Saroj Hospital Medical Negligence Case: Key Questions Raised

On 29th March 2018, Gargi Meena walked into Saroj Super Speciality Hospital in Rohini, Delhi. Gargi had mild stomach pain, but within 48 hours she was dead.

Since Gargi's death, for the last eight years, Uttam Chand Meena has been fighting to get justice for his wife. He went to court, he filed several RTI petitions, dug out documents related to the hospital, and eventually he found out that over 100 unregistered nurses were working in the hospital at the time of his wife's admission. Meena has alleged that his wife died due to medical negligence.

On 15th July 2026, he got a favourable order from the Delhi Nursing Council, which has decided to initiate criminal action against the hospital's management. Here are the transcripts of the conversation between The Probe's Editor-in-Chief Prema Sridevi and Uttam Chand Meena.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence in Delhi Hospital Claimed My Wife’s Life - Husband

How Gargi Meena Went to the Hospital

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, thank you for joining me. The Delhi Nursing Council order is a very significant one. But before we come to that, for those who don't know your case, tell us what happened to your wife, Gargi Meena, in 2018.

Uttam Chand Meena: Let me give you the background. On 29 March 2018 we were due to travel to Pushkar and Ajmer Sharif. That morning she woke up with her period and mild pain. I said, Saroj Hospital is close by, go and get some medicine. If she had the medicine with her, then on a long road journey she could take it whenever the pain came. You don't find a doctor on the highway. That was the only thought behind it. She went to the hospital on her own.

She reported at casualty, at emergency. They managed her pain there. She called me again at around 9:00, 9:15. I told her, your pain has settled, but get the medicine prescribed as well, that was the whole purpose. The moment she asked the emergency doctor for a prescription, he said no, it is OPD time now, go to the OPD.

So she was sent from emergency to the OPD. The gynaecologist on duty that day was Dr Nisha Jain. She saw her at about 10:20 in the morning. My wife explained the problem and asked for medicine. Instead of prescribing anything, the doctor told her to get tests done. One of them was a trans-vaginal scan. On the basis of that she said, you have a cyst, and this bleeding will not stop, you will have to undergo surgery. But that bleeding was menstrual bleeding.

And note this. When she pushed her towards surgery, she had already written out the pre-surgical tests at the very start. It is not that she added them after seeing the TVS report. They were written earlier. After the TVS she said, now get these further tests done too. By 3 p.m. the doctor had prepared her for surgery.

Why Was Surgery Recommended?

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, you are saying there was no need for that surgery, that for mild stomach pain she only needed medicine. When you raised this with the doctor, when you asked why surgery was necessary, what were you told?

Uttam Chand Meena: Before meeting the doctor I spoke at length with my CMO. He told me that doctors avoid surgery during menstruation, because the body is unstable anyway. So he said, ask them to plan it for after the period.

With that in mind I went to the labour management room. My wife was sitting up in bed. I told the doctor: I have no problem giving consent, but for now give her conservative treatment and manage the pain. We will go to the village and come back, and you can operate then.

The doctor flared up. She said, "You don't understand. She will die if you don't do the surgery." The HOD of the hospital, saying that to an ordinary man like me. I knew nothing about any of this at the time. I gave consent under pressure.

The Surgery and What Happened Afterwards

Prema Sridevi: We have seen photographs of her from before she went to the hospital. She looked cheerful and healthy. Then suddenly, at the time of surgery, what happened?

Uttam Chand Meena: They performed a total laparoscopic hysterectomy — a TLH. And they did it because it pays more. The same hysterectomy could have been done vaginally, but that earns less. That is why they pushed for a TLH. I was told she would be discharged on the third day. A small keyhole operation, barely any stitches, the patient recovers by the third day and walks about.

All of that was in my head. But when she said "she will simply die", I had no option left. I gave consent blindly.

She was taken to the OT at around 5:30. We waited. We had been told the surgery would take an hour and a half, two hours. It went on until 7:45. That is the time written in the records, but we were only taken in to see her at 8:45. 

She was in so much pain that I could not make sense of it. When she was being wheeled in for surgery she had looked at me briefly. I said only one thing to her. I said, you have delivered three children; this is a small surgery, removing the uterus, it will be done, you will come back, why are you worrying? I did not know she would not come back.

Prema Sridevi: What happened after the surgery?

Uttam Chand Meena: She was in severe pain. Terrible pain and this is immediately after surgery, when the anaesthesia is still working on the body. Even with that dose in her, she was in agony. And in that pain she whispered to me that she could not pass urine.

I went and called Dr Nisha Jain. I said, she is having trouble passing urine. She pulled back the sheet and said, look, the catheter is in place. At that point, there were other patients in the room. The doctor just pulled off the bedsheet and exposed my wife to everyone. She was nude. It was a very embarrassing and shocking moment for us. Why would a doctor who is a caregiver be so angry and ruthless?

Prema Sridevi: So in front of the other patients beside her, and their families, she pulled off the sheet?

Uttam Chand Meena: It was the labour room, and we had been called in specially to see her. The other patients were all around. And at that moment she pulled the sheet away. I could not react at that time. I was under pressure because my wife was in so much pain.

But understand what followed. In the post-operative period we simply kept waiting. It was 11:30 at night and they still had not shifted her to a room. They kept the patient lying there in the post-operative labour room. It turned 12:00, 12:30, and I thought, forget it, they won't move her now. In the morning our daughter, who had stayed there all night, called me: "Papa, they are shifting her to the ICU." I asked what had happened. They said her blood sugar had gone to 358. This was the morning of the 30th, around 7:30.

Now that I am fighting the case, I have learnt that there were no nurses available that night to manage her. The nurse simply did not bother to check that her sugar had to be monitored post-operatively. All her post-operative vitals should have been charted as routine. No such record was ever given to me.

And the biggest thing. They had spoken about transfusing blood, first the blood management, they said. If a patient's haemoglobin is 7.6 and you are operating, you must stabilise her first, bring the Hb up to at least 10. Instead, they started one unit and wheeled her into the OT. And at night, until about 11:30 or 12:30, they were still giving the three units they had decided on in the post-operative period. What is the sense in that?

On the one hand they say there was bleeding. But once you have removed the cause of the bleeding, the bleeding stops. So why keep transfusing blood afterwards? It means something inside the abdomen had been damaged, something had been cut during the surgery, and they had to get through the night on transfusions.

Also Read:  Saroj Hospital Medical Negligence: NMC Takes Action - The Probe Impact

What the Operation Recording Revealed

Prema Sridevi: Over these eight years you have done a great deal of investigation yourself, and the authorities have also examined the case. Looking back now, in 2026, what are the things that happened in that hospital that make you say this is medical negligence?

Uttam Chand Meena: The All India Federation of Laparoscopic Surgery is a federation based in Bombay. On the strength of a letter from them, Saroj Hospital had been made a centre for laparoscopy training, and the person delivering that training was Nisha Jain. Yet on the day of the surgery, the operative record does not even carry Nisha Jain's signature to show that she attended the patient. There is another assistant, Dr Priyanka Gupta. So the way I read it, Priyanka Gupta probably performed laparoscopic surgery.

Prema Sridevi: That is what you believe?

Uttam Chand Meena: Yes. If Nisha Jain's signature is not in my documents, that is what I will believe.

Prema Sridevi: But the National Medical Commission took action against Nisha Jain. On what basis did the NMC act against her, if she had not even seen the patient?

Uttam Chand Meena: Ma'am, it is a convention of the medical fraternity that the senior doctor under whom the patient is being treated carries the blame. It does not fall on the junior. That is our misfortune.

Prema Sridevi: So the first reason you call this negligence is that you believe Dr Nisha Jain did not perform the surgery. What else do you think happened in that hospital that day?

Uttam Chand Meena: After a great deal of effort we had the CD of the operation released through the court, and we watched it very closely. It shows that a cut was made. And while the ovaries and so on were being removed, a serious injury occurred. It is all on the CD. I am not the one saying this. The CD the hospital itself handed over says it.

Prema Sridevi: Could you identify the doctors in it, or is it only the computerised imaging?

Uttam Chand Meena: It is the imaging, ma'am. In laparoscopic surgery you only see the screen. 

Prema Sridevi: So what did you see on that CD?

Uttam Chand Meena: I saw that she was bleeding internally. We saw the bleeding. There was bleeding, and after that they did not control it. That is why they kept transfusing blood post-operatively.

Take it on principle. The doctors say she was bleeding because of a cyst inside the uterus. You removed the uterus. The bleeding should have stopped, and no transfusion should have been needed at all. The post-operative blood settles it: there was massive bleeding during surgery, which they kept clearing, kept suctioning out and this was caught on the CD.

Their target was to finish in about an hour and a half; that is roughly what it takes. It took far longer. So the anaesthesia dose has to be increased too. The dose given at the start covers a fixed duration, so that management also has to be extended. Finally within 48 hours of my wife stepping inside that hospital, she was declared dead.

How the RTI Investigation Found Nursing Records

Prema Sridevi: Over these eight years of fighting, how did you come to know that unregistered nurses were involved at the time of admission?

Uttam Chand Meena: In the documents Saroj Hospital gave me, a nurse's number appeared at the bottom of the sheets. I wanted to identify the nurse by name — which nurse did what for the patient, and in which shift. I was struggling with that. So I asked Saroj Hospital for the data of every nurse connected with my patient. They gave it to me.

When I analysed it, I asked them for the DNC numbers. What they had given me as DNC numbers were actually Saroj's own employee codes. Once I realised that, I filed an RTI with the DNC to verify it: tell me whether this nurse, by this name, is registered with you or not. For some of them the answer came back: she is not registered with us.

Once "not registered" was on record, I kept at it through RTI after RTI. Through that process I even obtained the DNC's approval to go into Saroj and take their complete record. I took the entire Excel sheet of nurses and then showed how many were unregistered. Multiple RTIs — I cannot even tell you how many. And the result is that things were gradually filtered out, and today we are sitting here with this favourable order from the DNC.

Prema Sridevi: One major outcome of your eight-year fight is that the National Medical Commission acted against Saroj Hospital's doctors, and the Delhi Medical Council also accepted that there was negligence by the doctors in this case. But whenever medical negligence is discussed, only the doctors' role is scrutinised. The role of nurses is hardly ever examined. In your view, in cases like this, what is a nurse's responsibility, and what is her role?

Uttam Chand Meena: Ma'am, think about it practically, exactly as an ordinary person would. Doctors come on their round, write a note on the chart and leave. Once that note is written, who administers the medicine according to it? The nurse. 

If she gives the wrong drug, or the wrong dose — or if the doctor has written that an injection is to be given after a certain interval and she does not understand what that means, and an unqualified woman pushes that injection into your IV line — what could the consequences be? 

Doctors barely give you five minutes. They come on rounds for a minute or two per patient. For the remaining 24 hours, whether the patient is in the ICU or a general ward, the person who provides the actual care — like a mother — is the nurse.

Also Read:  Delhi High Court Flags Regulatory Failures at Saroj Hospital | Impact

What the Delhi Nursing Council Order Says

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, I am looking at the Delhi Nursing Council order you received, dated 15 July 2026. It is a shocking order. The Council accepts that of 245 nursing staff, 114 nurses were registered with the Delhi Nursing Council. 120 nurses were not registered with the Council, which is against the rule of law.

More importantly, six nurses — in fact the order does not even call them nurses, it says six individuals — were completely unregistered with any state nursing council in India, posing a direct threat to patient safety in critical care. Those are the Delhi Nursing Council's own words. These six had no registration anywhere, so we do not even know what their qualifications were or what they were doing in that hospital.

And there is the misclassification. Five more individuals had been shown as nurses, and the order says they were "mistakenly rostered as nursing staff." What is this?

Uttam Chand Meena: There is a story behind those five that people don't know. Every hospital, according to its bed strength, must maintain the nurse numbers laid down in the Delhi nursing rules — how many beds means how many nurses, and how much OT staff if there is an OT. It is all defined. So to make up their headcount, hospitals sometimes fold in the OT staff. That is exactly what happened here: the nurses were falling short, so they included these people too. Technicians, assistants — they show all of them as nurses.

Prema Sridevi: To make the numbers add up on paper.

Uttam Chand Meena: Exactly. And notice point 102, which you read out, on "interstate registration default". There the DNC says the interstate registration is in default — that these people did not take an NOC from their home state and migrate properly. But alongside that it also says their documents were never verified.

Prema Sridevi: So among those 120, part of the responsibility may lie with the DNC itself.

Uttam Chand Meena: Exactly. 

Prema Sridevi: At The Probe we cover a great many medical negligence cases. We are probably the only news organisation focused on covering medical negligence and public health accountability. It is a major campaign for us.

Since we began, a great many victims email us and call us, asking us to cover their stories. The first thing I tell them is: register your case, go to your state medical council, do everything that is required — and we will look at the documents and cover the story. And what most of them say is that justice in medical negligence cases is impossible. That the doctors' mafia, the hospital mafia, are wired into the system, that they will waste their time and never get justice.

Your case is an inspiration to many families, because in eight years you have won a series of favourable orders — from the Delhi High Court, the Delhi Medical Council, the National Medical Commission, and now the Delhi Nursing Council. So to the people who say justice in medical negligence is impossible, what would you say? What is your message?

Uttam Chand Meena: What you have said is the reality. Let me explain what lies behind it. If my parents had not educated me, I would not be qualified. I am a graduate engineer, and I studied further after that. Could I otherwise have picked up a medical textbook and read it? I have brought the books with me — I even brought Harrison, and the book I found on laparoscopy, I studied it.

Now tell me, after all that: will an ordinary person concentrate on earning a living, or read medical textbooks and then consider himself fit to walk into the DMC and argue with doctors? At the DMC they do not let your lawyer in, nor any doctor. The NMC is the same: you cannot take legal support, you may bring a companion with a medical background but not a relative. In that kind of setting, how is an ordinary man to make those doctors understand what was done to him? It is very difficult, ma'am.

Prema Sridevi: So what message would you give them? 

Uttam Chand Meena: My message is this. Many NGOs are working, but I would ask that some good NGO enter this field as well — one that can help an unlettered person who arrives with documents, that can support the average, middle-income person, the poor man who cannot spend money.

And I would ask the government to do everything in its power to bring such NGOs onto the ground. Because just as a government does not function well without a good opposition, in exactly the same way, if there is nobody to spot the flaws in how the medical fraternity works, then whatever the fraternity does is accepted as correct. We treat the white coat as another form of God.

Prema Sridevi: Is this issue of unregistered nurses confined to Saroj Hospital, or do you think it is a far broader problem affecting many more hospitals in this country?

Uttam Chand Meena: Pull up the records of any nursing home and you will find the nurses' certificates and qualifications on file — and that nurse is not even working there. It is not as though I only looked at Saroj. There are plenty of other small hospitals and nursing homes where, when a minor accident happens, someone takes the injured person to the nearest roadside hospital. He has no idea whether the staff at the place he is taking an accident case to for first aid can even handle his patient.

A stranger passing through comes across an accident victim and takes him to the nearest hospital. It is neither the patient's fault nor his. Often you are told outright, this patient is not ours — meaning we do not provide this kind of care — but they will still enter the hospital's name on the record. And when the word "hospital" comes to mind, nobody stops to ask whether treatment for this particular condition is available there.

So I consider it a very big failure of the Delhi Nursing Home Cell that it grants hospital status to anyone at all, whether the place stands on 250 square yards or on four acres. The four-acre one does only one extra thing: it writes "Multi-Speciality Hospital" underneath. And now even the small nursing homes have picked up the habit — they write "Super Speciality Hospital" too. A great many deaths happen because of this, and nobody pays them any attention.

Gargi Meena: Her Life and Her Dreams

Prema Sridevi: Meena ji, the most important person in this entire conversation is Gargi Meena ji. We want to know about her. What kind of person was she? What were her dreams?

Uttam Chand Meena: My wife had done her JBT. She gave up her MCD teaching job for the children. And the dream we had, let me tell you, was to go back to the village and open a small school — to give tuition to children who cannot afford tuition. That was our dream: that if in that rural area, that countryside where people cannot manage a proper meal, we could move even a few children's lives forward, then the two of us having come to this earth would have been worthwhile. 

Prema Sridevi: So what happens next in this case?

Uttam Chand Meena: My next stage is to take the DHS to court over Saroj, and to take the Quality Council of India to court. Whatever the licensing authority is, whatever the accreditation body is, a strong message should go to all of them. 

Prema Sridevi: Thank you, Meena ji. Wish you all the best in your fight. We truly hope that you get justice. 

Uttam Chand Meena: Thank you. 

On 15 October, a fee arrives on UPI payments above ₹2,000. The government says it is small and merchant-only. A petition in the Supreme Court, read against the paperwork the state has published and the paperwork it has withheld, tells a harder story. This is what the UPI MDR really is, how it was made, and why it is being fought.

For six years, using UPI cost nothing, and that was not a courtesy. It was the law. From 15 October, for a slice of payments, it stops being free, and the way that change was engineered is at least as troubling as the charge itself.

What Zero MDR Meant, and Why It Was Suddenly Undone

A merchant discount rate, or MDR, is the fee a business pays its bank for accepting a digital payment. On the cards in your wallet it is real money, close to 0.9 percent on a debit card and as much as 2.5 percent on credit. On UPI, since the start of 2020, it has been zero. Zero MDR meant the shopkeeper kept every rupee and the bank recovered nothing from the transaction. That was the entire point, to make digital acceptance costless and therefore universal.

The policy came in three moves. In the July 2019 Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that businesses with turnover above ₹50 crore must offer digital payment options, with no MDR absorbed by them or passed to customers. From 1 January 2020 it hardened into law, written into Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007, which forced banks and processors to waive fees on UPI and RuPay debit cards. There it stood for almost six years, until September 2026, when the Ministry of Finance announced the amendment that unwinds it.

The revised arrangement is a hybrid. From 15 October 2026, the absolute zero-MDR rule survives only in parts. Person-to-person transfers stay free. Payments under ₹2,000 stay free. Small merchants receiving up to ₹1 lakh a month stay free. But a person-to-merchant payment above ₹2,000 will now carry a 0.4 percent charge that the merchant must absorb. This is the new UPI MDR.

Why now, and why like this? The government's case for the UPI MDR is that the network is now too costly to keep running for free and must be allowed to fund itself. That case has two holes. The cost figure the industry cites, around ₹20,000 crore a year, has never been published with any working to show how it was reached, so the public is asked to accept the premise on trust. And the claim that UPI cannot survive without a charge does not hold, because for years the government simply paid to keep it free, through a subsidy to banks and payment apps that it kept increasing, from ₹1,389 crore in 2021-22 to ₹2,210 crore the next year and ₹3,631 crore the year after. It could have continued. It chose instead to wind the subsidy down and move the cost onto merchants, which is a policy decision rather than an economic necessity, and one never argued openly as such.

The related reassurance, that 96 percent of payments are untouched and consumers will not pay, sidesteps the real question. The merchants in the remaining slice do pay, and a direction not to pass the cost to customers is only a sentence, and merchants who are told not to pass the cost on will find their own ways to recover it.

The Petition, the Petitioner, and a Gazette That Sets No Price

Here the story turns from policy to power. On 16 September, a Delhi advocate named Anjan Datta filed a public interest petition in the Supreme Court under Article 32 of the Constitution. His reason for going straight to the top court is that the change strikes merchants, consumers and the entire digital-payments economy at once, and the small traders who feel it most cannot each fight a nationwide framework across a dozen High Courts.

The document at the centre of his challenge is Gazette Notification S.O. 5067(E), dated 14 September, and it rewards a slow reading. What it says is narrow. It protects exactly two payment modes from charges, RuPay debit cards with no ceiling, and UPI transactions up to ₹2,000, and it forbids banks from levying on those. What it does not say is the heart of the matter. It fixes no rate. The figure 0.4 percent is nowhere in it. All the notification really does is lift UPI payments above ₹2,000 out of the protection they had held since 2020, leaving them open to a charge the gazette itself never names. Datta's petition asks the court to quash that notification, to compel the government to produce the full record behind the decision, and to declare that no UPI MDR can be imposed on the strength of a press release and a set of FAQs.

The Real Target: A Law Rewritten Into a Blank Cheque

Datta's more serious objection is not to the number at all. It is to the machinery that produced it. Until this year, Section 10A worked like a bolt. The protected payment modes were named in the statute itself, so no minister could remove UPI's shelter at will. Only Parliament could. The 2026 amendment drew that bolt and left a dial. The law no longer states what is protected. It now says the Central Government may decide, by notification, which electronic modes stay free of charge, and by extension which do not.

The petition's charge is that Parliament, through an amendment the government drafted and pushed through, handed over that power with no rules attached: no policy, no formula, no ceiling, no test the government must meet. In effect the legislature wrote the executive a blank cheque to choose which payment systems are shielded and which are charged, and to withdraw a benefit hundreds of millions had built their lives around, without answering to any standard at all. Lawyers call this excessive delegation. In plainer words, the petition says the rule-maker gave itself permission to invent the rules later. If Section 10A falls, the notification and the entire UPI MDR built upon it fall with it.

Five Weeks, Three Documents, and No Gazetted Rate

The chronology is where the unease turns concrete. Parliament amended Section 10A during the monsoon session that closed on 13 August, folding the change into the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Act, 2026, which received the President's assent that month. The old Section 10A had flatly barred any MDR on the payment modes listed under Section 269SU of the income-tax law, a list that covered all UPI and RuPay. The amendment swept that blanket protection away and replaced it with a power for the government to pick modes one at a time.

Then came the reassurance. On 8 August, with public disquiet rising, the Finance Ministry described the amendment as a mere enabling provision, promised that consumers and all person-to-person payments would remain free, and cast the purpose as raising resources for cybersecurity, fraud prevention and infrastructure. Five weeks later, on 14 September, the gazette stripped UPI above ₹2,000 of its protection. The very next day, 15 September, a Press Information Bureau release unveiled the full UPI MDR framework: 0.4 percent on general person-to-merchant payments above ₹2,000, capped at ₹300 above ₹75,000; a flat ₹5 in railways, telecom, insurance, fuel and farm inputs; 0.02 percent on capital-market payments; exemptions for P2P and small merchants; a direction that merchants must not pass the cost to customers; and 5 percent of collections set aside for a small-merchant fund.

The UPI MDR that lands on 15 October appears in no gazette. It lives in that press release and an NPCI circular, produced after deliberations of the UPI and Services Steering Committee. The cautious enabling provision of August had become a detailed, four-band levy by September, the opposite of limited. A charge binding on a whole country was fixed by a committee Parliament never empowered to fix it, announced through a press office, and never published as law. Whatever the merits of 0.4 percent, a compulsory national levy conjured this way is wrong at the root, because the power to impose it was never properly granted, guided or published.

Stabbed in the Back: A Nation Nudged Onto UPI, Then Charged

For millions of merchants, the grievance is not academic. UPI became the spine of everyday commerce because the state built it that way and told them to trust it. Governments put QR codes on every counter, pushed formalisation, celebrated the cashless economy, and said over and over that ordinary digital payments would stay free. When the pandemic made cash feel dangerous, and people watched lives lost and feared touching even their own, UPI was a lifeline that did not care whether you were rich or poor. Households and small businesses restructured around a promise. By the National Payments Corporation's own count, UPI carried roughly 2,451 crore transactions worth about ₹29.82 lakh crore in August 2026 alone, a scale reached precisely because it was free.

To reverse that by press release feels, to those affected, like a door closing quietly behind people who were ushered through it. The manner deepens the wound. UPI is regulated by the Reserve Bank of India and operated by NPCI, a not-for-profit company owned by the very banks that stand to collect the UPI MDR now being introduced. The rate was set by an NPCI-chaired committee that holds no rule-making power under the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, published in no gazette, and protected by none of the safeguards that normally surround a measure of this reach, no prior notice, no publication for objection, no laying before Parliament. A levy this large, arriving without those protections, is on Datta's petition's argument unlawful before anyone even reaches the question of whether the rate is fair.

The Questions Now Before the Supreme Court

Stripped to plain language, the petition puts the court a set of questions the country deserves to see answered. Did Parliament give the executive an unguided power to decide which payment systems are protected, breaching the guarantees of equality and free trade under Articles 14 and 19(1)(g)?

Can a nationwide compulsory charge be switched on without publishing the binding instrument, the source of the power and the reasons behind it?

Can executive FAQs and a press release stand in for a proper, reasoned, published order?

Do the unexplained lines, ₹2,000 a payment, ₹1 lakh a month, the ₹75,000 cap, sort near-identical merchants into winners and losers with no disclosed logic?

Can a compulsory collection shared among banks and payment firms be anything other than a charge that needs the authority of law?

And can a direction not to pass the cost to customers mean anything without audits, penalties or a way to reclaim money wrongly taken? The petition also records what did not happen before any of this: no consultation, no draft rates, no hearing for the hundreds of millions affected.

The petition has been filed, but it is yet to be listed for hearing, and the government maintains it will not reconsider the policy. With the 15 October deadline approaching, whether the Supreme Court agrees to hear the challenge - and what it ultimately rules - will decide far more than a 0.4 percent fee. It will determine whether a public good, built on public funds and public trust, can be repriced through press releases while keeping the legal rationale off the official record.

For Five Years, A Father Did Not Miss A Hearing. Then His Chair Went Empty

When The Probe first walked into a Gurugram apartment to report on the death of 17-year-old Manav Singh, his father Manoj Kumar was still counting the days. He counted them out loud, in court, on social media, to anyone who would listen. The Probe followed his fight from the start, reported it when almost no one else would, and watched that reporting push the National Human Rights Commission to intervene and hand the cyberbullying case to the CB-CID. Manoj thanked us then. He said justice was still a long way off, but that at least someone was watching. In December 2025, of a sudden cause, Manoj died. And when we returned to the court file, we found something that stopped us cold: the case he built now drifts with no one to carry it, and the court does not even seem to know the man fighting it is gone.

Who Manav Was

Manav Singh was a Class 12 student in Gurugram, his parents' only child, a cheerful boy who wanted to study abroad. On the night of 4 May 2020, he had dinner with his family, ordered burgers, and went to his room. Soon he was dead, having jumped from the eleventh floor of the family's apartment. His parents told The Probe they had left him smiling only minutes earlier. "I saw Manav's head split open like a watermelon and I saw my son die on the spot," his father said. "This is not a simple case of suicide. This is cyber murder."

Also Read:  Gurugram Parents Allege Cyber Murder of Son, Await Justice

What happened in those final forty-five minutes was, his parents said, a coordinated cyberbullying assault. After a defamatory post appeared against him on Instagram, they told The Probe, some twenty to thirty people descended on him online, calling and messaging without pause. "They were jumping on to Manav on the internet like wolves," his father said. Just before he died, Manav sent his parents a message saying goodbye. The Probe reported all of this at a time when the story was going untold, and accessed the electronic evidence that showed the trolling in the minutes before his death.

How The Case Was Botched

The family's account of the police response was damning, and The Probe documented it. Gurugram police took ten days to register the FIR. When the parents went to the police as victims, they said, they were treated like the accused. The first chargesheet, they pointed out, was filed against unknown persons, without invoking the cyberbullying provisions of the IT Act that they believed the case demanded.

The delays were not just the family's complaint; the court itself said so. A Gurugram magistrate, reviewing the sluggish probe, recorded that the investigating officers were "working at a low pace in the present matter for reasons best known to them," and ordered the police to file a status report every fifteen days. The parents said the social media platforms were no help either. Crucial digital records from Instagram and Snapchat, the material that could have shown exactly who did what that night, were not obtained or produced in time. It was this collapse of the cyberbullying probe, evidence left ungathered, deadlines ignored, that finally forced the NHRC to step in.

Also Read:  Gurugram cyber bullying case transferred to CB-CID by NHRC for reinvestigation: The Probe impact

The Fight That Would Not Stop, And The NHRC Impact

Through all of it, Manoj Kumar refused to let go. He moved from pillar to post, filed the applications, kept the case alive in court, and kept telling his son's story publicly long after the news cycle had moved on. The Probe stayed with him. Our continued reporting on the Gurugram case kept the pressure on, and it produced a result: the NHRC examined the record, found the investigation "nothing but a vitiated investigation which cannot rise to a valid chargesheet," and transferred the matter to the CB-CID for reinvestigation.

"When no media was reporting on this issue, The Probe had taken it up even before its launch," Manoj said at the time. "I really am grateful to NHRC and The Probe for their support, but justice still is a long way."

What The CB-CID Was Meant To Do

The transfer to the CB-CID was the single biggest win of Manoj's long fight. The NHRC had been blunt about why it was needed: no arrests reflected in the enquiry report, mobile phones not sent for forensics in time, a final report filed without the phone, Instagram and Snapchat data that the case turned on. The Commission directed Haryana's home department to have the matter reinvestigated properly and to report back.

But a transfer on paper is not the same as an investigation on the ground. The court record shows the CB-CID's action taken report being chased hearing after hearing, adjournment after adjournment, the report simply not arriving. At one point the court noted the notice to the station house officer had not even been issued by its own staff, and ordered a show cause notice. The report that Manoj had fought years to obtain was finally placed on record only in August 2025, a few short months before he died.

Also Read:  Cyberbullying: Two years on, Justice Evades Gurugram Parents

The Court That Does Not Know He Is Gone

In the months after Manoj's death, the case he had carried on his own shoulders kept getting called, and no one came. "None for complainant," the orders say, again and again. On one date the case was called several times through the morning; the magistrate waited until noon, and still no one appeared for the man who had never once stopped appearing. The court, "in the interest of justice", declined to pass any adverse order and simply issued another notice to the complainant and his counsel.

The complainant is dead. The notices are going out to a man who cannot receive them. His lawyer Amish Aggarwala, who once gave interviews and led the campaign, was unavailable for a comment when we reached out to him. The file was summoned by an appellate court and sent back. Fresh dates were fixed, then fixed again, the next stretching into 2027.

The Gurugram cyberbullying case that a father spent five years dragging toward justice now moves entirely on its own momentum, which is to say it barely moves at all, past a chair in the courtroom that will stay empty.

What Remains

Manoj Singh buried his only son and then gave whatever he had left to a fight he did not live to finish. He wanted one thing: for a court to look honestly at how his boy was hounded to death, and to say so. He did not get it. His wife has since relocated from Gurugram to another city. The case carries on in name, in a courtroom, under a father's name that no longer belongs to anyone who will walk through the door. That, in the end, is what a cyberbullying death cost one family: a boy, then his father, and a fight that outlived them both and still points at nothing.

Every summit communique is an exercise in choosing words, but the New Delhi Declaration is unusually revealing in what it chooses to name and what it leaves in shadow. Adopted by consensus on 12 September 2026 by all members of the expanded bloc, the document runs to 140 numbered paragraphs and touches almost every subject in global affairs, from the Security Council to submarine cables. Yet its real meaning lies in a single pattern. On some conflicts it speaks plainly and names names. On others it retreats into the passive voice. And on one major war it says nothing at all. Read through that lens, the New Delhi Declaration is the clearest map yet of how far this bloc, and its host India, will actually go.

What the New Delhi Declaration Said Plainly

Where BRICS felt safe, it was specific. On Gaza the language is direct and forceful. The Declaration condemns "the use of starvation as a method of warfare" and attacks on hospitals and civilian infrastructure, demands unhindered humanitarian access, and opposes "the forced displacement, temporary or permanent, under any pretext, of any of the Palestinian population" from Gaza.

It goes beyond rhetoric, noting the provisional measures of the International Court of Justice "in the legal proceedings instituted by South Africa against Israel," and restating Israel's obligation to let aid into Gaza. It backs a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital, and full UN membership for Palestine. On Lebanon it names Israel again, calling on it "to withdraw its occupying forces from all of the Lebanese territories".

India's own priority was named too. It condemns "in the strongest terms the terrorist attack in Jammu and Kashmir on 22 April 2025, during which 26 people were killed," the Pahalgam attack, and carries the language India has long pushed on the cross-border movement of terrorists, terror financing, safe havens, and a rejection of "double standards in countering terrorism." For New Delhi, getting a document signed by China, Russia, Iran and eight others to name an attack on Indian soil was a genuine diplomatic win, and one worth reading closely for what it does not do.

Also Read:  Modi, Xi, Putin: The Biggest Challenges Before BRICS in Delhi

What the Declaration Would Only Whisper

The moment the subject turned toward the West's most powerful state, the plain speech vanished. On the strikes against Iran, the Declaration expresses "serious concern over deliberate attacks on civilian infrastructure and peaceful nuclear facilities under full safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency". Every reader knows this describes the American and Israeli bombing of Iran's nuclear sites, yet the attackers are never named, and even the victim is identified only as the owner of "peaceful nuclear facilities." The paragraph before it urges all sides to show "maximum restraint" while "recalling our respective national positions", the diplomatic phrase that lets members who fundamentally disagree paper over the gap and sign the same page.

The same hush falls over economic grievances. The New Delhi Declaration voices "serious concerns about the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures which distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules", condemns "unilateral economic sanctions and secondary sanctions" and calls for their elimination, and demands an end to the "unilateral blockade measures" against Cuba. Each of these is a complaint aimed squarely at Washington. Not one of them says so.

The War the New Delhi Declaration Ignored

Then there is the silence. For all its length, the Declaration makes no mention of the war in Ukraine, the largest active conflict involving a BRICS member. The peace and security section moves methodically through West Asia, Iran, Gaza, Jerusalem, Lebanon, Sudan, Syria and Cuba, but the war Russia is waging simply does not appear. Where earlier BRICS texts at least gestured at it through members' "national positions," this one omits it altogether. That absence is not an accident of drafting. It is the price of Russian membership and of India's refusal to be drawn into criticising Moscow, and it marks, as clearly as any paragraph that is present, where the bloc's convenience lies.

The Country the Declaration Never Names

Put those threads together and one fact stands out above the rest. The United States is not named once in the entire Declaration. Not in the tariff paragraph, not on sanctions, not over the strikes on Iran, not on the Cuban embargo. The document assembles a comprehensive indictment of American economic and military conduct and then declines, everywhere, to write the word.

The contrast with how the New Delhi Declaration treats its own members is telling. It is perfectly willing to name China and Russia when the mention flatters: it credits them for supporting India and Brazil at the UN, praises China for extending "zero-tariff treatment to cover 53 African countries" and for its contribution to the Kunming biodiversity fund. The bloc will name friends in praise but not adversaries in protest. That is the signature of a group that wants the posture of defiance without paying the price of confrontation.

Where the New Delhi Declaration Stands on Dedollarisation

Nowhere is that caution clearer than on the dollar. For all the noise about BRICS building an alternative to the greenback, the Declaration is studiously modest. It acknowledges the work of the BRICS Payment Task Force on cross-border payments and notes "discussions on promoting trade settlements and investments using BRICS local currencies," but immediately hedges that there is "no one-size-fits-all approach" and that national priorities come first.

There is no common BRICS currency, no timetable to displace the dollar, and, once again, no mention of the United States. This is the toned-down dedollarisation India has argued for all along, now set into the outcome document. Even the New Development Bank is urged only to "expand local currency financing", an incremental nudge rather than a rupture. For a summit that the world watched for signs of a currency war, the declaration reads like a decision not to start one.

Also Read:  Modi BRICS Speech: The Global South's Case, Carefully Framed

Multilateralism and the Reform the Declaration Demands

If the declaration is timid on confrontation, it is expansive on reform, and this is the ground on which BRICS is most comfortable. The New Delhi Declaration devotes its opening pages to it, calling for a "more just, equitable ... representative, legitimate, democratic and accountable" international order for greater representation of developing countries in the UN and its Secretariat, and for a comprehensive reform of the Security Council. But even here the ambition is carefully fenced.

China and Russia "reiterate their support to the aspirations of Brazil and India to play a greater role in the UN, including its Security Council", a formula that blesses a vague "greater role" while stopping short of endorsing a permanent seat, leaving India's core demand exactly where it has languished for two decades. On the economic front the Declaration presses for reform of the IMF and World Bank so that voting power reflects "countries' relative positions in the global economy", supports WTO reform and the accession bids of Ethiopia and Iran, and quietly defends South Africa's seat at the G20 against any change not agreed "based on consensus of all members", a subtle rebuke to the pressure coming out of Washington on that forum. The demands are ambitious. The mechanism to force them remains, as always, absent.

Where India Gained, and Where It Fell Short

For India the New Delhi Declaration is at once a showcase and a ceiling. The gains are real. New Delhi steered a consensus text through the sharp Iran-UAE divide over West Asia, secured the naming of the Pahalgam attack, kept the currency language cautious, and stamped the document with its own initiatives: a BRICS Grain Exchange, a Risk Lab at GIFT City in Gujarat, the New Investment Platform, an India Centre for BRICS Industrial Competencies, the chairship of the Kimberley Process on diamonds, and an India-led International Big Cats Alliance. It also anchored a commitment to "implement the BRICS Leaders' Statement on the Global Governance of Artificial Intelligence" and won a nod to its AI Impact Summit of February 2026.

The shortfalls are just as real, and the same document records them. The Pahalgam attack is condemned, but Pakistan is never named, so India got the incident without the accusation. The Security Council language flatters India while advancing its seat not at all. And the sweeping reforms the New Delhi Declaration demands remain, as they have for years, aspirations rather than accomplishments. India left with the words it wanted. The substance stayed beyond reach.

What the Summit Achieved, and What It Did Not

The honest verdict on the New Delhi Declaration sits somewhere between triumph and theatre. Its first achievement is simply that it exists. An eleven-member bloc containing states on opposite sides of active wars produced a single consensus document, and for a group this fractured that is not nothing. It let India project real convening power, handed the Global South a long charter of shared demands on governance, trade, health and development, and logged dozens of working groups, task forces and centres of excellence that could, over time, harden into something durable.

What it did not do is act. The Declaration is a document of 140 paragraphs built on "we welcome," "we note" and "we acknowledge," abundant in intent and thin in binding commitment. It named no adversary, resolved no contradiction, and moved no institution from words to obligation. Its very length is not a measure of ambition but of consensus: the more members at the table and the more topics on the agenda, the more diffuse the text has to become for everyone to sign it. It is, in the end, the declaration of a bloc that can agree on what it dislikes far more easily than on what it will do.

What Comes Next

The real test of the New Delhi Declaration begins now, with the summit lights switched off. In his concluding remarks on Sunday, Narendra Modi seemed to concede as much, telling leaders that BRICS "must translate all outcomes into time-bound actions that deliver last-mile impact," an admission that the declaration is only intent until someone acts on it. He has proposed a Continuity and Implementation Mechanism to stop each year's promises from quietly evaporating, and the declaration itself is studded with study groups and roadmaps that will either mature into working institutions or lapse into footnotes.

With the chairship now passing to China for 2027, the burden of turning this text into action moves on with it. Three things are worth watching in the year ahead: whether the payment and local-currency plumbing is actually built or merely discussed, whether the reform demands survive contact with a Security Council and a Bretton Woods system that have no intention of reforming themselves, and whether an ever-expanding BRICS can keep finding language that eleven, and soon perhaps more, governments will all sign.

The likeliest future is neither the triumph its champions proclaim nor the irrelevance its critics predict. It is a bloc that keeps meeting, keeps issuing careful declarations, and keeps making Western dominance a little harder to exercise without ever openly challenging it. The New Delhi Declaration, loud where it was safe, coded where it was not, silent on the war it could not touch, and careful never to name the one power it most wants to constrain, is a faithful portrait of that middle path. India hosted it with skill. What even a skilled host could not do was make a divided bloc braver than the sum of its interests.

Reading the Modi BRICS Speech: Reform Up Front, the Hard Fights in the Fine Print

A leader's summit address is as much about what it withholds as what it declares, and the Modi BRICS speech delivered to the closed session of the 18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi is a near-perfect example. On the surface it was an ambitious, reform-minded call to remake global institutions. Read against everything else unfolding at BRICS Summit 2026, it was also a careful act of avoidance, steering clear of every flashpoint that could cost India something with Washington. The speech and its silences together are the clearest statement yet of how India means to lead this bloc.

Also Read:  Modi, Xi, Putin: The Biggest Challenges Before BRICS in Delhi

What Modi Said: A Bloc That Has "Come of Age"

Modi framed his remarks around a milestone, the 20th anniversary of BRICS, reaching for the image of a young adult stepping into responsibility. BRICS, he said, stands at a "coming of age" moment. He was careful to define the group by what it is not, telling the room that it moves ahead "with an approach that is not against anyone but instead seeks to take everyone along." That was a framing Putin used almost identically the same day, and it was the diplomatic spine of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's BRICS speech, a message pitched as much at the United States as at the leaders gathered for the BRICS Summit.

The Core Argument: A "Pyramid of Privilege" That Must Change

From there Modi built his central case, that the architecture of global power is broken and tilted against the developing world. The present system, he said, "resembles a pyramid," with power concentrated at the top and the countries most affected by decisions given the least say in shaping them. His sharpest line, and the one most quoted from the summit, was this: "The Global South is today in the front row of global crises, but in the back row of decision-making." The task, he argued, is to convert that "pyramid of privilege" into a "platform of partnership."

He offered structure rather than slogans. Modi proposed that BRICS draw up ten proposals for global governance reform and turn them into a "BRICS Reform Roadmap" by the next summit, built on three principles he labelled "Representation, Responsiveness, and Rule-making." On the first he was blunt, warning that "reform of the UN Security Council can no longer be delayed" and demanding that negotiations be tied to a clear timeline and concrete outcomes. He extended the same logic to the IMF and the World Bank, arguing that voting power, leadership positions and policy priorities "should reflect today's economic realities." On the third principle he made his most forward-looking pitch, that in the age of AI, cyberspace, outer space and biotechnology, the Global South must move "from rule-takers into rule-shapers."

Also Read:  BRICS In Delhi: Make Or Break For India, Caught Between Two Boats

The Deliverables in the Modi BRICS Speech

Alongside the vision came the kind of process proposals that are hard to argue with and easy to sign. Modi called for a "BRICS Continuity and Implementation Mechanism," run through the Troika and backed by a secure digital repository to record, for every decision, "the nodal point, timeline, and implementation status," so that the annually rotating chairship does not keep resetting the group's momentum.

In its most human touch, the speech proposed a "Seafarers Emergency Support Network" to link maritime authorities across member states for distress alerts, medical help and evacuation. He closed on a couplet built for quotation: "From voice to impact. From privilege to partnership."

It is a substantial address. What makes it revealing, though, is what it leaves out.

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What the Modi BRICS Speech Left Unsaid: The Dollar

Most striking is the silence on the dollar. Dedollarisation was the single most watched storyline of BRICS Summit 2026, the subject of Donald Trump's threat to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on any BRICS state that moves against the greenback, and the theme Xi Jinping pressed hardest. Modi did not touch it. The words dollar, currency and de-dollarisation do not appear in his remarks at all. That omission is a position, not an oversight.

The declaration his summit adopted hours later went further than he did, encouraging the BRICS Payment Task Force to build faster, cheaper cross-border payment channels and backing greater use of local currencies. India let the collective document carry that message. 

The Countries Modi Never Named

Just as telling, Modi named no one. There is no United States in the speech, no Trump, no Israel, no Iran, no China. He made no mention of the war in West Asia or the strikes on Iran, even with the Iranian president seated in the same session having pushed for exactly such language. He said nothing about Gaza, and nothing about Ukraine. The contrast with the declaration is instructive. That document, negotiated down to the final morning to bridge the gap between Iran and the UAE, deplored "unprovoked aggression" in general terms while refusing to name any country, and it addressed Gaza through the familiar language of humanitarian access and a two-state solution. The collective text absorbed the controversy; his own remarks kept clear of it.

The same held on trade. The declaration voiced clear opposition to unilateral tariffs, protectionist measures and coercive sanctions, the diplomatic shorthand for grievances against Washington, without naming the source. Modi, in his own words, did not go even that far. Even on counter-terrorism, a subject India almost always foregrounds and one it wrote into the declaration, his speech stayed silent, keeping his personal message trained on reform rather than on any adversary.

Why the Silences Define the Modi BRICS Speech

The context that explains all of this is the thread running through India's whole foreign policy right now: it will not be drafted into any camp. Modi used his platform to be the convener and the reformer, the voice of a Global South seeking fairer institutions, a role that offends no one and flatters India's own leadership ambitions.

The divisive questions, the dollar, the wars, the direct criticism of the West, he left to a negotiated document where the language is deliberately diffuse and no single leader owns it. With live trade talks under way and a prickly relationship with the second Trump administration, that division of labour at BRICS Summit 2026 was not accidental. It was the strategy.

Which is why the measure of the Modi BRICS speech is its omissions as much as its proposals. Modi delivered a confident, quotable case for reshaping the global order and empowering the developing world, and he did it without saying a single thing Washington could hold against him. "If our future is shared," he told the room, "then the right to shape that future must also be shared." It was a fitting line for a leader determined to shape outcomes while sharing the risk, and to let a collective declaration say the things he would rather leave unsaid.

Modi, Xi and Putin, and the Fault Lines Beneath the BRICS Summit in Delhi

When Narendra Modi, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin step onto the same stage at Bharat Mandapam, the photograph will carry further than anything written in the final communique. Xi's presence alone makes this summit unusual, since it is his first visit to India in roughly seven years, the two leaders not having met on Indian soil since their informal talks in 2019. And it comes at a raw moment for the world.

The war in Ukraine has ground into its fifth year, the contest between Washington and Beijing has become the organising rivalry of global politics, and West Asia is still smouldering after the strikes on Iran. India has seated inside the same hall both Iran and the United Arab Emirates, two members who stand on opposing sides of that conflict. A picture of Modi, Xi and Putin together will be read as a show of solidarity. The tensions running beneath it tell a different and more honest story, and those tensions are what the 18th BRICS summit is really about.

BRICS was a label before it was an institution, an acronym an economist coined in 2001 to flag the emerging economies worth watching. Brazil, Russia, India and China held their first leaders' summit only in 2009, and South Africa joined a year later to round out the original five. For more than a decade the club stayed exactly that size. Then it swung its doors open. Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE entered as full members at the start of 2024, Indonesia followed in 2025, and Saudi Arabia was invited as well, taking the group to eleven members on paper.

The bloc now reaches across Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Gulf, and its members together account for close to 40 percent of the global economy and nearly half the world's population. Saturday's session was held behind closed doors, with the leaders talking about reforming global governance and defending multilateralism.

On Sunday the room expands to take in partner states and invited guests before the leaders issue the New Delhi Declaration. That text matters more than any handshake, because in a bloc this large and this fractured, the language eleven governments can actually agree to put their names to is the truest measure of what BRICS has become, and of the limits it keeps running into.

Also Read:  BRICS In Delhi: Make Or Break For India, Caught Between Two Boats

Why Washington Is Watching Modi, Xi and Putin So Closely

No capital is studying this summit more closely than Washington. India is in the middle of trade negotiations with the United States, and the relationship with the second Trump administration has been anything but smooth, snagging repeatedly on tariffs and hard bargaining. That friction is exactly why New Delhi has been widening its options elsewhere.

A couple of years ago, Indian officials were said to be uneasy about belonging to China-dominated groupings like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, even as the country leaned towards the West. Yet at the SCO summit in Bishkek at the start of September, Modi stood alongside Xi and Putin and put India's signature to the Bishkek Declaration, which condemned the military strikes on Iranian territory and pushed back against Western sanctions. That was a notable turn, given that India had earlier declined to join in condemning those strikes. But New Delhi also knows the outer edge of this game. Lean too far towards Moscow and Beijing, and it risks handing Washington a reason to retaliate. Every gesture at a BRICS table is therefore calibrated.

The word for what India is doing is hedging, and it is the key to reading its foreign policy right now. Strategic hedging, put simply, is the refusal to lock into any single great-power camp. Rather than bet the house on one partner, a hedging state cultivates ties with several powers at once, including rivals, so that it always keeps its choices open and never becomes hostage to the goodwill of one capital.

For India this is less a doctrine than a daily tightrope walk. It buys discounted Russian oil while deepening defence and technology ties with the United States, courts a cautious thaw with China while quietly guarding its northern border, and speaks for the Global South without letting any partner conscript it into a bloc. The balance is delicate, and a single misstep in either direction carries a real cost.

What India wants out of Delhi is to bank as much as it can without setting Washington against it, and it is trying to do that in a room where Modi, Xi and Putin each arrive with a different wish list. Putin wants the summit to broadcast that Russia is neither isolated nor cornered, and he wants BRICS to keep expanding trade in national currencies so that sanctions bite less; India, for its part, has fixed a target of 100 billion dollars in annual trade with Russia by 2030, floated on cheap oil. Xi wants to press the case for loosening the world's dependence on the dollar and to cast China as the natural leader of the developing world, all of it staged just before his own meeting with Donald Trump later this month.

Modi wants something quieter and harder to photograph: a substantive chairship with real deliverables in agriculture, digital public infrastructure and health, a louder voice for the Global South, and a summit that advances the India-China reset without being swallowed by it. 

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Dedollarisation, the Fault Line India Would Rather Manage Than Fight

Nothing exposes those competing agendas like the argument over the dollar. India's dilemma is genuine. Russia, cut off from Western financial plumbing, and China, eager to build an alternative to it, both have strong reasons to chip away at dollar dominance, and the two now settle the overwhelming share of their bilateral trade in roubles and yuan. 

Trump has made his own position brutally clear, threatening tariffs of up to 100 percent on any BRICS country that moves to sideline the dollar. India has read that threat and softened its language accordingly, framing its own efforts as local-currency settlement and cheaper cross-border payments rather than any assault on the greenback. But several of the leaders now in Delhi carry a far heavier grievance against the United States than India does. Russia and Iran both live under sweeping American sanctions, and for them building payment channels outside the dollar is not a talking point but a matter of economic survival. That asymmetry, between members who want to manage the dollar and members who want to escape it, runs straight through the summit.

The most ambitious version of that project, a single BRICS currency to rival the dollar, has quietly been shelved, and the politics of why are instructive. India has been the most consistent sceptic, its ministers saying flatly that the country does not support a shared currency and that the very idea of one bound together with China is unworkable given the trust deficit between them. Even Brazil, whose president once mused aloud about a common trading currency, has since disowned any such proposal, its officials insisting there is nothing on the table.

What survives is far more modest: local-currency trade, linked payment systems and experiments with digital currencies, gathered under initiatives such as BRICS Pay. The reserve data explains the retreat. The dollar still makes up close to 58 percent of global reserves and features in the vast majority of foreign-exchange transactions, while the Chinese renminbi sits below 2 percent. Dedollarisation, in other words, is real as plumbing and mostly rhetoric as revolution.

Can Eleven Rival Nations Agree? The Real Test of Multilateralism

A photograph of Modi, Xi and Putin can make BRICS look like a single body with a single will. The harder question is whether genuine multilateralism is even possible among eleven governments this mismatched. India and China are wary neighbours whose trade relationship is lopsided, with India running a deficit of more than 112 billion dollars and an unresolved border still between them.

Iran and the UAE sit on opposite sides of the West Asia conflict. Egypt, Ethiopia and others bring their own regional quarrels and dependencies to the table. Getting all of them to sign a declaration that says something meaningful, rather than a string of pleasant generalities, is an enormous undertaking, and the more members the bloc admits, the thinner the consensus it can reach. A watered-down communique would not be an accident of drafting. It would be the truest possible portrait of the group.

