” remains one of the most powerful formulations in feminist economics because it captures the silent transfer through which public failures become private obligations which we all witnessed at a large scale during the Covid-19 Pandemic. The fiscal prudence at the level of policy during whether during emergencies, lockdown or any other calamity translates into longer days, intensified caregiving responsibilities, and greater unpaid labour at the level of everyday life for women.

Does it mean that we are asking the wrong question all this time and it’s not really about the monetary value of domestic work. Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers a useful way of thinking beyond the language of valuation alone. Sen’s central insight was that human well-being cannot be reduced to income. What matters are the substantive freedoms individuals possess to live lives they have reason to value. The predicament of homemakers is not merely that they remain unpaid. It is in reality those decades devoted to sustaining households that of the leave women physically unfit without independent assets, pension rights, social security, economic autonomy, or meaningful control over their futures. Thus, we need to move the conversation from compensation to capability.

A society genuinely committed to recognising care would therefore have to think beyond symbolic gestures and beyond wages alone. It would require pensions for caregivers, universal social security, robust childcare systems, healthcare guarantees, inheritance protections, and policies that expand women’s capabilities rather than merely assigning monetary value to their labour like 30,000 rupees.

The Supreme Court’s judgment is not merely the value of domestic labour but the limitations of the frameworks through which value itself is understood. For too long, economies have been imagined through the language of production while treating the reproduction of life as an afterthought. Feminist scholars have spent decades challenging this hierarchy. Societies survive not because markets function efficiently but because vast amounts of labour continue to be performed beyond the market’s gaze.

The homemaker has always been a nation builder. The real challenge posed by the Court’s judgment is whether we are prepared to reconstruct our understanding of the economy around that fact, or whether we will continue to celebrate the labour that sustains society while organising our measures of prosperity around everything except the work that makes life possible.

(The author teaches at Sarojini Naidu Centre for Women’s Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi)

[1] “We are also of the view that the housewife contributes to the growth of the human being and the nation. The homemaker builds nation. So we have laid down the principles, and as a nation builder, we have housewife, we have quantified the amount that the loss of domestic care monthly income minimum in any event would be 30,000 per month,” Justice Karol said at the time of pronouncement. “The homemakers, to put it directly, actually are the ‘nation builders’ and they ought to be recognised as such.” The Court stringently observed that homemakers continue to be perceived as dependent on earning members despite the household substantially depending on their labour and care. The bench noted that unpaid domestic and caregiving work performed by women remains economically undervalued despite its enormous contribution to society and the economy. “It is ironic to describe a homemaker as dependant on earning members, when, in reality the household’s functioning depends substantially on the homemaker,” the Bench said. The judgment contains an extensive discussion on the social, emotional, economic and psychological contributions made by homemakers. Referring to women as the first teachers of children and the unseen force behind families, the Court said homemakers play a central role in shaping human capital, social bonds and national development: https://www.livelaw.in/top-stories/homemakers-are-nation-builders-supreme-court-quantifies-homemaker-contribution-as-rs-30k-per-month-537483

Related:

‘Married woman told to do household work will not be seen as maid servant’: Bombay HC

Kerala HC: “Even if a woman wears a ‘provocative dress’ that cannot give a licence to a man to outrage her modesty”

The post Women: Nation builders, missing from the nation’s books appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Read the judgment primer by CJP here.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote the historian Lord Acton. Critics argue that legal protections governing the prosecution of offences by uniformed personnel have fostered a culture of impunity by making accountability more difficult. Over the years, members of India’s armed, paramilitary and police forces have been implicated in a range of serious offences against civilians, including rape, extrajudicial killings, staged encounters, culpable homicide, enforced disappearances, illegal detention, and custodial torture.

The 1991 in the villages of Kunan and Poshpora in Kashmir, the army personnel allegedly raped over 23 women in Kashmir (Human Rights Watch assessed the number of survivors at up to 100). It is gut wrenching but it is by no means the only one. In 2004, a 32-year old activist Thangjam Manorama was allegedly raped and murdered by the Indian paramilitary unit 17th Assam Rifles in Manipur. Following this, around twelve elderly women staged a naked protest outside the Assam Rifles headquarters. Their banner read: ‘Indian Army Rape Us.’

CREDIT: BBC News

In 2009, two women from Shopian in Kashmir were allegedly abducted, repeatedly gang-raped by soldiers, and murdered. Their bodies were recovered from a river.

In 2010, a 16-year-old Zahid Farooq Sheikh was shot and killed by BSF personnel as he was walking home from playing cricket with friends in Srinagar.

In 2015 and 2016, a National Commission for Scheduled Tribes (NCST) fact-finding report documented three instances of mass sexual violence including gang-rapes, physical assault, and looting by police and paramilitary personnel deployed on anti-Maoist operations in Chhattisgarh. The victims were Adivasi women, subsistence farmers. The report concluded that there had been a breakdown of discipline among the forces concerned.

In 2021, soldiers from the 21 Para Special Forces army unit shot and killed six coal miners in Nagaland’s Mon district, for mistaking the miners for militants.

These are only a few cases that reached the media. The structure of the law and the barriers to FIR registration in conflict areas means that for every case that surfaces, an unknown number do not.

In 2018, over 350 army personnel filed a petition in the Supreme Court to protect the AFSPA from being diluted. Its defenders argue that soldiers operating in counter-insurgency environments face split-second, life-or-death decisions. They are trained not to open fire unless they are fired upon, attacked, or have reasonable grounds to believe an attack is imminent. AFSPA was enacted in 1958 to enable the deployment of the armed forces in areas where the civil administration had failed to maintain law and order.  The legal protection under AFSPA is therefore justified, they contend, because actions taken during combat cannot be judged with the benefit of hindsight.

The criticism, however, is not that soldiers acting in good faith during genuine combat operations should be prosecuted. It is that the shield of prior sanction has repeatedly been invoked to protect those accused of abusing that power.

For instance, in Manorama’s case mentioned before, the post-mortem revealed injuries consistent with torture, including bullet wounds on her vagina. Most significantly, the Central Forensic Science Laboratory detected human semen on her clothing, suggesting that she had been sexually assaulted before her death. Yet the Assam Rifles invoked Section 6 of AFSPA to argue that no legal proceedings could continue without prior sanction from the Central Government. Manorama’s family questioned how acts such as rape, torture and the killing of an unarmed woman could ever be considered actions taken ‘in aid of civil power’ or in the exercise of official duty.

The full Human Rights Watch report can be accessed here.

Put very simply, there is no operational rationale for extending immunity to those who have abused the power, and specifically in the offence of rape. Unlike the use of force during an armed encounter, rape can never be characterised as a split-second military judgment or an act committed in good faith in the discharge of official duties. It is an intentional criminal act. The law offers no convincing explanation for why allegations of rape should be subject to the same procedural immunity as decisions taken during armed engagement.

According to Margot Walstrom, Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, “[Sexual violence] is a way of demonstrating power and control. It inflicts fear on the whole community. And it is unfortunately a very effective, cheap and silent weapon with a long lasting effect on every society.”

A 2019 paper titled ‘Violence against women by the army personnel’ reads, “Many in Mizoram do not even talk about those days when such trauma was so prominent as to bring gushes of trauma to them. Those instances have been simply called “troubles” and no discussion takes place, such is the trauma that has been inflicted on people.”

