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Good evening, The Mumbai Indians have done it again! On Monday, the Indian Premier League (IPL) franchise unleashed a rookie left-arm paceman in Punjab’s Ashwani Kumar, and boy, did he come through! Much like Kerala’s Vignesh Puthur, who emerged from relative obscurity to star in their season opener, Kumar, who had only four T20 games before Monday, delivered on his first ball. He lured veteran batsman Ajinkya Rahane with a full and wide delivery, which Rahane sliced to deep backward point, where Tilak Verma managed to hold on to the catch on his second attempt. It was an impressive arrival for the boy from a village called Jhajheri, near Mohali. Kumar, who had dreamt of wearing a jersey with his own name, wasn't finished with Rahane’s scalp. He would add three more wickets to his collection, dismissing Rinku Singh, Manish Pandey, and Andre Russell—all internationals—to cap off a dream debut with figures that read 4-0-24-4. My colleague Nitin Sharma has an excellent, must-read piece tracing Kumar’s journey from Jhajheri to Wankhede Stadium via the Sher-E-Punjab T20 league. On that note, let’s dive into today’s edition 👇🏽
📝 The Debrief
Amid strained relations with its next door neighbour India, Dhaka is increasingly cosying to Beijing
China is literally rolling out the red carpet to Bangladesh. If media reports in Dhaka are anything to go by, Beijing sent a special chartered flight “offered by President Xi Jinping” to ferry Bangaldesh interim government’s chief advisor Muhammed Yunus to Beijing last week for his first bilateral overseas tour. Red flags: While the move has been hailed as an “unusual” and “symbolic” gesture, it is also bound to raise eyebrows in New Delhi, especially amid India’s strained relations with Bangladesh since last year, when sustained (and often violent) protests overthrew its former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Of additional concern to India is Yunus’ remarks in Beijing, where he spoke about India’s northeast as “landlocked” and pitched Bangladesh as the “only guardian of the ocean for all this region.” Yunus envisaged a scenario where Bangladesh would be “an extension to the Chinese economy”, allowing it to “build things, market things, and bring things to China and the rest of the world.” Tightrope: Yunus’s comments on India’s northeast will, undoubtedly, complicate the already frayed ties. Why? Because India, with Hasina at the helm, had been working to solve a key economic and strategic problem—access to and from its northeastern states—by enabling transit through Bangladesh. His comments seek to project Dhaka’s “leverage on northeast India.” That's not great news for New Delhi. Nor is Bangladesh turning to China for major infrastructure projects, including the $1 billion Teesta Comprehensive Management and Restoration Project, a longstanding issue between India and Bangladesh. China also is reportedly open to extending the loan repayment period and ensuring duty-free access to Bangladeshi products in China. New friends: Since Yunus took charge, Bangladesh has been drifting away from otherwise strong diplomatic ties with India and opening up to newer allies. Its embrace of China is as strategic as it is economic—with newer investments into the country. Its growing proximity to Pakistan, a country with whom it has a chequered past, will also worry New Delhi. Earlier this year, a four-member delegation from Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, visited Dhaka—the first such trip since 2009, which the Bangladeshis reciprocated soon after. The US, on its part, has escalated matters, with the Trump administration’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard hitting out against Bangladesh’s alleged persecution of the country’s minority community during an interview with an Indian TV channel.
✍️ From our newsroom
Beyond tractornomics: I found this piece on how India’s farm mechanisation is evolving quite nerdy, but super interesting (and worth reading!). Typically, farm mechanisation in the country has been centered around tractors, which replaced bullocks. While India’s tractor market is about Rs 60,000 crore annually (9 lakh units), farm machinery, such as rotavators, harvesters and transplanters, is growing faster and is valued at Rs 10,000 crore. Rotavators alone form a Rs 2,000 crore market. Harvesters and transplanters help address labour shortages and reduce costs. The growing popularity of farm machinery has attracted some of the more prominent tractor players in the space, including Mahindra and Mahindra, which has forayed into harvesters and rotavators. But interestingly, these machineries are also upending cost models, with individual owner-operators earning by harvesting for multiple farmers.
🔎 Need to know
Making way: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s Tamil Nadu president, K Annamalai, may step down as alliance talks between the BJP and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) gather pace. Annamalai belongs to the same Gounder caste as AIADMK chief Edapaddi K Palaniswami.
Shots fired: Ahead of Wednesday’s announcement of reciprocal tariffs, the United States has once again criticised India’s 100% tariffs on agricultural products. The White House press Secretary Karoline Leavitt added that, in addition to India, the high tariffs other countries charge (Japan and the EU, among them) make it “virtually impossible” for US products to be exported to those nations. Coming soon: ChatGPT maker OpenAI will launch its first “open-weight model” since GPT-2 in the coming months. OpenAI’s announcement comes amid concerns that it is losing out to open-source models, such as the ones by Meta and Chinese upstart DeepSeek. Both have released some versions of open-weight models.
🎙️Expresso Playlist!
In today’s Playlist, I’ll recommend an episode from our in-house show, Our Own Devices. In it, host Nandagopal Rajan speaks with Shivam Ranjan, Motorola Mobility’s Asia-Pacific head, about how AI will transform smartphones as we know them.
✋🏽One last thing
✈️I’ll leave you with this fascinating piece from economist Noah Smith’s eponymous Substack, Noahpinion, discussing how Brazil is home to one of the world’s top jet-making companies, Embraer, despite not being a manufacturing powerhouse.
That’s all from me today. Thank you so much for reading this edition. If you enjoy the Evening Expresso, tell your friends to subscribe to the newsletter. You can do so by signing up for the Morning Expresso. Also, you can contact me via email for tips, feedback, or just a hello! 😀 Until tomorrow, Venkat Ananth |
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