Vote.

Hi,

Have you found yourself doomscrolling, crying, finding some time to eat, doomscrolling again, and from time to time texting your friends to say we are all doomed?

If yes, join the club. If no, please do. For once democracy needs you to sacrifice your mental health. Maybe even then nothing will come of it. But you will have tried. Sharing content online matters, signing petitions matters, liking/reposting videos matters. Showing up matters even more but I know most of do not have that option. Or rather, we do but it is a difficult decision to make. Ticket prices are high, the rest of the world does not stop as a democracy dies, and you might even be worried about your own safety if you did show up. You know, at Jantar Mantar, I mean. So I get it. I have checked and unchecked flight tickets to Delhi multiple times since this morning in between sobs and doomscrolling. So show up online. Boost posts that share fact-checked, reliable information. Unfollow celebrities who are quiet. Follow the ones who are showing up, not with hollow words and pray emojis but are actually showing up. Cross-check claims. Talk to your family about it. It is exhausting but avoidance is not an option anymore.

And then this one time, maybe our last chance even, go home when your state election and the general election comes happens.

States going into election in 2027:

• March - Goa, Manipur, Punjab, Uttarakhand
• May - UP
• December - Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh

No excuses, please.

Rage. Rage against the dying of the light of democracy.

Just the gist

It is all effed. That's the gist, honestly.

🔗 How to kill a peaceful protest

The operation to remove Sonam Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar was planned in a way that tells you exactly how seriously the government was taking the protest it had spent weeks calling a non-issue.

At 11 pm on Friday, a message went to all station house officers in the New Delhi district saying there would be a security drill at Parliament ahead of the Monsoon Session. They were told to arrive at Parliament Street police station by 3 am with 10 personnel each. When they got there, they were taken to Mandir Marg police station, where the briefing changed. They were told they were there to remove Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar.

The intelligence task was simple. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke had a routine. Every morning he left the protest site briefly to use a restroom nearby. Police identified that window. Around 6:30 am on Saturday, when Dipke stepped out, police moved to the stage equipped with white sheets so no one outside could see what was happening, and removed Wangchuk. Within two minutes he was in the ambulance, taken to Safdarjung Hospital. A separate police team stopped Dipke from returning. The site was then cleared. A phone jammer had been installed minutes before the operation. No, please let that sink it.

The day before, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs had abruptly replaced Delhi Police Commissioner Satish Golchha with Anurag Kumar. Golchha's removal was reportedly linked to how cooperative Delhi police had been unto that point with the protestors. How can a government for the people, by the people tolerate a police force working with the people. Duh!

Wangchuk had been on hunger strike since June 28, entering 20 days without food, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over repeated examination paper leaks that led to the suicide of 20 students.

The government did not engage with those demands. It replaced the police chief, assembled a covert operation behind a security drill cover story, waited for a two-minute window, and removed a man who had lost more than 9 kilograms in 20 days, behind white sheets. Tell me you are watching the dying breath of a democracy without telling me....

➡️ Several Opposition parties including Congress, Trinamool, Samajwadi Party, and Shiv Sena (UBT) have demanded the Centre engage with Wangchuk and sack Pradhan. The government has responded to 20 days of peaceful protest, a hospitalised student hunger striker, and a planned march to Parliament with a covert dawn operation. Abhijeet Dipke has not taken the place of Wangchuk while Wangchuk is kept at the hospital where his wife claims she is not being shown his medical reports.

🔗 A song gets more respect than a scientist

The government has circulated its legislative agenda for the upcoming Monsoon Session of Parliament, which opens on July 20, the same day the CJP has planned its march to Parliament. Five new bills are listed.

The one that will generate the most noise is the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Amendment Bill, 2026, which would make the intentional insult of, or disruption during, the singing of Vande Mataram a punishable offence under the 1971 law. The original act covers the national flag and national anthem. This amendment adds the national song. How "intentional insult" gets defined in practice, and who decides what constitutes disruption during a song that is not legally mandatory in the way the national anthem is, are questions the bill will need to answer clearly if it is not to become a tool for selective harassment.

The Registration of Births and Deaths Amendment Bill proposes stricter provisions for delayed registration. The Supreme Court Number of Judges Amendment Bill would increase the strength of the court. The Income Tax Amendment Bill and the MSME Development Amendment Bill round out the five new listings. The Foreign Contribution Regulation Amendment Bill, introduced in the Budget Session, and the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhisthan Bill, currently before a Joint Committee, are also listed for consideration.

