Modi Videos Fail to Move Gen-Z, Protestors Firm on Pradhan's Ouster; Anger Over Police Violence Grows; Russia’s Shadow over India-US Defence Ties
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Snapshot of the day
July 24, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
Even as Prime Minister Narendra Modi reportedly asked his ministers to increase their Instagram outreach and post reels to connect with the youth, the governance question kept leaking through the optics. The Union cabinet may have cleared the setting up of fast track courts and tougher penalties for paper leaks that Modi spoke about yesterday, but the political response to the student protests remained as unserious as ever. Asked about the issue at the briefing – despite Modi’s late-night proposal response that the Cabinet would take it up – Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw reportedly laughed and said, “No paper is leaking today.”
Needless to say, the Cockroach Janata Party was not impressed by Modi’s fast-track court idea, calling it mere “eyewash”. A delegation of the outfit today met the government’s representatives in health minister J.P. Nadda and MoS PMO Jitendra Singh at the Constitution Club and presented its three demands – Pradhan’s resignation, compensation for students who died by suicide after the NEET-UG leak and a halt to cases against protesting students. The government, it said, indicated its ‘in-principle’ agreement to the latter two (Nadda had also said by Sonam Wangchuk’s bedside yesterday that it is ‘positive’ about them). As for the CJP’s and thousands of supporters’ central demand that Pradhan put in his papers, the ministers sought time till Saturday.
Wanghchuk has put out a couple of videos where he has responded to critics who have questioned why he broke his fast in the presence of two ministers. First, he said that after 26 days of hunger strike, he did not need to prove his sincerity to anyone. Second, and more significantly, he revealed how he had wanted not just ministers to be present but opposition leaders and student protestors too but none of them were allowed to see him in his hospital room.
Following Modi’s ‘friends’ video on Thursday night – which Gen Z was quick to call it what it was: a red flag – the PM put out a new ‘reel’ to ‘thank’ his newfound ‘friends’ for their ‘positive suggestions’. But was he actually trolling them (since that’s basically what the smart kids on Instagram have been doing to him over the past 24 hours)? A sharp-eyed observer on X has noted that the scarf Modi chose to wear is a Sambhalpuri gamcha – and Sambhalpur just happens to be the constituency of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister whose resignation everyone is now demanding.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi today upped the ante with a press conference condemning the Modi government’s decision to use pellet guns on student protestors. Flanked by Sahil Lochab, a 19-year-old Delhi University student who is likely never to recover the use of his wounded right eye, Gandhi said that those who shot him with pellets and lathi-charged students must be prosecuted, and that Modi needs to apologise to students.
While Modi was clearly reading off his phone when he delivered his midnight message yesterday, pointing this out has landed an opposition leader in Takedown Baba’s crosshairs: Bengal CPI(M) leader Shatarup Ghosh’s Facebook post making a suggestion to this effect was removed within minutes of him uploading it. Ghosh was quick to seize the moment: “Good to see the government active on at least some fronts!” he wrote afterwards on his account. Later, he told The Wire: “The effort that goes to prevent the image of Modi’s teleprompter getting leaked, if half of this would go in preventing exam paper leaks, the country would not have seen so many students dying by suicide.” Big Tech may remove the satire. The teleprompter, unfortunately, remains in the [not so] public service.
Three days after videos surfaced on social media showing police using disproportionate force against unarmed men and women during the July 20 march to Parliament – including allegations of pellet-gun use – Delhi Police and the Union home ministry have still not issued a clear statement. PM Modi said yesterday that “a series of steps for safeguarding the interests of students” were being taken. What he did not offer was any assurance of a probe into the “police excesses” against protesters. The government has promised to punish paper leaks. On police violence, it has chosen the safer route: silence.
Manik Gupta, a Delhi-based advocate has said he was a victom of custodial violence at the Nizamuddin police station after he went there late Thursday night to seek the release of students detained while travelling to join the Jantar Mantar protest. The allegation adds another entry to a widening ledger: students beaten on the street, injured protesters followed into hospitals, and now a lawyer allegedly assaulted inside a police station for trying to secure detainees’ release.
Meanwhile, after much criticism on social media, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear two petitions alleging excessive use of police force against students protesting across the country on Monday. The matter was mentioned before a Bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant by senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, who sought urgent intervention. The court has found time at last. The videos, and the wounded, were always there.
