News Archive

The air rolling off the gold mine waste dumps in Extension 3, Wedela, was bitingly cold when the muzzle flashes tore through the darkness. Beneath a crooked corrugated roof west of Johannesburg, dozens of mine workers and local residents crowded the plastic tables of an informal tavern, drinking beer beneath a hand-lettered board that read No weapons allowed. At approximately 9:30 PM on Saturday, September 26, that sign became a grim irony.

The Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) aggressive push to expand its contentious street politics into the Northeast met a firm administrative wall in Guwahati over the weekend.

The dawn mist hung low over the agricultural fringe of Ashok Nagar, carrying the sharp scent of wet earth and damp mustard leaves. At daybreak on Wednesday, September 23, Fateh Singh stepped onto the cart track running parallel to the rusted rails of the Linepar cutoff, carrying an enamel bowl of grain to scatter for wild pigeons. His destination was an isolated masonry pump-house on his plot—a squat, windowless structure housing an electric submersible tubewell that fed the adjacent furrows.

The acrid stench of scorched fiberglass and smoldering tires cut through the heavy autumn mist settling over the Grand Trunk Road just after two in the morning. Under the harsh sodium floodlights illuminating the concrete perimeter of Girls Hostel 3, the sound of splintering plate glass came in rapid, rhythmic bursts. Hundreds of heavy terracotta planters had already been wrenched from the terrace borders of the campus mall, pulverized into clay dust across the paving stones as thousands of students surged forward.

Tensions flared in Hooghly district on Saturday, 26th September, when the vehicle of All India Trinamool Congress (AITC or TMC) spokesperson and MLA Kunal Ghosh was ambushed in Uttarpara. Ghosh was en route to Serampore to take part in a high-profile public meeting organized for his party chief and former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee.

The mobile phone on the bedside table vibrated against the dark wood, shattering the heavy silence of a Dharapur home at precisely two o'clock on a Saturday morning. When Nimisha Thakuria’s mother answered, expecting a hurried check-in from a daughter who had promised to stay overnight at a university hostel, the voice that emerged from the earpiece was fractured and desperate.

The morning mist hung heavy over the tracks at New Delhi Railway Station at 5:00 AM on September 14, carrying the acrid scent of diesel exhaust and damp concrete as the overnight express ground to a halt. Stepping down from the unreserved coach was a young woman who had spent the preceding twenty-four hours traveling over seven hundred kilometers from the Sarai Mohalla neighborhood of Satna, Madhya Pradesh.

Former Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Nivedita Menon has repeatedly found herself at the centre of intense public storms over her political positions. Over the years, her commentary concerning Kashmir, the concept of Indian nationalism, Hindu society, the Uniform Civil Code, and the broader political landscape of the country has drawn fierce reactions. Now, that accumulated history of confrontation has reached Rajasthan.

On Saturday, 26th September, diplomatic tensions took center stage at the United Nations General Assembly in New York as India delivered a resolute, point-by-point rebuttal to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s address before the international community. Rejecting his assertions regarding Jammu and Kashmir, bilateral ties, and the long-standing Indus Waters Treaty, the Indian delegation delivered a stern warning, making it clear that continued cross-border terrorism emerging from Pakistani soil would inevitably invite serious consequences.