Pahalgam: 'Won't Spare...': India Declares War On Pak Terror After Tourists Massacred In Kashmir
'Shot My Husband Suspecting He's A Non-Muslim': Pahalgam Attack Witness As Toll Surges
Terrorists opened fire on tourists in Kashmir's Pahalgam, killing one and injuring seven others. A chilling video shows a woman crying for help, claiming the attacker targeted her husband for being non-Muslim. The LeT proxy has claimed responsibility, citing opposition to non-local domicile status in Kashmir. Security forces have launched an operation to track down the attackers involved in this brutal act. Watch
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News18
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- News18
Hanuman Chalisa At Mosque: Allahabad High Court Grants Bail To Two On ‘Presumption Of Innocence'
Last Updated: The court reaffirmed the principle that pre-trial detention should not be punitive, stressing the fundamental presumption of innocence until proven guilty The Allahabad High Court on June 3, 2025, granted bail to two individuals accused of attempting to incite communal disharmony by allegedly reciting Hanuman Chalisa near a mosque in Meerut. The court reaffirmed the principle that pre-trial detention should not be punitive, stressing the fundamental presumption of innocence until proven guilty. The bench of Justice Raj Beer Singh, while hearing the bail plea of Sachin Sirohi and Sanjay Samarval, observed that continued custody is not justified solely based on the seriousness of the allegations. 'The object of keeping a person in custody is to ensure his availability to face the trial and to receive the sentence that may be passed. The detention is not supposed to be punitive or preventive," the judge noted, drawing from the Supreme Court's ruling in Vinod Bhandari v. State of MP. The duo had approached the court for relief in Case Crime No. 73 of 2025, registered under Sections 191(2), 196, and 197 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) at Sadar Bazar police station, Meerut. According to the prosecution, the applicants, along with others, entered a religious site belonging to the Muslim community and forcibly recited Hanuman Chalisa, allegedly aiming to provoke enmity between religious groups. Opposing the bail plea, the Additional Government advocate and counsel for the aggrieved parties contended that the accused acted deliberately to disturb communal harmony. The seriousness of the act, they argued, warranted denial of bail. However, counsel for the applicants maintained that the allegations were baseless and politically motivated. They argued that there was no credible evidence against their clients and that the criminal history referred to had been adequately explained in the affidavit submitted with the bail application. Weighing both sides, the court ruled that, without delving into the merits of the case at this stage, the applicants had made out a case for bail. Accordingly, bail was granted with strict conditions. These included a bar on tampering with evidence or intimidating witnesses and a requirement for regular court appearances. The order further makes it clear that the applicants must refrain from making any inducements or threats to individuals acquainted with the case, and any breach would give the trial court liberty to cancel their bail. First Published: June 05, 2025, 14:54 IST
Time of India
2 hours ago
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Sharmistha Panoli granted interim bail by Calcutta High Court
The Calcutta High Court on Thursday granted interim bail to influencer Sharmistha Panoli , arrested for allegedly posting video on social media with communal comments. The court had denied bail to the student on Tuesday. Panoli, a 22-year-old Pune law student, was arrested in Gurugram by Kolkata Police on Friday night after a social media post allegedly containing derogatory remarks went viral. The video, posted on Instagram, triggered widespread backlash for allegedly insulting a religious community and the Prophet Muhammad, despite Panoli issuing an unconditional apology and removing the content. On Saturday, a Kolkata court sent Panoli to judicial custody till June 13. On May 14, she posted a video in response to a Pakistani social media user who had questioned India's stance following the Pahalgam terror attack. Live Events In the clip, she sharply criticised Bollywood celebrities for remaining silent on Operation Sindoor—a major military response following the attack. Panoli's video, initially intended as a political reaction, quickly spiralled into controversy. Several viewers, especially from Muslim communities in India and abroad, said she made offensive remarks about Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. The backlash was immediate and intense. Hashtags like #ArrestSharmistha began trending, and she reportedly received rape and death threats. Despite deleting the post and issuing an apology the following day, the situation had already escalated legally. She posted on social media on 15 May, 'I do hereby tender my UNCONDITIONAL APOLOGY. Whatever was put are my personal feelings and I never intentionally wanted to hurt anybody. So anybody is hurt, I'm sorry… Henceforth, I will be cautious in my public posts.' Multiple complaints were filed in Kolkata. Police say they attempted to serve legal notices to Panoli and her family, but she was allegedly untraceable. A senior police officer explained, 'The case pertains to an Instagram video by a woman named Sharmistha Panoli that hurt the religious sentiments of members of a particular community.' With no response to the notices, a court in Kolkata issued an arrest warrant. Panoli was detained in Gurugram and brought to Kolkata on transit remand. Police also seized her phone and laptop for forensic analysis, looking for evidence of further offensive or manipulated content. In response to criticism of the arrest, Kolkata Police stated, 'All legal procedures were duly adhered to. All attempts were made to serve notice, but she was found absconding on every occasion. Consequently, a warrant of arrest was issued by the competent court… We urge all concerned to refrain from spreading unverified or speculative content and to rely on authentic sources.'
