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India’s opposition alliance drew tens of thousands to a rally in the capital on Sunday demanding the removal of the country’s chief election commissioner, a turnout far below the million its organisers had promised but the broadest gathering of opposition leaders on one stage in years. Image Via: @INCIndia on X Delhi police had expected around 50,000 and put the working capacity of Ramlila Maidan at 30,000 to 40,000 once the stages and enclosures were up. Organisers had said ten lakh — a million — would come. The ruling party said 40 per cent of the ground stood empty and counted several thousand vacant chairs out of 28,000 by mid-afternoon. More than 3,000 police and 10,000 paramilitary personnel were deployed, with cameras covering the venue and a cordon to stop any movement towards the de-notified protest ground at Jantar Mantar. Leaders marched the final stretch from Connaught Place in open-top vehicles. On the platform were Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge, Pri...

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...

India is pressing the global financial crime watchdog to examine Pakistan’s record on acting against the head of Jaish-e-Mohammed, as the Financial Action Task Force opens a three-day plenary in Paris running until Friday File Photo Via: @SukhiNehra on X At issue is the whereabouts of Masood Azhar, whom the United Nations designated a global terrorist in 2019. Pakistan has said he has been in Afghanistan since that year. The Taliban administration rejected that account in September, saying he was not in the country and that Islamabad had never formally raised the matter with Kabul. New Delhi has argued that the contradiction undermines Pakistan’s position, and that Islamabad should act against figures on its own territory rather than make announcements. It pointed to a bounty of seven million Pakistani rupees placed on Azhar last month, which India dismissed as a gesture rather than enforcement. Indian officials have spent the past week urging diplomats from partner countries and...

Three days before India’s opposition holds the largest rally of its campaign against the country’s election chief, the dispute surrounding it has stopped being only about electoral rolls. It has become an argument about who may gather in the capital, where, in what numbers, and at whose expense File Photo Via: @RahulGandhi on X The INDIA bloc meets at Ramlila Maidan on 1 November to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a nationwide revision of electoral rolls the opposition says removed voters improperly. Delhi Police have cleared the rally for 10am to 5pm, with conditions: high-definition cameras at every gate and across the seating, a dedicated control room with at least five monitors, drinking water and women’s toilets, volunteers for crowd control, nobody on the ground overnight, and no procession beyond the venue. That last condition is the significant one. Every road into Ramlila Maidan will be barricaded and manned to stop any march towa...

The aircraft came in low from the left, over the point where the Varuna meets the Ganga, turned above the water in front of the crowd and went out to the right towards the bridge and the spires of the Kashi Vishwanath temple Image Via:@myogiadityanath on X The Indian Air Force marked its 94th anniversary with a display at Namo Ghat in Varanasi, the city Prime Minister Narendra Modi represents in parliament. He watched from the main gallery with Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, the state governor Anandiben Patel and the chief minister Yogi Adityanath. The air chief presented him with a memento before the flying began. मां गंगा की लहरें, नमो घाट का अद्भुत नज़ारा और आसमान में भारतीय वायुसेना के विमानों की रोमांचक उड़ानें! काशी का वातावरण विशेष आकर्षण का केंद्र बना ! @narendramodi जी #VaranasiAirShow #WingsOverGanga #IndianAirForce #NamoGhat #Kashi #PMModi #narendramodi https://t.co/h9OtkLwVmF — जितेन्द्र मेहरा (@Jitendramehra93) October 25, 2026 Around a hundred aircraft took part, ...

India’s Narcotics Control Bureau sent 38 teams into 38 locations across three northeastern states in simultaneous raids aimed at the finances of a drug syndicate run from Myanmar, arresting 18 people and freezing 1,424 bank accounts File Photo Source: @AmitShah The raids were carried out in the early hours of 23 October by the bureau alongside Mizoram police and the Enforcement Directorate, the agency that investigates financial crime. Teams searched sites in Aizawl and Champhai in Mizoram, including Zokhawthar on the Myanmar border, as well as Churachandpur in Manipur and the Cachar corridor in Assam. Property worth 178 million rupees was attached. Officers seized 1.2 million rupees in cash and 500 detonators. The ministry listed no narcotics among the recoveries. Modi Govt deals another lethal blow against drugs with Operation Trident. Our agencies launched a barrage of simultaneous crackdowns across 38 locations in Assam, Mizoram and Manipur on 23 October, smashing an internati...

