On a rainy September afternoon in Rajasthan last year, I slid my bag into the back of a rustic jeep and set off on a drive into the Aravallis, the subcontinent’s oldest fold mountain range.

The person driving me was a senior activist who gently filled the journey with stories: of three mine workers crushed to death a day earlier; of a policeman transferred to another city while trying to expose the mining mafia; of his own humiliation at the hands of the local police as well as a judge who thought his appearance, after an hours-long bus journey, was too shabby for court.

He had suffered six murder attempts, he said; some of them in the same jeep in which we sat.

As we drove in and out of the idyllic villages, while the rain pitter-pattered against the glass, he stopped briefly to show me a rivulet that he said was once a river, a stone crusher set up barely 100m away from a conservation zone, and a mining project operating on the banks of a water body.

“This is one of the few places still untainted by mining,” he said, pulling the jeep over outside a house.

Buffaloes grazed. Kids looked up. The men of the house ushered us in.

Placing newspaper cuttings, legal documents, and warm cups of tea in front of me, the owners of the house, an Adivasi family, told me they were preparing for a court case.

A marble and granite company had acquired a lease for the land. And they did so by claiming that the mountains surrounding the village are not the Aravallis, and the river sustaining local families is not a river.

“So, your survival here basically depends on these definitions now?” I asked.

“Yes,” they replied.

Having reported on mining for years, I could see that this was a textbook case of mining-induced displacement.

But even before the farming community could effectively challenge these definitions, the Supreme Court gave us another definition that could not only change the fate of this community, but possibly entire regions of north India: the definition of the Aravallis itself.

The new, uniform definition the government accepted would open about 90% of the mountain range to unregulated mining, critics said. It would wipe away mountains, displace communities, destroy species, kill forests, dry up rivers, and drive desertification in the Indo-Gangetic plains.

As parts of the country erupted in protest, the Supreme Court stayed the order and constituted a committee to reconsider the definition.

In July 2026, the committee, mostly made up of current or former government employees, invited public suggestions by email. But the email address (mshpcaravalli@gmail.com) itself is so complicated, environmentalists say, that many emails might just get lost due to typing errors. “And how many people living in the mountains really have access to email?” one of them told me recently.

Meanwhile, the Adivasi community, as I report in my story, won a reprieve from the Supreme Court—a rare win for a mining-affected community in India.

But for how long?

You can read Romita Saluja’s full story here.

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In August 2026, a Delhi court acquitted former Wrestling Federation of India chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh in the sexual harassment case filed by several women wrestlers, citing a lack of evidence. The verdict closed one chapter of a struggle that had begun more than three years earlier.

But before there was a trial, before there was an investigation, before there was even an FIR, there was a protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi’s designated protest site, which I visited on 25 April 2023, the third day after the wrestlers resumed their protest against Singh.

The first thing I noticed was the uneasy atmosphere around the site. Jantar Mantar was surrounded by police barricades, cameras and security personnel. On the other side of the barricades sat some of India’s best-known wrestlers: Vinesh Phogat, Bajrang Punia and Sakshi Malik among them.

Yet, the protest felt strangely underreported.

There were cameras everywhere, but few mainstream television channels seemed interested. Most of those documenting events were independent and YouTube journalists.

I remember being struck by the fact that Olympic medallists and some of India’s most celebrated athletes were only demanding that the Delhi police take the first step required by law—the right to have sexual harassment allegations made by seven women wrestlers formally recorded and investigated.

The wrestlers had already protested in January 2023 and withdrawn after the government’s assurance that an independent oversight committee would investigate their allegations within four weeks. The committee’s report was submitted on 5 April 2023 but never made public. As for the FIR, a basic right, the police simply ignored it.

Listening to Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat and Bajrang Punia, I sensed a different kind of anger from the one I remembered during the January protest. There was a feeling that they had trusted the government once and been let down. Almost every conversation returned to what they described as broken promises and official inaction.

Malik, an Olympic medalist, said: “Hume laga tha hum itne bade athletes hain. Hum ek baar bolenge aur humari baat sun li jaayegi. Par aisa nahi hua. Hume nahi pata tha ki har stage pe log Brij Bhushan Singh ko support karenge. Hume nahi pata tha ye ladayi itni lambi ho jaayegi (We thought we were such famous athletes. If we spoke up once, they would listen. But that didn’t happen. We did not know that, at every stage, people would support Brij Bhushan Singh. We did not know that this would be such a long battle).”

The anger seemed personal, but it had also been sharpened into resolve. They seemed determined not to repeat what they regarded as the mistake of placing faith in assurances. I watched Phogat address the press. She spoke about how difficult it had been for women wrestlers to come forward and described attempts to intimidate them.

“There are girls in my house who also wrestle,” said Phogat, a gold medalist many times over. “Maine ye socha ki kal ko unke saath kuch galat hoga toh kya main tab bhi chup rahungi? Isliye maine faisla liya ki mujhe aane waali generation ke liye bolna padega (I thought that if something happens to them tomorrow, will I keep quiet? This is why I thought it’s important for me to speak up for the generations to come).”

What struck me was that the protest was no longer only about the wrestlers themselves. Again and again, they framed the issue as a larger question: if celebrated athletes could not get their complaints heard, what hope was there for women with less visibility and power?

As Phogat told reporters, This is now not just a wrestlers’ fight; this is the issue of all the women of this country.”

By the end of that day at Jantar Mantar, it was clear that the wrestlers were no longer merely seeking action against one federation official. They were questioning a system that had left their complaints unheard for months.

The atmosphere was also markedly different from the January protest.

This time, the wrestlers openly welcomed political leaders and civil society groups. CPI(M) leader Brinda Karat, who had previously been asked to leave the stage, was welcomed. Former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda visited. The wrestlers appeared to have concluded that this was as much a political battle as a legal one.

The court that acquitted Sharan appears to have seized on this support to describe the “false and fabricated” accusations as being “politically” motivated.

At one press conference, the wrestlers spoke about threats and intimidation allegedly faced by complainants. Bajrang Punia said that people associated with the federation were approaching families with offers of money. They held firm and battled on.

The upside to the whole depressing episode was the growth of collective action.

I saw mounting involvement by farmers’ organisations and khap, or clan, leaders. Representatives spoke about mobilising supporters from Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. What had begun as a protest by athletes was slowly becoming a wider social movement.

The FIR came only on 28 April 2023, roughly three months after the allegations first became public and only after Supreme Court intervention. Three years later, after the acquittal, that struggle—and the solidarity it created—remains a significant lesson in the lexicon of protest.

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A few years ago, S (name withheld) walked out of her marriage after enduring domestic violence. During the separation, after months of unexplained illness, she tested positive for HIV.

When I met her at an NGO office in Meerut, Uttar Pradesh, she was soft-spoken, wore glasses, had long straight hair and quietly served us water. She spoke about the violence at her marital home without flinching, but broke down when she described the day she was diagnosed.

To her, the diagnosis was the final betrayal by her ex-husband—beyond the slaps and punches she had already endured.

Today, she lives in Muzaffarnagar, divorced and in her thirties, supporting her ageing mother while undergoing intensive medical treatment herself. She carries the quiet resilience—and exhaustion—of someone rebuilding her life in a place where, she told me, women “like her” are easily judged for making their own choices.

The next day, at a government hospital, I met A, whose husband had abandoned her and their children.

My heart sank when the counsellor told me A’s son was HIV positive too. I had interviewed several women living with HIV before. Many had discovered their diagnosis during pregnancy, when timely access to antiretroviral therapy prevented transmission to their babies.

In A’s case, it was too late.

Government-run ART centres in Meerut and Delhi are crowded, understaffed and overwhelmed with patients from the margins, many searching not just for treatment but for care free of judgement and unaffordable medical bills.

What struck me most while reporting was the shame the women carried.

S repeatedly asked: Who will believe me when I say my ex-husband gave me this disease?

Others asked that their interviews not be used at all, afraid that relatives or neighbours might discover their diagnosis.

