Supreme Court Clears Way for Public Audit of EC's Voter List Deletions; Trump-Putin Summit to Decide Fate of Ukraine – and India; Aaj Tak Plumbs New Depths
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
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Snapshot of the day
August 14, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
The Election Commission must upload searchable, district-wise lists of electors who didn't make it to Bihar's draft voter roll along with the reasons why, the Supreme Court said in an interim order today. It added that doing so would be in the interests of transparency and help dispel the “narrative” against the poll body. Calling the court’s direction “very significant”, Anjali Bharadwaj, a leading transparency campaigner, said this will “enable public scrutiny and prevent wrongful exclusions.” Among the excluded were a number of persons declared dead by the EC but who turned up to dine with Rahul Gandhi in Delhi.
The bench comprising Justices Surya Kant and Joymalya Bagchi also said the EC must accept Aadhaar as proof of identity and residence from people seeking inclusion in the electors' list. The EC has been previously reluctant to share digital lists of electors excluded from the draft – saying it is under no obligation to do so – and had refused to accept the commonly kept Aadhaar on the grounds that it is not a proof of citizenship. LiveLaw quotes Justice Bagchi as saying:
“We are not being critical of your not doing something … transparency will help create voter confidence. Why don't you take an additional step of putting it up on [your] website, clearly identifying persons who are not there, with reasons, so that they can take remedial measures?”
The BJP yesterday tried to take the wind out of Rahul Gandhi’s ‘vote chori’ campaign by holding a press conference of its own where it fielded Anurag ‘Goli maaro saalon ko’ Thakur presenting details of bogus voters on the rolls of constituencies where opposition leaders like Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav and Abhishek Banerjee had won. Three aspects stood out. Assuming the lists he waved were accurate, Thakur clearly had access to electronically readable data from the Election Commission – something the Congress could never get hold of for its exposé – and appeared singularly focused on voters with Muslim names. Third, as folks have noted on social media, “will the EC now ask Thakur to make his claims under oath or is that only for Rahul Gandhi?”.
Jokes aside, the BJP press conference appears to have only confirmed the need for the EC to step up and take responsibility for the presence of spurious voters all over the country. The Congress has been quick to latch on to Thakur’s ‘revelations’. “We took six months—because it was paper—to collect data for one assembly segment of Bangalore Central called Mahadevapura. Mr. Anurag Thakur got the electronic voter list of six Lok Sabha seats within six days. If this is not collusion, what else is?”, said party spokesperson Pawan Khera, adding:
“And we thank Anurag Thakur and the BJP for proving the point made by Rahul Gandhi ji that the elections in this country are fought on the basis of fake voters. We demand that the Election Commission and Anurag Thakur to make the electronic voter list data of Varanasi public because he has access to the electronic voter lists. We know that the prime minister does not deserve to have won. Based on fake voters, he barely managed to win the Lok Sabha seat of Varanasi in 2024.”
Elsewhere in the realm of elections, a recount of the vote for a sarpanch election in Haryana ordered by the Supreme Court has reversed the result of that poll. The court in an unusual decision ordered a recount of votes from all EVMs concerned in Panipat's Buana Lakhu gram panchayat inside its premises, following which petitioner Mohit Kumar – who had challenged his loss to one Kuldeep Singh – won the election 1,051-1,000. Satya Prakash reports.
Supreme Court Justices Kant and Bagchi today issued notice to a number of state governments in a petition highlighting instances of Bengali Muslim migrant workers being detained – and sometimes even deported – in these states on the false (and mere) suspicion of being from Bangladesh. However the bench did not grant interim relief in the matter. Justice Kant suggested that “some mechanism [is] required for bonafide workers … state of origin can issue some kind of card … and local police accept it as prima facie proof of his having come for livelihood”, Debby Jain quotes him as saying.
It may no longer be just the authorities that Indians suspected of being undocumented Bangladeshis can expect trouble from. Speaking to Tamaghna Banerjee, a West Bengal man who travelled to Noida with his teenaged son for a skating competition said they were declined admission into a local hotel, which cancelled their reservations and told them the police had ordered it not to allow guests from Bangladesh, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir for ‘security reasons’. The father continued: “I said we were not Bangladeshis but were from West Bengal. But the receptionist said it was the same thing and that he wouldn't let us in.”