Smog settled over Bandra Kurla Complex on Saturday morning and the city’s municipal corporation spent the day setting out, at length, how much better Mumbai’s air has become Image Source: @iam_Jinesh on X Mumbai has recorded 231 days in the good or satisfactory air quality categories so far this year, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation said, against 218 in all of 2025, 216 in 2024 and 185 in 2023. PM10, the coarser airborne dust, is down by about 48 per cent since 2017-18, according to the environment ministry’s monitoring portal. It listed the machinery behind this. Twenty-eight guidelines for construction sites and seventy-six ward squads to enforce them, each required to inspect two sites a day. Compulsory sensor monitors at building sites, 3,166 of them wired to a central dashboard. Twenty-nine road sweepers. Covered debris lorries with washed wheels, tracked through a dedicated system. Cleaner fuel at 384 of the city’s 593 bakeries, which it calculates produce 3.5 per cent...

A weather system over the Bay of Bengal is expected to strengthen into a cyclone and come ashore on the morning of 28 October between the northern Andhra Pradesh and southern Odisha coasts, India’s weather office said on Saturday, as Odisha placed all of its districts on alert Representational Image Source: @PlaysSaheb on X The India Meteorological Department said the low-pressure area would deepen through the weekend, becoming a deep depression on Sunday and a cyclonic storm over the west-central Bay of Bengal by Monday morning before moving west-northwest towards the coast. Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, the department’s director general, gave the expected landfall window. If it reaches cyclone strength the storm will be named Arnab, a name contributed by Bangladesh. Odisha’s disaster management minister, Suresh Pujari, said the state was working to a target of no deaths. Collectors in sixteen coastal and southern districts have been told to take precautions and may close schools and co...

India’s foreign ministry said on Friday that conditions along its frontier with China are disrupted from time to time when Chinese forces depart from established patrolling patterns, after the head of the border police said confrontations with Chinese troops were continuing in Arunachal Pradesh File Photo Via: @ITBP_official on X Asked about those remarks, the ministry spokesman, Randhir Jaiswal, referred questions to the defence ministry but said the situation in the border areas was periodically disturbed when Chinese forces diverged from agreed patterns. Both countries continued to use diplomatic and military channels to settle outstanding issues and avoid misunderstanding along the Line of Actual Control, he said, and had agreed to discuss ways to improve a shared understanding of the line in some areas. Earlier, Shatrujeet Kapur, director general of the Indo-Tibetan Border Police, told personnel at a base in Alwar, Rajasthan, on Thursday that face-offs had occurred at severa...

India’s defence minister released a new Land Warfare Doctrine for the army on Friday and told its senior commanders to plan on a horizon of twenty to thirty years while remaining ready for immediate threats Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X Rajnath Singh, addressing the Army Commanders’ Conference in the capital, said the doctrine provided an overarching framework for preparing the force for the changing character of warfare and for future conflicts. He told commanders to watch geopolitical and regional developments closely and to keep strategy flexible enough to adjust as circumstances changed. He returned to Operation Sindoor, the military action India conducted against targets in Pakistan in May 2025, saying its success rested on innovative thinking, greater synergy and coordination, supported by advanced weaponry. The operation had made clear that India would not hesitate to act to protect its interests, he said. Singh praised the army’s restructuring and its use of drones, a...

A magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed at least 16 people and injured 65 in Tibet, bringing down hundreds of houses in a remote stretch of high plateau and forcing more than 12,000 people out of their homes Image Source: @PulseOrbit on X The quake struck Baqen county, in Nagqu city in the Tibet Autonomous Region, at 10.33pm local time (1433 GMT), with its epicentre in a mountainous area about 190 kilometres from Nagqu and 390 kilometres northeast of Lhasa. The US Geological Survey put its depth at 18 kilometres. Eleven of the injured were in a serious condition. At least 339 homes and 20 livestock sheds collapsed, the Nagqu city media office said, with the full extent of the damage still being assessed. Rockfalls forced the closure of a section of National Highway 317 to all but emergency traffic. Power and telephone services failed in the county town. More than 1,600 people were deployed on rescue work, along with over 300 police officers sent to the epicentre to check damaged build...

The Speaker of India’s lower house said on Thursday that any fresh motion seeking the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar would be examined under parliamentary rules, as the opposition prepares a third attempt to unseat him Image Via: @ombirlakota on X “If any fresh notice comes, we will see and examine it accordingly under rules and procedures,” Om Birla told reporters while responding to questions at a press conference. He said the process resembled that for removing a Supreme Court judge, and that in a democracy everyone had the right to express their views. Opposition parties have demanded Kumar’s resignation over the Election Commission’s nationwide revision of electoral rolls, in protests that have run through October. The campaign followed a report in The Indian Express that the two other election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had recorded objections at least fourteen times in ten months to decisions and orders connected with the rev...