Just as the student-led protests are turning the heat up on the government, the National Testing Agency is said to have let go of 47 employees as part of a reported (and vague) ‘restructuring’ exercise, with newspapers citing official sources as saying some staffers will face ‘legal and criminal action’ (though for what exactly is unclear). The education ministry was also asked for some details of the highly controversial testing agency in parliament: it revealed that 15 of the body’s 39 posts are vacant. Its income went up by 121.5% between 2019-20 and 2023-24, while its expenditure grew by 136.5% over the same period.
But not all of the NTA’s financial data seems to check out. The education ministry has offered varying expenditure figures for the agency for 2019-20 and 2020-21 to two MPs who asked for it, Basant Kumar Mohanty reports: to the Congress’s Vivek Tankha back in July 2024 and to the CPI(M)’s V. Sivadasan on Wednesday. This has prompted Sivadasan to move a privilege motion against junior education minister Sukanta Majumdar.
The Internet Freedom Foundation has condemned the Modi government’s reported order directing GitHub to disable access to the code repositories of the open-source messaging application BitChat, calling the move “unconstitutional and authoritarian” as it violates constitutional safeguards governing online content regulation. According to IFF, the order directed GitHub to remove three BitChat repositories over concerns of ‘misuse’, including the Android application and its release files, within three hours, while warning the platform of the loss of safe harbour protections and possible criminal prosecution for non-compliance. It said the government had not published the takedown order, adding that its existence became public only after Dorsey shared it on social media. BitChat allows proximity chatting via Bluetooth if the internet is down.
“In an instagram revolt of the young, India’s ‘WhatsApp Uncles’ are at a loss,” says The New York Times, noting how young protesters with phones in hand have outmanoeuvred the jaded government machinery. Al Jazeera calls it ‘televising our revolution’, reporting how Gen Z has flipped the BJP’s own social media game back at it. “Hating Modi is cool on the internet now, after years of criminalising dissent,” a 19-year-old protester told the network, before the crowd took up the chant: “Uncle Modi, go back, go back.”
The Economist is blunter still: ‘Modi’s party discovers the limits of propaganda’. India’s biggest protest in years, the British magazine notes, has produced shocking videos and angry young people – and a problem the BJP’s old playbook cannot easily solve. “The government tried every tactic to get a grip on the narrative … as control of the media environment can help hide the state’s failures. But it works only when propaganda has some basis in reality.”
The Financial Times also underlines why this protest is different. For four straight days, despite batons and tear gas, the protest only grew stronger; it is, Veena Venugopal writes, an unmistakably Gen Z affair, with meme placards, superhero costumes and “an Instagram reel for everything”. More significantly, she notes, the chants have now turned directly against Modi. More than twelve years after he first took office, “Modi must resign” is no longer a whispered private frustration or a risky online aside. It is being shouted in Delhi, full-throatedly, before cameras and witnesses. Fear, as Al Jazeera notes, has begun to switch sides.
Meanwhile, the otherwise absent Godi media has finally been forced to cover the student protests – not because it has discovered public interest, but because the public became impossible to ignore.
Mumbai Police suspended a police driver and launched an inquiry after a viral video allegedly showed him threatening student protesters with a fake drug case if they returned to demonstrations. In the clip, he warns he would “put 50 grams of powder” in their bags and ruin their lives.
Dharmendra Pradhan today met the young man who stood second in the (re-administered) NEET exam this year, Panshul Bansal. Bansal earlier spoke to NDTV where he said he preferred to study instead of going to the protest. Pradhan has yet to meet Aryan Gupta, who stood first, and who told PTI that ‘protests and dissent are an essential part of democracy’.
Shrey Gupta, a 28-year-old software engineer in Ahmedabad, built a digital vault to document the violence inflicted by Delhi Police during the July 20 ‘Sansad Chalo’ march. Then the Gujarat Police came for him.
The rupee today closed at 96.5625 to the dollar, avoiding a record low due to likely intervention by the RBI via state-owned banks amid volatility in oil prices due to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea among other factors. This morning the RBI appeared to intervene more strongly than earlier in the week in a bid to ward off speculation, “but fundamental pressures point to further depreciation”, a trader told Reuters.
India’s private sector growth slowed down to its lowest rate in four years this month on the back of lagging activity in the services sector, even as growing export orders and hiring buttressed growth to some extent, per HSBC’s India Composite Purchasing Managers’ Index. Notes Reuters: “A sharper slowdown in services, which have powered much of India’s recent growth, leaves the economy increasingly reliant on manufacturing, a sector that has yet to show signs of accelerating.”
