Rupee Continues its Downward Slide, Touching 90.55; After 11.5 Years of Officially Trying to Redefine Indian Culture, We Have FA9LA; President Murmu in Manipur Says She’s Aware of People’s Pain
Let’s Discuss Pollution Without Politicking, Says Rahul Gandhi, West Bengal BJP Chief Publicly Felicitates Three Men Arrested for Violence, Sex-Selective Abortions Among British Indians?
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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December 12, 2025
Sidharth Bhatia
With sentiment remaining dented by the lack of concrete progress in Indo-US trade talks as well as by continuing foreign portfolio outflows, the rupee slid to a new low of 90.55 against the dollar during early trading today before closing at 90.415 after the RBI, according to traders, probably intervened by selling dollars via state-run banks. Bankers and analysts “expect the currency to keep drifting lower in the near term with interventions by the central bank keeping a lid on volatility”, writes Reuters’s Jaspreet Kalra.
Some aspects of the rupee’s ongoing slide have parallels with its performance in 2013 during the US Federal Reserve’s ‘taper tantrum’ and when “India’s inflation and current account deficit were out of control”. This had then prompted Morgan Stanley to term India one of the global ‘Fragile Five’ countries. Identifying both a “contrast and a connection” with that time, Bloomberg’s Andy Mukherjee now concludes that while the RBI had “lost the plot in 2013 amid the Fed’s ‘taper tantrum’,” governor Sanjay Malhotra’s “challenge in 2026 will be Trump’s tantrums”.
President Droupadi Murmu was in Manipur today and yesterday, where she said she is “aware of the pain that the people … have gone through following the unfortunate violence” and called on “all communities to continue supporting the efforts for peace, understanding and reconciliation”. Some Imphal valley-based extremist groups had announced a shutdown for the duration of her visit.
Firebrand BJP leader and West Bengal leader of opposition Suvendu Adhikari publicly felicitated with saffron shawls three men whom the police arrested for allegedly assaulting vendors for serving chicken patties during the Bhagawad Gita recital event in Kolkata on Sunday. He is discharging his ‘duty of protecting dharma’, he claimed in the presence of seers.
Today’s Times of India features a report by Ismat Ara about Sunali Khatun – the nine-month pregnant 26-year-old whose deportation to Bangladesh with her husband, their son and some others the Calcutta high court had deemed an act of ‘hot haste’ and whom the Union government decided to bring back on “humanitarian grounds” – lamenting that she was expelled ‘despite showing all documents’. Solicitor general Tushar Mehta was indignant: “There is a concurrent and simultaneous narrative-building exercise going on” and TOI‘s report seems like an “attempt to influence” the Supreme Court’s hearing of the case, he claimed.
Bangladesh’s chief election commissioner announced on Thursday that the country will have its next general election – alongside a referendum on numerous constitutional amendments – on February 12. The main active political parties, the BNP, the Jamaat and the NCP, welcomed the decision while the banned Awami League denounced it.
If the next elected government indicates its desire to pick its own president he will resign, said incumbent Bangladeshi President Mohammed Shahabuddin whose five-year term began in 2023, but in the meantime he has felt slighted by the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government and feels like quitting, he told Reuters’s Krishna Das in an interview.
Are “India and Bangladesh sidestepping [deposed premier Sheikh] Hasina’s exile to improve frayed ties?” asks The South China Morning Post.
Seven districts in Maharashtra recorded a total of 14,526 child deaths over the past three years, Public Health Minister Prakash Abitkar told the state legislative assembly today, citing official government data. The tally covers deaths of infants and children under five admitted to government facilities, as well as cases related to severe malnutrition. In addition, the minister highlighted that Palghar district, with a significant tribal population, recorded 138 infant deaths during the period.
Veena Venugopal writes about the hidden costs of India’s push for new AI data centres in The Financial Times’ India Business Briefing newsletter. While headlines trumpet investment and innovation, the real price is already becoming clear: these centres are voracious consumers of electricity and water, straining a country still short on renewable energy and heavily reliant on coal.
The families of private doctors and medical practitioners who died while performing their duties during the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be denied insurance cover under the PM Garib Kalyan Yojana just because their services were not requisitioned by the government, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, setting aside a decision to the contrary by the Bombay high court.
