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

November 6, 2026

Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K., Siddharth Varadarajan

Voters whose enumeration forms were purportedly not received during the special intensive revision – and who were excluded from the draft rolls on grounds of being absent, shifted, dead or duplicate – in seven states where the exercise is ongoing have been given an opportunity to resubmit their enumeration forms. Until now, such voters were only given the option of participating in the Election Commission’s special enrolment drive and submitting Forms 6, by doing which they would have made the false declaration that they are first-time voters. Once restored, these wrongly excluded electors are to be given their old voter ID numbers, Nirvachan Sadan announced today.

Its move comes days after Supreme Court Justice Joymalya Bagchi had suggested that wrongly deleted voters could be allowed to belatedly submit their enumeration forms instead of being made to fill Forms 6. It also comes a day after the Goa bench of the Bombay high court said that such a deleted voter would indeed be making a false declaration by submitting Form 6 – this was despite the EC arguing recently to the contrary. The states that will benefit from this new move are Nagaland, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Telangana, Delhi, Haryana and Maharashtra.

Still, there are deleted voters who won’t benefit from this relaxation, and they are individuals who were struck off the rolls shortly before the SIR began and didn’t have any enumeration forms generated in their name (no enumeration form, no benefit). The Hindu‘s Suruchi Kumari and Aroon Deep had reported two months ago that in Delhi, between the February 2025 assembly elections and when the rolls were frozen before the SIR this June, a net 10.28 lakh deletions had already taken place, mostly during the pre-SIR ‘mapping’ period. Former chief election commissioner S.Y. Quraishi had called the scale of these pre-SIR deletions massive and unprecedented.

Appearing before the high court the Delhi police denied that it sent any takedown notices to X demanding that it withhold the handles of the Internet Freedom Foundation and the Software Law Freedom Centre – in addition to many other tweets – for defaming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. X too told the bench that the notices it received were sent by an ‘impostor’. The IFF and SLFC had moved the court after the police neither confirmed nor denied sending the notices.

Ayush Tiwari notes that there were red flags in both sets of communications purporting to be from the RSS and the police that pointed to them being part of a hoax. One of the legal notices sent in the Sangh’s name contained an address belonging to another right-wing group, the Rashtriya Seva Sangh, and was delivered from an email ID that was created just six hours prior. And one of the police’s notices was sent from an email ID that, as the SFLC has pointed out, does not seem to be functional at all. The SFLC also noted that X’s Law Enforcement Request Form for submitting takedown notices did not verify the authenticity of the entity submitting such requests.

Another question that the government’s sudden decision to let Agniveers serve for two more years has thrown up is what will happen to their marriage prospects during their extended tenure – recruits are often from rural areas and their standing in the matrimonial market may take a hit if they stay unmarried for that long. That’s why, reports Ajay Banerjee citing sources, another emendation of Agnipath is on the cards, to let this first batch of extended-service Agniveers marry while still part of the scheme. What isn’t on the cards is any grant of pension benefits to them in the event of their death in service. In other words, they can marry but their kin will still not receive a payout if they die in service.

Agnipath had also caused consternation among the Gurkha community that has been a source of recruits for the Indian Army for decades. The topic is likely to figure during discussions that will take place when Nepali Prime Minister Balendra Shah visits New Delhi later this month, reports Rahul Bedi.

The Hemant Soren government’s move to cancel the outcome of the Combined Graduate Level recruitment test after protests against exam irregularities rocked Ranchi a few months ago was unfair and unjust, the Jharkhand high court ruled today while reversing the administration’s decision. Those who were recruited but had their careers drop into limbo can continue to serve now while the investigation into the irregularities in connection with the test is to carry on. The state government had cancelled the CGL alongside 21 other exams in response to the weeks-long protests, which had immediately followed the Cockroach Janta Party-led agitation in Delhi that resulted in then-education minister Dharmendra Pradhan getting the sack.

The Ranbir Kapoor, Sai Pallavi and Yash-starring Ramayana – also featuring DNEG in the graphics department and a soundtrack by A.R. Rahman and Hans Zimmer – is now playing in theatres. Expectations are high and the movie has so far divided critics.

The Supreme Court has declined to suspend the Bombay high court’s decision to overturn journalist Tarun Tejpal’s acquittal and sentence him to ten years’ prison for raping a junior colleague. “We do not find it to be a fit case to grant suspension of sentence. On a prima facie view, we are not inclined to grant suspension of sentence,” the apex court said today. The high court while sentencing the former Tehelka editor had pointed to glaring deficiencies in the trial court’s judgment, including its assumptions on how the survivor ‘should’ have behaved after her assault.

Yashica Dutt has a useful thread explaining the progressive turn South Asian Americans appear to have made in the recent US mid-term elections.

Ro Khanna, the California Democratic Congressman of Indian origin, is “laying the groundwork” for a presidential bid in 2028, news reports say. Khanna is one of a handful of Indian -origin members of the US House of Representatives. He is also a critic of the Narendra Modi government. “I have unequivocally condemned Hindu nationalism & applauded the students in the streets speaking out against corruption and for inclusion,” he tweeted today. “My grandfather was part of Gandhi’s independence movement and I believe in Gandhi and Nehru’s vision of pluralism.” Promoting a Modi government official to launch a scathing attack on him.

Approached by vendors against the Gir Somnath district collector’s move to ban the preparation, sale and storage of meat in a 500-metre radius of the Somnath temple, the Supreme Court today declined to do anything. However it requested the Gujarat high court to expedite its hearing of the matter. A single-judge bench of the high court had held the collector’s ban to be ultra vires of the constitutional right to carry out trade, but a division bench in turn stayed the judge’s order. “This is during Diwali, this is bread and butter, [you] are killing an enterprise,” senior advocate Huzefa Ahmadi, appearing for the petitioners, told the apex court.

A group named ‘Crafty Falcon’ carried out a spate of AI-driven attacks on Indian non-bank lenders, fintech companies and crypto exchanges in recent weeks, CERT-In has said, revealing that it used four publicly available AI tools, including two linked to China. CERT-In did not say more about this ‘Crafty Falcon’, which “surveys its targets with machine intelligence, operates at machine speed and strikes by invoking the victim’s own payment and disbursement APIs”.

Cyber fraudsters are always a step ahead and the explosion in generative AI’s capabilities is making it extra hard to verify things online too. As per the latest official data – from the National Statistics Office’s Comprehensive Annual Modular Survey of 2023 – only three in ten men and two in ten women in their 20s were able to check the authenticity of social media content, determine when something was published online and establish the legitness of a web address, Nileena Suresh recalls. That was three years ago, before AI became such a big part of our lives.

Calm began returning to several of Bangladesh’s urban centres yesterday, a day after the newly set up wage board agreed to increase garment workers’ pay. Protests demanding a wage hike – the need for which has become pressing amid rising prices – saw hundreds of factories shut shop in Bangladesh, where garments account for 80% of all export earnings. However, the board hasn’t said how much it will hike workers’ pay by.

Gauhati HC quashes NSA, frees activist Pranab Doley after 117 days

Indigenous and land rights activist Pranab Doley walked out of Golaghat District Jail today, bringing an end to 117 days in custody after the Gauhati High Court quashed his preventive detention under the National Security Act. Doley walked free hours after the High Court set aside the Assam government’s detention order dated July 30, 2026, and directed that he be released and set at liberty forthwith, who was arrested in connection with protests against a proposed luxury hotel project near Kaziranga National Park in Golaghat district.

Doley’s lawyer, Dipesh Agarwala, told the Wire that the court set aside the detention order on several grounds, including the absence of a proximate link between old criminal cases cited against him and his detention, failure to disclose all relevant documents to him, and the authorities’ failure to consider his second representation against the detention.

Delhi chokes as AQI worsens

Even as the India Cable goes to press and firecrackers continue to burst across the national capital on the eve of Diwali weekend, Delhi’s Air Quality Index (AQI) touched 382 on Friday evening, edging close to the “severe” category. In response, authorities have invoked Stage III of the Graded Response Action Plan (GRAP), a set of emergency measures aimed at curbing air pollution in the national capital. The restrictions include a ban on piling work and demolition activities, major road construction and repairs, and the use of coal and wood for heating. Several curbs will also apply to vehicles on the roads, depending on their engine types.

However, several Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) monitoring stations across Delhi-NCR have already recorded AQI readings above 400, placing those areas in the “severe” category.

In UP, BJP turns to ‘infiltrators’ scare as SIR backlash mounts

Facing mounting criticism over the SIR, discrepancies in electoral rolls and growing demands for CEC Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, the BJP has turned to its polarised bogey of “Bangladeshi infiltrators” and Pakistan-backed anarchy to defend the EC and the voter-list revision, reports Omar Rashid. The message at its ‘Loktantra Bachao, Arajakta Hatao’ padyatras in Uttar Pradesh is blunt: those allegedly stealing your ration and resources are being struck off the voter lists. That, in essence, is the BJP’s narrative to battle resentment over the integrity of the SIR.

Reportedly

You might think right wing social media influencers are at least consistent in their trolling but it turns out they too are capable of big U-turns, where a person targeted for being ‘anti-national’ is capable of redemption.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

The 2026 Chicago Council Survey, conducted from July 10–21 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, finds that American views of India have rebounded from last year but are increasingly divided along party lines under Donald Trump’s second administration, with Democrats generally more favourably inclined towards India than Republicans. “Democrats’ feelings remain slightly warm (55), as do Independents (52)—but Republicans remain on the cooler side of the ledger (47),” the report notes. The decline in support for India as a US ally, however, cuts across party lines: “Democrats and Independents have declined 11 points since 2021 (from 22% to 11% today) and Republicans have declined 10 points (from 19% to 9% today).”

Wade into the report here.

Prime number: 31.2%

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• A Supreme Court bench (of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S. Chandurkar) has held that detention by any investigating agency beyond 24 hours violates Article 22(2) and that the 24-hour limit within which an accused has to be produced before a magistrate begins from the actual detention and not formal arrest. This is a significant and much-needed direction, writes Maneesh Chhiber but the only trouble is: “How to get the investigating agencies to play ball?”

• In an editorial on Modi’s having second thoughts on the controversial Agnipath military recruitment scheme, the Deccan Chronicle notes that “the government dismissed mounting criticism. Now, barely four years later, it has changed the rules. A supposedly non-negotiable military reform has been substantially diluted. Call it a recalibration, but it is unmistakably a U-turn.”

• What changes for India now that the US Congress has come under the control of the Democrats? Not all that much, says K.P. Nayar, though he notes that it remains to be seen whether the results have made Trump more tractable or even more mercurial. If treasury secretary Scott Bessent and trade representative Jamieson Greer have mellowed out, the time is now to strike the trade deal, Nayar also advises.

• Bharat Bhushan points to one minus for Modi: there will not just be more Democratic scrutiny of the Trump administration’s policies but also of the Indian government’s actions at home, he says. Things like USCIRF reports will start getting more play, he warns.

• India must eliminate situations that lead to sewer cleaning deaths, says The Hindu in an editorial.

• Sobhana K. Nair’s experience with government press notes as of late has been that they belong to two categories: ‘generic misdirection’ and ‘concealment charm’. They offer a masterclass on how to say very little while sounding like you’ve hung the moon, she points out with several examples.

Listen up

India prides itself for its pharma industry but is China outpacing it? And even the US in terms of medical innovation? China’s “DeepSeek moment” in artificial intelligence may have a rival in biotech. The Chinese company Akeso, whose cancer drug outperformed Merck’s blockbuster Keytruda in a clinical trial, is being held up as a sign of China’s growing prowess in medical research. On the China Books Podcast, Dr Ruby Wang, a London-based physician and author of China Cure: The Rise of Biotech, AI Medicine and a Global Health Superpower, discusses China’s healthcare revolution.

Watch out

Elizabeth Threlkeld, senior fellow and director of the South Asia program at the Stimson Center and a former US Foreign Service officer, offers a sobering assessment of the May 2025 India-Pakistan conflict—asking why neither side seems to have learned the lessons of the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ and how Washington’s public role in the ceasefire could complicate its efforts to mediate future crises.

Over and out

The most popular Bollywood star in the former Soviet Union was not Raj Kapoor—depite the popularity of Awara, or ‘Vagabond’, as it was called in Russian—or Amitabh Bachchan but Mithun Chakarborty for his role as Jimmy in Disco Dancer.

Despite its staggering budget and grand ambitions, writes Tatsam Mukherjee, Nitesh Tiwari’s Ramayana: Part 1 “settles for a cautious, visually underwhelming spectacle that struggles to bring fresh life to a familiar epic.”

Happy Diwali!

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

November 5, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

Form 6 is used to enroll new electors and contains a declaration saying its applicant is registering “for the first time”. Still, the Election Commission is using it to re-enroll existing voters who were deleted by the special intensive revision, and has tried to argue that such electors would not be making a false declaration by submitting the form. Is that convincing? The Bombay high court doesn’t seem to think so: on Thursday it ruled that a petitioner’s family who was struck off during the SIR would indeed have made a false declaration if they submitted Form 6 to get back on the rolls.

The court’s Goa bench was hearing the prominent case of Paresh Salgaonkar and his family, who submitted Forms 8 – used to modify electors’ details – during the SIR in view of having moved houses several years ago, but whose applications were not processed and their names taken off the rolls. Pavneet Singh Chadha quotes the court as saying:

… Had the petitioners filled in Form 6, they would be making a false declaration that their name did not exist in any electoral roll and that they were applying for inclusion in an electoral roll for the first time.

