TheWire.in, New Delhi (2025)

16/07/2025

A court in Assam recently granted bail to a man accused of alleged “anti-national activity” on social media. The court issued specific directions to the accused in its bail order, notably asking him to “chant ‘Jai Hind’ 3 times in the morning for 21 days.” The accused, Arif Rahman, has also been directed to record himself saying ‘Jai Hind’ and share the video on his social media.

The accused was arrested in the aftermath of the Pahalgham tragedy, which left tens of civilians dead, after a complaint was filed alleging that he had praised Pakistan using a fake Facebook account. While the case may later take its own course when it goes for trial, the bail order is prima facie flawed and defeats the purpose of procedural fairness.

Objective of bail

Bail is simply the release of a person from custody. Bail does not determine a person’s innocence or guilt, but given that a trial takes a long time to conclude, a person cannot be confined to prison for an extended period of time. Additionally, the principle of “presumption of innocence”, a core tenet of criminal jurisprudence, lays down that any person accused of an offence is innocent until proven guilty by the state authorities.

Read more on thewire.in

16/07/2025

| The Wire presents ‘Namma India: The Many Worlds in Our Words’

The author of Heart Lamp and International Booker prize winner Banu Mushtaq will be in conversation with Arfa Khanum Sherwani

🗓July 19 |🕠5:30 pm
📍Jawahar Bhawan, New Delhi

Free Entry!

16/07/2025

On July 15, a peculiar séance was underway at the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library at Teen Murti Bhavan. The official purpose was to reflect on the “Life and Legacy of P.V. Narasimha Rao,” the accidental prime minister, the architect of liberalisation, and – according to the whispers in the corridors of Indian politics – the “first Bharatiya Janata Party prime minister.”

The medium chosen for this communion was N. Chandrababu Naidu, the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, himself a politician whose career is a testament to ideological elasticity.

Read more on thewire.in

16/07/2025

India on Tuesday (July 15) offered to help restore filmmaker Satyajit Ray’s ancestral home in Bangladesh, after West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee voiced concern over reports that it was being demolished.

On Tuesday evening, Bangladesh’s Daily Star reported that the ancestral house of Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury, Ray’s grandfather and a towering figure in Bengali literary and cultural history, was being razed in Mymensingh city to make way for a new building.

Read more on thewire.in

16/07/2025

On Monday (July 14), the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) announced that 50% of India’s installed electricity capacity comes from non-fossil fuel sources, a milestone it has achieved five years ahead of schedule.

As per its latest NDCs (nationally determined contributions, which are voluntary targets set up by countries to tackle climate change through actions such as cutting down on carbon emissions) under the United Nations’ Paris Agreement submitted in August 2022, India had committed to achieving 50% of cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030, among other things.

A statement by the MNRE on July 14 said that as on June 30 this year, 49.92% of India’s electricity capacity comprised thermal power, 48.27% of power from renewable energy sources, and 1.81% of nuclear power, producing 242 gigawatts (GW), 224 GW and 8.78 GW of power respectively.

Of the renewable energy sources, large hydropower projects accounted for 10.19% (49.38 GW), while 38.08% (184.62 GW) came from renewable energy such as solar and wind power.

Read more on thewire.in

16/07/2025

An MP-MLA special magistrate court in Lucknow has on Tuesday (July 15) granted bail to Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in connection to the alleged ‘defamatory’ statements he made against the Indian Army during his Bharat Jodo Yatra, reported LiveLaw.

Gandhi, the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, personally appeared before additional chief judicial magistrate Alok Verma and surrendered to seek bail. He had been absent during the last five hearings in the case, according to the report.

Gandhi was represented by advocate Pranshu Agrawal, Mohd Yasir Abbasi and Mohammed Samar Ansari who argued before the court that Gandhi was innocent and that no offence had been made out against him.

Meanwhile, the counsel for the complainant argued that the Congress leader hurt the dignity and respect of the Indian Army and attempted to bring its morale down, and thus, should not be granted bail.

However, the court granted the Congress leader bail on the condition of furnishing his personal bond in the sum of Rs. 20,000 with two sureties of the like amount. The next date of hearing is August 13.

Read more on thewire.in

16/07/2025

For the first time since their latest military confrontation, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan shared a platform at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Tianjin. While both carefully avoided naming the other, the shadow of the Pahalgam terror attack and the four-day drone-and-missile clashes loomed large over their remarks.

Defending India’s cross-border strikes in response to the Pahalgam incident, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar urged the SCO to adopt an “uncompromising” approach to terrorism. Speaking at the foreign ministers’ meeting on Tuesday (July 15), he described the attack as “deliberately conducted to undermine the tourism economy of Jammu and Kashmir, while sowing a religious divide”.

He referred to the UN Security Council (UNSC)’s condemnation of the attack, which called for its perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors to be held accountable.

India has often cited the UNSC statement as justification for Operation Sindoor, the targeted strikes on terror infrastructure in Pakistan that triggered a four-day military exchange involving drones and missiles.

