Article 14

More than 1.1 million women in India live with HIV. Many were infected by husbands who concealed their illness, extramarital relationships or drug use. For women facing domestic violence, abandonment and stigma, medicines can treat the virus, but not the abuse, secrecy and isolation that often follow.

As Bollywood's propaganda films move from inventing conspiracies to minimising documented state violence, Chauhaan recasts one of Kashmir's most controversial crowd-control weapons-the pellet gun or pump-action shotgun-as a symbol of heroism, overlooking the evidence of its human cost: thousands wounded and about 1,000 blinded.

A revenue officer, two school teachers, a university professor, a daily wager, and a doctor are among around 90 Kashmir government employees dismissed since 2021-according to media reports-under an obscure and little-used Constitutional provision that allows termination without a departmental inquiry on security grounds. They describe lost incomes, shattered futures, social stigma and mounting debt.

India's legal conversation is conducted in English. The media watches the Supreme Court, reads the High Courts and pays the trial courts almost no attention. Yet for most Indians, and for nearly all poor and marginalised ones, the trial court is the justice system where the most consequential justice is delivered in Indian languages, which we happen to miss.

Agricultural labourers now account for more farm-sector suicides in India than farmers. Reporting from Maharashtra's suicide belt shows how shrinking landholdings, falling farm incomes, debt and climate shocks are pushing small farmers into wage labour-and to give up on life.

Nearly two decades after farmers in Odisha surrendered fertile farmland for a thermal power plant that never materialised, the land has resurfaced as the site of a Rs 35,000-crore steel project between an Indian and a South Korean company.

No cash or narcotics recovered from the accused, inadmissible self-incriminating statements to the police, no phone records or corroborative evidence linked to terrorism. Still, the Indian State built a narco-terrorism case against a Kashmiri man and kept him jailed for nearly six years before the Supreme Court granted bail.

Article 14 addresses threats to and failures of justice and deficiencies in the legal system, tracks successes that can be built upon and discerns trends and patterns that require to be brought to the widest public attention.

Journalist Prabir Purkayastha reflects on solidarity, uncertainty and the State's power after the Delhi High Court quashed a case against NewsClick, calling it a "gross abuse of process" and "malafide" proceeding. Comparing his two stints in prison, he said the Emergency felt more uncertain because courts were effectively shut, while today's UAPA regime allows people to spend years in jail before trial.