Report Exposes Communal Prejudice Among Police; Delhi HC Restores Modi Critic’s OCI Card; How New Is Naya Bharat's New Power Elite?
What does Yogi Adityanath have to do with Nepal and its re-emerging monarchists? Watch how former JDS leader Syed Shafiullah handled a podcaster who was worked up about Muslims praying on the roads.
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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable
Snapshot of the day
March 28, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
India, which also felt tremors in cities like Kolkata and Imphal, expressed its readiness to assist Myanmar and Thailand following a devastating 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck central Myanmar early Friday afternoon. The earthquake, which rocked Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-most populous city, also sent tremors more than 600 miles away to Bangkok, Thailand. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake, centred near Sagaing, was followed by several aftershocks, including one with a magnitude of 6.4.
Myanmar’s military junta, which seized power in a 2021 coup, declared a state of emergency in the capital Naypyidaw and five other regions. Due to the country’s ongoing political turmoil, reliable information on the ground is scarce. A member of a rescue team in Mandalay told the BBC, “The damage is enormous, and the number of deaths is quite high. The exact casualty figure is still unknown, but it’s at least in the hundreds.”
In Thailand, authorities declared a state of emergency in Bangkok after a building under construction collapsed, killing at least three people and trapping dozens more. The full extent of the casualties in both countries is still being assessed.
Noting that judges are duty-bound to uphold the fundamental right to free speech under Article 19(1) even if they don’t like what was said, the Supreme Court on Friday quashed the FIR registered by the Gujarat Police against Congress MP Imran Pratapgarhi over an allegedly inflammatory Instagram post, reports Live Law. A bench of Justice Abhay Oka and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan observed that no offence was made out:
“Literature and arts make life more meaningful; freedom of expression is necessary for a dignified life. Free expression of thoughts and views by individuals or groups of individuals is an integral part of a healthy civilised society. Without freedom of expression of thoughts and views, it is impossible to lead a dignified life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution. In a healthy democracy, the views of thoughts expressed by an individual or group of individuals must be countered by expressing another point of view … Even if a large number of persons dislike the views expressed by another, the right of person to express the views must be respected and protected. Literature including poetry, dramas, films, satire, and art make the life of human beings more meaningful.”
The court also reportedly criticised the Gujarat high court for not quashing the FIR against Pratapgarhi. “The endeavour of the Court should be to always protect and promote the fundamental rights including the freedom of speech and expression which is the most important right citizens can have in all liberal constitutional democracy,” the court said.
About the police officers’ haste in filing an FIR, the court said,
“The police officer must abide by the Constitution and respect the ideals. The philosophy of the constitutional ideals can be found in the Constitution itself. In the preamble, it is laid down that the people of India solemnly decided to constitute India into a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic and to secure for all its citizens liberty of thought and expression. Therefore, liberty of thought and expression is one of the ideals of our constitution. The police officers being citizens are bound to abide by the constitution and they are bound to uphold the right.”
Speaking of which, a shocking new study, ‘Status of Policing in India Report 2025’, has laid bare the deep-seated communal prejudice within India’s police force, with personnel from Gujarat, Delhi, Rajasthan and Maharashtra being the most likely to believe that Muslims are “naturally prone” to crime. The findings expose the rot at the heart of law enforcement, where bigotry replaces justice. Hindu police personnel, the worst offenders in this mindset, overwhelmingly buy into anti-Muslim stereotypes, making a mockery of their oath to uphold impartiality. Disturbingly, even 40% of Muslim police officers have internalized this toxic narrative, showing how state-backed propaganda seeps into the very fabric of institutions meant to protect all citizens. The study by Common Cause, Lokniti-CSDS and Lal Family Foundation also reveals that one-third of both Hindu and Muslim officers believe Christians are also “prone” to crime, exposing a widespread culture of religious profiling. This raises a chilling question – when bigotry drives policing, who ensures justice for minorities?
The BJP government in Haryana has said Eid will only be a restricted rather than a general holiday in the state. Why? Officially, because the day falls on March 31, which is the end of the financial year. And would any BJP government ever do the same for a Hindu festival if its date coincided with some similar date? We all know the answer.
