Mains Ready By December. Smash Mains & Smash PYQ Admissions Open

Talk to Mentor

GS Paper: GS2-01.Indian Constitution-Historical underpinnings & evolution; Features, amendments, significant provisions, basic structure of Constitution

Beyond blasphemy: how laws can curtail the possibility of social reform
Why in the News

Section 295A and the provisions that succeeded it have been turned against writers, artists and reformers, with arrest, mob campaigns and pre emptive withdrawal delivering the harm long before any verdict. India simultaneously runs statutes that direct the State to attack religious and superstitious practice, so the same legal system both punishes criticism of religion and mandates it.

What is Section 295A?
1. What it penalises: Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 punished deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.
2. Successor provision: The corresponding offence is now Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.
3. What the offence turns on: Liability rests on the intent to outrage and not on the truth or falsity of what was said.
4. How it operates in practice: The offence is cognisable, so a complaint can produce arrest and judicial custody before any court assesses whether malice existed.
What is the heckler’s veto?
1. Heckler’s veto: A heckler’s veto is the suppression of expression because a hostile audience threatens disruption or violence, so the objector rather than the law decides what may be said. Speech is stopped in order to keep the peace, which transfers the power of censorship to whoever protests loudest.
What is a sacrilege law?
1. Sacrilege law: A sacrilege law criminalises damage to or desecration of a religious text or object, as distinct from an offence aimed at outraging feelings through speech or writing. State level sacrilege provisions of this kind carry punishment extending to imprisonment for life.
What does the law on outraging religious feelings currently cover in India?
1. The core offence: Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 penalises deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings by insulting religion or religious beliefs, whether by words, writing, signs or visible representation.
2. Adjacent offences: Section 298 covers injuring or defiling a place of worship with intent to insult a religion, Section 300 covers disturbing a religious assembly and Section 302 covers uttering words with deliberate intent to wound religious feelings.
3. Group enmity provisions: Section 196 penalises promoting enmity between groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, language or caste, and Section 197 covers imputations prejudicial to national integration.
4. No standalone blasphemy statute: India has no offence of blasphemy as such, and the protection is assembled from provisions aimed at intent to outrage rather than at the content of any belief.
5. State level escalation: Some States have enacted sacrilege provisions carrying punishment up to imprisonment for life, which sets the penalty far above the central provision.
6. Judicial test applied: In Amish Devgan v Union of India (2020) the Supreme Court laid down a three part contextual test examining the content of the speech, the intent of the speaker and the harm caused or likely to be caused.
7. Truth is not a defence: Courts have held that a wholly true statement can still outrage religious feelings, so accuracy does not absolve the speaker.
Constitutional Provisions Related to Free Speech and Religious Freedom
1. Article 19(1)(a): Guarantees every citizen the right to freedom of speech and expression.
2. Article 19(2): Permits reasonable restrictions on that right on enumerated grounds, including public order, decency, morality, defamation and incitement to an offence.
3. Article 25(1): Guarantees freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality and health.
4. Article 25(2)(a) and Article 25(2)(b): Permit the State to regulate secular activity associated with religious practice, and to provide for social welfare and reform including throwing open Hindu religious institutions to all classes.
5. Article 26: Gives every religious denomination the right to manage its own affairs in matters of religion, subject to public order, morality and health.
6. Article 14: Requires that a penal classification rest on an intelligible differentia bearing a rational nexus to the object of the provision.
7. Article 21: Protects life and personal liberty, which is what arrest and pre trial custody in a speech case directly curtails.
8. Article 15(1) and Article 17: Bar discrimination on grounds of religion and caste and abolish untouchability, which are the constitutional basis for statutes attacking exploitative religious practice.
9. Article 51A(h): Makes it a fundamental duty of every citizen to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.
10. Preamble: Declares India a secular republic, and secularism has been held to be part of the basic structure and therefore beyond amendment.
How has the provision been used against writers, artists and film?
1. Angarey, 1932: A small collection of Urdu short stories attacking obscurantist customs and the sexual hypocrisy of some religious figures was banned soon after publication, and its authors faced threats.
2. The Satanic Verses, 1988: The government banned import of Salman Rushdie’s novel, making India one of the first countries in the world to act against it, and a secular one at that.
3. The Da Vinci Code, 2006: Seven Indian States banned the film and the book on the ground that they offended Christian sentiment, and two States lifted the ban only after High Court intervention.
4. The Hindus: An Alternative History, 2014: Wendy Doniger’s book was withdrawn by Penguin India after a civil suit invoking Section 295A, so the withdrawal followed a civil filing rather than any conviction.
5. Madhorubagan, 2015 and 2016: Perumal Murugan faced a criminal complaint and a mob campaign over the novel and announced his own death as a writer in 2015; a Madras High Court judgment of 2016 quashed the case and closed with the appeal to let the author be resurrected to what he is best at, write.
6. M.F. Husain: The painter was hounded into exile and death abroad after decades of prosecutions and threats over his nude depictions of Hindu deities.
7. Taslima Nasrin: Her writing has met comparable treatment through bans, threats and constraints on where she may live and publish.
Why does the harm occur before any verdict?
1. Rehana Fathima, 2018: Weeks after the Supreme Court lifted the traditional ban on women of menstruating age entering the Sabarimala temple, the Kerala activist was arrested under Section 295A over a Facebook photograph of herself dressed as an Ayyappa devotee.
2. Cost imposed without trial: She spent over two weeks in judicial custody and was suspended by her employer within days of the arrest, all over an image rather than an argument.
3. Amish Devgan, 2020: The television anchor called the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti a lootera during a live debate, apologised within days for what he said was an inadvertent slip for a different historical name, and still faced seven separate first information reports across five States.
4. Multiplicity as the punishment: The Supreme Court declined to quash any of the seven and merely clubbed them together in Ajmer, so the burden of defending across five jurisdictions was reduced rather than removed.
5. Conviction is not the point: These cases rarely end in conviction and the prosecution more often goes nowhere, so the process itself operates as the penalty.
6. Three channels of harm: The damage is delivered through arrest, through the heckler’s veto of an aggressive and sometimes violent audience, and through the pre emptive caution of publishers and film certifiers who calculate that no book or film is worth the trouble.
Which laws run in the opposite direction?
1. Constituent Assembly position, 2 December 1948: During the debate on whether personal law should be shielded from legislative reform, B.R. Ambedkar rejected the idea that religion could claim a veto over social legislation merely because a custom carried religious sanction.
2. The reasoning he gave: He said he did not understand why religion should be given a vast, expansive jurisdiction covering the whole of life and preventing the legislature from encroaching upon that field, since this liberty exists in order to reform the social system, so personal law cannot be excluded from the jurisdiction of the State.
3. Maharashtra, 2013: The Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act was passed after the assassination of the rationalist campaigner Narendra Dabholkar.
4. What that Act criminalises: It penalises a long list of exploitative religious practices, ranging from claiming to cure disease through faith healing to inducing self flagellation.
5. Karnataka, 2017: The State passed a comparable law against inhuman evil practices and black magic.
6. Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987: It criminalises not only the act of widow immolation but its glorification, treating celebratory speech about a religious practice as itself an offence.
7. The mirror image rather than the opposite: A law punishing praise of a religious practice uses the same technique as a law punishing criticism of one, since both make speech about religion a criminal question.
8. What the coexistence exposes: Indian law has no coherent theory of when religious sentiment deserves protection, and what governs is a case by case political calculation about which practices are currently unpopular enough, or which constituencies currently powerful enough, to tip the balance.
Why does the reformer fall on the wrong side of a blasphemy law?
1. The State of Mysore versus Henry Rodrigues, 1961: A Catholic editor was tried under Section 295A over an article in his Konkani language magazine Crusader, titled “Honour to Mary or Dishonour?”, which accused Catholic priests of exploiting the credulous by falsely attributing miracles to the Virgin Mary.
2. The defence offered: He argued that since the criticised beliefs and practices were superstitious and contrary to the Bible itself, the truth of his charge ought to absolve him.
3. The court’s answer: Following an earlier Allahabad High Court ruling, the Mysore High Court rejected this outright, holding that even a wholly true statement can outrage religious feelings and that the provision punishes the intent to outrage rather than the accuracy of what is said.
4. The insider treated as the stranger: A believer’s sincere and internally argued complaint against his own clergy was treated exactly as the law treats a stranger’s contempt.
5. Jyotirao Phule: He spent the 1870s attacking Brahminical religious authority as the theological scaffolding of caste oppression, recasting Hindu myth in his tract Gulamgiri to expose it as a device for keeping the lower castes subjugated.
6. Hamid Dalwai: A century later he founded the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal explicitly on Phule’s model, marched a handful of Muslim women to the Maharashtra Assembly to demand an end to triple talaq and polygamy, and was ostracised and abused for it.
7. The pair the law cannot separate: The offence does not distinguish a Phule or a Dalwai from a bigot baiting a rival faith for sport, since both are trying to make believers feel bad about what they believe.
8. A line a police station cannot draw: What should separate them is whether the critic is trying to improve the community or merely humiliate it, and an officer recording a complaint is poorly placed to make that assessment.
Major debates surrounding blasphemy and sacrilege law in India
1. Public order against expression: A targeted law applied with judicial restraint and the safeguard of proven intent is defended as a proportionate response to sentiment that has repeatedly proved combustible, rather than as an assault on free thought.
2. Restraint in principle against the record in practice: The historical record of Section 295A, and now of State sacrilege law, gives little confidence that restraint is what actually happens once a complaint is registered.
3. Discussion, advocacy and incitement: Shreya Singhal v Union of India (2015) held that only incitement carrying a direct and proximate connection to public disorder may be criminalised, and that discussion and advocacy remain protected even where unpopular.
4. Intent against effect: Whether liability should turn on what the speaker meant or on the disorder that followed, since the intent test is applied only after an audience has already reacted.
5. Truth as a defence: Whether a demonstrably accurate factual claim about a religious practice should absolve the speaker, which the 1961 ruling denied outright.
6. Proportionality of punishment: Whether imprisonment for life for an insult to a text can be reconciled with a Constitution whose secularism is held unamendable.
7. New law against enforcement: In Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v Union of India (April 2026) the Supreme Court dismissed a batch of petitions seeking fresh hate speech legislation, holding that creating criminal offences belongs to the legislature and that the real problem is an enforcement deficit.
8. Empirical gap: Data under these provisions is not published in a form that sets arrests, days in custody and withdrawn publications against convictions, so the argument runs on cases rather than on measured outcomes.
Challenges to reforming laws on religious offence
1. Cognisability delivers the punishment: An offence that permits arrest on a complaint produces custody before a magistrate examines whether malice existed. Eg. In Imran Pratapgarhi v State of Gujarat (2025) the Supreme Court extended the preliminary inquiry safeguard to first information reports in speech cases precisely to interpose a check before registration.
2. Forum multiplicity: A single utterance can be prosecuted in every jurisdiction where a complainant chooses to file. Eg. Clubbing seven first information reports at Ajmer in 2020 consolidated the defence without removing the cost of defending in a distant State.
3. Self censorship leaves no record: A publisher or certifier that withdraws before any order removes the work without producing a judicial decision that can be appealed. Eg. Penguin India withdrew and destroyed copies of The Hindus: An Alternative History in 2014 with no conviction and no court direction requiring it.
4. Mob campaign as the real enforcement mechanism: The threat of disruption achieves what a prosecution cannot. Eg. Perumal Murugan withdrew from writing in 2015 after a mob campaign and a local shutdown, and resumed only after the Madras High Court judgment of 2016.
5. State level bans without central legislation: Executive bans multiply at the State level and are reversed only through litigation. Eg. Seven States banned The Da Vinci Code in 2006 and two lifted the ban only after their High Courts intervened.
6. Penalty escalation at the State level: A State provision can prescribe imprisonment for life for an offence against a text, which exceeds the penalty for many offences against the person. Eg. State sacrilege provisions carry punishment extending to imprisonment for life against a maximum of a few years under the central provision.
7. Recodification carried the provision forward: The most recent opportunity to narrow the offence was not used. Eg. The Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 re-enacted Section 295A as Section 299 unchanged, instead of confining it to incitement to violence.
Conclusion

Section 295A and its successor punish the intent to outrage rather than the falsity of what is said, so a reformer criticising his own faith is caught by the same words as a bigot baiting a rival one. India runs that regime alongside statutes that direct the State to criminalise faith healing, black magic and the glorification of sati, which shows there is no settled principle about when religious sentiment deserves protection. What remains unresolved is whether these provisions will be narrowed to their original and defensible purpose of preventing incitement to actual violence, leaving criticism, satire and reform of religious practice to public argument rather than to the criminal courts.