In India’s conflict zones, sexual violence has long been dismissed as ‘collateral damage.’ As an unfortunate but inevitable cost of maintaining order in disturbed areas. However, it arguably is a documented, recurring pattern of abuse that is shielded by law and enabled by institutional silence.

The severity and persistence of the reports surrounding rapes by uniformed personnel compelled the Justice Verma Committee constituted in the wake of the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape to specifically examine the position of women in conflict areas and recommend a review of the AFSPA. The committee explicitly said that women in conflict areas are entitled to all the security and dignity that is afforded to citizens in any other part of our country.

That was over fifteen years ago.

In the intervening period, India has overhauled its criminal law framework wholesale, replacing the Indian Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Evidence Act with new statutes  expressly on the ground that the old laws were colonial relics. But the provisions of AFSPA, the Border Security Forces (‘BSF’) Act, the Army Act 1950, and the Disturbed Areas Act 1992 that shield uniformed personnel from prosecution for crimes committed against civilians remain untouched.

The Legal Architecture

Several statutory provisions form the backbone of security force immunity in India.

Section 197 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (now Section 218 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Suraksha Sanhita ) requires government sanction before a court can prosecute judges and public servants, including armed forces and police officials, for offenses committed while discharging official duties unless the Central Government first grants sanction for prosecution. The Ministry of Home Affairs is vested with the authority to grant sanction for prosecution of public servants.

Section 47 of the BSF Act provides that BSF personnel accused of serious civil offences including  murder, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, or rape against civilians cannot ordinarily be tried by an internal Security Force Court, unless the offence was committed on active duty, outside India, or at a location specifically notified by the Central Government. Read alongside the sanction requirement, this provision can operate as a gap between two forums where civilian courts are barred without sanction and military courts barred by the section itself.

Similarly, Section 70 of the Army Act, 1950 specifies when military personnel cannot be tried by a court-martial for certain serious crimes against civilians.

According to section 6 of the AFSPA no prosecution, suit, or legal proceeding may be brought against any person acting under AFSPA without the prior sanction of the Central Government. This provision has operated in parts of the Northeast since 1958 and in Jammu and Kashmir since 1990.

How have the Courts acted?

In Sebastian Hongray v. Union of India (1984), the petitioner, a student from the Naga community contended that two men were unlawfully detained by the 21st Sikh Regiment during a combing operation in Huining village of Manipur. The Army could not produce or account for two men taken into custody and asserted that the men had left the army camp alive and that an extensive search, including a CBI enquiry, had failed to locate them in Manipur. The Court applied habeas corpus directly against the Union of India and later imposed exemplary costs. The Court said:

“As we are inclined to direct registration of an offence and an investigation, we express no opinion as to what fate has befallen to Shri C. Daniel and Shri C. Paul, the missing two persons in respect of whom the writ of habeas corpus was issued save and except saying that they have not met their tragic end in an encounter as is usually claimed and the only possible inference that can be drawn from circumstance already discussed is that both of them must have met an unnatural death. Prima facie, it would be an offence of murder. 

….

 It is not necessary to start casting a doubt on anyone or any particular person. But prima facie there is material on record to reach an affirmative conclusion that both Shri C. Daniel and Shri C. Paul are not alive and have met an unnatural death. And the Union of India cannot disown the responsibility in this behalf.”

A decade later, in Nilabati Behera v. State of Orissa (1993), the Supreme Court confronted the death of a man after arrest by the police. With characteristic directness, the Court held that the doctrine of sovereign immunity used to shield the State from civil liability has no place in proceedings for the enforcement of fundamental rights and that:

“There is a great responsibility on the police or prison authorities to ensure that the citizen in its custody is not deprived of his right to life. His liberty is in the very nature of things circumscribed by the very fact of his confinement and therefore his interest in the limited liberty left to him is rather precious. The duty of care on the part of the State is strict and admits of no exceptions.”

“A reading of the morning newspapers almost everyday carrying reports of dehumanising torture, assault, rape and death in custody of police or other governmental agencies is indeed depressing,” was the Court’s observation in D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1996) in which it issued a comprehensive set of binding guidelines governing arrest, documentation, medical examination, and notification of family members, and held that violation of these guidelines would render police officers personally liable for contempt of court. The Court reiterated that defence of sovereign immunity is not available to the State for the tortious act of the public servants and for the established violation of the rights guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution of India.

In Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights v. Union of India (1997), the Supreme Court constitutionally upheld the validity of AFSPA. It also curated a list of ‘Do’s and Don’ts,’ in which the use of excessive force or retaliatory force by the Manipur Police or the armed forces of the Union was not permissible.

However, the provision that ASPA’s protection was not absolute and that it did not grant a ‘licence to kill indiscriminately’ remained a judicial aspiration rather than an enforceable limit.

Significantly in 2012, a division bench of Justices BS Chauhan and Swatenter Kumar while hearing the Pathribal case at the Supreme Court orally remarked that AFSPA gave very limited protection confined to action in discharge of duty and that rape and murder committed by its personnel should be considered a normal crime. The Court said that there is no question of sanction from the government before prosecution of offenders in such cases. Reported The Indian Express.

“You go to a place in exercise of AFSPA, you commit rape, you commit murder, then where is the question of sanction? It is a normal crime which needs to be prosecuted, and that is our stand,” the bench said.  However, ultimately the Court held that where AFSPA’s protection applies, prior sanction from the Central Government is required before the criminal court can take cognizance of the offence but if the competent Army authority opts for trial by court-martial, no such sanction is needed.

In 2013, the Supreme Court affirmed that the power of the armed forces to seek trial before a General Security Force Court is not unlimited. In the case concerning the killing of a teenager by BSF personnel, a Bench of Justices Chandramauli Prasad and Ibrahim Kalifulla set aside a Jammu and Kashmir High Court order that had transferred the trial to a General Security Force Court under the BSF Act, 1968. The Court described the allegations against the accused as “very distressing” and held that merely because the personnel were on active duty in a disturbed area did not automatically entitle the BSF to claim jurisdiction. The Court also held that the commanding officer’s discretion to seek trial before a security force court was not absolute and had been exercised without considering the statutory restrictions requiring such a course to be necessary in the interest of discipline.

In Extra-Judicial Execution Victim Families Association (EEVFAM) v. Union of India (2016), the Court examined 1,528 alleged encounter killings by police and armed forces in Manipur between 1979 and 2012. A court-appointed Justice Hegde Commission investigated six cases and concluded that none were genuine encounters and that the security forces had exceeded their powers.

While hearing the case, a bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and U U Lalit rapped the Army for silence over the allegations and questioned the state government for not proceeding with these cases against them. “Don’t you want to inquire even if somebody makes such allegations against your people (Army personnel)? Are you saying whatever was done was legitimate,” the bench asked. “The reports clearly suggest that the girl was subjected to rape. You are creating a stonewall and you do not want to break that stonewall. You have not tried anything. You have not asked the Army to handover the custody of the alleged culprits,” the Court added.

In its 2017 judgment, the Supreme Court held that even in a disturbed area under AFSPA excessive or retaliatory force is prohibited and ordered every death caused by the armed forces or police to be thoroughly enquired into.

“It does not matter whether the victim was a common person or a militant or a terrorist, nor does it matter whether the aggressor was a common person or the State. The law is the same for both and is equally applicable to both,” the order read.

The EEVFAM litigation remains alive as a continuing mandamus.