The sharpest test will be the final communique's treatment of the war. Will the New Delhi Declaration say anything at all about the American and Israeli action against Iran, or will it look away? Iran, a full member now, will press for pointed language, and its president is in Delhi to make that case. The SCO went there only days ago, its Bishkek Declaration condemning the strikes on Iranian soil and calling for a diplomatic settlement. If BRICS, with the UAE inside the tent, cannot bring itself to say something comparable, Tehran will feel let down and India will be accused by many of hiding behind its balancing act instead of taking a stand. If it says too much, it angers a Washington that India cannot afford to alienate. There is no comfortable landing here, and the drafting of a single paragraph on West Asia may prove the hardest diplomacy of the weekend.

Also Read:  Iran Demands Oil Tariffs in Chinese Yuan, Threatening Dollar Dominance

Trump, for his part, can afford a certain calm, because he understands the arithmetic. For as long as the members of BRICS carry conflicting interests and chase their own national advantage, the bloc cannot cohere into a genuine challenge to American power. The point is visible even among the four founding economies. When a crisis moves energy markets, Russia and Brazil, both major exporters, want prices high, while China and India, both enormous importers, want them low. The same fault line repeats across the wider group on issue after issue. A coalition whose members profit from opposite outcomes can protest Western dominance in unison, but it struggles to act in unison, and that is the difference between a lobby and a power.

The bloc's own guest list deepens the problem. Several of its members are close partners, and in some cases near-allies, of the very country BRICS is meant to counterbalance. The UAE holds deep security and commercial ties with Washington, Indonesia guards its relationships across the Western world, and Saudi Arabia, though listed among the members, has still not formally completed its accession, precisely because it does not want to jeopardise its dealings with the United States. These are not states with any appetite to turn BRICS into an anti-Western front. Their presence works as a built-in brake, ensuring the group's rhetoric of defiance rarely hardens into anything that would force them to pick a side.

Underneath all of it sits the grievance that gives BRICS its real reason to exist: the architecture of global power. The United Nations Security Council, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were built in another century and still carry its imprint, with the United States and its allies holding outsized sway over institutions that govern the whole world. From the vantage point of the Global South, those bodies too often behave as instruments of Western preference rather than neutral referees. This is the one ambition on which BRICS members broadly agree, a demand for a fairer distribution of voice and votes, and it is why the bloc keeps building its own scaffolding, from the New Development Bank to alternative payment rails. A BRICS that could speak with one voice on reform would be a genuine check on that imbalance. The bloc's misfortune is that the same internal divisions that dull its other ambitions also blunt this one.

What Twenty Years of BRICS Should Be Measured Against, for Modi, Xi and Putin

As BRICS marks two decades since its foundation, the temptation is to grade it against the wrong exam. The question is not whether the club fronted in Delhi by Modi, Xi and Putin has become a wrecking ball aimed at the United States, because it has not, and on the evidence of this summit it will not. The fairer test is subtler and more revealing. Can eleven nations that disagree on trade, on currency, on war and on the shape of the world order still keep showing up at the same table, still find the handful of things they can say together, and in doing so make the exercise of Western dominance a little more effortful and a little less automatic?

By that measure the summit need not deliver a thunderclap to matter. If BRICS can hold itself together and chip, patiently, at the assumption that the rules of the world are Washington's alone to write, that is not nothing. It may, in the end, be the most this magnificently contradictory bloc was ever going to be.

The Human Trafficking Cartel Turning Indian Workers Into Bonded Labour

In the first week of September, Babbar came back home to Asilpur village in Uttar Pradesh's Meerut district with nothing. No wages, no savings. He is now back in the sugarcane fields where he started, tying cane for a daily wage. "Today is my third day going to work," he told The Probe. His two eldest daughters, 16 and 15, have stopped going to school because he cannot pay the fees. "I don't even have money to buy a packet of salt," he said. 

Six months earlier, Babbar had left along with three other Indian workers for what he was told was a well-paid packing job in Malaysia. He became a victim of a human trafficking racket instead. He was sent on a tourist visa, walked across an international border on foot, stripped of his passport, and sold from one company to another as bonded labour. He was one of at least five men from two Uttar Pradesh districts moved through the same pipeline by the same network. One of the others, Sameer, left Delhi on the same day as Babbar. He is still in a Malaysian jail. His family has not heard from him since his arrest on 20 July.

This is the story of how poor Indian workers from western Uttar Pradesh are falling prey to human trafficking and being sold into bonded labour in Malaysia, and of the police and officials who, the families say, did almost nothing to stop it.

Also Read:  Ludhiana Brick Kiln Horror: Bonded Labourers Sold and Assaulted

To Go to Malaysia, He Sold the Only Asset He Had: a Buffalo

Babbar was working as a daily-wage labourer, earning ₹200 to ₹300 a day, when a man named Isha approached him. Isha, the man at the centre of this human trafficking cartel who has sent scores of Indian workers to Malaysia, was from his own village but lived on its edges; Babbar says he barely knew him. "One day he came to me and said, 'Your brother Billu knows me. The whole village knows me, but you don't know me,'" Babbar recalled. The pitch was simple. "He said, 'Brother, you earn ₹200, ₹250, ₹300 here. I will send you to Malaysia. You will get a salary of ₹60,000 to ₹70,000 for a packing related job.'"

Babbar has five children, the two eldest are daughters. "My daughters are grown up," he said. "I thought if he was offering ₹60,000 to ₹70,000, I would go for a year or two, maybe four, and earn enough to marry off one or two of them."

The price Isha demanded was ₹1,60,000. To raise it, Babbar sold the only asset his family owned. "I had a buffalo. I sold it for ₹90,000. I borrowed the rest from my brothers, and also took money on interest from someone in the neighbourhood," he said. "I put together ₹1,60,000 and gave it to Isha." He paid the money in cash and got nothing in return, no receipt, no document. 

The Route: Delhi, Mumbai, Thailand, and a Border Crossed on Foot

Nirmal Gorana, convener of the National Campaign Committee for the Eradication of Bonded Labour, has handled cases like this for years. He describes Isha's method as textbook. "This is a textbook case of human trafficking. First he identifies the poor people. Then he goes to them and gives them false promises," Gorana said. "He tells them, 'I will send you to Malaysia and you will get 80,000 to 90,000 rupees.' Then he asks them to give money for ticket and visa. These poor people sell their land or borrow money or take loans and then they pay. But what Isha does is he only makes a tourist visa. There is no work permit, nothing. I know of many Indian workers who have been trafficked to Malaysia by the same man, Isha."

In Babbar's case, he was called by Isha to Delhi at a day's notice. "He called me in the morning and said, 'Come quickly. There are three more Indian workers like you in Delhi wanting to go to Malaysia for better prospects. The tickets and everything are ready,'" Babbar said. At Nizamuddin railway station he met the men he would travel with, among them Sameer, the man now jailed in Malaysia. 

Isha travelled with them by train from Delhi to Mumbai but did not show them their tickets until they were at the airport. "Five minutes before entering the airport, he gave us the tickets," Babbar said. "We went inside and saw that the ticket said Thailand. We asked him, 'Brother, what is this?' He said, 'Don't worry. You go to Thailand. A man of mine will meet you there.'"

In Thailand, the group was taken by bus and put up in a hotel. "The next day, the agent there took three or four of us at a time across the border into Malaysia," Babbar said. "We crossed on foot." At the crossing, he said, uniformed officials sat watching, "they had three or four stars on their uniforms," but the group was waved through. To Babbar, it looked less like a lapse than a system: the officials, he believed, knew exactly what was happening. Once inside Malaysia, the men were put on a train, then a bus, then a Grab taxi to the room of an agent named Shameem. Only later did Babbar grasp that he had been trafficked to Malaysia on a tourist visa, with no legal right to work. "We didn't know any of this at the time," he said.

The first thing Shameem did was take their passports. "I asked, 'Why do you need these?' He said, 'I need them, so give them to me.'"

Also Read:  Ghaziabad Bonded Labour Survivor Gets Release Certificate | The Probe Impact

"This isn't your father's house. You have to work"

Babbar was put in a room with 17 or 18 other men, two fans between them, workers from Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana and Bihar. He was suspicious within days, after watching what happened to another Indian worker, Ramzan, who said he had a fever and could not work. "Aman slapped him so hard that he hit the wall," Babbar said. The agent's words, he recalled, were: "You people come from India and then you expect things to be free. Electricity isn't free here, water isn't free."

Then it happened to him. Babbar was made to work at a company he identified as GNT, loading and unloading sacks weighing 30 to 55 kilos on a conveyor. "It was not work we could manage," he said. Promised nine or ten hours, he worked twelve. He was paid nothing. When he fell ill, he said, he was kicked awake. "They would say, 'Get up. This isn't your father's house. You have to go to work.'" A vegetarian, he says he was forced to eat meat he could not identify. "They forced me to eat it. I don't know what kind of meat it was." During this period he was not paid any wages.

From the first company, Babbar was sold to another agent, Ali, and moved to a firm he named as VK Vege in Johor Bahru, cutting and packing vegetables. There, the hours turned brutal. "Instead of 12 hours, they made us work 15, 16, 17, even 18 hours," he said. He worked there unpaid for nearly three months before being sold into bonded labour to a third company. It was another Indian worker, a foreman from Bareilly, who finally explained the scam to him: the company was paying wages, but the agents were pocketing the wages of the Indian workers. "The company has paid the salary; your agents have taken the money," the foreman told him. It was exactly what Gorana had described, that in this racket, the Malaysian employer pays the worker's wages straight to the trafficker.

There were days, Babbar said, when he simply did not eat. "Sometimes I went two days without food. Sometimes three," he said.

"No Help At All": The Embassy That Never Came

As his situation worsened, Babbar and the other men contacted Gorana in India, who wrote to the Indian mission in Malaysia about the human trafficking racket. Babbar says embassy officials called, took his location, and then did nothing for weeks. "They kept saying, 'We are coming today, we are coming tomorrow.' They kept us waiting for about 20 days. Nobody came to us," he said. At one point, he says, officials told the penniless men to make their own way to a bus station. "I said, 'We haven't received our salaries. We don't have any money. How can we travel?'"

"No help at all," Babbar said of the mission. "You can ask them yourself."

In the end, Babbar says, it was a sympathetic Indian foreman inside the company, who paid for his taxi, along with pressure from Nirmal Gorana back in India. Babbar flew back on a ticket dated 30 August and landed at Kolkata airport on 1 September. His documents bear out the journey: an Emergency Certificate issued by the High Commission of India in Kuala Lumpur, and a Malaysian exit stamp dated 30 August. Asked who had helped him most, Babbar did not hesitate. "The person who helped me the most was Nirmal sir."

Also Read:  Saharanpur Bonded Labour Crisis: Children Expose Exploitation

Two Months Late: The FIR That Left Out the Crime

Babbar's family had been trying to get the police to act since the start of July. Billu, his brother, filed a written complaint at Kithore police station in Meerut. "On 2 July we gave a complaint to the police and asked them to register a case, but the police refused," Billu said. The FIR was registered only on 1 September, the very day Babbar returned.

When the FIR was finally lodged, it was, in Gorana's words, gutted. "They have diluted the entire FIR," he said. "They have not used bonded labour or human trafficking sections. They have made it a mere cheating case." The document bears this out. FIR No. 0359, registered at PS Kithore on 1 September 2026, invokes only Sections 318(4) (cheating) and 61(2) (criminal conspiracy) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, not the human trafficking or forced-labour provisions the complaint describes.

Babbar says that when he tried to register the case, police demanded proof of a cash payment no trafficker ever documents. "The police officer said, 'Do you have any proof? When did you give the money? Do you have any documents?' But we don't have anything in writing." He says that even while he was trapped in Malaysia, an Indian police officer had brushed him off: "His direct response was, 'I don't know anyone in Malaysia. Whatever you have to discuss, discuss it with your agent.'"

Both Babbar and Gorana say the police leaned on Babbar to settle the matter with Isha rather than pursue the case. Gorana puts it bluntly: "Police is asking Babbar to compromise with the trafficker." Babbar's own account is of officers who told him he had no proof related to bonded labour or human trafficking and therefore he had no chance in court. "They said things like, 'This is not like that. You don't have any proof. What can you do in court?'" he said. He came to believe the police were protecting Isha: two months on, he said, "they had neither picked up Isha nor made him speak face-to-face with me."

The Probe put these allegations to the officer in charge of Kithore police station, SHO Subodh Kumar Saxena. He denied them, calling the claim that police sought a compromise "baseless allegations". On the two-month delay, he said the police had to investigate before registering the FIR. Asked why the main accused, Isha, had not been arrested, he said the FIR had been lodged and the investigation was continuing, and that action would follow "as soon as evidence is found." Isha, he noted, was not in Meerut but in Muzaffarnagar. Of the recruiters, he said there were many such "agents" sending people abroad for work. A chargesheet, he said, would be filed once the investigation was complete. He gave no date.

Sameer, Trafficked by the Same Cartel, Is Now in a Malaysian Jail

Sameer, son of Vakeel, is from Nasirpur village in Muzaffarnagar. He was recruited by the same network, and left Delhi with Babbar. "They both went together on 9 March," his wife, Shehnaz, told The Probe.

His family paid more, ₹2,00,000, and went into debt to do it. "We gave it all in cash," Shehnaz said. "We took a loan." The loan is documented: a ₹2,00,000 advance from Ujjivan Small Finance Bank in Vakeel's name, with Sameer as co-borrower.

Sameer went for the same reason Babbar did. His elder brother, Sohail, explained: "There are three unmarried sisters who are grown up, and he has a son. We had to get the girls married. That is why we sent Sameer there."

The traffickers from the Indian side who belonged to the cartel, Shehnaz said, were "Isha, Nadeem, Talib, Tayyab and Dilshad", the same names figure in the family's written complaint to the Muzaffarnagar authorities, all from Sikhreda and Nasirpur, two villages in Muzaffarnagar district. When the family grew suspicious during Sameer's long stay in Thailand and asked for him to be brought home, they were refused. "Isha and Nadeem said, 'He will not come back now. He will work there. We will make him cross the border into Malaysia,'" Shehnaz said. 

In Malaysia, Sameer's story mirrored Babbar's. Promised an eight-hour day, he was made to work 17 to 18 hours. His passport was taken. He was not paid and forced into bonded labour. "He kept telling us, 'Bring me back. They are troubling me a lot. They are making me do terrible work,'" Shehnaz said. "But they neither gave him his passport nor any salary." The only money that ever reached the family was two early remittances, ₹38,000 and ₹20,000, sent from Sameer's own wages before they stopped entirely. 

Shehnaz told The Probe that her husband spoke of many other Indian workers who had fallen prey to this human trafficking racket and, like Sameer, had also been forced into bonded labour.

Then, on 20 July, came the call the family had dreaded. "The day he was arrested, I spoke to him for a few minutes," Shehnaz said. "He said, 'The immigration authorities in Malaysia have picked me up.' After that, I have not spoken to him." Sameer had been detained for overstaying, arrested for the very tourist-visa status his traffickers had imposed on him. He told his wife a fine would have to be paid, and that Isha would have to pay it. Isha never did. "As of today, Isha is not even answering our phone," Shehnaz said.

Gorana confirmed the cruel logic of the arrest. "His tourist visa was over and he was overstaying," he said. "They asked him, 'Why are you here?' He said, 'I'm here to work.' They said, 'You don't have a work permit, then how are you working?' These poor people don't know anything about work permits. They just trusted the trafficker completely."

Also Read:  Moga Bonded Labour Scandal: Officials Shield Slave Masters

The Bail Document That Wasn't Even Sameer's

There is one piece of paper the family clung to. Isha handed it to them, Gorana said, claiming it was proof that Sameer had been granted bail and was on his way out. It was a document in Malay, a language the family cannot read, any more than they can read English. Gorana obtained it and had it examined. It had nothing to do with Sameer. The paper was a Malaysian police bail bond for a man named Tiew Chin Hong, the owner of a house that had been raided, on information from Sameer, and found full of bonded labourers. It was the house owner who had been granted bail. Sameer remained in jail. In other words, Isha had taken a stranger's bail document and passed it off to a desperate family as evidence that their own son was free. "This is how the trafficker Isha has been fooling people," Gorana said.

Three Complaints, No FIR, and No Acknowledgement

While Babbar's case at least produced a diluted FIR, Sameer's has produced nothing. As of publication, no FIR has been registered, despite complaints stretching back to July.

Sohail, Sameer's brother, and the activist Nirmal Gorana say the family began seeking help almost immediately after Sameer's arrest by the Malaysian police in July. They first approached the Gandhi Colony police check-post, where officers stalled, gave them no acknowledgement of their complaint, and told them not to go to any other station, that they would handle it themselves. The family then approached the Station House Officer at Nai Mandi police station in Muzaffarnagar, and got no further. They filed again in the first week of September. Again, they say, they were given no acknowledgement.

Then came the round of offices Shehnaz describes, tossed from one authority to the next. "We went to the District Collector," she said. "He said, 'Now go to the SSP.' Then we went to the SSP. He sent us to Nai Mandi police station." At every office, she says, she asked for a receiving, an acknowledgement that her complaint had been accepted, which is her right. "They said there is no such system here."

The Probe attempted to reach the officers involved. Repeated calls to the Gandhi Colony police check-post, where the family had first gone, went unanswered. At Nai Mandi police station, Sub-Inspector Hariom Singh said he had no knowledge of Sameer's case and would need to speak to the SHO before he could say anything, including why no FIR had been registered. The office of the Muzaffarnagar SSP, Sanjay Kumar Verma, was no better informed: his public relations officer, Karan, said the SSP was in a meeting, that he himself had no details of the case, and that he too would need to obtain them from the SHO of Nai Mandi. On the question of why the family had received no acknowledgement of their complaints, he again said he needed to contact the SHO. The SHO, however, has not been available for comment.

A Human Trafficking Network Hiding in Plain Sight

What happened to Babbar and Sameer is not, on the evidence, the work of a lone fixer. It is an organised operation with a fixed method: identify the poorest, promise ₹70,000-a-month jobs, extract ₹2 to ₹3 lakhs, issue tourist visas rather than work permits, route the men through Thailand and across a land border into Malaysia, confiscate their passports, and sell them from company to company for little or no pay while their wages are siphoned to the traffickers. The same names, Isha, Nadeem, Talib, Tayyab, Dilshad, recur across the complaints of families in two different districts.

The network also takes advantage of a gap in the very system meant to protect workers like these. Malaysia is one of 18 countries India lists as "Emigration Check Required." In simple terms, this means a worker with little formal schooling cannot legally be sent there for a job unless the government's Protector of Emigrants clears it first, and unless the job comes through a licensed recruiting agent and a registered employer. None of the men accused here is a licensed agent. By sending the Indian workers out as tourists, through Thailand and across a land border on foot, the traffickers skip that check completely. No such clearance was ever sought for Sameer or the others.

Babbar believes the scale is far larger than his own case. He describes a room of 18 men in Malaysia and a steady stream of Indian workers passing through it. Gorana calls it what the documents suggest it is: "a huge international case of human trafficking and international bonded labour."

The Unanswered Questions

Two men left Delhi on the same day, sold the same lie by the same man. One made it home, only to find nothing waiting but debt, a house with no food in it, and two daughters pulled out of school, and now spends his days tying sugarcane for the same daily wage he left to escape. The other has been in a Malaysian jail for nearly two months; his family does not know how he is, and has not heard his voice since the day he called to say he had been taken. In neither case has the trafficker, Isha, named in police complaints in two districts, been arrested. He is, in Sohail's words, still roaming free. "I don't understand how he could do this with so many people and still be roaming freely," Sohail said.

The families' demand is simple. "These people who trap others like this should be put in jail," Shehnaz said. "And my husband should be released and brought home. He is not a criminal, he is a victim. When will the authorities on both sides understand that?"

That leaves the questions the authorities have still not answered. Why, nearly two months after Sameer's arrest and after complaints to four different offices, has no FIR been registered in his case? Why, in Babbar's case, was the FIR delayed by two months, then filed without any human trafficking or bonded labour charges? Why, in either district, has the main accused not been arrested, when his address is known? Why did the Indian mission in Malaysia, by the returned victim's own account, do nothing? And why were two families, their men trafficked abroad, repeatedly denied even an acknowledgement of their complaints, and told there was "no such system"?

Every week those questions go unanswered, the families and Gorana warn, is another week in which men like Isha send more Indian workers abroad. Babbar knows the scale first-hand: he saw hundreds of trapped Indian workers during his months in Malaysia. Thousands more, he believes, are being trafficked to Malaysia the same way he was, and Isha is only one of many running the trade. "There are thousands like me out there," he said, "and many more like Isha." Isha is only the tip of the cartel, the part the police can see, and still have not touched.

The Probe will update this report as soon as we get more details from the Meerut and Muzaffarnagar police. Sameer remains in a jail in Malaysia.

Why the Next UN Secretary-General Matters More Than You Think

When António Guterres steps down as United Nations secretary-general at the end of 2026, he will leave his successor with plenty to do.

Many challenges will remain, including the animosity among members and myriad global challenges, from ongoing wars and economic shocks to the worsening effects of climate change. But the next U.N. chief faces the additional woes of an international body starved of cash and at odds with its most powerful member: the United States. The second Donald Trump administration has proved itself no fan of multilateralism and sees the U.N. as a bloated organization doing little to serve U.S. interests. In fact, skepticism toward the U.N. is now on the rise in many countries.

For good reason, voices as respected as Graça Machel, the deputy chair of The Elders – the body created by Nelson Mandela to bring ethical guidance to global governance – have called the selection of the next U.N. secretary-general “one of the most consequential decisions the international community will make this decade.”

No doubt the U.N. needs – and is worth – saving. But as someone who once worked in the body’s executive office of the secretary-general, I know the process for selecting a new chief does not lend itself to finding a savior at the best of times. And in the current geopolitical climate, the prospects are next to nil. Moreover, any U.N. secretary-general is bound by the political and bureaucratic constraints under which they operate.

Yet even if asking the occupier of the office to restore the U.N. to relevance single-handedly is expecting too much, a secretary-general can wield substantial influence if they understand the potential and the limits of the role.

Next UN Secretary-General: Who calls the shots?

According to the U.N. Charter, the secretary-general “shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”

While the General Assembly – all member states of the organization – has ultimate authority, it is the Security Council that makes the decision. And because the five permanent members of the Council – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US – have veto power over who gets “recommended,” it is those countries, known by the shorthand P5, that call the shots. Until 2016, there was little campaigning for the job. Rather, the winner emerged through much backroom dealmaking among the P5 itself and between those nations and potential candidates.

Since then, however, pressure from civil society groups and the 188 U.N. members that do not have a permanent seat on the Security Council opened up the process. Candidates are now expected to issue vision statements and participate in General Assembly-convened “interactive dialogues” in which all states and NGOs can participate, as well as informal meetings with Security Council members.

This more open process was meant to reduce some of the P5 dominance and, arguably, it did with the election of Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal who has served as U.N. chief since 2017. Guterres leaves behind a mixed record, having notched notable successes with the Pact for the Future and putting AI governance on the U.N. agenda, but seen as too passive as a mediator of conflicts by some diplomats and former U.N. officials.

The risk to an open selection process this time around is that two of the most powerful leaders of P5 countries – Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin – appear not to care much about process, or about the reputational costs associated with circumventing it.

Moreover, they seemingly care little about how the selection might reflect on the legitimacy of the U.N. as a whole.

As of early September, eight candidates are still in the race, each of whom has gone through the more open process, as well as several straw polls among the 15 members of the Security Council designed to whittle down the number.

Yet one or more of the P5 could inject new names at the last minute, once again leaving the decision to behind-the-scenes bargaining among a few powerful states.

So, what kind of secretary-general is the U.N. likely to get?

At the risk of oversimplification, the P5 – the U.S. and Russia especially – want an “administrator” they can control. Most of the rest of the membership want an independent and proactive secretary-general that the P5 cannot control.

Given the stranglehold the five have on the selection process, we are not likely to get the second. Both the U.S. and Russia have made it clear they want a “secretary” not a “general.” Even if they did want a global leader, it would be hard for the P5 to agree on the issue areas where leadership is needed.

But many governments outside the P5 will have trouble accepting a passive bureaucrat who simply follows orders. They believe the future of the U.N. requires more. And even if they did want an apparatchik, they know it is not possible for an organization of 193 countries to give clear orders, so the officeholder will necessarily have to exercise some independent judgment.

Knowing who gets picked will not necessarily tell us how they will lead. Sometimes secretaries-general can surprise, as my former boss Kofi Annan did. Having risen through the U.N. bureaucracy, he was expected to be a dutiful functionary but served more as the world’s top diplomat and moral voice.

What the job entails

The U.N. Charter says little about the job of secretary-general, and yet it has been interpreted over the years to encompass many roles.

I would cluster them into three: global diplomat, normative leader and manager of a sprawling bureaucracy.

The key challenge for a secretary-general is to figure out what is achievable in each of the three roles.

As a global diplomat, the chief cannot resolve conflicts between the great powers, but can work at the interstices of those tensions, finding the political space to broker agreements such as the Black Sea grain deal between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, which reopened the maritime routes from Ukrainian ports that Russia had blockaded.

As a normative leader, the U.N. chief cannot impose binding obligations on countries, but can promote powerful ideas such as the responsibility to protect civilians from mass atrocities or foster human development.

As chief administrative officer, the secretary-general cannot fix the Security Council or eliminate inefficiency. But they can set a reform agenda, as Guterres has done with the UN80 Initiative, and cajole coalitions of states into driving that agenda forward.

To heaven or hell?

The main source of a secretary-general’s influence is not the authority that comes with the office, nor is it their own charisma. Rather, it is the ability to gauge the political winds, listening to the voices of key stakeholders and identifying opportunities to make a difference.

On some matters – conflict resolution, for example – those voices may be the conflict parties and a handful of neighboring states or global powers, and the listening may mean spending countless hours on the telephone.

On other matters – climate change, for example – the relevant voices are 193 governments and civil society organizations speaking for “we the peoples,” and the listening may mean sitting through endless meetings.

Only then can a secretary-general identify where the opportunities lie and choose the moment and method for stepping in. Is it through quiet diplomacy or public naming and shaming? Standing on principle or being pragmatic? Charting a new path, or doubling down on the path already chosen?

It is a mistake to assume success is measured only by dramatic breakthroughs for which a secretary-general can claim sole credit. More often than not, the U.N. chief is but one actor in a complex global political process involving many and often more powerful actors.

If he or she is able to change the dynamics and move the needle in the direction of peace, justice or prosperity, that is enough.

To paraphrase one former holder of the office, Dag Hammarskjöld, a secretary-general can’t bring the U.N. to heaven but can help to save it from hell.

Author Ian Johnstone has served in the United Nations’ Executive Office of the Secretary-General. His most recent books include "The Oxford Handbook on International Organizations" (Co-editor, Oxford University Press, 2016); "Law and Practice of the United Nations, 2nd edition" (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2016); and "The Power of Deliberation: International Law, Politics and Organizations" (Oxford University Press, 2011).

This story originally appeared in The Conversation.

Delhi Building Collapse: An Arrest, Five Suspensions, and No One Yet Answerable for Satya Niketan

Students in Hostel Daze were going about an ordinary Sunday. Many were indoors precisely because it was a Sunday, resting, studying, or sleeping off the week. At approximately 1:16 pm on Sunday, 6 September 2026, the multi-storey building they lived in came crashing down. The structure, a five-storey (ground plus four) boys' paying guest accommodation known locally as Hostel Daze, stood on a plot of roughly 55 square yards in the congested student quarter of Satya Niketan, near Delhi University's South Campus.

The Delhi building collapsed while repair work was under way. Witnesses said it felt "like an earthquake," and described cries of "save us" rising from the rubble. A PCR call reached the South Campus police station at 1:34 pm. By Monday, police put the toll at seven dead, with twelve people pulled out alive and several injured admitted to hospital, figures that were still being revised as the last of the debris was being cleared.

In the first minutes, it was neighbours, not agencies, who began pulling people from the rubble. Some of those trapped were able to reach the outside world from beneath the concrete: local representatives and rescuers said survivors made phone and even video calls from inside the collapsed structure, and that teams stayed in contact with them as the operation went on.

Through the afternoon, the National Disaster Response Force, Delhi Fire Service, Delhi Police and the Delhi Disaster Management Authority mounted a large operation in a lane too narrow for heavy vehicles to enter easily. The All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) Trauma Centre became the focal point. AIIMS said that of the patients brought in, five were declared dead on arrival and one more died after admission, while others were being treated, one requiring limb surgery. Outside, dozens of Delhi University students gathered with photographs of missing friends. An adjoining building, which housed a women's PG, was evacuated and later sealed over fears of a second collapse.

An Arrest and Suspensions, but No Accountability Yet

Delhi Police registered an FIR at the South Campus police station against the building's owner, named as Hariram, "and others," under sections 105 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), 290 (negligence in the construction, repair or demolition of buildings) and 125(a) (an act endangering the life or personal safety of others) of the BNS. 

The owner did not present himself. After the Delhi building collapsed, Hariram left his Gurugram residence and went underground. Delhi Police issued a Look Out Circular and deployed around ten teams across Delhi, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. He was traced roughly a day later and taken into custody in Bhiwadi, Rajasthan, on Monday, 7 September, and is being questioned on the structural work, the alleged unauthorised construction and the deaths. Chief Minister Rekha Gupta ordered a magisterial inquiry. The manhunt closed one gap, but the flight itself is telling: the first instinct of the person most directly answerable was to disappear, and the state's machinery had to be mobilised across three states to prevent it.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) moved against its own. Its Vigilance Department, on the Commissioner's orders, suspended five South Zone officials with immediate effect: Deputy Commissioner Rakesh Kumar, Superintending Engineer Ranvir Singh, Executive Engineer Lalit Kumar Goel, Assistant Engineer Sunil Chauhan and Junior Engineer Ashish Kumar. South Zone is the jurisdiction that covers Satya Niketan.

Suspension, however, is a reversible administrative measure, not a finding of guilt, and officials suspended in the glare of a disaster are frequently reinstated once public attention moves on. The action also runs in one direction only, downward, from a deputy commissioner to a junior engineer, all field staff. It reaches the people who were meant to inspect, and stops short of the policy and supervisory layers that set enforcement priorities.

Visiting the building collapse site, the Chief Minister said initial findings pointed to water accumulation in the basement combined with repair work on the ageing structure. She ordered the immediate sealing of unauthorised fifth floors across Delhi and announced a policy requiring structural audits and safety certification for all public-use buildings, from PGs to nursing homes and schools. The obvious question is why they needed a disaster to arrive. Sealing unauthorised floors is not a new idea conjured by this collapse; it is an existing statutory duty. That it is being announced as fresh policy, in the aftermath of seven deaths, is itself an admission that the duty was not being discharged before.

Delhi Building Collapse: Who Owns the Building, and What the Records Show

As per reports, the property is owned by three Gurugram-based brothers: Hariram Bansal, Anand Bansal and Azad Bansal, with Hariram named as the primary accused and arrested in Bhiwadi. The building was an old structure on a tiny plot, carrying additional floors, operating as a dense paying-guest facility, with repair work under way in the basement and, residents alleged, no proper second exit. A clause reported to appear in the PG's rent agreement, stating that the management would not be responsible for any casualties or risk to the tenant, also raises concerns about prior knowledge on the part of the building owner about the condition of the building.

Indian law does not permit a party to contract out of liability for death or injury caused by its own negligence, and criminal liability of the kind the FIR invokes cannot be waived by private agreement. If anything, a clause that anticipates "casualties or risk" suggests awareness that the premises were dangerous, which is evidence against an owner, not protection for one.

Pressed on oversight, MCD Commissioner Sanjeev Khirwar offered numbers: in the previous three months, he said, the civic body had carried out 960 demolitions, sealed 407 buildings and served notices on 1,500 more. The figures are meant to demonstrate diligence. They do the opposite. If 407 buildings were sealed in a single quarter, the population of unauthorised and unsafe structures they are drawn from must run not into hundreds but into the tens of thousands, and by the government's own reckoning Delhi contains more than 1,700 unauthorised colonies housing several million residents.

MCD drives since June 2026 had already logged hundreds of demolitions and seals before this collapse. Against a problem of that scale, a few hundred actions a quarter is not a crackdown; it is triage. And the more pointed question is not how many buildings were touched, but why this one was not. A five-storey PG on a narrow lane, close to which residents say an MCD office itself stood, did not slip beneath notice. It stood in plain sight for years.

There is a further, structural reason enforcement so rarely bites. Successive Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) statutes, renewed repeatedly since 2006, have shielded large categories of unauthorised construction from sealing and demolition, effectively freezing action and normalising illegality. In practice, a notice is often where enforcement ends in many cases. The historical record is stark: in one earlier accounting from an east Delhi civic body, thousands of illegal properties were booked over a period, yet only a tiny fraction were ever fully demolished, the rest surviving on partial action, penalties or simple inertia. Where owners can compound a violation with a fee, or wait out a drive, or rely on the next round of regularisation, the incentive to build the extra floor is overwhelming and the risk is negligible. Who, in the end, is ever held to account for knowingly raising an unsafe storey over other people's heads? The answer, on the evidence of a decade of collapses, is almost no one.

The Question of Who Is Responsible

Responsibility, as it stands and still to be tested by the magisterial inquiry and the structural findings, sits in layers. The owner faces the gravest exposure, for allegedly carrying out basement and repair work on an old, overloaded structure. The contractor who executed that work may share it. The MCD carries the institutional failure of oversight, which its own suspensions concede. Beneath all of them lies a systemic culprit that no single arrest addresses: an unregulated PG economy that has grown vertically around Delhi University to fill a chronic shortage of student housing, pushing young people into the cheapest available rooms in buildings no one certified as safe.

One student who lived on the fifth floor of Hostel Daze had, friends said, been urged repeatedly to move out because the building was visibly deteriorating, and had stayed because at Rs 15,000 for room and food it was all he could afford. That economics, not a single pillar, is the deeper structure that failed.

Delhi Building Collapse: The Anatomy of Government Neglect

The failures reported are not exotic. They are the standard signature of these disasters: additional floors built without permission, repair and excavation in a basement that weakened the frame, an absent second exit, and years of unchecked vertical growth of PGs on small plots in a student district. Policing exactly this is the MCD's core function, and it did not. The suspensions are the institution's own acknowledgement that monitoring failed.

What makes this failure harder to excuse is that it has happened before, in the same lane and across the same city. In 2022, a three-storey house at Satya Niketan, building number 173, collapsed during renovation being carried out to convert it into a PG, killing two labourers. The cause was near-identical, the neighbourhood the same, the interval barely four years.

In July 2024, three civil service aspirants drowned in the illegally used basement of a coaching institute in Old Rajinder Nagar, a disaster then under an AAP government, which underlines that the rot spans parties rather than one particular party like the BJP in the current case. 

In 2025, a residential collapse in the Mustafabad area of northeast Delhi killed around eleven people. In July 2025, a four-storey building came down in Seelampur, killing six. Beyond Delhi, Lucknow lost eight in a collapse in September 2024, and Kalyan near Mumbai lost six in 2025. The longer record is grimmer still, from older Delhi tragedies to the 2010 Lalita Park collapse that killed sixty-seven. Nationally, structural collapses killed roughly 8,756 people between 2018 and 2022, about five every day, with Delhi recording the highest such toll among the union territories. Each event produced the same sequence of arrest, inquiry and promise. The buildings kept falling.

The questions that remain are the ones that matter most. Did the MCD ever serve a single notice on this building before it fell, and if it did, why was that notice never enforced? If the civic body can seal four hundred buildings in a quarter, why not the one with an MCD office beside it? Who signs off on the extra floor, and who has ever gone to prison for it? How many more of Delhi's estimated tens of thousands of unsafe structures are, at this moment, full of people who cannot afford anywhere safer? 

Nine Hours, No Notice, Family Kept in the Dark: The Questions Delhi Police Haven't Answered on Ashish Joshi

On the morning of September 2, former bureaucrat Ashish Joshi left his home for a walk in Delhi's Nehru Park. He would not return for the better part of the day. At around 8:45 am, near the park gate, plainclothes personnel of the Delhi Police were waiting for him. By the time he was dropped back home that evening, Ashish Joshi had been questioned for close to nine hours, had been refused a copy of the FIR against him, and had spent most of the day unable to inform his wife of his whereabouts. 

Speaking to The Probe, Ashish Joshi laid out the sequence. "I left home for a walk in Nehru Park. A friend was with me, and at around 8:45, near the gate, the police were waiting for me," he said. "I asked them for their ID cards and they showed them. They said this was based on an FIR under Section 192 of the BNS." He was taken to the Counter Intelligence unit of the Delhi Police Special Cell in New Friends Colony, where he says he was brought around 10:30 am and held until close to 7 pm.

Ashish Joshi is a 1992-batch officer of the Indian Post and Telecommunication Accounts and Finance Service who retired on March 31, 2026, at additional secretary rank in the Union government. He has long used his voice to defend constitutional values and hold institutions to their obligations. He was suspended from service in 2019 after he wrote to the Delhi Police Commissioner seeking action against BJP leader Kapil Mishra over an allegedly incendiary video.

Also Read:  Delhi Police Blunder: Journalists Harassed Over Name Mix-Up

The tweet behind the Delhi Police case

The case against Ashish Joshi was registered under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the provision that deals with "wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot." According to Joshi, the FIR cites a post he made on August 26 calling for a "Nuremberg-style trial" of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. When he asked who had complained, he says he was told the Delhi Police had taken cognisance of the post on their own.

A retired officer's tweet demanding accountability from the Election Commission of India is an unusual foundation for a riot provocation case. Section 192 is aimed at conduct that is likely to set off actual public disorder. Whether a social media post criticising a constitutional authority clears that bar is the sort of question a court, and not a nine-hour interrogation, is meant to settle.

Ashish Joshi himself has pointed to the gap. In a post on X on September 4, he shared a video put out by the ruling party and asked the Delhi Police whether Section 192 would be applied to that content too, arguing that "a fair application of the law must be consistent." His point was blunt. If provocation is the test, it should be applied evenly, and not selectively against a government critic.

What the interrogation was really about

Joshi's account is that the FIR and the interrogation did not match. Although the case was booked over the Election Commission post, he says his questioners were focused on an entirely different tweet, one from the previous month about an alleged confrontation between Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Home Secretary Govind Mohan. That post was later withheld in India by X, which said it was acting on a legal demand.

"It is clear that the police were under pressure from the Home Minister's office. Probably they wanted to teach me a lesson," Joshi told The Probe. "They wanted to know where I got the information that there was a showdown between the Home Minister and the Home Secretary. They asked me for the source of the information. They took a list of all the people I had spoken to and why I spoke to each of them. I said it would be unethical and intellectually dishonest to disclose the source, and I would not reveal the source."

If Joshi's account is accurate, it points to an interrogation that used a riot provocation FIR as the entry point to press a citizen on the sourcing of an unrelated political post. The Delhi Police have not publicly explained the discrepancy.

Also Read:  Delhi Police Inaction Leads to Rape Survivor's Repeated Rape

Where the Delhi Police appear to have crossed the line

This is the heart of it. Section 192 of the BNS is a minor offence, punishable at the lower end of the scale. For offences of this kind, the law does not contemplate plainclothes officers picking a person up on the street. Under Section 35 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the successor to Section 41A of the old Criminal Procedure Code, the police are ordinarily required to issue a written notice directing a person to appear, rather than detaining them, where the offence carries a sentence below seven years. In Arnesh Kumar versus State of Bihar (2014), the Supreme Court made this restraint mandatory precisely to stop the reflexive use of custody in low-level cases. Ashish Joshi says he was served no such notice. He was simply intercepted on his walk.

The denial of the FIR copy compounds the problem. Joshi has said he repeatedly asked for the document during his detention and was refused, and that he has since submitted written representations to the Commissioner of Delhi Police and the DCP of the Special Cell seeking it. A person has a right to know the specific basis on which the state has taken away his liberty. Being told an FIR exists, being questioned on its strength for nine hours, and being denied sight of it is difficult to square with that right.

Then there is the matter of his family. For most of the day, Ashish Joshi was not allowed to tell his wife where he was. "Anyone would be distraught. Consider the plight of my family," he told The Probe. "If a husband steps out for a walk and then does not return home, how distraught will his wife be. I told them to just allow me to inform my wife, but they did not allow it." By his account, he was permitted to make a call only at about 6.30 pm.

On this point the law is unambiguous. In D K Basu versus State of West Bengal (1997), the Supreme Court laid down binding safeguards for anyone taken into custody, including the right to have a friend or relative informed of the detention as soon as possible. Joshi has called the conduct of the Delhi Police a "blatant violation" of that judgment and noted that informing a family member is a constitutional safeguard flowing from Article 22(1). "Informing an individual's family during interrogation or detention is a legal mandate, not an optional courtesy," he wrote, urging Commissioner Anurag Kumar to instruct all units accordingly.

The DK Basu guidelines apply to detention, not just formal arrest, so the choice of label does not remove the protections. On Joshi's account, he was held through the day and prevented from informing his wife until the evening. If that account is accurate, the safeguards the Supreme Court treats as mandatory were not observed.

In the evening, a crowd gathered outside the Special Cell office. Police sources said a senior officer decided to have Ashish Joshi dropped home in a police vehicle. "In the evening they told me they would drop me home. I said my vehicle was still there, and they said, no, we have been asked to drop you home," Joshi recalled. At around 7:30 pm he posted on X: "Just got back home. Delhi Special Cell dropped me home. Details later."

A pattern in the same week: the 4PM journalists

The questions around the Delhi Police did not end with Ashish Joshi. A day later, on September 3, two women journalists, Shaheen Khan of 4PM News Network and freelancer Nafisa Khan, alleged that Delhi Police personnel detained and assaulted them while they were covering an event at a private hospital in Saket attended by Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. 

Shaheen Khan alleged that the assault grew more severe after officers learnt she was Muslim, and the two said they were on their way to AIIMS for medico-legal certificates. Press bodies including the Press Club of India, the Indian Women's Press Corps and the Delhi Union of Journalists condemned the incident and demanded action against the personnel involved.

The Delhi Police have rejected that account. DCP (South) Anant Mittal said the claims were "totally false, misleading and baseless," stating that the two had parked their scooter on a designated VVIP route, obstructed it, and refused repeated requests to move before being taken to the station for enquiry. The allegations of assault and of religious targeting have not been independently verified, and 4PM has asked that CCTV footage from the venue and the police station be preserved and examined. Taken alongside the treatment of Ashish Joshi, the two episodes placed the conduct of the Delhi Police toward citizens and journalists who question authority under close scrutiny within a single week.

The questions that remain

The Delhi Police have not publicly answered the questions that matter. Why was a person picked up off the street, without notice, in a case the law says should ordinarily begin with a summons? Why was Ashish Joshi refused a copy of his own FIR? Why was his family kept uninformed for nearly a full day, in the face of a Supreme Court judgment that requires otherwise? And if his account holds, why did a case registered over one tweet become an interrogation about another? So far, the Delhi Police have offered no explanation.

On 2 September 2026, the Bombay High Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the death of Disha Salian, the young celebrity manager who died in Mumbai in June 2020. For her father, Satish Salian, the order was the end of a six-year wait. Standing outside court, he told reporters he had not shed a single tear in all those years, not even on the day his daughter died, and that only now the tears had come. 

The Mumbai Police had closed the Disha Salian case long ago as a case of suicide. If the official version was right, why did it take six years and a High Court order to have it investigated properly? And when you go through how the case was handled, why does so much of it fail to add up? 

Also Read: Chandni Lamba’s Suicide: Note Alleges Betrayal, No Arrest in 8 Months

Who Was Disha Salian, and the Night That Raised Questions

Disha Salian was twenty-eight. She worked as a celebrity talent manager in Mumbai, handling the schedules, contracts and public lives of well-known names, and had worked with the actor Sushant Singh Rajput, the comedian Bharti Singh and the actor Varun Sharma, among others. People who knew her described her as focused and good at her job. She was engaged and about to be married.

On the night of 8 June 2020, she was at a flat in a residential building in Malad, in Mumbai's western suburbs, with her fiancé and friends. At some point that night she fell from a high floor and died. The Mumbai Police registered an Accidental Death Report, which is a file that is opened when a death is not yet a criminal case. Over time the police leaned towards suicide.

The first questions surface right there. An ambulance driver named Pankaj, who has spoken publicly, says he was called to the building by the Mumbai police at around 1.45 am and reached within ten minutes, only to be told the body had already been taken away in a private vehicle and that he was no longer needed. When someone dies falling from a building, the scene is secured and the body is moved through proper channels. His account, if accurate, suggests the very first handling of Disha's death did not follow that process.

There are questions too about where that private car went. According to reports, it moved from Evershine Nursing Home to Tunga Hospital and only then to Shatabdi Hospital, where Disha was declared dead. The police have an answer. In an affidavit before the High Court they said private hospitals had refused to admit her, which is why she was taken from one to the next before reaching a government hospital, and that this was June 2020, at the height of the pandemic, when many hospitals were turning patients away. The route can be read as the chaos of a difficult night, or as a delay that still needs explaining. Either way, it is exactly the kind of question a proper investigation should have settled years ago.

A Case That Was Closed, but Never Investigated

The paperwork is where the pattern becomes hard to ignore. Disha died in the early hours of 8 to 9 June, but the post-mortem was conducted only on 11 June, a gap of roughly two days when such an autopsy is usually done within twenty-four hours. No clear public explanation for the delay has ever been given. The report recorded a serious head injury and multiple injuries, attributed the death to the fall, and did not record torture or sexual assault. So on paper the forensic finding supported a fall. Yet Disha Salian's own father says the police did not hand him a copy of that post-mortem report for about five years, releasing it only after he went to the High Court to demand it.

The inquiry itself never cleanly ended. According to the state's submissions, the Accidental Death Report was closed in October 2020, and a closure report in early 2021 described Disha as having been under stress for personal reasons. But the matter kept going. In December 2023 the state set up a Special Investigation Team, which never made its findings public. A further report was submitted in April 2026 and accepted in May, and still did not change the original conclusion. At no point in all those years did the police register an FIR. Across several hearings, judges of the Bombay High Court asked why, after so long, this remained only an accidental-death inquiry, noting that all that needed establishing was whether the death was suicide or culpable homicide, and that the case papers had not reached the family even five years on.

The court's own order records forensic discrepancies that deepen the unease. The post-mortem said vaginal and anal swabs were taken, but the forensic laboratory found only smears on slides, a weaker kind of sample. The medical officer later explained that only smears had been taken and that the word "swab" was written by mistake. The laboratory reported that no male DNA was found on those slides. In a case built around allegations of sexual assault, the difference between a swab and a smear, and how those samples were handled, is not a mere technicality. The judges also questioned the prosecutor about the panchnama, the on-scene record, which stated that Disha Salian's body had no clothes on it, a point her family says does not match photographs of her. These are contradictions in the official record that a judge felt the need to raise in open court.

Also Read:  Post Mortem Horror: Noida Facility Brims with Rotting Dead Bodies

The Politics, the Sushant Link, and What the CBI Must Now Answer

The loudest part of the Disha Salian case is also the part where it is easiest to be misled. In 2025, Satish Salian filed a fresh petition and a police complaint alleging that his daughter had not died by suicide but had been gangraped and murdered, followed by a cover-up. His complaint named several people, including the Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray, along with figures from the film industry and the police. These are allegations, unproven in any court. Those named have denied any involvement, and Thackeray has called the matter politically motivated and said he will answer it in court. When it ordered the probe, the High Court itself cautioned that no one is to be treated as an accused unless the investigation finds material against them.

The politics are unavoidable, because the case has shifted with power. Disha died under one government in Maharashtra and the case was revived loudly after a rival government took charge, and it has since been used as a weapon between parties. There is also a part that often gets left out. In 2020, it was Disha's own parents who pushed back against the murder rumours, publicly calling it a suicide and asking politicians to stop exploiting their daughter's death. Only in 2025 did Satish Salian reverse his position. However, a father changing his mind does not, by itself, explain a body moved in a private car, a two-day delay before the autopsy, a report withheld for five years, or an inquiry that ran for years and produced nothing.

Underneath all of it is the reason the case never stayed small. Six days after Disha died, Sushant Singh Rajput, the actor she had once worked for, was found dead at his Bandra home. Two deaths, linked by work and days apart, turned a local case into a national one and fed years of theories. It is worth stating plainly that the CBI, which investigated Sushant's death, concluded it was suicide and found no foul play, so the connection is one of timing and public suspicion, not proven fact. But the proximity was enough to make people ask whether the Disha Salian case had ever been examined carefully, and on the record, the answer was that it had not.

That is what makes the 2 September 2026 order matter. In Satish Salian versus State of Maharashtra, Writ Petition 1612 of 2025, the Bombay High Court handed the case to the CBI, directing it to register an FIR, appoint a senior officer, record the father's statement and take over all records from the local police. If it finds a crime, it files charges. If it does not, it must say so formally, and the family may challenge that. The court did not hold that Disha was killed. What it decided was that the questions, and the way the case was handled, were serious enough that the original conclusion could not simply be left to stand.

So the truth of what happened to Disha Salian is still not established. What is clear is that for six years the case was never properly investigated, and that has now changed, at least on paper. Whether the CBI gets to the truth is another matter. It is an agency often accused of bending to the politics of the day, and this case has changed shape each time the government has.

How new US tariffs could sink the India-US trade deal

US Ambassador to India Sergio Gor recently claimed that the India-US trade deal is on the verge of finalisation and that “almost everything” about the agreement was done “in principle”. 

However, even as Ambassador Gor was exuding confidence regarding the deal, two initiatives taken in Washington in just over a month have brought yet another round of tariff war at India’s doorstep. These initiatives have the potential of increasing friction between the two countries, and could even torpedo the deal. 

How the Graham Sanctions Bill Threatens the India-US Trade Deal

The most egregious of these developments is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, a bipartisan bill tabled in the US Senate, which has the backing of the US President. 

This Act proposes imposition of tariffs of up to 100 percent on all goods from three sets of countries: the five largest importers of Russian crude oil; the five largest importers of Russian natural gas; and countries facilitating Russian oil sanctions evasion. 

India, the second largest buyer of Russian crude oil, is an obvious target of the proposed excessive tariffs. This is a continuation of the actions successive US administrations have taken against the Russian Federation since its war against Ukraine. 

The second development is Donald Trump’s proposal to impose 100 percent tariffs on generic medicines from 2028, unless the firms exporting these medicines do not reshore their operations to the US. This proposal could significantly affect India’s pharmaceutical industry since the US is its largest export market.

The bipartisan Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, named after the Republican Senator, who was the bill’s strongest proponent, was overwhelmingly voted by the Senate (86-11) in early August. The House of Representatives would take up the bill for consideration after it reconvenes in early September, and could push for its early adoption.

India's Russian Oil Dependence Tests the Trade Pact

The primary objective of the bill is to tighten the economic sanctions on Russia for its continued war on Ukraine. The bill proposes 500 percent tariffs on all goods imported into the US from Russia. It also proposes 100 percent tariffs on all goods imported into the US from the five largest importers of crude oil or natural gas, by total volume, originating in the Russian Federation. As one of the largest importers of Russian-origin crude oil, India also faces penal tariffs for facilitating Russia’s sanctions evasion.

