Police cases, social media takedowns and online abuse have followed many who took part in India’s Cockroach Janta Party-led demonstrations that ended on July 25. Prime Minister Narendra Modi says he forgives ‘misled children’ who abused him during the protests.
Published On 1 Aug 20261 Aug 2026
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THE world’s best beaches have been revealed and the top pick has been described as being so beautiful it doesn’t look real.
The coastal spots were ranked from criteria like water-quality, popularity, public opinion, expert input as well as accessibility and climate.
Beach.com has announced the best beach in the world is Trunk Bay in the US Virgin Islands.
The beach is known for its white sand with clear turquoise water that has been described as looking ‘unreal’ by visitors.
It’s named after the Leatherback turtle (known locally as ‘trunks’), where smaller turtles are known to nest in the summer months.
The publication said that Trunk Bay is “truly the best beach in the world” with “top marks for beauty, water quality and an all-around perfect experience.”
Not only is it aesthetically beautiful, but the beach also has a 650ft long underwater snorkelling trail where its easy to spot tropical fish and colourful coral.
The second best beach, Elafonissi Beach in Greece, is no stranger to appearing on these lists.
It’s constantly recognised as being beautiful thanks to its rare pink sand.
The pink shimmer to the sand is essentially down to crushed shells from oyster-like micro-organisms called Benthic foraminifera.
The Sun’s Lizzie Parry who visited the beach a few years ago said: “I won’t lie, wandering down to the water it did just look like any other sandy beach. But the closer we got to the water’s edge it was clear to see what all the fuss was about.
“Dipping my slightly sunburnt toes into the sea, my pink foot blended in perfectly with a stunning stretch of bright pink sand.”
There are little coves to explore away from the mainland and it’s not far to get to from the UK as it’s just a few hours to Crete.
The third best beach is Grace Bay Beach which is found on Providenciales which is the main island on the Turks and Caicos archipelago.
Thanks to its beautiful clear waters, it’s a renowned snorkelling spot- and came in number one spot when it came to public opinion.
Deputy Travel Editor Kara Godfrey who visited said: “Grace Bay Beach is everything you’d imagine from an exotic beach. Soft white sands stretch for miles, with very few tourists if you get up early enough.
“Lined with hotel resorts, wait until the evening and you’ll get pink sunsets too.
Other top beaches include Golden Horn Beach in the Dalmatia region of Croatia – it got its name from its horn shape.
The beach has clear waters and is backed by a pine tree forest.
Praia da Falésia has been named one of the best beaches in Portugal, one of the best beaches in Europe and comes in the world’s best at number nine.
Found in the Algarve, it has striking orange-coloured cliffs behind it.
Two beaches on the Canary Islands made the list, the first being Playa de Cofete in Fuerteventura.
Playa de Maspalomas in Gran Canaria came in at number 25 – it’s famous for its sprawling Sahara-like golden sand dunes which lead down to the water.
Sadly, no UK beaches made the cut.
A sweeping package of new Russian sanctions has cleared its first hurdle in the United States Congress, and, if passed, could trigger huge tariffs for countries such as India and China which continue to buy oil from Moscow.
The bill, which was advanced in the US Senate this week, has been named for the late Lindsey Graham, whose funeral was attended by world leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the week.
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Here’s what we know:
The “Lindsey O Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026” was advanced overwhelmingly by the Senate this week in a vote of 86 to 12, meaning it can now proceed to the House of Representatives for further deliberation.
Named for the late Senator Graham, a staunch Ukraine supporter who died unexpectedly this month, the bill moved forward with the support of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was in Washington to attend Graham’s funeral and watched the proceedings from the gallery.
“It was an honour to be present as the votes were counted – 86 senators supported the bill,” he wrote on X afterwards. “This is the first step towards implementing Lindsey [Graham]’s plans, and certainly a step towards peace. It is important that this tool works.”
After clearing the Senate, there will be a delay before the bill can move forward to the House, which is now in summer recess.
