Indian

Pakistan has welcomed Sikh pilgrims from India in the first major crossing since their deadly conflict in May closed the land border between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

More than 2,100 pilgrims were granted visas to attend a 10-day festival marking 556 years since the birth of Guru Nanak, founder of the Sikh faith, a decision that was in line with efforts to promote “interreligious and intercultural harmony and understanding”, Pakistan’s high commission in New Delhi said last week.

In May, Islamabad and New Delhi engaged in their worst fighting since 1999, leaving more than 70 people dead. The Wagah-Attari border, the only active land crossing between the two countries, was closed to general traffic after the violence.

On Wednesday, the pilgrims will gather at Nankana Sahib, Guru Nanak’s birthplace west of Lahore, before visiting other sacred sites in Pakistan, including Kartarpur, where the guru is buried.

The Kartarpur Corridor, a visa-free route opened in 2019 to allow Indian Sikhs to visit the temple without crossing the main border, has remained closed since the conflict.

Four days of conflict erupted in May after New Delhi accused Islamabad of backing a deadly attack on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir, allegations Pakistan denied.

Sikhism is a monotheistic religion founded in the 15th century in Punjab, a region spanning parts of present-day India and Pakistan. While most Sikhs migrated to India during partition, some of their most revered places of worship are in Pakistan.

Cricket fans have been celebrating across India after the women’s team claimed their first ever World Cup, defeating South Africa in the final in Mumbai.

Nov. 1 (UPI) — At least nine people died and more than 25 were injured in a stampede at a private Hindu temple in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh on Saturday morning.

The stampede happened when around 25,000 worshippers crowded into Sri Venkateswara Swamy temple in the Srikakulam district on Ekadashi, a sacred holiday. On Saturday, there are usually 3,000 parishioners, the Times of India reported.

The deceased included eight women and one boy, and two of the injured were in critical condition.

“The heavy rush of devotees led to overcrowding, resulting in injuries to many devotees, who were immediately rushed to nearby hospitals,” an official said, according to Xinhua.

Chief Minister Y. S. Jagan Mohan Reddy has ordered an investigation into what happened at the 12-acre temple.

Organizers failed to inform the police in advance, which prevented adequate security, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said, according to News 18, a network co-owned by CNN.

The government will pay $2,500 to the families of the deceased and $563 to those of the injured, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while noting that he was “pained by the stampede.”

Ekadashi means 11 in English and corresponds to the 11th day of every fortnight in the Hindu Lunar Calendar. During the holiday, devotees fast and offer prayers to Lord Vishnu.

This was the third stampede this year in India.

On April 30, seven people died and six were injured when a newly constructed rain-soaked wall at Sri Varaha Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy at Simhachalam temple in Visakhapatnam collapsed.

On Jan. 6, six people were killed and others injured in a stampede in Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh at a counter to distribute tickets for a special event at Lord Venkateswara temple at Tirumala.

Last year, Reliance Industries Ltd signed a deal with Russian major Rosneft to import nearly 500,000 barrels per day.

India’s top importer of Russian oil, the conglomerate Reliance Industries Ltd, says it will abide by Western sanctions, ending several days of speculation about how the company will manage new measures targeting Russia’s two largest oil companies.

Reliance “will be adapting the refinery operations to meet the compliance requirements”, a company spokesperson said in a statement on Friday, while maintaining its relationships with suppliers.

“Whenever there is any guidance from the Indian Government in this respect, as always, we will be complying fully,” the statement added.

On Wednesday, the United States Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated Russian majors Rosneft and Lukoil for the first time as President Donald Trump becomes increasingly frustrated with Russia’s unremitting war on Ukraine.

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said the move was the result of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “refusal to end this senseless war” and encouraged allies to adhere to the new sanctions.

The following day, the European Union adopted its 19th package of measures against Russia, which includes a full transaction ban on Rosneft. The EU has previously said that, starting January 21, it will not receive fuel imports from refineries that received or processed Russian oil 60 days prior to shipping.

Reliance, chaired by billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani, operates the world’s biggest refining complex in western Gujarat. The company has purchased roughly half of the 1.7-1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) of discounted Russian crude shipped to India, the news agency Press Trust of India reported this week.

In 2024, Reliance signed a 10-year deal with Rosneft to buy nearly 500,000 bpd, Reuters reported at the time. It also buys Russian oil from intermediaries.

Reliance did not offer details on how, exactly, it planned to navigate the sanctions – nor the fate of the 2024 Rosneft agreement – but emphasised it would comply with European import requirements.

“Reliance is confident its time-tested, diversified crude sourcing strategy will continue to ensure stability and reliability in its refinery operations for meeting the domestic and export requirements, including to Europe,” the company spokesperson said.

The sanctions also arrive as India navigates the fallout from Trump’s tariffs on Indian exports, which rose to 50 percent starting in August as a penalty for importing Russian oil. China and India are the world’s largest importers of Russian crude.

Trump has claimed multiple times over the past month that India has agreed to stop buying Russian oil as part of a broader trade deal, an assertion the Indian government has not confirmed.

Neither India’s Ministry of External Affairs nor oil ministries have responded since the sanctions were announced on Wednesday.

Oct. 17 (UPI) — The Palm Bay City Council in central Florida censored council member Chandler Langevin after controversial remarks about the local Indian community on social media, including a call to “deport every Indian immediately” and “Indians are destroying the South.”

The 3-2 decision Thursday restricts his ability to introduce agenda items, speak during council reports and serve on city-appointed committees and boards. Langevin now has to receive majority approval from the council to place an item on the agenda.

Langevin voted against the measure.

Palm Bay, with a population of 142,000, is located about 50 miles south of the Kennedy Space Center.

Langevin is a 33-year-old Republican elected to a four-year term in November after serving in the U.S. Marines.

He has targeted others with incendiary, racist and xenophobic statements online though his X account.

Regarding Indians in the community, he wrote: “Indian migration has to cease immediately.”

He also wrote: “There is not a single Indian that cares about the United States. They are here to exploit us financially and enrich India and Indians.”

“I not only have a constitutional right, but I personally believe that I have a duty and an obligation to engage other elected officials, to have dialogue with my constituents and to drive policy in a matter that I deem best,” Langevin said, in describing the situation as a witchhunt.

Langevin, wearing a U.S. Flag around his neck during the meeting, said he would sue, alleging a violation of the First Amendment.

Anthony Sabatini, an attorney and Lake County commissioner, posted on X: “This textbook first amendment retaliation & totally illegal -tomorrow we will file a lawsuit and now they will pay.”

“The government cannot punish and limit your rights just purely based on your viewpoint,” Sabatini said in a report by WKMG-TV. “You can pass a censure motion, that’s fine, but you can’t limit his ability to speak based on his opinion.”

The council also voted 4-1 to look into hiring an outside attorney to investigate whether Langevin made any ethics violations.

Two weeks earlier, the commissioners wrote a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis asking to have Langevin removed from his elected seat.

Commissioners, as well as Mayor Rob Medina, said his comments are serious misconduct.

“I think if we represent the population at large, there’s some issues then we need to tailor our speech,” Medina said. “We represent everyone, right, so it is conduct unbecoming.”

Councilman Richard “Mike” Hammer voted against the censure. Hammer posted on Facebook that he did not agree with the things Langevin said about Indian Americans, but he did not agree with the restrictions placed on him, he said.

Indian American Chamber of Commerce President Jan Gautman told Spectrum News that he was satisfied with an apology.

“After meeting with several community leaders, he came to understand the tremendous value the Indian American community brings to this country — especially through business ownership, job creation, and contributions as one of the strongest economic drivers in our nation,” Gautman said. “Our community appreciates his apology and chooses to move forward with positivity, focusing on unity, understanding, and the betterment of our shared future.

“We wish him well and look forward to continued collaboration in building stronger communities together.”

On Oct. 6, Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a statement: “Chandler Langevin’s comments towards the Indian American community are vile and reprehensible. The people of Palm Bay deserve better leadership than someone who so proudly displays his hateful ignorance through divisive and racist rhetoric.

“The Florida Democratic Party proudly stands in solidarity with our Indian American neighbors and is grateful for their contributions to our State. We look forward to beating bigots like Mr. Langevin at the ballot box to ensure Florida’s elected officials represent the best of our shared values.”

Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott wrote on X on Oct. 1 that there is “no place for this kind of hate in Florida. As Governor and now as U.S. Senator, I’ve been proud to stand with our state’s incredible Indian American community, who are proud Americans and value the ideas that make our country great.”

ADVERTISEMENT

In the midst of negotiating a long-awaited trade deal with India, European Commissioner for Trade Maroš Šefčovič is facing a real headache: how to avoid a clash with Pakistan while resisting pressure from India to recognise the Indian origin of the long-grained, fragrant basmati rice.

“This is of course one of the issues which is on the list,” Šefčovič admitted on 12 September as he was back from a round of negotiation in New Delhi.

New discussions are taking place in Brussels this week, as both India and the European Union have set themselves the goal of reaching a trade deal before the end of the year, with the new tariff policy of the Trump administration putting both partners under pressure to build new trade ties.  

Of course, basmati rice will be among the issues discussed between Šefčovič and his Indian counterparts, as India wants its geographical indication (GI) protected in Europe.

But such recognition would not come easily, since its rival neighbour Pakistan — which has been in conflict with India over the disputed Kashmir region since the partition of the two countries in 1947 — also demands the EU to recognise basmati as of Pakistani origin.

The protection of GIs carries significant economic stakes. Trade talks between the EU and its partners usually include a separate section dedicated to it. Owing to its rich artisanal and culinary heritage, the EU — largely thanks to France, Italy and Spain — holds the largest number of GIs in the world.

