With ‘10 Year Moratorium’ on ‘Evil of Communalism’ Over, Modi’s 2025 I-Day Speech Signals Boost to Hindutva; Praising RSS is Attack on Constitution
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
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Over to Siddharth Varadarajan for today’s Cable
Snapshot of the day
August 15, 2025
Siddharth Varadarajan
Remember Narendra Modi’s first Independence Day speech as prime minister of India, in 2014? There was this one passage that stood out at the time:
“Even after Independence, we have had to face the poison of casteism and communalism. How long will these evils continue?... Let's resolve for once in our hearts, let's put a moratorium on all such activities for 10 years…”
The call was insincere, of course, but why he put a time limit on this resolve was never explained. In any case, the ten years have now ended and with it the commitment for a ‘moratorium’ on communalism is also over. In his speech today, which contained the usual tired promises of jobs and technology and progress (albeit leavened with Operation Sindoor triumphalism), two bits stood out like a sore thumb, underlining his open embrace of the evil of communalism. Modi chose to single out the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh – whose aim is a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, everyone else be damned – for commendation, and soon thereafter segued into demographic fear-mongering of the worst kind. “As part of a deliberate conspiracy, the demography of the country is being altered,” he said, claiming that “infiltrators are snatching away the livelihoods of our youth”.
In an endorsement of the ‘love jihad’ conspiracy theory of the Sangh, Modi declared, without any evidence whatsoever, “These infiltrators are targeting our sisters and daughters”. His answer to this “crisis for national security” is a ‘High-Power Demography Mission’ whose remit and recommendations are likely to provide further fuel to the vilification of Muslims around the country and even give an impetus to official attempts to disenfranchise Muslim voters – presumably through the National Register of Citizens or Bihar-style ‘special intensive revisions’ of the electoral rolls.
Another tell-tale sign of the exclusionary direction Modi intends to pursue in the years ahead is the curious reference he made to India’s diversity in his speech. “We wish to celebrate diversity, to cultivate the habit of celebrating diversity,” he said, but instead of using this as a peg to acknowledge India’s multi-religious heritage, he cited only the Kumbh Mela as an example of how “Bharat’s diversity is lived.”
His speech also contained rather goofy references to the ‘Sudarshan Chakra’ of Krishna – which he said his government would use as an inspiration to develop a “powerful weapon system” – and a pledge to “not allow even a single particle of slavery to remain in our lives, in our systems, in our rules, laws and traditions”, which is code for eliminating whatever still remains of India’s syncretic traditions.
Modi’s decision to appease the RSS by showering praise in his Independence Day speech on an organisation that consciously kept away from the independence struggle may well be driven by his desire to put a lid on contradictions within India’s ruling parivar. However, the boost to Hindutva-style religious sectarianism is a win-win for all factions.
In line with this aggressive front-loading of Hindutva preoccupations, the Petroleum Ministry’s Independence Day greetings today gave pride of place to V.D. Savarkar, founder of the ‘Hindu rashtra’ concept, visually demoting Gandhi, Subhas Chandra Bose and Shaheed Bhagat Singh. And oh, “the person linking Savarkar and Gandhi is Godse” – and who left for Delhi on his deadly mission with these words of the Hindutva ideologue ringing in his ears: ‘Yashasvi houn ya’ (‘succeed and come’).
Undeterred by the Supreme Court’s curious observation that terrorist incidents like Pahalgam – which occurred even as security in Jammu and Kashmir is directly controlled by the Union government – mean restoration of statehood cannot be rushed, J&K chief minister Omar Abdullah has announced that he will soon launch a door-to-door signature campaign for statehood.
The death toll from the mudslide in Chishoti in Jammu and Kashmir's Kishtwar has risen to 60. Eighty people are injured or have been rescued, and personnel on the ground are struggling to search for bodies amid the boulders, uprooted trees and mud that tore into the village and which are thought to have been propelled by a cloudburst in Kishtwar's higher reaches. Officials said that between 500 and 800 devotees were present yesterday in Chishoti, which is a base camp for the Machail Mata pilgrimage in the area.
