Mamata Walks Into ED Raids on I-PAC, Walks Out With Files; US Senator Says Trump Okayed Bill For 500% Levy on Countries Buying Russian Oil; India May Lift Curbs on Chinese Firms Seeking Govt Contracts
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January 8, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
Brouhaha ensued this morning when agents of the Enforcement Directorate carried out raids at political consultancy I-PAC’s Kolkata office as well as the home of its founder-director Pratik Jain in the city: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee visited both locations and walked out Jain’s home carrying a large green folder. “They were confiscating my party’s documents. I have brought them back,” Banerjee told mediapersons, asking if it was the ED and Union home minister Amit Shah’s ‘duty to collect the party’s hard disk and candidate list’. The ED has said that the CM, her aides and state police personnel “forcibly removed physical documents and electronic evidences [sic],” resulting in obstruction of its investigation.
The raids, which occur months before assembly elections in the state – whose politics Jain is considered highly influential in – were in connection with a coal smuggling case in which the ED alleges that a hawala operator involved in layering the proceeds of crime facilitated transactions amounting to the tens of crores to I-PAC, reports Aparna Bhattacharya. I-PAC was also associated with the BJP’s 2014 national election campaign.
In Paris for the India-Weimar Triangle (comprising France, Germany and Poland) meeting, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar said his choice to go to Europe – for his first foreign visit for the year – “reflected our belief that this relationship with Europe is really poised to grow, grow to the next level”, against the backdrop of New Delhi and Brussels working on a free trade agreement amid the Trump administration’s heightened tariffs. But immediately before Jaishankar, his Polish counterpart Radoslaw Sirkorski expressed his “satisfaction regarding the reduction of import of Russian oil to India because this is financing the war machine of Putin”. Jaishankar did not contradict Sirkorski’s assertion, Suhasini Haidar notes.
Meanwhile in Washington, the Republican senator from South Carolina Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday that Trump had ‘greenlit’ his and Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal’s bipartisan Bill authorising tariffs of up to 500% on countries that buy Russian oil or uranium. “This bill will allow President Trump to punish those countries who buy cheap Russian oil fueling Putin’s war machine,” said Graham, who had claimed days ago that Indian ambassador Vinay Kwatra was keen to communicate to the Americans about “how India is buying less Russian oil”.
And the US has declared that the International Solar Alliance proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 is one of the 66 international bodies, including UN-led ones, that it will exit.
A government notification on Wednesday said that the first phase