Still, it is relatively uncommon for allegations of rape against armed forces personnel to culminate in prosecution before ordinary civilian criminal courts. Instead, cases have often been dealt with through the military courts, if dealt at all. When convictions have resulted from court-martial proceedings, civilian High Courts have generally examined them in the exercise of judicial review rather than hearing the criminal case at first instance.

In Captain Vinod Kumar vs State of J&K (2012), the Jammu and Kashmir High Court heard the case of two members of the 8th Battalion JAKLI who allegedly broke into a residential house in Poonch and repeatedly raped two women, aged 18 and 24, in front of the victims’ young children. The Army’s Commanding Officer initially opted in 1999 for the accused to be tried by a civil criminal court rather than a Court-martial. However, the petitioners challenged this. The Court ruled that the trial should not be abandoned and rejected the idea that army personnel should go ‘Scott free’ due to procedural errors. It famously noted that “Crime does not die in this manner” and emphasized that the seriousness of a rape charge outweighs technical procedural wrangles.

In 2014, a division bench of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court upheld the sentence by the Summary General Court Martial which found four army personnel guilty of rape and sentenced them to ten years of rigorous imprisonment and dismissal from service. The Court ruled that Court Martial proceedings can only be invalidated if there is a breach of fundamental procedural rules that renders the trial illegal. The Court emphasized that there cannot be “any compromise with the standards and maintenance of discipline in the army. They are not only the sentinels of the frontiers of the country but are also sacred guards of the rights of the people. Any invasion of the rights of the people by this kind of force cannot be tolerated.”

Where the Courts have deferred.

Despite this increasingly robust jurisprudential framework limiting blanket immunity under AFSPA, accountability has remained elusive. More than three decades after the alleged mass rapes in Kunan and Poshpora, judicial and investigative orders have been repeatedly challenged, stayed, or left unresolved. In 2015, the Jammu and Kashmir High Court stayed the Magistrate’s order directing further investigation after objections by the Army. Separately, the State challenged the recommendation of the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission awarding compensation to the survivors before the Supreme Court. In its report, the Commission observed that the Director General of Police had attempted to “push the collective crime committed by the army personnel under the carpet” and that the medical evidence pointed towards gang rape. Following the abrogation of Article 370, the State Human Rights Commission itself ceased to exist, while the compensation proceedings remain pending before the Supreme Court and the criminal proceedings continue to languish without final adjudication. Reporter The Outlook.

The litigation in Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association (EEVFAM) continues as a court-monitored process nearly a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark rulings. Thangjam Manorama Devi’s case, despite forensic evidence suggestive of sexual assault and repeated judicial scrutiny, has similarly failed to result in criminal prosecution. In these cases justice has been deferred through prolonged litigation, jurisdictional objections, repeated appeals, and institutional inaction. The consequence is much the same that is the promise of accountability remains suspended indefinitely.

According to Rishika Arora and Iyina Grover, there is a requirement for a new protocol for protecting the women in an armed conflict. Women’s participation in the drafting of future laws and their appointment as judicial officers in army tribunals are essential steps. The concept of the court martial must be women-oriented.

The Justice Verma Committee recommendations are as follows:

1.  Sexual violence against women by members of the armed forces or uniformed personnel must be brought under the purview of ordinary criminal law;
2. Special care must also be taken to ensure the safety of women who are complainants and witnesses in cases of sexual assault by armed personnel;
3. There should be special commissioners – who are either judicially or legislatively appointed – for women’s safety and security in all areas of conflict in the country. These commissioners must be chosen from those who have experience with women’s issues, preferably in conflict areas. In addition, such commissioners must be vested with adequate powers to monitor and initiate action for redress and criminal prosecution in all cases of sexual violence against women by armed personnel;
4. Care must be taken to ensure the safety and security of women detainees in police stations, and women at army or paramilitary check points, and this should be a subject under the regular monitoring of the special commissioners mentioned earlier;
5. The general law relating to detention of women during specified hours of the day must be strictly followed;
6. Training and monitoring of armed personnel must be reoriented to include and emphasize strict observance by the armed personnel of all orders issued in this behalf;
7. There is an imminent need to review the continuance of AFSPA and AFSPA-like legal protocols in internal conflict areas as soon as possible. This is necessary for determining the propriety of resorting to this legislation in the area(s) concerned; and
8. Jurisdictional issues must be resolved immediately and simple procedural protocols put in place to avoid situations where police refuse or refrain from registering cases against paramilitary personnel.

Those recommendations remain unimplemented.

The Supreme Court has already suggested that AFSPA’s protection is limited to acts conducted in the line of duty, and that offences such as rape and murder are ordinary crimes that do not require special courts. The incorporation of these suggestions remains awaited because the nation will not fully deliver on its constitutional promise until its laws place all citizens, including those in its border areas and conflict zones, on an equal footing before justice.

“The primary task of the armed forces of the Union is to defend the country in the event of war or when it is face with external aggression. Their training and orientation defeat the hostile forces. A situation of internal disturbance involving the local population requires a different approach. Involvement of armed forces is handling such a situation brings them in confrontation with their countrymen. Prolonged or too frequent deployment of armed forces for handling such situations is likely to generate a feeling of alienation among the people against the armed forces who by their sacrifices in the defence of their country have earned a place in the hearts of the people,” said the Court in  Naga People’s Movement of Human Rights in 1997.

Nearly three decades later, that warning remains as relevant as ever.  The Mizoram conviction in the 2017 case is still, in this landscape, a welcome anomaly even though it took the Court nine years to reach a decision because it shows what the system is capable of.  The guarantee that every woman in a conflict area who files a complaint will have her case heard by a court that is independent of the institution she is accusing is perhaps the minimum that the Constitution already promises and what the Mizoram court, in its judgment of June 2026, briefly delivered.

(The legal research team of CJP consists of lawyers and interns; this judgement primer has been worked on by Tanishka Shah)

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The post Promising Principles Poor Outcomes: What the judicial record on security force accountability actually shows appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The statement has elaborated on the provisions of international humanitarian law that recognises that even in times of war, humanity must prevail, the Geneva Conventions and their Additional Protocols grant special protection to hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel, and rescue workers, recognising that those who dedicate their lives to saving others must never become targets of armed conflict. These fundamental and noble principles have been repeatedly and systematically violated by Israel, the occupying Power, says the statement.

“The destruction of healthcare infrastructure has reached catastrophic proportions. Hospitals have been bombed, besieged, and rendered inoperable. Ambulances have been attacked while attempting to rescue the wounded. Doctors, nurses, and paramedics have been killed, injured, or detained while performing their humanitarian duties.

“As of today, only 19 of Gaza’s 34 hospitals remain partially operational, operating under impossible conditions, while severe shortages of medicines, medical equipment, fuel, electricity, and clean water continue to push the healthcare system toward total collapse. In the occupied West Bank, repeated military incursions, restrictions on movement, and shortages of essential medicines have severely disrupted healthcare delivery, with approximately 11,000 surgical procedures reportedly postponed, placing thousands of patients’ lives at further risk.

“This humanitarian catastrophe is not an inevitable consequence of war; it is the result of Israel’s systematic dismantling of the Palestinian healthcare system upon which millions of Palestinian civilians depend for their survival.

“The world witnessed the tragic fate of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was targeted by the Israeli army after remaining trapped for hours. The Palestine Red Crescent ambulance sent to rescue her, despite prior coordination with Israeli authorities, was also attacked, killing the two paramedics. A recent United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry found reasonable grounds to believe that Israeli forces deliberately targeted both the family vehicle and the ambulance.