Market analysts put India as the second-largest buyer of Russian crude oil in July 2026, valued at over USD $7.3 billion, or about 37 percent of Russia’s global exports.  

According to Indian government data, India’s dependence on Russian crude oil increased from 30 percent to nearly 43 percent of its total imports between January and June 2026. In February 2026, after the US and India reached a framework for an Interim Agreement as a step towards finalising the India-US trade deal, President Trump announced that the 25 percent tariffs imposed on India in August 2025 for importing Russian crude oil was withdrawn. 

India, according to Trump, had “committed to stop directly or indirectly importing Russian Federation oil, has represented that it will purchase United States energy products from the United States”.  

However, after the conflict in West Asia, India’s dependence on Russian crude increased to record levels, and simultaneously, its imports from the US dropped from 13 percent in April 2025 to three percent in June 2026. Trump would surely have viewed this development as a trigger for action against India.

Generic Medicine Tariffs Deepen the India-US Trade Deal Standoff

India’s generic pharmaceutical industry faces uncertain times following President Trump’s post on Truth Social announcing his decision to impose a 100 percent tariff on all generic medicines from 2028, and increased to 200 percent a year by 2029. The objective of this proposed increase in tariffs is to “Reshore Generic Pharmaceutical Production into America, with a penalty to those Companies that decide not to build Plant and Equipment within the stated period of time given to them”. 

This announcement followed an earlier decision of the US President to impose a 100 percent tariff on patented pharmaceuticals and associated pharmaceutical ingredients from July 31, 2026, if the companies exporting them do not declare plans to start producing in the US. Thus, Trump has put in place an expansive plan to control the global pharmaceutical industry. 

Pharmaceuticals are the second largest products in India’s export basket to the US, accounting for about 13 percent of total exports in 2025-26. More importantly, the US is the largest export market for all major Indian pharmaceutical companies. 

The US accounted for about a third of the total sales of most companies, but two Indian pharma companies — Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories and Zydus Life Sciences — are considerably more dependent on the US market: their shares of sales to the US were close to  50 percent in 2023-24. 

Besides, all the top Indian companies have invested in production capacities in the US through their subsidiaries, with the largest company, Sun Pharmaceutical Industries having 21 subsidiaries in 2025-26. 

Trump’s insistence that the generic pharmaceutical companies must invest in the US to escape 100 percent tariff in 2028 has had its desired effect as  Indian companies, including pharmaceutical companies have already announced their plans to invest over  $19.1 billion to increase their production capacities in the US. 

Only time will tell whether these investments will result in diversion of India’s domestic pharmaceutical production to the US, and the implication this could have on the availability of medicines in India.

Biswajit Dhar is Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi. Earlier, he was Director General, Research and Information System for Developing Countries and  a Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

A sitting judge of the Supreme Court has mounted a forceful defence of dissent at a moment when the country is fiercely debating "dimagi naxals", dissent and the health of its democracy, telling a hall of graduating law students that the state cannot punish a citizen for the act of asking a question.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan, delivering the convocation address at the 13th convocation of the postgraduate programmes of National Law University (NLU), Delhi, on Sunday, framed the freedom to question and to disagree as a constitutional entitlement, not a privilege that those in authority may withdraw at will.

"When students express a different point of view, when students ask questions, they cannot be threatened with punitive action," he said. "That is unconstitutional. That is misuse of power and office."

The words carried unmistakable weight, arriving in the middle of a national argument over how far student protests may go and how the institutions of the state should respond when young people challenge those in power.

Read More:  NLU Delhi: A Heartfelt Piece by a Student Who Died Far Too Soon

'The right to question is not an act of defiance'

At the core of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's address lay a single proposition: that a democracy is measured not by the sameness of its citizens but by its capacity to hold disagreement without punishing it. Dissent, in his telling, is not a disturbance to be managed but a feature of freedom that the Constitution actively protects.

"In a democracy, the right to question is not an act of defiance," he said. "It is an essential expression of citizenship, liberty and constitutional responsibility."

A democratic society, he argued, "cannot be built on the edifice that everyone will think alike," and differences must be "accommodated within the broader constitutional framework." The space for dissent, he suggested, is precisely what gives every other freedom its meaning; the liberty to speak or to take part in public life rings hollow if disagreement invites retribution.

"A democracy becomes meaningful not when everyone speaks the same language of thought but when different voices can co-exist, be heard and be treated with dignity," he said.

He was careful to add that asking a question is only a beginning. What matters as much, he said, is the willingness to sit with an answer that unsettles you. A healthy academic culture does not demand that everyone arrive at the same conclusion; it allows views to be expressed, examined and debated. It is better, he observed, borrowing from the essayist Joseph Joubert, to debate a question without settling it than to settle it without a debate.

For a graduating class about to enter the legal profession, the charge was direct. The most valuable thing a legal education can offer, he said, is not the ability to memorise the law but the courage to question established assumptions and to ask whether the law, in a given application, has genuinely served the cause of justice. Tolerating dissent, on this reading, is the beginning of good lawyering, not a threat to it.

The student protests that frame his words

Justice Bhuyan named no institution and no individual. Yet his address followed, by only days, one of the sharpest recent confrontations between law students and the legal establishment.

Earlier this month, more than 450 students of the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) in Hyderabad objected to a proposal to invite the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, as chief guest at their convocation, pointing to his remarks in court on the Delhi student protests. The Bar Council of India (BCI), the statutory regulator of the legal profession, responded by directing state bar councils not to enrol NALSAR's 2026 graduating batch as advocates until the university identified who had organised the campaign.

The order effectively threatened to shut an entire cohort out of the profession over an act of protest, and the backlash was immediate. Within hours the BCI modified its direction, conceding that the "vast majority" of the students were innocent.

Tellingly, it was a Supreme Court bench led by CJI Surya Kant himself that rebuked the regulator, affirming that students have a right to protest and directing that no punitive action be taken against the students or faculty. "It's a dialogue between students and me. Who are they to interfere? This is totally uncalled for," the Chief Justice said.

That flashpoint belongs to a wider season of student protests. Since June, demonstrations have spread across the country over a series of examination paper leaks, with the online collective Cockroach Janta Party calling on people to mobilise and protesters demanding the resignation of the then Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. A march towards Parliament on 20 July ended in violent clashes between the police and the protesters at Jantar Mantar with the police being blamed for the excessive use of lathi charge, tear gas and pellet guns. It is against this backdrop of student protests, institutional pushback and hard questions about the state's response that Justice Ujjal Bhuyan chose to speak about dissent.

Intolerance as 'a form of violence'

If the defence of dissent formed the spine of the speech, its most arresting line was a warning about intolerance.

India, Justice Ujjal Bhuyan said, is "the land of Buddha and Gandhi," a country of peace and tolerance with "no place for violence." An intolerant mind, he cautioned, is "at odds with the spirit of the Constitution" and amounts to "a manifestation of another form of violence."

He then drew a straight line from intolerance to the silencing of dissent. "Our constitution protects the freedom to speak, to think, and to believe differently," he said. "Intolerance begins to undermine that framework when disagreement or dissent is no longer treated as a legitimate difference of opinion but as something that must be silenced, rejected or punished."

Tolerance, he insisted, is not a question of manners but a constitutional value. To press the point he reached back four decades to Justice O. Chinnappa Reddy's judgment in the 1986 Bijoe Emmanuel case, quoting: "Our tradition teaches tolerance, our philosophy preaches tolerance, our Constitution practices tolerance; let us not dilute it." He added that words relevant then were "even more relevant today."

The maturity of a democracy, he said, is revealed not in how it treats opinions that carry the majoritarian approval but in how it responds to those that are "difficult, unpopular or sometimes very inconvenient."

Also Read:  NLU Delhi Student Death: Exposes Shocking Details

Why a judge's words matter now

Coming from within the judiciary, the intervention carries weight. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan has become one of the more independent voices on the Supreme Court. He has spoken out against extra-legal "bulldozer" demolitions as incompatible with the rule of law, and has publicly questioned the opacity of collegium resolutions that record no reasons for judicial appointments. There is, too, a pointed resonance in his choice of subject: as Chief Justice of the Telangana High Court, he served until his elevation as Chancellor of NALSAR, the very university now at the centre of the enrolment dispute.

Justice Ujjal Bhuyan's remarks reinforce, from the bench, the principle the Supreme Court had already asserted in the NALSAR matter, that peaceful protest and disagreement cannot invite professional or institutional punishment. But they also make plain that the judiciary is not of one mind about how student protests and dissent should be handled, and that senior judges are prepared to say so in public, even when the dissent runs close to their own institution.

The intervention also speaks to a broader unease about academic freedom. Universities have increasingly become the places where the state's appetite for disagreement is tested, from campus demonstrations to disputes over who may be invited to speak and who may not. By locating the defence of dissent inside the university itself, and insisting that the habit of thinking freely "has to begin from the universities," Justice Bhuyan tied an abstract constitutional principle to the concrete institutions where young Indians first learn to argue, to organise and to object.

An entire mountainside of ice and rock fell into the Lhende Khola river on the Tibet-Nepal border, on the morning of August 26, triggering an earthquake and a flood that rose nine metres, killing hundreds, sweeping away at least six dams and hydropower stations, over a dozen crucial bridges, homes, roads and even a herd of elephants all the way downriver to India.

There was no rain, just the excessive heat caused by climate change that loosened the ice from the side of the 7,245-metre-high Langtang Lirung peak, till the entire mountainside, including a glacier clinging to it, collapsed into the river flowing some 3,000 metres below. There was no time for any “early” warning as the resultant wall of water, boulders and mud swept away within a minute the large three-storeyed Chinese government building that used to house the border land port at Jilong, facing Rasuwagadhi on the Nepal side.

A similar hillside collapse had triggered a devastating flood in the Chamoli region of Uttarakhand in February 2021.

And the danger is not over. A day later, debris was still blocking a part of the Lhende Khola, and water was accumulating behind the impromptu dam. More water, and that blockage is likely to give way, leading to a second flood. Authorities have already warned of fresh risk of flooding.

Why the Nepal Disaster Demands a Regional Strategy

Glaciologists have known for decades that a warming world is leading to faster glacier melting, formation of ever-larger lakes at their snouts, then the lakes bursting out of their unstable moraine bonds and flooding downstream in what is called a glacier lake outburst flood (GLOF). They have been emphasising the need to monitor these lakes, drain them slowly if possible and install early warning systems for people downstream. But the Nepal disaster was not a GLOF at all.

So what can one do if the flash flood is not due to a GLOF but due to this kind of huge mountainside collapse that threatens to become more frequent in the Himalayas as global warming gathers more pace? The Nepal disaster is exactly this harder-to-predict kind of event.

"The pace of change is so rapid that current efforts are struggling to keep up," said Mohammed Farooq Azam, senior cryosphere specialist at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). "Today's disaster in the Lhende Khola underscores the need for stronger regional collaboration, with governments taking coordinated action to respond to cross-border hazards."

Just a few months before the Nepal disaster, researchers from ICIMOD and other organisations had presented a regional cryosphere strategy that would involve all countries sharing the Hindu Kush Himalayas (HKH) – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan – in four activities: Consolidating and institutionalising standardised monitoring of glaciers, snow, and permafrost; building sustained capacity through specialised regional capacity-building activities;  establishing a Regional HKH CryoHub to ensure usable and policy-relevant data and knowledge services; and prioritising operational decision support services on seasonal snow watch for water and energy planning, hazard monitoring and early warning systems, and basin-scale assessments that link cryosphere trends to risks for people and infrastructure.

The strategy notes, “A basin-representative, quality-assured, and interoperable cryosphere observation and services system can strengthen regional resilience, reduce risks, and amplify the HKH voice in global climate dialogues. This institutional and technical architecture is designed to convert heterogeneous observations into policy-ready knowledge.”

Refining Predictions to Prevent Another Disaster

No early warning system would have helped those close downstream of the August 26 mountainside collapse. The flood came too fast. One way to manage this risk is to be able to predict such a disaster with a credible probability level, so that governments can take protective action before a disaster. This would need countries to comprehensively map all icebound slopes above a certain gradient.

This would be a huge task, far tougher than monitoring the expansion of glacial lakes. But that monitoring has improved in recent years due to widespread use of satellite imagery. It is far from an ideal solution. Glaciers should be monitored on the ground to get the actual mass balance and to see if they are losing more ice than they are gaining. But it is better than nothing. A monitoring of steep mountain slopes can be started through satellite imagery.

All of this assumes that countries sharing the Hindu Kush Himalayas will be willing to coordinate their cryosphere research efforts and seamlessly share data. Almost all joint research and policy work in the HKH has failed due to the absence of such cooperation. But the Nepal disaster of August 26 has once again underlined that there is no alternative to cooperation.

This story originally appeared in Mongabay. 

Why Nepal Flash Floods Are Deadlier the Second Time Around

Major flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border have destroyed homes, roads, bridges and local hydropower projects. The flooding of the Bhote Koshi river is affecting 50,000 residents. More than 100 people are dead, with hundreds more, including international tourists, missing.

This region of the Himalayas had not yet recovered from the Bhote Koshi flooding in 2025 that killed nine people as it washed away a “friendship bridge” linking Nepal and China, disrupting trade and transport for months.

In Sri Lanka, recent floods and landslides struck affected communities that were still recovering from Cyclone Ditwah, which had caused widespread damage only nine months earlier. With little time to recover from the cyclone, communities had no protection from further flooding. More than 15,000 people have been directly affected and 6,800 people were displaced this August.

Disaster risk usually considers how severe the next flood, wildfire, cyclone or drought will be. But the Nepal flash floods and Sri Lanka examples show another dimension that is often overlooked: how quickly can a community recover and will it do so before the next disaster arrives?

Nepal Flash Floods and the Communities That Never Rebuilt

A disaster rarely leaves a place exactly as it found it. Roads and bridges may remain damaged. Families may have spent their savings. Businesses may still be struggling. Governments can still be financing reconstruction, while hospitals and other public services remain under pressure.

If another hazard arrives before these systems have recovered, it does not encounter the same community that existed before the first disaster. It encounters a place with less resilience and a weakened infrastructure.

A useful way to understand this is through the recovery gap: the relationship between how long recovery takes and how much time is available before another damaging disaster occurs.

Imagine two communities experiencing similar floods. In one, the previous major disaster occurred ten years earlier. Homes have been rebuilt, infrastructure repaired and emergency resources replenished. In the other, another disaster happened only six months ago. Roads remain under repair, families are still displaced or in debt, and public authorities are still paying for reconstruction. The new flood may be physically similar in both places. Its consequences may not be.

Incomplete recovery can substantially increase long-term losses. A 2025 study of recurrent flooding in the Philippines that losses increased by 40% between 2000 and 2018 because of incomplete recover. This suggests that repeated disaster losses are not always simply additive. The first disaster can change the conditions under which the next one occurs and the effects of subsequent disasters can be much more severe.

Recovery has many clocks

Recovery is often described as if a community is either recovered or not, a simplistic binary. It’s more of a sliding scale. Electricity and freshwater supplies may return within days. A damaged road may take months to repair. Rebuilding homes can take years. Businesses may reopen while still carrying substantial debt. Household finances, ecosystems and mental wellbeing can recover on entirely different timescales.

A place can therefore look recovered according to one indicator while remaining highly vulnerable according to another.

It took more than a decade for New Orleans in the US to achieve substantial physical and structural recovery following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. While basic emergency operations and power restoration took weeks to months, full neighbourhood rebuilding, population stabilisation and major flood protection system upgrades spanned 15 years or more. And this was in one of the richest countries in the world.

Recovery is also unequal. Wealthier households may have insurance, savings and access to credit. Poorer households often have fewer resources to repair homes, replace belongings or absorb lost income. In the case of Hurricane Katrina, many poorer households who had hurricane insurance were refused payouts as the damage was deemed to be flood-related because of the burst levees and not by the hurricane. So, it is not only the time between disasters that matters. It is also how much recovery can happen during that time.

This issue becomes increasingly important where climate change alters the frequency or severity of weather extremes. If reconstruction requires five years but another damaging event occurs after two, the interval between disasters starts competing with the time needed to recover. That should change how we manage disaster risk.

Measure recovery, not only damage

Governments are generally good at recording immediate losses: damaged buildings, displaced people, destroyed infrastructure and financial costs. But they also need to know what remains unrepaired months or years later. Recovery monitoring needs to include housing, infrastructure functionality, business activity, household finances, public services and displacement. The question should not stop at “how much did we lose?” It should continue with “how much vulnerability remains?”

Disasters are not isolated occurrences. Floods, wildfires, droughts and storms are often assessed separately. These assessments are essential, but communities experience these hazards through the same infrastructure, economy and population.

The road damaged by one event may be needed for evacuation during the next. An electricity system weakened today may be supporting hospitals or water services tomorrow. Risk assessments should therefore consider plausible hazard sequences and the condition critical systems may be in when another disaster hits. This does not mean predicting the exact order of future disasters. It means abandoning the assumption that every new disaster meets a fully recovered system.

Recovery should not be seen only as the final stage of the disaster that just happened. It is also preparation for whatever comes next. Restoring infrastructure, supporting households and reopening essential services quickly can reduce the vulnerability carried into the next event.

But simply rebuilding the same vulnerable systems recreates the same risks. Recovery should therefore combine speed with adaptation: stronger infrastructure, better redundancy, improved emergency planning and greater support for communities that would otherwise take the longest to recover. Recent research shows that the government plays a critical role in ensuring rapid, efficient and effective recovery.

While asking “how severe could the next disaster be?”, we should also ask “how recovered will we be when it arrives?” Because the next disaster does not start from zero. It inherits what the last one left behind.

This story originally appeared in The Conversation.

News from Moscow and Beijing for New Delhi is not so comforting. It is reliably learnt that the two powers will not pull any punches when they converge in Delhi for the BRICS Summit on September 12–13, 2026. Along with Brazil, both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are of the strong belief that India, which is hosting the BRICS Summit, will oppose any move against the US.

Hence, they believe there would be no dedollarisation that allows trade in national currencies, nor would there be any attempt to criticise Israel over the war in Gaza or a demand for reform of the UN, all issues that are critical for India and other developing countries.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that India, despite the support it may receive from a new BRICS member, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which holds a similar worldview to the US and Israel, may find it difficult even to craft a joint resolution that is agreeable to all.

That will be a setback for India, as the big BRICS nations are determined to push New Delhi into a corner. Insiders even go to the extent of predicting a make-or-break situation for BRICS and possibly putting the host country in the dock. Now, sources claim, India will find it difficult to ride on two boats.

Also Read:  Asim Munir Is Betting on a Playbook That Failed Musharraf

The Iran–UAE Rift Inside BRICS

Ever since New Delhi was chosen to host the BRICS Summit, the global reality has become more complex, with the US and Israel attacking Iran and the West Asian nation retaliating against the US by bombing its bases across the Gulf countries located in its neighbourhood.

This means that, for the first time, we have a situation where two members of BRICS, Iran and the UAE, would be at war with each other. What has aggravated the relationship is that US President Donald Trump and his Finance Secretary, Scott Bessent, reportedly called UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) to sever trade ties with Iran.

This single move is likely to hurt Iran far more than all the damage Tomahawk missiles may have inflicted on the West Asian nation. Iran fears that its main trading partner, the UAE, will stop buying its oil. Last month, it earned US$5.7 billion from oil exports through the UAE.

Now, the Iranians will not be able to swap or buy essential goods from the Emirati country. Iran fears that its unemployment problem will soar and essential items will disappear from its shelves. Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has also expressed fears about the economic catastrophe facing the country.

If the UAE stops trading with Iran altogether, then either there will be a new war between the US and Iran, or worse, Iran could devastate the wealthy Gulf country. Conversely, there could be a possibility of Iranians advocating peace, as the tiny nation of Oman, a stakeholder in the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, has also been threatened with war by the US.

Trump's Claim Over The Strait Of Hormuz

Iran's problems have multiplied with US President Donald Trump declaring the Strait of Hormuz as US territory. The Strait has traditionally been controlled by Iran, but during the recent war, it came under renewed attention from the US President, who offered Tehran the possibility of imposing tolls on ships passing through it.

Some 130 ships laden with oil and cargo pass through this critical strait. Now, the US blockade, accompanied by claims from Tehran that it is also blocking the waterway, has confused the picture, compelling many countries to either wait for the US to triumph and take control of the controversial strait or hope for a return to the pre-war situation.

As this is unlikely to happen any time soon, until one of the countries claims a decisive victory, many countries are looking for alternative routes.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

Russia And China Seek A Route Around Hormuz

BRICS nations such as Russia and China are looking for viable routes to escape the Hormuz trap. They no longer want to be mired in a war related to, or prompted by, radicalism inspired by religion when they could instead be engaged in trade.

The Chinese are looking to leverage their close ties with Russia and the new Arctic sea passage, colourfully called the "Ice Silk Route", which begins from Ningbo in China, cuts through Russia's Northern Sea Route and, after cruising through the North Sea, culminates in Felixstowe in England.

In this way, ships will reduce journey times by half while also avoiding the turbulent Strait of Hormuz or Bab-el-Mandeb in the Red Sea. Ideally, China and Russia would also like to rely more on the Siberian trade route and avoid dependence on the Suez Canal or the Strait of Hormuz altogether.

This is also intended to change the way the world conducts business and reduce dependence on the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC). Similarly, the Indian government is exploring an offer from the Russian government for a maritime route connecting Chennai to Vladivostok.

IMEC And The Timing Of The Hamas Attack

Whatever the reasons behind the US-Iran conflict, there is a need to remember the timing of the Hamas attack. This was a fact reiterated by former US President Joe Biden after he returned from Delhi's G20 event.

It was on the sidelines of the G20 that the announcement was made, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, about the coming of a new corridor, IMEC, that would link South Asia with the Middle East and Europe and finally connect with the US.

It was an ambitious project that would sideline countries hostile towards the US while bringing nations such as Israel, the UAE and Saudi Arabia into a tighter embrace.

A month after the announcement of IMEC, Hamas attacked Israel. The subsequent war in Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's determination to take out Iran, which he believed was the last country standing against Israel, further complicated the geopolitical landscape.

As reports in the US media indicate, Israel managed to sell a lemon to US President Donald Trump by convincing him that Tehran would be easy to defeat and would wilt like Venezuela when attacked by US special forces.

Iran weathered the attack even though it lost its Supreme Leader and the country was badly savaged. Though the country is still standing up to the global hegemon, there is a rethink within its political leadership that it needs to revive the memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed in Geneva.

Former President Mohammad Khatami has been among the most vocal in demanding a return to diplomacy.

US President Donald Trump, in his usual erratic manner, is claiming ownership of the Strait of Hormuz and threatening war against Iran if it does not budge from its claim over the strait's waters.

It is a tricky situation, one that could come to a head during the BRICS Summit in Delhi on September 12–13, 2026, where the Indian government will have to search for answers that go beyond its claim of strategic autonomy, a policy that has, over the years, meant different things to different countries.

This article originally appeared in Hardnews magazine. 

Asim Munir Reaches for a Playbook That Rarely Saves Generals

Pakistan is not resolving its crises so much as containing them. On the economic front, the state is spending its scarcest resource, which is time, on servicing a debt mountain rather than dismantling it. On the security front, its western districts are absorbing the heaviest militant violence in more than a decade. On the political front, a jailed former Prime Minister still commands the street while the judiciary fractures under pressure. Presiding over all of it is Field Marshal Asim Munir, the most powerful army chief in Pakistan's history, and the strategy he has adopted to stay there is one his predecessors would recognise.

The Playbook Every Cornered General Reaches For

When a Pakistani general's grip loosens, the response tends to follow a familiar sequence. Power is consolidated at home through constitutional or legal engineering. Dissent is contained through pressure on courts, parties and the press.

Abroad, the general reaches for geopolitical theatre, positioning Pakistan as an indispensable partner to whichever power is willing to pay for the service, whether in aid, investment or strategic cover. Religion and national security are invoked to hold the base together.

The playbook can buy time. What the record shows is that it does not reliably buy survival, because it treats symptoms while the underlying crises of economy, security and legitimacy keep advancing. Two of Pakistan's most powerful generals ran this same play, and neither ended on his own terms.

Zia and Musharraf: Two Endings, One Lesson

General Zia-ul-Haq seized power in a 1977 coup and ruled through Islamisation and martial law. By the late 1980s his authority was fraying. He had installed Muhammad Khan Junejo as Prime Minister expecting deference, but Junejo asserted himself, signing the 1988 Geneva Accords on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan against Zia's wishes.

The rupture deepened after the Ojhri Camp disaster of April 1988, when an ammunition depot near Rawalpindi exploded and rained munitions across the twin cities. The official toll was put at around thirty, though independent estimates ran far higher. When Junejo pressed for accountability, Zia dismissed his government in May 1988.

Zia leaned hard on the external playbook. He had already staged his cricket diplomacy, flying to Jaipur in 1987 to watch an India-Pakistan match and defuse a military standoff while quietly signalling nuclear resolve. He kept the Afghan pipeline open to secure American aid, and wrapped himself in Islamic solidarity to hold the hardliners. Yet it is important to be precise about how Zia's story ended. He was not toppled by the crises closing in on him. He died in a C-130 crash near Bahawalpur in August 1988, still in office. The lesson from Zia is not that the playbook fails cleanly. It is that it papers over decay without arresting it.

Pervez Musharraf is the sharper cautionary tale. His authority unravelled after he moved to suspend the chief justice in 2007, triggering a lawyers' movement that fused civil society and the opposition against military rule. The siege of Lal Masjid the same year became a rallying point for militants, and the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan coalesced soon after, opening the bloodiest phase of Pakistan's internal war.

Musharraf answered weakness with the familiar moves. He declared an emergency in November 2007, suspended the constitution, jailed judges and detained opponents. He toured European capitals after Benazir Bhutto's assassination that December, and pressed Washington with the argument that his removal would put Pakistan's nuclear arsenal at risk, a bid for indispensability. None of it held. His party lost the February 2008 election, and facing impeachment he resigned that August, with the army under his successor declining to shield him.

Where Asim Munir's Gamble Runs Out

Asim Munir faces a different Pakistan, but he is answering it with a familiar script. On consolidation, the 27th Constitutional Amendment, passed in November 2025, made Asim Munir Chief of Defence Forces with command over all three services and granted him lifelong legal immunity, while curbing the Supreme Court and creating a new Federal Constitutional Court. Two Supreme Court judges and a Lahore High Court judge resigned in protest. It was the most far-reaching entrenchment of military power in decades, and it placed Asim Munir at the constitutional centre of the state.

On the external front, Asim Munir has been the driving force behind a burst of geopolitical theatre. Pakistan signed a Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement with Saudi Arabia in September 2025, committing each state to treat an attack on one as an attack on both, and followed it with a trilateral defence pact alongside Saudi Arabia and Turkiye in August 2026. Islamabad also positioned itself as a venue for contacts between the United States and Iran earlier in the year. Each move offers Asim Munir a measure of economic ballast and strategic relevance, much as the Afghan pipeline once did for Zia.

The trouble is that the underlying crises are not slowing. Pakistan's total debt and liabilities approached Rs100 trillion by the middle of 2026, with debt servicing the single largest line in the national budget. On security, Pakistan topped the 2026 Global Terrorism Index as the country worst affected by terrorism, and July 2026 was among its deadliest months, with more than six hundred deaths recorded.

Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa bear the brunt, where the Balochistan Liberation Army and the TTP have escalated coordinated assaults on security forces even as the army runs large counter-insurgency operations. The provincial politics of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where support for Imran Khan's party runs deep, remain at odds with the establishment.

Politically, the pressure point has a name. Imran Khan, jailed since 2023, still moves the street. The Supreme Court's August 2026 order to shift him to hospital for medical treatment was narrow in scope, and the government moved swiftly to challenge it, but it was a reminder that Asim Munir's chief rival remains a live force that the courts and the public have not forgotten.

Even the external picture carries a warning. When the United States ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, visited Srinagar in August 2026 and described Jammu and Kashmir as an important part of India, it underlined how narrow Pakistan's strategic leverage with Washington has become.

None of this means Asim Munir is finished. By the letter of the constitution he is more secure than any general before him. But the playbook he is running is the same one that could not save Musharraf and only outlasted Zia by an accident of fate.

If Pakistan's economic, security and political crises keep converging, the question is not whether Asim Munir holds power today. It is whether the sources of that power can withstand the pressures the playbook was never designed to fix.

Imagine a man walks into a police station because he has been raped. He asks the officer to register an FIR. And the officer tells him there is nothing he can do, because the BNS has no provision to register the rape of a man. Now imagine the same thing happening to a transgender person. The answer is the same. Under the law as it stands today, they have no recourse at all.

This is not a hypothetical. It is the reality created by the way the BNS defines the crime of rape. In our new explainer, we break down how India ended up here, what the law actually says, the petitions now before the Delhi High Court, and why, in 2026, the country still does not have a gender-neutral rape law.

Also Read:  India's Rape Law Says Only A Woman Can Be A Victim

What the BNS Rape Law Actually Says

The heart of the problem lies in Section 63 of the BNS, the provision that defines rape. It replaced the old Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, and it lists the specific acts, penetration, insertion, manipulation and oral contact, that amount to rape. But it describes every one of those acts as something a man does to a woman.

The consequence is stark. The BNS rape law sees only a man as the perpetrator and only a woman as the victim. It does not recognise a woman, or any other gender, as a possible offender, and it does not recognise a man, a transgender person, or anyone else as a possible victim. So when the crime happens to anyone other than a woman, the rape law simply has no place for them.

To understand how a brand new code ended up this way, you have to go back. India's Indian Penal Code was enacted in 1860 and came into force in 1862, which is why it is called a colonial-era law. When the BNS replaced it on July 1, 2024, it was celebrated as a historic, modern reform. And that raises the obvious question. If the BNS is the modern law, why is its rape law narrower, in one crucial way, than the colonial code it replaced?

The answer lies in Section 377. That section has a dark reputation, because it was used for decades to criminalise homosexuality, until the Supreme Court rightly read it down in 2018. But Section 377 was doing two jobs. Alongside the part that was struck down, it carried a protective function: it was the one provision that could reach non-consensual acts against men and transgender persons. When the BNS dropped Section 377 entirely and put nothing in its place, that protection vanished, and the BNS rape law was left covering only women.

Also Read:  Delhi HC to Examine Why the BNS Rape Law Sees Only Women | Impact

The Petitions Before the Delhi High Court

Our explainer walks through the petitions now challenging this gap, because each one approaches it differently.

The first, by Dr Chandresh Jain, speaks for transgender persons. He argues that the BNS rape law is unconstitutional because it leaves transgender persons entirely outside its protection, framing rape and most sexual offences around a female victim.

The second, by Barkha Nagar, argues that Section 63 itself is unconstitutional for recognising only a man as the offender and a woman as the victim, leaving men, transgender and non-binary victims unprotected. But her petition carries a flaw we explain in the video: while her synopsis talks about corrective measures, her actual prayer asks only for Section 63 to be struck down, without saying what should replace it. Strike down the rape law with nothing in its place, and you create a different crisis.

The third petition is the comprehensive one, filed by Shubhi Srivastava, S.K. Srivastava and others. It does not speak for one group alone. It challenges fourteen sexual-offence provisions of the BNS and seeks to cover everyone the rape law forgets, men, women, transgender persons and even animals. The petitioners say they were moved to act after police officers themselves told them that men and transgender persons come to file rape complaints and simply cannot, because the BNS has no provision. We spoke to the lawyer who filed it, who described those conversations with a station house officer directly.

An earlier version of this comprehensive petition was dismissed, with the court noting it could not direct Parliament to legislate. But the petitioners persisted and filed a fresh, wider petition, and this one goes further still, raising even the question of necrophilia, the sexual violation of the dead, for which India currently has no clear provision. The petition notes that the UK criminalised it in 2003, and that even Pakistan amended its penal code in 2024.

Why India Needs a Gender-Neutral Rape Law

On August 12, this case came up before the Delhi High Court, which will now hear it on October 7. The court tagged the comprehensive petition with a related one filed by Gantavya Gulati, and the Gulati story is the most revealing part of the whole saga.

Gulati first approached the court in 2024, seeking to restore protection for individuals left exposed by the gap, particularly those from the LGBTQIA community. The government did not defend the gap. Instead, it asked that his petition be treated as a representation, promising to consult stakeholders and decide. The court agreed. But two years later, no decision has come. When Gulati returned, the government said only that the matter was sensitive and needed more time. The court, unpersuaded, held that a year and a half was reasonable time and revived his petition.

And this gap was not an accident. When the BNS was being drafted, Parliament's own Standing Committee on Home Affairs, headed by Brij Lal, warned in writing that dropping Section 377 would leave men, transgender persons and bestiality unpunished, and recommended keeping that protection. The government did not accept it.

The court is now in a genuine bind. It cannot write a law, that is Parliament's job. But it is equally bound to protect citizens' rights, and the government's two years of inaction give it room to press for answers. At most, on October 7, the court can demand the government explain its delay and set out how it will fix the BNS rape law.

The rest of the world offers a clear contrast. Canada made its rape law gender-neutral in 1983. The UK's Sexual Offences Act of 2003 protects victims of either sex. Australia and South Africa have done the same.

The question our explainer leaves you with is simple. If a woman is raped, it is a crime. If a man or a transgender person is raped, the BNS rape law does not even call it rape. That cannot be right. Rape is rape, and a law that protects some victims while abandoning others is not just incomplete. It is unjust.

When The Probe first reported that India's new criminal code recognises only a woman as a victim of rape, it set out a gap that had quietly left men, transgender persons and others with no law to turn to. That reporting has now found an echo in court. The Delhi High Court has agreed to hear a public interest petition challenging the rape law provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), and has listed the matter for 7 October 2026. Rather than turning the challenge away, as the bench had at one point indicated it might, the Court chose to keep it alive and hear it alongside related petitions that raise the same question about who the law is willing to protect.

The petition has been filed through advocate Yogendra Kumar and argued before the Court by advocate S.K. Srivastava. The petitioners are advocates Shubhi Srivastava, Ajay Kumar Singh, Prince Kumar, N.Z. Lotha and Garima Singh, along with Ashok Kumar Singh, IRS (Retd.). All of them are advocates or retired government officers who describe themselves as officers of the court assisting on a systemic deficiency they encounter in practice. Its path to a hearing has not been straightforward. An earlier version, filed in 2025, was dismissed in October that year, with liberty to seek intervention in a connected matter. The Probe reported this story on August 5, setting out how the BNS rape law had come to exclude every victim except a woman. S.K. Srivastava meanwhile pressed on, and in August 2026 the High Court permitted the petitioners to file a comprehensive petition covering all the affected groups. That fresh petition is the one now listed for 7 October.

Also Read:  India's Rape Law Says Only A Woman Can Be A Victim

What the BNS Rape Law Leaves Out

At the heart of the petition is Section 63 of the BNS, the provision that defines rape. Read from beginning to end, it describes rape only as an act committed by a man against a woman. The code then defines a man and a woman as separate categories, with the result that, in the eyes of the rape law, only a woman can be a victim and only a man can be an offender. The petition argues that this makes the law discriminatory under Articles 14, 15 and 21 of the Constitution, because the same act of sexual violence is an offence when the victim is a woman and no offence at all when the victim is a man, a transgender person or, in the petition's framing, an animal. The petitioners set out eighteen combinations of offender and victim, and argue that the rape law addresses only one of them, leaving the other seventeen without any offence.

Article 14 guarantees not only equality before the law but also the equal protection of the laws. The petitioners argue that the protection the BNS rightly gives a woman against sexual violence must, on that principle, be extended to everyone else the law currently leaves out.

The petition traces the gap to the repeal of Section 377 of the old Indian Penal Code. After the Supreme Court's judgment in Navtej Singh Johar, Section 377 continued to cover non-consensual acts against men, transgender persons and animals, even though consensual acts between adults had been decriminalised. When the BNS replaced the Indian Penal Code and dropped Section 377, that residual protection vanished. 

The petition goes further than most, asking the Court to also consider sexual violence against the dead. It raises necrophilia as an offence now left entirely unaddressed, noting that the United Kingdom criminalised the sexual penetration of a corpse through Section 70 of its Sexual Offences Act, 2003. The petition also states that Pakistan, which still retains Section 377, amended its penal code in 2024 to punish the violation of dead bodies. On this reasoning, it submits that the BNS has created a vacuum that no other provision fills.

Srivastava's is not the only petition before the Delhi High Court on this question. Two others are pending, and each approaches the gap from a narrower angle. The first, filed by advocate Dr Chandresh Jain, is confined to transgender persons. It argues that the BNS does not recognise a transgender person as someone who can be raped at all, and that the one law meant to protect them, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act of 2019, caps the punishment for any offence against a transgender person, however grave, at a maximum of two years.

The second, filed by advocate Barkha Nagar, goes directly at the definition itself. It contends that the rape law is unconstitutional because it recognises only women as victims, and asks the Court to strike down the defining provision. That prayer carries a risk. If the Court were to grant only what is formally sought, it could remove the definition of rape without putting anything in its place.

What sets these two apart from S.K. Srivastava's petition is their limited scope. The Chandresh Jain petition speaks for transgender persons alone, and the Barkha Nagar petition trains its fire on the definition without offering the Court a way to cure the gap for everyone the rape law leaves out. Srivastava's petition, by contrast, seeks to cover the full range of affected persons in a single challenge.

The Probe has reported consistently on the absence of gender-neutral protection in Indian criminal law, and has followed the BNS rape law gap since the new code came into force. In its earlier report, The Probe set out plainly what the statute does and does not say, showing that a man who is raped, or a transgender person who is assaulted, finds no offence under which the police can register the case. The question is not one for any single community, but one of equal protection, that the law should see every victim of sexual violence rather than only some.

Also Read:  Licence to Rape: Doctor's Rs 5,000 Fine for Assaulting Schoolgirl

Two Years of Government Delay

On 12 August 2026, when the petition came up, the Delhi High Court tagged it with one filed by Gantavya Gulati and cancelled the separate date that the Gulati matter had been given, so that the two would be heard together on 7 October.

Speaking to The Probe, S.K. Srivastava said the decision was a significant step. "I am glad the Court has agreed to hear this case. It shows the Bench sees merit in the question we have raised. The Probe too has reported on this same gap. The fact is this, the law cannot recognise only one kind of victim of sexual violence and remain silent about the rest. By tagging our petition with the Gulati matter, the Court has brought the full scope of the issue onto a single hearing, and we now look forward to being heard on 7 October."

Gulati, appearing in person, had approached the Court in August 2024, asking that a Section 377-equivalent protection against non-consensual sexual acts be restored for the safety and dignity of individuals, particularly those from the LGBTQIA+ community, following the gap left by the BNS.

When Gulati first came to court in 2024, the government did not defend the gap. Instead, its lawyers asked the Court to treat his petition as a formal complaint to the government, rather than something the Court itself should decide. They told the Court that the government was already collecting views from various groups on the new criminal laws, and would take a considered decision after hearing everyone. On that assurance, the Court agreed. It directed the government to decide the matter quickly, and gave Gulati the right to bring his petition back to court if the government dragged its feet.

That delay is precisely what followed. By March 2026, more than one and a half years had passed and no decision had been taken. When Gulati returned to Court, the government repeated that the subject was sensitive and that consultations were still under way. The Court was unpersuaded, recording that a year and a half was reasonable time to decide and that the decision was nowhere in sight, and it restored his petition to its original number. It directed the Union to file an affidavit setting out what steps it had actually taken. Read together, the orders describe a government that has held the same position for about two years without acting on it.

The union government promised in August 2024 to take a holistic view on the representation before it. About two years have passed since, with no decision on record. That is exactly the inordinate delay the 2024 order had guarded against, and it strengthens the argument that the representation route has failed. Those challenging the BNS rape law say the matter is no longer one for further consultation but is ripe for a substantive direction from the Court.

The Court is in a difficult position of its own. It cannot direct Parliament to make a law, that much is settled, and defining an offence remains the legislature's domain. But it is equally conscious of its duty to protect the fundamental rights of citizens. With the government having failed to act for two years, the Court is left to weigh how far it can go, declaring the deficiency and pressing for a time-bound decision, without stepping into the law-making role that is not its own.

There is also a record that cuts against the government's position. When the BNS Bill was examined by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs, chaired by Brij Lal, the committee expressly recorded that omitting Section 377 would mean not penalising non-consensual sexual offences against men, transgender persons and bestiality, and it recommended that these provisions be retained in the new code. The recommendation was not accepted.

The Supreme Court, in Navtej Singh Johar, had itself preserved Section 377 for non-consensual acts even as it decriminalised consensual ones. Taken together, this suggests that the gap in the BNS rape law is a recognised deficiency that Parliament's own committee had flagged, rather than a considered policy choice. It is a deficiency the Court can declare, and on which it can direct a time-bound decision, without itself creating any offence, which remains the domain of Parliament.

Why a Gender-Neutral Law Matters

A gender-neutral framework would not dilute the protection that women already have under the BNS. It would extend the same protection to everyone the present law forgets.

The larger question is why a country that has rewritten its entire criminal code still holds to a rape law that sees only one kind of victim. The government was given two years to answer it and let the time run out. Now the Court must decide whether the law will go on seeing only one victim, or finally see them all.

The government's order of 10 August 2026 appointing Deepti Gaur Mukerjee as Secretary, Department of Higher Education names her as the successor to Vineet Joshi, and not to Naresh Pal Gangwar, who had been appointed to the same post on 23 July. Because the fresh order is a partial modification of the 23 July order and vacates the higher education chair specifically in the name of Joshi, it raises a question the government has not addressed. If Deepti Mukerjee is replacing Vineet Joshi, was Gangwar's appointment to higher education ever given effect, and who was actually running the department until this week?

Vineet Joshi, a 1992-batch IAS officer of the Manipur cadre, had led the Department of Higher Education since January 2025 and held additional charge of the University Grants Commission from April 2025. On 23 July, the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet moved him to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, filling the vacancy left by Vivek Bhardwaj, who was due to retire on 31 July. On paper, that transfer ended Joshi's tenure at higher education and opened the seat for a successor.

Also Read:  NEET 2026 Paper Leak: Inside the System Built to Keep Failing

The NEET crisis behind the reshuffle

Joshi's exit came at the height of the NEET-UG 2026 crisis. The medical entrance examination held on 3 May was cancelled after the government confirmed a paper leak. A re-examination was conducted on 21 June, the results were declared on 16 July, and the case was handed to the CBI.

Protests spread from Delhi's Jantar Mantar across the country, and the pressure led Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign on 25 July. The National Testing Agency, which conducts NEET, has faced repeated questions over examination integrity, and Vineet Joshi was the agency's first Director General in 2018. His transfer, alongside a wider secretary-level reshuffle, was read as the government reordering the ministry under sustained public scrutiny.

The officer named to replace him, and the questions around him

The 23 July order named Naresh Pal Gangwar, a 1994-batch IAS officer of the Rajasthan cadre and then Secretary in the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, as Secretary, Higher Education, in place of Vineet Joshi. Several outlets reported at the time that Gangwar had taken charge of the department.

The appointment drew immediate criticism. A June 2026 report by The Indian Express said that Gangwar's wife, mother and son had received subsidies of around Rs 1.16 crore under the National Horticulture Board's Protected Cultivation Scheme for cucumber cultivation, raising conflict-of-interest questions over approvals linked to his earlier tenure.

Congress leader Jairam Ramesh and CPI(M) member John Brittas questioned the propriety of placing him at the head of the education ministry while the government faced demands for accountability over the NEET paper leak. Gangwar denied any wrongdoing, saying no service rules had been breached.

Also Read:  Jantar Mantar Protests: A Generation Demands to Be Heard

A successor named for Vineet Joshi, not Gangwar

The order of 10 August, issued as a partial modification of the 23 July order, appointed Deepti Gaur Mukerjee, a 1993-batch IAS officer of the Madhya Pradesh cadre and then Secretary, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, as the new Secretary, Higher Education. The order records her as taking the post in place of Vineet Joshi, upon his appointment to the Ministry of Panchayati Raj. Pallavi Jain Govil was moved to corporate affairs in Mukerjee's place. The new order does not mention Gangwar's higher education posting at all. 

That drafting is the heart of the matter. If Gangwar had formally replaced Vineet Joshi on 23 July, the correct successor to name on 10 August would be Gangwar, not Joshi. By vacating the chair in Joshi's name, the government's own record reads as though the seat never passed to Gangwar. This raises a series of questions that remain unanswered. Did Gangwar assume and exercise charge of higher education at any point? Was Vineet Joshi the officer of record for the department until 10 August, even after being posted to Panchayati Raj? And if a controversial appointment was quietly set aside, was that decision placed on record anywhere, or simply written out of the next order?

The Department of Higher Education, the department at the centre of all this, is the same one that controls the National Testing Agency, the body that runs the NEET exam, at a moment when the credibility of the country's largest entrance examination is under challenge and its minister has already resigned. 

The public record now offers two conflicting accounts of who led higher education over the past three weeks, and the government has explained neither. Until it does, the appointment and quiet disappearance of a secretary named in place of Vineet Joshi is not a clerical footnote. It is a question of accountability at the top of the education ministry, and it deserves an answer.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has placed his government in open conflict with Washington over the future of the war in Gaza, telling his cabinet that Israel will not accept the 15-point document drawn up by President Donald Trump's Board of Peace. 

"Israel rejects the 15-point document," Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday, adding that he was stating the position plainly because some had questioned whether he had ever done so. The comment settled several days of ambiguity and set Israel directly against the Gaza plan that the United States has promoted over the past week as the route to ending more than two years of fighting.

Trump had presented the framework as a historic breakthrough, saying it would deliver the complete disarmament of Hamas and every other armed group in the territory, and describing it as a decisive move towards lasting security. Netanyahu's choice to reject the Gaza plan in such unqualified language therefore carries consequences that reach well beyond the cabinet room. It leaves the central diplomatic project of the Trump administration in the Middle East without the backing of Israel, its closest regional partner, and it suggests that the fragile calm in place since last October could remain frozen for months to come. For the population of Gaza, the rejection narrows an already thin route towards a halt in Israeli military operations, and it raises the risk that a stalled process slides back towards open confrontation.

Netanyahu was precise about the condition on which he was insisting. He said the Israeli military would carry out no withdrawal from the Gaza Strip until Hamas had been genuinely disarmed, a standard he defined as covering heavy weapons, light weapons and everything in between. He contrasted what he called genuine disarmament with what he described as fictitious disarmament, and he repeated his long-held position that there would be no Palestinian state for as long as he remained in office.

Also Read: Netanyahu: Why He Wants War Over Peace

That sequencing puts Trump in an awkward position, because the Gaza plan the president has championed treats disarmament and withdrawal as parallel, phased steps rather than as a single Israeli precondition to be met before anything else can move. Netanyahu is also under steady pressure from the right of his coalition, where ministers including Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have condemned any concession over the enclave, and that pressure goes some way to explaining why the prime minister has sharpened his stance in recent days.

What Trump's Gaza Plan Set Out

The latest 15-point roadmap at the heart of the dispute emerged from the implementation process around Trump's Gaza plan in late July. On 30 July, Trump announced what he described as a historic agreement providing for the disarmament of Hamas and the other armed factions in the territory, presenting it as a significant step towards peace and stability.

The following day, his Board of Peace published a detailed 15-point roadmap explaining how the agreement was intended to be implemented in structured phases. At the time, officials briefed reporters that Israel remained sceptical and had not committed to the terms, an early indication of the disagreement that has now been confirmed in public.

Under the terms of the Gaza plan, Israel would end its military operations, Hamas and the other groups would surrender their weapons, and civilian and security authority in the territory would pass to a new Palestinian committee supported by an international stabilisation force. The roadmap linked an Israeli withdrawal to the pace of disarmament, so that the two processes would move forward together rather than one being completed before the other could begin. Reconstruction of the territory would follow under the supervision of the board and the new administrative body, with financing and timetables set out in later stages. The framework rested on the ceasefire agreed last October and on the United Nations Security Council resolution that endorsed the wider settlement in November.

Also Read:  Fire and Ice: Trump's Erratic NATO Summit Rage Turns to Love

The Board of Peace was proposed in September 2025 as part of the framework of the broader ceasefire, and it was formally established when Trump ratified its charter in Davos on 22 January 2026, with the president serving as its inaugural chairman. The body held its first meeting in Washington on 19 February 2026, with dozens of countries taking part. In the days after the roadmap was published, the board itself appeared to move some way towards Israel's stated concerns, saying on 3 August that Israeli forces would not pull back beyond the so-called Yellow Line, the demarcation that has divided the territory since the ceasefire, until the disarmament of Hamas was complete. Netanyahu's statement on Sunday went considerably further by withholding Israel's consent from the Gaza plan as a whole, rather than seeking to adjust particular provisions within it.

Why the Rejection Strains Israel's Ties With Washington

The immediate effect on the ground in the enclave is that the prospect of a further Israeli pullback has receded. Israel still holds more than half of the Gaza Strip, and its forces have carried out near-daily strikes despite the ceasefire that has held since the middle of October, with the territory's health authorities reporting well over a thousand people killed in that period.

For Israel, the rejection deepens an estrangement from an American administration that had provided it with consistent diplomatic cover, and it tests Netanyahu's long-cultivated claim that he alone can manage the relationship with Washington to Israel's advantage. Regional observers have warned that the standoff complicates efforts to reduce tension across several fronts at once.

Trump has shown before that he is prepared to criticise the Israeli PM in public whenever the latter has angered him. Earlier this year the president used a blunt expletive to describe Netanyahu during a leaked telephone call that he later confirmed, and on other occasions he has said the Israeli leader needs to behave more rationally, including pointed remarks at an international summit. The two men also diverged over the timing of a ceasefire with Iran. That record matters now, because it indicates the president has both the willingness and the political room to distance himself from the Israeli PM should the rejection of the Gaza plan come to be seen in Washington as the main obstacle to a settlement on which he has staked his own standing. Analysts have described Netanyahu's approach as a considerable gamble at a time when support for Israel among American voters, and within the Democratic Party in particular, has been softening.

Also Read:  The Iran Deal Trump Calls a Win Is a US Climbdown

Hamas Holds to the Roadmap

Hamas, which had accepted the roadmap, responded by reaffirming its commitment to the Gaza plan and pressing the outside powers overseeing it to hold Israel to the agreed terms. In a statement, the group said it remained ready to implement the agreement in full and urged the mediators and guarantor states to prevent any breach that might derail the process.

A member of its political bureau said the mediators and the American guarantor should press the Israeli PM and his government to follow the roadmap rather than obstruct it for internal political and electoral reasons. The group, which recently confirmed Khalil al-Hayya as its new leader, has maintained that it will proceed only if Israel halts its strikes and pulls its troops back to the Yellow Line set out in the October ceasefire.

Netanyahu's Eye on the October Election

Much of Netanyahu's calculation appears to be shaped by the Israeli election scheduled this October. Opinion polls have repeatedly suggested that his coalition, the most right-wing in the country's history, is at risk of losing its majority, and he will need his hardline partners if he is to build another government after the vote.

