Farah Siddiqui writes on Indian politics with a focus on identity, community, and the management of majorities and minorities. Her essays move between the national and the regional, tracking how political language gets remade by each election cycle.
Recent work
Modi-Pezeshkian Meeting at SCO Resumes Direct Channel Amid US-Iran War
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian met on the sidelines of the SCO summit in Bishkek, their first face-to-face since the US-Iran war began. The conversation resumed a channel centred on regional stability, Chabahar, and the security of the Strait of Hormuz.
Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 Opens a New Front in India's AI Talent Race
Meta has unveiled Muse Spark 1.1, a multimodal agentic AI model capable of writing and debugging code, using external tools, and executing complex multi-step tasks with reduced human intervention. The developer preview is open to builders now. For India's vast developer community and its IT services sector, the arrival of frontier agentic AI on accessible terms is both an accelerant and a structural challenge — one that demands a strategic response, not a passive welcome.
A Glasgow Napkin, a Missing Northeast, and India's Sovereign Map Reflex
When Olympic boxer Lovlina Borgohain pointed out that a Glasgow restaurant's napkin design omitted India's Northeast, the resulting controversy — apology, account deletion, viral outrage — compressed into one episode a much larger argument about how India's territorial identity gets managed abroad. The incident illuminates both a persistent blind spot in how India's Northeast is represented in global commercial imagery and an emerging pattern of Indian athletes acting as first-responders to sovereign representation failures.
Monsoon's Intensifying Grip on Central India Exposes the Last-Mile Warning Gap
The India Meteorological Department has issued low-to-moderate flash flood risk warnings for parts of Chhattisgarh, east Madhya Pradesh, Vidarbha, and Odisha as the southwest monsoon enters an active phase. Dozens of districts face inundation risk over saturated soils, with widespread rainfall forecast across northwest and central India through early August. The warnings arrive at a moment when kharif sowing is at a critical juncture and India's institutional gap between national forecasting capability and village-level dissemination remains unresolved.
RAF Personnel Beaten at Connaught Place: When Protest Becomes Assault
Violence during a Cockroach Janta Party protest near Parliament on July 21-22 resulted in Rapid Action Force personnel being chased, assaulted, and beaten to the ground at Connaught Place, with Delhi Police filing over nine FIRs. The incident — captured on video and shared widely — exposes a persistent institutional gap in how India handles organised protest violence against uniformed security forces. The legal accountability of organisers, the vulnerability of RAF personnel in urban crowd-control settings, and the international narrative dimension of organisations with foreign donor networks all demand simultaneous attention.
Operation Hard Ball Reframes the Nijjar Case as a Law Enforcement Matter
The FBI's Operation Hard Ball has arrested 24 individuals across the US, Canada, and Europe, charging Lawrence Bishnoi and Goldy Brar with directing the 2023 murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia. Crucially, the US indictment makes no allegation of Indian government involvement — a significant evidentiary development that reshapes a diplomatic dispute that has shadowed India-Canada relations since Justin Trudeau's 2023 claims. India now has both a strategic opening and a structural obligation: engage the US Department of Justice proactively, or watch the evidentiary record form without Indian input.
A Rangoli on American Stamps: Diwali's Long March Into the US Mainstream
The United States Postal Service will release a Diwali commemorative stamp in October 2026, featuring a rangoli designed by Houston-based artist Sangita Bhutada. The stamp places Diwali alongside Hanukkah and Kwanzaa in the American cultural calendar — a positioning that took two decades of sustained diaspora civic engagement to achieve. For India, the moment is less about the stamp itself and more about what it reveals: that civilisational soft power travels farthest when carried organically by diaspora communities, not projected from government offices.
Iran Strikes Israeli Petrochemical Site as West Asia Violence Threatens India's Energy Security
Iran's Revolutionary Guard fired nearly 30 ballistic missiles at Israel, targeting a petrochemical facility in retaliation for Israeli strikes on Iranian sites. The escalation prompted US Ambassador Mike Huckabee to take shelter, highlighting growing regional tensions that threaten India's strategic interests in West Asia.
Jaishankar Navigates Energy Security Diplomacy in Quad Prep Talks with Japan
External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar met Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi to prepare for Quad discussions on the Free and Open Indo-Pacific, emphasising energy security concerns and West Asian tensions. The bilateral talks underscore India's strategic positioning as both nations navigate regional challenges through maritime cooperation.