Modi's Washing Machine Starts Running Even Before He Takes Oath; 'Made in India' Found in Deadly Missile Fragment in Gaza
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK
Snapshot of the day
June 7, 2024
Siddharth Varadarajan
It’s official: President Droupadi Murmu has appointed Narendra Modi as Prime Minister again. He will be sworn in Sunday. It is a different matter that Modi made all his plans – including sending invites to leaders from Sri Lanka and elsewhere – before this very necessary formality. Even the BJP parliamentary party meeting was convened after he had already got himself chosen by the National Democratic Alliance as the coalition’s choice for PM. Was this to ensure his lack of a majority would not prompt talk of an alternative? In his first two terms, Modi made short shrift of the many procedural steps a constitutional democracy follows. It looks like his third term will also go the same way. Unless his NDA allies insist otherwise.
Today, Nitish Kumar reportedly tried to touch Modi’s feet and has put out that he will “always” be with the NDA. But everyone knows that it is precisely when such statements and gestures are made that they should not be believed. On Saturday we will get a first look at the pushes and pulls which have happened so far when Modi’s ministers are sworn in alongside him and their portfolios are revealed.
New footage from Gaza shows Indian-made weapons being used in Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians. In a video that went viral online, a “made in India” label was seen on the remains of a missile dropped by Israeli warplanes at a United Nations shelter in Nuseirat refugee camp on Wednesday night. Last month, R. Ramachandran revealed through official records that India’s Munitions India Ltd (MIL), a public sector enterprise under the Ministry of Defence, was allowed to ship arms to Israel, potentially making New Delhi complicit in Tel Aviv’s war crimes committed against Palestinians in Gaza.
Modi has switched on his washing machine even before taking oath as the Prime Minister to fight against corruption. A court in Mumbai has quashed the attachment of seven flats worth over Rs 180 crore, owned by Nationalist Congress Party leader and Narendra Modi’s ally Praful Patel, in a money-laundering case, reports The Times of India on Thursday. The order was passed on Monday by a Smugglers and Foreign Exchange Manipulators Act appellate tribunal. The Enforcement Directorate had attached the flats, owned by Patel, his wife and their company Millennium Developers, in 2022. The properties are located at Ceejay House in Mumbai’s upscale Worli area. The central agency alleged that the Patels had illegally acquired the properties from Hazra Memon, wife of the late drug dealer Iqbal Mirchi. It said that the properties were attached after Memon and her two sons were declared fugitive economic offenders. But now, Patel has got a clean chit from the ED.
Modi and his followers wanted to change the Constitution but voters made him bow down to the original. Also note the complete absence of “Modi Modi” chants which were a regular feature.
"If India’s elections had been held with a noisy and balanced media, an independent judiciary and a thriving civil society, Modi would have lost," says Edward Luce on India’s worst kept election secret.
“The reproof from voters might encourage the BJP to steer the economy towards a somewhat fairer and more sustainable course, for its own sake. What it indisputably offers is an opportunity to halt the democratic erosion. It is possible that Mr Modi will now seek to intensify his authoritarianism; an election under fairer conditions would surely have proved still more damning. But without a supermajority he cannot push through constitutional changes, as many feared he might. With his air of invincibility punctured, politicians, business people, officials and broadcasters may be somewhat less eager to dance to his tune,” reads an editorial in The Guardian saying that democracy is the winner in India’s recently concluded general elections.
A closer analysis of the Uttar Pradesh and North-East results throws up more bad news from the BJP apart from the mere loss of seats.
Meanwhile, “The bulldozer now has brakes. At least, two of them. But perhaps several. And once a bulldozer has brakes, it becomes just a lawnmower. The change in the impact and intensity of its power will be felt by the two top men in the structure of governance — who will take time to acclimatise to the shift in their status — as the ruling BJP adjusts to its new position of the larger party in a coalition government,” says Deccan Herald in its editorial.
Meanwhile, the real dance, or mujra, seems to begin for Modi. And this one too.
Let’s not mince words. Bloomberg has the sharpest (and the most accurate) headline of the election mandate.
However, this sums up the trailer.
There is a high chance that Modi, unaccustomed to sharing power, doubles down on his ideological agenda, writes Emma Hogan in The Economist’s Essential India newsletter. That carries real risks, such as curbing international investment and widening religious divides in the country.
A special court in Bengaluru on Friday granted bail to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in a defamation case filed by the BJP’s Karnataka unit against the publication of advertisements labelling the BJP as corrupt in local newspapers ahead of the Assembly elections last year. The court had earlier granted bail to Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar, who is also the state Congress chief, after they appeared before it in connection with the defamation case. On his part, Shivakumar said the BJP added “Rahul Gandhi’s name to gain publicity”.
