Snapshot of the day

September 22, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

Donald Trump addressed the UN General Assembly on Tuesday at a tumultuous moment for the world – and for his presidency. He dredged up familiar grievances against the institution, alongside offering a striking description of himself: a peacemaker prosecuting a war. Trump defended the illegal US-Israeli war on Iran and said he now faces a “big decision” between striking a deal with Tehran and “annihilating” the Islamic Republic, while predicting a deal after the midterm elections in November and urging other countries to isolate Iran economically in the meantime.

For India, the speech had another familiar refrain. Trump again claimed that he ended eight wars, including by brokering a truce between India and Pakistan last year, despite New Delhi firmly denying this. He attributed his ability to broker the settlements to his “very special relationships”, trade, the use and threat of tariffs and other factors depending on the country. “Almost every one of these countries wrote me a letter of ‘thank you’. The prime minister of Pakistan, terrific man, said that ‘Donald Trump was responsible for saving 30 million lives and probably many more than that’.”

Trump’s address comes about a day after a new grouping reiterated the need for middle and smaller powers to join hands while under pressure from major powers (read the US). This is the ‘Partners for Multilateralism’ or P4M Initiative that Australia, Barbados, Brazil, Canada, India, Kenya and the European Union are co-sponsoring. Its founding declaration warns of “growing polarisation, the spread of conflict, violations of international law and the increasing resort to power politics, protectionism, coercion and the threat or use of force”, echoing Canadian PM Mark Carney’s acclaimed ‘rupture’ remarks from earlier this year. P4M is batting for reform and wider representation but – given its varying views on what that would entail – is yet to chart out a plan.

External affairs minister S. Jaishankar represented India at the P4M’s summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session. His remarks, the mildest at the event, did not dwell on any particular countries or instances of the breakdown of the international order. He only said that the grouping meets “at a time when the global order is under stress” from “extreme competition, geopolitical tensions and actual conflicts”.

No one who conscientiously objects to singing Vande Mataram ‘would be subjected to penal action’, the Supreme Court said today. It told the petitioner, the Carnatic musician T.M. Krishna, that it will look into whether the government’s recent actions impinge on the rights of such objectors. These actions are (i) its amendment of the 1971 Prevention of Insults Act, which now criminalises ‘causing a disturbance’ to recitations of Vande Mataram, and (ii) requiring recitation of not just the standard two but all six stanzas of Vande Mataram, which contain Hindu overtones, at certain official functions. Justice Joymalya Bagchi said:

“It is for the democratically elected state to decide and give aspiration to the nation as to what is the national song, two stanzas or four stanzas[, is]. But nobody who feels an infraction of Article 25, 26 rights [to religious freedom] or a conscientious objector would be subjected [to penal consequences].”

But senior advocate (and former chief justice of the Orissa high court) S. Muralidhar, who appeared for Krishna, argued that the Modi government’s six-stanza order is unbecoming of a decision involving nationwide implications as with Vande Mataram. “This is why when you use the term ‘national’, there has to be some building of a public opinion. It has to be by consensus. You can’t thrust it and you cannot have penal consequences,” he had told the bench.

Speaking of unbecoming actions,

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Snapshot of the day

September 21, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

The Supreme Court-appointed SIT probing the alleged embezzlement of Ram Mandir donations has identified 105 distinct instances of suspected theft – 35 more than the BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government’s first SIT found – and aims to file the charge sheet by September 25.

According to the Hindustan Times, the finding was based on an analysis of CCTV footage, witness statements and donation records. Citing people familiar with the matter, the newspaper said it formed part of a status report submitted to the apex court on September 16. The first SIT, constituted by the Uttar Pradesh government on June 13 and led by Vijay Vishwas Pant, had recorded 70 instances in its interim report.

Meanwhile…

Following a days-long delay, Delhi’s election authorities have finally released the lists of people against whom notices are being generated under the special intensive revision, and their contents are nothing short of bizarre. Many officials at the very top levels of government are reportedly among those who have had to or must ‘prove’ their status as bona fide voters of India, including Election Commissioner Sukbhir Singh Sandhu, Delhi CM Rekha Gupta, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, comptroller and auditor general K. Sanjay Murthy, foreign secretary Vikram Misri, SEBI chairman Tuhin Kanta Pandey and Rajya Sabha MP-and-senior advocate Kapil Sibal. Then there is the list of former officials: ex-Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, ex-VP Jagdeep Dhankhar, retired Supreme Court Justice Madan Lokur, ex-Union minister L.K. Advani and ex-Chief Election Commissioner Sushil Chandra are just some of them.

But really, it is unlikely that any of these individuals – who have been flagged either for various ‘logical discrepancies’ in their data or because they are supposedly unmapped to a past benchmark voter roll – actually have to go out of their way to assert their claim to remain on the electoral list. Suruchi Kumari of The Hindu cites an unnamed senior election official as saying that prominent persons like the above will not need to physically go to hearing centres like the rest of us do. Their booth-level officers will pay them a visit and verify their records, the official said. That affirms the questions that were raised when election officials clarified that Delhi CM Gupta (and later others) have already been cleared and reserved for inclusion in the final rolls – even if the SIR sweeps up the haves and have-nots, will we all have an equally easy time proving our entitlements? VIP culture, it seems, is alive and unconstitutionally thriving.

Meanwhile, there are those people who are not

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Snapshot of the day

September 18, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

Hours after the Election Commission in a late night order assigned Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress faction a new name and the ‘Football Player’ symbol for the coming bypolls, its Nandigram candidate Sanchita Pradhan (Dey) withdrew her nomination after meeting BJP chief minister Suvendu Adhikari. The pro-BJP Ritabrata Banerjee faction was named the ‘Democratic Trinamool Congress’ and allotted the ‘Envelope’ symbol. Banerjee has since announced that her faction will support the Congress candidate in Nandigram. “About an hour after Mamata announced her support, Congress nominee Milan Pradhan was arrested in connection with a murder case,” the Telegraph reports. Mamata has moved the Supreme Court on the election symbol issue.

With the BJP seeming happy, Aparna Bhattacharya decodes the extraordinary TMC factional battle and asks who gains as Mamata loses the party’s traditional twin-flowers symbol.

“There is a distinct poetic symmetry to the current spectacle.

Yet the distinction between then and now matters deeply, beyond the technicality. What the TMC did to the Congress and the CPI(M) was an act executed by a political party against other political parties. This was a wrong that voters could, in principle, undo at the ballot box. What is happening today is being driven through a constitutional authority whose orders bind everyone and whose logic sets the rules for tomorrow. These two wrongs differ in scale because they differ in fundamental nature.

While the current symbol freeze remains interim under Paragraph 15, with no final award granted to either faction, the practical precedent has been reinforced for the third time in four years. The definition of a political party in India now hinges entirely on counting those who desert it. It is a test that can be turned against any opposition party, with the outcome decided by how many legislators can be induced to stand in the opposing camp on the day the Commission does the arithmetic.

There will be a fourth case, and its outcome is already predictable.”

Meanwhile, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal has become the focus of a fresh controversy in the Supreme Court, after the EC said that around 37.18 lakh out of 38.20 lakh appeals against inclusion and deletion of names are still pending – but did not provide a break-up of how many relate to voters seeking inclusion versus those challenging inclusions.

Even as India grapples with US tariffs and a new bill targeting countries that buy Russian oil, another trade hurdle is emerging in the European Union. The EU has proposed banning scrap-metal exports to India – alongside Egypt – after a European Commission assessment found that neither country had demonstrated that the waste would be managed in an “environmentally sound” manner. Under the bloc’s Waste Shipment Regulation, exports of non-hazardous waste to non-OECD countries will be prohibited from May next year unless specific exemptions are granted. The Commission will consult on the proposed country exemptions until October 16 before adopting the final list in November.

India’s crude oil import bill rose 18.2% year-on-year in August despite a 3% decline in volumes, provisional government data cited by the Hindu show. Reflecting the continuing impact of the West Asia crisis, the Indian crude basket averaged $90.19 a barrel, up from $82.04 in July and $69.11 a year earlier.

Matthew Aaron Van Dyke, the US national arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in March this year and accused of entering India illegally, made bail today but only because the government decided not to press terrorism charges against him.

A 43-year-old government primary school teacher, Naushad Ahmed, was shot dead outside his school in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district on Tuesday earlier this week, by a local farmer who claimed the motive was the teacher’s alleged promotion of “love jihad”.

General Anil Chauhan, who demited office as Chief of Defence Staff sometime in May has been appointed head of the Vivekananda Intentional Foundation.

Explaining the Delhi police’s decision to refuse permission for a protest at Jantar Mantar Road, additional solicitor general Chetan Sharma claimed that the site – which is likely especially fresh in the Modi government’s memory in the youth movement’s wake – “is a very sensitive area”. The Delhi police believe that more people than accounted for may arrive for the protest in question because “the amount of likes and social media dissemination is so much”. Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma of the high court responded: “I am asking you to put any condition [restriction]. If not Jantar Mantar, then suggest some other place. I am only asking the state, how can there be a blanket ban?” The protest in question is planned by one Kshatriya Karni Sena against the updated UGC regulations.

Elsewhere in the capital, students and workers allege that Delhi police personnel beat them and roughed them up when they were protesting against what they say is the municipal corporation’s tardiness in dealing with the aftermath of the fatal Satya Niketan building collapse. One transwoman protester alleged that police personnel tore their clothes and called them a man.

It is hard to capture in one report the sheer scale of the ‘celebrations’ that BJP and allied NDA governments across the country (even where some recent happenings are no laughing matter) have unleashed on the occasion of the Prime minister’s birthday – but Sravasti Dasgupta took a crack at it anyway. These celebrations do occur against the background of some of the hardest questions the Modi government has grappled with in its over-decade-long tenure, including the youth protests and the Delhi police’s crackdown on them, the PM’s advancing age and India’s unequal growth, she notes.

(Not all of these birthday celebrations actually celebrated the prime minister though. Delhi’s chief minister Rekha Gupta launched an AI discordant music video dedicated to Modi in which one line declares that ‘delulu’ – delusional individuals – like to chant ‘jai Modi ji’. Whether that is Freudian slip or just incompetence we leave it to the reader to decide.)

Just because an organisation’s FCRA license has been cancelled doesn’t mean it ceases to exist at all, it just means it can no longer receive foreign funding, the Delhi high court told the Modi government after it tried to block the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative from using its funds. Earlier a single-judge bench of the court had allowed the CHRI – headed by Venkatesh Nayak – to draw Rs 20 lakh from its ‘reserve fund’ despite its FCRA registration being cancelled, a decision the government challenged. CHRI has also challenged the government’s move to cancel its license.

Tamil Nadu school education minister Rajmohan said today that his government stands firm on continuing the state’s two-language policy and in resisting the Union government’s Navodaya school scheme, which the previous DMK government had called a backdoor effort to impose Hindi onto the southern state. His remarks were prompted by Supreme Court Justice B.V. Nagarathna’s observations from the previous day – she had said that the Tamil Nadu government must shed its ‘mindset’ that Hindi cannot be taught in the state and that “individual states cannot act like individual countries”. Krishnadas Rajagopal has written up the highlights of yesterday’s court proceedings, where the judge and the state counsel sparred on the scheme’s implications for federalism.

Audit officials in Odisha have discovered hundreds of instances – 753 of them – of government records classifying a number of construction workers as deceased but the state ration system simultaneously authorising their fingerprints and disbursing rations, reports Satyasundar Barik. Officials have recorded this finding in a draft audit report on the implementation of the state’s construction worker welfare fund scheme. It also indicates that the state issued death certificates to people who are alive, the report notes.

The BBC reports that India’s private ‘hospital boom is improving access but pricing millions out of critical care’, with treatment often costing five to ten times more than at government facilities.

The Economist visits the India-Bangladesh border, calling it “one of the world’s longest and leakiest” where “people have been working and loving across the thinly guarded borderline for decades.” The British weekly examines the BJP’s championing of “pushbacks”, “in which Bengali-speaking Muslims, who are allegedly Bangladeshi, are rounded up across India, bused to border towns and literally shoved into Bangladesh.”

The Centre has told the Delhi high court that an adult can be permitted to nominate a partner, including the one in a non-heterosexual relationship, to take medical decisions in case of their incapacity while respecting the patient’s autonomy and continuity of care. The government made the submission in response to a petition seeking recognition of same-sex couples as medical representatives during medical treatment.

English county club Leicestershire has been docked 27 points and fined Rs 6 lakh over a poor pitch at Grace Road. It seems a Bollywood biopic on former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly’s is to blame.

The MAGA movement has brought both hope and headaches to Myanmar’s Christian diaspora and the rebels it supports. In ‘Trump, God and the Struggle for Chin State’, Michael Haack reports on the uneasy intersection of American evangelical politics and Myanmar’s resistance.

In ‘Where Israeli Soldiers Go to Wash Away Gaza’, Azad Essa reports from Rishikesh, a Himalayan town long associated with spiritual renewal. But what does that promise mean when it is extended to Israeli soldiers taking time off from the genocide in Gaza?

After spending nine years in Punjab jail, British Sikh finally gets bail

One-hundred-and-six months after the authorities arrested him in Jalandhar, the Delhi high court today granted bail to British national Jagtar Singh Johal in the seven murder and UAPA cases pending against him. Johal’s protracted incarceration in the case and the dim prospects of a speedy trial, combined with his acquittal in an eighth UAPA case against him by a Punjab court, convinced the bench to grant him bail today under a number of conditions, including that he surrender his passport. A UN working group has concluded that Johal, whom the Indian authorities accuse of involvement in targeted killings in Punjab and of membership in a Khalistani group, was arbitrarily detained. He has also alleged that he was tortured in custody.

IIIT Hyderabad cancels Umar Khalid documentary screening after CBFC’s ‘censorship’

The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) cancelled a planned campus screening of the documentary “Prisoner No. 626710 is Present” about incarcerated activist Umar Khalid organised by a student collective scheduled for today. The cancellation followed an objection from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which stated that the film had not received certification and sought action against the institution for organising a campus screening.

Critics were quick to point to the board’s recently revised guidelines, with one rather uncharitable translation of its ‘anti-national’ mandate: “certification” crossed out, “censoring” inserted instead.

Vishwaguru Abroad …

While PM Modi continues to invoke country’s Vishwaguru credentials, some Indians abroad are finding rather different ways of making the country noticed. Siddharth Jawahar, an undocumented Indian immigrant, has been sentenced to 11 years in a US prison for running a $35-million Ponzi scheme whose 64 victims included NFL star and Taylor Swift’s husband Travis Kelce. Jawahar was also ordered to pay $31.35 million in restitution.

Across the Atlantic, 24-year-old Indian national Hem Raj, who lives in the West Midlands, has become the first person in the UK to be charged, as part of a National Crime Agency investigation, with creating online material promoting unlawful immigration under section 17 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025. Raj is accused of publishing social-media posts offering foreign nationals advice on fraudulent visa and asylum applications.

The Long Cable

Scams, Chaos Grip BJP-Ruled States As Power Brokers and Influence Pedlars Rule the Roost

P. Raman

Two years back, Union home minister Amit Shah made a rather curious claim. Speaking at the PHD Chamber of Commerce, he said there was ‘not a single corruption’ charge against the Modi government during the past 10 years.

The home minister’s assertion came barely months after the Supreme Court struck down the government’s electoral bonds scheme – an opaque system of political financing that was widely seen as the ‘world’s’ biggest scam. The whole plan was designed by Arun Jaitley and implemented with the active support of Narendra Modi and Shah.

Forty one companies facing investigation by the CBI, ED and IT department gave Rs. 3,471 crore to the BJP through electoral bonds. And Rs. 2,698 crore of this was donated after raids by these agencies. And yet Shah could say the Modi government was not involved in a ‘single case’ of corruption in 10 years.

Thousands had applauded when Modi made his famous ‘na khaunga, na Khanedunga’ declaration at Balia during the election campaign in 2014. Since then, he has repeated the claim of ‘I won’t indulge in corruption nor let others to’ at different meetings. In 2019, he asked all ministries to send the names of ‘corrupt and non-performing’ officers.

