Veetto V.

🏡: 🇮🇳🇺🇲 ◇ 💖💜💙 ◇ ✈️: 🇩🇰🇮🇸🇳🇴🇹🇷🇸🇪

[Skyroot Aerospace @SkyrootA]

ORBIT ACHIEVED. 🚀

Vikram-1 Test Flight-1 has reached orbit. India's first privately developed orbital rocket has completed its final burn and injected its payloads into a ~450 km orbit, making India the third country in the world with private orbital launch capability.

History is made. 🇮🇳

#Vikram1 #JourneyToOrbit #SkyrootAerospace

[Lewis Hamilton @LewisHamilton]

REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE

[Formula 1 @F1]

HE’S DONE IT!!! 🤩

LEWIS HAMILTON WINS THE BARCELONA-CATALUNYA GRAND PRIX!!! 🏆🎉

#F1 #BarcelonaGP

[Prof. Shamika Ravi @ShamikaRavi]

Research shows that negative news travels 15 times more than positive news. This “news”👇- though now retracted - must have gained legs. Beware of manufactured narratives.

[Shekhar Gupta @ShekharGupta]

1. Pakistan has ended up losing every war against India but that hasn’t prevented it from claiming victory. My latest #NationalInterest, looks at how Pakistan has historically conducted warfare with India — tactically brilliant & strategically disastrous. That’s the reason it has lost every war after beginning strongly, sometimes even spectacularly.

2. The revisionist history of every war or skirmish is a popular subcontinental phenomenon. Just that in Pakistan it’s carried out at industrial scale, school textbooks included. Take the 87-hour skirmish. All of Pakistan believes it won this round. That this was followed by Trump’s embrace was seen as an endorsement of this self-proclaimed ‘victory’.

3. Fact is, Munir had planned this. The visit of Steve Witkoff’s son Zach & the crypto deal took place just 4 days after Pahalgam & nearly 2 weeks before Op. Sindoor. When he set up Pahalgam, Munir knew India would retaliate. The killings were his tactics to draw an Indian response. To reopen the Kashmir issue, with Trump sewn up, was his strategic objective. The first worked, the second failed.

4. Let’s look at the post-Pulwama story. Since the initiative of launching a terror provocation is always with Pakistan, they knew IAF will be used for retaliation. That’s how Op. Swift Retort, involving more than 26 PAF aircraft to bait the IAF into a scrap where they didn’t have the numbers or the range, was planned & rehearsed. They’re still celebrating shooting down an IAF MiG-21. Even if that’s a tactical plus, strategically, Indian deterrence lasted 7 years. Until Pahalgam.

5. The same story has played out earlier. Op. Gibraltar (about 10,000 regulars in mufti infiltrated the Kashmir Valley), followed by Op. Grand Slam to take Chhamb, then Akhnoor, cut off Kashmir & grab it with ease. Tactically, this was brilliant but somebody in Pakistani GHQ had to be extraordinarily dumb to think India would simply keel over & not expand the war to the Punjab plains.

6. Whatever the reality of Op. Sindoor, the Pakistanis have taken the wrong lessons from it. This will be compounded by the delusions of a rising diplomatic stature. India has to keep that in mind & anticipate a new provocation earlier than what we may have imagined 6 months back.  

Read #NationalInterest: https://t.co/WdrJ2fUkrd
Watch #NationalInterest:


https://t.co/1eBXMPLgZt

[Aravind @aravind]

India must be asking Norway to officially apologize for what its Epstein linked diplomat said about killing Indians. Instead India, the world's largest democracy, officially invites DS plants and small time sellouts to try prove something to them in Norway. Very disappointing.

[Alpha Defense™🇮🇳 @alpha_defense]

MEA saw the bait, inspected the bait, acknowledged the bait… and then still swallowed it whole.

[Velina Tchakarova @vtchakarova]

UAE left OPEC/+ to free production, is now doubling non‑Hormuz export capacity via Fujairah (after 2027), and is locking in India as a long‑term buyer via LPG/LNG deals and the build up of India's strategic reserve. These are three mutually reinforcing pillars of same strategy.

[Shiv Aroor @ShivAroor]

The ‘Liberal’ meltdown over Bengal is particularly satisfying. Their principles end at Bengal’s borders. Corruption, state power, sexual violence matter everywhere else. In Bengal it becomes “culture”.

