Indholdsfortegnelse for 1 December 2025 i India Today

Disgruntlement is simmering in the Congress after the Bihar poll debacle, with many leaders privately directing fire at AICC general secretary (organisation) K.C. Venugopal, treasurer Ajay Maken and Bihar in-charge Krishna Allavaru, three key Rahul Gandhi confidants who “have not won a direct election in over a decade”. Venugopal has been accused of gatekeeping access to Rahul; Maken has presided over lacklustre outcomes in Chhattisgarh (2023), Haryana (2024) and now Bihar; and former corporate honcho Allavaru, a key strategist behind Rahul’s Vote Adhikar Yatra, faces criticism for the initial stalemate in seat-sharing talks with the RJD, delaying preparations for both allies. The perception that a small, unelected coterie continues to dominate strategy despite repeated electoral setbacks has sharpened demands for accountability. Will the Bihar outcome change that? UNSETTLING BANTER SWEET…

IT’S NOT EVEN SLOW BURN. UTTAR PRADESH VOTES for a new assembly only in 2027, but the month-long Special Intensive Revision (SIR) has already turned it into a live battleground. Rolled out on November 4, it has put the entire field on high flame. Every party is moving to fortify its position: war rooms are being formed, party websites and WhatsApp groups being readied to track deletions, minders being named to keep a hawk’s eye. It’s being fought, well, booth and nail. Supplying electricity to this political grid is the landslide win for the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) next door in Bihar, preceded by the SIR’s controversial rollout. In UP, the Samajwadi Party (SP) has taken the most confrontational stance. Akhilesh Yadav calls Bihar a cautionary tale, framing it as…

IT WAS ON AN OLD MIGRANT PROPERTY, in a densely populated residential area and surrounded by houses, that the Nowgam police station stood. Strange place to store 358 kg of ammonium nitrate, chemicals and batteries. The same explosive used in the November 10 Red Fort blast in Delhi. What was the stuff doing back in Nowgam, uptown of Srinagar, ground zero of the crackdown that exposed the ‘white collar terror’ network? The recovered explosives are the ‘case property’ of Nowgam Police, which had registered a case under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) and Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, an investigation under which led to the busting of the Faridabad module and the recovery of 2,900 kg of bombmaking material from Faridabad. Procedure dictates that all evidence be submitted…

MALEGAON BLAST (2008) Six killed, over 100 injured in a Ramzan-time blast in Maharashtra town. All seven suspects acquitted in July 2025 as the NIA court found “no reliable evidence”. Among them were Pragya Thakur (above) and Lt Col. Prasad Purohit, alleged to be linked to Hindu extremist groups NOIDA DOUBLE MURDER (2008) Aarushi Talwar, 14, found murdered in her bedroom; domestic help Hemraj’s body recovered from the terrace. Aarushi’s parents were convicted, but later acquitted in 2017 as the court found “no direct evidence on record” and called the CBI’s honour killing theory “patently absurd”. Appeals are pending in the Supreme Court MECCA MASJID BLAST (2007) Eight killed in the Hyderabad mosque blast. All five accused, including Swami Aseemanand, acquitted in 2018 after 64 of 226 witnesses turned hostile. The…

Maharashtra deputy chief minister Ajit Pawar’s political career has rarely been without controversy—be it graft allegations in irrigation contracts, charges of irregularities in the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank, coalition flip-flops, or splitting the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). The latest challenge comes from a multi-crore disputed land deal in Pune linked to his son Parth. The scandal involving the state’s ministers and leaders comes amid the intensifying tussle for political space and power within the ruling Mahayuti, comprising Ajit’s NCP, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Shiv Sena, ahead of the local bodies election slated for next month. In May, Amadea Enterprises LLP—in which Parth, Ajit’s elder son, and his maternal cousin Digvijay Amarsinh Patil are directors—purchased around 40 acres of prime land in Pune’s Mundhwa-Koregaon Park. Amadea entered a…

Baba Bohrd’—a Punjabi term for a sprawling banyan tree and an undisputed master—befits Rajesh Bedi perfectly. Gaunt, gentle and stoic, with eyes that observe more than they see and a beard with its own quiet antiquity, Bedi stands as India’s most revered chronicler of the wild. Through his lens, the country’s wilderness has found its visual mythology. Along with his brother Naresh Bedi, he pioneered wildlife photography and filmmaking in India at a time when the field was still an uncharted frontier. For Bedi, photography was never mere documentation—it was discovery, born of patience, intuition, and a deep study of animal behaviour. His seventh book, Elephant: The Divine Mystery, is a tender, almost devotional portrait of one of Earth’s most sentient beings—the elephant—whom Bedi fondly calls his “first love”, his…

WHEN OFFICERS FROM GUJARAT’S Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) closed in on a silver Ford Figo with an Andhra Pradesh registration near a toll plaza on the Ahmedabad–Mehsana Road around 9:30 pm on November 7, they believed they were intercepting a gunrunning operation linked to a terror plan. The tip-off was precise; the car had been under surveillance for some hours. But within minutes of stopping it, the team realised they had stumbled onto something far more alarming: a suspected plot involving ricin, one of the world’s deadliest toxins. It soon unspooled into a multistate investigation, exposing India’s vulnerabilities to lowcost, high-impact bioterror. Inside the car was Dr Ahmed Mohiyuddin Saiyyad, a 32-year-old China-trained doctor from Hyderabad. From him, officers recovered three pistol—two Glocks and one Beretta—and 30 live cartridges. His arrest…

