Current Events :
Gen Dhiraj Seth on Tuesday took over as the 31st Chief of the Army Staff, succeeding Gen Upendra Dwivedi, who superannuated after more than four decades of service.
Gen Dwivedi said, “Future wars will be more joint, integrated and theatre-oriented. Therefore, the direction for the armed forces is clear: to see together, decide together and act together.”
An officer of the Armoured Corps, Gen Seth was commissioned into the Army in December 1986. It is the first time in more than three decades that an Armoured Corps officer has become the Army Chief. The last officer from the Armoured Corps to hold the post was Gen Shankar Roychowdhury, who retired in September 1997.
Gen Seth has extensive experience across the operational, strategic, capability development and institutional domains, contributing significantly to the Army’s combat effectiveness and long-term transformation.
He is an alumnus of the National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla.
The Chief with his Team
The General Officer has commanded formations at every level in diverse operational environments. His command assignments include an Armoured Regiment in the desert sector, an Armoured Brigade in the western theatre and a counter-insurgency force in Jammu and Kashmir. As a Lieutenant General, he commanded both the South Western Command and the Southern Command, which are responsible for operations along India’s western front.
Commanding two operational Army Commands is a rare distinction. In these roles, he provided strategic oversight across critical theatres for more than two-and-a-half years. He has also held several key staff and strategic appointments that have significantly influenced operational planning, force management and capability development.
Widely recognised for his contributions to force modernisation, Gen Seth has served in strategic planning and capability development roles at Army Headquarters, helping shape the Army’s modernisation trajectory, capability roadmap and long-term force-structuring initiatives. His contributions have been instrumental in aligning operational requirements with emerging technologies and future battlefield needs.
An accomplished military professional, Gen Seth has consistently excelled in professional military education, securing top positions in several courses of instruction. He is a graduate of the Higher Command Course and the National Defence College and has also attended the prestigious Command and Staff Course in Paris, reflecting his broad strategic outlook and deep understanding of contemporary military affairs.
Admiral Krishna Swaminathan, PVSM, AVSM, VSM assumed charge as the 27th Chief of the Naval Staff of the Indian Navy on 31 May 2026. He succeeds Admiral Dinesh Kumar Tripathi, PVSM, AVSM, NM who superannuated after 41 years of distinguished service.
Admiral Krishna Swaminathan was commissioned into the Indian Navy on 01 July 1987. A Communication and Electronic Warfare specialist, he has held a wide range of operational, staff and training appointments during a distinguished career spanning nearly four decades. Admiral Swaminathan’s sea commands include the guided missile vessels INS Vidyut and INS Vinash, guided missile corvette INS Kulish, guided missile destroyer INS Mysore and aircraft carrier INS Vikramaditya.
On promotion to the rank of Rear Admiral, he served as the Chief Staff Officer (Training) at Headquarters, Southern Naval Command, Kochi. He was subsequently appointed as Flag Officer Sea Training and later commanded the Western Fleet, the Sword Arm of the Indian Navy. Subsequently, he was appointed as Flag Officer Offshore Defence Advisory Group and Advisor, Offshore Security and Defence to the Government of India.
On promotion to the rank of Vice Admiral, he tenanted the appointments of Chief of Staff, Western Naval Command; and Controller Personnel Services, Chief of Personnel and Vice Chief of the Naval Staff at Naval Headquarters. Prior assuming charge as the Chief of the Naval Staff, Admiral Swaminathan was the Flag Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the prestigious Western Naval Command.
He is an alumnus of the National Defence Academy, Khadakwasla; Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shrivenham, United Kingdom; College of Naval Warfare, Karanja; and the United States Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. His academic qualifications include a BSc degree from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; MSc in Telecommunications from Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi; MA in Defence Studies from King’s College, London; MPhil in Strategic Studies from Mumbai University; and a PhD in International Studies from Mumbai University.
Admiral Krishna Swaminathan is a recipient of the Param Vishisht Seva Medal, Ati Vishisht Seva Medal and Vishisht Seva Medal for distinguished service.
