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“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy, Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.
Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”
nytimes.com/2026/11/05/us/po…
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Rohit Lal retweeted
I’m out of Met Police custody. Visited my local Sikh Temple to thank Almighty for protecting my family while I was mentally harassed by police. Big thanks to @JohnCleese for providing physical security at my business and home. 🙏
Let’s save Britain together against radicals
(Harman singh Kapoor)
Again, someone please educate me.
What is more revealing is the sight of India’s Leader of Opposition @RahulGandhi endorsing this, sitting in the audience and clapping at these remarks by a foreigner about Indian democracy.
I struggle to find the political benefit out of this circus. At the most, it will appeal to those already converted. I’m debating whether anyone sitting on the fence will get taken in by this tamasha. In any case, these allegations of “vote-chori” have been more or less debunked after the Election Commission submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court about its decisions being unanimous on the SIR exercise.
Nonetheless, Rahul Gandhi and his courtiers thought it fit to organize this pantomime. Why, it beats me. Besides deriving cheap thrills and some sense of getting validation from foreigners, I don’t see any other benefits. Someone, please educate me, if I’m missing some grand political calculation.
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Rohit Lal retweeted
BREAKING: Democrat Mary Peltola wins Alaska’s Senate race, defeating incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan, VoteHub projects.
Democrats will now hold 56 seats in the Senate.
Rohit Lal retweeted
Assuming this video is genuine :
Why was this Italian busybody given a visa?
Look at the effrontery of the man. No basic political sense.
He is endorsing a direct attack on Modi while on Indian soil and parroting the opposition slogan Vote Chor, Gaddi Chor.
Here is open proof of the foreign hand in supporting the political opposition in India.
If we were a strong state his visa should be immediately cancelled and he should be expelled .
But we would want to avoid a controversy . Look at the controversy created over a Norwegian nobody.
In any case this man should be blacklisted.
We should issue a statement slamming him for lacking basic political etiquette.
Rohit Lal retweeted
I must thank @ARanganathan72 for flagging my sacking at the behest of a Lutyens clerk merely because I was not deferential to his boss. So this is how this and other near-sackings happened in my otherwise vanilla life.
It was an extremely distressing experience to get sacked in 1995 from The Pioneer where I was Associate Editor because the then Editor (economist Ashok Mitra famously described him as a ‘handout Editor’) needed to suck up to Sonia Gandhi. No less distressing was the reality of being left without a roof and phone (rented / owned by The Pioneer’s then owners, the Thapars) with a family in tow — we were literally out in streets with nowhere to go. All this happened after Vinod Mehta resigned in protest against pressure from Thapar House to be ‘nice’ to Sharad Pawar to whom the ‘Bombay Club’ was beholden.
That was not my first or last experience of running into trouble with Sonia Gandhi and her factotums. I had published a photograph of Rajiv and Sonia in The Statesman’s popular weekend section (The Saturday Statesman) which I edited, shot during their visit to Mizoram in 1986. Sonia was in a Lacoste tee and the couple looked remarkably striking. Those were still Camelot days of Prince Charming.
It was a measure of the then Government’s illicit and undeclared reach that they had access to The Saturday Statesman, which was printed in Kolkata and shipped to Delhi on Thursday-Friday, before its distribution on Saturday. HY Sharada Prasad, Press Advisor to Rajiv Gandhi, called CR Irani, MD of The Statesman, and rained fire and brimstone on him for daring to publish a ‘private photo of Madam.’
Sharada Prasad demanded that The Saturday Statesman with the Rajiv-Sonia photo should not be distributed and all copies must be destroyed. Irani, who was then struggling to get the rebuilding plans for The Statesman’s Delhi office at CP approved, worked out a deal that there would be an ‘apology’ in the main paper and The Saturday Statesman would be distributed. Irani asked me to draft the apology and run it in Saturday morning’s paper.
