Morning Digest: Manipur imposes curfew, Internet ban in 5 districts; Rahul responds to ECI, says answer me if you have nothing to hide, and more

The Hindu Morning Digest: June 07, 2025

An Indefinite Curfew was imposed in Manipur’s Bishnupur district and orders prohibiting the assembly of four or more persons was implemented in four other valley districts — Kakching, Thoubal, Imphal East and Imphal West — late on Saturday (June 7, 2025), following the arrest of Arambai Tenggol (AT) member Kanan Meitei by a joint team of National Investigation Agency (NIA) and Manipur Police in Imphal West.

Hours after the Election Commission (EC) rejected Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi’s claim of “match-fixing” in the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly election, the Congress MP asked why the poll panel issued an “unsigned statement” in response. Mr. Gandhi, directly addressing the EC in a post on X, said that such “evasive” action will not protect the EC’s credibility.

On a day when the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, levelled allegations of irregularities in the 2024 Maharashtra Assembly election yet again, the Election Commission of India (ECI) said it was completely “absurd” to “defame” the poll body after “any unfavourable verdict by the voters”.

The Union Home Ministry (MHA) is all set to resume talks with Kuki-Zo insurgent groups in Manipur after a gap of two years. A senior government official told The Hindu that the suspension of operations pact (SoO) with the insurgent groups in Manipur will be “renegotiated with stringent ground rules”. The SoO framework has to be in existence before any “political solution” can be reached.

A day after inviting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the upcoming G7 meeting in Alberta, Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said India is the fifth-largest market in the world and therefore had to be included in the summit, which will see the participation of the world’s leading economies.

After a rise in COVID-19 numbers in Southeast Asia, India has started to show an uptick in the number of cases over the last couple of weeks. The numbers slowly grew to hit 5,755 cases (as of Saturday 5:30 pm) as per the Ministry of Health’s COVID-19 dashboard. As of now, the variants of COVID-19 doing the rounds in India are descendants of the Omicron variant, first reported in November 2021. The emerging sub-variants, NB.1.8.1 and LF.7, driving the current COVID-19 surge are descendants of JN.1, a sub-lineage of the Omicron BA.2.86 variant.

India expects its partners to understand its “policy of zero tolerance” on terrorism, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar told visiting British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, adding that the country could not “countenance” equating “perpetrators of evil” with their victims.