NEW DELHI — Saira Bano, whose son Hafeez Junaid was stabbed to death on a Mathura-bound train from Delhi on June 22 last year, held up a laminated picture of the 15-year-old's mortal remains and asked, "If Modi had a son, would he have liked to see his son like this?"

Bano had spent the last hour listening to families of other Muslim lynching victims' kin and activists in an event organised in Delhi by a collective called 'United Against Hate'. Earlier in the day, student-activist Umar Khalid had been attacked by a gun wielding person at the same venue when he had come to attend the event.

Bano briefly lifted the veil of her black burqa to address the gathering and question the government, which according to her, had emboldened the lynch mobs. "Had I been anywhere near when the man had attacked Umar, I would have grabbed him and given him two tight slaps. This is the work of a terrible person," Bano said to thundering applause.

Besides Bano, families of Rakhbar Khan who was lynched in Alwar, Rajasthan a month back and Alimuddin Ansari, who was killed last year at Ramgarh, Jharkhand were present at the meet. Samaydin, the man who survived the lynch mob in Hapur, Uttar Pradesh that killed Qasim was also present. Missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed's mother was also present at the meet.

Also Read: Killers Out On Bail And Felicitated By BJP Minister, Ramgarh Lynching Victim's Family Lives In Fear

"We have not got justice. My son was brutally murdered, and it's been 25 days since then. There's no sign of progress in the case," Khan's 60-year-old father told HuffPost India. Khan's brother Mohammad pointed at the the police's alleged mishandling of the case and said maybe his brother would have lived if they cared about keeping his alive. It has been reported that police took Khan to the hospital at least three hours after they found him at the spot where he was beaten up. They, reportedly, even stopped for tea on the way. Khan was lynched by a group of six to seven people, who suspected that he was smuggling cows for slaughter.

Maryam Khatoon, whose husband Alimuddin Ansari was beaten to death by a mob of 30 gau rakshaks and alleged Bajrang Dal members in July last year, said that her family had felt vindicated for a while when the killers were convicted and awarded life sentences. However, things changed radically after 9 out of the 10 convicted killers were granted bail by the Jharkhand HC. Eight of the convicts were later garlanded and felicitated by Union minister Jayant Sinha.

Also Read: Just One Month After Hapur Lynching, Qasim's Wife Says 'It's Like He Never Existed'

Speaking to HuffPost India a few days back, Khatoon had questioned what message the government was sending out by garlanding killers. At the meet, she said, "I want to ask Jayant Sinha, what if instead of my husband, his own son had been lynched by a mob? What if his own daughter-in-law had been widowed? How would he feel if then, the killers of his near and dear ones, were fed sweets and applauded by a minister. Would he be able to bear that?"

Former IPS officer and activist SR Darapuri asked why incidents of mob lynchings have suddenly peaked since the BJP came to power at the Centre. "I'm not saying there weren't incidents of lynching in the past. There used to be lynchings of people, especially adivasi women who were accused of being witches. But now this has increased in magnitude and seems to have spread to various sections of the society. Why is this happening?" he asked.

He added that the reason why these lynch mobs have been emboldened is because of the BJP's brand of politics. "Their's is a politics of hate, a politics of violence."

RECOUNTING NIGHTMARES

In April this year, the Punjab and Haryana High Court granted bail to one of the men accused of killing Junaid and said that the fracas that took the teenager's life was "only regarding the seat sharing and abuses in the name of castes and nothing more". A lower court had earlier observed that Junaid had been abused by the accused over his religion.

Recounting the day Junaid was killed, Bano said, "I remember both my sons were observing roza and on that day, they were both unfed for 16 hours. I was also keeping roza and meanwhile, preparing meals and waiting for my sons to return so that we can all break the fast and eat together. Then suddenly, people from the neighbourhood came and said, 'there was a fight between the kids, where's your boy?'"

Bano had just finished reading her namaaz at home and initially thought that the boys had gotten involved in a minor scuffle. As the hours passed and people around her began to look grim, Bano said, she started feeling uneasy about Junaid especially. "I don't know why, but I kept thinking that my son is dead and it is probably Junaid who has died," Bano said. She pulled out a picture of her other son Saqib lying injured in the hospital and said, "This is my other son. I was so filled with dread when people were refusing to tell me what happened to Junaid that I almost forgot about him."

Also Read: The Uttar Pradesh Police Are Sabotaging Their Own Investigation Into The Hapur Lynching, Lawyers For The Victims Say

She added, "What I suffered, I hope no mother ever has to." She added, "The Prime Minister will never understand. He left his wife even. Only a mother who has birthed a child, brought the child up, will understand the pain of losing a child."

Rakhbar Khan's brother recollected how he couldn't believe how human beings could inflict the kind of injuries on another human after he saw his brother's body. "One hand was broken at three places. His skull was smashed. Almost all the bones of his ribs were broken and had dug into the flesh. When I saw his body and shuddered thinking how much pain he must have suffered before he died," he said.

He said how the victim's wife is still reeling under the shock of his death and has barely been able to leave her bed or eat. "He has really young children. We are poor people, who will take care of them now? His wife faints even at the mention of his death even now," Khan said.

Vogo, a scooter sharing startup based in Bengaluru, announced its series A funding today in a round led by Ola, Hero MotoCorp, VCs like Stellaris Venture Partners and Matrix Partners, and several others including the Aparmeya Radhakrishnan (founder, TaxiForSure) and more. The company, which was founded in 2016, lets people rent scooters for short one-way trips across the city. Using the app, you can find the latest scooter, unlock it and pick it up. To use the scooter you need to enter an OTP to access the key, and start your ride.

Vogo is active in Bengaluru and Hyderabad as of now, and plans to add over 1,000 pickup points across the two cities in the coming year.

"Vogo was founded with a vision to revolutionise the existing transportation ecosystem in India, with a locally relevant solution that's apt for a quick, inexpensive movement," said Anand Ayyadurai, Founder and CEO, Vogo. "We've been working with the authorities since the launch of our operations late last year, to make this a reality in a vast majority of areas in Bengaluru and Hyderabad, and the response has been quite overwhelming."

"We see this partnership with Ola as a great strategic fit, and aim to leverage their products, technology and operations infrastructure, to better suit our customers' needs," he added.

According to Vogo, trips average about 5 km per ride and make for an ideal first and last mile commute in Indian cities like Bengaluru, that are plagued by traffic congestion. Using the Vogo mobile app, more than 27000 users have commuted for over 6 million kilometres.

Sandeep Divakaran, Vice President, Ola, said, "Mobility as an ecosystem in India provides immense opportunity to innovators to solve hyperlocal problems using technology and make everyday transportation convenient and affordable. Vogo, a young innovator in the space is adding an effective layer to the first and last mile connectivity needs with its self-drive scooters. Their offering resonates with our vision and we are thrilled to be a part of their journey of providing smart and pocket-friendly transportation."

