USCIRF Protests Blinken's Pass to India; Gandhi, Tagore and Temple Consecration; How Ustad Rashid Khan Will Be Remembered

A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Seema Chishti, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Sidharth Bhatia, Pratik Kanjilal and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writer: Kalrav Joshi, with additional inputs by Anirudh SK

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Snapshot of the day

January 9, 2024

Siddharth Varadarajan

Gujarat is so Vibrant that two of its top universities postponed their exams from today and tomorrow to January 17 and 18 so that students could be press-ganged to fill the venue of the Vibrant Gujarat summit – as ordered by the state government. The universities cited logistical issues around traffic but the truth came out anyway. As one newspaper coyly reported, “students from local colleges were present in large numbers to greet the PM and other officials at the inauguration.”

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), an independent, bipartisan US federal government agency created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), has expressed its disappointment that the US Department of State had failed to designate Nigeria and India as Countries of Particular Concern despite both countries repeatedly meeting the legal standard.