NEWS BRIEFINGS: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN INDIA

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.

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.

Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi has written to Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, demanding an end to the reported practice of requiring female Adivasi students returning after an absence to undergo pregnancy tests before being readmitted to government hostels. No student should have to prove that she is not pregnant or has not had sex to retain her accommodation and continue her education.

More than 87 million (8.7 crore) Indians age 15 to 29 are not studying, working or getting any training, according to report by NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s policy think tank.

Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) co-convener Ashutosh Ranka and his team travelled to Rampura-Kanwarpura village in Jaipur district on August 21 to investigate a government primary school reportedly operating from a cattle enclosure because its building was unsafe. According to reports, members of the delegation, including a woman, were chased, beaten and pelted with stones, while their vehicles and phones were damaged. Ranka said his clothes were torn and that one volunteer suffered a fractured hand. The incident is serious for at least five reasons.

Is the government using the Census to quietly collect information for the National Population Register (NPR), even though it has not officially announced that the NPR is being updated? Former senior Census official K. Narayanan Unni told a media outlet that some of the 40 questions announced by the Home Ministry appear more useful for the NPR than for a normal Census.

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.

Recent reports from the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) found that authorities left large sums allocated for disaster assistance, drinking water, housing, pollution control and railway passenger amenities unspent, raising questions about why parliamentary allocations were not converted into services for citizens.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has called on citizens, parents and village leaders nationwide to inspect government schools, film video evidence of missing facilities and submit the findings to the group, an nationwide initiative to begin on India’s Independence Day on August 15. This exercise could put every part of the school system on the spot, from the village panchayat to the education ministry.

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.

After the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests ended in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on July 25 following Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation, women and girls who had participated publicly and visibly in the agitation became the principal targets of a doxxing and harassment campaign. The campaign reveals that those behind it see women protesters as a threat and want to push them into roles defined by their own patriarchal beliefs.

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.

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.

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.

The Cockroach Janta Party has decided, for now, to remain a movement rather than register as a political party, leaving the final word to a leadership meeting set for August 5 and 6 in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in Maharashtra. The choice admits that a movement’s power can disappear the moment it starts competing for votes instead of making demands from the government.

The Cockroach Janta Party has decided, for now, to remain a movement rather than register as a political party, leaving the final word to a leadership meeting set for August 5 and 6 in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar in Maharashtra. The choice admits that a movement’s power can disappear the moment it starts competing for votes instead of making demands from the government.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Youth activists, organisations and trade unions in Sri Lanka expressed solidarity with student protesters in India by holding a peaceful demonstration outside the Indian High Commission in Colombo in support of weeks-long protests against exam-paper leaks and alleged police violence.

Dharmendra Pradhan stepped down as Union education minister on July 25, bringing to an end 36 days of protests initiated by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). Two days later, as of noon on July 27, key developments included a police investigation into the firing of pellet guns at protesters, Supreme Court petitions alleging police excesses against students, violent unrest in Bihar, an angry response from Central University of Kerala students to social media posts praising Pradhan, and activist Sonam Wangchuk’s planned visit to Rajghat in Delhi.

Hours after the Centre assured activist Sonam Wangchuk that no cases would be filed against those who had protested at Jantar Mantar and marched to Parliament on 20 July, one volunteer’s family was learning that the assurance did not extend to them, Newsreel Asia has been told.

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.

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.