“Similarly, on March 23, 2025, the international community watched in horror as video evidence emerged documenting the Israeli killing of Palestinian rescue workers in Rafah while carrying out their humanitarian mission. These were not isolated tragedies, but part of a systematic pattern documented by the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and numerous international humanitarian organizations, and they represent only the tip of the iceberg.

“Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital and a respected paediatrician, has become the face of the resilience and humanitarian commitment of Palestinian healthcare workers. As northern Gaza’s healthcare system collapsed under repeated military assaults and siege, he chose to remain with his patients, refusing to abandon those who depended on his care.

“His personal sacrifice became even more profound when he lost his own son, Ibrahim, who was killed during the assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital. Despite this devastating personal tragedy, Dr. Abu Safiya returned almost immediately to caring for his patients, embodying the highest ideals of the medical profession.

“On December 27, 2024, following the assault on Kamal Adwan Hospital-the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza-Israeli forces detained Dr. Abu Safiya, together with members of the medical staff and patients, under Israel’s Unlawful Combatants Law. Since then, he has remained in Israeli detention. His continued detention has become a matter of grave international concern.

“Yesterday, July 8, 2026, United Nations Special Rapporteurs and independent human rights experts called for Dr. Abu Safiya’s immediate release, expressing serious concern over credible reports that he has been subjected to torture, other forms of ill-treatment, prolonged solitary confinement, denial of adequate medical care, and a severe deterioration in both his physical and psychological condition. The experts further emphasized that his detention appears to be arbitrary and urged his immediate release unless internationally recognized criminal charges are promptly brought against him.”

It is in light of these dire and precarious circumstances that the Palestinian embassy has issued the statement and appeal. The appeal calls on all Indians to support and join the call for the immediate and unconditional release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya; advocating for the protection of Palestinian healthcare workers, hospitals, ambulances, and medical facilities in accordance with international humanitarian law; supporting independent international investigations and accountability for attacks against medical personnel and healthcare infrastructure; and backing urgent international efforts to restore and strengthen the Palestinian healthcare system while ensuring the unhindered delivery of essential medical supplies and humanitarian assistance.

The continued detention of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya is not merely the case of one physician. It symbolizes the broader assault on the Palestinian healthcare system and the humanitarian principles that underpin international law. Wider support can make a meaningful difference in defending these universal values.

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The post The arbitrary detention of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya: A call for justice appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Despite a sewer, death happening every 45 hours in the country, shameless governments have chosen to remain in criminal silence. Needless to say, Dalit lives don’t matter for government and they have been turned into a new normal. How widespread this practice is can be understood by this simple fact that this year sewer and septic tank deaths have been reported from 16 states across the. Increase in number of deaths in sewers and septic tanks have been alarming over the last decade. While in 2016 only 39 deaths were reported, this figure jumped by 350% next year in 2017 to a staggering 137 deaths.

After various Supreme Court Judgments and the subsequent passage of the ‘Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act’, 2013, one would have expected the governments to be proactive. However, SKA has documented 1726 deaths since the new act came into force. Among them 1203 deaths came just from seven states—Tamil Nadu (332), Gujarat (216), Delhi-NCR (157), Maharashtra (155), Uttar Pradesh (148), Haryana (104) and Bihar (91). Despite such high numbers, none of these states have taken even a single step to stop these deaths.

NAMASTE (National Action for Mechanised Sanitation Ecosystem) scheme was launched by the Modi government in July 2023. The scheme had an allocation of Rs. 349.73 Cr though for building toilets. While, under Swachh Bharat scheme, government had already spent Rs 19 thousand Cr for building 12 Cr toilets. However, neither was the sanitation ecosystem mechanised, nor were dry toilets completely eliminated.

Ironically and unfortunately, all these years ministers in the Modi government kept denying these sordid facts in Parliament, stating, shockingly, that there were no deaths in the country due to Manual Scavenging. Clearly, the act meant or means nothing for them. It also shows, how much government values the lives of Safai Karmacharis, who are still considered to be untouchables.

The SKA has demanded that the Prime Minister intervenes immediately to announce a complete full stop to deaths inside sewers and septic tanks. The press release has been issued by Bezwada Wilson, National Convenor, SKA.

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941 deaths while cleaning sewers, septic tanks: Centre informs Rajya Sabha

The post Though sewer deaths have crossed the 100 mark this year, government is silent: SKA appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The statement caused bewilderment not because the government’s legal position was new, but because it exposed a deeper Indian contradiction: citizenship is foundational yet curiously undocumented. In a constitutional republic of 1.4 billion people, citizenship exists as a legal status but not always as an easily demonstrable document. While India issues citizenship certificates in limited cases such as registration and naturalisation, it has never institutionalised a universal certificate for all citizens, especially those who acquire citizenship by birth. The MEA’s remark did not create this paradox—it merely forced the country to confront it.

At the heart of the confusion lies the persistent conflation of nationality, citizenship, identity, and residency, terms often used interchangeably in public discourse despite their distinct meanings. Citizenship is the legal bond between an individual and the state, determining political rights such as voting and constitutional protections, while nationality, in international law, refers to the state’s recognition of an individual for external purposes like diplomatic protection and travel. Though the two often overlap in many countries, in India the distinction has blurred through administrative practice and conceptual ambiguity. Indian institutions have long treated nationality and citizenship as nearly synonymous, making the state’s sudden insistence on a technical distinction all the more bewildering for ordinary citizens.

The Indian passport itself embodies this ambiguity. It explicitly states “Nationality: Indian,” leading ordinary citizens to reasonably assume that a state-issued passport, granted after rigorous verification, serves as proof of citizenship. Legally, however, the government argues otherwise: under the Passports Act of 1967, a passport is primarily a travel document, and courts have treated it as strong but not conclusive evidence of citizenship. Yet this legal distinction does little to resolve the deeper issue of public trust, which rests not merely on statutory technicalities but on reasonable expectation. An Indian passport is issued only after one of the most rigorous civilian verification processes in the administrative system, involving document scrutiny, identity and address checks, police verification, and database cross-checks. If even a document issued after such extensive sovereign verification cannot provide documentary certainty, citizens are left wondering whether such certainty is possible at all.

The government’s defenders argue that this distinction is standard administrative prudence. Fraudulent passports exist. Errors occur. Illegal entrants have occasionally obtained legitimate-looking documents through forged papers. Therefore, they say, no single document should be considered infallible proof of citizenship. That argument has limited merit. No document is immune from fraud—not birth certificates, not voter IDs, not Aadhaar, not passports. But that observation raises a different question: if every document can theoretically be fraudulent, does that justify treating every citizen as perpetually unverified? Reported NDTV.

This is where the debate ceases to be technical and becomes political.

The anxiety around citizenship in India cannot be separated from a decade of documentation politics. The National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, detention fears, and repeated rhetoric around “infiltrators” have transformed citizenship from a settled constitutional status into an administrative obstacle course, where documentation functions not merely as a tool of governance but as a test of belonging. The MEA statement came amid the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, when heightened scrutiny of voter eligibility had already reignited fears of exclusion and disenfranchisement. In that context, citizens did not hear a sterile legal clarification; many heard a warning that even the strongest state-issued documents may not protect political belonging. This fear is rooted in lived precedent. In a 2019 NRC in Assam, nearly 1.9 million residents were excluded despite many possessing multiple identity documents, shifting the burden onto individuals to prove belonging through legacy records and multi-generational paper trails. Mechanisms such as Foreigners Tribunals and the “D-voter” classification have further institutionalised citizenship uncertainty, forcing ordinary people into adversarial proceedings to prove they belong. For many, documentation politics remains inseparable from the spectre of detention, where documentary failure can lead to physical confinement.

