From Antony and Cleopatra to Burton and Taylor, history is filled with volatile relationships.

One might expect some circumspection from politicians about their personal ups and downs playing out in the public arena. But in an era of geopolitical instability and terminal online-ness, the rest of us can barely keep up.

Break-ups

Elon Musk and Donald Trump

It was “perhaps the most widely predicted break-up in American political history”, said Fortune. The “bromance” between Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, and Donald Trump, one of the most powerful, ended in very public acrimony.

The Tesla and X boss was initially known as the US president’s “first buddy” for his seemingly unparalleled access. Musk helped bankroll Trump’s return to the White House, and claimed after his election victory that he loved Trump “as much as a straight man can love another man”. But after taking a chainsaw to the federal government with his “cost-cutting” initiative, DOGE, Musk left the administration in May. Just days later, he urged Republicans to reject Trump’s “massive, courageous, pork-filled” tax bill, which he called a “disgusting abomination”.

After that, the “speed of the fallout was breathtaking”, said The New York Times, and “every bit as lowdown, vindictive, personal, petty, operatic, childish, consequential, messy and public as many had always expected it would be”.

Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana

After leaving the Labour Party in high dudgeon in July, Zarah Sultana attempted to set up a new left-wing grassroots party with now-independent MP Jeremy Corbyn. But the duo couldn’t even decide on the name, much less anything else.

Corbyn claimed Sultana had set up a paid membership system that collected money and data without proper approval and authorisation. Sultana claimed she had been frozen out by a “sexist boys’ club” of Corbyn and four pro-Gaza independent MPs. The pair had a bitter falling out that saw Sultana claiming she had consulted libel lawyers. She later rescinded the threat, and told Sky News that they were like Liam and Noel Gallagher, the famously feuding Oasis brothers who patched things up for their reunion tour.

However, she neglected to invite Corbyn to a rally due to take place on the eve of the (what is now known as) Your Party conference. Don’t look back in anger, indeed.

Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner

Angela Rayner was once seen as the future of the Labour Party – and possibly its future leader. But this summer she became embroiled in controversy after admitting that she had mistakenly underpaid stamp duty on a flat in Hove. Keir Starmer initially stood by his deputy, but the noise grew louder and she was nicknamed “three pads” Rayner.

Rayner referred herself to the independent ethics adviser, and after being found to have breached the ministerial code, she handed in her resignation, plunging Labour into a chaotic deputy leadership race and cabinet reshuffle. Starmer’s response to her resignation letter was ostensibly warm: “You have been a trusted colleague and a true friend for many years.”

But now the rumour mill is once again stirring that Rayner might be gunning for his job. She declined to rule out running for the party leadership if Starmer finds himself defenestrated, telling the Daily Mirror in her first big post-resignation interview that she had “not gone away”. (Neither has her bill: she has reportedly not yet paid her £40,000 stamp duty as HMRC has not sent the bill out.)

Make-ups

UK and EU

One of the most acrimonious break-ups in recent history must surely be Brexit. But this year, there’s been something of a warming in relations between the EU and its erstwhile member, the UK. (The UK, after all, still benefits from EU funds.)

In May, the government and the bloc held their first joint summit since the UK left the EU, and the word on everyone’s lips was “reset”. The former foes agreed on a new deal; Starmer hailed it a “new era”. Not everyone was on board with this make-up: Tory leader Kemi Badenoch called the deal a “total sell-out”.

This month, Labour announced that a new agreement with Brussels to allows UK students to participate in the EU-wide university scheme Erasmus from 2027.

Emmanuel Macron and Sébastien Lecornu

Speaking of rapprochement, French President Emmanuel Macron asked Sébastien Lecornu to return as prime minister just four days after he stood down.

The Élysée Palace said the president had tasked Lecornu with “forming a government” – no easy task in France, given its grande debt problem – and Macron’s entourage “indicated he had been given ‘carte blanche’ to act”, said the BBC.

Lecornu is now aiming his ire elsewhere, blaming “partisan cynicism and presidential ambitions” for his struggle to get next year’s budget plans approved, said Politico. “Everyone wants to push their own agenda and fly their ideological flag,” he said, in remarks that “bore a distinct similarity to those after his surprise resignation”.

Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping

When Xi Jinping met Narendra Modi in September, the Chinese leader used “his favourite catchphrase for China-India relations”, said the BBC: “The dragon and the elephant should come together.”

The relationship between the two most populous countries has been strained for decades, but the Asian giants have taken huge steps to normalise relations. This year, that thawing was “turbocharged by decisions taken thousands of miles away in Washington DC”, when the Trump administration imposed 50% tariffs on Indian imports: a “stunning onslaught from a trusted ally”.

After the September meeting – Modi’s first trip to China in seven years – direct flights between the “dragon and the elephant” resumed, and the visa process was simplified. Their thousands of miles of shared borders are still tense, bristling with troops from both countries. But what relationship doesn’t have boundary issues?

The spectre of Donald Trump looms large over the first state visit by Vladimir Putin to India since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began.

Putin was met on arrival with a warm embrace by Narendra Modi and the two leaders are due to discuss deals over oil, arms, working visas and strengthened diplomatic ties between the two countries.

Following an opening press conference, two things “stood out”, said the BBC: first, a “conspicuous display of mutual respect”; and second, an “absence of any blockbuster announcement”.

The “need” for both countries right now is to boost “bilateral trade”, as Russia is “reeling” from Western sanctions and India is “facing 50% tariffs from Washington”.

What did the commentators say?

Modi continues to walk a diplomatic “tightrope” between Russia and the US, said Foreign Policy. Putin’s two-day visit is a stern “test” of how well India can “balance ties” with the two countries.

The summit comes at a “critical juncture” for both Russia and India, mostly due to the looming presence of the US, said The Guardian. Trump’s re-election has “upended years of closely nurtured US-India relations”, causing disruption with “inflammatory rhetoric” and “punishing” import tariffs. As a result, Delhi has been thrown “into a tailspin”.

Putin, too, is not in Trump’s good books. He has rejected the latest US-proposed peace plan for Ukraine, and is looking to bolster Russia’s recent battlefield advances that have “strengthened his hand” with diplomatic gains.

“The question of oil also looms large.” Modi has “insisted that India would continue to buy Russian oil” – Moscow supplies over 35% of India’s crude oil imports, compared to only around 2% before the war in Ukraine began. However, heavy US-imposed sanctions have led to a “notable slowdown” in this supply to appease Trump, not to mention India having “agreed to import more US oil and gas”.

“India is rolling out the red carpet for the Russian president”, undermining global efforts to cast him as an “international pariah”, said Bloomberg. India, though still wanting to maintain economic ties with the US, is looking to diversify and “gain more access to the Russian market”. Most likely, this week could see an agreement reached over the “shipment of marine products and agricultural goods”, both of which would be in India’s favour.

Russia’s interests are clear too. India, with a population of around 1.5 billion and the “fastest growing major economy” in the world, is a “hugely attractive market” for Russian goods and resources, said Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s Russia editor.

Putin’s enthusiasm is plentiful. One “priority” is weapons sales, with reported deals on exporting “state-of-the-art Russian fighter jets and air defence systems”. Due to the war in Ukraine, Russia has also been hit with a labour shortage, and India presents itself as a “valuable source of skilled workers”. Most importantly, the main benefit is geopolitical: the Kremlin “enjoys demonstrating that Western efforts to isolate it over the war in Ukraine have failed”.

What next?

Any progression towards a peace deal in Ukraine would “give India more breathing room” with the US than it had six months ago. Then, Trump’s “ire” towards Modi “ran high” and he imposed additional 25% tariffs on the country, said The Wall Street Journal.

Putin is expected to offer “Russia’s latest arms” to “bolster the long-standing relationship” between them. Even if this were to fall through, the mere prospect of a summit shows that the relationship is on an “upswing”, according to one expert.

Keir Starmer has met Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Mumbai as the pair attempt to emerge from “the shadow of tariff turmoil” brought forth by the US.

On a trip meant to promote business opportunities between the UK and India – two of the world’s largest economies – Starmer said he is hoping to implement the previously signed trade deal as soon as “humanly possible”.

In July, Starmer and Modi signed a trade agreement in the UK, “sealing a deal to cut tariffs on goods from textiles to whisky and cars, and allow more market access for businesses”, said Reuters. But projections, which predict an increase in trade of more than £25 billion by 2040, are ultimately “a floor, not a ceiling, to the ambition of the deal”. This week’s visit provides opportunities to further that partnership, said Starmer.

What did the commentators say?

“This trip has a big first,” said Sky News. Taking more business leaders along than on any previous such visit, the UK government’s “enthusiasm to take advantage of the signed, though not completed, free trade deal is clear”. Business leaders said that they’ve joined the tour to boost business in India, and also to “raise their profile with the prime minister”.

Overseas markets like India are more important to domestic businesses than ever. But the bosses’ enthusiasm might also be “a response to the nervousness about a £20 billion – £30 billion black hole Chancellor Rachel Reeves will have to fill” in the upcoming Budget.

Even so, “the visit had some awkward undertones”, said Bloomberg. Just before Starmer arrived in India, Modi wished Russian President Vladimir Putin a happy birthday. Starmer, who has been vocal in pressuring Putin to end his invasion of Ukraine, “deflected a question while on the plane to India” about the exchange. “Just for the record, I haven’t sent birthday congratulations to Putin, nor am I going to do so. I don’t suppose that comes as a surprise.”

And despite blossoming trade relations with India, “tensions over migration are expected to linger”. Indian and British businesses had reportedly pushed for more visas for highly skilled workers moving from India to the UK when the two countries were formalising their trade deal over the summer. But Starmer said that “the visa situation hasn’t changed with the free trade agreement”, adding that the visit was more about “business-to-business engagement and investment and jobs and prosperity coming into the United Kingdom”.

What next?

Starmer’s visit to India has already coincided with some developments that promise continued cooperation between the two countries.

British Airways has “announced a third daily flight” between Heathrow and New Delhi starting next year, and it plans to look into further opportunities in India as trade “expands”, said The Hindu. The new flight, which also includes the announcement of a New Delhi-Manchester route operated by India’s IndiGo, is expected to generate tens of millions of pounds in exports and tourism income, as well as 450 new jobs.

Starmer “also used the visit to announce that three Bollywood films will be made in the UK” by major film studio Yash Raj Films starting in 2026, said the BBC. Bringing Bollywood back to the UK after an “eight-year hiatus”, the move is expected to bring thousands of jobs and “pour millions into the economy”.

Plus, the prime minister – having praised India’s digital ID system as a “massive success” – is to look into how the UK can take inspiration for its own implementation of widespread digital IDs, said The Guardian. “Starmer defended the introduction of a similar measure in the UK, saying he believed the rollout of a voluntary system could be expanded to school applications, mortgages and driving licences.”

What happened

Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Russian President Vladimir Putin and other leaders from across Asia Monday at a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin. Xi took thinly veiled jabs at the U.S. and President Donald Trump's disruptive economic policies as he promoted a vision of an "orderly multipolar world" with China as one of its leaders. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arrived in Beijing this morning to join Xi and Putin.

Who said what

Xi proposed an SCO development bank and offered other benefits for members of the regional organization, founded with Russia in 2001 as a Eurasian security bloc, but he "did not set out any concrete measures," Reuters said. Still, he "used the summit as an opportunity to mend ties with New Delhi," and "Putin and Modi were shown holding hands as they walked jovially" toward Xi in an "image designed to convey a mood of solidarity" against the West.

For now, the three leaders are mostly "united in a sense of aggrievement with the U.S. rather than a sense of common purpose," Carla Freeman of Johns Hopkins University told The Washington Post. "These are big countries with their own agendas."

But Trump's "steep tariffs on India and the tone coming from the White House have pushed New Delhi closer to China and Russia," The Associated Press said. Trump's "gentle treatment of Vladimir Putin has done nothing to pull Russia away from China," Michael Fullilove at Australia's Lowy Institute told The Wall Street Journal. "His rough treatment of Narendra Modi, on the other hand, is pushing India closer to Russia and warming up its relations with China."

What next?

Putin, Kim and other leaders are expected to sit alongside Xi Wednesday at a massive military parade to mark Japan's surrender at the end of World War II. But Modi, in an "act of careful diplomatic balancing," visited Japan before arriving in Tianjin and "will skip the parade and its display of Chinese-made weapons," the Post said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has told his fellow Indians that "nature has been testing us" after cloudbursts caused flash flooding that killed hundreds of people across the north of the country and in neighbouring Pakistan.

What causes cloudbursts?

Usually defined as more than 10cm (roughly 4 inches) of rainfall within an hour over an area less than 30 sq km (11.6 square miles), cloudbursts are caused by a combination of factors characterised by high humidity and low pressure.

When warm, moist air is forced upwards after, for example, encountering a hill or mountain, it cools and condenses, creating large, dense clouds. Once these become over-saturated they burst, releasing their rainfall all at once.

"Sudden and violent", these intense deluges behave effectively like "a rain bomb", said The Associated Press. They "thrive in moisture, monsoons and mountains", all of which are present in India and Pakistan, "making them vulnerable to these extreme weather events".

Why are they dangerous?

The intense rainfall often triggers deadly flooding and landslides, as happened in northern Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir last week, killing at least 344 people, according to authorities. The death roll includes 24 people from the same family, who were swept away on the eve of a wedding. In Indian-administered Kashmir, at least 60 people have been killed in flash flooding, with 200 more missing.

Flooding resulting from a cloudburst killed more than 6,000 people in 2013 at Kedarnath in the Indian Himalayas.

Cloudbursts are so dangerous in part because there is "no forecasting system anywhere in the world" that can predict exactly where and when they will occur, said Asfandyar Khan Khattak, an official from Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Are they caused by climate change?

Cloudbursts are a natural phenomenon, but extreme rain events and their related flash-flooding has worsened in recent years as a direct result of climate change.

A recent report from World Weather Attribution, an international group of scientists who study global warming's role in extreme weather, estimated that the 30-day maximum rainfall in northern Pakistan is approximately 22% more intense than it would have been without the impact of human-induced global warming.

Because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, "every tenth of a degree of warming will lead to heavier monsoon rainfall", said Mariam Zachariah, lead author of the study and an environmental researcher at Imperial College London.

A 2006 study published in the journal Science found "significant rising trends in the frequency and the magnitude of extreme rain events" in India in the second half of the 20th century as global temperatures have risen. And a study into the 2013 Kedarnath floods, published in Climate Dynamics in 2015, found more than half of the rainfall was likely to be linked to increases in greenhouse gases and aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

Khalid Khan, a former special secretary for climate change in Pakistan and chairman of climate initiative PlanetPulse, said global warming had "supercharged" the water cycle. "In our northern regions, warming accelerates glacier melt, adds excessive moisture to the atmosphere, and destabilises mountain slopes," he said. "In short, climate change is making rare events more frequent, and frequent events more destructive."

"The bear hugs have gone. The smiles have curled into sneers." The former friendship between Donald Trump and Indian PM Narendra Modi has descended into acrimony, said Amrit Dhillon and George Grylls in The Times.

India has been left reeling by Trump's decision to hit it with 50% tariffs. It's the penalty for Modi's refusal to cease buying Vladimir Putin's oil. Only a few months ago, Trump called Modi a "true friend", and Modi even breached protocol to urge the Indian diaspora in the US to vote for Trump during his second presidential campaign. Now the "easy badinage" between the two has been replaced with insults (Trump claimed that Modi doesn't care "how many people in Ukraine are being killed by the Russian war machine").

In the face of Trump's fury, the appeasement lobby in Delhi has gone into overdrive, said Pratap Bhanu Mehta in The Indian Express (Noida). They argue that to protect the Modi/Trump partnership, we'll just have to accede to Trump's demands. They want us, in effect, to submit to a new form of "imperialism". How else, after all, would you describe the behaviour of a power that seeks to subjugate other nations and "treats its long-standing allies like pieces of dirt"?

Trump is being completely hypocritical, said Saroj Chadha in The Times of India (Mumbai). He may now talk tough on Putin, yet the US continues to import billions of dollars of fertilisers and nuclear material from Russia. If the aim is to rob the Kremlin of its energy revenues, why hasn't he slapped extra tariffs on the EU, which continues to buy substantial amounts of oil and gas from Russia?

Trump's volley isn't about Ukraine, said The Indian Express. What's really made him furious is Modi's refusal to open up India's dairy and agricultural sectors to US companies, so he's resorted to insults, among other things calling India a "dead economy". He needs to get with the times, said Shishir Priyadarshi and Bidisha Bhattacharya in The Print (New Delhi). We are now a "politically self-assured power" with one of the fastest growth rates of all large economies. We used to be "pressured into alignment"; now we push back. "This doesn't mean the partnership is dead. But it is not unconditional."

Even so, this spat has to be one of the Modi government's biggest foreign policy indictments, said Roshan Kishore in the Hindustan Times (New Delhi). He and his right-wing pals, won over by Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric (which plays so well within Modi's Hindu nationalist project), waxed lyrical about how good Trump was for India. None of them seem to realise that Trump doesn't give a hoot about India's interests, only his own.

Personal relationships mean nothing to this transactional president, only "hard material realities". And the key material reality is that India stands to lose a lot if we don't fix this alliance. "Russia can sell us cheaper crude and air defence systems, but it cannot compensate for the loss of an economic partnership" with by far our largest trading partner. Our exports, our IT sector, the expats who send us remittances: all depend on this relationship. So we'll just have to suck it up, swallow our pride and get these tariffs reversed.

After nearly 60 years of violence, the jungle-based struggle for communist rule in India could finally be coming to an end. Operation Kagar, a military offensive launched by Indian security forces in April this year, has apparently reduced to remnants the once-powerful Naxalite insurgency group. But Prime Minister Narendra Modi's crackdown on the guerrilla movement "comes at a bloody price", and may, critics say, be motivated by something "other" than a "wish for peace", said The Guardian.

Agrarian revolution

The Naxalite insurgency began in 1967, with a peasant uprising in Naxalbari, West Bengal. Inspired by Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and Marxist-Leninist ideology, the rebels advocate for class struggle and agrarian revolution through armed resistance. Their aim is to overthrow the government and establish a communist state.

The insurgents say their fight is for the rights of indigenous tribes and the rural poor, pointing to decades of state neglect and land dispossession. Since 2000, violence between insurgents and security forces has claimed nearly 12,000 lives, more than 4,000 of them civilian, according to the South Asian Terrorism Portal.

The strength of the insurgency has "surged" at various points over the past 50 years, said The Guardian. During its "peak" in the early 2000s, the Naxalites controlled "large swathes of the country, known as the 'red corridor'", and had more than 30,000 foot soldiers. But now there are thought only to be about 500 active fighters, operating in "limited districts".

Corporate interests

Last month, India's most-wanted Naxalite, Nambala Keshava Rao, was cornered and killed, along with 26 others, in a major attack, described by Home Minister Amit Shah, as "the most decisive strike" against the Maoist insurgency in three decades, said the BBC. The moment marked "more than a tactical victory", it also signalled a "breach in the Maoists' last line of defence in Bastar", the densely forested heartland that's been the group's "fiercest stronghold" since the 1980s.

The government crackdown has its sceptics, however, given the Naxalite leaders' repeated calls, since the start of the year, for a ceasefire and peace negotiations. The government has "ignored" these calls, said The Guardian, reinforcing a "suspicion among activists and lawyers" that the main motive for the crackdown is "not peace but corporate interests". The forests in which the insurgents have historically operated are "rich with coal and minerals", such as iron ore, and some of India's biggest industrialists have plans to expand their mining operations there, with government backing.

"This is not an anti-Maoist operation; it is a killing spree," N. Venugopal, a newspaper editor who has spent years writing about the Naxalite movement, told The Guardian. The security forces have "become like bounty hunters, killing for rewards".

Modi's government has vowed that the Maoist insurgency will be "completely eradicated" by March 2026, so this "battle-hardened" story of rebellion "stands at a crossroads", said the BBC. It remains to be seen if this is "truly the end" or "just another pause in its long, bloody arc".

The leader of India's opposition party and great-grandson of its first prime minister has been charged with money laundering, in what his allies claim is part of a "vendetta" by Narendra Modi.