A firm line on Gaza allows Netanyahu to answer the demands of that base, even at the cost of friction with Trump, whose endorsement he may still hope to secure as polling day approaches. Whether the Gaza plan can survive Israel's rejection now turns on how hard Washington decides to push, and on whether the calculations in Jerusalem shift once the votes in Israel have been counted.

On 4 August, a spokesperson for the Ministry of External Affairs told a briefing in New Delhi that the government was making all efforts to trace two Indian sailors missing in the Black Sea, and that search and rescue operations were being carried out as directed by the Supreme Court. Three days later, in a written report placed before that same Supreme Court, the government said something that did not match. The search, it stated, had been suspended.

Also Read:  SC Issues Notices in Missing Sailor Case, Directs MEA to Act | The Probe Impact

The public message: making all efforts

At the ministry's briefing on 4 August, spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal confirmed that four Indian nationals had been aboard MV AGN Ragnar when it was attacked off the Ukrainian port of Odesa on 25 July. Two were safe, he said, and two still missing. Search and rescue operations were being carried out in coordination with the authorities in Ukraine and Romania, and had been undertaken, in his words, as directed by the Supreme Court. The government was making all efforts to trace the two missing sailors, he added, and was in touch with their families and providing all possible assistance.

The same message had run through the government's public account from the beginning. On 26 July, the Embassy of India in Ukraine said on X that it was closely monitoring the situation, that two of the four Indians were confirmed safe, and that search and rescue operations were underway. Taken together, the public statements describe a search that is active and continuing.

Also Read:  Pilot Boat Left Indian Sailors to Die in the Water, Says Officer

What the government told the Supreme Court

The government's own report to the Supreme Court describes something else. In a brief note cum action taken report filed for the hearing on 7 August, the union government stated that despite exhaustive efforts by the Ukrainian authorities, the Romanian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre and the Romanian Coast Guard, the two sailors could not be located, and that search operations presently remain suspended pending the receipt of fresh information.

The report describes how the search was run. On the Ukrainian side, the 18th Maritime Guard Detachment of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine searched alongside the Ukrainian Naval Force, then discontinued the operation because of a continuing aerial threat, and could not resume because of stormy weather.

On the Romanian side, the Romanian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC Constanta) conducted a search operation but the missing seafarers could not be located. 

What is conspicuously absent from both the versions the government has offered is the one detail that matters most: when the search and rescue operations were actually conducted, by either the Ukrainian or the Romanian authorities. The Probe had reported earlier that the Ukrainian authorities searched on 25 July, the day of the incident, and that the Romanian authorities searched on 26 July. The Probe also holds a written response from the Romanian authorities confirming that after 26 July, no further search and rescue was conducted.

The government's reply does confirm one thing: that the search and rescue was suspended. The truth is that it was suspended on 26 July itself. Even as the Ministry of External Affairs said in its statement on 4 August that search and rescue operations were being carried out, the search had in fact been called off on the 26th, more than a week earlier. There is further corroboration of this from India's Ambassador to Romania.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Moves Supreme Court After Every Door Shut

What the ambassador told the family

The gap between the public message and the private reality is at its clearest in a recording of a call between the family and Indian officials on 6 August 2026, reviewed by The Probe. On the call, India's Ambassador to Romania tells the family plainly that the Romanian authorities searched, found no one, and stopped when it grew dark, and that they have not resumed since.

But the most revealing thing he says is not that the search had stopped. It is the condition he attaches to restarting it. The Romanian side, he tells the family, will act only if fresh information is provided to it, and until such information arrives, no search is being conducted. In his account, reviving the search depends on the family of the missing sailors producing something new for the authorities to work with, rather than on the state continuing to look. The responsibility is quietly turned around.

Sandeep Kumar Gupta, Deepak's elder brother, presses the point. After 26 July, he says on the call, no search was run at all, and the family has been given only verbal assurances on messaging apps, never anything in writing. The ambassador does not dispute the account. He describes his own meetings with the Romanian coast guard, navy and interior ministry, and with the mayor of Sulina, and raises the possibility, first suggested by an embassy official in Kyiv, that the men may have drifted toward the Romanian coast.

Also Read:  Missing Indian Sailors: How a System Failed Two Grieving Families

The men the search left behind

MV AGN Ragnar, a Palau-flagged merchant vessel, was struck while leaving Odesa on 25 July. Of the nine crew members and one pilot on board, four were Indian. Seven crew and the pilot were brought ashore. Two Indian sailors, both serving as ordinary seamen, went into the water and were not found: Deepak Kumar Gupta (26) from Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh, whose family originally comes from Siwan in Bihar, and Ram Chandra Dubey (23) from Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh.

Two other Indian crew members, Vishesh Kumar and Rajat Kumar, were rescued. Rajat Kumar, the Chief Officer, was admitted to a hospital in Odesa with minor injuries. In an earlier account given to The Probe, Kumar said a pilot boat had been close enough to reach the two men and had been signalled to help, and that it fled the scene instead.  

The Black Sea has become a dangerous route for Indian seafarers. In an advisory issued on 26 July, the MEA itself noted that incidents involving commercial vessels in the region had risen since April, and had already cost five Indian lives. In less than a week, three commercial ships carrying Indian sailors were attacked in the Black Sea. On 18 July, MV Omorfi was struck, and one Indian sailor was killed. The next day, 19 July, MV Golden Leo was hit soon after leaving Odesa, killing four Indian sailors and critically injuring another. Six days later, on 25 July, MV AGN Ragnar was attacked off the same port, leaving two Indian sailors, Deepak Kumar Gupta and Ram Chandra Dubey, missing.

The families of both missing sailors say they wrote to the ministry and to the Indian embassies in Ukraine and Romania between 26 and 30 July, and received no substantive assurance. It was that silence that drove Deepak Kumar Gupta's family to the Supreme Court, with his elder brother, Sandeep Kumar Gupta, filing the petition.

In India today, if a man is raped, the law does not call it rape. If a transgender person is raped, the law does not call it rape either. This is not an oversight in how a case is argued in some far corner of the country. It is written into the letter of the law itself. The offence of rape, as India defines it, can only be committed by a man, and can only be suffered by a woman. Every other victim stands outside the rape law. 

This is the gap that a Delhi advocate, Shubhi Srivastava, has spent the better part of a year trying to force the courts to confront. And the Delhi High Court has now agreed to let her try. The court has permitted her and her co-petitioners to file a comprehensive petition covering the full range of people the rape law leaves unprotected. It is a small procedural step. But it opens the door to one of the more uncomfortable questions India's flagship criminal law reform has produced: why, in 2026, does the country's rape law still recognise only one kind of victim.

Also Read:  Licence to Rape: Doctor's Rs 5,000 Fine for Assaulting Schoolgirl

How the gap opened

To understand how the country arrived here, you have to go back to July 2024, when the government retired the Indian Penal Code, the 164-year-old spine of Indian criminal law, and replaced it with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the BNS. The change was sold as a decolonising overhaul, a modern code for a modern republic. In the shuffle, one old provision quietly disappeared and was never replaced. That provision was Section 377.

Section 377 has a bad name, and it deserves part of it. For most of its life it was a colonial weapon used to treat gay people as criminals. Two consenting adults could be threatened with prison simply for their relationship, and the police used the section to harass, blackmail and shame gay people. That is the Section 377 most people remember, and its reading down in 2018 was rightly celebrated as a victory for dignity and privacy.

But that is only half the story, and the forgotten half is the one that matters here. When the Supreme Court delivered its landmark 2018 judgment in Navtej Singh Johar, it did not erase Section 377. It removed only the part that criminalised consenting adults. It deliberately kept the rest of the section alive to deal with sexual acts done without consent. After 2018, Section 377 quietly became the only law that could reach the rape of an adult man, the sexual assault of a transgender person, and bestiality, the abuse of an animal.

India's rape law has never recognised anyone but a woman as a victim. Rape was defined in Section 375 under the old Indian Penal Code, and it is defined in Section 63 under the BNS, but in both, rape is something only a man can commit and only a woman can suffer. That is precisely why Section 377 mattered so much. It was the one provision broad enough to reach the victims the rape law refused to see: adult men, transgender persons and, in cases of bestiality, animals. 

When the BNS came into force and let Section 377 lapse, that shelter vanished. Nothing in the new code took its place. The result is a criminal law that celebrates its own modernity while leaving a hole where the protection of male and transgender victims used to be.

Also Read:  Transphobia Gets Legalised

BNS Section 63, and who it forgets

At the centre of the dispute sits Section 63 of the BNS. This is the provision that defines rape, and it is the successor to the old Section 375 of the IPC. Read it closely and the design is unmistakable. It describes rape entirely as something "a man" does to "a woman." The BNS then defines a man as a male human being of any age and a woman as a female human being of any age. Put those pieces together and the conclusion is stark. Under the BNS, rape is, by definition, a crime a man commits against a woman, and no one else can be the victim.

India's rape law does say only a woman can be a victim. It is important to be precise about what that means and what it does not. It does not mean a man or a transgender person who is sexually assaulted has no recourse to any law at all. Depending on the facts, lesser offences such as assault, causing hurt or the use of criminal force may still apply. But those are weaker charges, they carry lighter punishment, and crucially, none of them recognise the act as rape. The same violation is rape when the victim is a woman, and something smaller, or nothing, when the victim is not. That distinction is the heart of this story.

Shubhi Srivastava's case is that this cannot survive the Constitution. Her petition argues that Section 63 and a cluster of related BNS provisions, fourteen sexual-offence sections in all, covering rape, aggravated rape, gang rape, sexual harassment, voyeurism and stalking, are discriminatory because they protect women and abandon everyone else. She invokes Articles 14, 15 and 21, the constitutional guarantees of equality, non-discrimination and dignity. Her demand is not that women lose protection. It is that the same protection be extended so that men, transgender persons and, because Section 377 also covered it, animals, are not left outside the rape law.

What set it in motion

The origin of the petition, according to the family that drove it, was not an abstract reading of the statute book. It came from the ground, from the police themselves.

Shubhi's father and co-counsel, S.K. Srivastava, a retired officer of the Indian Revenue Service turned litigant, describes the moment the problem became impossible to ignore.

"As lawyers, we interact a great deal with police officials. During those interactions, the police themselves came to us and said, please do something. They brought an SHO to me and we had a long discussion. What he told me was simple. Whenever there is a case against a man or a third gender, the police are unable to register it. That is what triggered this petition."

It is a striking claim where the people meant to enforce the law are saying the law gives them nothing to enforce. A station house officer, faced with a male or transgender victim of sexual violence, has no offence of rape to record, because the rape law does not admit that such a victim can exist.

The family's second argument goes to the harder question, the one that sank their first attempt in court. When Srivastava's group first filed in October 2025, the High Court pointed out that granting their prayers would mean the court ordering Parliament to write a new law, something courts are not supposed to do. They withdrew. Their answer this time is more careful. They are asking the court to direct the government to act.

S.K. Srivastava states, "Parliament is a sovereign body and it decides what to legislate and what not to. But Parliament does not have the machinery to sense what the public actually needs. That is the job of the government, to gather these critical insights and place them before Parliament in the form of a bill. We are putting the onus on the government. We are not saying you did this deliberately. But those who drafted this law had a vision so narrow that for them rape is always in the man-woman construct, where the woman is the victim. I want the court to direct the government to look into the matter and initiate corrective measures, if necessary by going back to Parliament."

Also Read:  Delhi Police Inaction Leads to Rape Survivor's Repeated Rape

Three petitions, one hole

Srivastava's is not the only voice raising this alarm. In a matter of weeks in October 2025, the Delhi High Court found itself holding three separate challenges, all circling the same gap in the BNS. 

The first was filed by Dr Chandresh Jain, a Delhi advocate and human rights activist. His petition is narrower and, in tone, the most sympathetic of the three. It is concerned specifically with transgender persons, who he argues have been rendered legally invisible. Jain's case is that the law which is supposed to protect them, Section 18 of the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, is close to useless, because it bundles every offence against a transgender person into a single clause with a maximum sentence of just two years, whatever the gravity.

A transgender rape survivor's attacker, in other words, faces a fraction of the punishment that a woman's attacker would. Jain asks the court to read the BNS and other laws inclusively, so that transgender victims are recognised, rather than to strike anything down. His targets are the central ministries, Home, Law and Justice, and Social Justice and Empowerment.

The second petition was filed by Barkha Nagar, also a Delhi advocate, on 14 October 2025. Her petition goes straight at the definition itself. She asks the court to declare Section 63 of the BNS unconstitutional for violating Articles 14, 19 and 21, on the ground that a rape law which recognises only women as victims is arbitrary and discriminatory. Her petition argues, powerfully, that adult men, transgender and non-binary people are left without protection the moment they cross the age of eighteen, since the child-protection law is already gender-neutral but the adult rape law is not.

Yet there is a crucial catch in the Barkha Nagar petition, and it is worth spelling out because it explains why a third, broader case was thought necessary. Her arguments call for a gender-neutral rape law. But her formal prayer, the specific relief she actually asks the court to grant, asks only for one thing: that Section 63 be struck down as unconstitutional. It does not ask for a replacement law to be framed in its place. That omission matters enormously. A court that granted only what she formally sought would remove the definition of rape and leave nothing behind. In trying to widen the rape law, the prayer as drafted risks knocking out the one protection that already exists, and leaving a far larger vacuum than the one it set out to fix.

It is this landscape, one petition confined to transgender persons, another that could accidentally hollow out the rape law altogether, that Srivastava's group points to in arguing that neither existing case covers the full problem. Their pitch is that the answer must add protection rather than subtract it. In their language, the goal is positive equality, not negative equality. You do not achieve fairness, they argue, by taking the rape law away from women. You achieve it by extending the rape law to everyone else.

What the court has now allowed

For months, Srivastava's group was stuck between two bad options: join a petition they thought too narrow, or walk away from the fight altogether. So in July 2026 they went back to the same court and asked for something more ambitious: permission to file a fresh, comprehensive petition of their own, one that would gather every affected class, men, women, transgender persons and animals, into a single challenge.

The Delhi High Court has now granted that permission. It has agreed that the comprehensive petition can be filed. Essentially, the court has simply cleared the way for the fullest version of the challenge to be brought and heard. The real contest, over whether India's rape law can continue to see only one kind of victim, is still to come. But the door is now open, and that alone changes the story.

The BNS was meant to be India's confident break from its colonial past. Instead, in retiring a colonial law without reading it fully, the drafters of the BNS may have taken away a protection they never meant to touch, and left behind a rape law that, for a large part of the population, offers no protection at all. Whether the courts can repair what Parliament left undone is the question the coming months will answer. 

The Supreme Court on Monday issued notices to the Union of India and five other respondents in the case of the Indian sailor who has been missing since his cargo ship was struck by a drone in the Black Sea, and directed the Ministry of External Affairs to use its diplomatic channels to trace him.

A bench led by the Chief Justice of India heard the writ petition filed by Sandeep Kumar Gupta, the elder brother of Deepak Kumar Gupta, an Ordinary Seaman missing along with his fellow sailor Ram Chandra Dubey since the MV AGN Ragnar was attacked near the Ukrainian coast on 25 July. Notices were issued to all six respondents: the Union of India through the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, the Directorate General of Shipping, the Embassy of India in Bucharest, the Embassy of India in Kyiv, and the manning agency Dwelloship Management. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Union, accepted the notice on its behalf.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Moves Supreme Court After Every Door Shut

What the Supreme Court said

Opening the hearing, the Chief Justice set out the contradiction at the heart of the case. The petitioner's brother had been serving as an Ordinary Seaman when his ship was attacked by a drone off Ukraine, the bench observed, and the accounts that followed were irreconcilable: one held that the sailor had drowned, another that two of the crew were alive and two missing.

Counsel for the petitioner clarified the crew position. There were nine crew members in all, four of them Indian. Two were recovered at the scene, and two went into the water to escape the fire that broke out after the strike.

The bench then pressed the question that has shadowed the case from the outset: which arm of the Indian state was answerable for tracing the missing sailor. The Chief Justice asked whether the Indian embassy in Romania, the embassy in Ukraine, or the Ministry of External Affairs had established the facts.

The court then passed its order. It issued notice to all six respondents, including the Union of India, the Directorate General of Shipping and the two missions, and requested the government to seek immediate instructions from the Indian embassies in Ukraine and Romania to establish the whereabouts of the missing sailor, Deepak Kumar Gupta. It further directed the Ministry of External Affairs to use its diplomatic channels in the search, and sought to know whether the International Maritime Organization's convention on the fair treatment of seafarers had been observed.

Also Read:  Pilot Boat Left Indian Sailors to Die in the Water, Says Officer

The Probe's reporting, and how the family reached the courtroom

The order marks a decisive turn in a case that had, until now, moved almost entirely against the family. The Probe has reported extensively on the missing sailors, and it was through that reporting that the family, without the means to mount a legal fight of its own, was put in touch with the lawyer who took the petition to the Supreme Court pro bono.

Nishant Bharihoke, counsel for the petitioner, set out the significance of the day's proceedings to The Probe. "The Supreme Court has heard the petition today and issued notices to all six respondents, including the government of India. The learned Solicitor General of India has accepted the notice on behalf of the Union of India," he said. "The court has also asked the Union of India, through the Solicitor General, that whatever possible help is required for the family of the missing sailor Deepak Gupta may be provided. The case will be next heard on Friday."

He went on: "This is a significant order. I thank The Probe for bringing this case to me and helping the family fight this legal case. I have taken up this case in public interest. I hope at least these developments will help the government authorities take cognisance, and it is my firm belief that the MEA will not wait till Friday. They will act early. The Solicitor General has been given the advance copy of the petition. I am sure he will pass on this information to the government today itself."

Bharihoke said he had also counselled the family on the practical step to take next. "I have told the family of the missing sailor to get in touch with the authorities and tell them about this petition and the Supreme Court direction, and they will definitely help. At least they will wake up from their slumber."

For a family told for more than a week that the matter lay with the other embassy, first by Bucharest and then by Kyiv, the Supreme Court's order directing the Ministry of External Affairs to act is the first time any arm of the state has been placed under a formal obligation to find their missing sailor.

Also Read:  Missing Indian Sailors: How a System Failed Two Grieving Families

What the petition asked for

The petition was filed on 31 July under Article 32 of the Constitution as a writ in the nature of mandamus. Its argument is constitutional: that the right to life under Article 21 follows the citizen wherever he goes and does not lapse at India's territorial waters, and that where two missions of the same sovereign each disclaim responsibility, the responsibility of the Union as a whole stands established, not diminished. It invokes the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963.

Though brought by Deepak Kumar Gupta's family, the petition concerns both sailors who went into the Black Sea. If the rescue reports are true, it argues, Deepak Kumar Gupta and fellow sailor Ram Chandra Dubey may be alive, injured and unidentified in a foreign facility. If they are not, every hour without a resumed search narrows their chances of survival. In either case, the petition contends, immediate action by the Union of India is the only route to the truth.

The petition had asked the court to press Romania, Ukraine and the flag state of Palau, at the highest level, to resume and intensify search and rescue on the basis of updated drift modelling; to verify with the Romanian Coast Guard and ARSVOM whether any rescued or recovered persons matching the two men are in Romanian medical facilities, port authority care or immigration custody; to obtain the official incident report, logbook and search logs; to direct the Directorate General of Shipping to compel full disclosure by the owner and managers through the manning agency; and to appoint a single senior nodal officer in the Ministry of External Affairs to furnish the family with daily written updates. An accompanying application for interim relief asks that the Bucharest mission make the verification inquiry within 24 hours.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Says No Word From Govt, Ship Owner

What happens next

The case now turns on what the government places before the court on Friday. The Solicitor General is expected to return with instructions from the Indian embassies in Kyiv and Bucharest on the whereabouts of Deepak Kumar Gupta, and on whether the two people reported rescued by the Romanian authorities are in fact the two Indian crew members from the MV AGN Ragnar. The court has also asked the government to clarify whether the IMO's convention on the fair treatment of seafarers has been observed.

The contradiction at the centre of the case is the one The Probe has reported throughout. Two official search efforts, Romania's ARSVOM and Ukraine's Navy, searched the waters off Sulina and found no one, and no body has been recovered on either side of the Black Sea. ARSVOM's operations head, who ran the 12-hour search from Sulina to St. George, told The Probe that the reports of a rescue were false. The Ukrainian Navy's letter, obtained by The Probe, records the same outcome: the two crew were searched for and not found.

Against these two accounts stands the claim of the maritime security firm Ambrey Analytics, first carried by the trade publication TradeWinds and later put to the missing sailor Deepak Kumar Gupta's family in writing, sourced to Lloyd's List, that two crew who went into the sea were subsequently rescued with minor injuries and are in the care of the Romanian authorities. Ambrey could not confirm the identities of those rescued. 

For the family, Friday is the next test of whether the government will act. For the first time since the MV AGN Ragnar was struck, a court has directed the state to establish where the sailor is and to report back.

The two Indian sailors who went missing from the cargo vessel MV AGN Ragnar could have been pulled from the water alive within minutes of the drone strike that hit their ship in the Black Sea, according to the vessel's chief officer, who says a pilot boat sitting only a few hundred metres away fled the scene instead of rescuing them.

Rajat Kumar, the chief officer of MV AGN Ragnar and one of two Indian survivors of the 25 July attack, told The Probe that Ram Chandra Dubey and Deepak Kumar Gupta went into the water during the first of two drone strikes, and that a small pilot boat, which was waiting close by to collect the vessel's river pilot, was signalled to save them and turned away. "The biggest fault is with that pilot boat," he said. Rajat estimated the boat was about two cables from the ship, under half a kilometre, close enough to have reached the two men. 

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Moves Supreme Court After Every Door Shut

Where the ship was, and what happened

MV AGN Ragnar, a Palau-flagged general cargo ship, had loaded corn at Izmail, a Ukrainian port on the Danube, and was bound for Greece. It was moving down the river and out through the approach channel near Sulina, at the mouth of the Danube where the river meets the Black Sea, when it was struck. A local river pilot had guided the vessel toward open water and was preparing to disembark near the Romanian border. His pilot boat waited alongside to collect him.

According to Rajat, the first drone hit the cargo hold hatch cover as the pilot was about to step off. Dubey and Gupta, both Ordinary Seamen, went into the water. Whether they jumped to escape the fire or were thrown by the blast is disputed. Both families reject the account, first relayed to them, that the two sailors jumped.

A full 20 minutes passed before the second drone struck the vessel, setting off a fire and damaging the accommodation and bridge. In that interval, Rajat says, only one strike had taken place and the pilot boat was under no threat, because a pilot boat carries nothing that a drone campaign against cargo would be aimed at. The crew signalled to the boat by VHF radio and by hand that two of their men were in the water. The boat did not stop. It left without even collecting the pilot it had come for. The crew deployed a man overboard life buoy and gave the standard man overboard signals, but by the time a rescue craft reached them, roughly 40 to 45 minutes had passed, and the two men were no longer visible.

Also Read:  Missing Indian Sailors: How a System Failed Two Grieving Families

A second official account, from Ukraine's Navy

A document obtained by The Probe now provides a second official account of the search for the two missing sailors, independent of the Romanian agency that has so far been the main source.

The letter, dated 28 July 2026, is from the 18th Maritime Guard Detachment of the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine, based in Izmail, and is signed by its acting commander, Captain 1st rank Denys Zakharchuk. It replies to a query dated 27 July from Marinar Agent Service, the local shipping agent at Izmail. 

The letter confirms that after MV AGN Ragnar sustained damage, a crew of seven and one pilot who were aboard were evacuated by an 18th detachment craft and taken ashore for medical treatment. It states that search and rescue for the two missing crew was carried out in the approach channel area by a Maritime Guard ship, two Naval Forces boats and one boat of the 17th Border Detachment. It records that the search was terminated on the order of the Naval Forces command because of an air threat, and that operations are currently suspended due to stormy weather, with Navy patrols surveying the coastline. It adds that Romania's Coast Guard was informed.

That crew count, seven plus one pilot evacuated with two missing, matches the account Rajat gave The Probe. It is also the first documentary confirmation, from an on-the-water Ukrainian source, that the two sailors were searched for and not found.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Says No Word From Govt, Ship Owner

Two searches, two reasons for stopping

On the Romanian side, the search was run by ARSVOM, the Romanian Agency for Saving Human Life at Sea. The Probe spoke to Daniel Nasiescu, ARSVOM's Director of Operations, whose position is listed in the agency's approved organisational chart under the title Director Exploatare. He said ARSVOM carried out a search and rescue operation on 26 July, running from about 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening, about 12 hours, covering the area from Sulina to St. George, further south along the Romanian coast. The operation found no one.

Nasiescu told The Probe the search had been called off and could only resume if Romania's Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, MRCC Constanța, issued fresh orders, something he indicated would require pressure through diplomatic channels from India. He also said, directly, that media reports claiming the two seafarers had been rescued were false.

So two separate national efforts searched the same stretch of the Black Sea, and both stopped, for different stated reasons. Ukraine's Navy halted its operation because of an air threat and then stormy weather. Romania's agency ended its 12-hour search for want of fresh MRCC orders. On neither side of the border did anyone find the two men, alive or dead. MV AGN Ragnar was the third commercial vessel carrying Indian crew to be attacked in the Black Sea within roughly a week.

The rescue claim that does not hold up

Against these two official accounts stands a very different claim. On 27 July, the maritime trade publication TradeWinds reported, citing the security firm Ambrey Analytics, that the two crew initially reported missing had jumped into the water to escape the fire and were rescued with minor injuries, with the Romanian Coast Guard assisting.

On 30 July, Ambrey repeated the claim directly to Deepak Gupta's family in writing, again sourced to Lloyd's List, stating that two crew who jumped into the sea were subsequently rescued. Ambrey said it could not confirm the identities of those rescued.

Also Read:  Why Are Indian Sailors Dying in the Black Sea?

If they were rescued, where are they?

The contradiction leaves a stark question at the centre of the case. Two searches found no bodies. If the two men are neither in the Black Sea nor recovered from it, and if there is any truth to the account that someone pulled two people from the water near the Romanian border, then those two people are somewhere, and no Indian authority has verified where.

One possibility the family has weighed is that the two men, if rescued near or across the Romanian maritime boundary, could have been taken into custody by Romanian authorities, questioned over an unauthorised entry, and are yet to be identified as the missing Indian crew. If that were the case, ordinary process would see them released after interrogation, and a single official inquiry by the Indian mission in Bucharest to the Romanian Coast Guard and ARSVOM, checking hospitals, port authority care and immigration custody, could settle it. The family says no such verification has been done.

A darker fear, which the family has voiced, is that two young seafarers pulled from the water in a live conflict zone could be held or put to some other use, including questioning about the vessel's movements. The Probe cannot verify this, and there is no evidence for it beyond the family's fear and the unexplained gap between the rescue claim and the official record. The gap is real: a claim that two men were saved, two official accounts that no one was found, and no body recovered on either side of the Black Sea.

Families moving from pillar to post

While the two accounts remain unreconciled, the families of the missing sailors have spent more than a week trying to force some arm of the state to take ownership of the case.

Deepak Gupta's brother, Sandeep Kumar Gupta, wrote to the Embassy of India in Bucharest, the Embassy of India in Kyiv, the MEA and the Directorate General of Shipping. The Bucharest mission, he says, forwarded his request to Kyiv, which would assist "in due course of time." The Kyiv emergency helpline went unanswered for more than 18 hours. Each mission, the family says, treated the case as the other's responsibility. On 31 July, Sandeep filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court under Article 32, seeking an order directing the Union of India to press for the search to resume. The matter came before the Chief Justice's bench and was listed for hearing on Monday.

Ram Chandra Dubey's family has pursued a parallel track. Praveen Patel, the Lok Sabha member for Phulpur in Prayagraj, wrote on 29 July to the Romanian embassy, the Ukrainian embassy, the Minister of External Affairs and the Minister of State for External Affairs, asking that Romanian and Ukrainian maritime agencies intensify the search and that a direct line be opened to the family. On 31 July, Manoj Tiwari, the member for North-East Delhi, forwarded the family's request to the External Affairs Minister. The manning agency that recruited the two seafarers, Dwelloship Management, sent its first written confirmation of the incident on 28 July, more than 60 hours after the attack.

What the record now shows

Taken together, the documents assembled around the MV AGN Ragnar case describe a search that was real but brief, halted on each side of the Black Sea for its own reasons, and a rescue claim that the searchers themselves reject. The Ukrainian Navy's letter and ARSVOM's account agree on the essential point. Two members of the crew went into the Black Sea near Sulina and were not found. The Ambrey account says they were saved. Both cannot be true, and the difference between them is the difference between a search that must continue and two men who may already be somewhere on land, uncounted.

For the families, that difference is everything. They have a court date on Monday, letters from two members of Parliament, a petition before the Chief Justice, and still no confirmed word on whether Ram Chandra Dubey and Deepak Kumar Gupta are alive. What they do not have, more than a week after MV AGN Ragnar was struck in the Black Sea, is a single official answer to the only question that matters: where are the two sailors.

Missing Sailors: Family Moves Supreme Court After Every Door Shut

The family of one of two missing sailors from the MV AGN Ragnar has moved the Supreme Court of India, seeking urgent directions to force the government to resume a stalled search for their loved ones in the Black Sea. The writ petition, filed on Thursday by Sandeep Kumar Gupta, the elder brother of missing seafarer Deepak Kumar Gupta, came up before a bench led by the Chief Justice of India. Despite the plea's emphasis on extreme urgency, with the petitioner arguing that survival is measured in hours, the matter has been listed for hearing on Monday.

Deepak Kumar Gupta, an Ordinary Seaman aged 26, and his crewmate Ram Chandra Dubey have been missing since 25 July, when the Palau-flagged cargo vessel they were serving on was struck by drones near the Sulina river breakwater at the mouth of the Danube. Two other Indian crew members were rescued and are safe. The petition concerning the missing sailors was filed under Article 32 of the Constitution, seeking a writ of mandamus directing the Union of India to act.

Speaking to The Probe, Sandeep Kumar Gupta said the decision to approach the country's highest court was a last resort. "There was no other option left before me. All the doors had closed. That is why I decided to knock on the doors of the Supreme Court," he said.

Also Read:  Missing Indian Sailors: How a System Failed Two Grieving Families

Why the Family Went to Court

The petition sets out, in careful detail, the family's account of what it describes as a complete failure of the state's machinery to protect an Indian citizen in peril abroad. The core argument is constitutional: that the right to life under Article 21 "follows the citizen wherever he goes," and does not stand suspended when an Indian crosses the country's territorial waters.

At the heart of the case for the missing sailors lies a stark contradiction between two official accounts, neither of which, the petition says, has been verified by any arm of the Indian government.

On one side is the account of the Romanian Agency for Saving Human Life at Sea (ARSVOM), which conducted the only search. In a written communication annexed to the petition, ARSVOM confirmed that one of its search-and-rescue vessels searched the designated area from Sulina to St. George on 26 July, and that "despite all the efforts we have made, unfortunately, nobody was found." Crucially, ARSVOM added: "Since that day we have not received further instructions or orders from MRCC." The petition notes that this means the official search for the missing sailors "was thus conducted for less than ten hours and has stood halted since 26.07.2026."

On the other side is what the petition calls "credible maritime intelligence" pointing the other way. It records that TradeWinds, a maritime news publication, reported that two seafarers were rescued, and that the security firm Ambrey Analytics communicated to the family, in writing, that two crew members who jumped into the sea "were subsequently rescued" with minor injuries, with the Romanian Coast Guard assisting. Ambrey stated it could not confirm the identities of those rescued.

The petition frames the consequence of this contradiction with unusual clarity: "If the rescue reports are true, the Petitioner's brother may be alive, injured, and unidentified in a foreign facility today. If they are not, every hour without a resumed search extinguishes his chances of survival. In either event, immediate action by the Union of India is the only path to the truth."

Also Read:  Why Are Indian Sailors Dying in the Black Sea?

"The Family Has Knocked on Every Door"

A substantial part of the petition documents the family's own efforts to get information about the missing sailors, and the responses it received. According to the petition, Sandeep wrote repeatedly to the Embassy of India at Bucharest, the Embassy of India at Kyiv, the Ministry of External Affairs, the External Affairs Minister, the Directorate General of Shipping, and the recruiting agency.

The petition states that the Embassy at Bucharest, by email dated 27 July, "merely forwarded the request to the Embassy at Kyiv stating that the latter would assist 'in due course of time'." It records that the emergency helpline of the Embassy at Kyiv "went unanswered for over 18 hours," and that "each mission has treated the matter as falling within the other's jurisdiction."

This jurisdictional buck-passing forms one of the petition's central legal grounds. It argues that where "two missions of the same sovereign each disclaim responsibility, the responsibility of the Union of India as a whole stands established, not diminished." The petition invokes the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963, under which consular functions include protecting the interests of a country's nationals, arguing that "jurisdictional convenience of the State's own instrumentalities cannot defeat the fundamental rights of the citizen."

For Sandeep, this experience is the reason the family had no choice but to litigate. The petition records that the recruiting agency "took more than 60 hours to even confirm the incident in writing to the family." When The Probe first reported on the case, the family described receiving no meaningful information from the company or the state, only a single call, on 26 July, from a person who would not identify his company.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Says No Word From Govt, Ship Owner

What the Petition Asks For

Notably, the petition is careful about what it does not seek. "The Petitioner does not ask this Hon'ble Court to conduct foreign relations," it states. "He asks only that the Union of India be directed to do what it alone can do and what it is already obliged to do."

The reliefs sought on behalf of the missing sailors are specific and practical. The petition asks the Court to direct the Union of India to take up, at the highest diplomatic level with Romania, Ukraine, and the flag state of Palau, the immediate resumption and intensification of search-and-rescue operations in the Sulina and Danube-mouth sector of the Black Sea, including a reissuance of search orders by Romania's rescue coordination centre based on "updated ocean drift modeling."

It also seeks a direction to verify, with the Romanian Coast Guard and ARSVOM, whether any rescued or recovered persons matching the description of the missing sailors are in Romanian medical facilities, port authority care, or immigration custody, a verification the petition says "requires nothing more than one official inquiry by the Indian mission at Bucharest."

Further, the petition asks the Court to direct the appointment of "a single nodal officer of appropriate seniority" in the Ministry of External Affairs, to serve as the accountable point of contact for the case and to provide daily written updates to the family until the seafarer is traced. An accompanying application for interim relief seeks that the Bucharest mission be directed to make the verification inquiry within 24 hours.

A Question of Accountability

The petition is unsparing in its assessment of the recruiting agency's conduct, and of the wider system that placed the missing sailors on the vessel. It notes that the agency, on 29 July, asserted that the search operation was "still ongoing" by the Ukrainian and Romanian coast guards, "an assertion directly contradicted by ARSVOM's written statement that the search was halted on 26.07.2026 itself." It also records that the agency did not answer the family's specific questions, including on a discrepancy between the companies named in the seafarer's contract and a third entity named by Ambrey as the vessel's technical manager.

The petition places the Directorate General of Shipping's statutory role at the centre of this accountability question. It argues that the Directorate exercises control over recruiting agencies under the Merchant Shipping Act, 1958, "precisely so that Indian seafarers and their families are not left remediless when a casualty occurs on a foreign flag vessel."

Waiting Until Monday

For the family of the missing sailors, the listing of the matter for Monday is a source of anguish. The petition's own language stresses that "the matter is of the utmost urgency and irreparable harm will be caused if it is not listed and heard immediately, as the window for a successful search and rescue operation, or for tracing a rescued survivor, closes with each passing day."

Sandeep, for his part, is clear about why he has pursued this at all. "The petition is filed solely to save the life of his brother," the document states, recording that the petitioner "has no personal, private, or oblique motive." When The Probe spoke to him, that was the note he returned to: a brother who was due home, a family that has run from pillar to post, and a search that, on the official record, has not moved since 26 July.

The two missing sailors remain unaccounted for. Whether they are somewhere in the water, somewhere on a foreign shore, or in a hospital bed no one has yet checked, is a question that, for now, only the Union of India can answer. The family hopes the Supreme Court, on Monday, will compel it to try.

Missing Indian Sailors: Families Say They Were Left to Fight Alone

For four days, the families of Ram Chandra Dubey and Deepak Kumar Gupta have been waiting for a phone call that never comes. The two young Indian sailors have been missing since 25 July, when their ship, the MV AGN Ragnar, was struck in the Black Sea near the Romanian coast. Neither the Indian government, nor the company that recruited them, nor the ship's owners have given their families a clear account of what is being done to find them.

Speaking to The Probe, Dubey's sister, Seemakshi, and Gupta's brother, Sandeep Kumar Gupta, described an ordeal that has forced two ordinary families to chase embassies, ministries and shipping companies for information that should have reached them within hours. What they have found instead, they say, is silence.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Says No Word From Govt, Ship Owner

The Call That Broke the News, and Raised More Questions

The MV Ragnar was one of three commercial vessels carrying Indian crew attacked in the Black Sea within a single week. On 18 July, the MV Omorfi was struck, killing one Indian sailor. A day later, the MV Golden Leo was hit, killing four more. The attack on the MV Ragnar on 25 July left two Indian sailors missing. In all, five Indian sailors have died in the recent Black Sea attacks, with two more unaccounted for.

Under India's rules governing the recruitment of seafarers, families are supposed to be informed within 24 hours of any such incident. For both families, that did not happen.

"We found out on the 26th, in the afternoon at 1:30," Seemakshi said. The call came not to her, but to her younger sister, from a person who would not clearly identify himself or his company. "Since my brother was abroad, I knew immediately something was wrong."

The caller told the family that Dubey and Gupta had jumped from the ship. Seemakshi rejects this account. "That is absolutely not correct. They did not jump anywhere. They may have fallen from the jolt of the drone attack — but they cannot have jumped, because they had been working for 10 months. They knew the depth of the water, they knew the current." She added: "And if these people saw them fall or jump, then why didn't they save them?"

Sandeep's account was much the same. His father received a call on 26 July from Dwelloship Management, the manning agency that recruited the two Indian sailors. But he says the company never volunteered basic information, and it was only through his own efforts, emailing embassies and government departments in the hours after he learned the news, that he pieced together what little the family knows.

Also Read:  Why Are Indian Sailors Dying in the Black Sea?

Chasing a System That Would Not Answer

What follows in both accounts is a portrait of families left to navigate a bureaucracy alone. Sandeep says he contacted the Ukrainian and Romanian embassies, both of which told him they could not assist Indian citizens and directed him to the Indian mission. When he approached India's Ministry of External Affairs, he was routed to another desk and asked to send an email. "I did send the email," he said, "but no reply has come to the email yet."

The families say the Indian Embassy in Ukraine, which had published emergency contact numbers, stopped answering their calls for a period of roughly 18 to 20 hours. According to Sandeep, a response came only after The Probe published its first report on the case. Even then, he says, officials offered little beyond an assurance that they were "following a channel."

"Every time, they just say: follow the channel," Sandeep said. Both families say the shipping company that owns the vessel, Istanbul-managed and registered to Neva Shipping Corp, has never contacted them. "The ship owner never once contacted us," Sandeep said. He described messaging the ship's captain directly: "When he realised I was the elder brother, he completely ignored me. He still hasn't replied."

The Pilot Boat That Fled

The most significant new detail in the case comes from an eyewitness: Rajat Kumar, the MV Ragnar's chief officer, who survived the attack and is now in Odesa in Ukraine. His account, relayed to The Probe, describes a window in which the two missing Indian sailors might have been saved.

The MV Ragnar had loaded cargo at Izmail Port, a Ukrainian Danube port, and was bound for Greece. As is standard, a local river pilot had guided the vessel toward open water and was preparing to disembark near the Romanian border, where a small pilot boat waited close by to collect him. It was at this moment, according to the account, that the first drone struck.

Two of the Indian sailors jumped into the water either because of the impact of the attack or to escape fire. The crew signalled to the pilot boat, only a few hundred metres away, to rescue them. Crucially, a full 20 minutes passed before a second drone struck. In that interval, only one attack had taken place, and the pilot boat was not itself under threat.

The pilot boat did not stop. According to the chief officer's account, it fled, without even collecting the pilot it had come for. "There was so much time to save them," Rajat said.

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

A Rescue That Stopped After One Day

On 26 July, a vessel from ARSVOM, the Romanian Agency for Saving Human Life at Sea, conducted a 12-hour search from Sulina to St. George. It found no one. Speaking to The Probe, the agency's operations head confirmed that the search had been called off, and that it could only be resumed if Romania's Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre issued fresh orders, something that, he indicated, would require pressure through diplomatic channels from India.

That confirmation also exposed a piece of misinformation that had briefly given the families hope. A report by the trade publication TradeWinds, citing the maritime firm Ambrey Analytics, had stated that the two missing Indian sailors were rescued with minor injuries. The Romanian agency that actually conducted the search told The Probe this was false. 

"We just want to find out somewhere that they've been hospitalised, that they've been found," Seemakshi said. "Show us a photo, just that they're safe. What else do we need?"

Two Young Men, and the Homes That Wait for Them

Behind the shipping records and the diplomatic silence are two families whose lives have been suspended. Dubey was the hope of his household. "My father's eye surgery had to be done. We used to say, when my brother comes, then the operation will happen," Seemakshi said. "There were many hopes."

Gupta  was due home on 5 August. According to Sandeep, he had asked to sign off the ship weeks earlier, having spent nearly a year at sea, but the company pressed him into "one last trip." Both men were Ordinary Seamen, among the most junior ranks aboard. "They were just Ordinary Seamen, still learning," Sandeep said. "If you hire people this junior, you should protect them."

The families are now weighing a petition to the Supreme Court, seeking an order that would direct the Indian government to press for the search to resume. 

"We need our brother," Seemakshi said. "If he stays as missing, we'll keep considering him missing. We need our brother."

If you or someone you know is a seafarer or family member affected by the Black Sea attacks, Sailors' Society's Crisis Response Network is available 24/7:

Call: +1 938 222 8181 | Chat: sailors-society.org/helpline | Email: crisis@sailors-society.org

Those who visited the protest site at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, or turned to Instagram to watch compelling reels of the boisterous gathering, could hardly have escaped the impression that the high-voltage agitation was directed not so much against Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan as against Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Question of a Foreign Hand

Was the Jantar Mantar protest choreographed? Some people, brought up on a heavy dose of Congress beliefs, maintain that there was a foreign hand behind the uprising. They argue that such a well-organised and seemingly spontaneous movement was beyond the capabilities of Indians. But then who could have been involved? Americans, the Chinese, Pakistanis, or the Russians? Many loyalists blame China because a Ladakhi was among those leading the Cockroaches, but that runs contrary to Beijing's established approach. Quite a few years ago, both China and Russia refused to engage in regime change through colour revolutions.

Moreover, China does not enjoy the kind of influence over young Instagram users that the United States, its social media companies such as Meta and X, or their billionaire owners possess. Although the Chinese may have their differences with Modi, crediting them with the movement reflects a lack of faith in India's youth and an unwillingness to acknowledge that they have the courage to challenge an ageing Prime Minister determined to hold on to office.

The posters, placards, and countless reels cocking a snook at Modi's authority were manifestations of the anger directed at the Prime Minister and his unaccountable government. There was no foreign hand behind them. Tactically, many young protesters may have agreed that their immediate focus should be the Education Minister over the alleged examination paper leak, but they appeared to have no confusion about whom they held responsible for the larger crisis facing both them and the country. They cast aside the cloak of fear inherited from their elders and made one simple demand: the Prime Minister should resign. Everyone else was secondary.

The demand for the Prime Minister's resignation was so bold that it bordered on the scandalous. It was expressed in language that was often profane and deeply critical of the Prime Minister. Yet none of the protesters belonged to the Cockroach Janta Party, the ragtag formation that first called upon young people to assemble at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. It was also apparent that many protesters were not entirely persuaded by the demands of the leadership. However, almost all of them agreed that someone had to be held accountable for the alleged paper leak, and that Dharmendra Pradhan was an appropriate place to begin.

The agitation reopened all the issues that had been troubling the protesters besides the alleged paper leak: farmers' anguish, the blending of ethanol with petrol, environmental degradation, the sale of national assets to cronies, and, last but not least, the government's constant resort to communal politics whenever it found itself in a crisis. One slogan that resonated throughout the Jantar Mantar protest was: "Whenever the PM is in a spot, he unleashes the police against his detractors."

When the Prime Minister followed the advice of his media handlers and used an Instagram post to reach out to the Gen Z audience, he was savaged online. Although the post attracted millions of viewers, many young users mocked everything from the way he looked into the camera to the reflection of the teleprompter in his glasses and the visible pauses while reading his speech. At the time of writing, the unforgiving Gen Z audience was still ridiculing his Instagram foray, creating and sharing altered versions of his post.

The Crackdown at Jantar Mantar

Despite their irreverence and refusal to be cowed by a lathi-wielding police force, the protesters did not lose their composure. This writer spent two days at Jantar Mantar, where the student-led movement, backed by the resilient All India Students' Association (AISA), left no one in doubt that it was determined not to back down.

At around 1.30 p.m., Rapid Action Force (RAF) personnel launched what protesters described as a fierce crackdown on the demonstrators. Five tear gas shells, or perhaps six, exploded with loud blasts amid the restless crowd. Young volunteers, mindful of this writer's age, took me to a nearby church for safety and allowed me to leave only after the tear gas fumes had subsided.

A little later, an announcement triggered jubilant celebrations. An office-bearer of the Cockroach Janta Party announced that Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan had resigned. Much analysis has since followed regarding Pradhan's resignation and its implications for the Prime Minister and the government. What stood out, however, was that the country's security establishment was apparently not informed or kept in the loop about the impending resignation. It appeared that instructions were issued to the police and the Rapid Action Force only after the political negotiations had reached an outcome.

The security establishment then went into overdrive after the Prime Minister attempted his own intervention through Instagram. His first foray onto the platform was widely mocked by many young users. The post attracted millions of views, although many viewers altered and reshared it in satirical forms.

Bizarrely, the agitation dissipated very quickly. Cities that had only begun to mobilise crowds found themselves overtaken by developments such as Pradhan's resignation. Those developments, however, did not prevent police action, including the incarceration of protesters from different parts of the country. Was it immaturity, or simply satisfaction that the Cockroaches had succeeded in forcing the government onto its arthritic knees?

Be that as it may, the government proved more astute and removed virtually every trace of the protest from Jantar Mantar. Many protesters were arrested even though, according to the organisers, the Government of India had assured Cockroach Party leaders that participants would neither be arrested nor face criminal charges for joining the demonstration. AISA leader Neha Bora, who had earlier fasted for 23 days alongside Sonam Wangchuk, played a key role in securing the release of many arrested protesters from Bihar and other states.

Rahul Gandhi's Difficult Position

The trickiest challenge was for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. He was at the vanguard of the movement against the alleged NEET paper leak, but eventually found himself playing catch-up with the Cockroach Janta Party. In fact, both the media and the government began to accord greater importance to the Cockroaches and their leadership than to Rahul.

He staged a fast near the Prime Minister's residence, but the Congress failed to satisfactorily answer questions about how Rahul was able to get so close to Narendra Modi's official residence. No Congress leader appeared to have a clear explanation for why Rahul decided to march towards what was formerly known as 7 Race Course Road.

Rumours suggest a rift between Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. There has also been speculation that Rahul was briefed by the Intelligence Bureau on the violence at Jantar Mantar. If that were true, would it spell more trouble for Home Minister Amit Shah, who has yet to adequately answer the question that has intensified the confrontation with the young protesters: who ordered the use of pellet guns against the protesters?

As former Home Minister P. Chidambaram has pointed out, the standard operating procedure in Jammu and Kashmir differs from that followed in the rest of the country. Rahul Gandhi later addressed a press conference in which he claimed that the pellet gun that injured three protesters had been fired on the orders of the Home Minister.

As protesters converge once again at Jantar Mantar, the politics of tomorrow may well hinge on how the questions surrounding the use of pellet guns and the incarceration of protesters are answered.

This story first appeared in Hardnews. 

Why Are Indian Sailors Dying in the Black Sea?

Three commercial vessels with Indian crew have been attacked in the Black Sea within a single week. Five Indian sailors are confirmed dead. Two more, from MV AGN Ragnar, remain missing. As the death toll among Indian sailors in the Black Sea continues to rise, questions are mounting over who is actually responsible for protecting them, informing their families, and compensating them when disaster strikes on the high seas.

The Probe's Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Prema Sridevi, spoke to Manoj Joy, Head of Virtual Support, India, at Sailors' Society, an international organisation that works on seafarer welfare and has directly intervened in cases of Indian crew stranded or in crisis abroad. The conversation covered the AGN Ragnar attack specifically, and the much larger, largely unreported crisis facing Indian sailors across the world's most dangerous shipping corridors.

Below is the full transcript of that conversation.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Two Indian citizens, sailors by profession, are still missing after their ship, MV AGN Ragnar, was struck by suspected Russian drones in the Black Sea on July 25. There were four Indians on board this ship. Two of the sailors are alive today, and two others are missing. I have spoken to both the families of the missing sailors, Ram Chandra Dubey and Deepak Kumar Gupta. They told me that when the ship was attacked on the 25th, they only got to know about this on the 26th.

No one from the government has so far called them, and there is no help coming from the shipping company or the manning agency. This is now the third attack on a commercial vessel with Indian crew in the Black Sea in under a week. Think about this — three attacks on ships carrying Indian sailors. On July 18, MV Omorfi was attacked; one Indian sailor was killed. On July 19, the very next day, MV Golden Leo was attacked; four Indian sailors were killed. And on July 25, MV Ragnar was attacked, and two Indian sailors are missing.

To talk about what's actually happening to Indian sailors out there in the Black Sea, and the bigger question of who is responsible when Indian sailors are sent into a war zone and left to fend for themselves, I'm joined by Manoj Joy, Head of Virtual Support, India, Sailors' Society. Sailors' Society is an international organisation that works on seafarer welfare and has directly intervened in cases of Indian crew stranded or in crisis abroad.

Manoj, it's great to have you here. Thank you for joining me.

MANOJ JOY: Thank you.

Also Read:  Missing Sailors: Family Says No Word From Govt, Ship Owner

Who Is Responsible When Indian Sailors Go Missing?

PREMA SRIDEVI: Mr. Manoj, let's start with AGN Ragnar. As I've already said in my introduction, two Indian sailors are still missing. Today is the third day, and there is absolutely no news about them. From what you know of how these situations are supposed to work, who is actually responsible for keeping the family informed in real time? Is it the manning agency, the ship owner, or the MEA?

MANOJ JOY: It is the responsibility of the manning agency in India — the company which recruited them. The responsibility lies with them. They also have a responsibility to inform the Director General of Shipping when any casualty occurs on board the ship. So they cannot shy away by stating that it is the owner who has to provide the information.

As far as the Indian crew is concerned, he was recruited from India, and he was not directly recruited by the owner — it is through the manning agency that the crew has gone. So the responsibility stops with the manning agent. He has to keep the family informed from time to time, and also let the Director General of Shipping know the progress in the case.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Now, I spoke to both these families of the missing sailors. What they told me is that the incident happened on the 25th of July, and for the whole of the 25th, they had absolutely no clue as to what had happened. Then on the 26th, in the afternoon, they got a call from a stranger. They are very sure this was not a call from the Indian government, but they suspect it could have been someone connected to the ship owner or the manning agency. 