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Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit, a fighter pilot with more than 3,500 hours of flying experience, will notably be the senior-most officer in line when the present IAF Chief, Air Chief Marshal AP Singh, superannuates in October this year.
Air Marshal Dixit, in his previous appointment as Chief of Integrated Defence Staff (CISC) — a tri-services organisation under the Chief of Defence Staff — was part of the process of fostering jointness and setting up the theatre commands.
Air Marshal Dixit was commissioned into the fighter stream of the IAF in December 1986. He is an alumnus of the National Defence Academy, the Defence Services Command and Staff College (Bangladesh), and the National Defence College.
The Air Marshal has extensive flying experience on various aircraft, including the Mirage 2000, variants of the MiG series of jets, the Jaguar, the Tejas, and the Hawk. He has also flown transport aircraft such as the AN-32 and the Avro, as well as the mid-air refueller.
He is an Experimental Test Pilot and a Qualified Flying Instructor. During his service career, spanning approximately four decades, he has been actively involved in numerous operations and exercises, including Operation Safed Sagar, launched during the Kargil conflict with Pakistan in 1999, and Operation Sindoor in 2025.
During his career, Air Marshal Dixit commanded a frontline fighter air base in the Western Sector and a premier fighter training base in the Southern Sector. He has also served as a Directing Staff at the Air Force Test Pilots School.
Air Marshal Dixit has commanded the Central Air Command.
During his tenure at the tri-services organisation, he was part of the jointness and integration process. Multiple joint doctrines were released, and various initiatives were conceived to strengthen the Defence Forces across all domains.
Air Marshal Dixit takes over from Air Marshal Nagesh Kapoor, who superannuated.
As part of the ongoing reshuffle at the Army’s top level, new commanders have been appointed to head two key corps base in north-western India.
Lieutenant General Manish Luthra has assumed charge as the General Officer Commanding of II Corps at Ambala. Also known as the Kharga Corps, it is the Army’s most potent strike formation and had played a significant role during Operation Sindoor in May 2025.
Earlier, he served as the Director General Military Operations at Army Headquarters from September 2025 onwards.
He takes over from Lt Gen Rajesh Pushkar who has been elevated as the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Southern Command at Pune. During his tenure at Ambala, he spearheaded the Corps’ transformation towards multi-domain operations, integrating emerging technologies, modern warfighting concepts and enhanced jointness into operational planning and execution.
His tenure also witnessed the successful validation of new organisational structures and innovative operational concepts, significantly strengthening the Corps’ future warfighting capability, a defence spokesperson said on Tuesday.
Lieutenant General Madanraj Pande has taken over as the General Officer Commanding, 14 Corps at Leh from Lt Gen Hitesh Bhalla.
Lieutenant General Madanraj Pande (R).
Known as the Fire and Fury Corps, it was set up in the aftermath of the 1999 Kargil conflict and is responsible for operations in Eastern Ladakh, including the Line of Actual Control and Siachen Glacier. It also undertakes community development programmes for the civilian populace residing in remote areas.
On the occasion, the outgoing Corps Commander conveyed his appreciation to all ranks for their professionalism, dedication and unwavering commitment, while the incoming Corps Commander exhorted the troops to continue upholding the highest traditions and ethos of the Indian Army in the service of the Nation, according to a defence spokesperson.
ndian Army Chief General Dhiraj Seth on Wednesday stressed the need to speed up modernisation and laid out his five priorities, forming the acronym ‘VIJAY’, with each letter of the word signifying a key focus area.
General Seth, who took over on Tuesday, inspected a guard of honour at the lawns of the South Block on Wednesday, after which he saluted his father Lt Gen KM Seth (retd), who was present in the audience.
Gen Seth said the word ‘VIJAY’ stands for ‘Vigilance, Innovation and Transformation, Jointness and Integration, Atmanirbharta, and Yodha’. He said these priorities cover the entire gamut of tasks he has set out for the Army.
