Epstein Files Spectre Now Haunts Modi Govt; Rupee Plunges; Tejas Crash Deepens HAL’s Credibility Gap
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Tanweer Alam, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal, Seema Chishti, Sushant Singh, MK Venu, and Siddharth Varadarajan | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
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November 21, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
Amid “a bout of portfolio outflows, uncertainty over a US-India trade deal” and the Reserve Bank of India apparently stepping back from its defence of the national currency at the 88.8-to-the-dollar level, the rupee on Friday slipped to an all-time low of 89.49. It declined by 0.9% day-on-day, the steepest since May, reports Jaspreet Kalra.
A Tejas Mk1 light combat aircraft performing a demonstration flight at the Dubai Air Show on Friday crashed into the ground – the yet-unidentified pilot was killed and the Indian Air Force is setting up a court of enquiry to determine what caused the crash. Videos of the incident show the aircraft precipitously losing altitude before going up in flames upon hitting land. This is the second accident involving a Tejas this year and does not portend well for manufacturer Hindustan Aeronautics Limited: “a frontline fighter that crashes on a global stage sends a stark and unavoidable signal of unreliability, irrespective of the eventual official reason behind the accident” in an “unforgiving and ruthlessly competitive global defence market”. It is “more than a public relations embarrassment” and “threatens to deepen a credibility gap that HAL has been struggling hard to close”, Rahul Bedi points out.
The Supreme Court on Friday sought the Election Commission’s response to a petition filed by the Kerala government seeking to postpone the revision of voter rolls in the state until after local body elections next month, Bar and Bench reports. A bench of Justices Surya Kant, SVN Bhatti and Joymalya Bagchi posted the matter for hearing on November 26. In its petition filed before the Supreme Court earlier this week, the Kerala government said that revising voter rolls and simultaneously conducting polls will lead to an “administrative impasse” and disrupt the elections. It added that the elections would require about 1.7 lakh government personnel, along with 68,000 police officials and security staff. The Left Democratic Front government also told the court that, unlike local body polls which must follow a strict schedule, there is no such requirement for the special intensive revision exercise.
Investigators speaking to the Indian Express said they identified three ‘foreign handlers’ associated with the doctors from Faridabad’s Al-Falah University in connection with the Red Fort car blast – one of the three is “believed to be Turkey-based”, the newspaper says, but none are said to be Pakistani or living in Pakistan. One handler going by the moniker ‘Hanzullah’ sent 42 videos on bomb-making to Muzammil Ganai, who was arrested before the November 10 explosion, writes Johnson T.A.
Documents released by the US House Oversight Committee recently and a new tranche of some 18,000 Epstein emails obtained by Drop Site News, have claimed that the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein allegedly offered to set up a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in mid-2019, just two months before his arrest in the child sex trafficking case. By then, of course, Epstein was already a convicted sex offender. The revelations were made on the same day that Trump signed a law authorising the US Justice Department to finally make thousands of pages of files on Epstein public.
Drop Site News also reported that disclosures from Epstein’s private calendars showed “several appointments with Hardeep Singh Puri, a senior leader of Modi’s ruling BJP party”.
The Wire reports that Puri’s name appears in Epstein’s list of scheduled appointments at least five times between June 2014 and January 2017, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee. He has served as a minister in the Modi government since September 2017.
Activist-lawyer Prashant Bhushan took to social media claiming that there were “many emails” exchanged between the convicted sex trafficker and Indian business tycoon Anil Ambani, sharing screenshots of the alleged mail trail. The Drop Site report too mentions this correspondence, which dates back to March 2017, when an email account linked to Anil Ambani, the brother of Asia’s richest individual Mukesh Ambani, was reportedly used to interact with Epstein. The e-mail reportedly mentioned an article from Business Standard titled ‘After trump phone call, govt weighs if Modi should visit US early’, and reportedly stated: “Dear Jeffrey, Info. BR, Anil.” Epstein reportedly replied, “India Israel Key -not for email.”
Epstein’s communications regarding India-Israel relations came weeks before ties between the two countries reached new heights in July 2017, with Modi becoming the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. Notably, Ambani’s company, Reliance Defence Ltd, had also entered a joint venture with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd, a state-owned Israeli defense firm, to produce air-to-air missiles and air defense systems in a deal valued at USD 10 billion in 2016.