What is Secularism?
1. About: Secularism is the principle that the State holds no religion of its own and treats every faith on the same footing in law and in the distribution of public benefits.
2. Rationale: It exists to keep the coercive power of the State out of the hands of any religious majority or clergy, and to make citizenship independent of belief.
3. Strict separation model: The State and religion operate in mutually exclusive spheres, with the State neither aiding nor interfering with any religion, which is the model associated with the United States and France.
4. Principled distance model: The State keeps no religion of its own and retains the power to intervene in religious practice for social reform and equality, which is the model the Indian Constitution follows.
5. Positive neutrality: Equal treatment is delivered through equal respect rather than equal indifference, so the State may fund, regulate and administer religious institutions on a non preferential basis.
6. Constitutional location: The word secular was inserted in the Preamble by the Constitution (Forty second Amendment) Act, 1976, and S.R. Bommai v Union of India (1994) held secularism to be part of the basic structure.
7. Essential religious practices doctrine: Courts decide the reach of religious freedom by asking whether a practice is essential to the religion, which places the determination of religious content with the judiciary.
Key Concerns Regarding Secularism in India
1. State entanglement with religious administration: Endowment departments and statutory boards administer the institutions of some faiths and not others, so the State’s distance is uneven across religions.
2. Judicial determination of religious content: The essential religious practices test requires judges to decide questions of theology, a function courts were not designed or equipped for.
3. Asymmetric reform power: Article 25(2)(b) expressly permits the opening of Hindu religious institutions, and comparable reform in other communities has proceeded largely through litigation rather than legislation.
4. Personal law plurality against Article 44: The directive for a uniform civil code remains unimplemented, so family law continues to differ by religion.
5. Majoritarian capture of neutral language: A formally neutral provision protects the practices of the dominant community more effectively, since those practices attract fewer complaints and fewer prosecutions.
6. No horizontal anti discrimination remedy: Discrimination on religious grounds by private landlords and employers has no general statutory remedy, since constitutional guarantees bind the State.
Laws and Rules Governing Religious Offence in India
1. Indian Penal Code, 1860: Chapter XV grouped the offences relating to religion and remained the governing law until 2024.
2. Section 295A was inserted by the Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1927 following the Rangila Rasul prosecution.
3. Sections 295 to 298 covered defiling a place of worship, disturbing a religious assembly, trespass on burial places and wounding religious feelings by word.
4. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: Replaced the Indian Penal Code with effect from 1 July 2024 and carried this chapter forward.
5. Section 299 corresponds to Section 295A, Section 298 to Section 295, Section 300 to Section 296 and Section 302 to Section 298.
6. Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023: Provides for a preliminary inquiry before registration of a first information report in specified categories of offence, and for prior government sanction before a court takes cognisance of certain offences relating to religion.
7. Cinematograph Act, 1952: Empowers the certifying authority to refuse or condition certification of a film on grounds mirroring Article 19(2), including public order and decency.
8. Information Technology Act, 2000: Section 69A permits blocking of online content on grounds that track the restrictions in Article 19(2).
9. Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987: Criminalises the act of sati, its abetment and its glorification, and provides for Special Courts to try these offences.
10. Maharashtra Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and Other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act, 2013: Criminalises a listed set of exploitative practices including faith healing claims and induced self flagellation.
11. Karnataka Prevention and Eradication of Inhuman Evil Practices and Black Magic Act, 2017: Enacts a comparable prohibition in that State.
12. Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955: Penalises the enforcement of religious disabilities arising out of untouchability, including denial of temple entry.
Back2Basics: Jyotirao Phule
1. Life: Born in 1827 in a family of the Mali caste in present day Maharashtra, and died in 1890 in Pune.
2. First school: Opened a school for girls at Bhide Wada in Pune in 1848, among the earliest such schools established by an Indian.
3. Extension to the excluded castes: Opened a school in 1851 for children of the castes then treated as untouchable.
4. Organisation founded: Founded the Satyashodhak Samaj, the Society of Truth Seekers, on 24 September 1873 in Pune, to secure social justice for the lower castes without priestly mediation.
5. Principal writings: Wrote Gulamgiri in 1873, which read Hindu myth as a record of the subjugation of the lower castes, and Shetkaryacha Asud in 1883 on the condition of the cultivator.
6. Vocabulary contributed: Popularised the term Dalit for the oppressed castes, which entered later political usage.
7. Social work: Opened a home for widows and a centre for the prevention of infanticide, and supported widow remarriage.
8. Title conferred: Given the title Mahatma in 1888 at a public gathering in Bombay.
9. Partnership: Worked with Savitribai Phule, who taught at the Bhide Wada school and is counted among India’s first women teachers.
10. Later influence: His model was invoked directly by Hamid Dalwai in founding the Muslim Satyashodhak Mandal in 1970.
Way Forward
1. Narrow the offence to incitement: Confine Section 299 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 to speech carrying a direct and proximate connection to violence, in line with the Shreya Singhal test.
2. Make the offence non cognisable: Remove the power to arrest on a bare complaint, so that custody does not precede any judicial assessment of deliberate and malicious intent.
3. Require prior sanction and preliminary inquiry: Make registration of a first information report conditional on a preliminary inquiry and on sanction by a designated senior officer, extending the Imran Pratapgarhi safeguard to every provision in this chapter.
4. Consolidate multiple complaints by statute: Provide that all first information reports arising from a single publication or utterance are transferred to one jurisdiction as a matter of right, rather than case by case.
5. Introduce a public interest defence: Allow truth combined with a reformist or scholarly purpose as a statutory defence, so an insider critic is separated from a speaker seeking only to humiliate.
6. Cap the penalty: Bring State sacrilege provisions within a central ceiling so that an offence against a text cannot carry imprisonment for life.
7. Protect the publisher and the certifier: Bar interim injunctions and pre publication restraints on books and films except on a judicial finding of imminent violence, so withdrawal is not the cheapest option.
“[2014, GS2, 12.5] What do you understand by the concept “freedom of speech and expression”? Does it cover hate speech also? Why do the films in India stand on a slightly different plane from other forms of expression? Discuss.”
August 21, 2026
Former SC judge-led panel to probe ‘police excesses’ against protesters
Why in the News

The Supreme Court has constituted a five member High-Powered Enquiry Committee headed by a former Supreme Court judge to examine alleged excesses and disproportionate use of force by police and security personnel at Jantar Mantar and other locations during last month’s protests over the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Undergraduate) paper leak. The Court framed twelve issues for the inquiry, covering both police conduct and violence by protesters. The order therefore turns a policing controversy into an examination of the constitutional limits on how the State may respond to assembly.

What is the High-Powered Enquiry Committee?
1. What it is: The High-Powered Enquiry Committee (HPEC) is a fact finding body constituted by the Supreme Court to examine allegations of excessive force by police and security personnel during the protests, and to report back to the Court.
2. Who heads it and who sits on it: It is headed by former Supreme Court judge R Subhash Reddy. Its members are former Punjab and Haryana High Court Chief Justice Ravi Shankar Jha, former Delhi High Court judge Justice Shalinder Kaur, former Central Bureau of Investigation Director Rishi Kumar Shukla, and retired Director General of Police of Meghalaya L R Bishnoi.
3. How it must function: The inquiry is not to be a one time exercise. The Committee is to undertake a continuous and periodic assessment of the enumerated issues and submit interim findings periodically, so the Court can issue directions as warranted.
4. What it does not displace: The Court clarified that the constitution of the Committee shall in no way deter or debar police authorities or security forces from taking administrative or disciplinary action against officers found in contravention of the rules governing their conduct.
What is the current status of the right to protest in India?
1. The right itself: The right to protest is drawn from Article 19(1)(a), the freedom of speech and expression, and Article 19(1)(b), the right to assemble peaceably and without arms, read together.
2. The condition built into the text: The assembly must be peaceable and without arms, so the protection falls away for an assembly that turns violent or armed.
3. The limits on the right: Restrictions may be imposed under Article 19(2) on speech and Article 19(3) on assembly, and the restriction must be reasonable and imposed by law rather than by executive discretion alone.
4. No right to occupy a public space indefinitely: The Supreme Court in Amit Sahni v Commissioner of Police (2020) held that public ways and public spaces cannot be occupied indefinitely, and that demonstrations must take place in designated areas.
5. A blanket ban on a protest site is not permissible: In Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v Union of India (2018) the Court set aside an absolute prohibition on demonstrations at Jantar Mantar and directed that guidelines be framed regulating rather than eliminating protest there.
6. Force must be proportionate and compensable: In Anita Thakur v State of Jammu and Kashmir (2016) the Court held that use of excessive force by police against demonstrators violates Article 21 and awarded compensation to the injured.
7. The operative statutory levers: Prohibitory orders are issued under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and speech and assembly prosecutions have been brought under Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.
Constitutional Provisions Related to the Right to Protest and Police Accountability
1. Article 19(1)(a): Guarantees to all citizens the freedom of speech and expression, from which the right to voice dissent is drawn.
2. Article 19(1)(b): Guarantees the right to assemble peaceably and without arms.
3. Article 19(1)(c): Guarantees the right to form associations or unions, under which protest organisations operate.
4. Article 19(2): Permits the State to impose reasonable restrictions on the freedom of speech and expression on enumerated grounds.
5. Article 19(3): Permits reasonable restrictions on the right of assembly in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India or public order.
6. Article 21: Guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law, the provision under which bodily harm caused by disproportionate force is examined.
7. Article 22: Provides safeguards on arrest and detention, including the right to be informed of the grounds of arrest and to consult a legal practitioner.
8. Article 20(3): Protects a person accused of an offence against being compelled to be a witness against himself.
9. Article 32 and Article 226: Provide the remedies before the Supreme Court and the High Courts through which protest related grievances and monitored inquiries are brought.
10. Seventh Schedule, State List Entry 1 and Entry 2: Place public order and police within the legislative and executive competence of the States, which is why a national inquiry into police conduct proceeds through the Court rather than through a central department.
What is Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023?
1. What it does: Section 163 empowers a District Magistrate, a Sub-divisional Magistrate or an Executive Magistrate to issue a written order directing a person or the public generally to abstain from a specified act, where there is an apprehension of obstruction, annoyance, danger to human life or a disturbance of public tranquillity.
2. Its limits: An order under the section is temporary and cannot ordinarily remain in force beyond two months, and it corresponds to the power earlier exercised under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
What is Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023?
1. What it criminalises: Section 152 punishes acts that excite secession, armed rebellion, subversive activities or separatist feelings, or that endanger the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India, with punishment extending to life imprisonment or seven years with fine.
2. What it replaced: It came into force on 1 July 2024 in place of Section 124A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, the sedition provision inserted in 1870, and its constitutional validity is under challenge on grounds of vagueness and overbreadth.
What are metallic kinetic projectiles?
1. What they are: Metallic kinetic projectiles, commonly called pellets, are small metal shot fired in a scattering pattern from pump-action rifles or projectile-action guns, used as a crowd control weapon.
2. Why they are contested: The scatter pattern makes the point of impact uncontrollable, so injuries to the eyes and upper body are common and the resulting harm is often irreversible.
What are the twelve issues the Committee will examine?
1. Issue 1, excessive force: Alleged use of excessive force and violence against protesters by police authorities and other agencies, including deployment of pellet guns, electric batons, lathi charges and tear gas without adequate warning or proportionality, resulting in severe bodily harm and injuries, some alleged to be of a grievous and lasting nature.
2. Issue 2, proportionality of response: Ensuring a proportionate and measured police response during protests, public gatherings and peaceful assemblies, so as to strike an appropriate balance between maintaining public order and exercising the constitutional right to peaceful dissent.
3. Issue 3, banning pellets: The desirability of banning the use of metallic kinetic projectiles or pellets fired from pump-action rifles or projectile-action guns, having regard to the grave and at times irreversible bodily harm they cause.
4. Issue 4, identification of officers: The necessity of ensuring that police and security personnel wear proper uniforms and visible nameplates while effecting arrests or using force during crowd control operations, to secure accountability and enable identification of individual officers.
5. Issue 5, surveillance: Allegations of monitoring and surveillance of protesters by police personnel, and the extent to which such measures were consistent with the protesters’ constitutional rights to privacy and free assembly.
6. Issue 6, female protesters: Alleged incidents of targeted violence, harassment, molestation and secondary victimisation directed against female protesters, which warrant a focused and expeditious enquiry.
7. Issue 7, medical support and compensation: The provision of medical and other requisite support, including award of compensation, to victims of alleged police abuse, and the manner and adequacy of the support extended so far.
8. Issue 8, prohibitory orders: Regulation of the issuance of blanket prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, to prevent their use as a routine or pre-emptive measure that forecloses peaceful assembly rather than as a proportionate response to a real and imminent threat to public order.
9. Issue 9, thresholds for Section 152: The establishment of strict constitutional thresholds and safeguards to prevent Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 from being invoked to stifle political dissent and peaceful protest, so that it is not permitted to operate as a chilling restraint on constitutionally protected speech and assembly.
10. Issue 10, violence by protesters: Alleged use of force and violence by protesters against police officers and other security personnel.
11. Issue 11, damage to property: Damage to public property caused by the actions of protesters, including destruction of and injury to government installations, vehicles and other assets belonging to the State and to private citizens alike.
12. Issue 12, injuries to police: The injuries sustained by police forces in the course of discharging their duties, and the consequent mental and emotional trauma borne by their families.
Which issues has the Court told the Committee to take up first?
1. The two priority issues: The Committee is to address Issue 1 on excessive force and Issue 6 on targeted violence against female protesters on a priority basis, bearing in mind the sensitivity attendant on them.
2. The first deliverable: The Committee has been asked to complete its inquiry and deliberations on those two issues and submit its First Interim Report at the earliest.
3. The additional head opened: The Committee may also examine the grant of interim compensation to those injured on either side, whether police personnel or protesters.
4. The reporting design: Interim findings are to be submitted periodically rather than a single report at the end, so the Court can issue directions while the inquiry continues.
5. When the order was made: The order is dated 19 August 2026 and was released on 20 August 2026.
Why does the Court’s framing place police conduct and protester conduct on the same list?
1. The list is symmetrical by design: Nine issues concern police and State conduct and three concern protester conduct, so the inquiry is not framed solely as an investigation of the police.
2. The compensation head runs both ways: Interim compensation is opened for those injured on either side, which places an injured constable and an injured student within the same remedial frame.
3. Trauma is recognised on the police side: Issue 12 extends to the mental and emotional trauma borne by the families of injured police personnel, a head rarely written into an inquiry mandate.
4. Symmetry is not equivalence: The two issues marked for priority treatment are both allegations against the police, so the sequencing signals which set of allegations the Court treats as most urgent.
5. The disciplinary channel stays open in parallel: The Court expressly preserved the power of police authorities to take administrative or disciplinary action against their own officers, so the inquiry does not become a reason to suspend departmental accountability.
6. The tension the design carries: A committee asked simultaneously to judge police excess and protester violence must apply one standard of proportionality to an armed disciplined force and another to an unorganised crowd, without a settled test for either.
Major debates surrounding the right to protest and the use of force
1. Regulation against prohibition: One position holds that designated protest sites and prior permission are reasonable regulation of a public space, and the other holds that permission requirements convert a right into a licence.
2. Two rulings pulling in opposite directions: Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (2018) struck down a blanket prohibition at a protest site, and Amit Sahni (2020) held that public ways cannot be occupied indefinitely, so the boundary between the two remains contested.
3. The proportionality standard for lethal and less lethal weapons: There is no settled judicial test fixing when tear gas, water cannon, batons or pellets may be used, so proportionality is assessed after the event rather than fixed in advance.
4. Whether pellet weapons can be regulated or must be banned: One position accepts them as a less lethal alternative to firearms, and the other holds that an uncontrollable scatter pattern makes proportionate use impossible in principle.
5. Prohibitory orders as prevention against pre-emption: Section 163 is defended as a preventive power against imminent threats and contested as a routine instrument that forecloses assembly before any threat materialises.
6. Whether the narrowing of sedition survives its replacement: The Kedar Nath Singh (1962) requirement of incitement to violence narrowed the old sedition provision, and whether that narrowing automatically transfers to Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 is unsettled.
7. Command responsibility against individual liability: Accountability for crowd control failures is contested between the individual officer who used force and the supervising officer who ordered the deployment.
8. The evidentiary gap the dispute turns on: Without uniforms carrying visible identification, body worn cameras and a contemporaneous record of orders, allegations on both sides rest on competing testimony rather than on documented fact.
Challenges to the inquiry delivering accountability
1. A fact finding committee is not a prosecuting authority: The Committee reports to the Court and cannot itself frame charges or convict, so accountability depends on what follows the report. Eg. The Court has separately preserved the departmental power to take disciplinary action, which sits outside the Committee’s control.
2. Evidence degrades with time in crowd control cases: Injury records, video footage, control room logs and deployment orders have to be secured early or they cease to be reliable. Eg. Issue 4 arises precisely because officers using force were allegedly not identifiable by uniform or nameplate.
3. Prosecution of police officers requires sanction: Proceeding against a public servant for acts done in the discharge of official duty depends on prior sanction from the government that employs him. Eg. The requirement of prior sanction has historically been the reason many custodial and encounter cases do not reach trial.
4. Police is a State subject and the incidents spanned States: The Committee’s findings must be implemented by multiple State governments, each of which controls its own force. Eg. The mandate covers Jantar Mantar and other locations across the country during the same protest wave.
5. Compensation without a fixed scale invites disparity: Interim compensation awarded case by case, on both sides, has no published scale to anchor it. Eg. In Anita Thakur (2016) compensation was fixed by the Court itself in the absence of any statutory schedule for excessive force.
6. Monitored inquiries lose momentum once attention moves: A periodic assessment mandate depends on the Court continuing to list and act on interim reports over years. Eg. The Prakash Singh directions on police reform were issued in 2006 and remain incompletely implemented across States two decades later.
7. The unresolved statutory questions sit outside the Committee’s power: Issues 8 and 9 ask for constitutional thresholds on Section 163 and Section 152, which only the Court or Parliament can settle. Eg. The constitutional challenge to Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 is pending separately before the Supreme Court.
Conclusion

The Committee stands constituted with five members under an order dated 19 August 2026, and its immediate task is a First Interim Report on excessive force and on targeted violence against female protesters. The mandate is unusually wide, covering not only what the police did but also the statutory instruments through which protest was restricted, namely prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 and prosecutions under Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. The constitutional question the order raises is whether the State can be held to a proportionality standard in crowd control when no such standard exists in written form. Until that standard is fixed in advance, each episode will continue to be judged after the fact by a fresh committee.