Shah began the process of appointing centrally picked non-entities as chief ministers in BJP states with the selection of Bhupendra Patel in September 2021. These nominees were beholden to him. Moreover, Shah had an efficient system to micromanage them from Delhi. Things went smooth until the recent political crisis forced Modi to assign a more crucial role for Shah at the centre.

The sudden removal of the prop put these hapless and weak CMs to innumerable troubles, including revolts and scams which were not discernible during the period that Shah was able to put a lid on them. Consider what has happened in the less than 20-month old Rekha Gupta government, where a Rs. 650 crore medical purchase scam has just emerged.

The alleged mastermind behind the Delhi scam who was named in the ACB’s FIR has gone missing. He was accused of rigging the entire medical purchase process. How is this possible under a ‘double-engine sarkar”? How did Rajiv Rangeela manage to escape? Why was he not picked up earlier? Who gave him enough time to disappear?

No one in Rekha Gupta’s government gives answers to such crucial questions. Investigators were shocked to find that items available in the market at Rs 10 lakh were charged Rs. 33 lakh. Most items were similarly found over-charged. In some cases, the difference were unreasonably exorbitant. In the case of portable X-ray machines, the FIR states that machines with similar specifications were supplied to other hospitals for around Rs 10 lakh per unit. However, the Central Procurement Agency purchased these for Rs 33 lakh. A total of 448 machines were procured at a cost of Rs 148 crore, although their estimated market value was only about Rs 45 crore. Several files were found destroyed. Crores were moved via hundreds of accounts, missing tender files & phones.

Delhi’s Rs 650 crore medicine scam has opened a can of worms in other saffron regimes. This includes Puducherry and Maharashtra. The Chhattisgarh medicine scam involved Rs. 550 cr and UP’s Rs,10,000 crore. Soon it spread to other BJP-ruled states one after another.

The CAG reports found that government also purchased medicines and equipment from blacklisted firms but also paid Rs. 5.67 cr to 15 such agencies whose medicines have been proved substandard. Then there is the notorious ambulance scam in Haryana.

Barely four years in office, Modi realised it was impossible to stop corruption altogether. Therefore, from the start, he made elaborate measures to effectively suppress all traces of massive swindling and fraud taking place under his administration. His total control of the media made the task easier for him. Moreover, he has already rendered ineffective all available statutory watchdog panels like the CIC and CVC. Even the CAG had to suit itself to compulsions of new ‘ethics’. All parliamentary panels were ‘captured’.

Since then, Modi-Shah’s emphasis has been on keeping the frauds shrouded rather than trying to prevent these from happening. In Modi’s India, as a matter of fact, all negative stories emanate either from the foreign media, Congress spokespersons or a few independent media outlets or social media. Never the pro-government, largely circulated mainstream media.

State-level corruption, however, belongs to a different category, especially after Amit Shah withdrew from the micromanagement of provincial affairs. This left the field free for various power brokers and influence pedlars. Internal quarrels within the BJP at the state level made it worse. Hence every BJP-ruled state has its share of misdemeanours.

“I have joined BJP, and now I can get sound sleep,” said BJP leader Harshvardhan Patil, rather gleefully. “The ED won’t come after me since I am a BJP MP… We have to take a loan in order to purchase luxury cars worth Rs 40 lakh to show off. The ED will be surprised to see the amount of loan we have...” Sanjay Patil, another newly laundered man boasted after joining BJP.

Similarly, 23 of the 25 opposition leaders who were charged with corruption by the ED, CBI and police have got a reprieve after joining BJP. Among them are at least half dozen BJP chief ministers, including West Bengal’s Suvendu Adhikari, Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma, and Orissa’s Mohan Majhi.

Suvendu Adhikari, during his tenure as TMC leader, was accused of corruption by the ED. He was in jail for some time. A senior TMC leader charged Suvendu with involvement in the Sandeshkhali scam. The question remains why Adhikari was not arrested and interrogated for his alleged role in the Narada scam?

Assam’s Biswa Sarma has the distinction of being a politician with the largest number of cases against him. Consider the cases against him before his ‘shuddhikaran’ after joining the BJP. The former Orissa ruling party BJD has spoken of a recruitment scam by chief minister Mohan Charan Majhi.

Even in Kerala, where the BJP is not anywhere near power, there is a massive election fund scandal gripping the party.

Twelve years after his ‘na khoonga, na khan doonga’ promise, Modi is presiding over a feeding frenzy.

P. Raman is a veteran journalist.

Reportedly

Opinions may be divided on the quality of his performances but there is no doubt that Narendra Modi has been an actor for a very long time, pretty much since 1965.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

At its peak, India’s booming derivatives market saw investors trade 85 billion options contracts – more than anywhere else in the world. Millions of ordinary Indians, lured by the promise of quick returns, made cheap but perilous bets. Then the bubble burst. Savio Shetty tells this gripping story for Bloomberg. Read here.

Prime number: 0

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Subhash Chandra Garg analyses the record inflows into FCNR(B) deposits and warns that their true cost is being obscured. He estimates that the scheme will cost India at least Rs 1.76 lakh crore in additional interest payments and observes that “these deposits carry very high rates of interest, including forex depreciation cost.”

• “It is true that India’s economy is performing impressively in 2026. It is true, too, that the government deserves more praise than it has so far received for its handling of shocks.” But has India really become ‘filled with happiness’, as Modi said, upon hearing about the 7.8% growth figure? That much is clearly not true, The Economist observes, given that “a widespread sense of social collapse [has added] to the feeling of a country coming apart”.

• Sunil Gatade argues that the Modi government’s “feel-good” balloon has finally burst, drawing a parallel with the BJP’s defeat in 2004. Then, as now, the party had little to offer a generation whose aspirations were rising:

  “The Gen Z movement reflects the same faultline. Mr Modi has hardly anything new to offer when a new generation is becoming restless and assertive.”

• Aakar Patel was recently called upon to prove his citizenship at an SIR hearing. His thoughts and feelings on being subjected to this ‘guilty-until-proven-innocent’ process are perceptive and trenchant.

• India’s Data Center boom should learn from its dams, write Udisha Saklani and Aastha Kapoor. “Where dams displaced entire communities in the service of new reservoirs and electricity generation, data centers compete more quietly for land, water allocations, and subsidized power. Host regions therefore bear concentrated resource demands while many of the resulting economic benefits accrue elsewhere — in the profits of technology firms and investors, or in digital services consumed far beyond the communities hosting the infrastructure.” What makes matters worse is this:

  • “Dam electricity entered publicly regulated systems of distribution. Data centers produce privately controlled computing capacity whose distribution stays opaque

  • “Protests against the Sardar Sarovar Dam eventually forced recognition of displacement and resettlement of communities. Opposition to data centers, by contrast, has been more readily stifled or recast as resistance to development itself — or even "anti-national."

• Even though IN-SPACe is billed as an enabler and regulator, the “cardinal principle [is] that regulation and facilitation cannot go hand in hand”, writes Dinesh C. Sharma of the government’s controversial unbundling and privatisation of ISRO. Its functioning also points to a power shift that’s been taking place in R&D and medical research, which “place decision-making powers in the hands of non-technical people, centralise decision-making and undermine the autonomy of scientific agencies”.

Listen up

In the 2026 Ajay Gandhi Memorial Lecture, titled ‘Non-violent Resistance: From the Mahatma to the Cockroaches’, historian Mridula Mukherjee examines the enduring power of peaceful protest. She draws a line from Gandhi’s Satyagraha to the recent student-led agitation at Jantar Mantar that forced a resignation from the Modi cabinet.

Watch out

In the Wire’s Unmediated: Theatre Meets Economics, actor-director M.K. Raina and economist Jayati Ghosh settle into an easygoing conversation that is studded with insights.

Over and out

Check out this fascinating website by Kaustubh Misra, who maps the remains of the at least 18 empires that once ruled Delhi, tracing who built the capital’s monuments, where they were built and what remains stand today.

Margie Sastry remembers Partha, the self-development magazine created by Amar Chitra Katha pioneer Anant Pai.

Writer and journalist Taj Ali speaks to Novara Media about the “real story of South Asians in Britain”.

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

September 17, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

A United Nations-backed fact-finding mission on Iran says it has found “reasonable grounds” to believe that the United States committed war crimes in two deadly airstrikes in Iran on February 28. One involved a Tomahawk missile attack on a primary school in Minab, where Iranian officials say around 170 people were killed, most of them schoolgirls aged between 7 and 12. The Trump administration has neither formally accepted responsibility nor released the findings of the Pentagon investigation into the strike. The mission also cited an attack in Lamerd, where a missile scattered tungsten pellets over a “clearly identifiable sports complex and residential area”, killing 22 civilian men and women. US Central Command has denied responsibility for the strike.

After the US Congress on Wednesday passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act that would allow President Donald Trump to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the top buyers of Russian oil – including India – and gas, the external affairs ministry today responded saying India will continue to meet its energy requirements “through diversified sourcing and on the basis of evolving market dynamics”. New Delhi has “very clearly articulated” the tariff issue's “potential implications for not just the bilateral relationship, but also the international energy market”, it said. India, it added, will “take all necessary measures to protect its trade and economic interests”. Indian refiners have been heavily purchasing Russian crude amid the West Asia crisis, and the closure of Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline has further reduced routing options for India.

The Indian rupee, meanwhile, has slipped past 96 to the dollar for the first time in more than a month – giving Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who turned 76 today, some unwanted competition in the numbers game. An Axis Bank assessment based on the Fundamental Equilibrium Exchange Rate (FEER) model says the currency may need to weaken further “to align with shifting trade fundamentals and relatively weaker productivity gains from AI.”

The new 0.4% MDR on UPI merchant payments above Rs 2,000 will face an additional 18% GST, increasing the upfront charge to 0.472%. GST-registered businesses can claim input tax credit, as many already do on card charges, but unregistered merchants may have to absorb the additional cost.

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Snapshot of the day

September 16, 2026

Anirudh S.K., Kalrav Joshi

Legislators in the House of Representatives in Washington D.C. today passed by a 262-159 vote the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, which would allow President Donald Trump to impose up to 100% tariffs on the top buyers of Russian oil, including India. The Bill, which provides for a range of sanctions against Russian officials and Moscow’s shadow fleet of vessels, was passed by the Senate last month in an 86-11 vote and now awaits the president's approval. India remains the second-biggest buyer of Russian oil, behind only China. Two months ago Russia’s share of Indian crude imports hit an all-time high of 50.83%.

This share has climbed in recent months in light of the West Asia crisis choking off energy supplies from that region. Growing uncertainty has pushed up oil prices – the benchmark Brent crude is at around $108 a barrel – which in turn is among a number of factors weighing on the Indian stock market, where shares rebounded slightly on Wednesday after having slid over 5% over the last month or so. A day prior, investors had ended the session some Rs 9.5 lakh crore poorer as the Sensex fell nearly 778 points and the Nifty dropped 1.19% to a five-month low. Wednesday’s uptick came on the back of the Modi government announcing a new merchant discount rate on the hitherto free UPI.

Foreign portfolio investors for their part have offered little comfort: in the first ten trading sessions of this month alone they sold off roughly Rs 13,138 crore of Indian equities, pushing 2026’s net outflows to roughly Rs 2.37 lakh crore.

Meanwhile, India’s trade deficit unexpectedly improved to $26.9 billion in August, down from $31.98 billion the previous month, driven particularly by a cut in gold inflows. Exports went down in August compared to July but were the highest compared to any August in the last decade, note Shivangi Acharya and Manoj Kumar.

Speaking of the new merchant levies on UPI, observers have been quick to point out that it was only a year ago that the finance ministry stressed that anyone claiming it had plans to impose an MDR was a liar peddling sensationalism and fear. Now, after

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Snapshot of the day

September 15, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

The Patiala House Court granted bail to Hindu right-wing influencer Swatantra Bhardwaj for three weeks in a case related to the alleged assault of the father of a teenage Dalit girl activist during the Cockroach Janta Party’s protests at Jantar Mantar. He was arrested on September 5. Judge Saurabh Pratap Singh Laler said that Bhardwaj was being released on interim bail because the court wanted to observe his conduct before considering his plea for regular bail, reports Bar & Bench. The court’s 17-page order highlighted several shortcomings in the police investigation. It noted that allegations of caste-based abuse were not included when the FIR was initially registered and surfaced about 10 weeks later.

Bhanu Tatak has been protesting the Modi government’s plans to build a megadam on the Siang river – as the Brahmaputra’s main stream is known in Arunachal Pradesh – and now the CBI has lodged an FIR against her alleging that she received foreign funding without a mandatory certificate under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act. Arvind Gunasekar reports that the agency has accused Tatak of illegally receiving over Rs 17 lakh in foreign funding and that the protests against the Siang megadam “adversely [affect the] economic and strategic interests of the country”. Last year Tatak had condemned the authorities for preventing her from travelling to Ireland in connection with cases against her over the protest. She is legal adviser for the Siang Indigenous Farmers’ Forum.

About a month after parliament passed the Taxation and Other Laws (Amendment) Bill that paved the way for a merchant discount rate on some UPI transactions, the finance ministry today has announced how much MDR will be charged and when. Person-to-merchant (P2M) UPI transactions worth over Rs 2,000 will attract a 0.4% MDR. P2M transactions of more than Rs 2,000 in essential and thin-margin sectors like the railways, telecom and fuel will see flat Rs 5 MDR. Person-to-person UPI transactions will remain free, and small merchants like vendors on the street too shall pay no MDR if they receive less than Rs 1 lakh a month via UPI under the person-to-person-merchant category.

“Banks have been advised to ensure that merchants do not pass MDR charges on to customers,” the ministry said. MDR levied is to be distributed among banks, payment service providers and UPI service providers.

The backlash against the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) in France is refusing to die down. La Marne, a prominent French news outlet, reports that

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

Snapshot of the day

September 14, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

An unscheduled meeting between the President of Iran and the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and dogged diplomatic drafting ensured the BRICS summit hosted by India generated a closing consensus document despite persisting differences over the war in West Asia. Of course, the compromise paragraph included in the New Delhi Declaration said little of substance:

“We express deep concern over the continued escalation of tensions in Middle East/West Asia and, recalling our respective national positions, call for exercising maximum restraint, as well as avoiding actions that could further aggravate the situation.”

However, this bromide helped avoid the embarrassment of a grouping that styles itself as “an important platform for inclusive global governance” being unable to produce a joint statement.

At least one-third of the New Delhi Declaration is identical or nearly identical to BRICS’s 2025 Rio Declaration. Devirupa Mitra has a useful analysis of what is new in the Delhi document. Most significantly, the declaration condemns unilateral sanctions, secondary sanctions and trade barriers, and expressed “serious concerns” over the rise of unilateral tariff and non-tariff measures that distort trade and are inconsistent with WTO rules. BRICS members also included a paragraph expressing “deep concern on the situation relating to Cuba due to the tightening of unilateral blockade measures against the country, their adverse effects on the Cuban economy, energy supplies and the worrying humanitarian impact on the Cuban people.”

Apart from the Iran-UAE meeting, the summit sidelines also saw India and China seeking to put the bitterness of the past six years behind them. Prime Minister Modi and China’s Xi Jinping – who met already in Bishkek last month – had a 40 minute sit-down in Delhi. The border was a central element of the Indian readout of their meeting: the MEA cited Modi as saying that peace and tranquility along the Line of Actual Control ‘remains an essential basis’ for the development of ties. Per Beijing, Xi said while both sides should stay committed to resolving the boundary question, they should seek “parallel” progress in relations.

China also had notable things to say about the two sides being ‘partners’ and not ‘rivals’, and on Tibet and Taiwan; apart from citing Modi as saying that the development of Sino-Indian ties is ‘not affected by any third party’. Check out Devirupa Mitra’s report on the two leaders’ meeting for more.

