Citizenship, cockroaches, and the cost of eggs

Hey you,

Let me first tell you something really fun that I did this week. I went to a heavy metal concert. Of an Indian metal band! :O My husband is a fan of metal and Bloodywood, so he was super excited and I was super sceptical. Who wants to listen to a bunch of people scream into a mic? Turns out, ME! If you guys can catch them in your city or somewhere else, bloody do! They are incredible. The addition of dhol to heavy metal was very new to me but at the same time parts of the concert sounded like a Durga Pujo pandal to me. Which then made me wonder, if through our festivals - Durga Puja, Ganesh Chaturthi, Baisakhi, etc - we are not already exposed to some form of metal music. You'd really have to listen to them, especially live to fully understand what I mean. But it was really nice being transported to a puja pandal while standing in a concert hall surrounded predominantly by non-Indians. Also did you know metal lovers are some of the nicest concert folks? This was my second metal concert and the crowd really knows how to have fun but also look out for each other. Anyway, Bloodywood, check them out!

Now, on to the more concerning news. Well, not so much news as perhaps realisation. I, along with a lot of us, just found out that the Government of India does not consider my passport a proof of citizenship. Turns out it never did. Well, this is going to send me looking for a bunch of ancient documents just to make sure I don't get kicked out of the voter registry and who knows what else. More on this later. But yeah, if it is really just a travel document, it does not really allow a lot of easy 'travel', does it?

But let's get into it!

Just the gist

🔗 Can you prove your citizenship?

Just as the heatwave was battering through Europe and humbling the life out of me, I read another hot news that made my head spin. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), in a statement, mentioned that the Indian passport is merely a travel document and not a proof of citizenship. So you are telling me that the assurance that as long as I have an Indian passport, immigration officers in India cannot deny me entry does not exist?

But, apparently, this is not news. India has Aadhaar, voter ID, ration cards, PAN cards, passports, driving licences. None of them, the government itself has repeatedly clarified, is conclusive proof of citizenship. One document is used to get another document, in an endless loop that never actually terminates in a definitive answer.

The Assam NRC excluded 19 lakh people in 2019, many of whom were almost certainly citizens who simply could not produce the right paperwork for a state-defined standard of proof. The Citizenship Amendment Act then created a religion-based pathway to citizenship for migrants from three specific countries, directly contradicting the logic of an NRC that was supposed to be religion-neutral. And now the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is repeating the same pattern in West Bengal, Telangana, and elsewhere, putting roughly 90 lakh people in Bengal and 89 lakh in Telangana through a fresh round of proving they belong on a list they have likely been on for years.

The burden of proof always falls on the citizen, never on the state. So what do you have to show for your citizenship? Apparently, a birth certificate is not enough if you were born after 1987, which I am guessing most of us here are. For those born after 1987 and before 2004, you also have to be able to show that at least one of your parents was also born in India. For those born after 2004, that applies for both parents. So yeah, why show just one passport like most countries when you get to dig through a trunk full of papers to produce 3 different birth certificates?

A disproportionate number of the people caught in these exercises are Dalit, Muslim, or from other marginalised communities, not because they are more likely to be non-citizens, but because their lives do not fit the paperwork model the state has built.

➡️ The question is that if the Indian state, with decades of legislation, multiple census cycles, identity programmes, and a vast digital infrastructure, still cannot produce a single universally accepted citizenship document, why does the entire burden of resolving that institutional failure fall on ordinary people instead of the institutions that failed to build the system properly? So the next time you are home, make sure all the documents you might need one day to prove your citizenship are in one place.

🔗 Is the cockroach here to stay?

We have been following the Cockroach Janata Party since its founding, from a meme account to a Constitution Club press conference to protests across eight cities. This week they returned to Delhi for what is now an indefinite sit-in at Jantar Mantar, ongoing despite technically being illegal. The police have let it continue.

