On the second anniversary of the uprising, clashes between former coalition partners - BNP, Jamaat-e-Islami's student wing and the National Citizen Party - spread across Bangladeshi campuses, even disrupting an official state anniversary event where the Acting President said he felt "ashamed and pained."
BHU's Department of Ancient Indian History, Culture and Archaeology, with CDFD Hyderabad, has begun ancient DNA (aDNA) and stable isotope testing on a roughly 1,000-year-old skeleton recovered from Rajghat in 1957, in a rare instance of a decades-old Indian find being subjected to modern genetic science.
The scale of the Jharkhand deletion - nearly one in six voters - has put fresh focus on how the Election Commission verifies eligibility during a Special Intensive Revision, days after a similar exercise in Meghalaya excluded 1.8 lakh electors and as the claims and objections window opens for anyone wrongly struck off to seek reinstatement.
On the seventh anniversary of Article 370's abrogation, J&K CM Omar Abdullah publicly hardened his statehood demand, holding his first Delhi protest on the issue and declaring he had "neither forgotten nor accepted" the 2019 move. This follows a year of the NC government's cooperative approach with the Centre, which yielded a Cabinet resolution for statehood in October 2024 but no Central commitment on timing - a gap the…
The Indian Statistical Institute Bill, 2026, tabled in the Lok Sabha, proposes replacing ISI's 33-member Governing Council - elected under its society structure - with an 11-member, largely government-nominated Board of Governors and converting the institute into a statutory body corporate. ISI faculty, opposition MPs and economist Prabhat Patnaik have strongly criticised the Bill as centralising control and diluting the…
Iran's Foreign Ministry announced that geographical coordinates for a new Hormuz shipping route negotiated with Oman have been finalised, with a formal joint statement in the final drafting stage. Reuters reports the underlying deal would give Tehran control over ships entering the Gulf - one of the largest concessions extracted from ongoing negotiations since Iran seized de facto control of the strait following the outbreak…
Parliament expanded the Supreme Court's sanctioned strength under Article 124(1) from 34 to 38 judges via a Money Bill, even as MPs across parties argued the real crisis lies in subordinate-court vacancies and a judiciary appointment pipeline where, of 593 judges appointed since January 2021, only 26 came from Scheduled Castes and 14 from Scheduled Tribes.
Sheikh Hasina held her first international press conference since fleeing to India in August 2024, using it to announce a possible December 2026 return to Bangladesh and to demand the lifting of the ban on her party, the Awami League. Bangladesh's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted with a strongly worded protest, accusing India of allowing the event despite prior warnings about its impact on bilateral ties, sharpening…
The government signalled it will remove any retrospective effect from the FCRA Amendment Bill's asset-vesting provisions, after the CBCI raised concerns directly with the Home Minister and the Opposition used a stalled Monsoon Session to press its own demands - a rare instance of a Bill's substance shifting through informal negotiation rather than formal committee scrutiny.
Reuters reported, citing two sources with direct knowledge of the matter, that India's Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas is weighing a levy of ₹1.29 per kg on LPG and ₹1.43 per standard cubic metre on natural gas to fund new LNG and LPG storage infrastructure, extending India's Strategic Petroleum Reserve model - currently crude-only and centrally funded - to cover gas for the first time.
The order came in an interim application filed by Gadkari against Meta Platforms, X Corp, Google LLC and unidentified "John Doe" defendants, after AI-generated face-swap videos and manipulated clips falsely portrayed him as the architect of the E20 policy and as having personally profited from it. The Bombay High Court's remarks on the absence of a proactive takedown mechanism have made this as much a governance story as a…
Tamil Nadu Finance Minister N Marie Wilson presented the first budget of Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay's government on August 5, targeting an economy of $1.5 trillion by 2036. The budget speech and an accompanying White Paper flagged the state's rising interest burden - outstanding debt of ₹13.18 lakh crore including PSUs - as an early-stage debt-interest spiral crowding out capital and welfare spending.
Following a June 2026 executive order with a 60-day deadline that expired on August 1, the White House met with major tech companies on Tuesday to finalise a security review process for frontier AI models. The framework, reported by Axios and confirmed by multiple outlets, will apply only to closed models - leaving open-weight models entirely outside the review requirement.