Speaking to Xinhua on Monday, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi summed up the significance of the Modi-Xi meeting thus:

Xi and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi conducted a candid and in-depth exchange of views on strategic, long-term and directional issues concerning China-India relations, Wang said, noting that the most important consensus they reached was that China and India should be partners.

The Chinese president said China and India can draw on each other’s strengths, support one another, help each other succeed and pursue common development, Wang said.

The leaders of the two countries agreed to jointly maintain peace and tranquility in border areas, while the two countries will support each other as rotating chair of the BRICS,

Incidentally Xi did not attend a cultural programme arranged for visiting dignitaries or Modi’s gala dinner on Saturday. Now some people have joked that this was because of the dinner’s vegetarian menu, but in all seriousness the spread raises some crucial questions, foremost of them being: is the Modi

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Snapshot of the day

September 11, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

The BRICS summit gets underway in Delhi on Saturday but differences between Iran and the United Arab Emirates over the wording of a paragraph dealing with the ongoing conflict in West Asia continues to stand in the way of the customary joint declaration. Indian diplomats say they are still hopeful of finding the right combination of words that can capture Tehran’s desire to condemn the US-Israeli attack which began the war and Abu Dhabi’s insistence that Iran’s retaliatory attacks on its Gulf neighbours also be criticised.

Friday saw bilateral meetings between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran as well as beween Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin. These leaders met in Bishkek during the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit earlier this month and essentially repeated their earlier talking points to each other. At the BRICS Business Forum, however, Putin took a pointed dig at the West, or rather of what remains of the erstwhile US-led ‘order’. “The world is changing,” he said, and that “new growth drivers” were replacing the “old”. He said BRICS countries accounted for more than 40% of global GDP and nearly half of global economic growth over the previous five years. Putin also accused Western countries of turning economic competition into something more coercive. “They go so far as to employ instruments of direct physical force, including the destruction of industrial and logistical infrastructure, pipelines and similar facilities,” he said, adding that efforts were also being made to block transport corridors and seize ships.

The summit has brought unprecedented traffic restrictions and a virtual shutdown of Central Delhi, invonveniencing lakhs of commuters, officegoers, workers and vendors. One of the government’s concerns is that there be no public protest of any kind. Despite this, Tibetan activists did manage to make their presence felt.

The US and the European Union – which, combined, are India’s biggest trading partners – have taken their complaints about India to the World Trade Organisation. At India’s eighth Trade Policy Review, the EU raised concerns over “unpredictable” customs procedures, cumbersome SPS requirements and gaps in intellectual property and geographical indication protections, while both the US and EU criticised India’s tariffs and other regulatory barriers which undermine its efforts to open up the economy and integrate with global supply chains.

Karnataka’s Congress government will play only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram at state functions while adhering to the home ministry’s new requirement for all six stanzas to be played in functions involving certain Union officials, it has announced. This follows the Congress Working Committee deciding last month to reaffirm its historic resolution to sing only the first two stanzas of the national song in view of the Hindu undertones of some of the later ones.

But the Jammu and Kashmir National Conference has said it is bound by the Union home ministry’s requirement. After chief minister and party vice president Omar Abdullah was criticised – including by the Congress – for standing up during a full six-stanza recitation at a function earlier this week, he has said Kashmiris have no other choice. “So, what does the Congress want? That Kashmiris should be put in jail for this reason? This is a statutory obligation,” he said, maintaining that the NC will be happy if the Congress comes to power in Delhi and reverses the requirement. During its last session parliament passed a law criminalising disruption to the singing of Vande Mataram in addition to the national anthem.

Were the authorities in Delhi really empowered to shut down 17 metro stations during the crescendo of the Cockroach Janta Party-led youth agitation – evidently to prevent protesters from gathering in the heart of the city – two months ago? A petitioner has approached the Supreme Court saying that this sweeping move violated the constitutional rights of the public at large, was disproportionate and seemed to contravene the Metro Railways Act, which they said contains no provision allowing such a closure at all. The top court issued notice on the plea.

It also urged the Delhi police to act swiftly on their FIR lodged against a minor girl’s complaint that she was harassed and threatened after Hindutva vigilante Swatantra Bhardwaj beat her father during the protest at Jantar Mantar. “If there are anti-social elements roaming free and trying to browbeat a child and their family so that they do not pursue criminal proceedings, they have to be acted upon … a child is a child,” the court said.

For the third time in two years, Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati has relieved her nephew and once-heir-apparent Akash Anand from his post of party national coordinator. She has accused him of valuing his relationship with his father-in-law Ashok Siddharth, another target of Mayawati’s ire, and even held Anand’s decision not to repost her tweets to be a sign of his lack of loyalty. The episode is a new low for the BSP, which only a decade ago was a dominant power in Uttar Pradesh, notes Omar Rashid.

Festivities are around the corner again and concomitantly so is the imposition of religious practices on unwilling others. After a school – managed by the wife of a BJP MLA – in Mira Bhayandar near Mumbai asked students to avoid tuber vegetables like onions and potatoes in view of the Paryushan Jain festival, the Shiv Sena among other parties have cried foul, with one state minister calling the school’s definition a fatwa. It ultimately rescinded its diktat. And in Pune, the collector has withdrawn a 12-day ban on alcohol in view of festivities after the Bombay high court took issue with that. Now alcohol will be banned only on the first and last days of the Ganesh festival.

In Madhya Pradesh’s Shivpuri, groups of women have over the last three days vandalised liquor shops on the grounds that its sale is fuelling addiction. There are reports of women breaking liquor bottles and spilling it in front of a police station. One incident also saw protesters beat excise officers with sticks and rods and pelting stones on a police vehicle.

Hearing a PIL petition on Adivasi children dying in Madhya Pradesh’s Balaghat due to a likely measles-malaria outbreak, the MP high court has issued notice to the authorities. The petitioner in the case claims that over 30 children have perished. Yesterday Tabassum Barnagarwala had reported for Scroll that malnutrition, which appears to have been severely undercounted in Balaghat, may have exacerbated the affected children’s illness.

Srinagar MP Ruhullah Mehdi’s disagreements with the leadership of his National Conference party have widened, and now he has risen to Farooq Abdullah’s taunt by agreeing to resign both from his party and his Lok Sabha seat. This conflict, writes Rekha Chowdhary, foregrounds the tension between Omar Abdullah’s ‘pragmatic’ approach of prioritising statehood and Ruhullah’s view that the NC has received a mandate not just to govern but to seek restoration of J&K’s erstwhile constitutional safeguards. If Ruhullah really resigns and seeks election as an independent, his victory or defeat will strengthen these respective positions. But a “closely contested result could be even more consequential, leaving the question of political legitimacy unresolved while potentially deepening factional divisions”.

Unlike some Indian media reports indicating that Belgium was ‘very affirmative’ about extraditing Mehul Choksi to India and that New Delhi had pressed Belgian PM Bart de Wever on the issue during his bilateral visit, Ashis Ray was told by a Belgian official that the government only provided an update and not an undertaking to India. Delhi, the official said, “expressed its wish for the normal legal proceedings to be concluded and confirmed that it fully respects and understands the need for those proceedings to run their course”. Asked also if Indo-Belgian defence cooperation has had anything to do with movement on proceedings against Choksi, the official denied it.

The tussle between food brands and the FSSAI on nutritional labelling in India has kicked up quite some dust. Reuters has a quick brief on the peculiar Indian environment that packaged food brands have operated for years and its many variables.

The BJP has plumbed new depths with an AI-generated campaign mocking Congress leader Sonia Gandhi in a sexualised manner. As criticism mounted through the day, BJP state unit handles decided it was better to delete their posts.

Hindutva goes global, hits ceiling

It has not been the best week for the Hindu right and its carefully cultivated global image. A BAPS-linked visit triggered a gender-discrimination controversy, a one-day Eiffel Tower shutdown, a management investigation and cross-party political condemnation in France. But the row has also trained the lens on PM Modi’s connection with BAPS, a relationship that is longstanding, personal, religious-cultural and politically useful for the BJP. The Wire, in its analysis, lists four ways the controversy has hurt the BJP, Modi and, importantly, India:

• BAPS is tied closely to Modi’s political brand abroad

• This has happened in the heart of Europe, in Paris

• Indian diplomats have been promoting BAPS

• BAPS has exposed conservative Indian opinion

Meanwhile, the Hindu right appears to have hit another wall abroad just as RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat concluded his global centenary tour earlier this week. Writing on the pushback the RSS encountered from South Asian diaspora groups and the ceiling on its attempts to ‘whitewash’ Hindu nationalism abroad, Kalrav Joshi notes: “Bhagwat’s centenary tour leaves the RSS facing one blunt question: How can it claim to represent a global Hindu community when Hindus joined Muslims, Sikhs and caste-oppressed groups across three countries to reject its politics? The RSS may have secured prestigious platforms with its limitless resources, but South Asian solidarity groups denied it the legitimacy it hoped those platforms would confer.”

Pakistan is finding it is not so easy to play the role of mediator

The recent Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia have further complicated matters for Pakistan, which is a mediator between Iran on the one hand and Washington and Riyadh on the other, in addition to being committed to defence agreements with the Saudis and Turks. DC-based analyst Karman Bokhari notes speaking to Reuters that “relaying and shaping ⁠messages is one ​thing” but “active air-defense or intelligence support is another” – that would “[tip] Pakistan from stakeholder into combatant”. For now, the news agency reports, Islamabad has delivered a Saudi warning to Tehran to rein in the Houthis, and faced with its increased stakes in the region it is recalibrating expectations from some quarters about how much security cooperation it is willing to offer.

A day with Umar Khalid in Jail, six years on

Umar Khalid has spent most of his 30s in jail awaiting trial. Watch this short documentary by Quint. Depicting Umar Khalid’s first-person account of a day behind bars, as he completes six years in prison.

The Long Cable

Shri Modi’s take on Cogito Ergo Sum

Badri Raina

I have always had a poor opinion of academics who flaunt their scholastic attainments at the first opportunity they get.

Thankfully, not having any attainments, I have been saved the gauche temptation.

But this is one reason why I rate Shri Modi’s record of learning so high; no matter how challenged, he has never yielded to the weakness to put out his certificates for upstart accusers to survey.

His take on Dimagi Naxals, however gives us a glimpse of what his doctoral work in (Entire) Philosophy may have comprised.

One of the teasing conundrums in philosophical speculations has been the problem of individual existence.

Having recognised that our animal self is never in doubt (we eat, we defecate, we copulate), the question has tended to remain as to how the discrete uniqueness of individual selfhood may be established beyond the physical parameters of bodily features.

Among various speculations on the problematic, one of the most influential ones was that of the French philosopher, Rene Descartes.

In his Discussions on the Method (1637) (and in Principles of Philosophy in 1644) Descartes concluded Cogito ergo Sum, translating to I Think, therefore I am.

The telling formulation was rooted in the truth that before there is any specific thought or idea there must be a self that formulates the same, and the diversity of thoughts clearly point to separate self hoods.

In other words, before there is a thought, there must be a thinker.

No wonder that his breakthrough came to be a propellant for much personal, social, economic advancement in the Western world, among them the notion of individual rights and democracy.

And little wonder that this philosophical intervention challenged archives of received wisdoms in a way and at a scale not seen before – as individuals began to see their prowess as generators of new ideas that were not subservient to forms of unquestionable, antecedent authority.

Thus, in the reversions of social thought in our time to old world sanctities – deference to scriptures, to self-appointed knowledge gurus, to parental fiats, to other forms of hierarchy in community and official life, it is little wonder that Cogito Ergo Sum – I think, therefore I am – should come to be extended to the postulation “I think, therefore I am – a Naxal”.

Thus, any act of thinking that dares to be in contravention of any oracular given, any “authorised” item of articulation on the tablet of commandments, has once again come to be viewed as transgressive, subversive, dangerous to the order as established by the chosen ones who alone are given the right to interpret and establish ideas which must be deemed kosher by every “loyal” citizen.

Among current day world leaders who have mightily contributed to reversing the mischievous charge of Descartes’ formulation, Modi must be credited with a more than substantial share.

If “terrorist” was the obvious first desirable appellation to contrast with certified loyal citizen, in switching to Naxal as the new antagonist, Shri Modi has brilliantly underscored the heinous nature of those far more highly endowed and educated than mere terrorists, and therefore far more damaging to the oracular order of things.

The less well-fed Dimagi Naxals tend to be, the keener their minds and looks in canny opposition to the pulpit.

Modi as we know also been an avid student of Shakespeare, and cannot but have drawn inspiration form that vignette in Julius Caesar wherein Caesar says to his friend Mark Antony, “beware the lean and hungry Cassiius/ he thinks too much/ such men are dangerous.”

To conclude, the Cartesian thesis that every self exists because it thinks may well be existentially true, but for that reason is hardly politically desirable.

When human subjects are left to their own cognitive devices, the consequences for a no-nonsense state cannot but be harmful.

In a world that requires militarist certainties – if ever certainties they are – the call on the constructive and cooperative citizen committed to the goal of building an empire is clear: “there’s is not to reason why/ there’s is not to make reply/ there’s is but to do and die”.

It is a matter of great anxiety that a new generation of young Indians seem to think – yes, think – that the purpose of an educational system should not be to mass produce loyal citizens but such as can, in the course of their growth, generate ever new propositions, rejecting given ones.

No wonder that the call to disable Dimagi Naxals it is an urgent one.

Between the thinker and the thought thus must fall a shadow that ensures obliterating the consequence of thought-production.

(Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.)

Reportedly

As anybody who has been through the Central Vista can testify, the custodians of Lutyens’ Delhi are obsessed with garish, coloured lighting that at least one opposition MP has said are reminiscent of small-town marriage halls. Well, this is what the BRICS summit venue looks like now…

And this is the Central Vista right now:

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

Megha Kumar, Andre Cieplinski, Krithika P.R. and Aditya Gupta find that India’s transition to electric vehicles could support 7.2 million direct manufacturing jobs by 2040, provided the country builds its own battery cells rather than simply importing the most valuable part of the EV supply chain.

Prime number: 95.55

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Neeta Lal on India’s BRICS test: Success for India isn’t replacing the West or empowering China – it’s walking away with more strategic choices and leverage

• Senior advocate Dushyant Dave sounds the alarm over the Election Commission’s SIR, calling it a ‘Special Intensive Exclusion (SIE)’ which has excluded 13 crore citizens. Pointing to the removal of 48 lakh electors in Delhi and 2 crore in Maharashtra alone, Dave argues that the exercise is “constitutionally and legally flawed” and violates the promises of universal adult franchise made by the Constituent Assembly.

• Former Supreme Court judge Deepak Gupta pens a searing critique of the state of the judiciary in India. Among the issues he highlights is the selection of judges:

  “In the past few months, there have been a number of appointments to the Supreme Court. Some Chief Justices of High Courts have also been appointed. Almost all, if not all, belong to the upper castes. A majority are Brahmins. It is not as if there is a lack of talent among other communities and religions. Among the top 50 High Court judges in the country, there are many, some very high up in seniority, belonging to other religions and communities. They are men and women of impeccable integrity and capability. I am not casting aspersions on the persons appointed, but the Supreme Court, if it has to be the Supreme Court of the country, must have representation from all sections of society.”

• As the US-Canada trade dispute escalates, the Hindu argues in an editorial that New Delhi should be taking notes. Its warning is blunt: “India should learn from Canada and be wary of deals with the US.”

• T.N. Ninan examines India’s uneven quest for self-reliance in defence, arguing that weaknesses against an adversary’s “high-performance weapons systems” may have to be countered through “greater numbers” and smarter tactical use of even inferior systems. He points to the non-functional NavIC system as evidence of the continuing need for indigenous capability “more than a quarter century after Kargil 1999”, while arguing that the “critical need is for realism on what the country can sensibly do on its own”. And with China having developed the J-20, Ninan asks whether India “would have been better placed if it had stayed as a partner in Russia’s Su-57 stealth fighter programme.”

• In the wake of the horrific Satya Niketan building collapse, Bhoomi Goyal argues for bringing “PG accommodation under a Board, bar politicians from the business, ownership of every such facility must be disclosed in the public domain, and allocation must be transparent by merit or lottery.”