India's financial crime-fighting agency charged Rahul Gandhi, his mother Sonia and other members of the Congress party last week, accusing the family of forming a shell company to acquire assets of the National Herald newspaper illegally. The Nehru-Gandhi family (known as the Gandhis, but no relation to Mahatma Gandhi) have previously denied wrongdoing in the long-running case, although haven't commented on the charges.

But Congress spokesperson Jairam Ramesh described the allegations as "politics of vendetta and intimidation, external" by the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the prime minister.

Who are the Nehru-Gandhi family?

The Gandhis are the "first family of Indian politics", said Al Jazeera. They have ruled for almost half the years since India's independence in 1947. Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's inaugural and longest-serving prime minister, was followed by his daughter Indira, and later his grandson Rajiv. And their party, the Congress, is "synonymous" with the family. It governed India almost continuously until 2014, when Modi's BJP swept to power in a landslide.

But for Modi and his allies, the Gandhi dynasty is still "an object of intense loathing that manifests itself in visceral outbursts", said The Times. Modi "routinely singles the family out for behaving as though they were 'born' to rule India". Sonia "tends to be spared the worst epithets", but her son Rahul has been called "everything from an entitled 'prince' to having only one talent: the Gandhi name".

What is the case?

India's Enforcement Directorate, the agency that investigates financial crimes, began looking into the case in 2021 after a complaint filed by a member of the BJP.

Subramanian Swamy claimed that in 2010 the Gandhis used Congress party funds to take over Associated Journals Limited, which used to publish the National Herald – one of India's oldest newspapers, started by Jawaharlal Nehru. The paper ceased publication in 2008 after long-standing financial troubles, but was relaunched as a digital news outlet in 2016.

Associated Journals cleared its arrears by "swapping its debt for equity and assigning the shares to a newly created company", the Young Indian, said the BBC. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are two of the company's directors; they each own 38%, with the remaining 24% owned by Congress leaders. The couple were questioned by the enforcement agency in 2022 as part of a probe into the case.

The allegation is that through the purchase of Associated Journals, the Gandhis illegally assumed control of its valuable real estate assets across several Indian cities, worth $300 million.

A hearing is scheduled for 25 April.

What is the defence?

The Congress "maintains that it bailed out the publisher due to its historical legacy", said the BBC, claiming it had lent the company more than 900 million rupees over the years. The party said the Young Indian was a not-for-profit company, and accused Modi's BJP of using the directorate and other federal agencies as "attack dogs".

"It's the BJP being determined to remain the predominant party and look invincible by weakening the Congress with these allegations and telling voters it can't provide an alternative to the BJP," Neerja Chowdhury, an Indian political analyst, told The Times.

The Prevention of Money Laundering Act, which came into effect in 2005, allows the Enforcement Directorate to summon anyone without giving a reason. According to data compiled by Reuters last year, the powerful agency has summoned, questioned or raided nearly 150 opposition politicians since Modi came to power in 2014, leading to criticism that it has become a "weapon" of the prime minister to "cull political opponents".

"Financial and investigative agencies of the government have been weaponised to harass, intimidate, silence, and criminalise independent critical voices in the country," said Amnesty International.

"A pre-emptive and proactive policy is always better when it comes to Trump," said the former Indian ambassador to the US, Harsh V Shringla –and current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems very much to agree.

As Modi prepares for an Indian-US summit in Washington this week, it appears India is once again "ready to adapt" to the US president's "transactional style of diplomacy", said The Washington Post.

What will be on the agenda?

India's slowing economy means the main priority for Modi is to avoid crippling tariffs, like those Trump has already imposed on China, imposed (then rescinded) on Canada and Mexico, and threatened against the EU. Trump last year referred to India as a "very big abuser" of trade ties with the US, highlighting America's $45 billion (£37 billion) trade deficit with the country.

Modi will "almost certainly make some concessions on two vexed issues: trade and illegal immigration", said Foreign Policy. On the former, he has already made a "clear concession to Trump", said Bloomberg, by cutting India's "own (notoriously high) tariffs" on some US goods, including Harley-Davidson motorbikes.

"India's posture of appeasement is not unique, but it's very clever," Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Programme at the US Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Washington Post.

"By making pre-emptive concessions on relatively minor issues, governments can allow Trump to put quick wins on the board, without enduring too much pain themselves."

What about immigration?

Modi's government has signalled its willingness to accept the return of nearly 18,000 Indians living in the US, despite growing "anger" in his country at the "humiliating deportation" by the US last week of more than 100 Indian nationals in shackles and chains, said The Independent.

Delhi hopes this attempt to "placate the new US administration" over the number of illegal Indian immigrants – which the Pew Research Center estimates at 725,000 – will "safeguard legal migration pathways for its citizens, including student visas and H-1B visas for skilled workers".

Why is India tightening its ties with the US?

The US-India relationship is on a "more secure footing than it has been in decades", said Foreign Policy. Aside from the obvious "bonhomie" between their strongman leaders, this alignment is largely down to "a shared belief that China increasingly constitutes a threat to both countries' strategic interests in the Indo-Pacific".

India is one of the founding members of the Brics bloc, a group that has "long projected itself as an alternative to Western-led models of global governance", said the BBC. However, India is "perhaps the most Western-oriented Brics member", in line with its foreign-policy strategy to "balance relations with a wide spectrum of geopolitical players".

What does the US want?

As Brics member states become "more prominent and influential", the US hopes India's pre-eminent position in the bloc will allow it to act as a bulwark against the "longstanding vision – articulated emphatically by Beijing and Moscow – of serving as a counter to the West", said the BBC.

Trump has so far adopted a hawkish approach to the group, even going so far as to threaten Brics states with 100% tariffs when news emerged of them talking about replacing the US dollar as their reserve currency. His close relationship with Modi, however, may allow the US to exert more "soft-power" influence over the bloc.

Hindu devotees from across India flocked to the northern city of Prayagraj yesterday as the world's largest religious festival began.

Over the coming 45 days, an estimated 400 million Hindus are expected to come together for Maha Kumbh Mela. The festival is held every 12 years but the "Maha" or grand Kumbh Mela takes place only every 144 years, "marking the 12th Kumbh Mela and a special celestial alignment of the sun, moon and Jupiter", said The Guardian.

'Spiritual purification'

It is one of the most sacred pilgrimages for Hindus. It has its roots in a Hindu legend that holds that the god Vishnu seized a golden pitcher containing the nectar of immortality from demons, with a few drops falling in the cities of Prayagraj, Nasik, Ujjain and Haridwar.

The Maha Kumbh Mela represents a "symbolic journey of self-realisation, purification and spiritual enlightenment", said Sky News. Its "ritualistic dip" in the "sacred rivers" serves as a "spiritual purification" and a "symbolic cleansing of the body and soul" which "renews the connection with the divine".

Pilgrims believe that the ritual baths can ultimately help them "achieve Hindu philosophy's ultimate goal: the release from the cycle of rebirth", said The Associated Press.

Herculean task

Many pilgrims stay for the entire festival, "observing austerity, giving alms and bathing at sunrise every day", said the AP news agency, which means the authorities face a "herculean" task to manage such a large gathering, said The Times.

State authorities in Uttar Pradesh have "put in place state-of-the-art security measures", including drones, 268 AI-powered systems, and more than 2,750 CCTV cameras, said the Times of India. There are also 700 marked boats with life-saving buoys along the riverbanks.

A "vast ground" has been converted into a "sprawling tent city" complete with more than 3,000 kitchens and 150,000 toilets, said AP. It spreads over 15 square miles and has housing, roads, electricity and water, communication towers and 11 hospitals.

Hindu nationalism

In the past, India's leaders have "capitalised" on the festival to "strengthen their relationship with the country's Hindus", who make up nearly 80% of the more than 1.4 billion people.

Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the festival has "become an integral part" of his "advocacy of Hindu nationalism" as, for him, Indian civilisation is "inseparable from Hinduism".

This is the first Maha Kumbh Mela to be held under his party's rule after it changed the town's earlier Muslim name of Allahabad to the Hindu Prayagraj in 2018. So a "successful" Maha Kumbh is expected to "burnish" his project of "reclaiming India's cultural symbols" for his "Hindu base" after he "suffered a humiliating setback" at last year's election, losing his party's parliamentary majority.

But for the pilgrims flocking to the festival, it remains a spiritual, rather than political, experience. This year, it is "extra special", Hindu seer Mahant Ravindra Puri told the BBC, because "the current alignment of planets and stars" is "identical to what existed at the moment of the spill", and "such perfection" is "being observed after 12 Kumbh festivals or 144 years".

Cracks in the marble façade of the Taj Mahal are fuelling claims that the Indian government is choosing to look the other way as the much-loved monument crumbles.

The Taj Mahal is a Unesco World Heritage site and international symbol of India. But the marble mausoleum in Uttar Pradesh has "long been a source of political point-scoring", said The Times, and there are suggestions that Hindu nationalism could be contributing to its declining health.

Tear of marble

The Taj Mahal is India's most famous building, attracting around eight million visitors each year. It was built in the 17th century by Emperor Shah Jahan, as a mausoleum for his favourite queen, Mumtaz Mahal, who had died giving birth to their 14th child.

The emperor used marble from Rajasthan, which was believed to have a unique quality – it appears pink in the morning, white in the afternoon, and milky in the evening. Rabindranath Tagore, a renowned Indian poet, described the Taj Mahal as "a tear of marble… on the cheek of time".

However, recent photographs on social media have "fuelled concerns" that the monument is "crumbling", said The Times. The images include a leaking dome, cracks in the walls and a tree sprouting from a pillar.

"Semi-precious" stones "inlaid through the walls" are also "grappling with the ravages of time", Shakeel Chauhan, national general secretary of the Tourist Guide Federation of India, told The Times of India.

Damage caused by airborne pollution has also long been a concern, said the BBC. Environmentalists have been "particularly concerned" about a major oil refinery 30 miles away from the Taj Mahal emitting sulphur dioxide and other pollutants, which combine with moisture in the atmosphere to cause corrosive rain.

Go-slow?

The tree spotted emerging from a pillar at the Taj Mahal is a peepul, a variety of fig considered sacred by Hindus – symbolic, for those pointing the finger of blame for the monument's decline on the growing influence of Hindu extremists.

There is a "pervasive influence" of Hindu nationalism in the "highest echelons" of Indian politics, said La Croix, and "an intent to establish a Hindu hegemony at the expense of religious minorities", a policy known as Hindutva.

Some Hindu fringe groups have "set their sights" on the Taj Mahal, which they believe that was built on the site of a shrine to the Hindu deity Shiva, said France24. "It was destroyed by Mughal invaders so that a mosque could be built there," Sanjay Jat, spokesman for the organisation Hindu Mahasabha, told the news website.

But that claim was disputed by Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history with Rutgers University. The theory is "about as reasonable as the proposals that the Earth is flat", she said, and speaks to a "frenzied and fragile nationalist pride that does not allow anything non-Hindu to be Indian" and "demands to erase Muslim parts of Indian heritage".

Although responsibility for the monument lies with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), political opponents of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist BJP, accuse the party of turning a blind eye to the neglect. In a post on X translated by the Deccan Herald, Uttar Pradesh's former chief minister, Akhilesh Yadav, claimed: "The BJP government and its dormant departments have completely failed to maintain the Taj Mahal."

The ASI told The Times of India that there are "no serious structural issues" with the site, and on the allegations of "laxity, corruption, and mismanagement of funds" for its upkeep, it said maintenance funds are regularly audited and "no concerns have been raised in these audits".

What happened

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was projected to win a rare third five-year term but with his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) holding a smaller-than-expected majority, or even a plurality, in Parliament, according to early results released Tuesday. Exit polls had shown the BJP winning more than the 272 seats needed for a majority. But Modi's National Democratic Alliance coalition was ahead in 294 districts — including just 241 for the BJP — while the center-left INDIA alliance, led by the once-dominant Congress party, was leading in 232.

Who said what

The BJP coalition won 353 seats in 2019 and "set a goal of winning 400" this year, Mujib Mashal said at The New York Times. The early results "suggest either that Modi's popularity" is waning or it "took his personal push" to help his unpopular party "scrape by." Modi switched from "touting his economic bona fides" to "attacking Muslims" to mobilize the BJP's Hindu nationalist base amid slumping turnout, The Wall Street Journal said. But calling Muslims "infiltrators" apparently "rubbed some voters the wrong way," even many Hindus. 

What next?

If the BJP falls short of 272 seats, Modi will "need to turn to junior partners" to form a government, but his two biggest partners "do not share the ruling party's Hindu-first agenda," said the Times. Having a "stronger opposition augurs very well for India's democracy that has taken a hit during Modi's 10-year rule," political analyst Rasheed Kidwai said to The Associated Press.

It's not Election Day in India — rather, it's more like Election Weeks. Plural. Voters in "the world's largest democratic election" started heading to the polls last Friday, CNBC said, to start the first of seven phases of voting that will play out over six weeks. There probably aren't many surprises in store at the end of that marathon: Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) are expected to win "another landslide victory" that would give Modi a third five-year term in office.

That doesn't mean the campaign has been placid. "Armed men attacked polling stations and captured voting booths" in the state of Manipur, The New York Times said, forcing authorities to redo early voting there. Modi himself received accusations that he had committed "hate speech" late in the campaign, CNN said, after he told a Hindu audience that Muslim opponents give "your hard-earned money" to "infiltrators." And all that came after the election was plagued with AI-generated deepfake videos of Bollywood actors criticizing Modi. 

There is also the question of whether these elections are fair. "India's elections this year stand out for their undemocratic nature," Christophe Jaffrelot said at Le Monde. Modi's party has sought to transform the country into a Hindu state "where Muslims would be no more than second-class citizens." Those efforts, he said, are turning India's democracy into "electoral authoritarianism." 

'Deep in the wilderness'

Modi isn't the only figure in this election, however. He is opposed by Rahul Gandhi and the Indian National Congress Party. The party once ruled India almost unchallenged, The New York Times said, but now is "deep in the political wilderness" with fewer than 10% of seats in parliament. The challenge is steep: Modi's critics are often investigated and imprisoned on "flimsy" evidence, and the major media outlets are controlled by his allies. It would take a "miracle" to dislodge the BJP from power. "Still, it falls to Gandhi, steward of his enfeebled party, to try."

India's opposition parties have formed a 27-member block called the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance, CNN said, but so far "that alliance has proved lackluster." It has been riven by ideological differences and hasn't even named a candidate for prime minister. This means the question in this election isn't whether Modi wins or not, said one observer, but if the opposition can stay "alive to fight another day so that democracy in India survives."

While Modi is expected to win, observers are watching to see if his power slips in this election. There are questions about whether BJP "will be able to maintain the same overwhelming parliamentary majority it has enjoyed," said The Guardian. "Simmering discontent" over a "chronic lack of jobs" for young people could undercut the party's majority. A 400-seat majority could amend India's constitution and "formally enshrine the country as a Hindu-first nation."

Over mountains, through rivers

India's massive size and huge population make the election a logistical challenge, Reuters said. Election officials must "climb down mountains, go through rivers or fly by choppers" to ensure that remote voters can have their say in the election, one official said. Nearly a billion people are eligible to vote, making the election "world's largest election mobilization exercise of man and material." 

The election outcome will be felt abroad, said PBS NewsHour. The United States has come to rely on India as a regional counterbalance to the growing power of China, India's next-door neighbor. But Modi's government has also provoked criticisms from the U.S. and Canada over allegations of plots to assassinate Sikh separatist leaders in those countries. That makes the relationship challenging, but American officials still see the country as indispensable. A State Department official made that clear in March: "The single most important country in the world for the United States in the next 35 years will be India."

India heads to the polls this month for a democratic exercise "unmatched in scale" either historically or globally.

"From the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south, from the hills of the east to the deserts in the west… an estimated 969 million voters are eligible to cast their ballots," said Al Jazeera. That is more than 10% of the world's population. For context, that's more than the population of the EU, US and Russia combined.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014, is gunning for a third term in office at the helm of the world's most populous country – and the fastest growing economy – of more than 1.4 billion people. 

How does it work?

The election will take place in seven phases, starting on 19 April and ending on 1 June, according to the Election Commission of India, with results expected on 4 June.

The length of time needed is due to the "sheer size" of India, and the "astonishing levels of logistics" needed to ensure every voter can cast a ballot, said The Associated Press (AP). 

Electoral rules state that there must be a booth within two kilometres of each voter, which means that officials have to cross deserts and mountains to reach remote areas. In 2019, India's last elections, one team of polling officers trekked more than 480 kilometres to reach a "single voter in a hamlet", said AP. 

Another concern is security after "deadly clashes" between supporters of rival parties marred previous elections. 

This year a "15 million-strong army" of polling officials and security forces will oversee the "gigantic" 44-day exercise, at more than a million polling stations, with the help of 5.5 million electronic voting machines, said Sky News. 

Each of the 28 states and eight federal territories will vote to fill the 543 seats of the Lok Sabha (lower house). To secure a majority and form a government in this first-past-the-post system, a party or coalition needs to win at least 272 seats.

About 25% of those are reserved for members of two "disadvantaged communities", said Sky News – 84 seats go to those from "scheduled castes", known as Dalits, and there are 47 seats for "scheduled tribes", or Adivasis. 

India recently passed a measure to reserve a third of the seats for women, but implementation was delayed until after 2024.

Who are the main parties?

There are two main factions in parliament. Modi's BJP leads a centre-right coalition of more than three dozen parties, known as the National Democratic Alliance. 

It will face off against the India National Congress party, known as Congress. It has clubbed together with about 24 other political parties to form an opposition bloc known as INDIA (Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance). 

The alliance has been "roiled by ideological differences and personality clashes", said AP News, and has yet to select its candidate for prime minister.

What are the stakes?

"The world's largest democratic election could also be one of its most consequential," said AP. It is seen as a "test for the country's democratic values".

Last year a Pew survey found that nearly 80% of Indians viewed Modi, an "avowed Hindu nationalist", favourably. Supporters "hail him as a transformative leader" whose powerful mix of religious identity and modernisation has "propelled him away ahead of his challengers", said Sky News. 

But Modi is "loathed" by others, with critics decrying him as "representing an Indian variant of fascism". Under his rule institutions of secular and democratic India have been "vastly eroded", dissent stifled and the Muslim minority – about 14% of the population – increasingly stigmatised.

What's likely to happen?

In 2019, the BJP won 37.36% of the votes, resulting in a majority of 303 seats – the highest vote share by any political party since 1989.

This year, the coalition Modi leads could win nearly three-quarters of the parliamentary seats, while Congress could hit a record low, according to an India TV-CNX opinion poll published on Wednesday, said Reuters.

The "immensely popular" prime minister is "riding high on the back of strong economic growth, handouts and the January inauguration of a Hindu temple on a contested site", said Reuters. That's despite rising unemployment and "widening disparity between the rich and poor".

If Modi wins and completes another five-year term, he will be the third longest serving prime minister in Indian history.

Thousands of farmers are taking their tractors to India's streets to demand government action over crop prices and regulations. 

The "Delhi Chalo", or "Let's go to Delhi" march, said Reuters, has "brought back memories of the chaos" of 2020-21, when millions of farmers united to protest against the introduction of three agriculture laws. 

The year-long uprising posed one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "biggest challenges",  said the BBC. And with the country now just weeks away from a general election, his government won't want to lose the support of farmers, who are the "most influential voting bloc in India". 

What do India's farmers want? 

The "headline demand" of the farmers' 12-point agenda is that a minimum support price (MSP) must be legally guaranteed, said The Indian Express. The MSP provides a "safety net" for farming communities, said Al Jazeera, by setting the price at which the government buys crops. But while the MSP provides an "assured" income amid "market uncertainties", farmers want it increased to at least 50% higher than the cost of producing the crops.

Organisers are also calling for farm loans to be waived; for policies that allegedly "hurt" farmers to be overturned; and for farmers to receive pensions. They also want India to withdraw from the World Trade Organization (WTO) and for all free trade agreements to be frozen.

The movement's leaders claim members of more than 200 unions are now participating in the protest march, "under the banner" of the Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM), said The Indian Express. Talks between the unions and the government have so far been "inconclusive", said Sky News.  

What happened in 2020-21? 

The introduction of three "controversial" agricultural reforms in 2020 sparked a "massive" protest, said the BBC. The proposed laws "loosened" rules around the sale, price and storage of farm produce, which had "protected farmers from the free market for decades".  

