Donald Trump Jr met Gautam Adani in Ahmedabad Last November; Vance Suggested India Send Peacekeeping Troops to Ukraine, Claims New Book; As TMC Rebels Select New Leader, Mamata's Hegemony is Dead
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Snapshot of the day
June 23, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
A passage from the newly released book Regime Change claims that during a White House meeting in early 2025, US Vice President JD Vance suggested that countries such as India or Saudi Arabia could contribute troops to a potential peacekeeping mission in Ukraine. According to the book, President Donald Trump responded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi liked him, but added: “The Indians won’t do that... they don’t ever pay for anything.” The account offers a glimpse into internal discussions surrounding possible post-war security arrangements for Ukraine and Trump’s views, even as during the same period the Modi government focused on strengthening ties with Trump without abandoning its Russia relationship or its longstanding reluctance to join military coalitions outside narrowly defined UN peacekeeping frameworks.
In other news, Bloomberg reports that Donald Trump Jr. during his India trip last November had held a private meeting with Gautam Adani in Ahmedabad, although it is not known what the two spoke about. Just last month, the US Department of Justice announced it was dropping its fraud case against Adani, his nephew Sagar and others, while the Securities and Exchange Commission said it agreed to a settlement with the Adanis over its parallel civil case in the same matter. A representative for Trump Jr. reportedly said that the November meeting had nothing to do with Washington’s decision, and an unnamed source speaking to the news agency also denied a connection. Earlier this month ProPublica had reported that Trump Jr. had acquired a stake in the obscure firm America First Refining – apart from meeting Anant Ambani at Vantara – before its ‘deal’ with Reliance over a new refinery in Texas was announced.
Ritabrata Banerjee and his fellow Trinamool Congress rebels approached the West Bengal chief electoral officer this evening to submit documents over the ‘new’ national committee they announced yesterday and claim that it is they who enjoy the support of a majority of MLAs as the ‘real’ TMC. Yesterday the rebels – who Banerjee says now number 65 of the TMC’s 80 MLAs in Bengal – held a meeting and said they’d decided to remove Mamata Banerjee as the party’s chairperson. They decided to replace her – the party’s founder and leader for all of its 28-year-long history – with Arup Roy, legislator for Howrah Madhya and a former state minister. Meanwhile Mamata’s loyalists have dismissed the rebels’ party meeting and are preparing for a lengthy legal battle based on recent Supreme Court precedents. At the end of the day though, as Aparna Bhattacharya notes, “the undisputed hegemony of Mamata Banerjee is undeniably dead”.
Speaking of mutinies, the six Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena MPs who were widely anticipated to defect to Eknath Shinde’s ruling rebel faction finally crossed over to the NDA yesterday. Thackeray now finds himself commanding a party diminished even further and staring at an existential crisis.
With the NEET-UG retest over,