• MP Nathanael argues that governments should help athletes exit senior positions to protect efficiency, questioning a system in which sporting achievement can translate into advancement through the bureaucracy despite “little exposure to the posts for which they were recruited.”

• Why does it matter that Air Marshal Jeetendra Mishra (retired) has been selected as CEO of the Ram Mandir Trust? He “is not any old officer and the trust is not of any other temple”, this analysis notes. As Western Air Command chief, Mishra had “helped helm a politically prominent military operation”, i.e. Operation Sindoor. “And now, within months of retirement, he is helming the one institution most closely associated with the BJP’s political programme.” Plus, his appointment is preceded by the BJP forging closer and closer ties with the armed forces, as well as the latter becoming more and more comfortable with outward expressions of religiosity.

Listen up

Acclaimed author and essayist Pankaj Mishra asks why anger seems to rule the world and where India fits into this age of anger. Listen to the Al Jazeera Podcast here.

Watch out

Political scientist and economic historian Rohit Chandra traces the arc of India’s energy history, from the ‘fragmented coal markets and nationalisation’ of the ‘60s, through the emergence of Coal India and NTPC along with the NPA banking crisis, to the renewable energy transition being attempted today.

Over and out

The Master: Shyam Benegal, Khalid Mohamed’s feature-length documentary celebrating one of Indian cinema’s most important filmmakers, narrated by Naseeruddin Shah, is now streaming on YouTube.

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

September 10, 2026

Anirudh S.K. & Kalrav Joshi

Ahead of New Delhi hosting the BRICS leaders’ summit on September 12-13, the capital is being decked up in preparation, even as barricades, traffic personnel and police attempt to take care of the rest. The decor, meanwhile, has prompted one rather precise diagnosis:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has already arrived in the capital for the BRICS summit. China has now confirmed that President Xi Jinping will travel for just under 24 hours this weekend at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s invitation, marking his first visit to India in seven years. Xi is expected to meet Modi on the sidelines, in the latest step in the diplomatic thawing of ties frozen by the deadly 2020 border clashes. But the rapprochement has its limits. Reuters notes that “there are few signs as yet that their business ties will improve”, with investment restrictions, visa delays, export controls and a persistent ‘trust deficit’ continuing to shadow the relationship.

Aditya Kalra reports that the Serious Fraud Investigation Office under the corporate affairs ministry has recommended that India investigate Xiaomi for alleged irregularities in its business model, the movement of its funds and whether the firm sought compulsory investment approvals in line with New Delhi’s tightened requirements post the 2020 clashes. Asked about it today, the Chinese foreign ministry said Beijing hopes India will “provide a fair, just, transparent and non-discriminatory business environment for enterprises from all countries”.

Eight years after the last visit to India by an Iranian president, Masoud Pezeshkian will arrive in New Delhi on Friday afternoon for a two-day visit that comes as India seeks to bridge differences between Tehran and the United Arab Emirates over the war in Iran and salvage a consensus BRICS declaration.

Bangladesh, meanwhile, has ruled out Prime Minister Tarique Rahman’s participation. His “first visit cannot be a multilateral one,” Rahman’s foreign affairs adviser Humayun Kabir said per the state-run BSS news agency. “We are placing greater emphasis on bilateral visits and discussions.” India had invited Rahman to the BRICS summit in his capacity as chair of the BIMSTEC grouping, rather than as Bangladesh’s PM. A separate bilateral visit remains possible “when the environment is favorable and mutual respect is maintained”, said Kabir.

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Snapshot of the day

September 9, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi & Anirudh S.K.

China says it supports India hosting the BRICS leaders’ summit in New Delhi on September 12-13, but has stopped short of confirming whether President Xi Jinping will attend. The uncertainty is telling.

New Delhi is preparing for a summit at a moment when its much-advertised “strategic autonomy” increasingly resembles a difficult balancing act. India wants neither a China-Russia-led BRICS fashioned into an explicitly anti-Western bloc nor a Western alignment that leaves it estranged from Moscow and Beijing. US President Donald Trump’s increasingly unpredictable Washington has made that tightrope narrower still.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, is expected to arrive with some serious hardware on the table. Moscow says the sale of its fifth-generation Su-57 stealth fighter will be on the agenda when Putin and Modi hold bilateral talks on Friday, ahead of the BRICS leaders’ summit. India is seeking technology transfer and local production, while the two sides are also discussing wider defence cooperation, including upgrades to jointly produced missiles such as the BrahMos.

Xi, if he comes, arrives with considerably more complicated baggage. It would be his first visit to India in seven years and his first since the 2020 border clashes killed 20 Indian soldiers and an undisclosed number of Chinese troops. Yet the economic disengagement promised after Galwan has steadily given way to re-engagement. The Financial Times reports that bilateral trade reached a record $155 billion last year, up 12.4%, and has more than doubled over the past decade. In the first seven months of this year, it jumped another 23%.

It took the BJP-ruled Uttarakhand’s police 29 days to lodge a proper FIR in connection with a Hindutva group’s ‘purification’ ritual conducted on a ground where Rajya Sabha LoP Mallikarjun Kharge had delivered an address last month. Though it is publicly known who conducted the havan, the police have registered the case against unknown persons. This isn’t the only FIR they’ve lodged in connection with the incident – their first one named Kharge’s Lok Sabha counterpart Rahul Gandhi as an accused.

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Snapshot of the day

September 8, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi & Anirudh S.K.

“On 13 September, I will complete six years in prison. When I try to think of this period as a measure of time, I find it difficult to comprehend. Inside prison, days blur into each other.”

Next week, Dr Umar Khalid will mark 2,192 days behind bars. Arrested in September 2020 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in the Delhi riots’ alleged “larger conspiracy” case, he remains incarcerated without trial after repeatedly being denied bail, even as courts, including the Supreme Court, have repeatedly denied him bail under a law whose sweeping powers have become a defining feature of the Modi government’s approach to dissent.

Writing from Tihar for The Quint, Khalid describes an ordinary day as a political prisoner – headcounts, cramped routines, small solidarities and the anxiety of indefinite imprisonment – while reflecting on youth protests, hope, changing seasons and how captivity distorts one’s relationship with time.

With fresh tensions in West Asia propelling the benchmark Brent oil to nearly $100 a barrel, the rupee today sustained its sharpest decline since late in July, closing at 94.8175 to the dollar, 0.35% lower than yesterday. Intervention by the RBI last week – which spent at least $8 billion to buttress the rupee – had helped the currency scale an over-two-month high but now, writes Jaspreet Kalra, “that rally has run ​into resistance on account of a renewed rise in oil prices and still-elevated hedging demand ‌from ⁠local importers”. Last week also saw foreign portfolio investors turn net sellers for the first time since July.

The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS)-Eiffel Tower controversy has only lifted the lid on deeper questions about the Gujarat-rooted sect’s regressive, misogynistic practices and the row is now threatening to travel well beyond the monument itself. Eiffel Tower workers shut the landmark in protest on Monday after female employees were allegedly sidelined and “made invisible” during a BAPS delegation’s visit, prompting an official investigation and condemnation from senior French politicians, across party lines.

The Ministry of External Affairs, meanwhile, now appears keen to keep some distance from an organisation with which

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

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

Snapshot of the day

September 7, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Anirudh SK and Kalrav Joshi

The text of last week’s Allahabad High Court order quashing the imposition of the National Security Act on student activist Akriti Chaudhary is out and its unusually harsh and direct language should serve as a warning for all IAS and IPS officers out to serve their political bosses. Akriti was arrested for campaigning in support of Noida’s underpaid industrial workers who went on strike in April 2026:

• “The conduct of the District Magistrate Gautam Buddha Nagar who passed the impugned order, is worthy of derision”

• “…it shan't be long before the errant in the bureaucracy reduce the State of Uttar Pradesh to an Orwellian Dystopia.”

• “The District Magistrate desired to set an example out of the Petitioner and deter others from exercising their right to freedom of speech and expression in public spaces in support of the labourers.”

• “On account of the casual and cavalier exercise of authority by the State through the District Magistrate Gautam Buddha Nagar, which has violated the constitutional rights of the petitioner, this Court considers it sufficient to grant ₹5 lakhs as compensation to the petitioner. This Court also directs that the said amount must be recovered from the salary of the District Magistrate Gautam Buddha Nagar, who has passed this order of detention without application of mind and from all such other officers who may have been responsible.”

The judgment was delivered by Justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev. Justice Sreedharan was transferred out of the Madhya Pradesh High Court last year after he pulled up a BJP minister for calling a Muslim Indian Army officer a “sister of terrorists”.

Fun fact: Noida DM Medha Roopam is the daughter of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

While ‘virtually’ addressing the inaugural event of the ‘Swaminarayan Hindu Mandir’ in Paris yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said “this temple will surely enrich the diversity of France”. Well, thanks to the misogyny of its promoters – the BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha – the most visible impact on the diversity of France so far has been to impoverish it: Female employees at the Eiffel Tower were asked by management to make themselves ‘invisible’ on Saturday during a visit by a delegation from the Swaminarayan Sanstha at the request of BAPS representatives, says Le Monde. The offensive diktat only came to light because the staff at the Eiffel Tower decided to go on strike on Monday to protest the guidelines "which have led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex". Le Figaro reports that around a hundred members of BAPS conducted a private tour of the Paris landmark on Saturday. Quoting the CGT Union, AFP reports:

“Instructions were given to female employees of the Eiffel Tower and to female employees of service companies to make themselves invisible in order to welcome this delegation ,” reports the staff, indignant at having found themselves in a situation “serious and profoundly contrary to the values ​​of equality and non-discrimination.”

The exclusion of women and the capitulation of the Eiffel management has drawn widespread criticism from politicians in France. “It is not acceptable that such conditions can be tolerated,” tweeted Emmanuel Gregoire, the Socialist mayor of Paris. “Equality between women and men will never stop at the foot of our historical monuments, nor anywhere in this city. It must be applied everywhere, for everyone. I will ensure this, everywhere and without exception. An investigation will be launched as quickly as possible.” “In

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Snapshot of the day

September 4, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.

Delhi police personnel reportedly detained Swatantra Bhardwaj this afternoon as Cockroach Janta Party and Congress members in addition to Aazad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram) leader Chandrashekhar Azad demanded strict action against him for beating a Dalit protester at Jantar Mantar. Bhardwaj has been in the spotlight after claiming on camera that he grievously injured his victim Sanjay and bragging about avoiding jail as he enjoys the favour of the establishment, including of BJP leader and rabble-rouser Kapil Mishra. After Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi expressed support to Sanjay’s family yesterday Bhardwaj continued to claim impunity, saying that even ‘Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu or the collective Indian opposition’ cannot land him in trouble:

“Dharmo rakshati rakshitah (dharma protects those who protect it). We will go to jail, we will come back, then someone will say something again, and they will be treated once more.”

The CJP, Congress and Azad went to the Parliament Street police station today to demand that the cops invoke the attempt to murder provision against Bhardwaj in their case against him that was lodged during the protests, in light of both his claim that this was warranted as well as their account of the injuries he inflicted on Sanjay Azad. CJP spokesperson Saurav Das said tonight that the police have now invoked the provision pertaining to criminal intimidation by threatening to cause death or grievous injury, in addition to sections of the SC/ST Act. They will also invoke the attempt to murder provision shortly, he said. Sanjay Azad’s daughter has reportedly said that the police have also registered an FIR against her complaint of receiving rape threats and abusive messages.

Union minister Chirag Paswan, whom Bhardwaj had called his elder brother while claiming state patronage, has said that lack of action against the 21-year-old would set a bad example. “I take responsibility for ensuring justice for the family,” he told mediapersons on Friday.

Meanwhile, at the Press Club in Delhi, the 4PM News Network outlet today reiterated its demand that the Saket police officers who allegedly beat its woman reporters Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan yesterday be arrested and suspended. Police picked up the duo yesterday when they were covering an inauguration event involving chief minister Rekha Gupta and Union home minister Amit Shah. Shaheen has alleged that the police beat her more severely when they discovered she is Muslim, and videos shot from inside the station showed bruises and welts on their bodies.

In a miraculous development, Nepalese rescue personnel have recovered alive two workers from a hydel project tunnel on the Trishuli river – they also retrieved a body from the site. The two workers are Kabir Maharjan and Sanjay Sah, with the latter telling reporters he had stayed on at the project’s control room when the flash flood hit last week in order to help evacuate as many people as possible. The flooding near the Nepal-China border is believed to have trapped no fewer than 900 people in the tunnels of six hydel projects in the area.

It has also left more than 5,600 people missing. In Nepal the authorities are facilitating symbolic funerary rites for people who have remained unaccounted for, with relatives setting fire to their kin in straw effigies in a bid to deliver spiritual release in case they are never found. Nepalese authorities have counted 1,294 deaths as of Friday, while on the Tibetan side – where the flow of information is being heavily controlled – 31 people are known to have been killed.

Of the 2,873 individuals whom the Delhi police says have criminal antecedents and claims to have spotted during the youth protests with its facial recognition software are 25 individuals who were in jail at the time on serious charges per official records, Mahender Singh Manral reports in the Indian Express.

The Modi government ultimately decided to record people’s caste in an open-ended fashion during the census, Abhinay Lakshman reports citing official sources, “because the list of OBCs is not a list of castes, it is a list of classes”. The officials said that the open-ended method was cleared ‘at the highest levels’ because the Union and state OBC lists contained categories such as local-born people in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and tea workers, which are not castes. Lakshman also recalls that some communities that are OBC in one state may be SC or ST in another. Opposition leaders are critical of the open-ended method because it will probably make caste data unusable, like with the 2011 SECC exercise. Why did the Modi government not anticipate this issue when it promised to enumerate castes last year?

Punjab Police arrested Manjit Singh Bedi on Friday, just hours after the FBI put him on its “Most Wanted” list and offered up to $150,000 for information leading to his arrest. US prosecutors accuse the naturalised American citizen, originally from Jalandhar, of defrauding the US government of at least $600,000 through an alleged food-benefits scam at his Washington state grocery store before fleeing to India earlier in April. Bedi, however, was arrested in a separate Punjab case involving alleged cheating and illegal immigration services.

Ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s expected visit to New Delhi for the BRICS summit, India and China are stepping up economic engagement after years of strategic tension. India is likely to send a high-level delegation to China on September 7-8, possibly led by commerce secretary Rajesh Agrawal, to advance talks on trade and investment, reports the HinduBusiness Line.

HarperCollins will take over Penguin’s mandate to publish Sonia Gandhi’s memoir Belonging in India after the latter allegedly succumbed to pressure from the Modi government. Earlier Sunetra Choudhary of the Hindustan Times had reported that Penguin Random House India’s deal with Sonia fell through because she refused to make changes or deletions of references to Prime Minister Modi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Chinese intrusions into India.

A nationwide survey of 1,000 platform workers across ten cities offers a grim picture of the labour behind India’s gig economy. The Hindu reports, citing a survey, that among 778 workers exposed to extreme weather, 96.57% said heat affected their ability to work and 75.5% reported a moderate-to-severe impact on productivity and safety even as platform work amounts to long working weeks for many in the country. The survey further revealed that despite the risks involved in the nature of their work, 62.2% of the workers surveyed did not have health insurance while 44.2% did not have accident insurance.

Even as India’s gig workers labour through extreme heat with little insurance or safety protection, the Indian government abstained from voting on “decent work in the Platform Economy” when the ILO adopted the world’s first global labour standard dedicated to the platform economy in June.

There’s barely six months left before Uttar Pradesh is to go to polls but the question of Scheduled Caste reservation for the Nishad OBC community remains uncertain. Now key BJP ally Sanjay Nishad has brought up the issue again, issuing an ultimatum to the BJP double engine government to act, or else. Omar Rashid explains why Nishad’s warning is important – he writes that while the BJP “cannot ignore the Nishads, it is also unable to guarantee [to] them what they want”. The broader eastern UP region is also where the opposition did well in 2022 and 2024, he notes.