At least 38 bodies were recovered from the site of a mudslide in Jammu and Kashmir's Kishtwar district today, which was likely caused by a cloudburst. The disaster took place in Chishoti village, which is part of a local pilgrimage route that is traversed by thousands of faithful every year. Tents and a community kitchen that were set up to host pilgrims are thought to have borne the brunt of the mudslide, reports Jehangir Ali. The death toll is likely to go up.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska for their much anticipated summit and the fate of two countries seems to hang in the balance: Ukraine and India. Kyiv is afraid Trump may accept a deal which involves the permanent loss of Ukrainian territory. As for India, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is already warning that Trump’s punitive ‘secondary tariffs’ on India for buying Russian oil "could go up if "things don't go well".
Modi’s Chief Economic Adviser Anantha Nageswaran believes the adverse impact of higher US tariffs will “not last longer than six months” but his optimism is not shared by other economists, especially since countries which export a similar basket of goods to the US, like textiles, for example, face a significantly lower tariff rate.
M. Rajshekhar looks at India’s options in event that the US refuses to roll back its demands. The experts he speaks to believe the country should follow the example set by Brazil and Mexico – of resistance, and of developing alternative markets – rather than the model of Indonesia, which has essentially capitulated to Trump’s diktats.
The Modi government has kept a lid on its rhetoric, as has the BJP, but the RSS mouthpiece, Organiser, has just run a piece reminding readers about how the US is a promoter of terrorism and dictatorship worldwide. Pity the Sangh forgot about that when Modi was wooing Trump.
Pakistan is currently in Trump’s good books but how long will his last? Elian Peltier reports for the New York Times from Islamabad on the limits to the renewed partnership, largely because Pakistan is also ‘tightening its military partnership with China’.
One fallout from Operation Sindoor is Pakistan’s decision to create an Army Rocket Force to ‘supervise missile combat capabilities’. This is likely a reaction to the success India had in attacking Pakistani air bases on the closing day of the recent clash.
Sharad Pawar of the Nationalist Congress Party has come out strongly against the Maharashtra Special Public Security Bill, a draconian law that civil libertarians have assailed. “This law will strike at your thoughts, your fundamental rights; it will attack them”, Pawar said at a public meeting today.
Police in Jalgaon, Maharashtra have arrested eight people in connection with the fatal beating of a 21-year-old Muslim man earlier this week. Manish Pathak cites the local police as saying that the men paraded and beat to death Suleman Rahim Khan Pathan – who was apparently ‘close to a 17-year-old girl from a different community’ – after dragging him out of a cafe where he was with the girl. Pathan's father has said that the assailants also hit him, his wife and his aged father.
No one was arrested as of Wednesday night in connection with a Hindutva mob's vandalism of a mausoleum in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur amid their claims that it was originally a temple. However the local police – which has barricaded some areas around the mausoleum and prevented residents from speaking to outsiders – did arrest a Congress worker for protesting the incident, PTI reports. There was also tension in the town after the authorities disallowed the burial of a woman near the mausoleum; meanwhile a local man threatened ‘large-scale protests’ if any Hindus are arrested.
The public tussle between the Kerala BJP ‘faction’ comprising unit chief Rajeev Chandrashekhar – who sent general secretary Anoop Antony to liaise with the Chhattisgarh government regarding its arrest of two nuns on suspicion of conversion and human trafficking – and the ‘faction’ led by V Muraleedharan and K Surendran in conjunction with the RSS has brought to the fore the “right-wing tactic of targeting Christians in Chhattisgarh to foment Hindu consolidation, while pitting the same community against Muslims in Kerala”, Anand Kochukody points out.
‘Can't ignore Pahalgam’, CJI says on J&K statehood to state parties' disappointment
While hearing a plea regarding New Delhi's delay in making Jammu and Kashmir a state again, Chief Justice of India BR Gavai said that the petitioners “have to take into consideration the ground realities”. “You can't ignore what has happened in Pahalgam,” he said. The judge's remarks, note Jehangir Ali, are likely to add further pressure on chief minister Omar Abdullah, who has faced criticism, including from within his National Conference, for adopting a conciliatory stance towards the Modi government. NC spokesperson Tanvir Sadiq said referring to lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha's claiming ‘full responsibility’ for the Pahalgam terrorist attack that it occurred on the Union government's watch and that the “people of J&K are being made to pay a price for a crime they never committed”. Meanwhile, solicitor general Tushar Mehta accused the petitioners of ‘muddying the waters’ by taking up statehood “at this stage”.
