The June 2026 issue--How Boeing and Air India's role in India's deadliest aviation disaster is being covered up; How the Dalit Panthers forced the RSS into changing its language on caste; What Vijay’s victory tells us about Tamil Nadu's politics today; The manipulation of voter rolls is undermining the legitimacy of India’s election; SIR exclusions in West Bengal were connected to AITC lead and Muslim population; and more Read now: caravanmagazine.in/magazine The June 2026 issue is now available online for all subscribers. If you are a subscriber and unable to log in to our website, please write to subscriptions@caravanmagazine.in Print copies of the issue will be delivered to print subscribers and rolled out to newsstands over the next two weeks, depending on location. Copies will also be available for purchase on Amazon from June 10th. The Caravan is able to publish journalism like this thanks to the support of our subscribers. To help us continue doing this work, subscribe today: caravanmagazine.in/subscribe Or contribute: caravanmagazine.in/contribut…

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“A clean take-off roll on a 787 should take only between forty and forty-two seconds,” Amit Singh, one of Pushkaraj’s co-petitioners, told me. AI171 took a full 62 seconds, nearly double the time it was actually airborne. Normally, as the plane’s nose begins rising at about three degrees per second, lift increases, drag rises sharply, and the aircraft naturally stops accelerating the way it did on the runway. But AI171 did the opposite. It shot up. This was a fact that Simon Hradecky, an electronics engineer and editor at Aviation Herald, kept returning to in our conversations. He pointed out that, according to the AAIB report, the aircraft had been accelerating at nearly four knots a second immediately after take-off, compared to 2.6 knots a second on the ground. It was a telltale fingerprint that something was holding the jet back on the ground. Read the entire report by Rachel Chitra (@rachelchitra) on Boeing and Air India’s role in India’s deadliest aviation disaster and how it is being covered up: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

The crash of Air India 171 in Ahmedabad, on 12 June 2025 killed over 260 people and is the second deadliest air aviation accident in Indian history. “I WILL NEVER FORGET that day until I die,” Romin Vahora, a lab technician at the Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, told me. The hospital is housed in the same campus as BJ Medical College, which AI171 crashed into. Just hours earlier, he had been at the airport, seeing off his brother Parvez, his aunt Yasmin and Parvez’s three-year-old daughter, Zuveriya. He was on duty during the crash as bodies began piling into the hospital, and he was called to sign onto the panchnamas—witness documents—of the cadavers, all the time worrying if his family had survived. He shuddered while recounting the sights he saw. He had seen a woman who had been six months pregnant, her stomach split open with the foetus visible. He kept searching through the bodies brought in and, at one point, he found a child with her head separated from her body. The child was about Zuveriya’s age. He went closer to look at the disembodied head. “It wasn’t her, and I felt such a flood of relief then,” Romin told me. “Then I felt so terrible for that relief. Even if it is not my niece, that was someone else’s child.” Read the entire report by Rachel Chitra (@rachelchitra) on how Boeing and Air India’s role in India’s deadliest aviation disaster is being covered up: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air… 📷Romin Vahora (left), a lab technician at Ahmedabad Civil Hospital, poses with his brother Parvez Vahora’s family outside Ahmedabad airport before the Air India 171 crash. Parvez (33), his daughter Zuveriya (3 years), and their 50-year-old aunt were among those killed when the Boeing 787 crashed into the BJ Medical College hostel complex in Ahmedabad.

The 'Seeing the Sangh' project is set to expand, with more than 100 new organisations linked to the RSS being incorporated into the network map. Coming soon.

Families of the victims of Lion Air flight JT 610, visit an operations centre to look for personal items of their relatives, at the Tanjung Priok port in Jakarta, Indonesia, in October 2018. The plane crashed because of the same automation software that crashed Ethiopian Airlines. Read the entire report on Boeing and Air India’s role in India’s deadliest aviation disaster and how it is being covered up, in our June 2026 cover story: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