“[2013, GS2, 10] Discuss Section 66A of IT Act, with reference to its alleged violation of Article 19 of the Constitution.”
August 21, 2026
Collectors empowered to grant citizenship under CAA
Why in the News

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has transferred the processing of pending citizenship applications under the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 from centrally staffed Empowered Committees to District Collectors in eight States and Union Territories. The transfer reverses a centralising arrangement built two years earlier specifically to keep State machinery out of the process. It arrives after the political composition of the State that had resisted the law most strongly changed.

What is the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019?
1. What it does: It amends the Citizenship Act, 1955 to create a route to Indian citizenship for members of six communities from three neighbouring countries who entered India before a fixed cut off date.
2. Who it covers: It applies to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi and Christian migrants from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who entered India on or before 31 December 2014 without documents or illegally.
3. How it operates: It inserts Section 6B into the Citizenship Act, 1955, under which such persons may be granted citizenship by registration or naturalisation, and it exempts them from being treated as illegal migrants.
4. When it became operational: The Act was passed in December 2019, and the Citizenship (Amendment) Rules that made it operational came into effect on 11 March 2024, days before the 2024 General Election.
What is Section 6B of the Citizenship Act, 1955?
1. The provision: Section 6B is the enabling clause inserted by the 2019 amendment, under which the Central Government or an authority specified by it may grant a certificate of registration or naturalisation to a person covered by the Act.
2. What it removes: It provides that proceedings pending against such a person in respect of illegal migration or citizenship stand abated on grant of citizenship, and that the person is deemed a citizen from the date of entry into India.
What were the Empowered Committees?
1. Composition: Each Empowered Committee was made up of Central Government officials, drawn from bodies including the Census organisation, the Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the postal department.
2. Purpose: They were created to receive and clear citizenship applications without routing them through State government machinery, with at least four constituted, two of them at the district level.
What does the 19 August order change in the processing chain?
1. The transfer of pending cases: All applications pending before the Empowered Committees and the District Level Committees in the eight jurisdictions stand transferred to the concerned Collector.
2. The jurisdictions covered: Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, West Bengal, Assam except tribal areas, Tripura except tribal areas, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.
3. The instrument used: The Citizenship (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026, notified on 19 August 2026, empower Collectors in these jurisdictions to receive, scrutinise and dispose of applications for registration or naturalisation under Section 6B.
4. What the Collector must now do: The Collector is required to verify the documents submitted by an applicant and determine whether the applicant meets the eligibility requirements.
5. The earlier notification is displaced: The order makes the MHA notification of 11 March 2024 implementing the Citizenship Amendment Rules inapplicable to these jurisdictions.
6. The committee route is spent: The order renders the earlier multi agency committee arrangement redundant in the eight jurisdictions.
Why was the power centralised in the first place?
1. State opposition to the law: The Citizenship Amendment Act was strongly opposed by the then Trinamool Congress government in West Bengal.
2. The design was built to bypass the State: Empowered Committees headed by Central Government officials were constituted specifically to keep the State government out of the processing of applications.
3. The timing tracked the electoral calendar: The committees were created days before the Assembly polls in West Bengal in April 2026, and the amendment now decentralising the process was notified after the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in that State.
4. The first grants preceded the committees: The Home Ministry handed the first set of citizenship certificates to 14 applicants in May 2024.
Why does a Union List subject still need the States?
1. The subject is central: Citizenship, naturalisation and aliens fall under the Union List of the Seventh Schedule, so legislative and executive competence rests with the Centre.
2. The delivery is district level: Receiving applications, verifying documents and issuing certificates are field functions that need offices, staff and records located in the district.
3. Police verification sits with the State: Police is a State List subject, so verification of an applicant’s antecedents runs through the State police machinery whatever the processing authority.
4. The State’s role was reduced to logistics: Under the centralised arrangement the State’s contribution was limited to providing office space and police verification of applicants.
5. The Collector belongs to both systems: A District Collector is an officer of the State administration and simultaneously the Centre’s principal field functionary in the district, which is why the transfer restores State machinery without transferring the subject.
What are the other major changes the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 made?
1. Shortened naturalisation period: For the covered communities the residence requirement in the qualifying period for naturalisation was reduced from eleven years to five years, a change made to the Third Schedule of the Citizenship Act, 1955.
2. Exemption from illegal migrant status: Covered persons were exempted from the operation of the Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920 and the Foreigners Act, 1946, so their entry without documents no longer bars citizenship.
3. Abatement of pending proceedings: Proceedings pending against a covered person in respect of illegal migration or citizenship abate on grant of citizenship.
4. Geographic carve outs: The Act does not apply to the tribal areas of Assam, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura covered by the Sixth Schedule, nor to areas under the Inner Line Permit regime in Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur.
5. Effect on Overseas Citizen of India registration: The Act added a ground for cancellation of Overseas Citizen of India registration where the holder violates any law notified by the Central Government, with an opportunity of being heard.
Major debates surrounding the Citizenship Amendment Act
1. Religion as a statutory classification: The Act identifies its beneficiaries by naming six religious communities, which is contested as a classification that fails the reasonable classification test under Article 14.
2. The defence of the classification: The stated basis is that the three named countries have a State religion and that the six communities are religious minorities there facing persecution, which is offered as an intelligible differentia with a rational nexus.
3. The excluded groups: Persecuted groups outside the classification, including Ahmadis and Shias in Pakistan, Rohingya from Myanmar and Tamils from Sri Lanka, fall outside the Act’s coverage.
4. The cut off date and the Assam Accord: The 31 December 2014 cut off for the covered communities sits against the 24 March 1971 cut off fixed for Assam by Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, inserted after the Assam Accord of 1985 to regularise migrants in that State. The gap between the two dates is the source of the objection in Assam.
5. Section 6A itself has been upheld: A Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court upheld the validity of Section 6A in 2024, confirming the 1971 cut off for Assam as constitutionally valid.
6. The link with a national register: The objection that the Act operates as a filter alongside a nationwide citizens register turns on whether the two exercises are read together, since the Act creates a route to citizenship but no obligation to prove it.
7. The federal objection: Several State legislatures passed resolutions seeking repeal of the Act, and Kerala filed an original suit in the Supreme Court under Article 131, raising the question whether a State can sue over a Union List subject.
Challenges to implementing the CAA framework
1. Documentary proof of origin is the binding constraint: An applicant who entered without documents has to establish nationality of the country of origin and the date of entry, which is precisely what the flight left behind. Eg. The Home Ministry issued its first set of certificates to only 14 applicants in May 2024, years after the Act was passed.
2. Eligibility determination sits with a generalist officer: The Collector must now assess questions of foreign nationality, religious identity and date of entry alongside a full district administration workload. Eg. The function was earlier assigned to committees staffed by Census, Intelligence Bureau and postal officials specifically for that expertise.
3. Verification depends on a machinery the Centre does not control: Police verification of applicants runs through the State police, a State List subject, so the pace of processing depends on State cooperation. Eg. The centralised committee design was itself adopted because the West Bengal government opposed the law.
4. Applicants risk exposure by applying: Filing an application is an admission of having entered India without valid documents, which deters applicants where the outcome is uncertain. Eg. The Act exempts covered persons from the Foreigners Act, 1946 only on grant of citizenship, not on filing.
5. Uniformity across eight jurisdictions is hard to hold: Decentralising to district officers across eight States and Union Territories creates as many decision practices as there are districts. Eg. The 19 August order applies to Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, each with a different administrative history on migration.
6. The carve outs cut through the areas of highest migrant density: Excluding Sixth Schedule areas and Inner Line Permit States removes from coverage several districts where the affected population actually lives. Eg. Tribal areas of Assam and Tripura are expressly excluded from the 19 August transfer as well.
7. The constitutional challenge remains live: A framework operating while its parent Act is under challenge risks decisions being unsettled later. Eg. More than 200 petitions challenging the Act were filed before the Supreme Court after its enactment.
Conclusion

The Citizenship (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026 stand notified with effect from 19 August 2026, and pending applications in the eight named jurisdictions have been transferred to District Collectors, who will now verify documents and determine eligibility. The 11 March 2024 notification no longer applies in those jurisdictions and the Empowered Committee route is spent there. The source names no further date or milestone for the disposal of the transferred applications. The change is administrative in form, and it records that the reason for centralising the process, namely State government opposition, is no longer present in the State it was designed for.

“[2021] With reference to India, consider the following statements:

1. There is only one citizenship and one domicile.

2. A citizen by birth only can become the Head of State.

3. A foreigner, once granted citizenship, cannot be deprived of it under any circumstances.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

(a) 1 only

(b) 2 only

(c) 1 and 3

(d) 2 and 3
August 21, 2026
Dignity in death: Supreme Court upholds hanging under Article 21
Why in the News

The Supreme Court has dismissed a public interest litigation arguing that death by hanging is scientifically unreliable and violates the right to a dignified death under Article 21 of the Constitution. The ruling holds that a method of execution devised in colonial India still satisfies the constitutional promise of dignity, while leaving the question open to a future challenge built on fresh scientific material.

