Pakistan is facing accusations that its security forces have killed dozens of unarmed protesters in the past week of demonstrations in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Al Jazeera’s James Bays asked panellists on Inside Story if Islamabad is borrowing tactics from Indian-administered Kashmir.
Published On 30 Jul 202630 Jul 2026
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China’s top leaders pledged on Thursday to support the country’s slowing economy by accelerating spending on already-approved infrastructure projects instead of rolling out large-scale stimulus measures. The decision came after recent economic data showed second-quarter growth slowed to 4.3%, the weakest pace in more than three years and below the government’s annual target range of 4.5% to 5.0%.
The commitment followed a meeting of the Communist Party’s Politburo, where policymakers acknowledged mounting economic challenges but signaled confidence that existing fiscal resources would be sufficient to stabilize growth through the remainder of the year.
Rather than introducing fresh stimulus packages, Beijing plans to speed up implementation of projects that have already been budgeted. Analysts said the government still has significant fiscal room because infrastructure spending and bond issuance progressed more slowly than planned during the first half of the year.
Economists expect much of the spending to focus on China’s “six networks” initiative, covering investments in water systems, logistics infrastructure, underground pipelines, electricity grids, telecommunications and computing power centers. State media has previously indicated that roughly $1 trillion has been allocated for these projects.
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Analysts viewed the Politburo’s statement as confirmation that Beijing intends to support growth without significantly expanding its fiscal deficit.
Chinese leaders continue to avoid aggressive stimulus partly because they remain focused on tackling industrial overcapacity and encouraging local governments to maintain fiscal discipline.
The Politburo reiterated its commitment to addressing what it described as “involution competition”—a term referring to intense price wars among manufacturers competing for market share at the expense of profitability. While many economists argue that excess industrial capacity is driving these price wars, Beijing continues to reject claims that overcapacity is a structural problem.
Although manufacturing exports and advances in artificial intelligence have supported parts of the economy, domestic consumption remains weak.
China’s prolonged property downturn, sluggish wage growth and a challenging labor market have reduced household confidence. Millions of workers have shifted into lower-paying gig economy jobs with limited social protections, encouraging higher savings rather than consumer spending.
This imbalance has increased China’s reliance on exports to sustain growth, raising concerns among trading partners that Chinese manufacturers are flooding global markets while domestic demand remains subdued.
The Politburo pledged to strengthen domestic demand by expanding employment support, particularly for flexible workers and those in newer forms of employment. However, officials did not announce specific policies aimed at boosting household incomes.
Economists noted that while Beijing continues to emphasize consumption, its strategy remains focused on improving the supply of goods and services rather than directly increasing consumer purchasing power through large-scale income support or cash stimulus.
The latest policy signals suggest Beijing is seeking to balance economic stability with long-term structural reforms. Rather than relying on broad stimulus, China’s leadership is betting that faster implementation of existing infrastructure investments and targeted employment measures will be enough to keep the economy on track while avoiding a surge in debt and further industrial overcapacity.
With information from Reuters.
Deadly clashes reported in Pakistan-administered Kashmir amid first round of voting for regional elections on July 27.
Published On 30 Jul 202630 Jul 2026
Watchdogs have raised concerns over mounting reports of deadly clashes during regional elections in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, where a banned activist group has boycotted the vote and staged protests.
The clashes between police and protesters earlier this week killed more than 30 people in the region, according to the leaders of the Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC).
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In a video statement on Wednesday shared by Arab News Pakistan, JAAC committee member Sardar Umar Nazir claimed 20 of the group’s supporters had been killed during a march on Monday, when the first round of voting took place.
He listed reports of at least 10 other protesters being killed the following day in the towns of Rawalakot, Mirpur and elsewhere, including during sit-ins.
“Our demand was peaceful, it was peaceful, we tried to keep it non-violent and bullets were fired at it,” said Nazir in the video statement.
Pakistani authorities said a member of the security personnel was killed and five more were injured in clashes on Monday.
Rights group Amnesty International called the reports of lethal force against protesters in the area “disturbing” and urged an investigation.
Pear Pandya, a senior analyst at conflict monitor ACLED, said the violence in Pakistan-administered Kashmir “is bound to overshadow the legitimacy of the entire electoral exercise”.
Monday’s first-round vote – covering the districts of Mirpur, Kotli and Bhimber – will be followed by two more rounds on August 2 and August 10.
Pakistan’s primary governing party, the PML-N, won nine out of the 13 seats that were up for election on Monday.
JAAC was banned by the local government under “anti-terrorism laws” in June, causing deadly protests to erupt in Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
Banking, roads and internet services have largely been disrupted since then, hindering the flow of information.
Pakistani officials have justified the crackdown by alleging that armed and India-backed fighters joined the Kashmiri protesters. India has rejected similar accusations in the past.
Amnesty has called the ban on JAAC unlawful and said it does not provide justification for authorities to “mete out deadly violence against protesters”.
The rights group has also urged Pakistani authorities to ”restore all communications access and allow media and independent observers into the area”, its acting regional director for South Asia, Isabelle Lassee, said.
One of JAAC’s central demands regarding the regional elections is the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.
JAAC supporters say the seats are used by major Pakistani political parties to tip the composition of the local parliament in their favour with those who mostly live outside the region.
To form a regional government, the PML-N would likely need the support of some of the 12 representatives, said Hasan Askari, a political analyst.
“But when their government is dependent on those 12 controversial seats, how would it be able to find a solution for this issue?” Askari told the Reuters news agency.
Even among the candidates that did not boycott the vote on Monday, the results were contested. Parties accused each other of ballot box stealing and vote rigging.
Footage shows tens of thousands of Hindu devotees bathing in India’s Ganga and Saryu rivers to mark the sacred festival of Guru Purnima. They’ve flocked to northern India’s holy cities to offer prayers, pay tribute and seek blessings.
Published On 29 Jul 202629 Jul 2026
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An Indian student from Bihar says he has been charged over ‘Cockroach’ protests despite being in Russia for the last four months. Hundreds of students across India have faced arrest for participating in the youth-led demonstrations.
Published On 29 Jul 202629 Jul 2026
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West Indies take a 1-0 lead in the two-Test series after Jayden Seales dominates with the ball on day 4 in Trinidad.
Published On 29 Jul 202629 Jul 2026
Paceman Jayden Seales claimed his fourth five-wicket haul to bowl the West Indies to a 90-run victory over Pakistan in the opening Test match in Tarouba, Trinidad and Tobago.
After eking out a 29-run first-innings lead, the West Indies made 181 in their second innings to set Pakistan a target of 211 on Tuesday, the fourth day of play.
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Seales (5-20) and his pace colleagues returned to produce a superb fast-bowling display at the Brian Lara Stadium, routing Pakistan for 120 in a little over 40 overs, with one day of play remaining.
Pakistan captain Babar Azam made an unbeaten 58 and combined with number 11 Mohammad Abbas (23) in a brief resistance, but the West Indies’ victory appeared a formality after the tourists slumped to 71-9.
Pakistan number three Shan Masood, who fractured his finger during his first-innings knock of 109, batted at number eight in the second innings. He made three before Seales dismissed him.
Captain Roston Chase dedicated the victory to West Indies great Garry Sobers, who died earlier this month.
“We wanted to make him proud and had a chat about it before the match. I hope he is smiling down on us,” Chase said afterwards.
“I love the direction this team is heading. We’re not relying on one or two players; everyone is chipping in at crucial moments.”
Babar said Pakistan’s lack of partnerships proved costly.
“Today, as a batting unit, we weren’t up to the mark. We kept losing wickets back-to-back, and the batting failed. That’s something we’re working on,” he said.
The second and final Test match in Port of Spain begins on Sunday.
The recent uprising of the youth in India might seem to have subsided after forcing Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister of India, to resign. Still, he was never the true target of this historic youth revolt. The slogans, the placards, the irreverent digital art and the collective anger of the young were directed at one man alone: Narendra Modi.
There exists a pervasive prejudice among the intelligentsia that young Indians today are politically indifferent, consumerist and unconcerned with politics or the erosion of democratic norms. The events at Jantar Mantar have laid bare the shallowness of this assumption. The young harboured no illusions about the nature of this regime. They understood with absolute clarity that in the present constitutional setup, no minister possesses independent agency.
The Indian state today has been reduced to a single face, a single voice and an unyielding hub of authority: Narendra Modi. To demand the resignation of a minister, therefore, was not an administrative plea; it was a deliberate act to compel the supreme leader himself to yield.
Walking through Jantar Mantar, the protest site in central Delhi, occupied by thousands of young people for weeks, one could not escape this truth. What these young people achieved was nothing short of the iconoclasm of our times: the systematic demolition of the carefully curated, mythic public persona that this regime has spent a decade building as the sole visage of the nation.
What was most remarkable about this uprising was its radical decentralisation.
There were no high-budget, professionally printed banners. There was no vanguard organisation dictating the visual language of the protest or distributing uniform slogans for the benefit of television cameras. Scraps of cardboard, discarded paper and cheap marker pens sufficed. Each placard bore the unmistakable, authentic imprint of individual moral agency.
