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Switzerland's president arrived in New Delhi on Monday with a large business delegation, a year after the trade agreement between India and the European Free Trade Association came into force, and left behind five signed documents covering migration, young workers, transport technology and scientific research Image Source: MEA India Guy Parmelin was given a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan, received by President Droupadi Murmu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and held talks at Hyderabad House. His state visit runs until 7 October. The agreement underpinning the visit is worth understanding on its own terms. The European Free Trade Association is not the European Union. It consists of Switzerland, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, four countries that stayed outside the EU while trading closely with it. Their agreement with India was concluded after sixteen years of negotiation and entered into force last October. It is India's first trade agreement with any economic...

India and Switzerland signed five agreements in New Delhi on Monday, and the two that will matter most to ordinary Indians concern the right to travel, study and work Image Source: MEA India. The Migration and Mobility Partnership provides for multiple-entry visas valid for up to five years, allowing stays of up to six months on each visit, and for student permits of one year that can be renewed. The memorandum is built on what the two governments describe as principles of equal treatment, and it also commits both sides to working against irregular migration, human exploitation and trafficking under their own laws. Alongside it sits a separate agreement on the exchange of young professionals. It allows 300 people from each country every year to take temporary employment in the other in order to build skills in their field and improve their language, a number that can later rise to 500. Verification of a candidate's nationality or residence is to be completed within 30 or 90 days d...

India's Supreme Court on Monday asked the Election Commission, the central government, the Chief Election Commissioner and the two other Election Commissioners to respond within a week to petitions arguing that decisions belonging to the Commission as a body have been taken by its chairman alone. Image Source: @tarunjatav50 on X A bench of the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, issued notice on two petitions and tagged them together. It declined to grant any interim relief. The petitions turn on a distinction that is ordinarily academic. Article 324 of the Constitution vests the superintendence and control of elections in the Election Commission, a body that currently has three members. The Chief Election Commissioner chairs it but, the petitioners argue, holds no separate authority of his own. Under the law governing the Commission, business is to be transacted unanimously so far as possible, and where the members differ, by majority. ...

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...