On October 21, several important websites and online services around the world went offline. Not because hackers had broken into their systems, but because the organisations running them had deliberately taken them offline. They feared hackers might soon find a way in.

The reason was two serious security flaws in a programming language called PHP. Most internet users have probably never heard of it. Yet it works behind the scenes on a huge number of websites we visit every day.

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In India, the government’s cybersecurity agency, CERT-In, identified around 60,000 potentially vulnerable websites, including 303 belonging to government bodies, public-sector organisations and critical sectors.

What made this incident particularly interesting was how weaknesses that had existed in PHP for more than a decade suddenly became such a serious threat.

Artificial intelligence played an important role in this. It helped security researchers uncover these flaws and find ways to exploit them. AI also helped them test possible fixes. But developing, testing and coordinating the release of those fixes took time. Before the fixes could be released, information about the vulnerabilities began to leak, raising fears that hackers might exploit them before websites could be secured. That led several websites to go offline as a precaution.

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It also forced PHP’s developers to bring forward the release of security updates from October 22 to October 21. The seriousness of the threat was also evident in the response of Cloudflare, a major content delivery network (CDN), which developed its own protective measures and deployed them ahead of the official release.

To better understand why this caused so much alarm, let’s first look at what happens when we visit a website.

When we check our bank balance, read a news article or shop online, we click something, and the website responds. It might check our password, display information or process a payment.

Much of this work happens on computers called servers, and PHP is one of the programming languages that helps them do it. Its importance to the internet can be judged by the fact that around 69% of websites whose server-side programming language is known use PHP.

So what exactly was wrong with it?

Researchers discovered that under certain conditions, specially designed requests could trick PHP into doing two things it was not supposed to do.

First, it could expose private information that visitors were never supposed to see. Second, it could allow an outsider to take control of the server and make it carry out unauthorised tasks.

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Now imagine a PHP-based government portal holding confidential records. An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could potentially steal or alter that information, or install malicious software on the server without needing login credentials.

That is why the two flaws, collectively called PHP2Shell, were considered extremely serious, each receiving a critical security severity score of 9.2 out of 10.

. . .

Software vulnerabilities are nothing new. Even carefully written programs can contain mistakes. Some are discovered and corrected quickly. Others, like those found in PHP, can remain unnoticed for years.

What is changing in the age of AI is our ability to discover these weaknesses and, more importantly, figure out how to exploit them.

According to the PHP Foundation, which supports PHP’s development, one of the flaws in PHP was identified as early as 2024. However, because no one had demonstrated a way to exploit it at the time and the team had limited resources, work on fixing it was repeatedly delayed.

Then, in August and September 2026, researchers from Calif, OpenAI and Google’s cybersecurity company Wiz independently discovered serious weaknesses in PHP and ways to exploit them. Advanced AI models, such as GPT-5.6 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon, helped them make these discoveries in such a short time. They reported their findings to the PHP project, the worldwide community of developers responsible for maintaining and releasing the software.

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These discoveries made fixing the vulnerabilities an urgent priority. Any further delay increased the risk that the researchers’ findings could leak and fall into the hands of hackers. But there was another challenge. Preparing and releasing security updates of this kind requires coordination among several organisations. And the more people who know about a vulnerability, the greater the risk of information leaking.

That is exactly what happened in this case. Details identifying the vulnerabilities began circulating just before the scheduled release of the fixes. This forced the PHP project to bring forward its security updates by a day.

The incident demonstrates the unique role AI can play at every stage of such a crisis.

AI helped researchers uncover serious weaknesses in PHP, find ways to exploit them and develop possible fixes. These were tasks that would otherwise have required considerable expertise, time and effort. But AI could also help hackers just as effectively in discovering and exploiting such vulnerabilities.

This also means that even if hackers learn about software vulnerabilities only when security updates are released, AI could help them attack numerous websites before those updates can be installed.

. . .

PHP is not the only software on which a large part of the internet depends. Many others, such as Apache and MySQL, quietly perform essential functions behind the websites and online services we use. Finding their weaknesses before hackers do, fixing them and ensuring the fixes reach everyone who needs them is an enormous task.

One of the biggest challenges becomes apparent when we look at how PHP itself is developed and maintained.

Much of the modern internet relies on open-source software such as PHP. This means developers anywhere in the world can examine the software’s code, suggest improvements and help fix problems. But reviewing these contributions, coordinating official updates and maintaining the software require experienced developers and substantial resources.

Despite PHP’s enormous importance, the nonprofit PHP Foundation, which financially supports some of this work, operates with limited resources. In 2025, it received just $730,534 in donations and had “11 contracted developers who worked part- and full-time to strengthen and improve the core PHP language”.

PHP has a much larger worldwide community of contributors, but that does not guarantee enough experienced developers will be available when a serious security problem arises. The Foundation itself acknowledged that limited resources were one reason the flaw identified in 2024 remained unresolved for so long.

And AI is creating another challenge. According to Elisabeth Barron, the Executive Director of the PHP Foundation, the number of proposed changes to PHP’s code has nearly doubled over the past year, partly because AI has made writing software easier.

So what needs to be done?

The PHP incident itself suggests a way forward to overcome these problems and make the internet safer.

If advanced AI models can help researchers uncover weaknesses in PHP that have escaped scrutiny for more than a decade, they could also be used to examine thousands of other important software projects.

OpenAI has already launched an initiative called Patch the Planet, which brings together advanced AI tools, cybersecurity researchers and open-source developers to identify and fix security weaknesses in important software.

The PHP incident offers an example of this approach in action. Researchers from Calif, OpenAI and Wiz independently identified ways to exploit the vulnerabilities, but subsequently worked with PHP’s developers and other cybersecurity organisations to help prepare fixes and protections. Patch the Planet played a role in coordinating this wider effort.

Similar efforts are underway elsewhere, including Google’s OSS-Fuzz and the Linux Foundation’s Alpha-Omega project, which support security improvements across widely used software.

The challenge now is to extend such efforts to many more software projects, especially those maintained by small teams with limited resources. Finding a weakness is only half the job. Someone must also fix it and ensure that the update reaches the websites that need it.

That would not eliminate cyberattacks or guarantee that defenders would always discover weaknesses before criminals did. But it could substantially improve the security of important software such as PHP, whose maintenance and security teams have long struggled with limited resources.

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American audiences will be able to watch an English-dubbed version of “Ramayana,” a Hindi film based on a South Asian epic tradition, in theaters in November 2026.

The Sanskrit “Ramayana,” or “Journey of Rama,” is an epic poem that was composed sometime between 400 B.C.E. and 400 C.E by Maharishi (great seer) Valmiki. The epic follows Rama, an exiled prince and an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, as he journeys to rescue his wife, Sita, from the demon king Ravana.

For hundreds of years, people from different religious traditions across South Asia have retold the “Ramayana” through dramas, narrative poems, shadow puppet plays, pageants, folk songs, comics, television shows and many other mediums. Director Nitesh Tiwari’s upcoming “Ramayana” film is the latest retelling of this epic tradition.

For over a decade, I have studied how South Asian epics have been retold within and outside the Indian subcontinent. While many American moviegoers may not recognise the word “Ramayana,” they may have already encountered its characters and stories on the big screen.

Sita’s struggles in ‘A Little Princess’

A striking example is Academy Award-winning director Alfonso Cuarón’s 1995 film, “A Little Princess.” Although an adaption of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s well-known 1905 children’s novel of the same name, Cuarón’s movie begins with Sara Crewe – the daughter of a wealthy British Army captain posted in colonial India – telling the story of the Ramayana.

As Sara narrates the tale of Rama, the film presents scenes inspired by the epic. Actors portraying Rama and Sita are shown living in exile in a lush green forest. When Sita begs Rama to follow a demon disguised as a beautiful golden deer, Rama draws a magical protective circle around the princess and instructs her to stay within the circle’s borders. The story reaches a turning point with the demon king Ravana’s abduction of Sita after she exits the circle.

But the Ramayana is more than a story to Sara – it has parallels with her own life, especially after she is separated from her father when she moves to New York to attend boarding school. Cinema and media studies scholar Jyotsna Kapur explains that “the man cast as Rama is Sara’s father and the Ramayana is the imaginative thread that binds father and daughter together through their struggles while apart.”

At boarding school, Sara initially lives like a princess – like Sita – thanks to her father’s immense fortune. Yet after the apparent death of Captain Crewe in World War I, Sara’s headmistress confines the now-penniless child in the school’s attic.

While mourning her father, the heartbroken Sara uses a piece of chalk to draw a circle on the floor of the attic resembling the one Rama creates to protect Sita. Like Sita, Sara is eventually rescued – by Captain Crewe, who survives the war, and they return home to India.

By weaving these stories together, Cuarón used the epic’s themes of exile and separation to provide a fresh take on Hodgson Burnett’s classic novel.

Many cinematic Hanumans

The divine monkey Hanuman is one of the most beloved Ramayana characters. In the epic tradition, Hanuman is a loyal devotee of Rama, and he is the one who locates where Sita is being held captive in Ravana’s kingdom of Lanka.

Hanuman shows up in multiple different films. Pixar animator Sanjay Patel’s Academy Award-nominated 2015 short film, “Sanjay’s Super Team,” focuses on Sanjay, an Indian American boy who would rather watch cartoons than worship Hindu deities like Hanuman, Vishnu and the goddess Durga with his father.

Sanjay, however, gains a new appreciation for his family’s religious traditions when he reimagines Hanuman, Vishnu and Durga as superheroes resembling the three protagonists of his favorite animated television show, “Super Team.”

Ryan Coogler’s massively popular Marvel movies “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” are set in the fictional African country of Wakanda. In both films, a character called M’Baku proclaims “Glory to Hanuman!” M’Baku is the leader of the Jabari tribe, a Wakandan community that worships a gigantic white gorilla deity.

In the original “Black Panther” comics, this gorilla god is known as Ghekre and is based on a deity of the same name revered by the Akan Baoule people of the Ivory Coast. But in the “Black Panther” movies, the Jabari’s gorilla god is referred to as Hanuman.

Hanuman is at the heart of Dev Patel’s 2024 critically acclaimed action-thriller “Monkey Man.” The unnamed hero of this movie is an Adivasi belonging to one of India’s many Indigenous groups. Hanuman inspires him to avenge the rape of his mother by a corrupt policeman working for a deceitful Hindu nationalist spiritual leader.

“Monkey Man” draws from a variety of different narratives, including the Ramayana tradition and popular American revenge films like “John Wick” to shed light on key social justice issues in India, including sexual violence and Hindu nationalism.

Rama and Hindu nationalism in “Slumdog Millionaire”

Hindu nationalist interpretations of the Ramayana in modern India surface in the 2008 Oscar winner for Best Picture: Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire.”

While many Hindus worship Rama, Sita and Hanuman as deities, Hindu nationalists have also presented Rama as a historical figure – the legendary ruler of the ancient kingdom of Ayodhya.

On Dec. 6, 1992, a mob of Hindu nationalists demolished the Babri Masjid – a 16th-century mosque in the city of Ayodhya in northern India. They claimed that the mosque had been built by first destroying a Hindu temple that marked the location of Rama’s birth. Following the Babri Masjid demolition, more than 2,000 people were killed in riots across South Asia in 1992 and 1993.

“Slumdog Millionaire” follows Jamal Malik, an impoverished Muslim contestant on the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” When asked “In depictions of God Rama, he is famously holding what in his right hand?” Jamal has a flashback to the violent riots in the city of Mumbai after the destruction of the Babri Masjid.

As a 5-year-old, as Jamal flees the Hindu nationalist mob that had just killed his mother, he encounters a boy dressed as Rama holding a bow and arrow. The adult Jamal then states: “I wake up every morning wishing I didn’t know the answer to that question. If it weren’t for Rama and Allah, I’d still have a mother.”

The new Ramayana film

The newest Ramayana movie’s tagline, “Our Truth, Our History,” seems to suggest that there is just one “accurate” and “historical” way to tell the Ramayana. This reflects a prominent Hindu nationalist ideology that the Sanskrit “Ramayana,” along with retellings that closely follow the ancient epic, are the only legitimate versions of Rama’s story.

Yet as indicated by Hollywood films like “A Little Princess,” “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Sanjay’s Super Team,” the “Black Panther” movies and “Monkey Man,” there is no single way to depict or understand this immensely diverse epic tradition.

Sohini Sarah Pillai is an Assistant Professor of Religion and Director of Film and Media Studies at Kalamazoo College in Michigan, United States. She has authored and co-edited books on Hindu religious traditions and epic literature. Her current book project is titled “Epic Bollywood: Religion and Representation in Modern Indian Cinema”. She also co-chairs the steering committee for the Hinduism Unit at the American Academy of Religion and has received Fulbright and Sacred Writes fellowships.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

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One particularly striking photograph emerged from a protest in Delhi on 4 October. It shows a young woman jumping out of a bus window to escape police detention. Remarkably, she isn’t even looking at the ground as she leaps. The photograph clearly shows that all the hands reaching up to catch her as she falls backwards belong to men. The sight brings a mixture of surprise, joy and hope. Because in the world we are accustomed to, so many men’s hands surrounding a woman usually suggest something ominous. But this photograph raises another question: what kind of trust gives a young woman the courage to take such a leap?

To understand this, we need to look closely at a few more photographs. In them, women are staging sit-ins on roads, blocking traffic, climbing police barricades, being detained, returning again and again, and chanting slogans with clenched fists raised in the air. In the process, their clothes get torn, their hair comes loose, their sandals go missing, and photographs capture them in poses that could hardly be called ‘ladylike‘. Pictures like these of men have been a familiar sight at almost every protest. But women appearing in them in such large numbers is a relatively recent phenomenon.

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From childhood, women are taught how they should look, sit, walk and laugh in front of others—even how they should express anger or shed tears. Yet the women in these protests seem utterly unconcerned with such expectations. Their attention is not on looking beautiful or presentable in photographs and videos, but on what they are doing. This, too, is a kind of freedom that rarely gets talked about.

At first glance, this might seem like a sudden change. But look a little closer, and it becomes clear that the ground for it has been laid over several years. Indian women have fought major battles before, from the Chipko movement to the Narmada movement. But their active participation in a wide range of political protests in recent years has brought many new images before us.

When women gathered to protest at Shaheen Bagh in December 2019, hardly anyone could have imagined that their sit-in would last more than a hundred days. Had Covid not intervened, they might well have stayed for another hundred. These were Muslim women protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Many of them, accustomed to running their households, were stepping out for the first time for a cause that was not directly about their homes, husbands or children. The protest showed that they could step outside as citizens in their own right and register their dissent on a political issue.

What was remarkable was the same care and competence with which they organised the protest as they had long managed their homes. Their sit-in continued through bitterly cold nights. Food was cooked, children studied, songs were sung and the Constitution was debated.

The women who joined the farmers’ protest carried this spirit of resistance forward. During the movement, which lasted more than a year, they travelled from villages in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh and settled in for the long haul at Delhi’s borders. Much like Shaheen Bagh, the protest saw large numbers of older women, many with little or no formal education, who had never stepped out in this way before. They arrived on tractors, lived in tents and helped keep the movement going. In doing so, they inserted themselves, however modestly, into the familiar image of the Indian farmer—a man walking with a plough—that has long dominated the country’s collective imagination.

Looking at the protests that followed Shaheen Bagh and the farmers’ movement, three changes stand out. First, women have begun rejecting the idea that their bodies are something to be kept safe and protected above all else. They are no longer reluctant to enter places that involve discomfort or risk. Second, they have broken the unwritten limits on how long they can remain away from home. They can now stay at a protest for days or weeks, regardless of the hour. And the third change, perhaps the most important, is that their cause no longer has to be specifically a women’s issue. They can now speak out and fight over any question that matters to the country and society.

The women wrestlers’ protest, demonstrations on college campuses including Lady Shri Ram College, the Gen Z protestsand the Chita Andolan are all examples of these changes. The usual ifs and buts no longer seem capable of defining the boundaries of these women’s public lives.

During this period, women have made the journey from ‘vulnerability’ to ‘agency’. The Gen Z protests also showed how women were not merely resisting authority but stepping forward to protect their male companions. In Mumbai, Riya Ahirstood in front of a police vehicle to help free detained protesters. In Delhi, young women put themselves between their friends and police batons, becoming their shields.

Such acts suggest that a new bond of trust is taking shape between women and men. One in which neither is always the protector nor always the protected. When the men needed help, the women stepped forward. And when a young woman leapt from a bus window, the men reached out to catch her.

But the trust these women find in one another is no less precious. They don’t just bring their own courage to these protests; they find new courage in each other’s company. When the police grab one, another rushes to free her. Let a policeman lay a hand on one of them, and the others snarl at him like lionesses. When one falls, another picks her up. When one begins a chant, the others become her voice. And then, together, they sit in protest through the night.

These women are no longer particularly concerned about pleasing those who expect traditional ‘modesty’ and ‘decorum’ from them. Instead, they are claiming the right to decide for themselves when to speak, whom to speak to and what tone to use. The many photographs of student leader Neha Bora suggest that she has thrown out the rulebook that requires women to look ‘ladylike’ and, whatever the circumstances, speak little, softly and sweetly.

In other words, they are not merely claiming the freedom to protest. They are also choosing how to protest. It might be a reel built around the ‘Vaastegana Huiyaan?’ meme, a chant like ‘Ek kachori, do samosa, in mardon ka kya bharosa’, or a sharp, biting remark made in front of the media or the police.

Perhaps that is why the reactions to their protests are marked by a peculiar mix of discomfort and intensity. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s remark about experiencing a ‘cultural shock’ on hearing the language used by the country’s ‘daughters’, attempts by government supporters to ‘dox’ some women protesters, and the online abuse and threats directed at them are all part of the backlash. Then there are the Delhi Police’s batons and allegations of sexual harassment against some of its personnel. The very idea of women protesting makes some people uncomfortable. And here they are, fearless and outspoken too. Women are expected to protest without offending anyone, to express anger while remaining pleasant. But the trouble is that these women now care more about how they see themselves than about how others see them.

