Why Has the ED Renewed its Witch-Hunt Against the Gandhis Now? Indian Students in US Facing Visa Problems Reach out to Missions; US Agency Probes Discrimination Charges Against TCS
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
Dear readers,
If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you! If not, today there’s no paywall so go ahead and see for yourself what the India Cable delivers.
If you like our work and want to support us, then do subscribe. Please click on the following link to make a payment and start or renew your subscription - https://rzp.io/rzp/the-india-cable
Please give us at least up to 2 business days to activate/upgrade/renew your subscription
These are one-time payments and there will be no auto-renewal
Over to Sidharth Bhatia for today’s Cable
Snapshot of the day
April 18, 2025
Sidharth Bhatia
New Delhi has for the first time said that Indian students in the US facing problems with their F-1 visas have reached out to its missions. External affairs ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal added that Indian missions are “in touch with the students to provide support”. His statement comes days after Indian student Chinmay Deore – who said he received just a parking ticket and a speeding ticket that he paid off promptly – sued the US government along with three international students from China and Nepal over the abrupt cancellation of their F-1 visas and denial of entry into the States.
The Madras high court has said that an FIR ought to be registered against Tamil Nadu minister K Ponmudy for derogatory remarks he made against Saivites, Vaishnavites as well as women. Mohamed Imranullah cites Justice N Anand Venkatesh as saying upon being informed that the police had received complaints against Ponmudy that “Can I take it that an FIR will be registered? In fact, they [the police] have to. If they don’t, then I will initiate suo motu contempt of court proceedings against them.”
America’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating allegations by dozens of American people that Tata Consultancy Services discriminated against them on protected grounds. Mostly of non-South Asian descent and over the age of 40, the complainants said TCS laid them off but not their Indian colleagues; they began filing complaints to the EEOC starting in late 2023, find Newley Purnell, Eric Fan, and Paige Smith. The commission’s acting chairwoman appointed by Trump earlier this year has promised to ramp up probes into what she has said is discrimination against American workers. Similar allegations were made against TCS recently by former employees in the UK.
Russia has denied that it bombed the warehouse of Indian pharmaceutical company Kusum Healthcare. The Embassy of Russia in New Delhi said the most likely explanation was that one of Ukrainian air defence missiles fell on it. The Embassy said that “similar cases have occurred previously whereby Ukrainian air defence interceptors failing to hit their targets fell in urban areas due to ineptly operated electronic warfare systems.”
Among those who have pushed back against the Maharashtra government’s making Hindi a compulsory subject for students in classes 1 to 5 in Marathi and English-medium schools are Raj Thackeray and the Congress. The latter has said that Maharashtrians are “Hindus but not Hindi” and that “if you try to coat Maharashtra with a veneer of Hindi-isation, conflict in Maharashtra is inevitable”.
Tejashwi Yadav will lead the coordination committee the Mahagathbandhan has set up ahead of the Bihar elections, said the alliance, which stopped short of announcing a chief ministerial face.
Chandrababu Naidu’s government yesterday issued an ordinance categorising Andhra Pradesh’s 59 Scheduled Castes into three groups for sub-classification in reservation. The Supreme Court had ruled last year that states have the right to sub-classify SC and ST communities for quotas.
The only thing Kashmir has to do with Pakistan is that it is under Islamabad’s illegal occupation, the external affairs ministry said yesterday in response to Pakistani army chief General Asim Munir’s remarks that the region was and is his country’s “jugular vein”, a phrase not unfamiliar to Pakistani political discourse. The general, who made the remark during a convention for overseas Pakistanis in Islamabad, had also backed the idea that Muslims and Hindus are immiscible.
The Trump administration has shown interest in tapping into Pakistan’s vast mineral reserves, which could turn into a “new sweet spot for a relationship that has struggled to find anchors for partnership” since American troops left Afghanistan in 2021, and is significant for an Islamabad that has historically had trouble securing investment in the sector, notes Michael Kugelman. Of course, security threats are the main obstacle to turning this interest into investment. Most militant attacks that struck in Pakistan last year were in Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which account for most of the country’s mineral wealth; resource exploitation has also been a source of anger in Balochistan, Kugelman recalls.