The demonstrations "descended into violence several times", said Sky News. Farmers "hunkered down, encircling the capital and blocking key highways" before Modi repealed the laws in November 2021. "Dozens" died during the protests.  

The farmers are now calling for promises made by the government back then to be delivered. These include providing compensation for the families of farmers who died during the protests and the formation of a committee focused on providing price guarantees.

How has the government responded?  

Delhi has been "converted into a fortress", said Al Jazeera. Some of the city's entry points have been blocked with "barriers of barbed wire, spikes and cement blocks".  

Drones dropped tear gas on thousands of farmers along the border between Punjab and Haryana earlier this week, and police and paramilitary officers are "stationed all along the highways" to block "tractor convoys" from getting to the capital, said Sky News. 

With India's general election due to take place between April and May, and farmers comprising around two-thirds of the country's population, the government "will be keen to contain" the disruption and "not repeat past mistakes". 

Yet farmers have described talks with Modi's government so far as "delaying tactics", said the BBC. Setting the stage for another long-running protest, the movement's leaders say they have the resources to camp out for at least six months if necessary.

"Politics and religion cannot be mixed," ruled India's Supreme Court in 1994. This, said The Economist, was subsequently "considered a decisive elucidation of the country's secular constitution". 

But tell that to the world's most populous nation, said the newspaper, millions of whose citizens will watch Prime Minister Narendra Modi preside over the consecration of a "controversial" $217 million (£170 million) Hindu temple dedicated to the god Ram. 

The ceremony "marks the informal launch" of his campaign for a third term in office, ahead of May's election, as well as "the high point of a decades-long Hindu-nationalist project to dominate India", alarming the country's 200 million Muslims. 

The grand temple is in the "flashpoint" city of Ayodhya, northern India, said the BBC, and replaces a 16th-century mosque that was "torn down by Hindu mobs in 1992", sparking the riots in which nearly 2,000 people died. 

But although "top film stars and cricketers" attended the consecration event, "some Hindu seers and most of the opposition boycotted it", accusing Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of using the project for "political gain" to court votes from the 80% Hindu population. 

'A sense of despair and dislocation'

Excitement around the temple's consecration "had been building for weeks", reported The New York Times (NYT) from Ayodhya, with "saffron-colored pennants strung across a million streets and markets", and the town "covered" in posters and billboards of both Ram and Modi. This was a moment of "triumph" for Hindu nationalists, and of "jubilation" for those who "care little for politics" but a great deal for Ram. 

But for the country's Muslims, the temple "has reinforced a sense of despair and dislocation". The way the original mosque was destroyed "set a precedent of impunity that reverberates today": lynchings of Muslim men, beatings of interfaith couples and so-called "bulldozer justice", in which homes of Muslims are demolished "without due process". 

The "nationwide frenzy over the consecration" has brought the country of 1.4 billion people, and a nearly $4 trillion economy, "to a virtual standstill", said Al Jazeera. For many Indian Muslims, the "state-sponsored pomp" is the latest in "a series of painful realisations that – especially since Modi took office in 2014 – the democracy they call home no longer appears to care about them." 

"Today's date will go down in history," Modi said after the event. "After years of struggle and countless sacrifices, Lord Ram has arrived [home]."

'A monolith that falls behind Modi'

Increased religious polarisation affects the "political influence" of Muslims as well as their safety, said Al Jazeera.

The country's secularism allowed Hindus and Muslims to vote "primarily on economic or non-religious issues", which gave Muslims "the limited but definite ability to affect electoral outcomes", particularly in states with larger populations. But if the majority Hindu vote "consolidates" behind the BJP, "this equation no longer holds". 

"The 2024 elections could be a one-sided affair in favour of BJP," Hussain Afsara, a Lucknow-based journalist, told Al Jazeera.

India's founding fathers "took great pains" to keep the state secular after the "communal bloodletting" wrought by the 1948 partition from Pakistan, said the NYT. 

However, Modi "has unabashedly normalised the opposite". Mixing religion and politics has allowed him to turn "a diverse and argumentative Indian society into something resembling a monolith that falls in line behind him". 

Ultimately, Modi "wants to be India's most consequential leader since Jawaharlal Nehru", said The Economist. The danger "is that a hubristic Hindu chauvinism undermines his economic ambitions".

The nation of India could be preparing to change its name, according to rumours that have been fuelled by invitations for the G20 summit that asked people to join the “President of Bharat” for dinner.

Reports across Indian media suggest Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist government may be readying legislation that will change the country’s name during an upcoming “special session” of parliament later this month.

The speculation has not yet been officially addressed by government spokespeople. However, sharing the invitation on X, formerly Twitter, the top elected official of Uttarakhand state, Pushkar Singh Dhami, wrote that it represented “another blow to slavery mentality”.

India is hosting the annual G20 summit in New Delhi this weekend, with world leaders due to attend, including US President Joe Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron.

India or Bharat?

The nation of more than 1.4 billion people is officially known by two names, India and Bharat, but the former is most commonly used, both domestically and internationally.

The prime minister “typically refers to India as Bharat”, said The Guardian, which is “a word dating back to ancient Hindu scriptures written in Sanskrit”.

The Indian Constitution already mentions Bharat, as well as the more widely used name. Written and made public in 1951, the document states that “India, that is Bharat… shall be a Union of States”.

However, the country’s name, like much of the contents of the constitution itself, has been “heavily debated” since India gained independence in 1947, The Independent said.

The name “India” traces its origins to the River Indus, which is now known as Sindhu. Similar names have been used to refer to the subcontinent, dating back to those used by Ancient Greek writers. The English form “India” gained prominence when the country was ruled by Britain from the late 18th century onwards.

The name “Bharat”, meanwhile, comes from ancient Puranic literature and can also be found in one of the two major epics of India – the Mahabharata, whose oldest sections date to around 400 BCE. In it, Indians are said to be descended from King Bharat, a mythical figure whom Hindus claim started the Indian race.

Since coming to power, the Modi administration “has steadily chipped away at the legacies of former governments and leaders”, said The Independent, in a bid to “break away from the country’s colonial past”.

Official landmarks and buildings of national importance have changed their names, and Modi has repeatedly said India has “left behind” its former rulers, Britain. Modi’s government has also changed Islamic place names relating to the Mughal empire that preceded British rule.

In 2015, New Delhi’s Aurangzeb Road, which was named after a Mughal king, was changed to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road after protests from Modi’s party leaders. Last year, the government also renamed a colonial-era avenue in the heart of New Delhi.

The prime minister also replaced a statue of King George V with one of Indian freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose, under a canopy near India Gate – a memorial dedicated to Indian soldiers who fought for Britain in the First World War.

“The country has got a new inspiration and energy. Today, we are leaving behind the past and adding colours to future images,” Modi said at the time.

‘Mix of opposition and support’

The rumoured name change has been met “with a mix of opposition and enthusiastic support”, said The Guardian.

Shashi Tharoor, of the opposition Congress party, said on X: “I hope the government will not be so foolish as to completely dispense with ‘India’. We should continue to use both words rather than relinquish our claim to a name redolent of history, a name that is recognised around the world.”

BJP President Jagat Prakash Nadda, meanwhile, retorted: “Why does the Congress have so much objection to every subject related to the honour and pride of the country? It is clear that Congress neither respects the country, nor the Constitution, nor the constitutional institutions.”

Former Test cricketer Virender Sehwag agreed, writing: “India is a name given by the British (and) it has been long overdue to get our original name ‘Bharat’ back.”

Elections are due next year in some of the world’s biggest democracies, including the US, India and Indonesia, heralding the possibility of significant political upheaval across the globe.

All eyes will be on the US, where a former president could be running for a second term while facing a raft of serious criminal charges. But numerous other political currents are swirling, including concerns about how artificial intelligence (AI) and other technologies might impact voting, as well as growing environmental movements and the looming prospect of a global recession.

Elections

As ever, US election coverage has dominated the international media. The Trump presidency is still regarded as one of the most chaotic in recent memory and so the prospect of the 45th US president returning to be the country’s 47th is causing global intrigue.

Joe Biden’s advanced age (he will be 81 on polling day next November) has also raised questions and while neither his nor Trump’s nomination is yet secured, it is looking like an increasingly foregone conclusion, said The Conversation – “2024 looks to be 2020 all over again”.

India, meanwhile, is “entering the most dangerous phase of its existence”, said The Wire, with the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, “falling back on the one antidote with which he is familiar… stirring up hatred of Muslims and other minorities”.

With opposition splintered and in disarray, Modi will win a third term in 2024, according to Arvind Panagariya, an Indian-American economist and professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University.

Not only this but “India [will] jump from the fifth position to become the third largest economy in the world during the current decade”, Panagariya predicted in an article for The Times of India, which itself will have huge global ramifications.

Another of the world’s largest democracies, Indonesia, is also due to hold an election next year. “With a population of 270 million, Indonesia’s presidential elections in some ways resemble those of the United States, with massive rallies and enormous sums of money spent,” said Foreign Policy.

Its three leading candidates – incumbent president Joko Widodo and challengers Ganjar Pranowo and Prabowo Subianto – offer “three distinct paths for Indonesia: the continuity of an imperfect but democratic brand of politics, a reactive authoritarianism that harkens back to the era of the dictator Suharto, or a move to embrace growing religious radicalism”, the site said.

The UK is also likely to head to the polls in 2024, with many pundits suggesting Labour could rebound from 2019 (its worst performance in 80 years) straight to a Commons majority. If it does, the party’s leader Keir Starmer is expected to occupy a centrist space and will face significant headwinds, not least because he is likely to “inherit an economic mess”, according to The Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott.

Technology

The rise of AI is “already affecting” the 2024 US election, said Axios, “in ways that could reshape how campaigns are run and how voters are informed – or misled”.

“If 2008 and 2012 were the Facebook elections, this will be the AI election – but it’ll be massively more disruptive,” said Tom Newhouse, vice-president of digital marketing at Convergence Media, a Republican firm that uses AI.

Fake images and videos are being created using AI for use in campaign ads, said Axois. The technology is “also being used to improve fundraising efficiency by targeting prospective donors and voters”, the site said, and it “can also be used to flood voters with disinformation”.

Next year will be “a critical litmus test to decide who is in control: citizens and their democratically elected governments or big tech”, said Ellen Judson, from the think tank Demos, in The Guardian. “We urgently need to address the impact of AI on politics before it happens, rather than when things go wrong.”

Environmentalism and populism

Populism emerged as a powerful political force over the last two decades, ushering in a new breed of leaders from Brazil to Hungary, Turkey and the US. More recently, the environmental movement has become a source of similar upheaval across national and international politics.

Australia’s so-called “teal” independent candidates – most of whom had conservative fiscal politics combined with green views on climate – managed to “upend Australia’s election”, said The Guardian, defeating the country’s conservative Liberal/National coalition in key seats and helping usher in a new Labor government.

A similar challenge emerged in European politics, said the Financial Times. The centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), Europe’s largest political party, fought the last EU-wide elections “almost as environmentalists, championing the EU’s ambitious plan to cut emissions and nourish nature”, the FT said. In 2019, the EPP said that its Green Deal was its “man on the moon moment”.

Now, however, the pendulum appears to be swinging back the other way. Approaching the European elections in June 2024, “with populist and hard-right parties gaining ground, [the EPP] has shifted to counter – or even adopt – them”.

Economic weakness

Economists continue to predict that growth will continue to contract into 2024, potentially triggering recession, though in the US “the downturn will be mild, as recessions go”, according to Bill Conerly in Forbes.

“Memories of the 2008-09 recession are unfortunate because this one will certainly be much milder,” Conerly said. “Most families and businesses will feel it in news headlines rather than their own experience. But the more cyclical parts of the economy will have to face a downturn.”

What impact will the downturn have? “In the short term the answer is grim,” said The Economist. Amid numerous other shifting political forces, economic weakness, whenever it arrives, “could exacerbate geopolitical risks”, it concluded.

The Indian government’s costly rail modernisation programme is under intense scrutiny after the country’s worst train disaster in decades claimed the lives of at least 275 people and injured more than 1,000.

Last week’s crash, when a passenger train travelling at 80mph towards the city of Chennai veered on to the wrong track and hit a freight train before a second passenger train then hit the wreckage, occurred along one of India’s oldest and busiest routes. As a result it is “raising questions over the safety of the country’s massive and outdated rail network”, said CNN.

“In a country where major industry and political fortunes alike are often tied to a vast, interwoven rail system, India has lavished public resources on new trains, but its purse strings have been much tighter when it comes to ensuring the safety of those already racing along its tracks,” reported The New York Times (NYT).

What is the issue with modernisation?

“There is no railway system quite like the Indian railways” and trains remain an “essential lifeline” in the world’s most populus country of 1.4 billion people, said The Observer. First built more than 160 years ago under British colonial rule and now run by the state monopoly Indian Railways, the country’s 40,000 miles of tracks carry around 13 million passengers each day and 1.5 billion tonnes of freight each year.

Because of the importance of trains in connecting India’s fast-growing economy, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has allocated billions to upgrade and modernise the rail network. Last year alone, $30bn (£24.1bn) was committed to spend on new trains and stations, part of a modernisation plan that aims to deliver 100% electrification by 2024 and a target of net zero by 2030. At 65.8% India now has a higher proportion of its network electrified than France (60%) or the UK (38%).

Yet Modi has been accused of prioritising big-ticket projects at the expense of less glamorous upgrades to existing stock.

“The government’s record capital outlay for the railways, a 50% increase over the previous fiscal year, had focused on upgrading tracks, easing congestion and adding new trains, including a new, semi-high-speed train built in India called the Vande Bharat Express – or ‘Salute to India’,” said Sky News.

By contrast, “the amount spent on basic track maintenance and other safety measures has been falling”, the NYT said, citing a report last year by India’s auditor general.

“Decaying infrastructure is often cited as a cause for traffic delays and numerous train accidents in India,” said CNN. “Though government statistics show that accidents and derailments have been on the decline in recent years, they are still tragically common.”

So how dangerous is rail travel?

A railways ministry spokesperson said: “This question [on safety] is arising because there has been one incident now. But if you see the data, you will see that there have been no major accidents for years.”

The ministry claimed the number of accidents per million train kilometres fell to 0.03 in 2021-22, from 0.10 in 2013-14. This was way down from 2.2 in 1980 and 5.5 in 1961.

That may seem like a massive improvement, said the Financial Times (FT), but railway-related deaths in India remain “staggering”. Sky News reported that there were 100,000 train-related deaths in India between 2017 to 2021, according to a 2022 report published by the National Crime Records Bureau. This includes cases in which passengers fell from trains, collisions, and people being hit by speeding trains.

That said, rail travel in India is far safer than it was. Between 1980 to 2000, for example, there were an average of 475 derailments per year. In the decade to 2021 that number dropped to just over 50, said the NYT. More generally the number of serious train accidents dropped from more than 300 two decades ago to 22 in 2020.

Indian Railways is in the process of installing an anti-collision system, which causes trains to brake automatically, but so far it is only operational on 2% of the network. “Experts have in some cases questioned whether New Delhi is investing in the right places and have suggested that improvement in the capacity of railway staff has not kept pace,” said the FT.

What next?

While the cause of Friday’s crash is still unknown, it is widely believed to be related to a signal failure, which could be the result of a technical fault or human error.

Time magazine said: “Concerns about signal malfunctions had been expressed elsewhere in India earlier this year” and India’s Railway Board has recommended that the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI), which investigates high-profile cases including fraud and corruption, take over the investigation.

The FT reported that Modi’s opponents have also “seized on the disaster to accuse the government of trying to deflect attention from its failure to invest in safety mechanisms”.

Mallikarjun Kharge, president of the Indian National Congress, the largest opposition party, wrote to the prime minister on Monday alleging that “the people in charge – your goodself and Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw – do not want to admit that there are problems”.

Yet given the central role the railways play in Indian life, “a politician cannot go wrong by showering money on the system, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has done just that, with no little fanfare”, said the NYT. So if there is to be fall guy for the disaster it is unlikely to be him.

India’s 14th prime minister, Narendra Modi, is emerging as one of the country’s pivotal post-independence leaders – along with its founding PM Jawaharlal Nehru, who set the template for a secular, democratic nation in 1947, and his daughter Indira Gandhi, who ruled for 15 turbulent years.

Today, India is estimated to have overtaken China as the world’s most populous nation, with 1.4 billion people. It is the world’s fifth-biggest economy, and one of its fastest growing.

But India’s direction of travel under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a growing cause for concern.

Who is Narendra Modi?

He was born in 1950 in Vadnagar in the western state of Gujarat. His family were from the Ghanchi caste of vegetable-oil producers, officially designated as “backward”; Modi’s father had a tea stall in the station and Modi joined the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant Hindu nationalist group, at the age of eight. Modi left an early marriage at 17, and went on what he has described as a journey of spiritual “discovery” around India. Upon his return to Gujarat, he dedicated himself to the RSS, becoming a pracharak (a sort of missionary or foot soldier dedicated to chastity and the ascetic life; he is still celibate and teetotal). Modi did an MA in political science in Ahmedabad, where he led a student faction affiliated with the RSS. He joined the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party often seen as the RSS’s political wing, in 1987.

How did he rise to power?

When Modi joined the BJP, it had only two MPs. But in 1992, BJP and RSS activists led a crowd that destroyed a Mughal-era mosque in the northern city of Ayodhya, which they believed was built on the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. Hindu-Muslim riots ensued across the country, and support for both the RSS and the BJP soared. By 1996, the BJP had become the largest party in parliament. Modi, meanwhile, worked his way up to become chief minister of Gujarat in 2001 – a controversial tenure, owing to his alleged complicity in anti-Muslim riots in 2002; but in 2013, he was named as the BJP’s candidate for prime minister. In 2014, he guided the BJP to a crushing national election victory. In 2019, he was reelected by a bigger margin.

What happened in Gujarat?

Modi’s path to election as PM was paved with violence. A year after he became chief minister of Gujarat, a train carrying Hindu activists through the state was set on fire, allegedly by a crowd of Muslims. Fifty-nine people died. Modi ensured that the bodies of the victims were taken to Ahmedabad, and paraded through the streets. A pogrom ensued, with Hindu mobs killing and raping unrestrained by police. More than 1,000 people died, including some 790 Muslims; over 2,500 were injured. Allegations of complicity in this communal violence dogged Modi for years: in 2005, he was even barred from the US because of his alleged role in inciting the mobs. Modi always denied wrongdoing, and in 2012 he was cleared by a Special Investigation Team (SIT) appointed by India’s supreme court, owing to a lack of adequate evidence (a verdict that the court upheld last year). His US visa ban was lifted on his election as PM in 2014. But the questions over his role won’t go away: in January this year, a BBC documentary (which Modi tried to stop being aired in India) revealed that an internal UK Foreign Office inquiry had concluded that he was “directly responsible” for the violence, which, it said, bore “all the hallmarks of ethnic cleansing”.

Why has he been so successful?

Modi is a formidable politician and orator. In Gujarat he established himself as a pro-business leader who presided over rapid economic growth (partly by aligning himself with powerful business leaders). As PM, Modi has put a strong emphasis on development, providing electricity, gas and toilet facilities to areas that previously didn’t have them: one of his signature policies is his war on “open defecation”. This and his adept exploitation of India’s religious divisions have allowed him to weather even major crises such as Covid-19: India was one of the hardest-hit nations, and his handling of the pandemic was seen as disastrous.

Why is he a controversial PM?

Modi is an authoritarian who keeps a vice-like grip on his own party, and has built up a personality cult (there is, for instance, a “Narendra Modi App”). He has centralised power, and weakened India’s institutions. The independence of the judiciary has been eroded, while think-tanks and human-rights groups have been targeted. He has also cowed the free press: India now ranks 161st out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index. Journalists have been jailed on spurious charges; Modi’s business allies have taken over independent outlets; the PM himself hasn’t taken questions at a single press conference during nine years in power. But the most worrying aspect of his rule has been the oppression of India’s around 200 million Muslims.

How have they been oppressed?