How did a Jewish community – the Bnei Menashe – come to be in Manipur and Mizoram? Tracing an arc from the past to the future, the scholar Sanjib Baruah first locates their origins to a ‘Judaising movement’ in the predominantly Kuki-Zo hills in the Mizo hills at a time of Christian revivalism and insurgent violence. And looking ahead, he writes that our choices in defining the Bnei Menashe will have important consequences for Kukis and Mizos living both in India and in Israel.
Plan for ‘special courts’ for Manipur
Citing the “inordinate delay” in investigation of criminal cases pertaining to Manipur’s ethnic strife, the Supreme Court ‘tentatively proposed’ setting up special courts to hear these cases on a daily basis. The bench recorded the CBI’s submission that it has faced numerous challenges, including the relocation of witnesses, the state’s prolonged internet clampdown and an atmosphere of distrust. Special investigation teams are investigating some 3,020 cases and have filed chargesheets in just 301 of them, while trials have begun in merely ten. More than 38 months have passed now since the state’s Meitei-Kuki strife erupted; now a second, Kuki-Naga conflict has worn on, claiming more lives and displacing more villagers.
No plan to start airline says Adani group
Is Adani evaluating proposals to enter the airline industry? The conglomerate has denied doing so, a day after Reuters’s Abhijith Ganapavaram and Aditya Kalra reported that it is weighing its options in this regard. They write that the government has privately suggested to some corporates, including Adani, that they enter the airlines space after Air India came under increasing scrutiny following the flight 171 crash and IndiGo stranded thousands of passengers with its scheduling foul-up last year. Jagriti Chandra of The Hindu also reported that Adani had approached the government asking that cross-ownership rules be eased (it operates eight airports, so its entry into airlines raises a glaring conflict of interest question).
The Long Cable
Russia’s Shadow over India-US Defence Ties
Rahul Bedi
For years, India has carefully balanced its longstanding military and energy relationship with Russia, while steadily deepening its strategic and defence partnership with the United States.
That delicate equilibrium enabled New Delhi to strengthen defence, intelligence and technology cooperation with Washington while continuing to rely on Russian weaponry and, more recently, discounted Russian crude oil. But the arrangement was never entirely free of friction.
The clearest point of contention emerged over India’s decision to acquire the Russian S-400 ‘Triumf’ air-defence system, prompting President Donald Trump’s first administration to repeatedly warn that the purchase could invite punitive measures under the 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), enacted specifically to deter major purchases of Russian military equipment and diminish Moscow’s defence exports and geopolitical influence.
Yet, those warnings never translated into action. The Biden administration effectively gave India a CAATSA pass, concluding that Delhi’s overall strategic value as a counterweight to an increasingly assertive China outweighed Washington’s continuing unease over its enduring defence relationship with Moscow.
But that equation may now be changing and, ironically, the clearest indication comes not from Delhi but from Ankara, where Turkey is reportedly trying to rid itself of the very Russian S-400 Triumf air-defence system whose numbers India is preparing to double, in the hope of regaining entry into the US-led F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme. If confirmed, Ankara’s negotiations would offer a revealing glimpse of where American policy towards countries operating major Russian weapons systems may now be headed.
Turkey’s difficulties stem from its US$2.5 billion acquisition in 2017 of two S-400 batteries, the first components of which were delivered in July 2019. The purchase triggered Ankara’s expulsion from the US-led multinational F-35 programme and, a year later, the imposition of CAATSA sanctions. Washington’s objections centred on the risks of operating America’s most advanced stealth fighter alongside Russia’s premier long-range air-defence system, potentially allowing sensitive electronic intelligence on the F-35’s stealth characteristics to be collected.
The attempt to undo those consequences resurfaced earlier this month when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used the NATO Summit in Ankara and a meeting with Trump on its side-lines to press for readmission to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter programme.
It is against this backdrop that, according to recent Wall Street Journal and other Western media reports, Ankara is now exploring ways of divesting itself of the S-400—including, reportedly, a possible transfer to the United Arab Emirates—as part of a wider bargain with Washington on the F-35s. These reports remain unconfirmed, and any such transfer would require Moscow’s consent and would correspondingly necessitate overcoming formidable political, legal, and regulatory hurdles within the US government, especially in Congress.
Whether Turkey ultimately succeeds in persuading Washington to overlook its acquisition of the Russian S-400 system and restore defence ties, including a return to the F-35 programme, remains uncertain. But the negotiations themselves are revealing.
They serve to underscore a broader reality: operating and retaining the S-400 continues to cast a long shadow over defence relations with the US, particularly under Trump’s administration, and demonstrates that major Russian-origin weapon systems can carry enduring strategic and political costs in Washington.