“Bahut badnaami hogi, madam.”

A lot of shame will come on us, madam.

It took me weeks to find women willing to speak. Several agreed initially, only to withdraw later, fearing their husbands would find out.

For many, only a mother, sister or husband knew about both the HIV diagnosis and the violence. Friends remained unaware. Years of relationships could be undone by the stigma attached to a disease they had not chosen.

This wasn’t my first time reporting on women living with HIV. While working on an earlier story, I realised that many were also facing domestic violence because of their diagnosis. I knew then that I wanted to tell that story.

There are dozens of women and activists across India whose experiences could not be included here because speaking carried too great a risk. The violence, coercion and humiliation they described followed painfully familiar patterns.

Two of the women featured in this story continue to live with abusive husbands because they have nowhere else to go. One would call me only after her husband left for work. I was never allowed to return her calls or send her a message in case he discovered she had spoken to a reporter.

Alongside the violence, many were accused of infidelity and branded “sluts” by the very men who had infected them. They were expected to carry not only the burden of the disease but also the shame attached to it.

I left Meerut feeling angry at the system that had failed these women—but also hopeful.

As we said goodbye, S was on her way to help another woman living with HIV who was facing domestic violence.

You can read Jaishree Kumar’s full story here.

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It took several calls before she answered. When she finally did, she sounded anxious. Before I could explain why I was calling, she kept asking what the conversation was about and who would read it.

Let’s call her R. I cannot identify her because she asked me not to. Before saying anything else, she said, “Please don’t mention my name. I will lose my only source of income.”

Only after I assured her I would protect her identity did she agree to speak.

I had called to ask about maternity benefits for ASHA workers—the Accredited Social Health Activists who visit homes, track pregnancies, ensure children are vaccinated and, in many villages, are the only connection between the public health system and families.

When I asked whether she received maternity benefits, she fell silent.

“I don’t know what maternity benefits are,” she said.

For a moment, I wondered if she had misunderstood the question. I explained that women employed by the government and many private companies receive paid maternity leave before and after childbirth.

Before I finished, she interrupted me.

“We don’t get any of that.”

Instead, she told me about something else: unpaid work.

ASHA workers, she explained, receive a monthly honorarium of Rs 2,000. Most of their income comes from incentives for tasks such as health surveys, immunisation drives and other public health work. Those payments, she said, had not arrived for five or six months.

I asked why she continued.

“How can I leave?” she replied without hesitation. “This is my only source of income.”

A few days later, another ASHA worker in Delhi filled in the picture. In a good month, she said, incentive payments could reach Rs 10,000, depending entirely on how much work was assigned. But assignments had become scarce.

She told me that during the COVID-19 pandemic, her husband fell seriously ill and lost his job.

“Bhagwan ki dua se, woh theek ho gaye.” By God’s grace, he recovered.

Since then, she has been supporting the family.

As our conversation drew to a close, she asked me something I wasn’t expecting.

Did I know anyone who could help her get more survey work?

I had no answer.

I had called to ask why women who keep India’s public health system running are denied maternity benefits. I ended the conversation confronted by a more immediate reality: before they can claim rights they are entitled to, many are simply trying to secure enough work to survive.

Read Preeti Singh’s full story here.

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April rain lashed the roads when I met Aarif Nazeer. His eyes were ringed with the shadows of grief. His home felt haunted, as though silence itself had taken residence there. When he spoke about his late father, his body betrayed a struggle that words could barely contain.

“You know, no one helps forever,” he told me. “I have heard things from friends and relatives that I never imagined I would hear. But when you are in debt, you learn to bear the unbearable.”

As he spoke about the family’s financial burden, he broke down. For a moment, it felt as though he believed I could deliver justice simply by listening. I sat there, painfully aware that I could preserve his suffering through writing, tell the truth to the world, but I could never restore his family’s lost dignity or bring his father back.

Nazeer is one of 90 Kashmir government employees dismissed since 2021, I had reported, under an obscure and little-used Constitutional provision that allows termination without a departmental inquiry on security grounds. Those I spoke to described lost incomes, shattered futures, social stigma and mounting debt. With cases crawling through tribunals and courts, the punishment arrived long before any final verdict.

I watched Nazeer’s sister, who has special needs, quietly move through the house, dusting shelves and arranging cups. I paused to think about the invisible rules by which the world decides people’s lives. She could have become anything—a teacher, a doctor, or whatever she dreamed of.

Instead, I wondered whether society had already written her future for her, deciding that because of her disability she would remain confined within these walls, never allowed the life she deserved. Who decided her fate?

Nazeer tried to appear strong. Yet, every sentence revealed the weight he was carrying beneath that courage.

Outside, the snow had begun to melt on the Himalayas overlooking the Kashmir Valley. Among all the people I met, I sensed the same lingering helplessness. Their lives seemed woven together by uncertainty, by chaos, by an invisible battle—one without declared war or visible weapons, yet capable of leaving deep wounds.

Then I met Dr Nighat Shaheen Chiloo, a government gynaecologist dismissed in June 2023, nearly 16 years after she participated in a postmortem examination of Asiya and Neelofar, two women whose deaths in 2009, widely believed in Kashmir to be at the hands of Indian armed forces, triggered widespread unrest.

She fired questions at me almost immediately after we met.

“What happens after the story?” she asked. “What justice is delivered? What truth is proclaimed? Many journalists have written stories like ours. What do we get in the end?”

As we spoke, her daughter repeatedly urged her not to continue the conversation. I could hear frustration in Dr Chiloo’s voice—a frustration born from years of losing control over the narratives others had constructed around her life.

After leaving her home, I felt physically drained.

My blood pressure rose, perhaps because I had absorbed a fragment of her pain. It took me several days to gather the courage to call her again. Each time I tried, my legs trembled. Asking someone to reopen their deepest wounds is never easy.

When I finally reached Dr Chiloo again, I hesitated. I did not want to disturb a pain she was trying to contain. This time, she declined to speak. What remained was fear, exhaustion and hopelessness.

Five others, including Nazeer, were willing to speak openly about their suffering. Others, like Dr Chiloo, chose to keep the windows of their hearts closed.

Then there was Muheet, the scientist dismissed from the University of Kashmir over allegations of radicalisation. He spoke openly, yet cautiously. Every account of his own ordeal eventually returned to his children.

“I can bear whatever happens to me,” he said. “But I cannot bear anything happening to my family. Write the story, but please take care of my family. I am scared for them. The way things are happening, anything can happen.”

When my reporting was over, and I began my journey home, I realised I was carrying fragments of every story with me. By then, the rain had stopped. Thick clouds still hung over the Valley, like cotton suspended in the sky.

For a moment, I found myself thinking that even in overwhelming grief, people continue to endure. They continue to love, to hope and to survive. Their hearts keep beating despite everything they have lost.

Perhaps that is where my role as a journalist begins and ends—not in delivering justice, because I cannot—but in bearing witness. In recording the truth with honesty, so that their suffering is neither forgotten nor denied.

You can read Marila Latif’s full story here.

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When I met Vinayak More, I really did not know how to ask the 17-year-old about his father’s death.

A soft spoken teenager, Vinayak, was in a hurry to report to work—at a small event management company in rural Maharashtra that caters to birthdays, weddings, and other functions. His gelled hair and stone-washed jeans were in tune with the day’s style. It took a while for the grimmer reality underneath to surface.

He was six when his father, Shivaji, died by suicide in 2016, outside the town of Nanded. He has only faint recollections of the man who once held him for the photograph above. Shivaji had been a farmer—soybeans and cotton—before the land stopped being enough to get by, and he took to labouring on other people’s farms instead. After he died, it wasn’t long before Vinayak’s mother became a labourer too.

Vinayak studied up to 10th standard before dropping out to help his mother. His ambitions are modest, and still out of reach. “I wish I had the money to enrol in an ITI course to learn electrical fitting,” he said wistfully. “But it looks difficult.”