In trade negotiations, Brussels seeks to have as many of its products as possible protected by the other party to prevent counterfeiting in that country, with France’s champagne and Italy’s famed Parmigiano Reggiano cheese being the most commonly forged products.

And the other party to the negotiation can accept, provided the agreement also defends its own interests and GIs.

The failure of a joint recognition

If it were up to the EU alone, it would have recognised basmati rice as Indian and Pakistani long ago — but it’s not that simple.

At the beginning, things hadn’t started off so badly. In fact, India and Pakistan had jointly led a fight against a US company RiceTec, which had obtained a patent on basmati rice in the late 1990s. In 2001, the US Patent and Trademark Office revoked that patent.

A few years later, to protect the origin of basmati in the EU, Islamabad and New Delhi collaborated between 2004 and 2008 on a joint application to the European Commission for the recognition of their shared heritage over the rice which comes from the Punjab region, situated on the border between India and Pakistan.

But the 2008 Mumbai attacks, in which 160 people were killed and which India attributed to Pakistani intelligence services, shattered the joint efforts of the two countries and reshuffled the deck.

After years of deadlock and tension, India unilaterally submitted a request for GI registration to the European Commission in 2018.

The application states that the rice, characterised by “an exquisite aroma, sweet taste, soft texture, delicate curvature,” is grown in the Indo-Gangetic plains, a geographic zone divided between India, Pakistan, Cambodia and Nepal, which also includes the Punjab region.

In the months that followed, Pakistan opposed India’s application, perceiving it as an attempt to secure exclusive use of the term “basmati”.

And after unsuccessful exchanges between the lawyers of both parties, Pakistan submitted its own request for GI status in 2023, listing not only the Indo-Gangetic plains but also four districts of the much-disputed Kashmir — Mirpur, Bhimber, Poonch, and Bagh — as places where basmati rice is grown.

Both sides deny requests for exclusive recognition

After several years of attempting to mediate between the two rival brothers, the EU found itself caught in the trap of territorial recognition of Kashmir — the core of the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.

“The Commission is trying to defuse a geopolitical conflict,” Matteo Mariano, expert in trademarks at Novagraaf law firm said.

“It could have said ‘first come, first served,’ but it chose not to, considering that the territorial issues between India and Pakistan are not its concern.”

Sources from both Pakistan and India that were contacted by Euronews denied that their country was asking for exclusive recognition of the basmati origin. Yet, the path to a common solution does not seem to be emerging.

In the midst of negotiations for a much broader trade agreement — ranging from automotive markets to dairy products to public procurement — the EU finds itself walking a tightrope.

“If the Commission is strong-handed, it can force a joint registration by Pakistan and India”, Mariano said. “This depends on the importance of the trade agreement for India and whether the EU has time to block negotiations on GIs,” he explained.

According to the lawyer, if India wants to have doors opened for itself, the EU can leverage that to benefit its own companies.

But for that, the Commission will need to be a shrewd strategist, as Delhi is represented by “tough negotiators,” Šefčovič himself conceded in September.

New Delhi, India — Meghna Gupta* had planned it all – a master’s degree by 23, a few years of working in India, and then a move to the United States before she turned 30 to eventually settle there.

So, she clocked countless hours at the Hyderabad office of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest IT firm and a driver of the country’s emergence as the global outsourcing powerhouse in the sector. She waited to get to the promotion that would mean a stint on California’s West Coast.

Now, Gupta is 29, and her dreams lie in tatters after US President Donald Trump’s administration upended the H-1B visa programme that tech firms have used for more than three decades to bring skilled workers to the US.

Trump’s decision to increase the fee for the visas from about $2,000, in many cases, to $100,000 has imposed dramatic new costs on companies that sponsor these applications. The base salary an H-1B visa employee is supposed to be paid is $60,000. But the employer’s cost now rises to $160,000 at the minimum, and in many cases, companies will likely find American workers with similar skills for lower pay.

This is the Trump administration’s rationale as it presses US companies to hire local talent amid its larger anti-immigration policies. But for thousands of young people around the world still captivated by the American dream, this is a blow. And nowhere is that more so than in India, the world’s most populous nation, that, despite an economy that is growing faster than most other major nations, has still been bleeding skilled young people to developed nations.

For years, Indian IT companies themselves sponsored the most H-1B visas of all firms, using them to bring Indian employees to the US and then contractually outsourcing their expertise to other businesses, too. This changed: In 2014, seven out of the 10 companies that received the most H-1B visas were Indian or started in India; In 2024, that number dropped to four.

And in the first six months of 2025, Gupta’s TCS was the only Indian company in the top-10 H-1B visa recipients, in a list otherwise dominated by Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.

But what had not changed until now was the demographic of the workers that even the above US companies hired on H-1B visas. More than 70 percent of all H-1B visas were granted to Indian nationals in 2024, ranging from the tech sector to medicine. Chinese nationals were a distant second, with less than 12 percent.

Now, thousands across India fear that this pathway to the US is being slammed shut.

“It has left me heartbroken,” Gupta told Al Jazeera of Trump’s fee hike.

“All my life, I planned for this; everything circled around this goal for me to move to the US,” said Gupta, who was born and raised in Bageshwar, a town of 10,000 people in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

“The so-called ‘American Dream’ looks like a cruel joke now.”

‘In the hole’

Gupta’s crisis reflects a broader contradiction that defines India today. On the one hand, the country — as Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government frequently mention — is the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

India today boasts the world’s fourth-largest gross domestic product (GDP), behind just the US, China and Germany, after it passed Japan earlier this year. But the country’s creation of new jobs lags far behind the number of young people who enter its workforce every year, widening its employment gap. India’s biggest cities are creaking under inadequate public infrastructure, potholed roads, traffic snarls and growing income inequality.

The result: Millions like Gupta aspire to a life in the West, picking their career choices, usually in sectors like engineering or medicine, and working to get into hard-fought seats in top colleges – and then migrating. In the last five years, India has witnessed a drastic rise in the outflow of skilled professionals, particularly in STEM fields, who migrate to countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the US.

As per the Indian government’s data, those numbers rose from 94,145 Indians in 2020 to 348,629 by 2024 — a 270 percent rise.

Trump’s new visa regime could now effectively close the pipeline of those skilled workers into the US. The fee hike comes on the back of a series of tension points in a souring US-India relationship in recent months. New Delhi is also currently facing a steep 50 percent tariff on its exports to the US — half of that for buying Russian crude, which the US says is funding the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.

Ajay Srivastava, a former Indian trade officer and founder of the Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a Delhi-based think tank, told Al Jazeera that the hardest-hit sectors after the new visa policy will be “the ones that Indian professionals dominate: mid-level IT services jobs, software developers, project managers, and back-end support in finance and healthcare”.

For many of these positions, the new $100,000 fee exceeds an entry-level employee’s annual salary, making sponsorship uneconomical, especially for smaller firms and startups, said Srivastava. “The cost of hiring a foreign worker now exceeds local hiring by a wide margin,” he said, adding that this would shift the hiring calculus of US firms.

“American firms will scout more domestic talent, reserve H-1Bs for only the hardest-to-fill specialist roles, and push routine work offshore to India or other hubs,” said Srivastava.

“The market has already priced in this pivot,” he said, citing the fall of Indian stock markets since Trump’s announcement, “as investors brace for shrinking US hiring”.

Indian STEM graduates and students, he said, “have to rethink US career plans altogether”.

To Sudhanshu Kaushik, founder of the North American Association of Indian Students, a body with members across 120 universities, the Trump administration’s “motive is to create panic and distress among H-1B visa holders and other immigrant visa holders”.

“To remind them that they don’t belong,” Kaushik told Al Jazeera. “And at any time, at any whim, the possibility of remaining in the United States can become incredibly difficult and excruciatingly impossible.”

The announcement came soon after the start of the new academic session, when many international students – including from India, which sends the largest cohort of foreign students to the US – have begun classes.

Typically, a large chunk of such students stay back in the US for work after graduating. An analysis of the National Survey of College Graduates suggests that 41 percent of international students who graduated between 2012 and 2020 were still in the US in 2021. For PhD holders, that figure jumps to 75 percent.

But Kaushik said he has received more than 80 queries on their hotline for students now worried about what the future holds.

“They know that they’re already in the hole,” he said, referring to the tuition and other fees running into tens of thousands of dollars that they have invested in a US education, with increasingly unclear job prospects.

The landscape in the US today, Srivastava of GTRI said, represents “fewer opportunities, tougher competition, and shrinking returns on US education”.

Nasscom, India’s apex IT trade body, has said the policy’s abrupt rollout could “potentially disrupt families” and the continuity of ongoing onshore projects for the country’s technology services firms.

The new policy, it added, could have “ripple effects” on the US innovation ecosystem and global job markets, pointing out that for companies, “additional cost will require adjustments”.

‘They do not care for people at all’

Ansh*, a senior software engineer at Meta, graduated from an Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), one in a chain of India’s most prestigious engineering school, and landed a job with Facebook soon after that.

He now lives with his wife in Menlo Park, in the heart of the US’s Silicon Valley, and drives a BMW sedan to work. Both Ansh and his wife are in the US on H-1B visas.

Last Saturday’s news from the White House left him rattled.

He spent that evening figuring out flights for his friends — Indians on H-1B visas who were out of the country, one in London, another in Bengaluru, India — to see if they could rush back to the US before the new rules kicked in on Sunday, as major US tech firms had recommended to their employees.