Two significant bills are notably absent. The 130th Constitutional Amendment Bill, which proposes automatic removal from public office of anyone jailed for 30 days including the Prime Minister and Chief Ministers, is still with a Joint Parliamentary Committee and has not been listed. The 131st Constitutional Amendment Bill on delimitation and women's reservation, which was defeated in the previous session when the Opposition voted against bundling it with the seat expansion and boundary redrawing provisions, has not been formally listed either, though the government has neither confirmed nor denied reports of a revised version.

➡️ The Monsoon Session opening on July 20 is significant beyond the legislative calendar. It is the day the CJP has called its march to Parliament, the day the Opposition could stand behind one united cause. The time to disengage from politics and news is behind us. But then again, I keep hoping for radical change after every major event and we keep going to back life as is - only slightly more expensive, slightly less convenient, slightly less educated, every time.

🔗 More paperwork in digital Bharat

Trying to register online as a first time voter in India now means a requirement to provide your parents' details from the last Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, down to the specific polling booth number and their individual serial number on that roll.

This requirement does not exist in the law.

Form 6, the statutory form for new voter registrations under the Representation of the People Act and the Registration of Electors Rules 1960, has not been amended. The physical version of Form 6 available for download on the Election Commission's own website does not have this new section. Only the online submission portal does. The EC has not responded on what legal basis it rests on.

What this means in practice is that a young person registering to vote for the first time is now being asked to trace where their parents appear in a voter roll revision exercise that many families, particularly those who moved, were in informal settlements, or whose names were deleted in the SIR, may not be able to locate. If the parents were not in the last SIR, the applicant must provide their parents' names and EPIC numbers if available, and select an option acknowledging this. What happens to applications where this information cannot be provided is not publicly known, because the EC has not announced or explained the change at all.

The timing is significant. The SIR has now deleted 5.58 crore names nationally, including 27 lakh in West Bengal through a judicial adjudication process whose appeals are still pending. The children of those deleted voters are now trying to register to vote for the first time, and the system is asking them to establish their parents' presence on a roll their parents were removed from. LOL.

➡️ Article 326 of the Constitution guarantees the right to vote to all adult citizens who are ordinarily resident in a constituency. That right is not contingent on your parents' bureaucratic history. The Election Commission has inserted a new citizenship-adjacent requirement into the voter registration process through a portal change, without amending the underlying law, without any public announcement, and without explaining what happens to people who cannot comply.

🔗 Maharashtra's big spending problem

The Mukhyamantri Majhi Ladki Bahin Yojana, Maharashtra's flagship scheme paying Rs 1,500 a month to eligible women aged 21 to 65 from economically weaker households, was announced in June 2024 and became one of the most significant direct transfer programmes for women in any Indian state. It was also, almost certainly, a factor in the ruling alliance's Maharashtra election victory later that year. Well, that and possible election tampering but we don't talk about that.

A CAG audit has now found that the government spent Rs 33,237 crore on the scheme against an authorised budget of Rs 29,693 crore, an excess of Rs 3,541 crore. Spending more than your authorised budget by Rs 3,500 crore would have been called a scam, 'bahin-gate' but under the current government it is just overspending (whoops).

That corrective action has already begun. The government has removed over 92 lakh beneficiaries from the scheme, dropping the total count from around 2.43 crore to just over 1.5 crore, a 38% reduction. The official explanation is that most deletions were due to failed e-KYC verification or ineligibility on income, age, or other criteria. Whether 92 lakh women genuinely failed eligibility checks or whether the state is using eligibility as cover for a fiscal correction is a question the numbers alone cannot answer, but who cares about accountability anymore.

There are other genuinely important programmes that now risk being overshadowed in both funding and attention. The Manodhairya Yojana, which supports survivors of rape, acid attacks, and human trafficking, has an allocation of Rs 15 crore in FY26. One Stop Centres for women facing violence, working women's hostels, rehabilitation programmes for trafficking survivors, and women's self-help group initiatives all continue to be funded, but at a fraction of the scale of the cash transfer programme.

➡️ Large unconditional cash transfers for women are not inherently a bad idea. Financial autonomy is important, and Rs 1,500 a month matters to families living close to the margin. The problem is what happens when the programme is announced as a political instrument, scaled faster than fiscal capacity allows, and then corrected by removing nearly four in ten beneficiaries. The women who were removed may well have been enrolled correctly in the first place, verified their KYC, and now find themselves cut off without clear explanation.

But really, none of this matters if we cannot or do not stand up for what we believe it. If it is not obvious, I am straight up angry and upset. I hope you are too.

Watch the news on the 20th of July.✊🏼