Former judge of the Delhi high court Justice Rekha Sharma has said that the police treatment of journalists in the Kashmir Valley is “a direct attack on our freedom, an attack on our personal liberty … and an attack on democracy itself.” She says its “extremely extremely distressing”, adding “it’s totally without jurisdiction” and is in “disregard of the law”.

Justice Sharma was referring to the treatment of the Assistant Editor of the Express who is also the paper’s correspondent in Kashmir, Bashaarat Masood, who was summoned for four days between January 15 and 19 by the cyber police station in Srinagar and asked to sign a bond that he would not do anything to disturb the peace. He was also not the only journalist to be summoned in this manner.

The Science Editor of The Hindu says that Monday’s failure of ISRO’s PSLV rocket is a major setback and a very big blow to the organization. He agrees that it raises worrying questions about the reliability of the PSLV rocket which is ISRO’s workhorse. In an interview to Karan Thapar for The Wire, Vasudevan Mukunth raised questions about the functioning of ISRO Chairman V. Narayanan and ISRO’s lack of transparency during his tenure. He made this point in connection with the fact that this is the second successive back-to-back PSLV rocket failure. The earlier one was in May 2025. On both occasions the problem occurred during the third stage of the flight when the rocket was attempting to get into orbit around the earth. However, the Failure Analysis Committee investigation report into the May 2025 failure has not been made public. It was submitted to the Prime Minister’s Office but has not been released from there. This means that independent experts have not been able to review and analyse the findings. In turn, that has led to questions being asked whether there is something in the failure analysis report that is being hidden from the Indian public.