On the other side of the border too, at least 60 people were killed in a single day in flash floods that hit Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Gilgit-Baltistan regions. Discounting these fatalities there have otherwise been 325 deaths in rain-related incidents so far in Pakistan this monsoon, and over 700 others have been injured, Elian Peltier and Zia ur-Rehman report.
As if the tragedies in Kishtwar and Pakistan were not strong enough evidence of the need for India and Pakistan to find ways of jointly dealing with climate change and watershed management, Modi used his Red Fort speech today to double down on his decision to scrap the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) – the one process through which win-win solutions can and must be found. “The waters of rivers originating from Bharat are irrigating the fields of our enemies, while the farmers and the soil of our own nation remain thirsty,” he said. Actually, of the six rivers covered by the IWT, only the Chenab, Ravi and Beas, as well as the Jhelum, originate in India. Of these, the IWT already gives India the right to use the waters of the first three rivers (i.e. ‘eastern rivers’. As for the western rivers [the Indus, Sutlej and Jhelum], the first two originate in China. And it certainly won’t be nice if Xi Jinping announces that “the waters of rivers originating in Zhōngguó” must not be allowed to irrigate fields in India.
New Delhi has rejected an August 8 ruling by the Court of Arbitration (CoA) formed by the World Bank under theIWT which said that the “general rule” under the pact is that “India shall ‘let flow’ the waters of the western rivers for Pakistan's unrestricted use”. India had put the Treaty in abeyance following the April 22 Pahalgam terror attack. The external affairs ministry reiterated its position that it does not recognise the CoA and that its “pronouncements are therefore without jurisdiction” and “devoid of legal standing”. Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal also said in response to recent remarks by the Pakistani prime minister and foreign minister regarding the IWT that Islamabad “would be well advised to temper its rhetoric as any misadventure will have painful consequences as was demonstrated recently”.
A Supreme Court bench yesterday did not grant interim relief to petitioners seeking a stay on the court's order that stray dogs must be removed from the National Capital Region's streets and housed in shelters. Justices Vikram Nath, Sandeep Mehta and NV Anjaria, who reserved their judgment on the petitions, said that “local authorities are not doing what they should be doing … they should be here taking responsibility”. While lawyer for the petitioners Abhishek Singhvi argued that the court had “put the cart before the horse” as there weren't enough shelters in the NCR, solicitor general Tushar Mehta said that children were dying due to dog bites and that sterilisation does not stop this. He also made the curious argument that “we have seen videos of people eating meat and then projecting themselves as animal lovers” – a non-sequitur that the Carnatic vocal singer TM Krishna has labelled “brahminism out in the open.”
As the country awaits publication of the list of deleted voters, some fear that the Election Commission's special intensive revision of the voter roll in Bihar may undermine incremental gains made by Dalit and OBC communities in parts of the state, who were oppressed and often denied the right to vote by upper caste landlords, writes Tushar Dhara. He visited Dalit and Muslim citizens in Bihar's Bhojpur district whose names do not figure in the draft voter roll produced under the SIR, including some who said they submitted their enumeration forms to their booth-level officers.
Reporting from Jehanabad, Ajit Anjum highlights the case of an Army officer, Rajkumar Prasad, who came from Jodhpur to his village in Jehanabad to submit his “SIR” form only to find that the Booth Level Officer (BLO) had already fraudulently submitted one in his name without his knowledge. The officer recorded a video of the BLO admitting his mistake, in which the BLO confessed to having committed the fraud under pressure from above. “Will the Election Commission take any action in this matter?”, asks Anjum.
