Shah's Bills Take Aim at Opposition-Ruled States; Balance Sheet of Wang Yi Visit; CSDS in Sarkari Crosshairs; Adani's Lobbying in the US

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

---

Dear readers

If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you! And be sure to renew your subscription when it expires.

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. 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 following link - https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable

Please give us at least up to 2 business days to activate/upgrade/renew your subscription

These are one-time payments and there will be no auto-renewal

Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable

---

Snapshot of the day

August 20, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

Union home minister Amit Shah today introduced legislation in the Lok Sabha that if passed would allow the Union government to remove chief ministers and their cabinet ministers if they are arrested or detained for 30 days straight (but not convicted of) in connection with crimes carrying a prison sentence of five or more years. He later referred the Bills to a joint parliamentary committee. Opposition MPs protested the Bills – namely the Constitution (130th Amendment) Bill, 2025; the Government of Union Territories (Amendment) Bill, 2025; and the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation (Amendment) Bill 2025 – saying they will pave the way for a ‘police state’ and the allow for opposition-ruled state governments to be targeted by the Union government.

Referring to the Bills' statements of reasons and objects claiming that allowing CMs and ministers to continue in office while they are detained would amount to ‘hindering constitutional morality’, Congress MP KC Venugopal asked what happened to morality when Shah – who was serving as Gujarat’s home minister – was arrested in 2010 in the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case; Shah responded that he had “resigned on moral grounds” before he was arrested. Sravasti Dasgupta has the report.

Is this the return of the ‘Doctrine of Lapse’, asks former Navy chief Arun Prakash, referring to the British colonial policy of taking over princely states which did not have a direct male heir. The question is not facetious, given the use the Narendra Modi government has used of investigating agencies under its control to wreak havoc on opposition ruled governments (like Delhi under