On Wednesday this week, US President Donald Trump ordered lawmakers to amend the bill to include tariffs covering Iran as well. This will likely delay the bill further if it deters Democrats from supporting it, analysts said.
David Smith, an associate professor at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre, told Al Jazeera: “One of the things they’re worried about is how the tariff power in relation to Iran is going to be expanded. They’re going to be ok with tariff powers on Russia but they’re worried about tariff power on countries buying Iranian oil, which means China. I think there are going to be a lot of Democrats that are going to say these powers should be limited to sanctions and not tariffs.”
Without the Iran addition, he said he would have expected the bill to pass once the House resumes given strong Democratic support for Ukraine.
“Democrats have been genuinely worried about the Trump administration abandoning Ukraine. Something like this, which is ramping the pressure up on Russia so much, I just think there will be a large critical mass of Democrats who will vote for this,” he said.
The bill makes use of sanctions and tariffs to target Russia and cut off the economic pipeline that has kept the Ukraine war going.
Major provisions include new sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin as well as on more than 20 top officials and companies which work with the Russian defence industry. It also targets Russia’s “shadow fleet” of oil tankers and the network it uses to evade international sanctions on its energy exports.
The bill gives the president authority to impose sanctions by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Under it, he would be able to apply tariffs of up to 100 percent on exports to the US from the top five purchasers of Russian energy, military equipment or countries facilitating Russian sanctions evasion.
Tariffs of up to 500 percent can also be applied to Russian imports directly into the US. The US imported $3.8bn in goods from Russia in 2025.
China, India and Türkiye are potential targets of the bill, as they are among the largest buyers of Russian energy, according to data compiled by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
China has historically responded to Trump’s tariffs with tariffs of its own on US exports. Even Pay, a director at the Beijing-based consultancy Trivium China, told Al Jazeera that the US may wait to impose tariffs as Trump is due to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year.
Trump would still welcome the option, she said, after the Supreme Court struck down many of his tariffs in February.
“If passed and signed into law [which is still a big if at this point], the legislation would give Trump something he’s wanted for a while, namely, the legislature’s permission to impose high tariffs on China, alongside the small handful of other countries that import Russian oil,” Pay told Al Jazeera.
India is in a tricky position as its attempts to diversify away from Russian energy were disrupted by the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz, according to Maia Nikoladze, a deputy director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
Due to the disruptions, it has also applied for and received US sanction waivers to continue buying Russian oil in the interim, Nikoladze wrote in a report this week, and it is expected to do the same in the future.
“India will face a trade-off between maintaining energy security and managing the risk of US tariffs, potentially prompting it to again seek waivers and exemptions,” Nikoladze said.
Critics like Senator Maggie Hassan say the bill gives Trump too much power to impose tariffs while also potentially harming both the US taxpayer and allied countries.
Turkiye, for example, buys Russian energy but it is also a US ally and NATO member, while “major non-NATO ally” Brazil and “major security cooperation partner” Singapore both buy Russian oil products, according to CREA.
In a post on X, Hassan wrote that while she supports sanctioning Russia, she does “not think tariffs, which are paid for by American businesses and consumers, will help Ukraine win”.
The bill is also opposed by lobby groups such as the US Chamber of Commerce, which also says the true cost will be passed on to US businesses and consumers, as with past tariffs.
While many of Trump’s tariffs have already been struck down by the Supreme Court, the Russia tariffs could have more staying power because they would be imposed on a stronger legal basis, according to Smith.
That’s because it is new legislation which has been crafted using the powers of the IEEPA.
“Previously what Trump has done is to go back to old pieces of legislation and invoke from those his power to use tariffs in ways they haven’t been used before and in ways courts have subsequently found less lawful, whereas this looks like new legislation that is going to lawfully expand his tariff authority,” he told Al Jazeera.
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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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.
