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Snapshot of the day
September 18, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan, Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh S.K.
Hours after the Election Commission in a late night order assigned Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress faction a new name and the ‘Football Player’ symbol for the coming bypolls, its Nandigram candidate Sanchita Pradhan (Dey) withdrew her nomination after meeting BJP chief minister Suvendu Adhikari. The pro-BJP Ritabrata Banerjee faction was named the ‘Democratic Trinamool Congress’ and allotted the ‘Envelope’ symbol. Banerjee has since announced that her faction will support the Congress candidate in Nandigram. “About an hour after Mamata announced her support, Congress nominee Milan Pradhan was arrested in connection with a murder case,” the Telegraph reports. Mamata has moved the Supreme Court on the election symbol issue.
With the BJP seeming happy, Aparna Bhattacharya decodes the extraordinary TMC factional battle and asks who gains as Mamata loses the party’s traditional twin-flowers symbol.
“There is a distinct poetic symmetry to the current spectacle.
Yet the distinction between then and now matters deeply, beyond the technicality. What the TMC did to the Congress and the CPI(M) was an act executed by a political party against other political parties. This was a wrong that voters could, in principle, undo at the ballot box. What is happening today is being driven through a constitutional authority whose orders bind everyone and whose logic sets the rules for tomorrow. These two wrongs differ in scale because they differ in fundamental nature.
While the current symbol freeze remains interim under Paragraph 15, with no final award granted to either faction, the practical precedent has been reinforced for the third time in four years. The definition of a political party in India now hinges entirely on counting those who desert it. It is a test that can be turned against any opposition party, with the outcome decided by how many legislators can be induced to stand in the opposing camp on the day the Commission does the arithmetic.
There will be a fourth case, and its outcome is already predictable.”
Meanwhile, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls in West Bengal has become the focus of a fresh controversy in the Supreme Court, after the EC said that around 37.18 lakh out of 38.20 lakh appeals against inclusion and deletion of names are still pending – but did not provide a break-up of how many relate to voters seeking inclusion versus those challenging inclusions.
Even as India grapples with US tariffs and a new bill targeting countries that buy Russian oil, another trade hurdle is emerging in the European Union. The EU has proposed banning scrap-metal exports to India – alongside Egypt – after a European Commission assessment found that neither country had demonstrated that the waste would be managed in an “environmentally sound” manner. Under the bloc’s Waste Shipment Regulation, exports of non-hazardous waste to non-OECD countries will be prohibited from May next year unless specific exemptions are granted. The Commission will consult on the proposed country exemptions until October 16 before adopting the final list in November.
India’s crude oil import bill rose 18.2% year-on-year in August despite a 3% decline in volumes, provisional government data cited by the Hindu show. Reflecting the continuing impact of the West Asia crisis, the Indian crude basket averaged $90.19 a barrel, up from $82.04 in July and $69.11 a year earlier.
Matthew Aaron Van Dyke, the US national arrested by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) in March this year and accused of entering India illegally, made bail today but only because the government decided not to press terrorism charges against him.
A 43-year-old government primary school teacher, Naushad Ahmed, was shot dead outside his school in Uttar Pradesh’s Bijnor district on Tuesday earlier this week, by a local farmer who claimed the motive was the teacher’s alleged promotion of “love jihad”.
General Anil Chauhan, who demited office as Chief of Defence Staff sometime in May has been appointed head of the Vivekananda Intentional Foundation.
Explaining the Delhi police’s decision to refuse permission for a protest at Jantar Mantar Road, additional solicitor general Chetan Sharma claimed that the site – which is likely especially fresh in the Modi government’s memory in the youth movement’s wake – “is a very sensitive area”. The Delhi police believe that more people than accounted for may arrive for the protest in question because “the amount of likes and social media dissemination is so much”. Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma of the high court responded: “I am asking you to put any condition [restriction]. If not Jantar Mantar, then suggest some other place. I am only asking the state, how can there be a blanket ban?” The protest in question is planned by one Kshatriya Karni Sena against the updated UGC regulations.