Yet, beneath this extraordinary heterogeneity, there remained an unwavering thematic unity.
Everything revolved around Modi.
The prime minister was mocked, caricatured and systematically stripped of the sacral aura that had been constructed around him for more than 10 years. In a matter of weeks, this generation transformed an imposing figure of state authority into a subject of collective laughter.
The young were outraged, above all, by the sheer, unbridled arrogance of power.
This uprising did not spring from material grievances alone; it arose from a profound sense of humiliation. The immediate symbolic spark was the deeply insensitive remark made by the chief justice of India, who publicly compared unemployed young people to “cockroaches”.
Coming after years in which the higher judiciary has increasingly appeared less like an independent guardian of the Constitution and more like an extension of executive power, the remark was understood as an articulation of the regime’s own contempt for its youth.
The formation of the “Cockroach Janta Party” (CJP) was an act of counter-humour born of deep injury. The already unfolding scandal over irregularities in the NEET examinations provided the movement with a concrete institutional focal point. The scandal became the occasion to demand accountability not just for a single test, but for an entire culture of governance.
The regime, meanwhile, suffered from its own hubris. It had persuaded itself that Indian society was thoroughly managed. Preoccupied with engineering electoral outcomes through the manipulation of rolls, managing parliamentary majorities through party defections, and consolidating its hold over state institutions, it failed to notice the quiet, gathering storm beneath the surface.
Those who possessed platforms, prestige and the power to shape public discourse were engrossed in celebrating the grand narrative of national glory. Television studios debated the nation’s civilisational destiny and its global standing. The mainstream press sang panegyrics to a “New India”. Scarcely anyone looked towards the young who found every avenue of mobility blocked. Their anxieties were rendered invisible because the state and its allied media did not consider them worthy of serious democratic attention.
Deprived of traditional spaces, they constructed their own. Their smartphones became their public square; social media platforms became their political assemblies; and satire became their primary democratic vocabulary.
The ruling ideology had convinced itself that the project of cultural hegemonisation was complete: once the majority was mobilised around a politics of religious identity and grievance against minorities, material realities would cease to matter. The aspirations, anxieties and dignity of an entire generation simply did not figure in this political imagination.
It was against this backdrop of institutional indifference that Sonam Wangchuk began his fast at Jantar Mantar. The government’s initial response was its standard weapon: calculated silence. As Wangchuk’s health deteriorated, the refusal to even acknowledge his presence generated profound moral outrage. Then came the fateful decision to forcibly remove him.
It proved to be a fatal miscalculation. The young perceived the treatment of Wangchuk as an insult to their own citizenship. What was done to him could be done to anyone who dared to stand up. His humiliation became their collective provocation. The response was immediate: Jantar Mantar was flooded by thousands of young bodies.
When the young marched towards parliament on July 20, the state relied on its familiar playbook: barricades, prohibitory orders and violent suppression. It had deployed these very methods against the anti-CAA protesters and the farmers’ movement. But this time, the internal mechanics of fear failed to operate. The blows they received did not shatter their spirit; they deepened their moral clarity.
Their struggle was not merely about securing a policy change or extracting a routine administrative concession. They set out to breach that institutional arrogance. When the Delhi police rained blows on the protesters on July 20, beating young citizens with a ferocity typically reserved for enemy combatants, the protesters did not view those batons as the instruments of an indifferent police force. They recognised them as the direct expression of Narendra Modi’s political will.
Yet, fear failed to perform its intended historic function. Many returned to Jantar Mantar carrying their wounds like badges of honour. Some returned barefoot. Their injuries became symbols of moral persistence rather than reasons for retreat. Their resolve was remarkably simple: they would force Modi to sacrifice one of his own.
Crucially, the protesters refused to yield to the temptation of violence. Their weapons remained language, images and satire. Armed with their phones, they launched an unrelenting assault on the prime minister’s public image, the very asset he has guarded most fiercely throughout his political life. For the first time, Modi was drawn onto a battleground where he could not dictate the rules.
When the prime minister attempted to intervene directly on social media, addressing the youth as “friends”, the rebuttal was instant and devastating:
“We are not your friends.”
It was more than a clever slogan; it marked the psychological collapse of a carefully cultivated paternalistic relationship. For years, Modi had sought to speak directly to the populace, bypassing mediating institutions and independent media. The young rejected that calculated intimacy in a single sentence. The authority of the patriarch dissolved into the irreverence that a free people reserve for their elected officials. The spell of fear was broken.
The assault on Modi’s public image appears to have shaken the regime far more deeply than any routine electoral setback ever could. For more than a decade, his authority has rested not merely on the coercive power of the state, but on the illusion of invulnerability: an image of a leader who never retreats, never admits error and never compromises.
The movement had to be contained before the satire hardened into permanent collective memory and the laughter of the young became the common language of the republic.
Pradhan’s resignation must be read precisely in this light. It is not the sacrifice of a minister; it is a desperate attempt to construct a firewall around the prime minister himself. The government will undoubtedly frame this as evidence of its responsiveness and democratic sensitivity. But the young understand it differently. For them, the resignation is a political concession extracted from an authority that had run out of options.
Before arriving at this point, the state had exhausted its standard repertoire of delegitimisation. It ignored the movement, questioned its motives, accused the youth of being proxies for opposition parties and deployed its media networks to allege foreign plots. When these slurs failed to stick, it resorted to force. Having endured all of this, the young do not view the minister’s exit as an act of state benevolence; they see it as the reluctant admission of a defeat that could no longer be disguised.
Ordinarily, the vocabulary of victory and defeat should not dominate a constitutional democracy. A government is expected to listen to its citizens, not view them as adversaries to be crushed. Dissent is not treason. But when a state consistently treats criticism as hostility and peaceful protesters as enemies of the state, it transforms democratic dialogue into a confrontation. When that happens, it cannot complain if citizens celebrate its retreat as a democratic victory.
The ultimate significance of this movement lies in its moral and creative form. The young answered state coercion with speech, wit, art and an extraordinary mastery of contemporary cultural forms. Their elders have often lamented that a generation raised on short-form content lacks political depth and endurance. Jantar Mantar has demolished that patronising assumption.
The meme was elevated to a potent instrument of political resistance. Laughter accomplished what solemn political rhetoric often fails to do: it punctured fear, dismantled false authority and deprived power of the uncritical reverence upon which authoritarian politics depends.
Authoritarianism requires not just obedience, but awe. It survives as long as people believe the ruler is beyond challenge, beyond satire and beyond defeat. The young at Jantar Mantar refused to grant Narendra Modi that sacral status. They restored him to the position he must occupy in a constitutional republic: an ordinary, accountable political leader, subject to the scrutiny, criticism and satire of the citizenry.
The protest site at Jantar Mantar may now be empty. The barricades have been moved aside and the crowds have returned to their hostels, campuses and homes. But movements of this nature do not end when the physical space is vacated. The critique inaugurated on the streets will continue in countless quiet spaces: university libraries, rented rooms, bus rides and millions of illuminated screens. The language that has been discovered cannot easily be unlearned.
If this youth uprising leaves behind an enduring lesson for the republic, it is a simple, fundamental truth: democracy begins the moment a people recover confidence in their own voice.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Football’s world governing body announces plans to sell stakes of up to 20 percent in the World Cup and other events.
Published On 29 Jul 202629 Jul 2026
FIFA has proposed a plan to sell stakes in the World Cup and other events to private investors, provoking a furious response from the European football governing body, UEFA.
Under the plans announced by FIFA on Tuesday, a $20bn subsidiary would be created to run the World Cup and other events.
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World football’s governing body said it would retain a majority share in the new FIFA Forward Enterprise, offering minority stakes to external investment to raise up to $4.2bn.
The plan still needs to be voted on by FIFA’s 211 member nations.
If successful, the proposed investor group is expected to be led by a vehicle founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, FIFA said.
UEFA said the proposal “crosses a line that football’s governing institutions should never cross”.
FIFA has just held a 48-team World Cup across the United States, Canada and Mexico – the biggest in the tournament’s history.
It is one of the world’s wealthiest sporting organisations, generating billions of dollars, largely from broadcasting rights, sponsorship and other commercial deals linked to the World Cup.
But it says this proposal can increase funds to widen access to the sport and strengthen global participation, with all net benefits to be reinvested in football.
“Football is the world’s most popular sport,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement.
“Parts of the game have turned that popularity into remarkable commercial value – and we celebrate that success and want it to continue, because it lifts the whole game.
“Our job is to make sure the rest of football grows with it: FIFA exists to support sustainable, inclusive development in every corner of the world.”
FIFA said that in addition to retaining sole control of the subsidiary, it would retain authority over football governance, competitions, match calendars and regulatory and sporting decisions.
The proposal deepens the divide between FIFA and UEFA, with Europe positioning itself as football’s custodian, while FIFA, a not-for-profit organisation, says it is focused on broadening access with financial largesse.
In a statement, UEFA said it takes the new proposals “extremely seriously”.