While 1,049 undocumented immigrants – suspected to be from Bangladesh – were stopped at exit points along India's eastern border while trying to voluntarily leave the country last year, the number for this year until July 15 is over three times more – at 3,536 – Vijaita Singh reports. One official Singh spoke to attributed the spike in undocumented immigrants leaving voluntarily to the change of guard in Bangladesh.
It’s not just Russian oil that is fuelling the US-India trade war, there is another liquid – milk – writes the Economist. Simon Long describes India’s dairy industry as “inefficient and unproductive… not so much a business, more like a social-security system (with an element of religious duty)”. That may be so, but flooding India with cheaper dairy products from the US will ruin livelihoods and spell political doom for Modi. As the British magazine notes:
“India protects its dairy farmers with import tariffs comparable to those Mr Trump is now imposing on Indian exporters: 40% on most butter and cheese and 60% on powdered milk. Without these protections, says Shashi Kumar, boss of Akshayakalpa, a privately owned organic-dairy business in southern India that works with 2,200 small farmers, “smallholder farms will collapse”.”
The Washington Post has a story pegged on a testy encounter Ricky Gill, the US National Security Council’s senior director for South and Central Asia, had with with retired Indian diplomats on Operation Sindoor’s end in Delhi over dinner:
“Gill noted there was one thing irritating Trump’s team: Why were the Indians still obsessing over how the conflict in May had ended? … The Modi government’s insistence that Washington played no part in winding down the conflict has hurt its relationship with the White House, said Sanjaya Baru, who served as media adviser for former Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh when he was in office. But he said it reflects what Modi prioritizes most: mollifying his Hindu-nationalist base. Modi wants to be perceived as the “macho Hindu leader” fighting Pakistan, Baru said, and acknowledging American involvement would undermine that self-image. “When you make domestic politics your priority, then foreign policy falls by the wayside.”
British firms stand to enjoy unprecedented access to the Indian government's procurement market as a result of the free trade agreement between the two countries, but that itself doesn't automatically guarantee profits to these companies, experts believe. That's because Indian suppliers will receive preferential treatment over their UK counterparts, and British companies will have to grapple with a procurement market that is marred by pending dues and poor contract enforcement, Nikhil Inamdar points out. Still, he writes: “The hope is that more foreign players will force more accountability from the Indian government and "help standardise" its tendering and public procurement process – marked by payment delays and poor contract enforcement – to global standards.”
One group of people that is looking forward to the free trade agreement are grape farmers in Maharashtra, as their product will now enter Britain duty-free. A number of these farmers, reports Vinaya Pandit, owe their production capacity to collective farming.
Modi invokes environment in I-Day speech but leaves much unsaid
Prime Minister Modi brought up the environment and energy numerous times in his Independence Day speech, but he also left several things unsaid. Aathira Perinchery writes that while Modi said that “nature is testing us all” with natural disasters such as landslides and cloudbursts over the last few weeks, he missed talking about how scientists say that unplanned and unbridled construction in places including the Himalayas are making their residents more vulnerable. Such construction includes the government's Char Dham road project, regarding which scientists have urged great caution. He also spoke about clean energy (which is not necessarily green or just), India meeting its target of generating 50% of its energy via clean sources (which experts suggest will not “drive real world emission reductions) and a new initiative for extracting energy from the ocean (over which environmentalists have raised concerns).
Potential deal for close-range rifles could boost Army's COIN ops—and Adani’s profits
With the defence ministry's attempts to procure new close-quarter-battle carbine rifles repeatedly ending up and dying in bureaucratic limbo, the army has maintained a pendency of 425,318 CBQ units since the 1990s. But this is slated to change soon, Rahul Bedi reports citing industry sources, with the defence ministry having shortlisted Kalyani Strategic Systems Limited and Adani Aerospace & Defence to supply 425,318 CQB carbines in a potential Rs 2,800 crore deal that could be inked soon. Kalyani would series-produce the DRDO's Joint Venture Protective Carbine, while Adani would manufacture the Israel Weapon Industries' Galil carbine. Without a compact weapon like a CQB carbine at hand, soldiers conducting counterinsurgency operations must lug assault rifles into tight alleyways or board helicopters with unwieldy weapons.
