A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

Snapshot of the day

June 19, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

Iran is sending its petroleum minister to Delhi for next week’s BRICS National Security Advisers’ meeting as Tehran moves to sign up India as a customer for its oil now that the US-Iran peace deal includes an American commitment to waive sanctions on Iranian energy exports. The Modi government stopped buying oil from Iran as soon as Washington imposed unilateral sanctions.

The Trinamool Congress has submitted 20 separate petitions to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla seeking the disqualification of the 20 party MPs who have defected to the BJP-led NDA, reports Preetha Nair. The 20 MPs have merged with a little-known outfit, the Nationalist Citizens Party of India. “The Tenth Schedule [of the Constitution] clearly states that voluntarily giving up membership of one’s political party is a ground for disqualification,” said TMC leader Abhishek Banerjee. “Even if 28 or 29 MPs of a parliamentary party leave together, it does not amount to a merger under the Constitution,” he added.

Condemning the defection of six of his MPs to the NDA, Uddhav Thackeray offered to resign as leader of his faction of the Shiv Sena. "I would be happy if someone from the party ranks becomes the next Shiv Sena president, but I will not let it pass on in the hands of thieves," he told a meeting of party cadres today. “The country is moving towards ‘one party, no election’,” he said, mocking the BJP’s slogan, ‘One nation, one election’.

Cross-voting cost the Congress a Rajya Sabha seat from Jharkhand with the NDA-based businessman, Parimal Nathwani, who is from the Reliance group, getting elected. “With this, the BJP-led NDA is cruising towards the two-third mark of 163 in a House of 243,” reports Shemin Joy.

Reports have claimed that at least 11 NEET-UG aspirants have allegedly died by suicide in the run-up to the re-test scheduled for Sunday, intensifying anger over the handling of exam-related controversies and student distress. Against this backdrop, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke has written to Prime Minister Modi demanding Rs 1 crore compensation for affected families and renewed his call for the removal of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The Gen-Z led-group is also set to protest at Jantar Mantar on June 20 –  permission has been given by the Delhi Police – against the government for failing to respond to mounting distress linked to the paper leak crisis. Speaking from Maharashtra, Dipke cited a NEET-UG aspirant’s alleged death by suicide and claimed the family received no official outreach, contrasting their suffering with the ruling establishment’s unstated policy of “using money to procure MLAs and MPs.”

The government's decision to entirely block the messaging app Telegram in India until the day after the NEET-UG retest in order to prevent another leak of the exam was legally justified, the Delhi high court has ruled. Justice Tejas Karia held that the government's move to ban the app itself was the least restrictive measure possible – a requirement laid by the Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin (2020) – to achieve its objectives in this case because, according to the IT ministry, Telegram's features for preventing leaks are insufficient. The judge also said that the government can ban an entire app – as opposed to specific messages or channels – under section 69(A) of the IT Act as an emergency measure.

The Supreme Court today held that the right to walk on secured footpaths is a fundamental right and urged the government to bring a law that declares this right and recognises the duty of municipal authorities and local bodies to build, demarcate, and maintain necessary pedestrian infrastructure.

The West Bengal government was forced to clarify on Friday that participation in the International Yoga Day celebrations scheduled for June 21 in Kolkata – which the PM is expected to attend – is voluntary and not mandatory for state government employees. The clarification came after the Calcutta High Court disposed of a petition challenging an alleged directive that made attendance compulsory, with the state government informing the court that the communication was merely an appeal and not an enforceable order.

Meanwhile, the spectacle continues …

Confidence in robust defence preparedness takes on a different texture when ageing fleets are kept airborne through cannibalisation. India is set to receive nine retired British Jaguars for spares and sub-assemblies, as the world’s last remaining Jaguar fleet – already notorious for requiring around 20 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight – to sustain its six remaining squadrons of the Cold War-era fighter even beyond the 2030s.

Elsewhere in the constitutional courts of New India, the Madras high court has granted an interim injunction restraining a church official from constructing a church on public land in Coimbatore. The reason is that there is a Mariamman temple close by and some Hindus have opposed the church’s construction since 2011. Thus spoke Justices G.R. Swaminathan and V. Lakshminarayanan: “When Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority and they vigorously oppose the construction of a church in the immediate vicinity of the temple, then the authority must not casually brush the objection aside.” In the same breath the bench claimed that “we should not be understood as holding that if there is opposition, the state must submit to it”.

Coempt Edu Teck, the firm that made the on-screen marking system that the CBSE hastily rolled out for its class 12 board exams this year, has responded to the scrutiny surrounding its platform. Apart from denying allegations that the CBSE altered its tender requirements to favour it, Coempt also noted that almost 95% of students who requested soft copies of their marked answer papers had received them. What happened to the remaining 5% – or around 20,000 students – is unclear, reports Sanjay Maurya.

Speaking of the CBSE, the Supreme Court yesterday declined to give interim relief in a petition challenging the board’s new and contentious three-language policy for students of classes 9 and 10 (and above). Two of these three languages must be of Indian origin, so that necessarily means English and two other Indian languages. In much of north India the third language will likely default to Sanskrit, while in the south it could be Hindi, which was bound to stoke controversy.

Tomato, onion and potato (among other) prices have increased in large swathes of the country – with tomatoes becoming almost twice as expensive at Rs 53 per kilo in Delhi compared to last month – but farmers have been compelled to sell their produce at very low prices, the Samyukta Kisan Morcha has flagged. “Who is gaining from this increase … the corporate houses in the retail trade and big traders are gaining,” it said.

Among those in the Sangh parivar who have responded to Karnataka home minister Priyank Kharge’s call for the RSS to register itself is the BJP’s MP for Bijapur (Vijayapura) Ramesh Jigajinagi. “Why does a Dalit person need to get involved with the RSS?” he asked at a press conference. He also said that “no one who has messed with the RSS has ever survived”. Jigajinagi, who is Dalit himself, has previously criticised the BJP, saying it does not give space for Dalit leaders to grow. The cat is indeed out of the bag.

Ten airports or terminals in one state, six opened in a single day in early 2024 – PM Modi’s much-touted airport-building frenzy, as the Economist notes, is already seeing several facilities in decline within a year, looking less like planning and more like political ribbon-cutting on overdrive. “The fact that elections followed within a month was no doubt just one of those strange cosmic coincidences,” notes the British magazine. “Airports in places that most Indians could not find on a map either never saw a single flight or hosted a handful and then faded away. It was always an act of extreme optimism to think Saharanpur, an overgrown town of mostly poor people, could support an airport. Modi’s critics seized on the failures as evidence of the government’s obsession with vote-winning optics over governing substance.”

Kerala is cited in the UN Special Rapporteur’s Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth as an example of achieving low infant mortality and advancing universal healthcare “despite decades of relative poverty.”

Amit Shah clears plan to equip police with portable fingerprint scanners

The police in India will soon be equipped with portable fingerprint scanners linked to a national database of 1.3 crore criminal suspects and convicts, “letting them stop individuals anywhere, even on the streets, to collect thumb impressions and instantly check for any pending criminal records,” repors Vijaita Singh in The Hindu. While portable fingerprint scanners have been introduced in the UK, the police need to have probable cause in order to check the biometrics of anyone on the street. If this system is operationalised in India, the legality of the police compelling an ordinary person – not under arrest and not reasonably suspected of a crime – to provide their fingerprint on demand is bound to be challenged in court.

Palestine seeks urgent Indian aid, says scale of health crisis ‘alarming’

The Embassy of Palestine in India has urged New Delhi and the international community to ensure the uninterrupted delivery of humanitarian and medical assistance to Palestinians, warning of a “catastrophic collapse” in the healthcare crisis in Gaza and the occupied West Bank as a result of the ongoing Israeli military offensive that has claimed 1,000 lives despite a ceasefire.

At a press conference yesterday, Palestinian Ambassador to India Abdullah M.A. Abushawesh described the situation in Gaza as dire. Addressing the Indian public and government, he asked, “If not India and the Indian people, then who? And if not now, then when?” arguing that timely aid could save thousands of Palestinian lives.

Anthropic CEO says Modi’s AI Summit was ‘disorganised’, a hollow PR exercise

Anthropic head Dario Amodei has called India’s recent AI summit “extremely disorganised.” In an interview with Bloomberg’s Emily Chang, Amodei also spoke of the moment on stage at the New Delhi event when he and his former colleague at OpenAI, Sam Altman, were forced to be in some proximity:

Emily Chang: There was a moment at India’s AI Summit where you and Sam Altman refused to hold hands on stage. What happened there?

Dario Amodei: What happened is that the summit was extremely disorganised. We all came up at the last minute and they like changed the order in which we were standing and then, like, they took a picture of us and then they ordered us all to, like, hold hands. You know, if you’ve ever been to one of these summits – I am not saying anything bad about India in particular – but like, all of these kinds of international type summits that have, like, heads of state are, like, super disorganised.

Emily Chang: Okay, but everyone else held hands. Come on.

Dario Amodei: I, I, look, I don’t know what to tell you. Okay? There was like, you know, Narendra Modi up there suddenly telling everyone to, like, telling everyone to hold hands.

Amodei’s remark has been shared by several Congress leaders among them Abhishek Singhvi who said on X that the summit was for “Artificial Image Management”.

The Long Cable

Until Everyone Is Safe? India’s Refugee Regime Says Otherwise

Kaveri and Jyoti Singh

Disorder, said Foucault, is often a manifestation of underlying structure. India’s lack of a refugee policy is a good example of this. The absence of a refugee law is not the product of legislative oversight but the means by which the state maintains arbitrariness towards various refugee groups.

The United Nation High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) theme for World Refugee Day 2026, Until Everyone Is Safe asserts that safety is indivisible. It is a claim that sounds philosophical until you place it against India’s non-accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention. For a country born out of partition, an event that triggered one of the largest mass migrations in human history; this trajectory is particularly significant. Surrounded on nearly every side by conflict-affected, refugee-generating countries and territories such as Myanmar, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet etc. India’s evolving approach to refuge, citizenship and belonging deserves far greater analysis than it has so far received.

B.S. Chimni’s calls it strategic ambiguity: By declining to codify refugee protection in domestic law, the state has preserved maximum flexibility, extending protection when it is in alignment with its foreign policy and withholding when it is not. The consequences have been visible across decades. Tibetan refugees have been hosted in structured settlements; geopolitical assets carefully managed to neither fully antagonise China nor surrender the leverage they provide. Tamil Sri Lankan refugees were received across Tamil Nadu in a gesture that resonated with ethnic solidarity and regional politics. Afghan Sikh and Hindu refugees were evacuated to safety as well; neatly aligned with India’s domestic and foreign politics optics. India’s approach to humanitarian protection is openly driven by foreign policy and domestic political calculations.

Recent legislative developments in India suggest a shift from this earlier model of strategic flexibility toward a more formalised regulatory framework, codifying the prevailing arbitrariness. The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 (CAA) and the Immigration and Foreigners Act 2025 together mark a decisive departure from strategic ambiguity toward a more structured regime of citizenship and migration governance through constitutional legitimacy. This is what scholars of democratic backsliding have begun to call populist constitutionalism: the deployment of legal and constitutional instruments by elected governments to redefine who belongs, who deserves protection, and who can be legitimately excluded, all within the formal bounds of democratic procedure.

The reasoning behind the CAA is quite simple, although the significance it carries is contentious. The law allows for the expeditious conferment of citizenship on some minority religious groups from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan but does not include Muslims in its scope. Through this, religion is brought out explicitly as a criterion in the citizenship framework, marking a notable departure from the previous approaches that were not formally structured around explicit religious identity. This distinction has prompted much discussion in terms of its constitutional, political, and humanitarian ramifications. Critics argue that the Act deviates from India’s usual practice in matters of refugee law, which takes into consideration only individual cases, as opposed to the inclusion of religion in this new Act as a determinative factor that affects one’s right to citizenship. The shift is widely read by scholars as reflecting the ideological framework of contemporary Hindutva politics, in which belonging is increasingly understood through religious and civilisational classifications. As Jayalakshmi Itla Ragiri argues, immigration law functions as an infrastructure of sorting that decides whose movement is travel and whose is invasion or ‘infiltration’, whose suffering counts and whose does not. The CAA institutionalises precisely such a logic, now embedded in Indian statute.

The Immigration and Foreigners Act 2025 consolidates this architecture further. By swapping fragmented legislation with an integrated approach that enhances state power of detaining, deporting and classifying individuals, it reduces the room for manoeuvre that was possible through discretionary administrative powers. Considered collectively, these laws may be seen as representing a major change in the law regulating immigration and citizenship, with substantial repercussions for refugee rights and the possibility of gaining legal status.

The consequences of this approach is perhaps clearly visible through India’s treatment of the Rohingyas. Fleeing genocide and statelessness in neighbouring Myanmar, Rohingya refugees in India continue to endure legally precarious conditions governed by surveillance, biometric registration and the constant risk of detention and deportation, caught between humanitarian claims for protection and the state’s concerns over security, migration and border governance.

During the Supreme Court hearing of a case related to Rohingya deportation in 2025, the Union government maintained that Rohingyas are governed by India’s existing legal regime for foreigners due to India’s non-accession to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Consequently, the Supreme Court viewed their case within the purview of the Foreigners Act, leaving the door open to their detention or deportation. Such developments have renewed discussions about the applicability of the principles of humanitarian protection like non-refoulement in the absence of a proper refugee protection regime. The absence of an asylum law in India means that such questions continue to be answered through the broader immigration and foreigners’ legislations. An Asylum Bill was introduced in Parliament in 2015 and again in 2021, but was never passed..

According to the International Rescue Committee, 118 million people remain forcibly displaced worldwide, a figure that has doubled over the past decade. Resettlement is at its lowest since 2011. Asylum backlogs have grown over the years. Nearly 70% of refugees are hosted not in wealthy nations but in low and middle-income countries, many of them India’s neighbours. The global architecture of protection is under strain everywhere. The evolving laws in India raise some pertinent issues concerning the provisions of protection and the need for balance between refugee management and considerations of sovereignty, security and citizenship.