The words ‘Atmanirbharta’ and ‘Yodha’ refer to self-reliance and soldier, respectively.
Explaining ‘Vigilance’, the Army Chief said the force will maintain constant watch along borders and against emerging threats, ensuring a high level of operational readiness to respond effectively to any challenge to national security.
On ‘Innovation and Transformation’, he said the focus will be on innovation in both doctrine and technological solutions. Innovation will remain integral to thinking, systems and capability development, while necessary transformations will be undertaken in line with the changing character of warfare.
The letter ‘J’, standing for ‘Jointness and Integration’, will enhance operational effectiveness of the Indian Army and ensure complete synergy and coordination with the Indian Air Force and the Indian Navy.
He said national security is not limited to military strength alone but requires military-civil fusion. This integrated approach will also enable us to contribute to nation-building and the goal of a developed India by 2047.”
The letter ‘A’ stands for ‘Atmanirbharta’. With indigenous capabilities and technologies developed within the country, the Army must build a self-reliant force. “To win our wars with indigenous solutions” will be the overall aim, he added.
The final letter ‘Y’ stands for ‘Yodha’, Gen Seth said, adding that from the Agniveer to the senior-most veteran, each one is a yodha (warrior) and the greatest strength of the Army. He said enhancing the technological threshold and training standards of soldiers will remain a foremost priority.
He added that veterans are an integral part of the Army family, and their welfare, empowerment and professional growth will remain important.
Calling the Indian Army a combat-ready and battle-hardened force, he said it is fully prepared to meet every challenge in the operational domain.
He further said that to respond to the evolving security environment, we must push modernisation with renewed energy and firm resolve, aiming to build a technology-enabled, future-ready force capable of operating across multiple domains.
General Seth expressed gratitude to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh for reposing trust in him and entrusting him with the responsibility of leading the Indian Army.
Venezuela has appreciated the Indian medical team’s efforts to help victims of the earthquake that rocked the South American nation, killing over 1,700 people.
Under Operation Amistad, the Indian Army established a field hospital comprising highly experienced doctors at the International La Rinconada Racetrack in Caracas after arriving in the country.
The Indian Embassy in Venezuela on Monday said that India has intensified its efforts to provide disaster relief “with a healing touch to those affected by the earthquake.”
Advertisement“Minister of People’s Power for Foreign Minister, Andrea Corao Faria, visited our Field Hospital and appreciated our efforts to help the earthquake victims,” the Indian mission said. The 7.2 and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes that struck on Wednesday evening were among the strongest in Venezuela in more than a century and were felt throughout the region.
The death toll from two powerful quakes in Venezuela crossed 1,700 people on Monday, with thousands more injured and many more missing.
Under Operation Amistad, two IAF C-17 Globemaster aircraft transported 66 tonnes of aid, including the Indian Army field hospital, over 35 tonnes of relief supplies, medicines and medical equipment, and two BHISHM Cubes, the Indian Air Force (IAF) said on Sunday.
Bharat Health Initiative for Sahyog Hita & Maitri (BHISHM) cubes are mobile hospitals aimed at providing emergency medical care. Working alongside Venezuelan authorities, Indian rescue and medical teams are providing emergency medical care and conducting search and rescue missions, the Indian mission said.
IN Punjab, the passport is not really a document. It is a lifeline. No state in India holds them in such numbers. The rate at which Punjab issues passports per head of population is among the highest in the country. By common reckoning, more than one in five Punjabis carries one. The reason is plain. Almost every family in the state has someone abroad. Someone has a son in Brampton, another a brother in Southall or in Surrey.
The passport is the thread that ties the pind to Canada, the United States, England, Australia and the Gulf. Haryana lives much the same way. The northwestern plains have sent their young across the seas for a century, since the Ghadar men first sailed to America.
So, the recent statement from New Delhi was heard with particular unease in this part of the country. On Passport Seva Divas (June 24), the Ministry of External Affairs told the nation that a passport is a travel document and not a document of citizenship. As a matter of strict law, the ministry was right. The passport is issued under the Passports Act. Citizenship is governed by the Citizenship Act of 1955. One law regulates a document; the other regulates a status. But the law and the street do not always speak the same language.