Since then, the Trump administration has clarified that the new fees will not apply to existing H-1B visas or renewals. For now, Ansh’s job and status in the US are secure.

But this is little reassurance, he said.

“In the last 11 years, I have never felt like going back to India,” Ansh told Al Jazeera. “But this sort of instability triggers people to make those life changes. And now we are here, wondering if one should return to India?”

Because he and his wife do not have children, Ansh said that a move back to India — while a dramatic rupture in their lives and plans — was at least something they could consider. But what of his colleagues and friends on H-1B visas, who have children, he asked?

“The way this has been done by the US government shows that they do not care for people at all,” he said. “These types of decisions are like … brain wave strikes, and then it is just executed.”

Ansh believes that the US also stands to lose from the new visa policy. “The immigrant contribution is deeply sprinkled into the DNA of the US’s success,” he said.

“Once talent goes away, innovation won’t happen,” he said. “It is going to have long-term consequences for visa holders and their families. Its impact would reach everyone, one way or the other.”

India’s struggle

After the announcement from the White House on Saturday, Prime Minister Modi’s principal secretary, PK Mishra, said that the government was encouraging Indians working abroad to return to the country.

Mishra’s comments were in tune with some experts who have suggested that the disruption in the H-1B visa policy could serve as an opportunity for India — as it could, in theory, stanch the brain drain that the country has long suffered from.

GTRI’s Srivastava said that US companies that have until now relied on immigrant visas like the H-1B might now explore more local hiring or offshore some jobs. “The $100,000 H-1B fee makes onsite deployment prohibitively expensive, so Indian IT firms will double down on offshore and remote delivery,” he said.

“US postings will be reserved only for mission-critical roles, while the bulk of hiring and project execution shifts to India and other offshore hubs,” he told Al Jazeera. “For US clients, this means higher dependence on offshore teams — raising familiar concerns about data security, compliance, and time-zone coordination — even as costs climb.”

Srivastava noted that India’s tech sector can absorb some returning H-1B workers, if they choose to return.

But that won’t be easy. He said that even though hiring in India’s IT and services sector has been growing year-on-year, the gaps are real, ranging from dipping job postings to new openings clustered in AI, cloud, and data science. And US-trained returnees would expect salaries well above Indian benchmarks.

And in reality, Kaushik said, many H-1B aspirants are looking at different countries as alternatives to the US — not India.

Ansh, the senior engineer at Meta, agreed. “In the US, we operate at the cutting edge of technology,” whereas the Indian tech ecosystem was still geared towards delivering immediate services.

“The Indian ecosystem is not at the pace where you innovate the next big thing in the world,” he said. “It is, in fact, far from there.”

Vijay, who is a well-known actor and goes by only one name, launched a political party last year.

At least 36 people have been killed and more than 50 injured on Saturday at a rally held by Tamil actor Vijay, who is campaigning for election, state officials said.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin said eight children and 16 women were among the 36 people who died in the district of Karur in Tamil Nadu during a political rally by Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, Vijay’s party.

Large crowds had gathered for the meeting, part of Vijay’s ongoing state tour for his political party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam.

Vijay, who is a well-known actor and goes by only one name, launched a political party last year and began campaigning this month in advance of state elections that are to be held early next year.

State lawmaker Senthil Balaji told reporters that 58 people were hospitalised after what he said was a stampede. He added that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin will visit the area on Sunday.

“The unfortunate incident during a political rally in Karur, Tamil Nadu, is deeply saddening,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a post on X.

Vijay, one of Tamil cinema’s most bankable actors for three decades, has drawn massive crowds to his public meetings since launching his political party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, in 2024, which has targeted both the state governing party DMK and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. He is campaigning before state elections that are to be held in early 2026.

Videos from local media show thousands of people surrounding a large campaign vehicle on top of which Vijay is seen standing and speaking.

During the rally, visuals showed Vijay throwing water bottles from the top of the vehicle to fainting supporters and calling for police help when the crowd became uncontrollable.

“My heart is broken; I am in unbearable, indescribable pain and sorrow,” Vijay wrote on X.

At least 44 doctors from the nearby districts of Tiruchirappalli and Salem were sent to Karur, media reports added.

Stalin has announced 1 million Indian rupees ($11,280) each to the families of the victims who died in the incident and set up an inquiry panel.

This is not the first time Vijay’s rallies have faced safety concerns. At least six deaths were reported by media following the first meeting of his political party when it was launched in October last year.

Despite police-imposed restrictions, including limits on convoy size and venue changes, the sheer scale of public turnout has repeatedly overwhelmed local infrastructure.

After taking multiple economic hits in his household, Gurvinder Singh, a 47-year-old farmer in Gurdaspur, in India’s Punjab state, took a million-rupee loan ($11,000) from a private lender to marry off his eldest daughter. He saved a portion of that and used it to sow 3 acres (1.2 hectares) of paddy.

He placed his bet on the high-yielding pearl variety of aromatic Basmati rice. A good sale would have given him an earning of nearly 1 million rupees per acre ($11,400 per 0.4 hectares).

But now, Singh’s pearl paddy grains lie submerged in floodwater, buried under layers of soil and sediment.

“I cannot afford this shocking flood at this time in my life. We are ruined,” Singh told Al Jazeera. “This year’s harvest was supposed to cover our debts. But this field is a lake now, and I don’t know how I will start again.”

Singh also had to temporarily leave his home, along with his wife and two children, after the devastating floods hit their village earlier this month. “What will I go back to?” he wondered.

‘A lasting repercussion’

Northern Indian states have been reeling under the impact of heavy monsoon rains, flash floods and swelling rivers that have submerged entire villages and thousands of hectares of farmland.

In Punjab, where more than 35 percent of the population relies on agriculture, the situation is particularly grim. Here, farmers are facing the worst floods in the last four decades, with large tracts of paddy fields inundated just weeks before harvest. The state cultivates rice in nearly two-thirds of its total geographical area.

Gurdaspur, where Singh lives with his family, has been among the worst flood-hit districts in a region that borders three overflowing rivers – Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej – following heavy rainfall in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh state.

At least 51 people have died due to floods in Punjab, and 400,000 more people have been displaced.

Singh’s field of paddy contributes to India’s $6bn worth of Basmati exports. Punjab alone accounts for 40 percent of the total production. Across the border, Pakistan’s Punjab province, also submerged in floods, accounts for 90 percent of the country’s Basmati output, generating nearly $900m.

Initial official estimates put the complete loss of crops in more than 450,000 acres (182,100 hectares) — almost the area of Mauritius — of farmland in India’s Punjab. Independent agricultural economists told Al Jazeera that the final impact of floods could be five times higher than the official estimate.

“The crop is completely spoiled, their machinery is submerged, and the farmers’ houses have washed away,” said Lakhwinder Singh, director of the Patiala-based Punjabi University’s Centre for Development Economics and Innovations Studies.

“Punjab’s farmers have to restart from scratch. They would require a lot of support and investment from the government,” Singh told Al Jazeera.

So far, the Punjab government – governed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which is nationally in opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party – has announced a 20,000 Indian rupees ($230) allowance for farmers who lost their crops to flood. But that may be too little to deal with the monumental challenges that lie ahead for farmers, said Singh.

Nearly 6 percent of that basmati rice is shipped to the United States, which has slapped a 50 percent tariff on New Delhi. India has traditionally been protectionist towards its agricultural sector, which employs half of India’s population (the world’s largest) – a sticking point in trade negotiations with the administration of US President Donald Trump .

Singh warned the government of India against using the impact of the floods as leverage to liberalise policy to import food grains. “The government must not push the farmers under the bus to reduce the tariffs and get a deal with Trump,” he said. “These Punjab floods could have a lasting repercussion on the future of the agricultural economy.”

‘All we have is water’

The immediate and daunting challenge for Punjab’s farmers will be to get rid of the soil and sediment that have settled over their farmlands, agriculture experts have said.

Indra Shekhar Singh, an independent agricultural policy analyst, said that the extent of the damage could only be determined after the water receded from the fields. “There is excessive sedimentation and mud on farmers’ fields,” he told Al Jazeera. “Another problem is levelling the field, which is another cost, and readying it for the next season.”

In India, the monsoon or “kharif” crop makes up about 80 percent of the total rice production, which is harvested in late September to October. Now, experts say, Punjab’s farmers are racing against time to ready their fields for the next season’s crop, winter’s wheat, which must start by early November to avoid yield losses.

“Paddy fields are taking the worst hit in the floods,” said Shekhar Singh. “Unless there is a miracle, even the conservative numbers suggest heavy losses to farmers.

Other than the new diseases from floodwaters that may affect the standing crops, Shekhar Singh said that the farmers are also staring at a critical nutritional crisis for the Rabi season.

India’s farmers rely on urea, containing about 46 percent nitrogen, as their main fertiliser; the country is also the world’s largest importer of urea. But stocks have been dwindling: Urea stocks dropped from 8.64 million tonnes in August 2024 to 3.71 million tonnes in August this year.

This monsoon also saw panic buying of urea by farmers across several Indian states. Now, the floods have struck amid an underlying fear that fertilisers may fall short for the upcoming Rabi sowing. There has been a global surge as well in urea prices, rising from $400 per tonne in May 2025 to $530 per tonne in September.

“This would lead to black marketing for fertilisers in impacted states like Punjab, and adds to an existing problem of fake pesticides circulation,” added Shekhar Singh.

Punjabi University’s Singh said that farmers face a “prolonged economic crisis for them that will continue in the coming months”.

Meanwhile, Singh, the farmer from Punjab’s Gurdaspur, is pondering what the future holds for his family.

