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insights of social history while questioning some of the directions in which the newer cultural and postcolonial approaches were moving. One must say that his essay on the decline of the subaltern in Subaltern Studies makes the point particularly sharply. The early volumes of Subaltern Studies had concentrated heavily on peasants, tribals and workers and had emerged from a broadly Marxian and socialist intellectual milieu. Sarkar’s criticism was that the later project had increasingly moved towards critiques of Western colonial power and knowledge, with greater emphasis on non-Western community consciousness. He didn’t hide his worry about the growing tendency to define communities principally through religious identities. The historical irony is striking here. The original Subaltern Studies intervention had sought to rescue ordinary people from histories dominated by elites. Sarkar had considerable sympathy with that project because it shared his own concern with popular agency. Yet a history centred on the subaltern could itself become restrictive when the category of the subaltern acquired too much explanatory power. Peasants, workers, tribals and women were never defined by a single identity. Their lives were shaped simultaneously by class, caste, gender, religion, region, occupation and material circumstances. One identity could become politically important in one situation and recede in another.Sarkar’s engagement with Edward Said raised a related question. The critique of colonial knowledge had shown how deeply power could enter into the production of knowledge itself. Colonial categories were not innocent descriptions of Indian society. They helped organise the ways in which that society was governed and understood. Sarkar accepted the importance of this insight. His reservation arose when discourse and representation began to displace the social world in which they operated. Colonial knowledge had material consequences, but the material world also shaped the production, reception and use of that knowledge.His differences with Partha Chatterjee can be understood in this broader context. Chatterjee’s work had made an important intervention by examining nationalism as a cultural and intellectual project and by asking how Indian nationalists responded to the cultural domination of colonial rule. Sarkar, however, was uneasy with approaches that gave excessive autonomy to nationalist discourse, community identities or cultural domains. He wanted those categories brought back into contact with class, caste, gender, economic relations and the actual social processes through which political consciousness developed.That was also why Sarkar’s later position cannot simply be described as a rejection of the cultural turn. The cultural turn had corrected something that Marxist historiography had genuinely got wrong. Economic structures alone could not explain the meanings people attached to nationalism, religion, caste or political action. Yet the correction could go too far. Culture could not become a substitute for society, just as discourse could not become a substitute for history.Sarkar’s intellectual trajectory therefore acquires a certain coherence when Modern India is read alongside Writing Social History. In the earlier book, he challenged elite and leader-centred histories by bringing peasants, tribals, workers, caste groups and regional movements into the centre of the story. In the later essays, he questioned some newer approaches when their emphasis on discourse, identity and cultural autonomy seemed to sever those histories from material and social relationships. The underlying impulse remained the same: a suspicion of explanations that make history too neat.His lasting contribution lies in that tension. Economic structures matter, but they do not exhaust history. Culture matters, but it does not float above material life. Political leaders matter, but they do not manufacture popular politics at will. Ordinary

negotiations between Gandhi and the colonial government. The table of contents itself reveals the breadth of this approach: regional variations, Chauri Chaura, tribal and peasant movements, caste movements and the emergence of labour and communism all form part of the history of mass nationalism. This history from below also changed the way Sarkar approached the Congress. The party was not presented as a unified national organisation steadily carrying India towards independence. It was a field of competing tendencies and social pressures. Gandhi’s appeal; the relationship between Gandhi, the Khilafat movement, and the Congress; the pressures generated by popular mobilisation; the Swarajist and No-Changer controversy; the rise of Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru; and the growth of the Congress Left all formed part of the story. One can also note that Sarkar’s treatment of Gandhi was particularly revealing in this respect. The book goes beyond political pronouncements or Gandhi’s place in the nationalist pantheon. Sarkar was interested in the social sources of his appeal, the role of rumour, the different responses to Gandhian politics in different regions and the manner in which popular movements could acquire a momentum of their own. The relationship between leadership and mass politics therefore remained a central