As a journalist, I’ve seen my share of tragedy. But it is always unsettling to come face to face with the people behind the data—in this case, National Crime Records Bureau figures showing that, for the first time since separate records began in 2014, agricultural labourers are now dying by suicide in greater numbers than farmers who own or farm land. I’ve always believed that when data acquire a name and a face, reporting takes a break, and journalism begins.

Long before any of us got into this profession, the veteran farm leader Sharad Joshi spoke of two countries within one—Bharat and India. Bharat stayed in the villages, he argued, while urban India grew at its expense. I thought of Joshi that day, listening to Vinayak talk about the dreams he’d had to put away for lack of money.

Farm suicides have been reported across the country for years, but every story is still a learning experience for me—even in Maharashtra, my home state, where I have travelled to nearly every district. Reporting this one, I met people who had fought long odds and were still fighting them, in their own way.

Manish Jadhav, a farm leader in Yavatmal, was one of them. He had travelled the length and breadth of his district and seemed to know everything about it—its farms, its land, its people. He spoke at length about migration, poverty, and the absence of opportunity. Sitting with him, I understood how much knowledge people generate simply by living in a place the State has stopped paying attention to.

In the cotton belt of Yavatmal, knowledge is not in short supply. What’s missing is anyone willing to listen to it. People’s own understanding of their land deserves more respect than it gets—their lived experience speaks to a place in ways no planner, journalist, scientist, bureaucrat, or politician ever quite manages. We only have to listen.

Everywhere I went, people were willing to talk. What struck me most was how even the most distressed among them went out of their way to welcome a guest. Even when time was precious, they made time. In Washim, some villagers gave up a day’s work just to sit and talk with me. Their reason was simple. As one of them put it: someone should know our story.

Read Partha Sarathi Biswas’ full story here.

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At the outset, it may seem that work at shrimp farms is not “labour-intensive”—something the supervisors and farm owners in Surat, Gujarat, repeatedly told me, a labour researcher, and members of the Majur Adhikar Manch, a Gujarat-based trade union, during our monthly visits to farms in Olpad and Choryasi tehsil.

They often pointed to the workers resting, describing how there are only three or four times during the day when they are supposed to be performing some activity.

Otherwise, we were told, workers are on the charpai, “leisurely hanging out”.

It was difficult to accept this narrative when supervisors and owners often refused to let us speak to the workers directly.

The workers seemed to have been denied the agency to decide whom they wish to speak to and whom they wish to stay silent in front of.

During our initial visits, we were left sitting and nodding along to the larger “economics of the trade”, which the supervisors attempted to divert our attention to when we brought up the conditions under which the workers are labouring at the farm.

“The government provides no support or subsidies to the farm owners,” was a sentence often repeated.

Perhaps this was the rationale used to deny labour rights.

In the midst of this, the workers, who had not uttered a single word during the entire conversation, stood in silence.

It took us 3-4 visits to finally break this silence by finding ways to speak to workers when the supervisors or owners were not around.

Working with a trade union, the agenda of any action research is to finally move towards organising, the most critical labour right. But how do migrant workers even begin to speak about collective action when they work on isolated farms with their movements constantly watched and controlled?

The perception of ‘idleness’ has permeated among the workers as well. Not because the work isn’t tedious. There are many laborious and technical tasks that, if not done properly, result in a poor crop and losses for farm owners, companies, and other actors down the supply chain.

The reason is the comparison with life at dingy factories where they worked earlier. The farms become a lesser evil in that sense, even though workers’ choices remain heavily constrained, as we found out.

“Yeh mere mazdur hein” (These are my workers),

“Mainey inhe paise diye hein” (I have given them money),

“Mein inka seth hun” (I am their owner),

“Mein inko yahan laya hun” (I got them here).

These were some of the phrases directed at us, if owners found us speaking to workers without their permission. In a way, everything on that land becomes theirs, including the shrimps in the ponds and the bodies of the workers.

We kept hearing the paternalistic tone of the supervisors and owners when it came to the workers.

“Bacche.”

Both the baby shrimp and the young men working on the farms were referred to using that word.

This creates a relationship in which workers may not feel comfortable raising their concerns about working and living conditions.

These benevolent owners are doing so much for them: giving them work, food, and shelter here. Taking them to the doctors when required. Basically, tending to them as a child. And a child within patriarchal dominance is tied to the owner, to the supervisor, to the work, and to their circumstances.

Read Anamika Singh’s full story here.

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In Kashmir, people usually stop for funerals, protests, snowfall, and weddings. Now, they stop to mourn trees.

On the Srinagar-Baramulla highway, giant chinars lay on the ground like wounded bodies, their roots exposed, their centuries cut open by machines.

People stood silently beside them, taking photographs they did not know what to do with. Some touched the bark before leaving, almost instinctively, like saying goodbye to an elder.

Older residents recalled how their grandparents planted chinars decades ago.

Younger Kashmiris posted videos online mourning the loss as if mourning a relative.

The government says the highway expansion is necessary.

Development always arrives with maps, measurements and deadlines. But on this road, development also arrived with the sound of chainsaws cutting through memory.

For Kashmiris, the chinar is not a decoration. It is shade during political unrest, shelter during autumn prayers, witness to childhoods, funerals and long summers.

Entire neighbourhoods are remembered through the trees that stood there first.

Perhaps that is what made the silence around the fallen trees feel so heavy. Not only because trees were cut, but because something intimate and familiar disappeared with them.

In Kashmir, landscapes carry memory.

And sometimes, when a tree falls, people feel a part of themselves fall with it too.

Read Seerat-Un-Nisa’s full story here.

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For the people of Tijimali, Kantamal and neighbouring villages, the fight for survival has only intensified.

When I travelled to Tijimali, the atmosphere was tense, charged not only with fear, but with defiance. My visit to Tijimali came with the urge to document the various indigenous communities’ dissent movements taking place in different parts of India.

But what Tijimali revealed was something larger: the familiar pattern of state-backed displacement, the harassment that follows resistance, and the criminalisation of those who refuse to give up their land.

Since 2023, tribal and Dalit communities in the region have been protesting against a proposed bauxite mining project by Vedanta Ltd., the Andhra Pradesh-based mining giant. The project was approved under the Biju Janata Dal government led by Naveen Patnaik. But after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in Odisha in 2024, villagers say the pressure to operationalise mining has sharply increased.

Sipping chai while overlooking Tijimali’s lush green hills, local activists told me their movement draws inspiration from the historic Niyamgiri movement. In the landmark struggle, the Dongria Kondh tribe successfully resisted Vedanta’s attempt to mine the Niyamgiri Hills, barely 74 kilometres away.

In 2013, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the local communities, affirming their rights to the community’s forest and religious rights.

“Niyamgiri gave us hope,” said Subhu Singh Majhi, president of Maa Mati Mali Surakhya Manch, a grassroots organisation formed by local residents, as we sat at the Tijimali hilltop protest site where Vedanta plans to begin excavation. “If our brothers and sisters there could win, so can we. Our ancestors protected this land, the rivers and the forests. Now we are the ones being pushed out.”

The cost of that resistance was visible in every conversation.

When I met Kumeshwar Naik of Kantamal village, he had only recently returned from prison. He had completed what many here describe as a deeply humiliating bail condition imposed by the Odisha High Court: cleaning the local Kashipur police station.

Naik had missed the birth of his child while in custody.

“At first, I was only surprised,” he told me. “Later, I realised what it meant. Because we are tribals and Dalits, they think such punishment is acceptable. We were arrested for protesting for our rights.”

His was not an isolated case. Accessing court records and speaking to villagers revealed a disturbing pattern of how identical caste-coded punishments, repeated arrests, and legal processes were used.

Even now, as the protest continues, so do the arrests.

On 11 March 2026, more than 21 tribal villagers, including 12 women, were detained during demonstrations against Vedanta; nine have only recently secured bail. This followed a violent clash when police attempted to forcibly displace families for a three-kilometre road meant to connect Porolang to Sagabari Ghati, easing access to the proposed mining site.

An FIR now names a doctor as the alleged mastermind, alongside 100 unnamed persons.