He had married off his daughter earlier this year to another farmer in Amritsar, one of Punjab’s biggest cities that borders Pakistan. Their farmland is submerged, too.

“I cannot travel to visit them even when we are suffering from the same disease,” he said, before reflecting on the tragedies confronting a region where two sides of a tense border are grappling with the same crisis.

“We were ready to fight a war for these rivers,” Singh said, referring to the hostilities between India and Pakistan earlier this year after an attack in Indian-administered Kashmir killed 26 civilians. India had suspended the Indus Waters Treaty, which distributes the six rivers between the nuclear-armed neighbours, in response – a move that Pakistan described as an “act of war”.

“All we have now is water,” Singh said.

India’s most recent encounter with Pakistan in the Asia Cup was celebrated as a patriotic spectacle: a win dedicated to the armed forces and those affected by the Pahalgam attack. Such declarations, however, expose something deeper: a strategy of playing politics with sport, hypocrisy masked as principle.

Beneath this posturing and tokenism lies a contradiction too stark to ignore. This is not just sport. It is cynical theatre in which administrators, players and commentators attempt to ride on two boats at the same time. The hypocrisy is visible to anyone with a sane set of eyes.

At the heart of this contradiction is the relationship between India and Pakistan in cricket. Officially, India refuses bilateral cricket with Pakistan. The line is firm: no tours, no series and no diplomacy. The justification rests on national security, especially after the clash between the South Asian neighbours in May.

Indian artists are banned from collaborating with their Pakistani counterparts. Pakistani singers and actors once popular in India have been cut off on social media and otherwise. Indian celebrities themselves are trolled and shamed for past collaborations done on neutral grounds.

Yet the same ecosystem explodes with excitement when India faces Pakistan in multination tournaments. Matches are packaged as spectacles, marketed as the “greatest rivalry” and cashed in for billions in advertising revenue.

This duality is not accidental. Jay Shah, now serving in International Cricket Council (ICC) leadership, has been accused of pressuring Team India into playing Pakistan despite reluctance from within the camp. Sanjay Raut, a member of parliament in India, recently alleged that Shah’s hand forced the decision, turning the match into an obligation rather than a choice.

If true, this signals how far politics has penetrated Indian cricket administration for the sake of money and clout. The game is no longer simply sport but a vehicle for symbolic battles decided in boardrooms, not dressing rooms.

The hypocrisy becomes sharper when one considers the home environment. While Indians in other spheres faced online lynching for working with Pakistani colleagues even before the war, cricketers are being placed on a pedestal for defeating Pakistan. It is not only about double standards. It is about a calculated exploitation of sentiment.

Cricket is permitted as the only arena of “contact” because cricket sells more than most things in India. The ban on cultural exchange is explained as nationalism, but cricket is exempted in the name of multilateral obligations and commercial survival. Dedications of wins to soldiers and terror victims act as moral cover for what is essentially a business transaction. This is sheer hypocrisy and tokenism.

If India insists on involving politics in sport, consistency demands more. Look at Muslim athletes and countries known for boycotting matches against Israeli opponents. They forfeit games, risk sanctions and face bans. Whatever one thinks of their politics, their actions are clear, uncompromised and costly. They make a stand and face consequences.

India refuses bilateral cricket with Pakistan yet plays them in ICC tournaments because the money is too big to lose, especially when most of it comes home through viewership endorsements and advertisements. It tries to sail on two boats, waving nationalism with one hand while collecting profits with the other. The dedication of victories to the armed forces does not erase that contradiction. It exposes it.

The India-Pakistan rivalry itself is not what it used to be. Competitive balance has tilted drastically. India has dominated recent contests due to the Pakistani team’s poor form. Suspense is long gone, but the manufactured hype remains.

Broadcasters and advertisers pump the match as if it still defines the fate of nations. In reality, it defines the fate of sponsorship deals. The sporting value is hollowed out. The symbolic gestures after each victory only add to the theatre. In their latest match on Sunday, Indian players refused to shake hands with their Pakistani counterparts.

Such dissonance turns patriotism into branding and erodes the dignity of national discourse. The Board of Control for Cricket in India, the ICC leadership and political voices close to the game must confront this contradiction. Cricket cannot remain both business and battlefield. A rivalry stripped of sporting essence but inflated with symbolism cannot endure. The Pahalgam victims deserve solidarity but should not be used as props for cricketing theatre. Sport deserves freedom from tokenism.

Instead of continuing this hybrid model of opportunism, India can opt for one of two choices. It can refuse to play Pakistan entirely, across all formats, including ICC tournaments. That would align deeds with words at the highest level. It would be costly in terms of ICC sanctions and revenues, but it would at least be consistent.

Or India can accept playing Pakistan as part of sport while removing politics and symbolic dedications from the game. That would mean treating cricket as cricket, not as a stage for nationalism.

India’s cricket establishment must choose one path. If it wants politics in sport, it must show the courage of consistency. If it wants to keep politics out, it must strip away the hollow dedications and patriotic posturing. The current approach of trying to sail on two boats is not sustainable. It fools no one, neither at home nor abroad. Cricket is being diminished by this hypocrisy and so is national dignity.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

Sacramento, California – On a sunny August morning, 60-year-old Gurtej Singh Cheema performed his morning prayers at his home in Sacramento. Then, the retired clinical professor of internal medicine made his way downtown to join more than 150 other Sikh Americans at California’s State Capitol.

He was there to speak in support of a state bill that, to many Sikhs, represents a matter of safety for the community.

California is home to an estimated 250,000 Sikhs, according to the community advocacy group, Sikh Coalition. They represent 40 percent of the nation’s Sikhs – who first made California their home more than a century ago.

But a spate of attacks and threats against community activists in North America over the past two years, which United States and Canadian officials have accused India of orchestrating, have left many Sikhs on edge, fearing for their safety and questioning whether law enforcement can protect them.

That’s what a new anti-intimidation bill seeks to address, according to its authors and advocates: If passed, it would require California to train officers in recognising and responding to what is known as “transnational repression” – attempts by foreign governments to target diaspora communities, in practice. The training would be developed by the state’s Office of Emergency Services.

“California can’t protect our most vulnerable communities if our officers don’t even recognize the threat,” Anna Caballero, a Democratic state senator and author of the bill, said in the statement shared with Al Jazeera. “The bill closes a critical gap in our public safety system and gives law enforcement the training they need to identify foreign interference when it happens in our neighborhoods.”

But the draft legislation, co-authored by California’s first Sikh Assemblywoman Jasmeet Bains, and Assemblywoman Esmeralda Soria, has also opened up deep divisions within an Indian American community already polarised along political lines.

Several influential American Sikh advocacy groups – the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Sikh Coalition and Jakara Movement among them – have backed the bill. Groups representing Indians of other major faiths, such as Hindus for Human Rights and the Indian American Muslim Council, have also supported the draft legislation, as has the California Police Chiefs Association.

But in the opposite corner stand Hindu-American groups like the Hindu American Foundation and the Coalition of Hindus of North America, as well as a Jewish group, Bay Area Jewish Coalition and even a Sikh group, The Khalsa Today. The Santa Clara Attorney’s office and Riverside County Sheriff’s Office have also opposed the bill.

Critics of the bill argue that it risks targeting sections of the diaspora – such as Hindu Americans opposed to the Khalistan movement, a campaign for the creation of a separate Sikh nation carved out of India – and could end up deepening biases against India and Hindu Americans.

The Riverside County Sheriff’s Office said that it had “concerns regarding the bill’s potential implications, particularly its impact on law enforcement practices and the inadvertent targeting of diaspora communities in Riverside County”.

But as Cheema stood with other Sikh Americans gathered at the state legislature on August 20 to testify before the Assembly Appropriations Committee, the urgency felt by many in the room was clear: Some had driven all night from Los Angeles, 620km (385 miles) away from Sacramento. Others took time off from work to be there.

“Any efforts that help a community feel safe, and you are a part of that community – naturally, you would support it,” Cheema, who also represented the Capital Sikh Center in Sacramento at the hearing, told Al Jazeera.

‘Harassment by foreign actors’

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) defines transnational repression as the acts of foreign governments when they reach beyond their borders to intimidate, silence, coerce, harass or harm members of their diaspora and exile communities in the United States.

The bill marks the second major legislation in recent years that has split South Asian diaspora groups in California. A 2023 bill that specified caste as a protected category under California’s anti-discrimination laws was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom after several Hindu-American groups lobbied against it. They argued that the state’s existing anti-discrimination laws already protected people from caste-based bias, and that specifying the new category was an indirect attack on Hinduism.

The California Assembly has now passed the new anti-intimidation bill. It will now return to the California Senate – which had passed an earlier version of the legislation – for another vote, expected this week. If it passes in the upper house of the California legislature, the bill will head to Newsom’s desk for his signature.

Thomas Blom Hansen, professor of anthropology at Stanford University, said the bill addresses concerns around online trolling, surveillance and harassment of individuals based on their political beliefs or affiliations – often influenced by foreign governments or political movements.

“The bill doesn’t name any specific country – it’s a general framework to provide additional protection to immigrants and diaspora communities from harassment by foreign actors,” Hansen told Al Jazeera.

But the backdrop of the bill does suggest that concerns over India and its alleged targeting of Sikh dissidents have been a major driver. Hansen noted that Senator Caballero comes from the 14th State Senate district, which has a significant Sikh population.

In 2023, Canada officially accused India of masterminding the assassination in June that year of Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. India has rejected the accusation, but relations between the two nations plummeted as a result – and remain tense, as Canada continues to pursue the allegations against individuals it arrested and that it says worked for New Delhi.

