Your Daily Wrap: Ex-Japan PM Shinzo Abe assassinated, Amarnath cloudburst kills eight; and more

During his time in office, Abe was a great friend of India, and a relationship that he invested personally in. He also had a special rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. During his first stint in 2006-07, Abe visited India and addressed Parliament. During his second stint — during which he overtook the record set by Eisaku Sato, his great-uncle, of the number of days spent consecutively in office — he visited India thrice: in January 2014, December 2015, and September 2017. No other Prime Minister of Japan has made so many visits to India.

At least eight people have lost their lives in a flash flood triggered by a cloudburst near the Amarnath cave on Friday, Jammu and Kashmir Police said. As many as 25 tents at the Ball base camp are reported to have been affected. The cloudburst occurred around 5:30pm, after which a part of the base camp was washed away in the subsequent flash flood. IGP (Kashmir) Vijay Kumar said that rescue operations by police, National Disaster Response Force and security forces are in progress.

Amnesty International and its chair Aakar Patel have been slapped with penalties of Rs 51 crore and Rs 10 crore, respectively, by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act. The adjudicating authority of the ED has upheld the show-cause notice issued to both by the agency in this respect. The development comes months after Patel, based on a lookout circular issued by the CBI, was prevented from flying to the US to deliver a series of lectures.

Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi is in the process of completing the formalities of his departure from the Rajya Sabha and the Union Cabinet, including vacating his official residence. The exit of one of the BJP’s most prominent minority faces for the last two decades means the party has no Muslim minister at the Centre nor a Muslim MP now. In an interview with The Indian Express, Naqvi, who has been in the Rajya Sabha since 2002, says he would rather not dwell on the speculation of him being picked as the NDA vice-presidential candidate. Nor would he be disappointed if the Narendra Modi government didn’t choose him. He also says that filling up posts for the sake of symbolism was not “a guarantee of secularism and development”. Read edited excerpts here.

Political Pulse

Putting the seal on Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy’s complete control over his party, the YSR Congress Party is set to anoint him as its lifetime president at a two-day plenary that began near Guntur on Friday. So complete is the grip that it might now be causing friction within the family. Jagan’s mother YS Vijaya Lakshmi, the co-founder of the YSRCP, announced her resignation as honorary president of the party, saying she wanted to devote herself to helping daughter YS Sharmila Reddy. The latter, who floated the YSRCP Telangana Party last year, is believed to have made the shift to the neighbouring state seeing no space for herself in Andhra under Jagan. Read Sreenivas Janyala’s report.

He was once one of Nitish Kumar’s confidants and just two years ago the Bihar chief minister called him the future of the Janata Dal (United) after he took over as the party’s national president. But those days may seem ages ago for RCP Singh, or Ram Chandra Prasad Singh, who resigned as Union Minister of Steel on Wednesday, a day before his term in the Rajya Sabha expired. The JD(U) did not renominate Singh to the Upper House allegedly because he fell out with Kumar. Some senior leaders in the BJP are surprised that RCP, once the JD(U)’s “organisation man”, has been marginalised in this manner but many in the JD(U) were reportedly apprehensive about the former minister’s proximity to the BJP. That is said to have led to his downfall.

Express Explained

On Thursday, US Democratic Representative Ro Khanna said the US government must not impose sanctions on India under the Countering America’s Adversaries through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) for its purchase of S-400 missile weapons system from Russia. He noted the “Chinese aggression” at Indian borders, outlining India’s need for the system. The Biden administration has not yet issued a clear statement on whether India might be subjected to sanctions under CAATSA, even as India began receiving the weapons from Russia in late 2021. What is the CAATSA, why did the US enact this law, and could it apply to India? We explain.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was reported to have asked the BJP national executive in Hyderabad last weekend to reach out to “deprived and downtrodden sections” in communities other than Hindus, which was understood to be a message to the party to focus on groups such as Pasmanda Muslims in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Who are the Pasmanda Muslims? What is the demographic distribution of Pasmanda Muslims? What is the history of the Pasmanda movement? Read here.

Movie Reviews

This week, we reviewed Chris Hemsworth’s Thor Love and Thunder, Netflix’s new animated movie The Sea Beast, and Amazon Prime’s web series Modern Love Hyderabad. Watch it or skip it? Read our reviews to decide.