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.

Related:

Israel, United States & and other complicit entities guilty of genocide, ecocide, and forced starvation in Palestine: International People’s Tribunal

Gaza: 700 citizens demand release of detained Madleen activists, call upon UK to fix Israel’s accountability for genocide, blockade, war crimes in Palestine

Illegality of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine

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.

Related:

58 reported deaths in Gujarat in last 5 years: Union Govt data reveals deaths due to cleaning of sewers and septic tanks

Continuing deaths of sewer workers reveals a cynical culture of impunity

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.

Related:

Rethinking the ‘Rajput State’: The Neemuchana & Tiladi agrarian movements

When History substitutes Governance: Hindutva’s Politics of Manufacturing Pasts

Rajasthan: Gogamedi, a Rajput-Muslim shrine and the politics of communal capture

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

The post Rajasthan: From Giral to Islampur, how locals are contesting development and historical identity appeared first on SabrangIndia.

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.

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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

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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

The post Centre escalates action against Satluj, refers film to high-level committee after ordering OTT takedown appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Sadly, some claim the Kho originates further ahead from the forests at Dadamandi-Dwarikhal but accepting this would render the historically significant Langurgad meaningless. Langurgarhi holds a prominent place in Uttarakhand’s history as it was here in 1790 that Garhwali soldiers, after a year of fierce fighting, forced the invading Gurkha forces to retreat. The site lies about 25 km from Dogadda town, at an altitude of roughly 2,700 meters. Langur-gad is named as it actually is sourced from the forests in the Langur Patti or Languri or Langurgarhi and its adjoining forests. It ends its journey traversing nearly 20 kilometres to a scenic place of Dogadda where it meets the other river emerging from Sila village forests near Lansdown. The new river emerges out of this confluence is known as Kho or Khoh.

Dogadda has long been a culturally and politically important town in Uttarakhand. It deserves official recognition as the origin point of the Kho River like Devprayag, the sacred confluence of the Alaknanda and Bhagirathi. The Uttarakhand government should take a clear decision on this matter by officially acknowledging Dogadda as the source place of river Khoh and ask the local bodies there to act fast to preserve its beautiful confluence.

The most important thing is that both these tributaries, Langurgarh and Silgarh, carry water year-round and are not mere seasonal streams. During the monsoon, they turn fierce and aggressive, carrying tons of stones and boulders. Nothing can stand against their force. Having grown up in Dogadda, my birthplace, I am witness to its beauty as well as fury since my childhood when these rivers ran crystal clear and their gentle murmuring turning into a roar during the rains. But today, when I look at Langurgad towards Dadamandi or Silgad towards Lansdowne, I actually feel depressed at their ‘plight’. They were the place where we really enjoyed walking around and watching their powerful fury during the monsoon. How, we would debate among ourselves as which is bigger or which carries more water and devastation.

Today, large resorts have taken over the riverbanks. Water is blocked at multiple points to create recreational pools for tourists. People drive their Thars and other SUVs straight into the riverbeds. The river’s entire character has changed. Uncontrolled mining has inflicted further damage. It is extremely painful to see big vehicles being washed on the river and passing through it at various places.

Visiting the confluence at Dogadda filled me with sorrow. This was once our childhood playground, where we watched the rivers swell with terrifying power during monsoons. Today, people stand inside both Silgad and Langurgad, blocking the flow to create private pools. The growing number of riverside resorts is making the problem worse. By the time the water reaches the main confluence, the situation is even more dire. At the junction, Silgad barely has any visible flow. Grass has overgrown the area, and sewage from nearby markets flows directly into it. A sign at the municipal sewerage plant claims ₹21 lakh was spent, yet locals say the untreated waste continues to pollute the river at the confluence.

Can the local municipality and Uttarakhand government not stop these unauthorised constructions along the riverbanks to keep it alive?

Can they not organize cleaning drives with community help?

Mountain Rivers particularly those we term as smaller ones, are inherently beautiful and while smaller in size or volume, they have life and energy. Their clear, bubbling waters reflect their vitality. Small rivers like these also flow close to farmers and local communities because they are directly linked to their daily lives. Farmers draw water easily from them, and people once bathed in natural deep pools known locally as “Dhandi”. Those natural pools have now vanished. Outsiders have built stone walls across the rivers, artificially altering their flow and character. Water is dammed everywhere so tourists can lounge for hours. Riverside resorts are drawing more visitors, turning the rivers into venues for parties and recreation.

After the confluence of Langurgad and Silgad at Dogadda, the newly formed Kho River flows towards Kotdwar, a town at the distance of about 10 kilometres. The stretch between Dogadda and Kotdwar is particularly scenic: the river winds through massive rocks and boulders. Because the riverbed is not easily accessible, the water remains remarkably clean.  Dogadda’s famous Durga temple provides a beautiful view of the river carving its way through huge rocks. This section also serves as a vital watering point for wild elephants. Herds are frequently spotted here, as the area forms an important part of Rajaji National Park.

By the time the Kho reaches Siddhbali temple in Kotdwar, its condition deteriorates. The river splits into several channels — some naturally, others turned into small bathing pools by visitors. Tourists throng the area. Men, women, and children search for spots to bathe. The riverbed is full of stones brought down during monsoon floods. Beyond Kotdwar, the river reaches Saneh Park and Saneh Road, marking the beginning of its journey through the plains. By now, it has been joined by a couple of local streams and appears fuller. Saneh Road, located on the Najibabad-Kotdwar railway line, lies in a forested zone frequented by wild animals and remains remarkably scenic.

