Taliban Brings Its Brand of Misogyny to Delhi Courtesy Modi Govt; RSS at 100: Three Grand Defeats, a Fourth in the Making

Oct 10, 2025

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Snapshot of the day

October 10, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

The Nobel committee may have dashed US President Donald Trump’s hopes for the peace prize but, ironically, their pick for 2025 – Venezuelan opposition politician Maria Corina Machado – could pave the way for him to escalate the war he has already begun to unleash against the government of that country.

The political consequences of this choice make it apparent that this is no rebuke to Trump. Of course, the US president never hid his craving for a Nobel and he drew support for this claim from unlikely quarters — including Israel, Pakistan, Rwanda, Gabon, Azerbaijan and Cambodia – but nominations for the coveted prize close on January 31 every year so there wasn’t really any question of Trump making the cut for 2025.

Though he baulked at Trump’s peacemaking claims on the India-Pakistan front, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also joined the bandwagon, endorsing Trump’s so-called Gaza peace plan not once but four times in a single day on Thursday — just hours before the Nobel Committee made its announcement. From a congratulatory tweet to a personal phone call, Modi appeared eager to align himself with Trump’s self-styled image as a global peacemaker. Clearly, his advisers had no understanding of the Nobel process. 2026, of course, is another matter.

The Taliban accused Pakistan of bombing Kabul and Paktika, even as its foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, was being feted in New Delhi. This is as stunning a geopolitical reversal as any the world has seen in recent years – with Islamabad accusing its one-time proxy of providing sanctuary for terrorists and the Modi government overlooking the violence of a group that had once targeted India and the bizarre optics of embracing a regime that Hindutva ideologues have long used as a whipping boy to target India’s Muslims.

At the domestic level too, the red-carpet welcome extended to the Taliban’s top diplomat represents a staggering turnaround. This is the same government that jailed Indians who had publicly celebrated the Taliban’s takeover, and that had once insisted on “no engagement with terror regimes.” Yet, on Friday, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar went a step further, announcing that India would reopen its embassy in Kabul after four years of hiatus – effectively acknowledging the Taliban’s authority, even as most of the democratic world continues to withhold formal recognition.

The big question now is what comes next. With India reopening its embassy in Kabul, will New Delhi soon invite a Taliban-appointed ambassador to the capital? Will the black-and-white Taliban flag replace the tricolour of the fallen Afghan Republic over the embassy building? (Muttaqi fielded a small one at his press conference, though he also had a photo of one of the Bamiyan Buddhas that the Taliban destroyed in 2001.) And most crucially is formal recognition of the regime, something only Russia has dared so far, the Modi government’s next move?

Indian security analysts have been quick to try and square this circle for Modi. Brahma Chellaney, for example, sees these developments as “the collapse of Pakistan’s longstanding strategy to isolate Afghanistan from India”:

“The Taliban, no longer content to be Pakistan’s proxy, are actively broadening their diplomatic and economic ties — and India is the prime beneficiary of Islamabad’s missteps and its unraveling relationship with the very force it once nurtured to power.”

However, the argument that “we must engage with those in power” conflates engagement with endorsement. Many countries engage with the Taliban without allowing them to stage press conferences excluding women reporters [See Item 1 below] or display their ideology so prominently. It is not unusual for diplomatic engagement to include clear stipulations about conduct during visits. The Modi government could have insisted that the visiting Taliban minister meet with officials privately, and that there be no public events that violate Indian constitutional norms. What occurred instead suggests not hard-nosed realism, let alone basic statecraft, but the absence of principle and common sense. It raises the question: What does India actually stand for in the world today?

The Pakistani government today suspended internet services in Islamabad and Rawalpindi following a protest call by the hardline Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) outside the US Embassy against the Gaza ‘Peace Deal’. The Islamist group has condemned what it called army chief Asim Munir’s “embarrassing surrender to Trump and Netanyahu.” Major highways leading to the federal capital have been sealed as authorities brace for large-scale demonstrations.