A Kashmiri man has died in custody and his family alleges the authorities are hell bent on covering up the crime. Apparently the police gave them two options – the dead man would be framed in a militancy case and his body would be buried far away. Or that they would frame him in a drug-related matter and his family would get to take his body home.
NEET 2024 aspirants have written to the National Testing Agency and the Union government over alleged paper leaks as well as discrepancies and anomalous trends seen in the results. Maitri Porecha cites some students as saying that their OMR sheets and final scorecards contained different numbers, that 67 students got a perfect score this time compared to the usual handful, and that there were large differences between some students’ prelim exam results and final results. Careers360 founder Maheshwer Peri also adds that the results were shared unusually early this time and some students have scored marks that don’t seem possible given the test’s marking regime. Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has severely criticised the BJP-led union government for failing to satisfactorily address allegations that the results of this year’s NEET were rigged. She also questioned why the Centre had been “ignoring the voice of lakhs of students”.
Prashant Kishor has accepted that he got the results wrong. In the election, there was no pan-India undercurrent in favour of Modi, he says in this interview.
In Telangana, anti-incumbency against the Congress doesn’t seem to be behind the gains the BJP enjoyed this election – rather, the reason seems to be a wholesale transfer of the vote from the state’s erstwhile ruling party, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi. N Rahul writes on how exactly the BRS’s loss has been the BJP’s gain in the state.
Most commercial and educational establishments in Amritsar were closed yesterday amid a shutdown call by radical Sikh groups in commemoration of Operation Blue Star’s 20th anniversary, Vikas Vasudeva reports. Khalistan zindabad slogans were also raised in the Golden Temple, where the Akal Takht’s chief priest raised the issue of some Sikhs remaining in prison despite finishing their term.
The monsoon is set to cover more of India in the next few days but may briefly weaken next week, Rajendra Jadhav reports citing unnamed weather officials. One of them said farmers need to make sure they don’t hurry in planting kharif crops given the need to ensure enough moisture in the soil before doing so.
“If 2024 is to be a test of the BJP’s standing in the state [Tamil Nadu], the vote share figures show that the BJP is still only No 3 in the state despite there being no other real claimant to the No 3. If it’s a test of AIADMK’s continued relevance, it certainly has proven Edappadi [Palaniswami]’s point at least in part”, Kalyanaraman says, arguing that the state’s voters are “just not open to saffron politics even today”.
“This tournament could not have started better from the US perspective,” Joe Lynn, curator of the United States Cricket Museum in Pennsylvania, said of the US cricket team’s triumph over Pakistan yesterday. The American side is playing its first men’s world cup this year and its match with Pakistan was its first. Pakistan were limited to 159 in the first innings, which the US chased to a draw – the final outcome was decided by a super over. Ffion Wynne reports on why this match provides the “blueprint to show that cricket in the States can work and it can be brilliant”, and also on milestone moments for the sport in US history.
While that match was held in Dallas, Texas, games held at the Eisenhower Park in New York’s Long Island have taken place on an unpredictable surface and slow outfield. There is no diagnosis yet but the ICC has promised to “remedy” issues with the pitch, which has sparked concern for batters’ safety. Timothy Abraham reports that during the India-Ireland game held here on Wednesday, “India fans were even cheering runs for Ireland at one point … hoping the length of the game would be extended so they could see more of their team batting in the second innings”, given the state of the outfield and big boundaries. India and Pakistan are scheduled to play here on Sunday.
What do the election results mean for India-US defence cooperation and India’s dealings with an ascendant China? David Rising and Ashok Sharma have a primer.
More Lokniti: Welfare doesn’t evoke much sentimentality; Dalit votes more diverse
While comparative studies say voters prefer incumbents when they benefit from a government’s policies, the Lokniti survey results released today suggest that voters don’t feel much of a sentimental attachment to the Union government over its welfare schemes: KK Kailash finds that there “is more than a 10-point gap in all welfare schemes between credit attribution to the Centre and votes for the [NDA].” Lokniti also found that across the board, parties mattered more to voters than candidates or PM-aspirants; that though many young voters still back the BJP, their backing for the Congress’s allies helped close INDIA’s gap with the NDA; and that the BJP’s “Hindutva-driven subaltern outreach … at the grassroots level” paid dividends among Hindu OBCs and Adivasis, while Dalit votes were more diverse this time.
JNU professor defeats BJP in Manipur
In a significant political victory, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) professor Angomcha Bimol Akoijam, 56, secured the Inner Manipur Lok Sabha seat. Running as a Congress candidate, Akoijam defeated the BJP’s T Basanta Kumar Singh, the state education minister, with a substantial margin of 109,801 votes. This victory is particularly notable as Akoijam triumphed in the Meitei-dominated Inner Manipur constituency, a region also represented by BJP’s Manipur Chief Minister, Biren Singh.
