India Archive

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.

The heavy brass tumblers of the iron safe clicked open with a muffled scrape, breaking the stifling silence of the strongroom at Sabarimala Sannidhanam. Inside the windowless chamber, thick with the scent of aged teakwood, camphor, and oxidized metal, an inspection team operating under the direct mandate of Kerala High Court-appointed Amicus Curiae Justice K.T. Sankaran lifted a velvet-lined casket onto a precision balance.

The controversy surrounding the tragic death of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay undergraduate student Sahil Wakode has rapidly transformed into an intense political battleground. In a development that reveals how deeply institutional party machinery has embedded itself into the issue, Advocate Nikhil Kamble—the legal counsel representing Wakode’s grieving parents—has been identified as an active organizational functionary of the Maharashtra Pradesh Youth Congress.

Following the circulation of security camera footage from the examination hall at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay—where second-year B.Tech. student Sahil Wakode was caught using a mobile phone during his examination—a flurry of assertions surfaced across social media platforms attempting to dismiss the visual record as fraudulent or computer-generated.