UIDAI is testing a feature involving a QR code that contains people’s Aadhaar data, including their photo, that is aimed at ‘discouraging public places like hotel receptions to ask for physical copies of Aadhaar’ and which will allow users to selectively share data, the Authority’s CEO Bhuvnesh Kumar tells Aroon Deep.
A UK government report has shown that the sex ratio among ethnic Indian children whose birth order was three or more between 2017 and 2021 was 113 males to 100 females – this disparity “may indicate that sex-selective abortions are taking place” and if so that there may have been 400 such terminations, reports Naomi Canton.
The Pakistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) summoned the Norwegian ambassador over his presence at a court hearing in Islamabad, with officials stating the act constituted interference in the country’s internal affairs, terming it as “a breach of diplomatic protocol and relevant international law”. The Norwegian envoy was reported to have attended a Supreme Court hearing in the case concerning lawyer Imaan Mazari and her husband, Advocate Hadi Ali Chattha, over their controversial tweets.
Setting aside a Patna High Court order, the Supreme Court has reiterated that narco-analysis requires free, informed consent with safeguards calling involuntary testing unconstitutional and unusable as evidence. The ruling strengthens the protection against self-incrimination and reinforces privacy and due process in criminal investigation, explains The Hindu.
Ranveer Singh and Akshaye Khanna starrer Dhurandhar is banned in six Gulf nations – UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait and Oman – with authorities refusing certification over its allegedly ‘anti-Pakistan’ political framing, even as film’s box-office earnings near Rs 300 crore at the end of week. Speaking of box-office, The Hollywood Reporter highlights how “inorganic collections” are putting Bollywood under the scanner. With some makers fudging numbers, the trade is wary, and the industry’s long-term credibility is firmly in question.
Punjabi singer-actor Diljit Dosanjh’s upcoming film shoot sparked unexpected tension in Patiala’s Old Market after the crew put up Persian-script hoardings depicting a “Pakistani market set-up” allegedly without shopkeepers’ consent.
Discussion on pollution can be discussed without politicking says Rahul Gandhi
“Millions of children are getting lung disease, their future is being destroyed, people are getting cancer [and] older people are struggling to breathe,” due to India (and especially north India)’s toxic air, which is a topic that the government and the opposition can discuss without pointing fingers at each other, Lok Sabha leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi said today while demanding a discussion on the issue. In a rare instance of consensus, parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju agreed, noting that the Congress had raised air pollution when the Business Advisory Committee had met and saying the government would take a decision.
Although the government has claimed that there is no conclusive, direct correlation between deaths or diseases and air pollution alone, a report by Lancet noted earlier this year that some 17.18 lakh deaths in India in 2022 were linked to anthropogenic air pollution.
Assam contractors winning govt work later donated to BJP
The Reporters’ Collective reports that in Assam, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, more than half of the BJP’s declared political funds came from individuals or companies that had won government contracts, highlighting a direct link between government projects and party donations in the region.
India’s neighbourhood apprehension keeps SAARC on the sidelines
Forty years after its founding, the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) continues to struggle for relevance, largely due to India’s persistent apprehension that smaller neighbours could use the platform to counterbalance it. Former Foreign Secretary of Pakistan notes that just as Europe and ASEAN thrived when major powers led responsibly, “India can either lead Saarc, and with that the entire South Asia, to the next level of prosperity or relegate the organisation to the rubble of irrelevance, as is the case now.”
The Long Cable
After 11.5 Years of Officially Trying to Redefine Indian Culture, We Have FA9LA
Seema Chishti
The government of India has set in place now very overt moves to drastically enhance the ‘Indic’ – which is India, minus anything that spells its Muslim people and heritage. There are no elected Muslim representatives in the ruling party or ministers in government, school and college textbooks stand purged, there is an attack on Urdu/Persian words in courts and police stations, and vicious demonisation when it comes to films like Chhaava, Article 370, The Kashmir Story and The Kerala Story. After nearly eleven and a half years of a concerted plan to render India a monolith, how is our cultural fabric doing?
Unlike AQI, it is hard to have a government-verified measure of the state of its wear and tear. But what does anecdotal evidence, based on some events in December, say about what is ‘Indian’ these days?
The recent Hindi film Dhurandhar, which has supposedly worked at the box office in the first few days, is the latest to build a narrative of a ‘new India’ where to be Indian is being Hindu, and all others are either murderous killers or just contemptible. Pakistan is a useful proxy stand-in for ‘the other culture’. Yet the film’s own success exposes this contradiction.
