Humpty dumpty is having the greatest fall

Hello!

What a long weekend this has been. It is midnight on Saturday evening and after spending the entire day following the news about the protest in India I am finally giving this one the finishing touches so bear with me if it feels a bit unfinished. That's because the story of where our democracy is headed is unfinished. But I am hopeful. As scary as it is to watch the state unleash it's entire machinery on civilians asking for nothing more than accountability from a constitutional body, it gives me hope that this means something. It means that cracks are showing in the system. The other two election commisioners have refused to back the government's support of the ECI as it is and that says something. I have been a strong believer of Indian polity being a unique and a resilient one. I think we are seeing that in real time so let's watch, amplify, support. Gone are the days of having a higher moral ground. Let's, once more, stand for something real.

Inquilab....

Zindabad!

Just the gist

🔗 Democracy, it's done bro.

Last week's column on the siege manual for Saturday's protest turns out to have been a spoiler. The leadership of Cockroach Janta Party demanding CEC Gyanesh Kumar's resignation was detained before they got on the streets of Delhi. By evening, more than 6,000 people had been detained, mostly picked up on the way and driven to stadiums and makeshift detention centres.

The scale is striking. About 25,000 police and paramilitary personnel were deployed. Entry and exit were restricted at around 57 metro stations, up from the 12 closed on Gandhi Jayanti, and several trains were cancelled until 2 pm. Police checked vehicles entering from Uttar Pradesh and picked up people in all 15 districts as a "preventive measure". Mobile internet was suspended in the central business district. One bus driver told reporters that about 2,000 private buses had been contracted for round-the-clock police duty, and that his 40-seater was carrying far more detainees than it should.

The list of detainees reads like a seating chart for a very odd conference. CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke was detained inside his plane on landing in Delhi, along with convener Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka. Also detained: Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee (who went live on Facebook from the police van), Pinarayi Vijayan, Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, Manish Sisodia in Chandigarh, YouTuber Dhruv Rathee from his home in Gurugram, actor Imran Khan, and Mahatma Gandhi's great-grandson Tushar Gandhi in Mumbai. A 37-year-old woman picked up with her 17-year-old son said, "They didn't even let me start my protest". If that doesn't sound like a government that is shit scared.

Journalists were detained too. In Mumbai, about 400 people were detained around August Kranti Maidan.

The CJP has no updates on its leaders' whereabouts, even after news arrived that Dipke's grandmother had died. Delhi Police say they passed on the news "with due sensitivity", except the offer to him is "travel and give up protesting or continue to protest and stay detained". So basically, anything he chooses can be used to paint him as a bad person.

The BJP called it a "flop show" where "mobocracy" was "defeated by democracy", and pointed to injured police and damaged property in July's protest as the reason for the curbs. Honestly, I am so done with this that I cannot even try to be neutral in this anymore. No sir! You don't stop a protest 'preemptively' and call it a flop show. YOU are the flop show and it's showing now.

➡️ Imagine if half the effort and state machinery had been put behind finding the terrorists who killed Indian civilians in Pahalgam. Clearly, the state can. It just doesn't want to.

🔗 Your green card is their red flag

US Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced that Cognizant, Infosys, Tata, Wipro, HCL and Capgemini are suspended from the Permanent Labor Certification Program, known as PERM. Microsoft and Adobe are on the list too. The stated reason is alleged fraud and the displacement of American workers.

Some background, because PERM is the least glamorous and most important step in the employer-sponsored green card process. Before a company can sponsor someone for permanent residency, it files PERM with the Labor Department to show that hiring a foreign worker will not hurt American workers’ jobs or wages. The date that filing is accepted becomes their place in the green card queue. No PERM filing means no queue.

Sonderling says the affected companies have requested permanent residency for almost 3 million foreign workers since 2009, and received over 230,000 H-1B approvals and over 100,000 labour certifications. He calls that hundreds of thousands of jobs “stolen” from Americans. Those are the administration’s framing, of course. Nothing in the announcement actually shows any kind of fraud.