What is the long drop method of hanging?
1. The colonial inheritance: Hanging is the prescribed method of executing death sentences in India and derives from British Common Law.
2. The older short drop method: Historically, hanging was carried out through a short drop, which causes death by asphyxiation.
3. What the long drop is meant to do: A longer drop is calibrated to snap the second and third cervical vertebrae, the C2 and C3, and with them the spinal cord, rendering the person immediately unconscious.
4. Why calibration decides the outcome: The drop must be matched to the individual’s weight and height, since a drop that is too short causes prolonged strangulation and one that is too long risks decapitation.
5. The protocol afterwards: Standard prison protocols require the body to be left hanging for 30 minutes after the trap door opens.
What is the current status of capital punishment and the right to die with dignity in India?
1. Executions carried out: 971 executions have taken place in India between 1947 and 2025.
2. Executions in this century: Only six executions have taken place since 2001, the most recent in 2020, of the four convicts in the Delhi gang rape and murder case.
3. Sentences imposed: 1,281 convicts were sentenced to death between 2016 and 2025, which is far larger than the number of executions carried out.
4. The sentencing threshold: The death penalty may be imposed only in the rarest of rare cases, the standard laid down in Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980).
5. The statutory command: Section 393(5) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023 provides that where a person is sentenced to death, the sentence shall direct that he be hanged by the neck till he is dead.
6. How old the clause is: The clause has barely changed since it was introduced in the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1861 and has survived multiple amendments.
7. The recognised right: The Supreme Court in Gian Kaur v State of Punjab (1996) held that the right to life under Article 21 includes the right to live with dignity and consequently to die with dignity.
8. The limits on that right: The right to die with dignity does not extend to a right to take one’s own life, and its recognised application is to end of life decisions rather than to the manner of a lawful execution.
Constitutional Provisions Related to Capital Punishment
1. Article 21: Guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law, and this procedure must be fair, just and reasonable.
2. Article 14: Requires that the classification of offences and offenders attracting the death penalty be reasonable and non arbitrary.
3. Article 20(1): Bars the imposition of a penalty greater than that prescribed by the law in force at the time the offence was committed.
4. Article 22: Provides procedural protections on arrest and detention, including the right to consult and be defended by a legal practitioner.
5. Article 72: Empowers the President to grant pardon, reprieve, respite or remission of punishment, and to suspend, remit or commute a sentence of death.
6. Article 161: Empowers the Governor to grant pardon and to commute sentences, though the power to pardon a death sentence rests with the President.
7. Article 134: Provides an appeal to the Supreme Court in a criminal proceeding where a High Court has reversed an acquittal and imposed a death sentence.
8. Article 136: Provides for special leave to appeal to the Supreme Court against any judgment or order in any cause or matter.
9. Article 137: Provides the power of review, under which death row convicts are entitled to an open court hearing of a review petition.
10. Concurrent List, Entry 1 and Entry 2: Place criminal law and criminal procedure in the Concurrent List, so both Parliament and State legislatures may legislate on them.
What did the petition argue?
1. The relief sought: A declaration that the provision prescribing hanging is unconstitutional, on the ground that Article 21 includes a right to die through a dignified procedure.
2. The characterisation of the method: The method was described as accompanied by intense physical torture and pain, and as inherently unpredictable.
3. The scientific material relied on: A 1992 study of the remains of 34 people hanged in England between 1882 and 1945.
4. What the study found: Fractures at C2 and C3 were common, but the hangman’s fracture, assumed to cause near instant death, appeared in only three of the 34 cases, and six died of asphyxiation instead.
5. The inference drawn: Hanging is therefore neither quick nor controllable in the way the law assumes it to be.
6. The intervenor’s evidence: The Executive Director of a university death penalty clinic that intervened in the proceedings stated that researchers examining the remains of executed prisoners found that people had not died by an instant breaking of the neck, and that a range of painful and long drawn causes had produced their deaths.
Why did the Court decline to revisit the 1983 precedent?
1. The binding precedent: A three judge bench in Deena vs Union of India (1983) had upheld hanging as a constitutional mode of execution.
2. What Deena examined: That bench considered medical evidence, expert opinion and comparative execution methods before ruling.
3. What Deena held: Hanging, when properly administered, is a quick and certain method, causes no greater pain than any other known method, and avoids barbarity, torture and degradation.
4. The legislative hurdle: Parliament chose to retain hanging while enacting the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which is a recent legislative reaffirmation of the method.
5. The evidentiary finding: The new scientific material did not displace the basis on which Deena was decided.
6. The comparative finding: The material did not establish that lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas or shooting offered any advantage over hanging.
7. The constitutional conclusion: The existing method continues to satisfy the State’s obligation to carry out a death sentence with decency and decorum and without degradation or brutality.
What is the Union government’s position?
1. The claim made: Hanging remains the safest and quickest available method of execution.
2. The domestic record cited: No botched execution has ever been recorded in India.
3. The comparative argument: Lethal injection in the United States carries a well documented history of failures.
4. What this position implies: The burden of demonstrating that an alternative is measurably less painful and more reliable rests on the challenger, not on the State.
What did the Court leave open?
1. No permanent closure: The bench stopped short of treating the question as settled forever.
2. The ground for a future challenge: Constitutional law evolves, and a future challenge may succeed if new scientific, medical or empirical material fundamentally alters the assumptions on which Deena was decided.
3. The executive route: The Court left it open to the Union government to examine alternative methods of execution should it choose to do so.
4. What this means in practice: The method now depends on the state of the evidence rather than on the age of the precedent.
What do other countries’ execution methods show about the search for a humane method?
1. Hanging’s reach: A 2012 Cornell Law School database identified 60 countries that authorised hanging as a method of execution, concentrated in jurisdictions influenced by British Common Law, including India, Singapore and Japan.
2. Lethal injection: The primary method in several United States states where the death penalty is allowed and heavily used in China, administering an anaesthetic, then a paralytic, then potassium chloride, and frequently botched where venous access is compromised.
3. Shooting: Used in China, North Korea, Somalia and parts of West Asia, visually violent and traumatic for executioners, with proponents citing near instantaneous cardiac or neurological destruction.
4. Beheading: Carried out with a sword in Saudi Arabia, and reliant entirely on the executioner’s precision.
5. Nitrogen hypoxia: Recently introduced in the United States, using inhalation of pure nitrogen to cause asphyxiation without triggering the hypercapnic alarm response, the panicked sensation of suffocation, and criticised as insufficiently vetted and amounting to human experimentation.
6. The abolition trend: More than two thirds of the world’s nations, around 113, have ended the death penalty in law or in practice, according to Amnesty International.
7. The countervailing trend: A 2025 Amnesty International report recorded a 12 percent increase in executions over the previous year, so fewer states execute while those that do execute more.
8. The 2025 concentration: The countries recording the most executions in 2025 were Iran at 2,159 or more, Saudi Arabia at 356 or more and Yemen at 51 or more, with China’s total running into the thousands and not published.
9. What the comparison establishes: Every available method carries its own scientific and ethical controversy, which is why no alternative could be shown to be superior to hanging.
Major debates surrounding capital punishment and the method of execution
1. Retribution against reform: The claim that the gravest offences require the ultimate sanction stands against the claim that the state’s own conduct must not replicate the violence it punishes.
2. Deterrence unproven: The deterrent effect of capital punishment has not been empirically established, which weakens the principal utilitarian justification offered for it.
3. Two rulings in tension: Gian Kaur (1996) recognises a right to die with dignity within Article 21, while Deena (1983) holds that a method causing potential asphyxiation satisfies the same Article, and the present ruling resolves that tension in favour of the earlier precedent.
4. Judge centric sentencing: The rarest of rare test is applied unevenly across benches, which makes the sentence depend in part on the composition of the court.
5. Delay as cruelty: Prolonged delay in deciding mercy petitions has been held to be a ground for commutation, which converts the length of the process itself into a constitutional question.
6. Socio economic profile of death row: A disproportionate share of death row prisoners come from poor and marginalised backgrounds with inadequate legal representation, which raises an equality question under Article 14.
7. Irreversibility and wrongful conviction: The penalty cannot be corrected after execution, and acquittals in appeal after years on death row demonstrate that error occurs.
8. The evidence gap the present dispute turns on: No systematic post mortem study of executions in India exists, so both the State’s claim of no botched execution and the petitioner’s claim of prolonged suffering rest on foreign data.
9. Legislative expansion against judicial restriction: Parliament has extended the death penalty to more offences while the courts have narrowed the circumstances in which it may be imposed.
Challenges to ensuring a constitutional mode of execution
1. No Indian evidence base: India has no published forensic study of executions, so the constitutional question is argued on English data from 1882 to 1945. e.g. the 1992 study relied on by the petitioners examined 34 remains from England, not from any Indian prison.
2. Calibration depends on execution skill: The drop length must be computed for each individual, so the outcome varies with the competence of prison staff. e.g. the official drop tables in use derive from colonial era manuals rather than from contemporary biomechanical evidence.
3. Every alternative carries its own failure mode: No method has been shown to be reliably painless. e.g. lethal injection executions in the United States have taken over an hour where venous access failed.
4. Absence of monitoring: No independent medical observation or record of the execution process is published. e.g. prison protocols require the body to hang for 30 minutes without any requirement to record the time or cause of death.
5. Delay converts the sentence into a separate punishment: Prisoners spend years under sentence while appeals and mercy petitions are pending. e.g. the Supreme Court in Shatrughan Chauhan v Union of India (2014) commuted 15 death sentences on the ground of inordinate delay in deciding mercy petitions.
6. Unequal access to competent defence: The quality of representation at the sentencing stage decides who receives the sentence. e.g. mitigating circumstances are often not placed on record at all in trial courts, which the Supreme Court addressed in Manoj v State of Madhya Pradesh (2022).
7. Legislative expansion without sentencing guidance: New offences attract the death penalty without any accompanying sentencing framework. e.g. the death penalty was extended to the rape of a child below twelve years by the amendment to the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act in 2019.
Conclusion

The Court has held that hanging under Section 393(5) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 remains constitutional, on the twin grounds that Deena (1983) has not been displaced and that Parliament reaffirmed the method when it enacted the new Sanhita. The scientific material placed before it was found insufficient to dislodge the assumptions on which the 1983 ruling rests, and no alternative method was shown to be superior. The petition is dismissed, but the question is not closed, since a future challenge may succeed on fresh scientific, medical or empirical material. The Union government has also been left free to examine alternative methods of execution should it choose to do so.