One year ago on 12 June 2025, Air India Flight 171 crashed and killed 260 people. This flight of merely 32 seconds was the second deadliest air aviation accident in Indian history. The experts pointed to a specific chain of events that brought the plane down. The Caravan has copies of the Airplane Health Management records of VT-ANB—real-time digital dossiers of maintenance analytics that Boeing’s planes send to the manufacturer and operator. VT-ANB’s AHM records show that on its previous flight, from Delhi to Ahmedabad, both the stabiliser’s position sensor and electrical motor control unit had faulted. These are part of the system that helps control the aircraft’s nose position during flight, the motor moving the horizontal wing on the tail of the plane, and the sensors telling the aircraft computers its exact position. Together, they help keep the aircraft stable during climb, cruise and descent. The AHM records also demonstrate that all three of the plane’s Flight Control Modules—the aircraft’s “muscle” computers, which take commands from the main flight control computers and physically execute them by moving control surfaces such as the stabiliser, elevators and ailerons—were independently flagging conflict in the stabiliser data. When the entire FCM triplex goes into disagreement on a safety-critical surface such as the horizontal stabiliser, you are no longer looking at a nuisance sensor error. It points to a potential single point of failure in the airplane’s pitch control architecture. Regardless, the AHM records show the stabiliser’s motor and sensor were replaced in Ahmedabad before 12.10 pm, when the maintenance crew released the plane for flight on 12 June. But fifteen minutes before take-off, at 1.23 pm, the FCMs themselves started faulting. These faults were all being communicated to Air India and Boeing via the plane’s satellite link, called the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System. An FCM is a highly critical component, and such a fault is called a NO-GO fault, requiring the aircraft to not be cleared for flight. VT-ANB’s ACARS codes, copies of which The Caravan has, clearly show that six NO-GO faults existed on the plane, and it was still given clearance to take off. The codes, according to several engineers I spoke to, suggested that the plane suffered a massive electrical failure shortly into take-off. This was likely because of a failing inverter in the back of the plane, which caused a sustained electrical arc that ran through the 787’s highly centralised wiring. “The flight computers were already vulnerable to a reboot, given the faults pre-take-off,” a senior Air India engineer told me. “Just think of it like your home computer that will reboot itself automatically if it crashes. And so, these computers just needed a short power glitch to reset them, and instead what they got was a high-voltage inverter arcing. So yes, it would’ve made the flight computers reboot.” The reboot led to flight computers briefly entering “ground-mode,” which, several Air India engineers told me, led FADEC—Full Authority Digital Engine Control, the engine’s computer—to cut off fuel to the engines. Read the entire report by Rachel Chitra (@rachelchitra): caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

The 'Seeing the Sangh' project is set to expand, with more than 100 new organisations linked to the RSS being incorporated into the network map. Coming soon.

On 3 October 2023, the Delhi Police’s Special Cell conducted a series of raids targeting the office of the news website NewsClick and several journalists and people associated with the organisation. Later that day, the website’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and its human resources department head Amit Chakravarty were arrested under the anti-terror law UAPA. NewsClick has been accused of receiving funds to spread pro-China propaganda, a charge the organisation has repeatedly denied. NewsClick’s coverage has consistently reported on issues that concern the general public, ranging from labour issues, to the farmers’ protest and the anti-Muslim riots in Delhi. In the 27th episode of The Caravan Baatcheet, host Vishnu Sharma (@hellovishnu) talked to Hartosh Singh Bal (@HartoshSinghBal), the executive editor of The Caravan. Highlighting the distinction between journalism and propaganda, Bal says that journalism and democracy go hand in hand, and the crackdown on the last remaining bastions of independent media does not augur well for the country’s democratic future. What message does the government want to send to journalists and the media on these critical issues? Find out in this in-depth interview. Watch here: youtu.be/nDdDVLhpB_c

The Caravan has copies of internal correspondence between Boeing and Air India, which show that, in this case and in subsequent ones, Air India followed Boeing’s Fault Isolation Manual to the letter. It replaced components and performed wiring integrity checks, documenting every step. Boeing certified each repair as compliant, but these issues kept recurring. The P100 distribution panel alone had to be replaced twice. This is critical because, on VT-ANB’s last day, all three of these systems—the power distribution, the generator and the inverter powering the fire inerter—failed simultaneously. What the emails expose is not poor maintenance but a certification infrastructure that treats symptoms while ignoring architecture. Boeing’s responses consistently directed Air India towards component-level fixes. The crash of Air India 171 on 12 June 2025, was not the result of a single failure but of multiple breaches in the aircraft’s safety architecture—traceable to acts of omission and commission by both Boeing and Air India in the pursuit of cost-cutting measures. The crash investigation, however, seems to have only scrutinised the pilot and not Boeing’s opaque and deeply flawed safety architecture. Read the entire report by @rachelchitra here: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