In its final stretch, the Kho River crosses several small towns in Bijnor district of Uttar Pradesh. After traveling approximately 112 kilometres, it merges with the Ramganga River at Latifpur Bila (or Latifpur Ba) village in Dhampur tehsil. Honestly speaking, at the confluence, the Kho often appears larger than the Ramganga. This is because a massive dam at Kalagarh upstream drastically reduces the Ramganga’s flow, with water released only through barrages at a few points.

Interestingly, a barrage has also been constructed on the Kho River at Sherkot, about 25 km before the confluence. From here, an 82-km-long feeder canal supplies water to the Ganga. The main Ganga flows from Haridwar through Bijnor to Garhmukteshwar. At Haridwar’s Bhimgoda barrage, most of the Ganga’s water is diverted into the Upper and Lower Ganga Canals. The “divine” waters seen at ‘Har ki Pauri’ is actually canal water. The real, depleted Ganga can be seen near Chandi Ghat bridge, where the riverbed often lies almost dry. After Haridwar, the Ganga enters Uttar Pradesh at village Balawali in Bijnor district. Its course from Bijnor to Garhmukteshwar remains largely dry except during the monsoon.

This drying of rivers is devastating agriculture in the Gangetic plain. While large canals serve thousands of villages, fields along the natural river courses suffer severe water scarcity. At Garhmukteshwar Ganga water gets life from the direct water of Kho River released from Sherkot Barrage through its feeder Canal. Every day, 535 cusecs of water from the Sherkot Kho barrage travels through 82 kilometres long canal and merges with the Ganga at Tigri Ghat near Garhmukteshwar, helping keep the river alive in that region. However, excessive human interference with river waters — largely in the name of agriculture — is fundamentally altering their character and causing ecological damage. We have actually moved to a point where these rivers are increasingly being managed only to meet religious and tourism needs at specific ghats and pilgrimage sites, while the water for farming continues to decline due to climate change, rampant mining, and illegal construction of resorts and hotels along mountain streams. In effect, our rivers are being converted into entertainment zones, severing their vital connections with local communities, farmers, and indigenous people to cater to urban elite desires.

Read a previous report on the impact of religious tourism in Uttarakhand by the author here.

While the Kho River breathes new life into the Ganga near Garhmukteshwar, its main channel meets the Ramganga about 28 kms away at Latifpur Bila Ahatmali in Dhampur tehsil. Even here, multiple barrages on the Ramganga (after the Kalagarh dam) leave it depleted — and once again, the Kho revives it. The Ramganga then flows through Moradabad and Shahjahanpur before joining the Ganga at Hardoi, where the confluence area also resembles a desert. Further downstream, water reappears at Bithoor (22 km before Kanpur) due to yet another barrage, making Bithoor an important religious and recreational spot, while Kanpur’s stretch is dominated by sand mining.

Reaching Confluences is Extremely Difficult

In the plains, accessing river confluences — except at major religious sites — is very challenging. Reaching the Kho-Ramganga or Ramganga-Ganga confluence requires great patience and effort; many places are accessible only on foot or by tractor.  As these are not religious places hence none is bothered about the confluence of the rivers. At the Sherkot barrage on the Kho, grass has overgrown the area and water is barely visible. At Latifpur Bila, the path to the confluence is covered in dust and sand. I attempted to reach it twice in the scorching afternoon heat but failed. A farmer from the Saini community, seeing our struggle, kindly offered to take me on his tractor. The ride was perilous across the sandy, pitted terrain reflecting the flooded area in the monsoon. During the journey, he shared the fact that most locals belong to Dalit and extremely backward communities. He was also critical of the government for harming farmers and expressed faith in the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), while observing that the bigger farmers in the area support the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). He also mentioned that annual floods from these rivers regularly destroy crops. This year, with no rain yet, only sugarcane has survived. Even if rain arrives late, farmers stand to gain little. Remarkably, despite both rivers flowing through the fields, local agriculture remains heavily dependent on rainfall. This unambiguously means that farming communities living on the bank of the rivers only suffer the devastation caused by floods and benefit little from the river in “normal time”. During the monsoon, the canals are protected and the original rivers get the fury resulting in the water crossing to the nearby fields and destroying the crop, livestock and human life.

The Crisis Facing the Kho River

The Kho is a relatively small river, yet it has sacrificed much of its own identity to sustain the larger Ganga and Ramganga systems. It supplies water to Dogadda and Kotdwar towns and remains a vital cultural lifeline for local communities. In Uttar Pradesh, the barrage on the Kho irrigates hundreds of villages in Bijnor and Moradabad districts.

Tragically, the very river that gives life to the Ganga and Ramganga — and supports countless farmers — is under severe threat at its source. Both the Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments must act urgently, working with local communities, municipalities, and panchayats. Immediate steps are needed to:

– Ban all mining on the Kho River

– Stop the unnatural blocking of water in the river and its tributaries

– Take legal action against illegal resorts and hotels along its banks

Saving the Kho River also means protecting the wildlife habitats of Rajaji National Park and the Kalagarh forest division. Kho river’s ecological and environmental importance can be visualised both right from its beginning till it ends its journey. At places like Dogadda the ground water was available very easily. At the time, when a majority of the hill as well as Tarai regions of Uttarakhand suffer from Potable water crisis, towns like Dogadda were actually a haven for all. The water quality here was extraordinary and people never needed refrigerators in the past as water remained cold during the summer and warm in the winter.

It is time to protect and preserve river Kho so that it continues to give us life and energy.