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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After a difficult start to his international career in England, teen prodigy Sooryavanshi stepped up against Zimbabwe.
Published On 27 Jul 202627 Jul 2026
India’s teenage batting sensation Vaibhav Sooryavanshi has shown remarkable maturity over the past six months, a quality that has enabled him to thrive in high-pressure matches after a rapid rise in cricket, India T20 coach VVS Laxman said.
Sooryavanshi smashed an 18-ball half-century in the opening T20 against Zimbabwe before scoring 81 on Sunday as India completed a 3-0 sweep of the hosts.
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The 15-year-old, who was fast-tracked into international cricket following a breakthrough Indian Premier League season, was named the player of the series after scoring two half-centuries in the three-match contest.
“Very mature. That’s what I really appreciate about Vaibhav,” Laxman told reporters in Zimbabwe.
“With every experience and every match, he understands, assesses and gets better. He reviews every practice session, not just matches.
“His maturity, understanding and awareness over the last six months have skyrocketed. That’s why he’s been able to handle tough situations and perform under pressure against the best players.”
Sooryavanshi’s success in Southern Africa came after a difficult start to his international career in England earlier this month.
The youngest player to represent India registered scores of 14, 13 and 15 in his first three T20 internationals before being left out of the fifth match.
Laxman, who has tracked Sooryavanshi’s progress from age-group cricket through the IPL and into the senior national side, said the teenager’s willingness to learn had been one of his greatest strengths, but managing his fitness remained an important area of development.
“The one area we want him to improve is his overall fitness,” Laxman said.
“He’s a very young boy. He himself wants to get better in every aspect of the game.
“Even today, when he got injured, he still wanted to stay on the field”, the coach added, referring to Sooryavanshi’s effort while attempting a diving catch running in from deep square leg.
“It was our physio who asked him to come off. That’s the eagerness and earnestness he has to contribute in every possible way to the team.”
Laxman said he was not concerned by the left-hander’s struggles in England and backed him to build on his strong start to international cricket.
“I’m sure he will progress and break all the records at the international level. He’s got all the potential and ability to do that,” he added.
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.
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.
Leaders of India’s youth-led “Cockroach” movement are set to hold talks with government representatives on Friday in an effort to resolve a growing political crisis triggered by national examination paper leaks. Despite the dialogue, protest leaders have made clear that nationwide demonstrations will continue until their key demands, including the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, are met.
The negotiations come after activist Sonam Wangchuk ended a 26-day hunger strike overnight, raising hopes of a possible breakthrough in the weeks-long standoff that has brought tens of thousands of young protesters to the streets of New Delhi.
The movement has become the biggest youth-led challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi since he first took office in 2014. Opposition parties have backed the protesters’ demands and disrupted the ongoing monsoon session of parliament, turning the issue into one of the most significant political crises of Modi’s third term.
Representatives of the self-styled Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), which emerged from an online satirical movement into a nationwide protest campaign, will meet government ministers at a neutral venue.
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CJP spokesperson Saurav Das said the movement hoped the government would engage seriously with protesters’ concerns.
“We hope that the government comes with an open mind and listens to the people of this country who have been on the streets for so long,” Das told reporters. “We will explain our demands in greater detail, and we hope the government will respond positively.”
However, he stressed that negotiations would not halt the movement.
“We are not backing out,” Das said. “Real change begins at the grassroots, and that is exactly what we intend to continue.”
While the government has indicated its willingness to continue discussions, protesters insist accountability must begin with the removal of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Thousands gathered again at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar protest site on Thursday, where demonstrators vowed to remain until Pradhan resigns.
“We will continue protesting until Dharmendra Pradhan is removed,” protester Sudesh Singh said. “If we stop now, we compromise the future of millions of students.”
The demonstrations were sparked after authorities cancelled the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s highly competitive medical entrance examination, following the discovery that question papers had been leaked. Nearly two million students were affected by the cancellation, triggering widespread anger over repeated failures in India’s examination system.