He reports that the court also took issue with their Forms 8 not being considered during the SIR. What happened in the Salgaonkars’ case, Justices Amit Jamsandekar and Valmiki Menezes said, amounted to a suspension of existing provisions and was thus “impermissible”. “… Even whilst the revision of a roll is ongoing, whether intensive or summary … the EROs [electoral registration officers] receiving Form 8 are bound to decide upon the application,” they added.

Of course, the EC disagrees. It requested the bench to stay its order – directing the authorities to register the Salgaonkars within ten days – so it can move the Supreme Court, but the judges declined. “How can there be a stay when we are giving a direction to include the name of a voter?” the bench asked according to Lisa Monteiro.

Meanwhile, Nirvachan Sadan has issued a fresh work allocation order formally bringing Seema Khanna, the EC’s director-general for IT who is among those at the centre of the storm surrounding the poll body in the wake of the Indian Express‘s landmark investigation, under the supervision of a senior deputy election commissioner. Maneesh Garg, an official in the EC, had removed this oversight in a work order he issued in July and which election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had pointedly objected to, unusually to the cabinet secretary himself. The EC has previously clarified that this modified order was not implemented. (There’s more on the SIR in today’s Cable further below.)

Six years after the historic farmers’ agitation against the three farm laws deemed inimical to their livelihood, the Samyukt Kisan Morcha, the backbone of the 2020-21 protests, has called for demonstrations across the country on November 26. SKM leaders have said that they are reviving the agitation because the issues that forced them to the streets remain unresolved. Read this report from Asad Rizvi, which delves into the concerns that linger – despite the Modi government’s revocation of the three laws in November 2021 – and a fresh set of economic hurdles.

Former JNU students Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam

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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

How to Subscribe to The India Cable

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• Want to sample our newsletter? The India Cable is normally paywalled, but we lift the paywall once a week so that new readers can sample our content.

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Snapshot of the day

November 4, 2026

Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K., Siddharth Varadarajan,

The results of the midterm elections in the United States are in and voters have clearly chosen to punish Donald Trump’s Republican Party for the president’s appalling foreign and domestic policies. In particular, the disastrous war Trump launched against Iran earlier this year appears to have played a major part in his undoing — a fact that Vice President JD Vance has noted publicly.

And what might last night’s ‘blue tsunami’ entail for Raisina Hill, where Prime Minister Modi had gone out of his way to appease Trump on a whole range of issues and whose top foreign policy advisors had exulted in the ascendancy of the Republicans two years ago? One aspect of the bilateral relationship that comes into sharper focus against this background is the stalled trade deal: Ajay Srivastava says the results could mean that a wounded Trump may ratchet up tariff pressure on India in pursuit of a ‘quick win’. Speaking to TCA Sharad Raghavan, Deep Pal said on the other hand that negotiators in New Delhi will be keen to see if this ‘new reality’ makes the Trump White House more flexible for better terms for India. But from what we know so far, this administration ‘has … shown it does not believe in stepping back but rather in doubling down’. On the immigration front, there could be stronger Democratic scrutiny of Washington’s policies going forward, though Trump has plenty of executive power behind him in this area.

What ramifications could the rout have for Pakistan? Again, here there are two scenarios: it could mean that Islamabad’s clout in DC may fade a little, but if it results in Trump feeling pressured to strike a deal with Iran, it could also see it play a bigger mediating role.

Sushant Singh at Yale spoke to Jahnavi Sen about the US election results and their implications.

A number of South Asian Americans have made their mark in the midterms. Pia Dandiya got elected to the House of Representatives from Florida, making her the fifth person of Indian origin in the US Congress. Jyot Singh got elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. In the Los Angeles mayoral election, Councilwoman Nitya Raman, a Democratic Socialist, has a slim lead over incumbent Karen Bass, the official Democratic nominee. But in Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor, lost to the Democrats.

Arab-American Abdul El-Sayed, who won the hotly contested US Senate race in Michigan, has an Indian origin wife, Sarah Jukaku, whose family comes from Bhatkal in Karnataka. Prompting one observer to ask whether Indian-Arab couples “might be a winning ticket in American politics”.

The Kerala high court has sought to qualify the constitutional right to protest non-violently, with a division bench setting aside a single judge’s order allowing students suspended from the Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit to give their semester exams. A previous judgment of the high court,

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Snapshot of the day

November 3, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

In a shocking but hardly surprising move, the Delhi police has asked social media platform X to take down the entire accounts of the Internet Freedom Foundation, the Software Freedom Law Centre and Geo Blocked in India – not because they posted anything illegal but because they responded to a ‘legal notice’ purportedly issued to them by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. The cops also asked for 37 posts to be taken down – which commented on the ‘notice’ – including one by The Wire‘s editor Seema Chishti. In its latest of two communications to X, the police has invoked ‘hate speech’, ‘defamation’, ‘safety/security’ and ‘enforcement of court order’, though it neglects to mention who issued this order or what it says.

Ironically, the purported RSS notice to the IFF, SFLC and Geo Blocked demanded that the organisations stop criticising and documenting the Modi government’s censorship orders. The IFF has issued a statement arguing that the police communications to X fall foul of the law. “A takedown request that accomplishes the demand of an anonymous private notice is not law enforcement. It is the use of state power for a private end,” it said.

Elsewhere, in the government’s ongoing business of censoring Instagram, its latest target is particularly noteworthy: the Congress’s West Bengal handle.

The pattern is becoming harder to dismiss: even terms such as “SIR”, “ECI” and “protest” appear to be enough to invite takedowns on Instagram. Government requests may be triggering automated censorship without any human review, while Meta and the Ministry of Electronics and IT remain conspicuously silent.

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Snapshot of the day

November 2, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

The fact that a noxious haze blocked out Delhi’s afternoon sun yesterday proved no bar for thousands of citizens, who marched along Minto Road into Ramlila Maidan for the INDIA bloc’s ‘Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao’ rally demanding chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. Though the Congress and other opposition parties have faced criticism over the last several years for failing to mobilise their cadre, yesterday’s Ramlila rally witnessed the largest such mobilisations by a united opposition in recent memory, reports Sravasti Dasgupta, noting the prominent participation not just of the grand old party but also the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Left parties. Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi said during the rally that CEC Kumar has “committed the biggest crime” of “[trying] to shut off the country’s voice and its soul” and that for the opposition, ensuring that citizens retain their voice is “even more important than religion”.

If the visuals were anything to go by, Ramlila Maidan was a sea of flags. And the rally’s message went well beyond alleged vote theft. “Beyond alleged electoral irregularities, protesters raised issues ranging from unemployment, inflation to women’s safety and the rights of marginalised communities,” reports Deccan Herald. [See Reportedly]

For its part the BJP said the rally was a “complete waste of time”. Home minister Amit Shah, who was in Chandigarh for a police event, accused the Congress of rubbing salt into the wounds of Sikhs by holding the event on November 1, around the 42nd anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms. “Orders were issued from abroad to hold the rally on the very day that thousands of Sikhs were burned alive,” Shah said.

On the same day that the Commission for Air Quality Management imposed Stage 2 restrictions under the Graded Response Action Plan in Delhi and the NCR, the Supreme Court allowed the manufacture, sale and bursting of certified green firecrackers for two days during Diwali. A bench of Justices MM Sundresh and PB Varale permitted their use between 6 am and 8 pm on November 7, and between 7 am and 10 pm on November 8. The complete ban on firecrackers will be restored from November 9, the bench added.

Actor Imran Khan won’t have to quit India just yet because the Bombay high court today extended its stay of the government’s order that he leave the country in retaliation for his attending the October 10 protest against the CEC in Mumbai. But the court said that Khan, being a US national with an overseas citizen of India status, cannot claim the same rights as Indian citizens. It also directed him to offer an unconditional apology as well as an undertaking that he will not participate in more protests. Khan also had to be given an opportunity to respond to the government’s notice.

Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan on Monday moved the Supreme Court

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Snapshot of the day

October 30, 2026

Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K., Siddharth Varadarajan

Door-to-door enumeration for the population census – officially Phase II of the census process – will be conducted across India from January 25 to February 28, 2027, the Census Commissioner announced on Friday. In Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Goa and Punjab, the enumeration exercise will take place in the first week of January, as announced earlier, as these states go to the polls in February. The dates for Manipur will be announced later. According to an official notification, the reference date for the census shall be 00:00 hours of March 1, 2027, and will be the first census India has held since 2011.

“Enumerators will ask a set of 40 questions, including 13 new questions such as caste, (other than Scheduled Tribe/Scheduled Caste), religion, place and date of birth of both parents, number of bank accounts, spouse’s name, nationality, digital literacy, permanent residential address, place of Covid-19 vaccination, passport number, driving licence availability and mobile, Aadhaar and voter ID numbers, if available, which will be asked for the first time,” reports Vijaita Singh.

While the collection of Aadhaar details is not mandatory, the authorities may be training ground-level personnel to coax residents into providing it anyway. Vijaita Singh, who attended a census training programme in Uttar Pradesh, quotes a trainer as telling his students that:

“If any respondent creates an issue, they need to be told that the particular question is only to find out how many people have an Aadhaar. They are to be told clearly that we are not seeking their bank account details and Aadhaar cannot be used without biometrics anyway…”

Followed by these curious remarks:

“… At present, there is no single document that proves citizenship. If we get the accurate information during [the] census, then in the future, this document may act as a proof of citizenship.” (At the same time the trainer notes that census data is confidential.)

Aadhaar is only one of 13 new topics that this much-delayed population census will cover, and the new questions being asked have raised eyebrows because of their resemblance to those asked during the rehearsal for the controversial National Population Register, which its opponents said could be a precursor to a nationwide National Register of Citizens. A senior census official told Singh that “there is no instruction to link Aadhaar with [a] citizenship test”. Last month, former deputy registrar general K.N. Unni had noted that though census data is indeed confidential, there is a precedent in the 1951 census data being used to prepare a nationwide National Register of Citizens.

The Opposition’s movement against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar will see a ‘public impeachment’ on October 31 and a rally at the Ramlila grounds in Delhi on November 1, Sunday.

Manipur’s Kangpokpi district is under a 48-hour shutdown, the latest in a series of shutdowns over the past few weeks as tensions, abductions and attacks continue to escalate across the state. The latest call, issued by the Kuki-Zomi outfit Committee on Tribal Unity (CoTU), follows the alleged abduction of two Kuki men and demands their safe and unconditional release.

Meanwhile, tensions between the Meitei and Kuki communities have now extended to clashes between Meitei Hindus and Meitei Pangals. The unrest remains unresolved since 2023, even as parties in the ruling alliance trade charges against one another.

The law holds that the constituency-level electoral registration officer (ERO) has the power to decide who ought to be on the voter rolls. But this does not seem to have mattered in West Bengal where, during its especially contentious special intensive revision, EROs’ and assistant EROs’ decisions to place or remove electors on or from the rolls were sidelined by ‘observers’ appointed by the Election Commission, Aparna Bhattacharya reveals.

Drawing from official data from Bengal’s Nadia and Murshidabad as well as testimony from an AERO source, Bhattacharya reports: though the Supreme Court in February had ordered that cases still pending with EROs and AEROs on the deadline for the claims-and-objections period must be decided by judges (itself an unprecedented move), in reality cases that EROs and AEROs had already adjudicated on went to these judges as well, and in no trivial quantities at that.

The figures from Murshidabad are startling – though the district’s 22 EROs had by the deadline parked 18.3 lakh names for inclusion on to the final rolls, marked 41,214 for deletion and were yet to get to 13,513 others, a week later 11.01 lakh voters were marked ‘under adjudication’, and of these 4.55 lakh were struck off the rolls (that’s ten times as many people EROs/AEROs had flagged for deletion). This was because EC-appointed observers flagged cases already decided by the EROs/AEROs. Significantly, the EC’s communications from that time indicate it was not forthcoming about how cases ended up in this ‘under adjudication’ heading. And we all know what happened to those deleted by these judges – there were 27 lakh of them across Bengal – they ended up not being able to vote in the April assembly elections, not because they were once-and-for-all determined ineligible, but because the system was not given an opportunity to completely adjudicate their cases.

There’s more. What happened in Bengal did not go do down well with chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s two colleagues in Nirvachan Sadan, commissioners Sukhbir Singh and Vivek Joshi, whose “unease with the CEC peaked over this decision of switching decided cases onto adjudication overnight”, reports Bhattacharya citing highly placed sources.

Though the EC has said that the SIR declaration it has attached to Form 6 – asking new elector applicants for their or their relatives’s details on a past SIR roll – is only needed during the revision exercise, in Telangana officials have rejected Forms 6 that were submitted during the pre-SIR phase too on the grounds that they didn’t have this declaration attached, reports Swathi Vadlamudi. Despite the rules requiring Form 6 details to be exhibited at the ERO’s office and disposed of within a week, forms submitted up to June 14 (just before the SIR began in Telangana) are being processed now along with those filed during the SIR, Vadlamudi notes.

Every week more mischief by the BJP’s booth-level agents during the SIR comes to light. Suruchi Kumari reports from northeast Delhi’s Mustafabad constituency that though BJP BLA Chandra Shekhar Nainwal sought the deletion of 28 electors in the Dayalpur neighbourhood on the grounds that they have moved away or are absent, she could find all of them living there only. Mustafabad stands out in Delhi for recording the highest number of Form 7 applications at 843.