Kangana Ranaut, who conducted an interview with Jaggi Vasudev Sadhguru at NCPA in South Mumbai, has said that she 'stands by' everything that she spoke that evening.

Among other things, Kangana and Sadhguru called liberals a bunch of 'fanatics.'

Sadhguru had also said that those who outrage about lynchings "have not seen India and are living in cities and endlessly talking about these things." Kangana also said that liberals are people who won't include you in their group if "you don't hate the same people as them."

When it was pointed out that she was effectively normalising lynchings, Kangana, in an interview to Mid-Day, said, "We didn't normalise lynching at any point. If a certain religion worships cows, you can't slaughter cows. I am vegan and I can't see raw meat. I can't be shamed for my choices. If it's a sentimental thing, why instigate people?"

She also said that majorities run the risk of being wiped out by a minority-friendly government.

"The earlier government played on dividing basis majority and minority because the latter sticks together and votes flock in. The truth is majorities run the risk of being wiped out by the minority-friendly governments. Governments can't be partial to either side. Our religions are beautiful, but we must subscribe to nationalism to bind us together. These self-proclaimed liberals are b***ardising nationalist sentiment," she concluded.

Also see on HuffPost:

LUCKNOW, Uttar Pradesh — A few hours before Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed a forum of investors in the city last month, police constables surrounded Pooja Shukla as she stepped out of her friend's house in Ismailganj.

Shukla, a 23-year-old student activist with the Samajwadi Party (SP), said the policemen and women dragged her to a waiting jeep, snatched her phone, drove her around the city for five hours and only let her go when she pretended to be ill. Another group from the police, she said, raided her house in Sarojini Nagar, where she lives with her parents.

"They abused me for hours inside the car," Shukla said. "They narrated how encounters are done by the police. Then they said that I have been creating problems for them and I might get into big trouble."

This wasn't Shukla's first brush with the law: images of her sparring with the police have been widely shared among university students in the city. Last year, she spent 26 days in prison after she was arrested for waving a black flag at Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath when he visited Lucknow University.

Shukla, a slight young woman with an outsized presence, is one of a cohort of student activists who have been drawn into politics by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP's) crackdown on universities. The student upsurge began in January 2016, when the suicide of Hyderabad University student Rohith Vemula triggered protests on campuses across the country.

A few months later, the arrest of Jawaharlal Nehru University students Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya—and the widespread media coverage that followed—marked the first real signs of dissent against the Modi government.

Now, as the country is preparing to go to the polls again next year, students such as Shukla are a visible part of the opposition to the BJP.

"She is aggressive and not easily intimidated," said Rahul Singh, national president of the student wing of the Samajwadi Party, explaining why the party signed her up. "She won't shut up easily and is young and idealistic."

BLACK FLAGS

In June 2017, when Adityanath was scheduled to visit Lucknow University to unveil a statue of Shivaji erected inside the campus, Shukla (who was not affiliated with any political party at the time) and a group of fellow students stood by the gates—reading, chatting in pairs and pretending like they were simply waiting for class.

They had stuffed black cloth flags inside their books and lunch boxes, which they whipped out the moment Adityanath's convoy rolled up.

The police quickly rounded up and thrashed the protestors. Eleven of them—nine men and two women, including Shukla—were thrown into jail the next day after a court order.

Shukla was charged with rioting, obstructing a public servant from performing his duty and intimidation of a public servant—offences punishable with imprisonment of up to five years.

She spent 26 days in jail, the longest among all the detainees, and upon her release, joined the SP which had helped bail her out.

ALSO READ: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE PEOPLE ARRESTED FOR INSULTING MODI?

REALITY CHECK IN JAIL

Five days after Shukla was imprisoned, her father, Rakesh, visited her in jail.

"Is this what you wanted?" he asked. "To bring shame to the family?"

Shukla, who was flush with the excitement of standing up to the government, was suddenly faced with the enormity of her political choices: her parents and her two sisters lived in a room in a small one-storey house that they shared with eight other family members, in a neighbourhood loyal to the BJP.

Rakesh, a small-time real estate agent, couldn't step out of their house without a neighbour or a local vendor stopping him to ask if it was indeed true that "Shukla ji's elder daughter was in jail."

Young men in the neighbourhood harassed her family. Her parents couldn't protest as they feared she would be incarcerated indefinitely. Her mother was in shock, and couldn't bring herself to visit her daughter in jail.

Eventually, Shukla's family was forced to move to another house after the other family members complained of the frequent visits by the police.

"My sisters were scared to step out of home alone for fear of being taunted and bullied," she recalled. "Boys made nasty passes at them. Both are younger than me—one is in school, one in college."

Shukla's foray into politics, Rakesh told HuffPost India, wasn't something her family was equipped to deal with.

"She has been to jail, police keeps coming to the house, people keep saying we can't marry her or her sisters off," he said. But, Rakesh conceded, "some Samajwadi Party leaders also told me she will do well and apparently young people look up to her."

Rakesh said he was mostly apolitical, and had occasionally voted for the Congress. But Shukla's extended family of Brahmins have traditionally endorsed BJP's politics.

"Now they are very pro-Modi," Shukla said. "So they were even more riled that I went to jail opposing the BJP."

Shukla said that her family was unhappy with her political ambitions. Her father, she said, couldn't stomach her independence like "most patriarchal men."

WOMAN IN A MAN'S WORLD

Purushvaadi soch, or the patriarchal mindset, surfaces frequently in conversations with Shukla. For her, it explains her father's reluctance to pay for her education because she refused to attend a college of his choice, her family's response to her arrest and the local media's coverage of political events she is involved in.

"I used to have fights with my father over things he stopped us from doing just because we were girls," she said. "It irritated me, but it was college which taught me how skewed everything was."

Men of all political stripes made women miserable at university, she said, but it was the relentless aggression of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) that riled Shukla the most.

In her first year as a student, studying commerce at the university, Shukla forced a male student to apologise for harassing her friend. Soon after, the male student and his friends harassed Shukla to the point that she stopped attending college for two months.

In November 2015, Shukla joined the All India Students' Association, the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, after the ABVP attacked Kavita Krishnan, at Lucknow University where she had come to address a seminar against 'love jihad'.

"Just the other day, these men were telling me that women are like deities to them and then they try to physically assault a woman," she said. Shukla left the party a year later for personal reasons.

WHY SAMAJWADI PARTY?

"Shukla represents two important demographics—students and women—whose disenchantment with the BJP will be crucial for Samajwadi Party," said Sudhir Panwar, a Lucknow University professor and a member of the SP.

Shukla is aware of the difficulty of being both a feminist and an SP worker. The party's tenure in power was marked by apathy to violence against women; Mulayam Singh Yadav, the party's founder, sparked outrage in 2014 when he questioned capital punishment for rape with the assertion that "boys will be boys".

For Shukla, Akhilesh Yadav's ascent to the party leadership marks a hope that the party will change.