In Tijimali, that can only mean one thing: the cycle of arrests, humiliation and repression is far from over.

Read Nikita Jain’s full story here.

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Rashid Ahmed, my friend, interlocutor and host has been calling me often. He was deeply worried that of his five children, two sons had their names under scrutiny in the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls in West Bengal and subsequently deleted from them, making them ineligible to vote.

The consequence of the SIR, a large-scale voter verification exercise meant to identify eligible voters and remove ineligible ones, is the disenfranchisement of 9.1 million voters, or almost 11.9% of Bengal’s electorate.

“Are we citizens of this country or not?” Ahmed asked me.

I have been visiting Nirmal char, the site of my fieldwork as an ethnographer for the last five years.

Adjacent to the Indo-Bangladesh border and the river Ganga-Padma, in the district of Murshidabad in West Bengal, the char (sandbank) emerged during the “boro bhangan” (the big erosion) of 1988, precipitated by the operationalisation of the Farakka barrage.

My research initially was on ecological crisis and mitigation, but as the years went by, increasingly, border security and documentary citizenship overwhelmed my findings.

As I crossed the riverbed to reach the char last week, greeted by Anjuma Bibi, an ASHA or community worker with whom I have spent many afternoons trying to understand the digitisation of women’s care work.

Anjuma was on her way to the panchayat office with her mother, whose name had been struck off the list. Her mother, Shajana Bibi, nearly 80, struggled to walk across the dry, sandy riverbed that had to be crossed to reach the panchayat office from Nirmal char.

It was noon, and the sun blazed at its fiercest.

“We have been running pillar to post to get my mother’s name back on the electoral roll,” Anjuma said with deep fatigue in her eyes, tightly clutching a jute bag filled with documents. “She has lived in this area and voted in this booth all her life, everyone knows her, and yet because of some spelling mistake in the Aadhaar card, she is being labelled as Bangladeshi.”

Shajana squinted at me, trying to place my face, then asked, “Are they going to send me to some camp?”

Of the 9.1 million voters who have been disenfranchised, many have said they had the necessary documents required to prove their citizenship. Yet their right to vote has been stripped away by opaque, baffling bureaucratic rules set by the Election Commission of India. The randomness of this disenfranchisement, an almost Kafkaesque experience, has resulted in a certain estrangement as if one has become an outcast, a stranger in one’s own land.

“How does one eat or sleep in peace?” Ahmed asked me, shaking his head in disbelief. “I was born here. My children were born here. I own land. I have land titles from my grandfather’s time.”

“Our ancestors have lived on these lands, where you stand today, even before Bangladesh was born, yet my sons are being called foreigners,” said Ahmed.

I looked away, feeling unsettled.

My grandparents were Hindu refugees from Dacca (Dhaka) who came to Calcutta (Kolkata) in 1947. I had no ancestral documents, my parents had no birth certificates, and I voted infrequently, yet my name was on the electoral roll.

While Muslims constitute 34% and Hindus 63% of the 9.1 million deletions, the figure is disproportionately high for the former, considering they make up only 27% of the state’s population.

Those who lived and tilled the land for generations were suspect because they lived next to the border.

They are now caught in a bureaucratic nightmare whose inefficiency appears to be a well-calculated political strategy, designed to delay, deny, and exhaust their claims.

Read Panchali Ray’s full story here.

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When news broke in November 2025 that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh had appointed a US lobbyist, it did not fit.

A decade of reporting on the Hindu nationalist organisation had taught me one thing above most others: the RSS does not leave paper trails. It maintains no formal, traceable links with its affiliates—a deliberate structural choice, a senior RSS functionary in West Bengal had told me some years ago, born directly from the ban imposed on the organisation after the assassination of Mohandas Gandhi by a radical Hindu nationalist in 1948.

That experience shaped how the RSS built itself thereafter. Each affiliated and frontal organisation was constituted as a distinct legal entity, insulated on paper from the parent body. The RSS calls them “RSS-inspired organisations.” The RSS itself has never registered as an organisation — not once since its founding in 1925.

“This was done to ensure that even if we face another ban, some of our organisations and assets remain functional,” a former editor of Swastika explained to me. Swastika, published since 1947, serves as the RSS’s Bengali-language mouthpiece. It has no formal link to the RSS—only the people who run it do.

Against this backdrop, the lobbyist story made little sense. The RSS swiftly denied it, repeating its standard formal position: the RSS operates only within India.

This is a half-truth. The RSS works abroad through the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh—a point the RSS chief, Mohan Bhagwat, himself made at a centenary celebration event in August 2025. The HSS does not exist on paper, a fact I have laid out in detail in my full report.

The documentary record of this foreign work is not thin. Over decades, senior RSS functionaries have written about their international operations, often in literature apparently intended for internal circulation. The Ratan Sharda-edited 2008 volume, Memoirs Of A Global Hindu: Jagdish Chandra Sharda Shastri, maps this global work with some thoroughness.

More recently, as the RSS grew less cautious about publicising its reach — particularly after the electoral consolidation of its political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party under Prime Minister Narendra Modi from 2014 onwards — much of this material entered the public domain.

Organiser and Panchajanya, the RSS’s English and Hindi mouthpieces respectively, published pieces on the organisation’s foreign work, particularly in obituaries and essays marking stalwarts of the Vishwa Vibhag, the RSS world department: Chamanlal Grover, Jagdish Chandra Sharada Shastri, Lakshman Srikrishna Bhide, Shankar Vinayak Tatwavadi.

After the RSS denied appointing a US lobbyist, I went looking for these self-admissions. There were many. The Vishwa Vibhag’s own internal mouthpiece — described as such in a separately published essay by a world department figure, later republished by Organiser online — is now accessible online.

The lobbyist controversy was resolved in a predictable fashion. US-based businessman Vivek Sharma, associated with the “RSS-inspired” Ekal Abhiyan, assumed formal responsibility for appointing the lobbyist “to introduce the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to US officials.”

The RSS had not done it. Someone inspired by the RSS had done it independently. This is the organisation’s standard response to questions about its semi-covert activities.

But the weight of evidence has shifted. Their own admissions now sit alongside their denials.

You can read Snigdhendu Bhattacharya’s full story here.

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When I reached Dubapara Lupta Char, a shifting sandbar common along the Brahmaputra and its tributaries in Assam’s riverine areas, I wasn’t surprised by the conditions people were living in.

Makeshift, rickety homes built with broken tin, hay and tarpaulin sheets stood precariously, as if barely holding themselves together. After nearly seven years of working as an independent journalist in Assam, I have reported on the state’s citizenship crisis multiple times; this was a familiar sight.

This is what life on a char looks like.

Here, existence is without proper housing, electricity or toilets, and life is particularly difficult and unpredictable. As monsoons hit, growing more erratic each year, the river rises, reaching the sandbars and swallowing homes whole.

These sandbars are never permanent. Even for those who have lived and grown up by the river, cultivating its land, there is no guarantee of staying. Most char dwellers are always looking for land where they can build something more stable.

Land itself is precarious in Assam. The state loses an estimated 8,000 hectares every year to riverbank erosion. Since 1950, over 4.27 lakh hectares, about 7.4% of Assam’s total area, have been swallowed by the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. Nearly 40% of the state is flood-prone, according to government data.

For those who live along the river, displacement is not an event but a recurring condition.

I met Abul Kalam, Abu Chufiyan, Asiya Khatun, Asma Khatun, and several others on the char. They told me they were born in these riverine areas, their forefathers from here. When the river swallowed their homes, they moved to Dahikata Reserve Forest, about a kilometre away, in search of stability. Around 20-25 years ago, they bought land there, unaware then that it was forest land.

“We just knew that place as debosthan—land of god. Nobody told us anything,” Abul Kalam said. “We had been living there until the government demolished our houses last year.”

According to a 24 March 2026 report by The New Humanitarian, published in Article 14, over 20,387 families, more than 100,000 people, have been evicted across Assam due to eviction drives between May 2021 and 2026. These eviction drives have disproportionately affected the Bengali-speaking Muslim community.