problem. Congress leaders could initiate movements, redirect them and sometimes restrain them, but they could never completely determine what those movements would become once they entered the countryside and the streets.To an extent, the same sensitivity extended to the social and cultural dimensions of nationalism. Sarkar’s treatment of the Swadeshi movement, for instance, went well beyond the familiar account of the boycott of British goods. He discussed national education, samitis, labour unrest, Hindu-Muslim relations and the emergence of revolutionary terrorism. Elsewhere he examined the social roots of the intelligentsia, Hindu reform and revival, developments in Indian Islam, patriotic literature and nationalist economic thought. His account of nationalism therefore had a cultural history running through it, even though the underlying concern with economic and social structures never disappeared. That combination was one of the distinctive features of Sarkar’s way of applying a Marxist lens with a subaltern light of specificity. He was unwilling to explain nationalism simply through economic interests, class relations or the colonial economy. For his historical lens, ideas and symbols mattered; so did religious idioms, and caste and community relations. His study showed that excluding them as mere superstructure didn’t explain things. He applied the wider canvas to argue different points, including why the Congress understood public mood better than the communists during the 1942 movement.With time, the wider milieu shifted, and the balance became more difficult to maintain as the historiographical climate changed in the 1980s and 1990s. The challenge to economic reductionism had produced enormously valuable work on culture, consciousness, language, identity and colonial discourse. The influence of Foucault and Edward Said, and the expanding work of the Subaltern Studies historians, opened up questions that conventional Marxist historiography had often neglected. Sarkar himself had been part of that intellectual world. He, therefore, had little reason to dismiss the new cultural history. His concern was with the possibility of another kind of reductionism emerging in its place.It was late in 2005 that I read his work, Writing Social History, published by Oxford University Press in 1997, and found it as important in understanding a later phase of Sarkar's thinking. The book collected essays written largely during the preceding years and engaged directly with the new debates in Indian historiography. But its purpose was not to restore an older economic determinism. Sarkar was trying to retain the

Sumit Sarkar’s unfinished argument with history https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/14/sumit-sarkars-unfinished-argument-with-history Sometime in 2000, I lost my copy of Sumit Sarkar’s Modern India in the Hindu College hostel at Delhi University. It was unfortunate. I remember looking for another copy in the library but without any success. I was somehow in a hurry to finish reading it, so I bought a new copy. It was a brown-covered Macmillan copy of the classic. I wasn’t a student of history at the university; his work was there in the interdisciplinary readings. I finished reading the book soon. It has been a matter of wonder for me that Sarkar’s book, which otherwise was a dense and academic study, had engrossed me. The reason wasn’t far to seek. You had to just look at the rest of the bookshelf of readings for the same course. Even if some place the book within a broad Marxist corpus on modern Indian history, Sarkar’s work was remarkable in finding its way out of that dogmatic frame. In doing so, he found a subaltern footing in retelling “history from below”, opening up the narrow economistic gaze of Marxism to social and cultural registers, and noting even the ordinariness of agents shaping modern Indian history. In some ways, his work, and the exquisite flow with which he wrote even on a dry academic palimpsest, drew on his understanding and archives to make ideological schools grapple with areas of their intellectual unease. The journey ensured that readers, and particularly students, found moments of scholarly exploration in the book, not mere ideological thesis-proving history.To see two different ends of the frame, so to speak, one could contrast his broad-based account of the period with a more formulaic Marxist take in Rajni Palme Dutt’s India Today, or even the Marxist-nationalist strand of writings, as seen in Bipan Chandra’s writings. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that Sarkar’s account was adequate for all frames; it wasn’t. It had varying degrees of engagement and sympathy for different agents, forces and actors of the period. The point, however, is that the book didn’t make a case for not considering different frames. The wider scale on which Sarkar put his inquiry in Modern India was also an absorbing experience to read. In all fairness, not to be deceived by the year the book sets off, he did not begin his account with the Congress, and then treat everything outside its leadership as peripheral. It chose to move towards a history from below. The ordinary settings, the small registers of people and places find a way into the book. The section bearing that very title comes before the detailed discussion of the foundations of the Congress, and