"When I am surrounded by all these men at work, of course I am anxious at times," she said. "A majority of them, like a majority of men in India itself, come from very gendered social structures."

Yet, the discipline of a political outfit, she hopes, will make them think differently.

For the SP, Shukla's reputation as a young, compelling, anti-BJP political figure means she can integrate diverse voices critical of the BJP and convince them to vote for the SP.

Last month, for instance, she presided over the formation of the Students' Alliance for Democratic Rights (SADR), which encompasses a group of student leaders from major UP universities such as University of Allahabad, Banaras Hindu University and Aligarh Muslim University—to campaign against the BJP. Many of the attendees have been critical of the SP in the past, but may now consider supporting the party in 2019.

Jyoti Rai, a recent graduate from the university, said she was supporting SADR because of Shukla.

"I am not sure of SP's politics, but what Pooja has been demanding makes a lot of sense. She also went to jail for making valid demands," Rai said.

Shukla has also displayed keen political instincts.

Shortly after joining the SP, she applied to the women's studies department of Lucknow University. Shukla claims the course will help her flesh out her politics, but students said it was well known that the university had said that the students who had demonstrated against Adityanath would never be granted admission again.

Shukla applied anyway, and the university published a merit list with details of the scores of all the students who had taken the entrance exam—except Shukla's.

This gave Shukla the clear evidence she needed to prove that the university administration was discriminating against those opposed to the BJP government. She went on hunger strike, and her protest garnered support from across the political spectrum.

"How could they deny admission to a student who has had first class marks throughout?" said Ramesh Dixit, a former Lucknow University professor and the state chief of the Nationalist Congress Party.

"If the university has to refuse her admission, they have to furnish proper proof—how much did she score?" said Roop Rekha Verma, another former professor. "Why are they withholding her result without an explanation?"

Academic and social scientist Nadeem Hasnain said the university's treatment of Shukla was evidence of a BJP move to shut down spaces of critical political thinking.

Shukla has turned her protest into an opportunity to demand a reform of the university admission process.

"We started a signature campaign demanding fair and transparent admission processes and I have been making the rounds of colleges in Lucknow," she said, adding she will soon be travelling to other cities and towns in UP. "Protests often scare people off, so now I am trying to organise talks with academics like Ramesh sir and Roop Rekha ma'am, so that students understand what we are saying."

Shukla says she doesn't want an election ticket from the party anytime soon, but Panwar said that SP has always given preference to student leaders.

"There are several party people, especially in the upper house, who have made a name for themselves as student leaders," he said.

Delhi versus UP

"There's a world of difference in being a woman or an activist in Delhi and being a politically active woman in Uttar Pradesh," Shukla told HuffPost India.

Students from other states, even politically significant ones like Uttar Pradesh, don't get the kind of public support that students from JNU do. Shukla, who has less than 2000 followers on Twitter, says she isn't "good at protesting on Twitter." Rapes threats on Twitter are one thing, she said, but in UP men often end arguments by saying utha lenge—we'll abduct you.

"Someone goes to jail for protesting at JNU, it's all over people's social media and front pages of newspapers," Shukla said. "I spent almost a month in jail, did you come across anything on me on Facebook?"

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception," George Orwell wrote in his essay Notes on Nationalism. "Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakeably certain of being in the right."

Indian cinema has a long history of propagating this sentiment through films such as Upkar, Purab Aur Paschim, Border and Gadar. Yet, these films have existed alongside a vibrant counter-culture that has treated jingoism with the scepticism it deserves.

As India turns 72, amidst what appears to be an increasingly dark time for the arts, here are 7 films that shook the status quo.

1957— PYAASA

In the 1950s, India was a young nation torn between the hope of hard-won freedom and the horrors of the partition that heralded independence. The films of the era—by stalwarts such as Raj Kapoor, Mehboob Khan, Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy—spoke to the realities of the moment.

But one film stood out.

Seventy years after it stunned cinema-goers, Dutt's Pyaasa remains one of the best films of Hindi cinema: a wounded writer sublimates his disenchantment with the world through poetry, only to be marginalised by the hypocrisy of a corrupt society that maligns artists while profiting from the art they produce.

Moody, atmospheric and imbued with a persistent shadow of gloom, Pyaasa is beautifully shot. The black-and-white imagery heightens the sense of melancholy most visible in the song Hum Aapki Baahon Mein, which appears in a dream sequence.

Pyaasa marked the final collaboration between music composer S.D. Burman and lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi, who came together one last time to produce one of Hindi cinema's most memorable albums. Each viewing of Pyaasa is a rediscovery of its subtle symbolism and the many homages (the breakfast scene is a reference to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane) woven into this outstanding film.

1961— KABULIWALA

The film is best remembered for Balraj Sahni's iconic performance as the eponymous Kabuliwala, who comes from Afghanistan to Calcutta to make a living and support his daughter back home. In Calcutta, he befriends little Mini, with whom he shares a paternal connection.

Tragedy strikes when the Kabuliwala is imprisoned, and upon his release he realises that Mini doesn't recognise him anymore—a metaphor for how his country (and by extension his own daughter in Afghanistan) has perhaps forgotten him too.

The songs by Gulzar and Prem Dhawan, especially Ae Mere Pyaare Watan, capture the love and longing for a nation changed beyond recognition—an allegory for a post-partition India. The script was based on a celebrated short story by Rabindranath Tagore.

Kabuliwala didn't quite achieve commercial success but remains one of Hindi cinema's most celebrated works.

Guide, Waqt, Mughal-e-Azam and Sahib Biwi aur Ghulam were some of the other memorable films of the 1960s.

1974— GARM HAVA

MS Sathyu's enduring classic is as relevant today as it ever was. A film that poignantly examines the terrifying consequences of partition on a Muslim family that chose to remain in Agra, Garm Hava is based on an Ismat Chughtai short story and was adapted for screen by Kaifi Azmi and Shama Zaidi.

The film explores the alienation and marginalisation of Muslims who chose not to take the train to Pakistan. Sahni, once again, delivers a quietly dignified performance as Salim Mirza, the patriarch trying to hold his family together in an altered political reality.

A critical commentary on the prejudices faced by minorities, Garm Hava has aged with grace and remains a sharp dissection of communally divisive politics.

1983— JAANE BHI DO YAARO

Kundan Shah's iconic satire is ageless. The film found its inspiration in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (the park where Naseeruddin Shah and Ravi Baswani discover a dead body is called Antonioni), but captures the zeitgeist of a decade when the idealism of the early years of independence had decisively faded.

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was a victory of artistic vision despite a paucity of resources. The film went beyond its budget and there were creative differences within the team. But a talented cast and crew finally produced a powerful critique of the moral bankruptcy of a corrupted nation.

"Every day was a nightmare. Nobody laughed during the shooting," director Shah recalled in his final interview. "There were fights, swearing and what not. Tempers were high but the unit and the actors stayed on and finally, the film was made. But it was like riding a wild horse."