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The post Environment: The growing crisis on the Kho River appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Two days after the child, who had stepped out on Saturday afternoon to buy a birthday gift, was allegedly abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered, Surjyapur remains suspended between grief and rage. Four arrests have been made, a Special Investigation Team (SIT) has been constituted and further raids are underway. Yet for residents, the biggest question remains unanswered: could the crime have been prevented had authorities acted faster?

Nearly two years after the rape and murder of a trainee doctor inside RG Kar Medical College Hospital triggered one of Bengal’s biggest public movements, another brutal crime against a girl has once again shaken the state. This time, however, the epicentre of anger is not Kolkata but this village in South 24 Parganas, where protests continue to erupt in different corners rather than under one organised banner.

On Tuesday, there was no single protest site. Small groups of residents could be seen outside the victim’s house, near the Surjyapur police outpost, around the block office and at local crossings. The slogans may have become quieter than Sunday’s fury, but the demand has remained unchanged: justice without delay.

Surjyapur Residents Allege Police Delay, Demand Swift Justice

“We are not scared because police are here,” says Sagir Ali, who witnessed the recovery of the child’s body from the pond. “We are scared because if this could happen to an 11-year-old in our village, it can happen to anyone.”

He recalled standing a short distance away as villagers pulled the body from the water.

“I could not go closer. She was just a little girl. I felt shattered. Around 10 to 12 of us were present, but there was no administration at the spot when the body was recovered. We want nothing less than the severest punishment for those responsible.”

Residents repeatedly alleged that they, not the police, took the lead in tracing the suspects.

Juli Seikh, one of the villagers who participated in the search, claimed locals reviewed CCTV footage from nearby shops, identified two suspects, tracked them down and caught them before handing them over to police.

“It was us who checked the CCTV footage and caught them,” he alleged. “If villagers had not acted immediately, would the arrests have happened this quickly?”

Several residents also accused the police of failing to respond promptly after an FIR was lodged at Baruipur Police Station.

There are further allegations that local BJP workers attempted to intervene after villagers handed over the suspects to police, and that pressure was exerted to secure their release on Sunday. The allegation could not be independently verified, and there has been no official response from the BJP.

The sense of insecurity has spread far beyond the victim’s family. Parents say they are no longer allowing young children, especially girls, to step out alone even for routine errands. Conversations in tea stalls, markets and village lanes repeatedly return to the same question: “If an 11-year-old is not safe here, who is?”

The child’s body, stuffed inside a sack, was recovered from a pond in the Surjyapur Haat area on Sunday morning after she had gone missing the previous afternoon. The shocking discovery transformed grief into fury.

Hundreds of residents from Surjyapur and neighbouring villages poured onto the streets, blocking the Baruipur–Joynagar Road and railway tracks for several hours. Tyres were set on fire, a police vehicle was vandalised and protesters demanded immediate arrests and exemplary punishment.

Amid the violence, one man suspected by the crowd of involvement in the crime was allegedly beaten to death by an enraged mob, underscoring the intensity of public anger.

Political Reactions Intensify as Protests Continue in Surjyapur

Facing mounting pressure, police arrested four persons in connection with the case by Monday. A Special Investigation Team has been formed and further raids are continuing.

Inspector General of Police Kankarprasad Barui assured that every person found involved in the crime would face the maximum punishment under the law. The post-mortem report is awaited to determine the exact cause of death and whether sexual assault took place.

Thousands of people again assembled in Surjyapur on Monday, demanding a fair, transparent and time-bound investigation. Although road blockades had ended by Tuesday, the protests had not. Many villagers said they would continue demonstrating until they were convinced the investigation was moving in the right direction.

The incident has also snowballed into a political flashpoint.

CPI(M) leader Md. Lahek Ali visited the victim’s family and joined protests on both Sunday and Monday. Indian Secular Front (ISF) MLA Nawsad Siddique was prevented by security personnel from meeting the bereaved family.

Meanwhile, heavy deployment of police and Central Armed Police Forces outside former Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s Kalighat residence on Sunday night triggered a separate political controversy. The Trinamool Congress alleged the security arrangement amounted to “house arrest” and was intended to prevent her from travelling to Surjyapur. On Monday evening, unable to visit the village, she led a candlelight march in Kolkata condemning the killing and demanding justice for the child.

Back in Surjyapur, however, politics appears secondary to the pain etched on every face.

The pond where the body was found has become a grim reminder of a tragedy the village cannot forget. Outside the victim’s home, neighbours continue to arrive quietly, offering condolences to a family struggling to comprehend its loss.

For the people here, the story is no longer only about a child who left home to buy a birthday gift and never returned. It is about whether a village’s cries for justice will continue to be heard after television cameras leave, political leaders move on and public outrage fades.

That question still hangs heavily over Surjyapur.

Antara is a freelance independent journalist based in Kolkata, West Bengal. She reports on climate change, environmental issues, human rights, and crime, with a focus on stories that highlight marginalised voices and public interest. She holds a Bachelor’s (Honours) degree in Philosophy from the University of Calcutta.

Courtesy: The Enewsroom

The post Just 11, Her Last Birthday Gift: Inside Surjyapur’s Fight for Justice appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Released by the Washington D.C.-based Centre for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH), the report, Profiting from Hate Music, examines what researchers describe as the rapidly expanding ecosystem of Hindutva pop music, or “H-Pop”—a genre that combines devotional, nationalist and popular musical styles with rhetoric targeting Muslims and Christians. According to the report, this music is no longer confined to fringe corners of the internet. Instead, it is thriving across some of the world’s largest technology platforms, generating millions of views, streams and shares while simultaneously producing revenue for creators and, indirectly, the platforms themselves.

