CARE, cane, and they cannot care less
Hey there,
What a wild wild week it has been back home. From the Jharkhand protest win to the FIR about the use of pellet guns during the July Jantar Mantar protests and the 'School Theek Karo' (Fix the Schools) campaigns, we have seen a new wave of positive developments in the country. Of course there have been a lot of undesirable developments as well but for a second let's focus on how people are starting to take stand. The veneer of fear is starting to lift and I hope this is only the start, irrespective of party alignments. The first step is always the hardest, the scariest. And somehow the CJP protest acted as that first move in the game of checkers for many people. I don't know why but this is making me extra excited about my annual trip to India this year.
On that happy note, enjoy the rest of your weekend!
Just the gist
🔗 Jharkhand protest and the people that came under
Another day, another protest win... for some. The Jharkhand government agreed to the demands of the protestors after 26 days of protest. But not all are happy about it and for once they are not whatabouters who are just chronically unhappy people. This time, there is more to the story.
The 14th Jharkhand Combined Civil Services Examination this April drew allegations of irregularities, missing category-wise cutoffs, no signatures from commission members on results, and a viral OMR sheet that appeared to show a qualified candidate scoring below the cutoff. That triggered a CID investigation, then an SIT, raids, and around 25 arrests, including a former JPSC chairperson and a marketing manager for the exam vendor TDPL, a company that had already been blacklisted by Uttar Pradesh and by Jharkhand's own JSSC before this scandal even broke.
By late July, students in Ranchi were demanding a CBI probe and action across multiple recruitment examinations, not just the one that started the controversy. After 26 days of sustained protest and an ultimatum, the government announced on August 18 that it was cancelling 22 recruitment examinations and processes entirely, putting six more on hold pending investigation, and referring 17 older JPSC recruitments, some dating back to 2010, to CID for a fresh look. In total, 45 recruitment processes across the state's civil service, judiciary, medical, engineering, agricultural, forestry, and academic recruitment pipelines are now affected. Students called off their protest on August 19, treating this as a win.
The next day, however, the Jharkhand High Court stayed the cancellation of the 11th-13th JPSC exam specifically, along with the government's decision to cancel appointments of people who had already joined government service through it. Four of the cancelled recruitment processes had already reached the appointment stage, meaning real people, 342 civil service appointees, 1,932 JSSC-CGL appointees, plus smaller cohorts of Child Development Project Officers and Food Safety Officers, had already been selected, in many cases already working, already training, already posted to districts. The court order states that regular appointments cannot be cancelled overnight without due process or justification since there is no evidence against those whose appointment is being cancelled.
The protesting students have a completely legitimate grievance: if the recruitment process itself was compromised by leaks, rigged evaluations, or a blacklisted vendor, then everyone who went through that process, including toppers, deserves to know the results were actually fair. But candidates who cleared exams honestly, some of whom left stable careers to pursue this path, are now having to carry the burden of the system's failure.
The government's response beyond the cancellations includes some structural steps worth noting: a request for fast-track courts to handle these cases, internal vigilance cells within both JPSC and JSSC, and a reform committee headed by a senior IAS officer expected to report back within two months.
➡️ I believe that the protestors deserved their win. They deserved the acknowledgment that the system is rotten at its core and that needs to change. In that way, this win is no different and in no way less monumental than the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan after the July Jantar Mantar protest. However, treating this specific one as done and dusted is indeed unfair because while the latter came for the job of one corrupt politician, this one also came for the jobs of thousands of people. So the HC stay does make sense, even if that makes the win feel less like one, as long as the promised investigations into past exams and recruitment processes and the follow-up to the investigation results take place as promised. A cancellation of recruitments of some after the results of the investigations are out is fair for both parties, the current recruits and protestors who fought for a fair system.
🔗 PM CARES (not) Fund has a (not) spending problem
Finally, she has been unveiled. After years of rejected RTI requests, TV debates, and finally CJP spokesperson's sarcastic comment on national TV that the CJP is funded by the PM CARES fund and so it must be audited, the audit report is out and the numbers are bigger than its namesake's ego.