The huge turnout the Bahujan Samaj Party attracted during supremo Mayawati’s campaign in Lucknow yesterday on Kanshi Ram’s death anniversary has surprised many observers. After all, the BSP was wiped out in the 2024 general elections, where it won no seats, while its rival Samajwadi Party had charged ahead with its PDA (Pichda-Dalit-Alpsankhyak) strategy based on moblising OBCs, Dalits and Muslims. Not surprisingly, her speech primarily targeted the SP as a party that only thinks of Dalits when it is in the opposition but neglects their icons when it is in power. Reporting from Lucknow, Saurabh Chauhan said the rally appeared to be “less a lament for a fading party and more a defiant blueprint for revival.” Yet her expression of gratitude to the Yogi Adityanath government for maintaining Dalit heritage sites “introduced a jarring note” into the event and could end up being a “miscalculation that [hands] ammunition” to the SP, Chauhan notes.

Speaking to Asad Rizvi, some participants of the event also noted Mayawati’s silence on the lynching of a Dalit man on suspicion of theft in Raebareli earlier this week as well as on a senior lawyer’s attempt to throw a shoe at Chief Justice of India B.R. Gavai on Monday. “What is the meaning of such a big crowd? It’s merely a show of strength for political bargains if issues affecting Dalit rights and dignity are not raised,” a Dalit rights campaigner said.

Some two dozen Manipur BJP MLAs led by former chief minister N Biren Singh who travelled to Delhi to press the party’s central leadership for an end to President’s Rule and restoration of an ‘elected’ government in the state have been rebuffed. They have only been able to meet with Northeast coordinator Sambit Patra. Union home minister Amit Shah and BJP president J.P. Nadda, reports cite the legislators as saying, were apparently too busy preparing for the Bihar elections to hear out their own party leaders from a state that has been roiled by ethnic conflict for 29 months now. During their meeting with Patra on Wednesday, they were apparently told that “government formation cannot take place till members of all the communities come together”. Notably, the BJP’s Kuki-Zo MLAs were not present at the meeting.

Even as Modi and his UK counterpart Keir Starmer signed a free trade agreement three months ago, Thursday’s Mumbai event felt more like a carefully choreographed pageant than a substantive policy milestone. The leaders touted new economic and education initiatives, while the delicate issue of Khalistani extremism and the long-pending case of British Sikh activist Jagtar Singh Johal – detained in India for nearly eight years without a full trial – was raised by Starmer during his talks, a reminder of the Modi government’s fraught human rights record. Starmer’s motorcade passed 5,700 welcome posters, with streets closed and platforms built for dancers and musicians to perform for fleeting seconds as the convoy passed.

Meanwhile, Starmer made it clear that the UK will not expand visas for highly skilled Indian workers—a reminder that despite trade deals and pageantry, substantive policy issues remain unresolved. The spectacle laid bare the gap between Modi’s carefully staged image and the more complicated realities of governance and international diplomacy.

Pakistan’s renewed courtship of Washington reflects both desperation and opportunism, writes Avinash Mohananey. Army chief Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif are dangling mineral and port deals – including access to Balochistan’s vast reserves and a possible new port at Pasni – to win American favour even at the cost of alienating Beijing. Their overtures, including support for Trump’s Gaza plan and the Abraham Accords, mark a sharp policy shift that has unsettled China, Iran and domestic critics. The Economist notes that partnership, centred on projects like the Reko Diq mine, offers Pakistan short-term economic hope but carries immense political and security risks – potentially turning Balochistan into a new arena of great-power rivalry.

In what seems to be a travesty of justice, a special National Investigation Agency court in Mumbai rejected a plea by 85-year-old activist and poet Varavara Rao, who is out on bail in the Bhima Koregaon case, seeking permission to travel to Hyderabad for two months for a dental surgery. The court held that a “satisfactory reason” had not been presented to justify the request and noted that adequate and affordable treatment was available in Mumbai. Rao was arrested in August 2018 from his Hyderabad residence and is out on medical bail that was granted to him by the Supreme Court in August 2022. On Thursday, he had sought the court’s permission to travel outside the jurisdiction of the trial court as mandated by his bail conditions.

Veteran Assam BJP leader Rajen Gohain resigned on Thursday, citing sidelining of senior leaders, joined by 17 others in a rare mass exit. Assam BJP president Dilip Saikia called it “unfortunate and surprising,” but critics say it highlights growing internal discontent and the party’s tendency to alienate experienced hands.

