Aditya Parihar

Lawyer, Delhi

[Arshia Malik @arshiaunis]

As an Indian woman from Muslim heritage, I write this rebuttal with the clarity and directness that comes from living the reality @Ilhan only tweets about from afar. Ilhan Omar’s claim that India has reached the “eighth stage of genocide” against Muslims is not analysis. It is reckless, fact-free propaganda that insults every one of us who actually live here, work here, raise families here, and exercise our rights every single day.

If there were even the beginning of genocide, our population would not have exploded. In 1951, Muslims were about 9.8% of India. By 2011, we were 14.2%. Today we are estimated around 14.5–15%, heading toward 18% by 2050 according to Pew projections. From roughly 35 million in 1951 to over 200 million now. Absolute numbers have multiplied nearly six-fold while the country’s overall population grew far slower in percentage terms. Genocide does not produce the world’s largest Muslim-minority population that keeps growing faster than the national average for decades. It produces mass graves and fleeing refugees. We have neither.

We vote in every election in the world’s largest democracy. We contest seats, win them, become MPs, ministers, judges, IAS officers, doctors, engineers, and business leaders. Three Presidents of India have been Muslim. We serve in the armed forces and police. We own businesses, run hospitals, produce films, and dominate segments of entertainment and sports. This is not the signature of a community facing extermination.

We are thriving and prospering — with real data and real lives. Yes, like every large community, we have internal challenges — lower average literacy and educational enrollment in some metrics, pockets of poverty, and the need for better skilling. But the narrative of uniform victimhood is a lie told by people who have never walked through a Muslim-dominated area in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Lucknow, or Kerala and seen the middle class, the professionals, the entrepreneurs, and the young women studying medicine and engineering.

Prominent Indian Muslims — from business (Wipro’s Azim Premji built one of India’s largest companies), to cinema (generations of stars and directors), to sports, academia, and medicine — show what is possible when talent meets opportunity in a free society. Millions of ordinary Muslim families have moved from villages to cities, from informal work to formal jobs, from one generation of limited schooling to the next pursuing professional degrees. That is prosperity in motion, not persecution.

We enjoy specific rights and accommodations that Hindus as a group do not. This is the part Omar and her echo chamber never mention. Indian Muslims operate under a parallel personal law system for marriage, divorce, inheritance, and maintenance rooted in Sharia. Hindus do not.
After independence, Hindu personal law was comprehensively reformed and codified into a uniform framework (Hindu Marriage Act, Hindu Succession Act, etc.). Muslims retained the right to follow their own religious laws — including provisions for polygamy (up to four wives) and differential inheritance rules that the Hindu majority surrendered decades ago.

We also have constitutional minority protections under Articles 29 and 30 that allow us to establish and administer our own educational institutions with significant autonomy — rights the Hindu majority does not claim as a group because it is not classified as a minority. The Waqf Act gives Muslim institutions unique control over vast religious and charitable properties in a manner unparalleled for any other community.
In short: the Indian state has gone out of its way, through personal laws and minority safeguards, to preserve and accommodate Muslim religious and cultural identity in ways it has not extended equivalently to the Hindu majority. These are not “equal rights” in every narrow sense — they are deliberate accommodations that give us more space to live according to our traditions than the majority community receives under the same Constitution.

As a woman from Muslim heritage in India, I have the full protection of the Indian Constitution plus the framework of personal law. The criminalization of instant triple talaq in 2019 removed a specific vulnerability that existed under uncodified practice. I can study, work, vote, travel, criticize the government, wear what I choose (or not), and practice my faith openly — all while living in a country where my community’s population share has steadily risen for 75 years.

@Ilhan Omar’s “eighth stage of genocide” rhetoric is not solidarity. It is the lazy export of American culture-war talking points onto a country and a people she does not understand. It erases the agency of 200+ million Indian Muslims who are neither cowering nor waiting for rescue from Washington. It cheapens the word “genocide” while real atrocities happen elsewhere.
Stop peddling foreign fantasies about our lives. We are here. We are visible. We are voting. We are building. And we reject your narrative with the facts of our own existence. That is the view from inside — not from a podium in the United States.