Against that backdrop, Delhi’s current trajectory appears all the more striking as on March 27, the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC), chaired by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, accorded Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) approval for the procurement of five additional S-400 regiments as part of a ₹2.38 lakh crore package.
The Indian Air Force has already inducted three of five S-400 regiments acquired in 2018 for $5.43 billion, of which the fourth system is presently on its way by sea to India following extended delivery delays caused by the Ukraine war, while the fifth is expected by the year-end. And, should the proposed follow-on S-400 purchase be concluded, India will effectively double its S-400 inventory from five to ten regiments.
Simultaneously, industry and security sources said the IAF is examining the possible acquisition of at least two squadrons of Russian Sukhoi Su-57 fighters—or around 40 platforms—as an interim solution until India’s indigenous Advanced Medium Combat Aircraft (AMCA), intended to deliver a similar fifth-generation capability, enters service in the mid-2030s.
While neither the IAF nor the government has formally confirmed that such a proposal is under consideration, official sources said it was being driven largely by Pakistan’s expected induction of China’s J-35A stealth fighter over the next two to three years, creating what the IAF fears could be a significant capability gap unless ‘bridged’ by a comparable platform. Viewed alongside the planned acquisition of five additional S-400 regiments, however, the possible Su-57 procurement points not towards a significant expansion in India’s dependence on Russian military hardware.
Furthermore, these developments are unfolding at a juncture when Washington’s tolerance for countries maintaining major economic ties with Moscow is visibly wearing thin. India and China—the world’s two largest buyers of Russian crude—have come under pressure, with Trump publicly threatening secondary tariffs of up to 100% if Moscow fails to meet US demands over ending the Ukraine war.
A bipartisan sanctions bill before Congress would further strengthen that approach by giving the US President clearer authority to impose similar penalties. Neither measure has yet become law, but together they indicate a growing willingness in Washington to use economic pressure against countries that continue maintaining significant economic ties with Moscow.
That broader hardening of policy is also extending beyond defence equipment and energy.
Additional duties on Indian pharmaceutical exports have also entered Washington’s policy debate, adding another potential pressure point in an already strained economic relationship. Given India’s central role as a supplier of generic medicines to the US market, any escalation in this area would further complicate bilateral ties. Consequently, defence industry officials in Delhi and Bengaluru are questioning whether Russian military procurement can realistically remain insulated from a wider deterioration in bilateral economic relations between Delhi and Washington.
“From Washington’s perspective, India’s expanding economic and military engagement with Moscow is becoming increasingly difficult to treat as separate issues,” said a senior defence industry executive, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of this issue. Continued purchases of discounted Russian crude, additional S-400 regiments, a possible Su-57 acquisition and expanding defence-industrial cooperation with Moscow, he cautioned, risk eroding the political willingness in Washington to continue shielding India from action under CAATSA.
Until now, Delhi has consistently argued that its dependence on Russian military equipment was the consequence of decades of Soviet-era defence ties and inherited platforms—the accumulated ‘burdens of history’—rather than a reflection of a present-day strategic preference for Moscow. That explanation carried considerable weight in Washington, given that nearly two-thirds of India’s in-service military equipment originated in the former Soviet Union or Russia, making rapid diversification neither financially nor operationally feasible. Washington largely accepted this reality as penalising India under CAATSA would have weakened, rather than strengthened, its own Indo-Pacific strategy of balancing an increasingly assertive and militarist China.
But CAATSA waivers are political judgments, not permanent guarantees.
A cross-section of security analysts and defence industry executives warned that every fresh major military purchase from Russia made it ‘politically harder’ for Washington to continue looking the other way. Moreover, the cumulative effect of an expanded S-400 inventory, a possible Su-57 acquisition and sustained purchases of discounted Russian crude would reinforce the view within sections of the US administration and Congress that India’s dependence on Moscow no longer reflected inherited military realities, but had evolved into an active strategic choice. Consequently, the political argument for continuing to shield India from action under CAATSA could become difficult to sustain.
None of this, however, means sanctions are inevitable.
Washington still has compelling strategic reasons to exercise restraint, and few serious policymakers in the US wish to push Delhi back towards Moscow. But one of the principal strategic rationales that has underpinned that restraint is itself beginning to weaken.
The Indo-Pacific construct—which for more than a decade elevated India to a pivotal position in American strategic thinking—has lost some of its earlier prominence as Washington’s focus increasingly shifts towards the Western Pacific and the intensifying military competition with China.