The UNHCR theme says Until Everyone Is Safe. However, the trend in recent legislative measures indicates that there is an increasing emphasis on legislative categorisation of who qualifies as a refugee and who is excluded from this category, which is based on religion, nationality or political interest. The implications of this question extend far beyond refugees and asylum seekers, shaping the contours of protection, humanitarianism, citizenship, and belonging in India in the years ahead.

Kaveri is an assistant Professor at Azim Premji Universit. Jyoti Singh is an advocate based in Delhi.

Reportedly

India’s sense of nationhood is so fragile, per the Maharashtra police, that the idea of a Pakistani song being danced to at a school was enough to invoke the new sedition law (i.e. section 152 of the BNS, which deals with acts endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India), against two persons along with other provisions pertaining to promoting enmity and spreading misinformation affecting national integration. The school’s principal has said that the song was actually Turkish and that they never showed the photograph of someone being deemed as ‘Pakistani extremist Mumtaz Qadri’. Do our jails have enough room for everyone who’s enjoyed ‘Pasoori’ or a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song?

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

Read Aakar Patel’s incisive analysis of how India’s media has lost both its independence and its financial strength under PM Modi. Backed by hard numbers, he shows how the industry has shrunk dramatically – yet much of the mainstream media continues to behave as if nothing has changed.

Prime number: 84 days, but who’s counting

A septuagenarian lawyer approached the Supreme Court to complain that his appeal for inclusion into the West Bengal voter rolls has been pending from March 27, i.e. for 84 days now, after he was left out citing ‘logical discrepancies’ in his data during the state SIR even though he has practiced in the local court for over 50 years. The bench asked the relevant appellate tribunal to hear his case out of turn. That’s anyway too little too late for the lawyer, who has missed voting in the assembly elections – as did 27 lakh others like him – for the unprecedented reason that there was not enough time for the tribunals to hear their appeals. Last month the Indian Express‘s Damini Nath had reported that the tribunal in this lawyer’s district of Murshidabad had disposed of only 100 cases as of the 14th.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Dropping ‘Indo-Pacific’ clarifies the Pentagon’s China strategy, writes Ken Moriyasu. “By removing ‘Indo’ from the name of its largest command, US has told India, China, its allies and Pakistan exactly where they stand.”

• Modi and Trump’s meeting in Evian was less about warmth than utility, says Manoj Joshi. The two sides have important business to conclude with each other but the relationship is clearly on a “more transactional and perhaps difficult plane” than before.

• “High-stakes centralised exams like NEET are driven by a coaching-market economy that creates powerful economic incentives for malpractice” and in such a context more centralisation simply will not help, Arun Kumar P.K. argues. Instead, a more federal model may have the key. “Alternatives like multiple pathways, state autonomy [and] portfolio-based admissions are not untested idealism, they are the norm in most countries that produce competent doctors,” he points out.

• Jawhar Sircar, who resigned from the Trinamool Congress and as Rajya Sabha MP on conscientious grounds two years ago, appeals to the party’s rebels both in Bengal and in parliament to resign and then seek re-election without the taint of defection. And as for the BJP, he writes:

“People are watching as the BJP relishes eating an infected TMC with a knife and fork and some tomato sauce on the side. They pray that they do not suffer indigestion or food poisoning. After all, not every body is Neelkantha Mahadev, the god who could swallow poison without any harm.”

• The recent U.S.-mandated shutdown of access to Anthropic’s advanced AI models for non-Americans was a warning about the dangers of technological dependence, writes Rohit Kumar. Countries and companies that rely on foreign AI platforms can suddenly find themselves cut off by geopolitical decisions beyond their control. With AI becoming strategic infrastructure, India must invest in domestic capabilities, compute infrastructure, legal safeguards and sovereign technological capacity rather than assuming continued access to American AI systems.

Listen up

Rathin Roy dives deeper into his argument – which he presented in Wednesday’s Economic Times – that India’s growth is accumulating among the rich while the state pays for the welfare of the poor, “leaving the vast majority of the middle class in a state of income/consumption stagnation”. Tune in to his conversation with M.K. Venu.

Watch out

BBC follows the life of Shanti Rajput, a construction worker in Lucknow – a glimpse into the realities faced by millions of women labourers in the country.

Over and out

On history and its rather recurring buffoonery.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you tomorrow, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.

Snapshot of the day

June 18, 2026

Anirudh S.K.

Early today US President Donald Trump put his signature on a hard copy of the ‘Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding’ in Versailles, as did Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in Tehran – later, in the interim agreement’s namesake city, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif signed it as mediator and guarantor. With that, Iran is to immediately begin rolling back its blistering, retaliatory closure of the Strait of Hormuz and Washington is to both lift its blockade of Iranian ports and issue sanctions waivers for the export of Iranian energy. Iran and Oman are also to hold talks towards defining the “future administration” of the Hormuz strait.

Right off the bat the MoU declares that the two sides and their allies will permanently end their military operations, although this is subject to confirmation through a final deal they’ve agreed to hammer out in two months, by which time they are to reach a consensus on the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. The interim agreement’s clauses on Washington lifting all sanctions on Iran and releasing frozen assets too seem linked to progress on the nuclear front. The termination of military operations clause explicitly refers to Lebanon – as demanded by Tehran – whose territorial integrity and sovereignty the two sides are to ensure. But Israel has continued to hit Lebanon and just today Israeli airstrikes in the country’s south killed three people per local media.

Overall thousands of people have been slain by the US-Israeli war on Iran, including several Indian nationals, and given that the war hasn’t achieved America’s (shifting) objectives the following question, as Edward Luce puts it, will

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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

Snapshot of the day

June 17, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

Narendra Modi and Donald Trump met each other today on the sidelines of the G7 summit at Evian, France and appeared briefly before reporters. The interaction confirmed the US President’s reputation for dishing out bluster, flattery and insensitivity, while refusing to concede any ground on issues of concern to India. Modi, too, lived up to form. He seemed happy with the over-the-top praise Trump heaped on him and failed to directly raise the illegal American attack on civilian ships in international water near the Hormuz Strait that killed three Indian sailors. Worse, he sat silently as Trump made light of the crime:

In his brief opening remarks, this is all that Modi had to say about the sailors killed by the US military, i.e. nothing:

“India has consistently emphasized the importance of ensuring freedom of navigation, and we should work together and place a particular emphasis on that. Mr. President, you are aware that across the world, Indian seafarers and hundreds of thousands are working and performing their duties across global maritime trade routes, including the Strait of Hormuz, and their safety is of utmost importance to us. Mr. President, you made tremendous efforts towards reaching this understanding and this agreement, and I’m confident that the issue of seafarers will receive the highest priority during the implementation of this agreement.”

The interaction was notable on other counts. In his opening remarks, Trump said that Modi “is building a lot in the United States. He’s spending a lot of money in the United States, and we appreciate that job.” Asked about the fate of trade negotiations with India, Trump’s praise for Modi echoed his usual hyperbole:

“He’s the most beautiful-looking man. He looks so nice. He’s like an angel. But actually, he’s as tough as – he’s a killer. I don’t want to – he’s a killer. He’s as tough as they come. But he looks so good. So he gets you by surprise. But there’s few people like this. People say, he’s such a nice man. I say, he’s very tough. He’s a tough trader. And he loves the Indian people. But he also loves the U.S. We had Howdy Modi in Houston, remember?”

Modi too sought to flatter Trump – by praising him for his “efforts towards restoration of peace and stability in West Asia”. Not only was this praise misplaced – Trump was the person who actually disrupted peace and stability in West Asia in the first place by attacking Iran. – it also underlined the fact that India under Modi has no independent vision for the region. When an Indian reporter asked Trump whether he expects India to play any role in West Asia, the US President camouflaged his answer with flattery:

“Yeah, I do. I do. I think India plays a big role in everything. As long as he’s the leader, India is going to play a big role.”

To be clear, the ‘big role’ Trump has in mind is for India to sit on the sidelines and for Modi to go along with whatever the US does.

So central is Modi to Trump’s sidelining of a country that once took pride in the independence of its foreign policy that he even cracked a tasteless joke about this:

On the eve of the G7 meeting, Washington announced that it was dropping the prefix ‘Indo’ from its military’s Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) and reverting to PACOM (Pacific Command), reversing a 2018 decision that was (erronerously) seen in New Delhi as affirming India’s burgeoning role in America’s strategic ambitions in Asia and the Indian Ocean region. The move also comes amid the Trump administration’s greater engagement with China – Trump actually spoke of G2 in Modi’s presence today – and the continuing delay in the Quad leaders’ summit.

When viewed in conjunction with a number of other signals over these 16 months, former foreign secretary and ambassador to Washington Nirupama Menon Rao notes, the issue at hand has become “whether Washington still sees India as a co-architect of regional order or simply as one useful actor among many in advancing American objectives”.

A day before Telegram moved the Delhi high court to challenge the Union government’s decision to temporarily restrict access to the messaging platform in India till June 22, its CEO Pavel Durov alleged that Reliance Group, in which Meta holds a partial stake, and WhatsApp may have lobbied to

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Snapshot of the day

June 16, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

The Union government has temporarily blocked the Telegram app ahead of the NEET-UG re-examination scheduled on June 21 in a purported effort to curb paper leaks through the app amidst a nation-wide protest movement which has been demanding the resignation of the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has issued notifications under Section 69 A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 and will also issue a direction requiring Telegram to disable its message-editing feature in India till June 30.

The Internet Freedom Foundation has called the shutting down of Telegram “a band aid solution” and a “disproportionate answer to exam fraud.” Calling on the Modi government to publish the Meity order with reasons – as the order itself had not been published and it was National Testing Agency’s response that alerted journalists to the Telegram block – the IFF notes that the order is anti-student.

The other measures implemented by the Modi government to ensure a NEET exam without leaks have been garnering criticism. The defence ministry, for instance, has enlisted the Indian Air Force to transport the new question paper to 18 locations across the country. The NTA has reportedly placed an unknown number of paper-setters under “lockdown” until after the date of the test for which they are preparing questions.

On NEET re-test, Telegram assorted policy drama, 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant – who previously exposed Central Board of Secondary Education’s online marking system – reportedly fact-checked IIT-K director Manindra Agrawal with a “meow-meow” message on the need to shutdown Telegram – more like shorthand for a wider pattern of crisis management by evasion.

Who is really in charge of the obscure Nationalist Citizens Party of India, with which the Trinamool Congress’s 20 rebels in the Lok Sabha have sought to merge themselves? We don’t know, and

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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

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Snapshot of the day

June 15, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

Whether the ceasefire lasts just 60 days or gets converted to a more durable peace, it is clear that the memorandum of understanding signed electronically by Iran and the United States with Pakistani mediation over the weekend is a stunning victory for Tehran. The agreement will be be signed formally by the US and Iran later this week in Geneva, when the text will also become public. However, based on what is known so far, analysts agree the deal amounts to a major setback for Tel Aviv and Washington – which have been forced to abandon a programme they sought to impose through an illegal and unsuccessful war of aggression.

Far from parlaying India’s historic diplomatic strengths in the region, Prime Minister Modi was unable to play any role in the end to hostilities. His predecessors – Manmohan Singh and Atal Bihari Vajpayee – may not have fared any better but they certainly would not have done what Modi did: hitching himself to what he thought would be the winning side.

In his Long Cable dispatch below, Manoj Joshi talks us through the deal and its ramifications – and what the consequences of Modi’s reckless embrace of the aggressors are likely to be.

Currently on his 100th foreign trip (to Slovakia and France) as PM since 2014, Modi welcomed the “understanding reached between the United States and Iran on ending the conflict in West Asia, which has caused serious economic disruption across the world and led to loss of life in many countries.” His statement came many hours after most world leaders had spoken, and unlike them, made no mention of the role of the mediators.

Speaking of whom, Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif has been going out of his way to single out Field Marshal Asim Munir for the role he played in hammering out the Iran-US agreement. “Throughout this period, he was awake all day and night,” Al Jazeera quoted Sharif as telling Pakistani legislators.

“adding that Munir had “sacrificed day and night to extinguish the flames of war”. There were many moments, he said, when “it felt like the negotiations would come to a halt” but the army chief did not give up. “If this journey had not continued,” Sharif said, “the dream of peace would have been shattered.”

Pakistan upstaging India in diplomacy is a monumental failure of the Modi government’s foreign policy, writes Sanjay Jha. “In Switzerland, with Pakistan as an interlocutor, the historic USA-Iran détente will be signed. Elsewhere in the globe, some will be vanquishing a broken opposition to shards. And drooling over a film called Dhurandhar.”

Modi will attend the G7 summit in Evian, France along with the leaders of nine other ‘outreach’ countries – Brazil, Egypt, Kenya, South Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.

In a telephone call over the weekend with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, External Affairs minister S Jaishankar protested the killing of Indian sailors by the US Navy in international waters off the coast of Oman, but Rubio appears not to have taken Indian concerns seriously at all. A former Indian Navy chief, Adm (Retd) Arun Prakash, has said the “meeting between Trump and PM Narendra Modi at the G7 summit in France presents a critical opportunity for the latter to directly convey the nation’s deep disappointment with the

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Snapshot of the day

June 12, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

A year after the crash of Air India 171 in Ahmedabad that killed 260 people, a crucial cog in the country’s aviation safety – a crack unit meant to certify that aircraft in our skies are safe to fly – is even more short-staffed than it was before the accident. Data obtained by Kunal Purohit under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005, show that of the total 310 posts in the Directorate of Airworthiness (DAW) a total of 136, or 44%, were lying vacant. This number is across levels. Last July, a month after the crash, an RTI query by The Wire had revealed that 133 posts were vacant which has now increased to 136. The Modi government had not made a single new hire in the unit, nor created any new post in it, since the air crash.

The anniversary itself offered a telling contrast. The first person to pay homage at the crash site was not an Indian minister or senior official, but the British High Commissioner, who visited Ahmedabad to honour those who died. At the site, there were few visible signs of an official remembrance ceremony. The absence of any significant public commemoration raised questions not only about accountability in the aftermath of one of India’s deadliest aviation disasters, but also about how the state chooses to remember those whose lives were lost, says Jagriti Chandra.