Experts say Arunachal’s Siang dam, billed as flood shield, has limited role
India argues that its proposed Siang Upper Multipurpose Project dam on the Brahmaputra in Arunachal Pradesh will “act as a flood cushion” in the event of a sudden release of water from China's planned Medog mega-dam upstream. But does this argument hold water? Experts say that the Siang dam will be of limited use this way, because as its primary job will be to generate hydropower, it will need high water levels and therefore will not be much of a buffer. Feasibility studies for the Siang project also come many years after China began studying the site of the Medong dam, and experts fear that if India rushes to catch up with Beijing, “its own dam will not be built in the most optimal way”. Vaishnavi Rathore reports.
The Long Cable
Modi's Praise of RSS in Independence Day Speech Amounts to Attack on Constitution
SN Sahu
One of the key aspects of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort on the occasion of the 79th anniversary of our independence was his celebration of the constitution, the 75th anniversary of which is being marked this year.
While doing so, however, he gratuitously referred to the centenary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which never played any role in the freedom struggle. If anything, it supported British rule. In defence of not joining the Mahatma Gandhi led independence movement. MS Golwalkar, then chief ideologue of the RSS, resorted to convoluted logic. In Bunch of Thoughts, he wrote: "Territorial nationalism implies that the Indian nation is formed of all those people who reside in this land.... An effort was consistently made to look upon Hindus, Muslims, Christians as 'nationals' and forge them into an integrated force against the foreign rule."
Apart from standing against the freedom struggle, the RSS, on 14th August 1947 refused to accept the national flag adopted by the Constituent Assembly and scathingly declared, “"The so-called National Flag would never be respected and owned by Hindus. The word three is in itself an evil and a flag having three colours will produce a bad psychological effect." It was only much later that it accepted the tiranga. It is tragic that Modi glorified the RSS on the occasion of independence day despite its adversarial role against the freedom struggle and national flag.
While Modi never mentioned the RSS in earlier I-Day speeches, he presumably did so today in an effort to placate the Sangh – with which, as reported, he has a difficult relationship.
RSS's sustained opposition to the Constitution
“When we talk about democracy, independent India, then our constitution is the best lighthouse for us, our centre of inspiration,” said Modi. Not for everyone, he should have added. It is well documented, for example, that the RSS opposed the constitution tooth and nail on November 30, 1949, four days after it was adopted by the Constituent Assembly. RSS mouthpiece Organiser wrote on November 30 that there was nothing ‘Bharatiya’ in the constitution.
While incorporating many aspects of the “British, American, Canadian, Swiss and sundry other constitutions”, said the RSS about the framers of the constitution, they did not find any worth in the “laws as enunciated in the Manusmriti”, which “excite the admiration of the world and elicit spontaneous obedience and conformity”.
That adversarial disposition of the RSS against the constitution continued unabated for decades On the occasion of the constitution's 50th anniversary in 2000-2001, K Sudarshan, former RSS sarsanghchalak or chief, told Karan Thapar that the Indian constitution is alien to the Indian ethos and culture. When Thapar asked him,“And you are not feeling bound today by a constitution that was created 50 years ago”, he stressed that “… it needs an utter review. It must be reviewed completely.”
KR Narayanan saved the constitution
Around 1999-2000, when KR Narayanan was president of India, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who took pride in being a swayamsevak, repeatedly talked about a review of the constitution.
In his speech delivered on the golden jubilee of the constitution on January 27, 2000, Narayanan sharply countered Vajpayee and said, “Today when there is so much talk about revising the constitution or even writing a new constitution, we have to consider whether it is the constitution that has failed us or whether it is we who have failed the constitution”.