Dhurandhar, in large part, has made it thanks to the power of its soundtrack, the song FA9LA, going viral. The character played by Akshaya Khanna, Rehman Dakait, enters the set to this Bahraini rap track, sung by Bahraini-Moroccan rap artist Flipperachi aka Hussam Aseem. FA9LA was already a big hit in West Asia since 2024, and has now been adapted by music composer Shashwat Sachdev for Dhurandhar. This raging hit apart, the entire soundtrack of the film is, for the want of a better word, just India – and not ‘Indic’. It synthesises not just Arabic rap, but mixes together some retro hits, qawwali, Punjabi rap, and strains of pop. The titles of the tracks are also using words which would otherwise be deemed not ‘Indic’ enough for purified ‘Indic’ conversations in 2025. The tracks are called Ishq Jalakar, Gehra Hua, Shararat, Hawa Hawa, and Ez-Ez.
What is the whole vibe of this soundtrack? Fully transgressive of borders. The need to introduce cultural markers that would be popular and make the film a hit, has ensured that the mixed, the syncretic and not just a one-culture motif colour the canvas. This tilting at a specific culture, which is otherwise shown as seriously evil, is diabolical—and it sits uneasily with the film’s poison-laced narrative. Dhruandhar is to social ties what Animal was to gender ties, point out critics. The hate is not just on the screens but off-screen too. Film critics who dared point out to the elephant in the room have been hounded. Former MPs, those associated with the production, and prominent actors, have poured vitriol against critics and commentators who called out the film for its intentions and storyline.
Jashn-e-Rekhta (Rekhta, meaning “mixed”), the Urdu festival organised since 2015 on an industrial scale) was the biggest open-air event in the capital between December 5 and 7. Approximately 120,000 people came and inhaled Delhi’s noxious air to be a part of the live vibe. Audiences were visibly transfixed by the sounds and draw they felt towards Urdu. Jashn-e-Rekhta gets panned in some circles for not being political enough or focussing on just the foods, lyricism and ‘beauty’ surrounding a great Indian language, currently in an existential crisis. But we have come to a point when howsoever unintended, even signalling surviving and thriving is a political act.
Scholar and public intellectual Alok Rai – also Premchand’s grandson – was in the capital speaking on Urdu’s future. He spoke on how despite mounting government pressure to keep Urdu out of the room, it is unable to make it go away. Its popularity, in his view, stems from two important places; first, it having developed from an engagement with several languages and territories in India, and being spoken in India over centuries, meant the sounds and tones have been sandpapered and polished, rendered almost mellifluous to the human ear. Second, Bombay Hindi cinema music serves as the basic emotional landscape of those parts of India familiar with Hindi. That sensibility has almost intravenously fed Hindustani and Urdu into our psyche.
History suggests such purification drives backfire. Could we be seeing a replay of how misplaced ideas of India’s first I&B minister BV Keskar for a ‘pure’ All India Radio (AIR), banning them from playing impure Hindi film songs (in Hindustani) served as rocket-fuel for the popularity of both Hindi film music and the derided harmonium? It eventually forced AIR to acquiesce and start a station, Vividh Bharti that would play Hindi film music. This is a point very effectively made by Isabel Huacuja Alonso in Radio for the Millions, Hindi-Urdu Broadcasting Across Borders.
At Alok Rai’s public lecture on Sunday, former Culture Secretary Ashok Vajpayee recounted that in Ujjain during Mahakal this year, he was visiting after it was no longer Shahi Sawari, but Rajsi Sawari, as de-Urdufication was on. He addressed the locals in a gathering and told them he was very puzzled, “bhai, sawari bhi to Urdu hai (even sawaari is an Urdu word)”.
A drive towards ‘One-Culture’, being about only ‘one’ imagined, Brahminical Hindutva-laden variety, is unable to really get around the multiple strands of what makes the Indian weave. Arabic rap, qawwali beats, the dots, dashes and accents that make for a happy “mixed” and mixed-up confluence remain the top notes of all that is Indian.
The irony is complete. A film trafficking in hatred succeeds only by embracing the very syncretism it seeks to demonise. India’s plural sounds refuse to be silenced, even when amplified through speakers meant to broadcast their erasure.