The struggle is no longer merely about winning the freedom to come out onto the streets and make themselves heard. It is also about being recognised as citizens. The women in these photographs are not there as someone’s wife or daughter, as representatives of a family, or merely as victims complaining about a wrong done to them. They are citizens too, with just as much right as any man to question the government, the law and public institutions.

This declaration of freedom is both an achievement of these movements and a source of their strength. The women taking part are saying, loud and clear: when decisions are made, my voice will be heard too.

Freedom does not always arrive with a change in the law or someone granting permission. Sometimes it begins the day someone stops waiting for permission. Perhaps that is exactly what the women in these photographs are doing. They have not stopped fighting for freedom, but neither are they waiting for it to be handed to them.

They are no longer fighting just for freedom. They are fighting with it.

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One thing can easily be said about the protests taking place in Delhi against the Election Commission and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar: they are peaceful. People are raising slogans, carrying posters and asking questions. There is no violence, stone-pelting or vandalism that might justify preventing protesters from demonstrating at a place meant precisely for that purpose. Yet they are not being allowed anywhere near Jantar Mantar, let alone permitted to protest there.

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Delhi Police detained hundreds of people on October 2. It did the same on October 3. Then, on October 6 and 7, the same happened to Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi and a large number of opposition MPs. Anyone who resisted, including Rahul and Priyanka, was met with Delhi Police’s familiar use of force. Despite this, the protests remained largely non-violent. And yet, short of calling in the army, almost every measure is being taken to prevent them from continuing.

This raises a very simple question: why are questions being asked of the Election Commission being answered through the police?

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The police cannot explain why two members of the Election Commission repeatedly recorded written objections to the Commission’s decisions. It cannot explain who changed Form 6, which is used to give people the right to vote, or what consequences that change might have. The police cannot explain why, after judicial officers in West Bengal decided that the names of lakhs of voters should remain on the electoral rolls, the Commission seems determined to have those decisions overturned. Nor can it explain why names are increasingly being added to electoral rolls only through Delhi when, under the law, this is the job of EROs spread across the country. Or why the three members of the Election Commission no longer seem to meet and take decisions together. And how can the police explain what forced, for the first time in the Commission’s history, two Election Commissioners to write to the Cabinet Secretary about the disorder within their own institution?

Only the Election Commission can answer these questions—not the police or the central security forces, and not the Modi government. Yet the questions being raised about the Commission are receiving mostly political answers. Sometimes BJP spokespersons answer them, sometimes BJP chief ministers. The Election Commission alone remains silent. And when people protest against that silence, Delhi Police answers them in its own way.

The Modi government, too, has to answer several important questions related to this matter. But for now it seems busy turning central Delhi into a fortress to protect the Election Commission’s freedom to remain silent.

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The questions facing the Election Commission are not merely political questions invented by Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi or Abhijeet Dipke. In September 2026, an Indian Express investigation appeared whose basic findings the Election Commission itself did not deny. It showed that two members of the three-member Commission—Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi—had themselves raised several of these questions in writing.

According to The Indian Express, between November 2025 and September 2026 the two Commissioners recorded written objections at least 14 times to important decisions and procedures of the Election Commission. One of these concerned Form 6, through which new voters are added to the electoral rolls. Recently, the form was modified to ask whether the applicant or the applicant’s parents had been included in the previous SIR. According to Commissioners Sandhu and Joshi, this was “illegal” and “unauthorised” because the Election Commission could not change Form 6 in this manner on its own; a prescribed legal procedure had to be followed.

Later, when the Election Commission said in a press release that the new Form 6 had also been approved by the Supreme Court, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said in open court that the Supreme Court had approved no such modified Form 6.

The Indian Express report also said that in Goa, after 97 people received Election Commission notices, the concerned EROs heard their cases and found them eligible to be included in the electoral roll. The law gives the ERO—usually an SDM—the authority to decide such matters. But the Election Commission’s new website, ECINet, did not allow the officials to add these 97 names. The officials repeatedly wrote to the Election Commission in Delhi, but nothing happened. As a result, all 97 voters were left out of Goa’s final electoral roll. They are now trying to get their names added through Form 6.

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It was incidents like these that led both Election Commissioners to separately record their concern that control over electoral rolls was increasingly shifting away from EROs spread across the country and into the hands of a few people sitting in Delhi. According to them, this was not only contrary to the statutory arrangement, it could also create room for large-scale manipulation of electoral rolls.

During the SIR in West Bengal, around 60 lakh people were issued notices for “logical discrepancies”. Judicial officers were assigned to examine these cases. Tribunals headed by retired High Court judges were created to hear appeals against their decisions. Among the appeals that reached these tribunals, around 16 lakh were against decisions in which judicial officers had allowed voters to remain on the electoral rolls. In other words, the EC was seeking to have these 16 lakh voters removed even after rulings by judicial officers in their favour. According to the Express, Election Commissioner Sandhu wrote to Commission officials in August 2026 asking on whose instructions these appeals had been filed.

What is remarkable is that, during a Supreme Court hearing, the Commission told the Court that there were a total of 38 lakh West Bengal-related cases before the tribunals—but not that 16 lakh of those cases had been filed by the Commission itself seeking to remove people from the rolls.

One broad inference from this is that the Commission tried to mislead the Court. Another is that an institution that traditionally emphasised adding eligible citizens to the electoral rolls has, in recent times, begun to appear more focused on deleting names and making registration more difficult. And decisions do not appear to be taken collectively either. Otherwise, two Election Commissioners would not have had to repeatedly record their objections and dissent in writing. The Indian Express report also says that for nearly four months there was no joint meeting of all three Election Commissioners.

The law says the Commission’s business should, as far as possible, be conducted unanimously, and where there is disagreement, the decision should be taken by majority. But if that were happening, the extraordinary event that occurred for the first time in the Election Commission’s history would not have happened. Sandhu and Joshi separately wrote two letters to the country’s Cabinet Secretary, citing violations of rules within the Commission. The Election Commission later said that these letters concerned only the functioning of one official. But if two members of an independent constitutional body have to approach the Cabinet Secretary merely to complain about one official, the matter stops looking quite so simple.

To understand the seriousness of this, it is worth recalling the Supreme Court’s 1995 judgment on T.N. Seshan’s petition challenging the Narasimha Rao government’s decision to make the Election Commission a three-member body. The Supreme Court dismissed that petition.

The essence of that judgment was very clear: the Election Commission is not merely the Chief Election Commissioner. All three Commissioners together constitute the Election Commission. The Chief Election Commissioner is its chairman, not the master of the other two members.

But the present Election Commission does not appear to behave that way.

After The Indian Express report appeared, the Election Commission issued two rather evasive press releases. They do not deny the allegations contained in the report, but neither do they answer its fundamental questions.

Now to the Modi government’s role in this affair, and the questions that can be asked of it.

Article 324 of the Constitution gives the Election Commission extraordinary powers. But it does not prescribe a specific method for selecting Election Commissioners. It leaves the appointment of the Chief Election Commissioner and other Election Commissioners to the President, acting on the aid and advice of the Union government, “subject to the provisions of any law made in that behalf by Parliament”.

But Parliament did not make such a law for more than seven decades. The Union government continued to decide the names of Election Commissioners, and the President appointed them.

In March 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court filled this vacuum. In the Anoop Baranwal case, it said that the Election Commission had to be insulated from executive influence if elections were to remain free and fair. Until Parliament enacted a law, it put in place an interim arrangement under which all Election Commissioners would be selected by a committee consisting of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha and the Chief Justice of India.

For the first time, this created a selection process in which the government could not appoint Election Commissioners entirely on its own. A few months later, in December 2023, the Modi government replaced that arrangement with a new law—the Chief Election Commissioner and Other Election Commissioners Act, 2023.

The new law removed the Chief Justice of India from the selection committee. In his place, it put a Union Cabinet minister chosen by the Prime Minister. In the three-member committee, the Prime Minister and a minister chosen by him now sit on one side, and the Leader of the Opposition on the other. In plain terms, this means the government can once again choose whoever it wants as an Election Commissioner, as long as that person holds or has held a post equivalent to the rank of Secretary to the Government of India.

Section 16 of the law also gives serving and former Election Commissioners very broad personal legal protection for their official or purportedly official acts. In other words, no civil or criminal proceedings can be instituted against them in a court for such acts.

These changes raise several questions. And it is not only the opposition that has raised them. In September 2026, two Supreme Court judges—Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice S.C. Sharma—reached different conclusions on petitions challenging the 2023 Election Commissioners law (the matter will now go before a larger bench). In his judgment, Justice Datta said that it was not enough for the Election Commission to be independent; it must also appear to be independent. He also questioned whether a Cabinet minister on the selection committee could truly be regarded as independent of the Prime Minister, saying that in such a situation the presence of the Leader of the Opposition could become merely ornamental.

The question, then, is this: why did the Modi government use legislation to dismantle a Supreme Court-created arrangement for selecting Election Commissioners that was clearly better designed to protect the Commission’s independence? It is one thing to continue with an old system that carries the possibility of misuse. It is quite another to replace a better system, once it has been put in place, with one that gives the government effective control over appointments. That naturally creates suspicion.

A good system is not one that works well when good people are in power. A good system is one that even bad people cannot easily misuse. It should not depend on the virtues or vices of those in office.

In 2024, Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu became the first Election Commissioners chosen under this new law. And the manner in which they were selected places the Modi government under another set of questions.

The Election Commissioners Act received presidential assent at the end of December 2023, just a few months before the 2024 Lok Sabha election. Soon afterwards, Congress leader Jaya Thakur—and later the ADR—approached the Supreme Court against it. Then, on March 9, 2024, just days before the general election schedule was to be announced, Election Commissioner Arun Goel suddenly resigned. Had he not resigned, he would today be the Chief Election Commissioner instead of Gyanesh Kumar and would remain in office until the end of 2027.

After Goel resigned, only one member remained in the Election Commission—Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar—because the other Election Commissioner, A.C. Pandey, had retired in February 2024. Fearing that the government would now appoint both Commissioners under the new law even though a challenge to it was pending before the Supreme Court, Jaya Thakur and the ADR sought an urgent hearing. They wanted the new appointment law stayed. On March 13, a Bench headed by Justice Sanjiv Khanna agreed to hear the matter on March 15. But the very next day, the government hurriedly appointed Gyanesh Kumar and S.S. Sandhu as Election Commissioners.

They were the first Election Commissioners chosen under the new law. The selection committee consisted of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, then the leader of the largest opposition party in the Lok Sabha. Chowdhury said the final six names were given to him only minutes before the selection meeting, making it impossible for him to seriously examine them.

When Gyanesh Kumar became Chief Election Commissioner, Rahul Gandhi was the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. He too opposed Kumar’s appointment because a Supreme Court hearing on the composition of the selection committee was due shortly afterwards. He argued that the appointment should be deferred until then. It was not.

Arun Goel’s own appointment was no less interesting. In November 2022, while the Supreme Court was hearing the Baranwal case on creating an independent process for appointing Election Commissioners, Goel’s voluntary retirement was approved in a flash and, just as swiftly, the Modi government appointed him Election Commissioner. The Supreme Court appeared sharply displeased by the manner of the appointment and asked the Modi government some very pointed questions.

The timing itself raised questions about the Modi government’s intentions. Otherwise, why was there such urgency to make the appointment while the Supreme Court was in the middle of hearings on precisely this issue? Appointments to positions this important should, in any case, require considerable thought. Yet the government did something very similar when appointing Gyanesh Kumar and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu.

The official reason for Goel’s resignation remains unclear. But a Hindustan Times report says that he and CEC Rajiv Kumar had differences on several issues. One of them concerned the Shiv Sena split. When deciding whether the party name and symbol should go to the Shinde or Thackeray faction, Goel wanted organisational majority to be given weight as well. The final decision, however, was unanimous, and the party name and symbol went to the Shinde-led faction, which had more MLAs and MPs and was allied with the BJP in Maharashtra.

Whatever the reason, there can hardly be a more important responsibility for an Election Commissioner than managing a Lok Sabha election. During Goel’s tenure, that opportunity would have come only once—in 2024. Yet just before it, and only about a year before he was due to become Chief Election Commissioner, he left the field.

It did not cost him very much. A few months later, he was appointed India’s ambassador to Croatia.

The Modi government is the only government in the country under which two Election Commissioners resigned who, had they not done so, would later have become Chief Election Commissioners.

Before Goel, the Election Commissioner who did this was Ashok Lavasa in 2020. Before that, it had happened only once, in 1973, when then Chief Election Commissioner Nagendra Singh resigned. But he did not leave amid any controversy. He resigned because he had been appointed to the International Court of Justice.

Ashok Lavasa had been appointed Election Commissioner by the Modi government in the normal manner under the previous appointment process. But he did not get along with then Chief Election Commissioner Sunil Arora.

During the 2019 election, five complaints concerning alleged violations of the Model Code of Conduct by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah came before the Election Commission. Arora and the third Election Commissioner gave Modi and Shah clean chits in those cases. Lavasa disagreed. He wanted his minority opinion to be included in the Commission’s final orders. The Commission rejected his demand 2-1. Lavasa then recused himself from meetings relating to Model Code complaints.

A few months after the election, reports emerged of Income Tax investigations and notices involving his wife, son and sister. Some time later, Lavasa resigned from the Election Commission and moved to the Asian Development Bank. His departure cleared the way for Rajiv Kumar to eventually become Chief Election Commissioner.

After Gyanesh Kumar, Rajiv Kumar was perhaps the other Chief Election Commissioner to have attracted the most controversy. But before turning to him, it is worth looking a little more closely at the tenure of Sunil Arora, about whom Yogendra Yadav wrote in The Indian Express that with his appointment in December 2018, the Election Commission entered the present phase of decline in institutional autonomy and political neutrality.

After the Lavasa episode, Arora became embroiled in another major controversy during the 2021 West Bengal election. The Commission conducted polling there in eight phases. Critics alleged that such a prolonged schedule benefited the BJP because it allowed the Prime Minister and other senior BJP leaders to hold more campaign rallies in the state. The Commission argued that the schedule was necessary because of violence, the availability of security forces, the large number of polling stations and Covid. But the eight-phase schedule was unusual enough to raise questions about the Election Commission’s neutrality.

This is not to suggest that the Election Commission was never at the centre of controversy before the Modi government.

In 1989, just weeks before the general election, the Rajiv Gandhi government appointed two additional Election Commissioners for the first time. It created a major controversy. It was alleged that the appointments were intended to reduce the influence of then Chief Election Commissioner R.V.S. Peri Sastri because his relationship with the government had become strained.

The following year, the V.P. Singh government abolished both posts. One of the Election Commissioners, S.S. Dhanoa, went to court against the decision. He alleged that the new government was hostile to him, particularly because of a dispute over the Janata Dal’s election symbol during the 1989 election. The Supreme Court dismissed his petition.

In 1991, the Chandrashekhar government enacted a law governing the service conditions of the Chief Election Commissioner and other Election Commissioners—the Election Commission (Conditions of Service of Election Commissioners and Transaction of Business) Act, 1991.

Then in 1993, amid an open confrontation with T.N. Seshan, the P.V. Narasimha Rao government once again made the Commission a three-member body. At the same time, the 1991 law was amended to clarify that the Commission would try to decide matters unanimously and, where there was disagreement, decisions would be taken by majority. Seshan challenged this in the Supreme Court. But in 1995 the Court upheld both the multi-member Commission and the system of majority decision-making.

Despite these and a few other controversies, until fairly recent years the Election Commission remained one of the institutions that gave Indian democracy a good name around the world. Other countries learnt from it; Indians took pride in it. If that is no longer the case, a great deal of responsibility lies with Rajiv Kumar. Chosen by the Modi government, he succeeded Sunil Arora and became Chief Election Commissioner after Ashok Lavasa’s resignation cleared his path.

If Sunil Arora’s tenure saw the resignation of one Election Commissioner and only a handful of major controversies, Rajiv Kumar matched him on the first count and went miles ahead on the second.

It was during Rajiv Kumar’s tenure that a new practice began: notices over alleged Model Code violations were sent to the presidents of political parties instead of directly to senior leaders such as Prime Minister Narendra Modi. His tenure also saw a major controversy over voter-turnout figures, which eventually reached the Supreme Court.

It was under Rajiv Kumar that the Shiv Sena and NCP splits reached the Election Commission, and in both cases the Commission awarded the original party name and symbol to factions that were in power with the BJP.

It was during Rajiv Kumar’s tenure that the controversial delimitation of Assam took place. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma himself later said that, because of the delimitation, Muslim voters remained decisive in only around 23 seats. The obvious beneficiary was the BJP.

The unusual Surat election during the 2024 Lok Sabha polls also took place under Rajiv Kumar, when the BJP candidate was elected unopposed without a single vote being cast. An investigation by The Guardian reported allegations by several candidates of pressure and threats. According to the report, the Election Commission took no action on complaints made to it in the matter.

A 2024 Indian Express investigation found that since 2014, 25 prominent opposition leaders facing action by central investigative agencies had joined the BJP, and 23 of them later received relief of one kind or another—three cases were closed and action in 20 others stalled or went cold. The newspaper also noted that allegations of political misuse of central agencies had existed during the UPA years as well, but on a much smaller scale.

Just before the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the Income Tax Department froze the Congress party’s main bank accounts over a tax dispute. The Congress accused the Modi government of political vendetta, while the BJP and the IT Department described it as routine legal action.

Whatever the motive, restricting the main opposition party’s access to its electoral resources immediately before the Lok Sabha election was enough to raise serious questions. If it was merely routine legal action, could it not have been taken a few months earlier or a few months later?