On one hand, the absence of state confrontation is genuinely remarkable given how India has treated mass mobilisations over the last decade. Farmers were met with trenches and nails at Delhi's borders. Anti-CAA protesters were branded anti-national. Student leaders have been jailed for years as undertrials, Umar Khalid among them, still in prison after more than five years without trial. Against that backdrop, protesters handing roses to police officers who accept them, and right-wing disruptors getting removed by police rather than allowed to escalate things, represents something close to ordinary democratic protest functioning as it should. Which, in India in 2026, is itself remarkable.

On the other hand, that very calm is exactly what is raising eyebrows. The suspicion is whether this cooperative policing is convenient for everyone: the government gets to say it is allowing dissent, while the actual demands go unaddressed. But also reducing the entire movement to one minister's resignation undersells the scale of the youth's frustrations. The CJP's leadership is however seen becoming more politically literate over time and increasingly engaging with left organisations for guidance, which is a meaningful evolution from where the movement started.

I do, however, think that this is the pitfall of the left as it is today. A puritanic idea of what every movement should be. You need to check every box, no mistakes allowed, no slip-ups, and God forbid you don't want to fit every single agenda point in one sentence. The left is its biggest critic which, hey, I think we should all be. That is something the right does not do enough. Self reflection. But that is also why the left is as fragmented as it is. You are either with us one hundred percent or you are not with us at all.

➡️ Whether this becomes a genuine mass movement or a safety valve that lets a generation vent without changing anything depends on questions nobody has fully answered yet: will CJP build organisational structure beyond a few visible leaders, will it broaden its demands without losing its unity, and will the government's current patience hold if the protest actually grows. For now, it remains the most significant youth mobilisation India has seen in years, built by people who are mostly first-time protesters, trying to convert internet outrage into something that outlasts the news cycle.

🔗 More detail on the FCNR scheme

Two issues ago, I had mentioned the FCNR(B) scheme which would allow you to deposit your foreign currency directly into your Indian bank account without losing anything in the exchange. The RBI added some more colour to the scheme.

Indian banks, including their overseas branches, can now extend loans to non-residents and issue standby letters of credit against FCNR(B) deposits made under the swap facility. Banks can also mark a lien on your deposit and lend against it directly. In practical terms, this means you do not have to choose between parking your money in an FCNR(B) deposit and having access to liquidity. You can do both, using the deposit as collateral if you need funds for something else while your money continues earning interest.

The RBI also clarified the mechanics of its own concessional swap facility, which is the part that allows banks to offer you better interest rates by absorbing the currency hedging cost. That cost coverage applies only to the principal amount of your deposit, not to the interest you earn.

If you are weighing different options, banks are allowed to offer differential interest rates based on how long you commit your money and how much you deposit, which means shopping around between banks is worth the effort. And if you would rather not deal with the swap facility at all, regular FCNR(B) deposits of three to five years are still available without it, just at whatever rate the bank can offer without the RBI's hedging support, which will likely be lower.

➡️ The practical takeaway is that this scheme has gotten more flexible since launch. If your hesitation about locking money into an FCNR(B) deposit was about losing access to that money for three to five years, that concern is now largely addressed: you can borrow against the deposit if you need liquidity, without breaking the term or losing the better interest rate. Worth a serious look if you have not already explored it, and worth asking your bank specifically about the loan-against-deposit option if liquidity is your main concern.

🔗 Religious sentiments over children's nutrition

The new BJP government in West Bengal has handed over school midday meal preparation to ISKCON, a Hindu religious organisation, which has announced it will replace eggs with soybeans, rajma, and paneer. Hindutva supporters say these alternatives provide adequate nutrition. They are, technically, nutritious. They are also a worse choice on every metric that actually matters for a child nutrition programme.

This is not the first state to do this. Madhya Pradesh refused to include eggs in Anganwadi meals back in 2015. Maharashtra withdrew funding for eggs in school meals in 2025. The pattern of using public welfare programmes to enforce a particular dietary ideology, rather than nutritional science, has been building for over a decade, alongside beef bans that have devastated Muslim, Dalit, and cattle-trade-dependent livelihoods, cow protection vigilantism that has killed people, and recurring fights over non-vegetarian food in university hostels.