Elsewhere in the capital, students and workers allege that Delhi police personnel beat them and roughed them up when they were protesting against what they say is the municipal corporation’s tardiness in dealing with the aftermath of the fatal Satya Niketan building collapse. One transwoman protester alleged that police personnel tore their clothes and called them a man.
It is hard to capture in one report the sheer scale of the ‘celebrations’ that BJP and allied NDA governments across the country (even where some recent happenings are no laughing matter) have unleashed on the occasion of the Prime minister’s birthday – but Sravasti Dasgupta took a crack at it anyway. These celebrations do occur against the background of some of the hardest questions the Modi government has grappled with in its over-decade-long tenure, including the youth protests and the Delhi police’s crackdown on them, the PM’s advancing age and India’s unequal growth, she notes.
(Not all of these birthday celebrations actually celebrated the prime minister though. Delhi’s chief minister Rekha Gupta launched an AI discordant music video dedicated to Modi in which one line declares that ‘delulu’ – delusional individuals – like to chant ‘jai Modi ji’. Whether that is Freudian slip or just incompetence we leave it to the reader to decide.)
Just because an organisation’s FCRA license has been cancelled doesn’t mean it ceases to exist at all, it just means it can no longer receive foreign funding, the Delhi high court told the Modi government after it tried to block the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative from using its funds. Earlier a single-judge bench of the court had allowed the CHRI – headed by Venkatesh Nayak – to draw Rs 20 lakh from its ‘reserve fund’ despite its FCRA registration being cancelled, a decision the government challenged. CHRI has also challenged the government’s move to cancel its license.
Tamil Nadu school education minister Rajmohan said today that his government stands firm on continuing the state’s two-language policy and in resisting the Union government’s Navodaya school scheme, which the previous DMK government had called a backdoor effort to impose Hindi onto the southern state. His remarks were prompted by Supreme Court Justice B.V. Nagarathna’s observations from the previous day – she had said that the Tamil Nadu government must shed its ‘mindset’ that Hindi cannot be taught in the state and that “individual states cannot act like individual countries”. Krishnadas Rajagopal has written up the highlights of yesterday’s court proceedings, where the judge and the state counsel sparred on the scheme’s implications for federalism.
Audit officials in Odisha have discovered hundreds of instances – 753 of them – of government records classifying a number of construction workers as deceased but the state ration system simultaneously authorising their fingerprints and disbursing rations, reports Satyasundar Barik. Officials have recorded this finding in a draft audit report on the implementation of the state’s construction worker welfare fund scheme. It also indicates that the state issued death certificates to people who are alive, the report notes.
The BBC reports that India’s private ‘hospital boom is improving access but pricing millions out of critical care’, with treatment often costing five to ten times more than at government facilities.
The Economist visits the India-Bangladesh border, calling it “one of the world’s longest and leakiest” where “people have been working and loving across the thinly guarded borderline for decades.” The British weekly examines the BJP’s championing of “pushbacks”, “in which Bengali-speaking Muslims, who are allegedly Bangladeshi, are rounded up across India, bused to border towns and literally shoved into Bangladesh.”
The Centre has told the Delhi high court that an adult can be permitted to nominate a partner, including the one in a non-heterosexual relationship, to take medical decisions in case of their incapacity while respecting the patient’s autonomy and continuity of care. The government made the submission in response to a petition seeking recognition of same-sex couples as medical representatives during medical treatment.
English county club Leicestershire has been docked 27 points and fined Rs 6 lakh over a poor pitch at Grace Road. It seems a Bollywood biopic on former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly’s is to blame.
The MAGA movement has brought both hope and headaches to Myanmar’s Christian diaspora and the rebels it supports. In ‘Trump, God and the Struggle for Chin State’, Michael Haack reports on the uneasy intersection of American evangelical politics and Myanmar’s resistance.