“So should every National Football Association. So should every stakeholder: leagues, clubs, players, supporters, governments and everyone who cares about the future of the game.
“The soul and governance of football are not assets to trade – especially with zero transparency as to who gains financially. None of us are the owners of football. It is not FIFA’s to sell.”
The United Kingdom’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, joined critics, saying on social media that the sport does not belong to investors.
“The World Cup is not a product. It is the greatest competition in world sport, and it was never anyone’s to sell,” Burnham wrote on X.
“Dress the deal up however you like. Once you have sold a piece of it, you have sold out.”
As the FIFA World Cup 2026 reached its final week, Gourav Roy, an Indian software engineer living in San Francisco, drove more than 9,650 kilometres (6,000 miles) across the United States to attend both the semifinals and the final.
For Roy, it was the next best thing to what he had grown up dreaming of: seeing India play in the World Cup.
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But the possibility of that dream coming true is looking ever more distant as deep-rooted systemic issues and the failure to implement reforms have left the country of 1.45 billion ranked a lowly 138th in the world, failing to even qualify for the 2027 Asian Cup.
“I’ve learned to love without expectation. That’s the burden of the Indian football fan,” said Roy.
While countries with tiny populations like Curacao and Cape Verde qualified for the 2026 World Cup, India remains a prime example of wasted potential in the planet’s most popular sport.
Those working in Indian football say the problems range from poor youth development systems, a lack of popularity, and a national federation (the All India Football Federation) struggling to implement a uniform vision with a loose patchwork of state associations.
“If you ask me, to clean up the system and reorganise it will take a full cycle of four years,” Ravi Puskur, the CEO of Indian Super League (ISL) club FC Goa, told Reuters.
“Then it’s another 20-25 years to get us to the World Cup.”
In cricket-mad India, football remains popular only in a handful of states like West Bengal, Goa, Kerala, Mizoram and Manipur.
The ISL, launched in 2014 with the backing of Reliance Industries, one of India’s biggest conglomerates, tried to change that with limited success.
In 2025, the AIFF and Reliance did not renew their partnership as negotiations stalled amid a Supreme Court case to implement a new constitution for the federation.
This year, under new management led by clubs, the ISL is yet to finalise a broadcaster and announce fixtures.
NorthEast United CEO Mandar Tamhane, who previously led Bengaluru FC, said clubs alone cannot fix Indian football.
“You’re talking about the government, corporate India… it has to be a collective effort,” he said.
“The federation has to make sure the clubs, state associations, the corporates and other stakeholders all work together.”
AIFF executive committee member and Mizoram’s sports minister Lalnghinglova Hmar said the government can help with infrastructure, but for Indian football to improve, the country’s youth development system needs a drastic overhaul.
“In South Korea and Japan, kids play over 40 competitive matches per season. This is missing in India,” he said.
“We start developing players too late. Most under-15 players get only 12 to 15 competitive games yearly. Some get called up to the youth national camp after playing less than 20 competitive games.
“We’re short on qualified coaches. Many states don’t even have a youth league… we just can’t compete like that.”
But India’s size, the very thing that makes it an attractive sports market and led to the huge success of cricket’s Indian Premier League, also makes it difficult for the AIFF to implement widespread reforms.
“If even half the states were doing a proper job at grassroots, things would grow,” Hmar added.
The uncertainty over the ISL, which forced some teams to suspend player salaries last year, also dealt a blow to the clubs’ development programmes.
“If you can provide stability, gradually the investment will increase,” Puskur said.
With India bidding to host the 2036 Olympics, the government is considering the launch of a “sports passport” that allows Indian-origin athletes to represent the country.
The AIFF leadership has backed the initiative, believing it will help improve the national team’s performances. But the proposal is still far from becoming law, and Hmar said Indian football needs to act fast.
“The other nations aren’t sitting idle… if we don’t match them, even if we improve, we will remain where we are,” he said.
While Indian football hangs in limbo, fans like Roy can only live in hope.
“They are talking about a 64-team World Cup,” he said. “It won’t gift us anything, but more places mean more hope.”
THE most beautiful buildings in the entire world have been named and one surprising estate from the UK has made the list.
However, if you want to visit the pretty British attraction book to go as soon as possible is set to close for a multi-million pound revamp.
The Barbican in London has taken second place to India‘s grand Taj Mahal as Time Out’s 26 ‘most beautiful buildings’ to see in 2026.
The free-to-visit landmark attracts over a million visitors each year and is set to undergo a huge upgrade to save it falling into disrepair.
At the estimated cost of £231million, The Barbican will upgrade its indoor rainforest in its Conservatory which is home to 1,500 species of plant.
Also included in the plans is to protect Barbican’s brutalist foyers and lakeside terrace.
Outside in the courtyard, the pond will be revamped to stop water leaking onto the Metropolitan Line below – there will be new fountains and seating outside too.
The visitor destination is already free to visit, and this will continue once the revamp is complete.
The refurbishment project is set to start in 2028 when it will close until 2029.
The Barbican was pipped to the post by the Taj Mahal, a picture-perfect landmark in India built in the 1600s – it’s not hard to see why it got top spot.
Coming in third place was the Hallgrímskirkja in Iceland which is a church standing at 244 feet.
Not only is it a place of worship, but it has an observation tower where visitors can get incredible city views.
In Europe, other honourable mentions go to the Sagrada Familia in Spain which is very near completion after 140 years.
The outside of Gaudi’s basilica was completed in February, but there is some work still to do before it’s officially finished.
The Twist in Norway came in twelfth position and is a spectacular art gallery that is also used as a bridge.
It’s part of the Kistefos Sculpture Park and sits across the Ranselva River.
Another UK building did make the list coming in at number 21 – and it’s the Maggie’s Centre at St James’s Hospital in London.
The publication described it as having “mushroom-shaped forms grow from the floors to form the tiered roofs, and the stems are deep enough to contain loos and lifts.
“The space is decorated with mostly natural materials – think cork-topped tables, resin floors and cascading potted plants.”
Some more classic monuments and structures on the list include The Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the Pantheon in Italy and Ad-Dayr in Petra, Jordan.
Colombia‘s impressive Santuario de Las Lajas comes in at number 19.
The enormous basilica sits on a bridge over the Guáitara River – it has been a pilgrimage destination since the eighteenth century and now gets up to 900,000 visitors each year.
Rampur, India – More than 100 people sit cross-legged on mats, braving the brutal July heat, as they raise slogans and wave the national flag in a north Indian town.
Barely 200km (132 miles) from the capital, New Delhi, where thousands of youths demanding education reforms just forced a minister to resign, a group of students, alumni and residents are holding an indefinite sit-in to oppose the planned demolition of 38 of Mohammad Ali Jauhar University’s 40 buildings.
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Named after a freedom fighter who fought against British rule, the university was founded by prominent Muslim politician Azam Khan in Rampur district of Uttar Pradesh state. Khan established the Mohammad Ali Jauhar Trust in 2003, which oversaw the university’s establishment three years later.
On July 15, when protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) – a youth movement born out of a joke – were at their peak, the Rampur district administration issued an order to demolish most of the university’s buildings, alleging they flouted regulatory guidelines.
Only two structures, including a proposed medical college block, were built with valid approvals, the authorities claimed, as they ordered the university to take down the “illegal” buildings by August 5. If they failed to do so, the authorities said they will move in with bulldozers and recover the cost of the demolition from the university.
On Monday, the state administration issued an interim stay on its order, but did not explicitly state whether the demolition was halted.
Jauhar University’s vice chancellor, Zaheeruddin, told Al Jazeera the stay order does not mean the demolition has been called off.
“It means that the demolition will not take place by the August 5 deadline set by the RDA. The university is now seeking a verdict that quashes the demolition order outright,” he said, using the acronym for Rampur Development Authority.
For nearly 3,000 students pursuing dozens of courses at the 250-acre campus, the government move is a bolt from the blue.
Since July 15, a group of university students and alumni has been sitting outside its main gate, demanding the withdrawal of the demolition order.
“If a [federal] minister can be forced to resign following the CJP protest, why can’t the Uttar Pradesh government be forced to stop the demolition of the university when so many students are agitating here,” asked Usama Tayyab, who graduated from Jauhar University in 2019.
Uttar Pradesh – home to about 240 million people – has been governed by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2017. The state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, is a saffron-clad hardline Hindu monk, known for his anti-Muslim hate speech and policies.
Khan, the 77-year-old founder and lifelong chancellor of the university, had been one of the most stringent critics of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh. He is one of the founders of the Samajwadi Party (“samajwadi” means socialist in Hindi), a political group popular among the state’s 38 million Muslims, as well as a large majority of its underprivileged caste Hindu voters.
Khan studied law in the 1970s at the Aligarh Muslim University, India’s largest minority institution, about 160km (100 miles) from Rampur. At Aligarh, he made a mark as a fiery student leader, and later as a politician who took on a former royal family, which for decades had dominated the politics in Rampur, a district with nearly 50 percent Muslims, according to the last census conducted in 2011.