Read more on thewire.in

15/07/2025

The media have been full of claims by the World Bank and by individual governments that in the global South, ‘millions of people had been lifted out of poverty’ during the last four decades. India, by now the most populous country in the world, claimed that by 2022–23 only 5 per cent of its population was poor. The data on nutritional intake in India however show that hunger rose greatly for both rural and urban populations during the same period, while its very low ranking on the global hunger index worsened further. Even educated citizens believe the official claims and say, ‘how can hunger have increased when poverty has declined?’ The question however should be the other way round, namely, ‘how can poverty have declined when hunger has increased?’ The information on increase in hunger is far more direct and based on readily verifiable statistics, than are the official calculations of poverty. The latter are indirect and use certain calculation procedures – very strange and illogical ones as my book argues – to derive the results on which claims of poverty decline are based

It was not always the case that illogical statistical procedures were used. Initially in every country using consumer expenditure surveys, the ‘poverty line’ was ascertained as the currently observed actual spending level per head at which the accepted nutrition norm was satisfied. The problem arose because for every subsequent estimate in every country, this definition of the poverty line was quietly abandoned; the nutrition norm was no longer applied to determine the correct current poverty line, and instead the original poverty line was simply updated to later years using a consumer price index. This meant holding unchanged for many decades, the particular basket of goods and services consumed in the original ‘base year’, which in India is over five decades in the past.

Read more on thewire.in

15/07/2025

The ongoing special intensive revision (SIR) exercise in Bihar is getting murkier and murkier. The June 24 circular of the Election Commission caught Bihar unawares, but it did not take people long to decipher the enormous threat of mass disenfranchisement.

Pushed onto the back foot by the growing protests in Bihar, especially the July 9 chakka jam which evoked a great mass response across the state, the Election Commission has now sought to take steps to limit the scale of deletion of voters at the draft stage.

After the first 10 days of the SIR drive, when only 14% enumeration forms had reportedly been collected, the EC realised that at this rate, some 40-50% voters might easily get eliminated at the draft stage itself. Hence, the EC relaxed the time frame for submission of supporting documents and asked the administration to collect forms without documents and even photographs. The entire enumeration form distribution and collection exercise has now become a mockery.

Read more on thewire.in

15/07/2025

Former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan, who hails from a Congress family in the state, is a known party loyalist. He had been a close associate of former prime minister, the late Manmohan Singh, having served as minister of state in his PMO for several years before moving to Maharashtra as chief minister. Chavan also been Congress general secretary. As CM, he had taken on his deputy Ajit Pawar in a number of cases. Pawar is back to the deputy chief minister’s seat now. Where is the Congress headed and what happens as the Thackeray brothers unite?

The Wire speaks to Chavan over the telephone. Edited excerpts of the chat are as follows.

What is the future of coalition politics in Maharashtra at a time when the Shiv Sena (Uddhav Thackeray) and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena have moved closer while the bitterness between Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (SP) and Ajit Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party has diluted?

Uddhav and Raj [Thackeray] coming together is their internal matter. It will have no impact on the coalition. Our alliance is with Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena and the NCP headed by Sharad Pawar. If they [Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena] want to have a subsidiary alliance with someone, it is their internal affair.

For us, core values are secularism, equality, social justice, and the thoughts of Mahatma Phule, Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, and Dr. Ambedkar. We will not compromise on that.

Read more on thewire.in

15/07/2025

A day after external affairs minister S. Jaishankar visit to China wherein he described relations between India and China as having made “good progress” towards normalisation, the opposition Congress targeted Jaishankar and accused him of “destroying India’s foreign policy.”

“I guess the Chinese foreign minister will come and apprise Modi about recent developments in China-India ties. The EAM is now running a full blown circus aimed at destroying India’s foreign policy,” Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi posted on X on Tuesday (July 15).

Earlier, Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh issued a statement and asked when Jaishankar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will hold a detailed debate on China in the parliament.

“In his 14 July, 2025, meeting with China’s Vice President Han Zheng, external affairs minister S. Jaishankar stated that the India-China bilateral relationship “has been steadily improving since the meeting between Prime Minister Modi and President Xi Jinping in Kazan last October” and that “continued normalisation of our ties can produce mutually beneficial outcomes. Perhaps we should remind the EAM of recent developments in bilateral ties since the PM’s last tête-à-tête with President Xi,” said Ramesh in the statement.

Read more on thewire.in

15/07/2025

Yemeni authorities have postponed the ex*****on of Indian national Nimisha Priya, originally scheduled for tomorrow, July 16, Ministry of External Affairs has said.

Nimisha Priya, a nurse originally from Palakkad district in Kerala, faces ex*****on for the murder of Talal Abdo Mahdi, her Yemeni business partner. In Yemen, it is mandatory for a foreign medical practitioner to team up with a citizen in order to open a clinic. Nimisha Priya has alleged torture, financial exploitation and threats in Mahdi’s hands, along with the fact that he forged documents to claim marriage with her.

In jail in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, Nimisha Priya was sentenced to death in 2020, and her final appeal was rejected in 2023.

“GoI, which has since the beginning of the case been rendering all possible assistance in the matter, has made concerted efforts in recent days to seek more time for the family of Ms. Nimishapriya to reach a mutually agreeable solution with the other party,” sources said.

The MEA said that Indian officials secured the postponement “despite the sensitivities involved” and that they have been in regular touch with local jail authorities and the prosecutor’s office.

Read more on thewire.in

TheWire.in

16/07/2025

16/07/2025

16/07/2025

16/07/2025

16/07/2025

16/07/2025

16/07/2025

15/07/2025

15/07/2025

15/07/2025

15/07/2025

15/07/2025

Address

Website

Alerts

Contact The Business

Shortcuts

Share

Category