The Kuki Organisation for Human Rights (KOHUR), in an affidavit sworn on yesterday, has alleged that the Manipur Police forwarded heavily-truncated audio clips for forensic examination instead of the complete 48-minute-46-second recording, thereby preventing forensic verification of the authenticity of the ‘Manipur tapes’. On this basis, it has reiterated its demand for a court-monitored investigation to uncover the “larger conspiracy” behind the violence in Manipur. In the affidavit, KOHUR claimed that the shortened clips Manipur Police forwarded for forensic testing amounts to “selective transmission of material which raises serious concern regarding the bona fides of the respondent’s conduct and its impact on the fairness of the ongoing investigation”.
Days after two persons working as booth level officers (BLOs) in Kerala and Rajasthan died by suicide allegedly due to high pressure at work related to the ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls, a school teacher who was working as a BLO in Gujarat’s Kheda district has also died after suffering a heart attack. The family of the BLO, who has been identified as Rameshbhai Parmar (50), a resident of Jambudi village in Kapadvanj taluka of the district, has said that the cause of his death was “excessive work pressure” linked to the ongoing SIR. His brother Narendra Parmar told reporters that the BLO died of a heart attack in his sleep at his home during the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday.
A new report from India-based Markets & Data paints a blunt picture of the global air-purifier scramble. The firm says India’s air purifier market — already ballooning thanks to choking pollution, breakneck urbanisation and growing public health alarm — is set to surge from $151.52 million in FY 2026 to a whopping $381.37 million by FY 2033, at a brisk 12.23% compound annual clip. And with US tariffs effectively slamming the door on Chinese manufacturers, those same companies are now swarming toward India, treating the country less as a partner than as a convenient escape hatch for their redirected exports. Meanwhile, several global brands, eager to hedge their bets, are quietly peeling production lines away from China and parking them in India and Southeast Asia, reports Nikkei Asia.
Meanwhile, India’s manufacturing sector continues to struggle under rising input costs and the fallout from US tariffs, even as the Modi government moves to relax Quality Control Order (QCO) requirements. On Thursday, after easing norms for 14 petrochemicals, industrial raw materials, and several polymer and fibre intermediates, authorities extended the relaxations to specified steel products, reports The New Indian Express. Industry insiders, however, warn that these measures provide only temporary relief. While the move could ease sourcing pressures and reduce compliance hurdles, it falls short of addressing deeper structural challenges, supply chain bottlenecks and long-standing policy uncertainties that continue to weigh on domestic manufacturers.
Speaking of which, India’s manufacturing sector faces mounting pressure as the latest data from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry shows that output from the country’s eight core sectors flatlined in October. The Index of Core Industries (ICI) stood at 162.4, recording 0% growth compared with the same month last year – the worst performance in 14 months. Growth in construction-linked sectors and refinery products was offset by significant contractions in energy-related segments, including coal, natural gas, and electricity. By contrast, October 2024 had seen a 3.8% increase in core sector output, while August 2024 recorded a 1.5% contraction.
Outfits affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) have launched protests in the Jammu region, demanding that the Shri Mata Vaishnodevi Institute of Medical Excellence scrap the admission list for its first batch of students, 90% of whom are Muslims belonging to Kashmir. BJP’s MLA from Udhampur, RS Pathania, has lent support to the protests backed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal, arguing that an institution that has been set up by donations offered to the Vaishno Devi shrine should not be dominated by the Muslim community, and that seats should be reserved for Hindus. However, this would not be possible as the medical college is not classified as a minority institute. Despite this, the VHP and Bajrang Dal have held demonstrations outside the Katra-based institute and even burnt the effigy of the Chief Executive Officer of the Vaishno Devi Shrine Board.
While the RSS and its affiliates continue to stoke communal tensions, India faces a far more urgent challenge: a growing shortage of workers with practical training, digital literacy, and soft skills, reports The Financial Times.
More than 80% of Indians with disabilities remain without health insurance and over half of those who apply face rejection, often with no explanation despite legal mandates aimed at ensuring their right to health coverage, according to a white paper released by the National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People (NCPEDP), based on a comprehensive survey of over 5,000 persons with disabilities from 34 states and union territories. The report exposes deep-rooted discrimination in India’s health insurance ecosystem and urges urgent reforms to guarantee inclusive and affordable health protection for nearly 16 crore disabled citizens.
