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India's organised crime landscape is characterised by multi-domain criminal syndicates operating at the intersection of land, real estate, construction, and political patronage in major metropolitan areas; trafficking networks (human, drug, and wildlife) operating transnationally; and the increasingly important digital-criminal complex centred on fraud operations.  The Mumbai underworld — historically associated with figures including Dawood Ibrahim (D Company, currently believed in Pakistan), Chhota Shakeel, and successor networks — remains a reference point in organised crime discourse; its contemporary influence on Mumbai's film industry (extortion), real estate (land acquisition), and contract killings is documented but significantly diminished from its 1990s peak following sustained police and ED pressure.  Representational Image: How India Handles Organised Crime More significant in the current period are land-based syndicates operating in urban periphery areas of D...

India records approximately 1,700 deaths in custody annually (NCRB data) across police custody and judicial custody (prison); this figure, while itself alarming, is widely believed to be an undercount — deaths that occur shortly after release from custody, deaths attributed to "illness" without adequate investigation, and deaths in informal detention are not systematically captured.  The DK Basu v. State of West Bengal (1996) Supreme Court guidelines — now incorporated into the BNSS — established the foundational legal framework for arrest and custody procedure: police officers must wear visible identification badges; a memo of arrest must be prepared and witnessed by a family member or local respectable person; the time and place of arrest must be communicated to a nominated person within 8–12 hours; the arrested person must be subjected to medical examination every 48 hours; and CCTV installation in all police stations and lockups was directed by the NHRC in 2021. Represent...

India's primary drug law is the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (NDPS Act) — a comprehensive statute criminalising production, manufacture, possession, sale, purchase, transport, and consumption of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances.  The NDPS Act is notable for: mandatory minimum sentences (no judicial discretion below the minimum for commercial quantities); extremely stringent bail provisions that reverse the normal presumption of innocence (Section 37 NDPS: bail requires the court to be satisfied that there are "reasonable grounds for believing that the accused is not guilty" — an almost impossible standard before trial); and sentence structures ranging from small quantity penalties to life imprisonment for large commercial quantities.  Representational Image: How India Polices Drug Crime The NDPS Act's bail provisions have been characterised as among India's most severe — more restrictive than UAPA in some applications — producing ...

Cybercrime is India's fastest-growing crime category: NCRB 2023 recorded 31.2% growth to approximately 86,000 cases; NCRB 2024 recorded a further 17% rise to 1.01 lakh (101,000) cases — representing only the tip of an iceberg since massive under-reporting characterises cybercrime.  The India Cyber Threat Report 2025 by DSCI documented 369 million malware detections across 8.44 million endpoints, averaging 702 potential attacks per minute on India's digital infrastructure. The most significant new category in 2024 was the "Digital Arrest" scam — where criminals impersonating CBI, Customs, or police officers conduct video calls threatening immediate arrest and extort victims into transferring their life savings; the PM had to address this specifically in his Mann Ki Baat broadcast, indicating its scale and social impact. Representational Graphic: How India's Cybercrime Ecosystem Works India's cybercrime landscape divides into two distinct categories. The first i...

Foreign nationals in India are subject to Indian criminal law in the same way as Indian citizens — they can be arrested, charged, tried, and imprisoned under Indian criminal law for offences committed on Indian territory.  However, foreigners have specific additional rights under international law and Indian domestic law that apply specifically to non-citizen detainees. The most important is consular access: the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (1963), to which India is a party, requires that when a foreign national is arrested, the arresting authorities must "without delay" inform the person of their right to have their consulate notified; if the person requests it, the consulate must be notified promptly. In practice — as documented by the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) — only 5.7% of foreign prisoner cases involved actual consular access (2018 data); the gap between legal entitlement and administrative reality is wide. Representational Graphic: What Hap...

How the termination of This Country Called Us is categorically different from Penguin's withdrawal of Joe Sacco's book — and what it reveals about the Indian publishing industry's deepest ethical crisis. First Person:  Saket Suman When Penguin India refused to distribute Joe Sacco's The Once and Future Riot — a 135-page graphic investigation of the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots that killed at least sixty people and displaced over sixty thousand, mostly Muslim — the Indian literary world reacted with appropriate alarm. Arundhati Roy called it "a terrible loss to Indian readers." The Wire reported it. The Print published Sacco's own account of what he was asked to remove. He refused. Penguin India walked away. Tharoor and Guha shouted condemnations.  Representational Image: Home Minister Amit Shah at a Rupa book launch.   The story was covered. The author was heard. The book is available through parallel channels — imported from the UK by independent South Delh...