 Namaste, Aadab, hello and welcome to the second episode of This Week with NewsClick. A weekly podcast, in which we will bring a roundup of some of the key developments from within the country, and we take a brief look at some of the international developments as well. We are your hosts, Sonali and Tranita. So let's begin. First, we take a look at the developments in Manipur this week. The spate of violence that started about five months ago in the northeastern state seems to be far from dying down. It was announced just last Saturday on September 23 that mobile internet services had been restored in the state after a long gap of 140 days. Chief Minister Birain Singh had gone on to claim that the law and order situation had improved in the state. What followed the announcement, however, was a rocky week. After the incident ended, a lot of videos came out on social media, from which the events of violence in the early stages of the conflict also came out. Photos of the dead bodies of two Maitreyi students who had gone missing in July also surfaced on social media and led to widespread outrage and violence. After this, a crowd surrounded the ancestral house of Chief Minister Birain Singh in which the police used tear gas to remove it and about 50 people died in this incident. The state witnessed violent clashes in other areas too and mobile internet services had to be shut off again. In the middle of the chaos that has ensured, the BJP government in Manipur has extended the imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or AFSPA, in all of the Hill Districts, meanwhile exempting the Maitreyi-dominated Valley Districts. This decision has drawn flag, especially because the Army has demanded re-imposition of AFSPA in the Valley Districts, arguing that its absence had hampered operations against insurgent groups. The apex bodies of Kuki, Zomi and Naga tribes in Manipur have called the decision partisan and an outcome of the discriminatory mindset of the government. The state and the central governments have failed in curbing the violence in Manipur since it started in early May this year. The situation in the state remains tense and it requires a strong political will to find a solution to the crisis. Let's move on to our second story of the week. On 25th September, AIA-DMK ended the alliance between BJP and NDA. This decision was taken at a high-level meeting in the party chief, Palani Swami. Because of this split, BJP's state chief, K. Annamalai, is being believed to be a member of the BJP. However, AIA-DMK has not given a specific reason for this split. Annamalai passed remarks about the late chief minister Jayalalitha's conviction in a corruption case. He baselessly claimed that Dravidian ideologue Anadurai inserted Hinduism and had to go into hiding. He belittled AIA-DMK General Secretary Eddapadi on several occasions. Annamalai also said he will release a list of corruption charges against AIA-DMK leaders while still in the alliance. These activities have enraged AIA-DMK members and its leaders. The party even passed a resolution against Annamalai two months ago and sent it to the high command of the BJP. But so far, nothing has happened. BJP's high command has not yet said anything about the split. It is believed that AIA-DMK's alliance with the BJP has helped the Tamil Nadu to create their own political space. However, BJP's agenda of the Hindu-Hindi-Hindutva has little mileage in Tamil Nadu. So the party's move to ally with BJP has been widely criticised. Before the election of 2024, this is a big shock for the BJP and NDA in Tamil Nadu. Let's see how this political drama unfolds in the coming weeks. Now let's talk about Ramesh Bidhudi's remarks. Last week during Parliament's special session, Ramesh Bidhudi, the BJP MP from South Delhi constituency, abused Bahujan Samaj Parties MP Danish Ali on record. His highly unparliamentary and abusive words were expunged later but not before the video went viral on social media. After this, on political parties and on social media, the common people did a lot of negative things about this incident. Opposition raised a question where in the last session, the opposition MPs were suspended because of small reasons. Why did Ramesh Bidhudi, the Lok Sabha speaker, give only warnings? BJP has only asked Bidhudi to answer within 10 days. After immense pressure from opposition parties, the Lok Sabha speaker has finally referred the complaints against Bidhudi to the Privilege Committee. But the thing to think about is whether the BJP is acknowledging the gravity of his outrageous statements. Despite this, Bidhudi has been made the party in charge of the Tong district of Rajasthan. Rajasthan will soon be elected. Opposition is that BJP is giving Ramesh Bidhudi a reward for this kind of behaviour. This leads us to wonder whether what Bidhudi said in parliament represents the actual face and stance of the ruling party. Now let's move on to our last story from India. For many years, activists across the country have opposed the idea of reliance on Aadhar as the central infrastructure for welfare schemes. They have been consistently raising a number of concerns to highlight the problems with making the ID omnipresent and mandatory for a number of public and private services. These concerns were seconded by the global rating major Moody's this week. Moody's flagged security and privacy vulnerabilities in centralized identification systems like Aadhar. As has been reported in the past, the service denials because of the tricky biometric verification is a crucial hurdle, especially when it comes to manual labourers. Moody's said that the human conditions in a country like India make the biometric technologies unreliable. Pointing to the security and privacy concerns, it also said that a single entity controlling users ID credentials can dispose of user data for internal or third-party profiling purposes. These remarks on Aadhar are significant because the government just recently extended the deadline to switch to an Aadhar-based payment system for Manurega beneficiaries. Not paying heed to the concerns raised about the different aspects of Aadhar, the government has been hell bent on routing direct benefit transfers to beneficiaries of welfare schemes