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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 ...

At least two people were killed and standing crops across 52,459 hectares destroyed when Cyclone Murasu came ashore in the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh on Tuesday, with more than 12,000 people moved into relief camps and preliminary losses put at 3.44 billion rupees. Representational Image Only The storm crossed the coast near Ongole, in Prakasam district, between 3.30am and 8.30am, with winds of 110 to 120 kilometres an hour at landfall, according to the India Meteorological Department. Both deaths were in Bapatla district, where a man of 25 and a woman of 65 died in separate building collapses, the managing director of the state disaster management authority, Prakhar Jain, said. He put the number sheltering in relief centres at 12,230, across Guntur, Bapatla and Palnadu, the three worst-affected districts. Officials also reported 312 houses damaged and power transmission lines brought down. Rain back to the city! All credits to #Murasu cyclone https://t.co/Q2YxB6X0x3 — BULL...

India has launched a traceability system for churpi, the rock-hard cheese of the eastern Himalaya whose largest foreign market is not the dinner table but the pet shop, where it sells as a long-lasting natural dog chew. Image Source: @LalanSingh_1 on X The initiative was inaugurated in Gangtok on Tuesday by Rajiv Ranjan Singh, the union minister for fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying, at a programme held by the Sikkim Milk Union. The ministry said the system was intended to strengthen traceability and improve the product’s identity and marketability — the documentation that regulated import markets require before they will take a food product in volume. Churpi is made across Sikkim, Nepal, Bhutan and the Tibetan plateau by draining and pressing cow or yak milk and drying the result until it is almost too hard to bite. Locally it is chewed slowly or softened into soups.  Abroad, demand is driven overwhelmingly by its durability in a dog’s mouth. Nepal, which has built a...

India’s defence exports grew by nearly 63 per cent last financial year, leaving them within a third of a target set for 2029 and on course to clear it well before then. The production target for the same year is the far harder one: it requires an industry that has been growing at about 18 per cent a year to keep that up, without pause, for three more Image Source: PIB India Rajnath Singh, the defence minister, reaffirmed both goals — 3 trillion rupees of annual defence production and 500 billion rupees of exports by the financial year ending March 2029 — while opening the third Delhi Defence Dialogue at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses in the capital. The arithmetic separates them. Production reached a record 1.78 trillion rupees in the year to March 2026, up from 1.51 trillion the year before and 1.27 trillion the year before that. Reaching 3 trillion by 2029 needs about 19 per cent growth every year, marginally above the pace already being set. Export...

A metro line built by a private consortium to serve one of India’s largest technology parks begins carrying passengers in Pune on Wednesday, the first corridor delivered under a union policy that made private participation a condition of central funding for urban rail Image Via: @narendramodi on X Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the line by video link on Tuesday, alongside foundation stones for further work, in a package of Pune metro projects the government valued at about 218 billion rupees. The 23.3-kilometre elevated corridor runs from Maan, beside the Rajiv Gandhi Infotech Park at Hinjawadi, to the district court at Shivajinagar in the older part of the city, with 23 stations. Hinjawadi employs several hundred thousand technology workers and its road congestion is among the worst in the country. The line is intended to take a substantial share of that commute off the road, and connects the newer western edge of Pune to its historic centre. It was developed by Pune ...

India will have to ship goods and services worth 520 billion dollars in the six months to March, close to 18 per cent more than it managed in the same period a year earlier, if it is to meet the one-trillion-dollar export target its commerce minister reaffirmed on Tuesday. Over the first half of the financial year it grew exports by 14 per cent Image Source: @PiyushGoyal on X Piyush Goyal, the minister for commerce and industry, told students at Kirori Mal College in Delhi that exports had reached 480 billion dollars between April and September. The country shipped 863 billion dollars’ worth in the previous financial year, its highest on record. October, he said, had also been a good month. He was candid that the target had been set to stretch. India could have chosen 900 billion dollars, representing growth of about 5 per cent, and that alone would have been more than twice the 1.9 per cent expansion in global trade the International Monetary Fund was projecting when the target ...