He joined electoral politics in 1980 and represented Rampur in the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Assembly for 10 terms, also serving as a minister in several state governments and as leader of the opposition. He was also elected to the lower house of Indian Parliament from Rampur and sent to the upper house later by his party. In 2003, he established a Mohammad Ali Jauhar Trust, which oversaw the establishment of the university three years later, and cemented his position as one of the most prominent Muslim leaders in northern India.
And that brought him into the crosshairs of the BJP.
Shortly after coming to power in 2017, Adityanath’s government filed nearly 100 cases against Khan, charging him with landgrab, forgery and hate speech. Dozens of those cases against him relate to Jauhar University.
Khan spent more than two years in jail before the Supreme Court granted him bail in 2022. The next year, a court in Rampur convicted him, his wife Tazeen Fatima and their son Abdullah Azam Khan, also a former legislator, of using forged birth certificates.
He is currently serving a two-year sentence handed down in May this year for making “provocative remarks” during the 2019 general elections, alongside his conviction in a separate case related to a fake income tax document.
Supporters say the cases against Khan and his family are politically motivated. The state government denies the allegation.
Samajwadi Party MP Javed Ali Khan, unrelated to Azam Khan, told Al Jazeera the Jauhar University demolition order was “vendetta politics by a ruling dispensation opposed to education and intent on keeping people illiterate”.
“There are many reasons why this university is being targeted. First, it was founded by Azam Khan. Second, its foundation stone was laid by Mulayam Singh, the Samajwadi Party patriarch. Third, it was inaugurated by Akhilesh Yadav, the former chief minister of the state. And fourth, it is a minority university,” he said.
Mulayam Singh Yadav, the main founder of the Samajwadi Party, died in 2022. His son Akhilesh now heads the party and is a member of the anti-BJP coalition that includes the Indian National Congress, India’s main opposition party.
BJP spokesman Rakesh Tripathi said the demolition order is “in line with legal procedures against illegal construction”, and accused the Samajwadi Party of playing “appeasement politics”.
“Can anyone deny that Azam Khan built this university on illegal land? He used his position and power during the Samajwadi Party government to construct this university on illegal land and erect illegal buildings. What we are doing is simply following the law on illegal construction, and that means the university should be demolished,” Tripathi told Al Jazeera.
But anger over the imminent demolition of Rampur’s only full-fledged university is growing. The district is ahead of only four among Uttar Pradesh’s 75 districts in terms of literacy rate, according to the 2011 census.
Also, nearly half of the students at Jauhar University are females, according to chief proctor, Gulrez Nizami.
Iqra, a fifth-year law student who goes by only one name, told Al Jazeera she had chosen the university for a reason.
“Our parents were satisfied with the atmosphere here, and with the safety it offers to women students over other universities,” she said.
“If this university is demolished, girls like us will never get another chance to study anywhere else. Our parents will not be convinced to send us elsewhere. They chose this place because they believed Muslim girls were safe here,” Iqra said.
Iqra said the government is running a counselling camp to advise the students on joining another college or university to continue their education. “But we don’t want to go there. We chose this institution for a reason,” she said.
And it is not just Muslims who are protesting against the university’s planned demolition – more than a third of its students are Hindus.
“They may call it a Muslim university, and yes, it is indeed a minority university by legal status, but that does not mean others do not study here,” Chandni Diwakar, a first-year paramedical student, told Al Jazeera.
“I have been a part of the university for the past year and have never once felt like a non-Muslim in a minority university. Everyone here is friendly, teachers and students alike,” she said at the sit-in site.
The RDA says its action follows a report by a regional officer who flagged the alleged violations. A meeting with lawyers representing both the university and the RDA was held on July 15.
“They were given notice, and they have since given a written response. Out of the 40 buildings constructed at Jauhar University, only two were considered acceptable. The other 38 were proven invalid,” Ajay Kumar Dwivedi, district magistrate and RDA vice chairperson, told reporters on July 15.
But Vice Chancellor Zaheeruddin dismissed the charge, claiming the institution located in Rampur’s Singankhera village came under RDA jurisdiction only in September 2024, years after the buildings were constructed.
Approval, added Zaheeruddin, was therefore not required at the time of construction and cannot be demanded now.
“There was no RDA jurisdiction in Singankhera at the time the university was formed. We are running courses approved by different government bodies, which grant approval only once we meet all their criteria,” he told Al Jazeera, calling the RDA’s move a violation of the constitutional right to education.
“They are simply using this as a tool against the visionary Azam Khan, who created this university for the upliftment of the minorities, the poor, and the underprivileged,” he said.
But the officials say the alleged violations cannot be regularised under the existing laws, leaving demolition as the only legal remedy.
Al Jazeera made repeated attempts to contact Dwivedi for his comments and even visited his office in Rampur. But he declined to meet or respond to requests for an interview.
The university has challenged the RDA order as protests grow on campus.
“If others can achieve results through a peaceful protest, why can’t we, as Muslim students, achieve our legitimate goal of stopping the demolition of our university? If this requires sacrifice, we are willing to give it. But we will not accept this injustice against us any longer,” Usman Ali, a law graduate from the university, told Al Jazeera.
He alleged that police are visiting the homes of students on strike to pressure their families into calling off their protest. “Police are coming to our houses and threatening our parents with consequences, but we will not back down.”
On Sunday, the protesters were joined by a delegation of Samajwadi Party parliamentarians, including Javed Ali Khan, Ziaur Rahman Barq of Sambhal and Iqra Choudhary of Kairana.
“There are multiple dimensions to it [demolition]. One, it was meant to create a spectacle out of confronting powerful Muslims in front of its Hindu voters. Second, there has been a sustained campaign throughout this government’s tenure against minority institutions. And third, it does not want mingling between Hindus and Muslims, of which universities are a stronghold,” Apoorvanand, a teacher of Hindi literature at the University of Delhi who goes by a single name, told Al Jazeera.
Since 2014, when BJP’s Narendra Modi became prime minister, India has seen a spike in demolitions of homes, mosques, shops and other properties in a pattern that rights groups say disproportionately affects Muslims. Authorities claim they are targeting “illegal encroachments”.
Back in Rampur, Abdul Kaleem Ansari, another Jauhar University graduate, draws a parallel between their protest and the CJP movement that forced India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign over a series of examination paper leaks.
Ansari, who attended both, said he was surprised that calls for education reforms, which drove the “Cockroach” protesters to the streets, do not include the imminent demolition of a full-fledged university as part of their agenda.
“It is astonishing that they are talking about education reforms, but saying nothing about the demolition notice served to Jauhar University, a minority university situated just a few hundred kilometres from Delhi,” he said.
“The futures of all its students and alumni are at stake, and we do not know where to go from here.”
An Indian police officer has been suspended after firing an AK-47 rifle at students protesting over leaked exam papers. The protests, which led to the education minister’s resignation, have sparked accusations of excessive police force.
Published On 27 Jul 202627 Jul 2026
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Islamabad, Pakistan – Pakistan-administered Kashmir, formally known as Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), has spent the summer under an unofficial state of emergency.
Since early June, nearly 40 people have been killed in clashes between protesters and security forces, with sit-ins and road blockades regular features in the region over this period.
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Banks remained shut for two weeks. Mobile and internet services remain suspended across most of the territory. Poonch division, which borders India and has been the epicentre of the unrest, was effectively sealed off for weeks, disrupting the supply of flour and other essentials to a region that depends heavily on them.
The Jammu Kashmir Joint Awami Action Committee (JAAC), the movement behind the protests, was banned by the local government on June 5, days before a planned demonstration.
Its leadership has since been arrested, has gone underground or has continued organising from sit-in camps in Rawalakot, the administrative headquarters of Poonch division.
Its demands, once centred on subsidised flour and cheaper electricity, have expanded to 38 points, chief among them the abolition of 12 assembly seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees.
All of this is unfolding as the region prepares to vote. Elections for the 45-seat Legislative Assembly, originally scheduled for July 27, have been split across three dates.
Mirpur division votes as planned, Muzaffarabad division and the 12 seats reserved for Kashmiri refugees follow on August 2, while Poonch division, where tensions remain highest, goes to the polls on August 10.
JAAC’s leadership is not on the ballot and has urged supporters to boycott the vote.
Of all the movement’s demands, one issue has proved impossible to resolve: the 12 refugee seats. The government says they cannot be touched without a constitutional amendment. JAAC wants them abolished outright.
Between those two positions lies a legal argument stretching back nearly a century, and a more fundamental question: who gets to decide who governs Muzaffarabad?
Of the AJK Legislative Assembly’s 45 elected seats, 33 are filled from constituencies within the territory.
The remaining 12 are reserved for refugees from Indian-administered Kashmir who now live in different parts of Pakistan.
The arrangement traces its roots to electoral arrangements introduced in 1960, reinforced through laws in 1964 and 1970, before being formalised in AJK’s 1974 Interim Constitution and reaffirmed by the constitution’s 13th Amendment in 2018.