Scroll.in
10 hours ago
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A ‘missing' woman in Assam and her long struggle to prove Indian citizenship
Manowara Bewa, a barely literate Muslim widow in her fifties, is 'missing'. Manowara, who is from Dhubri, a district in western Assam bordering Bangladesh, was designated an 'illegal foreigner' by a foreigners tribunal in 2016. Unique to Assam, foreigners tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies that assess citizenship based on lineage and a 1971 cut-off date. These bodies rely primarily on documents submitted by individuals to establish their family's residence in Assam (or India) before 1971. On May 24, amid a renewed crackdown on unauthorised migrants in Assam, Manowara was arrested from her home despite her ongoing appeal against the tribunal ruling in the Supreme Court. Her family and lawyers suspect that she has been secretly 'pushed back' into Bangladesh by Indian authorities. 'Push-back' is the term the Indian authorities use when they force people suspected of being undocumented migrants across the border into Bangladesh. Manowara's situation echoes that of several other 'declared foreigners', who have gone missing and are suspected of being forcibly 'pushed back'. On Monday, the Supreme Court heard a habeas corpus plea filed by her son and issued notice to the Assam government. It is not the first time that Manowara has unwittingly become central to issues that profoundly affect the citizenship of India's marginalised. Having followed her case initially as a journalist and now as a doctoral researcher, I realise that her nearly decade-old struggle starkly – and devastatingly – encapsulates key turning points in the determination of Indian citizenship in recent times. Declared a foreigner Assam's foreigners tribunals have stripped about 1,30,000 people of Indian citizenship in the last four decades. The tribunals have faced repeated criticism from the Indian courts, legal experts, human rights groups and journalists. In March 2016, Foreigners Tribunal No. 5 of Dhubri declared Manowara an 'illegal foreigner', dismissing her documentary claims – her father's name in the 1951 National Register of Citizens prepared in Assam during the census that year and the 1966 electoral roll; her family's land documents from 1965; a gaon or gram panchayat certificate to establish her native village; and a certificate from the school she studied till Class 4. The tribunal attributed minor variations in names, arising from phonetic and transliteration mismatches, to intentions of fraudulence. All documents that could first verify Kashem Ali's identity and second demonstrate that Manowara was his daughter were rejected. Soon after, Manowara, then working as a cook at a madrasa, was arrested and sent to a detention centre. When I interviewed her son a few years ago for my book No Land's People, he recounted that he had to leave his job at a footwear manufacturing plant in Delhi to return home after hearing of his mother's arrest. The family's limited resources ran out, leaving him to care for himself and his younger sister. Through these years, Manowara's struggle to prove her citizenship has pitched her into a legal process that has often been criticised as arbitrary and loaded against the poor and marginalised because of its excessive reliance on error-proof documents. It has also coincided with crucial shifts in Assam's citizenship crisis. Her case was at the heart of a far-reaching development in 2017 – the state's decision to question the gaon or gram panchayat certificate, one of the most important documents on which poor, uneducated women relied to claim citizen status in the National Register of Citizens and continue to do so in foreigners tribunal cases. The National Register of Citizens is a list of legitimate Indian citizens in Assam, which was updated in 2019 after a rigorous and exhaustive verification of the ancestral documents of millions of residents. The doubts cast over gaon panchayat certificates made thousands of women vulnerable and the increased scrutiny of the document, some say, cost them their citizenship. In 2019, Manowara's release on bail from the detention centre was part of a shift in policy that allowed many 'declared foreigners' in Assam to return to their lives, provided they met their bail conditions. Her recent arrest and her son's concern that she may have been surreptitiously forced out of India warn of a troubling change in the country's approach to Assam's declared foreigners. The rejected documents The complications with Manowara's paperwork – inconsistencies in names and ages across ancestral documents – that led to her being declared a foreigner in 2016 broadly illustrate the reasons for the exclusion of a vast number of people in Assam from Indian citizenship. At the foreigners tribunal, Manowara claimed that her father, Kashem Ali, was listed in the 1951 National Register of Citizens, proof that her lineage in Assam dated back to the years before 1971. That year, the creation of Bangladesh resulted in millions of refugees seeking shelter in India. Manowara's family has a certified extract from the 1951 National Register of Citizens listing their names. It was issued in 1993 by the officer in charge of their local police station, Golakganj. Many Muslim families, especially in western Assam, hold similar certified extracts issued during the 1980s. But the tribunal order alleged that the 1951 National Register of Citizens extract had been tampered with, citing the fact that the age of her father had been overwritten: '10' was changed to '16'. It had a