There have been at least 11 incidents in recent weeks in Pakistan where protesters armed with sticks damaged KFC outlets in major cities and the police have arrested at least 178 people. This has been driven by anti-American sentiment and opposition to its support for Israel amid its devastating military campaign in Gaza, report Ariba Shahid and Mubasher Bukhari, who also note that KFC in particular has long been regarded a symbol of the US and “borne the brunt of anti-American sentiment in recent decades”.
An app in use in Chhattisgarh alerts locals when wild elephants are nearby in a bid to avoid human-elephant conflict – the state is responsible for 15% of all elephant-related casualties in India despite accounting for only 1% of the elephant population. The workers who help generate these alerts do this not by tagging elephants with radio collars but by wading through the forest and looking for signs of a herd nearby before logging the data into the app. Arunabh Saikia speaks to these workers and to villagers in Chhattisgarh at risk of conflict with elephants.
Why Modi’s posing with a Brazilian macaw at Vantara is a red flag
Brasilia was unaware of the fact that a number of Spix’s macaws – native to northeastern Brazil and which had gone extinct in the wild – were transferred from a breeding centre in Germany to Anant Ambani’s Vantara in Gujarat, a report by the Brazilian media outlet Conexão Planeta has said. It also said that Brazil’s government had flagged the exchange of “significant values” (of money) between the German centre and Vantara, which the former denied. Brazil at meetings of the CITES convention had also repeatedly raised the macaws’ transfer from Germany to Vantara without its endorsement.
Incidentally the parrot was one of the animals that Prime Minister Modi posed with during his visit to Vantara last month. Aathira Perinchery writes that such photoshoots with wild animals can make popular the bad idea of acquiring them as pets.
Accountability absent from Maharashtra policy compensating custodial deaths
Devendra Fadnavis announced at a cabinet meeting earlier this week that ‘unnatural’ custodial deaths in his state will be compensated for with Rs 5 lakh to the next of kin and suicides in custody with Rs 1 lakh. The policy even includes deaths by accident, assault by jail officials, medical negligence and fights among prisoners as unnatural, but what it misses is pinning accountability on officials for such deaths, Sukanya Shantha points out. Prisoners’ rights scholar Murali Karnam notes that the policy is as if “the state is saying deaths will happen, and since they can’t be stopped, here’s compensation”.
Amid relief for ‘untainted’ Bengal teachers, lawyer says sifting them out would be impossible
A Supreme Court bench headed by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna yesterday granted relief to the West Bengal government by allowing it to retain the services of teachers whose appointment was not ‘tainted’ by corruption in the recruitment process in 2016 until fresh recruitment is completed by the end of this year – the court had earlier upheld the cancellation of almost 24,000 teaching and non-teaching appointments en masse.
However, speaking to Rokibuz Zaman, lawyer Bikash Bhattacharya, who represented many aggrieved candidates in the Calcutta high court and the apex court, said that when it comes to the next step of drawing a distinction between tainted and untainted appointments, candidates find themselves at a “dead end” as doing so would be impossible. Zaman, who also speaks to selected candidates who face destitution in light of the court’s judgement, also finds that anger against the Mamata Banerjee government continues to exist in the state.
The Long Cable
Distract, stupid; distract and then deflect
Harish Khare
Why now? Why has the Enforcement Directorate renewed its witch-hunt against the Gandhis? Even that poor guy, named Robert Vadra, has come, once again, in the dreaded agency’s cross-hairs, in a case dated back to 2008. The cliché, “The Law must take its course,” is being bandied about. Once again, we have been made to realize how tortuous and how (in)convenient the course of law can be. Perhaps, one of those mysteries of the East.
Still, the question: why now? There is no disagreement, both among the pro and anti-government voices, that the Enforcement Directorate, during these last ten years, has been comprehensively transmuted into a political weapon, to be used and deployed against the Modi regime’s real or perceived enemies; sometimes it has also been misused against friendly souls who were refusing to fall in line at a quick enough pace to the satisfaction the Sultan. The polity—including, unfortunately, the judiciary—has ceded the Palace this royal privilege.
