Anti-Conversion Laws Are a Question of Citizens’ Rights and Freedoms
Maharashtra becoming the 13th state to enact an anti-conversion law once again raises a legal question that goes further than the protection of Christian and Muslim minorities, as the issue is often portrayed. Laws regulating conversion from one religion to another should be assessed by how they affect every citizen’s freedom of conscience and religious expression, rather than by which religious community they appear to protect or threaten.
Questions Over India Today Poll Presenting Modi as Still Popular After Youth Protests
The latest India Today-CVoter Mood of the Nation (MOTN) poll records a considerable fall in support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party, despite relying largely on interviews conducted before the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)-initiated protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar grew into a nationwide movement demanding accountability. However, India Today and sister organisation Aaj Tak presented it mainly as evidence that Modi remains popular and the NDA would retain power.
What Polygamy Feels Like to a Daughter in Arunachal Pradesh
Growing up in a polygynous household taught me how a man’s decision to take another wife can alter the lives of the women and children who are given no say in it. It divided my father’s time, money and presence between two families, leaving my mother and her daughters to live with the consequences, though I do not hold him alone responsible for what followed.
Nepal’s Political Mood Is Becoming Religiously Charged
Nepal underwent an epochal political upheaval just a year ago, toppling the government in a fashion few could have imagined. An even more dramatic development followed. Voters handed a near-supermajority to the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which was founded only four years earlier. Its senior leader, Balendra Shah, became the youngest prime minister in Nepal’s history and has since been leading the country.
Beaten as a Dalit, Denied Protection Because He is Christian
A recent case exposes that the law has wrongly misunderstood that conversion to Christianity or Islam automatically ends the caste discrimination faced by Dalits. Chinthada Anand, a convert to Christianity, was allegedly attacked as a Dalit in Andhra Pradesh, but the Supreme Court ruled that he could not receive the protection under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act because he was no longer legally recognised as a Scheduled Caste. This raises the question of whether the SC/ST Act should ask what religion the victim follows or whether society, including the alleged attackers, treated that person as a Dalit.
See Jharkhand Protests From Students’ Perspective, Not Politicians’
While government-job aspirants without party affiliations appear to constitute the principal base of the ongoing protests in Ranchi, Jharkhand, the agitation is not organisationally unified. This distinction is important because attempts by political groups to influence the protests risk diverting attention from young people’s genuine concerns about education, recruitment and institutional reform, and from their attempt to raise these concerns democratically.
As India Grows Older, Its Digital Economy Must Protect Senior Citizens
India’s digital revolution has transformed the way citizens bank, invest, receive pensions and access public services. However, beneath this success story lies a growing vulnerability that deserves far greater attention. Cyber fraud is no longer merely a technology or policing issue; it has become an ageing issue.
Government’s Disconnect With Gen Z Is Visible in Its Three Miscalculations
A protest movement built and led by India’s youngest citizens forced Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign, following weeks of hunger strikes and mass demonstrations. The government’s police crackdown subsequently backfired. Relying on its past successes in curbing protests and dissent, the administration led by officials decades older than the protesters tried to use silence and force during those weeks. However, the government and its advisors failed to realise that this time they were dealing with a generation they had no experience managing.
In Tamil Nadu, the Right to Pray Without Permission Is Slowly Eroding
Tamil Nadu’s courts appear to have quietly narrowed a constitutional right over the last seven years without ever admitting they were doing so. Every order still cites the same protection for peaceful prayer, but the burden to prove that prayer is harmless has effectively moved from the state to the worshipper. That change is invisible in any single ruling, and becomes clear only when the rulings are read one after another, in the order they were made.
Research Suggests 5 Things Gen Z Should Do After a Successful Protest
Young protesters have helped remove political leaders, forced governments to abandon unpopular policies and made corruption and bad governance major political issues in countries around the world. Securing major concessions from a government, however, is only the first step toward lasting change, which requires five more tasks, according to an analysis by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul.
How Gen Z Outsmarted the Govt With a New Version of ‘Gandhigiri’
In the days after police used batons and tear gas on thousands of young protesters at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on July 20, the youngsters responded with “reactance,” not the reaction authorities expected. Knowing their audience was on social media, especially Instagram, they posted videos of themselves joking, staged photographs beside the same officers who had charged them, and made reels that turned a shy Mumbai police constable into a viral heartthrob. While a crackdown is built to produce fear, they answered it with laughter instead: a version of “Gandhigiri” that turned the very officers meant to intimidate them into props for their own campaign.