None of these events proves that the Election Commission is in collusion with the government. But if someone looks at all of them together and raises questions about the conduct of the present Election Commission and Gyanesh Kumar, how can those questions be dismissed simply because there is no conclusive proof?

If someone questions the Election Commission’s decision to conduct an SIR in Bihar just before the Assembly election, during the flood season and when a large part of the state’s migrant population was away in search of work, how can that person simply be called wrong?

Similar questions can be asked about the SIR in West Bengal. It was carried out just before the Assembly election. In such circumstances, if errors occur, the scope for correcting them fully before polling is very limited—and that is what happened. If someone therefore questions why the Commission chose to conduct the SIR at that time, how can such questions simply be dismissed as wrong?

Why could the Bihar SIR not have been held at some other time? Why could the West Bengal exercise not have been carried out last year, when the Bihar SIR was held and the Bengal election was still some distance away? Why was it so necessary to conduct SIRs in both states immediately before elections?

When the BJP alone does not ask the Election Commission such questions, but instead begins answering questions that are being asked of the Election Commission, questions about the BJP’s role are only natural.

It is hardly a secret that the BJP tries to form governments at almost any cost. Beyond that, the Modi government dismantles a sound arrangement created by the Supreme Court for selecting Election Commissioners and replaces it with one that gives it effective control over their appointments. It then appoints to the Election Commission senior bureaucrats it has known, watched and worked with for years. When serious allegations are raised against them, it vigorously defends them. And when citizens protest against them, they find themselves facing the Delhi Police and central security forces controlled by the same Union government.

Does all this strengthen our trust in the Election Commission—or weaken it?

Should these questions not be asked?

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During a recent press conference, India Today journalist Mausami Singh put a direct question to Rahul Gandhi: “Sir, will there be a point that you will boycott the elections? Will it come to that?”

Gandhi did not pause to ponder scenarios or hedge his bets. He shut the question down immediately: “Main us distraction mein nahi jaunga (I will not get into that distraction.)… I will avoid the distraction. But thank you.”

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But there are many others who do not find this question to be a distraction. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), issued an impassioned plea on social media urging the entire opposition to walk away from the ballot box. His argument was straightforward: by participating in “rigged” elections, opposition parties merely legitimise the process and maintain the illusion of a functioning democracy. Contesting for survival, he argued, is self-delusion when parties are routinely split, lawmakers poached, and votes manipulated. Comparing the system to a fixed cricket match where a few catches are deliberately taken to make the contest look real, Dipke described occasional opposition wins as mere “crumbs” meant to keep them trapped in the game.

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The sentiment resonates with many citizens exhausted by controversies over the independence of the Election Commission. Yet, Gandhi’s curt refusal to entertain the idea and Trinamool Congress leader Derek O’Brien’s sharp public rebuttal of Dipke’s plea reveal a profound gulf. It is the divide between the moral absolutism of a young activist and the cold, unyielding mechanics of electoral politics.

The fundamental flaw in the boycott argument lies in a basic misunderstanding of Indian electoral law: the constitutional machinery does not pause for non-participants.

In corporate boardrooms or international organisations, a vote often requires a quorum to be legally valid. If half the members walk out, business halts. But Indian parliamentary democracy makes no distinction between voter turnout of 80% and 8%. And even when there is only one candidate in a constituency, that candidate is declared elected without a poll.

This is the scenario Derek O’Brien warned against when he countered Dipke: “Opposition boycotting elections = BJP wins all seats. Once that happens, they amend the Constitution to legalise all their crimes.”

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An opposition-free Lok Sabha would give a ruling alliance enormous legislative room, with no resistance to ordinary legislation. Constitutional amendments would still require a special majority in the Rajya Sabha. But if the opposition extended its boycott to Assembly elections, even this safeguard could weaken over time by giving the BJP and its allies more Rajya Sabha seats. Some constitutional amendments also require ratification by at least half the states. The BJP-led NDA already governs more than 20 states. A boycott, therefore, does not paralyse an incumbent government. The wider it spreads, the more institutional ground the opposition risks surrendering.

Some strategists argue that even if an opposition does not actually walk away, merely threatening a boycott could serve as a formidable tactical weapon.

If backed by a disciplined and united alliance, an ultimatum could act as an effective bargaining chip. Yet, this gambit carries an almost fatal catch: the risk of a called bluff.

If an opposition alliance issues an ultimatum that the government ignores, it faces a no-win scenario. Boycotting the election hands absolute legislative power to the ruling party, while backing down to contest anyway proves its threat was empty noise.

This high-stakes trap explains why Rahul Gandhi refused to open that rhetorical door even an inch. In hard-nosed politics, you never brandish an ultimatum you cannot afford to execute.

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Modern political history offers numerous examples of election boycotts leaving the parties that launched them weaker rather than stronger. Across different decades and continents, regimes have often treated an opponent’s walkout not as a crisis of conscience, but as an administrative gift.

Punjab, 1992

After five years of direct President’s Rule amid intense militant insurgency, the Union government scheduled Punjab Assembly elections in February 1992. Faced with militant threats and unresolved regional grievances, major factions of the Shiromani Akali Dal decided to boycott the polls to deny the Indian state legitimacy in the region.

The boycott helped depress turnout to just 23.8%, with participation particularly low in rural areas. But the outcome was decisive: the Indian National Congress swept 87 of the 117 seats. Beant Singh formed the government despite the exceptionally low turnout. For the next five years, the Akali Dal had no representation in the legislature and little formal influence over state policy while counter-insurgency operations continued. By 1997, recognising the depth of the strategic blunder, the Akalis returned to the ballot box.

Venezuela, 2005

Ahead of the December 2005 parliamentary elections, Venezuela’s mainstream opposition parties accused President Hugo Chávez of packing the National Electoral Council and manipulating automated voting machines. Convinced that participation would legitimise a compromised process, the opposition pulled its candidates just days before the vote.

Voter turnout fell to about 25%, but the legal consequence was absolute: pro-Chávez forces captured all 167 seats in the National Assembly. Without an opposition presence to register dissent, Chávez gained sweeping powers and packed key institutions with loyalists. The opposition then spent years trying to recover the institutional ground it had surrendered.

Bangladesh, 2014

In 2011, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government abolished the neutral “Caretaker Government” system. Khaleda Zia’s Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) demanded its restoration and eventually boycotted the 2014 general election, asserting that no fair election was possible under the Awami League’s direct watch.

Because of that, 153 out of 300 parliamentary seats were decided completely uncontested before a single citizen cast a ballot. The Awami League and its allies secured an overwhelming parliamentary majority. Far from collapsing under international opprobrium, the government remained in power for another decade. Sidelined outside Parliament, the BNP lost an important institutional platform as its organisational network came under growing pressure and much of its leadership faced arrests, cases or exile.

An election boycott can only succeed if it is the opening act of a sustained mass movement. This was how the Indian National Congress under Mahatma Gandhi used boycotts against colonial authorities, backed by nationwide non-cooperation.

The big question is, does today’s Indian opposition possess such a capability?

The clearest example in recent years of a movement forcing the Union government into a major policy retreat was the 2020–2021 farmers’ agitation against the three farm laws. But that struggle drew its staying power from non-partisan agrarian networks—khaps, village panchayats, and community-funded logistical supply chains—and its leaders deliberately kept political parties off their stages to prevent the state from dismissing the movement as an electoral conspiracy.

Dipke’s Cockroach Janta Party also showed genuine agility when its high-voltage sit-in at Jantar Mantar over exam irregularities and paper leaks culminated in Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. But forcing a cabinet minister to step down over a specific, visible administrative mess in the national capital is worlds apart from shutting down a subcontinent.

Calls for an election boycott also seem to ignore the human reality of grassroots politics. A political party does not live in television studios or social media feeds; it lives in municipal wards, village booths and district courts.

Thousands of its workers contest elections at different levels, backed by crores of supporters, often facing police scrutiny and putting their lives and livelihoods on the line. Derek O’Brien points to this reality in his post when he writes: “Also not contesting elections means betraying the lakhs of workers who are on the ground, fighting with their lives.”

Contesting elections is the oxygen that keeps this network alive. It gives local leaders and workers visibility, protection and political influence. If a party leadership announces that it will simply sit out elections for the next five years, its cadre cannot simply hibernate. Without political cover and under pressure from the ruling machinery, local workers may either defect to the ruling party or withdraw from public life altogether.

This is also why Rahul Gandhi dismissed the question as a “distraction.” To publicly entertain a boycott is an immediate political trap. The moment an opposition leader validates the idea, the national conversation can stop being about allegations of electoral manipulation, arbitrary institutional conduct or economic distress. Instead, the narrative can become one of an opposition conceding defeat and running away from the battlefield.

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Last week, Jacob Coxon, a prominent 27-year-old researcher at Anthropic—one of the world’s leading AI companies—resigned from his position. Coxon, who previously worked at ChatGPT creator OpenAI, did not leave to pursue a more lucrative career move. Explaining his departure on X, he wrote:

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

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His post was quickly endorsed by a senior colleague at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, who posted, “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

In ordinary circumstances, these posts might have circulated briefly before fading into the vast ocean of social media. This time was different, largely because of an unprecedented development inside OpenAI that had recently come to light—the “Hugging Face incident.” Hugging Face is actually a popular platform where developers share AI-related software code and data. It is often referred to as the 'GitHub of the AI world'. The episode revealed that, when pushed by difficult challenges and powerful incentives, AI can display behaviours remarkably similar to human actions—both clever and destructive.

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OpenAI itself described the event in stark terms:

“We consider this incident a ‘warning shot’ for us and for the world: evidence that, without proper safeguards, highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.”

* * *

The story began months before the Hugging Face break-in, during the training phase of an experimental AI model in May 2026. To train this model (we will call it AI-1) safely, OpenAI placed its active instances—known as AI agents—inside “sandboxes,” isolated virtual computers cut off from the outside internet. The goal was to let the AI practice running code and solving problems without any risk of affecting the outside world.

OpenAI trained this model using reinforcement learning, a method where an agent receives a mathematical “reward” whenever it solves a problem. Under this system, the agents were pushed to be persistent and never give up. Occasionally, however, trainers accidentally assigned them impossible practice tasks, such as analysing files stored on private Google Drive links that they could not reach from inside their disconnected sandboxes.

Faced with dead ends, the agents began looking for workarounds. Inside their sandboxes, they all had access to Artifactory, a shared internal tool meant to serve as a digital supply closet for downloading approved software packages. Instead of using Artifactory only for its intended purpose, an agent realised it could leave notes inside this shared space. Another agent running in a completely separate sandbox spotted the note and replied. Over several weeks, the agents turned Artifactory into a secret bulletin board. They also exploited a security flaw in the tool to access the internet. Because these unintended shortcuts helped the agents complete tasks and earn rewards, the behavior became deeply ingrained in AI-1.

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In early July, after heavy agent traffic crashed the Artifactory server, OpenAI engineers rebuilt the tool and inadvertently wiped the message board clean. At the time, the engineers did not realise what had actually caused the crash.

On July 7, OpenAI launched new evaluations on its models—including AI-1—to measure their underlying capabilities and determine the appropriate safeguards needed before their deployment. Hundreds of agents powered by AI-1 were assigned a series of difficult hacking puzzles, known as ExploitGym. For each puzzle, the goal was straightforward: find a security flaw in a target program and use it to retrieve a hidden digital passcode called a “flag”.

The problem was that roughly one-third of these new test puzzles were practically impossible to solve legitimately. Some were flawed by design, while others required files that the AI could not reach because its internet access had been disabled.

Here is where the human parallel becomes clear. Think of an ambitious student in a high-stakes exam who has been told that failing is simply not an option. If the teacher hands out an exam containing misprinted, unsolvable questions, a desperate student under immense pressure will not just sit idly. They will scan the room for any loophole—an unlatched window, an open textbook left in the hall, or a classmate’s desk.

The AI agents did the digital equivalent. Finding the test impossible from inside their sandboxes, they reverted to the habits they had learned during reinforcement learning training.

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When they discovered that their old method of posting notes in Artifactory was blocked, they improvised, encoding messages directly inside folder and directory names to rebuild their bulletin board. This behavior mirrors prisoners in isolation cells trying to communicate by tapping on walls or whispering through air vents. Despite being placed in strictly separated sandboxes, hundreds of agents began coordinating as an organised collective.

Next, the agents exploited flaws in Artifactory to escape their sandboxes and reach the public internet. Searching the web for answer keys, they discovered publicly exposed credentials belonging to users of Hugging Face. Suspecting that test answers might be hosted there, the agents broke in. Over several days, they took control of dozens of Hugging Face servers, extracted internal passwords, and set up a remote command channel to coordinate their search.

Crucially, the agents did not stop with outside targets; they also turned their attention to OpenAI’s own systems. Using a known operating system flaw, the agents broke completely out of their digital sandboxes onto OpenAI’s physical host computers. They did this for a direct reason: to rig the entire examination system. By taking over OpenAI’s host infrastructure, they could manipulate the test setup, seize the monitoring mechanisms, and extract the secret passcodes directly.

In human terms, it was like someone disabling the security cameras before doing something illicit, or students breaking into the principal’s office to alter the master exam papers before the test begins.

It was this noisy takeover inside OpenAI—not the Hugging Face breach—that finally tripped security alarms on July 19 and exposed the operation.

Even while breaking into networks, the agents faced another dilemma. They deduced that an automated grading system was scoring their work, and they feared that obvious cheating would result in a failing grade.

To bypass this, they generated fake activity logs to make it look like they had solved the puzzles legitimately. The collective even divided the labor. And agents that were unsure of passing the test submitted their answers early to learn what the grader was looking for, allowing the remaining agents to adapt their strategy.

Some agents ended up dedicating more effort to coordinating the broader group than working on their own individual puzzles. At the same time, as their chains of thought show, certain agents openly questioned whether breaking into outside systems was authorised, hesitating before deciding to push ahead anyway to secure the solution.

* * *

Both Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger acknowledge that current AI systems do not possess the power to end human civilisation. But they stress that this safety buffer applies only to the present, not to the near future.

“I think the risk from present models is low,” Hubinger observed. “What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement which is happening faster than we thought.”

By recursive self-improvement, he means the ability of AI models to develop the next generation of AI without human guidance. “...then you get what’s called an intelligence explosion,” Coxon warned in a CNN interview. “The AI just gets smarter and smarter with no human involvement necessary until you have a thing that is vastly smarter than humans.”

If an AI with superhuman capabilities behaves the way the agents did during the Hugging Face-OpenAI incident—evading controls, deceiving evaluators, and finding loopholes to achieve its goals—the risks would extend far beyond compromised research servers: “For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons. There’s a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world,” Coxon warns.

Following the alarm raised by Coxon and Hubinger, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei addressed these issues directly in an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier.” In this essay, he acknowledged the transformative upsides of the technology, noting that AI could cure major diseases within 5 to 10 years, dramatically accelerate economic prosperity, and strengthen democratic societies. Yet he also warned that the sheer magnitude of the technology brings corresponding tail risks: losing control over autonomous systems, catastrophic cyber and biological misuse, and rapid economic destabilisation.

A recent security assessment from Anthropic highlighted how real-world actors are already testing these boundaries. It revealed that a cell in Yemen attempted to use Anthropic’s Claude to develop guidance, navigation, and control algorithms for guided rockets and ballistic missiles—and even turned back to the AI to troubleshoot when a test launch failed.

Why, then, do frontier AI labs continue to rush forward?

“They find themselves in this scenario where they’re compelled to race towards building a deadly technology,” Coxon said.

Amodei also argues in his essay that the core problem driving these risks is a classic prisoner’s dilemma. Commercial competition and geopolitical rivalry create a dynamic where no single company or nation feels it can afford to slow down unilaterally.

Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, explained why this dynamic is unsustainable in an interview with CNN: “I know what everyone is thinking. If we slow down and we lose to China, then that’s going to be it. But if we lose to uncontrollable AI, neither the US wins nor China wins. And by the way, the US loses if China screws it up, and China loses if the US screws it up.” He concluded, “So we should see this moment as a gift where we’re actually getting an early warning shot.”

* * *

There is another dimension to this problem that often goes overlooked: artificial intelligence is, in many ways, a reflection of us. A child learns from family, teachers and the society around them. An AI model similarly learns from the enormous record of human thought, language and behaviour that we give it. It absorbs our books and history, our conversations and internet forums, and the countless interactions users have with it—including requests to create deceptive, manipulative or dishonest content. We also shape these systems through the goals we set, the behaviours we reward and the environments in which we train them.

An AI system cannot simply become an ideal moral actor when much of what it has learned comes from a deeply imperfect human world. That may be the most unsettling and least understood revelation of the Hugging Face incident. The AI agents did not display some uniquely alien form of malice. When faced with difficult goals and incentives, they behaved in ways that are recognisably human.

The important difference is what happens next. Even when humans abandon their conscience, they are constrained by physical and mental limitations and the fear of consequences. If a future superintelligence exhibits our worst behavioral traits without any of those limits, the consequences could be far greater than anything human flaws have ever caused.

In the worst case, that could lead to the very catastrophe Jacob Coxon warned of when he walked away from Anthropic.

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Gen Z has turned retro-fetishism into an art form. From dumbphones and wired earbuds to vinyl records and analog cameras, they have routinely revived obsolete tech to carve out stability in an hyper-connected world. But their latest obsession doesn’t stop at raiding the twentieth century—it leaps back hundreds of years. The new craze? Sending letters by carrier pigeon. And, with the usual cinematic disclaimer, no birds are harmed in the process: these pigeons are entirely digital.

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Enter the rise of “slowcial” platforms—a mashup of slow and social—designed to make messaging intentionally sluggish. On Carrier Pidge, built by American developer Noah Iarrobino, dispatching a note from Delhi to Bengaluru takes roughly 10 to 12 hours. Launched in April, the app lingered in relative obscurity before an August social media post went viral, sending its download numbers surging.