Authored by journalist Kunal Purohit, whose book H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars further documented the rise of the genre, along with CSOH researchers Tavishi and Hamaad Meer, the report presents itself as the first comprehensive effort to map the scale, reach and monetisation of hate music in India. Supported through a grant from the Human Rights Foundation, the study argues that major technology companies are not merely hosting such content but are enabling its amplification and profitability despite maintaining public policies against hate speech and incitement.

At the heart of the report lies a stark claim: online platforms have become critical infrastructure for the production, dissemination and monetisation of music that allegedly promotes hatred, dehumanisation and violence against religious minorities.

Over a year before Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop… was released on November 22, 2023, on October 10, 2022 Citizens for Justice and Peace was among the first to conduct its own investigation into YouTube and other platform’s promotion of hate lyrics. Hate through music, lyrics and visuals: Hindutva pop. CJP’s The online eco-system hosts a plethora of videos peddling hate may be read here. Four months before that, in June 2022, Caravan had also done its own investigation into Hindutva’s hate music: Hindu Rashtra OST authored by Samriddhi Sakuniya that can be read here. The CSOH’s recent report is then a logical, research driven extension to earlier work done that exposed this further capture of ‘culture’ by the majoritarian far right.

From white supremacist rock to Hindutva pop

The report situates Hindutva hate music within a broader global history of extremist music cultures. Researchers trace parallels with white power music in Europe and the United States, particularly the rise of white supremacist bands in the 1980s that used music as a vehicle for recruitment, radicalisation and political mobilisation. Similar patterns, the report notes, have emerged in other contexts, including Rwanda and Myanmar, where music was used to reinforce ethnic and religious hostility before or during periods of violence.

According to the authors, Hindutva pop has evolved into a distinctly Indian manifestation of this phenomenon. Unlike conventional devotional music, these songs frequently depict Muslims and Christians as enemies, invaders, traitors or existential threats. The report argues that many songs go beyond ideological messaging and explicitly advocate discrimination, exclusion, boycotts or violence.

The researchers further link the growth of the genre to broader political and social developments in India, including increasing incidents of anti-minority hate speech and communal polarisation. Citing data from India Hate Lab, the report notes that hate speech incidents documented in India increased dramatically in recent years, providing a social and political backdrop against which Hindutva music has flourished.

Importantly, the report does not portray these songs as isolated cultural products. Rather, it argues that they form part of a larger ecosystem in which music is used during religious processions, political gatherings, social media campaigns and community mobilisation efforts. Several incidents of communal tension and violence, the report notes, have involved processions playing songs containing anti-Muslim themes or violent rhetoric.

Building a database of hate music

One of the report’s most significant contributions is methodological. Rather than relying on anecdotal examples, the researchers spent a year building what they describe as a comprehensive database of Hindutva hate music across multiple platforms.

The study examined four major platforms: YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and Meta’s Music Library, which powers audio used in Instagram Reels. Before identifying songs, researchers first analysed each platform’s published policies governing hate speech, incitement to violence and discriminatory content. These policies then became the framework through which songs were assessed.

Data collection occurred between January 2025 and January 2026 and involved multiple research techniques. Researchers conducted keyword searches in English and Hindi, monitored social media accounts of prominent Hindutva influencers, reviewed footage of religious processions and tracked channels and creators repeatedly associated with such music. Songs identified through one platform were subsequently traced across others to determine their broader distribution.

The resulting database contains 523 songs that researchers concluded violated the content policies of at least one platform. These songs were then categorised according to the type of violation involved, including direct incitement to violence, dehumanisation, promotion of supremacist beliefs and other forms of hateful content.

The researchers also tested platform accountability by reporting a sample of songs and tracking platform responses over several months. In addition, they investigated how creators and platforms monetised such content through advertising, subscriptions, and fan funding and other revenue streams.

A vast digital ecosystem

The report’s findings suggest that hate music is not confined to a few isolated uploads but forms a substantial and highly visible digital ecosystem. Across the four platforms studied, researchers identified 523 songs that they argue violate platform policies. Of these, 210 were found on YouTube, 109 on Spotify, 103 within Meta’s Music Library, and 101 on Apple Music.

The scale of engagement documented in the report is striking. The YouTube songs alone accumulated more than 198 million views, while songs available through Meta’s Music Library were used in over 5.9 million Instagram Reels. Researchers argue that the actual audience exposure is likely far greater because each Reel can be viewed, shared and recommended repeatedly through Instagram’s algorithmic systems.

Perhaps most significantly, the report concludes that roughly half of all identified songs contain explicit calls for violence. Researchers found that 263 of the 523 songs directly threatened, encouraged or glorified violence against religious minorities, while the remaining songs primarily relied on dehumanisation, conspiracy theories, derogatory stereotypes and other forms of hateful rhetoric.

According to the report, Muslims were overwhelmingly the primary targets. Many songs promoted familiar Hindu nationalist narratives, including allegations of “love jihad,” demographic replacement theories, claims that Muslims pose an existential threat to Hindu society, and demands that India be transformed into an explicitly Hindu nation.

The researchers argue that these narratives do not merely express political opinions but function as tools of radicalisation. By repeatedly portraying minorities as enemies, traitors or invaders, the music allegedly normalises hostility and creates conditions in which discrimination and violence become easier to justify.

YouTube: The largest hub

Among all platforms studied, YouTube emerged as the most significant repository of Hindutva hate music. The report identified 210 allegedly violative songs uploaded across 100 channels with a combined subscriber base exceeding 76 million. Researchers found that nearly half of these songs contained direct threats or calls for violence against Muslims.

