Could have, would have, should have
Hey you,
Happy New Year! This week marked the new year for many regions and cultures across the country, from Punjab to Assam, from Bengal to Kerala, each celebration unique and equally tasty. :D As a Bengali, I wish you a Shubho Nobo Borsho. But also Happy Ugadi, Gudi Padwa, Baisakhi, Vishu, and Puthandu. We may call it by various names and eat different types of food at home to bring it in, but what it signifies across the board is renewal. A fresh start. So what if your new year's resolution went down the drain by mid-Jan. Here is a fresh start. Own it! As for me, I am hosting more people than I ever have before at my home this weekend to celebrate Poila Boishak and bring a little bit of Bengal into my humble Indo-Dutch home. After all, what are these occasions if not an opportunity to bring your community together?
Also, in this week's Sudeshna updates that nobody asked for, I have been obsessed with this new Haryanvi song 'Bairan'. I don't know what it is about this devastatingly sad song that has me HOOKED! My theory is its originality simplicity. In a world that is becoming more complex than ever, and an industry that is relying heavily on remixes, here is a song about heartbreak with no hope for reconciliation, that is not overproduced, has no major label backing, no Bollywood hook. Don't believe me, just listen to it. And if you find yourself listening to it on loop, drop me a line. I'd love to have someone to obsess over it with.
Moving on to the news of the week! Well, the week that has been.
Just the gist
The government had undertaken a controversial task, again. A three-day special session of Parliament began this week to pass three bills that would have expanded the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats, redrawn constituency boundaries, and implemented one-third reservation for women in Parliament.
Now, women's reservation is long overdue. The Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam was passed unanimously in 2023 with cross-party support. Implementation was then made contingent on a future census and delimitation. The opposition demanded it be implemented for the 2024 elections. The government had then said no. But two years later, now, they are suddenly in a rush. The reason given for expanding the Lok Sabha by 57% was that you cannot implement reservation without first creating new seats, because existing male MPs cannot be displaced. First question, why not? Why do you need to create more seats for a better representation in the Parliament? But also, why the sudden U-turn?
This brings us to the thorn on the crown of women's representation. The other issue with this Bill is that the delimitation would negatively impact southern states. According to our constitution, Parliament seats are proportionally allocated to states based on their population. So if your state's population constitutes 1% of the national population, your state is allocated 1% of the Parliament seats. Fair fair. But the issue is that southern states have seen a low population growth rate over the past decades and northern states have seen a higher population growth rate. This would mean that an exercise like this based on the 2011 census would allocate a higher proportion of seats to the Hindi belt states and the southern states could lose seats and representation.
Amit Shah had said that the %age of seats allocated to southern states will remain the same even if the number of total seats increase which at around 24% of the total seats today. This still would mean a major change in absolute terms. While the south goes from 129 seats to 195 seats in the new allocation, other states, mostly in the north go from 414 seats to 621 seats.
The government had proposed setting up a Delimitation Commission comprising of a Supreme Court retired judge; the Chief Election Commissioner; and a State Election Commissioner to decide how the new seats were to be allocated across states. This is in direct contrast with Amit Shah's 'percentages remain the same' and using-census-data-to-determine-proportional-split argument. So you can imagine why the rest were concerned. It does not help that the composition of the Delimitation Commission was also sus given how compromised the election commission and the Supreme Court have become.
The twist in the story is that on Friday evening, after the 4PM vote in the parliament, the bills DID NOT PASS. This was the first time in 12 years that a Constitutional amendment Bill introduced by the Modi government failed to clear the House.
The Bill required a special majority of both Houses to get passed – meaning two-thirds of those present and voting, which should not be less than one half of the total strength of the House. With 540 members currently in Lok Sabha, the Bill required 360 votes in favour. Only 298 members voted in its favour.
➡️ The last time a delimitation exercise took place was in 1971. The reason it was halted was because the parliamentarians did not want India's population control measures to be affected by politics and vice versa. And now here we are. 55 years later. Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT let anyone convince you that the Opposition voted against women. No sir. As mentioned above, that legislation has cross-party support since 2023. It is the expansion of the parliament and the redrawing of constituencies that the Centre was trying to pass along with the women's representation bill that the Opposition opposed. If the Centre really wanted to increase women's representation, they could have detangled it from the other two.
🔗 Scraping the bottom of the barrel
After the US 'allowed' India to buy sanctioned Russian oil that was already loaded on tankers, Indian refiners moved immediately. Russian oil imports nearly doubled to 2 million barrels per day in March, accounting for 44% of India's total oil imports for the month. Iranian oil also arrived in Indian ports for the first time in seven years. India was not going to leave barrels on the table while West Asian supplies were effectively dried up.
Now, the waiver for Russian oil purchase expired on the 11th of April and that for Iranian oil purchases will expire on the 19th and neither will be renewed by the US. Also, as we have already discussed here, US has made not buying Russian oil a condition for India to remove its additional 25% tariff on Indian goods (mind you, that is a 25% ON TOP of a 25%).
