'With the water level of several rivers rising in Uttar Pradesh due to continuous rainfall last week, state water resources minister Mahendra Singh has instructed the irrigation department to hold regular pujas (prayers) by those rivers in order to “control” possible flooding in the areas around them. The minister gave these instructions on July 12, while addressing field staff of the department through a video conference, organised to review the precautionary measures taken to check flooding. The press note issued after the meeting mentioned the minister’s specific order...'
'In yet another case of police high-handedness, a family in Mawana town of Meerut district in Uttar Pradesh has alleged that cops from the local police station ransacked their house on mere suspicion that one of their family members was involved in illegal animal slaughter. The incident of alleged police vandalism took place in Rajo Wala Bagh area of Mawana on Saturday night. According to the family, nearly a dozen policemen barged into the house asking for Mohd Umar. When the family told cops that the man was not in the house, the policemen started breaking household items...'
'On the same day that eight policemen were gunned down in Uttar Pradesh, two equally horrific incidents went unnoticed. First, four members of a family were murdered in Allahabad. Then, a 19-year-old Dalit girl and her father were murdered by her stalker, who belongs to the Thakur caste, days before her wedding. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger crime arc that would have been labelled ‘gunda raj’ if they had occurred under the governance of a lower-caste Chief Minister.
'Fifty-seven minor girls have tested positive for the novel coronavirus at a state-run children’s shelter home in Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, with five of them found to be pregnant and one HIV positive. Since the information was confirmed, the UP administration has gone into a frenzy, even as officials said the pregnancies began before the lockdown. The shelter home has been sealed, and its staff quarantined.
'The Uttar Pradesh police has booked the executive editor and editor-in-chief of the news portal Scroll.in under various charges of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and sections of the Indian Penal Code... Sharma recently wrote a series of reports on the poor state of affairs in Varanasi, which is also Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency.
'Sadaf Jafar, a member of the Congress Party, says that she knew that her name was in two First Information Reports in connection with the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Uttar Pradesh, but the political activist recently found out that the UP Police had booked her in two more FIRs. Jafar says she is now booked in four FIRs containing 34 criminal provisions, with some of them common to all the FIRs. HuffPost India counted 20 separate crimes in the four FIRs...'
'Ashwini Saini is a contributor to a Facebook page that publishes news on the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. Saini, who also works as a freelancer for the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, filed a video report for the page, called ‘Mandi Live’, on April 8. The report highlighted the failure of the district administration in supplying rations to migrant workers stranded in the district’s Sundernagar sub-division.
'...A faint glimmer of hope emerged in early May. Application forms were distributed in Bajardiha, with the promise that weavers would get cash assistance under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Yojana, the Central government’s relief package announced on March 24. About 350 people filled the form in Bajardiha, said the men. A few days later, a list circulated with the names, addresses, bank account numbers, Aadhaar numbers, mobile numbers of those whose applications had presumably been approved. At this stage, they were asked to pay Rs 100.
'In a grim reminder of the 2016 Una flogging incident, three other oppressed caste men were tied up, beaten, forcefully tonsured and paraded around with shoes hung around their necks in Lucknow’s Barauli Khalilabad village... The incident happened on 4 June after the three men - one belonging to the OBC and the other two belonging to Scheduled Castes - were allegedly caught stealing a fan from a house of a 'Brahmin man', the local police told The Quint...'
'A case of sedition has been registered against a young man for allegedly making ‘objectionable remarks’ on Facebook about Uttar Pradesh chief minister Adityanath, the Indian Express reported... The FIR alleges, “Rajesh Kumar Shukla, a resident of Allahabad, had said in his Facebook post ‘I do not understand why Priyanka Gandhi Vadra did not hire Uttar Pradesh Transport Corporation buses for migrant laborers?’ On this post, a resident of Allahabad, Anoop Singh, made objectionable remarks against Yogi Adityanath. He said, “Yogi kutta hai is liye (because Yogi is a dog).”...'