Air freight corridors between Kabul and Amritsar have been “activated” and cargo flights will operate along the route “very soon”, a Ministry of External Affairs official told Reuters today. Indian flights do not fly to Afghanistan as Pakistan has banned them from using its airspace but Afghan planes do. The announcement comes during Taliban industries and commerce minister Alhaj Nooruddin Azizi’s visit to Delhi. Yesterday he met external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, and among the topics discussed were stronger trade ties as well as use of the Chabahar port in Iran, which India has been developing and which Kabul is reportedly eyeing as a means of reducing dependence on its estranged ally Islamabad.
Speaking at the national security advisers’ meeting of the Colombo Security Conclave in Delhi yesterday, Bangladesh’s Khalilur Rahman spoke of the troubles posed by a “constant barrage of misinformation and disinformation” of late and that the forum needs to ‘face up’ to this obstacle. This comes against the backdrop of Dhaka’s contention that Indian media have spread disinformation about violence against Bangladeshi minorities in the aftermath of Sheikh Hasina’s ouster. Rahman also said his government has a “zero tolerance policy towards all forms of terrorism”, while Ajit Doval batted for a maritime security environment anchored in a rules-based order.
The propylene glycol solvent that the Kanchipuram-based Sresan Pharmaceuticals used to make a batch of Coldrif cough syrup – which is associated with the deaths of at least 24 children in Madhya Pradesh – apparently reached the company from a South Korean manufacturer and via two small firms in Tamil Nadu, Reuters finds. It isn’t clear how this shipment of PG came to be contaminated with the highly toxic diethylene glycol, but it had been unsealed and repackaged by the time it reached Sresan; neither of the two firms have license to handle pharmaceutical-grade PG but they told Reuters ‘they weren’t aware the PG they had sold would be used to make medication’.
There has been criticism of the killing of Maoist commander Madvi Hidma in an ‘exchange of fire’ earlier this week with some saying he could have been captured and produced before a court instead and others alleging the shootout narrative is fake and that he was killed in a staged encounter. Meanwhile, relatives of the CPI Maoist’s general secretary Thippiri Tirupati and central committee member Malla Raji Reddy have moved the Andhra Pradesh high court with a habeas corpus petition, alleging that the two are being illegally detained by the police and that they could be harmed if not produced before the court. The government denied having custody of the duo, reports V. Raghavendra.
Reliance’s Russian oil circus: US sanctions or PR stunt?
Signalling an attempt to appear compliant with US and EU measures against on Russian oil, Reliance Industries announced it has halted imports of the commodity into the export-oriented section of its sprawling Jamnagar refinery. The company claims it is “honouring commitments” for crude purchased before Washington slapped sanctions last month. The export-focused part of the refinery, which accounts for about half of its 1.4 million barrels a day of capacity, took its last shipment of Russian crude on Thursday, the company said in a statement. The move would mean keeping the refinery’s export wing eligible to supply fuel to Europe when new sanctions on Russian petroleum take effect early next year.
Reliance, predictably, refuses to commit to any future policy, with an anonymous source admitting the company hasn’t decided whether it will resume buying Russian oil. Meanwhile, the other part of Jamnagar, which serves the domestic market, continues to process crude purchased before the sanctions – revealing that Reliance’s supposed “compliance” is nothing more than a bureaucratic fig leaf. Even as it touts itself as a global refining powerhouse, Reliance’s actions expose a willingness to dance around sanctions while keeping business as usual for domestic gains.
Other refineries as well as banks in China and India – the two largest consumers of Russian crude oil – are working on complying with the Trump administration’s sanctions on Rosneft and Lukoil and some of their subsidiaries (and threatened secondary sanctions on entities dealing with them), reports Reuters.
India’s draft drone law draws fire
In September earlier this year, India’s Ministry of Civil Aviation unveiled the Draft Civil Drone Bill – and instead of cheers, it sparked outrage. Startups, tech bodies and hobbyists slammed the proposal as a regressive step, threatening the very freedoms that fueled India’s drone boom since 2021. Once poised to be a “global drone hub” by 2030, the country now risks stifling its own innovators, says The Daily Brief by Zerodha newsletter listing out the reasons that will stifle innovation:
“The first alarming issue is universal registration. Under the new bill, even something as simple as a small toy drone bought for a child’s birthday must be registered before it can be sold. This shifts compliance upstream to manufacturers, who must now build registration into every product. The toy drone market—worth crores and a gateway for young engineers and students—might end up shrinking because of this.
