Reliance wanted to make battery cells. It now assembles the ones China sends.

Reliance spent months negotiating a technology transfer with CATL, the Chinese firm that makes more batteries than anyone else in the world. The talks collapsed. It switched to Xiamen Hithium and hit trouble there too. The Jamnagar complex has settled for buying finished cells and wiring them into storage systems.

Now the Jindal group is saying it in public.

“We are very keen to make cells in India but the lithium phosphate iron (LFP) technology, currently is not available for us and the hunt is on for a technology tie-up.”

But making the cell itself, which is the most important part of an EV, that technology on LFP is not available anywhere outside of China and right now “they are guarding it like a weapon.”

Nobody owns LFP. John Goodenough and his colleagues at the University of Texas patented the compound in the 1990s and that patent expired around 2017. The carbon-coating patents that made the material usable in a working cell, held by Hydro-Québec and French state laboratories, expired in 2022.

There is literally no licence left to buy.

China has the process. Spreading a paste onto metal foil to a thickness measured in thousandths of a millimetre, drying it without cracking it, stacking it in a room drier than desert air, and getting more than 95 cells out of every 100 good enough to sell.

That knowledge is with the people who have done it a few million times. Nobody writes it down, so no tie-up delivers it. Given the leverage China has over India on such items, why would any serious nation give up that know-how?

Swarajya has been making this argument for a year. By assembling battery packs, Indian companies will only learn to assemble battery packs. They must, at least now, invest in the work that reduces dependence on foreign powers.

It is not our argument that this is easy. Tesla needed five and a half years to bring its 4680 cell to a yield worth selling. Northvolt raised over $15 billion and went bankrupt in March 2025.

Indian companies would be right to ask the government for financial support for research and process development. But are they making that case for Indian technological sovereignty yet? So far we are only seeing more white-labelling projects passed off as ‘indigenous’.

On 3rd August, Monday, the Election Commission announced that Prashant Kishor, the election strategist who built his own party, had won the Bankipur assembly seat in Patna by around 19,000 votes.

Bankipur sits in the state capital and had gone to the BJP for three decades. It is reported to be a constituency dominated by the ‘General Caste’ voters. The man who vacated it, Nitin Nabin, is now the party’s national president; he held the seat in 2010, 2015, 2020 and again last November, when he won it by more than 50,000 votes.

Within hours, many reasons were in circulation. The prime among them were:

1) That the bypoll took place when sentiments in favour of the ‘Gen-Z’ protest over leak of the NEET 2026 paper were still strong and those sentiments were against the BJP. In short, young voters angry with the party.

2) There is still fury over the death of Bharat Bhushan Tiwari, the 28-year-old shot dead by police in Bhojpur on 17 June.

3) There is discontent over UGC guidelines notified by the Centre in January this year (since stayed by the Supreme Court)

4) The narrative that BJP’s machinery for carrying genuine ground-level feedback to the top has broken.

But did Bankipur really have to be won by Prashant Kishor for these insights to become apparent?

The CJP protest ended on 25 July. The Bharat Tiwari encounter was on 17 June. The anti-UGC sentiment is apparent since the beginning of the year. The grumbling about BJP feedback loop being broken has been going on since at least June 2024.

None of these were contingent on how Bankipur voted, and even if the BJP had held the seat by 5,000 votes, all would still continue to be relevant talking points. At the most, they would be presented as challenges weathered by an embattled party and its voter base.

Bankipur is a single seat out of 243. Turnout was 34.24 per cent, more than seven points below the 41.45 per cent this same seat recorded in November, so two voters in three stayed home. Mid-term bypolls also draw the kind of voter who wants to register a complaint rather than pick a government. Also, Kishor is also famous in a way his party isn’t. Voting for him to win a bypoll and voting for Jan Suraaj to form the government are not the same thing.

This doesn’t make the Bankipur bypoll result meaningless, it only underlines that the result gives us no new information which political observers and participants did not already have.

BJP President Nitin Nabin has promised a thorough introspection of the Datia (MP) and Bankipur losses. But there hardly seems to be anything new that an introspection exercise might reveal that was not already apparent by late July.

The man Priyanka Gandhi Vadra called a gaumutra visheshgya (cow-urine expert) in the Lok Sabha led the team that built India’s first microprocessor.

She was speaking against the task force on examination reforms, constituted after the NEET protests. “The Radhakrishna Committee was also formed to bring in reforms,” the Wayanad MP said. “Till date, none of his recommendations have been implemented. And now this new committee has an ex-IB chief, an owner of an IT company, and also a gaumutra visheshgya. What do they know about education?”

As an MP, she could’ve made a case that the recommendations of the Radhakrishnan-led committee appointed after the 2024 NEET paper leak have largely gone unacted upon.

Instead, she chose to trade a serious critique for what is obviously a sneer at Hindu practices.

But set that aside for a moment and ask the narrower question about the person it was aimed at. She did not name him, but everyone understood — Prof. Veezhinathan Kamakoti, the director of IIT Madras.

Kamakoti took his master’s and his doctorate at IIT Madras, joined its faculty in 2001, and has run the institute since 2022. Nearly his entire working life has been spent at IIT Madras.

A jibe thrown at him is a jibe at that institution too.

IIT Madras has been ranked the best engineering institution in India for ten years running, and the best in the country overall for seven. Nothing in the history of Indian higher education comes close to that record.

It is this institution that Prof. Kamakoti now heads.

Not to say that is all. Prof. Kamakoti works in computer architecture, information security, and VLSI design. He himself led the team that built SHAKTI, the first microprocessor designed in India. He chaired the government’s AI Task Force. He sits on the National Security Advisory Board.

Under his tenure, IIT Madras filed 417 patents in 2024-25, more than one a day, and incubated over 100 deep-tech startups in a single year, one every third day, after he set that target in April 2024. It raised Rs 513 crore from alumni and donors in 2023-24, up 135 per cent in a year. And the top rankings continue.

But the numbers are not what the people around him talk about.

Shashwath T R, who runs a semiconductor startup incubated at the institute, describes how Kamakoti works — he goes and knocks on people and makes them move. He finds what is blocking a thing, knocks the block out, and gets it moving.

Prof. Kamakoti also pushed hard on student welfare, and Shashwath explains why that matters so much at a technical institute, in a system known for how much it stresses its students. A student who is not under stress can think, and a student who can think can experiment. The ones who experiment are the ones who walk into the incubation cell and start companies.

On the day the latest rankings came in, all Prof. Kamakoti said was that being a topper consistently is the result of collective, cohesive, and focused team effort.

This is the man Priyanka Gandhi Vadra reduced to a cow urine jibe. And it was intentional, not accidental. Gaumutra has become an abuse of choice in Indian political speech whenever the object of contempt is Hindu practice or anyone associated with it. It saves the speaker the trouble of an argument.

Whether Prof. Kamakoti’s remarks from 2025, made at a Chennai cow shelter, on the medicinal properties of Gaumutra, survive scientific scrutiny is a separate question, and an evolving one. But that was never the point. It was intended as an insult.

Pharmacology has never much cared where a hypothesis came from. Willow bark yielded aspirin. Sweet wormwood, drawn from a Chinese medical text sixteen centuries old, yielded artemisinin and Tu Youyou a Nobel Prize in 2015.