Abul Kalam is 39 and has six children. His 83-year-old father had been unwell for days. They were given barely any notice, maybe a day at most. They moved whatever they could the day before. He hired a car to bring his father out because he could barely stand. When I visited, his father was visibly very sick.

Kalam used to work as a daily wage labourer, but he himself fell ill soon after the eviction. He was diagnosed with multiple conditions—pancreatitis, kidney stones, an infection in his lungs, and appendicitis. He underwent surgery that cost around Rs 3 lakh, money he pieced together with help from others. Unable to return to work, he now relies on his elder brother, also a daily wage labourer, for food and basic needs.

Kalam still has his voting rights, and he is certain he will vote. But he is unsure who to vote for. “Everyone comes asking for votes,” he said. “But nobody has done anything for us. We will vote for anyone who gives us a home.”

Evictions in Assam are tied to a longer history of migration and citizenship politics. Refugee influxes into the state after 1947, during Independence, and again in 1971, during the Bangladesh Liberation War, shaped anxieties around “foreigners.”

These tensions culminated in the Assam Accord, which set 24 March 1971 as the cut-off date for citizenship. In 2019, the updated National Register of Citizens excluded around 1.9 million people, leaving their citizenship status uncertain.

Shrinking land and recurring floods have deepened insecurities among Assam’s khilonjiya, or indigenous communities, around protecting land, identity, language and culture.

The BJP, led in the state by chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, has tapped into these anxieties, sharpening a narrative that Assamese identity is under threat and that Bengali-origin Muslims are “encroachers” and “outsiders”, and jaati, maati, bheti (ethnic identity, land and base) must be protected “at any cost”.

Critics often argue that eviction drives are a way to appease dominant social groups. The issue has become a central election plank.

In campaign speeches, Sarma has said that if re-elected, his government will clear five lakh bighas of land of alleged encroachment, citing the 1.5 lakh bighas cleared in the past five years during his tenure.

But, on the char, people like Kalam just want one thing: a home. As water levels rise, they know these fragile structures will not last. A few days before I visited, a storm had already torn through many of their tin and tarpaulin roofs.

“We slept in fear. It’s hard to explain how we are living here,” Abu Chufiyan, another resident of the char, who stood next to Kalam, told me. “Even a dog wouldn’t pass through this area at night, but we are living here.”

Chufiyan said he would hold the chief minister’s feet if he could. “He is still our guardian,” he said. “It’s fine if he evicted us, but at least give us a proper place to camp. Otherwise, where will our families and children go?”

Kalam told me he had little faith that telling their stories would change anything. Many people come here, he said, take photos, ask questions, write about us. “But we don’t even get to see where it is published. They come, meet us and leave. We never hear from them again.”

A few days after my visit, I called Kalam to ask how he was doing, whether the water had risen. He told me it was inching closer to their homes; they might not be able to stay even another week.

I asked about his father.

“He died two days after you visited,” he said.

Kalam’s father could not bear the trauma of the eviction and what it had done to his family, Kalam told me. Already unwell, caught between a failing body and an uncertain river, he gave up.

Read Sanskrita Bharadwaj’s full story here.

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Ejaz Ahmed, a businessman in Ahmedabad’s Juhapura—derogatorily called ‘mini Pakistan’ by many Hindus—put it plainly: “I can send my daughters to study abroad, but we can’t move to any posh or even middle-class society in the rest of Ahmedabad.”

He lives in a neighbourhood often described as Asia’s largest Muslim ghetto, a term that collapses very different realities into one.

A dense, heaving neighbourhood of half a million people, Juhapura, is on Ahmedabad’s western periphery. A 2021 research report said the area was subject to “substandard public infrastructure and suffering from a stigmatized public perception”.

Walk down Prachina Road or through societies such as Faiz-e-Mohammadi Park, and the label of ‘ghetto’ begins to fray. There are villas, duplexes, landscaped compounds—homes that would not look out of place in any of the city’s wealthier enclaves. Some are worth Rs 3 crore, Rs 4 crore, even Rs 5 crore.

And yet, they are here.

I travelled to Ahmedabad twice after first reporting on Gujarat’s Disturbed Areas Act, each visit returning me to Juhapura. Each visit opened up a dystopian new aspect of the city’s segregation—how two families, similar in income, education and aspiration, could inhabit entirely different urban worlds, separated only by religion.

In Gomtipur, reporting on the death of teenage Saniya Ansari led me to a builder called Ruknuddin Sheikh. Over cups of cloyingly sweet chai, he scrolled through images of new projects—glass-fronted towers, gated complexes, the promise of Ahmedabad’s expanding suburbs.

Like other Indian metros, the city is pushing outward. Residents are leaving older neighbourhoods for high-rise apartments on the periphery, drawn by space, amenities and the language of modern urban living.

For Muslims, Sheikh said, most of these developments remain inaccessible.

Juhapura, then, is both refuge and constraint.

Migration to the locality dates back to the 1990s, accelerating after the 2002 anti-Muslim Gujarat pogrom, when even affluent Muslims began leaving mixed neighbourhoods, such as Paldi and Navrangpura.

Bad roads, scarce trees, open drains and heaps of gravel define much of Juhapura. The neglect is especially visible in areas housing lower‑income families. Localities like Fatehwadi have some of the worst conditions, with dense slums and few public facilities.

Even rehabilitation societies such as Siddiqabad Colony—built for families displaced from Gulberg Society and Naroda Patiya after the 2002 pogrom—show signs of deep civic decay.

Within this sprawl, wealthier Muslims have carved out gated enclaves like Faiz‑e‑Mohammadi, with small parks, tree‑lined lanes and streetlights. Yet even here, mosquitoes swarm around open drains, and the stench from a nearby sewage plant hangs in the air. Civic neglect, residents say, spares no one.

Most glaring are the waste‑dumping grounds—holding not just Juhapura’s garbage but other neighbourhoods as well—and sewage‑treatment plants that ring the area. When I visited in October 2025, residents from across classes were protesting the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation’s plan to convert another barren tract into a dumping site.

Two treatment plants already stand on Juhapura’s fringes, their odour a daily reminder of official indifference. Locals complain that unlike other parts of the city, open plots here are turned into waste yards rather than public parks or sports grounds.

Yet, Juhapura cannot expand easily.

The 35-year-old Disturbed Areas Act restricts property transactions in ways that, in practice, keep communities in place, an apartheid of sorts. With limited land and few alternatives, demand pushes up prices within Muslim-majority areas. The result is a market in which exclusion drives inflation.

“The law doesn’t just segregate us; it also forces us to pay a premium if we want to build a similar high-rise society for ourselves,” said Sheikh. Then, he chuckled, mirthlessly. “So if a luxury 3-BHK (bedroom-hall-kitchen) starts at Rs 2 crore somewhere for ‘them’ (Hindus), we have to pay Rs 3 crore for the same thing in our area!”

Across parts of Paldi and Navrangpura, where some mixed populations remain, similar constraints operate in more subtle ways. Elsewhere, they are more visible, etched into the geography of who lives where—and who cannot, making Ahmedabad a city where mobility is determined less by income than by identity.

In March 2026, Gujarat introduced new amendments to the disturbed areas law, expanding the powers of district collectors, including the authority to seize properties in cases where any party finds a property sale or transfer to be “objectionable”. Rajasthan has enacted a similar law. Together, they suggest a model that may travel.

In Ahmedabad, that model is already visible.

It is a city aspiring to global status—set to host the 2030 Commonwealth Games and even pitched as a potential venue for the Olympics—while quietly reorganising itself along religious lines. The comparison is difficult to avoid: when apartheid South Africa hosted international sport, the world responded with boycotts.

What, then, will the world see when it looks at Ahmedabad?

You can read Sabah Gurmat’s full story here.

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X came to meet me with four others, who stared at me while I interviewed him. His fiery red beard contrasted with his timid countenance.