The waiver expiring does not mean India stops buying Russian oil. It means Indian refiners have to be more careful about who they are buying from. Rosneft and Lukoil are directly sanctioned. But a growing network of intermediaries and traders have stepped in over the past few months, and as long as no sanctioned entity, vessel, or bank is involved in the transaction, the purchases are technically legal. Jugaad for the win!
➡️ The annoying thing about this is that India let itself get bullied by the US into this place. As the opposition has often said since, we have endangered India's energy security and it is showing.
🔗 Still a long road to recovery
On April 7, a rocket-like projectile hit a home in Bishnupur district. A four-year-old boy and his newborn sister were killed. The protests that followed left two more civilians dead.
This is Manipur in 2026. Nearly three years into an ethnic conflict that has killed over 260 people and displaced 60,000 more, and it is still a place where children die in their homes from projectiles.
Manipur was an independent kingdom before British colonisation and a reluctant annexee of independent India in 1949, with some groups maintaining the merger was signed under duress. The colonial administration drew a hard line between the Imphal Valley, home to the Meitei community, and the surrounding hills, home to Naga and Kuki-Zo tribes. If I had a penny for every British line that caused a conflict that continues to destroy lives even today, I'd be bought-a-holiday-home-in-Italy rich.
For decades, various insurgencies have simmered. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act ran from 1980 to 2004, leaving behind a legacy of alleged extrajudicial killings that nobody was held accountable for. Then came the refugees fleeing Myanmar's civil war, anxiety about undocumented immigration, and a thriving narcotics trade in the hills. Add to the mix the Meitei demand for Scheduled Tribe status, which would give them access to hill land and quotas. For hill communities, this meant their protections would be diluted, their land opened up. And a splash of divisive politics by the former Chief Minister, Nongthombam Biren Singh, a Meitei BJP politician, who withdrew from a longstanding ceasefire agreement with Kuki militant groups in March 2023. That leaves you with a violent conflict that has and continues to kill people and has led to the displacement of 60,000 people.
In early 2026 Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh took over, forming a coalition cabinet that includes Kuki and Naga representation for the first time. The new government's stated priorities are reconciliation, disarmament, and dialogue.
➡️ These are the right priorities. They are also the same priorities every administration has announced, and the looted weapons from 2023 are still out there, the vigilante structures on both sides are still functioning, and the land laws and quota questions that started all of this have not been touched. Manipur is a reminder that the Indian state can look away from an ethnic conflict for a very long time if it is inconvenient enough to acknowledge. But it is still our responsibility to stay informed.
Last year there was a lot of excitement about Indian becoming the fourth largest economy after the IMF released its projections. However, those projections have turned out to be just that. Projections. The reality of 2026 is that India is the sixth largest economy, having overtaken and un-overtaken (?) the UK in this period. Blame the tanking rupee, for one. But also, India seems to have overestimated its own GDP which was what had led to the projection. Then there is the fact that the pound and yen have fared much better against the dollar in the past year boosting their growth numbers when GDP is calculated in dollars by the IMF
However, all is not lost. The IMF still projects that India will be the fourth largest economy by 2028 and the third largest by 2031. Long road ahead.
➡️ The underlying growth story is not entirely false. But equitable growth, income inequality, and what the average Indian actually earns are the numbers that determine whether people's lives are improving. Those numbers are considerably less quotable at public gatherings.
Desi beat
🔗 Yet another birthday this week
Last week it was Happy Birthday, Odisa. This week it is Happy Birthday, Himachal! My favourite state in the whole wide country. So let me tell you a story. The story of a place.
After Independence, 30 princely hill states were integrated into a single unit and centrally administered. When the Constitution came into force in 1950, Himachal became a Part C state, which was essentially the administrative category for places the central government was not quite sure what to do with yet.
In 1953, Nehru set up the States Reorganisation Commission to sort out the growing demands for linguistic states. The commission submitted its report in 1955 and the majority recommendation was to merge Himachal Pradesh into Punjab. Himachal was small, resource-poor, and could not sustain itself administratively or financially. The rivers flowing through it fed into Punjab anyway.
The commission's chairman, Justice Fazl Ali, disagreed. He filed a dissenting note arguing that local sentiment against a merger was genuine and widespread, that hill communities would be drowned out in a legislature dominated by plains representatives, and that precisely because of its location near China, Himachal needed central control rather than absorption into a larger state. The dissenting note won. In 1956, Himachal retained its separate identity, converted into a Union Territory rather than handed to Punjab.
The biggest transformation came after 1966, when Punjab was partitioned to create Haryana and Chandigarh became a shared Union Territory capital. Large chunks of the old Punjab's hill regions, including Kangra, Kullu, Lahaul and Spiti, and Shimla, were transferred to Himachal. This more than doubled its territory and gave it the geographical shape it has today.
Statehood finally came on January 25, 1971, when Himachal Pradesh became India's 18th state.
➡️ Happy Birthday to the state that has felt like a home away from home for many of us who learnt to solo travel, especially as women, in India. The absolute majesty of the Himalayas, the warmth of the local population, and that thing called finding yourself that truly happens when you are the mountains are few of the many reasons why I tell everyone I meet that if you get to travel to one place and one place alone in your entire life, let it be Himachal. Let the calling of the mountains really take you.
Okay lovelies, over and out!
Take care and stay humble.