US State Dept report on human rights in India reflects Trump admin's shifting priorities
Similar to its report on human rights practices in India last year, the US State Department's latest issue indicts the Indian state for taking ‘minimal action’ against officials guilty of abuses, although there are significant differences in their areas of focus. This year's report has scaled back on coverage of women's rights issues and instead focuses on “coercion in population control”, reflecting the Trump administration's ideological bent. It also eliminates mentions of violence against LGBTQI persons and members of marginalised castes. On the other hand it has devoted more space to transnational repression, mentioning for the first time Washington's allegations that an Indian government official orchestrated a plot to kill US citizen Gurpatwant Pannun in New York.
Modi govt planning to allow private firms to mine, process, import uranium: report
The Union government is considering allowing private firms to mine, process and import uranium as part of its plans to step up India's nuclear power production capacity twelvefold by 2047, Sarita Chaganti Singh reports citing two official sources. Currently the government controls the mining, processing and importing of uranium. New Delhi plans to draft regulations that would allow the private sector to enter this space and make its proposed policy public later this financial year. The government will continue controlling the reprocessing of used uranium fuel as well as managing plutonium waste as is the global norm, reports Singh.
The Long Cable
Mohan Bhagwat’s Socialism ‘Rethink’ and the Wider Battle Within the Sangh-BJP
Badri Raina
Quite recently, the right-wing led by the RSS spoke for the umpteenth time in favour of erasing the word "Socialism" from the Preamble to the Constitution of India.
It is no historical secret, of course, that these forces have remained linked to private ownership of productive forces in opposition to an economic model in which the public control of productive and distributive systems has precedence.
That ideological alignment of the right-wing has, as is well recorded, obliged their spokespersons to castigate India's first prime minister, Jawahar Lal Nehru for having instituted a "socialistic pattern" of economic production and distribution, which they rue has held Bharat back from a "great leap forward" by preventing "animal spirits" from filling to the brim the coffers of private corporates.
Well now, we are pleased to note, how the chief of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat, speaking at an affordable cancer cure centre in Indore, has regretted the passing of a time when education and health were "services" and not "commercialised" activities.
Citing his interaction with a "minister", Bhagat recalls how he was told that education has become a "trillion dollar business".
"In earlier times" (the current prime minister may may kindly note), schools and hospitals used to be affordable and accessible to the poor of the country, but not any more.
Bhagwat notes how the "corporate centralisation" of both the healthcare and educational sectors has had the effect of ejecting the poor from such affordability access..
Bhagwat notes with empathy how only when the people enjoy healthy bodies and are educated can they contribute their mite to the welfare and growth of the nation.
It is of course too early to conclude that the RSS which leads the right-wing has had a notable mind-change.
What is most likely still is that, keeping its allegiance to the bourgeoisie intact, it is nonetheless complaining on behalf of the petty bourgeois classes who find themselves cruelly disenfranchised from their rightful claim to some tolerable livelihood status.
That class of the lowly, history teaches us, has always been of utmost importance to the revanchist cultural project of the right wing, and, it may be that the RSS chief is issuing a caution to the powers-that-be that should the economic dispossession of such subaltern classes become too visible, that revanchist project could be in jeopardy.
But, for now, what Bhagwat has said does seem to validate the holistic vision of Nehru which ensured that the new nation did not institute a home-grown colonialism guaranteed to unravel Independent India.
That many on the Left believe Nehru did not go far enough is of course another well-known fact; but it may be a thought that the "socialistic pattern of society" he proposed instead of a full-blown socialism helped to hold ideologically opposed and disparate Indias together in an enlightened social contract.
There is, incidentally, also the speculation that what Bhagat has said is related to the inner power struggle in the saffron camp.
It is thought that should pressure mount on Modi to step down after his seventy fifth birthday on September 17 – Bhagwat turns 75 on September 11 and has hinted at hanging up his shorts then – he would like the home minister, Amit Shah, to step into his shoes. But the RSS has other candidates in mind.
Could Bhagwat's implied but disparaging criticism of the Modi government's performance in education and healthcare thus be another element in a wider leadership tussle?
Reportedly
The Aaj Tak channel, owned by the India Today group, plumbs new depths. “Out of 4 crore Muslims, only 96 lakh went to Pakistan! Why was the purpose of India's partition not fulfilled?” it asks, and then goes on the repeat the BJP’s usual nostrums about ‘vote bank politics’.
Pen vs sword
Deep dive
Are India's unemployment statistics legit? Yes, say Payal Bhattacharya and Pragya Srivastava, pointing out however that the devil lies in the details. While the all-India unemployment rate for 2023-24 may seem low at 3.2%, the rate for graduates (13%) and people aged 15-29 (10.2%) is a fair amount larger. One also needs to distinguish between the two time frames that the Periodic Labour Force Survey uses to capture unemployment to get a more accurate sense of underemployment. Going beyond the headline-grabbing figures, they say, points to the problem with India's economy: “When it comes to creation of good-quality jobs for educated youth, the numbers speak for themselves.”