Particularly notable was the concentration of content among a relatively small number of channels. According to the report, three channels alone accounted for more than 40 percent of the identified songs. Despite repeatedly hosting content that researchers argue violates YouTube’s own hate speech policies, these channels allegedly remained active, verified and monetised.

The report further argues that YouTube’s own systems may be helping such content spread. Researchers note that the platform automatically generates videos for music tracks even when creators do not upload visual content, thereby ensuring additional visibility for songs distributed through music services.

Spotify, Meta and Apple: A pattern across platforms

While YouTube accounted for the largest number of allegedly violative songs, the report argues that the problem extends well beyond video-sharing platforms. Researchers found what they describe as a consistent pattern across Spotify, Meta’s Music Library and Apple Music, with songs containing anti-Muslim hate speech, conspiracy theories and incitement to violence remaining available despite each platform maintaining policies that prohibit such content.

The report argues that this demonstrates a systemic moderation failure rather than isolated lapses in enforcement. Although each platform adopts different approaches to content moderation and community standards, the researchers contend that all four companies continue to host content that appears to violate their own published rules.

Spotify: Hate music available beside mainstream artists

Spotify, the world’s largest music streaming platform, hosts 109 songs that the report argues violate its Platform Rules. Researchers found that 51 of these songs explicitly praise or encourage violence against Muslims, while 44 others promote hatred, dehumanisation or harmful stereotypes directed at the community.

According to the report, Spotify’s own rules prohibit content that promotes hatred or violence against protected groups based on characteristics including religion. Yet researchers argue that songs encouraging violence against Muslims, promoting the “love jihad” conspiracy theory, or portraying religious minorities as enemies of the nation remained easily accessible through ordinary searches.

The report also highlights Spotify’s recommendation architecture. Unlike traditional music stores where users actively purchase specific tracks, streaming services recommend songs, playlists and artists based on listening behaviour. Researchers argue that this recommendation system can inadvertently increase the reach of extremist content once a listener engages with similar material.

Another concern identified is the coexistence of such songs alongside mainstream music. The report argues that users do not encounter these tracks in isolated corners of the platform; instead, they exist within the same searchable ecosystem as Bollywood music, devotional songs and popular commercial artists, making discovery significantly easier.

Instagram Reels and Meta’s Music Library: Turning hate into viral content

Perhaps the report’s most striking findings concern Meta’s Music Library, the catalogue of licensed music available to users creating Instagram Reels. Researchers identified 103 songs within Meta’s music catalogue that they argue violate the company’s Hate Speech Community Standard. Of these, 46 songs actively encourage or incite violence against Muslims, while another 57 use abusive language, slurs or dehumanising rhetoric targeting the community.

What makes Meta’s ecosystem particularly significant, the report argues, is the extraordinary scale of amplification. Rather than simply existing as songs available for listening, these tracks have been incorporated into more than 5.9 million Instagram Reels, transforming music into a reusable soundtrack for millions of user-generated videos.

Researchers contend that every Reel using a hate song effectively creates another distribution channel for the underlying message. Since Instagram’s recommendation algorithm actively promotes short-form videos beyond a creator’s followers, songs embedded in viral Reels can rapidly reach audiences far larger than those who might deliberately search for the original track.

The report provides numerous examples illustrating this phenomenon. One of the most widely circulated songs documented is “Bharat Ka Bacha Bacha Jai Shri Ram Bolega.” According to the report, the song had already been used in over 730,000 Instagram Reels. Researchers note that some individual Reels featuring the song accumulated millions of views, vastly exceeding the reach of the original audio itself. One Reel showing a DJ performing the song before a large public audience reportedly received over 5.7 million views and hundreds of thousands of likes.

Similarly, the song “Gau Mata“, which the report says contains anti-Muslim slurs and threats of violence, had been used in more than 40,000 Instagram Reels. Researchers observed that many of these videos were posted by self-described cow vigilante groups or supporters, often depicting vehicle chases, confrontations or assaults involving alleged cattle transporters while the song played in the background.

Another frequently used track, “Bhagwa Se Dar Lagta Hai Toh Bharat Chod Do,” had reportedly been used in over 104,000 Reels by May 2026. The report documents examples where the song accompanied videos of Ram Navami processions, saffron flag displays and other communal imagery, with individual Reels reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers.

The report argues that Meta’s music catalogue effectively allows hateful audio to be endlessly repurposed, giving songs an afterlife far beyond their original release.

Apple Music: Minimal hate speech standards

Among the four platforms examined, researchers identify Apple Music as having the least detailed public standards specifically addressing hate speech. Unlike YouTube, Meta and Spotify, Apple does not publish an extensive standalone hate speech policy governing music content. Instead, the company requires artists to comply with local laws, cultural sensitivities and general standards of appropriateness.

Applying Indian legal standards as well as the report’s analytical framework, researchers identified 101 songs on Apple Music that they argue should not remain available. Several songs promote the discredited conspiracy theory of “love jihad,” alleging that Muslim men systematically target Hindu women for religious conversion. The report notes that the Government of India itself informed Parliament in 2020 that the term has no legal basis, yet multiple songs continue to invoke it as an established fact while encouraging hostility against Muslims.

Researchers also criticise Apple’s moderation of album artwork. According to the report, several songs employ imagery that reinforces anti-Muslim narratives, including depictions of veiled Muslim women intended to portray interfaith relationships or Islamic identity as inherently threatening.

