A Security Council Boost for India

Security experts in India have known for long that The Resistance Front (TRF), a Kashmiri terrorist group, is a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a United Nations-listed terrorist organisation. This has been denied consistently by Pakistan, the country that created LeT.

On July 24, the UN team that monitors Islamist terrorist groups stated this in clear terms. In its report, the 1267 Monitoring Com­mittee mentioned the Pahalgam terrorist atrocity and said TRF had claimed responsibility for the attack before retracting it.

The report stated that, “One Member State said the attack could not have happened without Lashkar-e-Tayyiba (LeT) support, and that there was a relationship between LeT and TRF. Another Member State said that the attack was carried out by TRF, which was synonymous with LeT. One Member State rejected these views and said that LeT was defunct.”

It does not require much imagi­nation to identify the member state that says LeT is defunct. The committee noting TRF as a LeT front is important. TRF was a “rebranding” of sorts for LeT to give it a less Islamist name and make the claim that events in Jammu & Kashmir represented “resistance” against India. But as is clear from the report, no one buys the ruse.

Since Article 370 of the Constitution ceased to be operative, levels of terrorist violence in J&K and other disruptive activities have come down dramatically. This is due to a combination of steps that include the downgrading of J&K from a state to a Union territory and ensuring that security forces are not subjected to political interfer­ence in anti-terrorist operations. This even as an elected government now presides over J&K. This restoration of normalcy has certainly given heft to India’s diplomatic efforts in forums like the 1267 Committee.

Now that matters are settling down in J&K, it is worth asking as to why Indian diplomacy—the favoured option for past governments—did not yield the right results on J&K.

Newsmaker
Meghnad Desai: Polymath Peer
An economist who was just as good as a cultural critic

MEGHNAD DESAI (1940-2025) was a quintessential “Old World” intellectual, multi-faceted and erudite, who engaged deeply with econometrics as well as Bollywood. He was also an institution builder who wrote tirelessly on Indian democracy and illuminated lesser known aspects of Marxian economics.
An alumnus of the University of Bombay and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his PhD, the Vadodara-born economist played a pioneering role in introducing students to sophisticated and emerging disciplines within economics. He began his teaching career at the University of California, Berkeley, before moving to the London School of Economics in 1965, where he became a professor of Economics in 1983. A renowned columnist and a politician long associated with the Labour Party in the UK, he was also a recipient of the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian award.

As the founding chairman of the Meghnad Desai Academy of Economics in Mumbai in 2014, he sought to produce graduates who were job-ready for industry, breaking away from traditional models of economic education. Desai’s columns, both in Indian and British media, attracted significant attention for their intellectual rigour and provocation.

A prominent figure in economic theory, he contributed to authoritative texts on Indian economic history. Known for his compassion and generosity as an academic, he also had a deep fondness for Hindi cinema. He authored a biography of Dilip Kumar, Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India. His autobiography, Rebellious Lord, reveals a life of scholarship, political engagement and creative pursuit. Lord Desai, who died on July 29, also wrote a novel and displayed great flair for literary criticism, blending theoretical insight with unbridled imagination. (By Ullekh NP)

Noisemaker
Deepender Singh Hooda: Mcdonald’s Isn’t Donald

A few days ago, Donald Trump claimed for the 28th time that he had intervened between India and Pakistan during their brief conflict in May. That got the goat of Deepender Singh Hooda, MP from Rohtak and son of former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda. On July 28, Hooda Jr thundered in Lok Sabha that either “Donald should be made to shut up or McDonald’s should be shut down.” The sum and substance of his speech was more suited to a rally in Haryana’s Bangar than the gravitas expected of a debate in Parliament. True to his salty idiom, he also said, “the American chieftain has made this (India-Pakistan) claim 28 times but the chieftain of our country has not condemned his statement even once.” Diplomacy is not the first nature of this chieftain it seems.

