NEWS BRIEFINGS: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN INDIA

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.

A new academic study argues that India has built an “infrastructure of inattention” around dowry killings, referring to legal and cultural processes that once made such deaths the focus of mass public protest but now allow such murders to pass with little public attention.

The central government is reportedly considering delaying its plan to increase the amount of ethanol mixed with petrol from the current 20% to 25%. The government’s rationale is that the move would reduce India’s dependence on imported crude oil, lower some vehicle emissions and create a bigger market for Indian farmers. However, these stated public policy objectives overshadow several economic principles that lie behind citizens’ opposition to the proposal.

Artificial intelligence is changing how Indian newsrooms reach their audiences, and the way outlets handle that change will affect what news people see, how well they can trust it and whether independent journalism can survive on platforms it no longer controls. This came out at a panel discussion at the India launch of the Digital News Report 2026, an annual study of global news consumption by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.

Millions of Indians now create videos, podcasts, photographs and social media content for online audiences. A new study suggests that content creation is spreading to smaller cities, growing more professional and occupying an increasingly important place in young people's lives. This growth brings significant social benefits. It could also bring problems of mental health, misinformation and a culture increasingly driven by the pursuit of attention.

The West Bengal Assembly has passed two laws that allow authorities to place people identified as “goondas” (violent criminals, gang members or habitual offenders) in preventive detention for up to 12 months and confiscate their property to compensate victims of damage caused during public disorder. The move is causing concern that these laws could be used against political opponents, activists and protesters because of the broad powers they grant the government.

A judge in Madhya Pradesh who sentenced seven men to life imprisonment for their role in a lynching case is facing a campaign of protests, threats and abuse. It is disturbing that sections of the public have reacted not with concern about the man who was beaten to death by a mob, but with anger that those found guilty of the killing were punished. The reaction points to a particular way of thinking about mob violence, justice and the rule of law, and deserves a psychological explanation.

R. Rajagopal, a former editor of The Telegraph, says his passport renewal has been held up after police reported that his name had been deleted from the electoral roll during a recent Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the voter list. Does this mean an exercise built to catch duplicate and inaccurate entries may now begin to decide, in practice, who is a citizen with standing to travel, work or have access to government services?

People born in recent decades are biologically older than their chronological age would suggest, and that gap appears to be widening with each generation, a pattern that a new study links to rising rates of cancer in adults under 55.

The Ministry of External Affairs has said that an Indian passport is primarily a travel document and should not be treated as standalone proof of citizenship. While the statement can be legally defended, it appears harsh and potentially unjust to tell citizens that none of their documents could finally protect them from suspicion when the state has treated them as citizens for decades, allowed them to vote, taxed them, issued them identity documents, educated their children, and issued them a passport after official verification.

The West Bengal government has appointed the religious organisation ISKCON to provide mid-day meals in schools under the Kolkata Municipal Corporation area, replacing eggs with a strictly vegetarian menu that includes items such as paneer, rajma and soybeans, which also contain protein. However, will replacing eggs with a compulsory vegetarian menu improve, maintain or reduce actual nutrition among children from low-income households?

The Union Home Ministry has amended the rules governing how non-governmental organisations receive foreign money, requiring them to select their stated purpose from a government-prescribed list and barring them from proselytising under several categories of activities eligible for registration.

A person who speaks warmly of democracy or equality may sound principled in general conversation, but the harder test comes when the question concerns the power, safety or identity of that person’s own group. A new study of Indian Americans suggests that many respondents supported more liberal positions when they were thinking about the United States and more conservative positions when they were thinking about India. Muslim Indian Americans were more consistently liberal in both countries.

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.

A genre of Indian music, called “Hindutva pop,” or H-Pop, is being used to vilify and dehumanise Muslim and Christian minorities on four of the world’s largest digital platforms, according to a new report by the U.S.-based research group Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH).

While public discussion has increasingly focused on generative AI as the force threatening entry-level white-collar jobs, researchers now argue that a much older “technology”, remote work, offers a better explanation for what has happened since the pandemic. They say remote workplaces make it harder to train, supervise and mentor new employees, leading many employers to favour experienced hires instead.

Women in economically precarious households in India went without food for days during Covid-19 lockdowns so children could eat and men could keep working, according to a new study based on interviews in Uttar Pradesh and Goa.

The Delhi High Court has quashed a police case and a money laundering investigation against the independent news portal Newsclick, ruling that nothing in the complaint amounted to a crime even if every claim in it were true, and that letting the prosecution continue would be a gross abuse of the process of law.

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.

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.

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.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-driven satirical movement that emerged online last month, is set to hold its first on-ground protest at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on June 6, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over examination failures that the group says affected more than 10 million (one crore) students. It’s difficult to predict how the government will respond. However, treating the protest as primarily a law and order issue rather than a crowd management exercise could carry significant political and administrative costs.

A study has found that 138 Indian cities belong to the category where economic expansion came with worsening air quality, the highest share of any country in the world at 35.4 percent of the global total. The finding raises a question about whose prosperity is being measured when the price of growth is paid in the air that everyone, regardless of income, has no choice but to breathe.

In a new survey, financial pressure has emerged as the biggest source of stress and anxiety among urban Indians, while adults aged 25 to 34 report lower overall well-being than people in their 50s despite being generally healthier, more connected to health information, more likely to use fitness apps and more exposed to modern health culture.

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.

Summers in much of India have always been tough, but what is happening now is far more severe. It is a public health emergency unfolding under the guise of a weather event. In recent years, temperatures have remained above 40°C for days at a stretch, leading to tens of thousands of suspected heatstroke cases across the country. And those who face the greatest risk are workers in the informal sector, who spend long hours outdoors and continue to lack strong, enforceable protections against extreme heat under India’s labour framework.

The recent killing of three Kuki Baptist pastors in an ambush showed that Manipur’s three-year conflict has widened beyond the Meitei-Kuki divide. The attack came barely three months after President’s Rule was revoked and a new council of ministers was sworn in. What began in May 2023 as violence between the valley-based Meitei community and the Kuki-Zo tribes had already claimed hundreds of lives and displaced tens of thousands, most of them from the tribal Kuki-Zo communities.

A new study analysed the hottest continuous 15-day stretch between April 15 and April 29 in parts of India and Pakistan to determine how much climate change influenced the event. While studying it, the researchers found that such prolonged heat events are now about three times more likely to occur and nearly 1°C hotter in today’s climate than they were before large scale industrial warming.

Kerala Chief Minister V.D. Satheesan took oath as “Vadasseri Damodara Menon Satheesan,” unlike earlier occasions where he had dropped “Menon,” an upper-caste surname. Days later, he went to the Guruvayur Sri Krishna Temple and offered thulabharam (ritual weighing) with butter, a ritual in which a devotee is weighed against an offering made to the deity. Coming within a week of the formation of a Congress government, the two decisions have triggered unease in the state because the party had projected itself as secular and inclusive.

The Editors Guild of India has criticised recent stand-offs involving Indian government representatives and journalists from the Netherlands and Norway as “embarrassing,” saying they followed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s refusal to take questions from local media during visits to the two countries.