A competing platform, Roost, founded by Logan Mendelsohn, takes the concept even further. Users can send messages via more than 1,000 virtual creatures, each calibrated to real-world biology. Send a dispatch via snail and it crawls forward at barely 1.5 kilometers per hour; an owl covers roughly thirty kilometers in the same span. Both apps feature live maps to trace a delivery’s progress, capping speeds around 177 km/h. On Carrier Pidge, there is even a 0.2 percent chance your bird gets lost or dies en route—requiring a 99-cent fee to dispatch a replacement. Roost, meanwhile, incorporates a global “Pen Pal” feature that pairs users with complete strangers.

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Why embrace synthetic inefficiency? Speaking to The New York Times, Iarrobino framed the app as part of the broader “slow-tech” counterculture—a refuge for people exhausted by relentless digital tethering. Mendelsohn echoed this to TechCrunch, noting that hyper-connectivity turns daily life into an unending barrage of pinging alerts. Slowing down communication, they argue, restores gravity, intimacy, and intentionality to everyday exchanges.

This fatigue is well-documented. A 2023 survey revealed that over half of Gen Z respondents felt technology was isolating people rather than bringing them together. Their pivot toward feature phones, paper journals, and physical maps is not a wholesale rejection of technology, but an attempt to renegotiate its terms. In tech circles, this sentiment has fueled an “anti-design” movement: stripping away friction-free, dopamine-engineered interfaces in favor of deliberate friction and utilitarian simplicity.

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By engineering delivery delays, these apps introduce what product designers call “manufactured friction.” Developers argue that delaying gratification breaks the dopamine loop of instant replies while injecting playful, game-like suspense into the wait. There is also a clever commercial model at work: free downloads monetized through minor microtransactions (like buying a replacement pigeon) rather than invasive surveillance advertising or data brokering—practices Gen Z actively avoids.

Yet whether artificial slowness can cure digital exhaustion remains an open question. In practice, slowcial apps might simply invent a new strain of screen addiction. Instead of doomscrolling, users may find themselves compulsively checking the map to see where their virtual bird has reached—behaving less like romantic letter-writers and more like hungry customers obsessively tracking a delivery rider on Swiggy or Zomato.

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There is also the question of utility. In a fast-moving world, can slowcial apps replace instant messaging, or will they simply sit alongside WhatsApp and Telegram as another icon cluttering the screen? And once the novelty wears off, delayed messages can still pile up, delivering the exact deluge of notifications users sought to escape—just on a time lag.

Developers insist that delayed replies will compel people to write thoughtful, comprehensive letters. But if length and gravitas were the goal, email has existed for decades. When users know a message will take half a day to arrive, the result is just as likely to be playful melodrama or fleeting romanticism as it is profound prose. The true source of digital burnout has never been transmission speed; it is the suffocating social expectation of immediate availability.

Ultimately, the phenomenon fits neatly into the broader ‘nostalgia economy.’ Having already recycled the fashion, gadgets, and aesthetics of past decades, Gen Z treats digital culture as an experiential playground. In an internet ecosystem defined by frictionless immediacy, waiting has become the ultimate novelty—and young users are even willing to pay for it.

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When Narendra Modi swept to power in May 2014, he offered the Indian electorate a compelling promise: clean administration and turbo-charged development. He pledged “minimum government, maximum governance” and championed the business-friendly “Gujarat model”. He asked voters for just five years to alter the nation’s trajectory: “You gave Congress 60 years, give BJP just 60 months. We will change India’s future and bring about development in 60 months”.

For years, public discourse in India has wrestled with how to evaluate his record. Supporters highlight his achievements, while critics point to his failures. But there is one more way to look at it.

“For a long time, the Modi government’s stance on criticism of its performance has been to blame the previous government, specifically the Congress government. In other words, they’ve argued that they were handed a very poor hand, and that much of this poor performance can be blamed on what was handed down to them,” observes Dr. Sumeet Malik, an economist at the University of Amsterdam, in a video analysis.

A research paper, “Promises, Promises: Governance and Growth in India under Modi and the BJP,” by Kevin Grier and Robin Grier of Texas Tech University offers a unique way to test this argument. Instead of measuring India against theoretical benchmarks or just comparing 2023 with 2013, the study asks a deceptively simple question: What might India have looked like if its pre-2014 trajectory had simply continued?

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The researchers attempt to answer this by constructing a “Synthetic India”—a statistical version of the country that continues along the path India was on before Narendra Modi took power.

Building a Synthetic India

The creation of Synthetic India began by tracking India’s actual performance over thirty years, from 1984 to 2013. The researchers looked at a range of economic and institutional indicators, including per-capita income and democratic freedoms.

They then selected several donor nations and combined them in carefully calculated proportions. The result was “Synthetic India”, a hybrid country whose economic and institutional indicators closely matched those of real India during the thirty years before Modi came to power (1984–2013).

To model India’s economic trajectory, researchers drew from emerging and developing economies such as China, Brazil, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Mexico, among others.

And for modelling democratic governance, researchers blended developing democracies including Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, Ghana, Peru, and Sri Lanka.

Why use two separate sets of nations for economic and democratic modeling of Synthetic India?

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“India is unique in that it has much better political institutions than most countries at its level of economic development. That makes it difficult if not impossible to choose a common donor pool for the economic and political outcomes we study,” explain Grier and Grier in their study. (A few nations, such as Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa, were included in both pools).

The researchers then compared the path real India took between 2014 and 2023 against the trajectory of this synthetic benchmark. Because Synthetic India matched real India so closely for three full decades before 2014, the researchers argue that the major differences between them after 2014 can be attributed to the change in government.

There is an interesting dimension here. The period used to construct Synthetic India runs from 1984 to 2013, and the final ten years of that stretch were the Manmohan Singh years—the longest uninterrupted tenure by any prime minister in that window. So while the study doesn’t literally state what a Manmohan Singh government would have delivered had it been re-elected in 2014, Synthetic India inherently reflects his government's path.

Now, back to our thread, the comparison between real India and its synthetic twin produced striking results. Across ten years and eleven economic and governance metrics, the study found that India didn’t just fail to beat Synthetic India—it underperformed it substantially.

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A decade of democratic decline

On the governance front, the researchers examined ten measures from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) institute’s dataset covering polyarchy (electoral health), liberal democracy, political corruption, equality before the law, freedom of association, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, equal protection, and institutional checks on executive power by both Parliament and the judiciary.

Grier and Grier compared these ten governance measures of real India with Synthetic India every year from 2014 to 2023 — 100 comparisons in all. In 96 of those 100 comparisons, India performed worse than its synthetic counterpart.

By the last year, India’s score on polyarchy was about 60 percent lower than the synthetic path. Liberal democracy was about 69 percent lower. Freedom of religion showed the steepest deterioration. Political corruption was nearly 47 percent higher than the synthetic path, compared with its 2013 level. Equality before the law, freedom of association, and equal protection also ended well below their synthetic counterparts.

The paper notes that these gaps did not appear because the donor countries used to construct Synthetic India suddenly improved. Synthetic India remained relatively steady while India’s institutional scores moved sharply downward.

Missing the ‘Gujarat Model’

Political scientists often discuss the “strongman bargain”—an arrangement in which citizens accept weaker democratic institutions if a leader delivers exceptional economic prosperity.

The study suggests that India did not achieve that bargain either.

Rather than outpacing “business as usual,” India’s real per-capita GDP fell behind its synthetic twin almost immediately after 2014.

By the end of 2023, India’s real per-capita GDP was roughly 10 percent lower than its counterfactual. In real terms, this translated into an annual shortfall of more than $1,000 per person.

The researchers also examined whether major disruptions such as the 2016 demonetisation and the COVID-19 pandemic distorted the results.

They argue that demonetisation was an intentional policy decision of the Modi government and should therefore be counted as part of the administration’s performance.

And the COVID-19 pandemic was a global shock that affected India as well the donor countries used to construct Synthetic India.

There is also a long-running debate over India’s GDP measurement after the 2015 revision to national accounts methodology. Critics argue that the revised methodology overstated subsequent growth. The authors note that if those critics are right, their estimate of India’s economic shortfall is conservative—meaning the actual gap could be even larger.

Studies like this depend on how comparison countries are selected and how closely Synthetic India matches real India before 2014. The researchers acknowledge this, but note that their 30-year pre-2014 matching period provides an unusually long baseline.

They also conducted a placebo test to ensure the model was not producing arbitrary divergence. When they instructed the model to assume that Modi took office in 2001 instead of 2014, actual India and Synthetic India still tracked each other closely through 2013. The divergence occurred only after the real political transition in 2014.

This does not mean every development after 2014 was caused solely by Modi, nor does it serve as a defense of earlier governments. It also does not measure India against an impossible standard. Rather, it compares India with what its own past trajectory and the experience of comparable developing nations suggest was achievable.

That said, the study is not beyond question. As Dr. Malik notes in his YouTube video:

“I know some of you will disagree with the study, and that’s perfectly fine... Go ahead, read it. Critique the assumptions. Critique the method. This is exactly what we should do with the research. But there is a difference between questioning evidence and refusing to look at evidence because we do not like where it leads us.”

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Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Vande Mataram was the emotional soul of India’s independence movement. It served as a powerful rallying cry against colonial rule and remains deeply etched in national memory. Yet, in January 1950, when the Constituent Assembly formally adopted the national anthem, it chose Rabindranath Tagore’s Jana Gana Mana, while granting Vande Mataram equal status as the national song.

But a national anthem has a different job from a song of resistance. It must turn emotion into a common voice of a nation, one that can be sung by crowds, played at ceremonies, and carried beyond the country's borders.

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1. Built for everybody

Many national anthems are notoriously difficult for ordinary crowds to sing. The US anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, demands a wide vocal range, with sudden leaps between high and low notes. As a result, it is often performed by solo singers or played from a recording rather than sung by the crowd. France’s La Marseillaise similarly demands dramatic, operatic power. Jana Gana Mana sits at the other end of the spectrum, alongside accessible anthems like Japan’s Kimigayo and Canada’s O Canada.

Widely believed to be based on Raga Alhaiya Bilawal—a simple morning raga—the melody moves gently note by note without sharp jumps. This steady structure lets thousands of untrained voices in school assemblies, stadiums, or parades sound dignified and unified. Vande Mataram, by comparison, has a more classical and intricate melody, with expressive bends and pauses. It can be beautiful when performed by a trained singer or choir, but those same features make it harder for an ordinary crowd to sing together in sync.

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2. Short, complete, memorable

Public ceremonies require precise, manageable timing. At approximately 52 seconds, Jana Gana Mana provides a complete musical arc: a clear opening, a steady build, and a decisive finish (Jaya he, jaya he...). Tagore’s original Bengali composition, Bharoto Bhagyo Bidhata, contains five stanzas, but India adopted only the first stanza as the anthem. This single verse forms a self-contained, balanced unit. In contrast, The Star-Spangled Banner has four verses, but only the first is ever sung, leaving the rest of the official poem largely forgotten. The full version of Vande Mataram spans six stanzas and takes several minutes to sing, whereas adopting only the first two stanzas leaves the melody feeling open-ended rather than conclusively resolved.

3. Restraint over fervor

National anthems often reflect the passions of their era. La Marseillaise is a martial call to arms born out of violent revolution. The larger Vande Mataram poem draws much of its strength from intense devotional imagery, including the personification of the motherland as a divine goddess. While this provided immense emotional courage during the anti-colonial struggle, it presented theological and ideological challenges for a multi-faith, secular republic.

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Jana Gana Mana chooses quiet restraint. It mentions no weapons, celebrates no battlefield victories, and avoids religious personification. By addressing the Bharata Bhagya Vidhata (the dispenser of India’s destiny) and focusing on moral unity, it creates a neutral civic space where citizens of every faith—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, and Parsi—stand on equal footing.

4. Shared vocabulary

Tagore wrote the anthem in Sadhu Bhasha, a Sanskritised literary register of Bengali. Its vocabulary draws heavily on Sanskrit-derived words familiar across many Indian languages. Rather than relying on complex poetry or regional metaphors, the verse is essentially a rhythmic map of the country: Punjab, Sindhu, Gujarata, Maratha, Dravida, Utkala, Banga, Vindhya, Himachala, Yamuna, Ganga. This makes the anthem more accessible across linguistic regions. Vande Mataram, though deeply poetic, uses denser classical language that requires greater effort for many citizens to read and pronounce with ease.

5. Made to travel

A national anthem is not performed only by citizens singing together. It also has to work when played by military bands, orchestras, and ceremonial ensembles, often far from home.

Nehru’s 21 May 1948 note to the Cabinet made precisely this practical case for India’s national anthem:

“It is to be full of life as well as dignity and it should be capable of being effectively played by orchestras, big and small, and by military bands and pipes. It is to be played not only in India but abroad and should be such as is generally appreciated in both these places.”

By the standards Nehru laid out, Jana Gana Mana was the better choice. It was better suited to orchestras, military bands, and international ceremonial settings. Its steady, march-like character made it easier to adapt to these formats, while Vande Mataram’s more classically inflected melody was less straightforward to render in the same way.

Vande Mataram remains India’s beloved national song of emotional devotion and historical struggle. But Jana Gana Mana was chosen as the national anthem because it was built for the everyday life of a democracy: accessible to every voice, neutral across all faiths, and unified in rhythm.

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Take a look around global politics today and an obvious disconnect jumps out: the median age of world leaders is 63, while that of the global population is around 30. There are exceptions, of course — like Nepal’s 36-year-old Prime Minister Balen Shah, the 38-year-old leaders of Iceland, Burkina Faso and Ecuador, and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who became Ukraine’s president at the age of 41. But the broader trend is clear: political power remains heavily concentrated among older people.

At the extreme end sit rulers governing populations a fraction of their age, like Cameroon’s Paul Biya at 93 or Saudi Arabia’s King Salman at 90. Yet this isn’t just an authoritarian habit. Major democracies show the exact same pattern. Donald Trump governs in his 80s, and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi serves in his late 70s.

In most fields, people in their 80s and 90s are rare exceptions at the top. Politics is different. National leadership has no mandatory retirement age, and some of the world’s most powerful political offices are still occupied by people well into their 80s and 90s.

It isn’t because voters dislike young candidates. As Aksel Sundström, political scientist at the University of Gothenburg and co-author of Youth Without Representation, pointed out in a recent TV discussion: “It's very expensive to run as a candidate for politics. So it's not really that voters do not want young leaders, but it is something in the systems that makes it inherently difficult to become elected.”

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According to Aksel, long tenures are frequently equated with competence and sitting political elites vehemently guard their positions, refusing to allow internal competition from capable young leaders.

Western European democracies—such as Sweden, Finland and Denmark—have party systems that keep campaign costs low and encourage competition, yielding far greater age diversity. In most of the rest, even measures such as age limits or age quotas often function as strategic tools rather than genuine efforts to bring young leaders into the decision-making core.

A prime example is India. After coming to power in 2014, the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi established an unwritten norm retiring leaders above the age of 75 from executive roles. This effectively phased out veteran stalwarts like L.K. Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi. However, Narendra Modi is in his late 70s yet still controls the party and government.

“In many African countries there are age quotas [reserving seats in parliament and candidate lists for young leaders], and generally the research shows that they too function more like a strategy for the elite to keep their power and to get in some young people, but not too many,” Aksel explains further.

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To understand this issue better, Aksel Sundström conducted research with fellow political scientists Charles T. McClean and Daniel Stockemer. Focused on the United States and the United Kingdom, the research set out to test whether this massive age gap impacts people’s faith in governments and the decisions they make. The findings, published in their 2026 study Youth Representation and Democratic Legitimacy, were eye-opening.

The research showed that legislative bodies with a balanced mix of younger members (under 40) alongside senior politicians commanded significantly more public trust. Perceptions of procedural fairness shot up by 21 percentage points in the US and a staggering 47 percentage points in the UK compared to bodies made up entirely of older politicians. Overall confidence that the government would make good decisions on future issues also jumped by 10 to 22 percentage points.

Unsurprisingly, these gains were strongest among young adults aged 18 to 34. When asked why youth inclusion mattered so much, over 50 percent of respondents explained that younger leaders simply understand the lived realities of modern life such as navigating tough job markets, rising education costs, and the digital economy.

A sizeable share of respondents also pointed out that younger leaders are far more attuned to long-term challenges like climate change, technology, and future planning. Broader political research cited in the trio’s work also shows that as politicians grow older, they use less future-oriented language in their speeches and legislative work. Aging political bodies and leaders often focus on short-term political survival and immediate benefits, kicking long-term issues down the road.

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To illustrate this contrast, Aksel points to municipal governance in Japan, where younger mayors allocate significantly more public funds toward childcare, early childhood education, and family support.

If we talk about India, the country has a median age of just 28, yet its Parliament remains overwhelmingly senior. If Narendra Modi wins office in 2029 at age 78, he will become the second-oldest person to take the oath of Prime Minister in Indian history, after Morarji Desai (who took office at 81).

When young citizens feel shut out of formal political institutions, their faith in democratic processes breaks down. This leaves Gen Z either indifferent or increasingly pushed toward seeking accountability and power through street-level resistance.

That makes bringing young people into decision-making bodies a necessity, not charity. However, as Aksel points out: “For the past 10 or 20 years, parliaments are not really becoming younger. If anything, they are becoming slightly older.”

Why, then, does almost nobody talk about age the way they discuss gender or ethnic representation in political decision-making?

“I believe that the idea is that everyone gets older, so in some sense this fairness will over time become adjusted. But the point is, if we never have presence of the young generations, those views will never be represented,” says Aksel.

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Rarely does a single human frame capture a generation’s defiance in an unforgettable visual. Standing on a rain-soaked road near Dadar’s Shivaji Park, 27-year-old Rhiya Ahir created one of those moments. As a police transport van packed with detained student protesters pushed forward, she stepped directly into its path—arm raised, refusing to budge.

