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Snapshot of the day
August 19, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
US ambassador to India Sergio Gor visited Srinagar today and described Kashmir “as an important part of India”. His throwaway remark angered Pakistan, which remonstrated with the US charge d’affaires in Islamabad. It is unlikely that Gor’s comment signals a change in American policy towards J&K – that the region’s overall status remains disputed.
Protesters in Jharkhand have announced that they will hold off on their agitation for two months in light of the Hemant Soren government’s decision to cancel the outcome of 22 recruitment exams conducted over the last three years. Nineteen of them have been cancelled due to complaints over irregularities, two have been scrapped because they were conducted by TSR Data Processing Private Limited or other controversial organisations, and the Staff Selection Commission’s key Combined Graduate Level exam too stands cancelled in line with the government’s announcement on Monday.
Youths in the state began their public protest 26 days ago now, in the wake of the Cockroach Janta Party-led agitation in Delhi and elsewhere, and have secured a number of concessions from the Soren government, including cancellation of the JSSC-CGL and the prelims for the Jharkhand Public Service Commission-led civil services exam. L. Khiangte, head of the JPSC and a former chief secretary, is among those who have been arrested.
But the retroactive cancellation of so many exams has also meant that the lives of those who cleared them and secured government jobs have been unsettled. Speaking to the Indian Express‘s Shubham Tigga, 32-year-old government employee Chanda Kumari, who had cleared the CGL exam, said poignantly: “We used to show our ID cards at the gate [of the secretariat], and the police personnel would recognise us and let us enter … Today, unfortunately, the same people are pushing us away.” For a lot of these employees a government job was their shot at escaping financial austerity. Earlier youth affairs minister Sudivya Kumar had passed the buck to the judiciary, saying such persons are ‘free to approach the courts for relief’.
The Congress party has reiterated that it only regards the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram as the ‘national song’ and that it will not sing the full version as the Modi government now insists.
Officers of the Delhi Anti-Corruption Branch arrested Aam Aadmi Party leader and former Delhi minister Satyendar Jain and five others yesterday night in connection with their case alleging corruption in the upgradation of the city’s sewage treatment plants up to 2022 (Jain then held the water portfolio). Also arrested was IAS officer and former Delhi Jal Board CEO Udit