What is technically legal is not the common understanding of how things work. For most Indians, the passport is the most authoritative thing the Republic has ever given them. It bears the name of the country. It carries their face. It is honoured at every border in the world because foreign governments trust that India checked before issuing it. The State does not hand out passports to all and sundry. It issues one only after it has satisfied itself that the holder belongs. So, when a citizen is told that the document proves nothing about belonging, the natural question follows: if the passport is not proof, then what is?
The word itself carries the older meaning. “Passport” comes from passing through a port or a gate. It began as a letter from a sovereign, a safe conduct, the State’s blessing on a traveller who wished to leave and return. The sovereign vouched for the bearer because the bearer was his own. A passport was an authorisation to leave a country with that country’s blessing. A State does not bless a stranger out into the world. It blesses one of its own.
Many Indians knew this in their bones. India does not allow dual citizenship. To keep an Indian passport is to refuse every other. Many an Indian achiever finds that passports of the West are theirs for the asking, as a recognition of their talent. Some, however, prefer to keep the Indian one. For them, as for the Punjabi woman flying out to her grandchild’s wedding, the passport was never merely a travel paper. It was a statement of who they were.
So, the timing was cruel. Passport Seva Divas marks the day the Passports Act came into force. It is meant to be a day of quiet pride. Instead, the spokesman made more people anxious than proud. He spoke a legal truth and left a public bruise. Call it the demonetisation effect, applied to passports. In November 2016, the citizen woke up to find that the currency notes that were legal last night were now to be doubted. The notes were still the Republic’s. The promise was still printed on them. Yet people stood in queues, unsure whether what they held was good. The passport statement did the same to belonging. It took a thing nobody questioned and taught a nation to question it.
But the real machinery is not in the passport office. It is in the electoral rolls. We have already seen it work. In West Bengal, the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) struck off 63 lakh names from the rolls. The new government has now ordered that the ration cards of deleted voters be switched off. Strike a name off the voter list and you do not merely remove a vote. You unplug the citizen from the State. The deletion is the kill switch of citizenship.
Now, carry that machinery to Punjab. The Assembly election is due in early 2027. The house-to-house enumeration for the SIR has begun. The revision works by matching names across the old rolls and the new, and flagging what it calls logical discrepancies. Consider what that means for a Sikh name written in English by one clerk, in Punjabi by another, and back into English by a third.
Amreek Singh on one roll becomes Amrik Singh on the next. Jasvinder turns into Jusvinder or Jaswinder. Gurmeet and Gurmit are the same man. So are Harpreet and Harprit, Kuldeep and Kuldip. None of this is fraud. It is the ordinary friction of carrying a Gurmukhi name through three scripts and four clerks. To a matching machine, it is a discrepancy. To the citizen, it is a summons to prove that he is himself.
Imagine then the Punjabi household. The vote goes first. Then the ration card. Then the passport will not be renewed, because the police verification leans on the rolls. The thread to Brampton and California is cut, not by any court that found the man a foreigner, but by a misplaced vowel. Why should a proud border state, which has sent its sons to fight the country’s wars and its children to build lives across the world, be put through the wringer of proving its citizenship merely to keep the passports that hold its families together?
Here the Supreme Court was petitioned, and it has so far faltered. In Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India, decided this year, the Court upheld the SIR of Bihar. Nearly 47 lakh names had been struck off there. The Court found the exercise proportionate and lawful. It held that a place on the rolls raises only a rebuttable presumption of citizenship, and that asking a citizen to prove himself afresh does not offend the Constitution.
Thus, the Court tacitly drew a line through the people. On one side stand the voter citizens, secure in their papers. On the other stand the non-voter doubtful inhabitants, the man with the misspelt name, upon whom administrative vengeance may be wreaked at leisure. Article 14 promises equal protection of the laws. A court that lets the State quietly raise two classes of inhabitants, and protect only one, has not kept that promise. It has failed in its duty as a sentinel on the qui vive.