Amid mounting criticism of its handling of the US Navy’s targeted repeated missile attacks on Indian-crewed vessels in the Gulf of Oman which is in Indian Ocean, part of Indo-Pacific framework of India-US cooperation – one of which killed three Indian seafarers – the Modi government today summoned the US’s charge d’affaires in New Delhi Jason Meeks for a second time and handed over a demarche expressing its strong protest over the attacks as well as its “deep concern over the use of lethal and deadly force against civilian shipping”. Unlike on Wednesday when India summoned Meeks in the evening, this time it called him up during working hours with TV cameras positioned outside and within the Ministry of External Affairs. US ambassador Sergio Gor – who is also special envoy to South and Central Asia – is understood to still be travelling outside India.

Yet even before the MEA lodged its second protest, Iran had issued a far stronger condemnation on Friday: hours after Modi government officials expressed their ‘concern’ over the attacks and ‘hoped and expected’ they would stop, the Iranian foreign ministry said the “brutal” US attacks “stand as clear evidence of America’s ongoing policy of armed robbery and State piracy”.

Defenders of Modi government’s weak response or his own continued silence – have pointed to sanctions violations by some of the vessels involved, almost sounding like defending US actions. However, available information indicates that only one of the three tankers targeted – Marivex – was under US sanctions. The other vessels were not sanctioned, raising serious questions about the legal basis for the attacks and the use of lethal force against civilian shipping.

The Modi government’s response also marks a stark departure from the more assertive posture India has often projected in matters involving Indian citizens abroad. More significantly, it suggests an implicit acceptance of the legitimacy of Washington’s enforcement of the Hormuz blockade, despite the absence of any UN Security Council mandate authorising such military action.

The US killing of Indian sailors have once again reignited concerns of India’s strategic autonomy and “compromises”, a concern also raised by Leader of Opposition and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. As The Wire notes,

“PM Modi’s continued silence on these US military attacks violates the constitutional responsibility to defend Indian lives. Article 52 of the Constitution establishes the President as defender of the nation, but the political executive, led by Modi, holds operational responsibility for protecting citizens abroad. Silence when US forces kill innocent Indians in international waters is an abdication of his constitutional duty as the prime minister.”

The Modi government has imposed restrictions on diesel sales for 90 days after state-owned fuel retailers struggled to manage rising demand amid disruptions in West Asian crude supplies, with authorities citing concerns over “black marketing and hoarding of diesel by unscrupulous elements”. The Indian government has capped purchases at retail outlets and prohibited commercial buyers from filling up at pumps.

Hopes of a resolution between the US and Iran have eased oil prices, softened the dollar and helped push up the rupee, which hit a weekly high of 94.955 to the dollar during trading today but ultimately settled at 95.11. However, writes Dharamraj Dhutia for Reuters, this “was not enough to protect the currency from posting its first weekly decline, after rising for the last three weeks”.

A landmark defence agreement between India and France for 114 Rafale fighter jets, estimated roughly at $39 billion – at nearly four times the cost of the original Medium Multi-Role Combat Aircraft (MMRCA) proposal – is unlikely to be announced when PM Modi travels to Paris tomorrow on the sidelines of the G7 Summit, despite the two countries discussing some of the deal’s most contentious terms. French diplomatic sources told the Hindu Business Line on Thursday that Paris is seriously engaging with New Delhi’s demand for access to source codes – a condition that would let India independently integrate its own weapons and systems onto the aircraft. India’s insistence that the entire acquisition be routed through the ‘Make in India’ procurement policy is also under consideration, as per the report.

The timing is particularly striking. Ahead of Modi’s bilateral meeting with Macron, France has proposed expanding maritime security cooperation with India, including New Delhi’s participation in a multinational initiative to safeguard freedom of navigation through the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Hindu.

Senior Advocate Chander Uday Singh has slammed recent Supreme Court rulings that have narrowed the scope of bail under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA), contending that prolonged detention under such stringent laws cannot substitute for credible evidence. Referring to the Delhi riots’ larger conspiracy and Bhima Koregaon prosecutions, he asserted that the allegations in both cases are fundamentally weak and unlikely to substitute for credible evidence. According to Live Law, Singh said that “every judge knows” the conspiracy charges in these cases are hollow and would eventually collapse when tested during trial.

“Hundreds taken to the border and many others put in detention centres as part of a ‘detect, delete and deport’ crackdown on undocumented migrants,” reports Al Jazeera, as Bengal pushes out Muslim Bangladeshis, deepening religious tensions between the two countries. The two countries have also agreed to coordinate patrols on the border and share intelligence.

A 47-year-old Kozhikode man has acquired a Nipah infection and is on ventilator support. The district administration has kicked off its containment protocol, with 77 of the patient’s contacts under surveillance. The Hindu reports it is suspected that he may have become infected either after coming into contact with bat excreta while cleaning a godown or after eating sapota from his garden. This is the fourth time the deadly viral infection is being reported from Kozhikode.

UNAMA, the UN’s mission in Afghanistan, has said that Pakistani airstrikes in eastern Afghanistan earlier this week killed 13 civilians, 11 of them children, one of them a woman and another a man. The strikes had unsettled about a month of calm that followed some of the worst fighting in decades between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Islamabad said its strikes targeted militants.

WhatsApp and Meta have approached a US federal court saying that NSO Group had violated the bench’s injunction against it – almost immediately after it was issued – by using the messaging platform for ‘testing’ purposes and to send malicious URLs to target users that are consistent with the deployment of its infamous Pegasus spyware. They have called on the court to impose daily escalating fines on NSO until it complies. Pegasus has been used against Indian activists, journalists and politicians and since NSO has clarified its clients comprise only governments there are no prizes for guessing who deployed the spyware here. The Modi government has consistently refused to confirm or deny whether it used Pegasus.

The Iran Embassy in India calls out unverified claims aired by Godi media Aajtak anchor Anjana Om Kashyap about the economic crisis in Iran.

In a gesture of friendship that transcends geographical borders, Lahore’s Aitchison College dedicated Classroom 108 to former Punjab Chief Minister Harcharan Singh Brar after Pakistan-based industrialist and philanthropist Syed Babar Ali – his lifelong friend and former classmate – donated PKR 4 million for the purpose, reciprocating Brar’s 1989 visit to Lahore when he inaugurated a library at the college and dedicated it to Ali.

SC dismisses Meenakshi Natarajan’s plea challenging rejection of nomination papers

An election petition is Congress leader Meenakshi Natarajan’s only option to challenge the rejection of her nomination papers for the Madhya Pradesh Rajya Sabha elections, the Supreme Court said today citing Article 39(b) of the Constitution and dismissing her plea. The court has not interfered in challenges to electoral procedures before and if it were to carve out exceptions it would read into the law a principle that does not exist, a bench comprising Justices Prashant Mishra and Atul Chandurkar ruled.

The returning officer concerned had rejected Natarajan’s nomination papers after the BJP complained that a ‘case’ was ‘pending’ against her in Hyderabad but that she did not reveal it. The Congress has pointed out that Natarajan was named as a respondent in a molestation complaint against another party leader, and that neither did the court take cognisance of the private complaint nor have charges been framed against her, in which case she would have needed to make the disclosure. When Congress leaders cried foul over a Jharkhand BJP leader’s nomination the returning officer there had given him time to resolve the objections.

Opposition and BJP demand probe into allegations of financial misappropriation in Ram Janmabhoomi Trust

The Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust’s initial terse statement on allegations of financial misappropriation have convinced neither the opposition nor the saffron camp itself, and BJP leaders and even the successor of the Trust’s president calling for or suggesting an independent probe into the matter. One of them, a former media man for the Uttar Pradesh government when the temple was being built, has demanded that Prime Minister Modi be made chairman of the Trust, as is the case for the Somnath temple. Nripendra Misra, a former principal secretary to Modi and the chairman of the temple’s construction committee, made a visit to Ayodhya after the allegations, setting off speculation over whether the PMO is getting hands-on over the matter. Omar Rashid reports.

BJP-led UP govt orders ‘anti-conversion’ cells in universities, higher education institutions

Even as there is enough evidence on how anti-conversion laws are misused by the enforcement agencies both suo motu and on political directive from the Hindu nationalist groups, Uttar Pradesh governor Anandiben Patel has directed all universities, higher educational institutions including medical and dental colleges in the state to set up “anti-conversion cells”, a move that has been backed by the ruling BJP-led Yogi government in the state.

“Any kind of illegal or forced religious conversion attempt carried out by influencing students, instilling fear, creating mental pressure or offering unethical inducements is completely unacceptable, unethical and contrary to law,” the letter reads. “At the university and institutional level, ‘Anti-Radicalisation’ units or Student Welfare Cells should be made highly active.”

The Long Cable

The Anxious governance of public Namaaz: why the state fears Muslim prayer in public

Fahad Zuberi

If you have ever lived in an Indian city, or observed Indian weddings or festivals, you can understand that all conversations about traffic disruptions due to Eid and Friday Namaaz are distractions. If you have observed an election season in India, you know about the loud rallies and roadshows that go on for weeks. Why, then, is the Indian state so obsessed about restricting and criminalizing only Muslim prayer in public space? What does this focus tell us about governmentality in India today?

Let us begin with a larger question: What is the role of festive congregation and prayer in public space? Conceptually, public space is a realm where everyone, as Hannah Arendt said, can appear as they are – with their beliefs, opinions, bodies and identities – and as equal members of the society. Public space – streets, sidewalks, parks and markets – is where members of a society interact with others and encounter differences, negotiate conflict, and learn tolerance and solidarity.

Festive congregation and religiosity form an integral part of this practice, especially across ethno-religious lines. Public space, when accessed responsibly and safely for public displays of religio-cultural expression, can be a site of inter and intra communal cohesion and learning. Celebrating festivals like Diwali in your local park, having public iftar during Ramzan, going to a Langar, or sharing cake on Christmas eve in your neighborhood Church, are some commonplace examples. By enabling festive congregation and prayer, these instances enable citizenship and solidarity beyond, across and within religious identities. Public space is, therefore, the canvas of this politics.

The role of the state in this context, then, remains that of a guarantor of safety and security – the enabler of this peaceful interaction. Simply put, the state is responsible for managing traffic, making sure there are no threats for those attendees and regulating space to prevent accidents like stampedes or fire. Countries across the world – including India, in case of Hindu festivals like Ganesh Chaturthi – observe this very regularly. Internationally, The World Charter on the Right to the City treats public congregation and prayer as part of the broader right to the city – a necessary condition for a democratic urban life.

But on the question of Muslims praying for half an hour for Fridays or Eid, the Indian state – hiding behind the logistics of traffic that they otherwise manage – assumes a punitive role. Moreover, conversations in defense of Muslim rights get muddled around issues like whether Muslims have enough mosques available to pray or not. These are all distractions. There is a deeper anxiety that the Indian state shows when it uniquely criminalizes Muslim prayer in public spaces: The anxiety about emergence of a consciously Muslim politics – a politics that is aware of being both Indian and Muslim and does not hold Muslimness and Indian-ness as opposing binaries.

India has the second largest Muslim population in the world and oppression of Indian Muslims is a fact. Additionally, Indian Muslims find themselves in a moment of disenfranchisement – both, directly through policies like the SIR, and indirectly through political untouchability and voter suppression. Indian Muslims are, therefore, an oppressed, disenfranchised community that is missing consciously Muslim politics. Barring rare examples, political success for Muslims is impossible and most movements for Muslim rights are either directly crushed or indirectly dismissed by the mainstream as being “communal.” Indian Muslims are denied a political consciousness of their own.

Suppressing congregational prayer and public expressions of religiosity is integral to this denial. Praying on the street on Eid with equal rights just like members of a Ganesh Chaturthi celebration do, will cement Muslim citizenship without shedding an explicitly Muslim religiosity. Having the state play the role of guaranteeing safety and security to Muslims as they pray will make the state recognize Muslims as equal citizens and stakeholders of the Indian Republic. Having non-Muslim fellow citizens navigate diverted traffic just as Muslims do for non-Muslim processions, will teach them acceptance for a people in an inclusive urbanity. And finally, an expression of Muslim religiosity will also give Muslims hope and confidence in being accepted as equal citizens of India. Praying in public, therefore, will build a politics of solidarity within Muslims and recognize them as a legitimate political and ethnic group within the Indian nation.

Under conditions of oppression, public acts of worship by the oppressed also build a moral core to their politics. During the Civil Rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders used prayer publicly during protests and mass meetings – one well-known example is King leading prayer after marchers were arrested in Selma in 1965. For King, public prayer was an important part of the movement’s life as it strengthened and unified participants. Gandhi also used public prayer as part of his political practice. His daily prayer meetings were public gatherings, and prayer services were an integral part of the Indian independence struggle. They functioned as visible acts of nonviolent resistance and witness. In both the cases, the American state and the British attempted to criminalize and violently suppress public prayer.

In the Indian context, public Namaaz gains an even more urgent meaning. A community of 200 million cannot be confined to private invisibility without attacking the very idea of plural democracy. Public space being the canvas of pluralism, thus, is a critical site of Indian Muslim erasure. When a minority community is being harassed, surveilled, stigmatized, and publicly marked as dangerous or excessive, the act of gathering peacefully for prayer acquires the force of civic affirmation.

Muslims praying publicly sends one message. It says: Muslims are here, they belong here, and they have the same claim to the city as anyone else. The Indian state seems very keen to ensure that these claims are not asserted, and they do not manifest into civic confidence for Muslims. The criminalization of an obsessive focus on preventing public Namaaz reflects the Indian state’s anxieties about the emergence of a Muslim politics. The state controls public space and prayer to suppress Muslim politics and undermine communal solidarity.

(Fahad is a PhD Student in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes about architecture and cities through the lens of politics, culture and history.)

Reportedly

Lieutenant General Rajiv Ghai’s appointment as Military Adviser to the National Security Council Secretariat will inevitably fuel commentary in New Delhi’s ever-active ecosystem over regimental loyalties, institutional networks and regional affinities. Commissioned into the Kumaon Regiment in 1989, Ghai—who served as Director General of Military Operations during Operation Sindoor last year—further reinforces the conspicuous Uttarakhand imprint on the national security establishment, where National Security Adviser Ajit Doval also traces his roots.