Prime number: 2,788 forest rights titles
Data obtained by Abhinay Lakshman via RTI shows that 2,788 individual forest rights titles appear to have vanished from the record in Chhattisgarh's Bastar district between May 2024 and June 2025. The number of community forest resource rights titles in Rajnandgaon district also reduced by half, from 40 to 20. It's not entirely clear why this happened, because these titles once issued are generally not transferable or alienable. One official said that the decrease was a result of “miscommunication” among officials and “may be seen as a reporting error”. This case comes against the backdrop of poor record-keeping in relation to implementing the Forest Rights Act, Lakshman notes.Opeds you don’t want to miss
“It would be no exaggeration to state that faculty appointments at universities are increasingly driven by RSS ideology and BJP preferences in politics,” writes Deepak Nayyar, and these appointees “willingly cede the autonomy of their institutional space for their political commitment or simply their career paths.” With disastrous consequences for the quality and future of higher education in India.
Pakistan’s military believes it won the May 2025 confrontation with India and as a consequence, “the army under Asim Munir as field marshal has even greater power over the state, the civilian government and the judiciary”, writes Salman Rafi Sheikh.
The Bihar SIR debate is missing a deeper interrogation into the tyranny of paper and the culture of distrust entrenched within the population of the nation, says Yamini Aiyar.
The Hindu’s editorial explains why it is wrong for the Union government to insist its nominee in Jammu and Kashmir – the Lieutenant-Governor – can unilaterally nominate five members of the legislative assembly without ascertaining the elected UT government’s views.
India needs a partner that respects its autonomy and invests in its rise, writes Amit Seru of the current tariff standoff, while the U.S. needs an ally that shares its long-term interests and democratic DNA. “That partner is waiting in New Delhi, but not forever.”
To truly reap the demographic dividend, India must spread out economic activity and economic growth beyond a handful of states and cities, overhaul education rapidly to produce job-ready talent, and attract manufacturing and industrial investment, writes Vivek Kaul in a long, meditative piece on India’s ‘fading growth dream’.
There are disparities in the investigation into the Malegaon and Bombay train explosions but both represent very different kinds of failures by the state, writes MR Shamshad. In the train blasts case, the police prosecuted persons who were not remotely involved, using torture to get confessions. While in Malegaon, the authorities chose not to properly prosecute persons against whom there was clinching evidence.
Karanjeet Kaur writes about how India is becoming a ‘Republic of RWAs’. Resident Welfare Associations that rule the roost in virtually all gated communities in our cities and tend enforce a particular form of exlusion.
Listen up
Unpacking the US-India-Russia tariff triangle: In this special episode of Columbia Energy Exchange, Jason Burdoff speaks with Richard Nephew, Tatiana Mitrova, and Shayak Sengupta about the latest frontline in President Trump’s trade war.
Watch out
Bihar's draft voter roll shows “sharp and uneven” elector deletions, with districts that have relatively high proportions of Muslims, greater out-migration and relatively low female-to-male elector ratios standing out. More women than men were dropped from the roll in 37 of the state's 38 districts, even as more women turn out to vote in Bihar and more men leave some of these districts. The Hindu's Srinivasan Ramani and Vignesh Radhakrishnan crunch the numbers.
Over and out
In a unique artistic collaboration between celebrated British-Indian artist-sculptor Anish Kapoor and Greenpeace, activists from the environmental group scaled a rig operated by Shell in the North Sea to instal the world’s “first piece of fine art exhibited from a working gas extraction platform.” The dramatic work consists of a 96-metre high canvas stained crimson to symbolise ‘1,000 litres of blood’ spilling from a North Sea has platform “to confront a toxic industry”.
In a video showing the installation, Greenpeace said the work ‘symbolises the damage oil giants like Shell are inflicting’ on the planet and people ‘like devastating floods, fires and heatwaves’. The art work is called ‘Butchered’. “I’m referring to the butchering of our environment. It is at the simplest level blood on a canvas. A reference to the destruction – the bleeding – of our globe of our state, of being,” Kapoor told the Guardian.
Dawn takes a look at the “rather strange Kaun Banega Crorepati debut” that the ‘faces of Operation Sindoor’ are making – and how people in India are reacting to this.
That’s it for today. We’ll be back with you tomorrow, 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.