The Cockroach Janta Party began as an online satirical campaign involving only a few hundred young supporters. It rapidly evolved into a nationwide movement after the examination scandal, attracting millions of followers on social media and drawing large crowds to protests across the country.
Monday’s march toward parliament saw tens of thousands of protesters defy restrictions before clashes broke out with police, who used tear gas and batons to disperse demonstrators.
Further confrontations occurred on Wednesday night when more than 10,000 people gathered in central Delhi.
Analysts say the movement reflects broader frustrations among India’s youth over limited employment opportunities, repeated examination scandals and declining confidence in public institutions.
Authorities have significantly increased security measures around the protests.
The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation announced that 17 metro stations in central Delhi would remain closed again on Friday, marking the third major shutdown of the capital’s transport network this week.
Mobile internet services around the protest area were also disrupted, with Reuters journalists reporting patchy connectivity throughout Friday morning.
Officials say the restrictions are necessary to maintain public order, though protesters argue they are intended to suppress demonstrations.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on Thursday that his cabinet would consider legislation aimed at strengthening punishment for those responsible for examination paper leaks.
The proposed amendments would seek faster prosecutions and tougher penalties for individuals involved in leaking examination papers.
Protest leaders, however, argue that stricter punishments alone will not solve the problem.
They say systemic reforms are needed to restore confidence in India’s examination process and prevent future leaks before they occur.
The protests have quickly evolved from a dispute over examination integrity into a broader political challenge.
Opposition parties, led by the Congress Party, have embraced the movement’s demands, seeing an opportunity to pressure Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of several important state elections scheduled for next year, including contests in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Punjab.
Political analysts warn that the growing movement could reshape India’s political landscape if the government fails to address the concerns of young voters, who form a crucial part of the BJP’s electoral base.
The protests have also been accompanied by an unprecedented surge in online criticism, memes and satire targeting Modi, reflecting what observers describe as diminishing public hesitation to openly challenge one of India’s most influential political leaders.
Friday’s talks may provide the first opportunity for both sides to de-escalate the crisis, but with demonstrations set to continue regardless of the outcome, pressure on the government is unlikely to ease in the near term.
With information from Reuters.
The Question Islamabad Has Not Answered
On the night of 16 March 2026, Pakistani warplanes struck a walled compound in Kabul’s ninth police district. Afghan officials say more than four hundred people died. The United Nations mission in Afghanistan has independently confirmed at least two hundred and sixty nine deaths and some one hundred and twenty injuries. Islamabad’s account was simple: the site held ammunition and military infrastructure, and any civilian harm followed from secondary explosions rather than the strike itself. Four months later, Amnesty International published an investigation reaching the opposite conclusion, built not on Taliban testimony but on satellite imagery spanning three years, verified video, and independent geolocation of the wreckage. On 9 July, Amnesty asked Pakistan’s foreign ministry for the evidence behind its military target claim. As of publication, no response has arrived. That silence, more than any single photograph, is now doing the analytical work in this dispute.
A Conflict Escalating Since October
The Omid strike did not occur in isolation. Cross border hostilities between Pakistan and the Taliban administration have intensified since October 2025, and the UN mission in Afghanistan has documented more than seven hundred and fifty civilian casualties in the first three months of 2026 alone, spread across a series of Pakistani air operations against targets it describes as militant infrastructure. The Omid center, a drug rehabilitation facility expanded after 2021 to house roughly two thousand patients, was neither obscure nor newly built. Its treatment programs featured in a 2023 Al Jazeera documentary, and signage identifying the site as a medical facility was visible above its main gate. This is the backdrop against which the competing claims about the March strike have to be weighed. It is a theatre where verification has become as contested as the fighting itself, and where each side’s evidentiary standard has become a proxy for its wider legitimacy claim.