What is the rarest of rare doctrine?
1. About: The rarest of rare doctrine is the sentencing standard under which the death penalty may be imposed only where the alternative of life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed.
2. Rationale: It exists because the Constitution permits capital punishment while Article 21 requires that its imposition be exceptional, reasoned and non arbitrary, so life imprisonment is the rule and death the exception.
3. Where it comes from: Laid down in Bachan Singh v State of Punjab (1980), which upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty by a majority while confining it to the rarest of rare cases.
4. The named typology it rests on:
  - Aggravating circumstances: Factors relating to the crime, such as extreme brutality, premeditation and the vulnerability of the victim, which weigh in favour of the maximum sentence.
  - Mitigating circumstances: Factors relating to the offender, such as age, mental condition, socio economic background and the probability of reform, which weigh against it.
  - The five categories in Machhi Singh v State of Punjab (1983): Manner of commission, motive, anti social or socially abhorrent nature of the crime, magnitude of the crime, and personality of the victim.
  - The balancing requirement: The court must weigh aggravating against mitigating circumstances and record why life imprisonment is unquestionably foreclosed.
Laws Governing Capital Punishment in India
1. Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), 2023: The procedural code governing trial, sentencing, confirmation and execution of the death sentence, which replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
2. Section 393(5): Directs that a person sentenced to death be hanged by the neck till he is dead.
3. Confirmation requirement: A death sentence passed by a Sessions Court has no effect until it is confirmed by the High Court.
4. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), 2023: The substantive penal code listing the offences that carry the death penalty, including murder, waging war against the Government of India, and certain aggravated forms of rape.
5. Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967: Provides the death penalty for a terrorist act resulting in death.
6. Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985: Provides the death penalty for repeat offences involving specified commercial quantities, made discretionary rather than mandatory after judicial challenge.
7. Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012: As amended in 2019, provides the death penalty for aggravated penetrative sexual assault on a child.
8. Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2013 and Criminal Law (Amendment) Act, 2018: Extended the death penalty to repeat rape offences and to the rape of a child below twelve years respectively.
9. Army Act, 1950, Navy Act, 1957 and Air Force Act, 1950: Provide the death penalty for specified offences under military law, where the alternative method of shooting is available.
10. Prisons Act, 1894 and State prison manuals: Govern the conditions of confinement of death row prisoners and the procedure at the place of execution.
“[2023, GS2, 15 marks] “The Constitution of India is a living instrument with capabilities of enormous dynamism. It is a constitution made for a progressive society”. Illustrate with special reference to the expanding horizons of the right to life and personal liberty.”
August 20, 2026
Workers protesting for higher wages spent over 50 days in jail on average until courts intervened
Why in the News
An investigation into 222 bail orders arising from the April 2026 wage protests by factory workers in Noida found that relief was granted in 188 of them, or 84 per cent, after courts repeatedly held that mere presence in a protesting crowd is not evidence of criminal intent. The average protester nonetheless spent 53 days in custody before that relief arrived. Two protests over comparable grievances in the same month produced opposite outcomes, one ending in a ministerial resignation and an assurance of no prosecution, the other in mass arrests and preventive detention.
What is the National Security Act, 1980?
1. What it is: A central preventive detention law that allows the State to detain a person to prevent an apprehended act, without trial and without a criminal charge being proved.
2. The period it permits: It allows detention for up to one year without trial.
3. Who orders it: A district magistrate, a commissioner of police or the State government may pass the detention order, and the State government must confirm it.
4. Its use in this case: Two of those arrested in the Noida protests were booked under the Act, a former journalist and a university graduate, and their pleas are pending before the Supreme Court and the Allahabad High Court respectively.
What is the current status of the right to protest in India?
1. A derived right, not an enumerated one: The right to protest is not written into the Constitution as a separate right, it is derived from the freedom of speech under Article 19(1)(a) and the freedom to assemble peaceably and without arms under Article 19(1)(b).
2. The qualification on it: Both freedoms are subject to reasonable restrictions in the interests of public order and the sovereignty and integrity of India.
3. The peaceful assembly limit: Protection extends only to assembly that is peaceable and unarmed, so the State may act against an assembly once it turns violent.
4. The bail standard courts applied here: Judges in these cases held that mere presence at a protest is not evidence to deny bail, that the absence of specific evidence outweighs the gravity of the charges, and that ordinary workers cannot be equated with those found organising or instigating violence.
5. Preventive detention sits alongside it: A person may be detained without trial under a preventive detention law even where no offence has been proved, which is the route taken against two of the accused here.
Constitutional Provisions Related to Protest, Liberty and Preventive Detention
1. Article 19(1)(a): Guarantees freedom of speech and expression, from which the right to protest is derived.
2. Article 19(1)(b): Guarantees the right to assemble peaceably and without arms.
3. Article 19(1)(c): Guarantees the right to form associations or unions, the basis of the right to organise labour.
4. Article 19(2) and 19(3): Permit reasonable restrictions on speech and on assembly in the interests of public order.
5. Article 21: Guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law, read to require a just, fair and reasonable procedure.
6. Article 22(1) and 22(2): Guarantee an arrested person the right to be informed of the grounds of arrest, to consult a legal practitioner, and to be produced before a magistrate within twenty four hours.
7. Article 22(3): Expressly withdraws those protections from a person detained under a preventive detention law.
8. Article 22(4) and 22(5): Cap preventive detention at three months unless an Advisory Board of persons qualified to be High Court judges reports sufficient cause, and require the grounds of detention to be communicated to the detainee.
9. Entry 9, Union List and Entry 3, Concurrent List: Place preventive detention connected with defence and foreign affairs with the Union, and preventive detention for reasons connected with State security and the maintenance of public order on the Concurrent List.
10. Article 23: Prohibits forced labour, the constitutional anchor of minimum wage jurisprudence.
11. Article 43: Directs the State to secure a living wage and conditions of work ensuring a decent standard of life, as a Directive Principle.
What triggered the Noida wage protests?
1. Rising fuel costs: Rising liquefied petroleum gas cylinder prices amid the West Asia crisis, with workers additionally citing black market prices for cylinders.
2. A rumour about the Labour Codes: WhatsApp rumours in late March that the new Labour Codes would raise minimum wages.
3. A neighbouring wage settlement: Wage hike protests in Haryana's Manesar, which produced a settlement that workers in Noida then demanded for themselves.
4. The underlying grievances: Workers cited unrealistic work targets, the absence of social security benefits such as provident fund, and hiring on a temporary basis through contractors.
5. Working hours in practice: Workers said they were officially on eight hour shifts but routinely worked ten to twelve hours with few breaks, with safety, especially for women, a further concern.
What did the wage revisions actually deliver?
1. The Haryana settlement: After the Manesar protests, the State government announced a 35 per cent hike in minimum monthly wages on 9 April, backdated to 1 April.
2. The Haryana figures: Rs 15,220.71 for unskilled workers and Rs 19,425.85 for highly skilled workers.
3. The effect on Noida: The Haryana announcement intensified the Noida protests, which turned violent as workers and activists took to the streets.
4. The Uttar Pradesh interim hike: Calm returned after the State announced its own interim revision on 14 April, raising unskilled wages from Rs 11,313 to Rs 13,690 and skilled wages from Rs 13,940 to Rs 16,868 in Gautam Buddh Nagar and Ghaziabad.
5. The parallel warning: Authorities in Noida warned contractors that complaints against them would be dealt with harshly.
What did the bail orders across the seven FIRs establish?
1. First Information Report 149 of 2026, Noida Phase III: 31 granted bail and 6 denied, on an allegation that 300 to 400 accused entered an electronics firm's premises in Sector 67 on 13 April carrying lathis, sticks, bricks, stones and deadly weapons and extended threats to kill. The sessions court held that the mere fact that an accused was part of the crowd cannot by itself lead to the conclusion that he possessed the same grave criminal intent, and found that the prosecution had described the crowd's acts in a collective manner without specifying individual roles. Fourteen further grants came from the High Court.
2. First Information Report 151 of 2026, Noida Phase III: 37 granted bail, on an allegation of stone pelting with intent to cause death and vandalism of security gates, closed circuit television cameras, glass structures and office property. The prosecution relied on an informant's statement, an inspection of the site and closed circuit television footage, and the court found that no such footage or electronic record had been placed on record depicting the accused in any violent activity.
3. First Information Report 163 of 2026, Noida Phase II: 3 granted bail and 10 denied, arising from protests by workers of three garment and apparel firms between 10 and 11 April. Bail went to three who had remained in judicial custody for a long period once the chargesheet was filed, and was refused to ten on prima facie allegations of an active conspiratorial role, including the creation of WhatsApp groups in the names of companies and the recovery of banners, posters and pamphlets from their residences.
4. First Information Report 165 of 2026, Noida Phase II: 29 granted bail and 6 denied, on an allegation that 450 to 500 workers assembled in Sector 84 and elsewhere on 13 April over wages, overtime and bonuses, and that the protest turned violent between 8.30 am and 9.30 pm. The prosecution cited independent witnesses including a water vendor, a chowmein cart owner and a rickshaw puller, and the court found it was not clear how they were previously acquainted with or able to identify the accused, adding that the presence of an accused at a labourers' protest is not unnatural. Six further grants came from the High Court.
5. First Information Report 169 of 2026, Noida Phase II: 26 granted bail and 1 denied, on an allegation that garment exporter employees blocked gates, restrained workers from entering and threatened vandalism and arson from 10 April. The court noted the First Information Report was lodged nearly ten days after the incident with several accused not named in it and no explanation for the delay, and that the complaint reflected no actual incident of arson or injuries. The single refusal rested on closed circuit television footage establishing a specific role.
6. First Information Report 172 of 2026, Noida Phase I: 21 granted bail and 7 denied, on an allegation that workers of an auto components manufacturer blocked a public road, damaged government and company property and injured police personnel. The court held that the only allegation was presence in the protesting crowd, that the role of every person in a crowd cannot be treated the same, and that mere presence does not by itself make every accused equally liable where no specific act is attributed.
7. First Information Report 164 of 2026, Noida Phase II: 41 granted bail and 4 denied, with 39 of the 41 grants coming from the Allahabad High Court, which applied a broad standard resting on the facts and circumstances of the case, the evidence on record and grounds of parity.
On what grounds was bail refused?
1. The common accusation: Those denied relief face an alleged role in the conspiracy rather than an alleged act at the protest.
2. Administering WhatsApp groups: Courts cited data showing certain accused were administrators of a WhatsApp group alleged to have been created to facilitate the commission of violence.
3. Mobilisation from outside: Bail was refused to accused said to have called others to Noida for the protests or to have run groups to mobilise and instigate workers.
4. Absence of an employment link: One court held that persons with no direct employment relationship with the companies concerned stand on a different footing from the companies' own workers.
5. Statements of co accused: In one case bail was refused on the statements of co accused despite the defence pointing to the absence of prior criminal antecedents.
6. Preventive detention instead of bail: On 13 May, nearly a month after the protests turned violent, the State invoked the National Security Act, 1980 against a 60 year old former journalist from Lucknow and a 25 year old Delhi University graduate, taking both outside the bail process altogether.
7. The material cited in the detention orders: The grounds included membership of a political organisation, writing described as inciting a new generation to join a rebel organisation, joining a library run by a co accused, the recovery of a book on Indian revolutionaries described as a controversial work of literature, and participation in earlier protests over citizenship registration and over Gaza. One police report used the term andolanjeevi.
What did the arrests cost the workers and their families?
1. Time in custody: Across the 106 arrests carrying substantive allegations, ranging from rioting and arson to attempt to murder, the average period a protester spent in custody was 53 days.
2. Arrest away from any protest: A 34 year old daily wage worker was picked up from Labour Chowk on 14 April while looking for work, and was released on bail 40 days later.
3. Cost of the process itself: That worker's family, migrants from Bihar, spent nearly Rs 50,000 on jail and court visits alone, and his mother lost her factory job over the frequency of those visits.
4. The scale of borrowing: The families of two young men aged 20 and 18 from Sitamarhi spent almost Rs 3 lakh between them on bail, and sought relatives' help for surety bonds.
5. Length of detention for the young: One of those two completed three months and a day in jail, and was released two days after the other because of a documentation problem.
6. The lasting effect: A 19 year old picked up on 14 April after stepping out of his workplace for a meal was released on 18 May, and reports that his parents now call six times a day fearing he will be picked up again.
Why did two protests over comparable grievances end so differently?
1. The first outcome: The Jantar Mantar protest demanding a leak proof examination system ended with the Union Education Minister's resignation and an assurance by the Centre and the States that the police would pursue no case against the protesters.
2. The second outcome: The week long protest beginning 10 April by factory workers in Noida demanding higher wages drew a police crackdown, with up to 200 people taken into custody.
3. The distinction was not the demand: Both protests raised a grievance against a State failure, one over examination integrity and the other over the statutory minimum wage.
4. The distinction was the protester: The workers were largely contract hires, migrants and daily wagers with no institutional voice, which is what left them dependent on the courts for relief the other protesters received by executive assurance.
5. The State conceded the demand anyway: Uttar Pradesh raised wages on 14 April, so the substance of the workers' claim was accepted while the workers themselves remained in custody.
6. The relief was judicial, not political: Courts granted relief in 84 per cent of the bail pleas, which means the correction came from the judiciary rather than from the executive that had made the arrests.
Major debates surrounding preventive detention and the right to protest
1. Preventive detention inside a rights guaranteeing Constitution: India is among the few democracies to carry preventive detention in the Constitution itself, and Article 22(3) removes the very safeguards Article 22(1) and 22(2) create for an arrested person.
2. Public order against ordinary law and order: Preventive detention is available only for a threat to public order, and the line between a law and order breach and a public order breach determines whether the ordinary criminal process or detention without trial applies.
3. Collective liability against individual act: The prosecution treats the crowd as the accused while the courts require a specific act attributed to a named individual, and the bail record here shows the two standards producing opposite results.
4. Bail as the rule and jail as the exception: The settled principle collides with a practice in which the average protester spent 53 days in custody before a court applied it.
5. Speech and association as evidence: Books read, library membership, publishing and participation in earlier protests were cited in the detention grounds, which raises whether protected expression can supply the material for a preventive order.
6. Advisory Board review against judicial review: Preventive detention is reviewed by an Advisory Board rather than by a trial, so the detenu's remedy is a writ petition, which is slower than a bail application.
7. The right to strike: Indian law recognises no fundamental right to strike, so a wage agitation has no protected status independent of the general freedom of assembly.
Challenges to protecting the right to protest
1. Procedure as punishment: Even where charges fail, the time spent in custody before bail is itself the penalty. e.g. the 53 day average custody in these Noida cases against an 84 per cent eventual bail rate.
2. Collective First Information Reports: Naming 300 to 500 unidentified persons in a single complaint makes individual defence impossible and shifts the burden onto the accused. e.g. First Information Report 149 of 2026, where the sessions court found the prosecution had described the crowd's acts in a collective manner without specifying individual roles.
3. Preventive detention bypasses bail entirely: Once a detention order is passed, the bail jurisprudence stops applying and the detenu must approach a constitutional court. e.g. the two National Security Act, 1980 detentions of 13 May 2026, whose pleas remain pending before the Supreme Court and the Allahabad High Court.
4. Cost of accessing justice: Surety bonds, travel, lawyers and jail visits impoverish families whose original grievance was a wage below subsistence. e.g. one family spending nearly Rs 50,000 on visits and another almost Rs 3 lakh on two sons.
5. Contract hiring removes institutional protection: Workers hired through contractors have no recognised union and no employer of record to negotiate on their behalf. e.g. courts here treated persons with no direct employer employee relationship with the companies as standing on a different footing when refusing bail.
6. Delay in registering complaints: Complaints filed days after the event allow names to be added without contemporaneous evidence. e.g. First Information Report 169 of 2026, lodged nearly ten days after the incident with several accused not named in it.
7. Unequal executive response: The executive can extend an assurance of no prosecution to one set of protesters and none to another, with no standard governing the choice. e.g. the Jantar Mantar assurance against the Noida crackdown in the same month.
8. Absence of accountability for wrongful arrest: No consequence attaches to an investigating agency whose case collapses at the bail stage. e.g. senior police officers linked to this investigation declined comment on the findings.
Conclusion
The Noida record shows a criminal process in which the crowd, rather than a named individual with a proved act, was treated as the accused, and in which the correction came from the courts rather than from the agency that made the arrests. The State conceded the wage demand on 14 April while the workers who raised it remained in custody for weeks longer, so the substance of the grievance was accepted without any consequence for the arrests. The pending challenges to the two National Security Act, 1980 detentions, before the Supreme Court and the Allahabad High Court respectively, are the next milestone in the matter.
What is Preventive Detention?
1. About: Preventive detention is the confinement of a person to prevent an apprehended future act, rather than to punish a proved past offence, and it therefore involves no charge, trial or conviction.
2. Rationale: It exists to allow the State to act on an anticipated threat to public order or State security in advance of the harm, on the reasoning that a completed offence would be too late to prevent.
3. Punitive detention distinguished: Punitive detention follows conviction after a trial, preventive detention precedes any trial and rests on the subjective satisfaction of the detaining authority.
4. The constitutional cap: Detention beyond three months requires an Advisory Board of persons qualified to be High Court judges to report sufficient cause, under Article 22(4).
5. The grounds requirement: The authority must communicate the grounds of detention to the detainee and afford the earliest opportunity to make a representation, under Article 22(5).
6. The judicial standard: Because the satisfaction is subjective, courts review the procedure and the relevance of the material rather than the sufficiency of the grounds themselves.
Key Concerns Regarding Preventive Detention
1. Constitutional safeguards expressly withdrawn: Article 22(3) removes the right to be informed of grounds of arrest, to counsel and to production before a magistrate for a preventively detained person.
2. No requirement to prove an offence: Detention rests on apprehension rather than evidence of a committed act, so the ordinary standard of proof never applies.
3. Executive rather than judicial review: An Advisory Board, not a trial court, examines the detention, and the detenu's only judicial route is a writ petition.
4. Vague standards for public order: The distinction between a law and order breach and a public order breach is not statutorily defined, so classification is a matter of executive judgment.
5. Successive detention orders: A fresh order can follow the revocation of an earlier one, extending confinement beyond the period any single order permits.
6. Use against speech and association: Writing, publishing, reading and participating in earlier protests have been cited as material in detention grounds, converting protected expression into evidence of apprehended threat.
Laws and Rules Governing Preventive Detention and Public Order in India
1. Preventive Detention Act, 1950: The first post independence preventive detention statute, tested in A.K. Gopalan versus State of Madras in 1950, and allowed to lapse in 1969.
2. Maintenance of Internal Security Act, 1971: Provided for preventive detention on internal security grounds and was repealed in 1978.
3. Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, 1974: Permits preventive detention in smuggling and foreign exchange matters, and remains in force.
4. National Security Act, 1980: Permits detention for up to one year to prevent a person from acting prejudicially to the defence of India, the security of the State, relations with foreign powers, the maintenance of public order, or the maintenance of supplies and services essential to the community.
5. Detention orders may be passed by a district magistrate, a commissioner of police or the State government, and must be confirmed by the State government.
6. Prevention of Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1988: Provides preventive detention in narcotics cases.
7. Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967: Governs terrorist and unlawful association offences, with restrictive bail conditions in place of ordinary bail jurisprudence.
8. Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023: Replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 and carries the preventive powers of the police and the magistracy, including the dispersal of unlawful assemblies.
9. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: Carries the substantive offences of rioting, unlawful assembly, mischief and criminal conspiracy on which protest prosecutions are built.
10. State security legislation: Several States operate their own public safety or goonda acts providing for preventive detention on locally defined grounds.
Back2Basics: The Four Labour Codes
1. What they are: Four consolidated central statutes that subsume 29 earlier central labour laws into a single framework covering wages, industrial relations, social security and workplace safety.
2. Code on Wages, 2019: Merges four laws including the Minimum Wages Act, 1948 and the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, and provides for a statutory floor wage set by the Centre below which no State may fix its minimum wage.
3. Industrial Relations Code, 2020: Merges three laws on trade unions, standing orders and industrial disputes, and raises the threshold for prior government permission for retrenchment and closure to establishments with 300 or more workers.
4. Code on Social Security, 2020: Merges nine laws on provident fund, gratuity, maternity benefit and employees' state insurance, and for the first time brings gig and platform workers within the definition of beneficiaries.
5. Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020: Merges 13 laws on factories, contract labour, migrant workmen and specific hazardous sectors.
6. Coverage of minimum wages: The Code on Wages, 2019 extends minimum wage entitlement to all employees in both organised and unorganised sectors, whereas the earlier law applied only to scheduled employments.
7. Why they figure here: A rumour in late March 2026 that the Codes would raise minimum wages was one of the three stated triggers of the Noida protests.
Way Forward
1. Require individualised allegations in a First Information Report: A complaint naming an unascertained crowd should be treated as insufficient to sustain custody absent a specific act attributed to a named person.
2. Apply a statutory bail timeline in protest cases: A fixed outer limit for the first bail hearing would prevent the process itself becoming the punishment, as the 53 day average shows it did.
3. Restrict preventive detention to defined public order threats: A statutory definition distinguishing a law and order breach from a public order breach would narrow the discretion the National Security Act, 1980 currently leaves to the detaining authority.
4. Bar expression and association as sole detention grounds: Books read, publications authored and participation in earlier lawful protests should not by themselves constitute material for a preventive order.
5. Enforce the Code on Wages, 2019 floor wage: Timely notification and revision of minimum wages removes the grievance that produced the agitation, since Uttar Pradesh conceded the revision within four days of the protests.
6. Regulate contract hiring: Registration of contractors and a statutory grievance route for contract workers gives them a channel short of street protest, addressing the absence of any union or employer of record.
7. Institutionalise a protest response protocol: A published standard for how the police respond to a peaceful assembly, applied uniformly, would end the disparity between the assurance given at Jantar Mantar and the crackdown at Noida.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2023] Consider the following statements: 1. According to the Constitution of India, the Central Government has a duty to protect States from internal disturbances. 2. The Constitution of India exempts the States from providing legal counsel to person being held for preventive detention 3. According to the Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002, confession of the accused before the police cannot be used as evidence. How many of the above statements are correct? (a) Only one (b) Only two (c) All three (d) None Answer: (a)”
August 20, 2026
Why is the Supreme Court examining polygamy again?
Why in the News
The Supreme Court has sought the Centre's response to a petition challenging the constitutional status of polygamy under Muslim Personal Law. The court additionally asked the Centre to consider legislative steps to abolish the practice for all citizens, irrespective of religion. The dispute sets a religion specific statutory exemption against the equality guarantees the Constitution extends to every citizen.
What is the legal basis of polygamy in India?
1. The practice: Polygamy is the contracting of a further marriage by a person whose earlier marriage is still subsisting.
2. The permitting provision: Section 2 of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 applies Shariat rules to matters of marriage and dissolution for Muslims, and it is under this provision that polygamy is permitted.
3. The prohibiting provision: Section 82 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 punishes marrying another person during the subsistence of an existing marriage with imprisonment up to seven years, and it applies to non Muslims.
4. The asymmetry at issue: The same act is a criminal offence for one set of citizens and a protected personal law entitlement for another.
What is the current status of polygamy law in India?
1. Permitted for Muslim men alone: Polygamy remains lawful for Muslim men under the 1937 Act, with the scriptural ceiling being four wives.
2. A criminal offence for everyone else: Bigamy is punishable under Section 82 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, carrying up to seven years, and applies to Hindus, Christians, Parsis and citizens married under civil law.
3. No compulsory registration: Muslim marriages and divorces are not universally required to be registered with State authorities, so a subsisting marriage is often not on any official record.
4. Related practices already struck down: Instant triple talaq was invalidated by the Supreme Court in August 2017, and the Centre followed by framing the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, making the practice a punishable offence.
5. Polygamy and nikah halala left open: The 2017 bench refrained from ruling on polygamy and nikah halala even though both had been sought, which is why the question returns to the court now.
Constitutional Provisions Related to Personal Law and Gender Equality
1. Article 14: Guarantees equality before the law and the equal protection of the laws to every person within India.
2. Article 15: Prohibits discrimination by the State on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.
3. Article 16: Guarantees equality of opportunity in matters of public employment.
4. Article 21: Protects life and personal liberty, read by the Supreme Court to include dignity and autonomy within marriage.
5. Article 25: Guarantees freedom of conscience and the free profession, practice and propagation of religion, subject to public order, morality and health, and expressly permits the State to legislate for social welfare and reform.