And those fake feminist netas can’t hide.

My piece: https://t.co/7UIxeoPKO3

[Yashwant Deshmukh 🇮🇳 @YRDeshmukh]

Zero violence for the first time in the history of elections, particularly in West Bengal. Not even a single death in political violence. No booth capturing. No rigging. Record breaking turnout. No controversy around 'missing EVMs', papertrail or VVPAT. Seamless transparent process and real time live data reporting in all five states.

In short, of that's the job, then yes, Election Commission has won hands down.

[Manish Tewari @ManishTewari]

There is some part of the human anatomy that seems to have gone missing in that response. 👇

At least have the gumption to stand up and say we are a 5000 year old civilisational continuum and not a hell hole .

How difficult is it say that ?

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Remembering the innocent lives lost in the gruesome Pahalgam terror attack on this day last year. They will never be forgotten. My thoughts are also with the bereaved families as they cope with this loss.

As a nation, we stand united in grief and resolve. India will never bow to any form of terror. The heinous designs of terrorists will never succeed.

[Anil Kakodkar @anil_kakodkar]

Today is a historic day. India has entered 2nd stage of our three stage nuclear power program with the achievement of clriticality of PFBR. Congratulations to every contributor to this critical technology that makes India only the second country to operate a large fast reactor.

[Abhijit Chavda @AbhijitChavda]

This is a landmark moment. India has officially begun its transition into Stage 2 of Dr. Bhabha's 3-Stage Nuclear Program.

Stage 1: Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs). This stage is complete and operational. India runs ~22 PHWRs which generate power and accumulate plutonium (Pu-239) fuel needed to feed Stage 2.

Stage 2: Fast Breeder Reactors (FBRs). They use Stage 1 plutonium as fuel and are loaded with uranium-238 and thorium-232 around the core. FBRs convert U-238 and Th-232 into more fissile fuel - more Pu-239 and U-233 (from Th-232). The reactor BREEDS more fuel than it burns. The Kalpakkam FBR is now sustaining a controlled fission chain reaction.

Stage 3: Advanced Heavy Water Reactors (AHWRs) on Thorium. This is the end-goal. AHWRs will use the U-233 bred in Stage 2 as their main fuel, along with Th-232. India's massive Thorium reserves will give India virtually inexhaustible, indigenous, clean nuclear energy for centuries.

India is transitioning into Stage 2 (long way to go) - and demonstrating indigenous mastery of one of the most complex reactor technologies, without foreign assistance.

Congratulations India, and kudos to all involved.

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Today, India takes a defining step in its civil nuclear journey, advancing the second stage of its nuclear programme.

The indigenously designed and built Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor at Kalpakkam has attained criticality.

This advanced reactor, capable of producing more fuel than it consumes, reflects the depth of our scientific capability and the strength of our engineering enterprise. It is a decisive step towards harnessing our vast thorium reserves in the third stage of the programme.

A proud moment for India. Congratulations to our scientists and engineers.

[sushant sareen @sushantsareen]

Actually an excellent piece on a certain class of Indian diplomats who think turning the other cheek is diplomacy and they are successful diplomats if the enemy adores and admires their gullibility

[Abhijit Iyer-Mitra @Iyervval]

Disagree vehemently ma’am (long post + thread)

1) previously the threshold of retaliation was kept deliberately low, precisely because of Pakistani nuclear threats … ergo the response was seldom “firm” - our “response” to 26/11 for example.

2) Yes, maintaining channels of communication is statecraft - but it isn’t the ONLY statecraft. When the very existence of communication is weaponised - as it was in pakistan as “india cowered, they had no option” then the statecraft lies in ending communication

3) Their standard fallback was “pakistan is a stakeholder, talk to us”. Right now the insurgency has ended (not terrorism - but the state of insurgency) - ergo the “stakeholder” argument also goes out of the window

4) With pakistan, engagement grants something far worse than mere immunity. It grants the notion of submission- that india was terrorised into talking - that’s how it is amplified to Pakistan’s domestic audience

5) The accusation isn’t a moral one - it’s an intellectual one - failing to realise the basics have changed and going back to staid patterns that yielded sub-optimal if not abysmal results at the best of times

6) The suggestion of a women’s caucus assumes that women will somehow find ways or means that men have not been able to. Yet engaging women in previous track 2s has yielded absolutely no discernible difference in outcomes - to statistically merit an all woman effort: your own, plus Chokila aunty and Meera Ma’am’s foreign secretary-ships being some examples - all three with very different outlooks but all three operated under the same pre “talks+terror” rubric. All of you plus several women were involved in track 2s .. to what different result?