For Indians, the practical damage is a delay, if not worse. For anyone working at one of these firms, if their green card process has not reached PERM yet, they are stuck in a limbo while the suspension lasts. And the queue is already brutal. In the September 2026 Visa Bulletin, EB-2 for India was listed as “unavailable” and the EB-3 final action date was January 1, 2014. People are already waiting for over a decade. Now some of them cannot even get in line.

There is a second pressure point. H-1B holders can usually stay at most six years, with extensions beyond that if a labour certification was filed early enough. Someone nearing that limit who cannot start PERM could be in real trouble. People who already have approved petitions and are only waiting for a green card number are in a better position, and can generally get H-1B extensions of up to three years at a time.

➡️ This follows the End H-1B Visa Abuse Act, the tightened public charge rule and the birthright citizenship fight, and the pattern is becoming increasingly clear. Each step on the path from student to worker to resident is being narrowed. .....

🔗 Did India just sign a case against itself?

Remember the US-India trade deal that was “in the short strokes” last week, with a second Section 301 investigation on overcapacity hanging over it? There is a plot twist. After the G20 Trade Ministers Meeting in Milwaukee, Washington DC released a joint statement saying 14 countries plus the EU, including India, Australia and Japan, “acknowledge” that structural excess capacity in any country is a problem for all its trading partners. They have committed to “effective actions” and to technical-level meetings before December 2026.

Overcapacity just means an industry produces far more than the market can absorb, which depresses prices and crushes competitors. The sectors under scrutiny are cars, EVs, batteries, chemicals, foundational semiconductors and solar panels, and China is the usual suspect in nearly all of them. The statement also set up an OECD-linked Global Forum on Steel Excess Capacity, and it pushes countries to end “non-market policies and practices” that distort markets.

For India, there are two ways to read this. The optimistic one is that US tariffs on India already dropped from a proposed 12.5% to 10% after Delhi banned imports of forced-labour goods, and experts think signing this statement could soften the overcapacity outcome too. It might even earn India better rates than its ASEAN competitors and China. The Section 301 results are due in a few weeks, so we will find out soon whether cooperation buys anything.

The pessimistic one is obviously that the Section 301 probe is looking at India too. A US report in August called manufacturing hubs, including the Pune-Gujarat-Chennai corridor, “ugly sister” cities (can you hear this comment in Trump's voice?) and said America loses when they win. Rules on excess capacity will not exclusively target China and India could suffer from it. Also the conversation is always about the manufacturing sector, while US agricultural overcapacity and subsidised exports wreck rural livelihoods in developing countries.

So the question really is whether this cooperation protects domestic manufacturing, or give Washington more legitimacy to challenge India’s industrial expansion?

➡️ India has just agreed, in writing, that overcapacity is a real problem, while the country running the investigation has already described Indian industrial hubs as a threat. Now signing the statement is not the same as accepting the case against Indian manufacturing, but it hands the US a document to point to later. If you weren't yet convinced that our foreign policy these days is a dupster fire, need I say more?

🔗 You've got a serious problem at hand when Elon Musk starts to sound reasonable...

Billionnaires slinging mud at each other is a sport I will pay good money to watch. In the latest bout of mud slinging Elon Musk just called out “certain oligarchs” of India for blocking Starlink from switching on in India to keep a “monopolistic chokehold on the Indian people”. He did not name anyone, but you need one semi-functional braincell to guess it correctly.

The Communications Ministry naturally jumped to the rescue of their rich overlord(s) saying that the framework is fair and non-discriminatory and that three companies hold satcom licences (Starlink, Bharti-backed Eutelsat OneWeb and Jio Satellite Communications). It also stated that all three are at broadly the same regulatory stage, with security assessments under way for each.

Starlink got its DoT operator licence after waiting three years, then the IN-SPACe authorisation last July, which seemingly was the last approval it needed. Since then, nothing. The sticking point is security, and specifically the worry that a foreign operator could route traffic around Indian gateways, the ground stations that connect satellites to domestic networks, and leave the government without control. And what is the one thing we have learnt about the Indian government? They like information controls like Modi likes his photo-ops.