the choice is significant. Readers may recall that, at the time of publication, the tribal movements, the Moplahs, the Deccan Riots, Pabna, no-revenue movements, caste consciousness, communal consciousness, and labour are all put under inquiry before the Congress is examined in detail. The point was not simply to recover a few forgotten rebellions. Sarkar wanted to show that popular politics had its own histories and its own sources of energy. This is illustrated in the Rampa rebellion led by Alluri Sitarama Raju, a movement tracing its origins in the grievances over moneylenders, restrictions imposed by forest laws on shifting cultivation and grazing, and the demand for unpaid tribal labour. Raju himself, Sarkar observed, had become a folk hero in Andhra while remaining almost unknown outside the region. The political history of India could no longer be confined to Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and the proceedings of the Congress. This approach continued into the period of mass nationalism. Sarkar paid attention to the Eka movement in Oudh, the tribal struggles in the Rampa region, peasant movements, caste organisations and labour unrest. During the Civil Disobedience movement, Chittagong, Peshawar and Sholapur received attention alongside the Salt Satyagraha and the

politically.”An appellate court examining that leap can reasonably ask what independent, objective material connects the retraction of two witnesses to a systemic conspiracy involving the four who didn’t retract, and whose accounts weren’t identical to begin with. The Mongolia allegation, again, was corroborated by two separate eyewitnesses, neither of whom turned hostile or retracted a word of their testimony. The constitutional question underneath it allThere is a broader tension sitting under all of this. Section 354 IPC requires proof of assault or criminal force intended, or known to be likely, to outrage a woman’s “modesty.” The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita carries the same formulation forward into Section 74. Meanwhile, Indian constitutional jurisprudence, most prominently KS Puttaswamy v Union of India, has moved toward reading Article 21 in terms of bodily integrity, personal autonomy, and decisional freedom.Against that backdrop, the trial court’s preoccupation with whether the complainants behaved “naturally,” whether they retaliated at once, whether bystanders reacted, whether husbands intervened, whether they looked comfortable in photographs, deserves close appellate scrutiny. An acquittal means the prosecution didn’t establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Appellate courts are, rightly, cautious about disturbing that under Chandrappa v State of Karnataka, given the double presumption of innocence an acquittal carries. But Ravi Sharma v State (NCT of Delhi) (2022) makes clear that appellate interference is warranted where a trial court’s appreciation of evidence is legally flawed, rests on speculative generalisations, or ignores material corroboration on record.The real question the Brij Bhushan judgment raises isn’t only whether every charge was proved. It’s whether, in deciding what counted as credible, the trial court was actually answering the legal question in front of it: what does the evidence establish? Or whether it quietly swapped that question for a different one: would a real victim have behaved this way?Small teams can do great things. All it takes is a subscription. Subscribe (http://newslaundry.com/subscription) now and power Newslaundry’s work.  ‘Neither supporting nor opposing bail’: Delhi Police’s courtroom dilemma in Brij Bhushan bail hearing (https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/07/20/neither-supporting-nor-opposing-bail-delhi-polices-courtroom-dilemma-in-brij-bhushan-bail-hearing)

against over-indexing on minor errors of date, location, or peripheral detail when the central narrative of assault holds firm, because ordinary human memory doesn't function with precision under stress.None of this means a wrong location is always insignificant. Sometimes it’s decisive. But the question the court has to ask is what the discrepancy actually disproves. Here, the country and year were wrong in an earlier, non-judicial document; the allegation itself was later backed at trial by two independent eyewitnesses. “Not at all understandable”The most troubling reasoning in the judgment concerns what the complainants did after the alleged incidents.The court repeatedly asks why the women stayed on cordial terms with Singh if he had harassed them. It points to photographs from family functions and weddings. It accepts that the complainants might have stayed silent for years out of fear that Singh, then WFI president, could damage their careers. But in the same breath, it says something else: that it was “not at all understandable” why they maintained cordial relations with him for years after.Para 73 of the judgement read: “It is understandable as alleged that Al being the then WFI President would have spoiled their careers if they had made complaint against him, however, it is not at all understandable as to why cordial relations were maintained with him for years. Victims did not complain, they gave justification for the same, but everyone who witnessed was either shocked, disturbed or felt sad for the victims, nevertheless, none was