X was charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), India’s anti-terrorism law, with the Karnataka state police claiming he was among those who had organised a riot against a local who had posted anti-Islamic material.

The incident was what the UAPA Database, developed at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, termed a “communal” use of the anti-terror law in Karnataka.

In 2024 and 2025, I made multiple trips to attempt to track individuals in this database. There was some precedence to this reporting journey. A few years ago, armed with Article 14’s sedition database, I’d travelled across the state in a rickety rental car with the basic outline of a travel plan.

I inquired, as sensitively as I could, at villages mentioned in court documents. Except for a village where a mob threatened to burn the rental car, the two-week reporting expedition went beyond my expectations: it led to interviews of at least 15 persons accused of sedition.

But for the UAPA, I realised quickly that those people charged with it retreated into the shadows. Weeks were spent in dingy law offices in the futile hope that lawyers could convince their clients to talk to me.

On a couple of occasions, I managed to trace the accused’s numbers, only to be quickly blocked after our initial conversation. When I landed up at their homes or shops, I’d be shunned or shooed away by family or neighbours.

By the time I’d come to the dusty central Karnataka town where the riots had taken place, I had run out of ideas. The nervous, restless energy of fieldwork—where one’s mind runs on overdrive, imagining all the last-minute calls to be made and leads to be pursued—had turned to exhaustion.

The interview with X was not critical for the story I wanted to write.

The riots and the political fallout were well-documented. The interview wouldn’t address the specific gaps I wanted to report on, especially those of those who pleaded guilty when charged under the law or have been accused of being part of proscribed terror groups.

Of the four who accompanied him, a well-dressed man who had a calm confidence about him caught my attention. He’d supplement X’s answers with specifics on the UAPA law or prior Supreme Court judgments.

After the interview, I couldn’t resist and asked him how he knew so much about the law.

“Because I was convicted under UAPA,” he said. “I pleaded guilty.”

At the time, there was not much reportage on the increasing instances of UAPA accused pleading guilty. His interview started this exploration for the series.

Serendipity would play a crucial role in organising interviews. On one of the trips, I decided to visit a small-time lawyer (who had once handled a UAPA case, but I had little hope). The lawyer was not there, but I decided to sit in the waiting room until my next appointment.

My neighbour began a conversation about the civil case he was fighting. His interest piqued when I told him I was a reporter. I contemplated being furtive about the kind of story I was working on, but decided to be honest. I was working on a story about the UAPA law.

“Then you should talk to him,” he said as he pointed to the person who was next to him. “He had pleaded guilty after being charged under UAPA.”

The biggest hurdle in the reporting was meeting people. UAPA engulfs them in fear: some, telling me that they wonder if I work for the Agency (National Investigation Agency). Once some trust was established, it was apparent they wanted their story told—to have a version other than the government’s printed somewhere.

I showed up at Z’s home using an address from a decade-old court document. He was arrested for allegedly collaborating with a Bangladeshi terror group. His aged, illiterate mother pulled out a number that was scribbled on a bank passbook. When I called Z, he was understandably in shock. It had been more than a decade since his arrest.

“Wait for me there, I’ll pick you up.”

Z came on his moped and asked me to hop on. He was a well-built man, with broad shoulders and a shirt one size too tight. We rode through agricultural fields and eucalyptus plantations until we reached a temple that rose from a clearing in the forest. Z, a devout Hindu, said that the allegations in court documents were false.

“I brought you here because I want you to know that whatever I am saying is in front of this God,” he said. “It is the truth.”

You can read our four-part UAPA series here, here, here and here.

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One day, three years ago, I woke up to find 11 trees missing in front of my house.

The neighbours who had witnessed the incident—and didn’t resist—told me later that the branches were colliding with aerial electric wires. So the people managing the gated community in Haryana brought a chainsaw and reduced the fully grown, lush, healthy trees to 5-foot-tall stumps. Their decaying wood still stands there, a brutal reminder of the State and the people's callous attitude toward trees and the natural environment.

Months later, in a déjà vu moment, one late morning, I rushed to another gated community where workers had felled at least two dozen trees and were ordered to uproot at least a dozen more. I demanded to know if they had sought permission to cut the trees. Their supervisor replied: “The trees stand on our land. We can do whatever we want.”

I frantically looked through my contacts to find activists, NGOs, government officials—anyone who could stop the further cutting. A local activist who had protested the felling of trees for a highway project a few years earlier said he couldn’t get involved in this case but shared the contact details of an official at Haryana’s environment ministry. The official asked me to write an email to his department. I wrote three and a half a dozen text messages in between numerous follow-up phone calls. No action was taken.

All the remaining trees were brought down over the next few days.

These were among the first instances of tree-cutting I documented in Haryana. In the last three years, as I reported in my story, I have witnessed the cutting of at least 150 trees and heard about the killing of dozens more from my sources around Haryana.

Some of the reasons people cited while cutting down the trees were: trees drop leaves on their cars, snakes live in trees, and trees block the sunlight. One person said cutting trees is as natural as trimming your hair. One got so aggressive when I mentioned the rising cases of asthma among children due to the notoriously polluted north Indian air that I had to call someone for help.

As someone who, for most of her life, has lived in or around the national capital, where people are protesting for clean air and struggling to find green, walkable spaces, while others pack up their bags in search of breathable cities, I was baffled.

Can you simply wipe out a dozen trees without facing any action? Is any authority doing anything about the pollution here? And whose trees are they, anyway?

An official at the state pollution control board said, in 2024, that acting on tree-cutting wasn’t the department’s responsibility. A few forest department officials in different cities of Haryana said something similar.

Senior environmentalists and activists directed me to the Punjab Land Preservation Act, 1900, a British-era law still used in Haryana to protect urban trees. But environmental lawyers confirmed that it only applies to 10 of its 22 districts.

“So there’s practically no law at all to save these trees?” I asked one of them.

“No,” he replied.

A local journalist I reached out to said he couldn’t cover the issue in detail because his editors didn’t support stories like this.

A divisional forest officer finally assured me of an investigation after the story’s publication. But so far, no action has been taken.

Meanwhile, people continue to cut trees. And I continue to document the incidents. In the most recent incident, a resident had at least three trees cut, saying he wanted a streetlight installed. A few days later, armed with a measuring tape, I went to check the distance between the denuded trees and the street light: 25 feet.

Read Romita Saluja’s full story here.

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My recent investigation into how Hindu vigilante groups have been terrorising and beating Dalit and Muslim workers who clear animal carcasses began one September morning on the dry riverbed of the Sheetla, in the foothills of the Himalayas near Dehradun.

I was speaking with Irshad Ali, 48, as he and two others unloaded the carcass of a large animal from a vehicle and carried it down to the riverbed on the doorstep of Uttarakhand’s capital city.

Irshad was visibly tense. One of the vehicles his community used to transport sun-dried animal bones had recently been set on fire.

As we talked, he explained how his entire community made its livelihood on clearing carcasses—something they had done for generations. His father and forefathers did this work peacefully, but today, workers are increasingly targeted by Hindu vigilante groups.

Irshad pointed to the sky, where vultures circled overhead.

With us was Sunny Joshi, a raptor expert with the World Wide Fund for Nature-India. Joshi told me that one of the vultures nearby carried a satellite tag. It had flown from Corbett National Park, stayed in the Shivalik hills, and kept returning to the Sheetla riverbed again and again.

The reason: food.

This riverbed has become a critical feeding ground. Twenty-four raptor species visit, including eight endangered species listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a global network of scientists and experts.

Small birds, butterflies, and even the soil itself benefit from the work of these communities. Without them, the stench of rotting carcasses would spread. Disease would follow.

Irshad’s community brings in carcasses, removes the skin, and collects sun-dried bones with legal permits. As the vultures feed, the environment stays balanced. The electricity department has insulated high-tension wires to prevent electrocution, saving the birds.

Humans don’t appear to have much protection.

In late August, a vehicle carrying dried bones was set on fire, and workers were beaten. Instead of helping them, the police filed cases against the victims. Irshad shrugged.