In November that year, US prosecutors also accused Indian intelligence agencies of plotting the assassination of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a New York-based Sikh activist. That plot was exposed after an alleged Indian agent accidentally ended up hiring an FBI informant for the hit job. Pannun leads Sikhs of Justice, a Sikh separatist advocacy group that India declared unlawful in 2019.

Several other Sikh activists in Canada and the US have received warnings from law enforcement agencies that they could be targeted.

Even Bains, the co-author of the new bill, has faced intimidation. In August 2023, after California recognised the 1984 massacre of thousands of Sikhs in India – following the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards – as a genocide, four men, apparently of Indian origin, visited her office. They allegedly threatened her, saying they would “do whatever it takes to go after you”.

Harman Singh, executive director of the Sikh Coalition, said the bill was timely.

“If a gurdwara committee leader calls the police to report a man who claims to be from the government of India coming to the gurdwara asking about other committee members’ immigration status, the trained officers will react to that very differently than those who aren’t,” Singh told Al Jazeera.

Vivek Kembaiyan of Hindus for Human Rights echoed Singh. The majority of crime is investigated at the local level, he said, and local law enforcement needs training to investigate transnational crimes.

Could ‘institutionalise biases’

But not everyone agrees.

Some groups argue that the bill is primarily meant to target India and Indian Americans, and especially suppress opposition to the Khalistan movement.

Samir Kalra, the 46-year-old managing director at the Hindu American Foundation, has emerged as one of the bill’s most vocal opponents.

“I believe that they have not gone far enough in providing adequate guardrails and safeguards to ensure that law enforcement does not institutionalise biases against groups from specific countries of origin and or with certain viewpoints on geopolitical issues,” Kalra, a native of the Bay Area, told Al Jazeera.

Kalra pointed to the supporters of the bill.

“The vast majority of supporters of this bill who have shown up to multiple hearings are of Indian origin and have focused on India in their comments and press statements around this bill. India is listed as a top transnational repression government,” he said. “It’s very clear that the true target of this bill is India and Indian Americans.”

Many Hindu temples, he said, had been desecrated in recent months with pro-Khalistan slogans.

“How can the Hindu American community feel safe and secure reporting these incidents without fear of being accused of being a foreign agent or having law enforcement downplaying the vandalisms?” he asked.

But Harman Singh rejected the suggestion that the bill was dividing the Indian American community along religious lines. “The coalition of groups supporting includes both Sikh and Hindu organisations as well as Muslim, Kashmiri, Iranian, South Asian, immigrants’ rights, human rights, and law enforcement organisations,” Singh said.

Some critics have expressed fears that activists training officers in recognising transnational attacks could institutionalise biases against specific communities.

But the Sikh Coalition’s Singh said those worries were unfounded. The training, he said, “will be created by professionals within those organisations, rather than ‘a small group of activists,’ so this criticism is not based in reality.”

‘My voice is being heard’

Rohit Chopra, a professor of communication at Santa Clara University in California, said critics of other governments “are all too routinely harassed, threatened, or even assaulted by foreign governments or their proxies within the US”.

“Even if the bill has some deterrent effect, which I believe it will, it will be well worth it,” Chopra told Al Jazeera. He emphasised that the bill does not restrict its ambit to any one country or a particular group of nations.

To Stanford University’s Hansen, that in effect raises questions about why some groups are opposed to the bill.

“When an organisation comes out strongly against such a bill, it almost feels like a preemptive admission – as if they see themselves as being implicated by what the bill seeks to prevent,” Hansen said.

Back in Sacramento, Cheema remains hopeful that the bill will pass. For him, the bill represents something far more significant than policy – recognition and protection on US soil.

“I could be the next victim if the law enforcement in my community is not able to recognise foreign interference,” Cheema said. “It doesn’t matter who is indulging in it or which country, I would naturally like my police officers to be aware of the threats.”

“If any group feels threatened, then all sections of society should make efforts to protect their people. This reassures me that my voice is being heard”, Cheema said.

New Delhi, India – The Indian government tabled a new bill earlier this week in parliament under which a prime minister, state chief minister or other federal or state minister can be removed from office if they are facing criminal investigations – even before they are convicted.

The draft law proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mandates the automatic removal of elected officials if they are detained for 30 consecutive days on charges carrying a minimum sentence of five years.

Even as Amit Shah, India’s home minister who is widely seen as Modi’s deputy, presented the bill in parliament, members of the opposition ripped apart legislative papers and hurled them at Shah, before the house was suspended amid chaos.

The opposition, strengthened in the 2024 national election in which the BJP lost its majority and was forced to turn to smaller allies to stay in power, has slammed the bill as an example of “undemocratic” weaponising of laws against dissent.

Meanwhile, the Indian government says the proposed law will rein in corrupt and criminal public representatives.

So, is the proposed law authoritarian or democratic? What’s behind the opposition’s allegations against the Modi government? Or, as some experts argue, is it all a trap?

What’s the bill proposing?

The Modi government tabled the Constitution (One Hundred and Thirtieth Amendment) Bill, 2025, in parliament on Wednesday.

As per the amendment, an elected leader would automatically lose their post if they are arrested and detained for 30 consecutive days on charges carrying a minimum sentence of five years.

The bill also includes a provision for reappointment, allowing leaders to return to their posts if they secure bail or are acquitted.

The government argues that the measure is a step towards reinforcing accountability and public trust, arguing that those facing serious criminal charges should not continue in constitutional office.

The amendment has been referred to a joint parliamentary committee – a panel consisting of legislators from both the government and opposition parties – for its deliberations, following opposition protests.

What’s the opposition saying?

Opposition leaders have alleged that the proposed amendment could be misused by the Modi government against critics and political rivals.

That risk, they say, is especially high since law enforcement agencies that come under the federal government only need to arrest and press serious charges against opposition members, and keep them in custody for 30 days – without worrying about actually proving those charges in a court of law.

Manish Tewari, MP from the opposition Congress party, said that “the bill is against the principle of presumption of innocence” until proven guilty.

Asaduddin Owaisi, another opposition MP from Hyderabad city in southern India, said this law would be used to topple adversarial state governments.

Critics have also pointed to how, under India’s constitution, state governments have the primary responsibility for maintaining law and order. The proposed law, they say, upends that principle.

Applying this law to state leaders undermines India’s federal structure, he said, noting that this weakens the people’s right to choose governments.

“The bill would change the federal contract in fundamental ways, including balance of power between centre and states, giving the centre enormous leverage to sabotage elected governments – and, of course, to the space for oppositional politics,” said Asim Ali, a political observer based in New Delhi.

Are the opposition’s allegations founded?

Since 2014, when Modi came to power in New Delhi, the opposition has alleged that the government has increasingly used agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED), tasked with fighting financial crimes, and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the country’s premier investigative body, to target rival politicians.

In March 2023, opposition parties petitioned in India’s top court against “a clear pattern of using investigative agencies … to target, debilitate and in fact crush the entire political opposition and other vocal citizens”.

The petition noted that since 2014, 95 percent of cases taken up by the CBI and the ED have been against politicians from the opposition. That’s a 60 percentage point and 54 percentage point rise, respectively, from the days of the previous Congress-led government.

In parliament, 46 percent of current members face criminal cases, with 31 percent of them charged with serious crimes like murder, attempt to murder, kidnapping and crimes against women.

In the run-up to the 2024 general election, investigative agencies had arrested multiple opposition leaders, including Delhi’s Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his deputy, Manish Sisodia. The ED also arrested Hemant Soren, just hours after he resigned as the chief minister of the eastern state of Jharkhand, on accusations of corruption.

In the last 12 years of BJP rule in India, at least 12 sitting opposition ministers have been detained and jailed for more than 30 days  – nine of them from Delhi and the eastern state of West Bengal.

Is this a distraction?

Some political observers and the Modi government’s critics say yes.

A constitutional amendment in India requires a two-thirds majority in both houses of the parliament, which the BJP and its allies lack.

Modi’s government currently survives with the support of the BJP’s alliance partners, after it fell short of a majority in the 2024 national election.

In recent weeks, the Modi government has faced mounting opposition criticism over a controversial revision of electoral rolls ahead of a crucial state election, allegations of vote theft, and heat over foreign policy challenges as India battles 50 percent tariffs from the United States under President Donald Trump.

It is against that backdrop that the bill – which Ali, the political observer, described as “authoritarian” yet “symbolic” in nature – is significant, say experts.

“Even if the bill does not become a law, it will anyway force a showdown to make opposition parties vote against the bill,” Ali said, “so that they can use that as ammunition against them in [election] campaigning.”

Since floating the bill, Modi, his government and the BJP have been accusing critics of being sympathetic to criminals in politics.

On Friday, speaking at a rally in election-bound Bihar state, Modi referred to Kejriwal’s refusal for months after his arrest on money laundering charges to quit from the Delhi chief minister’s post.

“Some time ago, we saw how files were being signed from jail and how government orders were given from jail. If leaders have such an attitude, how can we fight corruption?” Modi said.

Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst, said that while the bill is draconian and could be misused, Modi’s party, for now, thinks it can help them consolidate urban, middle-class votes for the upcoming election in Bihar.

“The opposition is in a bind because public opinion is against corruption,” he said. “It’s a double-edged sword.”

Digha, India – On a hot and sultry June afternoon, Mamata Banerjee, the chief minister of India’s West Bengal state, swept a sun-scorched road to make way for a towering chariot in Digha, a tourist town on the country’s Bay of Bengal coast.