courageous enough to proceed against Al for the alleged acts? Since nobody made any formal complaint or retaliated to the alleged acts of Al, it is highly improbable that the alleged acts are true.”This is exactly the terrain the Supreme Court warned trial courts of before. In Aparna Bhat v State of Madhya Pradesh, the court cautioned that judicial reasoning in sexual-offence cases must not lean on stereotypical ideas of how a woman “should” behave. That principle was reinforced in State of HP v Prem Singh (2009) and State of Punjab v Gurmit Singh (1996), both of which recognised that delayed reporting, social pleasantries, or unconventional post-assault conduct can’t be judged against a rigid, traditional benchmark, not when trauma and complicated socio-economic dependence are in play.The judgment accepts that Singh’s position could have made the wrestlers fear for their careers, and then treats their continued contact with him as inexplicable, for the very same reason. The two things aren’t in tension. A person can fear someone professionally and still keep interacting with them, smiling for photographs at public functions included, when their livelihood depends entirely on the institution that person runs.The same reasoning shows up again around a photograph from Jakarta. The court notes that the image shows a celebratory moment, and that the complainant doesn’t look uncomfortable in it. But a photograph captures a fraction of a second. It can’t establish what an interaction felt like before or after the shutter clicked. Nor does it disprove unwelcome physical contact happening in a crowded athletic arena.Two hostile witnesses, four who weren’tTwo of the six complainants, referred to as P and S P, turned hostile or retracted core parts of their testimony at trial. That damaged the prosecution’s case, no question. But under Khujji v State of Madhya Pradesh, a hostile witness doesn’t automatically wipe out the entire prosecution case. The portions of testimony that survive scrutiny are still supposed to count.What the trial court did instead was move from the retraction of two complainants to a much bigger conclusion: that the entire joint case was a false, fabricated “deep conspiracy,” and a politically motivated one at that. In the judge’s own words, the surviving evidence showed the allegations were “false and fabricated made collectively,” in a conspiracy that “seems to be motivated

Brij Bhushan acquittal: What the order leaves open to scrutiny https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/14/brij-bhushan-acquittal-what-the-order-leaves-open-to-scrutiny On August 3, 2026, a Delhi trial court acquitted Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the former Wrestling Federation of India president, of charges under Sections 354, 354A, and 506(I) of the Indian Penal Code in the sexual harassment case brought by six women wrestlers. Vinod Tomar, the WFI’s former assistant secretary, was acquitted of the remaining charge against him. The court held that the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.That conclusion is not, by itself, unusual. Criminal courts are required to acquit where the prosecution evidence leaves a reasonable doubt. What deserves closer examination is the route this particular judgment took to get there.The case so farThe allegations went back to January 2023, when some of India’s most decorated wrestlers, including Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik, and Bajrang Punia, sat down in protest at Jantar Mantar, accusing Singh of sexually harassing junior wrestlers over several years, at training camps, tournaments, and federation events. Singh, then a six-time BJP MP, denied everything and dared the wrestlers to prove it in court.It took months of protest, and a nudge from the Supreme Court, before Delhi Police registered two separate FIRs against Singh in April 2023 – one under the IPC for the adult complainants, and a second under the POCSO Act for the seventh, minor complainant. The POCSO case never made it to trial: the minor later withdrew her allegations, police filed a cancellation report, and the case was formally closed in May 2025. The IPC case, brought by the six adult complainants, is the one that reached trial. A chargesheet followed in June 2023, and in May 2024 a magistrate ordered charges framed against Singh under Sections 354, 354A, 354D, and 506 IPC. That trial ran for more than two years, held partly in camera, before Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) Ashwani Panwar delivered the acquittal on August 3. Two complainants had turned hostile at trial, telling the court they had been “forced” or “pressured” into making the allegations. The judgment leaned heavily on this, concluding that the case looked “false and fabricated, made collectively” in what it called a “deep conspiracy” that seemed “motivated politically.” Singh, for his part, called the verdict a vindication and said the judiciary had used the word “honour” while acquitting him.What’s worth sitting with is how the 239-page judgment got there. Across its length, the court repeatedly treated discrepancies in dates and places, continued contact with the accused, the absence of immediate retaliation, photographs, and the conduct of people around the complainants as evidence that the alleged incidents could not have happened. A wrong country, a