1998— DIL SE

The 1990s were largely dominated by melodramatic Bollywood fare, but there were a few exceptions. Dil Se stands out in a decade that also saw films such as Satya, Bandit Queen and Anand Patwardhan's documentary film Ram ke Naam.

Cinematic and politically charged, with strong performances by Shah Rukh Khan and Manisha Koirala, Dil Se is one of Mani Ratnam's most accomplished films. It unflinchingly interrogates the emotional complexity between two people on opposite sides of the political spectrum—a freethinker and a suicide bomber.

Rahman's music, from Jiya Jale to Dil Se Re to the iconic Chhaiya Chhaiya, perfectly capture the film's tense, volatile mood while the sprawling landscape of Ladakh, shot with haunting beauty by Santosh Sivan, renders the film on a sweeping canvas.

Ratnam seeks to understand what motivates extremists and makes no bones about placing the blame on institutionalized oppression by the state. The film was a box-office failure but in hindsight, it works as a sobering antidote to the blinding gaudiness of the 1990s.

2010— PEEPLI (LIVE)

A number of great films fundamentally changed Bollywood's cinematic sensibilities at the turn of the millennium. These include Lagaan, Dil Chahta Hai, Rang De Basanti, Swades and Chak De! India. And then there's Peepli (Live), directed by Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui.

A biting satire on India's scoop-hungry television media and the shameless opportunism of politicians, Peepli (Live) is the story of Natha, a farmer who decides to commit suicide so his family can avail the government compensation and pay off their loans.

The film captures the government's apathy towards farmer suicides, and also critiques the ratings-hungry media as an institution driven by spectacle more than sincerity. As television newsrooms have transformed into toxic mouthpieces for the state, Peepli (Live) remains an underrated classic we must all revisit.

2014— HAIDER

One of Hindi cinema's bravest films, Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider is a re-telling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, set amidst Kashmir's prolonged insurgency.

Co-written by Kashmiri journalist and writer Basharat Peer, the film casts an unsparing eye on the valley's violent history—a four-minute monologue offers a biting critique of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the song So Jao brings to mind the unmarked mass graves that lie beneath Kashmir's frozen ground with discomforting precision.

Featuring a strong performance by Shahid Kapoor, Haider is one of Hindi cinema's most authentic depictions of the Kashmir conflict.

NEW DELHI — Umar Khalid, until recently a student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, was attacked by an unidentified person near the Constitution Club of India on August 13, just two days ahead of Independence Day. Since then, there have been contradictory claims that the attacker, who had a gun, either shot at Khalid or that his gun jammed before he could do so. While the Delhi police has registered an FIR based on Khalid's complaint, within a few hours of the attack a section of the media called it a staged encounter.

While many people expressed their outrage on social media, some said they were disappointed at the assailant having missed his mark. Khalid, no stranger to vitriolic attacks by TV anchors, had not thought that the attack on him would also be picked apart and subjected to falsehoods.

Over two years have passed since 31-year-old Khalid was accused of raising "anti-national slogans" and arrested on charges of sedition. While the police haven't yet filed a charge sheet in the case, Khalid has persisted in questioning the ruling dispensation. In an interview with HuffPost India, Khalid spoke about his treatment by the media, the consequences of the hate and how it makes him feel on India's 72nd Independence Day.

Edited excerpts:

What flashed through your mind when you were struggling with the attacker?

I felt like I was going to die. I thought my time had come. It wasn't the only time I have thought like this. In the past two-and-a-half years, the thought that anything can happen has come into my head my head many times.

You did not freeze?

No, I did not freeze. Everything was instinctive.

Are you tired of narrating what happened?

It's important to tell the story because I want to remind certain other journalists, people who call themselves journalists, that there is a consequence of false propaganda and the demonization they have been doing of me and many of us. There are certain people who have whipped up hatred against me and incited violence against me. These are people who call themselves journalists. These are people who appear on television every night. They accuse me of being anti-national. They say I want India to break into pieces.

I have never said anything against India. The police have no evidence of my involvement in those anti-India slogans. The police have not been able to substantiate its accusations against me even by filing a charge sheet, which is a prerequisite for a trial to begin. When they say this, these media anchors, the self-proclaimed voice of the nation, they do it without any legal basis. The truth is that they know they are doing false propaganda. This is just politics. The section of the media is doing politics to help the ruling party.

There is a consequence of false propaganda and demonisation.

You blame sections of the media for the attack against you?

They are responsible for creating this situation. One TV anchor said that I have visited Pakistan twice, insinuating that I had links to terrorist groups in Pakistan. They know that this is false propaganda. If something happens to me tomor­­row, they have conspired to create this environment of hatred against me.

How are you feeling about Independence Day this year?

Seventy-two years ago, when we became independent, we had a dream, and that dream was enshrined in the Constitution. It was a dream of being a democratic republic, a secular republic. People who had absolutely no role to play in the freedom struggle, people who think the thoughts of M.S. Golwalkar and the Manu Smriti are the Constitution, they are trying to redefine our national project in terms of a Hindu Rashtra where minorities and marginalized do not have any rights.

That is what they have been doing, time and again. Even the previous NDA (National Democratic Alliance) regime, when (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee was prime minister, there was a committee set up to review the Constitution (in 2000). Prior to the Karnataka election, BJP leader Anant Kumar Hegde, who is also a union cabinet minister, said that we have come here to change the Constitution (in December 2017). They have made their intentions very clear. They don't share a vision of independent India that our forefathers had.

They don't share a vision of independent India that our forefathers had.

How independent do you feel this Independence Day?

Freedom to think, freedom to speak is being criminalized and criminalized in a variety of ways. It's not necessary that someone has to be assassinated or there has to be an assassination attempt. You create a threat perception—if not a threat to your life, then a threat to your job.

We see what happened at ABP News just because a journalist went ahead and busted (Prime Minister Narendra) Modi's claims and said a woman from Chhattisgarh was tutored to speak so. The journalist is out (of the channel). We are seeing what they do to academics. We are seeing what they are doing to Dalits. Dalits are attacked in Saharanpur and then Dalits are jailed under the National Security Act. Chandrashekhar Azad is in jail.

READ: One Year After His Arrest, Chandrashekhar Azad Is A Prisoner Of The Yogi Adityanath Government

How do you feel about your freedom?

Bhagat Singh had foreseen all of this when he said that transfer of power from the British to Indians is not enough. We have to work to change the social order. That is the challenge right now. That will be real freedom.

I certainly feel there is an attempt to curb my independence. I'm not free today to go out on the street; the way you came to my house, I'm not free to get out and go to your office. There is a security threat to my life and I have applied for security. There is an attempt to tell me that if you are independent in your thinking, then we can do something to you. If you are independent in your expression, then we can do something to you. But I have an independent mind and I refuse to crawl before them. Till I'm alive, I will live an independent life.

Bhagat Singh had foreseen all of this when he said that transfer of power from the British to Indians is not enough

How safe do you feel as a Muslim, this Independence Day?