Ideas
Downturn

The recent announcement that India’s largest IT company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will be laying off 2 per cent of its workforce, estimated to be over 12,000 employees, has set off alarm bells throughout the sector.

For years now, India’s IT sector has been a picture of growth and stability. There seemed to be little that could stop this industry’s march, not even the pandemic or the many conflicts raging across the world. The top Indian tech firms expanded aggressively over the last decade. Today, just the top four IT firms, including TCS, are said to employ around 13.70 lakh individuals. Now, as the TCS decision to lay off some of its staffers shows, the sector might be facing a downturn.

The reasons for the slump are obvious. The new Trump administration has unleashed uncertainties in global trade. The other reason is AI. Firms like TCS boomed because India’s large skilled workforce could produce software for global clients at lower costs. This model might be getting upended because of the rapid advancement in AI capabilities. Many of their clients are said to be delaying signing new contracts as they evaluate whether to invest in or IT services, or a mix of both AI. Nasscom, India’s top IT industry body, which believes more job cuts will occur in the coming months, has called this period an “inflection point” for the industry.

Eventually, things might look up. IT firms and their clients may get a better understanding of the capabilities and limits of AI. The advancement in AI might bring its own wave of new of opportunities. But for now, things do not look upbeat.

Money Mantra
Surviving A Skirmish
Look at India-focused businesses in these tariff times

WITH THE TRUMP tariffs all set to kick in, you can expect stock markets to trade in headlines. But fundamentals will soon reassert themselves. Where is the impact going to be felt first? Indian goods exporters with significant US exposure will face a sudden landed-cost step-up that US buyers will try to push back against via price renegotiations or short-term order deferrals. The second-order impact will run through energy and geopolitics, because any penalty that touches trade in Russian crude or refined product flows could alter compliance and working-capital frictions for India’s energy complex.
As a result, expect knee-jerk volatility across categories that dominate India-to-US merchandise flows.

So, for portfolio construction in the next two to four weeks, remember three things. First, treat this as a policy headline, not a cycle turn: Stagger buys and sells and upgrade quality rather than de-risk indiscriminately, because high-RoCE franchises with pricing power, clean governance and conservative balance sheets typically digest trade shocks faster than levered, low-margin peers. Second, do company-by-company analysis instead of sector generalisations. Third, look at businesses whose cash flows are predominantly rupee-denominated and domestically regulated or consumption-anchored: Large private and leading public-sector banks and top NBFCs with mostly India books, exchanges, insurers, hospitals, personal-care leaders with strong rural/ urban presence, telecom operators, and utilities/ power/ renewable platforms operating on regulated or long-term contracted models. These segments are largely insulated from direct US goods-tariff risk and tend to benefit if the policy noise merely delays global demand; if the rupee wobbles, some of them may even see translation or competitive benefits against imports.

Last but not least, keep the macro picture in mind: India’s growth and inflation path over the next six-12 months is still more a function of monsoon-food dynamics, domestic policy execution, and RBI’s glide-path than of a single tariff headline. Valuations can of course de-rate on uncertainty, but secular compounders with domestic moats rarely see their five-year value-creation engines derailed by transitory trade skirmishes. (By Ramesh Singh)

Viral
Russian Surgeons Defy Earthquake

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that struck Russia’s Far East coast, one of the strongest in many years, may have caused much calamity and even triggered fears of tsunamis, but at a hospital in the Russian city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, not far from the earthquake’s epicentre, a group of medical staff displayed remarkable poise. A team of four medics were performing a surgery when the earthquake hit. Footage captured from a CCTV camera, which has since gone viral, shows the four holding on to the patient, even as the operation theatre shakes violently, sending medical equipment flying all over the place. It was a remarkable display of courage, and according to the officials from the city, the team continued on with the surgery despite the earthquake.

Deepender Singh HoodainvestmentJ&KLashkar-e-TayyibaMeghnad Desaistock marketThe Resistance FrontUN Security Council