Modi’s BJP government has passed a series of anti-Muslim measures. A 2019 law prevented Muslim foreign nationals fleeing persecution from being granted Indian citizenship. In the same year, Modi revoked the autonomy enjoyed by Kashmir, one of India’s few Muslim-majority states. At state level, the BJP has promised tough laws to combat “love jihad” (an alleged conspiracy among Muslim men to lure Hindu women into marriage for conversion). BJP politicans have attempted to ban veils in schools, and restrict the Muslim call to prayer. History books have been rewritten, cutting sections on India’s Muslim Mughal rulers. Generally, the BJP, which is devoted to Hindutva (Hindu hegemony) has promoted an us-versus-them mentality that has emboldened nationalists: there has been a major rise in anti-Muslim violence, often condoned or excused by the BJP.

Where is the opposition in all this?

Congress, Nehru’s secularist party, which long dominated Indian politics, has performed dismally in recent years, leaving a void that Modi and the BJP have been happy to fill. Rahul Gandhi, the former party leader, has been pursued for allegedly defaming Modi by implying he was a thief. He has been disqualified from political office, and could face a two-year prison sentence. Gandhi joins a long list of opposition politicians who have been prosecuted in the courts.

Can India’s democracy survive?

The US-based non-profit Freedom House has downgraded India from a free democracy to a “partially free democracy”, because it has passed discriminatory polices and harasses critics. Sweden’s V-Dem Institute says that India has become an “electoral autocracy”, like Russia. In some ways, democracy is still thriving: only half of its 28 state governments are BJP-led, though it does control the populous Hindi-speaking heartlands. Modi himself appears invincible, and his approval ratings, particularly among the 80% Hindu majority, are spectacularly high. Krishna Prasad, a liberal journalist, reflects gloomily: “India is becoming the country it has always wanted to be.”

“Why do all thieves have Modi as their surname?”

So asked opposition politician Rahul Gandhi at a 2019 rally shortly before India’s last general election. To support his point, Gandhi named banned Indian Premier League commissioner Lalit Modi, fugitive diamond merchant Nirav Modi – and the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi.

The comments did not go unnoticed. Last week, Gandhi – the former president of his Congress party, and the great-grandson of India’s first PM, Jawaharlal Nehru – was found guilty of defamation and handed a two-year jail sentence.

The case against him was brought by Purnesh Modi, a member of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the western state of Gujarat. The lawmaker complained that Gandhi’s comments had “defamed the entire Modi community”.

Gandhi, who is appealing against the Gujarat’s court verdict, has countered that he made the statement to highlight corruption generally rather than to defame any specific community.

Some of Gandhi’s allies have gone further and “described the court order as politically motivated”, said Al Jazeera. Pradip Bhattacharya, a Congress legislator from West Bengal state, claimed the defamation case had been brought because the BJP was “fearful about the rise” of Gandhi and the “direct threat” that he poses to the Modi government.

India’s parliament disqualified Gandhi as a lawmaker with immediate effect following his conviction, and he will be “unable to contest future elections unless his sentence is either stayed or he is acquitted”, said CNN. With voters due to head to the polls next year, the verdict threatens to “neuter one of the few figures that has the kind of star power and name recognition” to challenge Prime Minister Modi, the broadcaster added.

Over the weekend, Gandhi’s supporters staged nationwide sit-ins inspired by his namesake Mahatma Gandhi. Critics are decrying his disqualification as a “murder of democracy”, while a Congress party spokesperson said the court’s conclusions were “legally unsustainable”.

Another senior Congress politician, Jairam Ramesh, tweeted that the party would “fight this battle both legally and politically”, adding: “We will not be intimidated or silenced.”

Many Indians will be “bewildered” by Gandhi’s disqualification, said The Guardian, “given that 233 of the 539 MPs elected in the 2019 general election have criminal charges against them – many of them more serious than defamation”.

In the immediate term, Gandhi’s disqualification will trigger a by-election in his constituency of Wayanad in Kerala, in south India. As he gears up for an appeal process that is likely to end in the supreme court, fellow opposition politician Derek O’Brien, of the Trinamool Congress party, said the whole saga showed that the BJP was “desperate to silence the voice of the opposition”.

“This is the lowest of the low in the history of parliamentary democracy,” O’Brien added. “Shame on them.”

A court in India's western Gujarat state sentenced opposition leader Rahul Gandhi to two years in prison on Thursday for a comment he made about the surname Modi at a 2019 political rally. Gujarat is the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but the defamation lawsuit was brought by another member of Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Purnesh Modi. The court suspended Gandhi's sentence for 30 days and released him on bail. Gandhi's Congress party said he will appeal the verdict.

Gandhi made his Modi comment at an election rally in Karnataka state ahead of the 2019 general election, in which Modi's BJP crushed Gandhi's Congress party. "Tell me one thing," Gandhi said, after hitting Modi over corruption allegations: "Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi, Narendra Modi ... how come they all have Modi as common name? How come all the thieves have Modi as the common name?" Nirav Modi was a fugitive diamond tycoon and Lalit Modi the former head of the Indian Premier League, BBC News reports.

Purnesh Modi accused Gandhi of defaming everyone with the last name Modi. Gandhi's lawyers said there were procedural errors in the trial and argued that since the comment was about corruption and Narendra Modi, the prime minister should have been the one to file suit, not Purnesh Modi. Congress party president Mallikarjun Kharge tweeted after the verdict that Modi's government is "cowardly and dictatorial" and "a victim of political bankruptcy."

Gandhi, whose once-dominant Congress party now holds fewer than 10 percent of the elected seats in the lower house of parliament, is expected to run against Modi when he seeks a third term in 2024. "Modi remains India's most popular politician by a substantial margin and is widely expected to win a third victory at the next general election," Reuters reports.

The BBC and the Indian government are in a battle over free expression in the south Asian country. Officials with the government raided BBC newsroom offices in Delhi and Mumbai on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday this week, CNN reports, after the broadcaster aired a documentary that criticizes Prime Minister Narendra Modi. That follows the government's attempts both to ban the documentary and — using emergency laws — force social media sites to take down clips. "Critics decried it as an assault on press freedom," CNN says, but Modi's allies have accused the broadcaster of having a "colonial mindset." What does the BBC documentary say? And does Modi's crackdown signal that India is sliding into authoritarianism? Here's everything you need to know:

What is in the BBC documentary?

The first episode of India: The Modi Question goes back several decades to examine Modi's actions in 2002, when he was the chief minister of the state of Gujarat. "It was during this time that 60 Hindu pilgrims were killed when their train carriage was set alight," The Guardian reports. Muslims were blamed for the deaths, and retaliatory riots ended up killing more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims. Investigators appointed by India's Supreme Court cleared Modi of allegations he was complicit in the violence, but the new documentary unveiled a previously secret report within the British government that faulted Modi and said the violence had "hallmarks of ethnic cleansing." The second episode focuses on the "troubled relationship" between Modi's government and the country's Muslim minority. Modi's party — the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — is often described as a Hindu nationalist party that has undone legal protections for the country's Christians and Muslims.

What is Modi's response?

In January, an Indian foreign ministry slammed the documentary. "Let me just make it very clear that we think this is a propaganda piece designed to push a particular discredited narrative," said Arindam Bagchi. "The bias, the lack of objectivity, and frankly a continuing colonial mindset, is blatantly visible." On PBS NewsHour, Bloomberg Opinion's Bobby Ghosh noted the government's anger was to be expected for two reasons: First, Modi's administration "has been very, very thin-skinned about any kind of criticism, even the mildest kind of criticism." But it has also spent years trying to tamp down the charges of Modi's involvement in the 2002 riots. "The government thought that it had put the matter to bed, it had intimidated and silenced all its critics, anybody who could bring it up." The documentary shows old questions aren't going away.

What actions has the government taken?

The government is trying to make the old questions go away. In late January, it blocked the airing of the BBC documentary within India, Reuters reports, "saying that even sharing of any clips via social media is barred." YouTube and Twitter were ordered to take down clips and tweets about the program, and they complied. And it asked the nation's Supreme Court to ban the BBC entirely, The Hindu reports, claiming that "the BBC film was intended to surreptitiously disturb the peace and national integrity of the country." The court declined. Three days of raids on BBC offices, ostensibly part of a tax investigation, have followed. All of this has raised cries of alarm from press freedom advocates. "The Modi government is clearly abusing emergency powers … to punish or restrict any and all criticism of its policies," says Amy Brouillette of the International Press Institute.

Is the ban working?

That's questionable. "Indians are easily circumventing" the ban, Rest of World reports, creating a Streisand effect that has "driven new interest and drawn attention to an ugly chapter in the prime minister's history." University students across the country have scheduled gatherings to watch the documentary — though those viewings have also been subject to crackdowns. During one January incident at Delhi's Jamia Millia Islamia university, 13 students were detained "amid a heavy police deployment," Reuters reports. At another university, officials apparently cut off power on campus as students prepared to screen the program on their phones and laptops. But at least one opposition party has vowed to show the documentary in every state. "They won't stop the voice of dissent," said Mayukh Biswas, a leader of the student wing of the Communist Party of India.

What does this mean for India?

Foreign Policy reports that while Western governments have tried to partner with Modi's government, India under Modi's leadership has become "an increasingly illiberal place, where activists are jailed and minority rights are undermined." The government's reaction to the BBC documentary has had the unintended effect of highlighting those problems on the international stage — and placed pressure on India's relationship with the British government, which subsidizes and oversees the broadcaster. But there is also increasing dissatisfaction at home, The Atlantic reports, especially among Muslims who "saw their houses and shops bulldozed, their businesses boycotted, and their religious gatherings heckled by Hindu-nationalist mobs" during last year's Ramadan observance. A national election will be held next year, The Guardian notes. Modi is still expected to win, "but it is still a critical moment for the government."

The smartest insight and analysis, from all perspectives, rounded up from around the web:

Next to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani's vast industrial empire, the short seller Hindenburg Research looks like "a peashooter," said The Economist. But the small New York–based fund's report, accusing the Adani Group of "the largest con in corporate history," had by last week wiped out more than $110 billion of his companies' value and toppled him from third place on the global rich list. It has also called into question India's "tycoon-powered version of capitalism," championed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Adani's multibillion-dollar projects, ranging from ports to power stations, "were the cornerstone of Modi's plan to turn the country into a global clean-energy powerhouse." Now Western multinationals will likely "think twice" about any partnerships with Adani or his fellow Indian tycoons.

The "storm surrounding Adani" comes during "a proud year" for India, as it overtakes China as the world's most populous nation and chairs the G-20 group of leading economies, said John Reed and Benjamin Parkin in the Financial Times. The Adani Group has portrayed Hindenburg's report as "a calculated attack on India; the independence, integrity, and quality of Indian institutions; and the growth story and ambition of India." And indeed, the ascent of Adani, who dropped out of school to work in Mumbai's diamond business, parallels the ascent of Modi and India's governing party. Both Adani and Modi come from the Indian state of Gujarat. Early on, Adani became one of Modi's strongest backers, building a local industrial empire that helped Modi "sell Gujarat as an economic model for India." When Modi was elected to national office, he flew on an Adani jet.

Adani has worked "hand in glove" with the government to advance the priorities of Modi and his party, said Stacey Meichtry in The Wall Street Journal. India has routinely used "large government subsidies to fund infrastructure construction by private firms such as Adani's." Now, that "symbiosis" is being tested. A key question is whether Adani's troubles will dent Modi's massive plans to revamp the country's transport and energy infrastructure, said Alex Travelli in The New York Times. Adani is closely involved in one of his pet projects to turn India into a global "green-power hub." But "fraud and failure are hardly the image that Modi or India wants to convey," especially with the country "freshly minted as the world's fifth-largest economy."

The Hindenburg-Adani battle is a "master class in financial globalization," said Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg. Without "a single dollar in the Indian market," which makes short selling nearly impossible, Hindenburg, which bet against Adani's U.S.-traded bonds, punctured Adani's "aura of unassailability." The Adani Group has thrown everything it has at Hindenburg, even comparing the attack on Adani to the 1919 massacre of Indians by British soldiers. This has backfired; in fact, the Adani Group's 413-page rebuttal amounted to "information overload." Adani's strongest backers now may come from India's billionaire class, which has banded together as an "impromptu national team." That "bromance" between the economy's "bigwigs" watching out for each other's interests should worry India as much as any of Hindenburg's claims.

This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.

Hundreds of people took to the streets in India on Monday to demand a probe into allegations of fraud against the man behind one of the country's most lucrative companies.

Protests raged in New Delhi and other cities against Gautam Adani, the CEO of commodities conglomerate the Adani Group and one of the richest people in the world. The company and Adani himself have been embroiled in a scandal after short-seller firm Hindenburg Research published a report accusing the Adani Group of running "the largest con in corporate history."

According to Hindenburg, the Adani Group was allegedly "engaged in a brazen stock-manipulation and accounting fraud scheme," and would also significantly overinflate the value of their companies even as debts began to pile up.

The scandal has caused outrage among India's leading opposition faction, the Congress Party, and The Wall Street Journal reported that the Adani Group has lost $100 billion since the allegations arose, while Adani himself has lost $50 billion of his net worth.

While the Adani Group has pledged to repay some of its investors, members of the Congress Party have urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to open an investigation.

Some Congress Party members have accused Modi of being in line with the Adani Group, and The Associated Press reported that protesters "burnt a suitcase plastered with images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Adani" during riots in New Delhi.

The Congress Party has also questioned the government's alleged investments made by state-backed banks in the Adani Group.

"The common man has invested his money in [Gautam Adani's] company and the government is trying to save him," Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee General Secretary Shiv Panday said, per Reuters, adding that the government was "supporting the businessman and not the common man."

It’s known as the “Streisand effect”, said The Hindu (Chennai): try to block information about something (as the actress Barbra Streisand tried to do with photos of her Malibu mansion) and you end up bringing it to the attention of a far wider audience than if you’d let it be.

That’s just what the Delhi government has done by invoking emergency powers to stop the airing of a BBC documentary. The film in question is an examination of the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat in which about 790 Muslims were killed, and of the role Narendra Modi, India’s current PM, might possibly have played in abetting them.

The rioting was triggered by the death of 59 Hindus in a train fire, an accid­ent that Hindu extremists were quick to blame on Muslims. Modi, chief minister of Gujarat at the time, has always denied that he and his ruling Hindu nationalist BJP gave tacit backing to the extremists: the BBC programme – India: The Modi Question – has uncovered memos suggesting otherwise.

So now Delhi has intervened to stop screenings, and ordered YouTube and Twitter to remove clips. Too late. The footage has been shared far and wide and interest in it has surged. A good thing too. India has quite enough censorship as it is; we don’t need any more.

‘Gutter journalism’

It isn’t Modi who’s to blame for this unedifying row, said Tariq Mansoor in The Indian Express (Noida): it’s the BBC. In revisiting an unfortunate chapter in Indian history, it has shown “utter contempt for the Indian judiciary”. Cases stemming from the 2002 riots have been heard at virtually all levels of the Indian justice system; that includes the supreme court, which in 2013 found there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute Modi for failing to stop the violence.

India under Modi is thriving, said Zahack Tanvir in Firstpost (Mumbai). Its economy is booming and it holds the G20 presidency: 2002’s riots are a distant memory. So the BBC programme looks like a “hitjob against Modi” and India’s rising status. “It’s gutter journalism.”

BBC’s rigorous standards

On the contrary, said Shruti Kapila on The Print (New Delhi), it’s the BBC’s rigorous standards that make this documentary so authoritative. Critics decry it as “white propaganda”, but it’s scrupulously fair, giving plenty of weight to the arguments of Modi’s supporters.

Alas, this is just the latest example of Delhi’s contempt for free expression, said The Telegraph (Kolkata). “India leads the world in internet shutdowns”; during mass protests by farmers in 2021, the government “explicitly sought the removal of posts by journalists and other critics”.

Modi himself hasn’t held “a single [open] press conference” since becoming PM in 2014, said Salil Tripathi in Foreign Policy (Washington). But he can’t escape the fact that “life has become harder” for India’s Muslims on his watch, as support for Hindu nationalism has surged. Happily, he has no power to stop the BBC from examining his troubling past. “Modi may thank his good fortune that he does not face a similar broadcaster in India.”

India is weeks away from overtaking China as the country with the largest population, according to latest UN projections.

The landmark event, predicted for mid-April, is a “timely reminder of the growing influence that India and its activities exert on the rest of the world”, wrote Viraj Mehta of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

After celebrating the 75th anniversary of Indian independence, the emerging Asian superpower assumed the G20 presidency in December – fuelling speculation about New Delhi’s geopolitical goals and ambitions.

Climate targets

India has been “at the forefront of driving global action on climate change”, said WEF’s Mehta. India has co-founded the International Solar Alliance with France, “and in doing so, is leading the global movement towards solar power”.

Prime minister Narendra Modi last year also vowed to establish a National Hydrogen Mission, “with an aim of making India a hub for the production and export of green hydrogen”.

And in a “major step” in achieving India’s long-term goal of reaching net zero by 2070, said Mehta, the nation’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), adopted under the Paris Agreement, “translates” Cop26 pledges into enhanced climate targets.

Despite these ambition goals, India has a mixed record on climate. The country is the world’s third-largest emitter of CO2, although its per capita emissions are lower than the world average, according to the UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report.

Russia and Ukraine

Since the invasion of Ukraine, India has been buying more and more discounted Russian oil, despite global criticism. According to data from energy cargo tracker Vortexa, India imported around a million barrels per day in December.

The oil deals have left India in an “odd position over the past year”, said Jyoti Malhotra of New Delhi-based news site ThePrint. Modi’s government may be “holding its nose” at what Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine but is “unable to say much about it because it needs Russia”.

“Leaving aside the thorny issue of ethics in foreign policy”, said Foreign Policy’s Ravi Agrawal, India’s leaders have “exhibited a growing confidence in asserting their own strategic interests instead of the West’s”.

“I am entitled to weigh my own interest,” said External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar last summer, amid criticism of India’s oil purchases. Western critics should “grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems”, he added.

The tensions over Ukraine could be offset, however, by Washington’s “increasingly fractious economic relationship” with China, said France 24.

“Countries like the US, some in Europe, others in the Indo-Pacific, see India as a geopolitical counterbalance to China and an economic alternative or a democratic contrast,” Tanvi Madan, a Washington-based senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, told the news site..

The “big question”, she added, was whether India could “take advantage of this window before it closes”.

Nuclear hotspot

The Indian military was believed to have approximately 160 warheads as of last summer, and “continues to modernise its nuclear arsenal”, according to experts from the Nuclear Information Project with the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). In an article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, FAS researchers warned that tensions between India and Pakistan “constitute one of the most concerning nuclear hotspots on the planet”.

The two nuclear-armed nations engaged in “open hostilities” as recently as 2020, when Indian and Pakistani soldiers exchanged artillery and gunfire over the Line of Control, leading to at least 22 deaths.

More recently, in March 2022, India accidentally launched what appeared to be ground-launched cruise missile 77 miles into Pakistani territory, damaging civilian property.

A ‘credible challenger’ to Modi

The country’s main opposition leader is on the final leg of a 3,500km (2,175 miles) march with a “simple message – religious harmony and prosperity for all”, said Shruti Kapila, professor of Indian history and politics at Cambridge University, on Al Jazeera earlier this month.

Rahul Gandhi, the face of the Indian National Congress, is “offering the world’s largest democracy a new political vision and script pitched against the shrill political Hinduism” of Prime Minister Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party, Kapila wrote, and has “emerged as a leader with mass appeal”.

With a “simple message of interreligious harmony and prosperity for all”, the epic walk has “focused on common human interactions” based on conversations with “farmers and workers, young and old, men and women and children too about their shattered dreams under the Modi government”.

The march – scheduled to end on 30 January in the northern city of Srinagar – has “resonated with ordinary Indians, who’ve turned out in their thousands to join him”, said the South China Morning Post. Gandhi has positioned himself as a “credible challenger”, raising hopes among those who feared India was turning into a dictatorship.

Demographic ‘time bomb’

With India on track to leapfrog China to become the world’s most populous country, this “demographic dividend” could boost economic growth, said CNN. India’s working-age population is expected to rise from 900m to more than a billion over the next decade.

But “there are fears the country might miss out”, the broadcaster reported, because “India is simply not creating employment opportunities for the millions of young job seekers already entering the workforce every year”.

India is “sitting on a time bomb,” said Chandrasekhar Sripada, professor of organisational behaviour at the Indian School of Business. “There will be social unrest if it cannot create enough employment in a relatively short period of time.”