Treating Hindu practice as self-evidently absurd, uniquely undeserving of even the courtesy of a test, is simply prejudice in the garb of scepticism.

The jibe thrown at Prof Kamakoti does not diminish him or IIT Madras, but it does speak a good deal about the class that cannot look at a Hindu scientist without reaching for such slurs.

A few months ago, my colleague Karan Kamble spoke to founders, students and faculty at IIT Madras for his piece covering how the institute became what it is.

It is worth giving a read to understand what IIT-M and Prof. Kamakoti stand for — a pedigree that gaumutra jibes can never undermine.

Karan’s full article on Swarajya: What Makes IIT Madras Unbeatable?

The September 2025 GST overhaul was the biggest change to the tax since it began in 2017. Within months however, critics were grading it on its revenue numbers, as though a structural reform ought to prove itself inside two-three quarters.

The fact is GST rate rationalisation was never a revenue exercise. The main and the only purpose of the GST rationalisation was to make the whole system simpler and more convenient for the people.

Fewer slabs mean fewer classification disputes clogging the appeals system. Compliance gets cheaper for the smallest businesses, who can least afford it. And cheaper everyday goods leave households with more to spend, which then expands the base.

And the base has widened sharply. In the six months after the GST slab rationalisation, taxable supply averaged about ₹51.7 lakh crore a month, up from ₹40.1 lakh crore in the same months a year earlier. That is close to 29 per cent growth. April 2026 held the pattern at 27 per cent over the previous April. What’s more, the rise runs across sectors rather than sitting in one or two, which is what a genuine widening of the base looks like.

Consumption is another measure to judge the reform, and it moved the same way. Passenger vehicle sales had fallen 1.4 per cent in the first half of 2025-26, and the industry expected only 1 to 2 percentage points of growth for the full year. After the GST slabs were rationalised in September 2025, sales rose 15.8 per cent in October, 18.1 per cent in November and 29 per cent in December. February 2026 was the strongest February on record. A rate cut that pulls buyers back into showrooms is doing what it was designed to do.

Even on the measure the critics chose, the reform holds up. Net GST, excluding cess, grew 7.1 per cent in 2025-26, in a year the lower rates were in force for only half of it, and states' revenues grew 6 per cent. The wider base recovered much of the revenue lost to rate cuts.

A change of this order works through prices first, then behaviour, then the base, and each stage takes longer than the last. Nine months cannot show the full return, and no honest reading claims otherwise. Judge the reform on the economic base it has widened and the spending it has freed, and it is already doing what it was built to do.

This SHARP is based on an article in a business daily by V Anantha Nageswaran, Chief Economic Advisor, and K Balasubramanian, Joint Secretary, Department of Revenue, Ministry of Finance.

Since 1 June, a single rule has rewired India’s solar market. Every new government-backed solar project must now buy its cells from a short list of approved domestic manufacturers. Cheap Chinese cells are shut out.

Who wins, who pays: The rule — the second phase of the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers, ALMM-II — hands Reliance, Adani, Tata, Waaree and Premier a captive home market . The bill goes to developers, and through them to consumers: some estimates say consumers will pay thousands of crores extra.

Why it matters: That premium is the price of self-reliance, and it may well be worth paying. But in return for handing these companies that protected market, the government asks them for almost nothing. The mandate pays them for making cells, not for owning the technology inside them.

The catch: A factory assembling licensed Chinese cell designs on imported Chinese equipment satisfies the mandate exactly as well as one built on Indian IP — and every high-efficiency cell line in India today is the former. So we are about to spend tens of thousands of crores protecting factories that make someone else’s designs. The rule entrenches the dependence it was sold to end.

The China lesson India gets backwards: India’s whole case for no-strings support to companies rests on the belief that Beijing also did the same in the development phase. But that is not the full story.

After China joined the WTO in 2001, it had handed its own solar and EV firms cheap land, easy state credit, and flat subsidies pegged to nothing but manufacturing output. But such unconditional money produced very little results in the technology space.

In 2016 its own finance minister said unconditional money had bred a “dependency syndrome” that killed firms’ appetite for R&D. A redesign that followed tied every yuan to engineering and R&D achievements. To get state protection Chinese companies must invest in R&D and actually show results.

The fix: India should also tie each protection to a rising technology target — a growing share of protected cells must use IP developed in, or co-developed with, India.

Won’t conditions slow the catch-up? The opposite. Indian firms clear hard bars whenever the state sets them: Indian companies clear FDA standards, export auto components that require high degree of reliability and so on. If R&D is demanded of them they will deliver.

The larger point is that only a R&D mandate will catalyse a culture of innovation AND start conversations about supply chains. It may well be that the industry genuinely needs massive support to localise the solar stack - these conversations will happen when the government creates a sense of urgency.

Congress is at it again. It is once again using a clipped video to mislead the country, and this time the subject is Operation Sindoor.

Pawan Khera has taken a few seconds of Rajnath Singh’s speech in Parliament and built two claims on it. First, the government hid the deaths of six soldiers who fell during the operation. Second, the Raksha Mantri lied to the House about it.

In Khera’s words, the soldiers’ sacrifice was covered up — and their families were denied the recognition they were owed. It is a serious charge that uses patriotism as a cover. It is also false, and falls apart the moment the full record is seen.

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The central claim, that the martyrdoms were concealed for a year, is patently false. The public record says so from the first week of Op Sindoor.

The armed forces named and saluted these soldiers within days, as their bodies were brought home and received with full military honours. The acknowledgements came in the steady, professional manner the forces always follow through the weeks following the May operation.

In August, the Air Chief even travelled to a soldier’s village in Jhunjhunu to sit with his mother and his widow. On Independence Day, the gallantry awards were announced, among them a Vir Chakra and a Vayu Sena Medal for two of the six.

None of this was secret. All of it was reported as it happened.

What took place this June was the inscription of their names at the National War Memorial, the most lasting honour the country gives its fallen. Congress has taken that act of remembrance and twisted it into proof of concealment.

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The second charge, that Rajnath Singh lied to Parliament, falls flat when we look at what the clip leaves out — as is characteristic of Congress.

The speech in full, which has been cut into a few seconds, in fact opens by honouring the dead. The Raksha Mantri bows to “उन सैनिकों की स्मृति” — the memory of those soldiers who, in his words, “भारत की एकता और अखंडता सुनिश्चित करने के लिए अपना सर्वस्व बलिदान कर दिया,” gave their everything to secure India’s unity and integrity.

That is a tribute to the fallen, said on the record, in the very speech Khera calls a cover-up.

The clipped line was not a casualty figure either. It was the last beat of a rhetorical list, where Rajnath told the opposition what it should be asking:

Ask if the operation succeeded. Ask if we destroyed the masterminds. Each answered with an emphatic yes. The last question in that sequence asked whether the operation had harmed the country’s soldiers, and he answered no.

Read in its place, the line is plainly a rhetorical close to that list, a flourish about the success of the operation, not a casualty report.

Plus, to any objective listener, the reference to the initial core strikes on the nine terror camps should be clear. It did not refer to the expanded hostilities in which the six fell to Pakistani shelling along the border.