wrong year, and two eyewitnessesTake the first complainant, referred to as V P. Her allegation is that Singh groped her while she was dining with the Indian contingent in Mongolia in 2016. That account was corroborated in court by two witnesses, and the judgment itself records that corroboration. But V P’s earlier statement before the government-appointed Oversight Committee had named Turkey, 2015, not Mongolia, 2016. She explained in court that she had inadvertently written the wrong country and year, and had since corrected the mistake.The court treated this as fatal. It called the failure to recall the location “abnormal conduct,” and held that the contradiction was “fatal to the prosecution case.”That conclusion sits uneasily against the Supreme Court’s own approach to discrepancies in witness testimony. In State of UP v MK Anthony, the Court held that evidence must be assessed as a whole, and that discrepancies which don’t touch the core of the case shouldn’t automatically sink the testimony. Bhoginbhai Bharwada Hirjibhai v State of Gujarat (1983) goes further, cautioning

This report was republished (https://www.thenewsminute.com/andhra-pradesh/andhra-pradeshpeddi-wants-the-anticaste-politics-of-tamil-cinema-but-without-its-progressive-vision) from The News Minute as part of The News Minute-Newslaundry alliance. Read about our partnership here (https://www.newslaundry.com/2023/04/28/newslaundry-the-news-minute-alliance-for-more-public-interest-journalism) and become a subscriber here (https://www.thenewsminute.com/membership).

‘Shadow ban’ fears at NALSAR after BCI seeks inquiry into CJI invite opposition https://www.newslaundry.com/2026/08/14/shadow-ban-fears-at-nalsar-after-bci-seeks-inquiry-into-cji-invite-opposition Following the Bar Council of India’s (BCI) statement that there would be an inquiry against students enrolled at Hyderabad’s National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) University of Law for opposing Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s invitation at their annual convocation, NALSAR students expressed concern about how this could impact their careers. On Thursday, the BCI had initially directed state bar councils not to enrol any students from NALSAR’s 2026 graduating batch as advocates. However, within a couple of hours of issuing the directive, the BCI issued a second letter to NALSAR Vice-Chancellor Professor Srikrishna Deva Rao and all state bar councils, rescinding its earlier order. The BCI said it would, however, proceed with an inquiry based on a report from the NALSAR Vice-Chancellor before deciding whether to take action against students found responsible.“The vast majority of the students of NALSAR (2026 pass-out students) are innocent and were not inclined to take part in the move of disrespect... It has further been reported by some reliable sources that a handful of teachers and outsiders were instrumental in instigating the innocent students,” BCI Chairman Manan Kumar Mishra said in the second letter.However, Vice-Chancellor Srikrishna Deva Rao said the university would assess whether such an inquiry was permissible. “We would have to assess whether such an inquiry was a constitutional exercise of their powers,” the VC said. “In order to assist the University, assess whether conducting such an inquiry would be constitutional and permissible under the University’s governance regulations, the matter will be placed before the Executive Council of the University.” Meanwhile, speaking to The News Minute, a student of the outgoing 2026 batch who was among those who signed the representation opposing the CJI’s visit said that the redacted statement from the BCI did little to assuage their fears. The student also took issue with the BCI’s letter dubbing students as ‘innocent’ and as a group that were ‘instigated’. “We weren’t naive when we wrote to the NALSAR administration,” the student told TNM. “We haven’t been misled by anyone. We just did not want to accept our degree from a man who dubbed the youth of this country ‘cockroaches’,” the student said, adding that they just wanted to receive their degree from someone who ‘values free speech’ and ‘respects the Constitution.’The student, requesting anonymity also told TNM that the BCI’s insistence on an enquiry did scare them. “For those of us who want to go into litigation, this is worrisome. But even for those who choose to go into corporate law, the BCI’s enquiry still matters as it has the potential to act as a shadow ban on hiring,” the student added. A shadow ban in hiring is when job boards silently limit the visibility of a job applicant without informing them. Around 450 students at NALSAR had opposed the invitation to CJI Surya Kant to attend the university’s convocation, citing his remarks in July regarding police excesses during student protests.During protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, students were beaten by Delhi Police personnel. The CJI had declined to hear a petition concerning alleged police brutality against the protesting students, reportedly saying, “Don’t waste our time. We are not interested in videos, we don’t have time to watch.”“We also sent the letter opposing the CJI’s invitation because he had said that watching videos on police brutality against students was a waste of time. We haven’t been and aren’t okay with this,” the student added.

