INDIA Bloc will Vote Against Govt's Constitution Amendment Bill; India Slips in IMF's GDP Ranking to Sixth Place from Fourth; Pakistani Army Chief in Tehran in Bid to Arrange Round Two of Talks
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK
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
April 15, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
India has slipped in global economic rankings, with a statistical overhaul and a weakening rupee quietly undoing years of political messaging about its rise. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India is now the world’s sixth-largest economy according to IMF estimates, down from fourth, even though its economy has grown faster than those of Germany, the UK and Japan. According to the IMF, India’s economy is projected at $3.92tn in 2025, placing it behind the UK at $4tn and Japan at $4.44tn. The US remains far ahead at $30.8tn, followed by China at $19.6tn and Germany at $4.7tn.
The downgrade has been driven less by slowing growth than by a nearly 10% depreciation in the rupee, which has sharply reduced India’s dollar-denominated GDP estimates.
A day ahead of the special parliamentary session called to discuss women’s reservation in parliament and the state assemblies, the opposition INDIA bloc announced on Wednesday that it will vote against the Modi government’s Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill that seeks to increase the cap on Lok Sabha seats from 550 to 850 – seemingly at the expense of the south – ostensibly to implement women’s reservation. Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi says that while the Congress supports women’s reservation, the proposed amendment “is an attempted power grab using delimitation and gerrymandering”.
The Amendment Bill in conjunction with the Delimitation Bill proposes to prematurely lift the freeze on delimitation that is tied to the 1971 census in order to implement women’s reservation, and instead carry out a redrawing of seats based on the “latest published census”, in this case the 2011 one. With the southern states having implemented more effective population control measures than their northern counterparts over the years, using the 2011 census would mean that the north by virtue of its higher population will enjoy increased influence in parliament at the southern states’ expense. Notably, the Bills do not say that the proportion of states’ seats in a larger parliament would be fixed at their present levels.
Pakistani Army