The report argues that visual imagery, combined with inflammatory lyrics, contributes to a broader ecosystem of communal propaganda rather than functioning merely as artistic expression.

Violence is not an exception—it is a central theme

One of the report’s most significant conclusion concerns the nature of the content itself. Researchers argue that violent rhetoric is not confined to a handful of fringe songs but constitutes one of the defining characteristics of the Hindutva pop ecosystem.

Across platforms, they found:

• 104 YouTube songs containing explicit violent themes targeting minorities;
• 51 Spotify songs praising or encouraging violence;
• 46 Meta Music Library tracks directly calling for violence;
• 67 Apple Music songs encouraging or glorifying violence against minorities.

Beyond explicit threats, the report identifies recurring themes that appear repeatedly across hundreds of songs. These include portraying Muslims as traitors or foreign invaders; invoking historical grievances involving Mughal rulers; calling for the demolition of mosques and construction of temples in their place; depicting demographic change as an existential threat; promoting conspiracy theories such as “love jihad” and “Ghazwa-e-Hind”; glorifying cow vigilantism; and encouraging Hindus to prepare for what songs describe as an inevitable religious conflict.

According to the researchers, these recurring narratives collectively create a worldview in which violence against minorities is portrayed not as criminal conduct but as a legitimate form of self-defence or historical justice.

The report therefore argues that the danger lies not only in individual songs but in the cumulative effect of hundreds of tracks repeating similar messages across multiple platforms, reinforcing one another through algorithms, recommendations and user-generated content.

Profiting From Hate: How platforms monetise extremist music

One of the report’s most serious allegations is that technology companies are not merely failing to remove hateful content—they are also profiting from it. The report argues that while companies publicly maintain zero-tolerance policies towards hate speech, many of the creators producing anti-Muslim songs continue to benefit from platform monetisation tools, while the platforms themselves earn advertising and subscription revenue generated by user engagement with this content.

Researchers contend that this creates what they describe as a perverse incentive structure. The more popular a hate song becomes, the more advertisements it attracts, the more revenue it generates for both the creator and the platform, and the more likely platform algorithms are to recommend it to additional users. According to the report, this commercial ecosystem transforms communal hatred into profitable digital content.

YouTube’s monetisation ecosystem

The report identifies YouTube as the platform where monetisation is most visible. Researchers found that many channels repeatedly uploading songs that allegedly violate YouTube’s hate speech policies remain eligible for monetisation through the YouTube Partner Program. This allows creators to earn money from advertisements shown before or during videos, while also accessing features such as Super Thanks, Super Chats, Channel Memberships and paid subscriptions.

The report notes that the 210 songs identified on YouTube had collectively amassed approximately 198 million views, generating substantial audience engagement through more than 3.1 million likes across roughly 100 channels with a combined subscriber base exceeding 76 million subscribers. Researchers argue that these figures indicate that Hindutva hate music is not a niche phenomenon but a commercially successful content category operating within YouTube’s broader creator economy.

The report also raises concerns about YouTube’s own automated systems. Even where artists did not upload music videos themselves, YouTube automatically generated videos—known as “Art Tracks”—using album artwork and audio files. According to the researchers, this meant that hateful songs could continue circulating on YouTube even without dedicated video production, further expanding their visibility through YouTube Music integration and algorithmic recommendations. Researchers argue that these automated uploads demonstrate how platform infrastructure itself can contribute to the dissemination of harmful content.

Brand advertising beside hate content

One of the most troubling commercial finding concerns advertising. The report states that advertisements from internationally recognised companies appeared before or alongside videos containing anti-Muslim hate music.

Researchers documented advertisements from major multinational brands—including technology companies, consumer goods manufacturers and financial services firms—being served on videos that they argue contain hate speech and incitement. The report stresses that there is no suggestion that these companies intentionally chose to advertise on such videos. Rather, advertisements were placed through automated advertising systems that purchase inventory across YouTube. Nevertheless, the report argues that automated advertising effectively channels corporate advertising budgets towards creators producing hateful material. This, researchers contend, raises broader questions about advertiser oversight, brand safety mechanisms and the adequacy of platform controls designed to prevent commercial support for extremist content.

A small network, massive reach

Another important finding is the concentration of influence. Rather than thousands of independent creators, the report identifies a relatively small network of artists and YouTube channels responsible for producing a disproportionately large share of Hindutva hate music.

The researchers profiled dozens of prominent singers and creators who repeatedly produced songs centred on similar themes: portraying Muslims as enemies of the nation, glorifying violence, advocating the demolition of mosques, promoting conspiracy theories such as “love jihad” and “Ghazwa-e-Hind,” and encouraging Hindus to prepare for religious conflict. According to the report, this demonstrates that Hindutva hate music is not a spontaneous or decentralised phenomenon but an identifiable ecosystem with recurring artists, production houses, distribution channels and audiences.

The report argues that because the same creators repeatedly upload allegedly violative content across multiple platforms, enforcement against a relatively limited number of accounts could significantly reduce the overall reach of the ecosystem.

Music and offline communal mobilisation

A recurring theme throughout the report is the relationship between online music and offline communal mobilisation. Researchers emphasise that the songs they identified are not simply consumed privately through headphones. Instead, they frequently accompany religious processions, political rallies, vigilante activities, election campaigns and public demonstrations, giving digital content a tangible presence in physical spaces.

Several songs documented in the report call for the demolition of mosques, the construction of Hindu temples at disputed sites, retaliation for historical grievances associated with Mughal rule, or violent action against individuals portrayed as threatening Hindu society. Others celebrate cow vigilantism or invoke slogans commonly associated with Hindu nationalist mobilisation.