The erosion of that framework has also been reflected in the changing fortunes of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad)—the grouping of India, the United States, Japan and Australia, first established in 2007, allowed to lapse in 2008, and revived in 2017 in response to China’s growing military assertiveness.
Once promoted as the diplomatic centrepiece of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, the Quad has lost some of its earlier momentum, with fewer high-profile initiatives and a noticeably lower political profile in recent months. That evolving geopolitical landscape could make it progressively more difficult for the Trump administration to justify repeated political exemptions under CAATSA if India’s military and economic engagement with Russia continues to expand.
India’s long-practised policy of strategic autonomy and multi-alignment has allowed it to balance Washington and Moscow, while extracting advantages from both relationships, but that balancing act may now be approaching its limits. The question is no longer whether Washington is prepared to keep overlooking India’s expanding defence relationship with Russia, but whether Delhi is willing to jeopardise access to advanced American weaponry, technology and industrial partnerships to deepen its materiel dependence on Moscow.
Reportedly
Amidst the growing clamour for his ouster, Education minister Dharmendra Pradhan posted photographs today of a meeting with the BJP’s Odisha MPs, ostensibly to discuss the state’s development. As @mxtaverse notes, was this a reminder from him that he “effectively has the support of 20 MPs, which makes him as crucial for the coalition as Naidu or Nitish”?
Drawn and quartered
Deep dive
Kanniyakumari resident S. Sabari Varman’s killing is the latest custodial death to take place in Tamil Nadu. The police initially told the disabled Sabari Varman’s family he suddenly ‘fell sick’ and was admitted to hospital before dying there, but his post-mortem report revealed 19 injuries on his body and later the authorities arrested prison staff and other inmates for allegedly attacking him. Sabari Varman’s family also had to sit on a dharna to get partial access to his body, which is only one of various due process violations that took place after his death. Akshara Sanal shines a light on this discomfiting story and puts the pieces together.
Prime number: 1 in 4
Over one in four urban Indian households and almost one in five rural ones that cook their food indoors do not do so inside a separate kitchen. This means that not only those who do the cooking (mostly women) but others too are exposed to risk of long-term health problems, including respiratory diseases. This is of particular concern in rural India where fewer than half of households use clean fuels like LPG. Nileena Suresh reports.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
The Carney administration’s stance on its predecessor’s allegations of Indian official involvement in crimes in Canada, and the Modi government’s response to it, suggests that Ottawa “is allowing the Indian government to use Canadian diplomatic silence as proof of innocence, with India using Carney’s desire for normalised relations to rewrite the narrative of the assassination”, Sushant Singh perceptively points out. But that leaves a key question unresolved:
“… Whether a foreign state used criminal proxies to kill a person on Canadian soil and what that means for the safety of Canadian citizens. Until that question is answered, the Nijjar case will remain a diplomatic ghost, haunting India–Canada relations long after the trade deals are signed.”
Can the same pattern of public mobilisation that the BJP rode to power 12 years ago become its own undoing? Varghese George argues that the CJP-led protesters’ belonging to a different generation altogether opens up this possibility. However: “What is clear … is that the cockroach protesters alone have no capacity to achieve that. That is where the role of the opposition, particularly the Congress, becomes critical.”
And Vir Sanghvi reckons that the BJP-run government’s response to the protests have probably only widened the gap between that generation and those in power. “It will never wipe away the perception that, when confronted with its failures not just to find jobs for young people but also to conduct exams properly, its response was not to listen but to attack, assault and abase.”
Vivek Kaul on the economics behind Gen-Z’s rage: “India promised its youth jobs. Instead, it delivered gig work, disguised unemployment, and broken dreams.”
There are many problems underlying India-China tensions - historically formed (and inaccurate) perceptions of each other and an asymmetry in priority (China looms much larger in the Indian imagination than vice versa) but allowing journalists from each side to properly cover the two countries is a necessary first step in erasing the history of mutual suspicion, writes Pallavi Aiyar.
Two important personalities from the Bombay film industry, Amol Palekar and Mahesh Bhatt, have written moving pieces on the student protest.
Listen up
Digitisation and the RTI Act raised hopes of more transparent governance but today – as protesters across the country seek accountability for repeated NEET paper leaks – corruption remains a key problem. If it hasn’t become less of a problem, is it in fact the biggest threat to this country’s future? Shailesh Gandhi and Anjali Bhardwaj ponder that question on Parley.
Watch out
Raghu Karnad reminds us about a 1974 speech on the important of student protest which has great contemporary relevance…
Over and out
There is no end to the creativity of Gen Z…
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.