On 3 October 2023, the Delhi Police’s Special Cell conducted a series of raids targeting the office of the news website NewsClick and several journalists and people associated with the organisation. Later that day, the website’s founder Prabir Purkayastha and its human resources department head Amit Chakravarty were arrested under the anti-terror law UAPA. NewsClick has been accused of receiving funds to spread pro-China propaganda, a charge the organisation has repeatedly denied. NewsClick’s coverage has consistently reported on issues that concern the general public, ranging from labour issues, to the farmers’ protest and the anti-Muslim riots in Delhi. In the 27th episode of The Caravan Baatcheet, host Vishnu Sharma (@hellovishnu) talked to Hartosh Singh Bal (@HartoshSinghBal), the executive editor of The Caravan. Highlighting the distinction between journalism and propaganda, Bal says that journalism and democracy go hand in hand, and the crackdown on the last remaining bastions of independent media does not augur well for the country’s democratic future. What message does the government want to send to journalists and the media on these critical issues? Find out in this in-depth interview. Watch here: youtu.be/nDdDVLhpB_c

The SIR in West Bengal differed from the Bihar exercise in its procedural design, in the scale of deletions and in a new category of “logical discrepancies,” that swallowed 2.7 million Bengal voters. This category was invented specifically for Bengal, leading to patently absurd situations. The numbers defy easy comprehension. The ECI removed approximately 9 million voters from the state’s electoral roll ahead of the election. Of 3.4 million appeals filed, just 1,607 names were restored—fewer than 0.05 percent. Contrast this with Kerala, where over ninety-eight percent of flagged voters were reinstated through an efficient adjudication process. In Tamil Nadu, nearly 5 million voters were removed from just eight districts, accounting for more than half of all statewide deletions. Over a third of registered voters in the capital, Chennai, were erased from the rolls. The figures have no plausible administrative explanation. @GillesVerniers writes: caravanmagazine.in/politics/…

People who have been marginalised—Dalits, Adivasis and others—should actually be brought into the mainstream, but instead they are kept away from it. The attitude is: “You should work under me.” Political parties, social groups, and different organisations and institutions are all trying to impose their own ideologies on them. But no one really wants to listen to what Adivasis themselves actually want. What is the problem in people leading their own communities? Sadhna Uikey is an Adivasi activist from Madhya Pradesh. She has been campaigning alongside thousands of Adivasis against the union government’s Ken–Betwa Link Project, which will channel water from the Ken River in Madhya Pradesh, through a network of waterworks, to the Betwa River in Uttar Pradesh. Ryan Thomas, the product manager at The Caravan, interviewed Uikey in Bhopal, where she is currently based. Read the entire interview in our latest issue: caravanmagazine.in/politics/…

In a democracy, the electorate is not a political variable but a precondition. The right to vote should not depend on party affiliation, religious identity, migratory status or the administrative efficiency of local officials. But the SIR, as implemented in West Bengal, did just that. It made the electorate malleable, susceptible to engineering before the competition had even begun. Read @GillesVerniers' essay on the manipulation of voter rolls is undermining the legitimacy of India’s elections: caravanmagazine.in/politics/…

Air India Flight 171 was one of the shortest flights in aviation history: just 32 seconds from takeoff to crash. It took 260 lives. A close analysis of those 32 seconds makes it increasingly clear that the disaster was not the result of a single failure but of multiple breaches in the aircraft’s safety architecture—traceable to acts of omission and commission by both Boeing and Air India in the pursuit of cost-cutting measures. Warning signs had been visible for years. These vulnerabilities compounded in the days leading up to the crash and ultimately reached a tipping point on that fateful runway. The crash investigation, however, seems to have only scrutinised the pilot and not Boeing’s opaque and deeply flawed safety architecture. Read the entire report here: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

In the Sangh’s view—revealed from time to time, including in its ideological text Bunch of Thoughts—the umbrella organisation is merely an incidental means to organise a nation while keeping the fourfold caste system at its very core. Across the years, the RSS would equivocate, prevaricate and even resort to outright lies, but it would never abandon its original model. Dhirendra K Jha reports how the Dalit Panthers forced the RSS into changing its language on caste: caravanmagazine.in/history/h…