With time running out for people left out of Bihar’s final electoral rolls to appeal for their inclusion, the Supreme Court yesterday in an interim order directed Bihar’s district-level legal services authorities to mobilise paralegal volunteers to help those people who were struck off the draft rolls by informing them of their right to appeal as well as by offering to draft their appeals. Free legal aid lawyers are to help these people file their appeals with the Election Commission before the deadline, the court said, adding that its directions must also apply with necessary modifications to those people who were left off the draft lists and who went on to unsuccessfully file a claim for inclusion in the final rolls.

During the hearing, Justice Surya Kant told the EC against the background of its plans for a nationwide special intensive revision that its experience in Bihar ought to have made it “wiser”. “You have decided to carry out an SIR on a pan-India basis. So, this experience [with Bihar] would have made you wiser now … The next time you introduce an SIR module, owing to what you experienced now, you would also bring some improvement,” Krishnadas Rajagopal quotes the judge as saying.

However, more than three months after unveiling its plans for a nationwide SIR of electoral rolls, the EC has yet to announce any concrete dates for the exercise, reports The Indian Express. The delay, as per the officials, is already eroding the limited time available for the routine annual special summary revision – a process that typically wraps up by the end of December. An intensive revision is no minor undertaking: it demands a complete, door-to-door rebuilding of electoral rolls, verifying each eligible voter afresh – a step usually reserved for moments when the integrity of the rolls is in serious question. Yet, in a democracy where the right to vote is the foundation of legitimacy, delays and administrative lapses of this kind are not mere technical oversights; they risk disenfranchising thousands.

Amid boardroom infighting at the Tata Trusts, two of Prime Minister Modi’s top lieutenants – home minister Amit Shah and finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman – held an extraordinary meeting with Tata executives, including Noel Tata and N Chandrasekaran, to discuss the conglomerate’s “stability.” However, the government’s move is “completely unprecedented”, said historian Mircea Raianu, author of a 2021 book on Tata Group to Veena Venugopal. According to him, the business empire had “strategic autonomy” despite its role in crucial sectors including arms manufacturing and semiconductors. “Tata Group is important for India and important for the Indian state,” Raianu said. “What is extremely unusual is the internal intervention by the government in the governance of the group.”

Speaking of which, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has reported one of its sharpest quarterly workforce contractions, with nearly 20,000 employees exiting in the second quarter of FY26. As PTI reports, the company’s headcount fell to 5,93,314 on September 30 from 6,13,069 at the end of June; a net reduction of 19,755 employees. The number is 66% higher than the layoffs TCS had projected earlier. In July, the country’s largest IT services exporter had said it would cut about 2% of its workforce, or around 12,000 employees, as part of a phased restructuring. The actual fall suggests a sharper-than-expected correction.

The makers of the Malayalam film Haal have moved the Kerala High Court challenging directions by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) to delete or modify several dialogues and scenes, including one that involves eating beef biryani. The film was originally scheduled to release on September 12, but the date was postponed. “The narrative of the film deals with socio-cultural dynamics and also involves religious sensitivities,” the newspaper quoted the board as informing the producers. “They allege a hidden agenda behind the movie,” said filmmaker Veera. “Our film does not depict violence or cruelty. It is an interfaith love story, highlighting the choice to stick to one’s faith despite pressure for religious conversion.” Critics quip that the CBFC seems more interested in rewriting menus than movies.

Taliban minister brings regime’s misogyny to Delhi

Conspicuously absent from Afghan foreign minister Muttaqi’s press conference at Kabul’s embassy in New Delhi were women journalists. The media fraternity in the capital has pointed out that the Taliban was pretty much “allowed to bring their abhorrent and illegal discrimination against women to India” by being free to exclude women from their presser. This discrimination has gone well beyond restricting women’s access to public spaces and banning girls from higher education, with the Taliban most recently removing books written by women from its university system. Another conspicuous visual from Muttaqi’s presser was that he held it in front of a framed photo of one of the two Bamiyan Buddhas – which his own organisation had bombed 24 years ago on the grounds that they were idolatrous.