Newslaundry traced the footage to two unrelated incidents outside Gandhi’s residence. The first was an August 7 ETV Bharat (https://www.etvbharat.com/en/bharat/sadhus-protest-outside-rahuls-residence-allege-their-attire-symbols-used-inappropriately-enn26080703228) report on sadhus protesting against an earlier demonstration in Parliament where opposition leaders were accused of misusing religious symbols. The second was a separate protest by women over allegations that money had been taken in exchange for Congress election tickets. Both groups were detained by Delhi Police, and neither involved students from Jharkhand. But the footage was later recirculated online as evidence that Jharkhand students had been turned away from meeting Gandhi.   Delhi: A woman, accompanied by her children, staged a protest outside Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi's residence, alleging that money was taken in exchange for an election ticket. She accused close associates of Congress MPs Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Rahul Gandhi in the matter.… pic.twitter.com/M44tGQeOCu (https://t.co/M44tGQeOCu)— IANS (@ians_india) August 7, 2026 (https://x.com/ians_india/status/2085579841076932686?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Ultimately, the binary being drawn on social media collapses under closer scrutiny. The foreign funding allegation has no official finding behind it. CJP’s own leadership discouraged the “Azadi” slogans. And the visual “evidence” of BJP hijacking or police blocking opposition leaders turned out to be unrelated and outdated footage. On the ground, protesters in Ranchi described the two protests not as rivals but as one drawing energy from the other.

यही राहुल गेंडी जब प्रधानमंत्री जी के आवास के बाहर बैठ गया था तब चमचों को अंदर घुसने की आजादी चाहिए थी pic.twitter.com/JxnRcwxpqr (https://t.co/JxnRcwxpqr)— ocean jain (@ocjain4) August 7, 2026 (https://x.com/ocjain4/status/2085659479891472619?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)

भाजपा के अंधभक्तों ने छात्र आंदोलन को हाईजैक कर लिया और उसका राजनीतिकरण कर दिया है।@JmmJharkhand (https://x.com/JmmJharkhand?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) @HemantSorenJMM (https://x.com/HemantSorenJMM?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) @INCJharkhand_ (https://x.com/INCJharkhand_?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) pic.twitter.com/b9acsSz6ny (https://t.co/b9acsSz6ny)— Advocate Sanjeev Kumar Singh (@Advocat64625996) August 10, 2026 (https://x.com/Advocat64625996/status/2086859935007313942?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) BJP hijacks student protest. They want to destroy everything that's peaceful.#Jharkhand (https://x.com/hashtag/Jharkhand?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) #StudentsProtest (https://x.com/hashtag/StudentsProtest?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) #ChhatronKiGoonj (https://x.com/hashtag/ChhatronKiGoonj?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) pic.twitter.com/YTc6HwSb6R (https://t.co/YTc6HwSb6R)— India With Congress (@UWCforYouth) August 10, 2026 (https://x.com/UWCforYouth/status/2086837264974553381?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Jharkhand pic.twitter.com/45TbhnxUwQ (https://t.co/45TbhnxUwQ)— We Dravidians (@WeDravidians) August 11, 2026 (https://x.com/WeDravidians/status/2087050880449409166?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) Newslaundry found that the video was from an unrelated Vidhan Sabha march. We traced the same footage to the news agency IANS, which published it on July 23.Ranchi, Jharkhand: During a Congress protest at the BJP office over the NEET paper leak and the lathi charge on students, eggs and tomatoes were thrown, along with demands regarding the position of Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. pic.twitter.com/OCgDRIBlPS (https://t.co/OCgDRIBlPS)— IANS (@ians_india) July 23, 2026 (https://x.com/ians_india/status/2080207036776870174?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw) According to IANS, Congress workers had protested outside the BJP office in Ranchi over the NEET paper leak and demanded the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan. The demonstration escalated into a clash between Congress and BJP supporters, during which eggs and tomatoes were thrown and police resorted to lathi-charge. In other words, the footage did not show BJP-affiliated individuals hijacking the protest.  