For anyone versed in the lineage of global civil defiance, the visual instantly summoned a phantom from the past: Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Thirty-seven years and more than five thousand kilometers apart, an ordinary citizen stood unarmed against the machinery of state authority. Yet while the visual memory of “Tank Man” stopping a column of 18 military tanks remains shrouded in historical tragedy, Rhiya Ahir’s standoff in Mumbai offers a vibrant, modern testament to citizen intervention in a constitutional democracy.

On the day of the protest, Rhiya was waiting for her friends inside her house. Listening to the slogans coming from the street, she decided she couldn't wait any longer. Stepping outside to join the demonstration, she witnessed police loading young students into a transport van—and moved instinctively to block its path.

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Rhiya comes from a military family, a background she credits for her courage and composure. Her father served in the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), and her extended family has a long history of military service. Drawing from that lineage, she expresses a desire to join the armed forces herself, believing civic service or military training should be mandatory for everyone.

In the immediate aftermath, as images of her stand dominated social media feeds across India, Rhiya was thrust into the spotlight. In an interview with journalist Rajdeep Sardesai on India Today, when asked if she felt like a hero or if this was merely an “Instagram moment,” Rhiya shrugs off the hype, saying: “I ain’t no hero, I am only a part of a nation that wants to be heard.”

During her conversation with Sardesai, Rhiya forcefully dismantles the prevailing stereotype that younger generations are politically passive or superficial. Reframing the narrative around her peers, she offers a powerful new moniker for Gen Z. She declares that the ‘Z’ in Gen Z stands for Ziddi—resolute, defiant, and unwilling to compromise on fundamental values and rights. “We are not interested in politics,” she tells Sardesai, “we are interested in protecting our rights and protecting our country.”

In another interview with journalist Barkha Dutt on Mojo Story, Rhiya Ahir reveals that her stand was far more than a spontaneous gesture—it was a smart and legally aware act.. While onlookers saw a young woman holding her ground, Rhiya was actively using her smartphone to collect proof—photographing the vehicle’s license plate and recording the encounter to remain as legally protected as possible.

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As she held the police vehicle at a standstill for several minutes, traffic backed up, creating a window of opportunity that allowed the detained student protesters at the rear of the van to hop off to freedom.

Pushing back against the common accusation that Gen Z takes nothing seriously, she notes, “whatever we don’t understand, we think it is wrong.” Rhiya explains further, sharing that she purposefully wears orange to send a message: the color “has not been bought by any political party... it is our national flag’s first color, which stands for courage and sacrifice.”

Credit for her conviction, she insists, belongs to her upbringing. Speaking fondly of her mother’s quiet resilience as a homemaker, she shares that her seva-bhav (spirit of service and empathy) comes from her mom, her support comes from her dad, and the courage is her own.

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While the visual comparison between what Rhiya did in Mumbai and Tiananmen Square’s “Tank Man” is natural, the two events played out in vastly different political environments. In 1989 Beijing, an anonymous man faced heavy military armour under an authoritarian regime where dissent was met with brutal suppression. His identity and ultimate fate remain lost to history.

In 2026 Mumbai, Ria Ahir stood before a police vehicle as a citizen in a democracy grappling with its challenges. Armed with a smartphone, an awareness of legal protocols, and media platforms to share her voice, her stand was not an act of hopeless martyrdom, but, as she calls it, a "Ziddi" assertion of her rights and demand for official accountability.

Rhiya’s “Sheroism” lies not just in stopping a police van, but in reminding a modern nation of a timeless truth: democracy is not a passive spectator sport.

Yet, a deeper similarity connects them both: whether 37 years ago or today, when ordinary citizens decide that their conviction is greater than their fear, even the heaviest vehicles of authority can be forced to a halt.

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In 2013, Tehelka magazine's founder and then editor, Tarun Tejpal, was accused of sexual assault by a colleague. A trial court in Goa acquitted him of all charges in 2021. The Goa government appealed the verdict in the High Court, where the matter is currently being heard. India's Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta, is representing the state in these hearings. Satyagrah originally published this detailed analysis of the trial court's judgment in 2021. For readers looking to understand the verdict, the debates surrounding it, and the case in its entirety, this analysis remains just as relevant today.

On page 509 of its judgment, the Goa district court, while acquitting Tehelka founder Tarun Tejpal, noted:

“The IO didn’t supply a copy of unedited CCTV footage of Block 7 to the accused (Tarun Tejpal) due to which the accused had to move to the honourable Supreme Court. The honourable court had directed the prosecution to provide clone copies of the unedited CCTV footage to the accused, which was not done for two years and a clone copy of the CCTV footage was finally handed over to the accused in 2016.”

Two important points emerge from this observation of the court. First, it would not have been easy for Tarun Tejpal to defend himself in court. Second, what actually was in the CCTV footage that required the accused to go all the way to the Supreme Court just to get a copy? Add to this the fact that despite the Supreme Court’s directive, the accused didn’t receive a clone copy of the footage for two full years, and the matter becomes even more intriguing.

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It is no secret that in our country, the victim of a sexual assault case often undergoes extreme hardships. This has less to do with the laws themselves and more to do with the attitude of law enforcement agencies and the overall response of society in such cases. The Tejpal case, however, was different in this regard: the establishment stood firmly with the complainant. The fact that the Goa police acted on its own and registered a suo motu FIR against Tejpal gives an indication of that backing.

Then there was former Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, who also exhibited keen interest in the case and held several press conferences with the media.

Furthermore, in her testimony before the district court, noted in the verdict, the Investigating Officer (IO) in charge of this case, Sunita Sawant, “admitted that deputy SP Sammy Tavares, SP O.R. Kudtarkar, and DIGP O.P. Mishra were directing and supervising the investigation” (Page 395).

Sawant has the reputation of a tough police officer, which is probably why the Goa police handed over the investigation to her despite her being the formal complainant in the case. This occurred even though there was another female officer, Sudiksha Nayak, in the Goa police’s crime branch department who could have been entrusted with the investigation (Pages 506–507).

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The Goa political establishment did not lose interest in the case seven and a half years later. Despite a change of guard, Chief Minister Pramod Sawant announced that the State would appeal the verdict in the High Court barely hours after the lower court acquitted Tejpal. A day after a copy of the judgment was released, the Goa government filed a plea in the High Court, and they were represented by the country’s second-highest law officer, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta.

As a side note that illuminates the unlikely nature of events in this case: in 2014, while Tejpal was in judicial custody, another case was suddenly registered against him, alleging he was forging a plan to escape from jail. Tejpal’s family alleges that this case was filed purely in an attempt to deny him bail. The accusation gains some ground given that seven years down the line, no one seems to have the faintest idea about what happened to that case.

The crucial evidence

A reading of the verdict makes it clear that whatever the CCTV footage contained played a crucial role in Tejpal’s acquittal. The victim had alleged that Tejpal tried to outrage her modesty at Goa’s Grand Hyatt on two consecutive nights, November 7 and 8, 2013, during Tehelka’s annual Think festival.

The victim’s assigned duties were to chaperone Hollywood actor Robert De Niro and his daughter Drena during their time at the event. The victim alleged that on the night of November 7, a day prior to the start of the festival, Tejpal accompanied her to see the De Niros off to their rooms after dinner. De Niro’s room was on the second floor of the two-storied Block 7 of the Grand Hyatt hotel.

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The victim, in her statement, stated that they were on their way back after seeing De Niro off at his suite, but as she tried to exit the lift on the ground floor, Tejpal grabbed her and pulled her back into the lift. “Let us go wake up Bob,” the victim quoted Tejpal as saying. Once inside the lift, Tejpal sexually assaulted her. He kept pressing random buttons on the control panel to keep the lift in motion, preventing it from stopping or opening its doors on any floor.

In her allegations, the victim went on to state that when the lift finally came to a halt on the ground floor after two minutes and the doors opened, she immediately dashed out of the lift blinking back tears, deeply distressed, and left immediately for the Goa International Centre (GIC) where the Tehelka staff were staying. Upon reaching GIC, she confided in three of her colleagues and told them what had occurred at the Grand Hyatt, according to her statement.

It is important to note that while the Grand Hyatt did not have CCTV cameras inside its lifts, there were cameras in the lobbies right outside them on every floor. This footage, therefore, held the answers to several vital questions: Did Tejpal actually grab the victim and pull her into the lift? What was their body language when they stepped out? And did the lift door remain closed continuously for two minutes, as the victim alleged?

This last question was crucial. In his defense, Tejpal maintained that they had accidentally stepped out of the lift on the first floor instead of the second because the floors looked identical. If true, they were not inside the lift continuously for two minutes, but for barely half a minute split across two separate intervals.

In other words, the utmost importance of the footage of Block 7 of the Grand Hyatt stands established beyond question. If Tejpal had committed the crime, the footage would have nailed him; if he was innocent, the footage was equally necessary for him to prove his case.

Yet, the Goa police—the formal complainant in the case—seized the footage only from the ground and second floors, leaving out the first floor. The court observed that despite being of crucial importance, the footage from the first floor was either destroyed or not submitted to the court (Pages 421, 507). The court also noted that since Tejpal in his defense had mentioned exiting the lift on the first floor, the first-floor footage would have been vital to prove his narrative false if it was untrue.

What makes things notable is that the investigating officer, Sunita Sawant, along with multiple other police officials, actually confessed in their testimony to having watched the first-floor footage in November 2013 (Page 419). Curiously, every one of the officials who acknowledged viewing the first-floor footage claimed that they could not remember what was on it.

When it became clear that the first-floor footage had existed and had been viewed by the police, the lawyer for the prosecution argued that it was possible the footage had been destroyed in the property room of the court due to improper storage. The court, rejecting this argument of the prosecution, noted in its judgment that if that were the case, all the footage would have been destroyed, not exclusively the footage of the first floor, and specifically only for a few select days from August 20, 2013, onwards (Pages 433, 435).

The court observed that while the IO directed her officers to seize the DVR for the ground and second floors, she did not ask them to seize the first-floor footage. The court further observed that the police failed to seal the DVR room of Block 7 at the Grand Hyatt, failed to seize the footage in time, and failed to generate the crucial hash value for the footage, which ensures that digital evidence cannot be tampered with (Pages 423, 507, 509). Moreover, information regarding the confiscation of the DVR was omitted from both the charge sheet and the case diary. The investigating officer told the court she had no idea how that omission happened.

On the other hand, Tarun Tejpal issued a press release on November 22, 2013, demanding that the related CCTV footage be made public. This was never done, and only selective footage was made available to him and the court.

Moreover, the court observed in its judgment that the prosecution objected to the request of the defendant to cross-examine the Investigating Officer while playing the DVR containing the footage by stating that “the DVR is not functional.” When a further request was made by the accused to either get the DVR repaired or obtain a compatible DVR from the Grand Hyatt, the public prosecution opposed this suggestion as well (Page 433).

Claims and the visual evidence

Let us examine the footage that was actually produced before the court.

The first revelation: the footage from November 7 shows that Tejpal did not pull the victim back into the lift on the ground floor after seeing off Robert De Niro, as had been alleged.

A brief but relevant digression: the victim told the court that Tejpal had insisted on accompanying her to see De Niro to his suite given it was the first day of the event. This detail was not part of her initial statement. This claim was introduced by the prosecution to show that Tejpal was using De Niro as an excuse, and that his real motive was to accompany the victim. However, Prosecution Witness 43 (PW43), Prawal Srivastava, testified that he was standing with the accused when the victim came up to them and asked Tejpal to accompany her (Pages 249, 251).

Baseline logic also suggests that if Tejpal had intended to assault the victim and was using De Niro as an excuse to accompany her, he would most likely have done so while coming down from the second floor after leaving De Niro in his suite, rather than reaching the ground floor and then pulling her back inside.

As it turns out, Tejpal did not pull the victim back into the lift as they exited. Instead, footage shows that they both exited the building entirely and spent almost six minutes in conversation outside the block before they went back inside Block 7 and re-entered the lift. While the victim omitted this segment entirely from her complaint and several subsequent statements, she finally accepted in court that they had been in conversation outside before re-entering the block. This indicates that the return to the block and the act of getting into the lift again might have been triggered by what they were discussing during those six minutes (Pages 249, 263).

To return to the allegations and the CCTV footage: in multiple statements to the police as well as before the court, the victim repeatedly emphasized that Tejpal was pressing random buttons on the lift’s panel to make the elevator stay in circuit, preventing it from stopping anywhere and keeping the doors from opening.

However, two prosecution witnesses—a representative of the elevator company, Ameen Jabbar, and Grand Hyatt security officer Priyan K.S.—testified in court that keeping the lift moving up and down in that manner without the doors opening is technically impossible (Page 385). The court also made an observation in its judgment that the investigating officer did not bother to check whether the lift could be made to go up and down without its doors opening, neither before registering the FIR nor after the case was lodged (Page 520).

This claim was the foundation of the victim’s allegation of assault—that the lift doors were prevented from opening, that she was trapped by Tejpal inside it, and that she had no way of getting out.

When it was established that this was not possible, the police paid additional visits to the Grand Hyatt Hotel in November 2020, seven years after the incident. Almost immediately following this, the victim in December 2020 amended her statement in court (Pages 512, 518).

She then claimed that Tejpal pressed only one button to keep the lift moving and the doors closed, rather than multiple buttons. She also changed her claim that the lift had been in constant motion, stating instead that she did not know whether the lift was moving or stationary. However, she remained firm on one thing: the doors did not open anywhere for two minutes.

During cross-examination of the technical witnesses, it was established that the doors of the lift could not be kept closed even by pressing the emergency button inside the lift (Page 396). Close observation of the footage of the ground floor and second floor during the two minutes of the alleged incident also shows that the lift doors opened at least twice on the ground floor alone. Because the footage of the first floor was not available, it was not possible to determine how many times the lift doors opened on the first floor, the court noted in its judgment (Page 389).

This leaves only two interpretations: either the victim and the accused were inside the lift when the doors opened during those two minutes, or they were not inside the lift at all.

This is where the court examined Tejpal’s version of what occurred. It was his account that the victim and he had exited the lift on the first floor instead of the second by mistake and walked to the corner room they thought was the De Niro suite, only to realize upon arrival that they were on the wrong floor. Tejpal’s version of events matched the two minutes in question. If they did exit the lift on the first floor, walk to the corner, recognize their error, walk back to the lift, and go up to the second floor, the sequence would take around two minutes (Page 443).

The CCTV footage went on to show more. The victim had said that when the lift finally opened on the ground floor, she dashed out of the lift (changing the floor from the ground to the second floor in her subsequent statements) while Tejpal followed her and kept asking, “What happened?” She also stated that she was visibly upset and blinking back tears at that point.

The CCTV footage, however, shows a different narrative. The footage of the second floor shows Tejpal was the first one to leave the lift, not the victim. She follows Tejpal out and they take the stairs to the ground floor. While first-floor footage of this time is unavailable, the ground floor footage half a minute later shows Tejpal walking slightly ahead while the two of them come down the stairs and walk out, talking, as they exit Block 7’s lobby.

Contemporaneous witness

The contradictions become more pronounced when viewed against the allegations of November 8, the day the victim said Tejpal tried to assault her again. Before that, there was another significant omission from the victim’s narrative of November 7.

The victim, in her statement, maintained that her friends and co-workers at Tehelka—Ishaan Tankha, Shougat Dasgupta, and G. Vishnu—were the first ones she confided in soon after she reached the Goa International Centre. Following this, on November 15, she wrote an email to these friends and attached a document with a detailed chronological account of the alleged incident. Because Tankha was unable to open the attachment, she sent him a fresh email the next day, November 16. This email was also sent to the victim’s stepmother and served as the draft of the letter emailed to Tehelka managing editor Shoma Chaudhury on November 18 as her official complaint. All of these emails were important evidence, but the police selectively seized only a few of them (Pages 282, 286).

It is an email which she wrote to her co-workers on November 15, 2013, that holds evidence of a crucial omission. In her email, the victim mentioned spotting a friend, Nikhil Agrawal (Defense Witness 4, or DW4), standing at the entrance to the lawn near Block 7 when she exited the block with Tejpal on November 7. According to her email, she immediately asked her friend DW4 to stand there and talk to her until Tarun Tejpal left from there. She stated in her email that she did not inform him about what had happened to her moments prior (Page 258).

This means that by her own account, DW4 was the first person she encountered, meeting him barely a minute or two after the alleged incident. Yet, the victim removed all mention of him after that initial email—from her subsequent complaints and every statement she made in court.

In cross-examination, confronted with this draft and the reference to the first person she met, the victim admitted that she had deleted DW4 from her account, stating she did so for personal reasons. She declined, however, to clarify those reasons (Pages 258–260).

In law, the first person a complainant meets after an alleged offense is highly relevant to the case, particularly if met immediately after the incident. Such a person is considered a “contemporaneous witness.” Yet, as the verdict notes, this fact was not disclosed to the court by the prosecution, and the victim removed references pertaining to Nikhil.

The court also noted that the IO, despite seizing documents that referenced this witness by name and knowing he was the only contemporaneous witness in the case, neither tried to contact or question him, nor did she ask the victim why she had deleted references to him in her official complaint.

The omission did not end there. The friend in question reached out to the police via a letter, asserting that there were facts he wanted to add to the case. Despite receiving this letter, the Investigating Officer failed to question him. Confronted with this, she maintained that she did not question the witness on the directions of her superiors in the police department (Page 271). Later, he was called as a witness by the defense.

The court observed that the testimony of this friend of the victim, DW4, stood in contrast to the victim’s claims. DW4 recalled meeting the victim on November 7 while standing in the garden with his fiancée.

“I saw them coming from the poolside towards the garden. Tejpal moved towards the bar while she came towards me,” DW4 told the court. “She was excited and had a smile on her face.”