Whether coincidence, comfort with familiar professional networks, or simply the outcome of merit and circumstance, the optics are unmistakable: in New Delhi’s security establishment, the hills of Uttarakhand continue to punch well above their weight.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

From Nehru to Modi, how has the Indian leadership understood the concept of state sovereignty? Scholar Raphaelle Khan traces this arc and finds that “whereas India’s territorial view of sovereignty has remained constant and amplified under the prime ministership of Narendra Modi, Indian worldmaking ambitions have narrowed”, thereby changing India’s relationship with sovereignty internationally.

Prime number: 3.93%

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• The Madhya Pradesh returning officer’s rejecting Congress leader Meenakshi Natarajan’s nomination papers in view of a private complaint against her “reeks of extreme arbitrariness and even a conspiracy”, The Hindu points out, mincing no words. The Election Commission “has the sacred constitutional duty of ensuring free and fair elections” but “is failing in that duty, damaging democracy in the process”.

• Publishers who truly matter, says Pratik Kanjilal after Penguin Random House India’s decision to ditch Joe Sacco’s latest book on the Muzaffarnagar riots, “think like incubators of culture, not like risk managers who got confused on the way to a rewarding but obscure career in merchant banking”. As for what exactly Penguin seems to have demurred at, he points us to this clue:

  ““We are trying to reach a riot… The riot happened more than a year ago,” writes Joe Sacco in the first chapter, ‘The Great Untruth’. “But what we seek isn’t just the fading memory of an actual event: we want the fiction, the myth, the imposter that is taking its place.” In a post-truth world, that’s a dangerous manifesto.”

• You read here yesterday that the INDIA bloc faces a challenging time ahead. What must the alliance do now to move ahead from its recent setback? Anand Sahay advises that the bloc “would gain an altogether new dimension if its constituents began to take part in people’s struggles initiated by one another”. And as for its primary constituent in the Congress, it needs to “build a sound election-based organisational structure from the booth-level up”.

• “Should Modi’s prime ministership ultimately be judged on the day it clocked 4,399 days, surpassing Nehru’s number by one day, or by what endures?”, asks Bharat Bhushan, asking the question in the context of comparisons between Narendra Modi and Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘elected’ tenure in office. Record-breaking longevity proves electoral success; it does not automatically confer greatness. “So, one must ask: Has India under Modi become more just, free, prosperous, and confident in its institutions?” Listing many comparisons between Nehru’s time and India today, he writes: “By modern standards, Modi’s economic record is better than Nehru’s licence-raj economy, which stifled entrepreneurship. However, growth became possible later precisely because Nehru built the industrial, scientific, and educational institutions — a network of CSIR laboratories, ISRO, Atomic Energy Establishment (later renamed BARC), steel plants, dams, IITs, AIIMS — that underwrote it.”

• Why was the MEA reticent about the acting Venezuelan president’s plans to visit Puttaparthi, asks former diplomat K.P. Nayar. “It is true that according to convention, such diversions are outside the business of the state,” but New Delhi “must adapt to changes to include the country’s soft power appeal in promoting leadership chemistry in international engagement,” he argues.

Listen up

India has long focused on limiting its population growth but with the overall fertility rate going below the replacement rate of 2.1, the question arises if it should now encourage larger families instead. Aparajita Chattopadhyay of the Indian Institute of Population Sciences and Neelanjan Sircar of Ahmedabad University take a whack at that question in this episode of InFocus.

Watch out

Sushant Singh and Sobhana Nair joined Jahnavi Sen to take stock of this week’s major developments, from the US Navy killing three Indian seafarers and striking three Indian-crewed ships in West Asia to the Trinamool Congress’s unravelling and Meenakshi Natarajan’s foiled Rajya Sabha nomination and quite a bit in between. Watch their discussion here:

Over and out

• Guyana-born Reginald Lal Singh was “at various times a jungle child, medical student, political activist [for Indian independence], prisoner, author, lecturer, editor, wartime rescuer, cultural ambassador and Hollywood actor”. Anu Kumar has profiled his intrepid and intriguing life.

• On Modi’s 4,399-days-in-office euphoria and everything that is wrong with it, irony could not have been starker.

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.

Snapshot of the day

June 11, 2026

Anirudh S.K.

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” – Ian Fleming in the James Bond novel Goldfinger (h/t Rezaul Hasan Laskar).

‘Concern’ again eclipsed condemnation in India’s official messaging on Thursday even as the US military struck a third ship carrying Indian sailors off Oman this week alone – this time it hit the MT Jalveer oil tanker early today saying it was transporting Iranian oil. The vessel’s 20 Indian crew had to be rescued by Omani authorities and the Modi government said today the continuous attacks are ‘deeply concerning’ and that it ‘hopes and expects’ they will come to an end.

Three other Indian seafarers however were not so lucky: the men aboard the MT Settebello who went missing after the US Navy hit it with a missile yesterday – deck cadet Aditya Sharma, engine fitter Shivanand Chaurasiya and chief engineer Patnala Suresh – were confirmed killed, in perhaps the first time in independent India’s history that the American military has slain Indian civilians. New Delhi yesterday summoned the US charge d’affaires to lodge a “strong protest” against the Settebello attack but so far no cabinet minister has come out and directly condemned it. Prime Minister Narendra Modi remains tongue-tied during another diplomatic confrontation with Washington (but not in general: he has thanked several world leaders who congratulated him on his asterisk-appended record tenure throughout the day, including the commander-in-chief of the US Navy, aka his “dear friend” US President Donald Trump).

During their regular inter-ministerial briefing on the conflict today Modi government officials, when asked if any of these vessels were sanctioned, seemed to emphasise the fact that two of the vessels are sanctioned by the US treasury and one of them is ‘non-compliant’. Former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal has pointed out that such emphasis indirectly justifies the American actions, which at any rate are illegal. “Our concern is that Indian seamen have been killed and no regret has been expressed by CENTCOM,” he writes.

Now IOS Marine FZE, the Dubai-based firm that manages the Settebello, has challenged the US military’s account of what happened on Wednesday, saying that no communication had been established between the vessel and the American navy before the latter attacked, and that the tanker had been stationary for around ten days at the time. It has demanded an independent international investigation into the US strike.

These attacks have thrown a stark spotlight on a hard question: just how safe are India’s sailors in West Asia? And when even sections of the media that typically act as the Modi government’s most reliable echo chamber struggle to justify its positioning, it only points to how damning it is.

The six Naga men who remained missing amid Manipur’s Kuki-Naga hostage crisis

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Snapshot of the day

June 10, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

Twenty-four Indians were aboard the Settebello tanker vessel when the United States struck it with a missile off Oman's coast today, and according to the external affairs ministry three of them are missing. Unlike with the American attack Monday on the MT Marivex that also carried Indian crew, the ministry today summoned the US's deputy chief of mission in New Delhi, Jason Meeks, to protest the attack on the Settebello (ambassador Sergio Gor is in Kazakhstan) and publicly condemned it, though it again did not name the US in its statement. “The continuing incidents of attacks on shipping in the region are deeply worrisome and a direct result of the ongoing conflict in the region,” India said, calling for a halt to such attacks and for de-escalation (What caused these tensions too did not find mention, as has been the case since February 28).

Yesterday, a day after the US military acknowledged attacking the Marivex saying the vessel was trying to evade its blockade of Iranian ports, the external affairs ministry had echoed the American account of the incident, saying the Marivex was ‘disabled’ and had been contacted by the US Navy but neither naming nor criticising the action. The defence ministry used the terms missile attack but also did not mention or criticise America.

According to a report by the BBC, crew members aboard the tanker Marivex repeatedly appealed for urgent assistance after the strike. “US Navy attack, the missile on our engine room. We have a hole at the bottom... 24 crew. All crew Indian. Please help quickly, we need immediate help,” a crew member said in a distress call shared by the Forward Seamen’s Union of India (FSUI).

Having spent four and a half years in pre-trial jail now, the Kashmiri human rights defender Khurram Parvez was granted bail today by the Delhi high court, which cited his prolonged incarceration and the slow progress of trial in the National Investigation Agency’s case against him. As the prosecution proposes to examine 197 witnesses in its case – alleging that Parvez ran a network of workers for the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba terrorist outfit – a speedy trial is unlikely, the bench comprising Justices Navin Chawla and Ravinder Dudeja noted, adding that much of the case against the activist relies on the statements made by a co-accused-turned-approver. Parvez’s arrest has attracted global opprobrium.

Inflows into Indian equity mutual flows in May slackened by 40% compared to April – amid concern over the West Asia conflict’s impact on an energy imports-dependent India – marking the highest drop in three years.

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Snapshot of the day

June 9, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

The theft of what remains of Indian democracy is in full flow with the Bharatiya Janata Party inducing defections from the Trinamool Congress in order to boost its numbers in the Lok Sabha and the Election Commission helping the BJP win an extra seat in the Rajya Sabha from Madhya Pradesh by rejecting the nomination of the Congress candidate at the eleventh hour on dubious grounds.

Rather than just a replay of the BJP’s usual ‘Operation Lotus’ impulse, the rush to boost parliamentary numbers may be driven by even baser instincts on the part of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah: making a second and more decisive push to their controversial plans for delimitation and for increasing the total number of MPs in the lower house to beyond 800.

Madhya Pradesh will elect three MPs to the Rajya Sabha this week and based on the strength of the BJP and Congress in the state assembly, the former was assured two of those slots with the third going to the latter. However, the returning officer this evening rejected the nomination of the Congress’s Meenakshi Natarajan on the grounds that she had failed to list a criminal case filed against her in Hyderabad last year. Natarajan countered that the court has not even taken cognisance of the case – a private criminal complaint – but her explanation was rejected. The Congress has protested, and noted that in Jharkhand, a BJP-backed candidate, Parimal Nathwani of the Reliance group, was given time to resolve an alleged discrepancy in his nomination papers rather than being summarily turned away.

TMC leader Mamata Banerjee and Sobhandeb Chatterjee, her choice for leader of opposition in West Bengal, have moved the Calcutta high court challenging the assembly speaker’s decision appointing expelled Trinamool Congress MLA Ritabrata Chatterjee as LoP after he cobbled together support from 59 of the TMC’s 80 legislators in a mutiny against the party leadership. Banerjee and Sobhandeb are arguing that the speaker could not have appointed the expelled Ritabrata as LoP; the bench will hear the matter on the 11th. Also today, the Bengal CID turned up at Mamata’s home in connection with Ritabrata & Co’s allegations that her heir apparent and nephew, Abhishek Banerjee, had forged a number of their signatures and manufactured their support for Sobhandeb.

Ritabrata’s rebellion isn’t the only one the TMC is beset with. In Delhi, a big chunk of the party’s 29 Lok Sabha MPs met with Union minister Bhupender Yadav and are planning not only to split with their party’s leadership but also extend support to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, their erstwhile rivals. Their ringleader, Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, claimed that ‘nearly 20’ of them wrote to speaker Om Birla of their decision. Dastidar, whom the TMC

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Snapshot of the day

June 8, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

India’s economic situation is increasingly being shaped by a mix of external shocks and domestic policy choices that are landing the hardest on ordinary citizens. The Reserve Bank of India’s net short dollar position has widened sharply to around $110–115 billion – about 16% of its dollar holdings – up from $95.3 billion just weeks earlier. The rupee itself slid 0.8% in a single session, marking its steepest fall in four weeks and closing at 95.7075 per dollar.

“Amid shift of global capital towards artificial intelligence (AI)-linked developments and a weak rupee, foreign investors pulled out over Rs 43,000 crore in the first week of June. Notably, National Securities Depository Ltd data has revealed that with this, total outflows by Foreign Portfolio Investors (FPIs) from Indian equities have reached Rs 2.67 lakh crore so far in 2026, surpassing the Rs 1.66 lakh crore withdrawn during the entire financial year of 2025,” reports the New Indian Express.

Iran and Israel attacked each other today for the first time since the April ceasefire halted the fighting triggered by the joint US-Israeli strikes early this year. Tehran said it hit Israel in retaliation against the latter’s offensive in Beirut on Sunday. The Iranian-backed Houthis, who have mostly stayed out of the conflict, also launched missiles at Israel, and with US-Iran talks not making any substantial progress, the episode threatened to reignite a full-scale war. Tel Aviv and Tehran have reportedly agreed to stop firing. New Delhi has said it “deeply regrets the renewed attacks”.

In other news an oil tanker with 24 Indian crew reported a fire on board today when it was off Oman’s coast; the sailors are safe and it is not clear yet what caused the blaze aboard the vessel that was not carrying cargo at the time of the incident.

(Update: the US Central Command announced it had attacked the oil tanker, the MT Marivex, saying it attempted to violate the American blockade of Iranian ports. The ship’s crew were rescued by Omani authorities. India has not responded to news of the US attack — though ‘sources’ came out and said the vessel was attempting for the fourth time to circumvent the US blockade when it was hit on Monday.)

In more news that is capable of drawing the ire of the person on the streets,

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Snapshot of the day

June 5, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

Cockroach Janata Party founder Abhijeet Dipke is due to land at Delhi airport at 8 am on Saturday and intends to proceed straight to the Parliament Street police station to seek permission for a protest at Jantar Mantar where he and other ‘cockroaches’ will demand the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. Dipke is likely to be joined by the Ladakh environmental activist, Sonam Wangchuk and an unknown number of supporters.

Bangladesh says the Indian authorities have made multiple attempts to push individuals across the border in the past 48 hours. Calling this a violation of “international border management norms and bilateral understandings”, the Border Guard Bangladesh said that “no individual or group will be allowed to enter Bangladesh illegally through the border.” In a response that sidestepped Bangladesh’s allegations, the Indian Ministry of External Affairs claimed the deportation of ‘illegal Bangladeshi nationals’ is being carried out through an established bilateral mechanism.

The deportations are a vital part of the demographic fears being stoked by the Modi government, as reflected both in the establishment of an official committee to study “unnatural” changes in India’s population and the move to use the electoral rolls revision process to disenfranchise citizens – especially Muslims. (See the Long Cable).