Khera insists there are “only two possibilities,” that the minister either did not know his soldiers had died or lied about it. The speech and context offer a plain third that shows two things Congress twisted:

• The minister honoured the dead openly, and Congress edited that part away.

• The minister deployed a rhetorical device, and Congress mischaracterised it.

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This is not a slip. It is how the party has chosen to politik. Misleading the public through doctored and decontextualised material has become a settled method.

During the 2024 campaign it was the edited Amit Shah video on reservations, cut to suggest the opposite of what he had said, which even drew police complaints in several states.

Sometimes a clip, sometimes a manufactured number, sometimes a claim with no source at all. The aim stays the same — to put a falsehood into circulation faster than the truth can catch it.

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What makes this one worse is where it leads.

A party that misleads the public to win an argument is doing something old and familiar. A party that does it on the army, by pushing a story Pakistan and China would be glad to see an Indian opposition spread, is doing something else.

So was the case with the claims about the loss of Indian fighter jets. There, too, Congress carried the adversary’s now-debunked propaganda.

The six soldiers were named and honoured, decorated on Independence Day and inscribed in stone in June this year. They were never hidden. They deserved better than to be turned, a year later, into the raw material for a lie.

There is a lot of outrage about ISKCON affiliated organisations taking over mid day deals supply logistics for government schools in West Bengal. This outrage at present is chiefly concerned with school kids not receiving eggs in their meals.

We would like to add to the outrage with some of our own views:

1. After so many decades of independence the governments of the day are having to lean on NGOs/orgs like ISKCON to deliver basic nutrition to India’s poorest school going kids. This should worry us.

2. It says something about our last mile level governance and staff’s integrity that we have not been able to build out modern kitchens in every government school (at feasible scales of >50 kids enrolled) and trust school staff to operate them cleanly.

3. The vast majority of tax payers are unlikely to object if government builds the necessary infrastructure to do what ISKCON’s Akshayapatra is doing today. Frankly, govt efforts will be more costly and less efficient - not to speak of dangers of corruption in procurements. Once again, we should worry as to how the simple task of feeding kids is now seen as outside government competence levels.

4. In any case the state of West Bengal state govt capacity today is such that Akshayapatra’s meals are likely an upgrade over what the govt’s own meals provisions were. It’s what the government has inherited.

5. Mid day meals must reflect the cuisine that kids are used to at home - adjusting for nutrition needs. What ISKCON’s Akshayapatra does not offer can always be supplemented by government.

There’s a genuinely good argument breaking out in the op-ed pages over why Indian companies barely spend on R&D.

Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) V Anantha Nageswaran started it. He’s been picking this fight in the pages of the annual economic survey he authors and more recently in newspapers and speeches as well.

Basically, the CEA wants us all to know that:

• Businesses fund just 41% of India’s R&D vs China’s 77%. Total R&D spend stuck at 0.64% of GDP

• He’s gone after India Inc repeatedly for “swimming in excess profits”. Nifty 500 profit-to-GDP hit a 16-year high in FY24 while jobs only grew ~1.5%

• Since 2022 he’s told corporates to put profits into tech, R&D and wages instead of just deleveraging

He’s tried to understand why Indian companies don’t do R&D so much:

• A vast captive home market dulls the urge to innovate (why build better when the old product sells?)

• A colonial hangover that pushed Indian business toward trading over manufacturing

• Premature financialisation: chasing shareholder returns before building industrial muscle

Naushad Forbes, Chairman of Forbes Marshall has today (20 June) written an interesting ‘counter’ of sorts to Dr Anantha Nageswaran’s published views:

• He agrees R&D is the core failure, but rejects the culture story

• The missing ingredient is competition, ambition and openness to imports

• Basically his view seems to be if you protect Indian big businesses by erecting barriers to importing input materials cheaply (he names QCOs) you are naturally harming competition and interests of MSMEs

• Family-business long-termism is an asset: the CEA’s own cited study shows public firms invest less than private ones

• The puzzle is this: Tata, Ambani, Adani pour lakhs of crores into capacity, little into technology. Why no Indian Google, Apple or SpaceX-scale bet? (Here maybe the CEA has a point and Forbes is refusing to see the writing on the wall?)

Where they actually agree:

• R&D underinvestment is India’s central innovation failure

• Throwing money at it won’t fix it — the new ANRF corpus is barely being spent

• Competition and exports are the real discipline behind innovation

At Swarajya too we’ve been obsessively covering this phenomenon of Indian companies not taking to new technology development. We believe it’s a cultural issue and not so much a financial issue.

We’re asking why India lags behind on engine development, EV cells, solar panels and so on. We’ve even got some heat for asking tough questions - which is why this debate between CEA and others is such a welcome development.

The reward for being India’s best engineer? They take you off the work. That’s the bargain India quietly offers the diaspora it keeps begging to come home.

Sridhar Vembu’s latest call for engineers abroad to return and build the country’s technological sovereignty pulled in tens of thousands of replies, and he’s right to make it. A louder version won’t bring them back. Everyone blames the usual suspects, the dirty air, the broken roads, the high taxes, the reservation rows, even the famous mother-in-law, and those are real, with most a generation from fixing.

For the builders, the ones who come back to lead the R&D and design the product, that whole list misses the point. The work they’d return to do doesn’t exist here.

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Picture what the returnee actually walks into.

An embedded-systems engineer with a decade at a German Tier-1 supplier comes home and finds that Indian carmakers don’t keep an R&D arm for her to lead. The frontier skills she trained for go into vendor schedules and appraisal sheets, because Indian industry spends next to nothing on research and imports most of its technology.

The deeper trap is structural. Abroad, a brilliant engineer can stay an engineer for thirty years, a principal, a fellow, a distinguished technologist, paid and respected the whole way without ever running a team. In India, the only ladder runs through management, so the better you get at the work, the faster you’re pulled off it. And it bites hardest exactly where the country can least afford it, in semiconductors, defence and automotive, the sectors that decide strategic weight and that nobody builds by stacking managers on managers.

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Here’s the thing: none of this is fated.

Indian pharma hit the same wall in the 1990s. Dr Reddy’s threw hundreds of scientists at drug discovery, watched it fail, and dropped the dream, but the capability survived and regrouped. It lives today in research houses like Syngene and Aragen that sell discovery to the world and keep thousands of scientists technical for a whole career.

China just did it on purpose, pulling its researchers back with the Thousand Talents Plan and standing up corporate labs at Huawei and BYD in the old Bell Labs mould. India’s grown faster than China for a decade and still hasn’t built the one vehicle that turns all that growth into somewhere to actually work.

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So the fix is way narrower and cheaper than the whole national to-do list. India needs one institution it’s never had, a publicly funded body that does the hard, unglamorous engineering neither the universities nor the companies will touch, ringed by venture-backed firms that sell that work to customers abroad.

Build it around senior engineers who actually lead the work instead of a management pyramid, and you’ve handed the returnee the individual-contributor career India otherwise refuses to offer. Then make seventy per cent of its budget come from customers paying for results, and merit stops being a slogan on a wall and turns into a survival condition, because any outfit that promotes the well-connected over the capable just goes broke.

