Modi Silent, Tamil Nadu Raises Voice of India on Gaza; Putin's Delhi Push; Using Yuan to Pay for Russian Oil; Shah and Modi Go From Zoho to Zaha

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

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Snapshot of the day

October 8, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

On the first day of his two day visit to India, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrived in Mumbai with a large delegation of business leaders. Reuters reports that his priority in this trip is to seek quick implementation of the recently concluded UK-India trade agreement.

The Modi government is hiding behind “bureaucratic babble” in not waiving the loans of people affected by the Wayanad landslides last year and has “failed the people of Kerala”, a bench of the Kerala high court declared today. The judges excoriated the Union government, going to the extent of saying that it has:

“shown again that you are hiding behind this power argument, you’re saying that you are powerless to act … It is not about whether the Union can act, but whether they are willing to act. If you are unwilling to act, have the courage to say it. Who are you trying to fool? … If they have the courage, let them say that they are not willing to help.”

Due to the court’s belief that Kerala ‘doesn’t need the Union government’s charity’, it will not issue further directions to New Delhi; it also ordered banks to stop loan recovery action pertaining to people affected in Wayanad last year. The government had said there is no legal provision to waive loans for people affected by natural disaster, reports Bar&Bench.

Traffic along a stretch of the Delhi-Kolkata highway in western Bihar almost entirely ground to a halt with heavy rains in the area causing waterlogging and rendering service lanes unusable. The situation has been so bad, said one truck driver, that it took him 30 hours to cover all of seven kilometres. “Despite paying tolls, road taxes and other expenses, we still face hours of traffic jams,” he added. Another driver said “we are hungry and thirsty and in a miserable state”. Prabhakar Kumar reports.

Traders offering Russian oil have begun asking Indian state refiners to settle payments in Chinese yuan, marking a shift in transaction preferences amid warming India-China ties, according to a Reuters report, citing trade sources. India’s top state refiner, Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), recently settled payments for two to three Russian oil cargoes using the Chinese currency,