NEWS BRIEFINGS: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN INDIA

A new COVID-19 variant, JN.1, has been detected in several parts of India and abroad, with rising cases and at least one death reported in Maharashtra. Here's what is known so far about the strain, its symptoms and how to stay protected.

As citizens debate freedom of speech—amid serious charges over social media posts and alleged selective blocking of news websites—it’s worth examining censorship through the lens of political science rather than ideology, which often reduces complex issues to partisan battles and obscures deeper understanding.

Many people today feel pessimistic about life and the world around them, largely because the news tends to focus on conflict, crisis and division. But a new research suggests this gloomy outlook may be misleading. The world appears to be far kinder—and more interconnected—than we often assume. Generosity, empathy and trust are widespread across societies, including in India.

As security forces wage an all-out war against Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh, citizens remain divided over how governments should handle insurgencies—whether to respond decisively with military force or first sit down for talks. The answer isn’t as straightforward as we’d like, because rebellions and insurgencies are almost always messy, complex affairs. But let’s unpack this clearly.

A new study has found that many personal care products used daily by women—like body lotions, shampoos, soaps and cosmetics—contain chemicals that release formaldehyde, a substance known to cause cancer. These chemicals are especially common in products used by African-American and Latina women in the United States, but some of these brands are sold widely, including in India.

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has reportedly issued a new directive to states and Union Territories, setting a 30-day deadline to verify the citizenship status of “suspected” undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh and Myanmar. This move is likely to create bureaucratic bottlenecks and trigger long-term humanitarian and geopolitical complications with no resolution mechanism in sight.

The arrest of Ashoka University professor Ali Khan Mahmudabad points to a troubling truth about how law enforcement operates in an increasingly polarised public sphere: in a politically charged atmosphere, the threshold for prosecuting an ordinary citizen—academic or not—can be alarmingly low. All it takes is one complaint, one misreading, or one wilful distortion of a public remark. The system, instead of examining the context or the merit of what is said, responds as if the outrage itself is evidence of wrongdoing.

The recent detention of Bahubali Shah, co-owner of Gujarat Samachar, by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has led to accusations of political vendetta. Opposition leaders, including Rahul Gandhi, have condemned the move as part of a pattern of intimidation against media critical of the government.

Two years after their homes were torched and their lives uprooted, residents of 45 Kuki-Zo villages from Manipur’s Chandel district are still waiting for government recognition, let alone compensation or relief. Not one official relief camp has been set up for them, no state support has reached them in their name, and the government continues to deny that their villages were even affected in the May 2023 violence.

Three independent fact-finding missions conducted in Odisha between March and April 2025 have pointed to an alarming rise in targeted attacks, coercion and violations of constitutional rights against Christians—especially Adivasi and Dalit communities.

Indian authorities have allegedly “abandoned”—rather than deported—40 Rohingya refugees in international waters near the Myanmar maritime border, forcing women, children and the elderly to swim to safety using life jackets. The action could be seen as a “secret rendition,” a term used to describe the covert transfer of individuals across borders without legal process.

As India and Pakistan exchanged fire recently, Indian media turned the conflict into a nationalist spectacle—fuelling misinformation, stirring up communal identity and drowning out voices of reason. In moments like these, warnings by poet-philosopher Rabindranath Tagore—who wrote India’s national anthem—about nationalism read less like history and more like a diagnosis.

A new biopic on 19th-century social reformer Jyotirao Phule and his wife Savitribai Phule, titled “Phule,” is now running in Indian theatres, drawing attention to enduring divides over caste, education and equality nearly 150 years after his death.

Hate distorts what we expect from our governments. It teaches us to demand emotion over reason, revenge over restraint and spectacle over seriousness. It normalises irrationality. And when governments allow or tacitly support this hate to spread unchecked, it doesn’t remain focused on the supposed enemy—it turns inward, undermining public servants, weakening institutions, and sabotaging the very public interest it claims to defend. The online targeting of Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri is a clear example.

By any diplomatic yardstick, U.S. President Donald Trump’s offer to mediate between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is misplaced. It rests on one of Washington’s most enduring and dangerous misconceptions—that Kashmir is the core problem between the two countries, a notion his predecessor Barack Obama also held.

Independent news portal The Wire became inaccessible to readers across India on May 9 after internet service providers displayed notices saying the site had been blocked on government orders, according to the media outlet. The disruption coincided with rising hostilities between India and Pakistan and came just weeks after the 2025 World Press Freedom Index placed India at 151 out of 180 countries.