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The builders who already tried weren’t wrong to come home. They were early, ahead of a country that hadn’t yet built the place where they could land without a crazy leap of faith. That place can be built now, and on the cheap, long before the last road is paved or the culture rewired. Get it right, and the next one won’t need to be stubborn or heroic. They’ll just need to be good. Vembu asked exactly the right question. The answer is to build the home worth coming to.

Based on Come Home — But To What? by Madhusudhan Chellappa.

In the space business, the hardest part often comes after you’ve built the thing.

You’ve made something clever in the lab. Now it has to become a product someone will actually buy — years of testing, tweaking and proving it won’t fail in orbit.

That long, expensive slog is where most deep-tech ideas quietly succumb, because private investors won’t wait that long and the only early customer is usually the government.

There’s a name for this graveyard: the valley of death.

On 11 June, IN-SPACe announced the first three companies it’s helping across it — Bengaluru’s Astrobase and SatSure, and Hyderabad’s TM2SPACE — under its Rs 500 crore Technology Adoption Fund.

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The fund is cannily built. It picks up to 60 per cent of a project’s bill — capped at Rs 25 crore — to carry a technology from “works in the lab” to “ready to sell.” The government takes no stake in the company. The founders keep the IP. It simply earns its money back over time, through a share of whatever the product eventually sells.

The only catches: you can’t use this money to build the thing with foreign partners, and you need IN-SPACe’s nod before licensing the technology to anyone else, at home or abroad.

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Look at what got funded and a pattern jumps out.

Astrobase is building a powerful, reusable rocket engine — one of the trickiest designs in the world, with very few built anywhere — and is already firing it on the test stand.

SatSure is building Dhaarini, what it calls India’s first sovereign Earth-intelligence model — an AI trained on India’s own monsoons, farms and cities to make sense of the flood of satellite images India collects: spotting stressed crops, tracking floods, keeping an eye on infrastructure.

TM2SPACE is making the small star-reading sensors that keep a satellite pointed the right way.

An engine, a brain, and a sense of direction — three things India has struggled to build well enough at home. Which is the whole point: the fund exists to cut that dependence.

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The design is clever. Now let’s do the maths. SatSure’s grant came to Rs 24.6 crore — just shy of the cap — and the three were chosen from 43 proposals. At Rs 25 crore a pop, the entire Rs 500 crore pot can back only about 20 projects over five years — and so far, 16 months in, it has backed three. Hold that against the dream it’s attached to: a $44 billion space economy by 2034, talk of India becoming the world’s third great space power after the US and China, a separate Rs 1,000 crore venture fund.

Union Minister Jitendra Singh has put the logic plainly — India can’t out-spend China on science, so it has to win on brains instead.

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That’s exactly what this fund is: small, sharp, founder-friendly, aimed squarely at the spot where Indian deep-tech — or actually, deep-tech anywhere — keeps stalling.

The Tamil Nadu Governor’s office recently released a crudely altered image of the seer-poet Thiruvalluvar in saffron robes, vibhuti, and rudraksha, layered over K.R. Venugopal Sarma’s iconic 1959 portrait.

The impulse was sound. The execution was almost designed to fail. A legitimate cultural assertion has been handed back to its critics in a form that confirms every charge of political instrumentalisation.

The Sarma painting is no incidental piece of state iconography. The artist spent nearly three decades preparing it, drawing on Shastric principles to depict Thiruvalluvar as a grihastha, a householder-sage in jada-makuta and uthariya.

Sarma was a Gandhian, deeply versed in classical iconography, and his portrait was accepted by the Congress-era Madras government in 1959. The Government of India placed it on a postage stamp in 1960.

The image belongs to a Tamil cultural mainstream that predates Dravidianism’s narrower racial reading of Valluvar by decades.

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To add saffron to that portrait is to overwrite the artist’s deliberate choices. Saffron is the colour of the sannyasi, and the householder-sage Thiruvalluvar was never one.

The earlier Mylapore stone idol, dated by the late Iravatam Mahadevan to the 15th or 16th century, similarly shows him in padmasana with palm-leaf manuscripts, every detail confirming the householder-sage archetype.

The colonial-era Francis Ellis coin of 1818 had drawn him as a Jain-style ascetic, and that depiction has fallen out of tradition. Returning to it through clumsy photoshopping is regression masquerading as assertion.

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The honest reclamation is available, and far more powerful. Tamil tradition holds that Valluvar belonged to the Paraiyar community, and that Valluvar itself designated the priestly and astrological lineage within it.

Gustav Oppert documented in 1893 that the Valluvar Purohits wore the yajnopavitam by right, performed Sanskrit ceremonies at Paraiyar and Pallar weddings, and were respectfully consulted by Brahman families on matters of astrology.

The anthropologist Michael Moffatt, working in Tamil Nadu in the 1970s, found the same continuity intact. The sixteenth-century text Gnana Vettiyan, attributed to Thiruvalluvar himself, asserts the community’s right to the sacred thread and the inner dignity it signifies.

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What the Governor’s office should have done, with care and scholarship, was to restore the yajnopavitam to the portrait.

That single change would have carried a historical claim no saffron robe ever can. It would have shown, in quiet visual truth, that the highest ethical voice in Tamil civilisation emerged from a community once labelled outcaste by colonial reduction, and that the community has been a full participant in Hindu sacred life all along.

What is at stake reaches beyond the colour of a robe. The question is whether Hindu cultural reclamation can rise to the seriousness of the inheritance it claims to defend. The yajnopavitam across Thiruvalluvar’s shoulder would have answered that question, and answered it without spectacle.

Based on “Thiruvalluvar: The Case For A Yajnopavitam, Not Saffron Robes“ by Aravindan Neelakandan.

About a fortnight ago, Vijay Gokhale, former Indian foreign secretary, observed that China sees Indian democracy as a long-term ideological problem. The Chinese commentary that followed went to lengths explaining why India does not matter, why Indian democracy was a curse, and why Indian aspirations exceed Indian means.

This vehemence itself is the story, because indifference does not produce a dozen essay-length tweets of correction.

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Stripped of theatrics, the argument is the one Chinese strategists and think-tanks have refined for two decades. India, the line goes, has built first-world aspirations on a third-world base. Universal suffrage in 1950 froze pre-modern hierarchies into governance and let identity-based tribalism hijack reform. Democracy, the conclusion offers, is what makes India unserious.

The diagnosis does carry some truth. The prescription is where it falls apart. Beijing repeats it with the urgency of a country reassuring itself rather than analysing another.

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That India does not matter to China is, oddly enough, the most successful Chinese narrative export to India, repeated by several CCP watchers in Delhi. The record of CCP’s conduct says otherwise.

Beijing helped Pakistan with Nukes in the 80s and 90s and even today arms it against India. It does something as petty as blocking the UN listing of Masood Azhar as a terrorist before finally relenting in 2019. It backs insurgent groups in India’s Northeast for decades. It dismisses Mao’s Five Fingers doctrine while behaving otherwise in every border dispute. It keeps prodding into the Indian Ocean. The current instrument of coercion is rare earth magnets — where China commands 91% of global output — and other supply chains.

So why is a neighbour considered irrelevant given this much attention?

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What Beijing actually fears is far plainer than the rhetoric admits.

A billion-plus society of comparable civilisational depth, incomparable internal diversity, and modest but growing resources is, every five years, choosing its rulers, absorbing its contradictions, and continuing to grow.

