No Indo-US Trade Deal Till Tariff Issue is Resolved, Says Trump; Rubio Says Trump “Delivered Peace” in India-Pak Conflict; Modi Talks to Brazil's Lula on Tariffs But the Readouts are Very Different
ED ‘Can’t Act Like a Crook’ Says Supreme Court, Cricket is No Longer a Gentleman’s Game, Declining Vehicle Sales Reflect Sluggish Consumer Demand
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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Over to Sidharth Bhatia for today’s Cable
Snapshot of the day
August 8, 2025
Sidharth Bhatia
In an escalating diplomatic row between the United States and India, US President Donald Trump has ruled out the prospect of trade negotiations with India until the ongoing tariff dispute is resolved. The State Department, however, insists the two countries remain locked in “full and frank dialogue” despite mounting strains. “No, not until we get it resolved,” Trump said in the Oval Office when asked if trade talks could move forward after his announcement of a 50% tariff on Indian goods. This comes after the State Department briefing, deputy spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Trump’s actions reflected “very clear” concerns about the trade imbalance with India and its purchase of Russian oil. “India is a strategic partner with whom we engage in a full and frank dialogue. That’ll continue… You’re not going to align a hundred percent of the time on everything, but it is very clear – the President’s been clear about the concerns that he has,” he said.
Asked whether the dispute signalled worsening ties or risked pushing India closer to China, Pigott said, “What this is about is an honest, full, and frank dialogue about real concerns… Ultimately, this is about a frank and full dialogue, and that’s what it means to advance American interests… to really have full diplomatic dialogue with partners – to address concerns that we need to see addressed”. A US delegation is slated to arrive in India on August 25 for the next round of bilateral trade treaty negotiations, but it remains unclear whether the visit will proceed as planned.
Meanwhile, the US “got involved directly” when India and Pakistan “went to war”, US Secretary of state Marco Rubio claimed on Thursday, adding that it was President Trump who “was able to deliver on that peace”. Rubio’s comments come amid Trump’s repeated claim – nearly 30 times – of brokering the ceasefire deal between the two South Asian neighbouring countries. In an interview to EWTN’s ‘The World Over’, Rubio said that Trump was committed to peace and being the “president of peace”. “And so, we saw when India and Pakistan went to war, we got involved directly, and the president was able to deliver on that peace,” he said, adding a series of other conflicts that he said Trump helped resolve. “Cambodia and Thailand more recently; Azerbaijan and Armenia, hopefully… DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Rwanda – a 30-year war, 7 million people killed – we were able to bring them here to sign it,” Rubio said, as per the report.
He added that the US was proud of these initiatives and that they are “looking for more – obviously, the big one being in Ukraine and Russia”. “We dedicate a significant amount of time to stopping and ending wars,” Rubio said. New Delhi has so far denied the claim, maintaining that it was resolved bilaterally.
“Trump, it appears, is happy to sacrifice Indian goodwill just to bring Russia back to the negotiating room. What will sting the Modi government most perhaps is this observation in China’s Global Times: “Perhaps, to the US, India may have never been a guest at the table - only an item on the menu.”” writes Shougat Dasgupta in Coda currents newsletter.
However, “serious damage has already been done to India’s relations with America. The future of their two-decade strategic partnership has rarely looked so shaky”, writes Jeremy Page in The Economist’s India Essential Newsletter.
A day after India and Brazil were hit with steep US tariffs, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called Prime Minister Narendra Modi – and the contrast in their public responses to the move was immediately apparent. While Lula explicitly signalled for the two countries to confront “unilateral tariffs” together, India’s official account of the conversation made no mention of the issue.
A day after he alleged collusion between the BJP and the Election Commission in the former's win from the Bangalore Central Lok Sabha seat in last year's general election, Lok Sabha leader of opposition and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi doubled down on his claims and also criticised the poll body for asking him to file an affidavit and submit the evidence he presented under oath. “I have taken an oath inside parliament holding the constitution,” he said, accusing the EC of ‘shutting its website in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan’. The commission too has stuck to its guns, saying today that Gandhi must either sign a declaration “or else apologise to the nation”. Sravasti Dasgupta has the details.
One of Gandhi's contentions against the EC relates to its destruction of CCTV footage of polling booths after a set time following elections. When India Today filed an RTI query with the commission asking it what prompted it to change the footage retention period to 45 days earlier this year, it responded by saying that it cannot provide this information as the matter is sub-judice in the Supreme Court. However, the magazine notes that the Central Information Commission has previously ruled that a matter's being sub-judice by itself is not grounds to decline information. India Today has appealed the EC's decision.