Chaudhry Muhammad Ibrahim Zia, a former chief justice of the AJK Supreme Court, said the basis for the seats goes back further still, to the AJK government’s founding declaration of October 24, 1947, which he said reflected “the collective will of the people of the State of Jammu and Kashmir”.
Refugee representation, he told Al Jazeera, has “a firm historical basis” rooted in that document. He rejects any suggestion that the seats are unconstitutional.
“They have both historical grounding and constitutional support,” he said. “These seats cannot be described as unconstitutional.”
Pakistan-administered Kashmir’s electorate has grown from 3.2 million voters in 2021 to more than 3.8 million this year, according to Election Commission figures.
Within that, the 12 refugee constituencies account for roughly 439,000 registered voters, scattered across cities including Lahore, Rawalpindi and Sialkot, rather than concentrated in a single geographical area like AJK’s territorial constituencies.
And that’s a problem, says Kashif Abbasi, a JAAC committee member.
“This election is meant for people who actually live in AJK,” he told Al Jazeera. “These 12 seats sit outside AJK’s jurisdiction. This doesn’t happen anywhere else.”
JAAC’s demands were not always centred on the refugee seats. Its original charter was almost entirely economic, focusing on subsidised flour, electricity at cost price, and a share in the benefits from the Mangla and Neelum-Jhelum hydropower projects.
The refugee seats first appeared in the group’s expanded charter, submitted in October 2025.
Even then, JAAC did not initially seek their outright abolition. In written proposals submitted on May 30 this year, the group offered two alternatives.
It proposed retaining symbolic refugee representation until the Kashmir dispute is permanently resolved or replacing the 12 assembly seats with four seats in the AJK Council, the Islamabad-chaired body that exercises legislative authority over AJK’s federal-facing affairs.
The 14-member council, chaired by Pakistan’s prime minister, oversees subjects including electricity, banking and parts of taxation, areas that largely fall outside the AJK assembly’s authority. The territory has no representation in Pakistan’s national parliament.
“Our suggestion was that these seat-holders should instead be given representation on the Kashmir Council, and that their assembly seats be eliminated, with that money used elsewhere in the territory,” Khawaja Mehran, a member of JAAC’s core committee, told Al Jazeera recently.
Both proposals were rejected at an All-Parties Conference in Muzaffarabad on June 3.
In June, the AJK Supreme Court addressed the issue directly.
The court held that the seats are protected under AJK’s constitution and can only be abolished through a formal constitutional amendment. They cannot be removed through executive action or public pressure.
A constitutional amendment, the judges wrote, is “a solemn constitutional act, not a concession to be wrested from a government under duress”.
Zia, the former AJK chief justice, said the opinion changed little about the existing legal position.
“These seats simply cannot be abolished without a proper constitutional process,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that, with the outgoing assembly’s term having ended, no such process is possible until a new legislature is elected.
Abdul Majid Khan, AJK’s former finance minister and himself from a refugee family, rejects the idea that the seat holders form an unaccountable political bloc.
He points instead to the size of the territory’s budget. AJK’s roughly 310 billion rupees (about $1.1bn) budget last year, he said, far exceeds the development funds allocated to the 12 refugee constituencies – nowhere near enough, in his view, to make them the powerful bloc JAAC describes.
“These are people who migrated for a larger cause,” Khan told Al Jazeera, referring to Kashmiris who fled Jammu, across the border, during the violence of 1947 following the partition of the subcontinent and settled across Pakistan in the decades that followed.
Refugee representation, he said, has existed since AJK’s first parliamentary election in 1975, when the territory’s first prime minister was himself from a refugee family.
At the June 3 conference that rejected JAAC’s proposals, AJK Prime Minister Faisal Mumtaz Rathore said any decision on the seats “can only be taken by the elected representatives in the House”, adding that most of JAAC’s other demands had already been met.
Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif told the National Assembly on June 11 that the future of the 12 refugee seats should be decided by voters, not under pressure from street protests.
He urged JAAC to contest the issue in the election rather than demand its resolution beforehand, asking: “How could you exclude them from the electoral process?”
A senior government official in Poonch, whose division has witnessed the worst of the unrest, took an even harder line.
“This is no longer a rights movement,” the official told Al Jazeera, requesting anonymity since he was not allowed to speak to the media, adding that the protesters were not only “challenging the authority of the state”, but also provoking the public through “inflammatory speeches and actions”.
In mid-July, JAAC leader Umar Nazir Kashmiri told supporters at a sit-in in Rawalakot, Poonch division, that the group had written directly to army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir after concluding that its concerns were not reaching him “through official channels”.
He thanked Munir by name for “understanding the grievances of the people of Kashmir”.
Shaheen was more direct. “We believe real authority currently sits with Rawalpindi,” he told Al Jazeera, referring to Pakistan’s military establishment rather than the civilian government. “That’s why we’re forced to negotiate through that channel, since nobody else actually holds the authority.”
Ershad Mahmud, a Canada-based researcher on Kashmiri displacement and politics, said that “Islamabad’s bureaucracy, military and intelligence establishment have reduced AJK’s elected leadership to a largely symbolic role”.
The current crisis, he told Al Jazeera, has once again shown that the local leadership “lacks the authority to negotiate a political settlement with its own people”.
The dispute over the refugee seats is unfolding within a framework that predates Pakistan-administered Kashmir itself.
Under a United Nations Commission for India and Pakistan resolution adopted on January 5, 1949, and endorsed by the UN Security Council, Kashmir’s final status was to be determined “through the democratic method of a free and impartial plebiscite”.
Nearly 80 years later, that has yet to happen on either side of the Line of Control.
Mahmud, who is also the author of Poonch: Identity, Politics and Resistance, argues the refugee seats endure partly because they continue to serve Islamabad’s interests.
“They let Pakistan maintain its position that AJK represents the entire former State of Jammu and Kashmir, not merely the territory it administers,” he told Al Jazeera. “And allows Pakistan-based political parties to influence government formation in Muzaffarabad.”
Islamabad, he said, treats the seats “as an instrument of its Kashmir policy and political influence”.
Hassan Kamal Wattoo, a Lahore-based constitutional lawyer, argues that giving greater autonomy to AJK “strengthens Pakistan’s case on the international stage”.
“There is no tension between real autonomy for AJK and an eventual plebiscite,” he told Al Jazeera.
Anam Zakaria, a historian and author of Between the Great Divide: A Journey into Pakistan-Administered Kashmir, however, argued that there was a deeper contradiction within AJK’s constitutional framework.
On the one hand lies India’s “longstanding and ongoing systemic violence and human rights abuses in [Indian-administered] Kashmir”, she said, arguing that nothing Pakistan has done or does in the part of Kashmir it administers can be compared with what’s happened in Indian-administered Kashmir, where tens of thousands of people have been killed in violence involving armed rebels and security forces since 1989.
At the same time, she pointed out, candidates seeking public office in Pakistan-administered Kashmir must first swear allegiance to AJK’s accession to Pakistan.
That requirement, she told Al Jazeera, also “in itself contradicts the right to self-determination” and sidelines Kashmiris who hold a different vision for the region’s future.
Ishan Kishan and Tilak Varma sets up 90-run win over Zimbabwe as India takes 2-0 lead in T20 series.
Published On 25 Jul 202625 Jul 2026
India inflicted another heavy defeat on Zimbabwe when they won the second Twenty20 international at Harare Sports Club by 90 runs to secure their three-match series.
Ishan Kishan scored 81 and Tilak Varma an unbeaten 60 as India amassed a formidable total of 219-5 after being put into bat before dismissing Zimbabwe cheaply for 129 to secure the victory on Saturday.
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Kishan, whose runs came off 44 balls, and Tilak, who took 29 balls to get to 60, accelerated the scoring in the middle overs, taking advantage of bowling that was often too full.
They put on 94 off 44 balls for the fourth wicket before Ishan was caught in the deep mistiming a slog at a wide delivery.
Zimbabwe faced a record run chase and, although opener Brian Bennett offered some early hope, they were always up against it and were dismissed in 17.5 overs.
Bennett played an array of strokes for 32 runs off 19 balls before falling to Yash Thakur, who finished with 2-30 on his T20 international debut.
Once Bennett had been dismissed, there was a steady fall of wickets, with the slow left-arm bowling of Abhishek Sharma producing the best figures of 3-17.
India won the opening match of the three-game series at the Harare Sports Club by seven wickets with 40 balls to spare.
The last clash is on Sunday.
The world claims to regard education as a universal right. Its financial system tells a different story.
New figures released by UNESCO show that 113 countries with a total population of 6.1 billion now spend more on servicing debt than educating their people. In low-income countries, debt payments are nearly four times education expenditure. In 18 of the most heavily indebted countries, governments spend at least five times more on debt than on education.
These are not merely signs of strained public finances. They reveal a stark political hierarchy.
Creditors possess enforceable claims on government revenues. Children possess declarations, development goals and promises. When the two collide, creditors are paid first.
The consequences are visible in overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating school buildings, teacher shortages, unaffordable school fees and children leaving education prematurely. Yet these outcomes are generally described as funding gaps or failures of domestic governance, as though governments had freely decided to neglect their schools.