Fifty years ago, in the ADM Jabalpur case, the Court held that even the right to life could be suspended in an Emergency. The judiciary never lived down that judgment and Justice Chandrachud the younger was among those who specifically overruled Justice Chandrachud the elder’s concurrence in the habeas corpus judgment.
The Bihar judgment has now taken away, in ordinary times and with no Emergency declared, the right to vote, and with it the ration card and the passport. In the ADM Jabalpur case, the judiciary at least had the excuse of the Emergency. This judgment has none.
Yet the account is not closed. The challenge to the SIR in West Bengal is still pending before the Court, because the judgment has not been delivered. One may still hope that when the Court turns to Bengal, it will see what it failed to see in Bihar. A citizen long on the rolls ought not to be struck off on proof demanded from him, but only on proof brought against him. That the vote, the ration card and the passport are not favours to be switched off by a clerk or an electoral officer; they are the inalienable rights of an inhabitant of the Republic.
So, the country still keeps a question open. Do we have an occasionally fallible Supreme Court or one that repeatedly fails its citizens? When the Bengal judgment comes, Punjab will be listening.
The Government on Wednesday expressed concern over the new username feature introduced by social messaging platform WhatsApp, with highly placed sources indicating that the issue is being monitored closely as it poses possible risks to digital security and the company could be sent a notice on the matter.
Sources said that social media platforms must ensure that their products are not misused for impersonation, scams or misinformation, while adding that misuse through usernames, edited messages, fake groups or impersonation could invite regulatory action similar to the measures taken against Telegram during the NEET examination controversy.
“Platforms must ensure their architecture is not used to create mischief. If it is, the response will be calibrated but firm,” an official said.
Features like username registration may pose risks to digital security as it could be misused by creating usernames in anyone’s name, therefore the ministry is looking into the issue and will discuss the matter with the relevant departments and every legal aspect of the issue will be examined.
WhatsApp is expected to roll out the username feature later this year, which will allow users to communicate without sharing their phone numbers. While privacy advocates say the move could reduce exposure to risks such as contact scraping and SIM-swapping attacks, as experts have raised concerns about identity fraud, impersonation and data-sharing implications.
After years of delays, the 110-year-old British-era Jalandhar Cantonment Railway Station has finally undergone a major transformation.
Unveiling its upgraded look through a video shared on social media on Tuesday, Minister of State for Railways Ravneet Bittu showcased the redeveloped station, highlighting improved passenger amenities and modernised infrastructure.
The video, titled “Jalandhar Cantt da Shaandar Railway Station”, attracted widespread attention online, with commuters and residents welcoming the makeover of one of Punjab’s key railway junctions.
According to officials, the station is currently handling the movement of over 62 trains, including Vande Bharat. The redevelopment has been carried out at an estimated cost of Rs 99 crore.
The officials said the upgrade has reshaped the Jalandhar Cantonment Railway Station, introducing wider platforms, arched-shaped roofing and improved passenger movement areas.
Platform number 1 has been expanded nearly four times to ease congestion and improve movement during peak hours. All three platforms have been completed under the redevelopment plan, with staircases improving access across levels.
Passenger mobility has also been enhanced with the addition of lifts and escalators, aimed at improving accessibility for elderly passengers and those with reduced mobility. Waiting facilities have been upgraded with expanded seating areas and air-conditioned waiting rooms.
As part of the redevelopment plan, several passenger-focused amenities have also been introduced, including modern ticket counters, food plazas, retail kiosks, and luggage scanning systems to improve security and convenience. Separate dormitory facilities for male and female passengers have also been added to support long distance travellers, requiring rest facilities, the officials said.
The station’s exterior and interior have also been significantly upgraded, featuring a redesigned main entrance with dome style architectural elements improving lighting and ventilation. Heritage themed installations at the entrance showcase Punjabi cultural motifs and traditional artwork, giving the station a distinct regional identity alongside its modernised infrastructure.