The PM CARES Fund was set up in March 2020 to fund pandemic and disaster relief. It is chaired by the Prime Minister, with Union Cabinet Ministers as trustees, and it accepts voluntary contributions including CSR money from public sector companies and donations from government employees. That structure alone should tell you this is functioning as something very close to a government fund in practice, even if it has been legally classified otherwise.
The audit statements for FY 2023-24 and FY 2024-25 were only released this week, after the fund had simply stopped uploading annual disclosures since FY 2022-23. Radio silence on whim. Sounds like our Home Minister during the Parliament's Monsoon Session this year.
Now to the actual numbers. In FY 2024-25, the fund's total income grew 41% to Rs 1,279.9 crore, even as direct donations fell about 30% to Rs 480 crore, the difference made up by interest earned on the fund's bank deposits and refunds (!) coming back from agencies that had implemented projects. Refunds because once a flash flood has wiped out villages, there is nothing left to spend money on, right? Of course those funds are underspent. -_-
Rs 324 crore was refunded to the fund in FY 2024-25 by implementing agencies, organisations that had presumably received money to actually carry out relief projects. But the filings provide no information about which agencies these were, why the money was refunded, or what the money had originally been meant for.
Against all of that money available, the fund spent a whopping Rs 87.85 lakh in FY 2024-25. Eighty-seven lakh rupees spent, against a closing balance of Rs 8,452 crore. I am not exaggerating when I say, I have friends whose wedding expenditure was more than that. That works out to roughly 0.01% of the available balance actually utilised in the year. Looking at the full picture since the fund's creation in 2020, it has spent less than one-fifth, 18.4%, of everything it has collected. This as flash floods ravage several states year after year. This as India faces drought-like conditions. This as the pandemic devasted families.
Also, despite functioning in every practical sense like a government fund, chaired by the sitting PM, staffed by Cabinet ministers, accepting money that flows through public sector CSR obligations, PM CARES has consistently maintained it is not a "public authority" under India's Right to Information Act. When this was challenged, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs reportedly went so far as to retrospectively amend the relevant Companies Act rules to help preserve that classification. The practical result is that PM CARES currently sits outside the reach of RTI requests, outside routine parliamentary scrutiny, and outside audit by India's Comptroller and Auditor General, the constitutional body that normally audits how public money gets spent in India.
➡️ While we get this brief window to talk about the PM CARES Fund before they throw another distraction at us, can we also address the absolute irony that is the name. In so many ways. PM CARES Fund that has not been spent towards caring for flood raavaged people. PM CARES Fund that is funded by everyone but the PM. PM CARES Fund that earns more in interest returns than it spends on relief! And worst of all how any and all information about the money that people donated is inaccessible to the same people.
🔗 This Diwali sweets might come with a sweeter price hike
Oh we are back on E20 but for reasons different from is in your parents' vehicles.
Retail sugar prices in India have climbed about 13% year-on-year, from Rs 46.34 to Rs 52.30 per kilogram as of mid-August. Ex-mill prices, what mills actually charge before retail markup, have jumped even more sharply, from around Rs 3,900 per quintal a year ago to Rs 5,400-5,500 now. This is a huge jump in a single year, and the timing is bad. Demand typically surges around this time with the festival season, Ganesh Chaturthi, Dussehra, and Diwali all falling in this August-to-November window.
Now, why is our kaju katli suddenly at the risk of becoming more expensive. The upcoming 2026-27 sugar season starts October 1, and opening stock estimates going into it are worryingly low. Industry estimates put it at 40-42 lakh tonnes, while some independent researchers peg it even lower, at 32-35 lakh tonnes. Either way, that is below India's estimated domestic requirement of around 50 lakh tonnes.
Interestingly, India has enough sugarcane growing in its fields. It has hundreds of distilleries built specifically to feed the ethanol blending programme. And increasingly, it looks like those two facts are directly connected to why sugar itself has become scarce and expensive. Sugarcane makes up 30-35% of ethanol feedstock in India, and as the government has pushed harder toward its E20 target, more cane has been diverted away from becoming sugar and toward becoming fuel.