Second: mandatory pilot licensing for everyone. A student flying a micro-drone in their college garden, for instance, would need a Remote Pilot Certificate — just like the self-help group working under Namo Drone Didi scheme. For budding entrepreneurs who would fly their own drones for testing, this is a let-down..
Third: type certification before manufacturing. The bill states no drone can be manufactured, assembled, sold, or operated without DGCA certification. This also means that you can’t even build a prototype to test. College projects would basically become illegal. A startup’s iterative motor development would require full certification for each design tweak — a process that takes months and lakhs of rupees.
Fourth: criminal penalties for paperwork errors. Flying an unregistered drone becomes a cognizable offense. Lastly, universal insurance. Every operator needs third-party insurance covering Rs 2.5 lakh for death and Rs 1 lakh for injury on a no-fault basis. For a student researcher or a rural SHG operating on a paucity of funds, this is a tall ask.
When you put all these together, it seems like the new bill puts a price on innovation, rather than regulating with balance.”
Nuclear control in Pakistan a ‘one man’ show?
Pakistan’s 27th constitutional amendment dismantles a number of institutional safeguards to place control of its nuclear command directly in army chief Field Marshal Asim Munir’s hands. One way it achieves this is by doing away with the two-tier system comprising the Nuclear Command Authority and its executive-technical arm in the Strategic Plans Division, which required civilian-military deliberation and provided a nominal safeguard against too much individual discretion. There is also no word about how the amendment will affect the two-or-three-man rule as well as the ‘permissive action links’ safeguard measures designed to “prevent unauthorised use and accidental detonation of nuclear weapons”. Now, writes Bedi, the situation in Pakistan is reminiscent of North Korea, where “strategic weapons are similarly commanded by an absolute and unaccountable Supreme Leader”.
The Long Cable
Modi’s cowardice is only one of India’s problems
Omair Ahmad
The physical absence of Narendra Modi from the recent ASEAN summit has raised eyebrows. He was also absent from the UN General Assembly, during which US President Donald Trump met the Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and the Pakistani Army Chief.
Modi, for all his bluster, is a coward. It is a line that runs through his whole political career.
It is hard to forget him sipping water to dodge questions from Karan Thapar during the one tough interview he has ever faced. He fled in fear after Rahul Gandhi hugged him in Parliament. He did the same from Punjab at the sight of protestors, and avoided the civil strife in Manipur for more than two years. During the second wave of the pandemic, when crematoria buckled under the stress of countless funeral pyres, the whole of the government went into hiding as citizens desperately scrambled for oxygen cylinders. After the confrontation between Indian and Chinese troops in Galwan all of his erstwhile bonhomie with Xi Jinping, with whom he sat on a jhoola in Gujarat disappeared, and he did not publicly utter China’s name in the aftermath, or for years afterward.
It is, therefore, no surprise that he should choose to hide while Trump publicly claims that he stopped a war between India and Pakistan through bullying. Unfortunately, the lack of testicular fortitude in the Indian prime minister comes at a time when the global order is being unmade, much to the detriment of the country’s strategic interests.
The US has backed Israel’s genocidal actions in the Gaza Strip and participated in the bombing of Iran in an unprovoked war. It murdering people in South American waters with no legal backing and assembling a massive force with the possible aim of toppling Venezuela’s government. The use of tariffs to manipulate other countries, is yet another challenge to a rules-based order. In the meanwhile, Russia continues its brutal invasion of Ukraine with no end in sight. Globally, we are breaching the 1.5°C limit over pre-industrial world, opening the way for more catastrophic and ruinous environmental disasters.
Throughout all of this, India has kept a very low profile, maybe gambling that these issues – most of them far from Indian shores except for climate change – would not impact the country unduly. If this was the calculation, then the recent Saudi-Pakistan pact should have been a wake-up call. While the issue had little direct linkage to India-Pakistan relations, it is part and parcel of how countries are manoeuvring as the old order crumbles. As a recent article on Saudi Arabia’s evolving nuclear posture states, “ If Tehran accelerates its path to the bomb, and Israel continues to leverage its own undeclared capabilities to reshape regional geopolitics by force, Riyadh will feel stronger pressure to keep the nuclear option on the agenda.”