Ladakh police accused of torture

Stanzin Yulo, a contractor working with Sonam Wangchuk’s Himalayan Institute of Alternatives Ladakh, was beaten in custody and has “torture marks all over his body”, the Leh Apex Body’s co-chairman Chering Lakrook alleged at a press conference, saying the LAB had also raised the issue at its first meeting with the Ladakh administration following the September 24 violence yesterday. Asked about the allegations, deputy general of police S.D. Jamwal sought to deny them and told Jehangir Ali he did not know why Yulo had to be hospitalised. At the LAB’s meeting, it demanded a judicial probe into the deaths of four civilians amid violent protests on September 24 as a precondition for resuming talks with the Union government. The BJP supported this demand, reports Ali.

Chhattisgarh women’s panel orders FIR against Bajrang Dal for harassment of tribal women and nuns

Chhattisgarh’s Commission for Women has asked the state police to lodge an FIR against Bajrang Dal workers who allegedly sexually harassed and threatened three tribal women in Durg in July; they had also harassed two nuns who were accompanying the women apparently to help them begin a new job in Uttar Pradesh. Saying that CCTV footage submitted by the government showed the Bajrang Dal workers harassing the women inside a railway police station, commission chairwoman Kiranmayee Nayak told Jayaprakash Naidu that she had directed an FIR to be filed in 15 days, failing which she would escalate the matter to the National Human Rights Commission and seek compensation from the police. The right-wing organisation – part of the Sangh parivar – had claimed that the nuns were engaged in conversion, although some have cited the women as saying they were Christians to begin with. The nuns had been jailed on charges of conversion and human trafficking; they were later given bail.

The Long Cable

RSS at 100: Three Grand Defeats and a Fourth in the Making

Harish Khare

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is celebrating its centenary and unsurprisingly, a plethora of voices—from Prime Minister Narendra Modi down to various rented pen-pushers—has been heard in praise of the organisation. There seems to be an epidemic of RSS-ness. Predictably, we stand buried under acclamations about the organisation’s presumed exceptionalism—its unique selflessness, its unalloyed idealism, its extraordinary love for the motherland, its unmatched commitment to national glory and resurgence and much, much more.

Granted, the mere fact that an organisation has notched up hundred years of existence in itself becomes a legitimate occasion for some kind of observance. In the RSS’s case, the occasion is being exaggeratedly observed as a victory celebration. It is important, therefore, to talk about the Sangh’s failure, especially the three grand defeats that were inflicted on this organisation and its ideological shibboleths; and there is also need to talk about the fourth defeat that is in the making.

The first strategic defeat the RSS suffered was at the hands of Mahatma Gandhi and his invocation of a kind of moral nationalism. K.B. Hedgewar and his successor, M.S. Golwalkar, simply did not have it in them to arouse even a minuscule part of India’s “Hindu” population to see any wisdom in their argument. Gandhi had already infused the Indian mind with his ideas and techniques, and at no point were the Nagpur warriors able to dislodge Gandhi from our collective imagination. In frustration, Nathuram Godse was assigned the assassin’s role and provided a pistol. In fact, January 30, 1948 was the most spectacular defeat for the RSS’s pretensions. Gandhi became a national saint.

Over the next four decades, the RSS and its ‘cultural nationalism’ was to face defeat after defeat in the ambience of ‘secular nationalism’ as formulated by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. It was a strategic defeat foretold. The Nagpur brass’s concepts and ideas simply could not make headway against the joyful exuberance that Nehru was able to whip up in the country for building a new nation on our terms and as per our dreams. Those presumptuous custodians of the Hindu samaj just did not understand that their sectarianism was against our civilisational genius for inclusion and accommodation.

Nehru invited the nation to think progressively and tirelessly urged our old society to align itself with modern ideas and innovations. The RSS was harking back to a distant past. Nehru had a sanctified legitimacy that accrued to him and his Congress party from the freedom struggle against British colonialism. The RSS had no matching respectability, leave alone any hint of legitimacy, except a kind of divisive patter. Nehru infected the newly forged political community with an Idea of India, and brilliantly marshalled society’s cultural and emotional energies to produce a stable and strong Indian state. By contrast, all the RSS offered was a rendezvous with antediluvian cant, with an implicit invitation to maar-kaat, i.e. violence.

The only thing that animated the RSS partisan was the birth of Pakistan and the existence of a large number of Muslim citizens in India. In 1971, Indira Gandhi took the bottom out of the RSS’s central lament when she forged a Bangladesh out of Pakistan. The 1971 war was as much a strategic defeat for Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s Pakistan as it was for the ideas of the Hegdewars and the Golwalkars.

