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India’s opposition alliance held a mock removal proceeding against the country’s chief election commissioner on Saturday in the garden of the Congress president’s official residence. This exercise carries no legal force and was staged a day before a mass rally in the national capital Image Via: @RahulGandhi on X About 250 people attended, among them opposition MPs, civil society figures, journalists and voters who say their names were wrongly struck from the electoral rolls. A former Speaker of the lower house presided from a stage built to resemble the old parliamentary chamber, with a wood-panelled backdrop, seats in a semicircle and microphones set in the front rows. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge moved a motion listing six allegations against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. It was seconded by a Samajwadi Party MP and carried by a show of hands. The charges allege that Kumar conspired with the governing party to manipulate elections, that the nationwide revis...

Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit becomes the 29th chief of the Indian Air Force on Saturday, bringing to the post an unusual background for the job: he is an experimental test pilot Image Via: @ShadowIND_IN on X He takes the rank of Air Chief Marshal and succeeds Air Chief Marshal Amar Preet Singh, who retires the same day. The appointment was announced on 6 October. Dixit has been vice chief since 1 July. Commissioned into the fighter stream in December 1986, he is also a qualified flying instructor and has logged more than 3,500 hours on types ranging from the Mirage 2000 and the Jaguar to the IL-78 tanker, the Hawk trainer and the indigenous Tejas. He has commanded a frontline fighter base in the western sector and a fighter training base in the south, and before becoming vice chief he was chief of the integrated defence staff and commanded Central Air Command. He has served in operations including Safed Sagar, the air campaign during the 1999 Kargil conflict, Operation Rakshak and ...

Andhra Pradesh has put preliminary damage from Cyclone Arnab at 46 billion rupees and asked the central government to send an assessment team. Forecasters warned that a fresh weather system over the Bay of Bengal is likely to bring heavy rain back to the same coast early next week Image Source: @ncbn on X A low-pressure area lay over the south Andaman Sea on Friday morning and was very likely to deepen into a depression over the southeast Bay of Bengal around Saturday, the India Meteorological Department said. It is expected to produce isolated heavy to very heavy rainfall over coastal Andhra Pradesh on 2 and 3 November, with thunderstorms, lightning and winds gusting to 60 kilometres an hour. Strong surface winds are forecast along the coast until 3 November. That would reach the state before it has finished repairing the damage from the first storm, which crossed the coast on Wednesday. Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu said the state had submitted its preliminary estimate to...

A Rafale Marine fighter landed on and took off from the Indian Navy’s home-built aircraft carrier INS Vikrant for the first time in trials intended to establish what has to be adapted before the aircraft can operate from the ship Image Via: @indiannavy on X Officials described the flight as a first step towards putting the type into service with the navy. Before it, the aircraft had been flown at a shore-based facility in Goa where a ramp and arrestor wires reproduce the conditions of an Indian flight deck. French pilots carried out those earlier tests under a contract signed last year. The purpose, according to accounts of the programme, is to identify the modifications the aircraft needs for carrier work. India signed for 26 Rafale Marines from Dassault Aviation in April 2025, at a reported cost of 630 billion rupees. The order covers 22 single-seat fighters and four two-seat trainers, together with weapons, simulators, training and support. It provides for the transfer of tech...

Six people were killed when a helicopter returning from the Himalayan shrine of Badrinath came down in forest in northern India on Friday. The state aviation authority has grounded the operator’s entire fleet while investigators establish what happened Image Source: @AirMedia24 on X The single-engine AS350B3, registered VT-HCX and operated by Trans Bharat Aviation, left the helipad at Badrinath shortly after 1pm bound for Sahastradhara helipad at Dehradun, carrying a pilot and five passengers. Accounts of the timeline differ: India’s civil aviation ministry put the departure at 1.14pm, while a national news agency reported that the aircraft left at 1.12pm and that contact was lost two minutes later. An Army signal centre in the area reported seeing smoke from the helicopter in the Hathi Parvat sector as it lost height, according to that agency. The wreckage was found in forest near Chai village, close to Joshimath in Chamoli district. Police, state disaster response personnel and...

Indian customs officers found 45 live reptiles sedated and hidden inside food packets in the luggage of two passengers arriving from Bangkok, in one of two recent wildlife cases the government disclosed Representational Image Only / Canva Stocks The passengers, both Indian nationals, landed at Tiruchirappalli airport in Tamil Nadu on 26 October on a flight routed through Colombo. Acting on prior intelligence, officers from the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the airport’s air intelligence unit searched their bags and recovered the animals from 27 separate food containers. The haul comprised 23 corn snakes, 16 ball pythons, five Argentine black and white tegus and a single white iguana. None of the species is native to India; all are common in the international exotic pet trade. The animals were seized and both passengers were arrested under India’s customs law. Separately, the environment ministry said it had sent a central team to Madhya Pradesh to investigate the death of ...

India used a regional security meeting in the Philippines to press its argument that countries which fund or shelter armed groups should face no tolerance from the rest of the world, and said the United States had reaffirmed its support for India against cross-border terrorism Image Via: @SecWar on X India’s defence minister, Rajnath Singh, met his American, Japanese, Singaporean and South Korean counterparts in a single day on the margins of the ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting-Plus in Cebu. In the meeting with US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, the two reviewed a ten-year defence framework agreed between the countries and discussed quicker technology transfer, closer integration of defence industries and the security of supply chains. According to India’s defence ministry, Singh called for an uncompromising approach towards states that support, train or finance armed groups, and Hegseth reaffirmed American support for India against cross-border terrorism. No American account of ...

India and Mexico have formally begun negotiating a preferential trade agreement, signing terms of reference that set out the scope, method and timetable of the talks. Image Via: PIB India A preferential agreement is narrower than a full free trade deal, cutting tariffs on selected goods rather than opening markets across the board. The terms agreed cover market access for goods, rules of origin, customs procedures, trade facilitation, dispute settlement, sanitary and plant health rules, technical barriers to trade and trade remedies. The negotiations follow an understanding reached between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and President Claudia Sheinbaum when they met on the margins of the G7 summit in Canada in June 2025. The terms were signed during a visit by India’s commerce secretary, who held talks with Mexico’s undersecretary for foreign trade, standing in for the economy secretary. Both sides identified automotive components, chemicals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, agriculture a...

Cyclone Arnab came ashore on India’s southeastern coast in a prolonged landfall lasting six hours early on Wednesday, killing at least eight people, uprooting tens of thousands of trees and cutting power across coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh. Representational Image Via: @IndianTechGuy on X The storm crossed the Andhra Pradesh and Yanam coastline between 2am and 8am, passing some 20 kilometres east-northeast of Narsapur and about 60 kilometres southwest of Kakinada. It arrived as a very severe cyclonic storm, with sustained winds of 125 to 135 kilometres an hour gusting to 150, and weakened to a severe cyclonic storm once inland. Forecasters expected it to decay into a deep depression within hours and to track north-northwest. 39 NDRF teams on ground in 5 states. 4 teams being airlifted for deployment in Andhra as additional reserve; people will be evacuated from low-lying areas before landfall.” : NDRF DIG Mohsen Shahedi on preparations for cyclone Arnab #WeathAlert #weatherfor...