PM at the Tiller, Adani Looks to Make Landfall in Greece; Supreme Court Questions Suspension of J&K Lecturer Who Argued Against 370 Scrapping

Mamata sees Dec 2023 elections, ISRO’s solar probe to launch on Saturday, Cong says Gujarat overpaid Adani Power Rs 3,900 cr, Neeraj Chopra wins, Simplipal tigers turning black, Konkona speaks

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

Snapshot of the day

August 28, 2023

Pratik Kanjilal

ISRO has announced that its solar probe Aditya-L1 will lift off from Sriharikota at 11:50 am IST on Saturday, September 2. It will carry seven payloads of instrumentation to observe the photosphere, chromosphere and solar corona. It will send back data from the L1 Lagrangian point 1.5 million km away, where the gravitational forces of the earth are in equilibrium, and a spacecraft put there is likely to stay put. 

The Chief Justice of India has instructed the Attorney General of India to seek the reasons for the dismissal of college teacher Zaroor Ahmed Bhat shortly after the Supreme Court heard his arguments against the abrogation of Article 370. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta had suggested  that he lost his job because of other issues. The court said that if it was otherwise, that would be a “problem”. 

Mamata Banerjee suspects Narendra Modi is looking to advance the Lok Sabha elections of 2024 to as early as December 2023 because the BJP has “booked all the helicopters” parties normally use for campaigning.

The VHP does not have permission to resume a shobha yatra called by the Sarv Jatiya Hindu Mahapanchayat, which had triggered violence in Nuh, but it is carrying on regardless today. The area has been sealed and seers heading for it were stopped in Gurugram. Hindu leaders in Gurugram are restricted to their homes. 

Isha Ambani, Akash Ambani and Anant Ambani have been inducted today as non-executive directors of Reliance Industries Ltd. Nita Ambani has resigned from the Board “to devote her energies and time to guide and enable Reliance Foundation (RF) to make even greater impact for India.”

Pro-Khalistan graffiti has been found in at least five stations of the Delhi Metro, ahead of the G20 summit. 

AltNews reveals that a Facebook page (now deleted) titled ‘Narendra Bhupendra - નરેન્દ્ર ભૂપેન્દ્ર', named after PM Narendra Modi and Gujarat CM Bhupendra Patel, violated Election Commission norms during the 2022 Assembly polls. The page spent Rs 55,53,940 on running 3,100 political advertisements on Facebook and Instagram from June 14, 2022, till the Gujarat assembly elections held in December.

The G20 culture ministers’ meet in Varanasi has failed to frame a joint statement because Russia and China objected to the language used about Ukraine. PM Modi sent a message underscoring the importance of restituting cultural property. He is in Greece, which has renewed demands for the return of the Elgin Marbles by the UK, following the discovery of mass thefts at the British Museum. 

Neeraj Chopra is the first Indian to win gold in the Asian Athletics Championship. The day before, Muhammed Anas, Amoj Jacob, Muhammed Ajmal Variyathodi and Rajesh Ramesh broke an Asian record and qualified for the men’s 4x400 relay final. 

With a little material help from Neeraj Chopra, athletics has become the rage in his home village of Khandra, near Panipat. 

A Muslim boy in a Muzaffarnagar village who was slapped by his classmates on the instructions of her teacher has politicians crawling all over his house, urging the family not to present it as a Hindu-Muslim issue. The region has been at peace since the riots of 2013, and they want to keep it that way. The local community, however, had urged the family to take legal action. Mohammed Zubair of AltNews, who was among the first to share a video of the incident, has been booked by the police for revealing the identity of the minor victim. 

In Ahmednagar, Maharashtra, four Dalit boys were hung upside down from trees and thrashed on the suspicion of stealing goats and pigeons. Prakash Ambedkar, president of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi, has taken up the issue and threatens a stir. 

In Attock Jail, Imran Khan says he has lost the confidential diplomatic cable which he had referred to to substantiate his claim that the US wanted to unseat him. A case has been filed against him for wrongful use of the document under the Official Secrets Act. He is presently in jail on a corruption charge. 

In the run-up to the G20 summit in Delhi, Rishi Sunak faces another conflict of interest controversy about a trade deal with India, which would benefit Infosys. His wife Akshata Murty holds shares worth GBP 500 million, and would be a potential beneficiary. Labour seeks more transparency about negotiations for the deal.  

The prodigiously talented Jayanta Mahapatra, one of the last great bilingual poets and the first winner of a Sahitya Akademi Award for poetry in English, passed away in his home city of Cuttack, Odisha, aged 95. A founder of Indian writing in English, along with poets like Nissim Ezekiel and AK Ramanujan, he was also editor of the respected literary journal Chandrabhaga. In 2015, he returned his Padma award in protest against the growing culture of hatred in India.   

In the past three months, a forest guard and a forest ranger have been shot dead in the Similipal Tiger Reserve in Odisha, Asia’s second-largest biosphere reserve. Aishwarya Mohanty reports how the deaths led to widespread protests by non-gazetted forest officials seeking better security and immunity. 

Tigers in Simlipal are turning ‘melanistic’, says the local press ― their stripes are so thick that their skin has practically turned black. Forest officers seek an explanation for the unique phenomenon. 

Arun Veerappan, who gave Kamal Haasan his break as a child artiste and pioneered digital film projection in the south, has died aged 90. 

Meera Srinivasan reports on a conversation the musician TM Krishna had with writer Perumal Muruguan and historian AR Venkatachalapthy in Jaffna, Sri Lanka recently.

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