It must be emphasised that for all its self-applauded ideology and idealism, and for all its numerous “swayamsevaks”, not once did the RSS appear to find traction among the majority of the majority community. Its ideology of “Bharatiyata” ran against the harsh realities of another centuries old Hindu institution—the immutable caste system.

For decades, the RSS remained a fringe organisation, wallowing in its own self-scripted specialness. Its cadre won a few street skirmishes here and there in times of communal violence; but the Sangh could never win a fight in the face of a determined collector. And, for all its infatuation with martial paraphernalia, it has never once sought to take on the Indian state.

The RSS’s third defeat came at the hand of one of its own swayamsevaks—Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had become the compromise choice of both the Washington-based quarterbacks of globalisation and the Mumbai-based corporate honchos. Both these lobbies wanted to put an end to the uncertainty and instability of the United Front government years.

Vajpayee became a fait accompli, without the RSS’s nod. The Sangh had the choice of remaining true to its pretence of being an uncompromising nationalist voice or of reconciling itself to becoming a cheer-leader, however reluctantly, for the Vajpayee regime. The Nagpur crew opted for the second role, and quickly became a party to all the compromises and concessions the BJP had to make in order to have the satisfaction of tasting national power. The RSS quietly caved in; but fortuitously, the Kargil conflict provided Nagpur an occasion to reaffirm its deshbhakti and rashtravad.

The RSS leadership was no match to Vajpayee’s realpolitik skills and cunning, and unprotestingly gave in to the prime minister’s demarche that senior pracharak Govindacharya be sent into exile. The Vajpayee regime, in fact, never gave the RSS commissars the time of day. And because the RSS acquiesced in Vajpayee and Advani’s electoral calculations, the Hindutva plank got devalued as an expedient jumla. Nagpur remained content with their own marginalisation within the Vajpayee regime. And for the ten years of UPA rule, the organisation was forced to play on the back foot.

Then began the era of ‘Hindu raj’ in 2014. Apart from enjoying a few crumbs of patronage, the RSS bosses found themselves having to play second fiddle to Modi’s personality cult as also having to bless the rampant corruption inherent in the organised crony capitalism that has become the Modi regime’s signature tune. A spiritual and moral barrenness now threatens to overwhelm the self-acclaimed custodians of our national renaissance. In its centenary year, the Sangh finds itself ensnared in the Modi project and mistakenly believes this entrapment is a great achievement and a matter of satisfaction. Clearly, Mohan Bhagwat and his colleagues are willingly walking into what is going to be the RSS’s fourth great defeat.

(Harish Khare is a former editor-in-chief of The Tribune.)

Reportedly

The day before Prime Minister Modi spoke at the Indian Mobile Conference at the Yashobhoomi convention centre in Delhi on Wednesday, some of its roof panels collapsed – flooding the venue.

The venue was quickly patched up, ‘jugaad’ style, so Modi would not be shocked by the state of a building he had inaugurated exactly two years back, but the displays of several exhibitors displays were apparently ruined by the cascading water.

Drawn and quartered

Deep dive

There is now a dataset covering polling-station-level election returns from the 2009, 2014, and 2019 Indian general elections, thanks to the efforts of Francesca R. Jensenius, Pradeep Chhibber, Sanjeer Alam, Pranav Gupta and Madhavan Somanathan:

“Our data can be used at the polling-station level or collapsed to the level of census units: we identified thecorresponding villages or towns for 95% of the polling stations we had data on in 2009 and 98% in 2014. Onaverage, there are about 1.4 PSs per census unit. Collapsing the election data to the census-unit level allows us toestimate voting patterns in more than 330,000 villages and towns in 2009 and about 360,000 villages and townsin 2014. For 2019, we were able to identify the village or town of almost 140,000 PSs, which amounts to morethan 83,000 villages and towns when collapsed to the census-unit level.”

Prime number: 1 every month

Karnataka’s government has made it mandatory for women to have one day of paid menstrual leave every month. The policy, which reportedly applies to both the public and private sectors, is so far the only one in India to do so, with The Hindu reporting that Bihar and Odisha’s menstrual leave policies apply only to government employees while Kerala’s policy only applies to universities.