“People have voted for Congress because of what has been happening in our state for the last year. The BJP government has failed to control the violence and restore normalcy... People have felt their state has been destroyed and ignored. I think that resentment has translated into this massive mandate,” he said to The Hindustan Times. “People tried to break up Manipur but this government has done nothing to fight back against such elements... This is a message for those who want to take Manipur and its people for granted”.
Renewed interest in using Kashmiri willows for cricket bats, but hurdles still loom
The production of cricket bats has increased 15-fold over the last decade to three million bats annually, a local cricket manufacturing union member tells Hirra Azmat. After the Afghanistan men’s cricket team used bats made of Kashmiri willow last year and Sachin Tendulkar visited a bat factory in Anantnag earlier this year, there has been renewed interest in using the Kashmiri willow to make cricket bats, Azmat reports. But a lack of awareness among manufactures of the willow’s varieties, indiscriminate growing in plantations and preference for poplar mean the industry here loses out to competition from abroad, Azmat says citing scientists and local growers.
Reportedly
Responding to the accusation of a stock market scam fuelled by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah’s pre-results advice, BJP leader Piyush Goyal recently claimed that it was foreign investors who bought stocks at high rates while Indian investors managed to book profits durin the exit polls peak. However, data from Monday, June 3, contradicts this statement. Domestic institutional investors, who manage mutual funds for numerous Indian citizens, net bought Rs 1,914 crores in stocks. This significant purchase suggests that Indian investors were actively investing, not just selling off assets. Critics have questioned Goyal’s comments, implying that foreign investors were misled, and raised concerns about why this would be considered positive.
Deep dive
Wade into the latest issue of Energy Trends Newsletter, taking stock of the issues, ground reportage and interesting reads pan-India in the run up to the elections.
Prime number: 6.5%
For the eighth time in a row, the RBI’s monetary policy committee, which met over Wednesday, yesterday and today, has kept the policy repo rate unchanged at 6.5%. This is the interest rate at which the central bank lends to commercial banks.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Yogendra Yadav writes that to reduce the election result to mere numbers would be grave injustice. It is about the message of the mandate. “This was the least free and fair national election in the history of independent India, where everything was stacked against the Opposition. Money, media, administrative machine and what have you — the ruling party enjoyed an infinite advantage over the Opposition”.
Andy Mukherjee on why markets must not worry too much about the return of coalition politics to India. ‘Reforms will slow’ is such a trope: What land or labour reforms happened under Modi? he asks.
The election results “mark the assertion of the citizen against the pernicious agenda to diminish her into a labharthi” – indeed, now they’ve turned Modi into a labharthi of his allies, Ashutosh Bhardwaj writes.
Salil Tripathi says that Modi’s unravelling has begun. “As a septuagenarian, it is difficult to imagine [him] navigating that well. Modi has antagonised many people across a wide spectrum over the years—not least by threatening rivals with raids and jailing opposition politicians. Without a majority in parliament, he is vulnerable like no previous point.”
It is a common perception that Ambedkar wanted to burn the constitution. However, this is often misquoted. Read an excerpt from Anurag Bhaskar’s The Foresighted Ambedkar: Ideas that Shaped Indian Constitutional Discourse, looking at the context of a statement often quoted by proponents of a new Constitution.
Nilanjana Roy “revisits the best fictional accounts of political high drama”, as across the world more than 80 countries will be going to polls this year.
Listen up
In The Economist’s ‘The Modi Raj’ podcast, Avantika Chilkoti asks if Modi can balance economic growth with his party’s Hindu-first ideology. Its first episode is out.
Watch out
Can Old Modi become New Modi? His biographer, Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, thinks not. Watch his timely conversation with Karan Thapar.
Over and out
Anime and the Indian general election seem like far apart topics, but this take on why so many are happy to see the BJP down a few pegs – using a surprisingly apt analogy – may convince you otherwise. Video is in Hinglish.
Election results have ignited new-born hope among artistes, read this interview of multitalented Varun Grover with Shriram Iyengar. Talking about freedom of expression and being hopeful of the checks and balances a coalition government will bring, he says, “A feeling that what you say will not be taken out of context or cause FIRs to be filed against you, or end with you receiving death threats on the Internet or in real life; this enables you to create something of value for society in turn. Otherwise, you end up creating a system that generates conformity. And conformity makes for the worst kind of art, as we have seen time and again over the years.”
Here’s a news flashback from The Mad Mughal Memes.
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.