In ‘Where Israeli Soldiers Go to Wash Away Gaza’, Azad Essa reports from Rishikesh, a Himalayan town long associated with spiritual renewal. But what does that promise mean when it is extended to Israeli soldiers taking time off from the genocide in Gaza?
After spending nine years in Punjab jail, British Sikh finally gets bail
One-hundred-and-six months after the authorities arrested him in Jalandhar, the Delhi high court today granted bail to British national Jagtar Singh Johal in the seven murder and UAPA cases pending against him. Johal’s protracted incarceration in the case and the dim prospects of a speedy trial, combined with his acquittal in an eighth UAPA case against him by a Punjab court, convinced the bench to grant him bail today under a number of conditions, including that he surrender his passport. A UN working group has concluded that Johal, whom the Indian authorities accuse of involvement in targeted killings in Punjab and of membership in a Khalistani group, was arbitrarily detained. He has also alleged that he was tortured in custody.
IIIT Hyderabad cancels Umar Khalid documentary screening after CBFC’s ‘censorship’
The International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT Hyderabad) cancelled a planned campus screening of the documentary “Prisoner No. 626710 is Present” about incarcerated activist Umar Khalid organised by a student collective scheduled for today. The cancellation followed an objection from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), which stated that the film had not received certification and sought action against the institution for organising a campus screening.
Critics were quick to point to the board’s recently revised guidelines, with one rather uncharitable translation of its ‘anti-national’ mandate: “certification” crossed out, “censoring” inserted instead.
Vishwaguru Abroad …
While PM Modi continues to invoke country’s Vishwaguru credentials, some Indians abroad are finding rather different ways of making the country noticed. Siddharth Jawahar, an undocumented Indian immigrant, has been sentenced to 11 years in a US prison for running a $35-million Ponzi scheme whose 64 victims included NFL star and Taylor Swift’s husband Travis Kelce. Jawahar was also ordered to pay $31.35 million in restitution.
Across the Atlantic, 24-year-old Indian national Hem Raj, who lives in the West Midlands, has become the first person in the UK to be charged, as part of a National Crime Agency investigation, with creating online material promoting unlawful immigration under section 17 of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025. Raj is accused of publishing social-media posts offering foreign nationals advice on fraudulent visa and asylum applications.
The Long Cable
Scams, Chaos Grip BJP-Ruled States As Power Brokers and Influence Pedlars Rule the Roost
P. Raman
Two years back, Union home minister Amit Shah made a rather curious claim. Speaking at the PHD Chamber of Commerce, he said there was ‘not a single corruption’ charge against the Modi government during the past 10 years.
The home minister’s assertion came barely months after the Supreme Court struck down the government’s electoral bonds scheme – an opaque system of political financing that was widely seen as the ‘world’s’ biggest scam. The whole plan was designed by Arun Jaitley and implemented with the active support of Narendra Modi and Shah.
Forty one companies facing investigation by the CBI, ED and IT department gave Rs. 3,471 crore to the BJP through electoral bonds. And Rs. 2,698 crore of this was donated after raids by these agencies. And yet Shah could say the Modi government was not involved in a ‘single case’ of corruption in 10 years.
Thousands had applauded when Modi made his famous ‘na khaunga, na Khanedunga’ declaration at Balia during the election campaign in 2014. Since then, he has repeated the claim of ‘I won’t indulge in corruption nor let others to’ at different meetings. In 2019, he asked all ministries to send the names of ‘corrupt and non-performing’ officers.
Shah began the process of appointing centrally picked non-entities as chief ministers in BJP states with the selection of Bhupendra Patel in September 2021. These nominees were beholden to him. Moreover, Shah had an efficient system to micromanage them from Delhi. Things went smooth until the recent political crisis forced Modi to assign a more crucial role for Shah at the centre.
The sudden removal of the prop put these hapless and weak CMs to innumerable troubles, including revolts and scams which were not discernible during the period that Shah was able to put a lid on them. Consider what has happened in the less than 20-month old Rekha Gupta government, where a Rs. 650 crore medical purchase scam has just emerged.