The moment, captured by dozens of cameras and broadcast widely on television, on June 27, marked the launch of the eastern state’s first-ever government-sponsored Rath Yatra (“chariot festival”) to celebrate the construction of a sprawling temple complex built to house the Hindu god, Lord Jagannath.

First announced in December 2018, and completed in May this year, the Digha temple has been pitched by Banerjee and her governing Trinamool Congress (TMC) party as West Bengal’s alternative to the more popular Jagannath Temple in neighbouring Odisha state’s Puri town, about 350km (217 miles) away.

Built in the 12th century, the temple in Puri is one of Hinduism’s four major pilgrimage sites, and home to an annual 800-year-old chariot festival, a weeklong event attended by tens of thousands of devotees. To kick-start the festival, descendants of the erstwhile Puri kingdom’s rulers symbolically sweep the chariot path, like their ancestors in power once did.

At Digha, that task was performed by Banerjee, neither the descendant of an emperor, nor a priest, raising questions about whether the construction of the temple was about faith or politics, a year before one of India’s most politically significant states votes for its next government.

Move aimed to counter BJP?

West Bengal, home to more than 91 million people, is India’s fourth most-populous state. Nearly 30 percent of its population is Muslim.

For decades, the state was also home to the world’s longest-serving elected communist government, until a feisty Banerjee – leading the centrist TMC party she founded in 1998 – unseated the Left Front coalition in 2011.

Since then, it is the Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, that has emerged as the TMC’s main rival in West Bengal. From winning just two parliamentary seats in 2014, the year Modi stormed to power, the BJP last year won 12 of the state’s 42 seats. The TMC won 29.

In the 2021 state assembly election, Banerjee’s TMC and its allies won a landslide 216 of 292 seats, while the BJP-led coalition won 77. It was also the first election in which the Left or the Indian National Congress, the main opposition in parliament, could not win a single seat in a state both had previously governed.

As the political landscape changed in West Bengal, so did its players.

For almost a decade now, the BJP and its ideological parent, the far-right Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have used Hindu festivals such as Ram Navami to expand their footprint in the state, often organising large processions that have on occasion passed, provocatively, through areas with large Muslim populations, with participants carried sticks, swords and tridents.

The BJP has also repeatedly accused the TMC of “minority appeasement”, in essence alleging that the party favours Muslim interests over the concerns of Hindu voters.

The TMC appears to be responding to that shift in politics in kind. In recent rallies, its leaders have been seen chanting “Jai Jagannath” (Hail Jagannath) to counter the BJP’s “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram), a slogan that, for millions of Hindus in India, is more a war-cry against Muslims and other minorities than a political chant.

“Now no one will say Jai Shri Ram. Everyone will say Jai Jagannath,” TMC leader Arup Biswas said in Digha in April.

To political scientist Ranabir Samaddar, the TMC’s temple politics is evidence of a brewing battle over the identity of Hinduism itself.

“If you agree Hindu society is not monolithic, then it’s natural that Hindus who reject the majoritarian version will assert a different understanding,” said Samaddar, who is a distinguished chair in migration and forced migration studies at the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group.

He argued that moves like Mamata’s represent a deeper social and cultural contest. “This is not a simple secularism-versus-communalism binary,” he said. “It is a protest against the idea that there is only one kind of Hinduism.”

For years, the BJP’s political opponents have struggled to craft a response to its vision of creating a Hindu-first state without being put on the defensive by Modi’s party, which portrays them as intrinsically anti-Hindu.

The Digha temple, Samaddar suggested, attempts to break that BJP stranglehold.

“As the dominant narrative becomes more rigid, insisting on a singular, state-aligned Hindu identity, the counter-response is also happening within the framework of Hindu identity,” he said. “It’s a dialogue, a form of social argument about plurality.

“This is also an assertion of rights. A claim to say, ‘We too are Hindus, but we won’t let you define what Hinduism is.’ These are attempts to break the monopoly of certain institutions and groups who have long claimed to speak for all Hindus. That’s what makes this moment significant.”

Bengal’s shifting religious terrain

Originally introduced by the government as a “cultural centre”, the Digha shrine soon evolved into a 65-metre-tall (213 feet) temple, spread over 8 hectares (20 acres) and costing the state exchequer more than $30m.

“This temple will add a new feather to the state’s cap. Digha will grow into an international tourist attraction. This will serve as a place of harmony. The sea adds a special charm to Digha. If it becomes a place of pilgrimage, more tourists will come,” Trinamool chief Banerjee had said during the structure’s inauguration on April 30. She will seek a fourth straight term as chief minister next year.

But the project has faced pushback.

When the Digha temple opened earlier this year, the BJP’s parliamentarian from Puri, Sambit Patra, declared: “There is only one Jagannath Dham in the world, and it is in Puri.” A dham is a shrine in Sanskrit.

On June 27, the BJP’s most prominent Bengal leader, Suvendu Adhikari, called the temple a “tourist attraction, not a spiritual site”.

“Puri Dham will remain Puri Dham. Mamata Banerjee is a fake Hindu. Temples can’t be built using government funds. It is a cultural centre, not a temple. Don’t mislead the people of Bengal,” he said.

He argued that Hindu temples in independent India have been made using donations – including the Ram temple in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, built on the ruins of the 16th-century Babri Mosque that Hindu zealots had torn down in 1992. “Hindus make temples on their own. No government fund was used to build the Ram temple. Hindus across the world funded it.”

Priests at the Puri temple were furious too. The temple’s chief servitor, Bhabani Das Mohapatra, called the Digha complex a “crime by Mamata Banerjee”, and accused the West Bengal state government of “arrogantly violating scriptural norms”. Ramakrishna Das Mahapatra, a senior servitor from Puri who attended the Digha consecration, was suspended by the Puri temple authority.

‘Nobody invited us’

The criticism of the Digha temple is not limited to political opponents and representatives of the Digha temple.

As hundreds of people watched the June 27 consecration from behind security barricades, a 64-year-old local and retired government employee, Manik Sarkar, said he was frustrated.

“All the cost is coming from taxpayers like us,” he told Al Jazeera. “But nobody invited us. The government hospital nearby doesn’t even have proper equipment, and they’re spending millions lighting up the temple.”

Another resident, Ashima Devi, said she was anxious about the daily electricity bills. “Lakhs of rupees, every night,” she said. “Unemployment is already so high here. Thousands of government school teachers who lost their jobs because of corruption – they had cleared the exams fairly. Why isn’t this government fixing that? What will happen to them?”

She was referring to a $70m public school hiring scam recently unearthed by India’s top financial crimes office, the Enforcement Directorate, for which the TMC’s former education minister is now jailed.

One man in the crowd, who called himself a TMC supporter, interjected. “Tourism will grow,” he said.

But Sarkar pushed back: “All the hotels [in Digha] are owned by outsiders. What benefit are you talking about?”

‘A politics that centres temples’

Historian Tapati Guha Thakurta said that the state’s involvement in temple building ought to be seen as a part of a larger arc in India’s modern journey.

“There’s been a major slide – from the modern, secular model to a politics that centres temples,” she said.

After India’s independence, the state actively supported projects like the reconstruction of the Somnath temple in Gujarat, backed by leaders like Vallabhbhai Patel — the man credited with bringing together 500 princely states into the Indian union using a mix of allurement and coercion.

But independent India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, opposed state support for the Somnath rebuilding, she noted.

“He stayed away. That moment showed how contested religion was, even within the Nehruvian vision of the state,” Guha Thakurta said to Al Jazeera. “That moment was emblematic. It showed that even at the dawn of Indian secularism, religion was never fully out of the frame.”

Nawsad Siddique, the sole state legislator from the Indian Secular Front, a coalition of the opposition Left groups and Congress party, called the Digha temple a “blurring of governance and faith”. Speaking to reporters on July 10, in Kolkata, he said, “We don’t have jobs. Our youth are migrating. Our schools are crumbling. And we’re building mega temples?”

Guha Thakurta recalled the deliberate separation of state and religion under 34 years of Left government.

“Our generation grew up under a firewall between religion and the state,” said Guha Thakurta, whose research into Durga Puja – the celebration of Goddess Durga that is the pre-eminent annual festival for Bengalis – helped secure a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage tag for the festival.

At the time, Marxist cultural elites dismissed even Durga Puja as “opo-sanskriti” or a degenerate ritual, to be merely tolerated.

That changed post-2011, when Banerjee first came to power.

“From $100 in grants, it’s now $1,200,” she said, referring to state funds for Durga Puja committees. “Durga Puja is now a state event. And this model is spreading.”

“We’re sitting on a volcano about to erupt. That’s all I’ll say.”

Drone footage showed workers in India’s Uttarakhand state building a makeshift bridge across a gorge to reestablish ground access to communities cut off by deadly flash flooding and landslides earlier this week. Rescuers have been using helicopters to evacuate those trapped in the Himalayan region.

More than 100 people are missing after floods swept through a village in Uttarakhand.

More than 100 people are missing and at least four people have died after flash floods swept through the village of Dharali, in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Teams from the army and disaster response forces are operating in the area to rescue people trapped under debris, local authorities have said.

“A massive mudslide struck Dharali village in the Kheer Gad area near Harsil, triggering a sudden flow of debris and water through the settlement,” the Central Command of the Indian Army said in a post on X.

Flash floods in Uttarkashi, where Dharali is situated, were triggered by intense rainfall known as a “cloudburst”, which caused the Kheerganga river to swell, at around 1:30pm local time (08:00 GMT) on Tuesday.

The India Meteorological Department (IMD) warned that heavy rainfall will continue for the next few days.

What is a cloudburst?

