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The Indian Prime Minister spent the festival of lights in a forest clearing, handing sweets to men in olive green at a commando base that until recently was a launch pad for operations against Maoist guerrillas in Bastar and the dense interior of Abujhmad Image Via: @kumar_talukdar1 on X “Diwali is sweeter with those who protect us,” Narendra Modi wrote afterwards. “Naxalism is history. Development is the way ahead.” Diwali, which fell on Sunday, is the largest festival in the Indian calendar and the simplest in its central idea. Households clean and then everything gets illuminated — rows of small clay lamps along parapets and doorsteps, fireworks, patterns of coloured powder laid on floors to welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of fortune. The oldest thought in it is that light is something you put deliberately where the dark is. That was perhaps also the point of the venue. On 8 April the home ministry wrote to nine state governments to say that no district in India any longer falls...

India’s home minister said on Friday that his party would introduce a uniform civil code in every state it governs, telling a crowd in Uttarakhand that 15 states had moved towards one since the Himalayan state became the first to enforce it Image Via: PIB India Amit Shah was speaking at Uttarakhand’s foundation day, marking the creation of the state — originally named Uttaranchal — on 9 November 2000, when a government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee carved it out of Uttar Pradesh. It was renamed in 2007. A uniform civil code replaces religion-specific personal laws on marriage, divorce and inheritance with a single statute. Uttarakhand brought one into force in January 2025, the first Indian state to legislate its own; Goa retains a civil code inherited from Portuguese rule. Under it, Shah said, no one in the state can take multiple spouses and no woman can be subjected to instant divorce. He also set a target for elections due in 2027, asking for 50 per cent of the vote and more than ...

INS Trishul left Crete on 3 November after three days at Souda Bay, one of the Mediterranean’s principal military harbours, where the Indian frigate’s commanding officer called not only on the Hellenic Navy but on the heads of NATO’s maritime interdiction training centre and the US Naval Support Activity there. Image Via: PIB India Those discussions, the Indian defence ministry said, covered “operational logistics requirements, cooperation and mutual support amongst partner navies” — the practical business of refuelling, resupply and port access that determines how long a warship can stay far from home. The Greek call was the latest in a long run. Trishul escorted tankers through the Bab el-Mandeb strait in August, then called at Djibouti and at Alexandria in Egypt in September. Later that month she was at Toulon for Varuna, the bilateral exercise with the French navy, followed by Valencia. In October she spent a week at Devonport and four days at sea off Plymouth for Konkan-26 with ...

From 400 kilometres up, a thunderstorm does not look like weather. It looks like someone setting off crackers under a sheet. The cloud deck glows from within, goes dark, and glows again somewhere else, and the whole continent beneath flickers Representational Image Only Group Captain Shubhanshu Shukla filmed exactly that last year, and on Friday, as India began the five days of Diwali, he posted it. “Diwali has always held a special place in my heart and has been my favourite festival for as long as I can remember,” he wrote. “There is something about the magic of lights, the sparkle and the fireworks that fills me with a sense of wonder and joy.” Looking down at the storms, he said, “they reminded me of nature’s very own fireworks — a beautiful, unexpected reminder that the universe has its own way of celebrating light.” He wished his friends and their families a happy Dhanteras, and hoped the season would fill their homes with “light, happiness, good health and prosperity.” Diwal...

India’s defence research agency flight-tested its Pralay missile off the Odisha coast on Thursday, completing user evaluation trials and clearing the way for a weapon that fills an unusual gap in the country’s arsenal: a ballistic missile built for conventional war rather than nuclear deterrence Image Source: @SpokespersonMoD on X The test was conducted from Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Island at about 11.10am, with the Defence Research and Development Organisation saying all objectives were met on data from range instruments at Chandipur. The missile was developed by the Research Centre Imarat in Hyderabad with other DRDO laboratories and produced by the state-owned Bharat Dynamics. Officials from the agency, the armed forces and industry attended. “The induction of the system has become imminent,” the defence ministry said. The distinction matters. India’s established ballistic missiles, the Agni and Prithvi families, are nuclear delivery systems held by the Strategic Forces Command and ...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke for about fifteen hundred words in Pune on Tuesday afternoon. He did not use the words Election Commission, electoral rolls, opposition or protest. File Photo Via: PM NaMo on X By that evening Rahul Gandhi was on X counting the hours. “It’s been 24 hours since I challenged you, Modi ji,” the leader of the opposition wrote, renewing a proposal he had made the previous day for a face-to-face debate. Modi could pick the stage, the venue and the adjudicator — “you can even make Mohan Bhagwat ji the judge,” he offered, naming the head of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling party. The media would be there, and the country’s young people. Daro mat , he wrote. Don’t be afraid. He signed off wishing the PM a happy Diwali, with a rose in hand. Notably, the subject he named was not the electoral rolls. It was the accusation being made against him. Who is anti-national, Rahul Gandhi asked, and who has connections with fo...

Delhi’s police commissioner has told India’s Supreme Court that the advent of technology and social media means the closeness of a protest site to the seat of government has “ceased to be relevant and has become redundant” — the reasoning behind stripping the capital of its best-known venue for dissent Image Via: @IndiaHistorypic/ Photo Division The affidavit, filed by Commissioner Anurag Kumar, defends the removal of Jantar Mantar from the list of designated protest sites, a decision taken weeks into a national agitation against the Chief Election Commissioner. Jantar Mantar, he argues, was never a site at all but a public road that “ought not to have been declared” one, and its designation was “contrary to public interest since the inception.” Three replacements have been named: Ramlila Maidan in central Delhi, CBD Ground in the east and Burari Ground in the north-west. The commissioner set out why. The venue hosts more than 1,300 protests a year but can safely hold about 1,500 ...

India’s finance minister has told the leader of the opposition that the venue he is demanding for a public debate with the Prime Minister already exists, and that he holds a seat in it File Photo Via: @nsitharaman on X Nirmala Sitharaman was publicly replying to LoP Rahul Gandhi, who had spent two days challenging PM Narendra Modi to a face-to-face argument about which side has connections to foreign powers, offering to let Modi choose the stage, the venue and the adjudicator. “Parliament, where you happen to be the LoP,” she wrote, using the abbreviation for Leader of the Opposition. Her argument was about conduct rather than about the electoral rolls at the centre of the dispute. “Demanding answers also carries an obligation to hear them,” she said, accusing Gandhi and the opposition alliance of walking out while ministers were responding to their allegations and of disrupting sittings until they were lost entirely. She asked him to bring specific allegations and evidence, sayin...

The formations the Indian Army built itself around last year, including light commando battalions and artillery regiments equipped with drones and counter-drone systems, are proving effective in the field, the defence minister told a cross-party panel of members of Parliament on Tuesday. It is the first ministerial assessment of the restructuring since it was announced fifteen months ago Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X Rajnath Singh was chairing the defence ministry’s consultative committee, a body drawing members from both houses of Parliament, which met not in the capital but at Jaisalmer, a garrison town in the Thar desert of Rajasthan close to India’s western frontier. The units he named were unveiled by the army chief, General Upendra Dwivedi, on 26 July 2025. Bhairav are light commando battalions of roughly 250 soldiers each, thirty of them being raised, held clear of routine infantry duties and intended as rapid-response troops along the borders. Shaktibaan are artillery ...