Wangchuk Rebukes Ladakh LG Over Imperious Tweet; As Siddaramaiah Gives Up CM Chair, Shivakumar Has His Task Cut Out; Assam Woman's Plight Exposes Dangers of Modi's ‘Pushback’ Playbook
For subscribers: Podcast | The Heat Wave in India is an Emergency. And Its Only Going to Get Worse; ‘I Was Never Good at Exams. Was I a Bad Student?’
A newsletter from The Wire | Founded by MK Venu, Pratik Kanjilal, Sidharth Bhatia, Siddharth Varadarajan, Sushant Singh, Seema Chishti, and Tanweer Alam | Contributing writers: Kalrav Joshi, Anirudh SK
If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Sign up with your email address by clicking on this link and choose the FREE subscription plan. Do not choose the paid options on that page because Stripe – the payment gateway for Substack, which hosts The India Cable – does not process payments for Indian nonprofits.
Our newsletter is paywalled but once a week we lift the paywall so newcomers can sample our content. To take out a fresh paid subscription or to renew your existing monthly or annual subscription, please click on the special payment page we have created – https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable.
Snapshot of the day
May 28, 2026
Anirudh S.K.
Under the saffron-tinted shadow of their growing insecurity in India, Muslims in most of the country observed Eid-ul-Adha or Bakrid on Thursday. Do check out this compilation of photos foregrounding the human side of the occasion that has in recent years made the news for unhappy reasons.
Inventor and activist Sonam Wangchuk has a different recollection of his meeting with Ladakh lieutenant governor V.K. Saxena on Tuesday, after which the Modi government official had claimed he ‘cautioned’ Wangchuk and that the latter expressed uncertainty over the ‘origins’ of the satirical Cockroach Janta Party that Saxena’s bosses have sought to repress. In a video message published this evening, Wangchuk said Saxena had asked him not to speak about the CJP on the grounds that it is a ‘conspiracy by foreign forces’. ‘I don’t know about that but I will look into it’, Wangchuk recalled telling the LG while internally laughing at the irony that he himself was accused of participating in a ‘foreign conspiracy’ and jailed under the draconian National Security Act following the violent protests in Leh last year.
‘Maybe he needed to make a boss of his in Delhi happy,’ Wangchuk said on Thursday, saying that even if just 70% of the CJP’s followers are Indian, it would make India a ‘Vishwaguru’ in terms of creative expression and protest. Its founder, Abhijit Dipke, has shown that the vast majority of its followers are Indian, contrary to what some BJP leaders have claimed. The Modi government has had the outfit’s X account withheld in India in addition to its backup Instagram account – its main handle has a 13 million lead over the BJP – while Dipke has reported receiving death threats.
Asked by the Congress high command to step down and make way for his deputy D.K. Shivakumar, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah has tendered his resignation, three years into assuming office for the second time. The 77-year-old said he has no plans of moving to the Rajya Sabha and will continue to be active in state politics. “Until my last breath,” he declared, “I will continue to fight for social justice and against forces of communalism”. Meanwhile Shivakumar, a Vokkaliga leader hailing from Karnataka’s Old Mysore region who was a key part of the Congress’s 2023 victory and who had reportedly struck a ‘power-sharing’ agreement with Siddaramaiah immediately after their win, has his task cut out for him.
A day before Eid-ul-Adha, while hearing a complaint from an Indu Makkal Katchi office-bearer alleging that temporary sheds meant for cow slaughter are being set up in Coimbatore, the Madras high court ordered
