H-1B visa tension rises amid US lawmaker's call to curb Indian tech hiring
India continues to be the top source of H-1B visa recipients. According to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), nearly 70% of all H-1B visas approved in FY 2024 were granted to Indian nationals. The programme is often a key step for international students transitioning from academic training to full-time employment in the US. Greene's statement emerged in the context of rising US-India trade tensions, with Trump demanding tariff retaliation for India's energy imports from Russia. While Greene tied her comment to American job losses, Miller's interview offered further criticism of India's economic and immigration practices.
Though no new visa restriction has been introduced, the political messaging has prompted concern. US lawmakers have recently debated reforms such as more transparency in the H-1B lottery, better wage protection for domestic workers, and broader access for STEM graduates trained in US institutions.
No policy change yet, but messaging matters As of August 2025, the F-1 visa and the Optional Practical Training (OPT) programmes remain operational. Indian students and professionals applying for H-1B visas continue to follow the existing process. However, experts advise staying informed through USCIS updates and seeking legal or academic guidance for long-term planning.While Greene and Miller's remarks do not carry immediate policy consequences, they reflect growing scrutiny around skilled migration programmes and outsourcing.
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Time of India
29 minutes ago
- Time of India
RBI MPC decision August 6: What Sanjay Malhotra might say on growth, inflation and tariffs
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The Hindu
29 minutes ago
- The Hindu
Necropolitics: who is allowed to live and who may die
Have you ever noticed how an airstrike in Mumbai triggers national outrage, but a similar attack in Kashmir rarely breaks through the noise? We're so accustomed to hearing about violence there that it barely feels like news. It's as if deaths in these regions are already anticipated and normalised. These aren't just accidents of geography. They are symptoms of a deeper system, a politics that decides whose lives are worth grieving and whose deaths are simply part of the landscape. Necropolitics is the use of political power to determine who is allowed to live and who can be made to die. It describes how states and institutions manage death by exposing certain populations, such as refugees, the poor, or racialised communities, to violence, abandonment, or structural neglect. Coined by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe in a 2003 essay and later expanded in his book Necropolitics (2019), the concept builds on Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics but shifts the focus. While biopolitics is concerned with managing life and populations, necropolitics interrogates the power to let people die, deciding who is disposable, who may be sacrificed, and whose suffering is structurally ignored. Biopolitics versus necropolitics Foucault traces how the organisation of power changed over time: from sovereign power, where rulers exercised authority through public spectacles of death, to disciplinary power, which works through institutions like schools and prisons to train individuals using surveillance and routine. This evolved into biopower — the control of entire populations through the optimisation of life via vaccination, sanitation, census-taking, and reproductive governance. Biopower appears progressive, but as Foucault warned, it carries within it the power to 'make live and let die.' Mbembe takes this further. He asks: if biopolitics is truly about preserving life, why are so many still dying? Why are certain lives treated as expendable? Biopolitics tells only half the story. The other half is necropolitics, the deliberate exposure of certain populations to death, not by accident but by design. While biopolitics governs life, necropolitics governs death. It does not merely ignore suffering; it produces it with calculated precision. Necropolitics is not about letting people die, but about making them die. Unlike sovereign power, necropolitics does not rely on the will of a single ruler. It operates through policies, institutions, and global indifference that erases the value of some lives. These lives are stripped of dignity, reduced to statistics, and rendered disposable. This logic, Mbembe argues, has deep colonial roots. Consider the Bengal famine of 1943. Millions died not due to a lack of food, but because British colonial policies prioritised imperial interests over Indian lives. Death was systemic, not accidental. People were treated as tools for the empire, valued only in relation to others' survival. In necropolitical systems, people are not killed through spectacle but through slow, structural abandonment. Death is normalised and bodies become data. The people, whether in borders, refugee camps, or detention centres, are managed, contained, and forgotten. For instance, during the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and '90s, queer people, especially Black, brown, trans, and working-class individuals, were abandoned by healthcare systems and denied dignity. As scholars like Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar note, only queer lives made respectable through whiteness or middle-class identity were grieved. Puar calls this queer necropolitics, where some queer lives are protected while others are left to die. Characteristics of necropolitics Necropolitics operates through several defining features that together create a system where certain lives are systematically devalued. First, state terror suppresses dissent through surveillance, violence, imprisonment, or elimination, even within democracies. Second, states collaborate with private militias or criminal groups, blurring the line between state and non-state violence. Third, enmity becomes a governing principle, making the right to kill a measure of authority. Fourth, war and terror become self-sustaining economies, fuelling global surveillance and arms markets. Fifth, active predation of certain social groups displaces entire communities, as seen in resource extraction projects. Sixth, death is administered in varied forms like torture, drone strikes, starvation, and disappearance. Finally, these acts are morally justified through ideologies like nationalism, religion, or utilitarianism. Creating a state of exception Necropolitics is sustained not only through violence but through the systematic invention of enemies. Modern states are driven by the desire for an enemy onto whom fear and blame can be projected. This enemy need not be real — the fantasy alone justifies surveillance, exclusion, and elimination. In neoliberal regimes, the threat turns inward, prompting expanded policing and emergency laws that target not just the accused but also those who resemble them. Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this condition the state of exception, when the law suspends itself in the name of preserving itself. Mbembe expands this to show how, for many populations, the exception is not temporary but permanent. In such spaces, legality becomes hollow and rights are applied selectively. What governs is not justice but logistics, such as who gets care, who receives compensation, who can cross a border, and who is punished for trying. These decisions may seem administrative, but they are deeply necropolitical, revealing how life and death are unequally distributed. The living dead Mbembe also introduces a haunting concept within necropolitical thought — the living dead: people who are not killed outright but are forced to live in conditions so degraded, unstable, and violent that life becomes a slow, continuous dying. These are individuals and communities who may remain biologically alive but are stripped of political, social, and moral recognition. We saw this during India's COVID-19 lockdown, when migrant workers were left to walk for days without food, shelter, or transport. Many collapsed and died on highways or railway tracks, not from the virus, but from state neglect. Their deaths were quietly processed and bureaucratically explained and largely unmourned. Mbembe calls these zones death worlds — spaces where populations are exposed to abandonment or sudden violence. Drawing from Agamben's 'state of exception,' Mbembe shows how these spaces operate outside the usual rule of law. Here, death is not a breakdown of governance but its very method. Gaza is one of the starkest examples. After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Israeli strikes flattened hospitals, aid centres, and homes. Even the deaths of children were dismissed as collateral damage. The silence that followed reveals necropolitics at its clearest: some deaths are not just permitted but framed as necessary for political strategy and national security. In everyday life Necropolitics does not always come with bombs or guns. More often, it takes the form of law, policy, and bureaucracy — sterilisation drives targeting Dalit and Adivasi women, police databases that profile Muslim names or Black people, drone strikes that label civilians as 'targets,' or detention centres where children sleep on cold floors. These are not failures of a protective system, but features of one designed to discard. It also exists in silence — in the world, including states and global institutions — looking away as thousands of civilians, including women and children, are killed in places like Gaza, while the rest of us carry on with our daily lives. Necropolitics is not confined to war zones. It thrives in the slow violence of poverty, caste, racism, and displacement. So, if power today functions through abandonment and death, what does resistance look like? The goal must not simply be to survive, but to live lives that are recognised, valued, and grieved. Rebecca Rose Varghese is a freelance journalist.
The Hindu
29 minutes ago
- The Hindu
NSA Ajit Doval in Moscow to discuss Trump sanction threat on Indian import of Russian oil
National Security Advisor Ajit Doval will hold meetings with senior Russian officials in Moscow on Wednesday (August 6, 2025), to discuss India-Russia defence and security cooperation, oil sanctions, and an upcoming Modi-Putin summit. Mr. Doval's visit to Russia began even as U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he would announce 'very substantial' increases to the 25% tariffs on Indian goods expected to kick in on Thursday (August 7, 2025) because of Indian oil purchases from Russia. 'The current escalation of the geopolitical situation will also be discussed. Apart from that the topics will include such pressing matters as supplies of Russian oil [to India],' Russia's official TASS agency reported. Among talks on defence cooperation, Mr. Doval is also expected to speak about the delivery of the remaining S-400 missile systems, that played an important role during the India-Pakistan conflict and operation Sindoor in May this year. This is the NSA's first visit to Moscow since Operation Sindoor, although he attended the SCO NSA meeting in Beijing in June and met with Mr. Shoigu's deputy, Russia's Security Council Deputy Secretary Aleksandr Venediktov there. In addition, Russia's recent decision to grant recognition to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is also expected to come up. While Mr. Doval's visit was scheduled some weeks ago, he is expected to talk about India's stand on the U.S. threats and tariffs and will also prepare for the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to India later this year for the annual summit with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The two sides will also possibly discuss the latest moves for talks between Russia and Ukraine, after the Kremlin said on Tuesday (August 5, 2025) that U.S. Special envoy Steve Witkoff will be in Moscow to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. Announcing the upcoming visit of Mr. Witkoff on Tuesday (August 5, 2025), Mr. Putin's Presidential aide Dmitry Peshkov said that Mr. Putin was prepared to meet Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskyy after expert-level talks but gave no timeline for the meeting. When asked about Mr. Trump's latest threats against India, Mr. Peshkov said that Russia believes 'sovereign countries must have, and do have, the right to choose their trade partners, the partners in trade and economic cooperation, on their own, and independently determine those modes of trade and economic cooperation that suit the interests of a country in question.' Later this month, External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar will also visit Moscow for talks on the visit, which has been delayed for several years due to the Ukraine conflict which began in February 2022. PM Modi had visited Moscow last July, reviving the summit after a gap of three years. Mr. Doval travelled to Moscow overnight, leaving Delhi after the official and bilateral meetings during Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.'s State visit to Delhi. In the U.S., Mr. Trump doubled down on the threats against India that came despite a strong statement from the Ministry of External Affairs that called U.S. and EU sanctions on India's import of Russian oil 'unjustified and unreasonable'. 'India has not been a good trading partner, because they do a lot of business with us, but we don't do business with them. So, we settled on 25% (tariff), but I think I'm going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours, because they're buying Russian oil,' Mr. Trump told CNBC in an interview. Since 2022, India increased its oil imports from Russia multi-fold, defying pleas from European countries to stop increasing Russian revenues, from procuring less than a percent of its imports from Russia, to nearly 40% of its oil at its peak. After the U.S. announced plans for penalty tariffs on India last week, many Indian oil importers have reduced their demand, although the government said it would not submit to the tariffs by the U.S. and sanctions by the European Union. In its statement on Monday (August 4, 2025), the MEA had also pointed out that the U.S. and EU continue to trade on other goods with Russia.