Other reports (https://x.com/ians_india/status/2080207036776870174) from the day also described pushing and shoving between workers of the two parties, followed by a clash involving eggs, stones and sticks. The incident took place amid a wider political confrontation in Ranchi. A day earlier, BJP workers had surrounded the Jharkhand Pradesh Congress office over allegations concerning serious irregularities in the JPSC and Jharkhand Staff Selection Commission (JSCC). Congress subsequently announced a protest outside the BJP office, leading to the July 23 confrontation.However, this does not mean that there was no violence during the August 10 student protest. Witness accounts and the Ranchi police’s version indicate that some stone-pelting did take place. Ranchi SP Paras Rana told Newslaundry that protesters pelted stones and slippers at security personnel, causing minor injuries to some officers. He said two police personnel suffered head injuries requiring five to eight stitches, while several others sustained minor injuries. Rana also alleged that some protesters concealed stones inside journalists’ microphone covers and threw them towards the police.The recycled footageAnother strand of the online narrative sought to portray the Jharkhand students as being denied access to opposition leaders. Several posts claimed that students from Jharkhand had reached Rahul Gandhi’s residence in Delhi to meet him, only to be removed by police. One post said: “Today, when students from Jharkhand came to meet Rahul Gandhi at his residence, the police were called.” An X page called Ocean Jain with 261,000 followers, which is often found sharing pro-Modi government content, posted this clip on August 7. आज झारखंड के छात्र राहुल गांधी से मिलने उसके आवास पर आए , तो पुलिस बुला ली गई

crackdown in Ranchi.

the JPSC. The Delhi protest was able to take the resignation of a Union minister. Its peak gave us some positive energy and we kept at it,” he said, adding that the protesters would continue until their demands were fulfilled.Binay echoed this, pointing to CJP’s success in forcing Pradhan’s resignation as a source of continued motivation. Chandan Rajak, another protester associated with the JPSC-JSSC Abhyarthi Nyay Manch, said, “The way people turned up at Jantar Mantar was a calling for us. I have been a part of many protests in the past but the way the crowd has turned up in Ranchi to support our cause is historic. We were able to take inspiration from CJP’s protest in Delhi in the way to organise protest, mobilise the crowd and put our demands forward.” Vimal also rejected the idea that the peaceful nature of the Jharkhand protest should be used to distinguish it from the Delhi protest. “Everyone is peaceful in Jharkhand and that’s our aim. Our protest is on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi,” he said. Referring to the police action during the CJP protest, he added that even if a small number of people became violent amid a large turnout, the police response was disproportionate. “Police action is wrong everywhere,” he said.Vimal alleged that Jharkhand students also faced a police crackdown at night and that electricity was cut during the protest. “Authorities need to listen to the movement,” he said. The comparison between the two protests, he added, was “given in the wrong context”. Rajak added that there was no need to compare two student protests. He said, “This is a way to deviate from the real issue which is that demands are met.”These accounts suggest CJP’s protest influenced some Jharkhand protesters – but influence isn’t control. The two movements had distinct grievances and leadership, while CJP volunteers offered support that protesters said they welcomed. The blame gamePolice action against protesters has become another point of comparison between the CJP-led protest in Delhi and the ongoing student protest in Jharkhand. Both protests encountered police action, and in both cases, protesters and their supporters accused the police of excessive force, while authorities cited violence or attempts to breach barricades as justification for their actions.During the July 20 “Chalo Sansad” march organised by the CJP, police used tear gas and lathis as protesters attempted to move towards Parliament. According to several media reports, around 100 protesters and 120 security personnel were injured; an RTI response from two Delhi hospitals also alleged pellet-gun use by the Rapid Action Force, injuring about 10 protesters. Several opposition leaders, including Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal, also condemned the police action. Delhi Police, meanwhile, maintained that smaller groups of protesters became violent and attempted to march towards Parliament, prompting the use of force.A similar debate emerged after police action against Jharkhand students on August 10. Police used lathis, tear gas and water cannons as protesters marched towards the state assembly. Several protesters were injured, according to a report in The Hindu (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/jharkhand/jharkhand-exam-protests-enter-19th-day-students-vow-to-intensify-agitation/article71335234.ece), with one protester telling ANI (https://www.aninews.in/news/national/politics/at-least-100-youth-subjected-to-lathicharges-injured-protester-condemns-police-crackdown-during-ranchi-protest-march20260811035145/)that at least 100 young people were lathi-charged. On social media, users described the protesters as peaceful students and questioned why they had been subjected to police violence. Some also questioned the silence of the CJP and parties such as the Congress – which shares power with the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) in the state – and the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) over the