ON November 20, as Nitish Kumar, the 74-year-old patriarch of the Janata Dal (United), walked up to take oath as the chief minister of Bihar for a record tenth time, he stepped into a tenure laden both with promise and the weight of expectation. He had decimated not just a younger, energetic opponent in Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), but also defeated any doubts about his mental and political astuteness, along with all insinuations of anti-incumbency. His party’s partnership with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a set of other fellow travellers with smaller but strategically disparate bases had led the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) to a landslide 202 out of 243 seats. Now comes the task of living up to the mandate. The vehicle to accomplish…

It was past midnight, days before the second phase of polling in Bihar, and Patna was all but asleep. At Hotel Maurya, though, a heavily curtained suite on the upper floors was showing signs of hectic activity. On a bare sofa, Union home minister Amit Shah was deep in the middle of another review. No papers, no courtesies, only questions: “Has every booth committee received the poll material? Why are the motorcycle rally flags so small? Which villages missed door-to-door campaigning today?” Every meeting followed the same routine: boxes ticked, gaps identified, progress debated, and execution details for the next 24 hours fine-tuned to the last measurable action. It was on the back of such careful micromanagement that the astonishingly successful campaign for Bihar was stitched together. The vaunted…

THE AIRPORT TERMINAL AT BHAVNAGAR IN GUJARAT looks freshly painted, but the air inside smells stale. Rows of plastic chairs are stacked in a corner. The baggage scanner, unplugged and dusty, stands like a relic from a different time. No planes have taken off or landed here for months. It’s a story that repeats itself in several of the 93 airports, including heliports and water aerodromes—part of the Udan or the Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik scheme the Modi government had launched in 2016, with the intention of making flying accessible to the common citizen and connecting small-town India through affordable air routes. Investment had followed intent, with more than Rs 4,638 crore spent on developing and reviving these airports over multiple phases. The number of airports under the Airports Authority…

The death sentence passed by Bangladesh’s International Crimes Tribunal (ICT) on Sheikh Hasina, the ousted prime minister of Bangladesh, was not unexpected. She was found guilty on several counts, including mass murder. The tribunal also ordered that the state seize Hasina’s assets. Her right to appeal is conditional on her voluntary return and arrest within 30 days, failing which she will be declared a fugitive. Will Hasina walk to the gallows? Unlikely. It is inconceivable that India will hand over Hasina to face certain death. The bilateral extradition treaty has explicit clauses exempting extradition for “an offence of a political character” [Article 6]. India’s decision will be watched avidly. The ICT’s legislative mandate was to try the war criminals of 1971. Its jurisdiction was altered through an ordinance, making the…

THEY ARE CALLING IT THE ‘SEMI-FINAL’ in Kerala, the local self-government (LSG) polls scheduled for December 9 and 11. The CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front and the Congress-led United Democratic Front are the traditional battlers, but the BJP, riding on the momentum of the stupendous win in Bihar, is hoping to stage a few surprises. It has certainly been prepping for it—way back in late July, the state unit led by ex-Union minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar had activated a 100-day ‘Mission Countdown 2025’ clock in all district offices, targeting the poll. That was just the beginning. Membership and voter enrolment drives, party workshops, new ward committees—it’s been a busy three months. In the 2020 LSG polls, the BJP had won a modest 10 village panchayats (out of the total 941) but also…

A SKEWED GROWTH Among ‘laggard’ states, Bihar has shown most growth. But the farm sector has not kept pace DEARTH OF JOBS Farming employs a majority and nonfarm jobs are barely expanding. So, millions outmigrate for work Workforce distribution by sector (2023-24, %) TRAPPED IN POVERTY Despite gains, Bihar still has the highest poverty rates, reflecting stalled structural reforms Multidimensionally poor population (%) A PERSISTENT INCOME GAP Despite employing so many, Bihar’s farm sector delivers incomes far lower than the national average Average monthly income of agri households (₹) MP: Madhya Pradesh; CG: Chhattisgarh; JH: Jharkhand; UP: Uttar Pradesh; OD: Odisha; WB: West Bengal Source: ICRIER, using MoSPI, NITI Aayog data NDA POLL PROMISES… Mass employment: Creation of 10 million jobs and employment opportunities over five years Mahila Rojgar Yojana:…

ON a dark November evening, a thin, greying man stepped out of Luksar Jail in Greater Noida. Masked and clutching a small cloth bag, he walked into a world that had once demanded his death. This was Surinder Koli—long cast as a ‘monster’ and a ‘man-eater’. For nearly two decades, he remained imprisoned for the 2006 Nithari killings, a case that horrified the country after skeletal remains of children and women surfaced in a drain behind the Noida bungalow of businessman Moninder Singh Pandher, Koli’s employer. Allegations of serial murder, necrophilia and cannibalism fuelled a media frenzy, and police charged both men with luring, raping, killing and dismembering at least 16 victims. Between 2009 and 2017, Koli was convicted in 13 separate trials and sentenced to death each time; Pandher received…

I love everything about Meena Arora Nayak’s retellings: her language, the stories she chooses, the cover design of the book, the cover illustration, the layout of the pages. What I admire most is the enormous erudition that lies behind the deceptively simple and light tone in which she presents her stories and her critical material. Much as I have taken pleasure in all of Arora Nayak’s books, I suspect The Undead Ghoul is going to be my favourite. The Vetala Panchavimshati is a wonderful cycle of tales held within a truly compelling frame story of a faceoff between a mysterious mendicant and a beloved king. It contains an endless universe of characters and events that allow for narrative arcs that Arora Nayak describes as “… light, capricious, and humorous, with…