The DoT’s rules for satcom companies are not light. They require data localisation, data centres and much of the infrastructure inside India, real-time monitoring to prove no Indian traffic goes through foreign gateways, and an undertaking not to copy or decrypt Indian telecom data abroad. Operators must also be able to restrict service in certain areas “during hostilities”, get separate security clearance for voice and data, support the NavIC navigation system by 2029, and indigenise at least 20% of their ground segment within five years. Under normal circumstances, and with a mostly uncompromised administration, I would say these requirements are fair and valid. Given how much faith many have in this government, the intent just does not seem fair.

The oligarch angle comes from one more fact. Reliance Jio is both a licensee and a would-be competitor, reportedly considering a sovereign low-earth constellation of 1,600 to 1,650 satellites costing $10 to 15 billion. Nobody has shown that Jio is holding up Starlink, and the government says the three are treated alike. But a company with a $10 billion satellite plan has an obvious interest in how fast a rival with 7,000 satellites arrives, and Musk is not the first person to notice.

➡️ Starlink’s pitch is affordable broadband for people who can’t get it or can’t afford it. ...

🔗 India’s Parliament Loves a Climate Target. It Is Less Keen on Counting the Bodies.

India is in an El Niño year with a major rainfall deficit, and the past decade has brought landslides, glacial collapses and heat waves we have covered here more than once. A new report from the Centre for Financial Accountability asks a simple question: what has Parliament actually been asking about all this? It went through every climate and environment question in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha between December 2015 and December 2025, 8,702 in total. The picture is of a Parliament that is very good at applauding itself and much less good at checking the homework.

The numbers first. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, extreme weather killed 4,064 people in India, up 48% over four years, according to the Centre for Science and Environment and Down To Earth. It also hit 9.47 million hectares of crops and destroyed nearly 100,000 houses. Against that, 2,938 of those parliamentary questions went to clean energy and decarbonisation, the part of climate policy where the government has good news to share. And it does: India reported that by June 2025, 50% of its installed electricity capacity was non-fossil, five years ahead of the Paris target.

Even the good news has an asterisk. As of October 2025, 42,626 megawatts of renewable capacity was stranded. Projects had been awarded, but state distribution companies had not signed the power sale agreements, citing financial worries. So the capacity exists on paper and the electricity does not reach the grid. A target met in the press release, an obstacle ignored in the follow-up.

The more worrying finding is about data. Again and again, when MPs asked about climate displacement, heatwave deaths among informal workers, or forests lost to wildfires, the answer was that the information is not centrally maintained. On air pollution deaths, the environment ministry said in 2024 that pollution is “one of the many factors” behind respiratory disease. The report’s point is that without data, nobody can measure the problem, compare regions or judge whether anything is working, including Parliament. The cloudburst example is stark: 279 incidents in the Himalayan region between 2018 and 2023, and only seven questions about them in ten years. The government’s answer was that cloudbursts are localised and unpredictable, and that no study has quantified the climate change contribution.

When disasters do reach the floor, the debate tends to become a fight over who pays. Opposition-ruled states complain about delayed disaster funds. The Centre defends itself or points back at the states. After the 2024 Wayanad landslides, Amit Shah accused Kerala of failing to evacuate despite early warnings, while the opposition demanded relief and national disaster status. As for who asks what, ruling party MPs mostly ask questions that let ministries list their schemes. Opposition MPs ask about gaps, funding and ecological damage. The Himalayas and Western Ghats are the rare topics both sides worry about together. They also share a blind spot: neither raised the Global Stocktake, the Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or most of the UN climate conferences. The discussion stays inside familiar diplomatic rhetoric.

➡️ One fair caveat from the author: fewer questions does not mean neglect elsewhere in government. It means less public scrutiny. But think back over this year’s issues. The glacial lake in Uttarakhand being monitored only after Nepal’s flood, Dharali’s cause still unsettled, data centres arriving before anyone measured their water use, and heat that killed the fish in a home with working AC. A pattern runs through all of it: India sets the target first and measures the damage later, if at all. If you have family in the Himalayas, in flood-prone districts or in drought-hit Maharashtra, their risk is not in any dataset Parliament can cite, because the dataset does not exist. Which raises the awkward question of how you hold anyone accountable for a number nobody collects.