A proposal to divert roughly 75 hectares of reserved forest for limestone mining in the Babarkot coastal corridor of Jafrabad Taluka - an officially recognised lion movement corridor linking the Satellite IV coastal subpopulation to the main Gir landscape - has raised conservation concerns. This comes alongside reports of babesiosis-related lion deaths in May 2026, reviving memories of the 2018 Canine Distemper Virus…
An unexpected spell of extremely heavy rainfall in early August 2026 caused flash floods across several Kerala districts. Chief Minister V D Satheesan confirmed 26 deaths, 4 people missing and over 27,000 people sheltering in around 460 relief camps. The state government has announced urgent desilting and land-auditing measures in response.
The MPC's decision to hold rates while simultaneously raising the growth forecast and cutting the inflation forecast is being read as a signal that the RBI sees current price pressure as transient and supply-driven - but the neutral stance, rather than an explicit easing bias, leaves open whether a rate cut follows once West Asian energy volatility and monsoon-linked food prices settle.
Jani, accused of bludgeoning three women to death, was convicted of only one of the three murders and had exhausted his appeal at the Odisha High Court before the Supreme Court intervened. The bench's order is significant not just for the acquittal itself, but for explicitly naming the chain of institutional failure - police coercion, a trial court that didn't test the evidence and an appellate court that added the case "to…
A writ petition by retired Air Force officer Maneesh Kumar Solanki sought accountability for violence during the Cockroach Janta Party-linked "Sansad Chalo" march on July 20, which led to a police crackdown in Delhi. The petitioner's counsel argued that 15 days on, no action had been taken against organisers and that a young man had separately died amid related unrest in Rajasthan. The Supreme Court, tagging the plea with…
The report was published after the Supreme Court, in February 2026, set aside a March 2025 Allahabad High Court ruling that had classified an act of sexual assault as mere "preparation" rather than "attempt" to rape. During those hearings, CJI Surya Kant reportedly called the 2023 handbook "too Harvard-oriented" for practical use, prompting the National Judicial Academy to build a more usable, trauma-informed framework for…
Protesters at a July 20 demonstration in New Delhi alleged excessive and indiscriminate use of force by security personnel, including the first known use of shock-batons for crowd control in the capital and nail-studded lathis. The incident has renewed scrutiny of India's crowd control regulations, which specify escalation rules but leave critical gaps on device specifications, targeting protocols and accountability - gaps…
The RBI Monetary Policy Committee voted unanimously to hold the repo rate at 5.25 percent in August 2026, maintaining its neutral stance despite CPI inflation rising to 4.38 percent in June from 3.93 percent in May, driven mainly by food and fuel prices, while core inflation stayed subdued near 2.3-2.5 percent and growth forecasts were revised up to 6.7 percent.
The Ministry of Finance's July 2026 GST data shows gross collections crossing ₹2,11,205 crore, the second-highest monthly growth rate of the fiscal year. But The Hindu's editorial argues the number conceals more than it reveals - that trade-led and inflation-led tax buoyancy is being mistaken for genuine economic resilience, just as the government prepares the next round of GST reforms ("GST 3.0").
Amid continuing student protests in Jharkhand and elsewhere over institutional accountability, exam fairness and jobs [OPERATOR VERIFY], commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta has argued that these protests indict not just the current government but the entire post-liberalisation generation's strategy of "accommodation" - pursuing individual careers instead of collective action - which he says allowed institutions to hollow out from…
On the seventh anniversary of Article 370's abrogation, Prime Minister Narendra Modi claimed on X that J&K and Ladakh's trajectory had been decisively transformed since 2019. A Hindu data analysis published the same week found a more mixed record - moderating GSDP growth, a declining Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education, rising UAPA cases and undertrials and continued non-restoration of statehood, prompting renewed…
A trial court acquitted Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, former MP and former WFI chief, of sexual harassment charges brought by Olympic and World Championship wrestlers, citing failure to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The case had drawn national attention since the wrestlers' January 2023 dharna at Jantar Mantar and their subsequent Supreme Court petition to compel an FIR, reviving debate on institutional accountability…