Reportedly
Remember that fake ‘PMO officer’ in Gujarat last year who had conned many businessmen by promising them business opportunities in Kashmir? Kiran Patel also duped the administration of Jammu and Kashmir which provided him security. Before he was busted, he had amassed lakhs of rupees from gullible businessmen. In October this year, another conman posing as a RAW officer cheated many people, also in Gujarat, by promising them ‘secret jobs.’ The latest example is the arrest of Dashrath Pal, a ‘fake’ representative of the Delhi state BJP chief named Virendra Sachdeva who was caught at the residence of the UP Deputy CM Keshav Maurya in Lucknow. Pal had gone to Maurya’s place for a courtesy meeting but the latter got suspicious.
Drawn and quartered
Deep dive
CERI-SciencesPo and The Caravan magazine have launched a groundbreaking research project, “Seeing the Sangh: Mapping the RSS’s Transnational Network.” In an accompanying essay, Felix Pal presents the first comprehensive map of organisations connected to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, revealing what is described as the world’s largest far-right network. The interactive dataset provides extensive qualitative and quantitative information on more than 2,500 affiliated organisations.
Prime number: $939
Global fashion brand Prada, fresh off a backlash from appropriating India’s Kolhapuri sandals, is now trying to save face by producing 2,000 “limited-edition” footwear in Maharashtra and Karnataka through state-backed partners. The price? A pair of sandals are reportedly set to be sold for $939, which amounts to approximately Rs 84,000.Opeds you don’t want to miss
Sandeep Bhardwaj writes that although India is better positioned than most to stake a claim as a pole in a multipolar world, the pursuit of great power status is a choice and not a preordained path. “Great power status would likely end up costing the country more than it would be worth. To become a pole is economically pricey, diplomatically challenging, and will place India at the frontline of geopolitical power competition.”
‘Vande Mataram’ should never be put to use as a political tool, the song was meant to unite not divide, reminds Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Kumar Jha. Vir Sanghvi notes that India has now become “a society that debates the national song for 10 hours in Parliament rather than the real issues facing India,” asking: “Why do the politicians do this? Because we let them. We will moan. We will groan. But when we go to the polling booths, none of this will matter. And we will get the governments we deserve.”
Commenting on the sacking of Lt Samuel Kamalesan – who chose not to enter a temple’s sanctum sanctorum because of his Christian beliefs – Lt Gen H. S. Panag (Retd) calls it what it is: a dismissal rooted in a colonial mindset. “However, there should be no doubt that the secular military ethos is under stress, which is compounded by the unethical conduct of a section of the military hierarchy.”
C. Uday Bhaskar writes that Putin’s visit to India highlights the anxieties of a shifting world order, noting that while Russia projects defiance and India seeks strategic autonomy, recent US policy shifts are pushing both countries into uncharted geopolitical territory. However, “partnering with Moscow brings New Delhi important leverage on Washington and Beijing as well as support for continued strategic autonomy,” notes Ivan Lidarev.
Jacob Koshy observes that while China flaunted lavishness at COP30, India’s pavilion was austere and nearly empty, highlighting the gap between its solar ambitions and coal-dependent reality.
“The Goan and the migrant labourer are both victims of an extraction economy” wherein “both are being hollowed out by a system that views Goa not as a place to live, but as a thing to be used up,” writes Kaustubh Naik in the wake of the deadly nightclub fire.
Listen up
The rupee’s fall has been conspicuous but will it have a negative effect on the economy and is it something to worry about? T.C.A. Sharad Raghavan asks Bank of Baroda’s chief economist Madan Sabnavis and PwC India partner Ranen Banerjee.
Watch out
When Prime Minister Narendra Modi blamed Jawaharlal Nehru and the Congress for ‘bowing to pressure’ from the Muslim League in using a clipped version of Vande Mataram – and thus putting India on its path to Partition – he was, to be polite, “being economical with the truth”, says former history professor at JNU Mridula Mukherjee. Watch her explain why this is so in this conversation with Karan Thapar:
Over and out
The Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) has concluded an Introduction to Sanskrit course this December, marking a historic moment in Pakistan’s academic landscape as a university has formally started teaching the language in its classrooms for the first time since Partition in its “commitment to engaging with the shared intellectual and cultural heritage of South Asia”.
Fifty years after it hit theatres and rewrote cinematic history, iconic film Sholay, returns on silver screen across 1,500 theatres with an unseen ending. Uday Bhatia maps the contours of its legend.
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.