A cloudburst is an intense downpour that delivers a large volume of rain in a short time. It is often accompanied by thunder and hail and can cause flash floods.

At any given time, clouds blanket about 70 percent of the Earth’s surface. Cloudbursts are often associated with cumulonimbus clouds, which contain large amounts of water.

The IMD said that over the past 24 hours, extreme rainfall of 21cm (8.3 inches) or more had been recorded in parts of northwest India, including Uttarakhand, where the flash floods happened – more than the 10cm (3.9 inches) of rain per hour required to be classed as a cloudburst, according to the IMD.

Cloudbursts tend to occur over a small geographical region of 20 to 30 square kilometres (7.7 to 11.6 square miles)

Is this caused by climate change?

Uttarakhand, which has a large amount of mountainous and often unstable terrain, is prone to monsoon-related flooding. Dharali village is nestled in the Himalayas between the villages of Harsil and Gangotri.

Uttarakhand is particularly vulnerable to climate change given the fragility of the Himalayan region. In particular, it is exposed to excessive precipitation, cloudbursts, flood events and periods of very cold weather (cold waves), according to a study published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

That study found that districts in higher regions are more exposed to these effects because of their inability to adjust to weather-related and climate changes and because the ecosystems in these areas are more sensitive to such changes.

Experts say global warming will cause mountain temperatures to rise faster than the global average.

Catastrophic flooding that has historically affected Uttarakhand will become more common as rising temperatures lead to hastening glacier melting, such as the Gangotri, the glacier that is closest to Dharali.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, rising temperatures in the Himalayas will ultimately reduce the size of glaciers, resulting in a reduction in the long-term availability of water for agriculture, people and power systems. It will also cause more solar energy absorption – accelerating the effects of global warming – because areas of glacial melting will be replaced by water or land, and the amount of light currently reflected by existing glaciers will decrease.

Karnataka state authorities singled out RCB, its partners and the state cricket for their mismanagement of stampede.

State authorities have blamed the management of India’s Royal Challengers Bengaluru cricket team for last month’s deadly stampede during celebrations for their first Indian Premier League (IPL) title.

Karnataka state authorities singled out the RCB, its partners and the state cricket association for their mismanagement of the event in a report made public on Thursday.

Eleven fans were crushed to death and more than 50 wounded in a stampede near the M Chinnaswamy Stadium after hundreds of thousands packed the streets in the southern city of Bengaluru on June 4, to cheer their hero Virat Kohli and other RCB team members.

The report said organisers had not submitted a “formal request” or provided enough detail for permission to be granted for the celebrations.

“Consequently, the permission was not granted,” it said.

The team went ahead with its victory parade despite police rejecting RCB’s request, according to the report.

The RCB did not offer any comment on the report.

Four people, including a senior executive at RCB, representatives of event organisers DNA, and the Karnataka State Cricket Association, were detained by police in the days following the stampede.

Players were parading the trophy near the stadium a day after their win over Punjab Kings in the final in Ahmedabad when the stampede occurred.

The dead were aged between 14 and 29.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi called it “absolutely heartrending”, and Kohli, who top-scored in the final, was “at a loss for words” after it unfolded.

India coach Gautam Gambhir said he was never a fan of roadshows, and the authorities should not have allowed the mass celebrations if they were not prepared.

Millions of people are on strike across India, shutting down banking, construction, manufacturing and postal services, and disrupting public transport, among other sectors.

Trade unions say they have united to protest against new labour laws and a long-standing policy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government to privatise public services and favour big business over workers.

Why are people so angry with these policies?

And what does this mean for Modi’s government and his economic policies known as “Modinomics”?

Presenter: Adrian Finighan

Guests:

Amarjeet Kaur – national secretary of the All India Trade Union Congress

Adil Hossain – political anthropologist and assistant professor at Azim Premji University

Daniel Francis – political analyst and political brand consultant

Kolkata, India — For the past several years, the United States has been a major market for Aditya Garodia to export more than 100 items of steel derivatives like fasteners from his factory in West Bengal state in eastern India.

But ever since US President Donald Trump took office and unleashed a range of tariffs – 25 percent on steel and aluminium initially, as well as standalone country tariffs – global markets have been on edge, creating significant uncertainty for businesses across sectors.

Garodia, director of Corona Steel Industry Pvt Ltd, told Al Jazeera that as a result of the tariffs, clients have slowed picking up their orders, delaying payments by a month on average, while business in general has slowed as customers adopted a wait-and-watch policy.

When Trump announced that he was doubling tariffs on steel and aluminium to 50 percent from June 4, it was “like a nail in a coffin”, Garodia said, as nearly 30 percent of orders were cancelled. “It is difficult for the market to absorb such high tariffs.”

Demand in the domestic market has also been low because of competition from cheaper Chinese products, he said, adding their future depends on India negotiating a lower tariff for its exports to the US than its competitors.

Last year, India exported $4.56bn worth of iron, steel and aluminium products to the US.

Tariffs ‘play well in politics’

During his first term, Trump in 2018 imposed tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminium under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, citing national security concerns. But certain businesses had managed to escape, as there were no tariffs on finished products.

But on February 10, 2025, he announced 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminium, including derivatives – or finished products – and removed all exemptions.

Ajay Srivastava, founder of Global Trade Research Initiative (GTRI), a trade research group, told Al Jazeera that higher tariffs imposed in 2018 have so far failed to revive the US steel industry.

“Since the tariffs were first implemented in 2018, [US] steel imports have increased,” rising from $98.6bn to $114bn in 2024, he said, and they “haven’t cut imports or boosted production, but they’ve mostly stuck around because they play well in politics”.

As a result, prices in the US are far higher than in Europe or China, “making cars, buildings, and machines more expensive to produce. India now needs a clear strategy to protect its trade interests, push for fair deals and strengthen domestic manufacturing,” Srivastava said.

Foundries also affected

In the so-called reciprocal tariffs that President Trump announced on April 2, he set a rate of 26 percent for goods from India. He put that on hold on April 9 for 90 days and introduced a 10 percent base tariff on all countries for the interim, giving them breathing room to strike individual trade deals with the US.

While the 10 percent is hard enough on the businesses, foundries – where metals are melted to cast into shape – say 26 percent is too high for any business to absorb.

India has approximately 5,000 foundries, of which 400 cater to both domestic and international markets and a further 100 are exclusively for exports. Several Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), in turn, supply pig iron, scrap and other items to the exporters.

Indian foundries export products worth about $4bn globally, out of which the US market is $1.2bn, Ravi Sehgal, chairman of National Centre for Export Promotion (NCEP), said. In the US, they compete not only with local foundries but also with Chinese and Turkish suppliers.

The latest set of tariffs will be a considerable blow to Indian foundries. More than 65 percent of these, and their suppliers of raw materials, are MSMEs that will “face the brunt of tariffs due to lower orders”, Sehgal said. Tariffs beyond 10-14 percent “would [make it] difficult for us to survive,” he added.

Pradeep Kumar Madhogaria, partner in Yashi Castings, which makes moulding boxes and pallet cars for foundries, said that several foundry projects have been either deferred or shelved, particularly those aligned to export-driven demand, due to the uncertainty in the US market.

Smaller units badly hit

Sumit Agarwal, 44, a Kolkata-based manufacturer of clamps, brackets and other items used in industrial goods, told Al Jazeera that his business has been hit hard by the tariffs and he is thinking of laying off some of his 15 employees.

“We are a small unit. The orders have practically dried up after the introduction of tariffs, which has made it difficult for us to continue with our existing staff. I am thinking about cutting at least 30-40 percent of my manpower. Business from the domestic market is just average, and the drop in the export market has added to our woes.”

Shyam Kumar Poddar, 70, who runs a small unit of sheet metal fabrication in Kolkata, recently invested about 800,000 rupees ($9,400) to buy a hydraulic press with an aim to expand his business. But the drop in orders has affected him badly.

“I bought the machine just four months ago to expand my business, but there have been absolutely no orders for the past two months.”

“We depend on exporters for our business as there is already an intense competition in the domestic market, but the present scenario is harming small entrepreneurs like us.”

Pankaj Chadha, chairman of Engineering Export Promotion Council of India (EEPC), an industry body, told Al Jazeera that diversification to countries like Peru and Chile, who would then export their finished products to the US, is the only way for survival as it was “not possible to do business with such high tariffs”.

Even as the 90-day pause on tariffs is set to expire soon, it’s not clear yet what the final number will be as India and the US are yet to finalise a deal. On Friday, Piyush Goyal, India’s minister of trade and industry, told reporters that while India was ready to make a trade deal, “National interest will always be supreme“, and it would not be driven by any deadlines.

For now, Garodia is hoping a solution will be found fast. “No industry can survive in isolation,” he said, listing US problems, including a manpower shortage as well as higher production and raw material costs. “India offers them a good substitute with cheap labour and low cost of production,” he said.

Cultural performances mark the occasion, while messages from global leaders are read out during the ceremony.

The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, has turned 90 to cap a week of celebrations by followers during which he riled China again and spoke about his hope to live beyond 130 and reincarnate after dying.

Dressed in his traditional yellow and burgundy robe, the Dalai Lama arrived at a Buddhist temple complex to smiles and claps from thousands of monks and followers who had gathered on a rainy Sunday morning in the north Indian hill town of Dharamshala, where he lives.

He waved and greeted them as he walked slowly to the stage with support from monks.

“As far as I am concerned, I have a human life, and as humans, it is quite natural for us to love and help one another. I live my life in the service of other sentient beings,” the Dalai Lama said, flanked on the stage by longtime supporters, including Western diplomats, Indian federal ministers, Hollywood actor Richard Gere, and a monk who is expected to lead the search for his successor.