After the Modi government summoned Meta’s top global executives over the temporary restriction of PM Modi’s Facebook video last month – eventually extracting an apology from the company – the IT Ministry now says it has no minutes of those meetings.

From ‘dog fruit to darling’: BBC reports on India’s avocado boom, as surging demand has local growers hoping to grab a bigger slice of the market.

Sri Lanka says spare us India’s GDP ‘theatre’

While the Modi government continues to cheer its 7.8% GDP growth figure – and issue clarifications as economists and former senior officials question the methodology – the debate has now crossed the Palk Strait, with Sri Lanka’s own second-quarter GDP figures expected this month.

Sri Lanka’s Daily FT, warning its own policymakers against taking inspiration from the spectacle, writes: “One hopes Sri Lankan policymakers and experts are not watching the theatrics in India with watering mouths and dreaming up smart arguments. Spare us such theatre!”

Over 300 killed in Manipur’s ethnic strife since it erupted 40 months ago

In the 40 months (and counting) since ethnic strife erupted in Manipur on May 3, 2023, the violence has killed a total of 306 people while 49 others remain missing, the state government has said in the assembly. While May 2023 marked the beginning of the Meitei-Kuki violence, another axis of conflict – between Kukis and Nagas – flared up this February. Speaking to Vijaita Singh, deputy chief minister Losii Dikho, a Naga, said that his relationship with his fellow deputy CM Nemcha Kipgen, a Kuki, has completely broken down. He accused Kipgen of not participating in peace efforts apart from alleging her husband’s involvement in the violence. If things go on the way they are now, it will be difficult to hold assembly elections in the hills next year, Dikho also said.

In other news, unidentified individuals triggered an explosion outside Manipur Congress leader Keisham Meghachandra Singh’s house in the Imphal valley yesterday. They are believed to have used a hand grenade. No one was injured in the incident.

Tata gets a Kenyan Ta-Ta

Kenyan President William Ruto has ordered Tata Chemicals to “pack up and leave”, accusing its Lake Magadi operation of extracting Kenya’s soda ash without generating enough jobs or value for the country, amid disputes over local employment and profit repatriation that are also before the courts. “They take our resources to India and other places,” Ruto said, accusing Tata of exporting soda ash rather than processing it locally into glass and chemicals.

Ruto says two new investors will be brought in to take over the Magadi operations and process the mineral locally, amid his wider crackdown on foreigners operating small businesses. Reuters notes that the terms of Tata Chemicals’ possible exit remain unclear.

The Long Cable

After success of EOS-05, seven-month launch hiatus for ISRO is over

Ajey Lele

On 4 September 2026, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) successfully launched the GSLV-F17/EOS-05 mission. This success comes in the wake of two consecutive failures of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV). On 18 May 2025, PSLV-C61 failed following an anomaly during the third stage while carrying the EOS-09 satellite. This was followed by the failure of PSLV-C62 on 12 January 2026, shortly before third-stage separation. Following the January 2026 failure, ISRO remained without a launch for nearly seven months.

There could understandably have been some apprehension within the ISRO community about this launch as well, given the historically challenging and unforgiving nature of the Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and particularly its cryogenic upper stage. The PSLV, long regarded as ISRO’s workhorse launcher, had experienced two consecutive failures in the recent past. On the other hand, the performance of the GSLV has historically been mixed. The GSLV Mk I, which used a Russian cryogenic upper stage and is now retired, undertook six missions, including two outright failures and two partial failures. The GSLV Mk II, equipped with an indigenous cryogenic stage and still in service, had completed 12 missions, with 10 successes before this mission. Promisingly, the GSLV Mk II’s success rate has been significantly better than that of the earlier Mk I configuration.

Interestingly, ISRO appears to have revised the nomenclature of its GSLV missions, with the earlier GSLV Mk I now being referred to as GSLV Mk II, while the vehicle previously designated GSLV Mk II is now simply referred to as GSLV. Following the failure of the GSLV-F10 mission in 2021, the subsequent four missions of the GSLV have been successful, indicating a period of improved reliability. The previous GSLV mission, GSLV-F16, had successfully launched NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) mission, the satellite jointly developed by ISRO and NASA, in July 2025.

The Earth Observation Satellite (EOS) series reflects ISRO’s effort to establish a dedicated constellation of advanced remote-sensing (also known as earth observation) satellites, with most positioned in low Earth orbit (LEO) and some in geostationary orbit (GEO). At present, four EOS-series satellites are operational in LEO. Two of these carry Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors, enabling all-weather imaging for applications such as flood mapping, soil-moisture assessment and hydrology. With EOS-05, ISRO is expanding this capability to GEO, where the satellite is expected to provide continuous, near-real-time observation of the area under coverage, with a spatial resolution of about 42 metres. In comparison, the LEO-based EOS series systems offer resolutions ranging from about 6 to 360 metres. Deploying satellites across different orbits allows ISRO to combine the higher spatial resolution of LEO platforms with the wider and more persistent coverage offered from GEO. Although primarily intended for civilian applications, these satellites have significant dual-use potential and are therefore highly relevant to India’s defence requirements. SAR based satellites have major utility for armed forces too. However, India would require a larger and more diverse EOS constellation to adequately meet its growing strategic needs. Notably, EOS-05 is actually a replacement for EOS-03 (GISAT-1), which was lost in a launch failure in 2021. ISRO is planning a few more satellites in this series and a satellite called EOS-10 (Oceansat-3A) could be launched around March 2027.

In regards to the use of satellites in disaster management, there could be one important learning from the recent high-altitude collapse of rock and ice triggering a catastrophic flash flood near the Nepal–Tibet border on 26 August 2026. The NISAR satellite operates in a near-polar, sun-synchronous dawn-dusk orbit at an altitude of approximately 747 km. There are views and counterviews in regards to the capabilities highlighted by NASA and ISRO about this satellite at the backdrop of the recent Nepal disaster. It is obvious that NISAR failed to give any early warning of this catastrophic event. Possibly, the disaster was difficult to anticipate because it resulted from the sudden failure of a high-altitude glacier–rock system in a remote and poorly monitored region. It appears that satellites like NISAR are not designed to detect subtle deformation across thousands of glaciers and unstable slopes.

This clearly demonstrates that even state-of-the-art single satellites may be not sufficient to monitor and respond to major disasters. NISAR does not pass over the Himalayan region on every orbit. While it completes about 14 orbits a day, its polar, sun-synchronous orbit means that each pass covers a different region as the Earth rotates below it. Normally, only a limited number of passes align with the Himalayan region, restricting the frequency of observations over a specific area. This may partly explain India’s efforts to develop a combination of LEO and GEO satellites to minimise data gaps and provide more continuous coverage. Such a multi-orbit satellite architecture would have significant civilian as well as military utility.

The success of the GSLV-F17/EOS-05 mission will undoubtedly boost ISRO’s confidence. It was unfortunate that a globally recognised space agency such as ISRO went through a nearly seven-month launch hiatus. The current situation suggests that all is not well with ISRO.

Shockingly at present India’s space programme faces a paradox of budgetary constraints alongside significant under-utilisation of allocated funds. The Parliamentary Standing Committee in its 410^th report on Science and Technology (2026-2027) has expressed concern that the Department of Space has not been able to utilise its allocations effectively. There are issues surrounding fluctuating government resource allocation on one hand and the inability to fully convert available budgetary resources into timely programme expenditure on the other. It is also important to note that currently ISRO is facing its worst human power shortages, with nearly 30% of its sanctioned positions remaining vacant while some top scientists are found leaving for the private sector. India’s private space sector is found making rapid progress. ISRO has transferred the technology for producing launch vehicles such as the PSLV and SSLV to private and other public-sector agencies. Thus, trained manpower with expertise mainly in such systems is likely to be in high demand in the private sector.

With recent launch failures, delays and capacity constraints raising questions about the organisation’s ability to sustain the pace and reliability expected of it. Is ISRO presently undertaking too many projects simultaneously? Is the shift in focus towards the human spaceflight mission (Project Gaganyaan) and the expanding Moon program impacting progress on other strategically important missions? Owing to manpower and other related issues, has the time come for ISRO to reprioritise its agenda and focus more on strategic requirements first, before investing into so-called trendy fields like the human spaceflight program, space station and other planetary missions?

ISRO is best placed to address its manpower shortages, project delays and other organisational challenges. Its track record demonstrates a capacity to overcome various setbacks. The successful EOS-05 mission could therefore mark the beginning of a process of renewal and reinvention.

Ajey Lele is a researcher and is the author of the book Institutions That Shaped Modern India: ISRO.

Reportedly

The BBC investigates the strange world of the country’s ‘paper parties’: six little-known Gujarat-based parties reported more income in 2023-24 than all national parties except the BJP combined:

These are called ‘Registered Unrecognised Political Parties’ or RUPPs. They do not take part in electoral politics. The investigation found, according to experts, that these may be functioning as fronts for tax evasion, money laundering, hawala transactions, and other financial irregularities. Only a thorough enquiry by the authorities will show where the money eventually landed up.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

For Scroll, Johanna Deeksha investigates why Tamil Nadu’s factories can become death traps for migrant workers. Across Chennai and Tiruvallur, she finds workers living inside or next to factories, often in unsafe and overcrowded conditions that leave them vulnerable to accidents, exploitation and confinement.

Prime number: 179

That is the number of years recent Indian applicants could now be waiting for a US Green Card.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg may indeed be comparing apples to oranges in his particular argument against the 7.8% growth figure, but there are still known problems with the government’s quarterly GDP numbers, and 7.8% is a big number for a time coinciding with the energy crisis, say Abhishek Anand, Josh Felman and Arvind Subramanian. “A convincing explanation is still elusive,” they point out.

• There is a disconnect between what the government says and the situation on the ground: “Lakhs of young people protesting at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, hopeless and anxious about their future. India announcing it’s the fastest-growing economy in the world, with record double-digit nominal GDP growth,” writes Praveen Chakraborty. Only the private sector can create jobs by investing, he says. But, “Private sector investment has languished at about 10-12 percent of GDP over a decade, down from 14 percent in the decade before.”This is despite the incentives like tax cuts that the Modi government gave the private sector.

• Suhas Palshikar advises those who are keen to feel sanguine about what Mohan Bhagwat said at Madison Square Gardens last week that they

  “must remember that we are not dealing with Bhagwat the person, howsoever soft spoken and accommodating he might sound. We are dealing with politics in a deeper sense: Of combining a mammoth project of hegemony that seeks to strengthen itself with the unforgiving authority of the state.”

• There are ‘three triads’ that the saffron establishment has mobilised recently to fulfill Hindutva’s sociological aims, writes G.N. Devy: ‘Constitutional Amendment-Census-Delimitation; Communalism-Census-ghar wapsi; and SIR-Census-Demography’. “If these threesome policies were to succeed, India will never be the same again,” he warns.

• It’s no surprise that the Madhya Pradesh governor has accepted the state government’s decision not to prosecute minister Kunwar Vijay Singh for his odious remarks on Colonel Sofiya Qureshi. But “if the BJP believes its own propaganda about its patriotism and concern for the armed forces,” writes the Deccan Chronicle, “it should take steps to ensure that the wrongdoer faces the law and does not escape with worthless apologies”.

Listen up

A country grows faster when it is healthy and educated but India’s spending on both these areas has been historically lacklustre. And spending aimed at people’s well-being is often labelled a freebie or revadi. Is that justified, or is such spending a right that the people can claim? Reetika Khera discusses with G. Sampath on InFocus.

Watch out

While sections of Indian media turn Nepal’s devastation into melodrama, Australian journalist Cassidy Mosconi lets the drone – and the catastrophe – tell the story.

Over and out

Edward Carpenter, a Victorian philosopher and socialist who travelled to Ceylon and Madras, found common ground between his ideology and ideas of equality and social justice that he encountered in Hindu philosophy. Ajay Kamalakaran writes.

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

September 3, 2026

Anirudh S.K. & Kalrav Joshi

Several protesters – including Neha Bora, the national president of the All India Students’ Association – camped late into the night at the Saket police station in south Delhi to object to its personnel allegedly beating and insulting two independent women journalists, Shaheen Khan and Nafisa Khan, earlier in the day. The 4PM News Network, for whom the duo was in Saket to cover an inauguration event involving chief minister Rekha Gupta and Union home minister Amit Shah, has alleged that the police picked them up, took them to the station and beat them there with sticks. Shaheen was trying to ask a question to CM Gupta when their ordeal began, 4PM has said, with the journalist also alleging that officers beat her more severely when they learned of her Muslim surname. In videos filmed from the inside the station, bruises and welts can be seen on Shaheen and Nafisa’s bodies, with the two at times appearing weakened and unable to move.

4PM as well as various press bodies have demanded that the police investigate the personnel who allegedly assaulted the duo; the outlet’s editor Sanjay Sharma wrote that no FIR had been lodged as of 1 am on Friday even as protesters sat in the Saket station raising slogans demanding justice. The Press Club of India, the Delhi Union of Journalists, the Press Association and the Kerala Union of Working Journalists, in addition to DIGIPUB, have strongly condemned the police’s actions and demanded a transparent inquiry. They also note the allegation that police officers had threatened Shaheen and Nafisa with FIRs while assaulting them.

The police force involved, of course, operates directly under Amit Shah’s home ministry. It has said that its personnel picked Shaheen and Nafisa up because they ‘obstructed a designated VVIP route by parking their scooter near the venue and refused to move it despite repeated requests’ (for more on the Delhi police’s (in)actions, scroll down to Item 1 below).

4PM has previously been in the current regime’s crosshairs: in May the Delhi high court ordered the restoration of its YouTube channel, which the Modi government got withheld for Indian audiences citing content ‘detrimental to India’s national security, sovereignty and public order’.

Elsewhere,

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Snapshot of the day

September 2, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Delhi Police picked up a senior retired bureaucrat, Ashish Joshi, during his morning run at Nehru Park today and took him in for an interrogation that lasted nearly 10 hours. He was finally allowed to go home in the evening.

Joshi, a 1992 batch officer of the Indian Post and Telecommunication Accounts and Finance Service, who retired on March 31, 2026 as an additional secretary-ranked officer in the Government of India, is a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi government on social media. While ‘police sources’ were quoted by a section of the media as claiming Joshi was taken in for “routine questioning” over “online content”, a friend of the retired bureaucrat who was also an eyewitness to the incident told The Wire the police officers who identified themselves as being from the Special Cell had said they were ordered to question him over a tweet against Home Minister Amit Shah. If that is so, it is likely that this was the tweet which got the system so riled up.

While the Indian Express reports that the police questioned him about a tweet on the Election Commission – and that a case has been registered “under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which deals with provocation with the intent, or knowledge, that it is likely to cause a riot” – a review of Joshi’s X timeline over the past week reveals nothing about the ECI that might warrant an eight hour police interrogation, let alone ‘cause a riot’. Yesterday he tweeted an interview of Prabhakar Parakala to MK Venu of The Wire with the following words: “I fully agree with Political Economist Parkala Prabhakar who says time has come for a mass movement against ECI to seek full accountability and transparency before the electoral and political system is totally destroyed.” And on September 1, he tweeted a story about the mass deletion of voters in Delhi with the message: “Delhi Assembly elections must be re-held, or [the EC] must immediately publish post-SIR voter lists at every booth for public verification. Booth-level officials must be present on-site to address wrongful exclusions and rectify rolls on the spot.”

Joshi is likely to speak about his encounter with the police on Thursday but on thing is clear already. Whether on Amit Shah or the EC, if tweets of this sort are now going to lead to the filing of cases and to the police picking up people from the street and taking them in for interrogation, the state of Indian democracy is even worse than most people imagine it to be.

[Fun Fact: India is already ranked 106 on the V-Dem Electoral Democracy list]

Not only did the Allahabad high court today quash the preventive detention – under the stringent National Security Act – of 25-year-old activist Aakriti Chaudhary who has been in custody for around five months in connection

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Snapshot of the day

September 1, 2026

Sidharth Bhatia

Russian President Vladimir Putin had his own response to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for the ‘end of war’ for the benefit of humanity: Russian forces struck a residential building in Kyiv and the surrounding region. At least 12 civilians were killed, including an Indian citizen and 21 wounded in the overnight attack. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy denounced the strikes as “Russian terror” and called on allies to strengthen Ukraine’s air defences.