The RBI has decided to keep its repo rate – the rate at which it lends money to banks – unchanged at 5.25% and also announced a number of measures aimed at keeping the rupee from sliding further amid higher oil prices triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran as well as persistent foreign investment outflows. Among the measures aimed at defending the rupee are an end to the 12.5% long-term capital gains tax for foreign investors on listed shares and bonds held for over a year, as well as the 20% tax on interest earned from these investments.

On a day the government said India’s economy grew 7.7% in FY26 – making it the fastest growing major economy – the RBI revised its estimates for inflation up and GDP growth down: the former is now predicted to average 5.1% this fiscal as opposed to 4.6% earlier, and the latter to stand at 6.6%, below the previous figure of 6.9%. One economist told Reuters that the revised forecasts alongside an unchanged repo rate “suggest it is preparing markets for a possible policy pivot as early as August” – a polite way of saying the central bank may already be running out of comfortable choices.

Bloomberg today retracted what it said was an ‘incorrect story’ filed on June 2 on the RBI offloading some of its gold reserves :

“The analysis erroneously used same-day domestic gold prices to value RBI’s gold reserves. Using previous day’s London Bullion Market Association price shows that gold holdings were unchanged in May.”

Market analyst Dhananjay Sinha, however, believes there has been some offloading:

“Parsing the weekly disclosures, price movements, and reported valuations points to a modest but material reduction in tonnage – a drawdown that speaks both to tactical currency defence and to deeper pressures on India’s external position.”

Members of parliament’s standing committee on finance asked the Modi government yesterday why oil marketing companies have raised fuel prices – they’ve done so four times, all of them after the recent round of assembly elections ended – even though their profits had increased by almost 130% in the last fiscal, reports Sobhana Nair. Jatin Takkar writes that panel chairperson BJP MP Bhartruhari Mahtab flagged flaccid private investment, while the government said that “consumption demand may face headwinds” due to a likely deficit monsoon and moderation in economic activity – an acknowledgment that the broader growth story is losing some of its earlier gloss.

Separately, reporting by Reuters highlights a more uncomfortable trend beneath India’s booming IPO market. “India’s red-hot initial public offering market may look irresistible as foreign firms line up for listings, but the rush is not about raising funds to expand in a fast-growing market; it’s about sending billions of dollars back to headquarters. Just one of six foreign-based companies ​that listed their Indian units in Mumbai since 2024 raised new funds, with all others structured purely as secondary offerings - or offer for sale (OFS), where existing shareholders sell their holdings ‌to the public without raising any new funds, according to data from Prime Database, an Indian market research firm.”

Rajesh Exports, now in the news after the Securities and Exchange Board of India issued an interim order alleging the company had misrepresented roughly Rs 15.15 lakh crore in revenue over five years, had been a beneficiary under the Union government’s Rs 18,100-crore Production Linked Incentive scheme for Advanced Chemistry Cell battery storage. The Ministry of Heavy Industries (MHI), which administers the battery storage programme, is currently examining the Sebi order. A government official, speaking to the Economic Times, said, “There is a strong view that the company should be removed as a beneficiary,” adding that a final call will be taken after the detailed examination is concluded. Furthermore, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs is coordinating with Sebi over the issue and may order a probe to ascertain potential corporate governance lapses.The MCA may even ask the concerned Registrar of Companies to inspect the company.

Although the CBSE in its first two tenders for its on-screen marking system estimated that it would pay Rs 28 crore for a vendor’s services, its work order for the third and final tender raises this figure to Rs 38.46 crore and it is not clear why, the Hindustan Times‘s Sanjay Maurya reports. The volume of answer sheets that the CBSE accounted for seems to have stayed unchanged across all tenders. At any rate, with the board having implemented – to chaotic results – its OSM system run by tender winner Coempt Edu Teck only for class 12 students, the actual amount it owes stands at Rs 25.39 crore, says Maurya. This is “roughly 66% of the value mentioned in the work order, despite the volume of work being only 42% of that mentioned in the two tenders and also the work order”.

Apart from the system’s glitches, the manner in which the CBSE went about hiring Coempt has been in the spotlight since 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant pored over the documents and alleged that it went out of its way to favour the firm. And remeber Nisarga Adhikary, the ethical hacker whose claims about the vulnerability of its IT system the CBSE was quick to dismiss? He has now been invited to meet with an "Indian Institute of Technology expert team to flag those security gaps, reports Maitri Porecha.

Bengal’s new bulldozer-happy BJP government has been going after small hawkers operating from various railway stations. At the Dum Dum station the authorities demolished stalls in a midnight operation on May 30, allegedly without notice, drawing criticism from vendors and passengers alike. One hawker speaking to Madhu Sudan Chatterjee pointed to a glaring irony: “The prime minister’s life story has often been published with the claim that he once sold tea at a railway station.” But when the dozers rolled on to Jadavpur station on Monday night they were greeted by hawkers, residents and Left activists prepared to stand their ground. The authorities, reports Chatterjee, had to retreat.

In other news, with Adani expressing interest and the Modi government giving its approval, the Bengal government has decided to pursue a deep-sea port at Dadonpatrobad near Digha. Pranesh Sarkar and Sambit Saha of The Telegraph recall that Mamata Banerjee’s government had picked the nearby area of Tajpur for the project so that it would not be under the jurisdiction of the Union government-controlled Syama Prasad Mookerjee Port. Adani had emerged as the top bidder for that iteration of the project but Banerjee did not go ahead after the Hindenburg report came out. Announcing the decision this week, CM Suvendu Adhikari said that Tajpur would not work for the project as there was not enough government land there. Game, set and match to Adani, whose stranglehold over the port sector in India seems firmer than ever.

An ‘award’ may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of last year’s Mahakumbh but the Modi government has given the event – as well as a number of tech projects – its ‘National Award for e-Governance’. This is the same Kumbh that witnessed a stampede where, per one estimate, upwards of 80 people were killed. What does that say about the ‘smart governance’ in service of crowd management that the government has touted? Crowding at the New Delhi railway station amid a high demand for trains to Prayagraj had triggered another stampede days later, this one claiming 18 lives.

AI systems are to be used only for assistance and “shall not supplant or compromise the independent exercise of judicial authority by a duly appointed judicial officer”, the draft Rules of AI in Courts prepared by the Supreme Court’s AI Committee earlier this week say. They also require that AI systems used in court processes “be designed, trained and deployed in a manner that promotes fairness and avoids discrimination”. AI must not be used to predict flight risk and recidivism and evaluate eligibility for bail, they say.

Suman Kalyanpur, who died last week, had a voice to rival Lata Mangeshkar’s but never got her due. In one of her last interviews (to Filmfare in 2025), she recalls:

“We really don’t know what happened behind the scenes. There have been times when my songs were dropped from films but I do not know how and why. Sometimes the songs which I recorded were not included in the film. Sometimes they were in the film but not in the records…. Often I was not credited for a song played on radio or a wrong name was given for a song sung by me. Also someone else’s name was given in the credits on the records that I had sung. It can’t be a mistake every time. There was a beautiful, slow lorie I had sung for a movie. But I was surprised to hear it in double speed on an EP.” Yet her voice betrays absolutely no rancour. “I’m happy with the songs I got. Even from the 10 per cent I got, 70 per cent have been hits.”

‘Green over Greed,’ LoP Rahul Gandhi slams Modi govt over Great Nicobar Project

Today is World Environment Day and Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi has slammed the Modi government’s justification for the destructive Great Nicobar Island Project as a “lie”. At the same time, the Public Investment Board (PIB), a Finance Ministry appraisal body, had in August 2024 assessed the proposed International Container Transhipment Port (ICTP) at Galathea Bay in Great Nicobar Island and found that it did not meet key “strategic objectives”, reports Jacob Koshy. Gandhi alleged that the project’s true purpose is to benefit Gautam Adani who seeks to construct hotels and casinos on what is India’s most ecologically irreplaceable land.

In a video spanning more than 16 minutes, drawing from his personal visit to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in late April, the Congress leader appealed to the public to sign a petition calling on the Modi government to choose environmental preservation over corporate profit, summarising the message as: “We choose green over greed.”

Manipur’s ethnic strife continues to claim blood – now in new Kuki-Naga conflict

Three Kuki villagers were killed in Manipur’s Kangpokpi district this morning by unknown assailants and local Kuki groups say the miscreants – whom they allege are Nagas – also set fire to some homes in the village concerned. The attack took place less than 24 hours after the All Naga Students’ Association of Manipur carried out a march to protest the fact that Kuki groups continue to hold six Naga men hostage; their procession passed through Kangpokpi’s Litan area, which was the epicentre of the Kuki-Naga tensions that are now roiling an already battered Manipur. Kuki groups on the other hand say the Nagas continue to hold 14 members of their community captive (read more on the hostage crisis here).

Amidst these tensions and the persisting segregation of Manipur’s Meiteis and Kukis, the Election Commission is carrying out its special intensive revision in the state. Yesterday the Kuki Inpi Manipur body said it opposes the controversial SIR taking place even as thousands of people remain displaced by the ethnic strife.

India’s dowry death trials are rigged against the dead

Using the death of Twisha Sharma as a lens to examine why dowry death cases in India so often fail in court, The Quint’s Himanshi Dahiya analysed 500 dowry death case judgements across the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bihar, and Karnataka, and found one pattern: a system that keeps failing the deceased women. Apart from highlighting systemic issues such as delayed FIRs, inadequate investigations, poor witness protection, and weak forensic practices, the report argues that many women face verbal, emotional, and economic abuse that is rarely documented, making it difficult to establish the legal link between harassment and dowry demands required for conviction.

The Long Cable

The Supreme Court’s Bihar SIR Verdict and a Fresh Citizenship Crisis

Abdullah Ghazali

In The Origin of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt refers to citizenship as “the right to have rights.” The absence of citizenship deprives one of not just the right to vote and access entitlements, but also of the very foundation to claim them. The Supreme Court’s judgment on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of Voter lists - Bihar 2025 (Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India), delivered on May 27, 2026, must be read and critiqued in this light.

On the surface, the judgment, amongst other questions, was concerned with whether the Election Commission of India (ECI) had constitutional and statutory powers to conduct the SIR in Bihar. The court has upheld it. Yet embedded within the judgment is an issue with far-reaching consequences: its direction that all persons deleted from the 2003 Bihar SIR on grounds of ‘doubt’ be referred to the “Competent Authority” under the Citizenship Act, 1955, for a determination of their citizenship status. In doing so, the Supreme Court has potentially subjected lakhs of people to a citizenship trial.

The 2003 SIR: An arbitrary baseline

The ECI used the 2003 SIR as the eligibility “base year” for inclusion in the 2025 SIR,. Individuals whose names had appeared in this eligibility list did not need to furnish any document; those who could not be traced to it were required to produce any document from a prescribed list. The court accepted this classification in favour, on the ground that the 2003 SIR was the product of an intensive revision and thus enjoyed a “higher degree of reliability”. The court, while accepting the ‘2003 SIR’ as the baseline, has in practice rendered all subsequent inclusions in the state’s electoral rolls as ‘irrelevant’.

What this means is that everyone deleted from the 2003 SIR list in Bihar on the ground of ‘citizenship under doubt’ will have to face a citizenship determination process. Take, for instance, a migrant worker from a remote district in Bihar who is working in another state and was deleted from the 2003 SIR due to a lack of proper documentation. For twenty-two years, the ECI did not act on that exclusion. The state acknowledged his continuous citizenship. But now, this deletion from the 2003 rolls – a sheer bureaucratic accident – becomes the basis for referring him to the Competent Authority to determine whether he is a citizen.

Echoes of the Assam NRC

The Supreme Court has opened a Pandora’s box by referring all excluded individuals to the Competent Authority, taising an uncomfortable parallel with the National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam. The Assam NRC, which used a different cut-off date, had placed the burden of proving citizenship on individuals. The exercise resulted in mass exclusion, leaving lakhs in limbo over their citizenship status.

The Supreme Court’s order means that the citizenship status of ‘deleted’ individuals would next be governed by the mechanism set out under the Citizenship Act, 1955, and the newly enacted Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025. The burden of proof will shift squarely onto the individual. This phenomenon, from the presumption of citizenship to the presumption of doubt, is the defining feature of the Assam experience and is now likely to be institutionalised in Bihar.

Statelessness crisis

The judgment crafts a referral mechanism of enormous consequence while remaining silent on its ripple effects. What happens if a genuine voter gets deleted from the SIR? The court says this will not affect their “claims of citizenship.” But if the Competent Authority formally holds a person to be a non-citizen, the legal outcome is statelessness.

Equally absent is any consideration of the cascading effect on descendants. Individuals and their descendants who were enrolled after 2003 were not required to re-establish their parental details, provided their names or their parents’ names could be traced to the 2003 list. For those who were deleted from the 2003 rolls, however, the entire family tree comes under the shadow of the referral.

Proportionality over due process

The court upheld the 2025 SIR as proportionate. It conducted a four-part proportionality analysis: a) legitimate purpose, b) rational nexus, c) least restrictive option, and d) fair balance. On each, it has ruled in favour of the ECI. While the judgment acknowledges that 47 lakh names were ultimately deleted, the court fails to examine the demographic distribution of those deletions – which districts, which communities, which constituencies bore the heaviest burden of exclusion. Without that data, the proportionality finding is a statistical average applied to a politically non-neutral exercise.

Notably, lakhs of voters were deleted from the 2025 SIR roll, yet no appeal was filed against the final list. By treating this absence of appeals as evidence that “the SIR was fairly and transparently implemented,” the court has turned its back on grassroots realities.

Instead, it should have asked: why did those individuals not challenge their exclusion? Possible answers include poverty, illiteracy, migration, paucity of legal aid, and a practical unfamiliarity with the administrative process.