At least 141 people have died after a pedestrian bridge over a river collapsed in India’s western state of Gujarat.

Local officials said there was overcrowding on the bridge at the time as people were celebrating the Diwali festival. It is believed that most of those who died were women, children or elderly people.

“Many children were enjoying holidays for Diwali and they came here as tourists,” an eyewitness told Reuters. “All of them fell one on top of another. The bridge collapsed due to overloading.”

Television footage showed dozens of people “clinging on to the cables and twisted remains of the bridge as emergency teams struggled to rescue them,” said The Guardian. “Some clambered up the broken structure to try to make their way to the riverbanks, while others swam to safety.”

The 230-metre (750ft) bridge, which was built during British rule in the 19th century, had been closed for repairs for six months and was reopened to the public last week.

The Times of India reported that the preliminary police report said the bridge was reopened for tourists despite the bridge maintenance agencies knowing that their “callous approach” to the recent renovation work may lead to human deaths.

“Questions are being asked about whether safety checks were done before the bridge was reopened,” said the BBC. Home minister Harsh Sanghavi said a number of criminal cases had been registered over the incident.

The families of the victims will receive compensation from the National Relief Fund, according to PM Narendra Modi, who said his “heart is filled with love and is with the families of those suffering”.

Hundreds of millions of national flags were bought and proudly displayed in the run-up to India’s Independence Day this week – but the country has been left with the thorny issue of how to dispose of them.

“Across streets and rooftops, from mansions to huts and even remote outposts on mountains”, the Indian flag has been on display across the nation following Independence Day celebrations, which marked the 75th anniversary of India gaining independence from Britain, said The Guardian.

Amid strong encouragement from Prime Minister Narendra Modi to fly the flag, strict rules regulating how and when the flag could be flown were deliberately relaxed by the government – and an “enthusiastic” response from the public meant that more than 200 million flags were bought, according to estimates from the culture ministry.

The issue now is how these flags should be safely disposed of, as simply throwing the Indian flag into a bin is considered sacrilegious. Disrespecting the flag is a crime punishable by up to three years in jail or a fine, or both, said The Guardian.

What are the options?

Indians who wish to dispose of their flag properly have two options under India’s National Flag Code 2022, which is a legally binding set of rules relating to the flag. They can either bury it or burn it.

Times Now, an Indian news outlet, offered some advice for disposing of Indian flags properly. If flag owners opt to bury their flags, they must “collect all the damaged flags in a wooden box”, folding and placing them properly inside it. Flag owners must “observe a moment of silence” once the flags are buried in the ground.

Those opting to burn their flags must find a clean, safe space to do it, where a fire can be built. The flags must be folded and placed in “the centre of the flames”. Times Now warns that “flags burned without folding or burning them directly is an offence”.

But many may simply choose to keep their flags flying. Taxi driver Kailash Kishore told The Guardian that he had no intention of removing the flag attached to the roof of his car as part of Independence Day celebrations.

“I won’t remove it at all. Once it gets torn and doesn’t look good, I will put it in my living room. Then maybe in the garden, but I’m not going to get rid of it,” he said.

The leaders of the US, Japan, Australia and India yesterday pledged to be “a force for good” in a “free and open Indo-Pacific” following a meeting in Tokyo of the so-called Quad.

In a joint statement, US President Joe Biden and prime ministers Fumio Kishida, Narendra Modi and Australia’s newly elected leader Anthony Albanese said the Quad was “committed to bringing tangible benefits to the region” at a time of profound global challenges.

But according to Reuters, the Ukraine invasion is “an issue that has risked division among the group”, as India, which has close ties with the Kremlin, resists calls to condemn Moscow’s war.

What is the Quad and how did it start?

Formally known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the Quad began as a loose partnership after the Indian ocean tsunami in 2004, when US, Japan, Australia and India joined together to provide humanitarian and disaster assistance.

But the group was disbanded just days later and the four nations joined broader relief efforts coordinated by the UN.

Why was it resurrected...?

In 2007, Japan’s then PM Shinzo Abe “suggested a more formal meeting of the four nations”, said USA Today.

The Quad duly gathered that May during the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Regional Forum in the Philippines. According to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the meeting “was characterised as an ‘informal grouping’ that touched on areas of common interest”.

The political union triggered alarm in China. The BBC reported that “a deeply concerned Beijing” had “sent formal protests to the four governments”.

Amid “unclear objectives and mounting Chinese pressure”, said USA Today, “Australia, India and the United States hesitated to formalise the dialogue”.

The sudden resignation of Abe in September 2007 then eliminated what the CSIS described as the Quad’s “main cheerleader and architect”.

… and then revived once more?

The Quad was formally resurrected in 2017, amid alarm over China’s growing regional influence.

“Both the Trump and Biden administrations saw the Quad as key to a pivot towards placing more focus on the Indo-Pacific region, particularly as a counterweight to China’s assertive actions,” according to the Associated Press. The first formal Quad summit was held in 2021 and the member nations’ leaders met again virtually in March this year.

The Quad’s goal “is to keep military and political influence out of the critical water routes in the Indo-Pacific”, said India-based site News9Live, and to “maintain a worldwide order based on norms, as well as freedom of navigation and a free trading system”.

The alliance also aims to provide alternative debt financing to countries in the Indo-Pacific.

What does the future hold?

“Over the years, the Quad’s diplomacy has waxed and waned,” said the Council on Foreign Relations.

Following this week’s meeting, the four nations unveiled a maritime initiative to combat illegal fishing, and pledged to invest more than $50bn in developing infrastructure in the Indo-Pacific as part of their push to counter China’s growing influence in the region.

China has shot back by describing the group as an “Asian Nato”. Although the four nations have not made a mutual-defence pact, the grouping is intended to deepen military, economic and diplomatic ties.

“And while they don’t often explicitly say it, those partnerships are meant to be a bulwark against Chinese aggression,” said Delhi-based news site livemint.com.

Beijing and some Indian nationalists and leftists argue that Asian security should be moulded by Asian powers alone.

As global tensions grow, South Korea has expressed interest in joining the Quad, “though US officials have said they are not contemplating adjusting the group’s membership”, the site added.

But South Korea, New Zealand and Vietnam have been included in “Quad-plus” meetings “which could form the basis for future expansion or partnership in the region”.

Hit with punishing sanctions and with few allies willing to defend him on the international stage, Vladimir Putin has cut an increasingly isolated figure in the days since he gave the order for an invasion of Ukraine.

But one major power that has “three times declined to condemn” Russia’s aggression has been India, The Times reported. So far it has “not spoken out” against the Kremlin’s unprovoked attack on its eastern European neighbour.

Narendra Modi’s government has for years “attempted to strike a balance between its Kremlin ties and maintaining India’s status as the world’s largest democracy”, the paper said. But it is also pursuing “warmer relations with the US”, a policy that may mean the government is forced off the fence over the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

‘#IstandwithPutin’

In the days since Putin gave the order for a three-pronged assault on Ukraine, Indian social media users have taken to the internet to back Russia’s attack.

“The hashtags #IstandwithPutin and #IstandwithRussia” have trended on Twitter, The Times said, with one user writing: “The man is fighting for his country and for the destruction of the monopoly of USA and western countries.”

Those individual expressions of support for Putin have also played out in the Indian government’s response, which included abstaining from a UN Security Council resolution, sponsored by the US, that condemned Russia’s actions in the strongest terms.

The abstention serves as “a balancing act of maintaining friends and partners of both sides”, The Indian Express said, as well as a “legacy of the Nehruvian foreign policy of non-alignment”. Jawaharlal Nehru was an Indian anti-colonialist campaigner who, while serving as prime minister from 1947 to 1964, steered a course between the US and Soviet Union during the Cold War.

India is wary of picking sides in a conflict between the US and its Nato allies and Russia for the same reason Nehru remained neutral in the 1950s and 1960s. Having fought for independence, Indian governments traditionally maintain an independent foreign policy.

The influence of Nehru’s anti-colonial politics on India’s position in the Russia-Ukraine conflict was also evident in a widely shared clip of reporter Rahul Shivshankar mixing up his guests during an episode of his show India Upfront.

Mistakenly thinking India was being attacked for its neutrality by Daniel McAdams, executive director of the US-headquartered Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, Shivshankar shouted: “Don’t lecture us here in India, I’m not going to hear your lecture.

“You people and your colonial agenda have wrecked the south and wrecked the east. Don’t sit here and lecture us, don’t lecture us Mr McAdams.” Shivshankar was actually berating a Ukrainian journalist, Bohdan Nahaylo.

India “has had close ties with Moscow for decades”, The Times said. Its army “depends on Russia for roughly half of its defence supplies, which it sees as vital to countering border threats from China and Pakistan”.

Moscow has also “backed India during numerous foreign crises”, the paper continued, “particularly by preventing UN intervention in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir”. With Russia now engaged in what Putin has framed as a border security conflict of its own, Modi “appears to be returning the favour”, the paper added.

Off the fence

While maintaining a position of strategic neutrality has so far served to maintain India’s relationships with allies in the East and West, its “fence-sitting no longer serves its diplomatic or security interests”, said Foreign Policy columnist Sumit Ganguly.

The UN abstention “seems jarring”, he said, but is “not a surprising move for India”. The country “not only has a historic friendship with Russia but also depends on Russian weapons”. Modi is also concerned “the anti-Russian vote could cement Moscow’s strategic partnership with Beijing”, a nation with which India has a strained relationship.

But refusing to take a side “is likely to tarnish” India’s “global image as a democracy”, he warned. When other members of the international community are lining up to condemn Russia, India “can’t expect the world to ignore its response to the current crisis”.

The US on Wednesday “called on India to distance itself from Russia”, Reuters reported, arguing that “new sanctions on Russian banks will make it harder for countries to buy major defence equipment from Moscow”.

Donald Lu, assistant US secretary of state for South Asian affairs, told a senate subcommittee that “India is a really important security partner of ours now, and that we value that partnership.

“Moving forward, I hope that part of what happens with the extreme criticism that Russia has faced is that India will find it is now time to further distance itself from Russia.”

Despite the “strong strain of anti-Americanism in India”, The Times said, officials are becoming concerned that “if Russia’s economy is ravaged by sanctions, its weakness might force it to become dependent on its ally China.

“Is that the Russia that India wants as a strategic partner? China is India’s biggest threat and any country that depends on China is a less-than-ideal strategic partner,” the editorial board at The Times of India argued earlier this week. “India needs America to counter China.”

A rising tide of discrimination against India’s ethnic and religious minorities has triggered warnings that the government is “playing with the fire of sectarian hatred”.

India’s Supreme Court was forced to intervene last month after “several Hindu religious leaders” were accused of calling for a “genocide” of India’s Muslims, Al Jazeera reported. Hindu monks have also repeatedly called for “an ethnic cleansing of the kind that targeted Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar”, said The New York Times (NYT).

These groups of “extremists” were “once considered fringe”, said the paper, but are “increasingly taking their militant message into the mainstream, stirring up communal hate in a push to reshape India’s constitutionally protected secular republic into a Hindu state”. And according to The Economist, Narenda Modi’s “government is ignoring and sometimes even encouraging” the “concerted and wide-ranging offensive” against minorities.

Tidal wave of hate

Under Modi’s leadership, the governing Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) “has increasingly resorted to Muslim-baiting to consolidate Hindu votes that tended previously to divide along lines of caste or ideology”, said The Economist.

The government’s “support for sectarian urges goes beyond speech”, the paper continued. Members of “minorities of all kinds are woefully rare in central ministries, in security agencies and in BJP-led local governments”, and the state “has ceased reporting such statistics as the religious composition of police, or the number of hate crimes”.

NDTV reported in January that BJP politicians had been responsible for 297 of a total 348 incidents of hate speech by “high-ranking political functionaries” since 2014, when Modi’s party first came to power. The frequency of such outbursts of so-called “VIP hate” had jumped by 160% over the past three-and-a-half months, the analysis by the New Delhi-based news channel found.

The recent spike may be down to the approach of elections in five states this month, with BJP nationalists “turning up the heat”, The Economist said. Modi’s party is “anxious to retain its hold on Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, in advance of the next general election in 2024”, and BJP campaign material has included “blunt sectarian content, such as images of Muslims as terrorists, or of opposition politicians dressed in ‘Muslim’ garb”.

Analysts and activists have warned that Hindu extremists are being “enabled, even normalised, by political leaders and law enforcement officials”, said the NYT. The ruling regime is accused of offering “tacit endorsements by not directly addressing such divisive issues”.

Modi “and his top leaders remained silent” after footage of a recent call to arms by monks in the holy city of Haridwar went viral, the paper reported. While the Supreme Court launched an investigation following calls for the Hindu religious leaders to be prosecuted, junior members of Modi’s party allegedly attended the meeting where the “genocide” call was made, “and the monks have often posted pictures” with senior politicians.

“You have persons giving hate speech, actually calling for genocide of an entire group, and we find reluctance of the authorities to book these people,” Rohinton Fali Nariman, a recently retired Supreme Court judge, said during a public lecture last month.

“Unfortunately, the other higher echelons of the ruling party are not only being silent on hate speech, but almost endorsing it.��

Call to action

Hindu nationalists that “incite violence openly boast that politicians and police will not touch them”, The Economist said. Modi’s BJP “has pushed government prosecutors to pursue cases against Muslims accused of sectarian troublemaking, but has rarely shown any zeal with Hindus”, according to the paper.

This alleged state “endorsement”, as former judge Nariman described it, is “stoking communal tensions in a country where small triggers have incited mass-death tragedies”, said the NYT.

The increasing hate speech “resonates with increasingly emboldened vigilante groups”, triggering attacks in which mobs have “beaten people accused of disrespecting cows”, “dragged couples out of trains, cafes and homes”, and “barged into religious gatherings where they suspect people are being converted”.

In “many instances” in which violence against Hindus and other minorities has occurred, “police appear to have ignored warnings of trouble” or “blamed and even arrested those being attacked”, said The Economist.

Such assaults include an attack on St Joseph’s School in Ganj Basoda, a provincial town in the state of Madhya Pradesh. In early December, a Muslim mob “surged” into the Christian educational facility, causing £19,000 worth of damage.

Vote winner

The attack on St Joseph’s “was not the first, but the third on a Christian-affiliated school in Madhya Pradesh since October”, The Economist reported.

And “more disturbing still”, given India’s “secular constitution”, is the fact that Modi’s “government is increasingly turning a blind eye towards and even actively encouraging majoritarian chauvinism”, the paper added.

According to economist and journalist Mihir Sharma, the BJP is “playing with the fire of sectarian hatred” in an effort to distract “from a struggling economy and the devastation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic”.

In an opinion piece for New Delhi-based news site The Print, Sharma wrote that Modi’s government is “not the first political party to wink at ethno-nationalist extremism among its followers”. But “such open promotion of genocide and ethnic cleansing should have set off alarms”.

“It is not only tens of millions of minorities – as well as India’s increasingly tenuous connection to liberal values – that are at risk,” Sharma warned. “The Indian state itself risks being undermined by its leaders’ tacit acceptance of religious vigilantism.”

Gregory Stanton, the founder of Genocide Watch, told a US congressional briefing last month that the “processes” that lead to genocide were well under way in India.

Speaking to the NYT, Stanton said that Myanmar served as a warning about how easily hate speech can spill over into violence. But in India, it would be mobs, not the military, doing the killing, he added.

“You have to stop it now,” Stanton said. “Once the mobs take over it could really turn deadly.”

In the short term, said The Economist, Modi’s “lurch towards majoritarian chauvinism” is likely to “win a few more votes for the BJP” in this month’s state elections.

But “the loser from this equation is not just the increasingly fretful fifth” of the population who are non-Hindu. “It is India itself.”

Criminals are capitalising on the coronavirus crisis by peddling fake and sometimes nonexistent medical supplies to countless desperate people across India.

Nationwide shortages of drugs and oxygen amid soaring Covid-19 case rates have fuelled a black market boom as sellers “prey on the desperation and grief of families” in deals “brokered online or in hushed phone calls”, The New York Times (NYT) reports.

“Sometimes the goods are fraudulent, and some are are potentially harmful,” adds the paper, which lists a string of examples including fire extinguishers being repainted and sold as oxygen canisters, risking explosions.

‘Moral fabric’

Police officers in the state of Uttar Pradesh last week arrested seven people accused of “stealing used funeral shrouds from bodies and selling them as new”, says the NYT. Reports of fraudsters hawking fake oxygen cylinders have also increased as India’s coronavirus crisis deepens.

A New Delhi resident told The National that she had paid 10,000 rupees (£96) for “for an oxygen cylinder that she desperately wanted for her friend’s father, a Covid-19 patient who was gasping for breath after missing out on hospital”.

But after driving to her friend’s home “at night to deliver the life-saving gas”, the news site reports, the woman discovered that “she had been swindled and the ‘oxygen cylinder’ was actually a fire extinguisher”. Her friend’s father died the next day.

Local police subsequently arrested five men who reportedly had “five more fire extinguishers that they had planned to sell”.

In a separate case in the Indian capital, police seized 532 fire extinguisher cylinders that had been repainted to look like oxygen cylinders by scammers in order to “sell them to needy people”, The Times of India reports.

Three men were arrested following the bust, which occurred after the head of an Indian NGO that provides free oxygen to Covid patients fell victim to the con and reported them to the authorities.

Such scams are potentially “deadly”, says the NYT, as “less-sturdy fire extinguishers might explode if filled with high-pressure oxygen”.

Nationwide shortages of antiviral drugs have also forced many Indians to turn to “black market dealers” who charge up to “80% higher than the original price and insist the entire payment be made in advance”, Quartz reports.

Some of the scamsters take an advance but never deliver the promised drugs, while others deliver “dupes of the medicine that look identical to the real one”, says the news site.

Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company Cipla last month issued a statement warning people to source their products only from “authorised stockists” in order to avoid falling victim to “unscrupulous persons”.

But despite efforts to crack down on the Covid crooks, many of the “more egregious examples” of the emerging black market “can be found in the country’s struggling hospital system”, says the NYT.

Accusations by a doctor in Madhya Pradesh that suggest officials are cashing in on hospital bed shortages “have gone viral”, the paper reports. Sanjeev Kumrawat claims “he tried to stop a local activist for India’s governing party from selling access to beds in a government hospital where he works”.

“We all know that to get a bed is a big struggle all around,” Dr Kumrawat said. “Government resources are to be distributed equitably and can’t become the property of one person.” The activist, named as Abhay Vishwakarma, denies the allegation.

Amid a flurry of similar claims, the High Court in New Delhi called on the government earlier this month to “provide the required medical facility for all persons suffering from the disease” in the capital, as legal news site Live Law reported at the time.

The “existing medical infrastructure in the state is completely exposed and has been put to test”, said the court, adding that increasing cases of hoarding and black marketing show that “the moral fabric of the society is dismembered”.

Underlining that bleak message, Vikram Singh, a former police chief in Uttar Pradesh, told the NYT that “I have seen all kinds of predators and all forms of depravity, but this level of predation and depravity I have not seen in the 36 years of my career or in my life”.

Duel waves

The second wave of Covid sweeping across India has pushed the total tally of cases to more than 20 million. The official death toll stands at more than a quarter of a million, but experts say the true fatality rate is almost certainly far higher. Exacerbating the crisis, the country was hit by Cyclone Tauktae on Monday, with around 200,000 people forced to flee their homes in the western state of Gujarat.

The cyclone made landfall a day after the authorities reported a further 311,170 new Covid infections, the lowest single-day rise in more than three weeks. However, daily deaths rose above 4,000 for the fourth time in a week.

As the country’s “chronically underfunded, under-resourced healthcare system” is “pushed to the brink of collapse”, says The Guardian, Narendra Modi’s government “has faced an unprecedented and visceral wave of public anger”, with “tough questions” being asked about the prime minister’s “competence and leadership”.

“Modi’s image will depend on how the mass suffering is interpreted, and whether he can successfully deploy his skills at narrative shifting, but I think he will have to pay a price,” Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Centre for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University in the US, told the paper.

“This is too immense a period of suffering and it will be too hard to convince people that this was just down to ‘divine will’ or individual failures to wear a mask.”

As India continues to break global records for daily new Covid cases, infection data emerging from Kolkata is fuelling fears that worse may be to come.

The Times of India reports that “every second person” taking a PCR Covid test in the eastern port city and its suburbs is getting a positive result, up from less than 20% at the start of April.