A helicopter carrying six people, including the pilot, has crashed amid snowfall and severe weather in Uttarakhand’s Joshimath, with search and rescue operations underway. The Dehradun-bound aircraft, operated by private firm Trans Bharat Aviation Pvt Ltd, took off from Badrinath at around 1:14 pm before losing communication over the Joshimath valley, officials said. The crash comes amid a troubling record of helicopter accidents along the Char Dham pilgrimage route, despite aviation authorities having “tightened safety checks and restricted some operations” following multiple accidents during the 2025 pilgrimage season.

Evidently rattled by a shifting public mood across the country – with the comments on Narendra Modi’s post on X offering just a glimpse of the discontent – the BJP is reaching for another polarising election plank. Union Home Minister Amit Shah has announced that the party will implement the Uniform Civil Code in Uttar Pradesh if it wins the 2027 Assembly elections. “This time, when the government comes to power, UCC will be implemented in Uttar Pradesh,” Shah told party colleagues at a daylong executive committee meeting in Lucknow, according to the Indian Express. “UCC has already been implemented in many states. If you form the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, we will implement UCC in Uttar Pradesh.”

Putting an end to months of speculation over Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh’s political comeback, the controversial former BJP MP and ex-Wrestling Federation of India chief has been named to the party’s Uttar Pradesh state executive committee, three months after his acquittal in a sexual harassment case brought by female wrestlers. Ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had dropped him from its candidates’ list amid the allegations, fielding his son from Kaiserganj instead.

Nepal’s police carried out a crackdown on the media in Kathmandu today, picking up three journalists and attempting to find at least three others. Two among the latter are Khagendra Pant and Nabaraj Mainali, editor and senior correspondent respectively with the Naya Patrika daily, who broke an explosive story yesterday revealing power broker Inam Sapkota’s communications with sitting Supreme Court Justice Hari Prasad Phuyal, including on a case which Sapkota sought to have dismissed claiming Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s interest. Those detained are NepalPress.com’s Bishwamani Subedi, Shobharaj Baral of Motivate News and Dhiraj Basnet of DNA Khabar. This action may be related to reportage surrounding Kathmandu’s alleged plans to sack Nepal police chief Dan Bahadur Karki, though the authorities have yet to release a public statement.

The Press Council of Nepal has taken serious note of plainclothes police officers entering newsrooms and seeking to detain journalists without clearly articulating the grounds for picking them up and even as it is unclear whether a criminal case exists at all. Shah’s office has claimed no knowledge of the police action and the PM is said to have ordered the release of the detained journalists.

The National Commission for Scheduled Castes has drawn a clear line: government posts reserved for SCs cannot be dereserved. If no eligible candidate is found, departments must appoint an SC candidate on contract or bring in an official on deputation. The commission’s unanimous decision is a warning to the government against diluting reservation. Read Nidhi Sharma’s report here.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has expressed concern at the corporate affairs ministry “hijacking” the staff recruitment process for the National Company Law Tribunal, “impinging upon the autonomy” of the institution. The bench, which included Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana, issued notices to the Centre and the tribunal, seeking their responses on regularising the appointment process through the UPSC or the SSC.

Heat exposure caused an estimated loss of 193 billion potential labour hours annually in India between 2016 and 2025, 75% higher than the annual average in the 1990s, according to the latest Countdown report by Lancet. In 2025, potential earnings lost because of heat-related reductions in labour capacity were equivalent to 4.2% of India’s GDP, compared with 0.91% globally. The report prepared in collaboration with the World Health Organization and led by University College London, also noted that half of the heatwave days experienced by people in India between 2016 and 2025 were directly attributable to climate change. It found that heat exposure is affecting people’s health and livelihoods, while air pollution, climate-sensitive diseases and water stress pose additional risks.

Takedown orders targeting cartoons are bad enough but now the authorities are deploying them against things as basic as news explainers (clearly Ashwini Vaishnaw has a different sense of the term freedom in mind when he talks about freedom of the press). The toolbox that is the IT Act and its Rules – 69A, 79(3)(b), all that jazz – can be hard to wrap your head around, but this article by Sejal Sharma in the Hindustan Times is a helpful refresher and jumping-off point for further reading.

What the data says about why women drop out of the formal labour force

Childcare and unpaid housework continue to push women out of India’s labour force, notes A.K. Waghmare. “Both men and women may enter, leave, and re-enter the labour force for a range of reasons. However, the circumstances that take men and women out of the labour force are very different.

Health reasons take some women out of work as well, but the numbers are much smaller, and restricted to older women. Women in their twenties, thirties and forties who have dropped out of the labour force largely cite household work and childcare as the reasons they left the workforce. Childcare is a particularly important reason cited by young women, or those in their twenties. More than three in ten women between the ages of 20-29 years who were earlier working report childcare as the reason they do not work anymore.”

A tale of two citizens …

One R. Ganesh Kumar has approached the Madras high court seeking directions to the home ministry to probe Cockroach Janta Party leader Saurav Das’s nationality and to concomitantly cancel his passport and Aadhaar if he is determined to be a foreigner. Kumar – who also wants Das’s social media accounts blocked citing his ‘abuse of the judiciary’ – certainly thinks he is not Indian: he has “roots in Nepal” and fraudulently obtained Indian documents, he told the court. It is not clear what if any evidence he produced to that effect. And he didn’t stop there. Their lordships were also warned that Das is a “jobless person … [who] has used his social media handle to spread hatred amongst the youth”, alongside that he “is a communist” who “most definitely” must be receiving funds from abroad. Obviously, the court dismissed his petition at the outset. Just kidding – it has issued notice to the home ministry and to Das.

Das has not commented on this case but he did retweet a news item on a recent decision made by another high court: namely the Delhi HC’s move to quash the Central Information Commissioner’s order that the Air Force comply with an RTI request seeking details of PMs Manmohan Singh and Modi’s foreign trips on IAF aircraft. The applicant, information activist Commodore Lokesh Batra (retired), said the information must be released because it concerns public expenditure, but the IAF argued that releasing the information sought even with redactions would pose a national security threat. The high court took the IAF’s side, prompting Das to opine that in India there is “absolute privacy for some elected persons”.

Stubble burning ‘barely’ impacted Delhi’s AQI between 2024-2026

A recent study’s findings throw doubt on simplistic claims blaming stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana for Delhi’s air pollution. A new analysis by Delhi-based climate research organisation Climate Trends found that stubble burning fell 31.3% year-on-year across six northern states during the initial weeks of this season, and had ‘barely influenced’ the capital’s air quality in September and October between 2024 and 2026.

E20’s broken promise to farmers

In what has become a familiar pattern of governance, a policy is defended in the name of farmers, while the reality on the ground tells a different story. The government claims its E20 push benefits farmers, with Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri putting the figure at Rs 1.4 lakh crore. But Vaishnavi Rathore’s report from the ground in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh finds little to show for it. Read why the ethanol push is failing farmers.

The Long Cable

Protest against ‘Modi’s Baap’ Remarks: Now Think of Modi’s ‘Pappu’, ‘Jersey Cow’, ‘Hybrid Calf’, ‘50 Crore Girl Friend’ Jibes

P. Raman

‘Modi ka baap bhi jayega’ (‘Modi’s father too will go’), Mallikarjun Kharge responded when someone from the audience said he will not be ousted without a rebellion against him. This was enough for the BJP bosses to launch nationwide protests against Kharge for ‘insulting’ the PM’s father, who had died in 1989.

Senior leaders like Amit Shah and Rajnath Singh will join the ‘Save Democracy, Remove Anarchy’ campaign soon after the opposition’s November 1 protests. This is all part of a drive. Shah may join its padayatras in Haryana and Telangana, while Singh could participate in Bhopal.

In reply to Kharge’s ‘Modi ka baap bhi jayega’, the BJP has now released a song ‘Modi kahi nahi jayega’ (‘Modi is not going anywhere’), which is being publicised in a big way.

But Shashi Tharoor, who was once moving closer to the BJP, does not agree with this proposition. ‘Modi ka baap bhi jayega’ is a common expression and does not amount to an insult to anybody’s father, he said.

Kharge’s ‘Modi ka baap’ remark pales in comparison with the sharp attacks Modi had hurled before and after becoming PM. During L.K. Advani’s Bharat Uday Yatra in 2004, Modi called Sonia Gandhi a ‘Jersey cow’ and Rahul a ‘hybrid calf’. In 2018, she was described as ‘Congress ki vidhva’ (‘Congress’s widow’). His jab on Tharoor was that he was the one with a ‘50 crore girlfriend’. Tharoor was then a Union minister.

As for Rahul Gandhi, let us confine ourselves to ‘Pappu’, the most abused term. He got the nickname soon after he began his political career. In fact, he had been the worst victim of nicknames and monikers. Just last month back the Madhya Pradesh chief minister had derided Rahul as ‘Pappu’. This, in turn, had provoked the Congress to say Rahul had already emerged as the “BJP’s papa”.

Shah, at his level, has been repeatedly deriding Rahul as Pappu. He had done so even six months before the 2014 elections. “Congress thinks the prime minister’s chair is Pappu’s birthright. But this is a democracy, you need people’s blessings, and the people’s blessings are with Narendra Modi,” said Shah at a rally.

The BJP even tried to put the Pappu jab in its election advertisements. However, the Election Commission – this was much before Shah put Gyanesh Kumar in the poll panel – strongly disapproved. The term is ‘derogatory’ towards a ‘specific person who is commonly known by that name’ and cannot be used, the Commission reportedly insisted.

It is not that Modi does not misspeak. Look at the bloomers galore by the PM which always go unreported by the pro-government media. The mainstream media carefully avoids any report adverse to Modi. On the other hand, they look for every minor slip up by Rahul Gandhi and highlight these.

Even this did not provoke the Congress leader. “The best thing that happened to me as a politician, as a human being, is the abuse I got … from the BJP and the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh]. [It] has been the biggest gift they could give me.” “I look at Modi when he abuses me and I feel like giving him a hug,” Gandhi said while addressing a public meeting at Bhubaneswar in 2019.

And he had already practiced what he preached. Seconds after ending his address in Lok Sabha during the no-confidence motion, Gandhi walked across the floor to where Modi was seated and gave him a warm hug. The PM did not stand up, yet Rahul gave a tight hug to a visibly flustered Modi.

“You have hatred for me. You have anger against me. I am Pappu to you. But I do not have an ounce of hate for any of you,” Rahul said in the Lok Sabha, calling out his opponents who make fun of him using the slang term.

P. Raman is a veteran journalist.

Reportedly

It takes a special kind of tone deafness for a regime to stage manage approbation of this kind for the Dear Leader – a public loyalty test – and then have the national broadcaster tweet it out as a great, rather than a cringe, moment.

Drawn and quartered

SIR and Software versus people and their right to vote.

Deep dive

Neeraj Hatekar and Hitesh Potdar argue why Dharavi’s redevelopment cannot be reduced to a mere housing problem as it “risks fragmenting its labour networks and leaving an empty shell”. It must be understood as a complex ecosystem of labour, production and value creation, they argue.

Prime number: 0

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Harish Khare writes about the Ambanis’ great seduction game — the agenda behind the messaging we saw and heard from Mukesh Ambani’s three children at the Jio Platforms IPO launch. Reliance is India and India is Reliance, notwithstanding the recent evidence that Reliance is beyond India as well:

  “It has been suggested that the whole advertising extravaganza was organised to soothe the anxieties and doubts voiced in many quarters over the Jamnagar tableau, featuring US secretary of state Marco Rubio and Mukesh Ambani. It was probably the first time that a serving American secretary of state (who also happens to wear the national security adviser hat) did not care to call on the prime minister during a visit to India. Bad optics. Avoidable optics.
  

  “The Jamnagar show not only confirmed Mukesh Ambani’s stature as the tallest Indian global businessman, it also carried with it the suggestion that perhaps he has become bigger than the Indian state—a man with his own global connections and global protection network. This is a perception that the very suave corporate house would want to do without. What the “Jio aapne banaya” tag-line does is divert attention away from the Jamnagar pageant and its lingering shadow.”

• The cabinet secretary is said to be planning a third round of administrative reforms. Ordinarily such a move would prompt excitement but this one is almost an indictment of the Modi government’s failures at previous reform attempts, says Pratap Bhanu Mehta. What keeps going wrong? For starters its political economy – as the chief economic adviser himself has suggested – is one of “influence and corruption”. But the deeper problem is the government’s

  “ideology of governance. There can be no lasting reform unless the state machinery, on principle and by instinct, is committed to three propositions: Presumptive trust in citizens, decentralisation to appropriate levels of governance, and a hostility to unnecessary surveillance and control. This government is off the charts on all fronts.”

• Haseeb Drabu writes about the decimation of J&K cadre in the bureaucracy:

  “The return of cadre autonomy and political control over the civil service is not merely one among several requirements of statehood — it is the necessary starting point for any genuine process of restoration. Without the capacity to direct the permanent executive, an elected government cannot exercise effective authority over the institutions that implement policies and allocate resources.”

• There are many things wrong with the Suvendu Adhikari-led West Bengal police’s moves to extrajudicially kill three rape and/or murder suspects over the last few months, which Jhuma Sen lists in her article. One of these things is the patriarchy implicit in such fake encounters: “the licence is claimed in women’s name, and kinship locates them: daughters, sisters and mothers, men’s kin whose avenging restores male honour – not persons with rights, including the right to the investigation and trial of violence against them.”

• When it comes to insults hurled at it, there are those the BJP can exploit and the ones it can’t, writes Bharat Bhushan. “An insult from an institutional political heavyweight is like a bonus for a party on the back foot, while abuses from the grassroots or unpredictable youngsters are a security and law and order issue.”