[Akshay Jogani @kshayjogani]

A lot of the discussion around the Mumbai–Ahmedabad bullet train seems to focus on whether it's running late.

What's far more interesting is what India is actually building.

We're getting the E10 Shinkansen, the same generation Japan itself will operate. That's rare. Countries importing high-speed rail often end up buying technology that's already a generation old. In this case, India is effectively becoming a launch market for the newest platform.

And the train itself is only one part of the story.

Over 350 km of viaduct has already been built. A tunnel is being constructed beneath Thane Creek. Slab track is being laid to Japanese high-speed rail standards; something India had never done before. A dedicated high-speed rail training institute is coming up in Vadodara. None of this infrastructure, expertise or capability existed in the country a few years ago.

And there's more.
BEML and ICF are developing the B28 trainset in Bengaluru. We went from Vande Bharat at 180km/h, designed for conventional rail, to developing a 250+ km/h trainset in a remarkably short period of time. It won't match the 320 km/h operating speeds of the Shinkansen. But that's not really the point. The real value lies in developing the capability to design and manufacture high-speed rolling stock domestically.

That's why I think less about the inauguration date of the first corridor and more about the seven corridors being discussed.

The first high-speed rail line is always expensive because you're building an entire ecosystem from scratch—engineering talent, standards, training systems, manufacturing capability, maintenance practices and regulatory expertise. But once that ecosystem exists, every corridor that follows becomes easier, faster and cheaper to build.

[Nandini @NBDwrites]

Chief Ministers have come and gone, but in all my years I have never witnessed this kind of pent-up rage as is now directed at Mamata Banerjee and her nephew.

What they ran was a grotesque hybrid of mafia and gulag.

And the greater shame? The complicity of the media, the educated class, and the so-called elite. They enabled it. They rationalised it. They helped crush dissent.

The vulnerable were extorted. Political opponents, especially those who supported the BJP were hounded, brutalised, and silenced through unspeakable acts. It is unforgivable.

What we are seeing today: eggs thrown, heads tonsured, white sarees draped in chilling symbolism is still a fraction of what Bengal endured.

And yet, the old Indian instinct will be to ‘move on.’

That instinct has cost us dearly before. History is witness: suppressed anger does not dissipate, it ferments.

There must be, there should be consequences.
By law, first and foremost.

But ‘moving on’ is certainly not an option.

[Kanwal Sibal @KanwalSibal]

“He has anchored Indias perception of itself in a worldview rooted in Indian heritage, not western secularism.”

What is wrong with this? Why should India divorce itself from its own heritage and define itself by yardsticks that have no civilisational basis in India?

There has been no conflict between temporal and ecclesiastical power in India, as in the West.

Interestingly, the Enlightenment in the West has “pagan” Greek roots.

Hindu civilisation is inherently secular.

The secularism debate in India is political, rooted in the partition of the country on the basis of religion and the political need to integrate the Indian Muslims in an independent India.

Western ideas of secularism have been artificially planted in India and have created political, social and religious dissensions in our country.

The burden of being “secular” in India should be shared equally by all religious communities. But is it the case?

European and US societies have deep Christian roots. Europe defines its roots as Judeo-Christian. It has powerful Christian lobbies that exert influence in their societies as well as colour the European world view.

The Evangelists in the US, the global power of the Catholic church, the religious activities of the Presbyterians- and all have been active in conversions in India- call into question “western secularism”.

Western societies have an understanding of Abrahamic religions but cannot intellectually and politically connect with Hinduism and hence the obsession with the caste system, cow worship and perceived social ills.

More can be said.

Erik Solheim may mean well but the phrase “Hindu nationalism” is a wrong term that distorts reality and carries a negative connotation.

India wants to be India, defined by its own civilisation and not western idioms.

[PM गुलाग Yojanā Lobbyist @GulagLobbyist]

It has been 2-days since a 21-yr old infiltrated & exposed an organized scheme against dehumanizing India on an industrial scale.

yet neither our government or leaders of the NRI have said or picked it up.