When Rohith Vemula ended his life, he wrote a very poignant line: "Never was a man treated as a mind... The value of a man was reduced to his immediate identity and nearest possibility."

In the past two-and-a-half years, I have been reduced to that immediate identity. A Muslim is all that I am for this regime. I'm not a citizen of this country. They view me as a Muslim and we have seen the disgusting mentality and the lens through which they see Muslims. If you are Muslim, you are definitely anti-national. That is their way of thinking. Three of us were arrested, Kanhaiya Kumar, Anirban Bhattacharya and Umar Khalid. Only Umar Khalid was linked to Pakistan. Only Umar Khalid was linked to terror organizations in Pakistan. They defamed Kanhaiya and Anirban but it was slightly different in my case. Why was that?

A Muslim is all that I am for this regime. I'm not a citizen of this country.

Why has student politics revived since the Modi government came to power?

It's an outcome of what the universities have faced in the past four years of this regime. This is an anti-student regime, it is an anti-education regime. This is a regime that has made it clear that it does not consider higher education a right, but a privilege of those who can afford it, those who can buy it. The government (is) cutting funds for education. They attempted to dismantle the UGC (University Grants Commission), there were attempts to do away with fellowships, there is an attempt in my university to fundamentally alter the socially inclusive policies. At the same time, they are bending over backwards to bring private players into higher education. The most brazen example is the Institute of Eminence tag being given to Jio Institute even though it does not exist.

They also want to saffronise our universities. That is why students are fighting back. Leaders come from struggles. Struggles have happened because of specific demands to make our universities socially inclusive, don't privatize our universities, do not bring financial autonomy in universities, put funds in higher education, make universities gender-sensitive, install anti-sexual harassment bodies in universities. These are the demands on which students have protested and that is why you see students' protests intensifying.

READ: Historian Audrey Truschke Explains Why The Hindu Right Is Terrified Of Having A Meaningful Conversation About The Past

What was the state of student politics before the present dispensation?

There were attempts to curb outspoken students even then. There was a feeling that something could happen back then as well. The intensity of it has reached another level now. Four years ago, you felt the proctor will rusticate you from the hostel. You might be leveled a fine of Rs. 5,000 if you speak out against the administration. That you will be suspended, have a sedition case on you, put in jail on fabricated charges, your family will be threatened, your sisters will be threatened with rape, there will be an assassination attempt, that was unimaginable four years ago.

What is the scariest thing that has happened to you in the past two-and-a-half years?

This (assassination attempt) was the scariest because it was a matter of life and death. This was aimed at silencing me. I don't see myself as a victim. That is not the perception I have of myself. I'm a fighter. I believe in fighting back. I'm believing in fighting for my rightful share, the rightful share of Muslims, the rightful share of students. That is what I believe.

What's next for you?

I have submitted my PhD, my viva is remaining, my PhD defence. I write and I freelance. I also have to write on my academic projects. Even for my viva, I need to have one more publication. I have to work on that. That is my priority right now.

Also on HuffPost India:

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India will launch its first manned space mission by 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Wednesday, which could make it the fourth nation to do so after the United States, Russia and China.

In his last Independence Day speech before a general election early next year, Modi also said the government would launch a medical insurance scheme for the poor from Sept. 25.

"It is high time we ensure that the poor of India get access to good quality and affordable healthcare," Modi said in an address from the ramparts of the Mughal-era Red Fort in Delhi in India's 72nd year of independence.

BISWANATH CHARIALI, Assam --Ji ei likhe, public or hoi likhibo.

"Whatever you write, write with the voice of the public."

This was a parting piece of advice given to me as I wrapped up my reporting at Kumolia village centre near the Biswanath Ghat area. I scrawled it absently along with my other notes on the page, another fragment from my many conversations about the updation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

But it is only in the course of the last month or so, as I noted the ebb and flow of the currents of public opinion, that the near impossibility of this dictum hit me.

How does one write with the voice of the public about a process that has left 4 million of that very same public in legal limbo?

In Assam in the month of July, if there was a wide consensus on anything, it was that the updating of the NRC was a good thing. I felt this sentiment was expressed across divides of ethnicity, class, religion and ideology—some supported it because they thought the process would finally identify the foreigners in their midst; another section supported it because they felt they would finally be included as Assamese.

As July turned to August, it was clear that the public was speaking in many voices.

It is another Independence Day in Assam—a place where independence has always evoked a complex welter of emotion.

Among the Original Inhabitants

This category was introduced to ensure that no original inhabitant was "excluded from NRC due to unavailability of document". Those deemed "original inhabitants" would be allowed into the registry on the "basis of proof to the satisfaction of the Registering Authority", which means that the verification process of documents for people in this category is much less strenuous.

Except no one is quite sure how officials distinguish an "original inhabitant", or OI, from others. Prateek Hajela, the officer in charge of the whole process, says it is an internal category to ensure "bureaucratic ease", but officials insist the government will never publish exactly who is, or isn't, an original inhabitant.

One of the questions in the NRC's FAQ is:

Q: "Who are non-OIs?"

Ans: There is no such category as non-OI.

Shanti is a part of the "tea community"—one of the many people whose ancestors migrated to Assam from central India in the 19^th and 20^th centuries to work in tea plantations. As per a 2015 Supreme Court order, "tea communities" are also original inhabitants.

Uncomfortable Reunions

At hearings, entire families and individuals from all over Assam congregate at the NRC centres they are summoned to—sometimes from as far afield as Kathmandu—to verify legacy data and family trees.

When the family trees were being verified, especially in the months of February and March this year, the centres were thronging with people, as entire families and their many forked branches camped out from the early hours of morning, often until close to midnight.

"The NRC has even brought families together!"one officer told me.

When the folklore of the NRC process is written—and written it will be—there will be a whole chapter devoted to uncomfortable family reunions, I suspect.

A bureaucracy that is often vilified as corrupt and inefficient has cause to celebrate the successful completion of the NRC in a time-bound manner. There has been praise from commentators and a general sense of fulfillment after months of work. Yet, the perception of the NRC and its efficiency depends upon who is standing at the other end of the table and what her name is.

Complex Legacy

There are 855 martyrs of the Assam movement and these sahid bedis or memorials to the Assam Movement and its dead dot the landscape.

This number, however, does not include the lives lost in other incidents of 1983—the Nellie massacre, when 3,000 people of Bengali Muslim origin were massacred, or the Gohpur violence when Assamese and Bodos clashed a few months earlier.

The legacy of the Assam Movement remains complex; much water has flowed down Assam's many rivers since the Assam Accord was signed in the mid 1980s.

If the first part of the 1980s were the time of the Assam Movement, the late 1980s and 90s saw the movement for Bodoland intensify, with the demand that a homeland for the Bodo community be carved out of Assam. The same period witnessed the United Liberation Front of Assam's (ULFA) call for sovereignty and armed insurrection against the State.