In reality, many governments are operating inside an international financial order that sharply restricts what they can choose.
The World Bank reports that developing countries transferred $741bn more to external creditors in principal and interest between 2022 and 2024 than they received in new financing. This was the largest net debt outflow in at least 50 years. In 2024 alone, low and middle-income countries paid a record $415bn in interest.
In other words, the financial flows are frequently moving in the opposite direction from the one suggested by the language of development assistance.
Poorer countries are commonly portrayed as beneficiaries of Western generosity. But vast amounts of public wealth are travelling from debtor countries to bondholders, commercial banks, multilateral institutions and wealthier creditor governments.
Money that could hire teachers, provide school meals or build classrooms is instead leaving the country.
This is particularly perverse because education is not simply another item of government consumption. It is an investment in a society’s future capacities. Cutting it may make debt payments easier today, but it will weaken productivity, public revenues and social resilience tomorrow.
Debt contracts are treated as binding obligations whose breach can trigger credit downgrades, capital flight, lawsuits and exclusion from financial markets. The right to education, by contrast, carries no comparable machinery of enforcement.
No ratings agency downgrades creditors when a country cannot afford enough teachers. No financial penalty is imposed on bondholders when debt service forces children out of school. Markets do not panic when classrooms collapse.
The system disciplines governments for failing creditors, not for failing children.
UNESCO has proposed expanding debt-for-education swaps. Under these arrangements, a creditor cancels or restructures part of a country’s debt in exchange for government investment in agreed educational programmes.
Such initiatives can produce tangible gains. A 2023 agreement with France helped Ivory Coast finance more than 30 schools in underserved areas. A German agreement with Egypt supported school feeding and basic services, while an earlier Spain-Peru programme funded education projects across vulnerable regions.
These programmes are worthwhile. But they are not a solution to the larger debt crisis.
Debt swaps typically cover only a small fraction of what countries owe. They are negotiated selectively, depend on creditor consent and may add new layers of external monitoring to domestic spending. Most importantly, they leave untouched the principle that creditors are entitled to repayment unless they voluntarily concede otherwise.
The question becomes how to persuade creditors to permit a little more education, rather than why the claims of creditors should take priority in the first place.
That question is especially urgent because education aid is also falling. UNESCO projects that international assistance for education could decline by as much as 30 percent between 2023 and 2027.
Debtor countries are therefore being squeezed from both sides: aid is retreating while debt payments continue.
The familiar recommendation that developing countries should mobilise more domestic resources is inadequate. Progressive taxation and reduced corruption matter. But additional revenues will not transform education systems if they are immediately diverted towards debts contracted at high interest rates, or made more expensive by currency depreciation.
Nor can the problem be solved by demanding ever more austerity. Education budgets consist largely of recurring expenditure, especially teachers’ salaries. When governments are instructed to freeze public-sector wage bills, they cannot solve teacher shortages or expand access, however often international institutions proclaim education a priority.
A more serious response would begin with large-scale debt cancellation for countries in distress, automatic suspension of payments during economic and climate emergencies, far cheaper concessional financing and a fair multilateral mechanism for restructuring sovereign debt.
At present, debt negotiations are fragmented among private creditors, bilateral lenders and international institutions. Debtor governments must bargain with powerful financial actors while trying to avoid being punished for seeking relief.
A binding United Nations framework for sovereign debt could establish shared rules, require both borrowers and lenders to act responsibly and prevent holdout creditors from obstructing restructuring. It could also make social rights central to assessments of what a country can genuinely afford to repay.
The world needs to move towards the idea that debt repayment cannot come at any human cost. A debt is not sustainable when paying it requires dismantling the institutions on which a society’s future depends.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
India’s young protesters are mocking their government. And the jokes are landing.
As thousands of demonstrators take to the streets in the Indian capital, they are waging a parallel campaign online, flooding social media with memes, parody videos and self-deprecating jokes.
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In doing so, they are also beating Narendra Modi – the powerful but image-conscious prime minister – at his own game.
Modi built his political brand through social media. Now protesters are using that same platform to mock his administration, ridicule pro-government television news coverage, transform confrontation with police into viral content and seize control of the online narrative.
The campaign has taken the protests demanding accountability and education reforms beyond the streets, broadening its reach and intensifying pressure on a government wary of appearing to yield to a rapidly growing youth movement.
The “Cockroach” movement’s digital campaign has been largely powered by humour.
Clashes with police have become viral content. Videos showed protesters joking about keeping their Strava streaks alive — a reference to the fitness tracking app used by runners — as they ran from police baton charges.
Others edited footage of themselves dodging police barricades to mimic the popular endless runner mobile game Subway Surfers.
Some women have borrowed influencer culture, posting “get ready with me” videos before marches and “fit check” posts featuring helmets, goggles and other homemade protest gear. Other protesters have created spoof videos mocking pro-government television anchors and their dramatic style of broadcasts that have labelled the protesters “anti-national” and “foreign-funded conspirators”.
Several protesters spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals from authorities.
One 25-year-old protester said the memes are more than comic relief; they are a way of coping. She sees them as a generational trait.
Unlike older generations, who learned to endure hardship, hers has little patience for “simply putting up with it,” she said.
“If our phone data runs out, we can’t even bear that. So we’re definitely not going to tolerate this,” she said, referring to Monday’s police crackdown on protesters in the capital.
The street protests erupted a month ago, fuelled by anger over a string of exam scandals, including the illegal sharing of entrance exams for the national medical programme.
Young people say the scandals have jeopardised their futures and eroded trust in the education system. They blame Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who resigned on Saturday.
But the demonstrations have expanded into wider anger over government accountability, spreading to other cities.
Much of that expansion has been driven by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a satirical group that started the movement two months ago. Through memes, humour and satire, it has given younger Indians a new way to express their frustration with the government and helped turn a single-issue campaign into a broader youth movement.
At the main protest site in New Delhi, that influence was hard to miss.
Some protesters marched in Spider-Man masks and Batman costumes, carrying tongue-in-cheek placards. Other protest signs echoed the irreverent tone of social media, with memes and pop culture references woven into the demonstrations.
One poster featuring the education minister asked: “When will AI take his job?” Another captured the movement’s spirit with the slogan: “Every joke is a [tiny] revolution.”
Some slogans and posters took on an overtly profane and risque tone. A 23-year-old student said the protesters were simply speaking the language of their generation.
“We find speeches boring, we are the summary generation. We have a habit of consuming things in a short span of time, so we are using the same ways to put our message across,” she said.
For Modi, who is entering his 13th year in office, the protests present an unusual challenge.
His image is built on strength and decisiveness, but he risks alienating young people if he responds too forcefully. Nearly half of India’s population is under 25, making young voters one of the country’s most influential electoral groups.
But the protests have broken a longstanding taboo: mocking Modi himself.
Jokes about Modi were rare during earlier protests, when his government was criticised for suppressing dissent. But now, even he has become a target of taunts.
Modi’s gestures, pauses and mannerisms have been turned into viral edits that turn his own words into political jokes.
When Modi released a late-night, selfie-style video on Thursday addressing the protesters, he promised swift legal action against those responsible for leaking academic or job exams.
But many internet users edited the clip with parody voiceovers and references to his past promises they said had gone unfulfilled.
One video went particularly viral.
Modi’s original address began with him referring to the protesters as “friends”. A parody video kept that opening, and abruptly cut to three young girls staring into the camera and responding: “No, we are not.”
A 21-year-old student said there is no better way to challenge Modi than by using social media that helped build his political brand.
“We are just answering him in his language,” he said.
Indian authorities release the two men after years in prison although both remain under tight court-imposed restrictions.
By Al Jazeera Staff, AFP and AP
Published On 23 Jul 202623 Jul 2026
Indian authorities have released prominent Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez and journalist Irfan Mehraj on bail after years in prison on “terrorism” financing charges although both remain under tight court-imposed restrictions.
The two men walked free from a New Delhi jail late on Wednesday, their relatives said, as India’s National Investigation Agency seeks to overturn their bail – the latest chapter in what rights groups call New Delhi’s sweeping crackdown on activists, journalists and dissidents in India-administered Kashmir since 2019 when it scrapped the region’s autonomy, granted under the Indian Constitution.
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Parvez, programme coordinator for the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), was arrested in 2021 by the National Investigation Agency at his home in Srinagar.
Mehraj, a freelance journalist who worked with the same rights group as a researcher, was arrested in 2023.
Both face charges of “funding terrorism” and “propagation of secessionist agenda” under India’s stringent “antiterrorism” laws, which in effect allow authorities to hold people without trial indefinitely.
The National Investigation Agency accuses the two of using the JKCCS to fund militant-linked activities and promote a separatist agenda. Both men deny the allegations.
A lower court granted them bail last week, but the agency appealed. The Delhi High Court refused on Tuesday to suspend the release order although it imposed tougher restrictions on the men’s movements and activities while it hears the appeal.