Listen up

Can religious conversion erase generations of social disadvantage? On the Infocus podcast, Abhinay Lakshman unpacks the Supreme Court’s ruling on reservation benefits for OBCs who convert to Islam, DMK president M.K. Stalin’s response, and the larger questions it raises about caste-based discrimination and social justice.

Watch out

Our very own Punjabi star Diljit Dosanjh has joined hands with Puerto Rican reggaeton star Daddy Yankee for a new international single, ‘Pokito’.

Over and out

The world’s top four whiskies by sales volume are all Indian – Royal Stag, McDowell’s, Officer’s Choice and Imperial Blue – with more than 100 million cases sold between them. Scotland’s Johnnie Walker comes in at fifth position with a mere 20 million cases.

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

October 29, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

After an 18-day-long agitation for restoring an elected students' union – which has been defunct since 2006 – Jamia Millia Islamia was forced to agree to the demands of protesting students following discussions with the VC and other officials late on Thursday. The university has set May 15, 2027 as the deadline for finalising the student union’s constitution, and elections are to take place within six weeks of the next academic year beginning July 16, 2027, in accordance with the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations. Having wrested this basic democratic right from their administration, protesting students called off their hunger strike and celebration ensued in and around campus, incidentally on Jamia’s 106th anniversary. The university again said it would revoke all disciplinary measures, including show-cause notices and suspensions, against protesting students.

Despite the university’s announcement, concerns remain over the fate of detained students and those facing police action. The Delhi police have registered two FIRs over alleged vandalism during the protests. Two students and National Students’ Union of India activists, Zeeshan Khan and Mohd Faizan, were sent to Tihar jail for three days, after they were allegedly detained illegally for 24 hours before being produced before an executive magistrate.

The hard-won victory comes almost seven years after the state stormed Jamia’s library and assaulted students during the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act. From that crackdown to the fight for elected representation, students have continued to resist the curtailment of their rights at the institution, including by way of a closure of campus, the cutting off of water supply, the deployment of security personnel and the imposition of prohibitory orders. Earlier the Jamia administration attempted to placate students with a vague assurance that elections would be conducted within 15 days of a constitution being finalised, but the protesters weren’t having any of it.

Opposition leaders and members of civil society will hold a ‘public impeachment’ of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar tomorrow as part of the ongoing agitation seeking his resignation and opposing the special intensive revision of voter rolls. The proceedings, which is to take place at Rajya Sabha leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence and feature people affected by the SIR, will be presided over by former Lok Sabha speaker Meira Kumar. Earlier this year the opposition twice introduced impeachment notices against CEC Kumar: the first time round they were rejected by the chairmen of both houses of parliament and the second one was simply put on ice.

According to home minister Amit Shah, opposition to the SIR is really a ploy to “protect infiltrators”; his comrades in the BJP have made similar statements and the EC too cited undocumented immigrants as one reason why it began the revision in the first place. Well then, with the exercise having lopped off crores of names from the voter rolls, surely it would have involved the large-scale removal of such immigrants, as Shah and others seem to insinuate? Asked for this data by the Hindustan Times‘s Himanshi Dahiya, only six chief electoral officers of 26 contacted provided any figures, and across their jurisdictions they discovered a whopping… ~1,600 suspected foreign nationals on the rolls. The electorate in these six states totals 9.86 crore individuals. Five other state officials claimed they did not have any data to furnish.

One of the states that did supply this data was Jharkhand, where in the run-up to the 2024 elections the BJP had sounded a loud alarm against ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’. How many undocumented nationals are here we do not know, but during the SIR officials have detected a grand total of three of them on the rolls, and they are not from Bangladesh but from Afghanistan. Jharkhand’s final rolls are due on November 30 (more on the SIR further below).

Read more

Snapshot of the day

October 28, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

After being denied permission to use several venues, the Congress announced on Wednesday that the INDIA bloc of opposition parties would hold a “public impeachment” of CEC Gyanesh Kumar at party president Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence on Rajaji Marg, refusing to “succumb” to what it alleges is Delhi Police’s obstruction of its “Vote Chori” rally preparations, as a warm-up event ahead of the rally scheduled for November 1 at the Ramlila Maidan. Speaking to reporters at Ramlila Maidan, Congress MP and general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal said the Ashoka Hotel had denied permission for the October 30 event after the “police came into the picture” – highlighting the Delhi Police’s role in obstructing opposition protests at the behest of Union Home Minister Amit Shah. The Cockroach Jantra Party has also extended its support to the INDIA bloc’s November 1 protest march.

The BJP president Nitin Nabin led a padayatra through Chandni Chowk in Delhi to denounce the Opposition’s campaign. The barricades and stifling police bandobast that have accompanied every other political mobilisation on the streets the past few weeks were conspicuously absent.

The Supreme Court has questioned the Election Commission of India (ECI) over its insistence that voters already on the electoral rolls fill out Form 6 to be included in the draft roll under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), simply because officials could not reach them. Chief Justice of India Surya Kant called the requirement erroneous, pointing out that Form 6 is meant for first-time voters, who must declare they have never been enrolled before. “Instead of burdening them to approach you, why don’t you reach out to them?” he asked.

The bench also clarified that it had never adjudicated on or approved the ECI’s use of ‘logical discrepancies’, allowing it only as an interim measure in the West Bengal case, Justice Joymalya Bagchi said. The distinction raises fresh questions about the deletion of 27 lakh voters in the state. Meanwhile, Aparna Bhattacharya lists down five problems in the ECI’s explanation for the 16 lakh appeals against Bengal voters, drawing on the poll body’s affidavit, court orders and appeal records.

In another significant exchange, the court questioned the ECI over the 47 lakh people on the ASDD (Absentee / Shifted / Duplicate / Deceased) list, asking why they could not be given an opportunity to submit enumeration forms or file Form 8. Read LiveLaw’s thread on X for more from today’s proceedings.

Meanwhile, despite the 30-day statutory deadline having passed, the ECI has yet to respond to an RTI query by activist Commodore (Retd) Lokesh Batra seeking details and copies of the recorded dissent and disagreements of Election Commissioners Vivek Joshi and Sukhbir Singh Sandhu to the conduct of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls 14 times in 10 months, as reported by the Express. Amidst nation-wide calls for CEC

Read more

Snapshot of the day

October 27, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

Facing mounting pressure from a massive farmers’ mobilisation in Maharashtra, BJP Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis has been forced to open talks with an All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) delegation as tens of thousands of farmers from more than 20 districts in large convoys march to Mumbai’s Azad Maidan. Led by the AIKS, the farmers’ wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the farmers are demanding a comprehensive farm loan waiver, drought relief, compensation and the implementation of land and forest rights.

The mobilisation comes even as Maharashtra has declared 305 of its 358 talukas – around 85% – drought-affected, in the backdrop of a 19% monsoon deficit and the prospect of El Niño conditions intensifying. Before the vehicular convoy set off, a foot march was organised in Akole town, led by AIKS national president Ashok Dhawale, national general secretary Viju Krishnan, CPI(M) MLA Vinod Nikole and AIKS Maharashtra state president Yashwant Zhade.

Here are the key demands of the AIKS-led farmers march.

Elsewhere, in the business of disenfranchising citizens ‘unconstitutionally’, in what is becoming a familiar pattern, Karnataka’s final electoral roll after the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has 99.7 lakh fewer voters than before, shrinking the electorate from 5.54 crore to 4.46 crore – a nearly 18% drop. More than 1.07 crore names had been deleted at the draft stage. Similar large-scale deletions and concerns over voter exclusion have already been reported in West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Delhi and other states, where citizens are being left in limbo, struggling to get their names back on the electoral rolls.

Meanwhile, Meta restricted LiveLaw’s Instagram reel about the ECI’s affidavit in the apex court, citing a “legal request”, effectively censoring reporting on a crucial constitutional matter. No details of who made this request and what it asked for.

In their counter-affidavit before the Supreme Court in several petitions challenging the SIR, the EC and all three commissioners have sought to address those aspects of the exercise and the poll panel’s functioning that have been in the spotlight over the last month, including the modification of Form 6 and the EC’s pleas to have lakhs of names struck off from West Bengal’s voter rolls. At the outset they took pains to mention that the affidavit stands approved “by a unanimous decision” of all three of them.

After it came to light that the online version of Form 6 – which is used to enroll fresh electors – was amended to include a new declaration without a gazette notification as legally required, the EC and its triumvirate has suggested that some officers (who, we are not told) effected the change so that applicants would not have to submit two OTPs, one for the form and another for the declaration. “This bonafide objective became a subject matter of deliberations and suggestions,” they said, noting that the addition had to be rolled back; they also denied

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Snapshot of the day

October 26, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

India’s press freedom has been in steady retreat under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with the country ranked 157th out of 180 in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index. Now even the big legacy media houses are pushing back. Twenty-one publishers, including Mukesh Ambani owned Network18, Gautam Adani’s NDTV, the Indian Express and Times Internet, have taken the Modi government’s controversial privacy law to the Supreme Court, warning it could expose journalists’ sources and reduce investigative journalism to “a benign and neutered recorder of events.” The law’s reach may be catching up with even those often being the government’s lapdogs. The Digital News Publishers Association calls its provisions “pre-censorship which is anathema to any democracy worth its name,” in its 698-page filing. The matter comes up tomorrow.

Meanwhile, from cartoonist Manjul to Satish Acharya, who ‘built an audience online - now their posts are being restricted,’ by the Modi-Meta nexus, notes BBC.

In other news of falling and failing, the rupee weakened for a third straight session as importers stepped up dollar purchases and foreign outflows mounted. After opening little changed against the US dollar, it slipped 0.3% to close at Rs 95.1850, taking its losses over three sessions to about 0.8%. Foreign portfolio investors, meanwhile, have pulled out Rs 3.08 lakh crore from Indian markets in 2026, according to the Times of India – nearly double the Rs 1.66 lakh crore withdrawn in all of 2025. While the international situation, especially higher crude prices as the war in West Asia continues, sparked outflows, domestic indicators such as high inflation are contributing to the aggressive and sustained exit of foreign capital.

The Modi government is doubling down on its ethanol push despite mounting concerns over fuel efficiency, consumer costs, food security and the depletion of groundwater. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has now amended vehicle rules to permit E85 and near-pure E100 ethanol in designated flex-fuel vehicles. The latest rule changes deepen the ethanol push even as the government is yet to adequately account for the programme’s hidden economic and environmental costs – or explain why consumers should bear the burden while its claimed benefits are celebrated.

The Supreme Court has issued notice to the Election Commission of India (ECI) on a petition challenging the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in Maharashtra, but declined to grant interim relief. It orally assured voters whose names were deleted that they would not face “prosecution” for reapplying through Form 6 — which is intended for fresh electors — while seeking the ECI’s response to concerns over the process. A bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant said it would hear the poll body before deciding whether to extend the deadline for claims and objections or restrain the ECI from publishing the final voter list.

Meanwhile, the use of Form 7 to delete voters from electoral rolls has again

Read more

Snapshot of the day

October 23, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

It’s been exactly a month since the Indian Express published its landmark investigation exposing serious dysfunction within the Election Commission over the special intensive revision of the voter rolls, and in its wake two things have stayed constant: chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar remains missing in action, and public anger against the CEC and the SIR – as well as the Modi government’s concomitant crackdown on dissent – has continued to simmer. Despite this crackdown involving widespread detentions, rough treatment at the hands of motley security personnel and prohibitory orders, several hundreds of protesters returned to Delhi’s streets on Friday to press their demand for Kumar’s resignation. Given the ruling dispensation’s proclivity to respond to peaceful protests by turning the heart of the capital into a fortress, demonstrators tried and failed to reach an amply barricaded Nirvachan Sadan, following which some of them were again shoved into detention buses.

And the Modi government does not intend to dismantle this fortress anytime soon. Wary of “flash protests by political and other outfits”, the home ministry has for the second time extended the deployment of 273 Central Armed Police Force companies in Delhi, now until October 31. These include 39 companies of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police whose job is to guard the border with China where, as you’ll read below, not all is well.

In the first official confirmation of the scale of tensions along the eastern sector of the Line of Actual Control, Indo-Tibetan Border Police director-general Shatrujeet Kapur said yesterday at an ITBP event that Indian and Chinese troopers have faced off at several locations in Arunachal Pradesh over the last few days. We do not know where these several locations are but Vijaita Singh cites government sources as saying that the two sides have been engaged in a standoff at Asaphila near Arunachal’s Taksing, which has been in the spotlight since local communities made allegations of Chinese encroachment starting four months ago.

Asked about Kapur’s remarks at its regular press briefing, the external affairs ministry deferred to North Block for details but said that the situation at the border becomes “disturbed from time to time when Chinese forces diverge from established patrolling patterns”. Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal added that

“Both sides continue to use existing diplomatic and military mechanisms to resolve outstanding issues and avoid misunderstanding and miscalculation along the Line of Actual Control … I would also like to emphasise that the maintenance of peace and tranquility in the border areas is essential for the overall development of bilateral relations.”

In June, the Nah Welfare Society said that the Chinese Army had expanded its presence into areas traditionally used by local communities around Taksing, and a fact-finding team formed by the opposition People’s Party of Arunachal said in August that Chinese troops have denied access to Indian soldiers to a patrolling point in addition to expanding control over lands traditionally used by locals.

Around the same time there were also reports of disquiet along the LAC. However the Army, Arunachal chief minister Pema Khandu and Union minister Kiren Rijiju denied allegations of Chinese encroachment into Indian territory. This is something that residents of Taksing dispute: see these two video reports from the area for instance, where locals press their allegations of Chinese encroachment despite the official stance.