On that occasion Swapan, also at The Statesman, stood like a rock by me — I remain grateful to him. He also drafted the ‘apology’ for me — Swapan’s nib-breaking, tongue-twisting, brain-wracking English impressed Sharada Prasad but little did he realise it was actually a non-apology.
The story of my encounters with the Nehru Dynasty is one of several episodes. In 2012 the Sonia Gandhi-led UPA regime invoked the draconian anti-Freedom of Expression, anti-liberty, anti-Constitution Section 66A (drafted and implemented by Kapil Sibal with great fervour to prevent, prosecute and punish any criticism of Sonia Gandhi and silence all critical Speech in India) against me, instructing ISPs to block my Twitter handle. The handles of several other journalists and regime critics were also blocked.
The sinister charges against me, never registered formally but only informally conveyed, made me feel like Trotsky in Stalin’s court. Better counsel by way of domestic and global criticism of this attempt to choke voices prevailed and the block order was quietly buried after a hearing in a dark room with a single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling, very reminiscent of the interrogation chambers of Mussolini’s secret police OVRA.
I was later told the Gestapo-style hearing was the brainchild of then Home Secretary RK Singh whose fetid imagination had also birthed the hideous nomenclature ‘Saffron Terror’. He who later floated into NDA and has now floated out again.
@kushanmitra
Rohit Lal retweeted
This is truly grotesk - first create the problem (together with buddies NYT, the ulta red journalist from the Economist, etc.) and now write about how worried you are over the consequences of creating the problem? People are not so dumb.
From @WSJopinion: Jensen Huang’s resignation from Nvidia was necessary, but it also does regrettable harm to the company and America’s AI industry. Maybe that was China’s plan.
on.wsj.com/4k9p4V2
Rohit Lal retweeted
How does this homily apply to those foreign lobbies which have always sought to weaken India in various ways including our internal political and social divisions?
By all means have this samvad between disparate political and intellectual thinking within our citizenry as part of our democracy.
How many foreign countries engage in samvad with us about their internal political and social issues?
This tendency we have to lecture to ourselves from a high moral ground about our traditions should be tested by our historical experience.
How much has this samvad helped us to make our foreign interlocutors understand, respect and learn from our Indic traditions.
This samvad was a great Indic tradition but it failed miserably with the Islamic conquest of India, British colonialism and India’s partition. @ShashiTharoor
I’m a bit taken aback by the viciousness of the comments on my tweet about the visa denials for the #BharatSummit. Why is it so hard for these so-called votaries of Hindutva to understand that Hindu civilisation was built on ideas of dialogue and “samvad”, and that our tradition of “purvapaksha” requires us to be able to fully understand and repeat the arguments of the other side in order to refute them effectively? What kind of political culture can be built on a rejection of the fundamental principle that “I disagree with what you say, but I will always defend your right to say it”?
Rohit Lal retweeted
With the kind of attention being given by us at the political, media and other levels in the case of visa denial to an insignificant European journalist who merits no notice we are acting like a banana republic with little self-confidence and unable to shed a colonised mindset .
This Norwegian woman of no consequence is having a great time taunting us and enjoying the publicity she is getting with all the reactions in India to her sneers.
We are building her up.
Shows how much we are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to petty westerners triggering political controversies in India.
Pity.
Rohit Lal retweeted
Do Indian citizens get an explanation for why their Schengen visa applications are rejected? Or US visa applications are rejected?
Rohit Lal retweeted
USCRIF has no locus standi to sit in judgment over the constitutional rights of Indian citizens.
Its habitual partisan, ill-informed, and jaundiced assessments cannot diminish India’s constitutional commitment to religious freedom and equal rights for all faiths.
India flourishes defying the agenda-driven partisan narratives of the USCIRF.
Taking the same liberty that USCIRF so readily assumes, a word of advice: introspect on your own prejudices and stop lecturing others.
Sharjeel Imam is a Muslim man detained in India for his religious freedom advocacy.
Read his profile: uscirf.gov/religious-prisone…
Rohit Lal retweeted
Osama Bin Laden was killed by USA for advocating his religious beliefs.