Still, the “why now” question remains unanswered. If the “leading voices” in the “national media” are to be believed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recovered his mojo after the drubbing received in the last Lok Sabha elections; he is the master of the Indian political universe. The best and the brightest in the commentariat have applauded the prime minister as the only outstanding, respected, and wise political leader in this turbulent world. He has successfully tamed those meddlesome priests in Nagpur. And, there is no regional or national political figure in the non-BJP crowd who can be deemed to be a threat to his presumed popularity.
And, the Gandhis? Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is no longer an active player, though she continues to command respect among the non-BJP honchos but no mass appeal, if she ever had. The Modi inner core group could not possibly regard Rahul Gandhi as a serious challenger to the Prime Minister, even though he vigorously refuses to pipe down. He is at best a niggling, little pain in the BJP’s collective back; an irritant, no doubt, who is unwilling to fade away.
Ten years ago, it was probably feasible for a triumphant Modi to put – by hook or by crook --the Gandhis behind the bars on any trumped- up charges. That moment has passed; there will be no political or electoral pay-off if the Modi government is now seen as going after the Nehru-Gandhi Family. And, this is because Mr. Modi himself has lost the much cultivated “moral” sheen as he has shielded and surrounded himself with known sinners and serial offenders. The Gandhis may have squandered their aura but neither the Prime Minister nor his Home Minister is perceived as a paragon of good governance or clean politics. The Modi regime’s hegemonic heft is rooted in the powers of the thanedar and the deep pockets of the crony businessmen. Immorality in public life stands institutionalized and has been sanctified as the “new normal.”
So, back to the original question: why this sudden flaunting of the baton against the hapless Gandhis?
Admittedly, as very clever political operatives, the Modi coterie understands the need to have “enemies” who can be paraded out as the excuse for the regime’s own incompetence or stupidities or as impediments to national greatness and glory. “The Dynasty” or “the Family” has served this purpose for a while; but, after ten years in office, to try to make the Gandhis again as the designated enemy is baffling, and reflects poorly on those who are touted as modern day chanakays.
Granted, the regime is rather good at playing the old, old game: distract, stupid, distract. Deflect, and, deflect again. Since 2014, Pakistan and its proxies have provided sufficient distraction from the Modi’s regime’s failures and foolishness. At Galwan, China made a tough “enemy” and took off at least 12 inches from the famed 56-inch chest. We are now being extremely careful not to offend China; we have put a cap on our unnecessary bravado. At home, the Muslims have refused to respond to incitement and provocation. The Meiteis and the Kukis have remained impervious to the Union Home Ministry’s danda. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Stalin has given the middle finger. Economy is not amenable to the Shahenshah’s firmans. ,
So, are we entitled to speculate that perhaps the Raisina Hill zamindars know of some gathering weakness or national vulnerability against which a distraction like the ED charge-sheet against the Gandhis can come handy. The great irony is that a regime which is good at inventing enemies does not have the guts to name the most obvious enemy in the room – Mr. Trump’s United States. The upper middle classes and the half-a-dozen crony oligarchs who sustain the Modi regime do not have the stomach to confront the United States, in the manner of a proud, nationalist, sovereign China.
The stage is being set for a surrender to President Trump and his cronies and business partners. The usual suspects in the so-called strategic community have already urged pragmatic realism, even though it is clear to everyone that the Trump agenda presents a clear and present danger to our national prosperity, as we know it. Some even think that if President Trump can inflict some pain on China, we stand to benefit from the resulting scenario. Errant nonsense. Ministers are travelling to Washington to try to negotiate terms of surrender.
Suddenly the avowedly uber-nationalist regime finds itself in a pickle. It knows that any concession and compromise with the Trump White House will be against our national grain, yet it is in no position to confront an “strategic ally” who is behaving like an adversary. In the coming weeks and months our dealings with Washington would produce national discomfort and would require serious distraction and deflection. It remains to be seen if the Enforcement Directorate’s move against the Gandhis would prove to be a sufficient distraction.
(Harish Khare was editor of The Tribune.)
Reportedly
One call with two different things to say. Prime minister Narendra Modi spoke to Elon Musk and at its conclusion said on X: “Spoke to @elonmusk and talked about various issues, including the topics we covered during our meeting in Washington DC earlier this year. We discussed the immense potential for collaboration in the areas of technology and innovation. India remains committed to advancing our partnerships with the US in these domains.” But DogeDesigner (an X handle said to be close to Musk) was more specific and let the cat out of the bag:
“BREAKING: Prime Minister Modi just had a call with Elon Musk. They discussed key areas of collaboration in tech and innovation, building on their earlier meeting in Washington DC.