Two decades of neutralising democratic experiments in China's near abroad, from Hong Kong to Tibet, have not given Beijing a template for India. The Party's case to its own people, that prosperity requires the suspension of choice, becomes harder to sustain the longer India continues to hold together.

The Indian economy crossed Japan’s in 2025. It has been the fastest growing major economy while in the same period China has come dangerously close to being a ‘Peaking Power’.

None of this requires Indians to argue with Chinese commentariat. India only has to do one thing — keep functioning.

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Swarajya has diagnosed the cost of Indian democracy before.

India democratised at 18% literacy, defying every comparable case, and has paid for it. Still does. But that there was no other way for India is also true. No way to be united in the 1950s except through democracy, no way to be democratic except through universal franchise.

Even with hundreds of languages and identities, India had a strong civilisational glue, but what about polity? Democracy gave it the polity and a unified statehood. Even sympathetic Chinese commentary concedes, when pressed and with some lament, that democracy has served as India’s safety valve.

The Indian task is to be a hard state inside the democratic frame, building industrial scale, human capital, and a private sector disciplined enough to compete.

As for China, a country at ease with its own model would not spend this much effort talking another out of theirs.

Inputs from “Why Premature Democracy Still Haunts India... And What To Do Now?” by .

For months, the Trump administration had been squeezing India over its purchases of Russian oil, and Reliance — India’s biggest oil buyer — was right in the crosshairs.

• Then Reliance committed money to a refinery project in Texas, and the pressure eased. The tariffs came down, a trade deal followed, and a company Washington had been attacking became a partner.

• There are questions swirling about how it all came together - but the basic manoeuvre is one that countries and companies have been running for a very long time.

The corner it was in:

• By August 2025, Washington had doubled its tariffs on India to 50% — about as harsh as it gets — just to punish India for buying cheap Russian crude.

• Navarro, the trade adviser, was out there in public pointing fingers at India’s “politically connected energy titans.”

• And think about what was at stake: nearly $87 billion of Indian exports, almost a fifth of the country’s goods trade, suddenly on the chopping block. Officials were warning that if India walked away from Russian barrels, crude could spike toward $200.

This was a national problem - it brings together business, national economy and security concerns all in one thread.

What Reliance did: Reliance simply pledged capital into a Texas refinery - and just like that, the adversary had skin in the game. Within months the tariff penalty was gone, a trade deal was signed, the sanctions waivers came through. Bloomberg even called it: foe to friend.

The pattern behind it: This is not new. Marrying business to national strategy is just how great powers have always operated.

• In 1945, with the war ending, Franklin Roosevelt met Saudi Arabia's King Abdulaziz on a US warship in the Suez Canal and struck a simple bargain: American protection in exchange for access to Saudi oil. The company that pumped it, Aramco, was American-owned — so a private oil firm became the living link holding the two countries together.

• The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe and, guess what, turned the place into a market for American factories.

• Today TSMC is sinking $165 billion into Arizona fabs as insurance against the very threat its chips are meant to deter.

Reliance may have its troubles elsewhere. But on this one - it read the board and moved at exactly the right moment.

Ever since the NEET-UG paper leak scandal erupted, the public conversation has settled on the Education Ministry as the villain. That story is emotionally satisfying and not without its logic but it misses a critical fact.

The ministry now facing the loudest criticism spent nearly eight years — across two separate leak controversies — trying to move NEET to a Computer-Based Test format.

The strongest resistance came from elsewhere, and it came twice.

The First Block: 2018

In July 2018, the then HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar announced that the newly created National Testing Agency would conduct major entrance examinations in computer-based mode. NEET too was slated to move online and be conducted twice a year.

But within a month, the plan was shelved — because the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare objected. The ministry argued that rural students would be disadvantaged by an online examination and raised concerns about additional stress from multiple exam cycles.

NEET would continue on paper, specifically at the Health Ministry's request.

Every other major competitive examination in India had already moved to CBT. JEE Main, CUET, NEET-PG, banking, railways, SSC recruitment — all digital. NEET alone was held back.

The Second Block: 2024–2025

When the 2024 NEET-UG paper leak triggered nationwide protests, a Supreme Court intervention, and the removal of the NTA chief, the case for CBT became impossible to argue against.

The Radhakrishnan Committee, formed in the aftermath, submitted recommendations in October 2024 strongly favouring a shift to CBT as the preferred mode to reduce leak risk.

Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan publicly stated in November 2024 that the transition was "in all likelihood" moving forward. The Education Ministry began implementation planning.

The Health Ministry and the National Medical Commission resisted again — this time citing concerns over equity, infrastructure gaps, and score normalisation across multiple exam shifts.

The Scandal That Forced the Obvious

On 3 May 2026, the paper leaked again. Within days, a national controversy had erupted, the examination was cancelled, and the matter was back before the Supreme Court.

On 15 May, Pradhan announced that NEET would move permanently to CBT from 2027. The position the Health Ministry had blocked twice in eight years became government policy in a matter of weeks.

India had the solution in 2018, rejected it, paid for it in 2024, rejected it again, and spent 2026 paying the bill a second time.

CBT brings its own challenges — normalisation, cybersecurity, infrastructure — but those are implementation problems. Paper leaks are structural ones.

The question Parliament should now ask is not why CBT is finally being introduced. It is who bears responsibility for the two occasions it was blocked, and what those decisions cost.

When the Ministry of Culture posted a picture of the Pashupati seal on X, calling it evidence of unbroken Indian civilisational continuity, it was met with frothing reactions from across the border and promptly ‘corrected’ by a corner of Western academia that the figure was probably an Iranian deity that Indian observers had read as proto-Shiva.

Four days later, MoC did something pleasantly unexpected. It doubled down and came back with a 4,500-year-old terracotta dice from “the Indus-Saraswati Civilization” and a line worth memorising: “Civilizational inheritance is not just about geography or ruins, it is defined by living customs, symbols, rituals, and unbroken cultural consciousness.”

For decades, the Indian state, when it bothered to speak of its civilisational past at all, did so in the apologetic manner of a guest at someone else’s seminar. Two posts in five days suggest a change. Something rarer. A preemptive strike on the narrative, made by a ministry that had its share of brickbats for not possessing civilisational instinct. No longer did it wish to be told what its civilisation was. It had to tell the story itself.

..

The loud counters that came from Pakistan are a symptom of a peculiar national pastime that has matured into a full-blown industry.

In the same month as the seal episode, Pakistani classical dance circuits held the country’s first Kathak festival in Lahore and rebranded Kathak, Odissi and Bharatanatyam as having sprung from the “Indus Valley” and therefore from “this part of the world.”

Pakistani wedding reels routinely showcase Haldi, Sangeet, Varmala, Garba, Dandiya, the diya and the aarti as elegant traditions with the source label peeled off.

The argument underneath the appropriation, however, is incoherent on its own terms. The Mecca-MohenjoDaro contradiction is so structural that Pakistan has stopped noticing it. Cite Mohenjo-Daro as proof of antiquity. Cite imagined Arab and Turkic bloodlines as proof of pure faith. Cite whichever uncle the occasion demands.