India’s documentation architecture is fragmented and often exclusionary. Birth certificates remain unavailable for many older and rural Indians; Aadhaar is explicitly not proof of citizenship and can be issued to non-citizen residents; voter IDs, ration cards, driving licences, and PAN each establish limited forms of eligibility or identity, not citizenship. Even passports, despite their prestige, are now reduced to “travel documents,” leaving the average Indian in a peculiar legal limbo—surrounded by identity papers yet lacking a universally accepted proof of citizenship. This contradiction is sharpened by the state’s own inconsistency: while past government deliberations on the Right to Information Act treated Indian passport holders abroad as citizens entitled to citizen-only rights, the state also disclaims passports when legal precision demands it. Such selective elasticity erodes trust; a state cannot demand faith in documentation while reserving the right to deny its meaning.

Modern states depend on documentation because scale makes personal recognition impossible. In a village, identity once rested on community knowledge: everyone knew who belonged. In a nation-state of continental scale, belonging must be mediated through paper, databases, and official recognition. Documents are therefore not merely administrative artifacts; they are instruments through which the state acknowledges personhood and membership. When the meaning of those documents becomes unstable, so does the citizen’s relationship with the state. History shows that documentation systems are never neutral; they can serve welfare and recognition, but also surveillance, sorting, and exclusion.

In the digital state, this problem grows even more complex. Exclusion no longer requires explicit denial; it can emerge silently through database mismatches, transliteration errors, biometric failures, OCR mistakes, and algorithmic flags. Citizenship can become vulnerable not only to missing documents but also to broken data. For migrant workers, rural citizens, linguistic minorities, and the elderly, such invisible failures can become life-altering. The irony is stark in the era of chip-enabled e-passports: even as the state invests in biometrics, cryptographic security, and advanced identity verification, documentary certainty remains elusive.

India’s citizenship regime also suffers from the legacy of Partition. Citizenship law evolved amid displacement, migration, refugee flows, and border anxieties. The Constitution initially addressed citizenship under Articles 5 to 11, while Parliament later enacted the Citizenship Act of 1955. Citizenship could be acquired by birth, descent, registration, or naturalisation. But unlike several other countries, India never institutionalised a universal citizenship certification system. This omission mattered little earlier because citizenship itself was rarely contested at mass scale. Today, however, in an era of biometric databases, surveillance, migration politics, and aggressive verification regimes, that old ambiguity has become dangerous.

Most modern democracies recognise that while no document is fraud-proof, state-issued identity documents must carry strong presumptive legitimacy. In countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, passports are widely accepted as authoritative proof of citizenship or nationality for most practical purposes. India’s problem, therefore, lies less in legal technicality than in its institutional reluctance to provide documentary finality. If the government merely intended to clarify that a passport is not legally conclusive in every dispute, that could have been communicated responsibly; instead, the blunt assertion triggered predictable panic—bureaucratically precise, yet politically reckless. Reported IndiaToday.

This debate goes far beyond semantics because documentation burdens are never distributed equally. The affluent, with digitised records and institutional access, can navigate verification with relative ease, while the poor, displaced, migrant workers, linguistic minorities, the elderly, and marginalised communities remain far more vulnerable. Once citizenship becomes document-dependent, inequality becomes destiny: those with paperwork belong, while those without must plead. This raises a constitutional question—whether citizenship is an inherent right of belonging or a status subject to endless bureaucratic revalidation. In a democracy, the burden must remain on the state to prove exclusion, not on citizens to repeatedly prove inclusion; otherwise, documentation becomes an instrument of coercion rather than a service. The gravest danger is not merely bureaucratic inconvenience but functional statelessness—a condition in which individuals possess histories, documents, and social belonging, yet remain unable to satisfy the state’s shifting documentary demands.

The stakes are not merely symbolic. Citizenship determines access to rights reserved exclusively for citizens, including voting, public office, and constitutional freedoms such as speech, assembly, and movement under Article 19. Uncertainty around citizenship, therefore, threatens not only identity, but the practical enjoyment of democratic rights

The strongest public reaction was not to legal technicality alone, but to what it symbolized: a deep erosion of trust. When institutions repeatedly blur the line between governance and suspicion, even routine clarifications begin to feel threatening.

A passport is undeniably a travel document, but it is also the republic’s assurance of belonging and sovereign protection in moments of crisis. Reducing it to mere travel facilitation strips it of its civic meaning, since passports are issued not to transients but to members of a political community. While citizenship may be challenged in exceptional cases involving fraud or unlawful acquisition, such exceptions cannot define ordinary belonging. The possibility of fraud cannot justify normalising uncertainty for all. The MEA may be legally correct that a passport is not conclusive proof of citizenship, but legality without civic logic becomes absurdity. If documents issued after sovereign verification carry no presumptive trust, the problem lies not with the document but with the state. That is the unsettling truth this controversy has exposed: citizenship must confer certainty, dignity, and belonging—not permanent doubt.

The author is an Indian author (his first book being The Essential,2023), policy analyst, and columnist. His research and commentary regularly appear in scholarly and popular publications. Follow @ens_socialis.

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The post The Battle of Belonging: Why India’s Passport Controversy Matters appeared first on SabrangIndia.

At first glance, one appears to be a labour struggle and the other a dispute over nomenclature. Yet viewed together, they reveal an important political trend. The emergence of local resistance to the convergence of economic dispossession and symbolic communal politics. These movements show that ordinary people often understand how struggles over jobs, land and livelihoods can be linked to disputes over identity and history, even when political leaders treat them as unrelated issues.

Giral Mines & “Benefits” from Development

Giral (often also spelled Girel/Girol in media reports) is a lignite-mining project located near Giral village in Barmer district, Rajasthan, about 43 km from Barmer city. The mine is operated by the state-owned company Rajasthan State Mines and Minerals Limited (RSMML). It was the first modern opencast lignite mine in Rajasthan after the closure of the Palana underground mine. Mining operations began in 1994 and commercial production started in May 1995. The Giral lignite field forms part of the larger Barmer Basin, which contains significant lignite deposits and has been the subject of geological and coal studies The mine was developed primarily to supply lignite to the

Giral Lignite Thermal Power Plant (GLTPP)

A major agitation began on 9 April 2026 and continued for weeks in Giral village. Protesters included mine workers, contract labourers, local youth, farmers and land-losers from surrounding villages. According to protesters and local residents, land in Thumbli-Giral and neighbouring villages was acquired by RSMML roughly three decades ago. Villagers allege that the acquisition was accompanied by assurances of local employment, preference to affected families as the long-term economic benefits from mining activities.

These claims form the central basis of contemporary agitation. The protesters’ principal demands reportedly have included: restoration of jobs lost by local workers, priority employment for land-losers and local youth, regularisation and protection of labour rights, action against alleged exploitation by contractors, payment of bonuses under the Bonus Act, 1965 and fulfilment of employment commitments allegedly made during land acquisition.