Fleeing his native Tibet in 1959 in the wake of a failed uprising against Chinese rule, the 14th Dalai Lama, along with hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, took shelter in India and has since advocated for a peaceful “Middle Way” to seek autonomy and religious freedom for the Tibetan people.

A Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Dalai Lama is regarded as one of the world’s most influential religious leaders, with a following that extends well beyond Buddhism – but not by Beijing, which calls him a separatist and has sought to bring the faith under its control.

In a sign of solidarity, Taiwan’s President William Lai Ching-te, leaders of Indian states bordering Tibet, and three former United States presidents – Barack Obama, George W Bush, and Bill Clinton – sent video messages which were played during the event.

In the preceding week of celebrations, the Dalai Lama had said he would reincarnate as the leader of the faith upon his death and that his nonprofit institution, the Gaden Phodrang Trust, had the sole authority to recognise his successor.

China has said the succession will have to be approved by its leaders, and the US has called on Beijing to cease what it describes as interference in the succession of the Dalai Lama and other Tibetan Buddhist lamas.

Show of solidarity

Guests gathered at the ceremony took turns to speak, including Indian Parliamentary and Minority Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju, a practising Buddhist, who had earlier made a rare statement contradicting China by backing the Dalai Lama’s position on his successor.

He later clarified that the statement was made in his personal capacity as China warned New Delhi against interfering in its domestic affairs at the expense of bilateral relations.

On Sunday, Rijiju said the Dalai Lama was India’s “most honoured guest”. “We feel blessed for his presence here in our country,” he said.

Cultural performances were held throughout the morning, including from Bollywood playback singers, while messages from global leaders were read out.

“I join 1.4 billion Indians in extending our warmest wishes to His Holiness the Dalai Lama on his 90th birthday. He has been an enduring symbol of love, compassion, patience and moral discipline,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote on X.

New Delhi, India — When models sashayed down the ramp at Milan Fashion Week last week, Harish Kurade looked at them on his smartphone in awe, sitting in his village in southern Maharashtra state, more than 7,000km (4,350 miles) away.

Models were showcasing a new line of open-toe leather sandals, designed by Prada, the iconic luxury fashion house. However, in India, the visuals raised a furore among artisans and politicians after the Italian giant failed to credit the ancient Maharashtra roots of its latest design.

“They [Prada] stole and replicated our crafty work, but we are really happy,” said Kurade in a chirpy tone. “Today, the world’s eyes are on our Kolhapuri ‘chappals’ [Hindi for sandals].” Kolhapur is a city in Maharashtra after which the sandals are named.

After facing backlash, Prada acknowledged that its new sandal designs “are inspired by traditional Indian handcrafted footwear, with a centuries-old heritage”, in a letter to the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce.

While Kurade is chuffed about the centuries-old sandal-making craft from his village potentially gaining global exposure, other artisans, politicians and activists are wary of cultural appropriation and financial exploitation by Prada.

So, what is the controversy about? And what are artisans in Kolhapur saying about Prada? Can it change anything for the workers behind the original sandals?

What did Prada step into?

Prada showcased the classic T-strapped leather flats at the Spring/Summer 2026 menswear collection at Milan Fashion Week.

In its show notes, the Italian brand described the new range of footwear only as “leather sandals”. The notes made no mention of any Indian connection, despite its uncanny resemblance to Kolhapuri sandals, which are wildly popular across India and often worn on special occasions, such as weddings and festivals, along with traditional Indian clothing.

Outraged, a delegation of Kolhapuri sandals manufacturers met Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday last week to register their protest.

Showing his support for the delegation is Dhananjay Mahadik, a member of parliament from the state’s Kolhapur district, belonging to the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Mahadik told reporters that the sandal makers and their supporters are in the process of filing a lawsuit in the Bombay High Court against Prada.

Mahadik also wrote to Fadnavis, drawing “urgent attention to a serious infringement on Maharashtra’s cultural identity and artisan rights”, and called on him to “protect the cultural heritage of Maharashtra”.

In his letter, he noted that the sandals are reportedly priced at approximately $1,400  a pair. By contrast, the authentic Kolhapuri sandals can be found in local markets for about $12.

How has Prada responded?

The Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (MACCIA) also wrote to Patrizio Bertelli, the chairperson of Prada’s Board of Directors, about the concerns of sandal makers.

Two days later, the company responded, acknowledging that the design was inspired by the centuries-old Indian sandals. “We deeply recognise the cultural significance of such Indian craftsmanship. Please note that, for now, the entire collection is currently at an early stage of design development, and none of the pieces are confirmed to be produced or commercialised,” Prada said.

The company added that it remains “committed to responsible design practices, fostering cultural engagement, and opening a dialogue for a meaningful exchange with local Indian artisan communities, as we have done in the past in other collections to ensure the rightful recognition of their craft.

“Prada strives to pay homage and recognise the value of such specialised craftspeople that represent an unrivalled standard of excellence and heritage.”

Srihita Vanguri, a fashion entrepreneur from the city of Hyderabad, said that Prada’s actions were “disappointing but not surprising”.

“Luxury brands have a long history of borrowing design elements from traditional crafts without giving due credit – until there’s a backlash,” she told Al Jazeera. “This is cultural appropriation if it stops at inspiration without attribution or benefit-sharing.”

Kolhapuris, which the sandals are also known as, are not just a design, she insisted. They carry the legacy of centuries of craft communities in Maharashtra and the neighbouring state of Karnataka. “Ignoring that context erases real people and livelihoods,” she added.

What about artisans of Kolhapur?

Kolhapur, nestled in southwestern Maharashtra, is a city steeped in royal heritage, spiritual significance and artisanal pride. Beyond its crafts, Kolhapur is also home to several revered Hindu temples and a rich culinary legacy – its food is spicy.

Its famed sandals date back to the 12th century, with more than 20,000 local families still involved in this craft.

The family of Kurade, who was happy about Prada showcasing the sandals, lives on the outskirts of Kolhapur, and has been in this business for more than 100 years.

But he said the business has taken a beating in recent years. “In India, people don’t really understand this craft or want to put money in this any more. If an international brand comes, steals it and showcases it on global platforms, maybe that is good for us,” he told Al Jazeera.

He said that craftsmen like those in his family “still stand where they were years ago”.

“We have the craft and the capacity to move ahead, but the government has not supported us,” the 40-year-old said.

Rather, Kurade said, politics has made things worse.

Since 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian government came to power in New Delhi, cows have transformed from just symbols of reverence into a flashpoint for religious identity and social conflict. Cow protection, once largely cultural, has become violent, with vigilantes hunting down Dalits and Muslims, the communities that mostly transport cows and buffaloes to trading markets where they are bought for slaughter.

That has disrupted a reliable supply of cow and buffalo hides, which are then tanned with vegetables to make Kolhapuri chappals.

“The original hide we use for quality is restricted in several states because of politics around cows,” said Kurade. “The supply has touched new lows due to politics on cows – and we have been suffering because it has become really expensive for us to keep doing it with the same quality.”

Craftsmen like Kurade believe that if they can make the sandals cheaper and more accessible, “people will wear this because it is what people have loved for centuries”.

Still, Kurade said, while Prada can try and imitate Kolhapuri aesthetics, it cannot replicate the intricate hand-woven design patterns, mastered by the Dalit community in southern Maharashtra and some parts of bordering Karnataka. Dalits are traditionally the most marginalised segment of India’s complex caste hierarchy.

“The authentic design is something which is rare and unique,” he said. “Even shops in Kolhapur city may not have them.”

The real designs, Kurade said, are still made in villages by using centuries-old craft.

But because of the challenge of sourcing quality hides, and faced with an increasingly digital marketplace that artisans are unfamiliar with, Dalit sandal makers need help, he said.

“People who know markets, who can sell it ahead, are the ones cashing in on this. Poor villagers like us cannot run a website; we do not have the marketing knowledge,” he said.

“The government should look into this, to bridge this gap – it is their duty to look into this. The benefits never reached the real makers from the Dalit groups.”

Has it happened before?

Since 2019, after sustained advocacy by artisan groups, India has protected Kolhapuri sandals under its Geographical Indications of Goods Act (1999), preventing commercial use of the term “Kolhapuri Chappal” by unauthorised producers. But this protection is limited within national borders.

Prada has previously faced significant criticism over alleged cultural appropriation, most notably in 2018 when it released the “Pradamalia” collection – keychains and figurines that resembled racist caricatures with exaggerated red lips, drawing immediate comparisons with blackface imagery. After the backlash, Prada pulled the products from stores and issued a public apology.

Prada has also been criticised for store displays that have evoked racial stereotypes, as well as for its use of animal-based luxury materials like ostrich and exotic leathers, which have drawn criticism from environmental and labour rights groups.

But Prada is not alone.

In 2019, Christian Dior drew criticism for incorporating elements inspired by the traditional attire of Mexican horsewomen in its Cruise collection, without formal acknowledgement or collaboration.

In 2015, French designer Isabel Marant came under fire in Mexico for marketing a blouse that closely mirrored the traditional embroidery patterns of the Mixe community in Oaxaca, sparking accusations of cultural appropriation.

Rather than apologise, Vanguri, the fashion entrepreneur, said that the “real respect would be Prada co-creating a capsule collection with Kolhapuri artisan clusters – giving them fair design credit, profit share, and global visibility”.

“Structurally, they could commit to long-term partnerships with craft cooperatives or even fund capacity-building and design innovation for these communities,” she said.