A missed opportunity for strict judicial scrutiny

As the ECI announced an SIR in 19 states and UTs, this judgment has far-reaching effects. Nearly two-third of India’s electorate has to undergo a fresh SIR scrutiny. A judgment of this stature should have recognised several ground realities. First, the fact that re-enrolment in successive rolls post 2003 is in itself evidence of continuous eligibility. Second, the Citizenship Act, 1955, contains no special mechanism for determining citizenship prompted by one’s exclusion from the SIR roll. Here, the Supreme Court has initiated a legal proceeding that neither parliament intended nor the executive requested. Third, the right to vote, according to the Supreme Court itself, is acknowledged to have been “upgraded from being a mere statutory right to a constitutional right” (In Re: Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 2024). Surely, a constitutional right demands a stricter judicial review than what the court applied here.

The Bihar SIR judgment will be remembered not for what it held about the ECI’s powers, which was perhaps necessary, but for what it created beyond: a citizenship tribunal waiting to happen. The persons whose names were deleted from a 22-year-old electoral roll now face the most terrifying question a democracy can ask to one of its own: prove that you belong here.

Hannah Arendt would have recognised this moment. When the state begins asking its citizens to prove their citizenship, it has already begun the process of making them aliens.

Abdullah Ghazali teaches law at Presidency University, Bengaluru. He writes and researches on Labour and Citizenship.

Reportedly

In Episode 420 of Smita Prakash’s podcast on ANI, notes Mohammad Zubair, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the PM says "So what if the rupee touches 100 to a dollar? It's just a number."

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

Indian H-1B workers moving to Dallas – driven by many companies relocating to here starting 2018 – had fuelled a housing boom in the area. But with the Trump administration cracking down on the visa scheme, report Prashant Gopal and Tanaz Meghjani for Bloomberg, “the momentum is quickly reversing … the shift has knocked down home prices, slowed population expansion and risks eroding the tax base needed to fund schools and roads planned during a five-year growth streak”.

Prime number: 7/10

Breaking into the workforce has become significantly more challenging for fresh graduates than it was five years ago, with seven in ten struggling to secure their first job due to limited internship opportunities, increasing demands for prior experience in entry-level roles, and low response rates from employers. As per the Indeed’s Fresher Hiring Report, almost half of the respondents (49%) said that their biggest challenge was to get identified while 61% said they rarely or almost never hear back after applying for jobs.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Laws in India have eroded workers’ powers for collective bargaining, writes Sophy KJ, but a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice on the right to strike must prompt reform.

• Andy Mukherjee takes stock of India’s growing external imbalance and says that “to save the rupee, authorities may have no choice but to bite the bullet on domestic interest rates, and offer just enough tax sweeteners to keep global capital from slamming the door on its way out.”

• UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s methods of controlling crime and criminals – i.e. police encounters – are being adopted by his counterparts in Bihar and Odisha, notes Julio Ribeiro with alarm. “The police, the prosecutor, the judge and the jailor each have a role to play independent of each other. If the cops are given the four roles by desperate politicians, the end result is a police force let loose, posing a constant danger to the public.”

• Want to know why young people in India are angry and frustrated? Christophe Jaffrelot says the answer lies at the data on unemployment and inequality.

• If there is one lesson we take away from the various reactions to Ramachandra Guha’s criticism of Rahul Gandhi, argues Harikrishnan S., it is this: “many people no longer know how to engage with criticism without questioning the critic’s loyalty”.

• Shikha Mukherjee writes that when a rebel faces a mutiny on her own ship, the feudal succession battle in Bengal reflects Trinamool’s infighting as a second windfall for the BJP, with Mamata Banerjee facing hard choices on the road ahead as “the era of cooperative politics is being reshaped. What happened in Maharashtra seems likely to be the template for the approved opposition’s role in West Bengal.”

• Rosalind O’Hanlon’s latest book, Lineages of Brahman Power, “explodes the myth that the social, material and intellectual power of Brahmans – indeed, the centrality of caste itself in Hindu social life – was largely a colonial construction,” writes Tanika Sarkar.

Listen up

Sarthak Sidhant, an 18-year-old from Bokaro, published a detailed blog questioning how Coempt Eduteck received a tender and later presented his findings to a parliamentary panel, after which the CBSE chairperson and secretary were later shunted out. Speaking to Manisha Pandey, he reflects on facing online trolling for challenging powerful institutions, while demonstrating striking political clarity and an unexpectedly sharp understanding of systems.

Watch out

Karan Thapar speaks to Kapil Sibal about the Modi government’s attempts to take over the Gymkhana Club.

Over and out

• Of the many Hauz Ranis and Press Enclaves, CR Parks and Govindpuris, Samachar Apartments and Acharya Niketans – and the roads that divide them. Akash Joshi writes on the invisible borders that shape Delhi. “Imagine if our neighbourhoods were more organic and connected as they once were. Where Hauz Rani and Khirki were not merely places we visit as tourists to try out an exotic cuisine, but as people with stakes in a place.”

• In between decades, her-story and everything that remains unchanged.

• Jalsaghar recalls a time when Greece was crazy about Bollywood.

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Snapshot of the day

June 4, 2026

Anirudh S.K.

Faced with unflattering ground realities such as prevalent open defecation and the continuing use of low-quality fuel, officials are asking census enumerators not to record data that could embarrass the government, The Hindu‘s Vijaita Singh reports. She cites two accounts from enumerators in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh and they are worth reading as quoted:

“In the mobile app, if we enter that a household has a tin roof, we are asked by our superiors to change it to concrete. Are we supposed to lie? Similarly, if the house does not have a toilet and occupants are defecating in the open, we are told to check if there is a toilet nearby, even that of a neighbour or a relative, which they may be using occasionally or even a public urinal. Then the entry can be changed from ‘open defecation’ to having access to a toilet. […]

“Being government officials, we have been asked not to select options that may show the government in a poor light.”

Official comms too indicate that census personnel – currently carrying out the first, house-listing phase of the exercise – are being nudged to ‘revisit’ data points that point to ‘discrepancies’ with government data. Singh obtained a letter showing that Rajasthan’s census operations director asked district functionaries to ‘verify’ enumerated data in cases where most households were found to practice open defecation; where the use of wood, dung cakes, crop residue and kerosene as fuel was recorded apparently even when homes have LPG connections; and where houses were not found to draw tap water from treated sources.

As bad as such data doctoring can be, perhaps we ought not to be surprised. Almost three years ago now the Modi government suspended K.S. James as director of the International Institute for Population Sciences after expressing displeasure with data that the fifth National Family Health Survey conducted under his leadership had produced. Among other things, that survey had indicated India was certainly not open defecation-free despite the government’s claims that it is so on account of Swachh Bharat, and that over 40% of households did not have clean cooking fuel, casting a shadow over the PM Ujjwala scheme. Just last month the sixth round of the survey conspicuously dropped a few indicators, including clean cooking fuel access.

Opening the lid off one of the largest cases of alleged financial misrepresentation in recent corporate history, SEBI has said that jeweller Rajesh Exports prima facie inflated revenue amounting to some Rs 15.15 lakh crore, or 99.8% of its revenues from its subsidiaries between FY2020-21 and FY2024-25. The market regulator has banned the company’s chairman Rajesh Mehta from trading in the company’s stocks until further notice. Rajesh Exports has denied the allegations.

The firm’s shares hit their daily lower limit of 5% in the report’s wake; LIC, which holds a 10.8% stake in the company, saw its shares decline by 1% too. But the slide in share prices is only the tip of the iceberg. The central concern goes deeper: how did the company manage to allegedly consistently report such extraordinary revenues year after year with so little independent verification? Vibes of India‘s Deepal Trivedi has an analysis here.

Meanwhile, SEBI recently carried out search-and-seizure operations in Kolkata and nearby locations as part of an investigation into alleged insider trading linked to IndusInd Bank, covering residential and commercial premises linked with Samir Agarwal, a former zonal head at the bank, as well as members of his family. The investigation follows an internal vigilance inquiry initiated after a whistleblower complaint. As Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta had reported earlier this year, the inquiry found that Agarwal allegedly traded in shares of companies that were clients of the bank using information obtained through his role – but that IndusInd did not tell SEBI about it.

Nearly five months

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Snapshot of the day

June 3, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

A massive fire broke out at a bed-and-breakfast in a five-storey building in the south Delhi locality of Malviya Nagar early Wednesday, killing at least 21 people and injuring several others. At least 18 foreign nationals were among the 21 people who died. An FIR has been registered by Delhi Police under charges of culpable homicide in connection with the case against hotel co-owner Luvkesh Bajaj, who as per the officials, is absconding.

The Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical political brand that has rapidly gained social media traction since its launch last month, appointed three spokespersons on Wednesday as it gears up for a protest against the Union education ministry’s dismal handling of multiple public exam failures. In a post on X, the group, founded by Abhijeet Dipke, named Saurav Das, an investigative journalist, as its chief spokesperson. Along with Das, Vijeta Dahiya, a political researcher, author and filmmaker, and Ashutosh Ranka, an Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur graduate who previously worked with McKinsey & Company in London, will represent the organisation across media platforms. The outfit held its first press conference today in Delhi, where it called the government’s transfer of top CBSE officials an ‘eyewash’ and said it is open to engaging in dialogue with the government as well as the opposition [see also The Long Cable].

One Indian national was killed – the ninth Indian casualty thus far of the West Asia crisis triggered by the US-Israeli strikes on Iran – and several others hurt in an Iranian attack on the Kuwait International Airport today. According to the Kuwaiti health ministry 63 people were injured by the attack.

Venezuela’s acting president Delcy Rodriguez arrived in New Delhi today for a five-day visit during which she will meet Prime Minister Modi and discuss cooperation in energy among other sectors. Her visit takes place against the background of India emerging as Caracas’s second-largest buyer of crude oil as its West Asian supplies stand disrupted by the US-Israeli war on Iran and Washington taking over distribution of Venezuelan oil, which it had previously sanctioned, after kidnapping Nicolas Maduro. US President Donald Trump had claimed last year that Modi agreed to consider buying Venezuelan oil while requesting to have a trade deal with America.

On the Russian oil front, US secretary of state Marco Rubio told the senate foreign policy committee on the Hill yesterday that his administration wants to end “as soon as possible” its sanctions waiver for the crude to countries like India. India has purchased Russian oil as Washington has repeatedly granted ‘licenses’ carving out an exemption from its sanction on the commodity.

Having concluded

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Snapshot of the day

June 2, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

Activist and education reformer Sonam Wangchuk has said he will join Abhijit Dipke of the Cockroach Janta Party in his Jantar Mantar protest planned for June 6 if union minister Dharmendra Pradhan does not resign by then as pressure mounts on the Modi government. Although many who are looking to join the demonstration may have the CBSE’s on-screen marking problems and the latest NEET paper leak in mind, Wangchuk said he has a larger, overarching reason for attending: the state of Indian education. The Indian government’s intention is ‘10/10’, he said, but the implementation of its policies on the ground are certainly not and warrant the minister’s resignation.

The last time Wangchuk knocked on Delhi’s gates with an entourage of protesters he was detained at the Haryana border itself; later, denied permission to carry out a fast at Jantar Mantar, he proceeded at Ladakh Bhavan in Chanakyapuri ( he was later jailed for half a year under the draconian National Security Act as the Modi government blamed him for the deadly Leh protests of September 2025).

In the hot seat over the vulnerabilities and discrepancies over the CBSE’s on-screen marking system as well as the manner in which it awarded the tender for the process, the Modi government today reportedly transferred the board’s chairperson Rahul Singh and secretary Himanshu Gupta from their posts. It also set up a one-member committee comprising retired IAS officer S. Radha Chauhan to probe the CBSE’s enlisting of the Coempt Edu Teck firm to run its on-screen marking portal, which is to submit its findings in a month’s time. Earlier 17-year-old Sarthak Sidhant of Ranchi had alleged that the CBSE ‘systematically rewrote its rulebook’ to facilitate Coempt to win the tender, and today he appeared before the parliamentary standing committee on education, women, children, youth and sports to present his findings.

A key parliamentary committee may recommend scrapping the traditional pen-and-paper examination system in favour of computer-based testing, as the fallout from the NEET-UG paper leak continues to put pressure all the way up to the Prime Minister’s office (PMO). “The PM is so miffed with the failures of Dharmendra Pradhan, that he has taken up all the responsibilities himself. Hence, it is their responsibility, we hope that it will be addressed… Now we are hoping that under the PM, paper leak would not happen,” committee chairperson and Congress Rajya Sabha MP Digvijaya Singh said after a meeting, Deccan Herald reports. [See Drawn and Quartered]

While the national attention remained fixed on the Pahalgam attack, the subsequent military operation, US President Donald Trump’s provocations, the BJP’s electoral gains in Delhi and Bihar, and the contentious Special Intensive Revision (SIR), in 2025, India’s state legislatures quietly passed more than

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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

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Snapshot of the day

June 1, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

Days after insisting that its on-screen marking portal is fine, the CBSE yesterday noted that it has been monitoring the ‘vulnerabilities’ on it that are being publicly flagged and claimed that they ‘have been contained’. However, the re-evaluation portal which was meant to go ‘live’ on June 1 after being delayed by two days, was still not operational as of Monday night.

The board is likely to act against Coempt EduTeck Private Limited, the Hyderabad-based company that it tasked with building the online marking portal, now that these issues have come to the fore but Sanjay Maurya reports that the CBSE is unlikely to be able to blacklist Coempt because its contract does not have provisions to let it do so for lapses of this kind. “Indeed, the blacklisting criterion made it into the August tender, but was removed in a corrigendum issued on September 20,” he writes. All this while, as this analysis notes, the CBSE’s portal travails have been amplified by the fact that it is teenagers who have shone a light on them.

The deficiencies in the CBSE’s on-screen marking system is one among the various points of consternation among India’s youth that the rise of the Cockroach Janta Party points to – now the satirical outfit’s founder Abhijit Dipke has said he will travel to India on June 6 to demand Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation. The Modi government has sought to curb the roaches’ online reach by having its X account and, for some time, its website withheld from Indian internet users. An early test of the movement’s appeal – and the government’s willingness to crack down on any opposition to itself – is on the cards as Dipke wants to hold a protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. In an interview to The Hindu, Dipke says he “will continue to use every constitutional means available to make people’s voices heard, including satire, and hopes to create a lasting movement” out of the viral handle he created.