The Independent MLA of Sheo constituency, Ravindra Singh Bhati became the most visible political face of the agitation. On May 6–7, 2026, about two months ago, he joined the sit-in at Giral village and announced that he would remain with the protesters until their demands were addressed. Bhati joined the workers at the protest site, spent nights with demonstrators, participated in negotiations with the administration, and insisted that discussions include the contractors involved in mine operations. As frustration grew over the lack of progress, he led large protest mobilisations, including a march involving hundreds of vehicles to the Barmer Collectorate.

The agitation reached a dramatic turning point when Bhati attempted self-immolation on May 19 during a protest, drawing state-wide attention to the protest and increasing pressure on the administration. Yet the most tragic moment came on June 4, with the death of Jaisaram Meghwal, a worker associated with the agitation. His death transformed the movement from a labour dispute into a powerful symbol of the people’s sacrifice/martyrdom: the human costs of neglecting workers’ grievances.

Unlike many mining conflicts in India, the Giral agitation centred less on opposing mining itself than on demanding that the promises accompanying development be honoured

Islampur and the Defence of Historical Memory

While Barmer witnessed a struggle over livelihoods, Jhunjhunu witnessed a struggle over history.

The controversy began when a proposal was mooted by Jhunjhunu’s BJP MLA Rajendra Bhamboo to rename Islampur village as “Shrirampur.” Supporters described the move as a cultural correction. Residents of the village, however, saw it as an attempt to erase a historical identity that had existed for centuries.

According to local historical traditions, the village was founded by Islam Khan, an Afghan officer who served under the command of Rao Shekha Kachhwaha, the eponymous founder of Shekhawati. Another notable Afghan officer associated with the Shekhawat court was Farid Khan—later renowned as Sher Shah Suri—who is said to have served under Rao Shekha’s descendant, Raja Raisal Shekhawat. The presence of Afghan military officers in the service of the Shekhawats, together with the history of Jhunjhunu’s Kayamkhani rulers, who were Muslim Chauhans, reflects the region’s layered political and cultural landscape. These intertwined histories complicate rigid religious interpretations of Rajasthan’s past, revealing instead a history shaped by political alliances, military service, and shared regional identities that often-transcended confessional boundaries. For villagers, therefore, the name Islampur was not merely a religious marker. It represented a historical legacy linked to the region’s own evolution. Many residents argued that changing the name would not restore history but erase it.

What made the movement particularly noteworthy was its broad social character. Opposition was not limited to Muslims. Villagers from different backgrounds emphasised that the issue concerned heritage, local autonomy, and communal harmony. They questioned why a settlement that had existed peacefully under the same name for generations had suddenly become the subject of political intervention.

The movement gained wider visibility when Rajendra Singh Gudha joined the protests. Gudha participated in marches to the Jhunjhunu Collectorate and argued that Shekhawati’s history was rooted in coexistence rather than communal division. Highlighting the historical origins of Nawab Islam Khan, he maintained that place-names must reflect their history and should not be altered to satisfy contemporary political agendas, warning against transforming local heritages into a battleground for symbolic politics.

Residents submitted memoranda, organised padyatras, and presented historical records supporting the antiquity of the village’s name. In doing so, they transformed a naming controversy into a broader defence of historical memory and local self-determination.

Unlike many place-name controversies framed as Hindu-Muslim disputes, opposition in Islampur was articulated largely in terms of local history, administrative continuity and communal coexistence.

Rajasthan’s Democratic Legacy 

Post-princely Rajasthan witnessed important shifts in rural power. In many regions, the decline of traditional feudal powers did not eliminate local hierarchies but reconfigured them, with new dominant landed and political elites emerging alongside expanding corporate influence in recent decades.

In western Rajasthan and parts of Shekhawati, changing political coalitions altered the composition of local elites rather than eliminating unequal structures of rural power. The Giral and Islampur movements suggest that communities today are increasingly questioning both economic and symbolic forms of domination Although Giral and Islampur emerged from different circumstances, they illuminate two dimensions of the same political process.

Across India, economic insecurity has intensified through unemployment, contractualisation of labour, land acquisition, and unequal patterns of development. Simultaneously, public debate is increasingly dominated by disputes over names, monuments, historical symbols, and religious identities. These two developments are not always directly connected. Yet they frequently coexist in ways that benefit entrenched power structures. Economic grievances become fragmented while symbolic controversies occupy public attention.

The significance of reading Giral and Islampur together is not that they concern identical issues, but that both involve local communities asserting agency against decisions made elsewhere. In Giral, villagers questioned who benefits from extraction undertaken in the name of development. In Islampur, residents questioned who has the authority to redefine a region’s historical identity. The significance of these movements lies precisely in their refusal to accept the separation of material and cultural concerns. People require both livelihoods and dignity. Development without justice breeds resentment; attempts to reshape local history through top-down cultural politics can similarly provoke resistance. That shared insistence on local agency—over livelihoods in Giral and historical identity in Islampur—may be the most significant form of democratic resistance emerging in Rajasthan today.

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

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

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Hindutva’s Rajasthan Project: Brahmin-Bania Power, not just Muslim baiting

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This second part of the P.V. Narasimha Rao Memorial Lecture 2026 at the Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Open University recently, political economist, Parakala Prabhakar emphasises that the end game of the controversial and ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) conducted by an obviously partisan Election Commission of India (ECI) is the transformation of the Indian state into rigid majoritarian rule.

Sabrangindia is publishing the second part of this lecture today

Leave alone the citizenry. Public intellectuals, media groups, and even political leaders have swallowed this propaganda. (the narrative propagated by the ECI and the present ruling dispensation that SIR is meant only to clean up voters’)

They are uninterested in casting a probing eye on this large-scale disenfranchisement. Political leaders and a large section of the media are looking at this exercise only from the electoral point of view. They are assessing only, who this disenfranchisement benefits and whose electoral chances it harms.

Therefore, many non-BJP/NDA politicians I have interacted with in the states that went to polls after the implementation of SIR felt that it was unlikely to harm their electoral prospects. Among these there are two categories: One felt that the deleted voters were not ‘their voters’. This in itself is troubling. Because these politicians did not want to bother about deletions per se, especially if their calculations show that those deleted from the rolls may have been voters but were/are not their own voters! The second category are those that understood that their own voters too were deleted, but not enough in number to harm their winning chances. For example, some told me that the deletions were about four thousand votes, but they won their last election by about eight thousand votes. And therefore, despite deletions of ‘their own voters’, their net chances of winning the election were intact. It does not matter for them if some eligible voters were disenfranchised.

Deleted voters stay in the public discourse and news cycles only until the election results are declared. Leaders who made some noise about voter deletions, the media which wrote about them suddenly fall silent once the election results are declared. Today nobody talks about the fate of 80 lakh deleted voters of Bihar, 93 lakhs disenfranchised people of Bengal, 97 lakh voters of Tamil Nadu. Because there are no elections there now, no one talks about the 2.83 crore deleted voters of Uttar Pradesh, 44 lakh deleted voters of Rajasthan, 28 lakh deleted voters of Chhattisgarh, 45 lakhs from Madhya Pradesh, 77 lakh deleted voters of Gujarat!

West Bengal presents an even more deeply troubling picture. About 28 lakh voters were not allowed to vote even though they were not pronounced ineligible. Their papers were not examined and claims not adjudicated. Yet, the ECI, the ruling dispensation, many in the political class and the media want us to believe that the Assembly election of May 2026 was legitimate. They also want us to believe that the SIR process was bona fide, only meant to weed out the “Shifted, Absent, Duplicate and Dead (SADD) voters along with infiltrators. The ECI officials still maintain with a straight face that no eligible voter would be denied of their right to vote. 