In an unstable global order, an arms race – and even nuclear proliferation – seems not just likely, but even rational. Both Israeli/US and Russian impunity are underwritten by nuclear weapons. The attack on Iran has underscored that latent nuclear ability is not enough to act as a deterrent. The Israeli attack on Qatar has demonstrated that bystander nations with no such weapons of their own – or the guarantee from another nuclear power – may be attacked at whim. It is no surprise that the Gulf states, as well as the rest of the world, is looking increasingly to bolster their defences.
In this new world disorder, Pakistan has played it fast and loose with its diplomacy – praising Trump one day, condemning the strikes on Iran the next, while bartering its military for Gulf Arab favours. But, at the end of the day, Pakistan does not really matter all that much for India except for our strategic community’s obsession with it. What matters more for us is an open trade network, safety for our migrant population that sends us back major remittances, and a world where we do not get sucked into major international entanglements for little gain. For that, we need an answer to the Trump administration – one that asserts that the functioning of the world order cannot simply happen on the whims of whoever sits in the White House. Indian security, safety, and prosperity do not stop at our borders, since economics and natural disasters easily sweep pass them. For a prosperous and secure India, we need a prosperous and secure world.
So far, we have done nothing. China has pushed back robustly against Trump’s tariffs, to the point that they have caused it some pain, but within manageable margins, while getting the US to beg it to buy soyabeans. Europe, despite its strategic dependence on the US, is large enough that Trump has pushed a little, but not more. The EU has the wherewithal to develop an independent security framework, and is (very) slowly moving in that direction. India has folded. In the first Trump administration it stopped buying Iran oil, now it is tapering off from Russian supplies. None of it seems to be strategically thought out, merely the tactical swallowing of bad news after bad news in a world where India is an afterthought.
For more than a decade, India has suffered from the excessive personalisation of its foreign policy in the figure of the prime minister. It has rejoiced at numerous hugs, and the foregettable moment when we hosted the G20 in our turn. Today, as that same prime minister beats a hasty retreat from a world that is getting too much from him, we realise what we have lost. There is no strategy, no plan, merely a retreat from a world that we can neither influence, or understand.
(Omair Ahmad is an author. His last novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and won the Crossword Award.)
Reportedly
Donald Trump Jr. is in India for the lavish wedding of pharma and medical-services magnate Raju Mantena’s daughter – a spectacle that has dominated headlines for its star-studded guest lists and paparazzi-bait glamour. Yet, amid the wall-to-wall celebrity-gossip coverage, one question remains conspicuously unaddressed: Is Trump Jr. taking the opportunity to meet with potential investors in Trump-branded real-estate projects? asks Christopher Clary.
So far, the media seems far more interested in who wore what and which VIP arrived next than in whether the visit carries any business significance.
Drawn and quartered
Deep dive
Amit Ranjan and Genevieve Donnellon-May argue that without renewing data-sharing agreements and seriously addressing India’s legitimate concerns over China’s proposed “super dam” in Tibet, any talk of trust or cooperation – especially in managing shared transboundary water resources – remains little more than empty rhetoric.
Prime number: 2%
Apple India may boast a record $9 billion in FY25 sales, placing it among the country’s top manufacturing multinationals. But the victory lap rings hollow. Despite all the hype about India’s manufacturing boom, the market delivered just over 2% of Apple’s $416.1 billion global revenue.Opeds you don’t want to miss
Kapil Komireddi is scathing on the failure of Congress and its leadership, suggesting a change in strategy urgently. “Unable to reform itself, Congress has taken to smearing anyone who refuses to venerate it as a stooge or an enabler of the government.”
Suhas Palshikar points out that the much-vaunted ‘MY’ vote – Mahila (women) and Yuva (youth-vote) – supposedly a game-changer which looks increasingly like a convenient myth in the wake of the NDA’s sweeping victory:
“The more sobering part is that whether it is women or youth, their vote choices align broadly with the vote choice of the class and the community that they belong to. In other words, if a particular class group or community is less likely to vote for NDA, then women or young voters from that social section too are less likely to have voted for the NDA. In the Bihar Assembly elections 2025, the upper and middle classes and upper castes voted for the NDA on a massive scale. Correspondingly, the women and the youth among them voted for the NDA in similarly large proportions.
