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On Thursday, assembly election results will be announced in five states. Our reporters travelled to three of them.

Uttar Pradesh, as you might know, has as many people as the fifth-most-populous country in the world. Given its daunting size, we decided to pick depth over breadth. In a deep dive series reported over five months, Arunabh Saikia tracked five districts in different regions of the state. 

Each of the districts had defied historical trends in 2017 to vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party. Five years later, Saikia spoke to hundreds of voters to find out whether they were sticking with the party – or voting for change. Read his insightful dispatches here.

Punjab, from all accounts, is experiencing a profound weariness with politics. The farmers’ movement wrested an important victory from the Modi government, but attempts by farmer leaders to prop up their own political party and candidates haven’t quite worked, Safwat Zargar found. He also profiled chief minister Charanjit Singh Channi, who is leading the Congress’ campaign for re-election, and his main opponent, Bhagwant Mann of the Aam Aadmi Party, both of whom have projected themselves as the face of change, one perhaps more convincingly than the other.

Manipur has had a turbulent election, with an unusual spate of political violence. As Rokibuz Zaman reports, part of the churn may be traced to the BJP’s inability to accommodate all those who defected from other political parties to join it in 2017, when it won elections in the state for the first time. Zaman also wrote about why barely two months after killings in neighbouring Nagaland revived demands for the withdrawal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the issue has barely featured in the election campaign.

Apart from our election coverage, do also read a series of chilling reports by Aishwarya Iyer from North East Delhi. In February 2020, communal violence here had left 53 people dead, a majority of them Muslims. Two years later, Muslims are on the edge, as members of the BJP-RSS, who are accused of murder and rioting, stare down from posters, vying to be elected as municipal leaders. In conversations with Iyer, many of these riot-accused also boasted of their links with the police. 

Finally, the Ukraine war hit close to home as thousands of Indian medical students enrolled in universities there found themselves stuck in places being shelled by Russian forces. Tabassum Barnagarwala followed the journey of a 19-year-old Indian student, who spent days in an underground metro station, walked over 40 km in a single day, went without food, before he was bailed out – not by the Modi government – but by his home state, Odisha.

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Supriya Sharma
Executive Editor, Scroll.in