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How Open Source Evidence Reshaped the Dispute
The strongest version of Pakistan’s position would rest on operational intelligence unavailable to outside observers: a genuine military use of the site that satellite imagery and testimony could not capture, perhaps weapons storage concealed within a facility that also treated patients. That is a coherent claim in the abstract, and cross border conflicts involving non state or quasi state administrations often do see dual use of civilian infrastructure. The problem for Islamabad is not that this claim is inherently implausible. It is that four months of opportunity to substantiate it, including a direct written request from an investigating body, has produced silence rather than documentation.
Set against that silence is a body of evidence that does not depend on Taliban cooperation. Amnesty’s investigators analysed satellite imagery of the compound from April 2023 through 15 March 2026, tracking the site’s physical layout and, in imagery from just three days before the strike, the presence of large numbers of people in the patient and administrative areas. A video recorded in 2025 and verified by the organisation shows the interior housing arrangements for patients. Separately, and this is the detail that most changes the analytical picture, broadcast journalists reviewing Pakistan’s own released strike footage identified at least four buildings struck with guided munitions, while a conflict researcher affiliated with the open source investigation group Bellingcat independently geolocated the strikes to the rehabilitation center’s buildings using imagery unconnected to either Amnesty or the Taliban administration.
This matters because it breaks the framing in which the dispute is simply Pakistan’s word against an adversary regime’s word. Geolocation from Pakistan’s own footage and independent satellite analysis are not Taliban sources, and they are not filtered through UNAMA’s access constraints in Afghanistan, real as those constraints are. A rigorous critique of Amnesty’s methodology would need to engage with this layer of evidence directly rather than treating the investigation as resting solely on interviews inside Afghanistan. It does not.
None of this settles the question of what Pakistani planners believed they were targeting at the moment of the strike, which is a distinct question from what the site actually was. Precision guided strikes can be aimed at accurate coordinates built on flawed intelligence, and an honest accounting of the incident would distinguish between deliberate targeting of a known medical facility and a targeting failure rooted in faulty threat assessment. Pakistan’s silence forecloses that distinction rather than resolving it in its own favour. A government confident in a genuine intelligence failure, as opposed to a deliberate strike, has strong incentive to say so, since the reputational and legal exposure of the two scenarios differs sharply. The absence of any account, four months on, is itself informative.
There is a genuine access problem in Afghanistan that deserves acknowledgment rather than dismissal. Restrictions on UN personnel operating inside the country, including limits on female staff, have long constrained what any investigating body can independently confirm through interviews on the ground. That constraint is real and worth stating plainly. But it is analytically distinct from the evidentiary chain that actually carries this case, since satellite archives, geolocation of released military footage, and broadcast forensic review do not depend on access to Afghan territory at all. Conflating the two, treating a legitimate critique of ground level access with a wholesale dismissal of imagery based verification, is where the strongest version of Pakistan’s defence collapses into a weaker one. Under international humanitarian law, the burden of demonstrating that a strike met the tests of distinction, precaution and proportionality sits with the party that carried it out, not with the investigating organisation. Silence does not discharge that burden. It simply leaves the imagery based record as the only account on file.
The Stakes Beyond One Strike
This dispute reaches well past the fate of one investigation into one strike. Pakistan is not a party to the Rome Statute, and the UN Security Council has shown no appetite for a binding inquiry into cross border strikes in Afghanistan, leaving no institution with the authority to compel either side toward resolution. Into that vacuum, open source verification, satellite archives, independent geolocation, forensic review of released military footage, has effectively become the closest available substitute for enforcement, even though it carries no legal power to compel compliance or impose consequences. How this case resolves, or fails to resolve, will help set the operating norm for a growing number of asymmetric conflicts in which a state conducts cross border strikes against a non state or quasi state administration controlling the affected population. If credible, independently corroborated evidence of civilian harm at a protected medical site produces no formal accountability, the lesson other militaries draw from this dispute will be that silence is a survivable strategy, and that the proportionality and precaution requirements of international humanitarian law can be managed through delay rather than compliance. That is the systemic risk this case actually tests, well beyond the question of what happened at one rehabilitation centre in March.