A polity that styles itself protector of Mecca and Medina, situated deserts and oceans away, whose theology has always taken civilisational belonging to flow through the sword of faith, which defines itself by conversion away from the subcontinent’s pre-Islamic past, cannot simultaneously walk back and claim that past as its own. It cannot now claim the Indus Valley by present-day cartography.

The very theology that grants Pakistan its kinship with Mecca forbids it kinship with Mohenjo-Daro. The grandparents cannot be repudiated as kafirs in one breath and resurrected as ancestors in the next. Heritage is not a buffet from which the inconvenient theological dish may be skipped.

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However, the cunningness lies in the next step, and the pattern repeats too cleanly to be a coincidence.

After the appropriation comes the distortion. The Pashupati seal is reread as a hand-me-down and attributed to a “proto-Elamite” iconography or to a generic Eurasian Lord of the Beasts. The dance traditions become “South Asian classical arts.” Yoga becomes generic “South Asian wellness.” Sacred rituals are branded as “aesthetics.”

The final move is the stripping. The Dharmic is recast as “South Asian” and “secular”, the distinctly Indian as the “common heritage of humanity”. By the time the recasting is done, the practitioners are incidental.

The terminal step is the cleverest. “South Asian” presents itself as neutral. It performs as a scalpel. The phrase excises Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh genealogies from the practices those traditions invented and sustained, and presents the residue as everyone’s.

The line one hears is that yoga has nothing to do with Hinduism. The same will eventually be said of the seal and Shiva, of the Indus-Saraswati Civilisation. Once that move is permitted, the original culture cannot defend its ownership without sounding chauvinist.

The Dharmic substrate of the inheritance is not allowed to remain, because it falsifies the founding myth of the Pakistani state. So the substrate is washed off.

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Inside Pakistan, the same instinct runs yet another parallel campaign.

The Lahore Authority for Heritage Revival set out to restore the pre-Partition names of Lahore’s streets and neighbourhoods. Islampura would become Krishan Nagar again; Jain Mandir Chowk would carry its old signboard. The project was budgeted, endorsed by editorials at home, and advertised abroad as evidence of an inclusive, civilisationally confident Pakistan.

Though the advertised inclusivity, disguised as restoration, could not survive its inception. The plan was quietly deferred when Islamist groups and a band of social-media vloggers registered their displeasure. The Hindu heritage gets reclaimed when it flatters the brand abroad and is dropped for Islamists at home.

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What the Ministry of Culture did, almost in passing, was decline to participate in this game. Its case rested on continuity. The inheritance belongs to India because India never let go of the practice — the mudras carved on the seal are still danced, the fire on the altars at Kalibangan is still lit at every yajna, the dice of the Vedic gambler’s hymn still rolls in every household before Diwali, and the morning prayers at every temple.

Geography is merely the accident of where ruins happen to fall. The civilisational thread the dice and the seal point to is the thread of the Saraswati flowing through the Ghaggar-Hakra basin where the largest concentration of these sites still lies. The proper name, which the Ministry’s own caption uses, is Sindhu-Saraswati. The river has dried. The civilisation has not. By that test the civilisational verdict was settled four millennia ago.

The two posts may mark the beginnings of an Indian state that has stopped apologising for the obvious. The pushback will keep arriving, as ‘academia’ from one direction and appropriation from the other. Sometimes, also from within. The work now is to make confidence and ownership the standing posture, not the exception.

There is a version of the ongoing UP power crisis story that fits neatly into the usual political template — government fails, people suffer, opposition scores points. That story is not wrong as much as it is incomplete.
For one, here is what the numbers actually say.

Uttar Pradesh supplied around 31,803 MW of electricity against a peak demand of 31,804 MW this month. The state has, for all practical purposes, matched its highest-ever electricity demand. A decade ago, that would have been unthinkable. The generation problem — the one that kept UP dark through the 1990s and 2000s — has largely been solved.

And yet, the lights are going out for many hours at a stretch in Lucknow's suburbs. Protests and demonstrations have broken out across districts. BJP MLAs have publicly raised concerns with their own government.

The electricity exists. It is simply not reaching the people.

Transformers are failing under loads they were not built to carry. Distribution networks designed for a different era are buckling. Repair crews are understaffed. When thermal plants go offline for maintenance — pulling 3,000 to 4,500 MW out of the daily balance — the slack that a healthier distribution system might absorb instead cascades into unscheduled cuts.

This is a Level 2 problem. Level 1 — build enough power — was the defining infrastructure challenge of the previous two decades. Level 2 is quieter, less heroic, and in some ways harder: upgrade every substation, every transformer, every last-mile wire in a state of close to 25 crore people, faster than the demand growth.

It does not generate the same political momentum that building a power plant does. There is no ribbon to cut on a replaced transformer.

But this is where the next decade of India's energy policy will be won or lost — not in generation capacity announcements, but in the unglamorous work of making sure the electricity that exists actually arrives.

America’s LNG investments are too big to fail. And that fact alone has turned US foreign policy into a market-share enforcement machine.

The United States is tripling its LNG export capacity by 2030. Hundreds of billions of dollars are already committed. Terminals under construction, pipelines laid, contracts signed. Money of this magnitude needs buyers, preferably buyers who have nowhere else to go.

Any competitor that shows up threatens to sink the whole thing.

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In 2024, America, Australia, and Qatar together controlled over 60 per cent of global LNG trade. Canada has two projects underway, aiming for 10 per cent by 2030. Together, this American-led bloc could meet virtually all global demand by decade’s end.

Now look at who’s sitting on the gas but not allowed to sell it. Russia holds the world’s largest natural gas reserves, roughly equal to America, Australia, and Qatar put together. Its share of global LNG exports? Eight per cent.

Iran has nearly as much gas as Russia. Its LNG market share is zero. Venezuela, Iraq, Libya, Kuwait, all sitting on enormous reserves, all exporting zero LNG.

That gap has been enforced, country by country, for two decades.

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Russia got sanctions and a proxy war in Ukraine that severed its gas pipelines to Europe.

Iran got decades of sanctions, a nuclear deal that was never meant to succeed, and then a third Gulf war, conveniently timed after it signed a $40 billion LNG terminal deal with Russia.

Venezuela got regime-change operations, after which American companies were handed rights to develop Venezuelan gas fields by routing them through Trinidad and Tobago’s infrastructure.

Yemen’s French-built LNG terminal was shut down by the Houthi uprising.

Mozambique discovered vast gas reserves in 2015 and ran into Islamist terrorism two years later, stalling an Indo-French LNG project for a decade.

Every country that tried entering the LNG export market without American approval found itself at war, in internal conflict, under sanctions, or all.

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Europe is bearing the cost most visibly.

It was shoved off cheap Russian piped gas, available next door, and onto American LNG that costs two to five times more. Over 190,000 companies went bankrupt across Western Europe in 2024. Steel and fertiliser plants are shutting permanently. The International Energy Agency says half the industrial gas demand lost during 2022-23 won’t come back because the factories that consumed it no longer exist. The colonisers have become the colonised.

China sees what’s happening and is moving fast. More piped gas from Russia, domestic production up 30 per cent since 2020. India is diversifying hard across UAE, Qatar, North America, Mozambique, and Russia, making sure no single bloc gets a chokehold on its supply.