The person called back, and to one of the families, he became argumentative, asking why they were sharing his number with people and complaining that he was getting too many phone calls. So in a case like this, who is supposed to keep the family informed? You've already told me it's the manning agency's responsibility, but one of the family members also told me that they tried contacting the Indian Embassy in Ukraine which had released an emergency phone number as part of their helpline support, and it seems that for the last 20 hours or so, the Embassy has stopped answering calls. In a situation like this, what does a sailor's family do? How do they navigate the situation?

MANOJ JOY: Again, the responsibility lies with the manning agent. Initially, whoever it might be, they made a call and informed the family. This has to be followed by a written mail or letter, or an email confirming what happened. They cannot shy away from that responsibility. Within 24 hours, the family has to be notified, and the Director General of Shipping has to be notified.

In this particular case, I really don't know whether they've notified DG Shipping within the prescribed time limits. If they have not, it is a violation of the law. It's difficult for families to run around calling this agency, calling that agency, calling the embassy, that is not possible. So the responsibility lies with the manning agent. Every minute, he has to coordinate.

What Should Happen In The First 24 Hours

PREMA SRIDEVI: What should actually happen, step by step, in the first 24 hours after a ship with Indian crew is attacked? From the shipping company's side, from the manning agency's side, and from the government's side — what are their responsibilities?

MANOJ JOY: It is not just about an attack. Any incident involving Indian seafarers has to be reported within 24 hours when the incident occurs.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Reported by whom, and to whom?

MANOJ JOY: By the manning agent, to the family. The rules are clearly stated in the Recruitment and Placement of Seafarers regulations — when a manning agency is given its license, all these rules are mentioned there.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Which rule exactly are you referring to?

MANOJ JOY: The Recruitment and Placement of Seafarers Rules — the RPS Rules. It is all clearly stated there. If they don't comply, it is a clear violation of the rules. Families can also get in touch with the Director General of Shipping directly. There is a 24-hour helpline manned by DG Shipping's DG Comm Centre. If families find that the manning agent is not receptive or not cooperating, they can pick up the phone and call the DG Comm Centre. They will get help.

PREMA SRIDEVI: There was also news that a rescue mission was underway to locate the missing sailors, and then we heard that search and rescue for the two missing sailors was suspended because of continuing drone activity in the area. What happens next in a situation like this? Is there a point at which families are told to stop hoping, and who makes that call?

MANOJ JOY: In a war zone, it's very difficult for me to comment, because the people involved in the rescue operation know exactly what is happening on the ground. In trying to rescue seafarers, they cannot put their own lives at risk — they need to be safe first. Only if they are safe can they rescue people at sea. Once it's declared that crew members have gone missing, typically the search continues for two to three days. Beyond that period, if they are still not found, it becomes very difficult.

Also Read:  R. Rajagopal Gets His Passport, But Wants the Government to Clarify

Indian Sailors: A Pattern The World Is Ignoring

PREMA SRIDEVI: Mr. Manoj, this is not just the case of one ship being attacked — it's a pattern. Three ships have been attacked in a week's time. And the larger picture is that India supplies more of the world's seafarers than almost any other country, second only to the Philippines. Given that scale, why does it feel like the moment something goes wrong, Indian sailors and their families are completely on their own?

MANOJ JOY: The problem, in my experience, is that most families don't know whom to approach. This is where Sailors' Society comes in — when we talk to cadets and trainees in maritime colleges, when we take classes, when we run our wellness programmes, we always tell the students: before you leave home to join a ship, take a notebook. Write down your ship's name, the company's name, the person in your company who can be contacted in case of an emergency at home. Leave that notebook with your family, so that in case of difficulty, they can immediately reach out, including to Sailors' Society's helpline, and to DG Shipping's DG Comm Centre.

Also, before joining the ship, when the company gives you the contract, send a copy of it home. The family should know. This is a high-risk profession, even setting aside war, anything can happen on a ship. There could be an accident, the ship could sink in bad weather. It's a risky life at sea. So how does the family know whom to contact? As long as the sailor is going on board and coming back safely, the family is content. But when calamity strikes, they are helpless. I urge seafarers not to leave their families helpless in a critical situation by assuming nothing will happen to them.

PREMA SRIDEVI: So according to you, when something like this happens, what should families actually do?

MANOJ JOY: In the present situation, where families are struggling because the manning agent is not supporting them, they need to immediately reach out to the Director General of Shipping. Even a simple Google search for "Director General Shipping" gets you the website, and the DG Comm Centre telephone number is listed there — there are officers sitting there who will attend to you immediately. This is the first step, because only DG Shipping's office can take the next step — they can get in touch with the Ministry of External Affairs, and through them, reach the embassy.

If a family is working with a good, reputable company, there's not much to worry about: the company will take care of it, and the family need not run anywhere. But even in a case where you're not fully convinced the company is doing enough, this option exists. In my experience, DG Shipping's office is proactive in these situations, especially in war zones. We've seen this in the Hormuz region as well as in the Black Sea region. There is no other source to go to.

Who Is Accountable? Flag States, Manning Agencies, And Compensation

PREMA SRIDEVI: I also want to know from you, when a sailor dies or goes missing on a foreign-flagged ship in international waters, who is actually accountable, legally and morally? Is it the flag state, the manning agency, or the ship owner? And does India really have any leverage in this situation at all?

MANOJ JOY: The flag state is ultimately responsible — the flag state of the ship. But in most cases, we find these flag states don't do anything at all. There are what we call "flags of convenience" — countries where the ship owner is not actually based.

PREMA SRIDEVI: For a layperson who doesn't know these terms, can you explain what a flag of convenience is?

MANOJ JOY: Take, for example, Tanzanian-flagged ships, or Mongolian-flagged ships — the ship owner is not based in that country at all. The labour laws are lax, the taxation is lax, everything is lax. So ship owners register their vessels there specifically to escape these responsibilities. There is a real danger in these kinds of ships. There are good companies that register under flags of convenience and still take proper care of their seafarers but in many of the cases I've been watching in the Hormuz region, the employment agreement doesn't even mention compensation. So how is the family supposed to get compensation? It's a big question mark.

PREMA SRIDEVI: So you're saying the first point of accountability is the flag state itself. What is the flag state actually supposed to do in these cases? And what accountability should the shipping company and the manning agency be exposed to?

MANOJ JOY: This is a very large question. Let me confine myself to what I've seen in this particular case and cases like it. What I find is that shipowners often simply don't respond. Recently, there was a case where a shipowner put out a press release on a letterhead: the company's name was on top, and there was some content but apart from that, there was no address, no telephone number, no email ID, and the person who signed it had no name, no designation, nothing. It's essentially unverifiable. How do you even contact this company when there are no particulars at all?

This is the problem most ships operating in this region are facing - where Indian crew are involved, the seaman's employment agreement often only states that death compensation will be "as per Protection & Indemnity (P&I)" cover - the P&I Club being the insurance club - without naming which P&I club it is, or what amount the family is actually entitled to. Even if the matter goes to court, the court will ask: as per your employment contract, where is the amount specified? If nothing is mentioned, how do you even proceed?

PREMA SRIDEVI: Since you're speaking about compensation and insurance, in this particular case, MV Ragnar's case, we spoke to the manning company, Dwelloship. I spoke to the Managing Director of that company, and he told me they are in touch with the family though the family says otherwise, that no one has been in contact with them. He also said the seafarers have P&I cover, and that a settlement will eventually be decided by the ship owners, not the manning company. I want to know, in practice, what insurance cover is a sailor actually entitled to, especially in high-risk situations like this? What does the rule really say, and who is responsible for providing it: the manning company or the ship owner?

MANOJ JOY: It is not the manning company that pays. It is the insurance company, and the owners are responsible. But this has to be clearly stated in the Seaman's Employment Agreement or the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The manning company draws up this agreement on behalf of the ship owner, and it must specify: in case of a 20% disability, what is the amount payable? A 30% disability, what is the amount? 100% disability, what is the amount? In the event of death, what is the amount? This has to be fixed in advance. It cannot be decided later. As per the Recruitment and Placement licence rules under Indian law, it has to be there.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Is there a minimum amount that companies are required to provide?

MANOJ JOY: No minimum has been mandated. However, the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) recommends a figure, and most companies in India, as of 2026, are paying close to $120,000 in the case of death.

Sailors should be careful when they join a vessel. They need to specifically look at the clause where accident and death compensation is mentioned. In good, standard companies, the death and accident compensation amount is clearly specified. In the recent incidents we've seen in the Hormuz region and the Black Sea region, the contracts are not mentioning the compensation part at all:  it's only stated as "per P&I," which is not sufficient. Unless the compensation amount is clearly stated in figures in the Seaman's Employment Agreement, families have no way of knowing what they're entitled to.

The problem is that most seafarers don't read their contracts closely. They simply sign on the dotted line, thinking nothing will happen to them, so why worry about death or accident clauses? But these things are part of life at sea. Even outside a war zone, if you meet with an accident and lose your life, what will your family do? If the company says your entitlement is only $10,000, what can the family do? It is essential that seafarers read their contracts carefully and ask the company directly what the compensation amount is in case something goes wrong, and insist it be mentioned in the agreement.

PREMA SRIDEVI: As per Indian law, is there supposed to be a minimum compensation and mandatory insurance requirement?

MANOJ JOY: When a licence is issued to a manning agent under the Recruitment and Placement of Seafarers Rules, this is clearly mentioned and is supposed to be strictly enforced — the amount of compensation must be stated in the Seaman's Employment Contract, as per the RPS Rules. But many agents violate these norms and get away with it.

For example, we have cases like MV Skylight, which was hit by an Iranian missile. Two people died, the captain and an engine room crew member. To this day, they don't know what their compensation is. The family writes to the company; the company stays silent, or shifts the blame to the ship owner, and the ship owner doesn't respond either. Who takes responsibility?

The sad part, in the Skylight case, is that the young man who died was around 20 years old. His father was very fond of him — after his death, and with his remains never recovered, the father went into depression and unfortunately passed away himself. Now the mother's condition is bad. It's not just one seafarer's story — it can collapse an entire family. Most of these seafarers may be the sole breadwinner. In this current Black Sea case too, one of the sailors who died is from Kasaragod — an only son, from a family that isn't well-off. The father raised him, he became a second officer, and the family thought their life was finally improving. Now the boy is gone, and compensation, God knows.

Does Diplomatic Pressure Over Black Sea Attacks Even Work?

PREMA SRIDEVI: Coming back to this particular incident — this is now the third attack on a vessel with Indian crew in the Black Sea in a single week, and we've already lost five Indian sailors to these attacks. We've separately learnt that India had summoned both the Ukrainian and Russian envoys earlier. What really happens at the diplomatic front when envoys are summoned? Does it actually help?

MANOJ JOY: We are able to convey our displeasure through these channels, but I seriously doubt how effective it really is in a war situation. Diplomacy has its limits when a war is actually underway.

The Hidden Crisis: Suicides And Deaths At Sea That Never Make Headlines

PREMA SRIDEVI: I spoke to you, I think, twenty years ago, when I was probably a cub reporter — and even then, you were championing the cause of sailors, and you continue that mission today under a different organisation. Given your experience, how many Indian sailors do you think have actually died or gone missing in conflict zones like this in recent years? And why does this crisis get so little attention compared to, say, Indians stranded in the Gulf or students in distress abroad? What really needs to change so this stops being a pattern?

MANOJ JOY: What I can say is that only gradually is the media beginning to cover these incidents. Otherwise, these kinds of stories relating to seafarers get very minimal coverage. The media covers a shipping case one day, and the next day some political story crops up, and they drop it and move on.

From India, we have more than four lakh registered Indian seafarers — not all of them at sea at any given time, but a good majority are. And when we talk about seafarers going missing or dying, it's not only about war. There are a lot of cases of suicide at sea, or mysterious deaths.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Can you tell us more about that?

Bullying, Suicides and Murder at Sea

MANOJ JOY: There are various reasons. Some seafarers are unable to withstand the pressure of work at sea, and having spent a huge amount — ten to fifteen lakhs — on their training, they feel unable to face going home without success. There are also cases of harassment and bullying on board that seafarers cannot withstand. Family issues can also play a role. When I was a seafarer myself, we had no internet on board — today, ships are equipped with internet, and sailors are in constant touch with their families, so personal and family issues can also contribute. It's very difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for a suicide unless the person leaves a note.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Have you personally come across cases of suicide?

MANOJ JOY: Many, many cases. We deal with and support these families through Sailors' Society regularly.

PREMA SRIDEVI: What's the predominant cause in the cases you've seen?

MANOJ JOY: That's hard to say definitively — when you ask the family, they often say they don't accept it as suicide at all; they feel something else must have happened. We run a 24/7 helpline. I recall a case where a young Chinese seafarer called our helpline saying he wanted to end his life due to problems on board. My colleague, who speaks Chinese, took the call, reassured him, and looped in the ship's captain to ensure he wasn't left alone and was properly watched. We recommended the company take him off at the next port. He claimed his seniors on board were harassing him — though the captain disputed that account, and we genuinely don't know the full truth.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Have you come across a case involving an Indian seafarer who attempted or committed suicide?

MANOJ JOY: Many cases. One recent case — about two months back — involved a seafarer, around 30 to 35 years old, from Tamil Nadu, who died by hanging on board. Most suicide cases at sea involve jumping overboard, but this was a case of hanging on the ship itself. The vessel was en route to China, and the body decomposed significantly during the voyage — it took more than a month and a half for the body to be repatriated to India, largely due to differing procedures across countries.

The ship's account was that he had taken his own life, but the family was not willing to accept this — they said he had been perfectly normal, and had spoken to them the previous evening. This is a common pattern.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Who actually investigates a case like this on the high seas?

MANOJ JOY: It falls under the flag state's responsibility, and the investigation is typically carried out at the ship's first port of call, by the local police of that coastal state. As Indian nationals are involved, our administration also has a responsibility to be party to that investigation. So it's not just about war — a seafarer also has to be concerned about internal problems on board: bullying, harassment, and worse.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Have you seen instances of murder or homicide at sea as well?

MANOJ JOY: Yes, absolutely. A recent case involved two seafarers, both from Tamil Nadu, both friends, on the same ship. This was on Christmas Eve, December 2025. Ship policy typically prohibits alcohol entirely — a zero-tolerance policy. But the captain, apparently with the company's go-ahead, arranged liquor for the crew to mark Christmas Eve while the ship was near a port in Indonesia. During the evening, an argument broke out between the two friends, and one stabbed the other. The injured man died before or shortly after reaching hospital. The other is now in jail in Indonesia.

What Sailors' Society Is Doing For The AGN Ragnar Families

PREMA SRIDEVI: My last question — as far as the families of these two missing Indian sailors are concerned, what support can Sailors' Society provide right now? At this moment, they are left to fend for themselves, with no idea whom to contact.

MANOJ JOY: This is exactly the moment they need support. Compensation and all of that can come later — it's not going to happen tomorrow or the day after. What matters right now is that the family should not feel they are alone. They have friends, they have relatives, but as a seafaring community, we have a major role to play too. Often, when friends or family members who know nothing about shipping start offering opinions, all kinds of stories start circulating, and the family becomes even more confused about what's actually happening. This is where we step in, so families aren't misguided by rumour, and they know we're available 24/7.

PREMA SRIDEVI: How does someone reach Sailors' Society if a family wants to get in touch, and what kind of support can you actually provide?

MANOJ JOY: Usually, when we do media interactions like this, we request that our helpline number be printed or displayed. Some families find us that way; often it's not the family themselves but a friend or a tech-savvy relative who searches for us online and finds the number.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Let's assume someone uses the helpline and calls your organisation — what kind of support will you extend?

MANOJ JOY: The first and foremost thing is telling them: we are with you. That is what families need most in these moments, or they feel completely alone. In missing-person cases especially, we genuinely don't know the reality — whether the person is alive somewhere, or has been rescued, or worse. We can't bring a life back, but we can be present with the family at that moment.

Let me share one case. There was a group of seafarers imprisoned in Tirunelveli. I used to visit them in person. The High Court eventually found they hadn't committed any crime and acquitted them — but they'd already spent three years in prison. One of the wives, from Punjab, used to call me every single day, and the call would last barely ten seconds — her only question was, "Sir, will my husband be released?" That was all. The matter was in court, we didn't know the outcome, but I kept telling her to hold on to hope. Eventually, they did come home.

PREMA SRIDEVI: Beyond that phone conversation and presence, what else can Sailors' Society do?

MANOJ JOY: We work with like-minded organisations across the globe, and we can connect families to the right ones depending on what they need — since families often don't have access to background information on the ship owner, the manning agency, or details of the P&I club involved. We have people who can gather this information for families. We also help connect people to legal aid — not directly, since we don't get involved in court cases ourselves, but we have a network of lawyers in India who take up pro bono cases, and we can point families toward the right option and the best remedy available in a given situation. It's not that everyone needs to go to court — but we can lay out what's possible.

For instance, if someone dies on board and the family isn't willing to accept the official explanation — say, a suicide — this can linger in their minds for the rest of their lives, with parents wondering if they should have done something differently. In such cases, if the family has doubts, we tell them a re-postmortem can be done in India to help settle those doubts. Some families have taken that option and, after doing so, have found closure — accepting that there was no foul play, that it was a natural death. There has to be closure to a case; without it, the mind stays agitated indefinitely, and it can affect the family's wellbeing for years.

PREMA SRIDEVI: I'm very glad to have had this conversation, and the work Sailors' Society is doing is genuinely commendable. As you rightly said, sometimes what people need most isn't compensation or insurance or money — it's information. In moments like this, families just want to know: is my loved one safe? The last thing the AGN Ragnar families knew was that the sailors had jumped into the water. Then some news sources reported that two sailors had been rescued — and now, for the last 24 hours, the families are desperately trying to figure out whether those two rescued individuals are, in fact, their own family members.

In moments like this, getting information is the single biggest challenge. And the work you're doing to bridge that information gap for these families is remarkable. I'll be putting out Sailors' Society's helpline number when this is edited, for anyone in distress to reach out to. Thank you so much, Mr. Manoj Joy, for speaking with me today.

MANOJ JOY: Thank you, Prema.

I want to add one more thing, if I may — in this particular Ukraine case, once we get in touch with the family, we have a chaplain in Ukraine, a colleague of mine is stationed there. I can pass this information on to him, and through him, we'll try to reach out to government officials there to get information for the family.

PREMA SRIDEVI: That would be wonderful. I really appreciate that gesture, and I hope the families back in India get answers very soon — and that these two sailors are found safe and make it back home. Thank you again, Mr. Manoj Joy, for joining me.

MANOJ JOY: Thank you, Prema, for highlighting this cause. Thank you for doing this.

Sailors' Society Helpline

If you or someone you know is a seafarer or family member affected by the ongoing crisis in the Black Sea, Sailors' Society's Crisis Response Network and global helpline team are available 24/7:

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Missing Sailors: Family Says No Word From Govt, Ship Owner

"My brother called home on Friday, the 24th. The attack happened the very next day, and nobody told us anything on the 25th," said Seemakshi, sister of Ram Chandra Dubey, one of two missing sailors still unaccounted for after the merchant vessel MV AGN Ragnar came under attack off Ukraine's coast.

Dubey, an Ordinary Seaman, and fellow crew member Deepak Kumar Gupta have been missing since Saturday, July 25, after the Palau-flagged cargo ship was struck by suspected Russian drones while outbound through the Bystre Channel, near the Danube's mouth into the Black Sea, on a voyage from Ukraine toward Istanbul. Two other Indian crew members were confirmed safe soon after. 

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Family Of Missing Sailor Says They Were Left In The Dark

According to Seemakshi, the family's only contact in the first 24 hours after the attack came not from the government or the company that employed her brother, but from a stranger. "We got a call from a private person on the 26th, around 1.30 pm. He told us his name is Prashant, and that my brother is missing. He later called back to complain that too many people were calling him, and asked why we had shared his number. You tell me — if a family member is missing, would we not call the only person who reached out to us? We don't know the background of this person. But we didn't get a single call from the company that hired my brother, or from the Indian Embassy," she said. 

The family says it remains anxious and unaware of what to do next, more than 48 hours after the two men went missing following the attack. 

Devendra Pratap Singh, a friend of Dubey's from the same village, had raised an alarm publicly, posting on social media appealing to the government to accelerate search and rescue operations for the missing sailors. Singh says he has been trying to fill the information gap left by official channels. "Information is very limited right now. I am trying my best to coordinate whatever details I can find and pass them on to the family," he said.

The Recruitment Agency Responds

The Probe reached out to Dwelloship Management Private Limited, the Noida-based recruitment agency that hired the two missing sailors. Managing Director Sushant Rajora confirmed both men were recruited by his company as Ordinary Seamen, and that a third Dwelloship-recruited crew member aboard the vessel, Chief Officer Rajat Kumar, is safe and currently hospitalised.

"There were nine people onboard the ship. Four were Indian — two are missing, one is injured, and the fourth was recruited through a different agency, so I don't have his details. The captain is from Azerbaijan; he is also injured," Rajora said.

Rajora disputed the idea that families had been left with no information from his end. "I am in touch with both the families of the missing sailors. I am passing on whatever information I am able to find," he said — an account that stands in direct contrast to Seemakshi's description of receiving no contact from the company at all.

Rajora added that he is in touch with the ship's registered owner, Neva Shipping Corp, with AGN Uluslararasi Tasimacilik listed as its commercial and ISM manager. Rajora explained that the two missing sailors had been earning $550 a month when they joined roughly nine months ago, a wage that was raised to $910 a month by the Istanbul-based owner three to four months into their contract. Dwelloship, he said, currently has around 130 to 140 sailors placed globally.

Rajora also relayed an account from the third surviving Indian crew member: that Dubey and Gupta jumped into the water during the attack. He said he believed the ship was carrying grain, though he was not certain.

Also Read:  LPG Shortage Risk Grows as Strait of Hormuz Crisis Threatens India

A Corridor The Government Has Flagged As Dangerous

The Embassy of India in Kyiv, in a statement posted on July 26, said: "Embassy of India in Ukraine is closely monitoring the situation following the incident involving MV AGN Ragnar which was struck at the Port of Odesa, on 25 July. Four Indian nationals were on board the vessel. As per the latest information, two have been confirmed safe, and information is awaited regarding the other two nationals. Search and rescue operations are underway. The Embassy is in constant touch with the concerned authorities." The embassy listed emergency consular contacts but gave no names, no cause for the strike, and no timeline for when the families of the missing sailors might expect further news.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

The Third Attack In A Week

AGN Ragnar is not an isolated case. It is the third attack on a commercial vessel with Indian crew members in the Black Sea corridor within roughly a week. On July 18, MV Omorfi was attacked while transiting Russian territorial waters; it had 10 crew members onboard, three of them Indian, and one Indian sailor was killed. A day later, on July 19, MV Golden Leo — departing Odesa with 17 crew, including five Indians — was hit by suspected Russian missiles, killing four Indian sailors and critically injuring a fifth. Together, these three attacks — on MV Omorfi, MV Golden Leo, and MV AGN Ragnar — have all left Indian sailors dead, injured, or missing, all within a single week.

The pattern connecting the three vessels is stark: all three were old, small, foreign-flagged cargo ships, cheaply insured and willing to run a route that larger, better-resourced shipping companies have increasingly abandoned. For the sailors aboard them, recruited through small agencies, paid modestly, and sent into a war zone that their own government had flagged as high-risk - the human cost of keeping this corridor open is now being counted in missing sailors and grieving families, not shipping delays.

India Sends The World Its Sailors — But Not Always Its Protection

India supplies more than 12% of the world's seafaring workforce and ranks second globally, behind only the Philippines, with close to 3.2 lakh registered seafarers as of last year, a number that has nearly tripled in a decade. It is this scale that all but guarantees Indian names will appear whenever a merchant vessel is hit anywhere in the world, from the Red Sea to the Black Sea.

Indian seafarers crew the ships that move the world's grain, oil and cargo. When those ships come under attack on the high seas, far from any Indian port or embassy, it is their families, not the companies or the state, who are left waiting by the phone for a stranger to call with news no one official is willing to deliver.

"Godi Media" is the term a generation of Indians has used for years to describe a media ecosystem they accuse of sitting in the government's lap rather than holding it to account and Gen Z, at Jantar Mantar, turned it from an online insult into a chant the whole country could hear.

For years, both the government and the newsrooms it was accused of protecting behaved as though they were untouchable: confident that outrage would burn out, that hashtags would fade, that one news cycle would quietly bury the last. Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation, and Pralhad Joshi's swift appointment in his place, is being read almost entirely as a story about a minister paying the price for an exam paper leak. It is that. But it is also something bigger, something Godi Media has not yet been forced to sit with: this was the week India's Gen Z proved that the trust television news spent a decade squandering does not simply return because a minister resigns.

The student movement that began at Delhi's Jantar Mantar may ultimately be remembered not only for its political impact but also for fundamentally altering the relationship between India's youth and mainstream media. While the protests led to a change of guard at the education ministry, they also exposed something equally significant: the deep crisis of credibility facing television news channels and large sections of the mainstream press. 

Also Read:  Independent Media in India: Why We Chose Depth Over Breaking News

When Godi Media Looked the Other Way

On the day the Gen Z protest at Jantar Mantar peaked, sections of Godi Media reached for a familiar playbook. Some channels chose to frame the demonstrators as Pakistan-sponsored, China-backed, Khalistani-funded or CIA-influenced: a rotating cast of external villains substituted for the students actually standing at the barricades. Others simply moved on, handing primetime slots to unrelated state politics while thousands gathered a few kilometres from their studios. Live visuals from the ground - the ones already flooding Instagram and X in real time - were conspicuously absent from several bulletins. When some police officers were injured amid the chaos, those visuals ran on loop for hours. The scores of protesters who were also injured that day barely got a mention. This selective lens - whose pain gets airtime and whose does not - became, for Gen Z, the clearest evidence yet of what "Godi Media" had come to mean.

For years, surveys, social media conversations and everyday arguments have pointed to a growing trust deficit in India's mainstream media. Yet many leading news organisations appeared unwilling to acknowledge it, let alone act on it. Ratings kept rewarding the loudest studio debates over the most rigorous field reporting, and channels kept commissioning the same panels engineered for outrage rather than understanding. The events at Jantar Mantar made that unwillingness impossible to sustain. What had been a slow, deniable erosion of credibility became, over a few weeks, an open and undeniable rupture between Godi Media and the very audience it was supposed to serve.

That rupture deepened on July 20, when police used lathis, tear gas and pellet guns against demonstrators marching toward Parliament. Visuals of the crackdown spread across social media within minutes but on several channels, that violence barely registered. A video showing an Additional DCP slapping a woman protester went viral on social media but Godi Media chose to ignore it altogether until the cop was shunted out. Separately, footage appearing to show a police officer thrusting a baton against a young woman protester's private parts also circulated widely, but it was almost entirely ignored by the Godi media. Instead, that evening's primetime debates on more than one channel focused on "anti-national forces" allegedly coming together to destabilise the government.

Also Read:  Jantar Mantar Protests: A Generation Demands to Be Heard

Gen Z's Newsroom Was Never Going to Be a Studio

Throughout the protest, a large section of Generation Z treated mainstream television journalists with visible scepticism. Protesters openly questioned news crews, chanted slogans against the Godi media, and, in many instances, simply refused to engage with television cameras altogether. Their message needed no elaboration: they did not need a studio debate to tell them what had happened at Jantar Mantar that morning because they had already either experienced it, watched it, filmed it, or shared it. By evening, several of the same channels had shifted the story again: from covering the protest to speculating about "toolkits" and foreign-funded conspiracies behind it. 

The irony deepened when the government's own institutions declined to back the narrative several channels were running. Asked directly about claims that the Cockroach Janta Party's protest was foreign-funded, the Ministry of External Affairs said it had "no information" to support the allegation: a quiet but pointed contradiction of a story that had dominated primetime for days. If Godi Media was more inclined to defend the government than the government itself was willing to be defended, this was the moment that suspicion found its clearest evidence.

While television debated motives, Gen Z built its own newsroom. Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, X posts, Telegram channels and WhatsApp groups became the infrastructure through which the protest was actually covered. Protesters livestreamed speeches, uploaded footage from the ground within minutes, and corrected inaccurate narratives in real time, often faster than any television bulletin could go to air. One 18-year-old protester, caught in a cloud of tear gas, filmed her own experience and posted a rough cut captioned: "Today, we rang Parliament's doorbell and ran." It travelled further and faster than anything a studio panel produced that week. Every participant with a smartphone had effectively become a reporter, an editor and a broadcaster: three roles Godi Media had spent decades insisting only a newsroom was qualified to perform.

This was perhaps the most significant defeat traditional media has suffered in India in years and not primarily because of a dip in TRPs. Godi Media's real loss was relevance. A generation that might once have waited for a 9 pm bulletin to tell it what mattered did not wait at all this time; it had already watched, argued and moved on by the time anchors picked up their earpieces. For an industry built on being the first and final word on any given day, being neither is not a ratings problem. It is an existential one.

A Decade of Debt Comes Due

The slogan "Godi Media Hai Hai" became, in its own right, one of the most widely shared moments of the protest: chanted at barricades, filmed, subtitled and recirculated within hours. What made this protest different from earlier ones was not just the slogan but what followed it. Reporters covering Jantar Mantar were heckled and surrounded, and in at least one instance a crew was chased toward a police vehicle that was later pelted with stones. Several reporters described receiving abuse and threats online days after their broadcasts, with personal details circulated and family members confronted by strangers demanding explanations for coverage the crowd disagreed with. None of this is to defend such targeting: a journalist doing their job should not be threatened for it, whatever the provocation. But it illustrates how far Gen Z's patience had already worn through: this was not scepticism anymore. It was refusal.

Protesters did not always distinguish between an institution and the individual sent to cover it. Several accounts from the ground describe demonstrators confronting specific reporters and crews directly at the barricade line, rather than criticising Godi Media only as an abstract category. Many protesters believed sections of the mainstream press had taken sides long before the movement even began: that they were being cast as anti-national, politically motivated, foreign-funded or opposition-backed before a single demand had been heard. Whether every such allegation was fair is a separate question. What is not in dispute is that this perception, once formed, is what Gen Z carried into every subsequent encounter with a camera crew.

Academic observers have pointed out that for this generation, a protest is never confined to one place. It exists simultaneously on the street, on the smartphone, across social platforms, on livestreams, and in a digital archive that outlives any single news cycle. That is partly why mockery worked as a strategy where confrontation alone might not have: protesters posed with, teased and even offered flowers to policemen at the barricades, reminding them on camera that all they had received in return were baton charges. It was protest reframed as content, built to travel further and land harder than anything a studio debate could counter it with.

As a result, the protest received relatively limited television attention in its early weeks. Wider coverage arrived only after activist Sonam Wangchuk was forcibly removed from his hunger strike, and even then, several reports focused more on law and order than on why thousands of young people were still gathered at Jantar Mantar in the first place. The real turning point came on July 20. Visuals of lathi-charges, tear gas and the reported use of pellet guns spread across social media within minutes, moving from phone to phone faster than any channel could prepare its evening bulletin. Hashtags trended nationally within the hour. Students on campuses far from Delhi reacted almost instantly. What might once have stayed a local, containable story became a nationwide reckoning because social media had quietly removed the gatekeepers who once decided what counted as news.

The visuals of that day's police action united anger across an otherwise politically divided generation. Even the government appeared to recognise where the real conversation was happening: senior leaders increasingly turned to Instagram and other platforms to communicate directly with young Indians, rather than routing every message through television interviews and press conferences. It was, in its own way, an admission: a tacit acceptance that digital platforms now shape public opinion faster than any primetime slot ever could. That the government arrived at the same conclusion about Godi Media's declining relevance that Gen Z had been shouting at Jantar Mantar for weeks is, perhaps, the sharpest irony of this entire episode.

Inside several television newsrooms, this period reportedly triggered uncomfortable conversations. Editors began asking questions about credibility and the widening gap between journalists and younger audiences: questions that had been easy to defer for years but had suddenly become impossible to. Some organisations are said to be pushing reporters back into the field and away from studio debates, in the hope that credibility, once lost, might slowly be rebuilt through consistent, fair reporting rather than louder television. Whether that translates into lasting editorial change remains to be seen.

What is not in doubt is this: more than a decade of coverage that Gen Z experienced as slanted, selective and increasingly indistinguishable from government messaging has now been answered: not by a regulator, not by a media watchdog, but by a generation with a smartphone and nothing left to lose in front of a camera. Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation will be remembered as a political outcome. But the longer story of this protest belongs to Godi Media, and to the question it can no longer defer: what happens to a newsroom when the audience it depended on simply stops watching, and starts filming instead?

Gen Z did not need Godi Media's permission to be believed. It went ahead and became its own broadcaster and in doing so, it did to television news exactly what it had come to Jantar Mantar to do to a government: it made arrogance answer for itself.

Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned on Saturday, ending a month-long standoff between the government and thousands of students who had camped out at Delhi's Jantar Mantar demanding his exit.

The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan is being described by several observers as the first significant concession Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government has made in the face of sustained street protest since the paper leak crisis began. But the question that now dominates political and academic circles in India is simple: what next?

Pradhan announced his decision on X, saying he had sent his resignation letter to the Prime Minister. "Considering the situation that has arisen at Jantar Mantar and across the country, so that anti-national forces do not take advantage of this situation... I have sent my resignation letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he wrote, adding that he respected "the aspirations, feelings, and legitimate expectations of the country's youth."

In a separate open letter, Pradhan invoked his four-decade association with education and students, and said he did not want the protests to leave young people "trapped in a web of confusion" or exploited by forces working against the country's interests. He also thanked colleagues in the Union Council of Ministers and officials of the Education Ministry for their support during his tenure.

The resignation caps weeks of escalating pressure that began after the cancellation of the NEET-UG 2026 medical entrance exam in May, following credible evidence of a widespread paper leak. The fallout deepened through July, with the NTA sacking 47 officials in a major internal purge and Higher Education Secretary Vineet Joshi shunted out to the Panchayati Raj Ministry, as the government scrambled to show it was cleaning up the agency. None of that satisfied protesters, who insisted that accountability had to travel further up the chain, to the minister himself.

Also Read:  Jantar Mantar Protests: A Generation Demands to Be Heard

How the protests forced Pradhan's hand

What began as a satirical online movement called the Cockroach Janta Party, founded by its digital strategist Abhijeet Dipke, grew into one of the more sustained youth mobilisations India has seen in recent years. Protesters, many of them students preparing for competitive exams, set up an indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar from early June, enduring extreme heat while student bodies including the Students Federation of India, the All India Students Association, and the All India Students Federation joined in.

The movement gained further national attention when activist Sonam Wangchuk began an indefinite hunger strike at the protest site in late June, adding moral weight to a demand that had, until then, been dismissed by some in government as fringe agitation. Dharmendra Pradhan himself had referred to the Cockroach Janta Party as the "B-team of terror groups" in a television interview, a remark that only hardened protester resolve rather than deflating it.

Opposition parties amplified the pressure throughout. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge accused the government of a "belated whitewashing exercise," while the CPI(M) called for Pradhan's resignation directly, describing the crisis as rooted in the "centralisation, commercialisation and communalisation" of India's education system. Student wings aligned with opposition parties, including the National Students' Union of India, had for weeks demanded not just Pradhan's exit but the scrapping of the NTA altogether and a CBI-monitored inquiry into the leaks.

Government sources had, as recently as a few hours before the resignation, indicated that Pradhan would not step down, with senior BJP leaders JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh reportedly holding meetings to manage the crisis without a ministerial exit. The reversal within hours signals how quickly the political calculus shifted once the standoff threatened to spill beyond the education portfolio into a broader question of governance credibility.

Who succeeds Dharmendra Pradhan, and what changes at the ministry

The most immediate consequence of the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan is a vacancy at the top of India's education establishment, and speculation over who fills it has already begun. Names doing the rounds include Shiv Sena's Shrikant Shinde, Maharashtra leader Devendra Fadnavis, and even Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, amid broader rumours of a wider cabinet reshuffle that could also touch the finance and environment portfolios. None of this has been confirmed by the Prime Minister's Office, and political observers caution that the eventual choice may come from among cabinet colleagues with prior experience in education, skill development, or human resource development.

Beyond personnel, the more consequential question is institutional. Protesters have consistently demanded that the National Testing Agency, the body responsible for conducting NEET, UGC-NET, and a range of other competitive exams, be restructured or scrapped entirely, and that a fresh, judicially supervised inquiry be conducted into the leaks. Pradhan's exit satisfies one demand on the protesters' list, but it does not by itself address the NTA's future, the compensation to the families of the suicide victims or the action against Delhi police personnel who used brute force on the protesting students. 

A new minister inheriting the education portfolio will therefore face an immediate test: whether to treat Pradhan's resignation as the resolution of the crisis, or as the opening move in a longer process of institutional reform that protesters say is still owed to them. Dharmendra Pradhan's own record, three decades in public life spanning petroleum, steel, skill development, and education, suggests the party is unlikely to let him disappear from public view altogether, with some reports suggesting a return to organisational work within the BJP or a renewed focus on his home state of Odisha.

Also Read:  NEET 2026 Paper Leak: Inside the System Built to Keep Failing

The unresolved questions students are still asking

For the students who spent weeks at Jantar Mantar, Pradhan's resignation is being read as a symbolic victory rather than a complete one. Sonam Wangchuk, reacting to the news, called it "a victory of democracy" and thanked the Cockroach Janta Party and fellow protesters, but the underlying grievances that brought students onto the streets in the first place remain largely unaddressed. Four examinations were either postponed or cancelled in the space of little over a week at the height of the crisis, leaving lakhs of aspirants uncertain about their academic futures, and no clear timeline has yet been offered by the government for resolving that backlog.

Questions also remain over what will happen to the National Testing Agency itself, whether its structure will be reviewed, its leadership further reshuffled, or its examinations decentralised as some student groups have demanded. The Supreme Court is separately hearing pleas alleging manipulation of OMR sheets in the NEET-UG process, a matter that will continue independent of any change in ministerial leadership. For the tens of thousands of students affected by the disruption to NEET-PG and other competitive exams this year, Dharmendra Pradhan's departure changes who is accountable at the top, but not necessarily how quickly their exams are rescheduled or their results validated.

There is also the matter of political framing going forward. The government has been careful, through Pradhan's own resignation letter, to caution against "anti-national forces" exploiting the protest movement, a framing that opposition parties and some civil society voices have pushed back against, arguing that the students' demands were about examination integrity and youth unemployment rather than any larger political project. How the incoming minister chooses to engage with the Cockroach Janta Party and allied student unions, whether through dialogue or through a more adversarial posture, will likely shape whether the protests at Jantar Mantar wind down entirely or continue in a modified form until the larger questions are addressed. 

For now, the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan marks a rare instance of a serving Union Cabinet minister stepping down in direct response to sustained street pressure in the Modi government. Whether it becomes a turning point in how India conducts its competitive examinations, or simply a change of face at the top of the Education Ministry, will depend on decisions still to be made in the days ahead: who replaces Pradhan, what happens to the NTA, and whether the students who forced this resignation get the systemic reforms they say they were protesting for all along.

A Generation Without a Filter

The Jantar Mantar protests were supposed to fade after the first day. On July 20, when the batons came out and the tear gas rolled across Parliament Street, the familiar arc looked set to repeat itself — a dramatic morning, a subdued evening, a slow return to the ordinary business of forgetting. Instead, the Jantar Mantar protests grew — across Delhi, then across the country to Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa, Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram, Jammu and Ahmedabad, and outward still, into solidarity gatherings and vigils among Indian communities abroad.

What is most striking about the Jantar Mantar protests is not the anger but the composition of the crowd. The children of Lutyens' Delhi stand beside students who took a night bus in from Bihar. Every faith is represented without a single communal placard in sight. Women, men and openly non-binary and LGBTQIA participants organise side by side, unbothered by the categories that usually divide Indian public life. Class, caste, religion, gender — at Jantar Mantar, for these remarkable weeks, none of it has mattered as much as it should have.

There is something else unfamiliar here. Since 2014, most journalists and most ordinary citizens have measured their words carefully before criticising Mr. Modi or Mr. Shah by name. That caution has defined public discourse for over a decade. Gen Z has discarded it entirely. Protesters hurl language at the Prime Minister and the Home Minister that would once have invited a knock on the door. Posters at the site depict the Prime Minister in women's clothing and lipstick. One poster — put up, pointedly, between the lights of a traffic signal pole — shows Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani kissing the Prime Minister on both cheeks. In twenty-five years of reporting, this scale of open anger has not been directed at a Prime Minister who, for most of his tenure, was treated by public discourse as someone beyond reproach — criticism of whom carried real and understood consequences.

A Generation Led by Feeling, Not Fear

Call them what you like — entitled, directionless, addicted to their phones, a generation with no patience and less discipline. There is a kernel of truth in some of it. But Gen Z does not care what you call them. This is a generation that has largely opted out of the religious fault lines that have organised Indian politics for decades — you cannot brainwash them with religion, because they were simply not raised to think in those terms. They do not organise by class hierarchy either. What moves them is simpler and, in some ways, harder for any establishment to manage: they act on what they 'feel' is right, and they cannot be influenced against their own instincts. That makes it essential, not optional, to make them feel they have been heard fairly.

During the course of the Jantar Mantar protests, small clusters of young people can be seen quietly negotiating logistics that have nothing to do with ideology — who needs to go home because their parents are calling anxiously, who can stay another night, who simply needs to show their face at the site before slipping away to reassure a worried household. It is a small, unglamorous detail, but it says something large: this is a generation navigating protest and domestic obligation simultaneously, in a way mine never quite had to. This generation is so unlike mine, or my father's. We were comparatively easy to influence. We responded to authority, to institutional pressure, to the fear of consequence. This generation does not carry that fear in the same way.

A Movement No One Controls Anymore

There is some authority to speak to this, having been present at two of the defining protests of a quarter-century in this profession. I was among the few journalists present in the earliest, thinly attended days of the Anna Hazare andolan — the anti-corruption movement that began as a handful of people and grew, in front of my own eyes, into one of the largest civil movements independent India has seen. I was also among the few journalists who followed the Nirbhaya case all the way to Singapore, reporting from outside Mount Elizabeth Hospital as the country waited for news of her condition after she was flown there for treatment following the gangrape that had left her fighting for her life on a moving bus in Delhi. When the protests broke out back home and swelled into the kind of mass movement every newsroom in the country was covering, I was on the ground for those too — where, amid the chaos, middle-aged men in the crowd molested women protesters, myself included, more than once.

A protest can curdle into chaos. A protest can curdle into cynicism. What is unfolding at Jantar Mantar is neither. Instead, young men pour water into the eyes of women blinded by tear gas. Boys form human chains around girls being pushed back by police lines. A young man, badly beaten, is lifted and half-carried away by a group of young women who did not know him an hour earlier. A young man in tears is quietly steadied by a young woman beside him. There are accounts, too, of plainclothes personnel slapping and molesting women in the crowd — one woman recounted being struck by an officer with such force and in such a manner that she was left in visible pain, while the Gen Z crowd came to her rescue. Another girl confronted an officer she accused of molesting her as he tried to slip away in an auto-rickshaw, refusing to let him leave until a crowd had gathered around them both. What followed each of these moments was not political theatre — it was the same instinctive fury you would expect if it had happened to a sister. This is a generation that is rebellious yet real, radical yet raw — one that argues with the state by day and holds a stranger together by night.

That instinct did not stay passive for long. On July 21 and 22, after the videos of Monday's crackdown had circulated overnight, the crowd's anger was returned in kind — protesters took the law into their own hands and beat back at the police who had beaten them a day earlier. They did not leave the site. The message was unambiguous: mess with this generation, and it will not simply absorb the blow. This is not the crowd that could be worn down the way Anna Hazare's or Nirbhaya's eventually were, and the Jantar Mantar protests have, by now, plainly outgrown the control of the Cockroach Janta Party leadership that lit the original spark. Abhijeet Dipke can call for calm; whether the crowd listens to him at all any longer is another matter entirely.

The Cost of Being Ignored

Many at the Jantar Mantar protests will say, almost dismissively, that they do not care about CJP, or about Abhijeet Dipke, or about any of the branding built around this movement. They did not come for a satirical political party. They came for something older and simpler — for the youth of this country, for an education system they no longer trust, to be seen and to be heard by a government that ignored them for a month before it finally noticed the size of the crowd it had created.

That underlying grievance deserves to be stated without embellishment, because it is legitimate. The protests trace back to the 2026 NEET-UG paper leak and the chaos of a cancelled and rescheduled exam that roughly 2.2 million aspiring doctors had prepared years for. In the weeks between the cancellation and the re-test, at least twenty one — by some accounts even more — young people reportedly took their own lives. Sonam Wangchuk — now on the twenty-sixth day of a hunger strike he has refused to end even from a hospital bed, declining intravenous fluids against his doctors' advice — and the demand for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation, sit on top of that grief. Whatever one makes of the theatre around the protests, the demand for accountability from the minister responsible for an examination system that has now cost students their lives is not an unreasonable one. Nor is the demand for fair compensation to the families who have lost their young ones. 

The state's answer to that grief was force. Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force lathi-charged marchers on July 20, some using canes studded with what protesters described as nails. Tear gas was fired directly into the crowd, some of it — by multiple accounts on the ground — expired stock. There is now ample documentation, corroborated by media of pellet-gun wounds among protesters, including one young man who underwent surgery — allegations Delhi Police have denied outright.

A viral video showing Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba slapping a woman protester who was not resisting led to Lamba being withdrawn from duty at the site within a day, and police privately conceded he had "lost his cool." All of this is wrong, and it should be named as wrong plainly and without qualification. Yes, police personnel were injured too. But a generation that has just watched its own being slapped, molested and filmed cannot reasonably be expected to turn the other cheek, and it did not.

The Cowardice Behind the Camera

Then there was what protesters call 'Godi media' — a term now used widely for television channels seen as functioning less as independent press than as an extension of government messaging. Reporters were heckled, jostled and in multiple documented cases physically assaulted at the site. One reporter had his clothes torn and his phone taken; other reporters were escorted to safety by police as crowds turned on them. This is public anger finding an outlet it should not, and it is not something I will defend. But it is happening, and it is real. One editor-in-chief of a prominent news channel, so wary of that anger that he chose not to send his own reporters to the site at all, instead sat safely in his studio and spewed venom at the young protesters — calling them China-sponsored, Pakistan-sponsored, CIA-sponsored, Khalistan-sponsored, anything but what they actually are. These editors genuinely believe there are buyers for this kind of journalism. The truth is simpler: they no longer dare step out of their own studios, because the crowd outside has made it clear exactly how it would receive them.

That is precisely the point the profession needs to reckon with. Reporters on the ground did not decide how their channels would frame this story. The young journalists being shouted down at Jantar Mantar are, in the main, doing a job under instruction, with bills to pay and few genuinely independent newsrooms left to move to. I know some of these reporters personally. They are not bad people. Most mainstream channels in this country are, today, compromised in one direction or another, and not everyone has the freedom, or the appetite for risk, to build something independent before an election cycle, as I once chose to do — and I say that without any wish to hold myself up as an example, only to acknowledge that the choice is not equally available to everyone. It is the editors and editors-in-chief who deserve scrutiny for the line they set — not the foot soldiers sent out to absorb its consequences. If that editorial line does not change, the risk is not hypothetical, and I say this as a professional observation rather than as any kind of threat: a public this angry, watching its own being beaten while certain channels call it foreign-sponsored, will not indefinitely distinguish between a channel's editorial leadership and the building that houses it.

Listen Now, or Lose Later

The same caution applies with even greater force to government. India's neighbourhood offers two recent and sobering precedents. In Bangladesh in 2024, a student movement that began over civil service quotas ended with the prime minister fleeing the country as protesters entered the seat of government itself. In Sri Lanka in 2022, economic protest drove crowds into the president's official residence. Neither country's leadership believed, until very late, that matters could go that far. I make no call for anything of the sort here, and nothing in what I have witnessed suggests the protesters intend it. But governments that keep clamping down on a generation this determined risk discovering, too late rather than too early, that the distance between a protest site and the Prime Minister's own residence is not as vast as it currently feels.

The remedy is neither complicated nor expensive. Hear them. Feel them. They want to be heard, and they want accountability. No minister's tenure is worth the risk this government is currently running. What begins as a demand for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation today can, if mishandled, become a demand addressed to the Prime Minister's own office tomorrow — and no one should want to find out how quickly that escalation can happen. Saying sorry should not be difficult. Saying "we were wrong" earns a government more than it costs — it earns it, in fact, a great deal.

Saying 'come, let us talk, we are here because of you' would make this government larger, not smaller — and that is true even if one sets aside every moral argument and looks at this purely as political strategy. Uttar Pradesh goes to the polls soon, and no party wins an election by alienating the first generation of Indian voters who have shown they can build a mass movement without any party's help at all. A government that treats its most energetic, most online, most persuadable demographic as an enemy to be tear-gassed is not protecting its flank — it is manufacturing an opposition it did not previously have. Can the ruling party really afford to let the anger of this generation spread like wildfire over something as small, in the end, as one minister's chair? Something is deeply wrong when a government finds it easier to deploy tear gas than to say two words, and something is politically foolish about it too — anger this raw does not stay contained to a protest site; it follows voters into a polling booth. The Jantar Mantar protests have already made that clear. It remains to be seen whether anyone in power, reading this as anything more than a law and order problem, is listening.

CJP Protest: How a Crackdown Built a Movement

On July 20, tens of thousands of people converged on Jantar Mantar to take part in the "Chalo Sansad" march, organised by the Cockroach Janta Party. What followed was one of the largest youth-led mobilisations Delhi has witnessed in recent years — and, in hindsight, a case study in how a government's own response to a protest can end up strengthening the very movement it was trying to contain.

The CJP protest began weeks earlier as a demonstration over alleged irregularities in the NEET-UG examination, with demonstrators demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. By the time the Chalo Sansad march was announced, it had grown into something much larger — a broader referendum on accountability in India's education system.

Aso Read:  NEET 2026 Paper Leak: Inside the System Built to Keep Failing

A Crackdown That Fuelled the Fire

The night before the march, people who had travelled from across the country were already sleeping on the ground outside Jantar Mantar, determined to be there in time to walk toward Parliament the next morning. When the sun came up, tens of thousands began pouring in — despite the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation shutting down key stations, despite overnight barricading, despite being told plainly that no permission had been granted for the march, and despite prohibitory orders imposed across New Delhi.

What is striking, in retrospect, is a pattern that repeated through the length of the CJP protest: the harder the state tried to clamp down, the larger the crowds grew. A few days before the march, the numbers at Jantar Mantar were comparatively modest.

That changed dramatically after Sonam Wangchuk, the engineer-turned-activist leading a hunger strike in support of the movement, was forcibly removed from the protest site and taken to Safdarjung Hospital. Visuals showed him wrapped in a white bedsheet and carried out, with protesters alleging he was shoved and dragged, and that phones recording the moment were snatched and smashed. The CJP called it a kidnapping.

