Thread by @alok_bhatt

For the past ten days, a coordinated campaign is being pushed on the social media claiming -

>>India is burning,
>> how the heatwave in 2026 is unprecedented, and
>> all that is caused by Modi government's forest policy
>> how Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 has destroyed the country's climate.

This April convergence is using a climate related event as a political cover to influence
1) Bengal Phase 2 voting and
2) an attack on India's most strategic Indian Ocean project

Let us see it in detail

Let us check all the claims against the realities.

Firstly, the claim that April 26 heat is unprecedented and politically attributable. Let us check IMD's own long record to demolish this.

@Indiametdept published its seasonal outlook on 28 February 2026, in which, it forecast above-normal heatwave days for March to May.

IMD followed it up with extended outlooks on 23 April, district-wise heatwave warnings, and daily bulletins citing real surface temperatures of 42 to 46 degrees Celsius across northern, central, and eastern India.

The narrative layer began forming when aggregator accounts converted IMD data into globally shocking visuals. The handle @stats_feed operating as World of Statistics with approximately 5 million followers and Kalshi, a US prediction market platform, listed as a paid partner, posted on 26 April 2026: "India became the HOTTEST nation on earth this week with 92 to 100 of the world's 100 hottest cities."

The reading is technically accurate but structurally meaningless. India's geography gives it a built-in advantage in any global ranking of single-station maximum temperatures because it has more inland tropical land mass than any other country except Australia. Clearly, the framing "hottest nation on earth" exists to monetise outrage, not to inform.

Parallel to this, the aqi.in and similar climateaggregator accounts aggresively pushed the "19 of the 20 hottest cities globally are in India" framing.

It was picked up uncritically by Deccan Herald, Moneycontrol, Business Today, and Zee News and carried in their headlines on 22 April.

Clearly, all these outlets were also responding to the same incentive structure by showing alarming visuals from credible looking sources to generate clicks.

Do note that the originating IMD bulletins never said or claimed that India is uniquely burning. It was all done by the aggregator-to-mainstream pipeline...

All this noise found an ally in much older and more deliberate campaigns built around the Forest Conservation Amendment Act that came into force on 1 December 2023. All the usual suspects like The Wire, Article 14, Down to Earth, and the Sanctuary Nature Foundation etc ran a sustained editorial critique around that and all that came in handy for leveraging the narrative that was built by aggegators..

The editorial critique built up by likes of The Wire, Article 14, Down to Earth, and the Sanctuary Nature Foundation etc is weaponised every April as and when India enters its summer season and this year was no different either.

When IMD heatwave alerts hit, the activist network layered the FCAA-2023 story onto the meteorological story, and began producing a single causal chain: tree felling caused the heat.

And this game found its fuel soon when Sijimali bauxite controversy in Odisha erupted when police clashed with tribal protesters on 7 April 2026, leaving around 70 people injured. Instantly, it was pushed as the most prominent example of "forests being cleared for corporate greed."

Vedanta's lease of 1,548 hectares including 700 hectares of forest land for bauxite mining has been opposed by tribal communities since 2023, and the framing of "Adivasi land cleared since the FCAA" became a recurring feature in liberal commentary across mid to late April 2026.

But the single most influential instance of this layered framing came from screenwriter Darab Farooqui, who is also a contributor to The Wire and signatory to multiple anti-government literary protests.

He wrote a long X thread on the night of 26 April arguing how 2001 Forest Survey of India redefinition under Vajpayee, and the Congress government's failure to correct it during 2004 to 2014, and the BJP's 2023 amendment is what is producing this heat. x.com/darab_farooqui…

Just to recap- the main claim is this:

April 2026 is unprecedented and it is being caused by FCAA-2023 as it is destroying deemed forests and that is the reason why our cities are burning today.

Well the narrative sounded clean narrative but is empirically false on every count....and here's why.

The warming trend is real. IMD data of last 125 years says that India has warmed 0.66°C per century since 1901.

If you plot a short trend, 10 of the 15 warmest years on record fall between 2010-2024. But this trend extends continuously to the 1980s and it pre-dates Modi by 30 years and FCAA by 40+ years.

The all-India annual mean temperature anomaly, computed by IMD against the 1981 to 2010 baseline and reported in the official Annual Climate Summaries, shows a clear warming trend.

The five warmest years on record are
2024 at +0.78 degrees,
2016 at +0.71 degrees,
2023 at +0.65 degrees,
2009 at +0.55 degrees, and
2017 at +0.541 degrees.

Ten of the fifteen warmest years on record have occurred between 2010 and 2024. The warming trend is approximately +0.12 degrees Celsius per decade since 2005, consistent with the longer 1901-2024 trend of +0.66 degrees per century established in one 2019 IMD analysis.

This warming is real but it pre-dates 2014, pre-dates the Forest Conservation Amendment Act of 2023 by decades. The signal extends back continuously to the 1980s, accelerating since around 2010 in line with global patterns.

The most powerful single fact against the alarmist framing of these activists comes from IMD's own Annual Climate Summary for 2023.

As per the summary "the monthly mean temperatures for the country during 2023 was above normal for the ten months of the year, except for April and May, where it was normal or below normal."

April 2023 anomaly was +0.1 degrees Celsius while May 2023 anomaly was minus 0.27 degrees Celsius which is actually below the long-term average.

If today's April heat were truly unprecedented, the IMD record books would have proved it but it doesnt.

7 out of 10 major Indian cities have their April record set BEFORE 1990. And most all-time records cluster in 1932, 1944, 1947, 1955, 1958, 1979, 1984, 1994, 1995.