With rescue operations in Uttarakhand's Dharali ongoing and a scientific investigation into the flash flood there – which killed at least four people and has left dozens missing – yet to begin, it isn't entirely clear what caused the incident. While the India Meteorological Department doesn't believe that a cloudburst, a kind of exceptionally heavy rain, triggered the mudslide in the area on Tuesday, a private satellite imagery firm believes that a glacial lake probably did not burst either, reports Jacob Koshy.
On Chief Justice of India BR Gavai's urging, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices JB Pardiwala and R Mahadevan reconsidered its decision to remove Allahabad high court Justice Prashant Kumar from the criminal roster and ask that he ‘sit in a division bench with seasoned senior judge’ for saying that a petitioner in a civil case should be allowed to pursue criminal proceedings as a civil suit “will take years … to see any ray of hope”. The apex court bench said today, per Gursimran Kaur Bakshi, that “… we must clarify that our intention was not to cause embarrassment or cast aspersions on the concerned judge” but to attempt to protect the dignity of the judiciary. The Supreme Court deleted the aforesaid parts of its order but maintained that Justice Kumar's order is “perverse” and “illegal”.
The Enforcement Directorate “can't act like a crook” and must “act within the four corners of the law”, the Supreme Court told the agency yesterday, which has challenged the maintainability of petitions seeking a review of the top court's 2022 judgment upholding its wide-ranging powers. Justice Ujjal Bhuyan pointed to the ED's low conviction rate and said, as quoted by PTI: “That's why we have been insisting that you improve your investigation, as it deals with the liberty of the individual … At the end of 5-6 years of judicial custody, if people are acquitted, who will pay for this?”
A mob reportedly comprising workers of the Bajrang Dal allegedly roughed up two priests and a catechist in Jaleswar, Odisha on Wednesday as they were returning from a memorial event and accused them of trying to convert people to Christianity. The Catholic Bishops' Conference of India condemned the incident and said it is another instance in a broader pattern of violence against Christians in India.
Mmhonlumo Kikon, the BJP's only national spokesperson from the northeast, quit the party yesterday. His decision, he said, “is guided by the need to explore new avenues of public engagement and policy work”, but The Hindu cites a party source as saying that a lack of room for constructive opinion as well as incidents of alleged maltreatment of Christians in the region ‘may have contributed’ to his resignation.
The families of 65 victims of the Air India flight 171 crash have hired the Beasley Allen law firm to pursue legal action against Boeing and Air India. The firm had previously represented families of people who died in the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes. Its head, aviation lawyer D Michael Andrews, said speaking to Maulik Pathak that he believes there is a possibility that a technical glitch rather than pilot error caused the ill-fated flight's fuel control switches to send ‘cutoff’ signals minutes before the engines lost power and the plane crashed.
India has quietly handed over control of the Afghan consulate in Hyderabad to a Taliban representative to run the mission. IANS reports that the handover took place in June, with Mohammad Rahman named as the Taliban’s diplomatic representative at the consulate. Sayed Mohammad Ibrahimkhil, who served as consul under Afghanistan’s previous government, has been transferred to the Afghan embassy in New Delhi, where he continues to serve as chargé d’affaires. Citing its own sources, the news agency also reported that Rahman has headed the Hyderabad consulate since June 2025. The report noted that in 2024, India similarly handed over the Afghan consulate in Mumbai to Ikramuddin Kamil, another Taliban-appointed diplomat.
Read this important interview by The Hindu with economist Amartya Sen on the ECI’s so-called Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, the dangers of targeted disenfranchisement of groups of citizens, alleged atrocities against Bengali migrant workers in BJP-ruled States, and efforts to promote Hindutva in West Bengal, which has a long and proud history of Hindu-Muslim cordiality and cooperation.
Pakistan's government has suspended mobile data services in Balochistan until the end of this month in order to thwart communication among militants, reports Reuters. The move comes amid an uptick in militant attacks in the province. The Baloch Liberation Army claimed responsibility for a bombing on Tuesday in which two soldiers and an officer were killed.
A 65-year-old native of West Bengal's Bankura district Baidyanath Dasmodak, who suffered from chronic malnutrition and starvation, died earlier this month after a prolonged illness. He wasn't able to access rations or government schemes because he did not have Aadhaar. It's not that he didn't try – he made multiple attempts to obtain it but always failed, apparently even in spite of intervention by local officials, reports Madhu Sudhan Chatterjee. The local block development officer said that Dasmodak's family has been given rice and clothes, but his son said that “we are on the brink” and “one day we too will die like my father”.