6. Article 44: Directs the State to endeavour to secure a Uniform Civil Code for citizens throughout India, as a Directive Principle.
7. Entry 5, Concurrent List, Seventh Schedule: Places marriage, divorce, infants and minors, adoption, wills, intestacy and succession within the legislative competence of both Parliament and the State legislatures.
What are the petitioners seeking?
1. Criminalisation of polygamy: The five petitioners want polygamy treated as a criminal offence under Section 82 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, for all citizens.
2. Striking down the enabling provision: They have challenged the constitutional validity of Section 2 of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, as violating Articles 14, 15 and 16.
3. Annulment of the exemptions: They have sought annulment of the exemptions granted to polygamy under Muslim Personal Law.
4. Compulsory registration: They want compulsory registration of Muslim marriages and divorces with State authorities, so that a second or subsequent marriage by a man with a subsisting marriage can be prevented.
5. Protection of the first family: Where registration is flouted, they want the first wife and her children to have the first and lasting right to the matrimonial home.
6. Codification of Muslim Personal Law: They want the court to direct the Law Commission of India or the Union government to prepare a draft codifying Muslim Personal Law so that marriage, divorce and succession align with constitutional principles of gender equality.
How has the Supreme Court ruled on plural marriage before?
1. Sarla Mudgal (1995): The Supreme Court held that the second marriage of a Hindu husband after converting to Islam, without dissolving the first marriage, is void, prohibiting conversion undertaken purely to marry again.
2. Lily Thomas versus Union of India (2000): The court reiterated the Sarla Mudgal position, holding that a second marriage contracted after a feigned conversion to Islam was illegal and punishable under Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860.
3. Shayara Bano (2017): The court invalidated instant triple talaq on the argument that the practice violated the fundamental rights of women, on a petition in which two of the present activists were also involved.
4. The gap the rulings leave: All three rulings addressed the abuse of conversion or the mode of divorce, none tested the validity of polygamy itself under Articles 14, 15 and 16.
Does Islamic scripture itself sanction polygamy?
1. The scriptural position: The Quran encourages monogamy and does not encourage polygamy, contrary to the common contention.
2. The narrow permission: It permits a man up to four wives in special circumstances, such as marrying a widow or an orphan.
3. The condition attached: It makes complete equality between wives incumbent on the man, and because that is a practical impossibility, it asks men to desist from multiple marriages.
4. The text relied on: Verse 3 of Surah Nisa states that if a man fears he will fail to maintain justice, he should content himself with one wife, a verse revealed when many men had multiple spouses running into three figures.
Major debates surrounding polygamy and personal law reform
1. Equality against religious freedom: One position reads Articles 14, 15 and 16 as overriding a religion specific exemption, the other reads Article 25 as protecting a practice integral to a community's personal law.
2. Judicial invalidation against legislative codification: The court can strike down Section 2 of the 1937 Act, but a durable settlement requires Parliament to codify Muslim Personal Law, which is what the petitioners are actually asking for.
3. The essential religious practices test: The dispute turns on whether polygamy is an essential religious practice protected by Article 25 or a permitted social custom open to reform, and the two characterisations produce opposite outcomes.
4. Uniform Civil Code against pluralism: The court's suggestion that the Centre abolish the practice for all citizens irrespective of religion moves the question toward Article 44, which reopens the standing dispute over a Uniform Civil Code.
5. The evidence gap: There is no reliable national dataset on the current prevalence of polygamy, so both sides argue from contested estimates rather than measured incidence.
6. Gender justice inside communities: The debate over whether reform of a minority's personal law is best driven by the courts, by Parliament or by the community itself remains unsettled.
Challenges to abolishing polygamy through law
1. Absence of marriage registration: Without compulsory registration, a subsisting marriage cannot be proved, so a bigamy prosecution collapses at the evidence stage. e.g. Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 has historically produced very few convictions because the prosecution must first prove a valid first marriage and then a valid second one.
2. The essential practices doctrine: Courts must first decide whether the practice is essential to the religion before they can regulate it, which is a theological inquiry judges are poorly placed to conduct. e.g. the Sabarimala reference of 2019 sent exactly this question to a larger bench, where it remains pending.
3. Standing and enforcement: A first wife who depends on her husband economically has little incentive to complain, so a criminal provision goes unused. e.g. the low prosecution rate for dowry related matrimonial offences despite a wide statutory framework.
4. Community resistance to codification: Attempts to codify a minority's personal law are read as an intrusion on identity rather than a gender reform. e.g. the reversal of the Shah Bano ruling through the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986.
5. Displacement rather than abolition: Criminalisation can push plural unions outside the legal record, leaving second wives and their children without maintenance or inheritance rights. e.g. Hindu bigamy has continued through unregistered customary unions despite being an offence since 1955.
6. Federal complexity: Marriage and divorce sit on the Concurrent List, so State level marriage registration laws vary and a national standard needs Parliamentary action.
Conclusion
The dispute before the court is not about the scriptural permissibility of polygamy but about whether a statutory exemption can hold when the same conduct is a criminal offence for other citizens. A judicial strike down of Section 2 of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 would remove the permission without supplying the registration and maintenance machinery that makes a prohibition workable. The Centre's response to the notice, and whether it accepts the court's invitation to legislate for all citizens, is the next milestone in the case.
What is Personal Law in India?
1. About: Personal law is the body of rules governing marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship, adoption, succession and inheritance, applied to a person according to their religious community rather than their territory.
2. Rationale: It survived as a distinct legal category because the colonial state declined to legislate on the family affairs of religious communities, and the Constitution retained it while placing the subject on the Concurrent List.
3. The four principal systems:
4. Hindu law: Codified through four statutes in 1955 and 1956, covering Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs.
5. Muslim law: Largely uncodified, applied through the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, with limited statutory intervention on divorce and maintenance.
6. Christian law: Governed by the Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872 and the Indian Divorce Act, 1869.
7. Parsi law: Governed by the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936.
8. The secular alternative: The Special Marriage Act, 1954 offers any two citizens a civil marriage independent of religion, along with a uniform succession regime.
Key Concerns Regarding Personal Law
1. Unequal entitlements between citizens: Rights on divorce, maintenance and inheritance differ by religion, so two women in identical situations receive different legal protection.
2. Gender asymmetry within systems: Several personal law systems give men wider rights over the dissolution of marriage and over property than they give women.
3. Uncodified rules resist reform: Where the law is not written into a statute, amending it requires either judicial intervention or community consensus, both of which are slow.
4. Weak registration infrastructure: Absent compulsory registration across all communities, the State has no record against which to enforce even the rules it has enacted.
5. Article 44 remains unimplemented: The Directive Principle on a Uniform Civil Code has produced State level initiatives rather than a national framework, leaving the constitutional aspiration unfulfilled.
Laws and Rules Governing Marriage and Personal Status in India
1. Indian Divorce Act, 1869: Governs the dissolution of marriage among Christians.
2. Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872: Governs the solemnisation of Christian marriages.
3. Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937: Applies Shariat rules to Muslims in matters including marriage, dissolution, maintenance and succession.
4. Section 2 is the provision under challenge, since it is the route through which polygamy is permitted.
5. Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936: Governs marriage and divorce among Parsis.
6. Special Marriage Act, 1954: Provides a civil marriage available to any two citizens irrespective of religion, with its own divorce and succession rules.
7. Hindu Marriage Act, 1955: Codified Hindu marriage law and made bigamy void and punishable.
8. Hindu Succession Act, 1956: Codified intestate succession for Hindus, amended in 2005 to make daughters coparceners by birth.
9. Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986: Enacted after the Shah Bano ruling to govern maintenance for divorced Muslim women.
10. Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006: Sets the minimum age of marriage and makes child marriage voidable at the option of the minor party.
11. Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019: Made the pronouncement of instant triple talaq void and a punishable offence.
12. Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023: Section 82 punishes bigamy with up to seven years, replacing Section 494 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860.
Back2Basics: Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937
1. What it is: A short central statute that directs courts to apply Muslim personal law to Muslims in the matters it lists.
2. Enacted: 1937, by the Central Legislative Assembly in British India.
3. Subjects covered: Intestate succession, special property of females, marriage, dissolution of marriage including talaq, maintenance, dower, guardianship, gifts, trusts and wakfs.
4. Effect of Section 2: It displaces custom and usage in these matters and substitutes Shariat as the rule of decision.
5. What it does not do: It does not codify Muslim personal law, it only directs which body of rules applies, which is why the substantive rules remain uncodified.
6. Present relevance: It is the statute whose Section 2 is under constitutional challenge in the polygamy petition before the Supreme Court.
Way Forward
1. Enact compulsory marriage registration: A uniform registration requirement for all marriages and divorces, irrespective of religion, creates the record without which any bigamy prohibition is unenforceable.
2. Codify Muslim Personal Law: A codified statute drafted with the community, as the petitioners seek from the Law Commission of India, converts contested custom into reviewable law.
3. Secure the first family's rights first: Statutory protection of the first wife's and children's right to the matrimonial home and to maintenance addresses the harm even where the marriage itself is not annulled.
4. Use the Special Marriage Act, 1954 route: Simplifying and publicising civil marriage gives couples an existing exit from personal law without waiting for its reform.
5. Build the evidentiary base: A national survey of the prevalence of plural marriage would replace contested estimates with measured data on which any legislation must rest.
6. Sequence reform through Parliament: A legislative framework, rather than a bare judicial strike down, supplies the transitional provisions, penalties and remedies that a court order cannot create.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2019] Which Article of the Constitution of India safeguards one's right to marry the person of one's choice? (a) Article 19 (b) Article 21 (c) Article 25 (d) Article 29 Answer: (b)”
August 20, 2026
District Collectors in six border States, Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh empowered to grant citizenship
Why in the News
The Union Home Ministry has notified the Citizenship (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026, authorising District Collectors in six border States and two Union Territories to grant registration or naturalisation to applicants found fit and proper. The power now sits with a single district officer in place of the Empowered Committees and Designated Officers that previously exercised it, in exactly the regions where citizenship determination is most contested.
What do the Citizenship (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026 provide?
1. Delegation of power: The Rules authorise District Collectors in the specified States and Union Territories to process applications seeking citizenship by registration or naturalisation.
2. The operative provision: The Collector, on being satisfied with the suitability of the applicant, that he is a fit and proper person to be registered or naturalised, shall grant him the citizenship of India.
3. Full processing authority: The gazette notification authorises Collectors to receive, scrutinise and dispose of such applications in accordance with the laid down parameters.
4. Replacement of earlier authorities: Collectors in these States replace the Empowered Committees and Designated Officers that previously held these powers, and all pending applications with those committees are to be transferred immediately to the relevant Collector.
What is the difference between registration and naturalisation?
1. Registration: Acquisition of citizenship under Section 5 of the Citizenship Act, 1955 by persons with a defined connection to India, such as persons of Indian origin, spouses of Indian citizens and minor children of Indian citizens, on shorter residence conditions.
2. Naturalisation: Acquisition under Section 6 of the Citizenship Act, 1955 by a foreigner with no such prior connection, on satisfying the longer residence and other conditions set out in the Third Schedule.
What is the current status of citizenship acquisition in India?
1. Single citizenship: India provides for a single citizenship of the Union with no separate State citizenship, and there is a single domicile for the whole territory.
2. Five modes of acquisition: The Citizenship Act, 1955 provides for acquisition by birth under Section 3, descent under Section 4, registration under Section 5, naturalisation under Section 6, and incorporation of territory under Section 7.
3. Naturalisation threshold: The Third Schedule requires residence in India for twelve months immediately preceding the application, and residence or government service for eleven years in the aggregate in the fourteen years preceding those twelve months.
4. Reduced threshold under the 2019 amendment: The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 reduces the aggregate residence requirement to five years for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India on or before 31 December 2014.
5. Birth rule as it now stands: A person born in India on or after 3 December 2004 is a citizen by birth only if both parents are citizens, or one parent is a citizen and the other is not an illegal migrant at the time of birth.
6. Loss of citizenship: Citizenship may be lost by renunciation under Section 8, termination on voluntary acquisition of foreign citizenship under Section 9, and deprivation by the Union government under Section 10 on specified grounds including fraud and disloyalty.
Constitutional Provisions Related to Citizenship
1. Article 5: Confers citizenship at the commencement of the Constitution on persons domiciled in India who were born in India, or either of whose parents was born in India, or who had been ordinarily resident in India for at least five years.
2. Article 6: Confers citizenship on persons who migrated to India from Pakistan, subject to conditions of date of migration and registration.
3. Article 7: Deals with persons who migrated to Pakistan after 1 March 1947 and later returned to India under a permit for resettlement.
4. Article 8: Confers citizenship on persons of Indian origin residing outside India who register with an Indian diplomatic or consular mission.
5. Article 9: Bars a person from being a citizen of India if that person has voluntarily acquired the citizenship of a foreign State.
6. Article 10: Provides that every person who is or is deemed to be a citizen continues to be so, subject to any law made by Parliament.
7. Article 11: Empowers Parliament to regulate the right of citizenship by law, which is the source of the Citizenship Act, 1955 and every amendment to it.
8. Seventh Schedule, Union List Entry 17: Places citizenship, naturalisation and aliens exclusively within Parliament's legislative competence, which is why the Rules are made by the Union Home Ministry and not by States.
Which regions and authorities does the new delegation cover?
1. Six States: Gujarat, Rajasthan, Punjab, West Bengal, Assam and Tripura.
2. Two Union Territories: Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.
3. A carve out for tribal areas: In Assam and Tripura, the Rules specifically exclude tribal areas, which remain outside the Collector's new authority.
4. Common characteristic of the list: Every State and Union Territory in the list shares an international land border, which is what links the eight jurisdictions.
5. Transfer of pending cases: All applications pending with the Empowered Committees and Designated Officers in the specified regions are to be transferred immediately to the relevant Collector.
Why does routing this power through the District Collector matter?
1. From a collegial body to a single officer: An Empowered Committee decides collectively while a Collector decides individually, which changes both the speed and the internal check on a citizenship grant.
2. The standard is discretionary: The Rules turn on the Collector's satisfaction that the applicant is a fit and proper person, a formulation that leaves the assessment to the officer.
3. Proximity to the applicant: The district is where residence, documents and antecedents can actually be verified, which is the administrative case for the delegation.
4. Border districts are where determination is contested: The delegation applies precisely in the jurisdictions where migration histories, documentary gaps and citizenship disputes are most concentrated.
5. A rules level change to a statutory power: The delegation is effected through subordinate legislation under the Citizenship Act, 1955 rather than through an amendment to the Act itself.
Major debates surrounding citizenship determination in India
1. Documentary burden versus lived residence: Determination rests on documents that the poorest and most mobile populations are least able to produce, which converts an evidentiary problem into an exclusion outcome.
2. Executive determination versus judicial safeguard: Citizenship in India is decided in the first instance by executive authorities, with judicial review available only afterwards and at the individual's cost.
3. The 2019 amendment and Article 14: The Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 uses religion and country of origin as criteria for a reduced naturalisation threshold, and its consistency with the equality guarantee is before the Supreme Court.
4. National register proposals: The relationship between the National Population Register, a National Register of Indian Citizens and the Citizenship Rules is contested, particularly on whether enumeration becomes verification.
5. The Assam experience: The Assam National Register of Citizens exercise, with its cut off of 24 March 1971 under Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955, remains the reference case for the administrative and human cost of large scale determination.
6. Statelessness risk: A person excluded from citizenship without any other State recognising them has no status at all, and India is not a party to the 1954 and 1961 statelessness conventions.
7. Uniformity across deciding authorities: Where dozens of district officers apply a fit and proper standard independently, the same facts can produce different outcomes in adjacent districts.
Challenges to the Collector led citizenship grant framework
1. Discretion without a stated test: The fit and proper standard is not defined in the Rules, so its content depends on the individual officer. e.g. two applicants with identical residence records in adjacent districts of Rajasthan can receive different outcomes.
2. Workload of the office: A District Collector already carries revenue, magisterial, election, disaster and development functions, and citizenship scrutiny is added to that list. e.g. Collectors in border districts of West Bengal simultaneously handle electoral roll administration and law and order duties.
3. Loss of collegial scrutiny: Replacing an Empowered Committee with a single officer removes the internal deliberation that a multi member body provided. e.g. pending applications before those committees now move to a single decision maker without any recorded transition of standards.
4. No stated appeal route in the notification: The Rules set out the grant power without specifying an appellate forum against refusal at the district level. e.g. an applicant refused by a Collector is left to writ jurisdiction of the High Court rather than a departmental appeal.
5. Tribal area exclusion creates a two track system: Applicants in the excluded tribal areas of Assam and Tripura continue under the earlier authorities, producing different processes within the same State. e.g. two applicants in Tripura face different deciding authorities depending on whether their residence falls inside a tribal area.
6. Verification capacity in border districts: Establishing residence and antecedents requires police and revenue verification chains that are already stretched in border districts. e.g. the Assam National Register of Citizens exercise showed how documentary verification at scale outruns administrative capacity.
Conclusion
The Citizenship (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026 have been notified in the Gazette and are in force, replacing Empowered Committees and Designated Officers with District Collectors in six border States and two Union Territories, with tribal areas of Assam and Tripura excluded. The immediate next step named in the notification is the transfer of all pending applications to the relevant Collector, and the source states no further date or milestone beyond that. The change is administrative in form and consequential in effect, because it places a sovereign determination in the hands of a single district officer applying an undefined fit and proper standard. Whether the delegation speeds up disposal or widens variation depends on the guidance and appeal architecture that follows.
What is Citizenship?
1. About: Citizenship is the legal relationship between an individual and a State that carries full civil and political membership, including the right to vote, to hold public office and to hold an Indian passport.
2. Rationale: It defines who belongs to the political community, and therefore who may claim the rights the Constitution reserves for citizens rather than for all persons.
3. Rights reserved for citizens: Articles 15, 16, 19, 29 and 30 of the Constitution are available only to citizens. Articles 14 and 21 extend to every person.
4. Jus soli, the territorial principle: Citizenship by place of birth, which India applied without qualification until 1987.
5. Jus sanguinis, the descent principle: Citizenship by parentage, which India progressively adopted through the 1986, 2003 and 2004 changes to the birth rule.
6. Naturalisation, the acquired principle: Citizenship granted by the State to a foreigner on satisfying residence, conduct and language conditions, which is the mode the new Rules deal with.
Laws and Rules Governing Citizenship in India
1. Citizenship Act, 1955: The principal statute, enacted under Article 11, providing for acquisition, determination and termination of Indian citizenship.
2. 1986 amendment: Ended unqualified citizenship by birth, requiring at least one parent to be an Indian citizen for those born on or after 1 July 1987.
3. 2003 amendment: Introduced the concept of the illegal migrant, barred illegal migrants from citizenship, and provided for a National Register of Indian Citizens and compulsory registration of all citizens.
4. 2005 amendment: Expanded the categories eligible for the Overseas Citizen of India status.
5. 2015 amendment: Merged the Person of Indian Origin card with the Overseas Citizen of India card, creating the Overseas Citizen of India Cardholder category.
6. 2019 amendment: Reduced the naturalisation residence requirement to five years for six specified minority communities from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan who entered India on or before 31 December 2014.
7. Section 6A: Provides the Assam specific framework with the 24 March 1971 cut off, upheld by a Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court in 2024.
8. Citizenship Rules, 2009: The principal subordinate legislation prescribing forms, procedures and authorities for applications under the Act.
9. Citizenship (Amendment) Rules, 2024: Prescribed the application procedure and the district and empowered committee structure for grants under the 2019 amendment.
10. Citizenship (Third Amendment) Rules, 2026: Transfers the grant power in the specified border States and Union Territories to District Collectors.
11. Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025: Consolidates the law on entry, stay and exit of foreigners, replacing the earlier Passport (Entry into India) Act, 1920, the Registration of Foreigners Act, 1939, the Foreigners Act, 1946 and the Immigration (Carriers' Liability) Act, 2000.
12. Passports Act, 1967: Governs the issue of Indian passports and travel documents, for which proof of citizenship is a precondition.
Government Initiatives Related to Citizenship
1. Indian Citizenship Online portal: The Ministry of Home Affairs portal through which applications for citizenship by registration and naturalisation are filed and tracked.
2. Dedicated portal and mobile application under the 2019 amendment: Launched in 2024 to receive applications from eligible applicants of the six specified communities.
3. National Population Register: Maintained under the Citizenship Act, 1955 and the Citizenship Rules, 2003 as a register of usual residents, updated alongside the census housing phase.
4. Long Term Visa scheme: Provides extended stay, employment and property rights to minority community migrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan pending decision on their citizenship applications.
5. Overseas Citizen of India Cardholder scheme: Provides lifelong visa free travel and parity with non resident Indians in specified economic and educational fields, without conferring citizenship or voting rights.
Key Facts about Citizenship in India
1. Constitutional location: Citizenship is dealt with in Part II of the Constitution, comprising Articles 5 to 11.
2. Single citizenship: India follows single citizenship on the pattern of the United Kingdom, unlike the dual citizenship model of the United States.
3. No dual citizenship: India does not permit dual citizenship, and voluntary acquisition of foreign citizenship terminates Indian citizenship under Section 9.
4. Overseas Citizen of India status is not citizenship: An Overseas Citizen of India Cardholder cannot vote, hold constitutional office or purchase agricultural land.
5. The 2004 birth rule cut off: Persons born in India on or after 3 December 2004 must have at least one citizen parent and no illegal migrant parent.
6. Union subject: Citizenship, naturalisation and aliens is Entry 17 of the Union List in the Seventh Schedule.
Challenges in Citizenship Determination in India
1. Documentary proof in a low documentation society: Establishing descent and residence over decades requires records many households never held. e.g. the Assam National Register of Citizens process excluded over 19 lakh persons from the final list published in 2019.
2. Gendered documentation gap: Married women who moved at marriage often lack independent linkage documents to a parent's record. e.g. panchayat residence certificates for married women became a contested category of proof during the Assam exercise.
3. Adjudication capacity: Determination bodies handle far more cases than their sanctioned strength can process fairly. e.g. Foreigners Tribunals in Assam handling large pendency with limited members.
4. Detention and post declaration limbo: A person declared a foreigner with no country willing to receive them remains in indefinite administrative limbo. e.g. the Supreme Court's directions on conditional release of long term detainees from Assam detention centres.
5. Legal challenge to the 2019 framework: The reduced naturalisation threshold for specified religious communities is under constitutional challenge, leaving the framework unsettled. e.g. petitions against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 pending before the Supreme Court.
6. Variation across deciding authorities: Multiple district level authorities applying an undefined standard produce inconsistent outcomes. e.g. the fit and proper test in the 2026 Rules carrying no statutory definition.
7. Absence of a statelessness framework: India has no domestic law on statelessness and is not party to the 1954 and 1961 conventions on the subject. e.g. persons excluded from a citizenship register having no recognised alternative legal status.
Way Forward
1. Issue binding guidance on the fit and proper test: Publish parameters, documentary standards and a reasoned order requirement so that Collector level discretion is structured rather than open ended.
2. Provide a departmental appeal: Create an appellate authority above the Collector for refusals, so that recourse does not begin at the High Court.
3. Mandate speaking orders and time limits: Require every grant and refusal to record reasons and to be disposed of within a stated period, with the position published in aggregate.
4. Publish disposal data: Release district wise data on applications received, granted and refused, so that variation between Collectors becomes visible and correctable.
5. Train and support district staff: Provide dedicated staff and training on citizenship law to Collectorates in the eight jurisdictions, given the additional workload placed on an already loaded office.
6. Enact a statelessness framework: Provide in domestic law for the status, rights and documentation of persons who are found to be citizens of no country, so that exclusion does not produce legal invisibility.
7. Harmonise the tribal area carve out: Specify which authority decides applications from the excluded tribal areas of Assam and Tripura, so that no applicant falls between two regimes.
Matching Previous Year Question
“[2021] With reference to India, consider the following statements: 1. There is only one citizenship and one domicile. 2. A citizen by birth only can become the Head of State. 3. A foreigner, once granted citizenship, cannot be deprived of it under any circumstances. Which of the statements given above is/are correct? (a) 1 only (b) 2 only (c) 1 and 3 (d) 2 and 3 Answer: (a)”
August 20, 2026
A secular republic’s sacrilege problem and the legal price of criticising holy writ
Why in the News