For ex-

🔸 Delhi April: 45.6°C in 41; unbeaten for past 84 years.
🔸 Delhi alltime: 47.2°C in 1944
🔸 Akola: 47.8°C in May 1947
🔸 Banda: 48.6°C in May 1994
🔸 Deesa: 49.4°C in May 1932
🔸 Barmer: 49.9°C in May 1995

Modi wasn't around then; FCAA wasn't passed but who will tell all this to the madarasa chaap @darab_farooqui

So if April heat is climatologically normal, why is the narrative peaking- because it's not really about the weather.

Yes look at the calendar between April 22 to Apr 29.

1) April 23: Bengal Phase 1. Morning turnout depressed by heat anxiety.
2) April 26-28: Rahul Gandhi visits Andaman to attack Great Nicobar project.
3) April 29: Bengal Phase 2. TMC desperately needs morning suppression.

Same week, same narrative & same beneficiaries.

Let us first pick- Great Nicobar ; it matters because of geography. The island sits 40 nautical miles from the Strait of Malacca- a choke poiont from where 80% of China's oil imports pass through

Hu Jintao himself coined "Malacca Dilemma" in 2003 to describe their core strategic vulnerability. And now @narendramodi govt is developing this project in a fast track mode

India's Rs 81,000 crore project entails construction of:

▪️ Deep-water port at Galathea Bay
▪️ International airport
▪️ Naval-capable infrastructure
▪️ Strengthened tri-services A&N Command

In short, India is going to build a credible capability over a choke point from where bulk of Chinese oil & their merchandise trade passes.

The 2026 Hormuz scenarios has already showed what narrow channel control delivers in conflict. Our Great Nicobar project gives India the same leverage over China that Iran briefly held over the West. This is the most strategically threatening Indian project against Chinese interests in many many years. Naturally son of Sonia Gandhi is rattled as he has to honour Cong- CPC agreement that he signed in his mother's presence.

Now see the press coverage around Rahul Gandhi visit

1) He said on the Day 1 of his Andaman visit on 26 April 2026, via Andaman Chronicle andamanchronicle.net/rahul-gandhi-p…

So Rahul Gandhi is going to Great Nicobar to "see for himself the devastation that may arise" from the project. Note his own framing "Devastation." Hold that word & check later

2) Also, Congress had pre-announced the environmental frame on 25 April 2026 when PTI carried Congress AICC in-charge Manickam Tagore's announcement of the visit's purpose: Rahul "is expected to highlight concerns over the Centre's ambitious Rs 81,000 crore Great Nicobar Holistic Development Project, which has sparked debates over its potential impact on the region's fragile ecology."

Source: newsdrum.in/national/rahul…. The frame was decided before he even boarded the plane; it was not jobs, not constituency outreach but ecology.

3) Rahul's address to Congress workers, 27 April 2026. Speaking at the ANTCC convention at Dr B R Ambedkar Auditorium in Sri Vijaya Puram, he said the project could have "adverse consequences, including impacts on local communities and the environment." Source: nicobartimes.com/local-news/rah…

The pattern is clear...

But the most damning evidence is not that Rahul Gandhi attacked Great Nicobar. Opposition leaders attack government projects all the time.

The damning evidence is that the vocabulary he used on 26 to 27 April was identical to the vocabulary being used simultaneously across the FCAA-Sijimali-Adivasi heatwave network. "Devastation." "Destruction." "Ecological disaster." "Adverse environmental consequences."

These are not the technical lexicon of environmental impact assessments. They are emotional escalation words chosen for rhetorical impact. When the same escalation vocabulary appears across Great Nicobar, Sijimali, the FCAA-2023 critique, and the heatwave forest framing within a single 7 days long news cycle, the carriers are reading from the same playbook even when no script exists.

"Sijimali Rising: A People's Resistance to Cultural and Ecological Devastation."

"Devastation" in the title sanctuarynaturefoundation.org/article/sijima…’s-resistance-to-cultural-and-ecological-devastation

happens to be the same word Rahul Gandhi deployed in Andaman 19 days later.

The vocabulary is everywhere that week:

▪️ Indian Tribal, 7 April: "destruction of sacred hills" theindiantribal.com/2026/04/07/ano…
▪️ Free Press Journal: "destruction of the ecology" freepressjournal.in/analysis/odish…
▪️ Mainstream Weekly: "destruction of forests"
mainstreamweekly.net/article16680.h…
▪️ Goldman Prize winner Samantara: "biodiversity will be destroyed" countercurrents.org/2026/04/same-s…

This was in continuation of the long standing Congress line, outlined by Jairam Ramesh in January 2026. He called Great Nicobar a "major environmental disaster being created by the Modi government," specifically citing "millions of trees" being cut. Source: thenewsmill.com/2026/01/ease-o…

A separate Outlook India report records Ramesh labelling the project an "ecological disaster pushed through by the Modi government." Source: outlookindia.com/national/jaira…

Same vocabulary but different geography.

Now the part nobody talks about; on 7 August 2008, Rahul Gandhi signed an MoU with Wang Jiarui of the Chinese Communist Party with Sonia Gandhi and Xi Jinping as witness.

As per unncirmed reports, this MoU obliges INC and CCP to:
"exchange high-level information"
"consult on important bilateral, regional and international developments"

Full text was never made public even 18 years after signing. No wonder, Great Nicobar which is an "important development" has burdened Cong with doijng something as per MoU and Cong is doing what it is expected of it

Taking everyone back to Bengal.

Phase 1 reports were explicit that morning turnout was depressed by the heat. Morning voters are always known to vote as one supporting anti-incumbency and are change-seekers. So, ecosystem wants to suppress them so that the incumbent wins.

The game continues!