Opeds you don’t want to miss

Sarayu Pani notes that it CJI Gavai’s “vision of the role of the Supreme Court reflected in the bulldozer ruling, and perhaps his own Ambedkarite upbringing, that poses a serious challenge to the Hindu nationalist vision of the Supreme Court.”
On the enduring curse of India’s caste system, Vir Sanghvi writes that Justice Gavai’s appointment was not a conscious effort by the Modi government to break caste barriers, but by purely “seniority principle. Hindutva hardliners were far from thrilled that the country’s highest judicial office was now held by a man who is not only Dalit but whose family had abandoned Hinduism for Buddhism.” He says,
“But neither can Modi fully disown the hardliners — the ones who propound their own definitions of Sanatan Dharma, hate Muslims and Dalits, venerate Godse, and cheer attacks like the one the Chief Justice was subjected to. They are his original Hindutva base. So when they boast that “the entire system is ours,” he looks the other way.
So far, this tightrope walk between the extremists and the Prime Minister’s own wider appeal has worked because the extremists have targeted only Muslims. But what happens when the hate shifts decisively from communalism to casteism?”
Most solutions to stubble burning have not been designed around farmers’ practical needs, says farmer and ex-Agriculture Minister of Australia Brian Chatterton. He says:
“Beyond stubble, there’s a deeper lesson: Punjab and India’s agricultural systems need a shift towards regenerative farming — crop diversification, cover cropping and soil-building practices that reduce the very need for burning in the first place.
It is equally important to reframe the narrative. The current discourse often paints farmers as the problem. But they can — and must — be a part of the solution. No farmer wants to breathe in smoke or poison his own soil.
Let us invest in that transformation — from straw as waste to straw as wealth — not just to reduce Delhi’s winter smog but also to build a resilient, profitable and sustainable farming system for generations to come.”
Sage counsel from the wise Admiral Arun Prakash (retd). “The armed forces are either initiating the process or allowing themselves to be progressively pushed into alignment with a specific religious-cultural agenda. This would not only be violative of the oath of allegiance that every serviceman swears to our secular Constitution, but would also send a message of alienation and exclusion to the personnel of diverse faiths, who continue to serve in uniform in significant numbers … Of more serious concern should be the distinct possibility that these acts, rather than being signs of soldierly piousness, are indicative of eagerness to please the political establishment.”
Don’t infect sports with politics, says an editorial in The Tribune:
“When military leaders are called upon to drive home a point repeatedly during TV talk shows and press conferences, the law of diminishing returns threatens to play spoilsport…. It is necessary for our political leadership to assess the impact of politicising sports and exposing our top defence officers to the media glare.”
Titles like Kalaingar, Thalaivar and Thalapathy not only boost the profile of Dravidian leaders but are also a nod to culture, writes M. Kalyanraman on a fascinating aspect of Tamil politics.

Listen up

It’s World Mental Health Day today. A study found that nearly 197 million Indians live with some form of mental disorder. Depression and anxiety alone affect more than 90 million people, yet for most, professional support remains out of reach. However, more young Indians are opting for therapy than ever. Sidharth Bhatia talks to Maherra Desai, Clinical Psychologist in Mumbai’s Jaslok Hospital, on how Covid stress, social media, and awareness are driving more Indians to seek therapy.

Watch out

Journalist Prajwal Manipal joins Errol Louis on Inside City Hall to discuss Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee who could become New York’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, and the growing influence of the South Asian vote – an insightful segment shedding light on a community long overlooked in city politics.

Over and out

What does it take to open a restaurant in NYC? You may have seen Nonnas, with Vince Vaughn, the fictionalised real life story of an Italian restaurant in Staten Island, but Priya Krishna chronicles the real life of a startup, ‘Cheeni’, featuring a desi, Mouleena Khan, with no restaurant experience, partnering with a Polish immigrant who runs a coffee shop. [In case of paywall, try this link].
Muhammad Hussain went to Wagah and noticed something unusual:

“The Indian pavilion is made of true domes - a technique brought to India by Muslims. The Pakistani pavilion is made of Rajput chhatris and motifs inspired from Hindu weddings.
I doubt either side was aware. They wouldn’t have been there.”

Such are the ironies of Southasia.

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.

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