Congress MP Jairam Ramesh hit out at the government in light of Kapur’s statements, alleging that its “calibrated concessions to China continue” while Prime Minister Narendra Modi maintains a “deafening silence” on the matter. He also recalled how Modi had told an all-party meeting after the deadly Galwan clash in Ladakh six years ago that there were no Chinese incursions into India.

The Delhi high court dismissed All India Students’ Association president Neha Bora’s petition challenging a special executive magistrate’s notice, issued after their attempt to reach the “Lehra Do Tiranga” march in the capital on October 16, asking them to furnish a personal bond of Rs 10,000 and one surety to “maintain peace during the period of inquiry” against them. The court also ordered the SEM to furnish all the material to Bora which they will rely on for their inquiry. The academic Apoorvanand has pointed out that such proceedings are premised on the preposterous idea that exercising one’s right to protest peacefully amounts to breaching the peace and are just ploys to suppress this right.

A group of Indian scientists working around the world, meanwhile, have written an open letter calling for the scrapping of the SIR, arguing that it has led to the mass exclusion of eligible voters, disproportionately affecting the poor, migrant workers and marginalised communities. They have demanded transparency and accountability in the process, “the immediate restoration of the names of all eligible voters wrongfully excluded and effective safeguards to ensure that no citizen is arbitrarily deprived of the right to vote”.

Elections to five graduate seats and six teacher constituencies of Uttar Pradesh’s legislative council took place today and among the voters registered to exercise their franchise were the individuals ‘Ram Ne Yadav Ko Maara’ (Ram Killed Yadav), son of Moorkh (Fool) Chandra Yadav; multiple people named ‘Takkar Marna’ (colliding/confronting); one ‘Mohd Pagal Rehan’ and one Narendra Yadav whose father bears the name ‘B.Com’. The Samajwadi Party has brought these bizarre entries to the notice of the state’s chief electoral officer, who ordered an inquiry. The voter rolls for these constituencies were prepared by the state election commission. The BJP too has raised some complaints over the rolls: it has said there are around 4,000 duplicate entries, with one saffron party official alleging that most of these pertain to Muslim and Yadav names (incidentally these communities are not considered a traditional BJP vote bloc). Akanksha Kumar reports.

The run-up to local body elections in Andhra Pradesh has been marred by violence, with workers of the Telugu Desam Party allegedly preventing candidates backed by the opposition YSR Congress from filing their nominations in several districts. The latter had approached the Supreme Court, which earlier this week asked the Andhra state election commission to hold off on publishing the final list of candidates for urban local body elections until Sunday. The state poll body has now extended the nominations window in four urban local bodies – Kadapa, Tirupati, Rajampet and Mydukur – through Saturday.

External affairs minister S. Jaishankar is in Baku, Azerbaijan, where his opposite number Jeyhun Bayramov acknowledged that the two sides have had their differences in the recent past but added that today’s bilateral talks have put ties on “a very serious way of developing … to higher levels” – something the Jaishankar concurred with. His visit marks one more step forward in building relations that became knotty given Baku’s support for Pakistan during and after Operation Sindoor last year. There are also economic and energy considerations in pursuing a reset of Indo-Azerbaijani relations.

Representatives of the Union home ministry were to meet with members of the Leh Apex Body and the Kargil Democratic Alliance in Delhi yesterday but no meeting took place. It doesn’t help that the two sides have been at a persisting impasse over the constitutional safeguards Ladakh ought to be granted; inventor-activist and LAB member Sonam Wangchuk yesterday said that the Ladakhi groups will not settle for anything less than a Union territory-level legislature. Though the two sides reached an in-principle understanding in May that Ladakh was to get such an elected body, the administration – which gets its orders from New Delhi – has since said that neither statehood nor a UT-level legislature are on the table. Delhi is citing national security for denying statehood to Ladakh but if that is a valid premise then Arunachal Pradesh should never have become a full-fledged state, Wangchuk argued.

How much progress has the government made on fencing the border with Myanmar over two and a half years after it controversially scrapped the free movement regime with the neighbouring country? As far as Manipur is concerned, the answer is not very much at all. Bikash Ranjan reports citing a source that of the restive state’s 398-kilometre border with Myanmar, just ten kilometres have been fenced, near the Moreh crossing.

Following weeks of backstage talks the Shiromani Akali Dal (Badal) and the BJP are all set to join hands ahead of the assembly elections in Punjab that are due by February, and have finalised the outlines of an alliance, Maneesh Chhibber reports. A few differences remain unresolved but the BJP has reluctantly agreed to be the junior partner in this alliance, which would take on a more-or-less steady incumbent in the Aam Aadmi Party. The tie-up between the two parties may be a necessity but it doesn’t mean they have a cakewalk ahead of them, because the SAD (Badal) is still unpopular among voters, especially among the rural Jat Sikh peasantry, notes Chhibber.

What does the Trump administration’s move to suspend employment-based permanent residency applications from several tech companies – including Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Infosys, HCL Technologies and Microsoft – mean for Indian workers and these companies themselves? The BBC’s Rachita Prasad takes stock.

With the Pakistani-Afghan conflict continuing to smoulder and occasionally flaring up – despite attempts by China, Russia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar at mediation – Elian Peltier reports for the New York Times that now Pakistani military and intelligence officials have met anti-Taliban armed groups in recent months to discuss potential support. Given Kabul’s alleged backing for the Pakistani Taliban, it seems the conflict may be developing a proxy dimension to it, and what we have on our hands then is a situation that’s “progressing from a low-grade confrontation to an entrenched conflict that has the potential to spiral out of control”, political scientist Amira Jadoon told Peltier. The conflict has killed or displaced thousands on either side of the Durand Line.

In some good news in an otherwise gloomy newscycle, the Delhi police has now granted permission for singer Diljit Dosanjh’s concert at the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on October 30, a day after it reportedly denied it citing ‘security concerns’.

Wary (again) of American sanctions, India stops Iran’s Mahan Air from collecting medicines

Though it had allowed the Iranian Mahan Air carrier to collect medicines from India even after direct flights between the two countries stopped in view of the US-Israeli war on Iran, New Delhi has since August frozen this arrangement fearing the impact of American sanctions, reveals Devirupa Mitra. In July Washington sanctioned an Indian company for being a sales agent for Mahan Air, and over the last two months has threatened to cut off from the dollar system firms, airports, ground handlers and fuel suppliers that provide services to various Iranian airlines. The Indian government, Mitra reports citing an official source, told Tehran it could instead charter flights from non-Iranian airlines to collect the medicines and take them to Armenia or Azerbaijan, from where they could be taken to Iran by road. But Tehran has persisted in its push for direct flights.

‘Now a new government is in power and we will ensure you abandon Christianity’: Bengal families recount horror

Madhu Sudan Chatterjee reports from West Bengal’s Paschim Medinipur on the ordeal of Christian villagers who allege that Bajrang Dal members barged into their homes, beat them, tore their clothes, threatened them with death if they did not convert to Hinduism and pressured them into performing Hindu rituals at a Durga Puja pandal. “Now, they [the Bajrang Dal workers] said, a new government had come to power, one that supported Hindutva, and the Bajrang Dal would ensure that we abandoned our religion,” one of the victims told Chatterjee. Local police have lodged an FIR based on her complaint but have yet to arrest anybody.

When teachers become election officials, students pay the price

Children in government-run and aided schools across Karnataka have gone months without seeing several of their teachers, many of whom have been deployed as booth-level officers for the highly rushed SIR. Speaking to The Hindu’s Rishita Khanna, students say that what initially felt fun, with more free time in the absence of their teachers, has now turned into a source of anxiety.

Reportedly

It takes a non-biological being to know another one. What a time it is to be alive for we are actually able to witness two such entities interact with one another. Plus, if there was any doubt that India is lagging behind in AI, this video should have the added benefit of putting an end to such anti-national thoughts head on:

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

The number of narcotics cases lodged in Bihar has climbed, going up from 1,822 in 2022 to 1,905 in just the first five months of this year. The number of people seeking help from Union government-run deaddiction centres too rose from 1,487 in 2022-23 to 29,429 in 2024-25. Officials, reports Himanshu Harsh in a two-part investigation for the Indian Express, say that addiction is a growing problem in Bihar, with alcohol prohibition generating demand for cheaper, longer-lasting highs. “Without community participation to build societal resistance against narcotics, mere police action will not suffice,” a senior police officer noted.

Prime number: 100/122

According to the 2026 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 100th out of 122 countries, with a score of 24.1, placing it in the “serious” category. India fares worse than both the South Asian regional average of 23.5 and the global average of 18.1. Bangladesh (84th) and Nepal (72nd) rank ahead of India, while Pakistan is placed 106th. The pace of improvement has also slowed down: India’s score improved by just 1.7 points between 2018 and 2026, compared with an 8.2-point improvement between 2006 and 2012.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa writes that while the EC’s rollback of certain SIR decisions is welcome, accountability on a host of other decisions remains pending and must be seen through. At this stage, “the matter … rests on collective will and individual sense of propriety,” he says.

• The Economist says Indians’ rights have been chipped away for decades, but “interfering with the sanctity of elections is a step too far” by the Modi government. The British magazine warns that India’s constitutional safeguards act as safety valves against public discontent: “It is to prevent precisely such an explosion that India’s founders added safety valves to the constitution. To block them all is not just dangerous. It is foolish.”

• Bengal’s festive season under the BJP has “become a battleground over ideology, identity and freedom of expression”, writes Shikha Mukerjee.

• The Deccan Chronicle in its editorial calls for Union minister Hardeep Puri’s resignation, arguing: “Waiting for a controversy to disappear is not governance. It is evasion. And that is why Mr Puri should quit pending a credible, independent examination.”

• Tarique Rahman’s election earlier this year has put Indo-Bangladeshi ties back on the rails but they remain hobbled by mutual suspicion. What’s the way out? Mohammed Ayoob says it does India no good to harp about its role in the Liberation War – that will only make Bangladesh more insecure – nor should Dhaka believe that counterbalances to Delhi can act as a substitute for stable relations with it. Fixing these is the only way the two sides can move on, he argues.

• Every now and then we hear about people losing their faith in the judiciary or of judges demanding that we keep it. But is faith the right thing to cultivate in the bar and the bench? The public, Govind Manoharan points out, “should have confidence in the judiciary, not faith”:

  “The fundamental problem with faith is that it can be demanded. Public confidence, on the other hand, needs to be earned and built. When judges and lawyers demand faith in the system (or decry the erosion of it), the public’s relationship with the court is centred around an unquantifiable notion.”

Listen up

Why does Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke defy stereotypes of Dalit leadership, and what challenge does this pose to BJP? Harish Wankhede unpacks this in a fascinating interview with Sravasti Dasgupta. Listen – or watch – here.

Watch out

Watch AISA’s Neha Bora discuss protests, police detention, CEC Gyanesh Kumar and the Modi government in their conversation with Karan Thapar.

Over and out

• Ever since BEST began plying AC buses on their routes, a number of fisherwomen say conductors have refused them entry or forced them out allegedly because they smell like fish. But not going to the market isn’t an option, so some of them are coping – with being excluded from public transport in India’s largest city – by shelling out more money for carpools or changing into different sarees, writes Ishika Gupta.

• Author Arundhati Roy spoke to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! about the recent youth protests and the Modi government’s brutal crackdown.

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

October 22, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

As the risk of further escalation looms over West Asia, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pulling out all the stops to regain control of the narrative ahead of next week’s elections, with his political future hanging in the balance. Against this backdrop, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Netanyahu held a telephone conversation earlier today. Netanyahu said his “friend” Modi had told him that “India and Israel are fighting terrorism together”. He also said he invited Modi to light a torch alongside Indian pilot Smit Machchhar on Israel’s Independence Day next May. Modi, in his own account of the conversation, said the two leaders had “underscored the urgent need to restore peace and stability in the region” but did not acknowledge Netanyahu’s invitation.

Their conversation comes amid mounting concerns over the war’s direct economic and strategic fallout for India. The Indian embassy in Riyadh confirmed on Thursday that one Indian national was killed and two others were injured in an attack on the Dammam Airport in eastern Saudi Arabia. Authorities did not say who carried out the attack and the Iran-backed Houthis have not commented. Dammam’s King Fahd Airport has previously been attacked amid a wider wave of Houthi strikes targeting major airports in Saudi Arabia.

Earlier in the day, Yahya Saree, military spokesperson for the Houthis, claimed on X, citing “preliminary information”, that Saudi Arabia had targeted a yacht carrying 14 Indian nationals near Zuqar Island in the Red Sea, close to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. Saree, who claimed the Houthis are rescuing the Indian nationals, described the alleged attack as a threat to international navigation; his statement did not mention any casualties. India said it is “ascertaining further details about the incident” and that it will provide all possible help to the 14 Indians.

Amid escalating drone and missile attacks attributed to the Houthis, the US order for non-emergency government personnel and their families to leave its embassy in Riyadh and associated consular posts may reflect its preparations for renewed strikes on Iran and the risk of Iranian retaliation against Saudi Arabia. This comes a day after the Financial Times reported that US President Donald Trump had rejected Netanyahu’s proposal for a “major attack” on Iran before the November 3 US midterm elections earlier this month. Trump, meanwhile, faces mounting domestic pressure over the war’s economic costs, his campaign rhetoric and divisions within his administration.