The steep hike comes amid warnings that city-wide lockdowns across the country will “send thousands of migrant workers back to their home villages, some carrying the virus with them”, The Telegraph says.

Tip of the iceberg

Covid is “killing thousands of people each day in major cities including Delhi and Mumbai”, The Telegraph reports, as a new double mutation of the coronavirus triggers a spike in infections.

India’s outbreaks now account for around 38% of global cases, up from 9% a month ago.

But while increasing case numbers are being reported nationwide, Kolkata is emerging as a new epicentre of the pandemic. A doctor in the city told The Times of India that local laboratories processing coronavirus tests “are reporting a positivity rate of 45% to 55%”.

In other parts of West Bengal, the state in which Kolkata is situated, positivity rates are “around 24%, up from 5% at the beginning of this month”, said the unnamed medic, a senior doctor at a state-run hospital.

And the actual positivity rates in both Kolkata and further afield “will be much higher”, the doctor warned, because there are “so many asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic patients who are not getting themselves tested”.

Kolkata is home to almost 15 million people but has “just under 1,500 beds” left unoccupied in the city’s hospitals, according to The Hindustan Times.

The surge in Covid cases has led “to a depletion of oxygen supply and shortage of antiviral remdesivir”, used to treat the coronavirus, prompting the authorities “to issue guidelines for their strict rationing”, says the paper.

Bhaskar Narayan Chaudhuri, a microbiologist at Kolkata’s Peerless Hospital, told The Times of India that “the high transmissibility of the mutant virus is infecting a large number of people in a short span of time”.

“In most cases, entire families are getting infected,” he added.

With medical services stretched to breaking point, some patients are dying in their homes after being unable to get a bed in hospital.

Bereaved families have told how they “called helpline numbers but did not receive any information about available hospital beds”, The Indian Express reports.

The bodies of Covid patients who died at home are also said to have been “left unattended for hours” as a result of delays by the authorities in charge of collecting them, the paper adds.

Rural spread

As the authorities in cities nationwide implement lockdowns in a bid to contain Covid outbreaks, the exodus of migrant workers returning to villages across India means the virus is “now spreading uncontrollably in its most vulnerable rural hinterland”, home to 800 million people, The Telegraph says.

“Decades of underfunding” have left rural communities “facing widespread shortages of oxygen, tests, medication, and, in many areas, a medical professional, creating a vacuum of critical care and leaving openings for quack doctors”, the paper reports.

And because Covid testing is limited, the full extend of rural infection rates can only be estimated, warns Motilal Sinha, a social activist in the district of Rajnandgaon in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh.

“Today, the situation is that between 15% and 20% of people from every village in Rajnandgaon are Covid-19 positive, but these cases aren’t on any government record,” Sinha told The Telegraph. “They would only be revealed if house-to-house testing is done in villages.”

India’s “best hope for dampening the second wave is to vaccinate more”, says The Economist. An average of around three million doses of Covid vaccines are currently being administered each day, but in a country with a population of around 1.4 billion, “this is only a drop in the ocean”, the paper adds.

Latest Oxford University tracking shows that around ten per 100 people in India have received at least one dose so far. At that speed, “it will be next year before all adults are vaccinated”, The Economist calculates.

The Indian government is massively underreporting the scale of the country’s Covid crisis, experts are claiming.

India recorded 349,691 new cases yesterday - setting a new global record for the fifth consecutive day - and 2,767 coronavirus deaths. But medical workers say those totals, “however staggering”, represent just “a fraction of the real reach of the virus’s spread, which has thrown the country into emergency mode”, The New York Times (NYT) reports.

The steep surge has been linked to a new “double mutant” Covid strain that has triggered a nationwide panic, “with hospitals unbearably full, oxygen supplies running low and desperate people dying in line waiting to see doctors”, the paper adds.

‘Covid apocalypse’

In a radio address yesterday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged all citizens to get vaccinated and exercise caution. “Our spirits were high after successfully dealing with the first wave,” he said. “But this storm has shaken the nation.”

The speech marked a significant shift in tone for Modi, who only the day before “could not hide his delight” as he greeted thousands of supporters at an an election rally in West Bengal, The Times reports. “I’ve never seen such huge crowds,” the PM said.

Modi had been riding high on a wave of praise after recorded new Covid cases in India dropped to an average of just 11,000 a day in February. Health Minister Harsh Vardhan declared last month that the country was “in the endgame” of the pandemic and described Modi as an “example to the world”.

Fuelled by “a cocktail of hubris, complacency and nationalist politics”, Modi “was determined to open up an economy that had taken a battering” during the pandemic, the newspaper continues. But the result has been a “Covid apocalypse” that is being “exacerbated by a slow domestic vaccine rollout, an ill-equipped health system, lax protection, pandemic fatigue and promotion of the economy over containment”, as well as the new double mutant variant of the virus.

The rapid collapse of India’s healthcare system “came as no surprise” to Abdul Fathahudeen, a critical care expert based in Kerela, who told The Times that he had warned “in February that Covid had not gone anywhere and a tsunami would hit us if urgent actions were not taken”.

“A false sense of normalcy crept in and everybody, including people and officials, did not take measures to stop the second wave,” he said. “Sadly, a tsunami has indeed hit us now.”

The “unprecedented surge” in deaths has seen families of victims “forced to store their dead at home as crematoriums are overwhelmed and hospitals struggle to function”, The Telegraph reports.

The paper’s India correspondent, Joe Wallen, tweets that he is being inundated with calls from acquaintances and people previously interviewed about the pandemic who are now “asking for help in hospital admission, finding an ICU bed, in getting tested, or securing [and] delivering medicines”.

As the virus continues to spread, the government in New Delhi has also requested international assistance in tackling the health crisis.

Britain yesterday pledged to send vital medical equipment including 495 oxygen concentrators, 120 non-invasive ventilators and 20 manual ventilators. And the US may provide oxygen supplies, Covid tests, drug treatments and personal protective equipment (PPE), as part of aid measures being considered by the Joe Biden administration.

Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Sunday that “it’s a terrible situation that’s going on in India and other lower middle-income countries, and there is more we can do”.

Missing dead

Although India is already reporting almost half of the world’s new Covid cases, the true scale of the health disaster may be even greater, according to interviews conducted by the NYT at “cremation grounds across the country”.

The claims have been backed up by analysts, who told the paper that “nervous politicians and hospital administrators may be undercounting or overlooking” deaths, with crematoriums where “the fires never stop” hinting at “an extensive pattern of deaths far exceeding the official figures”.

“It’s a complete massacre of data,” said Bhramar Mukherjee, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. “From all the modelling we’ve done, we believe the true number of deaths is two to five times what is being reported.”

“Deaths in India have always been counted poorly,” according to The Times of India, which says the “vast majority of deaths” in rural areas went uncounted “even before the pandemic”. And the speed with which the virus has spread has made mortality data even more “difficult to accurately assess”.

The paper cites the example of Lucknow, the capital city of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. The official Covid death toll for Lucknow between 11 and 16 April was 145. But “just two of the city’s main crematoriums reported more than 430 or three times as many cremations under Covid-19 protocol in that period”.

Other newspapers across India and further afield are reporting similar discrepancies. A recent frontpage of The Hindu claimed that “Covid-19 deaths in Gujarat far exceed government figures”.

And a recent survey by the NYT of the main Covid cremation and burial grounds in the city of Bhopal, in central India, revealed a total of more than 1,000 Covid deaths over 13 days in mid-April when only 41 were recorded officially.

Dr. G.C. Gautam, a cardiologist based in Bhopal, told the paper that the authorities were suppressing the true number of fatalities because “they don’t want to create panic”.

“Many deaths are not getting recorded and they are increasing every day,” he warned.

1. In the court of King Boris, only one thing is certain: this will all end badly

Rafael Behr in The Guardian

on Johnsonism

“Instead of a cabinet, Britain has courtiers. In place of a prime minister, there is a potentate,” writes Rafael Behr in The Guardian. “The traditional structures still exist, but as tributes to an obsolescent way of governing.” There are still secretaries of state, but they now have “little bearing on real power, which swirls in an unstable vortex of advisers and officials vying for proximity to Boris Johnson’s throne”. “The product of this arrangement is the acrid stew of scandal leaking out of Downing Street,” brought upon the country, in part, due to Johnson’s character; a man who “approaches truth the way a toddler handles broccoli. He understands the idea that it contains some goodness, but it will touch his lips only if a higher authority compels it there.” Behr continues that “having such a personality at the heart of government makes a nonsense of unwritten protocol” that governs British politics. “It was never rigorous. All manner of hypocrisies flourish when a self-selecting elite chooses the boundaries of legitimate behaviour. But there were boundaries. Johnsonism has none.”

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2. Modi’s posturing hides India’s real Covid death toll

Roger Boyes in The Times

on India's Covid crisis

“India’s populist and vainglorious prime minister Narendra Modi should stop counting votes and count the bodies instead,” writes Roger Boyes in The Times. “Modi presides over what’s known as the world’s biggest democracy and is so proud of his country’s medicine production that he calls it the world’s biggest pharmacy. Now he has hit another global record: the world’s highest daily number of Covid cases,” says Boyes. “The surging virus” has “ambushed many leaders” and the prime minister is “not the only one to have prematurely declared victory”. His declaration that the pandemic had been beaten at an unmasked rally of thousands earlier this year, now seems like an “act of hubris”. “What might finish him off politically is not so much his over-promising demagoguery, which has never hurt his standing in the polls, but the masking of the true death toll.”

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3. The Oscars - so where did the fun go?

Allison Pearson in The Telegraph

on the joyless Oscars

“There’s nothing like a glamorous, star-studded event full of escapist entertainment to cheer people up and give a lift to an industry that’s had a terrible year,” writes Allison Pearson in The Telegraph. “The 93rd Academy Awards was nothing like that.” The TV audience for the Oscars has “plummeted from almost 45 million in 2000 to Daniel Kaluuya’s mum and a few hundred insomniacs in 2021”, writes Pearson. “Things were great as long as the stars remembered people loved them because a/they look fabulous and b/they’re in showbusiness.” Now, however, the stars “think they’re in the show-and-tell business. Every award, every excruciating utterance, indicates that the speaker is a green, social justice warrior instead of a pampered Beverly Hills princeling whose agent negotiates furiously for the biggest, gas-guzzling trailer.”

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4. If you think Dominic Cummings has come out swinging for Johnson, wait until his inquiry appearance in May

Katy Balls in the i newspaper

on a chatty aide

When the prime minister’s former aide, Dominic Cummings, is due to appear before an inquiry into the government’s Covid response next month, “don’t expect the former No. 10 aide to be in a hurry or to grumble about being summoned there”, writes Katy Balls in the i newspaper. “This time, Cummings has something he wants to say.” The question is, will the evidence he gives “make an impact on voters?” asks Balls. “After all, he’s hardly a popular figure across the country since the Barnard Castle row. Johnson is the more popular of the two”, she writes. The real problem for Johnson is “that he has more to lose than Cummings. The longer this drags on, the more damage it will do”, she writes, “and it is hard to see what Cummings’s incentive to wind down this fight is.”

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5. Is this the end for Arlene Foster?

Andrew McQuillan in The Spectator

On unionism's next leader

“The end of Arlene Foster’s spell as leader of the Democratic Unionist party appears to be in sight,” writes Andrew McQuillan in The Spectator, after three-quarters of the DUP’s Northern Ireland Assembly members signed a letter calling for her departure. “When looking at the charge sheet, however, the fact Foster has lasted so long is remarkable given the state unionism has ended up in under her leadership. It is not unkind to say that this day was a long time coming”, McQuillan writes. A “fraught balancing act – of steadying the horses while also appealing to a broader spectrum of the electorate – awaits Foster’s successor”, however, given “Foster’s apparent moderation is a reason for her potential departure, the likelihood is that a hardliner, both constitutionally and socially, will replace her.” “Whoever it is, their inheritance is not a good one, and blame for that rests solely with Foster and those around her,” he concludes.

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Hundreds of police officers and demonstrators have been injured after tens of thousands of farmers rallied in New Delhi to protest against controversial new agricultural legislation.

Following “two months of determined and peaceful demonstrations centred on protest camps on the city’s outskirts”, tensions boiled over on Tuesday, with farmers “clashing with a police force that tried to push them back with tear gas and a baton charge”, The New York Times reports.

At least one man was killed in the violence. Farmers claim that he was shot while the police say he died when his tractor overturned.

Why are the farmers protesting?

The protests were sparked by three new bills that “will loosen rules around sale, pricing and storage of farm produce”, the BBC says.

One of the “biggest changes” is that “farmers will be allowed to sell their produce at a market price directly to private players”, the broadcaster continues. “Most Indian farmers currently sell the majority of their produce at government-controlled wholesale markets or mandis at assured floor prices.”

When selling to the government-run market, farmers were “assured of a basic minimum price,” The Times reports. But with the government’s role in agriculture reduced, farmers fear they will be left at the mercy of big businesses.

The Indian authorities insists the new laws will liberate farmers and attract private investment, promoting growth in the agriculture-dependent nation.

But the BBC’s India correspondent Soutik Biswas says that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has “misread the mood of India’s angry farmers” with his reforms, which have sparked accusations of “crony capitalism”.

Modi’s decision to enact the laws without discussion during the Covid-19 lockdown of his parliament has also been criticised.

This week’s violence is not the first time that farmers and police have clashed in New Delhi. In 2018, officers fired tear gas and plastic bullets at unarmed farmers during demonstrations over rising fuel prices and fertiliser costs.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Andrew Fisher in The Guardian

on dismantling the system from within

The Conservatives are hollowing the state and consolidating power: democracy is at stake

“For 15 years now, the Freedom of Information Act has been hugely important in increasing the transparency and scrutiny of government. Strangely, Blair continues to defend the Iraq war but regrets the act for partially opening up the ‘confidentiality’ of government. Michael Gove clearly shares his scepticism, as under him the Cabinet Office has established a unit that is actively delaying or blocking the release of information legally demanded under the act. The Conservative party chair, Amanda Milling, has said the Electoral Commission should be overhauled or abolished. Its current chair, John Holmes, is being forced out and mandatory voter ID is being mooted, which would suppress working-class voters who are less likely to have ID – another unwelcome import from the US, where voter suppression has long been part of Republican strategy. The Electoral Commission has been a brake on well-funded Conservative party election campaigns, as well as the leave campaign in the 2016 referendum.”

2. Trevor Phillips in The Times

on pointing fingers

The woke are gaslighting us into surrender

“Dismayingly, those allegedly responsible for the education of young minds are caving under the pressure and abandoning principle for the quiet life. Cambridge University is proposing a change in statutes that would require staff to display respect for the views of all colleagues — inter alia misogynists, fascists, Islamists, homophobes, flat-Earthers, climate change deniers, racists and antisemites. Despite a spirited campaign led by a minority academic, Arif Ahmed, the five men and one woman who occupy the most senior roles in the university — all white — appear to have been manipulated into overturning centuries of dedication to freedom of thought and tolerance under the guise of compassion for minorities. Maybe when they read the ‘woke’ bible White Fragility, they took the title as an instruction to deliver rather than a warning to avoid.”

3. Rana Ayyub in The Washington Post

on India’s deepening schisms

The hateful love ‘jihad’ conspiracy in India is going mainstream

“In recent weeks and days, the Indian right has been waging a campaign against any depictions of interfaith relations, including attacking Netflix for showing a kissing scene between a Muslim boy and a Hindu girl. These attacks keep feeding the dangerous ‘love jihad’ conspiracy theory, the proponents of which seek to ultimately constrain and restrict the freedom of Hindu women and further demonize Muslims in India. Videos of Hindu vigilantes beating up Muslim boys for allegedly falling in love with Hindu girls once generated universal condemnation. Now these attacks are gaining legitimacy. In a country whose guiding principle was love and respect for a plurality of views, faiths and cultures, the ruling party’s attacks on interfaith love to consolidate the support of Hindu nationalists are part of Modi’s broader assault on our once-vibrant democracy.”

4. Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer

on cinematic slaughter

From Terre Haute to Tehran to your grandma, Trumpism is revealed as a death cult in the end

“For a man who too often talked and occasionally governed more like a mob boss than like the 45th president of a democratic republic, it’s sadly fitting that the final days of Donald Trump’s White House are playing out like a closing montage from one of The Godfather movies. Cue the operatic aria, or maybe the piano riff from Layla, as the camera pans over the bloody pavement in a faraway village in Iran and the windshield of a sedan riddled with bullet holes, as a top nuclear scientist is brutally whacked just days after a not-so-secret sit-down between the crime bosses of Saudi Arabia and Israel with Trump’s traveling consigliere. The brutal killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh is arguably the most cinematic moment in our Trumpian death montage, but it’s not the most lethal. At a federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., Attorney General William Barr’s Justice Department is racing to commit state-sanctioned murder against five more inmates before Trump leaves office — the first time since 1889 that a lame-duck presidency has carried out any executions at all.”

5. Hugh Eakin in the New York Times

on the ancient spoils of modern war

When an enemy’s cultural heritage becomes one’s own

“Perched on a rugged slope in the western part of Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed region, Dadivank is one of the hundreds of Armenian churches, monuments and carved memorial stones that will come under the control of predominantly-Muslim Azerbaijan according to a cease-fire agreement reached earlier this month. Some of those structures — like the Amaras monastery and the basilica of Tsitsernavank - date to the earliest centuries of Christianity. For many Armenians, turning over so much of their heritage to a sworn enemy poses a grave new threat, even as the bloodshed has for the moment come to an end. Their concern is understandable. Under the cease-fire, hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis uprooted by a previous war in the early 1990s will be able to return. In a victory speech on Nov. 25, President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan suggested that Armenians have no historical claims to the region, asserting that the churches belonged to ancient Azerbaijani forebears and had been ‘Armenianized’ in the 19th century.”

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. John Crace in The Guardian

on a downtrodden Britain

Boris Johnson's tone-deaf lies fall flat as UK grows up

“The country has grown up in the time of coronavirus. Tens of thousands have died; hundreds of thousands have become ill; millions are feeling frightened and insecure about their jobs. Yet even though the prime minister has had time to move on, he appears to have learned nothing. Boris may himself have wound up in intensive care, yet he still wants to be Mr Good Time Guy, with gags about losing weight and arm-wrestling. But it’s becoming more and more of a struggle. His eyes that used to sparkle from the acclaim are now mere dead hollows. It’s possible that not even Boris believes in Boris. The scepticism is contagious.”

2. David Byler in The Washington Post

on not being ‘afraid’ of Covid-19

This is Trump’s worst tweet ever. No, really.

“The president is playing with fire. Sure, this specific tweet may get swallowed up in the insanity of the news cycle. But the message that Trump fought off the coronavirus and his followers can, too, has already been amplified by voices ranging from Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.), who tweeted an edited video of Trump at a professional wrestling match to make that argument, to Fox News. They’re speaking to a huge base of people who trust and support Trump. The drumbeat of this flawed argument, combined with the signals Trump and his supporters and family send by their failures to wear masks at official functions, adds up, sending mixed messages to both his devotees and the broader public and impeding nationwide efforts to fight the virus.”

3. Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator

on a French conundrum

Macron’s fight with the far-left over extremism

“The majority response in France to Macron's promise to combat Islamic extremism is scepticism. Of the 121,000 people who responded to a poll in the centre-right Le Figaro, 74% believed his attempt will end in failure. Not so much because of an unwillingness on Macron's part but because much of the apparatus for fighting Islamic extremism is still dominated by the left. For example, a Pakistani immigrant who last month attacked two journalists outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo had arrived in France three years ago claiming to be an unaccompanied minor but social services suspected he was older. They sought permission from a child's court to conduct a medical examination to determine his exact age but were refused.”

4. Pritish Nandy in The New York Times

on Modi tackling the elites

The campaign to silence Bollywood

“India today is like the Mad Hatter’s tea party - partly funny, partly weird - and hidden behind it is an incredibly tragic soliloquy of pain. More than six million confirmed coronavirus cases. About 100,000 deaths. The economy expected to contract by 12%. China trying to take over territory on a disputed border. Yet if you had switched on news television in India in the past two months, you would have found a country obsessed with a singular subject: the taming of Bollywood, supposedly a wild, drug-addled place where horrible things happen to outsiders; India’s Gomorrah, infested with vile liberals and Muslims.”

5. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett in The Guardian

on male violence in art

The history of art is full of female masters. It's time they were taken seriously

“The surge of emotion I felt standing in front of Susannah and the Elders – painted by a 17-year-old Artemisia Gentileschi in the same year she was raped by the artist who was hired by her father Orazio to teach her – was as powerful as any I have felt in my life. In it, a nude Susannah twists away from the two old letches with horror and disgust; unlike many of the nudes painted by male artists, her body is not an exercise in containment, static and mannered as though it could have been carved from marble: it is living, moving flesh.”

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Freddy Gray in The Spectator

on weaponising Covid-19

When a president gets sick

“Trump was, rather touchingly, so concerned about Boris that he tried to send in top American medical companies to treat the Prime Minister in his hour of need. Boris should repay the favour now by telling him to switch off for a few days, ignore the hubbub of the election, and concentrate entirely on getting through the infection. Maybe one of Trump’s advisers - not his counsellor Hope Hicks, who tested positive just before Trump - should take away his mobile phone so he can’t spend all day in bed tweeting. That would bring all sorts of benefits. Obviously lots of nasty people on social media want Trump to suffer and die - and are tweeting unpleasant remarks to that effect. But most aren’t so twisted, thankfully, and don’t want to turn his misfortune into another skirmish in the culture war. As we saw with Boris Johnson, the public will wish and pray for their leader to make a speedy recovery. Whether that goodwill will translate into political capital ahead of the election is another question - perhaps best left for tomorrow.”

2. Hassan Al Kontar on Al Jazeera

on a sombre anniversary

Jamal Khashoggi, the human

“There have been precious few people like Jamal - people who have known power, who have wielded it, but have chosen to give it up, speak up and uplift the powerless and the voiceless. His death was a loss not just to his family, friends and his country, but also to the whole region, where greed for power has left many of us destitute and despaired. Eventually Canada accepted my asylum application. The Malaysian authorities escorted me from the jail directly to the airport and put me on a flight to Canada. Today, in the safety of my new home, I remember Jamal, the human, and I wish there would be more people like him in the Middle East and the rest of the world. Rest in peace, Jamal. The truth will not die, justice will prevail, one day.”

3. Sophie McBain in the New Statesman

on online radicalisation

The new age of misogyny

“Young people’s confusion about sex makes them more susceptible to far-right misinformation. Many teens follow meme accounts on Instagram, where the sexist, racist, Islamophobic and transphobic content is disguised as humour and given appealing labels such as #edgymemesforedgyteens. Many are avid YouTube users, at the mercy of the site’s algorithm, which pushes ever more inflammatory content in an effort to keep them hooked. When Bates, as an experiment, clears her internet cookies and types ‘what is feminism’ into YouTube one of the first videos that comes up is a pro-feminism speech by the actress Emma Watson: so far, so good. The video that plays automatically thereafter is an interview with the far-right agitator Milo Yiannopoulos in which he describes feminism as ‘primarily about man-hating’ and it only gets worse from there.”

4. Paul Embery on UnHerd

on health and safety obsessives

How hysterical leaders fail workers

“The brutal truth, however, is that one thing has been missing throughout this entire debate: proportion. Safety in the workplace, as anywhere else, should be about implementing sensible and proportionate control measures to alleviate risk. It is this principle which underpins health and safety legislation. Instead, we have arrived at a point where, for many in positions of authority, any risk at all is too much and, where it exists, drastic action is required to eradicate it. That attitude serves no-one. Society becomes afflicted by paranoia, and individuals lose their ability to quantify risk — an essential skill in the armoury of any human being. The easy thing for a trade unionist like me would be to go along with it all. After all, as long as most union members are still drawing a salary, why should it matter?”

5. Nandita Rao and Iti Pandey in The Indian Express

on femicide in India

Brutality of Hathras crime, brazen police abdication, have shaken and shamed us all

“People who died of the plague or some other contagious disease were carried out of the village and their bodies were burnt without the dignity of a proper cremation. This indignity to our loved ones was accepted as a public health necessity. But Wednesday night, when images streamed in on social media and news channels, of a sobbing mother in Hathras being denied her young daughter’s body, followed by the images of police personnel, deployed in full force, burning this young girl’s remains, without any right in law, in a lonely field outside the village, it was an injustice that was morally and legally too much to bear. It was a reminder of a time when, in this country, a person relegated by oppressors through the unscientific and inhuman caste system as an untouchable, could be treated as worse than animals are - with social and legal impunity.”

Soldiers from nuclear-armed China and India have fought hand-to-hand high up in the Himalayas, as a border dispute threatens the uneasy truce between the world’s most populous nations.

The clashes were the first to result in fatalities in the border area, in the disputed Kashmir region, in at least 45 years. Although smaller incidents are not uncommon, “we should be worried” about these latest skirmishes, says Foreign Policy.

“The theory that Sino-Indian clashes are flashes in the pan and unlikely to lead to more extensive fighting has become a widely held consensus,” the news site reports. “Recent events, however, suggest that escalations are highly possible.”

What happened in the latest incident?

At least 20 Indian and five Chinese soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat in the mountains, when the two sides clashed with iron sticks, bats and bamboo sticks studded with nails.

Indian media says some of its army’s soldiers were “beaten to death”, while others fell or were pushed into a river.

“Even unarmed men who fled into the hillsides were hunted down and killed,” one Indian officer told News 18. “The dead include men who jumped into the Galwan river in a desperate effort to escape.”

A senior Indian military official told the BBC there were 55 Indian soldiers versus 300 Chinese, whom he described as “the Death Squad”. “They hit our boys on the head with metal batons wrapped in barbed wire. Our boys fought with bare hands,” the officer said.

Each side has blamed each other for the clashes. India said China had tried to “unilaterally change the status quo”, while Beijing accused Indian troops of “attacking Chinese personnel”, reports the BBC.

Indian government sources say at least another two dozen soldiers are battling life-threatening injuries, and over 110 required treatment. “The toll will likely go up,” a military officer with knowledge of the issue told News 18.

A long, cold border war

As The Economist explains, “thanks in part to slapdash colonial cartography, the boundary between India and China is undefined”.

The two sides fought a “brief but bloody border war in 1962, ending in a ceasefire that established the Line of Actual Control demarcating the boundary”, says Newsweek.

However, India and China “have different views about the exact location” of the de facto border they now patrol, adds The Economist.

As a result, their soldiers often encounter each other high in the Himalayas, on icy mountain passes that each regard as their own territory. “Sometimes stand-offs involve chest-bumping, pushing and shoving, and throwing stones at each other,” reports the BBC.

In 2017, a serious military clash appeared to be “a distinct possibility”, when the two armies squared up to each other across a remote mountain pass for 73 days, before “that particular crisis abated”, says Foreign Policy.

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Why now?

The latest dispute has been brewing for some time, as both China and India flex their muscles on the world stage.

“While Beijing has asserted its vast claims to the South China Sea,” says Newsweek, “New Delhi has consolidated control over semi-autonomous Kashmir”, changing the region’s legal status to bring it into line with other Indian states.

This move has “infuriated rival Pakistan and also angered China” - two antagonists of India that have close “economic, political and defence ties”, the magazine reports.

India, meanwhile, is “building strong strategic partnerships with China’s other rivals, especially the United States and Japan”, says Foreign Policy. “Beijing sees New Delhi as the principal impediment to the realisation of its ambitions to dominate Asia.”

Covid diplomacy

The coronavirus pandemic has also contributed to the renewed tensions, and drawn Nepal into the dispute between its two giant neighbours.

Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli told his parliament this week it was “very difficult to contain Covid-19 due to the flow of people from outside”, adding that the “Indian virus looks more lethal than Chinese and Italian now”.

The same day, India accused Oli’s government of an “unjustified cartographic assertion” after it published a map laying claim to a patch of land that India considers its own. Without directly mentioning China, the head of the Indian army said Nepal might be acting “at the behest of someone else”.

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Uncertain future

Despite all the posturing in Beijing and New Delhi, “no bullet has been fired over the border in the last four decades”, says the BBC. And many observers believe both sides are willing to maintain their imperfect truce.

China said that the situation at the border was “stable and controllable”, The Times of India reports, while India has characterised the situation as “serious but not alarming”.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a statement after the clashes, warning China but leaving the door open for deescalation, says CNN.

“India wants peace, but if instigated, India at all costs is capable of giving an appropriate response,” Modi said.

In a phone call on Wednesday with his Indian counterpart, Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi said that “India must not misjudge the current situation and must not underestimate China's firm will to safeguard territorial sovereignty”.

But the statement added that China and India had agreed to “cool down” the situation at the border.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Daniel Finkelstein in The Times

on casting some light on the power behind the throne

Top advisers should come out of the shadows

“Who advises the prime minister is one of the most consequential choices the occupant of No 10 ever makes. Probably the biggest change in the policy and outlook of any modern administration came about when Theresa May’s chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, were replaced by the more liberal Gavin Barwell. And making Dominic Cummings his senior adviser was one of Boris Johnson’s biggest calls... Appearing in his own press conference was probably against the adviser’s code. And by convention senior advisers are not called by select committees. In America senior presidential advisers can appear on the media, speak on the record and appear before congressional committees. They have real power and that power can be scrutinised. We should have that here. There should be limits but it is absurd that the first chance most people got to take the measure of one of the most powerful people in the government was in a press conference answering questions about when his son needed to go to the toilet.”

2. George Monbiot in The Guardian

on the slow sell-off behind the pandemic planning

Tory privatisation is at the heart of the UK’s disastrous coronavirus response

“Amid the smog of lies and contradictions, there is one question we should never stop asking: why has the government of the United Kingdom so spectacularly failed to defend people’s lives? Why has ‘this fortress built by Nature for herself against infection’, as Shakespeare described our islands, succumbed to a greater extent than any other European nation to a foreseeable and containable pandemic? Part of the answer is that the government knowingly and deliberately stood down crucial parts of its emergency response system. Another part is that, when it did at last seek to mobilise the system, crucial bits of the machine immediately fell off. There is a consistent reason for the multiple, systemic failures the pandemic has exposed: the intrusion of corporate power into public policy. Privatisation, commercialisation, outsourcing and offshoring have severely compromised the UK’s ability to respond to a crisis.”

3. John Longworth, former Brexit Party MEP, in The Daily Telegraph

on the question of why the UK locked-down at all

How can lockdown be justified in the first place?

“The government has delivered a socialist-style spending programme that they said would have bankrupted the country under a Corbyn administration, coupled with a curtailment of liberty that the fascist government from whence this virus originated would be proud. A country incidentally who are now seemingly being punished for coronavirus through the further limiting of the role Huawei in our 5G Network, not because they are a dangerous dictatorship, for whom the economy is an arm of the military and who don’t play by the rules. Topsy-turvy. The government have boosted idleness, squeezed the private sector and promoted the state, even when the state was plainly failing in its centralised control, for example track and trace, modelling the risk, laboratory testing and predicting hospital capacity. While Scandinavian countries have exhibited the grit and phlegm for which our British and Commonwealth VE generation were famous, our 21st Century government, the health and safety first authorities and the woke media have scared the country witless into avoiding economic activity.”

4. Steve Jeffels, doctorate of business administration at The University of Manchester, on HuffPost

on offering a lifeline to those worst hit by the pandemic slump

Universal Basic Income Is The Way Forward

“Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s policies – notably the furlough scheme – are set to be eye-wateringly expensive. Latest estimates suggest that the number of people being paid by the government is about half the workforce. Inevitably, Universal Credit applications have soared. However, there are many gaps and more problems to come. Those who are only recently self-employed do not qualify, nor those on higher salaries or those who are remunerated in other ways. The chancellor is yet to announce his changes to the furlough scheme but they are likely to involve a requirement for employers to bear more of the cost which in turn is likely to lead to more redundancies. The number of hardship cases will increase. Perhaps this is the tipping point that UBI has been waiting for. The rules of the game that dictate government social security policy have changed as a result of Covid-19, creating the opportunity to conduct a comprehensive but time-limited experiment.”

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5. Hartosh Singh Bal, political editor of New Dehli-based magazine The Caravan, in The New York Times

on the fatal shortcomings of the Indian government’s coronavirus strategy

How Modi Failed the Pandemic Test

“The starkest failure of Mr. Modi’s coronavirus strategy has been the devastation and misery it imposed on India’s informal sector workers, mostly people from impoverished villages, who work in Indian cities, without a safety net. Hundreds of thousands of migrant workers were left without wages after the lockdown imposed with a four-hour notice closed factories and businesses. They couldn’t pay rent; they didn’t have enough to eat. They looked toward their villages, where they could find shelter and food by relying on extended family. With the public transport suspended, the workers set out on foot, walking hundreds of miles in temperatures as high as 100 degrees Fahrenheit. In May alone more than 150 migrant workers walking back home have been killed in road or train accidents. As the lockdown is being partially eased, the migrant workers are now making the same journey they could have made two months ago when the cases in India numbered fewer than 1,000. Since some of the workers are serving as unwitting carriers of the virus to areas of low prevalence, they are greeted with alarm and apprehension in their villages.”

Muslims in India are facing a fresh wave of Islamophobia during the coronavirus pandemic.

The nation’s 200 million Muslims have been targeted on the streets and online, and accused of spreading the virus. CNN says this is “playing into growing Hindu nationalism which in recent years has seen India's Muslim societies increasingly marginalized”.

The renewed surge of bigotry began after a Muslim missionary group, Tablighi Jamaat, held a conference in New Delhi, which turned into one of India's biggest coronavirus hot spots. This led to Muslims being harassed across the country.

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Mehboob Ali, 22, was on his way home from a Muslim missionary conference in central India when he was attacked in Harewali and forced to beg for his life. Reporting on a video of the incident, NPR radio said: “He's shaking. His hands and face are bloody. His attackers beat him and threaten to douse him with fuel and set him on fire. They accuse him of intentionally trying to spread the coronavirus.”

Mohammed Shukrdeen, a milk producer in the state of Punjab, said his community has been targeted by both residents and the authorities. He said: “First, no one wanted to buy milk from us, and second, local authorities would raid our houses.”

Mohammed Sakeb, who distributes ration kits to Muslim families, said he and his fellow volunteers now face harassment. “The other day a 25-year-old volunteer was distributing rations to the worst affected Muslim families. The police stopped him, didn't ask any questions and then started hitting him. He had to run away,” he said.

Meanwhile, hashtags blaming Muslims for the coronavirus have gained traction on social media, including #CoronaJihad, #CrushTablighiSpitters and #BioJihad. “We have observed a deliberate pattern to delegitimize the community,” Alt News, an Indian non-profit fact-checking website, said.

In a post on social media, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for calm. He said: “Covid-19 does not see race, religion, colour, caste, creed, language or border before striking. Our response and conduct thereafter should attach primacy to unity and brotherhood. We are in this together.”

However, many blame Modi for the resurgence in anti-Muslim feeling in India. Many Muslims say his Hindu nationalist agenda has left them feeling like second-class citizens in their own country.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation has expressed “deep concern” about “rising anti-Muslim sentiments and Islamophobia within political and media circles and on mainstream and social media platforms”.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has imposed a nationwide lockdown in an attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The restrictions came into force at midnight local time and will be enforced for 21 days, after India reported a sharp increase in Covid-19 cases in recent days.

“There will be a total ban on venturing out of your homes,” Modi said in a televised address. “The entire country will be in lockdown, total lockdown.

“To save India, to save its every citizen, you, your family... every street, every neighbourhood is being put under lockdown.”

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There have been 519 confirmed cases of coronavirus across India and 10 reported deaths. However, analysts say the figure may be so low because of a lack of testing.

Deutsche Welle reports that people displaying symptoms of the disease have been turned away from government run hospitals, even with referrals from private clinics. The virus has spread to almost all states in India, with the highest number of cases in Maharashtra and the southern state of Kerala.

Healthcare facilities are limited in India, says The Guardian, with only 40,000 ventilators, one isolation bed per 84,000 people and one doctor per 11,600 Indians.

Despite Modi’s insistence that there is no need to panic, the lockdown has triggered frenzied scenes, with many Indians reverting to panic buying.

“I have never witnessed such a chaos in my life,” the owner of one store in the Shakarpur district of Delhi, told the Press Trust of India. “All our stocks, including rice, flour, bread, biscuits, edible oils, have been sold out.”

Rajini Vaidyanathan, South Asian correspondent for the BBC, writes: “The implications of a total lockdown in India are huge, not just economically, but socially.

“This is a nation where community is everything. Going to worship at a temple, mosque or church is an essential part of daily life for so many. This is a seismic cultural shift.”

CNN says that at the last count there were around 400 million people in India’s labour market. Of those, more than half were self-employed, and 121 million were casual workers, meaning they were only paid for the days they worked.

This makes the lockdown a frightening prospect for many. Ramesh Kumar, who comes from Banda district in Uttar Pradesh state, told the BBC: “I earn 600 rupees (£6.50) every day and I have five people to feed. We will run out of food in a few days.”

However, Modi insists the measure are necessary, warning that if India does not “handle these 21 days well, then our country... will go backwards by 21 years”.

The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Rachel Donadio in The Atlantic

on a strange week in Europe

Italy’s coronavirus response is a warning from the future

“Italy has long been a political laboratory, for better or worse, and a harbinger of developments that later spread. It’s also a rule-bound country where rules are often ignored, a place that often falls short on long-term planning but rises to the occasion in emergencies and has a knack for improvisation that its northern neighbors lack. It is a free society in which information is often unreliable and politicized. Today, it is an experiment in which free movement of people and goods meets free movement of a deadly virus. Countries across Europe and the world are watching how Italy handles an epidemic that knows no borders, has been putting tremendous strain on public-health structures, and is pushing the country’s already fragile economy to the brink.”

2. Una Mullally in The Irish Times

on 2016 repeating itself

Biden’s rise shows Democrats have learned nothing

“Biden is a poor candidate. His messaging is uninspiring. His performances in debates have been terrible. At a time when the only energy being injected into the Democratic Party is coming from young candidates with grassroots campaigning power, particularly women of colour, they’re gravitating towards an elderly white male candidate who already held the office of vice-president. The Democratic Party is falling into the same patterns that created a context where they convinced themselves Hillary Clinton was a good idea. Like Clinton, Biden has already had his shot. Like Clinton, he doesn’t want to rock the boat. Like Clinton, he has baggage. But at least Clinton’s candidacy stood for a broader idea: the idea of the first female president. What does Biden have going for him?”

3. Vidya Subrahmaniam in Al Jazeera

on a history of violence

India's Muslims are punished for asking to be Indian

“Both the [1984] Sikh massacres and the [2002] Gujarat pogroms started in response to alleged atrocities committed by the members of the targeted communities. Last month’s anti-Muslim violence in Delhi, however, was not ‘revenge’ for anything. It was not preceded by a major infraction against the Hindu majority. The Muslim community did nothing that could even remotely warrant retaliation. The only thing they had done in the weeks prior to the attacks was to peacefully protest against the country’s new, discriminatory citizenship law. Thus, unlike in 1984 and 2002, there was no ostensible cause for the violence. This time, Muslims were punished, only for being Muslim and asking to be Indian. And because of this, last month’s attacks mark the beginning of a new, frightening chapter in Indian history.”

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4. Sada Mire in The Guardian

on the significance of ancient rituals

We won’t eradicate FGM if we keep misunderstanding its history

“As an archaeologist I’ve been researching the history of FGM, and I’ve found it to be far more deep-rooted in cultural traditions than most campaigners – not to mention many who practise it – realise. These roots are long forgotten, even within the north-eastern African societies where it began. And this lack of knowledge has hampered efforts to tackle the issue. Campaigners often claim the tradition is mainly about virginity, chastity, paternity confidence or control of women’s sexuality. I’ve found that FGM began instead as an act of sacrifice to the divine. In other words, the initial intention was not about relations between humans but rather between humans and the gods: an act of self-preservation related to sacred blood, existence itself, and reproduction.”