“We’ve seen worse,” he said. “We are used to it.”

When the workers went on strike, cattle owners panicked. Who would bury the dead animals, and where?

On 23 September 2025, in Raipur, Dehradun, right-wing Hindu groups clashed with a team transporting carcasses. They tried to destroy the vehicle.

Rajesh Kumar Barman, a Dalit contractor, told me, “I am proud of our work. Generations have done this. I have never seen such chaos in the name of a cow.”

“It feels like this chaos is being created to weaken Dalit and Muslim communities,” said Barman. “The system cannot help us. Our sons and brothers are leaving this work.”

The workers are licensed by the local panchayat or village council. This is government work that saves crores: lifting and burying a dead animal costs around Rs 5,000. With 100 animals a day, the cost jumps to 1.5 crore a month.

Yet, from Dalit and Muslim workers to the police to the zila panchayat officers, everyone appears helpless. A few vigilantes disrupt centuries of tradition, and the law —and those meant to enforce it—appear inadequate to stop the attacks.

On the riverbed, I noticed tiny details: birds eating insects, butterflies swarming the nutrient-rich soil. The politics of terrorising the carcass clearers appears to disrupt the food chain itself.

And the dried bones? They end up as bone china, artefacts, and fertilisers. Products we all use—even those who torched the vehicles.

You can read Varsha Singh’s full story here.

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Ramachandra Gond, 42, sat in a rented two-room house in Nabarangpur, about 50 km from his village, Malbeda, which he had fled, and his crops, which he was forced to abandon.

Five months after his 21-year-old son Saravan Gond’s body was exhumed on 17 April 2025 in Odisha following his burial on the family farm, he said he “no longer knew what there was to return to”.

Ramchandra and his younger brother, Ganshyam Gond, were excommunicated from their village in April 2025 by dominant Hindu villagers who opposed Saravan’s burial. They forced the family to declare they had “reconverted” to Hinduism. When the family conducted the funeral on their own agricultural land after being denied access to the common burial ground, they were assaulted.

“We are denied dignity even in death,” said Ramchandra, a Gond Adivasi whose family—and that of his younger brother Ganshyam—converted to Christianity in 2020, while his three other brothers did not.

Then, the Hindu villagers had convened a meeting.

What Ramchandra told me over a conversation with his family that stretched through the day revealed his vulnerabilities—one that he, and many Adivasis who adopt Christianity, have long endured.

“Semaane kahile tama ghare kehi marile aame asibunu, ama ghare kehi marile tame asibani,” he said in Odia (They told us that if someone dies in your family, we won’t come; if someone dies in ours, you shouldn’t come either).

Ramchandra’s ordeal is not isolated.

Nabarangpur, a district in southern Odisha bordering Chhattisgarh, witnessed four burial denials between October 2023 and April 2024, as we reported this week. Another incident was recorded in Jaleswar, Balasore.

The state witnessed a surge with the BJP’s return in 2024. The Delhi-based hate-monitoring group United Christian Forum recorded seven incidents in 2023, 14 in 2024, and 8 in the first six months of 2025.

In Balasore, Shanti Jani, a Paraja Adivasi Christian, was forced to bury her deceased husband several kilometres away in the forests after she refused to convert to Hinduism.

“We didn’t convert from Hinduism to Christianity. Why should we reconvert to Hinduism?” said Ganshyam Gond, insisting that the BJP’s politics is deeply communal in targeting adivasis.

In Menjar, Nabarangpur, Budai Harijan, a Dalit Christian, hosted me in her little house, tucked in the corner of the street, next to her Hindu neighbours.

“His dead body was ‘converted’ to Hinduism,” she said, describing how her husband Madhu Harijan’s funeral was preceded by a shuddhi (purification) ritual and his last rites were performed according to Hindu customs.

“I was barred from walking on common land, accessing water and public sanitation,” she said, until she “agreed to a Hindu funeral”.

In August, I travelled to Malkangiri after more than a month since the 22 June attack on Adivasi Christians in the Kotamateru village. Yet, they were reluctant to return to their villages.

Sukra Madi, a 52-year-old pastor who was beaten with an axe, told me he “survived by a miracle”.

The brooding scar on his head was visible.

A similar fear marked Gangadhar Santa, whom I met in a church in Raighar, 25 km from his village, Siunaguda in Nabarangpur.

He said that the “Adivasis are targets not just of ‘development and mining’ but of being denied immediate access to their own land—even in death—and are being pitted against each other”.

Read Syed Affan’s full story here.

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The first thing I learned in Batla House was this: people here freeze when they hear a knock at the door. Whether it is a neighbour, a courier, or even a reporter, the first instinct is fear.

In this southeastern neighbourhood in the national capital, where most houses belong to Muslim families, being the minority is not just a demographic fact but the reason fear has seeped into the very fabric of daily life. It lingers in stairwells, behind half-drawn curtains, in the pause before someone asks, “Aap kaun?” (Who is it?)

It was a question I heard again and again when I visited Batla House after the DDA (Delhi Development Authority) had marked more than a hundred homes for demolition with red crosses. Although the Supreme Court has temporarily halted the action, residents—many of whom have lived there for over half a century and hold decades of legal documentation—continue their battle in court while living under the constant threat of losing their homes.

This was the latest in a pattern of State actions against Muslim properties, particularly in BJP-governed states nationwide.

On my first morning, as I walked through the lanes, I noticed that people no longer opened their doors fully. The aluminium latches remained half-locked, and the chains remained fastened. Some residents spoke with only one eye visible through the gap, as though revealing their full face might carry a risk they could not quite name but had learned to expect.

Inside his house, Sayeed Nasir-ul-Hassan, a retired DDA employee, pointed to a stack of house-tax receipts dated 1983–84 bearing his mother’s name, Khatija Begum, whose family built the home decades before the DDA existed. “I worked for them,” he said quietly. “I know how files are made.” He tapped a receipt with a trembling finger. “And now they tell me I am the one encroaching.”

Later, I followed Tahir Ali down a small by-lane to his upstairs office, which used to be a medical-insurance workspace and is now a community hub. Dozens of men sat around a battered wooden table, passing around electricity bills from the 1980s, old voter-ID cards, and a hardbound register recording shop licenses from the 1970s.

Closing the register, Ali said, “We are not just fighting for houses,” he told me. “We are fighting for our right to exist where we have lived for generations.”

In the lane where Balbeer Singh lived, the red cross on his gate looked fresher than the ones I had seen earlier. His father, Hari Singh, purchased the property in 1971, and the paper was still tucked inside a worn envelope.

Balbeer showed it gently. “This house shelters fifteen of us,” he said. “Three brothers, their families.”

His voice dropped. “We shared meals here. We shared deepest losses here. Now we share only fear.”

At dusk, I sat on a concrete step outside the home of Mohammad Shakir, 69. The mango tree that his father planted in the 1970s no longer bore fruit, the courtyard plaster had cracked, and the red cross loomed on the wall above. He held a letter dated 1980—a boring connection permit from the waterworks department—and he handled it like a heirloom.

“These papers,” he said, “tell the story of our lives. Now they say we have no right to that life.” He paused. Then added: “It feels like they are telling us our lives, our memories, our struggles mean nothing.”

In the evenings, the neighbourhood’s rhythm shifted. The sound of a government jeep rolling past triggered nervous glances. Through it all, the documents are like protective talismans, scanned and stacked in dozens of living rooms, circulated in dozens of living rooms, lawyer offices and courtrooms.

Walking back through the lane, I heard a small voice. A boy of perhaps eight stood on a stool, rubbing at the red cross with soap suds.

His mother called him back, but he persisted.

“Agar yeh nikal jaaye toh bulldozer nahi aayega na?” he asked. (If it disappears, the bulldozer won’t come, right?)

Read Masrat Nabi’s full story here.

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Mohammad Harun, 55, stood on the road a km away from a place he had made his livelihood for about four decades, Indore’s oldest garment market, quietly discussing how his efforts to lead a life without controversy or trouble had come to naught.

