It was hard to watch. In a now-deleted Instagram reel, American influencer Sam Jones is filmed picking up a young wombat, separating it from its mother, and running with it back to the car for a pose.

A poster restricting celebrations with colours at an iconic artisan fair in Shantiniketan, the abode of Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore about 180 km from Kolkata, has sparked a political ...