If the intention behind hospitalising Wangchuk was to deflate the CJP protest, it had the opposite effect. In the days that followed, actors, politicians across party lines, and ordinary citizens spoke out. The visuals of Wangchuk being carried away did not sit well with large sections of the public, and an online wave of solidarity followed. By the time the Chalo Sansad march itself began, the crowds at Jantar Mantar had swelled well beyond what organisers had seen before.

Who Showed Up, and Why It Mattered

The demographic makeup of the Chalo Sansad crowd is worth noting. This was not a rally bused in for the occasion, in the way some political demonstrations in India are organised. Young students, unemployed youth, activists, celebrities, parents, and even grandparents walked from Jantar Mantar toward Parliament, braving heat, rain, and the prohibitory orders in place across the city. Organisers had said in advance that their intention was a peaceful march, aimed simply at putting questions to the government over the NEET paper leak and demanding Pradhan's resignation.

That the government still moved to shut down metro access specifically to choke off the route to Jantar Mantar raised an obvious question: what was gained by making it harder for a self-declared peaceful protest to assemble?

Also Read:  NEET: How the NTA Misled the Supreme Court

Lathis, Tear Gas, and a Lost Opportunity

As the march pushed toward Parliament, Delhi Police responded with a lathi charge, and tear gas shells were fired to disperse the crowd. Several protesters were injured. For a government facing a protest built around a legitimate, well-documented grievance — accountability for a paper leak that has affected the futures of lakhs of NEET aspirants, several of whom have died by suicide this year — this was, arguably, a moment that called for a different approach.

A simple acknowledgement, a commitment to look into the matter, might have gone a long way toward defusing tensions. Instead, the CJP protest was met with force, and the imagery of young demonstrators being lathi-charged near Parliament spread rapidly on social media.

The disappointment deepened further when Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the nation just before the Monsoon Session began — literally a short distance from where the Chalo Sansad march was unfolding. His remarks touched on the session itself, on Skyroot Aerospace's rocket launch, on an oil refinery in Rajasthan, a green hydrogen train, and the global security situation. The protest happening a few metres away went unmentioned.

The Conditions Wangchuk Left Out

While hospitalised, Wangchuk wrote a formal letter to the Safdarjung Hospital director stating that his health parameters were normal and requesting temporary leave to join the march. However, he was not allowed to step out of the hospital — a decision that, if health genuinely were the sole concern, raises questions under Article 21 of the Constitution, which protects personal liberty and the right to make decisions about one's own body, absent a fair legal process.

In a separate note, Wangchuk laid out three conditions under which he would end his fast: government accountability for failures in the education system, including the paper leaks; or an assurance from MPs and party leaders — delivered either at Parliament's doorstep or at the hospital — that the issue would be raised in the House.

Notably absent from all three conditions was the demand that had anchored the CJP protest from its earliest days: Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation. An assurance that an issue will be "raised in Parliament" costs a government very little, and does not require any minister to face real consequence. Whether this reflects a strategic recalibration after more than twenty days without food, or an unintended softening of the CJP protest's central demand, is a fair question — and one this movement will likely have to answer for itself in the days ahead.

A Government Reaches Out — But Offers Nothing Concrete

On the day of the march, CJP leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka met Union Health Minister JP Nadda at his residence — notably, the first time in the month-long CJP protest that the Centre had initiated contact. They handed over a written letter with three demands: Wangchuk's immediate release, Pradhan's resignation, and ₹1 crore in compensation for every NEET aspirant who died by suicide.

Nadda's response was non-committal; he said he would need to consult his party's leadership. As of the latest updates, no concrete commitment had followed.

What Comes Next for the Movement

The scale of the Chalo Sansad march — sustained despite metro shutdowns, barricades, lathi charges, and tear gas — is difficult for any government to dismiss as a fringe event. Whether the solidarity built through this month of protest hardens into a sustained movement for accountability in education, or fades the way many protests eventually do, remains to be seen.

What is clear is that the CJP protest has already demonstrated something significant: that heavy-handed responses to a young, aggrieved public do not necessarily suppress dissent — they can just as easily amplify it.

Rs 5,000 and a Question of Rape: How a Sentence Undercut a Conviction

Three and a half years back, Simran Chhabra walked into a hospital along with her brother for a scratchy throat. She came back in a body bag. I have been representing her family for the past three years, and along the way I have also endured an attempt on my life. After enormous effort, the Magistrate summoned the accused doctor for causing death due to medical negligence, and that should have been the beginning of the trial. Instead, it became the beginning of another battle. The proceedings remained tied up in the High Court for almost two years. Eventually, the summoning order was set aside and the matter was sent back to the Magistrate, to start the process ab initio.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence: Who Killed Simran?

Like Odysseus, thrown back from the shores of Ithaca when the winds rose from the bag of Aeolus, we were carried all the way back to the Magistrate, to begin again. Meanwhile, time passes and justice continues to elude the family.

Must the law protect the accused or the victims?

If the law protects the accused, then it protects every accused — or was this a special case? This was special, as the accused is a doctor and the law is overgenerous towards doctors.

Here is something more worrisome. Article 14 of our Constitution promises equality before the law. Why then do judgments keep creating the impression that a separate, gentler law operates for those who wear a white coat?

When Assault Escapes the Law of Rape Meant to Deter It

Days ago, a seventy-one-year-old doctor was convicted for outraging the modesty of a schoolgirl. Seventeen years back, when she was still a minor, she had gone to his clinic complaining of irregular periods, accompanied by two friends. The doctor took her into his chamber for a check-up.

What happened inside that chamber, as recorded in the judgment of the trial court, was this. He unbuttoned her blouse and groped her breasts. She protested. He reassured her that such contact was not inappropriate. He was, after all, a doctor. He then removed her underwear and attempted to sexually assault her. She raised an alarm. Her friends rescued her.

Read that last line again. A schoolgirl had to be rescued by her friends from her doctor's chamber.

The court rejected the defence that this was part of a routine medical examination. It observed that a doctor examining a patient for irregular periods has no reason to grope her breasts, and that the victim's own consistent testimony was sufficient to establish the offence.

The trial court sentenced him to two years of simple imprisonment with a fine, in accordance with the law. He appealed and the High Court upheld the conviction.

Also Read:  Bardhaman Medical Negligence: "ROP Screening Could Have Saved My Child"

Why I Call This a Licence to Rape

But the sentence? It was reduced to a fine of Rs. 5,000. You read that right — five thousand rupees. I had to read the judgment many times to convince myself that I was reading it correctly. I kept asking myself whether I had missed something. I had not. To be fair to the Court, the reduction was not without legal basis. The incident took place before the Criminal Law Amendment of 2013. Under the unamended Section 354 IPC, a sentence of fine alone was permissible. The Court also took note of the convict's age of seventy-one years.

As a lawyer, I understand that reasoning.

But I also understand this. The law permitted a fine-only sentence, but it did not compel one. Imprisonment remained fully available. The choice to let a man convicted of groping a schoolgirl walk away with Rs. 5,000 was a choice. More importantly, Parliament was compelled to bring the 2013 amendment to the IPC only after the gruesome rape and murder of Nirbhaya. Hence, as a citizen, I have a different perspective too. Every sentence sends a message.

The message here is scary. If you are a doctor, the law appears willing to forgive what it would never forgive in an ordinary man. Why does it appear that when the accused wears a white coat, accountability becomes extraordinarily difficult? Why do victims leave court feeling that professional status has become an invisible defence? If anything, the position should be the reverse. Doctors are highly educated persons placed on a higher pedestal, and a greater duty is cast upon them to uphold the law and morality.

Justice is not judged only by legal principles. It is judged by the confidence it inspires. Today, I fear that confidence is disappearing. That is why I have titled this article "Licence to Rape." Not because any law grants such a licence. But because if judgments continue to create the impression that doctors can escape meaningful consequences for even the gravest offences, then the public will inevitably conclude that such a licence already exists.

And then I realised something.

The irony is almost impossible to ignore. Under the Electricity Act, if a doctor is found tampering with an electricity meter, or illegally using a domestic electricity connection for commercial purposes, a Junior Engineer of the electricity department has sweeping powers. The electricity supply can be disconnected. Assessments can be raised. Criminal proceedings may be initiated. Upon conviction, imprisonment may follow.

In practical terms, an allegation relating to electricity theft may expose a doctor to swifter and more immediate consequences than allegations involving the loss of a patient's life, or misconduct towards a woman.

That is a sobering reflection on our system of enforcement.

So, the next time someone loses a loved one because of alleged medical negligence, or a woman complains of criminal misconduct by a doctor, perhaps the most effective legal strategy is not to engage an advocate at all.

Instead, one might be better advised to inspect the doctor's electricity connection, or hire an electricity inspector and pay him to charge the doctor with tampering with the meter, even falsely. If the meter is found to be tampered with, or if the clinic is running on a domestic connection in violation of the law, the machinery of the State will spring into action with remarkable speed. The doctor may face disconnection of electricity, criminal prosecution, and the prospect of imprisonment. These are consequences that victims of far more serious offences often struggle for years to achieve through the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, the facts that inspired this piece are not fictional.

Our legal system appears to respond more decisively to the theft of electricity than to allegations involving the loss of human life or violations of bodily dignity.

No civilised society should ever reach a point where the most effective route to accountability for a medical professional runs through the Electricity Act rather than through the criminal law meant to protect life and personal dignity.

DNC Finally Acts, Eight Years After Gargi Meena's Death

The Delhi Nursing Council (DNC) has ordered criminal prosecution against the management of Saroj Super Speciality Hospital, Rohini, in a case that has taken nearly eight years to reach this point. In an order dated July 15, 2026, the DNC found that the hospital had deployed over 100 unregistered nursing staff at the time Gargi Meena was admitted to the hospital for what her family described as mild menstrual pain. Meena died at Saroj Hospital in March 2018. For Gargi Meena's family, it is the outcome of a fight that began the day she did not return home from what was meant to be a routine hospital visit. The Probe has tracked Gargi's case, documenting failures not only at Saroj Hospital but within the regulatory bodies meant to hold the hospital accountable.

Also Read:  Medical Negligence in Delhi Hospital Claimed My Wife’s Life - Husband

On March 29, 2018, Gargi Meena walked into Saroj Hospital with mild abdominal pain that her family associated with her menstrual cycle. Within hours, doctors recommended surgery, telling the family that delay could prove fatal. The surgery went ahead the same day. According to her husband, Uttam Chand Meena, Gargi appeared calm and even joyful beforehand, laughing as she removed her jewellery. After the operation, her condition worsened. She was unable to pass urine, and her blood sugar later spiked to a dangerously high level, prompting her transfer to the intensive care unit. In the early hours of March 31, 2018, she was placed on a ventilator. At 4.12 am, Saroj Hospital declared her dead — two days after she had walked in for what was meant to be a precautionary check-up.

Uttam Chand Meena has spent the years since pursuing accountability, both for the medical decisions taken inside Saroj Hospital and for what he alleges was a pattern of institutional evasiveness afterward. His central allegation is that he and his family were pressured into consenting to surgery under threat that Gargi would otherwise die, only for her condition to deteriorate sharply once the procedure was performed.

He has also alleged that hospital staff raised concerns about payment despite his eligibility for cashless treatment under a government scheme, and that he was asked to procure medicines from outside before treatment would continue. It was Meena's decision to file Right to Information applications seeking Saroj Hospital's staffing records that eventually opened up the question that would consume the next several years of litigation: who exactly was caring for his wife in her final hours.

Among Meena's most serious allegations is that the nurses attending to Gargi during her admission may not have been properly qualified or registered to practise in Delhi. He has repeatedly pointed out that while doctors visit a patient for a matter of minutes each day, it is nurses who provide round-the-clock care — administering medication, monitoring vital signs and responding to emergencies through the night. If that care is being delivered by unregistered or unqualified personnel, he has argued, patients are being placed at risk without their knowledge. This allegation, first raised through his RTI applications, formed the basis of the Delhi High Court's repeated interventions and, ultimately, of the Delhi Nursing Council's own inquiry into the hospital's nursing staff.

Also Read:  Delhi High Court Flags Regulatory Failures at Saroj Hospital | Impact

What the DNC Order Says

The Delhi Nursing Council's order followed a fresh, physical audit of Saroj Hospital's employment rolls and registration certificates for the 245 nursing staff on record as of March 31, 2018 — the date of Gargi Meena's death. The audit was conducted in the presence of hospital representatives, including the Additional Medical Superintendent, the Chief Nursing Officer and the head of human resources. The DNC's Review Committee, which confirmed the findings on June 11, 2026, found that only 114 of the 245 nurses held valid DNC registration.

A further 120 nurses, though qualified, were found to be practising without the mandatory registration required of nurses from other states, having failed to secure the necessary no-objection certificates. Six individuals were found to be entirely unregistered with any state nursing council in India. A further five people — four operating theatre technicians and one nursing aide — had been mistakenly classified as nursing staff altogether. The DNC concluded that Saroj Hospital had operated in gross violation of Section 17 of the Delhi Nursing Council Act, 1997, which bars the employment of unregistered individuals as nurses anywhere in Delhi.

The dangers of this kind of gap in oversight are not abstract. Nurses are typically the medical professionals with the most sustained contact with a patient, particularly during and after surgery, when close monitoring can be the difference between a complication being caught early or missed entirely. Gargi Meena's own case involved several of the junctures where such monitoring matters most: a rapid post-operative decline, a catheter-related complaint that her husband alleges was dismissed, and a sudden spike in blood sugar levels that preceded her transfer to intensive care.

Separately, the Delhi Medical Council has already found that the doctors involved in her case fell short of the standard expected of them, with the treating gynaecologist found to have failed to exercise reasonable skill and care, the anaesthetist found lacking in diligent record-keeping, and the attending physician found insufficiently diligent in managing her case. The National Medical Commission subsequently suspended the gynaecologist for three months and issued warnings to the other doctors involved.

The Delhi High Court intervened in this case on three separate occasions — in 2021, 2023 and again in February 2026 — each time expressing dissatisfaction with the pace and thoroughness of the Delhi Nursing Council's response. In its February 2026 order, the court held that Meena's grievance was genuine and could not be brushed aside, directing the DNC to complete a comprehensive fresh examination within six months.

This was not the first warning the regulator had received. As early as 2021, the DNC itself had written to the Directorate General of Health Services, urging the withdrawal of Saroj Hospital's registration over its employment of unregistered nurses. That letter went unanswered. For years, the case moved only through repeated court directions, RTI replies and painstaking verification, with little visible consequence for the hospital.

We spoke to Uttam Chand Meena following the DNC's order. "After 8 years, finally the DNC has acted against the hospital. This is not the end and is only the beginning," he said. "The doctor only comes for visits to the patient, but it is the nurse who cares for the patient throughout, so it is very important that the nurses are qualified and registered. I feel that the nurses' records should also be available on the DNC website, with their photographs and qualifications, so that people do not get hoodwinked. This is a wake-up call. We will also move court to get the licence of Saroj Hospital cancelled."

Also Read:  Saroj Hospital Medical Negligence: NMC Takes Action - The Probe Impact

A Long-Delayed Reckoning

The implications of the DNC's order extend beyond the fines and prosecution it has set in motion. For years, both the Delhi Nursing Council and the Directorate General of Health Services were aware, or ought to have been aware, of serious lapses at Saroj Hospital, yet neither acted with any urgency. The DNC's 2021 warning to the DGHS went unanswered. Its own inspection findings in 2023 prompted no decisive regulatory action until the Delhi High Court stepped in again. It has taken three rounds of judicial intervention, a formal Review Committee, and a fresh physical audit of eight-year-old records for the Delhi Nursing Council to arrive at an order that finally recommends criminal prosecution and refers the hospital to the DGHS for punitive action under the Delhi Nursing Homes Cell Act. For Gargi Meena's family, who have spent nearly a decade seeking answers, the order represents the first time a regulatory body has matched its findings with consequences that go beyond warning letters.

Prashant Vaxish, the advocate representing Uttam Chand Meena, framed the case in constitutional terms. "The Constitution guarantees every citizen the right to receive healthcare within the framework of law. Any systemic failure to enforce mandatory statutory requirements in hospitals undermines public confidence and raises grave concerns regarding the protection of patients' fundamental rights," he said. "The findings in this case raise a serious constitutional concern. Permitting patients to be treated by persons who were allegedly not in compliance with the statutory registration framework strikes at the very heart of the fundamental right to life and health guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. This case is not merely about one hospital — it raises a serious question about the effectiveness of regulatory oversight. If over a hundred nursing personnel could allegedly function without mandatory registration, it compels every citizen to ask whether public authorities are conducting timely inspections to safeguard patient lives."

Vaxish added that the case should be read as a broader warning to India's healthcare regulators. "This case is a stark reminder that public authorities exist to protect citizens — not to preside over institutional failures that endanger them. Any breakdown in statutory oversight within the healthcare system strikes at the very foundation of the constitutional guarantee of life and dignity. Hospitals and public authorities have no licence to gamble with human lives. The rule of law demands that every lapse affecting public safety be met with uncompromising accountability," he said.

What happens next will test how far the Delhi Nursing Council's order translates into real consequence. The DNC has given Saroj Hospital and the penalised nurses ten days to respond before proceedings escalate, and it has referred the matter to the DGHS for administrative action under the Nursing Homes Cell Act — a body that has, on this very case, gone unresponsive to the regulator's requests before.

Meena's petition seeking stricter punishment for the doctors involved remains pending before the Delhi High Court, and he has indicated he intends to seek cancellation of Saroj Hospital's operating licence altogether. Gargi Meena did not live to see any of this. Whether the systems meant to protect the next patient who walks into Saroj Hospital, or any hospital in Delhi, will act faster than they did for her, remains an open question.

E20 Petrol Complaints Mask a Deeper Ethanol Policy Debate

The controversy surrounding India’s E20 fuel programme has exposed a deeper tension than a disagreement over automotive technology. Recent proceedings in the Supreme Court and the subsequent clarification issued by the government brought renewed attention to a policy that has quietly transformed India’s fuel landscape.

Petrol blended with 20 percent ethanol is now available across the country, years ahead of the original schedule. Policymakers view the programme as a milestone in India’s energy transition. Many consumers view it with considerably more scepticism.

Complaints about declining mileage after using E20 fuel, uncertainty over vehicle compatibility and the absence of any visible reduction in fuel prices have fuelled a growing public debate. Much of that discussion has been framed as a simple choice between environmental responsibility and consumer convenience.

Also Read:  Fake Citations, Real Verdicts: India's AI Wake-Up Call

How the US, Brazil and Europe Approach Ethanol Blending

The reality is considerably more complex. Ethanol blending sits at the intersection of energy security, agricultural policy, climate commitments and household economics. Understanding its implications requires moving beyond the immediate concerns of motorists and examining the larger political economy behind the policy.

Globally, ethanol is neither experimental nor unusual. The United States has blended ethanol into petrol for decades, with E10 serving as the standard fuel across much of the country. Higher blends such as E15 and E85 are also available for compatible vehicles.

Brazil operates one of the world’s most extensive biofuel ecosystems, where E27 is the standard petrol blend and pure ethanol remains widely available. Several European countries have adopted E10 as a mainstream fuel. The underlying science is well established.

Ethanol offers genuine environmental advantages. Produced from agricultural feedstocks such as sugarcane, maize and other biomass, it reduces lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional petrol. Ethanol also improves octane ratings and promotes cleaner combustion.

According to estimates frequently cited by policymakers, ethanol derived from sugarcane can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90 percent relative to fossil fuels. At a time when governments across the world are attempting to decarbonise transport systems, biofuels have emerged as an important transitional technology.

The economic rationale is equally compelling.

India imports roughly 85 percent of the crude oil it consumes. Energy dependence has long represented one of the country’s most significant external vulnerabilities. Every increase in global oil prices widens the current account deficit, puts pressure on the rupee and contributes to domestic inflation. Policymakers have therefore searched for ways to reduce exposure to volatile energy markets without compromising growth.

E20 as Economic Insurance: Who Actually Gains From It

Viewed from this perspective, ethanol blending functions as a form of economic insurance.

The programme has enabled India to substitute a portion of imported crude oil with domestically produced fuel. Government estimates suggest that ethanol blending has already displaced millions of tonnes of crude oil imports and generated substantial foreign exchange savings.

These gains rarely feature in public discussions because they appear not at petrol pumps but in macroeconomic indicators. A lower import bill improves the balance of payments, reduces pressure on foreign exchange reserves and strengthens resilience against geopolitical disruptions in global energy markets.

The benefits extend beyond the external sector. Ethanol production has created an additional market for sugarcane and grain producers, directing significant revenue towards rural economies. For a government seeking to strengthen farm incomes while reducing oil dependence, ethanol blending offers an unusually attractive policy instrument. A litre of ethanol represents not only a reduction in fuel imports but also an expansion of domestic value creation.

Yet policies that generate national gains do not always distribute those gains evenly.

This is where much of the current discomfort originates.

Also Read:  India-US Trade Deal Stalls Amid Tariffs, Politics And Legal Hurdles

Why E20 Mileage Loss Hits Older Vehicles Hardest

Consumers encounter ethanol through mileage rather than macroeconomics. E20 fuel contains less energy per litre than conventional petrol. Its energy density is roughly one-third lower than that of pure gasoline. Modern engines designed for higher ethanol blends can compensate for some of this difference through calibration and improved combustion. Older vehicles often cannot. Laboratory tests suggest relatively modest efficiency losses. Real-world driving conditions, particularly in congested urban environments, have produced more mixed experiences.

These concerns become sharper because India has pursued one of the fastest ethanol transitions among major economies. Brazil’s ethanol programme evolved gradually over several decades alongside substantial changes in vehicle technology, fuel infrastructure and consumer behaviour. Manufacturers, fuel retailers and consumers adapted together. The transition became an ecosystem rather than a mandate.

India’s trajectory has been more compressed. Ethanol blending rose from negligible levels a decade ago to 20 percent nationally within a relatively short period. Vehicle manufacturers have increasingly produced E20 compatible models, yet many of the older vehicles remain on Indian roads. The transition has therefore created a gap between national fuel standards and the technical characteristics of a significant share of the existing vehicle fleet.

The challenge extends beyond engineering.

The E20 Paradox: National Gains, Unchanged Petrol Prices

Public acceptance of large-scale transitions often depends on whether citizens perceive a tangible benefit from participating in them. The economics of ethanol blending present a paradox. Imported crude oil is being replaced with a domestically produced fuel. Foreign exchange savings are accumulating. Farmers receive an additional source of demand. Carbon emissions decline. Yet retail fuel prices remain broadly unchanged.

Part of the explanation lies in the economics of ethanol production itself. Ethanol procurement prices are designed to support agricultural producers and distilleries. Feedstock costs have risen. Lower energy content means more fuel is required to travel the same distance. These factors limit the scope for dramatic reductions in retail prices.

The result is a transition whose macroeconomic benefits are visible to the state but less visible to consumers.

This does not diminish the strategic logic of ethanol blending. India cannot indefinitely rely on imported oil to meet its energy needs. Nor can climate objectives be postponed indefinitely. The direction of policy is broadly consistent with global trends. Questions surrounding implementation, however, deserve the same attention as questions surrounding intent.

Brazil’s experience offers a useful lesson. The success of its ethanol programme emerged from patient institution-building rather than blending targets alone. Vehicle technology, fuel markets, pricing structures and consumer incentives evolved together. Policy credibility grew because the transition appeared predictable and manageable.

India’s E20 programme now stands at a similar crossroads. Future debates are likely to focus less on the chemistry of fuel and more on the economics of adaptation. Consumers, manufacturers, farmers and policymakers are participating in the same transition but not necessarily experiencing it in the same way.

Energy transitions inevitably create winners, losers and trade-offs. The durability of such transitions often depends on how those trade-offs are managed. Public trust grows when benefits and burdens appear proportionate. It weakens when costs become concentrated while gains remain diffuse and difficult to observe.

The long-term success of E20 fuel will therefore be measured by more than import savings or blending ratios. Its broader legitimacy will rest on whether citizens come to view the programme as a shared national transition rather than a cost imposed upon them in pursuit of larger objectives.

Deepanshu Mohan is Dean and Professor of Economics at O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of International Development and a Visiting Professor at London School of Economics (LSE).

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. 

When AI Enters the Courtroom, Verification Becomes Justice

Every courtroom runs on an assumption that is rarely stated aloud but always relied upon: when a judgment is cited, it exists. Not as description or approximation, but as a real, traceable legal record. That quiet assumption is what gives legal reasoning its authority. When it breaks, even in a single instance, the damage goes beyond one case. It strikes at the credibility of the process itself.

That fragility was on full display on July 2, 2026, when the Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment in Pooja Ramesh Singh v. Jammu and Kashmir Bank Ltd. & Anr. While examining an insolvency dispute, a bench of Justices P.S. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe found that the National Company Law Tribunal had relied on judicial precedents that did not exist in any recognised legal record. These were not misread cases or interpretative errors. They were AI fabricated citations, treated as if they were valid law.

Also Read:  ONOE: The Reform That Cheapens Your Vote and Cuts Your Mandate

A Verdict That Named the Problem

The case began as a routine corporate insolvency matter. Jammu and Kashmir Bank had moved the NCLT under Section 7 of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code against Essel Infraprojects Ltd., seeking recovery of dues owed by the original borrower, Pan India Utilities Distribution Company Ltd. The NCLT admitted the insolvency application, and the NCLAT upheld that order by relying on a string of what it presented as Supreme Court precedents. When the matter reached the Supreme Court, the appellant, a suspended director of Essel Infraprojects, argued that several of those precedents simply did not exist.

On independent verification, the Court agreed. It found citations such as ICICI Bank Ltd. vs Urban Infrastructure Real Estate Ltd. and Sarbjit Singh vs Union Bank of India, both attributed to the Supreme Court Cases reporter, to be entirely fictitious, while other citations carried paragraphs and quotations that never appeared in the genuine judgments they claimed to come from.

Jammu and Kashmir Bank filed an affidavit clarifying that its own lawyers had never placed these cases on record, and that the tribunal appeared to have generated them through its own research. The Supreme Court held that the source of the error did not lessen the damage done to the rule of law, and it set aside the NCLT and NCLAT orders, sending the insolvency application back for fresh adjudication.

The bench did not mince words about what such material does to judicial reasoning once it enters the system unchecked, comparing its spread to a toxic industrial leak: invisible at first, and catastrophic by the time anyone notices. The Court declared that courts must adopt a zero-tolerance approach to producing, citing, or relying on AI generated precedents without verification, and it went further, holding that a lawyer who cites unverified machine-generated judgments commits professional misconduct, while a judge who relies on such material commits an equally serious lapse. The Court also directed the Bar Council of India to constitute a committee to frame guidelines and consider disciplinary measures for the use of unverified, unchecked machine-generated material in legal work.

Also Read:  The CPA Scandal That Exposed Delhi's Broken Procurement System

Not India's First Encounter, and Not the World's

India's judiciary has already brushed up against this problem more than once this year. Earlier in 2026, the same bench had dealt with a separate matter in which a trial court had relied on non-existent, AI generated judgments, a recurrence that the Court itself flagged as reason enough to move toward firmer standards.

In April 2026, the Punjab and Haryana High Court went further still, issuing a circular related to AI that bars judicial officers from using generative tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot for legal research or the writing of judgments, citing data-privacy concerns under India's yet-to-be-enforced Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023.

The problem is neither new nor confined to India. The first widely reported instance came from the United States, in Mata v. Avianca, Inc., decided in the Southern District of New York in 2023. Two lawyers representing a passenger who claimed he was injured by a serving cart on an Avianca flight used ChatGPT to research their opposition to a motion to dismiss. The tool invented six complete judicial opinions, complete with fabricated judge names, docket numbers, and quotations.

When opposing counsel could not locate the cases, one of the lawyers reportedly asked the chatbot to confirm the cases were real, and it did, itself hallucinating a second time. Judge P. Kevin Castel fined the lawyers and their firm 5,000 dollars, not for using AI as such, but for standing behind the fabricated cases even after being warned they might not exist.

The United Kingdom has logged dozens of comparable episodes. In the combined 2025 High Court matters of R (Ayinde) v. Haringey and Al-Haroun v. Qatar National Bank, judicial assistants checking one set of submissions found that eighteen of forty-five cited cases did not exist at all, while several genuine cases were quoted for propositions they never contained.

The presiding judges referred the lawyers involved to their professional regulators and warned that fabricated citations amount to an abuse of the court's process, regardless of whether the person responsible is a qualified lawyer or an unrepresented litigant. A related case, Bandla v. Solicitors Regulation Authority, saw an appeal struck out entirely after a former solicitor kept relying on fake authorities even after being told they were fake.

Also Read:  Patent Filings in India Surge—Are Universities Faking Innovation?

The Scale of the Problem, in Numbers

What began as a scattering of isolated incidents has become a measurable pattern. Damien Charlotin, a Paris-based legal researcher affiliated with HEC Paris's Smart Law Hub, maintains the most widely cited public database of court and tribunal decisions in which generative AI produced fabricated legal material. By mid-2026, that database had logged more than 1,400 cases worldwide, more than 1,000 of them in the United States alone, with new entries arriving, in Charlotin's own description, at a pace of roughly ten cases from ten different courts on a single day.

Penalties have escalated alongside the volume: from the original 5,000-dollar fine in the Avianca matter to sanctions exceeding 100,000 dollars in a 2026 case out of Oregon, and to what appears to be the first indefinite licence suspension tied to AI-fabricated citations, handed down by the Nebraska Supreme Court in April 2026.

Most of the cases in Charlotin's tracker involve self-represented litigants rather than practising lawyers, which is its own warning sign: AI tools are now a first stop for people who cannot afford legal counsel, and courts are having to build new safeguards to protect litigants from the very tools meant to help them navigate the system alone. But it is the cases involving licensed advocates that carry the heaviest professional consequences, ranging from wasted-costs orders and referrals to bar regulators, to strike-outs of entire pleadings and, increasingly, suspension from practice.

Courts Are Building Guardrails, Not Banning the Technology

None of this amounts to a rejection of the technology. The Supreme Court's AI Committee released a draft framework, the Regulations for Use of Artificial Intelligence in Courts, 2026, in June, opening it for public comment, with the consultation window extended to July 15, 2026, before the rules are finalised. The draft permits the use of artificial intelligence for legal research, citation verification, drafting assistance, translation, transcription, and court administration, but it draws a hard line: such systems cannot decide cases, assess bail eligibility, evaluate flight risk, predict recidivism, or judge the credibility of a witness or party.

The draft also proposes a mandatory disclosure requirement, meaning any lawyer or litigant who uses such tools to prepare a pleading or submission would have to say so at the time of filing, and it envisages a permanent apex oversight body at the Supreme Court, backed by dedicated technology committees and annual audits of any such system used in Indian courts. Roughly 53.57 crore rupees has separately been earmarked under Phase III of the government's e-Courts Project for future technological advancement, including artificial intelligence and blockchain integration, according to a Lok Sabha reply by the Union Law Minister in December 2025.

This mirrors the direction courts have taken elsewhere. UK judges operate under a formal Guidance for Judicial Office Holders on the use of artificial intelligence, first issued in December 2023, and the Law Society has published its own checklist for practitioners weighing whether and how to use generative tools. 

In the United States, the American Bar Association issued its first formal ethics opinion on lawyers' use of generative tools in July 2024, making clear that the duties of competence, candour to the court, and client confidentiality apply in full regardless of whether a human or a machine drafted the first version of a document.

Also read:  RBI Bans Dark Patterns: A Confession Dressed as a Circular

The Deeper Fix Starts Earlier Than the Courtroom

The challenge, though, is not confined to courts or regulators. It begins earlier, in legal education itself. Law students already use AI tools widely for summaries, notes, and early-stage research, and that is neither unusual nor inherently a problem. The concern arises when these tools replace verification rather than assist it. Legal training has always rested on one core discipline: nothing is accepted as law unless it can be traced back to an authentic, checkable authority. If that habit weakens early, it rarely returns in full strength later in practice.

Practical guidance is converging on similar advice everywhere this issue has surfaced: never cite a machine-generated case without independently confirming it against an official database such as the Supreme Court's own website, Indian Kanoon, or SCC Online; keep a research log capable of proving due diligence if the citation is ever questioned; and treat any such tool as a starting point for research, never as the final word on whether a precedent is real. What is learned as convenience at the start of a legal career can become genuine professional risk later. Law schools, in India and elsewhere, will have to adjust their approach, not by resisting the technology, but by teaching its limits more deliberately.

The Standard That Doesn't Change

In the end, the responsibility remains where it has always been. Lawyers are officers of the court, and that role carries a continuing duty of accuracy that predates any such technology by centuries. The ease with which information can now be generated does not reduce that obligation; if anything, it raises the bar. And for judges, the standard is identical: what enters judicial reasoning must be verified, even when it arrives with the appearance of unimpeachable authority.

AI will continue to become part of legal practice in India and everywhere else; that much is now beyond dispute, borne out by a Supreme Court judgment, a pending regulatory framework, a High Court circular, and a global tracker already past 1,400 documented failures. What remains uncertain is how responsibly the profession will use it. Because in law, credibility has never been created by speed, fluency, or confidence of language. It is created by proof. Verification was always part of justice. After July 2, 2026, no court, lawyer, or law student in India can credibly claim not to have been told so.

Journalist Samrat Choudhury received his passport today, bringing an end to a prolonged and unexplained citizenship verification process. Speaking to The Probe shortly after, Samrat said he still does not know what triggered the scrutiny of his citizenship in the first place, even though every document he submitted was found to be in order.

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

How Samrat Choudhury's Passport Case Unfolded

Samrat's ordeal began not as a routine formality but as a shock. He had held an Indian passport since 1993 — issued from Shillong, Delhi and Bengaluru at different points in his career — with no trouble at any stage. Then, four years after his Tatkal passport was issued in 2022, he received a letter from the Regional Passport Office (RPO) in Kolkata stating that an adverse police report had been received, with "citizenship not established" recorded against his name. 

He was asked to appear at the RPO in Kolkata to submit his passport for police re-verification. He then had to report to his local police station, where he was asked to produce a long list of documents, including his birth certificate, 10th standard certificate, Aadhaar card, voter ID, his own passport, and even his father's and mother's passports. 

The Probe had first reported Samrat's case on July 3. His case is riddled with irony that goes beyond the bureaucratic runaround. Samrat has spent years documenting and writing about the idea of belonging, only to find himself having to prove that he belonged. Adding to that irony, his passport was impounded by the government on Passport Seva Divas — a day observed every year on June 24 to commemorate the enactment of the Passports Act, 1967, meant to celebrate the service of issuing passports.

While media attention around his case began to build, Samrat was simultaneously navigating the re-verification process through official channels. Whether it was that scrutiny that eventually prompted authorities to act, or whether the case would have been resolved regardless, remains unclear. What is certain is that after his documents were verified, his file was sent back to the RPO, and an automated message eventually informed him that it had been cleared. The passport was released and delivered to him today.

Speaking to The Probe, he said that the entire process left him without answers about why his citizenship had come under question at all. "I am still mystified about what happened, what caused this whole thing in the first place. I still don't know," he said.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Government Sought Far More Than Required, Says Samrat

Samrat raised concerns about the gap between the official passport requirements and what he was actually asked to produce. Under Indian citizenship law, anyone born in India between January 26, 1950 and July 1, 1987 is a citizen by birth, irrespective of the nationality or documentation of their parents — meaning no proof of parental lineage is legally required.

Samrat, who was born before this cut-off, said the process was especially demanding given this, as he had already submitted his birth certificate and 10th standard certificate, both of which record his date of birth and should have settled the matter on their own.

"This is not what the official list of documents says. It basically says you have to provide one document for proof of address and one for proof of identity, the usual thing. It doesn't seem to require your father's passport and your mother's passport and stuff like that," he said.

He was critical of the discretion exercised by officials handling passport and citizenship verification cases, arguing that it adds unnecessary hardship to an already difficult process. "The government officials just seem to want to cover themselves by asking you for things which are not required, just making the process much harder than it needs to be. If two documents are enough, ask me for two documents. Don't ask me for ten," he said.

Echoes of R. Rajagopal's Passport Case

Samrat's case follows a similar citizenship and passport ordeal faced by R. Rajagopal, former editor of The Telegraph, whose story The Probe had reported on June 30. Rajagopal, who had held a valid passport since 2005 and renewed it without incident in 2015, applied for a routine renewal in February 2026 after his passport expired in October 2025. Instead of being processed as usual, his file was quietly diverted to the Security Control Organisation, which functions under the Kolkata Police Special Branch. 

On June 17, the Regional Passport Office informed him in writing that police had submitted an adverse verification report, citing the fact that his name had been deleted from West Bengal's electoral rolls during the state's Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise. Rajagopal spent nearly a hundred days tracking down decades-old records of his late parents from Kerala, trying to establish an identity he had never once been asked to prove in over three decades as one of India's best-known editors.

After The Probe's story and renewed media glare on Rajagopal's case drew attention to the delays in restoring his passport, he eventually received his passport — via speed post on July 4. Rajagopal told The Probe that the resolution came after sustained media coverage, along with the intervention of the Editors Guild of India, the Press Club of India and a Chief Minister's intervention, but that he did not see it as a moment to celebrate, since the government had still not clarified whether SIR data could be lawfully used to deny a citizen a passport. 

The Probe's follow-up story reported on the development, along with Rajagopal's call for the government to clarify its position on the SIR process linked to such citizenship checks — a clarification that has still not come from the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Home Affairs, or the West Bengal government.

A Wider Problem Beyond Passport Delays

Both Samrat Choudhury's and R. Rajagopal's cases point to a larger pattern facing citizens caught up in citizenship and passport verification processes across the country, many of whom do not have the visibility or the platform to have their cases resolved. 

Samrat said the state of passport and police verification offices reflects years of underinvestment, leaving both citizens and officials to deal with an outdated and inconsistent system. "They just get desensitised to the human being facing them across the table. After some time, they stop caring about their jobs and the difference it makes to people's lives," he said, adding that he hopes the government will invest in improving these offices for the many citizens who depend on them daily.

India-US Trade Deal: From '99% Done' To Sudden Pullback

About two weeks ago, the much-anticipated bilateral trade agreement (BTA) between India and the United States (US) seemed close to completion. United States Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer led his team to New Delhi, and both governments aligned on claims that 99 percent of the India-US trade deal was finalised. 

Immediately after Greer’s visit, however, the Indian government unexpectedly pulled back from the deal. 

Why India Paused The India-US Trade Deal Despite Early Momentum

Clarifying India’s position, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, claimed immediately afterwards that the BTA would remain on hold unless the US offered India “some competitive advantage over what is being given to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and other neighbouring countries”. 

This about turn was surprising given India’s long-standing enthusiasm to clinch the deal with its second-largest trading partner. 

Negotiations began in early 2025 following political endorsement from the leaders of both nations, who launched “Mission 500” to double total bilateral trade to $500 billion by 2030. The BTA was to be the primary catalyst. Initially, both governments agreed that the first tranche of this multi-sector trade deal would be ready by the Fall of 2025. 

Also Read:  Fire and Ice: Trump's Erratic NATO Summit Rage Turns to Love

India-US Trade Deal Talks Hit Tariff And Agriculture Roadblocks

This timeline proved overly ambitious for two primary reasons.

The  “America First” Mandate of President Donald Trump’s trade policy explicitly stated he would “negotiate agreements on a bilateral or sector-specific basis to obtain export market access for American workers, farmers, ranchers, service providers”. This signaled that the US would prioritise its own stakeholders without guaranteeing reciprocal advantages to partner countries.

And, then there were tariff disputes between India and the US. President Trump repeatedly targeted India for maintaining high tariffs and enjoying a trade surplus with the US. It seemed, therefore, that the BTA was being envisioned as a mechanism for the US to extract market access concessions from India, particularly within its protected agricultural sector.

Although the original deadline was missed, the two nations announced a framework for an “Interim Agreement regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade” in early February. The Indian government enthusiastically hailed this as a “landmark trade victory” that unlocked the “$30-trillion US market for exports across key sectors”.

But this optimism did not match the actual terms of the framework. 

Russian Oil, Reciprocal Tariffs And A Supreme Court Curveball

India had agreed to eliminate or reduce tariffs on all US industrial goods as well as a wide range of agricultural products, but the US secured the right to apply a reciprocal tariff rate of 18 percent on originating Indian goods. By accepting these asymmetric terms, India  was, in effect, opening its sensitive sectors even though the US could increase tariffs on Indian exports seven-fold, compared to July 2025 levels.

President Trump announced at the same time that India had committed to halting direct or indirect imports of Russian oil. In exchange, he said, the US had agreed to remove the 25 percent ad valorem duty it had imposed on India in August 2025 over these very oil imports. 

For India, halting Russian oil imports represented a major geopolitical shift, considering Russia’s decades-long role as a dependable strategic partner.

The framework was quickly turned upside down when the US Supreme Court ruled that President Trump did not have the authority to impose “reciprocal tariffs” under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). This knocked the bottom out of  the Trump administration’s trade unilateralism as it was the IEEPA under which high tariffs were levied on 57 countries in April 2025. 

The US Supreme Court ruling forced, therefore, both the Indian and US governments back to the drawing board.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

New Section 301 Probes Complicate India-US Trade Deal Talks

India’s initial acceptance of the lopsided February deal remains difficult to parse. Its subsequent refusal to finalise the BTA, however, stems from sudden and new US provocations. Within weeks of the Supreme Court ruling, the Trump Administration initiated two separate investigations under Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974, which grants the USTR unilateral tariff authority to investigate and take unilateral tariff actions against other countries it trades with. 

In the first investigation, the USTR is examining 60 trade partners for their failure to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour. India is among the 54 countries facing the prospects of additional import duties of 10 percent. 

The second USTR investigation is for determining structural excess capacity of the countries it trades with. Sixteen of them are being targeted for manufacturing overcapacity across 22 sectors. In India, seven sectors are targeted — including broad categories such as construction goods – meaning that any subsequent duties could broadly depress exports to its largest trading partner, the US. 

Unlike the first investigation, the USTR has not as yet specified the duty rates it intends to impose. For decades, governments have been forging bilateral trade agreements to provide a transparent and predictable trading environment to their businesses. The Trump Administration is clearly an exception in this regard; its trade dealings have been anything but predictable. 

Given this situation, the Indian government faces some hard choices while continuing to negotiate the BTA. Surely, it would not like to be left in a situation where the US, after extracting all the concessions it is seeking, uses unilateral measures like Section 301 to deny benefits to Indian businesses.

Biswajit Dhar is Honorary Fellow, Institute of Chinese Studies, New Delhi. Earlier, he was Distinguished Professor, Council for Social Development, New Delhi, and  a Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

At the NATO Summit, Trump's Most Erratic Moment Yet

US President Donald Trump’s media conferences at the NATO summit in Ankara were the most disturbing since his session with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in 2018.

Back then, Trump stunned those assembled when asked whether he believed the conclusion of US intelligence agencies that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election. “President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be,” he replied. From that moment on, Trump’s credibility in standing for America first over Russia was in doubt.

The president’s media performances at NATO were even more destabilising and erratic.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz: Iran's Long War Trap for a Reluctant US

NATO Summit Rage: Trump Torches Spain and Reopens Greenland Bid

In the morning, Trump came in angry at NATO and Iran. “I’m not happy with NATO because of the fact that they didn’t want to help us with the number-one state sponsor of terror, that’s Iran. They were unwilling to help us.”

He was livid about Spain and demanded his treasury secretary cut off all trade with Spain immediately. “Spain is a wasted cause. We don’t want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I’d like you to cut it off […] I don’t want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. They make so much money with us, and we’re going to see that they make a lot less. I want no business with them.”

Trump: "Spain is a wasted cause. We don't want to do any trade business with Spain anymore, by the way. I'd like to cut it off. Spain is a terrible partner in NATO. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Including visits. We don't want anything to do. They're hopeless. Bad… pic.twitter.com/mcWRBhARjF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 8, 2026

Trump then reopened his imperial design to acquire Greenland from Denmark. “Greenland is a big problem for us […] Greenland is very important for the United States, but it’s not important for Denmark. In fact, when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day. Hitler beat them out in one day took over, and they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland and then stupidly we gave it back. We shouldn’t have given it back to them because we’re the ones that need it. We need it for protection of the world, not just the United States, and it’s very important. It doesn’t help Denmark, but it helps us, and it’s very important for us.”

NATO Summit Swing: Trump Calls Iran 'Scum,' Then Praises NATO 'Love'

Trump was cold on NATO and red hot on Iran. He was asked whether the memorandum of understanding to end the hostilities, open the Strait of Hormuz, and begin discussions to denuclearise Iran was dead.

To me I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. You know what scum is? They’re scum. They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. And they’re vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon they’d use it. As far as I’m concerned, it’s over.“

And more: "But these are evil, sick people, and we have to rid their cancer, their cancer, and you know what you do? You got to cut out cancer early. And that’s the way I feel.”

By the afternoon media session, Trump had adopted a more conciliatory, if not affectionate, tone.

I just want to say there was tremendous love in that [NATO] room […] And they have a lot of good in their heart, not evil, good. And they’re doing a great job for their country.

NATO Summit: Trump's Bravado Clashes With a War Still Raging

Trump assured the room his rough language about NATO leaders did not cause any consternation. “I mean, you know, they, they like the job I’m doing. They said, we love, sir, we love you. These are grown people saying that, isn’t that nice? Maybe, I don’t know, maybe they’re trying to get to me. And in the way they did because there was tremendous unity in that room.”

But the prospects for ending the current rounds of violence, reopening Hormuz and serious engagement on Iran’s nuclear programs are decaying rapidly. At the NATO meeting, Trump threatened imminent strikes on Iran, and a new wave of attacks has been unleashed. “This is in retribution for yesterday’s bombing of ships by Iran. If it happens again, it will get much worse!”

He signalled his awareness of his own mortality in the war with Iran. He repeatedly cites how he killed tiers of Iranian leaders. “Their leaders are gone. They had leaders they’re gone and they had another set of leaders, they’re gone. Now they have another set of leaders, they may be gone.”

Trump sees his life in danger. “They want to take out the US leader, me. I’m on every list. I saw things this morning. I’m on every single one of their lists. And so far I guess I’ve been a little bit lucky, but that maybe doesn’t last very long.”

What Trump had to say was all in the course of just one day. He left NATO proud of America’s standing. “They respect our country again […] They have more respect for our country than they’ve ever had before.”

But from this torrent of words and contradiction in speech, Trump left NATO with the Iran war continuing, the alliance under immense tension, and questions about the stability of the commander-in-chief growing.

Author Bruce Wolpe is a Senior Fellow (non-resident) at the United States Studies Centre. Bruce is a contributor on US politics to Sky News Australia, appearing regularly across its programs and for breaking news.

This story originally appeared in The Conversation. 

Strait of Hormuz Strikes Push the Ceasefire to Collapse

The United States has launched a series of strikes on Iran in response to the Iranian targeting of vessels in the Strait of Hormuz.

These are the most severe violations yet of the Memorandum of Understanding that came into effect on June 17, and may signal an end to the truce.

For the first time since the initial ceasefire on April 8, US President Donald Trump has definitively stated the ceasefire is over.

These escalating tensions suggest the ceasefire will not turn into a permanent peace. The US is being drawn into a long war with Iran, against its will.

Also Read:  Strait of Hormuz Crisis Shows Insurance, Not Warships, Controls Oil

Fighting for control

The key sticking point that has driven the latest round of strikes is Iran’s determination to impose control over the Strait of Hormuz.

The Memorandum of Understanding stated Iran would use its “best efforts” to ensure safe passage of commercial vessels through the Strait with no charge for 60 days.

However, tensions immediately spiked over ships using the “Omani route” through the strait. This is a US-endorsed maritime corridor that hugs the coast of Oman and involves international coordination.

Iran wants vessels to use a second route that passes along the Iranian coast and is closely monitored and controlled by Iran.

The Strait of Hormuz is too wide for Iran to maintain control over both routes without the use, or threatened use, of force.

Iran has shown it is willing to use live fire to deter vessels from sailing the Omani route.

A battle of different strengths

One reason it has been so hard for the ceasefire to hold is that US and Iran have different strengths. Neither sees themselves as having surrendered.

The US is militarily strong, with overwhelming military capability.

But it has weak political resolve. It does not want to stay in this war or put boots on the ground in Iran. The US does not want to expend its military arsenal in a long war, or focus its global military efforts on the Iranian regime.

So, while the US has the military capability, it is highly unlikely to force regime change in Iran or forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian regime’s greatest strength is its political resolve. It is determined to survive.

Since key political leaders were killed at the start of this war, the regime has become even more hardline and militaristic. The current regime is ideological, savvy and ruthless.

Iran is determined to show the US and the region that it is in control and will not back down. It is willing to bear staggering economic and security costs to achieve this aim.

Iran’s resolve is shown in its willingness to threaten civilian vessels in the strait with light, cost-effective drones and attack boats.

The Iranian regime’s main weakness is economic. Iran has suffered massive economic and military damage as a result of this war. It could not weather another long US blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and sustained US air strikes on infrastructure and military targets.

Also Read:  LPG Shortage Risk Grows as Strait of Hormuz Crisis Threatens India

The power of domestic politics

The very different domestic landscapes in the US and Iran are driving both parties closer to a breakdown of the ceasefire.

In Iran, as noted, the war has led to a hardened regime with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) more firmly in control of political power. Iranian leaders who even talk to US counterparts, let alone make concessions, may risk being branded political traitors by some IRGC elements.

As history has shown with the assassinations of President Anwar Sadat in Egypt in 1981 and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Israel in 1995, leaders can put their own life on the line if they make agreements with counterparts considered sworn enemies by hardliners in their own country.

This drives Iran to focus on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and appearing uncompromising, rather than capitulating to enjoy the economic benefits of sanctions relief and the promised US$300 billion reconstruction fund.

Trump, on the other hand, does not want to return to full-scale war due to a lack of domestic support.

However, Trump is also influenced by those in the US who do not want to see the US walk away from the war with Iran with no agreement on the nuclear issues, and Iran in full control of the Strait.

Trump expects Iran to cooperate with the Memorandum of Understanding due to its promised economic benefits. But he has vastly underestimated Iran’s determination to assert dominance over the strait and control in the region.

What will happen from here?

Trump’s reticence for full-scale escalation means we are unlikely to return to the war of February 28.

Iran’s determination to show control means we are also not likely to see the ceasefire hold or a substantial peace agreement forthcoming.

The most likely scenario is we will return to the status quo from the first ceasefire of April 8 until June 17. This was a precarious truce, below the threshold of all-out war, but also not a substantive peace.

Tit-for-tat strikes will continue over coming months. The Strait of Hormuz will remain partially closed with security uncertain.

As I have previously noted, this is more akin to a frozen conflict than a full ceasefire or a return to full-scale war.

ONOE: The Reset Button That Guts Federalism

Imagine that, one morning in 2029, India's President issues a routine notification — and in that instant, the clock on every elected state government in India is reset. A state government elected to a full five-year term would see that term cut short the moment the national election clock is reset — no matter how much of its mandate was left. Not because it lost a vote, not because it lost the confidence of its assembly, but because the national calendar demanded it.