Big Tech is fighting for India’s 700 million internet users with free AI tools as bait, reports Rest of World. “Training AI on vast Indian data sets pushes models to handle linguistic diversity, low-resource contexts, and noisy real-world data, making them more robust globally. What works in India will scale better everywhere else”.
Human rights activist Martin Luther King III, the son of late American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, and academician Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, called for humanitarian aid to be made available to the people of Gaza without obstruction or delay and said that the continued violence in the besieged Palestinian territory does not bring justice and only “multiplies suffering”. They requested world leaders and regional actors to “act now”, saying that the “international community must not look away”.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met in Jerusalem with India’s Ambassador to Israel, J.P. Singh, to discuss strengthening bilateral ties between the two nations. The two leaders focused on expanding cooperation, particularly in security and the economy. Following the meeting, Netanyahu spoke with senior Indian journalists. The journalists seemed to be charmed and overawed meeting him. One had carried his book with him to get it autographed, another said that Netanyahu had, in an answer to his question, said that “Israel will not annex Gaza.” Though there’s also this, a plan by Israel to let the IDF take over Gaza, which clearly contradicts this claim.
And this…
India halts plan to buy US arms after Trump tariffs
India has put on hold its plans to procure new US weapons and aircraft, Reuters reports citing three Indian officials familiar with the matter, although the defence ministry has been cited in the press as denying the news agency's report as “false and fabricated”. The move comes as India's first major response to the 50% tariffs imposed on its exports to the US by President Donald Trump. Discussions on India's purchases of Stryker combat vehicles made by General Dynamics Land Systems and Javelin anti-tank missiles developed by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have been paused due to the tariffs. Trump and Modi had in February announced plans to pursue procurement and joint production of those items. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh had also been planning to announce the purchase of six Boeing P8I reconnaissance aircraft and support systems for the Indian Navy during his now-cancelled trip, two of the people said. Talks over procuring the aircraft in a proposed $3.6 billion deal were at an advanced stage, according to the officials.
But the defence ministry has been quoted as ‘clarifying’ that “the various cases of procurement are being progressed as per the extant procedures”.
Meanwhile, India had been planning to send Singh to Washington DC in the coming weeks for an announcement on some of the purchases, but that trip has been cancelled.
Declining vehicle sales reflect sluggish consumer demand
Retails sales of passenger vehicles along with two-wheelers, three-wheelers, tractors, and commercial vehicles in India decreased 4.31% year-on-year in July to 1.96 million units, on a high base, and reflected a sluggish consumer demand. While commercial vehicle sales remained flat, retail sales of both passenger vehicles and two-wheelers decreased during the month, with the only exception being an increase in tractor sales, owing to a good monsoon and crop sowing, reports The Economic Times. The data indicates that while two-wheeler sales went down 6.5% on-year to 1.36 million units in July this year, sales of passenger vehicles decreased by around 1% to 328,613 units. Commercial vehicle sales largely remained flat at 76,439 units last month, while three-wheelers grew 0.8% to 111,426 units, the ET report says.
Report links Hindutva extremism to 2022 Leicester riots, urges UK government action
A new report has blamed Hindutva-inspired extremism, police bias, and political complacency for fueling the 2022 Leicester riots, warning that failure to act could deepen divisions in one of Britain’s most diverse cities. The joint study by the United Kingdom Indian Muslim Council (UKIMC) and the Community Policy Forum draws on interviews with nearly 500 members of Leicester’s Muslim community. It concludes that Hindu nationalist ideologies – imported and amplified online – fractured inter-community relations and sparked violence that left Muslim residents traumatised and fearful. The report, published earlier this week, states that participants painted a “troubling picture of perceived police bias and complicity, as well as a range of practical barriers to reporting, which has exacerbated community distrust of the authorities during the intense period prior to, during, and since the riots”.
The Long Cable
Lament for the gentleman’s game that Cricket once was
Krishnan Srinivasan
Cricket is traditionally known as the "gentleman's game" due to its association with fair play, sportsmanship and mutual respect. Cricket remains one of the very few remaining sports played in long trousers; its white clothing could symbolize purity. In its early development in England, it was primarily played by the upper classes. The emphasis on values, often referred to as the "Spirit of Cricket," is enshrined in the Laws (not rules, please note) and traditions of the game. Cricket is the only sport that has produced great literature, from Neville Cardus to Henry Newbolt (in his poem Vitae Lampada) to Ramachandra Guha.
Lords cricket ground in central London, address of the Marylebone Cricket Club, had till 1963 separate dressing rooms for gentlemen (amateurs who were paid nothing) and players (paid professionals). Cambridge and Oxford universities played matches there, as did Eton and Harrow. The ‘bodyline’ series in 1932 in Australia instigated by England captain Douglas Jardine led to common outrage both in Australia and England, leading to changes in the Laws. There were murmurs of concern in the Lords Long Room when England was first led by a ‘player’ in 1952.