How Political Ego Made the CJP Protests a Crisis for the Government
The government could have prevented the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests from becoming a national political crisis for itself. It had several opportunities to do so but missed each one, apparently because key decision-makers treated compromise as weakness and dissent as a challenge to their authority. Political ego ended up putting at risk not only the government’s standing, but also public confidence in institutions acting on its behalf.
Delhi’s ‘Jantar Mantar Republic:’ the India Its Youngsters Want, and Are Building
A huge, leaderless crowd of protesters has been gathering at Connaught Place in Delhi alongside the organised Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protest at a designated site at Jantar Mantar. By July 23, it looked at least four times the size of the CJP protest. Even without any leadership, except a few self-appointed volunteers doing crowd management, they seem to be living out the India they want, one they seem to be building themselves, an India where your identity and agency are never questioned but accepted with mutual trust and protection for one another.
As a Woman Journalist, I Felt Safe Amid Thousands of Stranger Men at CJP Protest
Thousands of men have been filling the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protest ground at Jantar Mantar in Delhi for nearly a month. In the initial days, each time I walked into that crowd I expected to feel unsafe, as I always have as a woman in this city. What I soon found instead, as I covered the ongoing youth movement, is a kind of safety I had almost stopped believing was possible in a public space in the capital city, despite the area being dense with strangers.
‘Satluj’ Ban Erases the Line BJP Drew Against Congress in Punjab
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has spent years accusing the Congress party of grave human rights failures in Punjab during the militancy period. Every reference to the killings, disappearances, and unmarked cremations of the late 1980s and early 1990s has come from BJP platforms as an indictment of Congress rule. The party has positioned itself as the one willing to name events that Congress preferred to leave unspoken. The recent removal of the film “Satluj” from ZEE5 has undone that position.
Why India’s Heat Crisis Falls Hardest on Dalits and Muslims
India’s caste system has long assigned the most physically exposed forms of labour to the communities least able to refuse them. That old arrangement has taken on new urgency as summer temperatures push past the limits of human endurance. Sections of the Muslim community also bear a disproportionate burden during heatwaves because of residential exclusion.
Photo Feature: Masks, Placards and Anger at the Cockroach Janta Party Protest
Thousands of young people, including students who appeared for recent NEET and CBSE examinations, their parents, student unions, job aspirants, and civil society groups, gathered at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on June 6 for a protest organised by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Participants demanded the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan following the NEET paper leak controversy and a series of examination-related irregularities reported in recent years.
A Telegram Bot Is Selling Indians’ Personal Data for ₹2.50 Per Search
Twenty-three-year-old Maryam Siddiqui (name changed) was trying to leave her family, where she said she had been facing harassment from an extended family member. She left her home in a small town in Bihar and travelled to Patna without informing her parents. After searching for her for ten days and filing a police complaint, her family was advised by a friend to use a bot that illegally tracks a person’s exact location, provides detailed coordinates and reveals sensitive personal information.
The ‘Politics of the Unprotected Body’: Why Women From Northeast India Remain Vulnerable to Violence
Repeated racial and gender-based abuse against women from Northeast India points to a deeper structural failure of the Indian state to provide equal protection to all citizens. Law enforcement agencies, courts and policymakers often acknowledge such incidents, yet their racial dimension frequently disappears from legal and institutional responses, producing a pattern of unequal citizenship. Women from the Northeast thus occupy what may be called the “unprotected body,” formally included within the republic but repeatedly denied the full protection of its institutions.
Public Donations Free Kerala Migrant Worker from Saudi Death Row. Where Was the State?
Abdul Rahim, a Keralite migrant worker who had been on death row in Saudi Arabia, returned home on May 28 after nearly 20 years in prison, freed only after a community fundraising campaign collected 340 million (34 crore) rupees in blood money. The case exposes how completely a migrant worker’s life can come to depend on a foreign legal system that their family cannot navigate, and how the resilience of Kerala’s diaspora networks, genuine as it is, has come to substitute for protections the state was never equipped to provide.