through Aadhar. Can this latest alarm make it pay attention to the issues of privacy, security and most of all exclusion? Now let's take a look at the international stories of the week. Our first story is about the tension brewing between India and Canada. The Khalistan movement seems to be at the centre of it all. However, there is a history to the whole issue and even in the current situation, India and Canada are not the only components of the equation. Many western countries are playing their role in the controversy. Let's hear what news clicks editor-in-chief Praveel Purkayastha has to say on the whole issue. This is not the first time that we, India, are saying that the heritage of Canada, which is the Khalistan summit, and which reaches Punjab through Pakistan, Canada presents it very gently and gives a message. He has presented it to the parliaments and the outside world that one country with five eyes has received the signal intelligence that the people of the Indian Embassy and High Commission were participating in this murder. This is the one. But if the signal intelligence has been shared with Canada, it is obvious that the United Kingdom did not do it in Canada. And it is obvious that if America has shared it with Canada, it means to do it somewhere in the corner. This is the intention of America. So the question is why the relationship is bad? That this relationship is therefore bad. It can be two reasons. But we are just speculating. One is that America is not happy with G20. Why? Because they wanted to blame Russia with Ukraine and came to the statement, which was the statement of Bali. So one is that whatever we think that we are doing very well with America and that we are going with America to corner China. This is fine. This will work for us. But the truth is that the world is not just China and India but America. There is such a big world. What will happen to Russia? Especially in Europe. And why? We need oil. We need fertilizer. We need food grains. So that is why we can't agree with Russia on America's statement. I think that because of this, this is being told to India. That you should not consider yourself so big that you will do such a thing on the ground of Canada. There won't be any criticism on this. And maybe we are overestimating what our weight is on the international level. So that is why we have to play in this way. We feel that on both sides, Canada, America and India, the way they are going, there won't be a good solution for anyone. In our second international story, we are looking at the developments in the central Asian region of Nagorno-Karabakh. Prashant from Peepers dispatches here to give us an overview of the complex ongoing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The first thing we need to know about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict is that it's actually been going on for many decades now. In fact, the conflict has its roots even before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In the late 80s, Armenia and Azerbaijan, the two countries were having a conflict on this issue. There have been multiple fights including a long war. And in 2020, there was another round of fighting. Now the crux of this issue lies in the fact that the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is recognized as part of Azerbaijan, was at least mainly populated by people from ethnic Armenians. What has happened now in the past few days is that we've seen a lot of Armenians, tens of thousands of Armenians actually leaving Nagorno-Karabakh and being forced to move to Armenia. This happened after, basically, Azerbaijan launched yet another military operation last week or so and basically took over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. So in some senses, this is a brutal end to a conflict which has been going on for decades. But clearly none of the issues that this conflict raised are going to be solved. Bulk of the Armenians, of course, moving back to Armenia, the ethnic Armenians, so taking care of them, resettling them is going to be a big issue as well. The other aspect we need to understand when we're talking about the Nagorno-Karabakh region, the conflict itself, and the rivalry and the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is the fact that it's really the question of what are the roles of the big powers in this conflict. For instance, Russia is, of course, the major power in the region. In 2020, when the last round of major fighting took place, Russian peacekeepers were deployed in the region after a ceasefire that was negotiated with the help of Russia. But over the past few years or so, especially in recent times, what we've seen is that Armenians, in fact, moving far more closer to the West, to the United States, to the European Union, etc. In fact, there seems to have been certain deals struck in the background. The President of Armenia, the leader of Armenia, the Prime Minister has basically taken a strong position against Russia at this point of time. He's blamed Russia for not being able to actually resolve the issue or why he's blamed Russia for its peacekeepers not being able to be effective in this process, which Russia has very much denied. But in the meanwhile, what we're seeing is that the possibility of Armenia emerging as a kind of close ally of the United States of the Western powers is very much there at this point of time. In fact, some high-level US officials did visit Armenia recently. There have been some summits and conferences as well. On the one hand, we have this humanitarian disaster in Nagorno-Karabakh, a massive exodus of people, a lot of uncertainty about what will happen to that region itself. On the other hand, we have the possibility of this region, the whole Armenia-Azerbaijan region becoming another site of conflict between the United States and Russia. The signs, unfortunately, are very dangerous when it comes to this. Russia will probably see this as the West opening another front in its attempt to encircle it. There's already the question of Ukraine. Now whether this region will also be a site for further pressure against Russia is what Russia is really worried about at this point of time. Until next week, this is Sonali and Tranita, signing off.