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A third day of marches in Delhi ended with buses, barricades and a student leader driven fifty kilometres out of the city before being let go. What the protesters want is the Chief Election Commissioner's resignation, which the Indian Constitution leaves almost nobody in a position to grant. File Photo: @SpokespersonECI on X Neha Bora was picked up for the third consecutive day on Sunday. She heads the All India Students' Association, a left-wing student body founded in 1990 and affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, which has long been among the strongest organisations on campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University. She was taken from near Jantar Mantar at about five in the evening and driven to a police station in Narela, roughly fifty kilometres away in the far north of Delhi. She was released that same evening and posted a video afterwards. AISA says she came back without her bag or her phone. The officials have maint...

Captain Smit Machchhar has given the first detailed account of what happened in the cockpit of flydubai flight FZ1073, describing a blow to the back of his head, a loss of vision, and a final effort from the cockpit floor to reach the door handle. He gave it in a video call on Saturday with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who invited him and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to light a flame at Israel's next Independence Day ceremony — an honour, Netanyahu said, usually reserved for Israeli citizens. By the captain's account, the flight was ordinary until the first officer asked to pray, which Machchhar said was not unusual among local colleagues. Out of respect he kept facing forward rather than turning around. Four or five minutes later came what he called a big blow to the back of his head. His first thought was that the aircraft had suffered catastrophic damage. Then the blows kept coming, and he understood it was the other man in the cockpit. He ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 15 Of 15 Image Source: @UN on X Every September, world leaders come to the green marble podium of the General Assembly, deliver their national statements and leave. Most of what they say is forgotten within days. Read together rather than one at a time, the statements of this year's General Debate, held from September 22 to 28, record something larger than any one of them conveyed, that a broad, cross-regional admission that the distribution of power has moved faster than the institutions meant to manage it. The Secretary-General set the terms on the opening morning. "We are clearly moving towards a multipolar world. And that movement is irreversible," António Guterres said in his final address to a General Debate before his term ends. He did not present this as good news or bad news. He said multipolarity could take two shapes: a world of "fragmentation and transactionalism", or a "networked" one in which severa...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 14 Of 15 File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X Malaysia told the UN General Assembly it was "sick of" the Security Council veto and called for its abolition, arguing that the world's "global majority" could no longer simply live with decisions taken by a few. Delivering Malaysia's national statement on Saturday, September 26, Foreign Minister Mohamad Hasan said nowhere was the need for reform more critical. "No place requires reform more than the Security Council. No place more clearly exposes the weaknesses of the United Nations than the Security Council," he said. His frustration centred on Gaza. Malaysia and other states, he said, had pursued every avenue, including calls for an immediate ceasefire, unrestricted humanitarian aid, punitive action against Israel and full UN membership for Palestine. "Yet, again and again, the collective will of this assembly has encountered the silencing effect of the veto. ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 13 Of 15 File Photo: @DrSJaishankar on X Belarus used the UN General Assembly to accuse the European Union of clinging to a "slipping dominance", a day after co-launching with Russia a Eurasian charter meant to anchor a multipolar order on the continent. Foreign Minister Maxim Ryzhenkov addressed the General Debate on Saturday, September 26. Turning the session's theme on the organisation itself, he said the UN "does not work for the benefit of all" and "does not manage change", blaming states he accused of deliberately undermining the system of international relations. He singled out the EU. Belarus, he said, was "concerned by the policies of the European Union's leadership", whose aim he described as preserving its "slipping dominance". He questioned whether Europeans wanted to become "cannon fodder" in a future war with Russia, and accused officials in Brussels of wanting to ...

UNGA81 And The Multipolar Drift | Part 12 Of 15 Cuba told the UN General Assembly that the international system was dangerously close to falling into "the law of the jungle", as Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla accused the United States of imposing an "energy blockade" that has repeatedly brought down the island's power grid. Image Source: @BricsIndia2026 Addressing the General Debate on Saturday, September 26, Rodríguez said international law and the founding principles of the UN, among them the sovereign equality of States, were under "permanent attack" from expanding militarism and economic coercion. He called Washington's aim of imposing peace through force absurd and unachievable. He opened by recalling that 66 years earlier, almost to the hour, Fidel Castro had addressed the Assembly from the same podium. The centre of the speech was an account of US pressure since January. "Since January, 2026, this aggression has strengthene...

India said on Saturday that it had secured the deportation from Türkiye of Navpreet Singh, who the government says had obtained Turkish citizenship under a false identity and continued to move heroin and methamphetamine into India from Afghanistan. The Union home minister, Amit Shah, announced it, describing Singh as a hardened narco-trafficking kingpin who had lived as Navab Virk until Indian agencies, in his words, ripped apart veil after veil to establish who he was. Singh has been brought back and jailed in connection with drug trafficking and other cases in which he is an accused.  "Modi govt is committed to destroying every narco-cartel before Dec 2029," Shah wrote. The framing is worth noticing as much as the arrest. A man accused of smuggling is described in the vocabulary of a security threat and his return is presented not as a police success but as a national one. Over the past several years India has steadily moved narcotics out of the category of crime and publ...

India summoned the senior-most Pakistani diplomat in New Delhi on Saturday to protest against what it called the continued facilitation of illegal cross-border infiltration, and dismissed Pakistani allegations about an incident on the Punjab border two days earlier. File Photo: BSF India The Ministry of External Affairs said it had called in the Chargé d'Affaires of the Pakistan High Commission and lodged a strong protest. It described Pakistan's claims over the 2 October incident in the Ferozepur sector as "baseless and motivated". According to the ministry's account, three people crossed into Indian territory and kept moving towards the border fence after repeated warnings from the Border Security Force to turn back. "The BSF was compelled to engage them for posing an imminent security threat," the ministry said in its statement. It placed the episode within what it called a wider pattern. "This incident highlights a clear pattern of repeated c...

Six of Indian Parliament's 24 department-related standing committees have changed hands in the annual reconstitution of the panels, which takes effect from 26 September 2026 for the 2026-27 term, with the Trinamool Congress losing the two chairmanships it held. Image Source: @TajinderBagga on X A parliamentary bulletin setting out the new composition was issued on Saturday. The commerce committee, which the Trinamool's Rajya Sabha member Dola Sen chaired through the outgoing year, passes to Sudhanshu Trivedi of the BJP. The committee on chemicals and fertilisers, chaired by the Trinamool's Kirti Azad, goes to Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar. Dastidar's position is itself unsettled. She led a group of Trinamool MPs that broke away after the West Bengal assembly elections earlier this year and told the Lok Sabha Speaker it had merged with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India, a Tripura-based outfit, seeking recognition as a separate bloc. Om Birla has yet to rule on the claim...