The alleged mastermind behind the Delhi scam who was named in the ACB’s FIR has gone missing. He was accused of rigging the entire medical purchase process. How is this possible under a ‘double-engine sarkar”? How did Rajiv Rangeela manage to escape? Why was he not picked up earlier? Who gave him enough time to disappear?
No one in Rekha Gupta’s government gives answers to such crucial questions. Investigators were shocked to find that items available in the market at Rs 10 lakh were charged Rs. 33 lakh. Most items were similarly found over-charged. In some cases, the difference were unreasonably exorbitant. In the case of portable X-ray machines, the FIR states that machines with similar specifications were supplied to other hospitals for around Rs 10 lakh per unit. However, the Central Procurement Agency purchased these for Rs 33 lakh. A total of 448 machines were procured at a cost of Rs 148 crore, although their estimated market value was only about Rs 45 crore. Several files were found destroyed. Crores were moved via hundreds of accounts, missing tender files & phones.
Delhi’s Rs 650 crore medicine scam has opened a can of worms in other saffron regimes. This includes Puducherry and Maharashtra. The Chhattisgarh medicine scam involved Rs. 550 cr and UP’s Rs,10,000 crore. Soon it spread to other BJP-ruled states one after another.
The CAG reports found that government also purchased medicines and equipment from blacklisted firms but also paid Rs. 5.67 cr to 15 such agencies whose medicines have been proved substandard. Then there is the notorious ambulance scam in Haryana.
Barely four years in office, Modi realised it was impossible to stop corruption altogether. Therefore, from the start, he made elaborate measures to effectively suppress all traces of massive swindling and fraud taking place under his administration. His total control of the media made the task easier for him. Moreover, he has already rendered ineffective all available statutory watchdog panels like the CIC and CVC. Even the CAG had to suit itself to compulsions of new ‘ethics’. All parliamentary panels were ‘captured’.
Since then, Modi-Shah’s emphasis has been on keeping the frauds shrouded rather than trying to prevent these from happening. In Modi’s India, as a matter of fact, all negative stories emanate either from the foreign media, Congress spokespersons or a few independent media outlets or social media. Never the pro-government, largely circulated mainstream media.
State-level corruption, however, belongs to a different category, especially after Amit Shah withdrew from the micromanagement of provincial affairs. This left the field free for various power brokers and influence pedlars. Internal quarrels within the BJP at the state level made it worse. Hence every BJP-ruled state has its share of misdemeanours.
“I have joined BJP, and now I can get sound sleep,” said BJP leader Harshvardhan Patil, rather gleefully. “The ED won’t come after me since I am a BJP MP… We have to take a loan in order to purchase luxury cars worth Rs 40 lakh to show off. The ED will be surprised to see the amount of loan we have...” Sanjay Patil, another newly laundered man boasted after joining BJP.
Similarly, 23 of the 25 opposition leaders who were charged with corruption by the ED, CBI and police have got a reprieve after joining BJP. Among them are at least half dozen BJP chief ministers, including West Bengal’s Suvendu Adhikari, Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma, and Orissa’s Mohan Majhi.
Suvendu Adhikari, during his tenure as TMC leader, was accused of corruption by the ED. He was in jail for some time. A senior TMC leader charged Suvendu with involvement in the Sandeshkhali scam. The question remains why Adhikari was not arrested and interrogated for his alleged role in the Narada scam?
Assam’s Biswa Sarma has the distinction of being a politician with the largest number of cases against him. Consider the cases against him before his ‘shuddhikaran’ after joining the BJP. The former Orissa ruling party BJD has spoken of a recruitment scam by chief minister Mohan Charan Majhi.
Even in Kerala, where the BJP is not anywhere near power, there is a massive election fund scandal gripping the party.
Twelve years after his ‘na khoonga, na khan doonga’ promise, Modi is presiding over a feeding frenzy.