Nor is it the only Indian casualty of Russia’s war. Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri says 227 Indian nationals have been recruited into the Russian military so far, of whom 51 have been killed and 139 discharged. New Delhi says it has repeatedly pressed Moscow for the release, discharge and repatriation of Indians still serving with Russian forces. The diplomatic appeals to ‘end the war’ now sit alongside a grimmer ledger.

Invoking its plenary powers under Article 142, the Supreme Court today deemed that FIRs lodged against youth protesters for the agitations they held across the country between July 20 and 25 stand quashed (the Delhi police’s cases against close to 3,000 individuals with ‘serious criminal antecedents will remain in place). The bench also forbade fresh cases against protesters for these agitations. For its part the Modi government said it will formulate within three months a policy for compensating the families of students who died after the NEET-UG leak in May. In response the Cockroach Janata Party called off its September 5 march from India Gate to the Delhi police’s headquarters, which it had announced because of the government’s delay in cancelling cases against protesters.

All this comes less than two weeks before the BRICS summit in Delhi on September 12, with the Modi government hardly eager for images of another youth protest in the capital to travel around the world.

Speaking of which, remember the 15-year-old from Noida who became the target of a Hindutva hate campaign and state action after a video of her criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the Jantar Mantar protests went viral, and was subsequently shamed to apologise? She has now

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Snapshot of the day

August 31, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Anirudk SK and Kalrav Joshi

Narendra Modi is in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit. He met with Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and called for expanding bilateral trade. Devirupa Mitra notes that the call to expand trade comes at a time when India-Iran commerce has contracted dramatically under the impact of US sanctions and the disruption caused by the war. “Last week, the Trump administration launched Operation Economic Outcast against Iran, expanding sanctions and warning countries and companies that continue doing business with Tehran that they could face measures affecting their access to the US financial system.”

Mitra notes that Pezeshkian’s account of the talks “specifically mentioned Chabahar” – the Persian Gulf port India has invested in but backed out of under US pressure – and the Iranian readout also said “the two sides discussed transport and maritime cooperation, developments related to the Strait of Hormuz and “the process of cooperation in Chabahar port”." But neither Modi’s post on the meeting nor the Indian government’s detailed readout, mentioned Chabahar by name.

So is Modi signalling a newfound willingness to confront Trump on the issue of trade with Iran? Or is he making a rhetorical declaration to buttress claims to an independent foreign policy?

Whatever the truth, there is no denying the carefully scripted jumla, or slogan, that Modi unveiled during his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Bishkek. “We must move from ‘endless war’ to ‘end of war’ for the benefit of humanity”, he said in a reference to the Ukraine conflict, though the fact that the PM read this alliterative ‘gem’ from a piece of paper robbed it of much of its flourish. However, the PMO spent the evening hard-selling this phrase to reporters and editors so don’t be surprised if all the newspapers lead with this in the morning.

“These words are fair and true. Ukraine is thankful for them,” said an advisor to the Ukrainian government. “However, Putin doesn't understand words, he understands actions. So India's refusal to purchase Russian oil would be more persuasive. If India stops financing Russia's budget through buying Russia's crude and then helping Russia with gasoline, Gandhi's teachings will come true quicker.”

Incidentally, Modi’s words apply equally forcefully to the ‘endless war’ the US is waging against Iran, now in its seventh month. Perhaps Modi will find a way to convey this message to Trump.

India’s GDP growth rate reached 7.8% in the first quarter of this year, driven by manufacturing and some services, according to government data. This is slower than Q1 last year but quicker than last year, reports TCA Sharad Raghavan.

Keeping in view the “feelings and aspirations of the people of Manipur”, the Union and state governments today decided that the census exercise there must be deferred until further orders, chief minister Y. Khemchand Singh said. The ‘people’ the CM has referred to are the state’s Meitei and Naga communities, who have demanded that the census be put off until a National Register Citizens is implemented in Manipur so that ‘illegal immigrants’ are not counted. That label is often applied to members of the Kuki-Zo community in the state. The past two years has witnessed ethnic conflict between the Kuki-Zo, Meitei and Naga communities. The Kuki-Zo Council had called the demand for an NRC preceding the census as premature.

The houselisting phase of the census was scheduled to begin in Manipur tomorrow, on September 1, in the run-up to which protesters in the Imphal valley had disrupted training activities and enforced shutdowns. Meanwhile the special intensive revision of voter rolls has carried on in this strife-torn

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

Snapshot of the day

August 28, 2026

Siddharth Varadarajan, Anirudh SK and Kalrav Joshi

In line with earlier Trump administration announcements about Indian compliance with American diktats on which countries it can and cannot buy oil from, US Ambassador Sergio Gor today revealed that India plans to buy Javelin anti-tank guided missiles from the US. While he hailed this decision as a “great step forward” in defence ties and flagging possible co-production, the government of India has yet to make public its decision or even comment on Gor’s announcement.

The Javelin is a man-portable, “fire-and-forget” anti-tank missile used by the US military, NATO partners and countries including Ukraine and Saudi Arabia. Gor’s announcement comes months after India and the US signed a 10-year framework for their “major defence partnership” in October 2025. India first sought to buy the weapon in 2010, Rahul Bedi reports, “only for the effort to flounder on technology-transfer disputes, bureaucratic inertia, competing procurement priorities, and the lure of alternative and indigenously developed systems.” The Javelin’s return, he notes, says less about the missile itself than about a recurring feature of Indo-US defence and technology cooperation: “that US arms transfers, along with the tightly-controlled technologies that accompany them, remain among the most heavily regulated in the world, subject to extensive governmental, commercial, and legislative scrutiny, often resulting in procurement timelines measured in decades rather than just years.”

Sonia Gandhi’s forthcoming memoir is to be published by Knopf in the United States and Penguin Random House India was expected to bring out the Indian edition. It now turns out Penguin will not be publishing the book in India after all. Ritu Sarin reports that the publisher took this decision following Gandhi’s refusal to accept changes and deletions it had wanted. On its part, Penguin issued a statement that purports to contest this report but which actually broadly confirmed it.

So what might these ‘recommendations’ have been that Penguin made and Gandhi rejected? Quoting “Gandhi aides”, Sunetra Chaudhary reports that the book deal fell through “as she refused to make changes or deletions of references to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s ideological fount, and Chinese intrusions.” Specifically:

“One of Gandhi’s aides told HT about some of the sections that PRHI wanted removed. Primary among them were her recollections and observations about her meetings with Modi. The aide confirmed that she has gone into details about his comments about her and cited one calling her a “Jersey cow” at a public rally in Gujarat in 2004.”

In February 2014, Penguin withdrew Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus because of objections from a right-wing Hindu outfit. It now partners with BlueKraft Foundation, which publishes books promoting the personality cult of Modi. Last year, to mark Modi’s 75th birthday, Penguin published a four volume hagiographic photobook, priced at Rs 6999, titled Sewa Hi Sankalp Rashtra Pratham Hi Prerna : Narendra Modi. Someone, somewhere must now be mightily pleased that Modi will not have to share space with Sonia Gandhi on Penguin’s shelves.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent bipartisan US federal agency, has again put the Modi government’s record under the scanner, citing violations of religious freedom, crackdowns on faith-based organisations, especially with the push for FCRA Bill and what it describes as “continued acts of transnational repression targeting religious minorities abroad”.

The report’s assessment is stark. It says the “systematic and ongoing persecution of multiple minority groups including Christians, Dalits, Muslims, and Sikhs—including denial of citizenship and voting rights, enforcement of harsh anti-conversion and cow slaughter laws, restrictions on the activities of NGOs, censorship, and transnational repression—continue to impede religious freedom in India and diaspora communities,” the report concluded. Hindu nationalist mob activity, it adds, is “rampant and occurs with impunity, with little or no accountability for violent attacks against religious minority communities. It referred to the cases of Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Jagtar Singh Johal and Ali Khan Mahmudabad in discussing India’s use of controversial anti-terror laws against critics and members of minority communities.

In Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled Uttarakhand, the Special Intensive Revision is throwing up some revealing arithmetic. Across five assembly constituencies, just five men – all linked to the BJP – filed 6,500 objections seeking the deletion of voters. Every name on their lists is Muslim, Ashwine Kumar Singh and Basant Kumar find in the second part of their investigation.

“In the Kichha assembly constituency of Udham Singh Nagar district, 4,857 objections were filed, 4,855 of them from just one man: Rajesh Tiwari, whom a report in the Hindustan Times identifies as a BJP booth level agent.” His entire list was Muslim. The revision may be ‘special’ and ‘intensive’; who is being singled out based on religion looks rather less mysterious.

Remember the six-year-old boy in Bihar who became an unlikely face of the protests over the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) examinations earlier this week and demanded the resignation of the chief minister? Police subsequently said he had been handed over to his parents, who were advised to be “more careful with him”. It turns out there was rather more to that handover. His parents told Umesh Kumar Ray that the family was kept at the police station for at least six hours and that they were beaten. “They beat us for 15 minutes. They treated us as if we were hardened criminals,” his father said. The parents appear worried. Their six-year-old, less so. He says he intends to keep joining protests. “Ye humare bhavishya ki baat hai” – this is about our future – he said, sitting beside his mother.

A Dalit man in Maharashtra’s Jalna has alleged that a group of ‘Bajrang Dal’ members waylaid a vehicle he was carrying cattle in, slapped him, insulted him with casteist language and forced him to consume cowdung while threatening to do the same to his 11-year-old boy. Police have lodged an FIR against six persons; they have also filed a Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act against the man, one Parameshwar Hiwale.

The death toll from the devastating flash flood in Nepal is now 579. Nepalese and Chinese authorities put their rescue missions on hold after a lake that formed at the site of the floods threatened to overflow and unleash more destruction, but resumed them today after the risk was assessed to be manageable – for now. A Chinese team was able to reach the hardest-hit area on their site, the Gyirong border port that visuals had captured on Wednesday. Hospitals in several districts in Nepal are unable to accommodate all the bodies they are receiving. The external affairs ministry in Delhi said this afternoon that 320 Indian nationals are among those who are currently uncontactable.

The consensus now is the cause was a glacier collapse. Subeksha Poudel writes in the Kathmandu Post:

“The US Geological Survey at first suggested that a 4.4 magnitude earthquake triggered the floods. But satellite imagery from Planet Labs found that a large section — about 600 metres (2,000 feet) wide — of glacier and rock had collapsed from an altitude of 5,200 metres, falling 1,200 metres into the valley. The USGS later revised its assessment, concluding that the massive collapse of the glacier itself had generated a seismic signal of 5.2 magnitude.

“Scientists believe a glacier and rock collapse sent ice and debris into the Lhende valley, blocking the river before a massive surge of water and debris travelled downstream into the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli.

“Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, drawing on satellite images shared by the Chinese side, reached a similar conclusion. Binod Parajuli, a senior divisional hydrologist at the department’s Flood Forecasting Division, said the imagery pointed to a combination of an ice avalanche, permafrost movement and a rockslide.”

The flood also severely damaged at least 13 hydropower projects situated along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river valleys – has travelled downstream into Sikkim’s hydropower debate. The Sikkim Bhutia Lepcha Apex Committee (SIBLAC), a body representing two of the state’s ethnic communities, has urged the Modi government to freeze all new hydropower initiatives in the state and commission an independent, time-probe investigation into projects already operating there. “The disaster in Nepal highlights the vulnerability of the Himalayan region, requiring a fresh assessment of development activities,” according to Tseten Taski Bhutia, convenor of SIBLAC and, notably, chief adviser to the BJP’s Sikkim unit.

The two additional meeting points that India and China have agreed to set up in the central and eastern sectors of the Line of Actual Control will be located in Joshimath and Tawang respectively, Snehesh Alex Philip reports, citing sources. The two sides had announced the meeting points, as well as the establishment of two hotlines in the same sectors, in their rare joint statement a day after the latest round of special representatives’ talks. The idea behind having corps commander-level talks in the central and eastern sectors, as in the western sector of the LAC, is to allow the two sides to discuss issues quickly on the ground rather than send them higher up the military and diplomatic chain every single time.

Twenty-four-year-old Himanshu Thakur was recently granted bail in two cases against him lodged after the Noida labour unrest: in one case the Allahabad high court noted that though the prosecution alleges he was ‘instrumental in spreading violence through social media’, no specific role has been attributed to him. His family has said that he was arrested without a warrant or cause being furnished, and his devices confiscated without the production of a seizure memo. A NET-qualified student, Thakur was arrested only because of his association with fellow accused Aditya Anand, they said.

The Congress has urged President Droupadi Murmu to dismiss the Madhya Pradesh cabinet, alleging that the BJP-led state government had blocked judicial proceedings against minister Vijay Shah for his derogatory and communal remarks against Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, one of the faces of the Operation Sindoor briefings along with Wing Commander Vyomika Singh. In a letter to Murmu, state Congress chief Jitu Patwari said the government’s refusal to sanction Shah’s prosecution amounted to political protection for a “loudmouth” minister and an obstruction of the judicial process.

The BJP’s newly appointed IT cell co-convener Priti Gandhi gets the Alt News treatment and the digital trail is quite a CV. From expressing her “highest regards” for Nathuram Godse to a sustained record of pro-BJP misinformation, Gandhi has repeatedly figured in fact-checks over the years. Back in 2014, even WikiLeaks called her out for circulating a fabricated Julian Assange quote praising PM Modi.

Abhinay Deshpande travelled to the Karregutta hills along the Telangana-Chhattisgarh border that was one of the last bastions of the Maoists until ‘Operation Kagar’. See his dispatch for a snippet of the state of affairs, past present and future, in this troubled region.

Why India seems immune to global warming

While the rest of the world is experiencing a pronounced version of global warming, the rise in average temperatures in India has been slower. If India is indeed “immune to global warming”, as Hayley Bennett puts it, the two main reasons for this could be the extensive use of ground water for irrigation and the high levels of air pollution – both of which serve to keep the surface temperature down. But there’s bad news. She quotes Harvard climatologist Dan Schrag:

“Those effects are going to be diminished in the next 50 years… And that means from India’s perspective, they’re likely to warm faster than the rest of the world, just because they’ve suppressed it.”

Angered by Anne Frank and Malala, Hindutva goons in Gujarat assault book reading event

Right-wing Bajrang Dal thugs disrupted a silent reading meeting organised in Ahmedabad where the selected books included Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl and Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, and allegedly assaulted its participants with sticks and bats in full public view and in front of police officers too. The meeting’s organisers alleged that the saffron goons shouted Jai Shri Ram, chanted provocative communal slogans, called attendees ‘terrorists’ and said that some attendees ought to be undressed so it could be determined whether they are Muslim. They also claimed that when they were being beaten in front of the police, an officer said that “we do not know these people, they can even kill you”.

The organisers, the Student and Youth Collective Ahmedabad and the Gujarat Reads Anyway groups, were protesting a local school’s decision to remove these two books following opposition from (again) right-wing groups. The local police have lodged an FIR against two individuals and a ‘mob of 18 other persons’.

Fun Fact: Only two places in the world restrict Malala’s book – Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and BJP-ruled Gujarat.

The plight of Kashmiri families whose homes were demolished in ‘anti-terror’ campaign

The families of Haroon Ganaie and Adil Thokar have had their homes destroyed twice – once after the Pahalgam terror attack and next after the murder of a policeman in Anantnag last month – on the pretext that the duo are with the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, even though they say they haven’t heard from him since 2018. Now, report Junaid Dar and Pragya Singh from Anantnag, after the authorities have subjected the two families to collective punishment, even their friends and relatives are wary of associating with them even as they’ve been rendered homeless.

Peace activist Kapil Kak notes: “There may be a sense of normalcy, but the hearts and minds of the people have been further alienated. That alienation could trend towards people adopting paths like joining militancy as a result of the resentment against the state.”

