Sailaja makes a useful distinction between Standard Indian English Pronunciation (SIEP) and various kinds of non-standard pronunciation strongly influenced by the phonetics of the speaker’s L1. On the question of rhoticity, for example, where I wrongly said that “most speakers have a more or less fully rhotic pronunciation” (p. 629), this author asserts that SIEP is non-rhotic, but “most non-standard varieties of IE are rhotic”, although “there are those whose speech would be somewhere in the middle of the cline but they may still have non-rhotic speech” (p. 20). So
In Indian English p t k are well-known to be unaspirated. With the exception of Tamil, Indian languages have a phonemic opposition between aspirated and unaspirated plosives. This is exploited for the voiceless th sound: we regularly get aspirated t̪ʰ where other varieties of English have θ. (Indian languages have no dental fricatives, nor usually does SIEP: “the sound /θ/ is sometimes articulated in SIEP but /ð/ is almost completely missing”.) If you hear a speaker of SIEP pronounce thing as t̪ɪŋ rather than as the usual Indian t̪ʰɪŋ, that probably means he or she is a speaker of Tamil.
Sailaja points out that if the aspiration of voiceless th were due purely to the influence of spelling we might expect d̪ɦ as the counterpart of ð: but in words such as this, mother, bathe we in fact get plain d̪. Then again, though, we do get ɦ in ghastly, ghost and also in John and sometimes in why wɦaɪ, which must certainly be due to the spelling.
Our stereotype of Indian English (or my stereotype, at least) has v and w merged as ʋ, with no distinction between vet and wet. Sailaja asserts, however, that “the distinction is maintained in SIEP”.
The advertisement for a recent Hindi film that says ‘villager, visionary, winner’ is obviously meant to be alliterative.
And so finally to linking and intrusive r. The Indians are different from the English.