Indian Polity in the wake of the SIR

One needs to look at the long-term implications of SIR for our polity. It is to these implications that I now turn.

In the wake of SIR India will have two classes of people: one with the right to vote and another without the right to vote. The ones without the right to vote will necessarily be unsure about their citizenship. That is no surprise nowadays when almost everybody’s citizenship is uncertain. Now we are told that even a passport is merely a travel document and not a proof of citizenship.

Let me undertake a thought experiment now. Imagine that none of us in this hall has a vote. Let us also imagine that all of us live together in one residential colony. To this colony where every resident is a non-voter, would any politician or a candidate in an election come to campaign? Would any politician work for us? Would they give us drinking water, a road, a school, a health centre, a power connection?

I can say for sure that a politician would not even spend a minute of their time to stop by in our colony.

We can live there but with no claims on the state for protection and care. We are beyond the state’s pale. The state has no responsibility towards us. It does not have to care for us. If at all it does, which is unlikely, it is out of its generosity and not on account of our rightful claims on it. The state is not duty bound. We do not any more belong to the political society. In other words, the political society of India will be constricted, circumcised. Those who are excluded are no longer relevant to the Republic.

Let me tell you here that so far SIR has deleted about six crore voters. At this rate, by the time the exercise is completed in the entire country, the estimated deletions would be about 16 crores. This means 160 million voters! This is not a small number. About 80% of the countries in the world have populations of 16 crores or less. SIR in other words, is excising (or eliminating) a few countries from within India and throwing them out into the wilderness.

We are so far used to a democracy where voters decided who should be in the government. But now, in the wake of SIR, we are transitioning into a new a democracy in which those who sit in the government are deciding who should be the voters.

That is the picture which is unfolding in our country today.

BJP-isation of Political Parties

SIR has yet another troubling consequence. It is not difficult to understand that every political party will address only the interests, concerns, and priorities of those who have a right to vote. Only they matter to political parties. As we have understood the drift of the SIR deletions, most of those who retain voting right are likely to be savarna (upper caste/privileged caste) Hindus, if not in the immediate present, but eventually at any rate. We need to keep in mind that the present SIR is unlikely to be the last one. Do not rule out the possibility that SIR becomes unstoppable once it is normalised in the way that it is now normalized and even accepted. There is a probability that we will regularly have such SIR exercises that would progressively eliminate the so called unwanted and impure elements from our political society. After many iterations of SIR, the polity will be fully purged of those unwanted elements.

The non-Hindus and non-savarna Hindus who might still retain their voting right will be rendered into a politically inconsequential minority. Even without the SIR the ruling party at the centre is able to have a council of ministers without a single member belonging to the Muslim and Christian minorities. In the entire history of our independent Republic, we never had a Union Council of Ministers that did not have a Muslim and a Christian representative. Even after the conclusion of the SIR, if any minorities and non-savarna Hindus still remain with franchise, they will still be made politically inconsequential by the process of Delimitation. Assam and Jammu C Kashmir showed the way on how to pack and crack the constituencies by implementing Delimitation to make such unwanted populations irrelevant in electoral contests.

If that is the situation now, imagine what would be the political significance of these sections of our society after the SIR after it is fully implemented. That is the level of Hindu majoritarian consolidation that the current ruling dispensation could mobilize behind itself. With SIR that would be the only political society that is going to remain for every political party in the country to operate in. That would mean Hindu-isation, or rather ‘savarna Hindu-isation’, of our polity. This would result in every political party ending up as a Hindu majoritarian party, some more and some less. But all of them Hindu majoritarian, nevertheless.

The die would be cast; the pitch would be set; the political turf would be transformed. Every political party if it has to be electorally successful or even stay relevant in that curated polity and transformed turf, would play like the BJP, adopt the programme of the BJP, would perhaps even be compelled to be more BJP-like than the present BJP itself.

The point I am making is: in the medium to long term, the consequences of SIR would make every political party like the BJP. In other words, every political party in the country would be BJP-ised.

Israel-isation of India

We already see religious symbols of the majority gradually creeping up to the status of quasi state symbols. Not long ago we had seen the spectacle of several Hindu religious men parade along with a symbol of monarchy, the Sengol, in our democratic Republic’s newly built Parliament House. Not long after a ten-hour marathon debate on Vande Mataram, the government had issued an order that all central government functions should have the song’s all 6 stanzas rendered in every official function. We also are witness to government schemes getting their names that clearly allude to Hindu scriptures, godheads, and epics. Renaming MNREGA to call it G-RAM-G is only the latest example.

This process is worryingly close to the political culture of Israel. The Jewish state is unapologetic about having Jewish religious symbols as its state symbols. The Star of David is on its national flag. Every political party in that country serves only Jewish interests, addresses only Jewish aspirations, heeds only to Jewish concerns and priorities. They are barely distinguishable from one another on core issues. They, in fact, work to outdo each other in championing Jewish interests as well as in displaying their indifference and antipathy to non-Jewish concerns. The state takes no obligation onto itself to the well-being of non-Jews.

The process that is now underway in India, if unchecked, will make India go the Israeli way. In other words, what we see today is a steady Israel-isation of India.

Dismantling Secular, Inclusive India 

The unfolding of these two phenomena is unmistakable: BJP-isation of political parties on the one hand and Israel-isation of Indian polity on the other, both proceeding in lockstep.

This is dismantling the idea of India as a secular, plural, and federal state that pledged itself to delivering liberty, equality, justice and fraternity to its people and to foster a humane society. The idea of India embedded in our 1947 tryst with destiny and the political compact enshrined in our 1950 constitution are now in mortal danger.

The secular, plural, democratic conception of India has been the target of unrelenting assaults from a body of individuals and several other past-worshipping obscurantist platforms. They have been openly and doggedly championing an unequal social order for over a century. Their project is to seek India’s future in its past; to recover from that imaginary past a fabricated pristine glory; to turn the secular, democratic Republic into a culturally, linguistically, religiously homogenized nation. The notion of Indian civilization as a synthesis, and as a palimpsest, is abhorrent to them. Their project’s notion of India seeks to obliterate the rich diversity of cultures, languages, lifestyles, eating habits, sartorial practices, ways of worship and syncretism that the country is blessed with. A flattened India is their notion of a ‘civilizational’ state.

SIR is but one key element in a grand project that seeks to assert exclusive Hindu ownership of the Indian nation, to make that Hindu-owned nation the sole rightful resident in the territory of the Indian state – and turn it into a Hindu nation-state, a Hindu Rashtra. It seeks to redefine the country’s identity as ‘Hindu nation-state’. In that configuration ‘savarna’ is deliberately muted and made illegible for the time being for tactical reasons.

Eventually, when constraints are broken, it would be unveiled as a full-blooded, unapologetic, wall to wall ‘savarna Hindu Rashtra’. Make no mistake.

SIR as a Bloodless Political Genocide

When we became a Republic, our founding parents made it a home for everyone who lived in its territory. Membership of the Republic, or citizenship, was not predicated on religion, caste, gender, language, culture, region of residence, colour, economic status, educational qualifications and such other things. Everyone who chose India as their land of residence was a citizen and also a voter. Denominational attributes did not privilege one or the other as rightful owners of the nation. Everybody was.