India’s democracy does not face the extinction that democratic theory once associated with coups and juntas. It faces something subtler and, in some ways, more insidious: the gradual conversion of its electoral machinery into an instrument of incumbent entrenchment, even as elections themselves continue. Voters still go to the polls. Parties still campaign. Winners are still declared. But the field in which competition occurs is steadily being tilted, and the institution designed to ensure fairness has become, in key respects, a partisan actor. @GillesVerniers writes: caravanmagazine.in/politics/…

Within the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau itself, there was less certainty about the cause of the crash of Air India 171 in Ahmedabad on 13 June 2025. @rachelchitra spoke to a subject-matter expert at the AAIB, who wished to remain anonymous. (Days after the crash, the civil-aviation ministry had issued an unofficial gag order on its officials speaking to the media, even banning journalists from entering the ministry building.) They told me that the independence of the investigation had been compromised very early by the companies leading the aviation industry. “The preliminary report was a negotiated deal between Air India, Tata, GE and Boeing—GE to a lesser extent,” the expert said. “But the slew of emails being exchanged in the days running up to the 12 July 2025 deadline was primarily between the airline and the manufacturer. The Indian and US regulators were on standby.” Tata owns a majority stake in Air India and General Electric manufactured the crashed flight’s engine. The companies, the expert added, were negotiating which parts of the findings should be released until moments before publication. “The document was released a little past midnight, and I suspect it largely had to do with Boeing’s desire to influence public perception by targeting Western audiences first.” Read the entire report on Boeing and Air India’s role in India’s deadliest aviation disaster and how it is being covered up, in our June 2026 cover story: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

Archives | “My case has at least led to the recognition that procedures have to be made strong”: NewsClick’s Prabir Purkayastha on his release from jail. Prabir Purkayastha, the founder of the digital portal NewsClick, was arrested on 3 October 2023, under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for allegedly receiving funds from China. His house and office have been subject to several raids over the years. The Supreme Court ordered his release from custody on 15 May, categorically stating that his arrest by the Delhi Police was “invalid in the eyes of the law,” since proper procedure had not been followed. Shahid Tantray, a multimedia reporter at The Caravan, spoke to Purkayastha on 18 May, soon after his release. They spoke about his time in jail, both during the Emergency and under the Modi government; the weaponisation of draconian acts such as the UAPA and PMLA; and the Supreme Court judgment that authorised his release. Read the full interview by @shahidtantray: caravanmagazine.in/media/pra…

The crash of Air India 171 in Ahmedabad, on 13 June 2025 killed 242 people and is the second deadliest air aviation accident in Indian history. As more and more data points are unearthed from the investigation it is clear the plane crashed because of holes in security architecture that point to Boeing and Air India. The Enhanced Airborne Flight Recorder, conventionally called the black box, records every input and output of an aircraft’s system and is designed to be nearly impregnable. The Boeing 787 has two. The forward EAFR, which faced the full brunt of impact and the fire from over fifty thousand kilograms of fuel, managed to yield 49 hours of data, while the aft EAFR, found on the rooftop of a building near a largely intact tail section of the plane, showing no visible fire damage, had its housing and connectors burnt, and yielded nothing. The report also mentions that the plane’s distress beacon did not activate during the impact. “It’s built to withstand high G force and high temperatures,” Sharath Panicker, an Air India pilot, told me. “How did it not survive in AI 171?” But the report did not raise a question about this. Read the entire report by Rachel Chitra (@rachelchitra) on how Boeing and Air India’s role in India’s deadliest aviation disaster is being covered up: caravanmagazine.in/crime/air…

"Today’s youth are educated and aware, and they want meaningful participation of young people in political parties. They want opportunities to provide leadership themselves. Let me tell you one important thing: you must have noticed that everyone wants to lead Adivasis. Everyone wants to work for Adivasis, but they do not want to create Adivasi leaders. They do not want Adivasis themselves to lead. There are now big organisations, big institutions, NGOs, and political parties, but, if you look closely, you will hardly see Adivasi leadership there. Instead, other people mainly use Adivasis as a vote bank—for campaigning for their parties, carrying flags and banners, and following behind them. That is how they are used." Read the entire interview here: caravanmagazine.in/politics/…