New Tables, Shared Skies

Story 1

Central Europe Puts India at the UN Table

On Monday in New York, four Central European foreign ministers sat down with India’s external affairs minister for the first time as a group. By the end of the meeting, Slovakia’s Juraj Blanár was speaking for Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and his own country. India, he said, “must be at the table as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council”.

The Visegrád Group, or V4, is a compact of industrial EU states that coordinate on defence, energy, and trade. It is not the European Commission and it cannot rewrite the UN Charter. What it can do is add European political weight to a campaign India has run for years and has now tied to a 2028–29 bid for a two-year elected Council seat. S. Jaishankar called the session “a new historic occasion”. The five agreed to meet every year and to start an annual business forum, on the logic that India’s deepening work with the European Union should have a Central European track of its own.

They also named the fields they want to use: defence industrial history that both sides say they intend to refresh, technology and research, space, connectivity, and the movement of students and workers. These are not abstract headings. Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic are manufacturing and engineering economies. A standing political channel with them is a way for Indian firms to reach supply chains that do not run only through Paris or Berlin.

The same Monday, Jaishankar co-chaired the first Partners for Multilateralism summit with European Council President António Costa. India joined as a co-sponsor of a grouping founded by the EU, Brazil, Kenya and Canada, with Australia and Barbados coming in alongside. The pitch, as The Hindu reported it, is a “non-superpower” frame: support the UN, push it to be more representative, and refuse to treat every problem as a test of two capitals. Jaishankar’s own language was plainer. Fuel, food, fertiliser, and finance, he said, “cannot be left to itself”. Where chokepoints can be used as weapons, countries should diversify. Where the case is strong, the like-minded should “have the confidence to come together”.

None of this settles the Council. The five permanent members still hold vetoes, and reform has been stuck for decades. What the week did change is the map of who is willing to say, in public and as a bloc, that India belongs in the room. For readers outside India that is the point. A country often described only through Washington, Beijing, or Brussels is now collecting smaller European tables and a cross-regional coalition at the same UN week, and it is doing so without waiting for a grand bargain that may never arrive.

Story 2

Jodhpur Becomes a Shared Battlespace

On Saturday the Indian Air Force opened the second Tarang Shakti over the Rajasthan desert. Jodhpur is the hub. The reserved airspace runs across Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Barmer, and Phalodi, up to about 12,200 metres. For two weeks, visiting crews will fly visual-range and beyond-visual-range combat, large-force engagements, air-to-air refuelling, mobility missions, and combat search and rescue.

The numbers published this week are large by Indian standards. Hindustan Times, briefed on the eve of the exercise, put more than 80 Indian and foreign aircraft and about 1,500 personnel on the base. Seven foreign air forces are bringing machines: the United States, France, Germany, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Another 32 countries are sending observers, among them Japan, Singapore, Oman, Egypt, Brazil, and Vietnam. Invitations had gone to 65 capitals.

The aircraft list is the part that will travel. The United States is bringing six F-35s. That is the first time the fifth-generation fighter has flown a tactical exercise in India; earlier appearances were air-show visits. France is contributing Rafales and tankers. The UAE is expected with F-16s. Transport and tanker types on the sheet include the A400M, A330 MRTT, KC-135, and C-130. The IAF will put up Su-30MKIs, its own Rafales, Mirage 2000s, Jaguars, MiG-29s, Tejas LCA Mk-1s, helicopters, and IL-78 refuellers. Vice Chief Air Marshal Ashutosh Dixit told reporters the force wants to move beyond years of mostly bilateral drills. The world, he said, is changing quickly and so is the character of warfare.

There is a sales floor attached to the flying. Air chiefs rotating through the exercise are due in Bengaluru at Hindustan Aeronautics and Bharat Electronics, then at the C295 transport line in Vadodara. India is treating the fortnight as a showcase for exports. Hindustan Times recorded defence exports of ₹38,424 crore (about US$4.0 billion) in 2025–26, against a target of ₹50,000 crore (about US$5.2 billion) by 2029–30.

For an international reader the meaning is not a scoreboard. It is that India can now put American stealth aircraft, French Rafales, Gulf F-16s, and an Indian light fighter into one controlled piece of sky, write the scenario, and walk the guests through factories afterwards. That is a different posture from sending a handful of jets to someone else’s exercise and coming home. The sorties start this weekend. The test is whether the flying stays safe and the industrial visits turn into orders. The fact of the gathering is already a statement.

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December Is Being Cleared for Signatures

Mid-December has become a crowded line in Delhi’s diary. On the sidelines of the UN week, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said trade talks with India were making “good progress” and that both governments were aiming to finish by the G20 summit on 14–15 December in Miami. He also said that, as he understood it, Narendra Modi would visit Canada around that time. “I very much look forward to hosting him”, he said.

The Indian Express, citing diplomatic sources, described a wider December circuit still waiting for a formal Ministry of External Affairs announcement: Miami for the G20, Canada for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement, Brussels to sign the India–EU free trade agreement and sit with the European Council, and a possible stop in Berlin. Commerce minister Piyush Goyal said the next Canada round begins on 5 October and that the two sides have agreed to fast-track the text.

The Canada piece is the one that would have sounded implausible three years ago. After 2023, when Ottawa alleged Indian involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia and New Delhi called the charge absurd, the relationship nearly stopped. It has been rebuilt in stages through G7 meetings and a March visit. A dated close by the G20 is the first commercial test of that repair. Canada wants markets that are not the United States. India wants uranium, potash, gas, and pension capital. The sources do not say those chapters are finished. They say the political instruction is to try.

