India Tops in Data Breaches That Are Inside Jobs; With His Mass Contact Programme, Gandhi is Setting the Agenda for the PM

CBI probe possible as Gandhi family NGOs’ FCRA licence cancelled, PM’s pilgrimage made for camera, women advocates doing their hair disturbs Pune court, Sunak’s weaknesses: Star Wars and Coca-Cola

A newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas | Contributors: MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, Sushant Singh and Tanweer Alam | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal

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Snapshot of the day

October 25, 2022    

Pratik Kanjilal

A senior executive of Saudi Aramco spent almost a week in an Uttarakhand jail this summer, arrested for taking a satellite phone on a yoga holiday near the LAC, reports the Financial Times. Fergus MacLeod, 62, head of investor relations at the world’s largest oil exporter, said he was arrested on July 12 at his hotel in the Valley of Flowers National Park, Uttarakhand, and held in Chamoli until July 18. Authorities picked up the coordinates of his phone, which MacLeod says he turned on and off at his hotel but did not use while on the holiday with friends, including colleagues from Saudi Aramco. It has been illegal for foreign nationals to have or use satphones without permission ever since Pakistani terrorists used them to coordinate the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Central security agencies have been asked to prepare “demographic and economic profiles” of residents of pockets with significant Muslim populations along the Pakistan border in Rajasthan, reports The Telegraph. Profiling ahead of the 2023 Assembly polls in Congress-ruled Rajasthan is like an exercise conducted in West Bengal before the 2021 state elections.

PM Modi has not yet congratulated Xi Jinping on his re-election for the third term. In October 2017, he had been very quick to congratulate Xi after his re-election. Is the bonhomie fading?

Demand for work under MGNREGS rose 5.3% month on month in September, the sharpest growth for this time of year in a decade, government data shows. About 20.2 million people sought work under the scheme in September, up from 19.2 million in August. A rise in rural work demand even before the monsoon officially ended could signal a slowdown, forcing farm workers to the jobs guarantee scheme. Demand for MGNREGS is a useful indicator of job market stress. 

Entry level cars and bikes are piling up at small-town showrooms. Motorbike leader Hero MotoCorp is offering discounts and financing in rural and semi-urban areas of UP, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, the key markets. 

Most unusually, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan had asked nine vice chancellors in the state to resign by 11 am on Diwali. They went to court instead, and Justice Devan Ramachandran said, “It does not require much judgement to say no one can be asked to tender resignation.” He noted that the governor issued show-cause notices to the petitioners today, meaning that yesterday’s deadline has lost relevance and the vice chancellors are still in harness. The court also wondered how the governor could say that the VCs would cease to hold office from October 22, if he thinks that their appointments were void in the first place. Khan has earned the ire of the ruling LDF, and has been called an RSS representative. The chief minister reminded him that “there are laws”. SFI put up a banner saying ‘Governor is not King’ outside his gates. He has been banning TV stations from attending his press conferences. The Kerala Union of Working Journalists has protested.

The Madhya Pradesh High Court has drawn ire for reducing the sentence of a rape convict from life imprisonment to 20 years because he did not kill the victim, aged 4.

A Karnataka BJP minister was videographed slapping a woman on Saturday. V Somanna, minister of infrastructure development, Karnataka, was in Hangala village of Chamarajanagar district to distribute land titles when a woman who had not got hers confronted him. The minister slapped her. In the video, the woman is seen touching the minister’s feet after the attack.

Two Indian journalists were mysteriously killed in Kenya, followed by a Pakistani journalist yesterday. The two Indians, who were part of the digital campaign of Kenyan President William Ruto, were killed by the defunct ‘directorate of criminal investigations’. India has been in touch with the Kenyan authorities, the Ministry of External Affairs said last week.

What does Pakistan being taken off the FATF grey list mean? Two informative explainers are here and here. India is preparing for its turn at the FATF scrutiny or MER process, set to begin in early 2023. Pakistan and China are negotiating at least three corridors like CPEC. 

In India, the zombie Law Commission (notified in 2020, term ending in four months, but with no member) will take forward the conversation on the Uniform Civil Code. It’s a dreadful fate.

The Centre has issued a controversial advisory asking Union ministries, state governments and Union territory administrations not to engage directly in broadcasting or distribution. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting asked them to route these activities through Prasar Bharati. It also asked entities active now to “extract themselves” by December 31, 2023. The advisory will immediately hit Kalvi TV, Tamil Nadu’s educational channel, which is on some DTH platforms, Arasu Cable and IPTV of the Andhra Pradesh government. 

Salman Rushdie has lost the use of an eye and a hand in the attack he suffered while preparing to deliver a lecture in New York state two months ago, his agent has confirmed. The author of The Satanic Verses, 75, was stabbed in the neck and torso as he took the stage to give a talk on artistic freedom at the Chautauqua Institution on August 12.

The Pulitzer Prize for Journalism honoured many Indians, but there was poignancy around the absence of the late Danish Siddiqui. His six-year-old son received the award on his behalf, and withering anger was directed at the Indian government for preventing Sana Irshad Muttoo from travelling to receive her prize. Quick fun fact: India ranks 150 out of 180 nations on the Press Freedom Index, a sharp fall from 2015.

Hindi films may not prosper during the Diwali week, despite theatres operating at full capacity for the first time in nearly three years. Bollywood offerings like Akshay Kumar’s Ram Setu and the Sidharth Malhotra-starrer Thank God, scheduled for release today, are not family entertainers. Southern cinema will help theatre owners. Tamil movies Prince, starring Sivakarthikeyan, and Karthi’s Sardar, which hit theatres last Friday, and Mohanlal’s Malayalam film Monster, are expected to rake it in. Hollywood film Black Adam, which was also released this weekend, has made Rs 11 crore. 

Former BCCI President BCCI Sourav Ganguly will be free of “responsibility”, at least for some time, after he decided against returning as president of the Cricket Association of Bengal, leaving the post to his elder brother Snehasish Ganguly. 

The British Queen Consort, Camilla, is in India. She arrived on Friday and is at Soukya, a holistic health centre near Whitefield, for Ayurveda and naturopathy treatments. This is her eighth trip here. Rishi Sunak is the first South Asian, non-white and non-Christian (Hindu) PM of the UK. Financial Times writes on Sunak, “for all his slickness, he could appear geeky and out of touch. He is slightly obsessive about Star Wars and Coca-Cola (he has seven fillings). He was photographed working with a heated travel mug that sold for almost £200. In April 2022, he admitted he had held a US green card until the previous year, and that his wife had benefited from non-domiciled status, allowing her to avoid UK tax on her foreign earnings while he was chancellor. She agreed to pay UK taxes.”

Having failed to authenticate some of the inputs used, The Wire has retracted its controversial stories on Meta, which had claimed that a BJP functionary could ask for material to be pulled down by Instagram at will. The problem, it says, lies with material sourced by the technical team on its own staff. The Wire says attempts to deliberately mislead it may have been made, and as a further precaution, it has also removed from public view earlier stories filed by the same technical team, pending an internal review.