India's latest National Family Health Survey found that 19% of children under five nationally are wasted, meaning too thin for their height, and 29.3% are stunted, meaning too short for their age due to poor nutrition. In Bengal specifically, the numbers are 20.3% wasted and 22.4% stunted. The midday meal programme exists precisely to interrupt this cycle, because for many children from poor households, school lunch is the only properly nutritious meal they get all day.

Eggs are one of the cheapest, most efficient protein sources available anywhere. The plant-based alternatives ISKCON is proposing are more expensive, take longer to cook at scale for a school feeding programme. Replacing a scientifically proven, cheap protein source with a costlier, slower, less accepted one, in a programme specifically designed to fight malnutrition, is just so BJP.

There is also a specific irony here. At least 98% of Bengalis are reportedly non-vegetarian. Meat and fish are central to Bengali festive and everyday food culture across communities. The claim that vegetarianism represents authentic Hindu identity ignores that millions of Hindus across eastern, southern, and northeastern India eat fish, meat, and eggs without seeing any contradiction with their faith. The purity and pollution framing that treats eggs as impure is rooted in caste hierarchy, and it is Dalit, Adivasi, and OBC communities who have historically depended on affordable animal protein precisely because it has been one of the few accessible sources of nutrition available to them.

➡️ Malnutrition is not just a health statistic. It shapes lifelong outcomes, productivity, and the workforce a country builds for itself. A government that talks about Atmanirbhar Bharat while compromising on one of the simplest, cheapest, most effective nutrition interventions available is making a choice that will show up in stunted growth and missed development before it shows up in any election result. And they still keep winning election after election.

DD partner's corner

Meet queerbeat. This week we are partnering with queerbeat to bring their work to you. This is not a sponsored section. No money has exchanged hands, only kudos have.

🔗 The erasure of intersex people in India's gender politics

When the Transgender Persons Amendment Act became law and we covered it here, the focus was on what it meant for transgender Indians: the loss of self-identification, the new requirement for medical board certification, the deletion of identity categories from the law. There is another community caught directly in this law's path that gets almost no attention. Intersex people.

Momo, who co-founded Intersex Human Rights India in 2019 and now works as an independent activist, describes the relationship between intersex and trans communities as "cousins, not twins." Both face the policing of bodies, documentation barriers, stigma, and violence. But the specific intersex experience, centred on bodily autonomy and the right not to be surgically altered without consent, is different from trans advocacy's focus on identity recognition and self-determination. When intersex realities get folded into broader gender-diverse language, that specificity disappears, and so does the chance of policy actually addressing it.

In most Indian hospitals, when a child is born with ambiguous genitalia, doctors tell parents surgery will fix it. There is often no real conversation about long-term consequences or the child's eventual right to decide for themselves. Momo describes a friend who grew up believing they were a woman, only discovering in adulthood that they were chromosomally male, because their family wanted a girl and made that decision for them without ever telling them. Chromosomal testing in India is expensive and slow, many intersex variations do not show up until puberty or later, and some are only discovered after death, during autopsy. With over 66 documented intersex variations and counting, the data needed to make a community visible to policymakers simply does not exist, because secrecy, fear, and cost prevent it from being collected in the first place.

The Transgender Persons Amendment Act makes this worse. It requires individuals to appear before a District Magistrate and undergo medical examination for gender identity to be officially recognised. For an intersex person, this means standing in front of an official who may have no understanding of intersex variations, who may expect to find something resembling outdated and inaccurate ideas of what an intersex body looks like, and who has the power to demand further testing, more clinics, more scrutiny. Momo points out that chromosomal data feeding into state systems is not a hypothetical risk. It has already affected welfare access and passport issuance elsewhere. There is currently no intersex person on the National Transgender Council, the body that is supposed to represent this community in policy decisions.

➡️ The 2026 Amendment, combined with a healthcare system that still frequently treats intersex variations through secrecy rather than informed consent, means bodily autonomy for this community is under active threat.

queerbeat is a collaborative media and research project focused on deeply and accurately covering LGBTQIA+ persons, in their voice, in India.

That's all, folks! Stay hydrated!