Welcome Back to the Kashmir Treadmill, Mr Modi; Death Penalty for Hasina Has Upped the Ante for Delhi; Epstein and South Asia

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

---

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

November 17, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal today gave deposed premier Sheikh Hasina the death penalty after convicting her of “crimes against humanity” committed during the July-August 2024 uprising against her rule. Hasina faced five charges and in three of them the bench declared it “decided to inflict upon her only one sentence: the sentence of death”, drawing applause and cheers. Former home minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal, who like Hasina has been in India since the fall of their regime, was also sentenced to death. The third accused, former inspector general of police Abdullah Al-Mamun, had turned approver and was handed five years’ jail time. Chief adviser Muhammad Yunus hailed the verdict as underlining that “no one, regardless of power, is above the law”. “This verdict offers vital, if insufficient, justice to the thousands harmed in the uprising,” he added. Julhas Alam reports that Hasina responded to what she called the “biased and politically motivated verdict” by denying having ordered the killing of protesters. “We lost control of the situation, but to characterise what happened as a premeditated assault on citizens is simply to misread the facts,’ she was quoted as saying.

Dhaka has called on India to extradite Hasina and Kamal to Bangladesh. “It would be a grave act of unfriendly behaviour and a travesty of justice” for any country to grant asylum to the duo found guilty of crimes against humanity, it said in a communique in Bengali, adding that India ought to “immediately” hand them over to Bangladeshi authorities. “This is also an obligation for India under the existing extradition treaty between the two countries,” it said. New Delhi for its part “noted” Hasina’s conviction. “As a close neighbour, India remains [committed] to the best interests of the people of Bangladesh, including in peace, democracy, inclusion and stability in that country. We will always engage constructively with all stakeholders to that end,” the Ministry of External Affairs said.

Before today’s verdict, Hasina while speaking to NDTV had denied that a foreign hand may have been behind her ouster last year, but she did say that “many people in American political circles admired Yunus for his economic achievements and erroneously equated these with political prowess”.

Jasir Bilal Wani today became the second person to be arrested by the National Investigation Agency in connection with the Red Fort car explosion of November 10, which it has said was a suicide terror attack. The agency alleges that Wani alias Danish “provided technical support for carrying out terrorist attacks by modifying drones and attempting to make rockets” ahead of the Delhi blast. He had “worked closely” with Umar-un-Nabi, the doctor who is said to have blown up his car outside the monument, “to plan the terror carnage”. Wani had been detained in the case last week along with his uncle, in response to which his father, a dry fruits trader, killed himself by immolation. The other person whom the NIA has arrested is Amir Rashid, whose documents Nabi used to purchase the Hyundai i20 that exploded last week. Jehangir Ali reports.

As officials of the Jammu and Kashmir police at Nowgam police station prepared a sample of the explosives they had confiscated from Faridabad as part of their investigation into a ‘terror module’ based there, a powerful explosion took place killing nine people. A civilian tailor, an elite anti-terror official, three forensics personnel, two revenue officials and two police