PM Modi Decides to Skip Going to Kuala Lumpur for the East Asia Summit; Reliance Industries to Soon ‘Recalibrate’ Oil Supplies from Russia; Tejashwi Yadav to be CM face of Grand Alliance in Bihar

Sixty Hospitalised in Bhopal After Calcium Carbide Gun Injuries on Diwali, Reclaiming Ground for Democracy in Bihar, Uncontrollable Pilgrim Flows in Fragile Char Dham Circuit

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

---

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

October 23, 2025

Sidharth Bhatia

In a move that has raised eyebrows across diplomatic circles, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided to skip in-person participation at the East Asia Summit later this month – a rare absence from a key multilateral forum central to India’s Act East policy.

The annual gathering, set to begin on October 26 in Kuala Lumpur, will now see External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar representing India, while the Prime Minister is expected to virtually attend the summit. The decision – coming just three days before the summit – is highly unusual in diplomatic practice and has triggered speculation about what might lie behind it.

Officially, the explanation is because of festivities: Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim posted on X that Modi had informed him over a phone call that he would attend virtually “due to the ongoing Deepavali celebrations in India.” But few in the strategic community are convinced that the festival alone explains a sudden change of plans for a summit of this stature.

The absence has been described by foreign policy observers as a missed opportunity and a signal of drift in India’s engagement with ASEAN – especially at a time when China’s influence in the region continues to deepen. With Trump scheduled to attend the Kuala Lumpur summit as part of his three-nation Asia visit, there had been expectations that the Indian and US leaders might meet even as negotiations on an India–US trade deal appear to have stalled, making the Kuala Lumpur summit one of the few remaining chances this year for Modi to meet Trump face-to-face.

Since taking office in 2014, Modi has been present at every East Asia Summit until 2019. The 2020 and 2021 editions were held virtually due to the pandemic. In 2022, then-Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar represented India in Cambodia, the only time Modi did not attend. He resumed participation in 2023 in Thailand and travelled to the 2024 summit in Laos.

Flows of Russian crude to India are set to plunge after Washington imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies Rosneft PJSC and Lukoil PJSC, tightening the screws on Moscow’s oil exports and putting New Delhi in a diplomatic bind. The move comes as