The Union government told the Supreme Court that it is reconsidering the regulations issued by the University Grants Commission in January to address caste-based discrimination in colleges and universities. The court had stayed the rules in January observing that their provisions were “prima facie vague and capable of misuse”.

The rules had led to protests by upper-caste students who argued that it could lead to discrimination against them. The protesters contended that the rules were biased against students from the general category as they did not provide for measures against “false complaints”. Read on.

Journalist Tarun Tejpal moved the Supreme Court challenging the Bombay High Court’s decision to convict him of raping and sexually harassing a junior colleague in 2013. His petition against his 10-year sentence is likely to be mentioned for an urgent hearing as he has been directed to surrender to the authorities in the first week of September.

The Goa government has also moved the Supreme Court seeking life imprisonment for Tejpal instead of the 10-year sentence.

On August 6, the Goa bench of the Bombay High Court overturned a 2021 sessions court verdict acquitting Tejpal. Read on.

Former Congress MP Sajjan Kumar, who was convicted in two cases related to the 1984 anti-Sikh massacre, died at a Delhi hospital. He was 80. The cause of his death was not immediately clear.

Kumar was serving life imprisonment in Tihar jail. He was convicted by the Delhi High Court in December 2018 in a case involving the murder five members of a Sikh family in Delhi Cantonment’s Raj Nagar area on November 1, 1984. The court found him guilty of murder, promoting enmity between groups, and defiling public property. Read on.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was depicted as a Hindu deity at an event organised by a group of transgender community members at the Press Club of India in Delhi. They recited some verses, which they described as the “Modi Chalisa”, according to videos posted on social media. A chalisa is a Hindu hymn to a deity.

The group also shouted “Jai Jai Modi”, or hail Modi, and “Har Har Modi”, or victory to Modi.

The Press Club of India said that it stopped the event because the organisers violated the terms of renting the venue. The event was criticised on social media, with users saying that it hurt their religious sentiments. Read on.

A clash broke out between members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and Left-affiliated student groups at Kolkata’s Jadavpur University during a meeting of a students’ union on Wednesday. The clash continued into the early hours of Thursday.

Several students were injured and taken to a hospital. The two sides blamed each other for the violence and accused the other of bringing people from outside the university onto the campus.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad is the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the parent organisation of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Read on.

Pakistan has announced that it will confer its highest civilian honour posthumously on two Mumbai-based Parsi doctors for not revealing that Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the country’s first president, had a terminal illness in the years before Partition.

Jinnah’s physician Jal Ratanji Patel and radiologist Jal Daeboo will receive the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, said the Pakistan Cabinet’s official awards list. Some members of the community believe that Daeboo is a misspelling of the Parsi name Deboo.

Jinnah had been suffering from tuberculosis at the time of Partition. He died in September 1948, just over a year after Pakistan was created.

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins have claimed in their 1975 popular history Freedom at Midnight that if British India’s last Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten, had known that Jinnah was suffering from a terminal illness, he might have delayed the transfer of power from British India to independent India and the creation of Pakistan. Read on.

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