Each movement had moments when questions and formulations of "indigenous and outsider" resulted in tensions between communities: often, this idea of the "son of the soil" could shift with the very soil one was standing on.

The Indian Army was deployed; and the counter-insurgency would forever change the fabric of democracy in the state.

The graffiti and slogans of the Bodo and ULFA groups have faded from public walls and shop fronts, yet the legacies of these movements remain, and continue to complicate the question of who exactly belongs to Assam and to whom Assam actually belongs.

The poet Kazi Neel's words have resonated more than once in this land—

That land is mine

I am not of that land

New Monuments

Two Brothers

Every day, Bodo, Karbi, Nepali, Muslim, Bihari, Marwari, Hindu Bengalis, Adivasis or members of 'tea tribe' and assorted Assamese groups walk past the jatiya bir memorial. Some of these communities fall under the NRC's formulation of 'original inhabitants' and some do not.

Sumit De, who drives me around in his electric auto, falls in the latter category.

Like many other partition migrants from what was then East Bengal, De's grandfather, too, had crossed the border into Assam's Cachar district from Sylhet in 1947. During the partition, large numbers of people came to Assam from Sylhet after it became a part of then East Pakistan.

After coming to Cachar, De's grandfather registered himself as a refugee and got his Refugee Registration Certificate. Then he began his new life in Cachar as a farmer.

Then there is the question of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill 2016, under which refugees from certain religions will be given a chance for naturalization. There have been widespread protests around this bill in Assam. One of the options, says the BJP, is to relocate Hindu non- citizens to other states.

There is a marked contrast in the experience of the NRC process depending on which community you belong to. Regardless of who gets their name in the list and who doesn't, the experience of this process is bound to be different depending upon the community and history you profess, and what this portends for the future is a difficult question.

ALSO READ: NRC: This Graphic Novelist Sketches The Citizenship Test That May Render Millions In Assam Stateless

NEW DELHI –- On Wednesday morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi delivered his fifth Independence Day address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort in New Delhi. In the speech, which lasted more than an hour, Modi hailed his government's achievements. HuffPost India lists the key takeaways from the speech:

Eye on elections

Modi's last Independence Day speech before next year's general elections was clearly drafted with the polls in mind. The address was partly a report card of the government's achievements in the past four-and-a-half years. The speech also included some key announcements such as declaring September 25, the birth anniversary of RSS icon Deen Dayal Upadhyay, as the launch date for the ambitious health insurance scheme, Ayushman Bharat, which aims to cover 50 crore Indians. The PM also said that by 2022, an Indian will be sent to space under Mission Gaganyaan. Modi lauded the social achievements made by his first major initiative as PM, the Swachh Bharat mission, which, he said, had been appreciated by the World Health Organization. He also asserted that his government had increased the minimum support price for buying a large number of crops, acting on a long-pending demand by farmers.

Reaching out to women voters

Consistent with his approach of reaching out to women voters, the PM mentioned the bill for outlawing the practice of triple talaq, which has been introduced by the government in Parliament. He made sure to add that it was the opposition which has not ensured a smooth passage for the bill. He added that the legal system has become proactive in giving justice to victims of sexual crimes such as rape. By way of example, he highlighted a recent rape trial in Madhya Pradesh where the accused was sentenced to death within a few days. He also added that the message that rapists would be punished with death should be widely publicized to ensure deterrence. Evidently, the intention behind these pronouncements was to convey that the government is sensitive towards women's concerns.

Idealism has petered out

The grand ambition and idealism that marked Modi's first Independence Day speech in 2014 was absent this time. Save for an announcement about putting a son or daughter of India into outer space, the speech was filled with initiatives and policy decisions which the government has been trying to implement with mixed results. For instance, the national health insurance scheme has been fleshed out in greater detail by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his budget speech in February. There was no word from the Prime Minister about whether the challenges in implementation which cropped up after Jaitley's announcement have been addressed. Save for limited achievements in initiatives such as the Swachh Bharat campaign, the speech did not have any significant details about how other initiatives announced in the 2014 speech have fared. The PM was also silent about the status of the 10-year-moratorium on communal violence he had called for in his 2014 speech—at a time when people from minority communities are facing persecution from multiple angles.

DEHRADUN, Uttarakhand — When the Punjab Police's Organised Crime Control Unit (OCCU) stormed a hotel room in Tarn Taran district last year to bust a drug deal, one suspect got away.

But a photograph from a phone recovered from the scene was enough to track him down.

"We looked at their phones, we saw a photo—a group selfie they had clicked," said Nilabh Kishore, Deputy Inspector General of the Indo Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), who was formerly in charge of OCCU.

Kishore's team cropped out the image of the missing man and ran it through the Punjab Artificial Intelligence System (PAIS), which uses an artificial-intelligence assisted face-recognition algorithm to match any photograph against an ever-expanding database of over 100,000 criminal records maintained by the state police.

It was also PAIS that found a match which, Kishore said, helped the police track down Vicky Gounder, an alleged gangster who was shot dead by the police earlier this year.

"The criminals are shaken up now," Kishore said. "When a constable can just point a phone at you and identify you along with your aliases and known accomplices, it strikes a note of fear in them."

A big data revolution is sweeping through police departments across India, as state police forces tie up with private companies to harness easily available commercial technology to monitor citizens. PAIS, for instance, was created by Gurgaon-based Staqu, a software company which began as an AI image recognition service for e-commerce companies, before branching out into law enforcement.

Resource-strapped investigators say these tools have made it easier to track dangerous suspects, make connections between gang members and control crime. The convicts don't have to consent to their image being used, as India has no laws to prevent this from being done, although the police can't take photos of undertrials.

Punjab is not the only state using such technology; Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Bihar and Telangana are all looking to implement similar systems, and Andhra Pradesh has networked multiple departments to create a state-wide surveillance system.

The Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS), a union-government funded programme, is compiling a nationwide biometric database of criminals that the government hopes to integrate with the Aadhaar database. In July this year, the Union cabinet also proposed a bill that allows for the creation of a national DNA database.

Yet, much like the controversial Aadhaar programme, so-called "smart policing" is on the rise with little public scrutiny of what this means for the rights and liberties of citizens. Experts worry that policing technology such as face recognition, which has serious implications for the privacy and freedom of citizens, remains largely untested.

"As these tools are proprietary, we can never have access to the source code. There are no impact assessment studies," said Mishi Choudhary, managing partner, Mishi Choudhary & Associates, a law firm specialising in technology law. "We or the police have no way to assess the risks of biased data or faulty prediction systems that these may be. I see a feedback loop where police keeps going back to the same people."

The consequences of handing such technology to India's notoriously poorly trained policemen could be devastating, analysts say.

"Databasing is a very potent and dangerous exercise because without context, quantitative data can mean anything and everything," said Noopur Raval, a PhD candidate in Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and formerly an affiliate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. "Datafication, or these dashboard fantasies, can draw a very wrong picture."

