NEWS BRIEFINGS: LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN INDIA

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.

Delhi Police and Rapid Action Force (RAF) personnel used batons and tear gas against thousands of protesters during the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) “Chalo Sansad” march on July 20, leaving scores injured and dozens detained. Eyewitness accounts from journalists covering the protest, including those from Newsreel Asia, and videos circulating on social media point to at least five serious forms of possibly unlawful and punitive force.

Tens of thousands of young people converged around Delhi’s Connaught Place area on July 20, responding to a call by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) for its “Chalo Sansad” march towards Parliament. Most of them belonged to no party, community or movement the government could name, and their active participation appeared to shatter its claim that dissent or grievances in India are confined to a few groups that can be conveniently bracketed into Muslims, Christians, communists, left-leaning civil society, farmers and independent journalists.

The Cockroach Janata Party’s protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi has held together for 19 days because “cockroach” means something different to everyone under the tarpaulins, I found when I visited the site on July 16. My biggest concern now is that what could end this diverse coalition is the deteriorating condition of the fasting man on the mattress on the stage. Let me explain how.

An international advocacy network is pressing the United Nations to formally endorse December 8 as International Dignified Menstruation Day, an observance it has held for seven years without official recognition from the world body.

Farmers in Punjab and Haryana have been protesting against a proposed bilateral trade agreement between India and the United States. They are concerned that opening India’s agricultural market further to American products could place millions of Indian farmers at a serious disadvantage because the two agricultural systems are very different in size, costs and government support.

The Kerala Club, an 87-year-old socio-cultural institution founded by V.P. Menon, the civil servant who helped unite India’s princely states, is fighting eviction proceedings brought by its landlord in a dispute the club says rests on a false claim that it stopped paying rent.

Obesity could be emerging alongside persistent undernutrition among children in India’s poor urban communities, suggests a long-running study of one such neighbourhood, which found that a rising number of children were overweight or obese by age nine while a larger number were dangerously underweight.

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.