Three Paths From Here
Three trajectories are plausible over the coming months, none of them mutually exclusive in sequence.
The likeliest path, on available evidence, is continued silence accompanied by informal briefings to allied capitals disputing Amnesty’s methodology without engaging its strongest evidentiary points, particularly the independent geolocation. This preserves ambiguity domestically while avoiding a formal admission that could carry legal exposure under international humanitarian law. It is a moderately likely outcome, on the order of an even chance or somewhat better given precedent in comparable disputes involving other militaries.
A less likely but plausible path is a formal Pakistani rebuttal that engages directly with the satellite and geolocation evidence, offering an alternative account of what the imagery shows or asserting an intelligence failure rather than deliberate targeting. This would be the more legally cautious route and would represent a meaningful shift from the current posture. Call this a modest possibility, distinctly less likely than continued silence but not remote.
The least likely path in the near term is a referral to an international investigative mechanism with independent access, given both Pakistan’s incentive to avoid binding scrutiny and the Taliban administration’s own resistance to international access inside Afghanistan, which cuts against any process requiring cooperation from both sides. This remains a low probability outcome absent significant diplomatic pressure from third parties with leverage over Islamabad.
The clearest near term indicator to watch is whether Pakistan’s foreign ministry issues any substantive written response to Amnesty’s evidentiary request before the anniversary of the strike in March 2027. A specific, documented reply, even one contesting the findings, would mark a break from the pattern observed since March. Continued non response through that date would itself be a data point confirming the first scenario.
The Precedent Being Set
What is being tested in Kabul is not only one contested strike but the durability of official denial once satellite archives, geolocation researchers, and broadcast forensic review become standard evidentiary tools in conflicts fought behind restricted access. For Western policy planners, the operative signal is the widening gap between what open source verification can now establish and what official statements are willing to confirm, a gap increasingly shaping how allied governments calibrate cooperation. For investors reading South Asian risk, cross border escalation between Islamabad and Kabul remains an active, under priced variable, with legal exposure now harder for militaries to contain through silence alone. For rights and development organisations, the case is a template for how methodology itself becomes the battleground before accountability is even reached.
Silence was once a viable strategy for governments awaiting the news cycle to move on. Satellites do not move on.
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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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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Chaibasa, India – As the world celebrates Spain winning its second FIFA World Cup and the “GOATS” of football who headlined the month-long tournament, a remote Indian village has also joined in – albeit with an indigenous touch.
To coincide with the FIFA event, residents of Tirilbasa village in Chaibasa, a tribal-dominated district in eastern India’s Jharkhand state, organised a football tournament from July 14 to July 17, featuring teams from 64 nearby villages.
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But the star attraction at the Rangila Star Tirilbasa tournament (“rangila” means “colourful” in Hindi), besides relatively handsome prize money, was a herd of goats to be handed as trophies to the best-performing teams.
The finals were played on Friday, with NCS Maudi beating Kumbaram 1-0, a dramatic prediction of what happened between Spain and Argentina two days later in New York.
NCS Maudi carried home prize money of 15,000 rupees ($156) and three male goats (locally known as “khassi” for their castration at a young age). Runners-up Kumbaram won 12,000 rupees ($125) and two khassis, while Kobra FC Nimdhi and Galubasa FC, the third and fourth rankers, won 9,000 rupees ($93) and one khassi each. There are also cash prizes for the man of the match, man of the series and the best goalkeeper, but they don’t get any khassi.
NCS Maudi’s captain Sachin Devam, whose team arrived on two-wheelers to play the game, told Al Jazeera he would have to arrange for an autorickshaw to carry the goats home, 10km (6 miles) away.
“It’s the first win for our team, and we are going to celebrate it with everyone in the village,” he said with a beaming smile. “It’s going to be a khassi picnic.”