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America has turned hydrocarbons into its single largest export category and built an entire geopolitical architecture around protecting it. The capacity is being built. Every cubic metre needs a buyer who has nowhere else to turn. So rivals with reserves stay offline, allies stay locked in, and the wars that enforce the whole arrangement keep grinding on.

Every LNG terminal under construction in Louisiana or Texas has a corresponding conflict burning somewhere to keep it profitable. That can’t last forever. But the damage it does on the way down could reshape the global order for a generation.

Based on “The Gas Wars Are Here: America’s Quest To Own LNG Empire Rests On Conflict, Not Competition” by Venu Gopal Narayanan | Read the original

There is a particular kind of Indian diplomat, retired, comfortable, fluent in the language of nuance, who has spent decades ensuring that Pakistan never pays the full price for its terrorism. The method is always the same. After each atrocity, this class counsels restraint, proposes a fresh dialogue track, and frames continued engagement as the sophisticated response. The vocabulary rotates; the function does not. Absorb the shock, propose a process, let the moment of accountability pass, repeat.

Nirupama Menon Rao, former Foreign Secretary of India, has just offered the latest iteration of this service.

In a series of posts on X, Rao declared the India-Pakistan relationship trapped in a “single script: territory, terror, recrimination,” repeated with “ritual precision” and yielding “diminishing returns.” Her prescription: parallel tracks of engagement in West Asia, energy cooperation, diaspora welfare, maritime stability, and, with a flourish, a “women’s caucus” animated by women’s “ingrained common sense.” She branded it “insulation, not transformation,” as though the rebrand were itself the argument.

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What Rao airily dismisses as a single script is a set of facts, and the consequences of discarding them deserve to be stated plainly.

If territory is a rhetorical habit, then Pakistan’s occupation of Kashmir is simply the status quo, to be managed rather than reversed, which is, of course, Islamabad’s preferred position.

If terror is a talking point that yields diminishing returns, then India should stop raising it, which grants Pakistan the only thing its terror infrastructure has ever needed: impunity.

And if accountability is mere recrimination, then the dead of Pahalgam and Mumbai are reduced to diplomatic baggage, an embarrassment to be set aside so that sophisticated people may get on with the business of engagement.

Rao does not state these conclusions. She does not need to. They are the only destination her logic permits, and a former Foreign Secretary ought to know where her own argument leads.

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Since when do the women of India want anything different from the men of India when it comes to the Pakistani problem? At Pahalgam, newlywed husbands were shot in the head while their brides, still wearing wedding bangles, watched. Did the widows of Pahalgam grieve differently because of their gender? Did the mothers and widows of soldiers killed along the LoC across three decades desire “women’s caucuses” and “parallel tracks”?

When terror did discriminate based on gender, it was worse for Indian women.

The terrorists at Pahalgam spared the women because the logic of Pakistan’s terror ecosystem has always carried a specific, gendered cruelty: kill the men, render the women as spoils. In 1990, loudspeakers atop mosques across the Kashmir Valley blared through the freezing dark: Asi gachchi Pakistan, Batao roas te Batanev san, we want Pakistan, with Hindu women, but without their men. A promise of conquest and enslavement, directed explicitly at women.

The argument that gender can cut through what decades of statecraft could not is also historically illiterate.

Benazir Bhutto, Oxford-educated, photogenic, globally hailed as the face of progressive Muslim leadership, sponsored the JKLF’s escalation into full-blown insurgency in Kashmir. Under her watch, the Taliban were created with ISI support.

On a visit to Muzaffarabad in 1990, she exhorted a crowd to chop the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir into pieces, jag-jag, mo-mo, han-han, slicing the air with her hand to leave no ambiguity. She screamed azadi slogans, called Kashmiris the blood of mujahids and ghazis, and effectively lit the fuse for the ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits. On the Indian side, it was during a woman’s Prime Ministership that India broke Pakistan into two. Gender has never determined strategic behaviour. There is no reason to pretend it does now.

As Arshia Malik, herself a Kashmiri Muslim woman, has pointed out, the elite women of Pakistan provide intellectual and rhetorical cover for the jihadi apparatus of their own military-industrial complex, even as ordinary Pakistani women suffer under Hudood laws, honour killings, blasphemy accusations, forced conversions, and the quiet genocide of Baloch communities. A “women’s caucus” bridging a gap rooted in the Pakistani state’s use of terror as an instrument of policy does not deserve serious engagement. It deserves derision.

..

The most instructive part of this episode, however, is the applause.

Within hours of Rao’s thread on the Iran war, Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan’s former Foreign Minister, quote-tweeted it, calling it “strategic clarity” and expressing “deep nostalgia.” She hoped “the current trend is an aberration and not the final chapter of South Asia’s destiny.” The next day, replying directly to Khar’s endorsement, Rao proposed the parallel tracks, described them as “insulation, not transformation,” and concluded: “The women must speak.”

Let us be precise about who was applauding. Khar, who just months ago called India a “belligerent, rogue, terrorist state.” Who told a press conference in Islamabad that “no country has used terrorism better than India.” Who, after Operation Sindoor, accused India of “setting a dangerous new criteria” for the region. She now gazes upon Rao’s thread and feels nostalgia, and one can see why.

What Khar misses is the diplomatic class to which Rao belongs, the class that staffed track-II dialogues and bankrolled peace initiatives while the deep state ran the terror pipeline without so much as a polite pause. Those processes gave Pakistan cover, optics, and time. Khar misses those Indians because they were useful. They kept the game going while Pakistan never had to fold.

One does not need to speculate about whether Rao’s proposal serves Pakistan’s interests. Pakistan’s own former Foreign Minister confirmed it, publicly and enthusiastically, within hours.

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Rao, to her credit, anticipates the objection that any engagement risks being instrumentalised. She knows the counter well enough to state it herself. She simply believes the word “insulation” is sufficient to retire it.

It is not. Insulation requires a partner who respects boundaries, and Pakistan has not respected a single one across seven decades: not at Agra, not after Mumbai, not after Pathankot, and not after Pahalgam. Every insulated track India has opened has been converted, with practised efficiency, into a concession extracted while the terror infrastructure hummed along undisturbed.

Rao herself has form. In 2012, barely four years after 166 people were killed in Mumbai by Lashkar-e-Taiba, the diplomatic establishment that Rao led was planning to sell electricity to Pakistan even while India could not generate enough for its own demand. This instinct is consistent: engage first, assess later, and treat scepticism as a failure of imagination rather than a product of lived experience.

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The women of India did not need a caucus. The widows who watched their husbands shot through the skull were not waiting for parallel tracks with the country that made them widows. They wanted what decades of this diplomatic gentility have deferred: a price, paid in full.

Rao’s hubris is naive at best and callous at worst. She is auditioning, whether she knows it or not, for exactly the role Islamabad needs. An Indian voice that buys time and ensures the cost of terrorism never quite arrives at Pakistan’s door. Wrapping that audition in the language of women’s empowerment does not soften it. It mocks the women who suffered most from it.

India’s most vulnerable chokepoint — twenty-two kilometres of land connecting the mainland to eight northeastern states — just got two new governors. One is a career IB officer who spent decades studying how border populations migrate, settle, and redraw political maps. The other commanded Kashmir’s Chinar Corps during its worst years.