Under their bail conditions, the two must arrange their own stay in the capital, where they are facing trial, and cannot travel to Kashmir, according to a court document seen by the news agency AFP. Proceedings in the case will continue in the coming weeks.
The JKCCS has for decades documented alleged rights violations by Indian government forces in Kashmir, including torture and unlawful killings, and has drawn attention to thousands of unmarked graves in border areas suspected of holding victims of “enforced disappearances”.
International rights groups, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have consistently called for the men’s release, saying they were jailed for their work.
In 2023, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said Parvez’s arrest was an “act of reprisal for his human rights work, and an attempt to silence him and Kashmiri civil society as a whole”.
After their release, the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture said the two were arrested on “trumped-up charges” and called on Indian authorities to drop the case, describing the proceedings as politically motivated.
Journalists in Indian-administered Kashmir say they have faced harassment and arrests since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government annulled the region’s partial autonomy.
From 2019 to 2023, more than 3,600 people were arrested there under “antiterrorism” laws, more than half of whom remain in prison, according to government figures.
Muslim-majority Kashmir has been divided between India and Pakistan since their independence from British rule in 1947. Both countries claim the territory in full.
Rebel groups have fought the Indian government since 1989, demanding independence or a merger with Pakistan. The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people, mostly civilians.
New Delhi, India — She darted through a sprinting crowd, running from a cloud of tear gas just above her head. Her eyes stung so badly she could barely see, yet she filmed the chaos on her phone.
“I saw policemen brutally beating up unarmed girls and peaceful children,” said Avanshika Singh, who has been turning up for student protests that shut down the national capital, demanding the education minister’s resignation.
On her return home, the 18-year-old put together a rough cut from the chaos and captioned it on Instagram: “Today, we rang Parliament’s doorbell and ran.”
The march to the Indian parliament on July 20 against serial examination paper leaks brought the nation’s capital to a standstill as tens of thousands of protesters occupied central roads leading to the country’s corridors of power. More than 100 students were injured in a crackdown by police, operating under the direct instructions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
But since then, Indian internet has turned into a relentless reel of police excesses: shaky smartphone footage, rapid-fire edits pulsing to hip-hop tracks, and a tidal wave of memes and expletives.
“This is the only thing anyone is talking about. If nothing, we are televising our revolution,” Singh, a teenager, told Al Jazeera, standing amid a sea of protesters choking Parliament Street on Wednesday. “The entire country today feels the sting of batons and tear gas with us.”
Twelve years ago, Modi rode to power and pioneered in many ways, leveraging social media platforms to reach the masses. Today, Gen Z is flipping his Hindu majoritarian party’s dominance on social platforms, weaponising against it the very tools the Bharatiya Janata Party has long relied on.
“Hating Modi is cool on the internet now, after years of criminalising dissent,” she said, before bursting into slogans: “Uncle Modi, go back, go back.”
After the July 20 demonstrations against the government’s handling of paper leaks, the police denied all the protesters’ allegations and media reports of excess force in the crackdown.
But by then, social media was flooded with evidence, recorded by the protesting students.
A New Delhi police officer thrusting a baton on a female protester’s back; usage — potentially by a paramilitary force that was deployed alongside the police — of lethal pellet guns, for the first time in the national capital; a mother crying and pleading with dozens of police officials; another officer slapping and chasing unarmed students; police officers wearing Meta glasses; law enforcement agents planting a damaged car outside a protest strip; and footage where an officer casually trips the students running from tear gas.
No sight escapes the cameras at the Jantar Mantar protest strip, where thousands of protesters keep recording round the clock. The visuals from July 20 have prompted protests across India, in cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Patna, Lucknow and Aizawl.
The Cockroach Janta Party, a political pressure group that has been leading the students’ protest, has said the demonstrations would continue “peacefully” until three demands are met. They want Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister, to resign; for the Modi government to assure that no criminal cases would be pursued against protesters; and for compensation of about $105,000 for families of students who died by suicide due to exam paper leaks and cancellations.
Niharika Soni, a 19-year-old, stood among the thousands-strong crowd that occupied Parliament Street on Wednesday, distributing water bottles to protesters. She did not take part in the July 20 march and did not care much about it either.
Then, the visuals appeared on her feed.
“My mother and I cried for two hours, watching the videos together at home,” she said, adding that her mother has been a staunch supporter of PM Modi.
“We hugged each other and come here every day now,” she added, now holding her mother’s hands, as part of a human chain, ready to confront government forces if attacked.
It is also a meme fest on the Indian internet.
Protesters pose, mock and tease police personnel stationed near the protest site. Some offer flowers to them while reminding them that the officers only offered baton hits.
A stroll through the protest site and nearby roads is like scrolling an Instagram feed: posters and graffiti now line central New Delhi.
Even when they speak, protesters use language riddled with smart one-liners and mockery of the government.
“This government is leaking any responsibility towards the youth of this country,” Ipshita Gulyari, a 20-year-old, told Al Jazeera. Modi, she said, had messed with the “wrong generation”.
“There is a lot of arrogance in him — and, you know, teenagers do not tolerate that, bro.”
Another duo carried the popular Japanese manga One Piece, a symbol adopted by Gen Z protest movements worldwide. A group of friends donned fictional superhero costumes from Marvel’s Avengers: Spider-Man, Iron Man and Hulk, sitting together on police barricades, looking onto Parliament Street.
“We, the Gen Z people, are born on and for the internet. We were using Instagram before I could read a clock,” said Gulyari.
Mainstream television news channels friendly to Modi have faced accusations of not covering the protests adequately. But young people like Gulyari rely increasingly on independent small publications, and, even more, on social media.
“Gen Z is taking it lightly, being funny about it, because humour is our coping mechanism,” said 18-year-old Yashvi Kumar, a friend of Gulyari at the protest.
“In the middle of all chaos, somewhere we decided that to rebel, we need to find a way that unites us. The memes are uniting us.”
On the other hand, social media posts put up by the BJP are spammed by thousands, calling for the minister to resign.
In 2014, Modi was among the first world leaders to understand and leverage social media to take his narrative to the masses. The Congress party, now in opposition, was trounced by Modi’s BJP in national elections that year, and has long struggled to keep up with the BJP’s social media dominance.
But with years in power, as India slid in multiple democratic indices, Modi’s government faced mounting accusations that it was criminalising dissent, with several critics jailed for years without a trial.
Modi’s party also mobilised extensive resources in the last decade in its so-called IT Cell, where a bunch of anonymous accounts, or creators friendly to the government, dox, troll and delegitimise social media criticism.
It is fitting, therefore, analysts say, that the biggest challenge Modi has faced on the streets stems from an online joke. After India’s chief justice casually likened the youth to “cockroaches” and “parasites”, the resulting fury led to the formation of the Cockroach Janta Party.
Before the Cockroach movement, “there was an undercurrent of memes from anonymous accounts, masked people, mocking the government,” said Anurag Minus Verma, a cultural critic and author of The Great Indian Brain Rot.
“In a post-ironical world, anything said with irony travels faster — and irony becomes a central feature of the internet during this kind of protest,” he said. “The pent-up anger found a channel at Jantar Mantar, allowing youth to do their thing, speak in their language.”
The most remarkable turnaround for Verma, he said, has been the unmasking of critics at the protest, where demonstrators ridicule and mock Modi, erasing the fear.
Verma argued that the Modi government had crushed and criminalised protests by labelling them anti-nationals and breaking them into sections. “The Gen Z protesters already identify themselves ridiculously enough: they are cockroaches,” he said. “It becomes a single identity — and that becomes easier to penetrate the virality zone.”
“Some are recreating the popular memes from Nepal, Bangladesh and Hong Kong uprisings,” he told Al Jazeera. “The criticism and hate directed at Modi in the capital is not only acceptable now, but even cool.”
Modi, in a tacit acknowledgement of the power of the social media wave that’s against his government, on Thursday morning offered his first comments on the student protests — on X.
“Nothing is more important than the welfare and future of our youth!” he wrote, before mentioning that his government had set up fast-track courts to punish those behind the paper leaks.
But the CJP’s leader Abhijeet Dipke was quick with his riposte on X.
Playing on Modi’s own words, overlaid on a photo of Education Minister Pradhan, Dipke wrote: “Hi, my name is Nothing”.
Indian activist Sonam Wangchuk says he will end his hunger strike if the government guarantees that police will not use force against student protesters or take punitive action against them. Demonstrators are calling for the education minister to resign over a medical exam scandal.
Published On 23 Jul 202623 Jul 2026
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Renewed fighting between the US and Iran has overshadowed the ASEAN gathering in Manila.
The Philippines is hosting a meeting of foreign ministers from Southeast Asia.
They are expected to address regional security issues, including the civil war in Myanmar and the territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
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But renewed fighting between the US and Iran has overshadowed the gathering.
Ministers have called for hostilities to end.
The conflict has hit Asia hard – disrupting its energy and food supplies, international commerce and raising fears of a global economic slowdown.
Will it also affect ASEAN’s efforts to tackle issues within the region?