From the early hours of May 8 to the morning of May 9, a sharp escalation unfolded along the India-Pakistan border, particularly around the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir. The 24-hour period was marked by intense military activity, with Pakistani troops reportedly resuming fire early on May 9, amid mutual accusations and growing international concern over the threat of a full-scale conflict.

As tensions rise between India and Pakistan, questions about what constitutes a lawful war are once again in focus. International law makes a clear distinction between jus ad bellum (the right to go to war) and jus in bello (the rules governing conduct in war). These are framed by the United Nations Charter, customary international law and treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, all of which define what states and their leaders can—and cannot—do during conflict.

India launched a major military strike deep into Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir early on May 7, saying it targeted sites used by terror groups responsible for the April 22 attacks on civilians in the Kashmir region. Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif called the attack a “blatant act of war,” promising that it “will not go unpunished” and claiming that a “resolute response is already underway.”

The Supreme Court on May 5 opened a sealed report from the Central Forensic Science Laboratory on leaked audio recordings allegedly featuring former Manipur chief minister N. Biren Singh, in which he is purported to admit a role in the ethnic violence that erupted in May 2023. Finding the report inadequate, the Court directed the government to have the tapes re-examined and stated that neither the judiciary nor the Centre is expected to “protect anyone.”

The delay in population Census has left over 120 million people without access to subsidised foodgrain under the National Food Security Act (NFSA). The shortfall, attributed to outdated beneficiary data from the 2011 Census, is pushing millions towards food insecurity, despite the government continuing to operate one of the world’s largest food distribution programmes.

India climbed eight spots in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, moving from 159 last year to 151 out of 180 countries. The index by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), released on May 3—World Press Freedom Day—paints a bleak picture of India’s media environment, describing a deepening crisis that affects how journalism is practised and received across the country.

After ethnic violence erupted in Manipur on May 3, 2023, hundreds of Kuki-Zo settlements mapping the community’s lineage burned in the following weeks and months. “When a village is burned, its history, culture and identity burn with it,” says Dr. Jangkholam Haokip, a Kuki-Zo tribal scholar who has returned to Churachandpur to salvage what he calls “irreplaceable human wisdom.”

For many years, researchers believed that people were generally happy when they were young, then their happiness levels dipped during midlife, and finally started rising again as they got older. However, a large study involving over 200,000 people across more than 20 countries now shows that people in their late teens and twenties today are not as happy or well-adjusted as people of the same age used to be in the past.

The April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, which killed 26 civilians, has pushed India and Pakistan into one of their most dangerous standoffs in recent years. Daily gunfire is being reported across the Line of Control (LoC), diplomatic ties have been cut off and military activity is intensifying. Though there has been no formal declaration of war, the present situation carries all the signs of a serious military escalation between two nuclear-armed neighbours.

Ashraf, a Muslim and daily wage labourer from Wayanad, Kerala, had arrived in this coastal Karnataka city just weeks earlier. On the evening of April 27, he was found dead near a temple in Kudupu—barely 10 km from Mangaluru city’s centre. Reportedly killed on the sidelines of a cricket match, his death was a brutal act that felt grimly familiar.

India faces a sharp rise in dementia cases, with around 340 million people aged 60 and older expected by 2050 and 5.3 million already living with dementia since 2020, according to a report published in The Lancet Psychiatry. Yet there are still major gaps in public knowledge, available services, and trained staff.

A new geological study finds that, contrary to earlier belief, the Indian Plate beneath the Tibetan Plateau is breaking and twisting deep below the surface. The discovery has serious implications for understanding earthquake risks across South and East Asia, including Myanmar, India, Bhutan, Nepal and China.

Rakesh Sharma, 58, a senior correspondent with the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, was recently beaten by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers in Kathua, Jammu and Kashmir, while covering a roadside protest over the April 22 terror attack in Pahalgam. They attacked him for a simple reason: he had asked someone at the rally why the party kept burning effigies of Pakistan instead of addressing what he called a “security lapse.”

Imagine being over 60 and having to travel 14 kilometres for a routine check-up and more than 40 kilometres for a hospital bed; a new study in a journal, The Lancet Regional Health – Southeast Asia, shows this is normal for India’s 138 million older adults, exposing how sheer distance—more than cost or doctors—now dictates whether they receive care at all.