Survivor to Challenge Bail for Convicted Rapist Kuldeep Sengar of BJP; Ramnarayan’s Death: When Prejudice Turns Deadly in God’s Own Country
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December 24, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
The woman kidnapped and raped by former BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar when she was a minor in 2017 has said she will move the Supreme Court against the Delhi high court’s decision to grant him bail pending his appeal against his life sentence. “If the convict gets bail in cases like this, how will the country’s daughters remain safe? For us, this decision is no less than ‘kaal’ (death) … Those with money win, those without money lose,” she told PTI over the phone. Sengar remains in jail, serving the ten-year sentence he was awarded in connection with the custodial death of the survivor’s father in 2018 – but he has an appeal pending against it.
The draft voter rolls produced under the special intensive revision in Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were released by the Election Commission on Tuesday. The proportion of names from their lists that stand deleted are 8.65%, 7.45%, 13% and 20% respectively.
Two people were killed and at least 58 police officers, including the state’s director general of police, were hurt as violence in Assam’s West Karbi Anglong district flared up further on Tuesday. One man from the tribal Karbi community was killed in police action and a Bengali man was killed in an arson incident, Sukriti Baruah reports. The violence occurs amid tensions caused by demands that north Indian and Nepali-origin people be evicted from grazing lands in the area.
Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance has received around 15 shipments of crude oil from Rosneft since the day Washington’s sanctions against the Russian oil major kicked in; the Jamnagar-based conglomerate has received a one-month concession from the US state department, Nidhi Verma reports citing sources. Reliance told her that “these are pre-existing transactions which are being wound down in a sanctions-compliant manner”.
A court has sentenced 13 people of lynching Hargobind Das and his son Chandan Das in April amid the communal violence that took place in Murshidabad, West Bengal during protests against the Waqf (Amendment) Act; they were all sentenced to life in prison. The public prosecutor has said that the sentence is the second in India and first in Bengal to involve the mob lynching provision in the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
India will provide a $450 million reconstruction package to Sri Lanka to help it recover from the devastation wreaked by Cyclone Ditwah. Announced by external affairs minister S. Jaishankar during his visit to Colombo in his capacity as special envoy to the prime minister on Tuesday, the package will cover five areas of reconstruction, and comprise $350 million in concessional lines and $100 million in grants. The gales, floods and landslides triggered by Ditwah in late November and early December killed 643 people, displaced more than 66,000 others and are estimated to have caused damages worth $4.1 billion, or 4% of the Sri Lankan GDP.
A year after Union home minister Amit Shah said that a National Counter Terrorism Policy and Strategy would be released soon, Vijaita Singh reports citing an official of the anti-terror National Investigation Agency that Shah’s ministry is finalising it. “Digital radicalisation, the misuse of open borders, and conversion networks funded by foreign players are among the key issues being discussed in the run-up to the policy’s release,” Singh writes.
For the past six years, Safalta Kartik has been attending Pastor Dharmendra Jena’s Christmas lunch for visually impaired children in Jabalpur, Prateek Goyal Reports. Normally a simple gathering, “she never imagined would one day invite hate, abuse, and physical assault.” Yet that is what happened when a local BJP leader descended and accused her and others of ‘illegal conversion,
Jamia Millia Islamia has suspended a professor – identified as Virendra Sahare – for setting a question in the semester exam for BA (Honours) Social Work students asking them to write about “the atrocities against Muslim minorities in India, giving suitable examples”. An office order said that the competent authority had taken a “serious view” of his “negligence and carelessness”, reports the Times of India.
Meanwhile, one wonders who, if anyone, is taking a ‘serious view’ of the sort of stuff said at the ‘Sanatan Rashtra Shankhnad Mahotsav’ held at the Bharat Mandapam in Delhi earlier this month. Union ministers Gajendra Singh Shekhawat, Shripad Naik and Sanjay Seth, as well as Delhi tourism minister