Inside PAIS

The heart of PAIS, Punjab Police's AI-based face recognition system, is an innocuous-looking app with an intuitive interface of a grid of orange icons on a yellow background with options like Face Search, Text Search and Gang Tree Search.

When confronted with a suspect, officers can snap a photograph with their smartphone and search it against a database compiled by uploading pictures of convicts housed in jails across Punjab. Since this began a little over a year ago, more than 100,000 records have been added to the system. Kishore, the policeman, said undertrials are not added to the system.

"What we did was put phones in the hands of policemen in the jails, rather than putting them in all stations. We purchased just about 30 phones and used them to snap pictures of all new people coming in, and also from the people who were already in jail," he explained. "So when they would take the photos, they would also enter the data on the phone right there, and most of it is menus and lists so you can quickly fill up the information without having to sit on a computer and type for a long time. We did this only for male prisoners, because we thought if male constables are taking photos of female prisoners, it could become controversial."

The results of PAIS' face-matching technology are sometimes surprising. Kishore started off by showing HuffPost India a photograph of a heavily bearded man wearing a turban, with less than a third of his face visible. In seconds, the system returned a set of around ten different photos.

The top match, with an 82% match score, was an image of a clean-shaven man with short hair, wearing a t-shirt.

At first glance, it's hard to believe the two images are of the same person, but after staring at the two photographs for long enough, one can see similarities in the nose, the shape of the lips, and the eyes.

"It's not always the top person suggested, this is only the start. Then you have to do investigation to figure out who the person really is, but in my experience, the correct person has always been one of the top four suggestions in the app," said Kishore.

The ambiguity of face-recognition technology, and its outsized claims, has prompted questions from civil rights experts.

In July, the American Civil Liberties Union compared photographs of members of the US Congress with 25,000 mug shots of criminals using Rekognition, a face recognition software Amazon is pitching to law enforcement agencies in the US. The software misidentified 28 of the politicians as criminals who had been jailed.

"It's not hard to imagine a police officer getting a 'match' indicating that a person has a previous concealed-weapon arrest, biasing the officer before an encounter even begins," the ACLU report said. "People of colour are already disproportionately harmed by police practices, and it's easy to see how Rekognition could exacerbate that."

The bias in AI systems comes from the training data. In the case of Staqu's software, the company used publicly available images to 'teach' the AI what a human face looks like. In India, it isn't hard to imagine a similar algorithmic bias towards minorities.

"Technology itself is a human product and as such, it is subject to the same social influences of all human behaviour," said Dr. Winifred R. Poster, a professor at Washington University, St. Louis, who has written on the subject. "Researchers at MIT have shown that facial recognition systems are very effective at reading the faces of white people, but they are egregiously poor at reading black faces, with error rates that increase exponentially."

Aside from the problem of accuracy, there is also the question about whether laws are keeping up with technology. This is particularly true as technology gets sourced from around the world.

"The transnational circulation of knowledge professionals in the surveillance industry is a growing trend. Indian tech entrepreneurs have been designing and marketing surveillance systems for prisons that are sold in the US," she said. Such companies have databases of the prisoners, with videos and photos, as well as biometric data and analysis. "Because such technology is being developed across state lines, regulation and oversight should be international as well," Dr. Poster said.

Meet the makers

Staqu, the company that built PAIS, has contested claims that it can lead to mistakes in law enforcement.

"Earlier, to recognise a face, the algorithm was looking at specific points, and making a wireframe of the face, which was less accurate," said Atul Rai, co-founder and CEO of StaqU. "Today, we're able to make a much more sophisticated model, that takes into account changes like weight gain or loss, age and occlusion, so even if you grow a beard, it will work."

Staqu was launched as an AI solutions company that focused on computer vision. While its early clients were in e-commerce, it was looking to operate in any niches where computer vision could be deployed. Rai first pitched the idea of using his company's technology to find missing persons, but soon discovered that a niche existed in the security space, where Staqu has been growing.

Today, Staqu is also working with the Dubai police for a predictive model that includes real-time data, with a goal of 25% crime reduction by 2021. It was chosen from among a slate of international companies, out of nearly 700 applicants.

It's not the only one either—there are several private sector companies offering similar solutions. FaceOrbit has been working more closely with the private sector. Like Staqu, it didn't start as a security company—its speciality was the transmission of video over the Internet. This made it an ideal service provider for CCTVs, and then its creators decided to work with artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide the "brain of a camera".

"Wherever you get video from, we can analyse it and help you take the appropriate action. We can do gesture analysis, face recognition, weapon detection, so if there's any security issue, it can be flagged automatically," said Sanjay Sinha, founder and chief mentor of FaceOrbit. Some malls are also interested in the technology, and deployment has begun. Another company in this space is Facetagr, based out of Chennai.

This technology can also be used to identify images from outdoor CCTV footage, which raises the prospect of the police filming public gatherings and using the technology to profile people protesting against government policies.

In one case, it was used on footage from a CCTV camera in Punjab. In the video, two men are standing by a scooter having an argument. Two other men walk up to them, and then casually start shooting. The first two men drop instantly—it's like a movie, though with less blood. One of the shooters looks around for a second, and his face points towards the CCTV camera for a split-second. This blurry image was enough to make a match, sources said.

The most comprehensive example of AI-powered surveillance, though, is in China. There, a national surveillance system is coming up, used by everything from hotels, airports, banks, and of course, the police.

The Aadhaar Issue

Policemen like Kishore say fears that deploying such technology will result in the creation of a police state are overblown. PAIS has made a huge difference in Punjab, he said, where sharing information between police stations was a huge problem—a difficulty accentuated by the constant movement of suspects from district to district.

At the same time, a senior law enforcement official told HuffPost India on background that AI-based policing would eventually be integrated with Aadhaar's vast citizen database.

"I believe that Aadhaar access will have to be given to the police," he said. "Right now, only people who have been jailed are being tracked. If you give the police more data, it will only benefit people."

The government has already spent crores on gathering Aadhaar data, the policeman said. "Why would you want to waste money to duplicate the effort?"

"Laws and regulations need to catch up to the pace of technology growth," said Sharmila Nair, a legal consultant working on information technology and the scope of AI laws.

"The regulated use of predictive policing would help in reducing crime rates," Nair said. "But simultaneously the aim should be to uphold the fundamental right to privacy."

It’s deep, deep suffering. … The only thing they can do is provide as much information as they can. Zubayra Shamseden, Chinese outreach coordinator at the Uyghur Human Rights Project

The probe into an FIR filed in January by a Deputy Director of the UIDAI against The Tribune and its reporter has brought the spotlight towards the office of the District Magistrate in Surat, reports The Indian Express. The report which set of this chain of events had shown how, for just Rs. 500, anyone could gain access to the Aadhaar demographic details of billions of citizens across the country.

Investigations into the report by the Delhi police has led to two people working in the Aadhaar centre inside the DM's office being questioned by the Delhi Police, Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime Branch) A K Singla toldIE.