Meanwhile, the Meerut police on Wednesday gave a list of eight persons to the District Magistrate saying they violated last year’s order that prohibited offering namaz on the streets during Eid. The police said they have begun steps to cancel their passports and licences. Talking about the extensive security measures being taken ahead of Eid this year, Meerut’s Superintendent of Police Ayush Vikram Singh said, “We will not allow prayers on the streets this year. Anyone who attempts to do so will be booked and will face the cancellation of their arms licence and passport.” Union minister of state and RLD chief Jayant Chaudhary has sharply criticised a recent warning from the Meerut police that those who do namaz on the streets could face cancellation of their passports and licences and registration of criminal cases, calling it “Policing towards Orwellian 1984!”.
Of course, Big Brother is busy spreading love.
Stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra has been granted transit anticipatory bail by the Madras High Court in a case filed against him in Mumbai concerning his satirical remarks about Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde. The case was mentioned for urgent hearing before Justice Sundar Mohan on Friday. Kamra said in his petition that the Madras High Court had jurisdiction to provide him such protection as he is a permanent resident of Villupuram town in Tamil Nadu.
In a blow to Russia’s crude trade, India has denied entry to the Honduran-flagged oil tanker Andaman Skies from docking at Vadinar due to incomplete documentation, reports Reuters. The vessel, laden with 767,000 barrels of Russian crude for Indian Oil Corp., remains stranded in the Arabian Sea, exposing the mounting risks in Moscow’s shadowy oil trade. India, a key buyer of Russian crude post-Ukraine invasion, has been under scrutiny for its dealings with sanctioned oil. While Andaman Skies isn’t on the latest U.S. blacklist, the UK has already flagged it. With the tanker idling between Oman and India, the episode signals growing hurdles for Russian crude’s backdoor entry into global markets. Is India finally tightening its leash on Moscow’s murky oil dealings?
Three police personnel and two militants were killed during an encounter in an area of the Kathua district in Jammu and Kashmir that is close to the international border. The encounter began yesterday morning when a cordon-and-search operation, part of a larger anti-insurgency operation, came under fire in the area yesterday morning. The slain police personnel were identified as constables Tariq Ahmad, Jaswant Singh and Balwinder Singh.
Two and a half years after it denied her a journalism permit and over a year after it issued a notice for the revocation of her Overseas Citizen of India status, the Union home affairs ministry granted French journalist Vanessa Dougnac a journalism permit, she announced. Although the then-foreign secretary had claimed that the government’s action against Dougnac was unrelated to her reportage, she said that the MHA’s notice on her OCI card said her articles were “malicious” and harming “the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India”.
The arrest (and re-arrest) of The CrossCurrent journalist Dilwar Mozumder comes against the backdrop of Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s grappling with a novel power centre in the state BJP: its new president Dilip Saikia, Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty points out. While Saikia has sent signals to the state’s journalists that they must not avoid constructive criticism of the government, Sarma has grown increasingly aggressive towards the media and recently told one outlet that it must do only positive stories on the BJP if it wants higher TRPs. Might Mozumder’s detention – he was covering allegations of a scam at a bank where Sarma is president – be a way of Sarma’s suggesting that in Assam he calls the shots on press freedom?
After initially declining his asylum application, the Irish judiciary granted asylum to the family of a Mumbai-based businessman who said he was attacked and hounded by cow vigilantes for transporting buffalo meat starting in 2017. Danish Khan reports.
Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon who has lived in Britain for three decades, has told colleagues that he will leave Britain over the government’s plans to end the “non-dom” tax regime, which gave some UK residents a way to avoid paying British tax on income earned abroad. “He is exploring his options and will take a final decision over the course of this year,” a friend of Mittal told The Financial Times. “There is a good chance he will cease to be a UK tax resident.” The UK government’s crackdown has resulted in a stream of billionaires departing Britain, with many choosing to relocate to the UAE, Italy and Switzerland, which have friendlier tax regimes. The 226-year-old non-dom rules allowed UK residents who declared their permanent home as being overseas to avoid paying British tax on their foreign income.