The report argues that when such music becomes embedded within public processions and viral social media videos, it helps normalise hostile narratives against minorities and reinforces communal identities through repetitive cultural messaging.

The Pahalgam attack and the rapid weaponisation of tragedy

The report devotes particular attention to the aftermath of the April 22, 2025 terrorist attack in Pahalgam, in which 26 civilians were killed. According to the researchers, Hindutva pop artists responded with remarkable speed. Within hours and days of the attack, multiple songs were released portraying Indian Muslims collectively as responsible or urging Hindus to unite against an alleged internal enemy.

Five songs released immediately after the attack reportedly accumulated more than 1.1 million YouTube views within a short period. Several rapidly spread to Spotify, Apple Music and Instagram Reels, where users created thousands of videos using the songs as background audio.

The report does not claim a direct causal relationship between these songs and subsequent incidents of communal violence. However, it argues that they contributed to an environment in which anti-Muslim hostility intensified.

Researchers cite monitoring by India Hate Lab, which documented 64 anti-Muslim hate rallies within ten days of the attack and 113 hate speech incidents and hate crimes within approximately three weeks. The report presents this as evidence that online hate music formed part of a broader ecosystem of communal mobilisation during a period of heightened national tension. Detailed report may be read here.

Less than two months after the Pahalgam attack, Citizens for Justice and Peace had mapped the rising hate attacks against Muslims, across five key states. The data based investigation had, on June 19, 2025, published 180 plus attacks with 37 % tied to ‘revenge’ for Pahalgam. CJP’s Mapping Hate: The Pahalgam Attack and its ripple effects may be read here.

Testing the platforms

Beyond documenting content, the researchers also sought to assess whether technology companies acted when alerted. The report explains that researchers formally reported numerous songs through the platforms’ own complaint mechanisms and monitored the outcomes over several months.

According to the report, most of the reported content remained available despite allegedly violating the platforms’ published hate speech policies. Researchers argue that this demonstrates substantial inconsistencies between the companies’ stated rules and their enforcement practices.

The report contends that the persistence of such content, despite repeated reporting, raises broader questions about transparency, accountability and the effectiveness of automated moderation systems, particularly in languages other than English.

Recommendations and a warning for Big Tech

The report concludes with an extensive set of recommendations directed at YouTube, Meta, Spotify and Apple. Among other measures, researchers call on platforms to:

• proactively identify and remove music that promotes hatred or violence against protected groups;
• improve moderation of music and audio content rather than focusing primarily on text and video;
• strengthen moderation capacity in Indian languages;
• ensure that creators repeatedly producing hate content are ineligible for monetisation;
• increase transparency regarding enforcement decisions;
• improve advertiser safeguards so that brands are not inadvertently funding extremist content; and
• invest in specialised moderation teams capable of recognising coded forms of communal hate speech.

Ultimately, Profiting from Hate Music argues that music has become one of the most powerful yet understudied vehicles for spreading communal hatred online. Rather than treating songs as merely another form of entertainment, the authors urge policymakers, researchers and technology companies to recognise them as influential political and cultural artefacts capable of shaping public attitudes at enormous scale. The study significantly expands the conversation around online hate speech in India. It shifts attention beyond viral speeches and inflammatory posts to an ecosystem where melody, repetition and algorithmic amplification intersect—raising difficult questions about the responsibilities of digital platforms when content that allegedly promotes hatred is not only hosted, but also recommended, monetised and transformed into a profitable business model.

The complete report may be read below:

Related:

CJP flags casteist, anti-Dalit videos on YouTube targeting CJI Gavai; seeks urgent takedown

Central Government silent over the number of YouTube channels blocked in last 5 years; dismisses concern about press freedom and internet shutdowns

YouTube allows content containing false and incendiary information about India’s elections: report

From Outrage to Acquittal: The Raja Singh hate speech case comes to a close

The Supreme Court blinks when it comes to Hate Speech

CJP files complaint against BJP MLA & Minister Nitesh Rane and right-wing leaders over alleged hate speeches in Maharashtra and West Bengal

The post How big tech is profiting from Hindutva hate music appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Within just four days of the commencement of SIR (SIR commenced on June 30, 2026), two BLOs have died in Karnataka. Another person collapsed due to severe stress and has been admitted to hospital.

In addition, as newspapers reported on July 6, yesterday, senior officials ‘have threatened BLOs with disciplinary action’, including removal from their jobs, if they fail to complete the distribution of forms today itself. This has created even more dangerous pressure on them. It is certain to have even more fatal consequences in the coming days.

Furthermore, voters across the state are facing numerous difficulties while filling out the Enumeration Form and are experiencing immense anxiety. In what is described as a simple process, election officials are failing to provide proper answers even to simple questions, thereby further increasing public anxiety.

It is only natural that this anxiety among the people will increase further after the publication of the draft roll-on August 5. During that period, the state is likely to witness even greater chaos and helpless anxiety among the people.

Therefore, conscious sections of society must remain alert, understand the causes behind all these tragedies, and stand against the danger.

In this context, it is necessary to understand the real reasons behind the inhuman pressures being created by the Commission.

What is causing the deaths of BLOs and the anxiety among voters?

In Karnataka, the process of distributing and collecting Enumeration Forms, which began on June 30, must be completed and digitised by July 29—that is, within one month. This is because the Election Commission (ECI) has, without any rational basis, imposed an unscientific and undemocratic deadline requiring the entire SIR process to be completed by October 2026—that is, within a total period of three months. It is this deadline that is creating enormous pressure on both BLOs and voters. This, when elections to the State Assembly are due only in mid-2028, that is at least 18 months after October 2026. Why then the unholy hurry?