The Long Cable

Finally, a Proposal to Decide the Fate of Sri Lankan Tamil Refugees in India

M.R. Narayan Swamy

For decades thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils have lived as refugees in India, their pleas for citizenship rebuffed by a country they embraced to escape violence in their land. Now, a prominent Sri Lankan leader has called for a referendum to decide once and for all if they wish to remain in India or return to Sri Lanka.

Mano Ganesan, an outspoken opposition leader who heads the Tamil Progressive Alliance (TPA), said the issue of refugees has remained unresolved since 1983 when the first boatloads fled to India following anti-Tamil violence in the island nation.

“The refugee population in India, including those who have lived there for generations after migrating from Sri Lanka, many of whom are of Indian Tamil ancestry, face an uncertain future,” the MP said. “Their lives and citizenship cannot continue to be determined by the political whims of politicians on either side of the Palk Strait.”

This is the first time a leading Tamil leader has advocated a referendum among the estimated 89,000 Tamil refugees in Tamil Nadu, the bulk of whom live in more than 100 designated camps spread across the southern state.

Ganesan, whose forefathers hailed from India and who champions the interests of the so-called ‘Indian Tamils’, underlined that the refugees, almost 40 per cent of whom have been born on Indian soil, must be given the right to choose between Indian and Sri Lankan citizenship.

The problem, he said, “must now be settled once and for all through a humanitarian, rights-based and mutually agreed process…

“A free, fair and independent referendum should be conducted among these refugees to determine whether they wish to return to Sri Lanka or obtain Indian citizenship and continue their lives in India.”

A staggering 300,000 Tamils reached Tamil Nadu, separated from Sri Lanka by a strip of sea, during different years from 1983, when Tamil militancy began taking the shape of an insurgency.

While many went on to migrate to Western countries to start life anew, a small section returned home after a period of time.

As of now, at least 89,000 – some reports place the figure at over 100,000 – Sri Lankan Tamils live in Tamil Nadu. Around 60,000 are packed in refugee camps, partly on doles provided by Indian authorities. The rest, relatively better off economically, live in rented accommodation in in the state.

Some refugees have complained that their lives are shackled because of their uncertain status and they and their families find it both a pain and an insult that their repeated requests for Indian citizenship have been ignored.

“How long can we continue to be a refugee?” asked a Tamil in his 50s who lives in Chennai. “Frankly, it is very demeaning.

“Sri Lankan Tamils who chose Western countries got citizenship within a specified period,” he added, requesting that he should not be named. “Only India refuses us citizenship. Is this fair?”

In February this year, the then Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to grant Indian citizenship or long-term visas to the refugees.

In an open letter to the PM, Stalin urged the Union government to find a “humane and pragmatic” resolution to the limbo over their citizenship and legal status. He also pressed Modi to rescind an Indian government rule blocking citizenship applications from Sri Lankan Tamils.

While Stalin was voted out in May, there was no response from the Union government to his demand.

Ganesan, who recently visited India, said any outcome of the referendum he has suggested should be respected. “Those who choose to return to Sri Lanka should be facilitated with dignity, security and full rights. Those who want to remain in India should be given a clear pathway to Indian citizenship.”

While some leaders of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), Sri Lanka’s present dominant ruling party, earlier called upon the refugees to return to the island, they have become seemingly indifferent since taking power in Colombo in 2024.

Indeed, the Sri Lankan government has now announced that Tamil refugees who desire to return to their country must undergo scrutiny by the Sri Lankan intelligence. Earlier, police verification was deemed enough.

Even as some Tamil leaders want the refugees to return so as to bolster the dwindling Tamil population in Sri Lanka, young Tamils continue to quit the country for Canada, Europe and Australia, which are together home to a mammoth Tamil diaspora.

Unlike in India, where the refugees have been left hanging, innumerable Tamils of Sri Lankan origin have done well in the West, achieving success in various fields ranging from politics to multiple professions.

Shanthan K Thambiah, one such Tamil who lives in London and is a UK citizen, said that in most countries, the refugees, once they are accepted, have access to children’s education, health services, social security, employment rights and housing assistance.

“This enabled them to start rebuilding their lives and gave them a feeling of security,” he said. In the process, members of the second generation Tamil diaspora are making enormous contributions in every sector.

“In contrast, the status of Tamil refugees in India is very vulnerable. That they have remained refugees for so long is unacceptable.”

There was a time when many of the refugees in India may have thought of returning home if there was peace. But Ganesan pointed out that a majority of those now in Tamil Nadu have no great desire to return to Sri Lanka since economic conditions are much better in India.

“So many Tamils have spent their entire adult lives in India or were born there. They studied there, they work there. Do they want to give up all that and return to an uncertain future?”

The MP added: “The situation in Sri Lanka is such that if, say, Canada were to send a ship to Trincomalee or Jaffna and grant visas to Tamils, thousands will gladly take up the offer. This is the unfortunate reality.”

Another refugee, who too did not want to be named, said it was a great pity that no one in authority in India appeared to be genuinely interested in their welfare.

“We become a talking point during elections; then we are forgotten,” he said. “For all practical purposes, most of us are already Indians, emotionally. Why not give us Indian citizenship?”

M.R. Narayan Swamy is a veteran journalist.

Reportedly

Even by the abysmal standards of the Big Media in India, the fact that reporters in major outlets confused Iftikhar Gilani – the senior Indian journalist now working in Ankara – for Barrister Iftikhar Gilani, the newly elected ‘prime minister’ of ‘Azad Jammu Kashmir’, as one part of Pak-occupied Jammu and Kashmir is called in Pakistan, marks a new low…

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

Sumit Baudh looks at a recent Supreme Court judgment on who belongs to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes and who does not.

Prime number: Seven lakh

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Former CDS Gen. Anil Chauhan’s explanation that an Indian loitering munition inadvertently hit Pakistan’s Kirana Hills highlights the huge risks of any military conflict between the two sides, and how easily “an initially limited conventional conflict might begin to take on a nuclear dimension”, warns Sushant Singh. “The priority should be to institutionalise restraint rather than celebrate brinkmanship,” he writes, spelling out what that would entail.

• Worth reading is this deeply felt dispatch from Nepali journalist Shreejana Shrestha, reporting from a camp housing survivors of the catastrophe.

• Mohan Bhagwat's global gambit may prove costly for the RSS as it involves the secretive ‘cultural organisation’ shifting from under the radar to coming under global fire, writes Bharat Bhushan:

  “In seeking high-profile engagements in North America, Bhagwat may have walked into a reputational trap. Within India, he enjoyed the protection of the RSS protégés in governments at the Centre and states. They ensured friendly media coverage. That protection vanishes on the global stage, exposing his organisation’s strategic vulnerabilities.”

• Maharashtra food administration chief Tukaram Mundhe’s crusade against eatery hygiene is a good thing but it points to the heap of work that remains to be done, in the areas of product labelling and reining in ultra-processed foods, says Vir Sanghvi. “… Judging by the public anger about food safety and health, any government that ignores these issues risks damaging itself. No nation should sit back and let itself be poisoned,” he writes.

• The logic behind Agnipath – to make the military younger and leaner – is still solid but the scheme’s implementation could use some fixes, Lt. Gen. (retd.) HS Panag writes now that the first batch of Agniveers is about to complete service. The government must train Agniveers for longer, enforce a variable retention based on specific branches’ needs, ensure full parity in pay and compensation between Agniveers and regular soldiers, and ensure that every Agniveer knows their career options before they join, he recommends.

• Skilling alone won’t solve the job problem, writes Ajit Ranade. The economy needs to create far more productive work, backed by a robust social security system, he says.

• Increasing the Lok Sabha’s size by 50% is not an optimal way of ensuring better representation for a larger Indian population for a variety of reasons, argues SY Quraishi. But there is a way: “Retain the Lok Sabha at 543; preserve the present inter-state distribution of seats; undertake delimitation within states on updated population figures; implement women’s reservation within that structure; and expand the vidhan sabhas to absorb the accessibility pressure that population growth has created.”

Listen up

Is English a foreign language in India? Apoorvanand and Ganesh Devy discuss the question in a conversation moderated by Priscilla Jebaraj for The Hindu’s ‘In Focus’ podcast.

Watch out

The opening day of England’s Lord’s Test against Pakistan nearly acquired a political subplot after Sky Sports aired Michael Atherton’s interview with Imran Khan’s sons, Suleiman and Kasim, during the lunch break. ESPNcricinfo reports that the Pakistan Cricket Board threatened to keep its players off the field for the afternoon session, while The Guardian says the PCB lodged a formal complaint with Sky. Watch the interview below:

Over and out

• Utkarsh Saxena, the queer lawyer and petitioner who led one of India’s most prominent legal battles for same-sex marriage recognition, has made TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI for 2026. Saxena founded “Adalat AI, a legal tech nonprofit training its speech recognition models specifically on Indian languages, dialects, and legal jargon. It now runs in 5,500 courtrooms across 11 states. Kerala mandates it for recording witness testimony statewide; Sikkim uses it to require paperless filing; Andhra Pradesh will require Adalat across its entire courtroom workflow from October.”

• Gujarat never fails to surprise. An entrepreneur is selling rakhis made with cowdung. Why? “To defeat China, as it counters radiation”, to promote love for the cow, to further the demand for an end to the slaughter of cows across India, and other imperatives of Naya Bharat.

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

August 27, 2026

Anirudh S.K. & Kalrav Joshi

The Modi government’s choice of protesters it considers worth engaging with – let alone hearing – is becoming increasingly instructive, even if hardly surprising. For over a month, tens of thousands of students protested peacefully across the country, demanding accountability over examination irregularities, the unemployment crisis and education reforms. The government did not formally engage with them until July 20 – the day peaceful protesters were met with a brutal Delhi police crackdown, including the use of pellet guns and tear gas grenades – when senior BJP leader and Union minister J.P. Nadda finally was forced to meet the representatives of the Cockroach Janta Party (after keeping them waiting outside his office for two hours).

Yet it took considerably less for Nadda to decide to meet representatives of the Reservation Hatao Andolan, which was born last month and held a protest at Jantar Mantar last week seeking an end to caste-based reservations. Earlier today, Nadda met Harsh Dubey, Mrityunjay Pathak and Ran Bahadur Singh Chauhan as per a pre-determined schedule, with another meeting expected soon. Details of what transpired were not disclosed, though Dubey described it as an important step towards “dialogue”. Notably Nadda did not mention the Andolan by name or what they are agitating for.

The BJP’s far-right flank, however, is clearly not pleased. Hate peddler and frequent abuser Ajeet Bharti accused the party of treating Dubey as its “planted” leader and staging a “pretence of negotiation”, claiming that the memorandum submitted contained “worthless demands” and did not even use the word “reservation”. Other leaders with the Andolan have also called Dubey a ‘plant’ for the BJP.

The contrast comes at a particularly significant moment. India’s much-delayed census is supposed to conduct the first enumeration of caste since 1931, but its design is already raising troubling questions. Of course there is the fact that the exercise’s population phase will simply record what people say their caste is, risking a repeat of the 2011 SECC episode. And the questionnaire has again raised the shadow of the National Population Register in addition to throwing up privacy concerns. Speaking to Sravasti Dasgupta, ex-deputy registrar general K.N. Unni said: “For instance, Aadhaar and mobile numbers can be sought for identification, but what purpose these other details are serving is not clear if not for [the] NPR.”

And for those who say that caste discrimination is just a relic rather than a living reality, the news keeps providing the answer.

If anyone thought the controversy over the “purification” of the venue where Congress president and Rajya Sabha leader of opposition Mallikarjun Kharge – a Dalit – addressed a rally in Haldwani had embarrassed the BJP, its

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Snapshot of the day

August 26, 2026

Anirudh SK, Kalrav Joshi and Siddharth Varadarajan

A devastating flash flood at the China-Nepal border today killed 157 people, left hundreds missing and devastated settlements, bridges as well as hydropower infrastructure. Kathmandu has said that among the 400 people missing are 133 Indian tourists. According to the Kathmandu Post,

“The flood was caused after an avalanche blocked the flow of the Lhende tributary of the Bhotekoshi and first hit Timure, near Nepal’s border with China at Rasuwagadhi. Much of the settlement, home to hundreds of people, was swept away before the flood surged downstream. With no rainfall reported in the area, residents had no warning of the disaster and were going about their daily routines when the flood struck.”

Experts are also blaming an ice avalanche upstream of the Trishuli river; a 4.4-magnitude earthquake had occurred simultaneously and the role of a glacial lake outburst is being looked into. Chilling footage and images show mud and debris cascading down onto the Tibet-Nepal border crossing, and silt submerging villages. Pilgrims en route to Kailash-Manasarovar are among those struck.

Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are on alert after the National Disaster Response Force warned of a possible flood wave in the Gandak river following a sharp rise in Nepal’s Trishuli river.

India’s stock-market exceptionalism is having a difficult year. A Reuters poll of equity analysts expects Indian shares to be trading below their level at the start of 2026 even by the middle of next year – the third consecutive quarter in which analysts have cut their outlook. Indian equities are already down more than 7% this year and headed for their weakest annual performance in over a decade, even as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan post solid gains. Foreign investors, meanwhile, are increasingly taking their money elsewhere in Asia.

The student protests in Patna over alleged irregularities in the 70th Bihar Public Service Commission examination turned violent yesterday, as police used batons and water cannons to prevent demonstrators from marching towards the Bihar assembly, leaving several people injured. It was amid this crackdown that the extraordinary sight of a six-year-old ‘Gen Alpha’ boy carrying the Tricolour matters – first surrounded by helmeted, baton-wielding police and then by a forest of television microphones in Patna. “Why aren’t students getting jobs? Where did your promises of jobs and employment go, Samrat Choudhary? He should step down,” the boy was seen raising slogans over unemployment and demanding the resignation of the Bihar chief minister, prompting strong reactions from Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, Cockroach Janata Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, the Aam Aadmi Party and others.

Then came the media scrum. Surrounded by more than 20 microphones – and asked, rather helpfully, whether he was being arrested – the six-year-old boy wanted to know who had given the police instructions to act against the protestors. “Aap SP ho toh kya... police ka yahi kaam hai. Aapko patrolling karne ka kahin jagah nahi mil raha tha toh aap logon ne matha phudwa diya. Half murder hai ye... aapke upar toh 307 IPC ki dhara lagna chahiye.” (So what if you are the SP? Is this what the police are supposed to do? You had nowhere to patrol,? Did you have to make people’s heads bleed? This is half murder... Section 307 of the IPC should be imposed against you.” At six, apparently, he grasped the accountability question rather faster than some of those holding the microphones.

The Bihar police, meanwhile, rejected claims that the child had been “detained”, telling PTI that he was taken to a police station for his safety and later handed over to his mother. His parents – his father a daily-wage worker and his mother a domestic worker – were reportedly advised to be “more careful with him”.

Striking a circumspect tone about Beijing’s potential assistance to Pakistan during Operation Sindoor last year, former chief of defence staff General (retd.) Anil Chauhan said it is not necessary that – and it is currently unknowable whether – China had provided real-time information to the Pakistanis. “That could be falling under the [realm] of speculation,” he said speaking at the Vivekananda International Foundation in Delhi. The presence of Chinese technical personnel, there to service imported military hardware, is “contractual obligation which we must understand”, he added. Gen. Chauhan’s cautious remarks come a month ahead of the BRICS summit in Delhi – which Chinese President Xi Jinping could attend – and after Army and MEA officials had made more direct statements about Beijing’s role.

Gen. Chauhan also clarified reports of an Indian ‘strike’ on the Kirana Hills near Sargodha – which are associated with Pakistan’s nuclear infrastructure – saying that an Indian loitering munition that was seeking radars near Sargodha “have come and hit one of those hills”. Such ‘mistakes’ cannot occur, the former CDS said.

