India's space agency said it lost touch Saturday with its Vikram lunar lander as it made its final approach to moon's south pole to deploy a rover to search for signs of water.

The fate of the lander — whether it crashed or landed — wasn't immediately known. A successful landing would have made India just the fourth country to land a vessel on the lunar surface, and only the third nation to operate a robotic rover there.

After living in India all his life, father-of-two Gokul Chandra Saha woke up last weekend to learn he was among almost two million people in the religiously diverse state of Assam that the government had suddenly deemed to be foreigners.

Almost two million people in northeast India were left facing statelessness on Saturday after the state of Assam published a citizenship list aimed at weeding out "foreign infiltrators", in a process the central government wants to replicate nationwide.

India and Pakistan exchanged "heavy" cross-border fire on Saturday, after New Delhi's move to strip the restive Kashmir region of its autonomy prompted a rare meeting of the UN Security Council.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi defended his government's controversial measure to strip the disputed Kashmir region of its statehood and special constitutional provisions in an Independence Day speech Thursday, as about 4 million Kashmiris stayed indoors for the 11th day of an unprecedented security lockdown and communications blackout.

In his live address from the capital's Mughal-era Red Fort, Modi said that Kashmir's previous status — some political autonomy and a ban on outsiders buying land and taking public sector jobs in the Muslim-majority Himalayan region — had fueled a movement for separatism and was unjust for Kashmiri women, because the law said that they lost their inheritance rights if marrying a person from outside the region.

India issued a fresh flood alert Wednesday for parts of the southern state of Kerala, as the nationwide death toll from the annual monsoon deluge rose to at least 244.

Restrictions on freedom of movement in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir will be eased after Independence Day on Thursday, the state governor has said, although phone lines and the internet will remain cut off.

Satya Pal Malik told Wednesday's Times of India that communications will stay blocked as India's government relaxes its clampdown since it stripped the region of its autonomy in early August.

The death toll from India's monsoon floods climbed to 202 on Tuesday as heavy rainfall kept pounding coastal regions in the west and south.

Armed soldiers stand in front of barbed wire in Indian Kashmir's near-silent summer capital of Srinagar during a massive security lockdown imposed on the restive region by the Hindu nationalist government.

Authorities in Indian-administered Kashmir placed large parts of the disputed region under lockdown early Monday amid a massive troop buildup by India, which traded accusations of clashes with Pakistan at the de facto border.