Speaking of students, some two dozen candidates for Uttar Pradesh’s BEd exam had gathered at a computer centre in Kanpur to print out photocopies

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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.

Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. Today is that day. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.

Snapshot of the day

May 29, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

The scandal surrounding the Modi government’s conduct of centralised exams continues to swirl with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi amplifying the exposé by a 17 year old student of the manner in which the Central Board for Secondary Education appears to have rigged the tender process for the contract for evaluation of its exams so that a Hyderabad-based firm, Coempt Eduteck, would emerge the winner. Students have complained of mix-ups in answer sheets and an ethical hacker has gone public about major security flaws in CBSE exams portal. The CBSE, of course, has denied any suggestions of impropriety in Coempt’s selection.

NEET is the other exam (for entrance to medical colleges) that’s been messed up and today the government told the Supreme Court that “PM Modi is personally supervising NEET paper leak issue”. Prompting Rahul Gandhi to tweet, tongue presumably in cheek, “PM Modi also personally supervised the NEET paper leak.”

The Cockroach Janta Party’s X account will remain withheld in India in compliance with the Modi government’s orders as the Delhi high court today declined to provide interim relief. Although counsel appearing for CJP founder Abhijit Dipke pointed out that the outfit is a work of satire and asked the bench to consider having its X account restored while perhaps leaving specific posts withheld, Justice Purushaindra Kaurav said he would need to hear the government before passing orders. The judge also asked the Union government’s review committee to examine the blocking order against the CJP’s X page and granted liberty to Dipke to appear before it virtually from his residence in Boston. The Modi government reportedly invoked national security to block the youth-led satirical outfit’s account.

The Aam Aadmi Party has raced ahead of the Congress and every other party to win nearly half of all the municipal wards in Punjab. The BJP came in fifth, after the Congress, Independents and the Akali Dal.

Propelled by a fall in oil prices as a plan to extend the US’s ceasefire with Iran waits at President Donald Trump’s desk, as well as by the RBI’s dollar sales, the rupee registered its best day since April 2 today when it jumped above 95 to the dollar. It eventually settled at the 95-mark. Next week the RBI’s monetary policy committee will meet and decide whether to change its repo rate – Reuters’s poll suggests economists think the central bank will hold it at 5.25%. Meanwhile India’s foreign exchange reserves in the week ending May 22 fell by $7.5 billion to $681.4 ​billion, the lowest in over a year. TCA Sharad Raghavan reports that India’s Balance of Payments “stood at a deficit of $30.8 billion in 2025-26, showing that total outflows including trade and investments, exceeded inflows by that much — a 6x increase over the previous year.” What’s hurting India on the capital account are “payments made in advance for imports and an increase in funds parked abroad”, he notes.

“India is seeking to diversify its sourcing network for new-age manufacturing for which it has set ambitious targets,” reports Saurav Anand, “but China’s grip over India’s clean-energy and advanced manufacturing supply chain is only getting stronger.”

India’s digital payments story is often told as a triumph of technology under the Modi government, with Unified Payments Interface driving rapid adoption across the country. Yet beneath that narrative lies a striking contradiction: cash in circulation has surged to a record Rs 42.86 trillion. Even as UPI transactions continue to boom, cash usage is rising alongside it. This paradox sits at the centre of a report by Manojit Saha which suggests that India may even be heading toward the introduction of plastic currency notes.

El Nino may weaken the monsoon more than expected earlier, with the IMD now forecasting that India will receive 90% of its long-term average monsoon rainfall this year – its previous prediction was 92%. Reuters reports that this would mark India’s lowest rainfall in 11 years.

The rains are expected to hit peninsular India next week, later than the May 26 date that was anticipated, so we are to bake in the heat for sometime longer. That includes those of us in Haryana, which has seen temperatures exceed 43°C this summer, but the authorities in the state – which has India’s lowest forest cover – have stopped distributing free saplings citing poor upkeep by recipients. “A complete halt on free sapling distribution is not justified. Instead of stopping public participation, the focus should be on better monitoring,” a forest official told the Times of India. Of course, when we figure out the bug, we make it a feature.

The Wall Street Journal reports that India is offering large subsidies to attract Google’s AI data centers, but nearby communities are facing worsening water shortages questioning whether the benefits of the tech boom outweigh the local environmental costs.

India’s attempt to diplomatically sideline Pakistan has not worked as planned and has instead “backfired” on the Modi government, writes Saif Khalid. The report suggests that Pakistan is currently enjoying stronger international engagement, with attention and outreach from the US, China and several countries in West Asia, despite India’s efforts to limit its standing. Analysts quoted in the piece argue that these developments reflect strategic missteps by the government led by Modi.

The Delhi high court today ordered Shamita Yadav aka The Ranting Gola to take down a tweet of hers from December where she mocked BJP spokesperson and Supreme Court lawyer Gaurav Bhatia for appearing on a TV news debate in a kurta but not very much below it. If Yadav’s tweet stays online it will cause prejudice and injury to Bhatia, said Justice Mini Pushkarna, orally calling Yadav’s remarks in ‘bad taste’ and suggesting that her lawyer Vrinda Grover would have made different arguments ‘if the genders were swapped’.

An investigation has found that Pernod Ricard’s India withheld the real composition and age of its Scotch whiskies, potentially to reduce tax liabilities in the market, reports Reuters. The company is now dealing with multiple probes in India over its business practices. Earlier, its Indian arm was also drawn into a formal antitrust inquiry over claims it secured exclusive retail deals in New Delhi to favour its brands. This adds to another ongoing investigation into alleged collusion with retailers to expand its market share in the capital – allegations the company has denied.

Remember union minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari had dismissed concerns about ethanol-blended petrol last year, challenging critics to cite a single vehicle affected by the rollout of E20 fuel (petrol blended with 20% ethanol), and insisting there have been no complaints while citing approvals from SIAM and ARAI. But a LocalCircles survey offers a more scathing counterpoint: 1 in 2 petrol vehicle owners with cars purchased in 2022 or earlier report a noticeable drop in mileage in the past nine months since the E20 rollout.

An industry that was closed down in Europe due to severe contamination caused by PFAS – per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (often called “forever chemicals” because they persist in the environment) – is reportedly now operating in India using the same equipment and continuing similar production processes. Communities in Maharashtra are protesting the environmental and health risks, while India still does not have dedicated regulations specifically governing PFAS chemicals, says the Guardian.

The Economist asks whether Vaibhav Sooryavanshi – who has already become the first IPL player to score 500+ runs in the powerplay – could go on to be one of the greatest batters in cricket history. It notes that “it is hard to think of an athlete in any sport who has been so dominant at such a young age,” highlighting how extraordinary his early impact has been.

Santiago Martin’s rise – from selling lottery tickets at a tea shop to building a lottery business worth $2.2 billion across India and then stepping into politics – shows how closely money, business, and political power are often interwoven in the country, says Bloomberg.

It’s amazing what passes for Breaking News for India’s breathless anchors: Prime Minister Modi chaired a meeting of the cabinet and urged his ministers to drink water as a way of beating the summer heat!

Toolkit Janata Party?

As complaints over technical failures in the Central Board of Secondary Education’s On-Screen Marking (OSM) system mount, hundreds of school principals were sent a social media playbook this week, directing them to boost the board’s rapidly deteriorating image amid widespread backlash, reports Hindustan Times. Following the directives and closely mirroring the language mentioned in the circulated document, multiple schools, including government-run Kendriya Vidyalayas and Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas, posted videos defending the digital evaluation process, predominantly Instagram reels. See exhibit here.

The controversy gained attention after a social media user inquired why students from earlier batches were appearing in promotional clips.

VFS under the scanner

Lighthouse Reports-led investigation finds that 11 European and Schengen states flagged over 150 concerns over visa processes of VFS Global, including possible EU norm violations in various countries, including India, reports the Indian Express for data errors, document mishandling, IT failures and alleged slot selling. Following which, a 20-member EU delegation visited India to address the mess.

Myanmar president to visit India

Min Aung Hlaing, who became president of Myanmar last month after a neither-free-nor-fair election and before that military ruler of the country after snatching power from the elected government, will pay a five-day official visit to India starting tomorrow. He will meet Prime Minister Modi, participate in a business forum and travel to Bodh Gaya. The National Unity Government in exile has flagged its ‘deep concern’ over the visit and Myanmar opposition groups based in India have said they will hold protests. Asked today at its weekly press briefing about the Myanmar military’s dark human rights record – Human Rights Watch notes that it has illegally attacked civilians and is driving the country into a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’ – the external affairs ministry dodged the questions with boilerplate answers. The Modi government’s ties with the junta in Naypyidaw too are a subject of international scrutiny.

The Long Cable

The Prime Minister Walked Away. Indian Journalism Followed.

Shyam Tekwani

The suppression of journalists rarely looks like suppression. It looks like a press conference that is never scheduled. A question that is never asked. An editor who already knows which stories will not be commissioned and does not need to be told twice.

Anyone who has spent time covering governments that perform democracy more readily than they practise it knows this. It took a Norwegian journalist, arriving fresh, to say it out loud.

Her name is Helle Lyng Svendsen. She is in her twenties, covers labour markets and local policy for the Oslo newspaper Dagsavisen, and was in the Norwegian capital last week covering her prime minister’s bilateral summit with Narendra Modi. As the two leaders finished their joint appearance and began to leave, she called out: “Prime Minister Modi, why don’t you take some questions from the freest press in the world?”

He walked away without answering. Since becoming prime minister, Modi has not held a full press conference in India; abroad, he has only rarely submitted to unscripted questioning. In Oslo, then, his silence was not news.

What happened next was.

Within hours of Modi leaving Norwegian soil, Svendsen’s Instagram and Facebook accounts were suspended, triggered, she believes, by a coordinated wave of complaints from Indian users. Indian television studios devoted prime time to her impertinence. She was branded a foreign spy, a Congress proxy, a George Soros agent. At a subsequent briefing, a senior Indian diplomat lectured her for 11 minutes about India’s invention of zero and chess.

The question she asked – why does India’s prime minister not face the press? – was never answered. It was not even addressed. It had already been replaced by a more manageable question: who does this Norwegian girl think she is?

That replacement did not happen by accident. It did not require instruction. It required only a media culture that has spent over a decade learning to protect power from scrutiny by redirecting attention toward the person who exercises it.

It is worth being precise about what this is and what it is not.

It is not censorship in the way censorship is usually understood: the midnight knock, the seized press, the journalist who disappears. Those things happen too, and they are worse. But what happened to Svendsen is something that does not require state machinery to operate. It requires only a press that has internalised edicts so deeply that the process is no longer visible even to itself, that certain questions are not questions but provocations.

Twelve years without a full press conference in India is an extraordinary fact. In a functioning press culture it would be the subject of sustained, relentless scrutiny. In India it has become, somehow, unremarkable. The silence has been normalised so completely that when a foreign journalist notices it and says so out loud, the story becomes her noticing, not his silence.

This is not what happened to Indian journalism. This is what Indian journalism became. That becoming did not happen overnight but through the slow adjustment of what feels normal: which questions are reasonable, which framings are responsible, which stories are worth the cost of telling.

The forces behind this adjustment are not mysterious. Political alignment brings access. Access improves visibility. Visibility feeds both market performance and political legitimacy. The pattern was visible in the coverage of Oslo: within hours, Republic TV, Times Now, and a host of social media influencers were not asking why India’s PM refuses to face journalists. They were asking who Svendsen was, what she wanted, who had sent her, and why she had dared.

The story had been flipped before most viewers knew there was a story.

Once that loop closes, the journalist who disrupts it feels not like a professional doing her job but like someone making trouble. And making trouble, in a profession that has made comfort its operating principle, requires a justification that journalism alone no longer provides.

There was a time – imperfect, uneven, never dominant – when journalism in India understood its labour differently. That instinct has not disappeared entirely. It survives in scattered, underfunded, often precarious outposts: in vernacular newspapers that the metropolitan press does not notice, in independent digital outlets operating without institutional shelter, in individual journalists who have chosen accountability over access and paid for it.

They are not relics. They are the only functioning conscience of a profession that has largely traded its judgment for its position.

Svendsen understood something about her own situation that deserves to be said plainly. “I just literally did my job from a privileged corner of the world,” she told BBC Hindi. “You guys in India are the ones doing the hard work, the really heavy lifting.”

She meant it literally. She asked her question from Oslo, absorbed the backlash from Oslo, and had her accounts eventually restored because she operates within a media and legal culture that treats press freedom as a condition of democratic life rather than a concession from it. The Indian journalists she was speaking for – a diminishing number – operate within no such protection.

India ranks 157th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index. Norway ranks first. The distance between those numbers is not a gap in constitutional provisions. India has those. The distance lies in what journalism has learned to do when it is in the room with power.

Norway did not become the world’s freest press by accident. Neither did India become 157th.

Svendsen was not describing Norway as exceptional. She was describing India as having chosen otherwise.

There is one detail from Oslo that has received less attention than it deserves. After Modi left the room, Svendsen had hoped that senior international correspondents present would follow her lead, that the momentum of her question might carry. They did not.

“I had hoped that when the Indian Prime Minister left the stage, someone else could try to challenge him as well,” she said. The room, full of experienced journalists from around the world, let the moment pass. The failure of nerve that evening was not India’s alone. But India’s was the most instructive, because it was not nervousness. It was habit.

In the footage from Oslo, the moment is worth holding in the mind.

The room is small and crowded. Modi is walking away from the joint appearance. Svendsen is in the second row. She calls out her question. He does not break stride. He does not turn. He continues walking with the practised indifference of a man who sees no reason to answer questions.

The silence in that moment is not empty. It is full of everything that has been decided, long before Oslo, about who gets to ask and who does not have to answer.

What Indian journalism did with that image - how it turned away from the silence and toward the woman who interrupted it, how it made her the story rather than the 12 years that made her question necessary - is not a failure of any individual editor or anchor or channel. It is a portrait of a profession.