problem with the entry for her mother Dil Jan Bibi. It questioned why next to the name, in the column where the father's or husband's name is to be specified, ' pee ' (pita or father) was overwritten with ' sha ' (shami or husband), suggesting fabrication of the relationship. Dil Jan's age was documented as 17. The order deemed the document 'not trustworthy'. About her father's enrolment in the 1966 electoral rolls, the order found that Kashem Ali was recorded as a 39-year-old man and asked how someone aged 10 in 1951 could be 39 in 1966. In their writ petition against the tribunal order filed in 2016, Manowara's lawyers at the Gauhati High Court, Syed Burhanur Rahman and Aman Wadud, contested the reasoning. They argued that the alleged overwriting on the 1951 National Register of Citizens extract had been inadvertently done by the issuing authority of the certified copy, the local police in this case, and not by Manowara. Moreover, they highlighted that the 1951 extract officially made available during the application process of the 2019 National Register of Citizens recorded her father's age as 26, and listed Dil Jan as his 17-year-old wife. If Kashim was aged 26 in 1951 and 39 in the 1966 electoral roll, then the discrepancy is just two years and not 14 years, as the foreigners tribunal had concluded, the lawyers pointed out. The tribunal order had also flagged inconsistencies in Kashem Ali's father's name. In the 1951 National Register of Citizens, it is Getaullah but in the 1966 electoral roll it is Chetaullah. In the 1951 document, the family's village is listed as Khagrabari but in the 1966 records it is Sukhatikhata. The order concluded that these inconsistent names referred to different individuals. First, Manowara's petition in the High Court pointed out that Khagrabari and Sukhatikhata were not different villages. The discrepancy had arisen because 'Sukhatikhata was carved out of Khagrabari sometime between 1958 and 1966' and are now neighbouring villages. Second, the petition claimed that Getaullah, Chetaullah and Khetaullah were the same person, attributing these inconsistencies to typographical variations. It alluded to the fact that officials when noting down names often spell them differently from how a family pronounces them. This mismatch could also have resulted from a problem with transliteration. 'In voter list or other documents such anomalies are very normal as the field officers very often inadvertently record [sic] the such similar sounding name,' Manowara's lawyers wrote in their petition to the Supreme Court in 2017. To prove she was Kashem Ali's daughter, Manowara had submitted a gram panchayat certificate and a certificate from her primary school in Khagrabari village. The foreigners tribunal rejected the former because it listed her husband's name as Sopiyal Hoque, whereas in other documents submitted in the case, her husband's name was Sapiyar Rahman. The lawyers argued in the High Court that this was a spelling anomaly and that Sopiyal Hoque and Sapiyar Rahman were the same person. Strikingly, Manowara's school certificate was deemed inadmissible by the tribunal primarily because the word 'duplicate' was inscribed at its top. In the High Court, Manowara's lawyers pointed out that 'duplicate' on the school certificate meant that it was a copy of the original document, and not a forged document. Nevertheless, these two documents – the school certificate and the gram panchayat certificate – which connected Manowara to her father, Kashem Ali, were not proven to the satisfaction of the foreigners tribunal and were discarded. The High Court reviewed Manowara's written submissions to the tribunal and the documents presented before it. But in early 2017, Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Rumi Kumari Phukan dismissed Manowara's petition, upholding the foreigners tribunal order that she was an 'illegal foreigner'. A setback for women In the High Court, Manowara's lawyers attached a second gram panchayat certificate, which stated that Manowara, aged 35 in 2015, was the daughter of Kachim Ali of Sukhatikhata and that she had married Sapial Hoque. After this, she moved to her husband's village, Khoderchar. The High Court order pointed out that the certificate states she migrated to Khoderchar, while the first panchayat certificate indicated that she lived in Khagrabari. Her lawyers, in their petition to the Supreme Court, argued that Manowara had indeed migrated to Khoderchar, but moved back to her ancestral village of Sukhatikhata after the death of her husband – all neighbouring areas in the same district. As they had previously argued, Sukhatikhata was carved out of Khagrabari, and were neighbouring villages. Presented with two certificates from two village panchayats, the Gauhati High Court decided to expand the scope of the case beyond Manowara's foreigners' tribunal order to what it termed a 'larger issue', questioning the very need and legality of such gram panchayat documents. The National Register of Citizens procedure had permitted married women to utilise certificates from their village panchayats or circle officers as supporting documentation to establish their lineage. Women, especially those from marginalised Bengali-origin Muslim families, often lack documentation that identifies their parentage. This is largely due to factors such as not attending school, marrying before being registered on the electoral roll with their parents and not being mentioned as heirs in their family's land records. Hence, they rely on the village panchayat certificate, which states their parentage, to substantiate their claim