The police reportedly believe that the server of this Aadhaar centre was used to access the details of citizens. The original FIR had been filed by BM Pataik of the UIDAI, which mentioned cheating, forgery, Section 66 of the IT Act, and Section 36/ 37 of the Aadhaar Act. The IE reported that police sources said the UIDAI had not shared particulars with the police, but two months ago, it was discovered that the Surat DM's credentials were used to access the data.

Curiously, Surat seems to have seen a fair amount of activity around Aadhaar-related fraud. On Wednesday, TOI reported that an illegal Aadhaar registration was busted in Varachha , a suburb of Surat. Officials raided a shop based on a tip, which was found to be an illegal Aadhaar center. At the shop, the officials found a laptop which was being used for the registrations, along with a webcam and a fingerprint reader which were being used to record biometric details.

Earlier this year, two men were arrested in an Aadhaar card tampering racket in Surat, TOI reported. The two accused were pilfering foodgrains issued to poor people by modifying the Aadhaar card data on individuals, using a rubber thumb. The duo had a pen drive which included the Aadhaar credentials of a bank officer, along with a thumb impression. By creating a rubber thumb to match his fingerprints, they were able to access the Aadhaar database.

Two fair price shop owners were also busted in Surat in February, The Hindustan Timesreported, who had used fake biometric data to divert subsidised foodgrains.

"The accused who were authorized to use E-FPS application provided by the government for issuing subsidised items to beneficiaries by matching their stored biometric details with barcoded ration card and UID (Aadhar), used illegal software and somehow accessed the data built by the government. This way they diverted the quantum in name of unsuspecting beneficiaries, who were not utilising their allotted quota," said the Crime Branch of Surat police in a press statement.

Leaders from across party lines arrived at New Delhi's AIIMS Hospital on Thursday to visit former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee after the hospital announced in a bulletin last night that the 93-year-old's health was in a critical state.

One of the best known leaders of the BJP, Vajpayee served as the prime minister of the country before the Manmohan Singh-led UPA came into power in 2004.

Here are eight things you need to know about the former prime minister:

1. Vajpayee was the first prime minister outside of the Congress to complete a full term, from 1998 to 2004. Before that, he became prime minister in May 1996 but remained in office for only 13 days.

2. He was jailed for 23 days for participating in Quit India movement protests in 1942. Years later, he went to jail in 1975 for protesting against the Emergency imposed by the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government. A report in Business Standard says that while he was in jail for months, he was later put under detention in his Delhi home.

3. After the Emergency, Vajpayee became the External Affairs Minister in the Morarji Desai government between 1977 and 1979.

4. While Vajpayee was a part of the RSS in his youth, he had dabbled with communism as a student in the 1930s before choosing to join the right-wing organisation.

5. Vajpayee won his first election to the Lok Sabha in 1957 from Balrampur. He was elected to the parliament nine times since and twice to the Rajya Sabha.

6. In 1977, as the Minister of External Affairs, Vajpayee became the first person to deliver a speech in Hindi at the UN Assembly.

7. Jawaharlal Nehru was so impressed by the speeches made by Vajpayee during his time in Parliament, he reportedly said that Vajpayee will become prime minister one day. This prediction came true years later in 1996.

8. Vajpayee quit active politics in 2007.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi's politics has often been contrasted with that of former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee. A section of political analysts who criticise the far-right Hindutva sentiments that Modi's regime has stoked often pit it against Vajpayee's more 'liberal' views.

In several unofficial accounts about Vajpayee, writers have spoken at length about the alleged 'coup' at the BJP's national executive meet in Goa in April 2002, where the former Prime Minister was prevented from sacking Modi as the CM of Gujarat after the riots in the state.

Shortly after the riots, Vajpayee held a joint press conference with Modi in Ahmedabad where a reporter asked what his message for the chief minister would be. The Prime Minister, known for speaking in chaste Hindi, took a few moments to start answering the question. He began with saying that Modi should follow raj dharma. He added that he himself tries to follow the raj dharma as much as possible. and a raja or a king shouldn't discriminate against his subjects based on his status in society or religion.

"Raja ke liye, shasak ke liye, praja praja main bhed nahin ho sakta hai. Na janam ke aadhaar par, na jaati ke aadhaar par, na sampraday ke adhaar par (A king, a ruler, should not discriminate against the subjects. Not on the basis on birth, not on the basis of caste, not on the basis of religion)," he said.

Modi's expression changed from a smile to a mild laugh, then a scowl and finally became impassive over the course of Vajpayee's comments. He then turned towards the Prime Minister and said, "Hum bhi wohi kar rahe hai sahib (that's what I am doing sir)."

Vajpayee took a few seconds to respond after that and said, without turning to look at Modi, "I trust that Narendra bhai is doing the same." Modi's smile returned briefly after that.

Though Vajpayee seemed to have backed Modi on that platform, albeit after a nudge from the former Gujarat CM himself, political analysts have chronicled his displeasure with Modi at length.

In his book The Untold Vajpayee, journalist and writer Ullekh NP recounts how the BJP stalwart was stopped from sacking Modi as the CM of Gujarat. Before reaching the venue of the meet, writes Ullekh, the consensus was that 'Modi must go'. LK Advani, Arun Shourie and Jaswant Singh was present on the flight when the decision was taken. Advani and Vajpayee were reportedly putting off a discussion until Shourie goaded them into speaking.

However, at the meet itself, Modi reportedly declared he would step down as the CM of Gujarat. Immediately, a chorus of party workers and office bearers began chanting that Modi must not be sacked over the riots. Though Vajpayee tried to delay the decision by saying he would consider it at a later time, the crowd insisted he give up any idea of getting rid of Modi.

"He would never forget that humiliation," Ullekh writes.

Later, while addressing a gathering in Gwalior in 2013, Modi said that Vajpayee never criticised him over Rajdharma and urged people to check out the video on YouTube.

Watch the video here:

The condition of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee remains critical. He has been admitted to AIIMS for the past nine weeks and his condition worsened on Wednesday night. He is currently on life support.

The Times of India reported that Vajpayee had a kidney tract infection, chest congestion and other age-related ailments and had been put on life support because of his critical condition.

Reports say that the leader has only one functional kidney because of diabetes.

Several leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah, have visited Vajpayee in the hospital.

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is likely to arrive in Delhi on Thursday afternoon to visit the former prime minister, reported News18.

Vajpayee was admitted to the hospital on 11 June.

Vajpayee's first stint as prime minister was in 1996, for 13 days. He then served as prime minister when BJP came to power again in 1998. He held the position till 2004, becoming the first leader outside of the Congress to complete a full term as prime minister.

India conducted five nuclear tests in Pokhran in 1998 and fought the Kargil War with Pakistan under Vajpayee's leadership, .

Vajpayee also served as the Minister of External Affairs in the Morarji Desai government elected in 1977, right after the emergency.

Born on 25 December, 1924 in Gwalior, Vajpayee's first brush with politics was during the Quit India Movement in 1942.