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A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal

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Snapshot of the day

December 14, 2023

Pratik Kanjilal

One of the first decisions of the new BJP government in Madhya Pradesh is to ban the open sale of meat, fish and eggs under food safety rules, a move driven by the RSS’s illiberal dietary instincts that will – you guessed it – disproportionately affect Muslim livelihoods.

In Uttar Pradesh, the Allahabad High Court has given a boost to Hindutva activists pressing revanchist claims for possession of a historic idgah in Mathura, claiming it to be the birthplace of Lord Krishna. It has green-lighted a so-called ‘survey’ of the idgah as Hindu litigants claim there are Hindu symbols present there. What happens next is already foretold.

The ghost of Rafale continues to hover around us. Yann Philippin of Mediapart reports that the Narendra Modi government is refusing to cooperate with French judges who have requested India’s assistance in their ongoing investigation into alleged corruption in the sale of 36 Dassault-built Rafale fighter jets to India in 2016 for €7.8 billion. The report provides embarrassing details of