Punjab’s Governor assented in April 2026 to the Jaagat Jot Sri Guru Granth Sahib Satkar (Amendment) Act, which provides punishment up to life imprisonment for sacrilege. The Act also covers words, signs, visible representations and electronic means, raising debate over the boundary between sacrilege and blasphemy.

What is the Act?
- Applies to wilful and deliberate desecration of the Guru Granth Sahib.
- Covers physical acts such as damage, defacement, burning, tearing and theft of Saroop.
- Also covers certain spoken/written words, signs, visual representations and electronic acts.
- Emerged against the backdrop of the 2015 Bargari and Burj Jawahar Singh Wala incidents.
Key Legal Provisions

Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 (BNS)
- Replaced the Indian Penal Code, 1860 from July 2024.
- Section 298: Offences involving injury/defilement of places of worship.
- Section 299: Deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings, including through electronic means.
- Section 299 carries forward the substance of former Section 295A, IPC.
Constitutional Provisions
- Article 19(1)(a): Freedom of speech and expression.
- Article 19(2): Permits reasonable restrictions, including for public order.
- Article 25: Freedom of conscience and religion, subject to public order, morality and health.
- Article 14: Equality before law.
- Article 51A(e): Promotes harmony and common brotherhood.
- Article 51A(h): Promotes scientific temper, inquiry and reform.
- Secularism: Part of the basic structure of the Constitution.
Sacrilege vs Blasphemy
- Sacrilege: Physical or conduct-based desecration of something sacred.
- Blasphemy: Expressive acts showing contempt or irreverence towards religious beliefs.
- Concern: Punjab’s law potentially merges the two by treating certain expressive acts as sacrilege.
Historical Background of Section 295A
- Rangila Rasul pamphlet triggered controversy in Lahore in 1924.
- Section 295A IPC was enacted in 1927 to criminalise deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings.
- The Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in Ramji Lal Modi v. State of Uttar Pradesh (1957) under the Article 19(2) public order exception.
Key Concerns
- Chilling effect on speech, scholarship and satire.
- Subjective interpretation of religious hurt.
- Potential misuse by organised complainants.
- Risk of vigilante violence despite criminalisation.
- Digital communication expands the potential reach of the offence.
- Different States may prescribe different levels of punishment.
August 19, 2026
Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 makes obstructing Vande Mataram an offence
Why in the News

Parliament passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 in the recently concluded Monsoon Session, making it an offence to attempt to stop or prevent the singing or playing of Vande Mataram. The amendment lands on a live political dispute over whether public rendition may be confined to the first two stanzas, a practice the principal Opposition party traces to a 1937 Congress Working Committee resolution and the ruling party contests against the Constituent Assembly declaration of 24 January 1950. A statute now attaches criminal liability to conduct around a symbol whose status rests on a Presidential declaration in the Constituent Assembly rather than on any article of the Constitution.