The European signature on the same trip is a sequel, not a new negotiation. The Commission has already sent the completed FTA to the Council. Signing in Brussels would turn last month’s legal text into a ceremony. A US bilateral trade agreement is the least certain of the three. Goyal has called that text “done and dusted” while also saying execution still waits on a competitive advantage for Indian exporters. After Jaishankar met Secretary of State Marco Rubio in New York, Washington publicly stressed that it could help partners with energy security even as a new US law authorises steep tariffs on buyers of Russian oil.

None of this is a signed deal. Carney’s verb was “aim”. The Express’s verb was “looking to schedule”. Readers should keep that hedge. What the week did establish is that three advanced economies are trying to put India on a calendar before the year ends, and that Delhi is willing to run North America and Europe in a single winter loop to meet them. For firms watching market access, that clustering is the news.

Story 4

Factories and Offices Move Together Again

The first look at September’s private economy arrived on Wednesday, and it was firmer than August. HSBC’s flash Purchasing Managers’ Index, compiled by S&P Global from most of the month’s survey responses, put the composite output index at 56.5, up from 54.3. Manufacturing rose from 52.8 to 55.7. Manufacturing output, a narrower factory-floor measure, jumped from 54.8 to 58.2. Services business activity went from 54.1 to 55.8. Any reading above 50 means expansion. Both industry and services climbed back above their long-run averages.

Pranjul Bhandari, HSBC’s chief India economist, described the month as activity “led by stronger manufacturing”, with output and new domestic orders rising faster. The Print’s account of the same survey called the manufacturing print a seven-month high and placed the composite back above its long-run mean. Final manufacturing and services numbers are due in early October. Flash figures can move, but they rarely reverse a swing of this size without a shock.

The context is a year that has not been calm. Indian factories spent the spring absorbing a West Asia energy shock that pushed oil higher and slowed new work. Growth in the April–June quarter still printed strong, at 7.8 per cent year-on-year in earlier official data, but the summer PMI readings had cooled. September’s rebound suggests that pause did not become a stall. Firms reported more new business in both factories and offices and a solid rise in hiring.

The same survey refuses a simple victory lap. Bhandari said renewed tension in the Middle East had again led companies to build buffers. Input purchases accelerated. The stocks of finished goods index, she said, was at an eleven-and-a-half-year high. That is precaution, not just confidence. Price pressures firmed among manufacturers, with output prices rising as firms tried to protect margins. Overall input-cost inflation still eased, to its lowest since January, because services costs were softer and offset some of the factory increase. Companies that did see costs jump named electrical components, food, fuel, metals, pharmaceutical ingredients, and technology.

For readers, the PMI is a shorthand. It is how investors check whether the growth story survives a month of expensive oil and noisy geopolitics. A composite at 56.5 does not settle the inflation debate, and it does not replace official GDP. It does say that, in September, Indian managers in factories and service firms saw more work on the books than in August and chose to hire and to stock. That is a quieter kind of resilience than a ratings-agency forecast.

Story 5

Nagoya Ends a 44-Year Wait and Hands India Its First Golds

The Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya are the continent’s largest multi-sport meeting, the Olympic cycle’s Asian chapter. India arrived with more than 500 athletes and a memory of 106 medals from Hangzhou three years ago. Through the first week the gold column stayed empty. That changed on 22 September.

The women’s cricket team beat Sri Lanka by 147 runs in the final and gave India its first gold of the Games. India made 216 for three, the highest total in Asian Games cricket. Smriti Mandhana scored 79 off 45 balls. Richa Ghosh hit 48 off 22. Sri Lanka were bowled out for 69. Shafali Verma, Deepti Sharma, and Shree Charani shared the wickets. It was a second successive Asiad gold for the same side, after Hangzhou, and it arrived in a tournament separate from the Women’s Asia Cup they had won the week before. Dominance on two stages in ten days is still dominance. It is also a different medal.

Kabaddi, the sport India has owned at these Games since 1990 with only one interruption, returned gold this week. The women beat Iran 37–34 in a tight final at the Tokai Citizen Gymnasium. The Hindu’s Sportstar later recorded a men’s gold on the same day, completing a double. India has now taken kabaddi gold in every edition except Jakarta 2018, when Iran interrupted the run.

The image that will last longest sat off the team sports. Sawan Barwal, 28, ran the men’s marathon on Saturday morning in the rain and finished second in 2 hours 11 minutes 36 seconds. Either clock is a national record. Japan’s Ichitaka Yamashita won. Barwal had run only one marathon before this year. In April, at Rotterdam, he became the first Indian under 2:12 and broke Shivnath Singh’s 48-year-old mark. Nagoya broke his own record and ended a 44-year wait: India had not medalled in the Asiad marathon since a bronze in Delhi in 1982. He is only the fourth Indian on that list.

By Saturday evening Sportstar had India on four golds, twelve silvers and fourteen bronzes, thirtieth medals and tenth on the table, far behind China and the hosts. The week’s point is not the rank. It is that a continental Games still notices when India wins the cricket gold first, keeps kabaddi, and produces a marathoner who rewrites the book in his second attempt. Those are results other Asian capitals can measure without a briefing on Indian domestic politics.