Taken, without quite meaning to, by a Norwegian journalist who came to cover a bilateral summit and ended up capturing the habits of Indian media more clearly than many of its own practitioners now dare to do.

The prime minister walked away. Indian journalism followed.

Shyam Tekwani is a professor and columnist specialising in security affairs. Views expressed in this article are those of the author.

Reportedly

Austerity anyone? Here’s the motorcade of BJP president Nitin Nabin. No carpooling in sight…

Drawn and quartered

Grounds for hope: Ridding Dhaka of gridlock

Anybody who has been to Dhaka in the past decade knows how awful the city’s traffic can be. But an attempt is now being made to replace the Bangladeshi capital’s dysfunctional traffic management ‘system’ run manually by the police with AI-enabled traffic lights and cameras. And the results, reports Surya Mim in Counterpoint, so far are positive:

“Earlier this month, the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) deployed artificial intelligence (AI) based traffic enforcement signal systems at multiple intersections in Dhaka representing an important and long-overdue shift in policy thinking. For the first time, traffic management is shifting away from purely manual control toward data-driven automation.

“Now, 25 cameras are monitoring vehicle movement, detecting five types of traffic violations, including red-light jumping, entering closed left lanes, lane violations, wrong-way driving, and illegal parking, adapting signals according to traffic density.

“Initial observations from intersections where AI-controlled systems have been introduced appear encouraging. In the enforced intersections, traffic flow has become more organized, particularly during peak hours. Waiting times at signals have reportedly decreased, and the need for constant manual intervention by traffic police has been reduced.”

Deep dive

Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Associate Professor in the International Relations of South Asia, University of Oxford, surveys India’s mixed relationship with the US-led global order.

Prime number: 53

India has an average maternal mortality rate of 87 per one lakh live births but Madhya Pradesh fares worse at 159, and the Sidhi district in the state’s eastern tribal belt even more so at 211. In fact, 53 women here died before, during or after childbirth between April 2025 and March 2026. To get a sense of why this might be, the Indian Express‘s Anand Mohan J. travelled to Sidhi, finding a strained system in an area where many villages remain hard to reach.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Suhas Palshikar examines how the political order established in May 2014 has taken shape and explains what needs to be done to restore the vitality of democratic spirit.

• Hussain Indorewala reflects on the punitive use of house demolitions, arguing that “pity the nation that makes a machine of destruction its symbol of development.”

• The Supreme Court’s verdict upholding the legality of the contentious SIR is an “unqualified reaffirmation of the letter” of the law “no matter if the spirit seems stifled”, says former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa. The bench, he writes, “left the people with the impression that ‘might is right’ and all that is legal is presumed fair”, all the while being “unmindful of the wrongful exclusion of electors through the ‘logical discrepancy’ tool”.

• Madan Sabnavis suggests that the economy’s “Goldilocks” phase may not last much longer. As he puts it, “With so many factors at play, the Goldilocks story seems set to change – and Cinderella’s midnight bells could chime at some point,” signalling a possible shift in economic conditions ahead.

• Amid concerns around cow slaughter laws and the falling cattle population, Faizan Mustafa and Abdul Samad question whether a central, total ban on cow slaughter and cattle trade is the right approach noting that “over 20 States in India have laws prohibiting cow slaughter. Only Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura, Manipur, Mizoram and Kerala do not have such laws. But what is the efficacy of these laws? Have the stringent provisions and enhanced punishments introduced over the last 12 years helped preserve cows, or could such laws ultimately contribute to their decline?”

• Bans in the Persian Gulf states on hyper-nationalist Bollywood films like Dhurandhar carry a quiet warning, writes Shanthie Mariet D’Souza:
  India’s remittance windfall from the region is not unconditional.

• Himadri Sekhar Mistri in his essay ‘The Paper Republic: Ambedkar, Electoral Erasure, and Dalit Citizenship in West Bengal’ writes about his Namasudra kin who found her name deleted in SIR. Himadri with the help of Dr. Ambedkar’s writings analyses Bengal politics and plight of Dalits and Muslims in Bengal.

• A lot of issues that take a backseat during the day-to-day political grind finally get some airtime during elections. In Kerala, says Anandan S. reflecting on his coverage of the recent assembly polls, these include the worries of its Kannada and Tamil-speaking minorities in Kasargod and Idukki respectively. He writes: “The awareness of a society’s shared realities, such as these groups’ contribution to its cultural, linguistic and economic progress, is paramount in … recognising the role they play in democratising a multi-ethnic society.”

Listen up

KPS Menon, who was India’s ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time, met Joseph Stalin at the Kremlin in February 1953 and a broad account of what they discussed is already in the public domain thanks to a declassified summary cabled to Washington by the US charge d’affairs based on what Menon himself chose to share with the American diplomat. But what did KPS Menon make of the Soviet leader and his meeting with him? The diplomat – who had also served as India’s foreign secretary – shared his experience with the BBC in 1967; they’ve now made it public as part of their Witness History series.

[Note: The BBC has erroneously misidentified KPS Menon as VK Krishna Menon and the India Cable reproduced this error in an earlier version of this item]

Watch out

The Sita Ram Haveli in Lahore, an iconic residence built in the 1930s which had long fallen to rack and ruin, has been lovingly restored by its new owner. Here’s a video of the finished product.

Over and out

• Photographer Raghu Rai, who died last month at the age of eighty-three, spent his career documenting India’s post-colonial journey and its transformation over time. Taran Dugal notes that one of his best-known images, “Chaiwala, Delhi–Mumbai train,” shows a tea seller leaning out of a moving railcar as it travels through the Indian countryside

• His term as India’s ruler was a short one but Sher Shah Suri was always ‘lager’ than life…

• Despite having relatively low immigration, Japan has embraced Indian food in a big way, with an estimated 4,000–5,000 Indian restaurants - outnumbering McDonald’s outlets across the country. But as the Economist notes, Japan’s beloved Indian restaurant scene is now facing an unexpected threat amid the country’s growing backlash against immigration.

• Indian literature has lost one of the last towering figures of modern Urdu ghazal, Dr Bashir Badr, who passed away at 91 and had been bedridden for a decade due to Parkinson’s disease and dementia. A Padma Shri awardee, his poetry moved far beyond literary circles and became part of everyday emotional language. Writing with striking simplicity, he captured broken homes, fading relationships, loneliness, communal wounds, urban alienation, and fragile hope. Perhaps no couplet captures his moral clarity more powerfully than this immortal sher, especially at times like this under the Modi government when ‘bulldozer’ is held as the new form of justice:

Log toot jaate hain ek ghar banane mein/ Tum taras nahin khate bastiyan jalane mein

(People break themselves building a single home/ Yet you feel no pity while burning entire settlements)

That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.

If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.

Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.

Snapshot of the day

May 28, 2026

Anirudh S.K.

Under the saffron-tinted shadow of their growing insecurity in India, Muslims in most of the country observed Eid-ul-Adha or Bakrid on Thursday. Do check out this compilation of photos foregrounding the human side of the occasion that has in recent years made the news for unhappy reasons.

Inventor and activist Sonam Wangchuk has a different recollection of his meeting with Ladakh lieutenant governor V.K. Saxena on Tuesday, after which the Modi government official had claimed he ‘cautioned’ Wangchuk and that the latter expressed uncertainty over the ‘origins’ of the satirical Cockroach Janta Party that Saxena’s bosses have sought to repress. In a video message published this evening, Wangchuk said Saxena had asked him not to speak about the CJP on the grounds that it is a ‘conspiracy by foreign forces’. ‘I don’t know about that but I will look into it’, Wangchuk recalled telling the LG while internally laughing at the irony that he himself was accused of participating in a ‘foreign conspiracy’ and jailed under the draconian National Security Act following the violent protests in Leh last year.

‘Maybe he needed to make a boss of his in Delhi happy,’ Wangchuk said on Thursday, saying that even if just 70% of the CJP’s followers are Indian, it would make India a ‘Vishwaguru’ in terms of creative expression and protest. Its founder, Abhijit Dipke, has shown that the vast majority of its followers are Indian, contrary to what some BJP leaders have claimed. The Modi government has had the outfit’s X account withheld in India in addition to its backup Instagram account – its main handle has a 13 million lead over the BJP – while Dipke has reported receiving death threats.

Asked by the Congress high command to step down and make way for his deputy D.K. Shivakumar, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah has tendered his resignation, three years into assuming office for the second time. The 77-year-old said he has no plans of moving to the Rajya Sabha and will continue to be active in state politics. “Until my last breath,” he declared, “I will continue to fight for social justice and against forces of communalism”. Meanwhile Shivakumar, a Vokkaliga leader hailing from Karnataka’s Old Mysore region who was a key part of the Congress’s 2023 victory and who had reportedly struck a ‘power-sharing’ agreement with Siddaramaiah immediately after their win, has his task cut out for him.

A day before Eid-ul-Adha, while hearing a complaint from an Indu Makkal Katchi office-bearer alleging that temporary sheds meant for cow slaughter are being set up in Coimbatore, the Madras high court ordered

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If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.

Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.

Snapshot of the day

May 27, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

In what is perceived to be the final nail in the coffin of the mass disenfranchisement under the Modi-led government, Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi today upheld the legality of the Election Commission’s contentious special intensive revision of voter rolls across the country starting in Bihar, ruling that it is in line with the “constitutional imperative of free and fair elections” and was not disproportionate in nature:

“The measures adopted bear a rational nexus to the objective sought to be achieved, are not manifestly excessive, and are accompanied by sufficient procedural safeguards to prevent arbitrary exclusion. The impugned exercise was founded upon a legitimate and constitutionally grounded purpose, namely, the restoration of the accuracy, completeness, and integrity of the electoral rolls … the measures adopted by the Commission cannot be said to be disproportionate to the object sought to be achieved.”

It also said that the poll body is empowered to carry out a limited inquiry into someone’s citizenship vis-a-vis their eligibility as electors but its decision does not amount to a final call on their status as citizens. In this regard it directed the commission to refer the cases of those people it found ineligible for inclusion in Bihar’s roll to the competent authority in the Union government for a final decision on their citizenship. If they are found to have been citizens all along, they are to be included in the voter list.

It is worth noting that so far SIR has struck off over 6.13 crore voters in 10 states and 3 union territories. Yet, the ECI hasn’t disclosed how many of them were illegal immigrants. In one of the hearings, when SC had asked ECI the same, its counsel didn’t have an answer.

Sharp important points by activist Yogendra Yadav on why this order today could be the “ADM Jabalpur of our times, I will wait for the review by history.” Watch his conversation alongside senior advocate Sanjay Hegde with Sarvasti Dasgupta below:

In a second physical meeting between the two sides since the February joint statement agreeing on a framework for an interim agreement regarding reciprocal and mutually beneficial trade, US negotiators

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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.

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Snapshot of the day

May 26, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

Following up on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Independence Day promise of a future “high-powered demographic mission” to deal with a nebulous “conspiracy” to change India’s demography through “infiltration”, the government today announced the composition and mandate of the panel. To be headed by former Supreme Court Justice P.P. Naolekar, instead of a demographer of repute, the committee is to examine “demographic changes occurring across India due to illegal immigration and other unnatural causes” (including what the Union home ministry calls “orchestrated migration”) and look at “abnormal population shifts at the levels of religious and social communities”.

The spectre of ‘unnatural demographic change’ – driven by Muslims, of course – is a longtime obsession of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the BJP frequently invokes it in poll-bound states. However, whenever questions have arisen in parliament about the scale or extent of “illegal immigration” into India, the government has said that it has no official estimate.

One of the members of the committee is the Census Commissioner of India, whose main preoccupation right now ought to be the proper conduct of India’s delayed decennial census. His presence raises a serious conflict of interest. Census work requires counting the population and measuring objective demographic change – rather than getting caught in the subjective weeds of what is “unnatural”.

Another member of this panel is Shamika Ravi, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, who during the 2024 general elections – which the BJP and Modi himself contested with all communal cylinders firing – had co-authored a dubious paper pointing to an increase in the Muslim share of India’s population between 1950 and 2015 and a decrease in that of Hindus. It also argued that the share of minorities represented “a cumulative outcome measure of their well-being”. The Population Foundation of India had said at the time that the paper’s highlighting the former figures was alarmist given that the growth rate among Muslims had declined between 1981 and 2011, in fact more steeply than that of Hindus.

‘Demographic change’ has also been raised by the BJP as a reason behind the contentious special intensive revision of voter rolls but it is still not known how many undocumented immigrants the exercise discovered, in Bihar or Bengal or elsewhere.

Fun fact: Nowhere is the term ‘Unnatural Demographic Change’ defined. One unusual demographic change the new committee will almost certainly not investigate is the actual death toll from the two waves of Covid. The official count of 530,000 deaths is much lower than the 3.8 million to 4.7 million excess deaths that independent studies by Banaji et al. and the WHO have estimated.

The Quad met today at the foreign ministers level but the latter were able to do little more than tread water since it is clear there is no buy in at the level of the US president and hence no clarity about whether and when the group

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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK

If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.

Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.

Snapshot of the day

May 25, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

“Contrary to claims that poverty in India has been largely eliminated,” write the authors of a major new study, “we suggest that poverty decline in India has faltered and has not kept pace with progress achieved during the first decade of the century.” Specifically, write Himanshu, Peter Lanjouw and Philipp Schirmer [PDF], “all estimates indicate a significant slowing of poverty decline between 2011/12 and 2022/23 compared to the preceding decade.”

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio is in India for a visit that aims to breathe life into both the flagging bilateral relationship and the anti-China ‘Quad’  grouping – whose utility remains under question in the wake of the recent US attempt to reset ties with Beijing.

In India, Rubio defended all the moves the Trump administration has taken that have hurt India – its punitive tariffs, its crackdown on legitimate travel and work visas, its military actions in West Asia that have caused a severe disruption in the world energy and fertiliser markets – while his Indian hosts did little to set the record straight. At a joint press conference with External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, Rubio was able to duck a question about Trump’s racist ‘India is a hellhole’ social media post since the Indian journalist who asked the question was too coy or terrified to even name Trump. In this, of course, he mirrored the MEA. An American reporter asked Rubio the same question and the exchange makes for interesting reading:

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