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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
Under pressure from climbing oil prices, the rupee today experienced its sharpest weekly fall since mid-May, sliding 1.1% (and 0.1% over the day) to end at 95.55 to the dollar. The dampener that the surge in crude prices as well as high global bond yields have put on the rupee has cancelled out a good chunk of the rally it experienced early this month, when it hit a two-month peak of around 94.30 to the greenback, reports Jaspreet Kalra.
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.