Nobody cares until we do a Karen , Nikita Bier probably supports this

[Khapitar @bholekabhagatt]

7.9 million views on the op video

We’re all getting tired of saying this but this is not organic. This cannot be solved without government intervention , how many threads will you make ? How many doxxes will you do? It means nothing anymore. Gov needs to summon twitter and establish consequences for rampant anti India disinformation. Everything else is cope.

[Namita Balyan @NamitaBalyan]

Modi must resign. 😡
Fascist Modi. 😡
Death of Democracy. 😡

But in Tamil Nadu... ohh! 🤡

[UP 10T Economic Goal™ @up_10t_army]

This is a far better way for political parties to communicate with the public.

Now the opposition can respond with a similar list of genuine failures based on current realities, instead of relying on narratives that most people don't relate to.

[Nikhil Mehra @TweetinderKaul]

UP Police is apparently just doing its job. Its job wasn't to save Yuvraj Mehta. But it is its job to protect the public from those who tried to save him. This, like many other cases in UP, will end in an excoriating judgement from the Allahabad High Court. But that is simply not good enough. Because it creates neither justice nor restitution.

[Indian Tintin @IndianTintin_]

"The amount of violations of human rights in a country is always an inverse function of the amount of complaints about human rights violations heard from there. The greater the number of complaints being aired, the better protected are human rights in that country."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

India is very easy place to live for educated upper middle-class feminists because they can air infinite complaints. Their maids otoh can never complain, and are hence truly suffering.

Good Night.

[Nirmalya Dutta @NonsensicalNemo]

https://t.co/09K9CiElYH

[Abhijit Iyer-Mitra @Iyervval]

😂😂😂 what a read. (Warning: it’s satire)

[Rahul Raj @x_rahulraj]

Arrest the labour who carried bricks to this location.

[Ajeet Bharti @ajeetbharti]

Thank you @dpradhanbjp, thank you @narendramodi

[𝘽𝙡𝙖𝙠𝙚 @Arealmfngl]

If true this would be a huge win for feminism. Women are grossly underrepresented in the dictatorship and authoritarianism fields

[Lt Gen DP Pandey @LtGenDPPandey]

Would urge Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay to write a story about the Qatari population that is disenfranchised. He can also write about lakhs of migrant workers of all class and country being denied any say in politics of the country.
And will like to see the courage of the free media of @AJEnglish to publish the same. Justice will come faster than the news is published. @ajaykraina @ARanganathan72 @AadiAchint @gauravcsawant @AnchorAnandN

[THE SKIN DOCTOR @theskindoctor13]

Dharmendra Pradhan should go.

Javadekar, and Nishank were removed from the Education Ministry for far less than what has unfolded under Pradhan's tenure.

The govt should not worry about whether Congress will portray his removal as a political victory. Let them. They are irrelevant. The govt is answerable to students and parents, and they are increasingly disillusioned by repeated paper leak controversies, CBSE evaluation discrepancies, contentious UGC regulations, and a series of avoidable crises. In recent years, there has rarely been this level of public anger directed at the Education Ministry.

Pradhan's removal should be followed by an independent probe to determine whether tender rules were altered or interpreted in a manner that favoured Coempt Edutech, and whether any conflict of interest exists between the company and anyone associated with the Education Ministry. Public confidence in the education system must be restored.

[Gabbar @GabbbarSingh]

Monday plug. Latest column. In case y missed 🙏

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Gems @gemsofbabus_]

A family in Kanpur Dehat is watching its land being grabbed overnight by powerful people.

A BJP chairman under the protection of a BJP MP, is being accused of taking over someone’s property while the police, SDM and administration remain silent.

Imagine the pain of a helpless family seeing their land taken away, while the very system they trusted refuses to stand with them.

If this can happen under the govt’s nose, what hope is left for ordinary citizens?

@CMOfficeUP @myogiadityanath ji, this is deeply unfortunate. Please look into it. Slowly, hope is fading. 🙏