A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK
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Snapshot of the day
September 2, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
The Delhi Police picked up a senior retired bureaucrat, Ashish Joshi, during his morning run at Nehru Park today and took him in for an interrogation that lasted nearly 10 hours. He was finally allowed to go home in the evening.
Joshi, a 1992 batch officer of the Indian Post and Telecommunication Accounts and Finance Service, who retired on March 31, 2026 as an additional secretary-ranked officer in the Government of India, is a vocal critic of the Narendra Modi government on social media. While ‘police sources’ were quoted by a section of the media as claiming Joshi was taken in for “routine questioning” over “online content”, a friend of the retired bureaucrat who was also an eyewitness to the incident told The Wire the police officers who identified themselves as being from the Special Cell had said they were ordered to question him over a tweet against Home Minister Amit Shah. If that is so, it is likely that this was the tweet which got the system so riled up.
While the Indian Express reports that the police questioned him about a tweet on the Election Commission – and that a case has been registered “under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which deals with provocation with the intent, or knowledge, that it is likely to cause a riot” – a review of Joshi’s X timeline over the past week reveals nothing about the ECI that might warrant an eight hour police interrogation, let alone ‘cause a riot’. Yesterday he tweeted an interview of Prabhakar Parakala to MK Venu of The Wire with the following words: “I fully agree with Political Economist Parkala Prabhakar who says time has come for a mass movement against ECI to seek full accountability and transparency before the electoral and political system is totally destroyed.” And on September 1, he tweeted a story about the mass deletion of voters in Delhi with the message: “Delhi Assembly elections must be re-held, or [the EC] must immediately publish post-SIR voter lists at every booth for public verification. Booth-level officials must be present on-site to address wrongful exclusions and rectify rolls on the spot.”
Joshi is likely to speak about his encounter with the police on Thursday but on thing is clear already. Whether on Amit Shah or the EC, if tweets of this sort are now going to lead to the filing of cases and to the police picking up people from the street and taking them in for interrogation, the state of Indian democracy is even worse than most people imagine it to be.
[Fun Fact: India is already ranked 106 on the V-Dem Electoral Democracy list]
Not only did the Allahabad high court today quash the preventive detention – under the stringent National Security Act – of 25-year-old activist Aakriti Chaudhary who has been in custody for around five months in connection