5. Kirsten Short on CBC

on coping mechanisms

Concussion had made my life a mess. So I gave my brain injury a name

“My concussion was changing everything about me and everything about my life. I could barely walk, talk, think, see or sleep. I was a mess. We named that mess Stella. It was the first name that came to mind. I quickly realized that by naming my concussion, I had inadvertently added humour to my situation. Rather than bursting into tears when I got lost in my own neighbourhood or when I used the freezer as a microwave, I’d giggle and mumble, ‘Oh Stella, not again’. While shopping online for a lawn chair, I accidentally purchased a journal with a lawn chair on its cover. Once I got over the initial disappointment — I really wanted that lawn chair — I shared Stella’s misstep with my friends and family. By turning Stella into a punchline, laughter became my medicine and sharing my story became my therapy.”

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has rolled out the red carpet for a two-day state visit by Donald Trump that is set to be packed with pomp and circumstance.

After flying into Ahmedabad city with First Lady Melania Trump on Monday morning, the US president was greeted by a cheering crowd of more than 100,000 people at a “Namaste Trump” (“Hello Trump”) rally - designed to mirror the “Howdy Modi” event that welcomed the Indian PM during a visit to Texas last September, USA Today reports.

Addressing the crowd at the new Motera Cricket Stadium in Gujarat, Trump declared that he had travelled 8,000 miles to deliver the message that “America loves India, America respects India and America will always be faithful and loyal friends to the Indian people”, according to Time magazine.

But with US-India trade relations under strain and both leaders facing domestic crises, what is at stake as Trump begins his whirlwind tour?

What is on the agenda?

NBC News says that Modi had “promised that adoring, and carefully arranged, crowds” would turn out as Trump’s motorcade moved through Ahmedabad - the home town of both Modi and Mahatma Gandhi.

The US president and first lady are also due to visit the city of Agra, for a trip to the Taj Mahal, before moving on to capital New Delhi, where they will spend the night.

Tuesday’s agenda will reportedly include more ceremonial events and a meeting with Indian business leaders as part of a CEO roundtable at the US embassy.

Trump with also meet his Indian counterpart, Ram Nath Kovind, at the presidential palace, known as the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

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What other functions will the trip serve?

Trump’s visit is “not just about theatrics”, with India and the US “looking at signing pacts in areas of intellectual property rights, defence deals, nuclear power cooperation and homeland security”, says Business Today.

A key moment on the agenda is the expected signing of a $2.6bn (£2bn) deal for India to buy 24 Seahawk helicopters from Lockheed Martin - a purchase that will “take the total value of US arms exports to India to nearly $20bn [£15.5bn], up from virtually zero two-way defence trade 12 years ago”, adds the South China Morning Post.

Trump and Modi are also expected to finalise a deal for US energy company Westinghouse to build six nuclear reactors in India.

The trip serves an equally important function as a show of friendship between two nations. The two leaders have both pushed nationalistic and isolationist policy agendas during the terms in office, with trade deals becoming a point of contention between Delhi and Washington.

In addition, both leaders have been embroiled in domestic scandals in recent months, and a deepening of ties between the two superpowers could help boost their images on the world stage after a difficult 2019. That could prove very welcome to Trump, as he begins his re-election campaign in the wake of a damaging impeachment trial.

Meanwhile, Modi has faced criticism over his poor handling of India’s economy, amid rising unemployment, and over his policy on Kashmir and a controversial law that fast-tracks citizenship to non-Muslim religious minorities from three neighbouring countries.

“It will be a political boost and a good news story for him,” Tanvi Madan, director of the India Project, told the BBC. “He will be seen in visuals standing with the most powerful leader of the world, so to speak.”

President Trump has landed in India for his first state visit, "and at the center of it will be Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a man for whom Trump seems to have a great deal of affection," John Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight. While Modi may have charmed Trump, however, "within India he's an increasingly controversial figure, because his government has pursued a steadily escalating persecution of religious minorities — persecution so intense that for the last two months, Indians across the country have been taking to the streets in anger."

The charismatic, previously Teflon-coated Modi has both a "cult of personality" inside India and a new groundswell of opposition, Oliver said, "and if citizens in the world's largest democracy, home to over a billion people, are either wearing masks of Modi or marching in the streets, it seems like tonight it might be worth exploring why that is" and "where things could be heading."

One of Modi's "defining beliefs" is Hindu nationalism, the idea that "India is a fundamentally Hindu nation — which is provocative, given that India's founders, Gandhi and Nehru, explicitly disavowed that," Oliver said. While they created India as a secular nation, Modi's BJP party "has served as the political arm of a hard-core Hindu nationalist paramilitary group, the RSS," whose founders admired Hitler's aim to purify the race, he noted. India is home to the world's second-largest Muslim population, and while Modi doesn't say much publicly about Muslims, "those closest to him are comfortable saying a lot."

And "since winning re-election, Modi has moved from quiet support for religious intolerance to concrete action," his government working to "strip millions of Muslims of citizenship, and they did it in a diabolically clever two-step way," Oliver said. "They're basically Marie Kondo-ing India, and it's only Muslims that don't seem to 'spark joy' in them." Now, "the government is now building detention camps for all the illegal immigrants that they are creating," and "the only glimmer of hope here is that for perhaps the first time in Modi's whole career, his actions are creating a massive and sustained backlash." Oliver ended with an image of the Taj Mahal and a message: "India, home to this enduring symbol of love, frankly deserves a lot more than this temporary symbol of hate." There is NSFW language. Watch below. Peter Weber

America's harsh anti-immigration policies under the Trump administration are hardly a good example for the rest of the world. But leave it to the supporters of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to distort a well-intentioned American law for nefarious ends. They have dusted off something called the Lautenberg Amendment, an obscure Cold War-era law, to justify Prime Minister Narendra Modi's anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).

Modi's law has sparked massive protests in India and condemnation around the world. But his supporters claim there is no functional difference between America's Lautenberg and India's CAA.

A recent piece in News18, CNN's Indian news site, dismissed the West's reaction to the CAA as "ill informed" because it "ignored the similarities to the U.S.'s Lautenberg Amendment." Likewise, the HAF (the Hindu American Foundation), a U.S.-based outfit dedicated to fighting Hinduphobia, advises U.S. critics to read the Lautenberg Amendment before criticizing the CAA. Meanwhile, Modi supporters in the Indian-American community are petitioning the Seattle City Council to reject the "severely misguided, misinformed" anti-CAA resolution floated by one of its members because CAA is India's Lautenberg.

But this is pure posturing meant to confuse the world.

It is true that America passed Lautenberg, named after the Democratic Jewish senator from New Jersey who sponsored it, in 1990 to hand Jews and Christians in the Soviet Union and some Southeast Asian countries — Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos — an expedited pathway to gain refugee status in America. Typically, prospective refugees have to individually prove they are facing persecution to gain admission (and they have to flee to another country and apply through international organizations like the United Nations). But Lautenberg created a presumption of persecution for Jews and Christians because of concerns that the political turmoil generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union might make them even more vulnerable to persecution than usual. So they had to show merely a generalized — not individualized — fear to be considered for admission. (Also sometimes they could apply directly from their home countries without fleeing first.) When Lautenberg was passed, International Refugee Assistance Project's Betsy Fisher told The Week, it created additional pathways to expand America's relatively generous refugee program at the time (before the current administration gutted it).

What does the CAA do?

It fast-tracks citizenship for Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Parsees from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who arrived in India before December 2014 — but leaves out persecuted Muslims such as the Ahmaidyas from Pakistan or the Rohingya from Myanmar. In other words, it imposes a religious test for citizenship.

CAA's supporters argue this is functionally similar to Lautenberg because just like Lautenberg, the CAA creates special channels for some groups without eliminating existing channels for any group. Muslims who are left out of the CAA can still access normal channels for admission, just like refugees not covered by Lautenberg can apply through usual channels.

But this analysis strains the truth at every level.

For starters, unlike the CAA, Lautenberg is a flexible, ongoing program, not a one-time deal. Its underlying purpose is to create a mechanism to rescue the most vulnerable religious groups in the world at any given time. Hence, the law has to be reauthorized every year at which point lawmakers have the option of revising the list of groups needing help. In 2004, Lautenberg was extended to Iran — and not just the Jews and Christians in the country but also the Baha'is, a religious sect that is considered heretical by Iran's mullahs.

In other words, Lautenberg cuts against dominant prejudices while the CAA caters to them. Moreover, Lautenberg, laudably, aimed to admit more refugees into America, not create a discriminatory citizenship standard for those inside the country. When it comes to U.S. citizenship, one uniform standard applies to everyone regardless of race, caste, creed, religion, or nationality.

But the biggest lie that CAA supporters tell is that refugees not fast-tracked by the law can still avail normal channels, just like Lautenberg.

Lautenberg relaxed standards for some refugees to admit more in. The CAA admits not a single extra refugee. Furthermore, once admitted, refugees in America have a pretty straightforward path to citizenship. But India's existing refugee and citizenship channels are a sick joke.

Unlike much of the world, India has studiously refused to sign the United Nations convention on refugees or other similar protocols. So it is under no obligation under international law to extend even minimal care or assistance to those fleeing to its shores. Moreover, notes Ipsita Chakravarty of Scroll.In, one of the few unafraid and honest publications left in India in the Modi era, India has no dedicated law that guarantees basic due process rights to refugees. It relies, instead, "on a thicket of other laws" and vague operating procedures to determine who has a "well-founded fear" of persecution.

This basically leaves refugees to the tender mercies of bureaucrats. The upshot unsurprisingly is that those groups the CAA targets for favoritism already get better treatment than the others from the Indian system.

Even before the CAA, notes Chakravarty, Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Bangladesh were able to obtain driving licenses, bank accounts, and PAN cards (the equivalent of Social Security cards). They even got access to education and health-care facilities and can buy "small dwelling units for self-occupation and self-employment." This is not a lot but it is a lot more than what the Rohingya or the Ahmadiyas get.

These groups have been herded into filthy camps and can't even obtain SIM cards for cell phones. More shockingly, two years ago when tens of thousands of Rohingyas were desperately trying to escape Myanmar because of the unspeakable brutality of the security forces, Modi declared the Rohingya refugees in India a "terror threat" and wanted to deport them back to their country to be slaughtered. Indeed, thousands of Rohingyas live in just five Indian cities but only 500 have been granted long-term visas.

In other words, referring these folks to "normal channels" means consigning them to either a sub-human existence in camps or certain death back home.

But the biggest lie that CAA supporters peddle is that the law won't leave these groups any worse off. What the law's proponents conveniently don't acknowledge is that the CAA is only one arm of Modi's pincer to disenfranchise Muslims on India's soil. The other is the National Registry of Citizenship.

This registry, which Modi's Muslim-baiting home minister has declared will be implemented nationwide by 2024, would require India's 1.3 billion individuals to prove to the government that they are citizens. Every man, woman, and child in India will have to arrange papers showing, for example, that they have ancestors going back to a specified cutoff date along with other requirements.

This is a near-impossible task for India's poor and illiterate especially given the notoriously bad record keeping at the municipal level –— and the Modi government knows this. Indeed, if the pilot program in the province of Assam is any indication, the upshot of this exercise will be that hundreds of millions of Indians of all faiths will be unable to come up with the proper paperwork to make the cut.

The whole point of the CAA is to hand Hindus and other select groups who don't make it on the NRC a way out while stripping citizenship rights from an untold number of India's 140 million Muslims, not just recent refugees but also those with ties going back generations. The Modi government is reportedly building detention camps all over the country for those excluded from the NRC.

This is the opposite of Lautenberg — both in letter and spirit.

To be sure, Lautenberg has never fully lived up to its promise. Like the rest of the refugee program, it's become hostage to competing special interests and the foreign policy whims of the sitting administration. And, shamefully, phony national security considerations have prevented the law from being extended to groups like the Iraqi Yazidis who were facing genocide by ISIS.

India has invoked bad American immigration laws for its nativist ends in the past. For example, a 2005 Indian Supreme Court ruling actually quoted from the U.S. Supreme Court's notorious and largely discarded 1889 Chinese Exclusion decision to declare that "the highest duty of a nation" is to "give security against foreign aggression and encroachment" including from "vast hordes" of foreigners "crowding in upon us."

But turning a well-intentioned American law on its head to justify the Modi government's sinister designs is obscene. The world should see this insidious comparison by Modi cheerleaders for the disinformation campaign that it is: A new low.

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When Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to bring his Gujarat Model to the rest of the country, everyone thought he meant the pro-growth reforms that had allegedly done wonders for the economy of his home state. But the events of last week suggest that the real Gujarat Model that Modi had in mind was something else entirely: Government looking the other way as private militants violently attack disfavored groups. It's a model that infamously resulted in the slaughter of more than 1,000 men, women, and children, mostly Muslims, over the course of a few days in 2002 when Modi was its chief minister.

And now Modi has done a mini re-enactment at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a prestigious college in the heart of New Delhi whose opposition has long irritated him. This is no doubt a warning shot to the growing youth resistance against his "papers, please" citizenship law.

Here's what happened at JNU:

Sunday evening, 40 to 50 hoodlums, mostly men but also a few women, faces partially wrapped in scarfs, armed with clubs, iron rods, and sledgehammers, stormed the campus. Eyewitness accounts and video footage suggest that several of these people were members of the ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad), a student union associated with Modi's party. They approached a group of students protesting a sudden, massive fee hike and began thrashing them. They bloodied the student president, Aishe Ghosh, and many others.

Then, chanting that the students were traitors who deserve to be shot for opposing the administration, the attackers barged into dorm rooms and went on a rampage, taking care to spare rooms that sported ABVP posters. Muslim students were of course fair game. And so was a blind Hindu student, a Sanskrit scholar and a student of Hinduism no less, whose wall sported a picture of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, India's reformist founding father. (Ambedkar has fallen from grace in pro-Modi circles because he was a vigorous opponent of the caste system and other regressive Hindu practices and his thought is fueling the constitutional case against Modi's Hindu nationalism.)

JNU's vice-chancellor, who is appointed by the central government, failed to mobilize campus security to stop the mayhem. Meanwhile, the Delhi police, which is under the command of the Modi government rather than local authorities, ignored the frantic calls of students for over an hour. There was a veritable battalion of cops standing right outside the campus gates, but not a single one of them went in to stop the attack. As if this is not shocking enough, the cops even stood by as ambulances were vandalized right in front of them.

Modi hasn't said a word condemning the violence at JNU. No assailant has yet been charged or arrested. The police claim they're zeroing in on some suspects, but judging by how they have handled cow vigilantes lynching Muslims suspected of consuming beef, the culprits will face no more than a slap on the wrist.

Incredibly, at the exact same time that the JNU students were getting bashed, the cops were preparing a rap sheet against some of them, including Ghosh, for allegedly vandalizing university computer servers the day before to stop students from registering. Ghosh denies that allegation. Meanwhile, a video that ABVP circulated — and no less than the vice chancellor retweeted — showing that the Sunday violence was triggered by a prior episode when a "lefty student" punched an ABVP member turned out to be the opposite: an ABVP supporter appears to be attacking a "lefty student."

All of this — law enforcement standing by as private militants allied with the ruling party go on a violent spree, criminalizing the victims, spreading disinformation to confuse the public — was precisely Modi's modus operandi in Gujarat. But the ominous parallels with that grisly episode don't stop there.

The Gujarat carnage was preceded by a long vilification campaign against Muslims, a strategy he is replicating in miniature against the university. Modi has long castigated JNU students and faculty as communists and traitors who want to break up the country — never mind that last year’s Nobel Prize recipient in economics along with two of Modi’s own cabinet ministers hail from the university. His Home Minister and right-hand man, Amit Shah, known for his brass knuckles politics, has repeatedly said the university's "tukde tukde gang" — meaning the gang that wants to dismember India piece by piece — needs to be "taught a lesson." Modi popularized this moniker a few years ago when some of JNU's firebrand student leaders harshly protested the abrupt hanging of a Muslim man who had allegedly attacked the Indian parliament.

Such statements signaled to Modi and Shah's most extreme supporters that they wanted the university targeted, without having to bother with actually giving orders to law enforcement authorities.

Not that the duo is shy about doing so when necessary.

A few weeks ago, cops appeared to vandalize Jamia Millia University, a Muslim university in New Delhi. But Modi's comrade, Yogi Adityanath, the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, went even further. His police showed up at Aligarh Muslim University and roughed up students protesting Modi's faith-cleansing policies that'll strip an untold number of Indian Muslims of citizenship. Over 60 students were injured, three critically. Several students have just disappeared. A Muslim female journalist who was covering a protest in nearby Lucknow was arrested and allegedly assaulted by police.

But such tactics are backfiring spectacularly. The anti-government protests, especially on college campuses, are spreading like wildfire. Students at many elite colleges have gone on strike and are holding candle light vigils to protest the events at JNU and AMU along with Modi's nefarious citizenship law.

A normal politician would back off in the face of such public opposition and extend an olive branch, especially given how quickly Modi's carefully cultivated squeaky-clean image is getting trashed in India and abroad. But Modi and Shah are doubling down.

Previously, they had dubbed secularists defending religious freedom as "Muslim appeasers." Now, even moderate free-market conservatives or middle-of-the-road liberals expressing concern over the direction of the country are being branded as the radical left, Madhvan Narayanan, a veteran Indian journalist, told The Week.

Why is Modi doing this? What's his end game?

Many fear he is deliberately baiting protesters and fomenting widespread unrest to build an excuse to cancel elections in Delhi next month and put the city under the president's rule. His party is expected to lose handily just as it has done in other state elections in recent months, thanks to the growing dismay over his assaults on citizenship. There is even speculation that he is preparing to suspend India's constitution and declare an emergency, just as Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi notoriously did in 1975.

That may or may not be the case. But one open question about Modi always has been whether he was pushing an extreme Hindu nationalist agenda to gain power or vice versa: pursuing power to push his agenda. His growing enemies list — and the private and state violence he will apparently deploy against those on it — suggests that the former might be the case.

This means no one outside of Modi's band of merry brothers is safe in India anymore. All of India is Gujarat now. Dissent is out. Violence is in.

As one poster at a protest noted: "First AMU. Then JNU. Next You."

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The Week’s daily round-up highlights the five best opinion pieces from across the British and international media, with excerpts from each.

1. Rebecca Bodenheimer in CNN

on a misstep by a usually-woke awards show

How the Golden Globes missed the mark

“Many people presumably take the stance on the Golden Globes that Gervais took: It's just an awards show, and not even a well-respected one at that. But it's still considered to have an impact on Oscar nominations, and calling oneself a Golden Globe winner can help an actor command a higher rate. For a director, it might mean the difference between getting your next movie funded or not. So, inclusion isn't just an abstract concept - it matters.”

2. Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times

on death and destruction in the Middle East

The nightmare stage of Trump’s rule is here

“Unlike with North Korea, it’s difficult to imagine any photo op or exchange of love letters defusing the crisis the president has created. Most of this country has never accepted Trump, but over the past three years, many have gotten used to him, lulled into uneasy complacency by an establishment that has too often failed to treat him as a walking national emergency. Now the nightmare phase of the Trump presidency is here. The biggest surprise is that it took so long.”

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3. Hamid Dabashi in Al Jazeera

on revisiting Christianity in 2020

Decolonising Jesus Christ

“The figure of Jesus Christ has come to represent many different visions and served various functions throughout time and across geography. As we mark the 2020th anniversary of his birth, amid global turmoil, tension and uncertainty, perhaps the multiplicity of meanings he has embodied should have us rethink dominant narratives among Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and other believers worldwide.”

4. Jane Dalton in The Independent

on plant-based piety

Vegans have won this court case – but they're losing hearts and minds

“To me, being a dietary vegan is pretty ethical already. But resorting to the law to enforce one’s rights is hardly the best way to promote support for one’s views. The perception of vegans as shouty turns many people off veganism; nobody likes to think something is being foisted on them, or that they’re being judged. Indeed, many people react badly to it.”

5. Kapil Komireddi in the New Statesman

on the Modification of India

Is India still a democracy?

“In 2019, many well-heeled media personalities in Delhi and Mumbai were appalled when India was ranked 140 in the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders. That the world’s largest democracy was ranked so low was, to them, proof of an international conspiracy to discredit Modi. Many now loudly denounce the aggressive coverage of the prime minister as a left-wing conspiracy against India, from foreign publications that once swooned over Modi. What such fulminations don’t account for is all that is happening around them in India: the silencing of critics, the hacking apart of intrepid reporters and the quashing of dissent. The democratic content of the republic is being hollowed out, but the people believing themselves to be the guardians of democracy are concerned most of all with image. India, you see, has become Modified.”