This year was the fifth edition of the Rangila Star Tirilbasa tournament.
The organisers say they follow the FIFA rulebook and invite popular commentators and referees certified by the state football association to ensure compliance with the guidelines and “avoid fights as players can get aggressive on the field”.
But the rest of the setup is markedly different from the conventional game. Rather, it is adapted to the ancient tribal traditions of the Ho community, which is native to the Chaibasa region.
The Ho people, numbering a little more than a million across India, genetically belong to the Austroasiatic group and identify themselves as tribal (“aadivasi” in Hindi) people inhabiting the forests. The word “ho” in their language means “human” or “people” of the Kolhan region in Jharkhand, one of India’s poorest states despite being home to some of India’s biggest coal and mineral mines.
The Austroasiatic tribes such as Santhals, Ho and Munda organise their traditional, religious and sporting activities like a close-knit community. Football events are an opportunity to invite fellow tribal kin to celebrate their bond.
For the Ho people, no celebration is complete without the khassi. The animals are used for ceremonial sacrifices during religious events and rituals, and their meat is shared among the community members.
“Khassis are part of the prize as they are an important part of our culture. Their meat is tasty, and everyone loves good mutton. Most teams slaughter the goats, but some also keep them as livestock and trophy prize,” Manish Kudada, an 18-year-old player and one of the organisers of the tournament from Tirilbasa, told Al Jazeera.
Kudada has preserved the black khassi he won in another football tournament in February, but his friends joke that the goat is being fattened up for a feast. The khassi goats are prized for their meat quality. In Chaibasa, the goats can be spotted everywhere, especially during the weekly Tuesday markets, where a baby goat costs up to 8,000 rupees ($83).
“Without khassi, our celebrations are half-hearted. At weddings, even if the hosts serve double the amount of chicken and no khassi meat, it will upset the villagers,” Raj Keshri, goalkeeper for the Tirilbasa team and one of the organisers of the tournament, told Al Jazeera.
“We therefore decided to offer cash and goats as the prize. Players get to keep their money, but with the khassis, they also get to celebrate the victory with the entire village.”
The Ho practice what they call the Munda-Manki governance system, under which the hereditary head of a village upholds all social, legal and customary rights of the people. Their tribal codes and customs take precedence over the Indian government’s panchayat (village administration) and police systems.
The Rangila Star Tirilbasa tournament is conducted at the “ek munda” (“ek” means “one” in Hindi) level, which means that a team’s members must belong to the same village. Instead of 11 players, each team has nine, of which at least six must belong to the same village to qualify for the tournament. Organisers say the rule is strictly followed to reinforce a sense of unity among the players.
The rules of the game have also been modified. There is no offside, and players are free to score from anywhere on the field.
“This kind of match setup provides an opportunity for players like us from small villages who never get a chance to qualify in open tournaments which are dominated by seasoned players,” Sudarshan Tiu, who plays for Galubasa FC, told Al Jazeera.
Suvir Kumar Tanti, the commentator for the tournament, travels widely across the Kolhan region during the monsoon football season, when most male members return home for cultivation and agricultural festivals.
At the finals at Tirilbasa on Friday, his high-pitched, lyrical play-by-play commentary boomed through the loudspeaker, helping the spectators keep track of the fast-paced action on the football field.
“The Rangila Star tournament reflects the culture of the Ho community. And khassi goats as prizes make it even more unique. Very few tournaments in the region follow this and prefer to conduct events in a professional manner, with trophies and medals as rewards,” he told Al Jazeera.
The tournament offers entertainment for the villagers, who pour in and out of the grounds through the day, squatting by the sides of the field or finding a place on the trees.
Nearby, food stalls sell fried dough balls, potato chops, yellow peas, and hooch. Men sit in circles, taking a break in between the matches to drink “madia”, a fermented rice beer that locals say helps them stay cool in the hot and humid weather.
In the evenings after the matches, men also play a rooster-catching game, which spectators can bet their money on.