That was then. Australian media millionaire Kerry Packer in the 1970s and 1980s led the departure from the white clothing of equality to football-style coloured kit, and shattered the fundamental ethical code of not playing the game against white-dominated apartheid South Africa.
Now cricket has become a performative display of temper, foul language and aggression both on and off the playing field. Coaches and support staff give rein to bad manners, such as reminding ground staff in patrician manner of their lowly status. The stump microphones eavesdrop on verbal exchanges between batters and fielders that exceed the bounds of jest and propriety to rank taunts and personal abuse including about family members. As Ravi Shastri on Sky Sports said without irony recently, “The first hour was watchful — really good bowling, plenty of chat out there in the face of the batsmen, the fielders as well as the bowlers.”
Each fallen wicket provokes wild scenes of celebrations, and like ‘seconds’ at a boxing match, support staff from both teams rush on the field at every pause with refreshments and presumably counsel from the dressing room. Pitch invasions by ardent fans are not uncommon and police ring the field facing outward towards potentially unruly spectators
No one enjoys these deviations from the spirit of cricket more than old people who have never played sports and youngsters playing truant from school riveted to TV screens or mobile phones all day. In their view, overt confrontation adds a desirable spice to an otherwise languid game.
Captains are often setting the worst example. In India, cricket has long ago replaced hockey as the national game. A lantern-jawed Indian star raced across the turf flailing his arms like a whirling dervish in an Indian version of Maori haka intimidation. A legendary player, perhaps the last to eschew protective clothing and body armour in an epitome of courage, writes columns on exchanges of unsporting behaviour with no critique for violations of the spirit in which cricket is supposed to be played. No less is the emphasis by television coverage commentators, most of them past players of note, on anatomising the bad-tempered exchanges, deliberate collisions, purposive time-wasting and showing manifest dissent with umpires.
There was once a sacred convention that the umpire’s decision was final. For decades, this was unchallenged. ‘Neutral’ umpires from third countries were then introduced to avoid allegations of bias. But as standards fell, Captains continued to make their dissent known in ‘unparliamentary’ language, often deplorably racial in character. This introduced a ‘review third umpire’ in the stands behind a video screen. Soon enough, the third umpire will also be challenged and a further review will be permitted. So when does final become final?
There are match referees now introduced to monitor unseemly behaviour. The penalties handed down by these referees are so derisory, mere slaps on the wrist, and fines handed down that the multi-millionaire players could only scoff at.
There is a Board of Control for Cricket in India, but its ability to control or influence player behaviour is non-existent since its emphasis is on revenue and not ethics. Despite judicial investigations, its character has remained autonomous and unanswerable, the more so since Jay Shah, former secretary of the BCCI and currently chairman of the International Cricket Council, is son of the Union Home Minister. Small wonder that the cricket heroes neither collectively nor individually supported the female wrestlers’ justified allegations of sexual predation in the Wrestling Federation.
So what can be done to restore the gentleman’s game, if indeed that is an objective, instead of the current warfare without weapons? Are the deteriorating standards a manifestation of the general vulgarization of social values, or the fault of the captains and players on the field, the TV coverage, the print media, the former players, the umpires or the referees? Or are all equally complicit? How could this unseemly trend be reversed; by sharper penalties, bans, or disqualifications? If there are no more gentlemen playing the game, then allow the free-for-all to continue unchecked, starting at school and university level.
No international team is exempt from the reputation of bad behaviour. Perhaps New Zealand comes closest to playing the gentleman’s game like gentlemen, and they win matches. But no other side takes them as an exemplar. Women’s cricket mercifully does not suffer from deviations in proper etiquette but these are early days; the media baying for red-meat to propel ratings have still not taken sufficient interest in the ladies game to corrupt it.
In short, let us lament the demise of cricket as the gentleman’s game; it has long ceased to be so. “Times change and we change with them”, as the Roman poet Arbiter wrote in 600 AD. Before long, cricket hooligans will arrive on the scene to emulate their brethren the football hooligans.
(Krishnan Srinivasan is a former foreign secretary and author.)
Reportedly
Against the backdrop of The Economic Times, an Indian business daily's getting caught running an AI-hallucinated – that is, manufactured – quote from disinformation expert Nina Jankowicz, journalist Nic Dawes reminds us that while newsrooms may find it tempting to ‘edit by AI-augmented algorithms’, they must “consider that [they] cannot build the direct, trusted, relationships with readers that keeps them coming back, and paying, on AI slop. For that, they can go straight to the source.”