That is not a rhetorical flourish. It is, Justice A.P. Shah told a gathering in New Delhi on 4 July, the plain mechanism of the One Nation One Election bill. "If the law is passed," the former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court said, "the next time India has a national election, the President will press the start button by issuing a notification. That moment becomes the start button for every state assembly as well." The consequence, he added, is blunt: "the term of every single state assembly will reset to match the term of the Lok Sabha."

The One Nation One Election project — ONOE, in the shorthand that has attached itself to it — is sold as a tidy reform: synchronise the country's elections, vote once every five years for both New Delhi and the state capital, and spare the nation its permanent campaign. But across an afternoon of a conclave on federalism, elections and citizenship, a former judge, a former Chief Election Commissioner, a former diplomat and others took the proposal apart. They arrived at a shared conclusion: that ONOE, as written into the 129th Constitutional Amendment Bill now before a Joint Parliamentary Committee, is not a scheduling fix at all. It is a rewiring of the federal compact — and the efficiencies it promises do not survive contact with the fine print.

Also Read:  SIR and Citizenship: 'You Are a Foreigner Until Proven Otherwise'

A model found nowhere in the world

Shah walked the room through the machinery. The bill inserts a new Article 82A to create "simultaneous elections," and amends Articles 83 and 172 to handle governments that fall early. And it is that second part — what happens when a government collapses mid-cycle — that he called the strangest feature of ONOE.

Under the bill, a government elected to fill a vacancy does not get a fresh five years. It serves only the leftover portion of the original term, so that the national clock stays undisturbed. Take his example: a Maharashtra government elected afresh in 2029 would ordinarily sit until 2034. Should it fall in 2031, the replacement voters choose would not govern until 2036, as now, but only until 2034. "This kind of mid-term election for a then-unexpired term," Shah said, "is very novel, and does not appear to have any counterpart anywhere in the world."

That novelty, he argued, quietly corrodes the value of a vote. A citizen voting in a mid-cycle poll elects a legislature "only for the unexpired period," which means "a mid-term voter's vote has less value than that of a voter at the start of the full-term cycle." He put the unfairness as a question: "If the full-term and mid-term governments have the same powers and standing, shouldn't the votes also have the same strength and weight?" A government that knows its clock is already running down, he added, governs like a caretaker — unable to make hard decisions, its officials and its opponents alike simply waiting it out.

Then there is the one-time cost of getting every assembly onto the same start line. To launch ONOE, every state legislature would have to be dissolved together at the end of a Lok Sabha term, regardless of how much of its own term remained. "This en masse derogation of the legislative assemblies," Shah said, "even though a one-time affair, is a direct assault on the principle of federalism, and is unworkable for precisely this reason." His verdict on the design was unsparing: "Even if we assume that simultaneous elections are a good idea, the mechanism proposed in the current bill is deeply problematic." The One Nation One Election model, he concluded, "is a threat designed to centralise power and silence state voices."

The Election Commission's blank cheque

For Shah, the most dangerous clause was the one that hands the Election Commission of India the power to defer a state poll. If the Commission believes an assembly election cannot be held alongside the general election, it can recommend postponing it — and the bill offers no test, no criteria, no limits. The Commission, he said, "essentially has arbitrary and unfettered discretion to do as it pleases."

That would be worrying under any circumstances; it is more worrying, he argued, given who now controls appointments to the Commission. "We must also bear in mind that in India today, the government has an effective veto in making appointments to the Election Commission."

An umpire the government effectively appoints, handed the power to delay elections in states the ruling party is unsure of, stops being a referee and becomes a weapon. "You press the trigger," Shah said, "and the government in power is not sure about certain assemblies. The Election Commission, at their behest, can postpone or defer the elections for these legislative assemblies… So you can really distort the whole scheme of simultaneous elections." Simultaneity, in that reading, is not the point of ONOE at all — the discretion to set it aside, state by state, is.

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The savings that were never there

If Shah dismantled the design, S.Y. Quraishi dismantled the sales pitch. And he did it, at first, with a straight face — pretending to endorse the arguments for ONOE precisely in order to puncture them.

He began by conceding the government's case fairly. The Prime Minister, he recalled, had long argued that repeated elections are ruinously expensive, that the model code of conduct freezes governance for months at a stretch, and that a country perpetually in campaign mode wastes the time and money of its workers. Those are real concerns, and the Kovind Committee — the high-level panel under former President Ram Nath Kovind that recommended simultaneous polls — reported that some 80 per cent of the public responses it received backed the idea.

Then, one by one, Quraishi took the props away. On the claim that the model code paralyses governance, the former Chief Election Commissioner was categorical. "If you read the model code of conduct," he said, "you will find that everything under the sun is allowed to happen, except two things" — no new schemes announced to woo voters, and no fresh transfers of officials. Everything else continues. The paralysis, he suggested, is a myth that a former custodian of that very code could puncture from memory.

On cost, he turned the argument inside out. Mid-term elections, he pointed out, still have to be held — for the unexpired term — and cost the same as any other. As Shah had put it, "it is amazing that the bill lists cost-cutting as part of its Statement of Objects and Reasons, but offers a more expensive solution." And that 80 per cent public support? Quraishi said it collapses the moment you ask how it was gathered. "They issued the proforma only in Hindi and English," he said. "What about the other languages? Tamil Nadu, Kerala, the South — everywhere the issue of federalism comes in." The result, he argued, was that "all the responses are from the Hindi heartland, and then they say that 80 per cent of people are in favour. So this is totally misleading."

The tier that quietly vanished

Quraishi reserved a particular scorn for what ONOE has quietly dropped. The Prime Minister's original vision, he noted, was for simultaneous elections at all three tiers — Parliament, the states, and the panchayats and municipalities. But the third tier has all but disappeared from the conversation.

"The bottom tier is actually the most important — three million elected people," he said. "You have left them aside." What remains, he noted, are "4,120 MLAs and 543 MPs. So much for the determination for simultaneous elections, with this much dilution."

Where the local tier does appear — in the Kovind Committee's proposal to hold panchayat polls within a hundred days of the main election — it defeats the whole promise.

Turning to his former colleague Ashok Lavasa, Quraishi noted that conducting elections is "no joke," carried out not only in Delhi but "in the northeast, in Kashmir, and with what difficulty." To send exhausted polling staff back out again three months later, he said, is absurd: "Another election held after 100 days — is that a simultaneous election?"

His most damning point was about consent. The Prime Minister, Quraishi recalled, had himself asked for a national debate to build consensus. "The national debate happened, but no consensus was arrived at. So the logical conclusion should have been to drop the idea." Instead, he said, the response was: "Consensus may go to hell, we cannot achieve it — we are going to do it anyway."

The double engine

Where the two former election chiefs saw a broken mechanism, Yamini Aiyar saw a deeper design. Federalism, the public-policy scholar argued, is not merely a set of fiscal and administrative arrangements; it is the principle that lets a vast, plural country hold together. "The true challenge of federalism in today's India," she said, "is that precisely this idea — that you can be many, and you are still one — is the idea that is being challenged." ONOE, in her reading, belongs to a broader centralising drift, of which the most telling symptom is a single slogan.

"Yamini referred to the term 'double engine' many times," Quraishi had noted, and Aiyar built her case on it. The pitch that a state prospers only when it elects the same party that rules the centre is not, she argued, a claim about efficiency — it is an argument against the very idea of federal dialogue.

"There is no need for dialogue in a double-engine context," she said. When a government tells voters to pick the same party at both levels for "efficiency and development," it is "essentially pitting the federal principle of accommodation, dialogue and deliberation against the possibilities of development, almost arguing that too much democracy is not good for development."

Quraishi put the same point more bluntly, quoting what he called the most direct attack on federalism he had heard from the top. The double-engine argument, he said, amounts to a threat: "If you do not vote for me, I'll starve your state of all the funds" — and he added, witheringly, "as if the funds are coming from his ancestral property." A synchronised national election, both of them suggested, is the natural companion to a politics that wants one engine, one clock, one conversation — and no room for a state to answer back.

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

One design, many fronts

That the afternoon's separate anxieties belonged together was the argument Gautam Mukhopadhaya, a former diplomat, made in summing up. ONOE, the SIR, the delayed census, the coming delimitation — these, he said, should not be read as unrelated headlines. "These exercises are not isolated, but interlinked. They are part of a grand design." Among that design's purposes, he said, was "altering the balance in Parliament between the north and the south."

That last phrase points to the fear that hangs over the whole debate. A delimitation based on the 2027 census could reward the populous, slower-growing north with more parliamentary seats while the south, which curbed its population growth, loses relative weight — the very anxiety that makes ONOE's centralising logic so combustible in states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Aiyar framed the underlying inequality starkly: "UP's per capita GDP looks closer to Nepal's; Tamil Nadu's per capita GDP looks closer to Indonesia's." Redrawing representation across that gulf, she warned, "cannot be resolved by bulldozing legislation through Parliament, and by bulldozing the idea of delimitation without dialogue and debate. It needs a Union that is trustworthy" — and, she added, "all citizens of India should be entitled to minimum public services, regardless of whether they are born in Bihar or born in Kerala."

It fell to Mano Thangaraj, a DMK legislator from Kanyakumari and the one serving politician to take the floor, to state the constitutional stakes in a sentence. "Our Constitution begins with the words 'We the people'," he said, "not 'We the government'. Governments come and go, but constitutional values must endure." He offered a data point from his own state as a rejoinder to the sense of inevitability around the ruling party: a civil-society "Zero BJP" campaign, he said, had helped cut the BJP's Tamil Nadu tally from four seats to one. "We must unite," he said, "to oppose the common enemy."

Forever nation, forever election

Against ONOE, the conclave's chair offered a counter-slogan. Dr G.N. Devy, the linguist and cultural activist, said the phrase itself gets the order of things backwards. "Why talk of One Nation One Election?" he asked. "We should talk of forever nation, forever election." By "forever nation," he explained, he meant a simple correction: "the citizen comes before the nation — citizens constitute the nation." By "forever election," he meant a democracy in which representatives can be questioned and held to account continuously, "all the way from the panchayat to the presidential election," rather than one where a single synchronised vote every five years settles everything. He had a sharper line, too, for the state of the country the bill claims to be tidying: "Right now, half a nation has been made, and half an election exists — let that first become one." Not One Nation One Election, he said, but "a truncated nation and a truncated election."

There was, from the former Chief Election Commissioner, one note of hope — and it lay in the very slowness the government finds frustrating. The Joint Parliamentary Committee examining the ONOE bill, Quraishi observed, had been at it for the better part of two years without a resolution. "The fact that they have not been able to come to a conclusion means there is internal resistance from the states," he said. "That is where some hope lies."

If the bill's supporters cast ONOE as good housekeeping, the room's diagnosis was that housekeeping was never the point. The government has made a genuine case — that endless elections are costly, that campaign mode never ends, that a synchronised calendar would let it govern in peace — and the Kovind Committee's headline number lends it public cover.

What the speakers disputed was whether the cure fits the ailment: whether a reform sold as efficiency is worth a mechanism that shortens some mandates, cheapens some votes, dissolves elected assemblies by operation of law, and hands a government-appointed umpire the discretion to decide which states vote and which wait.

Aditi Mehta, the former civil servant who closed the session, refused to treat the outcome as settled. "Only 37 per cent of our country voted for this government," she reminded the room, and yet a sense of inevitability had set in. That, she suggested, was the real danger — not the bill, but the resignation around it. The task now, she said, "has to be about how" — how citizens and states answer a proposal that arrives dressed as a clock, and turns out to be a lever. On the evidence of this room, One Nation One Election is not the reform its name promises. It is a question about who, in a federal republic, gets to hold the button.

Terrorism or Resistance? The Leila Khaled Question

Leila Khaled, by today's definition, would be called a terrorist. Yet, in 1969 and 1970, when she hijacked an aircraft and later participated in the hijacking and destruction of four aircraft at Dawson's Field in Jordan, she was viewed very differently. These were audacious acts that brought the world's major powers to the brink of confrontation and intensified the repression of Palestinians living in Jordan, forcing many to seek refuge in neighbouring Lebanon.

Her daring actions compelled the international community, particularly the United States, to pay greater attention to the Palestinian cause. In distant towns and cities across the world, the reverberations of Leila Khaled's actions were widely felt. She was compared to the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, and countless newborn girls were named after her. At the time, she was regarded as an icon rather than a terrorist.

Also Read:  The Iran Deal Trump Calls a Win Is a US Climbdown

Why the Palestinian Struggle Was Recast as Terrorism

Imagine if Leila Khaled had carried out similar attacks in 2025 or 2026. The reaction would have been entirely different. The media might either have ignored the incident or, if it had reported it, unequivocally condemned it as an act of terrorism.

Despite the legitimacy of their demands, the Palestinian cause received only a lukewarm response from the US. Even Arab countries were relatively restrained when it came to supporting the demand for a separate Palestinian homeland.

Anju Gupta's excellent book, Glocal Terror in South Asia, traces the evolution of Islamic terrorism from the Arab world to South Asia. A retired senior police officer who also served with the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), Gupta provides a much-needed South Asian perspective on terrorism. She explains how the Soviet Union's entry into Afghanistan contributed significantly to the growth of radical Islam.

This reviewer, however, would have appreciated it had the author stated more explicitly that the United States also played a key role in the rise of Islamic militancy. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton herself has acknowledged that American support for the Mujahideen during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan contributed to the emergence of militant jihadist movements. At the time, both the Palestinian struggle and the Afghan resistance were often described as local jihads—two conflicts of immense historical and strategic significance.

What was overlooked, however, was that the Palestinian struggle was not fundamentally a jihad, as it was often portrayed, but rather a national liberation movement by people who claimed to be citizens of a country whose land was taken away on May 15, 1948—a day Palestinians remember as the Nakba, or catastrophe. Approximately 750,000 Palestinians lost their homes during this period, of whom an estimated 10 to 12 per cent were Christians.

Since then, the Palestinian struggle has remained relentless, even as the rise of Israel and the support it received from the United States and European powers increasingly recast the Palestinian quest for independence as an act of terrorism.

How Terrorism Reached the Indian Subcontinent

Gupta's meticulously researched book highlights the dominant Western narrative that equated the Palestinian struggle for independence with the Afghan campaign against the Soviet Union. As she points out, the funds raised by Saudi Arabia for the Palestinian cause through the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) were not only considerably smaller but were also distributed over a much longer period than those provided to the Afghan Mujahideen.

Also Read:  US-Iran Deal: A Ceasefire That Solves Nothing

As Gupta notes, "The PLO received a total of $992 million from Saudi Arabia between 1978 and 1991, while the Afghan Mujahideen received $1.8 billion between 1987 and 1989." This was also the period during which Arab fighters began arriving in Pakistan in large numbers.

Gupta argues that the rise of terrorism in the Indian subcontinent was closely linked to the influx of Arabs such as Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who became al-Qaeda's chief strategist. Although their principal strategic interests lay in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they honed their capabilities in Afghanistan and used Pakistan as a sanctuary to strengthen their networks with the support of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The dispute between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir Valley provided legitimacy to Al-Qaeda and its Pakistan-based affiliates, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizbul Mujahideen.

The author, Anju Gupta, discusses how India was drawn into the Afghan imbroglio following the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 from Kathmandu to Delhi. For this reviewer, who has closely followed the trajectory of attacks on India's security environment, the episode has left many unanswered questions about the motives and identities of those who perpetrated a criminal act that had the potential to trigger a war between the two neighbours.

The book does not depart from the prevailing narrative that attributes the hijacking to Pakistan-based terrorist groups. IC-814 also brought the Taliban's growing role in terrorist operations into sharp focus. Subsequently, the Russians began to view the Taliban as an indigenous force that also challenged the Islamic State. This perception was gradually accepted by India and even by the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, the Taliban's emergence as a nationalist force also gave rise to a new Afghanistan that openly asserted territorial ambitions long constrained by the British Raj's creation of the Durand Line.

These differences have endured and continue to fuel armed standoffs between the two neighbours. Although Anju Gupta's book concludes with developments up to 2025, there are several reasons to believe that the geostrategic landscape of South Asia has changed significantly since then, particularly following the confrontation between the United States and Iran.

Pakistan's emergence as a mediator and its growing ability to stand up to India have enhanced Islamabad's strategic importance. Experts in strategic affairs argue that Pakistan has evolved into a significant defence power, aided by its close ties with Saudi Arabia. It is also a military ally of China and has actively marketed its defence capabilities and weapon systems to several middle powers.

In other words, the geopolitical landscape has changed considerably since Operation Sindoor and since Anju Gupta completed her book. That said, Gupta's scholarship is evident throughout as she deftly marshals forgotten facts about various terrorist organisations and their leaders. Glocal Terror in South Asia is an engaging, well-researched, and important contribution for readers seeking to understand the evolution of terrorism and the complex geopolitics of South Asia—a region inhabited by what Salman Rushdie famously called the "midnight's children."

This review originally appeared in Hardnews.

Picture a citizen who walks into a courtroom to reclaim the most ordinary of freedoms — the right to speak, to move about the country, to earn a living. Someone, somewhere, has decided that this person is no longer Indian, and with that stroke the freedoms have gone. The judge listens and asks a single question: what proof do you have that you are a citizen of India?

The person reaches for the one document that has always seemed to answer that question. "You have a passport," Justice Madan Lokur told a gathering in New Delhi on 4 July, walking his audience through exactly this scene, "but the judge says, sorry, the passport is a travel document, it is not a document of citizenship." The former Supreme Court judge let the silence do its work. "What is your answer? You don't have a single document to show that you are a citizen of India."

That courtroom is still hypothetical. But the machinery that could one day fill it was what a former Supreme Court judge, a former Election Commissioner, a former Union Home Secretary, a political scientist and a right-to-information campaigner had gathered to discuss, taking up the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls from very different directions. They arrived at more or less the same place: that the exercise has quietly reversed a founding assumption of the Republic. For seventy-five years, the state presumed you were a citizen, and had to prove otherwise. Now the burden has been flipped onto you.

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The presumption has been inverted

No one at the conclave named that reversal more precisely than Dr Niraja Jayal, a scholar of Indian citizenship. The Constitution and the Citizenship Act of 1955, she reminded the room, were built on the principle of unconditional jus soli — citizenship by birth on the soil. Underlying it was something simpler still: a presumption of belonging.

"The foundational conception of universal, equal citizenship in our Constitution," Jayal said, "was underpinned by a presumption of citizenship. That presumption of universal citizenship is being replaced, as we speak, by a presumption of universal alienage."

Alienage — the presumption that a person is a foreigner until shown otherwise — was, in her account, the thread connecting a set of developments that are usually reported as separate stories.

 "It is the principle underlying the NRC. It is the principle underlying the SIR. It is also the principle underlying the latest salvo against passport holders." Each arrives dressed as something routine. "One day it is an amendment to the law on citizenship. Another day it is a new method for the routine task of revising electoral rolls. Yet another day it is a throwaway comment about whether passports constitute proof of citizenship or not. But all of these are tending towards the same purpose, the same objective — the presumption of alienage."

Who is asked to prove themselves, she argued, is not random. "Who gets the memo and who doesn't is, for the most part, a function of one's identity: religion, caste, class, gender, tribe." Occasionally the net catches someone it was not designed for — "a Black Swan event, such as the story of the journalist R. Rajagopal" — but for the most part, she said, "this is precision targeting."

Jayal traced the erosion through the amendments of 2003 and 2019, describing a long migration in the law "from unconditional jus soli … to conditional jus soli, to what we are now in, which is more or less jus sanguinis" — citizenship by descent, by blood. The consequence, she said, was a settling of citizenship "to the service of a majoritarian agenda," and its sharpest edge now falls on the rolls. "Up until now, one's registration as a voter was limited to determining one's eligibility to vote," she said. "Today, the electoral rolls have become decisive in determining an individual's citizenship status, and in determining their access to welfare provisioning."

That last shift — from the vote as a right, to the vote as a gate — is what she called the true inversion. "The relationship between citizenship and the vote has been inverted," Jayal said, "from citizenship being the condition of the vote, to the vote becoming an instrument for sifting citizens, for inclusion and exclusion, for casting doubt on the citizenship of citizens."

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A revision that 'defies logical explanation'

If Jayal supplied the frame, Ashok Lavasa supplied the view from inside the machine. A former Election Commissioner, he spoke as someone who has administered the very rolls now under revision — and he did not soften the assessment.

The Commission, he pointed out, has two tasks: to enrol electors, and to conduct free and fair elections. It has performed the first for seventy-five years without treating citizenship as something to be re-proven. He described the first electoral roll of 1950, drawn up before the 1951 census figures were even available, which nonetheless enrolled the overwhelming majority of eligible adults.

"In the absence of documents, the Election Commission, through its machinery, was able to enrol the maximum number of people," Lavasa said, citing the historian Ornit Shani's phrase for that early inclusiveness — "democratic imagination." His conclusion was a mirror image of Jayal's: "There was always a presumption of citizenship attached to whoever was around. And the identification of a non-citizen was an exception."

Against that long practice, he set the SIR notification of 24 June 2025. "To my mind, what has happened in that notification is something which defies logical explanation," he said. In Bihar, an electoral roll had been prepared through the normal legal process and published only in January 2025. "So, suddenly, less than six months down the line, there is a realisation that something is horribly wrong with the electoral roll."

The revision then split existing electors into those enrolled before and after 2003 — "all of them have been enrolled by following the same process," he noted — and introduced a word the Commission had, in his experience, never used in this context. "The Election Commission has never used the expression 'citizenship' while conducting a revision," Lavasa said. The law does allow a non-citizen to be excluded, he acknowledged, "but for that, somebody has to say that so-and-so is a non-citizen — and not only create suspicion, but produce evidence." That, he stressed, "is an exception, not the rule."

He returned repeatedly to a single unanswered question. The Supreme Court, in upholding the exercise, had accepted that there was "material on record" showing the rolls needed wholesale revision. "What is that material on record?" Lavasa asked. "We don't know. Nobody knows. At least, it is not in the public domain. I don't even think it is part of the court records."

If the stated purpose was to remove the ineligible, he said, then the public was owed a number: how many people had actually been found ineligible under Article 326, and how many referred to a Foreigners Tribunal as the court's own order required. "There is no data available in the public domain to show how many people have been deleted because they were ineligible."

He ended not with a statistic but with a story — a colonel of the Indian Army who telephoned to say his wife of fifty years had vanished from the rolls because a spelling of her father's name could not be reconciled with an older record. And then, a couplet by the poet Krishna Bihari Noor, which in translation runs: "I have been divided into so many parts that nothing of me is left in my own share."

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The questions the Election Commission will not answer

Where Lavasa asked what the Commission knew, Anjali Bhardwaj asked why it would not say. A right-to-information campaigner, she has filed question after question during the SIR, and collected the Commission's refusals to answer them.

The pattern, she argued, predates the SIR. She pointed to the Commission's long resistance to releasing Form 17C, the statutory record of votes cast at each booth, and to its decision, after the Punjab and Haryana High Court ordered disclosure of certain election records, to amend the rules rather than comply.

When the Leader of the Opposition alleged manipulation of the rolls, she said, the Commission "hid behind technicalities," and its chief, asked for CCTV footage of polling stations, invoked "the privacy of the bahus and betis of the country." Bhardwaj was unsparing about the logic: "Clearly there was no concern about the privacy of women when the CCTV cameras were being installed."

On the SIR itself, she said, the Commission had launched an exercise touching the entire electorate "without offering any reason … and without any consultation." When activists filed RTI requests asking why, the reply, she said, was that "no information exists in material form." On appeal, the answer grew stranger still. "The Principal Secretary gave it in writing that the decision to hold the SIR had not been taken in the Election Commission," Bhardwaj said. "That begs the question: where was this decision taken? Was it taken in the BJP headquarters? Was it taken in the Ministry of Home Affairs?"

The figures she cited were her own, and large. Nearly 6.5 crore names, she said, had already been struck off, with estimates running towards 10 crore — a hundred million people. Many, she conceded, were the dead, the shifted or the duplicated. But others, she insisted, "were born here, we are citizens, we have documents to prove it," and had still been removed. In Bengal, she said, deletions in a large number of constituencies exceeded the winning margins in those seats — "so there is a huge question mark today over the Bengal election results." When those left off the rolls approached the courts, she said, the answer was that they could vote another time.

It is here that the other side of the ledger belongs. The Election Commission has consistently described the SIR as a constitutional duty, not an assault on it: an exercise to remove the deceased, the permanently shifted, duplicate entries and non-citizens, so that "eligible citizens are not left out." It has cast the revision as participative, with political parties invited to appoint booth-level agents.

And on 27 May 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the Bihar SIR, finding it within the Commission's statutory mandate and in consonance with the Representation of the People Act. That judgment — delivered, as Lavasa noted with some irony, on the death anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru — is the legal ground on which the exercise now rolls out across the country. The conclave's speakers were not disputing the Commission's power to revise. They were disputing what the revision has been made to mean.

When the passport stops being proof

For Justice Lokur, the meaning had crystallised in a single official claim: that an Indian passport is "nothing but a travel document." He had gone back to the Passports Act of 1967 to test it. The preamble, he said, speaks of "the issue of passports and travel documents" — two distinct things, each separately defined. "Parliament does not make laws using superfluous words," he said. "To say that a passport is nothing but a travel document is a complete misreading." His verdict was flat: "A person who holds an Indian passport is a citizen of India. I think that should be very clear."

Follow the official claim to its end, he warned, and the passport collapses into something trivial. "The passport is effectively reduced to a ticket. Not even an airline ticket, but perhaps a bus ticket." He dismissed the argument that a rarely used provision allowing passports for certain non-citizens undoes the general rule, calling it, on the evidence available, "a dead letter."

Then he made the move that turned a documents dispute into a rights emergency. Some fundamental rights, he reminded the room, belong to everyone — the right to life under Article 21, equality under Article 14. But the freedoms of Article 19 — speech, movement, the right to a trade or profession — "are granted only to citizens."

Strip a person from the rolls, treat that as a mark against their citizenship, and those freedoms fall away with it. "So you have these 27 lakh, or 22 lakh, or 6.5 crore persons — whatever the figure — roaming around the country without the fundamental right to freedom of speech, to movement, to expression, to carrying on any business or occupation, because they are not citizens." His refusal to fix the number was itself telling: even from the chair, the scale of exclusion could only be guessed at.

The burden of proof, he argued, had been turned upside down. A "rebuttable presumption" of citizenship, properly understood, means the state must come forward and rebut it. "I don't have to prove that I am a citizen of India," Lokur said. "Whereas now, what has happened is that I have to prove that I am a citizen." He reserved his sharpest phrase for the Commission's expanding authority, borrowing a term the Constituent Assembly had used as a warning: Imperium in Imperio, a power within a power. "That is what the Election Commission is becoming today. Nobody can question it."

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

The next turn of the wheel

If the SIR is the present, the census is the near future — and Gopal Pillai, a former Union Home Secretary who has overseen one, came to explain the machinery about to be set in motion. The 2027 census, he said, will be India's first digital count, its first to allow self-enumeration, and its first to record caste. Its data will feed two of the most consequential exercises in the Republic's political life: the reservation of seats for women, and the delimitation that will redraw the number of constituencies. "The number of constituencies will change," Pillai said, "and that itself has political implications, which the country will have to take care of when it happens."

His warning was about the caste count, but its logic rhymed with everything else that was said. Caste names, he explained, are not fixed; they shift with migration, with conversion, with the slow pull of Sanskritisation, so that any attempt to fix people into official categories will generate disputes.

The answer, he argued, was disclosure before decision. "It is so essential that there is a public debate, open, within the entire country, before this is done." The exercise, he said, was under way in the Ministry of Home Affairs, "but very little of it is still available to the general public." The refrain — a state machinery reclassifying who people are, without showing its working — was by now familiar.

Deconstruction before reconstruction

Jayal put it most starkly. Beneath the legal argument, she said, lay a purpose the separate controversies were converging upon: "to make Muslims into de jure second-class citizens." Their second-class status in daily life, she argued, had already been achieved; what remained was to write it into law. Before the country could talk of rebuilding, she said, it would have to reckon with what had been dismantled. "Before we can think about reconstruction … we may need to think about deconstruction — not in the sense in which literary theory uses the term, but in the sense of undoing the damage that has been done."

Lokur closed on accountability, drawing on two judgments he had read in the previous days — a man kept out of his own city for seven months on an externment order the Bombay High Court later found illegal, and a custodial death for which the Delhi High Court awarded compensation. The point, he said, was that a wrong quashed is not a wrong answered. "This entire controversy about the SIR — not being able to vote, not having fundamental rights, not getting welfare benefits — somebody has to be held accountable."

The speakers were careful to concede the Commission's power and the Supreme Court's endorsement of it. What they would not concede was the inversion beneath both — the quiet rewriting of a citizen into a suspect, obliged to produce papers for a status that was once simply presumed. Lavasa had reached, in the end, for a scene from an old film, in which a father demanding proof of a suitor's love is asked in return what proof he has that he is the girl's father. In a country now asking millions to prove what was never in question, the joke has stopped being funny.

Former Telegraph Editor R. Rajagopal has finally received his renewed passport, months after his ordeal began. His name was deleted from West Bengal's electoral rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, and that deletion was subsequently cited as the reason for holding up his passport renewal. Rajagopal had first spoken to The Probe about his case in June, describing how a routine renewal turned into a nearly hundred-day battle involving the police, the Passport Office and the Security Control Organisation.

Also Read:  Passport Renewal Nightmare: Former Telegraph Editor Narrates Ordeal

Will The Government Finally Clarify If SIR Data Can Be Used To Deny A Passport?

The Probe spoke to Rajagopal after he received his passport. He said that as far as he is concerned, nothing has really changed. His fight, he said, was never about his passport alone.

“As far as I am concerned nothing has changed. I didn't speak for my passport alone. I wanted the clarification from somebody in authority to tell us whether SIR data can be used to deny passport to a citizen. Neither the MEA, MHA or the West Bengal government has still clarified this. Until this is clarified by the government, this confusion will continue to persist,” Rajagopal told The Probe.

Rajagopal's passport had expired in October 2025. When he applied for renewal in February 2026, his file was quietly diverted to the Security Control Organisation, which functions under the Kolkata Police Special Branch, instead of being processed routinely. On 17 June, the Regional Passport Office officially informed him that the police had submitted an adverse verification report, citing his deletion from the electoral rolls as the reason. He was then given an appointment to appear before the Passport Office on 17 July. In the months in between, Rajagopal spent his days tracking down decades-old records of his parents from Kerala, trying to establish an identity he had never once been asked to prove in over three decades as one of India's best-known editors.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Rajagopal said the logic of how his case was eventually resolved raises more questions than it answers, and that he does not see this as a moment to celebrate.

“I recently read that another 17 people are affected like this. The actual numbers could be higher. If the police can use SIR data arbitrarily, it is a dangerous situation for people. The government could have issued a standalone statement to clear the air on whether SIR data can be used to deny passports to people, but that has still not happened. After my case came to light, no one in the government contacted me, except one passport official who called me three days ago and told me to send an email to the Regional Passport Office seeking re-verification. I sent the email. But the point to be noted is that I was not asked to submit any document or go anywhere — nothing. What does this show? It shows that the documents I had already submitted were enough for them to issue my passport. But if those documents were enough, then why did they deny me the passport in the first place? Obviously, it looks like they acted under pressure from the media, the Editors Guild of India, the Press Club of India and others who took up my matter. But what about those whose matters were not taken up by anyone? They deserve relief too. That is why I don't feel jubilant about getting my passport alone,” Rajagopal said.

Rajagopal received his renewed passport via speed post on 4 July. The resolution comes after sustained media coverage of his case, along with the intervention of the Editors Guild of India and the Press Club of India, who took up the matter with the authorities. Rajagopal had also written to the Kolkata Police Commissioner and approached the National Human Rights Commission during the course of his ordeal, neither of which yielded a substantive response at the time. His case before the SIR appellate tribunal, concerning the original deletion of his and his late father's names from the electoral rolls, remains pending.

Rajagopal said his thoughts now turn to others caught in the same uncertainty, particularly author and journalist Samrat Choudhury, whose case The Probe reported on separately.

“I really wish and hope that Samrat Choudhury gets his passport too. Samrat's case is more worrisome — even after he submitted all his documents, when they told him his citizenship was denied, they didn't give him a reason why. I want all the people who have faced this problem to get relief from the government,” Rajagopal said.

The Probe had earlier reported on Samrat Choudhury's case, a writer and former editor who has held an Indian passport since 1993. On 24 June, Passport Seva Divas, Choudhury's passport was impounded by the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata after an adverse police report stated that his citizenship was "not established" — a finding that came with no explanation on file. Choudhury was born before 1987 and is a citizen by birth under Indian law, meaning he is not legally required to prove descent from Indian parents. He was nonetheless asked to produce his parents' passports, his Aadhaar card, his voter ID, his Class 10 certificate and other documents. His case remains unresolved.

Also Read:  Indian by Birth, Passport Gone, Citizenship in Doubt: Samrat Choudhury

Inside The Passport Office: What Rajagopal Says He Witnessed

In his conversation with The Probe, Samrat Choudhury had described the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata as a Kafkaesque space where he saw people sitting on the floor, crying, overwhelmed by the process. Rajagopal told The Probe that this account matches exactly what he saw himself when he visited the same office.

“At the regional passport office in Kolkata, when I went there, I saw a lot of people crying. I could see that these were marginalised people, and many of them could barely breathe. One gentleman thought I was some sort of officer and approached me as I was leaving the passport office. He pleaded with me, saying, 'Sir, please help me, help me, help me. My job will be in jeopardy.' He was a Bengali who works abroad. I felt so helpless. So many people are facing the same problem. That is why, even today, when I get my passport, I am not happy about it," Rajagopal said.

Passport Taken, Citizenship Questioned: Samrat Choudhury in Conversation with Prema Sridevi

Today I'm joined by a writer who has spent years studying one of the most difficult questions in this country — the question of belonging. Who is an insider, who is an outsider, and who holds the power to decide this?

Samrat Choudhury was born in Shillong. He edited major newspapers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru before turning to the Northeast to write its political history — the story of how a diverse, complex region became part of India, and how its people came to belong.

He co-edited two books on precisely that theme. The first is Insider-Outsider: Belonging and Unbelonging in North-East India. The second is But I Am One of You: Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong.

Samrat has held an Indian passport since 1993. He has a voter ID card and has been voting regularly. He has every document the state could possibly ask for — his own documents as well as his parents' documents.

And yet, on June 24 — look at the irony — on Passport Seva Divas, the very day the government celebrates the service of issuing passports, the state took his passport away. The reason recorded on the notice was simple: "Citizenship not established."

A man who spent his life writing about belonging is now being asked to prove that he belongs.

This is the second such story we are bringing to you — of a credible Indian, arguably more Indian than those now deciding whether he is Indian at all. Earlier, we brought you the story of R. Rajagopal, former editor of The Telegraph. Here is the story of Samrat Choudhury.

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, thank you for joining me on The Probe.

Samrat Choudhury: Thank you.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

How a Passport Held Since 1993 Was Suddenly Taken Away

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, you've held an Indian passport since 1993, but today you don't have one. Tell me exactly what happened.

Samrat Choudhury: I received a letter from the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata, which has jurisdiction over my passport since it was issued there. The letter simply stated that they had received an adverse police report regarding my passport.

It was a Tatkal passport that had been issued in 2022. Four years later, for reasons I still don't understand, I was informed that an adverse police report had been received stating that my citizenship had not been established.

The notice directed me to appear before the Regional Passport Office within 21 days to contest the case and show cause as to why my passport should not be cancelled.

As you mentioned in your introduction, it so happened that I appeared before the Regional Passport Office on Passport Seva Divas itself. On that day, my passport was taken away, and I was informed that my case would be sent for re-verification to establish whether I was indeed an Indian citizen.

"Citizenship Not Established" — But Why?

Prema Sridevi: But Samrat, this was a passport that had been issued to you in 2022 under the Tatkal scheme. Earlier, when we spoke, you mentioned that the process had been extremely straightforward. You received the passport within just two days. It is therefore very strange that four years later the authorities suddenly ask you to surrender your passport. When they wrote "citizenship not established", what exactly did they mean? What reason did they cite for arriving at that conclusion?

Samrat Choudhury: I have absolutely no idea. It is as much a mystery to me as it is to anyone else.

When I went to the Regional Passport Office, the official handling my case opened my computerised file in front of me. There is a designated field in the system where the reason for an adverse report is supposed to be recorded. That field was blank. No reason whatsoever had been entered.

So I was never informed why my citizenship had suddenly come into question. I was born in India, and I was born before 1987. Under Indian law, I am a citizen by birth. My entire education has been in India. My entire professional life has been in India. I have always been a resident of India. So I genuinely do not know what suddenly happened to cause this. It remains as much a mystery to me as it is to everyone else.

"Which Document Was Missing?" The Authorities Had No Answer

Prema Sridevi: When you visited the passport office and later the police station, I'm sure you must have asked the officials on what basis they believed your citizenship had not been established. Did they tell you which document was missing? Did they point out anything that you had failed to submit? What was their response?

Samrat Choudhury: I only went to the Regional Passport Office. As I mentioned, the official opened the computerised file in front of me. Since no reason had been entered into the system, even the person at the counter had no idea why the adverse police report had been issued.

I was also informed that my documentation was perfectly fine. So I still do not know what went wrong. After that, my file was sent back to the police for re-verification. I returned to the police station and submitted all my documents again.

Also Read:  Passport Renewal Nightmare: Former Telegraph Editor Narrates Ordeal

A Growing List of Documents

Samrat Choudhury: I have held an Indian passport since 1993. Over the years, I have gone through the passport verification process several times. My passports have been issued from Shillong, where I was born; from Delhi, where I worked with Hindustan Times and India Today; and from Bengaluru, where I was effectively functioning as the Resident Editor of The New Indian Express.

This is the first time I have ever been asked to produce not just my own documents but also copies of my father's passport, my mother's passport, my Aadhaar card, my voter ID card, my Class 10 certificate, electricity bills and several other documents. The list of documentary requirements seemed to grow longer and longer.

When I looked at the passport rules, I could not find any provision requiring such extensive documentation. Ordinarily, the rules require documents establishing identity and date of birth. If my Aadhaar card reflects my current address, then technically that single document should be sufficient. At most, one may need two or three documents.

There is no legal requirement in India that someone born before 1987 must prove descent from Indian parents. That simply is not the law. Fortunately, I had every one of these documents, so I was able to submit them all.

Citizenship Law: Why 1987 Matters

Prema Sridevi: It's important that you mentioned the year 1987 because that's where citizenship law changed in India. The law clearly says that if a person was born in India before 1987, birth on Indian soil itself automatically makes that person an Indian citizen.

The 1986 amendment changed that position. For those born between July 1, 1987 and December 2004, birth in India alone was no longer sufficient. At least one parent had to be an Indian citizen. For those born after December 2004, the law became even stricter. Both parents must be citizens, or one parent must be a citizen while the other cannot be an illegal immigrant.

But you were born before 1987. That means you fall squarely within the category of citizens by birth. You are not legally required to prove your lineage. Then why should you be asked to submit your parents' documents and so many additional records? It simply doesn't make sense.

Samrat Choudhury: I am completely mystified. I have no idea why this process was applied to me. I should also add that I do not believe I am being individually targeted. I don't think this is targeted harassment.

Instead, it appears to me that some sort of bureaucratic process has taken hold — a bureaucratic regime of suspicion. While standing in line at the Regional Passport Office and later at the police station, I noticed many ordinary people who had also been asked to produce similarly long lists of documents. So I don't think this is something directed only at me.

It appears that, somewhere within the administration, the bar has simply been raised, even though I don't believe the law itself has changed.

Also Read:  West Bengal Voter Deletion: How Elections Are Won Before Polling Day

Was This Linked to the Fake Passport Racket?

Prema Sridevi: You said that you don't think you were specifically targeted. Could there be another explanation? In 2024, a fake passport racket was busted in Kolkata, following which the police tightened passport verification norms. Do you think your case is part of that broader crackdown?

Samrat Choudhury: Well, that happened in 2024, which is already two years ago. I honestly don't know whether there is something continuing within the system because of that.

Normally, if a Tatkal passport is issued, there is post-police verification. But one would expect that verification to happen within 21 or 30 days — roughly within a month. In my case, however, four years later, an adverse police report suddenly surfaced.

An adverse report is not something that should be issued lightly, especially when it questions a person's citizenship. Ordinarily, the police are expected to verify whether the applicant has a criminal record and whether the particulars furnished in the application are correct. When they visit your home, they verify that the person matches the photograph, that the address is correct, and that the documents correspond with the applicant. That is why it is particularly strange that my citizenship itself has been questioned.

"Even I Cannot Understand Why My Citizenship Was Questioned"

Samrat Choudhury: What makes my case even more puzzling is that sometimes suspicions are raised because of a person's religion or ethnicity. But I am a Hindu Bengali currently residing in West Bengal, and my passport was issued by the Regional Passport Office in Kolkata. So even by those standards, I genuinely do not know what the reason could have been.

What Does It Feel Like to Prove That You Belong?

Prema Sridevi: You have now submitted far more documents than the law actually requires. Without getting into anything that could affect your ongoing case, I simply want to ask you this: What does it feel like to prove that you belong to a country that you love and respect so deeply? How frustrating was it to repeatedly visit government offices and convince people that you belong here?

Samrat Choudhury: It is actually heartbreaking. Especially for me. Throughout my life I have dealt with this question of belonging because I was born and raised in Northeast India, where there has long been suspicion towards Bengalis.

There is a long history of riots, violence and hostility in different parts of the Northeast. I could describe it year by year, state by state, going back to the 1960s. Even when I was growing up in Shillong during the 1980s and 1990s, there was always this feeling that one might be treated as an outsider.

But strangely enough, that treatment came from strangers, from mobs on the streets — not from the State. Friendships were never affected. The government never questioned my citizenship.

This is the first time in my life that the State itself has questioned whether I belong. Ironically, it has happened after I moved to West Bengal. If a Bengali does not belong in West Bengal, then where exactly am I supposed to go? Am I a Bangladeshi? Why is the State questioning my citizenship without even telling me why it is doing so? It is deeply painful.

The Burden Falls on Cross-Border Communities

Samrat Choudhury: I also think this burden falls disproportionately on particular communities. Certainly Bengali Muslims are affected. But Bengali Hindus are affected as well.

Nobody is likely to assume that a Tamil is Bangladeshi or that a Gujarati is Bangladeshi. However, any community that exists across national borders is vulnerable under this kind of bureaucratic suspicion. For example, Nepali-speaking Indians are often suspected because Nepal lies across the border. Similarly, Tamils may face suspicion because there is also a Tamil population in Sri Lanka.

Whenever the bureaucracy begins to operate through suspicion rather than law, every cross-border community becomes vulnerable. That is the danger of this kind of citizenship verification regime.

"Citizenship Not Established"

Prema Sridevi: What exactly was written on the notice you received? Did it simply say, "Citizenship not established"?

Samrat Choudhury: Yes.

Prema Sridevi: When you first saw those words, what went through your mind? It is not only shocking — it is deeply hurtful. How did you process that moment?

Samrat Choudhury: It was both shocking and hurtful. The first thing I wondered was: What on earth has happened?

If this had happened at the time I applied for the passport, I might have assumed it was some bureaucratic error. But because it happened four years later, naturally I began asking myself whether it had something to do with something I had written. The irony is that I am no longer actively involved in journalism. I hardly write these days. So I was left completely mystified.

Prema Sridevi: That's exactly what many citizens begin thinking. People naturally wonder whether they are being targeted because of something they wrote or said. But that should never be the case.

Samrat Choudhury: Exactly. Frankly, even if I had written something critical, that still would not be a valid reason to question my citizenship. Whether someone dislikes a headline I wrote has absolutely nothing to do with whether I am an Indian citizen.

We are also asked to participate in elections. If my citizenship can be questioned because I voted for the "wrong" political party, then what is the purpose of holding elections at all? If citizens are not free to vote according to their conscience, then why spend enormous public money conducting elections? That defeats the very purpose of democracy.

A Writer Who Spent Years Studying the Meaning of Belonging

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, I mentioned this in my introduction. You have written extensively about the Northeast. You have authored and edited books that examine the very concept of belonging. When we spoke earlier over the phone, you told me that you always feared this question of belonging would one day become a national issue. Today, that is exactly what seems to be happening. Tell me about your books. What does belonging really mean? Why is it so important for citizens to feel that they belong? And what happens when that sense of belonging is taken away? How dangerous is it when this becomes a national problem?

Samrat Choudhury: Belonging really lies at the core of a person's identity. It is one of the fundamental elements that shape who we are.

When the State questions your citizenship, it does not merely affect your sense of self. It also affects your rights. The right to travel. The right to vote. And sometimes even more basic rights. During the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise, media reports have already spoken about people losing access to ration benefits because their names did not appear in the electoral rolls. A poor family can lose access to food without even understanding why their names have disappeared from the system.

If educated, privileged and well-connected people like me — or like R. Rajagopal — have to struggle to prove something that the law already recognises, then I cannot imagine what an ordinary landless farmer living in a border district must endure.

I am a Bengali. My name clearly identifies me. My religion is Hindu. Even then, I have found this process difficult. Imagine the situation of a Muslim farmer living in a border district whose name does not appear in the SIR records. I honestly do not know how such a person would survive repeated rounds of bureaucratic scrutiny. That kind of process can become deeply painful and drawn out.

The NRC Experience and Why Samrat Sees It as a Warning

Prema Sridevi: That's a very important point you've made. Like Mr. R. Rajagopal, you've repeatedly said that you don't want this discussion to be about you personally. You've already explained what ordinary citizens could face if their citizenship comes under question. But when you visited the Regional Passport Office and later the police station, what exactly did you see around you? What kind of difficulties were other people facing? Before that, however, you also spoke about Assam. You believe Assam's experience offers an important warning for the rest of India. Tell us why.

Samrat Choudhury: Assam is the only state in India where the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise was actually completed. I believe it provides an important case study of what could happen elsewhere if similar exercises continue.

The NRC exercise in Assam was conducted when Justice Ranjan Gogoi, who himself is from Assam, was the Chief Justice of India. The BJP was in power both in Assam and at the Centre. The exercise was carried out rigorously under their supervision. It took years to complete. It cost approximately ₹1,600 to ₹1,700 crore.

Every resident of Assam became part of that exercise, along with the entire state machinery. When the process finally concluded, around 19 lakh people had been left out of the NRC. But the irony was that the very people who had demanded the exercise ultimately rejected its outcome. As a result, the NRC left lakhs of people in limbo.

The next legal or administrative step — whether acceptance of the report, notification or implementation — never truly materialised. Years have now passed. Instead of resolving uncertainty, the process created more confusion.

My concern is whether this same documentary uncertainty — what I would call document terror — will now spread across the rest of India. That is what worries me.

Inside the Passport Office: "Kafkaesque Spaces"

Prema Sridevi: You and Mr. Rajagopal have both been clear that this isn't only about your individual cases. When you visited the Regional Passport Office and later the police station, what did you actually witness? What kind of environment did you find yourself in?

Samrat Choudhury: I have to say those spaces themselves felt dystopian. They were Kafkaesque. I didn't take photographs, but if photography had been permitted, those offices could easily have become the subject of an entire photo essay.

The buildings are old. The corridors are narrow. Rooms branch off in every direction. People wander through these corridors carrying files, trying to understand where they are supposed to go. What struck me most was the emotion. I saw people sitting on the floor crying. Some were crying loudly.

Prema Sridevi: Outside the passport office?

Samrat Choudhury: Inside the passport office. It felt like a place carrying the accumulated anxieties of countless people. Entry is tightly controlled — only those carrying the appropriate documents are allowed inside. Yet the building remains overcrowded. The queues snake through the corridors.

To be honest, I also felt sorry for the officials working there. I wish the Government of India would invest more resources in improving these spaces. Better buildings. Better layouts. More humane environments. Public service should begin by making citizens feel that they are entering a place designed to help them — not intimidate them. The entire process should become less harrowing for everyone who has to go there.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

Why Such Systems Create Middlemen

Samrat Choudhury: The other problem is that people often leave these offices without receiving the help they need. When citizens cannot navigate the system, they step outside the building — and someone immediately approaches them saying, "I know someone inside. I can help you." That is precisely the environment in which middlemen thrive.

Ironically, this is also the kind of system that eventually contributes to fake passport rackets of the sort we discussed earlier. If the government does not create a transparent, citizen-friendly process, people become dependent on unofficial intermediaries.

The officials behind the counters often appear to make life even more difficult by demanding documents that are not officially required. Citizens begin the process under suspicion. When they find themselves trapped in a maze of paperwork with no assistance, many turn to middlemen. That is not how a public institution should function.

"I Have Complied With Everything Asked of Me"

Prema Sridevi: The bitter irony in your case is impossible to ignore. Your passport was taken away on Passport Seva Divas — the very day meant to celebrate passport services. And another irony is that someone who has written extensively about the idea of belonging is now being asked to prove that he belongs, despite having been born before 1987, when no law required you to establish your lineage. At this stage, getting your passport back is obviously important. What happens next?

Samrat Choudhury: I have completed every documentary requirement placed before me. I responded to the show-cause notice. I appeared before the Regional Passport Office. I surrendered my passport because I was directed to do so.

The file was then sent back to the police for verification. I have met the police officials. I submitted all my documents once again. They told me that my documentation was completely in order and that everything was fine at their level. They said they would forward the file to the appropriate authority. As far as I know, the process is now simply moving through the bureaucracy. I hope it concludes without any further complications in the near future.

"We Are Citizens by Birth"

Prema Sridevi: My final question. You wrote a book titled But I Am One of You. Today, the system is asking you to prove exactly that. If you could say one thing to the system that is questioning your belonging, what would it be?

Samrat Choudhury: I would simply remind the system of what our Constitution and the laws of the Republic already say. Those born before 1987 are citizens of India by birth. This growing regime of suspicion, where everyone is treated as a suspect without any written law justifying that suspicion, shifts the burden onto ordinary citizens for reasons that are neither explained nor recorded.

That is an extremely harsh way to govern a country of 1.4 billion people. We have already seen in Assam that this model did not produce the results its supporters expected. If such documentary scrutiny is extended across the country, lakhs of people's lives could be disrupted simply because a name was misspelled in a document decades ago.

Families will be forced into endless bureaucratic battles over clerical mistakes. That kind of uncertainty creates anxiety, resentment and unrest. People will not be happy. Lakhs upon lakhs of citizens could find themselves affected. That is not a situation any country should want to create.

Prema Sridevi: Samrat, thank you for speaking with us, and for speaking so openly even while your own case remains unresolved. I genuinely hope your passport is returned to you soon and that the questions your experience raises are answered — not only for you, but for everyone else caught in the same uncertainty. Thank you.

Samrat Choudhury: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

In This Country, What Does It Take to Prove You Belong?

Samrat Choudhury will very likely get his passport back. He has a name, a body of work, and people willing to speak up for him. But that is exactly what should worry us.

Because the man who wrote the definitive history of how the Northeast became part of India — who co-edited two books on what it means to belong — was still asked by his own government to prove that he belongs. If it can happen to him, with every document in order and a passport held since 1993, it can happen to anyone.