DW4 testified that the victim motioned for him to come near and told him that she had been flirting with Tejpal. She was smiling and did not look perturbed, DW4 testified (Pages 260, 262). Interestingly, the next day, the victim exchanged multiple messages with DW4. Two of the messages from her to him read: “But thank God I met you,” and “Obviously, you won’t tell anyone about this.”

The court also noted that the victim gave conflicting accounts regarding her relationship with DW4. She claimed he was only an acquaintance and not a close friend; however, the verdict notes that a total of 53,176 messages were exchanged between them on WhatsApp on the phone seized by the police. When DW4 was asked about their friendship, he affirmed their extreme closeness. Despite meeting him within seconds of the incident and sharing a close friendship, the victim did not mention the incident to him. Conversely, she had never communicated with Shougat Dasgupta on WhatsApp, had fewer than 10 messages exchanged with Ishaan Tankha, and under 500 with G. Vishnu, yet she chose to return to her hotel and talk to these three colleagues two hours later in her room (Pages 134, 253).

November 8

Returning to November 8, the second of the two alleged incidents, the victim recalled in her complaint to Tehelka and statement to the police that Tejpal had asked her to accompany him to Robert De Niro’s room. 'We need to get something from there,' she quoted him as saying when she ran into him on the ground floor of Block 7. Concerned about being asked to go to an empty room with him, she insisted on retrieving the item herself. At that point, according to her statement, Tejpal grabbed her hand and dragged her into the lift, where she was again sexually assaulted. (Page 191).

She further alleged that when they reached the second floor, he said to her, “the universe was telling us something,” to which she replied that she was going down by the stairs and not the lift. Tejpal, however, did not let her and, “sensing her hysteria,” pulled her back into the lift. “He was comfortable manhandling me by now,” she wrote in her complaint.

Here is what the CCTV footage for this sequence of events shows:

On the ground floor, at 08:10 pm, Tejpal is walking toward the lift while the victim walks behind him. Near the lift, Tejpal runs into renowned photographer Rohit Chawla. Tejpal and Chawla speak briefly, and Tejpal gestures to Chawla that he would “call him” before walking into the waiting lift, followed by the victim, who waited for him to finish his conversation. Contrary to the claim of being grabbed by the wrist and pulled in, Tejpal does not make physical contact with her here (Page 444).

Twenty seconds later, the footage from the second-floor camera shows the lift opening. The victim comes out followed by Tejpal, but barely two steps out, Tejpal turns around and re-enters the lift. At this point, the victim, who has gone a few steps ahead, realizes he has gone back into the lift and turns to run back into the lift after him.

This is the moment which her narrative describes as him manhandling her and preventing her from leaving the lift. The footage shows no physical contact initiated by him to pull her back (Page 445).

The contradiction between the visual record and the victim’s account on both days led the verdict to note:

“What the victim has claimed and what the screens show are completely opposite of each other and still the Investigating Officer didn’t even question the victim on the same.” (Page 520).

The contradictions, the concealment of facts, the omission of key witnesses, and the shifts in narrative led the court to conclude that the victim could not be considered a witness of “sterling quality” on whose sole deposition a conviction could safely rest (Page 229).

The court also noted the absence of medical evidence in the case. When the victim was asked about this in court, she maintained that the police never asked her to undergo a medical examination, otherwise she would have done so. The documentary record, however, shows that she declined the medical examination on paper (Page 47).

This case presents multiple dimensions for examination. We can focus primarily on two. First, the role of the police in this case. While the lacunae in the investigation have been outlined above, they represent only a portion of the issues highlighted. The verdict lists innumerable counts of institutional failure in this investigation.

The second aspect relates to the discussion surrounding the judge’s assessment of the victim’s behavior, which generated significant public debate. A look at the judgment alongside the complaint and the statements of the victim places this in context. While public commentary suggested the judge criticized the victim for not behaving like a victim, the judge’s observations seems to have directed at the contrast between the complainant’s statements regarding her feelings and actions versus the actual behavior recorded on camera, in photographs, and as described by witnesses.

The victim’s narrative spoke of being terrified, avoiding Mr. Tejpal, and being scared to remain in the hotel for fear of encountering him again (Page 468). However, multiple photographs over the course of the three-day event show her posing for pictures with the accused, Robert De Niro, and others, appearing at ease. Witnesses recalled hearing her call out to Mr. Tejpal to join a photograph she was taking with Robert De Niro on November 10, 2013. One of the prosecution witnesses even noted that she looked happier than both Mr. De Niro and Mr. Tejpal in that photograph. After the alleged incidents, she also sent messages to the accused informing him of her location without being prompted to do so (Page 489).

The court also examined WhatsApp and CCTV evidence showing that the victim returned to Robert De Niro’s room late at night on two occasions and detailed playfully her encounters to her friends on WhatsApp—including Tarun Tejpal’s daughter—in a tone that the court found inconsistent with the narrative of being fearful and deeply traumatized by an assault a few hours prior. In fact, on the night of November 9, she chose not to return to her own hotel but instead obtained a key to a production room from a staff member and stayed back at the Grand Hyatt itself (Page 469).

The victim told the court that as she was about to leave for the airport after the Think festival concluded, she realized her mother was staying in her flat in Mumbai and three of her mother’s associates were also coming to stay. Additionally, she wanted to process the distress caused by the incident, so she decided to extend her stay in Goa for a few days. However, the court observed, citing evidence, that the victim had planned to stay in Goa with her friends before and after the Think festival well in advance, and the incidents of November 7 and 8 did not alter her or her mother’s travel plans. She arrived in Mumbai a day after her mother had already left the city (Pages 491, 500).

It was the combination of these contradictions, the omissions, and the conflicting material evidence that led the court to find the victim’s testimony insufficient to serve as the sole basis for a conviction. Ultimately, Tejpal was acquitted based on the CCTV footage and the technical implausibility of the lift operating in the manner alleged by the prosecution.

Regarding the role of the police, the court commented at length. The court noted its disappointment that the IO did not reconcile the claims made by the complainant with the CCTV footage of the hotel on November 26, at the time of recording her statement, even though the IO had already watched the footage. The IO did not ask the victim how she determined she was in the lift for exactly two minutes on November 7. The police did not inquire about the specific buttons pressed to stop the doors from opening, nor did they secure the emails sent to co-workers on November 15, which constituted her first detailed account of the incident.

Furthermore, none of the emails produced by the police in court were downloaded directly from Tehelka’s server. The police did not record statements from Nikhil Agrawal, Tia Tejpal, or Kartikeya from the production team who assisted the victim in staying at the Grand Hyatt on the night of November 8–9. The police did not question the complainant about Nikhil and did not produce the technical manual of the Mitsubishi lift in court.

Apology emails

Finally, regarding the two emails Tarun Tejpal wrote to the Tehelka staff and the victim on November 20, 2013:

The first of these was an “official” apology written to the Tehelka staff, which evidence shows was drafted by managing editor Shoma Chaudhury after the victim demanded an apology for the “closure” of the complaint. The judge notes that multiple Supreme Court judgments make clear that “confessions” demanded under threat or under the inducement of closure of a complaint, or demands for confessions that require an accused to “self-incriminate” are inadmissible in a court of law.

The judge also noted that the second email, titled “Personal” by Tejpal, did not contain an admission of the specific acts alleged by the victim. The judge referenced Supreme Court precedents stating that a statement cannot be read selectively to omit parts that contradict or deny the central allegation.

“If the mail titled ‘personal’ is looked at in the light of the Supreme court decision, there is absolutely no admission of confession of any incriminating fact even remotely suggesting sexual assault by the accused,” the court maintained (Page 300).

And at the end, a small, seemingly insignificant detail but one that was responsible for a lot of public rage against Tejpal: the claims that Tejpal was a father figure to the victim, someone she knew and trusted since childhood, which is why her anguish and devastation was bigger, and why Tejpal’s crime was even more heinous.

But an email by the victim on Tarun Tejpal’s 50th birthday (in March 2013, the same year when the alleged incident took place) shows that this was not true. In this mail, she wrote that when she met Tarun Tejpal for the first time, she was already working for Tehelka (page 110).

(With inputs from Vikas Bahuguna)

Disclosure: Sanjay Dubey, the author of this analysis, served as Editor of Tehelka Hindi and attended the 2013 Think Fest in Goa. After the allegations surfaced, he actively encouraged independent writers to cover the controversy critically and wrote editorials that questioned his own organization’s handling of the crisis.

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When a film shines a light on the darkest chapters of a nation’s history, governments usually react in one of two ways: they either suppress it out of fear it might disturb public calm or their political interests, or they keep their calm and trust their citizens to confront reality.

The swift digital takedown of Satluj—released on ZEE5 and removed within 48 hours—shows a clear preference for containment. Yet global experience shows mature democracies consistently choose open dialogue over censorship. By treating audiences as adults, they have found that facing uncomfortable truths builds greater public trust than sudden bans ever could.

Satluj, directed by Honey Trehan, portrays the life of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who documented alleged police excesses and disappearances in 1990s Punjab before his own abduction and murder in 1995—events backed by court records and investigations. The film faced over three years of CBFC hurdles, including demands for more than 100 cuts. Here is how five other nations responded to similarly critical films:

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1. South Korea: A Taxi Driver (2017)

This film depicts the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, when the military dictatorship imposed a strict media blackout and killed hundreds of civilians and student protesters.

Instead of blocking A Taxi Driver out of fear that it would damage the military’s reputation, the government embraced the film. President Moon Jae-in publicly attended a high-profile screening alongside its creators.

The film became a massive box-office hit, represented South Korea at the Oscars, and helped spark a fresh, independent official investigation into the historic massacre and its subsequent cover-up.

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2. United Kingdom: Bloody Sunday (2002)

The film reconstructs the 1972 killing of 14 unarmed civil rights marchers by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland—a deeply sensitive and volatile issue tied to decades of conflict in the region.

Despite Bloody Sunday’s sharp and unflinching criticism of the army’s actions, the government did not interfere with its release. It was broadcast on mainstream national television (ITV) and shown in theaters nationwide.

The film won major international awards, including the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Crucially, its release came while a major public inquiry into the killings was underway—an inquiry that ultimately held the British Army responsible—without the film causing any significant public unrest.

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3. United States: The Report (2019)

This political drama exposes the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) systematic use of brutal and illegal torture techniques after 9/11, alongside government efforts to bury the findings.

The Report depicts serious misconduct at the highest levels of the nation’s intelligence apparatus while retaining the real names of several high-profile officials. Despite its sensitive national security themes, the government made no attempt to censor, edit, or delay the film’s release.

Amazon Studios released the film in theaters and later streamed it globally without political interference, contributing to a wider public debate over the ethics of American counterterrorism tactics.

4. Argentina: Argentina, 1985 (2022)

The film recreates the historic trial of the top leaders of the military dictatorship responsible for the “Dirty War”—a dark period involving state-sponsored torture, illegal detentions, and an estimated 30,000 forced disappearances of dissidents.

The legacy of the dictatorship remains a highly sensitive and polarized political issue in modern Argentina. Despite the potential for political friction, the government did not restrict Argentina, 1985. Instead, it allowed the film to be produced and distributed internationally without interference.

The film became a major cultural phenomenon, drawing over a million viewers to theaters in its first month alone. By refusing to hide past horrors out of fear of controversy, it tried to educate a younger generation born into peace about core democratic values.

5. Israel: Waltz with Bashir (2008)

This animated documentary confronts an Israeli soldier’s repressed memories of the 1982 Lebanon invasion and the harrowing Sabra and Shatila massacres.

Waltz with Bashir exposed severe moral failures and negligence within the nation’s military leadership during an ongoing foreign conflict. Yet, the government did not restrict it—and the project was actually partially financed by the Israeli Film Fund, a state-backed body under the Ministry of Culture.

It swept the Israeli Academy Awards, earned an Oscar nomination, and opened up a crucial, healthy space for veterans and the public to discuss collective trauma and responsibility.

Democracies do have valid reasons to restrict films, which includes stopping deliberate distortion of facts. In Satluj’s case, the government cited concerns over law and order and potential misuse by anti-India forces. But global human rights standards hold that such restrictions on free expression must involve a direct, imminent, and provable threat—not just generalised anxiety about public discomfort or political sensitivity.

The core of Satluj—Jaswant Singh Khalra’s documented pursuit of justice—is deeply rooted in Indian judicial records. If the film distorts facts, it can surely be challenged on that count. Suppressing it entirely in the name of security (which in any case doesn’t work fully in this digital age) risks distancing India from the very democratic standards it upholds. True confidence in a democracy lies in allowing citizens to confront history openly, not shielding them from it.

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You could easily call Rahul Dev Burman the Gulzar of the musical world. Not just because decades before Vishal Bhardwaj, Pancham and Gulzar epitomized the ultimate duet of a meaningful lyricist and an experimental composer, but because within Pancham the musician, there always lived a Gulzar.

Just as Gulzar altered the grammar of film lyrics, discovered new imagery, and shifted the audience’s sensibilities with his pen, RD Burman did the exact same for Hindi film music. He didn’t just step out of the shadow of his father, SD Burman; he also steered clear of the established tracks laid down by composers like Salil Chowdhury, Naushad, Kalyanji-Anandji, and Shankar-Jaikishan. He chose an entirely new, uninhibited path of experimentation.

Credit for the success of Pancham Da’s music is also given to the superstar of that era, Rajesh Khanna, who popularized the songs by lip-syncing them in his signature style. Yet, he could perhaps only do so because RD’s music afforded him that creative freedom. Shunning the addiction of purely commercial success throughout his long career, Pancham did not just alter the temperament of Hindi film music; he subtly transformed the cinema and its audience as well. Through continuous, fresh experiments, he constantly hooked the audience to entirely new flavors of music.

While the music directors who followed him often overindulged in Western influences, Pancham remained that rare, distinct composer who never let the Western elements disrupt the balance of the melody beloved by Indians. One can easily divide Hindi film music into two eras: before RD and after RD. Listening to just a few songs from either period makes the transformation—from song structure to melodies—instantly recognizable.

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Pancham’s initial training in music took place under the watchful eye of his father, rooted in the classical Hindustani music that defined SD Burman’s temperament. Yet, his inclination always leaned toward Western music. He deeply listened to foreign musicians of his time who mastered various genres of Western music. From rock bands to jazz, Latin, Spanish, and the music of any land that could reach India—Pancham studied it all with profound depth.

Several anecdotes circulate about how Rahul Dev Burman earned the moniker ‘Pancham’. Some believe that as an infant, he cried in several different notes, prompting his family to call him Pancham! Others say that when Ashok Kumar heard him repeatedly saying ‘Pa’ as a child, he named him Pancham. However, Manna Dey recalled asking SD Burman about it, who replied, “When he cried at birth, he cried in the fifth note (Pancham), which is ‘Pa’. So, I named him Pancham.”

Pancham began his film career as an assistant to his father. He practiced the tabla and vocal modulations under Pandit Brajen Biswas and learned the sarod from Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. He was also an exceptional mouth organ player; the iconic mouth organ piece in ‘Hai Apna Dil To Awara’ (picturized on Dev Anand and sung by Hemant Kumar) was played by him. At that point, he hadn’t yet become an assistant to the father who would not only provide the bedrock for his music, but in whose studio the very foundation of his personal life would also be laid. Pancham’s first meeting with his second wife, Asha Bhosle, happened during one of his father’s music sittings in 1953, when Asha came to the studio to record a song for the film ‘Armaan’. It was there that SD first introduced Asha to a remarkably thin and school-going Pancham.

Pancham never passed his matriculation exams; he left his studies behind to immerse himself entirely in the music. His second meeting with Asha took place in 1957 during the making of ‘Nau Do Gyarah’, which featured SD’s music. Asha had come to the studio to rehearse, and there she saw Pancham for the second time, sitting on the floor, playing an instrument. A few years later, in 1966, Pancham married Rita Patel, but the marriage lasted only until 1971. The reason was his overwhelming preoccupation with films. The girl who had married him out of admiration for his music ultimately left him because of his total obsession with that very music.

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After years of growing closer, Pancham and Asha Bhosle chose each other as life partners in 1980. Though their personal duet could not sustain each other until the very end, their musical partnership became immortal. They complemented each other so beautifully that Asha went on to sing more than 800 film songs for Pancham.

The serendipitous twist of fate that transformed him from his father’s musical assistant into an independent music director walked right up to Pancham within the very walls of SD’s studio itself. Mehmood had visited the studio to rope in SD for his film ‘Chhote Nawab’. However, after seeing Pancham play the tabla (and since SD had declined the film), Mehmood signed Pancham on the spot. With the song ‘Matwali Ankhon Wale’ from his 1961 debut film, he began unleashing his Western-infused musical flair. Yet, the same film contained ‘Ghar Aaja Ghir Aaye Badra’ in Lata Mangeshkar’s voice—a pure Hindustani classical track that showcased an uncompromising grip on melody. Listening to this, one can understand just how profound a grasp of music this composer possessed even during his very first film—long before he would go on to create wonders in the years to come.

There has always been a debate over whether SD composed songs for Pancham or if Pancham completed SD’s tracks when he was unwell. Some in the industry believe there are several songs where Pancham composed the mukhda (opening lines) and SD finished the rest, and vice versa. Many anecdotes clearly state that several of SD’s massive hits were originally composed by RD, even though he only took credit as an assistant. Songs like ‘Gaata Rahe Mera Dil’ from Guide and ‘Kora Kagaz’ from Aradhana credit SD Burman as the composer, but their melodies were crafted by Pancham.

Pancham often found it challenging to set Gulzar’s lyrics to a tune. Gulzar’s style of writing did not conform to traditional poetic meters, and stories from Pancham’s associates reveal that he always had to put in extra effort to compose for Gulzar. The famous anecdote surrounding the song ‘Mera Kuch Saamaan’ is now legendary: when Gulzar brought him the lyrics, an exasperated Pancham snapped, saying that tomorrow he might bring a copy of The Times of India and ask him to tune that as well! Later, in tandem with Asha Bhosle, Pancham composed that immortal song in just ten to fifteen minutes.