This resonates with the question which scholars such as Rajeshwari Deshpande have been raising about women’s vote: do women vote necessarily differently from the community they belong to? Or does their voting pattern get shaped by the factor of caste/community?
The rhetoric of there being a game-changer is useful for both the politician and the analyst. But, Bihar 2025 underscores a very fundamental concern about positing uniqueness in the gender factor (and now in the age factor) as having bypassed the class-caste factors. To put it conservatively, we can say that women’s vote and a limited surge among young voters surely helped the NDA. The question whether ‘MY vote turned the tide’, however, requires a more careful analysis of many other factors.”
Harish Khare on why the Presidential reference ruling marks a bad day for the republic arguing that “in the absence of wise political leadership, it falls to the judiciary to minimise the imbalances. On that count, the ruling fails to inspire confidence.”
The probe into Delhi car blast shows that even doctors are not immune to radicalisation, writes Julio Ribeiro underscoring how the heavy-handed policies and boastful posturing of the Modi-Shah government in J&K have sown resentment and fueled alienation, writes Julio Ribeiro:
“The answer lies in the motives of other terror modules that have been busted over the years. Abhinav Bharat was a lone module surprisingly embedded in the majority community; it was unearthed by Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorist Squad. Its members resorted to terrorism because they were dissatisfied with the steps taken by the ruling BJP against jihadi terrorists.
Deep anger drove even those who were advantageously placed in the political sphere. So, what about those who had already got a raw deal? The ground was prepared for rancour and hate to thrive when the Muslim-majority J&K was deprived of statehood and condemned to an inferior status by those who should have welcomed it into the ranks of the secular and the equal. It was a rude reminder to the people of the state-turned-UT that they could not be trusted.
The Modi-Shah duo could not stop boasting about the transformation it had engineered in J&K. The UT was flooded with more troops and paramilitary forces, expecting thereby that cross-border terrorism and separatism among the Kashmiris would be curbed. That happened initially because of the surprise factor. It took a few years for the disgruntled elements to regroup, but the inevitable rejection has surfaced and become a reality.”
Monideepa Banerjie asks: After the Sheikh Hasina verdict, will the spirit of 1971 survive?
“No wonder then that it is with great confidence that Sheikh Hasina’s son says his mother will return to Bangladesh one day. It’s a denouement India desires. India’s relationship with Bangladesh during the years of military rule was not cordial. Its relationship with the Yunus regime is frosty, too, but the government has indicated it is ready to warm up once there is an elected government in place following February polls. That has been welcomed by Dhaka.
This December 16 will go a long way in paving the future of India-Bangladesh ties. Last year, the Bangladesh delegation of military officers and freedom fighters came to Fort William at the very last minute ahead of Vijay Divas and Dhaka celebrated the day but without the traditional military parade at its historic National Parade Square. This Vijay Divas will be a test of the spirit of 1971, which made India and Bangladesh close friends and neighbours. Will that spirit survive?”
Is there any designated document to prove citizenship in the country? The Modi government is not certain. In 2008, a pilot project was launched to issue a national ID to residents, but it was soon overshadowed by Aadhaar. With the SIR now underway, Vijaita Singh examines the maze of citizenship documentation.
Listen up
On the Law and Other Things, Jeetendra and Srijan Mandal speak to academics Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s important new book, Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History.
Watch out
At a New York screening of Homebound hosted by Martin Scorsese, the legendary filmmaker joined director Neeraj Ghaywan for a strikingly candid conversation on art, empathy and the politics woven into every act of storytelling. In a moment that brought the room to a hush, Ghaywan unpacked for Scorsese the enduring force of Annihilation of Caste and the central place of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar in shaping modern India’s democratic foundations. “Shakespeare said, ‘What’s in a name?’” Ghaywan remarked. “Come to India and find out.”
Over and out
Thailand (then Siam)’s forced alliance with Imperial Japan after its invasion by the latter resulted in the few ethnic Thais or Thailand-returned Indians living in British India to become potential subjects of surveillance by the Raj. Even those in Assam who were descended from Tai peoples who arrived there centuries ago were identified. Some were left alone but not everyone was so lucky, finds Ajay Kamalakaran.
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.