A newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas | Contributors: MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, Sushant Singh and Tanweer Alam | Editor: Pratik Kanjilal

Snapshot of the day

September 19, 2022

Pratik Kanjilal

A day after two religious preachers were detained under the draconian Public Safety Act (PSA) from locations in Jammu & Kashmir, the police on Saturday detained seven more, including prominent preacher Sarjan Barkati and Auqaf president Nazir Ahmad Khan. On Friday, seven people, including members of the Barelvi, Jamiat Ahle Hadees (JaH) and Salafi groups and the banned Jamaat-e-Islami group (JeI), were detained under the act. Among them are Abdul Rashid Dawoodi and Mushtaq Ahmad Veeri, preachers with a large following on social media. Reasons for the arrests are unknown. The PSA permits detention without trial for up to two years.

Officials of the Union government and Isak-Muivah-led National Socialist Council of Nagalim (NSCN-IM) are to meet on Tuesday to resume talks on the Naga peace process. United Democratic Alliance chairman TR Zeliang termed the decision of the NSCN-IM to return to New Delhi to pick up the thread as “positive news”, after a meeting between the state’s parliamentary core committee on the Naga political issue and the NSCN-IM on Saturday at Chumoukedima. The NSCN-IM delegation, he said, was unhappy with AK Mishra for omitting important political points that former interlocutor RN Ravi had accepted. Mishra, a former Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau, succeeded Ravi in September 2021.

Multiple reasons prevent India from de-escalating troops and equipment or deinducting them from positions on the Line of Actual Control in Ladakh. The disengagement at Gogra Hot Springs (Patrolling Point 15), verified on September 13, was only a pullback by a few kilometres, reports The Tribune. The stationing of troops along the LAC is the “new normal and the same would be factored in planning till the situation returned to the pre-April 2020 level”. The Tibetan plateau on the Chinese side allows rapid deployment while the Indian Army has to traverse high passes like Khardung La, Chang La and Tasak La to send troop vehicles from Leh. Both sides have thousands of assets in eastern Ladakh along the 832-km undemarcated LAC. Tanks and missile trucks are 5-7 km from each other across the border for quick deployment. Deccan Herald has an explainer on how events stack the cards against India.

In a desperate attempt to show that Putin is isolated, American leaders and the media seized on PM Narendra Modi’s opening remarks at a meeting with the Russian President to claim that concerns expressed by India and China earlier had increased pressure on the Kremlin to end its aggression in Ukraine. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said: “I think what you’re seeing is just a manifestation of the fact that this aggression has been an aggression against the interests of people across the planet.” CNN termed PM Modi’s comment that “today’s era is not of war” as a “striking rebuke” and the New York Times interpreted it as “India along with China distancing from Russia”. Both countries have provided vital outlets for Russian exports like oil, gas, coal and fertilisers after the West imposed sanctions.

India once again refrained from affirming support for China’s One Belt, One Road (OBOR) initiative in the Joint Declaration issued after the Samarkand summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation on Friday. While Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan acknowledged the ongoing work, India did not endorse Beijing’s flagship project. The SCO was the first occasion Xi had seen Modi in person since the deadly border skirmishes of 2020. They did not greet each other after posing for a group photo.

On the day the SCO Summit started, China blocked a US-led proposal to designate key 26/11 mastermind Sajid Mir a global terrorist at the UN Al-Qaeda sanctions panel. China has blocked sanctioning three Pak-based terrorists this year. Last month, a proposal to blacklist Abdul Rauf Azhar, brother of Jaish-e-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar, was put on hold. In June, a proposal to list AR Makki under the 1267 Al-Qaida Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council met with the same fate.

Thousands of Gujarat government employees, including schoolteachers, joined a mass casual leave protest across the state on Saturday demanding implementation of the old pension scheme (OPS). The umbrella union bodies had on Friday called off the agitation, stating that the state government had accepted most of their demands, but the district-level unions claimed that the government had not considered their main demand for OPS.

Majid Freeman @Majstar7

Hindu mobs on Belgrave Road throwing glass bottles at the Muslims but narrowly missing police officers heads on numerous occasions. There is NOT a small minority of these Hindutva thugs. Theres hundreds of them. Will the Hindu community leaders continue defending them? #Leicester

In east Leicester, about 200 Hindutva supporters marched in Muslim residential areas, creating “large scale disorder”, according to the BBC. In the video, objects including bottles can be seen being hurled about. Police said two arrests had been made, and that trouble flared up after “an unplanned protest”. Commentators reported that several Indians were alarmed to see “these divisions” being “exported” outside India. A reporter’s diary makes painful reading.

Another ranking crashes: India slipped to 54th place in the 2021 TTDI, released in May, down from 46th in 2019. A project monitoring unit in the Tourism Ministry will now try and scramble back up the prestigious rankings, which the World Economic Forum puts out.

On the controversial ‘madrasa survey’ the Adityanath government is said to have embarked on, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind head Maulana Arshad Madani has said on behalf of the Dar-ul-Uloom that the doors of madrasas are open to all. He added that the whole system should not be denigrated if a few institutions break the rules. Incidentally, the Sachar Committee in 2006 had found that only 4% of Muslim children are schooled in madrasas.

Nalanda University has fallen victim to the Modi government’s saffronisation project. Like several other institutions of higher education, the ancient seat of learning, which was revived in 2010, is on the brink of complete capture by subscribers to the BJP-RSS ideology.

RBI’s forex reserves were at $550.8 billion as on September 9. This is sharply lower than $631.53 billion on February 25, about when Russia invaded Ukraine. Foreign exchange reserves were at $553.1 billion on September 2, equivalent to nine months of imports projected for 2022-23.

Nearly two-and-a-half months after RBI liberalised means for banks to tap overseas deposits, $1.5-2 billion have come in and $3.5-4 billion may be raised. In September 2013, when the RBI provided a special swap window, $26 billion flowed into FCNR(B) accounts. Bankers then said $6-8 billion had flowed in within a fortnight, says Business Standard.

An “education crisis grips poor countries hit hardest by the pandemic”, says the Financial Times. It speaks of India, where food insecurity and inflation “have added to setbacks for children experiencing poverty.”

More than a year after it activated a dormant constitutional provision to appoint retired high court judges ad hoc to clear the case backlog, and observing that the continuing lack of judges is causing a default on the “judiciary’s promise of speedy justice”, the Supreme Court asked the Union government whether any such appointments have been approved. A bench headed by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said that almost 6 million cases are pending in 25 high courts. Article 224A of the Constitution, used rarely, allows the chief justice of a high court may request a retired high court judge to take office. Ad hoc judges are appointed for two to three years.

What the Supreme Court judgement means for the BCCI: more power to Secretary Jay Shah, tweaks to rules about the cooling-off period for office bearers to extend their stints and changes to disqualification criteria.

Actors Akshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan and Alia Bhatt were the three most visible celebrity endorsers in TV ads in January-June. According to data released by AdEx India, a division of TAM Media Research, ﬁlm stars scored over sports stars. Nearly 30% of TV ads were endorsed by celebrities. Of this, film stars took an 80% share followed by sport stars (11%) and TV stars (4%).

And finally, to no one’s surprise, the lies India Today group and its senior journalists tell:

Pratik Sinha @free_thinker

How does it happen that a fact-check published by @IndiaToday itself, albeit without mentioning that their own anchors had put out the misinformation, doesn't get relayed to the members of the same organisation? 8/8

The India Cable

To Undermine Putin, US Leaders And Media…

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