Over recent years, exports have been steadily restricted culminating in an outright export ban from May 13 through September 30 this year. Despite that, domestic prices kept climbing, which is what pushed the government to considering importing sugar from abroad for the first time in a decade. That too when India is the second largest exporter of sugar, after Brazil.
India's Chief Economic Advisor, V Anantha Nageswaran, in a co-written piece had explicitly recommended that the government not push toward higher ethanol blends "until India has thoroughly costed the food-versus-fuel trade-off." Given everything we have already covered about E20 delivering lower mileage without clear consumer savings, this is another data point suggesting the programme was rolled out hastily.
Furthermore, at a time when the PM had to ask his fellow citizens to avoid foreign trips to save on India's foreign currency reserves and the RBI literally made banks make it sweeter for us to park our foreign currencies in India, having to spend those foreign currencies on buying something that we used to be able to sell is kinda... not chic.
➡️ Poor policy never lives in isolation. It starts a domino effect. And the starting point is often sheer arrogance. The same that we have seen in the way the entire cabinet rallied behind the E20 push in the name of energy security, a security threatened largely by the Centre's bowing down to US demands. Now, the run for the security has led to food insecurity. Which will lead some other insecurity which will, somehow, lead us back to how it is all Nehru's fault somehow. On the bright side, fewer people are falling for it now because when the government's bad policy reaches your wallets, narratives run out of steam.
🔗 The only topic worth discussing in the Parliament: Vande Mataram
A new distraction strategy has entered the discussion lately and that is our national song. From trying make it mandatory to be sung before the national anthem during official events to making it a punishable offence to interrupt, the government has been on top of it while Indian citizens drown in Assam, die in Manipur, and generally suffer everywhere else.
New in that deck of cards is how much of the song is the official version. The BJP wants all 6 stanzas to be sung. We were taught the first two. They probably can't sing one. But when has that ever stopped them? The Congress Working Committee decided that only the first two stanzas of Vande Mataram will be sung at party events, and it is citing a specific 1937 CWC resolution as its basis. This comes right after the BJP made a point of singing all six stanzas at its Independence Day and Goa events, and just months after Parliament passed a law making it an offence to intentionally disrupt or prevent the singing of Vande Mataram, extending it the same legal protection as the national anthem.
The history behind the debate exists and is very telling of why the BJP is making this push now and it's not because of the songs literary merits. The song was written by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1875, included in his 1881 novel Anandmath, which is set during an armed uprising against the East India Company. It became central to the freedom movement during the Swadeshi period in the early 1900s. But the Muslim League objected to it from early on, on the specific grounds that "bowing to the mother" as depicted in the song amounted to idolatry, a conflict with Islamic monotheism. Subhas Chandra Bose and Nehru wrote to Tagore asking his opinion directly. Tagore said the first portion of the song, with its tenderness toward the beauty of the motherland, appealed to him specifically because he found it easy to separate from the rest of the poem, while conceding plainly that "the whole of Bankim's Vande Mataram poem, read together with its context, is liable to be interpreted in ways that might wound Moslem susceptibilities."
The actual textual reason becomes clear once you look at what the later stanzas contain. The third stanza invokes "crores and crores" of arms bearing swords in the motherland's defence. The fourth describes the motherland's image carved into every shrine. The fifth explicitly likens the motherland to the goddesses Durga, Lakshmi, and Saraswati. Historian Tanika Sarkar's reading is that these later portions become, in the context of the novel itself, a call to war where Muslims are positioned as the adversary, with the motherland taking the form of a Hindu goddess.
So in October 1937, the CWC made the two-stanza distinction, explicitly noting that the later stanzas were little known, rarely sung, and contained "religious ideology which may not be in keeping with the ideology of other religious groups in India." Gandhi took essentially the same position, writing in 1939 that he never considered it a Hindu song, called it "an anti-imperialist cry," but said plainly that he "would not risk a single quarrel over singing Vandemataram at a mixed gathering" and that if anyone objected even to the truncated version, the singing should simply be dropped. To mix this with appeasement politics would be wrong because this was the founding generation of the freedom movement working through a pluralism question in real time, with real disagreement, informed discussions, landing on a specific compromise keeping in mind all those who call the country home.