Keshri, goalkeeper for the Tirilbasa team, explains the spirit behind the tournament’s eccentric name: Rangila Star Tirilbasa.
“The name was chosen because it embodies the identity of our village. ‘Rangila’ [colourful] signifies our enthusiasm to do something unique while ‘Star’ represents talent. Through our football tournament, we hope Tirilbasa will become the ground for local talent.”
The tribal-dominated state of Jharkhand has been a sports powerhouse for decades. It has produced globally-awarded field hockey players and athletes, the most famous being India’s former cricket captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni.
The state government helps local football and hockey clubs like Rangila Star with financial grants, resulting in the rise of some of football’s next generation of players. Many such clubs, including Rangila, also hold tournaments for female teams.
But until over a decade ago, Chaibasa was not on the sporting map.
Located among remote forests and hills, the district was cut off from mainland India due to the Maoist insurgency – a tribal-led armed revolt against the Indian state over large-scale felling of forests and selling of lands to private corporates for mining and related activities.
The government regained control of Chaibasa from Maoists only in 2011. Still, until last year, private vehicles avoided taking roads crossing the district at night. Commercial buses operated from 4am to 4pm, and the region remained on the government’s list of “sensitive areas”.
In March this year, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah declared the end of the armed Maoist rebellion after a series of top commanders were killed or arrested by the security forces in Jharkhand and the surrounding states, mainly Chhattisgarh.
As violence ebbed, Chaibasa turned into a busy town. Shops selling pizza, burgers and laptops, alongside offices and warehouses of mining companies extracting coal and iron ore, have come up. Christian missionary schools and colleges are dotted across the region, providing educational opportunities to tribal people.
Sporting activities are also thriving, with Chaibasa fast emerging as a football hot spot, producing players like female midfielder and forward Malati Munda.
Munda, who found national fame through local tournaments, ended up playing in league matches in Kolkata, the capital of neighbouring West Bengal state, where football is extremely popular.
“I had no coach to guide me or provide training. No one had even heard about me. After coming to Chaibasa town for higher studies, I met several brothers and sisters who taught me and improved my game,” Munda told Al Jazeera.
The weekly local tournaments gave Munda experience and skills to improve her game. They also brought rewards. “I have played at several such games where we won cash, and yes, khassi as well,” she said with a laugh.
Munda currently plays for the Home Guard paramilitary in Jharkhand’s capital city of Ranchi – a route many players from poorer families take to secure a government job in India.
Harish Hembram from Chaibasa began his career as a football content creator by covering local matches and uploading their videos on social media. His YouTube channel today has more than 211,000 subscribers, and livestreams key matches across Jharkhand.
“Football has always been popular in the villages, and many like me would attend matches at different venues. I started uploading the videos for fun for those fans who couldn’t attend. But soon the videos clocked high viewership, and I started my YouTube channel. Now organisers call me to cover their tournaments,” he told Al Jazeera.
Hembram said he earns about 20,000 rupees ($208) a month through his YouTube channel alone. He has moved to Ranchi, where he has also opened a sports shop selling football, jerseys, shoes and other accessories. Many players from Chaibasa visit his shop.
The grassroots football culture in Chaibasa defies the stereotype that India is not a football country.
Sandeep Menon, author of Sacred Grounds: A Journey Through People’s Football in India, says he has discovered and documented a football subculture across the country. He said while India does not figure prominently on the global football map, the love for the sport in the country is “unparalleled”.
“At the grassroots level, football is played with great interest across the country. And everyone has their own version of the game, to make it palatable and adaptable depending upon the availability of space, local geographical surroundings, weather and social conditions,” Menon told Al Jazeera.
Menon said hyper-local village tournaments like the Rangila Star Tirilbasa attract young players and provide them an opportunity for overnight fame. “There is a high emotional investment in playing for a village and representing it,” he said. “For some players, football becomes their identity and pride.”
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