Pen vs sword
Deep dive
Many hamlets in northern Telangana's forests are cut off from the rest of the state – including its healthcare centres and schools – during the monsoon, but regulations prohibit building permanent structures inside sanctuary areas. So officials took to jugaad and tried running clinics and schools from inside shipping containers instead, which has seen some success, reports P Laxma Reddy from Mulugu, which is home to Gutti Koya tribespeople who settled here after fleeing the Maoist conflict in Chhattisgarh.
Prime number: 4-5 lakh employees
Tata Consultancy Services' decision to lay off around 12,200 employees is but a sign of what is to come in the outsourcing sector as it more widely adopts AI, say experts, one of whom estimates speaking to Reuters that around four or five lakh employees risk losing their jobs over the next two to three years “as their skills don't match client demands”. The positions that are most vulnerable to being hit are people managers with few or no tech skills, testing personnel and infrastructure management staff.Opeds you don’t want to miss
Donald Trump’s ‘secondary tariffs’ are a close cousin of sanctions, writes Andy Mukherjee. “New Delhi should be wary. The goal of the punitive tax is to get Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the Ukraine War,” he writes. “Team Modi must switch its focus”, and not bother too much at the moment to negotiate a discount to the 25 percent of the reciprocal tariff. “Getting the secondary tax cancelled in Trump’s three-week grace period has to be the more immediate goal.”
The cricket series between England and India in the UK has revived interest in a format that for many has been long gone, the five-day test. On the head coach of Indian team Gautam Gambhir, Rahul Bhattacharya writes:
“Their coach Gautam Gambhir, whose facial language tends to resemble a root vegetable languishing in the refrigerator too long, could be a cussed batter, like his predecessors, Rahul Dravid and Ravi Shastri. But Dravid and Shastri were thoroughly attacking tacticians, inclined towards an extra bowler, and unlikely to altogether sideline a wrist spinner, the one species capable of making magic on flat decks. But then Gambhir, whose credentials as a recent MP for India’s ruling party, the BJP, in no way harmed his prospects for landing the job, was doubly cautious because of the horror start to his tenure — a whitewash by New Zealand at home and a pounding in Australia.”
Personality politics will not make up for the Global South’s mistrust of India’s purely self-serving strategic autonomy, writes Bharat Bhushan. Referring to the high tariffs the US has imposed on India, Bhushan writes, “It is not the misreading of the relationship with Trump that has led to India’s current denouement. The malaise lies in the mistaken belief that the personal charisma of a leader is sufficient to shape India’s relationship with the world.” Nehru’s rapport with leaders like Gamel Abdul Nasser and Josef Tito were based on shared values, he points out.
Retired top cop Julio Ribeiro grieves for his late friend Hemant Karkare who was gunned down during the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November 2008. “We mourned his death at that time. Today, we mourn the demise of justice after seven accused, including former BJP MP Pragya Singh Thakur and Lt Col Prasad Purohit, were acquitted in the 2008 Malegaon blast case,” he says, in the vein of a man who never hesitated to speak his mind. Ribeiro says Karkare had called him the day before he was killed. “Karkare had been advised by a top BJP leader from Delhi to go slow on Pragya (a request that unnerved him and nudged him to seek my counsel).”
All parties that have emerged from Bal Thackeray’s Shiv Sena – the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, and the two Shiv Senas run by Eknath Shinde and Uddhav Thackeray, are “in the grip of uncertainty and tension”, writes Rohit Chandavarkar. There is internal conflict in the Mahayuti parties too, he says. The BJP is not letting go of any opportunity to corner Eknath Shinde or perhaps they don’t need him any more.
Listen up
Despite what one might hear today, the Mughals “saw religion as a very personal affair and rarely tried to convert non-Muslims”, the eminent historian Richard Eaton tells Sidharth Bhatia in this episode of The Wire Talks, adding that they “saw fooling around with religion as something that would only endanger the stability of the state”. He also says that trying to erase the Mughals' legacy from India would be a fool's errand because ‘their influence on art, culture, good, language and everything else in India is all-pervasive and part of India’.
Watch out
Taking off from the closure of prominent cases such as those against Satyendar Jain and Suresh Kalmadi, and keeping in mind the ED's very low conviction rate in cases against politicians, the Hindustan Times's Sunetra Choudhury scrutinises the ED and the CBI's record, asking whether it “is … a sign of systemic failure – or politicisation”.
Over and out
Rahul Gandhi’s made strong allegations about vote theft, but the shockwave seems to have escaped the lead sections of many newspapers English and Hindi, Newslaundry points out.
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.