Additionally, a post shared by Facebook page Bharat Defence Hindi (https://www.facebook.com/bharatdefencehindi/photos/1500256318784376/) on August 4 showed an image of students holding up a tent in the rain with the text: “No Foreign Funding, No Azadi Slogans, No Disrespect to Hindus, Not Even a Proper Tent. We stand with students of Jharkhand.” The post, which gathered 5,800 likes and was shared 671 times, used an image that was later found to be AI-generated (as detected by AI-detection tool Hive Moderation (https://hivedetect.ai/fiyFfi)). The posts did not directly mention CJP. However, the phrases they used, particularly “foreign funding” and “Azadi slogans”, also featured in the online discourse around the CJP-led protest in Delhi. The vocabulary overlaps with the one used to attack CJP.  While the allegation about foreign funding has circulated in mainstream television coverage and across social media, there was no publicly available government order, investigation report or other official finding establishing that CJP received foreign funding at the time of writing this report. On July 24, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal, when asked about the matter, said (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DbNI3VOobXz/): “I do not have any information on this matter to share with you at this time.”Several posts praising the Jharkhand protesters pointed to the absence of “Azadi” slogans as evidence that their protest was different from CJP. However, the CJP leadership had distanced the protest from such slogans and urged protesters to avoid them. The leadership had approved four slogans for the protest: “Inquilab Zindabad”, “Jai Bheem”, “Bharat Mata ki Jai” and “Dharmendra Pradhan Istifa Do”. Addressing protesters on July 22, CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka said that negative slogans should be avoided because “they are looking for a chance to make a narrative”.The online distinction between the two protests becomes more complicated when compared with accounts from the protest site.CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke condemned (https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/jharkhand/dipke-condemns-police-action-against-fasting-student-leader-in-jharkhand/article71331290.ece) the police action against Jharkhand students, calling for an impartial inquiry and accountability. Dipke also reiterated that he was not physically present in Jharkhand and said he did not want to “hijack” the protest. He acknowledged that CJP volunteers were present in Ranchi and had joined the protest. Contrary to some claims circulating online, CJP leadership did publicly condemn the crackdown by the Jharkhand Police.Protesters on the ground also acknowledged CJP’s involvement, but did not necessarily see it as an attempt to take over the protest. Vimal Kumar, a Ranchi University student who is part of the JPSC-JSSC Abhyarthi Nyay Manch, told Newslaundry that CJP volunteers supported the protesters, participated in a press conference with them and joined the protest at Jaipal Singh Munda Stadium.“CJP volunteers showed support and did a press conference with us. I also joined and sat with them,” he said. He added that anyone who wanted to support the students was welcome at the protest site.“All student demands and protests should be heard and not pitted against each other,” he said. “We are not a political party. The main aim is to bring significant change in the state and not be wary of such small things.”Binay Kumar, who is associated with the JPSC-JSSC Reforms Manch, spoke to Newslaundry and said, “Our goal is simple. We want reforms. Anyone is welcome to support our movement and nobody is being asked to leave. However, we will not allow any political or casteist statements to be made from our stage. Our student movement should not be deviated because of outside forces. CJP volunteers have visited the protest site.” More significantly, Vimal said that the protest in Delhi inspired them. “We had been angry for a long time because of these problems with

Well Done Jharkhand India is listening . No foreign Funding, No Azadi Slogan, No Insult to Hindus or the Nation, Just Students Demanding Fair and Transparent JPSC & JSSC CGL Exams. pic.twitter.com/SGKYii4xAg (https://t.co/SGKYii4xAg)— Prince Mishra (@PrinceM40609955) August 9, 2026 (https://x.com/PrinceM40609955/status/2086519983551783023?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)