P. Raman is a veteran journalist.
Reportedly
Opinions may be divided on the quality of his performances but there is no doubt that Narendra Modi has been an actor for a very long time, pretty much since 1965.
Drawn and quartered
Deep dive
At its peak, India’s booming derivatives market saw investors trade 85 billion options contracts – more than anywhere else in the world. Millions of ordinary Indians, lured by the promise of quick returns, made cheap but perilous bets. Then the bubble burst. Savio Shetty tells this gripping story for Bloomberg. Read here.
Prime number: 0
For the first time since the National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) began in the 1990s, India has no estimate of how many women and children are anaemic, notes Karan Babbar.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Subhash Chandra Garg analyses the record inflows into FCNR(B) deposits and warns that their true cost is being obscured. He estimates that the scheme will cost India at least Rs 1.76 lakh crore in additional interest payments and observes that “these deposits carry very high rates of interest, including forex depreciation cost.”
“It is true that India’s economy is performing impressively in 2026. It is true, too, that the government deserves more praise than it has so far received for its handling of shocks.” But has India really become ‘filled with happiness’, as Modi said, upon hearing about the 7.8% growth figure? That much is clearly not true, The Economist observes, given that “a widespread sense of social collapse [has added] to the feeling of a country coming apart”.
Sunil Gatade argues that the Modi government’s “feel-good” balloon has finally burst, drawing a parallel with the BJP’s defeat in 2004. Then, as now, the party had little to offer a generation whose aspirations were rising:
“The Gen Z movement reflects the same faultline. Mr Modi has hardly anything new to offer when a new generation is becoming restless and assertive.”
Aakar Patel was recently called upon to prove his citizenship at an SIR hearing. His thoughts and feelings on being subjected to this ‘guilty-until-proven-innocent’ process are perceptive and trenchant.
India’s Data Center boom should learn from its dams, write Udisha Saklani and Aastha Kapoor. “Where dams displaced entire communities in the service of new reservoirs and electricity generation, data centers compete more quietly for land, water allocations, and subsidized power. Host regions therefore bear concentrated resource demands while many of the resulting economic benefits accrue elsewhere — in the profits of technology firms and investors, or in digital services consumed far beyond the communities hosting the infrastructure.” What makes matters worse is this:
“Dam electricity entered publicly regulated systems of distribution. Data centers produce privately controlled computing capacity whose distribution stays opaque
“Protests against the Sardar Sarovar Dam eventually forced recognition of displacement and resettlement of communities. Opposition to data centers, by contrast, has been more readily stifled or recast as resistance to development itself — or even "anti-national."
Even though IN-SPACe is billed as an enabler and regulator, the “cardinal principle [is] that regulation and facilitation cannot go hand in hand”, writes Dinesh C. Sharma of the government’s controversial unbundling and privatisation of ISRO. Its functioning also points to a power shift that’s been taking place in R&D and medical research, which “place decision-making powers in the hands of non-technical people, centralise decision-making and undermine the autonomy of scientific agencies”.
Listen up
In the 2026 Ajay Gandhi Memorial Lecture, titled ‘Non-violent Resistance: From the Mahatma to the Cockroaches’, historian Mridula Mukherjee examines the enduring power of peaceful protest. She draws a line from Gandhi’s Satyagraha to the recent student-led agitation at Jantar Mantar that forced a resignation from the Modi cabinet.
Watch out
In the Wire’s Unmediated: Theatre Meets Economics, actor-director M.K. Raina and economist Jayati Ghosh settle into an easygoing conversation that is studded with insights.
Over and out
Check out this fascinating website by Kaustubh Misra, who maps the remains of the at least 18 empires that once ruled Delhi, tracing who built the capital’s monuments, where they were built and what remains stand today.
Margie Sastry remembers Partha, the self-development magazine created by Amar Chitra Katha pioneer Anant Pai.
Writer and journalist Taj Ali speaks to Novara Media about the “real story of South Asians in Britain”.
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.