Tesla and Starlink are launching soon in India. India continues to deepen its US partnership.”
Deep dive
Rajasthan is the fourth-most groundwater-extracting state in India but unlike the four other states in the top five, which saw a decrease in groundwater extraction for irrigation between 2013 and 2023, Rajasthan saw an increase of 3.74%. The number of ‘overexploited’ water blocks in the state also increased from 164 to 216 during this time period. Water scarcity has pushed some farmers to switch to less water-intensive crops, but for many others even these are not an option – they are instead forced to enter the labour market, reports Ashwini Kumar Shukla.
Prime number: 96%
The number of appeals the central information commission began returning to citizens rose abruptly in 2015 and has stayed high since then. This has been accompanied by a decrease in the number of appeals it has registered. The Satark Nagrik Sangathan finds that in 2023, the commission returned 40% of the appeals or complaints it received, and that almost 96% of cases that were returned did not make it back to the CIC.Opeds you don’t want to miss
The Supreme Court’s action on the Tamil Nadu governor by using Article 142. has been criticised by some as an overreach. Lawyer Indira Jaising does not see it that way. The balance of power between the Centre and the States has been restored, she writes. But the question remains: does the Governor face no consequences for his inaction in the performance of his duties?
Why is Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin pushing for state autonomy now, asks Bharat Bhushan. He has been saying that the Centre has been progressively moving into the State’s space and has set up a committee to look into the issue. But while this demand reflects its apprehension of being margnisalised, “it is also a search for a new campaign narrative” considering that elections are due next year in April-May.
After some Brahmin groups objected, the Central Board of Film Certification, popularly called the Censor Board, asked the makers of a film on Jyotiba Phule to make certain changes to it. So words that specifically mentioned caste names were cut. The film’s director Ananth Mahadevan told interviewer Tatsam Mukherjee that he did not agree with the modifications but ended up doing what they asked, because “we wanted to follow the law.”
The new Waqf amendments are a case of a troubling legislative overreach, writes Thamizhachi Thangapandian, a Member of Parliament from Chennai. “The legislation fundamentally alters the principles that have long guided waqf creation and management.”is not reform but rupture.” He says the Act must be immediately withdrawn and a consultation with state and community stakeholders.
Former top cop and diplomat Julio Ribeiro too says the new Waqf (Amendment) Act reeks of a divisive agenda. He concedes that Waqf was being misused by Muslims, but those perpetrators could be dealt with by the law. But he also does not mince his words saying “laws such as the CAA and the Waqf (Amendment) Act are meant to needle the Muslim community.”
Listen up
“The things people were then scared to speak openly about are now all around us,” author of the book H-Pop Kunal Purohit observes. Referring to the recent Ram Navami processions in Mumbai where participants used obscene language against Muslims, he says that while his social media posts have forced the police to take action “the genie is out of the bottle”. Listen in on his conversation with Sidharth Bhatia in The Wire Talks podcast here.
Watch out
While our attention was on the Waqf (Amendment) Act and Washington’s tariff plans, the government passed the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025. Speaking to Karan Thapar, lawyer and Congress MP Abhishek Singhvi says the law is “unconstitutional, un-Indian and Orwellian”. It “criminalises the idea of foreignness” as it is a “licence to harass, detain and deport without rhyme, reason or remedy”. Section 3 of the Act also offers no way to appeal the decision of an immigration officer. And the law’s impact may not stop with foreigners, Singhvi cautions.
Over and out
Earlier this month the army issued a request for information from state-owned and private companies for fake T-90 tanks, and the air force is also planning to deploy replicas of its Rafale, Su-30MKI and Tejas fighters. Rahul Bedi recalls that the use of deception on the battlefield – from fake tanks, aircraft and dummy troops to techniques of sonic and radar deception – is “as old as war itself”. The Greeks’ fabled use of the Trojan horse and Erwin Rommel’s North African campaign are two famous examples.
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.