No, Mumbai Police, You Can't Banish Someone For Saying ‘Amit Shah Murdabad’; India Must Ask Itself: Do We Want to Take a Stand on the Atrocities Against Palestinian Children or Not?
For subscribers: What can renaming PCOS achieve for Indian women?
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK
If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.
Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.
Snapshot of the day
July 2, 2026
Anirudh S.K.
News flash: sloganeering against the powers that be is not, in fact, valid grounds to banish someone from a city. Bombay high court Justice Madhav Jamdar was constrained to point this out today because the Mumbai police – in BJP-ruled Maharashtra – had ordered Socialist Democratic Party of India leader Saeed Chaudhary externed from the city and its suburbs for a year for protesting against the Modi government. Actually, a baffled Justice Jamdar said much more than just that:
“What is this? All citizens are being made slaves of [the] Indian government … They cannot stage protests, they cannot agitate – what is all this? … It is the right of the citizens to protest … The petitioner has just raised slogans like ‘BJP government murdabad’, ‘Amit Shah murdabad’ … Why [can’t citizens] raise such slogans? Why externment orders for such slogans?”
Nor are the police servants of the government: “they are public servants … I am going to impose hefty costs on your officers”, LiveLaw‘s Narsi Benwal quotes the judge as remarking orally. He also railed against paper leaks and politicians busying themselves with horse-trading – at one point joking that Chaudhary ought to switch sides in view of the familiar “washing machine” – before formally quashing the externment order. It is malafide and undermines Chaudhary’s fundamental rights to free speech and dignity, Justice Jamdar said.
Of course, that the Mumbai police considered externing him at all need not surprise us. Just last week we got a flavourful sample of the attitude that those on high have towards people who sloganeer against them – when Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan was pleased to deem the Cockroach Janta Party and its supporters, who have been demanding that he step down, the ‘B-team’ of terrorists.
India, which has spent much of the last four years buying discounted Russian crude, now appears to be sending fuel back the other way. Russia has begun seaborne petrol imports from India as Ukrainian drone strikes on its energy infrastructure deepen shortages across the country, forcing even President Vladimir Putin to admit, unusually, that there isn’t enough fuel. Citing industry sources, Reuters reports that at least 60,000 tonnes of petrol have been dispatched from India, including two tanker parcels of about 30,000-40,000 tonnes each. Moscow says it is talking to other countries too about imports at ‘acceptable prices’.
Meanwhile, in New Delhi, Ireland at the launch of its six-month presidency of the Council of the European Union