A parliamentary standing committee has noted that there has been an “unusual decline” in placements in IITs with many B. Tech placements recording a drop of over 10 percentage points in 2023-24 against 2021-22. Jobs crisis, anyone?
Delhi HC restores Modi Critic’s OCI Card
In a scathing rebuke to the Modi government’s crackdown on dissent, the Delhi High Court on Friday set aside its arbitrary cancellation of academic Ashok Swain’s OCI card, reports Live Law. Swain, a vocal critic of Modi’s policies, was stripped of his Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status in what was seen as a clear act of political vendetta. His lawyers argued in court that he cannot be witch-hunted for his views, exposing the regime’s relentless persecution of intellectuals. This is the second time the court has struck down the cancelation of Swain’s OCI status. As it did in 2023, the court once again allowed the Centre to issue a fresh and reasoned notice, the ruling is a stark reminder of not just the government’s authoritarian streak but its disregard for the courts. The 2024 notification canceling his OCI card issued after the last HC ruling again avoided giving any detailed reasons. How much longer before India resists this assault on free speech?
Nepali Bhutanese men who went to US as refugees reportedly deported
Officials of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported at least four Bhutanese men of Nepali ethnicity after detaining them, a spokesperson representing the community in Pennsylvania has said, reports Ivey DeJesus. Tilak Niroula, the spokesperson, said the men were en route to India and would then be transported to Bhutan; he feared that if they were taken to Bhutan they would be ‘permanently imprisoned’. The men are believed to have been granted legal refugee status in the US and arrived there after fleeing the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bhutan against its Nepali-speaking Lhotshampa people. All men who were detained in the last two weeks “have had some type of encounter with the law”, DeJesus notes.
What does Yogi Adityanath have to do with Nepal and its re-emerging monarchists? A lot
The appearance of posters featuring Yogi Adityanath among supporters of the monarchy during a recent rally in Kathmandu had sparked a political controversy in Nepal. But Yogi’s association with pro-monarchy sentiment and the royals themselves goes back a long way in time, and his role as mahant of the Gorakhnath temple means he is the inheritor of a tradition of close links between Hindu nationalists on either side of the border. Omar Rashid explores these links as well as what Yogi has had to say about the secularisation of Nepal and about the restoration of its (Hindu) monarchy.
The Long Cable
How New Is the New Power Elite?
Sanjaya Baru
Sometime in the 1990s, when New Delhi came out of its socialist mindset and embraced free enterprise and the rich and powerful were no longer shy of celebrating their elitism, the Delhi media began publishing a list of the rich, famous and powerful. There was an earlier era when the powerful played down their power and the wealthy shied away from showing off. That is passé. Today the arrogance of power is on full display and billionaire bling is on reality TV.
Over the past quarter century, the national media periodically put out lists of billionaires, of the politically powerful and of the ‘movers and shakers’ in the Delhi Darbar. Any such list is always contested. Everyone tends to have an opinion on whether X deserved to be at No.3, while Y is at No. 33. That is partly the purpose of publishing such lists. To seek a talking point around a publication. Listing the rich is easy since there are numbers that define them. Listing the ‘powerful’ is not that simple. Any such list can and will be disputed.
I know of individuals who were eager to get on to such lists and even know some who were unhappy to attract attention to themselves. A senior civil servant who kept a low profile through most of his career finally stepped out to even pose in front of a camera, with bright lights penetrating the dark corners of his South Block office when a magazine listed him in the country’s ten most powerful. Such has been the appeal of these lists.
While some may pooh-pooh these exercises in pandering to the vanity of the powerful, such lists do tell us something both about changes in the composition of the country’s power elite and the media’s perception of who constitute the elite.
The Indian Express’s ‘ List of the Most Powerful Indians’ (March 2025), once again offers an interesting data base for a student of power. Coming as this list does a full decade after a major regime change in New Delhi, this year’s list also offers us a basis to judge the kind of transformation that has occurred in the country’s pyramid of power.