Europe went through a different experience when nation states were formed. There were people who rightfully belonged and those who were others or minorities. That was the basis of the European nation-states. There were majorities and minorities. Minorities’ residence was predicated on their becoming tolerable to the majorities. European countries, and countries which adopted that model of building their nation-states, either subjugated minorities, pushed them out of their territories, or even exterminated them. Beginning from the cleansing of the Iberian Peninsula in the mid 15th century until the ethnic cleansing that Israel carries out today, history is witness to many bloody attempts to forge homogenised nations.

But in India we chose a different path. We designed our collective life in a way that the state gave room for everyone, despite their diversity, to live together and thrive.

But ideologies in India that continue to draw their inspiration from the European nation-owned state concept want our Republic too to be turned into a state, owned by one nation – the Hindu nation. In their conception of a Republic, the others needed to be assimilated to the point of obliterating their respective identities, pushed out of the territory of the nation-state, or exterminated through genocide. In the present-day India, both the pushing out and physical extermination of unassimilated minorities are politically impractical.

However, extermination of a political kind of the others is possible. Instead of exterminating the citizen, citizenship could be exterminated. SIR is the weapon forged for that kind of extermination. It exterminates citizenship of those unwanted elements by exterminating their franchise. It is clear that without franchise, citizenship is hollow, without substance. Disenfranchisement hollows out citizenship. Therefore, SIR is nothing but a bloodless political genocide. It exterminates citizenship, pushes people out of political society, and makes people stateless even as they continue to live within the borders of the Indian state. What CAA-NRC could not do, SIR is tasked to accomplish.

The idea of India as a state-nation (in contradistinction to a nation-state) that is home to diverse peoples, cultures, languages and religions is being dismantled at a fiendish pace.

Thank you for your attention.

Part one may be read here.

Related:

SIR and the Making of a Stateless Citizen? | R. Rajagopal Speaks Out | Teesta Setalvad

Bihar SIR: New elector applications doubled in just 2 days, showing a 96.6% increase

99.8% of 65 lakh voter deletions go unchallenged on 13th day of objection period

The Stolen Franchise: Why the Election Commission cannot escape accountability

Major Irregularities in 2024 Maharashtra Vidhan Sabha Polls; Vote for Democracy

The post Disenfranchisement route to Majoritarian Rule: Political Logic of SIR appeared first on SabrangIndia.

According to Hindustan Times, the IDC will now examine the contents of the film and make recommendations to the Union government regarding any further action. The committee forms part of the government’s oversight mechanism for OTT platforms and digital publishers and comprises senior representatives from the Ministries of Information and Broadcasting, Home Affairs, Electronics and Information Technology, Law and Justice, Defence, External Affairs, Women and Child Development, along with other ministries or domain experts that the MIB may nominate. It is chaired by an authorised officer of at least the rank of Joint Secretary.

The latest development follows the government’s directive to ZEE5 to take down Satluj under Section 69A of the IT Act, read with Part III of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Section 69A empowers the Central Government to block or disable public access to online content on grounds including the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, defence of India, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, or to prevent the commission of cognisable offences.

Unlike theatrical releases, which require certification from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), OTT platforms fall outside the CBFC’s jurisdiction and are governed by Part III of the 2021 IT Rules. These rules extend a regulatory framework to publishers of online curated content and digital news, enabling the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to issue directions regarding online content under specified circumstances.

Government sources, quoted by PTI and Hindustan Times, stated that the takedown was prompted by “security concerns” and the obligations imposed on OTT platforms under the IT Rules. According to officials, the makers had originally submitted the film, then titled Punjab ’95, to the CBFC in 2022 for theatrical certification. The Board reportedly sought an unprecedented 127 cuts before granting certification. The filmmakers declined to accept those edits, following which the project remained stalled for several years before eventually being released directly on ZEE5 under the new title Satluj on July 3.

Officials told PTI that after the uncut version became available online, the government intervened and directed ZEE5 to remove it. “If they want to release the film in theatres and OTT, they should follow the laid down norms,” one official was quoted as saying by PTI.

Following the government’s direction, ZEE5 confirmed through an official statement on Instagram that Satluj would be “unavailable in India until further notice” due to “current developments”, without elaborating further. The platform thanked viewers for the overwhelming response the film had received following its release. While inaccessible in India, the film reportedly continues to be available internationally through ZEE5 Global.

The controversy has also highlighted the distinct regulatory regimes governing cinema and digital platforms. Newly appointed CBFC Chairperson Shashi Shekar clarified that the certification board had no role in the OTT release, observing that “OTT platforms don’t come under the jurisdiction of the CBFC.”

A film about one of India’s most important human rights cases

Directed by Honey Trehan, Satluj chronicles the life of Jaswant Singh Khalra, the prominent Punjab human rights activist who exposed the illegal cremation of thousands of unidentified bodies by the Punjab Police during the militancy and counter-insurgency period between 1984 and 1994.

Khalra was abducted outside his residence in September 1995 after documenting these disappearances and was never seen alive again. His case later became one of the most significant instances of enforced disappearance and custodial killing in India. In 2005, four Punjab Police personnel were convicted for his abduction and murder, and in 2007, the Punjab and Haryana High Court enhanced their sentences to life imprisonment.

Despite the historical importance of Khalra’s work, the film has faced repeated obstacles since its completion. Apart from the demand for 127 cuts by the CBFC, Punjab ’95 was also removed from the official line-up of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival shortly before its scheduled premiere, without any public explanation from the festival organisers.

Detailed report may be read here.

Legal basis invoked by the government

The government’s action relies on the framework created under the Information Technology Act and the 2021 IT Rules. Part III of the IT Rules incorporates a Code of Ethics applicable to publishers of online curated content. The Code requires publishers to exercise due caution when content may affect India’s sovereignty and integrity, threaten national security, disturb public order, harm friendly relations with foreign States, or incite violence. It further requires publishers to be mindful of India’s multi-religious and multi-racial social context while depicting communities and sensitive subjects.

Notably, aspects of the Code of Ethics have themselves been the subject of constitutional challenges before various High Courts. The Bombay High Court had stayed certain provisions relating to governmental oversight under the IT Rules in 2021, a stay that the Madras High Court subsequently observed would operate across India. As reported by Mint, it remains unclear whether the Centre specifically relied upon the Code of Ethics while issuing the takedown direction to ZEE5, or whether the order rests exclusively on its powers under Section 69A.

More on IT Act may be read here and here.

Political and public backlash

The removal of the film has triggered sharp criticism from political leaders, filmmakers and free speech advocates. As reported by Scroll, Shiromani Akali Dal president Sukhbir Singh Badal described the decision as “not mere censorship” but “an assault on our collective memory, truth and freedom of expression”, arguing that Punjab must be allowed to confront its history rather than suppress it.

AAP leader Baltej Pannu similarly alleged that the removal was intended to prevent younger generations from learning about a painful chapter in Punjab’s past, claiming that both the BJP and Congress had an interest in suppressing the historical record.

Related:

From Punjab ’95 to Satluj: When cinema becomes a battlefield over history, memory and censorship

Satluj: A film encountered

Kerala’s LDF govt to defy Centre’s diktat, to screen all films as per schedule at IFFK

Erasing Resistance: How the CBFC is censoring films that challenge caste and state power

Safe harbour or shadow censorship? The battle over India’s digital speech

The telegram NEET case and the expansion of platform-level censorship in India

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