What is the urgency behind the cut-off date of October 2026?

The ECI itself admits that the previous SIR in 2002 was carried out gradually over a period of one-and-a-half years.

The real motive and intention of the Commission and the ruling BJP regime is to complete SIR in 31 states across the country by December 2026, before the Census begins in February 2027. That is why this unscientific deadline has been imposed.

What is the connection between the Census and the SIR?

A Census is generally conducted to enumerate/count the population of the country. However, the Modi government –which heads an ideological majoritarian state– had intended to use the 2020 Census to verify people’s citizenship and to strip communities it did not want of their citizenship.

That is why the CAA was enacted in 2019.

For the 2020–21 Census, questionnaires had been prepared for creating the NPR (National Population Register) by asking people for ‘proof of citizenship.’

The plan was then to separate those who could prove their citizenship and prepare the NRC (National Register of Citizens). Those who could not provide proof of citizenship were to be excluded from the NRC, placed on a list of ‘suspected foreigners’, and subjected to processes aimed at deporting them from the country. Or else…

However, this could not be implemented because of a massive public outcry and sustained public protests. The Census itself was not conducted in 2020–21 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now, the Census is set to begin again in February 2027. (The house-listing exercise will be completed in 2026.) While only ₹3,000 crore was allocated for the Census in the 2025 Budget, ₹6,000 crore has been allocated in the 2026 Budget for conducting the NPR alongside the Census. Reported Moneycontrol.

This only means one thing: that the Modi government is now moving ahead to complete, during this Census, what it could not accomplish in 2019.

It is possible to carry out the NRC through the Census process itself. But instead of conducting the NRC directly, the same questions are now being asked through SIR, thereby completing the groundwork for the NRC.

Isn’t the SIR just a Voter Verification process?

No. The lawyers for the Election Commission in the proceedings contesting the controversial SIR before the Supreme Court have made it clear that SIR is being conducted to examine citizenship and not merely to revise electoral rolls:

“Revision of electoral rolls had been done earlier on the basis of self-declaration of citizenship. This [SIR 2025] we found was an opportune time to take note of this statutory amendment of 2003 and examine citizenship for the purpose of preparing the electoral roll.” – the Hindu

Understand the Chronology

First, SIR.
Then, the Census.
Alongside it, the NPR.
Immediately after that, the NRC.

Therefore, SIR is being rushed through in order to prepare lists of citizens and non-citizens required for the NPR, which is to be conducted alongside the 2027 Census, and for the NRC that is to follow.

This is the only reason why the present SIR enumeration process is being hurriedly completed within a three-month period even in states such as Karnataka, where elections are not currently due. SIR has to be completed across the country before the 2027 Census.

This is precisely why Chief Electoral Officers are pressuring BLOs to distribute, collect, and digitise SIR forms within one month.

Without providing proper and comprehensive training or the necessary time, BLOs are being threatened with various disciplinary measures if they fail to meet the targets within the prescribed period. That is why, as has happened in other states, a series of deaths among BLOs has now begun in Karnataka as well, with BLOs unable to withstand the pressure.

Although the SIR enumeration questionnaire may appear simple at first glance, it has created considerable confusion. It has been designed by officials who have little understanding of the lives and awareness levels of ordinary people, in order to serve the needs of their political masters.

People unfamiliar with the language of administration are filling out the forms in ways they understand and are consequently getting into difficulties. Here too, instead of creating awareness and collecting the forms patiently, the rushed process is causing anxiety among the people.

Following this difficult, non-transparent and unfriendly process, ‘the draft roll’ will be published on August 5. Those whose names are missing as well as those who receive notices because the information they have provided ‘fails to satisfy 12 categories of logical consistency checks’, (Logical Discrepancy), will thereafter get only one month to get their names re-inserted in the roll.

If they fail to provide documents that satisfy the administration within one month, they will be excluded from the roll.

This will then create even greater chaos and anxiety and may have fatal consequences for voters.

This then is the real reason behind the brutal administrative push to complete SIR before the Census begins.

This is the real reason. The only real reason

SIR is being conducted in order to unconstitutionally implement the BJP government’s politically malicious intentions and Hindutva’s agenda. To implement an untested, contested NRC through the backdoor.

To implement this plan of action (POA) aggressively, the Election Commission—acting as a puppet of the BJP—has devised extremely unscientific SIR criteria, impossible deadlines, an undemocratic process, and an anti-people questionnaire.

This is the cause of the deaths of BLOs, voters’ anxiety, and the developing anarchy.

There is only one solution:

Scrap The Unconstitutional SIR.
Let voter-roll revision be carried out patiently and in a people-friendly manner.
Let’s Act to save democracy.

[1] The National Population Register (NPR) is a comprehensive database of all ‘usual residents in India’, recording both citizens and foreign nationals.

[2] National Register of Citizens (NRC) was a requirement inserted by the 2003 Rules to the Indian Citizenship Act (CA) of 1955. In 2019-2020 the amendment to the CAA drew huge protests, delaying the process of excluding ‘undocumented’ Indians into a list of ‘suspected foreigners’

Related:

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

Karnataka launches SIR with 5.5 crore voters, State Govt voices transparency concerns

Karnataka’s new PRC rules are people-friendly, but will the ECI accept them?

To Karnataka’s Anti-SIR Movement: A note of caution and concern

Anti-SIR Activists Beware: A mere Residential Certificate does not satisfy SIR requirements

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