Of course, like all such lists this one too is the product of the subjective thinking of the newspaper’s editors and publishers. That’s par for the course. Questions will not only be asked about the list itself but also about the ranking within the list. By what definition of power does Mohan Bhagwat, the RSS chief, figure in rank below foreign minister S Jaishankar. Or, indeed, can Amitabh Bhachchan really be pushed all the way down to 99 out of 100? There is no point wasting time on such questions. The more interesting ones to ask are what is the social composition of any list of the ‘powerful’ and what does it tell us about the changing power structure.
First, some facts. Of the country’s 100 most powerful, the IE list has only 7 women (4 politicians, 2 billionaires and one movie actor). In the top 50 of the most powerful, 16 are Brahmins, 9 Banias, 2 OBCs, one Dalit (Kharge), one tribal (Soren) and one Muslim (Omar Abdullah). Among the top 50 only 9 are from South India (5 chief ministers, two politicians, one sportsperson and one industrialist). There isn’t a single scientist, scholar or educationist in this list of the powerful and only one engineer (the administrative head of ISRO).
There are many ways in which this list, like any other, can be dissected. Profession, religion, caste and region are of particular relevance to understanding the composition of the country’s power elite.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the opinion makers who sought to define him have long argued that his assumption of power constituted a regime change. In many ways it has and I have tried to capture some dimensions of that change in my book, India’s Power Elite: Class, Caste and a Cultural Revolution (Viking Penguin, 2021). Yet, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, the more things change the more they remain the same. The individuals who have entered ‘Lutyens ki Dunya’, as Modi once dubbed the Delhi Darbar, may have changed but their caste and regional identity has not changed by much. The Khan Market Gang now wears saffron and votes for Rekha Gupta.
A similar list of 100 most powerful done in 2013 would perhaps not have included Mohan Bhagwat and Gautam Adani in the top 10, but they would have figured in the top 100 or so. There are of course new entrants to any such list, but its caste and class composition would have been similar. So too the regional spread of the top hundred. As Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council observed recently, there has been little churn within the business elite in India with 7 out of 10 top business groups of 2005 remaining within the top 10 in 2025.
What should worry any society is the gender bias (only 7 women out of 100) and the regional bias (only 19 South Indians out of 100) and that entertainers are viewed as more powerful than scholars and scientists. While some may criticise any such list and prefer one over another, the fact remains that the benefits of the growth process remain skewed in a variety of ways and so does our imagination of power.
(Sanjaya Baru is an author, a former newspaper editor and adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.)
Reportedly
Why do Muslims in some areas come on to the roads to say the namaz on Fridays? Chances are you’ve heard that question from a politician, a Hindutva-oriented person or even a friend or acquaintance. Syed Shafiullah, a former JD(S) leader from Karnataka who left his party when it allied with the BJP, was recently asked the same thing by a podcaster and his answer left his interviewer at a loss for words. “Tell me, do Hindus in India never do anything on the roads or in a public place? Do the kavad yatris walk at home? Are huge statues of Ganesha in Mumbai not left on the streets for days?” Shafiullah was not arguing that two wrongs make a right as much as asking his interviewer why the presence of Hindus doing religious acts on the street never raises questions.
Deep dive
In the 1970s, Kerala’s average income was about two-thirds of the Indian average, making it among the poorest states in India. However, in the coming decades, Kerala became one of the richest. Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman on the prominent elements in the story that made it happen.
Prime number: 1,100,000,000,000 hours
Indians spent a combined total of 1.1 trillion hours on smartphones last year. Together, we dedicated on average five hours every day to our smartphones, “70% of it devoted to social media platforms, gaming and videos”. In terms of daily average smartphone time India lagged behind only Indonesia and Brazil, reports Satviki Sanjay.
Opeds you don’t want to miss
Religious processions have often led to riots, writes Kunal Purohit, but what is unfolding now is different: the nature of the mob, the digital afterlife of these processions and the state abandoning neutrality. Writing about UP’s mosque coverings as a new chapter from the Hindutva playbook unfolds, he says we should brace ourselves for more tarpaulin sheets.