Sharjeel Imam is a Muslim man detained in India for his religious freedom advocacy.
Read his profile: uscirf.gov/religious-prisone…
Rohit Lal retweeted
Absolutely mind boggling achievement by this surgical team in kerala. What amazing fine work. 👍
When 19-year-old chemical engineering student Shreya Siddanagowda lost both arms in a devastating bus crash on her way to college in 2016, doctors told her that upper-limb transplants in Asia were virtually unheard of.
One year later, at Amrita Hospital in Kochi, India, a team of 20 reconstructive surgeons and 16 anesthesiologists led by Dr. Subrahmania Iyer performed a grueling 13-hour operation — achieving Asia’s first upper-extremity double arm transplant and the world’s first male-to-female bilateral hand transplant, using limbs donated by Sachin, a 20-year-old male college student.
What happened over the next three years stunned reconstructive surgeons worldwide:
• Reconnecting Bones, Arteries, Tendons & Nerves: Surgeons plated both donor radius and ulna bones to Shreya’s residual arms, microscopically sutured arteries and veins to restore blood flow, and spliced dozens of flexor tendons and peripheral nerve trunks so her brain could learn to drive the new hands.
• Biological Remodeling of Male Limbs: Immediately after surgery, the male donor arms were bulkier, hairier, and noticeably darker in complexion than Shreya’s natural skin tone. Over three years of nerve reinnervation, hormonal circulation, and lymphatic remodeling, muscles subtly slenderized to match her frame — and her body gradually lightened the donor skin’s melanin pigment until the hands blended seamlessly with her own arms.
• Writing Her Own Exams Again: After nearly two years of intensive neuromuscular rehabilitation, Shreya regained fine finger dexterity — returning to university to hand-write her own engineering exams.
Source : @engineeringpost
Rohit Lal retweeted
Sometimes the most ignorant speak with a lot of confidence about matters they know little about.
Visa policy, rules, security clearance are decided by the Home Ministry, not MEA.
The Visa Manual is issued by the Home Ministry.
The tenor of your post doesn’t deserve a response but a clarification on X may be useful for followers in view of the topicality of the subject.
Rohit Lal retweeted
'Part of the genius of both Bezos and Jobs was that they figured out how to turn their personal capabilities into corporate culture and competencies. The parallels are hard to find at Nvidia, which is a real failure of leadership by Huang.'
bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Ok, this is confirmed: nbcchicago.com/news/local/is…
ATTENTION: I don’t know the scale of what’s happening right now, but multiple companies in the U.S. are facing Outlook issues.
Hopefully this is a benign and temporary hiccup, and not something more concerning.
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Rohit Lal retweeted
As Prime Minister of Denmark he virtually sabotaged the India- EU summit in 2002 when I was FS.
A politician with a closed mind, with no diplomatic skills and no vision.
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has laid out a five-point plan for peace in Ukraine:
1. Integrate Ukraine into NATO’s missile, air and drone defences and send all Patriots to Kyiv
2. Unfreeze Russian assets and give them to Ukraine
3. Enforce more sanctions on Russia and ban all Russian fossil fuel supplies to Europe
4. Move the Coalition of the Willing into Ukraine to defend rear areas and critical infrastructure
5. Develop ironclad security guarantees and expel countries from the Coalition that aren’t willing to fight Russia if a ceasefire breaks down
Rohit Lal retweeted
Dear CEOs working in critical industries and infrastructures, get yourselves a geopolitical strategist. Not someone from FinTwit, but someone from the field of security and defence. It‘s a new Cold War and it‘s unforgiving if you haven‘t taken steps towards mental preparedness.
Breaking: Jensen Huang has resigned, effective immediately, because Nvidia did not manage and reduce its China risks. Over the coming years and possibly even months, he will not be the only Fortune 500 CEO who falls as a result of their ties to China. Every Fortune 500 board needs to be assessing what their China exposure and China risks are, and how to reduce them.
