Daily Times Editorials 5th September 2026

Unsafe India

India has spent the better part of eight decades investing political capital in a particular distinction: Pakistan, it told the world, was born in religion while India was anchored in citizenship. The claim survived wars, pogroms, insurgencies, communal riots and constitutional emergencies because New Delhi could still invoke the architecture of a secular republic. That architecture now looks increasingly occupied by another idea.

The allegations made by journalists Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan deserve to be read against that larger retreat, according to which Delhi Police detained and assaulted them while they were covering a September 3 event in Saket attended by Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. Shaheen Khan alleges that police violence intensified after officers learnt they were Muslim.

Injuries visible after the incident, the seriousness of the journalists’ account and the intervention of several Indian press organisations demand an inquiry outside the chain of command now defending itself. CCTV footage should be secured and released. Officers present should be identified. Anything less will look like institutional self-exoneration.Send Money Overseas

What gives the episode its political charge is the alleged invocation of Muslim identity. India has crossed enough thresholds under Narendra Modi for such an allegation no longer to sound implausible. The language of majoritarian politics has travelled steadily outwards: from RSS doctrine into BJP campaigning; from campaigning into legislation and from legislation into administrative practice. Citizenship, conversion, cattle, mosques, waqf property and even neighbourhoods have been drawn into a vocabulary in which Muslims are repeatedly required to prove that they belong.Read Political News

The deterioration is measurable. Reporters Without Borders places India at 157 out of 180 countries in its 2026 press-freedom ranking. USCIRF has only recently warned of worsening religious-freedom conditions and has linked discriminatory policies to the political ascendancy of Hindutva.

New Delhi’s customary response is to point towards Pakistan. That reflex is becoming less persuasive. Pakistan has grave unfinished business on minority protection, but it also has reserved minority representation, a five per cent federal jobs quota, the Hindu Marriage Act, constitutional guarantees of religious practice and initiatives ranging from Kartarpur to the restoration of non-Muslim religious heritage.

Even if Amit Shah may not have personally directed the alleged assault, the onus lies heavily on him to get to the bottom of the incident and react to these allegations with proof. Release the footage. Establish what happened. Punish those responsible if the allegations are proved.

A republic that once advertised secularism as its great civilisational answer should understand the danger when a citizen’s name begins to carry the weight of suspicion. *

Dengue Season

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has entered September with its sharpest weekly rise in dengue cases in 34 weeks. Ninety-eight infections were confirmed over the past week, up from 87, taking this year’s tally to 581. There is still some comfort in comparison with last year, when more than 1,000 cases and four deaths had been recorded by this time, whereas no dengue fatality has been reported so far. The provincial government’s early start to its Dengue Action Plan appears to have helped. The problem is that the difficult part of the season has only just begun.

Officials expect high transmission to continue until the end of October. Peshawar has reported 220 cases and Kohat 209. Together, two districts account for almost three-quarters of the provincial caseload.

These remain manageable numbers, and unusually clear coordinates for intervention. If they develop into a much larger outbreak over the next several weeks, the administration will struggle to argue that it did not know where to look.

There has certainly been no shortage of activity. More than 211,000 houses and 779,000 water containers have been inspected; larvae found in 529 houses and 934 containers were destroyed, while 286 outdoor positive sites were sprayed. Such exercises matter most, however, when surveillance directs teams towards the households and neighbourhoods where transmission is actually occurring. Inspections matter most when surveillance directs teams towards the households and neighbourhoods where infections are actually occurring.

Here, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s response runs into an embarrassing administrative failure. Medical Teaching Institutions in Peshawar continue to withhold complete lists of dengue patients despite repeated requests from the health department. This complaint has been surfacing for months.

In a province where Peshawar has braved dengue for years, it is extraordinary that institutions belonging to the same public-health universe still cannot reliably exchange such elementary information. The outbreak in Kohat makes the wider governance problem equally clear. Authorities have ordered the levelling of demolished refugee-camp sites where recent rains left pools of stagnant water in ditches, identified as possible mosquito-breeding grounds. The relevant issue is the condition in which the land was left behind. Mosquitoes are indifferent to administrative jurisdictions, and dengue prevention cannot be handed to doctors after failures of drainage, sanitation and land management have already created breeding sites.

That deserves particular attention when the development programme allocates billions to urban development, drinking water and sanitation.

Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has enough nightmares from 2017, when its worst dengue outbreak killed 70 people and sent around 50,000 to hospitals, to afford complacency now.

While the government has kept the toll lower and deserves credit for doing so, it should now use that advantage to settle the coordination failures that have survived every previous dengue season. *