In light of the Justice Yashwant Varma matter, Prashant Bhushan argues that the right way to handle the removal of judges in the higher judiciary must not involve parliament but a “high-powered and full-time judicial complaints commission” that is independent both of the government and the judiciary. He also says the ideal way to appoint judges would be through a “full-time judicial appointments commission”.
“This isn’t the United States, where the First Amendment is treated like sacred text,” writes Anurag Verma amid the hounding of Kunal Kamra. “We prefer the other kind of amendment, where people are expected to amend their words to suit the ever-expanding Republic of the Offended.”
Can the US and India have a defence partnership that is premised on ‘mutual indispensability’? Air vice marshal (retired) Manmohan Bahadur’s appraisal is that a “truthful analysis of their respective defence research and development and manufacturing sectors shows that there is great asymmetry in the capabilities, and the follow up can only result in India’s stifling dependency on the US”.
While it may be “easy to conclude that there is nothing but momentum for India” – with a history of warm relations between Trump and Modi and the emergence of multipolarity on a global level – “the jury remains out on whether the age of nationalist politics will benefit the Indian people”, writes Marietje Schaake. “The narrative of India as a rising global power is compelling but it must ensure that its rule of law grows with the same ambition as its digital economy.”
Kani Kusruti writes about colourism in India:
“To begin with, a memory: I’m a child, whose relatives advise her to wear only light-coloured clothes. “If you wear black or any other dark shade, we can’t see you,” they complain, only half joking. This stricture — “don’t wear black!” — breeds in me a distaste for lighter colours. Ask me now and I’ll tell you how much I love black, and that I wear it all the time. And that, to me, it’s just a colour, like blue or orange. But that’s not all, is it?”
Listen up
The Great Nicobar mega infrastructure project is bad for the island on the environmental, geological as well as social fronts, says researcher Pankaj Sekhsaria to Sidharth Bhatia in The Wire Talks.
Watch out
The News Minute editor Dhanya Rajendran and transparency activist Anjali Bhardwaj speak to Jahnavi Sen about the brouhaha in the wake of Kunal Kamra’s latest comedy special, the alleged discovery of cash from the residential premises of Delhi high court Justice Yashwant Varma, as well as the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and “how it will infringe on people's access to information and ability to hold the government accountable”.
Over and out
“Have you ever held a puppy that was so unbelievably fluffy and adorable you didn’t know how to convey the strong urge to squeeze it without sounding like a maniac?” asks the Guardian? Turns out there’s a word for that emotion: gigil. Gigil (pronounced ghee-gill) is one of the new words that have made it into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Gigil, extracted from Tagalog, the language of the Philippines, it refers to what psychologists describe as cute aggression: “[a] feeling so intense that it gives us the irresistible urge to tightly clench our hands, grit our teeth, and pinch or squeeze whomever or whatever it is we find so adorable”.
In a surprising cultural crossover, King Charles and Queen Camilla were welcomed at Westminster Abbey in the UK with the iconic Bollywood tune ‘Dhoom Machale,’ performed by the Shree Muktajeevan Swamibapa Pipe Band. This unexpected musical choice left desi viewers in disbelief and sparked a flurry of reactions online. Some netizens joked, “That’s clearly Hrithik Roshan disguised as Camilla,” while others quipped, “Leaked footage from Dhoom 4.”
OpenAI’s latest image generator, inspired by Studio Ghibli, has set the internet abuzz with memes, including this one depicting the classic aborted ‘dosti bani rahe’ interview Narendra Modi gave Karan Thapar before fleeing.
Fans are in awe of the whimsical, hand-painted aesthetic of Ghibli. And those worried about AI infringing copyright, Ghibli itself is an echo of an earlier style in Japan. The artist Yoshida Hiroshi visited India in 1930-31 and produced amazing depictions of what he saw.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you on Monday, on a device near you. If The India Cable was forwarded to you by a friend (perhaps a common friend!) book your own copy by SUBSCRIBING HERE.
Perhaps Muslims should reflect on their own actions rather than attributing issues solely to prejudice, and consider whether there’s any validity to this perspective. For comparison, Black Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population but are involved in over 60% of violent crimes. Meanwhile, some progressive-led cities have stopped maintaining detailed crime statistics, which complicates the discussion.