Police Puts UP Congress Chief Under House Arrest to Prevent Him From Visiting Ayodhya Ram Temple; Why This Present Ongoing SIR Must Go; Uddhav Thackeray-Led Shiv Sena Loses Yet Another Legislator
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
June 30, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
The Adityanath BJP-led Uttar Pradesh government is so “scared” that Congress unit chief Ajay Rai has been placed under house arrest at an Ayodhya hotel, ahead of a high-level Congress party delegation – led by Rai and comprising MPs Kishori Lal Sharma, Rakesh Rathor, Ujjwal Raman Singh and Tanuj Punia – planned visit to offer prayers at the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Former Rajya Sabha MP and senior Congress leader A.P. Gautam too was supposed to join, but was reportedly stopped by the police from leaving his home in Barabanki.
The Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Sewa Samiti was supposed to hold a press conference over the donation embezzlement allegations in Ayodhya today but the organisation says it was twice denied permission for the same. “So we cancelled the event,” its general secretary Achyut Shankar Shukla told Akanksha Kumar.
Meanwhile, Shankaracharya Swami Avimukteshwaranand questioned the BJP’s accountability, asking how those who once styled themselves as the nation’s “Chowkidar” could now be associated with, or allow, such theft.
As they resolved to do during their meeting earlier this month, the opposition INDIA bloc’s constituents today jointly sent a letter to Chief Justice of India Surya Kant expressing their concerns over the Election Commission’s contentious special intensive revision of the voter rolls. Though the DMK and the AAP had skipped that meeting – the former has felt cheesed off by the Congress ditching it for Vijay after the Tamil Nadu poll results came out – the two parties too are said to have thrown their weight behind the letter, in addition to independent Rajya Sabha MP Kapil Sibal, marking a total of 23 signatories.
Last week marked the passage of one year since the EC first rolled out the SIR. Sravasti Dasgupta has a snapshot of the exercise’s impact a year on: including 27 lakh people being held back from voting in West Bengal for the unprecedented reason of want of time to adjudicate on their appeals, and some governments moving to exclude deleted electors from welfare schemes. Another impact is one we have no inkling of: the poll body has cited foreigners’ presence on the rolls as a reason for the SIR, but the public to date does not know how many such individuals the EC has swept up. For more on this subject, scroll on to The Long Cable below.