This is now the second such story we've brought you, after R. Rajagopal. Two credible Indians, asked to prove something the law had already settled long ago. And behind them are countless others with no book to their name, no editor's title, and no one to write a letter on their behalf. These Indian citizens are quietly gathering old records, standing in queues, and trying to prove they are Indian.

The law says birth on this soil made them citizens. The state now seems to be asking for something more. Until there is a clear answer to this simple question, we will keep asking it: In this country, what does it actually take to prove that you belong?

I'm Prema Sridevi. This is The Probe.

In June 2026, the Delhi government's Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) arrested the former head of the Central Procurement Agency (CPA) of the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS). Days later, it arrested a former DGHS chief and a senior accounts officer. The ACB pegs the alleged medical-procurement racket at roughly Rs 650–700 crore.

Portable X-ray machines were allegedly billed at Rs 33 lakh against a market price near Rs 10 lakh; hospital bedsheets at Rs 450 against Rs 150; oral rehydration sachets (ORS) at Rs 15 against Rs 2.5. This deep dive report seeks to reconstruct how the alleged CPA scam worked and how it surfaced, explain the digital procurement architecture — the Government e-Marketplace (GeM), the Central Public Procurement Portal and e-tendering — that was meant to prevent exactly this, and dissect where checks and balances, transparency and documentation failed. It also gives the accused the benefit of the doubt where the evidence permits, then asks the uncomfortable question: if such leakage is possible in a relatively small health budget, what is happening in the far larger arenas of roads, buildings and big-ticket capital equipment? 

Also Read:  Passport Renewal Nightmare: Former Telegraph Editor Narrates Ordeal

How the CPA scam worked

Strip away the jargon and the alleged fraud is almost insultingly simple: buy cheap, bill dear, pocket the gap. Investigators say the Central Procurement Agency — the centralised buyer for Delhi government hospitals and dispensaries, operating under the DGHS of the Government of NCT of Delhi — paid roughly three times the going rate for portable X-ray machines, triple for ordinary linen, and six times for a humble ORS sachet. The ACB has so far valued the CPA racket at around Rs 650–700 crore, and says the figure may climb as the books are reconstructed.

Three names anchor the case. Dr Vinod Kumar Ranga, former Head of Office of the CPA, was arrested on June 18 and remanded to police custody; the ACB alleges he kept crucial procurement files in his personal custody and failed to explain their disappearance. Days later the ACB arrested Dr Vatsala Aggarwal, a former DGHS chief, and Neeraj Chopra, a Deputy Controller of Accounts at the CPA, after they allegedly could not provide "satisfactory explanations." 

Around a dozen more officials, contractors and bidders are reportedly on the radar, and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has since opened a parallel money-laundering case under the PMLA. One clarification matters: this is the Delhi NCT government's health-procurement arm, not the Union Health Ministry's — a distinction the headlines blur but the accountability does not.

Also Read:  CIC Imposes Penalty on DGHS in Artemis Hospital Case, The Probe Impact

How the CPA case came to light

Scams of this kind rarely announce themselves; they leak. This one began to surface in May 2026, when the Delhi Directorate of Vigilance, acting on complaints about tenders for medicines, surgical items and equipment, raided the Central Procurement Agency's office across two nights. When vigilance officers arrived on May 18 to collect the CPA's procurement records, they were told the key files were unavailable — and that they sat in Dr Ranga's custody. Even after some folders were later handed over, the principal procurement files allegedly remained missing. On June 2 the ACB converted the vigilance complaint into an FIR under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988 (as amended in 2018), read with the criminal-conspiracy provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.

From there the dominoes fell quickly: Ranga's arrest on June 18, the arrests of Aggarwal and Chopra on June 27, the suspension of five pharmacists and two CPA officials after an internal inquiry, and a Section 17A sanction to prosecute. The Lieutenant Governor (LG) ordered disciplinary action; the Chief Minister invoked the familiar "zero-tolerance" refrain. The sequence is textbook — vigilance flag, FIR, arrests, ED entry — but the very fact that it took missing files and a tip-off, rather than the procurement system's own alarms, to expose the racket is itself the first indictment of the system.

The anatomy of the alleged fraud

The alleged padding was spread across categories so that no single contract screamed. On portable X-ray machines — Rs 33 lakh a unit against a market price near Rs 10 lakh — the vigilance department estimates excess payment of around Rs 100 crore under one contract alone. On linen, three linked suppliers were allegedly paid Rs 75 crore against an estimated true cost of Rs 25 crore, leaving Rs 50 crore to be siphoned.

For C-arm radiology units and anaesthesia workstations, technical specifications were allegedly tailored to favour particular models, with equipment available for a few lakh rupees invoiced at multiples of cost. And in ORS and surgical consumables — sachets, sutures, cannulas, gloves — procurement worth around Rs 400 crore was routed through hospital-level local chemist tenders, with nearly Rs 300 crore allegedly diverted.

The method, as alleged in the complaint, is where the real lesson hides. Manufacturers reportedly first agreed among themselves to nominate specific distributors; those distributors then drafted restrictive technical specifications and tender conditions tailored to their nominees; the documents were allegedly submitted to Ranga and approved by DGHS officials. Several ostensibly independent firms were allegedly controlled by a single distributor close to the officials under scrutiny. Approvals were granted on the same day, financial bids were opened secretly, and purchase orders were issued by the CPA without publishing the awards on the Government e-Marketplace or other e-procurement portals — and tenders were deliberately kept marked "Active" even after contracts were awarded and paid, so competitors and the public could never see the final rates. In other words, the fraud did not defeat the transparency machinery so much as route around it.

The digital system built to prevent this

India did not sleepwalk into this. The Government e-Marketplace (GeM), launched on 9 August 2016 and built in a record five months, was conceived precisely to drag public buying out of the paper-and-handshake era. It replaced the old Directorate General of Supplies and Disposals (DGS&D), is owned by a 100% government-owned non-profit (the GeM Special Purpose Vehicle), and was made effectively mandatory for central purchases through Rule 149 of the General Financial Rules, 2017. Its pitch is a holy trinity of efficiency, transparency and inclusiveness: open catalogues, e-bidding, reverse e-auctions, demand aggregation and audit trails, with the World Bank estimating median savings near 9.75% over legacy processes.

Alongside GeM sits the Central Public Procurement Portal (CPPP), where open tenders are advertised, and a suite of state e-tendering systems. The theory is elegant: publish the requirement, let everyone bid, open bids on a fixed clock, award to the lowest compliant offer, and post the result for the world to audit. "E-market" simply means buying standardised goods off a digital catalogue at displayed prices; "e-procurement" means running the tender — notice, bid submission, evaluation, award — through a portal that timestamps every click. The bitter irony of the Delhi case is that these rails existed and were allegedly avoided: routine consumables were pushed through off-portal "local chemist" tenders, awards went unpublished, and the "Active" status trick kept the digital trail permanently inconclusive. A transparency tool is only as honest as the official obliged to use it.

Also Read:  RBI Bans Dark Patterns: A Confession Dressed as a Circular

How the Central Procurement Agency became a single point of failure

A central procurement agency exists for good reasons. Instead of every hospital separately haggling for gauze and ventilators, a single body aggregates demand, standardises specifications, negotiates volume discounts and professionalises buying. Done well, centralisation is the taxpayer's friend — it is the logic behind GeM itself. But centralisation has a dark twin: it concentrates discretion. When one Head of Office can shape specifications, one accounts wing can clear payments, and one distributor can allegedly puppeteer a clutch of "competing" firms, the CPA, designed to be a shield, becomes a single, well-guarded gate where a small group can quietly set the toll. The Central Procurement Agency was meant to be a bottleneck against waste; instead, the CPA became a bottleneck that throttled competition.

Where the rules and safeguards failed

Let us start with the foundation: India still has no single, comprehensive statute governing public procurement. The General Financial Rules (GFR) and the procurement manuals are executive instructions, not law; "procurement" does not even appear as a distinct subject in the Constitution's Seventh Schedule, and a Public Procurement Bill drafted in 2012 on the UNCITRAL model has been gathering dust ever since. That means much of the discipline depends on internal rules and the integrity of the people applying them — precisely the variable that allegedly failed here.

Even the digital system has gameable seams. GeM permits proprietary-article buying via a Proprietary Article Certificate (PAC), low-value direct purchases below fixed thresholds, and rate-based selection — features that are legitimate but exploitable. Splitting a large demand into many small ones to dodge competitive bidding is formally prohibited, yet remains a perennial dodge. The master key, though, is specification capture: write the technical specifications so tightly that only one model qualifies, and an "open" tender becomes a coronation.

Indian courts have recognised exactly this danger, carving out an exception to their usual hands-off stance for tenders that are "tailor-made" to favour one bidder or exclude all others. Add the lowest-bidder (L1) reflex — which has elsewhere left laboratories and hospitals with substandard supplies because price, not fitness, decides — and we have a regime that can be gamed from both ends: inflate through captured specifications, or hollow out through cheap, non-compliant goods.

Crucially, enforcement against the supply side has long been weak. Analysts note that while tenders routinely carry anti-corruption clauses, there has historically been little by way of penalties for bidders who collude, and scant institutional muscle to detect cartels and bid-rigging — even though these are the very mechanics alleged at the CPA.

At the Central Procurement Agency, four classic controls appear to have failed at once.

First, documentation: the CPA's audit trail is the spine of accountability, and missing files kept in an official's personal custody snap that spine cleanly — no records, no reconstruction, no proof.

Second, segregation of duties: when the same hands that draft specifications also approve them, open the financial bids and clear the payments, the wall between proposer and approver collapses, and "same-day approvals" become possible.

Third, transparency by publication: awards that are never posted, and tenders frozen at "Active", defeat the single cheapest anti-corruption device there is — the gaze of competitors and citizens.

Fourth, the timing of oversight: vigilance arrived after the money had moved, not before. Internal audit and pre-audit are supposed to be the smoke detectors; here they functioned as the fire brigade, useful only once the building was already alight.

Is there another side to the story?

Fairness demands it. These are allegations, not convictions; the FIR is a charge, not a verdict, and the accused are entitled to a defence and to the presumption of innocence until a court says otherwise. Beyond that bedrock, a sceptic can raise genuinely substantive doubts. Price benchmarking in healthcare is treacherous: a "market price" quoted for a bare consumer-grade device is not comparable to a hospital-grade machine bought with calibration, warranty, annual maintenance, spares and staff training bundled in; certified medical linen and pharmacopoeia-grade ORS legitimately cost more than the cheapest bazaar equivalent. Headline multiples — "six times the market rate" — can mislead if they compare a lifecycle contract against a spot price, or conflate total contract value with per-unit cost.

There is also a structural irony worth airing: India's own lowest-bidder orthodoxy has been blamed for substandard supplies, which means that paying more may not, by itself, be proof of graft — sometimes it is the price of quality the L1 rule otherwise crushes. And trial by media has a poor record of distinguishing aggressive negotiation from criminal conspiracy. That said, the benefit of the doubt has limits. Missing principal files, awards withheld from the portal, financial bids opened in secret, same-day clearances, and a web of firms allegedly run by one distributor are not the fingerprints of honest price variation. Even the most charitable reading struggles to explain why the CPA's paper trail vanished.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Could it happen on a bigger scale?

Here is the sobering part. India's public procurement is gigantic — an estimated 15–20% of GDP, somewhere between Rs 15 and Rs 20 lakh crore, or roughly USD 500–600 billion a year. A Rs 700-crore health racket at the Central Procurement Agency is, in that ocean, a rounding error. And the larger the contract, the richer the opportunity. In civil works and infrastructure the favourite trick is the mirror image of inflation: the "suicide bid", where a contractor quotes absurdly low to win, then — often with complicit consultants and engineers — recovers and multiplies the loss through inflated variation claims, bogus "extra items", and ghost works never executed, sometimes leaving behind roads that crack and bridges that fail.

This is not hypothetical. In the Jal Jeevan Mission, investigators in Rajasthan flagged roughly Rs 960 crore in contracts allegedly awarded on fake documentation, with the broader manipulation network estimated to touch contracts worth up to Rs 20,000 crore. Cartelisation is now serious enough that the Competition Commission of India passed an order against 17 entities for collusive bidding in April 2026, and the national auditor is pushing data-driven detection of bid rotation and vendor clustering.

Defence — India's most capital-intensive procurement — remains rated a high corruption risk, with no dedicated central legislation governing it. The Delhi medical case, in short, is a small and legible specimen of a much larger pathology: scale up the rupees and the same levers recur — specification capture, collusive bidding, weak documentation and concentrated discretion.

If this could happen in the national capital — under the watch of a Lieutenant Governor, an active legislature and a press pack always on the lookout — it is worth asking what goes unnoticed in states where scrutiny is weaker and the spotlight dimmer. The Union government's 2016 e-procurement template has not stayed in Delhi: the Government e-Marketplace is now operational across all 36 states and union territories, and at least eight — Maharashtra, Gujarat, Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Manipur and others — have made its use mandatory. That is a single, standardised pipe carrying a colossal share of public money through identical valves and joints — which means identical loopholes (specification capture, PAC misuse, off-portal "local" tenders, unpublished awards) are now replicable in thirty-six jurisdictions at once. This is precisely the terrain a performance audit is built for.

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) should mount a focussed, holistic, all-India performance audit of GeM and state e-procurement — not a politically selective trawl that singles out opposition-ruled states, but an even-handed, criteria-based examination applied uniformly to every government, ruling party and opposition alike. An audit that flinches along party lines audits nothing; one that maps the same red flags across all thirty-six is how a one-city scandal becomes a nationwide cure.

Fixing the system before the next scam

The fixes are not mysterious; the will to apply them is the scarce resource.

First, give procurement a spine of law: enact a genuine, statutory public-procurement Act — the long-pending UNCITRAL-based framework — so that integrity does not rest solely on executive rules an official can quietly ignore.

Second, make the digital rails unavoidable and tamper-evident: route routine goods through GeM or e-tendering with immutable, time-stamped audit trails, auto-publish every award by default, abolish off-portal "local" tenders for standard items, and kill the "keep-it-Active" loophole that hides outcomes.

Third, attack specification capture at the source — mandate generic, performance-based specifications vetted by independent technical committees, and auto-flag any tender that effectively names a single make or model. Fourth, professionalise price discovery: maintain shared benchmark-price databases and evaluate on whole-of-life cost rather than the crude L1 reflex, so that quality is rewarded and inflation is caught.

Fifth, rebuild the human controls: enforce segregation of duties, rotate procurement staff, demand conflict-of-interest declarations, and end personal custody of files through mandatory digital record-keeping with whistle-blower protection.

Sixth, shift oversight from autopsy to early warning — actually deploy (rather than presenting papers only in conferences) the analytics the CAG and CCI are now championing to spot bid rotation, suspicious vendor clusters and price outliers in near real time, and pair them with independent and social audits.

Finally, give accountability teeth: real penalties and debarment for collusion, swift asset recovery through the ED route, and time-bound prosecution so that "zero tolerance" becomes a track record rather than a press release. The Delhi CPA case will be remembered not for the bedsheets and the X-ray machines, but for whether it finally forces the system to install the smoke detectors before the next, far bigger, fire.

Passport Renewal Nightmare: "If This Can Happen to Me, It Can Happen to Any Indian"

For more than three decades, R. Rajagopal helped shape India's public discourse as one of the country's most respected editors. As Editor of The Telegraph, he was known for fearless journalism, sharp editorial judgment, and headlines that often defined the national conversation.

Today, however, Rajagopal finds himself at the centre of a bureaucratic battle unlike anything he reported during his long journalistic career. His name was deleted from the electoral rolls, preventing him from voting in the West Bengal Assembly elections. His passport renewal was subsequently held up, forcing him to miss the possibility of attending his daughter's wedding in the United States despite possessing a valid long-term U.S. visa. Now, he spends his days searching for decades-old records of his parents in an effort to prove his identity.

In this conversation with The Probe, Rajagopal recounts his experience, reflects on journalism, democracy and citizenship, and raises larger questions about the systems governing identity in India.

Passport Renewal Becomes an Unexpected Battle

Prema Sridevi: Mr. Rajagopal, thank you for taking the time to speak with The Probe.

Before we get into the larger issues surrounding your case, I'd like you to begin with the basic facts. You held a valid passport that was nearing expiry, and you applied for a routine passport renewal. The timing was particularly important because you wanted the option of attending your daughter's wedding in the United States.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

Could you walk us through exactly what happened? How did what should have been a routine administrative process become such a prolonged ordeal for you and your family?

R. Rajagopal: Thank you. I am speaking to you from Kolkata, where I have lived for many years. My first passport was issued in 2005 from this very address after the required police verification was completed.

Ten years later, in 2015, I renewed the passport from the same address. Once again, the police verification was carried out without any issues.

My passport expired in October 2025. At that time, I was in Kerala. I returned to Kolkata in February and applied for passport renewal. Nothing had changed—not my address, not my personal details. 

The initial process was remarkably smooth. Biometrics took barely twenty to twenty-five minutes.

The very next day, my application was forwarded to the Ballygunge Police Station for police verification. In the past, the police had always visited my residence for verification. This time, however, I received a call asking me to come to the police station instead.

I assumed the police were under considerable pressure because the West Bengal Assembly elections were approaching. I didn't want to insist that they visit my home, so I went to the station.

Before I went, the officer asked me to bring my voter identity card.

I asked why it was required.

He told me they needed it to generate a one-time password for verification of my antecedents.

I explained that while I could physically bring the voter card, it would not serve any purpose because my name had already been deleted from the electoral rolls on 29 March because of the SIR process.

The officer seemed momentarily unsure about how to proceed. He then asked me to bring other documents instead—my matriculation certificate, my father's death certificate, Aadhaar card, PAN card, and utility bills establishing my residence.

I took all the original documents to the police station. The officers examined them carefully, took photocopies, and informed me that the passport renewal process would continue.

At that point, I was not worried in the slightest.

I had absolutely no idea that there was any connection whatsoever between deletion from the electoral rolls and passport renewal.

As far as I was concerned, the deletion from the voters' list appeared to be because of some logical discrepancy—perhaps a spelling mismatch or some similar issue. I was confident that whenever the appellate authority called me, I would be able to establish my credentials without difficulty.

After all, you don't expect someone to suddenly tell you that you are not Indian.

So I assumed it was simply a procedural glitch.

Also Watch:  Passport IS Citizenship Proof: Government Documents Expose the Truth

 Meanwhile, Bengal was in the middle of election season. I attended campaign events in Khardah where a friend was contesting. I remained occupied and never imagined that my passport renewal would become a serious issue.

I had every reason to believe it would be completed quickly.

In fact, when my daughter's passport had been renewed earlier, the police had been extremely cooperative and the entire process had taken less than two weeks.

There seemed to be ample time before my daughter's wedding.

To be fair, I had not yet finalised my own travel plans to the United States. My wife was definitely going. I had not completely decided whether I would accompany her. So it would not be accurate to say that I missed the wedding solely because my passport was delayed.

However, the fact remains that even if I had wanted to travel, I simply could not have done so because the passport renewal had not been completed.

The Police Verification Takes an Unexpected Turn

R. Rajagopal: As time passed, I became slightly concerned because the passport had still not arrived. I called the police station. They told me that the file has been sent. Since I remained completely confident, I assumed they meant it had been forwarded to the Passport Office. I thanked them and disconnected the call.

I genuinely believed the passport would now be printed and delivered shortly. A few days later, however, I realised nothing had happened. So I called again. This time I was told something entirely different.

The officer clarified that when they had earlier said the file had been "sent," they meant it had been forwarded not to the Passport Office but to the Security Control Organisation, which functions under the Kolkata Police Special Branch.

I knew what that meant. Normally, applications reach the Security Control Organisation only when the local police station has reservations or doubts regarding police verification.

So I was asked to visit the Security Control Organisation. When I went there, I was categorically informed that my police verification would not be cleared unless my name was restored to the electoral rolls. That came as a complete shock. I immediately asked the officer under what law this decision had been taken. I asked whether there was any government notification, circular or official order linking electoral roll deletion with passport renewal. I said that such a significant policy decision could not have escaped public attention if it had indeed been issued. Could they please show me the government order? Instead of answering, they simply stonewalled me.

They repeatedly said they didn't know anything beyond the fact that this was what they had been instructed to do.

So I returned home. Then, on 17 June, the Regional Passport Office officially informed me that the police had submitted an adverse verification report, specifically citing my deletion from the electoral rolls.

At that point, there was no room for speculation. The reason had been officially recorded in writing. Nothing else had been cited.

The Passport Office then gave me an appointment to appear before them on 17 July. That is where the matter presently stands.

When Routine Delay Begins to Raise Questions

Prema Sridevi: You mentioned that throughout the initial stages you remained confident that your passport would eventually be renewed. But journalists develop instincts over the years. At some point, did you begin to feel that this was no longer an ordinary bureaucratic delay. Normally, when officials realise that the applicant is an established journalist with a long professional record, things tend to move faster rather than slower.

Did it ever occur to you that you might actually be facing something more than routine administrative delay?

R. Rajagopal: Not initially. To be honest, I thought it was simply routine bureaucracy. Most of my interactions were with junior-level officials. They were uniformly courteous and polite. None of them behaved in a hostile manner. I never got the impression that they were personally targeting me during the passport renewal process.

The point at which I became genuinely worried was 20 May, when I was told quite bluntly that my verification simply "could not be done." The Bengali expression they used was "Hobena." That is a very final expression. It means, "It cannot be done." When I heard those words, I was deeply shaken. I returned home and wrote an email addressed to the Kolkata Police Commissioner using the official email address listed on the Kolkata Police website. To this day, I don't know whether that email ever reached him. I never received even an acknowledgement. That silence worried me.

I expected that if the Commissioner's office had received the complaint, someone—if not the Commissioner himself—would at least acknowledge it. That never happened.

Later, I also approached the National Human Rights Commission. They acknowledged receipt of my representation. Beyond that, I have no idea what became of it.

That was when I slowly began to feel anxious. But even today, I do not possess any evidence that I was personally singled out or deliberately targeted.

Electoral Roll Deletion and a Father's Legacy

Prema Sridevi: You mentioned earlier that your passport renewal issue eventually became intertwined with your deletion from the electoral rolls. The explanation given to you was that your name and your father's name—could not be traced to the 2002 electoral rolls.

Before we discuss that process, I'd like to know a little more about your father. I read the article you wrote about him. You described him as a Gandhian. Could you tell us about him? And could you also explain how someone who has voted in election after election suddenly finds his name missing from the electoral rolls?

R. Rajagopal: To be fair, I was not surprised that my own name was not present in the 2002 electoral rolls. At that time, my wife and I were raising a young family, and my career required frequent transfers. I worked first in Delhi, then Mumbai, then Kolkata, then back to Mumbai, and again to Delhi. We were essentially a floating family. It was only during the early 2000s that we finally decided to settle permanently in Kolkata.

There was another reason as well, which younger journalists today may find rather unusual. In those days, journalism placed an enormous premium on neutrality. We were constantly told that journalists must never be seen as taking sides. The principle was taken so seriously that journalists working for business newspapers were discouraged from investing in companies they covered.

If you covered Reliance or ACC, for example, you were expected not to own shares in those companies because that might compromise your independence.

A similar philosophy existed in political journalism. There was a belief among many journalists that even voting could compromise neutrality. The argument was that if you voted for a political party, you were, in some sense, taking a political position. I wasn't a political reporter—I largely worked on the desk—but that philosophy influenced many journalists of my generation.

As a result, I did not seriously participate in elections until around 2010. From 2010 onwards, however, I became a regular voter after enrolling in Ballygunge. 

"My Father Never Missed an Election"

R. Rajagopal: My father was very different. He was an economics professor. After retiring from government service in Kerala, he became deeply involved in social work. He served as Secretary of the Gandhi Smarak Nidhi. He actively participated in prohibition campaigns because Kerala had—and continues to have—serious concerns regarding alcohol abuse. He also worked for communal harmony during periods of tension in northern Kerala. That entire generation believed deeply in public service.

I remember him as an extraordinarily conscientious voter. He never missed an election. So I was genuinely surprised when we could not locate his name in the electoral rolls.

Later, my brother suggested that there had been a period—around eleven months perhaps—when my father had temporarily shifted residence while repairs were being carried out at his home. We searched the electoral rolls for that address as well. His name wasn't there either. It is also possible that the problem arose because of spelling variations.

His name was Ramadas. That name can be written in several different ways—Ramadas, Ramdas, and other variations. We simply don't know. The bottom line is that we could not locate his name. That was why I was placed in the SIR adjudication process.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

The Matriculation Certificate Was Rejected

Prema Sridevi: When your father's name couldn't be found, what happened next?

R. Rajagopal: Even then, I wasn't especially worried. The procedure was quite clear. If your name entered adjudication, you were required to submit one of the 11 to 12 documents prescribed by the Election Commission.

I submitted my matriculation certificate issued by the Government of Kerala. To my surprise, it was rejected. I believe that happened because of what they called "logical discrepancies." In India, names often have multiple accepted spellings. "Kumar," for instance, can be written in many different ways. So I suspect there were spelling mismatches between my current documents and older records. There was also another possibility. Some of us wondered whether these records were being matched through automated systems.

If a human being had examined them carefully, small spelling variations would probably have been recognised as harmless. Machines, however, operate differently. If they are programmed to detect exact matches, they naturally flag discrepancies.

At present, the matter is before the appellate tribunal. When I receive my hearing, I hope to establish my case there.

That, in itself, was the SIR issue. What I had never anticipated was that the passport verification process and the electoral roll issue would suddenly merge into one. That was the last thing I expected. After all, this was merely a passport renewal. It had already been issued once. It had already been renewed once. The address had remained unchanged.

As far as I know, I have no criminal case or any adverse record against me. So I had every reason to believe the renewal would be routine.

"Journalists Never Want to Become the Story"

Prema Sridevi: I know that you've said before that you don't want to be seen as a victim. Journalists generally don't want to become the story. They want to report the story. I understand that completely. But there is another reason we wanted to bring your experience into public view.

If this can happen to someone with your professional standing, your public profile and your credentials, then it can happen to anyone.

It is important not only for ordinary citizens but also for the bureaucracy to recognise that if someone like R. Rajagopal can be made to prove his citizenship repeatedly, something may be fundamentally wrong with the system.

For viewers watching this interview, could you explain how all of this has affected you personally? You couldn't vote. Your passport renewal stalled. Every morning now seems to involve chasing documents and checking portals. How has all of this changed your daily life?

"I Suddenly Felt Like Half a Citizen"

R. Rajagopal: It has been deeply frustrating. The moment my name disappeared from the electoral rolls, I kept trying to reassure myself that the process wasn't over. There was still an appeal pending. The law provided a mechanism. Yet something fundamental had already changed. I had voted in this constituency for several elections.

I had always regarded voting as an ordinary civic responsibility. People often say, "If you miss one election, you can vote in the next." That sounds simple. But until you actually lose the right to vote, you don't realise how precious that right really is. When it was taken away, I suddenly felt incomplete. Almost like a half-citizen. I found myself wondering why I was being denied something that every other citizen around me continued to enjoy. It created a strange psychological effect.

I would attend gatherings where everyone discussed politics. Normally, I am an extremely talkative person—as journalists usually are. We tend to offer opinions whether anyone asks for them or not. But after this happened, I found myself remaining silent.

Whenever someone asked why I wasn't participating in the discussion, I would simply say: "This election doesn't belong to me." I no longer felt entitled to discuss it.

In fact, I even recorded a small video for some friends joking that perhaps we should discuss municipal elections in Italy, or elections in Timbuktu, or Nicaragua. For me, the Bengal election had become just as distant because I had not been allowed to participate in it. That was emotionally devastating.

A Daily Search Through the Past

Prema Sridevi: You mentioned that every morning now begins with a set of tasks that have become almost ritualistic—checking the tribunal portal, tracking your passport application and writing to schools and colleges.

How are you coping with all of this? What exactly does your day look like now?

R. Rajagopal: It has become a routine now. Every morning, the first thing I do is check whether the tribunal has assigned me a hearing date. Before I go to sleep each night, I check it again, hoping that something has changed. Realistically, I know that a hearing is unlikely to be assigned overnight, but I still check. Without doing that, I find it difficult to sleep.

The second thing I check every day is the status of my passport application. These two things have become part of my daily routine. After that, I spend my time writing letters—to schools, colleges and government offices. Some institutions have been very responsive. Others take time.

But almost every enquiry involves explaining my entire story from the beginning.

Searching for His Mother's Records

Prema Sridevi: When you say you are writing to schools and colleges, what exactly are you looking for?

R. Rajagopal: I am trying to reconstruct my family's paper trail. For example, my mother taught at a college in Thiruvananthapuram in 1965. I discovered that year only because I came across a photograph from her postgraduate convocation ceremony. Once I identified the college, I found its email address and wrote to them. They responded by giving me a contact number. When I called, I had to explain everything from the beginning.

You have to understand that this is not a normal request.

Someone calls from Kolkata and asks whether the college has any record showing that his mother taught there in 1965. Naturally, people are puzzled. Sometimes you call again the next day and a different person answers the phone. Then you have to narrate the entire story all over again.

Eventually, the college informed me that they no longer had records dating back to 1965. However, the school where my mother had studied was able to locate an old register from 1959 containing her name. From that register I was able to discover her date of birth—a detail I myself did not know.

My mother passed away in 1978, when I was only ten years old. You cannot expect a ten-year-old child to remember dates of birth and similar details. So every small piece of information I recover now feels significant.

Correcting His Birth Certificate

R. Rajagopal: The next complication concerns my own birth certificate. On my birth certificate, my mother's name has been recorded as Radha Bai. Her actual name was Radha Devi. It appears to be a small difference, but officially it has to be corrected. The authorities have told me that they need her matriculation certificate before the correction can be made. That means I now have to locate her school records from 1959. 

The Kerala Pareeksha Bhavan maintains examination records. However, because my mother is no longer alive, I cannot apply directly. The application has to be made through the school. That, in turn, requires further documentation. So it becomes a chain of paperwork.

Once I obtain the matriculation certificate, I can request a correction on my birth certificate. Only then will I have what can reasonably be called a fully corrected birth certificate. I don't blame the officials handling these records.

In fact, considering that I was born in 1968—and registration of births and deaths became mandatory in India only from April 1, 1970—it is remarkable that these records still exist. Kerala has done a commendable job digitising old records. My birth record is available. The issue is that my mother's name now needs to be corrected.

I have no idea how long that process will take. It is a surreal experience. Here I am, sitting in Kolkata in 2026, spending my days researching documents from 1959. I never imagined that this would become my life.

"I Have Been Reduced to a Voteless, Passport-less Person"

Prema Sridevi: You have spent decades building one of the most respected careers in Indian journalism. You have edited one of the country's leading newspapers.

Yet today you find yourself searching through records from the 1950s simply to establish your own identity. How does that feel?

R. Rajagopal: It feels as though everything I have done in my life belongs to another world. Today, I have been reduced to what I can only describe as a voteless, passport-less person.

Every day I move from one government portal to another, searching for evidence—not merely about myself, but about my parents and my family. That is what my life has become.

Looking Back on a Career in Journalism

Prema Sridevi: I also want viewers to understand who is telling them this story. For over thirty-five years, you have been a journalist. Much of that time was spent at The Telegraph, a newspaper whose front pages were read across the country and whose headlines often shaped public debate.

Tell us about the work you are most proud of. For those who question your Indianness today, what would you want them to know about your contribution to Indian journalism?

R. Rajagopal: The Telegraph has always been known for its headlines. That reputation existed long before I became Editor. I did not reinvent the wheel. The paper already had a remarkable editorial tradition.

Our founder-editor, M.J. Akbar, established that culture. For example, when former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, The Telegraph carried the unforgettable headline:

"Indira Assassinated. Nation Wounded."

People still remember it. So the newspaper always had a distinctive voice. What changed during my tenure was the arrival of social media.

Earlier, The Telegraph was largely regarded as an eastern Indian newspaper. Copies reached Delhi in the evening and other cities like Mumbai and Thiruvananthapuram even later. There was no online edition in those days.

With social media, however, our front pages began travelling instantly across the country. That expanded our reach enormously. It was not because we had suddenly become more innovative. Technology simply amplified our work.

Standing With Students During the JNU Controversy

R. Rajagopal: If there is one period I remember most vividly, it would be the events surrounding Jawaharlal Nehru University. When students were attacked and beaten, we realised that journalism could not simply remain an exercise in recording statements from opposing sides. There are moments when a newspaper has to stand with constitutional values. We concluded that this was one of those moments.

It reminded me of the atmosphere surrounding American universities during the Nixon years. We believed we could not remain mere spectators. That was when we consciously moved away from what I earlier described as "neutrality." There is one front page that remains deeply etched in my memory.

When Kanhaiya Kumar and others were produced before a court, one of their supporters was brutally assaulted by a group of lawyers. The images were horrifying. The young man looked as though he had been hunted down. Later it emerged that he was the son-in-law of a well-known Bengali political figure. Those were difficult days. They were not pleasant stories to edit. But we believed they deserved to be reported prominently.

During the COVID-19 pandemic as well, despite our limited resources, we tried to do whatever journalism we could.

"It Was Never About One Headline"

R. Rajagopal: People often ask me which headline or which front page I consider my finest. I don't think about journalism that way. For me, it was about the editorial choices we made over time. The Telegraph had traditionally devoted considerable space to sports. During certain periods, however, sports virtually disappeared from Page One.

Politics occupied that space instead because we believed the country was going through events that demanded sustained public attention. We changed our priorities because the times required it. I was also fortunate to work with an exceptionally strong editorial team. Many members of that team were willing to disagree with me. They would tell me when they believed I was making the wrong decision.

There were occasions when I accepted their arguments and corrected myself. That, to me, was healthy journalism. Of course, there were difficult periods as well. We had to make painful decisions. At times, we had to let colleagues go. Those are decisions I still regret. I cannot fully defend them even today.

But at the time, I believed those decisions were necessary to keep the newspaper alive.

Journalism is never simply about writing memorable headlines. It also involves carrying the burden of difficult choices.

"Journalism Cannot Become Stenography"

R. Rajagopal: In fact, the current controversy itself provides a good illustration. Recently, I came across a news report about a woman who had been in Dubai when the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) process was taking place. Because she was abroad, she did not submit the required form. When she returned to Kolkata, she realised that her passport would soon need renewal.

Someone apparently told her that because her name had been deleted during the SIR exercise, her passport would not be renewed. Now, that information may or may not have been correct. The newspaper simply reported her statement exactly as she made it. That, in my view, is an example of what I call neutered journalism.

Surely it is the responsibility of journalists to contact the police, the Passport Office or the government and ask a simple question:

"Is this correct?" If deletion from the electoral rolls can affect passport renewal, the public deserves to know. Even if the authorities refuse to answer, that refusal itself becomes part of the story.

Instead, if journalists merely reproduce what one person says without verifying it, they are doing little more than stenography.

That is not journalism. Journalism must go beyond recording statements. It must explain what is happening. That is what I meant when I criticised neutral—or rather neutered—journalism.

Journalism Must Evolve

Prema Sridevi: I completely understand what you mean. In many ways, newspapers once served as platforms for official statements. Political parties, governments and corporations relied on newspapers to communicate with the public. Today, that has fundamentally changed. Politicians have their own social media handles. Corporations have their own communication channels.

If the Prime Minister wants to address the country, he no longer depends on newspapers or television. He can communicate directly with millions of people. The same applies to companies like Reliance or virtually any major organisation.

So journalism also has to evolve. Today we have artificial intelligence, social media and instant access to information. People no longer need newspapers merely to know what someone has said. What AI cannot do, however, is stand on the ground, ask difficult questions, challenge official narratives and investigate facts. That remains the role of journalists. If we stop doing that, I don't think people will continue to need us.

R. Rajagopal: Exactly. That is the essential point.

If a Passport Isn't Proof, What Is?

Prema Sridevi: At The Probe, we recently examined the government's position that a passport is merely a travel document. We reviewed several official documents issued by the Ministry of External Affairs, the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Citizenship Rules and OCI guidelines. Many of those government documents clearly describe an Indian passport as evidence of citizenship. That raises an obvious question. If the government's own documents treat a passport as proof of citizenship, how should citizens understand statements suggesting otherwise?

Coming back to your case—you were denied passport renewal because your name had been removed from the electoral rolls. Then the country was told that a passport itself does not establish citizenship. If a passport is not proof, then what is? How does an ordinary Indian establish that he or she is an Indian citizen? What, in your view, should be the way forward?

"Why Do We Need a Citizenship Certificate at All?"

R. Rajagopal: At present, India does not issue a universal citizenship certificate. The only people who receive such certificates are those who acquire Indian citizenship through naturalisation. For most Indians born in this country, there is no single document officially called a citizenship certificate.

My question therefore is a different one. Why do we need one? A passport serves its purpose for international travel. Birth certificates serve their purpose. Educational records serve theirs. Why should every citizen constantly be required to prove citizenship through some additional document? The argument often made is that India faces the problem of illegal infiltration. If someone has violated the law, then of course the law must deal with that person.

But if someone wishes to live in India peacefully, I believe India should have the confidence to see that as a tribute rather than a threat. India is a large, civilisational nation. It should behave like one. We should not behave like a frightened or insecure power.

Historically, India's strength has always been its openness and pluralism. We became a great civilisation because we accommodated diversity. Attempts to make everything uniform—one language, one identity, one way of thinking—risk weakening that diversity.

That diversity is our greatest strength.

Personally, I do not believe we need a separate citizenship certificate for every individual. If someone genuinely belongs here and lives here, that itself should matter.

The Larger Question: Is It the Process or the Intent?

Prema Sridevi: The government justified the Special Intensive Revision exercise by saying it was necessary to identify illegal infiltrators. However, after lakhs of names were deleted from the electoral rolls in West Bengal, very few cases of actual infiltrators appear to have been established.

You have spent decades reporting on West Bengal and national politics. Looking at the larger picture, what do you believe is actually broken here? Is it the process, or do you think the problem lies in the government's intent?

"Citizens Are Being Kept in a Constant State of Flux"

R. Rajagopal: In the absence of concrete evidence that individual officials are deliberately breaking the process, I would have to say that the issue lies with the intent behind the policy. If you look back over the past several years—from demonetisation onwards—you notice a pattern. Citizens are constantly being kept on their toes. They are never allowed to settle into a sense of certainty.

It reminds me of military training. In the army, soldiers are constantly kept moving because they are not meant to become comfortable.

Similarly, citizens today seem to be kept in a permanent state of administrative uncertainty.

When people are constantly worrying about whether they are still recognised as citizens, whether their documents are valid, whether they will be allowed to vote, or whether they will have to prove themselves yet again, they stop asking larger questions. They stop asking whether the government has performed well. They stop asking whether their children will find employment.

They stop asking about climate change, clean air, drinking water or the quality of education. Instead, they spend their time digging through old records, tracing their family histories and worrying about whether they possess the right documents.

At the same time, we are constantly encouraged to look backwards—to celebrate what happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. We become obsessed with the past rather than focusing on either the present or the future. That, to me, is one of the biggest problems.

If the objective is to keep citizens permanently occupied with proving themselves, then this constant state of uncertainty begins to make sense.

"Demand Clarity From Your Representatives"

Prema Sridevi: For someone who does not enjoy the visibility that you do—someone without public recognition or influence—what would your advice be if they found themselves facing the same situation?

R. Rajagopal: Honestly, I feel rather helpless when I try to answer that question. The only practical advice I can offer is this: Citizens must immediately approach their elected representatives. Whether it is their councillor, MLA or Member of Parliament, they must insist on clarity. They must ask their representatives to obtain clear answers from the government. We often judge our elected representatives primarily on roads, bridges or infrastructure projects. Those things matter. But there are issues that are even more fundamental. Civil rights. Voting rights. The security of one's identity.

These are the questions representatives should be helping citizens resolve. If those rights become uncertain, then all the other achievements lose some of their meaning. I wish I had a better answer. Unfortunately, I don't.

Can Journalism Still Hold Power Accountable?

Prema Sridevi: After nearly thirty-five years in journalism, do you still believe Indian journalism can hold power accountable? Or do you think something important has been lost?

R. Rajagopal: I absolutely believe journalism can still hold power accountable. There are many outstanding journalists and independent news organisations doing excellent work today. Online journalism, in particular, has produced some remarkable reporting. If, however, you are asking me whether I still have faith in India's mainstream media, then my answer is no. I have very little faith in it at present.

Perhaps that will change if another political party comes to power. Perhaps then the mainstream media will suddenly rediscover its mojo and begin asking difficult questions again. But under the present circumstances, I do not expect mainstream journalism to perform that role. Fortunately, independent journalists continue to do important work. That gives me hope.

Prema Sridevi: When your passport is eventually renewed—and I sincerely hope it will be—what would you like to say to the bureaucracy that made you prove your own citizenship?

R. Rajagopal: I don't really have anything I wish to say to the bureaucracy. My concern is much larger than my own passport. What I want is clarity. The government needs to answer one simple question: If someone's name has been deleted from the electoral rolls during the SIR process, are they eligible for passport renewal or not?

People deserve a clear answer. I am not in any particular hurry to travel abroad. That is not the issue. The issue is that millions of people deserve to know where they stand. The Ministry of External Affairs could clarify this in a matter of minutes. A simple statement would suffice.

Either say that electoral roll deletion has no bearing on passport renewal, or say that it does. But the present uncertainty serves no one. As for me, I don't wish to engage in arguments with bureaucrats. I have spent nearly a hundred days trying to explain my situation. They did not listen then. I don't expect them to listen now.

Prema Sridevi: Mr. Rajagopal, thank you for speaking with The Probe. We sincerely hope your case is resolved at the earliest and that the system addresses the questions your experience has raised.

Your passport may eventually be renewed. Your name may eventually return to the electoral rolls.

But there are lakhs of ordinary Indians who do not have a public platform, whose voices are rarely heard, and who may be facing the same uncertainty without anyone speaking on their behalf.

The government says that a passport is not proof of citizenship. Electoral rolls can erase a citizen's name overnight. Until there is a clear answer to a simple but fundamental question, we will continue asking it: In this country, what truly proves that an Indian belongs?

I'm Prema Sridevi, Editor-in-Chief of The Probe.

Thank you for watching.

Confessions of a Smiling Desk: How the RBI's New Rulebook Quietly Catalogues Every Dark Pattern Played on the Indian Bank Customer

There is a useful rule of thumb for reading any regulator's circular: a watchdog only bothers to ban what is already flourishing. Nobody legislates against a problem that does not exist. So when the Reserve Bank of India, in a formal directive, finds it necessary to forbid something called "confirm shaming," we may take it as settled that confirm shaming has been alive and well across the screens of Indian banking, doing quiet damage to ordinary savers.

The columnist Dhirendra Kumar put the point with surgical precision: read the new rules as confessions, and the picture of what has been normal practice becomes uncomfortably clear. That is the lens worth keeping as we walk through what the RBI has actually done.

The temptation is to treat the headline — eleven RBI dark patterns banned — as the whole story. It is not. The annexure listing those eleven tricks is the most quotable page and the least important. The real document is the body of the directive, where every clause has been written to fit an abuse already in progress.

Also Read:  Inside the HDFC Bank Scandal That Triggered a Market Crash

When the Watchdog Finally Names the Game

The directive did not arrive out of a clear sky. It is the final, hardened version of draft amendments the RBI floated on 11 February 2026, opened to public comment, and then notified on 15 June 2026 as the Responsible Business Conduct (Second Amendment) Directions, 2026, to take effect from 1 January 2027. It amends the parent Responsible Business Conduct Directions of 2025 and applies, in mirror-image versions, to commercial banks and to NBFCs.

The political weather had already turned. Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had publicly lashed banks for mis-selling, asking the obvious and awkward question: if a home loan is already secured by the house itself, why is a fresh insurance policy being pressed on the borrower as though it were part of the paperwork?

Beneath the rhetoric sat a number that explains everything. Over a decade, the State Bank of India's bancassurance income — the fee it earns for selling insurers' products across its counters — multiplied roughly sixfold to around Rs 2,766 crore, even as its interest income, the thing a bank is actually supposed to do, merely doubled. For some insurers, bancassurance now supplies close to four-fifths of premiums. The branch had, in part, quietly become a commission shop with a banking licence.

A LocalCircles survey gave the rot a face: 57 per cent of respondents reported "basket sneaking" on banking platforms, 51 per cent ran into "forced action," and 46 per cent were worn down by "nagging." The RBI was not inventing villains. It was catching up to them.

Eleven RBI Dark Patterns — Read as an Itemised Confession

The directive defines a dark pattern, in language borrowed from consumer-protection law, as any interface or design choice engineered to mislead or trick a user into doing what they did not intend, by subverting their autonomy and choice. What makes these patterns dark is that the deceit lives inside the design itself — the easy, obvious, default path is reliably the seller's path, and the trap springs shut on the careful and careless alike.

Consider the list, and hear the admission in each.

False urgency — the countdown timer and the "offer ends soon" banner — exists for one purpose: to stop us comparing and make us click. Basket sneaking slips an extra charge or donation into the cart at checkout, hoping we will not notice the swollen total. Confirm shaming needles us with guilt for declining — "No, I don't want to protect my family." Forced action makes us surrender unrelated data or sign up for a service we never wanted, just to finish the task we came for. The subscription trap makes leaving harder than joining — the cancel button buried, or a branch visit demanded to undo what a single tap created.

Interface interference dresses the bank's preferred option in bold and bright while greying out the alternative, quietly defaulting our consent to "Yes." Bait and switch serves us something other than what was advertised. Drip pricing shows the seductive headline rate and reveals the processing fees only after we have waded through five screens. Disguised advertisement masquerades as news or honest user content. Nagging pings us again and again to enable a service we have already refused. And trick wording leans on vague phrasing and double negatives in consent boxes, so that we cannot tell what we have just agreed to.

Every one of these RBI dark patterns is now prohibited on banks' apps and websites. Every one of them, by the logic of the ban, was until now somebody's quarterly target.

The Structural Bans That Cut Deeper

Behind the eleven photogenic RBI dark patterns sit the structural clauses, and these are where the directive truly bites.

Compulsory bundling is dead — in principle. A bank may no longer make the sale of one product conditional on the purchase of another. Where a product genuinely is needed as a risk mitigant — say, insurance behind a home loan — the customer must be free to buy it from any provider they choose, not herded into the bank's captive partner. The implication is liberating and overdue: the policy "folded quietly into the loan you came in for" was, the rule concedes, routine.

A bank cannot fund a purchase out of your own loan without your knowledge. The directive forbids a bank from using a sanctioned loan facility to bankroll a customer's purchase of a product — its own or a third party's — without explicit consent. Read that twice. It exists because banks were, in effect, lending people money and spending it for them on products they had not knowingly chosen.

Consent must now mean consent. Approval has to be captured deliberately — via signature, OTP, a recorded confirmation, or a clearly marked consent block. Where a form carries several products, each must be explained and separately agreed. The default box must read "No" or "I do not agree." The pre-ticked box, that small masterpiece of inertia, is finished. But the deeper move is this: even valid consent no longer protects the bank. A product can still be ruled mis-sold if it was unsuitable for the customer in the first place. The legal question shifts from "Did you sign?" to "Why was this ever sold to you?"

Also Read:  GST Invoice Fraud: Why ₹58,772 Crore Slipped Through Audits

Suitability becomes a legal duty. Before selling, a bank must assess whether the product fits the person — weighing age, income, financial literacy and risk tolerance against the product's complexity, fee structure, risk-return profile and time horizon. This is the most quietly damning clause in the document, because to mandate that a bank check suitability is to admit that, until now, checking suitability was nobody's job.

The kickback is cut at the root. Bank staff selling third-party products may no longer accept any incentive, direct or indirect, from the provider whose products they push. The commission was the engine of the entire arrangement. Whether this clause holds is the open question of the whole reform.

Accountability outlives the sale. Within thirty days of any sale, the bank must seek feedback to confirm the customer actually understood what they bought and the risks attached. And if mis-selling is established, the remedy is not a token gesture: the bank must refund the entire amount paid, cancel the sale where applicable, and compensate the customer for losses. A standing refund mechanism is the kind of permanent cure one builds only for a chronic, recurring disease.

The salesman steps into the daylight. Promotional calls and visits are limited to a 9 a.m.–5 p.m. window; marketing may go only to those who opted in; unsubscribing must be as easy as subscribing; agents on bank premises must be visibly distinguishable from bank staff; and — crucially — the bank carries the liability whether the mis-sale was committed by a relationship manager, a call-centre voice, or an outsourced agent. The bank can no longer hide behind the intermediary it hired to do its selling.

Also Read:  Exclusive: Government's Own Documents Call Passport Citizenship Proof

What Changes for the Customer — and What Does Not

For the customer, the gains are real and concrete. Fewer ambush add-ons at checkout. A genuine right to take the insurance elsewhere. A default that no longer quietly says yes on your behalf. A thirty-day window in which the bank itself must ask whether you understood what it sold you. And, where it all goes wrong, a refund rather than a runaround.

But it is worth being clear-eyed. The earnings at stake are enormous — bancassurance is too lucrative to surrender quietly — and history is not encouraging. The insurance regulator and the markets regulator have each issued earnest instructions against mis-selling before, and the practice carried on more or less undisturbed. A ban on staff commissions does not abolish sales targets, appraisal pressure, or the thousand soft coercions that never appear in a circular. And the whole edifice rests on enforcement: on the RBI actually establishing mis-selling, actually compelling refunds, actually penalising the bank rather than the branch clerk. A right that is expensive and exhausting to claim is, for most people, no right at all.

What Banks and Customers Must Now Do Differently

The honest lesson for banks is that the regulatory frame has shifted from disclosure to design and suitability. It is no longer enough to bury a fact in a footnote and call the customer informed. The bank must now show that its digital journeys do not steer, that its products fit, and that its consent is real. The smart institutions will treat this as a chance to rebuild trust. The foolish ones will re-engineer the same coercion in subtler clothing and wait for the next circular to catch up.

The harder lesson is for customers. The RBI has handed them an authorised list of the dark patterns played at the desk — avoiding them remains their own work. The single most reliable defence has not changed and will not change: a firm reluctance to buy anything offered unasked, and the instinct to treat every unsolicited pitch as a sales pitch until proven otherwise. Ask who earns what when you sign. Insist on buying the bundled insurance elsewhere. Read the box that defaults to "No," and leave it there until you are sure.

Also Read:  The CAG Cannot Audit Ram Mandir. Its Officer Is on the Trust.

RBI Dark Patterns: The Test Is in the Teeth

The test of this directive will not be its drafting, which is genuinely good, but its enforcement. Three things will decide whether 1 January 2027 marks a turning point or another well-meaning footnote.

First, penalties large enough that mis-selling costs the bank more than it earns, applied to the institution rather than the foot soldier.

Second, closing the incentive gap: as long as the commission survives somewhere in the chain, pressure will find a new channel, so the RBI, IRDAI and SEBI will have to move in concert. 

Third, transparency the public can actually see — the half-yearly suitability reviews, the dark-pattern audits, the mis-selling refunds made visible, so that the customer can judge the bank by its record rather than its brochure.

Until then, the wisest reading of this document is the one offered at the start. The RBI has, in the language of prohibition, confessed on the industry's behalf. The confession is welcome. The penance is yet to be seen.