Modi-Xi Bilateral Meet Planned in Jo'burg; TOI Scrubs, Then Restores Zubin Mehta Comment Expressing Concern About Muslims in India

India blocks ‘Kashmir Walla’, Chandrayaan-3 ready to land, Article 370 repeal faces serious challenge, Mirwaiz to sue for liberty, UP crimefighters deploy panchang, how Madras Standard Time became IST

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

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Snapshot of the day

August 21, 2023

Pratik Kanjilal

TheKashmirwalla.com, perhaps the last refuge of independent reporting in the former state, has been blocked in India by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. Its social media handles are also inaccessible in India. True to form, no official order has been released and no reason has been given either to the news site or the public. Digipub

Chandrayaan-3’s lander has finished deboosting, which means that it is ready to take a trajectory down to the lunar surface, where it will release the Vikram rover at 5:45 pm IST on Wednesday. Yesterday, Roscosmos announced that Luna-25, the first Russian moon mission in almost 50 years, which could have beaten Chandrayaan to the moon, has crashed. 

(From https://twitter.com/sajithkumar)

The G20 health ministers’ meet in Gandhinagar, in which issues like long Covid and zoonotic transmission of disease were discussed, has joined the list of G20 meetings under India’s presidency which have ended without a joint statement, because of the objections of Russia and China about the language in which to describe events in Ukraine. 

Indian students who returned to Ukraine to complete their medical degrees are facing the hostility of locals as the conflict with Russia drags on. India is seen to be supporting Russia, and Ukrainians are telling Indians to “go home”, increasingly so in recent weeks. 

The repeal of Article 370 faces a serious challenge in a short 1971 judgment by the Supreme Court produced by senior advocate Shekhar Naphade. The Centre had held that the “breakdown of constitutional machinery” in Jammu and Kashmir led to President’s rule, which led to the abrogation. The 1971 ruling, which concerned M Karunanidhi, says that once a governor dissolved the legislature and takes over all powers ― as Satya Pal Malik did on November 21, 2018 ― there is no question of the president taking charge on the plea of a breakdown of constitutionalism. 

A Modi-Xi bilateral meeting is planned at the BRICS leaders’ summit in Johannesburg, which begins tomorrow. It will be their first in-person meet since the Doklam conflict, apart from a rather odd encounter at a G20 dinner in Bali last November. However, Nitin A Gokhale says that there is “no clarity on any substantive bilateral meeting”. “Positive statements from both sides, some backchannel contacts and the urgency with which negotiations are being held between local commanders since last week — point towards a desire to achieve an agreement to end the border impasse in Ladakh.” The commander-level talks had made no progress, though.  

Meanwhile, trade between the two countries is becoming ever more lopsided. Of the $117 bn in goods that flowed between them in 2022, 87% came from China, finds The Economist. “Whereas India sells China the products of the old economy — crustaceans, cotton, granite, diamonds, petrol — China sends India memory chips, integrated circuits and pharmaceutical ingredients.”

Reporters are being turned away from Saikul subdivision of Manipur’s Kangpokpi district, two months after Kuki villages there were burned to the ground, and nine Meitei people were reportedly killed. The only information emerging from this black hole is selective leaks by the security forces ― who are themselves accused of being partisan.  

The Delhi Police Special Unit for North-Eastern Region, which has had good relations with the community of 2 lakh which it serves in the capital, has invited suspicions of profiling by circulating a survey form seeking personal information.

In Manipur, people from Churachandpur district would rather travel 800 km to Guwahati for medical treatment than go to Imphal, which has good hospitals and is only 60 km away, because the hill people don’t feel safe either on the road into the valley, or the institutions there, reports India Today NE. Persons unknown have stopped a shipment of vaccines meant for children below 10 years and pregnant women in Kangpokpi district. The medical department of the Committee on Tribal Unity says that “it is sad to learn that the Meira Paibis have restricted essential items including medical aids meant for the Kuki-Zo hill districts.”

Five years ago, Brinda Thounaojam of the Manipur Police made a huge drug seizure, which suggested that Chief Minister N Biren Singh’s ‘war on drugs’ was not completely on the level. Now a politician, she is one of the CM’s leading critics. 

A trans men’s football team is helping displaced children in relief camps across Manipur heal from their trauma of ethnic strife through sport.

All Parties Hurriyat Conference chief Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has decided to wage a legal battle against the Jammu and Kashmir administration over his “arbitrary and illegal” detention. He has been under house arrest for four years. He has not officiated at the Srinagar Jamia Masjid for 200 Fridays. 

To cool prices, the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs (CBIC) on Saturday imposed a 40% customs duty on onions being exported from India till December 31 in “public interest”. “The export duty will make Indian onions more expensive than those from Pakistan, China, and Egypt. This will naturally lead to lower exports and aid in reducing local prices,” Ajit Shah, an exporter based in Mumbai, told Reuters. But farmers led by the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatna in Maharashtra are protesting the government’s move.  

The Supreme Court has reversed a trial court’s verdict absolving former RJD MP Prabhunath Singh of shooting dead two people outside a polling booth for not voting for him. That was in 1995, in Saran district, Bihar. Their families pursued the matter for 28 years, in the face of material adversity, deeply unfair lower courts and pressure from the accused, who went to the extent of kidnapping witnesses before they were to depose, reports Santosh Singh in the Indian Express.   

In Gujarat, Vinod Gheravda, President of the Upleta Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was arrested for sharing a video critical of the RSS. The complaint alleged harm to the RSS founder’s reputation and the intention to to “create unrest, fear and confusion”.

As nations industrialise and their economies grow, more women enter the workforce. The phenomenon has been noted in the US, China, Japan and South Korea. But in India, women’s participation in the workforce grew to 31% in 2000 ― still under one in three workers ― and now languishes at 24%. To blame is a mix of poor job creation, which causes high levels of competition which women burdened by home responsibilities may not be equal to, and a deeply conservative attitude which holds that if women work, their families are dishonoured. As Western companies try to diversify manufacturing out of China, it’s preventing India from benefiting. 

The UP Police are going to use the Hindu astrological panchang to fight crime. Director General of Police Vijay Kumar has sent a circular to police stations stating that crime surges in the week before and the week after the amavasya (new moon) in Krishna Paksha, and patrols should be alert. The phase of the moon does correlate with disorders like gout, but correlation with crime waves is not established. If the full moon correlates with more crime, it’s because better illumination helps thugs. Indoor crime rates remained unaffected in US studies. 

Taking the cult in floriculture to new heights, the Modi government has announced a new variety of the lotus flower, the ‘Namoh 108’, “as a grand gift to the relentless zeal and innate beauty of Shri Narendra Modi coming as it does in the tenth year of his tenure as the Prime Minister.” The lotus has 108 petals and is originally from Manipur. Modi has yet to visit the state three months after the ongoing violence there started. But who says Manipur can’t come to him.

Reporting for RFI, Côme Bastin confronts the wildest claims of the Patanjali PR machine, like the efficacy of Coronil. It’s part of a series which will investigate the scientific, financial and judicial controversies around the herbalists’ hegemony over the Indian mind. 

The conductor Zubin Mehta and Yusuf Hameid of Cipla were neighbours in early childhood and remain chums, both aged 87. Asked by Karan Thapar what he thought of the sort of country we are becoming, the maestro repeated a line he first gave to the Times of India but which the newspaper inexplicably cut from its print edition – “I hope my Muslim friends can live in peace forever in India…”. Caught out, the newspaper restored the line claiming it “came towards the end” and had been deleted for space reasons. Not true.

Yesterday was World Mosquito Day. They’re still winning.