Back home, an RTI request

Read more

Snapshot of the day

October 21, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

A whole week into their dubious detention for attempting to protest at Jantar Mantar Road, the Cockroach Janta Party’s Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were released today after a special executive magistrate granted their bail and accepted their sureties. The duo was required to submit an undertaking saying they would not call for any protests at Jantar Mantar as long as it remains a denotified protest site and that they will not breach the peace again (which according to the authorities can even mean waving the national flag at a denotified protest site).

Former Delhi High Court Judge Justice S. Muralidhar strongly criticised the jailing of CJP leaders, calling their custody a “fundamental affront to the freedom of movement” and a clear example of the executive misusing the law.

But the movement shows no signs of backing down. Economist Parakala Prabhakar, actor-activist Prakash Raj, and others are set to join CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke, at a nationwide anti-SIR protest on October 23, demanding that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls be scrapped and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar resign. The alliance has also called on people across the country to take to the streets under the slogan: “Har haath mein Tiranga, Har gali mein Jantar Mantar.”

Alongside taking demonstrators and others into custody the Delhi police also snatched their phones during the latest round of protests. A complaint has been filed accounting for 24 phones the authorities took away from detainees inside a van on October 11. The detainees allege that the cops told them they’d get their phones back after their release but that officers later refused to take responsibility for their devices or to give them seizure memos. One of those detained told Astha Savyasachi that the police were forcing detainees to delete pictures they took during October 10 and 11. With the phones remaining missing over a week later, senior advocate Suroor Mander points out, “these devices and numbers could be used for any kind of malicious activity. Who is stopping anyone from doing that?”

After Maharashtra’s chief electoral officer S. Chockalingam wrote to Nirvachan Sadan suggesting changes to the way the SIR is being conducted that would ease the burden on voters and officials alike, the EC

Read more

Snapshot of the day

October 20, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Anirudh SK, Kalrav Joshi

“Thank you for the free publicity,” Cockroach Janata Party founder Abhijeet Dipke wrote on X, reacting to a BJP MLA-led committee which burnt a 30-foot cockroach effigy – symbolising a party founded by a young, educated Dalit leader committed to the Indian constitution – alongside those of Ravana, Kumbhakarna and Meghnad at a Ramlila event in the national capital. The spectacle laid bare the Bharatiya Janata Party’s politics of hostility, even as calls for action against ‘termites’ have resurfaced within the Hindutva party, in an apparent reference against ‘anti-nationals.’

Meanwhile, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the organisation’s annual ‘Vijayadashami’ rally that agitation rarely solves problems, a remark that is particularly notable given that the RSS did not officially participate in the 1942 Quit India Movement, one of India’s defining mass struggles against British rule. He also called for unity rooted in the “Hindu spirit” and cautioned against agitations that divide society.

The CJP has moved the Delhi High Court seeking an urgent hearing after a Special Executive Magistrate extended the judicial custody of its co-convenors, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das, by two days on Monday, while Delhi Police transferred the trespassing case against them to the Crime Branch’s Inter State Cell for further investigation. “Saurav and Ashutosh must be released. Their liberty cannot be sacrificed at the altar of political vendetta. Justice delayed is justice denied,” the CJP said in a post on X on Tuesday.

The crackdown on peaceful protests and dissent by the Modi government in the national capital and by authorities elsewhere has been flagged by 24 experts linked with the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OCHCR). In a statement they said

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Snapshot of the day

October 19, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

“We are in an emergency. There is no justice. This is a police court. Just look at the grounds that they have taken,” Cockroach Janta Party’s Saurav Das told Smita Sharma, as he and Ashutosh Ranka were taken back to Tihar jail late in the evening with their judicial custody further extended by two days by a special executive magistrate (SEM) court after five hours of proceedings. The duo are being kept in the can for five days and counting because they waved the national flag at Jantar Mantar Road after it was ‘denotified’ as Delhi’s designated protest site, with the charges against them being trespass, disobeying official orders and obstructing police personnel on duty.

But it has been an extraordinary day for justice.

On January 9, 1920, the British colonial Hunter Committee asked Mahatma Gandhi a series of questions on what he thought about citizens using civil disobedience and peaceful protest against his own – i.e. an Indian led – government and ministers. His answers stunned Lord Hunter. And they will also stun Narendra Modi and Amit Shah:

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Snapshot of the day

October 16, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

Prohibitory orders, detentions and the (credible) threat of assault by security personnel proved no bar for thousands of protesters who turned up for yet another day of demonstrations, this time to wave the tricolour at Connaught Place in defiance of the Modi government’s continuing crackdown on dissent. Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, who called for the ‘Lehra do Tiranga’ (‘Wave the Tricolour’) demonstration, himself could not attend because police officers took him into custody en route to the protest site this afternoon. As this newsletter goes to press early on Saturday, Dipke’s whereabouts are unknown, and the CJP has said his lawyers do not have access to him either.

All India Students’ Association president Neha Bora too was detained – again – and her organisation noted that the police denied her advocates an opportunity to meet her at a detention centre, that officers subsequently attempted to surreptitiously move her to another location, and that it remained unaware of her location for hours. At midnight AISA said its lawyers met Bora at the R.K. Puram police station but it was unclear when and if she would be released.

But Dipke and Bora’s detentions did not deter tricolour-wielding demonstrators, who continued to arrive at Connaught Place (unable to enter the actual protest site of Central Park because the administration has closed it off) in batches through early evening. Security personnel detained some 150 people today.

Journalists at the protest site were discouraged from filming security personnel in public before the Tiranga march began, but in case you weren’t there to get the message, the Press Council of India was bound to have you covered. Silent so far on the detention – and in some cases the alleged assault – of journalists during this past week’s protests, the statutory body today felt the need to instead issue ‘guidelines’ to reporters covering protests. Among its tips are that journalists must visibly display their ID cards (it is another matter that this did them no good last weekend, when the police picked them up anyway), “avoid arguments during tense situations” (wouldn’t that be convenient for detention-happy cops) and “maintain a reasonable and safe distance from confrontations”.

Meanwhile in Chennai, the high court said that the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh shall be allowed to hold route marches later this month and early next month on the occasion of its centenary. The bench disposed of a petition by the Sangh challenging the Tamil Nadu government’s move to deny it permission after the state said the marches can ‘go on subject to modifications by the police depending on the local conditions’, reports LiveLaw. It would be quite ironic if the Sangh gets to march with lathis or saffron flags days after youths waving the tricolour were detained in the heart of the national capital. The high court also came down on the state government for its justifications for denying permission to the RSS.

Amid the pressure it is under, the Election Commission has announced a special summary revision of the voter rolls in 17 states and Union territories where the special intensive revision (or special revision in Assam’s case) is over. The EC hasn’t conducted an SSR ever since the contentious SIR kicked off in Bihar in June last year; Anubhuti Vishnoi of the Economic Times has reported that this was so even though election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi were in favour of resuming the exercise (implying that chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar may have been against it). SSRs generally aim to enroll newly eligible voters and electors who have shifted. The SSR announcement also comes days after the EC announced its conciliatory ‘special enrolment drive’ in the wake of the Indian Express‘s expose of its functioning as well as of the public anger against it.

There’s about a month left until Maharashtra’s final, post-SIR electoral rolls are due, but a list of individuals who’ve been served notice for being ‘unmapped’ to the previous benchmark list or for having so-called ‘logical discrepancies’ in their data is still yet to be published. Asked by Vinaya Deshpande Pandit about the delay, the office of the state’s top election officer passed the buck to the constituency-level electoral registration officers. If an elector misses attending their hearing pursuant to such a notice, perhaps because they never know about the said notice, they risk getting struck off the voter rolls.

That, as we’ve seen already, can be bad news and not just during election time. Debraj Mitra reports the case of a 37-year-old Murshidabad, West Bengal man who has cleared the tests and interview to be a police constable but is unable to take up the job because his name was excluded from the state’s final rolls. He was deleted after being flagged for a ‘logical discrepancy’ even as all five of his adult siblings made it on to the rolls. In fact, writes Mitra, an appellate tribunal heard his case out of turn and decided to put him back on the list but a formal order remains pending because of the standoff between the tribunals and Nirvachan Sadan in Delhi.

But god forbid someone supports the protests against this SIR – especially someone not from India. Our ambassador in D.C. Vinay Kwatra declared yesterday that Congresswoman (D. Wash.) Pramila Jayapal’s expressions of concern over the exercise and support for the ongoing agitation amount to “unacceptable interference in India’s internal affairs”.

It’s been 64 days and counting since the monsoon session ended but the Modi government hasn’t prorogued parliament yet. Opposition parties suspect that may be because the government plans to take another whack at its delimitation agenda, and now Congress president and Rajya Sabha leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge has written a fourth letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi requesting an all-party meeting to discuss that agenda if it really is on the cards. The government’s previous attempt to pass its delimitation package through parliament failed because it could not muster support from a two-thirds majority of MPs present and voting.

Former Keralam chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan has moved the Supreme Court against the high court’s move to order an FIR naming him, his daughter Veena and her husband Mohamed Riyas in connection with the corruption allegations against them. Yesterday a division bench of the high court dismissed Vijayan’s argument that the single-judge bench ought to have heard him before ordering the FIR last week. The Enforcement Directorate, which has lodged its version of an FIR against them, has meanwhile summoned the former CM for questioning on Wednesday.

That the US embassy and ambassador in Delhi first announced secretary of state Marco Rubio’s visit to India – he will go to Mumbai and Jamnagar but not to New Delhi – is not surprising, the Congress said, recalling how it was US President Donald Trump who broke news of the cessation of hostilities between India and Pakistan last year. “But what is quite extraordinary,” party MP Jairam Ramesh said, is his [ambassador Sergio Gor’s] statement that “we expect the Minister Dr. Jaishankar to be joining us there along with other individuals”.” Today the external affairs ministry acknowledged Rubio’s visit to Mumbai and defended it saying India often receives foreign dignitaries in places outside Delhi.

The affair, Rahul Gandhi said, is as if “Mr Rubio has summoned his employee to Mumbai”. (Whose employee is Jaishankar really? Rubio’s? ‘Prime Minister Ambani’s’? Jokes aside, Reliance today responded to Elon Musk’s jibes against Mukesh Ambani – though without naming him – saying that the conglomerate ‘welcomes competition in satellite communications, including [from] Starlink’, and that the Union government is applying the same standards to Jio and to Musk’s firm.)

The BJP celebrates the success of non-resident Indians as proof of India’s inevitable rise, conveniently ignoring the more damning reality: a country that takes pride in its diaspora while failing to retain its own talent. As The Economist argues, the exodus of talent is as much an indictment of India’s failures at home as it is a story of success abroad. The British magazine notes:

“The diaspora can do little to stem the hate, let alone advance India’s interests. In America it has failed to persuade the Trump administration to adopt policies favourable to India. Indeed just last month Congress in Washington passed legislation allowing 100% tariffs on India for buying Russian oil. The diaspora may be large and even influential, but it is no diplomatic corps.

Mr Modi has hailed his overseas audience as rashtradoot, or emissaries of India. But for all their attachment to India, few in the diaspora want to return to a country where decent jobs are scarce and cities are unlivable. Those are the same factors contributing to frustrations among youngsters in India who are increasingly expressing their anger on the streets. Celebrating success abroad may feel good, but a real reason for national pride would be for Indians to flourish at home.”

India is deeply concerned by an attempted mass shooting at a Hindu temple near Chicago earlier this week, the external affairs ministry said, adding that the incident comes amid “growing concerns over racist hostility and anti-India hate in the US”. Local media reports that the police have arrested a 19-year-old man in connection with the incident; disaster was averted allegedly only because his rifle jammed up once he arrived at the temple on Sunday and a coworker tipped the police off about his plans. The accused sent his coworker a document outlining a plot to kill non-white people and using racial slurs to refer to them, prosecutors have alleged.

The RBI has deployed some $75-80 billion in dollar sales and swaps to support the weakening rupee, depleting more than half of its $140 billion foreign exchange boost, reports Reuters. And these aren’t the only ways in which the central bank is supporting the rupee: in a bid to discourage demand for dollars, it has made it costlier for importers to hedge future current-account payments, and in a reversal has also hiked the cost for banks to buy foreign currency for certain transactions in addition to disallowing firms from rebooking cancelled forex contracts. Such changes to hedging rules, a portfolio manager told the news agency, could undermine policy predictability and fracture currency market liquidity.

Negotiations between the home ministry and Ladakhi groups agitating for constitutional safeguards for the Union territory continued yesterday, with the Leh Apex Body flagging a ‘huge gap’ between their demands and what Raisina Hill had to offer; the next round of talks is scheduled for Wednesday. The two sides are wrangling over the nature of a future Union territory-level elected body for Ladakh as well as over fresh safeguards for the region under Article 371.

Salman Rushdie, Mira Nair throw weight behind India’s protesting cockroaches

As the protests seeking CEC Kumar’s resignation over alleged SIR irregularities continued in Delhi and other parts of the country and were met with brutality and suppression, Booker Prize-winning, Indian-born author Salman Rushdie has extended support to the CJP. Speaking at a pre-Diwali dinner in New York City that doubled as a fundraiser for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, according to Amitava Kumar, Rushdie said:

“There is something going on in India right now. India is boiling. And I would feel wrong not to say – maybe not the thing to say in a restaurant – to celebrate the cockroach. Young people of India have given us the most hopeful moment for a very long time.”

The dinner was hosted by acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, mother of New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, alongside Rushdie and former Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones. Nair, who described herself as a “mamma cockroach”, said, “I am so deeply energised by the cockroaches of our country, the cockroaches of today and the cockroaches of tomorrow, because this is what Diwali is also about – to light a lamp for change,” the New York Times reports.

