Shots Fired at Farooq Abdullah; Trump's $300 Billion Refinery Announcement Boosts Reliance Even if it Never Materialises; The Joke That Power Fears
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March 11, 2026
Siddharth Varadarajan
Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah survived an assassination attempt Wednesday evening when a man approached him at a wedding reception in Jammu and opened fire with a pistol. Abdullah was unharmed thanks to the intervention of his close protection team, his son Omar Abdullah tweeted. “There are more questions than answers at the moment,” he added, “including but not limited to how someone was able to get this close to a Z+ NSG protected former CM.”
With the shortage of cooking gas triggered by the US-Israeli war on Iran already apparent around the country (see map below), the Modi government is seeking to reassure people by saying it is lining up supplies from distant new sources like the United States and Norway. But when these supplies eventually arrive, they will inevitably lead to an increase in gas prices for consumers, government officials are conceding.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi made his first remarks surrounding the conflict in West Asia – although he did not mention, let alone criticise, the US-Israeli attack on Iran or their assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. His remaks on Wednesday came not in parliament but at an NDA rally in Ernakulam. True to form, Modi attacked the opposition for ‘spreading fear and panic’ and “deliberately making provocative and irresponsible statements to worsen the situation”.
Ducking the entire controversy over the American diktat to stop buying Russian oil and then its granting of ‘permission’ to India, Modi asserted that the “ongoing war in the Gulf has once again taught us the importance of self-reliance”. Here too the opposition figured: “On the one hand the BJP-NDA is working to make India self-reliant, but the Congress and Left are ridiculing this self-reliant India. They made India reliant on other nations and today they are spreading fear.”
The US will have its first new oil refinery five decades in southern Texas and Reliance has provided a “tremendous investment” for it, US President Donald Trump announced early on Wednesday Indian time while breaking news of the “HISTORIC $300 BILLION DOLLAR DEAL”. America First Refining, which is to build the refinery in Brownsville, TX, did not name Reliance in its press release but said that the ‘global supermajor’ who made the ‘nine-figure investment’ had signed a 20-year offtake agreement wherein it will “purchase, process, and distribute American-produced energy exclusively sourced from American shale oil”. The arrangement will shave off $300 billion from the US trade deficit, it added.
The Gulf of Mexico coast already has eight of the US’s ten largest refineries, and one expert speaking to Reuters said that as there is not a lot of local demand, the Brownsville facility may be an export-oriented one. Reliance has not acknowledged or commented on the ‘deal’, around which there are a few questions, including as journalist Govindraj Ethiraj notes, who the other investors are and what rationale Reliance used to choose Texas over anywhere else, including within India, as a destination for its investments.
Actually, that question answers itself. “Reliance goes from Trump foe to friend with oil refinery pledge,” reports Bloomberg. Either way, though, the $300 billion figure Trump mentioned makes no sense. “Reliance's own Jamnagar facility in India, the world's largest refinery complex, cost roughly $6 billion to build. It processes 1.4 million barrels per day. The Brownsville project is permitted for 160,000 barrels per day,” said one commenter on X. As for $300 billion, that’s “the GDP of Ireland.” By the time the project materialises or doesn’t, Trump will no longer be president of the US. Which makes one wonder about whether he picked numbers out of thin air for domestic political optics. Either way, the optics couldn’t be better for Reliance, though.
External affairs minister S. Jaishankar on Tuesday spoke with his Iranian opposite number Abbas Araghchi for the third time since the US-Israeli attacks began. He did not say what they spoke about – other than that they
