Rupee Breaches the 91 Mark to the Dollar, is Asia’s Worst Performer; One of the Shooters in Australia Identified as Indian Citizen; MNREGA to VB-G RAM G, More Than Just a Name Change

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Snapshot of the day

December 16, 2025

Sidharth Bhatia

The Indian Rupee plunged for the fourth straight session on Tuesday, with the USD/INR pair surging toward 91.45, dragged down by relentless foreign fund outflows amid US–India trade tensions. India’s currency is now Asia’s worst performer this year, reports Reuters. It “avoided steeper losses amid likely central bank intervention,” four traders told the news agency. The currency’s slide is now starting to sting the $5.2 trillion stock market, “with analysts warning that prolonged weakness could undermine confidence in the nascent recovery,2 notes Bloomberg. In December alone, global investors yanked $1.6 billion from Indian equities – erasing the modest inflows of the past two months – and also pulled money from local debt, underscoring growing skepticism about India’s market stability.

Hyderabad native and Indian citizen Sajid Akram was one of the shooters who killed 15 people at a Hanukkah event in Sydney on Sunday, the Telangana police confirmed on Tuesday – the other shooter was 50-year-old Akram’s 24-year-old son Naveed, who was shot by police during the attack and who has been in hospital since. The duo had travelled to the Philippines for about four weeks last month; it has not officially been revealed why but the ABC cites security sources as saying it was to receive ‘military-style training’. Australia’s federal police commissioner said the terror attack appeared to be “inspired by Islamic State”. The Telangana police noted that the elder Akram left India in 1998 and The News Minute‘s Jahnavi reports that his estranged family said they were shocked to hear of his involvement. The Hindu reports citing diplomatic sources that the Australian authorities are “in touch” with Indian agencies over the investigation.

Ironically and unsurprisingly a number of Indian social media accounts and the mainstream media had amplified the falsehood that Pakistani New South Wales resident Naveed Akram was one of the shooters, notes The Guardian. Being misidentified in this way was “extremely disturbing”, traumatising and dangerous to his family’s safety, he said speaking to them publication.

West Bengal’s draft voter rolls following the special intensive revision are out and a constituency-wise analysis suggests that the BJP’s rhetoric of a big threat posed by undocumented ‘Bangladeshi’ or Rohingya immigrants may be hot air. Aparna Bhattacharya writes that it is those districts with the highest Muslim populations that also have the highest rates of documentation. But seats with large Matua populations have the ‘sharpest concentration’ of people who could not ‘map’ their presence on the rolls to a legacy anchor, indicating that “the population most affected by the SIR’s legacy linkage is not the stereotyped ‘outsider Muslim infiltrator’ of BJP speeches, but Hindu refugees who arrived post-1971,” she argues.

The draft rolls in four other states or Union territories are also out and against this backdrop “a procedural red flag from Bihar has set off concern within the election machinery”, reports Damini Nath: this is that