Those thoughtful utterances by Narayanan forced Vajpayee not to review the constitution but only its “working” – by appointing a commission headed by Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah.
People in defence of the constitution
Now in 2025, when its 75th anniversary is celebrated, the issue of saving the constitution has become an electoral issue and people have come forward to defend and protect it.
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi often holds up a copy of the constitution in public meetings across the country and sensitises people about the danger it is facing from the BJP and the RSS.
By juxtaposing the 75th anniversary of the constitution and the RSS's centenary in his Independence Day speech, Modi was implying a link between the two events, which is akin to the relationship between a mongoose and a cobra.
RSS's stand against ‘secular’ and ‘socialist’
This is further evidenced by the remarks of Dattatreya Hosabale, RSS general secretary, in January this year that a decision must be made to remove the words “socialist” and “secular” from the preamble to the constitution, because those words were inserted during the Emergency in 1976 by the Indira Gandhi government.
He did so in spite of the Supreme Court ruling in favour of the insertion of those words just on the eve of Constitution Day on November 25, 2024.
RSS and Gandhi's assassination
Apart from the track record of the RSS in negating the constitution, its role in distributing sweets after the dastardly assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948 has been documented by none other than Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first home minister of India, whom the BJP and Modi try to appropriate. Patel banned the RSS in February 1948, and in September that year in a letter to its chief M.S. Golwalkar wrote,
“All their [RSS leaders'] speeches were full of communal poison. It was not necessary to spread poison in order to enthuse the Hindus and organise for their protection. As a final result of the poison, the country had to suffer the sacrifice of the invaluable life of Gandhiji. Even an iota of the sympathy of the government, or of the people, no more remained for the RSS … Opposition turned more severe, when the RSS men expressed joy and distributed sweets after Gandhi's death. Under these conditions, it became inevitable for the government to take action against the RSS…”
In a letter to India's chief ministers on February 5, 1948, a day after the RSS was banned, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote that “a deliberate coup d’etat was planned involving the killing of several persons and the promotion of general disorder to enable the particular group concerned to seize power.”
Patel and Nehru's warnings need to be read alongside the unseemly praise Modi heaped on the RSS from an official platform.
S.N. Sahu served as officer on special duty to former President K.R. Narayanan.
Reportedly
One of the schemes Modi announced today in his Independence Day speech is the Pradhan Mantri Viksit Bharat Rojgar Yojana under which young workers landing their first job and enrolling with the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) scheme will be entitled to a grant of Rs 15,000 payable in two instalments over the first year of their employment. Rs 15,000 is a far cry from the Rs 15 lakh Modi had promised every Indian during the 2014 general election but tying even this small sum to EPF enrolment means it will apply only to workers hired by enterprises with more than 20 employees. This may help formalisation but perhaps what is needed is to extend the benefits to workers enrolled with the Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC), which. covers workplaces with 10 to 19 employees. Some 8 crore workers are enrolled with the EPFO while ESIC enrolments account for over 3 crore workers.
Pen vs sword
Deep dive
The Mandal dam – officially the North Koel reservoir project – in western Jharkhand's Garhwa district is a site of turmoil for local villagers. Twenty-eight years ago, a flood triggered by its blocked gates – something human rights groups allege was intentionally done – killed 21 people and submerged some 32 villages, and now that the state is trying to revive the dam, locals unwilling to leave are protesting for various reasons. These, reports Ashwini Kumar Shukla, include broken past promises and the fear of losing a local heritage site; villagers also claim that their consent was falsely obtained through forged documents.
Prime number: $27.35 billion
India's trade deficit widened to that amount in July, higher than economists' forecasts of $20-21 billion and driven by an increase in oil and gold imports. Goods exports rose from $35.14 billion in June to $37.24 billion last month, while imports surged from $53.92 billion to $64.59 billion, partly owing to pre-festival demand, Reuters reports. The trade deficit was $18.78 billion in June.Opeds you don’t want to miss
In a thoughtful meditation on the growing conformist streak in India’s contemporary political culture, Suhas Palshikar asks a county’s freedom amounts to:
“Is it about tactical silences in order to escape the wrath of the state and private vigilantes? If we are a free society, should the exercise of freedom be an act of bravado demanding that the citizen pays a heavy price for it?”