for lineage-based citizenship in the National Register of Citizens or at a foreigners' tribunal. Over 40 lakh such documents were submitted in the National Register of Citizens. Summoned to the High Court, Prateek Hajela, the former Indian Administrative Service officer who led the National Register of Citizens exercise in Assam, submitted that these certificates did not certify citizenship. Rather, they were intended to clarify the parental linkage and residential status of married women who had migrated from their native villages to another location after marriage. The High Court finally ruled that a gram panchayat certificate was not admissible as a 'public document' and possessed 'no statutory sanctity'. Amnesty International criticised the order, commenting that it 'failed to consider the particular vulnerability of married women who migrate from their paternal homes at a young age to their marital homes and thus find it difficult to prove a documented linkage to their parents'. Several appeals contesting the ruling, including one by Manowara, were filed at the Supreme Court. In December 2017, the top court set aside the High Court's order, clarifying that the certificates would not prove citizenship and would only be used to establish lineage between the holder and their ancestors. But the court asked that the authenticity of the certificate and its contents be verified through an 'exhaustive process'. The legal doubts surrounding the certificates cost many marginalised women their citizenship, according to lawyers and activists. Following the Supreme Court order, 'special verification' hearings were conducted for such documents issued to married women in the National Register of Citizens in 2018. Nearly 50,000 married women who had submitted gram or gaon panchayat certificates and were included in the first draft of the NRC were excluded in the second draft after the special verification hearings. The humanitarian crisis 'Declared foreigners' are not individuals who have been apprehended at India's borders, attempting to enter the country without documentation on the sly. They are typically long-term residents with families and properties in Assam, who assert that they are Indian citizens. Most declared foreigners appeal to the High Court, and subsequently to the Supreme Court, if necessary, to prove their Indian citizenship. Bangladesh accepts 'convicted foreigners' – Bangladeshi nationals whom judicial courts in India convict. But it rarely accepts 'declared foreigners'. The humanitarian crisis in Assam's citizenship imbroglio begins here – neither India nor Bangladesh acknowledges the 'declared foreigners' as their own. The Supreme Court, it is worth noting, has not yet determined whether Manowara is a foreigner. Manowara remained in detention until 2019, when she was released under a Supreme Court order allowing conditional bail to 'declared foreigners' who had spent three years in detention. Given the bleak prospects of deportation, the 2019 Supreme Court order was followed by another in 2020, which reduced the detention period to two years amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, hundreds of declared foreigners were conditionally released from detention. If Manowara was released on bail with her case pending in the Supreme Court, how is it that she is thought to have been been arrested and pushed into Bangladesh now? The answer may lie in what seems to be a change in the status quo, and the government's rethinking on how to deal with declared foreigners. In a case in February, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices AS Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan asked the Assam government to being the process of deporting 63 'declared foreigners' currently held at the Matia detention centre, even if the addresses of these individuals in Bangladesh are unknown. The court ordered this after the Assam government claimed that the nationality of the 63 people was known (that they are Bangladeshis). The submission failed to indicate that the process of nationality verification for 'declared foreigners' can be considerably more complex than that for convicted foreigners. Their legal appeals against foreigners' tribunal orders in India can take years, as demonstrated by Manowara's case. Asked about the pushback of declared foreigners, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma stated that the government is operating in accordance with the Supreme Court's directive. As part of this new crackdown, evidently not limited to 'declared foreigners' in detention but also those out on bail, Manowara was summoned to the police station on May 24 and has since been missing. The authorities have not provided any information regarding her whereabouts. Her family fears that she may have been 'pushed' across the border and there are claims that she has been spotted in a video from Bangladesh's Sherpur district. Bangladeshi officials have said that such ' pushbacks' are unacceptable and they 'violate established repatriation procedures and bilateral norms'. As Manowara's family awaits relief from the Supreme Court, there is no clear end in sight to her ordeal. Hers is a stark story of how an ordinary woman previously regarded as a citizen can be declared a foreigner, how discrepancies in documents can undermine her claims of belonging, and how a 'push-back' policy may have pitched her into another upheaval in the contentious citizenship question in Assam. Abhishek Saha is a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford. He is the author of No Land's People: The Untold Story of Assam's NRC Crisis.
