Rahul Gandhi Silenced in Lok Sabha, Eight Protesting MPs Suspended; Y Khemchand Set to Be New Manipur CM; US Official Says India to Eliminate Tariffs on Industrial Goods, Wines, Fruits & Vegetables
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal 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
February 3, 2026
Sidharth Bhatia
Y. Khemchand Singh of the BJP is set to be Manipur’s next chief minister as he was elected leader of his legislature party in the state on Tuesday. The BJP called its and Manipur’s NDA MLAs to Delhi for a meeting today and Vijaita Singh had reported that both Meitei and Kuki-Zo legislators were among those who headed for the capital. PTI reports that Nemcha Kipgen, a Kuki leader, is likely to be made deputy CM. (Some Kuki groups have expressed their opposition to the formation of a popular government with the support of Kuki MLAs unless there were assurances towards a separate administration for them carved out of the strife-torn state.) The events make it unlikely that President’s Rule – set to reach the one-year mark on the 13th – will continue for long in Manipur.
Eight Lok Sabha MPs were suspended by voice vote on Tuesday – seven from the Congress and one from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – after they raised slogans and threw torn paper in the House earlier in the day. They were protesting leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi not being allowed to complete his remarks as part of the motion of thanks on the president’s address. Gandhi had once again tried to bring up the former Army chief’s recountal – in his yet-to-be-greenlit memoir via excerpts in Sushant Singh’s Caravan article – that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had passed the buck to the general amid Chinese advancement in eastern Ladakh in August 2020.
Speaking outside parliament on Tuesday the LoP said he was not allowed to speak because Modi was “compromised”, and alleged that the prime minister reached a ‘trade deal’ with US President Donald Trump on Monday night because he was under pressure by US authorities’ civil and criminal bribery case against Gautam Adani and because of revelations in the Epstein files that have not yet been released. He did not elaborate on the latter, and of the former he said it “targets not Adani but Modi’s financial structure”.
Speaker Om Birla on Monday had cited Rules 349 and 353 of the Lok Sabha’s procedural and business conduct rules to prevent Gandhi from quoting General Naravane in the House, but Sravasti Dasgupta reports that these grounds may be shaky. While Union ministers Rajnath Singh and Amit Shah had protested saying unpublished material cannot be quoted, neither rule says that, she points out. Rule 349 says articles unrelated to the House’s business must not be drawn from, but former Lok Sabha secretary general P.D.T. Achary says this didn’t apply on Monday – in fact, he pointed out, the motion of thanks is generally an event when “every subject under the sun is liberally allowed to be discussed”. And while Rule 353 creates a procedure for allegations against individual MPs to be raised in the House, Achary argued that what Gandhi was about to say didn’t fall in this category.
That General Naravane’s memoir is still awaiting official clearance despite having been set for an early 2024 release “amply illustrate[s] why even the most senior and respected veterans