Anurag minus Verma takes a “satirical stroll through the rituals, ironies, and small absurdities that mark India’s annual celebration of liberty… Freedom and entrapment here are happy illusions, mirages that keep everyone believing the real thing is still coming, just not this year.”
There are three things India can do to regain global relevance, writes Omair Ahmed. First, it should leverage its large working population to move global debates on migration while also proving more jobs at home. Second, paying more attention to agriculture. And third, and creating an economy of the future based on technologies that serve the majority of its people, most of whom are still poor, rather than reserving investments in innovation to serve those at the top of the pyramid.
India is not Israel – and shouldn’t want to be, says Nirupama Rao. Addressing Hindutva admirers of Israel, she writes:
“India has more than 200 million Muslim citizens, spread across its entire territory, integrated in every sector of life. Treating them through the permanent-security lens that Israel applies to Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank would not “scale up” — it would destabilise the country from within. India’s unity is a product of political inclusion, however imperfect. Hollow that out, and no amount of military hardware can hold the center.”
Clamour over the Election Commission's conduct and voter rolls is not mere “hoo-ha” or “irksome comic relief”, as one retired businessman put it recently, argues MG Devasahayam. He lays out a laundry list of serious concerns that citizens have had regarding the electoral process in the country recently, including the EC's soft-pedalling of the prime minister's hateful conduct during last year's election campaign, its “deliberate denial of verifiability and auditability” to the public and “astounding mismatches or spikes” in assembly election data.
Rahul Gandhi's data-based allegations of voter fraud have energised workers across opposition parties and “enhanced the credibility of the electoral grievances the opposition had in common”. Can the opposition keep its momentum going? If it is to do this, says Bharat Bhushan, its path does not point to the courts for the time being, but to the people at large “whose voting rights have either been denied or their weightage reduced by the addition of fake voters or multiple voters”.
DeepSeek's emergence on the world stage prompted some self-reflection in India, which produces many world-class engineers but does not produce a DeepSeek or an Nvidia of its own. Why might this be? Taking a stab at this puzzle, Henny Sender says the answer is partly a mix of brain drain, Indian universities' “paltry record in commercialising and developing research”, and a dearth of ambitious entrepreneurs in its corporate sector.
Brian Y.S. Wong makes the case for India and China to start a new chapter, beginning by not looking at their bilateral relationship through the lens of their own ties and tensions with the US. “From strengthening trade to forging a multipolar global order, Beijing and New Delhi must capitalise on shared interests to overcome obstacles to detente.”
Listen up
With US President Donald Trump “threatening to double tariffs over Russian oil imports and China on its doorstep”, can India “maintain its strategic autonomy?” That's the question Foreign Policy's editor-in-chief Ravi Agarwal and former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan discuss in this episode of the Deep Dish on Global Affairs podcast.
Watch out
British comedian, writer and actor Meera Syal on Who Do You Think You Are “explores her grandfather's contribution to the struggle for Indian independence, looking at the fall of the Raj, the creation of India and Pakistan and the rise of immigration from the subcontinent”.
Over and out
Sudha Tilak takes stock of Rajinikanth's wildly successful career and the sheer scale of his fandom on the occasion of his 50th year in cinema. Having grown up poor and entered the film world as a bus conductor, Rajinikanth's characters on screen represent, as one of his biographers noted, “the underdog's dream: to beat the odds without losing one's humanity”. This value, notes Tilak, is “timeless and universal”.
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.
The cartoon pretty much sums it up!
This was India's darkest Independence Day ever. Will it be Hindupendence Day next year?