Everyone’s talking about a new Union Territory. They’re watching the wrong hand.

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Between 25 February and 6 March, three things happened in quick succession. Amit Shah arrived in Seemanchal for a closed-door security tour. R.N. Ravi, whose official IB profile lists his specialisation as the political sociology of border populations, was moved from Tamil Nadu to West Bengal’s Raj Bhavan. Lieutenant General Syed Ata Hasnain, architect of Kashmir’s Hearts Doctrine, was named Bihar’s governor. Both appointments dropped within twenty-four hours of each other.

The RJD immediately accused Shah of planning to carve a UT from Seemanchal and West Bengal. Mamata Banerjee staged a sit-in, warning Delhi was trying to “divide Bengal.” Pappu Yadav piled on. The Home Ministry denied everything. And the UT debate consumed all the oxygen, which may have been the point — because the actual instrument Delhi appears to be assembling doesn’t require Parliament’s permission at all.

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Look at what’s already on the table. In West Bengal, the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision deleted 58 lakh voter names and placed 60 lakh more under adjudication — highest concentrations in Murshidabad and Malda, the corridor districts. In Jharkhand, the Centre filed an affidavit before the High Court documenting that the tribal share of Santhal Pargana’s population fell from 44.67 per cent in 1951 to 28.11 per cent by 2011, while the Muslim share surged from single digits to an estimated 22–24 per cent. The affidavit used the word “infiltration.” In Seemanchal, Kishanganj sits at 68 per cent Muslim — against Bihar’s state average of 17 per cent.

Thirteen contiguous districts across three states, two international borders, and one chokepoint. The demographic data is now on court record. The voter rolls are being cleaned. And the two men installed on either side of the corridor have spent their careers in exactly this kind of terrain.

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Here’s the thing: a Union Territory carved from three states is legally simple but politically impossible. Article 3 requires consulting three legislatures — two of which are opposition-governed. Mamata would weaponise it as victimhood for a decade. Hemant Soren defeated the BJP’s infiltration argument in Jharkhand’s 2024 elections and has zero incentive to cooperate. The J&K 2019 model needed President’s Rule and no elected government to resist. None of those conditions exist here.

But there’s a precedent for something quieter. In 2023, the Election Commission completed Assam’s delimitation — the first since 1976 — using 2001 Census data instead of the more contested 2011 figures. It redrew all 126 constituencies and recalibrated political representation in ways that Bengali-origin Muslim communities argued had diluted their electoral weight. No parliamentary vote required. Delimitation Commission orders carry the force of law and are nearly unjusticiable.

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Now connect the pieces. The post-2026 Census provisions that froze constituency numbers are about to expire, reopening nationwide delimitation. A delimitation exercise covering Seemanchal, Bengal’s corridor districts, and Santhal Pargana — using the SIR-cleaned voter rolls as baseline — achieves electorally what a UT achieves administratively. It recalibrates representational weight across the entire belt. No majority needed. No victimhood platform for Mamata. No cooperation required from Hemant. It arrives not as a political event but as a technical exercise by a constitutional body: routine democratic maintenance, not territorial surgery.

The political consequences could be identical. The optics would be unrecognisable.

Ravi is the Centre’s sensor inside a state whose government will treat every central intelligence initiative in the corridor as a provocation. Hasnain, with his counter-insurgency background and civilian engagement doctrine, is positioned for the period when the recalibration — if it comes — needs to be managed without producing the very alienation it’s meant to prevent. They aren’t there to announce anything. They’re there to prepare conditions — patiently, institutionally, below the threshold of crisis.

The formal instrument, when it comes, probably won’t be reorganisation. It’ll be delimitation. Same destination. Reached by means that don’t require announcing the journey.

Based on “Why Delhi Placed A Spymaster And A General On Either Side Of The Siliguri Corridor“ by Abhishek Kumar.

India has 125,000 chip designers, and not one of them designs a chip that India owns.

Niti Aayog member V.K. Saraswat said the quiet part out loud last week when he told Mint that Indian designers contribute to virtually every chip produced globally but work primarily for MNCs, mostly on subsystems and components, with very few capable of what he called “ab initio design of a complete system.”

What makes this significant is not the diagnosis — anyone in the industry knows this — but the fact that a senior government figure finally framed India’s celebrated design talent as a structural dependency rather than a national strength.

..

Because what Saraswat described is India’s IT services model — labour arbitrage without value creation — replicated inside silicon. Intel employs 14,000 engineers in Bengaluru, AMD has 6,500 across ten locations, and in February 2026 Qualcomm completed a 2nm chip tape-out entirely from its Indian centres, which is a genuine frontier achievement.

But the architecture decisions, the product strategy, and the patent filings all stay at headquarters, which is why Qualcomm filed 3,482 patent applications at the Indian Patent Office in 2022-23 while Cadence India’s own managing director acknowledged publicly that what India is missing is homegrown product companies. India provides the brains; San Diego captures the value.

The pride in “Indians design every chip” is precisely the delusion that prevents the country from asking why no Indian company designs any chip worth naming.

..

And yet a handful of startups have quietly proven that end-to-end chip design from Indian soil is an accomplished fact. Signalchip, backed by Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu, built India’s first indigenous 4G/5G modem chips — one of roughly eight companies on Earth with this capability, now deployed in Indian Army base stations.

Mindgrove Technologies shipped a commercial RISC-V microcontroller fabricated at TSMC’s 28nm node. Saankhya Labs developed production software-defined radio chipsets. ISRO’s Vikram 3201 is a flight-tested, fully indigenous space-grade processor. These are real chips with real deployments, and they validate Saraswat’s premise that the talent exists — the question is entirely about what kind of ecosystem surrounds it.

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Which is where his diagnosis collides with budget reality. The Design Linked Incentive scheme, the only government programme directly funding chip design startups, has a total allocation of roughly ₹1,000 crore — barely 1.3% of the semiconductor mission outlay — and supports just 24 companies whose combined VC funding of ₹430 crore is less than what AMD spends in India in a single year.

ISM 2.0’s R&D allocation works out to approximately $120 million, which would not cover the cost of a single advanced SoC programme at Qualcomm or Apple. For perspective, China poured $98 billion across three Big Fund phases and built a $91 billion fabless industry from near-zero in two decades, and Taiwan spent 20 years building a deliberate pipeline from ITRI’s government-funded research to the TSMC spinoff to MediaTek.

We’re saying the scale of this challenge is many times larger than the budget we have for it.

..

Saraswat says the mission will recruit MNC designers to build indigenous capability, but the question he didn’t answer is what they’d be recruited to — because Signalchip’s founder survived his first four years on $2 million from family and friends after every VC in the country turned him away, and the DLI scheme’s per-company allocation of roughly $2.4 million is enough for one mask set at a trailing-edge node but nowhere near enough to build a globally competitive product.

There is no government procurement mandate for indigenous chips, no patient capital fund that understands decade-long hardware return horizons, and no DARPA equivalent guaranteeing first customers.

The startups have proven the concept, but until the distance between what gets said at Niti Aayog and what gets funded by the Finance Ministry narrows dramatically, Indian chip sovereignty will remain a conference-stage aspiration rather than an industrial reality.