7) Invoking the suffering of victims is not deploying rhetoric. Far from it - every victim is statistical proof, a walking talking data point, of the failure of past policy. Asking someone to confront statistical proof of policy failure is not rhetoric - quite the antithesis in fact.

8) Agree 100% on judging policy by who agrees and disagrees. However as a general rule, we’ve seen Pakistanis agree with every single proposal of talks - precisely because of points 2,3 & 4 raised earlier

9) As you yourself point out ( I agree) - the end game has to be “containment, deterrence, internal strengthening, and selective engagement”… that - including selective engagement is exactly what is happening. Selective to the point it reduces the weaponisation opportunity given to pakistan.

10) Regarding “reducing pakistan to rubble” - this is an extremist point and I’d say you’re caricaturing the other PoV here. What has happened however is that the limits of nuclear deterrence have been tested and shifted very significantly. That is brinkmanship yes, but necessary brinkmanship against a high-risk-acceptance adversary

11) Regarding your 4 points
First we are in complete agreement - but what you fail to mention is that the sticks - specifically military retaliation has increased significantly imposing disproportionate costs. That’s a recalibration of the calculus.

12) Second - Pakistan’s veto on india has finally ended after nearly 40 years of insurgency & bombings - starting with Punjab, through the mumbai bombings, the dual - Kashmir-Punjab insurgency, the mumbai attacks. My question is where exactly are you seeing a Pakistani veto on/over india right now? And how did talks in the past negate that veto?

13) Third - refusing engagement & keeping it to the bare minimum (Indus waters for example) and cancelling even that is ALSO - CONFLICT MANAGEMENT. It may not be your preferred method, but that doesn’t mean it’s not conflict management and it is significantly more successful than past methods in reducing indian fatalities

14) Fourth: which part of current policy suggests we haven’t kept alternate futures in mind?

Continued 👇🏾

[Yashwant Deshmukh 🇮🇳 @YRDeshmukh]

A "safe and thriving place" my foot. All this gyaan vanishes when you are harboring best of the best in internationally designated terror list under your watch just to unleash terror in "South Asia". You (as in your country) were never an aberration to start with, you were always THE norm set by your masters in Uniform.

[sushant sareen @sushantsareen]

I for one have always found this business of vishwaguru/vishwamitra quite cringe. I also turn off the moment I hear anyone say 'Vasudhaiva Kutumbhakam'. But what I am trying to understand is that during the halcyon days when we were actually playing VG/VM (the days when we were airing our views even if no one heard them or cared for them, much less acted on them...i mean the days when we pretended to be non-aligned and leader of third world) what war did our voice stop, what great change came in the world because we took a 'moral and principled stand'? Did the world come up to us and say, hey India because you are saying we shuld or should not do something, we are going to follow your lead? Oh because the Indians oppose something and have issued a statement against it, we shouldnt do it? Please educate me if ever such a thing happened. BTW even back then, we forgot our principles when convenient. In Eastern Europe and Afghanistan, we preferred to stay quiet and not take a stand. That doesn't mean we didnt protest with the Soviets. But we did it quietly, behind closed doors. I wonder where the diplomats who want us to take a strident stand today were standing back then.

[sushant sareen @sushantsareen]

The obsession of some Indian diplomats to "make our voice heard, stand by our principles, make the moral argument" tells us how ill-equipped they were in understanding the ruthless and unforgiving reality of international relations. Any surprise that under their watch India was constantly being attacked by Pakistani terrorists and all this moralising brigade could do was retaliate by threatening to retaliate and then scurrying back to a desultory dialogue with the Pakistanis. Having been epic failures in protecting India's interests, they should now sit down and keep their moral science IR to themselves because no one in India or rest of the world is interested in hearing what they say, no one gives a damn about their principled stand and their moral arguments evoke a derisive yawn.