Loss, victory, and an anniversary

Hey you,

Thank you for your kind messages after my last email. It meant a lot.

I am going to keep this week's issue short as well but I wanted to showup nonetheless because it has been an important week in India. I also got questions around where to find reliable information in this day and age and honestly, that is a tough question. I have a few recommendations but I do not want to push you into one bubble or another. But if you have thoughts, reach out to me with them and we can look at them together. Most importantly, nothing is free in this world other than the air (for now). So if you are not paying for it, someone else is. Often that someone else is corporations or sponsors which can impact editorial independence. The best way to ensure that you are able to consume independent, unbiased journalism is to carry the load yourself as well. Pay for journalism. More often that not a news website subscription will cost you less than a Netflix subscription but do you and the world more good than all streaming and food delivery services combined. Think about it, yeah?

Anyway. I am glad you are here. Let us get into it.

S.

Just the gist

🔗 Election fever is over. Now the aftermath.

The 2026 state election results are in, and the story is more complicated than "incumbents lost". West Bengal and Kerala voted out their ruling parties after years of sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, and governments borrowing money to fund cash transfers rather than build anything lasting. Tamil Nadu's DMK lost despite relatively decent growth numbers, while Assam bucked the trend entirely and returned the BJP for a third term, riding an economic momentum: fastest-growing GSDP among the four states, fastest growth in per capita incomes, and the only state of the four that was not borrowing to pay its own salaries.

The word often thrown around post election India is "anti-incumbency," which is turning out to be a lazy explanation. Incumbency in India is roughly a coin toss: 50/50 chance of getting re-elected, because a large share of Indians depend directly on the state for their wellbeing. But the real story of these elections, and of Indian politics over the past decade, is less about anti-incumbency and more about the BJP's growing organisational and financial advantage at the national level, which is now squeezing regional parties from Kerala's Left to Bengal's Trinamool. Three regional heavyweights lost this cycle. The BJP held Assam and had a historic win in West Bengal. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore.

➡️ The incoming governments have inherited a mess and a mandate simultaneously. What they do with the finances in the first year will tell you more about the next election than anything that was said on the campaign trail.

🔗 Bengal had a lot to say this election season

Now, the elephant in the room. The BJP won 207 of 294 seats in West Bengal on May 4. A historic sweep, in more ways than one. Many explanations have emerged, from anti-incumbency against a 15-year Trinamool government to a fractured opposition vote and Hindu consolidation. None of those are particularly controversial. What is controversial is what happened before a single vote was cast. A Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls deleted 27.16 lakh voters whose eligibility was placed under adjudication, on top of a further 66 lakh removed for administrative reasons. The election went ahead while lakhs of appeals from deleted voters remain pending before 19 tribunals.

The assumption most commonly made, that those deleted were TMC voters, deserves scepticism: they could have been anyone. And the BJP's counter-argument, that the rolls had been inflated for years and needed cleaning, cannot simply be dismissed. Both things can be true at once. What the data shows is that in 82 BJP-won constituencies, net deletions exceeded the BJP's winning margin, and 70 of those were seats that flipped from TMC. Under the strictest test, comparing adjudicated deletions to the full electoral swing from 2021, the number of seats where deletions plausibly changed the outcome shrinks to one.

➡️ The one definite truth is that the SIR created an abnormal election in which the basic right to vote was placed in uncertainty for lakhs of people, and whether that uncertainty was the result of legitimate correction, deliberate disenfranchisement, or both, the Election Commission has so far refused to answer transparently.

🔗 The breaking of the electoral system

Speaking of the Election Commission. The Supreme Court this week described Parliament's decades-long failure to legislate on how Election Commissioners are appointed as "tyranny of the elected". Every government that came to power dropped its demands for an independent appointment process the moment it gained the ability to misuse the existing one. So the post stayed filled by bureaucrats recommended by the Union Law Ministry to the PM, who would then send the names over to the President with no independent oversight, until the Supreme Court intervened in 2023 and set up a three-member selection panel: the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, and the Chief Justice of India.

Parliament then passed a law that removed the CJI and replaced him with a Cabinet minister appointed by the PM. Two of the three seats on the panel that picks the people who run India's elections now belong to the government. When the current Chief Election Commissioner was appointed in February 2025, Rahul Gandhi filed a dissent note asking the government to wait for the Supreme Court's ruling on an ongoing case related to this matter before proceeding. The government proceeded anyway. The debate in Parliament before passing the law was minimal, partly because a significant number of MPs had been suspended at the time. This was a year before this year's elections that would result in the increase of BJP's national footprint. Just saying...

➡️ The institution meant to protect Indian democracy from the government is being shaped, almost entirely, by the government. The court has not yet ruled, but you can guess which way this is heading.

🔗 Is a virus on a cruise ship going to become our problem again?

A Dutch-flagged expedition vessel called the MV Hondius reported eight suspected and confirmed hantavirus infections while travelling from South America toward Africa, including three deaths. Two Indian crew members on board are currently asymptomatic and under observation. The WHO says the overall public health risk remains low.

Hantavirus is rodent-borne and primarily transmitted through contact with infected rodent saliva, urine, or droppings. The strain involved here, called the Andes strain, is the only known hantavirus variant with limited human-to-human transmission, which is why it has drawn attention. But limited is the operative word: it does not spread easily and generally requires prolonged close exposure. It is not Covid. Not yet at least but precaution never hurt a soul.

➡️ No immediate cause for concern. If you want to be sensible about it, keep your home rodent-free and use wet cleaning rather than dry sweeping in areas that might be contaminated, since dry sweeping can make infected particles airborne. Beyond that, carry on and do not panic. And if you have the right mix of whimsy and scepticism, start planning on your influencer career trajectory, just in case.

One year of Operation Sindoor

🔗 One full year of unanswered questions and chest thumping

One year ago, around this time I was in India fielding calls about what was going on. One year ago, around this time we started working on the idea of DoorDesi because we wanted to help reduce the noise created by multiple half baked news reports. So it makes sense to do a review of India's foreign standing a year after Operation Sindoor.

The strikes from May 7 to 10, 2025 established what Modi called a new policy: India will respond to terrorist attacks, will not distinguish between state and non-state actors, and will not be deterred by nuclear blackmail. Seven all-party delegations travelled to 33 countries afterward to make India's case. Some of it worked. The Resistance Front that carried out the attack was designated a Foreign Terrorist Organisation by the US in July, and made it into the UN Security Council's sanctions monitoring report.

However, things also did not go as India had thought. The international community condemned the Pahalgam attack but counselled restraint once India started striking. Trump announced a ceasefire before India's own foreign secretary had finished briefing the press, claimed credit for brokering it, and floated the idea of mediating on Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, ran a more aggressive communications operation with its PM, army chief, deputy PM, and foreign minister all spoke constantly, flooded Western media with their version of events, signed a crypto deal with Trump-linked companies, offered critical minerals, and nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. India did none of that. The result is that a year later, Pakistan's army chief has visited the White House multiple times, Pakistan is brokering the Iran ceasefire talks, and India is still recalibrating.

➡️ The lesson here is that better strategic communications and less assumptions around how the international community really sees India would have taken us further. Being the wronged party and being perceived as the wronged party are two different things.

That is all for this week, folks! It's been a week...

Take care of yourselves. See you next Sunday.