The 1950 resolution is where I think the current legal argument actually gets interesting. President Rajendra Prasad told the Constituent Assembly that Jana Gana Mana would be the national anthem, while Vande Mataram, "which has played a historic part in the struggle for Indian freedom, shall be honoured equally" and have "equal status." Congress general secretary Jairam Ramesh's argument now is that this 1950 declaration specifically referred to the two-stanza version that had already become the de facto standard, and that Parliament's 2026 law extending legal protection to the song never actually passed a resolution formally establishing that the full six-stanza version is what qualifies as the national song, meaning the government's directive requiring all six stanzas at official function has no legal leg to stand on.
➡️ The more you read and learn about the context in which the song was written and in which the truncated version was honoured as the national song, the more you see why a party that has run and won elections on communally divisive politics more than anything else would want to start this up. Congress's standing by the 2 stanza version will feed straight into their Muslim appeasement narrative against the Congress while stoking the ego of their newfound Bengali mates. But most importantly, is this the most urgent need of the country?
🔗 When anti-discrimination is too incovenient for your votebank
In 2019, the mothers of Payal Tadvi and Rohith Vemula, two students who died by suicide over alleged caste-based discrimination in their institutions, petitioned the Supreme Court for stronger anti-discrimination mechanisms in higher education. That petition eventually produced the UGC's 2026 equity regulations, replacing older 2012 rules, and specifically defining caste-based discrimination as discrimination against members of SC, ST, and OBC communities, while also requiring OBC representation on new "equity committees" set up in institutions.
The regulation immediately drew a legal challenge. Petitioners argued that defining caste discrimination this narrowly excludes people from general or upper castes "regardless of the nature, gravity, or context of discrimination suffered by them." There was also a separate, more procedural objection: an earlier draft of the regulation had included penalties for filing false discrimination complaints, and that penalty provision was dropped in the final version, while institutions themselves could still face consequences for non-compliance. The Supreme Court stayed the regulation back in January, with the bench noting it could have "sweeping consequences" and might "divide society," and one judge specifically invoked the risk of India ending up with the kind of segregated schooling history the US went through.
This week, the Solicitor General told the Court the government is "reconsidering" the regulation. Multiple BJP leaders are candid that this is not really about legal or constitutional concerns, it is about upper-caste anger, which the party considers its core constituency. The BJP's loss in Bankipur, a seat it had held for three decades and one with a notably high upper-caste voter concentration, is being read as a direct expression of that anger. Add to that a Rajput Karni Sena protest in Jaipur against this same regulation.
But here is why I think this is a much harder needle for the BJP to thread than it might look from the outside. OBCs, SCs, and STs combined vastly outnumber general category in the actual electorate, and the party has spent years since 2014 deliberately courting exactly these communities, agreeing to caste enumeration in the Census, introducing this very UGC regulation, having former President Ram Nath Kovind describe the party as "Ambedkarwadi" at an RSS centenary event. That outreach was itself a direct response to the 2024 Lok Sabha election, where the Opposition's "400 seats to end reservations" narrative reportedly cost the BJP real seats in states like Maharashtra and UP. So withdrawing or gutting this regulation now risks reopening exactly that wound, handing the Opposition a fresh and very simple line: the BJP talks about backward classes and then rolls back protections the moment its own upper-caste base gets uncomfortable.
➡️ This is not a legal story about the precise wording of an anti-discrimination regulation. It is a live demonstration of how caste arithmetic shapes even ostensibly neutral policy decisions in India, where the same government that built years of outreach toward OBC, SC, and ST voters is now visibly wobbling the moment its traditional upper-caste base pushes back, in a state election cycle where both blocs matter enormously. The regulation itself emerged from two deaths and a genuine, well-documented pattern of caste discrimination in Indian higher education. I mean our track record is so bad that even California had to pass a law criminalising caste-based discrimination! Now, whether the UGC anti-discrimination regulation survives in anything like its current form depends less on the merits the Tadvi and Vemula families originally fought for, and more on which caste coalition the BJP calculates it can least afford to alienate before the UP election.
That's all for today, folks. Thank you for coming this far!
See you next week! 😄