Gujarat’s very own ‘hate machinery’ rumbles on at garbas

In a disturbing display of religious intolerance, Muslims and other non-Hindus were asked to leave a high-end garba event in Ahmedabad earlier this week, with the anchor announcing that the “Vishva Hindu Parishad has come here to protect Sanatan Dharma”. Attendees were also given a helpline number to report “suspicious people”. Following this, popular folk singer Aditya Gadhvi, the event’s lead performer, distanced himself from the announcement. “A few words from me, because a lot is being said in my name. I am an artist. I am a proud Hindu. Navratri is the most sacred time of my year, and standing on a stage singing for Maa Ambe in front of thousands of people dancing garba is the greatest blessing of my life,” Gadhvi said in a statement on Instagram, without naming the VHP.

Meanwhile, Gujarat VHP spokesperson Hitendrasinh Rajput defended what happened, saying it was just stuff that Bajrang Dal volunteers regularly do at garba events across the state. Another addition to the Model State file.

After ordering compensation, Gauhati HC orders Dispur, MEA to trace woman ‘pushed back’ to B’desh

Earlier this week the Gauhati high court told the external affairs ministry and the Assam government to trace the whereabouts of 44-year-old Mumtaz Begum, whom the authorities expelled to Bangladesh earlier this year under dubious circumstances. Last month the court ordered Rs 2 lakh in interim compensation to Begum after finding that the foreigners’ tribunal that declared her a non-Indian had acted maliciously in ordering her arrest after being asked to reconsider her case. The judge, Bipul Kumar Nath, “had taken a personal grudge on the matter being remanded back for a fresh opinion”, the high court had said. Begum went missing as a result of her summary expulsion across the border.

Reportedly

Did NIT Hamirpur’s administration ‘cancel’ its Navratri celebrations in order to retaliate against students for their low attendance at a recent programme held by BJP MP Anurag Thakur, after he expressed displeasure at the small size of his audience? That’s what an X user alleged had transpired at the university. We would link to it directly here but the account has vanished from the platform.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

If China no longer views the US-India partnership as a threat, what exactly is Washington gaining from the relationship? Yun Sun has written a timely analysis.

Prime number: 3️⃣

Three countries – Russia (44.3%), the Emirates (17.4%) and America (5.1%) – accounted for more than two-thirds (66.8%) of India’s oil imports in August, notes T.C.A. Sharad Raghavan. The price India paid for US oil, averaging $810.6 per tonne, is a good deal higher than the $640 per tonne it paid on average overall in August.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• “What I really want to say about those AI companies is this: terminate with extreme prejudice,” writes Arundhati Roy in Equator magazine.

• Washington has controlled India’s energy choices and, by way of its war on Iran, made its development dearer; meanwhile “all we have had to offer in resistance is stony silence”. Maybe the time has come for New Delhi to “convey to the US that, while we are open for business, we do not pay homage to this new Pax Americana” characterised by Trump’s imperialist vision, writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta. “We ought to find all possible leverage to stand up to it, rather than pass over it in cowed silence.”

• “The path to securing another non-permanent seat on the UNSC next year is not easy. India’s win can only be guaranteed by defeating the ambitions of its old friend and regional partner [Tajikistan] – the choice is between a Pyrrhic victory versus a tactical defeat,” warns Suhasini Haider as New Delhi campaigns for the non-permanent Asia-Pacific seat at the Council.

• One could object to Jantar Mantar being the designated protest site because it is prone to traffic disruptions, but such an assertion would be “valid only as much as similar arguments that are usually raised against democracy itself”, The Hindu points out. Indeed, such an objection would be in keeping with the “reactionary view that democracy delays decision-making, elections disrupt development and economic activity, and that there should therefore be fewer elections and less politics”.

• Sociologist Avijit Pathak argues that India’s students are increasingly finding classrooms on the streets and in detention centres.

  “What is refreshing about the ongoing protest in the streets of Delhi and other cities is that we are seeing a new kind of studentship. We are seeing young students seeing beyond their own careers; they are cherishing their creative agency; they are laughing at the mighty power of the coercive state; and above all, they are negotiating in their own ways with Gandhi, Ambedkar and Marx and trying to save the soul of democracy.”

• Recent developments in Keralam – including a Muslim cleric’s proclamation that women ought to stay at home – point to the reality that misogyny ‘is not something imposed on the state from the outside but endemic to its social structure’, contrary to its popular image, says Pulapre Balakrishnan. Political parties can ameliorate low levels of women’s representation in Keralam’s institutions but a wider change would be beyond their remit, he writes.

Listen up

On The News Minute‘s South Central podcast, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sukanya Shaji and Abhinandan Sekhri speak with Dhanya Rajendran and Anisha Sheth on violence against protesters and journalists in detention centres, the involvement of individuals accompanying the police in confronting demonstrators, and how mainstream legacy media has covered the detentions.

Watch out

Historian Ayesha Siddiqa examines the ‘stranglehold’ that the Inter-Services Public Relations wing or ISPR of the Pakistani armed forces ‘maintains over the national conscience’. You can also read her piece in Himal Southasian here.

Over and out

The Museum of Modern Art, New York presents Nilima Sheikh: Fractured Skies, the Indian artist’s first solo exhibition in the city. Her paintings juxtapose Kashmir’s breathtaking beauty with the violence that has shaped its history since partition in 1947. The series Home, Land responds to the 2018 rape and murder of eight-year-old Asifa Bano. The New York Times features the exhibition and profiles Sheikh, the Vadodara-based artist whose work has profoundly shaped contemporary South Asian art.

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.

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

October 15, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi

The national flag will be unfurled tomorrow, October 16, in New Delhi.

In a direct challenge to the state’s crackdown on dissent, Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijit Dipke has called on people to wave the tiranga at 5 pm on October 16 in Central Park, Connaught Place in what he describes as a defiant assertion of democratic rights. Speaking at a press conference at the Press Club of India in New Delhi, Dipke urged people to “let the dictator know that it is not a crime.” The ‘Lehra Do Tiranga’ (Unfurl the Tricolour) demonstrations are being organised against the jailing of CJP co-convenors Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka following their protest at Jantar Mantar earlier in the week for unfurling the national flag.

On Friday, the Delhi High Court refused to restrain the planned protest when asked to do so by a traders’ association but the Delhi Police told the bench that it would take “all possible measures” to control the demonstration. Later in the day, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation – a civic body directly under the control of the Union home ministry – announced Central Park would be closed to the public on Octobeer 16 and 17 “for administrative reasons”. The park has five entrance gates, which will be locked, but the fence surrounding the park is easy to scale so determined protestors ought to face no trouble getting in. The police is mobilising thousands of constables to thwart the protest and were quick to announce that they would "facilitate a group of 11 persons" to carry the flag and sing the national anthem "at a suitable place" at the park but that others should stay away.

“Our movement cannot be silenced by your repressive apparatus. This movement is for the rights of millions of disenfranchised citizens and their right to vote,” Dipke declared at a joint press conference attended by AISA president Neha Bora, human rights lawyer Prashant Bhushan, SFI leader Aishe Ghosh and other voices.

A Republic TV reporter started heckling Bora and Dipke during the press conference, presumably on instructions from his channel, and was eventually made to leave the venue by other journalists present.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has issued notices to the Centre and Delhi Police in nearly 46 fresh matters linked to the October 10 detentions and restrictions on protests in the capital, including the de-notification of Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site. A bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant observed on Thursday, “Nobody can browbeat the Supreme Court.” The court also issued notice to the Election Commission of India on an Opposition petition challenging decisions by Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and alleged irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.

During the hearing on the removal of Jantar Mantar’s designated protest status, Justice Joymalya Bagchi remarked that in the age of digital technology, voices could be heard from distant locations. Senior advocate Hariharan retorted: “If that is so, why do we need to be in Delhi? We can do it from Kerala.”

Here’s the reality check: Modi-Meta censorship whirs on, with social media accounts documenting the protests reportedly being blocked or restricted in India by Meta, citing legal demands. Instagram posts by Mathrubhumi and The Observer Post have been withheld, while the accounts of Journo Mirror, Molitics and journalist Shubhangi have been blocked in India.

The Supreme Court has also sought responses from Opposition leaders Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge of the Congress, Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, and the Kerala Congress on a separate petition seeking

Read more

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

October 14, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi

After the tumult on the streets of New Delhi over the past few days, a clearer picture is emerging of the political dynamics at play.

Narendra Modi and his advisors are battening down the hatches and pretending they can get by with business as usual. Which means using lawfare against opponents, tightening their grip on the institutions and levers of power and relying on a pliant media to malign the movement for democracy and free and fair elections as anti-national.

Thanks to this pressure, the opposition is getting its act together and there is now the possibility that the Congress and the Cockroach Janata Party may put an end to their passive-aggressive one-upmanship. Rahul Gandhi and a host of prominent INDIA bloc leaders condemned the recent arrest and remand of CJP leaders, drawing messages of gratitude from CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke. The CJP has also now called a ‘wave the tricolour’ protest for Central Park, Connaught Place on October 16. If the Congress, Left and others mobilise for it, the game is on.

In its latest crackdown on dissent, Delhi Police has sought an extension until October 20 for the deployment of 273 companies of the Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) in the capital, citing the need to “maintain law and order and deal with any potential situation”. A total of 301 companies were approved for deployment – 221 on October 6 and another 80 on October 8. Of the latter, 28 had not reported to Delhi Police as of Monday, reports the New Indian Express citing sources.

For context, Manipur had 218 CAPF companies available for deployment in November 2024 amid an ethnic conflict that erupted in 2023 and continues to flare. The state is nearly 15 times the size of Delhi. The question, then, is: what threat, exactly, is the capital preparing for?

Meanwhile, in the “mother of democracy”, Delhi Police have registered four FIRs over social media posts allegedly spreading misinformation and inflammatory content about the protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the subsequent police crackdown. More than 500 posts had been taken down by Tuesday evening, officials told the Hindustan Times.

Read journalist M Rajshekhar’s account of the abuse he witnessed and experienced after Delhi Police detained him and others during the recent protest.

If the filing of cases – against the CJP and other prominent protestors like the YouTuber Dhruv Rathee – and the denotification of Jantar Mantar as a protest site are inviting ridicule rather than inducing fear, the government’s institutional missteps are also laying the ground for a widening arc of protest. The appointment of former BJP state-in-charge of Uttarakhand Dushyant Kumar Gautam as governor of Sikkim has reopened the controversy over the 2022 murder of hotel receptionist Ankita Bhandari in Rishikesh. The murder had made national headlines due to the hotel’ owners’ questionable actions, the allegations of sexual coercion and the reported involvement of a politically influential ‘VIP’ in the case. Her parents on Wednesday staged a dharna at India Gate to protest Gautam’s appointment, alleging that he was the ‘VIP’ and had never been investigated. Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi turned up at the dharna in solidarity, tweeting later,

“For four years, Ankita Bhandari's family has not received justice, but a 'VIP' accused has certainly been rewarded with protection and a constitutional position.

“Where rapists and murderers are welcomed with garlands and criminals are honored with the power of authority - no hope can be expected from such a misogynistic BJP either.”

Another Modi-appointed governor, Braj Mohan Ram, began his first day in a constitutional post (that is supposed to be above politics) by declaring that he would work to get more votes for the BJP.

Union home minister Amit Shah’s attempted a shaky rebuttal of Rahul Gandhi’s attacks on the SIR by making the claim that the goal of the Opposition’s campaign was to protect the ‘infiltrators’ supposedly being rooted out by the Election Commission.

Now that’s a hell of a lot of ‘infiltrators’, even by the standards set by the BJP

Read more

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

October 13, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi

The Cockroach Janta Party on Tuesday refused to let the denotification of Jantar Mantar be the end of the protest against the chief election commissioner. Party leaders Saurav Das, Ashutosh Rana and Ajinkya Shinde, along with other team members, climbed over barricades and a locked gate to enter the heavily guarded protest site, unfurled the Indian Tricolour and raised slogans of “Bharat Mata Ki Jai”, “Jai Bhim” and “Inquilab Zindabad”. They were detained shortly afterwards. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke declared, “You cannot denotify the resistance.” The police held them at a police station near Dwarka, miles away from where they had been detained, till 2 am and then moved them to Parliament Street police station where they formally arrested for trespass, violation of the bond they had been released on earlier, and obstruction of public official’s duty. “They’ll be produced before the SCM Court in the morning. A possibility of Judicial Custody (JC) in the Tihar Jail is possible,” Ratna Singh, the CJP’s legal affairs head tweeted just as the Cable was being released. “They were not allowed to meet their lawyers till late at night. They were brought to Parliament Street PS at 3 AM in a private van. Despite these illegal actions, their spirits are high.”

The INDIA coalition of Opposition parties met on Tuesday afternoon at Rahul Gandhi’s house to take stock of the protest against CEC Gyanesh Kumar and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and plan their next moves. “Though largescale Delhi protests may see a break”, the Deccan Herald quoted Rahul Gandhi as saying, based on a source’s account, he told the leaders of other parties to “be ready to be in Delhi in 24 hours notice. Anything can happen anytime. We need to be ready to react fast. Everyone has a responsibility. It is collective...”

The CJP did not join the Opposition-led mass march to the Supreme Court on Monday and Dipke today accused the government of “treating different protests differently”:

“When CJP was granted permission to protest, many were quick to float conspiracy theories that we were planted by the BJP.

Yesterday, the INDIA bloc held a massive protest, but there was no crackdown like the one we witnessed on October 10.