Meanwhile Dhaka announced yesterday that it is moving forward on its plans to acquire Chinese J-10CE fighter jets partly in view of their ‘performing very well in a combat situation’, namely Operation Sindoor. “When India and Pakistan were at war, India’s Dassault Rafale(s) was downed, and it was done by a Chinese J-10. This information is now established,” said Zahed ur Rahman, an adviser to Bangladeshi PM Tarique Rahman. Though Pakistan, currently the only foreign operator of J-10s, said the platform was instrumental in taking down multiple Indian jets including Rafales, Indian officials (including the ex-CDS) have disputed that claim.

Speaking of BRICS, Sushant Singh writes on the tightrope India faces: avoiding Western agendas that could alienate Russia, China or Iran, while resisting attempts by Beijing and Moscow to turn the grouping into an explicitly anti-Western bloc. But India’s room for manoeuvre has narrowed. The Modi government may project global leadership through summit spectacle, he argues, but BRICS also exposes the limits of its claims to lead the Global South or secure India’s strategic autonomy. “His approach offers no concrete solutions to the grave security and economic challenges currently facing 1.5 billion Indians,” Singh notes. “BRICS is only the latest evidence of that glaring political failure.”

India, the world’s largest sugar consumer and second-largest producer, is suddenly importing sugar again. With prices jumping nearly 40% in two months ahead of the festive season, the Modi government has approved 1 million tonnes of duty-free imports – the first in nearly a decade – and told bulk consumers they cannot stock more than 15 days’ supply.

The weather played a part, but so did the maths. Production is now expected to be 30.6 million tonnes, 11% below the government’s earlier estimate, after New Delhi had already allowed 2 million tonnes of exports before stopping them in May. “From allowing exports at the start of the season to ending with an import of a million tonnes is a large variation on production estimates,” analyst Vikram Suryavanshi told the BBC. From exporter to importer within a season: atmanirbharta has encountered a sugar crash. The sugar situation is “a fiasco”, “total failure of policy”, Govt has been “irresponsible” says economist Ashok Gulati.

An SIT constituted on the Supreme Court’s directions sought sanction to prosecute BJP minister Vijay Shah under Section 196(1)(a) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for his derogatory and communal remarks against Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, one of the faces of the Operation Sindoor briefings along with Wing Commander Vyomika Singh. The BJP government’s cabinet reportedly discussed the matter in secret – asking officials to leave the room – and then turned down the request of prosecuting its minister.

The Supreme Court has sought the Centre’s response to a plea from a 82-year-old US-based doctor whose Overseas Citizen of India card was cancelled over allegations of “pro-Pakistan propaganda” and activities “inimical to the sovereignty and security of India” by the Modi government. Khalid Qazi wants permission to visit Jammu and Kashmir for a family wedding, offering an undertaking that he will not engage in political activity. When his lawyer stressed that a delay could mean missing the wedding, the bench had a solution: the family could hold another function when he arrives. The matter will be heard on September 7.

A Supreme Court judge has accused Acting Chief Justice of the Rajasthan High Court Sanjeev Prakash Sharma of misusing his administrative powers ahead of his retirement next month, Bar and Bench quoted letters sent to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as saying. Justice Sandeep Mehta alleged that Sharma manipulated the listing of cases to favour rich litigants and used his position to appoint persons close to him in administrative posts and has sought that the acting chief justice be replaced “with immediate effect”. The CJI has taken note but says he is obligated to follow due procedure when it comes to complaints against judges.

The New York Times notes: ‘India’s Summer of Youth Protests Is Boiling Over.’

Why isn’t the Uttar Pradesh government accepting the request of the 2020 Hathras gang-rape victim’s family members to be relocated either to Ghaziabad or Noida, the Allahabad high court asked earlier this week. “There appears to be an unnecessary resistance by the state to a consideration as was ordered by us vide our orders” dated September and November 2024 as well as January 2025, the bench said, directing the government to rehabilitate and relocate the family members to either of the two cities within three months. The government had offered to relocate them only to Aligarh, Etah or Kasganj.

Female cheetah Nirva has been off the radar for nearly a week in Madhya Pradesh’s Kuno National Park, prompting a search involving more than 100 forest staff, drones and CCTV cameras. Officials say heavy rains may have disrupted her radio collar – which has malfunctioned before, when Nirva effectively disappeared for 22 days in 2023.

Wildlife activist Ajay Dubey, meanwhile, has pointed out that Kuno field director Uttam Kumar Sharma recently found time to warn of ‘dimagi Naxals’ among those claiming to help wildlife – borrowing PM Modi’s latest ridiculous jibe. With Nirva missing, Dubey’s retort writes itself: perhaps fewer ‘dimagi Naxals’ to hunt and more cheetahs.

As UN panel flags instances of discrimination in India, Modi government hits out

In its latest report on India, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which comprises independent experts, has flagged a litany of concerns including ‘police stops and identity checks targeting Rohingya and Bengali-speaking Muslims, migrants and asylum-seekers’, the lack of legal action against law enforcement personnel for arbitrarily detaining and collectively expelling them, statements made by high-level officials in West Bengal and Assam conflating Indian Muslims with undocumented immigrants, reports of Bengali Muslims being disproportionately excluded in the Bengal SIR, continuing discrimination against Dalits, and cases of tribal people being evicted for development projects.

Today the external affairs ministry said that an Indian inter-ministerial delegation led by the solicitor general “had already rejected the sweeping generalisations, unsubstantiated allegations, or tendency to exceed the Convention’s mandate during the review meeting” with the committee. “India rejects any politically motivated highly malicious references in the report with all the contempt that it deserves,” spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said.

RSS leader’s plan to address meeting in New York triggers protest

Indian-origin New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani does not support Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat’s address scheduled to take place in Manhattan this Saturday. He has been ‘incredibly troubled’ to see the “rise ​of a movement that is predicated on an exclusionary vision” – i.e. Hindutva – because the “vision of India that I was taught by my family … was of a pluralistic society of a secular republic that believed in the belonging of each and every person who was from India”. Bhagwat arrived in New York yesterday and his address, planned by the American Hindus for Engagement and Dialogue organisation, is expected to draw 5,000 attendees.

But Mamdani, the first Muslim and ethnic Indian mayor of New York City, suggested it may not be up to him to ‘cancel’ Bhagwat’s address. Unlike in America though, such pesky issues of powers and jurisdiction wouldn’t stop an assistant sub-inspector-rank police officer from doing their job back here in the ‘mother of democracy’, as comedian Kunal Kamra points out in jest.

Another day in New India, another ridiculous outrage

Sanskar strikes again: the jewellery brand Giva has withdrawn its Rakshabandhan-themed advertisement because right wing commentators a online did not like what the actor, Kriti Sanon, was wearing in it. Sanon was compelled to point out the obvious: “When will we stop telling women what to wear?? … Culture & Traditions are in her heart, not in her neckline!” she wrote. The ‘controversy’ appears to have been created after BJP MP and actor Kangana Ranaut objected to Sanon’s dress. Some other social media users also objected to Sanon tying a rakhi to a dog. Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi is among those who batted for Sanon, saying that a woman’s sartorial choices are her own to make.

The Long Cable

India is Now Ready to Move Towards a Post-Hindutva Polity

Harish Khare

Except for a very small minority of dimagi bhakts, there is a new national realisation that the Narendra Modi-led Hindutva project has run out of steam. The Gen Z protest, with its epicentre at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, has now transmuted itself into a nation-wide resistance; and, the young have made their elders see through the structured bogusness of the entire Modi spectacle. More importantly, there is a natural authenticity to the young protesters’ resistance because Modi’s prime ministerial enterprise has sown the seeds of its own dismantlint. The resistance we see all around us is only the organic manifestation of an inescapable denouement that has been in the works for some time.

There was a certain inevitability about the Jantar Mantar eruption. Though the spark and immediate anger had to do with a very corrupt examination system operated by very corrupt Hindutva examination warriors, the Jantar Mantar resistance found a purchase in the national imagination because Modi has, over the past 12 years, lent his name and his popular mandate to an extreme distortion of national purpose.

Twelve years is too long a time in this age of communication and internet and social media for any regime to cover up the gap between rhetoric and reality. Citizens are no longer willing to give Modi the benefit of doubt when he seeks to attribute his own inefficiency and inadequacies to presumed deficiencies and infirmities introduced in our collective affairs by previous regimes. Get cracking, man.

The slogans of Vikas and Viksit Bharat do not stir any excitement because this agenda has only produced a debilitating tycoon-thekedar-thanedar nexus. This is, in fact, nepotism institutionalised. Most senior RSS and BJP functionaries are either – as perhaps Modi would put it – the labarthis of this nexus or are reconciled to it as the small price that has to be paid to ensure Hindutva rules.

Except for a very privileged elite, it was dawned upon the vast majority of Indian citizens and consumers – including those who vote and support the BJP – that the greed and avarice of this tycoon-thekedar-thanedar nexus have clogged the central arteries of our national existence. Never before has the collective well-being been so openly mortgaged to cronies among the corporates, the entire contractor class and the criminals. The Indian mind is no longer allowed to think or question the officially approved dogmas and slogans. Our once vibrant collective imagination has been reduced to shabby docility. Life has become precarious for all those sections of middle and lower middle classes who think they had escaped the trap of poverty.

What the Jantar Mantar protest managed to do was to force each one of us to connect our individual pain, dissatisfaction and frustration with similar pangs of deprivation felt by others. All authoritarian regimes try to isolate their citizens and turn them into atomized subjects, preventing them from coming together to tell their individual experiences and tales of suffering. Once dissatisfied individual voices converge, a new torrent of energy gets released. That is every authoritarian’s nightmare. And, that is precisely what was achieved at Jantar Mantar. Suddenly the Modi regime’s carefully built walls of intimidation and coercion began crumbling.

Not only has the “vikas” mantra turned into a curse, even the Hindutva coating has brought no spiritual solace nor an ease of living for the Hindu majority. The original seduction of Hindutva was the promise, first, of driving Muslims out of political space, then, forcing them out of a few positions they had in the formal employment sector. Many Hindus take satisfaction from the fact that the Modi regime has put the Muslims in “their place.” Fine.

But the marginalisation of the Muslims has not – and cannot – produce ‘acche din’ for the Hindu masses. Because the Hindus are in an overwhelming majority, it is only natural that they would be the principal victims of the tycoon-thekedar-thandedar nexus. It is the Hindu majority youth who crowd the unemployment queue. The Modi model of governance has degenerated into an extractive arrangement by the cronies as far as the majority of the Hindus are concerned.

And, since Hindutva politics has also been organised as an authoritarian arrangement, it is only logical that the Hindu majority would be the largest victim of the regime’s insatiable demand for conformity and submission. It is the Hindu majority – and especially its affluent segments – that receive threatening calls and visits from the income-tax inspector or the Enforcement Directorate officials. It is the Hindu small and medium businessman who is being driven out of the market square. And, it is the Hindu vehicle owner who is being made to buy petrol ‘adulterated’ with Ethanol, even if he can recite all the stanzas of Vande Matram. Perpetrators of economic crimes are religion-neutral.

After twelve years, our Hindutva polity is defined by a rigged economy, an increasingly violent society and a thoroughly corrupt politics. The Hindus are no longer willing to put up with these organised delinquencies. And, they have been ready for any one who will talk a different language.

That is precisely what fascinated the majority of the Hindus about the youth who congregated at Jantar Mantar. These young men and women refused to grant the Hindutva establishment a monopoly of pattiotism or deshbhakti. Suddenly the Modi regime, with its Hindutava signature tune, stood defrocked of all moral authority. Its iqbaal has evaporated in to thin air. The majority of Hindus are ready to move beyond the Hindutava polity.

This Jantar Mantar “movement” can only have a future if it remains a coherent enough force, demanding a return to constitutional values and democratic virtues. The bigoted demagogue has to be dislodged from the pulpit. As a nation ,we will need to find a new common purpose for our collective existence, beyond electoral victories and defeats. The Republic has to be reanimated with a spirit of fairness and openness. The road to a post-Hindutva polity is steep but not too difficult.

Reportedly

Kakoli Dastidar, esrstwhile MP from the Trinamool Congress is now a member of a BJP-adjacent potemkin outfit, the ‘National Citizens Party of India’. But she is so unsure of her new political address that she tags a random social media handle instead of the actual party she is supposedly defending from destruction by Mamata Banerjee.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

Listen to the 28th D.S. Borker Memorial Lecture by Justice S. Muralidhar, laced with humour and a vision of the India – and world – he hopes to see in 2047: one without the concentration of political power embodied by today’s strongmen, from Trump and Putin to Xi and Modi.

Prime number: 31.8%

Opeds you don’t want to miss

• Andy Mukherjee believes the decision to tighten animal acquisition rules at Vantara – the private zoo run by Mukesh Ambani’s son, Anant – could ease investor “scrutiny of Reliance Industries, as Mukesh Ambani seeks to limit reputational risks and ensure a smooth succession”.

• Ding Gang writes in the Global Times that while the China-India border talks may look much the same, the real shift is happening away from the negotiating table: the American shadow over the relationship is fading. “This shift is not the preference of any single US government; rather, it is a deeper, structural change: the transactional turn in American foreign strategy, the rise of protectionism, and an increasingly instrumental approach to allies and partners are altering global expectations about what the US can actually deliver. India, in particular, has genuinely felt this shift over the past few years across various concrete issues - tariffs, energy procurement, and technology cooperation. The “special partnership” it once placed such hope in has not always translated into substantive consideration when real interests were at stake.”

• On why education has not failed Indian children everywhere, Christophe Jaffrelot points to the stark North-South divide and argues that the policies of the southern states and the reform launched by Manmohan Singh – which made school attendance mandatory for children aged 6 to 14 and required private schools to reserve 25% of their seats for “disadvantaged groups” – have shown that there is a way forward.

• There are ‘more unknowns than knowns’ about what India and China have been up to vis-a-vis the border, and yesterday’s meeting in Beijing shows that both sides “are singing from the same hymn sheet in their view that revealing less is better”, says Ananth Krishnan. That may be understandable, but “in the long term, if they are serious about making meaningful progress on the boundary question … India and China are going to have to start communicating a lot more with their publics”.

• “There is a particular kind of admission a government makes when it decides that the problem is not the broken toilet, but the camera that photographed it,” says Anand Teltumbde about the reaction in BJP-ruled states to the CJP’s ‘School Thik Karo’ Campaign.

• Looking at the marginalisation of Muslims in judicial appointments, MR Shamshad writes that “the judges making recommendations know that many names of those coming from minority communities are stopped or delayed at the government level. The option is to recommend more names from those sections rather than not recommending them or recommending only a few to be blocked by the government. There is no paucity of eminent and well-regarded Muslim lawyers practicing in the constitutional courts, so there is no shortage of a talent pool to choose from, if the will exists.”

• Colonel (R) Rajesh Kalia, who retired from the Indian Army in January 2025, writes of how a lifetime of protecting India is outweighed by the EC’s demand that he provide his identity via the SIR. “Anyone can be born in India. But it takes a special kind of endurance to survive the ultimate test of belonging initiated by the Election Commission of India (ECI). For those who have never faced this bureaucratic machinery, the grand interrogation is not a standard background check, it’s a deep-dive into your entire existence, requiring a level of ancestral detail that makes a top-secret military clearance look like a casual chat.”

Listen up

In view of a parliamentary standing committee tabling a report on chronic kidney diseases and calling for a national screening protocol for CKD – which may not show any symptoms at all until it is rather late – nephrologist Dr Rajan Ravichandran and Zubeda Hamid have done a PSA of sorts on what CKD is and who needs to be tested.

Watch out

What sort of challenge have the youth protests posed for the Modi government and what can we expect ahead of the Cockroach Janta Party’s planned march from India Gate to the Delhi police headquarters on September 5 if cases against protesters are not withdrawn? Al Jazeera spoke to Sravasti Dasgupta of The Wire as well as Uday Chandra of Ashoka University, with Shaina NC of the Shiv Sena presenting the government’s views..

Over and out

In the spirit of Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai (or buy-buy), here’s a Chinese robot breaking out into a Bollywood style dance at the opening of a shop in Ujjain Madhya Pradesh.

And in bad news for vegetarians, vegans and Jains…

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.