Merchant of Fear

Newsmaker: Harpreet Singh
The Khalistani terrorist caught in the US specialised in grenade attacks

On April 22, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel put up a post on X: “CAPTURED: HARPREET SINGH, part of an alleged foreign ter­rorist gang here illegally in the United States, who we believe was involved in planning multiple attacks on police stations both in India and the United States.” It signalled the end of the road for a man who had risen from being an ordinary criminal to an exporter of terror into India.

Singh, more infamous as Happy Passia, an alias he got from the village Passia that he comes from, went from petty crime to organised crime to terrorism, a journey that mir­rors the complex dynamics of Punjab’s underworld and the international networks that interweave it. Associated with the Babbar Khalsa International, a designated terror group and also Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, Passia became a global operator around seven years ago making trips to Dubai and the UK. He later illegally entered the US. Passia’s speciality in recent times had been grenade attacks, by some accounts, as many as 14 of them. Last year, one lobbed into the house of a retired police officer had made headlines. It led to the National Investigation Agency taking over the investigation and offering ` 5 lakh to anyone providing information leading to his arrest. The chargesheet mentions Passia’s associate as Harwinder Singh Sandhu, a terrorist based in Pakistan. The Indian government is asking the US for Passia’s extradition. A number of agencies will be waiting for him. There is Punjab Police, of course, but even Uttar Pradesh wants to question him for a foiled terror attack plan in Prayagraj during the Mahakumbh. (Madhavankutty Pillai)

Noisemaker: SQR Ilyas
Total Rejection

The cacophonous protests against the recently passed Waqf (Amendment) Bill, which is now law, echoed at Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium this week, with speakers claiming that the system of Waqf exists in every Islamic country. Most of them, however, omitted saying that no country had the sweeping and arbitrary provisions such as “Waqf by user” and lack of civil court appeal in the Indian law. All India Muslim Personal Law Board leader SQR Ilyas removed any doubt as to the agenda of the meeting when he said, “We are against the Waqf (Amendment) Act completely, not just against a clause or two. While we request the government to take back the law, it is our democratic right to approach the Supreme Court against the Waqf (Amendment) Act, and to organise peaceful protests against the new law.”

The Big Picture

Vatican City, April 24, 2025: Farewell, Holy Father: The body of Pope Francis, who died on April 21 at the age of 88, lies in state inside St Peter’s Basilica as mourners pay their respects.

Ideas
Workplace Culture

Culture, as the common workplace aphorism goes, eats strategy for breakfast. Even the most brilliant business strategy, according to this maxim, will come undone if it isn’t supported by the people implementing it.

There have been several studies that suggest a correlation between culture and business. And it is something a new study, done on Indian firms by the consulting firm Deloitte, also finds. According to this report, companies with higher culture scores are more likely to experience an improvement in their net profit margins by 1.6 times than those with declining culture scores. Such companies also have 1.7 times increased cash flows and give 1.2 times higher returns to the shareholders of the company than those with declining culture scores.

The report looks at 75 organisations drawn from the Nifty 250 index across six major industries and analysing a vast trove of reviews by employees on social media platforms, examines the influence of what it calls key culture drivers on the firm’s finances. While the report finds Indian organisations overall exhibit high culture scores, driven by what it calls growth opportunities and a growing focus on inclusion, it also looks at what aspects of culture particular industries do well at and struggle with. So while the financial services sector, for instance, pays well, and provides an empowered culture, it struggles at work-life balance.

No workplace can provide everything an employee wants from it. But improving the overall environment may not just mean more satisfied employees. It might be good for business too.

Money Mantra
Home Truths
Staying focused on domestic opportunities drowns out the tariff noise

EVERY FEW WEEKS a new headline sparks panic across the markets—Washington raises duties on Chinese goods, Beijing counters with its own measures. Export bellwethers wobble, currencies lurch and strategists revise spreadsheets overnight.

Yet, amidst all this turbulence, a quieter cohort of companies keeps ringing up sales. And this is largely because its customers live within In­dia’s own borders and couldn’t care less about tariff rates. For investors hunting for durability rather than spectacle, that is the group to own.

India’s domestic first story rests on three sturdy pillars.

The first is scale. Roughly, 25 million people move up the con­sumption ladder each year, and the appetite they bring is disarm­ingly basic: emulsion paint for a freshly plastered wall, two-wheeler upgrades, sanitary pads, digital data packs, ready-to-eat breakfast, perhaps a low-ticket SIP. These purchases hinge on wage growth and urbanisation, not on whether container freight rates out of Shenzhen in China will spike in the next quarter.

Policy is the second pillar. Production-linked incentives, calibrated customs tariffs on finished imports, and GST rationalisation together tilt the playing field towards local manufacturers—be they air-condi­tioner makers in Gujarat or battery assemblers in Tamil Nadu. A tariff war abroad often ends up reinforcing Delhi’s make-and-consume playbook rather than disrupting it.

The third advantage is logistical. Boardrooms scarred by the pan­demic learnt that a six-week voyage and a volatile dollar can demolish working-capital discipline. Shorter domestic supply chains, mean­while, release cash and stabilise margins. Each bump in freight costs or currency moves widens that benefit, turning localisation into a self-strengthening moat. This is not an appeal to economic nationalism; it is portfolio risk management. The further a company’s cash register stands from the customs house, the less it shakes when global sabres rattle. Owning businesses that sell overwhelmingly to the Indian household turns tariff skirmishes into background noise and lets the slow, predictable machinery of domestic demand keep grinding out shareholder returns. (Ramesh Singh)

Viral
The Bangkok Meltdown

Holidays can be stressful. Flights get cancelled, hotels turn out to be rundown, and you sometimes even get billed twice. But when a tourist in Bangkok got charged twice at a hotel by mistake, the meltdown that ensued was so overblown that it quickly went viral across the world. It seemed as though a mental switch had been flipped when a tourist, a South Asian man who some have claimed is Indian, and others, Sri Lankan, learned that the group he was part of had been charged twice for their stay. Wearing a T-shirt with the message ‘Greatest Dad Ever’, he screamed and hurled abuses, moved around the lobby scaring away other guests who were attempting to enter the hotel, and even attempted to lunge at a woman at the reception. The meltdown continued even as the hotel’s terrified employees and members of his own group tried to calm him down. According to reports, the police had to be eventually called to defuse the situation.

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