This is exactly how the govt plays us against each other. By treating different protests differently, they create suspicion and mistrust among people who are ultimately fighting for the same cause.

My only request to everyone is to see through these tactics. Today, they may allow one protest and crush another. Tomorrow, they could reverse the roles. The idea is to keep us doubting each other instead of questioning those in power.

Don’t let conspiracy theories divide us. Don’t fall into the trap of fighting among ourselves when we should be standing together.

The fight is against Gyanesh Kumar and those protecting him. Don’t lose sight of that.”

What he did not explain is why he spoke of “different protests” when the goal is the same and the CJP could well have mobilised its supporters for Monday’s

Read more

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

October 12, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

In Naya Bharat, the prime minister can casually stroll into the official residence of the chief justice of India for a bit of praying and chit-chat without jeopardising the separation of powers doctrine or the need for even-handedness but the leader of the opposition will not be given time to meet the country’s top judge. Unfortunately for Narendra Modi, the lack of an appointment today with the CJI did not prevent Rahul Gandhi, Neha Bora and other opposition leaders from taking out one of the largest rallies central Delhi has witnessed in over two decades with anywhere from 50-60,000 to over two lakh people joining the INDIA bloc’s ‘March for Democracy’ from Connaught Circus to the Supreme Court.

At the core of today’s march were cadres of the Congress and the Left parties but the size of the crowd quickly swelled with ornery folk to produce a disciplined, peaceful human wave that is likely to give Narendra Modi pause for thought if not sleepless nights. ‘Do I need to save myself from Gyanesh Kumar?’, the prime minister could well be forgiven for asking. [See Long Cable below by Harish Khare].

“Today, everyone is here and there’s solidarity in that. We were getting detained left and right. So, today is the day you can come and take your stand,” a woman in her 20s from Mathura, told Antara Baruah. “It is a clear scene of dictatorship, it’s worse than dictatorship. At least some dictators improve conditions in their country.” She had got on a train to reach Delhi on October 10 but only made it in today because the government canceled dozens of trains to prevent people from arriving to the capital.

For the moment, of course, the regime is responding to public anger in the way such regimes have always done when they ignore reality: with ostrich-like moves. Taking advantage of a convenient suggestion from the Supreme Court, the Union home ministry and Delhi Police announced the ‘denotification’ of Jantar Mantar as a site of authorised public protest and said that henceforth organisers of protests should seek permission to use one of three designated grounds: Ram Lila Maidan in central Delhi, the CBD ground in Shahdara, east Delhi and the Burari ground in north Delhi.

The announcement was farcical, since the government had anyway effectively banned protests at Jantar Mantar, the Ram Lila ground is heavily booked for public events of all kind, and the other spots are too far from central Delhi to have a visible public impact. And of course, the Cockroach Janata Party is not having any of it.

The Congress today also submitted a petition to the Supreme Court on the Election Commission’s fraught Special Intensive Revision of Electoral Rolls, with ten specific reliefs sought.

Speaking to Amy Goodman’s ‘Democracy Now’, Jahnavi Sen and Shoaib Danyal explain the context of the opposition’s march to the Supreme Court.

Police detained at least 37 journalists who were covering protests, several assaulted

Offering the first systematic count of the concerted police assault on press freedom during the Oct 10-12 protests in Delhi and elsewhere, the Committee for the Protection of Journalists has said that at least 35 journalists were detained in Delhi and several were also assaulted, while at least two reporters were detained elsewhere in India. “Police continued detaining journalists even after Supreme Court justices won assurances from Solicitor-General Tushar Mehta on October 11 that lawyers, journalists, and other professionals would not be impeded in their professional duties,” notes CPJ.

Kerala assembly takes on CEC, ruling Congress attacks CJI

Kerala’s legislative assembly has passed a resolution seeking the removal of CEC Gyanesh Kumar. The resolution, perhaps the first such in the country, was moved by Chief Minister V D Satheesan and supported by the ruling Congress-led United Democratic Front and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Democratic Front. The BJP opposed it and proposed amendments, which were rejected. The resolution calls for an inquiry into the alleged SIR irregularities, the immediate restoration of voting rights to eligible voters wrongfully excluded from the rolls. It also sought reconstitution of the election commissioners’ selection committee to include the prime minister, the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, and the CJI, “to ensure the independence and credibility of the institution.”

But which CJI does the Congress mean? The party tied itself in knots today by first attacking Chief Justice Surya Kant in a tweet and then deleting what it said was an unauthorised post.

India inflation jumps to 5.54% in Sept, crossing 5% for first time

India’s retail inflation rose to 5.54% in September, up from 4.83% in August, adding to pressure on the Reserve Bank of India just days after it raised interest rates for the first time in more than three-and-a-half years. The RBI expects headline inflation to average 5.2% in the financial year ending March 2027, above its 4% medium-term target. With India importing nearly 85% of its fuel needs and exposed to supply disruptions from the war in West Asia, the oil shock is feeding into an already difficult inflation outlook.

Food inflation surged to 7.74% from 5.97% in August, with onion prices more than doubling, while rural inflation crossed 6%.

The Long Cable

Can Modi Find a Way to Rescue Himself From Gyanesh Kumar?

Harish Khare

At one of many stops in Israel during the course of his whirlwind shuttle diplomacy in 1975, Henry Kissinger told reporters that on that particular day he had come “to rescue [Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin from [defence minister Shimon] Peres.” Flippancy apart, the then US secretary of state was invoking one of the most unresolved conundrums faced by every supremo: how not to let a deputy or a close aide or ally spoil the broth. When a helmsman fails to rein in hawkish voices in his entourage, the result invariably is lasting damage.

Our own post-independence history records many instances: Nehru allowing Govind Ballabh Pant and Morarji Desai to scupper any agreement during Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s last visit to India in 1960; Sanjay Gandhi trapping his mother, Indira Gandhi, into the quagmire of the Emergency; L.K. Advani ensuring that the Vajpayee-Musharraf summit at Agra ended in a deadlock. The list is long.

In a dynamic polity, inter-locking institutions are often nimble-footed enough to see to it that there is no systemic breakdown. Because of weakened institutions, however, the Indian polity today is staring at a catastrophic meltdown – unless a new imagination makes itself felt.

The contours of the deadlock are all too visible. A prime minister, surrounded by a posse of take-no-prisoner hardliners; an Election Commission, a constitutional body, theoretically not easily amenable to any blandishments yet suspected of being at the beck and call of the ruling party; an agitated Opposition, led by a leader who has nothing to lose; and, a leaderless army of angry insurgents who have no time or respect for old-fashioned niceties and protocols.

This deadlock has manifested itself dramatically these last few days in the battle for control over the streets in the national capital. From July 20 to October 10, the officially empowered instruments of coercion and violence have asserted themselves against unarmed dissenters of various hues. Highly unappetising images have emerged of a police force ruthlessly pitting itself against young boys and girls and other decent citizens. Even more unpalatable and troublesome is the utter indifference of (the Union home ministry-directed) Delhi Police to the Supreme Court’s directions. The longer the deadlock persists, the greater will be the ruling regime’s appetite for defying judicial injunctions, and for relying on thuggish militias to chase unarmed protestors out of the streets.

That inclination cannot bode well for the republic. The stalemate has to be prised open.

At the heart of the deadlock are the proven illegalities wilfully committed by the incumbent chief election commissioner (CEC). Hardly anything need be said any more about the institutional mischief knowingly set in motion by Gyanesh Kumar. The rub is that he, as CEC, enjoys not only constitutional autonomy but also has been provided protection against any future punitive action for acts of commission and omission. That someone in the Modi establishment deviously felt the need for putting in place this legal protection suggests malice aforethought.

Now, there is seemingly no way out of the deadlock. Whatever use Modi has made – and still hopes to make – of him, Gyanesh Kumar has become an albatross around the prime minister’s neck. The CEC can be removed only through a motion of impeachment in parliament. But the ruling party cannot possibly let such a motion pass. Still, no one can be sure if the inner clique has come to realise that Gyanesh has become a debilitating liability. At the same time, one can be sure that if the ‘competent authority’ does decide the time has come to cut its losses and let the CEC go, the regime definitely has the requisite resourcefulness to get him to step down. Not too long ago, a vice-president of the republic was made to send in his resignation, citing reasons of health.

It is against the grain of the ruling regime to yield to pressure; its inner coterie wallows in confrontation and remains in thrall of its own roguish impulses. Yet if history is any guide, a king surely knows that no one is – or should be – indispensable. If Modi has not totally shut off his antennae, he should be able to grasp that the CEC’s carefully curated excesses have cast a shadow on what should be a prime minister’s most potent asset: the perception that he or she is an honest leader worthy of citizens’ trust. The legitimacy of the Modi regime is at stake.

Arguably, an even more fundamental question has presented itself: is our constitutional arrangement efficacious enough to find a way out of the deadlock? On the one hand is the argument, spelled out a few days ago by Shiv Sena chief, Uddhav Thackeray: “You can control institutions but the streets belong to us.” Against this, the BJP spokesperson has argued that the national agenda would be set in parliament and not on the streets. Between these two positions, the polity effectively remains checkmated.

Has the time then come to resort to the old, time-tested (but unacknowledged) legerdemain: seeking the judiciary’s help to help end a political quarrel. To be sure, judicial intervention is not to be easily countenanced; but, often in the past, the court has allowed itself to be used by politicians to put a lid on a raging fire.

Prime Minister Modi needs to be given an excuse to seek Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation; the CEC needs to be given an honourable exit; the sanctity and autonomy of elections need to be protected; and, the Opposition needs to feel reassured that the incumbent regime is not ‘stealing’ elections.

While the Supreme Court cannot ‘suspend’ Gyanesh Kumar, it is entirely within its remit to legitimately pass adverse strictures against him. Such a judicial aspersion would give the prime minister the fig leaf of a decent excuse to nudge Gyanesh babu to go home. Such a ‘solution’ would be in line with the civilisational common sense that has worked most usefully in this complex land: saap bhi mar jaye, aur lathi bhi na toote. Above all, it is starkly clear that Narendra Modi needs rescuing from Gyanesh Kumar.

Reportedly

So indiscriminate were the police in picking up suspected protestors on October 10, 11 and 12 that they also scooped up the driver of a bus the police had themselves brought to central Delhi to detain people.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

In the Leap Blog, Amol Phadke, Nikit Abhyankar and Umed Paliwal examine how renewable energy combined with storage can provide reliability and operational flexibility comparable to coal power at a lower, fixed cost, drawing on evidence from India’s market test.

Prime number: $70,000

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• When a private company’s software effectively overrides statutory authority and results in the mass exclusion of citizens from the electoral roll, that company – in this case, TCS – owes the country answers, writes S. Raghotham. More dramatically, he also asks whether there is a link between TCS, SIR’s digital stack, and the Noel Tata-N. Chandrasekaran tussle where the government clearly appears to have chosen a side.

• Neera Chandhoke analyses how the alleged actions of CEC Gyanesh Kumar and Modi’s government have sparked public protests and how the movement against SIR will persist despite coercion.

• Strong editorials in several dailies against the Modi government’s crackdown on peaceful protestors. “An authoritarian reflex in the national capital”, says Deccan Herald. “Instead of calling for accountability from the Election Commission of India, which has disenfranchised millions of Indians in a clear act of illegality, the BJP and its central and State governments are deploying the strong arm of the state to defend him,” writes The Hindu, adding: “That itself suggests that Mr. Kumar’s relationship with the BJP is different from his relationship with all other parties. The Modi government should play by the rules, and not misuse power against citizens.” The Telegraph also looks forward, even as it condemns the crackdown:

  “Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation — if his transgressions are proved true — is not going to resolve the matter. His departure, if it does take place, could be followed by the government appointing another pliable functionary. The malaise is deeper; it is systemic. What is required is the certainty that the selection process of the members of the Election Commission of India must take place on even, impartial ground.”

• Craig Tindale writes about India’s “existential materials trap” – its dramatic, even crippling over-dependence on imported minerals and formulations that its public sector companies once excelled at making but which successive governments shuttered in favour of privatisation:

  “The irony is bitter. A republic born of the fight to throw off colonial chains, whose first leaders built state plants to make its own rare earths, magnesium and penicillin, put on new chains by choice. It took up the West’s financial doctrine, which counts dollars and cannot see smelters. It closed the banks that funded its factories and let its plants rust. Today India is solvent in money and insolvent in matter, and the country that profits is the one it fears most.”

• Namita Bhandare criticises Indian media obituaries on Nana Patekar for ignoring the allegations of sexual harassment and groping made against him by actor Tanushree Dutta:

  “An obituary is not a verdict, nor does it settle allegations. Patekar’s considerable talent, his achievements as an actor and a philanthropist are a matter of record. But so are Dutta’s allegations and the price she paid. More than an individual accusation, they tell us about the power imbalance in the film industry, they tell us about the unacceptable price of speaking up. To leave that out while celebrating the rest is to tell only part of the story.”

Listen up

Apoorva Jadhav speaks to G. Sampath about India’s demographic dividend, and whether its cities are ready for the jobs and growth ahead.

Watch out

Journalist Aakar Patel speaks with Professor Radhika Desai on ‘Do World Leaders Even Respect Modi?’

Over and out

A Hindustani Bella Ciao echoes outside the metro station at lunchtime in the capital as the anti-establishment protest finds its voice in ‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayak’.

Samar Jodha looks at Ahmed Ali’s photographs of workers and industry “within the wider history of industrial photography, from Soviet state imagery and Sunil Janah to Lewis Hine.”

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.