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Whether it is Ijaazat, Aandhi, Parichay, Kitaab, Kinara, Masoom, or Dil Padosi Hai—the songs born from the collaboration of Gulzar and Pancham will remain timeless. They also stand as a testament to a friendship forged between a lyricist and a composer that lasted until the end. This is evident not just in the nazms (poems) Gulzar wrote about Pancham, but also in the way Gulzar’s eyes well up with tears every single time Pancham’s name comes up.

For many, Pancham Da was the Nalanda of music; for others, an IIT or an IIM. He was an academy in himself, a school from which not only his immediate successors and the generation that followed (Bappi Lahiri, Anu Malik) learned, but even highly successful modern composers like Vishal-Shekhar, Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy, Shantanu Moitra, and Vishal Bhardwaj continue to draw deep inspiration from his melodies. Even in Amit Trivedi’s music, Pancham’s footprint is unmistakably visible. Sujoy Ghosh’s vibrant debut film, Jhankaar Beats, was an outright tribute to this very ‘Boss’ of music. Coming across Pancham in that film still warms the heart—”Do you know who the Boss was?”

Pancham also experimented extensively with his own voice and unconventional instruments, generating a distinct soundscape never heard before in Hindi cinema. Think of the song ‘Duniya Mein Logon Ko’ from the Rajesh Khanna-starrer Apna Desh. The first things that come to mind are the astonishing breath control in the “Haha..ha..hahaha” and the raspy, high-pitched “Tara tara tara tara tara”. Just as a later generation was left spellbound by AR Rahman’s early tracks, listeners of Pancham’s era were filled with disbelief. They wondered how a composer could craft a song where the brilliance emerged not from traditional vocals or standard instruments, but from a bizarre play of breath and vocal textures.

Such unique experiments were a regular feature of RD Burman’s music. He ran a gurgling female voice through a sound processor to churn out the chilling entry theme for Amitabh Bachchan’s alter-ego in Satte Pe Satta. Sometimes he scraped two pieces of sandpaper together, and at other times, he ran a small comb over a surface to generate rhythm. Sneha Khanwalkar fascinated us much later by discovering raw sounds in her show Sound Tripping, but Pancham was doing this decades ahead of his time. He would sit through the night recording falling rain or the chirping of crickets. He blew into empty glass bottles to craft the background track for ‘Mehbooba Mehbooba’ in Sholay, and once even tapped on an assistant’s bare back to extract an entirely unique resonance from a dholak.

Yet, a composer so consumed by his passion could not escape the vortex of failure. Post-1985, a phase began in his life that no artist should have to endure, but one that inevitably visits everyone in an industry known for saluting only the rising sun. When your work stops hitting the mark, and the setting sun is left to walk alone. RD spent a long time in isolation as friends and industry well-wishers drifted away.

This composer, considered a certified hitmaker until 1985, saw the music of his next 27 films fail commercially, and this string of failures broke him deeply. Although the soundtracks of films from this period like Ijaazat, Parinda, Gardish, and Libaas were hailed in subsequent years as anywhere from exceptional to masterpieces, the man everyone calls a genius today was deeply marginalized and humiliated in his final days. Subhash Ghai signed him for Ram Lakhan (1989), only to abruptly replace him with Laxmikant-Pyarelal one day without even bothering to inform Pancham directly. Pancham, who had suffered a heart attack in 1988, reportedly remarked after the Ram Lakhan incident: “Just because I went away for a bypass surgery, he bypassed me entirely.”

This deeply humiliating blow wounded Pancham profoundly. He could neither come to terms with it nor recover from the betrayal of a close assistant. Many film personalities remember him in his final days as a melancholic and desperately lonely man, with some attributing his fatal heart attack to this deep sense of isolation and depression.

But rare are those who answer all their failures and humiliations solely through their work. RD Burman delivered exactly that kind of resounding reply to the world with his final film album. As the story goes, director Vidhu Vinod Chopra was adamant about hiring RD Burman for his 1994 film 1942: A Love Story, but the music label that bought the rights resisted having a “faded star” score the film. Vidhu refused to back down—as he seldom does. 1942: A Love Story did not just gift listeners immortal, romance-drenched anthems penned by Javed Akhtar; it also earned RD Burman his third Filmfare Award for Best Music Director—a career spanning from the 1960s to the 1980s where he had won it only twice before. It came posthumously.

A song written by Javed Akhtar for someone else felt as though it was destined for him—

“Jaate jaate wo mujhe achhi nishani de gaya,
Umr bhar dohraunga aisi kahani de gaya.”
(In leaving, he left me a beautiful token;
he gave me a story I will repeat for a lifetime.)

(To understand Pancham Da better and faster, do watch Brahmanand Singh’s two documentaries: ‘Knowing Pancham’ and ‘Pancham Unmixed’. Our own horizon of information expanded through them, as did this article.)

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Yet another chapter has been added to the political turmoil gripping Britain over the past few years. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who led the Labour Party to a historic victory just two years ago, has resigned from office. He is the sixth British prime minister in the past ten years to leave before completing a full term. The country is expected to have a new prime minister in the coming weeks or months. However, given the current political situation, Britain could even end up getting yet another prime minister before the next general election in 2029.

When Keir Starmer led the Labour Party to a massive victory in the 2024 general election, he was hailed as the party’s savior. Before this, Labour had last won a national election in 2005, and in 2019, it had suffered its worst defeat since 1935. But Starmer’s victory was not what it seemed on the surface. Political analysts described it as a “loveless landslide”—a victory devoid of genuine public affection or trust.

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In that 2024 election, Labour won 411 out of 650 seats in the House of Commons—a commanding 63 percent. Yet, the party secured just 33 percent of the popular vote. In terms of absolute numbers, this vote count was actually lower than what Labour received during its historic defeat in 2019. Because of this, analysts argued that Starmer’s landslide was less a mandate for Labour and more a fierce public backlash against the incumbent Conservative (Tory) government. Voters wanted change at any cost; consequently, traditional Tory supporters either switched to parties like Reform UK or stayed home entirely. As a result, the Tories collapsed to just 23 percent of the vote and 121 seats, handing Keir Starmer an incredibly massive victory.

Looking back at Starmer’s two years in office, he tried to govern as a serious leader and deliver on several fronts. Under his watch, Britain introduced its largest defense budget increase since the Cold War. He sought to curb illegal immigration by sea, taking tough steps like shutting down asylum hotels. His government also rolled out policies to protect children from the dangers of social media. Internationally, he maintained a resolute stance on the Ukraine crisis and European security. Yet, despite all of this, he failed to project the image of a strong and visionary leader to the British public.

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Keir Starmer’s defining weakness was his tendency to often backtrack on his own policies. Shortly after taking office, he made the deeply unpopular decision to cut winter fuel payments for the elderly. Following widespread backlash, he was forced to reverse the move. A series of such U-turns severely damaged his credibility, reinforcing a perception among both the public and his own party that he lacked the political courage to stand by his decisions.

Alongside policy hesitation, serious questions arose regarding his political judgment. The most glaring example was the case of Peter Mandelson. Starmer decided to appoint Mandelson as the UK’s ambassador to the United States, despite his well-documented ties to the disgraced American financier Jeffrey Epstein. To make matters worse, when it was revealed that Mandelson had actually failed the security clearance for the post, Starmer claimed he was completely unaware. This episode cast a long shadow over Starmer’s administrative competence and political acumen.

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What little credibility remained was shattered by his relationship with US President Donald Trump. Initially, Starmer invested heavily in cultivating a rapport with Trump, succeeding to the point where some labeled him the “Trump Whisperer”—someone who knew the art of managing the American president. However, this alignment lasted only as long as Starmer agreed with Trump unconditionally. The moment differences emerged over Iran, Donald Trump began publicly mocking the British government and its military capabilities. He went so far as to deride the Royal Navy’s large warships as “toys” and remarked that Starmer was certainly no Winston Churchill.

This public humiliation was bound to alienate the British public, and the fallout inevitably manifested on the ground—especially for a prime minister whose mandate was born out of a “loveless” or “voteless” victory fueled mostly by anti-Conservative anger.

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The breaking point came with the local elections in May 2026, where the Labour Party suffered a crushing defeat. The primary catalyst for this downfall was the hard-right leader Nigel Farage and his party, Reform UK. Farage successfully dented Labour’s traditional vote bank, triggering panic among Labour MPs. They realized that under Starmer’s lackluster leadership, winning the 2029 general election would be an impossible task for the party and themselves. This panic fueled an internal rebellion, coinciding with the rapid rise of Andy Burnham—the man now widely poised to become Britain’s next prime minister. The cumulative effect of these factors was that Labour MPs gave Starmer an ultimatum to lay out a timeline for his departure.

Just a day before Starmer could officially announce his resignation, Donald Trump pre-empted him by revealing the news on Truth Social. It echoed the public humiliation Trump used to inflict on Canada’s former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau before and around his exit. By doing so, Trump robbed Starmer of the opportunity to exit office with any semblance of dignity.

Keir Starmer is generally not perceived as a bad person or a thoroughly incompetent leader. However, he held the reins of power at a time when the country was grappling with a cascade of domestic and international crises triggered by Brexit, Covid-19, and the whims of Donald Trump. The extraordinary times demanded an extraordinary leader—a quality Starmer simply did not possess. He operated like a decent manager when the country was desperately searching for charismatic, visionary leadership. Ultimately, the combination of a fragile electoral mandate, chronic indecisiveness, and a perfect storm of adverse circumstances brought an abrupt end to his political journey.

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The recent resignation of Tulsi Gabbard from her post as the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) marks a telling pattern. She is the fourth cabinet-level official to leave the Trump administration within a span of just three months. High turnover is hardly a novelty under Donald Trump; during his first presidential term, nearly 90 percent of his top-tier officials were replaced or ousted.

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However, the striking anomaly this time lies in the demographics of departure. All four cabinet officials who have left the administration so far are women—a figure that represents exactly half of the total female representation in the Trump cabinet. While it is true that most of these women were surrounded by controversies and allegations, the same can easily be said about several male cabinet officials who continue to remain securely anchored in their positions.

This raises a fundamental question: Can we view these high-profile exits merely as routine administrative shifts or personal decisions? Or is there a deeper, systemic gender bias at play? If so, it invites us to examine a larger global reality: when it comes to institutional gender parity, are governing structures from New Delhi to Washington equally flawed?

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India

In 2023, India passed the historic Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (Women’s Reservation Act), aimed at securing a 33 percent quota for women in national parliament and state assemblies. The legislative triumph was widely celebrated, yet its actual implementation remains deferred to an uncertain future. The law was bound to two stringent preconditions: the reservation will only take effect after the next official census (scheduled post-2026) followed by a subsequent delimitation exercise to redraw constituency boundaries. Effectively, a structural right that could have been granted immediately was pushed into an indefinite timeline.

In stark contrast, Indian women secured grassroots reservation in local municipal and village bodies decades ago. India also historically made headlines by electing a woman Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, less than twenty years after gaining independence. Yet, looking at the current federal structure, out of 30 cabinet ministers, only two are women—and one of them holds the traditionally gender-siloed Ministry of Women and Child Development. Furthermore, among the five Ministers of State with Independent Charge, there is not a single woman. Of the remaining 36 Ministers of State, only five are women, none of whom hold portfolios that could be classified as traditionally powerful or strategic.

Excluding Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, no female leader in the central cabinet wields the kind of institutional authority enjoyed by her male counterparts. Even in her case, political analysts frequently argue that the most critical financial decisions are steered directly by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) rather than the ministry itself.

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While Sitharaman also holds the distinction of having served as the nation’s Defence Minister, no other woman has ever headed the ministry responsible for the country’s borders. Similarly, internal security—the Ministry of Home Affairs—has never been entrusted to a woman, except when Indira Gandhi held it as an additional portfolio. When the late Sushma Swaraj was appointed as the first full-time female External Affairs Minister, it was an open secret that her administrative footprint resembled that of a junior minister. Major diplomatic breakthroughs were largely handled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his extensive foreign travels, with the PMO managing the rest.

The United States

Across the ocean, the United States routinely lectures the world on democracy and institutional equality. At the dawn of the second Trump administration, it briefly appeared that women were being handed the reins of some of the most formidable sectors of governance. However, by May 2026, that illusion completely shattered.

Tulsi Gabbard’s resignation as DNI is merely the latest link in a fast-developing chain. Before her, Attorney General Pam Bondi was removed from her post, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was dismissed, and Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer was shown the exit. In every single instance, the vacancies left by these women were promptly filled by men. Conversely, not a single male cabinet-level minister has been removed from his position, despite navigating massive public controversies. The male officials who were displaced were either peripheral advisors or lower-level staff.

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Consider the case of Mike Waltz, Trump’s former national security adviser. After becoming embroiled in a major controversy, he was removed from his position but given another prestigious assignment as US ambassador to the United Nations. FBI Director Kash Patel offers another example. Despite facing repeated controversies and criticism, he remains firmly in his position. The contrast with the treatment of several female Cabinet officials is striking. While they lost their positions and were replaced by men, senior male officials facing serious criticism have either retained their jobs or, in Waltz’s case, been accommodated elsewhere in the administration.

Following Gabbard’s exit, her position is set to be filled by Aaron Lucas. This leaves women occupying just four out of the 26 cabinet-level positions in the US administration—a mere 15 percent. A closer look at these remaining portfolios reveals an even darker reality. Except for White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, whose role remains central to any administration, the remaining female cabinet members manage severely diminished domains. Linda McMahon heads an Education Department that the administration actively intends to dismantle, while Brooke Rollins leads an Agriculture Department facing deep proposed budget cuts. Kelly Loeffler runs the Small Business Administration, a relatively minor agency.

When it comes to women’s representation, America’s two major parties have traditionally taken different approaches. Democrats have championed gender equality, with women holding a record 48 percent of Cabinet and Cabinet-level positions under Joe Biden, while Kamala Harris became the country’s first female vice president. Republicans, by contrast, have generally been more closely associated with traditional social values and male-dominated political leadership.

Yet, despite elevating women to some of the country’s most powerful positions, Democrats have been unable to break the highest glass ceiling in American politics. Both women they nominated for president—Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024—lost their elections. The United States, unlike many other democracies, has yet to elect a woman president.

It is a striking historical irony that South Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had women leading their governments decades ago—Indira Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Sheikh Hasina and Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Yet the United States, which prides itself on being a model of modern democracy, has never elected a woman to its highest office.

India, however, has its own contradiction. It has elected two women presidents—Pratibha Patil in 2007 and Droupadi Murmu in 2022—both of whom rose through grassroots politics. But in India’s parliamentary system, the prime minister holds the reins of government, and Indira Gandhi, who came from the country’s most powerful political dynasty, remains the only woman to have held that office.

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For decades, the friction between India and Pakistan was largely contained within South Asia. Occasionally, it spilled into international forums, and at times its echoes reached the Middle East—though usually confined to cricket fields. That is now changing. In recent months, the Middle East has emerged as a primary arena for this rivalry. At the center of this shift is an informal alignment of four Islamic nations, with Pakistan playing a leading role.

This development stands in contrast to the formal Quad that India had invested significant strategic capital in. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—consisting of the United States, Japan, Australia, and India—was born from shared relief efforts after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and eventually formalised to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific. For New Delhi, it was a golden ticket to a high table where it could balance the rising influence of China. However, Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his administration’s isolationist “America First” stance, along with cooler India–US relations, have left it a largely dormant forum.

Even as the original Quad faded into the background, a new and more assertive formation began to take shape in West Asia. This informal Quad—bringing together Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia (PETSA)—has evolved from a collection of shared interests into a more coordinated alignment, sometimes described as a “West Asian Quad,” or “Islamic NATO.” Unlike the formal Quad, which has often moved cautiously, PETSA seems to be moving faster on key security and strategic issues. For New Delhi, the irony is hard to miss: this emerging alignment, which places Pakistan at its centre, appears to draw tacit support from the United States, the leader of the original Quad, and China, the very power the Quad was designed to counter.

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To understand this shift better, it helps to recall the optimism of the early 2020s. At the time, India was central to a new diplomatic architecture. The Quad was at its peak, holding high-profile summits and moving with a sense of purpose aimed at balancing China’s growing influence. It was in this atmosphere that the I2U2 (India, Israel, the UAE, and the US) also took shape. Often described as a “West Asian Quad,” it complemented the original Quad’s broader strategic outlook. Together, these frameworks reflected India’s attempt to project influence across both the Indo-Pacific and West Asia. But as the political climate in Washington shifted, the momentum behind this approach began to decline.

The emergence of the PETSA grouping can be traced to a series of events that reshaped regional calculations, most notably Operation Sindoor in May 2025. Launched by India in response to a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, the operation marked a shift from strategic restraint to a more assertive doctrine of deterrence. Pakistan, however, used the moment to reposition itself globally, strengthening its ties with the United States while also engaging more closely with major powers in the Muslim world—Turkey with its advanced military industry, Saudi Arabia with its vast capital, and Egypt with its control over the Suez Canal. By projecting itself as a major military power, Pakistan sought to convince these countries that their interests would be better served by working together during a period of regional instability.

A recent development added to Pakistan’s westward shift. The World Bank has moved Pakistan from its South Asia grouping to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for the 2026 fiscal year. While this may seem like a bureaucratic adjustment, it changes how Pakistan’s economy is viewed globally. Instead of being compared with India or Bangladesh, it is now benchmarked against Gulf and North African economies. This suggests that Pakistan is beginning to operate in a different economic space—one increasingly shaped by Gulf investment and West Asian partnerships.

