Sycophancy Galore to Mark PM Modi’s 75th Birthday; Blatantly Communal Ads Targeting Muslims Released in Assam; India Condemns Israel’s “Violation of Sovereignty of Qatar” in UN Rights Council Meet

India’s $30 Trillion Economy by 2047 is a Distant Pipe Dream, Thirteen Dead in Heavy Rains in and Around Dehradun, US Khalistani Outfit Threatens a Siege at India’s Vancouver Mission

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

September 17, 2025

Sidharth Bhatia

The BJP and its leaders went to town in showering praises on our Dear Leader today on the occasion of his birthday, which is hardly surprising, but the sheer scale of the adulation points to a concerted effort by the party to “flip the speculation around his retirement” at 75, Sravasti Dasgupta observes. It wasn't just the party that participated in the “blitzkrieg of Modi’s birthday celebrations” but “newspapers … sportspersons, celebrities, industrialists, private companies, educational institutions and exhibitions” as well. Some of these were unrestrained in their sycophancy, with Mukesh Ambani hailing our non-biological prime minister as sent by God Almighty himself “as an avtar purush to lead our motherland to become the greatest nation on earth”. Prayers were offered in his name and school life interrupted to mark the occasion. Such displays, Dasgupta recalls, are exactly the kind of thing Ambedkar had presciently warned against when he said that ‘hero-worship’ with its unparalleled popularity in India constantly threatens to turn it into an “eventual dictatorship”.

Several Indian newspapers were full of advertisements with laudatory messages to mark the birthday. The Delhi edition of The Indian Express included a full front page ad of wishing Modi on his birthday from Maharashtra deputy chief minister Eknath Shinde, calling him the “Architect of New India”, along with images of the prime minister over the years. Shinde happens to be from the Shiv Sena. The Delhi editions of The Times of India, Hindustan Times and The Hindu also opened with front page ads by Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta wishing Modi on his birthday and listing his achievements. Private companies like Dalmia Bharat also provided full page ads wishing Modi, while BJP leaders like Satish Lohia and Sanjay Kakade, also greeted the prime minister in newspaper ads. The News Minute has reported that among the English newspapers, The Times of India led with 16 ads wishing Modi on his birthday, followed by The Indian Express with 10, Hindustan Times with 9, and The Hindu with 3.

While Union ministers and BJP leaders posted video messages with the hashtag #MyModiStory, chess grandmaster Viswanathan Anand inadvertently exposed the chinks in the orchestrated fanfare around Modi’s birthday. Anand faced ridicule for allegedly copy pasting a message received from the BJP IT cell after his #MyModiStory post on X included “Vishwanathan Anand ji” at the top, which Anand later deleted and re-posted it. Here’s the truth as shared by Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha referring to an instance six years ago when he was on a BJP-affiliated WhatsApp group where coordinated tweets and messages were sent. “That was 6 years ago. Nothing has changed. All the coordinated tweets on Modi’s 75th birthday today follow the exact same strategy, only now expanded to a much larger base,” he said.

Meanwhile, do not miss this tribute from the Diamond Jubilee Productions for the man celebrating his ‘god-like’ existence.

If you thought the BJP's openly communal videos ahead of the general and Jharkhand assembly elections last year were as bad as it gets, perhaps you ought to think again. With elections coming closer, the saffron party's Assam unit has unleashed a fresh stream of vitriol against Muslims with a new video. An imagination of what Assam would look like were the BJP not in power, the AI-generated video shows men in skull caps and women in hijabs (i.e. Bengali-origin Muslims) strolling about in various places in Guwahati, entering the state ‘illegally’, butchering cow meat on the street, ‘acquiring government land’ and constituting “90%” of the population, while also calling the Congress a “Pakistan-linked party” and cautioning viewers to ‘choose your vote carefully’. Since we are in New India, even as this hateful content continues to be online it is instead videos featuring reportage on the Adani Group (and in one case simply carrying a photo of an article on the conglomerate) that are ordered to be taken down.

The usual tone with its communal undertones that are part of the prime minister's speeches were conspicuously absent from his addresses in Manipur. But just a few hours later,