Presenter: James Bays
Guests:
Richard Heydarian – Political Scientist and Author of Indo-Pacific: Trump, China and the New Struggle for Global Mastery
Phar Kim Ben – Professor in ASEAN studies at International Islamic Univeristy of Malaysia and former Director of Political & Security Community at ASEAN Secretariat
Don McLain Gill – Lecturer at De La Salle University and Indo-Pacific Research fellow with Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada
Published On 23 Jul 202623 Jul 2026
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Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has spoken out publicly for the first time since he was arrested during protests in New Delhi, voicing support for student demonstrators who are demanding the resignation of the education minister.
Published On 22 Jul 202622 Jul 2026
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Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) bids farewell to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un following their meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the end of World War Two, in Beijing in September2025. File Photo by Sergey Bobylev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool
July 22 (UPI) — The author prefers to use the lowercase “n” to challenge the Kim family regime’s legitimacy.
Northeast Asia has reached a strategic inflection point.
China, Russia, Iran and north Korea can no longer be treated as separate security problems managed through isolated policies, disconnected commands or narrow bilateral initiatives.
They increasingly operate as a loose, but consequential, CRInK axis. It is not a formal alliance. It is flexible, transactional, and opportunistic. That makes it more difficult to deter because its members can cooperate without a unified command or mutual-defense treaty.
Each regime pursues distinct interests. China seeks regional dominance and weaker U.S. alliances. Russia seeks resources for its war against Ukraine and leverage against the West. Iran seeks strategic depth, sanctions relief, and stronger military partnerships. The Kim family regime seeks survival, military modernization and acceptance as a nuclear-armed state.
Their interests differ, but they converge when cooperation weakens the United States, divides democratic allies, circumvents sanctions and protects authoritarian rule.
China provides north Korea economic support and diplomatic cover. Russia provides revenue, operational experience and possible military technology. Iran contributes weapons cooperation, sanctions-evasion expertise and pressure in the Middle East. north Korea provides ammunition, missiles, personnel, cyber capabilities and a persistent threat to the Republic of Korea, Japan and the United States.
A crisis in one theater creates opportunity in another. This is more than collusion. It is coordinated political warfare.
The democratic answer must be equally coordinated. The ROK, United States and Japan need a durable trilateral strategy that connects deterrence with diplomacy, intelligence, economic security, technology protection, law enforcement, information and the human domain.
Evolution of trilateral cooperation
Wednesday’s ministerial meeting in Manila showed that ROK-U.S.-Japan cooperation is expanding beyond coordination on north Korea. The ministers reaffirmed deterrence and denuclearization, but they also addressed maritime security, economic coercion, critical minerals, nuclear energy, emerging technologies, supply-chain resilience, advanced technology protection, transnational crime and disaster relief.
That wider agenda reflects strategic reality. north Korea’s military growth cannot be separated from Russian support or Chinese protection. China’s coercion cannot be separated from maritime security, critical technologies, energy, shipping or supply chains. Iran’s support to Russia and its military relationships with north Korea connect Northeast Asian security to conflicts beyond the region.
The threats are interconnected, so the response must be, as well.
The Manila meeting demonstrated political alignment. The test is whether that alignment produces shared intelligence, integrated planning, coordinated sanctions enforcement, resilient supply chains and combined responses to coercion. Statements matter. Institutions, capabilities and sustained action matter more.
Stop calling It the gray zone
The first requirement of strategy is to describe the threat accurately. The term “gray zone” suggests uncertainty about attribution, legality, responsibility or intent. The Philippines offers a clearer description: ICAD, or illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive activities.
The actions of the CRInK regimes are rarely purposeless or truly ambiguous. China combines maritime harassment, economic pressure, cyber operations, military intimidation, information warfare and lawfare.
Russia employs sabotage, proxies, espionage, disinformation, energy leverage and military threats. Iran uses proxies, covert action, missiles, drones and economic networks.
north Korea uses nuclear coercion, cyber theft, criminal finance, missile tests, maritime incursions, subversion and information control. These are integrated instruments of political warfare.
Calling them “gray” can create passivity. Democracies debate thresholds while authoritarian regimes consolidate gains. Shared terminology should identify hostile activity, attribute responsibility and connect each act to the larger campaign. Shared language is the beginning of shared strategy.
West Sea as a test of trilateral resolve
The West Sea, also known as the Yellow Sea, shows how political warfare can change the status quo without conventional war. The unresolved maritime boundary creates opportunities for Pyongyang to manufacture disputes, employ civilian-looking vessels, deploy drones, mobilize maritime forces and portray aggression as routine law enforcement.
Such a campaign would create a dilemma for Seoul. A forceful response could be portrayed as escalation. Restraint could permit a fait accompli. The decisive terrain would not be the water alone. It would be international perception. Who changed the status quo? Who controlled the narrative? Who convinced regional audiences that coercion was legitimate administration?
China has used similar methods across the Asia Pacific through coast guard vessels, maritime militia, legal claims, economic pressure and information operations. Pyongyang could adapt those methods with Chinese political protection and Russian technical assistance.
The ROK would remain the principal actor in a West Sea crisis, but Japan and the United States would contribute intelligence, maritime domain awareness, attribution, cyber defense, diplomatic coordination, sanctions enforcement and strategic communication. A maritime provocation could test whether trilateral cooperation can recognize coordinated coercion and act before it succeeds.
From consultation to integrated campaigning
Deterrence remains necessary. It is not sufficient. The three nations need integrated campaigning across military, diplomatic, economic, financial, intelligence, informational, cyber, technological, legal and law-enforcement domains.
They should begin with a recurring trilateral strategic estimate of the CRInK axis. It should assess China, Russia, Iran and north Korea as an interacting network, identify warning indicators and vulnerabilities, trace sanctions-evasion and technology-transfer networks, and examine how simultaneous crises could divide attention and resources. This estimate should guide policy and campaign planning.
Military cooperation should build on exercises such as Freedom Edge, but interoperability must serve clear political objectives. The three countries should deepen missile warning, maritime awareness, anti-submarine warfare, cyber defense, air and missile defense, logistics, space support and intelligence sharing.
Planning must also cover crises involving coast guards, fishing fleets, commercial shipping, criminal intermediaries, cyber actors, proxies, disguised military personnel and manipulated civilian incidents. The seam between military and civilian activity is where the CRInK regimes will seek advantage.
Economic security Is national security
The Manila ministerial meeting also recognized that economic resilience is part of deterrence. China can exploit dependencies in critical minerals, manufacturing, shipping, energy and advanced electronics. Russia uses energy and commodities for leverage. Iran and north Korea rely on illicit finance, cyber theft, front companies, arms networks, overseas labor and sanctions evasion.
The ROK, United States and Japan possess immense combined economic and technological power, but only if they coordinate. They should align export controls, protect advanced technologies, diversify supply chains, strengthen access to critical minerals, enforce sanctions and develop common responses to economic coercion.
Cooperation on small modular reactors, emerging technologies, and energy security can give vulnerable states alternatives to Chinese or Russian dependence. The objective is not economic isolation. It is reduced strategic vulnerability.
Political warfare and the human domain
The CRInK regimes understand that strategic competition is a contest of will, legitimacy and political endurance. The democracies must compete without abandoning their principles. A coordinated trilateral information strategy should expose military cooperation, sanctions evasion, corruption, maritime coercion, cyber theft, technology transfers and human rights abuses, while explaining how separate incidents form a larger campaign.
For north Korea, information and human rights are strategic. The regime survives by isolating the Korean people in the north and monopolizing information. Truth weakens that monopoly. Human rights pressure exposes the regime’s illegitimacy.
Support for the Korean people affirms that the Kim family regime does not permanently define Korea’s future. The ultimate objective should not be the endless management of division, but the peaceful resolution of the Korea question and a free and unified Korea.
Holistic imperative
The central danger is not only CRInK military strength. It is allied fragmentation. The adversaries integrate military power, economic leverage, proxies, cyber operations, lawfare and information. Democracies still divide those problems among separate ministries, commands and bilateral channels.
The Manila meeting suggests that this may be changing. Trilateral cooperation is becoming a framework for regional security, maritime law, economic resilience, energy, technology and resistance to coercion. That is necessary, but not yet sufficient. Diplomatic continuity matters. Deterrence becomes credible only when political alignment produces operational capability.
The essential question is not whether the ROK, United States and Japan can issue strong statements after the next provocation. It is whether they can anticipate, decide and act together before individual acts of coercion accumulate into a new strategic reality. The CRInK axis already thinks and acts holistically. The democracies must do the same.
David Maxwell, executive director of the Korea Regional Review, is a retired U.S. Army Special Forces colonel who has spent more than 30 years in the Asia-Indo-Pacific region. He specializes in Northeast Asian security affairs and irregular, unconventional and political warfare. He is vice president of the Center for Asia Pacific Strategy and a senior fellow at the Global Peace Foundation, where he works on a free and unified Korea. After he retired, he became associate director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is on the board of directors of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and the OSS Society and is the editor at large for the Small Wars Journal.