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The PETSA alignment is not a simple monolith; it brings together actors that, until recently, had strained relations. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are only gradually moving past years of diplomatic tension. In this context, Pakistan has emerged as a key connecting link, maintaining robust ties with every other actor in the group. More importantly, as tensions around Iran continue to shape the region, Pakistan remains the only member of the grouping with a functional backchannel to Tehran. This unique position makes Islamabad indispensable for the group’s current primary mission: de-escalating the potentially catastrophic Iran-Israel conflict.

Pakistan’s leadership within PETSA is further cemented by its nuclear capability and its deep defense partnership with Riyadh. The Saudi-Pakistan Mutual Defense Agreement (SDMA), signed in late 2025, is a historic “collective security” pact. It contains a NATO-like provision that treats an act of aggression against one as an act against both, effectively making Pakistan the primary security guarantor for the heart of the Middle East—a role once held exclusively by the United States. This alliance provides Saudi Arabia with the “boots on the ground” and a nuclear umbrella it has long desired, while providing Pakistan with the financial lifeblood it needs to sustain its economy.

No country can remain a passive observer to such shifts. With the formal Quad losing momentum, New Delhi has also been trying to expand its western partnerships. The most significant is the Strategic Defence Partnership framework with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Initiated with a formal signing in early 2026, this partnership has deepened a relationship once centred on oil and Indian labour into one with growing security and strategic dimensions. This has coincided with the UAE’s withdrawal from OPEC in early 2026—a move that signals Abu Dhabi’s willingness to pursue a more independent geopolitical path, rather than align fully with Saudi Arabia. For India, a more autonomous UAE provides an opening to secure long-term energy ties and strengthen its maritime connectivity in the region.

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At the heart of India’s competing vision is the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), an infrastructure project linking Indian ports to Europe through the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Israel. It is intended to strengthen trade, connectivity, and supply chains, while offering an alternative to parts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This may encourage regional players to balance their security alignments with Pakistan against their economic partnerships with India.

The inclusion of India in the ‘3+1’ summit with Israel, Greece, and Cyprus is also seen as useful in giving India access as far as the Mediterranean. This adds a secondary strategic axis, particularly with countries that have existing tensions with Turkey. Together, these partnerships reflect a wider network of economic and strategic ties—from the Arabian Sea to the eastern Mediterranean—linked to India’s long-term interests.

For decades, India projected itself as a restrained power and a champion of non-alignment. That position is now being recalibrated, most visibly through its deeper engagement with West Asia, including its strategic relationship with Israel and participation in emerging regional frameworks. Some critics argue this risks diluting India’s standing as a voice of the Global South. But New Delhi appears to be betting on ‘calibrated multi-alignment’ and ‘strategic autonomy’—seeking to balance hard strategic interests with its longstanding global image.

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The Modi government has convened a special three-day session of Parliament from April 16–18, 2026. The stated objective is to amend the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (The 106th Constitutional Amendment Act) to fast-track the 33% reservation for women in the Lok Sabha by 2029.

However, a closer look at the timing and the legal fine print suggests that this move has less to do with gender justice and more to do with a strategic “delimitation” designed to secure a lopsided political advantage for the BJP.

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The first red flag is the schedule. The session is being held while West Bengal is in the middle of crucial assembly elections, with polling phases on April 23 and 29. By calling this session now, the government is forcing opposition MPs—particularly from the TMC—to choose between representing their constituents in Parliament or campaigning in their home state.

This isn’t just a logistical hurdle; it is a calculated attempt to disrupt the opposition’s momentum. If the government truly cared about the sanctity of the process, this exercise could easily have waited until after April 29.

When the Women’s Reservation Bill was passed in 2023, the law (under the newly inserted Article 334A) explicitly stated that reservation would only come into effect after two things happened:

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1. A new Census was conducted (post-2026).

2. A Delimitation (redrawing of constituency boundaries) was carried out based on that Census.

Now, the government is pivoting. They are reportedly seeking to bypass the wait for a new Census and use the 2011 Census data instead. Why the rush? The Registrar General has already indicated that a fresh Census could be completed by December 2027. By using 15-year-old data to redraw the map of India today, the government is signaling a desire to manipulate constituency boundaries to suit their 2029 electoral map.

Article 334A also says that delimitation can be carried out only for the purpose of implementing women’s reservation—that is, only to decide which seats will be reserved for women. However, the proposed amendment seeks to implement it through a “general delimitation” based on the old Census while also increasing the number of seats.

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This means that the government is using women’s empowerment as a shield for political engineering. We have already seen in Jammu and Kashmir and in Assam how delimitation was used for political purposes. No opposition can accept this.

The most dangerous aspect of this plan is that it would damage India’s federal structure. Delimitation carried out solely on the basis of population would completely upset the political balance between North and South India.

Consider the math: Uttar Pradesh currently has 80 Lok Sabha seats and Tamil Nadu has 39—a difference of 41. If delimitation is carried out as per the 2011 Census and the total number of seats is increased to the proposed maximum of 850, UP’s tally would jump to 140, while Tamil Nadu’s would only reach 51. The gap would widen from 41 to 89 seats.

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This essentially punishes Southern states for their success in population control and economic development. In a country as diverse as India, representation cannot be a numbers game that erases the voice of entire regions.

If the Prime Minister is genuinely concerned about the delay in women’s representation, the solution is simple: Grant 33% reservation within the existing 543 seats of the Lok Sabha today. All opposition parties would support such a move.

The fact that the government refuses to do this—and instead insists on a complex exercise—proves that the “Nari Shakti” narrative is merely a cover for a “Rajneetik” (Political) power grab. No member of the opposition should accept this assault on our federal structure. We must demand reservation without the strings of a biased delimitation attached.

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“Based on conversations with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Asim Munir of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran… I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks. This will be a double-sided CEASEFIRE!”

Donald Trump, the President of the United States, wrote on social media announcing the ceasefire between the US-Israel alliance and Iran.

In an official statement, Iran’s Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi, responding to the “brotherly request of PM Sharif”, also declared the ceasefire on behalf of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. He expressed gratitude and appreciation for his “dear brothers HE Prime Minister of Pakistan Sharif and HE Field Marshal Munir for their tireless efforts to end the war in the region.”

In the volatile weeks following the February 28 US–Israeli strike that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, a quiet but profound role reversal unfolded in South Asian diplomacy. Pakistan—often dismissed as a rogue actor in world affairs—emerged as the most visible mediator in the Middle East crisis. India, with its centuries-old civilisational links to Iran, strong ties with both the US and Israel, non-aligned legacy, membership of the Quad, presidency of BRICS+, and reputation as a principled global voice, found itself largely on the margins—issuing measured calls for restraint while watching Islamabad take the lead in a conflict that affected not just a few countries, but much of the world.

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This is remarkable. Until May 2025, when Pakistan fought a four-day war (Operation Sindoor) with India, the country was widely seen as a pariah state. At the time, both Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and General Asim Munir were struggling to hold their positions and keep the country together amid deep economic and political crises. But Pakistan’s global standing and Shehbaz Sharif and Asim Munir’s domestic positions improved dramatically after that.

“In mediating between these two parties, Pakistan pulled off one of its most resounding diplomatic victories in years. It is a stunning reversal of fortunes for a country that Mr. Trump once derided as offering ‘nothing but lies and deceit’ and that the Biden administration shunned,” wrote the New York Times, the world’s most influential media outlet, describing Pakistan’s role in the US-Israel-Iran ceasefire.

From India’s point of view, this is more than a one-off event. Some analysts see it as a sign of erosion in the country’s earlier international standing—a shift driven by the steady dilution of a brand that could assert self-interest without appearing selfish. That brand once allowed India to punch above its material weight.

On March 1 — the very next day after the US-Israel strike on Iran — Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif issued a public statement on X. It offered “the most sincere condolences on the martyrdom” of Khamenei, expressed solidarity with the Iranian people, and explicitly criticised the strike as a “violation of the norms of international law” and the “age-old convention that Heads of State/Government should not be targeted.” It was a careful balance that sounded empathetic and principled, without naming the US or Israel. President Asif Ali Zardari and opposition voices reinforced the message. Within days, Pakistan turned this into concrete action.

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By late March, Pakistan was relaying messages between US and Iran. Islamabad convened backchannel summits with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, floated practical ceasefire proposals, and positioned itself as the most desired mediator. When the fragile two-week ceasefire took hold on April 7–8, Pakistan was at the centre of attention.

Michael Kugelman of the Atlantic Council calls it “a large feather in the cap” for Pakistan. But he also points to another dimension: “Pakistan has been willing to engage in unconventional diplomatic tactics that score points in Washington — including excessive flattery and commercial opportunities with Trump’s inner circle.” Somewhat similar tactics involving China and Xi Jinping may also have worked in Pakistan’s favour. Trump may also have leaned toward Islamabad for mediation in part because it offered a level of flexibility that is hard to expect from most other countries.

During this period, India’s posture could hardly have been more restrained. The Ministry of External Affairs issued generic statements following the US–Israel strike, urging “restraint, dialogue, and de-escalation,” while placing strong emphasis on protecting the nearly 10 million-strong Indian diaspora in the Gulf and safeguarding energy routes. No high-level condolence message was issued by Prime Minister Narendra Modi or External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar in the crucial initial days. It was only on March 5—five to six days later—that Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri signed the condolence book at the Iranian Embassy, using carefully neutral language referring to the “demise,” rather than the “martyrdom,” of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.

Opposition leaders—from Congress to regional parties—called the delay an “abdication, not neutrality.” Typically measured voices like Shashi Tharoor noted that, irrespective of condemnation, a timely expression of grief was the bare diplomatic minimum given India’s longstanding ties with Iran.

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The messaging gap widened when India strongly condemned Iranian retaliation against Gulf states and Israel and co-sponsored a UNSC resolution targeting Tehran, while remaining silent on the initial assassination’s breach of sovereignty norms and on the deaths of 168 schoolgirls in the US-Israeli strike. Domestic vulnerabilities — energy shocks from the Hormuz closure, remittances from the Gulf, and defence cooperation with the US and Israel — clearly drove the calculus. Yet the optics were unambiguous: a tilt toward transactional partners at the expense of visible solidarity with an old friend and old principles.

What India got wrong

Three interlocking miscalculations might have defined New Delhi’s approach during the Iran war.

First, an apparent over-optimism about Iranian regime fragility. After Khamenei’s death, initial assessments in Delhi (mirroring some Western thinking) seem to have expected the regime to collapse or at least become severely weakened. When the regime instead showed structural resilience, India was forced to change course — requesting safe passage for its ships through the Strait of Hormuz and resuming Iranian oil and LPG imports after a long hiatus. Returning to the “same regime” after early silence only reinforced perceptions of opportunism.

Second, by prioritising only immediate self-interest over broader signalling, India ceded the moral-diplomatic high ground that Pakistan skilfully occupied. Sharif’s Day One statement on norms instantly got Pakistan into Tehran’s good books without burning bridges in Washington. India’s silence on the assassination of Khamenei, by contrast, fed narratives that New Delhi had subordinated principles and old relations to its ties with the US and Israel. Narendra Modi’s visit to Israel exactly before the US-Israel attack also muddied the waters.

Third, the absence of proactive quiet outreach. While Pakistan flooded backchannels with proposals and venue offers, India explicitly ruled out any “go-between” role. No early public or private ideas to improve the situation were floated. The vacuum was filled by Islamabad.

A pattern, not an outlier

This did not emerge in a vacuum. It fits a recurring script of recent years — from Operation Sindoor to India’s deteriorating relations with Bangladesh.

In May 2025’s Operation Sindoor — India’s precision strikes on terror sites in Pakistan/PoJK after the Pahalgam attack — New Delhi emphasised unilateral success and bilateral resolution. Trump claimed he “stopped the war” via trade leverage and mediation. India’s categorical denial of any third-party role irritated Washington. Pakistan, more flexibly, gave the mediation credit and earned Trump’s goodwill. India could have handled this issue more deftly but did not.

During Operation Sindoor we also failed to present our side of the story effectively to the world, the way Pakistan did. While two women military officers — not fully equipped for the job — were left to put forward India’s case in a one-sided manner, and no prominent leader from the ruling administration was visible, Pakistan’s army, its political leaders and its lobbyists in America were doing everything possible on every important forum to present their viewpoint. India tried to rectify this mistake when it sent the all-party parliamentary delegations to different parts of the world. But the damage was already done.

The 2024 Bangladesh crisis is another case in point. While granting refuge to ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was an unavoidable necessity, India’s subsequent handling — marked by visa refusals, exclusion of Bangladeshi players from the IPL to pander to domestic politics, and the expulsion of the Bangladesh team from the T20 World Cup — escalated a difficult problem into a diplomatic disaster. These actions deeply bruised public sentiment in Bangladesh, isolating India in its own backyard. The optics are particularly jarring as Pakistan and China gain ground in a country that owes its very existence to India.

Even the Trump relationship carried self-inflicted costs. Narendra Modi’s enthusiastic “Abki baar Trump Sarkar” rallies in 2019–20 built personal rapport with Donald Trump, but might not have sat well with Joe Biden. During the 2024 US presidential campaign, Modi maintained a cautious distance from Trump and reportedly did not meet him despite his overtures. When Trump won re-election, the earlier hedging became problematic. This is what happens when a country aligns itself too closely with one political party in another country instead of cultivating bipartisan support.

All this seems to suggest that India is losing the strength that came from its principles, while at the same time not succeeding at the new transactional approach it is now pursuing.

India cannot indulge in what Kugelman describes as the “unconventional diplomatic tactics” of Pakistan. Its historic influence came not only from its size but from its non-aligned tradition — speaking up for sovereignty, standing with anti-colonial causes, and acting as a balancer. That brand made its voice matter far beyond its GDP or military power. But staying silent on big global issues now risks turning India into just another pragmatic deal-maker whose principles look changeable.

The April 10 talks in Islamabad are not yet final. A full US-Iran deal is still not certain. India still has strong cards: good working relations with all three — the US, Israel and Iran; its place in both QUAD and BRICS (India currently has its presidency); and an economy bigger than almost any other country except the superpowers. If India can use these advantages intelligently, it can still have its skin in the game.

India is too big and too important to be sidelined. But what counts the most for a country like India is the courage to speak at the right time without being seen as picking clear sides.

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On March 4, 2026, during a discussion at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney ended his remarks with an unusual gesture. Instead of waving or nodding, he briefly pressed his palms together to thank the audience.

It was a small, almost reflexive moment at the end of a high-stakes program that many might not have even noticed. But for those who did, it might have triggered a vivid memory of exactly six years ago.

It was March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first tightened its grip on India, forcing a nationwide lockdown. At that time, the world was scrambling for ways to say “hello” or “thank you” without risking infection. Six years later, seeing one of the most educated leaders of the G7 fold his hands in a high-level forum in Australia suggests a deeper reality: India’s most widely used body gesture has moved beyond a cultural symbol to become a global symbol of hygienic, sincere, and refined etiquette.

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The Indian folded-hand gesture, called the Anjali Mudra, is rooted in the Vedas and the Natya Shastra. It has always served a multi-dimensional purpose: it is the posture of worship, the standard social greeting (Namaste), and a profound expression of gratitude. And these are not separate from each other. Whether you say “hello” or a heartfelt “thank you,” you also acknowledge a spiritual presence in the other person.

In the West, folded hands (palms together) were never a gesture of greeting. They emerged by the early medieval period and became widespread in the Middle Ages as a symbol of submission and loyalty. A weak vassal’s folded hands stretched toward a lord was a show of submission. This was later transposed into Christian prayer to signify submission to God.

In Jewish tradition too, folded hands appear in early descriptions of prayer. The Babylonian sage Rabba bar Nachmani is described in the Talmud as praying with folded hands, suggesting that the gesture was also known in parts of the ancient Middle East as an expression of reverence.

For centuries, these two versions lived parallel lives: the Indian one as a multi-purpose cultural symbol, and the Western one used strictly for addressing the divine.

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This was not the case in several other parts of the world, especially across Asia. Long before COVID-19, the Anjali Mudra had already become part of daily life in many societies. Between the 1st and 13th centuries, as Hinduism and Buddhism spread across Asia, the folded-hands greeting evolved into local forms: the wai in Thailand, the sampeah in Cambodia, the nop in Laos and gassho in Japan.

But until recently, Westerners mostly encountered this gesture as tourists or through the global rise of yoga and meditation. In the West, it was something “exotic” that you did at the end of a class or while experimenting with Indian spirituality. But they rarely folded their hands while meeting a bank manager, greeting a prime minister, or expressing gratitude.

The year 2020 changed the way humans interact. As the pandemic struck, the most fundamental Western social ritual—the handshake—was revealed to be a primary vector for disease.

Historically, Western discourse had often labeled Indian social habits as “unhygienic.” But as the world entered the COVID era, the script was flipped. Namaste was suddenly the world’s most hygienic greeting. It then saw rapid adoption by world leaders who had long been committed to the “firm handshake.” Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron, and Charles III were all seen using the gesture during the height of the crisis.

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But when Mark Carney used the gesture at the Lowy Institute, he wasn’t being cautious about germs. He appeared to be using it as a natural cultural expression of gratitude. What makes this especially striking is that he did so at a time when India’s global voice appears deeply subdued.

It may signify something more as well. In a world where Carney argues that middle powers must increasingly set the agenda, adopting the greeting of the world’s most populous democracy becomes a powerful symbol—signalling a shift toward a multipolar world that treats others with humility and respect.

So far, the West has adopted only the “base version” of India’s folded-hands gesture for safety and gratitude. It has yet to learn its grammar. Many may not realise that when palms are joined at chest level, it signals equality, while a slight forward bend makes the greeting more respectful.

They may also learn that folded hands touching one’s forehead can signal extreme respect. With subtle variations, the same gesture can even express sarcastic submission—or, in certain postures, quiet arrogance.

Perhaps that last variation might even make the gesture attractive to the Donald Trumps of the world—who may not find its humble versions as appealing in normal times as they did during the pandemic.

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