  Extreme rainfall in the Indian summer monsoon can be destructive and deadly.
Although El Ni\~no/ events in the equatorial Pacific make dry days and whole
summers more likely throughout India, their influence on daily extremes is not
well established. Despite this summer-mean drying effect, we show using
observational data spanning 1901-2020 that El Ni\~no increases extreme rainfall
likelihoods within monsoonal India, especially in the the summer's core rainy
areas of central-eastern India and the narrow southwestern coastal band.
Conversely, extremes are broadly suppressed in the drier southeast and far
northwest, and more moderate accumulations are inhibited throughout the domain.
These rainfall signals appear driven by corresponding ones in convective
buoyancy, provided both the undilute instability of near-surface air and its
dilution by mixing with drier air above are accounted for. When the summer ENSO
state is predicted from a seasonal forecast ensemble initialized in May, the
extreme rainfall patterns broadly persist, suggesting the potential for
skillful seasonal forecasts. The framework of analyzing the full distributions
of rainfall and convective buoyancy could be usefully applied to hourly
extremes, other tropical regions under ENSO, other variability modes, and to
trends in extreme rainfall under climate change.