“We were well equipped to handle any kind of adversity a garment merchant could face,” said Harun, a confident and soft-spoken garment trader, who built a business from scratch over 40 years, as did many other Muslims in the market.

“Humne apni taraf se koi kasar nahi chodi thi. Humara record bedag tha. Hum waqt per rent dete the, sab se miljul kar rahte the (We had made every effort. Our records were clean. We always paid rent on time, and lived together with everyone),” said Harun. “But we never imagined our faith would be weaponised against us,”

On 25 September 2025, Harun was evicted by his landlord—his only fault, his religion. Every Hindu in the market was pressured by Hindu extremists to cut ties with Muslims, who they alleged—with no evidence—were involved in luring Hindu women to friendship, marriage and conversion to Islam.

“There is no place left to seek justice,” said Harun. The police and district administration, he alleged, deliberately overlooked the traders’ complaints against Hindu vigilantes who coerced landlords to evict Muslim tenants.

The open call for political and economic isolation of Muslims in India is not new. Over the last decade, states run by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), such as Uttarakhand, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and—the latest—the National Capital Territory of Delhi, have given free rein to Hindu stormtroopers. Islamophobia and violence against Muslims, amplified under State patronage, have divided society more sharply along religious lines—a division clearly visible in Madhya Pradesh, especially in Malwa and Indore.

My experience living and reporting here shows that ghettoization is deepening in rural areas, with explicit exclusion now routine. The propaganda term and conspiracy theory of “love jihad,” has moved from a whisper on the Hindu far right to a loud fact, used and weaponised by the ruling party, its legislators and their supporters. With no proof that it even exists, love jihad–the allegation that young Muslim men lure or coerce young Hindu women into marriage and convert them to Islam—is a widely used tool to manipulate public sentiment and isolate Muslims.

Economic boycotts evolved from slogan to policy, as I chronicled in my recent story from Indore. That call for boycott was not shocking to me, as a journalist who had covered Central India for years and witnessed countless State-supported incidents of Islamophobia and violence over the decade.

In 2022, Article 14 reported how, after a riot that broke out in the town of Khargone in April, on Ram Navami, boycotting Muslims became a household slogan. Shops and homes rented by Muslims were vacated in the months that followed. The Indore police’s record of impunity in cases involving hate-mongering BJP leaders is now an established fact—from the COVID-era targeting of Muslims, to the arrest of comedian Munawar Faruqui over a fake complaint, and the attack on UP bangle seller Tasleem Ali.

But then, at least, the police and district administration made some effort to respond. This time, all neutrality collapsed. Institutions were compromised. Not even political pressure could command a response, nor was there any pretence that the police were unbiased.

What shifted this time was the silent assent of government and law enforcement—victims’ appeals and interventions by opposition figures, including former Congress chief minister Digvijay Singh and state Congress President Jitendra Patwari, were ignored. Even the Madhya Pradesh High Court—long known for suo motu action on social issues—stayed silent.

Congress spokesperson Ameen Ul Khan Suri called out the government’s double-standard, pointing to chief minister Mohan Yadav’s visit to Dubai in July. “For three days,” said Suri, “He met and wooed Muslim business tycoons, pitching safety and inclusivity, and earned investment proposals worth over Rs 1,000 crore. But just 30 days later, in Indore—the economic capital—150 Muslim men were thrown out of the market for their identity.”

Fearful Muslim salesmen and traders, evicted and struggling to survive, initially refused to meet me in the garments market. It was only after Singh publicly extended support that they agreed to speak. Hours later, they agreed to gather after dusk at a quieter street corner in the Jama Masjid locality, where I met Harun.

Aged between 22 and 55, they recounted evictions and harassment but declined to be photographed or filmed. Several said they had loans, rent, and school fees to pay.

“Will this report change anything?” one asked me. “Can we get back our shops?” asked one. All I could offer was truthful reportage of their situation and urged them not to lose hope.

I must admit, in a state where a great silence has fallen over crimes against Muslims and the growing apartheid against them, that is a faint hope.

You can read Kashif Kakvi’s full story here.

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On a June morning in Dhar district of southwest Madhya Pradesh, I arrived in Katnera, a low-lying village along the Uri-Baghni, a tributary of the Narmada. I planned to understand how small and marginal farmers cope with falling incomes and rising dependence on market inputs.

Within hours, the villagers redirected me to their most urgent story: the recurring floods and the unfinished promises of rehabilitation for the Sardar Sarovar Dam, the largest dam built on the Narmada River in Gujarat, affecting Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

The anganwadi centre or government creche was my first stop, as it usually offers researchers a starting point with household lists. The karyakarta there greeted me, then quietly recalled how, in 2023, the Uri-Baghni had risen overnight, swallowing homes, fields, and cattle. Even the anganwadi was damaged, and services were suspended for weeks. She spoke with her pallu pulled over her face, reluctant to be quoted.

“Once you are on the government’s payroll,” she said softly, “you cannot speak freely.”

By then, short spells of monsoon rain had already turned the mud roads into a gluey paste. Bullock carts and motorcycles ploughed through, villagers moving with the stubbornness of people used to hardship. Flood scars marked every house: exposed brickwork three to four feet high, stains on kitchen walls where water had stood for days.

At the house where I stayed, the village elder placed my rucksack on a shelf under the roof. “What if the water comes in while we sleep?” he said. Flood preparedness had become second nature here.

During my five days in Katnera, the rain never let up. Farmers kept calling activists of the Naramada Bachao Andolan—people linked with the protest against the construction of large dams on the Narmada River—in nearby Barwani for updates on dam water releases. Anxiety seemed to hang thick in the air.

In 30 interviews, every farmer told me they had lost crops, produce of wheat or cotton in storage, or had their homes damaged by rising waters. Soybeans and cotton, their main cash crops, had been wiped out. With this loss came extended periods of hunger for some and mounting debts to input dealers and landlords for many. But the greater injustice, villagers said, was bureaucratic.

When the Sardar Sarovar dam was commissioned, Katnera was marked within the submergence zone. In 2008, a revision of backwater levels slashed the number of affected families in the village from 149 to 37. Across Madhya Pradesh, the count of project-affected families fell from 37,754 to 21,808; 17 villages were erased from the list. Overnight, more than 15,000 families lost their entitlement to resettlement and rehabilitation, though their lands and homes still flood.

An environment ministry committee said these revisions had many “technical infirmities”. Yet the decision stands.

Children, meanwhile, were eager narrators of protest. They described how, on the night of the 2023 flood, women and children staged a blockade of the National Highway while men scrambled to save livestock and belongings.

One 10th grader, Srishti, showed me newspaper clippings from the protest. When I asked about her future, she answered instantly: “SDM banungi!” I will become an SDM or a sub-divisional magistrate, an administrative officer with magisterial and executive functions in the districts. Her reason was simple: to save her village from injustice.

One evening, Srishti and her friends led me on a walk to the bridge across the Uri-Baghni. From there, if one squinted, the river’s confluence with the Narmada was just visible to the south.

The children turned the walk into a geography lesson, tracing the lines of the land and explaining their village’s and farmlands’ vulnerability with a clarity that came from lived experience. Their grasp of the dam’s ecosystem and its risks was far sharper than anything I had gleaned from official maps or documents.

Some of the houses I visited were in near ruins, yet families continued to live inside them. A handful of upper-caste farmers, those who could afford it, had built or rented homes in nearby Nisarpur town, 4 km away. But the vast majority of Katnera’s adivasi families remained, staying on in damaged houses along the river.

The anger here is sharp and personal. “Modi ke janam din, humare maran din,” the villagers chanted—Modi’s birthday, our death day—just as they did during their chakka jam of the national highway. They believed the dam’s water releases were timed with official birthday celebrations of the Prime Minister, downstream in Kevadia, Gujarat.

Authorities dismissed the allegation as rumour, blaming extreme weather. Between these competing versions, Katnera remains trapped in fear and loss.

You can read Ambika Subash’s full story here.

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