What is the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971?
1. Purpose: The Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971 penalises insults to India’s national symbols, and is the parent statute the 2026 amendment modifies.
2. Protection of the Flag and the Constitution: Section 2 penalises burning, mutilating, defacing, defiling, disfiguring, destroying or showing contempt to the Indian National Flag or the Constitution of India.
3. Protection of the National Anthem: Section 3 penalises intentionally preventing the singing of the National Anthem or causing disturbance to any assembly engaged in singing it.
4. Punishment: Contravention attracts imprisonment of up to three years, or a fine, or both.
5. Disqualification for repeat offenders: Section 3A provides for disqualification from contesting elections to Parliament and State legislatures for a specified period on a second or subsequent conviction.
6. Earlier amendments: The Act has been amended previously, including in 2003 to extend the prohibition on improper use of the Flag and in 2005 to permit specified respectful uses.
What does the 2026 Amendment change?
1. New offence created: The amendment makes it an offence to attempt to stop or prevent the singing or playing of Vande Mataram.
2. Extension of the Section 3 principle to the national song: The parent Act protected the National Anthem from obstruction, and the amendment extends comparable protection to the national song.
3. Trigger for the amendment: The controversy over the national song began after Parliament passed the amendment in the recently concluded Monsoon Session.
4. The conduct targeted is obstruction, not abstention: The offence attaches to attempts to stop or prevent rendition, which distinguishes it from a duty to sing.
What other provisions of the parent framework does the amendment sit alongside?
1. The Flag Code of India, 2002: Governs display and use of the National Flag, and was amended in 2021 to permit polyester and machine made flags and in 2022 to permit display by night.
2. The Orders relating to the National Anthem of India: Issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs, they specify the occasions for the full and short versions and the playing time of 52 seconds.
3. The Emblems and Names (Prevention of Improper Use) Act, 1950: Bars improper commercial and professional use of specified names and emblems, including the National Flag.
4. The State Emblem of India (Prohibition of Improper Use) Act, 2005: Regulates use of the State Emblem, adapted from the Lion Capital of Ashoka at Sarnath.
5. No parallel protection exists for the national song in the parent Act: Before this amendment, the 1971 Act protected the Flag, the Constitution and the National Anthem, but not Vande Mataram.
Why does the two stanza convention exist?
1. The 1937 resolution: The Congress Working Committee passed a resolution in 1937 on the public rendition of the national song.
2. The stated reason: Leading figures of the freedom movement, including Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, backed limiting public rendition to the first two stanzas to avoid verses containing specific religious imagery.
3. Continuity claimed: The Congress president stated that the version sung was the same one sung by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
4. The 90 year framing: The party position is that it has continued a practice in place for 90 years, and that a governing party’s preference does not by itself set a national standard.
5. State units following the same line: The Karnataka unit stated that only the first two stanzas would be sung at its programmes, in keeping with existing practice.
6. The counter allegation: The ruling party alleged that the Congress entered into a pact with the Muslim League in 1936-37, under whose pressure only two stanzas were to be sung.
What did the Constituent Assembly decide on 24 January 1950?
1. The declaration: Dr Rajendra Prasad, as President of the Constituent Assembly, declared on 24 January 1950 that Jana Gana Mana would be the National Anthem and Vande Mataram the national song.
2. Equal honour, unequal legal treatment: The declaration accorded the national song honour equal to the anthem, without conferring on it the same statutory protection the anthem later received in 1971.
3. The source of authority: The status of both symbols rests on this declaration and subsequent executive practice, not on any article of the Constitution.
4. Historical lineage invoked: The contributions of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore and Bal Gangadhar Tilak were recalled, with the song described as a major source of inspiration during the freedom struggle.
5. The political point pressed: The ruling party emphasised that the person who made the declaration was himself a Congress member and later the President of India.
6. The broader charge: The Congress was accused of compromising national symbols and the core values of its own freedom movement.
Why does criminalising obstruction of a national song raise a free speech question?
1. The anthem precedent cuts both ways: Section 3 of the 1971 Act penalises preventing the singing of the anthem, and the Supreme Court has separately held that respectful silence is not an offence.
2. Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, 1986: The Court held that expelling students who stood respectfully but did not sing the anthem violated Article 19(1)(a) and Article 25.
3. The definitional problem of attempt: An offence framed around an attempt to stop or prevent rendition turns on intention, which is inferred from conduct at a charged political event.
4. Partial rendition is not obstruction: Singing two stanzas of a five stanza song is a choice about what to sing, distinct from preventing others from singing.
5. Article 19(2) is the test: Any restriction must fall within the enumerated grounds, and the sustainability of this offence depends on locating it within public order or decency.
6. The unresolved consequence: The dispute has moved from a convention about rendition into a question about who can be prosecuted at a public event, without the constitutional status of the national song itself being settled.
Challenges to enforcing the amended Act
1. Proving intention to obstruct: Distinguishing deliberate obstruction from ordinary disorder at a crowded event is evidentially difficult, e.g. complaints under Section 3 of the 1971 Act arising from cinema hall incidents have frequently collapsed for want of proof of intent.
2. Risk of politically motivated complaints: A criminal provision attached to a contested symbol invites first information reports as a campaign instrument, e.g. the current dispute arose from rendition at an Independence Day event at a party headquarters and a subsequent event in Goa.
3. Conflict with the respectful silence doctrine: Enforcement can slide from obstruction into compelled participation, e.g. Bijoe Emmanuel v. State of Kerala, 1986 protected students who declined to sing while standing in respect.
4. No settled authoritative text or duration: Unlike the anthem, the national song has no notified official version or playing time, e.g. the Orders relating to the National Anthem fix a playing time of 52 seconds with no counterpart for Vande Mataram.
5. Judicial reversal risk from over enforcement: Courts have withdrawn mandatory rendition directions when enforcement produced harassment, e.g. the 2016 direction making the anthem compulsory in cinema halls was made optional in 2018.
6. Federal enforcement variation: Police being a State subject, prosecution practice will differ across States, e.g. identical conduct at party events in different States can attract different responses.
Conclusion

The amendment converts a ninety year old convention about how much of a national song is sung in public into a matter capable of criminal prosecution, without resolving the underlying question of what legal status the national song holds. The 1971 Act protected the Flag, the Constitution and the National Anthem because each has a notified form, and the national song has none, so the offence rests on a symbol defined only by the Constituent Assembly declaration of 24 January 1950. The stage reached is that Parliament passed the Prevention of Insults to National Honour (Amendment) Act, 2026 in the recently concluded Monsoon Session. The source names no commencement date, rules or further milestone, so the next step on the record is notification bringing the amendment into force.
August 19, 2026
ID cards issued to transgender persons remain valid: Centre
Why in the News

The Union government assured a three judge Bench of the Supreme Court that transgender identity cards issued before the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 came into force continue to remain valid. The assurance was given in a challenge arguing that the amendment, in force since 30 March, dismantles the right to self identification recognised in the National Legal Services Authority v Union of India (2014) line of cases. The dispute turns on whether gender identity is declared by the person or certified by the State.

What is the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026?
1. About: It amends the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, the statute that governs recognition of transgender identity and the certificate of identity issued to a transgender person.
2. Commencement: It came into force on 30 March 2026.
3. Core objection to it: Petitioners argue that it dismantles the right to self identification and gives the State unfettered authority to determine gender identity.
4. Status of earlier cards: The Solicitor General assured the Court that identity cards issued before the amendment remain valid, and their validity is unaffected by the new law.
5. Judicial position so far: The Court had already indicated in the previous hearing that the 2026 law should not operate retrospectively to invalidate cards issued under the earlier legislation.
6. Forum: The challenge is before a three judge Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India.
What is self identification of gender?
1. About: Self identification is the principle that a person’s gender is determined by that person’s own declaration of identity, without any requirement of medical examination or third party certification.
2. Legal origin in India: The Supreme Court recognised it in National Legal Services Authority v Union of India (2014), holding that the right to determine one’s gender is integral to dignity under Article 21.
What is a transgender identity card?
1. About: A certificate of identity issued to a transgender person that provides official recognition of the person’s self identified gender.
2. Practical use: It is used to support changes to name and gender across official records, and the government’s transgender portal expressly enables such changes.
What is the current status of gender identity recognition in India?
1. Statutory basis: Recognition runs through the certificate of identity issued under the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 and the rules made under it.
2. Application route: An application is made to the District Magistrate, who issues a certificate of identity as a transgender person and a revised certificate after gender affirming surgery.
3. Third gender status: Transgender persons are recognised as a third gender for the purposes of state welfare and identity documents.
4. Prohibition of discrimination: The 2019 Act bars discrimination in education, employment, healthcare, access to public goods and the right to residence.
5. Reservation position: No reservation in education or public employment has been extended to transgender persons as a class, despite the direction in the 2014 judgment to treat them as socially and educationally backward.
6. Position after the amendment: The 2026 Amendment Act is in force from 30 March 2026, and its validity is under challenge before a three judge Bench.
7. Position of existing card holders: Cards issued before the amendment continue to remain valid on the government’s own assurance to the Court.
Constitutional Provisions Related to gender identity
1. Article 14: Guarantees equality before the law and equal protection of the laws to every person, not only to men and women.
2. Article 15: Prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth, with sex read to include gender identity.
3. Article 16: Guarantees equality of opportunity in matters of public employment and permits reservation for backward classes.
4. Article 19(1)(a): Protects freedom of expression, which includes expression of gender identity through dress, speech and behaviour.
5. Article 21: Guarantees life and personal liberty, read to include dignity, personal autonomy and the right to determine one’s gender.
6. Article 15(4) and Article 16(4): Permit special provisions and reservation for socially and educationally backward classes, the route directed in the 2014 judgment.
7. Article 32: Provides the remedy through which the present challenge to the amendment has been brought.
8. Article 23: Prohibits trafficking and forced labour, relevant to the exploitation the community faces in the absence of livelihood options.
What did the National Legal Services Authority judgment establish?
1. Recognition of a third gender: The Supreme Court held in April 2014 that transgender persons must be recognised as a third gender for the purposes of law.
2. Right to self identification: It held that the gender to which a person belongs is to be determined by that person’s own identification and not by biological or medical criteria.
3. Constitutional grounding: It located the right in Articles 14, 15, 16, 19(1)(a) and 21, treating gender identity as an aspect of dignity and personal autonomy.
4. Backward class direction: It directed the Centre and the States to treat transgender persons as socially and educationally backward for the purposes of reservation.
5. Positive obligations: It directed provision of separate public toilets, medical facilities, welfare schemes and measures to address social stigma.
6. The wider line of cases: Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) recognised privacy and decisional autonomy, Navtej Singh Johar v Union of India (2018) decriminalised consensual same sex relations, and Arunkumar v Inspector General of Registration (2019) upheld the marriage rights of a transgender person.
What do the petitioners argue against the 2026 amendment?
1. Loss of self determination: The amendment allows the State unfettered authority to determine gender identity, displacing the person’s own declaration.
2. Conflict with binding precedent: Self identification was recognised as a constitutional right in 2014, and a statute cannot narrow a right located in Article 21.
3. Value of existing documents: The importance of transgender identity cards already issued cannot be trifled away, since name and gender across official records depend on them.
4. Retrospective effect: Any reading that invalidates earlier cards would strip recognition already granted under a previous legislation.
5. Who is before the Court: The petitioners include community members and activists, so the challenge is brought by the group the law regulates.
Can the State certify gender identity without displacing the right to determine it?
1. Two claims in tension: The State has an interest in a verifiable identity document, and the individual has a constitutional right to declare gender without external validation.
2. Where certification becomes control: A certificate that records a declaration is administrative, and a certificate that decides the declaration is determinative of the right itself.
3. Documentary dependence: Name and gender in every other official record follow from the certificate, so control over the certificate is control over legal personality.
4. Precedent against statute: The right was recognised through Article 21 in 2014, and the amendment operates on the same subject through ordinary legislation.
5. The retrospectivity carve out: Protecting existing cards resolves the immediate hardship of current holders and leaves the question of future applicants untouched.
6. The unresolved core: The assurance settles who keeps a card already issued, not who will be entitled to one under the amended procedure.
Major debates surrounding gender self identification
1. Declaration against certification: Whether recognition should follow a self declaration or require screening by a district authority.
2. Medicalisation of identity: Whether any surgical or medical requirement for a revised certificate is consistent with autonomy under Article 21.
3. Appeal and remedy: Whether refusal of a certificate by a District Magistrate should carry a statutory appeal, which the 2019 Act was criticised for omitting.
4. Reservation for transgender persons: Whether the 2014 direction to treat the community as socially and educationally backward requires a horizontal reservation across categories.
5. Penalty asymmetry: Whether the lower punishment for sexual violence against transgender persons under the 2019 Act compared with the general criminal law is constitutionally sustainable.
6. Family and residence: Whether the requirement to reside with the natal family or in a rehabilitation centre respects the autonomy of adults who leave hostile homes.
7. Data and enumeration: Whether recognition can be operationalised at all without accurate population data, since the last enumeration of the community was in Census 2011.
Challenges to the transgender rights framework
1. Certification bottleneck: Recognition depends on a single district officer with no statutory appeal against refusal. e.g. applicants under the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Rules, 2020 have reported long delays in issue of the certificate of identity.
2. Absence of reservation: The 2014 direction on backward class status has not been operationalised at the national level. e.g. Karnataka became the first State to provide a one per cent reservation in public employment in 2021, and most States have not followed.
3. Weak penalty structure: Offences against transgender persons carry lower punishment than equivalent offences in the general criminal law. e.g. the 2019 Act prescribes six months to two years for sexual abuse of a transgender person.
4. Healthcare exclusion: Gender affirming care and mental health support are unevenly available and rarely insured. e.g. Ayushman Bharat TG Plus was created precisely because transgender persons were excluded from mainstream health coverage.
5. Livelihood and employment: Discrimination pushes the community towards begging and sex work despite a statutory bar on discrimination. e.g. the SMILE scheme’s livelihood component was designed to move persons out of begging.
6. Documentation mismatch: Records in education certificates, bank accounts and property documents do not update automatically after a change in gender. e.g. the government’s transgender portal exists specifically to enable name and gender changes across records.
7. Data invisibility: Policy runs on a 2011 count with no subsequent enumeration. e.g. Census 2011 recorded 4.88 lakh transgender persons, a figure widely regarded as an undercount.
Conclusion

The assurance protects existing card holders and leaves the constitutional question untouched, since the dispute is about whether gender identity is declared or certified. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 remains in force from 30 March 2026, and its validity is pending before a three judge Bench of the Supreme Court on a challenge grounded in the 2014 line of cases. The Court has recorded that the law should not operate retrospectively and the government has accepted that position on the record. The source names no next date for the hearing, so the stage reached is the government’s undertaking and the pending challenge.

[2024] Under which of the following Articles of the Constitution of India, has the Supreme Court of India placed the Right to Privacy?
(a) Article 15
(b) Article 16
(c) Article 19
(d) Article 21
August 18, 2026